Anyone who understands global warming feedback loops would not have to ask that question. It is clear that the predator class is incinerating the planet to line their pockets and that is not going to end well for most of us.
Let’s try to convince everybody you must have a traditional looking family from a 50s TV show. Like it’s a religious caliber requirement.
Oh but number must go up, so we’re gonna put every economic stress we can on them to make that impossible.
And we might screw up some childhoods and send some adults over the edge. It’s a real shame. But hey let’s find that silver lining: cheap prison slave labor! Number go up again!
I do think that the Nordic countries show pretty well that even if you treat your population well and put quite a lot of effort into helping the population with child rearing, it seems like women just don’t want to have many children in modern society, even before everything became doom-and-gloom.
Maybe that’s just how it goes when you let people decide for themselves. Or maybe modern, capitalistic society is just not conducive to childrearing, and no amount of state support for young families, kindergartens etc. is going to change that.
I read this article recently and you might find it interesting as well: Commodification of housing and fertility rates
TL,DR: high housing prices delay and reduce fertility rates.
In this context, Nordic countries are not much better than the rest of the developed world (don’t like this descriptor, but I can’t come up with a better one)
That’s today, though. As an example, Sweden’s fertility rate has been around 2 since the 1930s. That article didn’t mention when housing started being such a big issue, but I assume it wasn’t the 30s and not the 50s or 80s, either.
The 30s would be in the upswing after the Great Depression, which hit the entire world hard, and right in the middle of WWII. Post WWII was incredibly hard on almost every European country, as well. The founder of IKEA was inspired during the reconstruction period by Swedish socialists and a simple idea: that everybody deserves to be able to afford furniture. Before IKEA, the Swedish were largely using hand-me-downs of generational pieces or improvising wooden shipping boxes into tables and chairs. True furniture was generally custom pieces made for the wealthy by artisans. IKEA is still banned to this day from buying materials (like lumber) from a number of Swedish companies because they were black marked for providing affordable furniture to the masses by outsourcing the assembly labor to the customer with their innovative flat pack design. Much of Europe in the Cold War was massive concrete prefab buildings because the need to build large-scale housing quickly was so dire. Many cities were practically levelled by the air raids.
On another note, I think a lot of the conversation on the topic of birth rates ignores or under-values the impact of sex ed, safe sex, and the rise of accessible home entertainment. Teenage pregnancies dropping has had a major impact on the birth rate, as has the reduction in accidental pregnancy. Combined, they probably make up a lion’s share of the difference between the present and a century ago. There’s a reason that so many people are born in the summer/fall, and it’s because 9 months before - in the winter - people are cooped up inside more and have less options for things to do for fun, which leads to more “Netflix and chill” and more accidental pregnancies as a result.
It’s almost like we shouldn’t structure our society around endless growth, including the population
It’s true that “unchecked growth is the motto of the cancer cell”.
And that nature’s program has predation/feeding upon itself as its prime mechanism of survival, which runs on boom and bust cycles. For example, when conditions allow for echinoderm populations to explode everything that feeds on echinoderms is having a pleasant and easy time of living “high on the hog”. But when that overpopulation inevitably leads to collapse(bust) due to resource depletion, plague, environmental/social dysfunction and disorder, etc, that’s when all the beings whose existence depend(ed) on the pleasant and easy times of abundance get to see the real cost/bill of having profited from that oh so very temporary abundance.
Homo sapiens can attempt to structure their societies any which way that suits them based off of the conditions they’re dealing with at the time. But unless they somehow graduate from animal-hood, or at least attempt to transcend being slaves to their instincts, they’re destiny as animals will remain unchanged.
Yet i optimistically happen to see that a percentage of our species choosing not to reproduce(even for selfish reasons) is a good indication that some of us are able to control/deny the impulses of the body as a means of damage control. These things have been observed and studied for some time now, and fall under the categories of ‘Malthusianism’ and ‘social decay’
Thank you. Demanding women to make more babies is sexist. But, this is what happens, when governments focus shit like productivity, gdp, etc. These are such terrible metrics.
Everyone wants to speculate as to why women don’t want to have children. I’m not an expert, but hear me out. What if we just ask them? Not just why, but if. Do we actually know that they don’t want to, or are there other factors we haven’t considered preventing them from having children.
Heretic! If we allow them to have their own opinions (on childbearing no less!), then what’s next? Giving them the right to vote?!?
Childbirth seems decidedly not chill. Maybe women just want to chill
There has been strong social support systems in Finland for example, but even there birth rates here have been falling. I can tell you that when you have an aggressive neighbor pushing a war right next door, job prospects are uncertain, inflation is eating away at wages, and social safety nets are being cut or dismantled, it fundamentally changes how people think about having children. That kind of instability and uncertainty about the future makes starting a family feel like too big a risk for many people.
I can also add that Trump is also screwing over the planet with his damn tariffs. This has caused variation in availability and fluctuations in pricing. It’s also continuing greedflation.
We hear about it every day. Now, let’s see how women feel about cranking out more tax payers.
I’m from a Nordic country: we’ve seen a clear birth rate decline since COVID and especially since 2022 with Putin’s invasion and the war.
We got messages from our daycare that they have to make adjustments because there are so few children etc. So it might be several factors, but the uncertain world right now is definitely a huge factor.
Especially since COVID and the war sent inflation and prices spiralling out of control, with food and housing prices soaring, making having children a fiscally irresponsible thing to do.
We had our first child and signed up to buy an apartment right before COVID. Those interest rates were not what I had planned for. Like, quadrupled.
Sweden’s fertility rate hovered around 2 since the 1930s. It picked back up a little in the 50s, but even then the highest value was around 2.4, and it dipped below 2 in 1970. So doom and gloom and all that, but even in the (relatively) good times, they barely went above replacement level, and under it as soon as contraceptive pills became available. Overall they did manage to stay at a higher value than other countries like Germany, so the effort is clearly paying off, but I think this still clearly shows that people just don’t want to have a lot of children in modern, capitalistic society even when the circumstances are good.
Right, I’m just saying that it’s even worse with the events of recent years. It’s even made the news here on several occasions, so doom, gloom, and the effect it has had on the economy, very much has affected things, like I said. I have first hand experience. It’s not been nice.
I imagine that women “feel” the future and while there might not be crisis in nordic countries today, there might be in the coming decades. Our world is changing so rapidly, and humans live for 80 years; can you really say confidently that no major changing in living conditions to the negative are going to happen within your potential child’s lifetime?
Nordic countries are also “highly” educated in the traditional sense, and part of that education has long been hammering home how having children is socially irresponsible in a global context. So, I’d say it’s less about social support or their own immediate environment and more about decades of Western culture and academia actively telling them to not reproduce or risk being seen as, or simply feeling like, bad global participants.
Also, economic security, women’s access to healthcare and early sex education contribute to their ability to follow through on that ideological shift. There’s no religion telling them to procreate but a whole lot of social cues instead telling them it’s selfish and potentially harmful to their own livelihoods, and the planet’s welfare, to do so.
Don’t forget the backsliding civil rights and ecological doom
I’m hung up on the fascism. Call me picky 🤷♂️
Everyone here is being so negative. The rich are far richer and more powerful than ever. Y’all need to practice gratitude.
All the local over the air news stations in my area…
(super cheery voice, on the verge of giddiness) Tonight we learn more from local investigators about the tragic bus accident that left 14 orphans dead and 10 others in critical condition. (almost laughing, kind of giggly voice) So tragic.
But first, who will Mandy pick tonight on The Surrogate Show, find out at 9 p.m. right here on channel 8 WPPV-TV. And stick around to meet the Dachshund that adopted an abandoned baby squirrel and find out what you can do to help support her family.
I want to hear more about the Dachshund and squirrel
I made this diagram a while ago:
Basically, human labor is required to make the economy grow, but to sustain it doesn’t need so much labor.
That’s like when you’re building a house, a lot of working hours goes into building it (10 men for 1000 hours each), but sustaining it can be done by a housewife in her spare time after she took care of children all day. (I’m deeply sorry about the gendered language but i feel it gets the point across more clearly - maintenance requires significantly less work than building something in the first place.)
This leads to the following phenomenon:
As time goes forward, we have more resources available due to better automation (consider farming robots) but at the same time there’s less demand for human labor also due to automation.
This changes the way that society operates significantly. And it also makes it very displeasant for the people who only identify through the labor they produce to have children, because these children will have a difficult time finding meaningful employment.
Note that this phenomenon takes decades to roll out, but that’s also the time in which children would grow up, so it matches on the timescale and that’s why it’s relevant.
PS the word “homemaker” exists. …Just wanted to tell you!
Graphs without axis labels 💀 what do the numbers mean
I’m genuinely curious, where are theses numbers from? Could you please cite the source of your graphs?
it doesn’t seem that they are based on any data, it just illustrates their point
yep
No offense, but it is very misleading. I’m not necessarily disagree what you are saying, but my first impression was that it is based on data, and you know, not just your opinion.
huh i guess i could have presented it in another way, but i’m not sure how exactly.
I just want to add to my description above that the cost of living is actually decreasing if you looked at it from an objective perspective. However, we are humans and don’t look at things from an objective perspective, but from a subjective one instead, i.e. how much can i buy with my money.
And that is becoming less. Because the wages decrease faster and more dramatically than the cost of various products. As a consequence, if you divide the cost of products by our wages, things still seem to get more expensive in relation to our own buying power.
So what is this “objective” perspective? Could you break it down like you broke down the subjective one?
the objective perspective is if you compare prices to food.
historically, food was one of the first type of products to be optimized as much as can be, because people in the 19th and 20th century understood very well how central and important food is for a society. like, for example, under hitler, in nazi germany a whole lot of focus was put on how to produce as much food as possible on the area available. as a consequence, everything about the food production process got optimized as much as possible. the same happened everywhere else in the west at roughly the same time btw, i was just citing nazi germany as an example because there’s extensive literature about that one, but you can probably find fair amounts of literature about the situation in england and the US as well.
anyways, food production got optimized as much as possible early on, in the first half of the 20th century, and as a consequence, food production could not ever be truly improved (from an economics point of view) ever since, because it’s already “maximum performance”. as a consequence, the price of food production (in terms of real resource use and labor use) is already the lowest it could be and did not change in the last 75 years. that is why, from a realist point of view (i.e. one that looks at objective reality such as materials used and labor hours worked) its cost has stayed constant for a long time.
on the other hand, luxury products like TV screens, entertainment, and such had not experienced similar optimization in the first half of the 20th century, instead these things got tackled only much later starting around 1970 when companies realized that there was still a lot of improvement among these products so they continued to invest and develop the production processes for these products. as a consequence, from a realist point of view, the production processes for these products got much more efficient in the last 50 years.
thank you
so you consider the price basket excluding luxuries to be objective?
yeah, more or less, especially food.
I just don’t like children so I chose not to have any
Pretty simple
I just don’t like children, so with the current situation, I choose to have as many as I could.
Pretty simple.
“Tonight, 96 Half-Hours investigates how a Trad Fam Man was ‘disappeared’ by Trump Thugs after inadvertently speaking the quiet part out loud.”
speaking the quiet part out loud.
Specifically, while not being rich.
Evil
I love it!
It didn’t happen for me. I wanted to meet someone I’d like to have them with first. That has happened, but she’s past the child rearing agree.
And that’s fine!
You don’t like children? Wow. Ok. We have WILDLY different takes on this. I love children…with bbq sauce, and a side salad. Really hits the spot!
I prefer the taste of billionaire
Yeah, ladies, what are you up to?
Is parthenogenesis no longer an option?
Wait till people fully realise that retirement isn’t secure. Then the third world retirement patterns will be back in style.
I have no words for this headline. “Breaking news” with nothing else. I mean, wow.
So perfect that all news stories should have this headline right?
More of a title than a headline, really
Like Broken 💔 News?
I prefer Borking News and it’d just be videos of dogs.
It’s not just more people choosing not to have children at all. People who want to have children are having a lot fewer. In my grandparents’ time families would have 10+ and sometimes 20+ children. Now even having 4 kids is considered a lot!
Gee, I wonder why? What could it possibly be?
(/s)
Huge room, huge TV- they’re well off.
Oh thank goodness, I was almost worried about the state of things for the country. Relax guys, the people in this comic are well off because they can fit a couch in a room, all is well. 😌
TV b𝖾ing 𝖾xp𝖾nsiv𝖾 is an outdat𝖾d m𝖾ntality. Early TVs w𝖾r𝖾 incr𝖾dibly 𝖾xp𝖾nsiv𝖾, and boom𝖾rs had to pay d𝖾arly for th𝖾ir 𝖾nt𝖾rtainm𝖾nt, but that isn’t the cas𝖾 any mor𝖾.
R𝖾gardl𝖾ss, poor p𝖾opl𝖾, w𝖾ll-off p𝖾ople, and p𝖾ople in comics ar𝖾 allow𝖾d to choos𝖾 to buy a TV.Well, as long as you are ok with a TV that spies on you, annoys you and blast you with adds. Also it will stop getting security updates and have to be trashed when planned obsolecence kicks in.
I find that TV backlights just don’t last. Most flat panels made in the last ten years I’ve seen have at least some dead areas of backlighting.
Dude, it’s a TV. No one forces you to use “smart” features at all.
If you want to use the product, there’s a computer built into it you can’t shut down while using the TV, that will connect to any open Wi-Fi it finds. They’re insidious.
