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I have a modest proposal.
Let’s all just skip a generation and no one have kids this time. We can easily start having kids again later with a nice clean slate.
Good idea, right?
Poland has super strict abortion bans in 2021. Wait until 2035 to see that place turn into a shithole
well that is because shareholders are wetting their pants realizing that with low birth rates they are losing both slaves and customers. Well, jokes on them, it is because of the shitty world they spearheaded (and that we followed)
It’s almost like if people are able to mature enough to make an informed choice, they get a choice.
That person and the author of the article obviously suck at reading/understanding crafts. Teen pregnancies did not have a high enough percentage (and it’s good that it went down).
Also, how do you miss the drop in the age range 20 - 24 and the rise in the age ranges above 30. It’s even indicated in the title to “40 is the new 20”.
This is indicative of a bad economy. I bet if you add a graph showing the rise in rent, you will see an inverse correlation.
I bet if you add a graph showing the rise in rent, you will see an inverse correlation.
Or about inequality of income.
Not much of a bet, really. More of a fact.
let kids be kids. when you force kids to be parents, you are stealing their childhood. all you have to do is explain “sex” in bits and pieces, when it’s appropriate, and eventually they’re ready for the anatomy explanations and maybe you can help soften the trauma of puberty.
EVERYBODY is mad!!!
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture. The GOP thinks they can do it by destroying reproductive rights, civil rights, and marriage laws, if they harm women enough they’ll HAVE to be baby makers! Dehumanized baby factories! And even conservative voters are fighting against it, because it’s insane and it’s against our current culture. It has to work for everyone. It would be more intelligent to create free childcare, better pregnancy and birth leave for both parents, and child tax credits. They could use WIC to absorb the cost of having a child and public education sooner with preschool. If people are hopeful their children will have high education access and a stable life they will be a lot more likely to have kids. Being horrified that your children will live in a fascist theocracy and intentionally kept uneducated and poverty stricken, they might actually voluntarily avoid sex to not have kids.
What if we don’t want infinite growth? What about stability? Or (gasp) a population reduction so we don’t destroy the planet. Have less babies. Feed the ones we have. Educate them.
Sure, easing into a deflating population over several hundred years is fine but tanking it and ending up with a society having to support a vastly older population ain’t easy either. Better for governments to provide positive reasons to have children but there’s zero chance of that.
Our government has no issue going into debt for anything and everything they want, aside from social services. The whole concept of a younger generation having to take care of a growing older one means nothing to me. If they care, they can shift their priorities on reckless spending. If they don’t (they dont) then the population can take to the streets and demand they start caring.
We’re going to run into a crisis within our life time whether we like it or not. Within 10-20 years, possibly longer if legislation somehow hampers it, pretty much the entire working class will be unemployable because machine labor will be cheaper and more readily available than any human. Yes, some people will still have jobs, but not the working class.
Long before we have a crisis of too many elderly for the working to care and provide for, we are going to have a crisis of not enough jobs paying a liveable wage for one, let alone a family, because corporations are going to be able to replace large swathes of their workforces with machines that cost less to maintain per unit than minimum wage, so why would they ever hire a person?
I just have to pont out, If you have to have a job, you are working class. It doesn’t matter if it’s a well-paying automation job, you are still working class.
Technically yes, as there are many definitions. But practically, no. Tthe commonly accepted and popular definitions break down with the working class being those without college degrees, those who’se living expenses and day to day expenses is most if not all of their income, where another common definition specifically list unskilled labourers, artisans, outworkers, and factory workers as working class.
Both arguments are valid. Less children, better education and growth perspectives = better humanity. And still there are some sick fucks down voting. Which shows how fucked we are.
I mean yes, children should be an affordable option and please take my tax money to make it practically free. But also I think a lot more people don’t want children than is generally assumed it expected. Just lots of societal pressure pushing vulnerable people to make a decision that’s not necessarily in their best interest.
Let’s not pretend the GOP are doing it for the good of humanity…
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture.
For most of history it wasn’t advantageous to have children. People just didn’t have many options, and we were used to babies dying all the time so if we wanted any help in our old age we had to have enough to survive into adulthood.
Where do you base this information from?
E.g. people who had a farm or crafts/trade business usually had children to help and later take over the business. Having children to help at old age is mentioned by yourself.
Sounds quite advantageous to me. Especially when labor is more physically demanding or you need enough people to maintain security like for traders etc.
Wrong thread. Im drunk
Been there. What are you drinking? I’m sipping on some Bushmills Black (sherry cask). Got a bit project out today. Spent a year writing this beast:
What’s your occupation?
What is that software?
PDF Xchange! It’s fucking amazing. My work switched from Adobe because it does more and costs like $2 a licence vs $150 for Adobe
What is a CKJ unified icograph? And why don’t you have any?
Chinese characters. Presumably they’re not Chinese, Japanese or Korean.
There was a theory that roughly 15 years after Roe v Wade crime started decreasing because people who weren’t ready for or didn’t want children could now have an abortion. Many of those kids that were previously born “unwanted” were in poor households and so the kids getting to about 15 years old in those conditions would start getting into trouble and start committing crimes.
For any fuckwit that says “make better decisions then! Use protection!” I’m the result of a broken condom, that shit absolutely happens. I was a “pleasant surprise.” Honestly I wish they’d have just had the abortion.
I fail to see how this crime fighting measure involves more cops, guns and racism so I don’t think you’ll be able to convince the “tough on crime” “pro life” GOP supreme court on this.
Detailed in Freaknomics where Romania is used as an example.
My sister had her first child because her birth control failed due to another medication making it less effective.
No one warned her about that being a thing that can happen with that particular med. Not her doctor. Not the pharmacist. No one said a thing… which is super fucked up. She was married at the time, but still. They were not ready for a kid(their words)
This was almost 20 years ago so I don’t remember which med it was, and I’m hoping the medical community is better about this now.
I have been called a weirdo many times for always reading the information that comes with medications. I still do, even for stuff i have taken many times like Tylenol.
Of course doctors and pharmacists should inform their patients and have an eye on these things. But the full legally required known documentation is always with the medication. And humans are prone to error, especially in a field as complex as medicine/pharma.
Read the things before starting the medication. Always.
I read them too after what happened to my sister.
However, I think that certain types of side effects(life altering ones Tardive dyskinesia) and medications that are known to mess with hormonal birth control should have their own little text box right on the front where people can clearly see it.
Throwing a long ass pamphlet in there and calling it informed consent doesn’t really cut it for me. There’s a lot of room for improvement.
It’s really honestly amazing that there are so many people in this world that don’t understand that, A, married couples use birth control and have regular sex and, B, that birth control can fail.
Are they all incels are something?
Unfortunately, a lot of people who are under the influence of religion believe that marriage is for creating children, and many of those people very received little to no sex ed.
The ideas that “every child is a blessing” and “God will provide” are used to handwave away the importance of people’s bodily autonomy and to deflect the reality that people can and should have access to the resources to chose if, when and how many children they have.
I’ve taken to calling them reproductive luddites. They’re afraid of contraceptive technology.
“Your child its a miracle from god!” - anti abortionists
PSA: Antibiotics will make your birth control less effective.
Also no they do not warn most people about that.
Wait a moment, antibiotics will break condoms? /s
Came here to say this. It’s not some edge case medicine that people rarely encounter. Just you had a sinus infection and now you’re pregnant!
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It doesn’t get brought up because it’s not useful to anyone politically. Already support abortion rights? Well then lower crime rates is just a positive unintended side effect of a policy that grants women their inherent right to bodily autonomy. Already oppose abortion rights? Then you probably don’t care about crime rates because you already think that abortion itself is a crime.
Probably not, but I just thought it was interesting to bring up in relation to young age births that may or may not have been intentional.
A debunked theory
Absolutely not, Slovakia saw the same thing. When abortion was strictly outlawed, crime skyrocketed in 18 years due to children being born in awful conditions.
The prolife movement is a probirth movement only. Because they don’t give a fuck about the kid after birth.
Edit: Romania not Slovakia
I think you may have the wrong country. I can’t find anything about a complete abortion ban in Slovakia (except for a rejected proposal in 2020), nor a sharp increase in crime, apart from that following promptly after the overthrow of the communists.
You’re right it wasn’t Slovakia but I know it was one of the countries that formed a theocracy after communism fell. I wanna say Yugoslavia or Slovenia. One of those countries.
Found it, it was Romainia. My mistake.
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I think the 20-24 line is hinting at a bad economy.
You just can’t hear that hint over the hint of the constant torment of the growing lower class
For real. Middle class was a low but comfortable bar back in 1987 when I was born. My parents went above and beyond having two incomes, one of them being a small business. I do essentially the same thing as my mom small business wise, and my wife makes arguably more than my old man dad, but the thought of doubling our starter home (or even moving out of it) just hasn’t crossed my mind.
And we also had kids about three years later on average than my folks did (though compared to my wife’s folks, about five years earlier).
The '90s were fucking awesome (except for the acid rain, shit had me spooked in first grade when they played the laser disc about it).
It was never about stopping abortion. It’s about keeping people in poverty and creating a cycle of uneducated voters that either don’t vote or vote Republican because they don’t know better
TIL that America’s birth rates have been traditionally driven by teen pregnancies. Nobody tell Tallarico, but ooof.wav
“Driven” suggest more than half of total pregnancies, which is not true looking at the graph given above. It was solidly
thirdfourth* in terms of totals, which is still unsettling, but not as pronounced as your comment suggests.*I overlooked 25-29
Who told you that drivers have to be 51%?
That’s not what a driver is. Driver is a general term, ten pregnancies are a driver of total birth rate, as they have impacted total fertility significantly.
Less than 20% of a total is “significant”?
When it comes to teen pregnancies, 1 is 1 too many. ~20% is significant.
Yeah, that’s not what I said.
Yes. For example, 60 million people in the US (less than 20% of our total population) is a significant amount of people.
The amount the percentage represents is irrelevant. A billion people could be involved, but if the total is 7 billion, it’s not going to be a significant part of the total trend.
5% can be a driver if it’s having a decent impact on your results. This is kind of a stats 101 thing man. You might even look for those outliers in your results and find a way to specifically exclude them if you find that the information you’re getting is being skewed. Do that too hard and it’s called P-hacking.
“We found that the bottom 5% of respondents were driving results negatively and so excluded the top and bottom 5%.”
Think about it as a literal driver. It’s a driver. It’s not the driver and also half the passengers. You can drive a motorcycle, you can drive a bus, and how much of the occupancy you are of those two things can change dramatically but you’re still a driver.
Obviously even 1 extreme outlier can skew things, but that’s not the case here.
In the terms of your analogy, this is about 3 people out of 20 pedaling a (weirdly long) bike and steered by all of them (somehow). Would you say that group of 3 are driving? Or would you concede it’s the two groups of 6 that are mostly driving the bike?
Yes it is…
Don’t worry, Republicans will solve this by banning abortion and birth control nationwide!
They are always thinking of the children.
And legalizing marriage to minors. And outlawing comprehensive sexual education.
A few Republicans also rape and traffic minors just to show how dedicated they are to countering the declining birth rate!
Pizzagate was projection.
A few?
They misspoke. A few don’t.
Only a few do both!
Conservatives are thinking of the children. How is that unclear?
Also, we need to be clear, rape is such a harsh word, it’s not fair to ruin someone’s whole career over a little misunderstanding like consent…
It’s such a steep [word] for 20 minutes of action.
Fight against SA protection in the workplace and push more children to work to live? Anything is better than the Great Replacement right? /s
But honestly thinking about what terrible combination of policies.
Uh, yeah, about that. Republicans need to stop thinking so much about children, mmkay?
Okay, so on an actual serious note – Historically, this has actually been the lever that’s been pulled by government in order to control population growth.
The problem is that we’ve grown so much as a society that we now realize that bodily-autonomy is a human right.
There are ways they can promote population growth, if that is something we really want. Better and free school lunches would be a start. Childcare. Pre-K education. Free college. Health-care. And generally a more wealthy middle class.
The biggest reason people are having fewer kids is money.
This 100%. We and many of our peers with a kid are one and done in the current system. But if we could afford college educations for multiple kids, get adequate parental leave, access to early childcare that doesn’t cost an entire paycheck? That would change the decision quite a bit.
But also I’m happy to have fewer kids and let more immigrant and/or refugee families with young kids move here too. Solves the labor shortage and provides a much needed influx of fresh ideas and culture, not to mention getting some folks out of dangerous situations. Somehow all of the people who want to “save the children” are extremely silent on that front when it’s children moving to another country for a better life.
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please stop having babies ffs
I think it’s fine to have kids if you want them but the government trying to get people to have more kids for economic reasons is sickening
Found the pro-abortionist.
(For those that don’t get the joke, notice that I didn’t say pro-life or anti-choice. It’s the “flush them all - no exceptions” position.)
until we get it down to around half the current population, yes.
Is everyone having an abortion in your plan, is the selection random; how would this even work?
And what then, the human race just dies out? I get the pessimistic feeling, but we may very well be the only sapient species in this galaxy. It would be such a waste to just give up and perish because of momentary hardships.
We are literally sapient stardust, and I’m certainly not going to give up and throw away the efforts and struggles on millions of ancestors just because of some current corporate greed and fascism is in fashion.
we literally have 8 or 9 billion people dude i think we’re good for now
We are in no way at risk of dying out from negative population growth. If we start to go down below a few million, then maybe let’s talk.
World population is still increasing, and is set to maybe stabilize in a couple decades. Fingers crossed. If we could (gently, without mass starvation) reduce the population down to a more sustainable level, that is an unmitigatedly good thing.
What might kill us is infertility from pollution or disease, but this won’t do it.
gently, without mass starvation
Even more gently if you want to make sure there’s enough younger people to care for the elderly
A fuckton of people work bullshit jobs that should not exist. We could run the same society with much, much less people working.
Then fix that first instead of delaying it. Climate change is more directly caused by capitalism than it is caused by natalism. It’s easier to (proverbially) eat the rich than it is to tell people to stop having the children you need to wipe your grandparent’s ass.
I’n not telling anyone to have kids or not, I’m actually saying that having kids is a personal decision, and society should not care beyond making sure those kids grow up safe in loving families.
Ok, so just make a shitload of people homeless in the meantime?
That’s precisely what I accuse malthusianist solutions of 👌
I totally agree with you. I just hate all of these “don’t have kids” arguments from liberal people. It’s not a viable solution, because the fascists and the idiots are gong to have kids. We need at least some sane people to continue on.
But the is all emotional and subjective, I’ll admit that. I’m not really thinking about this topic with a clear head anymore.
And it doesn’t work, either. When they tell you we need half the population, they don’t tell you how to reach that objective, when the objective is considered to be achieved.
They might recognize that some people will have to suffer, but they don’t tell you who will suffer and how.
Malthusianism is yet another unclear ideology that offers vague promises but assured hardships from dilettantes that are spared enough to not feel the full weight of capitalism.
Nothing that stands rigorous scrutiny.
That talking point died decades ago. We have a clear path to reducing our population. Well-off people with access to contraceptives don’t have high birth rates. We can roll back the human birth rate to sub-replacement levels and over time, reduce it.
There will be a problem with increasing population in 2250 or so, but we can cross that bridge when we come to it.
The moral thing to do is to ensure that all humans have access to clean water and food, contraceptives, and comfortable lives. The population will naturally go down and we can stabilize it over time.
This is a good read: https://ourworldindata.org/un-population-2024-revision
The new estimated global peak population is 10.3B in 2084. But now, looking at the break down by region, you may be talking about North America? That graph looks wildly 3rd world… If you edit the graph to show US and Nigeria’s 2024 projections side by side it’s samepicture.jpg
People are not not having kids because of contraceptives, but because they can’t afford them anymore. It is a luxury older people have enjoyed, but that just isn’t realistically achievable anymore.
Give them a more certain future, they will start having more babies again.
The Earth can sustain the current population levels. Imagine we decrease those, at what point do we stop?
The problem with malthusianism is that it doesn’t give any tangible answer to the issues it claims to solve.
First off, when do we stop that decrease? Secondly, when we reach the coveted equilibrium point, how do we stop the plundering of resources capitalists will still subject us to?
I’m not arguing for an ever-increasing demography, but I’m against a system that’s unattainable (because, even with violent rule enforcement, people will keep having kids), does not meaningfully address the issue with the plundering of terrestrial resources, and means the lower class will have to bear the brunt of the work of dealing with an aging population.
I don’t think it can sustain the current population levels, at our North American standard of living. If we could distribute resources evenly, sure, we could keep everyone alive, but energy consumption, plastic production, all that adds up to an ecological footprint of resource use that isn’t sustainable.
World wildlife levels have gone down dramatically. We’re expanding human life at the expense of all other life. The other life on earth isn’t superfluous: it’s an ecosystem that keeps us alive, recycles our waste, provides our medicines and cultural wealth of all sorts.
We can’t keep our wealthy lifestyle and at the same time tell the poor people of the world that they have to stay poor so that we can remain wealthy.
I’m not saying the north american lifestyle is sustainable. Just that planet Earth can sustain 7 billion people if things are managed a bit more efficiently.
I’m well aware that our lifestyles are causing suffering on the other side of the planet. And I solemnly condemn spoiled westerners that have the gall of telling the people they cause suffering to to stop having kids (because those faraway regions is where population levels grow the fastest).
Malthusianism, like eugenics, is half-baked. It’s surface-level ideology that offers no real answer and is more of a feeling than anything with nothing concrete to show for it. Push it to its logical conclusions, and you get to nazi-style forced sterilization and similar policies. And you still didn’t address climate change.
I mostly agree but I think we could maintain a lifestyle that is near Western levels, but done more efficiently. It wouldn’t be the same lifestyle, but it would be a good one.
I.e.
- dense, walkable neighbourhoods with mixed-use zoning
- trains, trams and electric buses instead of cars
- any job that can be done from home should be mandatory to do from home
- minimal to no meat consumption, especially emissions intensive meat like beef
- economic incentives and disincentives to minimise energy consumption and waste
- circular economies that re-use and recycle most things
- 100% renewable energy production (and eventually, green manufacturing).
Although even with that, it would be an easier job if there is some level of population decline, but I don’t think any encouragement is needed (societies where women are highly educated tend to have declining birth rates).
These are all good measures, but I doubt they would be enough to stop the wildlife decimation.
The real issue is that we have a rapidly aging workforce and there’s not enough young people to replace them. With the average age of parents raising, the gap is getting larger. In the 50s it was 16 workers for every 1 retired. The 70s, 5:1. That number is now almost 2:1. This is bad. Very bad.
Higher bar for jobs. Lower wage for entry level. Later retiring age. Higher need for migrant and seasonal workers.
Aw, crapitalism will break because line cannot always go up.
Cry me a fucking river. Humanity is a cancer, and we need to be about half our current population. Yeah, we’re not gonna like it when we drop that population. Our kids, my daughter, are going to have it fucking tough. But if we want to survive long term… We gotta stop.
Says who? Who needs half the population? To what end?
Says Thanos who did nothing wrong. Really though, it’s not rocket science to understand eternal growth is not a viable strategy. It’s also obvious that the number of people on the Earth now is too much if we want them all to live a comfortable life and not to destroy the planet at the same time. How big should the population be to make things ok longterm? That is open to discussion and depends on many factors, so there’s not just one correct answer.
I’m not advocating for eternal growth. But the malthusians claim the population should be smaller without telling you how smaller or how to reach the objective. It’s candid ideology that’s not very different from eugenics if brought to its logical conclusion. They tell you some will suffer, but they don’t tell you who and how. The answer is of course: some poor schmuck that’s not them.
And they fail to realize that, even after the population’s been reduced, we’d still suffer from the same issues we’re facing now because population reduction didn’t address the real issue, which is capitalism.
Why would bars raise and entry level wages go down if supply is decreasing?
We’re upright locusts. Stop stroking your ego and look at the state of the world. Humanity doesn’t justify itself.
Really? Why not? You think the impressive development of an intelligent and aware species is important enough to make that same species suffer more and more to the inevitable extinction anyways? Let’s do it now while it’s still partially habitable so that the end isn’t quite as horrific. Your logic makes no sense.
Hundreds of billions of stars in our own galaxy, and planets are thought to be just as common as stars. We’re discovering more and more exo-planets as technology improves. Add on top of that, our milky way galaxy is just one of hundreds of billions, if not trillions of galaxies in the known universe.
Each galaxy having at least millions of stars, up to trillions of stars per galaxy. What are the odds that our one planet is the only planet in the universe with life? We aren’t that special. We simply don’t have the technology to discover other life yet.
The idea that we’re the only life in the galaxy, let alone the universe is absurd. I’m not saying little green men are visiting us, but to think we’re alone in such an incomprehensibly vast universe is just straight up wrong IMO. If humanity doesn’t destroy itself in war, then hundreds of years from now humanity will look back on the idea that we’re the only life the same way we currently look back on people that thought the Earth was the centre of the universe.
Life will go on, with or without humanity.
i also think people are probably good yes
Why would I care if the human race dies out? I won’t be here to notice.
Let’s instead focus on not burning the place to the ground during our lifetimes.
This is what we hate boomers for. Short-termism. How about we start being angry at the right culprits? Your peers in the West aren’t having kids anymore already.
I’m thinking long term as well. Without humans, the universe would be less uncertain.
The universe is very much certain with or without humans.
Who cares? Without sentients in it, the universe is pointless.
Oh come on, it’s a #notallmen moment. Lol
When people say “stop having kids”, what they mean is stop having unplanned pregnancies. I don’t think that many people want our literal extinction.
I wish all people would stop having kids. I am all for the voluntary human extinction movement. A very key word is voluntary though, which really just makes it an ideology.
Good luck telling people not to have kids. China’s tried that already.
You don’t have to. Turns out, when you give women the option to not shove a watermelon-sized object through their hoohaws at an age when they’re not ready for it, many of them opt not to!
And yet, people did not stop having babies, which is what the person that started this thread asked people for.
Curiously, it worked too well. China is now desperately offering incentives to get people to have more children.
(Okay, I’m just being glib. It’s not clear whether it was the one-child policy that was responsible for the birth-rate crash.)
It’s a reasonable explanation. But China is still one of the most populated contries on Earth.
I understand that, I’m very aware that my reaction is emotional and subjective. I’m just sick of reading that sentence over and over and over again.
People can do all that, but you will still have population growth and climate change, which you want to fix. That, and an aging population. How about we stop for advocating for known non-solutions and fix the actual problem already?
I don’t share this view. Life is an interesting pattern created by matter, but no need to be spiritual about it. If life ceased to exist, no one would be sad about it. Actually a lot of struggle and pain would be over which is positive in my opinion. In practice, we should value quality of life of conscious beings instead of quantity. Having less is better.
Just here to say I feel you and agree with your sentiment.
