“So why are birth rates falling all over the world? The authors knock down the conventional hypothesis that rising monetary costs are to blame. The real costs of children, they argue, are the opportunity costs: “what a potential parent would be ready to give up to have an extra child.” The seductions of the modern world include higher paying work, longer vacations, restaurant meals, sports, video games, innumerable on-demand entertainment options, and so forth. “Once we see that costs include opportunity costs, as life becomes richer and more rewarding, children cost more,” they say. “Even if we eliminated every dimension of social inequality and unfairness between women and men, the opportunity cost of having a child would still be greater in the richer, freer, better-entertained future than it was in the past.” And as demographic history shows, fewer and fewer people are willing to pay those costs.”
Population growth isn’t a primary cause of environmental damage or global warming. Other things matter much more. So, the environment is not a good reason to not have kids!
France had modestly successful pro-natal policies, so such policies can work! They were implemented in 1939. These policies produced an additional Paris!
Private equity have purchased nursing homes, sold their assets like their facilities, then leased these facilities from who they sold them to, they pocket the cash from the sale, buy more properties, then use market power to drive down expenses, then use the profits to get the nursing homes to take a loan and pocket that cash, the nursing home is strained by all these burdens, but who cares when private equity already made money. Such activity may have caused 20,000 premature deaths over 12 years as service quality is cut.