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Comment by Veraticus | Hacker News Reader

If economic growth is a byproduct of population growth, then we need to find new patterns for economic growth. There was never a future in which human populations would (or could) increase forever.

Blaming wealthy capitalists for ruining motherhood/fatherhood seems rather conspiratorial. Why do you believe men and women are not rational actors working in their own self-interest? Again, women want jobs not because capitalists forced them to participate in the workforce, but because being forced to be a dependent of the men in your life truly sucks.

And this discussion in the context of women having jobs is my problem with the framing. Forcing women to be birthing factories permanently hitched to a man for their own safety and security is a worse outcome than the cessation of economic or population growth.

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> Forcing women to be birthing factories permanently hitched to a man for their own safety and security is a worse outcome than the cessation of economic or population growth.

Worse for whom? For women personally, probably. For nations? For the species? I don't know.

I thought nations and the species were composed of women, so what is worse for women is probably worse for them too. Or are women outside of nations and the species?

Come on. Life depends on reproduction to sustain itself. That's completely at odds with the current status quo where both men and women postpone or even forgo reproduction for economic reasons. How are you supposed to have a human race if it doesn't reproduce?

What's good for the individual does not necessarily align with what's good for the collective.

There are 8 billion people on the planet and the population is still growing. Concern trolling about the future of humanity itself is pretty dumb given that, don't you think?

Though maybe not quite as silly as claiming that the individual desires of women don't matter but the individual desires of men do, given that there are more women than men. Certainly women's voices compromise more of the collective than men's voices, given there are more women, hmm?

> Concern trolling about the future of humanity itself is pretty dumb given that, don't you think?

No, I don't think so. It's still growing for now because there are still countries with birth rates above replacement. It is slowing down though. It's expected to peak and start its decline at the end of this century.

https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/07/1122272

I'm framing this in the sense that capitalism forced nearly all women into the workforce. Without any women in the workforce, a woman could be a full-time mother to their child. Now, they must work to achieve the same level of pay and standard of living as when men were paid enough to sustain a family at home off their single paycheck.

It's not a bad thing that women are able to become independent today with no spouse or children. In fact I agree that it's better now that women are no longer literally forced to find a man to live separate from their parents. It's just bad that capitalism made it impossible to be a mother without two incomes (as in, forcing both parental figures to have enough of an income to provide for the child). To add, this is partially what the school system is for - not just to educate the workforce of the future, but to babysit them during the day so that their parents can work their 9-5.

Women wanted to enter the workforce. No one (capitalism, capitalists, men) forced them to do so. That is why your framing is bad.

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