Honestly this is not difficult. Even in my 80th decade, sex is fun. And with four children and six grandchildren, the benefits are tangible and obvious. You will never know a love like that you experience when you first hold that little life that you helped create. And the joys keep growing from there. Smart societies encourage families. The make it easy to have families, own homes and raise children. This includes parental leave, programs to ease home ownership and good health care. My older son lives with his wife and 9 month old son in Barcelona. Spain is way ahead of us on health care, parental leave and housing affordability. Let's have a discussion and forget about labels. We can do better.
I agree, Bruce. I think education is the foundation of most of our societal and cultural ills.
If we can revert our education system back to learning - productive and essential subjects only - we gain most of what we need to tackle these big problems.
Social justice teachers must be eliminated and replaced with teachers that know the subject matter and can/will impart that knowledge to our children.
For the record, social justice is forced on teachers, both in the curriculum & office politics. Those who resist get fired or quit. It’s like dealing with Covid. 😢
When those who lied to us about Covid, stealing our liberties and property, are finally punished, I'll know we've finally turned a corner as a just and responsible society.
I just read this post that Robert Malone shared. It shares your (and my) viewpoint on how this nation and its people treated the covid unvaccinated. As a culture we have to face what was done to the covid unvaccinated, how they were scapegoated. And now that move traveled to other social issues, as we often discuss here, such as teachers or doctors who have to teach and spread faulty social ideas or they lose their jobs:
Malone drives them nuts. Not only because he speaks truth but. more to the point, he knows more than the putative "experts:" having invented the very things they bray stupidly about.
All you need to know about the Education system in this country is that the head of the American Federation of Teachers is one Randi Weingarten. A confirmed Marxist, Socialist, and all around wicked/disgusting women who knows NOTHING about education.
It's about 80 marxists to 8 sane people in my district. We even have trouble figuring out who else is "on our side" because the pressure to conform (or to keep quiet) is so intense. 😢. That said, the few sane teachers have tried to organize, but there's very little we can do because admin is obviously well-paid to support the party line.
Yes which reminds me that I’d barely heard of Randi Weingarten until this forum last week and she popped up in my news feeds twice since then: once as an organizer of No Kings and then resigning from the DNC. Why the head of the TEACHERS UNION is in the news for those activities really says all you need to know about how far off track it all is.
According to the Macrotrends site, Spain's birthrate increased slightly in 2024, but is still seventh from the bottom (at 7.74 live births per 1,000 it's ahead of Portugal, Italy, Japan, Puerto Rico, Greece, and South Korea). The U.S. has almost 12 live births per 1,000. Number #1 is impoverished Niger, with over 43 live births per thousand.
What needs to happen is for the AMA to continue to embrace the psychotic bs so that more doctors will shun it and embrace the alternative, reality-based AAMC.
For those with the same advanced case of nerdiness I have, let me recommend (yet another) book: Rules Of The Game by Eigen and Winkler-Oswatich. It’s not new. What it looks at are non-linear systems and how they behave. Here’s a simple example:
There are wolves, rabbits, and cabbage. You start out with, say 100 rabbits, a field of cabbage, and a mating pair of wolves. Wolves eat a few rabbits, so they survive and make a litter of wolf pups. Surviving rabbits, meanwhile, eat a lot of cabbage and make a whole bunch of little rabbits. For the moment, then, more wolves, more rabbits, and a little less cabbage.
But wolves can eat a lot of rabbits, so if wolves start to multiply enough, they’ll eat an increasing fraction of the rabbits, thus lowering their numbers. Now we can get more cabbage.
But now there aren’t enough rabbits to feed the growing number of wolves, so their population starts to decline. Leading to more rabbits and less cabbage.
Rinse and repeat, mutatis mutandis.
Back in the ‘60s, a guy named Jay W. Forrester, then Germeshausen professor of electrical engineering at MIT, realized that even systems as simple as the three-component one I just described can’t be characterized by simple equations. They behave in non-linear ways that defy simple intuitive solutions. If you make systems more complex still, their overall behaviors become literally impossible to describe symbolically. To solve the problem, he devised a way to model system behavior on computers.
They way this works is straightforward: first, figure out whether and, if so, how each piece interacts with each other piece. Then do incremental calculations at successive points in time to find how the system behaves. In the above example, we began with 2 wolves, 100 rabbits, and, say, an acre of cabbage. At the next time point, say, a month later, you still have 2 wolves, one of whom is now pregnant, 95 rabbits, 30 of whom are pregnant, and maybe 99 acres of cabbage. Another month later, 2 wolves, 90 rabbits but 98 acres of cabbage. Another month later, still 2 wolves, but now maybe 200 rabbits, and 93 acres of cabbage. Another month, 4 wolves, 175 rabbits, 89 acres of cabbage. Another month, growing wolves eating even more brings rabbits down to 125, many of whom are pregnant, 80 acres. Next, she-wolf is pregnant again, so are rabbits, now down to 75, cabbage is stable- the field can grow cabbage fast enough to feed 75 rabbits.
The cycles repeat, but not exactly. Too few rabbits, wolves starve. To little cabbage, rabbits starve, and so do wolves, but then cabbage takes off again. Unless all of one thing, wolves/rabbits/cabbage go completely to zero, the system will keep going. And this is for a three-component system. Nothing is that simple in reality.
Forrester then modeled an industry, a city, and finally the world, and wrote successive books about them: Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics, and finally World Dynamics. (Among others.) Software to do these things exists and can be used pretty easily. Lots of variables, though—sometimes hundreds of them. But you get to see how counterintuitive system behavior really is.
What does this have to do with depopulation? Population will come back. Where and when is probably unpredictable at this time. But remember that world population 75 years ago was only about half what it is today. I remember TV announcing 4 billion people. We’re past 8 today. I don’t know why population has started sagging, but it won’t stay sagged very long.
Joe, you explained my much less nerdy comment in a more erudite manner. But we BOTH are pointing to the same dynamic. Things change, people suffer, and then things begin to renew. One other data point is war. War tends to depopulate the masses, as does rampant disease, such as the Black Plague. There are a lot of data points, but the end result is always "Time marches on"!
The comment seems to be buried under an avalanche of other comments. It took me a while to find it, so I copied it for you. 😊 I don’t think it got many likes, so perhaps it was too dismal! Here it is:
I’m going to address the effects of having a declining birth rate. I’ll limit my thoughts to the US, as an “industrialized country” or “world-wide” limit is a lot more difficult to unravel. Also, Joe Horton has presented a complex systems argument for why populations fall and rise, a homeostasis kind of feedback loop that leads to a return to normal pattern which I believe is a good general model, and if you haven’t read it yet, please do.
My concern is about the social effect of a declining birthrate. There are those that preach that over population will result in an environmental disaster and the only thing that can be done is to stop having babies. They’ve been saying this at least since the 1960s and in the early 70s I was taught that the world population would crash due to disease and famine by the turn of the century. They’ve were wrong because they didn’t account for human engineering. Oddly, not everyone was happy that prosperity (and population growth) was spreading, so the tactic changed. We, for the good of the planet, should stop having babies (a typically entitled position implying that people in underdeveloped countries don’t have sense enough to limit their families to two or three children). So, here in the US, our birthrate is rapidly declining. By removing the stigma of going childless, not just environmental activists but non-activists joined the bandwagon. Being childless means more freedom and more money, being able to travel and cultivate a truly lived experience, whatever that means.
There is a downside to individuals who have made this decision (and to those who had this decision made for them by unfortunate fate or circumstance my heart goes out to you). They have lost a chance to experience what truly unqualified love is. Pure love, with no expectations. The joy of giving of yourself just in doing it. They may find unqualified love elsewhere perhaps in religious faith, but given the profile of those that wish for declining population rates, I feel like their faith has probably been placed elsewhere.
They will also miss the lessons of patience and tolerance that raising children gives us. They miss the opportunity to experience some of the hardest moments in life, when your child is sick or injured or hurt by what another child said to them. A parent shares these pains of childhood, an empathy that could break you but you won’t let it because you have to be strong for your child. These are all lessons in selflessness. Obviously not everyone learns from this, but the opportunity is there when you decide to raise a child, and more often than not, a parent becomes a better person and this is beneficial for society. Living a free, childless life can also be beneficial, but note that convents and monasteries require a different set of sacrifices that are analogous to raising a family. For others, the freedom of not having children can lead to a much different outcome, one of self-indulgence, self-righteousness, and narcissism. It’s always challenging to write about generalities because there are always exceptions and I’d love to be able to list each one, but that’s not appropriate in this space.
There remains the societal impacts of falling birth rates. My mind is overwhelmed with scenarios, none of them good. As populations decline, market demand declines which leads to falling prices, that leads to economic slowdown, recession. Tax revenues fall while elderly population increases in proportion to the number of tax paying citizens. This places stress on our already stressed social welfare system. More people retire into poverty. Medicare has to cut services. Everyone has less money to spend leading to more layoffs. Prices are slashed further. Our dollar deflates, which is one of the worst things possible as government debt becomes impossible to refinance with a fatally devalued dollar. Government services collapse and anarchy reigns.
The scariest part is that many of the proponents of anti-natalism want our country to collapse. It’s the only predictable outcome of their philosophy. They hate capitalism and they know one sure way to destroy it. Stop having babies.
Now if only I can cleanse myself of the vision I’ve just created!
I apparently left out the part that you stressed. At the end of the cataclysmic event I hypothesized, our genetic imperative will surely kick in and humans will once again start reproducing as required to sustain the species. The feedback loop I envision has high volatility!
That’s fascinating. It sort of implies however the lower birthrate is because of limited resources. What would those resources be in the equation? Incomes? Number of eligible (i.e., desirable) males? Limited time to start a career? I have no answers, it’s just your post intrigued me.
There are numerous possible factors that aren’t related to scarce resources. There might be purely negative psychological forces operating. There might be something decreasing fertility. Or libido. Hard to know for sure just now. I just strongly suspect that things will rebound. And when they do, they probably will with a vengeance- baby boom 2.0 !
I’ve seen one potential culprit of declining birth rates hung around the neck of micro plastics in the human body causing impotency. Another variable in an ocean of them, with an offsetting mechanism somewhere.
That is something that worries me. Since WWII we have been pouring more and more toxic things into our bodies and into the environment (which ends up affecting our bodies). For a while, there was genuine pushback against pollution, but it seems as if all the organized opposition went off on virtue-signaling tracks that had less to do with pollution and more to do with pet bugbears. As a result, many people dismiss the environmental movement as 'cranks' (and alas, too many of them are). But that has allowed dangerous pollution (like microplastics) to proliferate.
Actually, I have the same fears. I notice that a lot fewer men are hirsute. In fact, it looks like a lot never get beyond peach fuzz stage of facial hair. This suggests some degree of feminization to me. Not sure of the source, but something seems to be turning on estrogen receptors--maybe estrogen.
But there's more going on than meets the eye. Problem with sorting it out is the existence of a lot of junk science. Even after being discredited, Rachel Carson is still believed by groups like the EPA.
Current hipster culture is very weird. Lots of beards, but then they body shave, everywhere. There are electric instruments that can do things with body hair that are downright strange. Go figure.
More and more lately I'm seeing a gathering consensus among young people (many who weren't raised in two-parent homes) that marrying and raising a family is appealingly countercultural, and that there are practical advantages to the nuclear family. There's too much nihilism in the culture. Something's gotta give!
I think delaying childbearing definitely plays a role because people are constantly fed the message kids are hard and expensive and that you have to have everything perfect before you have them. So one waits and then by the time you're ready your fertility (for women) has declined and it's harder to get pregnant.
Hell….Young couples can’t afford housing as it is. How can they afford to have children too?
On the other hand I see couples who make it all work to have both somehow.
It’s a whole different world than when I was growing up where the father was the sole breadwinner and mom stayed at home running the ship. Virtually impossible today.
This is what Data Scientist Stephen Shaw discovered as the primary cause of “unintentional childlessness”: education during peak fertility, and waiting for mythically perfect conditions.
Just tossing it up against the wall here, but the scarce resource may be fertile human females. What percentage of child bearing year females are cut out because:
1) current society has deemed them too young to marry/have kids.
2) birth control usage male and female.
3) insanity of so called "gender confusion".
The "why" for females on birth control could be a big range, but leaving out the why and just focusing on the how many would result in scarcity.
We could probably start a list for males as well, since sperm counts seem to be dropping. Those are probably societal issues (types of food we eat, side effects of all the medication we are on, etc.).
Maybe to your point, Joe, the crazy purple haired feminists, who have decided to be childless, will die off because of course they’re not reproducing themselves. Then we’ll get back to a more conservative world where people are wanting to start families and have children.
Except that this is why they are so determined to indoctrinate other people's children. They refuse to have children of their own, so brainwashing other people's kids is the only way to perpetuate their ideology.
Excellent point! The many conservative and liberal parents that I know aren’t at all interested in telling other parents how to raise their children.
The childless 2 income professional class couples, who treat everyone like children have no qualms about telling others how to think and live their lives.
Yes, well, Darwin ~was~ right. Those who reproduce survive. To Celia's comment below, true, but sooner or later, fundamentally rational people become rational and act that way. Irrational people are lost causes. Might as well argue with furniture.
A big problem though is when the irrational get hold of the reins of govrnment and rule the rational--and when you mix in the $$$ the irrational make as a result, you get rules that can seriously harm a species. Or even wipe it out--what with "wars" of various kinds, including on "health."
I actually see this out in the wild. When I visit a smaller city that is deeply conservative, you see more kids. When I visit larger cities I tend to see much less kids per adult.
Obviously small sample size issues, observational bias, and many other things that make my observations less scientific, but I've noted it many times within the past 10 years or so.
That's a very good point. Community used to be an important thing. One of the unforeseen problems of the internet is that it allowed people to fill their need for socialization without having to participate in the community they physically lived in.
Globalist thinking marginalizes different cultures though they pretend they are uniting or improving upon them. Many primitive cultures (as the nanny staters see them) are happy where they are and are averse to the push toward homogeneity, and also technology and modernization that they deem more detrimental than helpful. The history of humanity is a good lesson to all of us, yet of no importance to the Davos crowd
We gave over our communities to the government by allowing them to unburden us from the task of caring for our communities. Where we once helped the elderly, the poor, and the disabled have been gutted and replaced with forms to fill out to see if you're eligible. The government doesn't want to help you, they want to enslave you.
I have joked several times that Scrooge was right; after he gave a big portion of his money to the government for poor houses and prisons there simply isn't enough left over to be generous.
Don't take me wrong, I am not advocating for a Scrooge lifestyle, but let me tell you...if I was taxed at a reasonable rate I would give more away. I'm not naive; I'd keep more for myself too. But I would be inclined to multiply what I might normally donate.
Yesterday I watched a horrifying video of a young woman in her twenties being run over by a car during the protests in downtown L.A. She'd unwisely attempted to block the car's progress and the driver panicked and accelerated. She slid from the hood and fell to the side and was run over by the right-side tires, resulting in lower-body injuries.
My first thought: in a saner society, this young woman would be at the park with her young children, not wasting her time on the 'revolution'.
You might be being a bit generous in your assessment. I saw that woman and I doubt very much that anyone would really want her for their wife or a mother. Secondly, I don’t know if the driver accelerated accidentally. If it was me, I would’ve been running her over on purpose. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
I suspect that happens all the time. Probably like with humans: amplify good traits and bad ones. Good ones are the alphas. If the mix is bad enough, the offspring die. Evolution kinda works that way.
All I gotta say is that after yet another sleepless night surrounded by idiot neighbors with constantly barking dogs that no county agency is willing to deal with-----I just want them all to go away and NOT re-populate.
That’s truly a nightmare RMW! I am so sorry. That’s truly terrible. Are the neighbors approachable? Does your town have a noise ordinance or nuisance law?
No and no. If I lived in the nearby city there would be, but not out here in the county. What minimal dog/pet laws there are, are not enforced at all. Over the decades we have tried every reasonable tactic and nothing has worked. In fact the problem has only worsened with so many more people moving to this area. We have been invaded with way way too many out of control humans and their dogs.
Better widows/doors ? Maybe a bit of sound-proofing the bedroom?
My house is only 3 yrs old and the widows/doors are all very tight and not much sound penetrates. My husband and I rarely are bothered by noise outdoors... pets, traffic, fireworks, etc.
We have tried everything and we do have to have a fan or background sound on all nite to get any sleep, but one cannot stay locked in one's sealed up house forever and the barking goes on day and nite so even relaxing outside in our yard in the evenings is impossible.
A barking dog is like a crying baby, I cannot stand it. My dogs are inside 99% of the time and still wear their Nomo bark collars because if they see a dog out the window it's like an intruder has entered the house. I am a good neighbor!
I needed new windows to replace the crumby replacement windows some prior owner had slapped onto my c. 1854 house. I bought top-of-the-line Marvins, but while helpful there are some savage noises they're unable to block entirely. And after all, one wants them open in good weather to let in breezes and bird sounds.
Exactly. There is a new dog that came in these past couple of days that has a screechy penetrating, nails across the chalkboard bark. Impossible to completely block out.
Off-topic I know, but it just goes to one of my favorite soapbox issues, which is people and their damn dogs. Maybe it is relevant to this conversation because people treat their dogs like their children instead of actually having children.
Nah, no one puts their cat on a leash to take it to a restaurant, bar, or Home Depot.
Also, cat people don’t demand that you treat their cat as if it’s a toddler whereas I’ve seen that many times with dog people. Especially when they’re pushing them around in a stroller and blocking up sidewalks.
Friends pushed around their 19-year-old dog in a stroller. He was sickly, his head lolled to one side, he was deaf and blind but loved the breeze in his face and was happy. He ate like a little hog.
Where allowed, we'd drive them and the dog to the beach, to a nearby fort, to a not-so-nearby historic house and gardens that have occasional Dog Saturdays. The guy was happy and eventually died quietly.
I'm all for allowing for exceptions although I tend to be a terrible stereotyper, as in, Those f#%s with their lousy boomboxes standing on corners and scratching their cro#%|#s.
We are going through a sort of crisis of conscience right now about our dog. He was headed to a shelter, and we decided that maybe he would be good for us. We live out in the country and have some animals (chickens, other fowl) that need protecting. The dog is a Great Pyrenees.
I knew a few things about the breed: they tend to sleep during the day and are active at night, they are bred to protect a flock, and they wander, they bark a lot, and are excellent escape artists.
We've had him about 3 months, and while he does ok keeping the birds safe overnight, which is why we got him, he does certainly bark almost constantly. This is not a major problem as the closest house is over 2 miles away. But, the wandering! I didn't know that we were getting a neighborhood dog. They've been very tolerant, but he's gone about 14 hours a day and we have no idea where he is. We've tried everything to keep him closer to the house, but he just takes off and at his size there really is nothing that can be done to keep him in our fenced off 2 acres.
We decided last night to try and re-home him, mainly because I don't want to be that neighbor that just doesn't think about others.
Is this dog looking for something he thinks he needs? Maybe bring him into the house at night so he is with you? Dogs are VERY social for the most part. But if that isn't an option, yes, I would rehome him if possible. His "job" of protecting the chickens clearly isn't enough for him. He needs a bond with...something that is meaningful to him. If not the chickens, it would be YOU. Just musing from a dog lover.
He refuses to come inside, and we've done everything we can do to give him some creature comforts. He won't even come close to the door for either fear or dislike of being inside. He's really a sweet dog, great with kids, but if it were my neighbor with a 100lb dog that doesn't respect fencing or boundaries I'd be saying what Rainbow is saying.
When we go outside to sit with him, he may or may not even walk over to us. He seems more like a cat...he just does what he wants. Sweet enough, but just not interested in things. The only thing I can do to get him excited/happy is I give him a hotdog every night. He really looks forward to that.
My wife and I have had dogs our entire life, and he is just an odd one. I even got more interaction/bonding with a Basenji that I owned for 12 years.
It is relevant! I have noticed lately that people seem to have gone dog crazy. I have nothing against dogs, in fact, I like dogs, especially my own. However I don't want to deal with other people's dogs. People bring them everywhere. I see dogs in airports, and on flights, in grocery stores, restaurants, sports stadiums, shopping malls, the bank, high end resorts, beaches, you name it. They are in strollers, in dog handbags, and on, and off leashes. Invariably, when people see a dog they make such a fuss, as if they've never seen a darn dog before. They ooh and aah over strangers' dogs, more than they would ever comment on an infant. I have seen a dog urinate on the carpet in the shoe department at Saks 5th Avenue. I've also witnessed a vicious dog fight inside a convenience store located at a turnpike service station. What is it with this recent trend to bring your dog with you wherever you go? I don't want to be in close proximity to anyone's dog inside the public spaces that I've mentioned above. It's gotten out of control in South Florida. These dog nuts are vey inconsiderate. Are they seeking attention via their dog? There are plenty of idiots willing to oblige. I walk past, ignoring them and their dogs. If eye contact is made, I give them a dirty look as if to say, "Keep your dog away from me!"
I had a funny incident last week. My wife and I were having dinner at a local QSR burrito joint that has a bar. A guy sitting at the bar had his little lap dog with him....in a baby bjorn....on a Monday....at happy hour. I guess there is one fella that isn't going to be contributing to increasing the population any time soon.
My Brooklyn neighborhood has actively become much quieter this past year, and my roses are terrific this week, but a Mamdani mayoralty here is a nauseating proposition. So I'm looking at houses in New England -- at least online -- more seriously again.
But it's always something. A good-looking old house on 11 acres in New Hampshire has as its neighbor a paintball amusement park. I'm not sure what that is, but it can't be good. One anticipates happy screaming. Another is near a school athletic field, and that can only mean loudspeakers and energetic kids running track to rap music. Or some sort of music.
Another has six pickleball courts two houses away. That problem needs no explaining.
When a village house is on half an acre -- one is available in Maine -- it means marijuana smoke and radio music can waft into windows. In Sheepscot last week, a passing car deposited a dense cloud of marijuana along the country road we were strolling and into our lungs. There are at least seven cannabis shops between Bath and Damariscotta, a 25-minute drive.
In coastal villages up and down, from Maine to Delaware and beyond, workers on ladders play their radios loud. And there are always workers on ladders. It goes with the salt air.
I know. It's a trade off which is why we have tolerated the endless barking for over 30 years. But the cacophony has definitely escalated this summer and we are older now and have less tolerance for the unrelenting stress.
Come Block Party Assaults in August, I plan to be out of town as opposed to cowering in a far corner of the basement trying to escape the relentless thundering from gigantic speakers.
Noise pollution is a huge and rather urgent problem.
It can and does drive people nuts.
I was at a KOa campground for a few days last week. What a marvel that so many people parked cheek to jowl could adhere to quiet time after 11 pm. It was amazing.
"Noise pollution . . . can and does drive people nuts."
Probably that's why so many guys in low-slung black BMWs blast through stop signs and mow people down. Or they shoot one another.
Or they go 90mph on the Cross Island looking like fiends. (I know because sometimes I glance in the rear-view mirror to see who's tailgating me, and their dumb faces are bug-eyed masks.)
It's their music. It interferes with rational thought.
Yes definitely damaged with lots of substance abuse. This is where the poor folks who cannot afford high priced housing come with dogs that are not allowed elsewhere. It's how we ended up here. We could not afford anything else in this crazy county. However my compassion for these folks is all used up. I am absolutely dreading the fourth of July as usual because we will have so much illegal really dangerous fireworks for over two weeks and it makes the dogs frantic of course, not to mention the fire danger as we haven't had much rain. I will escape to the mountains as much as possible, but hard to relax.
My compassion is on a thin edge these days too, and it involves living in a neighborhood where the houses are very close together. (I miss my 7 acres in Maine often.) I am struck by how many living in this small suburb have no connection with their neighbors and do not consider how what they do--the noise they make, what they build--impacts their neighbors. It has probably always existed to some extent, but now the social ties are so broken and people are so damaged. The solution of at least some of these "modern" issues has to come from the grassroots, but then there are folks like YOUR neighbors living there too.
Hubby and I no longer even try to connect with the neighbors as there are far too many of them we have had to call the authorities on over the years for one reason or another. The barking dog issue is the most constant stress, but a lot of really scary shit has gone down as well over the years and so we just do not engage. We have maybe three neighbors in this area we can trust to not do crazy shit and we have just lost one of them who was right next door. Hopefully the new neighbor replacing him will be okay, but we aren't counting on it.
Maddening. I had a neighbor once whose dog barked in the middle of the night. It stopped after I told him his dog was waking my husband who really needed his sleep as a physician. I guess my neighbor is respectful.
You are quite lucky. After decades of dealing with this problem and literally trying everything, we don't even waste our time anymore trying to talk with the dozen or so neighbors with problem dogs. They really want their dogs to bark and it doesn't bother them at all.
I have wondered the same thing. Yet they do not seem to be. Literally I have watched these neighbors stand outside next to the frantically barking dog and calmly smoke a cigarette and carry on a conversation with their friends. I have wondered if it is a boundary thing whereby the dog barks for them because they cannot themselves 'bark' and establish their own space. And here's the rub, these dogs are not happy. They are distressed. Endless barking is a sign of anxiety. Not just in my opinion but what many dog experts have pointed out.
Interesting. Makes good sense. Perhaps there is something outside (I assumes the barking dogs are outside) that is causing them stress, and thus the barking. Do the owners feed the dogs ? Is there an outside influence causing the dogs to bark ? I see the makings of a late night investigation.
Oh yeah they bark at every single possible thing both day and nite. Impossible to control the multiple triggers. It's my understanding that most dogs can be trained to only bark at someone entering the property, but these owners are simply not interested in that kind of training at all. They really like their dogs to bark all the time, it makes them feel safe somehow.
Do you have dogs? If not you might want to try an ultrasonic bark deterrent. I haven't used one but a friend said it helped make the neighbor's dog stop barking. I've read that they are perfectly safe and also that they can hurt dog's ears, but it might be worth looking into if you haven't tried one before.
I have looked into that and as you say mixed results. We would probably have to install several at multiple point around the property just on a hope they would work, what hassle, but if we get desperate enough.......
You should think about getting one of these. They can be turned up pretty loud. Loud enough to drown out playing kids while their dad tries to sleep during the day. We have several and love them. The only downside is waking up when the power goes out and it’s suddenly silent.
Hah! Noise ordinances. Sure there are noise ordinances but I think most are there for virtue signaling. Case in point.
Our house in Florida is in a nice older very quiet neighborhood. However, across the park and in another city (as they are all jumbled together anymore) is a bar that has live music OUTSIDE, on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The bandstand faces out. It’s surrounded by mobile homes and I don’t see how they can stand it- maybe they are all profoundly deaf.
Anyway, this other city has a noise ordinance. Hah! Code enforcement is supposed to be the enforcer. They work 9-5 M-F. The bands go from 6-10. Do you think the city would rearrange work schedules? Hah! Surely you jest. The cops are then the enforcers but they don’t carry audiometers. Go to the mayor and council meetings to complain? Hah!
It’s amazing that a hurricane hasn’t taken this place. I pray. I pray.
22 years retired in Arkansas, the dogs and lawn mowers rule, but the Golf was worth it. And actually, Arkansas doesn't seem to have any R&Rs for anything, which is maybe why the people are always waving and smiling at each other, just going along to get along. Now, about those teens and young adults and their muffler-less pickup trucks....
In our deep-blue area, whatever noise ordinances there used to be are no longer enforced. If you call to report a noise complaint, you are told that LE is no longer being dispatched for such things. And with our Soros-funded prosecutor (who was re-elected!), even if there was enforcement, no one would ever be charged.
One day, someone somewhere will figure out that noise pollution is contributing significantly to poor health. But nothing will change.
They already have. See NYT on noise pollution and blood pressure. I sent it to all our politicians re ear-splitting noise from Open Streets.
Now most Open Streets Sundays when the schedule calls for "Live Music" (no, guys, amplification is not artistry), we simply drive off somewhere. Sometimes day trips, often overnights. All our trips are planned to begin on Sundays.
Then again, Sunday at 7:30 AM is a good time to drive out of Brooklyn: no traffic.
A larger question on a declining birth rate is, can we increase births in families without sacrificing the prosperity that so many enjoy? Can we still have two cars and a large home with a swimming pool? Will we be able to subsidize "child care" for families that NEED to have both parents working to pay for all of our "necessities? Yes, there ARE families who bear more than the replacement quota of children, but, by and large, they are NOT the most prosperous families, with only a smattering of exceptions.
Name one country that shares our level of luxury that does NOT have a declining birth rate. I challenge you to tell me!
Do we need artificial wombs so that women can continue to "have it all"? Or perhaps "rent-a-womb" facilities, where poor women get paid to bear other people's children, only to deposit them into a community crèche?
Are we willing to sacrifice? My guess is "NO", we are not!
Yep. I have friends who are surrogates and I will say no matter the cointry they are always women whocare poorer. The rich lady soing it as a nice gesture rarely happens.
I read The Genius of Israel when it first came out. Dan Senor does a podcast as well called: Call Me Back, which is outstanding. The book is excellent. It really explains why Israel is such an amazing place. The author walks through the various soft institutions that are in place in Israel that bind the society together.
Recently, I joined a discussion on Leslie Elliot Boyce's The Radical Center in response to how most of the women on the panel wound up childless.
Each claimed that they were afraid to 'risk it' with the men with whom they'd had relationships/marriages.
A channel called Manosphere Highlights clipped my talk with Leslie. The commenters all blamed me for being childless, because I "chose to ride the hot dog carousel in (my) 20s," hence squandering most of my fertility window (which is likely the case with the women mentioned above.)
I reached out to Manosphere, and they gave me the opportunity to expand on my story / perspective in a video.
I won't be sending them the first video I made, in which I summarize my relationships with men over the past few decades.
In my talk with Leslie, I cite the Sexual Revolution as part of the cause of rising childlessness. That and feminist tenets that claim a woman is 'so much more than' a mother. Feminist tenets that degrade motherhood -- the message I imbibed in my 20s, despite wanting to have children since before puberty.
I was in my 20s in the 80s, when the push for women to work, and put off motherhood and family went into full swing. It seems to me that the entire culture of dating towards marriage was thrown out. Now you could live together -- and protract the single life -- indefinitely...
Anyway, when I listened to the drafted video I made for Manosphere Highlights, it was a litany of FECKLESS MEN with whom I would not risk getting pregnant.
However, most of these men were victims of parents who jumped on the divorce bandwagon in the 70s; my ex-husband had been abandoned in a bar in Denmark when he was 12 -- left to the care of strangers -- so his father could chase after some woman in Sweden.
Many of the men with whom I had relationships never married or had children. I was involved with a man from my late 30s into my mid 40s who told me at the outset that not only did he not want children, he would never live with a woman either. There was much I appreciated about him (plus I was lonely) so I went with the flow...
One boyfriend, as I recall, was so utterly crippled by his father running off to become an artist (downsizing their affluence considerably -- he had been a lawyer, previously....this is an old WASP family) that he could hardly function at all. He just lay in bed all day.
Another boyfriend died a death of despair during the COVID debacle. His wife had the high-powered career -- it seemed to have emasculated him -- however I noticed, when he was MY boyfriend, a strident lack of ambition that may have been brought on by HIS father abandoning the family -- that's why I didn't want him...
I had another boyfriend who won awards for poetry, including an NEA grant, who was bitter as the day is long about the no-white-men hiring practices in academia...he wound up married to a career academic -- while he floundered....and died young.
So what I realized is that there will always be the rats that make it out of the maze, but most get stuck in it. With a reigning narrative to protract adolescence as long as possible, to please one's self, to find one's "own happiness," that family is drudgery, and so on...
The narrative needs to change. It's too late for me, but I plan to do my share to change it, at least, for future generations.
Regardless, it's increasingly difficult to get married and have children in this culture. Both sexes need to drop the 'me first' edict. But how...
I graduated HS in 1989, but I think *some* difference can be attributed to my Catholic upbringing. However, to your point, we were encouraged to get married and have families, but we also had the larger societal pressures of having a career placed on us.
Divorce was/is a big part of the problem. When it’s relatively easy to leave someone, it makes your situation less stable, and therefore people are less likely to bring a child into an unstable situation. Plus, as children of divorce, we learned that as a woman, you need to have a back up plan to support yourself. Hence the big push for careers for women.
All of those words to say people need to understand commitment. Lack of commitment is one part of this problem.
There doesn't seem to be a declining birthrate in the Hispanic culture, nor in the African American culture. Appears to be prominent in what in the past would be the WASP culture.
You've hit the nail on the head--the primary cause of a hesitation to marry and have children is the messaging that's been playing on our cultural loudspeakers since the 1970s: that it's all about "me." That the *only* thing we ought to care about is our own happiness, and that the only way to be happy is pursue money and pleasure. Preferably without any connections that can't be easily broken the moment we want to go in a new direction.
There is nothing in our culture that argues against that path for adult life except religion, which has been pushed further and further onto the sidelines as antiquated, restrictive, and even (in the minds of many progressives) evil.
Good point. As we move more and more into a post-religion world the side effects are becoming evident in many areas. Not prioritizing marriage and family seems to be one of these effects.
Well said Celia. It's a big change from the culture in which I grew up. I graduated high school in 1963--and gender roles were VERY set at that time. Men worked and women raised the babies, etc. A man who changed a diaper was...not manly. One of the good things about feminism that I loved is that these roles got a bit changed, so that both genders had more balance. Men didn't have the full weight of providing and could help nurture and physically take cre of their own children and women could have some outside paying jobs, not just community work. Both of my sons grew up in this more balanced arrangement and were and are actively involved with their children, though both also carry more of the providing weight. It's so sad to me that our culture has now moved to the insanity about genders--in work and in actual composition of what is a gender. The culture is floundering and all the adults are forced to work full jobs--or they think they have to in order to have "things" and to keep up. Meanwhile, the children are being...lost, addicted to cell phones, etc.
The more from you I read, Dog, the more I like. It’s the blend of superb writing, astute thinking, sane politics; and, this time, more of the fascinating biographical details you’re not afraid to share.
In my opinion, a big part of the reason people end up mateless, hence childless, is the advice not to “settle.” The perfect is the enemy of the good. And, having been married more than once and now with another girlfriend (fingers crossed), I’ve learned from bitter experience that lasting relationships require compromise. They do something annoying, let it go. Don’t sweat the small stuff - and almost everything is small. Look at the bigger picture. Do your part to try another way of relating. Meet him/her halfway. By all means, communicate rather than suffer, or assume, in silence! Learn what shoes he or she is wearing at the time of dispute, and put yourself in those shoes to achieve awareness and empathy.
I think we’re in an era where people shy from confrontation on a personal level, so they fail to communicate for fear of rejection or inflaming the situation. It happened to me. This can result in a deteriorating relationship. Divorce has become too easy, too routine, so people get one foot out the door instead of hanging in for the tough work of finding ways to stay together. After all, at one point the two of you were exchanging “I love you’s” all the time.
This has been a litany of platitudes and “Dear Abby” advice, but it’s also my so-called accumulated wisdom. FWIW.
I'm approaching 40 years of marriage to the same woman and I can vouch for your advice. Although I have to admit by marrying the very nearly perfect woman I've had to compromise a hell of a lot less than her.
Thanks, Mark. I very much appreciate your appreciation.
The issue with cutting and running when things get difficult plays a significant role in our fractured society. Say, putting off having kids with a spouse, then deciding one isn't "happy," then leaving for someone 'better' and not finding him until UVF time, if one is lucky...
We have to address the problem of health in the US to resolve some of the issues of declining birth rates. Fertility rates are declining and I believe our diets and some vaccines are a detriment to our birth rates. A healthy body and mind is a good start.
That doesn’t account for the one million abortions every year. Although those abortions do likely account for lost fertility of those getting the abortions.
And all the toxic chemical we spray everywhere and on everything. We need to rethink "germ" hysteria, the spots on an apple peel, and our need to kill all insects with toxic sprays that, yes, also harm US. And...plastics.
I think one thing that could help would be if popular culture venerated larger families again. I'm Gen X, so I grew up watching the Brady Bunch, the Partridge Family, Eight is Enough, etc. All these shows made it seem like fun to have a big family. Now, if there are big families, they are grotesque, like the Duggars.
That said, I don't think we should aim to simply encourage more births. We should only do it if the would-be parents are capable, married, and likely to produce children who grow into self-sufficient adults. We already have a generation of young, able-bodied adults who don't work and are on Medicaid.
I don't see why it has to be destroyed underground. Couldn't access be destroyed at surface level? I mean, there are roads and entrances, right? Just seal it up.
I guess it's because blocked roads can always be unblocked. I'd like to see that particular vampire get a stake through its heart. It's not enough to seal the tomb. If we don't come through with our bombs, no doubt Israel will do as you suggest, or try to sneak saboteurs in, but . . . .
A comment on today’s Jupplandia (another brilliant analysis of Tucker vs Trump) “Richard North has a supportive post today entitled “Israel’s job is not over until Iranian nuclear sites are smouldering ruins”. He describes how Israel may be able to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities by repeated strikes with their own precision-guided 5,000 pound bunker bomb.”
That would avoid us getting directly involved with our B-2 dropping MOABs.
Israel has repeatedly stated on X that it can destroy Fordow, this is part of the plan. It may take longer than the bunker buster, but it can be achieved.
What bothers me more about Tucker is the veiled anti-Semitism that infuses his rants. Very disappointed in a guy I used to admire. But this is never usually new. just always lurking beneath the surface.
TFP printed an essay by British historian Andrew Roberts saying now is the unique, Churchillian moment to strike hard with a bunker-buster. But will Trump seize the moment? I think he will. The naysayers are wringing their hands to say it would put our troops in the region at risk from missile attacks, but I wonder. Besides, some crockery may need to be broken for the greater good of avoiding a nuclear-armed Iran.
The biggest problem with Trump is his inability to articulate and in a simple way, why stuff needs to be done. Like why do we not want a nuclear Iran. Like why we have to have a closed border and deport every illegal not just the criminals.
He rambles, repeats and then gets combative with the idiot media. And then the message is lost.
Maybe but he’s clearly smart enough to not play so stupid. And by not crisply and simply explaining why things are being done, he allows the leftist/media/DeMS13s to set the narrative. It’s so effing frustrating.
IMO, this is a spiritual problem probably with a dab of physical health fertility decline, not a financial one. When we focus on paid leave and paid childcare we suggest that you need to be compensated for having children, implying that it is a sacrifice. When you promote the idea that sex has nothing to do with marriage or children you imply that marriage and children are a constraint.
Young people are given very little idea of the joy of family. If we can reignite the importance and nobility of marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood, the financial side is a by-product, not the feature.
One theme I keep hearing over and over again these days is what a sacrifice it is to have children and that children are a burden, both financially, and on your time. It doesn’t have to be this way folks.
I experienced nothing in your first sentence and everything in the second.
If you raise much of your own food and raise your kids to help you do it, the expense and the stress go away and rather than constrain life's choices, it becomes life choice
We raised three kids in spite of being poor. And I never wanted to make life choices that didn't include them.
But stressful, I will admit. Not unbearably so. But being responsible for the care and instruction of a child is undeniably stressful. Many joys make up for the stress. But you never stop worrying, even when they are grown and gone.
Try explaining that to an eighteen-year-old, perhaps one who has never seen a happy family.
A flat-line EKG shows no stress. There is nothing worth accomplishing in life that comes without hard work and accompanying stress. Paradoxically, doing nothing and trying to avoid stress is less healthy, satisfying, and joy-inducing than being willing to work hard for something meaningful.
One additional facet has to be the cheap/free/easy access to porn. On the one hand (pardon the pun) it provides an easy release... on the other hand it sets ridiculous expectations for all parties. Combine these two and any potential relationship that might have produced children is nipped in the bud.
Now think about female robots with embedded AI that are no doubt under development. We may already have them, I suppose. I don't keep up with what's current in the sex trade.
We are going to have to solve this problem somehow.
My 32 yo daughter has a high school friend group of 9 ladies. All but two are married, 3 are pregnant now 4 already have babies. One is getting married in a month and plans to have children. The other one is trying hard to find a man. I have hope!
Hope for the future, a future full of hope. When I had my babies I was full of hope for a bright and happy life. It never occurred to me that giving my love, time and resources was a sacrifice. I waited a very loong time for it to be my turn. Patience paid off.
• In most developed societies, birth rates are inversely proportional to prosperity. Greater affluence means less need for children to work.
• Declining population probably enhances the potential of AI. Somebody's got to do the manual labor.
• Declining population – and growing affluence – offers a "natural" solution to human-induced global warming. Frankly, it appears that with peak population almost here (perhaps as soon as the next decade) the climate cult may have to find some other cause to whine about (NB. Greta T already has).
• The impact on GNP is a bit more murky. Productivity almost certainly goes up, but intuitively economic activity decreases (though probably not per capita).
• The biggest impact of peak population is the dramatic change in the demographic distribution by age and country. In the developed world, peak age has shifted and continues to shift older. The developing world is already much younger, but with less affluence continues to churn out the children.
• As we're already seeing, the economies of "aged nations" differs from their younger counterparts. The demand for health care services and products is much greater. This may set up a feedback loop that means the elderly live even longer, pushing the average age of the population even higher.
• This begs the question - "Are the elderly in danger of outliving their savings?" Sadly, the answer for most of the Baby Boomers is yes.
Before we consider whether to "cure" (more babies) or to mitigate, I think we have to ask - "What's the problem?" - or maybe - "Which problem do we tackle first?"
Or at least to be doing something productive. I think humans, in general, want to feel like they are accomplishing something. Video games are a fake way of fulfilling that need to feel like they've done something.
Honestly this is not difficult. Even in my 80th decade, sex is fun. And with four children and six grandchildren, the benefits are tangible and obvious. You will never know a love like that you experience when you first hold that little life that you helped create. And the joys keep growing from there. Smart societies encourage families. The make it easy to have families, own homes and raise children. This includes parental leave, programs to ease home ownership and good health care. My older son lives with his wife and 9 month old son in Barcelona. Spain is way ahead of us on health care, parental leave and housing affordability. Let's have a discussion and forget about labels. We can do better.
I agree, Bruce. I think education is the foundation of most of our societal and cultural ills.
If we can revert our education system back to learning - productive and essential subjects only - we gain most of what we need to tackle these big problems.
Social justice teachers must be eliminated and replaced with teachers that know the subject matter and can/will impart that knowledge to our children.
Knowledge is strength and power.
For the record, social justice is forced on teachers, both in the curriculum & office politics. Those who resist get fired or quit. It’s like dealing with Covid. 😢
When those who lied to us about Covid, stealing our liberties and property, are finally punished, I'll know we've finally turned a corner as a just and responsible society.
I just read this post that Robert Malone shared. It shares your (and my) viewpoint on how this nation and its people treated the covid unvaccinated. As a culture we have to face what was done to the covid unvaccinated, how they were scapegoated. And now that move traveled to other social issues, as we often discuss here, such as teachers or doctors who have to teach and spread faulty social ideas or they lose their jobs:
https://open.substack.com/pub/reportfromplanetearth/p/vindication-for-the-unvaccinated?r=a3dgf&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Malone drives them nuts. Not only because he speaks truth but. more to the point, he knows more than the putative "experts:" having invented the very things they bray stupidly about.
Didn't RFK, Jr appoint him to the vaccine board?
Then the teachers need to revolt.... they have representation .... change it!
Randi - the horrendous harridan.
She quit the DNC....which I am not sure what it says about either party (DNC or Randi G.)
I just commented on that fact. How does her activism relate to education? Sad
All you need to know about the Education system in this country is that the head of the American Federation of Teachers is one Randi Weingarten. A confirmed Marxist, Socialist, and all around wicked/disgusting women who knows NOTHING about education.
It's about 80 marxists to 8 sane people in my district. We even have trouble figuring out who else is "on our side" because the pressure to conform (or to keep quiet) is so intense. 😢. That said, the few sane teachers have tried to organize, but there's very little we can do because admin is obviously well-paid to support the party line.
You are correct! The pressure to conform in most school districts is intense.
Yes which reminds me that I’d barely heard of Randi Weingarten until this forum last week and she popped up in my news feeds twice since then: once as an organizer of No Kings and then resigning from the DNC. Why the head of the TEACHERS UNION is in the news for those activities really says all you need to know about how far off track it all is.
Doesn't Spain still have a declining birthrate?
Probably. Western Europeans have lost their minds. Probably why they give the Hungarians such a hard time.
According to the Macrotrends site, Spain's birthrate increased slightly in 2024, but is still seventh from the bottom (at 7.74 live births per 1,000 it's ahead of Portugal, Italy, Japan, Puerto Rico, Greece, and South Korea). The U.S. has almost 12 live births per 1,000. Number #1 is impoverished Niger, with over 43 live births per thousand.
80th decade? Unless you're biblically old I think you meant 8th decade. ;-)
Good catch. Call me Methusalah? ( I won't fix it!)
Methuselah Miller has a nice alliteration.
Barcelona is one of my favorite cities, boasting a rich heritage and excellent cuisine.
I envy him.
80th decade? Holy stuff!
Off topic, but was in today’s Journal of Higher Education
Gee, ya think? Now do law schools!
https://www.chronicle.com/article/medical-school-has-gotten-too-political
There’s now increasing pressure on medical schools to cut the bs. They’re starting to buckle—a good thing.
Thank God!
What needs to happen is for the AMA to continue to embrace the psychotic bs so that more doctors will shun it and embrace the alternative, reality-based AAMC.
For those with the same advanced case of nerdiness I have, let me recommend (yet another) book: Rules Of The Game by Eigen and Winkler-Oswatich. It’s not new. What it looks at are non-linear systems and how they behave. Here’s a simple example:
There are wolves, rabbits, and cabbage. You start out with, say 100 rabbits, a field of cabbage, and a mating pair of wolves. Wolves eat a few rabbits, so they survive and make a litter of wolf pups. Surviving rabbits, meanwhile, eat a lot of cabbage and make a whole bunch of little rabbits. For the moment, then, more wolves, more rabbits, and a little less cabbage.
But wolves can eat a lot of rabbits, so if wolves start to multiply enough, they’ll eat an increasing fraction of the rabbits, thus lowering their numbers. Now we can get more cabbage.
But now there aren’t enough rabbits to feed the growing number of wolves, so their population starts to decline. Leading to more rabbits and less cabbage.
Rinse and repeat, mutatis mutandis.
Back in the ‘60s, a guy named Jay W. Forrester, then Germeshausen professor of electrical engineering at MIT, realized that even systems as simple as the three-component one I just described can’t be characterized by simple equations. They behave in non-linear ways that defy simple intuitive solutions. If you make systems more complex still, their overall behaviors become literally impossible to describe symbolically. To solve the problem, he devised a way to model system behavior on computers.
They way this works is straightforward: first, figure out whether and, if so, how each piece interacts with each other piece. Then do incremental calculations at successive points in time to find how the system behaves. In the above example, we began with 2 wolves, 100 rabbits, and, say, an acre of cabbage. At the next time point, say, a month later, you still have 2 wolves, one of whom is now pregnant, 95 rabbits, 30 of whom are pregnant, and maybe 99 acres of cabbage. Another month later, 2 wolves, 90 rabbits but 98 acres of cabbage. Another month later, still 2 wolves, but now maybe 200 rabbits, and 93 acres of cabbage. Another month, 4 wolves, 175 rabbits, 89 acres of cabbage. Another month, growing wolves eating even more brings rabbits down to 125, many of whom are pregnant, 80 acres. Next, she-wolf is pregnant again, so are rabbits, now down to 75, cabbage is stable- the field can grow cabbage fast enough to feed 75 rabbits.
The cycles repeat, but not exactly. Too few rabbits, wolves starve. To little cabbage, rabbits starve, and so do wolves, but then cabbage takes off again. Unless all of one thing, wolves/rabbits/cabbage go completely to zero, the system will keep going. And this is for a three-component system. Nothing is that simple in reality.
Forrester then modeled an industry, a city, and finally the world, and wrote successive books about them: Industrial Dynamics, Urban Dynamics, and finally World Dynamics. (Among others.) Software to do these things exists and can be used pretty easily. Lots of variables, though—sometimes hundreds of them. But you get to see how counterintuitive system behavior really is.
What does this have to do with depopulation? Population will come back. Where and when is probably unpredictable at this time. But remember that world population 75 years ago was only about half what it is today. I remember TV announcing 4 billion people. We’re past 8 today. I don’t know why population has started sagging, but it won’t stay sagged very long.
I’m amazed—and heartened—that anyone reads my posts.
Thanks, guys.
Joe, you explained my much less nerdy comment in a more erudite manner. But we BOTH are pointing to the same dynamic. Things change, people suffer, and then things begin to renew. One other data point is war. War tends to depopulate the masses, as does rampant disease, such as the Black Plague. There are a lot of data points, but the end result is always "Time marches on"!
This nerd will get the book!
When you get a chance, please read my comment I just posted. It contains a reference to your post, a post that I thought was excellent.
I can't find it, John. Did you post it under a different name?
If you’re looking chronologically it’s posted around 9:30 am.
On this blog? Or elsewhere?
The comment seems to be buried under an avalanche of other comments. It took me a while to find it, so I copied it for you. 😊 I don’t think it got many likes, so perhaps it was too dismal! Here it is:
I’m going to address the effects of having a declining birth rate. I’ll limit my thoughts to the US, as an “industrialized country” or “world-wide” limit is a lot more difficult to unravel. Also, Joe Horton has presented a complex systems argument for why populations fall and rise, a homeostasis kind of feedback loop that leads to a return to normal pattern which I believe is a good general model, and if you haven’t read it yet, please do.
My concern is about the social effect of a declining birthrate. There are those that preach that over population will result in an environmental disaster and the only thing that can be done is to stop having babies. They’ve been saying this at least since the 1960s and in the early 70s I was taught that the world population would crash due to disease and famine by the turn of the century. They’ve were wrong because they didn’t account for human engineering. Oddly, not everyone was happy that prosperity (and population growth) was spreading, so the tactic changed. We, for the good of the planet, should stop having babies (a typically entitled position implying that people in underdeveloped countries don’t have sense enough to limit their families to two or three children). So, here in the US, our birthrate is rapidly declining. By removing the stigma of going childless, not just environmental activists but non-activists joined the bandwagon. Being childless means more freedom and more money, being able to travel and cultivate a truly lived experience, whatever that means.
There is a downside to individuals who have made this decision (and to those who had this decision made for them by unfortunate fate or circumstance my heart goes out to you). They have lost a chance to experience what truly unqualified love is. Pure love, with no expectations. The joy of giving of yourself just in doing it. They may find unqualified love elsewhere perhaps in religious faith, but given the profile of those that wish for declining population rates, I feel like their faith has probably been placed elsewhere.
They will also miss the lessons of patience and tolerance that raising children gives us. They miss the opportunity to experience some of the hardest moments in life, when your child is sick or injured or hurt by what another child said to them. A parent shares these pains of childhood, an empathy that could break you but you won’t let it because you have to be strong for your child. These are all lessons in selflessness. Obviously not everyone learns from this, but the opportunity is there when you decide to raise a child, and more often than not, a parent becomes a better person and this is beneficial for society. Living a free, childless life can also be beneficial, but note that convents and monasteries require a different set of sacrifices that are analogous to raising a family. For others, the freedom of not having children can lead to a much different outcome, one of self-indulgence, self-righteousness, and narcissism. It’s always challenging to write about generalities because there are always exceptions and I’d love to be able to list each one, but that’s not appropriate in this space.
There remains the societal impacts of falling birth rates. My mind is overwhelmed with scenarios, none of them good. As populations decline, market demand declines which leads to falling prices, that leads to economic slowdown, recession. Tax revenues fall while elderly population increases in proportion to the number of tax paying citizens. This places stress on our already stressed social welfare system. More people retire into poverty. Medicare has to cut services. Everyone has less money to spend leading to more layoffs. Prices are slashed further. Our dollar deflates, which is one of the worst things possible as government debt becomes impossible to refinance with a fatally devalued dollar. Government services collapse and anarchy reigns.
The scariest part is that many of the proponents of anti-natalism want our country to collapse. It’s the only predictable outcome of their philosophy. They hate capitalism and they know one sure way to destroy it. Stop having babies.
Now if only I can cleanse myself of the vision I’ve just created!
I apparently left out the part that you stressed. At the end of the cataclysmic event I hypothesized, our genetic imperative will surely kick in and humans will once again start reproducing as required to sustain the species. The feedback loop I envision has high volatility!
So my solution to your conundrum is to string up all the mammals like Edison did that elephant and let the electric engineer shock them to death
That's a horrifying video. If it's the same elephant, the electrocution is featured in Ric Burns's documentary "Coney Island."
(In many ways, Ric is better than Ken. His "New York" series has me bawling at times.)
That’s fascinating. It sort of implies however the lower birthrate is because of limited resources. What would those resources be in the equation? Incomes? Number of eligible (i.e., desirable) males? Limited time to start a career? I have no answers, it’s just your post intrigued me.
There are numerous possible factors that aren’t related to scarce resources. There might be purely negative psychological forces operating. There might be something decreasing fertility. Or libido. Hard to know for sure just now. I just strongly suspect that things will rebound. And when they do, they probably will with a vengeance- baby boom 2.0 !
I’ve seen one potential culprit of declining birth rates hung around the neck of micro plastics in the human body causing impotency. Another variable in an ocean of them, with an offsetting mechanism somewhere.
That is something that worries me. Since WWII we have been pouring more and more toxic things into our bodies and into the environment (which ends up affecting our bodies). For a while, there was genuine pushback against pollution, but it seems as if all the organized opposition went off on virtue-signaling tracks that had less to do with pollution and more to do with pet bugbears. As a result, many people dismiss the environmental movement as 'cranks' (and alas, too many of them are). But that has allowed dangerous pollution (like microplastics) to proliferate.
Actually, I have the same fears. I notice that a lot fewer men are hirsute. In fact, it looks like a lot never get beyond peach fuzz stage of facial hair. This suggests some degree of feminization to me. Not sure of the source, but something seems to be turning on estrogen receptors--maybe estrogen.
But there's more going on than meets the eye. Problem with sorting it out is the existence of a lot of junk science. Even after being discredited, Rachel Carson is still believed by groups like the EPA.
Go figure.
Current hipster culture is very weird. Lots of beards, but then they body shave, everywhere. There are electric instruments that can do things with body hair that are downright strange. Go figure.
🎯🎯🎯🎯
More and more lately I'm seeing a gathering consensus among young people (many who weren't raised in two-parent homes) that marrying and raising a family is appealingly countercultural, and that there are practical advantages to the nuclear family. There's too much nihilism in the culture. Something's gotta give!
I think delaying childbearing definitely plays a role because people are constantly fed the message kids are hard and expensive and that you have to have everything perfect before you have them. So one waits and then by the time you're ready your fertility (for women) has declined and it's harder to get pregnant.
PJ, I agree with you. I think delayed childbearing due to women’s career aspirations is a big part of the problem.
I agree too. I had my two early. I like to say before I knew better. When they became teens I didn't want any more.
A form of Bread and Circus? Have MORE due to working a job rather than building a family on less money?
I agree with this. Combine it with the online dating scene which has messed up a whole generation of people who no longer know how to interact IRL.
Hell….Young couples can’t afford housing as it is. How can they afford to have children too?
On the other hand I see couples who make it all work to have both somehow.
It’s a whole different world than when I was growing up where the father was the sole breadwinner and mom stayed at home running the ship. Virtually impossible today.
This is what Data Scientist Stephen Shaw discovered as the primary cause of “unintentional childlessness”: education during peak fertility, and waiting for mythically perfect conditions.
Just tossing it up against the wall here, but the scarce resource may be fertile human females. What percentage of child bearing year females are cut out because:
1) current society has deemed them too young to marry/have kids.
2) birth control usage male and female.
3) insanity of so called "gender confusion".
The "why" for females on birth control could be a big range, but leaving out the why and just focusing on the how many would result in scarcity.
We could probably start a list for males as well, since sperm counts seem to be dropping. Those are probably societal issues (types of food we eat, side effects of all the medication we are on, etc.).
Fascinating post, thanks Joe.
Maybe to your point, Joe, the crazy purple haired feminists, who have decided to be childless, will die off because of course they’re not reproducing themselves. Then we’ll get back to a more conservative world where people are wanting to start families and have children.
Except that this is why they are so determined to indoctrinate other people's children. They refuse to have children of their own, so brainwashing other people's kids is the only way to perpetuate their ideology.
Devious bastards.
Excellent point! The many conservative and liberal parents that I know aren’t at all interested in telling other parents how to raise their children.
The childless 2 income professional class couples, who treat everyone like children have no qualms about telling others how to think and live their lives.
Yes, well, Darwin ~was~ right. Those who reproduce survive. To Celia's comment below, true, but sooner or later, fundamentally rational people become rational and act that way. Irrational people are lost causes. Might as well argue with furniture.
Darwin has a consequence for irrational people.
A big problem though is when the irrational get hold of the reins of govrnment and rule the rational--and when you mix in the $$$ the irrational make as a result, you get rules that can seriously harm a species. Or even wipe it out--what with "wars" of various kinds, including on "health."
Pretty sure my vegan sofa is smarter than the purple haired people. 😂
Lucky you. My damn couch is definitely radical left. It’s about to move to the curb soon.
I actually see this out in the wild. When I visit a smaller city that is deeply conservative, you see more kids. When I visit larger cities I tend to see much less kids per adult.
Obviously small sample size issues, observational bias, and many other things that make my observations less scientific, but I've noted it many times within the past 10 years or so.
We are, as humans, probably more comfortable in small tribes. Modernity and technology has seriously dented that method of living.
That's a very good point. Community used to be an important thing. One of the unforeseen problems of the internet is that it allowed people to fill their need for socialization without having to participate in the community they physically lived in.
Globalist thinking marginalizes different cultures though they pretend they are uniting or improving upon them. Many primitive cultures (as the nanny staters see them) are happy where they are and are averse to the push toward homogeneity, and also technology and modernization that they deem more detrimental than helpful. The history of humanity is a good lesson to all of us, yet of no importance to the Davos crowd
We gave over our communities to the government by allowing them to unburden us from the task of caring for our communities. Where we once helped the elderly, the poor, and the disabled have been gutted and replaced with forms to fill out to see if you're eligible. The government doesn't want to help you, they want to enslave you.
I have joked several times that Scrooge was right; after he gave a big portion of his money to the government for poor houses and prisons there simply isn't enough left over to be generous.
Don't take me wrong, I am not advocating for a Scrooge lifestyle, but let me tell you...if I was taxed at a reasonable rate I would give more away. I'm not naive; I'd keep more for myself too. But I would be inclined to multiply what I might normally donate.
so true Celia
When I lived in San Francisco, I'd only see children while walking home from work through Chinatown.
The sword of Darwin.
Either that or the West turns Muslim.
Yesterday I watched a horrifying video of a young woman in her twenties being run over by a car during the protests in downtown L.A. She'd unwisely attempted to block the car's progress and the driver panicked and accelerated. She slid from the hood and fell to the side and was run over by the right-side tires, resulting in lower-body injuries.
My first thought: in a saner society, this young woman would be at the park with her young children, not wasting her time on the 'revolution'.
You might be being a bit generous in your assessment. I saw that woman and I doubt very much that anyone would really want her for their wife or a mother. Secondly, I don’t know if the driver accelerated accidentally. If it was me, I would’ve been running her over on purpose. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
The darker part of me didn’t not enjoy it. How’s that for a double negative?
All these angry young women who were first row last year in the campus protests…
I could not find the words, but you did. Thanks.
In your example I worry about sibling wolves mating with damaged offspring.
But somehow I’m sure his model accounts for this.
But overall, yes.
I agree with the thesis.
Eb and flow.
Self correcting.
I suspect that happens all the time. Probably like with humans: amplify good traits and bad ones. Good ones are the alphas. If the mix is bad enough, the offspring die. Evolution kinda works that way.
🎯🎯
So interesting Joe Horton.
Fascinating, thank you!
All I gotta say is that after yet another sleepless night surrounded by idiot neighbors with constantly barking dogs that no county agency is willing to deal with-----I just want them all to go away and NOT re-populate.
That’s truly a nightmare RMW! I am so sorry. That’s truly terrible. Are the neighbors approachable? Does your town have a noise ordinance or nuisance law?
No and no. If I lived in the nearby city there would be, but not out here in the county. What minimal dog/pet laws there are, are not enforced at all. Over the decades we have tried every reasonable tactic and nothing has worked. In fact the problem has only worsened with so many more people moving to this area. We have been invaded with way way too many out of control humans and their dogs.
Better widows/doors ? Maybe a bit of sound-proofing the bedroom?
My house is only 3 yrs old and the widows/doors are all very tight and not much sound penetrates. My husband and I rarely are bothered by noise outdoors... pets, traffic, fireworks, etc.
We have tried everything and we do have to have a fan or background sound on all nite to get any sleep, but one cannot stay locked in one's sealed up house forever and the barking goes on day and nite so even relaxing outside in our yard in the evenings is impossible.
I hear you. I moved to more land. I still have neighbors with barking dogs, they are just farther away and luckily, not day and night.
Same here, Rain. What I wonder about is how the owners of the dogs stand it, even up closer.
A barking dog is like a crying baby, I cannot stand it. My dogs are inside 99% of the time and still wear their Nomo bark collars because if they see a dog out the window it's like an intruder has entered the house. I am a good neighbor!
I thank you and fervently wish you were my neighbor!
I needed new windows to replace the crumby replacement windows some prior owner had slapped onto my c. 1854 house. I bought top-of-the-line Marvins, but while helpful there are some savage noises they're unable to block entirely. And after all, one wants them open in good weather to let in breezes and bird sounds.
Exactly. There is a new dog that came in these past couple of days that has a screechy penetrating, nails across the chalkboard bark. Impossible to completely block out.
Off-topic I know, but it just goes to one of my favorite soapbox issues, which is people and their damn dogs. Maybe it is relevant to this conversation because people treat their dogs like their children instead of actually having children.
Or having cats.
Hey watch it. I have cats.
Easy there Barry, my Percy doesn’t bark all the time or stick his wet nose where it isn’t wanted.
Nah, no one puts their cat on a leash to take it to a restaurant, bar, or Home Depot.
Also, cat people don’t demand that you treat their cat as if it’s a toddler whereas I’ve seen that many times with dog people. Especially when they’re pushing them around in a stroller and blocking up sidewalks.
That I agree with. Yet, I see cat people treat their cats as children.
Friends pushed around their 19-year-old dog in a stroller. He was sickly, his head lolled to one side, he was deaf and blind but loved the breeze in his face and was happy. He ate like a little hog.
Where allowed, we'd drive them and the dog to the beach, to a nearby fort, to a not-so-nearby historic house and gardens that have occasional Dog Saturdays. The guy was happy and eventually died quietly.
I'm all for allowing for exceptions although I tend to be a terrible stereotyper, as in, Those f#%s with their lousy boomboxes standing on corners and scratching their cro#%|#s.
Not true .... I had an employee who would take her cat for walks around town in a stroller - even to Walmart .... they let her!
We are going through a sort of crisis of conscience right now about our dog. He was headed to a shelter, and we decided that maybe he would be good for us. We live out in the country and have some animals (chickens, other fowl) that need protecting. The dog is a Great Pyrenees.
I knew a few things about the breed: they tend to sleep during the day and are active at night, they are bred to protect a flock, and they wander, they bark a lot, and are excellent escape artists.
We've had him about 3 months, and while he does ok keeping the birds safe overnight, which is why we got him, he does certainly bark almost constantly. This is not a major problem as the closest house is over 2 miles away. But, the wandering! I didn't know that we were getting a neighborhood dog. They've been very tolerant, but he's gone about 14 hours a day and we have no idea where he is. We've tried everything to keep him closer to the house, but he just takes off and at his size there really is nothing that can be done to keep him in our fenced off 2 acres.
We decided last night to try and re-home him, mainly because I don't want to be that neighbor that just doesn't think about others.
Is this dog looking for something he thinks he needs? Maybe bring him into the house at night so he is with you? Dogs are VERY social for the most part. But if that isn't an option, yes, I would rehome him if possible. His "job" of protecting the chickens clearly isn't enough for him. He needs a bond with...something that is meaningful to him. If not the chickens, it would be YOU. Just musing from a dog lover.
He refuses to come inside, and we've done everything we can do to give him some creature comforts. He won't even come close to the door for either fear or dislike of being inside. He's really a sweet dog, great with kids, but if it were my neighbor with a 100lb dog that doesn't respect fencing or boundaries I'd be saying what Rainbow is saying.
When we go outside to sit with him, he may or may not even walk over to us. He seems more like a cat...he just does what he wants. Sweet enough, but just not interested in things. The only thing I can do to get him excited/happy is I give him a hotdog every night. He really looks forward to that.
My wife and I have had dogs our entire life, and he is just an odd one. I even got more interaction/bonding with a Basenji that I owned for 12 years.
I’ve run up against this phenomenon.
Very frustrating.
It is relevant! I have noticed lately that people seem to have gone dog crazy. I have nothing against dogs, in fact, I like dogs, especially my own. However I don't want to deal with other people's dogs. People bring them everywhere. I see dogs in airports, and on flights, in grocery stores, restaurants, sports stadiums, shopping malls, the bank, high end resorts, beaches, you name it. They are in strollers, in dog handbags, and on, and off leashes. Invariably, when people see a dog they make such a fuss, as if they've never seen a darn dog before. They ooh and aah over strangers' dogs, more than they would ever comment on an infant. I have seen a dog urinate on the carpet in the shoe department at Saks 5th Avenue. I've also witnessed a vicious dog fight inside a convenience store located at a turnpike service station. What is it with this recent trend to bring your dog with you wherever you go? I don't want to be in close proximity to anyone's dog inside the public spaces that I've mentioned above. It's gotten out of control in South Florida. These dog nuts are vey inconsiderate. Are they seeking attention via their dog? There are plenty of idiots willing to oblige. I walk past, ignoring them and their dogs. If eye contact is made, I give them a dirty look as if to say, "Keep your dog away from me!"
Yes to everything you said!
It’s unclear to me what the obsession is about, especially since I’m a cat person anyway.
Why has it become so acceptable to bring a dog into previously dog free spaces? I do think it’s the dog as substitute child problem.
I had a funny incident last week. My wife and I were having dinner at a local QSR burrito joint that has a bar. A guy sitting at the bar had his little lap dog with him....in a baby bjorn....on a Monday....at happy hour. I guess there is one fella that isn't going to be contributing to increasing the population any time soon.
My Brooklyn neighborhood has actively become much quieter this past year, and my roses are terrific this week, but a Mamdani mayoralty here is a nauseating proposition. So I'm looking at houses in New England -- at least online -- more seriously again.
But it's always something. A good-looking old house on 11 acres in New Hampshire has as its neighbor a paintball amusement park. I'm not sure what that is, but it can't be good. One anticipates happy screaming. Another is near a school athletic field, and that can only mean loudspeakers and energetic kids running track to rap music. Or some sort of music.
Another has six pickleball courts two houses away. That problem needs no explaining.
When a village house is on half an acre -- one is available in Maine -- it means marijuana smoke and radio music can waft into windows. In Sheepscot last week, a passing car deposited a dense cloud of marijuana along the country road we were strolling and into our lungs. There are at least seven cannabis shops between Bath and Damariscotta, a 25-minute drive.
In coastal villages up and down, from Maine to Delaware and beyond, workers on ladders play their radios loud. And there are always workers on ladders. It goes with the salt air.
Nowhere's safe, Rainbow.
I know. It's a trade off which is why we have tolerated the endless barking for over 30 years. But the cacophony has definitely escalated this summer and we are older now and have less tolerance for the unrelenting stress.
Wow, there’s a quiet yard in Brooklyn!
Come Block Party Assaults in August, I plan to be out of town as opposed to cowering in a far corner of the basement trying to escape the relentless thundering from gigantic speakers.
Noise pollution is a huge and rather urgent problem.
It can and does drive people nuts.
I was at a KOa campground for a few days last week. What a marvel that so many people parked cheek to jowl could adhere to quiet time after 11 pm. It was amazing.
"Noise pollution . . . can and does drive people nuts."
Probably that's why so many guys in low-slung black BMWs blast through stop signs and mow people down. Or they shoot one another.
Or they go 90mph on the Cross Island looking like fiends. (I know because sometimes I glance in the rear-view mirror to see who's tailgating me, and their dumb faces are bug-eyed masks.)
It's their music. It interferes with rational thought.
Lost souls, Rainbow. They don't know how to fit into a community. Or they are damaged in some way.
Yes definitely damaged with lots of substance abuse. This is where the poor folks who cannot afford high priced housing come with dogs that are not allowed elsewhere. It's how we ended up here. We could not afford anything else in this crazy county. However my compassion for these folks is all used up. I am absolutely dreading the fourth of July as usual because we will have so much illegal really dangerous fireworks for over two weeks and it makes the dogs frantic of course, not to mention the fire danger as we haven't had much rain. I will escape to the mountains as much as possible, but hard to relax.
My compassion is on a thin edge these days too, and it involves living in a neighborhood where the houses are very close together. (I miss my 7 acres in Maine often.) I am struck by how many living in this small suburb have no connection with their neighbors and do not consider how what they do--the noise they make, what they build--impacts their neighbors. It has probably always existed to some extent, but now the social ties are so broken and people are so damaged. The solution of at least some of these "modern" issues has to come from the grassroots, but then there are folks like YOUR neighbors living there too.
Hubby and I no longer even try to connect with the neighbors as there are far too many of them we have had to call the authorities on over the years for one reason or another. The barking dog issue is the most constant stress, but a lot of really scary shit has gone down as well over the years and so we just do not engage. We have maybe three neighbors in this area we can trust to not do crazy shit and we have just lost one of them who was right next door. Hopefully the new neighbor replacing him will be okay, but we aren't counting on it.
Maddening. I had a neighbor once whose dog barked in the middle of the night. It stopped after I told him his dog was waking my husband who really needed his sleep as a physician. I guess my neighbor is respectful.
You are quite lucky. After decades of dealing with this problem and literally trying everything, we don't even waste our time anymore trying to talk with the dozen or so neighbors with problem dogs. They really want their dogs to bark and it doesn't bother them at all.
I don't see how it doesn’t bother them. Maybe they are profoundly deaf.
I have wondered the same thing. Yet they do not seem to be. Literally I have watched these neighbors stand outside next to the frantically barking dog and calmly smoke a cigarette and carry on a conversation with their friends. I have wondered if it is a boundary thing whereby the dog barks for them because they cannot themselves 'bark' and establish their own space. And here's the rub, these dogs are not happy. They are distressed. Endless barking is a sign of anxiety. Not just in my opinion but what many dog experts have pointed out.
Interesting. Makes good sense. Perhaps there is something outside (I assumes the barking dogs are outside) that is causing them stress, and thus the barking. Do the owners feed the dogs ? Is there an outside influence causing the dogs to bark ? I see the makings of a late night investigation.
Oh yeah they bark at every single possible thing both day and nite. Impossible to control the multiple triggers. It's my understanding that most dogs can be trained to only bark at someone entering the property, but these owners are simply not interested in that kind of training at all. They really like their dogs to bark all the time, it makes them feel safe somehow.
In our neighbourhood we have quite a bit of wildlife, from possums to deer (even had a herd of mountain goats out back one morning).
Along with feral cats, those presences always set the neighbourhood dogs off
Do you have dogs? If not you might want to try an ultrasonic bark deterrent. I haven't used one but a friend said it helped make the neighbor's dog stop barking. I've read that they are perfectly safe and also that they can hurt dog's ears, but it might be worth looking into if you haven't tried one before.
I have looked into that and as you say mixed results. We would probably have to install several at multiple point around the property just on a hope they would work, what hassle, but if we get desperate enough.......
https://a.co/d/ftsyKSd
You should think about getting one of these. They can be turned up pretty loud. Loud enough to drown out playing kids while their dad tries to sleep during the day. We have several and love them. The only downside is waking up when the power goes out and it’s suddenly silent.
Thanks for the recommmend !
Oh dear. There are no noise ordinances? Or just no one in the county willing to enforce them?
Hah! Noise ordinances. Sure there are noise ordinances but I think most are there for virtue signaling. Case in point.
Our house in Florida is in a nice older very quiet neighborhood. However, across the park and in another city (as they are all jumbled together anymore) is a bar that has live music OUTSIDE, on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. The bandstand faces out. It’s surrounded by mobile homes and I don’t see how they can stand it- maybe they are all profoundly deaf.
Anyway, this other city has a noise ordinance. Hah! Code enforcement is supposed to be the enforcer. They work 9-5 M-F. The bands go from 6-10. Do you think the city would rearrange work schedules? Hah! Surely you jest. The cops are then the enforcers but they don’t carry audiometers. Go to the mayor and council meetings to complain? Hah!
It’s amazing that a hurricane hasn’t taken this place. I pray. I pray.
I feel your pain.
No ordinances plus no enforcement.
22 years retired in Arkansas, the dogs and lawn mowers rule, but the Golf was worth it. And actually, Arkansas doesn't seem to have any R&Rs for anything, which is maybe why the people are always waving and smiling at each other, just going along to get along. Now, about those teens and young adults and their muffler-less pickup trucks....
In our deep-blue area, whatever noise ordinances there used to be are no longer enforced. If you call to report a noise complaint, you are told that LE is no longer being dispatched for such things. And with our Soros-funded prosecutor (who was re-elected!), even if there was enforcement, no one would ever be charged.
One day, someone somewhere will figure out that noise pollution is contributing significantly to poor health. But nothing will change.
They already have. See NYT on noise pollution and blood pressure. I sent it to all our politicians re ear-splitting noise from Open Streets.
Now most Open Streets Sundays when the schedule calls for "Live Music" (no, guys, amplification is not artistry), we simply drive off somewhere. Sometimes day trips, often overnights. All our trips are planned to begin on Sundays.
Then again, Sunday at 7:30 AM is a good time to drive out of Brooklyn: no traffic.
I used to live near a man with a dozen outdoor hunting dogs. Opening windows for fresh air was just not possible.
Ayep.
The cruelty of the caged life is what gets me.
That’s frustrating.
A larger question on a declining birth rate is, can we increase births in families without sacrificing the prosperity that so many enjoy? Can we still have two cars and a large home with a swimming pool? Will we be able to subsidize "child care" for families that NEED to have both parents working to pay for all of our "necessities? Yes, there ARE families who bear more than the replacement quota of children, but, by and large, they are NOT the most prosperous families, with only a smattering of exceptions.
Name one country that shares our level of luxury that does NOT have a declining birth rate. I challenge you to tell me!
Do we need artificial wombs so that women can continue to "have it all"? Or perhaps "rent-a-womb" facilities, where poor women get paid to bear other people's children, only to deposit them into a community crèche?
Are we willing to sacrifice? My guess is "NO", we are not!
We already have rent a womb; surrogacy.
Yes, but only for the more prosperous few.
And increasingly, surrogates are being “hired” from third world countries…which brings up some very tricky issues.
Yep. I have friends who are surrogates and I will say no matter the cointry they are always women whocare poorer. The rich lady soing it as a nice gesture rarely happens.
Prosperity is the most effective birth control know to humanity. You can love kids or stuff. It’s becoming clear you can’t do both.
Israel has an increasing birth rate. I don’t know the comparative economics with the US. But I know the per capita GDP of Israel is very strong.
They have a history of self preservation. Most Western countries and repressive ones do not.
Exactly! They are aware that if they don't make more young Israelis, they won't survive as a nation.
If only we’d realize that same thing, that if we don’t make more Americans, we won’t supply as a nation.
Yes, they need to multiply.
In a big way.
https://tinyurl.com/4pt9ntts
(Haven't read all of it, but spent a half-hour with it in a bookstore while waiting for a friend)
I read The Genius of Israel when it first came out. Dan Senor does a podcast as well called: Call Me Back, which is outstanding. The book is excellent. It really explains why Israel is such an amazing place. The author walks through the various soft institutions that are in place in Israel that bind the society together.
I should’ve guessed!
Recently, I joined a discussion on Leslie Elliot Boyce's The Radical Center in response to how most of the women on the panel wound up childless.
Each claimed that they were afraid to 'risk it' with the men with whom they'd had relationships/marriages.
A channel called Manosphere Highlights clipped my talk with Leslie. The commenters all blamed me for being childless, because I "chose to ride the hot dog carousel in (my) 20s," hence squandering most of my fertility window (which is likely the case with the women mentioned above.)
I reached out to Manosphere, and they gave me the opportunity to expand on my story / perspective in a video.
I won't be sending them the first video I made, in which I summarize my relationships with men over the past few decades.
In my talk with Leslie, I cite the Sexual Revolution as part of the cause of rising childlessness. That and feminist tenets that claim a woman is 'so much more than' a mother. Feminist tenets that degrade motherhood -- the message I imbibed in my 20s, despite wanting to have children since before puberty.
I was in my 20s in the 80s, when the push for women to work, and put off motherhood and family went into full swing. It seems to me that the entire culture of dating towards marriage was thrown out. Now you could live together -- and protract the single life -- indefinitely...
Anyway, when I listened to the drafted video I made for Manosphere Highlights, it was a litany of FECKLESS MEN with whom I would not risk getting pregnant.
However, most of these men were victims of parents who jumped on the divorce bandwagon in the 70s; my ex-husband had been abandoned in a bar in Denmark when he was 12 -- left to the care of strangers -- so his father could chase after some woman in Sweden.
Many of the men with whom I had relationships never married or had children. I was involved with a man from my late 30s into my mid 40s who told me at the outset that not only did he not want children, he would never live with a woman either. There was much I appreciated about him (plus I was lonely) so I went with the flow...
One boyfriend, as I recall, was so utterly crippled by his father running off to become an artist (downsizing their affluence considerably -- he had been a lawyer, previously....this is an old WASP family) that he could hardly function at all. He just lay in bed all day.
Another boyfriend died a death of despair during the COVID debacle. His wife had the high-powered career -- it seemed to have emasculated him -- however I noticed, when he was MY boyfriend, a strident lack of ambition that may have been brought on by HIS father abandoning the family -- that's why I didn't want him...
I had another boyfriend who won awards for poetry, including an NEA grant, who was bitter as the day is long about the no-white-men hiring practices in academia...he wound up married to a career academic -- while he floundered....and died young.
So what I realized is that there will always be the rats that make it out of the maze, but most get stuck in it. With a reigning narrative to protract adolescence as long as possible, to please one's self, to find one's "own happiness," that family is drudgery, and so on...
The narrative needs to change. It's too late for me, but I plan to do my share to change it, at least, for future generations.
Regardless, it's increasingly difficult to get married and have children in this culture. Both sexes need to drop the 'me first' edict. But how...
Dog, we experienced many of the same things.
I graduated HS in 1989, but I think *some* difference can be attributed to my Catholic upbringing. However, to your point, we were encouraged to get married and have families, but we also had the larger societal pressures of having a career placed on us.
Divorce was/is a big part of the problem. When it’s relatively easy to leave someone, it makes your situation less stable, and therefore people are less likely to bring a child into an unstable situation. Plus, as children of divorce, we learned that as a woman, you need to have a back up plan to support yourself. Hence the big push for careers for women.
All of those words to say people need to understand commitment. Lack of commitment is one part of this problem.
And what would you say is the common denominator in this?
Education?
Culture
There doesn't seem to be a declining birthrate in the Hispanic culture, nor in the African American culture. Appears to be prominent in what in the past would be the WASP culture.
I love your stories. But I’m also gobsmacked by them. We have led very different lives. I couldn’t imagine living yours although it sounds exciting.
You've hit the nail on the head--the primary cause of a hesitation to marry and have children is the messaging that's been playing on our cultural loudspeakers since the 1970s: that it's all about "me." That the *only* thing we ought to care about is our own happiness, and that the only way to be happy is pursue money and pleasure. Preferably without any connections that can't be easily broken the moment we want to go in a new direction.
There is nothing in our culture that argues against that path for adult life except religion, which has been pushed further and further onto the sidelines as antiquated, restrictive, and even (in the minds of many progressives) evil.
Good point. As we move more and more into a post-religion world the side effects are becoming evident in many areas. Not prioritizing marriage and family seems to be one of these effects.
Well said Celia. It's a big change from the culture in which I grew up. I graduated high school in 1963--and gender roles were VERY set at that time. Men worked and women raised the babies, etc. A man who changed a diaper was...not manly. One of the good things about feminism that I loved is that these roles got a bit changed, so that both genders had more balance. Men didn't have the full weight of providing and could help nurture and physically take cre of their own children and women could have some outside paying jobs, not just community work. Both of my sons grew up in this more balanced arrangement and were and are actively involved with their children, though both also carry more of the providing weight. It's so sad to me that our culture has now moved to the insanity about genders--in work and in actual composition of what is a gender. The culture is floundering and all the adults are forced to work full jobs--or they think they have to in order to have "things" and to keep up. Meanwhile, the children are being...lost, addicted to cell phones, etc.
The more from you I read, Dog, the more I like. It’s the blend of superb writing, astute thinking, sane politics; and, this time, more of the fascinating biographical details you’re not afraid to share.
In my opinion, a big part of the reason people end up mateless, hence childless, is the advice not to “settle.” The perfect is the enemy of the good. And, having been married more than once and now with another girlfriend (fingers crossed), I’ve learned from bitter experience that lasting relationships require compromise. They do something annoying, let it go. Don’t sweat the small stuff - and almost everything is small. Look at the bigger picture. Do your part to try another way of relating. Meet him/her halfway. By all means, communicate rather than suffer, or assume, in silence! Learn what shoes he or she is wearing at the time of dispute, and put yourself in those shoes to achieve awareness and empathy.
I think we’re in an era where people shy from confrontation on a personal level, so they fail to communicate for fear of rejection or inflaming the situation. It happened to me. This can result in a deteriorating relationship. Divorce has become too easy, too routine, so people get one foot out the door instead of hanging in for the tough work of finding ways to stay together. After all, at one point the two of you were exchanging “I love you’s” all the time.
This has been a litany of platitudes and “Dear Abby” advice, but it’s also my so-called accumulated wisdom. FWIW.
I'm approaching 40 years of marriage to the same woman and I can vouch for your advice. Although I have to admit by marrying the very nearly perfect woman I've had to compromise a hell of a lot less than her.
Great advice.
Thanks, Mark. I very much appreciate your appreciation.
The issue with cutting and running when things get difficult plays a significant role in our fractured society. Say, putting off having kids with a spouse, then deciding one isn't "happy," then leaving for someone 'better' and not finding him until UVF time, if one is lucky...
Both of my daughters are me first.
It’s been interesting to watch.
There is a lot they do that I find self destructive.
But, I just bite my tongue.
I so agree with Mark Adams below about really appreciating your posts Under Dog.
We have to address the problem of health in the US to resolve some of the issues of declining birth rates. Fertility rates are declining and I believe our diets and some vaccines are a detriment to our birth rates. A healthy body and mind is a good start.
That doesn’t account for the one million abortions every year. Although those abortions do likely account for lost fertility of those getting the abortions.
And all the toxic chemical we spray everywhere and on everything. We need to rethink "germ" hysteria, the spots on an apple peel, and our need to kill all insects with toxic sprays that, yes, also harm US. And...plastics.
🎯🎯
I think one thing that could help would be if popular culture venerated larger families again. I'm Gen X, so I grew up watching the Brady Bunch, the Partridge Family, Eight is Enough, etc. All these shows made it seem like fun to have a big family. Now, if there are big families, they are grotesque, like the Duggars.
That said, I don't think we should aim to simply encourage more births. We should only do it if the would-be parents are capable, married, and likely to produce children who grow into self-sufficient adults. We already have a generation of young, able-bodied adults who don't work and are on Medicaid.
Yes, we need humans that add to society, not bring it down.
Off topic (sorry, not sorry) but please read this extremely topical essay by Daniel Jupp on why Trump is right on Iran and Tucker is full of shit.
https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/understanding-the-maga-iran-split?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1761987&post_id=166132221&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=7bo5d&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
I am hoping we get our big-time bunker bombs to work in Iran ASAP. Anything short of that is a terrible waste of this opportunity Israel has given us.
I don't see why it has to be destroyed underground. Couldn't access be destroyed at surface level? I mean, there are roads and entrances, right? Just seal it up.
I guess it's because blocked roads can always be unblocked. I'd like to see that particular vampire get a stake through its heart. It's not enough to seal the tomb. If we don't come through with our bombs, no doubt Israel will do as you suggest, or try to sneak saboteurs in, but . . . .
A comment on today’s Jupplandia (another brilliant analysis of Tucker vs Trump) “Richard North has a supportive post today entitled “Israel’s job is not over until Iranian nuclear sites are smouldering ruins”. He describes how Israel may be able to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities by repeated strikes with their own precision-guided 5,000 pound bunker bomb.”
That would avoid us getting directly involved with our B-2 dropping MOABs.
Top Gun Maverick predicted this. Except today, Israel wouldn’t have to worry about Iranian SAMs since they don’t really exist anymore.
What you describe is how Israel killed the leader of Hezbollah deep under ground.
One big part of Germany's success against bombing in WW2 is that the bombs couldn't penetrate to their underground manufacturing/storage sites.
Israel has repeatedly stated on X that it can destroy Fordow, this is part of the plan. It may take longer than the bunker buster, but it can be achieved.
I’m disappointed in Tucker these days; his lack of support for Israel is disturbing, to say the least.
What bothers me more about Tucker is the veiled anti-Semitism that infuses his rants. Very disappointed in a guy I used to admire. But this is never usually new. just always lurking beneath the surface.
Yes Bruce, since October 7, 2023, the hidden anti Semites have outed themselves. Now we know for sure.
Bingo.
TFP printed an essay by British historian Andrew Roberts saying now is the unique, Churchillian moment to strike hard with a bunker-buster. But will Trump seize the moment? I think he will. The naysayers are wringing their hands to say it would put our troops in the region at risk from missile attacks, but I wonder. Besides, some crockery may need to be broken for the greater good of avoiding a nuclear-armed Iran.
The biggest problem with Trump is his inability to articulate and in a simple way, why stuff needs to be done. Like why do we not want a nuclear Iran. Like why we have to have a closed border and deport every illegal not just the criminals.
He rambles, repeats and then gets combative with the idiot media. And then the message is lost.
True but we ride the horse we have. And Trump's inherent common sense beats the garbage we've had at the top for decades.
Maybe but he’s clearly smart enough to not play so stupid. And by not crisply and simply explaining why things are being done, he allows the leftist/media/DeMS13s to set the narrative. It’s so effing frustrating.
Thanks Bruce. I'm struggling with this issue too.
After another week of mop up air strikes, don't be surprised to see Israeli troops on the ground at Fordow. Why wouldn't they?
Yup, they gain entry, then blow it up from the inside.
Thanks for sharing this.
I’m watching this unfold on X in real time.
IMO, this is a spiritual problem probably with a dab of physical health fertility decline, not a financial one. When we focus on paid leave and paid childcare we suggest that you need to be compensated for having children, implying that it is a sacrifice. When you promote the idea that sex has nothing to do with marriage or children you imply that marriage and children are a constraint.
Young people are given very little idea of the joy of family. If we can reignite the importance and nobility of marriage, motherhood, and fatherhood, the financial side is a by-product, not the feature.
Susan, yes! Love this comment. So true.
One theme I keep hearing over and over again these days is what a sacrifice it is to have children and that children are a burden, both financially, and on your time. It doesn’t have to be this way folks.
I wonder if the health fertility decline would exist if women went back to starting families in their early 20s rather than early 30s.
!
Maybe even less autism!
I have an autistic boy, not profound but def impaired in many ways. Had him at 37, dad was 39. I bet it’s a factor.
Personal opinion: kids are expensive, stressful, and a real constraint on my life choices.
And the BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME, and I wouldn't trade it for the world.
I experienced nothing in your first sentence and everything in the second.
If you raise much of your own food and raise your kids to help you do it, the expense and the stress go away and rather than constrain life's choices, it becomes life choice
We raised three kids in spite of being poor. And I never wanted to make life choices that didn't include them.
But stressful, I will admit. Not unbearably so. But being responsible for the care and instruction of a child is undeniably stressful. Many joys make up for the stress. But you never stop worrying, even when they are grown and gone.
Try explaining that to an eighteen-year-old, perhaps one who has never seen a happy family.
A flat-line EKG shows no stress. There is nothing worth accomplishing in life that comes without hard work and accompanying stress. Paradoxically, doing nothing and trying to avoid stress is less healthy, satisfying, and joy-inducing than being willing to work hard for something meaningful.
I chose energy so I really have nothing.
One additional facet has to be the cheap/free/easy access to porn. On the one hand (pardon the pun) it provides an easy release... on the other hand it sets ridiculous expectations for all parties. Combine these two and any potential relationship that might have produced children is nipped in the bud.
Now think about female robots with embedded AI that are no doubt under development. We may already have them, I suppose. I don't keep up with what's current in the sex trade.
We are going to have to solve this problem somehow.
My 32 yo daughter has a high school friend group of 9 ladies. All but two are married, 3 are pregnant now 4 already have babies. One is getting married in a month and plans to have children. The other one is trying hard to find a man. I have hope!
Hope for the future, a future full of hope. When I had my babies I was full of hope for a bright and happy life. It never occurred to me that giving my love, time and resources was a sacrifice. I waited a very loong time for it to be my turn. Patience paid off.
My family experience: we don’t want bring up our kids in the current political climate.
That's a cop-out. They have other excuse(s) or fears but just don't want to articulate them.
I agree - just I cannot “mindread” anyone including myself.
A few observations:
• In most developed societies, birth rates are inversely proportional to prosperity. Greater affluence means less need for children to work.
• Declining population probably enhances the potential of AI. Somebody's got to do the manual labor.
• Declining population – and growing affluence – offers a "natural" solution to human-induced global warming. Frankly, it appears that with peak population almost here (perhaps as soon as the next decade) the climate cult may have to find some other cause to whine about (NB. Greta T already has).
• The impact on GNP is a bit more murky. Productivity almost certainly goes up, but intuitively economic activity decreases (though probably not per capita).
• The biggest impact of peak population is the dramatic change in the demographic distribution by age and country. In the developed world, peak age has shifted and continues to shift older. The developing world is already much younger, but with less affluence continues to churn out the children.
• As we're already seeing, the economies of "aged nations" differs from their younger counterparts. The demand for health care services and products is much greater. This may set up a feedback loop that means the elderly live even longer, pushing the average age of the population even higher.
• This begs the question - "Are the elderly in danger of outliving their savings?" Sadly, the answer for most of the Baby Boomers is yes.
Before we consider whether to "cure" (more babies) or to mitigate, I think we have to ask - "What's the problem?" - or maybe - "Which problem do we tackle first?"
Definitely "Which problem do we tackle first?" And that, I do not know.
my take away from this is I blame child labor laws...
Look at the popularity of the online game Minecraft....the children yearn to be back in the mines
Or at least to be doing something productive. I think humans, in general, want to feel like they are accomplishing something. Video games are a fake way of fulfilling that need to feel like they've done something.
I was being facetious about the mines, but I do believe that kids are more fulfilled when given responsibilities - “chores”
Plus it’s free labor