Late Stage Capitalism

When "there is no such thing as society," but "it takes a village" to raise children, it's obvious that many choose to simply not have children. There is also a correlation between improving material conditions and lower birth rates, but that only partially explains the current situation in the west.

I learned something interesting about the average gap between children in different mammal species recently. Great apes, I think it was orangutans specifically, have babies roughly eight years apart, as that's how long it takes for an orangutan to mature enough to not need constant care. This being while orangutan babies are more mature and capable at birth than human babies. Whereas in hunter-gatherer human communities the gap is more like four years, not because a four year old is mature enough for the mother to have time to care for another infant, but because child rearing is a communal responsiblity; she has help. In the US this gap has been reduced even further to just two years, even though the average mother in the US has essentially no help with domestic labour and likely has to participate in wage labour as well.

I was thinking about this comment and thread a bit earlier and I think while it def has a good point, some of it is even more straightforward than that; western capitalism/empire went to great lengths to isolate and individualize because that makes it harder for people to organize and see eye to eye, makes them easier to exploit, etc., including segmenting on gender. That means many of the connections that a person might make in a "normal" (cooperative) society just from knowing other people and working (or playing) with them closely in the day to day, are just... not there. Which of course is going to include romantic connections too. Online dating seems to have tried to answer this problem by giving you a wider search range to compensate for how splintered people are and it got captured by gamified profiteering, and on top of that, in a place like the US for example, the splintering seems to have gotten progressively worse over time, diminishing any gains from an expanded search range.

So there is the factor of whether people can afford to have kids, have the time to, have any desire to, but there's also the step of them even getting into a lasting relationship where that convo might come up, in the first place. The capitalists want to have their cake and eat it too; they want a populace that is so splintered it poses no threat to them, yet also somehow falls in love with each other and makes babies for the factory heaving, but the one is contradictory to the other.

It's a cold one

Damn, the comments here! So much fedora-tipping...

Maybe it's capitalism or maybe women just don't want to spend their best years constantly pregnant and breastfeeding, no way to know I guess if you don't talk to them

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBudghsdByQ

It will be a challenge of the century to see if socialism can fix this crisis where capitalism clearly hasn't.

I certainly hope that, as China improves living, working, and social conditions, that birth rates rise back up to replacement rates or higher. That would cement the superiority of socialism and prepare the world for the population required to expand into space across the solar system.