I’d also blame certain employers for replacing entry-level jobs with unpaid internships.
And that’s why so many of us remain emotionally immature!
I don’t disagree with you about adolescence being perpetuated - but I have to say I wonder how much of that is the system and how much of that is the parents. I look around me ( here, in advice columns, in my personal life) and I see parents handling interactions for their offspring that would have been unthinkable when I was young. There is no way my parents ( or the parents of any of my friends) would have , for example, called the boss at my high school job and told him I needed the third week of August off for a family vacation. They might have insisted I go on the vacation - but they would have left it to me to deal with the job. They wouldn’t have called the HR office at my first job to ask about my health insurance benefits - they might have helped me choose but I would have had to get the information. They wouldn’t have written letters to the college admissions office asking about some policy or to my professors asking them to explain my grades. Of course a person is still going to feel like a child if their parent is still handling everything for them.
Now, some of that was probably because our parents didn’t go to college and had to be adults pretty soon after they graduated from high school - but that’s not the reason they would have expected me to deal with my high school job on my own.
What some people are calling “extended adolescence” is actually “extended family support”. It’s good that families take on burdens and responsibilities for each other. That’s something that makes raising children easier.
The idea that people need to be entirely self sufficient is exactly what makes it harder to raise children.
My parents both had graduate degrees, and neither did anything like that for me. I don’t think “parents doing the adulting for their adult children” is causally related to schooling at all, i think that’s a separate thing that’s relatively new in American society. And i don’t know how that plays out in other countries.
The whole premise of this thread is wrong, it seems to me. Sure, white people, Koreans and Japanese people are going to diminish away to nominal levels in the next century, but the total population of the world will continue to rise until near 2100. Worrying about if they are the wrong colour is just racism.
If we allow enough immigration then we should have enough people to look after us in our old age until well after 2100, even if the native birthrate drops, which it will. By which time medical technology and automation should allow us to live without human caregivers to a much greater age. The demographics, age distribution and employment characteristics of 2100 are likely to be quite different to today.
Exactly. If Western culture has any worth at all, it will adapt and absorb new cultures and ideas. If not, not. Cultures all over the world are changing, and this will continue for ever - the culture of the 22nd century will be almost completely unrecognisable to our eyes.
If you gave great-grandchildren, odds are some, or most of them, will be different shades of brown. Get used to it. White people are going to fuck themselves out of existence, and that is a good thing.
That’s the issue, really. It’s not that a few extra years of schooling is directly causing a decade or more of “parenthood lag” merely due to chronological delay. It’s causing the parenthood lag indirectly, by giving educated people a wider range of options in life.
So ultimately, you don’t really mean that the goal of this proposed birthrate-boosting strategy is simply to “reduce time spent in (formal) education” for more people. What you mean is that the goal is to reduce the amount of formal education for more people. Because having less education will have the practical effect of limiting their various life options more narrowly. And that will make them more likely to start immediately down the parenthood path simply because that’s what’s expected of them, or that’s their only really fulfilling choice in life, or similar reasons.
Layered on top of that is the second fundamental issue: the fact that our society isn’t succeeding in making young parenthood sufficiently feasible and appealing for people who do have more options in life. That is going to take a hell of a lot of structural change.
I get that it seems like it would be easier to simply push for reducing the average person’s options—whether that’s by reverting to a traditional male-supremacist society as many conservatives desire, or by more gently nudging people toward higher fertility by lowering their education levels or encouraging more unplanned pregnancies or whatever. But I don’t think that’s the way forward in the long run.
Another related issue that I don’t think has been discussed here yet is the need for societies to responsibly address the problems of climate change and increase people’s confidence that we can cope with these problems even if human population is not declining rapidly. It’s undeniable that in the short run, having more people (especially in high-carbon developed societies) is putting more of a burden on an overstrained global climate. And the people who are most likely to be aware of that are precisely the better-educated responsible types whose decreasing fertility is causing the most worry.
We can’t unring that bell, so we need to follow it up with credible environmental strategies for coping with climate change despite large populations. This mixed message that young people are now getting, where scientists point out that “unsustainable greenhouse-gas emissions increase in quantity and environmental impact with population” while politicians beg “have more kids to ensure that older generations’ retirement gets funded!”, isn’t working.
This could be addressed by working hard now to make sure everyone’s children and gradchildren grow up learning that you don’t marginalize anyone in the “minority”.
Which alas seems too hard for too many of us around the whole world… including among some minorities looking at other minorities…
A related issue nowadays is that teenagers’ pre-college experience is also in many cases doing less to prepare them for adulting.
The ongoing stratification of teen employment, where a little more than a third of teenagers nowadays have summer jobs compared to nearly two-thirds a half-century ago, is producing many teens from more affluent families with little or no formal employment experience, while less affluent families are relying more heavily on their teenage workers whose child-labor-law protections are being undermined by new legislation.
So, shittier jobs and longer hours for poor teens, compared to no jobs for wealthier teens who are spending more time instead on courses and extracurriculars to burnish college applications.
Decreases in teen driving and car ownership rates, related to high automotive costs and increasing numbers of cars per family, are also disincentivizing the classic “Intro to Adulting” experience of getting qualified to drive a car, managing the responsibilities of owning a car, and earning money to pay for your car.
(Mind you, as a driver but non-car-owner myself, I’m all in favor of more people figuring out how to navigate transport needs without individual car ownership. But there’s no denying that such ownership was a valuable “adulting” rite of passage for many teens that isn’t being replaced by anything else in their current experience.)
It’s more a matter of defining themselves out of existence with the “one drop rule”. Since anyone with even one non-white ancestor isn’t “white”, barring Nazi-level eugenics programs to prevent it you end up with more and more very pale people who aren’t “white”. Culminating in a world with no “white” people but plenty of pale people.
I wonder if there is an ecological argument to be made about the birth rate.
I have read several articles about boom and bust cycles in animals. Rabbits, for instance, in the absence of predators like wolves and coyotes will expand their population until they run out of resources, then die off until the resources recover and then they boom again.
Humans on the other hand are not rabbits - mostly. Until things like the discovery of the germ theory of disease, what most humans died of - our major predator if you will - was microbes of various sorts. We have that more or less - not completely - under control these days and as a consequence have begun to fill up our ecological niche. Humans, unlike rabbits, have an ability to comprehend their situation and modulate their breeding habits accordingly. In that case any responsible person would decline or delay reproduction until such time as they think they can supply enough resources to bring their offspring to productive adulthood.
Increasing the birth rate is not going to be possible until we can increase the available resources to the point that every person reproducing can be sure they can supply enough to provide the desired number of offspring with resources equivalent to what they enjoy. I don’t really see any way to do that do you? And would it be a good idea even if we could?
That’s not how whiteness really works in practice, though. Over 3% of all white Americans have 1% or more Black ancestry.
Historically, a lot of mixed-race people who have been able to “pass” as white have simply assimilated into white identity, while entire ethnic groups that were not originally considered white (Italians, Irish, Jews, etc.) have been reclassified as white. For better and for worse, whiteness as an identity is very likely never to disappear from human society, even while more and more white people recognize some non-white ancestry.
The white people who “recognize some non-white ancestry” and white people who worry about having children with non-white people are groups with a limited overlap, I expect. And we are blatantly swinging towards a much, much less racially tolerant society, and quickly. People are going to be a lot less willing to admit to non-white ancestors if it risks them getting deported or worse.
Agree, 100%. I had a job at a pizza chain in HS, and I was told that I was taking whatever week it was off. I told the job, and the schedule manager (you know, some 20 year old with a chip on his shoulder) said that part time employees took what they got, and he could make no promises. My response was “Well, I won’t be here that week, regardless of whether you schedule me or not.” I got the week off. That’s not boasting- that seems perfectly appropriate for a 16 year old in a job that is, frankly, less important than his family obligations.
On another note, 60 minutes just dropped this, which seems right on point for this thread
Yeah, this is silly. Race isn’t a binary and never has been. This is how you get dumb rules like Apartheid South Africa classifying Japanese people as white but Chinese not (“your GDP must be this high…”?), and the US government saying Afghans are white but Pakistanis are Asian.
Also, ‘whiteness as an identity’ is less of a thing in Europe, because people identify with their country instead.
Is it, though? For any one person, more education gives them more options, but is that true of increasing education for the population as a whole? Educating young people for longer doesn’t cause more or better jobs to appear (except for teachers and university professors 
). My belief is that a lot of higher education is just signalling, so cutting back for everyone wouldn’t reduce opportunities in general, and it would help to counteract the extended adolescence issue, as well as probably making young people less likely to move far away from their parents, giving them more help with childcare (but this probably genuinely would reduce opportunities slightly).
Yeah, college plays into it, but it’s a bigger societal change. And unlike many we’ve mentioned, I think this one is genuinely bad and something we should try to reverse.
It’s an attractive idea, but I don’t think there’s any evidence for it. Humans today have vastly more resources than at any time in history, yet birth rates are at historic lows, and are lowest in the countries where people have the most resources.
It isn’t helping, because too many people give minorities themselves a pass for racism (and sexism etc).
Damn, that was sad. The village of puppets, single karaoke, single wedding photoshoots. The high rates of virginity, and the fictional-girlfriend doll 
. The Japanese are failing-to-fuck themselves out of existence. And it will be so hard to turn things around with fewer people in the fertile age groups, even if they can achieve the difficult feat of persuading young people to start marrying and reproducing again.
That’s irrelevant. The absolute amount of resources doesn’t matter. It’s the amount of resources needed to bring up a child and that’s relative to what your competitors have. Wealth inequality has a lot more to do with it than the absolute amount of resources
Maybe not, if accompanied by the more large-scale social changes you seem to be advocating (e.g., not treating college degrees as a prerequisite for a lot of white-collar jobs, etc.). I completely agree that it’s perfectly thinkable, in theory, to have a healthily functioning high-opportunity society with significantly lower rates of higher education participation than we see in most developed countries nowadays.
But in the developed societies we have now, as your quoted article described at length, college education in practice does translate into a wider range of options—professional, social, geographical, etc.—for most of its participants.
Well, yes, if more people are more likely to consider their geographical options (and their choices when it comes to familial dependence) more narrowly limited, that does count as reduced opportunity. I think that could still be a worthwhile trade-off for many people, but it does make their life options more limited in some respects.
Except that humans today also have a vastly greater destructive impact on their global environment than at any time in history, and a greater understanding of their impact than at any time in history. And that understanding is greatest in the countries where, as you say, people have the most resources.
Beyond that, if you ask me, the fundamental problem we’re seeing here is simply that developed societies are no longer able to offload their demographic needs so easily onto a subordinated female population. When women had few career options outside of marital relationships, and little control over their own fertility, the natural outcome of sexual desire and female subordination was high birthrates.
Nowadays, women have more control than ever before over their own professional, familial and reproductive choices. And the flaws in traditional social systems, from the point of view of women’s overall life satisfaction, are standing out very noticeably.
The interplay among work, parenthood, domestic life and romantic/sexual partnership is going to have to be made more attractive to women in particular (men too, but especially women) if societies really want to boost birthrates. I don’t think that trying to squish people back into the societal boxes that used to reliably produce high fecundity is going to work.
If so you’d expect to see some linear function of greater SES and greater fertility - but we tend to see a mild U shape, some increase at very highest and more with lower SES but otherwise flat.
We would also expect countries with less wealth inequality to have greater fertility, but that is also not seen.
In a global economy, yes it does. Better anyway. Countries with an uneducated workforce have jobs on the tee shirt assembly line. Countries with a highly educated workforce have jobs providing the higher value services and goods needed worldwide. Creating the ideas of them even. It is associated with higher productivity, which has to be part of the answer too.
I am completely supportive of the idea that there should be more support for non college paths. And a highly educated population does increase the quality of the jobs available.