Billionaires demand more babies but make parenthood unaffordable
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/16/billionaires-demand-more-babies-but-make-parenthood-unaffordable
Posted by Tsavkko
Billionaires demand more babies but make parenthood unaffordable
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/16/billionaires-demand-more-babies-but-make-parenthood-unaffordable
Posted by Tsavkko
41 Comments
The foxes want more chickens?
Meat sacks for profits
It is a very complex issue but imo the main reason is cultural. Children’s place hasn’t caught up in the 21st century. You’re expected to be a helicopter parent while both parents work minimum 40 hours a week. It wasn’t like this before. Not even that long ago parent’s lives weren’t expected to be shaped around their kids. Genuinely wouldn’t be surprised to see childcare become something like healthcare in America where it’s integrated with your job. Getting a bit tired of the blame billionaires for everything. There is a lot they are to be blamed for but it is becoming the lazy accusation.
Rawdog for the shareholders pleb!
Bilo je prije trideset godina riječ da će roboti zamijeniti radnike i da će radnici biti višak.
How many kids per $100.000 per year should one have? 😂 Billionaires are obviously the ones not reaching the minimums
You can tell that educational standards are dropping when rather than explain in depth about how the post 1970s world economic system & asset price inflation has resulted in both parents need to work in order to afford the home that in the 60s just one breadwinner was able to, just blame it on “billionaires”.
There are 8 or 9 billion people. We don’t need more and things were fine and would be fine with much less.
If you had to design a system that had finite resources and the best you could come up with is a system that is dependent on exponential growth of the things that consume those resources you would not be very bright.
Psychopaths
Of course they want more people to use as wage slaves.
Billionaires are a problem.
The greatest threat to humankind is the billionaires.
We will probably be replaced by robots and AI later on, so why would he want to boost the birth rate?
slaves, they want more slaves.
“Billionaires demand more babies (slaves) so that their properties won’t devalue over time, will have larger pool of people to pull workers on barely livable wage from and more consumers to finance their shit”. Truly an amazing motivation to have kids.
Can we replace billionaires with AI?
I demand fewer billionaires.
Every country with high QoL has lower birth rates
I’ve never been convinced you can move the needle materially to boost birth rates by making it more affordable.
As long as both partners have to work 40 hours per week to even be able to stay financially afloat, they’re not gonna have kids. Too expensive and no time for kids. Maybe billionaires need to find out a solution to this problem instead of just complaining about it.
They could start by significantly raising wages, so that more people can afford to work less hours.
The painful part of course is the fact that money isn’t why people aren’t having more babies. Go ask someone who has 1 kid why they don’t have 2. Their answer is practically always going to be about bad policy, not a direct lack of money. Sure food and diapers are expensive, but for most not prohibitively so.
It’s always something else capitalism has destroyed on the way, like a lack of a social fabric, the need to be a 24h helicopter parent, availability of suitable housing, childcare, inflexible working hours, I bet you can think of a few more.
But these billionaires don’t want to talk about that either. Because all those things require a narrative that the government can actually do good things. And when people trust the government they are willing to go along with higher taxes, including for the rich.
*The economic model championed by figures like Musk makes raising children economically irrational for most households.*
Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO, talks to employees as he holds his son X Æ A-Xii during a visit to the company’s electric car plant Tesla Gigafactory on March 13, 2024 near Gruenheide, Germany [Maja Hitij/Getty Images]
Elon Musk recently declared on X that “an immediate increase in the birth rate is needed”. It’s the kind of statement that sounds dramatic, urgent and vaguely civilisational, but it is also profoundly disconnected from reality. However, Musk is far from an isolated voice within the far right and among the world’s billionaires.
Low birthrates are not a mystery. They are not the result of moral decay, declining ambition or an excess of “woke politics”, but rather the predictable outcome of an economic system in which people are paid too little, work too much and are told to feel personally responsible for structural failures engineered far above their heads.
This disconnect is not limited to fertility. The same billionaires and CEOs who lament demographic decline also complain that people do not buy locally, that European industries are losing ground, and that “the West” is becoming economically fragile, with some even calling for bans on Chinese online platforms such as Temu or Shein. And yet, when it comes to solutions, they reliably converge on the same prescriptions: longer working hours, wage restraint, mass layoffs and deregulation.
In other words, even when their diagnosis occasionally overlaps with reality, their remedies systematically make the problem worse.
Start with wages. Across much of Europe, real wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years. Inflation has eaten into purchasing power, while salary increases have lagged behind the cost of housing, energy, food and childcare. The results are visible in the numbers: the EU’s average fertility rate has fallen to around 1.4 children per woman, well below replacement level. For millions of households, income is no longer a foundation for planning a future, but a constant exercise in damage control.
But better wages alone will not make a difference if the cost of living continues to rise. Young people simply cannot buy a home in most European countries and basic living costs have risen several times faster than wages.
All of this has direct consequences for fertility. Having children requires not just love or desire, but time, money and a sense of stability. When rent absorbs half your income, when childcare costs rival a second mortgage, and when job security is eroded by endless “restructurings”, choosing not to have children is not a cultural failure, but an economically rational decision.
Yet this reality is routinely ignored by those at the top. Musk, for instance, is famous not only for his concern about population decline, but also for championing extreme work cultures. Employees at companies he controls have been told to work “hardcore” hours or leave, and similar messages echo across corporate America and increasingly in Europe: work more, rest less, be grateful, and somehow also find time to have children and buy local products, which are often more expensive than those sold by Chinese online retailers.
The contradiction is obvious. You cannot demand longer working days, weekend availability and permanent precarity, and then act surprised when people do not have the time, energy or confidence to raise children. Biology may set limits but economics determines whether people feel safe enough to build families within them.
It is also true that falling birthrates in wealthy societies are a long-observed pattern shaped by structural conditions, not simply by “cultural decline” or a lack of desire for children.
“Demand”? I demand their heads.
We are living in a science fiction movie.
They could each fund free childcare and healthcare, at least in their own city. That could collectively make a massive difference.
But they won’t. They’d rather keep robbing us than fixing things
Parenthood is getting unaffordable because more and more wealth is being held by billionaires. Seriously, if I was a billionaire I would either give most of it away or keep what I have but give away ALL further earnings for free. For a human being to live comfortably requires a fraction of a fraction of what these few people have. They are the flaw of capitalism, the cancer of the system, feeding on its body and preventing healthy growth of the rest. But who’s gonna stop them? Only healthy democracies could. But Russia is already fascist, US is quickly becoming fascist, China is a dictatorship, India more or less as well. Who’s left? EU, Australia and a few other countries here and there. Billionaires are winning. Question is what world will we live in after they finally do. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty for the average, poor, free-thinking person. It’s going to be a dystopian, digital feudalism with an ultra rich, all powerful ruling class.
Do they? They don’t believe they’ll need workers in the future, it’ll all be automated. So why exactly do they want hordes of destitute, unemployed, homeless people who can’t buy anything they produce? What’s the point?
Destroy every Dollar
That’s why they want women back in the kitchen
billionaires can g f themselves
I’d say billionaires are replacing ppl while millionaires are the ones that need cheap labor.
Have more children and believe in religion so we can have our army of morons who we use at our disposal and promise heaven in reward. I’m getting Jesus ads in all my socials.
Told you so couple of weeks ago, if you inflate price of premium service or tools (like smartphones) people won’t be able to buy them anymore
Billionaires want to play Sim City and Civilization but are always terrible at it. Their undue influence is a blight on democracy and the sooner the people reclaim their power from them the sooner we can move forward past the war, destitution and chaos that they are causing.
Slaves shouldn’t have affordability, thats the point.
Which Billionaires are making parenthood unaffordable?
Its true it’s very exspensive to raise children. All most impossible for large families with say 10 children. Food bill will be your montly wage
They want more workers and the more desperate the better. Desperate people work for less money for longer hours and don’t take days off because if they miss one shift they literally stave. The worst part is that after helping to create this situation they will replace said workers in a heartbeat the second new technology allows it and throw them out like garbage
Can’t we threaten to invade China if they don’t buy soybeans?🤡🤡🤡
USA: # How can a **widow with two teenagers** survive on a gross State wage of just $7.25 an hour:
before taxes, Social Security, fees, dues, tithes and other deductions ($3.75 Net or $600/month), while covering the costs of: phone/ utility/ electricity bills $325, rent $1350, car payment $650, insurances $380, groceries $650 and the countless expenses $1999 that come with raising teenagers?
Teenagers tend to require more resources than adults: clothing, shoes, food, and everything else they need to grow and thrive. It’s an overwhelming struggle to make ends meet. (… 2026, around 20 states still use the $7.25 federal minimum wage, either because they have no state law…)
The federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour first took effect on July 24, 2009… now 2026! And the USPS has increased mail stamp prices **20 times** or 110% since June 2009!
P.S. In 1963, the minimum wage was $1.25 – five 25-cent coins made of 90% silver, which are now valued at $76 TODAY! (Imagine a $76 minimum wage today! And you will get the 1950-1960 economy.) The 1960s average mortgage was between $40 or $60 a month for a 2- or 3-bedroom house, with the average new house around $10K.
(**1963, $7.25 in silver dollars/quarters would be $580 today.** “Pay the minimal wage in silver coins then!”)
* Nearly 38% of all hourly workers earn at Or slightly above their State’s minimum wage.
(45 million workers, making under the MIT minimal Living Wage for a single adult is $26 to $33/hour, indicating $7.25/hour homeless living wage for many)
Yeah, the billionaire breeding fetishists know that they might have to pay a few extra bucks if the labor pool is tight. So the poor need to give them more slaves.
In other words, kill off the people, assault the next generations options to learn and make them dumb slaves.
If you wish to destroy your kids future, vote for those who want to destroy peoples right to autonomy.