I have ten children. I don't know whether I'll have any grandchildren; my oldest daughter is engaged, at 31, and the rest have pets and their siblings for company.
On the one hand, seeing the old apex predators come back as humans attempt to self-extinct is an interesting plot twist, not entirely unexpected over the eons of life on earth. On the other hand, in the short term, the disappearance of whole nationalities is kind of sad.
Yeah, the most optimistic thing I have to say about the future WRT to this matter is that, having been born in 1979, I'll probably die of natural causes before things get REALLY awful. But the late 21st century and 22nd century are going to be an absolute nightmare. Or maybe aging will have been cured or slowed by then and I'll get to watch it all unfold after all?
By the way, I half suspect that today's climate panic will go the way of the old "population bomb" panic eventually, and it will disappear for the exact same reason.
Same here, I'd like to live forever if I can get away with it. Things are going to be very rough over the next 200 years though due to aging of societies and mass migration.
22nd century is when the massive Mormon and Amish ethno-nation states will manifest in what is now the USA thanks to their high birth rates, BTW, if you ask some demographers. There will be a Deseret state for Mormons that emerges centered on what is now Utah after 2100, according to them, kind of like how a France emerged for the French some centuries ago. Eric Kaufmann (who is awesome) has written on this a bit.
Edit to add that apparently Mormon rates are also dropping. No one is immune to this effect, it seems.
Mormons are having fewer kids too, mainly due to economic reasons.
The Amish occupy a niche that can only fit so many people. If they reproduce beyond that they will cease to be Amish (and probably their birthrates will fall as a result).
Rather pessimistic. That aside, when I look at the history of the family tree, you clearly see the shrinking family sizes. All four grandparents were born in the late teens to 1920, all four were one of four children. Each set of grandparents had two children. Out of the four children of that generation, there are only two further grandchildren. A clear shrinking across the generations.
A key factor to declining birthrates is surely the high cost of raising children. As expectations have gone up for a materially comfortable world, so has the cost of raising children. It is staggeringly expensive. Somehow past generations were able to have 3, 4, 5+ children while still holding on to some sense of middle class comfort. *Why* is it so expensive to have children in the western / developed world? That is the question to answer. While it's true that the rise of the female workforce has also had its impact and declining interest in having additional children, many mothers (and fathers these days) still work because the income is needed so they further restrict the number of kids to make it easier to work too, and many would be glad to have another child or two if they felt they could afford it.
My husband and I were just talking about housing this morning. There is a lot of building in our area. Most of the houses going up are bigger than the one we live in. (At our peak, we had 11 permanent residents: Daughter A moved out before Daughter D was born. Now there are 7-1/2, because Daughter C comes over on weekends to cadge meals and do her laundry. Son B may turn back up if his rental house is sold out from under him.)
The rent for a 1-BR/1-BA apartment in my dream location - near my church, the library, and a bar - is more than double our mortgage payment. I don't know where all these people are coming from or how they are paying these prices. We get solicitations from Realtors wanting to sell our house every day, but where would we live, in the van?
Sure enough, Son B says we can expect him on April 1, and no fooling. I told him to bring his bed and sell his desk. At least he doesn't have kids or a pet.
We now substitute paid labor and purchased technology for childcare that used to be accomplished through unpaid domestic work by wives and grandparents. Modern communications and transport technologies have killed the ability of small- and mid-size towns to hold any portion of the striving middle-class's interest or remain economically viable as engines of production. The specialized training necessary to access the high-paying jobs of the middle class takes longer and longer, and as a result people are not financially on their own two feet and ready to start a family sometimes well into their thirties. Within the megacities that the middle class now drains into, wealth is the only socially- and even sometimes legally-acceptable criterion by which segments of society may admit to segregating themselves away from disproportionately disruptive elements of the urban underclass, so the cost of housing in the areas judged "good" enough for a middle class or higher upbringing is extremely high. Technological progress has also multiplied the gidgets, gazmos, and other material items which are necessary to keep up appearances.
Most of these are the unexpected consequences of things whose flipside we would call progress - liberation of women, non-discrimination law, mental health and criminal justice reform, globalized supply chains, the internet - but we can't ignore the ways in which they all have served to remove social institutions which had been key to family formation and life, and replace them with an assumption that the increased economic prosperity generated would more than counterbalance. But we forgot to make sure that it actually was doing that...
My dear Irish Granny lived to 102. Bright as a button till the end, if occasionally doolally, though she would cheerfully admit to have being that way most of her life.
Her daughter, had four children. They went on to have ten children between them. All of whom have born at least two sprogs. That family is growing and growing - I posited that maybe in 30 or so years, the country would be half Muslims and half the Whatever family. Glad some are still popping out babbers. My ex and I had four, and now3 four grandkids. Many will not know grandchildren - one of the great delights of life; e.g. you can feed them on Chocolate Brownies for a meal, and send them home to wreak havoc there from their sugar overdose ;-)
I have somewhere a photo of said Granny's 100th party, with all the family, About 30 altogether with wives and partners; better that very same day one of my cousin's had a baby, named after her great grandmother, Clemency.
Paul Ehrlich is a representative example of so many of today's "progressive thinkers". Spectacular as to the magnitude of their wrongness and the harm done by their followings.
May be truer than you think. Birth rates are falling massively all over the world. It's apparently a Standard Deviation of 10 from the norm, something which should only happen every man many years...
Drop has occurred everywhere nine months after the Covid vaccine rollout began.
There'll be famines anyway because of the wheat, fertilizer, and gasoline disruptions caused by the Ukraine war, and shipping bottlenecks caused by China's covid lockdowns.
One of the many things I love about your writing is your clear approbation of P.D. James, in my mind one of our late-20th/early-21st C British Greats. The savagery of her inter-character dialogue is breath-taking (look up the passage where a sister berates her psychologist brother's profession's inutility in, I think, The Murder Room); her obsession with brothers-and-sisters alarming (for only children like me); her dispassionate gaze at, and description of, the pointlessness of existence and the miracle of that pointlessness' alleviation by the fact of love (there is a passage at the end of, I think, The Private Patient which is shocking) is unflinching... and then, of course, there is The Children of Men.
"Dystopian" doesn't do that completely unexpected novel (Baroness James? Writing 'science fiction'?!) justice. The film was also great - I think you wrote about it recently - but the novel is gulp-inducing in its horror. Someone (again, it might be you, apologies!) wrote recently about the fetishisation of puppies among young British couples who one might otherwise expect to be engaged in reproduction. I don't mean the classic "Here is a family and here is its dog, whom they all love very much", but the narcissistic displacement smothering of a creature by young couples desperate for the satisfaction of child-rearing but unwilling/unable to commit to that. I know two young couples who are like that; I suspect many of us do.
And whenever I see them I remember a passage in The Children of Men in which P.D. James foresaw exactly that state. The protagonist comes across a woman pushing a pram; she's eager to show its contents. I won't describe any more in case anyone hasn't read it, but James's simple description of something almost completely ordinary left me wanting to retch at its horror.
(Apologies if I've misplaced any of those memories of her books. I'm in Philadelphia for work, and dealing with jetlag by re-reading Innocent Blood, another of her not-quite-Dalgleish works, about an adopted girl and her "relationship" with her mother, that is definitely worth reading by anyone who likes Children of Men.)
‘Putin’s crimes’ suggests that you’re not seeing the wider picture—the war on Christianity—and that this phase of the war is being conducted by the anti-Christian West against Christian Russia using the people of Ukraine as cannon fodder.
The defeat of Western Christianity dates from the time governments began importing Islam, one of Christianity’s worst enemies, with Church leaders of all denominations chipping in to praise the very diversity which will eventually do away with Christianity. Church leaders doing the work of the Antichrist, just think of it.
Russian Orthodoxy is proving a tougher nut to crack, having already survived the genocide of tens of millions of Christians between 1917 and 1937.
Even though I am now a lapsed Christian, I retain a strong sympathy for the faith. As such I cannot but support Russia and wish her well. In the struggle between Christ and Antichrist, the West has taken the side of the Antichrist.
I have ten children. I don't know whether I'll have any grandchildren; my oldest daughter is engaged, at 31, and the rest have pets and their siblings for company.
On the one hand, seeing the old apex predators come back as humans attempt to self-extinct is an interesting plot twist, not entirely unexpected over the eons of life on earth. On the other hand, in the short term, the disappearance of whole nationalities is kind of sad.
Wow! ten, that is very impressive. I'm sure you'll have lots of grandchildren, don't worry!
I'm fortunate to have very good health.
Yeah, the most optimistic thing I have to say about the future WRT to this matter is that, having been born in 1979, I'll probably die of natural causes before things get REALLY awful. But the late 21st century and 22nd century are going to be an absolute nightmare. Or maybe aging will have been cured or slowed by then and I'll get to watch it all unfold after all?
By the way, I half suspect that today's climate panic will go the way of the old "population bomb" panic eventually, and it will disappear for the exact same reason.
I'm hoping Peter Thiel will cure ageing and Im still here then TBH
Same here, I'd like to live forever if I can get away with it. Things are going to be very rough over the next 200 years though due to aging of societies and mass migration.
22nd century is when the massive Mormon and Amish ethno-nation states will manifest in what is now the USA thanks to their high birth rates, BTW, if you ask some demographers. There will be a Deseret state for Mormons that emerges centered on what is now Utah after 2100, according to them, kind of like how a France emerged for the French some centuries ago. Eric Kaufmann (who is awesome) has written on this a bit.
Edit to add that apparently Mormon rates are also dropping. No one is immune to this effect, it seems.
Mormons are having fewer kids too, mainly due to economic reasons.
The Amish occupy a niche that can only fit so many people. If they reproduce beyond that they will cease to be Amish (and probably their birthrates will fall as a result).
Rather pessimistic. That aside, when I look at the history of the family tree, you clearly see the shrinking family sizes. All four grandparents were born in the late teens to 1920, all four were one of four children. Each set of grandparents had two children. Out of the four children of that generation, there are only two further grandchildren. A clear shrinking across the generations.
A key factor to declining birthrates is surely the high cost of raising children. As expectations have gone up for a materially comfortable world, so has the cost of raising children. It is staggeringly expensive. Somehow past generations were able to have 3, 4, 5+ children while still holding on to some sense of middle class comfort. *Why* is it so expensive to have children in the western / developed world? That is the question to answer. While it's true that the rise of the female workforce has also had its impact and declining interest in having additional children, many mothers (and fathers these days) still work because the income is needed so they further restrict the number of kids to make it easier to work too, and many would be glad to have another child or two if they felt they could afford it.
my grandmother was one of seven. And she has 3 great-grandchildren
I guess the price issue comes down to expectations. it's expensive because it's expensive for the parents around you. But housing is the biggest issue
My husband and I were just talking about housing this morning. There is a lot of building in our area. Most of the houses going up are bigger than the one we live in. (At our peak, we had 11 permanent residents: Daughter A moved out before Daughter D was born. Now there are 7-1/2, because Daughter C comes over on weekends to cadge meals and do her laundry. Son B may turn back up if his rental house is sold out from under him.)
The rent for a 1-BR/1-BA apartment in my dream location - near my church, the library, and a bar - is more than double our mortgage payment. I don't know where all these people are coming from or how they are paying these prices. We get solicitations from Realtors wanting to sell our house every day, but where would we live, in the van?
Sure enough, Son B says we can expect him on April 1, and no fooling. I told him to bring his bed and sell his desk. At least he doesn't have kids or a pet.
We now substitute paid labor and purchased technology for childcare that used to be accomplished through unpaid domestic work by wives and grandparents. Modern communications and transport technologies have killed the ability of small- and mid-size towns to hold any portion of the striving middle-class's interest or remain economically viable as engines of production. The specialized training necessary to access the high-paying jobs of the middle class takes longer and longer, and as a result people are not financially on their own two feet and ready to start a family sometimes well into their thirties. Within the megacities that the middle class now drains into, wealth is the only socially- and even sometimes legally-acceptable criterion by which segments of society may admit to segregating themselves away from disproportionately disruptive elements of the urban underclass, so the cost of housing in the areas judged "good" enough for a middle class or higher upbringing is extremely high. Technological progress has also multiplied the gidgets, gazmos, and other material items which are necessary to keep up appearances.
Most of these are the unexpected consequences of things whose flipside we would call progress - liberation of women, non-discrimination law, mental health and criminal justice reform, globalized supply chains, the internet - but we can't ignore the ways in which they all have served to remove social institutions which had been key to family formation and life, and replace them with an assumption that the increased economic prosperity generated would more than counterbalance. But we forgot to make sure that it actually was doing that...
My dear Irish Granny lived to 102. Bright as a button till the end, if occasionally doolally, though she would cheerfully admit to have being that way most of her life.
Her daughter, had four children. They went on to have ten children between them. All of whom have born at least two sprogs. That family is growing and growing - I posited that maybe in 30 or so years, the country would be half Muslims and half the Whatever family. Glad some are still popping out babbers. My ex and I had four, and now3 four grandkids. Many will not know grandchildren - one of the great delights of life; e.g. you can feed them on Chocolate Brownies for a meal, and send them home to wreak havoc there from their sugar overdose ;-)
I have somewhere a photo of said Granny's 100th party, with all the family, About 30 altogether with wives and partners; better that very same day one of my cousin's had a baby, named after her great grandmother, Clemency.
More babies please!
Paul Ehrlich is a representative example of so many of today's "progressive thinkers". Spectacular as to the magnitude of their wrongness and the harm done by their followings.
May be truer than you think. Birth rates are falling massively all over the world. It's apparently a Standard Deviation of 10 from the norm, something which should only happen every man many years...
Drop has occurred everywhere nine months after the Covid vaccine rollout began.
https://dailysceptic.org/2022/06/29/whats-behind-the-worldwide-drop-in-birth-rates-nine-months-after-the-vaccination-rollouts-to-younger-people/
There'll be famines anyway because of the wheat, fertilizer, and gasoline disruptions caused by the Ukraine war, and shipping bottlenecks caused by China's covid lockdowns.
One of the many things I love about your writing is your clear approbation of P.D. James, in my mind one of our late-20th/early-21st C British Greats. The savagery of her inter-character dialogue is breath-taking (look up the passage where a sister berates her psychologist brother's profession's inutility in, I think, The Murder Room); her obsession with brothers-and-sisters alarming (for only children like me); her dispassionate gaze at, and description of, the pointlessness of existence and the miracle of that pointlessness' alleviation by the fact of love (there is a passage at the end of, I think, The Private Patient which is shocking) is unflinching... and then, of course, there is The Children of Men.
"Dystopian" doesn't do that completely unexpected novel (Baroness James? Writing 'science fiction'?!) justice. The film was also great - I think you wrote about it recently - but the novel is gulp-inducing in its horror. Someone (again, it might be you, apologies!) wrote recently about the fetishisation of puppies among young British couples who one might otherwise expect to be engaged in reproduction. I don't mean the classic "Here is a family and here is its dog, whom they all love very much", but the narcissistic displacement smothering of a creature by young couples desperate for the satisfaction of child-rearing but unwilling/unable to commit to that. I know two young couples who are like that; I suspect many of us do.
And whenever I see them I remember a passage in The Children of Men in which P.D. James foresaw exactly that state. The protagonist comes across a woman pushing a pram; she's eager to show its contents. I won't describe any more in case anyone hasn't read it, but James's simple description of something almost completely ordinary left me wanting to retch at its horror.
(Apologies if I've misplaced any of those memories of her books. I'm in Philadelphia for work, and dealing with jetlag by re-reading Innocent Blood, another of her not-quite-Dalgleish works, about an adopted girl and her "relationship" with her mother, that is definitely worth reading by anyone who likes Children of Men.)
‘Putin’s crimes’ suggests that you’re not seeing the wider picture—the war on Christianity—and that this phase of the war is being conducted by the anti-Christian West against Christian Russia using the people of Ukraine as cannon fodder.
The defeat of Western Christianity dates from the time governments began importing Islam, one of Christianity’s worst enemies, with Church leaders of all denominations chipping in to praise the very diversity which will eventually do away with Christianity. Church leaders doing the work of the Antichrist, just think of it.
Russian Orthodoxy is proving a tougher nut to crack, having already survived the genocide of tens of millions of Christians between 1917 and 1937.
Even though I am now a lapsed Christian, I retain a strong sympathy for the faith. As such I cannot but support Russia and wish her well. In the struggle between Christ and Antichrist, the West has taken the side of the Antichrist.