Well yeah, but before government-organised pension, it was your kids taking care of you when you get older, so the system was much more balanced (or rather, only imbalanced on the micro scale, not at a mega scale we see now...)
This oversimplification has never been true. Humans evolved in extended family groups generally between 30 - 300 people. And humans are far more promiscuous and willing to adopt chosen family than most will admit.
The nuclear family is a shockingly recent invention.
"An adult" didn't provide. All adults did.
And you left them for places with a stronger social safety net. Interesting.
It's all incredibly short sighted and selfish.
You've condemned a sixth of the world's population through no fault of their own.
Beethoven and Chopin wrote some music.
Queen Anne united a Kingdom, and Queen Mary II assented to the 1689 Bill of Rights.
Frida Kahlo painted some art.
Virginia Woolf wrote some literature.
Helen Geisel edited Dr. Seuss.
Rosalind Franklin helped discover DNA.
Jean Purdy helped develop IVF.
All infertile due to no fault of their own.
Perhaps you should consider moving out of the country, avoiding classical music, literature, and art, foregoing all DNA-related medical developments and IVF, and meditating on empathy as you do so.
The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies, everyone wanted to be a George Washington or Rosalind Franklin and decided to pursue their passion. Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
What part of 1/6 the population don't you understand? Is this ignorance willful?
> The problem is that for the last few generations in the Western societies... Not enough people were willing to do boring work of raising kids. That is definitely not sustainable.
Biology seems to have incentivized reproduction heavily enough that we're sitting at 8.2 Billion humans worldwide.
"The human population has experienced continuous growth following the Great Famine of 1315–1317 and the end of the Black Death in 1350, when it was nearly 370,000,000." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
Wake me up when it actually starts shrinking.
Alternatively, if you think there's something you can do to incentivize reproduction more than sex, let me know, I'd like to be a first-round investor.
The 1/6 number is made up. Here's an example source: https://www.who.int/news/item/04-04-2023-1-in-6-people-globa...
The first red flag is they use the Newspeak "experience infertility".
If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile": https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/i-keystat.htm
Obviously there's a sense in which a woman who's had children and now can't is "infertile" (though FAR more than one-sixth of women experience menopause). But it's not the sense being used by you and your parent commenter in this thread.
It's this very new language from approximately the 17th century. And if you think real hard, you might find that you're a person who's experienced things too. Wow.
> If you look at the data sources, they're calling women (and men) with children "infertile"
The phrase that particular source uses is "impaired fecundity" which makes perfect sense. No clue what you're on about. If someone is born with two legs and through some "experience" loses one, we might refer to that person as having "impaired mobility". Crazy.
What causes you to post such insanity? Isn't it embarrassing?
As I said the first time, there's a sense in which such a woman can be infertile and it is NOT the sense your parent commenter means.
I understand you feel that way. Perhaps you are just a person who is experiencing dissatisfaction.
The research seems clear and sensible to me. And wholly relevant to OP. You may want to mail your criticism to the authors.
Inuits would leave their old out in the snow, and walk away. Just saying.
https://www.straightdope.com/21343302/did-eskimos-put-their-...
I'm not sure what you meant to communicate by sharing this thought. That 100 years ago hunter gatherers in the harshest inhabited climate on the planet made some unfathomably hard decisions and did horrifying things to survive?
I don't see how that has any relevancy to what we do today in the richest most industrialized society in the world.
Some tribes in Papua New Guinea prior to 1960 practiced occasional cannibalism. Doesn't mean we should be eating our neighbors today.
Wild that I should have to say so.