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It's Not Feminism. The American Family is DEAD. - Video học tiếng Anh
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It's Not Feminism. The American Family is DEAD.
It's Not Feminism. The American Family is DEAD.
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0:00
The developed world is running out of babies. Almost everyone agrees about why.
0:05
Almost everyone is wrong. In 2026, the United States recorded
0:09
its lowest fertility rate ever. Demographers predict countries like Japan and South Korea
0:14
could lose half their populations within decades... then halve again.
0:19
Governments, economists, and billionaires say young people just don't want kids. But Gen
0:24
Z isn't rejecting parenthood. Surveys show they still want children. But they also did the math.
0:31
The cost of raising a child has more than doubled since their parents were young.
0:35
Childcare costs have exploded. And the house their parents bought on one income now takes two…
0:40
even then, it might still be out of reach. You can't spend 50 years pricing people out
0:44
of parenthood and then act surprised when people stop becoming parents.
0:48
The truth is, people didn't stop wanting families. Families just became a luxury.
0:52
There was a primary school in the South Korean village of Nogok,
0:55
about 110 miles (177 km) east of Seoul, that had just one student. His name was Chung Jeong-su.
1:02
Every morning, Jeong-su walked into a building built for hundreds of children, sat down at his
1:06
desk, and had one-on-one lessons with his teacher When Jeong-su graduated, the school closed. There
1:12
was nobody left to fill it. The surrounding villages had no children to send to the school.
1:16
South Korea spent 100 million won, roughly $87,000 a year, to keep that one boy enrolled.
1:23
Because the alternative, admitting the children were gone, somehow felt worse.
1:27
In 1960, Nogok had just under 5,400 people. More than 2,000 of them were under 12.
1:33
By 2010, the population had fallen to just 615. Only 17 were school-aged.
1:39
By then, the post office was gone. So were the police station, the bank,
1:43
and many of the businesses that had once served the village. What remained was farmland,
1:47
old people, and one boy with a weed covered playground all to himself.
1:52
Chung Jeong-su wasn’t an exception. He was a preview of things to come
1:56
for many countries the world over. Since 1982, nearly 3,600 schools have
2:01
closed across South Korea for the same reason. The country’s fertility rate,
2:06
which is the average number of children a woman will have in her lifetime, hit 0.72 in 2023.
2:12
That’s the lowest birth rate ever recorded for any country in modern history.
2:17
South Korea is one of the wealthiest,
2:19
most educated countries on earth. But women there are averaging less than one child each.
2:24
Run that forward, and things get pretty dark pretty fast.
2:28
Two parents have one child, and that child grows up and has a child. Within
2:33
three generations, or roughly 75 years, that family of 4 becomes a family of 1.
2:39
Put more plainly, for every 100 grandparents alive in South Korea today,
2:43
there are approximately 13 grandchildren.
2:46
Every 100 South Koreans today will have only 6 great-grandchildren between them down the road.
2:52
Apply that math to 51 million people, and you see why demographers are starting to worry.
2:57
At the current rate, South Korea’s population is projected to nearly halve by 2100.
3:03
In the grand scheme of things, South Korea may
3:04
seem like an outlier. It’s not. It’s a warning for the rest of the world.
3:09
Japan has 9 million abandoned homes sitting empty because there aren’t
3:13
enough people left to live in them. In one Japanese village called Nagoro,
3:16
a local artist has spent years building life-sized dolls to replace
3:20
the neighbors who died or left. The dolls now outnumber the living residents 10 to 1.
3:25
The children aren’t being born.
3:27
The question is why.
3:29
Conversations about this topic usually go one way. Someone brings up the birth rate,
3:33
and within about 30 seconds, the word “selfish” is usually mentioned. Young people are supposedly
3:38
too obsessed with avocado toast, travel Instagram, and personal freedom to commit to anything harder
3:43
than a streaming subscription. So they just don't have kids.
3:47
In 2023, Pew Research Center found that 47% of non-parents under 50 say they are unlikely to ever
3:54
have children. That's enough people to fill all 30 NFL stadiums in America more than 12 times over.
4:00
Worryingly, that number was 10% smaller just 5 years earlier,
4:04
so whatever is happening, it seems to be accelerating.
4:07
When researchers asked these people why, the answers were not what the
4:10
“Selfish generation” crowd wanted to hear. 36% said they can’t afford to raise a child.
4:15
38% cited serious concerns about the state of the world they’d be bringing a child into.
4:20
86% of millennials and Gen Zers who have delayed having kids listed finances as the primary reason.
4:27
There’s a 29-year-old working-class millennial, let’s call him Charlie,
4:30
who put it better than any economist managed to. In a video that went quietly viral,
4:35
he said, “It absolutely baffles me that the government is pretending like they
4:38
don’t know why we’re not having kids, because frankly, it’s glaringly obvious.”
4:43
It is.
4:44
In 2025, the average cost of raising one child under the age of 5 in America
4:49
was around $27,700 per year. The average annual salary in 2025 was $62,000.
4:56
That means one child, before rent, before food, before your own healthcare,
5:00
before anything else, consumes almost 45% of what the average American makes.
5:05
That’s before you factor in the fact that wages have barely moved in real terms in decades;
5:10
while the cost of everything required to raise a child has gone through the roof.
5:14
This is a generation that wants children, or is, at least, willing to entertain the idea.
5:19
What they don’t want is to do it badly, in debt, in a one-bedroom apartment,
5:24
with no safety net and no realistic path to anything resembling stability.
5:28
And from a certain perspective, that might be the most rational
5:31
financial decision a generation has ever made.
5:34
1979 is the year economists typically use as the
5:37
starting point when they want to show you exactly where things went wrong.
5:41
Between then and 2019, worker productivity in America grew by
5:45
nearly 60%. The economy got dramatically more efficient. Goods got cheaper to make,
5:51
services got faster to deliver, and profits got larger. By every measure
5:55
of output, the American worker became a significantly better economic engine.
5:59
Yet over the same span, their paycheck went up just 15.8%.
6:05
If wages had kept pace with productivity over that same period,
6:08
the typical worker today would be making $9 dollars more per hour than they currently are.
6:13
That money went somewhere. Just not to the people doing the work.
6:17
Now layer housing on top of that. In 1960,
6:20
the median American home cost roughly 2.1 times the median household income. That’s expensive,
6:26
sure, but manageable on a single salary with some discipline and a decent job.
6:31
By 2024, that same ratio had climbed to 5 times the median household income.
6:36
Between 2019 and 2024 alone, a 5 year span,
6:40
median home prices surged 48%. Median income grew just 22% in the same window.
6:47
Over that time, the gap between what people earn and what homes
6:50
cost became a different conversation entirely.
6:53
The next time someone tells a 28-year-old to stop renting and just buy something,
6:58
remind them that the median mortgage payment has risen 40% in the last five years.
7:03
Have we mentioned the debt?
7:05
Millennial adults are saddled with it. The average American college graduate carries
7:09
roughly $30,000 in student loans into adulthood. Research shows that a woman carrying $60,000 in
7:15
student debt has a 42% lower annual probability of having children than their debt-free peers.
7:21
A recent BYU American Family Survey, one of the longest-running studies of family life in
7:26
the country, should end the debate entirely. It found that for the first time in history,
7:32
Americans now cite financial concerns as the primary reason they are limiting family size.
7:37
49% of a thousand employed American adults surveyed believe their wages will simply
7:42
never catch up to the cost of living. And 48% of those have already delayed or abandoned
7:48
a major life milestone like buying a home or having a child because of it.
7:53
Everyone knows having a kid is priceless.
7:55
A new study by LendingTree begs to differ.
7:58
According to them, the cost of raising one child in America to age 18 is more than $300,000.
8:04
That’s before a single dollar gets spent on college tuition. If you flew to Italy today
8:09
and purchased a brand-new, heavily-optioned 2026 Ferrari Roma, you’d be in a similar ballpark.
8:15
That’s without even factoring in childcare.
8:18
That’s when the math starts getting genuinely unhinged.
8:21
The average annual cost of full-time childcare in 2024 was nearly $13,100 per child.
8:27
That’s up 29% since 2020 and up 220% over the past three decades.
8:33
In 45 states, the cost of childcare for two kids exceeds average mortgage payments.
8:38
And in 41 states, sending your infant to a daycare center
8:42
costs more per year than sending your older kid to a state university.
8:46
A mother posted her daycare bill on camera a couple of years ago. She was spending $35,000
8:52
a year, and walked her audience through it step by step. Her daycare center charged by
8:56
the 10-hour block, and if she was one minute late for pickup it was an extra $2 a minute.
9:02
“The older generations have zero idea how serious younger people are when they say we
9:06
can’t afford kids,” she said dejectedly. Sure, she was talking about maximal childcare coverage for a
9:12
parent who has to commute to work, work 8 hours, and commute home. But by and large, she’s right.
9:18
Imagine spending upwards of $60,000 to send both your kids to daycare all day. A recent Care.com
9:24
report found that the average parent spends 22% of their household income on childcare. Meanwhile,
9:30
the US Department of Health recommended 7% of family income as the most sustainable benchmark
9:35
for affordable childcare. That means current costs are floating at three times the recommended level.
9:40
That’s definitely not sustainable.
9:43
What’s more, when a woman in America has a child, her earnings go down.
9:46
It sounds counter-intuitive, but the economy is structured to pay her less
9:50
for the act of reproduction it’s simultaneously demanding from her.
9:54
Researchers call it the motherhood penalty, and it’s not small by any measure.
9:59
Each child under the age of 5 reduces a typical mother’s earnings by 15%.
10:03
Full-time working mothers earned 35% less than full-time working fathers in 2024.
10:09
And if that gap holds, and it has stubbornly held on for decades, the
10:13
average worker will earn $600,000 less than her male counterpart over the course of her career.
10:20
All because she chose to have a baby.
10:22
The system charges women a financial penalty for having children.
10:26
Then it holds congressional hearings to ask why women aren't having more of them.
10:30
Governments have noticed something is wrong, to their credit.
10:33
Their solutions, though, are something else entirely.
10:36
In 2006, South Korea took a look at its falling birth rate and decided to try to
10:41
do something about it. And it might be one of the world’s most expensive failed experiments.
10:46
The government launched what would become the most aggressive pronatalist spending
10:50
program in human history. Birth rates were in severe decline, so they started offering
10:54
cash bonuses for new babies. They threw in subsidized housing for younger families,
11:00
free childcare, and even paid parental leave. There were also
11:03
government-sponsored matchmaking services which were about as awkward as it sounds.
11:08
Over the next 16 years, South Korea spent about $200 billion
11:12
trying to convince its citizens to have more children.
11:15
By 2023, the fertility rate was lower than when they started.
11:19
Things today are steadily improving. Back from the precipice they were once on,
11:24
the South Korean birth rate has climbed back to less critical 0.80.
11:29
But the returns are far lower than anticipated, given the expenses.
11:33
Incredibly, South Korean researchers later realized that 74% of the baby
11:37
bonuses they’d handed out had gone to births that were going to happen anyway.
11:42
They’d basically given tips to people who had already made the decision.
11:45
But South Korea is not alone in that particular hall of shame.
11:49
Hungary tried it, and for a while it seemed like they’d actually cracked the code. Between
11:53
2011 and 2021, their fertility rate climbed from 1.23 to 1.61 through a combination of
12:00
generous tax exemptions, subsidized loans, and outright cash payments to mothers.
12:05
The pronatalist crowd held up the Hungarian example
12:07
like a sports trophy. The policy works. Just pay people to breed.
12:12
Then the rate started falling again.
12:14
By 2024, Hungary’s fertility rate had dropped to 1.39,
12:18
the lowest it’d been in over a decade. The gains evaporated almost as fast as
12:22
they had appeared. This happened without any meaningful change to government policy.
12:27
Japan. Singapore. Russia. Belarus, Estonia.
12:30
Every country that has publicly committed to a fertility target has failed to hit it,
12:35
with the sole exception of Bulgaria… which is not exactly held up as a paragon of economic dynamism.
12:41
Why don’t these national strategies work? Can’t you solve any problem in
12:45
this world by just throwing more money at the root of the problem?
12:48
That’s precisely the issue with pronatalist policies. Nobody can agree with the root of
12:53
the problem. When researchers dug into why they failed in these cases, they kept bumping into
12:58
the same two issues. Housing costs, and something economists call “time poverty.”
13:04
That’s a very clinical way of saying that people are too broke and too exhausted to have children.
13:10
Handing them a few thousand dollars will not actually make them any less broke or exhausted.
13:15
Slightly less broke and exhausted? Sure.
13:18
But not before the underlying math reasserts itself again.
13:22
Remember the South Korean village with one student left? South Korea tried everything
13:26
short of physically manufacturing children to reverse what happened to places like that.
13:31
The building where Chung Jeong-su learned to read is being converted into a hub for remote workers.
13:36
And contrary to expectations, the governments aren’t stupid.
13:39
They know these bonuses aren’t working. But admitting that the problem is structural
13:43
means accepting that you have to fundamentally redesign how housing is priced, how wages are set,
13:49
and how childcare is funded. Those are entirely different and messier conversations to be had.
13:54
Spending $770 per family on a monthly check is actually cheaper than that fight,
14:01
so that’s what they keep writing.
14:03
And while they’re writing those checks, something else has been happening on the
14:06
other side of the economy that makes the whole exercise look even more absurd.
14:10
Goldman Sachs says AI is coming for 300 million jobs globally.
14:15
The entire US workforce is about 168 million people. So when the same governments panicking
14:21
about the birth rate tell you they need more workers, the obvious question becomes,
14:26
“more workers for what, exactly?” There's something else almost nobody talks about.
14:31
The economic model we've built depends on an endless supply of new workers to fill jobs,
14:36
pay taxes, and keep the whole machine running. But that model was already running into a wall.
14:41
Automation. While everyone was arguing about falling
14:45
birth rates, machines were getting better at doing the work we once needed millions of people to do.
14:50
In the US and Europe, roughly two thirds of all current jobs are exposed to some degree
14:55
of AI automation. Up to a quarter could be replaced outright. Unlike every previous
15:00
wave of automation which took over physical labor and pushed humans into cognitive work,
15:04
AI is coming for the cognitive layer too. Today, it can write the copy, read the X-Rays,
15:10
draft the contracts, generate the code, and drive the taxis…
15:15
well, sort of. The thing humans were supposed to move up to is what’s being automated next.
15:20
Which means the workforce the birth rate panic is trying to manufacture
15:23
might be obsolete by the time it arrives.
15:26
Goldman Sachs is careful to note that technological disruption historically
15:29
creates new jobs too. The Industrial Revolution killed the blacksmith and
15:34
created the factory worker. The internet killed the travel agent and created the UX designer.
15:39
Maybe AI follows the same pattern?
15:41
But every previous wave replaced physical labor with cognitive labor.
15:45
This one is replacing both at the same time. And nobody has an answer for what that will mean.
15:50
What we do know is this. If AI displaces hundreds of millions of jobs over the next few decades,
15:56
a shrinking workforce might actually be the softest possible landing for the most
16:00
disruptive technological transition in history. It’s a counterintuitive
16:04
way of looking at the developed world’s demographic decline, but here we are.
16:08
Fewer people chasing fewer jobs is a crisis.
16:11
Fewer people chasing no jobs might be something more akin to an equilibrium.
16:16
Goldman’s estimates AI could drive a 7% increase in global GDP over a ten year period through
16:22
productivity gains alone. That works out to $7 trillion. It looks awfully optimistic,
16:28
but the economy of the future may not actually need population growth to grow.
16:32
It might just need smarter deployment of the people and technology it already has.
16:37
So if factories don’t need the workers and the economy doesn’t need the population to grow,
16:42
why are global elites still screaming for more babies?
16:46
Because it’s still about power. Just not the kind people usually talk about.
16:51
In the second quarter of 2025, the wealthiest 10% of all Americans accounted for nearly half
16:56
of all consumer spending in the country. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% of households
17:01
haven’t seen their standard of living budge in real terms since before the pandemic.
17:06
That’s the whole thing right there.
17:08
The wealthiest 10% of Americans own 93% of the stock market. The bottom 50% own 1%. When the
17:15
market goes up, the people who own it get richer. The people who don't are just getting older.
17:21
Economists call this the K-shaped economy. Picture the letter K, where after any shock,
17:26
the top half recovers and keeps climbing while the bottom half stalls out or falls.
17:31
Two trajectories, one letter, 50 years of widening gap.
17:35
For example, Airbnb doesn't need a booming middle class. It needs wealthy people
17:39
paying $500 a night. A luxury car brand like Maserati or Porsche doesn't need
17:45
millions of customers. It needs thousands of very rich ones. One wealthy consumer
17:49
can replace several middle-income consumers in raw spending power. The businesses that
17:53
figured this out have been restructuring the entire economy around it ever since.
17:58
And so, the elite’s sudden panic about the birth rate is revealing,
18:02
once you understand what they actually need.
18:04
They don’t require workers or even soldiers the way they used to in the traditional sense.
18:09
What they need is a large enough base of working and middle class participants to pay taxes,
18:15
service debt, and keep consumption propped up at a level that justifies current asset valuations.
18:21
They need enough people at the bottom of the K
18:23
to keep the top of the K looking like a good investment.
18:26
Nobody blew up the American family.
18:29
That happened the way most systemic failures happen. Incrementally, almost imperceptibly.
18:34
And extremely profitably for the people at the top of the earning pyramid.
18:37
Wages decoupled from productivity in 1979 and never reconnected. Housing became an
18:43
investment vehicle instead of a place to live, and the price followed accordingly.
18:47
Childcare was left to the market, and the market did what markets do: it charged what
18:52
it could get away with. Student debt ballooned while public investment in education collapsed.
18:57
And women who tried to do everything right - get the degree, build the career,
19:01
start the family - got handed a bill for 35% of their lifetime earnings as a thank you.
19:06
Economists, demographers, and researchers
19:08
have all been warning governments that the trajectory was never really a secret.
19:12
The response from governments has widely been to sign more baby bonuses and cash incentives.
19:17
Gen Z inherited this mess, and looking at the numbers,
19:20
they’re concluding that it doesn’t pay to play.
19:23
So they’re choosing to opt out in droves.
19:25
The people who built this economy have spent the last two decades calling that decision selfish.
19:30
But in reality, it’s just a conditioned response.
19:33
For 50 years, people were priced out of parenthood. Stability gave way to debt.
19:37
Homes became speculation. Family life became financial survival.
19:41
Now there aren’t enough people left to hold it together.
19:44
So if the worst does happen and people stop having children… what actually happens? Find
19:49
out in ‘What if No Babies Were Born for a Year.’ Or click on this video.
