This year the Japanese pavilion was full of 11lb baby dolls, which a user could adopt and walk around with and interact with in changing stations and sleep and play areas. The intro said: "Babies are born anywhere, regardless of wars, terrors, and boycotts." It made me think how they used to be everywhere and now that birth rates have declined significantly they have become rare, expensive and often parents handle them like some luxurious pet, when they should be 'renewables' of ourselves.
Although, perhaps it could be better framed as the short term expense was not accounted for, whereas now, the long term expense is not accounted for.
Short term being less than a few decades and long term being more than a few decades.
There is also a collective vs individual expense aspect.
They have always been expensive, and they have never been as expensive as today.
More than any other resource, babies require time. Talking purely from a US perspective, inflation adjusted income has never been higher.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/mehoinusa672n
When we earn more, the time spent to care for a baby 'costs' more because it's time not spent working. It's time not spent continuing your education. It's time not spent doing some expensive bougie luxury like paying someone else to cook you a meal.
It's a similar reasoning as to why working hours have only dropped a bit. When we earn more per hour, we can afford the same quality of life with fewer hours worked. However it also means each hour we choose not work is costing us more in opportunity cost. So we choose to work more.
Still, considering how many years we spend in education with little to no employment, and how many years we are currently able to live after we have retired, the % of our lifetime spent working has never been lower.
For much of history people would often have children to work on farms and support the parents when they're older. Sometimes this support system was nuclear. Sometimes it was broader in society. So how do you account for "expensive" here? I honestly don't know.
But a lot of people focus on more modern times, particularly post-WW2, because the trend here is pretty much straight up. Education, housing and medical expenses have far exceeded inflation and real wages.
In more developed Asian countries (eg South Korea, Japan, China) the number of children has gone down in part because it is so expensive. In South Korea, so much is spent on tutoring to get into a good university to get a good job. The entire family's income is devoted to that. In China, for a man to be marriageable he often needs to pay the bride's family, have property, have a good job and so on. China has actually tried tackling some of this by popping the real estate bubble and outlawing private tutoring. Still, competition is intense and the bride price is still very real.
I think about the Fermi Paradox. What if the answer to why there are no galactic civilizations is as simple as "because capitalism"? Birth rates in developed countries are generally falling off a cliff as the barrier-to-entry gets increasingly higher.
One thing people never get about fertility crisis: people always have more babies in crisis and uncertainty. Simply matter of reproductive strategy: when you're not sure about the future, push for quantity, as fast as possible. When you have stability, you can accumulate resources, and not be afraid to invest them into fewer offspring. I don't think that people realize that they're doing this choice, but there must have been enormous evolutionary pressure for this to evolve, and a lot of data shows exactly that.
I don't think that's true. There's a lot of crisis and uncertainty today, but fertility is still going down. Many people are investing their resources in zero offspring.
If you haven't watched it: don't read the rest of the comments here, go watch the movie, then read the comments.
Also, the bit where the kid is just scrolling / playing on his device while his dad yells at him is some kind of crazy fever dream from right now.
A couple of things I like about the film are the fact that babies are wonderful and children are wonderful, even if that world realizes it only through their absence. I think the practice of this is going to be simply people substituting this experience with other things they consider luxuries, and then supporting a shifting tax burden so that the few productive and reproductive carry the weight of the machine.
The shift from relying on one’s own children to take care of one in one’s old age to other people’s children doing so is that fewer people need allocate any of their effort into it. Free-riding off other people’s children is now fairly typical. Simply having paid someone else’s social security isn’t actually good enough. The agreement only worked when you did that and created the means in aggregate for your generation’s social security to be paid for by successors.
But the old parasitise the young in the West (at least, not exclusively). “Tax exemptions for the rich” primarily takes the form of older people just being free of various forms of society’s needs. Already the median French pensioner has a higher income than the median French worker, with the latter eager to try to make his way into the formed class so that he too may transform from the stepped on to the stepper on.
The other thing I like is that the movie is unambiguously hopeful. Kee and her child reach the rescue ship, hurray! Movie’s a bit bleak so nice to have a happy ending.
But I really wonder about what happens afterward. Is it Kee’s responsibility as the only fertile woman to have as many children as she can? Mother of Modern Man she’ll be remembered as. Fun thought.
So what do you think about what the movie implies and about the factors that bias society against the young?
Sits on the throne with the one in True Detective S01E04
To me it's one of the best scenes if not the best scene I've ever seen in a movie: from a small intense escape scene to a full battle, followed by a revelation that brings people to their knees. All shot basically first-person, with extremely complex action and emotion. Absolutely gutting.
As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive (i.e. >2.0 children per woman), and birthrates are only really low in very affluent demographics.
There's nothing particularly sinister going on either - since most children with access to adequate nutrition and healthcare now survive into adulthood, these societies are not losing a ton of population to wars, very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.
So not just a handful of countries.
That most countries are 3) below replacement rate by some amount is a separate third thing.
But reproduction is below replacement rate.
Ireland is the richest country in Europe by GDP-per-capita[1] (apart a few uber-rich city states).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...
> India...
India has been struggling to get its population growth control under control for decades. I think we can excuse a brief overcorrection as they stabilise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich
This is now mostly a thing of the past but there are still lingering after-effects.
I didn't even go to the movies to see it specifically, I went for The Departed, but I saw that Children of Men was showing and figured, what the heck.
Imagine going into that movie with zero expectations. I felt shellshocked afterwards. I go online, no one is talking about it. I watched what I still consider one of the greatest movies ever made and over the next few months it's like it doesn't exist.
I did eventually see The Departed, it's pretty great. I think I made the right choice though.
The original book is even more explicit about that, like Theo does a makeshipt baptism on the infant amidst all the fighting.
I'd say it's not just one of the best sci fi movies, it's one of the best movies of the 21st century, period. Definitely one of my all time favorites, despite some of its flaws, it wastes no time, has great pace, is a fully contained story and gets its point across very well. And I'm not even talking about how relevant some of its themes are.
...anyway, back to reading.
The parallels between that film and the UK as it currently is are harrowing.
I always joked I was going live in a house like Michael Kanes character, only to end up doing it.
A connected rural hide away, where we can weather the UK’s rapid decay and decline.
The way the film depicts the treatment of immigrants was what always got me, I would joke (half) just wait till climate change makes southern Europe too hot to live in…
I hate being right!
I love Children of Men, I think its dark, prescient, moving and a fantastic technical achievement. Easily one of my top five movies.
I found myself nodding along with everything until I hit these lines:
> Many excellent movies are chase movies! The Terminator (1984) is a chase movie. Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) is a chase movie. One of the greatest movies ever made (according to me), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), is the purest distillation of a chase movie.
Why do people love Fury Road so much? I watched it in the cinema, and I enjoyed it. I thought it was very colorful, had great stunts, etc. A bit derivative of the second and third movie but whatever. George Miller has a format that seems to work. I was shocked when it was nominated for best picture. Best Picture! Years later I listened to a podcast on the making of it, and got a lot of insight into the struggle behind the scenes, and how difficult it was both on set and in pre-production. I had new found respect for everyone involved. I watched it again with new eyes, and... nope. It's fine. It's got some great set-pieces, but I just don't understand the hyperbole. It is, at best, the 3rd best Mad Max movie
Mad Max is big shoes to fill, and Fury Road managed it in a way that was so fresh I barely thought about the previous films. It truly stands alone and that's no easy feat. I do not find it derivative at all. If anything it pulled the franchise in a new direction.
Everything is just awesome. They made an awesome movie. The cars are awesome. The characters are awesome. The sounds and practical effects are awesome. The pace is awesome. It's just great stuff.
It surpasses mediocrity across all metrics. That's why it's more than "fine".
When I first saw this movie, I think the last scene was just her with baby and dead protagonist in a boat, in the fog.
But when I rewatched it more recently, there was also the ship they were trying to reach appearing out of the fog.
Did this movie have two different ending versions? Or did I just misremeber or watched a damaged copy? What ending have you seen?
https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/iea5it/children_of_...
"There was an interview with the cinematographer who had argued for a more open ending with the two of them in the boat and you don't see or hear the rescue ship. So that was under consideration for a while. Maybe you read the director or someone taking about it?"
It's entirely possible that I didn't even come up with the better ending to remember on my own.
Apple if you don’t mess up Neuromancer, please make this next!