This, but also people used to see having a family as being the meaning of their lives. In the modern world, the alternative meaning of life invention is the Career™. This alone, that people have been influenced to believe a career is a replacement for having a family, is highly suspect of "top-down" influence. We don't even have the perspective of how ridiculous career driven culture is.
This also causes people to move farther away from their families for both school and then work, often meaning that the grandparent support system is not available when you want to have kids.
That, in my opinion, is taken for granted more than anything else.
It also causes people to wait longer and longer to have children. My twins, my first children, came when I was 38 years old. My wife was 35. Most of our friends and family were also well into their 30s before having their first kid. This is not a winning strategy...
I think there's definitely something to this, and I'd agree that career driven culture is very toxic.
But I'd also hesitate to call it "top-down" influence. That would drastically downplay the autonomy we have in first-world countries. Nobody is forced to prioritize their career over everything else. In most countries, I'd say it's the complete opposite - tax incentives and benefits are usually structured to encourage child-rearing.
It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
> It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
> The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Aside from tying healthcare to employment in the USA, what systemic issues are there?
> Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
Yet birthrates decrease with income - lower income households have higher birthrates [0]. This suggests that a lower fertility rate is indeed a choice, rather than economic necessity.
top down to me equal some secret cabal of people that push an agenda
systemic to me means the way the system is but how the system got that way would be the random inputs of thousands or even millions of individual and uncoordinated actions.
People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families. In fact the largest families in the modern world come from the people with the least amount of money (not judging, just stating what I've read). So having a paycheck looks like it has the opposite effect of encouraging family. No I'm not arguing that we should therefore get less pay. Just arguing against that idea that if everyone had a paycheck large enough to support a bigger family that they'd start having bigger families.
I would agree that not all systemic problems are top down, but many are, and there are "secret cabals" dedicated to creating and propagating such systems. It doesn't make sense to me to define systemic problems as strictly random, since humans attempt to create top-down, complex systems constantly (especially post-WW2 in more modern society).
> People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families.
Different eras, different issues. In agrarian times a large family was an investment in future labor, and as a retirement/continuity strategy. In modern society, adding children is a significant expense, and with the easy availability of birth control, it's far more of a choice. In both cases, people were following the rational incentives that society has created for them.
We can argue about whether the current economic circumstances are random or top-down, but in either case, if you change the incentives for having kids (universal healthcare, affordable childcare, food/housing security, etc.) then you will get more kids.
