So many people loved the baby boom generation, because instead of needing to do extensive marketing, there were so many people with so many different tastes that anything could be sold. Businesses enjoyed those decades of profits, and have been working to emulate those profits ever since, hoping that people would resume being hyperconsumptive. In fact, there are a number of countries offering baby incentives, such as South Korea, Japan, Germany, Finland, Australia, Italy, and Estonia. The United States empire just went insane and voted to take our reproductive rights away to try and bring it back, because that seems to be the only thing that people remember about the baby boom: the babies.
Meanwhile, all of those countries have forgotten that the entire reason for the baby boom was that the planet was devastated after a war, but had begun to recover. The United States had just recovered from a depression and started reviving, but in places like Mexico, the government nationalized the oil trade, and created its own middle class. Life was therefore completely different than it is now, especially in Japan where there is literally a word for death by working. There were support systems in place, and life was more manageable, though not perfect; now, life is such an unforgiving grind that people have less interest in living, let alone raising children. Now, there is nothing about society that makes people want to risk starting families.
I have two solutions to increase the international birth rate. First, make the world an easier place to raise children, and accept that children will need parents–regardless of how they look–to survive. Employers demanding that everyone work 40 hours a day to go home and be on call? The price of everything increasing to the point of unaffordability while insisting that everyone is lazy? I almost think that people getting pregnant should be arrested for child endangerment at this point in the timeline. Greed is killing the birthrate, and all of the fascist oligarchs–ALL of the billionaires, hands down–are responsible for destroying their own consumer base.
Second, let people live wherever they want to live by changing the immigration laws, and stop isolationist policies that harm everyone, including the current residents. There is no reason that every single nationality should be chasing money nonstop, and that kind of behavior is keeping human beings in dangerous situations. How is anyone supposed to aspire to more when all nationalities are looking for money-makers? In my opinion, that kind of behavior is no different from “traditionalists” all thinking that they can find rich supermodels who want to cultivate a parasite, regardless of gender. If all classes exist in all countries, it should not be so difficult to gain dual citizenship, or to repatriate.
All over the world, people have repeatedly demonstrated that they will do anything to bring more babies into the world except change it. I guess they never thought there would be a time when people finally called them on their behavior, but all of the younger generations have not bought into the hype. They know that there is nothing to be gained from sacrificing their well-being for people who could care less, and they are not going to be held responsible for the mistakes of their elders. Life needs to change, and until it does, people will continue not to be interested in having babies to suffer alongside them.
Chasing A Dying Empire 