Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college.

Only one in three Millennials have gone to college, so you’ll need to pro-rate this. You’re also talking about a population that begun employment between 14-17, even in an advanced economy like the US. So that cost is offset by revenue, especially in those later years.

The unique expense for a kid is education

Young kids require a lot of health care, tbf

There’s too many people on this fucking planet.

There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.

A much smaller population that lived at this degree of population and destruction would be no better globally.

you would expect the young to outnumber the old

Kinda depends on how you define the two cohorts.

We’re also overlooking a seminal moment in history where

• Vaccinations
• Nitrogen rich fertilizer
• Fossil fuels
• A sixty year long people of relative global peace

All came online at about the same time, radically improving human life expectancy over two generations.

As a point of comparison, the county of Tibet had an average life expectancy of 35 in the 1920s and 72 in the 2020s.

We already have that.

Elderly population falls off quickly after age 80

Okay but you’re looking at more than just white people

They’re slow off the mark, averaging 27-28 for the first child rather than 22.

Sure, but only the inner lips of the labia matter

more young people to support the old people

But human labor is incredibly efficienct in the modern day. You don’t need ten young people for every one old person - nine of whom die by their mid-30s - so that everyone doesn’t starve.

But the role of elderly people has changed so much in the last century. On a national scale, they’re no longer master craftsmen or child caregivers or elder advisors. They’re just the base of the consumer economy and the electoral pool.

As democracy fails and the economy becomes more fixated on tech capital than quality of life, they’re marked out as increasingly expendable.

It isn’t that we need more young people so much as we’ve alienated and de-skilled our old people.

This isn’t even a bad idea on it’s face. Child care is labor and taking care of your own kids shouldn’t be considered any less of a job than taking care of other people’s kids.

But like so much else in modern American politics, they’re always a hard ceiling on how much they want to spend for domestic benefits. So we get means testing and welfare cliffs and robbing Peter to pay Paul, as we dump a cool $300B into Iran and another $1T into tax cuts.

The experience with job sites and the experience with dating sites have entirely too many similarities.

What must it be like to live in a country whose illusion of democracy is being stripped away?

He’s absolutely wrong

Trump’s fully primed to be at the center of a Messianic Cult once he’s kicked it. People are going to be talking about the Second Coming of Trump for the next fifty years.

be yourself

Maybe don’t be a guy who catalogues his classmates’ underwear colors.

I believe the first half of this story

Unironically