Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris
The shrinking size of families was at one time about reduced need to ensure some survived. But now it’s about child-bearing as just one of a broadening range of things a woman can choose to do with her life. It’s an interesting conundrum because it sets that most prized of Western cultural achievements - freedom of individual choice, especially in the sphere of sex equality - against the sense of obligation to perpetuate the species.
There is a very serious imperative to fix this, as it is the labour and the taxes of the young that cares for the old. But by the time you’re 80 years old, you face the consequences of your generation’s choice not to replace itself at the same time as finding you’re way too old to do anything about it.
Today’s BBC report makes some half-hearted suggestions about tax incentives for larger families but the problem is rather more fundamental than that. In the longer run, our conception (pun intended) of the balance between our personal freedoms and our obligations to society is going to have to shift, and simple biology means that is going to have more of an impact on women than on men. Interesting times ahead.
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IIRC, the news said that Africa would increase (by 2/3?)
As automation increases, there wouldn't be any jobs for the young people that would have been born had things not changed; they would have been an added burden as opposed to helping to keep retired people. As It's imperative that we have to start thinking about the way that we use the Earths resources too, this reduction is a good thing. I think.