I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
>This stuff is being pushed from the top.
Is this some kind of Sparta thing? Like you all go up to the top of the mountain and someone pushes Dad off? Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
>It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family
When and where was this? As someone who grew up Catholic it feels like that cut both ways.
To be vaguely serious for longer than I want, my wife and I just had a long, unfun conversation about how hard it is to deal with her mom's dementia and I don't know that we could do anywhere near as well with dealing with it if we didn't have a kid of our own. It's a shitty Ponzi schema, but the alternative is being Shakers.
Access to birth control and abortion, social services and welfare, trends in divorce and family court ... All of these things are top-down forces that create a tapestry heavily influencing human sexuality and the choices men and women make. One only has to look at how different things were 50 or so (or less) years ago before these things were as widespread.
Was the average person happier under these circumstances? That's what should be optimized not keeping things the same for the sake of it
If societal forces can be so effective in limiting women's choices/options, is hard to believe they could have had a hand in expanding them as well?
History goes through many stages of social belief intertwined with social control. In ancient Rome there was a plant that caused abortions and was so popular it went extinct [1]. However also in ancient Rome, Augustus patronized writers like Virgil to help instil "traditional family values" in the Roman population.
It's a profoundly dis-empowering and anti-democratic message, which is of course why a lot of those rich people are happy for you to believe it.
The reality is this: in every instance we know of, making education and birth control available to women (not forcing, just giving them the option) has resulted in declining birth rates and increasing standards of living.
It's really quite inconvenient to be pregnant, to parent a newborn, and to be responsible for a child for 2+ decades. It's very rewarding, but it's also really hard. You don't need a global conspiracy to explain why many women limit or opt against it if given the chance.
The claim that the wealthy are controlling everyone's fertility is as short-sighted as it is parochial.
Given that elsewhere in this thread you explain how this is all the work of a shadow government, the label hardly seems unwarranted.
There is no cabal of They. The "shadow government" thesis is straight-up conspiracy batshit.
Unless you mean the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China who certainly authorized the two-child law just a few years back, but they're not really a shadow government. They're a regular one, just not very transparent.
Ultimately both Chinese communism (via Hegel) and Western feminism (via Wollstonecraft) trace their origins back to the French Revolution, so maybe you are being controlled by Robespierre.
"go read this book which explains my point because I can't explain it well enough to others." is not a convincing argument in the least.
The groups that are still growing are those that oppress women. Islamic countries [1] and ultra-orthodox Jews, especially. Evangelical Christians used to be higher but have now dropped down to the below-replacement US rate.
Teen pregnancies are way down in the US. So are abortions; that's not it.
Nobody really understands why. There's lots of speculation. The decline of religion? Better birth control? Video games? Declining testosterone levels? Fewer people in agriculture?
[1] Fertility rate 2.9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_population_growth
[2] Fertility rate 6.2. https://geopoliticalfutures.com/israeli-population-increase-...
[3] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/06/faith-fer...
I can see in my extended family and friends the monetary and general success of those with supportive families (especially those families with multiple brothers) that worked together versus those families that were split apart and did not have someone to rely on. They are in completely different socioeconomic classes now.
Funding cheap ubiquitous birth control on a global scale.
First, a top dictating human sexuality is hilarious to read out of context. Also somewhat accurate.
Anyway, I don't think they mean there is a concrete system designed to keep people from reproducing. It's more of a feedback loop where the richest people in the world get concerned about things like global warming, overpopulation, and whatever else risks their way of life and so they use their social capital to dictate ideas and ideals that protect them. They can do this with things like think tanks or social media influencers or whatever. It's not some highly organized psyop but it's effective because they have so much economic influence.
There is a cultural elite, who’s effect has been so profound, they have led you to believe that such a cultural norm as we enjoy today was inevitable and have convinced the world that taking a perfectly healthy reproductive system and making it dysfunctional is “healthcare”.
There is no cultural elite brainwashing me into believe otherwise. I can arrive at this position all on my lonesome, simply by rejecting the appalling prejudices of the Catholic church (and many other religions), misogynists in general, and bigoted authoritarians (but I repeat myself); both on the basis of the crushing harm they have inflicted over the centuries, and the colossal waste of talent due to the systematic oppression of women.
As for this:
> the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual
That depends who you read. If your selectively chosen history of the last 6,000 years consists entirely of texts written by and/or documenting the fun police, I can see how you might arrive at this conclusion. On the other hand, there have always been voices otherwise. Until the Enlightenment they tended to be pilloried and/or executed, but that doesn't exactly highlight the hypocrisy in charge as something to be desired, rather something to be abandoned.
Again, unless you are amongst them.
edit: poking around, this seems to be some reference to an American college commencement speech. I'm not an American, so I didn't get the cultural allusion, sorry.
Point of fact, I don't swim in your water at all. Any assumptions you may choose to make about the cultural perspective, skin colour, second language, religious tradition(s), countr(ies) of birth/residence/affiliation/upbringing, nationality of parents and/or in-laws, immigration status, education, newspaper subscriptions, food and musical preferences, or political leanings influencing my worldview are likely flat wrong.
Contraception is not dysfunction, and this is neither a parochial, nor (what-americans-call-"liberal") liberal assertion.
And they failed also because non stigmatized contraception lowers teenage pregnancies and make aids spread less. Meaning it actually solves societal problems.
Inability to control pregnancy means less heath, particularly for women and small children.
New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."
It's economics, plain and simple. Of course there's a "top" and the "top" does dictate the structure. If you doubt that, ask: what percent of your income do you pay in taxes, and what percent of his income does your CEO pay in taxes (assuming you work at a typical bigcorp)?
I'm not saying that "yolo all the way to carrying capacity -- and beyond!" would be a better policy, but it clearly used to be the policy and isn't anymore. Personally, I think we dodged a big bullet and took a little one. The "little" bullet is still going to hurt quite a bit, though.
But I'd also hesitate to call it "top-down" influence. That would drastically downplay the autonomy we have in first-world countries. Nobody is forced to prioritize their career over everything else. In most countries, I'd say it's the complete opposite - tax incentives and benefits are usually structured to encourage child-rearing.
It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
Aside from tying healthcare to employment in the USA, what systemic issues are there?
> Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
Yet birthrates decrease with income - lower income households have higher birthrates [0]. This suggests that a lower fertility rate is indeed a choice, rather than economic necessity.
[0] - US statistics, but this is broadly the same across the world https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
top down to me equal some secret cabal of people that push an agenda
systemic to me means the way the system is but how the system got that way would be the random inputs of thousands or even millions of individual and uncoordinated actions.
People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families. In fact the largest families in the modern world come from the people with the least amount of money (not judging, just stating what I've read). So having a paycheck looks like it has the opposite effect of encouraging family. No I'm not arguing that we should therefore get less pay. Just arguing against that idea that if everyone had a paycheck large enough to support a bigger family that they'd start having bigger families.
> People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families.
Different eras, different issues. In agrarian times a large family was an investment in future labor, and as a retirement/continuity strategy. In modern society, adding children is a significant expense, and with the easy availability of birth control, it's far more of a choice. In both cases, people were following the rational incentives that society has created for them.
We can argue about whether the current economic circumstances are random or top-down, but in either case, if you change the incentives for having kids (universal healthcare, affordable childcare, food/housing security, etc.) then you will get more kids.
That, in my opinion, is taken for granted more than anything else.
I do not agree with that. In my opinion, technology advancements (say, driverless cars) will make reduce the amount of young people needed to support for older people.
What is more concerning is loneliness, but maybe VR NPCs or something.
Obviously that won’t happen overnight, but it could definitely happen gradually.
My calculus is not at all that society will support me. In fact, it’s the opposite. I anticipate no support from society, but I also don’t want to burden my family or society so I hope to be able to go out on my own terms once I am no longer self sufficient.
To the best of my knowledge, the correlation is somewhat negative--that is, rich people have lower average birth rates than poor people.
How can it be economics "plain and simple" if even people who can easily afford to raise large families choose not to? Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan could afford more kids than the Duggars. But they have two.
You forget that old calculus also included "Eh it's barely worth learning their names until they're 5 years old".
In 1900 child mortality under 5 was 35%! In 1800 it was almost 40%. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_mortality#/media/File:Gl...
You needed 3 babies just to make 2 toddlers. Let alone adults.
Are we arguing with the very data from this article? Clearly children are not that in demand if the fertility rate is experiencing a “jaw dropping global crash”.
everything the commenter described are not things one would “demand” before having children, but would only experience after having them. honestly, referring to having children as something that would be “in demand” is disgusting to me
Pre-modern agricultural societies had huge families because there was so much work that you could always use an extra pair of hands. (Also, many of them died off anyway so you had to factor that in.) You are looking at the past with a seriously rose-tinted lens.
Starting a family used to be the first thing you did, but now it’s more of the capstone that one could easily not burden themselves with after all of life’s bullshit.
We are psychologically and financially exhausting a generation.
I don't blame people that want to look the other way...it's not a pleasant sight.
That's my take anyway.
The main retort to this is, what about all those people who have a gnawing pain of loneliness. Well, with fewer people that pressed to find a partner, local community engagement is down. This forces dating online which results in people screening, judging and not taking chances, leading to a low success rate. This is not a consequence of a lack of social skills. When people engage in person, there are multiple interactions that occur which are not judgemental (in dating terms), leading to more opportunities for people to see the interesting bits in others.
Yeah... I'm not so sure about that. My bet would be on easy access to porn, entertainment, and social media resulting in less in person social interaction.
At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids. If you do have them, the trade is that you will always be financially drained. Somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Very few will ever acquire equity in anything.
The American Dream is now working until you're 70, supporting 2 kids through college, building equity in your house, then reverse-mortgaging your property to hopefully cover your final years.
You could argue that it's an organic evolution of our profit-driven system, but that system only exists because it's what the owner-class is pushing.
Either we should accept that having children is a hobby for the rich and find other meaningful ways to live our lives, or we should have radical changes in society to increase family sizes.
I politely disagree, the childcare support and social services you have in Europe are not an incentive in anyway, for the large majority of countries here, they are a mitigation at best.
The majority of young europeans in fertile age, continue to struggle with housing costs (high rents high down payments) and salaries not in line with COL until far too late in their careers, if not indefinitely. Those two are the major drivers for 'post-poning' having children in IMHO.
As for the rest of Europe, sure, housing is expensive and all that, but people have more discretionary income now than ever, after housing and daily necessities (at least as far as I can recall from economics classes). But I do think young people's expectations have shifted as well, which makes it feel like we've got less headroom for a bunch of kids. And we certainly don't have the safe, well-paying jobs our boomer parents often lucked into.
> How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college?
College costs money. The incentives with government backed student debt has inflated that cost dramatically. This wasn't some scheme to tax parents. It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
> Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
Again, because insuring more people costs more money. Whether you're adding a child or a spouse, more insurance coverage ought to equate to higher premiums. That the economics of how insurance works. Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
> The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids.
The system does disincentive having kids but that doesn't at all imply the system was intentionally designed to do so. (A) kids cost money and that is by definition a disincentive and (B) some policies like college loans were not setup to cause this disincentive. They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
> It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
Do you really think that's unsolvable? That "bad policy" is corruption. That tuition inflation could be capped.
> Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
You would think we would all want to educate, insure, and support the next generation. Maybe some costs should be shared?
> They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
I know you're saying this unironically, but please consider that a system which allows an 18 year old to sign up to accrue tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of debt over 4+ years with no guarantee that they will be able to pay it back... well, maybe that's just not a system we should have built. You know who would love to build that system? Probably the recipients of the 18 year old's borrowed funds.
I have friends that are engineers in various fields, college educated, career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses and paying down their college debts.
It's no problem though, they just have to keep working and it's all fine. Unless they can't work for some reason, then they've got a big problem.
"career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses"
That just isn't going to work. It can't. By law in most places, the ratio of childcare workers to children is limited. The work simply doesn't scale. Suppose the ratio is 1:4, and there is a 100% markup on the wages to pay for stuff like the building. Sending 4 kids will thus cost the pay of two workers. Dividing down, just 2 kids will cost as much as the typical parent might earn.
Birthrate declines as a society becomes more prosperous and women gain control over their reproductive rights.
In fact, the correlation is the opposite of what you said; wealthier people have fewer kids than poor people in almost every country. Your suggestion that people decide not to have kids because they can't afford them is not supported by the data; those who can most afford the kids have the fewest.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
> Most billionaires have three or more children, the GoCompare analysis found. Among them, 5% had no children, 9% had one child, 23% had two children, 25% had three children, 17% had four children and 21% had five or more. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has four children, and Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of the luxury goods empire LVMH, has five. [1]
So if you're a billionaire, you're having lots of kids, but if you're making 200k/yr you're having fewer kids. It makes sense to me.
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/weird-things-top-billionaires...
It was only in the recent history that it was the expectation that your child would live and go on to have greater than replacement number of children. That is evident by the fact that for most of our species history the total population was fairly static.
Pulling nitrogen out of the air and sprinkling it on domestic crops was real "unnatural" but it got us past ~3B
Especially if you are female. Children turn your very nice life into a completely different one and take up an enormous amount of resource.
I would even go a step further that in certain cultures simply getting married turns your life from a very nice thing into something destined for drudgery. Japan is a primary example as the woman is expected to take care of both sets of parents in their old age.
Do you love some man enough to take that on? Or are you better off having sex occasionally and skipping the marriage thing?
> I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
No need. People aren't stupid and can see the consequences of their actions.
Lack of elder care support is probably becoming more crucial than lack of child care support. Children start with their needs at infinity and get more independent on a strict time schedule--elderly get more dependent on an indefinite schedule and their needs go to infinity right before they pass.
Most people aren't thinking about the ROI of their kids, that ironically is a pretty modern twist.
Birth Control is way, overwhelmingly the #1 issue, so far ahead of anything else. Condoms and 'the pill' are a very new phenom. Imagine before them, when every sexual act had a pretty high change of pregnancy. And then it's easy to understand how sex<->marriage<->family are so deeply intertwined in pretty much everywhere. 'Sexually active' basically guarantees children, children need stability, so it's 'nuclear family' or bust for the most part, before the pill. An enormous amount of social conditioning is baked into this.
'Working for corporations' is better than 'working in a factory, mine, or on land you don't own' ie serfdom, which would have been the default for most of our ancestors in one way or another.
Undoubtedly, the 'thing we cannot say in public' is that double-working families has had a double effect on the family 1) less time and 2) more acerbically - the cost of living goes up, particularly for property, forcing everyone else into the same 'two workers or risk being be poor' trap.
Playing with the reproductive system (I mean social system, not so much physicality), is really, really dangerous, as I don't think our individual intentions are all that positive - but the silver lining is that the world does have quite a bit of people, and that in many places, we do need to have less kids.
Remember we're living a lot longer now as well.
So at least for the moment, if India and Nigeria can get a grip on fertility ... it has upsides.
The real challenge, and scary things is what this will mean longer term. Once Japan drops to a certain point, will they level out? Or expire?
Hopefully we can work it out.
The primary issues were first increased probability of survival to adulthood (shift focus to raising fewer kids better) and then higher opportunity cost (especially for women who gained opportunities).
In my view, the will of the people is not being reflected in the government due to corruption.
If you view the purpose of your life through a purely hedonist lens, sure. If you view the purpose of your life as being a member of an unbroken chain going back to the very first living cell, with an incredible legacy to uphold and protect, the burden is really just a masked joy.