I can only speak from a German perspective but the real problem from my point of view is that in todays world everything seems as if it is going down slope.

Todays generation has less job security than the generation before.

Todays generation does not have a secured pension (like the generation before had).

It is expected of todays generation to be a life-long learner (if you are not, your economic value drops immediately and if your job gets terminated you fall back to the same support someone receives, who has never worked in their life before).

Affordable housing has decreased.

It is expected of both parents to work (tell me again why I should have children, if I rarely see them?).

Pressure on children has increased as there is less time at school and less time at Uni to learn the same things (do I really want to do this to my possible future children?).

Especially for women having a child still is very bad for your career. Also if you have a fixed-term contract (which there is an increasing number of, your maternity employment protection is severely limited).

Of course this is just an anecdote, but at least in my circle of friends, those with secured government jobs are the ones having the most children. I would love to see some large-scale data on this subject.

The few generations before were the only generations ever to have job security. I suspect it was because Europe was so devastated by the war (and so many of the previous generation were dead), that the economy couldn't help but grow.

Honestly, no. That's not enough.

You're competing with jobs here, and you ask if 180€ a month is sufficient? And then you're surprised that women prefer to stay in the workforce?

You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again.

So not only does 180€/month not substitute for a second salary, it doesn't substitute for the permanent hit to the second wage-earner's career caused by raising children.

The economic message is clear: raising children is intended to be a low-paid, part-time job done on top of a full-time career for economically non-valuable warm-fuzzies.

> You're also dealing with a labor market that punishes people who actually take their maternity/paternity leave, or who actually leave the labor force to raise children, by simply never letting them back into a career-track position ever again.

By the way, in Germany usually you are guaranteed to get back into your old job after the 18 months of maternity leave.

Industrialise child raising, like everything else.

Artificial wombs. Group day-care. Have women donate eggs, men donate sperm and combine them randomly. Make it the duty of every person to be a parent to 2 to 3 children with fines for not doing their part until they hit 30/40 years of age. The babies will be born never knowing their biological parents. Then they're sent to child-raising facilities, either government or private, which are subject to strict regulation against mistreatment and indoctrination. Only the mega-rich, or very rural will afford/choose to have babies the usual way.

This seems to be the only choice in a society where everyone has to work 40 hours per week to secure a living for him/herself. If you had guaranteed basic income that can cover the cost of children, people could leave their position for one to two years, maybe do contracting work from home on the side. You will need very strict laws against discriminating against those who chose to have children. Or, you know, make making children a specialised industry like everything else.

I certainly hope there is some sarcasm intended with this. A world where raising children is turned into an industry (makes me think of Orwell's 1984) is one that I would not enjoy being a part of.

It does however seem that the flow of the economy, the fact that no one is willing to slow down for anything, and everything needed to be finished yesterday, certainly hinders people from things such as having children. Companies simply see a mother on maternity leave as an employee that isn't producing, as cold as that sounds. It's sad how emotionless companies can be when they're focused solely on the dollar signs...

Not so much sarcasm, as cynicism... I mean it, if the current employer-employee dynamic persists, either you need women to sacrifice their career, or pay someone to bear your children. Which you then have no time to raise, so you pay someone to do it for you. You can find a certain parallel with characters in novels who are children of rich people who are never home and thus the child is raised by the wet nurse/maid/etc. If you do the same at scale, it should be cost-effective and probably the only option.

Fortunately, I'm pretty sure we'll run out of resources long before our greed for growth pushes us that far.

Edit: of course companies are emotionless. They aren't people. You should view any company of more than about 200 people as a super-organism. Every actor in the company acts in their own best interest, while kept in check by the people on top. The emergent behaviour is one of calculated exploitation.

advanced, wealthy, egalitarian societies simply do not produce babies because nobody really needs them and they're extremely expensive both in actual cost and opportunity cost, especially for females. sure you can shift the cost from the family to the taxpayer or employer, but that doesn't actually remove it.

and this phenomenon is not limited to white people, i.e. japan, korea, singapore, taiwan.

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e...

It is not the fact that nobody needs them. It is rather that members of such societies delay this step (to an uncertain extent) due to having a large amount of possible/alternative life choices, which sadly a negative consequence of such a blossoming society.

It's not that people delay having children, it's that society punishes having children.

My fiancee's pregnant coworker was told (we live in the USA, unfortunately) that she would have six weeks of unpaid leave after giving birth, followed by two weeks of short-term disability insurance, and then she could return to work or lose her job. This is for a salaried, postdoctoral scientist at a biotechnology company. In a related matter, the same HR employee who explained that policy says that he opposes the very idea of paternity leave -- and he's a male homosexual.

Likewise, the largest wage gap between men and women isn't actually a gap between men and women, it's a gap between men and mothers.

It takes two incomes to support a household these days, and yet society punishes women for childbearing as if it only took one. What did they expect would happen under these conditions, that people would stop responding to economic incentives "because babies"?

apparently all the benefits that exist in europe and asia still don't work, so i'm not really sure what your point is here, other than you want some free money for having a baby.

society doesn't 'punish' you for having children, having children is simply an expense somebody has to pay for, and nobody wants to do it.

you clearly don't want to pay the opportunity cost, as evidenced by your post, so what makes you think the employer wants to do it either? or the taxpayer?

His / her point is that de facto the industry takes a point of view biased on an economical perspective towards the situation. (Your answer ironically does reflect this as well). The benefit of having children is to have a family and to, in a more biological sense, have offspring which ensures your dna remains within the society. Having a family takes time and enforcing a young parent (especially a person with such a background) to start working in a relative short amount of time is very taxing on their personal life. A better possible solution would be to let the young parent have the ability to work home for a couple days, rather than just giving the option to be fired.

Let me brag a little bit.

Myself and my fiancee don't have children yet. However, you may kinda want us in society's gene pool. After all, I've got a damned resilient immune system, she's wonderfully empathetic, and we're both ferociously clever and hardworking individuals who valued our educations and actually want to contribute to society. Hell, we're even proud of paying our taxes, we both volunteer for things in our spare time, and we consider time spent on civic or community affairs to be well-spent.

I'd be fine paying the "opportunity cost" myself, but you see, I'm not the one with the uterus. Really, if we could get by and support a kid on one income per couple, we could easily just make some sacrifices of Nice Things, but we can't. Yes, we actually are stuck between living as fiscally responsible adults in the Dual Income No Kids class, and the precarity of the so-called "middle class" nowadays, in which one layoff or unexpected medical emergency can throw the whole family into poverty.

It's become: housing, children (with the entailed college funds, housing cost of good public schools, etc.), responsible preparation for a rainy day -- pick any two.

Elizabeth Warren was lecturing people about this a decade ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GHg3GAeQ1Y

i'm a business owner operating on thin margins and no outside funding. why should i be forced to pay for leave if one of my employees decides to have a baby? what if i'm a small company that simply can't afford it?

i think "having other options" is a pretty good definition for "not need".

These are mostly economical solutions. The problem however seems to be on a sociographic level.