As women have far fewer babies, the U.S. and the world face unprecedented challenges
As women have far fewer babies, the U.S. and the world face unprecedented challenges
45 comments
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My BIL who works in ecology asked me why people are freaking out about low birthing rates, because in his area of specialty most people are still talking about the need to slow population growth down.
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These articles often state ‘women’ not having babies like it’s a woman led problem.
It takes more than a woman to make a baby, a man is needed too. Society has made it so hard to have/want a child. Not m/f specific. Even if you do have kids, what world are are you bringing them into. Not m/f specific.
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As a woman, you couldn't PAY ME to have a baby, you NEVER could. You know that shit in A Handmaid's Tale where they send the women who are too old to have kids out to work the fields until they die? Sign me up, because I'd rather be dead than bring a child into this world that has gotten only more and more fucked up as I've been alive. I always say, I love *my *children so much that I refuse to give them life on Earth.
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I love *my *children so much that I refuse to give them life on Earth.
Yes! You can't pay me enough to bring my children here to suffer. If I'm not willing to be part of anyone's war, why should I subject my descendants to do that? We all know how this IRL "civilization" game is played. And it's anything but civilized.
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Boy, this world sure keeps telling me to not have kids. Like everywhere I look, the signs all say NO KIDS! Jobs market, housing market, grocery prices, utility prices, healthcare costs, political divide, rising fascism, anti-intellectualism, rising concerns with AI, all of it!
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1st world problems: women arnt having babies, but refusing to address the actual issue.
at the same time creating the problem by removing womens rights, not addressing HCOL, and job prospects for MAJORS.
thier solution: half ass suggestions of having babies.
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thier solution: half ass suggestions of having babies.
And forced birth! Fuck that noise.
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Many researchers believe this accelerating global shift is being driven in large part by a positive reality. Young couples, and women in particular, have far more freedom and economic independence. They're weighing their options and appear to be making very different choices about the role of children in their lives.
Lol the wolves are upset the sheep aren't breeding enough.
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Low birth rates are only problematic to carcinogenic ideologies.
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File this under: Not a real problem.
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Less babies less pollution I see no problem with this lol, of course stupid people have more kids but as long as education is still funded stupid people will have smarter kids which will vote out stupid peoples politicians
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You mean capitalism is facing challenges on how to exploit workers when there are less people? Good.
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Ding ding ding. Capitalists are seeing the inevitable lack of blood for the blood god, and are starting to panic. Infinite growth in a finite system, after all.
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I've heard this was one of the causes of The Enlightenment:
I am not a history expert, take what I say here with a hefty grain of salt
After The Plague killed a bunch of people, the rich didn't have as many people to work on the farms. Thus the farmers suddenly had the ability to demand higher wages and working conditions. This led to the average person being able to buy things like books and pay for tutors, which in turn led to more people becoming educated and working in the arts and sciences.
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To build on this, in Norway so many people died that in 1450 (100 years after the black death) 60% of all farms was left abandoned and the term Ødegård (øde = desolated/abandoned, gård = farm) was popularized. Ødegård/Ødegaard is still quite a common family name to this day.
Anyone that wanted could just go and take a farm and be their own boss.
Of course, in the 1500s when the population had increased sufficiently the farms all had to be rebuilt and the rich landlords claimed the farms in their area and the King took the rest. The peasants were allowed to work the farms if they paid the lords for the privilege.
In the 1600s a new underclass of Husmenn (hus = house) was created. They owned their houses, but not the ground. When they moved they would normally take their houses with them.
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For decades, we've been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world. But, now that birthrates are declining...a shrinking population is suddenly the problem.
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Both have their problems. A steadily and slowly increasing or stagnant population would probably be best
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Pretty much the only reason why humans have had a population explosion over the last 120~ years is because of technology and oil. Prior to the industrial revolution the human population grew very slowly and would suffer significant declines from time to time. Greed is pretty much what got us here today.
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They were maintaining the idea that we don't live post scarcity. That there aren't enough homes or food for the current population, so there can't be enough for a large population. The rich will never give up being the elite class and will perpetuate artificial scarcity until they die.
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we've been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world
It's always been wrong, and some of us have been arguing against that kind of neo-Mathusian worldview this entire time.
Note that the same view also leads to the incorrect conclusion that population shrinkage will be good for resource management, pollution, etc. If one believes that a large and growing population will deplete the world's resources and destroy the environment, one might conclude that a shrinking population will help conserve the world's resources and preserve the environment.
But look at how things actually play out. The countries with the shrinking populations are still increasing their resource consumption, and the slowdown in population growth hasn't slowed down resource depletion in large part because humans don't all use the same amount of resources. If the population of India shrinks to the size of the population of the United States, but then increases its greenhouse emissions to match that of the United States, that would be bad for the environment despite the population reduction.
A shrinking population isn't really a problem in itself, but an aging population is. That's the concern about birth rates, is the worry that unproductive old people will have their lives cut short rather than enjoying a reasonable retirement.
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I get this, but we can't have an infinitely expanding population, at some point it will have to stabilize, and there has to be the glut of old people at the beginning of that. People are aging more slowly than in the past, at least, even if living longer more of those years are good and can be productive.
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So?
The only downside to a declining population is that the moneyed class will have fewer people to exploit, and at this point, anything that harms the moneyed class is a good thing.
Oh, and:
Many researchers believe this accelerating global shift is being driven in large part by a positive reality.
And I believe they're wrong. I believe it's driven primarily by the negative reality that much of human civilization (and the planet itself) has been warped and corrupted for the benefit of a relative handful of greedy, power-hungry psychopaths, and more people all the time don't want to bring a child into such a shitty world.
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There’s a bubble of aging people who need to be supported by younger people. Fewer younger people means declining options for everyone.
Except those rich people, who are going to find it more easy to exploit the remaining, more desperate workers.
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If we lived in a fair and equitable society, caring for those people would not be a huge burden. It's only because everyone is fighting just to survive that adding the care for those elderly in top is such a problem.
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Appropriately enough, that bubble of aging people also holds an outsized proprtion of the political power.
So all they have to do, if they want to ensure that there's a constant supply of young people to do the work, is use their political power to make the country the kind of place into which people would want to bring children.
And I have to say, cruel though it might be, that if they can't even be arsed to do that, then it's their own problem and their own fault.
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It's true that this is very bad news for the moneyed class. But it can simultaneously also be bad news for normal people. A higher ratio of pensioners to tax payers will raise taxes for everyone which is a bad thing, to everyone. This is true for any economic system I can imagine. Even in an economic system without money having a high ratio of pensioners means a larger portion of working people have to be dedicated to taking care of the elderly which means less medical workers, less farmers, less social workers helping the non-pensioners etc, meaning worse living standards for the population.
Even in your preferred dream society and economic system (which I don't know about) I can't see an aging population being a good thing. If you have a suggestion for how it could be a good thing please enlighten me. And before you say we can just tax the rich to pay for pensions. You could also tax the rich to pay for better healthcare, which would be preferably for us non-pensioners would it not?
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Nah. The rich have more than enough money to cover the missing people.
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We can't simultaneously be in a society where productivity goes up faster than wages and AI is going to provide labor for free and one that is worried we won't have enough resources to support the elderly in some indeterminate future.
The retired have already had a lifetime of wages stolen from them to pad capitalists' bank accounts. The excess productivity is there, it's just not available to the broad tax base. Take that back and there's plenty to go around.
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Even if you take money out of the equation, people need the productive output of other people to survive.
A man alone on a desert island cannot retire. As soon as he is unable to provide for himself, he dies. Yes, he can accumulate certain "savings," but much of what is needed to survive cannot be banked and used later. Food storage is limited, and any method of long term food storage tends to require additional processing to be edible, so there will always need to be some kind of just-in-time cooking process to keep people fed. Same with shelter, where maintenance needs will always be there, or health care, where real time treatment will always need to be done.
In a society with a shrinking population, there will be an unrelenting pressure to simply stop supporting those who are not productive. And those who are productive will selfishly shape that society to cover their own needs first.
That's not just capitalism, it's every economic system. Taking care of our elderly and our disabled is a luxury of a prosperous society. If the ratio goes out of wack, the willingness to continue supporting that luxury may not always be there.
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Ancedotal: I wanted 3 kids. I have none. I'd like to think I'd produce a better than average member of society. While I have more money than many Americans, I don't feel like I have job security, financial security, and I see my country in a decline, where quality of life is lower than it was during my childhood, and my parents lifetime.
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That's the thing.... They don't want you to produce a better than average member of society. Better than average members are less likely to accept low wages in crap jobs without complaining. There are only a handful of good paying jobs in the future and those are for nepo-babies. Merit no longer matters.
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This just in: Women are aware of what's going on.
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Only a problem for oligarchs.
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Fewer people in the world is the thing I want the most of all.
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Honestly I always have felt this way. No one asked to be born, and we would all be better off with fewer people (once the olds are gone).
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The US' population growth has been sustained by immigration. Guess what is being discouraged by the actions of the current administration?
Who tf is going to have money for children when there is so much financial uncertainty and the job market is this bad?
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Well, without cheap labor from immigrants, companies are either going to have to pay living wages or go under. I am okay with both.
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oh no! the economy!
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Don’t worry. Elon will make fifty more babies to offset the difference. /s
But not really sarcasm, cause that weird fuck will probably do it.
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Seriously though, this is the wealthy's problem. They have the funds, let them have the kids.
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Agreed; the system is now so completely inverted and has been for a while. The extremely wealthy can actually afford to have huge families and not suffer a huge setback in quality of life.
In agrarian societies where having more help around the farm was relatively cheaply done by having more babies, the poor would often have very large families. If most people are living in and near cities and very, very few have anything to do with farming, the cost per child is much different. People in the middle class that push children past something like 5 or so are almost guaranteed to be treading water or backwards, economically.
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Yay!
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Well, just wait until the likes of Bannon and Stephen Miller have Taco create the American Lebensborn.
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