US Birthrate Hits New Low, CDC Data Shows (thehill.com) 323
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Births in the United States dropped again between 2022 and 2023, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The national birth rate has been steadily declining for the last 17 years, with a particularly steep drop in births between 2007 and 2009 during the Great Recession. Between 2007 and 2022, the U.S. birth rate fell by nearly 23 percent, according to CDC data. There were 3,596,017 registered births in 2023, about 2 percent fewer than in 2022, when there were 3,667,758 registered births, according to CDC data.
The general fertility rate fell by nearly 3 percent last year to 54.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. That's down from the 2022 rate of 56 births per 1,000 women, CDC data shows. Teen births have declined almost every year since the 1990s and are continuing to fall. The teenage birth rate dropped by 4 percent between 2022 and 2023, from 13.6 to 13.1 births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, according to the CDC. And the birth rate for teens between the ages of 15 and 17, specifically, declined by 2 percent from 5.6 to 5.5 births per 1,000 girls. In 2007, the general fertility rate reached a height not seen since the 1990s at 69.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, 1 percentage point higher than the year before, according to CDC data.
The general fertility rate fell by nearly 3 percent last year to 54.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44. That's down from the 2022 rate of 56 births per 1,000 women, CDC data shows. Teen births have declined almost every year since the 1990s and are continuing to fall. The teenage birth rate dropped by 4 percent between 2022 and 2023, from 13.6 to 13.1 births per 1,000 girls aged 15 to 19, according to the CDC. And the birth rate for teens between the ages of 15 and 17, specifically, declined by 2 percent from 5.6 to 5.5 births per 1,000 girls. In 2007, the general fertility rate reached a height not seen since the 1990s at 69.5 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44, 1 percentage point higher than the year before, according to CDC data.
Cost of living consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
For the generation who can barely afford rent and owning a home is just right out of the question, does it come as any surprise no one wants to do the whole family thing ?
If they don't get the whole excessive cost of living thing under control and soon, things are going to fall right off a cliff in a generation or two.
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Who will make the income and pay taxes to keep the pyramid scheme going?
Robots and AI.
Getting from here to there (Score:2)
This strikes me as almost certainly correct. However, I'm expecting the transition itself and the initial economic forms to be pretty awful. There's too much inertia in our (US) legal system to manage a change of this magnitude with any grace.
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Re:Cost of living consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
The easy solution to the whole mess, make the very wealthy pay the same percentage they would have paid back in the 1960s, which would allow for greater benefits for citizens. Now, once citizens get benefits that immigrants don't get, then Republicans might not care about how many immigrants come in, because they wouldn't get the benefits.
Re:Cost of living consequences (Score:5, Interesting)
But the myth of millenials being poor is also just that. They were a bit poorer than the past few generations for years after the great recession, but have caught up.
https://economistwritingeveryd... [economistw...eryday.com]
Millenials have also caught up Gen X in home ownership rate at the same age
https://www.redfin.com/news/ho... [redfin.com]
I'm actually glad the population is headed for some decline, but a slower steady decline would be better than dropping off a cliff. Things are looking pretty rough by the time of elderly Gen-Z, unless a huge advance in technology changes everything etc.
Re:Cost of living consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in the good old days you could count on a company being loyal to it's employees and be comfortable working there for years.
Now both parents have to work and if you haven't seen daycare prices then you better have a seat and make sure your nitro pills are within reach.
Take your old salary and mortgage costs and run them through the inflation calculator and then get back to me. https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/c... [bls.gov]
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They also don't get less compensation now, as your graph shows.
What is does show is that they get a lower fraction of what they call "worker productivity," which has gone up tremendously.
"Worker productivity" is an (intentionally) misleading term since it implies workers are doing something extra - presumably working more, as you were apparently lead to believe? Of course it's mostly technology. By the metric of 'worker' productivity, even workers who lose th
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People were poorer than today ...
Socialism meant US-ians didn't need a lot of money to get an education and a job, get pregnant, get a home for the babies, stop the babies catching disease and educating the babies. Then, Reaganomics appeared and demanded someone else pay for housing subsidies, healthcare and education, because the government was giving the money to rich people. That bad habit has multiplied over 40 years and poor people can no longer help rich people and help themselves.
There no need to ask if gen. Z are getting a house:
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Re:Cost of living consequences (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think the wealthy care (Score:2, Flamebait)
I do think they're underestimating how spiteful and destructive we are and our capacity to get a hold of nuclear weapons and keep flinging them at their bunkers until they collapse. But the way I see it is if they let civilization collapse about half of them will be killed but the other half are going to have a pretty good time a
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They've built bunkers in Hawaii and have private armies.
The problem with preparing to live in a post-apocalyptic shithole is that after the dust settles, you're still living in a post-apocalyptic shithole. No amount of money can change that.
I seriously doubt the wealthy folks who are building bunkers truly believe they're actually going to ever need them. It's more likely just a case that they have too much money and can't think of anything else to splurge on. It's the ultra-wealthy equivalent of you or I impulsively buying some Black Friday crap that goes st
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For the generation who can barely afford rent and owning a home
If that were the problem, then those who can easily afford to buy homes would have more kids.
They don't.
The better off have fewer kids, and the wealthy have the least.
Re: Cost of living consequences (Score:2)
Re: Cost of living consequences (Score:5, Informative)
Because the people who can afford homes are afraid of losing no their jobs since there is are no secure careers any more m
That is the opposite of reality.
Well-paid people with secure careers are having the fewest children.
People with precarious finances, living from paycheck to paycheck, have the most.
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Re:Cost of living consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
All of the developed nations have the same issue. South Korea has an implosion coming up. But even in places like the nordic countries where daycare and schools are free, and you get plenty of maternity/paternity leave, the population growth is below replacement rate - has been for decades.
You can blame *some* of this to the current work culture - where comfortable living is no longer possible with a single income, but mostly it's a societal change, from two directions: First, kids are a lifestyle choice (as someone said), and it's no longer expected everyone to have kids. Second is that being what is viewed as "good parents" is these days much harder. Remember the 80's (or look at first season of Stranger Things). I mean, it used to be that after preschooler phase was over, kids basically roamed wherever they wanted with their bikes as long as they turned up before bedtime and visited home for food. Now, they are expected to be carried over to every activity - and there should be plenty of those. I mean, I'm glad that physical punishments are these days considered child abuse, but so are plenty of other things that used to be perfectly normal.
Re:Cost of living consequences (Score:5, Insightful)
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You mean a few getting richer and richer and most other people strugling? Well, fixing that would help, but how are you propose to do that in the country of greed?
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You might want to Google "The French Revolution"
Or sponsor "Madame la Guillotine" on Twittter/X.
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Sweden and Finland have high social security and their birth rates are still https://www.nordicstatistics.o...
Having kids is uncomfortable, even if you have the money. The reason why people had kids in the past was due to economical pressure and social stigma of being childless. Since these reasons are gone people now only do the absolute minimum to leave something in this world.
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Today, they cost you money, and then, when older, help you spend it.
In most 3rd world countries, child labour is still a thing. It works better if the adults die young leaving their kids for others to exploit.
Vote Trump and make America third world again (It is easy enough that even trump could do it).
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That seems obvious but every time a country makes a policy change to relieve some of the financial burden of raising kids, it never makes a difference in the birth rate.
Something else is going on, and that something else is simply cultural. When I was growing up in the 80's it was still common to hear a young girl say she wanted to be a Mom when she grew up, and there was no stigma around saying that any more than saying she wanted to be a doctor, a nurse, or a lawyer. These days its no longer culturally
Automate it (Score:2)
We need artificial wombs and in-vitro gametogenesis. The way we currently have kids is stupid. Having to repeatedly thrust ones urination organ into a concealed location on another person is dumb. Take the human element out and there's less chance of mistakes being made. The whole thing can be confusing as there are two holes in the general vicinity. If you count the belly button that's three. If you think about it, the whole protocol is complicated too. Often the other person has a headache or in certain c
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Who currently decides what genes your offspring might have? If you want a high chance that your kid is blond, would you date a brunette?
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Lets try this again without unstated assumptions about infant mortality or illness being ignored.
Lots of children die at or before the childbirth bit, and many soon after... from problems in their genes. This isn't an artificially imposed situation, not some deviation from an observable ideal, and it's never been any better EXCEPT by the use of technology.
As people who deal with technology, we should know that people assume that the technology works every time, roughly to within a margin of error. And they
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> Who would decide what the good gene combinations are though
When did eugenics enter the room?
It is possible to just you know, use a random number generator to couple eggs and sperm to create several related kids oin this automated alternative to "doing the deed".
Eugenics need not apply, but you can eliminate STD's and also the idea of rape.
Homebuilding stagnated (Score:4, Interesting)
This is directly the result of local governments making it very difficult to build new housing units. Either by making it blatantly outright impossible or putting requirements that make it impossible. The only solution is for a non-profit foundation to start acquiring land slightly away from cities and building basic shelters with free food and online/offline education/certification courses for people. I'm talking about UN style homes https://www.fastcompany.com/26... [fastcompany.com] for non drug addicts. Put an able bodied work requirement. Non-=abled bodied should be in hospital room style care. Put drug addicts in drug treatment dormitories. It's better and cheaper than having people sleep on the streets. Make that illegal since a measurably safer alternative exists.
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This seems pretty smart to me. Hard to see it actually happening until its way too late though.
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This is directly the result of local governments making it very difficult to build new housing units.
Housing shortages are a local problem.
Collapsing birthrates are a worldwide phenomenon.
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Make being alive affordable again. (Score:2)
Re: Make being alive affordable again. (Score:2)
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Has anyone tried making alive being affordable again?
That is counter-productive.
More prosperous people have even fewer children.
Those who have the most children are those who can least afford them.
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Dont worry, Comrade Kamala will make everyone so poor that all will be able to afford babies again
Kamala is making some silly populist proposals to appeal to swing voters, but she isn't serious, and they'll never be enacted.
Donald is saying even dumber stuff, and he means it.
A recuring decadence effect. (Score:2)
Highly developed societies all have this problem, the historic records are pretty clear about this. There is an abundance of goods and resources, turning children and young adults from being useful into (very) expensive pets with dissipating sexual identities and strange behaviours. Birth rates plummet (way) below reproduction and two generations later that society has gone the way of the Dodo. What remains are strange artifacts like those ancient temples where sex was some holy high profile ritual in some
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They didn't lie about the need for orgasm, or the need for children to know that sex was something grown-ups did. They didn't pretend the need for orgasm was wrong. Sex was seen as a magical part of living, and a necessity for producing food, making slaves and protecting old people (AKA grand-parents). Aside: It also made forced-sex, a way to cheat.
The ability to avoid pregnancy for long periods of time, is new to women and they are choosing to spend that time on themselves and being self-sufficient.
Cause? (Score:2)
Please note that US fertility rate in 2024 is 1.84. Niger has the world's highest rate of 6.73, and Taiwan the lowest of 1.09. To maintain the current population, a value of about 2.1 is required.
In general, highly developed countries have a low fertility rate. But despite that, from the list of 223 countries and fertility rate that I looked at, with Niger at the top and Taiwan at the bottom. The USA came in position 132, i.e.
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In my circle of friends, and am 35 so am at just the right age for the question to start seriously popping up, most of the women want children but know that they NEED to work to be able to support them. The idea of staying at home to take care of the kids while the husband makes enough money to cover everything is pretty much a distant dream for all of them.
So it's true that women are pursuing a career before a family, but more and more am starting to think that it's not by choice but is, ironically, someth
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But there is parental leave in many countries, and in many countries, but not all, available for both men and women.
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Parental leave only covers the first 12 months for a woman, at least in the UK.
If you go longer without work by the time the kid starts pre-school you are hounded by the powers that be to get them in full time education ASAP so you can go back to work.
For the "father", should he be involved, which is less common these days, he gets 2 weeks.
Thats in the UK but birthrate is dropping like a stone here too.
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People say economy, womens rights; a womens desire to avoid childbirth to further her success etc.
Nobody asks about the continuing drop in male fertility.
Its basically a mix of everything.
All good then (Score:2)
Due the the massive overpopulation of the planet it is only natural to see that the yearly skyrocket that is world pupulation will tend to level off.
Glad to see that the Teen birthrate is on the downward trend, kids shouldnt be having kids.
Short-term pain (Score:5, Insightful)
A shrinking population will cause short-to-medium-term economic pain, but in the long run, it's better for the planet. The Earth cannot sustain 10 billion people all consuming the way people in developed countries do. So we either have to condemn most people to poverty, or else reduce the population, to avoid environmental catastrophe.
There are a lot of humans on the planet. We're not going to die out any time soon because we're not reproducing.
Instead of trying to increase the birth rate, which is extremely difficult absent draconian and dictatorial measures, we should be trying to adjust our economies to cope with a shrinking population.
For the record, I have three adult kids... but I doubt any of them will have kids. If I were in their shoes, I also wouldn't have kids.
I don't see a problem (Score:4, Interesting)
Whenever I see these types of articles, it's always framed as something bad -- often because it's through the lens of economics, especially consumer-capitalist systems.
We have too many people, period. Reduced birthrates are a GOOD thing. Now, if you're talking about reduced fertility (people trying/wanting to have kids encountering problems), that's different.
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Indeed. Low birth-rates are a sure indicator something is fundamentally broken with society.
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Re:It will get worse (Score:4, Informative)
Tyrone
Ahhh a little bit of insecurity with a hint of racism. Would it surprise you to hear I’ve never worried about a woman running off to fuck tyrone?
Data shows white guys are actually the most preferred sexual partners in the USA.
Axolotl Tanks (Score:2)
Re:Axolotl Tanks (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure that's something the GOP could get behind. They appear to be going in that direction without any encouragement anyway. Much better than proving affordable healthcare, paid maternity leave, & social & financial support for parents with babies & young children, right?
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affordable healthcare, paid maternity leave, & social & financial support for parents with babies & young children
The countries that provide those benefits have even lower birth rates than America.
The countries with the highest birth rates provide no social services.
Social benefits are nice, but they do not increase birth rates.
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Correlation ain't causation.
Indeed, but a NEGATIVE correlation is solid evidence of a lack of causation.
VeryFluffyBunny claims that a lack of social services causes low birth rates.
The reality is that a lack of social services strongly correlates with HIGH birth rates, so it's absurd to say they cause the opposite.
Also, a number of countries & cities in the EU have introduced support for young families, including better maternity & paternity leave & especially free child care & have found that it has increased birth rates.
Citation needed. Most EU countries have seen birth rates fall despite programs designed to raise them.
One of the biggest problems in the USA is that mothers come out of hospital after giving birth with a hefty debt from healthcare fees. What a great way to start a family!? In the EU, healthcare is universal.
Yet, the USA has a higher birth rate than the EU.
Re: It will get worse (Score:5, Interesting)
Uh, no.
The problems are mostly economic.
Housing, healthcare, food, and childcare are all too expensive, and you can't on a steady job either.
You can bet that, if you had to spend less time on survival at a decent quality of life, you'd see more kids.
Re: It will get worse (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it's more along the lines that in a first world country you can live a significantly better lifestyle on a modest income if you forgo having kids. If it was just simply crap income = don't have kids, poor countries would be showing the same sort of declining birthrates.
Re: It will get worse (Score:4, Informative)
I think it's more along the lines that in a first world country you can live a significantly better lifestyle on a modest income if you forgo having kids.
Another factor is that women are heavily penalized in their careers for having children. Even if they get to keep their jobs, promotions, raises, and favorites roles are harder to obtain when talking time off for childbirth and managing daily schedules for kids.
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hes right, so are man
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So are man, who chose to be at home stay dads. Where applicable.
All one of them? ;-)
Re: It will get worse (Score:5, Funny)
So are man, who chose to be at home stay dads. Where applicable.
All one of them? ;-)
We had several in our neighborhood. Stay at home dads, and mom the breadwinner. It was interesting, the men were the happiest people I ever met, but the wives always looked like she had been chewing on a lime.
Re: It will get worse (Score:4)
I think it's more along the lines that in a first world country you can live a significantly better lifestyle on a modest income if you forgo having kids.
Another factor is that women are heavily penalized in their careers for having children. Even if they get to keep their jobs, promotions, raises, and favorites roles are harder to obtain when talking time off for childbirth and managing daily schedules for kids.
You are on to something - but it is kind of backwards. Women have been taught that the most important thing in their lives is to have a career. So relationships and children are a distant second and third to what is the most important thing - having a career.
Now that being said, a lot of women are changing their minds as they hit their mid 30's and mid 40's. Because despite admonitions otherwise, reproductive urge is a real thing. But generally, at that point, it it is very late to try to have a child, so they need to focus exclusively on the most important thing - that is their career.
Re: It will get worse (Score:5, Insightful)
In poor countries housing is cheap. Income may be low but people can afford not to be homeless. Plus their children are likely to increase their lifetime wealth, where as in developed nations they are likely to become a financial burden as they can't move out before age 40 and need help with their rent/deposit.
Make it viable for one parent on an average wage to buy a nice house and look after a family of 4, and things will change. Full time parent is an attractive lifestyle for many, as are family holidays.
Also properly deal with climate change, because people worry that their children won't have much of a future if we don't.
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In poor countries housing is cheap
everyone can afford houses in poor countries? sounds like the braindead musings of AmiJoJo alright
Income may be low but people can afford not to be homeless.
people can afford to not be homeless?
Plus their children are likely to increase their lifetime wealth, where as in developed nations they are likely to become a financial burden as they can't move out before age 40 and need help with their rent/deposit.
srywat
fuck id love to see what you look like in real life
Re: It will get worse (Score:4, Interesting)
the poor do their children a favor by not having them
I grew up extremely poor. For example, my parents would have me sleep in a dresser drawer instead of having a bassinet or cradle. A couple of times when I outgrew my shoes my mom cut the upper loose from the sole to let my toes poke out to get another month or so out of the shoes. We lived in motels and trailer homes as my dad traveled around for work in the chemical plant construction business. Things got better when I got to be around 7 years old, but it was damn hard at first. Also, I was born only one month before Roe versus Wade. Had I been created a few months later, I'd have been aborted (according to my parents).
You might think I'd say "but hey I'm here now and it's great and I'm glad I didn't get aborted." However, not really, I'd probably have been better off if they'd been able to get an abortion (though I do enjoy my life, now it's been a rough road). I can say without a doubt my parents would have been WAY better off. Being realistic, I cannot say I've improved their lives by being born nor did I get a lot of opportunities others had due to being poor. I've made the most of what I've got, but all in all, it would have been better for my parents if I'd never existed and saved me a lot of hassle.
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Yeah, heresy, I know, but I am completely on the other side of this debate from people like Elon Musk. I don't care if the government's ponzi schemes will collapse. They shouldn't have designed them as ponzi schemes, anyone ever consider that ? I don't care if Elon won't have any "little people" to clean his house or peel him a grape. I don'
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Remember, in the past some powerful factions in America opposed birth control funding with foreign aid, sometimes even being opposed to education about birth control. But full steam ahead if the money is used for weapons... These days this has morphed into an anti-abortion policy instead that goes back and forth depending upon the administration. But before Roe-v-Wade and Griswold-v-Connecticut, being anti-birth-control was somewhat mainstream. However even today there are some who are still strongly op
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You can bet that, if you had to spend less time on survival at a decent quality of life, you'd see more kids.
You'd lose that bet because it is the exact opposite of reality.
The poorest country in the world is Niger. It is racked by civil war and famine. It has the lowest quality of life of any country and the highest child mortality.
It also has the highest birth rate, at seven babies per woman.
Even within countries, the prosperous have fewer children than the poor.
As economic conditions improve, women have greater opportunities for education, travel, and professional careers. They choose those opportunities over h
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If you want more kids, you need to squeeze families economically, deny women education (educated men are less of a problem), and end vaccinations and other public measures that reduce child mortality (If more kids die, families have even more to compensate).
Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned
Re: It will get worse (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not so much influenced by poverty, as by level of industrialisation, urbanisation, and education, especially women's education. Also access to and awareness of contraception plays a role. When you work in non-mechanised agriculture, as many in the third world do, having many children is an economic benefit, often an economic neccesity. In a large extended family that farms the land, young children can look after even younger children, and they can start doing farm work that doesn't require physical strength from a very early age. Also, in the third world there is often very little access to pension and rest homes, so the only way to survive in old age is to live in a large extended family where your children and grandchildren will look after you.
This is how pretty much every country in the world functioned before the Industrial Age and urbanisation happened. In countries which aren't very industrialised and urbanised, like Niger, this is how things still work to a large extent.
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A more practical option is to restructure society so that it isn't reliant on an ever increasing population. That will be painful, but it's probably necessary.
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A more practical option is to restructure society so that it isn't reliant on an ever increasing population.
That would be fine if populations were leveling off.
But they're not. They are collapsing.
In another generation, Korea, Singapore, and Japan will lose half their people. China is close behind.
Other developed countries are heading in the same direction, just a bit more slowly.
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Which shouldn't be a huge issue if it means that the wealth is better distributed among the smaller population. The problem is everything is built in the assumption of infinite growth forever.
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You nailed it. Everyone thinks hard times lowers birth rates, but it is in fact good times. Birth rates in North America began to decline in the 1970s as the post-war baby boom faded, and while they stabilized for a few decades, all in all the trend has been downward. It is, in fact, wealth that leads to demographic decline, not poverty. The richer a society, the fewer children. This has been noted by demographers when studying data as far back as the Stuart era of England, where wealthier families, even wi
Re: It will get worse (Score:5, Interesting)
governments often try the same measures to incentivize birth; baby bonuses and subsidizing child rearing tending to be the popular ones, with little evidence that such incentives ever work.
There was an article in the Economist a few months ago about France's program to help families to afford babies. What they found:
1. Nearly all the benefits went to people who were already planning to have children.
2. The benefits slightly raised the number of families having a first child.
3. The extra prosperity actually depressed the number having a second or third child.
The net effect was likely fewer babies, although the subsidies meant that those babies were healthier and better educated.
I can't even imagine drastic measures like banning birth control would have the desired result (though I'm wagering someone is going to try).
Nicolae Ceausescu [wikipedia.org] tried it in Romania. The result was a surge of babies for about a year, many of which were abandoned to orphanages, and then a collapse in birth rates as people learned to use ad hoc methods or smuggled pills.
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China, of course, is different. As usual, they killed their birth rate via government fiat, in all the CCP's infinite wisdom.
They just keep repeating the same mistakes. They had huge problems with infanticide that caught up to them during the Boxer Rebellion. When there were so few girls the rich guys started taking wives from the poor class folks and that pissed the poor folks off intensely. It caused some major chaos back then.
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My own great grandfather was a peasant, poor as feck, yet he had 7 male children and an unknown (to me) number of female ones. Granted, he probably didn't raise his kids according even to the loosest definitions of child's rights, but back then nobody was paying attention to such things. And he fulfilled his demographic duty to his country just fine. And not only he, but all of his neighbours fulfilled their duties too, as far as I know.
The modern humans have become too soft, too lazy, too dependent. It's a
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Uh, no.
The problems are mostly economic. Housing, healthcare, food, and childcare are all too expensive, and you can't on a steady job either.
You can bet that, if you had to spend less time on survival at a decent quality of life, you'd see more kids.
Isn't it weird though, that in earlier times, when people definitely didn't have a high standard of living, people popped out new people just fine?
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Well, there was that rat experiment [wikipedia.org] where the scientists discovered if you keep enough rats confined but otherwise provide for all their needs, eventually odd behaviors begin to emerge and then later on the entire population collapses. It's still quite up for debate whether the rat studies truly apply to humans, though.
Plus, there's already 8 billion people on this rock. If anything sends humanity into extinction, it isn't going to be a lack of popping out kids.
But hey, if you want to believe the rat stud
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If all are supposed to do on this earth is have babies and then die I would say life is pretty meaningless and it really doesn't matter if the whole planet explodes.
Our progeny will cease to reproduce eventually. Probably relatively soon in the scale of things. Even if our lines last for 1,000,000 years the contribution we made to the human genome will be so tiny it won't matter, and by that time it might simply have been corrupted by mutations or overwritten - our DNA is only so large.
Re: Mass mental illness (Score:2)
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The wife and I both agreed early on in our relationship that we didn't want kids or even particularly enjoy them. It has nothing to do with consumerism.
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If you're smarter than average and rich, it's a moral imperative to have zillions of kids like the Mormons.
Elon Musk has 12 kids, so he's doing his part.
His kids hate him, but that's irrelevant to stabilizing the population.
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Hating him might just make them not want to be parents themselves see as he's not a particularly good role model.
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> His kids hate him
I wonder why, lets look at what he named them...
Oh my god, the poor babes
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We need smart, educated people to fix the world's problems.
But those are the people having the fewest kids.
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Probably because those people can see that trying to fix things is not actually going to work out and placing kids into such a situation is immoral?
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We need smart, educated people to fix the world's problems.
Most of the world's problems can be distilled down to being issues of economics and disputes over land. The smarter you are, the more likely it is that you'll just be frustrated that people can't just stop arguing over imaginary numbers and imaginary lines.
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As a smart, educated person with no kids I disagree. We might need smart people to have proportionately equal numbers of kids, but I would dispute that as well. We need a [controlled] population drop. We need to consume fewer resources and to find ways to endure the environmental mess that is being unleashed. We don't need more landfills to get rid of two year old phones. We need people to learn to work together to solve problems. We need to let some of the mental health issues weed themselves out.
Blindly h
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So less children getting born because of the gayness. It's simple really.
I'm assuming by your post's low starting score that you're just trolling, but gay couples do have several options for having kids. In fact, my partner and I once had a friend (after she'd had a few drinks) give an unsolicited offer to surrogate for us, to which my partner and I both thought was a super awkward thing to ask. We had a good laugh about that conversation later when she had sobered up.
For the record though, we don't want kids.
Re: Men Can't Get Pregnant (Score:2)
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More likely it's just that the little girls can't outrun their brothers.
Re:Alt (Score:4, Informative)
Sounds like people are switching to alternative hobbies.
Birth rate drops as flag shagging increases.
And, apparently, couches. :-)
[Yes, I know that's been debunked as a joke, but it resonates because it's easy to see JD as someone who'd actually do that.]
Re: Only the few (Score:4, Informative)
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If anyone proposes taxing the rich to expand social programs, including social security and medicare, I would vote for them.