The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

Israel is a very complex case to say the least...

But one thing for sure is that despite wars and terror attacks, the mentality is that they are living the best life. Instead of living among Arabs as dhimmis or the disposable "other" among Europeans, they are a nation again and have the power to defend themselves. That's very powerful and one of the reasons for the extremely natalist society.

I tend to think people who argue about the economics or community issues tend to miss the forest for the trees. For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?

Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.

I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.

That's gonna be hard to do if massive industries in every country pump out fear as a business plan.

The USA had those same protests a decade before the Netherlands, but collectively decided that they preferred to blame the parents more than they wanted to restrict car drivers:

From https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-08/the-hidde...:

> "all over America in the 1950s and 1960s, residents, particularly women, organized demonstrations against car traffic—and their street protests often closely resembled the Dutch Stop de kindermoord protests that would come in the 1970s. They demanded slower driving, usually seeking stop signs, streetlights, or crossing guards. Some demanded pedestrian over- or underpasses." ...

> "Many demonstrations—particularly the biggest ones—were triggered by the injury or death of a child. Against any tendency to blame the parents for permitting their children to have a life of their own beyond home and school, demonstrators consistently demanded streets that local children could use safely. And while the demonstrations were nearly always nonviolent, they were vocal and insistent, and sometimes confrontational. They included some degree of traffic obstruction, sometimes even full blockades that barred all motor vehicles." ...

> "Women bearing signs picketed streets and intersections, or set up folding chairs across the breadth of streets and sat in them. Children often participated. A mainstay of the demonstrations was baby carriages, occupied or not, which rhetorically associated the demonstrations with motherhood and with the safety of children. The technique was common enough to give the demonstrations a name: Some newspapers called them “baby carriage blockades.”" ...

> "the now-preferred path to child traffic safety: the two-car family, parental chauffeuring of children, a surrender to car dependency regardless of the costs or family income, and the abandonment of children’s independent mobility. Where streets were unsafe for children, the problem became the mother’s responsibility, and an injury or a death was the mother’s fault."