I thought the following quote was a legend, but it actually might be true.
King Louis XV (the 15th) of France was a huge horndog. He had a long string of mistresses (I mean, many). He also involved France in several disastrous wars. He also spent a lot on lavish public works and on the court. In other words, he had a pretty extravagant lifestyle all around, personally and policy-wise, and it depleted the national treasury.
At some point he or his latest mistress, Madame de Pompadour, was pondering all this, and said, “Après moi, le déluge.”
"After me, the flood."
That gets quoted a lot by people who criticize other people who are being selfish in a very short-term way: "Those people are thinking, 'Not my problem. It'll blow up after I'm gone.' In other words, 'Après moi, le déluge,' amirite? Those assholes."
Sadly, right now 'Après moi, le déluge' is in fact the attitude of most policymakers. I'm not an anti-natalist, so I do think it's a problem. But after millennia (yes, thousands of years) of high birth rates (to counterbalance the horribly high death rates), with reliable birth control women are saying, "No more." And who can blame them?
It's actually a complex problem.
- Penicillin, condoms, and hormonal birth control have changed sexual norms a lot in the last few decades. Having been alive and aware in the 1970s, I can tell you that it's very different.
- Girls' education is a key driver of economic growth, so many international organizations are pushing it. High fertility also gets in the way of economic growth, so that's gotta go, too.
- Feminism as a movement is another contributor, and this has, in different forms, become worldwide. It's part of the sexual revolution, part of a revolution in voting, in education, and in employment.
- Industrialization means most jobs are not that physical. Women can and do work at hard physical labor; men just are a little more productive at it - not dramatically, but noticeably. But almost nobody needs to do it anymore in developed countries, and the number of such jobs is shrinking in developing countries.
Overall, this means that girls educated this way and encouraged to have small families grow up to be women in good jobs (better than historically) who sex before marriage and say, "Enough of this patriarchal shit," and have no families.
Men are not keeping up. They still are the majority of policymakers in the world, and that means they're not really listening to women, who are the people who actually do the hard work of making people. Yes, things are changing among younger men - more are willing to be very involved fathers - but it's slow going, and they are, globally, still the minority.
Thus, improve society? Yes. It'd be nice to improve society for half of humanity. It's happening, but not fast enough. And many feminists note the benefits of gender equality to men, who don't have to suppress their emotions, but that's a tough sell. And policymakers are in office only for a few years, so they have no incentive to solve a problem that will take decades to play out.
I'm over 60. I'm even a Boomer. I actually can say, "Not my problem." But I don't. I worry about my daughter and her cousins. What sort of world will we leave them? And what about their kids - if any? In the short run, low birth rates lead to the young paying for a numerically larger number of old people (healthcare and retirement). That's a burden. In the long run, it'll be even more unstable. Are policymakers trying to improve society enough so that most couples will end up having two kids?
Not so far.
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