3 hours ago, Gramarye said:

 

"Rethinking" is too soft a term, though.  It's too late, and too soft a term, to "rethink" dancing on the edge of cliffs when you're in the middle of falling, and likewise to expect that "rethinking" gravity will cause it to treat you any differently.  Some things cannot be rethought.

Agreed on the principle, but I would argue the cliff whose edge we've been dancing on has been the environmental damage we've done over the last couple hundred years- and in numerous ways we are teetering over the edge of this cliff right now.  I believe I'm the one suggesting we watch our step, while you are calling for more wine.

And btw, you are so going to get quoted on this in the global warming thread!

46 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

There's room to get our infant mortality rate down.

 

Not to mention other causes of premature death-accidents, homicide, suicide, preventable diseases.  While I think we need to find a way to live with less humans on the planet, we should all want better, healthier, longer lives for all the humans we do bring into existence.

9 minutes ago, X said:

Agreed on the principle, but I would argue the cliff whose edge we've been dancing on has been the environmental damage we've done over the last couple hundred years- and in numerous ways we are teetering over the edge of this cliff right now.  I believe I'm the one suggesting we watch our step, while you are calling for more wine.

And btw, you are so going to get quoted on this in the global warming thread!

 

It certainly says a lot that you consider that precipice more dangerous than this one, and/or that we're further over that one.

 

It conforms to type, though.  Anti-natalism and environmentalism have a great deal of overlap.

 

4 minutes ago, X said:

 

Not to mention other causes of premature death-accidents, homicide, suicide, preventable diseases.  While I think we need to find a way to live with less humans on the planet, we should all want better, healthier, longer lives for all the humans we do bring into existence.

 

Why not both?

1 hour ago, Gramarye said:

It conforms to type, though.  Anti-natalism and environmentalism have a great deal of overlap.

 

@Xsaid nothing remotely close to "Having babies is morally wrong."

1 hour ago, Gramarye said:

 

You need people to (1) want to have children and (2) not be prevented by circumstances from having children, in that order.  Policy can address parts of (2) (paid family leave, paid maternity care, etc.) but that's irrelevant if no one's thoughts on the matter make it past (1).

The WANT is the biggest thing. Go back 40 years ago or longer and you had a lot more families who desired to be larger for numerous reasons. I think a good part of that is that people married earlier and started having kids earlier.  Younger marriages meant more opportunity to have children. Despite all the advances in science, they have not been able to stop the biological clock. While more people delay in their families now, older age makes pregnancy more expensive for older parents, it makes the opportunities to start families fewer as people will try and squeeze 2-3 kids in over an 8 year period now instead of having 15-20 childbearing years to spread out more kids. 

Also, more dual income houses diminishes the amount of kids people have. People can make policy arguments about family leave or free child care all day, but the one thing that having a dual income household does is it creates less time. Parents are busier than ever with both trying to juggle a career today. Affordability and desire aside, a lot of parents are left to say I just do not have the energy to work and juggle another child.  Anecdotally, i know a number of couples with larger families around me, many came from dual income professional households. Oftentimes, you see after 2 kids both parents keep working full time, by the 4th kid most mother's start to stay home and then certainly after 5+ kids the mother quits her fairly high powered job to stay home.  To your point, I do not think enough parents want to do that today in order to juggle more children. 

1 hour ago, Gramarye said:

It conforms to type, though.  Anti-natalism and environmentalism have a great deal of overlap.

On 2/17/2023 at 1:22 PM, atothek said:

The arguments here also end up being functionally reductive where we all sit around forming ad hominem arguments against people that have different cultural view points than our own...  At the end of the day, the discussion inevitably devolves in to people self-affirming their own decisions and deriding people whose decisions differ from their own.  

 

Edited February 27, 20232 yr by atothek

2 hours ago, X said:

but I would argue the cliff whose edge we've been dancing on has been the environmental damage we've done over the last couple hundred years- and in numerous ways we are teetering over the edge of this cliff right now.  I believe I'm the one suggesting we watch our step, while you are calling for more wine.

The overpopulation argument is such an old argument that has been disproven over and over and over again it is become a tired old trope by this point. At one time it was the nativists and xenophobes that rallied around that line in an effort to prevent overpopulation but today it is the Green Zealots who embrace this brand of faulty science. 

 

Go back over the last 100 years and you hear a loud faction of "Chicken Littles" who decry that the world cannot support a population if it reaches.... 1 billion,.... 2 billion.... 3 Billion... and so on. There would be no food, no land, people would be too crowded, etc etc. Each time the world crossed over a population threshold, these people were proven embarrassingly wrong. Even more severely, you have countries like China who enacted one child policies with disasterous results. Such policies resulted in the deaths of millions of babies over the last 50 years, and now China is looking at a shrinking population that will not be able to support and provide for the needs of their rapidly aging population.   Are these really the policies that the Green Zealots care to espouse, because as history has proven, they are a recipe for utter failure. 

1 hour ago, Ineffable_Matt said:

@Xsaid nothing remotely close to "Having babies is morally wrong."

 

Hairsplitting given:

  

On 2/22/2023 at 5:29 PM, X said:

A declining human population is the best thing possible for the future of the planet.

 

The ways to make the human population decline are to have fewer babies or to make existing people die more quickly.  Which do you think he was suggesting was morally right?

4 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

 

Hairsplitting given:

  

 

The ways to make the human population decline are to have fewer babies or to make existing people die more quickly.  Which do you think he was suggesting was morally right?

Plus @Ineffable_Matt, @X further stated that we should work to increase the quality of life for those who are already here, so by process of elimination he is talking about not having babies.

Because I have virtually no knowledge on the subject I have to ask:

 

Is the argument that fertility rates need to be constantly growing in order for the global economy to be sustainable? Like, is it comparable to a corporation where that entity requires continual growth to maintain its economic existence? Or is there evidence that decline in population has improved the economic health and well-being of people within a city or region? 

 

Anyway it's difficult - for me anyway - how this birth rate issue really intersects with economic policy, immigration, sociology, philosophy and the role of religion and government in our lives. 

 

17 minutes ago, surfohio said:

Because I have virtually no knowledge on the subject I have to ask:

 

Is the argument that fertility rates need to be constantly growing in order for the global economy to be sustainable? Like, is it comparable to a corporation where that entity requires continual growth to maintain its economic existence? Or is there evidence that decline in population has improved the economic health and well-being of people within a city or region? 

 

Anyway it's difficult - for me anyway - how this birth rate issue really intersects with economic policy, immigration, sociology, philosophy and the role of religion and government in our lives. 

 

I think the key thing is that at minimum populations need to sustain themselves. Small growth in the birth rate is a good thing, but at a minimum there should be enough births for people to replace themselves.  

How to get there is anyone's guess

6 minutes ago, surfohio said:

Because I have virtually no knowledge on the subject I have to ask:

 

Is the argument that fertility rates need to be constantly growing in order for the global economy to be sustainable? Like, is it comparable to a corporation where that entity requires continual growth to maintain its economic existence? Or is there evidence that decline in population has improved the economic health and well-being of people within a city or region? 

 

Anyway it's difficult - for me anyway - how this birth rate issue really intersects with economic policy, immigration, sociology, philosophy and the role of religion and government in our lives. 

 

So, it's not fertility rates per se that need to stay high (it also doesn't need to be constantly growing, since the number itself is a rate of growth).  It's more nuanced than that.

 

It's closer to accurate to say that we need to maintain a certain number of workers per retiree in order to keep Social Security, as currently structured, financially sustainable.  So we can do that by having more young people or reducing the pool of eligible elderly people (raising the retirement age or means-testing), or increasing the payroll tax or other funding mechanisms for that fund.  We've gone to that well many times; when the Social Security act first passed in 1937 until 1949, the rate was actually only 1%.  It's now 12.4%, and that's just for Social Security, not Medicare.

 

That's an important policy aspect to this issue but it really is deeper than that, and this is where policy really takes a backseat to the larger cultural issue(s).  This wouldn't be such a touchy subject if it were just about public pension liabilities.

This topic made me think about how 5 elementary busses and 5 middle/high school stop at the trailer park across from our farm. I didn't really notice it when I was working a regular job and wasn't there during the day especially since I don't live at the farm. It made me think though, "Do they have all those kids because they live in they trailer park or do they live in the trailer park because they have all those kids?"

5 hours ago, Gramarye said:

 

It certainly says a lot that you consider that precipice more dangerous than this one, and/or that we're further over that one.

 

It conforms to type, though.  Anti-natalism and environmentalism have a great deal of overlap.

 

 

Why not both?

 

May be a reason for that, of course.  Humans using resources and generating pollution and all.

 

Of course, we can have more humans and a healthy environment to the extent that we can vastly reduce the amount of resources we use and the amount of pollution we generate per capita.  I'm pretty skeptical, though.  We're currently seeing unprecedentedly quick climate change and species collapse around the globe.  I'd say we're already way out ahead of what our planet can support.  We may have already spun out beyond the edge of the cliff.

 

More wine!

2 hours ago, Gramarye said:

Which do you think he was suggesting was morally right?

I don’t think he was making any sort of moral judgment, I think he was making a snarky yet salient point about the impacts of human activity on our planet.

 

2 hours ago, Brutus_buckeye said:

Plus @Ineffable_Matt, @X further stated that we should work to increase the quality of life for those who are already here, so by process of elimination he is talking about not having babies.

I think we can have babies and work to increase the quality of life for those already here. Call me crazy, but it’s doable.

2 hours ago, Brutus_buckeye said:

The overpopulation argument is such an old argument that has been disproven over and over and over again it is become a tired old trope by this point. At one time it was the nativists and xenophobes that rallied around that line in an effort to prevent overpopulation but today it is the Green Zealots who embrace this brand of faulty science. 

 

Go back over the last 100 years and you hear a loud faction of "Chicken Littles" who decry that the world cannot support a population if it reaches.... 1 billion,.... 2 billion.... 3 Billion... and so on. There would be no food, no land, people would be too crowded, etc etc. Each time the world crossed over a population threshold, these people were proven embarrassingly wrong. Even more severely, you have countries like China who enacted one child policies with disasterous results. Such policies resulted in the deaths of millions of babies over the last 50 years, and now China is looking at a shrinking population that will not be able to support and provide for the needs of their rapidly aging population.   Are these really the policies that the Green Zealots care to espouse, because as history has proven, they are a recipe for utter failure. 

 

Brutus Buckeye always delivering that quality content!  Keepin' it classy!

 

I think instead of looking at a raw number of people, we should look at our impact on the planet as a guide.  Spoiler alert: it isn't good- we're experiencing climate change that is unprecedented in speed of change, and perhaps the largest die-off of species our planet has ever known.  We still have plenty of food in a gross sense, though that is largely because of fossil fuel based fertilizers, so there are limits to that, not to mention the habitat destruction that attends converting more land to ag uses. 

 

The rest of your post is beneath response, as I've already made it clear that I'm pro-immigration and anti-coercive means of population control.

3 hours ago, Gramarye said:

 

Hairsplitting given:

  

 

The ways to make the human population decline are to have fewer babies or to make existing people die more quickly.  Which do you think he was suggesting was morally right?

 

I wasn't suggesting anything about individual morality.  I was suggesting something about public policy, namely that we shouldn't be encouraging people to have more babies than they otherwise would.  Nothing more, nothing less.

 

If we want to discuss the morality of having children, I think that having children is not a moral good or bad in and of itself, but rather should be the end result of a personal moral calculation that includes many things- can one provide a good life to that child, what kind of world will it live in, what kind of impact will it likely have upon its world?  The state of our planet's ecosystem impacts upon all of those, as do other things that a prospective parent should consider carefully before creating another life.

Better a green zealot (lol so dumb) than a regular ol zealot

I've been pretty delicate throughout this thread but I need to be pretty blunt it seems.  We keep using this phrasing that falling fertility rates are a cultural issue and I want to be very clear that  it's NOT a cultural issue.  A cultural issue unique to Western Europe and the United States would not see this occurring in countries with entirely different cultures of our own.  The reason why this is not a cultural issue is because the biggest correlation for falling fertility rates in a country is The Educational Attainment of Women in the Country:

 

Quote

Research has found that higher education in women is correlated with lower fertility. For instance, in Iran in the 1950s, women had an average of three years of schooling and raised seven children on average.

 

But by 2010, when Iranian women had nine years of schooling on average, the average fertility rate in the country had dropped to 1.8.

 

This theory is further supported when you look at countries where women’s education is still relatively lagging. For instance, in 2010, women in Niger had 1.3 years of education on average, and an average of more than seven children—more than double the global average at that time.

(Source - World Economic Forum)

 

The strongest correlate to high fertility rates are uneducated women.  

 

India's Fertility Rate - 1960 - 5.92 | 2020 - 2.05 - India Female Literacy Rate - 1960 - 15% | 2020 - 70%
Mexico's Fertility Rate - 1980 - 4.78 | 2020 - 1.90 - Mexico Female Literacy Rate - 1980 - 80% | 2020 - 95%
Brazil Fertility Rate - 1980 - 4.04 | 2020 - 1.65 - Brazil Female Literacy Rate - 1980 - 73% | 2020 - 95%

Indonesia Fertility Rate - 1980 - 4.49 | 2020 - 2.19 - Indonesia Female Literacy Rate - 1980 - 58% | 2020 - 95%
Pakistan Fertility Rate - 1980 - 6.73 | 2020 - 3.56 - Pakistan Female Literacy Rate - 1980 - 15% | 2020 - 46% 

Global Fertility Rate - 1980 - 3.75 | 2020 - 2.3 - Global Female Literacy Rate - 1980 - 61%| 2020 - 83%
 

The reason fertility rates have dropped globally is because the world, rightly so, wanted to give women equal access to education and professions equivalent to men.  Women should be allowed to pursue education and careers (I can't believe I have to say this).  This isn't some culture war, where a bunch of women with masters degrees decided to not have a kid, this is, "A woman in India learned to read at an 8th grade level and could communicate and plan with her husband because she had the ability to read and they co-decided the number of children they want to have".  

 

Social Security is doomed, but it's been doomed for 40+ years at this juncture, my undergrad college econ prof had a multi week presentation on the unsustainability of Social Security in 2004.  We've known about this for 20 years.  It is what it is, likely, eligibility for Social Security will need to go past 70, but that's okay, because in 1935, the average male only lived to 60 years old and a person wasn't eligible for benefits until they hit 65.  If the policy were written the same way today, we wouldn't make people eligible for benefits until they're, like, 82 years old.  

The cost of a lower global fertility rate is well, WELL worth women having the ability to seek an education and the global economics and politics community is more than talented enough to find solutions to the policy problems that a lower fertility rate will create.  

 

In the words of the WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM:
 

Quote

Intelligent policy should therefore identify and remove any barriers unnecessarily depressing birth rates, such as labor-market discrimination, limited parental leave, or inadequate childcare facilities, which make it difficult for women to combine careers with having as many children as they wish. The Scandinavian countries are exemplary in this respect, though fertility rates there have not returned to replacement levels, but only to about 1.75-1.9.

 

Similar policies in the US might marginally increase the fertility rate from today’s 1.75, with a mildly beneficial net effect. But the predominant response to America’s recent fertility decline should be to accept it as inevitable and to stop worrying about it.

(Source - emphasis my own)

 

I'm sorry, but this is three pages of a lot of people beating around the bush about how women, especially the global poor, receiving education in society is causing some massive societal ill and frankly I'm over it.  I really hope no women stumble on this thread. Later.  

And that goes back to the fact that immigration and automation are the answer since women attaining education is a positive development.

16 hours ago, GCrites80s said:

This topic made me think about how 5 elementary busses and 5 middle/high school stop at the trailer park across from our farm. I didn't really notice it when I was working a regular job and wasn't there during the day especially since I don't live at the farm. It made me think though, "Do they have all those kids because they live in they trailer park or do they live in the trailer park because they have all those kids?"

I think some people just like to live in trailer parks. Give them a choice between a 2-3 bed apartment community or a double wide where they have a yard and some people will choose the trailer.  Plus, with the trailer park, they can at least have equity ownership in their trailer that they could never achieve in an apartment community. There are a lot of reasons why people would choose trailer park living. It is not something I would ever choose (although depending on the park and home, it may not be all that bad), but they are perfectly rational choices for living there. 

11 hours ago, atothek said:

The reason fertility rates have dropped globally is because the world, rightly so, wanted to give women equal access to education and professions equivalent to men.  Women should be allowed to pursue education and careers (I can't believe I have to say this).

 

...

 

I'm sorry, but this is three pages of a lot of people beating around the bush about how women, especially the global poor, receiving education in society is causing some massive societal ill and frankly I'm over it.  I really hope no women stumble on this thread. Later.  

 

I could make an equally long response to this strawman, but it wouldn't be worth it.  It is a strawman. Period.  Actually, not period.  It is a particularly pernicious and facile strawman, designed to shut down debate by legitimizing barbarous stereotypes about people on the other side of the issue from you.  My wife has two advanced degrees and I have every hope that my daughter achieves at least one, and we wouldn't be paying what we pay for her education if we believed women "receiving education in society is causing some massive societal ill."  As you so bluntly put it: I can't believe I have to say this.

 

What an absolute crock.  You're right to be leaving this thread.  You are contributing nothing to it but lies.  Don't come back.

  

10 hours ago, GCrites80s said:

And that goes back to the fact that immigration and automation are the answer since women attaining education is a positive development.

 

I got back to what I said upthread: Fertility rates are also falling below replacement level in just about every country in the world, including the largest, China and India.  Certain parts of Africa are the only part of the world where people still celebrate large families.  In addition, even if we said we just don't care about that, and it's fine if we bring in young people for ourselves that those other countries can't afford to lose, that's at best a one-generation solution considering that immigrant fertility rates in this country, while higher than second-generation and later ones, are still falling to at or below replacement level.  So all it does is kick the can down the road here.

I'm aware of the correlation.

 

That doesn't make your point even about causation, let alone about the barbarous folderol you tried to impute to those on the other side of this issue from you regarding our beliefs.

 

If putting words in people's mouths that they never said is the only way you can try to win an argument, you're not winning.

I'm not seeing how atothek is on "the other side of the issue" though by pointing out one reason why birthrates are lower.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/05/health/us-women-health-care/index.html

 

Quote

Study of wealthy nations finds American women most likely to die of preventable causes, pregnancy complications

 

Quote

According to data collected by the Commonwealth Fund and published Tuesday, American women have an avoidable mortality rate of 198 per 100,000, the highest of any nation included in the study. The United Kingdom had the next highest rate, at 146 per 100,000.

 

The US also had the highest maternal mortality rate: 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, more than triple the rate of any other country studied. When looking only at Black maternal mortality, the rate jumped to 55.3 deaths per 100,000 live births.

 

By comparison, in Norway in 2019, the last year for which data was available, there were zero maternal deaths.

 

Maybe more women would be fine having kids if our maternal mortality rate wasn't the highest among industrialized nations.

25 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

 

I could make an equally long response to this strawman, but it wouldn't be worth it.  It is a strawman. Period.  Actually, not period.  It is a particularly pernicious and facile strawman, designed to shut down debate by legitimizing barbarous stereotypes about people on the other side of the issue from you.  My wife has two advanced degrees and I have every hope that my daughter achieves at least one, and we wouldn't be paying what we pay for her education if we believed women "receiving education in society is causing some massive societal ill."  As you so bluntly put it: I can't believe I have to say this.

 

What an absolute crock.  You're right to be leaving this thread.  You are contributing nothing to it but lies.  Don't come back.

  

 

I got back to what I said upthread: Fertility rates are also falling below replacement level in just about every country in the world, including the largest, China and India.  Certain parts of Africa are the only part of the world where people still celebrate large families.  In addition, even if we said we just don't care about that, and it's fine if we bring in young people for ourselves that those other countries can't afford to lose, that's at best a one-generation solution considering that immigrant fertility rates in this country, while higher than second-generation and later ones, are still falling to at or below replacement level.  So all it does is kick the can down the road here.

19 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

I'm aware of the correlation.

 

That doesn't make your point even about causation, let alone about the barbarous folderol you tried to impute to those on the other side of this issue from you regarding our beliefs.

 

Dude, you've been calling people anti-baby, anti-natalist, morally corrupt throughout this entire thread.  I bring numbers and data to back up the fact that the reason global fertility rates are dropping is largely due to rising rates of female education in the developing world and I'm  the barbarous heathen.  Stop making this personal, we get it, you have children and you love them, that's great and I think that's great for you.  But you have to recognize that the primary reason that fertility rates are falling is because women are being educated, this is well accepted throughout all economic fields. 

Edit - I mean you're free to not LIKE this reason, but it's predominant reason why fertility rates are dropping.

Edit 2 - THIS ENTIRE TOPIC WAS RESTARTED WITH THE POSTING OF A STRAWMAN ABOUT PEOPLE WHO DON'T WANT TO HAVE BABIES AND CALLING THEM OLD MAIDS

Edited February 28, 20232 yr by atothek

1 hour ago, GCrites80s said:

I'm not seeing how atothek is on "the other side of the issue" though by pointing out one reason why birthrates are lower.

 

He went way beyond that with his nonsense about those on the other side seeing women's education and professional success as problematic.  There was absolutely zero justification for that.

 

As for the correlation-vs-causation issue: By choice or coincidence, he chose a chart that began just before the invention of oral contraception.  Query how different that chart would look if either:

• it went back to 1850 instead of 1950, when public education began to be more widespread but oral contraception had not yet been invented (the pill was patented in 1960); or
• if oral contraception had not been invented in 1960.

Three kinds of lies: Lies, damn lies, and statistics.  He relied on both of the latter two.

 

And before someone makes yet another baseless assumption, since it seems like I have to clarify a dozen things I don't say for everything I do: No, I am not saying that access to oral contraception should be legally restricted.

 

1 hour ago, atothek said:

 

Dude, you've been calling people anti-baby, anti-natalist, morally corrupt throughout this entire thread.

 

IIRC, I used that term exactly once, in response to someone who specifically said:

 

Quote

A declining human population is the best thing possible for the future of the planet.

 

The difference is that you both did not quote and did not ask.  Your "I'll be blunt" post shot from the hip, made a ton of assumptions, and then ended with "I'm out."  That's not the way to handle a civilized debate, and of course your "I can't believe I have to say this" signaled that you didn't think this was a civilized debate--never mind the fact that it was multiple pages that showed at least partial agreement on some points between me, @ryanlammi, and @Boomerang_Brian, which, if you follow other UO politics and culture threads, isn't exactly an everyday occurrence.

 

You could have asked something along the lines of "one thing lurking in the background ought to be discussed here--how do you reconcile increasing TFR with women's education?"  Instead, you assumed that anyone who wants to see more children in the world thinks that "women, especially the global poor, receiving education in society is causing some massive societal ill," and must not believe that "Women should be allowed to pursue education and careers (I can't believe I have to say this)."

 

On that subject, you might find this relevant, from last August:

 

In rich countries, working women and more babies go hand in hand

The opposite used to be true

 

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2022/08/23/in-rich-countries-working-women-and-more-babies-go-hand-in-hand

 

It is well known that fertility rates have declined as women’s labour-force participation has increased. Handling a career as well as juggling childcare appeared to leave little room for big families. But new research now helps to explain a striking reversal of that trend in rich countries: higher female participation rates are associated with more babies.

 

Now, I understand that you were talking in part about poor villages in South Asia and this thread has veered back and forth from talking about global rates to Western rates to specifically American rates.  And I was part of that veering because of making sure people knew that declining TFR in countries of origin for most immigrants means that it can't be a long-term solution.  But to be clear, those of us who seek a higher TFR in the U.S. (or developed countries generally) today are not looking to replicate our own pre-industrial rate of 7.0 in 1800, or the situation in other countries where those conditions held until more recently.  And as that Economist article notes, the old assumption that more education means fewer children isn't even holding true anymore, at least vis-a-vis our current levels.

 

Or, long story short, there's no reason my daughter can't have both an M.D. and a large family, any more than my sons.

Meet the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind

https://news.yahoo.com/meet-elite-couples-breeding-save-100000548.html

 

6 minutes ago, Lazarus said:

Meet the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind

https://news.yahoo.com/meet-elite-couples-breeding-save-100000548.html

 

Shawn Kemp, Pokey Reese, and Nick Cannon are some of the other elites doing their part to help humanity out too.

5 hours ago, Brutus_buckeye said:

Shawn Kemp, Pokey Reese, and Nick Cannon are some of the other elites doing their part to help humanity out too.

 

 

Interesting you singled out those three and not, say, Elon Musk.

6 hours ago, Lazarus said:

Meet the ‘elite’ couples breeding to save mankind

https://news.yahoo.com/meet-elite-couples-breeding-save-100000548.html

 

 

These weirdo freaks are in their 30s and have 3 kids, if I read the article correctly.

 

Hardly abnormal or noteworthy.

Edited April 18, 20232 yr by DarkandStormy

I bet they wish Connecticut Republicans were back

On 2/27/2023 at 3:38 PM, Gramarye said:

 

Hairsplitting given:

  

 

The ways to make the human population decline are to have fewer babies or to make existing people die more quickly.  Which do you think he was suggesting was morally right?

 

The PRC has done both, as a matter of policy.    They face a demographic time bomb as a result.

22 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

These weirdo freaks are in their 30s and have 3 kids, if I read the article correctly.

 

Hardly abnormal or noteworthy.

 

Unlikely that kids with names like these survive to adulthood.

 

 

 

12 minutes ago, E Rocc said:

 

The PRC has done both, as a matter of policy.    They face a demographic time bomb as a result.

 

...and the inability to surpass, let alone match the United States in influence.  

1 hour ago, DarkandStormy said:

 

 

Interesting you singled out those three and not, say, Elon Musk.

What are you trying to imply here @DarkandStormy.  It is interesting that you seem to want to read something more into this than there actually is.  

 

 

7 hours ago, Lazarus said:

 

Unlikely that kids with names like these survive to adulthood.

 

 

 

 

I remember in the early 2000s it was the thing to give boys cowboy names influenced by Western locales. Yet when I was in the gaming industry I heard those names over and over with customers wanting indoor activities such as video games and trading cards. I remember seeing so many tan frustrated dads with buzzcuts sighing as their kid demanded another expensive Pokémon card.

37 minutes ago, GCrites80s said:

 

I remember in the early 2000s it was the thing to give boys cowboy names influenced by Western locales. Yet when I was in the gaming industry I heard those names over and over with customers wanting indoor activities such as video games and trading cards. I remember seeing so many tan frustrated dads with buzzcuts sighing as their kid demanded another expensive Pokémon card.

 

A big problem with the fracturing of extended families across geography and kids not knowing their grandparents is people looking to baby name books or making stuff up rather than honoring their family by passing on names.  When you give a kid a name that has been repeated in your family (or at least that the tradition is continued with siblings and cousins), it helps the kid recognize that their behavior either reflects well or poorly on the family, and that they ought to center their life around serving the family. If you are raised in a family with deep roots in a specific locale, pop culture looks positively bland by comparison to your reality. 

 

 

 

 

 

5 hours ago, Lazarus said:

A big problem with the fracturing of extended families across geography and kids not knowing their grandparents is people looking to baby name books or making stuff up rather than honoring their family by passing on names.  When you give a kid a name that has been repeated in your family (or at least that the tradition is continued with siblings and cousins), it helps the kid recognize that their behavior either reflects well or poorly on the family, and that they ought to center their life around serving the family. If you are raised in a family with deep roots in a specific locale, pop culture looks positively bland by comparison to your reality. 

 

I'm not sure this was all that common for most of Western history, though I don't have statistics on this.  What I do have is many months of genealogical research on both sides of my own family tree during the interminable boredom of the COVID lockdowns.  The "repeating" names in my family tree coincide with the era of what would probably be the grandparents and great-grandparents of most posters here: late 1800s through early-to-mid 1900s.  Before that, names start to sound much more foreign, likely because they weren't repeated among descendants and therefore I/we would not have grown up knowing many living people with those names.  My working hypothesis is that there's an immigration-based element to this, i.e., that whatever generation of a given person's family immigrated to America from Europe (or anywhere else with our surname conventions) is more likely to name a child after a relative they left behind in the old country.  The one line of my family that immigrated here much earlier--as in, they came over on the Mayflower--also had a generation of similar names, though of course there simply wasn't as much name diversity among that group.  If every John and Thomas on the Mayflower had died at sea, the ship would have been derelict by the time it reached Plymouth.  But from the late 1600s/early 1700s until the late 1800s, you didn't see a whole lot of repeating names.

 

And when it comes to non-Western history, naming conventions are often so different that this notion of repeating names doesn't map very well.  In my wife's native culture, for example, they don't really have family names as surnames at all.  The surname of both sons and daughters are the given name of the father.  My wife's last name was her dad's first name until she married me.

 

6 hours ago, GCrites80s said:

 

I remember in the early 2000s it was the thing to give boys cowboy names influenced by Western locales. Yet when I was in the gaming industry I heard those names over and over with customers wanting indoor activities such as video games and trading cards. I remember seeing so many tan frustrated dads with buzzcuts sighing as their kid demanded another expensive Pokémon card.

 

Curious as to what some of these were.  The only Cheyenne and only Montana that I know are both girls/women.  And Pierre might be the capital of South Dakota but I'm not sure it has exactly a cowboy/Western ring to it.

 

14 hours ago, DarkandStormy said:

20 hours ago, Brutus_buckeye said:

Shawn Kemp, Pokey Reese, and Nick Cannon are some of the other elites doing their part to help humanity out too.

Interesting you singled out those three and not, say, Elon Musk.

 

@Brutus_buckeye said "some of the other elites."  The article that @Lazarus posted prominently mentioned Elon Musk.  And I know you read it because you saw the same thing about the ages and fertility rates of those couples that I did (which, of course, also describes my own marriage, and quite a few more that don't consciously think of themselves as pro-natalist).

 

But I'm on board with that, and I think a lot of those tech-family parents would be, too.  The hypothetical in the middle of that article about having eight children, and each of them having eight children, etc. doesn't actually appear to describe anyone in particular, even Musk.  Incidentally, Musk wouldn't count in the fertility rate stats the way some think, because TFR is generally measured by children per woman, not per man, and so Musk having 10 children with 3 women is actually a TFR of 3.3, so not so different than the three-kids-in-their-30s couples mentioned elsewhere in the article.

 

My wife and I might have loved to have one or two more but I doubt we'd have had more than that.  The real issue goes back to the conversation that @ryanlammi and I were having upthread:

  

On 2/27/2023 at 11:12 AM, Gramarye said:

My three should not be an above-median family size, and of the ten houses on my street, mine should not be the only one with children.  We can talk about revitalizing neighborhoods with arts and culture and greenery and street beautification all we want, but ignoring increased family size as an obvious determinant of both density and vitality is an enormous urbanist blind spot.

 

We don't need a few outlier families having 8+ children while more and more people have zero.  That direction probably honestly involves undereducated and overworked parents (especially mothers) in a neighborhood filled with neighbors who will never empathize with them (and some of which will probably constantly complain about the kids and actively make life worse for the parents--it's always a fun day when you get parenting advice from the childless).  And we don't need Musk- or Trump-types where the child count gets increased by driving up the marriage count along with it, either.  We need social, economic, and political foundations that re-normalize the life script of getting married, staying married, and having a low-single-digits number of children within the normal age range for having healthy pregnancies for the mother, and healthy children.  (And yes, I'm aware that there are segments of my political party that hold contradictory or counterproductive positions on this.  Don't jump to pointing that out as if it negates everything.)

 

I would very much like for there to be 15 kids on our street, but not all mine!

46 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

 

Musk having 10 children with 3 women is actually a TFR of 3.3, so not so different than the three-kids-in-their-30s couples mentioned elsewhere in the article.

 

 

Probably 11, if you count the son who died of SIDs.

 

5 (6) with his first wife, one likely with Amber Heard, two with Claire Boucher (Grimes), two with Neuralink exec Shivon Zilis.

 

There's nothing unusual about men having a lot of kids, it's women where the numbers have shifted, for obvious reasons.

 

I tried to avoid giving parenting "advice" when I had no kids and didn't expect to, but now that I do I'm not sure I succeeded LOL.

 

"Montana" as a girl's name has more to do with Hannah Montana than being western.   The name "Cheyenne" I have only heard as a female name, and most of the times I recall that it was shall we say a "professional" name.

Edited April 19, 20232 yr by E Rocc

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-tucker-carlson-fox-birth-control-abortion-1234717505/

 

Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk discussed this last night, citing, without evidence, the "population collapse."

 

Getting a lot of eugenics vibes from the few people publicly making a big deal out of this.

3 minutes ago, DarkandStormy said:

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-tucker-carlson-fox-birth-control-abortion-1234717505/

 

Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk discussed this last night, citing, without evidence, the "population collapse."

 

Getting a lot of eugenics vibes from the few people publicly making a big deal out of this.

Just more of the fascist playbook being adopted.  Smh.

the answer is so obviously increasing immigration. But people don't want to hear that. There are real overpopulation concerns in countries where birth rates are the highest. Not enough jobs to fulfill the population's needs. Then there are countries like ours, most of Europe, Japan, soon China, that have unfilled jobs (usually entry level and trades) that immigrants would happily take. But we artificially restrict immigration and only let in the highly skilled, educated immigrants, or we let in (not enough) migrant farmers for a limited time and then force them to leave and apply for a new visa.

11 minutes ago, ryanlammi said:

the answer is so obviously increasing immigration. But people don't want to hear that. There are real overpopulation concerns in countries where birth rates are the highest. Not enough jobs to fulfill the population's needs. Then there are countries like ours, most of Europe, Japan, soon China, that have unfilled jobs (usually entry level and trades) that immigrants would happily take. But we artificially restrict immigration and only let in the highly skilled, educated immigrants, or we let in (not enough) migrant farmers for a limited time and then force them to leave and apply for a new visa.

 

What I think you don't want to hear is that immigration is not the answer, which has already been said multiple times upthread, because population growth is slowing worldwide, and population decline is affecting an increasing number of countries (including the largest in absolute terms); we're hardly the worst.  I can accept increasing immigration as a stopgap, but it's not a long-term solution.  There simply aren't enough countries producing "extra" people anymore.

 

Even opening the borders as wide as the Wall Street Journal ever dreamed would not solve this.

11 minutes ago, Gramarye said:

 

What I think you don't want to hear is that immigration is not the answer, which has already been said multiple times upthread, because population growth is slowing worldwide, and population decline is affecting an increasing number of countries (including the largest in absolute terms); we're hardly the worst.  I can accept increasing immigration as a stopgap, but it's not a long-term solution.  There simply aren't enough countries producing "extra" people anymore.

 

Even opening the borders as wide as the Wall Street Journal ever dreamed would not solve this.

 

Upthread I argued for learning to live in a non-growth economy. We don't live in that economy, so I agree that increasing immigration to historical levels would be a stop-gap. But we aren't going to increase birth rates significantly regardless of our policy efforts.

 

We have lived in those no-growth times before, but never in the industrial era. Our economy will eventually adapt. But increasing immigration would help alleviate the issue for the short-medium term.

ETA: by "we have lived in those no-growth times" I meant "humanity", not "the USA"

4 hours ago, E Rocc said:

"Montana" as a girl's name has more to do with Hannah Montana than being western.   The name "Cheyenne" I have only heard as a female name, and most of the times I recall that it was shall we say a "professional" name.

 

Can't leave "Dakota" out of this conversation.  

 

 

4 hours ago, Gramarye said:

I would very much like for there to be 15 kids on our street, but not all mine!

 

 

I can see this issue becoming a bigger issue for Fox News, since they have plenty of viewers ages 60-80 who raised 3-5 kids.  It might not be the case for them, but they certainly know peers who have "fail to launch" kids who are 30 years old and playing video games 50 hours a week in a sad apartments, or brunch and girls-trip-to-Mexico! daughters who just keep taking photos of themselves.   

 

 

 

1 hour ago, Gramarye said:

 

What I think you don't want to hear is that immigration is not the answer, which has already been said multiple times upthread, because population growth is slowing worldwide, and population decline is affecting an increasing number of countries (including the largest in absolute terms); we're hardly the worst.  I can accept increasing immigration as a stopgap, but it's not a long-term solution.  There simply aren't enough countries producing "extra" people anymore.

 

Even opening the borders as wide as the Wall Street Journal ever dreamed would not solve this.

I read something somewhere a few months ago that stated over 80 million people, if they could, would move here immediately. We should have more and varied immigration-we are a nation of immigrants.  As long as we are not just a shell of our former self, This country will always have plenty of people willing to come here.

25 minutes ago, Toddguy said:

I read something somewhere a few months ago that stated over 80 million people, if they could, would move here immediately. We should have more and varied immigration-we are a nation of immigrants.  As long as we are not just a shell of our former self, This country will always have plenty of people willing to come here.

 

I'm surprised that that number isn't higher.  Let's make it 200 million for the sake of argument.  I'd think we could get 80 million from India alone.  Though I admit I have a rather high opinion of America so I may be overselling it in my mind.

 

If we wish into existence science fiction powers, teleporters to bring every single one of those people here and matter replicators and skyscraper-sized 3D printers to provide every single one of them a residence (preferably in a mixed-use midrise in a walkable urban neighborhood with quality transit and biking options), but change nothing else, it merely gets us closer to being what China is today: large in population but still circling the demographic drain.  Moreover, we just took 200 million people away from other countries that are likewise also likely facing similar problems, and while I'm comfortable calling myself an American nationalist, we ought to at least consider the consequences of solving our problems on the backs of everyone else.  We might well go ahead and do it anyway, but we should at least think for a moment first.

 

Heck, suppose we used our hypothetical sci-fi powers and simply annexed Canada.  Poof!  We just increased our population by almost 40 million.  But we actually make the demographic trend slightly worse adding their 1.40 TFR into ours.  Suppose we annexed Mexico on top of that--make USMCA into an empire instead of a trade bloc.  Poof again!  We just added another 125-130 million ... that are also below replacement TFR (1.90, so a little above ours but not much).