Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
North America is not exceptional geographically-Western continental drift and a huge dormant volcano - Australia could be luckier?
Even South America though experiencing some of the same continental drift related natural disasters - could be better off as it is farther east than NA.
I was quoting The Accidental Superpower.
The points the author was making remain intact - America is a superpower because it has the largest agriculture-friendly area in the world, has 14,000 miles of navigable waterways, lies in a temperate climate zone, and has enough energy resources to provide for itself. No other country comes close. It is discussed in great detail in the book.
A thought I wanted to put out there... In response to the idea that we will end up producing humans in artificial wombs and reproducing like manufacturing a product, that doesn't really solve the problem we've got.
It is the labor that is required to raise a human being from birth to adulthood that is the real issue. That is the part, I strongly believe, that really makes women hesitant to consider motherhood. And people REQUIRE real nurturing in order to become healthy adults. Even with natural parents doing their best, the process doesn't always produce functional people. There are a thousand ways it can go so wrong. And that whole thing, it is a LOT of labor in and of itself and in capitalist countries it's also been leveraged as another way to squeeze wealth out of people...raising a child is brutally expensive, even if one's insurance manages to make birthing one more or less free.
I mean in my case, being pregnant and giving birth wasn't that bad. It was an interesting experience. But raising my kids...good lord. And although they are technically adults, they're nowhere near done needing lots of investment on my part. Might never be, who knows?
Some might call me selfish but I really did want there to be more to my identity than just "somebody's Mom." I wanted to experience and do more with my life than serve the needs of others. And I can get crushed with blame and guilt if I don't manage to utterly, totally provide for myself including my own retirement AND help the elderly of the family AND provide for the kids forever... We cannot simultaneously act like this kind of sacrifice is the logical punishment for the sheer audacity of having sex while not being a rich person, but get mad at people for choosing not to reproduce.
I keep hearing that there are so many childless couples out there desperate to adopt, but who are these people? Who is buying babies for hundreds of thousands of dollars from these adoption brokers anyways, and are they all REALLY doing it for altruistic or genuine reasons? Who is really volunteering to step up and do that work, with kids that aren't even their own? Gay couples? Not most of 'em. I suspect that a lot of kids that are given up for adoption end up in the foster system. And you know, I've met some adults who grew up and aged out of foster care and every...single...one...has shocking and horrifying tales to tell of abuse, molestation, and severe trauma. Every one. No exceptions.
If one is a pregnant mother, the notion that giving your kid up for adoption might be the solution to go with is a really hard one to accept if you have no assurances that your kid will be well cared for and loved, rather than tortured. Much better to avoid conception altogether if one can.
So it's not so much a shortage of willing wombs that is the problem here, women who are just like, "ugh stretch marks"...it's not a problem you solve with incubation chambers. It's the JOB of raising the kids and doing it right, that's got us stuck, and the very high resource cost to people whose resources are already strained.
^ Bravo to the above post!
Not to mention:
The WORK of raising a child is unpaid. why on earth would anyone put in 18+ years of labor on what is expected to be a *volunteer* job?
A dropping birth rate is nothing to bemoan. After centuries of slavery, women are shouting, “Fuggedaboudit!”
^ Bravo to the above post!
Not to mention:
The WORK of raising a child is unpaid. why on earth would anyone put in 18+ years of labor on what is expected to be a *volunteer* job?
A dropping birth rate is nothing to bemoan. After centuries of slavery, women are shouting, “Fuggedaboudit!”
I'm the rare nerd so obsessed with spreadsheets that I've tried to document and pick apart and analyze every facet of my life I can think of...and with access to my meticulous records covering nearly my entire adult life, I went back and figured it up. Conservatively, raising my two kids cost over a million dollars, to date. And we've never really felt like wealthy people. Like we've stretched out and touched what we consider to be middle class at times.
And that's just dollars.
That is not unpaid labor hours. Nor years spent in a not-great and eventually abusive relationship because I wanted to give my kids the chance to grow up with their natural father. Not opportunities for more fulfilling careers I passed up, or chances to further my education that I just didn't have room for on my plate. Not the time and effort that I did not put into maintenance of my own health because those minutes and hours and dollars had to go to more important things (for other people.)
Though I admit that on the other side of the scales, weighs a complete unknown. Because before I had my kids, I was doing a lot of irresponsible things and I don't know if I would have plotted the same course and figured out how to make progress as an adult at the same rate if I had not the motivation of two little beings who depended on me. It's hard to say. I might have been better off, but then again, maybe not.
But if I'd been a really functional person well poised to succeed in life, then I don't know that I'd have seen raising children as a net positive. Likely not.
Mine are now 20 and 23 and they are still the single most stressful element of my day to day life.
On Sunday (July 24) China announced they expect population decrease to begin a lot sooner than previously thought.
The new date is "before 2025". Many demographers point to discrepancies in the reported Chinese population figure of 1.4B, and believe the figure is already inflated by 100 million. Other authorities, such as Peter Zeihan, forecast a Chinese population collapse of 50% in the next 50 years.
Births in the central Hunan province, for example, dropped below 500,000 for the first time in nearly 60 years, the Global Times reported, adding that China's southern Guangdong province is the only one to deliver more than 1 million new births.
"Financial means" is cited as one reason Chinese women say they do not want more children. In the area of personal income vs Cost of Living there seems to be no help coming. Children are very, very expensive almost everywhere on the planet.
A thought I wanted to put out there... In response to the idea that we will end up producing humans in artificial wombs and reproducing like manufacturing a product, that doesn't really solve the problem we've got.
It is the labor that is required to raise a human being from birth to adulthood that is the real issue...
This is precisely why, in my alterative/future universe, the raising of children is professionalized and left to a dedicated, specialized few... assisted by machine. 200 years ago, most people worked in agriculture, raising their own crops, and bartering for necessities. Today, some 2% of the population in Western countries is farmers. Most people only touch food to buy it and to consume it. A small cadre of professionals, assisted by machines (tractors, irrigation systems, fertilizer,...) are primarily responsible for the "raising" of crops and livestock. In a similar way, the babies of the future would be raised all of the way to adulthood by a small cadre of professionals.
Orphans are at serious disadvantage, and orphanages are awful, because they are few. The "natural" way to grow up, is with a mother and a father. But if motherhood or fatherhood become as rare as production-farming, where 98% of mankind is incubated in factories and raised in institutions, then the stigma of being an orphan is moot. In the contrary, it would be the few persons still raised in traditional families who would be the odd and the stigmatized ones.
In my alternative/future world, a son or a daughter would know of their mother, about as much as currently they know, of whomever it is, who harvested the carrots or onions, that are on the dinner-table. Sure, some person or persons did this... but they are abstract and unknowable, reduced to a faceless commodity.
This is precisely why, in my alterative/future universe, the raising of children is professionalized and left to a dedicated, specialized few... assisted by machine. 200 years ago, most people worked in agriculture, raising their own crops, and bartering for necessities. Today, some 2% of the population in Western countries is farmers. Most people only touch food to buy it and to consume it. A small cadre of professionals, assisted by machines (tractors, irrigation systems, fertilizer,...) are primarily responsible for the "raising" of crops and livestock. In a similar way, the babies of the future would be raised all of the way to adulthood by a small cadre of professionals.
Orphans are at serious disadvantage, and orphanages are awful, because they are few. The "natural" way to grow up, is with a mother and a father. But if motherhood or fatherhood become as rare as production-farming, where 98% of mankind is incubated in factories and raised in institutions, then the stigma of being an orphan is moot. In the contrary, it would be the few persons still raised in traditional families who would be the odd and the stigmatized ones.
In my alternative/future world, a son or a daughter would know of their mother, about as much as currently they know, of whomever it is, who harvested the carrots or onions, that are on the dinner-table. Sure, some person or persons did this... but they are abstract and unknowable, reduced to a faceless commodity.
I think that it will be hard to do that effectively at scale, to the degree to which we would need to, in order to truly meet the needs of growing humans. We are pretty limited in the extent to which we understand (and agree on) what those needs truly even ARE.
I mean, you know I'm thinking about public schools and daycares and preschools. I'm sure you are, too. It could be said that we are moving in that direction, as so many of our children are raised a large portion of each day in some institutional setting.
But I don't know about anybody here, I never got the kind of nurture or imprinting or feelings of being cared for from any professional, that I got at least sometimes with this or that relative (in my case, not always my parents but my grandparents or my great aunt.) Even in in-home daycares where the person running it could have bonded with the kids...actually those were the worst, and featured rampant abuse and neglect.
I just don't see it working to the extent that it needs to. I don't know.
This is precisely why, in my alterative/future universe, the raising of children is professionalized and left to a dedicated, specialized few... assisted by machine. 200 years ago, most people worked in agriculture, raising their own crops, and bartering for necessities. Today, some 2% of the population in Western countries is farmers. Most people only touch food to buy it and to consume it. A small cadre of professionals, assisted by machines (tractors, irrigation systems, fertilizer,...) are primarily responsible for the "raising" of crops and livestock. In a similar way, the babies of the future would be raised all of the way to adulthood by a small cadre of professionals.
Orphans are at serious disadvantage, and orphanages are awful, because they are few. The "natural" way to grow up, is with a mother and a father. But if motherhood or fatherhood become as rare as production-farming, where 98% of mankind is incubated in factories and raised in institutions, then the stigma of being an orphan is moot. In the contrary, it would be the few persons still raised in traditional families who would be the odd and the stigmatized ones.
In my alternative/future world, a son or a daughter would know of their mother, about as much as currently they know, of whomever it is, who harvested the carrots or onions, that are on the dinner-table. Sure, some person or persons did this... but they are abstract and unknowable, reduced to a faceless commodity.
Interesting thoughtviews both here & above. There would be a pretty long transition from now to the alternative, perhaps longer than 200 years? The film ‘After Yang’ examines what this transitional period might look like & be like. It is based on a short story "Saying Goodbye to Yang" & recommend if interested in these types of ideas.
I'm a sucker for a good bucket of data, so I found this site "Worldometer" that has info on population.
Among the stats on World Population (WP)found there are:
- WP will increase by 81M people this year;
- WP rate of increase this year will be about 1.05%;
- WP right now is about 7.963B;
Lots more data on that website. Note how population took off with the Industrial Revolution when steam power changed a lot of things, especially manufacturing and transportation, not to mention public sanitation, modern medicine, science, education, refrigeration and migration to cities.
__________________
- Please follow our TOS.
- Any Questions about City-Data? See the FAQ list.
- Want some detailed instructions on using the site? See The Guide for plain english explanation.
- Realtors are welcome here but do see our Realtor Advice to avoid infractions.
- Thank you and enjoy City-Data.
Last edited by Mike from back east; 07-29-2022 at 06:34 PM..
I'm a sucker for a good bucket of data, so I found this site "Worldometer" that has info on population.
Among the stats on World Population (WP)found there are:
- WP will increase by 81M people this year;
- WP rate of increase this year will be about 1.05%;
- WP right now is about 7.963B;
Lots more data on that website. Note how population took off with the Industrial Revolution when steam power changed a lot of things, especially manufacturing and transportation, not to mention public sanitation, modern medicine, science, education, refrigeration and migration to cities.
Find the data on 'replacement rate' . The u.s. this year with 3.6 million babies born is a 4% decline from the year before.
"Fertility rates have fallen around the world over the last decade—even in countries with generous social welfare states, which experts had long expected to be holdouts in the face of fertility declines. But while demographers often talk about this change in terms of “fertility rates” or “births per woman,” another way to tally the total is in terms of missing births. That is, if the population of women who might have kids changed the way it did over the last decade, and if fertility rates had remained at their 2008 levels (the last time we had replacement-rate fertility in America), how many more babies would have been born?
The answer is 5.8 million babies."
Another article I read stated that 2.5 million are missing this year from the workforce, because they weren't birthed. So sure there are millions of babies being born around the world, but they key is --- is it at a replacement level? The last I checked it was at 2.4 and since in takes 2.1 to replace a society, globally it's alright for now (we won't talk about the percentage drop from the last time I looked) however, not ever country is replacing itself.
When the aging population dies out --- then people will begin to see the global population drop like a punctured hot air balloon.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
