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.
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.
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
people aren’t going to stop having sex.
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.
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.
If population declines no one needs to do a land grab. There’s enough for everyone.
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.
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
