See - that's the thing. Lots of us can't commit to that because we're still securing the consistency of those resources for ourselves. All I'm saying is I don't agree with "I'm way too preoccupied" when I see the following grocery list as a very tall order for most people starting off today.
> Kids are sensitive to their social conditions but oblivious to their material situation until they've entered preadolescence.
As someone who grew up in a family with even mild struggles... yeah this just doesn't hold up. Lots of kids know as early as when they enter school. You notice the gaps between you and your peers almost immediately and often will have peers point it out to you because the poor kid is easy to pick on. You wear different clothes (second hand/etc), you probably struggle a bit with school, you don't have the cool video game system, you don't get to do the cool stuff other kids do... etc etc.
Kids notice way earlier than preadolescence.
I alluded to this in a different comment, but I think for most people the uncertainty is a bigger impediment than absolute conditions. If you had poor material conditions, but could at least count on them to remain stable no matter what, you could make that work as fair as raising a family. But the defining feature of the contemporary economy is that you'll never have that certainty: at any minute you might go from material security to being kicked out onto the street, and in the US at least you'll get no help except "Guess you shouldn't have had children lol; pull yourself up by your bootstraps loser."
> This can be pulled off even in times of great economic insecurity (think about all the depression-era babies).
I'm not sure what you mean by "all the depression-era babies". The Great Depression had the lowest birthrate the US had ever seen, and it did not pick up again until after the war: [0]
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033027/fertility-rate-u...
(Of course, the same comic also notes "They did it, therefore I'm here, therefore I can do it" is the mother of all confirmation biases ;) )
As someone with 2 kids and a third on the way, I think this is a really sad and reductive way to think about life. The way I think about the meaning and purpose of my life has changed since I had kids, but I had a perfectly meaningful and purposeful life before that. Focus more on finding meaning and making connections with other people, and less on your economic situation and whether you can afford to "breed". People who live in abject poverty can still have happy families, or live happy, meaningful lives.
The one way I agree with Ponzi Scheme... in the USA currently, at least, there's been a massive transfer of wealth to Boomers from everyone else via SS, Medicare, pensions, and all the cheap education and services that have since evaporated. I doubt these conditions will exist for anyone else...Boomers really got an amazing deal.
-As people grow old, they are economically dependent upon people younger than them.
-A growing population goes hand-in-hand with a growing economy. This tends to bring prosperity to many people.
And as a bit of a tangent: The argument that a shrinking population is good for the planet and is therefore better than a growing population feels to me like an extremely pessimistic argument, and the people that I personally know that embrace it have a much less human-centric moral intuition than I do. I put a lot lot lot more worth on human happiness than that of animals, and to me it seems that a cultural disconnect from the natural act of procreation implies an unhappiness that is rooted in how cultures are run nowadays.
Why does a growing economy require a growing population? There's not a very strong correlation between population and GDP per capita - the US has the highest GDP and there's several countries with significantly larger populations.
To have higher GPD US atleast doesn't require more population.
Here is why:
1. American companies sell outside US so we can benefit from selling to India, china and Europe.
2.Even if we aren't exporting to some countries, there is still demand for our currency as they can use it to trade for other things like petroleum
4. Even if we've no petrol or exports, rich people and companies from other countries invest in our treasury bills, bonds and stock market.
Look at how many companies of different countries even like the ones from UK, India and China invest into US market because of its safety
A growing economy requires, in the large, an increasing labor pool, but that labor can be human or machine-amplified human. If the amplification rate is growing fast enough, we can grow the economy with a shrinking headcount.
(The other side of the equation---consumption---also balances out; people with more leisure time consume more).
That said, there are many things social structures and institutions with embedded growth assumptions such as social security, pension plans, government debt, etc.
Because most public and private retirement accounts assumed that the growth would occur, thus it was okay to promise themselves a pension and health package that was very, very generous based on lots of younger people paying X%.
They literally are pyramid schemas which require a larger group of workers to support. In other words, they calculated something like 'When I'm 63, there will be 4 workers available for each retiree, and each worker can afford to pay $15K a year in taxes to support that $60K / year pension.'
Well, it turns out there are only 3 workers for each retiree. So either the workers need to be taxed $20K each to support this pensioner, or the pensioner has to take a 25% cut.
https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/dr74i0/life_i...
All those people earning money by doing nothing needs to be supported by an ever-increasing influx of people actually doing work. So we promise the latter the American Dream. Ponzi scheme.
If you sprinkle water on the top, those molecules stay mostly at the top: rich parents’ kids mostly stay rich. If you feed water in through a pump at the bottom, most of those molecules will stay at the bottom: poor parents’ kids usually stay poor.
In general, the closer you are to the top or bottom, the more likely you are to stay there. Adding from the bottom pushes the people at the top even higher, yes; but those in between the bottom and top mostly just shift around as the middle gets wider.
I don't know about other people, but the idea of trying to have a child is unfathomable to me because I am very, very far away from being (economically) in a place where I feel comfortable breeding. As someone who doesn't fit the mold society wants me to be (i.e., a real contrarian but not in the hip cool SV way), there's simply no way I can participate in the one thing that being human is really about: procreation.
PS[edit]: Idiocracy is a great film and everyone should watch it.