When we were an agrarian society, children were in fact a profit center: extra hands to help out on the farm, to help with collecting eggs and milking the cows. Today children are an expense: the very notion that children should work is a complete non-starter in todays society, and the educational system has got parents spending a ton of money trying to get their children into the best schools. The only area in our society where this doesnt hold true is for those on welfare: as our welfare programs tend to be oriented towards small families and single mothers, children tend to be (at least) revenue neutral to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. Basic economics: things that are expensive tend not to be purchased as much. Things that are cheap tend to be purchased more. And things which are profit centers tend to be invested in. -- Im not suggesting this as a blueprint for the future, by the way. Rather, I suggest that this is one reason why those predicting 20 billion people and a planet in ruin are wrong: I suspect that eventually we will see declining world populations (as more of the planet adopt a western attitude towards children), resulting in a planet of perhaps a billion or so.
Posted on: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 09:27:16 +0000
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