I thought about your post this weekend while I spent a day with my rural relatives.  90 year old farmwives from the American South make the best fried chicken in the world!  It was interesting  to try to figure out how the younger set are reconciling the norms shown on the Internet with the norms set by their parents, who in turn once had to try to reconcile the world shown on television with traditional farm life.  There’s a lot of “us .vs. them” thinking involved, not quite class warfare but strongly reminiscent of it.

Of course, my own ancestors swept down on Zog’s valley at dusk, burned the village, raped the women, and crucified all the warlords and priests, and used the new-fangled bread to make sandwiches out of the roasted farm animals.

But I’ve put all that behind me now.  I’m making new norms and dragging my friends and family with me.

A few dozen millennia ago, I think you were probably the guy who harumphed loudly when Zog and the rest of the guys over in the next valley started domesticating primitive grains. You told everyone it was just a stupid passing fad, or a never ending treadmill they’d be sorry they started.

And you’d have been right to try to avoid it, because Zog and his descendants mostly just ended up working their asses off to feed a new parasitic class of priests or warlords or whatever, while themselves ending up with vitamin deficiencies and exciting new diseases picked up from the farm animals they’d taken up residence with.

Yet a couple of millennia later, you wouldn’t really have much choice anymore. It’d be go down and live with everyone else in the villages and cities, or be a lonely old hermit. 

I wonder if the real lesson of Louis’ nobles is that they preferred to go broke buying ridiculous hats rather than lose access to the only people and society that they knew. People just can’t live too far out from the norms set by all the other people.

I’m also guessing that if you were a homeless guy, looking for work, you’d be slightly annoyed when a Fox News commentator in a $5,000 suit tells you that you must be richy rich and have no real problems since you could obviously afford that luxurious $20 pre-paid phone…

Imaginary necessities are all part of the Ponzi scheme that we call capitalism. A couple of years ago, I only made ~ $8K for the whole year, but my FICO was over 800, and I could have pulled $60K in cash of my credit cards.

There’s a brilliant neo-realist film called La prise de pouvoir par Louis XIV, in which Louis destroys the nobility and consolidates power by making it impossible for them to exist without spending all their money on shoes and hats. It worked.

So, yes, the fact that I work at home makes a cell phone unnecessary for me, whereas a homeless person would need it for survival. But it’s also true that you’re never going to get off the leash if you keep focusing on how tasty the dog treats are.

In the year 2000 over 50,000 children were adopted in the USA alone.  The parents who chose to exercise their basic humanity and provide loving homes for children in need did not do so because they had some extra money they felt like throwing away.  Some of them were infertile or gay or otherwise incapable of “breeding” but that’s not why they did it either.  They did it because providing for children is a moral, ethical, and biological imperative.

To understand what it means to be a person and not just a meat robot, be a loving parent to a child.

Fuck money and the horse it rode in on.

Alright. You got me. They’re obviously not quite as essential as oxygen or food. But still.

And I’m guessing this is a reasonable choice for you. You’ve obviously got a computer. Probably employment, a fixed address, a land line if you need to call 911 or something. Friends and relatives who remain tolerant of your luddite tendencies and know how to get in touch with you. Etc.

I’m also guessing that if you were a homeless guy, looking for work, you’d be slightly annoyed when a Fox News commentator in a $5,000 suit tells you that you must be richy rich and have no real problems since you could obviously afford that luxurious $20 pre-paid phone…

Also, just for the record, a cell phone is not a luxury good these days…Having a reliable way for people like family and employers to reach you, to respond to emergencies, etc., is essential to modern life.

Apparently, I’m in mortal peril, because I don’t have one.

Don’t be obtuse. Nobody is saying that it is literally impossible to avoid having children. Or that someone’s choice to have a child should not be deliberate and well considered.  

What I’m saying is that it’s really, really weird the way you’re insisting on putting children in the category of consumer goods, as if having children is really just another luxury for well off people, like a fancy car or vacations in the Bahamas. 

I humbly submit that they are not. 

As such, if there is evidence that many people do not have any meaningful choice in the matter of reproduction – that is, for many people the “choice” is between being unwillingly childless on the one hand, or being unreasonably impoverished and immiserated on the other – then that is a problem. A problem that is in no way helped by sniping that “Having a child should be like anything else: getting a car, going on holiday.”

Of course there is. Safe sex, no sex, or pull out.

There are many countries that choose to help with the cost and burden of having children, and they should…because if you think the current state of the world is depressing, try imagining it with no children. As others have said, it is also economically unsustainable to have low reproductivity (also too high) but people actually have fewer children when they have more secure societies, so having parenthood be a more financially secure prospect actually moderates population growth.

Many countries have neighborhood daycares, yes, socialized to be affordable and home assitance in the early months. Someone mentioned Canada’s year of leave at, what, 60% pay? This (I’d be happy with 3 or 6 months though, honestly) would reduce unemployment because companies would have to have an extra workers fill in. Also, it benefits families to be able to not pay for childcare that first year, formula cost, transportation cost, etc.

On site daycare, enocuraged by providing tax credits to companies who provide it (and still charge people but not as much as the current market) would allow more women to work and continue to breastfeed (pumping is opressive and I much admire those who do it long-term. I work from home with grandma-care, so I’m very lucky in that regard). Longer breastfeeding would reduce obesity, cancer, diabetes, asthma, etc and pay off in reduced healthcare cost, not to mention eliminating the need to pay the huge cost of formula. More companies could be flexible like mine, and allow for people to work from home, helping reduce commuting cost, possibly childcare expenses, certainly reducing the amount spent on eating out, maintaining professional wardrobes, etc.

Yes, many of these things would only benefit certain people in certain situations, but we are a society. If families can’t make ends meet, they can’t spend money. If they can’t spend money our economy suffers. Companies right now have record profits, that they are pocketing, not spending on hiring people or improving benefits. Why? Because they can and they are not altruistic by nature.

There are plenty of solutions, but until our society values people, parenting, and the common good rather than the profit of corporations, I don’t have much hope things will change. People just don’t care enough about other people. They selfishly say that doesn’t directly benefit me, so I won’t support it. So, we are left with a government that supports the profits of corporations and doesn’t support a healthy and productive society.

Instead of even wanting to support each other, we attack each other for our choices…to have or not have children. Who’s a bigger drain on society? Who took our jerbs?

That is exactly the way they want it, the powerful people sit back and reap the rewards of a system skewed in their favor while we argue over the last meager piece of pie.

The comment about phone boxes and landlines is doubly irrelevant. Not only do social expectations change rapidly to accommodate the new technology (the expectation that most people have telephone access most of the time has completely changed how things are arranged and how fast they move), but hard line infrastructure is increasingly obsolete. Public phones are disappearing rapidly (in my neighborhood, even if you can find one here and there, there’s long odds that it’s actually in service). And in many cases it is cheaper to get a cheap cell phone than to pay for land line service. Not to mention more useful, especially if you move frequently or don’t have any fixed address at all.Also note that increasingly it’s not just voice calls you need. Text messages are increasingly relied upon. And email is also an expectation these days. As is access to various websites – which you might need to find information, search for jobs or housing, retrieve government forms, etc.

There’s also increasingly little difference between “a cheap phone that makes calls” and “an iPhone etc.” Data plans aside, they’re both free with a contract these days. There’s even ultra cheap android handsets and the like for pre-paid plans.

So stop being so elitist. It’s not 30 years ago. Update your expectations.

But that’s not even my main point, which is that you’re still conflating how things are with how they should be. When it comes to non-luxury goods and services, never mind access to something like education, health care, or the right to have a child, then observing that “you make the choice you can afford” is profoundly inadequate. There is, in fact, no choice at all. That’s the problem.

Also there’s a difference between a cheap phone that makes calls and an iPhone etc. Again… you make the choice that you can afford. I know someone who has an ~eight year old mobile and it costs him around £10 per month. It makes calls, it works.

I think it’s just possible that you may be missing the point. 

If not, I’m not sure I’m on board with your proposal that children ought to be considered a luxury good.

I mean, apparently you agree that’s it’s a bad thing that, for various reasons beyond their control, far too many people do not have access to good drinking water? A bad thing that, in general, you would be in favor of taking reasonable steps to do something about?

So what’s your response to a person who somehow gets in over their head financially trying to obtain water. “Tsk, tsk. You need to decide whether you can afford it before getting any?” “Tsk, tsk. You should have known the human body is mostly water before you were born.” 

What?

The point is that ultra high costs for things like day care or college are unreasonable. They represent policy failures that we, as a society, can and should do something about. Better parental leave policies, public provision of day care, investigations into the causes behind runaway tuition, etc. Saying that this is the way it should be and people should just not have children if they can’t afford it is tantamount to saying that ultimately only the richest should be able to have children. And it’s monstrous.

I think this is a bit unfair, and possibly misguided. 

I mean, the fact that many women, both in developed countries and everywhere else, are having a lot more children than they’d like (because of poverty, lack of control, and lack of access to health care and family planning) is absolutely true so far as it goes. But that’s obviously not a good thing. 

I mean, globally, are you suggesting that we rely on keeping lots of women poor, uneducated and depriving them of access to health care in order to maintain birth rates? Are you opposed to providing services or policy interventions that would ensure that having children was practical for those who choose to?

I assume not, because that wouldn’t make much sense.

I presume that most of us here, Brainspore included, would like to see a good deal less poverty in the world, more choices for women, etc. And [ecological catastrophe aside] that’s probably optimistically achievable in a generation or two. But if global birthrates then start to match first world trends, the species might start to have a real problem. Even if you think there’s too many people (I don’t), and would be happy to see population level off or fall for a couple generations, it’s still got to be a long term concern. 

Refrigerators I would say a more of a human necessity and I’d worry if people couldn’t have one. Of course not everyone does in the world sadly, along with so many other fundamental requirements such as water.

You’ve made a couple of comments like this. I’m not seeing where they’re justified given the comments you’re replying to.

(That’s not to say that obnoxious race panickers don’t exist, just that I don’t think we’ve seen any so far on this thread.) 

Inasmuch as women still make less than men in general, I suppose it probably would have cost somewhat less. But that’s obviously not a state of affairs which should be tolerated.

Sure. Or a yacht, or a private jet. Or the refrigerators and cell phones that so many lucky duckies have these days. And hey! If you don’t go to the right schools or make partner by 34, you don’t really deserve a child anyway, amiright?

Of course I’m also so totally sure that astronomical child care and college tuition costs are completely justified by the fundamentals. There’s no WAY that arbitrary and harmful runaway price inflation could ever occur in such services. I mean, who ever heard of such a thing?