Quote: (08-29-2014 01:40 AM)Glaucon Wrote:
No-one mentions the one thing that would boost the birth rate significantly:
Low taxes.... when 50% of my salary is taken by the government, I think twice before having a child. I barely have money to take care of myself.
I'm not sure that high taxes are necessarily an issue. They might be in certain countries. However, East Asia has very low birthrates (lowest in the world), yet several East Asian nations have very low tax rates (the average person in Taiwan pays ~5%, for instance, and the government also keeps prices of utilities, petroleum and other things artificially low).
I think that in both Asia and Europe the real problem is that people have bought into consumerism too much and too many people have essentially decided that having children gets in the way of having a good time. They're living like permanent adolescents. Planning to have children, and then actually having them, often has the effect of forcing people to be more ambitious and enterprising, pursuing a better job, etc. The people I know or have known here in Taiwan who don't have kids have often been content to fool about in a largely dead end job, even if it's not a terrible job, because it's enough to pay for their vacations abroad, the latest fashions, and all the electronic gadgets they think they can't live without. These are not people with absolutely no prospects. They're well educated enough. It's just all about their attitudes.
My observations are that whilst a fair number of people might only have one kid, those people throw tons of resources at that kid, so it's not a financial thing. Most people who do have kids do tend to have two. They manage somehow. The real problem, I think, is those people who don't have any kids, and as I wrote above, those people tend to be unwilling to take responsibility for themselves in general, not just by having kids.