961–970 of 1001 posts
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> improved health and safety and lifespan will shrink the urge to procreate Not what I said at all. Note the “even if I grant … (which I don’t…)”.
Oh, I misunderstood. You were only talking about the greater positives of industrialization, to counter ideas against it. That is true without debate. Material wealth going up, plus improved health conditions, are all positives. Material wealth replacing human relationships is not.
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> retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees. Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
You can't eat assets. Retirees need goods and services, these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free. No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.
Are farmland, greenhouses, livestock, tractors, silos full of grain, and refrigerated warehouses packed with produce not "assets"?
> Retirees need goods and services
Which are produced by...assets. Factories, labs, intellectual property.
> these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free
Well not exactly "free". Retirees make contributions to the retirement system throughout their career.
> No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.
The solution is tax the workers' output (productivity and asset growth), not their salaries. I don't know what you mean by "wealth redistribution" here.
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And abortion.
That's absurd. Remind me again what the ratio of abortions to pregnancies is?
About 73 million annually worldwide, or roughly equal to the total death toll (civilian and military) of WW2 every single year.
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Fortunately this exponential decay is very unlikely to continue forever. The present structure of society will not survive a 90% reduction in population. Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies for fun again and not coddling them to the extreme detriment of their own lives, and human population will stabilise.
> Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas t…
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There are so many factors. I think the biggest one is that the developed world looked at women and said "hey, they are just as smart and capable as men and if they work at companies we have 2x the workers" which is obviously true but what it leads to is a DINK society - and it locks you in. It is just much, much harder to raise children when both parents work and they don't live near their parents and other familial…
I agree that women's employment is the common factor in all societies with reduced birth rates. > In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates. 1. T…
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My understanding of Singapore work culture though is it's intense and competitive. Yes the housing is cheaper and more accessible but it's the same age to get there (maybe a bit earlier). You aren't "economically secure" earlier in life than in Western countries. I don't know enough Vienna's system to speak for it.
This has nothing to do with economic security. Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena. Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch. Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms. We'…
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Yes, absolutely. I agreed with the parent too, but I think your explanation is not as different as it seems. I think your framing is just more direct and correct. However, one big caveat: "If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family" What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed na…
I think the "entitlement" argument can be easily refuted by telling your interlocutor they're not entitled to you having children, and if they want America to have a million more children they should have them themselves.
At any other time, it was assumed that if you got to a certain age and didn't have, it was a problem. We've finally mostly gotten over that hurdle (at a high level, not necessarily within close-knit groups and families), and people act surprised that many of us never wanted them to begin with.
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I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there wa…
You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.
If they have the freedom to choose otherwise, they will. The global fertility "crisis" is simply individuals exercising their choices. Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.
There's no amount of money (that society could ever afford to pay) that could convince my wife to have children.