This is also happening with reproduction
"Don't reproduce if you can't afford it"
But also
"Why are fertility rates falling into the abyss?"
this post was submitted on 27 Jun 2026
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I mean why are birth rates always the highest in the poorest regions? Makes you think that money likely has little to do with reproductive rates, and more along the lines of women gaining education and having access to family planning methods.
This perception is largely overblown though, there is some difference but the poor in western civilisation still do not produce enough children on average to gent to a sustainable number.
What might be a part of it is that globally the poorest region there is a lot of internal solidarity and community building.
Helping each other out becomes second nature if it means that the neighbourhood will have your back during worst times. Forming the village to raise a child.
The west has a long history of living from exploitation. we build a culture around “civilized /s” families having wealth and became financially competitive. When things go bad there is rarely ever someone to help because either “i don’t have this problem so it must be your own fault” or “no one helped me when i was in that position”
Poorer regions usually are more conservative too.
Which means that women are more likely to stay at home taking care of the kids. And if they do work, they do so part time. Which still leaves time to take care of the kids.
The regions with low birthrates usually have women working full time. And full time means 8h+.
I bet people would be having more kids if people that can work from home, worked from home. And if full time meant 6h instead of 8h+.
That way, instead of working husband + stay at home mom, we could have commuting parent and WFH parent.
With the added benefit of commuting parent having a shorter commute since there would be a lot less people commuting.
A lot of what people miss is the importance of safety and security. People don't have kids when they reach a certain income level. They have kids when they are reasonably confident they can give their children a decent living.
A subsistence farmer in Subsaharan Africa can have a much more secure existence than the working poor of countries like the US. People are poor, but they live on land they own or at least have assured access to through shared community rights. They may not have much money, but they have security. They can have kids, and at the very least, the kids can always take over the farm from their parents. The parents probably want the kids to go get an education and be more successful than themselves, but at the very least, the kids will have no worse a life than the parents do.
Compare that to developed countries. You pay monthly for rent that can skyrocket at any time, paid for with a job that can disappear at any time. And I would say raising kids in a rural African village is probably feels a lot more reasonable than trying to raise kids in a studio apartment built in a car-dependent American suburb.
Might be less that the subsistence farmer is so secure and more that they need the kids as a retirement plan. Most of the countries with falling birthrates have some sort of national pension for old people.
Sure, you could just make some shit up. That also works.
American? Would explain why you haven't heard of national pensions. Though I thought even Americans had Social Security.
Or you mean the other thing? Dude that's exactly what we did here 150+ years ago. If you have a bunch of kids, they'll provide your upkeep in old age. Some will tend to the farm, others may help in other ways (get a job in a city or even abroad, send money back home).
The periphery is of course the past.
Nice analysis. Thank you for posting.
The poorest may reproduce the most because they are going to be poor either way, and they might also not have as much means to avoid it. But it is definitely a consideration for middle class people in developed nations who may have reasonably comfortable lives if they don't reproduce but will put themselves into hardship if they do.
I think there's actually a bath tub curve with reproduction.
Also, poorer nations tend to have less protections for children/youth in the labor sector, so having more children can be beneficial in that you can send all of them out to earn money.
Note the pattern of how the people at the top of the economy continually blame the people at the bottom of the economy for everything going wrong.
Even if you donated all your money to billionaires and worked unpaid, they'd still demand more. The concept of 'enough' doesn't exist in capitalism.
I mean, how could it? Can you give me the highest number?
Yes, it's ထ + 1.
I am too poor to eat out. But I would also not eat out if it helps destroy capitalism.
Prices have skyrocketed, quality has tanked.
Sorry, but I have a hard time buying a salad for $10 when I can grab the ingredients for 10 salads for about $5. And they'll be higher quality. Not browning lettuce with mayo sauce.
Would you like to leave a tip for the service of grabbing your pre-made salad from the refrigerator?
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Sysco also is the food supplier monopoly. When you sign a contract with them you select what products they regularly stock for you to buy, and they heavily discount certain products they want to incentivize you to buy.
It's why everything tastes the same now and a lot of restaurants do sysco slop bowls.
It’s weird too because there is a burger place down the street from me that literally gets all of their ingredients locally. Buns from a local bakery, beef and potatoes from local farms, etc… A single patty combo with fries/tots and a drink is $13.79. Meanwhile down the street McDonald’s (I know McDonald’s doesn’t use Sysco but it’s the easiest burger comparison) is charging like $12.99 for a Big Mac combo that almost certainly has less beef in it and is nowhere near the same quality on any level in any capacity.
We are reaching a point where corporate overhead is so huge that it might actually bring back small businesses.
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My lunch from home tastes the way I want it, and it cost less, and it’s better for me…sooo yeah.
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fewer lunches than they did in 2020
When everything was shut down and people were working from home? Wtf?
maybe "february 2020" is the sense here
Shit happens. If restaurants were more fiscally responsible and lives below their means, they would have been prepared for something like this.
I’m not paying $22 for a burger. I can spend $6 on the meat, $4 on buns, $3 on blue cheese, and I have all the other seasoning and condiments at home already. That’s 4 blue cheese 1/4 pounders for $13. Or trade out the blue cheese for a handful of mushrooms and some Swiss for about $15 total. $15 vs $88 plus tip.
They did this to consumers/the economy and now they’re complaining about the fallout.
At this point I only go out for sushi. For obvious reasons.
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Poor people should not be allowed to hoard wealth. Only wealthy people should be allowed to hoard wealth.
Remember when fast food was fast food? Now you have to wait 10 minutes for your number and the things you overpaid for are barely describable as food (i.e. McDonalds CEO refusing to eat his own burger).
No, because McDonalds has been trash for decades, now they just raised their prices enough that people are finally noticing.
There is a market for trash food at trash food prices. Sucks we don't have any sort of mechanism in our communist shit hole country to fill unexploited market niches. Capitalism, real capitalism, would have fixed this. Its priests told me so.
If I could get a lunch for 7-8$ I'd go to restaurants every day. Instead even the fucking fastfood places all want 10-15$ for a fucking meal. I paid almost $10 for 2 burritos that used to be ,75 at tacobell a few weeks ago. The assholes are doing it to themselves.
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The level of entitlement that just most American business owners / capital holders in general have is actually delusional, insane.
Now of course... not all of them. There are a few that are not delusional, that are not totally full of thrmselves... that are, ironically, conservative, in the sense of low ongoing risk apetite and actually performing due diligence.
... But so many of them act like it is just your responsibility, your social expectation, you disgusting pleb, to buy their product or service, whatever quality it is, whatever price it is.
No, motherfucker.
Literally, that's not even capitalism, capitalism at least very much acts like / believes that a fundamental element of it is that consumers vote with their dollars, they compare and contrast the idea of 'would i rather have thing, or the money that thing costs?'
Whats going on is that a whole bunch of people, across many different sectors of business, are actually terrible business people, who did not well predict future demand or input costs, who financed their businesses based off of loans they couldn't actually afford.
Oh you can't afford a property tax hike or insurance rate hike for your business location?
Not my fucking problem, maybe you should have considered that that is a thing that could happen.
Oh you can't afford shipping and input cost increseases?
Again, not my fucking problem, maybe you should have structured a business with less thin margins, maybe you shouldn't have voted for tariffs and blowing up 1/4 of the world's oil supply.
You can just keep going with this, farmers with no more immigrant labor to exploit, casinos and tourism businesses baffled that the state doing pogroms with a gestapo is bad for business, landlords in denial over how they're not actually geniuses and are in fact underwater and overleveraged.
So much of the American sense of cultural hierarchy is based on the idea of 'i am a business owner' or 'i make good investments'.
No, you fucking idiots, you're mostly all stupid and bad at all of this, and deserve 0 cultural accolades awarded to the 'successful entrepenuer' ... because you are an incompetent entrepenuer, a failure.
Turns out, no, no this country isn't actually a meritocratic land of opportunity that rewards something like 'just giving it the good ole college try'. Turns out its massively full of itself, fake, lying to itself, and broadly systemically corrupt.
None of that can be fixed with individualistic entrepenuership.
It can only be fixed with a collective hang over / come down, realizing we need an intervention, and then realizing we are all more or less wallowing in the same field of pigshit, and will need to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways to get to anywhere better than that.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
The timing on this (last year after months of very sudden cuts to federal funding and tariffs tariffs tariffs killing private industry jobs) makes me think that all those hundreds of thousands of layoffs and lost jobs across the country every single month might've played a factor in this as well. But, you know, that's just me and my opinion.
At which point we normalized listening to opinions of companies' owners?
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