The problem is we did bet that the future could subsidize the past. Government borrowing, pensions, all took money from the future. At some point we have to face the music and go through some sort of massive bankrupcy and crisis, but that won't be pretty. Besides, it is strange that the basic biological urge to reproduce seems to be absent in humans living today.
Every day people predict things that will cause a crisis and they don’t happen. It’s more likely there will just be a long slog of change we’re all going to have to get used to, like interest rates never seeming to go past 10% now.
I agreed with the rest of your post, but I think nothing has changed on this front aside from it being much easier to avoid unwanted pregnancy than it used to be. A desire to have babies has more effect on fertility than it did before monthlong birth control shots were available in every box of crackerjacks, and now the genes that carried on through sheer unwillingness to forsee the risk of pregnancy from sex are unfit.
I won't go so far as to say that people who plan for the future are even more fit, now, but at least people who actively plan for and sacrifice conveniences in order to have babies are fitter.
In other words, there were plenty of 15th Century peasants who would have been on r/childfree, but they couldn't resist the urge to get reamed by Gaston.
It still exists. Kids give you purpose in life but also compete for time with other pleasurable activities. Now, the urge to reproduce can get redirected to careerism, pets, consumerism, and a minefield of other hedonistic behaviors.
I would go so far as to say that careerism, pets, consumerism, and other hedonistic behaviors existed in the 1950s.
Women being "liberated" by wage labor, allowing wages to fall behind productivity, houses being legislated into being endlessly appreciating assets instead of depreciating goods, the absolute state of education, and of course oral contraceptives, now, those weren't ready to stifle the baby boom.
The typical number of children mothers have has been seen only slight declines over the past 20 years in most countries. In contrast, the total proportion of women having any children at all has dropped sharply:
In Chile, slightly under 70% of women have children (down from almost 100% in 2000). In Finland, 60% (down from 70%). In the U.S., about 65% (down from about 85%). In South Korea, only about 50% of women ever have children (down from about 65%).
What's interesting here is the extremely steep decline in Chilean women (over 30% drop) as opposed to -20% in the U.S., -15% in South Korea, and only about -10% in Finland. It definitely lends credence to the idea that while the third world still has much higher TFR for now, they're seeing more rapid declines than first-world countries, which could potentially lead to them falling even below the West eventually.
It's also worth noting that just by looking at the graphs, it's obvious that around 2010-2015 was the point at which childbearing among women saw a steep decline. Presumably the rapid proliferation of smart phones and social media was to blame for this.
I've discussed this before on the thread, but I think it's extremely sobering to see just how low fertility desires can reach among women. The lowest value on this chart indicates 50% in South Korea (e.g., developed societies everywhere could see as low as 50% childbearing if Korea is any indication). However, this chart counts older cohorts of women (30-45) in completed fertility and doesn't account for the new wave of Zoomer women who, based on all surveys and polls, indicate even lower fertility intentions (in most surveyed developed countries, only 30-60% of young women indicated any intention at all of having children).
This is also why it may not be as effective a strategy as initially thought to just push people who already have kids to keep having more. You could probably incentivize people with one or even two kids into adding another, but once you hit only about 60% of the population even having kids, you reach a situation where an entire 33% of the people who do have kids would need to have 4 of them, and the other 66% would need 3 in order to bring society's TFR up to about 2.00 (i.e., the 60% who do have kids would need a TFR of 3.33 to make up for the 40% who don't). When you consider that surveyed desired fertility tends to hover in the 2.20-2.50 area, that is not a possible demand to meet even with financial incentives.
That's not to say we shouldn't pursue larger family sizes -- we should. But it's a secondary problem to the fact that in many societies, large pluralities or even majorities of young women just have no interest or feelings of obligation whatsoever when it comes to perpetuating their own people.
It's also worth noting that just by looking at the graphs, it's obvious that around 2010-2015 was the point at which childbearing among women saw a steep decline. Presumably the rapid proliferation of smart phones and social media was to blame for this.
I think while it easy to blame one or the other I am not sold. That mirrored decline is too consistent. I doubt smartphone or social media adoption was that uniform to cause such an equally uniform result.
I've discussed this before on the thread, but I think it's extremely sobering to see just how low fertility desires can reach among women. The lowest value on this chart indicates 50% in South Korea (e.g., developed societies everywhere could see as low as 50% childbearing if Korea is any indication). However, this chart counts older cohorts of women (30-45) in completed fertility and doesn't account for the new wave of Zoomer women who, based on all surveys and polls, indicate even lower fertility intentions (in most surveyed developed countries, only 30-60% of young women indicated any intention at all of having children).
Nobody is actually trying to raise their TFR. No nation gives meaningful money to married couples for having children. No nation gives special privileges. They may give a tax exemption, priority for government housing and like a care package or two and an allowance per kid. Heck my country might give the only interesting incentive with priority parking and queue skipping for parents with young children.
The modern world gives more resources and privileges to the disabled and welfare leaches.
The other reality is that there are very few things you can do to increase TFR of one group but not the other so neither liberals nor right wingers really want those policies because they will lead to people they don't like having more kids.
It's also worth noting that just by looking at the graphs, it's obvious that around 2010-2015 was the point at which childbearing among women saw a steep decline. Presumably the rapid proliferation of smart phones and social media was to blame for this.
I'm going to double down on smart phone proliferation being the primary global instigator of TFR collapse and they act principally by preventing social interactions and eventual coupling. Smart phones are an entertainment device, first and foremost, that has prevented people from experiencing boredom while in the public forum. Instead of speaking on the bus/gym/etc. , there is now a cheap and dynamic source of music, television, video games, and news that can eliminate spontaneous social opportunities. Despite all of the zoomer complaints about the death of third places, they will not take a total portable media player death policy at the third places that they regularly inhabit (school, gym, transportation, etc.). With smart phones acting as a condom against spontaneous social interactions, this leaves the younger generation dependent on dating apps to meet a potential spouse.
To be clear, there are many other drivers are falling coupling rates and voluntary childlessness in married couples, however these tend to vary wildly depending on the nation in question. Smart phones are ubiquitous across the globe from the most impoverished regions of Africa to the wealthiest ski slope in Norway.
This takes us back to the hedonism problem. You cannot pay anyone but the least desirable populations to have kids. There are ways to incentivize children but they trend into territory deemed unacceptable. Good luck instituting limitations on the addictiveness of entertainment, cracking down on years wasted on worthless college educations (puts a stop to midwit women wasting 10+ years chasing social status via economically unproductive careerism), blocking immigration and foreign labor importation (to raise effective wages), and cutting old age welfare (to get room in the budget to actually pay for more useful line items like maternity and childhood healthcare). Killing dating apps would probably also do a lot to raise the TFR in a counterintuitive method by forcing public social interactions in mate seeking (which puts an end to the sociopathic match.com cartel commodifying romance).
What's interesting here is the extremely steep decline in Chilean women (over 30% drop) as opposed to -20% in the U.S., -15% in South Korea, and only about -10% in Finland. It definitely lends credence to the idea that while the third world still has much higher TFR for now, they're seeing more rapid declines than first-world countries, which could potentially lead to them falling even below the West eventually.
That's because Chile started from 100%, while other countries started from a lower point. It roughly matches if you take 30% of their previous % of mothers.
Apparently thais dont give a shit that their fertility rate is bellow one unlike the japanese, the chinese or the koreans . The goverment is like meh the people are meh and live moves on with bellow sub zero fertility rate .
Apparently thais dont give a shit that their fertility rate is bellow one unlike the japanese, the chinese or the koreans . The goverment is like meh the people are meh and live moves on with bellow sub zero fertility rate .
The problem is we did bet that the future could subsidize the past. Government borrowing, pensions, all took money from the future. At some point we have to face the music and go through some sort of massive bankrupcy and crisis, but that won't be pretty.
It won't be pretty, but what's the alternative? Throw more shit on the pile and pretend it's salad?
Even in the absence of being outbred by parasites, if we insist on an eternal pyramid scheme, living in the pod and eating the bugs becomes an inevitability. Densely populated countries are shitholes where the individual does not matter and human life is barely a concern. Even Japan is a complete nightmare for the people living there. Conditions like this drive people into sociopathy and mental illness. They are simply anti-human. This cannot be our destiny.
Besides, no matter what you do, you'll never win the race against high time-preference, low impulse-control human detritus. It's like trying to outrun a lion when you have a gun. Just shoot it in the fucking head.
It won't be pretty, but what's the alternative? Throw more shit on the pile and pretend it's salad?
Even in the absence of being outbred by parasites, if we insist on an eternal pyramid scheme, living in the pod and eating the bugs becomes an inevitability. Densely populated countries are shitholes where the individual does not matter and human life is barely a concern. Even Japan is a complete nightmare for the people living there. Conditions like this drive people into sociopathy and mental illness. They are simply anti-human. This cannot be our destiny.
Besides, no matter what you do, you'll never win the race against high time-preference, low impulse-control human detritus. It's like trying to outrun a lion when you have a gun. Just shoot it in the fucking head.
There are plenty of nations with low pop density that still have fertility in the shitter. It's not the bug hives that make people not want kids, specifically, though cities do have really bad fertility.
It's often overlooked how much people date within their own social class. A high income woman is very likely to be dating a high income man, and vice versa. Even if the woman isn't making as much as the man, there are good chances that the middle-to-upper class woman works as a status indicator. She's not going to stop working to raise a kid unless her social clique begins to show favor to it. This is probably the biggest cause of fertility suppression in educated women. An uneducated woman working a generic low status job incurs little to no loss of social status in staying home. This inevitably puts a pretty strong limit on the number of children she'll want.
The correlation with length of education and number of children is inverse. The longer a woman spends in study the fewer children she has.
There is no reason to look for other causes until we either try prohibiting over education among fertile women or prohibit them from advanced study until a higher age.
We should absolutely try to increase the status of motherhood anyways but spending your most fertile years getting in debt is bad for the TFR and everone knows it. No one wants to attack the issue head on. Because education = good even if it costs us our very existence.
I'd argue that the entire problem is that they're not pursuing "education". They're, like most westerners in higher education today, pursuing "certification". They're not learning, not generating new knowledge or acquiring new skills, but instead gaining meaningless paper qualifications that certify their ability to fill in forms, comply with arbitrary rules, and pursue further qualifications and certificates. This isn't a female-exclusive problem. Men in long-term education are also much less likely to pursue marriage and family.
People joked about underwater basket-weaving degrees in the 70s, but the joke had a serious justification behind it; education was being replaced with credentialism, or the pursuit of degrees for the sake of the socially-assigned prestige rather than because it is actually beneficial or useful. Think about all the MBAs who spend four years in university to learn literally nothing about how business actually works, but who can generate new paperwork and memos and rules and business strategies at a thousand sheets a minute. Think of the journalism degrees, instituted to give journalism the ego-boost of being a credentialed, white-collar profession rather than the blue-collar trade it started out as.
The issue here isn't women in education, but the fact that the academy itself has been devalued to the point of meaninglessness, and the fact that people in general - male and female - are encouraged to pursue entirely pointless "education" in order to pad stats, provide money for universities, and improve their standing in the administrative workforce.
If you ignore this framing, your argument will be perceived as specifically aimed towards denying women any form of education, regardless of intent, which generates an immediate emotional response from pretty much everyone involved. You will be hit with "you don't want girls to go to school!" before you've finished the sentence. Denying women education is a non-viable position. It would be better to argue that education in general needs to be narrowed and focused so that it becomes valuable again.
If you ignore this framing, your argument will be perceived as specifically aimed towards denying women any form of education, regardless of intent, which generates an immediate emotional response from pretty much everyone involved. You will be hit with "you don't want girls to go to school!" before you've finished the sentence. Denying women education is a non-viable position. It would be better to argue that education in general needs to be narrowed and focused so that it becomes valuable again
The few matriarchal tribes currently known are not cabable of civilation.
We can start by forbidding fertile women from education until a cutoff age or until they've reached whatever fertility rate we want.
I agree with you that this is politically impossible in the short term. But if population trends continue in european countries this question will not be put to vote.
Your idea of reforming education will disproportionately remove the most intelligent women from the gene pool simce they will still want to study. Which is status quo.
Only women can produce children pretending that they can do anything else that is more important is asinine.
Actually true, given the effect education/employment has on women, the end result has been profoundly dysgenic
TBF I think women are wired to not want to have kids until they have a lot of free time, if they are constantly busy they think 'im just not ready yet i need to do x y and z first' and dont realize its endless and they will be 45 before they know it (for the relatively normal/not evil ones anyway)
