US Births Dip To 30-Year Low (npr.org) 571
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The birthrate fell for nearly every group of women of reproductive age in the U.S. in 2017, reflecting a sharp drop that saw the fewest newborns since 1978, according to a new report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There were 3,853,472 births in the U.S. in 2017 -- "down 2 percent from 2016 and the lowest number in 30 years," the CDC said. The general fertility rate sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44 -- a 3 percent drop from 2016, the CDC said in its tally of provisional data for the year. The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate -- the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers. "The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971," according to the report from CDC's National Center for Health Statistics. "The decline in the rate from 2016 to 2017 was the largest single-year decline since 2010," the CDC said. The 2017 numbers also represent a 10-year fall from 2007, when the U.S. finally broke its post-World War baby boom record, with more than 4.3 million births.
Feminism at work (Score:4, Funny)
I, for one, welcome our new sexless, soulless, joyless Feminist overlords.
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
nah, most feminists have children, 86% of women do. they're just not having more than 2, instead about 1.86 kids on average. That's not enough to keep a population growing.
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Does the population need to grow? We keep hearing about how robots are going to take over manufacturing and agriculture and AI will take over service industries, that there will be fewer jobs for humans. Maybe America doesn't need to grow further, but has instead reached a technological level where the machines can sustain our standard of living while we reach a more sustainable population equilibrium with nature.
Oh, wait, the underclasses will breed like rabbits and immigrants will flood our country because we're rich. Fuck.
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People having children boosts the economy if the parents have jobs. They need to spend money on clothes, household items, toys, gifts and food. Many places have now become ghost towns because so many families have moved out.
The trouble is everyone moves to where the jobs are, and the jobs move to where everyone is. Many people won't take the risk of moving to a one company town for job security reasons.
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Modern economies are based on continual exponential growth. From the stock market to pension plans, they all depend on it.
If your population doesn't grow, that's probably not going to happen. And yeah, it has to end sometime, but the western countries are all desperately trying to stave off the day of reckoning, mostly with very open immigration policies and paying people to have kids.
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What you probably consider growth IS exponential growth.
How much do you think the economy should grow every year? 10%? 1%? 0.1%? Those are all exponential growth.
Financial growth and population growth don't have to be linked, but they generally are in a modern economy. People make and buy more things as more products are produced, especially if you can play tricks like making things wear out faster, but the whole thing looks a lot better if you've got more people too. It's easy to find a historical GD
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Naa, that would be rational, fact-based and forward-thinking. Cannot have that, must make America Great Again!
Re: Feminism at work (Score:3)
But how would that maximize short-term profits for the oligarchy?
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For that to work, you'd have shoot all the people that only want to increase their wealth by expansion of the economy.
Nope. I know primitive brains have a deep knee-jerk reflex to reach for violence, but given that 99% are not the 1%, you only need to come up with a solution that actually works and implement it. As much as I derided BitCoin in the past, and still think it's deeply flawed, I do respect how it started from one man and eventually made a wave that went across the word.
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Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe the ecahhhhnamy needs to be restructured so it can function even without continuous growth, sprawl, and environmental depredation.
It's not the economy that's the problem, it's our approach to aging and retirement. Because the working population supports the retirees, we need to maintain the ratio of workers to retirees above one, preferably well above.
If we can stave this problem off for two or three decades, I think automation will solve it. Or, rather, automation will produce a different problem, where we need very few workers. Total production will be massively higher (and can continue growing unboundedly) so we'll have plenty, we'll just need to distribute it differently.
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Re:Feminism at work (Score:4, Funny)
Re: Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Look, I know the MBAs sold us out. They shipped half the jobs in the software industry to India. Then lied to Congress so they could import hundreds of thousands of Indian indentured workers to drive down wages for the remaining domestic software jobs.
So definitely, let's see the rich private school Progressive capitalists as enemies of the people. But we don't need to be racist towards our Indian brethren. Have you never even once met a *nice* Indian person? I have, many times. They, like us, are but pawns in a bigger game.
Re: Feminism at work (Score:5, Funny)
But we don't need to be racist towards our Indian brethren.
A banker, a worker, an immigrant and a politician are sitting around a table with 10 cookies on it. Without warning the banker grabs 9 cookies and shoves them all in his mouth. Everybody looks perplexed and is silent for a second, then the politician leans over to the worker and says "Watch out, that immigrant is eyeing your cookie".
Re: Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Feminism at work (Score:4, Interesting)
This is natural.
Maybe so, but "natural" is not the same as "good" or "desirable". The issue isn't solely one of immigrants not wanting to integrate; it becomes a much larger issue when a society no longer encourages them to do so.
As for the US, the first batch of adult immigrants struggle to survive here. Everything is unfamiliar and different from what they adapted to over a lifetime. ... So they collect and congregate and identify. ... But the locally born children or grandchildren of the immigrants end up totally integrating.
And this isn't inherently true either. My parents immigrated with me when I was a child. From day one they took to the new life and integrated into the community. Meanwhile we had relatives who had moved to the country 15 years earlier and had children my age who were born here; their children spoke English almost as poorly as I did because they had been completely isolated in an immigrant community and raised to speak "our language". I also had friends growing up who, despite being born here, mainly sought out friends and business relationships with people of the same ancestry, and were far more passionate about "the old country" than I was, or than their parents were.
We've also seen - repeatedly - cases of Islamic terrorists who were born in a western countries to well integrated moderate parents, and then self-segragated themselves later on in life.
It's complicated.
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Feminism at work (Score:4, Insightful)
You can, and a lot of people try. It is just hugely unethical and has spawned the most evil movements the human race has ever seen. (Organized Religion, Fascism, etc.)
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No, I do not. While they called themselves "communism", they actually fall under fascism in most respects that matter. The funny thing here is how utterly clueless you are. But I guess you just want to push some demented propaganda.
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, it doesn't matter if they were "really" communist or not, you left them out. They were certainly atheists, so maybe you should have called them "organized atheism".
Second, we could play the same "Are they really X?" game with religion. The people who did the worst atrocities in the Crusades, as with Islam extremists today, often clearly violated the teaching of the leaders in whose name they claim to be acting. So either those people don't count as "organized religion", because they weren't "really" Christians / Muslims / whatever; or, Stalin and Pol Pot and Mao do count as "communists" (and "atheists"), because whatever Marx would have thought of them, they did see themselves as trying to follow his teaching.
You can't have it both ways: You can't tar me with the Crusades without accepting the black mark of the Killing Fields.
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Feminism at work (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
Feminism is about equal opertunity, true feminists won't mind chivalry but nor will they expect it where a feminazi would want both in their hypocritical mind.
Also I don't see what your 'social family duties' have to do with this, are you advocating that women should be pressured into marriage commitments and the traditional 'wife' role? You feel like you missed something that required giving women less choice, and more societal pressure?
From someone who has mentored exemplary young women in a professional environment, I really have no words for that if so. Women can balance work and life goals such as a family on their own terms with a partner, not a caretaker as some groups would advocate.
Re:Feminism at work (Score:4, Informative)
How do you know "cohabitation rate in Quebec is very high"? I was never able to find any statistics on this
Really? You must not have looked hard.
https://www.statcan.gc.ca/tabl... [statcan.gc.ca]
Re:Feminism at work (Score:5, Insightful)
No one is obligated to breed kids for the good of the country. If women want to work, eat, pray, love whatever, it's their business -- you can't choose others' path in life for them.
That s correct. One of the oddest things about this whole matter though is that in all of the stories about the falling birth rate, the focus is very gynocentric.
Which is a little odd - if you don't consider the other half of the equation, you don't get the whole picture.
The only time we get any mention of the male aspect of this birth issue is attack pieces on this so-called MGTOW movement, men who have dropped out of the relationship game. And as passive avoidance, it is becoming a problem.
I guess you might consider "types' of men involved. The divorced and now indigent males who are no longer attractive as support providers, the traditional nerds and otherwise males unattractive to women come to mind.
But there is a new sub-group of normal men who have simply chosen to opt out of relationships because it offers benefits like less financial drain, avoidance of the divorce trap, and greater overall freedom.
Coupled with the new demographic in Universities of female to male ratio, largely in favor of the females, and still growing, there are a lot of well educated women in high paying jobs that simply cannot find a male that measures up to their standards. They aren't freezing their eggs because there are men lined up to mate with them. A lot of ladies, and a much smaller pool of acceptable men.
I suppose the issue of men choosing to remain childless and out of relationships with women doesn't fit the narrative, but not addressing it at all except in hit pieces describing these men alternately as selfish jerks and pathetic weasels isn't helping the women's cause.
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That s correct. One of the oddest things about this whole matter though is that in all of the stories about the falling birth rate, the focus is very gynocentric.
Which is a little odd - if you don't consider the other half of the equation, you don't get the whole picture.
That's because the women are the ones who actually give birth. They're also the ones who decide whether or not to have a child the vast majority of the time. It's not like women actually need to be in a long-term relationship to get pregnant. Heck, sperm donors mean she doesn't even have to have sex.
And yet - here we are. Seems like there is absolutely no problem at all, men have not one thing to do with the issue, and women can take care of all of this with no issues whatsoever. http://www.bbc.com/news/health... [bbc.com] . Seems some places are having trouble getting donors. Perhaps this low birth rate is fake news.
And as passive avoidance, it is becoming a problem.
Citation required.
Okay, let us start. You can get an inkling of the problem just by DDG'ing "Where have all the good men gone?" one of the best links is http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem... [dailymail.co.uk]
https://www.theglobean [theglobeandmail.com]
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A logical thought. The problem is in human reproduction is most often not reliant on logic but inebriation and laziness. The smarter make the logical choice and the dumber just 'hmm', 'well', what can you say but drink and fuck, birth control, well, beer is for drinking and not for thinking.
With a declining birth rate I would be more interested in the association with IQ, as well as age of reproduction and the long term forecast for achieving an idiocracy https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] or a parenting li
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Sow cut you're bawls of, write know.
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If feminists didn't want sex and children then why are they so concerned with birth control, sexual liberation, parental leave etc?
Re: Feminism at work (Score:2, Insightful)
If you hurl enough sophomoric insults, *someday* a feminist will give you a kiss. Keep trying!
But don't waste too much time on it - you've still got a lot of capitalist boots to lick today.
Re: The Trump Effect (Score:2, Funny)
Naw brohamley, feminists just love having sex. Kinda like Quakers love to drink, environmentalists love pollution, and Orthodox Jews just can't get enough pork.
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Feminists normally like to have sex, just on their terms, not when/how men tell them to. I can't say that I blame them.
Re: The Trump Effect (Score:2)
Feminism is a weapon of memetic warfare. All these NGOs with endless millions to spend on Feminist propaganda... just where do they get all that money?
America funds Falun Gong to weaken Chinese culture. China funds Feminism to weaken American culture. Sounds plausible, at least.
Re: Feminism at work (Score:2)
Because I lived in the great sewer of humanity that is San Francisco for over a decade.
Re: Yes, exactly. (Score:3)
"Future societies will most likely pay women to be mothers."
Interesting. So you believe in the future we will return to the traditional working father and stay at home mother model of parenthood. Personally I'd bet more on Confucian extended family model - but who knows!
Want us to have kids (Score:3)
To be honest the solution right now isn't to pay us more, it's to bring in more labor from overseas. It's hard to argue with that since it's working. It just sucks if you're a member of the working class.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Want us to have kids (Score:5, Insightful)
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And better education, including tertiary education that doesn't require taking on a massive debt load.
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Re:Want us to have kids (Score:5, Interesting)
Yep. Reasonable working hours, parental leave, sick/personal days, vaca time, so people actually have TIME to care for their families.
Here in Norway we have all that in abundance and we still are below reproduction rates. The primary reason is that we start having children later, in the last 30 years the average age of first motherhood has risen from 25 to 29 years old. It's got nothing to do with teaching kids about condoms and such, teen pregnancies haven't been statistically significant in ages. Through the pill and legalized abortion women generally have children when they want to have children and no sooner, the change is intentional.
One of the reasons is modern day equality, apart from some immigrants no Norwegian woman thinks housewife is a career or want to settle for less than men but pregnancy and the first months of a child's life can't be split 50-50. So most women want to be done with their education and have an established job before they start a family. And with their economic independence it's not about "catching" a man and rushing to get the ring on his finger and pop out a kid so he's stuck and even then divorce and finding a new partner is not the scandal it used to be.
The effect of this is that even established couples are living out their responsibility-free lives for years until the woman is approaching thirty and the biological clock starts ticking, because once it starts it's diapers, babysitters and wailing toddlers for the next five years. And most typically stop at two, some have three but almost never four or more because you start running into either time or money constraints. Like if the woman is going back to work as most do then three is a bundle on top of two working parents, if she (sorry, it's usually she) does part time or stay-at-home then the money runs short.
Not like the kids go hungry or freezing short, but like "we can't afford to let you participate in the things other kids do" short. It's hard not unintentionally acting like a dick when it's loose change for your two high income, one kid family while to a single income, three kid family it's an expense they can't afford on a really tight budget. And admitting you're poor well that's still a taboo, we've gotten rid of a lot of other social taboos but that one still hurts. And if you get like five kids, you're pretty much guaranteed to end up there these days.
Re:Want us to have kids (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Want us to have kids (Score:5, Informative)
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It's more basic and universal. In third world countries more kids means more profit as you get "free" labor. In first world countries there is absolutely no labor or financial incentive and the drain is huge (day care, food, clothing, doctor bills, etc.). Every single country that moves towards a first world system sees their birth rates drop. Not a bad thing seeing as how the alternative would really screw the world.
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Incidentally, there was an early 20th-century German eugenics program that paid cash bonuses to college graduates who had children. The theory was that their offspring would be genetically superior to that of the lower classes. I'm skeptical that holds up, but it might have made sense for other reasons.
Today in the USA there are many subsidies for having children (tax breaks, increased welfare/food stamp benefits, child healthcare programs). IMO the most effective subsidy would be on hospital childbirth cos
Re:Want us to have kids (Score:5, Insightful)
It is not about money. At some time, a society just reaches a state where it does not expand anymore and instead shrinks down slowly to a sane size. Most of the west is already there or getting there fast. It is not really a problem, you just need to manage this instead of ignoring it and sticking to the old recipes. Of course, the leadership of some countries is less well equipped to do that...
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I, unlike you, have access to more sources of information than just this article. It is not about money. That is just an agenda pushed by some people that want to obscure the real thing that is going on.
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Don't be selfish. Get with it and have a family.
Quite a bit of hard scientific data indicates that the ones having those children are the selfish ones and they are destroying the planet.
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Or, perhaps, allow people from other countries to move to the USA ... Like, Syrians and other people living in war-torn areas.
Having Children is Expensive nowadays (Score:5, Insightful)
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State/city college is cheap -- in NY, CUNY/SUNY are great and basically free if family income is less than $120,000/yr. Ivy-league schools are better for grad/pre-professional (i.e. law/med school) anyway, not for undergrad.
This goes for many states with a good public uni system -- NY, NJ, PA, Maryland, CA, MA.
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An easy way to improve employment opportunities is to take a large number of people out of the workforce. Given all the time it takes to raise children, perhaps some people who are working could rear children instead. Then, the remaining workers would have employers competing for workers by raising their wages. The increased wages could cover the cost of one's reproductive partner raising a child rather than working.
Gentlemen, I present to you: Domestics!
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Or just encourage part-time work for one or both parents. 30 hr a week can be more easily be made to coincide with time kids spend in school/pre-school/kindergarten.
National insurance, lower the fixed costs of employment benefits by socializing them, require employers to provide parental/vacation leave.
Re:Having Children is Expensive nowadays (Score:4, Insightful)
This should be higher voted. Women entering the workforce in droves is in large part why wages have stagnated since the 60s & 70s. It's plain old supply and demand, available labor surged so rates went down. Add the glut of "undocumented workers" and all combined you've just solved why it takes a dual-income family to raise kids anymore if you don't want to be raising them in poverty.
Re:Having Children is Expensive nowadays (Score:4, Informative)
If you want to send the kid to college to be a part of the future, else you're all but assuring them knee-capped employment possibilities. There's a higher expectation overall for parenting, especially for middle income Americans that plan this out. Uneducated folk in the lower income brackets however will still reproduce irresponsibly though.
Why college? Send them to trade school to become a welder, electrician, AMT, etc. With enough time in and skill, any of those jobs can lead to six-figure incomes without the debt load of a 4 year degree. This is an especially attractive option for children who have natural intelligence but are more mechanically inclined or like to tinker/build things as opposed to being book smart. Not everyone is built for college.
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And nobody cares if a welder is over 40.
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30-Year Low since 1978 (Score:3)
Wellcome to 2008!
BTW, the original article has been edited to correct the date yo 1987.
Good (Score:2, Insightful)
There are already too many people on the world. Having less would be a good thing.
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So what human population size is the objectively perfectly ideal size? If we reach that size, are you sure noone will then argue that it should be a different size?
This seems as pointless as saying 'things should be different' with no explanation.
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So what human population size is the objectively perfectly ideal size?
One that is sustainable. I don't know the exact number, but I'm pretty sure we're at least an order of magnitude too high right now.
If we reach that size, are you sure noone will then argue that it should be a different size?
Oh, I'm sure they will argue.
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One that is sustainable. I don't know the exact number, but I'm pretty sure we're at least an order of magnitude too high right now.
You really would have been better off ending at "I don't know."
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There are plenty of signs that our current population is too high for sustainability. We're running out of resources, including water, topsoil, phosphates, fuels, and we're creating way too much CO2 to name just a handful of obvious things.
I don't think anybody knows the "perfect" number (which would obviously depend on a lot on technology), but it's fairly obvious that we've already overshot it. There's certainly no harm in going back a bit.
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but it's fairly obvious that we've already overshot it.
It's not.
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It's not.
It is.
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We're running out of......fuels
Really?
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Yes, really.
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Killing/letting die off and not replacing 293 million people seems like an unsustainable drop.
Why unsustainable ? It's been that low before.
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Very obviously so. There are a lot of irrational nay-sayers on this very idea though. These are the people that want to stick to the human race expanding against all evidence that it is not a good idea, until it starts to rot away like a bacterial colony that has grown too far. There are those that say this has already started...
Crazy Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
In developed countries we've seen the birth rate decline over the last several decades. I suggest that young people are reacting to negative conditions for having kids, by having less kids. Student debt, declining real wages, the rising cost of housing, expensive medical insurance, politics, religion shown to be empty, cultural Marxism; all are perceived by the primitive layers of our brains as the kind of resource scarcity and adverse social conditions that make having kids unwise.
That even today's relatively poor people have more goods and better health care than the rich did a hundred years ago is irrelevant: the reptile layers of our brain translate our collective worry and disconnection into less offspring.
This is positive news, because the birth rate should rise if conditions improve. I ascribe the declining prosperity of recent decades to declining energy returned for energy invested in the extraction of fossil fuels, an effect ameliorated somewhat by automation's productivity increases. Things will continue to get worse until the exponential increase in cheap solar and wind energy overwhelms the decrease in the value of fossil energy; which should happen in the next few years. Once this happens, everyone will start getting wealthier fast, as increasing energy and automation will improve people's lifestyles in tandem.
Cheapening energy means financial security for the young, which leads to affordable housing, health care, food security, reduced conflict and increased social cohesion. Under these conditions, the birth rate will rise.
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Things will continue to get worse until the exponential increase in cheap solar and wind energy overwhelms the decrease in the value of fossil energy; which should happen in the next few years
Solar is still insignificant on a global scale, especially where it concerns transportation fuels. Tesla is only producing a few thousand fully electric cars in a week, while we have a billion cars driving around using fossil fuels. It's going to take more than 'the next few' years to catch up.
Birthrate low? Copy the Aussie model. (Score:2, Interesting)
Just import people, import an insane amount of people, just keep importing people over and over and over, hundreds and hundreds of thousands a year.
Increase your population by over 1% a year, we do! It's fantastic.
Well, it's fantastic for employers and people in government, road toll and public transit operators.
I mean the roads are packed, houses have maintained insanely high prices for over a decade, wages are suppressed super low and employers have their pick when it comes to choices to hire. The gov
A band thing? (Score:2)
Thanos would be pleased.
A decline in population is a good thing every once in a while. It would solve a vast number of the worlds problems.
This entire story is meaningless (Score:5, Interesting)
Are there more people in the US, Japan, Italy, the UK, Germany, etc than there were 100 years ago?
Yep.
After this population decline will there still be more people?
Yep.
Was the US, Japan, Italy, the UK, Germany under populated 100 years ago?
Nope.
so... Problem?
Constantly we get "because there are too many people the EARTH is going to die"... then we get this stupid shit with "Because there are fewer babies freak out."
Which is it? Seems like the newsies just want to turn anything into a story. Numbers go up and the world will eat itself to death... numbers go down and the world will empty of all people.
Both narratives are stupid.
There is no under population or over population issue in the industrialized Western world. We have HOUSING shortages... stressed schools... stressed water and power infrastructure. So... under population? Not really possible.
The story out of Japan is that they have a big problem with low birth rate. Have you seen Japan? Does it "look" under populated? And here you might say "but in 30 years it will be"... no it won't. The trend would have to continue for several generations to actually cause a problem. And whilst it is fun to just take a trend line from a statistic and project it out 500 years a projected statistic gets increasingly less reliable the farther you project it.
Populations are going to go up and down in the future as our societies, our economies, our cultures change.
I mean, who wants to be packed into a coffin apartment in Mega City 1? I don't. Fuck that noise. I want a lawn and a dog. I want a garden where I can putter around in my old age growing tomatoes or something just for fun. If you want to die in a tiny apartment, that's great. Everyone should have what they want. But I think a lot of people want a little space.
I want to spread out a bit. Big concentrations of population have all sorts of statistical problems. The worst schools, the worst crime, the worst corruption, the least political agency, the highest stress... there are reasons to not want it. There are also good things. The best hospitals, the best schools, the most economic opportunities, wonderful museums, concerts, plays, wonderful shops, etc.
Just let what is going to happen happen.
We have a lot of stuff that has changed in our society. The entry of women into pretty much every profession. The changing notion of when you have a family. The changing notion of what it means to be married in the first place. All of that. How could it not have an impact on birth rates? Of course it will.
And this is just going to play out. Probably the most aggressive career seeking women that spend the least energy on trying to get a family will statistically have fewer children. That will play out in time in the population. With the cultural tropes that push that below replacement rate becoming less and less common such that AT LEAST there is replacement. Who thinks that when we made all those changes we got everything 100% right? Of course we didn't. This is an experiment.
We'll see what happens. But there's no population problem up or down in the modern industrialized West. We're fine. And that's before even talking about immigration which is its own little shit show.
Please stop talking about reproduction on Slashdot (Score:2)
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Fearmongering. We're not actually loosing people (Score:3)
> The results put the U.S. further away from a viable replacement rate -- the standard for a generation being able to replicate its numbers. ...and yet the US population is still rising year on year.
http://www.multpl.com/united-s... [multpl.com]
Why would you? (Score:3)
It's society/behaviour shifts (Score:3)
The US is going through some big structural/societal changes. It's not some, "I don't want to bring a child into this horrible world" thing -- it's the fact that more people have choices or feel they have choices than they did in the past.
- Fewer women are voluntarily deciding to spend their entire work life raising children. They are better educated overall and the workforce is more open to them. When you go this route, you just can't in good conscience have a huge number of kids because something has to give between work and family. Most good parents I know would rather err on the side of family, but they also know they have a responsibility to work.
- People are less religious: I grew up in a very Catholic area of the city, and I'm not shocked that so many priests and bishops got away with crimes against kids. Back in the day, priests were likely the only people in the neighborhood who went to college, and many people felt they were the representative of God and the Pope, and totally beyond question. Birth control is not allowed in Catholic doctrine and Catholic families used to be HUGE as a result. I know people who have 9 siblings...and I think a lot of it is due to people adhering strictly to their religion's rules.
- Women as a whole aren't just looking to find a husband and take the first situation that comes their way, so they're starting to have kids later in life. And even if they do get married early on, they're way more likely to delay having kids until they're more financially secure.
The interesting thing is whether the expected replacement rate is still too high. We need fewer people, not less, if we want to keep the whole employment cycle going. The thing that will probably keep this from becoming a catastrophe is the US' diversity. For every hard-charging single-by-choice female executive that's 110% dedicated to their career, there's a traditional, religious woman who gets married when they're 21 and has a kid every 2 years until they're 35. This is different in places like Japan where they have almost no immigration and a very homogeneous society...in their case the birth rate is too low and they're going to have to have some huge shifts in the next few decades to deal with it.
We have 2 kids, we both work and that's way more than enough for us. We've done our evolutionary duty IMO and would rather concentrate on turning the kids into people who will contribute something to society. You can't do that when your attention is spread between 2 jobs, your living situation and 5 kids.
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20 years ago "omg we have to reduce the teen pregnancy rate!"
Today "omg where's all the babies at?"
I thought the age range used for their statistics was odd:
The general fertility rate sank to a record low of 60.2 births per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 44
Since it's generally illegal to have sex with a person under 18.
It’s legal if they’re both under 18 and no more than 2 years age difference.
Re:Knocked up teenage sluts (Score:5, Informative)
It depends strongly on the state. In Kentucky, the minimum age was effectively raised to 16. Marriage below that age is not explicitly forbidden, but requires a judge's consent.
http://www.wdrb.com/story/3765... [wdrb.com]
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Covenant?
Why should anyone need to get the permission of a justice of the peace or some shaman in a funny robe just to be able to have sex? Marriage, no marriage, cohabitation, let people do what they want.
Personally, I think marriage protects kids, and is thus best saved for after conception... marriage without kids is just a form of antiquated ritual.
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Millennia of human experience, not to mention science, tells us that some patterns of human behavior turn out better over the long term than others. You seem to disregard that.
New Report: Majority of U.S. Teens Don’t Live in Intact Families [dailysignal.com]
You're right that marriage protects kids. But "Marriage after conception" . . . better than not at all, but both backwards and suboptimal for producing good marriages that last.
Related: How shacking up leads to divorce [nypost.com]
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I guess I'm an old-timer at 42, but I work in a place that skews older. Because it's IT (yes, seriously,) we have lots of men who are divorced or on their 2nd/3rd wife. I think the MGTOW thing is mainly because so many of them got taken to the cleaners by their wives' divorce attorneys. And, I think a lot of them just picked the best-looking woman they could find with zero regard to long-term compatibility. So, they're telling everyone who will listen that all women are manipulative fill-in-the-blanks who d