I think there are plenty of things going wrong in the world as it exists today, at least as an American, that would dissuade me from having children. The exploding costs of childcare, healthcare, and education, let alone the impending crisis of climate change and ecological collapse, are all pretty scary. None of those things need to be exaggerated by the media.
Healthcare and childcare and education are in fact (largely though not comprehensively) nonessential goods that are already in very many ways far better than they were 50 years ago. Childcare wasn't even a thing except for the incredibly wealthy until pretty recently. It would be very difficult to argue that the overall options for post-secondary education (and the number of people taking advantage of them) are not better than 30 years ago, even though their costs are known to be rising much faster than their quality. Most of the kinds of healthcare that are clearly price-gouging were not even categories of healthcare 50 years ago, and most of the ones that were are so qualitatively better now that we're comparing apples and oranges. Etc.
Climate change is the one where by almost any objective measure we're headed for potentially irrecoverable catastrophe, and yet this one doesn't actually receive media coverage commensurate with the weight of the potential risk and its probability.
Saying things like, "look, it really is better!" when wages haven't gone up in 50 years as college has gotten twice as expensive in the last 20 I think is really missing the point and being overly dismissive of people's life experiences.
Price gouging because kinds of healthcare most people weren't really getting a few years ago? My best friend was billed 1100 dollars for an ambulance ride and 4000 dollars for a recent hospitalization that lasted 12 hours. Get out of here with this dismissive nonsense.
This argument is made time and time again as though it's a self-evident truth...except it's not true at all. The inflation-adjusted median personal income is higher than it's ever been.
Yes, college has gotten more expensive (and there are a lot of reasons why), but it's also worth contextualizing: the median number of years to recoup the cost of a bachelors degree, adjusted for inflation, has gone down since the 1980’s, from about 22 years to about 10 years.
This is all information you're not going to read in most news media today, because it's, well, pretty boring and doesn't generate revenue.
Yes, there are always improvements that we need to make. Healthcare is indeed a bit of a mess. There are a number of ways to fix it (and not just the one proposal you keep hearing about). Does that mean society is crumbling? Absolutely not. We're living in just about the best time in human history. But climate change is very real, and just about the most catastrophic thing we have to worry about.
not intending to dismiss real challenges! merely pointing out that often news media talk about these things like society is crumbling, when they really aren't indicative of that.
