I dont think there is any solution that govts can put forward. It is far from their purpose.
There needs to be a change in social approach. And treating men and women like they are the same is the first problem.
There needs to be a change in social approach. And treating men and women like they are the same is the first problem.
Russia is rather socially conservative and their birth rates are low as well. It's quite a stretch to blame low birth rates on gender equality given the scope of cultures and societies where low birth rates have been a problem. Some other common factor would seem much more likely. Maybe economic incentives.
Unless you also think Russia is too progressive for you tastes. If so, what does your ideal social system look like with respect to the enforcement of gender roles, where women are expected to bear 3 or more children? What would enforcement of these roles look like in the society you're envisaging?
If you could honestly and clearly answer those questions I'd be very impressed. Then, I would follow it up with: and do you think many people would enjoy living in the society you've just dreamed up?
If yes, is there a status quo ante that was similar to what you're describing (seems likely given that women's emancipation is fairly recent and lots of different patriarchal structures have been tried out over the millennia)? Can you try to trace out why that status quo was left behind in favor of where we are now?
If no, how do you plan to persuade people to live less comfortably so that birth rates are as high as you'd like to see them? Persuasion is your only tool, because you've already said that you don't think government is the answer, and, without persuasion, you'd need to use force. To use force you'd need the government to act in some capacity, or at least _not_ act in a way that's complicit e.g. by not prosecuting honor killings carried out against anti-natalist daughters and sisters or at least condoning discrimination against childless women.
A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences.
You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities. I could not find any but I did find this: https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/26/world/mother-russia-makes...
I assumed that you are against gender equality. Gender equality meaning that men and women are given the freedom to do as they wish without being sanctioned. I think you'll find that men and women tend to gravitate toward very different lifestyles in the most egalitarian societies - look at gender ratios in various job fields in Norway or Sweden - but life is much easier for those men and women who are not typical. It seems rather wasteful to organize society around the needs of 80% while forcing 20% into a box that doesn't fit them. Better to let people self sort.
If you think gender equality means that women are being sanctioned for doing traditionally womanly things like home making or mothering I'd have to ask where you got the information that led you to that conclusion because it doesn't fit with my own experiences growing up in the United States.
> A culture where both men and women are expected to work and have the same roles and responsibilities is the worst treatment. It does not respect gender differences and strength differences.
This comment is just a roundabout way of saying that you believe gender equality is bad.
> You asked me to quote birth rates so I looked up birth rates of Russian minorities.
Why minorities? What makes them substantially different from, say, an Orthodox white Russian who lives in St. Petersburg, or one who lives in Yakutia for that matter?
They are conservative, do not have modern interpretations of gender equality, and have higher birth rates.
I'm going to steer clear of the gender inequality debate. It has been hijacked by reactionary comparison-justifying women trying to claim there are no differences between men and women and try to fight gender inequality without having an accurate idea of what gender equality looks like.
Instead, I'm going to claim if the strength of women cannot be respected, their abilities are not recognized, and their high functioning roles as mothers are not honored, and yet the male obligations are held in higher regard, the female will be stretched too thin in trying to have equal authority and importance in matters. This is pure distortion and not rectifiable by authority.
What are their un-modern interpretations of gender equality that you'd like to see emulated in the USA, Australia and Western Europe?
It's also curious that you're noting that some groups have high birth rates, also global population growth is still rising, while also worrying about underpopulation. The subtext is that you're concerned about white and northeast Asian people in particular yes? That would fit into a worldview that's been called "Human Biodiversity" (HBD) iirc?
If you weren't familiar with HBD people, the gist is that they think that western European and northeast Asian people should be preserved because their genes are precious.
I can remember reading Steve Sailor and some other such HBD people when I was younger and feeling persuaded by them at first -- easy because I'm white and blonde haired and blue eyed so they appealed to my vanity lol. After thinking on it for a few years however, I came to the conclusion that HBD is just a weird little religion that hasn't actually thought much about the consequences of its propositions beyond some romantic vision of a glorious Evropean golden age -- that their proposed policies would never be able to create, since they'd destroy everything unique and interesting about the same groups that they want so badly to 'save' from themselves.
Secondarily, why do you think birthrates need to be increased above replacement level? A lower population along with technological developments, particularly recent ones around improving AI, would likely create much higher standards of living so long as the correct economic policies were laid into place.
> I'm going to steer clear of the gender inequality debate. It has been hijacked by reactionary comparison-justifying women trying to claim there are no differences between men and women and try to fight gender inequality without having an accurate idea of what gender equality looks like.
Any examples of this that aren't just Twitter hot takes? Gender roles are alive and well all over the world. People today, in some ways more than ever, revel in adhering to them. IME it's just seen as taboo to try to force people to adhere to them.
> Instead, I'm going to claim if the strength of women cannot be respected, their abilities are not recognized, and their high functioning roles as mothers are not honored, and yet the male obligations are held in higher regard, the female will be stretched too thin in trying to have equal authority and importance in matters. This is pure distortion and not rectifiable by authority.
The point is that every group has outliers. 80% of women might have dispositions that lend themselves very well to mothering but some 20% will have dispositions that lend themselves better to other things. Similarly about 80% of men seem drawn to developing stereotypically masculine traits, but some 20% will have a more stereotypically feminine disposition. It makes no sense to attempt to organize all of society around pretending that 100% of men and 100% of women fit into the same mould as that 80%. It's equally delusional to the idea that men and women have no differences at all.
It's trivial to measure just about any trait that varies between the sexes and notice that they form two overlapping normal distributions. You've accused 'modernity' of pretending that the distributions overlap completely while simultaneously pretending that the distributions have no overlap at all.
You're on HN so you probably like technological development. Human efforts are wasted when we don't let people do what suits them. Technological development will move more quickly if we aren't wasteful.
My husband and I have a child and I would be more open to having a few more if we could maintain our standard of living on his salary alone. Despite my strange propensity for studying extremist literature online and then trying to de-radicalize people I'm otherwise pretty normal so I'd hazard a guess that fixing economic inequality would do as much to drive up birth rates as abolishing gender equality, but the former would cause much less human suffering.
This seems like a feminist take/fight. Feminism is a hate masquerading as a fight for women's rights. And I am not engaging any further.
Okay.
> Feminism is a hate masquerading as a fight for women's rights. And I am not engaging any further.
But then you follow up with this, which makes me even more confident that I didn't misunderstand you. From the start my impression has been that you're a little shy about saying exactly what you mean, thus my attempts to read between the lines so that we can have a real direct conversation in lieu of beating around the bush so to speak.
I don't know you, but when I read your responses I can't help but imagine that you're in a dark place. When life has hurt us in some way it's easy to project that negativity out onto the world, but a part of healing is separating what's inside of us versus what's outside. I hope we can all get there. Sending good vibes.
They used to be communist. Communism generally gave women much more equality than most traditional societies. While Russia may be more conservative now, I think the effects take at least one or two generations to permeate through a society.
Only partially true. Yes, women were equal to men in many regards, being accepted to work in pretty much positions (there were even women fighting in the army during the big wars), had the same rights and etc. but, and this is a massive but, it was on top of their "traditional" roles, and the opposite didn't apply. Meaning that women were equal and free to work as whatever, but also expected that women fulfil the vast majority of traditionally female roles (nursing, teaching, etc.) while also being the primary caretaker of children. As an example, maternity leave in the Eastern Block was usually 1 year and more (e.g. in Bulgaria it was 1+1+1 years, and still is but with massive caveats for 2nd and 3rd year around money), while paternity leave was practically non-existent. Spousal relations were also pretty conservative (e.g. domestic abuse, up to and including marital rape, was fine).
So women were more equal in some, mostly economic, aspects, but not at all in other, mostly social aspects.
Capitalism sees human labor as a resource to be exploited, and that is a powerful incentive (especially to educated women) to avoid procreation and family life. You want to work on your career early, and young people make the best labor.
Russia looks conservative compare to Europe or western world more broadly, but liberal compare to most countries in Africa and Middle East (where birth rates are higher). See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index
Can govt really cause people to have more children? Or can they just remove roadblocks? I would go with the latter. The former is a social problem.
Hard to tease out but here's a start
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertili...
Its not related to money.
They still have lower TFR than the United States.
It sure as hell is a money issue. Just not a cheap one.
I've heard people argue the exact opposite - intense work cultures tire out the male working class. That combined with a gender culture that discourages women being forward with their intentions, and no way to meet people of other genders socially, means it becomes difficult to actually meet or date people. There is a lack of free time, a lack of opportunity, and a lack of motivation.
Frankly, it sounds to me like the issue would be solved by bringing in better working conditions.
But family institutions are less stable now then they have been before. I blame overwork for this, and also commercialism that has taken away needs of a nurtured family. This is not a govt problem.
People point to poor nations, or the Great Depression, as times or places when people had/have more kids. But peoples' expectations are different there. People during the Depression didn't expect to send their kids to college, for instance; usually, they just put them to work on the farm, or in factories. These days, we don't allow child labor, and want kids to get an education for some strange reason, and that all costs money.
Women's rights and contraception are also a big issue. A century ago, women didn't have any rights. Their husbands could beat them if they got drunk and mad, and it was OK. Women couldn't have real jobs. Basically they were slaves. They could (usually) choose whom to marry, but it was a crapshoot, and divorce was usually unobtainable, plus women couldn't survive on their own very well. Plus contraception wasn't very good. These days, for some strange reason, this has changed and women now have rights, and aren't stuck being slaves to their husbands, so they have the ability to choose whether to marry at all (!), and how many kids to have, if any.
If we want people to have lots of kids again, we need to make women 2nd-class citizens without the ability to have gainful employment, we have to ban good contraception and divorce, we have to allow spousal abuse, and we have to allow children to be forced to work in dangerous and dirty factories.
The reason is called social progress. Even though some people are reactionary and idolise "the golden age", whenever they imagine it being, in general most developed societies have seen massive social progress. Rolling it back so that women can get back to being baby-making machines is... impractical and cruel.
Childcare in the US, for example, is outrageously expensive. If you aren't lucky enough to have a grandparent or other relative do it for free, or for nominal compensation, your childcare cost is prohibitively expensive. In many cases it's so expensive, that it's more cost effective for the parent with lower salary to quit and stay home. Hopefully programs like the free childcare New York City is offering become more common.
When these two problems are combined, a more socialist mindset would burden govt to resolve with subsidized housing and childcare. This is not a sustainable social system.
Even simple things like office culture and the perception of falling behind might be enough to skew the stats. If I care for my career, taking 5 years off doesn’t sound like the best idea - despite being the practical early childhood window for a family of 2-3.