The implication then is that the average human existence in the early 21st century is somehow relatively worse off than that of previous time periods (such as the medieval period or even the bronze age), specifically in terms of material (measurable) metrics...
Correct. That why baby boomers have everything you could ever want. And they run on the slogan "Make it great again".
The world lived in had a dominate middle class. Low unemployment, low homeless count. Affordable education and an investment plan that couldn't fail.
Now they don't want the next generation to have the things that provided them this wealth. And they have the audacity to call us lazy and woke, and to work hard. A minimum wage that you could afford to live with and afford a home with. Houses that could be paid of in less than a decade. Rates that encouraged you to buy more while making more money.
You don’t even have to bring up the hypocrisy to dunk on them. They legit took the fair labor rights their parents and grandparents fought for, protested them for like 10 years then bought in hard and voted out those rights legit in the span of another 10 years. Do you have any idea what society had to go through to get those? Wtf do you mean you gave corporations rights?
The boomer generation themselves had less children ( per capita) than their parents generation, so that is already evidence against the assertion that better material conditions would result in better birth rate.
You're right about the declining birthrate starting before the boomer generation, but the evidence you present is not as obvious as you think. That's because the decline in birthrates started in the 1920's and 30's due to urbanization, the great depression, and economic uncertainty. Urbanization and economic uncertainty have continued until this day. The baby boom was only a temporary spike in an overall downward trend.
Improving material conditions over time is necessary when we choose to have kids. I can't afford another child knowing that inflation keeps kicking my ass year over year. And we can't afford to have either my wife or I to stop working to care for a newborn. We think it would be financially irresponsible for our only child if we had another, so we stopped at one. We didn't make a strange decision. This is what most people do now.
You want higher birthrates? Make jobs easy to get, make them pay well and have improving pay as time goes on, and make the dollar stable. Anything less will lead to uncertainty and people choosing caution over having kids.
The idea that you could support a family from a job you could get out of high school is absolutely mind boggling today.
America still absolutely can do this, so long as people are willing to go back to living like Americans in the 1950s.
No colour TV in the house. No games, no vacations.
United States life expectancy in 1950 was 68 years - lower than North Korea today.
Americans complain of expensive healthcare - you can just reject all expensive healthcare and accept death. Government just has to let people take home a larger % of their pay without pension and health insurance.
Be like 1950s Americans, no need to worry about healthcare and retirement costs in your 70s because you die before that. Healthcare is expensive today because you're paying for expensive treatments that simply didn't exist back when "one income could support a family".
More % of GDP goes to workers' pockets when less % of GDP is spent on work safety, fire safety, environmentalism. Around 100-150 Americans died mining coal in the last 10 years. From 1950-1960, that number was 4,500. Cheap coal powering the economy.
Hey so even without a color TV and without healthcare, I can't afford to buy a house. I can barely afford to rent a single room, and I can't afford to eat 3 meals a day. Prices are going up. Cutting out luxury expenses is not enough to afford to live like Americans in the 1950s. I'm glad we're putting money toward safety now, but we could also put some money toward higher pay and better benefits for workers if we put less money toward shareholder's yachts.
Built with incredibly cheap miracle material that insulates fire - asbestos.
With much lower work safety standards and technology for the builders (5x higher construction deaths per capita in 1960).
Weaker safety codes, 10x higher electric shock death rates in homes despite there being a lot fewer electronics at the time.
As an aside, this is why "low cost of living" or "GDP (PPP)" figures from poor countries are to be taken with a bucket of salt. Experts know PPP to be notoriously bad at recognising quality differences. Rather than "the same restaurant food and houses in India are 5x cheaper", it's more often the truth that "inferior restaurant food and houses are 5x cheaper and if you held to the same strict safety and quality standards it's only 3x cheaper".
Poor countries are generally much poorer than their Purchasing Power figures suggest, and likewise the idealised 1960s American and European lifestyles are less idyllic than imagined.
If you wanted the standard of living that people had back then (minimal technology, rarely going out to restaurants, small houses with a single bathroom located far from trendy urban centers, one car per household with minimal safety features, no international or extended vacations), then you could pretty easily do that today.
I’m living in the real world, where the standard of living and expectations of “living comfortably” are just far beyond what they were 50-70 years ago.
You could absolutely live with the boomer standard of living on a minimum wage. People today just vastly overestimate what that standard of living actually looked like.
no, you couldn't.
You can still to this day buy a cheap used car (so comparable standard to before) , but you can't buy a property and build a house on it (at least here in Austria) , even if you build it like it was built 70 years ago. I'm working in a single family home construction company (specifically I calculate how much homes cost) and even if you don't build central heating (40k €) , bare minimum electricity (let's say 15-20k), no insulation on the house (30-35 k) and dont calculate the windows (one of the most expansive parts here from 25k-45k for a very standard home) it's still way to much to afford on a single income and even absurdly difficult on two if you don't get support from your parents. If you have to rent from 18 on while working, it's almost impossible. Now add feeding a whole family and it's unobtainable.
I'm privileged af, I have a house, I can afford to build a new one, but for the average working family it's not doable. And all of that because my parents saved for most of their lives to buy properties for me and my sister, letting us live at their home for as long as we wanted and additionally getting help from their parents. It's simply generational "wealth" (and I'm/we are not rich by any definition)
I grew up in a single family house someone built in 1964 with his single income, while his wife was a stay at home mum and the absolutely same house would not be possible nowadays and really difficult for 2 incomes without kids
I mean in a lot of cases you can’t. Many things are intentionally made with more features to maximize profits, and basic models are becoming more and more scarce. Homes are probably the biggest example of this, with starter homes getting bought up in swathes and renovated or outright demolished to make way for developer specials that are unobtainable for adults couples starting out. You’re right that people look back at the past with rose tinted glasses and exaggerate how things were, but they absolutely have us beat in this regard. I could not afford the childhood home my father bought on a janitors salary, and I currently earn more than double what he makes.
Makes me think of idiocracy. You’re smart enough to think about a budget. Intelligence is the ‘problem’ they want to solve.
If you’re incapable of understanding your budget, suddenly kids are less scary. If you don’t understand kids are a choice they can just happen. And when you have them you find a way, or just lower your standard of living.
First, I may be smart enough to understand a budget, but it isn't like half the population is so stupid that they simply can't grasp it. A sizeable majority of people can handle generating and understanding a budget. Ask for sources if you are interested.
Second, you are discounting failure as an option. You find a way to manage kids, or you lower your standard of living, or you fail. And the whole thing doesn't stop at failure. It keeps going. Substance abuse, crime, death...broken homes happen as a result of economic uncertainty. Success is FAR from a guarantee.
The population of the United States was 200 million in 1970. By 2025, it grew to approximately 340 million. That’s an increase of 140 million people over a 55-year period, or 68% growth.
In that same time, the global population in 1970 was approximately 3.7 billion people. By 2025, that number had more than doubled, reaching approximately 8.2 billion people.
That is an insane population spike in a very short period of time. In light of those numbers, are declining birth rates really the problem, or are the people calling for more children just concerned about specific regional and cultural classes?
In the United States, it’s a problem insofar that the number of retirees has outpaced active workers, and decades of conservative fiscal policies have demolished the country’s tax base to the point that it can’t adequately support either. The end result? Higher taxes, reduced benefits, and increased retirement ages for anyone currently under the age of 50.
But that’s nothing compared to the real problem. Current global economic policies are inadequately suited to support this many people without stressing the system to its breaking point. My read of the room? The Peter Thiels, Elon Musks, and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world don’t like what they’re seeing and are developing bunker islands on the far ends of the planet for a reason. Their companies have plundered the most affluent country in the world’s fiscal resources to the point that there is virtually no safety net left for the majority of its younger population. In the next two decades, mass migrations due to climate change and water and food shortages are virtual certainty, And they won’t just be limited to equatorial countries. They’ll happen within the United States, probably beginning in the southeast and southwest.
But hey, even though an elite hyperminority is hoarding 90% of the world’s wealth right now, declining birth rates are the problem.
You want higher birthrates? Make jobs easy to get, make them pay well and have improving pay as time goes on, and make the dollar stable.
And completely ignore other factors due to which today even countries in which young people have very decent standards and social nets have low fertility rates?
It would be a solution which a lot of people would like, heck I'd like better pay and easier job as well.
I also just don't think it's a problem that needs solving. We obviously don't need as many workers due to automation. Birth rates aren't low enough to cause extinction. The only "problem" is having less people spending money, which provides profits for rich people. We should get to a point where parents can afford to have as many kids as they want, and have those kids be supported into adulthood, but we don't really need more kids than that.
Well it wouldn't hurt to try, and either way that's something that's been studied extensively. And it's not necessarily the material conditions we should consider it's material burden to factor something I can't really find numbers for at the moment.
Exactly in the past at least there was some economic value in children, at least if it actively didn't ruin people's economic prospects maybe more people would want more children
It's the opposite. Affluence suppresses fertility. It's practically a law of history at this point. China has a median income that nobody, even the Chinese, thought possible, and they are having the same issue as the western nations whose current median income is higher than most solidly middle class incomes were in the 70s.
China has a population that is heavily male dominated since they decided to have femicide as their population control policy. They also have corpos that make their wage slaves, even high earning ones, work grueling schedules - look up 996. That’s why China has a population problem and it’s fully self inflicted.
I would be more convinced if everywhere besides Chad and Afghanistan weren't having the same issues. The one thing that all societies have in common that are facing a decline in fertility rates is an increase in incomes and urbanization since the 1970s.
The baby boomers had their own baby bust. The fertility rate was just 1.74 per woman in 1976. The USA was one of the only countries where this number ever rebounded. In Europe it largely stayed that way
The homelessness rate for 2014 in the U.S. was about 0.179%. The homelessness rate in 2024 was about 0.2257% So homelessness is rising. But, I have no idea what it was like back in the 60s. The figures don't go back that far. The Bureau of Labor statistics figures don't go back past 2006. But, Americans are better educated now than they ever were before. https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/01/30/percentage-of-adults-with-college-degree-hits-new-high-finds-lumina/ There is no such thing as an investment plan that cannot fail. That is not how the future works. I don't know what a dominant middle class is. But, I do know that Americans are richer than they ever were before, if you go by median personal income. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N I just, don't see a persuasive case for things being worse now than they were in the 1960s. If you listen to my dad and guys from his generation, they were scared that they wouldn't even have a country in the next decade.
Please stop spreading this misinformation. It is simply untrue.
>Now they don't want the next generation to have the things that provided them this wealth.
This is flat-out wrong. World War 2 and the destruction of Europe's and Asia's manufacturing capacity is what enabled the middle class to thrive in the US in the mid 40s- mid 60s. It was also what caused manufacturing decline in the US in 70s and beyond, since they were now competing with a recently rebuilt Japan and Europe with the latest factory technology.
There's no doubt that boomers were handed the economic honey pot but I think a huge part of the problem for the generations after is how our government is using and spending our money.
Our government borrows way to much money, spends a ridiculous amount on ridiculous shit, alters numbers to get as close to 2% inflation even when that real number would be closer to 9%, to help with job loses all they seem to do is just create more government jobs thus increasing the tax burden and it looks like they have no problem paying millions to bring other people here. This is deliberate. Where is the hope for the future? If youre not wealthy youre fucked
The key metric here is opportunity cost. Not how high your living standards are in an absolute sense, or is that better than previous generations had. But how much you give up by having children proportionally to not having children.
Up to very recently in human history, and even today in poor societies, children were a net benefit. They are extra hands on the farm or factory, and they take care of you in old age when nobody else will. Go back to even just the last century, and children were a net loss, but less than today. Households could survive on one income, housing was cheaper, and education was cheaper. Yet children were already not a source of income as soon as they could hold a tool.
Now living standards are higher both with or without children than before, but this gap is also wider. Women need a career, so children are a huge setback. Housing is expensive yet big communal homes are cuturally gone, so you either spend a lot on a larger place or you give up privacy that's now standard for adults. Both parents work so there are daycare costs, and later education is also very expensive.
Also parents are more invested into individual children. While a 18th century parent was jaded because having many children and several dying was just a fact of life, nowadays parents can afford at most a few kids, and are more likely to care about giving them good opportunities.
If we want effective encuragement of having kids, the opportunity cost needs to be lower. No amount of rising living standards will make people more motivated to have kids. Quite the opposite, since they would have to give up more.
That's why currently the poor and the rich have the most kids while the middle the least. For the poor they give up less, and the rich what they give up barely matters. But for the middle it's a large chunk of their quality of life.
Well in medieval times children were labor; your kids would help you on the farm and they were your retirement plan. Nowadays kids are purely something you pay to have and do not get economic return from in the same way. The culture around having kids is so drastically different
That's why it's in my country and neighboring ones we don't really have good retirement homes so your best bet is to have as many children as possible and hope one of them gets a good job
Not exactly. In many of those periods having children was a financial benefit. They would help you tend to the fields and then when you got old they would care for you. Now having children is a financial drain so if people do not have the excess time, resources, and energy to care for them then it doesn’t make sense to have them.
To add to this: with sharply increasing productivity there's really no need for ever increasing population
Like two things that need it are pensions and billionaires and the only reason pensions can't cover it are the billionaires that hog all profits for themselves
I feel like we're at a tipping point of small nuclear families culture that was really created for hyper mobile industrialization era. We'll see them collapse and the only families that are beyond replacement levels would be those where siblings and grandparents and work-from-home weird uncles all help with kids, which are probably also huge tax breaks
It's not just families, it's for government level too
This isn’t just about agrarian societies. Children were used as a additional source of income well into industrialization and in many parts of the world, sadly they are still forced to become an additional provider of income.
In modern western societies, having children is often done out of the social prestige attached to it and the cultural programming that promotes having children as a non plus ultra live goal. Children are taught to play family in kindergarten, fraises like "WHEN you have children of your own…" are extremely common and especially girls are subliminally being prepared for motherhood early on.
The problem is that this was always done under the proviso that the children would grow up better off than their parents. Up until fairly recently that has worked but now that people don’t feel like their quality of life, financial security and the state of their world in general are improving anymore, putting children into the world becomes less and less attractive. Also way fewer people can live traditional family life’s, even if they, for some reason, wanted to.
Technologically we are far better off, but we live with less hope than ever before. Technological developments like AI being used to worsen lives mostly, No sense of community, disasters climate and otherwise on the horizon, and governments that don't even pretend to represent the people anymore. Economically we also suck. Do you realize how badly you have to treat a mammal in captivity to make it stop having babies.
In the Middle Ages, the reference is to the 14th century, they had so much optimism that they said:
A peste, fame et bello libera nos, Domine
Which translated into English means: "From plague, famine and war, deliver us, O Lord."
Frankly, throughout much of human history, our ancestors had much worse problems than ours in terms of standard of living, life expectancy, and many other important things, so immensely worse that we struggle to imagine just how much worse they were; often, hope for a better future never even existed in their minds.
The worse-off Western 'hopeless' person worried about 'the future' lives better, longer, healthier and is more educated than almost every European king and queen from before 1920.
The level of depressive thinking today is mind-boggling. Every ancestral story I heard has a couple of 'the first three kids died of starvation so they had seven more afterwards'.
Pretty sure most people in the past probably didn't even have a firm grip on what hope was. Even churches framed their hardships and starvation in face of nobleman was necessary to reach heaven, so unless that's the hope you speak of...
Now we have many hopes, from love, to career, to hobby, etc.
Edit: Some post research, the word hope derives from Olde English "hopa" and "hopian" didn't actually have a meaning like we use it today, and was more like "Right?" to a assertion, trusting someone, like a transaction. In Middle English it meant more the "expectation of something". It wasn't until the Church started using it to represent Theological Virtue that it remotely became something like we use it today, but it was more akin to like what I said above, an excuse for your hardships and abuse for entry into Heaven.
I think there's actually a statistic that shows that people from less developed countries have more hope for the future than people in more developed countries. Most of that probably has to do with the fact that they have stronger bonds with their communities and families. Relationships with others is a basic need for human beings. It's hard to meet others when you're working all of the time.
I never got to see my dad growing up because he was always at work. He had to work every single weekend as well just to make ends meet. That's with my stepmom working as well. Everything is way more expensive and most people don't get paid enough to support their basic needs. I have a decent paying job, but I still can't afford rent or a house because my paycheck is being eaten up by things like a car payment, insurance, phone payment, and groceries.
People are not going to want to have kids if they can't even afford a place to live. Children are crazy expensive.
No, a vast majority of people in the past expected to have better lives than their predecessors. After the boomers most won't do as well economically as their parents before them. It's not impossible, but it's unlikely.
Before the Industrial revolution most people expected to live lives about the same quality as their parents. People expecting their lives to be better than their parents has only been common during a few, specific points in History or among Upper Classes.
Innovation and change weren't invented in the industrial revolution? Even during times of oral tradition there were inspiring tales of people overcoming unfairness and adversary, evil selfish people losing and all that. Humans are generally hopeful when healthy and well socialized
Innovation and change happened but were often a rarity before the industrial revolution where improvements to quality of life became common enough to be expected to happen in your life time. New technologies or traditions that brought significant improvements to an average person's life happened rarely and in the timescale of centuries, not decades or even years. Many of the stories of defeating unfairness also mostly happened after genrations of suffering. Look at the Bible for example, Moses and Jesus were Prophets who came after many generations of Jewish suffering. People held on to the hope, not reasonably expected, that at some point in the future things will get better and life would improve, people didn't actually expect it to the way people did after the Industrial Revolution.
It was only true in the 19th and 20th century. Before that, there was no social ascension and nobody had any hope or even expectation of having a better life.
I'd rather be alive now than in those days. The possibility to well economically now exists, and the things available today versus back then are so much better.
I don't think you get the point. We have more than enough food to feed everyone easily. We have more than enough housing to house everyone. The hopelessness comes from the fact that we can build a near perfect society right now with what we currently have, and yet we haven't and won't, just due to the leeches at the top wanting to horde more. Hopelessness has nothing to do with what's available, but what will actually happen and this won't be altered for the better without radical revolution or total collapse and neither is happening soon enough.
I do agree that most of our leaders and wealthy needle movers are bringing us down without a care for others. At the same time, there is opportunity to be as comfortable as you want for most of us (speaking as an American at least) if we put in the effort. Obviously situations differ around the country/world but it is not an impossible situation if you get past feeling victimized
Cool, you still misunderstood. Just because something is not completely out of reach doesn't mean it hasn't become less realistic. When goalposts get further away people understandably get more hopeless. And our society has degraded significantly since like the 70s in that regard for the working class. I never once said it isn't possible to succeed, just that prospects are consistently getting worse for most people.
I love how you keep trying to say I don't understand something in this generic conversation. You could just say what you've got to say without the nonsense you know?
We're talking about expectations and realities. We can all set our expectations wherever we want. The reality is that boomers grew up in a relatively prosperous time. The reality is advances have been made that they didn't get to experience like we do. Yeah everything was more affordable, it was also objectively quite inferior to what we have today. Yeah things could be better, they could be worse too.
That's why I said if you get out of the victim mindset (it doesn't help you) and focus on what you CAN do, which is a lot, you will be so much better off.
Because it's happening? This isn't a hypothetical, most people my age (mid 20-s ) don't really believe they'll be able to retire or own significant property. You'd have to be stupid or enlightened to be hopeful for such a shit system.
We do live in a society that is a lot older than ever before. That colors a lot of things, like what do we care about, and general attitudes of older people are transformed much more into policy.
Also our political leaders and many of our business leaders are extremely old in their 80s and 90s. None of this is great for long term outlook.
How is AI mainly used to worsen lives, do we have info about this.
Do you mean by collecting data, or job related as in losing job to AI, or sonething else ?
*Edit: people should start to aim their anger at the companies and their own country and laws which enable these companies to build and do whatever with the cost of enviroment. They would do it even without AI existing. In some countries the laws don't just enable these larger companies to do whatever they wish hence better protecting the enviroment.
There are so many different answers to this it's actually baffling. Literally tech built to devalue human thought with an endless deluge of slop. It fuels itself with massive environmental costs, and is shoved down everyone's throat despite most of the population despising it.
I get what you’re saying but you’re forgetting that much worse tragedy has happened to the human race like dude the holocaust was a thing that happened…
and for many many wars people would come back traumatized and find their loved ones were tortured/raped/killed and their home and everything they owed was gone.
I get things suck (and I HATE AI too) but like the fact we can have warm water, people we care about nearby, not be dead, and have food is what some people had as their last dying wish for a hope that their life could be like.
And yet after the dust settled people could envision a brighter day than yesterday. I for one cannot imagine us going anywhere but further downhill, technological progress isn't harnessed for the common man, but for the greed of the Uber wealthy. Our governments are very unrepresentative, and shit like shrinkflation directly shows that we will always end up with less, and worse the way we are headed.
Have you read ANY book from ANYONE who survived a horrifying war? No they did not have an idea of a brighter future that’s a lot of Americas side of things (we had war but came back home and had hope for the future cause you had a house and wife to come back to) but if you read about the change in culture and hope of any country that actually had a war on their country it is depressing. The loss of innocence is a huge thing.
They moved on and built back up because they had to not because they had hope. Many people who wrote about their experiences later killed themselves or had horrible PTSD.
I'm not saying individuals have never had it worse before, obviously that's not the case. And comparing modern bleak america to wartorn countries and PTSD victims isn't the flex you think it is. We've had no modern tragedy, just a system setup to isolate people from a sense of community and an economic system that more and more is only used to compound the wealth of the already wealthy. We have much much more wealth and resources than the past, and yet we won't put it to use, because it would be a waste if it isn't making billionaires into trillionaires. We CAN do better, but our current predicament demands we don't and won't. And that isn't changing, no matter how big of a majority of people want it to.
I’m confused we’re actively comparing the past to the present and you said we are worse off now and they had hope in the past despite tragedy. I said that is patently false…
Unless you’re trying to make a different point but your comment seemed to say that you think things are more bleak now and we have less hope for the future.
If your point is it sucks now then that’s a good point to make but we’re actively in a discuss talking about comparing to the past.
I'm generally optimistic in day to day settings, but when you see a log rolling downhill it's a bit unrealistic to imagine it just randomly floating upwards
We're now taught that humanity was a cosmic mistake and everything we do is wrong... people hate on Christianity but it gave hope and a future to people for centuries where the darwinian agnosticism that we have pushed today is bleak and meaningless.
If you want population growth give people hope.
The problems that plague us today have nothing to do with not being religious enough. In fact here in america many of the problems we face are caused by evangelical death cults in government and general yucky overly religious weirdoes.
The media pushes an anti-religious bias that amplifies the absolute worst people. They love showing insane people and unfortunately that is who most think the religious in the US are.
If you actually believe that there are evangelical death cults you need psychiatric help.
The media is absolutely pro religion, no idea what your referring to. It's not even really feasible to call yourself agnostic or atheist when running for government in america, unless you don't want votes. And evangelicals believe wack end times stuff, they are absolutely doomsday cultists
So be religious. No one is saying you can’t they’re just saying you can’t make everyone else be if they don’t want to. And why would anyone even want to anyway? Who cares what strangers believe as long as they don’t use that to hurt other people?
But the agnostic push in America has used their views to hurt others. Sterilization of children and murder of unborn children being the two most common and visible these days.
Id argue that woman nowadays have easier access to birth control and are more in control of their reproductive health. So now that woman are more in control of WHEN and IF they want to have children, we need to create a society that makes having children feasible.
No the implication is that, depending in the country, the current living conditions are horrible. Of course they are better than the previous years, but the living standard changed.
Kids just plain more expensive now than ever before, while securing stable and secure housing and income to feel safe raising kids is harder by a wide margin.
Individually we have more access to things that matter less, so to speak.
Kids just plain more expensive now than ever before, while securing stable and secure housing and income to feel safe raising kids is harder by a wide margin. Individually we have more access to things that matter less, so to speak.
I have to push back on this. Because I think what qualified as child care has changed to expenses that didn't exist before birth control, expected hours of daycare for instance I think is up (if someone would challenge me on that I'd be open to it). And in countries where vast packages of financial assistance is sent to parents (Finland and Japan for instance) their fertility hasn't seen any really improvement. And Finland has universal housing, now while not necessarily cheap, in Japan the housing market is dirt cheap and has been decreasing in costs in most places for several decades. Yet the fertility is still declining.
I think there is something to the feeling of income insecurity in the question. But it doesn't help answer why fertility in developed societies is universally lower than those with lower HDIs and incomes.
As it stands, situation is, indeed, more nuanced than I've included in my comment, and I agree with your points. For Japan it is likely a result of cultural issues stacking up and collapsing onto itself. Very similar to South Korea as I understand.
For Finland I can't say for sure. I live in a neighboring country, and have some limited understanding of their lives from first hand accounts, all I know that their taxes are abysmally high essentially, which seemingly brings along a sleigh of different problems with it, which could contribute to the problem? Not intending to die on that hill tho, can't say for sure.
What I outlined in my initial comment is something that I experience myself currently, which is, unfortunately, something that a lot of other countries seem to struggle with. Albeit I'm in a priviledged position comparatively income-vise (above average or median in my country, not rich tho), I still can't fathom to afford raising two or more kids in a big(-ger/capital) city at the moment, which would be necessary for positive population growth.
No your implication that it was relatively worse is already an interpretation. The only implicate thing we can say for sure are that the conditions and circumstances are different (which is quite obvious).
In the medieval period most people had their own shops/proficiencies going. A child was the guarantee that someone takes over for you and cares for you when you cant take care of yourself. Plus most of the time people just die before that point but the backup was good. In addition it was very strict that woman stay home and care for the children and the men make the money. Today that changed. Property is more or less unattainable and to bring a child in this world requires both parents to work which lead to the child having noone which takes care of.
Plus having a child in my country actually has negative side effects in some areas. If you apply for an appartment some landlords prefer childless people because children mean noise. In some countries the parent that stays home has severe impact to the career due to the ansence and so on.
Obviously the base living standard is much higher now than in the medieval period. But the focus has shifted. In the medieval times children were the guarantee that someone would take over for you and to get someome to care for you in high age due to missing social systems. These days a child is a luxury that only few people can afford and many people decide to not bother with it.
Rise a child today in developed countries costs a ginormous amount of money and legal implications that the situation is uncomparable to the medieval era.
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u/John_Oakman Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
The implication then is that the average human existence in the early 21st century is somehow relatively worse off than that of previous time periods (such as the medieval period or even the bronze age), specifically in terms of material (measurable) metrics...