World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
i think there is a difference between low fertility rate and low birth rate. Its not like these people CANT have children, they are CHOOSING not to.
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My wife and I made the same decision. We joke that Octomom had our kids.
8 billion people call Earth home. As another commentor has said, we probably should have half that. Your choice and our choice not to have kids enables that, even if only stupid people reproduce. With how the world is turning out right now, I think we both made the right choice.
Yeah, with what the assholes have done to our trajectory, I think I’m fine leaving the world that’s coming to the stupid people and their stupid kids.
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They’re under pressure to increase fertility rate but only in a way that it doesn’t cost employers money
That's what is wild to me. Boiled down to the basics, the quandary we're facing is having a functional society or a few hundred billionaires; and the billionaires are our priority.
There's this possible ending in Cyberpunk 2077 that I think speaks to how Billionaires view the world. The leader of the Japanese megacorp Arasaka is arguably the most powerful man in Japan, more-so than even the Japanese emperor. His company's security forces includes an aircraft carrier, not to mention endless drones and faceless goons equipped with ... if not the best technology on the planet, then the second best. And they've unlocked the technology of digitising a person's consciousness and storing it.
The CEO's son is a bit of a rebel, trying to undermine his father. He eventually gets very hands-on (integral part of the plot that your character witnesses first-hand early in the game) and bumps his father off and takes over Arasaka. And if you play the game a certain way, you reach an ending where the daughter of the CEO assists her dead father in ... coopting the son's body, displacing his consciousness, and 'reincarnating' in the son's body, to continue his centuries of ownership of Arasaka.
This is fiction, but Cyberpunk is all about assuming the worst of our corporate overlords. I don't think it's an overreach.
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They’re under pressure to increase fertility rate but only in a way that it doesn’t cost employers money
That's what is wild to me. Boiled down to the basics, the quandary we're facing is having a functional society or a few hundred billionaires; and the billionaires are our priority.
Money is power in this society, and billionaires have the most money. See also climate change what is again the choice between a few hundred billionaires and a livable planet, and the billionaires are winning.
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They’re under pressure to increase fertility rate but only in a way that it doesn’t cost employers money
That's what is wild to me. Boiled down to the basics, the quandary we're facing is having a functional society or a few hundred billionaires; and the billionaires are our priority.
As someone else said. Are we talking birth rate? Or fertility rate?
Choosing to not have a kid is different from wanting to have a kid and not physically being able to.
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
Loss of biodiversity, climate change, more extreme weather events, ocean acidification, Gulfstream collapse, microplastics in literally everything, the rise of fascism, constant wars/oppression/genocides, everything being politicized and radicalized, capitalistic exploitation of consumers in every market, the mega-rich using their money to cause misery for profits, even more than I can think of right now.
Want more reasons why I don't want to raise my children into the world we are heading towards?
One could argue that the Internet and how we are now so interconnected is the cause of a lot of these things, but I think the biggest reason for it all stems from a lack of compassion. Compassion for fellow humans, compassion for fellow living creatures, compassion for the planet at live on.
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Not an English native speaker so this is probably on me, but I find it weird to call it a fertility decline. Like, fertility of people is probably going down but the reasons people don't have more kids are purely economical, as the article also says.
For me a better descriptor would be something like birthing rate or whatever. Fertility decline sounds to me like people are really at it like rabbits and just cannot get any pregnancies.
No, you're correct, most articles of this type define fertility as "births/women" - whether the outcome is by choice or not. However, there is also a decline in what we might refer to as biological fertility (or "fecundity").
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
Population increase is only important to employers.
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
Fucking good.
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My wife and I made the same decision. We joke that Octomom had our kids.
8 billion people call Earth home. As another commentor has said, we probably should have half that. Your choice and our choice not to have kids enables that, even if only stupid people reproduce. With how the world is turning out right now, I think we both made the right choice.
Honestly thats another reason. I know how hard I've worked to get a decent life and I can only see it getting harder. It feels like it costs $300/day just to exist, I can't do that to another person.
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My wife and I made the same decision. We joke that Octomom had our kids.
8 billion people call Earth home. As another commentor has said, we probably should have half that. Your choice and our choice not to have kids enables that, even if only stupid people reproduce. With how the world is turning out right now, I think we both made the right choice.
But think of the economy!
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Aside from the psychological/sociological side of it, PFAS and microolastics have been shown in some studies to reduce women's fertility and to mess with sperm. So environmental damage is also poisoning us and destroying our ability to procreate. Go team!
The rich will fix it by putting out disinformation campaigns telling you it's all fake.
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Population increase is only important to employers.
It's important to everyone, including you. As the population ages, and fewer young people move into the economy, the tax base shrinks. Who is going to pay for government?
Also, employers will have to compete for the remaining workers, raising wages. That's good to a point, and then everything becomes too expensive, now you're in a depression. It's an economic death spiral.
Taxing the rich only works to a point. Their wealth is mostly in the global stock markets, which will eventually crash. As well, the value of those publicly traded companies will nosedive as fewer and fewer workers are available to produce the goods and services.
We're facing the global equivalent of the fall of Rome. Nation states will splinter into smaller and smaller, self-dependent groups and the riches we enjoy today will be memories of a better time. If you want a contemporary version of that, look at China restricting rare earths. That's impacting about every other country on Earth. Now imagine international trade utterly collapsing.
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We do need to reduce the human population. About 4-5 billion would be ideal.
On the negative side, we don't know how to handle this situation of declining population. The entire human history is one of non-stop growth interrupted only by catastrophic pandemics, which were the only way the population dropped so far.You're right, there is no economic system for dealing with this.
We are royally screwed. Global warming will only exacerbate the population drop, both through weather related deaths and less willingness to produce children.
If you're young, I'd suggest you learn to grow food. Not even joking.
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It's important to everyone, including you. As the population ages, and fewer young people move into the economy, the tax base shrinks. Who is going to pay for government?
Also, employers will have to compete for the remaining workers, raising wages. That's good to a point, and then everything becomes too expensive, now you're in a depression. It's an economic death spiral.
Taxing the rich only works to a point. Their wealth is mostly in the global stock markets, which will eventually crash. As well, the value of those publicly traded companies will nosedive as fewer and fewer workers are available to produce the goods and services.
We're facing the global equivalent of the fall of Rome. Nation states will splinter into smaller and smaller, self-dependent groups and the riches we enjoy today will be memories of a better time. If you want a contemporary version of that, look at China restricting rare earths. That's impacting about every other country on Earth. Now imagine international trade utterly collapsing.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Humanity desperately needs to move away from capitalism, if it wants any chance of survival. Either that or we install a Universal base income system.
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
When business is the world's first priority, why does it come as a surprise that people don't feel like bringing an innocent life into the orphan crushing machine?
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It's important to everyone, including you. As the population ages, and fewer young people move into the economy, the tax base shrinks. Who is going to pay for government?
Also, employers will have to compete for the remaining workers, raising wages. That's good to a point, and then everything becomes too expensive, now you're in a depression. It's an economic death spiral.
Taxing the rich only works to a point. Their wealth is mostly in the global stock markets, which will eventually crash. As well, the value of those publicly traded companies will nosedive as fewer and fewer workers are available to produce the goods and services.
We're facing the global equivalent of the fall of Rome. Nation states will splinter into smaller and smaller, self-dependent groups and the riches we enjoy today will be memories of a better time. If you want a contemporary version of that, look at China restricting rare earths. That's impacting about every other country on Earth. Now imagine international trade utterly collapsing.
Sure but you can't have an endless increase in population. Whatever the problems of declining or stabilizing the population are, they need to be tackled, not ignored, yes. You can't fix them by saying just keep the pyramid scheme going.
The real problem is more like how many workers for each retired person. So there are other ways to fix that. Personally I'm down with working more years so that people don't have to have kids if they don't want to. I can't imagine forcing people to have children.
And you know what? Employers having to face a tight labor market doesn't sound like it's worse than employees having to find scarce jobs.
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
I would never subject a child to the same life I have had to live
It's abuse
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
Fuck yeah. I got my nads snipped
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Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: 'Can we afford it?'
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. "We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do."
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata's situation is becoming a global norm.
Maybe life shouldn’t be that expensive (food/shelter), and IVF programs be free.
