We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

to me it’s an important aspect. try as we might, we’ll still be subject to planetary forces outside of our control.

the planet is warming. we can delay it for a bit, but the planet will continue to warm no matter what we do.

of course we should manage our impact on the planet. but this will represent just a small delay in the grand scheme of things. a few generations, maybe even a few thousand years as you’ve put it.

but a multi generational effort to tackle either moving to a different planet or something like living underground will be needed.

unfortunately our extremely limited existence will make these efforts extremely hard to tackle.

Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families, (or specifically, women) who have 2 or more children are either exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally poor.

I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor you have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going to change that radically, and hypothesize it's mainly educated middle class people who are having kids below the population replacement rate, if at all, because their lives do not find a relatively stable equilibrium. The mix of the promise of upward mobility that is always just out of reach, and the risk of "losing it all," creates a condition of constant low-level stress similar to other species that do not breed in captivity.

If you have the Malthusian or environmentalist worldview that fewer people is better, this is a positive (if cynical) development. But even that's not going to work because public debt and entitlements mean shoring up a replacement rate population with immigration from high-birthrate societies. The other thing is the people who are having kids create even more polarized opportunity, where the life outcomes of a 3-kid wealthy home vs. the outcomes of a 3-kid working class or public-dependent home are going to be alien to each other. An (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class home is not only a social minority, but has to create more of their own opportunities because they are an outsider to both societies.

IMO, the covid baby bust is only a symptom of a much larger and longer term macro-decline, and just the beginning of the real and inevitable consequences of the post-war baby-boom generation.

> it's not overpopulated.

I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous statement to make, except maybe if our opinions on what overpopulation means are vastly different.

> Privilege" is a terrible word to have become entrenched for such a useful concept, because many people instinctively get their backs up about being told they're privileged when they don't have to face a challenge that someone else faces.

I think people get their backs up because privilege checks as a concept are based largely on stereotypes/generalisations and confrontational behaviour, not empathic individual relating.

> And it's not just a question of generalization, but a question of whose stories get told through the media. Whose lifestyles make it into the "lifestyle" section

That's because the mainstream media is, by definition, normative - so it caters to what are considered cultural norms. The great thing about the Internet (and one of the good things about the postmodern breakdown of the metanarrative) is that while there are still dominant cultural norms, they're not standards to live up to anymore in the sense they might have been in the modern era. We're fragmenting into subcultures of subcultures where everybody can find a place where others share their tastes or beliefs. I find the idea that competing narratives have to share space in the mainstream media to be a strangely modernist-apologetic approach for a (progressive) movement that could do much better by embracing the breakdown of the normative standard by creating competing spaces.

I think it's naive to believe it's possible to drop assumptions all together. Without assumptions this thread wouldn't have happened

Taking the word "privilege" as an example, you have an assumption about what I mean when I use it and that it entails "moral judgement". These are not things I've expressed in any of my posts

> try to back leaders who want what's best for all.

I'm confused how you can know what's best for all without making assumptions. Could you elaborate?