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The window for great-grandmothers is closing

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Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, the classism in the "poor/uneducated people are having too many kids!" always has this assumption that class and values are perfectly presevred across generations and ignores the social mobility and the fact that children are capable of making their own path and not just following in their footsteps. children raised in big families by uneducated, closed-minded parents often rebel against their parents and espou…

Of the big households I've personally experienced that most would consider closed-minded parents might have a few of their kids complaining about the backwards views, but not necessarily the majority of the kids. I'd be interested in seeing some actual statistics other than assuming the people ranting on reddit about their families are the majority of that population. The kids who agree with their closed-minded paren…

yeah, that's why i said it wasn't a representative sample.

the subreddit threads don't prove that these views are a majority, just that they are a non-zero proportion.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes are that transmissible? My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?

You may be pretty radically different from your grandparents, outliers always exist, nobody's futures are truly written in stone. But what percentage of your distant cousins are more like your great grandparents?

You don’t need to wait the answer to take into account that they most likely aren’t farmer for most of them. Though of course it doesn’t mean they all topped the social pyramid as it is by definition structurally unclimbable for most with its power distribution.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#54
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My family has really long generations. Going back 7 generations for me patrilinearly is exactly 280 years; 40 years per generation. When I was young my grandparents were already in their 80s and both grandfathers gone before I was 14. Sadly, both had mental decline (stroke, Alzheimers) and I never knew them in their right mind. They'd be in their 110s today. The idea of knowing my great-grandparents, who would be in…

Same. When my were in school and had friends who were visiting great-grandparents in nursing homes (and in one instance great-great), I had to explain that my great-grandfather was a Civil War veteran, and that I'd only met my grandfather (who worked as a sharecropper alongside freed slaves and the children of freed slaves on my great-grandfather's farm) once. One of those children lived behind us when I was growing…

feel like it is questionable to describe yourself as a sharecropper if your daddy owns the entire farm

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#55

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

What you wrote sounds superficially plausible, but you're overcorrecting. It is true that the average age of first birth varies widely based on socioeconomic factors, but it's up for all groups. The average age to have a first child was 21 for a woman in the US in 1972. In 2018, it was 26. For women without a college education it was 23.8, but that's still higher than it was in 1972. https://www.nytimes.com/interacti…

2016 looks almost binomial. We also need to take into account population size (significantly more in 2016 compared to 1980). It could be that there are just as many young women having children - but there are now more mothers >30. So maybe there won't be less great grandmothers, just a lesser percent of the population.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#56

I (and I'm sure others) call this the idiocracy bias. While your friends are mulling over the ideal age and economic circumstances to have children, there are plenty of other families not thinking about this. They're having kids in their late teens and early twenties. That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

> That doesn't mean we're doomed to live out the idiocracy future, but it explains this blog post.

We're already living in the idiocracy future. Actually, the film needs a sequel something fierce, smartphones and now AI is fast making our reality post-idiocracy.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#57
post #37

If you haven't read the article, it's about how people having kids later means you won't meet your great grandparents. My mom had me when she was 23, and her mom had her at 22. I'm in my forties and still have two living grandparents, and am very grateful for them. I remember a lot of days where my grandmother watched me and my sister, and she was able to do that because she was only in her late 40's herself and plen…

One of the (maybe more) obvious downside being the increase in mutations this brings, in the order of 1 full generation of mutations for every decade the fathers are older for instance. There are plenty of studies on these issues, notably paternal age genetic disorders and "selfish genes", as well as increase of autism, schizophrenia, mendelian disorders, .... https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001502…

Probably a good thing to speed up the evolutionary landscape during these rapidly changing times.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#58
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because of ecological overshoot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot ), which is a real problem ( https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da... .). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.

"Number of kids you have" is a strange place to focus on environmental impact, don't you think? A modest household with 6 kids, even one that lives to developed-world standards, has much less of an environmental impact than a single billionaire with a private jet. Like, orders of magnitudes less. If the family has one car and doesn't eat a lot of beef they probably have less of an impact than a family with 2 kids and…

FWIW, "number of flights you take" also drowns out your eating habits in environmental impact. Compared to how much they cost, flights have stupid CO2 equivalents.

However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it wildly classist to so patly assume that attitudes are that transmissible? My great grandfather had like 10 siblings and worked on a farm. What's that tell you about me?

You may be pretty radically different from your grandparents, outliers always exist, nobody's futures are truly written in stone. But what percentage of your distant cousins are more like your great grandparents?

Less than 10%. The outliers are the ones who have stayed similar to our great-grandparents, not the ones who are different.

Re: The window for great-grandmothers is closing

#60
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense. Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?

Because of ecological overshoot ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot ), which is a real problem ( https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da... .). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.

A vast supermajority of the entire inhabited human planet is so far below replacement-level fertility that human extinction is now closer than the ice caps being completely 100% melted.

This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing.

Even with a handful of countries still breeding like rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline.

Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia: "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal."

Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is routinely increased by human activity.

For instance, when humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-planted crops sprung up in places they never had before.

Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now have an entirely different problem: for the first time in human history, there are more people consuming too many calories than there are people consuming too few calories. Clearly, food isn't the problem.

The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean on the planet hundreds of times over even with our current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem.

While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've had fission for decades now. You can power the global electricity needs of twice the population of today's planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed of continuously by launching it into the sun for something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP.

Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine using a bullet train to get from one side of the humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem.

In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling.

I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population - just what demands are being made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to, but continuing to expect more of?

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