Crank them out, ladies
Ah yes, women don’t have any rights, women are simply machines for supplying the state with people.
Russian authorities are limiting access to abortions in an attempt to confront the country’s longstanding demographic crisis.
That is, Russian authorities are treating women as brood mares.
The Russian Orthodox Church, which has close ties to the Kremlin, is playing a key role in the anti-abortion campaign.
Because it’s up to men, in government or religious institutions or both, to decide what women get to do with their bodies and lives.
A stagnant population
Russia’s population is virtually the same size as it was over 20 years ago. According to official figures, there are now 144 million people in Russia – 2 million fewer than in 2001, when President Vladimir Putin first came to power.
Why is the BBC labeling that “stagnant”?
We can’t just go on having more and more people forever; the planet turns out not to be an infinite resource.
I have been told we have to have more people to cover the taxes; that was by a Nebraska politician. Nebraska has a high birth rate, but it doesn’t grow. The kids don’t stay there. So the world grows, and the kids they have go to a more pleasant place that doesn’t need more people (neither does Nebraska, to be honest).
If you cannot maintain the economy with a population at or below sustainability, then the problem is not the size of the population or the number of births. It’s the economy, stupid. If all the world’s best minds put their heads together and worked to figure out an economic system that could work with a declining population, we could solve one of the world’s largest problems. But people won’t even admit it’s a problem, because babies.
Hear, hear!!
Successive French governments from the early 19th century were increasingly worried that their population didn’t change much during a period when England and Germany increased theirs threefold. Given today’s figures one is inclined to forget that in 1800 France had by far the largest population of the most powerful European states. So what did they do about it? Restricting abortion wasn’t an option because abortion was anyway illegal. So instead they introduced the most generous child-support system to be found anywhere, along with free state-supported schools from the age of about 3. Many of the reforms still apply, and when we arrived in France we were impressed that one could send one’s 3-year child to an École Maternelle, and many people did, though it’s not compulsory at that age. (It may be possible younger than 3, but as our daughter was 3 that’s the age we know about.) All this may seem to be reform for the sake of improving women’s lives, and in practice to some extent it is. The real motive, however, was idea that women are machines for supplying the state with people. The more children that come out the better.
When Germany was unified in 1990 most people, including most East Germans, thought that unification was a huge improvement for people in East Germany. In most respects it was, but there was one respect in which East Germany was much better, in that it had a child-support system similar to that of France, and East German women had a nasty shock when they found that in unified Germany they were pretty much on their own when it came to looking after their children.
A healthy populace needs steady economic growth.
Steady economic growth comes from constantly increasing productivity.
Productivity growth requires the ongoing creation of new jobs.
New jobs require an ever-growing working-age population.
That’s been the formula for the past half-century or more. But it rests on a number of assumptions that can’t stay true forever. And just because this formula has worked up until now doesn’t mean it’s the only one that can ever work.
Firstly, and most obviously, civilization can’t just keep growing and consuming forever. The planet’s size is fixed, and so are the resources within it.
Secondly, there’s no actual law that states that a healthy populace needs steady economic growth. It’s just that in a capitalist system, that’s how things have turned out. An ever increasing amount of total resources can serve as a modest counterbalance to capitalism’s tendency to concentrate resources in the hands of the few. New resources just entering the system will be distributed somewhat evenly at first before the Gordon Gekkos of the world inevitably find ways to capture them.
So how about instead we build an economic model that stops the Gordon Gekkos stealing what we already have so we don’t have to keep mining new resources to make up the losses?
And lastly, there’s the sudden emergence of AI, which may at long last uncouple the link between productivity and human-powered jobs. At the very least it will certainly disrupt such a link. Our species is running out of skills to justify our existence in pure economic terms. A human life costs a lot ot maintain — a lifetime of food, water, shelter, and energy — and under the current economic model, we’re losing opportunities to earn our keep, as we get outbidded by the automatons of Artificial Intelligence.
Things are rapidly coming to a head all around the world, with climate change, overpopulation, and now the technological disruption of labour. If civilization manages to emerge from this period of maximal disruption at all, it will have to do so with a new economic model to sustain humanity at a much lower population, with a fixed or even declining rate of consumption of the planet’s finite resources.
It would be nice of some kind of Artificial General Intelligence could find a way to orchestrate a safe passage for humans through the upcoming mess.
But I’m not particularly hopeful. When we look up at the skies, there’s a reason we aren’t seeing a universe teeming with civilized planets. More and more I’m coming to believe it’s because civilization is intrinsically doomed to wipe itself out.
They’re going to have to do it one way or another, either before the imminent disaster or after. The former will be a global affair featuring sophisticated Powerpoint and Zoom presentations; the latter will be made up of whoever shows up around the fire, and will have its finer points worked out while the participants scratch in the dirt.
There’s a type of aircraft crash called CFIT, or Controlled Flight Into Terrain:
Well, we’re yelling as loudly as we can, but the cockpit is soundproof, and the flight crew are all wearing headphones.
Welcome aboard.
YNnB, that’s what I’ve been telling my students for years…make that decades. Sooner or later, we’re going to have to find a new way through. It’s better if we do it before catastrophe strikes. Human history suggests we won’t.
[…] a comment by Artymorty on Crank them out, […]
#3 Athel
I wonder if those efforts would even have the desired outcome of increasing population. It is well known that lifting populations out of general poverty reduces its birth rate, and those civic improvements must have gone a long way to relieving financial stress on many families.
Athel @3, I know an East German woman. She says much as the communist regime was awful, she felt that the role and lot of women in EG relative to men was significantly better than in the west. Her feeling is that overall things are better for people in the former East Germany, but in certain respects life is worse. I think the West took far too much validation from the collapse of the USSr and Soviet Bloc.