It's easy to say "It doesn't matter if my family has no descendants, look at the millions of other people living in this country" but as you get older and the older generations die off, it becomes very clear how fragile the chain of knowledge is. Things changed in my father's lifetime, and he told me of those changes; things have also changed in my lifetime. But there's no-one for me to hand that knowledge on to, and in future if any one is researching such-and-such a place and the changes there, they won't know the information I could have told them.
This makes me think about the historical tradition of adult adoption.
Even in Rome the adult adoption ran in family. For instance Augustus was grandson of Ceasar's elder sister Julia Minor and Hadrian was Trajan's cousin. It is not a bad way of running the family - but we are talking about extended patriarchal clan-like family type that is typical in Sicilian mafia movies or in Middle East as opposed to egalitarian nuclear family of English/US type.
Which might be a worthwhile adaptation to falling birthrates. If fewer Americans are having kids, the kids that exist should naturally be spread more evenly.
Except they won’t be- IIRC parity is actually rising for women with children, but fewer women are having kids. So the decline in the birthrate is mostly about the increase in family size being unable to cancel out the decline in numbers, and that means kids are spread less evenly.
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Notes -
This makes me think about the historical tradition of adult adoption.
Even in Rome the adult adoption ran in family. For instance Augustus was grandson of Ceasar's elder sister Julia Minor and Hadrian was Trajan's cousin. It is not a bad way of running the family - but we are talking about extended patriarchal clan-like family type that is typical in Sicilian mafia movies or in Middle East as opposed to egalitarian nuclear family of English/US type.
Which might be a worthwhile adaptation to falling birthrates. If fewer Americans are having kids, the kids that exist should naturally be spread more evenly.
Except they won’t be- IIRC parity is actually rising for women with children, but fewer women are having kids. So the decline in the birthrate is mostly about the increase in family size being unable to cancel out the decline in numbers, and that means kids are spread less evenly.
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