San Francisco, for example, is home to nearly 150,000 dogs but just 115,000 children under age 18. Farther north, Seattle has more households with cats than with kids. Nationwide, pets outnumber children in apartment buildings. In New York neighborhoods like Long Island City and Williamsburg, wealthy singles have the highest number of pooches per capita.
In a recent Atlantic essay, Derek Thompson wrote about how “America’s urban rebirth is missing a key element: births.” Manhattan’s infant population is projected to halve in 30 years. High-density cities are losing families with children over age six, while growing their populations of college-educated residents without children. Indeed, the share of children under 20 living in big cities has been falling for 40 years.
Young professionals’ four-legged friends have replaced those babies. While statistics are spotty, the cultural signs of a shift toward the parenting of pets in major cities are evident in apartment ads, park design, retail mixes, and the explosion of services catering to the “fur-baby economy.” In the absence of kids, a dog or cat serves as something like a starter family. Young Americans dote on their pets with the care once reserved for children, with lavish birthday presents or “family portraits” on Instagram.
https://www.city-journal.org/pet-ownership-over-children-cities
Click link for full article.
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This really gets to the core of liberalism's weakness: it simply does not place any value on the family & community. The only things that really matter in liberal societies are pleasure & money. But how can a country be sustained with those hollow 'values'? Quite simply, they can't. The left will argue that the solution is immigration, not realising that the countries which the immigrants are brought in from are some of the most conservative on the planet, thus proving the point that a liberal country simply cannot sustain itself and needs a conservative, religious culture to constantly supply new people.
This also raises the question of how will the culture of the accepting country change due to large-scale immigration from deeply religious, socially conservative countries? Immigrants from Africa & Asia, particularly Muslim countries, are the least accepting of secularism, casual sex, abortion, gay marriage, feminism & transgenderism, so how does the left plan to keep alive its 'values' in the face of massive demographic transformation? This conflict was exposed in full in a school in Birmingham (UK), a city with a large Muslim population. The school, which has an almost entirely Muslim demographic, introduced a new curriculum which included teaching the children about homosexuality & transgenderism. The backlash was swift and bold: the Muslims weren't having any of it. They utterly refused to give an inch to the leftist drive to indoctrinate the minds of the young. The result: decisive Muslim victory.
So what future does liberalism really have in the West, if liberal Westerners can't even be bothered to bring new life into the world, to pass on their 'values' to?