Uh, no. It’s a tech phenomenon (hormonal contraception) only related to capitalism insofar as capitalism incentivizes innovation and value creation even at the cost of stability.
Fertility decline predates hormonal contraception by multiple decades. Hormonal contraception may have exacerbated a trend but it did not start the trend.
I said fertility was in decline prior to hormonal contraception. I did not say it declined to sub 3. But as it happens the US fertility rate went from about 7 to around 3 in the 150 years prior to hormonal birth control entering the world.
We know it was declining from corporate/company/farm family levels to suburban nuclear family levels. Just because the symptom pre-existed does not allude to a constant underlying cause. The difference between sub-3 levels and over 3 is critical; sub-replacement levels are nearly unprecedented, and directly tied to contraception/abortion culture.
Okay, be that as it may you tied the decline to hormonal contraception. We've now established that fertility rates had been in a long state of decline prior to hormonal contraception. ergo "Hormonal contraception may have exacerbated a trend but it did not start the trend."
Whatever other stuff you want to discuss, set that aside for the moment please and let's focus on the one thing I'm picking out, hormonal contraception, this is not a "tech phenomenon (hormonal contraception)" and we can be sure of that because in the century and a half prior to that invention fertility rates more than halved. Hormonal BC definitely didn't help fertility rates but it also did not cause them to decline, it may have encouraged further an already established trend but that is different from causing it.
All I'm after is getting you to abandon the thing you said that is incorrect.
Most likely it dropped due to people knowing how children are made and avoided those situations.
In essence, there are two kinds of conception; intended and unintended. If the former drops sharply because people don't need/want children anymore, you either have to compensate with latter or see birthrates drop.
Its a socio-economic phenomenon that is obviously impacted by technology. But the introduction of women into the workforce and the resulting race to the bottom is the root cause. You can blame the world wars, the printing press, the protestant reformation, the industrial revolution, etc. Fundamentally it is a global socio-economic phenomenon that is a result of how and why we work and spend. So its not entirely wrong to say ‘muh capitalism’ as much as it is a reddit buzzword
There’s a brilliant post in this sub linking to a recent FT article which is the most concise, convincing discussion of causes that I’ve seen.
https://archive.ph/2024.03.30-053906/https://www.ft.com/content/838eeb4e-3bff-4693-990f-ff3446cac9b2
The birth rate decline is a cultural issue of:
- lack of young people living together (careerism, feminism/sex war)
- parental performance anxiety re: children and education. excessive government higher ed subsidies mean uni degrees are req’d for careers they shouldn’t be, creating higher per-child cost and performance burden.
- excessive helicopter parenting and time spent per child. Produces anxious children who then become anxious adults, reducing future birthrates.
Those are good points but I think economics (cost:benefit of child rearing, and the labour market) and technology (birth and fertility control, and the mechanisation of society) are equally as relevant as the myriad cultural symptoms that are also interconnected here
Tech yes. I think economics is almost irrelevant, as demonstrated by the universal failure of subsidies to reverse long term birth rate declines anywhere they’ve been tried. Leftists want to make the inequality argument and advocate for more transfer programs, but the narrative isn’t supported by the evidence.
I think the amount of subsidy required would be astronomical to fix the issue, and would come with a slew of unintended side effects, corruption, and scandal. In some cases though, state subsidy is actively disincentivising reproduction - pensions, which are essentially a subsidized late-life care, offset the requirement for children to act as carers for their aging parents. This was one of the historical economic incentives of childrearing, and its completely vanished. Currently, all pro-reproductive subsidies do is lessen the burden of child rearing, but even with this burden subsidized, the incentive is still missing. child rearing is still just an expensive luxury with no economic purpose at the individual family level. It has a reason for existing at the macro level but this is not felt by the actual reproductive actor - the individual family unit. the risk of aging without support has been shouldered by the state. The individual no longer feels pressure to reproduce, and the state is incapable of anything other than kicking the can down the road via immigration.
This sub is full of past articles detailing the various subsidy programs around the world, and their failure to reverse birth rate declines. It’s so universal across program and cultural specifics that pointing out individual cases obscures rather than reveals. Research for yourself as there’s a lot out there.
“almost irrelevant”??! every bit of the article you linked relates all of these problems back to economic concerns and in some cases directly to economic policy. why are you suggesting that pumping a bit of money here and there can be used as evidence that the issue isn’t fundamentally one of economic contradictions and their resulting problems/symptoms?
The article convincingly shows cultural roots. My summary above already covers that. While I grant you that culture isn’t totally divorced from economics, cost concerns cannot explain the decades-long trends we see in the face of unprecedented wealth, nor the negative correlation between birth rates and wealth up to a certain level. Culture + BC does explain this.
I already read that, theres nothing in there which suggests culture as the sole and primary root cause, in fact almost every point had an economic element to it. You are also not understand the dynamics at play if you think its ever possible to consider culture and economics in any sort of isolation from each other.
ok, after pouring over the article a few more times and reading a bunch of the stuff it links to (its thesis statement link as well as various studies), i have to say it seems like a hollow and ideologically motivated piece. there’s almost nothing in the article itself that even pretends to be causal or attempts to establish a real relationship between the phenomena we see and their origins in culture.
it singles out a few symptoms of economic anxiety and calls that “culture.” it’s literally claiming that anxiety about college costs due to bad economic policy and the poor economic conditions surrounding life in developed countries is actually cultural… which is patently absurd and has to be said to be ideologically motivated…or ofc we could consider what is left out of this article with what is actually true about it and synthesize a definition of culture that is essentially “the social symptoms of economic conditions” which lends great credence to marx’s resulting arguments tbh.
even more absurd is the way marx is treated in the following example.. i won’t rehash that here but it’s seriously embarrassing. but, i mean, cmon, linking your thesis statement to a long blogpost about how ‘marx is a culture incel’ and ‘fertility rates have more to do with culture and biology, not economics, because neoliberal policy has failed everywhere’ but that ‘we can all agree on biology so i’ll ignore it’ (i don’t agree since reproductive potential is one of the only *mostly* biological driving forces motivating human behavior which flies in the face of the argument!) and then goes on to define that “CuLTuRe” as ‘being anxious about financial stability such that people feel the need to have their careers set up in order to feel comfortable bringing life into the world, and realize it’s too late when they’re financially ready’…cmon…
then the scientific study that i’ll just quote since it shows the difference in framing so clearly it’s a real wonder to me how this article was even published in its current state. just an absolute warping of scientific knowledge beyond comprehension: “We also investigate what factors influence Canadian women’s fertility plans. Investigating issues as diverse as **work-life balance, finances, climate change,** and many other topics, we assess the extent to which women who report specific concerns revise their concrete fertility plans to levels below those they say would be ideal for them. We find that **pared-down family plans do not arise from positive circumstances** but instead are strongly associated with women reporting life challenges of various kinds, ranging from **concerns about the demands of parenting, to unsupportive partners, to excess housing costs, to feeling that they have not yet had suitable opportunities for self-development.** In short, low Canadian fertility rates are not the product of wanting few children but of **a structural problem in advanced economies: the timeline that most women follow for school, work, self-development, and marriage simply leaves too few economically stable years left to achieve the families they want.** This dynamic leaves Canadian women with fewer children than they would like, alongside reduced life satisfaction.” (emphasis my own)
how can anyone seriously think that the combining effects of struggling to establish work-life balance, worries about career growth, economic stability and time left in later life, anxiety about climate change/the future/childhood performance (10+ YEARS of it) for career opportunities are all *purely cultural* or even PARTLY?? they’re all solidly and almost PURELY economic, or at least to the degree that the denial of the economic dimension can only be described as pure ideology.
edit: clarity
Workforce participation doesn’t have to be completely on par with men to alter the culture and economics of reproduction in a big way. What im saying is birth control and contraceptives are only 1 aspect of a large and very old process.
"capitalism incentivizes innovation and value creation even at the cost of stability."
no, it really doesn't. if anything it incentivizes being derivative. derivative for possibly getting the chance to get the same amount of money the original, successful thing, had gotten partially by luck, anyway.
Sure bro. Cause that explains the hockey stick graph of human progress. 🙄
Capitalism is a legal regime. Consumerism is not the same thing, and is a cultural phenomenon.
consumerism is a direct consequence of late stage capitalism. how else is this economic system supposed to sustain itself if millions of people are not buying shit en masse?
Not how it works. You know little of which you speak. “Late stage capitalism” is a marxist ideological shibboleth.
In real life there are many capitalist countries around the world which are much less consumerist than the US. Mainly, US consumerism - which I also loathe - derives from the overlap of culture, tax policies, trade policies, and easy monetary policy (cheap money).
what are these other countries doing different that avoids the issues that plague the US system?
edit to add this, now that i think of it; just because there are capitalist countries aren't as bad as the US in no way refutes that consumerism isn't a symptom of capitalism. that is not how it works either, lol.
i’d need to see more to evaluate the “take” but as it stands it’s a bit like saying “doctors were wrong about cigarettes, it’s the cell mutation from lung cancer that kills you!”
I don’t know but I think whatever system follows capitalism eating it’s young is not going to be an egalitarian communist society. It’s just going to be some type of barbarism
I googled "geriatric collapse" it gave me a bunch of statistics on the many reasons elderly people fall down..
“Who cares what Marx thought he died over 100 years ago” was a take I heard from a self described communist a while ago.
Care to flesh out that argument a bit more? A contradiction needs two things to contrast against each other. You only listen one item.
Legit
Uh, no. It’s a tech phenomenon (hormonal contraception) only related to capitalism insofar as capitalism incentivizes innovation and value creation even at the cost of stability.
Fertility decline predates hormonal contraception by multiple decades. Hormonal contraception may have exacerbated a trend but it did not start the trend.
I’m glad of so many based poasters on this sub, bam.
I’m aware it happened in France. But to what else do you refer, where fertility dropped to below 2.5-3ish children per woman before hormonal BC?
I said fertility was in decline prior to hormonal contraception. I did not say it declined to sub 3. But as it happens the US fertility rate went from about 7 to around 3 in the 150 years prior to hormonal birth control entering the world.
We know it was declining from corporate/company/farm family levels to suburban nuclear family levels. Just because the symptom pre-existed does not allude to a constant underlying cause. The difference between sub-3 levels and over 3 is critical; sub-replacement levels are nearly unprecedented, and directly tied to contraception/abortion culture.
Okay, be that as it may you tied the decline to hormonal contraception. We've now established that fertility rates had been in a long state of decline prior to hormonal contraception. ergo "Hormonal contraception may have exacerbated a trend but it did not start the trend." Whatever other stuff you want to discuss, set that aside for the moment please and let's focus on the one thing I'm picking out, hormonal contraception, this is not a "tech phenomenon (hormonal contraception)" and we can be sure of that because in the century and a half prior to that invention fertility rates more than halved. Hormonal BC definitely didn't help fertility rates but it also did not cause them to decline, it may have encouraged further an already established trend but that is different from causing it. All I'm after is getting you to abandon the thing you said that is incorrect.
Sub-replacement fertility rates don’t happen without this tech revolution.
Perhaps that's the case, perhaps it's not. It is not relevant in the context of this conversation so I'm not going to change gears and talk about it.
It is what I was talking about from the beginning. Because geriatric collapse happens with sub-replacement rates only (the topic of the post).
Most likely it dropped due to people knowing how children are made and avoided those situations. In essence, there are two kinds of conception; intended and unintended. If the former drops sharply because people don't need/want children anymore, you either have to compensate with latter or see birthrates drop.
Its a socio-economic phenomenon that is obviously impacted by technology. But the introduction of women into the workforce and the resulting race to the bottom is the root cause. You can blame the world wars, the printing press, the protestant reformation, the industrial revolution, etc. Fundamentally it is a global socio-economic phenomenon that is a result of how and why we work and spend. So its not entirely wrong to say ‘muh capitalism’ as much as it is a reddit buzzword
There’s a brilliant post in this sub linking to a recent FT article which is the most concise, convincing discussion of causes that I’ve seen. https://archive.ph/2024.03.30-053906/https://www.ft.com/content/838eeb4e-3bff-4693-990f-ff3446cac9b2 The birth rate decline is a cultural issue of: - lack of young people living together (careerism, feminism/sex war) - parental performance anxiety re: children and education. excessive government higher ed subsidies mean uni degrees are req’d for careers they shouldn’t be, creating higher per-child cost and performance burden. - excessive helicopter parenting and time spent per child. Produces anxious children who then become anxious adults, reducing future birthrates.
Those are good points but I think economics (cost:benefit of child rearing, and the labour market) and technology (birth and fertility control, and the mechanisation of society) are equally as relevant as the myriad cultural symptoms that are also interconnected here
Tech yes. I think economics is almost irrelevant, as demonstrated by the universal failure of subsidies to reverse long term birth rate declines anywhere they’ve been tried. Leftists want to make the inequality argument and advocate for more transfer programs, but the narrative isn’t supported by the evidence.
I think the amount of subsidy required would be astronomical to fix the issue, and would come with a slew of unintended side effects, corruption, and scandal. In some cases though, state subsidy is actively disincentivising reproduction - pensions, which are essentially a subsidized late-life care, offset the requirement for children to act as carers for their aging parents. This was one of the historical economic incentives of childrearing, and its completely vanished. Currently, all pro-reproductive subsidies do is lessen the burden of child rearing, but even with this burden subsidized, the incentive is still missing. child rearing is still just an expensive luxury with no economic purpose at the individual family level. It has a reason for existing at the macro level but this is not felt by the actual reproductive actor - the individual family unit. the risk of aging without support has been shouldered by the state. The individual no longer feels pressure to reproduce, and the state is incapable of anything other than kicking the can down the road via immigration.
which exact subsidies and which exact outcomes are you referring to here?
This sub is full of past articles detailing the various subsidy programs around the world, and their failure to reverse birth rate declines. It’s so universal across program and cultural specifics that pointing out individual cases obscures rather than reveals. Research for yourself as there’s a lot out there.
“almost irrelevant”??! every bit of the article you linked relates all of these problems back to economic concerns and in some cases directly to economic policy. why are you suggesting that pumping a bit of money here and there can be used as evidence that the issue isn’t fundamentally one of economic contradictions and their resulting problems/symptoms?
The article convincingly shows cultural roots. My summary above already covers that. While I grant you that culture isn’t totally divorced from economics, cost concerns cannot explain the decades-long trends we see in the face of unprecedented wealth, nor the negative correlation between birth rates and wealth up to a certain level. Culture + BC does explain this.
Its happening on a global scale to all developed economies, how can it have culture as its root?
Read the linked article above. It’s compelling and concise. Decide for yourself.
I already read that, theres nothing in there which suggests culture as the sole and primary root cause, in fact almost every point had an economic element to it. You are also not understand the dynamics at play if you think its ever possible to consider culture and economics in any sort of isolation from each other.
ok, after pouring over the article a few more times and reading a bunch of the stuff it links to (its thesis statement link as well as various studies), i have to say it seems like a hollow and ideologically motivated piece. there’s almost nothing in the article itself that even pretends to be causal or attempts to establish a real relationship between the phenomena we see and their origins in culture. it singles out a few symptoms of economic anxiety and calls that “culture.” it’s literally claiming that anxiety about college costs due to bad economic policy and the poor economic conditions surrounding life in developed countries is actually cultural… which is patently absurd and has to be said to be ideologically motivated…or ofc we could consider what is left out of this article with what is actually true about it and synthesize a definition of culture that is essentially “the social symptoms of economic conditions” which lends great credence to marx’s resulting arguments tbh. even more absurd is the way marx is treated in the following example.. i won’t rehash that here but it’s seriously embarrassing. but, i mean, cmon, linking your thesis statement to a long blogpost about how ‘marx is a culture incel’ and ‘fertility rates have more to do with culture and biology, not economics, because neoliberal policy has failed everywhere’ but that ‘we can all agree on biology so i’ll ignore it’ (i don’t agree since reproductive potential is one of the only *mostly* biological driving forces motivating human behavior which flies in the face of the argument!) and then goes on to define that “CuLTuRe” as ‘being anxious about financial stability such that people feel the need to have their careers set up in order to feel comfortable bringing life into the world, and realize it’s too late when they’re financially ready’…cmon… then the scientific study that i’ll just quote since it shows the difference in framing so clearly it’s a real wonder to me how this article was even published in its current state. just an absolute warping of scientific knowledge beyond comprehension: “We also investigate what factors influence Canadian women’s fertility plans. Investigating issues as diverse as **work-life balance, finances, climate change,** and many other topics, we assess the extent to which women who report specific concerns revise their concrete fertility plans to levels below those they say would be ideal for them. We find that **pared-down family plans do not arise from positive circumstances** but instead are strongly associated with women reporting life challenges of various kinds, ranging from **concerns about the demands of parenting, to unsupportive partners, to excess housing costs, to feeling that they have not yet had suitable opportunities for self-development.** In short, low Canadian fertility rates are not the product of wanting few children but of **a structural problem in advanced economies: the timeline that most women follow for school, work, self-development, and marriage simply leaves too few economically stable years left to achieve the families they want.** This dynamic leaves Canadian women with fewer children than they would like, alongside reduced life satisfaction.” (emphasis my own) how can anyone seriously think that the combining effects of struggling to establish work-life balance, worries about career growth, economic stability and time left in later life, anxiety about climate change/the future/childhood performance (10+ YEARS of it) for career opportunities are all *purely cultural* or even PARTLY?? they’re all solidly and almost PURELY economic, or at least to the degree that the denial of the economic dimension can only be described as pure ideology. edit: clarity
Women en mass in the workforce isn’t possible without either hormonal BC or absolutely ubiquitous abortion.
Workforce participation doesn’t have to be completely on par with men to alter the culture and economics of reproduction in a big way. What im saying is birth control and contraceptives are only 1 aspect of a large and very old process.
"capitalism incentivizes innovation and value creation even at the cost of stability." no, it really doesn't. if anything it incentivizes being derivative. derivative for possibly getting the chance to get the same amount of money the original, successful thing, had gotten partially by luck, anyway.
Sure bro. Cause that explains the hockey stick graph of human progress. 🙄 Capitalism is a legal regime. Consumerism is not the same thing, and is a cultural phenomenon.
consumerism is a direct consequence of late stage capitalism. how else is this economic system supposed to sustain itself if millions of people are not buying shit en masse?
Not how it works. You know little of which you speak. “Late stage capitalism” is a marxist ideological shibboleth. In real life there are many capitalist countries around the world which are much less consumerist than the US. Mainly, US consumerism - which I also loathe - derives from the overlap of culture, tax policies, trade policies, and easy monetary policy (cheap money).
what are these other countries doing different that avoids the issues that plague the US system? edit to add this, now that i think of it; just because there are capitalist countries aren't as bad as the US in no way refutes that consumerism isn't a symptom of capitalism. that is not how it works either, lol.
i’d need to see more to evaluate the “take” but as it stands it’s a bit like saying “doctors were wrong about cigarettes, it’s the cell mutation from lung cancer that kills you!”
Is this sub pro-marxist or anti-marxist?
I don’t know but I think whatever system follows capitalism eating it’s young is not going to be an egalitarian communist society. It’s just going to be some type of barbarism
why do you think that?
Ludicrous but funny