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[MetalSlimeHunt]

so you're saying you want women out of the office and back in the kitchen?

(i'm being facetious here, but the point stands: if you want women's lib, then women will want to do things in their prime years which don't consist of constant nappy changing).

I'm just saying that maybe we could burn down the offices and do ridiculous things instead

Like spending time with your family, sick shit, I know

(Also thanks for making me realize I can call capitalism inherently antifeminist on top of everything else for forcing women to devote their lives to profit even once they've escaped traditionalism)

[Reelya]

Actually, the thing that most correlates with delayed childbirth is women's education. It's really that simple: schooling, not forced labor, is the correlating factor.

But it's pretty silly to blame capitalism for the fact that once women aren't reliant on a man for income-support that surprise, surprise, they have to rely on themselves for income support, and thus, have to balance that with the desire to have kids. It's really that simple.

e.g. that makes as much sense as blaming "capitalism" for the fact that once you leave your parent's home, you have to get a job to be able to support yourself.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Perhaps we should be brave enough to ask why something like active education has the effect of making children undesirable

do you think that

perhaps

maybe

woah now

our educational system is a slave to and replicates the problems of

stay with me here






^_capitalism?

[Reelya]

No. Because even non-capitalist nations see the same pattern. People get an education, they want a career, they want to achieve stuff and get recognition.

Kids get in the way of stuff, and not just because of "capitalism". Don't buy the "you can have it all" bullshit. People have to choose and prioritize what they want out of life, so if you open up new things to do for women, some of the old things will be prioritized down, and that means more women either delaying or deciding not to have children. Women have more choices now: e.g. don't get married or have kids whatsoever. It wasn't a choice before, but it is now. Naturally that means delaying or in many case just not wanting to have kids, and there's nothing wrong with that, or any proof that this is undue

[MrRoboto75]

But it's pretty silly to blame capitalism for the fact that once women aren't reliant on a man for income-support that surprise, surprise, they have to rely on themselves for income support, and thus, have to balance that with the desire to have kids. It's really that simple.

Can you raise kids on a single income source these days?

[smjjames]

No. Because even non-capitalist nations see the same pattern. People get an education, they want a career, they want to achieve stuff and get recognition.

Kids get in the way of stuff, and not just because of "capitalism". Don't buy the "you can have it all" bullshit. People have to choose and prioritize what they want out of life, so if you open up new things to do for women, some of the old things will be prioritized down, and that means more women either delaying or deciding not to have children.

Ispil said that it’s not really delayed childbirth either.

But it's pretty silly to blame capitalism for the fact that once women aren't reliant on a man for income-support that surprise, surprise, they have to rely on themselves for income support, and thus, have to balance that with the desire to have kids. It's really that simple.

Can you raise kids on a single income source these days?

Depends on the career and the country (due to currency differences).

But really, I think it’s just largely due to the lowered infant mortality in developed countries where you don’t need to have a lot of children just to ensure several reach adulthood. Not the only factor, but it’s a pretty big one. Though obviously, if you want to have a big family, you can, just that women are choosing not to have a huge number of children.

[Reelya]

I'd also point out that we're talking about things in what's pretty much the richest per-capita country in the world, where they hand out food stamps and stuff. Then saying that because some people (actually, the wealthiest people) have less kids, then that's because of too-much capitalism. First up, that's a very limited first-world perspective.

The real capitalist hellholes where everyone works in Nike sweatshops for the equivalent* of $1 a day and it's completely cut-throat without any unions or any welfare: those places have mega-huge birth-rates. There's not really much evidence that excessive capitalism causes low birth rates, unless you're literally in the top 5% of the richest people in the whole world capitalist system. e.g. the places in Asia with the lowest birth rates are the ones which are the wealthiest, regardless of whether women are expected to work or not. e.g. in Japan, a wealthy developed nation, women are expected to drop out of the workforce when they get married, but they still have way less kids than the "overworked" American women, and many less children than the truly overworked women in factories across third-world developing nations.

* when they say "$1 a day", it's bad, and exactly how bad it is, is made clear because the people who worked it out pointed out - that's after exchange rates and cost of living is taken into account. e.g. if you can buy a block of cheap noodles for $1, then that's what a person working in a factory in Cambodia can also afford with their day's wages. e.g. it's not what $US 1 would buy you in their nation. This is actual raw tooth-and-nail capitalism, and it doesn't actually seem to depress the size of families all that much.

[redwallzyl]

A thing to take into account when discussing population and such is that stuff like increased access to things like proper access to birth control can operate to not decreases births but instead be used to help space them out and thereby increase the health of the mother by avoiding pregnancy when they are not physically ready. This is an unintended but I would say good use. As such it can not be assumed that things like increased birth control will decrease births when other factors are at play but can increase health.

[Reelya]

But really, I think it’s just largely due to the lowered infant mortality in developed countries where you don’t need to have a lot of children just to ensure several reach adulthood.

Yeah pretty much. e.g. when I was looking up stats on life expectancy on Palestine in 1900, it was pointed out that the life expectancy was ~20 years or something, but if you survived to 5 years old, then your life expectancy at that point would be 50 years, e.g. not to shabby. It wasn't like people were dropping dead for little reason, left and right.

e.g. traditionally poor nations have a very high infant mortality, but the ones that survive to 5 years old have a pretty good survival rate after that. So parents in those sorts of nations are getting pretty fast feedback: most of the non-survivors are going to drop dead pretty soon after they're born indicating that you need to make more.

Also, I'd argue that capitalism on the whole has made us materially wealthy. e.g. even the poorest people have more food and more stuff than ever before. Except, maintaining the amount of stuff that we all think we need is a lot of work. Sure, you can have a non-capitalist lifestyle, if you forgo manufactured modern products. Then you have plenty of free time to raise kids well. Except you don't get to also have cable TV, broadband internet, central heating, iPhones and the latest video games, to go out to restaurants, clubs and concerts, and drive a nice new efficient car, all those things that actually require you to consume resources made by other people.

EDIT: Something as simple as deciding who gets to put gasoline in their car, and how much, suddenly becomes an unanswered question when you decide to remove markets from the story. do we have price fixing and/or ration cards, from government-run fueling stations, or what? And then, if the answer is "just go for electric cars" how do we fund the development of electric cars, should everyone pay for it via taxes, even if they don't want to drive a car? And even then, someone has to be paid for the effort of generating the electricity, because that involves labor, so you're still back at the idea of who gets to fuel up the energy needed for their car, out of the available energy. And this is just a really basic question for the the "get rid of capitalism" idea.

[PTTG??]

The criticism of capitalism isn't that it has been or is bad (although there is a legacy of exploitation associated with capitalism that cannot be ignored); it is rather that capitalism will inevitably collapse in a terrible and deadly way, and we must move on to some other form of society before that happens.

Automation, harnessed for the good of all, freed from capitalist exploitation, promises to change human society to one of leisure and self-improvement. Automation within capitalism will eventually lead to a global genocide -- or else eternal poverty for nearly everyone.

[Reelya]

Yup, though the "legacy of exploitation" is pretty much endemic to every workable large-scale system we've come up with so far. Feudalism was no better than that.

Also the idea of an eventual future with a small number of super-rich who live in mega-towers while 99% of people who live in the dirt with nothing because they don't have access to the robots, that's not actually all that likely.

e.g. if you live in the dirt with no means to support yourself, you will actually turn to doing things like growing your own vegetables. If the products made by automation aren't accessible to people, then it will be the same as if those products and robots didn't exist, and the remaining people will in fact have no barriers to creating new stuff - with old-fashioned labor.

[wierd]

There's also the genie that is out of the bottle:

The knowledge of how to make, program, and make use of robots exists in the "poor people" world-sphere.  The 1% dont spend their time learning or honing such skills.

So, the only barrier to entry is the strong arm of a government that enforces the 1%'s intellectual cockblock in the form of intellectual property (and eternal extensions to same to prevent entry to the public domain.)

This knowledge is disruptive, in more ways than one.  In the proper sense, the people with this knowledge will design and build their own robots that are not encumbered by the IP owned by the 1%, and some percentage of those people's works will be explicitly open-licensed. (See for instance the recent rise in "Open hardware") In the improper sense, it also means malicious sabotage, hacking, and other technical denial of automation's perks to the 1% by vigilantes in the 99%.

[Reelya]

There's also this to consider: if the 1% own all the industries and they're extracting > 50% of the labor-value of each worker who works there, then for every job lost, the 1% lose more income for that than the 99% do. They gain wealth by selling products to other people. If those sales dry up, e.g. in the no-jobs future, then there's no real reason to believe that further wealth concentration is all that inevitable.

e.g. say the 1% own 90% of the farms. But it's clear they don't eat 90% of the food. e.g. ownership and consumption are completely different things. The 1%'s wealth is mainly paper money, not measured in terms of raw resource consumption. Average people in fact consume most of the resources, and wealth is built on top of resource-delivery systems for regular people. e.g. if farms become automated, food will become much cheaper to produce (that's why they automate in the first place). But hey, everyone lost their factory jobs, how are they going to afford food? But remember, food's much cheaper to produce now. e.g. a food stamps equivalent program would be much cheaper to run, too. e.g. there's no real logic in the idea that incessant productivity increases which is really what we're talking about are going to drive most of humanity to near-extinction levels of poverty. e.g. there are already programs like food stamps and medicaid, and if everyone's out of a job because everything is automated, the cost of running those programs also plummets along with the cost of everything else. Catastrophe averted.

[martinuzz]

While the discussion is quite interesting, wouldn't it be better placed in the MSH Karl Marx thread?

[sluissa]

https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse/status/997255568782852096

Is this more on topic?