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I agree with your gut feeling, and I disagree quite strongly with most of the sentiment found in the comments of this article, stating that the lack of children

by marvin 5y ago

I agree with your gut feeling, and I disagree quite strongly with most of the sentiment found in the comments of this article, stating that the lack of children stems from selfishness or responsibility towards the planet. High rents and other features of contemporary society make it difficult and expensive to have children. These things also make it difficult to get enough time for children, with the amount of income-generating work that's required. Then, most of the care is offloaded to professional caretakers, as this gives a significant improvement to the budgets of time and money. My suspicion is that many who state that they skip kids due to the environment or personal reasons, actually just need a fig leaf to cover the fact that they're financially unable to support kids while maintaining a lifestyle that makes children net positive for their own quality of life. For most, this would be a pretty painful admission to make, but there's plenty of observations indicating it's true for many. In contrast to most people here, I believe that this is actually a pretty big problem. It's not as bad as having a birthrate of 4 and sprinting into a demographic catastrophe, but economic growth in the sense of making all aspects of life better and cheaper is critical if we want to make civilization sustainable. Balanced demographics and kids raised with love, care, plenty and care from capable parents are a very important part of that. This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right.

pasabagi 5y ago
> This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right. If you go back into the early history of conservatism, there was a breed of conservative that wanted to protect traditional social relations against the social dislocation of early capitalism. The problem is, the people doing the social dislocation, the people doing the enclosures and clearances, were also those who benefited the most from the traditional social relations, aristocrats, etc. So the idea developed in two divergent directions: the first, the conservatives, who tried to protect traditional society by moral education, enforcement, entreaty, etc, the second, the early socialists, who tried to protect traditional society by protecting traditional social relations (usually land rights) through politics. As you can imagine, this cuts in opposite directions: the first group would want to protect, for instance, traditional aristocratic privilege, while the second might want to abrogate it, in order to prevent an aristocrat from taking their land. Both sides would be seeing themselves as 'conserving' the status quo. This was all about three hundred years ago in the UK, or much less in Spain, or Mexico, or Russia. The current dominance of 'conservative liberals' in all nations shows that the first direction, where you protect the veneer of tradition while allowing unfettered capitalism to trash its innards, won out. The last socialist revolutionaries of the old sort were people like Zapata, protecting their societies against the encroaching Haciendas. Today, there is nothing left to protect, so that's why modern socialists don't have much truck with whatever shreds of traditional culture remain.

by marvin 5y ago

pasabagi 5y ago

> This is one of the things I actually believe the conservatives get right. If you go back into the early history of conservatism, there was a breed of conservative that wanted to protect traditional social relations against the social dislocation of early capitalism. The problem is, the people doing the social dislocation, the people doing the enclosures and clearances, were also those who benefited the most from the traditional social relations, aristocrats, etc. So the idea developed in two divergent directions: the first, the conservatives, who tried to protect traditional society by moral education, enforcement, entreaty, etc, the second, the early socialists, who tried to protect traditional society by protecting traditional social relations (usually land rights) through politics. As you can imagine, this cuts in opposite directions: the first group would want to protect, for instance, traditional aristocratic privilege, while the second might want to abrogate it, in order to prevent an aristocrat from taking their land. Both sides would be seeing themselves as 'conserving' the status quo. This was all about three hundred years ago in the UK, or much less in Spain, or Mexico, or Russia. The current dominance of 'conservative liberals' in all nations shows that the first direction, where you protect the veneer of tradition while allowing unfettered capitalism to trash its innards, won out. The last socialist revolutionaries of the old sort were people like Zapata, protecting their societies against the encroaching Haciendas. Today, there is nothing left to protect, so that's why modern socialists don't have much truck with whatever shreds of traditional culture remain.