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What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

derekthompson.org

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Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#11
post #7

War, sadly. Seems like some politicians are doing their best to arrange that

Do you see rising birth rates in Ukraine and/or Russia?

Baby Boomers are the folks born from 1946 to 1964.

The war is the cause, but it has to end to do it.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#12
post #7

War, sadly. Seems like some politicians are doing their best to arrange that

Do you see rising birth rates in Ukraine and/or Russia?

Is the war in Ukraine over yet? The baby boom happened after World War II, not during.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#16
This post gradually seems to tiptoe towards eugenics, which makes me a little nervous, closing with this bit:

> If we took this history seriously, we might spend more money on not only parents of young children but also the basic scientific breakthroughs that would make it easier for future parents to have the children they want, whenever they want them.

This is in the context of enabling broader fertility by making it easier to get pregnant, to be completely fair. But for me it does raise the question of what 'the children they want' looks like in a modern climate where heritable traits not only affect your capabilities in life but now dramatically impact how you are treated, whether it's being mistreated based on skin color or being at a disadvantage in education & the workplace due to conditions like adhd, chronic fatigue, etc. Raising a child with heritable conditions (or random genomic quirks) can also be much more expensive than a child that is closer to the norm, too.

I'm still not sure where I land on the question of whether it's appropriate to try and edit these 'disadvantageous traits' out of an embryo. It seems like a classic slippery slope problem and I don't know if it's possible to trust anyone (or anything, if one were to suggest AI as a solution) to navigate it right.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#17
post #5

>What Caused the 'Baby Boom'? WW2 >What Would It Take to Have Another? WW3

It only happened after WW2 because the US came out of that war as the only untouched developed economy. A WW3 isn't going to leave anyone unscathed and would probably mean all-out nuclear war.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#18
The assumption that a war would trigger another baby boom is incorrect. The conditions are very different than in the 50s and there's no going back. World devastation, reverting to the stone age or some agriculture society will not result in a population growth for decades, maybe a generation at best, as western society falls into the familiar throes of barbarism and resource starvation.

The more likely approach is some sort of mass socialism, for starters. Even if you had technological innovations to breed humans en masse, there would have to be subsidized care. Creating a breeding class, who's job it was to breed and care for children would require a massive upheaval in the social fabric. It's not possible anytime soon.

If it was easy, another boom would have already happened.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#19
(Purely anecdotally, my own and my peers experience) We’re seeing educated people waiting longer in life to have children. Fertility drops, assistance from older generations drops, the village has gone, nursery and care prices are ridiculously high, support from the government (UK) is a bit of a farce if you’re earning anything more than a living wage in cities, the opportunity cost of a parent putting a (more developed as older) career on hold

Having children younger seems like a solution to a lot of this, however people know what the sacrifices are, and very understandably don’t want to make them.

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