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Fertility has fallen hugely, which is bad IMO. In addition to hundreds of millions of lives not lived, there are surely many discoveries and artistic products that were never made, because their creators were never born. I don't buy Malthusian logic, we could've used our resources more efficiently to sustain higher populations. Labour and brainpower is the most important economic input, more is better.
The advanced world is now below replacement rate, our civilization is literally unsustainable. A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope - I recall a statistic showing unmarried women in the 40-50 age group were hardest hit. Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.
Anyway, the massive fall in fertility came just as the sexual revolution showed up, it's not like there was a massive plague or war at the same time. What other cause could there be?
Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom.
Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no' because 'I have depression' was not something that would have even crossed most people's minds, even if they displayed the same symptoms as someone who was 'diagnosed' with depression today, but would they have been popping SSRIs if they were available and socially acceptable? Does the question even make sense? Like I said in another comment, I don't really put a lot of stock into downward trends of positive answers to questions like "are you happy?" over time, because I doubt the invariance of the measurement. People were different in the past, even in very basic psychological ways. Someone then saying "I'm happy" and someone now saying "I'm not" doesn't imply the modern would be happier with the life of the premodern. Even if people are significantly more miserable today than the historical average, the sexual revolution is hardly the only thing that's changed in the past few decades. There's a huge inflection point in rates of self-reported anxiety and depression right at 2012 when social media exploded.
We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.
On a purely personal and selfish level having to marry a girl and raise seven kids sounds nightmarish and I am endlessly thankful that the technological and social change of the past century means I don't have to do that.
People like playing and cuddling with kids, and if those people are women they also like dressing them up in cute outfits and taking pictures of them to post on instagram. People do not like disciplining kids, making them eat their vegetables, waking up in the middle of the night to take care of them, changing their diapers, etc. For obvious reasons for the vast majority of the population the two categories go together, but I think that the first category makes people happier than the second category annoys them.
This can be rough, but when you successfully soothe them and get them to sleep again, it feels really good. Compare the popularity of Dark Souls; there's something to be said for succeeding at a challenge.
This is so little trouble it's barely worth the mention.
It does seem like it's going to be a massive deal before you've done it though.
Only to PMC women who are afraid of dirt. Men are only afraid of it to the extent that they think it is emasculating. Traditional elite women learned to handle filth by mucking out stables as teenagers. (Old money will buy their daughter a pony, but never hire a groom for her). And working class women don't seem to have a problem with it either.
Aren't we talking about on the same level as making them eat vegetables or waking up at night to look after them? My point is about expectation childless people have of looking after kids vs the reality as understood by parents - expecting parents I talk to often seem to expect every second diaper change to look like tequila night at the burrito barn.
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Ever mucked out stables and barns? Horse, cow and chicken shit is not even close to as disgusting and rank as human shit. Pig is the only kind that is even in the same zip code.
There's also the element of the distribution of tasks not being equal in many relationships; trading off 50-50 is one thing but being the designated shit cleaner for years on end is a bit much. Thankfully Millennials seem much more fair about dividing up unpleasant tasks like that, compared to the stats on single digit percentages of baby boomer men having ever changed a diaper.
Baby poop really isn't that bad. Much smaller quantities and probably much less fragrance in general. This may depend on the diet. We tend to feed babies very simple dishes like pureed vegetables, pasta, rice, cut fruits, and a lot of dairy (milk and yogurt). It may get more pungent if they eat garlic, onions, eggs, meats... It smells so little sometimes that you don't even notice it until you actually take off the diaper.
I find the biggest inconvenience to be the dirtiness of it, having to quickly dispose of a very full diaper before somebody decides to play with it and stick it on clothes or carpet. Also wiggly babies that will not let you tie them up, but eventually they calm down.
By the time it starts getting more significant, you should have them potty-trained (2-3 years old).
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I agree diaper changing is no big deal. Waking up in the middle of the night during the newborn stage is just awful. My littlest is two and I still haven't recovered from sleep deprivation.
I stay up pretty late by nature (generally to 2 or 3am), and my wife has done most of the nighttime wakeups when I wasn't already awake. Taking it in shifts, we mostly get by, but there have been a couple nights where at 4:30am, the baby's wide awake and cooing, and I want to cry... but holding them while they sleep is incredibly nice. My kiddo being especially wiggly and refusing to cuddle under most circumstances is probably also part of it.
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The point was throwing out the ‘work’ part in contrast to the ‘fun’ part.
sorry, was mostly reacting to the contrast between my own perceptions going in, and my perceptions now that I've had direct experience...
I can see how you’d react that way- and your point about getting them to go to sleep was genuinely a valuable contribution.
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FWIW I found hanging out with kids to be surprisingly fun/less gross than it seemed at a distance.
It is hard to explain, but at least personally I am very clean and germophobic, while also being a stand off-ish introvert who finds most people to be boring. Still had a hell of a time playing with my little cousin and his snot covered Legos.
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Even earlier in France - probably due to declining authority of the Church.
Seems like revolution is still at fault.
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That was a special circumstance. Think about what was happening in the US immediately prior to said baby boom.
Hunters offload much of the hard work in hunting with their guns, dogs, traps, tools, tactics... Yet they still enjoy it. Travellers offload much of the hard work of travelling onto planes, hotels, travel books. Just because you want to have more of the best parts of an experience and less of the worst parts, it doesn't follow that you don't enjoy said experience.
I'm not a parent myself but I'm inclined to believe the many parents who say they did enjoy having children on balance.
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I used to think that. I was very, very wrong.
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On the other hand we still have subgroups that maintain above replacement fertility, and they tend to not be the ones that leaned into the sexual revolution.
I don't like self-reports either. If they're dropped from all of sociology, we can dismiss them when discussing the sexual revolution as well, but not before.
Falling fertility seems to go hand in hand with both technological development and political/social liberalization. It's possible that only one is responsible for the effect, but since they almost never occur independently, it's hard to tell. If we all collectively decided to adopt the material and social circumstances of 19th century Russian peasants maybe we could get fertility rates back up, but this is exactly my problem with the "modernity is terrible because fertility rates are falling" argument. It is apparently the case that pre-modern society was able to reproduce itself, but I and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing. As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction. Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence, though obviously the first would be better.
I don't want to defend all or even most of sociology.
Selection effects will eventually solve the fertility problem. We might see some shrinking generations in between, but we won’t go extinct.
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I feel like you've dodged my argument. I have mentioned neither Russians nor peasants, the trend of more religious / conservative people having more children than secular / progressive ones is clear as day. We don't have to go full Amish (although - yes, they do have even higher birth rates).
Revealed preferences show that many people think modern society is not worth reproducing.
Thankfully we also have the option of just not listening to you, rejecting your worldview and your values, and reproducing the way we used to.
No one's forcing you to return to anything, you're free to believe that and act accordingly, but I don't see what gives you the right to speak in the name of all of humanity. For me, I'll happily embrace a pre-modern existence if that's the only option, and will wholeheartedly oppose any Frankensteinian invention like artificial wombs. Technology is there to serve us, not to reshape us according to the wants of those who own it.
Even among conservatives and the religious, fertility rates have been falling for decades and are barely at replacement. Even Utah is now below replacement. Only full on parallel societies like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews seem to be robustly reproducing and likely to keep it up for the foreseeable future.
I didn't claim to speak in the name of all humanity.
Technology serves us precisely by extending the production possibilities frontier and allowing us to get away with stuff that we couldn't in prior generations. Like hypothetically, allowing for the fertility rates of the 18th century without having to readopt any of the social mores or taboos.
Is that based on entire states like Utah, or levels of religiously / conservatism of specific groups. There's been increasing apostasy, and it's not news to me, but it only proves my point.
Well, if you want us all to go extinct, if we fail to endorse your Brave New World utopia, you kinda are.
My point is there is no "us" here, or if there is, it's a group vehemently opposed to my interests. In theory the Internet enables "us" to talk, organize, share, on a never before heard of scale. In practice, these conversations, organizing, and sharing is shaped by "them", while "we" are hounded on every step. At least when it comes to the Internet, it's impacts are limited to the black box in my room / pocket, with artificial wombs you are giving "them" total control over who will have how many of what kind children. From there, the assumption that humanity will even remain recognizably human for very long strikes me as extremely naive.
I'm pretty sure conservative/religious fertility is at almost exactly 2.0/replacement, while self identified liberal/secular is at 1.75 or so. Maybe it will maintain there, but considering how much higher it was a century or two ago, it strikes me as unlikely.
I state my preferences. Many people, including you, disagree.
Obviously we have totally incompatible views on what human society should look like in the future.
If that’s the data I’m thinking of, it’s that normie Republican fertility was at exactly replacement- I can’t find the data right now, but every religious group except the most liberal has a fertility rate high enough to be replacement after balancing out apostasy when you limit it to church attendance(the average normie Republican is not a weekly churchgoer, but weekly churchgoers are strongly over represented among normie republicans). So it actually points to secular red tribers having like a 1.75 tfr and church attending Christians having like 2.5, with some sects being higher(mass attending Catholics have 3.1, for example).
I’m pretty sure the blue tribe tfr is a lot lower, like Spain tier.
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Burned out progressives like me might be screwing up the statistics. In any case it seems like conservatism is at least a protection factor, if not a cure.
I wasn't even referring to different visions for the future of humanity. There's the question of whether people controlling these technologies will see you as one of them, or as a tool at best, and an obstacle at worst. Personally I don't rate your chances well.
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It really is not that hard to make babies. Why would artificial wombs be needed?
Natural selection is making room for the ones that can figure it out. Like this bus driver in Japan.
Don't then. If you're not reproducing the future state of humanity is not really your business.
Women see pregnancy as hitting pause (and in some high-powered careers, halt or rewind) on their carreer progression for a couple of years. Unless they are in a very secure position with their mate, it is a scary prospect. An artificial womb would shorten that pause to the time spent taking care of the newborn before it can be sent to daycare, time which could be more equitably split with the father than the time being pregnant could.
It sounds like some kind of subscription child-rental business would be more appropriate if the idea is to have other people handle the birthing and then ship them to daycare. You will own nothing and you will be happy.
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Absolutely, which is why all the vapouring about abortion rights and abortion is health care and we must pass an amendment to the state constitution to make and keep abortion legal.
See above about abortion. It's easy to have babies, but a lot of people don't want to have babies and will try very hard not to have babies. If you want babies, but nobody wants to have those babies the natural way, then you need technology and artifice.
I don’t think ‘I’m afraid of sex’ is the main reason fertility rates are dropping, I think it’s ‘I don’t want another dependent for the next two decades’.
Yes? That's what we're agreeing on here: sex makes babies, but people don't want babies because babies need you to take care of them and they're expensive which interferes with fun times and spending money on yourself, so people try and get around the 'having babies' part of 'having sex' via contraception and abortion.
"I don't want a dependent for the next two decades" being the case, then all the exhortations to 'do your duty for the common god and have four kids' are not going to work, and if you need every couple to be having four kids to keep your economy afloat, then you better get working on those artificial wombs.
How do artificial wombs have anything to do with the sacrifices parents make in raising children?
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Artificial wombs in themselves don't solve the problem of the 'next two decades dependents'.
What do you do with these artificially-born children?
Are they going to be slaves fully raised by some kind of government or corporate facility?
Or is the idea that the market is going to capture potential parents that would want to take care of additional dependents but do not have access to a fresh womb?
I doubt that that would be a lot of people. Raising kids takes energy and people tend to run out of energy as they age. Helping raise grand-children, nephews and nieces, now that's a more accessible goal for a children-loving middle-aged or senior citizen.
If there is such a glut of desperate people just waiting to take care of children, all they have to do is knock on doors, network, involve themselves locally... Daycares take volunteers if you are ready to jump through licensing hoops.
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But why want babies?
People's revealed preference is not to have any, or few. Is the concern coming from business owners who need cheap (preferably teenage) labor for fast food restaurants or janitor positions that cannot immediately be automated? Is it because we need able-bodied workers for care jobs in nursing homes?
The solutions are robots and deregulation. Let's just make it legally clear that if you drop your elderly relative that you don't care enough about to look after yourself in some kind of hospital or managed home, they may just end up dead for no reasonable reason. You sign on this or you take them home and you deal with them yourself.
There. No more liability, no more costly trainings and procedures to avoid liability, no more staffing issues...
Let's give the unloved elderly the same level of respect we afford unloved pre-birth children.
I have trouble using "revealed preference" to describe a situation where someone's actions are different from what they would do if they believed X and completely understood it, and the gap between their action and belief is related mainly to that lack of understanding. For instance, people who fall for scams haven't shown a revealed preference for losing money. That's not what the phrase is supposed to mean.
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The economy. Babies grow up to be working age adults who get jobs, pay taxes, and contribute for decades which pays out the pensions/social welfare entitlements for the current aging population. If you have a bulge where the current population is getting older but there are fewer young people coming up, then your economy is in trouble.
If robots can earn money or produce revenue to support the welfare state, then that's the way to go. Otherwise it really is a crisis about "I never had kids and now mysteriously there are no working age adults around".
People really did believe, around the time of The Population Bomb, that there were way too many people on the Earth and unless populations decreased there would be drastic and terrible natural disasters. Overpopulation was a genuine worry. That's why China, for instance, started with the One Child Policy. Things like the expansion of Cairo, which had and has a population zooming up, creating a sprawling, expanding city that is more like a collection of slums, was a visible proof of the problem (or so it seemed) - not enough resources, too many bodies, too much demand on the scarce resources:
There are also the problems with pollution - air, water and land, as well as lead and copper smelting.
A lot of people thought Cairo and similar cities were the future, if population growth remained unchecked.
What nobody seems to have considered is that Western nations crashing their fertility rates from a combination of "overpopulation is the coming threat" and "I don't want to be tied down with kids, now that I'm young, in a good economy which gives me plenty of disposable income, and the sexual revolution and social liberalisation means I can have an entire smorgasbord of choices that my parents' generation never had about self-indulgence" would be a bad thing. We're still grappling with "the poor countries have way too many people which they can't support", but the fertility decline in the West isn't doing anything to help that and now we are facing the results of "who will pay the piper?" because if there aren't enough workers coming up, the benefits which the retirees expect won't be there.
And the future problem seems to be not alone the lack of recognition that "the people are the wealth of the nation" but that only a shrinking number of those workers will be considered economically contributing and valuable. Well-paying jobs that provide growing tax revenues are increasingly shifted to the white collar world, and to a particular sub-set of that - IT or finance. And with AI looming on the horizon, the lower levels of those niches will be chipped away.
Not everybody can learn to code and even if they do, there's the spectre of "the machine will do it better, faster and cheaper". I imagine that's why a lot of people and institutions are pinning their hopes on Fairy Godmother AI which will magically ensure an economy of plenty, like the cornucopia, where all we desire can be drawn out limitlessly, there will be trillions and zillions of money, and we'll dodge the bullet of an aging population and an increasingly unequal society.
Sounds like you need to change up your economy then.
What did the horse breeders do when Americans started driving cars? Carmakers can keep shifting their production to SUV and more accessible vehicles, and then eventually come back full circle and start making horse buggies again.
If Star Wars fans are not getting made anymore, perhaps media companies can shift to making Christian movies.
Or maybe we can scale down the welfare state? Make these retirement payments conditional to having had dependents (what you've provided on your tax returns...)?
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Apparently it is.
Most of the high fertility subgroups are subsidized by larger, less fertile society. Color me skeptical of the 'Amish/Haredim will inherit the earth' scenarios.
I'm a sperm donor, so I'll have some descendants running around.
So you care about the future state of fertility out of care for your descendants but you don't care enough to actually help raise them?
What other scenarios do you have?
People who don't have kids are not suddenly going to muster the courage to because Elon Musk came out with an artificial womb. Innovations in social engineering so that if you have a kid and they just up and die for whatever reason like you were too busy watching Youtube shorts then it's no big deal would go a longer way I suppose.
There was that one incident of some scientist woman who was too wrapped up in her stressful and important duties that she forgot to take out a young child out of a car and ended up losing it. This is probably what's keeping a lot of more-educated people out of parenting.
He isn't laying eggs out in the wilderness, presumably the people who opt to take sperms from donors are above average in terms of dedication and interest in parenting, certainly in wealth.
No, in some kind of refrigerated device.
People with an interest in parenting don't need to buy sperm in most cases.
I would surmise that that group would be older and less likely to have large families. While wealth is a good thing to have to support a family, having young parents and siblings can arguably be beneficial as well.
Especially when it comes time to help raise grandchildren.
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I've always had kind of a niggling, I guess atavistic drive to propagate my genetics and would feel sort of guilty about terminating my 'line', which is why I jumped through all the hoops to donate (well that and the payment). But no I have no interest in raising kids.
We could probably just pay people to raise them in Brave New World style barracks or something honestly.
I've been following this thread with interest and I feel like you've been holding your own fairly well in the face of multiple onslaughts. Here, however, you undo what I imagined was a fairly internally consistent, rational point of view (nevertheless quite different from my own, but compelling) and reveal a certain immaturity about what the hell you're talking about.
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