Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
It’s hard to reproduce a culture and a people when you don’t have children.
“The U.S. general fertility rate hit an all-time low — again — with 53.1 live births for every 1,000 women in 2025. That’s down about 1% from the prior year”
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/family-relationships/article/the-us-fertility-rate-dropped-again-whats-the-big-deal-040100863.html
In 1967, a sociologist wrote that if the government wanted to control population, they could do so by squeezing consumers through taxation and inflation, by making housing scarce by limiting construction, forcing mothers and wives to work outside the home to offset the inadequacy of male wages and provide few childcare facilities, encouraging migration to cities by paying low wages in the country and providing few rural jobs, increasing city congestion by starving the transit system, and increase personal insecurity by encouraging conditions that produce unemployment.
Eerie.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqnI1UTwZtM
“The social impact of the housing affordability crisis is huge: fewer marriages, less household formation, lower birth rates, lower economic growth. The prices of stocks and bonds can go up indefinitely with few consequences. But housing is something people need, in addition to being an asset. It is an asset you also consume.”
https://reason.com/2026/02/02/trump-i-want-to-drive-housing-prices-up/
A parallel between the demographic crisis and global warming is that for each, one side of the partisan divide largely doesn’t think it’s a problem at all. And for each side, the deniers are straight up wrong. Human caused global warming is essentially a fact. Declining demographics and the problems it causes are simply true. Being in denial of either of these is not a difference of opinion, but being wrong about the ample and sufficient evidence. Disagreeing about what to do about these problems once they are recognized is legitimate and complicated, so is disagreeing about some of the consequences, but, denying them as problems is going against reality.
Unfortunately, global warming has been coded as a liberal issue. The demographic crisis has been coded as a conservative issue. But neither of them them should have partisan or ideological coding. They are both real problems that are happening. The only disagreement should be what to do about these problems, not whether they are severe problems with difficult consequences, because that is in the realm of fact.
“”Flexibility at work has the power to drive fertility decisions,” according to researchers running a survey in the U.S. and 38 other countries.
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People who worked from home at least one day per week “had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in the future, compared to observationally similar persons who do not” work from home, according to the August 2025 working paper, “Work from Home and Fertility.”
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Researchers say working from home may make it easier to balance work and family, but note that “it’s also plausible that parents with young children at home may select” work-from-home arrangements more often.
Self-selection seems less of a confounding factor when it comes to future fertility intentions. In both the U.S. and multicountry samples, and for both men and women, working from home at least one day per week increased their preferred number of kids. For women, having a partner who occasionally worked from home was also associated with a desire for more children.
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A study out of Norway published in the December 2025 edition of Labour Economics found the country saw “a significant and persistent” 10 percent increase in births beginning nine months after the first COVID-19 lockdowns started. These “fertility increases were concentrated among women in ‘greedy jobs’ with lower flexibility prior to lockdown,” according to the paper. “The overall birth response was driven by women who retained their job during the lockdown period, consistent with changes in the nature of work (flexibility) being a key mechanism,” rather than increased time due to job loss.
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It also calls into question the wisdom of a professedly pronatalist presidential administration ordering all federal employees to return to the office, as President Donald Trump did in early 2025. Simplifying remote work for both public and private sector employees could be a quicker, cheaper path to more children.”
https://reason.com/2025/12/28/work-from-home-have-more-kids/
The West is losing its ability to win wars because: ,among other causes, they believe in fantasies that there will be a technical solution to winning tough wars that don’t involve great loss of life; they no longer have a demographic edge; and they don’t believe in the correctness and goodness of their overarching goals.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlZ7cw_9pvc
China’s population could be lower than we think.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTS38Ihqmtk
Our current estimates on births may be too high, meaning the demographic crisis is worse than we even think!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeBsN_t84Q0
Why ISRAEL is the ONLY country that is avoiding demographic COLLAPSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyH9t9nJJi4
“due to structural changes in our politics, which are largely due to a realignment in our politics based on education levels, even if the Democrats were to have a really great election cycle in the midterms, there’s going to be a limit to how many seats they can win back due to these structural changes.
If you look at Trump’s job approval on issues, he’s underwater on everything, particularly way, way lower now on the economic ratings, on inflation, and even immigration now is underwater. So you would think that his total job approval, currently around 44 percent, would be lower.
The bottom line is based on historical standards, Trump and the Republicans should be headed to a really bad midterm election. But because of these changes in our politics, due to realignment based on education, they’ll be more insulated than they would have been in the past from a tsunami-type of midterm.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/27/democrats-education-class-divide-2026-midterms-00527583