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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?

#521

Post by kelseyfrog »

teitoklien wrote: post #466
kelseyfrog wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people feel the game is unfair, they quit. When the game is society, the society ceases to exist. It's wild that we find it harder to change the system than to walk away from it entirely. People opt out in a thousand small ways - refusing to have kids, refusing to participate, numbing themselves with distractions, or just mentally checking out. If the core pitch of society is "keep grinding or suffer," it’s not…

Things should be made better I agree, But at the same time. Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing. Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity an…

Empirically, how well does the "we have it better off now" response work against feelings of an unfair system. Does it tend to change perspective in your experience?

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

#522

Post by odyssey7 »

What if we just made people financially comfortable and secure again? The axis is "feed and breed" vs "fight or flight."

And stop making people move away from their families for a shot at financial security. Having family around is a key expedient to raising kids, just as it has been since the dawn of time. Stop making people leave their families for return-to-office nonsense.

Millennials have been through repeated periods of economic shock, and they can't afford houses. You don't need to invent something new to prevent the next generation from doing the same thing, you just need to make people feel secure so that self-actualization is permitted to happen.

I can't tell you how much I've heard millennials tell me about the grief of the inability to have children despite high-status jobs in hideously expensive cities. People didn't stop wanting children, people stopped being able to have children.

Of course, reality won't stop policymakers from trying to do the dead-end solutions of manipulating people into having children and taking away birth control. Those dead-end options must seem very appealing to policymakers when compared to empowering workers with genuine security.

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

#524

Post by MangoToupe »

itake wrote: 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…

Tbf, the pressure to have a career also sucks.

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

#525

Post by MangoToupe »

Aurornis wrote: post #27
phkahler wrote: post #6

What will it take to have a stable society that doesn't depend on indefinite economic/population growth?

A stable population requires a fertility rate of about 2.1. It’s not about growth, it’s about stability of population at this point.

You don't need a stable population to have a stable society. I'm not sure why you're connecting the two.

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

#526

Post by MangoToupe »

bethekidyouwant wrote: post #386
SamuelAdams wrote: post #55

As a new parent, it’s money. Daycare costs $400 USD per week in my area, from 7am-6pm, 5 days a week. So for one child that is roughly 20,000 USD annually. Once you hit the 3-5 kid mark, it usually does not make sense for the spouse to work, unless they are earning well above 6 figures. So then you’re going down to one income supporting a family of 3-5. That’s risky for a variety of reasons. If you want actual action…

We have a subsidized childcare in Quebec and the fertility rate is still shit

My understanding is the cost of housing is increasing far faster than inflation in the entire anglosphere.

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

#527

Post by gt0 »

anon291 wrote: post #204
anonymars wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this ridiculous? If the topic is about the baby boom, surely "optimism" at the end of WWII plays a big role. (Unsurprisingly, birth rates during the Great Depression had plummeted)

The entire male populace suffered from PTSD, and substantial portions from combat induced disability. My goodness... If that's optimism imagine today.

It may be hard to believe, that is considered a major reason for the baby boom. People were happy the war was over, happy to be back with their families, The GI Bill made people optimistic about the future.

There was PTSD of course, a lot of grief and life altering injuries, but back then you didn't talk about it and just drank and beat up your wife and kids instead.

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

#528

Post by 121789 »

labcomputer wrote: post #468
Aurornis wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s strange to see that anecdote so highly upvoted when it’s so trivial to look at birth rates by parental age. Reduced teen pregnancies are not the driving factor in recent fertility rate declines at all. It is interesting how an appeal to emotion with a difficult story can lead so many to overlook the obvious shortcomings in that explanation. Honestly this entire comment section has a lot of people making guesses…

The data doesn't exactly support your argument though: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother Just looking at raw number of births by age of mother: * 15-19 peaked in 1989 and has decreased 35% since then * 25-29 is higher than at any point in the 20th century * 30-34 is higher than at any point in the 20th century * 35-39 is higher than at any point in the 20th century * 40-44 is higher than the…

You are looking at the full world numbers, which isn’t really what’s being discussed in this thread. Try filtering for South Korea or the US

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

#529

Post by pempem »

teitoklien wrote: post #466
kelseyfrog wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people feel the game is unfair, they quit. When the game is society, the society ceases to exist. It's wild that we find it harder to change the system than to walk away from it entirely. People opt out in a thousand small ways - refusing to have kids, refusing to participate, numbing themselves with distractions, or just mentally checking out. If the core pitch of society is "keep grinding or suffer," it’s not…

Things should be made better I agree, But at the same time. Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing. Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity an…

Have you ever seen that meme about having less days off than a medieval peasant?

Yes, I can get chicago, new york, italian, or tokyo style pizza from my phone, in about an hour in a city that is none of those places. Still even my weekends include work. A strong effort in high school, college, grad school and at my jobs has led to fairly regular weekend work and working after putting the LOs down for bedtime, not connecting or socializing.

The answer isn't fewer rights. Its more.

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

#530

Post by teitoklien »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #521
teitoklien wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things should be made better I agree, But at the same time. Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing. Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity an…

Empirically, how well does the "we have it better off now" response work against feelings of an unfair system. Does it tend to change perspective in your experience?

the mindset you're discussing isnt whats driving this for majority of people (im myself young and in my 20s). its a problem in your extremely small bubble of leftist spaces which i've often heard this doomism being argued.

World has never been that fair, its a work in progress that has been going on since 1000s of years heck probably 100,000s for humans.

First there was Anarchy / Stateless Societies (Pre-Leviathan), then came the notion of leviathan / Authoritarian Centralization the idea that letting a state get run by a ruler and his nobles would lead to a more stable state (the era of kings and emperors since last several centuries),

then came Theocratic or Feudal Orders : Society governed by divine rule or hierarchical feudal obligations. Middle Ages in Europe, dynastic China, Islamic Caliphates.

then Absolute Monarchy / Early Nation-States then Constitutionalism / Enlightenment Liberalism then came Democracy (but anti minority and primarily majoritarian with tons of political violence on minorities, still can see it in places like bangladesh, malaysia (singapore itself was born out of violence on such a non-malay minority) )

then came Liberal Democracy / Republic Which is what most western europeans, americans, indians, japan, etc live under or atleast the ideals its politicians promise to follow and do follow majority of the time.

Everything you and enjoy in our lives was created and improved upon by people before us, life has never been 'fair' nor will ever reach that utopian ideal of fair ever. Nor has it ever been the limiter on birth rates or growing societies.

It's just an excuse (sorry I'm not saying your concerns are invalid, but only that you share it with every human who has ever existed across time, and this has never been the bottleneck for our current problem with birth rates)

The problems are more behavioural in kind, and the norms that have arised rather than unfair system, psycological issues like that.

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