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.
Whole Washington is doing some good work.
The path to victory is in the west coast, lads.
great postIt’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.
Ngl I think it’s selfish and cruel to the child to have a child in the current world. Why the fuck would I have a kid as I’m facing down a planet that may not be inhabitable in 10-20 years, in a dying empire that limps closer to collapse every day. Where they’ll grow up in fear of getting shot or permanently disabled by covid just to go to school.
And that’s if I could afford to take care of kids in the first place, when I can barely afford to give myself a decent standard of living.
In order to convince me to have a child I’d need the following: Free child care, free healthcare, triple my current wage, a house in a walkable area because kids can’t drive and thus shouldn’t be in car dominated areas, gun control, a better education system, and Climate Stalin.
Climate Stalin
Strongly influential on Geoff & Wainwright’s Climate Mao, presumably.
I saw an interview with one of the authors once. Very informative.
The book is quite good too.
The appeal of Climate Mao to radical critics of capitalism continues to strike us. Since it is clear to them that the capitalist nation-state has proven an irremediable obstacle to climate action, let alone anything approaching climate justice, the appeal of Climate Mao is almost visceral.
Yeah the whole book goes pretty hard for anti-capitalism in general.
Feels like “Most people are poor as shit” is a pretty good indicator. No need to write a whole article about it.
And, unlike any other point in history I’m aware of, we have contraceptives so we can keep fucking without having babies.
outside of famine/war conditions, birth rates have historically been (much) higher among people (much) poorer than most americans. I think the difference is more that social support structures are weak, “standard of living” expectations are high, education is both expensive and necessary, and contraception/abortion are widely available and relatively destigmatized
People are poor but if you are poor and have kids there is a huge stigma attached to it if you were raised middle and upper middle class.
Yeah this is a huge part of it. Boomers were able to give their kids good lives. Millennial can’t even give their kids the same standard they have. People want to give their kids a better life than they had, but this is impossible without a house and a yard and extra money for game consoles and extracurricular and playmates and all the shit that was taken for granted in a 90s childhood.
Nail on the head. Would my hypothetical kids be fine without the treats I was given as a child? Probably.
Would it be exhausting to justify internally, explain to people, and face judgement from family? Definitely.
This is arguable as a lot if the “all people before capitalism were mud farmers” claptrap comes from the fact that the priests of capitalism always leave non market/capitalist goods out of their calculations. Like medieval pesants were wealthier than early modern farmhands because they had the commons.
hm the fed’s survey of consumer finances says the median household wealth in the us is $192,900 as of 2023 and that seems pretty high
That covers ~15 years of the average cost to raise a child. Huh, maybe this is the source of the child labor push.
Not sure what this has to do with my comment.
The birthrate is only about 15% lower than in 1975, and 90% of the US population is in a state of financial crisis as severe as the Depression. People should be celebrating that it isn’t cratering that hard.
“America is a third world country, and people don’t recognise it… and I think that that’s pretty god damn sad, that they don’t recognise their own country as a third world, third rate, third class slum.”
Huh, I wonder what happened in the early 1900s and then in the 70’s that might have caused that? And i wonder if a dead German guy might have written something about it…
Fewer people are pairing off as couples, too. Nobody has time for a social life when they’re juggling multiple jobs, there’s no Third Places, all the social media and dating apps suck, people are more alienated from one another than ever, and to top it off absolutely everything is getting ridiculously expensive. If people don’t have a person to fuck and a place to fuck and the energy to fuck they’re not gonna fuck, and that’s step one of having kids.
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The other factor here is that the main popular entertainment within the imperial core countries is television and videogames which are distinctly antisocial entertainment forms that do not offer opportunities for bonding. These aren’t non-existent elsewhere but they’re less dominant.
I have a better answer:
I have a theory that millennials are the first generation to realize how their own parents fucked them up. Before, children would look to their parents to learn what to do. Now they do the opposite.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.Phillip Larkin wrote this in 1971, so the sentiment isn’t quite new. The amount of despair in the air, and the “luxury” of being able to express it and you know… Disengage is newer though
I’m sure individual people had the idea for a long time but I don’t think it was ever a popular idea among an entire generation.
In part this might be because millennials are the most educated generation in history - that has consequences.
You might be right, the fact that your folks screwed you up is much more common nowadays, or at least more mature. I think it also has to do with the system being literally unable to keep it’s barest promises. Even when there was hardship before, people who did “everything right” to live comfortably and happily, and have nothing to show for it but misery and despair, haven’t been the majority in the history of capitalism I think.
I think its the systematic way they fucked up. Like the 50’s and 60’s had huge massive social problems, but the idea that like labor builds the world and we should have collective wealth and distribution was like in the space and social democracy was sort of a thing. There was some real communism that could have, if not for terrible luck and historical contingency, really built something better. And the boomers around the world were like “yeah but what if we keep most of the bigotry and we burn down social democracy for a condo in florida?”
Before, children would look to their parents to learn what to do.
Oh come on. There’s a stack of classic literature a mile high disputing this claim. If anything, the 70s/80s/90s was a renaissance in exploration of the ideas of Good Parenting. But like so much else in our neoliberal hellscape, the idea of a quality childhood was commodified on one end and problematized on the other. The 80s-era parents were constantly bombarded by paranoid “They’re sticking razor blades in your kids’ candy and stealing children off the streets for satanic rituals!” headlines. They were solid a thousand different panaceas for Genius Children. They were told to hate their own parents, to hate where the parents lived, to hate teachers, to hate “bad influence” of other kids…
Like, on the one hand, its cool that we got a bunch of focus on nutrition and discouraged people from straight up beating your kids to win obedience. But on the other, holy fuck was the discourse toxic.
This generation is just getting a repeat of the shit fed to the last generation. The “don’t trust anyone over 30” line is being recycled by the Millennial media hustlers and to the same effect. If you aren’t learning anything from your parents this time around, you’re falling into the same trap laid by the Boomer era media hacks.
It’s true I am afraid that I would fail to provide my children with an acceptable standard of living on a dying planet thanks mom and dad.
I’m coming to the realization that I would have kids if I could give them a good life. But I can’t, and my household is like, actually upper middle class. It is obscene that with how much money we make we can’t even use that money to have a kid and give them a good life.
It’s because they killed the middle class. We can’t afford children. The single most effective way I can kill the ruling class is to not give them a future worker to consume. Get fucked billionaires!!
The single most effective way any of us can kill the ruling class is
also adoption is cool
I think that my SO and I would make fantastic parents and we almost certainly have the support system and financial means to have kids. My hang up is, what do you tell your kids in 20 years when living conditions are much worse than they are now and they realize that you must have known the trajectory society was on when you made the decision to have them? How do you explain your choice to bring a new human into a world full of increasing suffering and injustice?
There’s always adoption - all the benefits of being a parent and you can easily deflect the blame when they ask you why their spark of consciousness was conjured into this empty and entropic universe.
Child: Dad, I’m going through a really hard time. I don’t have any hope for the future, and I see society falling apart around me. How could anyone create me knowing that this is what life is like?
Dad: I guess this is a good time to tell you that you’re adopted
Have you asked your parents the same question? If you haven’t, I don’t see why your future children would question your choices
Having one child is so expensive. I often look at families having 2+ and always wonder WTF they do to make it work. The answer is always more money and parents/extended family that they can rely on.
For now I just have to hope I don’t have many expensive things happen until my kid can enroll in Kindergarten.
Anyoje I know that isn’t visibly struggling and working themselves to death to just keep a rental makes close to 6 figures.
I told my extended family that they’d get a grandkid if Bernie won in 2016 or 2020. They made their choice, so did I.
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They know, they’re just choosing to be coy. Someone’s gotta maintain the transparent veneer of normalcy and decorum in this hellhole.
these articles are for people who are already out of touch and to help them feel good about it.
Okay I’ve had a think on it and my serious answer is this: We can argue that the world has always been full of exploitation and suffering and pain and that there have been dark times when it seemed like the eschaton was truly at hand (there were people who saw the black plague and still had kids). There’s two explanations for why:
- People still wanted to fuck despite birth control being unreliable or unavailable.
- Kids were an economic necessity - you needed the extra hands to make a farm productive, and the social expectation was that your kids would take care of you when you were old. It was a standard part of the retirement plan.
Re: 1: Now we have free porn and consequence free sex
Re: 2: Now we have 401k’s and - pfft, who am I kidding, no millennial thinks they’re going to be able to retire and the atomization of society means we’re currently relegating our own parents to nursing homes and who wants that? If I’m still alive when I’m 80 I’m going to wander out in the woods and take mind-dissolving quantities of hallucinogens until I get to go face-to-whatever with the eternal Dao and ask it what the hell it was thinking.tl;dr - having kids used to be unavoidable or necessary for your own survival, and now they’re not
If most people stopped having kids, 401k would be useless. Old people still rely on labour of the young, even if it is abstracted.
True, but now you have a prisoner’s dilemma situation where it’s to the general benefit to have kids but not your personal benefit. So we’re relying on other people’s kids, or, as the high-income country birthrates decline and the equator continues to heat up, immigration.
