Notes from the human population implosion
March 6, 2025 7:05 PM Subscribe
“There is fundamentally no way to do this that doesn’t end up treating women’s bodies as a tool.” Gideon Lewis-Kraus (previously) examines the demographic transition: the decline in childbirth alongside the growing number of elders. A long read, grounded in South Korea's experience.
We live on a finite planet. We can come to a situation where the population crests gently, or one where it crests violently. But crest it will.
posted by ocschwar at 7:27 PM on March 6 [15 favorites]
posted by ocschwar at 7:27 PM on March 6 [15 favorites]
doctornemo, that looks like the exact same link as in the original post, and it's not ungated.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:47 PM on March 6
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:47 PM on March 6
Population decline creates many social and economic challenges. The economic ones in particular are practically insoluble, within the bounds of our current system.
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:10 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
posted by Smedly, Butlerian jihadi at 8:10 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
Good catch, Artifice_Eternity, and thank you, axiom. Mods, could you please adjust accordingly?
posted by doctornemo at 8:14 PM on March 6
posted by doctornemo at 8:14 PM on March 6
>economic ones in particular are practically insoluble
how so?
posted by torokunai2 at 8:16 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
how so?
posted by torokunai2 at 8:16 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]
Well, I guess it's a shame that our days of trying to destroy the planet may be numbered, but I'm honestly having trouble getting sad about the idea of humans dwindling away to nothing. It's just the same with pretty much any feral weed - they keep growing, pushing aside and down everything else until they grow so big they strangle on their own tendrils. Seems perfectly logical and fine to me.
posted by dg at 8:22 PM on March 6 [10 favorites]
posted by dg at 8:22 PM on March 6 [10 favorites]
I will fully admit that I got partway through this article and gave up. I may try the audio version later but it’s over an hour so it will have to be a good long dog walk.
I will say that Liberal Currents had some useful discussion recently on birth rates and the demographic transition, in the context of how gender relations are a major cause of our current political moment. It can be true both that declining birth rates are a serious problem for keeping society running, and that they don’t justify destroying people’s rights.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 8:35 PM on March 6 [7 favorites]
I will say that Liberal Currents had some useful discussion recently on birth rates and the demographic transition, in the context of how gender relations are a major cause of our current political moment. It can be true both that declining birth rates are a serious problem for keeping society running, and that they don’t justify destroying people’s rights.
posted by learning from frequent failure at 8:35 PM on March 6 [7 favorites]
This article was chilling. The author was dismissive of the idea that the way to increase birth rates is to improve life for women and families - he discussed that briefly, then discarded the idea as not supported by evidence.
The more I read, the more I read overcome with creeping dread that pro-natalism is going to lead to forced breeding of women. That's where the right wing anti-abortion, anti-birth control, need more babies contingent wants to go.
posted by medusa at 8:49 PM on March 6 [54 favorites]
The more I read, the more I read overcome with creeping dread that pro-natalism is going to lead to forced breeding of women. That's where the right wing anti-abortion, anti-birth control, need more babies contingent wants to go.
posted by medusa at 8:49 PM on March 6 [54 favorites]
I’m a little surprised Korea hasnt made it illegal to have a business license and declare the business off limits to children. I mean, if you’re pushing on social norms, start with the one posted on placards?
posted by clew at 8:55 PM on March 6 [8 favorites]
posted by clew at 8:55 PM on March 6 [8 favorites]
The author was also featured on the New Yorker’s Political Scene podcast of Feb 26th. I was especially stunned to hear that population collapse is exponential just like population growth can be, and the picture depicted about the dearth of children in South Korean cities was startling.
I have found that this podcast is consistently among the best quality conversations, whether politics or otherwise, with impeccably chosen expert guests.
Highly recommend.
And as medusa stated in an earlier comment, it does seem like birth control is the Right’s next target, with this impending population collapse as their rationale. Ignoring the fact that individual decision drives this effect.
posted by GrandPunkRailroad at 9:32 PM on March 6 [4 favorites]
I have found that this podcast is consistently among the best quality conversations, whether politics or otherwise, with impeccably chosen expert guests.
Highly recommend.
And as medusa stated in an earlier comment, it does seem like birth control is the Right’s next target, with this impending population collapse as their rationale. Ignoring the fact that individual decision drives this effect.
posted by GrandPunkRailroad at 9:32 PM on March 6 [4 favorites]
Exponential decay/decline is much less scary than exponential growth. Exponential growth is scary because it gets rapidly bigger over time in terms of actual numbers.. Exponential decline on the other hand gets rapidly smaller over time in terms of actual numbers.
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:03 PM on March 6 [13 favorites]
posted by Zalzidrax at 10:03 PM on March 6 [13 favorites]
I always was curious about the fact that the same people who are freaking out about declining birth rates are the same ones freaking out about immigrants coming to their countries and having babies
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:11 PM on March 6 [62 favorites]
posted by Jon_Evil at 10:11 PM on March 6 [62 favorites]
I like this part, from near the end of the article, quoting a Korean economist:
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:18 PM on March 6 [8 favorites]
He just wasn’t sure what to make of it all in the end. He said, “The low fertility rate is not really good or bad. We just don’t know.” This is the intellectually responsible position.As with so many things, it's too soon to tell what the ultimate results of declining fertility will be, and how societies will adapt. There's not really much point in getting too happy, sad, or angry about it.
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 10:18 PM on March 6 [8 favorites]
I always was curious about the fact that the same people who are freaking out about declining birth rates are the same ones freaking out about immigrants coming to their countries and having babies
Population decline is definitely a relatively mainstream concern for (economically, classically) liberal types who would posit immigration as a solution, in light of economies not being built for working-age populations “getting rapidly smaller in terms of numbers.” It is of course also a concern for people who really mean “the population of the white race.”
posted by atoxyl at 10:19 PM on March 6 [12 favorites]
Population decline is definitely a relatively mainstream concern for (economically, classically) liberal types who would posit immigration as a solution, in light of economies not being built for working-age populations “getting rapidly smaller in terms of numbers.” It is of course also a concern for people who really mean “the population of the white race.”
posted by atoxyl at 10:19 PM on March 6 [12 favorites]
Having and raising children is backbreaking, miserable, unending labor; it sucks, and the vast majority of it falls on women. When women have options other than being forced (physically or by economic constraints like farming) to pump out children, they tend to have fewer children, because why the fuck would you go through that more than you really, really wanted to? Especially given that, because of patriarchy, the other parent of the child is almost certainly the next best thing to fucking useless?
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:21 PM on March 6 [59 favorites]
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:21 PM on March 6 [59 favorites]
I wish the writer had put a little more time into connecting the dots with the developing countries he mentions, in addition to post-WW II Korea. The elephant in the room/piece is capitalism, I think. It helped some developing economies (as in Korea and Singapore, apparently) to have people (women, specifically) prioritize building up their country's economic output over having and raising children.
If you're now in an economic elite, when you have AI, robots, cloning, anti-senescence technology etc. now coming online, are children really as "necessary", unless they in some way help you maintain or gird your place at the top of society? Does a Thiel see a young man as much more than a walking blood bank to suck dry in order to stay youthful, etc.
And if children are still necessary, how do you structure society so that you maximize your control over it, even with more kids running around? Which is basically, I think, the tack that right-wing extremists in Hungary and the United States are taking with regards to "ethnic purity" and what they believe is the subjugated place that women should have in those societies.
In these cases, children are a means to an end: they exist in order to support the upper-end of the age bracket, often in the upper tier of society.
The anxiety in this New Yorker piece isn't maybe so much over the sunsetting of humanity, but over the end of a subset of humanity accustomed to its place at the top and how younger generations are needed to keep that system going, to maintain the hierarchy.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:36 PM on March 6 [18 favorites]
If you're now in an economic elite, when you have AI, robots, cloning, anti-senescence technology etc. now coming online, are children really as "necessary", unless they in some way help you maintain or gird your place at the top of society? Does a Thiel see a young man as much more than a walking blood bank to suck dry in order to stay youthful, etc.
And if children are still necessary, how do you structure society so that you maximize your control over it, even with more kids running around? Which is basically, I think, the tack that right-wing extremists in Hungary and the United States are taking with regards to "ethnic purity" and what they believe is the subjugated place that women should have in those societies.
In these cases, children are a means to an end: they exist in order to support the upper-end of the age bracket, often in the upper tier of society.
The anxiety in this New Yorker piece isn't maybe so much over the sunsetting of humanity, but over the end of a subset of humanity accustomed to its place at the top and how younger generations are needed to keep that system going, to maintain the hierarchy.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 10:36 PM on March 6 [18 favorites]
It'll benefit society to have a real sustained population decline, even after accounting for migration.
"For [solving] immiseration, population decline is an unvarnished good, because it reduces the supply of labor" - Peter Turchin, TGS 169 #t=49m
The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel says population decline favors workers too,
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber suggests we only have trouble funding elder care because of all our "bullshit" social hierarchy jobs: advertising, management, law, law enforcement, etc.
As a simplistic concrete policy proposal, apply an extra 25-50 % payroll tax across the economy, including both corporate and government jobs, like law enforcement, but excluding "really essential jobs" like non-animal agriculture, manufacturing, repair & maintenance, medical jobs, and elder care, with the last three being Graeber's "care work" definition. You then spend much of that tax money paying for more elder care, and paying care givers more. The payroll tax itself is essential to reduce human labor spent "being elites" ala Turchin, while the new better paid care giver jobs pushes those possible "counter elites" jobs into the role required by the demographics.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:07 PM on March 6 [14 favorites]
"For [solving] immiseration, population decline is an unvarnished good, because it reduces the supply of labor" - Peter Turchin, TGS 169 #t=49m
The Great Leveler by Walter Scheidel says population decline favors workers too,
Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber suggests we only have trouble funding elder care because of all our "bullshit" social hierarchy jobs: advertising, management, law, law enforcement, etc.
As a simplistic concrete policy proposal, apply an extra 25-50 % payroll tax across the economy, including both corporate and government jobs, like law enforcement, but excluding "really essential jobs" like non-animal agriculture, manufacturing, repair & maintenance, medical jobs, and elder care, with the last three being Graeber's "care work" definition. You then spend much of that tax money paying for more elder care, and paying care givers more. The payroll tax itself is essential to reduce human labor spent "being elites" ala Turchin, while the new better paid care giver jobs pushes those possible "counter elites" jobs into the role required by the demographics.
posted by jeffburdges at 11:07 PM on March 6 [14 favorites]
This article was chilling. The author was dismissive of the idea that the way to increase birth rates is to improve life for women and families - he discussed that briefly, then discarded the idea as not supported by evidence.
BS. wages for housework, wages for childcare
posted by eustatic at 11:14 PM on March 6 [11 favorites]
BS. wages for housework, wages for childcare
posted by eustatic at 11:14 PM on March 6 [11 favorites]
This was a good article. I'm glad I read it. I feel the discourse on this topic is often infuriatingly pat and reductive, and while there definitely were angles that could have been explored further, I appreciated that the author at least tried to work through how complex the problem is and how ill understood the possible solutions are.
I have three kids myself, and I'm in my thirties. I know few people who have as many kids as I do, none my age or younger.
posted by potrzebie at 11:43 PM on March 6 [7 favorites]
I have three kids myself, and I'm in my thirties. I know few people who have as many kids as I do, none my age or younger.
posted by potrzebie at 11:43 PM on March 6 [7 favorites]
The problem, as I see it, is this: if the common population is in a diminishing phase, soon the ruling classes will have no one to actually rule over, and they will become the common people.
Who’s da biyotch now?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 12:44 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Who’s da biyotch now?
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 12:44 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Just finished reading this in the print mag. It is very long, but worth every minute of your time.
learning: I recommend going back to the article and picking up where you left off. I almost never finish these giant NYer piece in one go, but the section breaks they always use make it easy to break them into two (or even three) reading sessions.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:52 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
learning: I recommend going back to the article and picking up where you left off. I almost never finish these giant NYer piece in one go, but the section breaks they always use make it easy to break them into two (or even three) reading sessions.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:52 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I'm honestly having trouble getting sad about the idea of humans dwindling away to nothing. It's just the same with pretty much any feral weed
This must be absolute fire to all the other 12 year olds in detention. Kindly, get lost if you're that unhappy with mankind; some of us care about staying alive.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 3:28 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
This must be absolute fire to all the other 12 year olds in detention. Kindly, get lost if you're that unhappy with mankind; some of us care about staying alive.
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 3:28 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
Bit of an overreaction. they're not advocating annihilation, they're just talking about the logical outcome of humans choosing not to procreate. You'd still be living for your normal lifespan.
posted by biffa at 3:34 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
posted by biffa at 3:34 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
The part that stood out to me was the intense vicious circle around (perceived) educational opportunity in South Korea. When a whole culture gets stuck like this, a solution could be the creation of a counter-culture, as seems to be happening in China.
posted by Vegiemon at 3:35 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
posted by Vegiemon at 3:35 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
As if humans are merely individuals
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 3:35 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
posted by DeepSeaHaggis at 3:35 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I always was curious about the fact that the same people who are freaking out about declining birth rates are the same ones freaking out about immigrants coming to their countries and having babies
Oh, I’m sure there’s some sort of underlying concern coloring their responses.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:47 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
Oh, I’m sure there’s some sort of underlying concern coloring their responses.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:47 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
With small groups hoarding resources, no one who can help it is likely to want to have children. If population decline is something we care about, we have to make it possible for most people to afford to have kids. If it's not something we care about, well, just keep on keeping on, I guess.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:36 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
posted by kittens for breakfast at 4:36 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
It's just the same with pretty much any feral weed -
That's not how weeds grow. It's not how populations of invasive species grow either. It's not how anything grows as a general rule, but it can happen to any plant if it's mistreated enough.
A common example is a tree planted too deep, popping out of a mulch volcano. Which doesn't really seem like an apt comparison for humans, because who is the inept human planter in that analogy?
Anyway, complain about humans all you want, but leave plants out of it ;)
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:41 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
That's not how weeds grow. It's not how populations of invasive species grow either. It's not how anything grows as a general rule, but it can happen to any plant if it's mistreated enough.
A common example is a tree planted too deep, popping out of a mulch volcano. Which doesn't really seem like an apt comparison for humans, because who is the inept human planter in that analogy?
Anyway, complain about humans all you want, but leave plants out of it ;)
posted by SaltySalticid at 4:41 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
The end of patriarchy means the end of (exponential) growth, which means the end of capitalism. We can see all the nice things we could have just on the other side of that hill, if only we could get there.
posted by rikschell at 4:49 AM on March 7 [9 favorites]
posted by rikschell at 4:49 AM on March 7 [9 favorites]
The more I read, the more I read overcome with creeping dread that pro-natalism is going to lead to forced breeding of women.
I think that is very much the crisis, indeed, and the root of the obscene resurgence of forced-birth rhetoric and propaganda that we've seen the past few years. Fascism is ascendant, and fascism needs a steady supply of soldiers, workers, and consumers.
The powers that be would much rather create the conditions in which people are forced and coerced to breed against their will, rather than create the conditions in which breeding becomes an appealing proposition. And all because they can't stand the thought of white people losing their hegemonic advantage.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:00 AM on March 7 [16 favorites]
I think that is very much the crisis, indeed, and the root of the obscene resurgence of forced-birth rhetoric and propaganda that we've seen the past few years. Fascism is ascendant, and fascism needs a steady supply of soldiers, workers, and consumers.
The powers that be would much rather create the conditions in which people are forced and coerced to breed against their will, rather than create the conditions in which breeding becomes an appealing proposition. And all because they can't stand the thought of white people losing their hegemonic advantage.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 5:00 AM on March 7 [16 favorites]
If I were a government, I would start by funding (yes, bold strokes, since we know that government funding is waste fraud and abuse. etc) some broad population studies of different kinds and asking people, especially but not exclusively women, "what would need to change for you to want to have a child/more children". People don't have perfect self-insight, but it would be helpful to understand what most people really think. Influencers and tweets and speculation don't actually tell you much.
I mean, population decline is one thing, but a population crash seems concerning both for logistical reasons and for what it says about social outlook. My general sense is that a majority of people would like to have a small number of kids if [conditions were met]. I wouldn't, god knows, but most of my friends in economically stable (not rich, just stable ) situations have had one or two and really seem to like their kids, so it's not that child rearing is simply so thankless and awful that no one who isn't coerced into it will do it. Lots of people like kids; I'm constantly struck by historical evidence of this even in places and times where we believe that people had kids mostly because they had no choice or needed the labor. You go back to Ancient Rome or medieval Europe where kids died all the time and it wasn't exactly a woman's paradise, and you find evidence that people loved their kids - even their daughters - and mourned them deeply if they died.
It's not so much that there's actual moral value in reproducing, but when people seem to be avoiding kids for reasons of nihilism and poverty, that's kind of bad.
But anyway, what I'd start with is not just "making people's lives better" to get them to have kids, or some kind of horrible Musky forced breeding project - I'd start by literally asking people "would you have kids or have another kid if conditions changed" and "what change would you need to see before you'd have kids" and then try those specific things.
posted by Frowner at 5:13 AM on March 7 [25 favorites]
I mean, population decline is one thing, but a population crash seems concerning both for logistical reasons and for what it says about social outlook. My general sense is that a majority of people would like to have a small number of kids if [conditions were met]. I wouldn't, god knows, but most of my friends in economically stable (not rich, just stable ) situations have had one or two and really seem to like their kids, so it's not that child rearing is simply so thankless and awful that no one who isn't coerced into it will do it. Lots of people like kids; I'm constantly struck by historical evidence of this even in places and times where we believe that people had kids mostly because they had no choice or needed the labor. You go back to Ancient Rome or medieval Europe where kids died all the time and it wasn't exactly a woman's paradise, and you find evidence that people loved their kids - even their daughters - and mourned them deeply if they died.
It's not so much that there's actual moral value in reproducing, but when people seem to be avoiding kids for reasons of nihilism and poverty, that's kind of bad.
But anyway, what I'd start with is not just "making people's lives better" to get them to have kids, or some kind of horrible Musky forced breeding project - I'd start by literally asking people "would you have kids or have another kid if conditions changed" and "what change would you need to see before you'd have kids" and then try those specific things.
posted by Frowner at 5:13 AM on March 7 [25 favorites]
It's just the same with pretty much any feral weed -
That's not how weeds grow. It's not how populations of invasive species grow either. It's not how anything grows as a general rule, but it can happen to any plant if it's mistreated enough.
At the risk of sandbagging, there’s also no such thing as a ‘weed’ outside of human context, that’s just a plant growing in a place somebody doesn’t want it. Sure, there are invasive species, but that too is more relevant onna human scale. Over the grand arc of plant and animal evolutionary development new ecosystems will develop and something will figure out how to eat it.
On topic, I’ve wondered if maybe THIS is the great filter that explains some of the galactic silence. Civilizations gain control over procreation and stop exponential expansion. I worry what that means for future scientific development and innovation.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:22 AM on March 7 [7 favorites]
That's not how weeds grow. It's not how populations of invasive species grow either. It's not how anything grows as a general rule, but it can happen to any plant if it's mistreated enough.
At the risk of sandbagging, there’s also no such thing as a ‘weed’ outside of human context, that’s just a plant growing in a place somebody doesn’t want it. Sure, there are invasive species, but that too is more relevant onna human scale. Over the grand arc of plant and animal evolutionary development new ecosystems will develop and something will figure out how to eat it.
On topic, I’ve wondered if maybe THIS is the great filter that explains some of the galactic silence. Civilizations gain control over procreation and stop exponential expansion. I worry what that means for future scientific development and innovation.
posted by leotrotsky at 5:22 AM on March 7 [7 favorites]
Over the years I've read about the generational shifts in the hard work of parenting, how while many of the countries which have tried to encourage people to have more children haven't been willing to pay for the kind of support which meaningfully changes that, and the studies which have found that male partners who pick up more of the load want fewer children. This is rather painfully topical at the moment because in our local parent community things are notably closer to even, but a significant majority of the people you see coordinating childcare and other domestic requirements are federal workers – not because they're slackers, of course, but because until recently they were more likely to be allowed to work from home and had more flexible schedules and legal protections against being discriminated against for not working unpaid overtime (this is actually illegal) or using their sick time to care for children.
Caring for children is never going to be easy but especially in the United States there's just an array of additional burdens which could easily be solved if any of the “family values” types actually valued families.
posted by adamsc at 5:22 AM on March 7 [9 favorites]
Caring for children is never going to be easy but especially in the United States there's just an array of additional burdens which could easily be solved if any of the “family values” types actually valued families.
posted by adamsc at 5:22 AM on March 7 [9 favorites]
If we’re really worried about replacing labor, why do we keep storing “surplus labor” in prisons?
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:22 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:22 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I really wish these articles would be more critical about gender and misogyny. My sense is that most women want kids in their 20s/30s - but they are openly derided for this goal by men who fear being “trapped.” Yes childfree women exist. But out of the many 40+ women without kids that I know, only one of them really chose it deliberately, despite all of these women having had long-term relationships. It’s entirely culturally acceptable to deride young women who want children and for men to withhold family formation.
posted by haptic_avenger at 5:36 AM on March 7 [12 favorites]
posted by haptic_avenger at 5:36 AM on March 7 [12 favorites]
why do we keep storing “surplus labor” in prisons
Oh, be assured that said labor is being put to use. Over two-thirds of prisoners are laborers, often for pennies on the dollar.
And these numbers will only increase for the foreseeable future.
posted by Rudy_Wiser at 5:43 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
Oh, be assured that said labor is being put to use. Over two-thirds of prisoners are laborers, often for pennies on the dollar.
And these numbers will only increase for the foreseeable future.
posted by Rudy_Wiser at 5:43 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
I struggle on this topic because the thought of wanting children is just so alien to me. Why inflict this existence deliberately on a new human being? And then call it love instead of cruelty?
I too wonder if this is the Great Filter. A species evolves sentience, realizes that the creation of offspring is innately immoral, and makes the moral decision to stop doing it.
But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
posted by notoriety public at 5:52 AM on March 7 [13 favorites]
I too wonder if this is the Great Filter. A species evolves sentience, realizes that the creation of offspring is innately immoral, and makes the moral decision to stop doing it.
But that’s probably just wishful thinking.
posted by notoriety public at 5:52 AM on March 7 [13 favorites]
“ prison labor programs fail to provide incarcerated workers with transferable skills. In reality, the vast majority of work programs in prisons involve menial or repetitive tasks, and prison industries jobs and vocational training programs are declining nationwide, while maintenance jobs increasingly represent a larger share of work assignments.”
They don’t specify what “menial and repetitive tasks” means here, but I suspect it’s the cleaning, cooking, and maintenance mentioned higher up on the page, which, why not remunerate that at value on the outside?
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:55 AM on March 7
They don’t specify what “menial and repetitive tasks” means here, but I suspect it’s the cleaning, cooking, and maintenance mentioned higher up on the page, which, why not remunerate that at value on the outside?
posted by toodleydoodley at 5:55 AM on March 7
I too wonder if this is the Great Filter. A species evolves sentience, realizes that the creation of offspring is innately immoral, and makes the moral decision to stop doing it.
The vast majority of the people not having kids are making that decision because it's not an option for them, or they don't want it for themselves. Not because they think it's innately immoral. Please stop projecting this viewpoint onto the rest of us.
posted by Tomorrowful at 5:58 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
The vast majority of the people not having kids are making that decision because it's not an option for them, or they don't want it for themselves. Not because they think it's innately immoral. Please stop projecting this viewpoint onto the rest of us.
posted by Tomorrowful at 5:58 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
Uh it's a viewpoint just like yours. No need to take offense to it. We're all allowed to speculate and share ideas.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:02 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:02 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
I know at least 3 young American women who have had their tubes tied. It surprised me & made me sad … and also I get it.
posted by anshuman at 6:07 AM on March 7
posted by anshuman at 6:07 AM on March 7
I too wonder if this is the Great Filter. A species evolves sentience, realizes that the creation of offspring is innately immoral, and makes the moral decision to stop doing it.
Children were originally a survival mechanism because families needed labor just to survive. Subsistence farming was hard work. Kids helped as soon as they were able. 50% of them died so you had to have a lot of them. If you didn't have resources to support them in the case of something like a famine? Nobody eats and you roll the dice on the strongest surviving. Nature takes its course because there was literally no other option. Now we have industrial farming. We have industrial everything. We have virtually no child mortality anymore. We don't need kids for labor and we don't need spare kids.
The vast majority of the people not having kids are making that decision because it's not an option for them, or they don't want it for themselves. Not because they think it's innately immoral. Please stop projecting this viewpoint onto the rest of us.
Exactly. Capitalist society has seen that kids, to put it in cold economic terms, morphed from a profit center to a cost center for families. So you had all these families before that had to have kids to survive now saying hell no to kids because they're a burden they can't afford. Even in this age of plenty, it's a struggle to provide for children which should be seen as society's biggest failing. The bright side of the train wreck being that a lot of people that don't particularly want kids aren't having unwanted children.
If you made kids, for lack of a better word, "profitable" for families again? I'm not sure if that's the solution either because some people certainly would have kids for profit and every kids deserve to be wanted by a loving family.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:13 AM on March 7
Children were originally a survival mechanism because families needed labor just to survive. Subsistence farming was hard work. Kids helped as soon as they were able. 50% of them died so you had to have a lot of them. If you didn't have resources to support them in the case of something like a famine? Nobody eats and you roll the dice on the strongest surviving. Nature takes its course because there was literally no other option. Now we have industrial farming. We have industrial everything. We have virtually no child mortality anymore. We don't need kids for labor and we don't need spare kids.
The vast majority of the people not having kids are making that decision because it's not an option for them, or they don't want it for themselves. Not because they think it's innately immoral. Please stop projecting this viewpoint onto the rest of us.
Exactly. Capitalist society has seen that kids, to put it in cold economic terms, morphed from a profit center to a cost center for families. So you had all these families before that had to have kids to survive now saying hell no to kids because they're a burden they can't afford. Even in this age of plenty, it's a struggle to provide for children which should be seen as society's biggest failing. The bright side of the train wreck being that a lot of people that don't particularly want kids aren't having unwanted children.
If you made kids, for lack of a better word, "profitable" for families again? I'm not sure if that's the solution either because some people certainly would have kids for profit and every kids deserve to be wanted by a loving family.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:13 AM on March 7
It's all such an obvious sham, because the people who bemoan the "collapsing birth rate" are the exact same people who constantly claim that the earth is overpopulated, and that we are overdue for some sort of mass culling.
It's just about the racism, full stop. There is no reasonable justification for any of their histrionics. They just don't want the white-caste to lose its status and power.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:13 AM on March 7 [17 favorites]
It's just about the racism, full stop. There is no reasonable justification for any of their histrionics. They just don't want the white-caste to lose its status and power.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 6:13 AM on March 7 [17 favorites]
But anyway, what I'd start with is not just "making people's lives better" to get them to have kids, or some kind of horrible Musky forced breeding project - I'd start by literally asking people "would you have kids or have another kid if conditions changed" and "what change would you need to see before you'd have kids" and then try those specific things.
That's way too fuckin' logical for this world, man.
I work closely with two Korean women here in the USA. Both are married, one to a Korean man and the other to a (white) American man. Both have two kids; both women and the first woman's Korean husband are now US citizens. All four kids were born here. The subject of S Korea's birthrate came up over lunch, and I asked them would they have had kids if they'd stayed in Korea, and both women were like oh fuuuuck no, that Korean work culture is absolutely shitty and that the patriarchy there is so bad that any man who even tried to help with the kids would just get slaughtered by every other man and his own family. The first woman's Korean husband is your basic Involved Middle-Class Dad and both his and her parents just dump on them constantly because she doesn't do every aspect of childcare and serve him cocktails. The second woman's American husband has some independent source of wealth or income, and just decided to be a stay at home dad while the kids are in grade school, and he'll post a picture on Facebook of him baking cookies with the kids or whatever and her family will just dump on both of them: she was like I'm so glad he can't read Korean because the shit my own mother will say is just horrendous. Every year, they both go back to Korea for a week or two for ritual family visits, and for both of them, it's fifty older people loving on the kids and dumping on the parents for not putting literally 100% of childcare on the moms.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:14 AM on March 7 [37 favorites]
That's way too fuckin' logical for this world, man.
I work closely with two Korean women here in the USA. Both are married, one to a Korean man and the other to a (white) American man. Both have two kids; both women and the first woman's Korean husband are now US citizens. All four kids were born here. The subject of S Korea's birthrate came up over lunch, and I asked them would they have had kids if they'd stayed in Korea, and both women were like oh fuuuuck no, that Korean work culture is absolutely shitty and that the patriarchy there is so bad that any man who even tried to help with the kids would just get slaughtered by every other man and his own family. The first woman's Korean husband is your basic Involved Middle-Class Dad and both his and her parents just dump on them constantly because she doesn't do every aspect of childcare and serve him cocktails. The second woman's American husband has some independent source of wealth or income, and just decided to be a stay at home dad while the kids are in grade school, and he'll post a picture on Facebook of him baking cookies with the kids or whatever and her family will just dump on both of them: she was like I'm so glad he can't read Korean because the shit my own mother will say is just horrendous. Every year, they both go back to Korea for a week or two for ritual family visits, and for both of them, it's fifty older people loving on the kids and dumping on the parents for not putting literally 100% of childcare on the moms.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:14 AM on March 7 [37 favorites]
I was deeply involved in promoting the protection of the women in South Korea until I got banned from Twitixter because I drive Elon into a level of fury that brings me private number threatening phone calls.
I heard things that would frighten Lucipher himself. And now those same moods are shifting here to the US. This is real ya'll. I'm a white woman from Texas and I'm afraid. That should tell you something.
posted by lextex at 6:14 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
I heard things that would frighten Lucipher himself. And now those same moods are shifting here to the US. This is real ya'll. I'm a white woman from Texas and I'm afraid. That should tell you something.
posted by lextex at 6:14 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
I find myself revisiting this observation from Chris Arnade, upon visiting Phnom Penh. And yes, it is just an observation, not an argument, and yes, lives are complex, and yes, child rearing is hard, and yes, relationships can be hard, and yes, the decision to create the next generation is not a simple one. Unless it is.
"Phnom Penh is a young city chock full of kids. They are everywhere, and they bring a positive energy, warmth, and joy that no amount of adult diversions — no amount of bars, casinos, exceptional cuisine, and museums — can replicate, because nothing warms the heart like a big smile from a tiny face. I don’t care how silly and maudlin that sounds, because it’s simply true, at an innate and an intellectual level. ...
Yesterday I met a couple with their first born, sitting on the boardwalk. They’d taken the bus into Phnom Penh the night before from their rural home to visit the pediatrician, a ride that took them eight hours. They have, by every measure, have had, and still have, tough lives, making money by doing odd jobs (he as a tour guide, when he can get it, her at a shop), and when in Phnom Penh, sleep in the backyard of a relative who lives another twenty miles from the doctors office.
While they didn’t complain, after hearing their story, it sounded precarious and complicated enough that I tried asking them, as gently and politely as I could, after congratulating them, did they think having a child at this moment was the 'right thing to do'. I don’t believe I worded it as blunt as that, more along the lines of 'How has the birth of your daughter changed your lives.'
However I asked it, for the first time in our twenty minute conversation, they looked confused and not because of language issues, but because as we talked more I realized they couldn’t conceive that their new daughter could bring anything into their lives but good. The monthly twenty hour round trip bus ride, the two days camping in Phnom Penh, the new mouth to feed, the additional expense, all of that was simply what you did when you had a baby and it wasn’t mentally being recorded in a ledger as a negative thing to tally up against the positives, because having a baby wasn’t a decision you thought about that way. It was what you did when you finally found a person you loved."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:18 AM on March 7 [13 favorites]
"Phnom Penh is a young city chock full of kids. They are everywhere, and they bring a positive energy, warmth, and joy that no amount of adult diversions — no amount of bars, casinos, exceptional cuisine, and museums — can replicate, because nothing warms the heart like a big smile from a tiny face. I don’t care how silly and maudlin that sounds, because it’s simply true, at an innate and an intellectual level. ...
Yesterday I met a couple with their first born, sitting on the boardwalk. They’d taken the bus into Phnom Penh the night before from their rural home to visit the pediatrician, a ride that took them eight hours. They have, by every measure, have had, and still have, tough lives, making money by doing odd jobs (he as a tour guide, when he can get it, her at a shop), and when in Phnom Penh, sleep in the backyard of a relative who lives another twenty miles from the doctors office.
While they didn’t complain, after hearing their story, it sounded precarious and complicated enough that I tried asking them, as gently and politely as I could, after congratulating them, did they think having a child at this moment was the 'right thing to do'. I don’t believe I worded it as blunt as that, more along the lines of 'How has the birth of your daughter changed your lives.'
However I asked it, for the first time in our twenty minute conversation, they looked confused and not because of language issues, but because as we talked more I realized they couldn’t conceive that their new daughter could bring anything into their lives but good. The monthly twenty hour round trip bus ride, the two days camping in Phnom Penh, the new mouth to feed, the additional expense, all of that was simply what you did when you had a baby and it wasn’t mentally being recorded in a ledger as a negative thing to tally up against the positives, because having a baby wasn’t a decision you thought about that way. It was what you did when you finally found a person you loved."
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:18 AM on March 7 [13 favorites]
because as we talked more I realized they couldn’t conceive that their new daughter could bring anything into their lives but good.
And that's great, but it also leaves scary room for a lot of loneliness and alienation when others around you don't want to acknowledge the hard parts you may be going through. Honesty about the difficulties of parenting is important.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:31 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
And that's great, but it also leaves scary room for a lot of loneliness and alienation when others around you don't want to acknowledge the hard parts you may be going through. Honesty about the difficulties of parenting is important.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:31 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
And that's great, but it also leaves scary room for a lot of loneliness and alienation when others around you don't want to acknowledge the hard parts you may be going through. Honesty about the difficulties of parenting is important.
Yep. Especially since so many parents, especially mothers, in the Western world are just flat out on their own since we almost completely abandoned multi-generational households.
"It takes a village" but we bulldozed the village.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:34 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
Yep. Especially since so many parents, especially mothers, in the Western world are just flat out on their own since we almost completely abandoned multi-generational households.
"It takes a village" but we bulldozed the village.
posted by Your Childhood Pet Rock at 6:34 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
leotrotsky,
I doubt human choices could ever supress reproduction enough to be a great filter per se. If you've ecological stability and population drops, then you'll have workers being paid better & better, so workers then have the time and disposable income for raising children.
According to the planetary boundaries report, "novel entities" like plastics, PFAS, and pesticides seemingly have the highest risk potential, so among everything occuring here on earth plastics, PFAS, pesticides represent our best guess as the great filter. "Biosphere integrity" ranks second, which includes land miss-use, but also some overlaps. "Biochemical flows" ranks third, which means fertilizers disrupting the P and N cycles. Climate change ranks only fourth.
We think human civilization arose because of a stable climate period though, which we've now disrupted through fossil fuels. I'd think overpopulation could cause a population crash back low enough that civilization ends, after which human beings survive but civilization never restarts, because agriculture never works well enough again. I'd also think overpopulation could make it impossible to stop using fertilizer or plastic, or require degrading ever more land, which lowers carrying capacity and worsens the eventual population crash. In other words, overpopulation could be one major component of a great filter.
Also..
"On average among all countries, we found the strongest associations between fertility and infant mortality, household size, and access to any form of contraception."
Corey Bradshaw observes that infant mortality has the single largest impact upon fertility rate, meaning people have more kids when they expect more to die young.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:41 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
I doubt human choices could ever supress reproduction enough to be a great filter per se. If you've ecological stability and population drops, then you'll have workers being paid better & better, so workers then have the time and disposable income for raising children.
According to the planetary boundaries report, "novel entities" like plastics, PFAS, and pesticides seemingly have the highest risk potential, so among everything occuring here on earth plastics, PFAS, pesticides represent our best guess as the great filter. "Biosphere integrity" ranks second, which includes land miss-use, but also some overlaps. "Biochemical flows" ranks third, which means fertilizers disrupting the P and N cycles. Climate change ranks only fourth.
We think human civilization arose because of a stable climate period though, which we've now disrupted through fossil fuels. I'd think overpopulation could cause a population crash back low enough that civilization ends, after which human beings survive but civilization never restarts, because agriculture never works well enough again. I'd also think overpopulation could make it impossible to stop using fertilizer or plastic, or require degrading ever more land, which lowers carrying capacity and worsens the eventual population crash. In other words, overpopulation could be one major component of a great filter.
Also..
"On average among all countries, we found the strongest associations between fertility and infant mortality, household size, and access to any form of contraception."
Corey Bradshaw observes that infant mortality has the single largest impact upon fertility rate, meaning people have more kids when they expect more to die young.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:41 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
And that's great, but it also leaves scary room for a lot of loneliness and alienation when others around you don't want to acknowledge the hard parts you may be going through. Honesty about the difficulties of parenting is important.
Life is often lonely and alienating, parenthood is not unique in this matter.
More than that, it doesn't feel like there's a shortage of commentary or information about the challenges of parenthood these days. This actually seems like an area where we've swung so far to the "hardships" side that we actively discourage people from becoming parents. From the various (real) dangers of pregnancy to the fears about how your children will be X and you're doing it wrong sold to parents to the general sentiment about children being extremely expensive to, yes, the loneliness and hard parts of raising kids and being in a family, I don't think we're in any danger of people not knowing that having kids is not a fantasy. I share this because for me, I was nervous about having kids and expected more downsides than I have so far experienced, and the upsides have felt much more rewarding than I expected.
If anything, it's weird that we can't hear stories about parents who view having children as good, despite the incredible hardships clearly mentioned in the story of the parents' life, without immediately bringing up different other hardships.
posted by ch1x0r at 7:01 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
Life is often lonely and alienating, parenthood is not unique in this matter.
More than that, it doesn't feel like there's a shortage of commentary or information about the challenges of parenthood these days. This actually seems like an area where we've swung so far to the "hardships" side that we actively discourage people from becoming parents. From the various (real) dangers of pregnancy to the fears about how your children will be X and you're doing it wrong sold to parents to the general sentiment about children being extremely expensive to, yes, the loneliness and hard parts of raising kids and being in a family, I don't think we're in any danger of people not knowing that having kids is not a fantasy. I share this because for me, I was nervous about having kids and expected more downsides than I have so far experienced, and the upsides have felt much more rewarding than I expected.
If anything, it's weird that we can't hear stories about parents who view having children as good, despite the incredible hardships clearly mentioned in the story of the parents' life, without immediately bringing up different other hardships.
posted by ch1x0r at 7:01 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
Mod note: Changed the main URL to the Ungated URL
posted by loup (staff) at 7:04 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
posted by loup (staff) at 7:04 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
Life is often lonely and alienating, parenthood is not unique in this matter.
More than that, it doesn't feel like there's a shortage of commentary or information about the challenges of parenthood these days...If anything, it's weird that we can't hear stories about parents who view having children as good, despite the incredible hardships clearly mentioned in the story of the parents' life, without immediately bringing up different other hardships.
From many of my experiences, it's quite the opposite. People can't express a lot of their fears, unhappiness, the exhaustion of parenting without being told its a joy bubble and they should appreciate it. It's not at all weird to acknowledge people's emotions and the difficultly of parenting. It's not a slam on anyone but look, even here acknowledging it gets push back! Why can't it just be happy? Well as you say, LIFE can be quite lonely and alienating. It's fine to acknowledge it as a whole but not specifically for parenting?
I reject that wholeheartedly.
Parents and moms in particular get too much grief to hold the party line on "view having children as good" full stop.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:10 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
More than that, it doesn't feel like there's a shortage of commentary or information about the challenges of parenthood these days...If anything, it's weird that we can't hear stories about parents who view having children as good, despite the incredible hardships clearly mentioned in the story of the parents' life, without immediately bringing up different other hardships.
From many of my experiences, it's quite the opposite. People can't express a lot of their fears, unhappiness, the exhaustion of parenting without being told its a joy bubble and they should appreciate it. It's not at all weird to acknowledge people's emotions and the difficultly of parenting. It's not a slam on anyone but look, even here acknowledging it gets push back! Why can't it just be happy? Well as you say, LIFE can be quite lonely and alienating. It's fine to acknowledge it as a whole but not specifically for parenting?
I reject that wholeheartedly.
Parents and moms in particular get too much grief to hold the party line on "view having children as good" full stop.
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:10 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
My sense is that most women want kids in their 20s/30s - but they are openly derided for this goal by men who fear being “trapped.” Yes childfree women exist. But out of the many 40+ women without kids that I know, only one of them really chose it deliberately, despite all of these women having had long-term relationships.
Interestingly, my sense is that this was true even when I was in my twenties but now, ten to fifteen years later, I'm actually not seeing this dynamic. Women younger than me really do not seem to want kids the way even a decade ago they did. I really feel like in my particular social circles there was a flip from "yeah we'll probably have a couple kids" to "yeah I just don't see why we'd have kids" that happened very quickly, and I only didn't get hit by it because I had mine relatively young. I'm approaching perimenopause and a lot of the couples I know who in the eighties or nineties would have been freaking out and taking expensive measures to try to reproduce before the clock ran out are just...not.
I do think domestic politics are playing into this. When white women with college degrees think "should I have a kid?" it's very easy to think of Elon Musk and JD Vance doing a sickos.jpg out the window as they discuss it with their spouses. When the absolutely least cool people you know are like "yes, OBVIOUSLY you should have a child to perpetuate the Glorious White Race. Have six or seven!" I do think a nontrivial percentage of American women are like "yeah, no, somehow only creeps are into procreation anymore" and opting out.
I do wonder if the South Korean "ugh don't bring your KID in here" culture is a pathology specific to them or if it's an inevitable development once few enough people are routinely around children. I've spent a ton of time in Taiwan, another place with an abysmally low birthrate, with small children, and I've never felt unwelcome anywhere I've taken them. On the contrary, people fawn over little kids in Taiwan. There are private, clean breastfeeding rooms everywhere; when I had babies I remember thinking Taiwan was like paradise for new moms compared to the US. But I wonder if the next generation keeps that culture up or if part of the spiral is that people get less used to kids in public and stop tolerating their noise and mess.
posted by potrzebie at 7:12 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
Interestingly, my sense is that this was true even when I was in my twenties but now, ten to fifteen years later, I'm actually not seeing this dynamic. Women younger than me really do not seem to want kids the way even a decade ago they did. I really feel like in my particular social circles there was a flip from "yeah we'll probably have a couple kids" to "yeah I just don't see why we'd have kids" that happened very quickly, and I only didn't get hit by it because I had mine relatively young. I'm approaching perimenopause and a lot of the couples I know who in the eighties or nineties would have been freaking out and taking expensive measures to try to reproduce before the clock ran out are just...not.
I do think domestic politics are playing into this. When white women with college degrees think "should I have a kid?" it's very easy to think of Elon Musk and JD Vance doing a sickos.jpg out the window as they discuss it with their spouses. When the absolutely least cool people you know are like "yes, OBVIOUSLY you should have a child to perpetuate the Glorious White Race. Have six or seven!" I do think a nontrivial percentage of American women are like "yeah, no, somehow only creeps are into procreation anymore" and opting out.
I do wonder if the South Korean "ugh don't bring your KID in here" culture is a pathology specific to them or if it's an inevitable development once few enough people are routinely around children. I've spent a ton of time in Taiwan, another place with an abysmally low birthrate, with small children, and I've never felt unwelcome anywhere I've taken them. On the contrary, people fawn over little kids in Taiwan. There are private, clean breastfeeding rooms everywhere; when I had babies I remember thinking Taiwan was like paradise for new moms compared to the US. But I wonder if the next generation keeps that culture up or if part of the spiral is that people get less used to kids in public and stop tolerating their noise and mess.
posted by potrzebie at 7:12 AM on March 7 [15 favorites]
Creating an entire new sentient being for your own gratification is absolutely the most selfish act i can concieve of, tbh.
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:14 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:14 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
Women younger than me really do not seem to want kids the way even a decade ago they did. I really feel like in my particular social circles there was a flip from "yeah we'll probably have a couple kids" to "yeah I just don't see why we'd have kids"
I think the other side of this is that we don't know how many people who had kids did so out of feelings they were expected too, and would have been happy without them. That's a hard thing to admit to, for obvious reasons, but if not having children becomes more normalised then maybe we will also see more people choosing not to have kids.
posted by biffa at 7:20 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
I think the other side of this is that we don't know how many people who had kids did so out of feelings they were expected too, and would have been happy without them. That's a hard thing to admit to, for obvious reasons, but if not having children becomes more normalised then maybe we will also see more people choosing not to have kids.
posted by biffa at 7:20 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
Parents and moms in particular get too much grief to hold the party line on "view having children as good" full stop.
It seems to me like we get too much grief to hold the party line that "parenthood is pain and suffering" these days. Maybe this is just the (almost entirely lefty) places I inhabit, I'm sure there are places with the opposite problem, although metafilter certainly isn't one of them.
posted by ch1x0r at 7:29 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
It seems to me like we get too much grief to hold the party line that "parenthood is pain and suffering" these days. Maybe this is just the (almost entirely lefty) places I inhabit, I'm sure there are places with the opposite problem, although metafilter certainly isn't one of them.
posted by ch1x0r at 7:29 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
A problem in all these conversations seems to me to be that human experience doesn't fit neatly into words and theories. That's not to say that you can't broadly express human experiences or broadly explain economics or imperialism, etc, but I don't think that "selfishness" is really a good word for wanting a kid. It might be - Elon Musk wants kids for selfish reasons, for instance.
But:
1. Most people may struggle with their kids' growing up into separate people, but most people (again, sizeable minority of others) know going in that a kid may be a continuation of your family but fundamentally a kid will be their own person. My parents really struggled with letting me have autonomy, for instance, but not because they truly believed that I needed to do everything they said and follow a life plan they laid out. When you have a kid, you are creating something that will escape and exceed you.
2. Is is selfish to paint a picture or write a book or become a research scientist? Wanting to create something is maybe a kind of selfishness, but if so I think it's a kind of selfishness so distinct from, eg, yelling at a clerk because the store is out of perrier that it's not a very helpful descriptor.
3. I wouldn't say that I regret not having kids, but from time to time I do think that my dad would really have loved being a grandfather and he is a good man and it would be nice if he had that, and I think it a pity that - while the world does contain people who are kind and smart and weird - the world won't contain any more people who grew up being shaped by my family's particular kind smart weird people. I think about how all the little stuff I inherited from my family, the special books and the art my aunts did and the little ornaments that are important to me because they were my grandmothers, all that is going to be just a heap of unimportant junk when I'm gone. Obviously none of this convinced me to have a kid, and my dad even said that now he's glad he doesn't have a grandchild facing climate change and fascism, but I can see that continuity and family doesn't have to be about, like, fourteen words bullshit.
4. I'm always reminded of Ursula Le Guin's book (her best book, IMO) Always Coming Home. Adrienneleigh, maybe you've read it? You know where Stone Telling chooses to have a baby when she's in a bad situation? She has a baby because she's lonely, in a way, and because she wants to recreate her home, the Valley, in this horrible place where everyone has terrible values, but I am not sure that "selfish" really captures her choice or her understanding of her daughter and who her daughter is.
I just think that it's very hard to neatly sum up in words exactly what it means to do something as big, scary and complicated as having a kid. It's big, scary and complicated even if you're a terrible and thoughtless parent, even if you have twenty million dollars and an army of au pairs, even if you are a Very Good Leftist indeed, etc.
posted by Frowner at 7:33 AM on March 7 [18 favorites]
But:
1. Most people may struggle with their kids' growing up into separate people, but most people (again, sizeable minority of others) know going in that a kid may be a continuation of your family but fundamentally a kid will be their own person. My parents really struggled with letting me have autonomy, for instance, but not because they truly believed that I needed to do everything they said and follow a life plan they laid out. When you have a kid, you are creating something that will escape and exceed you.
2. Is is selfish to paint a picture or write a book or become a research scientist? Wanting to create something is maybe a kind of selfishness, but if so I think it's a kind of selfishness so distinct from, eg, yelling at a clerk because the store is out of perrier that it's not a very helpful descriptor.
3. I wouldn't say that I regret not having kids, but from time to time I do think that my dad would really have loved being a grandfather and he is a good man and it would be nice if he had that, and I think it a pity that - while the world does contain people who are kind and smart and weird - the world won't contain any more people who grew up being shaped by my family's particular kind smart weird people. I think about how all the little stuff I inherited from my family, the special books and the art my aunts did and the little ornaments that are important to me because they were my grandmothers, all that is going to be just a heap of unimportant junk when I'm gone. Obviously none of this convinced me to have a kid, and my dad even said that now he's glad he doesn't have a grandchild facing climate change and fascism, but I can see that continuity and family doesn't have to be about, like, fourteen words bullshit.
4. I'm always reminded of Ursula Le Guin's book (her best book, IMO) Always Coming Home. Adrienneleigh, maybe you've read it? You know where Stone Telling chooses to have a baby when she's in a bad situation? She has a baby because she's lonely, in a way, and because she wants to recreate her home, the Valley, in this horrible place where everyone has terrible values, but I am not sure that "selfish" really captures her choice or her understanding of her daughter and who her daughter is.
I just think that it's very hard to neatly sum up in words exactly what it means to do something as big, scary and complicated as having a kid. It's big, scary and complicated even if you're a terrible and thoughtless parent, even if you have twenty million dollars and an army of au pairs, even if you are a Very Good Leftist indeed, etc.
posted by Frowner at 7:33 AM on March 7 [18 favorites]
I mean, if it's selfish to have a kid, how much more selfish it was to write Capital right? Or even Debt - there you are, writing a book that will change untold numbers of people's lives in ways you absolutely cannot predict, for good and for bad, for god knows how long. Better to keep those writing fingers neatly folded.
posted by Frowner at 7:37 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 7:37 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
I don’t think it’s just people of childbearing age that are less enthusiastic about children. I’ve been so surprised by how many of grandparents I know that are flat out uninterested in their grandchildren. They aren’t mean, but they don’t make any efforts to help out with time or resources. When one of my friends was ready to have her baby she approached all the grandparents asking if they could commit to babysitting a few times a month and they all politely declined. The most involved grandparent I know goes over to her daughter’s house once a week to help out, and she’s told me that she refuses to babysit, her daughter has to stay in the house too. I do not blame anyone who doesn’t feel like spending their old age doing another round of childcare, but I do think there’s a societal belief, grandchildren are a joy and your parents will want to help, that isn’t true anymore. Which is especially frustrating because I frequently hear “well if you need childcare talk to your parents, they’ll help!”. No, many of them won’t.
posted by lepus at 7:37 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
posted by lepus at 7:37 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
I know at least 3 young American women who have had their tubes tied. It surprised me & made me sad … and also I get it.
Why would this make you sad? Were these women forced to do it at gunpoint, or did they choose so of their own volition?
It's not lost on me that much of the publicly hateful rhetoric and testeria around trans people is often couched in discussions of reproductive futurity. Consider the scaremongering around "young women removing perfectly healthy breast tissue."
posted by cultanthropologist at 7:40 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
Why would this make you sad? Were these women forced to do it at gunpoint, or did they choose so of their own volition?
It's not lost on me that much of the publicly hateful rhetoric and testeria around trans people is often couched in discussions of reproductive futurity. Consider the scaremongering around "young women removing perfectly healthy breast tissue."
posted by cultanthropologist at 7:40 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
I mean, if it's selfish to have a kid, how much more selfish it was to write Capital right?
As a parent, the word 'selfish' and appropriately taken-care of children kinda funny. Like is it selfish to want to go the bathroom by yourself? Or to not ferry food to someone 36 times a day? Or to spend the same as your rent on some 3 week long 1 hour a day activity? Or to spend 2 hours letting someone vent and cry on your shoulder because they are having best friend drama? And then you have to clean up their mess.
The world 'selfish' takes on a different meaning when you have children.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on March 7 [7 favorites]
As a parent, the word 'selfish' and appropriately taken-care of children kinda funny. Like is it selfish to want to go the bathroom by yourself? Or to not ferry food to someone 36 times a day? Or to spend the same as your rent on some 3 week long 1 hour a day activity? Or to spend 2 hours letting someone vent and cry on your shoulder because they are having best friend drama? And then you have to clean up their mess.
The world 'selfish' takes on a different meaning when you have children.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:41 AM on March 7 [7 favorites]
It seems to me like we get too much grief to hold the party line that "parenthood is pain and suffering" these days.
Ah I'm relieved I didn't say that then!
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:41 AM on March 7
Ah I'm relieved I didn't say that then!
posted by tiny frying pan at 7:41 AM on March 7
It's not lost on me that much of the publicly hateful rhetoric and testeria around trans people is often couched in discussions of reproductive futurity. Consider the scaremongering around "young women removing perfectly healthy breast tissue."
This is an important connection to make. In Fascism, your body is not your own. It's something you have on loan from the State, and it's your responsibility as a citizen to use your body to further the interests of the State, whether that be through labour, military service, or producing children.
Trans people are a physical manifestation of the concept of personal liberty and freedom, which is why they have become target #1 for the modern international fascist movement. People who decline to breed are also castigated in this manner, for having the audacity to view their lives and bodies as their own, and not simply assets of the State.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 7:46 AM on March 7 [25 favorites]
This is an important connection to make. In Fascism, your body is not your own. It's something you have on loan from the State, and it's your responsibility as a citizen to use your body to further the interests of the State, whether that be through labour, military service, or producing children.
Trans people are a physical manifestation of the concept of personal liberty and freedom, which is why they have become target #1 for the modern international fascist movement. People who decline to breed are also castigated in this manner, for having the audacity to view their lives and bodies as their own, and not simply assets of the State.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 7:46 AM on March 7 [25 favorites]
Frowner: it's the "sentient being" part that's a problem here, not the creative impulse! A book or a painting isn't conscious, it can't suffer or die, and you don't have to inflict epistemic violence on it in order to socialize it into your culture. (A book or a painting may ofc inflict its OWN epistemic violence, but generally only on people who have at least consented to the possibility of that happening.)
Meanwhile, every time you create a child you have doomed a sentient being to suffering and death, and you are absolutely committing to the infliction of epistemic violence on it for years and years while it is completely helpless and entirely in your control. I don't, actually, think those things are moral or good! I acknowledge that this is a minority position!
(And yes, i have read Always Coming Home. I love Le Guin, and mostly agree with her, but not about parenthood.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:51 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
Meanwhile, every time you create a child you have doomed a sentient being to suffering and death, and you are absolutely committing to the infliction of epistemic violence on it for years and years while it is completely helpless and entirely in your control. I don't, actually, think those things are moral or good! I acknowledge that this is a minority position!
(And yes, i have read Always Coming Home. I love Le Guin, and mostly agree with her, but not about parenthood.)
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:51 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
It's incredible that people keep talking about government supports (e.g. child care, parental leave, tax credits) as increasing fertility rates. They obviously do not work to that end. That's not to say that those are bad policies, just that they will do nothing to restore replacement fertility rates.
In any meaningful measure, people have kids early and often* because of religious and cultural traditions or economic necessity (for family labor) they support or must obey and/or because they don't have reliable access to birth control. If you don't want to reimpose those conditions, you accept (at best) a rapid decline in your native population mitigatable only by immigration, or a rapid decline full stop if you can't accept immigrants or immigrants don't like your place.
*in the intermediate term, "early" approaches the impact of "often"; women having 1.5 kids in their early 20s will stave off population decline quite a while versus having them in their mid-30s.
posted by MattD at 7:52 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
In any meaningful measure, people have kids early and often* because of religious and cultural traditions or economic necessity (for family labor) they support or must obey and/or because they don't have reliable access to birth control. If you don't want to reimpose those conditions, you accept (at best) a rapid decline in your native population mitigatable only by immigration, or a rapid decline full stop if you can't accept immigrants or immigrants don't like your place.
*in the intermediate term, "early" approaches the impact of "often"; women having 1.5 kids in their early 20s will stave off population decline quite a while versus having them in their mid-30s.
posted by MattD at 7:52 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
There's gotta be a Godwin's law about parenting/children threads and the word "selfish." There it wasn't until just suddenly for no discernible reason, there it was. Athena, sprung from Zeus' forehead!
***
It seems to me like we get too much grief to hold the party line that "parenthood is pain and suffering" these days. Maybe this is just the (almost entirely lefty) places I inhabit, I'm sure there are places with the opposite problem, although metafilter certainly isn't one of them.
I basically avoid any online spaces dedicated to parenting because they seem to have more drama than a city's Nextdoor page. However, my in-person spaces seem to be a generous mix of attitudes and mostly a willingness to share them. The parents from my son's class all seem to be pretty realistic about the joys and hardships of parenting. Everyone also generally appears to have what they need to care for wanted children, across a spectrum of course, so that's also not going to be everyone's experience.
Speaking of which, I've found parenting to be very rewarding both in respect of caring and teaching our son and for my wife and I to learn and grow together. The attitudes to men's involvement in my cohort are also fairly modern and from what my wife has been able to gather, most of the other Dads in the heterosexual couples from our group put in an equal or greater amount of work than their partners/spouses. I'm still see mostly women organizing social activities, though they aren't always the parents that show up for them. So it's hard to say what's going on in other people's homes. Apart from one parent, everyone seems to be pretty content.
Would introducing policies and programs that support this kind of environment change the attitudes toward childrearing in places like Korea? Is that even necessary or desirable? I did appreciate that aspect of the linked piece, that there is probably not an answer or a predictable outcome here.
posted by Captaintripps at 7:56 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
***
It seems to me like we get too much grief to hold the party line that "parenthood is pain and suffering" these days. Maybe this is just the (almost entirely lefty) places I inhabit, I'm sure there are places with the opposite problem, although metafilter certainly isn't one of them.
I basically avoid any online spaces dedicated to parenting because they seem to have more drama than a city's Nextdoor page. However, my in-person spaces seem to be a generous mix of attitudes and mostly a willingness to share them. The parents from my son's class all seem to be pretty realistic about the joys and hardships of parenting. Everyone also generally appears to have what they need to care for wanted children, across a spectrum of course, so that's also not going to be everyone's experience.
Speaking of which, I've found parenting to be very rewarding both in respect of caring and teaching our son and for my wife and I to learn and grow together. The attitudes to men's involvement in my cohort are also fairly modern and from what my wife has been able to gather, most of the other Dads in the heterosexual couples from our group put in an equal or greater amount of work than their partners/spouses. I'm still see mostly women organizing social activities, though they aren't always the parents that show up for them. So it's hard to say what's going on in other people's homes. Apart from one parent, everyone seems to be pretty content.
Would introducing policies and programs that support this kind of environment change the attitudes toward childrearing in places like Korea? Is that even necessary or desirable? I did appreciate that aspect of the linked piece, that there is probably not an answer or a predictable outcome here.
posted by Captaintripps at 7:56 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
It’s sort of surprising to me when these conversations don’t mention climate change. Any informed person is looking at the near future and wondering if it is even moral to bring a person into this world. I did a lot of work coming to the decision that it not immoral for me to have a child (actually, today, we’re implanting an embryo to have a second—very scary times to consider having a daughter).
I’m not going to write up my entire moral reasoning about it, but the decision wasn’t made lightly. I find it so easy to understand people who don’t want to make children based on the climate crisis alone.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 7:59 AM on March 7 [9 favorites]
I’m not going to write up my entire moral reasoning about it, but the decision wasn’t made lightly. I find it so easy to understand people who don’t want to make children based on the climate crisis alone.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 7:59 AM on March 7 [9 favorites]
Meanwhile, every time you create a child you have doomed a sentient being to suffering and death, and you are absolutely committing to the infliction of epistemic violence on it for years and years while it is completely helpless and entirely in your control. I don't, actually, think those things are moral or good! I acknowledge that this is a minority position!
See, this is where I feel that theory fails, at least as a final arbiter, because it requires one either to agree that existence is bad or disagree and say that it is good or worthwhile. Saying "obviously never existing and never experiencing anything at all, good or bad, is better than existing" is a statement of opinion or faith. Like, I'd come right back and say, "since I'm not condemned to immortality, I at least welcome the epistemic violence, etc, because I got to climb a small mountain in China on a perfect day and that was worth all the suffering". That's an opinion too, and you could come right back and say, "you only THINK that because you are BRAINWASHED about existence", but it seems like this whole line of argument is one of those unresolvable things like "am I just a brain in a tank and I only THINK the world exists". "You only THINK being alive is better than never having existed because of the epistemic violence that has been inflicted on you" just seems like one of those things you take on faith or not at all.
I am afraid I am existence-pilled, even in our present times.
posted by Frowner at 8:04 AM on March 7 [29 favorites]
See, this is where I feel that theory fails, at least as a final arbiter, because it requires one either to agree that existence is bad or disagree and say that it is good or worthwhile. Saying "obviously never existing and never experiencing anything at all, good or bad, is better than existing" is a statement of opinion or faith. Like, I'd come right back and say, "since I'm not condemned to immortality, I at least welcome the epistemic violence, etc, because I got to climb a small mountain in China on a perfect day and that was worth all the suffering". That's an opinion too, and you could come right back and say, "you only THINK that because you are BRAINWASHED about existence", but it seems like this whole line of argument is one of those unresolvable things like "am I just a brain in a tank and I only THINK the world exists". "You only THINK being alive is better than never having existed because of the epistemic violence that has been inflicted on you" just seems like one of those things you take on faith or not at all.
I am afraid I am existence-pilled, even in our present times.
posted by Frowner at 8:04 AM on March 7 [29 favorites]
It's incredible that people keep talking about government supports (e.g. child care, parental leave, tax credits) as increasing fertility rates. They obviously do not work to that end. That's not to say that those are bad policies, just that they will do nothing to restore replacement fertility rates.
What? Exactly how much do you think the average government gives to people to have kids?
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:04 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
What? Exactly how much do you think the average government gives to people to have kids?
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:04 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
I am afraid I am existence-pilled, even in our present times.
Same. And although I don't have any kids, nor any plans to have kids, I definitely bristle at the idea that the choice to have kids is somehow inherently cruel to them because of *gestures vaguely at everything*.
I mean, as a person who exists, I have experienced a certain amount of suffering in my life. I'm also deeply anxious about the state of the world, and what's to come in the future. I don't blame my parents for that though. Life is suffering. It's part of the deal. And even given the circumstances, I'm grateful to my parents for choosing to have had me.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 8:08 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
Same. And although I don't have any kids, nor any plans to have kids, I definitely bristle at the idea that the choice to have kids is somehow inherently cruel to them because of *gestures vaguely at everything*.
I mean, as a person who exists, I have experienced a certain amount of suffering in my life. I'm also deeply anxious about the state of the world, and what's to come in the future. I don't blame my parents for that though. Life is suffering. It's part of the deal. And even given the circumstances, I'm grateful to my parents for choosing to have had me.
posted by mrjohnmuller at 8:08 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
(Being existence-pilled does not mean that everyone should CHOOSE!! LIFE!! and no one should feel that their life is unbearable; it just means that I don't think it is irrefutably arguable that it is always worse to exist than not to exist)
posted by Frowner at 8:13 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 8:13 AM on March 7 [6 favorites]
>gives to people to have kids?
How much it cost us to have a baby ($37,000 billed, $11,558 out-of-pocket)
posted by torokunai2 at 8:14 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
How much it cost us to have a baby ($37,000 billed, $11,558 out-of-pocket)
posted by torokunai2 at 8:14 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
Frowner, thanks for articulating how I feel and giving me the great term “existence-pilled.” That was my ultimate moral reasoning. I like being alive despite*all this* and I think I can make people who also like it. My kid may not have willed himself to exist, but neither did he have a say in his non-existence.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:17 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:17 AM on March 7 [5 favorites]
Meanwhile, every time you create a child you have doomed a sentient being to suffering and death, and you are absolutely committing to the infliction of epistemic violence on it for years and years while it is completely helpless and entirely in your control. I don't, actually, think those things are moral or good! I acknowledge that this is a minority position!
There’s an implicit assumption here that the suffering of existence outweighs the joy. I don’t know that this assumption is widely shared.
Also, that kind of logic applied more broadly would seem to make any kind of existence in the world pretty darn fraught. You’re basically living like Doug Forcett from the Good Place.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:18 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
There’s an implicit assumption here that the suffering of existence outweighs the joy. I don’t know that this assumption is widely shared.
Also, that kind of logic applied more broadly would seem to make any kind of existence in the world pretty darn fraught. You’re basically living like Doug Forcett from the Good Place.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:18 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
Suffering is a part of everyone’s life, even, and maybe especially, people with very happy lives. The idea that making a life causes someone to suffer and so you shouldn’t make one is so weird to me. And such a western-centric one that worships individualism as the pinnacle virtue.
Definitely don’t have children if you don’t want one, I strongly agree with that decision. But it is not in every case immoral to have one, I’m secure in that.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:22 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
Definitely don’t have children if you don’t want one, I strongly agree with that decision. But it is not in every case immoral to have one, I’m secure in that.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:22 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
In the long, hard years before I learned that depression could be treated, I resented my parents for inflicting existence on me and hated myself for selfishly inflicting existence on my children. In retrospect, I feel like "it's better not to exist" is just another lie that my depression told me. YMMV.
posted by killingmesmalls at 8:25 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
posted by killingmesmalls at 8:25 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
The idea that making a life causes someone to suffer and so you shouldn’t make one is so weird to me. And such a western-centric one that worships individualism as the pinnacle virtue.
Wouldn't "life is suffering" be more of a Buddhist idea than a Western one? And I swear I didn't notice your username until after I wrote that!
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:29 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
Wouldn't "life is suffering" be more of a Buddhist idea than a Western one? And I swear I didn't notice your username until after I wrote that!
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:29 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
Phases of contraction are always painful. And throwing the term selfish out at people who have kids is pretty silly because not having kids would be considered selfish as well. Come on church ladies, stop calling people selfish.
posted by waving at 8:30 AM on March 7
posted by waving at 8:30 AM on March 7
I don't like the term selfish for either side because do what you want for your life, but not having kids being selfish always seemed more bizarre to me. Cause I don't owe the State anything.
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:32 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:32 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
Wouldn't "life is suffering" be more of a Buddhist idea than a Western one?
That sentence (and the word suffering) means something specific in a Buddhist context that doesn’t exactly map to the standard meaning. You certainly don’t move to “…therefore better not to have life.”
posted by leotrotsky at 8:32 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
That sentence (and the word suffering) means something specific in a Buddhist context that doesn’t exactly map to the standard meaning. You certainly don’t move to “…therefore better not to have life.”
posted by leotrotsky at 8:32 AM on March 7 [1 favorite]
I mean, I don't think it's incoherent to say that there is a thing called epistemic violence, that we are brought into being as subjects through this violence, etc. I think that's a little different from just saying that life is suffering; I understand it are more like a kind of foundational suffering that we can't even understand or remember because it is what brings us out of the everywhere into the here. But I also think that calling it "violence" is a particular framing that assumes some stuff, and that again, it's something you kind of have to take on faith.
I'm not against taking things on faith at all, but it's one of those things like if I say that I believe in the Triune God and you say that you are a Zoroastrian and we are both decent people, we just sort of have to say okay, we believe different things. If I start aggressively trying to convert you, of course, all bets are off - but if we're just chatting in a neighborly way, it's more of a politely inquisitive conversation than a debate where one of us should expect to win.
posted by Frowner at 8:32 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I'm not against taking things on faith at all, but it's one of those things like if I say that I believe in the Triune God and you say that you are a Zoroastrian and we are both decent people, we just sort of have to say okay, we believe different things. If I start aggressively trying to convert you, of course, all bets are off - but if we're just chatting in a neighborly way, it's more of a politely inquisitive conversation than a debate where one of us should expect to win.
posted by Frowner at 8:32 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I always understood “life is suffering” to mean “life includes suffering” and that a lot of suffering is the result of the belief that suffering is to avoided.
My username predates my interest in philosophy, haha. Something I picked for AIM in 7th grade and lives on here at MetaFilter (and nowhere else) thirty years later.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:33 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
My username predates my interest in philosophy, haha. Something I picked for AIM in 7th grade and lives on here at MetaFilter (and nowhere else) thirty years later.
posted by BuddhaInABucket at 8:33 AM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Fair enough! :)
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:34 AM on March 7
posted by tiny frying pan at 8:34 AM on March 7
The_Vegetables, he's talking about how even *well above average* governments in that regard don't experience high fertility rates.
posted by Selena777 at 8:44 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
posted by Selena777 at 8:44 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
It's incredible that people keep talking about government supports (e.g. child care, parental leave, tax credits) as increasing fertility rates. They obviously do not work to that end. That's not to say that those are bad policies, just that they will do nothing to restore replacement fertility rates.The only obvious thing here is that your sweeping dismissal is making a couple of logical errors. The data clearly shows that government support can increase fertility rates, but that’s a separate question from whether it’ll return to historic levels (which were high due to unplanned teenage pregnancy) and it also makes the libertarian mistake of treating all government policies as equally unproductive. This is a gross error because fertility is a complex decision with significant societal dependencies so, for example, a policy encouraging children in a country with economic decline and authoritarian leanings won’t help because prospective parents are still reacting rationally to poor conditions. Similarly, if there’s some kind of baby bonus but expensive gaps in critical services like childcare compatible with full-time employment or societal expectations that women stay home to raise children, those policies aren’t adequate to cancel out the lifetime earnings loss and again all their failure says is that women are making rational decisions given their societal incentives.
None of that means that good policies can’t work but, as we’re seeing everywhere else, there isn’t an easy tweak which allows rich people not to pay taxes or change their business practices. If you talk to almost any parent in the United States, for example, they’ll almost certainly mention the lack of affordable childcare and housing as driving decisions to have fewer kids. There is no way to change that which doesn’t involve making that decision not involve being able to afford on the order $25k/year per child for several years, especially daunting in an era of vanishing job security and rising costs.
posted by adamsc at 9:13 AM on March 7 [12 favorites]
...we almost completely abandoned multi-generational households.
And often for very compelling reasons. Having Grandma around to watch the kids while you go to work is awfully convenient and useful, but at the same time, it gives Grandma the chance to pound outdated religious/sexual mores into the kids. I know a LOT of people who are secular and/or not homophobic and have to seriously limit their kids' alone time with their parents, usually because of Jeezus. Same goes for Friendly Uncle who gets too friendly, etc. Yes, multigenerational households DO spread the work around, but very often at what modern parents perceive as unacceptable risks.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:28 AM on March 7 [12 favorites]
And often for very compelling reasons. Having Grandma around to watch the kids while you go to work is awfully convenient and useful, but at the same time, it gives Grandma the chance to pound outdated religious/sexual mores into the kids. I know a LOT of people who are secular and/or not homophobic and have to seriously limit their kids' alone time with their parents, usually because of Jeezus. Same goes for Friendly Uncle who gets too friendly, etc. Yes, multigenerational households DO spread the work around, but very often at what modern parents perceive as unacceptable risks.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 9:28 AM on March 7 [12 favorites]
Humans are almost ten times the biomass of all wild mammals put together.
To me this is disgusting, awful, and criminal by any meaningful standard, as well as far worse than the aggregate of all the terrible things we've done to each other.
posted by jamjam at 9:45 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
To me this is disgusting, awful, and criminal by any meaningful standard, as well as far worse than the aggregate of all the terrible things we've done to each other.
posted by jamjam at 9:45 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
>criminal by any meaningful standard
? Who's making this judgment exactly?
posted by torokunai2 at 9:53 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
? Who's making this judgment exactly?
posted by torokunai2 at 9:53 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
"Phnom Penh is a young city chock full of kids. They are everywhere, and they bring a positive energy, warmth, and joy that no amount of adult diversions — no amount of bars, casinos, exceptional cuisine, and museums — can replicate, because nothing warms the heart like a big smile from a tiny face. I don’t care how silly and maudlin that sounds, because it’s simply true, at an innate and an intellectual level. ...
I don't feel this. I'm not trying to be an edgelord or too cool, I don't hate children, I support other people who want children, but I do not feel like this. And I'm not even trying to be fighty about the author feeling this way, or other posters feeling this way, but.... it's not universal! And that's okay!
posted by nakedmolerats at 10:00 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
I don't feel this. I'm not trying to be an edgelord or too cool, I don't hate children, I support other people who want children, but I do not feel like this. And I'm not even trying to be fighty about the author feeling this way, or other posters feeling this way, but.... it's not universal! And that's okay!
posted by nakedmolerats at 10:00 AM on March 7 [10 favorites]
Who's making this judgment exactly?
It was jamjam! They literally wrote "To me" at the beginning of the sentence and then put their name underneath.
posted by biffa at 10:33 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
It was jamjam! They literally wrote "To me" at the beginning of the sentence and then put their name underneath.
posted by biffa at 10:33 AM on March 7 [8 favorites]
I’m currently pregnant with our third. I struggled a lot with this decision: I am 39 and I fear my husband or I will die before the child is 30, which feels unfair to the (hopefully adult) child’s development. From a climate change perspective, I am terrified for our kids. Financially, this probably harms my elder two kids in some way, leaving them with less as we must all share from the same pot of funds (and likely a diminishing pot of funds, as I will be out of the workforce for a while after the kid is born and bring in less income).
But then I think: my kids are awesome. (So far) They are growing to be good people. I am raising them to respect others, to value the earth, to be kind, to be politically engaged. I am choosing to spend my money and time on a third kid, and not on vacations or hobbies or my career, which would likely be the other paths we would take with our time and funds. Increasing the size of my family is ultimately my choice. It’s a selfish one, yes, in the way that almost all of my choices are driven by my own wants and values. And it’s what I want. We believe we can afford it (thanks, generational wealth and being born white in America), and we believe we can be good at it, so we are going for it. I just hope to do the most good I can with the decisions I make.
posted by samthemander at 11:04 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
But then I think: my kids are awesome. (So far) They are growing to be good people. I am raising them to respect others, to value the earth, to be kind, to be politically engaged. I am choosing to spend my money and time on a third kid, and not on vacations or hobbies or my career, which would likely be the other paths we would take with our time and funds. Increasing the size of my family is ultimately my choice. It’s a selfish one, yes, in the way that almost all of my choices are driven by my own wants and values. And it’s what I want. We believe we can afford it (thanks, generational wealth and being born white in America), and we believe we can be good at it, so we are going for it. I just hope to do the most good I can with the decisions I make.
posted by samthemander at 11:04 AM on March 7 [14 favorites]
I don't know why I had kids. I just did. But I'm not sure I want them to have kids because, between the economy and the patriarchy and the environment, I'm afraid it will ruin their lives. How ironic is that?
When a good friend was asking me if she should have kids (I was the first to do so), and whether having kids was right or wrong, I finally settled on an answer I feel good about: You are a living creature. Reproducing is your birthright. I know that's maybe a cop out but to me, it means that if you want to have kids, you simply aren't required to justify it to anyone.
posted by kitcat at 11:09 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
When a good friend was asking me if she should have kids (I was the first to do so), and whether having kids was right or wrong, I finally settled on an answer I feel good about: You are a living creature. Reproducing is your birthright. I know that's maybe a cop out but to me, it means that if you want to have kids, you simply aren't required to justify it to anyone.
posted by kitcat at 11:09 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
There’s an implicit assumption here that the suffering of existence outweighs the joy. I don’t know that this assumption is widely shared.
Yeah, and it's almost like there's a specific outcome (cough, suicide, cough) that would indicate how people feel about this topic! People enjoy living more than the alternative by a sizeable majority. This doesn't exactly map onto the choice to create life, but this whole thing strikes me as a fruitless derail.
The real issue is that we're in the middle of a global political fight at a point where we can almost sort of all talk to each other. And there are real issues with the extent to which we're shitting where we eat and if we can collectively manage a transition through these things.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:11 AM on March 7
Yeah, and it's almost like there's a specific outcome (cough, suicide, cough) that would indicate how people feel about this topic! People enjoy living more than the alternative by a sizeable majority. This doesn't exactly map onto the choice to create life, but this whole thing strikes me as a fruitless derail.
The real issue is that we're in the middle of a global political fight at a point where we can almost sort of all talk to each other. And there are real issues with the extent to which we're shitting where we eat and if we can collectively manage a transition through these things.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:11 AM on March 7
I may be a boring old materalist but I was very struck by this: "Some observers believe that subsidies could succeed, but they would have to be on the order of three hundred thousand dollars per child."
I think there is a likely a deep connection between this and the capture of all the benefits of improved productivity by the richest people in the world since the 1970s. I'm struggling a bit to articulate the linkage, but where I'm heading I think is that in seemingly affluent societies most people nonetheless now have to have every adult in the household in paid employment to achieve basic stability and feel like they are safe and making it. (And indeed part of the article talks about the massive change in Korea getting women into the paid workforce). And maybe households wouldn't need to do that in a world where the 0.1% hadn't worked so hard to change the balance between capital and labour.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:23 AM on March 7 [19 favorites]
I think there is a likely a deep connection between this and the capture of all the benefits of improved productivity by the richest people in the world since the 1970s. I'm struggling a bit to articulate the linkage, but where I'm heading I think is that in seemingly affluent societies most people nonetheless now have to have every adult in the household in paid employment to achieve basic stability and feel like they are safe and making it. (And indeed part of the article talks about the massive change in Korea getting women into the paid workforce). And maybe households wouldn't need to do that in a world where the 0.1% hadn't worked so hard to change the balance between capital and labour.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:23 AM on March 7 [19 favorites]
To put this another way, when my daughter was born 30 years ago it was not easy or convenient but we had faith we would all make it and achieve our rightful middle class place if we kept going, and our parents' generation all smilingly told us There's never a perfect time to have a kid but you'll be fine... and they were right.
My daughter is seeing someone she's very serious about now, and I am grandad age, but if she and partner were in the same financial situation as her mother and I had been, I'd really struggle to express that confidence in the future and circumstance to her now.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:29 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
My daughter is seeing someone she's very serious about now, and I am grandad age, but if she and partner were in the same financial situation as her mother and I had been, I'd really struggle to express that confidence in the future and circumstance to her now.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 11:29 AM on March 7 [2 favorites]
I think humans are good and that we should, if possible, have more of them.
posted by Urtylug at 11:41 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
posted by Urtylug at 11:41 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
and our parents' generation all smilingly told us There's never a perfect time to have a kid but you'll be fine... and they were right.
I loathe when people say this. For some, of course, it will not be alright. It's a bizarre way to think about any decision in life - oh, it'll be fine. Really?
posted by tiny frying pan at 11:43 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
I loathe when people say this. For some, of course, it will not be alright. It's a bizarre way to think about any decision in life - oh, it'll be fine. Really?
posted by tiny frying pan at 11:43 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
To me this is disgusting, awful, and criminal by any meaningful standard, as well as far worse than the aggregate of all the terrible things we've done to each other.
Wait until you find out about insects.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:45 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
Wait until you find out about insects.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:45 AM on March 7 [4 favorites]
If you don't want to reimpose those conditions, you accept (at best) a rapid decline in your native population mitigatable only by immigration, or a rapid decline full stop if you can't accept immigrants or immigrants don't like your place.
Another corollary here is that immigration is ultimately only actually a temporary solution because the rest of the world is bound to go through the same demographic transition eventually. In the US we are used to immigrants coming from Latin America but much of Latin America is at or below replacement fertility at this point.
I am generally of the mindset that since population growth can’t be sustained indefinitely, it doesn’t really make sense to treat the downward cycle itself as the problem to be solved. But I’m not going to say don’t accept immigrants or don’t implement policies that make life easier for parents because that’s good even if it only softens the landing a little.
posted by atoxyl at 12:08 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Another corollary here is that immigration is ultimately only actually a temporary solution because the rest of the world is bound to go through the same demographic transition eventually. In the US we are used to immigrants coming from Latin America but much of Latin America is at or below replacement fertility at this point.
I am generally of the mindset that since population growth can’t be sustained indefinitely, it doesn’t really make sense to treat the downward cycle itself as the problem to be solved. But I’m not going to say don’t accept immigrants or don’t implement policies that make life easier for parents because that’s good even if it only softens the landing a little.
posted by atoxyl at 12:08 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Curiosity that killed the cat, here. Could anyone here be paid to have a child? If so, how much would the state need to give you?
posted by Selena777 at 12:58 PM on March 7 [1 favorite]
posted by Selena777 at 12:58 PM on March 7 [1 favorite]
Not quite answering your question, Selena777, but regarding government policies: when there were discussions here about daycare becoming free, I did find myself thinking 'so maybe we could have another child'. The policy didn't make it, so we'll never know whether this unbidden thought would actually have influenced our actions.
posted by demi-octopus at 1:06 PM on March 7
posted by demi-octopus at 1:06 PM on March 7
I see radical depopulation as a wonderful thing for our Mother Earth and our ecosystems! There are no solutions without radically re-inventing our political-economic systems, seeing our species as ONE society, smashing the patriarchy, fulfilling our rôle as caretakers of the planet,
really a fundamental spiritual wakening is required, the desire for survival at the species level, not just individual or bound in time to the current generations...
Which of course means we as a species are indeed doomed, and soon, not in so many centuries.
Mother Earth and her ecosystems will be just fine, in fact much better off without us...
posted by goinWhereTheClimateSuitsMyClothes at 1:23 PM on March 7 [2 favorites]
really a fundamental spiritual wakening is required, the desire for survival at the species level, not just individual or bound in time to the current generations...
Which of course means we as a species are indeed doomed, and soon, not in so many centuries.
Mother Earth and her ecosystems will be just fine, in fact much better off without us...
posted by goinWhereTheClimateSuitsMyClothes at 1:23 PM on March 7 [2 favorites]
Could anyone here be paid to have a child? If so, how much would the state need to give you?
It's a fun question. I know people who wouldn't even need money; it's just the energy and time pressures that make it impossible. But I'm sure there are plenty who would have more if the state paid.
Me, you couldn't even pay me millions to do it at 44 with two, ages 6 and 14. I'm used up.
posted by kitcat at 1:49 PM on March 7
It's a fun question. I know people who wouldn't even need money; it's just the energy and time pressures that make it impossible. But I'm sure there are plenty who would have more if the state paid.
Me, you couldn't even pay me millions to do it at 44 with two, ages 6 and 14. I'm used up.
posted by kitcat at 1:49 PM on March 7
This was a great article hampered by the unstated premise that a population decline is bad with no upside. Human population retraction won't solve all our existential problems but it sure would solve a lot of them and make most of the others less severe. I don't know what the lower limit is but I'd bet a billion people would be able to maintain Civilization. Probably a lot less. And there would be way more fireflies, whales, wolves, spiders, forests, wetlands, butterfly, etc. ad nauseam). Even the species that depend on humans would be fine.
The real question will be can we wind down things so they don't require active maintenance to not be a hazard before their aren't enough people to do the work. We probably won't be able to do much about freeways and landfills but maybe decommissioning nuclear reactors and large dams is doable.
Curiosity that killed the cat, here. Could anyone here be paid to have a child? If so, how much would the state need to give you?
100% wage replacement with benefits for 18 years plus an allowance for kid expenses.
If Musk offered every woman who had one of his kids $20k a month indexed to inflation until the kid graduated college or turned 25 he wouldn't be lacking for options.
There's never a perfect time to have a kid but you'll be fine... and they were right.
My mother told me this when I told her we couldn't afford anymore kids. And it was probably trueish when I was a kid (though we were pretty poor a lot of the time. Like never had new clothes and had a large garden so we didn't go hungry at times). Since then housing has went from 20ish% of incomes to over 50%. And there essentially aren't any jobs that provide decent benefits and pensions. I really don't know how my kid is going ever leave the nest without being dirt poor because of housing.
The problem, as I see it, is this: if the common population is in a diminishing phase, soon the ruling classes will have no one to actually rule over, and they will become the common people
I think, besides the racism, this is one of the things that drives Musk to beat the population collapse fear drum. He's successful because he's rent seeker and if the number of renters declines his line starts going down rather than up. Basically he's an apex parasite and he's afraid his host is dying off.
posted by Mitheral at 1:51 PM on March 7 [7 favorites]
The real question will be can we wind down things so they don't require active maintenance to not be a hazard before their aren't enough people to do the work. We probably won't be able to do much about freeways and landfills but maybe decommissioning nuclear reactors and large dams is doable.
Curiosity that killed the cat, here. Could anyone here be paid to have a child? If so, how much would the state need to give you?
100% wage replacement with benefits for 18 years plus an allowance for kid expenses.
If Musk offered every woman who had one of his kids $20k a month indexed to inflation until the kid graduated college or turned 25 he wouldn't be lacking for options.
There's never a perfect time to have a kid but you'll be fine... and they were right.
My mother told me this when I told her we couldn't afford anymore kids. And it was probably trueish when I was a kid (though we were pretty poor a lot of the time. Like never had new clothes and had a large garden so we didn't go hungry at times). Since then housing has went from 20ish% of incomes to over 50%. And there essentially aren't any jobs that provide decent benefits and pensions. I really don't know how my kid is going ever leave the nest without being dirt poor because of housing.
The problem, as I see it, is this: if the common population is in a diminishing phase, soon the ruling classes will have no one to actually rule over, and they will become the common people
I think, besides the racism, this is one of the things that drives Musk to beat the population collapse fear drum. He's successful because he's rent seeker and if the number of renters declines his line starts going down rather than up. Basically he's an apex parasite and he's afraid his host is dying off.
posted by Mitheral at 1:51 PM on March 7 [7 favorites]
Let's Never Have Kids (cw: corny)
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:54 PM on March 7 [1 favorite]
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:54 PM on March 7 [1 favorite]
So yes, of course, biochemistry being what it is, most people who are already alive want to continue to be alive. At the very least, we're generally more averse to dying than to continuing to live.
And society being what it is, many people for whom that's not true are subjected not only to epistemic violence but to physical violence (caging, drugging) in an attempt to prevent them from making a free choice to end their own existence. It's regarded, not only as a tragedy and a failure, but as something that must be forcibly prevented. "Oh, they're suffering from depression, they're not in their right minds"—undoubtedly that is true of many of them, but it's not true of all of them, and well-meaning people don't generally make that distinction; they tend to bring the force of the state to bear on their "loved ones" regardless.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:29 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
And society being what it is, many people for whom that's not true are subjected not only to epistemic violence but to physical violence (caging, drugging) in an attempt to prevent them from making a free choice to end their own existence. It's regarded, not only as a tragedy and a failure, but as something that must be forcibly prevented. "Oh, they're suffering from depression, they're not in their right minds"—undoubtedly that is true of many of them, but it's not true of all of them, and well-meaning people don't generally make that distinction; they tend to bring the force of the state to bear on their "loved ones" regardless.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:29 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Could anyone here be paid to have a child? If so, how much would the state need to give you?
I said to myself, about $300k, then asked Ms. Hobnail, who gently pointed out that it wasn't my body and demanded half a mil.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:35 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I said to myself, about $300k, then asked Ms. Hobnail, who gently pointed out that it wasn't my body and demanded half a mil.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:35 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I’m fascinated by the idea that every other animal reproduces simply because it is their natural inclination and any animal who lacked that inclination wouldn’t be around for us to have met, while so many humans in this thread take absolutely for granted that humans reproduce for Bronze Age agricultural labor procurement purposes that can only be suppressed through philosophical contrivances of various depths.
Perhaps it is my lower class background but in my experience many humans including myself reproduce because it is their natural inclination.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:11 PM on March 7 [11 favorites]
Perhaps it is my lower class background but in my experience many humans including myself reproduce because it is their natural inclination.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:11 PM on March 7 [11 favorites]
The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is supposed to be, because, judging from acts—from the whole of the present constitution of society—one might infer that their opinion was the direct contrary. They might be supposed to think that the alleged natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to their nature; insomuch that if they are free to do anything else—if any other means of living, or occupation of their time and faculties, is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable to them—there will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already implied in much that is written on the subject)—“It is necessary to society that women should marry and produce children. They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is necessary to compel them.” The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of South Carolina and Louisiana. “It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled.” An illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment. Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be the power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used! and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort—First pay the sailors the honest value of their labour. When you have made it as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for other employers, you will have no more difficulty than others have in obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except “I will not:” and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is no longer advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be, that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one’s thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson’s choice, “that or none.”(from The Subjection of Women, by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, 1869)
posted by adrienneleigh at 7:20 PM on March 7 [40 favorites]
That is such a perfectly apt quote (and argument) that it basically closes the thread.
posted by leotrotsky at 8:37 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
posted by leotrotsky at 8:37 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
Especially given that, because of patriarchy, the other parent of the child is almost certainly the next best thing to fucking useless?
I'm one of those "fucking useless" fathers about which you are so very wrong.
No wonder I stopped coming to Metafilter so much.
posted by readyfreddy at 9:22 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
I'm one of those "fucking useless" fathers about which you are so very wrong.
No wonder I stopped coming to Metafilter so much.
posted by readyfreddy at 9:22 PM on March 7 [3 favorites]
This was a great, multi-faceted article, thanks.
I also just want to point out that on balance this is one of the most non-contentious Metafilter threads on children that I can recall, and I'm low key thrilled about that. If there's one thing we can say with certainty about children and the decisions to have them, it's that they're not simple.
Is life suffering? Is humanity worth it? Are children toil? Are they're smiles golden? Is capitalism to blame? Is it selfish to have children during global warming? Is each child an incredible, irreducible spark?
...yes I said yes I will Yes.
posted by Alex404 at 11:38 PM on March 7 [5 favorites]
I also just want to point out that on balance this is one of the most non-contentious Metafilter threads on children that I can recall, and I'm low key thrilled about that. If there's one thing we can say with certainty about children and the decisions to have them, it's that they're not simple.
Is life suffering? Is humanity worth it? Are children toil? Are they're smiles golden? Is capitalism to blame? Is it selfish to have children during global warming? Is each child an incredible, irreducible spark?
...yes I said yes I will Yes.
posted by Alex404 at 11:38 PM on March 7 [5 favorites]
The fertility preference rate - how many children would people like to have - is generally higher than the actual fertility rate. And the gap is larger where the actual fertility rate is lowest. In the UK, I think it's typically that 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 women would have preferred to have one more child than they actually had. My interpretation is that there is scope for increasing the actual fertility rate if you really wanted to, but that you would need to address the economic and social realities of childbirth and childcare.
It's also notable that the start of the decline in the fertility rate in Western European countries predated the pill and other modern contraceptives. The economic and social circumstances changed, and then that created a desire for family planning.
posted by plonkee at 4:20 AM on March 8 [5 favorites]
It's also notable that the start of the decline in the fertility rate in Western European countries predated the pill and other modern contraceptives. The economic and social circumstances changed, and then that created a desire for family planning.
posted by plonkee at 4:20 AM on March 8 [5 favorites]
If there's one thing we can say with certainty about children and the decisions to have them, it's that they're not simple.
Except when it's completely and utterly simple! For some of us. It's a hard "never wanted to" for me.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:40 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]
Except when it's completely and utterly simple! For some of us. It's a hard "never wanted to" for me.
posted by tiny frying pan at 5:40 AM on March 8 [2 favorites]
I know a lot of women who have told me it was their idea to have children. It feels paternalistic to tell them that they don’t know what they’re talking about and that in reality they only did it because men manipulated them into thinking they wanted to do it.
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 5:57 AM on March 8 [5 favorites]
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 5:57 AM on March 8 [5 favorites]
I always was curious about the fact that the same people who are freaking out about declining birth rates are the same ones freaking out about immigrants coming to their countries and having babies
What happens when immigrants also stop having kids? The issue with an immigration solution is that it assumes that other societies also won't behave in the exact same way we do. I think it's much more racist to assume that immigrants will always be some magical panacea to Western world fertility issues. Most natalists are including the point when the African countries go into below-replacement fertility rates. Immigration only works as a solution when you're not able to project the timeline even further and consider the immigrants' home countries' fertility rate trends.
Like I've posted on other threads, I actually think that accepting population decline smashes the current structure of pro-growth capitalism. The older generation will likely have consequences with depleted pension funds and declining home prices, but I think the younger generations will get higher wages. It will be young people's job positions that have a labour shortage. And I think unconstrained free market gets thrown out, because it doesn't provide good solutions to keep population numbers stable. Social democratic policies can distribute the risks and costs of parenting to offer somewhat of a solution, while maintaining individual rights.
posted by DetriusXii at 9:03 AM on March 8 [4 favorites]
What happens when immigrants also stop having kids? The issue with an immigration solution is that it assumes that other societies also won't behave in the exact same way we do. I think it's much more racist to assume that immigrants will always be some magical panacea to Western world fertility issues. Most natalists are including the point when the African countries go into below-replacement fertility rates. Immigration only works as a solution when you're not able to project the timeline even further and consider the immigrants' home countries' fertility rate trends.
Like I've posted on other threads, I actually think that accepting population decline smashes the current structure of pro-growth capitalism. The older generation will likely have consequences with depleted pension funds and declining home prices, but I think the younger generations will get higher wages. It will be young people's job positions that have a labour shortage. And I think unconstrained free market gets thrown out, because it doesn't provide good solutions to keep population numbers stable. Social democratic policies can distribute the risks and costs of parenting to offer somewhat of a solution, while maintaining individual rights.
posted by DetriusXii at 9:03 AM on March 8 [4 favorites]
I had a child, 38 years ago, in pretty mad circumstances--I had known the father for less than a month, was wallowing my way through an undergraduate degree with a lot of time off for going to punk rock shows and demonstrations, and with a wicked case of untreated depression and ADHD (except for the usual self-medications available). My son is still the lodestar of my life, the source of my greatest joys, and the reason I am still here all this time later. His father is dead now, but we made a more or less decent go of it for 8 years. He found someone much better for him, and eventually so did I. I think it is a natural state for people to want children, that the creation of human webs of relation is really where we thrive, but in this complex society and on this earth groaning with population and climate change which will cause untold suffering as millions try to move north, population decline is rational.
And, as J and H Mill so astutely observed in 1869: given the choice, women would rather be free. Free from forced marriage, brutalizing husbands, and relentless birthing of mouths to be fed. Effective contraception gives women the choice to determine our own fates, which it is why it is one of the greatest gifts of medicine in the last hundred years. Korean women, held responsible for a crashing birthrate, know a bad deal when they see it; and none of the hamfisted attempts to "encourage" women to have children, in any society I can think of, have been enough to compensate for economic crises, lack of housing, and the creeping feeling of calamity ahead... Romania tried to raise the birthrate, and the result was orphanages full of abandoned babies left to their fate and many women dead of illegal abortions.
posted by jokeefe at 6:14 PM on March 8 [6 favorites]
And, as J and H Mill so astutely observed in 1869: given the choice, women would rather be free. Free from forced marriage, brutalizing husbands, and relentless birthing of mouths to be fed. Effective contraception gives women the choice to determine our own fates, which it is why it is one of the greatest gifts of medicine in the last hundred years. Korean women, held responsible for a crashing birthrate, know a bad deal when they see it; and none of the hamfisted attempts to "encourage" women to have children, in any society I can think of, have been enough to compensate for economic crises, lack of housing, and the creeping feeling of calamity ahead... Romania tried to raise the birthrate, and the result was orphanages full of abandoned babies left to their fate and many women dead of illegal abortions.
posted by jokeefe at 6:14 PM on March 8 [6 favorites]
I also just want to point out that on balance this is one of the most non-contentious Metafilter threads on children
And yet anti-natalists are the proverbial turd in the punch bowl, there's really no amount small enough. Existing to widely bash the existence of others whether hypothetical or real is such a loser of a position on so many fronts. If only there was something constructive you could do with your philosophy.
posted by Wood at 8:56 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]
And yet anti-natalists are the proverbial turd in the punch bowl, there's really no amount small enough. Existing to widely bash the existence of others whether hypothetical or real is such a loser of a position on so many fronts. If only there was something constructive you could do with your philosophy.
posted by Wood at 8:56 PM on March 8 [1 favorite]
Again posting as someone happily pregnant with their third child- this only feels possible for us because my husband’s parents died untimely and sad deaths, and because they bought a then-affordable home in 1980 in Southern California which we then went on to partially inherit. Additionally, my parents have already nearly funded the first two kids’ college funds in an amazingly generous “here’s your inheritance while we’re alive” gift. If it weren’t for this financial inheritance (from one living and one lost set of grandparents), this third child would have been absolute nonstarter.
As it is, having a third kid feels similar to buying a boat. Costly, silly, more work than you want it to be, but probably fun if all goes well.
I think if we hadn’t paid $30k/year in daycare for the last few years and could expect free daycare for a third, that might have helped us to have a third without inheritance, but no guarantees. the inheritance allowed us to purchase a home that took us from 1000sf to 1900sf, and thus made it feel like we could reasonably house 3 teenagers and 2 adults for several years without completely losing our minds. I can’t imagine doing that in 1000sf frankly.
posted by samthemander at 7:40 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]
As it is, having a third kid feels similar to buying a boat. Costly, silly, more work than you want it to be, but probably fun if all goes well.
I think if we hadn’t paid $30k/year in daycare for the last few years and could expect free daycare for a third, that might have helped us to have a third without inheritance, but no guarantees. the inheritance allowed us to purchase a home that took us from 1000sf to 1900sf, and thus made it feel like we could reasonably house 3 teenagers and 2 adults for several years without completely losing our minds. I can’t imagine doing that in 1000sf frankly.
posted by samthemander at 7:40 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]
I know a lot of women who have told me it was their idea to have children.
I share my life with a woman who:
a) was certain she wanted children and
b) was equally certain she didn't want a husband
We met when the younger of 2 was just graduating high school. I don't know why and how we ended up with 15 years and running, but I sure as shit know she knows what she wants.
posted by ginger.beef at 8:09 AM on March 9
I share my life with a woman who:
a) was certain she wanted children and
b) was equally certain she didn't want a husband
We met when the younger of 2 was just graduating high school. I don't know why and how we ended up with 15 years and running, but I sure as shit know she knows what she wants.
posted by ginger.beef at 8:09 AM on March 9
I'm one of those "fucking useless" fathers about which you are so very wrong.
No wonder I stopped coming to Metafilter so much.
Once you get past the sting, what is the reason for the sting
posted by ginger.beef at 8:12 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]
No wonder I stopped coming to Metafilter so much.
Once you get past the sting, what is the reason for the sting
posted by ginger.beef at 8:12 AM on March 9 [2 favorites]
Yes childfree women exist. But out of the many 40+ women without kids that I know, only one of them really chose it deliberately, despite all of these women having had long-term relationships. It’s entirely culturally acceptable to deride young women who want children and for men to withhold family formation.
This isn't the case in my circles. I (married) chose not to have kids; the same is true for many of my friends. And my experience was different from what you suggest here. I have been questioned by friends, relatives and even my boss (!) about why I didn't have children. There is a lot of judging going on if I answer truthfully and say that it was my choice.
So perhaps it's entirely culturally acceptable to deride women who want children, and to deride women who don't want children.
posted by sagehen at 3:25 PM on March 9 [3 favorites]
This isn't the case in my circles. I (married) chose not to have kids; the same is true for many of my friends. And my experience was different from what you suggest here. I have been questioned by friends, relatives and even my boss (!) about why I didn't have children. There is a lot of judging going on if I answer truthfully and say that it was my choice.
So perhaps it's entirely culturally acceptable to deride women who want children, and to deride women who don't want children.
posted by sagehen at 3:25 PM on March 9 [3 favorites]
Astro Wild has other fun tracks besides the banger linked upthread. lol
adrienneleigh,
An ethical position should really endorse the continued survival of intelligent life, which feels pretty problematic for philosophical anti-natalism. Anti-natalism could be less universalist of course, like by asserting that anti-natalist thought would be correct now, but should disapear once population declines enough. Yet, why even touch philosophy then? We're deep into ecological overshoot, and a child is always your single largest choice impacting CO2 emissions, so you harm many more future people having an extra kid today.
We typically worry about philosophical positions not being universalist, but not really about practical observations like this not being universalist: It's good humanity survives, but some people want kids. It's good to have under 1 billion people, but some people don't want kids. It's unlikely the numbers match up, and nobody agrees what that even means, but interestingly reduicing infant mortality plus providing birth control looks promising, which sounds good anyways. Around this, we should fear that infant mortality picks up, because of cuts in public health, which then increases population growth, and exhaust resources faster.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:07 PM on March 9 [3 favorites]
adrienneleigh,
An ethical position should really endorse the continued survival of intelligent life, which feels pretty problematic for philosophical anti-natalism. Anti-natalism could be less universalist of course, like by asserting that anti-natalist thought would be correct now, but should disapear once population declines enough. Yet, why even touch philosophy then? We're deep into ecological overshoot, and a child is always your single largest choice impacting CO2 emissions, so you harm many more future people having an extra kid today.
We typically worry about philosophical positions not being universalist, but not really about practical observations like this not being universalist: It's good humanity survives, but some people want kids. It's good to have under 1 billion people, but some people don't want kids. It's unlikely the numbers match up, and nobody agrees what that even means, but interestingly reduicing infant mortality plus providing birth control looks promising, which sounds good anyways. Around this, we should fear that infant mortality picks up, because of cuts in public health, which then increases population growth, and exhaust resources faster.
posted by jeffburdges at 5:07 PM on March 9 [3 favorites]
As always I am reminded of the words of the brilliant Abigail Thorn:
“Future people, by definition, do not exist.”
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:15 PM on March 9 [4 favorites]
“Future people, by definition, do not exist.”
posted by The Monster at the End of this Thread at 7:15 PM on March 9 [4 favorites]
An ethical position should really endorse the continued survival of intelligent life
jeffburdges: why?
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:05 PM on March 9 [5 favorites]
jeffburdges: why?
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:05 PM on March 9 [5 favorites]
jeffburdges: why?
I am not jeffburdges but I've played them in a few made-for-tv specials
Ultimately we have no choice. Life persists in you and me, like it does in jellyfish and millipedes. We are all on the side of life in that regard, let it lead you to your own conclusions. E.g. cut off a limb to save the body?
posted by ginger.beef at 9:00 AM on March 10
I am not jeffburdges but I've played them in a few made-for-tv specials
Ultimately we have no choice. Life persists in you and me, like it does in jellyfish and millipedes. We are all on the side of life in that regard, let it lead you to your own conclusions. E.g. cut off a limb to save the body?
posted by ginger.beef at 9:00 AM on March 10
Once you get past the sting, what is the reason for the sting
Because it's a gross mischaracterization of reality.
posted by readyfreddy at 9:51 AM on March 10
Because it's a gross mischaracterization of reality.
posted by readyfreddy at 9:51 AM on March 10
An ethical position should really endorse the continued survival of intelligent life
jeffburdges: why?
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:05 PM on March 9
I'm tempted to make the "Metafilter: ..." joke here, or modify it to "adrienneleigh: ...", but honestly, while there might be an interesting discussion to be had about the reasons underpinning the value in the continuing survival of intelligent life, if you don't take that as a given I can't take you seriously.
posted by Reverend John at 11:30 AM on March 10
I must be some weird outlier.
I am almost 58 years old. I have been childfree by choice, and pretty much always knew that I didn't want children. I would guess that about half of my friends are also childless, and most by choice. It's never really been strange to be either one or the other, and I don't really remember any resentment or misunderstandings on either side. You either had some or you didn't. Shrug. I never really got any weird pressure from my elders either. I think it's probably indicative of social democracy that all my Norwegian female relatives have children, with or without a partner. They can afford to! They get parental leave and all that! Free education. But as an American, I chose to leave a career type job and to live on less, but also to not reproduce. I never thought I'd be a good parent anyway.
But then in my thirties I got together with a man with two elementary aged children, and he was the primary caregiver. Their mother liked being seen as a good mother, but did very little in the way of parenting. Mr. Emma did all the school events, made sure they were clothed and fed and took them to their activities. Their mom chose to spend a lot of her time going out to bars, bringing strangers home, and leaving the kids with an empty fridge in the meantime. It was definitely not great that we had 50/50 custody, but we tried our best to make up for their other home by being a bit extra. (Candle lit dinners every night, and loads of togetherness.) We even homeschooled for five years!
It was kind of a shock to me to be suddenly a stepmom, but I got used to it, gradually. It helped that their father never depended on me to be any kind of parent, so as I became one, it was strictly a volunteer position. And they were good kids. My now-husband always said that even though he didn't choose to have kids really, (unexpected pregnancies) once he had them, his goal was to raise kids he liked to have around, and who liked to be around him. And he succeeded!
Though I never wanted kids of my own, I became a parent. And though when I was younger I didn't much like being around kids, I started working with small kids and found that I actually liked them a lot. I am generally charmed by children, unless they're throwing up or snotting up the joint. (It's just a personal aversion. Gross!)
Now my stepkids are around thirty years old, and it's clear that neither of them will likely have children, clearly by choice. One of their partners has just had a tubal ligation. I'm a tiny bit sad I won't get to be a grandparent at all, because I was interested in seeing how that might transform me, helping young parents with their kids and all. And that's what I planned to do. I never understood why my mother wasn't into babysitting my brother's kids. They have three. All awesome kids. When my SIL was worried about having her third (ethically, climate change), I told her she could consider that one as taking over my share. Their birth mom, on the other hand, reportedly sobbed when they told her they weren't going to be providing her any grandchildren. Which, you know, made us all laugh. Because WTF.
I am glad that old trope about overpopulation isn't coming true. But I can't say that I care that much about depopulation. For me, a lady living on the edge of the northern wilderness, that means maybe we won't bulldoze more forest, or poison more clean water. Maybe it means that all these material goods will help get the young over the hump of the nightmare coming down the pike as far as climate change goes.
Maybe we have enough stuff that we don't need to manufacture much more. Maybe we'll learn again to repair things when they break instead of tossing them into a landfill. My kids have two aunts that had no kids, and they'll inherit what we have plus what they have. That includes four mortgage free properties and a couple generations of tools and material wealth, including a big garden. And maybe that's how they'll make it. Maybe that means their friends will move in and maybe the children that exist will be raised by a little community of loving adults.
Maybe that's a fantasy, but I've never known kids like ours, who are so attached to this place next to that great lake that they can't stand going anywhere else even for four years of college. Neither of them will get their driver's license, and they use the bus and walk everywhere as a matter of course. I don't always understand them. But I don't blame them for not wanting children. I never did.
posted by RedEmma at 12:00 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]
I am almost 58 years old. I have been childfree by choice, and pretty much always knew that I didn't want children. I would guess that about half of my friends are also childless, and most by choice. It's never really been strange to be either one or the other, and I don't really remember any resentment or misunderstandings on either side. You either had some or you didn't. Shrug. I never really got any weird pressure from my elders either. I think it's probably indicative of social democracy that all my Norwegian female relatives have children, with or without a partner. They can afford to! They get parental leave and all that! Free education. But as an American, I chose to leave a career type job and to live on less, but also to not reproduce. I never thought I'd be a good parent anyway.
But then in my thirties I got together with a man with two elementary aged children, and he was the primary caregiver. Their mother liked being seen as a good mother, but did very little in the way of parenting. Mr. Emma did all the school events, made sure they were clothed and fed and took them to their activities. Their mom chose to spend a lot of her time going out to bars, bringing strangers home, and leaving the kids with an empty fridge in the meantime. It was definitely not great that we had 50/50 custody, but we tried our best to make up for their other home by being a bit extra. (Candle lit dinners every night, and loads of togetherness.) We even homeschooled for five years!
It was kind of a shock to me to be suddenly a stepmom, but I got used to it, gradually. It helped that their father never depended on me to be any kind of parent, so as I became one, it was strictly a volunteer position. And they were good kids. My now-husband always said that even though he didn't choose to have kids really, (unexpected pregnancies) once he had them, his goal was to raise kids he liked to have around, and who liked to be around him. And he succeeded!
Though I never wanted kids of my own, I became a parent. And though when I was younger I didn't much like being around kids, I started working with small kids and found that I actually liked them a lot. I am generally charmed by children, unless they're throwing up or snotting up the joint. (It's just a personal aversion. Gross!)
Now my stepkids are around thirty years old, and it's clear that neither of them will likely have children, clearly by choice. One of their partners has just had a tubal ligation. I'm a tiny bit sad I won't get to be a grandparent at all, because I was interested in seeing how that might transform me, helping young parents with their kids and all. And that's what I planned to do. I never understood why my mother wasn't into babysitting my brother's kids. They have three. All awesome kids. When my SIL was worried about having her third (ethically, climate change), I told her she could consider that one as taking over my share. Their birth mom, on the other hand, reportedly sobbed when they told her they weren't going to be providing her any grandchildren. Which, you know, made us all laugh. Because WTF.
I am glad that old trope about overpopulation isn't coming true. But I can't say that I care that much about depopulation. For me, a lady living on the edge of the northern wilderness, that means maybe we won't bulldoze more forest, or poison more clean water. Maybe it means that all these material goods will help get the young over the hump of the nightmare coming down the pike as far as climate change goes.
Maybe we have enough stuff that we don't need to manufacture much more. Maybe we'll learn again to repair things when they break instead of tossing them into a landfill. My kids have two aunts that had no kids, and they'll inherit what we have plus what they have. That includes four mortgage free properties and a couple generations of tools and material wealth, including a big garden. And maybe that's how they'll make it. Maybe that means their friends will move in and maybe the children that exist will be raised by a little community of loving adults.
Maybe that's a fantasy, but I've never known kids like ours, who are so attached to this place next to that great lake that they can't stand going anywhere else even for four years of college. Neither of them will get their driver's license, and they use the bus and walk everywhere as a matter of course. I don't always understand them. But I don't blame them for not wanting children. I never did.
posted by RedEmma at 12:00 PM on March 10 [7 favorites]
adrienneleigh,
I've nothing super deep there, just the selfish meme theory: If actually successful, then the idea no longer exists. Ala the Shakers or similar.
As I said, a non-universalist anti-natalism fits our zeitgeist fine, and fits our overpopulation and overconsumption perfectly, but initially the philosophical aspect makes it feel overly complex to me. We might overvalue moral universalism of course, certianly avoiding moral universalism seems like a defining purpose of Abrahamic religions, but it's tricky to shake off Chomsky here. lol
I'm definitely not a serious philosophy student, but my best guess..
At least animal multicellular life seemingly depends upon genetic material mostly being forced through the germe line, enforced by the Hayflick limit aka telomere shortening. It seems this enables greater cell specilization. At our level of complexity, we need the "genetic fascism" provided by this pre-programmed death, or else we'd degrade into balls of cancer and disease. Animals like us could only really exist in suffering and conflict vs the the Hayflick limit, so then suffering and conflict become "opinions" required by our mobility, intelligence, etc.
There exist tumor-like mutations in plants and fungi too, but their cells have less specilization, and do not use telomere shortening in the same way, but they still benefit from germe-line reproduction. An intelligent-ish plant or fungus, if even possible, would experence itself rotting away in very different less preprogrammed ways. Anyways..
Intellectually, we seemingly depend upon death for intelligence and "progress" too, because of how we focus upon and reorganize ideas/memes. "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
As some intuitive philosophical level, I cannot bring myself to view the really impossible as good, or to view the really "essential" as bad, not sure if that's stoicism or not. Instead, my best guess is death and suffering cannot intrinsically be bad simply because they're essential, but they become bad in some more specific contexts.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:43 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]
I've nothing super deep there, just the selfish meme theory: If actually successful, then the idea no longer exists. Ala the Shakers or similar.
As I said, a non-universalist anti-natalism fits our zeitgeist fine, and fits our overpopulation and overconsumption perfectly, but initially the philosophical aspect makes it feel overly complex to me. We might overvalue moral universalism of course, certianly avoiding moral universalism seems like a defining purpose of Abrahamic religions, but it's tricky to shake off Chomsky here. lol
I'm definitely not a serious philosophy student, but my best guess..
At least animal multicellular life seemingly depends upon genetic material mostly being forced through the germe line, enforced by the Hayflick limit aka telomere shortening. It seems this enables greater cell specilization. At our level of complexity, we need the "genetic fascism" provided by this pre-programmed death, or else we'd degrade into balls of cancer and disease. Animals like us could only really exist in suffering and conflict vs the the Hayflick limit, so then suffering and conflict become "opinions" required by our mobility, intelligence, etc.
There exist tumor-like mutations in plants and fungi too, but their cells have less specilization, and do not use telomere shortening in the same way, but they still benefit from germe-line reproduction. An intelligent-ish plant or fungus, if even possible, would experence itself rotting away in very different less preprogrammed ways. Anyways..
Intellectually, we seemingly depend upon death for intelligence and "progress" too, because of how we focus upon and reorganize ideas/memes. "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
As some intuitive philosophical level, I cannot bring myself to view the really impossible as good, or to view the really "essential" as bad, not sure if that's stoicism or not. Instead, my best guess is death and suffering cannot intrinsically be bad simply because they're essential, but they become bad in some more specific contexts.
posted by jeffburdges at 12:43 PM on March 10 [1 favorite]
honestly, while there might be an interesting discussion to be had about the reasons underpinning the value in the continuing survival of intelligent life, if you don't take that as a given I can't take you seriously.
You're making an awful lot of assumptions about me based on a two-word comment!
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:24 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]
You're making an awful lot of assumptions about me based on a two-word comment!
posted by adrienneleigh at 1:24 PM on March 10 [2 favorites]
From the Guardian, today:
posted by jokeefe at 5:48 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]
Microplastics hinder plant photosynthesis, study finds, threatening millions with starvationDoesn't sound like a depopulation crisis to me.
The annual crop losses caused by microplastics could be of a similar scale to those caused by the climate crisis in recent decades, the researchers behind the new research said. The world is already facing a challenge to produce sufficient food sustainably, with the global population expected to rise to 10 billion by around 2058.
posted by jokeefe at 5:48 PM on March 10 [3 favorites]
Intellectually, we seemingly depend upon death for intelligence and "progress" too, because of how we focus upon and reorganize ideas/memes. "Science progresses one funeral at a time."
[...] Instead, my best guess is death and suffering cannot intrinsically be bad simply because they're essential, but they become bad in some more specific contexts.
I think the point about science is really a point about power rather than progress. It's the Iron Law of Institutions: 'The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.' (This law is, I think, a subset of Robert Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy.) We don't have a good way to retire people in power, and so their thoughts, their insistences, define entire fields and hinder progress.
But this also illustrates how social structures appear naturalized in the mind. It's hard for us to talk about growth or depopulation without resort to ideas that feel right but have no empirical basis. "Kids are expensive, thus, if someone would help pay for them, we could have more"--except, as the FPP points out, the experiment fails in countries with great institutionalized child support.
I question my own thought here, that it's not the financial expense but a sort of psychological expense, a zero-sum game where you only have so much effort you can expend on children. It feels like a natural thought but maybe that means it's questionable or wrong. The people I know with, like, eight kids, they are simply not spending as much mental effort per child as the people I know with only one kid. Not that anyone would seriously talk about having "spare" kids...but if you've only got one, there's an argument to be made that you could invest far more of your emotional energy into that one. But there were families with only one kid back in the 70s, and the parenting was just as neglectful for those with one kid as those with many; smoking around the kids, no seat-belts, being left alone for long stretches. So the psychological-expense theory doesn't necessarily hold up either, or at least is constrained at one side of the equation (it's always possible to pay less attention to your kids; there is a limit to how much more attention you can give them).
But I think this gets us (or me, at least) back around to the question of anti-natalism. If life contains such suffering that it's better to never have been born--and thus better for no one to be born--how much of that suffering is institutional, and could be alleviated through better social policies? And how much of it is relative--that is, obviously if you're a philosophical anti-natalist writing books and stuff, you are probably at a higher social class and living in more comfort than someone who is suffering privation and physical harm daily. How much of your suffering, if you're that philosopher, is a result of true harm being done to you, how much is a result of the comparison between your current life and the life you believe you deserve, and how much is based on empathy for other people's suffering?
But (and god this is turning into yet another wall of text, my mid-comment apologies to all) what's the use of projective empathy, that you would make a decision for someone not yet born? "I wish I had never been born" is one thing, "I wish someone else who hasn't been born yet, to never be born" is making a decision on someone else's behalf. Our sort of street-level ethics around abortion come to mind: Abortion is ethically okay because the embryo is not yet a person, and because the pregnancy is taking place in the woman's body, and she should have the final say; that intimate entanglement in another's life gives you a certain right over that life; but what right does a philosopher have to say whether you should not be born? Once that decision, that right-to-say, leaves the condition of intimate-entanglement, it becomes a kind of eugenics, projecting out the philosopher's unquestioned preferences onto the population.
And that in the end gets us to the question of death and suffering, and whether an "ethical position should really endorse the continued survival of intelligent life."
We are such weird creatures. I had to stop reading the Gene Hackman thread when it turned out one of his dogs had died. Like, here are actual human beings dying tragically, but the dog? The dog haunted me. It's so dumb, what we find ourselves able to invest with empathy. There was this article about trawling nets in the UK and how huge they are, and even though my own position is that most creatures do not suffer because they lack the neurology for it, my anger and despair was less about some objective waste and ecological destruction, and more about killing poor sad fish and crabs and all that never hurt anyone.
But where that leads me is to this point: We don't really have any kind of objective philosophy or ethics, what we have is our position as social creatures with a certain empathetic bent, and that stuttering incomplete empathy is the tool we use for our ethics, and we attempt to build past that empathy whenever its discrepancies come up...but our evolution stays with us, forms a kind of shadow-ethics that keeps appearing. Death and suffering are bad because we don't like them happening to us and those others within our intimate entanglement.
I would want to say that we should want intelligent life to continue, and would want to believe I have a rational, objective reason for that, but I know that at least some part of that theory is that I worry and fret over how the last person on earth would feel. The FPP brings up Children of Men, and how exhausted that society had become, with nothing in the future to look forward to. We are open-ended creatures and the thought of a final and permanent death fundamentally does not make sense to us. (I honestly think that's where part of religion comes from; we don't get death, it doesn't make sense, so there must be something else after this, either we shades sit in judgment of our children and grandchildren, or we go somewhere else, a punishment, a reward, or maybe an underworld that is essentially a dull holding cell.) We can hardly think about it--how many of our "last person on earth" stories involve--surprise!--finding a second person? In our apocalypses we are always looking for survivors to band together with. How much of our science fiction takes a particular end of things--a big crunch or a big rip--and imagines a way we could survive past that?
And yet, here we are, imagining futures where we survive forever, yet having fewer and fewer babies--the one choice that guarantees we will not survive forever.
posted by mittens at 6:20 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
[...] Instead, my best guess is death and suffering cannot intrinsically be bad simply because they're essential, but they become bad in some more specific contexts.
I think the point about science is really a point about power rather than progress. It's the Iron Law of Institutions: 'The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.' (This law is, I think, a subset of Robert Michel's Iron Law of Oligarchy.) We don't have a good way to retire people in power, and so their thoughts, their insistences, define entire fields and hinder progress.
But this also illustrates how social structures appear naturalized in the mind. It's hard for us to talk about growth or depopulation without resort to ideas that feel right but have no empirical basis. "Kids are expensive, thus, if someone would help pay for them, we could have more"--except, as the FPP points out, the experiment fails in countries with great institutionalized child support.
I question my own thought here, that it's not the financial expense but a sort of psychological expense, a zero-sum game where you only have so much effort you can expend on children. It feels like a natural thought but maybe that means it's questionable or wrong. The people I know with, like, eight kids, they are simply not spending as much mental effort per child as the people I know with only one kid. Not that anyone would seriously talk about having "spare" kids...but if you've only got one, there's an argument to be made that you could invest far more of your emotional energy into that one. But there were families with only one kid back in the 70s, and the parenting was just as neglectful for those with one kid as those with many; smoking around the kids, no seat-belts, being left alone for long stretches. So the psychological-expense theory doesn't necessarily hold up either, or at least is constrained at one side of the equation (it's always possible to pay less attention to your kids; there is a limit to how much more attention you can give them).
But I think this gets us (or me, at least) back around to the question of anti-natalism. If life contains such suffering that it's better to never have been born--and thus better for no one to be born--how much of that suffering is institutional, and could be alleviated through better social policies? And how much of it is relative--that is, obviously if you're a philosophical anti-natalist writing books and stuff, you are probably at a higher social class and living in more comfort than someone who is suffering privation and physical harm daily. How much of your suffering, if you're that philosopher, is a result of true harm being done to you, how much is a result of the comparison between your current life and the life you believe you deserve, and how much is based on empathy for other people's suffering?
But (and god this is turning into yet another wall of text, my mid-comment apologies to all) what's the use of projective empathy, that you would make a decision for someone not yet born? "I wish I had never been born" is one thing, "I wish someone else who hasn't been born yet, to never be born" is making a decision on someone else's behalf. Our sort of street-level ethics around abortion come to mind: Abortion is ethically okay because the embryo is not yet a person, and because the pregnancy is taking place in the woman's body, and she should have the final say; that intimate entanglement in another's life gives you a certain right over that life; but what right does a philosopher have to say whether you should not be born? Once that decision, that right-to-say, leaves the condition of intimate-entanglement, it becomes a kind of eugenics, projecting out the philosopher's unquestioned preferences onto the population.
And that in the end gets us to the question of death and suffering, and whether an "ethical position should really endorse the continued survival of intelligent life."
We are such weird creatures. I had to stop reading the Gene Hackman thread when it turned out one of his dogs had died. Like, here are actual human beings dying tragically, but the dog? The dog haunted me. It's so dumb, what we find ourselves able to invest with empathy. There was this article about trawling nets in the UK and how huge they are, and even though my own position is that most creatures do not suffer because they lack the neurology for it, my anger and despair was less about some objective waste and ecological destruction, and more about killing poor sad fish and crabs and all that never hurt anyone.
But where that leads me is to this point: We don't really have any kind of objective philosophy or ethics, what we have is our position as social creatures with a certain empathetic bent, and that stuttering incomplete empathy is the tool we use for our ethics, and we attempt to build past that empathy whenever its discrepancies come up...but our evolution stays with us, forms a kind of shadow-ethics that keeps appearing. Death and suffering are bad because we don't like them happening to us and those others within our intimate entanglement.
I would want to say that we should want intelligent life to continue, and would want to believe I have a rational, objective reason for that, but I know that at least some part of that theory is that I worry and fret over how the last person on earth would feel. The FPP brings up Children of Men, and how exhausted that society had become, with nothing in the future to look forward to. We are open-ended creatures and the thought of a final and permanent death fundamentally does not make sense to us. (I honestly think that's where part of religion comes from; we don't get death, it doesn't make sense, so there must be something else after this, either we shades sit in judgment of our children and grandchildren, or we go somewhere else, a punishment, a reward, or maybe an underworld that is essentially a dull holding cell.) We can hardly think about it--how many of our "last person on earth" stories involve--surprise!--finding a second person? In our apocalypses we are always looking for survivors to band together with. How much of our science fiction takes a particular end of things--a big crunch or a big rip--and imagines a way we could survive past that?
And yet, here we are, imagining futures where we survive forever, yet having fewer and fewer babies--the one choice that guarantees we will not survive forever.
posted by mittens at 6:20 AM on March 11 [1 favorite]
It's not really up to us. Humans will eventually not survive, like all life.
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:30 AM on March 11 [4 favorites]
posted by tiny frying pan at 6:30 AM on March 11 [4 favorites]
The question "why should an ethical position really endorse the continued survival of intelligent life?" is not the same as an assertion that, say, an ethical position should reduce the number of sentiences born to suffering. (I'm not even sad that people taking the former for the latter might be ungenerous. I'm sad we're parsing so badly.)
And! Even if you're solidly in favor of intelligent life, you should know why you're in favor of intelligent life because different strategies to support it support different outcomes. And it's not coincidental that many of the science fiction novels working this through have a Torment Nexus somewhere in them; nor just a systematic working out of extreme cases; there have been max-natalist philosophies in the real world that found themselves supporting a maximization of suffering. Which requires more defense than intelligent life does, I hope.
posted by clew at 11:37 AM on March 11 [3 favorites]
And! Even if you're solidly in favor of intelligent life, you should know why you're in favor of intelligent life because different strategies to support it support different outcomes. And it's not coincidental that many of the science fiction novels working this through have a Torment Nexus somewhere in them; nor just a systematic working out of extreme cases; there have been max-natalist philosophies in the real world that found themselves supporting a maximization of suffering. Which requires more defense than intelligent life does, I hope.
posted by clew at 11:37 AM on March 11 [3 favorites]
here we are, imagining futures where we survive forever, yet having fewer and fewer babies--the one choice that guarantees we will not survive forever.
Zalzidrax touched on this, but reiterating -- exponential decay *doesn't go to zero*. The rate of shrink decreases enough that the quantity stays positive.
(In biology, we don't have fractional beings, so it might go to zero - but if we're bringing in biology we should think about density-dependent reproductive rates. "Negative density-dependence, or density-dependent restriction, describes a situation in which population growth is curtailed by crowding, predators and competition." If this is the case with humans, perhaps mediated by pollution, etc., we can expect human birth rates to go up again at some smaller population. Scatter, adapt, remember, as another SF author puts it.)
posted by clew at 11:44 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]
Zalzidrax touched on this, but reiterating -- exponential decay *doesn't go to zero*. The rate of shrink decreases enough that the quantity stays positive.
(In biology, we don't have fractional beings, so it might go to zero - but if we're bringing in biology we should think about density-dependent reproductive rates. "Negative density-dependence, or density-dependent restriction, describes a situation in which population growth is curtailed by crowding, predators and competition." If this is the case with humans, perhaps mediated by pollution, etc., we can expect human birth rates to go up again at some smaller population. Scatter, adapt, remember, as another SF author puts it.)
posted by clew at 11:44 AM on March 11 [2 favorites]
Yup, the impossible cannot be good anyways, tiny frying pan, but intelegence seems pretty interesting while it could reasonably be prolonged. Yay circularity. lol
It's different if intelegence were doomed to cause extinctions and monocultures of course, but that's really not supported by most of human history. I've proposed elsewhere that sustainablity could depend upon human v human conflicts, so maybe advanced civilizations could be sustainable, even if a globally collaborative civilization like ours cannot be sustainable.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:56 PM on March 11
It's different if intelegence were doomed to cause extinctions and monocultures of course, but that's really not supported by most of human history. I've proposed elsewhere that sustainablity could depend upon human v human conflicts, so maybe advanced civilizations could be sustainable, even if a globally collaborative civilization like ours cannot be sustainable.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:56 PM on March 11
mittens,
It's imho likely more fundemental than merely institutions. Animals seemingly need the Hayflick limit. We reboot computers. I'd assume intelegence and culture require that individuals die on timescales similar to rate of change of the culture.
We do know "immortal" complex systems but they're extremely different from us, including not being conscious (no god, no gaia). Afaik anything "like us" should squeeze the configuration data through a pin hole, in part to have a fresh perspective, but largely to avoid intellectual cancers.
mittens> it's not the financial expense but a sort of psychological expense, a zero-sum game where you only have so much effort you can expend on children.
As social complexity increases then parents must spend more effort navigating the extra social complexity, educating children, etc, which maybe provides a density-dependence without evolutionary pressures. I suppose density-dependence reproductive rates might typically come from some subtle resource shortage, not evolutionary pressures.
Corey Bradshaw cites 10.1371/journal.pone.0280260 when he claims infant mortality has the largest impact upon fertility rate, so one could ask him or another coauthor about controlling social complexity too, although not sure how easily one could quantify that.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:59 PM on March 11
It's imho likely more fundemental than merely institutions. Animals seemingly need the Hayflick limit. We reboot computers. I'd assume intelegence and culture require that individuals die on timescales similar to rate of change of the culture.
We do know "immortal" complex systems but they're extremely different from us, including not being conscious (no god, no gaia). Afaik anything "like us" should squeeze the configuration data through a pin hole, in part to have a fresh perspective, but largely to avoid intellectual cancers.
mittens> it's not the financial expense but a sort of psychological expense, a zero-sum game where you only have so much effort you can expend on children.
As social complexity increases then parents must spend more effort navigating the extra social complexity, educating children, etc, which maybe provides a density-dependence without evolutionary pressures. I suppose density-dependence reproductive rates might typically come from some subtle resource shortage, not evolutionary pressures.
Corey Bradshaw cites 10.1371/journal.pone.0280260 when he claims infant mortality has the largest impact upon fertility rate, so one could ask him or another coauthor about controlling social complexity too, although not sure how easily one could quantify that.
posted by jeffburdges at 1:59 PM on March 11
Wow, photosynthesis being hindred by microplastics feels terrifying, thanks jokeefe.
We definitely do not have a depopulation crisis yet. As I quoted above, depopulation should porobably never become a "crisis" from the perspective of ordinary workers or parents.
We might expect conflicts over workers' hours between different "elites", in the sense used by Peter Turchin. I kinda wondered if retirees could be one unusual "elite" in the class analysis by Turchin, but overall inflation sounds essenial anyways, which likely dooms coalition that advantage retirees over workers, so not really a useful elite under Turchin.
Anyways..
I think 10 billion by 2060-ish is the "economists' estimate", which everybody knows and quotes, but actually lacks scientific rigour. Asia might decline even faster, given their rate of development, improvements in womens rights, etc. Africa could start declining sooner than projected there.
We've way too many people, and they consume way too many resources, but the problem might not be as bad as economists desire. Instead, the real problem occurs when something restarts high birthrates too soon, like rising infant mortality.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:39 PM on March 11
We definitely do not have a depopulation crisis yet. As I quoted above, depopulation should porobably never become a "crisis" from the perspective of ordinary workers or parents.
We might expect conflicts over workers' hours between different "elites", in the sense used by Peter Turchin. I kinda wondered if retirees could be one unusual "elite" in the class analysis by Turchin, but overall inflation sounds essenial anyways, which likely dooms coalition that advantage retirees over workers, so not really a useful elite under Turchin.
Anyways..
I think 10 billion by 2060-ish is the "economists' estimate", which everybody knows and quotes, but actually lacks scientific rigour. Asia might decline even faster, given their rate of development, improvements in womens rights, etc. Africa could start declining sooner than projected there.
We've way too many people, and they consume way too many resources, but the problem might not be as bad as economists desire. Instead, the real problem occurs when something restarts high birthrates too soon, like rising infant mortality.
posted by jeffburdges at 2:39 PM on March 11
You're most welcome, jeffburdges! /s
I've been thinking about the "replacement birthrate"; I don't think I actually internalised before now that replacement depends on every woman having two children, and every tenth woman having three (I cannot math, so if I'm wrong it won't be the first time). When I grew up, in the Sixties, myself and my brother were anomalous in having only each other and not another handful of brothers and sisters. Pretty well everyone I knew came from a family of four children, often more, occasionally many more. When I asked my parents why we didn't have any other siblings, they told me that they believed in zero population growth, and that myself and my brother would replace them. Okay.
But young adults in the 2020s choosing not to have children is a very real thing; my cousin had eight children, and she now has exactly two grandchildren. This new little family lives in the suite in my cousin's basement after the landlord of their building tried to jack up the rent on the premise that once they brought home their first newborn there were now three people living in the apartment. They took it to court, to no avail. It's so hard now for young people, so very hard, and I hate it.
I don't disagree that a world without children would be a dreary one. Children are mostly a delight, they are life itself, they are both a promise to the future and an expression of hope in there being one. I'd love to be a grandmother myself, before I age out of being able to run around with a three year old, but that's not up to me. Anyway.
posted by jokeefe at 3:03 PM on March 11
I've been thinking about the "replacement birthrate"; I don't think I actually internalised before now that replacement depends on every woman having two children, and every tenth woman having three (I cannot math, so if I'm wrong it won't be the first time). When I grew up, in the Sixties, myself and my brother were anomalous in having only each other and not another handful of brothers and sisters. Pretty well everyone I knew came from a family of four children, often more, occasionally many more. When I asked my parents why we didn't have any other siblings, they told me that they believed in zero population growth, and that myself and my brother would replace them. Okay.
But young adults in the 2020s choosing not to have children is a very real thing; my cousin had eight children, and she now has exactly two grandchildren. This new little family lives in the suite in my cousin's basement after the landlord of their building tried to jack up the rent on the premise that once they brought home their first newborn there were now three people living in the apartment. They took it to court, to no avail. It's so hard now for young people, so very hard, and I hate it.
I don't disagree that a world without children would be a dreary one. Children are mostly a delight, they are life itself, they are both a promise to the future and an expression of hope in there being one. I'd love to be a grandmother myself, before I age out of being able to run around with a three year old, but that's not up to me. Anyway.
posted by jokeefe at 3:03 PM on March 11
If life contains such suffering that it's better to never have been born--and thus better for no one to be born
This is a misstatement of my position, for the record.
The FPP brings up Children of Men, and how exhausted that society had become, with nothing in the future to look forward to.
I never bothered to read the book (i don't really like PD James), but that movie enraged me, especially the ending where the baby girl was born. Oh, great! A baby girl! She's going to grow up and be a commodity and be raped over and over and over again to produce children until she dies, probably from having 10 babies in 10 years! Because see, when the plot of your story is fundamentally about how children are everything and society is destroyed without them, that's what you're implicitly consenting to for that baby girl.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:56 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]
This is a misstatement of my position, for the record.
The FPP brings up Children of Men, and how exhausted that society had become, with nothing in the future to look forward to.
I never bothered to read the book (i don't really like PD James), but that movie enraged me, especially the ending where the baby girl was born. Oh, great! A baby girl! She's going to grow up and be a commodity and be raped over and over and over again to produce children until she dies, probably from having 10 babies in 10 years! Because see, when the plot of your story is fundamentally about how children are everything and society is destroyed without them, that's what you're implicitly consenting to for that baby girl.
posted by adrienneleigh at 3:56 PM on March 11 [2 favorites]
I'm just not much of a litfic person! And i especially don't like it when litfic authors decide to go slumming by writing SFF, because they're always so full of themselves and so bad at it!
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:43 PM on March 11
posted by adrienneleigh at 8:43 PM on March 11
I had one more thought on the article. Whenever I would approach the fertility issues as an expression of the economic challenges that young people face, occasionally someone would counter with "It's not economic, it's because of education and female empowerment". If we were to go down that route that it's because of modern feminism giving economic mobility to women and men equally, then the birth rates of the country are going to fall. Everyone should strive to have modern feminism universalized as a good for every country. Birth rates then fall for every country, which is happening. This leads to global fertility rates in a permanent decline and eventually to human extinction or a feminist society that is replaced by a non-feminist society. Feminism, which was championed as an individual good, appears to break down to maintain societies.
It's why I lean towards the beliefs that falling fertility rates are an economic expression, rather than an expression from woman's empowerment, because it doesn't fundamentally lead to the removal of women's rights to restore fertility rates.
posted by DetriusXii at 7:40 AM on March 12
It's why I lean towards the beliefs that falling fertility rates are an economic expression, rather than an expression from woman's empowerment, because it doesn't fundamentally lead to the removal of women's rights to restore fertility rates.
posted by DetriusXii at 7:40 AM on March 12
So you're solving for X? As a woman, the connection seems clear to me. My grandmother was pregnant for a decade. My mother had two well spaced pregnancies, and I have had none. That's autonomy, education and the artificially facilitated ability to flick that fecundity switch back off after nature turns it on.
posted by Selena777 at 7:37 AM on March 14
posted by Selena777 at 7:37 AM on March 14
The film isn't much like the book.
I'm aware; that's why i specified that it's the movie that enraged me?
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:22 AM on March 14
I'm aware; that's why i specified that it's the movie that enraged me?
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:22 AM on March 14
It's imho likely more fundemental than merely institutions. Animals seemingly need the Hayflick limit. We reboot computers. I'd assume intelegence and culture require that individuals die on timescales similar to rate of change of the culture.
Bats express telomerase in many somatic tissues, so the Hayflick limit is much less of an issue for them, and they are very long-lived for their size — which is one of the things that really frightened me about COVID: if a virus has evolved in a species whose tissues can divide without limit, it can reproduce with gleeful abandon without necessarily killing its host, but then when it gets into a species with no telomerase in almost all non-cancerous somatic tissues, it ages the host more or less drastically.
Which makes it into a pretty good bioweapon for species which don't seem to have many defenses against predators who can find masses of them all huddled up in one place every night if they know where to look.
posted by jamjam at 12:59 PM on March 14 [1 favorite]
Bats express telomerase in many somatic tissues, so the Hayflick limit is much less of an issue for them, and they are very long-lived for their size — which is one of the things that really frightened me about COVID: if a virus has evolved in a species whose tissues can divide without limit, it can reproduce with gleeful abandon without necessarily killing its host, but then when it gets into a species with no telomerase in almost all non-cancerous somatic tissues, it ages the host more or less drastically.
Which makes it into a pretty good bioweapon for species which don't seem to have many defenses against predators who can find masses of them all huddled up in one place every night if they know where to look.
posted by jamjam at 12:59 PM on March 14 [1 favorite]
« Older How to draw a line that is not stupid | Southern, courteous, and old-fashioned Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by doctornemo at 7:05 PM on March 6 [1 favorite]