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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28136 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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It really is not that hard to make babies.

Absolutely, which is why all the vapouring about abortion rights and abortion is health care and we must pass an amendment to the state constitution to make and keep abortion legal.

Why would artificial wombs be needed?

See above about abortion. It's easy to have babies, but a lot of people don't want to have babies and will try very hard not to have babies. If you want babies, but nobody wants to have those babies the natural way, then you need technology and artifice.

I don’t think ‘I’m afraid of sex’ is the main reason fertility rates are dropping, I think it’s ‘I don’t want another dependent for the next two decades’.

I think it’s ‘I don’t want another dependent for the next two decades’.

Yes? That's what we're agreeing on here: sex makes babies, but people don't want babies because babies need you to take care of them and they're expensive which interferes with fun times and spending money on yourself, so people try and get around the 'having babies' part of 'having sex' via contraception and abortion.

"I don't want a dependent for the next two decades" being the case, then all the exhortations to 'do your duty for the common god and have four kids' are not going to work, and if you need every couple to be having four kids to keep your economy afloat, then you better get working on those artificial wombs.

How do artificial wombs have anything to do with the sacrifices parents make in raising children?

Artificial wombs in themselves don't solve the problem of the 'next two decades dependents'.

What do you do with these artificially-born children?

Are they going to be slaves fully raised by some kind of government or corporate facility?

Or is the idea that the market is going to capture potential parents that would want to take care of additional dependents but do not have access to a fresh womb?

I doubt that that would be a lot of people. Raising kids takes energy and people tend to run out of energy as they age. Helping raise grand-children, nephews and nieces, now that's a more accessible goal for a children-loving middle-aged or senior citizen.

If there is such a glut of desperate people just waiting to take care of children, all they have to do is knock on doors, network, involve themselves locally... Daycares take volunteers if you are ready to jump through licensing hoops.

If we're at the stage of artificial wombs to keep society running, then it will be the government raising the children. Not slaves but productive citizens with all the Right Values.

Think of Asimov's Spacer civilisations where robot nannies raise the kids and the parents have so little contact with them, on some worlds accidental incest happens and nobody thinks it a big deal.

If you want babies, but nobody wants to have those babies the natural way, then you need technology and artifice.

But why want babies?

People's revealed preference is not to have any, or few. Is the concern coming from business owners who need cheap (preferably teenage) labor for fast food restaurants or janitor positions that cannot immediately be automated? Is it because we need able-bodied workers for care jobs in nursing homes?

The solutions are robots and deregulation. Let's just make it legally clear that if you drop your elderly relative that you don't care enough about to look after yourself in some kind of hospital or managed home, they may just end up dead for no reasonable reason. You sign on this or you take them home and you deal with them yourself.

There. No more liability, no more costly trainings and procedures to avoid liability, no more staffing issues...

Let's give the unloved elderly the same level of respect we afford unloved pre-birth children.

People's revealed preference is not to have any, or few.

I have trouble using "revealed preference" to describe a situation where someone's actions are different from what they would do if they believed X and completely understood it, and the gap between their action and belief is related mainly to that lack of understanding. For instance, people who fall for scams haven't shown a revealed preference for losing money. That's not what the phrase is supposed to mean.

But why want babies?

The economy. Babies grow up to be working age adults who get jobs, pay taxes, and contribute for decades which pays out the pensions/social welfare entitlements for the current aging population. If you have a bulge where the current population is getting older but there are fewer young people coming up, then your economy is in trouble.

If robots can earn money or produce revenue to support the welfare state, then that's the way to go. Otherwise it really is a crisis about "I never had kids and now mysteriously there are no working age adults around".

People really did believe, around the time of The Population Bomb, that there were way too many people on the Earth and unless populations decreased there would be drastic and terrible natural disasters. Overpopulation was a genuine worry. That's why China, for instance, started with the One Child Policy. Things like the expansion of Cairo, which had and has a population zooming up, creating a sprawling, expanding city that is more like a collection of slums, was a visible proof of the problem (or so it seemed) - not enough resources, too many bodies, too much demand on the scarce resources:

In the second half of the 20th century Cairo continue to grow enormously in both population and area. Between 1947 and 2006 the population of Greater Cairo went from 2,986,280 to 16,292,269. The population explosion also drove the rise of "informal" housing ('ashwa'iyyat), meaning housing that was built without any official planning or control. The exact form of this type of housing varies considerably but usually has a much higher population density than formal housing. By 2009, over 63% of the population of Greater Cairo lived in informal neighbourhoods, even though these occupied only 17% of the total area of Greater Cairo. According to economist David Sims, informal housing has the benefits of providing affordable accommodation and vibrant communities to huge numbers of Cairo's working classes, but it also suffers from government neglect, a relative lack of services, and overcrowding.

...Cairo accounts for 11% of Egypt's population and 22% of its economy (PPP). The majority of the nation's commerce is generated there, or passes through the city. The great majority of publishing houses and media outlets and nearly all film studios are there, as are half of the nation's hospital beds and universities. This has fuelled rapid construction in the city, with one building in five being less than 15 years old.

This growth until recently surged well ahead of city services. Homes, roads, electricity, telephone and sewer services were all in short supply. Analysts trying to grasp the magnitude of the change coined terms like "hyper-urbanization".

There are also the problems with pollution - air, water and land, as well as lead and copper smelting.

A lot of people thought Cairo and similar cities were the future, if population growth remained unchecked.

What nobody seems to have considered is that Western nations crashing their fertility rates from a combination of "overpopulation is the coming threat" and "I don't want to be tied down with kids, now that I'm young, in a good economy which gives me plenty of disposable income, and the sexual revolution and social liberalisation means I can have an entire smorgasbord of choices that my parents' generation never had about self-indulgence" would be a bad thing. We're still grappling with "the poor countries have way too many people which they can't support", but the fertility decline in the West isn't doing anything to help that and now we are facing the results of "who will pay the piper?" because if there aren't enough workers coming up, the benefits which the retirees expect won't be there.

And the future problem seems to be not alone the lack of recognition that "the people are the wealth of the nation" but that only a shrinking number of those workers will be considered economically contributing and valuable. Well-paying jobs that provide growing tax revenues are increasingly shifted to the white collar world, and to a particular sub-set of that - IT or finance. And with AI looming on the horizon, the lower levels of those niches will be chipped away.

Not everybody can learn to code and even if they do, there's the spectre of "the machine will do it better, faster and cheaper". I imagine that's why a lot of people and institutions are pinning their hopes on Fairy Godmother AI which will magically ensure an economy of plenty, like the cornucopia, where all we desire can be drawn out limitlessly, there will be trillions and zillions of money, and we'll dodge the bullet of an aging population and an increasingly unequal society.

If you have a bulge where the current population is getting older but there are fewer young people coming up, then your economy is in trouble.

Sounds like you need to change up your economy then.

What did the horse breeders do when Americans started driving cars? Carmakers can keep shifting their production to SUV and more accessible vehicles, and then eventually come back full circle and start making horse buggies again.

If Star Wars fans are not getting made anymore, perhaps media companies can shift to making Christian movies.

If robots can earn money or produce revenue to support the welfare state, then that's the way to go.

Or maybe we can scale down the welfare state? Make these retirement payments conditional to having had dependents (what you've provided on your tax returns...)?

If everyone is buying horseless carriages, yes you can shift from making buggies to making these new vehicles and creating a whole new economy around them.

But if nobody is buying buggies, because there's nobody there to buy anything, you won't improve your finances by switching to making cars or planes or rocket ships.

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