Plummeting Birthrates Watch Thread - The horrifying implications of living in a Children of Men situation.

[Audit]

And yeah you cited Mexico graduate school rates, but educational attainment for overall women in Latin America peaked/plateaued around 2010 and the birth only really cratered in the last 5-10 years. It maps more cleanly to cell phone/internet adoption than to women’s education.

It's part of shifting social dynamics away from real life interactions and toward the internet and algorithms. I'll avoid sperging too hard, but I personally consider online dating to be the anti-thesis to all healthy sex relations. It's clearly had an adverse effect on coupling rates and increased the disposability of relationships. Good luck trying to find a spouse nowadays without touching a dating app. It's an extremely hard task. People don't socialize with strangers at great frequency and when they do it's transactional hobbies with little possibility of interactions leading to friendships or relationships. Social groups are becoming very self-contained and segmented.

Likely its a mix of everything, women's rights, education, celebrated immaturity in culture and social media, etc all together in a perfect storm

Yep. There's no silver bullet to shoot. It's dozens of independent variables that exist to a greater or lesser extant across the world. The cause of birthrate collapse in the US isn't the same as in Afghanistan. Outliers within the same cultural and ethnic demographic are the most notable to study. E.g. the ultra low birthrates in Chile.

It's probably not so much school itself as it is the domino effect of getting into debt, starting a career and not wanting to risk not getting further in it by having outside responsibilities, work for a lot of fields tends to be in high cost of living areas so everything is expensive, falling into the trap of thinking men value similar things in a partner as a woman does so surely having a nice job will be a major factor in getting a man.......nobody who wants kids is going after post 30 project managers oh no.

It's been well demonstrated that urban areas are a population sink. This is one of the big factors crushing Latin America. There's also an interesting migration of men and women into different areas based on job preference. This is seen in Sweden where men go to work highly paid resource extraction jobs in rural areas while the women move to urban areas to seek niche college graduate work.

 

[Rootless Cosmopolitan]

Likely its a mix of everything, women's rights, education, celebrated immaturity in culture and social media, etc all together in a perfect storm

Yes. I agree with this. I am (of course) a fan of women’s rights and I don’t believe removing women’s rights would be an effective or even guaranteed way to boost fertility, since (as we have talked about absolutely to death) there are plenty of places with shitty human rights for women AND incredibly low fertility.

With education, I again don’t think preventing people from getting an education would be the solution. I know KFers seem to think that women in white collar jobs just sit around and eat bonbons all day while not having babies, but IME the women who are working actually productive jobs (engineers, doctors, accountants, etc) and doing them well are ALSO the ones having more children.

Part of the answer might be shifting resources away from the do-nothing jobs and the do-nothing degrees. Or allowing more flexibility in degree programs so that women can study while having children.

As for cultural problems, those are very difficult to fix. Religion? Media? I don’t know. Probably we will need a huge propaganda campaign or something here.

Other causes might include SSRIs/general over-medicated-ness. I know women who are scared to get pregnant because they’re on a bajillion drugs and are scared to get off the drugs because they’ve been on them since they were 12.

Obesity and general poor health also can’t help.

Most babies historically have been “oops babies”. We have abortion, true, but this isn’t the whole explanation for the decline of oops babies (see Chile). People just aren’t having sex and aren’t socializing as much.

It was perfectly normal* to accidentally knock a chick up on a drunk bender, marry her in a shotgun wedding, then live (more or less) happily ever after. This was even a-okay. Now, men are ultra paranoid about women “baby-trapping” them and, while I get it and probably would be paranoid about this as a dude, this is kind of unnatural and definitely suppressing our birth rates.

Maybe if it is such a nightmare to be “baby trapped” by her, idk, don’t fuck her? Spend more time fucking people you wouldn’t mind having babies with?

It’s all so odd.

(* for example, in my family there was a case of two young uns getting married after an extremely suspiciously short period of time and having a baby ~7 months later. Hmmmmm. But no one gave a shit because, truly, no one actually cared as long as you made it official before the baby was actually born. I believe most of the “decline in marriage” can actually be explained by the decline in shotgun weddings. Shotgun weddings were basically the norm)

 

[The Gay Oboma Creature]

With education, I again don’t think preventing people from getting an education would be the solution. I know KFers seem to think that women in white collar jobs just sit around and eat bonbons all day while not having babies, but IME the women who are working actually productive jobs (engineers, doctors, accountants, etc) and doing them well are ALSO the ones having more children.

I can see that. The rare autistic woman who sincerely loves calculating radar cross sections can get along well with men, respect the work they do, and understand the impossibility of asking for a guy who makes twice as much as she does when the guys in the $500k tax bracket have a completely separate dating pool.

In contrast, the rotund mystery meat VP of DEI who makes $300k doing little to no actual work is not going to respect the guy who makes $150k supervising a crew on an oil rig, because she assumes that life is as easy for him as it is for her. She's spent her entire career being told that she worked harder than him, in fact.

Maybe if it is such a nightmare to be “baby trapped” by her, idk, don’t fuck her? Spend more time fucking people you wouldn’t mind having babies with?

It’s all so odd.

You can't build a society around men being the gatekeepers of sex, it's not how they're wired. For men, sex is a fundamental physical/psychological need, something like hunger, thirst, or sleep. You end up with a lot of men who get scared away from dating at all, developing all manner of psychological issues as a result, and another swath of men who will break every social convention imaginable in the pursuit of sex. The first group, with no stake in society, does the bare minimum to cover Steam sales and cheap apartments, and the second group hits our matchmaking institutions like acetone, burning through the collective pool of social trust with unmatched determination. Life gets really fucked up really fast when you put men and women in roles that they are biologically unsuited for.

This is why contraception is such a headache for traditionalist-types. It used to be that women would avoid try to avoid sex with guys they didn't think would marry them and be good husbands, because the stakes were a lot higher. "Hoeflation" was tamped down because knowing what your league is was a survival skill for the female half of the dating market, and dating the same guy as a dozen other women in your city was a lot more than just fun-but-mildly-embarassing.

 

[N Space]

Humans will breed if conditions are acceptable.

Then why are all of the most prosperous countries in the world well below replacement level while African hellholes are still above? I really would agree with your arguments because they superficially make sense and it'd be awesome if they were true but the empirical evidence is not cooperating.

 

[Mister Fister]

Then why are all of the most prosperous countries in the world well below replacement level while African hellholes are still above? I really would agree with your arguments because they superficially make sense and it'd be awesome if they were true but the empirical evidence is not cooperating.

African hellholes have community. You have all your family and friends to nig it up with your niggas, you don't have as much of that grinding stress you would have in a wealthy nation.

 

[Audit]

African hellholes have community. You have all your family and friends to nig it up with your niggas, you don't have as much of that grinding stress you would have in a wealthy nation.

This and literally nothing to do but have sex. It's not like they're working hard to survive when everyone's satisfied being poor and every once in a while some NGO drops food and clothing on you like you're playing fortnite.

 

[Mister Fister]

This and literally nothing to do but have sex. It's not like they're working hard to survive when everyone's satisfied being poor and every once in a while some NGO drops food and clothing on you like you're playing fortnite.

You've never had to work hard to survive in Africa.

 

[Audit]

You've never had to work hard to survive in Africa.

Well, it is a pvp server. There's always the trouble that the neighboring warlord will show up with his army of child soldiers and decide to ransack your village. The tolls exacted in such raids are immeasurable, and often include tribute of whatever the last NGO left behind and, in some locales, perpetual slavery in the cobalt mines to make cell phones.

Fear not though, the warlord will take all of the women as his breeding harem and ensure that the NGO will not run out of charity opportunities.

 

[N Space]

African hellholes have community. You have all your family and friends to nig it up with your niggas, you don't have as much of that grinding stress you would have in a wealthy nation.

That's the irony, the more prosperous a country is, the less unified it tends to be.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

If you want a higher birthrate, and want people to have big families, then you should consider that firstborn children of families with a lot of children tend to become parentified. A lot of people who dislike children were firstborn children of big families who were parentified. If you don’t want any more childfree people who dislike children, then maybe you shouldn’t have such large families.

 

[The Gay Oboma Creature]

If you want a higher birthrate, and want people to have big families, then you should consider that firstborn children of families with a lot of children tend to become parentified. A lot of people who dislike children were firstborn children of big families who were parentified. If you don’t want any more childfree people who dislike children, then maybe you shouldn’t have such large families.

This is retarded reddit-slop that started getting pushed only a few years ago to the dumbest quartile of internet libs. No, giving minor responsibilities to older children is not the reason why birthrates are low, children were expected to mature far earlier in the past, and birthrates were much higher then. It is well-documented that people with more siblings have more children, in fact. This persists across birth order.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7113329/

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

This is retarded reddit-slop that started getting pushed only a few years ago to the dumbest quartile of internet libs. No, giving minor responsibilities to older children is not the reason why birthrates are low, children were expected to mature far earlier in the past, and birthrates were much higher then. It is well-documented that people with more siblings have more children, in fact. This persists across birth order.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7113329/

People had a lot of kids in the olden days because they knew that a lot of them would die young because of bad medicine. Also because they wanted more labor on the farm. They didn’t like or romanticize children as much as people like to think.

 

[The man The only man]

People had a lot of kids in the olden days because they knew that a lot of them would die young because of bad medicine. Also because they wanted more labor on the farm. They didn’t like or romanticize children as much as people like to think.

This has nothing to do with your initial argument and you are basically divulging basic dumb bitch information. Admit that you are wrong and then read the thread before posting (izzat lost).

 

[geckogoy]

They didn’t like or romanticize children as much as people like to think.

Tbh you should be stripped of your kiwi avatar because such a cute and friendly creature should not be associated with such gay and niggery opinions

 

[Fruttasecca]

People had a lot of kids in the olden days because they knew that a lot of them would die young because of bad medicine. Also because they wanted more labor on the farm. They didn’t like or romanticize children as much as people like to think.

If you wanted more labor on your farmland then you either hired a farmhand or bought a slave depending on where and when you were. This idea of having children as a workforce is fucking ridiculous, it takes more than a decade before they can do anything independently and useful. Likewise, children werent an "insurance" for old age, children travel or get alienated, there were other institutions for old fucks like corrodies.
People didnt plan for children, they just had them, it was just how life went, for better and for worse. And a considerable chunk of people also remained childless.

idk where you got this crap from that older siblings taking care of younger ones causes lower birthrates lmao, the elephant in the room are women on contraceptives. Outlaw that crap and birthrates will shoot up as well as women will calm the fuck down again because their hormones will normalize. Thats the only thing that matters here, everything else is just cope and nonsense.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

This has nothing to do with your initial argument and you are basically divulging basic dumb bitch information. Admit that you are wrong and then read the thread before posting (izzat lost).

Forcing people to have lots of children will be disastrous, like what happened in Romania during the Ceausescu regime. There were a lot of abandoned children because people were forced to have kids that they didn’t want. Case in point:

In the aftermath of this revolution, it quickly became apparent that Romania had a major child health crisis to resolve. This catastrophe had arisen because Ceausescu tried to emulate the philosophy of the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin to increase the population of the country and implemented policies to outlaw abortion and contraception. Ceausescu famously declared, “Anyone who avoids having children is a deserter who abandons the laws of national continuity.”

As the country sank deeper and deeper into financial calamity throughout the 1980s one of the consequences of this austerity was child abandonment. Increasing numbers of parents simply discarded their unwanted children and put them into state-run institutions. By the end of the Ceausescu era, it was estimated that more than 100,000 children were institutionalized in state-run orphanages. In the final years of the regime, the economy of Romania was broken and the children in the state-run orphanages suffered extreme hardship with deterioration of nutrition, warmth, and caring. The eventual staff shortages ensured that although the physical needs of the children may have been partially met, their emotional needs were not!

 

[teriyakiburns]

If you wanted more labor on your farmland then you either hired a farmhand or bought a slave depending on where and when you were. This idea of having children as a workforce is fucking ridiculous, it takes more than a decade before they can do anything independently and useful.

You're not taking into account that most farmers for most of history were subsistence farming and couldn't afford to hire hands, or were bound to the land and so had no say in it. They made children to ensure continuity and labour as they aged, and to inherit their land or their liege when they died.

The rest I mostly agree with.

 

[Audit]

You're not taking into account that most farmers for most of history were subsistence farming and couldn't afford to hire hands, or were bound to the land and so had no say in it. They made children to ensure continuity and labour as they aged, and to inherit their land or their liege when they died.

The rest I mostly agree with.

Kids were also quite liable to die before the age of 10. Spamming out 8 kids in the hope that 4 survive to adulthood wasn't even weird. Depending on where you lived, your eldest son and his eventual wife would take over the farm when you passed and tend to you in your old age. Any other kids you've got get married off or find a trade in their 20's. They're hardly a proper, longterm source of labor. It's literally just the eldest son, his wife, and any kids they've got.

The primogeniture system is a rather remarkable one that was quite effective at keeping wealth inside of a family while forcing 2nd+ sons to find adventurous ways of making a living. Honestly, it's a good system that served many European nations quite well. The alternative system we use today, per capita, is a shit system that sees wealth broken up into useless chunks that are quickly fritted away. Primogeniture answers the question "But who will take care of the elderly?" quite nicely with minimal complaints. The eldest son, or I suppose child in these times, will do it and receive the parents' assets as compensation. No mass importation of third worlders or nursing homes required.

But anyhow, enough of my fluffing about how maintaining family wealth over generations is what produced prosperity in nations like Sweden and the United Kingdom. Generational industry was a cornerstone of western Europe that provided continuity across generations.

 

[74164978231]

It wasn't just boomers. It was a full-spectrum cultural jihad. At the root of it was the belief that if you spent your 20s not having maximal fun with minimal commitments, you were ruining your life. You'd spend the rest of your life regretting the money you didn't make, the places you never visited, and the sex you didn't have due your stupid spouse and bratty children. Marriage and children are prison; jobs and birth control are freedom.

Cultural jihad is putting it nicely. Its a complete and total annihilation of men and women coming together.

Family courts are defacto kangaroo courts
The idea of settling down, day i saw get married in your early 20s is considered heresy
Social media means from a mans perspective you are in competition with the idea of the perfect man, not just your coworker or neighbor
Dating apps allow women to have men at their finger, the second a man displeases her for any reason she can have another tap dancing back flipping monkey
General cultural zietgiest telling women to be girlbosses and settle for nothing less than perfect and she can easily have kids into her late 30s

There is genuinely zero incentive for a woman to settle down and start a family in her 20s. In fact she will be looked down upon unless she basically wins the lottery and has kids with a ultra successful man.

All women who want kids should aim to have their first before 30. That way there's enough wiggle room to have at least one more healthy one.

If a woman is single at age 30 she should just write off having kids. The time it takes to find a man, date, get married, get into a spot to have a child is easily 4-6 years which congratulations, geriatric pregnancy.

It's part of shifting social dynamics away from real life interactions and toward the internet and algorithms. I'll avoid sperging too hard, but I personally consider online dating to be the anti-thesis to all healthy sex relations. It's clearly had an adverse effect on coupling rates and increased the disposability of relationships. Good luck trying to find a spouse nowadays without touching a dating app. It's an extremely hard task. People don't socialize with strangers at great frequency and when they do it's transactional hobbies with little possibility of interactions leading to friendships or relationships. Social groups are becoming very self-contained and segmented.

I dont think theres anything wrong with the concept, but with how companies like match basically turned it into a gatcha game fine tuning their algos to keep you engaged not finding a partner.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

Why do you think theyve been fighting so hard for ai and automation for years now? Read the Georgia Guidestones (back when they existed)

Was the person who did it ever caught? If so, they probably were working against themselves the whole time by hiding their plan when it was in plain sight for all to see. "The Georgia Guidestones are no more, but I beat the oligarchy, guys!"