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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30707 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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This is so underrated comment, it really is an unspoken bubble. The demographic change is huge, especially in Southeast Asia where people born in 50s or 60s are often from large families of 5 to 6 while their children have one child or are childless. I have a friend who is single child of single children on both parents side. He has a wife who is also single child although she herself has an aunt. But in general their combined family is incredibly small, if my friend's parents die he will have no living family in this world. This is the family of the future.

I have many uncles and aunts and number of cousins that I being me would probably mix some names. It is such a vast difference in social experience. My experience is just blip in history, it is a rare transition towards inevitable modernity.

My experience is just blip in history

Mathematically his is too, right? Not every only-child is going to have kids, and in that extreme case, a TFR below 1 (hi, South Koreans! Remember that the last one there has to turn off the lights!) is as unstable as a TFR above 4.

it is a rare transition towards inevitable modernity.

I can barely imagine what a future stable modernity is going to look like. You could tell me anything from "After the AGIs cure aging low TFR is a good thing" to "After the environment/economy/whatever collapses and the low TFR subpopulations die out, Malthus has the last laugh for the next million years", and I wouldn't be sure you were wrong...

I know a couple of only children of only children (one or even both parents). It makes me very sad, because in the latter case they really are all alone in the world after they die. No siblings, no cousins, deeply deeply tragic to think about.

Then again, my mom and dad both came from trad rural families with like 8-9 surviving children, so I have a ton of aunts, uncles and cousins, approximately none of which I see with any regularity outside of family events (since they don't live where I live).

True, it’s an option though. I’m grateful that if anything went badly wrong in my life (addiction, parents dying suddenly, some kind of deep depression etc) there are a lot of people who love me and who would take me in, at least for a time, and treat me as family. You never know how life will turn out, family is always the ultimate safety net.

The demographic change is huge, especially in Southeast Asia where people born in 50s or 60s are often from large families of 5 to 6 while their children

Or the United States, where people born in the 90s were often from large families of 5 or 6 while their children (if they lived in a city) have one or no children and (if they lived in the country) only had 2 or 3.

This is the family of the future.

Of course, by "90s" I mean "1890s". TFR by the early 1920s (when their children would be having children) was down to 2.3 in a country that was 50% rural- if we assume that people in rural areas are the ones bringing up the average (these old statistics never seem to differentiate by area) to a mere 3.0, that means the urban areas of the 1920s US had birth rates comparable to modern-day South Korea.

The fact that fertility rates only went down to 2.0 in the 1930s (the largest economic crisis in 100 years; the second largest would happen due to mass hysteria roughly 90 years later) is some evidence against this claim, though latex condoms and hormonal birth control weren't even invented yet. Urbanization inherently prices most people out of having kids (and sex in general) and most people don't really care all that much- both of things happen to be the the historical norm, too.

Come to think of it, it's interesting that the US entered WW2 sending a bunch of what would have been at that point only children and it's weird that nobody really talks about that (especially since the war on the border of the American Empire is being fought by groups with similarly bad TFRs and economic prospects that were assumed by some to be chilling effects).

it's interesting that the US entered WW2 sending a bunch of what would have been at that point only children

I'm pretty sure that's just not true. Unless by "a bunch" you mean "a small minority".

Come to think of it, it's interesting that the US entered WW2 sending a bunch of what would have been at that point only children and it's weird that nobody really talks about that

Possibly because it is not, in fact, true.

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