When “there is no such thing as society,” but “it takes a village” to raise children, it’s obvious that many choose to simply not have children. There is also a correlation between improving material conditions and lower birth rates, but that only partially explains the current situation in the west.
I learned something interesting about the average gap between children in different mammal species recently. Great apes, I think it was orangutans specifically, have babies roughly eight years apart, as that’s how long it takes for an orangutan to mature enough to not need constant care. This being while orangutan babies are more mature and capable at birth than human babies. Whereas in hunter-gatherer human communities the gap is more like four years, not because a four year old is mature enough for the mother to have time to care for another infant, but because child rearing is a communal responsiblity; she has help. In the US this gap has been reduced even further to just two years, even though the average mother in the US has essentially no help with domestic labour and likely has to participate in wage labour as well.
Damn, the comments here! So much fedora-tipping…
Maybe it’s capitalism or maybe women just don’t want to spend their best years constantly pregnant and breastfeeding, no way to know I guess if you don’t talk to them
I’m not sure what this is in response to exactly. Comments on the youtube video? I’m sure some women don’t want to go through pregnancy throughout all of human history and they should have the right not to, wherever possible. But plenty do want to have kids of their own now and historically (in spite of the fact pregnancy can be a difficult and at times dangerous thing to go through), and it’s not as though all of them need to for a society to keep going anyway. And when it comes to the point that knfrmity raised about “takes a village”, it’s probably better to have some people who aren’t raising children of their own, but are nevertheless helping raise other people’s children as “part of the village.”
The question here is what has changed compared to certain numbers in the past. If capitalism is not a factor, what is the factor? Or are you saying the difference is made up?
I’m also just a little weirded out by this wording:
spend their best years
I would define a person’s best years as the years they are the happiest about, not a range set from the outside. When you turn 30, or 40, or 50, you aren’t in decline now and it’s all downhill from there. That would be a nihilistic, overly biological, depressing view of life. And one that syncs up rather uncomfortably with an objectified view of women…
I was thinking about this comment and thread a bit earlier and I think while it def has a good point, some of it is even more straightforward than that; western capitalism/empire went to great lengths to isolate and individualize because that makes it harder for people to organize and see eye to eye, makes them easier to exploit, etc., including segmenting on gender. That means many of the connections that a person might make in a “normal” (cooperative) society just from knowing other people and working (or playing) with them closely in the day to day, are just… not there. Which of course is going to include romantic connections too. Online dating seems to have tried to answer this problem by giving you a wider search range to compensate for how splintered people are and it got captured by gamified profiteering, and on top of that, in a place like the US for example, the splintering seems to have gotten progressively worse over time, diminishing any gains from an expanded search range.
So there is the factor of whether people can afford to have kids, have the time to, have any desire to, but there’s also the step of them even getting into a lasting relationship where that convo might come up, in the first place. The capitalists want to have their cake and eat it too; they want a populace that is so splintered it poses no threat to them, yet also somehow falls in love with each other and makes babies for the factory heaving, but the one is contradictory to the other.
Oh in the American Dystopia they’ve abandoned the ‘love each other’ part. They still pay lip-service to the notion of loving families but absolutely no maintenance is put into it.
Rather they attack all forms of birth control such that if one uses sex to cope with the dystopian conditions, at all, there’s a likelihood you will be saddled with the economic burden of children. Doesn’t matter if it was a one-night-stand or if neither party is rationally old enough to be effective parents… hell traumatized kids may be even less effective at forming effective resistance to their power.
Honestly, that’s not enough for replacement, let alone population growth, and they know it. I’m certain they’re going to resort to even more dystopian methods as they have demonstrated not just a lack of care for Human decency but active contempt for the concept.
There is also the residual school systems that secretly continues after 1997 and that are a series of slave camps, human experimentation camps, and death camps to waste so much taxpayer money on doctrine of child hatred to the level that that children and grandchildren of the fake school survivors do not understand the concept of family love. The European immigrants are now complaining about family violence of aboriginal people in North America because they magically ‘forget’ that they are responsible for the savage indoctrination in the fake schools and because they somehow cannot comprehend the fact that the European immigrants themselves are assassinating any Indigenous first nation people who tried to return the universal culture of child love.
It’s a cold one
It will be a challenge of the century to see if socialism can fix this crisis where capitalism clearly hasn’t.
I certainly hope that, as China improves living, working, and social conditions, that birth rates rise back up to replacement rates or higher. That would cement the superiority of socialism and prepare the world for the population required to expand into space across the solar system.
Colonizing other planets is way, way, way beyond our current abilities. It would be easier to colonize the ocean first, because at least that has water and a biosphere, or even Antarctica, because at least that has breathable air. Counting on flight to another planet is a bad idea: it’s infinitely harder than fixing things at home.
I don’t know where y’all get the idea that I want humans to escape from Earth. That would be incredibly stupid.
We need to go to space for resources to increase living standards at home and avoid further ecological destruction. For instance, the only good sources of helium-3 (an excellent fuel for fusion) is mining from the moon or gas collecting from gas giants. Nothing is alive in space, so there aren’t downsides to mining there like there is on Earth. Socialism is also the only way to prevent space resources from only bulking Jeff Bezos’ (or his childrens’) pockets.
I, for one, do not think socialism means forever stalling at 2030s-era tech.
It’s just a matter of priorities. In order to build a spaceship and get it out of the atmosphere, you have to do a colossal amount of ecological damage, which is the last thing we can afford right now. Space ships are made with lots of lithium and cobalt and fun stuff like that.
I’m not saying forever, I’m saying that we’re in the ER for internal bleeding and you’re talking about doing an operation to fix our scoliosis.
Getting large numbers of people into space will be prohibitive for a long time. It’s more important right now to focus on the problems of the here and now. Build international socialism and improve habitability of the world.
none of that stuff requires high birth rates btw.
Eh, it’s a matter of investment into the technologies required for bulk space transport. Infrastructure like space railguns (basically a really long Hyperloop section that points towards the sky to shoot payloads into space) are feasible today (and China is researching them already: https://newatlas.com/space/china-railgun-spacecraft-orbit/ ), and more out-there ideas like space elevators are a matter of time. In order to reach full communism without strip mining the entire Earth, getting resources from lifeless space is essential. That will require lots of people in space.
The interesting thing to see at this time is if China can show another way to sustainable population management. Capitalist countries seem intent on shrinking their overworked populations into nothingness. South Korea’s birth rates have only decreased further, even as their population keeps shrinking.
Space elevators are likely not feasible. Off-planet mining would probably be a better fit for autonomous robots as long as weight is a factor in sending things to space. Plus, you won’t get people to space with a railgun.
As for the question of population maintenance, it’s not necessarily a crisis in itself. One thing is for sure, though: any policy viewing women as docile broodmares or encouraging more pregnancy without a comprehensive and clear analysis of the whole situation and the input of educated women will not succeed. If any country can successfully encourage more births it would probably be a socialist one. The GDR had relatively good policies for its time, for example.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
