I am under 30. At current trajectory, my government (USA) will be unable to fund social security, medicaid, and medicare to care for me in my old age due to worsening working-youth:retired-elderly population ratio. I am concerned about unsustainable tax burden on the next generation youth. This problem will be worse in countries which don't attract immigrants.
Why are you suggesting that problem is caused by contraceptives? Birth rates in industrialized nations are cratering because the social and economic conditions in these countries have evolved to be fundamentally hostile to those who choose to have children. Pregnant women are almost universally punished by their employers especially in the private sector, childcare costs have gone through the roof, while the "career above all" koolaid is being shoved down our throats every single day.
If people take contraceptives, it's because they don't want to have kids at that moment. Forcing these people to have kids will create broken parents and broken kids, who go on to become broken parents themselves and perpetuate the cycle. Most of modern society's problems can be traced to parents who should not have been parents in the first place. We don't need more of that.
The problems you mentioned are real, but I am not convinced they are the root cause for low birthrates. Do you think that Sweden, Norway, and Finland are hostile to parenthood?
For career-oriented people, yes. Those countries operate on the same market economy principles as every other industrialized nation. Extensive welfare and benefits coverage not reversing the birthrate decline only further reinforces my argument that the root cause lies deep within how our society functions.
Are you saying that a free market economy is incompatible with high birth rates? How did even less generous free market nations have high birth rates in the past? Don't you think being forced to choose between having a free market and having high birth rates an even more extreme idea than the one in my OP?
>Are you saying that a free market economy is incompatible with high birth rates?
Industrialized free market economies are incompatible with high birth rates.
>How did even less generous free market nations have high birth rates in the past?
Because those nations were not yet fully industrialized nor did they respect basic human rights for every individual. Even in the U.S. it was not possible to have a no-fault divorce until the 1970s.
>Don't you think being forced to choose between having a free market and having high birth rates an even more extreme idea than the one in my OP?
Do you also think stock buybacks is an "extreme idea"? It's the nature of every business in a free market economy. This is why they punish employees who take leave instead of continuing to work.
I don't think birthrates are strongly tied to the economic system. I don't believe every human being before BC was having their human rights violated just because it didn't exist yet. I think that BC is an extremely powerful tool to fight poverty, but that the tradeoffs it could have on society aren't fully understood yet either. We should be open to the idea that there are tradeoffs here.
