Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.
It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".
I have a large extended family and we're fairly tight-knit. Lots of family gatherings each year. When questions like this pop up we can just ask the "kids" what they think (kind of a neat idea). Here's the top three replies from last Thanksgiving:
1) We can't afford it.
2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore.
3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
The problem with "just" asking people is that people aren't always aware of the reasons for their own behavior, and even if they are, they are prone to giving socially desirable answers, _especially_ in a social setting like a family Thanksgiving dinner.
Point 1 about affordability is directly contradicted by the fact that low income households are having the most children (except for a tiny minority of ultra rich), and those kids are rarely starving to death.
Point 2 is true, and probably a factor, but even married couples and partners sharing a household are having less children than before.
Point 3 is another excuse: fertility rates are low in _all_ industrialized nations in the world, from Canada, Italy, to Australia, to Japan, with perhaps Israel as the only exception. Meanwhile the countries with high fertility rates are absolutely terrible places to live like Afghanistan or Somalia.
Right. Kids cost time and money. So the lifestyle you can afford _with_ kids is slightly lesser than _without_ kids. But this is true at all income levels below the richest 1% or so.
Every person who chose to have kids had to make some lifestyle adjustments. If "we cannot afford kids" just means "if we had kids we'd have to make some lifestyle adjustments" then practically nobody could afford kids in this sense, including the overwhelming majority of people who _did_ have kids and are doing fine.
That shows that "we cannot afford kids" is not really the reason you're not having kids. More honestly it's "we prefer having more time and money over having children" which is not even an objectively bad preference, but people don't like phrasing it that way because it sounds selfish.
So they say "we cannot afford it", suggesting "we _would_ have kids if we had more money", except in reality they still wouldn't, because at a higher income level they'd be making exactly the same argument, too. Which is why we see fertility rates _decreasing_ with income levels, up to a household income of approximately $500K/year in the US.
Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
Babies are also free labor. They are just like the AI agents of today, parents had their children do a variety of things around the farm, instead of paying for tokens, they had to feed them, thats all.
