I really wonder why women think they have a vagina and breasts, or why men have a penis and testicles, if not to become parents of CHILDREN! This experience is also maturing — and it keeps your nation and race going.
.
.
The two articles below are good but, of course, ignore the main issues: the NWO wants a 90% depopulation, a jewish-billionaire master race, a few human slaves, and lots of robots.
……McDonalds fires humans, hires AI
McDonalds in PANIC as Customers Wrongly Charged THOUSANDS By A.I. Cashers | Drive-Thru Vids Go VIRAL.
With cheap prices gone, why patronize fast food? $12 for two Egg McMuffins?
.
.
.
The Radical Cultural Shift Behind America’s Declining Birth Rate
Today we go deep on the psychology of having children and not having children and the cultural revolution behind the decline in birthrates in America and the rest of the world
We’ve done several podcasts on America’s declining fertility rate, and why South Korea has the lowest birthrate in the world. But we’ve never done an episode on the subject quite like this one.
Today we go deep on the psychology of having children and not having children and the cultural revolution behind the decline in birthrates in America and the rest of the world. The way we think about dating, marriage, kids, and family is changing radically in a very short period of time. And we are just beginning to reckon with the causes and consequences of that shift. In the new book What Are Children For, Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman say a new “parenthood ambivalence” is sweeping the world. In today’s show, they persuade Derek that this issue is about more than the economic trends he tends to focus on when he discusses this issue.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com.
In the following excerpt, Derek talks to Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman about their book and about their approach to explaining declining birth rates.
Derek Thompson: I am so happy you’re here. I’m so interested in this topic of declining childbirths around the world, and especially in the West and the U.S. I’m interested in its effect on economics, its effect on migration, on geopolitics, and the future, even, of warfare. This is such a huge and rich subject.
The title of your book comes at this huge, rich subject from a very interesting direction. The title is What Are Children For? And of all the questions that we might ask about this age of declining childbirth, why did you choose this one, what are children for? Rachel, why don’t you start?
Rachel Wiseman: Right, that’s a great question. So the title was chosen for two main reasons, I would say. First is that it points to a basic difficulty that many people have today when it comes to even answering the question of why they might want to have kids. So it’s self-evident to most people, especially in progressive, secular society, why someone might want to go to college or pursue a fulfilling career or fall in love. But it’s much less obvious to them why someone should have kids, especially if you take into account all of the sacrifices and the resources and the time that they demand.
And the second thing about what are children for kind of goes to the philosophical character of the book, where we felt that you can’t really know why some big trend is happening, like declining birth rates, without first stepping back and asking what that thing is for. So why should we have children? What role do they play? How could they fit into a well-lived, modern life?
And then, just as a matter of fact, the book emerged out of an editorial that Anastasia and I both wrote for The Point magazine that was dedicated to this very question of what children are for. And in that editorial, and the real seed of the book, was our expression of dissatisfaction with these big, historical narratives about why millennials aren’t having kids today, and if it’s even OK to, especially in relation to climate change.
Thompson: Anastasia, at the highest level, why do people who don’t have children say they don’t have children?
Anastasia Berg: When people who are childless are asked, “Why did you not have children?” the second-most common reason they give, this is true in both the U.S. and the U.K., after “I didn’t want any” is “I failed to find a willing and suitable partner.”
This is actually true of men and women at almost the same rates. And we have sociologists and pundits respond to this by saying, “Oh, there is a shortage of Mr. Rights. There is a problem of finding eligible men.” They point to statistics about how men are not graduating in the same rates from college. “Their jobs aren’t as good, so we cannot find good men anymore.”
Now, that is an interesting supposition, but Rachel and I, in the book, explore how the actual dating scripts that we abide by include very long explorations on the dating market, they include dedicating your entire 20s and early 30s to more or less casual dating, certainly not dating with a view to family. They involve an endless vetting of that potential partner through long, nonexclusive dating, then long, exclusive dating, then cohabitation, then trial parenting a pet before one even is willing to consider having children.
In this case, we’re inviting people to ask whether or not this self-evident logic of postponement within professional life, within romantic life, within personal life is in fact a good one.
Thompson: One thing that I love about the way this book comes at the question of why people are having fewer children is that it’s so different than the way I would typically write about the issue of declining fertility in the West. Because, I think, I would start with a paper that looked at the huge, broad strip of history and said, “Well, the no. 1 correlate for declining fertility is rising women’s education rates and rising labor force participation.”
So, overall, let’s just say this is mostly about women moving from working inside the home, working in childcare, preparing the house, to women working side by side with men. And you are saying, no, we have to connect these grand, historical narratives with personal stories, with the psychology of parenthood; we have to consider culture. Why are you so sure that this is largely a cultural story?
Berg: Within the U.S. framework, and in talking to people in the U.S., one would be led to believe that economics plays an outsize role in people’s decision whether or not to have children and how many.
But, first of all, the understanding of millennials as a radically precarious generation has been vastly challenged. If we’re looking at countless measures, from their wages to their savings to their homeownership, not to mention how much they are about to inherit, and they know it, the story of them as being a generation that’s been completely economically forsaken is one that is inaccurate.
But much more importantly, even in looking at countries where having children is easy, affordable, in fact somewhat financially advantageous because they’re subsidizing having children, we see that their birth rates are almost just as low.
And so when the material explanation doesn’t hold, when material factors can’t explain the changes we’re seeing, we have to turn to what people are thinking, experiencing, in order to understand what’s driving their decision-making.
And at this kind of moment, we turn to cultural artifacts, not just as reflections of what people are thinking, but also because these are the kind of objects that people turn to for guidance and for an interpretation of their own experience. So, for instance, if you’re looking at TV shows, after decades upon decades of the success of the family sitcom, when you look today, you are unable to find a single portrayal of a woman who is both excelling at whatever it is that she’s doing, if she’s a spy or a businesswoman or a lawyer, and at the same being anything but a failed mother, then you’re having a social script that’s suggesting that motherhood is incompatible with the pursuit of excellence.
*** And yet conservative religious families are having tons of kids!
The great Patrick Buchanan wrote 30 years ago that by the year 2100 most humans will come from conservative religious families, whether Orthodox Jews, Mormons, Amish, Mennonites, etc.
The secular, materialistic couples will have one or no kids.
Guess whose genes and culture will survive?
This is part of why I have labored tenaciously for decades to create the Eternal Solutreans!
The expression is demonstrably true: the family that prays together stays together.
To raise a nice family and have a good marriage is seen as a divine calling.
***
If you’re looking at the rise of an entire literary genre that explores the ambivalence of women around having children, then something is happening. If you’re looking at a philosophical question that was raised for two millennia, but it was raised in the abstract, it was raised by philosophers, it was raised by a lonely poet, and you see that same question being raised every month in the New York Times op-ed section, which is “Is human life so full of suffering and so harmful that perhaps you shouldn’t be perpetuating it?” [JdN: excuse me, but and who exactly is making earth such a hell?????] then I think we are liberated to ask the question in a cultural register.
.
.
……The Baby Crash in South Korea
(JdN: In the 1990s I worked with many Japanese at Harvard and MIT, and it was the same thing: work has become the pseudo-meaning of life, not family.)
Why Fertility Rates Are Plunging—in the U.S., South Korea, and Everywhere Else
Andrew Yeo joins to explain South Korea’s declining birth rate and why fertility affects just about everything else in society
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/72365754/1184620448.0.jpg)
Last year, there were 3,661,220 babies born in the U.S. That sounds like a lot. But historically speaking, it’s really not. It’s actually 15 percent below our peak in 2007. And it means America’s total fertility rate—the average number of babies a woman today is expected to have in her lifetime, based on current trends—is essentially stuck at its all-time record low. For decades, the U.S. birthrate has been below the so-called replacement level of 2.1. Today it’s around 1.6.
Sometimes, I feel a little weird talking about fertility and birth rates like they’re just ordinary numbers with decimal points, like monthly used-car inflation. Fertility is complicated. It is emotional. And it is private.
But I’m fascinated by this issue because the collective private decisions of hundreds of millions of families really do shape the future of population growth. And there’s just no getting around the fact that population growth is one of the most important factors in determining economic growth, tax revenue, productivity, innovation, and public finance.
We’re in a moment now in world history where every major country is projected to have a shrinking population in the next 20 years. No country gives us a better glimpse of this impending future than South Korea. In 1960, the average Korean woman had six children. Today, Korean woman average less than one child. Today, the country has the world’s lowest fertility rate.
Today’s guest is Andrew Yeo, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies and a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. In this episode, we look at this thorny and important issue by first zooming in to South Korea, where Andrew gives me an education on a country I’m extremely curious about, but frankly know very little about. And then we zoom out and talk about how South Korea is a canary in the coal mine for the rest of the planet when it comes to the many ways that fertility rates affect just about everything else.
If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at PlainEnglish@Spotify.com. You can find us on TikTok @plainenglish_.
I had been up with her half the night but that is what love is.
In the following excerpt, Derek and Andrew Yeo talk about the declining birth rate in South Korea and what it might have to do with the country’s culture of work and productivity.
Derek Thompson: In the open that I just recorded, I talked about the breaking news on U.S. birth rates, which are just about at their all-time record low. I want to put a pin in America right now, and I’m going to come back to the U.S. at the end. I want to talk to you about South Korea, which has not just among the fastest-declining birth rates in the world, but also, to my mind, the lowest fertility rate in the world. Before we get into why this is happening, Andrew, how would you summarize what’s happening in Korea?
Andrew Yeo: Right. So it’s not something to take pride in that you’re no. 1 in terms of having the lowest birth rate in the world, but there’s a confluence of factors that are driving this trend. And it relates to changing attitudes towards work. It’s related to the high cost of education and just the cost of living, particularly in cities like Seoul, the capital and the largest city.
It’s also related to changing trends related to marriage. I think with more women in the workforce and then also women thinking about their careers, they’re delaying marriage. And actually in the last 10 years, the marriage rate has dropped by about 35 percent. So that also means less children, but there’s still a stigma of raising children on your own.
So it’s work, it’s the high cost of education, and the high cost of living and housing. And I just think one final piece of this is, many like to note how South Korea has grown rapidly, and it is a tremendous success story that I think South Korea wants to tell the world. And many countries want to emulate the secret sauce behind South Korea’s economic development. But it developed so rapidly that you have to keep in mind that the pace of societal change has just occurred so rapidly. And I think one of the side effects has been this declining birth rate.
And I was looking at the statistics in the 1970s. The number of children that the families bore was between four and five. And so in 40 years, you go from four to five children to having less than one per household. So part of that, I think, is just the rapid changes that have taken place in South Korean society in such a short period of time.
Thompson: I think that’s a fantastic overview. To pivot off of the very last thing that you said, it really struck me when I was looking at comparative fertility rates in South Korea versus the U.S. that in 1960, Korea had roughly two times more children per woman than the U.S. And today, the fertility rate in the U.S. is almost, or roughly, twice as high as Korea.
So it has flipped in a really remarkable way, even as both those numbers have come down. You set out a really good, I think, menu of explanations for what’s happening: work, cost of education, marriage, and some cultural things.
Let’s start with work.
A couple years ago, I wrote an essay for The Atlantic about a phenomenon that I called workism. And workism was my coining for this idea that in many places in the U.S., especially among the elites, and also in other places around the world, lots of people who had turned away from religion and become more secular had made work the centerpiece of their life in a way that almost seemed to replace organized religion.
Like the things that people historically sought from organized religion, whether it was self-actualization or community, transcendence, meaning in life, they now sought those things from a career.
South Korea has one of the longest work weeks in the developed world, and I found you in part through an article that linked the declining fertility of South Korea with this phenomenon of workism. So tell me a little bit more about the culture of work in South Korea, how unusual you see it relative to other developed countries, and how it might play a role in declining fertility.
Yeo: Sure. Koreans work very hard, and they do have one of the longest work hours in the world. But I want to emphasize that there’s a difference between work, though, and also productivity. Because I think Korea is also a productive country. But let me just give you one anecdote. So I remember when I was in Korea, this is about 10, 15 years ago, and I wanted to hang out with a friend. I was a student, so I had more time. He said, “Oh no, I got to be in the office.” I was like, “Well, are you done with your work?” And he said, “Yes.” And I said, “Well, when are you going to leave?” He said, “When the boss leaves.” I said, “When is that going to be?” He says, “That’s about 9 or 10 p.m.” And so part of it is that, yes, Koreans work very hard, but there’s also this culture that you want to show others that you’re working hard as well.
In this case, it looks bad if you leave before your boss. So everyone in the office is just staying until late, even if they’re not necessarily doing work. So that’s what I mean by this differentiation between doing work and then being productive. But that being said, I do think Koreans take pride in that they work these long hours, and the work itself, work life, in a sense, becomes a family.
I think it’s changed since the pandemic a little bit, but if you’re working in a business environment, you get off work at 9, and then you’ll go out for a late dinner, and then you’ll go to have drinks, maybe one round, maybe two rounds, maybe you’ll go to karaoke. And it’s not necessarily every night, but it’s this idea that you are with—it is not work, it’s even after work—but that you’re spending a lot of time with colleagues in this setting. And it means that you’re not getting home, you’re not productive in the other place, in the bedroom.
And so we see that people have really prioritized work, not just for the sake of work, but it becomes, as you said, like a replacement for religion.
Work in some ways becomes an idol, but it’s also where your social life begins to revolve around as well too. And you feel that if you don’t stay late, if you don’t go to the dinners—it’s called hweshik in Korean—but the group dinners, that somehow you’re going to be left out. And that’s also something that’s cultural because in Korea, you tend to stick together with the group. You do things as a collective. So there’s these pressures to stay long hours at work. A, because I think Koreans generally do work hard. There’s a strong work ethic. But B, because there’s also social pressure to stay in the office longer and then to hang out even beyond office hours.
This excerpt was edited for clarity. Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow the Plain English feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Andrew Yeo
Producer: Devon Manze
I think that the Western birthrate and South Korean birthrate are collapsing due to slightly different reasons. The Koreans seem to primarily be struggling with a work-oriented culture that saps their women of energy and a form of hyper-urbanization which makes it difficult to raise children. In America, it seems that the issues are:
1. Inflation and the cost of living make it difficult for young people to afford children.
2. The media encourages negative, anti-family behaviors.
3. The school system teaches young women that it’s empowering to not have children.
4. There is a karmic / reincarnation / spiritual malaise related element.
The last one might sound strange, but I’m convinced it’s an important factor. A large number of young women in America now identify as LGBT and most trans people are now female-to-males.
And who do the transgenders and leftist White women hate the most? Nazis. Because of this, I genuinely think some of them are the reincarnation of anti-Nazi Allies & Soviets. Others are very likely mentally ill people that have negative spirit attachments (aka they’re borderline possessed).
I think these attachments can put nightmares and negative ideas in people’s heads, so not all trans folks are genuine cross-sex incarnation cases. Some of them are experiencing feelings and thoughts which are not coming from their own mind but instead originating from a toxic spiritual presence that is ‘free-riding’ off of them. If you look up the George Ritchie NDE case (I believe that’s the one), he said that he saw disembodied human souls attempting to latch onto living humans who were drinking.
Not all souls in the interlife are good or willing to talk with their guardian angel about their problems. Some probably linger and morph into dark spectral shades which live parasitically off of the living.
In a healthy society, the average ‘vibration’ pushes these things away from most people.
Thanks for a very interesting comment. I respond here:
https://johndenugent.com/five-million-biden-illegals-military-age-young-males-scot-explains-lethal-purpose/
No one forced a percentage of our women to be entitled, self-centred bitches.They made that choice themselves.
They have a brain and the ability to think for themselves.
True, but one could say that about the men too.
The jews basically are mind-controlling half the population.
It was this way during the Weimar Republic in Germany…. and along came Adolf.:-)
https://youtube.com/watch?v=j1cqNDDG4aA&si=gTMETzOY3LPZXvvl
Vegetables are trying to kill us.
Interesting.
Fascinating!!!
I have watched half so far and it all makes perfect sense. I am also impressed that this guy is a neurosurgeon and a MD….
Margi was a big meat-eater, though she had a garden, albeit one that was totally organic. It gave her pleasure and distraction from her cancer the attendant pain and the whole world situation, so I supported her gardening.
The Nordics live on meat, though they hate to coop up and then kill animals, and since meat can be grown from stem cells, this is how they do it. They are extremely healthy and strong.
.