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>There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child

>There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny. There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(

sgath92 5y ago
Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
- throwaway6532 5y ago
  >Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for. Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide. Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced. I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age. TL;DR - hope for the best, plan for the worst.

sgath92 5y ago

Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.

throwaway6532 5y ago
>Lowered birth rates is actually a good thing, if we're going to be honest about our way of life and its sustainability problem. As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about what quality of life we want to have, as the answer to that question will determine how many people should exist at one time. So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for. Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide. Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced. I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age. TL;DR - hope for the best, plan for the worst.