6 ms·
Late stage capitalism driven extinction
by ClumsyPilot 3y ago
Late 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.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoWhen there is consequently more to do, more to experience, more people to meet, more to discover, more novelty to novel at. In short, the modern era has more of what makes the childhood experience what it is, enough to spill over into what was previously considered adulthood. I sometimes ponder what would happen if we did discover the secret to substantial life extension or even immortality; if this phenomenon of trying to stretch that delightful halcyon glow of childhood wonder - what I've heard the Finns call lapsuus - would extend into decades or centuries or perpetuity as a result. It would if nothing else provide a plausible explanation for the behavior of characters like Q from Star Trek.
- 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.