It's Not Feminism. The American Family is DEAD.

Kind: captions Language: en The developed world is running out of babies. Almost everyone agrees about why, but almost everyone is wrong. In 2026, the United States recorded its lowest fertility rate ever. Demographers predict countries like Japan and South Korea could lose half of their populations within decades, and then half again. Governments, economists, and billionaires say young people just don't want kids, but Gen Z isn't rejecting parenthood. Surveys show they still want children, but they also did the math. The cost of raising a child has more than doubled since their parents were young. Childcare costs have exploded, and the house their parents bought on one income now takes two, and even then it might still be out of reach. You can't spend 50 years pricing people out of parenthood, and then act surprised when they stop becoming parents. The truth is people didn't stop wanting families. Families just became a luxury. There was a primary school in the South Korean village of Nogok, about 110 miles east of Seoul, that had just one student. His name was Chung Jong-soo. Every morning, Jong-soo walked into a building built for hundreds of children, sat down at his desk, and had one-on-one lessons with his teacher. When Jong-soo graduated, the school closed. There was nobody left to fill it. The surrounding villages had no children to send to the school. South Korea spent 100 million won, roughly $87,000 a year to keep that one boy enrolled, because the alternative, admitting the children were gone, somehow felt worse. In 1960, Nogok had just under 5,400 people. More than 2,000 of them were under 12. By 2010, the population had fallen to just 615, and only 17 were school age. By then, the post office was gone, so was the police station, the bank, and many of the businesses that had once served the village. What remained was farmland, old people, and one boy with a weed-covered playground all to himself. Chung Jong-soo wasn't an exception. He was a preview of things to come for many countries the world over. Since 1982, nearly 3,600 schools have closed across South Korea for the same [music] reason. Their country's fertility rate, which is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, hit 0.72 in 2023. That is the lowest birth rate ever recorded for any country in modern history. South Korea is one of the wealthiest, most educated countries on Earth, but women there are averaging less than one child each. Run that forward and things get pretty dark pretty fast. Two parents have one child. That child grows up and has a child. Within three generations, or roughly 75 years, that family of four becomes a family of one. To put it more plainly, for every 100 grandparents alive in South Korea today, there are approximately 13 grandchildren. Every 100 South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them down the road. Apply that math to 51 million people and you see why demographers are starting to worry. At the current rate, South Korea's population is projected to nearly halve by 2100. In the grand scheme of things, South Korea may seem like an outlier. It's not. It is a warning for the rest of the world. Japan has 9 million abandoned homes sitting empty because there aren't enough people left to live in them. >> [music] >> In one Japanese village called Nagoro, a local artist has spent years building life-sized dolls to replace the neighbors who have died or left. The dolls now outnumber the living residents 10 to 1. The children aren't being born. The question is why? Conversations about this topic usually go one way. Someone brings up the birth rate and within about 30 seconds, the word selfish is usually mentioned. Young people are supposedly too obsessed with avocado toast, travel Instagram, and personal freedom to commit to anything harder than a streaming subscription. So, they just don't have kids. In 2023, Pew Research Center found that 47% of non-parents under the age of 50 say they're unlikely to ever have children. That's enough people to fill all 30 NFL stadiums in America more than [music] 12 times over. Worryingly, that number was 10% smaller just 5 years earlier. So, whatever's happening, it seems to be accelerating. When researchers asked these people why, the answers were not what the selfish generation crowd wanted to hear. 36% said they can't afford to raise a child. 38% cited serious concerns about the state of the world they'd be bringing a child into. 86% of millennials and Gen Z'ers who have delayed having kids listed finances as the primary reason. There's a 29-year-old working-class millennial, let's call him Charlie, who put it better than any economist managed to. In a video that went quietly viral, he said, "It absolutely baffles me that the government is pretending like they don't know why we're not having kids >> [music] >> because, frankly, it is glaringly obvious. It is." In 2025, the average cost of raising one child under the age of five in America was around 20 $7,700 per year. The average annual salary in 2025 was $62,000. That means one child, before rent, before food, before your own health care, before anything else, consumes almost 45% of what the average American makes. And that's before you factor in the fact that wages have barely moved in real terms in decades, while the cost of everything required to raise a child has gone through the roof. This is a generation that wants children or at least is willing to entertain the idea. What they don't want to do is do it badly, in debt, in a one-bedroom apartment with no safety net and no realistic path to anything resembling stability. And from a certain perspective, that might be the most rational financial decision a generation has ever made. 1979 is the year economists typically use as the starting point when they want to show you exactly where things went wrong. Between then and 2019, worker productivity in America grew by nearly 60%. The economy got dramatically more efficient. Goods got cheaper to make, services got faster to deliver, and profits got larger. By every measure of output, the American worker became a significantly better economic engine. Yet, over the same span, their paycheck went up only 15.8%. [music] If wages had kept pace with productivity over that same period, the typical worker today would be making $9 more per hour than they currently are. The money went somewhere, just not to the people doing the work. Now, layer housing on top of that. In 1960, the median American home cost roughly 2.1 times the median household income. That is expensive, sure, but manageable on a single salary with some discipline and a decent job. By 2024, that same ratio had climbed to five times the median household income. Between 2019 and 2024 alone, a five-year span, median home prices surged 48%. [music] Median income grew just 22% in that same window. Over that time, the gap between what people earn and what homes cost became a different conversation entirely. The next time someone tells a 28-year-old to stop renting and just buy something, remind them that the median mortgage payment has risen 40% in the last five years. Have we mentioned the debt? Millennial adults are saddled with it. The average American college graduate carries roughly $30,000 in student loans into adulthood. Research shows that a woman carrying 60 grand in student debt has [music] a 42% lower annual probability of having children than their debt-free peers. A recent BYU American Family Survey, one of the longest-running studies of family life in the country, should end the debate entirely. It found that for the first time in history, Americans now cite financial concerns as the primary reason they are limiting family size. 49% of a thousand employed American adults surveyed believe their wages will simply never catch up to the cost of living. And 48% of those have already delayed or abandoned a major life milestone like buying a home or having a child because of it. But everyone knows having a kid is priceless. [music] A new study by LendingTree begs to differ. According to them, the cost of raising one child in America to age 18 is more than $300,000. That is before a single dollar gets spent on college tuition. If you flew to Italy today and purchased a brand new heavily optioned 2026 Ferrari Roma, you would be in a similar ballpark. That's without even factoring in child care. That's where the math starts to get genuinely unhinged. The average annual cost of full-time child care in 2024 was nearly $13,100 per child. That is up 29% since 2020 and up 220% over the past three decades. In 45 states, the cost of child care for two kids exceeds average mortgage payments. And in 41 states, sending your infant to a daycare center costs more per year than sending your older kid to a state university. A mother posted her daycare bill on camera a couple of years ago. She was spending $35,000 a year and walked her audience through it step-by-step. Her daycare center charged by the 10-hour block and if she was 1 minute late for pickup, it was an extra $2 a minute. The older generations have zero idea how serious younger people are when they say we can't afford kids, she said dejectedly. Sure. She was talking about maximal child care coverage for a parent who has to commute to work, work 8 hours and then commute home, but by and large, she is right. Imagine spending upwards of 60 grand to send both your kids to a daycare all day. A recent care.com report found the average parent spends 22% of their household income on child care. Meanwhile, the US Department of Health recommended 7% of family income as the most sustainable benchmark for affordable care. That means current costs are floating at three times the recommended level. That is definitely not sustainable. What's more, when a woman in America has a child, her earnings go down. It sounds counterintuitive, but the economy is structured to pay her less for the act of reproduction it is simultaneously demanding from her. Researchers call it the motherhood penalty, and it is not small by any measure. Each child under the age of five reduces a typical mother's earnings by 15%. Full-time working mothers earned 35% less than full-time working fathers in 2024. And if that gap holds, and it stubbornly has held on for decades, the average worker will earn $600,000 less than her male counterpart over the course of her career. All because she chose to have a baby. The system charges women a financial penalty for having children. Then it holds congressional hearings to ask why women aren't having more of them. Governments have noticed something is wrong. To their credit, their solutions though are something else entirely. In 2006, South Korea took a look at its falling birth rate and decided to try to do something about it, and it might be one of the world's most expensive failed experiments. The government launched what would become the most aggressive pro-natalist spending program in human history. Birth rates were in severe decline, so they started offering cash bonuses for new babies. They threw in subsidized housing for young families, free child care, and even paid paternal leave. There were even government-sponsored matchmaking services, which were about as awkward as it sounds. Over the next 16 years, South Korea spent about $200 billion trying to convince its citizens to have more children. By 2023, the fertility rate was lower than when they started. Things today are steadily improving. >> [music] >> Back from the precipice that they were once on, the South Korean birth rate has climbed back to a less critical 0.80, but the returns are far lower than anticipated given the expenses. Incredibly, South Korean researchers later realized that 74% of the baby bonuses they'd handed out had gone to births that were going to happen anyway. They had basically given tips to people who'd already made the decision. But, South Korea is not alone in that particular hall of shame. Hungary tried it, and for a while it seemed like they had actually cracked the code. Between 2011 and 2021, their fertility rate climbed from 1.23 to 1.61 through a combination of generous tax exemptions, subsidized loans, and outright cash payments to mothers. The pronatalist crowd held up the Hungarian example like a sports trophy. The policy works. Just pay people to breed. And then the rate started to fall again. By 2024, Hungary's fertility rate had dropped to 1.39, the lowest it had been in over a decade. The gains evaporated almost as fast as they had appeared. This happened without any meaningful change to government policy. Japan, Singapore, Russia, Belarus, Estonia, every country that has publicly committed to a fertility target has failed to hit it, with the sole exception of Bulgaria, which is not exactly held up as a paragon of economic dynamism. Why don't these national strategies work, and can you solve any problem in this world by just throwing more money at the root of the problem? That's precisely the issue with the pronatalist policies. Nobody can argue with the root of the problem. When researchers dug into why they failed in these cases, they kept on bumping into the same two issues: housing costs and something economists call time poverty. That's a very clinical way of saying that people are too broke and too exhausted to have children. Handing them a few thousand bucks will not actually make them any less broke or exhausted. Slightly less broke and exhausted? Sure. But, not before the underlying math reasserts itself again. Remember the South Korean village with one student left? South Korea tried everything short of physically manufacturing children to reverse what happened in places like that. The building where Chung Jong-soo learned to read is being converted into a hub for remote workers. And contrary to expectations, the governments aren't stupid. They know these bonuses aren't working, but admitting that the problem is structural means accepting that you have to fundamentally redesign how housing is priced, how wages are set, and how child care is funded. Those are entirely different and messier conversations to be had. Spending $770 per family on a monthly check is actually [music] cheaper than that fight. So, that's what they kept writing. And while they're writing those checks, something else has been happening on the other side of the economy that makes the whole exercise look even more absurd. Goldman Sachs says AI is coming for 300 million jobs globally. The entire US workforce is about 168 million people. So, when the same governments panicking about the birth rate then tell you they need more workers, the obvious question becomes, more workers for what, exactly? There's something else nobody likes to talk about. The economic model we've built depends on an endless supply of new workers to fill jobs, to pay taxes, and to keep the whole machine running. But, that model was already running into a wall. Automation. While everyone was arguing about falling birth rates, machines were getting better at doing the work that we once needed millions of people to do. In the US and Europe, roughly two-thirds of all current jobs are exposed to some degree of AI automation. Up to a quarter could be replaced outright. Unlike every previous wave of automation, which took over physical labor and pushed humans into cognitive work, AI is coming for the cognitive layer, too. Today, it can write the copy, read the x-rays, draft the contracts, generate the code, and drive the taxis. Well, sort of. The things humans were supposed to move up to is what's being automated next, which means the workforce the birth rate panic is trying to manufacture might be obsolete by the time it arrives. Goldman Sachs is careful to note that technological disruption historically creates new jobs, too. The Industrial Revolution killed the blacksmith and created the factory worker. The internet killed the travel agent and created the UX designer. Maybe AI follows the same pattern, but every previous wave replaced physical labor with cognitive labor. This one is replacing both at the same time, and nobody has an answer for what that will mean. What we do know is this. If AI displaces hundreds of millions of jobs over the next few decades, a shrinking workforce might actually be the softest possible landing for the most disruptive technological transition in history. It's a counterintuitive way of looking at the developed world's demographic decline, but here we are. Fewer people chasing fewer jobs is a crisis, but fewer people chasing no jobs might be something more akin to equilibrium. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI could drive a 7% increase in global GDP over a 10-year period through productivity gains alone. That works out to $7 trillion. It looks awfully optimistic, but the economy of the future may not actually need population growth to grow. It might just need smarter deployment of the people and technology it already has. So, if factories don't need the workers and the economy doesn't need the population to grow, why are the global elites still screaming for more babies? Because it's still about power, just not the kind that people usually talk about. In the second quarter of 2025, the wealthiest 10% of Americans accounted for nearly half of all consumer spending in the country. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% of households haven't seen their standard of living budge in real terms since before the pandemic. That is the whole thing right there. The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stock market. The bottom 50% own 1%. When the market goes up, the people who own it get richer. The people who don't are just getting older. Economists call this the K-shaped economy. Picture the letter K, where after any shock, the top half recovers and keeps climbing while the bottom half stalls or falls. Two trajectories, one letter, 50 years of widening the gap. For example, Airbnb doesn't need a booming middle class. It needs wealthy people paying 500 bucks a night. A luxury car brand like Maserati or Porsche doesn't need millions of customers. It needs [music] thousands of very rich ones. One wealthy consumer can replace several middle-income consumers in raw spending power. The businesses that figured this out have been restructuring the entire economy around it ever since. And so, the elite's sudden panic about the birth rate is revealing once you understand what they actually need. They don't require workers or even soldiers the way they used to in the traditional sense. What they need is a large enough base of working and middle-class participants to pay taxes, service debt, and keep [music] consumption propped up at a level that justifies current asset valuations. They need enough people at the bottom of the K to [music] keep the top looking like a good investment. Nobody blew up the American family. That happened the way most systemic failures happen, incrementally, almost imperceptibly, and extremely profitably for the people at the top of the earning pyramid. Wages decoupled from productivity in 1979, and they never reconnected. Housing became an investment vehicle instead of a place to live, and the price followed accordingly. Child care was left to the market, and the market did what markets do. It charged what it could get away with. Student debt ballooned while public investment in education collapsed. [music] And women who tried to do everything right, get the degree, build the career, start the family, got handed a bill for 35% of their lifetime earnings as a thank you. Economists, demographers, and researchers have all been warning governments that the trajectory was never really a secret. The response from governments has widely been to sign more baby bonuses and cash incentives. Gen Z inherited this mess, and looking at the numbers, they are concluding that it doesn't p