I wouldn’t even put it on poverty, because large population booms have happened under impoverished conditions elsewhere without issue.
But there’s a huge social taboo against pregnancy at virtually any age. Children are treated like luxuries. They’re enormously expensive to have and to raise, and everything about childhood is commodified to shit. Add to that how people are all terrified of one another. Men are told to put their prospective spouses on a pedestal, so they’ve all got to be supermodels with PhDs and rich parents. Women are inundated with the grossest men imaginable in dating markets that reward you for being an annoying creep. Everyone is told to hate one another constantly by a media apparatus that profits off your alienation.
We also seem to absolutely hate kids, in this modern moment. They’re constantly presented as violent, parasitic, gross, vulgar monsters.
So much of this is just mass media bombarding us with bad advice and bigoted worldviews. How is anyone supposed to procreate under these conditions?
I wonder what the correlation is to those previous booms vs now when medical bills for child delivery(like all medical bills) are higher than ever? I’ve done no research but I’m pretty sure it’s more expensive than ever just creating a kid. (USA based observation)
It’s honestly not a question of objective or absolute material wealth, it’s subjective and relational. Like marx himself pointed out that social reproduction is based on a basket of goods that is culturally conditioned. It’s why young white people today can objectively have a better material standard if living than their ancestors 100 years ago and still feel poorer, because effectively they are. If your cultural context says you need 10 wealth to reproduce successfully and safely but you only have 8, it doesn’t matter that your grandparents had 7 social wealth with 6 kids because for them successfully reproduction only required 4.
Additionally the perceived rate of change in that wealth is if critical importance. If you have 10 wealth and that is what society has conditioned you to believe is required for reproduction, but you believe that in 10 years you will have 9 and it will still require 10 you will avoid reproduction.
There is this bizarre belief that humans just reproduce willy nilly and always have. That our ancestors were just morons who didn’t know where babies comfrom. When the truth is they knew, and especially women, had elaborate methods of controling their reproduction. The difference between us and our ancestors us the effectiveness of our tools for controlling reproduction, not that we didn’t understand it and try to control it.
I wouldn’t even put it on poverty, because large population booms have happened under impoverished conditions elsewhere without issue.
But there’s a huge social taboo against pregnancy at virtually any age. Children are treated like luxuries. They’re enormously expensive to have and to raise, and everything about childhood is commodified to shit. Add to that how people are all terrified of one another. Men are told to put their prospective spouses on a pedestal, so they’ve all got to be supermodels with PhDs and rich parents. Women are inundated with the grossest men imaginable in dating markets that reward you for being an annoying creep. Everyone is told to hate one another constantly by a media apparatus that profits off your alienation.
We also seem to absolutely hate kids, in this modern moment. They’re constantly presented as violent, parasitic, gross, vulgar monsters.
So much of this is just mass media bombarding us with bad advice and bigoted worldviews. How is anyone supposed to procreate under these conditions?
I wonder what the correlation is to those previous booms vs now when medical bills for child delivery(like all medical bills) are higher than ever? I’ve done no research but I’m pretty sure it’s more expensive than ever just creating a kid. (USA based observation)
If you want ANY hopium for the US.
Gavin Newsom in California has been making attempts to get the ball rolling on a statewide universal healthcare system, which is almost identical to how Canada got universal healthcare. Tommy Douglass got it in Saskatchewan and it started to catch on for the rest of the state.
Whole Washington is doing some good work.
Oregon too
The path to victory is in the west coast, lads.
It’s honestly not a question of objective or absolute material wealth, it’s subjective and relational. Like marx himself pointed out that social reproduction is based on a basket of goods that is culturally conditioned. It’s why young white people today can objectively have a better material standard if living than their ancestors 100 years ago and still feel poorer, because effectively they are. If your cultural context says you need 10 wealth to reproduce successfully and safely but you only have 8, it doesn’t matter that your grandparents had 7 social wealth with 6 kids because for them successfully reproduction only required 4.
Additionally the perceived rate of change in that wealth is if critical importance. If you have 10 wealth and that is what society has conditioned you to believe is required for reproduction, but you believe that in 10 years you will have 9 and it will still require 10 you will avoid reproduction.
There is this bizarre belief that humans just reproduce willy nilly and always have. That our ancestors were just morons who didn’t know where babies comfrom. When the truth is they knew, and especially women, had elaborate methods of controling their reproduction. The difference between us and our ancestors us the effectiveness of our tools for controlling reproduction, not that we didn’t understand it and try to control it.