Oh I see it in my hometown. When I grew up I was next to a corn farm and it was a big deal when the city got its first stoplight. Fast forward from the 80s to the 2010s and the city, with its aging demographic passed all crazy manner of projects to upgrade and beautify the city. It underscores that they wanted a very cute main drag where the retirees could get a $20 martini. The farms all sold to be subdivisions, the gravel road I grew up on became well paved with British style signposts, and the costs were passed on to taxpayers. It resulted in closing one of the two middle schools.
You can have a hard scrabble gravel road with young families or you can have streets paved in gold where only the last generation with a pension can afford it. The fact that we're making the choice for the latter is telling.
I don't know what a child cost my great grandparents but I know my grandfather was born in a house in one of maybe 4 counties in Wisconsin. I am looking at a much higher cost to birth and raise a child. Raising a child is a prohibitive cost. But that just means we need to be smarter with our resources. I *might* prefer a world where family costs are minimized and we have more kids and easier community support but that's not the way the world (and I do mean globally) is going.
I should add there is one amazing fiscal event that we don't discuss because it's impolite. Eventually there will be no baby boomers. I feel the tail of that will have a very marked impact on the finance of our society. We don't yet know what (lack of) pension and retirement looks like for the heavily muted gen X. When gen Z sees what the future is like they may be encouraged to never have kids.
Sorry to be morose but this is economics. In all fairness I have a child and I wouldn't trade her for anything. At the end of the day any human who isn't a parent has missed a vital part of humanity.
