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Posted on 07/25/2026 7:00:15 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans.
Elon Musk pointed to the same pattern that appears whenever a civilization gets comfortable: birth rates drop.
Julius Caesar noticed it around 50 BC and explored incentives for a third child. Augustus went further with the Lex Julia and Lex Papia Poppaea, creating the ius trium liberorum, privileges, tax relief, and inheritance advantages for those with three or more children, plus penalties for the childless. The laws failed to reverse the trend.Will and Ariel Durant’s reading of history shows the cycle repeating: higher births under stress, decline once external threats ease and prosperity rises. Few exceptions.
A society that stays below replacement long enough disappears. Basic arithmetic.pic.twitter.com/fECCdymiEf— Camus (@newstart_2024) July 25, 2026
(Excerpt) Read more at x.com ...
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Ironic how this came up just after I posted about the financial impact of the demographic crisis in Japan. (Anyone else seeing 2 links for this OP, one with text from the prior thread I just posted? That’s a weird glitch.)
My daughter has a 2.5 year old child. I was shocked she pays $2500/month for daycare. That is $30,000/year!
Only $7500 is tax deductible if I recall correctly. Both my daughter and her husband work full time to afford a decent standard of living.
Well, That is something you can’t criticize Elon Musk for.
If your daughter stayed home to raise her child she could save at least $30,000 a year, and probably a lot more.
I’ve seen articles on families where the wife lost her job, and instead of it causing a crisis, it lead to a more affordable financial situation. They didn’t realize they were spending more on daycare, transportation, business clothing, restaurant lunches, and other costs of holding the job than it was paying.
Until the 20th century, couples had large numbers of children. Ten children were not unusual, and twenty was no unheard of.
I’ve seen this posted before.
In my very conservative parish there are plenty of families with a lot of children; 7-8 are not unusual. It is a matter of priorities.
Life was tough back then.
Daughter makes over $100k/year and so does her husband. Both like their jobs. Daughter runs clinical trials for newer cancer drugs.
Thanks be to God we have Americans and lots of Catholics south of our boarder who can help the US population grow. Imagine if we were dependent upon North African Muslims for population growth.
Romans didn’t have Paul Ehrlich and the environmental Left screeching at them for 30 years about “overpopulation” and of course didn’t have equally insane feminists pushing abortion on demand.
right. The wife spend her entire 20’s on her back with her feet in the air. half the kids were dead by 5. Sounds amazing.
it’s spelled border.
ya well, until the 18th century people married to maintain or expand family dynasties. Marrying for love is a new concept. Things change.
This is an easy one:
“Suffer” just little bit...have Mommy watch and teach her daughter to grow up...have fun with her, notice the changes on a day by day bisis...
YOU WON’T BE SORRY...THE MONEY WILL NOT GIVE YOU AS MUCH PLEASURE.
And when you are sharing her fifteenth birthday...get a job and watch your standard of life improve.
Ann Landers
The FACTS are readily available on this and we ARE living it right now. People will NOT listen, so only the consequences remain.
>In my very conservative parish there are plenty of families with a lot of children; 7-8 are not unusual. It is a matter of priorities.
Yea, it’s not that the biology shuts off without stress. (you know this, I’m using the reply to build off your point)
Rather when ‘comfortable’ then people have choices, whereas in a building society they’re a necessity. This I understand; whether it’s the famed ‘bread and circuses’ or today’s social security, people can have an old age without the kids and grandkids supporting them directly.
Then some people make a family a priority, others produce pretty amazing things by making that their priority building on the stable society (to a greater or lesser degree; aptitude, ambition and opportunity are not equally apportioned), and some say either one of those is Someone Else’s Problem.
What I do not yet understand is how the leadership reaction both in ancient Rome and present West is “hey, let’s hand all the best of what we built to a bunch of people who hate us, have wanted us dead for generations and have no idea or desire how to build on what we made.”
(Caveat: people have understood the relation between stress and accomplishment for ages. That’s why even though we hate it we also intentionally set up systems with boom and bust, more or less but never no inflation, and other mechanisms to quietly force people to be uncomfortable).
Talk is cheap, Elon.
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