I wonder if there is any positive correlation between how many square feet a family occupies and how many people are in the family anyways.

> Housing cost is the easy one to solve.

The long term solution is to lower the population. We have too many people and too few resources. Reduce the population, and the resource problem becomes much more tenable until it eventually disappears. As an added bonus, employment conditions start to favor the employed.

We are vastly overpopulated, so any long term reduction in population is a net gain for everyone.

Thereâ(TM)s also the dislike of building upwards, or rather the general attitude towards living this way. Probably council high rises from the 60s and poor quality developments general have put people off, but if you look at other cities around the world, even just five story buildings are much more common. Where I live, the major of London has overruled locally planning rules and we have some very out-of-character high rises planned, although without commensurate infrastructure plans to improve publ

Expensive housing is the only way to ensure a segment of the population stays working. Food is widely available and cheap in the west. Healthcare too (at least nowadays). If you're broke in a city, you can't survive because you'll lose housing. In 1940 a home cost about 1x annual median salary. As in, most homes cost the amount a typical person would earn in one year. So if you made $2000 a year, a decent house was available to you for $2000. Which meant your mortgage was no big deal. Today, a typical perso

> Housing cost is the easy one to solve. Most of the UK, but England especially, have made it incredibly difficult to build new housing. So there's massive demand and very little supply, so cost goes up. While there are construction issues, the main aspects are extremely involved planning processes, regulatory barriers, and letting even the smallest community interest block housing (sometimes literally one disgruntled neighbor). See [1]https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/news/2024/9/new_research_identifies_barriers_to_housing_supply_in_england_and_wales/ [warwick.ac.uk].

The fascinating thing is the narrative that one must be pretty wealthy to even think about having children.

When it fact, it is in direct opposition to the fact that for so many years, people have married young and started families at a time when they were making a whole lot less money than when they were older.

The problem with the "you must have a lot of money, or else you can't have children outlook is that there really are not that many people who are 6 figure income people (or even millionaires) du

[1] https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/news/2024/9/new_research_identifies_barriers_to_housing_supply_in_england_and_wales/

> Housing cost is the easy one to solve. Most of the UK, but England especially, have made it incredibly difficult to build new housing.

Here's the thing. Housing units per capita ratio is _growing_. There's now more housing than ever, and it's better than ever.

The issue is the _concentration_ of housing. Pro-urbanist policies create economic forces that push people to live near ever-densifying cities. While the countryside and smaller cities just die out. The fix for this is to stop these forces, not try to "build more housing".

Someone has been reading their Sam Bowman! I tend to agree

We have similar NIMBYism* in the US. Empowering local gov't results in local gov't throttling their population growth. It's not easy to overhaul the power structure to force them to build, as no town wants to give up power and thus fight like hell to keep it.

But I also feel people need to spread out. There are empty houses in the rust belt. We can't and shouldn't stuff most our population in a few favorite cities. I can't believe sardine-canning is the only way. A few nukes on these favorite cities would si

4) Allow more immigrants and tell the bigots to STFU. They are not going to ruin your wonderful way of life (cough) and they rarely eat pets, despite what tinted trolls claim.

None of that will really "fix" the problem so long as we're telling young people, and particularly young women, that being a parent is "ick" or hard, or not worth it. Yes, there are times when it's very icky and there are times when it's really hard, but the truth is that it's still worth it and rewarding (I say this as a parent of 3 kids). What's happening right now is that twenty-somethings (both men and women) are being told to put off having kids for years and years to focus on their careers. This gi

Women wanted to work with pay equal to men, that's fine. But something happened along the way: both parents now have to work just to maybe make ends meet.

I guess I was lucky but around here the husband worked and it was enough to raise a family. Homemaker is a fully legitimate title, but either no one wants to be one or more likely the family simply can't afford to have a parent stay home.

How much more can you subsidize child care really? We all pay into the school system, along with a bulk of taxes t

But here in the real world motherhood isn't just not stigmatized it's held up on a massive pedestal.

What we don't do though is provide literally any significant or useful long-term support for mothers who aren't extremely wealthy.

This is because 100 years ago women and children were property. That was a trick to make men think they owned something when they didn't. But it did also mean that the family unit was basically stuck taking care of and raising their kids more or less on their own because af

I am not nearly convinced (3) is a good idea. Even leaving all the issues of faith aside, its like assisted suicide in a way, there is just so much potential for abuse.

I don't want to live in a society where some women feel they have birth other peoples children, because it is that or homelessness..

We absolutely need to do 1, and 2, though and curb immigration at the same time. If we don't western society is really doomed. Oh and spare me the Christian-nationalist bull crap. Even in the USA we are already

Shrinking populations usually result in stagnating local economies. Maybe there's a "proper way to shrink" but nobody has discovered it yet (including my E.D. doctor).

it's just fertility rate going down, total population is increasing. luckily, capitalism isn't picky about race or origin as long as it gets the ever increasing meat it needs to function. brits ... do seem to be a bit picky lately, afaik. tough call.

I think it's humbling how little we understand about living systems and life itself, that the question of calculating the planet's correct carrying capacity, has been around for 60 or 70 years, if not more, and depending on who you read and what data and reasoning they use, the estimate of the correct caring capacity is anything from 500 million to 100 billion, and nobody seems to know how to reduce that degree of uncertainty.

Long term yes, but short term we have economic systems that are insane; they require eternal growth to support our standard of living.

We should be looking at gradually reducing the growth rate and then letting it go slightly negative... But it's crashing. It turns out that when you give people a choice of kids or more stuff... If they don't need those kids for support in retirement they're going to choose the stuff. That's on top of dropping fertility due to pollution.

TL;DR: the domestic birthrate is too

Population does not grow because we are having more kids. Population grows because we are living longer than before.

This should give you a good impression of the situation in Europe (and North America) in comparison to for example Africa. In Europe there are more old people than young, while in Africa there are a lot more kids than old people.

[1]https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]

And this graph will show how 25-64 year olds have have increased from 1 billion to 4 billion, while the amount of younger has stayed p

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/265759/world-population-by-age-and-region/

Our planet could easily support 20 billion people with the current technology we have. The problem is our society is built around the concept of if you don't work you don't eat and after 45 years of non-stop automation and process improvement we don't have enough work to go around.

The problem isn't that we don't have the room for all these people it's that we don't have any place to put them in society. Hell just as waymo cars alone are going to put six or seven million people out of work very shortly.

Life was not very great a century ago too. There were lots of uncertainties: constant wars, famines, plagues, unemployment, low life expectancy... Yet the birth rate was high. People willingly wanted to have many children, in spite of all the uncertainties.

Is it because avg. education levels were very low, so parents didn't have to worry much about the cost of education? And health care was as good as absent, whether rich or poor. People squeezed into tiny houses, as they didn't own many things. And more kids meant more household income and a hedge against unemployment and starvation.

Now things have changed. We have to send our kids to college and beyond. We now have health care, and we have to worry about the cost of future health care for ourselves and our kids as well. Houses have progressively become larger, and we cannot think of living in tiny homes anymore. Each kid needs his/her private room. Having many kids is not any kind of hedge now. If anything, it's a liability. Quite naturally, people are avoiding accumulating liabilities.

> England is kinda the canary in the coal mine for the west at large

Japan's situation is far more serious. Their birth rate is decreasing a lot faster than most other nations and people there have a long life expectancy.

It's not really so much a lot more death, just not enough births to replace them. I'm fine with it and wish the economy wasn't currently 'designed' such that everything must always be expanding to remain profitable - It's a stupid premise.

I know I have been looking at the same stats, but I think we need a lot of economic turmoil without it we will not change. I am coming to the conclusion that without a solid slap to the face to snap us out of the ruling classes economic delusions nothing will change.

We now have such amazing technology now that we should be so much more efficient, but because of our economies endless need consume more, the diversion of resources into screwing each other over (e.g. crypto, licensing everything, dynamic pricin

The global population is projected to go up another 2 billion over the next half century [1]https://ourworldindata.org/un-... [ourworldindata.org] so not so much on the "pretty much every country".

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/un-population-2024-revision

> Another one of these stories, another group of comments blaming economics. Right off the bat, let's get this out of the way: many nations have offered economic incentives, some fairly significant, and none of them have managed to increase birth rates by any appreciable amount. And birth rates were already plummeting back when the economy was much stronger, so that line of reasoning isn't consistent with the data.

> I have a ton of reasons for why I believe birth rates are lowering but the biggest reason is the one I've realized most recently: society has gotten to a point where parenthood is almost an afterthought. Instead of fostering ambitions of parenthood in children, we focus almost exclusively on preparing them for their careers. People are spending more years of their life in higher education and establishing a career before having children. And for a growing number of people, this means focusing less on serious relationships, let alone preparing for raising a family, while they become accustomed to living alone or in casual relationships. And when that happens, you can become set in your ways and being in a serious relationship will become even more challenging. A quick look at the numbers will show that the number of people even interested in being in a relationship is plummeting, so it's no surprise that fewer people are having kids. This is mostly a social issue, not an economic one!

> As others have pointed out, a decrease in the population may not be the worst thing to happen to humanity, but that's only the case if it's gradual. We need enough young people to feed our aging population applesauce and change our diapers. And for many of them, they'll have had no prior experience doing that since they haven't had kids.

Am glad to hear others making these arguments, I am continually surprised at the proportion of people who think this is some kind of economic issue rather than a failing of our societies and cultures to inculcate the values and traditions that are necessary for them to continue. The comfort and constant entertainment available to people in the modern world is an extremely nice thing, but it also causes people to become who are not vigilant of human tendencies to become soft and settled down into a pillowy p

People want to keep pretending it's not the economy while they're profiting from it, but it really, really really is.

If I had a house in a nice place with a backyard, 3-6 bedrooms, kids sounds like fun and fulfilling. Teachers salary in the 70s could get that.

Now you can be an educated professional and foreign investments basically assure you that you're going to be paying someones loan on a house at a crippling rate prevent you from getting one or living in a tiny apartment

Why would you want to bring in mo

Different groups of people.

Strongly typed system, I guess.

Did you forget your meds today? You might want to double-check.

May you be touched by his noodley appendage.

Japanese?

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

Countries that have low birth rates are worried about low birth rates.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/28/birth-rate-japan-record-low-2023-data-details

Well I assume that all those cultures in the countries the English immigrated to and took over are just being racist right?

> There is only one race of people that are worried worried about low birth rates. Three guesses which one.

The Japanese?

> Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida acknowledges the severity of the issue, proclaiming it as the "biggest crisis Japan faces." In response, Kishida unveils a comprehensive package of measures, including support and subsidies for childbirth, children, and families, in an effort to reverse the disconcerting trend.

-- [1]https://economictimes.indiatim... [indiatimes.com]

[1] https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/us/why-is-japan-grappling-with-record-low-birth-rates-heres-what-the-govt-said/articleshow/108116336.cms

What's worth saving of white culture? What even is "white culture"? It seems mostly ignorance, hate, fear, greed, oppression, war; all the things that make living on this rock largely unenjoyable. You can counter-balance it with some science, maybe some arts, but when you look at the global atrocities in the last century and a half, it's primarily white people. Yeah, sure; let's save that. For the record, I'm white, but I don't celebrate what is essentially a biological result of chance, with which I h