It seems like women in pretty much all cultures where women achieve financial independence and have control over how many children they have, choose to have 0, 1, 2, or rarely 3. Which makes sense given the risks and costliness of childbirth for them.
So I would guess that any culture that results in population explosion would have to either have medical advances that address the risks and costs of childbirth, or go backwards on women’s independence. Or really sweeten the deal in terms of financial and other incentives, but I don’t imagine that would fare very well.
American women say they want closer to three kids than two kids: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility... (average 2.7). Half of women with kids, and even 30% of women overall with a college degree, would prefer a homemaker role to working: https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer.... These women would probably have more kids if it was easier to have a single income household.
I suspect “logistics” has more to do with it than “independence.” Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family. Raising kids without family around is much, much more difficult.
There is also the fact that the feminist revolution stalled in this weird place where women have freedom to pursue careers--but only if they can shoehorn themselves into existing roles designed for men. Want to grind through your 20s in Big Tech or Big Finance seeking promotions? Fine. Want to take time off to have kids at an age when it's the lowest risk and you have the most energy for it? Then you're off the career ladder forever! That's not some unavoidable consequence of "women's independence." Our retirement and pension systems are very much designed around the biological reality of men's bodies working strenuous industrial jobs. But our career ladders haven't changed one bit to accommodate the biological realities of motherhood.
I experienced this first hand. I moved to follow career with my wife, who also has an extraordinary career compared to median. We delayed and struggled to find the right time to start a family. The whole dynamic of planning the start of your family was self defeating. There's no good time to have kids while prioritizing career...
So we took the plunge, had kids, made it 6 months, and moved back to be near our family.
In retrospect it is obvious that the narrative of success being concentrated in gross salary was poisoning our lives and forcing us to make unhealthy decisions to live in awful situations. We're "richer" in our hometown by a long shot, when you calculate the slush money left over after cost of living, babysitters, day care, housing, even cars. Not to mention the joy of having a big family that the kiddos can play with all the time.
If we had realized this in our 20s, I'm sure we would happily have had 4 or more kids and accepted half the money overall for the same net takehome.
Most of my rich friends in tech who take CNN seriously, don't want kids.
Whether it's to save the environment or because having kids has been painted like the ultimate martyrdom and having casual sex until you're 50 as the best thing in the world.
2.5%. That is nothing of nothing. It is a non-event, and dwarfed by “I just don’t want kids” or “financial reasons”. Now that’s not “why do you have 2 kids instead of 3” but yeah.
Men and women are fundamentally different on biological and emotional plane. They complement each other. But instead they are being forced to compete. It's time to recognise and change this.
Throughout the history men have fought war and died in wars. How many wars were fought by women?
In modern times women are in the defense forces, how many women have chosen combat duties and made supreme sacrifices?
Ofcourse there are exception.
Are you a man and should I assume you signed up for every war, as your Y chromosone dictated?
> Are you a man and should I assume you signed up for every war, as your Y chromosone dictated?
Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically? If this behaviour is uniformly distributed across men and women then why you don"t see equal number of crimes by either genders.
Also we were talking about what men want.
Does the fact men fought in wars imply they wanted to fight in wars?
Did men in history during times of peace sit around saying to themself 'I hope someone starts a war so I have an excuse to stab a guy and get away from my wife and kids?'
"Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically?"
Assuming you are a man... unless you are Tony Soprano and you go around hitting people with a baseball bat you probably don't "solve your problems physically".
So why write a sentence like "Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically"
This makes it sound like the world would be better off if all the men stayed home raising the kids and away from things like international relations while having the women take care of all the larger societal functions
Issue with recent activism is two folds. Tendency to demean the motherhood and also make men feel guilty for being their natural self. This is I do not want.
[0] https://www.thebetterindia.com/292468/brave-indian-queens-in...
This is similar to people saying trans people have never existed. Instead of seeing the western world as abnormally sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. IE the way the British treated hijras (men identifying with feminine traits) when they took over India in the late 1800s. Before and since then (though this is affected by how awful the British were), hijras weren’t treated equally, but much better than the abusive and bigoted Europeans.
I am aware of status of women in my own country India before invaders came.I won't go into the ancient history. But women like Ahilyabai Holkar, Laxmibai existed not too long ago.Both of them rose to the occassion. But my point stands that women generally do not enjoy these types of roles. Love, affection, child rearing, and home making comes more naturally to them then going out and picking fights.
Being a house husband doesn't bode well with psychological traits where the extremes sit in the male population (which are responsible for things like men doing all the dangerous jobs, men being most of the inmates in prisons, men being the ones most likely to die in war).
I certainly hated my paternity leave and, anecdotally, I've heard from many peers who would have preferred to just work over taking care of their children. It's fine for a limited amount of time, but I can't tolerate that full time.
Do you think a post bellyaching about simply having a family makes you sound masculine?
Men wanting propagation of life by desiring offspring makes them not men?
[edit: at this point I just assume that folks on HN don't have any concept of the demographics of reservations and how many children are being born. If you mention lack of Hispanic population but don't mention the Native American population then you are skewing the point.]
You might as well talk about how women might raise their children on Mars. Outside the Amazon jungle, for the past 10000 years women have been raising children under class-based society under class-based relations of production. The ruling class makes decisions about production, that's the point of a class-based society. Thus the world is turning into a place where the purpose of women's fertility is reproduction of labor, not an increase of it. The ruling class prefers two educated, productive children to three or four less educated, less productive children.
It doesn't matter what working class women want in terms of children, because this is a class-based society, and the ruling class has things aligned to what is good for them, not her.
I’m not convinced that how we do things now is the best balance of the interests of children and parents. As one example, on weekdays, a parent’s morning time with children is dominated preparing them for school while getting ready to work, and the evening time sees tired post-work parents doing the school run, sorting homework, preparing dinner, extra-curricular, etc.
"Oh I see you have a 15 year gap in your CV" LMAO.
We have research papers with animal fetuses being grown in artificial wombs. Never know, could be some technology developed for humans during the next 100 years.
Raising the baby is the hard part, and no one's lining up to make that easier.
>medical advances that address the risks and costs of childbirth
We all batteries in 100 years
That rumor of producers changing it to batteries started because Neil Gaiman thought the battery thing was dumb so when he was hired to do a promotional wrote Matrix short story he changed it to the humans being used for computer processing.
There’s tons of alternative research paths going untouched that leverage information theory to hack “reality” directly rather than hack on synthetic computers and software within an enclosed time-space vacuum constrained by known hardware limitations.
Metaverses running on synthetic machines seems way more prosaic than a metaverse in my own head I might be able to switch on off with a pill.
I'm really not sure what's so outrageous about the situation. Most adopted (or fostered) people manage without psychosis.
We already have surrogacy, which is when one human volunteers use of their womb to carry somebody else's child (that is, egg comes from person A, sperm from person B, A+B = new human life => fertilised egg is implanted in person C, the surrogate). I know two kids who were born this way, they have loving parents, the eldest will be aware that something is a bit unusual - any other mummies she knows who had a second kid the baby was obviously inside them, whereas her baby sister was inside this other nice lady who just showed up for a few weeks and she's been told that's how it worked for her too - but obviously the tricky details aren't going to be worth explaining to a pre-schooler once they're satisfied with any immediate questions (e.g. is this new baby my sister? Yes. Does the nice lady mean I get extra birthday presents? No)
An artificial womb potentially makes surrogacy an option for larger numbers of people. Some people find pregnancy pretty good really, and their main reason to stop after one or two is economics or practicalities, so this innovation changes nothing for them - but others don't want to risk a second pregnancy after discovering how badly their body reacted the first time, so such technology (if cheap enough) would mean they could have a second or third child.
This also changes the calculus for government intervention. Hiring women to be impregnated is a much more difficult proposition than hiring nursery or orphanage staff. An artificial womb would mean only the second is needed.
If we invent artificial womb's the egg is still coming out of the mother's body.
The egg still get inseminated by a father.
Why should anyone care whether the mother painfully forced the baby out of the vagina after 9 months?
Now the social pressures of being a “machine baby” vs “natural womb baby” would be a different thing.
Much like now.
If you don't believe me, look at history. Plenty of times in history there have been great civilizations that grew and grew until they collapsed, or periods of great societal progress followed by periods of great strife, or periods of great feast followed by famine. Some of these periods lasted hundreds of years. Even today there are nations that forcibly control population whereas others do not. Some developing nations starve due to international trade policy while others grow to provide most of their needs. Some become more radically conservative while others grow more liberal. Some countries collapse economically while others become burgeoning super-powers. And all this in the face of global climate change on a scale not seen in millennia.
Which all are taken into account, by the financially independent woman choosing to get pregnant (because they have access to very effective birth control and are not being forced to have sex, and have abortion as an option).
>And all this in the face of global climate change on a scale not seen in millennia.
I think the biggest thing that has not been seen regarding population dynamics is women having complete control over if, when, and how many children they have.
This is what I mean. Not that each woman is explicitly evaluating all of those factors, but implicitly, they all culminate in an environment where a woman may or may not choose to have x number of children.
Hell, just look at the USA. A woman still can't choose when she can or can't have a baby, regardless of her wealth. This being one of the supposed "civilized nations"; other nations are far less subtle with their societal controls.
Then I would say she is not financially independent, since she cannot afford to hire sufficient security to protect her from rape.
>Hell, just look at the USA. A woman still can't choose when she will or won't have a baby, regardless of her wealth.
Unless one is being held captive, one’s wealth should allow access to IUDs and travel to jurisdictions where abortion is legal. At the least, there is sufficient rule of law where the societal norm is that rape is completely unacceptable.
Although even on that front, it is, well, just completely insane to insinuate that a woman needs to be rich enough to hire a body guard to prevent her from being raped. I can't believe I had to type that sentence.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/politics/abortion-rights-2022...
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/birth-control-benefits/
Also, I am using the term financially free to mean a person who not only has civil rights that would prevent them from ever becoming pregnant without their permission, but also someone who cannot be coerced, such as a woman with sufficient assets or income to sustain (and protect) herself.
>just completely insane to insinuate that a woman needs to be rich enough to hire a body guard to prevent her from being raped.
Yes, unfortunately, some women are born in societies where the concept of rape is not completely rejected.
In reality abortion is readily available until birth in many jurisdictions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... [2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...
In the village where I was raised, all families had kids until the wife cannot have them anymore or dies because of that. And because of the rapid decline of religion over there, it was pretty much inbreeding as there are not many candidates that want a life like that outside these families, so always some of them have massive defects (my neighbour had a son born without a left arm, a blind daughter, a son with a disabling low iq, and more like that).
You mean it's not 100% genetic... very little is. But very little is 0% genetic
Twin study has .35 correlation between identical twins but .21 for non identical
Many many countries recently went this path. Look at USA or Poland where abortion was forBiden.
If you read the article (I know, I know...) it's extremely honest about the accuracy of population modeling as it reaches into the future, and fully admits that projections past 70 years aren't good. It even does so relatively close to the beginning.
“Demographic projections are highly accurate, and it has to do with the fact that most of the people who will be alive in 30 years have already been born,” the UN’s population division director, John Willmoth, says.
“But when you start getting 70, 80 years down the road, there’s much more uncertainty.”
I think the Population Bomb scenarios have done better than people give it credit for. The authors are also still active in public discourse, see eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-po...