I disagree. There’s a lot of reasons why people don’t have children, including:
- emotional devastated youth (abandoned by parents, addicted to smartphones, misunderstood by society)
- people can’t find partners for this reason
- too much stress from too much work
- wages are barely keeping up with inflation, and I project they will in fact not keep up in the long term in the US due to missing labor protections and decreasing demand for labor.
- rising cost of living because politically, nobody really cares about the population.
edit: sorry i realized i made these points US-specific but you were talking about russia, sorry.
They aren’t necessarily US specific. Wages not keeping up with inflation and rising cost of living is a factor from South Korea to Japan to Singapore as well. Some countries muck it up themselves like China with their one child policy back in the day (even the Chinese fertility rate has dipped below 2.2, I think).
Well, it’s only a very, very recent problem in Japan. They had stagnation for decades. Little to no change in wages, little to no change in prices. In 2011, I was making something like 33,000 USD per year there and living very comfortably with ample savings and what the Japanese considered to be a large apartment. It’s a pretty affordable country, aside from travel. Or if you want to live in a fancy place in a desirable big city neighborhood.
(And yes, I have been to Japan since then and know that things have changed somewhat. It’s still cheap compared to the US. Food is so cheap, it’s amazing what you can get.)
- Women get educated
- Women get their own money
- Women get control over reproductive rights and tools
So much of our world is based around women keeping it on the rails without receiving credit for their efforts.
No - actually I was talking worldwide. Russia’s just a notable example.
And I would say that all of the things you listed are, directly or indirectly, consequences of the fact that wealthy authoritarian parasites have warped societies to their benefit regardless of the harm done to others, so are actually examples of exactly what I’m talking about.
One point I want to add: Throughout most of human history, it was economically beneficial to have lots of children. They were your retirement plan (and cheap labor).
In most developed countries, this is no longer the case. People who want children get one or two, just to scratch the itch, but that’s not enough to sustain the population (without migration).
