more to the point disincentivising or limiting pension provision tends to cause property bubbles and the kind of scenario much of the UK, USA,Canada and Aus/ NZ is facing
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How might a modern baby boom occur?
- Thread starter Twiggierjet
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And it seems also like it's eroding the Swedish rental market, as well.
Ban Televisions.
More seriously:
Get rid of the current American style, survival of the fittest, winner takes all, profit over everything else capitalist system. Replace it with something that pays workers a decent income rather than treat them as wage slaves earning as little as the employer can get away with, and which has workers working shorter hours. Make it so people can raise a family, own a house and car etc on one income while still having quality time together.
Low cost housing. Houses are for living in, not an investment opportunity.
Free/low cost healthcare and education
Cheap childcare, including extensive before and after school clubs, for those whose parents want to go to work.
Provide plenty of recreation facilities and activity/sports clubs to help keep the little buggers entertained and to allow parents to socialise with each other at the same time.
Either cheap cars and fuel or an extensive and cheap public transport system.
Ban TV.
More seriously:
Get rid of the current American style, survival of the fittest, winner takes all, profit over everything else capitalist system. Replace it with something that pays workers a decent income rather than treat them as wage slaves earning as little as the employer can get away with, and which has workers working shorter hours. Make it so people can raise a family, own a house and car etc on one income while still having quality time together.
Low cost housing. Houses are for living in, not an investment opportunity.
Free/low cost healthcare and education
Cheap childcare, including extensive before and after school clubs, for those whose parents want to go to work.
Provide plenty of recreation facilities and activity/sports clubs to help keep the little buggers entertained and to allow parents to socialise with each other at the same time.
Either cheap cars and fuel or an extensive and cheap public transport system.
Ban TV.
I think he meant "comfort ableism" in which the group/faction in question refuses to make any significant effort, risk, or sacrifice, instead expecting the government to mitigate those problems.
And he has a point, if the cost of the subsidizing childrearing of certain social classes is such that it outweighs the productivity of any potential offspring of said classes, then there's no point in implementing said policies.
Well here the point is just making new bodies. Economic ratings are moot if we run out of people.
If automation is as all powerful as some has been raving about, then population decline isn't a problem. A post scarcity society can be achieved simply by having the majority of the population worrying themselves out of reproducing.
All of this but also ban the internet, because the internet actively disincentivises people from interacting in real-life and forming organic relationships with one another.
A post-scarcity society is not possible, simply because resources are finite. They always have been, and they always will be. Even the strongest particle accelerator would take millennia to make a single gram of solid matter (gold is the example usually given). Automation will not permanently get rid of jobs either, it will just create new jobs elsewhere, in different sectors of the economy. This has always occurred, and always will, as regards technological advancement. When the printing-press was invented, many an amanuensis or scribe retrained as a printer or printer's devil, to give an example.
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We pretty much live in a post-scarcity today and have since the Green Revolution, and honestly it have not created the utopia people imagined, it just resulted in new resources to run out of.
The baby boom was a specific set of events as follows:
1. Demobilization: tens of millions of men and women returned to domestic life after years of minimal sex and wanting to start a family to get away from the war.
2. Medicine: The development of mass-manufactured antibiotics and antibacterials, and the pioneering of blood banks and tranfusions significantly helped lower child mortality, while people were still stuck with a high-child mortality mindset (namely making as many children so at least some would survive to adulthood).
3. Prosperity and a much higher quality of life in the postwar: the years preceding the baby boom were ones of hardship, with the Great Depression followed by the stresses of wartime measures (even in the US). In Europe, the interwar also had significant economic issues, not to mention the trauma and devastation of WWI, and the WW2 affected the population even worse compared to North America.
So to actually have a baby boom, these set of circumstances need to be replicated. I imagine the aftermath of a prolonged, conventional WW3 fits the bill. Now, there are plenty of pronatalist policies to increase the birth rate, but unless governments turn to outright dystopian measures like establishing breeding camps or spend an insane amount of money to subsidize birth rates, those will only result in a gradual increase, not the kind of spike in birth rates that only drastic circumstances, such as those in the wake of WW2, could cause.
1. Demobilization: tens of millions of men and women returned to domestic life after years of minimal sex and wanting to start a family to get away from the war.
2. Medicine: The development of mass-manufactured antibiotics and antibacterials, and the pioneering of blood banks and tranfusions significantly helped lower child mortality, while people were still stuck with a high-child mortality mindset (namely making as many children so at least some would survive to adulthood).
3. Prosperity and a much higher quality of life in the postwar: the years preceding the baby boom were ones of hardship, with the Great Depression followed by the stresses of wartime measures (even in the US). In Europe, the interwar also had significant economic issues, not to mention the trauma and devastation of WWI, and the WW2 affected the population even worse compared to North America.
So to actually have a baby boom, these set of circumstances need to be replicated. I imagine the aftermath of a prolonged, conventional WW3 fits the bill. Now, there are plenty of pronatalist policies to increase the birth rate, but unless governments turn to outright dystopian measures like establishing breeding camps or spend an insane amount of money to subsidize birth rates, those will only result in a gradual increase, not the kind of spike in birth rates that only drastic circumstances, such as those in the wake of WW2, could cause.
Ironically, it seems we are actually running out of human resources, right now.
Not really, unless a major disaster happen I’m unlikely to live to see the human population going down.
Personally, I sometimes wonder whether the phenomenon of advanced societies failing to reproduce might actually be a universal constant, kind of like a form of social entropy. There’s John B. Calhoun’s famous ‘mouse utopia’ experiment that he did in the 60s, where he created enclosed spaces where mice and rats were given unlimited access to food and water, enabling unfettered population growth, essentially simulating advanced, first-world standards of population density, standards of living, and comfort, except for mice. Here’s what happened afterward:
There’s more on the experiment on Wikipedia. Apparently homosexual behavior started to become common among male mice lol, along with other deviant and anti-social behaviors like cannibalism, and social withdrawal of some mice. It seems the total lack of external stress factors (no predators, unlimited food and drink, comfortable shelter), combined with high population density, leads to the rise of certain social pathologies, followed by social collapse and even extinction – at least for mice. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the relative comfort, security and safety found in advanced societies has similar effects on humans. It seems a certain level of stress and discomfort might actually be beneficial for society.
There’s more on the experiment on Wikipedia. Apparently homosexual behavior started to become common among male mice lol, along with other deviant and anti-social behaviors like cannibalism, and social withdrawal of some mice. It seems the total lack of external stress factors (no predators, unlimited food and drink, comfortable shelter), combined with high population density, leads to the rise of certain social pathologies, followed by social collapse and even extinction – at least for mice. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the relative comfort, security and safety found in advanced societies has similar effects on humans. It seems a certain level of stress and discomfort might actually be beneficial for society.
That experiment can mostly be explained by mouse mating habits and pheremones, you shouldn't put too much stock in it.
Agree that how you'd get a religious revival becomes the largest question, followed by how exactly did we come to an era in which religion has receded so much from human life. Reeeally don't think 1990 is near the cut-off, though. The trend is global and was coming all century, regardless of how I remember it certainly felt in the rural US during the '90s.
I still think it's worth taking into consideration. Urban, industrial society is less than two hundred years old, which is a blip in the grand span of human history, so we could very well adapt to the new conditions over the next few centuries, but I think a mouse utopia situation is, to quote Joe Rogan, entirely possible.
Industrial society yes, urban society no. Ancient Antioch had population densities higher than modern Manhattan for instance.
To address the OP, there are two fairly simple answers.
First, the semi-plausible case. You could have a small baby boom if the vast majority of breeding age people in a developed country felt financially unable to start families (check!), then very large numbers of that demographic got in relationships at once but had to spend much time apart (hard to imagine, not essential anyway), then very abruptly a strong majority of them flip to both financially able and financially stable.
What would happen? Many people would be starting families simultaneously, normalizing it, and nothing drives large families like the social normality of large families. But while this is a recipe that would show up clearly in statistics and would be called a "baby boom," actually this would not approach the scale of the 20th century capital letters Baby Boom. The social and cultural foundations aren't there, and women would not substantially abandon the workplace. Maybe, maybe you'd see Americans passing replacement family size, but the average births per woman simply is not going up to 3, even in this dramatic case.
Second, creating an actual baby boom. A strong and very rich state could in fact create a domestic population explosion, the old-fashioned way. The old-fashioned way is total economic incentives. When most people were farmers and child mortality was statistically meaningful, not giving birth made you poor. Raising children maintained or improved economic prospects for most people, most of the time. Simply (ha!) make parents more wealthy than non-parents. That's it.
How? Well in the US, university education costs might need to be capped and the caps to be phased downward over several years (so you don't just immediately kill off institutions you need) and a lot of capacity added. Something like Canada's system of supporting children is fine, but for a baby boom you actually want cash getting into the parents' hands. You'd probably want to space financial rewards out as income rather than front load them at birth, so... pay parents to send their kids to school? People splurge when they get bonuses, but people come to rely on income. Make parenthood a form of income.
What would happen? Enormous numbers of people would have children, and many of them would establish lifestyles that would depend on parental subsidies, so few would seriously consider choosing to reduce their lifetime income. Meanwhile medium-to-large families would suddenly be socially normative, so many people would have more children than they'd rationally choose when not under the influence of societal pressure. And much of the young adult generation would start generating justifications for why this was all good and natural and demanding media, news, and commentary that endorsed and centered their lifestyle.
Obviously this isn't a policy that comes easily through the legislative process of a liberal democracy, nor is it an affordable path for most authoritarian states or mixed systems. So a government ever doing it is extremely doubtful. Obviously the US government getting transformative social laws of absurd cost that do nothing for the older population past Congress and the states is a joke. China is the obvious candidate I can see for a system that could credibly try, but I suspect they simply could not afford it. Perhaps a smaller state would find it easier - South Korea? Or a younger one - Malaysia?
But if it were done, it would work like a runaway train.
First, the semi-plausible case. You could have a small baby boom if the vast majority of breeding age people in a developed country felt financially unable to start families (check!), then very large numbers of that demographic got in relationships at once but had to spend much time apart (hard to imagine, not essential anyway), then very abruptly a strong majority of them flip to both financially able and financially stable.
What would happen? Many people would be starting families simultaneously, normalizing it, and nothing drives large families like the social normality of large families. But while this is a recipe that would show up clearly in statistics and would be called a "baby boom," actually this would not approach the scale of the 20th century capital letters Baby Boom. The social and cultural foundations aren't there, and women would not substantially abandon the workplace. Maybe, maybe you'd see Americans passing replacement family size, but the average births per woman simply is not going up to 3, even in this dramatic case.
Second, creating an actual baby boom. A strong and very rich state could in fact create a domestic population explosion, the old-fashioned way. The old-fashioned way is total economic incentives. When most people were farmers and child mortality was statistically meaningful, not giving birth made you poor. Raising children maintained or improved economic prospects for most people, most of the time. Simply (ha!) make parents more wealthy than non-parents. That's it.
How? Well in the US, university education costs might need to be capped and the caps to be phased downward over several years (so you don't just immediately kill off institutions you need) and a lot of capacity added. Something like Canada's system of supporting children is fine, but for a baby boom you actually want cash getting into the parents' hands. You'd probably want to space financial rewards out as income rather than front load them at birth, so... pay parents to send their kids to school? People splurge when they get bonuses, but people come to rely on income. Make parenthood a form of income.
What would happen? Enormous numbers of people would have children, and many of them would establish lifestyles that would depend on parental subsidies, so few would seriously consider choosing to reduce their lifetime income. Meanwhile medium-to-large families would suddenly be socially normative, so many people would have more children than they'd rationally choose when not under the influence of societal pressure. And much of the young adult generation would start generating justifications for why this was all good and natural and demanding media, news, and commentary that endorsed and centered their lifestyle.
Obviously this isn't a policy that comes easily through the legislative process of a liberal democracy, nor is it an affordable path for most authoritarian states or mixed systems. So a government ever doing it is extremely doubtful. Obviously the US government getting transformative social laws of absurd cost that do nothing for the older population past Congress and the states is a joke. China is the obvious candidate I can see for a system that could credibly try, but I suspect they simply could not afford it. Perhaps a smaller state would find it easier - South Korea? Or a younger one - Malaysia?
But if it were done, it would work like a runaway train.
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