The impact of a declining population, on individual countries and the world as a whole

UK Government is going to expand childcare benefits to parents of 1-2yo children.

I currently pay about £15k for childcare a year and this will effectively give me half of that back.

£7,500 for a family is an absolutely massive amount of money.

 

Childcare is a huge cost for families in the US. I know of several families who wanted to have at least one more kid, but couldn't make it work with the added childcare costs.

If the Republicans wanted to win over families, subsidizing childcare costs would be a silver bullet.

 

Is that 230hr/month per child? Crazy good.

 

We were so relieved when our son finally started school. Not that I like the idea of school as daycare, but the reality is that free public education takes a huge burden off of working parents.

 

CNN wrote an article about Japan’s baby shortage

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/17/asia...is-countryside-cities-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

 

That reads like a positive to me.

The central American jungles and some claim the Amazon jungle are examples of how mother nature can reclaim the land we humans "steal" from her.

 

They'll come up with some creepy baby robot with big eyes to make up the baby gap

 

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...or-babies-in-japan?srnd=politics-vp#xj4y7vzkg

While Japan's short-term issues could be resolved by allowing more permissive immigration, in the long run the amount of people they will need to move to the country to keep the population stable is simply unsustainable.

 

Well, NBA players, NFL WRs, RBs, DBs, LBs (basically everybody but QBs kickers and offensive linemen), National Baptist Convention members, Ultra Sheen customers, Lincoln Continental drivers, you get the picture

 

I hope we are going to be happy about it.

 

Great thread on housing costs and birth rates.

NEW: for this week’s column, I looked at the impact of London’s sky-high house prices and rents on young familieshttps://t.co/q8sBxB1IpZ

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) April 21, 2023

Basically, one big way to improve quality of life is to build more houses.

 

India has passed or will soon pass China as the most populous nation

 

Anti-immigration parties are poised to have one hell of a year in European elections.

While full figures aren't out yet, we now have more countries with official TFR below replacement than not. Led of course by China and its collapsing population.

Finally, countries are (starting to) moving away from globalization towards renationalizing and onshoring manufacturing and agriculture.

All together this paints a bleak picture. Prices start to go up, fewer children means closing schools, fewer immigrants mean less dynamism pretty much everywhere.

 

As housing and healthcare has gotten so much more expensive here, even Mormon families are having fewer children. 5 kids used to be fairly common, but now more than 3 is pretty unusual.

That, mixed with in migration to the state of more typical families, has led to the closure of a bunch of elementary schools, which really sucks. Kids who could walk to school now have to get driven or take a bus a few miles away, which also makes it a bunch harder for parents.

A big reason we moved where we did was proximity to schools. Our elementary has gone down from 3 classes per grade to 2. Kids get bussed up to keep numbers. The neighborhood is starting to turn, where people who moved here 30-60 years ago are dying/leaving, but the houses are almost all over 1million after spiking the last 5years, that the younger families only have a couple of kids if that, and many get sent to Ivy prep schools anyhow.

 

Is there any government program anywhere in the world that has been able to keep birth rates from plunging? Other than keeping women uneducated and unequal and without access to birth control, I guess.

Falling birth rates aren't something that just happened. They're a result of the choices of hundreds of millions of people all over the world.