I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture. The GOP thinks they can do it by destroying reproductive rights, civil rights, and marriage laws, if they harm women enough they’ll HAVE to be baby makers! Dehumanized baby factories! And even conservative voters are fighting against it, because it’s insane and it’s against our current culture. It has to work for everyone. It would be more intelligent to create free childcare, better pregnancy and birth leave for both parents, and child tax credits. They could use WIC to absorb the cost of having a child and public education sooner with preschool. If people are hopeful their children will have high education access and a stable life they will be a lot more likely to have kids. Being horrified that your children will live in a fascist theocracy and intentionally kept uneducated and poverty stricken, they might actually voluntarily avoid sex to not have kids.
What if we don’t want infinite growth? What about stability? Or (gasp) a population reduction so we don’t destroy the planet. Have less babies. Feed the ones we have. Educate them.
Sure, easing into a deflating population over several hundred years is fine but tanking it and ending up with a society having to support a vastly older population ain’t easy either. Better for governments to provide positive reasons to have children but there’s zero chance of that.
We’re going to run into a crisis within our life time whether we like it or not. Within 10-20 years, possibly longer if legislation somehow hampers it, pretty much the entire working class will be unemployable because machine labor will be cheaper and more readily available than any human. Yes, some people will still have jobs, but not the working class.
Long before we have a crisis of too many elderly for the working to care and provide for, we are going to have a crisis of not enough jobs paying a liveable wage for one, let alone a family, because corporations are going to be able to replace large swathes of their workforces with machines that cost less to maintain per unit than minimum wage, so why would they ever hire a person?
Both arguments are valid. Less children, better education and growth perspectives = better humanity. And still there are some sick fucks down voting. Which shows how fucked we are.
I mean yes, children should be an affordable option and please take my tax money to make it practically free. But also I think a lot more people don’t want children than is generally assumed it expected. Just lots of societal pressure pushing vulnerable people to make a decision that’s not necessarily in their best interest.
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture.
For most of history it wasn’t advantageous to have children. People just didn’t have many options, and we were used to babies dying all the time so if we wanted any help in our old age we had to have enough to survive into adulthood.
E.g. people who had a farm or crafts/trade business usually had children to help and later take over the business. Having children to help at old age is mentioned by yourself.
Sounds quite advantageous to me. Especially when labor is more physically demanding or you need enough people to maintain security like for traders etc.
I think this is where a lot of modern civilization is falling apart at. If you want population replacement and growth, you actually have to make it advantageous to have children, and at appropriate age for your society and culture. The GOP thinks they can do it by destroying reproductive rights, civil rights, and marriage laws, if they harm women enough they’ll HAVE to be baby makers! Dehumanized baby factories! And even conservative voters are fighting against it, because it’s insane and it’s against our current culture. It has to work for everyone. It would be more intelligent to create free childcare, better pregnancy and birth leave for both parents, and child tax credits. They could use WIC to absorb the cost of having a child and public education sooner with preschool. If people are hopeful their children will have high education access and a stable life they will be a lot more likely to have kids. Being horrified that your children will live in a fascist theocracy and intentionally kept uneducated and poverty stricken, they might actually voluntarily avoid sex to not have kids.
What if we don’t want infinite growth? What about stability? Or (gasp) a population reduction so we don’t destroy the planet. Have less babies. Feed the ones we have. Educate them.
Sure, easing into a deflating population over several hundred years is fine but tanking it and ending up with a society having to support a vastly older population ain’t easy either. Better for governments to provide positive reasons to have children but there’s zero chance of that.
We’re going to run into a crisis within our life time whether we like it or not. Within 10-20 years, possibly longer if legislation somehow hampers it, pretty much the entire working class will be unemployable because machine labor will be cheaper and more readily available than any human. Yes, some people will still have jobs, but not the working class.
Long before we have a crisis of too many elderly for the working to care and provide for, we are going to have a crisis of not enough jobs paying a liveable wage for one, let alone a family, because corporations are going to be able to replace large swathes of their workforces with machines that cost less to maintain per unit than minimum wage, so why would they ever hire a person?
Both arguments are valid. Less children, better education and growth perspectives = better humanity. And still there are some sick fucks down voting. Which shows how fucked we are.
I mean yes, children should be an affordable option and please take my tax money to make it practically free. But also I think a lot more people don’t want children than is generally assumed it expected. Just lots of societal pressure pushing vulnerable people to make a decision that’s not necessarily in their best interest.
Let’s not pretend the GOP are doing it for the good of humanity…
For most of history it wasn’t advantageous to have children. People just didn’t have many options, and we were used to babies dying all the time so if we wanted any help in our old age we had to have enough to survive into adulthood.
Where do you base this information from?
E.g. people who had a farm or crafts/trade business usually had children to help and later take over the business. Having children to help at old age is mentioned by yourself.
Sounds quite advantageous to me. Especially when labor is more physically demanding or you need enough people to maintain security like for traders etc.