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I've previously posted on the Motte about the state-funded Swedish Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility. Recently the Committee released its second report more closely detailing the root cause of the decline – which women are not having children anymore? As before here's a link in case you know the Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-2-fran-hoga-till-sjunkande-fruktsamhetstal-hur-ser-situationen-i-sverige-ut/
The focus of this report is a lot narrower than the previous one which means there are fewer fun takeaways. Two facts stand out. There's been a lot of speculation about coupling not working, people delaying childrearing so they are unable to get that third child, et cetera, but the report doesn't bear any of these concerns out. Men and women are still moving in together, but the major driver of the decline is that there's a growing cohort in which the couple never decides to have kids. A lot of DINK-couple (Double Income, No Kids) are no longer as eager to become DICKs (Double Income, Couple o' Kids) as they used to be. This fact is concerning because I have a suspicion it has a strong potential to rapidly initiate a self-replicating demographic spiral. DINKs have more resources compared to DICKs, and if more people choose to stay DINKs then life for DICKs will probably become even harder, which in turn will lead to even fewer DICKs. I think the carrot for DICKs probably won't be enough here: society probably also needs to put a dent in the wallet of the DINKs, maybe throught some tax scheme, to encourage more childrearing.
Beyond that the report also has a few tidbits of interest here and there. The common narrative of a foreign underclass quickly and decisively outbreeding the native population isn't quite on the mark for example, as the report points out that second-generation immigrants tend to have about as many children as natives (first-generation is another story, and a large part of the very justifiable demographic anxiety in Europe). On the other hand that also means immigration cannot possibly solve the issue long term or even medium term; while many children of immigrants often learn Swedish quite poorly, commit more crimes than average and remain largely unintegrated for vast periods of time, they at least seem to take our individualistic childless culture to heart.
This is less meaty than the previous post on the subject, but I think that's enough to bring some fodder for discussion. What do you think should be done to support our DICKs? Should DINKs be made to pay to make their lives easier? Is the reports take naive on the questions of immigration and demography?
Yep, this is a major problem imo. As a DICK myself, you frequently directly compete with the DINKs. DINKs can easily work 10-12 hours and still have a decent amount of free time, especially since sleeping through for 6 hours is OK. With (small) kids, you struggle to get your 6-8 hours of work, and your sleep is fucked up for a looong time, so you might feel tired even with technically 8-9 hours. DINKs can and do buy the same houses in the same locations, just with a different layout, and they have waaaay more excess money to spare to drive up the prices. Etc.
There's a lot of other issues, too, but this makes everything a lot harder.
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As others have said, low fertility is fundamentally about the desire for a comfortable life (charitable) or hedonism (uncharitable). I think the latter is often uncharitable because I don’t think DINKs mostly want to party and do drugs and eat 17 course three star tasting menus in all their free time in the way the natalist caricature often suggests, I think they mostly just want a quiet, peaceful life that doesn’t involve waking up throughout the night, spending all weekend ferrying kids to and from various activities and babysitting for years.
That desire can be overridden by material or extreme ideological (as in the religious examples) circumstance. But ‘extreme’ is important. Moderately conservative Jews, Christians and Muslims who believe the same things their 7 tfr ancestors did 100 years ago have far fewer children today.
@4bpp is essentially correct. Give every DINK a taxpayer-funded nanny to look after the kids, handle the night nurse stuff for the first 3 years, then take them to school and home, to stuff on the weekend, pay for camp in the summer, and most would happily have children. This was - by the way - the norm for middle class and above households until about a century ago. Mothers of a certain class in 1926 were not spending dozens of hours a week looking after their children, and even working class moms pooled resources.
I expect children but I couldn’t do it on a normal income, not because kids themselves are expensive but because I don’t believe in a form of atomized, isolated, high investment nuclear family parenting that leaves the two parents (mostly the mother it has to be said) as slaves to their own children until they graduate college.
It used to be that parenting was much more low investment (both in terms of money and time and emotional involvement). Some older women in the local community would look after your kids for a pittance if you ever wanted them to, you saw them for an hour a day, certainly you weren’t expected to devote every minute of your free time to them.
The motherhood narrative post-1950 of kids becoming your life and central to every waking minute of your day (and into which men are, post-1990s, also increasingly indoctrinated) just isn’t compelling, presently or historically, to a lot of people. This has (and this is a conservative mistake) nothing to do with women working or not working. An upper class mother in 1890 who saw her children every day before dinner wasn’t working long hours at a merchant bank, but she still had various things she did every day that mostly did not involve constantly looking after her kids.
If you want more women to have more children, the best way is to lower socially expected levels of parental investment, especially in terms of time, and build institutions that essentially let you drop off your child whenever you want and pick them up whenever you want. Free, 24/7 daycare for everyone under 16.
It seems trivially true to me that pretty much every single person posting here today lives a life of wealth and abundance that my grandparents would have quite literally been willing to die for, and that at the very least I think it's safe to assume that anyone posting here is probably doing better financially than the 37 year-old ex-con who runs the kitchen at my local sports bar.
Accordingly I find the complaint that "kids are too expensive" to be laughable on it's face. Anyone posting here about how they can't afford kids can absolutely afford kids, they just don't want to. See @LazyLongposter's comment down thread or my own from a month ago
This is true, but unless you are younger than me, your grandparents had some luxuries that would cost us our left arms to get. They were able to send their kids ages 5 and up out to play with other kids. If they were townies, these children were welcome or at least tolerated on public grounds, had safe parks to play in, and did not require adult supervision. If they lived in the country, there might not be so many neighbor kids, but the natural world made up for it - kids could make forts out of logs and spend all day observing nature.
If you tried that today, you would have CPS called on you. Or you'd be violating some nature preservation statutes. You could be criminally charged with child endangerment. If you can afford it, you can hire a nanny who can take your kids to be supervised at a park. Otherwise, there is a huge time cost that was transferred out of thin air onto the average parent sometime in the past forty years. I don't know what caused the change in attitude. Stranger danger, white flight, vaccines made the possibility of losing even a single kid unthinkable whereas before it was unavoidable? I don't know. But working parents spend twice as much time with their kids than stay-at-home parents did fifty years ago.
We made everything else faster and more convenient while simultaneously we made kids more laborious.
Many of the things you describe can still be had, and at a reasonable price too if you're willing to look outside blue-state urban cores. the proliferation of electric bikes and scooters give my kids and their friends a radius of action that 13 year-old me could have only dreamed of.
I am not in a Blue State. I am not in an urban core. I live in a red town with a population of 10,000 people.
Also, you seem to be talking about 13 year olds. I'm talking about 8 year olds. What are 8 year olds allowed to do where you live?
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I've heard these stories on the internet as much as anyone else, but does anyone have any clue as to the actual scale of the problem? It's certainly annoying that this failure mode exists at all, since it's relatively scary. That said, my small observation of the real world, seeing kids running around the neighborhood unattended all the time, seems to clash with it. My mild wonder is whether the problem is akin to "unarmed black men getting shot by police for no reason", which objectively is an extremely small problem that manages to capture an extremely oversized proportion of the fears of a subset of the population. Maybe it's just worse in worse places, where perhaps it might actually be a danger for them to be running around on their own?
I homeschool one of my daughters who still receives speech services from the Public School. She is 8 years old.
On the days where my daughter has speech therapy, my husband drops off the boys at their preschool and I drive my daughter to speech therapy. One day, my husband had to take a car to be maintained, and I figured I would drop off my daughter at speech and then take the boys to school, then come back to pick up my daughter.
I watched my daughter go into the school building, made sure she made it to the office where two secretaries are, then I started driving my boys to their school.
I hadn't left the parking lot before the school office ladies called. They were freaked out. "Where are you, why is your daughter here alone? You need to be here now, she cannot be in the waiting room without you." I told them it was snowing and I had trouble finding parking (both true). They told me, "OK, I will watch her to make sure she is SUPERVISED but I need you here right now."
By 8 years old I was left home alone for a few hours at a time. Waiting in the school office where there is a waiting room with couches, books, and a fish tank, two secretaries and a nurse wouldn't have been something to think twice over. My mom waited in the car to nurse my baby brother and had me walk into McDonalds to purchase a cheeseburger by the time I was five.
Stupid? Yes. Annoying? Yes. Should be better? Obviously. But it's not calling CPS. It's not taking your kids away. It's not charging you criminally with child endangerment.
Nor does it seem to contradict my observation of just looking out the window or walking down the street and seeing kids running around unattended all the time. I'm sure plenty of black people can describe some stupid or annoying situation that should have gone differently, and many of them even have a plausible claim that racism was involved. I still sorta think that the concern about unarmed black men being shot by police for no reason is just not an all-consuming problem in the world.
The threat is there. Even if only 1% of parents who leaves a kid unattended they get CPS called on them, it creates a chilling effect.
All parks have signs saying something like, "Kids under 12 need adult supervision." Amtrak will not let you buy train tickets for kids unless you have one adult per kid. I have four kids, so I can't take my family on an Amtrak trip until they are teenagers.
The culture is different. The rules and expectations are different. You have to admit that much.
Honestly, my initial reaction is basically the same as it would be if I had heard, "Even if only 1% of unarmed black men are shot by police..." Which is, I'm pretty sure you're missing some number of zeros. I don't know how many zeros. I don't know how many zeros matter. I'm not sure if there's a particular number of zeros where it goes from concern to not-concern. But I'm pretty sure the number is far from correct.
I was ready to believe you, because I am never surprised that the federal government would screw up literally anything in the most ridiculous way. Right before I hit "comment", I did decide to check. My search for "Amtrak children" brought me here, which says:
Ok, I could read that either way. But I guess what was nice about your claim is that it was that they won't even let you buy tickets. It's not some situation where you could buy tickets, get there, and learn that the correct reading of this phrase is that they have a one-adult-per-child policy. So, presumably, it's something I can check.
Sure enough, I just went to the reservations, picked totally random cities, totally random dates, one adult, four children (2-12, not 'youth', which could plausibly have different rules under various readings, though at this stage, it actually says, "Youth, children and infants must travel with at least one adult who is 18 years old."). At the very least, it lets me get to the page where they want me to start putting in traveler information (name, etc.) for each of the five passengers. I can tab over without entering any information, and it clearly has marked four children, with a different amount of information requested for the children than the adult.
I suppose it is possible that at some point after this step, after all the personal info has been put in and whatnot, the system will finally realize and say, "No, we actually had a one-adult-per-child policy all along, and we just tricked you into getting this far," but on first read, I think you're just wrong on this claim.
I mean, yes? But that's true for any epsilon difference. Presumably you also have to admit that I look out the window or walk around town and see kids out playing unattended all the time, too, right? Like, we're probably somewhere between epsilon and infinity, but it's kinda squishy to really capture it well.
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Wow, that's crazy to me.
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Which only works when you get other women to not have their own kids but instead work in childcare taking care of yours. And if you never bother raising your own child at all (24/7 daycare) then what is the point of having a child? Might as well go full bore "surrogate mothers, raised by state carers" in that case.
Solaria from "The Naked Sun" when? Where "children" is a dirty word and asking does anyone have children is the most embarrassing and disgusting thing you can do:
It’s the ‘option’ of 24/7, I don’t think most people who wouldn’t today put their kid up for adoption would take it. But yes, even things like travelling as a couple while leaving your young kids at home with extended family or friends (which were normal in my grandparents’ day) are now looked down upon.
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I think you're on to something here. I am very invested in my young child's life and I really enjoy it. I chose this. However, I totally get that I'm the minority, especially as a man. It did not appeal at all until I got older and more established.
A good friend had twins when he was 20 and it gobbled up his life. But looking back, that was for the best because now his kids are independent and he's young enough to enjoy his freedom while also having all of the benefit of having a family. Here I am, relatively old and established, but I won't be having multiple children because I'm just too old to add another one every 2 years.
The cultural narratives around having kids are not appealing. The expectation is that you need to invest everything you've got into your kids, so either don't do it or do it when you're older and have your own shit sorted out. There's not much push to just have some kids when you're younger. And when you see your friends who do have kids young just disappear and drop out of their social life, it makes the whole prospect seem terrible, especially when you're young and invested in your own plans and projects.
This goes both ways, though. If you’re in a high-fertility (sub-) culture, the young families start having their own separate social lives centered around the children, while the few single adults just sort of disappear and drift away.
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When it comes to high TFR, there are only a handful of successful interventions in the modern period:
These don't seem very applicable in Sweden.
The post-WW2 Baby Boom is perhaps more plausible. But that required a cultural foundation that we don't seem to have, rising prosperity amongst the middle class... The 1950s are nearly as far away as Afghanistan or Imperial Japan.
The most realistic path is mass cloning and artificial wombs, I think. And what's even the point? Why are more people needed, from a policy point of view? A child born today will come of age in 2044. Add another 4 years of university, 2048. Is Sweden going to need infantry digging trenches? Is Sweden going to need lusty youths bringing in the harvest? Industrial proletariat in the steel mill? Is Sweden even going to need universities? No, Sweden should and will mechanize all that. Even the production of ideas will likely be mechanized by then.
For all of human history, more children in your state was usually a good thing, there was no substitute for people, especially high-quality people - Swedes have a good history of achievement and ability. I think our logic is fundamentally wrongfooted by modernity here, people will point out the high youth unemployment in China and then the low TFR... how is low TFR a problem if there aren't enough jobs for existing youth? Even if one's not a singularitarian, why are people so unwilling to look at the general trend of a declining number of legitimate jobs? We can just predict the trend will continue, right?
If Sweden really needed more children, wouldn't they have a 'firm handshake and you're in' labour market? But they don't, no Western country does, they all want a bachelor's degree minimum and plenty of interviews. There is huge demand for 140 IQ agentic innovative dynamic agile 10x engineers with great communication skills and a flourishing Linkedin... not so much for 100 IQ Sven I think.
And yet, even without all that, Sweden had nearly replacement rate fertility (both as a whole and among native Swedes, anticipating a potential objection) as recently as 2010 without any of that.
Well they had actual replacement rate fertility from 1950s to 1967...
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/swe/sweden/fertility-rate
And even that wasn't sufficient for demographic stability/expansion since it did not last. I don't think Sweden's 'high' TFR that's still below replacement matters that much, if it's just one peak on a rollercoaster that mostly goes downhill.
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The problem I have with that sort or argument is that societies have a good deal of inertia, so it's easy to find yourself debating how the dude that fell off a tall building was in perfectly good health just prior to hitting the ground.
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If my understanding that the real obstacle to people having children is the hedonistic opportunity cost of raising children is correct, I think there is room for a lower-tech solution: state-run nurseries/orphanages that are actually optimised for quality rather than to dump undesirables without making everyone feel too guilty about it, and a flat cash benefit on the order of 4 of the mother's yearly salaries for delivering a child to them. You could even give the biological parents dibs on adoption in the event they later change their mind.
(By not paying the same amount of upfront cash to parents who raise their own children, you (1) save money and (2) implicitly brainwash people into thinking children are valuable. Someone is willing to pay you 200k for one! Will you take the money like a poor person, or have one and keep it to broadcast to the world that you are so well-off that you don't need it?)
I don't buy that the state is capable of good childcare, and since I'd sooner build my own killdozer than let them put my children in such a facility, all this means is that I'm now competing in the market (for food, jobs, housing) with those who don't mind using it and so have substantially-lower monthly expenses. Oh yeah and my taxes are higher now too. Hard veto from me.
Well, the set of people who don't mind using it would be drawn from both people who otherwise would raise their own children and those who would otherwise go childless. The latter will compete with you on those terms regardless (modulo the one-time competitive advantage from the cash injection), and you shouldn't forget the downside of letting birthrate decline continue as usual, which is that the entire pyramid scheme of big society may collapse. Surely you can't be completely indifferent towards the prospect of being left to your own devices in old age with no medical insurance or pension (any savings might at that point be confiscated or devalued by inflation, and for good measure they might also legally restrict the right of any children you raised personally to preferentially support you rather than slaving away for the entire cohort of geriatric millennials). Reducing the probability of this scenario at least a little winds up on the other side of the scale.
The premise seems to be that all children are equal, whereas I expect that the ones who end up in government-run childcare facilities will almost entirely be net drains.
Well, that's the speculative part of the proposal. Nobody doubts government childcare facilities are garbage right now, but I would like to see how far we could go with a moonshot to make it not so. It's not hard to justify considering we are essentially looking at an epidemic of people unwilling to put up with the work of childrearing in the form that is expected.
From Minnesota to Somalia, and back again. The problem isn't resources, a daycare is not a complicated service to provide, the problem is the kind of people who'd want to be in charge of the program, how much they'd wan't to skim off the top, and what they'd want to do with other people's children.
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I read a rather persuasive essay that argued at the end that financial redistribution was largely ineffective, even counterproductive since it basically transferred money away from married men (the biggest net-taxpayers) to someone else, who might or might not have children with that money. While these men aren't raising their own families with their own money that's being taken from them...
Financial tweaks don't have a good track record, Niger and Mali or Yemen don't need these tricks to enjoy high fertility. Really, it's about culture rather than financial incentives.
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Not sure if this has been posted yet, but there's a video doing the rounds of a woman who didn't want kids changing her mind after being exposed to a baby. The government may want to consider this type of exposure in any final year sex ed/home economics programs in high school.
Basically the theory is that people (women) don't want kids because they aren't exposed to babies and young children in a childcare environment. They don't really have a trigger for their childbearing instincts. Not sure if the various European governments tried this in their studies.
Hey bud I posted that, it's the first comment in the whole thread! ;P
Lol, sorry. I really shouldn't drive-by post like that.
No worries friend. I hope you like my top level though!
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Yes, but if they did that then the rate of teen pregnancy would increase. Since we axiomatically believe that's bad because reasons, this would be detrimental to that and the overall graduation rate, so the notion those metrics dropping is a Bad Thing would have to go away first.
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Less kids means higher taxes on working aged people to pay for retirements. All one needs to do to properly apportion the costs to those that cause them is to raise taxes and give a tax break to those with kids. If you're footing the bill to bring in someone to pay for your retirement on average then you gotta contribute enough to pay for your own. pretty simple. Someone with a TFR of 0 should be paying roughly twice the redistribution portion of the tax bill(excluding more fixed costs like military spending that don't really figure into the per capita societal upkeep). I wouldn't consider this punitive or coercive, just making people internalize their externalities.
Sure, I'll internalize it further by voting to remove funding from Grandma because the boomer's couldn't save a 401k like the rest of the following generations and couldn't not blood-let the economy either.
Sure, that'd reduce the redistributive tax burden and proportional reduce the difference expect from those producing the next generation and they who must contribute in other ways. Still there are many other ways you implicitly free ride on the parents. Even in ancapistan where you've hoarded capital, durable goods and gold for your retirement when it comes to you needing to exchange those things for youthful labor you are depending on someone to have brought that youthful labor into existence. One could probably come up with a fancy financial product to have parents paid now as some kind of royalty for future labor of their offspring by anyone who expects to benefit from it, but that simplifies to a general transfer.
The problem with any redistributive scheme around this topic is that you are in essence punishing people for things that are generally outside their control. I'm a man. I cannot have kids. No about of forced taxes to pay for the privileged people who can is going to change biology. In order for me to have kids I'd need to find a woman who wants them. Single rates are up and unless the State is going to do something dysgenic like make it legal for me to go around raping woman or forcing them to marry me to get my TFR quota in, I'm not sure what there is much I can do about it.
This entire exercise is some weird technocratic meddling. Just go full authoritarian already. We already think that men don't have a right to bodily autonomy in times of crisis. Make the same argument for women, this is a fertility crisis. Go draft women to be mothers. A state that can't get its citizens to volunteer to make sacrifices for it has no right to exist. Apparently people have forgotten that quintessential rule. If that means most of the first world then let them die. Maybe the next batch of cultures will learn from our mistakes.
You can probably not do much personally about whether other nations seek to make war with your country either. And if you're unfit for military service you can't serve a direct role in the conflict. But you can contribute through taxation. As I said in the outset, this isn't meant to be punitive or coercive. It's meant to get everyone to contribute their fair share, those having children are sacrificing their own consumption in a real way. If you were crippled and thus unable to participate on the front lines you might reasonable be jealous of able bodied men who returned with heroic stories, like people who always wanted to be parents and had great kids that brought them glory they were very fortunate in a way. But there are also soldiers that die in ditches as their lungs slowly fill with fluids, and there are parent's who's kids come out with severe disabilities. Life is not fair in that way and never will be.
And whether it's military defense of the nation or the production of the next generation we as a society simply cannot survive without it. If tax policy can be used a tool to prevent either the birth rate or the military from collapsing it ought to irrespective of how it might make some individuals feel.
You're bemoaning that you might be made to make the sacrifice of marginally higher tax rates.
Trampling on the rights of the individuals because a State cannot get people to volunteer is a state that shouldn't exist. Let it collapse.
Why should I sacrifice for my society? What has my society sacrificed for me? It is a give and take reciprocal relationship. The state seems to have forgotten that and it has failed to instill a sense of civic responsibility in its citizens. Probably the REAL problem, is when the state exist merely for the interests of the mercenary elites. All this other stuff seems downstream of that.
Your rights are not being trampled because you're asked to pay for taxes to support things that will pay dividends to you in your old age dude, be serious.
Every society we know about is struggling with fertility. Even the bright spots are just declining more slowly. There is wide diversity in the makeup of each of these societies so it can't actually be that mercenary elite capture is the monocause. It's almost certainly something economic(in the very broad sense, concerning modern industrial incentives) in nature. In fact the darkest spots of fertility are some of the most abject patriarchal eastern societies so your general axe to grind about how awful western women are is particularly ill suited to explain the problem.
Nah my axe is with how awful western elites are, its not gendered. I wouldn't even say its a western elites vs eastern elites, I just live in the west. Rather it seems that the current crop of elites are particularly incompetent and out-of-touch with the world. Despite centralizing power and authority they seem incapable of actually using it to make things better for anyone besides themselves.
What dividends am I getting? I'm pretty sure if I just invested that money I would get better returns be it in stocks, gold, or lead and rations. Considering the last time the government got money for people's elderly age they spent it all on booze and hookers, and setup the current ponzi scheme we have now.
Some problems can't be solved with money. And if raising taxes is a means to punish the childless, then yes it is trampling rights.
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That's not what I'd normally call "beyond my control".
Yeah, how about just putting the same penalty on childless women?
I would as I have been actively dating for marriage for the better part of 15+ years at this point. The reality is that I have yet to find a partner who both wants me and wants to have kids. It is literally outside of my control, as I do not possess the powers of mind control.
If the goal is to control behavior why not just go full Gilead, 1984, or Brave New World? At least that would be intellectually honest. Punishing people for behavior that requires another agent to cooperate them is very totalitarian. Unless you just want women to have kids out of wedlock with every random dude or sperm bank to escape the societal collapse. I'm sure just like Mao, y'all will then be whining about all the single mothers with shitty kids and the dysgenic impact that has on society. One of the problems with technocracy is arrogant technocrats who can't see past the current crop of problems or plan long term.
It's cheaper?
Nah, if anything, I was prepared to say "out of wedlock kids don't count".
I don't know, sometimes you have to give everyone a good bonk on the head, to get them out of a defect-defect equilibrium.
But apparently less effective. I feel like a percussive maintenance approach to fixing a defect-defect is similar to a pray and spray approach to shooting. It might work, it might not, but punishing people on a "might" is how you get the saying: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions"
I always find it funny, ironic, and depressing how people on the right are not opposed to technocratic solutions, they just don't want to be a on the receiving end of them. Everyone wants to wear the boot.
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To misquote Lincoln, you might consider a tail to be a leg, but that don't make it so.
If it's punitive or coercive it's only so in the way all taxes are, and less so because it more fittingly distributes fruits amongst those who planted fruit trees. Society needs a next generation to survive no less than it needs a military to survive. And at war if you're spared the draft you'll still need to pay for the tools our brave soldiers use to maintain your society.
Everyone claims their punitive, coercive, redistributive tax is somehow more fitting than the ones they don't like. Still doesn't make it so. You're not proposing to tax the childless to pay for their own retirements (nor even pretending to do so the way FICA does); you're straight up proposing to tax them to pay for the other people's children. Of course the effect this can have is limited; as with any sin tax, if it actually reduces the sin it also reduces the tax base.
With this one, at least, that problem is self correcting long term, as the children had form the tax base.
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Is military spending punitive and coercive?
These are the same thing. The parent's children are who will perform labor necessary for childless retirement. I'm not saying people should subsidize the life choices of people who selfishly want to be parents, I'm saying in your own self interest you need them to be parents, it's a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a demographically collapsed society just like funding the military is a bargain for your future self to not have to live in a conquered society.
I'm not framing this as a Pigouvian tax, but if you insist it is one then to the degree it shrinks the subsidy it is a pareto improvement, not a self defeat.
They certainly are not the same thing. The children will naturally expect to be paid for the labor they do for the retirees (childless and otherwise). You're proposing to tax childless people to pay the parents of those children, then charge them again for the labor. Two different charges.
The market wage compensates the child. It doesn't compensate the parent for the investment. It's like a communist who sees a laborer use an expensive machine to turn $1 worth of materials into $2 worth of finished goods and demands $1 is the fair compensation. Or bemoaning that when shipping a package you must pay both for the road out of your taxes and pay the delivery company to move the package over the road. They're different payments for different services rendered, both of which are necessary for the end result.
What compensation is owed by a childless person to a parent for raising their own child? What if that child turns out to be a lifetime NEET instead of providing any useful services?
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Just have most of someone's FICA be earmarked to their parents. It shifts the framing from punitive to a benefit. More or less eliminate Social Security for people who don't have kids (maybe give them a couple hundred of dollars a month or so); if you don't have kids, you have more opportunity to earn income anyway, so you don't have an excuse not to have saved for retirement.
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DINKs are already made to pay for children. They are just paying in an inefficient manner.
K-12 education costs about $11,800 per child in the USA (not per pupil, per child 0-17 that exists in the country, whether or not they are enrolled in public k-12 school). My Googling and back-of-the-envelope calculations get $19,000 per child for the same calculation in Sweden, but this surprises me because I thought we Americans were particularly pathological about overspending on education, so possibly I did something wrong.
Those numbers are cost per child in the population, not cost per student, so a per child payment (much bigger than the ones claimed downthread to have had little effect) could be tried and be revenue neutral.
(Edited to clarify per child rather than per enrolled pupil.)
The blog you're quoting isn't saying k-12 costs 11,800 per child/year, it's proposing dividing the k-12 budget amongst all parents of Children 0-17.
That's two completely different things as k-12 represents ages 5 through 18. It partially explains why the number is so off, I think the average cost in the US is somewhere around ~18k.
Clearly, I didn't phrase my comment well enough. I may edit. (I'm also the author of the linked post, BTW.)
Dividing the US k-12 budget by the number of US children 0-17 is $11,800. Dividing the Swedish k-12 budget by the number of Swedish children 0-17, I got about $19,000. (I'm still wondering if I'm missing something, particularly about Sweden.)
Unless I'm way off, I think the main I made still stands - DINKs are subsiding children already, but in an inefficient way.
Oh haha, I made that classic mistake of correcting the author without realizing it was the author.
Sorry I assumed you were a commentator conflating two different categories of spending. My apologies.
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Yeah except people with kids have to pay for all of that as well.... and I wouldn't say parents get the value back out of it, not even close.
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I thought that seemed super inexpensive
Idk from Grok I got:
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In my eyes there is a simple explanation for dropping birth rates, which all these reports fastidiously ignore: adult life without children has continuously gotten more fun, while adult life with children has at best remained about the same, and the millennial generation is the one for which the enjoyableness of the former has finally conclusively overtaken the latter. We are in fact the first generation in the West to have completely shed the taboo on adults engaging in frivolous play outside of a handful of sanctioned categories that can be seen as healthy or the like, which I am occasionally reminded of when my mother asks me on the phone what I have been up to and I slip up and mention some game I tried whereupon she inevitably switches to a tone of anger and disgust and reminds me of my age.
If you want people to have children again, you either need to find a way to feed adults with children comparable amounts of dopamine to what is available to those without, or ban the whole spectrum of international pleasure travel (outside of boring package holidays priced so you can afford them once a year), escape rooms, hip restaurants, Tiktok trends and Steam accounts for the over-25.
I do think that there are small things that could be done on the margin that are related to the above while not being quite as drastic, but these still would require sacrifices from a people very used to having its cake and eating it too: most significantly, removing most of the relatively novel legislation that is purported to enhance the safety of children but gets in the way of the parents' dopamine acquisition, such as mandatory child seats in cars, legally required supervision, or liability for harm done to or by unsupervised children. It should be permissible once again to put five year olds on the laps of their 12 year old siblings in the back of your car, and let them roam the streets freely when the parents want a break from them, as was the case for me growing up; and if they climb a tree and fall down, or get injured in a car crash, that ought to be considered tragic but not intrinsically treated as someone's legal fault.
I don't think life without children has gotten more fun, the idea that singles today are having more fun than singles at the height of the 60s or even the 80s just doesn't pass the smell test. What I do think is happening is that people are becoming less mature and less "human" in the Bene Gesserit sense of the word.
Having kids has always entailed the making of significant sacrifices in the short to medium term, something I have written about on multiple occasions. Being completely free of responsibilities has always been more "fun" than having responsibilities, the availability of the internet-streaming did not change this. What has changed is people's willingness and/or ability to think beyond the short to medium term and thus make those sacrifices.
Surely singles are not the category we are talking about? Like many I know, I'm in the category of "long-term partner, no children". Either way, why do you think it doesn't pass the smell test? I think electronic entertainment is the most obvious reason why the idea that people in the 60s/80s had at least as much fun is the one that doesn't pass the smell test: when given the choice, people overwhelmingly choose games, modern videos and slop over just about any [activity that was available in the '80s].
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The ideal of maturity seems to be that you suffer through childhood preparing for an adulthood that you spend suffering through preparing your children for adulthood then spend a couple of years when you're old playing with your grandkids and then die. It is certainly no surprise people opt out of that if they can.
That "suffering is an intrinsic part of life" is neither a new nor novel insight.
"Suffering is the only part of life" is what you're offering.
what do you imagine you are offering?
Personally I offer nothing. But there are alternatives to the Calvinist ideal that one should be suffering all the time; hedonism and epicureanism are diametrically opposed, for instance.
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I think what won't work is to nag or threaten people about it. Only three kinds of people care about fertility rates: people with children, politicians, and (in the West) some political thinkers largely of the highly online "save EVROPA" type.
People with children have already made their choice. It's people who have no children who need to be reached if fertility rates are to go up.
Politicians have tried to fix fertility rates and even in very authoritarian countries have failed.
The political thinkers who care about the issue are very small in number.
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This is an excellent point and a specific case of a general form problem. The same could be said about sex. Porn and masturbation can be endlessly optimized, AI, VR, devices like fleshlights. Sex with your wife or girlfriend is more or less the same as it was fifty years ago for most people unless you get into things like strap-ons and such. One is much more constrained by reality and biology, the other is much freer to endlessly optimize and improve. Learning a language or a musical instrument is mostly about as hard as it was fifty years ago (yes, apps like Duolingo and Youtube can improve this somewhat) but video-games are orders of magnitude more entertaining now. I even see it a bit with children vs puppies. We aren't genetically engineering children to be extra cute, extra docile and so forth, but we have actually done that with dogs. It's unsurprising that a certain amount of people would choose to be dog moms. Generally, real life experiences like relationships, children, skills like musical instruments or woodworking, advancement at your job, doesn't really work that differently from in the past and is often limited by real-world constraints. Especially with AI I think this will be a major life problem people have to face
Or if they get into you.
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Day in the life before kids
Day in the life after kids:
Well you removed vtubers so overall it seems like a giant quality improvement
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The "before" is probably a little tight since you're at six hours of sleep assuming it takes an hour to get dinner. You might have to cut down to an hour or two of vidya every day. Otherwise accurate.
Speedrun some counter service fast casual slop near the office or home to get that number down.
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"Day in the life before kids" rather sounds like the day in the life of an unemployed trust fund kid.
The second item is literally "work"
You can totally do all those things while having an 8 hour per day wageslave job. Of course that's assuming no overtime but there's a ton of jobs that end after 8 hours.
Maybe I'm uninformed but how does an average wage slave afford to wake up at 10 AM and spend 7 hours a day outside his work shift staring at screens?
I've had remote jobs along those lines. Not like most white collar laptop jobs these days are a solid 9-5 of actual work/production
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Yea I basically lived that life for a decade:
Woke up @11 Worked 12-815 Video games / reading / movies for 2-3 hours Worked out 11-1 somewhere in there Jerked off Sleep @2-3ish
I changed the schedule up just enough here and there with real human interaction, but 5 days a week this was me.
I can kinda see how Jim Norton jerked himself off enough to marry a tranny. Two years with mostly normal sexual thoughts now.
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Some interesting plums:
So, the usual "women are too educated! going to college defers fertility! careers and work depress fertility!" explanations don't hold there.
So I would ask, what generational cohort is coming of age and getting ready to have kids in 2010? Depending on cut-off points, late Gen X (those born in 1980), early Millennials (born 1981-1985). I'm using an age range of 25-30 here as "ready to marry and have kids", which is my own personal view.
Could it be people in this particular grouping (1980-85 births) have different attitudes to life, career, marriage and children? I think it very possible. Wikipedia article on the Millennials has an entire section about "they're not getting married and having sex as much as their predecessors, this might be why":
2010 is also after the 2008 economic crash, which was more or less severe/prolonged depending what country you lived in, but I imagine it had a large impact on young adults about "get an education to get a good job to ensure you have enough money for a decent life, because circumstances are risky and so you need to put your future first, before dating and marriage and babies".
And again, if you put off having that first child to later or never, you're not going to have second or third children. Also, cohabitation is not leading to marriage (even though it started off as 'trial marriage', that is, make sure you're both compatible before getting married) since it has now become acceptable as its own thing. I think cohabitation also, because it's not marriage even though it's nearly marriage, does put a barrier to having children for a slew of reasons ranging from economic to personal decisions.
So if everyone around you is putting off serious long-term relationships, getting married later or not at all, putting off having children or not at all, and concentrating on economic security and having a good time while at the same time contrasting how much tougher it is for you than your parents' generation, it makes it easier for you to do likewise.
The other complication of a giant housing crash is, well, the crash.
For the cohort which didn’t lose a job in 2008, 2010 was actually a really good time to buy a home. Better than the next 10 years, anyway. I’m having a hard time sorting the data, here, but it’s possible that 2010 was a high-water mark before the rebound in prices made kids less appealing again.
2010 indeed was a good year, though 2012 was better. But it was actually historically good right up until COVID hit, and we saw a lot of the same whining then. NOW it's actually bad.
Sure, historically low rates.
How about percent of income? From that second chart, it looks like mortgage payments are going up faster than incomes, with a big exception in 2020 and a smaller one in 2016. Depending on the strength of that effect, we could see new homebuyers losing ground even when the overall rate is good.
The other independent variable is total mortgage debt. I couldn’t find data separated by cohort, but if the median home price took off fast enough, maybe that low rate doesn’t feel so good.
I’m mostly spitballing, here. Some of the effect is probably rational financial caution. Some of it’s probably psychic damage from Dad losing his job three years back. And some surely comes from touring Europe. No idea what drives parents on the margin.
The second chart appears to be comparing nominal mortgage payments to real incomes. That is, I can reproduce it by using the mortgage payments from the first table (which are clearly nominal, showing $2207 in 2024 and $141 in 1971) and the incomes in the second table (which are in 2023 dollars, as can be verified by looking on FRED)
If you properly use nominal incomes (from FRED) it looks a lot different.
Disgusting.
I was fooled by the fact that chart 1 did adjust for inflation.
Turns out you can do the chart in FREDs interface. Here's median mortgage payment for a house bought in a given year as a percentage of income, assuming a median-rate 30-year mortgage. Very different look!
And one which tracks other economic markers a lot better.
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At least around me, there are four broad classes of people who don't have kids. Some people are in more than one group.
I think all four of those cases have different solutions, and to be honest, I don't know if I know what those solutions are.
For the first case, I think several Eastern European countries have tried fairly generous tax credits to have children. I'm sure there are people here who are far more interested in this topic than I am, but if memory serves, it didn't do too much to move the needle. I vaguely recall it causing people who had two kids to consider a third, but it didn't make people who had zero kids more likely to have one.
For the second case, it's going to take a lot of work. There are a lot of variations on this - I simply used AGC as a simple example that I see a lot. Trump and the fact that every C-level executive in the country seems to be all but publicly pleasuring themselves over the idea of an impending jobpocalypse ushering in a new era of feudalism fit as well. Fundamentally, it's a problem of hope. There are an increasing number of people who have essentially zero hope that tomorrow is going to be better than today. I'm not sure how you fix that when a lot of powerful people seem to have a vested interest in keeping people scared and hopeless.
The third option is difficult. As somebody in this bucket, I hope to adopt one day. Accessible CRISPR or cheap genetic screening would also be nice.
I have no idea about the fourth option.
Option 5: I can’t find a partner so I can’t have kids. Many such cases.
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I think what you’re talking about touches on a bigger problem I’ve noticed culturally, and even within myself: People don’t want to do things unless they’re ideal.
Most media and entertainment you can consume nowadays is exceptionally optimized. Not to say it’s good - but it’s optimized to be approachable and easy to consume. I often think of video games, porn, YouTube/netflix, and the like. These are digital items, so you might think it can’t possibly apply to things that are limited to real life, but it’s really insidious because of two reasons:
For 1, I cannot understate how insidious this optimized mindset is. I see it in others and in myself. I remember I used to fuck with config files and nested dependencies to make and install game mods, and otherwise set up my system how I wanted. Now, the idea of downloading a mod without an installer/loader is exhausting to me, and generally I just don’t (I also have less free time in general nowadays, but even when I had limited free time as a younger man I was willing to get my digital hands dirty). Installing mods for a supported game has never been easier, so why not just do that instead of fucking with files for an unsupported one to get a mod working?
Websites used to have nested menus and lots of options. Studies have shown that simply increasing the clicks needed to access an option by one dramatically decreases usage of that option. Understandably they’ve worked to minimize this effect, but now we’re very used to sites with exceptionally slick UI, or worse, a mobile design where you scroll endlessly. Pretty much every app that can use this format does because it will be outcompeted and die (see: Instagram and YouTube adding reels and shorts in response to TikTok). Movies are the same. Sure, you could go to an unsearchable or otherwise seedy website and stream/torrent it (after installing and activating your VPN) and waiting for it to download… or you could go to a very slick Netflix/Hulu/HBO site and credit card a few bucks away.
None of these on their own are harmful. They’re understandable and even economically beneficial. But the fact is that everything you do is exceptionally easy.
Now factor in 2. Your food can be delivered with a couple taps on your phone. Sure, you could call and pick up the food for cheaper, but this is easier. You can invest in the latest meme stock, or find an app for a well regarded investment bank (depending on your financial literacy). Sure, you could do research and build a good portfolio, but this is easier. You can scroll your phone endlessly and watch some slop while you eat. You could find some activity or go somewhere nice, but this is easier.
It has never been easier to be fed something that seems good enough, and the mental load is exceptionally low for all of it.
I think this has far reaching implications for a lot of life, but keeping it relevant to kids: I’ve noticed in everyone (again, myself included) that decisions that fall off this tap-to-slop pipeline are incredibly more difficult than they used to be; or rather, should be. Buying a car? I have to cross reference information on models and years and be ready to stand firm against a seller (be it private or a dealership) who is incentivized to bilk as much cash out of me as possible. Job applications? I need to craft my resume and be ready to answer questions that cast doubt on my abilities. Buying a house? I need to look into dozens of factors both in the market and the specific locations and houses I’m looking at.
You will notice that these examples have services that sell themselves on helping you out. Previously, we had family, friends, and other networking to fill in, but we are getting noticeably more atomized. These services likely won’t give you the optimal solution, but they are optimized to give you a solution within the safe and curated app based world we’re all trapped in.
Kids have no such guarantees. Not even a service or app. Everything is something you need to judge for yourself, and put in serious legwork to not only do at all, but do well enough to end up not neglecting or otherwise failing your child.
Oh, and all those services and apps that conveniently bilk money from you and effortlessly fill your time are now an extravagance you can’t afford. You are not only embarking on a path that requires serious thought and effort, you have to explicitly give up the entire ecosystem that society has cultivated around you.
When the world is built of sure things, kids are a very unsure thing, and that makes them novel and scary in a way no other generation has experienced.
This is the crux of it. You can talk about cultural meddling, you can talk about financial insecurity, and those are problems for sure. But to me the biggest cause is the silent problem in the way people live their lives every day. There are obviously degrees to this but except for the most unplugged of us, this way is not conducive to risk taking. Being comfortable is simply too easy.
As for me, I have a young child. What’s funny to me is I haven’t given up all that much. I still order out, I still watch movies and TV, I still play some games, I still have some hobbies that I get to. Sure, there are limitations, but life goes on. I credit this to two things: 1) I’m a bit of a Luddite and eschewed paid services and apps for convenience purposes. What few services I paid for I terminated when my kid was born. 2) I always wanted kids, and I realized a few years back that the purpose it gives me outweighs any insecurity in my life. Without both of these factors, it would have been much harder to justify it.
I’m reminded of the meme of clippy looking at you with the prompt “It looks like you’re waiting for ideal circumstances to make a change. Might I remind you that ideal circumstances cannot and will not exist?”
The only options are “I’m aware” and “Wow, rude”. I think society is solidly set in the second prompt, and having the proper response is very difficult when life is fed to you every day. Sure, it’s a cheap and unfulfilling one, but this is easier.
Counterpoint.
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Money seems to work in the States but at levels the government can’t fund. >750k a year seems to have a big boost in fertility. Blue cities it seems impossible to have kids below this. 50% tax rate + expensive real estate + blue states have a bad reputation on public schools.
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I think you made the simple mistake of taking those arguments seriously.
I was about to post a version of this.
This is just online dorks. They only vaguely mean it.
Also, such people are probably just selfish and don't care for any suggestions that would upend their existing lifestyle.
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From what I've learned, it makes people have their next children quicker, but doesn't make them have more of them. Basically, it makes people switch from "we want two kids, but we can't really afford two pregnancies in a row, we need a few years of double income to rebuild our savings" to "okay, we can try for the second one".
Which is not to say it isn't helpful. Moving births earlier still improves a country's demographic situation, because children born earlier will come to childbearing age earlier.
For a toy example, imagine two countries with a completed fertility rate (CFR) of exactly two, but one country has the children at ages 18 and 20, and the other has them at 38 and 40. Two parents who live to 80 in country one will have 16 great great grandchildren, while their equivalents in country two will only have four grandchildren.
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I think "I don't like children." is covering a lot of ground between "I dislike being around children generally" and "I yearn to be a parent but am anxious about whether I'd be bad at it and ruin their childhoods so I won't risk it" (with mid-range options being things like "I like children fine, but there's so much more to life and they're such a time-sink - I'd rather be an uncle!").
I yearn to be a parent feels to me like it fits in the lack of hope box, rather than the don't want to box.
I'll admit that the categories are imperfect, but I think they roughly capture what I've seen. For every one aspiring fun uncles, there are at least five people who disdainfully talk about "breeders".
I don't have any statistics to prove you wrong, but this doesn't describe my experience at all. Even if you back off from "sneer at breeders" to just "actively dislike kids", my perception is that this group is still vastly outnumbered by people whose objection falls into the "too much effort" bucket.
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Perhaps, but the way you'd phrased it seemed to be focused on people who are doomers about the world as a whole, whereas I'm talking about people with self-confidence issues/therapy-culture-induced paranoia about their personal ability to do right by a child.
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I never really believe that money is the factor. Take for example if someone walked up to me and asked me "Hey Daguerrean, why don't you buy a new car?" I suppose I would answer that money was the reason. But let's say they then asked me, "So what car would you want to buy?" Suppose I answered and on-the-spot that person cut me a check for X dollars, X being exactly the price of the car I named. So am I going to go out and buy that car? Of course not! Obviously not! Only if buying a new car is top on my list of priorities of "What I would do if I had X dollars", which presumably it isn't. Maybe I would get some repair done on my house or landscaping. Maybe I would save the X dollars because "Having 10X dollars saved" is a higher priority for me than "Having the new car". In reality, even if the car costs X and money is the reason I don't buy the car, you might have to give me 20*X dollars before I actually go out and buy that new car today. I'm not lying that cost is the reason I don't buy the new car, if the car cost $1 or I had unlimited money I would go buy it today. But it's obviously not the whole story, and a check for $X won't make me buy it.And if buying the car actually were the top of my list of financial priorities I would already have bought it as I routinely make and spend $X.
I think children work the same. I don't think people are lying, and if they had unlimited time and money they probably would have children, but I don't think we can just assume money will fix it. Even if we calculated the cost of raising a child for the first 4 years of life and gave that check to every newly married couple, I imagine the effect would be minimal. It is about the priority of having children. If having children is low priority behind vacations to Europe, new cars, bigger houses, luxury goods and cosmetic surgery then the quantity of money it would take to get them to have children would be absolutely massive. You'd have to pay for the cosmetic surgeries before the dollars had anything to do with children.
I think "money" is misunderstood as a rationale, or possibly underspecified.
There are the kind of financial worries that center around immediate funding issues like paying for diapers while still making rent, etc. and those, as you say, are probably not all that influential.
But "money" also covers a more generalized financial anxiety that comes from not seeing a clear path to prosperity for your child without enormously expensive investments in things like private schools, impressive extracurriculars and service trips, tutoring to make top SATs, etc. The Millennials were the generation who saw their prosperous helicopter parents spend the most on ensuring their path to a good job, and today the path to ensuring your child a solid professional-class career is if anything far more opaque, risky and potentially expensive. Those are worries that could absolutely make a young couple think "Hmm, we should maybe hold off and save for a few more years."
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It's almost certainly true that the marginal dollar of aid wouldn't go directly to having a child. But why do you think it's going to luxury consumption? How many of their higher priorities are boring, responsible things like house repairs? How many are outright virtuous? There's some number of couples out there who are prioritizing their sick or aging parents over having their own kids.
Sure, sneer at the avocado toast. That doesn't apply to everyone.
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Not necessarily. If our only option was to cut people a fully fungible check then sure that wouldn't work. But we could either have accounts that you have to spend on child associated costs, like a healthcare spending account, or more straightforwardly and better give them money if and only if they have a kid. That'd be equivalent to making the car cost $0.
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There's definitely a chance that what they say is not what they believe, but I can only report on what they say. It would be interesting to come up with some kind of questioning line that could tease out any discrepancies between their word and their secret heart.
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This is a surprising claim since I've read many studies pointing to reduction of fertility among the parous rather than increased childlessness as the major driver of reduced TFR.
For reduced fertility among the parous, how much of the drop could plausibly be attributed to the rise in neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD? Looks like developmental disabilities in US kids aged 3-17 rose 8-15% over the last decade, for a total prevalence of about 1 in 6 today-- and that's leaving out anxiety, depression, gender dysphoria, a whole raft of other mental health things that are also common in today's children.
There's been discussion here about how parents tend to keep having kids until they hit an especially difficult one, then stop. Combine rising odds of having a difficult kid with the chilling effect of watching friends' lives be severely impacted by a child's mental health issues, and that could account for at least some level of diminished fertility.
I don't even think you'd have to accept that there's any kind of organic issue underlying the trend; even if it's just overdiagnosis/ overmedication for kids' screen-induced behavior problems, any parent who hauls their IPad toddler to the pediatrician for a developmental disorder diagnosis is a parent who is having a much tougher time with that kid than they anticipated.
I don't think you're cynical enough. One reason there might be overdiagnosis is because having autism or an alphabet disease is highly adaptive - the student gets accommodations, the parents get to have "neurospicy" children, etc. There doesn't actually have to be any underlying behavioral problem at all.
Highly anecdotal but my mom is a now-retired teacher who did about 40 years of special ed across UK/New Zealand/Australia, generally focusing on a band between say the 5th-percentile to the 15th-percentile. She had a very clear seat to see the diagnostic drift of stuff like that, considering to her eyes the 'intellectual level' of the kids stayed consistent but the amount of formal diagnoses absolutely exploded between the start of her career and the end of it.
There were always kids given actual diagnoses to begin but they tended to be the ones on the absolute bottom end of the scale who were essentially incapable of functioning in society at all. Over time, due to a mixture of increasing availability of psychologists, shifts in the diagnostic criteria and frankly shifts in how public funds are allocated towards special education students the diagnoses proliferated. What used to be a fairly vibe-driven system of 'kid seems unintelligent, gets funneled into my mom's classes' 40 years ago became 'Kids with diagnoses for XYZ get funneled to that class, kids who seem unproductive get diagnosed, sent into my mom's classes'
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Anecdotally, the long-term drop is mostly driven by reduction in fertility among the parous but the cliff-edge drop some countries have seen post-pandemic is driven by reduced couple formation. I don't think the paper you linked breaks the trend out by decade.
Which countries have a cliff edge drop post pandemic? Sweden does not.
A drop of 0.3 children per woman in 2 years seems cliffy enough to me.
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Not calling them DICKs would be a start.
Bi-Income Trusty Child Havers?
People Aligning Relationships, Employment, Ninos, Toddlers, Sprogs?
Seriously, you don't need a cute term for married parents. They should just be normal.
Nonetheless, if you give me an excuse to cook up a tortured acronym, I'm going to take it. It keeps me from making puns.
I feel like the cure is worse than the disease
– A sufferer
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It's just a fun acronym – lighten up, I don't mean anything by it.
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