Best Of

An interesting theory:

"Sean Thomas
The economic purge of the young white male
How the Boomers sacrificed their sons to save themselves" (£)

https://spectator.com/article/the-economic-purge-of-the-young-white-male

Mr Thomas (who used to post here IIRC as @SeanT), seems to keep reading PB, as somebody posted the link to https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/ on here a few days ago.

Fox jr 2 got quite a nice 4 figure bonus from his advertising company, and by the sound of it a very boozy traditional company party. Not bad for his first proper job (he has done various outher minor jobs at university).

It sounds as if "London is back". I think rising advertising profitability is a reasonably good leading indicator of economic recovery.

If the government does want to fix the birthrate then they need to start working with positive male social influencers like Joey Swoll and family first women influencers to really push home the message that having a family is a good thing, having kids is a blessing, and whatever perceived sacrifices there are don't come close to the emotional rewards of having amazing children in your life everyday.

If male influencers want to influence the TFR then they should be encouraging stay at home dads who are eager to help with the chores, and not just the fun stuff like the cooking.

But I don't think it will make much difference. The drop in TFR is a worldwide phenomenon, even in places not noted for its Woke University professors like Russia and Iran.

TFR still holding up in the poorest but most religious continent, Africa though.

How religious parents of child bearing age are is probably the biggest factor in TFR

Infant mortality is another.

It is but even in the UK Christian evangelicals and Muslims and still to an extent Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jew parents have more children on average than atheist parents do

Which is weird, when you think about it.

Because atheist parents know their kids won't be going to hell. While it has to be a constant worry for the more religiously minded.

The hope is though for religious parents their children will go to heaven if they follow God, Jesus, Muhammad etc

Well, if Revelation 7:4 and 14:1 are correct, then only 144,000 people are going to heaven over the entire history of humankind.

So, statistically, the chance don't look good.

Jesus made clear that all who trust and follow him go to heaven. As atheists like you are largely responsible for declining fertility a bit more humility would be a good thing, even if you yourself have produced some heirs

Also, I'm agnostic, not atheist.

I admit, I'm on the militant, prosthelitizing hard line wing of agnostics.

But I'm definitely on the agnostic rather than atheist side of the fence.

Hedging your bets without clearly committing to one side or the other, as usual RCS

Not at all.

That's regular agnostics.

I'm on the prostheleyzing wing of agnoticism. We hate the wishy washy regular agnostics. They're worse than believers and atheists in our eyes.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, I belong to an extremist Unitarian fundamentalist sect I’ve founded.

Are you affiliated to the PCN?

The thugs with a hard line in ULEZ penalty charges?

No, the other lot - the Progressive Christian Network.

If the government does want to fix the birthrate then they need to start working with positive male social influencers like Joey Swoll and family first women influencers to really push home the message that having a family is a good thing, having kids is a blessing, and whatever perceived sacrifices there are don't come close to the emotional rewards of having amazing children in your life everyday.

If male influencers want to influence the TFR then they should be encouraging stay at home dads who are eager to help with the chores, and not just the fun stuff like the cooking.

But I don't think it will make much difference. The drop in TFR is a worldwide phenomenon, even in places not noted for its Woke University professors like Russia and Iran.

TFR still holding up in the poorest but most religious continent, Africa though.

How religious parents of child bearing age are is probably the biggest factor in TFR

Infant mortality is another.

It is but even in the UK Christian evangelicals and Muslims and still to an extent Roman Catholic and Orthodox Jew parents have more children on average than atheist parents do

Which is weird, when you think about it.

Because atheist parents know their kids won't be going to hell. While it has to be a constant worry for the more religiously minded.

The hope is though for religious parents their children will go to heaven if they follow God, Jesus, Muhammad etc

Well, if Revelation 7:4 and 14:1 are correct, then only 144,000 people are going to heaven over the entire history of humankind.

So, statistically, the chance don't look good.

Jesus made clear that all who trust and follow him go to heaven. As atheists like you are largely responsible for declining fertility a bit more humility would be a good thing, even if you yourself have produced some heirs

Also, I'm agnostic, not atheist.

I admit, I'm on the militant, prosthelitizing hard line wing of agnostics.

But I'm definitely on the agnostic rather than atheist side of the fence.

Isn't agnostic sitting on the fence with the believers and atheist on the other sides?

Personally having look at it a lot, religion seems nothing more fear of the unknown.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-brain-food/202107/why-do-humans-keep-inventing-gods-worship

I’m delighted to have triggered a multi-hour PB thread derailment with my posting of the Paul Johnson article on birth rates.

Now we’ve lost the SeanTs the rest of us need to step up and do more thread derailing.

We've had a few conversations on the topic which have never really got properly going.

My take is its not down to one specific thing, its a multitude, but doesn't have much to do with religion or uni professors. Saying that, the TFR among my friends who went to uni is way lower than those who didn't.

There is no quick fix, some people just don't want kids

My recollection is that the survey evidence shows that women, on average, want one more child than they have.

So we don't have to worry about the people who don't want kids. We have to worry about the people who want kids, and then don't, or don't have as many as they want.

If we want to reverse demographic trends we need to create a society where women feel economically secure having children in their 20s and 30s.

We also need to produce men who can be good husbands and fathers so that women will feel emotionally secure having children in their 20s and 30s.

I don't think the Andrew Tate generation are going to help with this.

British society has always been quite anti-child. Eg kids should be "seen and not heard", boarding school, public support for the 2 child benefit cap etc. My wife and I were lucky to have been brought up in families who didn't share those kinds of attitudes, and maybe that's why we have three children.
I think there are lots of factors behind the declining birth rate, and it is a global phenomenon. But I do suspect that being much more ready to see children as a blessing not a burden and an investment not a cost would probably help.

I think your last sentence is absolutely 100% true. Kids aren't a cost or a burden, they're brilliant and I know that if we didn't have ours I'd living through a lifetime of regret. Again, the answer to this question is emotional, not monetary. In countries where they have huge incentives to have kids the birth rate is barely above ours, there's been this huge global push across all forms of media to discourage women from starting families and, as you say, paint children as a burden rather than a blessing. That's the attitude we need to change.

I am not sure that leaning on women to have kids is the best way to go about it. My wife wanted to have 3 kids because she knew I would play my part - I would be there for the childcare and do my fair share in terms of domestic tasks, I wouldn't be in the office all hours or down the pub after work, I would support her so she could have a meaningful career as well as having children, and I wouldn't cheat on her or run off with someone else leaving her holding the babies. Being a father means you can't always focus on your career and your weekends and evenings are not your own anymore. I think a big part of the problem is that women rightly expect more from their life nowadays, and men aren't willing to play their part to help make that happen.
I guess the other elephant in the room here is that the world is going to shit and maybe some people don't want to bring children into that. Thinking of my children trying to survive in a world of rising temperatures, depleted natural resources and growing fascism is the only thing that makes me regret our choice.

I've heard this twice from newly married couples in the last few months. I didn't pay any attention to it at the time, but now you mention it, maybe that's another contributory factor.

I think it is a factor, definitely. But I also think that liberal minded people need to not just despair at the world and give up. All the crazy rightwingers are breeding like mad with their tradwives and it's a numbers game at the end of the day.

Especially given the fact that in almost every part of the Developed and Developing world, the best time to be born was yesterday.

No, too close to Christmas.

Eldest Grandson was born a week before Christmas. When he was small his mother always insisted that no decorations (etc) were put up until AFTER his birthday.
He's now married and his wife puts up the decorations on or about Dec 1st!

Proof that your wife will never love you like your mum does.

Sadly, his Mum is dead. MND. The discussions could have been 'interesting', though.

Although, to conflate issues discussed earlier, whether he'd have been able to afford his house without his share of his mother's life insurance........

An interesting theory:

"Sean Thomas
The economic purge of the young white male
How the Boomers sacrificed their sons to save themselves" (£)

https://spectator.com/article/the-economic-purge-of-the-young-white-male

Mr Thomas (who used to post here IIRC as @SeanT), seems to keep reading PB, as somebody posted the link to https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/ on here a few days ago.

Fox jr 2 got quite a nice 4 figure bonus from his advertising company, and by the sound of it a very boozy traditional company party. Not bad for his first proper job (he has done various outher minor jobs at university).

It sounds as if "London is back". I think rising advertising profitability is a reasonably good leading indicator of economic recovery.

It's really not.

Everyone I know who works in the ad industry is either out of work, or fearful of their job. It's part AI (grunt copywriting and graphic design and so on being automated) but it's mostly the shift away from ads as you think of them (tv commercials, posters, billboards, etc) to cheap and cheerful sponsored instagram posts and 'meme' type content made for pennies on the pound, filmed on iphones often by the company staff themselves (think what Currys and Cex are doing on instagram, or Brita water filters with the 'weird' social posts).

Whereas once upon a time the ad industry might have employed thirty to fifty people for six months to a year to make a single 30 second tv commercial, from the creative director to the cameraman to the editor to the makeup artist etc, now it's done by one or two people on their phones. Idea in the morning, script by lunchtime, shot in the afternoon, posted by 5pm.

And that's before you get into banner ads or 'performance' as they call it. Which is just slop churned out to match the vast amounts of data they have on you, showing up in your facebook feed, down the side of news websites etc. Costs pennies to make, mostly automated.

So it's possible to say the ad industry isn't dying, but the 'traditional' element of it is dead and buried now, it's all about ad tech and AI - Meta, Google etc are the world's biggest 'advertising' companies now. More money gets spent on google sponsored search results than gets spent on TV advertising now.

Emblematic of this is the way DDB closed its doors this year, putting 4000 out of work. DDB was the biggest of the old school 'mad men' era ad agencies that were big in the 60s and carried on being very big up until the last few years. Now dinosaurs rapidly going extinct. I know people who got made redundant by that - at a senior level too. All of them chasing a dwindling number of available jobs. Some of them don't reckon they'll ever work in the industry again.