In the extreme views thread some folks want to tie financial stability to the ability have kids. I’m not so much interested in the morality or lack thereof of this perspective so much as the practical demographic effect.
If there are no poor people’s kids coming into the workforce, and assuming immigration is strictly controlled, who is going to do the low pay, physically hard scutwork jobs of society? People who become poor in their lifetimes? Do the hard, nasty jobs now become well paid?
What happens if there are much fewer economically desperate people being pushed into the workforce?
Just look at any place that has a low birthrate to see what will happen. Japan’s low birthrate is causing some problems in their social safety net, for example. Programs like Social Security assume a growing population, and become much more expensive if the current working population isn’t large enough to pay for the current retired population.
Here’s a good place to start examining the issue of low fertility rates in general.
I don’t think it’s worth making a distinction between fertility rates in general, and fertility rates among only poor people. As wealth increases, fertility rates decrease. The poor are the engine for population growth, and you’ll see changes in population growth rates primarily reflected among the lowest incomes.
I was going to suggest Japan as an example as well. Take a look at some of the early posts on Spike Japanto see what a society in demographic decline looks like. He goes out into the hinterland and wanders round the derelict villages and the like documenting how things are - the Hokkaido series is particularly good.
Well… you’d always have poor people. You’d always have people who don’t have much to offer employers: brains, education, talent, work ethic, whatever, and you’d always have people living in places where there aren’t many job opportunities, especially for unskilled workers. And you’d always have employers willing to go elsewhere for even poorer workers who will accept even less pay. Are we talking worldwide poor?
What would happen to all those poor people as they got older, with no kids to take care of them? Who would do those lower-paid jobs as they retired or even became too old to do certain kinds of physically demanding jobs? I imagine some of the jobs would go away, the middle class would be willing to accept lower wages (and become poor themselves), and we would have more and more poor older folks draining social services with fewer and fewer people paying into it.
In short, THE END OF THE WORLD.
My question is, what if just about anybody anywhere in the world could get a job that paid a low but decent living wage, say the equivalent of $10/hr and free medical and dental care. (I know, I’m dreaming. Can I have a pony, too?) With no room for advancement. Anybody that paid slave wages or minimum wage would lose their workers unless they came up to $10/hr and free medical and dental care. My question is, would that be the new definition of poor? Prices of everything would go up?