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

derekthompson.org

511–520 of 927 posts

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

#511
While I'm sure won't be a popular opinion, the data seems to backup that the rise of far-left liberalism and feminism by women and shift toward moderate and conservative men has been a huge contributing factor.

Take South Korea, which arguably has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has seen women rise toward liberalism while men stunningly favor conservatism. The graph for men goes off the chart[1]!

Secondly, social media, including onlyfans. This ideology of feminist power I believe has been a cancer.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd....

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

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From everything I hear, being a mom is pretty awesome and rewarding. Then you don’t even read magazines , let alone mom forums, or attend playgroup, or basically hear anything.

Let me guess: you're not married, nor do you have kids, nor do you hang out with people who have kids.

Wrong on every count. And I’m a woman, so I probably have a hell of a lot more exposure to moms than most people pontificating away here.

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

#513
post #438
post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only a fluke because we've allowed the resources that once enabled this period to accumulate at the top so that it's not feasible on a broad scale any more.

It was a fluke because the US was unscathed by a war that destroyed much of the industrial and productive capacity in the rest of the world, at the same time vast strides in technology were being made. The US worker had a worldwide monopoly on labor and innovation for 30 years.

This explanation seems lacking to me. The same time period had a single-earner home-owning, baby-boom-raising middle class in places like Germany and Japan where entire cities had been completely obliterated by war. They didn't have as many cars or televisions as the Americans but they could pay their mortgage. And blowing up a whole bunch of productive infrastructure and capital worldwide is not the kind of thing you'd expect to contribute to gross material wealth. And gross wealth should be much higher now anyways, since we have so much more technology and better infrastructure.

The only reasonable explanation I can see is a distribution-of-wealth lens. Workers clearly had much more bargaining power during that era, but why? Is it because so many men were killed during the war? Because women who had been working in factories were expected to become stay-at-home mothers? Because of insufficient automation?

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

#514

The tiny period of time that allowed some men in the wealthiest parts of the world to purchase property and support a family of 4+ on a single salary was an anomaly. It was a macroeconomic fluke, forever lost to the specific place and time that allowed it to briefly flourish. There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absol…

I make 5 times more than my SO and I can realistically have 3/4 families if I wanted. I proposed multiple times my SO to work part time and spend more time at home and have children and she has 0 intentions of giving up a single dime of her independence.

Good for her, I wouldn't want to be beholden to someone else either.

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

#515

The tiny period of time that allowed some men in the wealthiest parts of the world to purchase property and support a family of 4+ on a single salary was an anomaly. It was a macroeconomic fluke, forever lost to the specific place and time that allowed it to briefly flourish. There's a chance a highly-automated future could reduce our neccesary working hours to those boomtime levels. But the one thing that will absol…

I make 5 times more than my SO and I can realistically have 3/4 families if I wanted. I proposed multiple times my SO to work part time and spend more time at home and have children and she has 0 intentions of giving up a single dime of her independence.

I had a similar financial situation. Difference is we already had two kids. My wife gladly gave up her career to be a stay at home mom. She’s still independent, though. The “contract” is that I make the money, she takes care of home stuff and kids, and she gets to do whatever else she wants.

If our situations were reversed and she was the one making crazy tech money, I’d happily be a stay at home dad.

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

#516
post #161

My $0.02 is being a mom sucks. In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day. Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-part…

> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other. Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.

100%, if my gf made half as much money as I do, I'd be happy to do all the housework, literally all of it.

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

#517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m absolutely telling people not to have kids into a macro that just wants economic slavery to pay back debt of all sorts incurred (sovereign, demographic). Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should. Can you…

You're screwed financially during child-bearing years if you have kids. You're screwed financially in retirement if you don't, because care is going to be super expensive if/when the population pyramid gets inverted. The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.

[deleted]

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

#518

> between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, the US maternal death rate fell by 94 percent that’s it so basically very few people - as in both partners - were consciously planning kids, they were just having sex, but the irresponsibility was curbed by nature, sanitation, as many of the resulting children died. of the people that were planning children, they also has to hedge with many dead children, but suddenly they were…

Do we still have sex? I keep seeing headlines that younger generations aren't having sex. My last relationship ended because my mid-30s male partner wasn't interested in sex.

I think this would be worth a post and a bunch of discussion all by itself. I think there are a bunch of factors influencing this.

If you’re willing to share, did they ever discuss with you the reasons they weren’t interested, and do you think they told you the complete and honest list of all the reasons?

For example, did they have concerns about unplanned accidental pregnancy? Or were there certain expectations related to it that detracted from the experience?

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

#519
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that you're right and that this is one of the predominant reasons for declining child births. I think that if I were a woman that I would personally choose career or personal life first before having children, all other things in my life held equal. I have a lot invested in those things, they're here and tangible, and they bring me joy. Media says that it's the economy, but I've never once believed that to be…

Yeah, drives me crazy when governments are trying to lower the cost of childcare with tax incentives or creating dating apps to encourage connectivity. Yeah, this might convince some people, but money is not preventing educated women from having kids. My 31-year-old ex-girlfriend told me she needs a high degree of career stability, especially after recently losing her job. Even if she landed a new role quickly, it of…

I think to qualify for FMLA (have your job protected while you go on unpaid maternity leave) you have to work for a company for at least a year so if you lose your job unexpectedly that can postpone having a family as you have to re-set your FMLA timer.

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

#520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Come on, you only ever stand to lose half your resources. Also you’re interacting with the wrong kinda lady my friend.

> you only ever stand to lose half your resources

Not true. You can lose half your current assets easily, but possibly more.

Then you likely need to pay alimony for many years, which if you add it up might be.. pretty much the other half, depending on the situation, and maybe much more.

And that’s before talking about child support, which can be gamed, because they can argue for higher custody percentage in order to extract higher payments from you. It’s so common it’s basically routine.

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