Namrata Nangia and her husband have been toying with the idea of having another child since their five-year-old daughter was born.
But it always comes back to one question: ‘Can we afford it?’
She lives in Mumbai and works in pharmaceuticals, her husband works at a tyre company. But the costs of having one child are already overwhelming - school fees, the school bus, swimming lessons, even going to the GP is expensive.
It was different when Namrata was growing up. “We just used to go to school, nothing extracurricular, but now you have to send your kid to swimming, you have to send them to drawing, you have to see what else they can do.”
According to a new report by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN agency for reproductive rights, Namrata’s situation is becoming a global norm.
Sure but you can’t have an endless increase in population. Whatever the problems of declining or stabilizing the population are, they need to be tackled, not ignored, yes. You can’t fix them by saying just keep the pyramid scheme going.
The real problem is more like how many workers for each retired person. So there are other ways to fix that. Personally I’m down with working more years so that people don’t have to have kids if they don’t want to. I can’t imagine forcing people to have children.
And you know what? Employers having to face a tight labor market doesn’t sound like it’s worse than employees having to find scarce jobs.
Never proposed that growth should continue, indeed it cannot. But depopulation is going to steamroll us in the next century and I see no way around it.