> how frustrating must it be that manufacture of the most important product of all — new human beings — cannot be scaled up or digitised; can only happen slowly and organically within the bodies of individual women?
Frustrating to whom? A few religious zealots who take "be fruitful and multiply" to its extreme? Shrinking countries like Russia, perhaps. Pregnancy is cosmetically inconvenient and occasionally life-threatening (and C-sections sever lots of interesting things) so it's easy to imagine the wealthy going for pregnancy-free reproduction. But after your 14th kid or so, it gets to be a bit much, and all 14 in diapers at the same time would be a bit overwhelming?
> With an efficient, centralised source of new workers, governments can continue positioning having a family as an unaffordable luxury without staring down the barrel of demographic collapse. You’re thirty years old and spend all your salary renting a box room in a flat you share with four strangers? That used to be at least partly the state’s problem as well as your own — but not anymore.
First, what government suggests that families are an unaffordable luxury? Societal expectations of music lessons,summer camp and non-second-hand clothing are what make child-rearing expensive.
As I read it, it implies that families springing from wombs would become eccentric, while people emerging from vats would become the norm.
But the vat people would still have adolescence, hormones, all the standard causes of rebellion and instability, and would have only state workers as their comrades/family. "You're grounded, no car keys" becomes "You're incarcerated" so I suspect the revolution won't take long to start.
I suppose the cost side of raising all the children to be productive drones isn't prohibitive? It costs a fair amount to raise a child to productive adulthood, but of course all the rich countries have lots of extra housing lying around to house the kids and the state workers raising them. Or just raise them in barracks, by legions of nannies?
After all, in this picture, the state is the parent and family for the vat people. But the vat people will live, work with and have hormonal overflows with standard family people who still exist. The picture is a lot more complicated than just "set up a baby factory and run it".
Remarkable. I never wanted to have kids, because the economics don't make sense. But at this point the government may have to pay people to have kids, just to keep the wheels of capitalism turning.
yeah it's unfortunate that in their drive to plan and centralize everything they overlooked that the reasons why people have kids are not at all economical or even rational anymore. Unlike some type of steel or concrete, you can't just build a child factory and flip a switch to catch up on the 5-year plan. Although who knows, if they really put their mind to it, maybe some kind of massive propaganda campaign like "if you're not having children you are betraying your country" may work? who knows.
I mean... cool but that's not addressing the problem at all (which is that having kids is too costly and risky right now, we have negligible infertility issues instead) because to pay for this you probably would have to pay far more than needed to allow current fertile population to have kids "the standard way", which needs: social support, controlled house prices and paternal/maternal pay leave.
In this case instead you would have to pay not only for the whole "babies farm" (which sounds extremely costly) but then also to grow and educate every single kid at least for 18-22 years without real parents/community.
It sounds like making the solution even worse than the problem.
I have been recently picturing a dystopia (utopia?) wherein women sell their eggs to some kind of govt. agency which in turn hires women who are willing to carry babies to term.
These babies are then raised in child group homes by state employees all the way from infancy. Meanwhile the state pays for their education until they either graduate or until some kind of arbitrary deadline.
Thus the problem could become cost effective due to economies of scale thereby partially mitigating the cost problem.
However, it is still unclear whether to then make childbirth opt-in or something along those lines.
If we are going to farm kids, then why not do it properly?
The problem is that children, rather than free farm labor, are now too expensive, while the wages on which the majority of people depend, are too unpredictable and intermittent for the kind of long term involvement 2.1+ children represent.
If countries want to solve their fertility problem, they can waste their time with various tricks and "incentives" to postpone what they'll eventually have to do for geopolitical reasons alone, which is to go to war with their own business community.
Capital controls, tarrifs, sector bargaining -- the exploding heads of think tank libertarians guide the way like lit torches through a swampy marsh.
If wage earners can be assured that they are taken care of irrespective of the spasms of the global market, they can have children. Otherwise they will persist in their state of soft rebellion, which is marked by low fertility and low laber market participation, among others.
This is great news. Before long, we can stop having kids naturally and just create them artificially in factories, like in the prescient 1949 novel "Brave New World", and let governments raise them in institutions run by professionals. Having amateurs raise kids has had mixed results at best, with many people proving to be absolutely terrible parents, and usually the people who are the worst parents having more kids than those who are actually good at it. Finally, we're now finding that when people are financially comfortable and busy with fulfilling lives and careers, they don't want to have kids, or very many of them (not enough to maintain the population). Outsourcing reproduction and child-rearing to the state will fix all of this.
"Since the 90s, parental incentives have soared across rich countries, yet birthrates have continued to plummet"
The premise is wrong. It's extremely expensive to have a family in rich countries. In most families both parents have to work to raise them. Making it very hard to raise kids. Bottom line as countries get richer and the population flocks to the cities so the costs associated with having a family soar. A lower cost to have kids is the fix but the question is how can that be done? Current incentives are not enough.
If they built decent residential areas where families could live, DINKs and other childless folks would move there first. Families are and are permanently expensive in post-industrial society to the point where they're nearly a luxury if you want to also live in an urban (read: trendy, young, creative) area because space, and therefore anything that depends on space, is at a premium.
Make no mistake: this sucks. But it isn't "anti-natalism". It's om-nom-nom capitalism. The fix is deeper than whether or not planners like families with kids or not: it's a rethinking of how we allocate resources. And that's a hard conversation to have.
That's one of the craziest things I've ever heard proposed, but I assume it's a joke. Otherwise would said government pay for raising this child? Or are we going to treat this like pro-life supporters do in the US and only care about babies up until the point where they are born. I simply don't understand why we would want overpopulation and especially unwanted children who will likely grow up in a foster home being beaten and raped, unwanted by anyone. It's hard enough being born to a family that loves one and has the means to support one. These kind of ideas remind me of the Romanian ban on contraception during the communist years. That did not work out well at all and neither would this (introducing placebos). I'm quite sure society can adjust and accept the fact that fewer people want kids or even marriage. It's already started in many countries and so far seems to be just fine.
Industrialise child raising, like everything else.
Artificial wombs. Group day-care. Have women donate eggs, men donate sperm and combine them randomly. Make it the duty of every person to be a parent to 2 to 3 children with fines for not doing their part until they hit 30/40 years of age. The babies will be born never knowing their biological parents. Then they're sent to child-raising facilities, either government or private, which are subject to strict regulation against mistreatment and indoctrination. Only the mega-rich, or very rural will afford/choose to have babies the usual way.
This seems to be the only choice in a society where everyone has to work 40 hours per week to secure a living for him/herself. If you had guaranteed basic income that can cover the cost of children, people could leave their position for one to two years, maybe do contracting work from home on the side. You will need very strict laws against discriminating against those who chose to have children. Or, you know, make making children a specialised industry like everything else.
Thing is, the marginal cost of kids has shot through the roof. It’s no longer a sensible thing to do - in the horrible times you mention, children were investments - you spend ~ 10years raising them, and after that they worked for you, almost free labor. And a lot more things required labor to function.
Now, kids are almost all cost, as the government / society itself captures their economic output, and doesn’t give enough back to the family that did the work to raise them.
So now you have kids because you want to, and its no longer rational act, more emotional one.
> how frustrating must it be that manufacture of the most important product of all — new human beings — cannot be scaled up or digitised; can only happen slowly and organically within the bodies of individual women?
Frustrating to whom? A few religious zealots who take "be fruitful and multiply" to its extreme? Shrinking countries like Russia, perhaps. Pregnancy is cosmetically inconvenient and occasionally life-threatening (and C-sections sever lots of interesting things) so it's easy to imagine the wealthy going for pregnancy-free reproduction. But after your 14th kid or so, it gets to be a bit much, and all 14 in diapers at the same time would be a bit overwhelming?
> With an efficient, centralised source of new workers, governments can continue positioning having a family as an unaffordable luxury without staring down the barrel of demographic collapse. You’re thirty years old and spend all your salary renting a box room in a flat you share with four strangers? That used to be at least partly the state’s problem as well as your own — but not anymore.
First, what government suggests that families are an unaffordable luxury? Societal expectations of music lessons,summer camp and non-second-hand clothing are what make child-rearing expensive.
As I read it, it implies that families springing from wombs would become eccentric, while people emerging from vats would become the norm.
But the vat people would still have adolescence, hormones, all the standard causes of rebellion and instability, and would have only state workers as their comrades/family. "You're grounded, no car keys" becomes "You're incarcerated" so I suspect the revolution won't take long to start.
I suppose the cost side of raising all the children to be productive drones isn't prohibitive? It costs a fair amount to raise a child to productive adulthood, but of course all the rich countries have lots of extra housing lying around to house the kids and the state workers raising them. Or just raise them in barracks, by legions of nannies?
After all, in this picture, the state is the parent and family for the vat people. But the vat people will live, work with and have hormonal overflows with standard family people who still exist. The picture is a lot more complicated than just "set up a baby factory and run it".
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