http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion...babybust_x.htm
I wrote a long set of commentary to go with this, but this f***ing stupid piece of crap garbage moron useless board timed me out and threw away the post. So just pretend I said a lot of stuff about smart women breeding themselves out of existence because they don't start having kids until 30 or 35, and how the hell do we fix that?
When it says you aren't logged in, log in, hit back on the browser until you get to your post and then hit submit. It used to happen to me a lot, until I fell off my toilet, hit my head and discovered the secret of time travel. (I call it the flux capacitor)
This does assume that the children will necessarily inherit their parents' social/religious/political outlook, which is hardly a given. I don't think conservatism is genetic. Intelligence, maybe, but there are smart and dumb people on both sides of the fence.
Ah.
Thank you.
It's a society problem. Children aren't a source of wealth, but instead are a financial hardship in an industrialized nation that forbids child labor. This leads to people who mind the bottom line having disincentives to reproduce.Originally Posted by Rollory
The solution is both obvious and almost unworkable. A society that wishes to remove economic disincentive to reproduction must pay all costs for child rearing , or at least a large majority of them.
Ok, that was one objection I mentioned when I was originally writing it. Conservatism itself might not be genetic. Outlook and personality probably is strongly influenced by genes, however, and that ties into whether someone decides to be conservative or liberal.
People are like their parents, particularly when you start applying consistent selection pressures for several generations. We don't see it that clearly yet because conservatives and liberals have been freely intermarrying and reproducing at about equal rates in the past, so the genes are pretty mixed up. Once you start consistently getting people who behave and think in a liberal fashion to not have kids, or very few, the genes that help them "think liberal" will be far less widespread, and less likely to turn up in conservative families.
I think environment is far more important than genetics when it comes to shaping one's outlook. Which will probably result in the same net effect that you're worried about.
Assuming that conservative birth rates mean some ultimate victory for conservatism on demographic grounds is bottom-rung cargo cult science.
I'm not sure I agree on how important the attitudes of the parents are to the next generation. In Britain we've been through constant shifts in attitudes, the same as everywhere else. In the 18th century London was a haven of debauchery, with the kind of lewd, drug-addled free-for-all sex parties that would make a Hippy blush. The following century saw a return of puritanical Victorian values that saw the legendary Bowdler appear to remove every reference to bodily parts in works of literature, even if it was just a chair leg. He even Bowdlerised Shakespeare. I don't believe there was any difference in the curch attendence between these two generations.
I mean we are more conservative now than we were in the sixties and seventies, and yet they were born of a generation even more conservative than us.
Problem my ass. Urban areas & rich people have had low-birthrates, and more rural areas high birthrates, since like the 1600s.
*cough* Sweden.
How do you know?
In 1960's gay pride parades in major cities. Even in Orlando Florida they put up rainbow banners near 'gay day' at disney. Now assuming Disney world existed in 1960, I do not think Orlando would have gay day banners.
I do not think the whole gay-rights agenda was even in the public eye back then. You certainly would never have had church leaders defying church higherachies in support fo gay rights or openly gay politicians in office.
I would say socioty is more liberal as a whole then it was in the 60's and 70s. Of course there are spikes in either direction such as a liberal spike near woodstock and a conserative spike after 9/11. But overall I think everyone, including the conservatives, are more liberal today then yesterday.
Imagine in 1960 the attitude towards interacail marrages. Today, except for what is proabbly considered right-wing whackos, interracial marrages are a non-issue. Maybe in the year 2040, same-sex marrages will a complete non-issue for even the conservitives and they would think you are a whacko for having a problem with it.
Hell even the Pope admitted that there *might* be something to this evalution thing after all.
Well, I was talking about Britain, not America, but it wouldn't even change my point if I was: societal attitudes have fluctuated throughout history regardless of the birthrate.
Yeah, that's the problem I was referring to. Or perhaps you don't consider it a problem, but I certainly do. Allow me to rephrase. That's the issue I was referring to.
And I'm not sure what your swedish cough was trying to convey.
Last edited by Nick Walter; 03-14-2006 at 12:01 PM.
One of the central assumptions for the original argument is simply that political affiliation tends to be similar between generations -- it's not necessary to get into whether genetics or environment drive the similarity. There is evidence for this: children have a tendency to adopt the political identification of their parents when they become adults (download the paper here for an example).
The author may be onto something, but there are a lot of potential confounding variables. For example:
* Conservative couples may not differ in family size than liberal ones. The author uses indirect data (i.e., beliefs about ideal family size) in his essay, and a quick Google didn't come up with any evidence for or against actual differences in number of children by political affiliation of parents.
* The greater number of children born in Republican households may not result in a greater number of Republican voters. Relative to liberal housholds, children from conservative families may be more likely to die before adulthood (doubtful) or be less likely to vote (maybe).
* While there's a trend for kids to be the same political ideology as their parents, obviously many children switch. It may be that conservative adolescents are more likely to change political beliefs than liberal adolescents. If this is true, percentages of adult liberals and conservatives may remain stable, but there will be more Democratic adults who were raised conservative than vice versa.
The last point to remember is that these shifts will occur fairly slowly. In one hundred years, there will still be conservatives and progressives, but who knows what ideologies from early 21st century Republicans and Democrats will still be around? Maybe progressives will believe "all babies, all the time" and the conservatives will be stockpiling resources for smaller numbers of children.
Clearly demographics caused the defeat of the Federalists, and the subsequent destruction of the core US values.
Nick, Sweden basically has very very cheap child care for everyone.
And it hasnt helped our birthrate.
Well, it has, slightly. It's just that getting and rearing a child still has quite extreme consequences, if you do not consider getting a child is some sort of status quo.
Cheap child care hasn't really helped birthrates anywhere in Europe. Religious folks (notably immigrants from poor countries) have lots of kids. Non-religious folks don't. The end.
State-funded child care only turns a big burden (in terms of health risk, money & leisure time) into a smaller one, and it does so by decreasing the time the parents would otherwise spend with their child -- that is, by decreasing what is seen as the most positive aspect of child rearing. If your only argument for a product is "it's useless but cheap!" you shouldn't be surprised that you find few takers.
There aren't any alternatives, really. Religious folks have children because they consider them inherently valuable in a spiritual sense, and folks in poor countries have children because they start working at school age and support their parents in old age, and thus are economically valuable to them. Secular humanitarianism rejects both reasons to have children, and hasn't found any better reasons. So there you go.
What's the evidence it's had no effect on the birthrate? Here's a random OECD article talking like Sweden's birth rate increased during the time they were doing these changes.
Mind you, I don't think it's an issue; us secular humanist types will gladly corrupt the little religious bastards. Have for years.The early 1980s brought more economic expansion. The participation rate of women in the labour force was high; 86% of women aged 20 to 64 and 90% of men of the same age group were gainfully employed, one of the highest in the OECD area. Most men worked full-time, while a third of women had reduced working hours. Still, the birth rate increased to 2.1, while other European countries such as Italy, Germany and Hungary reported rates of 1.3 to 1.5 children per woman.
That article says that only the following measures had a positive effect on birthrate in Sweden:
So Swedish women only had more children when the state forced employers to pay them for staying with their children. That's not the same as child care! As I wrote above, one big positive aspect of having kids is spending time with them, which the Swedish model allowed for. However, that model proved economically unsustainable.The reasons behind Sweden’s high fertility level, despite its high female employment rate, were generous parental benefits and improved childcare conditions, allowing working women to have a third child. By 1989, combined maternity and paternity leave had been extended to 12 months at 90% of salary and three months with minimum pay. Moreover, either parent became entitled to up to 60 days paid leave a year to look after a sick child.
But a shift from economic boom to deep recession and high unemployment in the 1990s put an end to these reforms. Efforts to restore the economy to health led to cuts in almost every area of the welfare system, including parental benefits. The birth rate fell back to 1.5 children per woman at the end of the 1990s, the lowest ever recorded.
Other European countries have maternity leave and free or cheap child care, too. Didn't have any effect. German birthrates just fell to the lowest level ever, it's all over the news here.
That may work well for America but not for Europe where the little religious bastards live in segregated immigrant families who may not even speak the same language, at least not on a daily basis.
Chris, did Sweden go bankrupt or something? Can you elaborate on "economically unsustainable?"
What does it have to do with religion? Looks to me like it was related to economics.
And they'll be happier too.
That's in the quote from the article you linked to, right in my post! When the Swedish economy went into recession they couldn't sustain their extremely generous social policy anymore, and the birthrate promptly collapsed.
Erm, and then right after that they brought it back up, according to the article. Not sure how cutting social spending gets you out of a recession, anyway.
Note the sweden.se article was written in 2003, the OECD one in 2001.
Ok. The effect of genes on one's cultural outlook and behavior is not proven. There have been cultural swings between conservative and liberal extremes in the past. This is all true.
However: what is completely unprecedented today is that this is the FIRST time in the history of civilization that large numbers of women could simply choose - and in fact do so choose - to not have children.
In the past, all classes of women had kids, if they weren't packed off to a nunnery. You had very occasional exceptions, but having kids was just the norm. It was the default, regardless of culture or politics, and therefore all types of genes continued to get passed on to later generations so as to be able to influence them in whatever way they do. Today, that is no longer the case.
To blithely assume that this will have NO impact on the resulting genepool seems to me foolhardy in the extreme.
But I guess we'll see in about 30 years.
Do you have any evidence that the women choosing to not have children are somehow one defined group or class? Last I checked birth control was cheap and widely available to pretty much anyone in the U.S.
There is a definite disparity in reproductive rates between urban/wealthy and rural/poor groups but that has existed for hundreds of years. I've not seen anything that suggests that modern birth control has really changed things, but then I haven't researched it extensively either. Share your evidence and I'll give it a read through.
I'd also like to here more about your genetic uberwomen that are going to hurt the human race by not sharing their eggs with us.
Firstly this upper class you seem to be in love with mostly exists because of inherited wealth, connections and the education they get. Not some super smartness gene that will dissapear if they quit having babies.
Secondly just because some women decide they want career more than famlies does this mean that the men that have this (hypothetical) gene will quit breeding too? Lay your wisdom on me Rollory.
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