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0 pointsinglor_cz7mo ago0 comments

Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".

It doesn't really fit the picture. Capitalism is about 250 years old and most of that time it correlated with a massive population explosion, not a collapse. The current world also isn't uniformly capitalist. Socioeconomic conditions and systems differ across the globe, but the collapse seems to be nearly universal.

There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school and we mostly eliminated teenage pregnancies in the developed world. Which is likely better for the socioeconomic level of the now-not-mothers, but it also has negative biological effects and sank the overall birth rate in a non-trivial way.

What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy. That is a very small subset of "capitalism", though.

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palmotea7mo ago· 1 in thread

> Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".

Capitalism probably not the only cause, but I think it's a pretty central cause, and may be driving some of the other causes. I also think its worth pointing out because it can be one of those things that's so familiar that it can become invisible.

Birth control technology is probably the other big cause, because it would have the effect of "unblocking" the effect of other cultural trends on birthrate.

> There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school...

I assume you're talking about 18-22, but my impression is that historically, most women had their first children after that age, even before widespread college education.

I think a bigger factor is probably early focus on career pushing many women to try to start having children even later in their late 20s/early 30s. And that goes back to capitalist workplaces being pretty unaccommodating to parents (it's a bit better now, but work still demands your first priority to be your work).

> What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy.

That's not that new though: the book Bowling Alone was published in 2000 and is apparently based off a 1995 essay. COVID and smartphones just accelerated existing trends.

inglor_czOP7mo ago

"I assume you're talking about 18-22, but my impression is that historically, most women had their first children after that age, even before widespread college education."

In cities and in richer families, yes. In rural settings, everything was sped up a bit, and, until very recently, most population worldwide was rural. Even if we look at highly fertile regions today (Afghanistan, Niger, Chad...), the first-time mothers tend to be between 16 and 18 and live outside the few cities that are there.

My own grandmother grew up in a rather underdeveloped corner of Slovakia in the 1930s (no electricity, wooden huts etc.), and a peasant girl who wouldn't be at least betrothed by 20 was seen as a bit weird.

Quite a lot of our previous fecundity was driven by rural mothers having six or seven children. This was a major source of "kid surplus". The urban population was never as fertile, plus there was some extra mortality from diseases and higher cost of food.

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