How might a modern baby boom occur?

[Mechadogzilla]

Can you point to some examples of people making Handmaid's Tale-esque suggestions in this thread?

One of the most liked posts on the entire thread amounts to a misogynistic rant about how the only way to save civilization is to push women out of higher education and the workforce and send them back into the kitchen lest we enter some mass death scenario:

If people have to ask themselves why they should have children, and start doing economic calculations, it’s already over. It means your civilization has reached a point where it can’t even justify its own existence. For pretty much all of human history, having children was simply something that just happened. People got married (usually), had sex, got pregnant and had kids. That’s it. If your society is having debates on how to increase the birthrate, you’ve already lost.

Of all the socioeconomic factors that led to the collapse of birth rates in advanced economies, I would argue none was more impactful than the expectation for women to join the workforce and work until retirement like men. Women joining the workforce then led to women being expected to have a good education too; after all, if you join the workforce, you at least want to have a decent job with good wages, and a good degree is certainly helpful in this regard. This led to women delaying family formation more and more, and for an increasing number of them it meant having no children at all.

This is why all the efforts by various governments around the world to deal with sub-replacement level birthrates will fail, even in totalitarian states like China. Because despite their proclaimed social conservatism, neither China, nor Iran, nor Hungary etc are willing to get women out of the workforce. Egalitarianism between the sexes has been so ingrained in the collective consciousness of advanced countries (including ‘authoritarian’ countries), that the idea of women not going to university and doing full-time wage labor is just inconceivable to them. Rumania’s policies under Ceausescu in this regard for example were totally schizophrenic: on one hand they banned contraception to get women to have children, but on the other hand they still expected them to work outside the home (as was usual for socialist countries).

There simply is no policy solution to this – unless you’re willing to use the full power of the state to enforce an ideological commitment to women as homemakers and mothers. That’s what the Nazis did in the 30s, and it’s probably the only example of a society managing to significantly increase its birthrate by decree without needing to ban contraception.

I think the only way out of this is through. Advanced societies will simply have to shrink, until the only ones left are the descendants of those who wanted to have children, despite all the incentives not to. There still are people who have children, some even more than two, and not all of them are poor people. As someone else said, we are currently living through a genetic bottleneck, possibly the biggest bottleneck since humans first left Africa. Who knows, in the end it might be for the best, and whatever comes out on the other side of this bottleneck might well be better than what came before.

Like, is there anything more that needs to be said? There's been a dozen of these threads on demographics and the birth rate on this site and they always boil down to the same thing; a bunch of dudes in an already male-dominated hobby arguing with each other which combination of cartoonishly exaggerated institutional sexism and child tax credits will be best to produce a society where women are reduced to nothing more than baby ovens. It's, at best, a kind of lazy dystopian worldbuilding that's not really saying anything interesting, new, or introspective about gender roles beyond gesturing to their existence, and at worst betraying a moral implication that women choosing for themselves is some kind of aberration that either needs to be socially forced out of them and/or removed from the gene pool. It's pretty hard to tell what's what, because half of the comments seem to be talking about imagining a fictional world and half seem to be talking about policy that needs to be enacted in the real world.

So yeah, I stand by my framing of this kind of thread. It's at best a little bit weird and off-putting that this is such a major topic of discussion, and at worst so creepy and objectifying it actively pushes women out of the hobby. I have no problem with dystopian worldbuilding, nor do I take with people discussing what are the most competent ways to run an 'evil' society. But it needs to be explicit from the start that that's what this is, and any pretenses that you're talking about the real world or that such ideas would improve anything in the real world need to be dropped at the door. It also needs to be treated with some level of tact and human empathy or else it just reads like the outgroup naval gazing about the oppression of an ingroup they don't belong to.

 

[Zireael]

I never, ever said it would add to the 'baby boom'.

I never said you said that, I mentioned that since the entire thread is about a boom

Again, re-read my post to Tai-Pan

Your post to Tai-Pan is a single sentence that equates having children with solely a lifestyle choice - which I what I was replying to.

 

[RousseauX]

The time allocated for childrearing has decreased drastically. It is not the money we lack for raising children, but rather the time to do so.

it's not just time as in how many hours of the day you are free

it also has to do with people having aspirations other than having kids in their 20s-30s. It's time in terms of years of your lives.

People ITT are overselling the economic obstacles to having kids and dramatically underselling the cultural aspects of it.

Like my (lesbian) friend's conservative parents literally told her that "if woman don't have kids: then it's a waste of a daughter". For most of human history there was immense cultural and social pressure for women to have kids asap that would today be seen as (correctly) incredibly sexist. Girls are brought up and taught that their role in life is to be mothers/homemakers. So the norm was you were expected to meet a partner (likely through your family) in your late teens/early 20s and then have kids right away. And if you are miserable in your marriage (read domestic violence) well you just had to deal with it/too bad.

Now it's kind of the norm for you to go through your 20s-30s dating around trying to find "the one" and you are told all the time you shouldn't settle etc. So the result is avg age of marriage is now past 30 and even then society thinks there's legitimate avenues of success for women outside of having kids. There's plenty of childless couples now. The cultural pressures that resulted in >2.1 kids per couple just aren't there anymore.

It's not really a problem you solve by throwing money at it

 

[RousseauX]

Japanese neologism that's by now not unknown in the West, people who lock themselves up in their own room only interacting with their parents when they bring them food and stuff, fully unable and unwilling to funcation in mainstream society.

it might be lowkey worse in the west at this point at least in terms of relationships. It's one of those stealth problems the west is too ashmamed to talk about and manifest in different ways.

IIRC something like 1/3 of mellenials said they gave up on dating

 

[Twiggierjet]

But it needs to be explicit from the start that that's what this is, and any pretenses that you're talking about the real world or that such ideas would improve anything in the real world need to be dropped at the door.

I mean, I did make it explicit right from the start that I was looking for suggestions to explain a piece of worldbuilding, not that I was looking for actual real life policy suggestions.

 

[Parmenion]

I think another social aspect isn't just kids, but relationships in general. There's a shit ton of people who just don't want relationships, people in general seem to be getting tired of eachother.

 

[Giant Man Eating Rabbits]

Your post to Tai-Pan is a single sentence that equates having children with solely a lifestyle choice - which I what I was replying to

It is a lifestyle choice isn't it as you can have a choice of either adopting newborns or not.

Clearly you're just trolling as you continue to repeat the same thing over and over again despite me explaining repeated times what I said. If you're unable to either comprehend what someone says or plain refuses to understand then I have nothing more to say to you.

Goodbye.

 

[ETK023]

I think another social aspect isn't just kids, but relationships in general. There's a shit ton of people who just don't want relationships, people in general seem to be getting tired of eachother.

Do you think that pets are partly to blame? I've noticed a recent rise in people calling dogs their children. To be clear, not jokingly or light-heartedly, but genuinely equating the lives of canines with the lives of human young.

I've also seen people on Reddit saying. verbatim, that they prefer dogs to humans because humans are complicated, while dogs will love them unconditionally for simple things like food.

 

[Parmenion]

Do you think that pets are partly to blame? I've noticed a recent rise in people calling dogs their children. To be clear, not jokingly or light-heartedly, but genuinely equating the lives of canines with the lives of human young.

I've also seen people on Reddit saying. verbatim, that they prefer dogs to humans because humans are complicated, while dogs will love them unconditionally for simple things like food.

Nah I'd say that's more a symptom. People have had pets longer than we've had agriculture

 

[RanulfC]

Pay every married couple $26,000 per year, per child up to the age of 18. That should do it.

As a child free person, I can't help but feel this might engender some negative reactions from folks without kids.

But having a child is a lifestyle choice isn't it?. You can either choose to have them or not.

However the primary suggestion has now turned it into a economic choice. People like me and my wife who can not have children due to biological circumstances are essentially discouraged to remain together and are at a economical disadvantage if we do remain together. The idea penalizes anyone who does not have children for any reason.

Randy

 

[ETK023]

However the primary suggestion has now turned it into a economic choice. People like me and my wife who can not have children due to biological circumstances are essentially discouraged to remain together and are at a economical disadvantage if we do remain together. The idea penalizes anyone who does not have children for any reason.

Randy

Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought that @Giant Man Eating Rabbits said that adoption would be the way to get around this for, and only for, couples that couldn't have children due to medical reasons.

So, for example, couples that are:

A. Infertile
B. At significantly increased medical risk to give birth
C. Homosexual
D. Transgender

Would be able to get the child payments by adopting, whereas cisgendered-heterosexual couples without increased medical risk would have to give birth to biological children in order to get the payments.

I could have misunderstood, however.

 

[da Racontor]

Something else that the "we just need to make it more economical viable" & "give more time" arguments miss.

Pre-industrial domestic/agricultural work certainly did not have shorter work weeks. They were longer. The difference is that you could tailor the work around the kids.
You need to fit in a nap time at 9am, do it. You just finish later in the day. It's the flexibility not the hours most modern jobs don't allow.

Also both my great-grand parents didn't work well over 40hr work weeks in a mill, in a house so small you had to walk backwards into the bathroom to use the toilet, decided to have 10 kids to help work & not have them work by sending them to parochial school.
It was not just them either, this was common for the area.

 

[Hugh Third of Five]

Do you think that pets are partly to blame? I've noticed a recent rise in people calling dogs their children. To be clear, not jokingly or light-heartedly, but genuinely equating the lives of canines with the lives of human young.

I've also seen people on Reddit saying. verbatim, that they prefer dogs to humans because humans are complicated, while dogs will love them unconditionally for simple things like food.

People have had pets for a long time before the drop off in birth rates.

 

[RanulfC]

Maybe I misunderstood, but I thought that @Giant Man Eating Rabbits said that adoption would be the way to get around this for, and only for, couples that couldn't have children due to medical reasons.

So, for example, couples that are:

A. Infertile
B. At significantly increased medical risk to give birth
C. Homosexual
D. Transgender

Would be able to get the child payments by adopting, whereas cisgendered-heterosexual couples without increased medical risk would have to give birth to biological children in order to get the payments.

I could have misunderstood, however.

Yes but it's still being a monetary incentive to HAVE children so those who don't are economically discriminated against. Further I'll point out that other than A-B in many places C-D would be legal grounds for NOT allowing them to adopt, (I might add that despite rhetoric towards encouraging adoption many areas I found out have a semi-official doctrine that anyone serving active duty in the military is not to be considered a "suitable" subject for allowing to adopt) plus a strong "eugenics but we don't call it eugenics" attitude about who should be allowed to adopt. These issues don't tend to go away, especially if the "government" is offering the incentives.

Randy

 

[Intosh]

Make single-income households the norm again, for starters.

In countries with enough social services helping family with day nurseries and kindergarten, you don't need "single-income" households to have big families.

"Single-income" families are something that don't "exist" in a country in France since a lot of time.

Women in France born in 1945 have a level of employment of 69%.

Women born in 1975 have a level of employment of 86%.

 

[Kalga]

But it needs to be explicit from the start that that's what this is, and any pretenses that you're talking about the real world or that such ideas would improve anything in the real world need to be dropped at the door. It also needs to be treated with some level of tact and human empathy or else it just reads like the outgroup naval gazing about the oppression of an ingroup they don't belong to.

• Fact: Most of human history is filled with horrors/evils of patriarchy/misogyny, authoritarianism, slavery/bondage/unfree labor, wealth inequality, social inequality, etc. etc.
  • Opinion: Most of those times were also without much of modern/advance technologies.
• Fact: Most of human history populations had been growing or remain stable outside of famine, natural disasters, and war.
• Fact: Most countries/societies on the other end of the demographic transitions are less horrific/evil than most of the history before them.
  • Opinion: immigration to make up for population shortfalls in developed economies are reaping the fruits of all the evils they have mitigated/abated in their own lands from those other lands/societies.

For all those evils they were/are successful enough in perpetuating themselves. Point out that they are evil all you want, but don't pretend that said evil also doesn't work. Reality isn't some nice fairytale or just world theory.

 

[CalBear]

Well this has turned remarkably toxic.

Closed simply to avert significant actions.