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.
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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.
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.