WTF
Edit: I wasn’t sure what I was appalled by at first but now I realize it’s that this fucking medal just encourages women to be treated no better than a prized heifer.
WTF
Edit: I wasn’t sure what I was appalled by at first but now I realize it’s that this fucking medal just encourages women to be treated no better than a prized heifer.
Governments are always offering weird wacky incentives for women to have children, when the solution is usually patently obvious: you can increase fertility by making it easy and affordable to have children. Stipends for food, paid maternity/paternity leave, free childcare services, affordable housing, and a good economy with an abundance of high-paying jobs.
I mean… there’s a reason the baby boom happened in the 50s! But no, that would be socialism!!
These fuckers will do anything to invent a flying machine except the proven model that works because they knoooow it gotta be possible with large square blocks of quarried marble tied to huskies. Just need more dogs. Or maybe more marble. mush! Ok add some more marble see if that works.
I posit that if we add a spoiler with 20" rims and a high flow muffler, this block of marble will surely take flight.
Well somebody’s about to get added to a Signal chat
Honestly, we need to reform our economic system and not continually rely on fertility to solve all of our problems.
I’ll add that even those incentives probably won’t help, as fertility declines are strongly associated with education levels and money (and women’s liberation in particular). Give women options and unsurprisingly, some will choose not to have children.
I think you’re forgetting the marital rape, financial dependence on men, lack of choice, sexist culture and general helplessness and misery of women involved in creating the ‘baby boom’.
Were those new problems that didn’t exist before the 50s?
Of course they did. But medical advancements have reduced infant mortality and increased life expectancy.
I think you misunderstood my point. Even with all material comforts and financial stability, what makes the original commenter think women will voluntarily choose to have children? The huge surge in population was not only because of government subsidies, but brutal repression and lack of any real choice women had. It is not natural – it was artificially created by a system of violent repression of women.
If it was due to reduced infant mortality then why didn’t the same pattern happen from 1800 to 1880? Infant mortality dropped from about 1/3rd to 1/5th dying before their 5th birthday. Fertility rate being fairly consistent around 5 with a slight (10%) increase for a few years around 1815 before going back to around 5.
Then fertility rates nosedive from 1880 to 1935 with a temporary increase (boomers are the peak of this) before dropping down again and continuing to where we are today.
I get it, people have been treated badly throughout history and it even continues today. But that isn’t the reason the boomers exist.
Except your point doesn’t contradict mine at all. The post-war economy offered a lot of job opportunities as well as social safety nets, unlike the 19th century. This was a factor, but it wasn’t the only factor. Because it was also a period with bad contraception. Soon after contraception became more reliable, fertility rates declined. If financial stability was the only factor, why did fertility rates decline as soon as women had the choice? The population boom was also stronger among Catholics. What explains that other than a misogynistic culture?
The fertility rates in Germany persist in being low despite the country having a decent safety net. Might be because women never really liked having children. Perhaps, just perhaps, having rampant marital rape has something to do with the baby boom?
So you think marital rape significantly increased specifically in the parents of the boomers, and was lower both before and after?
I have no idea why you have trouble comprehending that. You also conveniently skipped over my point on contraception and modern Germany.
Germany has most of these and a low birth rate.
You still need 2 working parents, few people want to balance a career and children. We’re not designed for it. And their social help, while good for global standards, amounts to a fraction of the cost of having kids. In prehistory a whole village raised children and people barely worked. Social policies help but we need a global structural change.
Yes, the social support structure is essential. If you have extended family for example; that will help you out a lot with costs and care. Families are small, atomized and fractured today.
In the past, people had several children because most would die before adulthood. The 20th century population boom is because better sanitation and healthcare reduced child mortality but it takes at least one generation for women to adapt and have fewer children.
Not true and it misses the point. Infant mortality was never over 50% and women aren’t having significantly fewer children because of it. It’s become impossible to raise even 1 kid for many couples. There is no financial, marital, or familial support anymore. Now that women have a choice via birth control, they aren’t putting up with it.
I do not disagree with you on the reasons why women have fewer children. I think there is also a significant cultural shift in the number of children women were supposed to have. In pre-industrual Europe, women were expected to be quickly married and then have lots of children with their husband. Women today can enjoy long careers and fulfilling lives without marriage or a family while such options were not available to women of the past.
But that’d hurt billionaires.
Nooo not the billionaires!
Someone think of the poor billionaires!
There are also signs that there is an opportunity window that closes for large families.
As families sizes shrink, the children of those families go on to have a family size similar to what they grew up in. This is especially problematic for single child households.