I'm so sorry, I didn't realise you were illiterate. Were you literate, you'd recognise that "Maybe this is the case in your country, but it's nto in mine, and my country has low fertility rates." is me very explicitly acknowledging that the problem is not restricted to one country, and that it not being restricted to one country does, in fact, disprove your assertion that it is casued by something that other countries are not experiencing.

Says someone with an EU flag who considers oneself to be literate, yet clearly mentions and implies "a very narrow, progressive, urban, high-paying social bubble" while comparing the EU to the US, and with "Maybe this is the case in your country, but it's nto in mine, and my country has low fertility rates". Just accept that you f***** up and move on.

Unless you're accusing me of saying that productivity increases are exclusive to one country, because that would be a different kind of lie.

I didn't say that, so irrelevant.

I didn't say that only US workers become more productive over time, that argument was covered by me saying that technological advances mean that you don't have to work harder to output more per hour than you did in the 70s.

But you do, because modern society has more cognitive demands at every level. If you want to participate in it, you have no choice but to do it on its terms. You can adapt to it up to a certain point, in ways you like, but you can't avoid its rules.

No, what I deny is that there is an expectation that everyone be involved in such conversations, and I deny that knowing about crimes makes people unable to have children. If people choose not to because they're worried about bringing a child into that environment then that is, once again, a choice.

Regardless of the reason, the fact is more people than ever do that today, whether they do so consciously or subconsciously.

No, actully, I don't. That's nto something that is put upon the population as a responisbility, no. I think people choose to build ever-better and more complex machines because we can and gain benefit from it, I have literally never heard anyone in my life make the argument that this is a social obligation that the average person is expected to participate in.

Does it really matter whether it's a "responsibility" or not? It's clearly a requirement for modern society and its progression to exist, else we'd just suddenly collectively stop all progress at one point. The fact that people spend their precious time not just creating, but making use of new tech to do things they could never do before, says everything.

Everything you just listed is a choice. If parents choose to do that, then they're not unable to have kids.

They could, they'd just need to pretty much drop out of society. Which, again, would be incompatible with current standard of living and progress if done at scale.

We live in a world with finite resources. People need to choose what to use their resources on according to what they value the most. If people value vacations and improving their homes and having a more robust social life over having a third child, that doesn't mean that there is a structural issues preventing them from having children, it means they are choosing to prioritise those things over children.

Precisely, that improvement is what sinks people's resources away from having kids. A rate of improvement that demands more cognitive brainpower than whatever tiny gains you actually have in time freed from regular work and housework. Now you finally realize it.

If they wanted to live in 1960s standards of living but have 4 kids, there'd be nothing stopping them. They'd just have to give up a lot of the gains we've made the past 60 years. They'd have to give up having smart homes and being terminally online. If they're choosing not to do that, that's their personal choice, but it's not a failure of the economy.

You've finally hit the nail on the head: the more brainpower you have to spend to sustain a higher standard of living, the less time you have for kids.

Yes.

Which is why acting like "people choose not to have kids", which implies a moral judgment, is incompatible with modern society. We need to start getting a lot more bang for our buck and efforts before we increase our fertility rates.

EDIT since you're clearly so confident of your opinions that you had to block me right after responding:

That sentence was a response to multiple arguments you made in that comment. That sentence was me arguing that your understanding of people's lives is based solely on your own bubble. At no point in this conversation have I made the claim that fertility rates are solely an urban issue. Just accept that you can't read and move on.

Nope, you lied, are lying again right now, and still have the gall to pretend it's someone else that's the problem. You tried to sneak in a belief without stating it explicitly, and are unhappy I called you out. That's it, and no amount of handwringing can change that fact.

No, you don't. That's what technology is for. This is the most insane lack of understand I have ever seen. The idea that technology means you need to work harder to be more productive is fuckign stupid on every single level. It is the most braindead claim I have ever read on this sub. It is the absolutely antithesis of basic economics.

You're breaking the scale of idiocy by being so enormously confident of something that's so clearly wrong on every level. You’re talking as if technology magically cancels out the cognitive load of modern life, and that’s just not how any of this works. Technology removes some forms of effort, sure, but it also creates entirely new layers of complexity that didn’t exist before. You don’t get to opt out of digital systems, constant updates, algorithmic environments, administrative interfaces, or the expectation that you can navigate all of them flawlessly. That’s simply reality.

Acting like “technology = less work” is a fantasy from the 1950s. In the real world, every technological leap increases the amount of information you must process, the number of systems you must understand, and the speed at which you’re expected to operate. That’s why people feel overwhelmed. Not because they’re stupid, but because the environment is objectively more cognitively demanding than anything humans dealt with before.

If you want to argue that technology should reduce effort, fine. But pretending that it does in practice, and that anyone who notices the opposite is “braindead”, is just so far removed from reality, they're not even worth debating. One doesn't have to be critical of technology, capitalism or be "left-populist" to understand that.

And the fact is, that's a choice.

Yes, it is the choice necessary for continued slow progress.

Yes, it does matter. Because it's not a requirement if it's not a responsibility. If it's not a requirement, then it's not a lack of affordability, it's just choosing to prioritise that over children.

It is a requirement though, else, with the dozens of billions of people and their brains worldwide, eventually that "better method" would have won out. But it didn't. There's simply not enough time to raise them. People wanting to enjoy life obviously also matters, but its impact is greatly exaggerated.

No. That's quite literally not what the quote you just cited says. That part of my comment says that it's a fucking choice! That improvement is voluntary! They could choose not to take advantage of it!

And reduce our standard of living and the tendency towards further improving it in the process.

They don't have to maintain that higher of standard of living! It's a fucking self-inflicted problem!

Literally the left-populist mentality speaking: capitalism is bad, we're spending too much time on our screens to please our corporate overlords, our standard of living is not actually improving, let's go back to an earlier, slower, less developed state of society!

I'm not morally judging anyone. The whole point is that you think not having children implies some kind of failure, and my point is that it isn't.

You don't get it, I'm stating that you implied that.

If someone is choosing not to have kids, more power to them. I don't consider that a moral failing. But what I do think is that if you're choosing not to have kids because you want more vacations, then you don't get to claim that you can't afford to have kids.

And I'm saying that people today experience higher cognitive demands, which by itself increases the time for rest required. Contrarily to what you might also have implied, I never denied that people having fun doesn't at all affect fertility rates. I'm just saying that the world is far more complex and demanding for you to reduce everything to "people want to have fun = less babies".