Generally “welfare queens” were a Reagan-era myth, but basic logic suggests that if you don’t have a job, you don’t need to line up daycare.
Having a baby isn’t all that hard. Most people can meet a child’s most basic needs. The hard part is providing for their future, which requires a job, which requires daycare. When we had our kids, half the money went out the window to daycare so we could keep our careers. The long game did pay off eventually, but I resented it then and I resent it now. I get why people don’t choose it.
The classic “welfare baby” story was the belief that families (or unwed Moms) got more money in incremental benefits for each child born than it cost to raise that child. So it was profitable to Mom to generate more mouths to feed, and butts to diaper, and feet to shoe. So of course, every welfare Mom in the country quickly got into this easy way to make lotsa money.
Which wasn’t dollar for dollar true in the comparatively generous Great Society era of LBJ and sure wasn’t 20 years later when Reagan was steering the various programs into penury.
And completely ignores that raising a brood of pre-K kids is one hell of a lot of work even if you’re doing your damnedest to ignore them all all day every day.
I’m no fan of modern capitalism, but the fact is that the world population has been increasing since the start of recorded history, and archaeology says long before that. Local populations waned and waxed over centuries, of course, but that’s true today in America. See Rust Belt. The economic systems governing cities and “nations” changed over time and place long before capitalism. None of them mattered if the population and the wealth that brings dropped precipitously.
People debate exactly what you would call the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union 1918-1991, but I’m reasonably sure that “capitalism” doesn’t fit. And even back then Russia was facing demographic decline which has only gotten substantially worse since then.
Actually, Russian birthrates have been declining as far back as the end of the 19th century pre-Revolution. Apparently reductions in childhood mortality caused Russians to scale back how many children they thought they had to have for 2-3 to make it to adulthood.
Again: there’s a whole lot of ground between “dropped precipitously” and being expected to expand every year forever.
And, even aside from the fact that population crashes over significant areas have happened repeatedly including fairly recently (not to mention boom and bust economic cycles): because something has been happening for an infinitesimal portion of the planet’s history doesn’t mean that it will, or can, keep happening indefinitely.
Considering that human bodies in order to function properly need to incorporate a whole lot of organisms some of which are bacteria — in some sense, maybe?
But in any case I don’t think that’s relevant to whether the human population can continue to expand indefinitely. Capitalism, properly limited and controlled, can be very useful. But it isn’t magic.
Life expands until something stops that from happening, whether that’s an extinction event, or whether the waste products make further growth impossible.
That’s not to say that an economy that needs to grow infinitely is a good or desirable thing. It’s just the outcome of every participant trying to maximize their own value, which describes pretty much every population of everything that’s ever lived.
It’s a dismaying thing to reflect upon, but nothing about it is unnatural or insane. It’s how life has always worked. There’s never been a humanity before, and now that there is, it will have to have to figure out how to be the exception to every other lifeform that preceded it. We’ll govern our way out of it, or we’ll stall our growth swimming in our own waste, or we’ll die via some abrupt catastrophe. There are ways we can prevent most of it, but we’d be the first organism to even think about not outgrowing our space and resources, much less actually pull it off.
Some species last a lot longer than others. Horseshoe crabs and tadpole shrimp and nurse sharks don’t seem to have managed it by having ever- expanding populations. It may be that individual members of the species are in some sense trying to, but the species as a whole is constrained by its environment but doesn’t disappear.
And any claim that it’s an essential part of human nature to expand our population indefinitely is running up, right now, against strong evidence that no, it isn’t. If it were, the topic of this thread would never have come up.
Some species increase their reproductive success when there are a lot of them, others when they are sparse. I’m sure most have a sweet-spot, and not every species grows incessantly. (we call those species “weedy”.) The number of trees in a forest remains approximately constant, because there’s only light for a new seedling to reach reproductive age if there’s a hole in the canopy. There are people who study density dependance, although from the wikipedia article on the topic, it sounds like a lot of the research is around parasites, not larger animals. Still, I think the concept applies to larger animals, too. I don’t think beavers generally breed until they find a suitable territory, for instance. And if they live in a crowded location, they stay longer with their parents before even looking for a territory.
I don’t think perpetual growth is uniform for life.
We’ve been looking in the wrong places for the cause. The real source of the “problem,” said Fox senior medical analyst Dr. Marc Siegel, is the falling number of teenage births.
“We still have 3.6 million births a year, but the problem is teens and young adults. From ages 15-19 the fertility rate is down 7% and it’s down 70% over the last two decades, meaning we’re telling people that are young not to have babies, to wait until they’re in a more stable life situation, until they’re more financially secure, maybe they haven’t found the right partner…”
When they become educated, they generally do have a decline in birth rate.
IMO, countries that are starting wars need to have lower birth rates, and this includes a lot of the Middle East that is not Third World. However, Russia already has a low birth (as does the U.S.), and Russia and the U.S. are notorious for starting wars.
I think a lot of people would want majority Muslim countries to have lower birth rates, but people who have fundamentalist religious beliefs (whatever the religion is) are a danger to the rest of the world.
As I said, life expands perpetually until it fills its niche and some feedback process kicks in. There is no organism that sees adequate space, resources, and competitive environment to grow and simply chooses not to do that.
The whole thesis, if you care to engage with it, is that it’s the nature of populations to grow until they are constrained. The reason the birth rate is falling in some places is because it’s constrained by externalities. Not by anyone or anything deciding that the population is too much. In the large, most people who are choosing smaller families are choosing this because of quality-of-life and quality-of-future effects, which are a function of resource constraints.
When people have adequate resources to meet those needs, they reproduce themselves in excess of the replacement rate. That’s why these threads usually feature at least one person pointing out that if you want people to have more kids, one answer is to give them reasons and resources not to delay fertility, rather than just forcing pregnancy on them.
Oh, i misunderstood you. Yeah, i think a major reason that fertility is declining is because young adults think it would be hard to support kids. High housing prices in the US, for instance, are a major disincentive.
There’s a huge fecundicity gap between my cohort and that if my sister, just a few years younger, because good jobs were abundant when i graduated college and scarce when her cohort did. All of my straight college friends have two kids. None of her friends have kids.
There is something called the welfare cliff in the US. If you have kids and you are poor you get a lot of assistance like medicaid/SCHIP, food assistance, housing assistance, tax credits, etc. However the more money you earn, the more public assistance you lose.
A single parent with 2 kids earning 20k a year gets about 45k a year in public assistance/welfare, but as their income goes up they lose a lot of benefits. If they get to 40k a year in income they lose most of their welfare and they were better off financially earning 20k a year.
The more kids you have, the harder it is to fall off the welfare cliff and the higher the income cutoff before you hit it. So that could be an incentive.
Ah, is that what you’re saying? I read you as saying that it expands until it collapses and dies; which may have been a misreading. Going back, I see that you said
But I gather you meant mostly the second half of that, though you seem to mention only the potential output problem and not any potential input problem. Predators are more likely to be limited by the amount of prey than by how deeply their shit is piled; and what limits many creatures is suitable habitat. This does probably vary by species.
In any case, an economic system that requires perpetual expansion is still doomed; because eventually population hits that limit. Humans have been very good so far at expanding that limit; but that doesn’t make the limit infinite. And if we push up too close against it, we risk a hard crash and collapse, instead of a gradual slow drop to a sustainable level. We may have already done so; we’ve been mining our resources for quite a while now, and have a fragile system based in many ways on a climate we’re no longer getting.
And in pursuit of an economy that we think Must Always Grow, we’re using a lot of those resources to produce things nobody needs and few even want. Excess packaging that people swear at as they cut it open and send it to the landfill. Clothing destined almost immediately for the landfill, in many cases without ever being worn. Humans shut in cubicles, sometimes by force, calling people who don’t want to be called in order to scam them. I could go on. Much of this economy is doing no one any good and some active harm, all in order for some figure somewhere to go up on a chart.
Both excess packaging and scams are simply crime, or reactions to crime. If humans didn’t crime, today’s world would have neither of those things.
Any system we invent, including some sort of perpetual economic stasis, will have humans criming. And will pay the overhead: police, prisons, heartache, and yes, excess packaging, to deal with it.
I’m convinced that much of the enshittification of the economy today is because we’re running out of technological innovations that truly allow for investment in a new growth industry. As a result more and more things like housing or medical care that properly ought to be steady-state businesses are being forced into unsustainable expansion modes by equity investment desperately seeking something that can yield a return on capital. Investment in expansion worked for five hundred years as western civilization expanded and innovated but we’d need to be mining the Moon and building cities on the ocean floor by now to keep up the pace and it isn’t happening.
I hate to interrupt a good rant about how all growth is because evil profit-seeking overlords are making heedless little piggies of all of us so they can make their lines on charts go up, but the problem is that it isn’t true. If you engage with any actual economist, they will tell you that economic growth is a natural consequence of any economy that anticipates future needs. Saving. Borrowing. Investing. Social security entitlements. Any kind of progress at all. All of these are how we get things that we can’t yet pay for, they all involve some notion of creating money that doesn’t yet exist, and all of this causes growth. Virtually every economist from Marx onward agrees on this point, if not necessarily the implications or solutions.
Also please note that by describing the structural drivers of growth, I’m not condoning it or praising it, so you can save the screeds about how the hoi polloi are greedy little pigs who buy too much stuff. I despise disposable-junk consumerism as much as everyone else, but it’s not the cause, it’s a symptom of deeper structural phenomenon. If you want to explore it, read Keynes as a foundation and maybe sample Minsky and Brenner. None of it is about “lines go up” on a chart.
For those of us who are unlikely to read foundational economics texts, could you explain a tiny bit further on the difference between economic growth and expansion? What I think you are saying is that saving / investing inherently creates growth, and I’m trying to reconcile that with the fact that you can only get so many pumpkins out of a one-acre field (the limits of the material world). You seem to be saying that the economic and the material resources don’t restrict each other in the way that I thought was intuitive, and I’m intrigued but unwilling to become an economist in order to understand.
