Fox News analyst blames low birth rate on teens not having enough kids
cross-posted from: https://lemmings.world/post/44132137
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/fox-news-teens-low-birth-rate-fertility-children-b2956006.htmlOpen linkView original on feddit.org422
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Encouraging more teen pregnancies seems like it might cause problems for the education system, but that's okay; Fox News loves the uneducated.
Personally I suspect that the best cure for a low fertility rate is a good 60 to 100 years of declining population size. It's worth a try anyway.
My biggest concern is not that fertility rate is low/population decline is happening, it's that it's happening way too quickly for society to be able to handle it.
We're talking like 4 old people per child (estimated number). Not only would it be a massive strain on the economy to have so many elderly people/retirees to take care of, older people will also have a highly disproportionate account of political power due to their relative abundance. If it's already such a big deal that boomers were twisting the political landscape for their gain, I shudder to think what would happen at this larger and longer scale.
All of this is going to be a breeding ground for misogyny and right-wing ideology when people start thinking that it's [opposite gender]'s fault that they're not living as well as they were promised by the previous generation. We've already seen it in South Korea, and we're seeing it now with the rise of isolation and inceldom.
Plus, without younger people to take up the mantle, many industries that we rely on will need to downsize, and a lot of institutional knowledge will be lost. Many roles that require a "master-to-apprentice" style of learning will be lost and will be unable to recover, even if the population started growing again.
Fox News has the wrong take here, as it is wont to have. But we genuinely should be really concerned that birth rates across all developed countries are this low below replacement rate and are still dropping
Even without capitalism the math doesn’t math.
If there’s only one working person for every four old people, and those four old people each need one or two caretakers a piece then there’s not enough workers to go around.
And that doesn’t count every other job in society that needs done to support the caretakers, like growing food and fixing toilets.
I don’t think most jobs need doing. I don’t want any jobs at all period.
But if you have four old people who need four workers to care for them and there’s only one worker to go around no amount of firing social media managers and insurance adjusters is gonna fix it.
This isn’t an economic problem, it’s a demographic one. Which is why it’s a problem across the world and not just in capitalist nations. (And is in fact worst in China due to the effects of the one child policy.)
Okay, let’s assume it’s 10-1. How many other people, in a perfectly efficient system, would it take to provide a decent quality of life for that caretaker and the 10 elderly people? Growing and transporting food, building and maintaining infrastructure, researching and providing medical care, producing electricity and clean water. Nothing extra.
And how many people to support these people.
Probably more than we’d have available to work.
There’s a reason China started taxing condoms.
Are you advocating for not treating the sick whatsoever, or are you assuming total governmental funding for treating the sick?
What term would you use instead of “funding”? Even if we ditch capitalism, as we should, doctors et al still need to get paid, and hospitals still need money to operate (assuming we got rid of any for-profit healthcare). We wouldn’t be doing this with a barter system, right?
What's it like to consider reality a distant and off-putting concept but an imaginary conception of society totally familiar and so doable it's not even worth mentioning the process to get to it?
Capitalism has been around for a couple of hundred years. During most of that time fertility rates were high in pretty much every capitalist society. This changed within a generation of contraceptives becoming widely available, even in those capitalist societies most strongly influenced by socialism, with low poverty rates and where generally everyone can easily afford to have children. I think we can make a fair guess which factor was more important, between capitalism and contraception.
Humans, and mammals in general, never developed an innate desire to reproduce. It was never necessary in an evolutionary sense, since fucking led to reproduction. There hasn't been enough time for humans as a species to adapt to the new reality, and we can probably develop new contraceptive technology faster than any resistance to them can evolve (one would expect, for example, allergies to the contraceptive pill or condoms to start appearing and/or increasing in frequency among the population).
The more impactful evolution might be of a sociological nature. Cultures and subcultures that encourage large families should be expected to begin proliferating globally. We have seen some beginnings of this happening, such as the Haredim in Israel and ultraconservative communities elsewhere.
just let us oldies die when we want ffs. At 60, i hope to have enough $ left to fly to Switzerland and do a Daniel Kahnerman when i feel iv'e had enough.
Seems like the ruling class are trying to normalize pedophilia ahead of more Epstein news.
The Epstein class
Again, this is why they're against abortion and want immigrants out of the country. They want a white nationalist population that are slaves to them. This is all a class war, not an immigrant or age war.
They need the poors to fight their wars and work on their factory floors.
Spitting bars, dude. I hope you don't mind if I borrow this.
Dude, I want you to steal it.
They probably see white slaves as the ultimate status symbol.
I'm sure there'd be higher birth rates if we could fucking afford them.
If 1950s nazi germany had a chance of existing, I'm sure by then hitler would be furious that women stopped having sex.
For me, even though I'm not a woman, the biggest issue would be the fact that the world is a dumpster fire, and why would I want to bring MORE life to suffer in it?
Not to mention health care system. Irrelevant!
Ironic that the first generation in 100 years not to grow up inhaling fucktons of lead with every breath are making more informed decisions concerning their reproductive health.
Huh, guess they're feeling brave enough to push pedophillic narratives instead of simply homophobic and transphobic ones.
pedophelia is quite acceptable amonsts the gop, and the republicans in general, as is sexual assault.
All 3 are based off denying people bodily and relationship autonomy, so really you repeat yourself here
Conservatives spent years advocating abstinence education. They got what they want and all they can do is bitch about it. I guess what they really wanted was to fuck children though.
Ice has breeding facility for the minors they raped, they moved them to texas so its harder to get an abortion there. they are literally the plot of cylons in the reimagined series, the cylons had these "breeding farms" for women who them impregnated with cylon dna, and they also kept men around too.
Is the closure of Eipstein Island really affecting birthrates that much?
Thing is, a child might be an investment for the future of society, but, for the parents, it's just an expense. And with the cost of everything rising and wages failing to keep up, a lot of people make the realisation that they can't afford a child.
I 100% agree. If the government and corporations don't consider children important, then parents won't bring them in. Simple as.
They don't consider them important otherwise they would actually take measures to prevent school mass shootings.
How DARE Children NOT have Sex!
-Jeffrey Epstein's Defenders!
Wanting children to fuck more is at least a little pedophilic
Pedophile parasite class is justifying their crimes
A veiled endorsement of rape if I ever saw one.
Ah... it's so cynically amusing when one of the toxic assholes who has actively made this country into such a shitty place to live that more people every day decide there's no fucking way they're going to subject a kid to that (or that even if they wanted to, there's just no fucking way they could afford it) tries to blame the resulting declining birth rates on some idiotic red herring.
And just that much more amusing when, as happens very often, their red herring just serves to advertise their ephebophilic fantasies.
It's actually a bit more than 2. About 2.07, IIRC.
EDIT: Though you'll often see it rounded to 2.1.
EDIT2: Basically, at about the Great Recession (~2007), it took a major wallop and didn't recover, and then kept declining through the COVID-19 era. My understanding from past reading is that it had been expected that the Great Recession would send it down --- economic uncertainty causes fertility rates to drop --- but the problem is that it didn't rebound afterwards.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=US
I don't know the reasoning of that fox news analyst. But it is true that the declining birth rates are to a large extent due to less teens and early 20s women having kids. The amount of late 30s and 40s women having kids has actually increased in the same period. Kinda ironic how the young single moms conservative media have been shaming and demonizing for decades were actually the ones keeping the birth rate up. And now that they are far fewer suddenly that's a problem as well.
What about childbirth mortality? Isn’t it like 3rd world country level in the US&A? It adds up, it’s the wealthiest 3rd world country in the world;)
well its fox, they are concerned there wont be more inbred conservative men being born to sustain the voter base, or the gop as a whole, on cannon fodder for low wages and for the military.
Seems that sexual activity among minors is not just a topic of legal debate, but an outright expectation of the conservative creed
Analyst is confirmed pedo.
But he is kinda right, despite the moral questionability and other social consequences of that line of thinking. Especially this let's lower age of consent. The birthrate decline is primarily about reduction in teen pregnancies. Women in their 20s and 30s are not having significantly less kids that previous generations, but teens are. However when it comes to the total child per woman the average age of becoming a mother is a major factor.
If industrial agriculture stops, birthrates are still much too high.
I don't know what's your point? By that metric human population got too high and over natural carrying capacity, when humans moved from hunter gathering to primitive agriculture.
Humans are not reliant on nature's given carrying capacity since humanity has always created it's own environment and has adapted, engineered and invented itself out of multiple unsustainable ecological collapses through the advancements in the quality of means of production.
And btw while I think it's shitty project to plan to increase teen pregnancies... Still, fuck anti-natalism and degrowth if that's your point.
If they want kids so much, they can have them themselves, thank you very much.
LMAO WHAT
I'm sorry but female fertility happens to peak at late teens, and drop off like a stone after mid 30s. That's just biological reality
OK cool, what the rapport with the context ?