Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don’t think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It’s just been smoke and mirrors.
Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don’t think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It’s just been smoke and mirrors.
What comments are you referring to? Most of this thread is just people saying they don’t want a kids and a few blaming it on economic conditions.
“economic conditions”. its anti factual, there is no reason to believe it whatsoever. you literally cannot pay women to have kids countries have tried. in the richest countries in the world population rates decline. places with free healthcare and child care and all the bullshit people lie and say will make people have kids. population rates go down when women have more rights and education. thats it. mad about that? awesome youre mad about women having more rights. its not “economic conditions” thats just a misogynistic idea that if you have a couple of thousand dollars more a month you would be able to live out your fantasy of being able to afford having women as property again. women wont have 2.5 kids because half of women halving 3 kids is A SHIT TON OF KIDS AND WOMEN WANT LIVES. they do not want to rip their vaginas 2-3 times. they dont want to have a kid with a man who will expect backrubs and blowjobs for doing 10% of the work they do and wear feminist dad shirts. if you dont have a society that coerces women into to having children SHOCKER they dont have children. theres no shortage of people in the world. it doesnt fucking matter what so ever that first worlders are having less kids. it literally should not be a concern for anyone who calls themself a leftist yall on this issue are indistinguishable from liberals. brown people around the world are having plenty of kids. poor people around the world are having plenty of kids. why? how can that be when “only rich people can have kids”. immigrants who move to the first world have FAR more kids. there is non population “problem” none at all. UNLESS you are mad that there are less white children, thats the only reason you as a “leftist” would be mad about first worlders having less kids. you can be mad at worse economic condition in the first world sure, but you dont need to lie and claim that “economic conditions” being BAD makes people have less kids. if youre mad about that youre JUST mad that women have rights, thats it. its the opposite of the truth, and its a hexbear mantra. “people are too poor to have kids in america” theres no reason to believe that the more money women have the LESS kids they choose to have. youre just getting amd at WOMEN CHOICES and then BLAMING THE ECONOMY like if you just had a bit more money women will stop being dumb and give you children. its reactionary, anti-materialist misogynistic, and i consider it a white supremacist dog whistle. AND ITS EVERYWHERE ON HEXBEAR. its not just this thread, this thread is the ten thousandth straw. there is a post like this EVERY TWO DAYS. i swear they are increasing, i got into it with someone saying that people in norway weren’t having kids because of “economic issues” and that a 200 dollar a month difference would make people choose to have more kids. its THE MOST reactionary thing about this entire site and it actually makes me consider leaving almost regularly lately. the hitler detector have being going off like crazy.
Less pirates means more global warming, so if you are against global warming, you are supporting killing innocent sailors.
But seriously, the reason is that for subsistence farmers more kids meant more available labour and it increased their quality of life. That was the primary reason for high birth rates. For industrial/office/service workers more kids inevitably mean a lower quality of life, and increasing atomization of society and economic troubles just make this fall sharper. In fact, you can look at historical data and see that urban birth rates were always god awful (usually even lower than present-day) and it was rural areas that provided cities with people. With urbanization and replacing subsistence farming with industrial farming this source has been destroyed. The right wing can destroy women’s rights, but it will not bring birth rates back. In fact, in will result in less available labour for industry and fall in the quality of life, which will result in lower birth rates.
So I actually have agree with you, people blaming it on people being “too poor” are being reductive. I do think there’s economic factors at play here but I think it’s more complicated than just “too poor”.
I would point out, birth rates are declining in most of the world, this isn’t purely a rich developed white country thing, and there are some worrying societal implications to that. And yes educated women with more rights have less kids and that’s a good thing, but I do also think there is a phenomenon of women who want children but find they can’t for a variety of social and economic reasons in the modern world and I think that’s also a bad thing.
I would get more into this but it’s early and I’m having a hard time organizing my thoughts right now.
Yes, figuring out how to keep the global population sustained is eventually going to be a problem once (if, given capitalism) all developing countries fully industrialize and nowhere has a high birth rate.
Educated women work instead of having kids because two incomes is almost required at this point and having kids ruins career prospects. If it were somehow possible to have kids and maintain a job, e.g. by the spouse taking on an appropriate and equal amount of responsibility, or with free and government-funded daycare, women would probably be more likely (but not certain) to have kids. This can be seen in the 1970s in the GDR, where birth rates increased (at least temporarily) when free daycare was introduced. Also, employers need to give more vacation time all around so parents are not disproportionately taking vacation time and putting their careers at a disadvantage. This is actually, in combination with the fact that women are expected to do most of the parenting, a large contributor to the wage gap; Employers see women as a liability and pass over them for promotions and such because they believe they will have children and miss work, regardless of the truth of that for any individual.
However, this doesn’t mean people will have many kids if circumstances allow, just that it would be more likely that a couple would have kids at all. As the other user mentioned, three kids is a lot.
TL;DR Economic conditions matter when having a kid only when the women are educated and required to be in the workforce but parenting is not accommodated by employers or governments (in non-financial ways). In countries where women are not expected to join the workforce, economic conditions and government policy have less influence.
Yeah, I have found myself using “too poor” as a shorthand for “no social support of any kind” which is the more general cause.
And even then, it’s only a problem insofar as people are being denied choices. Overall population is only a problem for bourgeois economics, and even then it’s probably not a top-5 problem.
I think if people had adequate social support and stability (in a hypothetical socialism or communism) they would tend to have kids at around the replacement rate, and if they didn’t it would balance itself out over a few centuries.
There is a possibility that it would balance itself by returning to traditionalist agrarian society, which wouldn’t be good.
IDK I could imagine some kind of solarpunk communism 300 years from now with world population that gradually stabilized at 500 million or something. Or a high-tech spacefaring star-trek communism also with 500 million. Or either of those with 20 billion population. I just think population is a relatively small factor compared to all of the rest of economic and social organization.
It is a very important factor. After all, all economic value come from labour, not to mention economy of scale and division of labour, which are more efficient with higher population. I really doubt you can get space-faring civilization with 500 million people, satellites and unmanned exploration would be its limit at best.
Also, I fear a scenario, where the world collapses back into agrarian traditionalism, because it is the only known way to sustain population and all the other societies just decline into irrelevance, and then we get another cycle of class society, until we finally manage to solve this problem.
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Birth rates are declining in the developing word too, this isn’t an exclusively white first world thing.
Thank you for this post, this is the take to read!
Do you have any articles or books I could look into about materialist and feminist analysis of procreation/birth rates? I know it’s a pretty central subject in feminism of course, but I want to understand this specific issue a little better because I honestly did believe the idea that “give families a better environment and they’ll choose to have kids” but you definitely have some good points that make me question it.
I guess my main issue is, you say we shouldn’t be concerned as leftists because only white birth rates and declining. And I don’t really care about white birth rates, but isn’t the trend that happens with white people going to happen with PoC in the future, should systemic racism be dismantled? Why shouldn’t we expect that if FALGSC came about in 100 years and there was no systemic racism, PoC would also have pretty low birth rates? Which would, at some point, become an actual problem. And not one that should ever be solved by limiting women’s rights.
But just to be clear, you’re right in that this is not an immediate concern. Climate change and global war are orders of magnitude more threatening, and there is no shortage of people being born at this moment.