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I have no words for this headline. “Breaking news” with nothing else. I mean, wow.
So perfect that all news stories should have this headline right?
Huge room, huge TV- they’re well off.
Oh thank goodness, I was almost worried about the state of things for the country. Relax guys, the people in this comic are well off because they can fit a couch in a room, all is well. 😌
All the local over the air news stations in my area…
(super cheery voice, on the verge of giddiness) Tonight we learn more from local investigators about the tragic bus accident that left 14 orphans dead and 10 others in critical condition. (almost laughing, kind of giggly voice) So tragic.
But first, who will Mandy pick tonight on The Surrogate Show, find out at 9 p.m. right here on channel 8 WPPV-TV. And stick around to meet the Dachshund that adopted an abandoned baby squirrel and find out what you can do to help support her family.
I made this diagram a while ago:
Basically, human labor is required to make the economy grow, but to sustain it doesn’t need so much labor.
That’s like when you’re building a house, a lot of working hours goes into building it (10 men for 1000 hours each), but sustaining it can be done by a housewife in her spare time after she took care of children all day. (I’m deeply sorry about the gendered language but i feel it gets the point across more clearly - maintenance requires significantly less work than building something in the first place.)
This leads to the following phenomenon:
As time goes forward, we have more resources available due to better automation (consider farming robots) but at the same time there’s less demand for human labor also due to automation.
This changes the way that society operates significantly. And it also makes it very displeasant for the people who only identify through the labor they produce to have children, because these children will have a difficult time finding meaningful employment.
Note that this phenomenon takes decades to roll out, but that’s also the time in which children would grow up, so it matches on the timescale and that’s why it’s relevant.
PS the word “homemaker” exists. …Just wanted to tell you!
I’m genuinely curious, where are theses numbers from? Could you please cite the source of your graphs?
it doesn’t seem that they are based on any data, it just illustrates their point
I just want to add to my description above that the cost of living is actually decreasing if you looked at it from an objective perspective. However, we are humans and don’t look at things from an objective perspective, but from a subjective one instead, i.e. how much can i buy with my money.
And that is becoming less. Because the wages decrease faster and more dramatically than the cost of various products. As a consequence, if you divide the cost of products by our wages, things still seem to get more expensive in relation to our own buying power.
It’s not just more people choosing not to have children at all. People who want to have children are having a lot fewer. In my grandparents’ time families would have 10+ and sometimes 20+ children. Now even having 4 kids is considered a lot!
I do think that the Nordic countries show pretty well that even if you treat your population well and put quite a lot of effort into helping the population with child rearing, it seems like women just don’t want to have many children in modern society, even before everything became doom-and-gloom.
Maybe that’s just how it goes when you let people decide for themselves. Or maybe modern, capitalistic society is just not conducive to childrearing, and no amount of state support for young families, kindergartens etc. is going to change that.
There has been strong social support systems in Finland for example, but even there birth rates here have been falling. I can tell you that when you have an aggressive neighbor pushing a war right next door, job prospects are uncertain, inflation is eating away at wages, and social safety nets are being cut or dismantled, it fundamentally changes how people think about having children. That kind of instability and uncertainty about the future makes starting a family feel like too big a risk for many people.
I can also add that Trump is also screwing over the planet with his damn tariffs. This has caused variation in availability and fluctuations in pricing. It’s also continuing greedflation.
We hear about it every day. Now, let’s see how women feel about cranking out more tax payers.
It’s almost like we shouldn’t structure our society around endless growth, including the population
It’s true that “unchecked growth is the motto of the cancer cell”.
And that nature’s program has predation/feeding upon itself as its prime mechanism of survival, which runs on boom and bust cycles. For example, when conditions allow for echinoderm populations to explode everything that feeds on echinoderms is having a pleasant and easy time of living “high on the hog”. But when that overpopulation inevitably leads to collapse(bust) due to resource depletion, plague, environmental/social dysfunction and disorder, etc, that’s when all the beings whose existence depend(ed) on the pleasant and easy times of abundance get to see the real cost/bill of having profited from that oh so very temporary abundance.
Homo sapiens can attempt to structure their societies any which way that suits them based off of the conditions they’re dealing with at the time. But unless they somehow graduate from animal-hood, or at least attempt to transcend being slaves to their instincts, they’re destiny as animals will remain unchanged.
Yet i optimistically happen to see that a percentage of our species choosing not to reproduce(even for selfish reasons) is a good indication that some of us are able to control/deny the impulses of the body as a means of damage control. These things have been observed and studied for some time now, and fall under the categories of ‘Malthusianism’ and ‘social decay’
Thank you. Demanding women to make more babies is sexist. But, this is what happens, when governments focus shit like productivity, gdp, etc. These are such terrible metrics.
I imagine that women “feel” the future and while there might not be crisis in nordic countries today, there might be in the coming decades. Our world is changing so rapidly, and humans live for 80 years; can you really say confidently that no major changing in living conditions to the negative are going to happen within your potential child’s lifetime?
I read this article recently and you might find it interesting as well: Commodification of housing and fertility rates
TL,DR: high housing prices delay and reduce fertility rates.
In this context, Nordic countries are not much better than the rest of the developed world (don’t like this descriptor, but I can’t come up with a better one)
That’s today, though. As an example, Sweden’s fertility rate has been around 2 since the 1930s. That article didn’t mention when housing started being such a big issue, but I assume it wasn’t the 30s and not the 50s or 80s, either.
I’m from a Nordic country: we’ve seen a clear birth rate decline since COVID and especially since 2022 with Putin’s invasion and the war.
We got messages from our daycare that they have to make adjustments because there are so few children etc. So it might be several factors, but the uncertain world right now is definitely a huge factor.
Especially since COVID and the war sent inflation and prices spiralling out of control, with food and housing prices soaring, making having children a fiscally irresponsible thing to do.
We had our first child and signed up to buy an apartment right before COVID. Those interest rates were not what I had planned for. Like, quadrupled.
Sweden’s fertility rate hovered around 2 since the 1930s. It picked back up a little in the 50s, but even then the highest value was around 2.4, and it dipped below 2 in 1970. So doom and gloom and all that, but even in the (relatively) good times, they barely went above replacement level, and under it as soon as contraceptive pills became available. Overall they did manage to stay at a higher value than other countries like Germany, so the effort is clearly paying off, but I think this still clearly shows that people just don’t want to have a lot of children in modern, capitalistic society even when the circumstances are good.
Right, I’m just saying that it’s even worse with the events of recent years. It’s even made the news here on several occasions, so doom, gloom, and the effect it has had on the economy, very much has affected things, like I said. I have first hand experience. It’s not been nice.
Nordic countries are also “highly” educated in the traditional sense, and part of that education has long been hammering home how having children is socially irresponsible in a global context. So, I’d say it’s less about social support or their own immediate environment and more about decades of Western culture and academia actively telling them to not reproduce or risk being seen as, or simply feeling like, bad global participants.
Also, economic security, women’s access to healthcare and early sex education contribute to their ability to follow through on that ideological shift. There’s no religion telling them to procreate but a whole lot of social cues instead telling them it’s selfish and potentially harmful to their own livelihoods, and the planet’s welfare, to do so.
Wait till people fully realise that retirement isn’t secure. Then the third world retirement patterns will be back in style.
Don’t forget the backsliding civil rights and ecological doom
I’m hung up on the fascism. Call me picky 🤷♂️
Gee, I wonder why? What could it possibly be?
(/s)
I just don’t like children so I chose not to have any
Pretty simple
I just don’t like children, so with the current situation, I choose to have as many as I could.
Pretty simple.
“Tonight, 96 Half-Hours investigates how a Trad Fam Man was ‘disappeared’ by Trump Thugs after inadvertently speaking the quiet part out loud.”
speaking the quiet part out loud.
Specifically, while not being rich.
Evil
I love it!
You don’t like children? Wow. Ok. We have WILDLY different takes on this. I love children…with bbq sauce, and a side salad. Really hits the spot!
I prefer the taste of billionaire
