The reason for low fertility rates is in large parts due to capitalism. I want at least one more child, but it is too expensive. We need to get a bigger apartment, which is prohibitably expensive. Want to stay home with the child? Too bad, both parents have to work to make the economy work. If you want higher fertility rates we just have to make it easier to become a parent through systemic changes, and lots and lots of reforms helping parents
this post was submitted on 10 May 2026
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The main problem of most developed societies is horribly low fertility rates.
It's not an opinion if it's just straight up factually incorrect.
Why shouldn't men also have better knowledge of psychology, health, childcare...?
It takes two to build a strong and stable relationship, let alone a family.
Are you a woman? Just curious
Reasons women say they don't have children: 1) They can hardly sustain themselves economically and 2) They can't find a partner
No amount of psychology training will get you to magically earn x3 or will give you the power to change adults behavior. No amount of education will fix your own shortcomings as a person either.
You want fertility rates up ? Fix your economy, get rid of corruption, make housing affordable, promote better role models, invest in actual community strengthening so people can build healthy relationships (and also crime rates go down). And affordable quality healthcare would probably help too.
Nah, I'm dude.
If the last few years are any indication providing benefits for the poorest doesn't improve fertility. Where I live government spends tons of money on subsidies for young people for housing, childcare, and even pays for each child directly, and these policies didn't improve anything fertility is even worse than in US. Looks like finances aren't the main factor.
The problem with subsidies is that they don't fix anything. They're a bandaid measure. It's better than nothing, in my opinion, but I don't consider it a fix. Note also my answer wasn't only limited to finances.
What’s going on in your brain that low fertility is the main problem?
Like have you take a look at the news lately?
And from that spectacularly uninformed position, we’re supposed to entertain your radical sexist plan to replace public education?
What’s going on in your brain that low fertility is the main problem?
It's collapsing the whole economy. In few decades you'll have the shrinking working population having to work their ass off to support retirees.
It's only a problem under capitalism. Under a decentralized socialist system, everyone would only need to voluntarily work around 4 months out of the year to have all of our basic needs met for everyone, for free. None of us would have to work bullshit jobs that only exist to profit CEOs and shareholders, so there'd be more than enough people to help take care of the elderly.
Under a decentralized socialist system
Except that system doesn't exist. I'm talking about what we have now, and what we have to work with.
I resent thinking in terms "we'll have something better for sure in the future" It's not planning it's pure hope
I'm pointing out the coming issue is completely arbitrary due to our current system, since we could abandon capitalism at any point with no downsides besides the rich losing their power and wealth. I'm not saying "Don't worry, it'll get better in the future" I'm saying we could do the groundwork to switch to a better system now, while we still can, and before increased suffering and artificial poverty and scarcity hits us globally due to the system of capitalism requiring infinite growth in a shrinking world.
This is not correct. There are lots of breakdowns as to why, but the clearest and most obvious is to look at productivity.
We are more productive than we were previously. If we compare how much GDP is produced by an hour of labour over time we see that we are getting better and better at making GDP with each hour of labour. We tend to increase at about 1-2% per year, so if one year you made $100000 of value the next year you would make $101000-102000.
This seems odd as surely this should mean people need to work less or have less trouble affording to live? Well, that is where capitalism comes in. Someone is finding life easier, but it isn't you. It is someone who is rich, someone who owns the means of production, a capitalist. By virtue of owning the company they can take your productivity, the total amount of GDP you produce, and then take a slice of that and pay you.
For the capitalist any productivity gains are just pure profit for them, so they love increases of productivity. They also love reductions in labour cost as that is often the largest cost they can potentially get rid of. From their perspective if they could pay you nothing they would. A good example of this is offshoring. Companied do this all the time to send the labour to somewhere that pays the worker less allowing the capitalist to extract even more value.
So how does this relate to the birth rate? Increasing the population increases the number of people you can extract value from. If you are a capitalist this is good because it also increases competition for the jobs you offer, lowering the labour price further.
The simple fact is we could afford to have way less population growth, in fact a bit of a contraction, without any ill effects if we wanted to. We would just need to give the capitalists less of the productivity per hour of labour. They would need to make less profit. They don't want that so they have made a big effort to make people think it would be bad to have low population growth.
Also, parents should get education before having kids. There should be courses you can do to learn what you need to be a parent, we agree there. It shouldn't be women alone getting that. Men who want to be parents should be able to learn the skills needed to be good parents. Putting all that on the mother is sexist and also just silly. Men would be better served by gaining skills to manage parenting than by outsourcing that duty to women.
Current fertility rate in US is like 1.6
1-2% GDP growth isn't going to cover it. And in Japan it's even worse
1-2% per year, compounding.
At a 1% rate it is 10.46% after 10 years, 22% after 20 years, and after 25 years or one lifetime it is 28.2%. This means the GDP per person is almost a third higher after one generation at the lowest estimate.
If you use the 2% estimate it is 64% instead, so you have two thirds more productivity per person. You reach double at 35 years.
So if you can produce double the output for the same input why are we all more poor than our parents? Someone is taking the growth and putting it in their own pocket. It isn't the immigrants or the gays. It absolutely is the rich people who own things, the capitalists. People who contribute nothing but permission to use their stuff and honestly it sounds like a scam to me.
This is actually first really good argument in the whole debate. There's an assumption growth will be sustained, and that fertility rates won't get any worse, which is IMO debatable, but it's a good argument nonetheless.
It absolutely is the rich people who own things, the capitalists
Capitalism isn't perfect, but trust me, you don't want to experience the alternatives.
To be honest, I do. I want the alternatives and advocate for them on the regular.
Capitalism is not commerce. You can have markets and personal property and so on without capitalism. On top of that you van have degrees of capitalism, like the difference between the US and other English speaking countries like Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. All of those except the USA have universal healthcare. All of those have more restrictions in business. All of those have some degree of socialised services.
I think that if you let capitalists have control of the government they move it towards fascism. I think that if you have a degree of state intervention and you have an accountable state then you can potentially move in the right direction. It doesn't have to be fully communist or socialist, but what we have globally right now is not working.
Capitalism with taxation is still capitalism. What you want is welfare state, with higher taxes and more funds diverted towards things like state run healthcare. It works decently well in EU, but the foundation is still capitalism.
When I'm talking about alternatives I mean all the communists here advocating for some impossible utopia.
Honestly, I want much more democracy than we have. Right now we have a vote over who represents us every couple of years, depending on the system. That person goes to the seat of government and casts a vote ostensibly because that is what all of the people in their electorate would have wanted.
The fact is we actually have an oligarchy. The people we get to choose from are almost always landlords, at least where I live. They have multiple houses, lots of wealth, and connections. This is needed to get elected, but it means that the only choice we really have is which arseholes we want to vote for. There is no option for "none of the above". Those people who we can pick from get a 4 or 6 year term and then we vote again with either the same person winning, which happens the vast majority of the time, or someone else who is also a rich fuck.
These rich people don't know what life is like for a poor person. They are completely oblivious to how hard accessing our social support systems is and how dehumanising the process can be. They don't know how often you will get your payment cut because someone else didn't do some paperwork properly. They don't understand that it takes a whole day on the phone to fix it every time.
They also don't know the price of bread and milk, how much school uniforms cost for kids, how hard it is to afford anything nice at all on so little money. They don't know how to cook because they can afford to have someone else do that for them, so they don't know how hard it is to budget your tiny income to feed a family. They don't understand that the major reason people don't want kids is because it is too damn expensive.
The rich pigs have to go. They have been slurping up resources for all recorded history in one way or another and they really don't add anything to the world. Could they be reformed by having their insane wealth removed and being average in wealth and income? Maybe. I would be willing to run the experiment. But at this point they have all committed so many crimes that a vanishingly small number of them would not be due to serve considerable prison time for wage theft, fraud, worker exploitation, and all the actually salacious crimes such as in the Epstein Files.
So I do actually want a radically different world than we have now. I do want to have a world where if someone abuses a child they face a fair and impartial justice system and then have justice play out, be it prison time or something else. I also recognise that aiming for that society from here is like aiming for a Mars base to build a space program. It is a reasonable long term goal but the steps along the way must be incremental and will involve a lot of time, effort, and energy. It won't be a linear process, it will have stops and starts along the way, but with determination we can make the world much better than it is right now. Each step towards that amazing goal is progress that makes living here better, so I am willing to take those challenges and victories along the way.
First things first. I'd want to see acts posted on github and developed like every open source project. With higher quality of law and better engineering practices you'd see a lot of smaller issues gone. One can only dream tho.
One can dream, but action is better. Asking for transparency is a good start, having legislation presented before voting for public comment is actually not that hard an ask for a legislature. Starting at your most local level and asking them to put legislation under consideration publicly on the local governmental site is a reasonable ask and may actually be done in a reasonable timeframe. Asking the next level up for the same once it is done locally and works out fine is actusy easier than starting at that level, so starting smaller is practically more effective.
I would recommend asking your most local form of government for the transparency you want and explaining your reasoning. Go to town hall meetings, be part of the process. It is more possible at that local level than at any higher level.
This is an unpopular opinion.
Congratulations! You achieved the goal of the community.
But now I feel the need to ask: are you not aware that what you propose is going back on civilizational achievements of nearly a century?
Considering that some people here advocate for abolishing capitalism in favor of communism, I think my take on education is pretty mild in comparison. I expected the negative response, no regrets.
Capitalism is as failed of an economic model as what is coloquially called "communism", associated with the brutal authoritarian regimes that rose in the late USSR, China, etc.
Basic reasoning is enough to find flaws in your opinion.
As living standards rise, fertility rates drop. This is a demonstrated reality throughout every nation. Birth rates remain high where gender roles are enforced - usually through religious belief - and poverty is generalized.
Unless you intend to enforce poverty, ignorance or both, what you propose is a civilizational regress, not advancement.
Capitalism is as failed of an economic model as what is coloquially called “communism”
You're telling this to person who was born in the transformation period, whose parents were born in it, and whose grandparents lived through it all. You have no idea what you're talking about. This horrible communist system was voted away in my country in 1989 in first fair democratic elections since ww2 and since then I saw nothing but insane progress and wealth creation. Claim that capitalism failed, is asinine. Your argument is incomprehensibly invalid.
It is a system that allows for the flow of wealth to pool around a very reduced number of individuals, built on debt and exploitation.
It is a broken, failed and failling system and the proof is plenty and ubiquous, unless we are to deny the last twenty years, just to keep within recent times, where several unprecedented economic disasters took place that have led to lowering living standards and the rise of personal fortunes to never before registered levels, while nations go into mounting debt.
That is asinine.
But this was not about economics but education.
Where does your reasoning goes to force an outdated and regressive doctrine to individuals, particularly women? And why are men exempt of similar considerations, apparently?
This post makes you sound like you think a woman's purpose is to have babies.
I think only women can give birth to children. Am I wrong? System should be adjusted accordingly
I won't disagree that there may be some benefits to how we prepare young girls and boys for adulthood, but basing how we do that for girls around being a mother is extreme. Not every woman wants to be or is even able to become a mother. I won't pretend that I have an answer for what the meaning of life is, but I reject the idea that the answer for women is to have babies. If you want to do right by young women in the education system, help them find ~~our~~out what they want to do with their life and find a way to help them achieve that.
If you want to do right by young women in the education system, help them find ourout what they want to do with their life and find a way to help them achieve that.
This is correct reasoning from ethical and philosophical standpoint. The issue is that we have a ticking bomb here and we need to disarm it somehow.
Kurzgesagt made amazing video about birthrates topic
Let's assume it's a ticking time bomb. The solution is to destroy the system that brought us here, which is patriarchy.
I won't lie, the issue of fertility rates is not one I have any prior knowledge of, and I made it about a quarter of the way through that video before I had too many questions to be able to continue. The video says some reasons of low fertility rates is because of poor handling of pensions and high healthcare costs for retirees. Are these not things that can be addressed and fixed before putting the expectation of having more babies onto women?
I feel like putting that kind of burden on women, especially young girls in school is like some form of slavery. Black schools in the US were underfunded by design so that black Americans wouldn't be qualified for higher paying jobs and had less opportunities for a higher quality of life. The proposal in your post doesn't sound very different for women.
Different profile of education doesn't mean worse. Just different. I don't know where "slavery" interpretation comes from.
different profile of education doesn't mean worse. Just different.
I can't tell if you're trolling me here. That's literally how whites sold the idea of segregation. And the word "different" in that context is what I was saying about opportunity. When you provide different education to different demographics of people, the levels of opportunity are vastly different for each group. You're idea of curating a young girl's education to prepare her for having babies does exactly that.
I'm not tolling.
That’s literally how whites sold the idea of segregation
And they were lying. I'm not.
When you provide different education to different demographics of people, the levels of opportunity are vastly different for each group
Since women can have children, their opportunities are bigger than opportunities of man. Building a family and childcare is an opportunity. Different one than professional career, but it isn't worse in any way. Many people feel lonely and want a child after decades of work, except the biological clock is ticking unequally faster for women, and it might be too late for some. Somehow you people treat children like an unnecessary burden. This is wrong on so many levels. Promoting and educating women in that direction isn't a disservice - it opens completely new path... And benefits whole society in current context.