> The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.
What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is.
To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases.
The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month.
Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth.
Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change?
The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
We had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came dangerously close to causing a nuclear war. Even after surviving that, we still lived under the threat of sudden nuclear death until about 1990. We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better. (I'm not old enough to go back to the Great Depression and World War II, but things didn't look optimistic then either.)
Then 1990 came. The wall came down; the USSR dissolved. Everything was going to be wonderful from then on. The good times were finally here, and they would continue forever. When that optimism didn't pan out, people may not have been mentally prepared for living in, essentially, what people had always lived in.
> The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
That I think I can agree with, except that we also need to fix blue-collar pay, and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media).
> We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better.
And yet, despite all of that, a blue collar wage was enough to own a home, a car for the breadwinner, a second car for the stay-at-home wife, healthcare, two children and their education. The economic base indicators were just way better than they are for my generation.
Also, politicians actually did something about all the crises you mentioned. The threat of nuclear war and other weapons of mass destructions got tackled by non-proliferation programs or outright bans (on chemical and biological weapons). Threats to the environment such as lead, acid rain or the ozone hole got combatted by banning lead and sulphur in fuels and CFC gases as refrigerants. The islamist terror threat got combatted by carpet-bombing Afghanistan, Iraq and a number of other hellholes, as well as upgrading airports and planes. The oil crisis got under control by introducing consumption limits and an expansion of domestic production to a point the US is a net exporter of oil.
In contrast, none of the modern polycrises got tackled. The financial world has deregulated to the point that we have yet another impending collapse, with actual giant banks like Credit Suisse going down. Migration and its causes aren't addressed, instead we build borders and threaten people with deathly conditions on their travel. Pandemic prevention has gone down the drain so hard that wearing masks and getting vaccines got politicized. Climate change is outright denied. If you don't get top degrees you have virtually no chance at getting a halfway decent paying job. Would-be parents, even young children can see all of that deliberate inaction.
> and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media)
Social media is an useful scapegoat - the mental health crisis (and I'd say also the drug abuse epidemic) is a direct result of our hyper-competitive, individualist everyone-for-themselves environment and the above-mentioned inaction of leadership to crises.
I'm not sure a blue-collar job in the 1970s got you two cars; I'm pretty sure it didn't in the 1950s. I'm not sure it got your kids through college without working, either.
Afghanistan and Iraq were in response to a later wave of Islamic terrorism. The earlier one got handled... I forget all the details, but I think there was some hunting down and killing of the responsible parties, and a (non-carpet) bombing of Libya.
Today, I think you can get a "halfway decent job" - or even a pretty good one - with a degree that is less than a "top degree".
So, overall you have at least something of a point. Leadership seemed a lot more competent then, and infighting was a lot less of an obstacle. But you're also looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and at the present with gloom-tinted ones.
From your perspective, do you think there's a good possibility the USA will improve the living conditions of our generation and the zoomers? I'm very skeptical and that's why I don't live there anymore, but I'm curious about those who are sticking it out. Is the hope that there'll be some kind of political change, a slow shifting to more progressive politicians?
I'm German anyway so I can't say much about the US - but given that Trump of all people still has more popular support in the polls than Biden has, and the average age of Congress members continuously rising? No chance.
For Europe? It's not as bad but still bad - we share the same issue, too many gerontocrats in power and the Boomer generation will dominate voters for the next 15-20 years given they enter pensioner age now and will probably live to age 80-85.
What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is.
To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases.
The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month.
Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth.
Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change?
The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.