Tell me if I am wrong. But my understanding is that children are the Social Security programs of many poorer countries for the people when they get old. In America we want more babies. We pay for people to have babies. We pay people to raise children in the form of tax benefits. We help feed a lot of the children. We pay for their schooling. Let’s for discussion sake say the we stopped all those benefits. If you had children and you had to paid for day care, schooling, no tax breaks, no welfare state. What do you think would happen to the birth rate? I bet the churches will try and fill the gaps for the 10%ers.
Point being, is religion really as powerful reason as many think it is for having babies or a moral excuse.
I wouldn’t stop educating and insuring that the babies we have, grow up healthy and smart. If the birth rate did go down, and we needed more ppl, there will be immigrants we could choose from. A side benefit of a system such as this, is that white nationalists’ heads would explode.
Humans have too many babies for various reasons, be it religious beliefs, economic reasons, longing for more familial connections, but especially because humans really like having sexual intercourse.
"Humans have too many babies for various reasons, "
At base, could it be a simple as “that’s what mammals tend to do”? By that I mean breed to the point of exhausting natural resources. We’re clever mammals, so have found many ways of accessing resources.
An aside. How is it that ‘nature’ always ensures a global balance between males and females? I think there are slightly more of one than another, but that overall balance is close to 50/50. When an imbalance occurs, such as after WW2, there is a population explosion. This question puzzles me, but am not willing to simply declare ‘god did it’, just because I don’t understand.–Nor d I accept the notion of Gaia, which I consider a sneaky way to introduce deism.
However, people need basic needs (and btw, I never was paid to have my two sons) such as education, medicine, healthy food, clean water, shelter, and clothing. I don’t think it would be humane to stop educating people and alike. IMHO, this isn’t what causes people to have more children. I’ve already stated that it isn’t these safety nets that encourage these things, but rather humans being gullible concerning religion. There are people out there who really believe their god (usually the Xian deity in the U.S.) wants women to pump out babies and women either fall for it or they are forced to because of their religion. It is these stupid and superstitious beliefs that do these things and quite frankly, whether the woman knows it or not, it is religion that is highly abusive to women. What I would do, if it were possible, is remove the freedom of religion clause in the Constitution and state we are all free from religion, by basically outlawing any form of religion, especially if it force a person to do things that are harmful and unhealthy, such being a baby factory. We should not remove the safety nets from the people though, just religion.
But my understanding is that children are the Social Security programs of many poorer countries for the people when they get old.
Mike gets something right every now and then. I'm not sure where you'd find this, but I did an online class on the economics of the poor. Yes, it's what humans did to survive for a long time, procreate excessively. Some died, some helped with the gathering, some became great hunters. Now, it's that they might get a job in a sweat shop and be able to send some money home, but, same basic idea. Or, looked at from the other way, when the Middle class grows, birth rates go down. The logic is, with the infrastructure to keep people alive, you are more confident your child will survive, so you invest more into each one.