The world isn’t a crumbling post-capitalist hellscape. It’s pretty nice.
I’d much rather be living now than at any time in the past. And so far, my kids have it much better than I did at their age.
Well, leaving kids alone who are under 12 or so it’s typically illegal these days. And honestly, i don’t think we are likely to change those social mores.
But more to the point… Why don’t you have kids? Perhaps we can extrapolate to why other people aren’t having kids.
This is an excellent point. And so is
So let’s assume that we can’t increase the world population indefinitely. Because we can’t, for a lot of reasons. How can we fix our social structures to work with a static population, or a slowly shrinking one?
(Crashes and booms are always hard to deal with, in any system.)
It’s… complicated. The TL;DR version is 80 per cent. You’re also guaranteed to keep your job and be included in any general wage increases during your leave. More on this below.
Why it’s complicated:
Only for people with an unhealthy interest in the Swedish welfare state
Since before WWII our work place system as a whole is based on collective bargaining. The most obvious consequence is that there is no legal minimum wage in Sweden. Our politicians have basically left it to unions and employers to haggle it out, with a threat of: “You sort it out or we’ll push legislation.”
I want to make it absolutely clear that even if the model was introduced b y Social democrats, conservative governments have never attempted to do anything about this.
Employers and unions are, all in all, quite happy with the system. It makes it easy for the companies to have a central negotiation1 and the local company can just sit back and wait for the result, and then implement whatever the outcome is. Saves a lot of resources.
Now, part of the haggling besides wages, is a bunch of benefits. It could be more vacation, shorter workdays, better unemployment benefits, funds for retirement and paid parental leave. If you work for a company/organization that has one of these agreements, called collective contracts2, you get all of the benefits. One of those may be getting 100 % of your income during parental leave, i.e. the employer adds to what you get from the government. Working for a private company will generally mean getting more than 80 %. Working for the public sector in an unskilled position will leave you with those 80 % and nothing more.
1 This is done by national organizations. Companies belong to one employees to a union.
2 Tesla has been blocked by a legal strike for more than a year, because they refuse to negotiate, claiming that their individual contracts pay better. Those on strike are discovering that their union is paying them better than Tesla does. Toys R Us tried the same stuff when they established in the 80’s as well as Amazon about a decade ago. They both caved. If you want to to business here, you play by our rules.
When we look at parents with resources, their decision tree includes a few things.
First, they can use their (limited) resources to support their children as they get started in life. Good community, good schools, tutors, college, so that their children can have a “better life than I did”. This is a powerful motivator. However, if those parents go from 1 child to 2,3,4+ children, their resources get spread thinner, and that “better life” gets harder to ensure.
We are suggesting that parents with resources take away from the 1-2 children they already have in order to bring in a 3rd or 4th… for what reason? Some nebulous desire to increase the birthrate? That’s a terrible motivator.
Now, you look at parents with few resources, adding that 3rd or 4th child doesn’t really take away from child 1 & 2, those first kids weren’t getting any special support to begin with. And, when you eventually retire (if you get to) you have more children to help support you, good reason to have more kids.
From a utilitarian standpoint, you’d think that (modestly) wealthier people could afford more children, but the opposite is true.
Eugenics and mass deportations are bad because they harm the rights and liberties of individuals (for example, some individuals might be forbidden from reproducing under Eugenics, while other individuals are forcibly deported under mass deportations).
Who exactly is hurt by a government program that makes it easier to raise kids?
I guess the state better get out of education, then. We don’t want the state to do anything that might adjust society, and what adjusts society more than teaching the next generation?
You understate the issue. A falling population (and more crucially, an aging population) would be disastrous under any economic system.
Sick burns against Capitalism aside, no system is well equipped to dealing with an aging population.
“From each according to their needs, to each according to their ability” doesn’t work at scales much larger than Dunbar’s Number because of human nature, but even if we somehow did get people on board with the concept, you’re going to run into serious problems when half the population has both the needs and abilities of septuagenarians.
We can certainly increase the world population much higher than it currently is. And if we get there through gradual growth rather than exponential, it could be sustainable for a very long time.
still spoken like a man who doesn’t have children. Children NOW, not then.
Well, definitely not that way around.
Also, allowing for that just being a slip-up, you seem to have me confused with someone else, like a Marxist or something, who would believe the corrected formulation. I’m not.
Every single “solution” is predicated on humans being 1.unselfish (willing to provide for others what they do not need themselves), 2. able to plan for the future, 3. able to foresee and forestall the inevitable “unintended consequences” which are usually horribly damaging in ways that are difficult or impossible to undo.
Not a single one of these is remotely true of human beings as a group. In fact, we are the absolute opposite of all these. If we were these things, we wouldn’t be destroying the only planet we can live on, as fast as we possibly can without nuclear war.
Dream on, fools.
Definitely. Education has helped free the minds of women who have suffered throughout history under the yoke of sexist oppression. Unfortunately, we still have far too many women who, because of what I can only term as a form of the Stockholm Syndrome, identify with their oppressors and thus accept all the restrictions put upon them by their oppressors.
Personally, I would have my ovaries removed before I would allow myself to be enslaved as a “baby machine”.
Doh! Yes, that’s a mistake (or maybe the new Republican platform).
Regardless of your personal economic views, my point is that socialism, capitalism, and everything in between is going to struggle with both declining population and an aging population. Under any economic system, having less of your population be productive at the same time that more of your population requires more medical care is going to be a challenge.
I don’t know what economic system you favor, but I doubt it would view an aging population as a boon.
It’s like Lenin said: you look for the person who will benefit, and, uh, uh, you know…
Even though we probably won’t do it well, I have more confidence in the global economies managing the brand new complexities of aging and declining populations than I do in our ability to avoid crashing the planet’s ecology from relentlessly adding more humans.
Cheap green energy, widely applied, may alter my feelings but right now we have sizable contingents of the powerful actively opposing the transition.
Short term prediction: two decades from now western countries will be actively recruiting worker-citizens in Third World nations and the current wave of hostility to immigration will seem like another blip of idiocy in human history.
I am the walrus
Support parents. Make it possible to have a secure life and family on a single income. Achieve this by implementing a robust social services system, funded by a gradual, finely graded marginal income tax that surpasses 90% on income margins greater than US $500,000 a year.
Make it so that having children doesn’t put people at a status and wealth disadvantage relative to their childless peers, and people will gladly have children.
Absolutely true.
Socially, how do we ensure the non-earning parent is not a “victim” of this (unable to leave because the earning partner has all the financial power, unable to spend as much on hobbies, have just as new a car, have equal say in where to vacation, what house to buy, etc.)? Or is that beyond the scope of this mission? Similarly, what if one parent doesn’t wan to give up a career for a child or the other parent doesn’t want to give up all day-to-day parenting for a career? How do we make that work? Or, again, is that beyond the scope and we only care about numbers, not happiness?
Show me the numbers. How does that tax meet that need (what are the tax rates, how many have that high an income, how much does it bring in a year, how much do these services cost, etc.)? Particularly while also providing an income that allows those providing that social safety net to support a family on one income. I see this proposed a lot, but very seldom see numbers. Or any description of how people being taxed higher might then change their behaviors. I know the tax rate was higher in earlier decades (it was also higher for low and middling earners, but people tend to ignore that), but then we have to talk all the loopholes and actual intended exemptions at each time and that’s complex.
I think we have to recognize that raising kids is a valuable task for people to perform, and that as a society we need to reward people when they perform valuable tasks. I think we need to pay parents, either so they can take that money and get childcare with it (allowing them to remain in the workforce) or so they can essentially “pay themselves”. That would go a long way towards preventing a power deferential; rather than one spouse bringing in all the money and allowing the other spouse to stay home, the spouse who stays home with their kids is earning money for the family as well.
If you get the money for childcare either way, it’s up to you whether you want to do it yourself, hire someone else and work full time, or some combination of the two.
Please don’t over-interpret. I didn’t say it should be mandatory to support a family on one income, I said it should be possible.
Do it yourself. This is a discussion board, I’m offering a point of discussion, not drafting legislation. There’s a whole process for that.
It’s really weird how a discussion thread can be full of ideas for forced birth and eugenic embryo selection, but nobody bats an eye about logistics until we start talking about supporting parents to help care for all the children that everybody wishes were being born. Really weird how that works!
Unfortunately, I think this is the crux of the issue. “Have more children” is, for most people in the developed world, an appeal to the greater, long-term social good, at the expense of their personal wishes and freedoms. And, with distrust in our societies and governments to have individuals’ best interests in mind grows, that becomes an even harder appeal to make than it might have been a few decades ago.
Well, for one thing, I wouldn’t consider 70 year-olds as somehow magically unproductive. Yes, higher medical costs, but unless actively senile, not suddenly bereft of all abilities.
And personally, I think a UBI, combined with UHC and free education, is a better solution than one-off financial incentives.
Not that I support the OP, in any case. I think less people, achieved by slow multi-generational decrease, is better for everyone as long as it’s planned for. I just don’t see that as compatible with a system that promotes massive inequality, like we mostly have now.
Let’s see, if you started in kindergarten, that’s 13 years of being a latchkey kid, so you must be no older than 25.