Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not super thrilled about being compelled by evolution or a god.
Then I suggest you introspect and observe your own behavior. A lot of it can be boiled down to evolution.
How do you figure?
Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
91–100 of 109 posts
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#92Works where archive.ph is blocked:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/suddenly-there-aren-t...
JSON-only, no cruft:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/BB1mhbxT
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#93The other day my boss said something along the lines of "there's too many people in the world", and seemed genuinely surprised when I pointed out articles like this one showing overall humanity is on the road to start shrinking over the next few decades. I think a lot of people still believe we're in the population bomb scenario Ehrlich painted in 1968, when actually we're looking more like a sad "Children of Men" sc…
Just a few jabs at your opening paragraph.
We can simultaneously have "too many people" and be on the verge of decline. We aren't there yet. Most countries are still growing, just at a decelerating rate.
And the reason isn't a Children of Men biological fertility collapse. We've spent 60 years telling women to get jobs, everyone to defer employment for higher education and housing age childcare are both the most scarce and expensive they've ever been. This isn't a mystery collapse. It's money. Always has been.
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your first point. Societies that socialize people to prioritize individual “happiness” over fulfilling social obligations will die out and better societies will take their place.
I don't think it's about happiness (scare quotes or otherwise), I think it's about avoiding ruin. In a society where you have to run as fast as you can to keep up, children will slow you down and you might end up consumed by the predators that surround you. That's why the line from the abstract "Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support" rings so true to me. The response to the above t…
Sure—but that just means I get to indulge my kids with private school and trips to Japan. By contrast our neighbors are probably right around the median, and had kids in their 20s like we did, and their kids are just as happy. (At the end of the day—both sets of kids value the fact that the respective grandparents live nearby more than anything money can buy.)
The point you’re trying to make is contradicted by the demographics of who is having kids. My friends from law school are the ones who disproportionally aren’t having kids. Meanwhile my wife’s step mom’s rural Idaho family is bursting at the seams with kids.
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your first point. Societies that socialize people to prioritize individual “happiness” over fulfilling social obligations will die out and better societies will take their place.
I think Asian societies have a higher collectivist "the collective over the individual" culture than others, and their populations are the fastest declining currently.
That’s because Asian societies spent the last several generations harnessing that collectivist impulse to socialize people into not having kids. The idea that limiting reproduction was essential to lifting society out of poverty was drummed into generations of Asians: https://www.prb.org/resources/did-south-koreas-population-po...
Family planning was one of my dad’s specialities in public health, and most of our family friends are in that field. At a party a few years ago, someone jokingly asked if my wife and I planned to have a fourth kid, and someone reflexively interjected “nobody needs four kids.”
Arguably it was a necessary policy at the time, but has probably doomed countries like Korea and Japan to extinction.
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it's about happiness (scare quotes or otherwise), I think it's about avoiding ruin. In a society where you have to run as fast as you can to keep up, children will slow you down and you might end up consumed by the predators that surround you. That's why the line from the abstract "Conceptualizing parenting as a stressor buffered by institutional support" rings so true to me. The response to the above t…
Sure—but that just means I get to indulge my kids with private school and trips to Japan. By contrast our neighbors are probably right around the median, and had kids in their 20s like we did, and their kids are just as happy. (At the end of the day—both sets of kids value the fact that the respective grandparents live nearby more than anything money can buy.) The point you’re trying to make is contradicted by the de…
It doesn't actually seem contradictory; not that I know much about law (hell, I think I lost my belief in it sometime in the last decade or so), but my impression is that it's a fairly all-consuming profession between school and a very grinding early career and very competitive; taking time out to raise children could be very costly. And I bet a lot are coupled with other lawyers so there's not much likelihood of one being a homemaker.
For those without good career prospects, ruin is not such a big deal. I looked it up, and no surprise that medicaid pays for a huge share of births in rural Idaho; if anything, 48% is lower than I'd expect.
> Medicaid coverage is even higher for births in rural Idaho. For instance, 48% of births in Lemhi County involved mothers covered by Medicaid. [0]
[0]https://washingtonstatestandard.com/2023/11/28/idahos-infant...
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
wow, that’s really quite reductive. It sounds more like this might be a choice you feel strongly about but are projecting selfishness on to others? This can be a totally fine choice for someone to make personally (which I support), but also not good for society as a whole. Both things can objectively be true.
Why would it not be good for society as a whole?
Having an aging workforce means you lose available skills.
And aging population means you have more dependents than caretakers for them.
An aging population in some parts of the world means you have fewer men to fight in a conflict (assuming your adversary doesn’t have an aging population).
There’s loss of specialization, loss of skill transfer, younger people do more manual labor like harvesting food.
You need people of a certain age range to basically run society.
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
wow, that’s really quite reductive. It sounds more like this might be a choice you feel strongly about but are projecting selfishness on to others? This can be a totally fine choice for someone to make personally (which I support), but also not good for society as a whole. Both things can objectively be true.
Are you saying it's selfish to not have kids? Other than accidental parents, I've never met any who didn't have kids because they wanted them. How were they not acting selfishly?
I was saying the opposite. The parent poster is implying that there are only selfish reasons that someone would want society to have more families/kids.
I was saying that it didn’t feel like they were arguing in good faith by ascribing only selfish motivations for those who advocate for that point of view.
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to see this comment downvoted. I'm honestly curious as to the thinking here. How are parents having kids because they want them not acting selfishly?
Actually both parents and non-parents exhibit selfishness, just of different flavors. Parents have natural urges to have kids (literally, evolution!). So it is self-explanatory. Non-parents will need a younger generation when they grow old for satisfying all the Maslow hierarchies of needs (food, medical care, entertainment, funding social safety nets etc). So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are con…
Agreed. I just thought it was unnecessary to just paint one side as purely selfish.
Re: Suddenly There Aren't Enough Babies. The Whole World Is Alarmed
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's interesting to see this comment downvoted. I'm honestly curious as to the thinking here. How are parents having kids because they want them not acting selfishly?
Actually both parents and non-parents exhibit selfishness, just of different flavors. Parents have natural urges to have kids (literally, evolution!). So it is self-explanatory. Non-parents will need a younger generation when they grow old for satisfying all the Maslow hierarchies of needs (food, medical care, entertainment, funding social safety nets etc). So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are con…
> So the ones who are not producing any kids by choice are consciously offloading their old-age care and hence act selfishly.
When my father was dying, I out of all his children was able to help him the most since I don't have children of my own. Clearly I could devote my life to helping old people and do more overall good for that group, then just producing children (who may or may not do so). In fact, I could make the claim that "the ones who *are* producing kids by choice are consciously producing more work for future generations to do hence acting selfishly". That position would be similarly asinine.
But sure if you understand there is no inherent good to parenting and it's basically just people doing what they want to do (well when having the children by choice anyway), then I guess you maybe show a little humility. I may someday have children, but I'm under no illusion that I'd be doing the world a favor.