I've been pondering more on the plummeting birthrate, which I have argued comes primarily from the economic cost of raising children.  However, I had an epiphany thinking about what kids do in our society, which is essentially nothing for the first 18 years of their lives.  They are the epitome of Winston Churchill's supply of "useless eaters".  Not only do they cost money to raise, they don't earn any money either.  In fact our society makes it explicitly illegal to have children work.  If you do put them to work, it's considered "exploitation of child labor".

In both our prior forms of social organization, hunter-gatherer and agriculture, children had clear economic benefits and began to pay their own way as soon as they were weaned and could walk.  They followed their mothers and dug up roots, they picked berries, they killed rabbits and squirrels throwing rocks at them or chasing them into traps.  Of course that food still was supplemented by some of the meat from the big kills of the older hunters, but they were 3rd down the list getting their portions after the hunters and the women.  They got the leftovers.

On the farm they milked the cows, churned the butter, gleaned the wheat fields, planted and dug up potatoes, washed clothes  etc.  In those days "doing your chores" didn't just mean taking the trash out to the curb, loading the dishwasher or washing the car.  You really hadda WORK as a kid back in those days.  Cinderella's evil stepmother was probably fairly typical of the era, you didn't take in somebody else's kid and not expect to get some work out of them.

The beginning of the industrial era was of course notorious for its use of child labor.  In the Dickens era, orphans were sent to Workhouses to do some factory task 12 hours a day, then when given a bowl of gruel to eat by the workhouse boss and Oliver asked "Please, sir, can I have another?", Fagin would just laugh.

In fact many of those kids weren't really orphans, they had simply been abandoned by their parents who weren't being paid enough to afford to feed them.  Once abandoned by their parents, they became a cheap source of labor for the capitalist.  They literally would "work for food".  At this point in history, whatever profit there was in making children was transferred from the parents to the capitalists.

The one profit there was in having children in the early years of the industrial evolution was as an insurance policy for your old age.  If you could successfully raise them and get them educated, you could hope for them to do better than you and take care of you in your dotage.  As time went by though, mobility increased, children moved away and basically you just saw them on holidays.  The state took over the job of caring for old people, sort of.

The real killer though was women having to join the workforce in order to have enough money to buy a house and raise kids.  This led not only to fewer kids being born, but starting in the 70s generations of "latchkey" kids who had both parents working and had empty houses to go home to and little to do besides get in trouble.  The family disintegrated, and the kids became harder and harder to teach in school when they were there.  The good schools and after school activities all cost money, and needed somebody to drive the kids around to soccer practice or dance class.  To afford this lifestyle, the parents had to be in the top 20% of wage earners, the average salary just paid enough for the basics.

Upon graduating, the generations after the Boomers have NOT been doing economically better than their parents, and instead of being a help to aging parents, they have instead become a continuing financial drain well into their adult years.  They continue living at home into their 20s and 30s, and parents have to supplement their low wage jobs giving them money.

Essentially, by bringing women into the capitalist workforce, it was the human equivalent of "eating the seed corn".  The women aren't breeding up the next generation of workers because there is no profit in it for them to do so.  All the profit of raising an adult to become a worker goes to the capitalist, all the cost of raising them goes to the parents.  Now capitalists like Elon Musk are all in a tizzy about this and are trying to convince people it's their moral responsibility to have kids.  They aren't picking up the cost of raising them though in any meaningful fashion.  A few tax credits and subsidized child care isn't going to cut it.

The only way people will start having more kids in a capitalist system is if they are paid to have them.  All the costs of health care for birthing, all the costs of food and housing and education until they are old enough where the law allows them to work for their food and shelter.  If the kids stay with the parents, they should be paid a monthly child care fee.  Otherwise, the capitalist can buy the child for a one time fee and run his own child care facility and pay professionals to raise the kids communally.

Elon of course is trying to single handedly make enough kids to fill up his future workers factory.  Sadly for him, even if he fathers a few hundred with his A-list Vagina concubines, he can only make enough to fill vacancies in the executive offices.  He needs 100X that number though for them to boss around, so he needs to pay for them also.  Otherwise he has only himself to blame when he can't find staff for his battery factories or consumers to buy his Teslas.

https://www.ft.com/content/444a637b-9712-475b-8c14-9b147f4ff244

South Korea's birth rate has become a national emergency

RE