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That's an interesting way to say "the West largely stopped breeding a while ago".
by jojobas 3y ago
That's an interesting way to say "the West largely stopped breeding a while ago".
- ClumsyPilot 3y agoLate stage capitalism driven extinction
- jojobas 3y agoBullshit. USSR did the same thing about the same time.
- whatshisface 3y agoPeople stop having kids when economic forces work against them. It doesn't matter how the forces were put there. At least it's not like it was in Adam Smith's time, when the downward pressure was a result of children failing to reach adulthood. Thanks to birth control and modern medicine, people can decline to have children when they know the conditions are not right.
- jojobas 3y agoPeople stop having kids when they choose something else. Yes, career for one. Thanks to birth control and modern values, Western people can bring themselves to extinction.
- defrost 3y ago> Western people can bring themselves to extinction. Sounds like pearl clutching with bated breath. It's a long way to extinction with many chances to stabilise before zero. The only options are not continuous growth or death.
- solveit 3y agoAll evidence suggests that people stop having kids when their society gets richer and better educated.
- whatshisface 3y agoChildren are massively more expensive, and less useful, in richer societies. I don't think anybody in Japan would be allowed to provide for their children the standards of care provided in a country with a growing population. As for the second point, if you are a farmer in a country with little physical mobility, your children are your retirement savings. If you live in America, your children are future employees of a company ten states away. I read a statistic somewhere that it costs $2M to raise a child. Considering that it's considered a horrible imposition to ask your kids for money, or even to ask them to take care of you, it's easy to explain why urbanization, industrial development, and education, work against population growth.
- jojobas 3y ago"Useful" is subjective. Somehow a billion-year-old imperative to continue your bloodline by all costs faded to nothing in many people. Go figure.
- justahuman74 3y agoThat's ok, it'll only take a couple of generations for the people who don't feel the drive to have kids to be out of the gene pool. Then the next baby boom begins.
- whatshisface 3y agoThe imperative to continue your bloodline never existed. For one thing, animals have no concept of ancestry.
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- slibhb 3y agoThe whole "children are so expensive" meme is overrated. College is expensive but attendance rates are high. Real estate is expensive but people keep buying homes. Some alternate reasons for declining fertility: 1. Decline in religious belief 2. Widespread, easy to use birth control 3. More options for entertainment are widely available. Having kids is less attractive when you could be traveling, binging endless series, or playing computer games 4. Strong anti-natalist sentiment that was pushed very hard post-war and persists 5. Higher rates of college attendance, which means people are studying and furthering their careers in their 20s rather than having kids
- whatshisface 3y agoChildren are not too expensive for anyone to afford, they're too expensive for most people to think it is worth having more than two. That might sound like a qualification, but it's what population decline means.
- silverquiet 3y agoI believe the average cost to raise a child in the US is comparable to a Lamborghini. I suppose it's up to the individual to decide what the more desirable purchase is.
- whatshisface 3y agoJust imagine if the future of our economic system required a significant number of middle class Americans to buy three Lamborghinis, to offset the people who only bought one.
- MostlyStable 3y agoI unfortunately can't find the source right now, but I recently came across a study that found that, in the US, number of children was almost completely uncorrelated with regional cost of living but was quite correlated with beliefs about the amount of effort/time raising a child requires. I think our culture of expecting/demanding that parents invest ever greater amounts of time and effort (with all the evidence suggesting that these increased investments do not improve long term outcomes) is a far bigger driver than costs.
- niceice 3y agoHow do you know it's late stage capitalism?
- timeagain 3y agoOr extinction?
- chaostheory 3y agoThere’s also late stage socialism. It’s called communism. It too relies on the right kind of growth just like capitalism. Socialism also tends to fail faster than capitalism because power is centralized from the start, so corruption spreads faster and is more malevolent.
- phs318u 3y agoNot just 'the West'. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-21/chinas-population-is-inexorably-shrinking-planet-population-turn/101873032 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-21/chinas-population-is-... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/japan-population-how-many-people-drops-first-time-births-deaths https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/26/japan-populati...
- jojobas 3y agoJapan has embraced everything West starting 1868. China outright banned having more than 1 kid and people aborted girls en masse. This one I grant an exemption.
- huytersd 3y agoIt’s not just China and Japan. India is under replacement rate as well.
- 7thaccount 3y agoZeihan (geopolitics celebrity dude) talks about this pretty often. It goes hand in hand with urbanization. When you're on the farm and especially when child mortality is high...you have lots of kids as they're needed for work. In the big city, kids are just a costly burden, so people have a lot less. All the countries that jumped into urbanization are in this boat. China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, and Japan are all in a really bad spot. It's not that they just ran out of kids...it's that they ran out 30 years ago. It's in this decade that they start running out of working age adults and shit starts getting really screwy. There isn't a known macroeconomic model for when the population pyramid is inverted and there is no money at the top to invest in new tech (it's all being used for them to live off of) and not enough people at the bottom to work or drive consumption.
- nostrademons 3y agoThere is, it's feudalism. The dynamic is that when markets are expanding, it makes sense to invest in the future, because you can capture a portion of the expansion and the reap indefinite profits off of it. When markets are contracting, your incentive becomes to grab as much of the pie now before it shrinks. This tends to make firms...well, militant. The incentive to cooperate only appears when people weight the future more than the present, giving value to future interactions; otherwise, the incentive is to kill off your rivals, take their stuff, and hide the bodies. Thus, during a contraction and in times of scarcity people tend to become raiders, scavengers, and conquerors. To protect themselves against raiders, scavengers, and conquerors, people tend to band together into larger groups. Thus a hierarchy emerges - weaker groups pledge fealty to stronger ones, which in turn protect them from other strong groups that have not pledged fealty, and so on. Usually you get war in the meantime, but feudalism is the peace treaty that arises out of that. Interestingly this dynamic tends to play out within the capitalist system. When an industry reaches maturity, usually there's a shakeout with a price war where many of the weaker companies go bankrupt, and then the savvier-but-weaker get bought up by the bigger ones, and so on until you have a few megacorps with hierarchical organization. The purpose of managerial capitalism is as much to defend firms against competition as it is to increase efficiency. In many cases, they are significantly less efficient than they were as startups, but at least they have hoovered up all the competition.
- offices 3y agoThe 14th word in TFA is 'worldwide'