Disgusting reporting when compared to ausgovs social media ban. This is good, tech companies shouldn’t be able to peddle emotional dependence on opaque and erratic chatbots.
Disgusting reporting when compared to ausgovs social media ban. This is good, tech companies shouldn’t be able to peddle emotional dependence on opaque and erratic chatbots.
I don’t even think it’s caused by anything inherently negative. In developed societies having children has become a burden, they are a cost that weighs you down for 18 years. In previously undeveloped societies children were an addition to your home’s collective labour pool and made things easier rather than harder.
In my opinion until we address this change we’re not getting positive birthrates in developed societies but nobody wants to consider that people weren’t just having kids because procreating is magical and for the joy of simply having kids. I argue that this was a convenient myth created by religion to coverup and justify what people were really doing - having kids for the personal gain. Instead of admitting this, people could explain their actions with the convenient mythology built by religious procreation and marriage culture.
I would consider the state not adequately supporting reproduction to be for all intents and purposes inherently negative
Yeah maybe.
If I’m right about this whole economic incentive thing then the state could calculate what it costs for a family to support a child for 18 years vs what a member of the population contributes to society and the state.
If the contribution outweighs the cost, the state could just pay for the entire cost of the child for those 18 years.
If the birthrate decline is economically motivated, this would resolve the problem.
I don’t think states ultimately have much of a choice in the end, because as more countries get more developed this issue will spread and immigration will no longer be a solution, so it’s basically choosing between support or civilizations imploding from population decline.
Only if they realise that’s the measure they have to take to solve it. There’s a strong chance they take every single other possible measure first before the one that costs money and even then I’m not convinced they’ll even try it.
interesting take
The material economic relations in the household undergo a very obvious change between an undeveloped society and a developed one.
It’s exceptionally obvious to me that kids in pre-industrial revolution Britain (and during the revolution itself) were a benefit to a household. Sending the kids to work at the coal mine was bringing in money to the house. More kids meant more money. The same can be said of agricultural society before that, more kids working the farm meant more output and less work.
You see people openly state that their reasons for not having kids today are “because I like my free time” and “I don’t want the responsibility” and stuff like that. These reasons are economic. We even see anti-child movements grow as people push back against the mindset that having kids is virtuous and should be done for the sake of how enriching it is, why? Because people are made to feel bad by those former mythologies now that they don’t gain benefits from having children. So they push back. This I also believe contributes to the child-hate we now see in certain communities. It’s a pushback against cultures of pro-procreation because people feel it’s economically harmful to themselves and the free time in their lives. They may not consciously admit it because doing so requires some deep introspection but it’s a major driving force within.
This is not advocacy for a return to child labour. I don’t support that. I’m simply explaining how changing these economic relations has had an influence on all of this.
GOOD post
Well, there’s also the fact that many children didn’t survive childhood. Not only were children an economic investment, they were also an investment that came with risk: disease or famine or war or genetic lottery might kill them first. Those former “be fruitful and multiply” mythologies were developed in material conditions where a child’s survival to adulthood wasn’t guaranteed.
i think that’s less correct for pre-industrial. i forget the name of the term but there was something where the extra labor cancelled out the extra mouth to feed because of farming outputs. iirc this was an explanation for population trends 300+ years ago.
but hey, what if we did child labor but it was FPV drone versions of all those chore simulator videogames?
why do you think it is interesting?
I mean speaking from a biology stand point. Birthrates should reach a equilibrium at some point. People are not separate from nature. I feel like if its not as urgent people are just not going to have as many kids as quickly let alone material conditions like you pointed to. But there will always be a point where it should plateau. Maybe some various ups and downs here and there.
I’ve always been fascinated about obsession on birthrates because of this. We are having to many kids. Now we are not having enough. Then you have racism and all the other shit in there. Capitalism demanding new workers to break. Its just not natural. Hell I think its obvious that not everyone is supposed to have kids (from a naturally inclined perspective, not forced or cause they are bad at it)
We are social creatures. We are supposed to live in groups. I love children for example. But I never want one coming out of my body. It would of been super unhealthy if I had caved to pressure when I thought I had to birth children to take care of them.
When you think of various natural tendencies from the lens of group dynamics. People start to make more sense.