This is an opportunity to see how to make it work. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead eventually. I find the idea of creating new life to keep a poorly functioning pyramid scheme going grotesque, ymmv.
Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).
Things that old people need are going to get super expensive with a shrinking population because there are so few working age people providing those services compared to the number of retirees.
So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....
I’m absolutely telling people not to have kids into a macro that just wants economic slavery to pay back debt of all sorts incurred (sovereign, demographic).
Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.
Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.
You're screwed financially during child-bearing years if you have kids. You're screwed financially in retirement if you don't, because care is going to be super expensive if/when the population pyramid gets inverted.
The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.
Yeah, the people in the year 1000 really had it a lot better than us. You see when they had 10 kids and realized that they couldn’t split up their plot of land 10 times. They just went off to war and took some of their neighbour shit we should really just go back.
This is like going along with the crowd in China when they started killing off all their young girls leading to this current population imbalance. The right solution is to go where no one else is at the moment and have large families.
No one is stopping couples from having big families (except their economics perhaps), but no one should help them either. There are 8 billion people on Earth, headed to 10 billion. We are currently unwilling to spend what it takes and reconfigure socioeconomic systems to provide quality of life for the humans here now. Fix this and then an argument to have more kids is potentially palatable. But "spit more expensive [time and fiat] kids into the torment nexus?" Neither a rational nor empathetic argument imho.
Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).