Regional health minister says those who are busy with careers can ‘create offspring’ on work breaks
While addressing a crowd at the Eurasian Women’s Forum in St. Petersburg on Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin hailed government policy geared toward helping women achieve the ultimate balance — professional success while being the linchpin “of a large, large family.”
He went on to joke that Russian women can manage it easily, and still remain “beautiful, gentle and charming.”
His comments are the latest in a public push by government officials to try and reverse Russia’s sinking birth rate by appealing to a sense of patriotic duty and promising financial incentives to sway prospective parents.
Russia’s fertility rate — which measures the average number of children born to a woman over a lifetime — stands at approximately 1.4, less than what is considered the rate for population replacement, which is 2.1. Kremlin officials have labelled Russia’s statistic “catastrophic,” and it comes at a time of higher mortality among younger Russian men due to the war in Ukraine.
I wonder if a birth rate that stays low for a while might be what it takes to avoid future wars? Just in general, across all nations? Funny that the very things that have damaged society’s faith in the future might end up mitigating conflicts in the future.
When manpower can no longer be replenished, then wasting it trying to pull off landgrabs can only be sustained for so long. Not just physically, but politically.
If population declines no one needs to do a land grab. There’s enough for everyone.
or, the ultra wealthy will take even more of it.
Indeed. We already have more than enough land for every human, and can probably even provide for double our global population. The problem is that wealthy already owns the majority of land, and limit its access and usage to the average citizen of his nation.
They are some exceptions of this, India and China are the two I can think of right now. But it also probably one reason they are able to have a very high dense population, people there have more access to land.
Tell Russia that lol
Everyone wants more. while there are limits to how much more we are not even close. Besides it is governments going to war and those leaders have a lot more ability to control more than normal people.
21st century automated warfare won’t require as many warm bodies. Few have any real idea what it will be like.
Just a few weeks ago, a Russian soldier blew his own brains out when he heard a drone approaching. I saw it myself. Modern warfare is a gruesome business.
Drones are piloted for now, but this is already changing. Fewer available soldiers won’t matter. War never changes.
Drone on drone warfare might be how wars are waged, but not how they’re won. There’s still gonna be lots of destroyed infrastructure and lives lost. Doubly so for any sort of asymmetric war
That’s exactly the point I’m making.
I misread the last paragraph, oops ^^
As for the Russians, there were also a few videos of Russians blowing themselves up with grenades when they heard drones overhead. I can’t imagine how indoctrinated they must be to prefer suicide over surrender
I doubt they fear surrender.
It’s more like preferring quick and painless suicide over lying in the field maimed and in desperate pain wishing you had died. Maybe you’ll die slowly as you bleed out. May e you’ll be a target of the new thermite drone and be set on fire to die in agony. Maybe you’ll live on in pain and disfigurement with no hope for the future. Maybe you’re not there willingly and do not want to kill or see your friends killed
Still, it’s been proven time and time again that the Ukrainians generally accept surrender, even towards drones. It is an extreme decision to choose certain death over a chance at captivity
It’s been proven to us, here on the internet, not those kids in the Russian trenches. I find it hard to fault their logic given what they’re likely to know.
Their state media has done a number on them.
Eventually we will have drone vs drone and robot vs robot wars.
More like drone versus “strategic targets”. Infrastructure, energy, logistics, manufacturing.
Civilians will continue to suffer. Technology can’t meditate away the essence of warfare - i.e. “diplomacy by other means”.
I don’t think anyone with half a brain is earnestly concerned about lower birthrates. Humanity isn’t going to disappear off the face of the planet just because birthrates dipped for a bit. These things have a tendency to correct themselves and people aren’t going to stop having sex.
Sure, in the long run humanity will adapt and survive, but we will definitely have problems to address in the near-ish term like the next 100 years or so. the main problem will be an inverted age structure; there will be fewer people paying taxes, and fewer people around to take care of the older generations when they are elderly. Many developed nations are experiencing this and worried about it.
and ‘sex’ isn’t the issue; with modern education, contraception, etc you have to convince families to want to have kids. It doesn’t seem to be any one particular thing holding people back either, so it’s not as simple as subsidizing childcare or making families more financially secure. Countries in europe give lots of financial assistance to raise kids, but their birth rates are still much lower than replacement levels.
I am. Lower birth rates are no big deal now and may be a necessity for the near term, but it’s a worrying trend for the future. As we drop well below replacement birth rate, each generation becomes a lot smaller than previous, giving us an aging population that quickly drops as larger generations die off. This could lead to more disruption, political instability, huge costs as we can no longer afford the infrastructure we’ve built out, and less opportunity for scientific, technical, mental or cultural growth.
To compound this, countries with worryingly low birth rates have found tremendous generational inertia. Once it becomes common for fewer people to choose parenthood, you can’t easily change that.
To me, this is a similar problem to climate change. We’re here in the 1970s trying to reduce pollution but no one cares. Or maybe we’re in the 1990s fighting to get global warming recognized but no one sees any environmental changes. Do y’all need collapsing societies before you recognize the long term trend! Heck, even the “tipping point” ideas have analogies.
If we act now, maybe we can implement some tweaks to slow the decrease or even stabilize it in some future generation
Let me introduce you to the internet. But seriously, with economic forces against having children, education and human rights giving people more choice than ever, and a new outlet with online life, these are permanent societal changes that are disrupting that cycle. Birth rate has never been this low across the developed world and continues heading lower.
Population declines have happened many times in history and were always a good thing. It takes more resources to raise a child then to care for elderly. When the elderly die it frees up resources for everyone making the next generation more prosperous.
The Black Plague, WW1, WW2, all were huge population declines. WW2 killed almost exclusively the best workers leaving the elderly. The result was a global boom.
That’s my point
Your examples are also one time events, vs lasting societal changes
Your examples are limited in scope, leaving much of the world unaffected
One income is enough if you want to like that way. In the one income 1950s you had one phone for the house, a radio (maybe a black and white tv with a tiny screen), one car (mom didn’t have a drikers license anyway)… it is easy to put on rose colored glasses but they had a worse standard of living.
Realistically that was the only time one worker was somewhat normal but only because we rarely count ‘womens work’. For that matter the effort women hut in to maintain their 1950’s house was significant - though if you were a women it was probably your best time to live from work standpoints (but there were still a lot of socity issuse that made your life worse). last while a significant number of women were ‘housewives’ it was still comon to have jobs- just less common than any other point in history.
was single income really better? That is a complex debate that I only scratched the surface of. You can get phd’s looking into this.
I’m not saying that lack of women’s opportunity was better: I’m saying it was easier to choose children in a family when one parent could afford it, when one parent could be dedicated to it.
I’m also not saying women’s lack of choice and opportunity was a good thing or that we should wish for it, but you can see how it facilitated a higher birth rate. We never want to go back, but how do we make it easier for people to choose more children, in that context? How can that conflict ever be fixed?
For myself, I loved taking care of kids and believe I would have made a great stay at home Dad. However among other things, my ex could not financially support our family alone and it would have seriously derailed my career, my future ability to support our family. Now that women have the same opportunity, the same choice, the same freedom, they’re also stuck with the same consequences. How can we expect more parents to choose children when you face less ability to support them, for both men and women.
Regardless of societal changes being for the better, we have lasting changes that will keep the birth rate too low
I’m saying you could have afforded it. That you didn’t want to accept that lower quality of life is a valid counter though. (it may have required you to move to the poor side of town which is often dangerous). Your observations about how it affects future career is also spot on. You could have done it though.
I suppose there’s always a way, always a compromise that could have been made.
However our situation was more extreme than most. As a software engineer, I earned enough to support my family reasonably well, even on one income. Our family could afford that my ex be a stay-at-home Mom, which many families could not. One of the benefits was also to allow my ex the opportunity to take the job most fulfilling to her (as the kids went to school), despite it paying well below the average income, well below what she could have earned. Trying to support a family on that would be very poor indeed
It’s just incentive for developed nations to produce more automated weapons of war.