Right, and in 95 years, there will be no living people with experience in gerontological medicine or retirement planning.
A good point. What happens as the pre-childless generation grows old and there’s no up-and-coming generation to replace them?
Imagine there are no children born from 2013 to 2043. And then children start being born again. As these children hit young adulthood around 2063, they’re going to be expected to take over from the youngest of pre-2013 generation who are now in their fifties.
By the time that first generation of 2043 reach their own fifties, they’ll be the oldest people on Earth with only a handful of pre-2013 survivors left.
What exactly is this plan meant to accomplish? Just to allay general fears of over population?
Even assuming things work out pretty well, which is a pretty ridiculous assumption to begin with, you’re going to end up with a retirement crisis that will dwarf all others. When that first generation after the break reaches working age, the percentage of the population old enough to retire is going to be huge, far, far bigger than someplace even like Japan. The economic burden on that generation is going to be enormous. You could say that since everyone has been waiting to have kids that generation will be large enough to endure, but then wasn’t the original point to reduce population in general? This plan is completely unreasonable to me.
No, Dan Savage does NOT hate children. He’s a parent himself and he and his partner had to go through more than the average hetero parents to achieve that state.
Folks, let’s consider the context. On a radio broadcast he was specifically asked for a “dangerous idea”. The intent was to get panelists to suggest something edgy/radical/controversial. The point was to shine a light on a serious threat to the planet (Savage’s was overpopulation) and get a discussion going. Which it did. Unfortunately, the conversation seems to be leaning towards how evil Dan Savage is rather than anything else. (Well, maybe not so much here)
He is NOT seriously advocating this. He is not anti-child or anti-parent. The people repeating this sound bite are taking it out of context and using it to assassinate the character of a man who has repeatedly stood up for abused and bullied children.
Fair enough so.
So what would be the maximum acceptable length of a moratorium? 5 years? 1? Or is there no acceptable gap of any length? A 1 year gap might be handled if it was planned in advance so that the economic impacts might be mitigated.
I like Dan Savage, and I get that he isn’t advocating this, but I still wonder how a man who is obviously as intelligent as he is would think that this idea is “helpful” at all. Even as a thought-exercise, there is nothing about this that would improve the current situation.
I like him too. My guess is that it was an off-the-cuff remark, the first dangerous idea that popped into his head, not something he’d given much or any thought.
The world’s population would drop for the next 30 years which doesn’t sound good for the economy. The millenial generation, I guess people born in the 90s and later may never have any children, which maybe is a good thing from an old guy’s point of view. There won’t be a huge baby boom after 30 years either since there won’t be anyone under 30 years old, and most people will be at least in their 40s. There will certainly be a lot of older parents though, which might be a good thing for that new generation. Overall it would have disastrous economic implications. Negative population growth will seriously impact demand, a dwindling workforce in the face of an older population increasing in size, a lack of motivation to provide for family needs, it just doesn’t sound good.
“I mean in the past. Before they changed the water.”
I’d say the idea is helpful in getting us to think about what would be the consequences of such a situation.
The idea has to be helpful, not the actuality of the idea.
Just today one of my coworkers described Soylent Green during lunch, re. “implementing forced expiration dates for people”: is the situation described in Soylent Green “a helpful one”? No… but having it or Logan’s Run as references can help people put the idea of “forced expiration dates” into perspective.
And they would have forgotten how to do it.
A 30-year stretch without kids would have pretty profound implications for reproductive rights. Forced abortions would lead to a backlash against the procedure that might be fierce enough to outlaw it for everyone when the child-ban was lifted. On the other hand, if (say) some unknown cosmic force prevented pregnancies for 30 years, those seeking abortion, birth control or sterilization after the cosmic force had been defeated might face a lot of anger for “not doing their part” to re-populate society.
Countries with low life expectancies would be changed almost beyond recognition after 30 years of no kids. Their population drops would be even more serious than those of industrialized countries, since it’s common for the median ages of their populations to be around 18-25. Some countries’ populations would probably become too small to be sustained by their current social and government structures. Large parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia would simply be uninhabited.
Toys R Us will go out of business. No more G rated movies being made after a while. Strip clubs will have older and older strippers on average
It seems like most childless or childfree people really dote on their pets. I bet we’d see a thriving market for luxury pet products and maybe more exotic pets and stuff. Not as large of a market as kid products currently are, of course, but I bet it would be greatly expanded.
See, if Dan Savage had written a novel with that idea as the basis people would probably go “oh, neat idea!” or whatever. Because he said it in the context he did, though, it’s evil.
I agree that Dan Savage was not seriously advocating forced abortion. The foofaraw surrounding this comment reminds of what happened with Bill Bennett a few years back when he said, “you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down.”
We have a media environment where inflammatory remarks are one of the best ways to get attention. If the person’s goal is attention, he has no motivation not to be as absurd as possible.
As for the actual topic of the thread, I’m in agreement that without kids, all of human society would go downward in a hurry. The desire to make a better world and preserve what we have for our children is a principle driving force in many adult lives. Not all, obviously, but many. With that removed, there’d be a huge shift away from productive, pro-social behavior towards short-term and selfish behavior.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. If mankind started reproducing again, do you think the necessary knowledge about birth and child rearing would be irretrievably lost forever?
I can see that. Maybe Savage was thinking about that article last week about how the younger generation of Japanese aren’t getting married and having babies. The one with the “more incontance garments sold than diapers” line. Or all the trouble China’s having with the fall out of the one baby policy.
No babies for a generation would be one of the more dangerous things I can think of for society and the economy. Not quite to the level of let’s-give-madmen-nukes, but close.
Does anybody have a link to the interview(?) Savage said this in? What were some of the other ideas?
No, absolutely not. I definitely don’t think that child birth and child rearing is something that we couldn’t relearn, from scratch if necessary, and a 30 year moratorium on childbirth certainly wouldn’t mean we’d have to relearn it from scratch. We’ve proven to be fantastically resourceful in that regard, and with a current 7 billion of us I don’t doubt humanity would figure it out and survive. That said, a 30 year gap in child birth and child rearing is historically and even prehistorically unprecedented, and would represent a huge and catastrophic collapse both economically and in simpler terms in the loss of medical knowledge of children and childbirth, cultural knowledge of childbirth, child care, and the role of children in our culture. We have a decent track record at surviving catastrophes, even global ones, and we’d very likely survive this one on the whole. It would still be catastrophic and cause a lot of misery on an individual and group level.