101–110 of 160 posts
People finally started to realize that they have only one life and wasting half of it to raise another human is wasteful.
It could be a communal job like so many others, and indeed as it already is in some cultures.
Ancient, tribal cultures, absolutely raised children in a communal way as you say. There's even a saying, "it takes a village to raise a child..." But I'm not aware of any modern cultures that still do that in reality.
People finally started to realize that they have only one life and wasting half of it to raise another human is wasteful.
I wonder how your parents feel about your attitude, lucky for you they didn't share it.
How do you think your childhood teachers feel about your attitude (of not being interested in going into the teaching profession)? Lucky for you that they didn't share it, right?
How about working in local government, as a mayor or alderman for instance? Did you ever do that? Lucky for you that someone else did, right?
Do you feel bad for not doing these jobs that are essential for society?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions. A drastic reduction could cause serious short term issues for humanity (not for any other form of life) but were not here at all, curves are stabilizing around 2kids. You shouldn't be afraid to let go of the gas pedal on the freeway, the car won't stop straight away. Especially if your speed is exp…
>This comparaison is very strange: less population means less consumption, which is highly correlated with GHG emissions So the operation succeeds but the patient is dead? The survival of people and cultures trumps GHG emissions. Unless you prefer an empty planet with no GHG emissions.
The incentives will change as population decreases to where having kids is profitable at some point in the curve
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Why is it serious?
Extinction of peoples, nations, cultures and civilizations is not trivial. At least for normal people.
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Aging population per se isn't a problem, because better hygiene, lower child mortality and enough food creates the same effect. Lower economic growth doesn't have to be. Fewer people means less supply on workforce means higher wages means higher purchasing power. The existing people would like to be more, but can't afford because of low wages. Fewer people will give them leverage.
Higher purchasing power per person not overall. That would increase the wealth inequality divide and the aging population would suffer as lower and middle class services struggle in favour of high wealth services. We are seeing that in clothing at the moment, high end clothing is doing really well but serves fewer people. Japan is a country to watch, it has an aging population but historically good support for middle…
Between four and six billion humans seems like a good target. There were only 2.5 billion in 1950, since then automation has advanced leaps and bounds meaning an advanced lifestyle with fewer workers and less resource drain is entirely possible with a more sustainable population size.
Why? There are huge stretches of the world that are basically uninhabited. Even in densely populated places like Europe there are large areas with low population density. People are crowding in cities and then complaining that there are too many people. Resource drain is no longer an issue once we got an economy running on photovoltaics and nuclear energy. Everything can be recycled given enough energy.
Isn't that a valid argument still (despite his Swiss semi-counter-example)? Many jobs are complicated these days and require education + experience, making it very hard for women who want to work and become economically independent to have kids early in life; when they are most fertile.
I also think his Swiss example is somewhat misleading, since he argues that Switzerland has few women working (56%), and also a low birthrates (1.4). So at least 44% of the women have time to have babies, then Swiss birthrates should be high. But a friend of mine is from Switzerland, and his wife stopped working after they had a child (she has a PhD in biology as well, so highly educated). Schools typically send children home for 3 hours in the middle of the day (lunch/siesta or whatever you want to call it). Somebody has to be home, and that very often ends up being the mother. And after you've been out of the working life for a long period of time, getting back can be difficult. I.e. it could be that one of the reasons the Swiss women are hesitant to have children, is that they know that it will most likely end their career; so the implication could go the other way.
I believe one reason that is rarely talked about is that having children later in life makes you more tired than if you had them in your 20s. In the times when people were having more children, they were having them early. We all now how it is easier to shrug off a sleepless night in your 20s than in your 30s. We use that advantage to stay out drinking more when we are young, but it was probably evolved to help stay…
I had my first kid at 38 and second at 41. Age didn't stop me.