The fertility rate in the United States has been trending down for decades, and a new report shows that another drop in births in 2023 brought the rate down to the lowest it’s been in more than a century.
There were about 3.6 million babies born in 2023, or 54.4 live births for every 1,000 females ages 15 to 44, according to provisional data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics.
After a steep plunge in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the fertility rate has fluctuated. But the 3% drop between 2022 and 2023 brought the rate just below the previous low from 2020, which was 56 births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age.
I don’t know who this would be bad news for.
It’s bad news for the wealthy because it means they’ll have less labor to exploit
Well if they wanted people to have kids perhaps they should have helped make this country one that’s worth bringing kids into.
Unfortunately because the world runs on speculative investment, a smaller birthrate means less investment in child care, making it harder to find babysitters and daycares
Japan is already suffering from this, the birthrates are incredibly low but the daycares are packed because nobody is paying daycare workers enough, and nobody is investing enough to build new ones.
and Japan is incredibly anti-immigration
That’s bullshit I believe, because if more babies are born, sure there are more babysitters, but again, more babies. So it will even out and make no difference.
Good news for my kids. Less scarcity for them. This is what the world needs. Less kids. Everywhere.
You mean more older people to support for each worker, so higher taxes on workers
That’s just fearmongering. We have enough shit to help everyone already, and we are automating jobs at a very high rate, to the point that a lot of jobs are literal unneeded bullshit.
If anything, fewer workers always meant more worker power, better organizing, higher wages, etc. Look at what happened when the oligarchic idiots got a whole generation killed in WWI. Labour won big after, since labour was scarce, while capital was not.
You have it backwatds, there will not be the same quantity of stuff divided by fewer people. There will be less of everything to begin with.
Explain: Why would there be fewer crops, and fewer minerals?
It’s bad news for people in a few decades who will need younger people to care for them in their old age.
It’s good news, however, for the planet.
bosses in 2039
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If you happen to own a human meat grinder you may consider this bad news I suppose.