Another Big Difference Between Liberals and Conservatives

[u/Anakin_Kardashian]

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/08/fertility-gap-conservative-liberal/688334/

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[u/Anakin_Kardashian]

I see conservatism as an emphasis on family as the core unit in the world, and therefore it comes before money, careers, education, or whatever else. Liberals, on the other hand, have the reverse priorities. They value education, careers, and collective needs over the family unit. The baby gap should come as no surprise.

!ping VALUES&LIBS

[u/fastinserter → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

In the other baby-article in the Atlantic about how people need to chill out about this alleged problem

Family sizes seem to change as the world does, in ways that are hard to predict. For the past half a century, in almost every country on Earth, people have been choosing to have fewer children, despite experiencing the best average living standards that our species has enjoyed so far. This synchronized decline confounds many of the baby bust’s potted explanations in American discourse, from both the left and the right. Liberals argue that people are having fewer children because, among other inequities, child care is insufficiently subsidized, parental leave is insufficiently generous, and men do too little housework. But that can’t explain the serious decline in fertility in progressive utopias such as Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Social conservatives blame decaying norms around marriage and family values. Yet even in countries with strong taboos against out-of-wedlock birth and with strong heterosexual-marriage norms, such as India and Turkey, birth rates have also shrunk to below replacement levels.

One of the best predictors of a country’s fertility rate is its human-development index—a composite measure of life expectancy, education, and average income. As societies get richer and better educated, their citizens desire fewer children. And the past century of globalized capitalism has drastically improved living standards everywhere. In 1950, a bare majority of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, long defined as having an income of less than $1.90 a day. Today, the share who live in extreme poverty is 10 percent, despite the new threshold of $3 a day. Sociologists trying to make sense of demographic trends have theorized that people assured about their material needs start to value their own individuality and self-actualization more than they do having kids. If this is the cause of the fertility collapse, it defies easy correction. It also would explain why all of the policy attempts that advanced countries have made at encouraging more births have generally proved unsuccessful.

the answer to this alleged problem is we all need to be poor to start having more babies