Social Contract
...the united city has ceased to exist; there is no more communion of ideas. The town is a chance agglomeration of people who do not know one another, who have no common interest, save the of enriching themselves at the expense of one another. (1892)
What is a social contract? It's what you are expected to give to the society you live in and what you expect to get back from it.
The rise of individualism and personal excess, coinciding (most recently) with the "Me Generation" of the 1960s, has shared more space lately with the socially conscious Millennial generation. It is perhaps this rubber-banding of society that makes the field so ripe politically to grow Wedge Issues. We see this frequently with all these memes and articles about how the millennials are ruining America vs. the boomers already ruined America etc. - it's division in action.
And why aren't those millennials having kids, anyway? They have less hope for the future, they are poorer than ever, and the information age has uncovered the gritty, bloody, poopy details of raising a family.
In detail:
They've grown up watching multinational corporations screw the world over, that is, when they aren't watching world powers screw the world over. The first war they remember Iraq/Afghanistan. Mad Max: Fury Road feels too much like their future - and in many cases like their present.
They have all the data showing labor being robbed of the rising GDP. They can see the minimum wage being left in a 1940s standard of living, and essential products/services like housing, child care, education, and medical care outpacing inflation. Jobs pay less, and it costs more to live. Especially with kids.
This dystopian data makes the prospects of raising children less appealing - not everyone feels they can do it responsibly with the resources they have, and that pause makes them pay attention to the system they've been a part of. The communities they live in seem lacking in, well... community.
The people choosing not to raise children are rejecting the social contract offered to them.
More and more people are looking at that social value placed on the massive effort they could put in to raise kids and finding it really rather insulting. Raising your own children has turned into a valueless task as far as society is concerned.
There has always been an immense amount of unpaid labor behind the scenes in the capital/industrial world. Domestic labor has been only a few steps away from slave labor for a very long time, and in some cases still literally is slavery, even in the USA. Domestic labor is likely the largest remaining pool of unpaid labor. In a society focused on the individual and worth measured in dollars, for someone to work hard every day and have no income at all, besides that assigned optionally by the spouse, has its own mental struggles for self-worth.
It's very striking that our society could not exist without the raising of children, yet we do not provide a way of recognizing the greatest necessity to our community in our social contract.
Oh, you're a mother, you've personally raised five children, and cared for neighbor kids? Well guess what, we're evicting you because you don't have enough money to pay rent.
But wait a minute. Money is the value represented in our social contract. The system is saying, is saying every day, that these caretakers of the future have no place in our society. It's quite the paradox that caring for your own children "is its own reward" but having the stand-in for the community (daycare services) help you is one of those costs above that has outpaced inflation.
That's just labor being exploited. You gotta think like a dragon for it to look good. What should we do, dragons, if a bunch of valuable labor is locked up raising the next batch of laborers? Why, fellow dragon, what we should do is get that labor working, and also monetize the raising of those laborers! Brilliant, dragon council, I believe we have a three point plan:
People need money for the rising costs of essential services - housing, food, medical, education
If they work, somebody needs to take care of the kids, but if we did our dragon-job right, everyone is working. Thus, some of those working are now working to take care of kids.
A huge chunk of laborer's earnings are now going to take care of their kids. We've extracted their labor, and actually penalized them (to our dragon benefit) for providing a way for society to continue.
The idle rich were a point of ridicule for the Greeks, who tried to invent democracy. Now, the "lazy poor" are the point of ridicule for the Americans, who tried to live out the reality of capitalism.
If you can discover a better way of life than office-holding for your future rulers, a well-governed city becomes a possibility. For only in such a state will those rule who are truly rich, not in gold, but in the wealth that makes happiness — a good and wise life. - Plato, The Republic
Plato's point is that people making decisions about our society should be active in it, not a leech class whose primary job is "ruling".
In other words, the social contract should provide a community for the citizen, not simply a cash-flow that's skimmed to the maximum, with data analysts constantly calculating how much needs to be left as comfort to curb a mass revolution.
Can people create a community? Of course, that's what people do. But when a system exists that finds avenues to discourage it, it becomes hard to blame a single person for not undoing the society they were brought into. In reality, the system has become very responsive to communities - it finds ways to subvert them, in the case of evangelicals, via the wedge issue, or it outright destroys them in the cases of heavily socialist or outright communist societies (or otherwise stick-in-the-mud governments).
Let's keep building communities that resist being subverted into profits.