Precedent. Every Brown Pundits post, new ones included, must be at least 70 percent original to BP. Reposts from other sites are allowed, but the reposted portion must not exceed 30 percent of the post.
The Philippines has just recorded one of the fastest fertility declines in modern history, and almost nobody saw it coming.
In 1993 the average Filipino woman had 4.1 children. By 1998 it was 3.9, by 2013 around 3.0, and by 2017 it was 2.7. Then it fell off a cliff. The 2025 National Demographic and Health Survey put the figure at 1.7, well below the 2.1 a population needs to replace itself. That is a 37 percent drop in about eight years, the steepest the country has ever recorded. In the early 1950s, Filipino women were having more than seven children each.
At 1.7 the Philippines is not yet as low as East Asia. It still sits above Japan at 1.2 and well above South Korea at 0.8. What unsettles demographers is not the level but the speed, and the direction, which is the same one every developed Asian society has already taken.
Why nobody expected it
None of this was expected here. The Philippines is the largest Catholic country in Asia and one of only two places on earth, alongside the Vatican, where divorce is still illegal. It has one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the region and a young population that was supposed to power Southeast Asian growth for decades. By every standard expectation it should have stayed high.
The ordinary part
Some of the decline is ordinary. Every developing country passes through the same demographic transition: when most people farm and many children die young, families have many; as medicine improves and people move to cities, children become a cost rather than an asset. The Philippines urbanised fast from the 1950s, Metro Manila taking in around a million migrants every five years, and fertility slid from seven to roughly three by 2013. That much it shares with Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia.
Outcome of a no-divorce society
The collapse after 2013 is where the Asian Boss video reaches for reasons specific to the Philippines, and here a note of caution is needed. The video leans hard on relationships: men who cannot be trusted, women who stop trying, a dating market gone sour. That is part of the story, but it is told with more confidence than the evidence carries, and it crowds out causes a demographer would weigh just as heavily.
The first factor it names is the absence of divorce. A Filipino whose marriage fails has two options: legal separation, which bars remarriage, or annulment, which can cost over $10,000 and take two to four years, against a Manila minimum wage of about $11 a day. For most, neither is realistic, so men in failing marriages walk out and vanish. By 2024 there were over 15 million single parents, 95 percent of them mothers, and only about two thirds of young Filipinos had been raised by both parents. From this the video reasons that a generation of daughters learns early not to rely on men. It is a plausible chain, but a chain of inference, not a measured cause.
Schooling and work
Firmer ground is education and work. On the 2022 PISA tests, Filipino girls led boys by 14 points in maths and 35 in reading, and women have out-graduated men from college for over a decade. That edge met two booming sectors.
Outsourcing, which made the country the world’s call-centre capital by 2010, is about 54 percent female. Overseas work is bigger still: of 2.19 million Filipinos abroad in 2024, 57 percent were women, sending wages home as nurses, carers and domestic workers.
For the first time on a mass scale, Filipino women earned independently, and female-headed households are now roughly one in four. Wherever women gain schooling and income, fertility falls, with or without a divorce ban.
The weakest link
Social media is the video’s last factor, and its weakest. An old self-mocking phrase, NBSB, No Boyfriend Since Birth, flipped from an admission of failure into a badge of choice. But memes track changes in behaviour at least as often as they cause them, and a viral label is easier to film than the quiet facts beneath it: contraception, later marriage, the plain cost of a child in a city.
Old before rich
What makes the decline serious is timing. The Philippines is growing old before it has grown rich. It has no universal pension, a minimum wage of $11 a day, and by 2030 a rising weight of elderly to support. The outsourcing jobs that carried a generation are, by one estimate, 89 percent exposed to automation.
The last holdout
And here is the part the video never quite says. The Philippines is not an outlier. It is the last major Asian holdout to give way. China is near 1.0, South Korea 0.8, Japan 1.2, Thailand far below replacement, Vietnam recently under it. The same has happened across the subcontinent, under wholly different rules of marriage and family. India has dropped below replacement to 1.9. Bangladesh, poorer and more religious, is now there too. Sri Lanka and Nepal sit at the edge. Only Pakistan and Afghanistan still hold high. These countries share no divorce law, no meme, no dating culture. What they share is development: girls in school, women in work, children in cities. The Philippines was meant to be the exception that proved Catholic Asia could resist. It turned out to be the rule, only late. The question is no longer why the Filipino birth rate fell. It is why anyone expected it not to.
The video: Why Filipino Women Are Choosing to Stay Single Forever – Asian Boss
This is great news for the planet imo.
Great news for humans as well. Little by little we are going to be forced to confront the limitation of the infinite growth economic models that are treated as common sense as well as cultural defects that leads women to not want to seek out men.
And if AI turns out to be half as good as it is marketed to be having less people is not a bad thing. Even if it does not it suggests prosperity awaits those children who will.be born.
The only problem is the lack of pension and growing burden on the state but these are only problems countries like the Phillipines have 40 or so years to prepare for
Can we please stop with the degrowth nonsense. Philippines isn’t doomed, there is still large possibilities of economic growth in that nation. Growth might have a ceiling but humans are nowhere near that ceiling right now. If we were to assume that the Kardashev type 1 was the ceiling for Earth then we are at least 4 orders of magnitude off from utilizing sufficient amount of energy to reach that ceiling.
Idiots like Piketty have filled minds in the west with this degrowth nonsense. Even if Philippines starts to decline in population in the next 20 years it still has a couple decades to deal with that problem as was shown by South Korea which has grown despite having a declining population.
economic growth is a misnomer.
endless consumption, as a substitute for life’s real purpose, is not an end goal.
There is definitely a point where consumption just becomes an endless activity with marginal gains. But most of humanity isn’t at that point, many people still struggle for basic meals, affordable healthcare, and decent housing. We live in a world where large portions of Asia aren’t even past 10k $ per capita. There is no good reason for these regions to stay destitute. In most of these places having higher consumption leads directly to a better life. So for many of these places such first world problems aren’t real.
Putin is kind of right about the golden billion.
it’s just hoarding of resources more than anything else alas
Do you actually work in public health and policy or are these all just theoretical postulates?
well for most of the planet- one healthy, fertile grandchild is an optimum..
very soon we’ll be banking our genetic material as a matter of course
Only with good social safety nets and savings. Without these two a serious burden is put on a single grandchild.
It will.be interesting to see what kind of solutions we come up with in the future.
The point is that the idea of education and retirement will have to transform entirely ..
Governments around the world have tried throwing money at this problem for decades but to no avail. What they don’t understand is that this is a cultural problem. I have maintained this position for almost 2 decades during a time when UN projections were being alarmist about ‘overpopulation’ that there was never an ‘overpopulation’ problem. It’s so good to be proven right on long held beleifs.
There is only one solution to collapsing birth rates and that is to severely restrict female access to contraceptives, higher education and employment. Ban universities from churning out useless degrees, remove diversity and gender based quotas (or infact introduce them disproportionately for males), restrict female political representation and the whole 9 yards. People will cry about ‘human rights’ but this is strictly from a policy perspective.
If this is not done, societies with miserable TFRs will collapse within 2 generations and with collapse comes war – often total war – which often rebalances the equation. Either pay nor or pay later. We all know what most governments will choose (pay later)
erm.. we are presuming you aren’t serious?
Absolutely serious. This is a very deep multilayered discussion, but what I have said is what governments will need to do to stave off societal collapse in the future (say 15-20 years). You have already seen the signs in the US where billions in funding is pulled from universities for DEI programs, and this cultural shift is even affecting Canada and Western Europe.
For decades, western countries with low TFR were relying on immigration from high TFR developing countries. Now most developing countries have low TFR themselves so they can’t feed that ponzi scheme anymore.
With low TFR, population pyramids invert, the old depend on the young and the young are losing incentive to work and support the bloat. This is made worse when the young are not having children either, due to completely dysnfunctional gender dynamics in modern culture. Humans don’t intuitively understand exponentials, and they don’t get how grave the situation is for most countries (it’s irreversible), and how fast shit is going to hit the fan (in social terms 10-15 years is pretty fast)..
The TFRs are only going to fix when the family system is fixed. The family system cannot be fixed if women have freedoms they are granted today. If you examine the youth dating dynamics, freedom of mate choice has resulted in basically all the young females, chasing the top 5-10% of males. This is how it used to be in the paleolithic and neolithic age. You can’t have the same dynamics in the modern age, but no violence like they had in the stone age. Eventually this is a recipe for social upheavel and conflict.
The worst thing that we will be seeing in your projections is at some points some of our descendants will have possibly the best and most calm lives in human history.
You seem to not know that there is nothing wrong with dying gracefully. Which is not going to happen we are just going to reach an equilibrium number. More research needs to be done on what this looks like, what is it and how to reach it.
the Parsis aren’t really dying out; their descendants are simply inheriting more and more property.
WASP Americans haven’t died out in a way their prestige has simply exploded.
I mean yeah, and one of the biggest handicaps of Parsi community is its refusal to consider offspring of females who want to initiate as parsis,
Anyways at one point there will be sufficient wisdom and richness that having children wont be a burden
S with their loser talk being tolerated on this blog is not going to improve readership or engagement with women.
Surely you can make your point without using un-parliamentary language?
S is entitled to his point of view even if one doesn’t agree with it.
We edited the French but kept the essence
A point of view that seeks to strip the right of half the population and treat them as breeding stock is the issue, not my very accurate description of S and his bs.
It’s amuses me you consider yourself a liberal. You are a milquetoast moderate, the kind MLK understood to be worse than actual racists. “…moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…”
Women who have children, or prefer to have children, have been labelled as ‘breeding stock’ by feminists around the world.
This is the cultural problem I talked about.
Nobody wages war on women better than other women.
we doubt that feminists have had that much of an impact..
it’s simply that women, very rationally, don’t want to raise children without the right support mechanisms in place.
the nuclear family is a failed concept. a wage earner and a care provider in the same house providing for dependents.
the model worked for an industrialised society but not a post-industrial society.
Feminists are just the front, the real effect on culture is a result of modern capitalism and its need for more worker slaves, combined with elite culture promoting materialism as a way to salvation. Capitalism combined with feminism has had a devastating effect on the family unit (extended and nuclear) and the declining TFRs are a result of it. Women have been convinced by the capitalists that what they really need is a career, and all the material wealth that comes with, and that children are a burden. News articles are floated in mass media how much chidlren cost over a lifetime showing them as just another product.Left wingers team up unconsciously with capitalists making arguemnts about ‘saving the planet’ (as if the planet is a living being that really cares about tiny human ants on it)
Modern feminists like to imagine and group with left wing causes, but all modern leftists/feminists are just worker fodder for corporations, filling their lower tier and middle management.
You are correct that women don’t want to raise children without the right support, but you are incorrect to say that they always make this decision rationally. For the right man, most women will always become very irrational. Someone like Elon Musk can distribute his sperm in a tiny bottle at the supermarket and women will line up to have his babies (I am told he has curretnly over two dozen kids running around with different women, many unrecognized by him). This guy would be an involuntary celibate (aka incel) based on his looks and him being autist, if he wasn’t famous or rich.
The root cause of this problem is simply this:
1) Machines are replacing manual labor, which reduces reliance on males
2) Stonger governments creating a more secure environment, thereby reducing the reliance on male protectors and extensive family networks
3) Welfare states taking care of women at vulnerable times, which once again reduces reliance on male benefactors and extensive family networks, and even children.
4) Unprecendented peace time post WW2 which reduces male utility
All of this causes reduced male utility, male income which leads to dysfunctional gender dynamics (women don’t want to reproduce with lower quality males who earn less than them), dysfunctional family units and low TFR.
these are interesting points..
What according to you is the definition of feminism?
I have no problem with your point of view. I do have a problem with your un-parliamentary language. This is not done on BP.
I don’t know who you are and you seem to be new to the site but I would strongly advise you not to get personal with me. I don’t take kindly to that.
one can understand why Ruhi would be triggered by what Q wrote.
understandably all women would.
Whether someone is triggered or not, there is never any excuse for un-parliamentary language.
ordinarily there is not but that will invariably add the patriarchy..
The point could have been made perfectly well without directing personal insults at Q.
Otherwise, this is a slippery slope. We are all triggered by different things. Making excuses for foul language leads to a bad place.
what is K meant to consider himself?
K doesn’t agree with Q does he?
I’m not going to venture into the substance of what Q wrote.
I’m only saying he has the right to hold whatever opinion he wants.
I come from an extremely educated family. Many of my female relatives are medical doctors. My great-aunt was a professor of Pathology at Fatima Jinnah Medical College way back in the 1960s.
At the same time, it is true that for Pakistani women (and Muslim women in general) marriage provides a very important social status as does being the mother of sons. This is reality–whether someone likes it or not.
Kabir we have held multiple ceasefires because u don’t take kind to anti-Pakistani comments ..
by the same token the female Commentariat will take extreme offence to the idea of them being forced to be mothers.
it is an offensive opinion
I never said women should be forced to be mothers.
I am saying that in Pakistan (and in plenty of other countries) women gain social status through marriage and through becoming the mother of sons.
My mother is a very accomplished professional woman. She often says that being a mother is one of the greatest joys of her life. Obviously, women (and men) who don’t want to have children don’t need to have them.
Marriage is considered a fundamental requirement in Islam. It’s often considered “half the religion”. Perhaps that influences Q’s views.
Also, in a country like Pakistan which lacks social protections, women do need a man to take care of them. That man is either their father, brother, husband or son.
“Also, in a country like Pakistan which lacks social protections, women do need a man to take care of them. That man is either their father, brother, husband or son.”
Pakistan feels like a very backward society tbh
I think most of the “third world” is like this. The family is a very important social institution.
The West is obviously different.
India is light years ahead in female rights.
Pakistanis do not seem to understand just how progressive India is.
You do realize that marital rape is still not a crime in India?
Anyway, this India vs. Pakistan comparison is tiresome and I’m not going to indulge in it.
India is not the West.
it is not the West but it is next door.
we didn’t know about marital rape but there is the domestic violence law:
498A IPC states – “Husband or relative of husband of a woman subjecting her to cruelty. —Whoever, being the husband or the relative of the husband of a woman, subjects such woman to cruelty shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to three years and shall also be liable to fine.
We had a whole discussion about marital rape probably last month.
There’s this:
“India refuses to criminalize marital rape. This new series shines a light on it”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgqkl2kqkxzo
India may be more progressive than Pakistan. It’s not an “Islamic Republic”. But it is hardly a feminist paradise in the European or American sense. I’m just saying keep it in perspective.
Has downstream effects too.
Pakistani women sports is a non-entity.
In women’s cricket, even Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, smaller countries have achieved more.
Indian women famously won the World Cup last year.
More than 50% of Medals in sporting events require female participation (including mixed).
I like the quote. Please do engage here. Its very refreshing to see another strong female voice in a space that is predominantly male.
Perhaps you can tell us your theoretical solution to this problem – if you even consider this a problem – that is.
Is it a problem?
Forcing people who don’t want to become parents to become parents is an even worse problem tbh
No, its not about direct force, but policy.
It was government policy that created this disaster, and it will be government policy that fixes it (short of war & conflict)
However I personally think the elites of the world have other plans in mind since they see most people as cattle.. but at that point we are going into conspiracy theories.
that is true as to how the elites code human populations.
Excluding the fact that it wasn’t government policy, rather the gradual shift from the feudal socioeconomic structure to the market socioeconomic structure caused this situation. In some places, this organically happened, and in other places actively pushed for this system. The basic reason being that this new system allowed for expansion in economic productivity, state power, and broader improvement in living standards. I mean, this shift represents one of the largest improvements in human history. Everyone shifted to this in one system, or else they were conquered or ethnically cleansed, as we see in the case of the native americans and the Qing dynasty of China. The present elite benefit from the present Market economy; I doubt they want a return to feudalism and weakened positions. Above all else, people generally are irrational and won’t go the way that the elite wanted them to; if that were possible, things like the French Revolution wouldn’t have happened.
This is a permanent shift, and no government policy will ever bring back the old way of doing things. All of the nonsensical policies literally conflict with a society that values economic productivity and high living standards. Those policies require a return to feudalism and a worse socioeconomic system with lower living standards. Furthermore, I doubt women want to be incubators any more than men want to be seen as inseminators for child production. I’m pretty sure making marriage seem like, you know, a desire thing would make child production more appealing. Culturally, people don’t want relationships and children because they only see shitty things about those concepts, like suggesting that the government actively discriminate aganist 50% of the population isn’t going to exactly change their mind. If relationships and children were treated as something valuable in life.
This is overestimating the power of the peasant. The peasants have no power because the peasants are not organized, they are consumers and followers and easily shephered.
Modern peasants (i.e working class in the modern economy) are easily controlled and any government worth their salt can control them.
Just an example, the Trump admin pulling funding from universities and corporations for promoting DEI has competely flipped the board and this is culturally felt even in countries that just do business with the US. This year, there were no major corporations changing their logos to rainbow colored pride flags, no pride rallies in public schools and very little media content created on a feminist bend. Pulling funding from USAID that was funding women’s NGO’s promoting these ideas in developing countries also singlehandedly put and end to all the feminist kanging that was being done in countries like Pakistan since money tied to those jobs evaporated overnight.
We are already going through a cultural shift and this will be apparent in the next 5 years if it isn’t already.
While it is somewhat true that governments need to be mindful of what the population feels, what the population feels can also be easily controlled by the government because the population is fickle with short attention spans.
Reproduction is a biological imperative, you can culturally program people for so long (maybe 2, maximum 3 generations) until they flip the switch back to factory settings either naturally or through violence.
yes shrinking birth rates isn’t really that big of a deal fwiw- society adapts..
it’s the Global North not allowing the migration of capital and resources to the Global South.
Africa produces cocoa and has people; why aren’t the global brands based there for chocolate say instead of Switzerland?
corporate slavery is the real issue here, which is why humanity can’t reproduce itself. u r right on the diagnosis but (completely) wrong on the solution
Soceities will always adapt. But the process adaptation is going to be messy, many cultures may go extinct and countries may cease to exist.
South Korea here is the canary in the coal mine.. what happens to them in the next 20 years is going to demonstrate what happens to others.
Almost every society in the world is seeing dipping birth rates. India is a recent example, but many places in Africa that have some degree of propearity are also getting there.
Firstly, the political shift toward the conservative direction began somewhere near the end of Obama’s second term and the beginning of Trump’s first term. The present situation represents the peak of his political shift and will stabilize in the coming years. The rest of the world is behind this political shift, so they are still at earlier stages, well, except for India, which shifted to the right earlier on and is starting to see a stabilization in recent years. Secondly, Trump has more or less squandered any political goodwill he could have had from voters who weren’t a part of his core group of MAGA supporters. The worsening economy, the endless wars, tariffs, the Epstein case, and the outright corruption have tainted his term to the extent that even his traditional allies like Tucker Carlson have disassociated themselves from him. Additionally, they have been losing multiple elections recently. I don’t see much room for a cultural shift; this is his last term here, and he is already losing momentum.
Thirdly, people do not always follow what the government and corporations say. If your argument is so valid, then why did China have a hard time reversing its fertility decline?. Even in America, the fertility rate is below 2 for conservatives and liberals; ironically enough, the Latino population has a higher rate than every other group, irrespective of their politics. Policy doesn’t change people’s attitudes in many cases, even in dictatorships. On top of that, no one wants a child, for that matter, if it basically means having to give up their freedom and change their lifestyle. If people don’t find meaning in having children, then they won’t have them; in the past, religion and culture provided a sense of value in life that gave people a reason to continue having children. These days, religion and culture are seen with suspicion due to the endless slew of corruption and violence historically.
My main point still stands: you can’t force people into doing something they don’t want or lack the capacity to. Also, the best examples of countries with high fertility rates are ones that are exceptionally weak and lack any sovereignty, something that no government wants. None of this includes the fact that we don’t live in a feudal society with lords; most of us live in a nation-state that still requires popular consensus. Even China still cares about its people’s opinions and material conditions in spite of the autocratic nature of its government.
1) Trump squandering his political capital does not affect the rise in conservatism. The core driving forces underlying these problems remain the same, and Trump will be replaced by another one who promises to fix them.
2) China, like every other government is trying to solve the problem by throwing money at it. This is not a money problem, as I have repeatdely said. This is a gender dynamic problem. People are getting pissed at me for saying it but eventually they all will come around to it. Once policy makers realize what they have to do, then the question becomes, whether they should do it and bear the consequences, or not.
3) I think you can force people into doing things they don’t want to do, especially if you excercise power. Even if you can’t directly coerce people, you can indirectly coerce them through legal system by making things legal or illegal. You can coerce them through the economy by printing money or raising taxes. You can also coerce them by changing the culture top down by subsidizing one thing or another, buying off media, controlling SM algorithms.
Most people don’t want to work 9 to 5 getting weekends off, but they have to. Most people don’t want dual income households where kids are carted off to daycare for most of the day, but now they have to. Most people don’t want to pay exobirhant rents to corporate landlords but they now have to.
Government policies are reponsible for almost all of it. In life, very few things are true free choices, peasants are often choosing between one bad choice or another because there are no options they truly want.
See, you haven’t provided a reason or incentive for the government to go through with any of these policies here. For one, women contribute in this day and age to the economic productivity of a country, and by choosing to push them out would naturally worsen the economy rather than improve it. The state cares more for the economy rather than its own people these days, so it doesn’t make sense why they would remove 50% of the labour force, especially in first-world countries where people are low in numbers to begin with. Even if they choose to remove women, that doesn’t guarantee that the fertility rate will rise and there will be long-term economic benefits. Look around you, the most successful countries tend to treat women a lot better, and the worst countries tend to treat women very poorly. I am sure Afghanistan isn’t leading the way into becoming a massive political power despite the policies you said are being implemented. Even among the first-world countries, the ones that treat women poorly also suffer from the lowest fertility, such as the cases of South Korea, China, and Japan. Hell, China in recents have removed safe contraception just to resolve their fertility crisis, rather than simply throwing money and yet things haven’t improved for them.
Your argument about government policy is basically “might makes right” at this point. If the government forces its people to do anything, as you’re saying, why would they stop at women’s conditions? Afterwards, they could simply do ethnic cleansing and other horrific acts if they see fit. At this point, how exactly is your arguement anymore different than what Israel says to justify their actions against Palestinians or what Trump is doing to the people of Iran? Are they too justified in doing all these things since it works out in their best interest? This is similar to what the Hindu nationalists or the Taliban view of the world. So it would be the same as saying that it is right for Hindutva groups to simply cleanse the land of muslims. Your entire view is nothing more than a slippery slope that eventually leads to moral degradation and the gradual decay of society.
What happens if the reverse happens and women decide to create a matriarchal country and strip men of their power? After all, men are obsolete since there aren’t any wars, and women don’t need to depend on them. You don’t really need so many men; we could all just kill all the males that are required, since you only like 12 men to fertilize 50 women. Why don’t we embrace polyandry at that point? As you said before, welfare, a lack of war, machines, and a secure state reduce male utility as well as reliance. We could just kill men of low quality and economically unproductive, leaving only the high-quality, economically productive ones to breed with the remaining women to produce superior offspring after all.
God, your worldview is very myopic and feels insulting to men more than women, honestly, since at least women are seen as having some worth outside of their male partners. While men in your worldview can have no value outside of what vague gendered contribution they make to society, and their sense of identity is dependent on how much the opposite sex relies on them. They are placed into stupid boxes, such as low or high quality, rather than being treated as human beings. Maybe if we (both male or female) stopped with this insecure bullshit superficial ideas once in a while, maybe people might be happy and decide to have a large number of children. Happy people are willing to play along with anyone that gave happiness, while miserable and sad people are willing to follow anyone, even a clown like Trump, if it means they return to a happier time. People are driven to action by their emotions, something that any state policy could never replicate. The thing with emotions would be the fact that they are very fragile, it swings in one direction today, and they swing the other way tomorrow; a revered hero today becomes the villain tomorrow.
Lastly, Trump spurred on a conservative wave, but it is objectively still weaker in contrast to everything in the past. Like Reagan got a larger conservative push in contrast to anything that Trump received. Today’s conservativism is much more diluted than it has ever been, and it mostly remains reactionary with very little policy substance, in contrast to past waves that were objectively more policy-oriented. If what is happening to Modi is anything to go by, then you gradually end up in a political cycle trying to double down on reactionary politics until you lose sight of your vision and policies. So, no, this objectively isn’t anywhere close to a massive cultural shift you are talking about, but rather a diet version. I mean, Trump represents a form of Christian nationalism, yet America continues to become less christian overtime, and the younger generation tends to be atheists, with even the religious followers in the cohort saying that they don’t believe in god. Some things change, but nothing else truly does.
This is a fallacy to assume that discouraging women from joining the formal job sector is ‘reducing GDP’ and destroying the economy. Maybe on paper (since household unpaid labor is not counted as ‘product’ in your GDP stats) but not really, and not by that much. The work that was historically done by women is now done by machines or other humans. Washing, cleaning, fruit picking etc are now done by machines, while other unrelated individuals like nannys imported from your village are formal daycare centres staffed by stiffed lipped women now take care of the baby instead of its own mother who is slaving away for her work boss.
However this is the long term view. The economy will not be affected in the long term, perhaps even improve.
In the short term however, there will be unheavel.
So once the governments understand what needs to be done and the costs that need to be paid, will they follow through? Therein lies the rub. In democracies with 50% of the people being women who are brainwashed into this lifestyle, the governments wont follow through. And that is why authoritarianism will make a come back (like it already is doing)
I am not saying ‘might makes right’. I am observing might makes right.
Do you have any examples of anything like this ever happening? There has been no successful matriarchical societies. Given a long enough time scale, partirachicy will eliminate matriarchy. The fundamental nature of the two sexes are different. Men are more stronger, more dominant, take more risk, and naturally can organize better to commit extreme violence. Women are also shown to prefer such men in mating preferences so it perpetuates. So we not only have a social imperative for patrirachy but also a biological one.
So let’s not entertain hypotheticals.
They are doing what they can do. Justified, no? Understandable? Yes – history is filled with examples like these.
Will there be resistance and payback? Yes most probably although not always guaranteed.
From a current strategic viewpoint, they are digging their own grave since they have overplayed their hand.
The nature of work is going to transform from pay to purpose
Firstly, if women can be replaced, then so can men. Corporations don’t care about gender; they care about profit at the end of the day. In post-war North America, many of the men who came back from the First World War were unable to get employment since women did all the jobs, and they were paid less than their male counterparts. The men protested to have women removed from the workplace, but that failed since the corporation could make a profit from the lower wages. Fundamentally, if labor can be replaced, then it will be replaced. Furthermore, men’s jobs are more likely to be replaced than women’s since they tend to work in low-income fields to begin with, things like nursing. While men usually end up working in higher-income fields like computer engineering, these tend to be the first ones targeted for replacement due to their higher costs. Additionally, many of the female-dominated fields have strong gender norms that stem from traditional values since the female gender is considered the “Gentle” gender, and I doubt people (who are willing to implement your policies) are willing to have men replace those roles.
Secondly, you have a thoroughly poor understanding of what traditional society would look like. The housewives that picks berries and do house chores do not represent anything close to what normal working-class populations would experience. That was a thing only for rich people in high-end positions as opposed to ordinary folk. My own grandmothers by modern standards, is considered a “housewife”, but they literally had to plant, grow, and harvest crops by themselves. They, alongside their husband, had to cut trees and collect rubber sap to produce rubber sheets that can be sold in the market for a stable income. Housechores were nowhere close to their main duty.
In today’s what use does a housewife even have here? Most food can be pre-cooked and preserved in refrigerators; very few other chores require active participation. Even child rearing requires more active involvement until the schooling period begins, where children spend most of their time at school. At that point, everything that the wives do is stay at home doing nothing productive, while the entire future of the household is on the single income of the husband. Everyone has the material means to work, and they contribute back to the society in which they live.
Unproductive labor is the same as reaping the benefits without contributing back to society. One who does not work is one who is less than a dog in this world; the only justification is if they are unable to do so outside of their own circumstances. It is as the ancestors say: one must complete their social role by using their free will; avoiding one’s role means one will be condemned to the depths of hell. Both men and women, irrespective of their gender, must have productive labor; the way of the housewife is not one. My grandparents cultivated crops together, irrespective of gender and regardless of social status.
One who has to depend on others for survival and fails to complete one’s role is unworthy of life. A man who raises a child is a father, and a woman who raises a child is a mother; one who doesn’t raise an offspring isn’t a parent, rather they are a stranger unworthy of the entire home and better left for dead. This is the worldview that I was taught by my very conservative Christian family, and one that I partially agree with as well as partially disagree with. From my family’s perspective, your policies are nothing more than a heretic worldview that encourages laziness, immorality, and sin in addition to being against basic tradition. This is the traditional worldview of what the joint family believes in.
As for your view on might makes right, well, I don’t see any strong people anywhere; I only see morons who squander everything. Trump is the best embodiment of this; he starts wars he can’t stop and lacks the balls to face the consequences of his own actions. None of his decisions has improved anything in a meaningful manner; it was like giving a monkey a garland and a crown; a complete waste. A strong leader convinces his people to follow his way without having to use force since they are violence is a sign of weakness and inadequacy.
Lovely comments ..
We completely disagree with what he wrote ..
Would you be interested in writing for BP? We, the admin would be very happy if you choose to do so.
So what if humanity dies out? Good for the earth frankly!
Humans aren’t critical to the planet. We may think we are, but we are just as dispensable as any other species.
Your misogyny makes me sick.
Will you kill your child if he breaks something in your house? Perhaps he drew over your newly painted walls? Perhaps he/she vomited all over your newly bought sofa?
If you think it’s preposterous to kill your child to protect your material belongings, well I got news for you, I think it’s preposterous to kill your children to save the planet.
I am a sarcastic person so I will assume you are being sarcastic too.. which makes it all good.
Agni has admin rights – she can edit this comment If she likes as it feels offensive but we can’t decide.
No, let the regressive mindset be exposed. I’m in shock frankly that he actually believes it is ok to enslave another human being to propagate the species by using her as a baby making machine, human rights be damned.
Sorry, I’m a bit confused. Where is he actually talking about “enslaving” another human being?
Islam (like most other religions) encourages marriage and reproduction. Islam forbids pre-marital and extramarital sex so marriage is the only legitimate sexual outlet (for both genders). Part of the purpose of marriage is to produce the next generation. In this sense, Muslim societies are not different from other conservative ones.
The original post was about the Philippines. In Catholic doctrine (until fairly recently) the only legitimate purpose of sex is reproduction.
Also, there is the idea that you have children so there will be someone to take care of you in your old age. At least this idea is very prevalent in Pakistan.
I concur with XTM’s response on this. I would agree with your points that conservative India also still values a traditional family unit with a male child preference as insurance for old age. That attitude is shifting subtly though with more women taking up parental responsibility as parents age. So most don’t prioritize a male child as much. It is more about educating the one or two that they have no matter what the gender. There’s a realization that daughters take good care if not better compared to sons on average.
My personal experience is an outlier. Most women do not have that privilege. That it is unfair rankles. No woman deserves any less than supportive parents, a partner she willingly chooses and just to be able to live her full life without judgement or restriction.
Muslim societies are actually significantly different that other conservative societies. Muslims are quite unique in their regressive practices towards women. Purdah, naqab, almost complete gender based segregation in schooling, prayer, and all activities remains common throughout many Muslim societies. Even Islamic inheritance is biased against women. Women don’t even have equal testimony as males in a contract or in a court.
Erm .. this is why we pushed back against your protestations against Q.
This is just Islamophobic; there is no nuance or complexity to this comment.
According to your own graph – Qatar is the only country in the world where are far more female university students then male..
Please take some liberty and point out where I am being inaccurate or facetious. Caste is quite openly discussed in BP and is often portrayed as primarily a Hindu issue. However, the treatment of women in Islam remains a issue which is swept under the rug.
Qatar might have women heavily outnumbering the men in universities but power remains sequestered among men in the Qatari cabinet. The only female minister in Qatar is the Education minister. The reason men don’t opt for university education as much as women is they have other avenues for advancement for example through the military.
Your own religion (I assume you are Hindu) called for burning women alive when their husbands died. It was the British who put an end to that frankly barbaric practice.
But of course let’s criticize Islam as if it uniquely evil.
Islam gave women the right to divorce. Widows can remarry in Islam. Muslims never burned widows alive.
Women’s rights is essentially a Western phenomenon. I’m not against Women’s rights obviously but let’s just be clear that it is a Western concept.
I would oppose sati in the same breath as I oppose purdah or naqab. But sati has been abolished for more than a century however purdah and naqab remain endemic in many Islamic societies. Islam is uniquely regressive due to the fact that it refuses to reform. Hinduism and Christianity have both had issues with burning women but they reformed from their radical phase. Islamic society seems to have no such impulse for reform.
The point is that Islam was revealed in the 7th century. Since the 7th century, widows had the right to remarry.
Hindus literally burned women alive. It was the British that stopped you all from doing this.
But of course, many of you have an anti-Islam animus. Carry on.
And frankly you know very little about Pakistan. Otherwise, you would be aware that most Pakistani women are not in niqaab. They wear shalwar kameez and dupatta.
You can continue to take solace in the fact that you are more progressive than Muslim societies. But you are nowhere near as civilized as the West is. That’s the reality.
Good job congratulating yourself about the 7th century when will you return to the 21st century?
I have said multiple times that my great-aunt was a professor of pathology. My mother is a medical doctor as are my father’s sisters.
You have absolutely no idea who you are talking to.
You all burned women alive. Muslims never did this. I rest my case.
If you persist in criticizing Islam, be prepared for people to bring out all the disgusting bits of your own religion.
Half the women in my family are doctors and engineers as well. You all kept women caged in their houses for their entire lives. You all segregated them as a separate species. You all still keep doing that like its normal. Please stop sermonizing the rest of us who have decided to treat them like humans.
The sins of Islam aren’t any less heinous than any other religion. Any pretentions otherwise are fictional at best.
> Half the women in my family are doctors and engineers as well.
Very curious, are they married to country bumpkins or do they have husbands who earn much higher than them?
You are an Islamophobe. I have no interest in any further interaction with you.
“The sins of Islam”– whose Islam? There isn’t any one Islam–only interpretations of the religion.
My mother is certainly not “caged in her house”. Neither are my aunts. They are all educated professional women.
If we are seriously doing whose Islam what-aboutery then I should be allowed to whose Hinduism what-aboutery as well. Sati was never prevalent in my denomination of Hinduism therefore I am exempt from all sin. None of my family’s women committed johar therefore I am exempt from all criticism.
Kabir you’ve yourself on multiple occasions called yourself “world bank class” meaning you aren’t an accurate representation of the population you come from. How is your personal experience a representative sample in that case. You could simply be the exception that proves the rule. Complacent in your ivory tower, ignorant about the day-to-day sufferings of a common person.
The point regarding sati was that it was the British that stopped you all from doing it.
Your religion is particularly problematic. You all have a theologically sanctioned caste system. Hinduism is the only religion on earth with a concept of “untouchability”. In Islam, all believers are equal in the eyes of Allah.
But please do go ahead and attack Islam. You just reveal your own Islamophobia. Pathetic.
I actually have zero interest in attacking Hinduism. But if you attack Islam, I can attack back and then you can see how it feels.
I have no problem acknowledging that I come from economic privilege. However, Pakistan is full of educated and professional women–not all of whom are from the elite. So you are making generalizations based on insufficient knowledge.
BP has done a survey. We know that the majority of Indian commentators here are upper caste. A large proportion are Brahmin. “You aren’t an accurate representation of the population you come from”.
It is clear that–for many of you– any topic is an excuse to attack Islam. It’s actually getting to be quite sad.
do we need a ceasefire?
I actually think that’s a good idea.
so the current ceasefires are between
K-Q and RNJ-BB
K – 0M-2
we are not aware of Q wants to drop his ceasefires. Ceasefires can also be dropped after a while.
presumably you want to keep yours?
I am happy with my ceasefires. I think it’s working out for the best.
sounds good..
I am fine with continuing the ceasefire with BB since he continues to spam low quality & low effort posts under each and every one of mine which destroys logical discussion (if it was just a few times that would be tolerable but everytime, really?)
Rest of the ceasefires I don’t care about. It’s fine if they dont reply I dont either.
I thought you did not like religions being attacked?
You know you can use criticism of islam to speak about islamic culture, how it has helped women, and how patriarchy in pakistsn is a product of backwardness.
Insulting others religion does not help, and only leads to more acrimony. It does not matter if people dont change but they should have differing facts implanted in their mind to reflect on.
I think criticizing anyone’s religion leads to bad places. I do stand by that position.
However, those attacking Islam do need to be shown the mirror sometimes.
I only brought up sati to counter the argument that Islam is uniquely regressive towards women.
Anyway, the person concerned is not arguing in good faith. I agree with XTM’s suggestion that a ceasefire be instituted.
Ataturkization is the way.
Pakistani Muslims are a lost cause but soon Indian Muslims will be the largest group of Muslims in the world to live in a society where
Homosexuality is legalAlchohol is legalSecular personal law (Once UCC is rolled out everywhere)
This will be more than the total population of Muslims living in such conditions anywhere else in the world.
Nowhere did I talk about ‘enslaving’ anyone, but as you can see, the culture paradigm has shifted so far out into cuckoo land that any talk against uber-individualist ideology is considered calling a return to enslavement. People using terms like ‘women’s emancipation’ for feminist movements are obviously going to consider a reversal as ”slavery”.
Definitely not being sarcastic. But you do you and continue with the strawman.
A: set of those who want children
B: set of those who don’t
When n(A) is significantly smaller than n(B), said extinction event will occur due to choices not by forcing either set to either not reproduce or reproduce. This, in case you’re unaware, is called free will.
What you are suggesting is handbook slavery of the female gender, Handmaiden’s Tale ring a bell??? Or closer to home, the Taliban in Afghanistan.
No one’s killing anyone. Gradually reducing due to declining birth rates is different than murder.
Please learn the difference.
is the extinction of the only sentients history has ever known, a good thing?
Not if it happens naturally. All species are vulnerable to extinction eventually. I just don’t understand why we humans see ourselves differently. From Mother Nature’s perspective, all are equal.
If I’m not mistaken, we are currently in the midst of the 6th mass extinction event, losing thousands of species each year. It’s not improbable that humans might be next in line.
So if a human gets an infection, your first instinct is to let the human die because it’s natural?
There is nothing natural about a declining TFR. If contracpetives are banned/destroyed and welfare states evaporate, you will see TFRs increase dramatically.
What part of “choice” do you not understand? Just as its a choice to have a child, its a choice to not have one.
Giving nonsensical and irrelevant analogies does not help just fyi..
If you have sex, you will eventually have a child – it’s a natural process. Pregnancy is not a choice you make. The choice part comes when you actively prevent pregnancy. That’s a choice.
So I ask again, if a human gets an infection naturally, will you let him/her die because the infection happened naturally? Will you let ‘nature take it’s course’?
Seriously most of you people don’t think through before you make your argument and just say whatever you were brainwashed to say. Why is everyone acting so enraged but cannot refute anything I said logically. You guys know I am right on the money.
we’re confused – what is wrong with contraception.
We are brainwashed? Droll..
Pray explain the connection between the choice of becoming a parent and getting an infection? I don’t see any logic here lol.
Animals (and humans are just another group of animals) don’t choose to become parents, just as much as they don’t choose to get an infection.
Most humans acting on their biological imperative will become parents.
Preventing this is a choice, a choice people regularly excercise, infact so much that they now think that not preventing it is a choice.
If a species in nature stop increasing in numbers, and actually start to decline without any predator preying upon them and without any shortage of food, it is very likely that group is considered diseased.
Humans too have recently contracted a disease.. and it’s spreading which is problematic.
Q is obviously wrong on this Agni but let’s look at this rationally. I believe that humans will figure out the issue with TFR through a change in culture in the future by making society a lot more supportive towards women’s careers along with maternity.
The reality is that it shouldn’t be a choice of either having an independent career or a child. It should be both, either or neither with most choosing both or either. The reality is that in most of the world women have surpassed men in terms of university graduations and qualifications. Removing them from the economy is no longer an option for most of the world.
Q’s option only works in places that have already enslaved portions of their populations therefore feel it nature to enslave a bit more to keep their system working.
Why does Japan have significantly more men than women in university?
Otherwise, the middle east and Africa is what you would expect.
Also, I don’t think Q ever used the word “enslave” so I don’t know why people keep imputing that.
Anyway, he doesn’t need me to defend him.
Q’s comment:
“There is only one solution to collapsing birth rates and that is to severely restrict female access to contraceptives, higher education and employment. Ban universities from churning out useless degrees, remove diversity and gender based quotas (or infact introduce them disproportionately for males), restrict female political representation and the whole 9 yards. People will cry about ‘human rights’ but this is strictly from a policy perspective.”
Restricting female educational opportunities is tantamount to slavery. Barring them from political representation and their access to contraceptives and employment.
It made not be a “literal enslavement” but it is a functional one.
I obviously don’t agree with his viewpoint. I am just pointing out that people are needlessly piling on. Let the man express his opinion.
Anyway, no more comments from me on this issue. I really don’t care that much frankly.
yes but the comments are tantamount to slavery fwiw..
If there is freedom of speech, then he is allowed his opinion–no matter how unpalatable others may find it.
well alot of our systems do need to change.
the concept of education and retirement are hugely redundant.
kids aren’t earning till 25 and the average human’s working life is only 40 years.
it isn’t about regressing but understanding the colonial institutions imposed on the world (schools, universities, retirement) are no long fit for purpose.
with AI everyone can be learning new skills and knowledge constantly.
also one of the worst things in the West is old age loneliness, OAPs have literally nothing to do.
We disagree with Q on virtually everything except his diagnosis. There is a huge societal problem; and the modern day consumer is little different to the Ye Old Peasant, except healthier and has more ability to spend.
but our systems are withering and crumbling because the rate of technological change in the last 200 years has been phenomenal and unprecedented. but bureaucratic systems take time to keep up
Q is debating an entirely different issue, that of restricting female autonomy.
TFR dropping is attributable to multiple other factors including points that you previously mentioned.
Unlike what is commonly assumed, not all women (and presumably not all men) want to bear and raise children. Just because society has conditioned everyone from childhood to believe it does not make it true for everyone.
To have both a career and a family is an extremely tough choice for the woman. Unless there is a super strong support system along with a supportive partner, it invariably takes a toll on the woman. Sacrificing oneself at the alter of spouse and family is not the virtue its made out to be. It kills the individual over time with many becoming bitter as they age. I have seen this across various socio-economic levels.
Even today marriage is lopsided tilting in favour of the man. Look at the news filled with the dowry deaths that still shockingly happen even today.
The US went back in time with the reversal of Roe vs Wade. Such decisions only endanger women’s lives. So literally a lot of women there are living the Handmaiden’s Tale. Not a situation I would wish on any woman anywhere. So, Q’s attitude isn’t just confined to the visibly regressive places on the planet. India is very interestingly far more liberal and balanced in terms of not restricting women’s reproductive rights.
The bitterness comes regardless to some people. I know of people who are immensely bitter despite having worked their entire lives and not having children and vice versa. Children for the most part are a choice for the individual however we need to understand that any animal in the wild needs to be heavily abused for it to not to desire to have its own children.
Most people want to have children. Many are unable to due to their financial conditions. The lowest effort policy that the govt can institute is to make married couples on a much lower tax bracket to incentivize pair bonding in people. After that its all about providing subsidized daycare, affordable healthcare, housing, and education.
The largest issue I see with restoring TFR would be instituting a large change in culture towards natalism. Women for the most part don’t have it easy if they want a family and a career. But most need to otherwise we have no hope of creating a sustainable society for the future. Marching into extinction is not a real option. There are real policy options that need to be explored.
No, I disagree with your assumption that most people want children. Women beg to differ. Societal conditioning is a big factor in foisting motherhood on women.
Men literally have nothing to lose because the entire system from marriage to children is uniquely tilted in their favour. All under the ever encompassing garb of patriarchy.
If you look at the current scenario dispassionately, it makes sense that the TFR is decreasing. Any more people on the planet is simply unsustainable. Just go back to Malthus.
Personally I don’t think as a species we really matter in the big scheme of things. We are after all a little blue dot in one galaxy in the universe.
My final point is, nobody should force motherhood on a woman in the name of species propagation. Those who want children obviously have all means at their disposal to have them.
Again you are making statements which are absolute when the reality might be a lot more conflicting in nature. Most of us living creature have inherent impulses towards creating progeny. Many of us are able to reason out of those impulses. However, it would be inaccurate to say those impulses aren’t real. Most humans are programmed to want children, to like children, and to treasure any childlike creature (cats, dogs, any baby mammals, etc).
Malthus was wrong in his own lifetime. There is no resource scarcity stopping the expansion of civilization. After the green revolution of the 70s there hasn’t been a single famine in India which was the main prediction of Malthusian philosophy. The Industrial revolution meant that food supply was always stable and the Malthusian crisis never emerged.
It doesn’t matter if we as a species matter or not in the grand scheme of things. Our survival or our extinction will happen regardless of those facts therefore that in itself has no relevance towards our discussion.
Motherhood doesn’t need to be forced on any person for the survival of our species. Natural selection ensures that only those women who desire to procreate end up creating a future generation. Even if you believe that procreation is unimportant then your belief will simply stop mattering after a generation or two.
It is one of the main drivers which ensures that nihilism often never survives beyond a couple generations. Philosophies which are anti-natal in their primary outlook are just anti-life meaning they end up being bred out of society eventually. An Indian examples for this would be the ajivikas.
A man cannot presume to speak on behalf of women was my main point. If that was not your intent, I’m sorry to have misread it as such.
Of course reality is nuanced. Never disagreed there. Merely pointed out the absolute power differential that still exists between men and women and thereby influences decisions disproportionately.
My personal belief is immaterial here. My point is very simple. Those who wish to marry and procreate are free to do so. So why judge those who choose otherwise. Surely that is an acceptable argument.
Btw, Malthus being wrong in his time does not negate the possibility of his being right in ours. Resources are scarce, they are finite.
## It doesn’t matter if we as a species matter or not in the grand scheme of things. Our survival or our extinction will happen regardless of those facts therefore that in itself has no relevance towards our discussion. ##
Exactly, so why worry about propagation of the species then?
Wants more autonomy, but also wants more support systems and a supporting husband. Also wants career and more financial support because children are expensive.
Meanwhile grandma popped out 6 children at $300 GDP per capita, with no husband support and is now a proud old matriarch in her old age with 3 generations of humans directly descended from her, none of them caring about her nonexistent career in the HR department.
Excuses galore!
If you don’t want children, just say you don’t want children. Why invent lame excuses.
Read again you absolute illiterate ignoramus.
Those who want children should get support. Those who don’t won’t ask. And who are males to give females autonomy. You don’t get a say in the matter you flaming misogynist.
Grandma didn’t have a choice, duh!
As ironic as it is, if the government removes all support from women and gives them ‘true’ autonomy (which in simple terms means ‘fend for yourself’), they will migrate to secure more direct male patronage (i.e. support systems) and most of these TFR problems will evaporate overnight. So in a way, it will work out.
Calling people misogynist for stating the obvious will not change reality.
Govt assistance counts for naught. If the family unit is to survive, men need to pick up the slack and stop behaving like overgrown children who demand agency but take zero responsibility.
Fly Die has taken the time and the effort to explain the fallacy in your argument. Maybe take an unbiased look at it?
we think it’s not just men but the nuclear family is unsustainable..
people need to live in as large and extended households as possible.
for instance right now the capital expenditures for a household of say 5 people (2 adults, 3 children) is staggering.
rent/mortgage, car, utilies, etc.
so essentially it’s one provider and a caretaker to raise children..
if anything what India or the Subcontinent should do is institute the role of trained facilitators and mediators; how to ensure equity in ever-larger families.
that’s the problem people learn the wrong things at school (English literature, rote memorisation) but they don’t learn key core skills like assertion, costing emotional burden (Q wants to place unpaid emotional labour entirely onto women)..
what is critical is knowing what to monetise (time, effort, energy) and what not to monetise (love, passion, compassion).
The nuclear family is unsustainable if both parents are working. Children need a stable home, present parents who give them time and affection. A large multigenerational family works only when there is mutual respect. The tragedy for most women is that their own parents treat them as “pariya dhan” and in-laws treat them as unpaid labour to be mistreated. This attitude will have to change for marriage to work for women.
Otherwise, a working woman does not really need a husband. If she wants children, the options of both adoption (Sushmita Sen) and a sperm bank are available. The household runs on a support structure consisting of other women (cook, daily help, driver etc). What is the value add of a man here? Just to be clear, I’m playing Devil’s advocate. But many women in India are increasingly opting for this.
I do agree broadly with all your points though.
Here’s a recent controversy that unfortunately highlights the average male’s attitude in urban India.
https://m.rediff.com/getahead/column/is-a-womans-consent-only-worth-rs-370/20260612.htm
>men need to pick up the slack
Men do almost all the grunt work in this world that is required to keep the lights on.
It’s very privileged to call men slackers whhile sporting a masters degree in useless-studies which is never really used to produce anything of value to anyone.
I will reply to Fly Die, since most of his arguments are 20 year old arguments that don’t fly anymore.
The point of the new posts is for the Commentariat to actually feed on what is written; otherwise we may just do a weekly Open Thread and let the Commentariat duke it out..
LOL Delusional much!!!
The fact that you’re implying I have a Master’s degree in some “useless” discipline only reinforces the fact that you think less of a woman without even knowing what her actual qualification is. You sir are a certified misogynist.
I don’t know if you have a master’s degree or not but I gave you credit for having one, and you interpret it as me thinking less of a woman?
So you do agree that a master’s is useless and deny the credit?
Or pehaps I am right and you do have a master’s degree and you are just offended that I think it’s useless
In any case, my point is that men are doing almost all the work required to run the world today, women mostly fill up the middle managerial spaces that can be mostly trimmed off without much consequence.
However because of the way our economy works these days, the guy laying electrical lines in 35C heat under direct sunlight earns a fraction of what a woman writing emails all day in an air conditioned room.
I don’t dispute the value of those emails (since I am a capitalist) just that humanity can survive without it just fine if it really came down to it.
Your “deductions” are so amusing that I almost feel sorry for that tiny brain of yours working overtime to come up with ludicrous arguments. So I’ll leave you to it lol.
I am wrong but I am right?
South Korea spent $300 billion in the last 10-12 years on cash bonuses, housing assistance, and parental leave.. and the fertility still declined to disaster levels.
At some point, even less intelligent people are going to notice that economic incentives are not working because it’s not an economic issue, but a cultural one that relates to gender dynamics.
Well, you are still very wrong, though. Firstly, South Korea may be rich, but they still hold onto the traditional social dynamics quite strongly. For one, women are expected to sacrifice their professional lives after marriage, become a housewife, and generally behave more closely to the traditional standards. Also, men are expected to serve in the army, while women are not due to stereotypical assumptions about gender. In spite of adhering to these standards, their population didn’t increase at all.
Also, the way they spend the $300 billion is quite stupid. Firstly, they tried paying people to have children, but the amount of money they gave wasn’t enough to even cover basic education for children or any of the other aspects. So, people didn’t have much of an incentive to have children. Then, the government tried to import workers from foreign countries, but they failed to produce a pathway for integration. Then, they tried to import wives from foreign countries in exchange for citizenship, but that didn’t pan out anywhere. The rest of the plans involve unifying with North Korea, which isn’t happening in this lifetime.
The gender dynamic hasn’t rapidly changed from the past and remains traditional, while the economic policies were half-assed. The gender dynamic is conservative as ever, and that pushed women to go into things like the 4B movement, which actively involves them not having children. I doubt any of your arguments being implemented in this country would reverse anything; in fact, women will double down on things like 4B rather than simply accept second-class citizenship.
+1
1) If South Korea is a traditional society still (a claim I reject, but let’s entertain it) – then why do the non-traditional societies of Northern Europe face the same problem of a falling TFR?
Clearly, the claim that South Korea is traditional is false or it’s basically the same issue I talked about that exists in both societies.
2) South Korea is not the only government to spend money increasing TFR. Russia, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan and recently China all tried it.
All are failing or near failing. Surely they are not all stupidly throwing money away without a plan?
They fail to address the issue I talked about. They will all come around to it late, like governments always do.
You are arguing for the nuclear family which is not “traditional.”
The fact that there are such ridiculously skewed ratios (one adult caregiver one adult provider) is simply to create a consumer class
I am more arguing for a joint family, it’s so much superior in child rearing but I do understand the toxicity it can sometimes breed. Nuclear was just an attempt to reduce that but we continued to migrated to single motherhood and now permenant singlehood with no chidlren.
That’s why it requires trained factilitators
And mediators to make it work for all..
And every government that implemented your strategy seems to be exceptionally poor and weak. Why would any government want to give up its status to become a third-rate power with even less relevance? Quite frankly, a population decline is still better than what places like Afghanistan go through. I am not exactly sure why any government would want to anger half its population for a policy that yet again worsens living standards. Like a return to the traditional joint family will always require a return to the same, no obsolete economic system that made such a system possible. What is the intrinsic benefit here, since a country is a lot more than its population size? I mean, South Korea can push size position right now, even if its population increases, that will never translate to an improvement in its broader position due to geography and material limits. Your policy literally requires them to give up on their economic position since their country is only able to run properly because of the maximum manpower they have, both male and female. If their position weakens, then their entire country will probably get subsumed by their neighbours. Yet again, why is a population for them manageable, while the economic weakening that you present with these policies won’t be easy to resolve for them.
No government has implemented what I have said, and no don’t lump me with what Afghanistan has done – they have completely gone off the rails to the other side – although interestingly without much of an effect to its economy since most of those jobs were easily filled by men.
I am not making normative statements here, I simply provided an explanation to a common problem we are facing today and how to solve it. The ‘solution’ may create other problems & costs, but hey if you are going extinct and your society may just collapse or be taken over by others, perhaps those costs are worth it? (unlike many others who propose nihilistic save the planet fantasies)
Just food for thought.
Afghanistan is a fairly poor country?
How exactly are your policies anymore than what the taliban has done exactly. They removed women from higher education, restricted their personal freedoms, and basically followed through with the policies you proposed. Also, your economic arguments don’t mean anything here since Afghanistan hasn’t shown any signficiant improvement, and I am pretty sure having an end to the pre-existing civil war conditions probably helped the economy more than any of their gender policies.
Also, Korea is going to be extinct, rather sensationalist nonsense. The country, like every other post-war industrialized country, experienced a massive population boom a few decades ago, which was an unnatural incident. The basic reason for the boom mostly stemmed from a stable post-war economy and improving health care services. This naturally declined over time as this boom was an exception rather than the norm, resulting in a skewed demographic pyramid. The decline mainly stemmed from a gradual end to the post-war economic boom, an increase in global competition, and a horrible work culture that literally subsumed people’s waking hours. East Asia has a thing 996, basically 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week, which doesn’t leave any time for anything else.
Despite all this, Korea’s fertility rate has increased over the last few years and the work culture has become more calm overtime. Above all else, fertility and statistics are permanent things that are easy to predict, considering the number of times even the UN has gotten its predictions wrong. I doubt that the idea that a nation is going to go extinct like that is mostly an example of what we in the business call forecasting bias; nothing is set in stone.
This is what we mean –
Most people overwork for what exactly.
Capital expenditure, endless consumption
And little else.
Excellent comments btw
There is no guarantee other species wont become sentient.
Perhaps they already are. Human hubris has discounted it possibly to it’s own detriment.
Maybe, but many other species have not developed complex society like we have
Anyways, if this complex society ends up killing us we probably are not as good with it as we think.
Many other species might have matching or comparable levels of intellect. However, they often lack the tool use. Humans have way more advantages over other species than just intelligence. You have to account for tool use, stamina, and bipedal nature as well.
language seems like a main one; the ability to communicate and collectively problem solve
Thank you for your Groyper-tier opinions. I can safely ignore any opinion coming from your mouth going forth. You are a bigot against half of the world’s population.
This feels hostile.
We don’t agree with Q and we will allow the Female Commentariat (and the Female admin) to moderate and adjudicate on this thorny issue.
But we don’t think abuse (especially by the Male Commentariat) is justified. “You are a bigot”
Let’s avoid righteous indignation where we can, as Jesus Christ, “let him without sin cast the first stone.”
If he made the same comments regarding any other group of people he wouldn’t even be entertained. The real issue here is that he doesn’t see the problem with the solution he is prescribing himself. In his ideal world my sisters, and nieces would be born as unequal citizens not given equal amounts of education. Even after which the problem he is trying to fix wouldn’t be fixed because the underlying economic issues would remain unsolved.
He could’ve pointed out real failures of states globally like the price of education, healthcare or housing which contribute quite a lot to fertility rates but he goes directly into regressing towards the medieval era. It reveals something about him that should unnerve all of us regarding the nature of his ethics.
Thanks for not responding to me but then responding further.
In my world your sisters and nieces will be born. In your world, they wouldn’t have been even born because it wasn’t good for the planet (or insert any other excuse)
This is the difference between the two world views.
Its a cultural and moral difference that perhaps may never be bridged.
The price of education, housing or healthcare has absolutely nothing to do with decreasing TFRs worldwide.. so why in the world would I repeat the same old nonsense talking non-points which are politically correct way of not addressing the issue.
essentially enslaving half of human to continue humanity is a terrible solution..
Admin note: We will not delete this, but if you keep making the argument that female slavery is the solution to the world’s problems, any further offensive comments will be deleted.
Original comment:
Were women enslaved before feminism? It’s a very feminist view point to think they were. We don’t believe they were ever enslaved as a gender.
And the alternative here is that people are advocating for the extinction of the human race to eliminate this presumed female slavery, the irony is just lost on many!
For them: ‘na rahey ga baans, na bajey gi baansuri’ is a good argument but it’s preposterous
we will write on this..
we always remain suspect of those who advocate and essentially appropriate other voices. there is a female admin team in BP; they have agency to deal with Q as they see fit but the point of the blog is also to venture into the unmentionables as well.
otherwise the space just becomes dead. this is not about stimulating masala but we read and engage with BP to get challenged.
what next, advocating for human slavery? Cannibalism?
There’s a certain point where ‘strong opinions’ have to be, at the very minimum, called out for their flaming bigotry.
Calling for banning contraceptions, blaming women’s ‘independence’ for TFR issues, is…………quite ridiculous.
Now I’m not calling for his ludicrous opinions to be censored, but by the same token, challenges and ‘pushback’ to such silliness also ought not be censored.
personal respect is non-negotiable.
as mentioned we have a Female Admin Team, who will decide how to deal with Q.
we won’t have the Saffroniate otherwise pounce on this for point-scoring.
You can always have a sex change operation and do your bit.
Wow! That was uncalled for.
Let the man have his opinions. People need to stop piling up on him.
how?
Joyland 😀
ok, that made me chuckle.
How easy it is to proscribe drastic solutions when they apply to ‘others’ 😀
Glad you enjoyed it. To quote the resident traffic constable, It was a high signal comment 🙂
we are building a fairly good traffic infrastructure; just have to make there is enough flow circulating through.
we don’t know if you read our piece on traffic: https://brahm.beehiiv.com/p/the-sky-above-s-o-paulo?
in BP we play warden but we do drive in the X.T newsletter
Lady Dhurandhars 😍
370 was really good. Watched it the other day.
370 was slick as hell. Will watch Baramullah by the same director soon.
Baramulla keeps you on edge. It’s absolutely brilliant.
[…] The modern consumer is the Ye Olde Peasant with better teeth and a credit card, and somewhere the peasant knows […]
wow 2 weeks is a long time in BP; this post feels like months old already!