My issue with the South Korea video and demographers doomsayers is the hysteria and the lack of truth about the consequences of such hysteria. Yes put incentives for people have more children, give money for children, free daycare, keep housing prices low and flexible working hours. If the birth rate goes up by a little is ok, is not the end. But when hysteria kicks then is when you see government putting punitive measures and that should be talked more and even force.
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- Thread starter bd popeye
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In4ser
Junior Member
Yeah, well, that's the problem with collectivist societies. Benefits are shared, but so too are often the responsibilities as well as the punishments. There are no solutions, only trade-offs.
F*ck your natural order, if I could have a Yao Ming-Albert Einstein hybrid, I will do it.
In4ser
Junior Member
I would, too. That's the problem! Everyone would do it. Over time, more and more people's babies would follow trends and look and be more and more similar. This would likely cause the genetic pool to shrink ever more as it's not the immediate disaster that's often the most dangerous, but the one that is far away, that people become too complacent until they can no longer reverse it.
The dude is using diapers.
The entire world and including your country is going to be a collectivist society if this hysteria continues on,
People are talking about birth rates here. I don't think people are paying enough attention to the fact a lot of people struggle to fulfill the basic needs of having a stable long term job with full health benefits and decent pay, a house they can pay off, a car, getting married etc. Something that will affect most countries. India for example is already below replacement birth rate and they were supposed to be hyped for it.
This is just a basic milestone for a lot of men for example. Yet I think a lot are going to struggle to meet it in the future. Its not even that countries are lacking the money. Its just due to science and technology as well as the way the workforce develops, a lot of jobs are going away while the number of educated workers keeps going up and the requirements to even achieve the first one keeps going up as competition increases. And this problem spreads into many other fields.
So we already have so many problems before even thinking about having kids which is going to be another set of difficulties.
Honestly Im surprised this isn't talked about more. I think governments, think thanks etc dont wanna talk about it because this is a much more dire and urgent problem which they have no solution for so far.
This is just a basic milestone for a lot of men for example. Yet I think a lot are going to struggle to meet it in the future. Its not even that countries are lacking the money. Its just due to science and technology as well as the way the workforce develops, a lot of jobs are going away while the number of educated workers keeps going up and the requirements to even achieve the first one keeps going up as competition increases. And this problem spreads into many other fields.
So we already have so many problems before even thinking about having kids which is going to be another set of difficulties.
Honestly Im surprised this isn't talked about more. I think governments, think thanks etc dont wanna talk about it because this is a much more dire and urgent problem which they have no solution for so far.
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I think at this point the line between discussing birth policies and bouncing ideas for a science fiction shorty story competition is starting to get blurred, so I suggest staying on topic.
For my part, I don't tend to think that far into the future, for the simple fact that even the worst predictions of the consequences of China's current demographics have most of it manifesting when most of the folks posting on this forum will be long dead. So the course right now is focusing on the short term, in which case the government has already begun addressing some of them, such as discouraging overtime work and making child rearing more financially viable. I think more can be done down the line, but its not a hopeless situation. Plenty of countries in the past have dealt with periods of low birth rates, such as France in the late 19th Century when it was bad enough they couldn't even keep their military properly staffed and yet they're still here to this day, so I think its doable.
One Child policy was necessary, most of China's big problems today still relates to its massive population, such as unemployment, and a huge percentage of its population still working in unproductive agriculture (22% compared to 2-5% for other advanced countries). without the one Child policy there would have just been more rural population with the same about of land.
China has lower fertility now, but all the previous year's China had fertility rates decently higher than Japan's. They can probably push fertility rate higher than Japan's again in a few years.
I'd just like to leave everyone with a prime dystopian vision since that's what my prognostications always get met with. The "artificial wombs" people talk about are not going to be mechanical devices like the incubators in use today or even elaborate bioreactors used to grow tissues in the lab. They're going to be transgenic animals, most likely pigs. The reason is once you've engineered a pig lineage that can bring a human embryo to term (a monumentally difficult problem, but one that need only be solved once), the marginal cost drops through the floor since it can be endlessly cloned.
The day will come when transgenic pigs carry synthetic human beings to term.
The day will come when transgenic pigs carry synthetic human beings to term.
