Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging Russians to have more children.
"Large families must become the norm," Putin said in a speech Tuesday.
Russian birth rates are falling amid war in Ukraine and a deepening economic crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country’s population crisis.
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” Putin said.
I find it hard to imagine wanting to have kids just so your dictator has more meat to feed into his meat grinder. Perhaps the only good news is Putin hopefully doesn’t have 18 more years in him, so the kids won’t have to deal with him directly, but who knows who will sit in the throne next…
I doesn’t work either. Appeals to nationalism, religion, and even straight up paying and providing luxury benefits to people, in order to have them start having more kids just did nothing in the long run. The world is different. Your children are more likely to become independent adults when you put your resources into a smaller number of children. The cost/benefits ratio of having large families to produce stability, and increase the chances at least one child will be successful, has completely reverse from 100+ years ago.
Putin will open rape/baby factories for female prisoners next. Just watch.
Putin will open rape/baby factories for female prisoners next. Just watch.
If anything, they would outlaw contraception first, before going down that road that you’re describing, not that that road would be successful in either case.
If this is true, this has to be the ultimate way of not really dealing with the population crisis upon us. Not saying any government is doing a great job here as they are all beating around the bush and not addressing root causes, but this one from Putin has to be the most delusional of them all.
There is no population crisis, unless you mean there are too many people. Most of the work we do is entirely unnecessary and only exists to help billionaires become trillionaires. At least that’s the case in countries that don’t need meat to throw in front of bullets.
Necessary jobs are mostly farming, mining, manufacturing, and customer service. The first two have already been automated to need only a tiny percentage of the workforce they once require. Manufacturing is mostly there as well, and is getting closer all the time. Customer service still employs a lot of humans, but even those jobs are being replaced or augmented with physical or logical bots.
The crisis is that without enough babies, there will not be enough young people to support the older people. It is why places like Canada have such high immigration as it offsets the lack of births from Canadian citizens. Now, it is a crisis from a planet health perspective. No. It is the best thing that could happen right now as we really could use less people and their associated carbon emissions, but it will still impact the economy hard especially since it is becoming a steep birth rate decline in so many countries. Feels like a free fall right now and to address is going to take as much change as it will take to fix the climate emergency. Might even have some of the same solutions.
Don’t care, I’ll be dead.
Maybe. There is serious breakthroughs with longevity tech with aging and diseases perhaps being a thing of the past in the decades to come. Maybe.
Lucky we have automation and AI making everyone jobless, will be plenty of people and machines to look after the older generations
That is a real crisis on the horizon as the evidence so far is that there is no support for those who get displaced. I am counting down the days till my career is replaced. I am Imagineering a VR Theme Park and am certain that in the years to come you will be able to ask AI to make you one via a prompt and it will customize it to your tastes. When that happens I need to find a new career. Unsure what but I am hopeful that new careers will open up that we cannot foresee today. That or we will all be in a hellscape of which I have positioned myself to weather.
I think if we don’t change the system then we’re going to have a world of hurt for pretty much everyone, if we do change the system into something that facilitate an existence where people can survive periods without work or with minimal work then it could become a golden age.
A lot of the big problems with that comes from legacy obsessions which persist even when technical solutions have displaced the need or reason behind them. Building sites are already nothing like they used to be, the cost of construction has fallen dramatically especially in labour time but house prices rise because they’re not tied to construction cost but availability, which is often kept purposely low so rich people who run government can have big numbers in their balance s sheets. At some point this stress point will fracture.
Subtle automation already makes things like surveying and designing incredibly easy, we’re not far from the point where ai assisted architecture tools are as easy to use as the Sims and will produce plans which can be automatically passed or rejected for the technical side of planning. Not only will more visible forms of automation like concrete shuttering and pouring become more widely adopted this again reducing the time and cost of construction but they’ll have sensor driven analysis which can be uploaded to local authorities for instant inspection and verification. Likewise for cable routing, pipework, insulation, plastering, brickwork, roofing, decorating…
When a house can be demolished and rebuilt in weeks for the cost of machine rental and materials then the housing crisis will fade away, especially when industrial areas shrink due to efficiency of automation, office space gets repurposed, and transport infrastructure gains efficiency - areas like where I live in the UK with absurd property prices are almost certainly going to see automated construction tools take a lot of industry and transport underground - shooting cargo down small underground networks could replace a huge amount of road and rail usage which would be a huge positive for people and free up space for housing.
I got off track but what I’m getting at is we can use these things to solve major problems in our society, but we need to make sure people can lose their job and go through peeiods of adjustment without it ruining their life.
I agree, but as you pointed out, we already have many tools to solve most of our global issues, but instead we carry on like we like in a scarcity world. I am concerned about the AI disruption as I am not seeing evidence of us really caring for those impacted let alone the millions impacted daily by how the global economy is run. We can fix so many things, but don’t. Heck, even getting rid of day light savings is a cause too far it seems despite overwhelming support.
That is depressingly true, though I do think there’s hope. I’m in a lot of open source dev and design communities, they’re flourishing and growing steadily because they’re able to build on all the prior developments. Every day people are writing code to improve design tools, and writing code to improve programming languages and development environments so that it’s easier to make better design tools … and the better the design tools get the easier it is to make better designs on them, easier to build on prior open source designs and improve or customise them.
I already use AI coding tools in my open source project, they’re awkward and not always useful but for certain tasks they can save hours - for example I got it to divide a circle into an arbitrary amount of sections and return the quadrant coordinates, I could have worked it out and coded it myself but not doing things like that allows me to make much more progress. The easier it gets to code the more time I’ll be focused on making it do useful things which will result in a far better product.
Likewise the complexity and quality of stuff I see on 3d printing model sites continues to improve, printers continue to improve… We can’t be far away from ai assisted pick&place enabling complex electronics to be built into designs - there will be a cheap open source printer that can make everything except the magnets in the motors. A lot of companies are going to find the their entire product line is completing against items that can be made better and cheaper in any tech guys garage.
It wasn’t eBay that took down Tandy and Maplins it was the people with any garage space buying the same bulk orders of components but selling them without the overheads. The same will happen to Hotpoint and Logitech, people who have bootstrapped high quality fabrication labs in the garage selling things made from open source designs.
They won’t be able to stop it, they might slow it for a while but progress is as a river in that you can only hold it back so long.
I say this as someone who had lots of kids - you cannot build an economy on a continuous explosion of population. That is ridiculous. There are enough people - the population of the earth has more than doubled in my lifetime. I’d much rather work till I die, than tell someone else they must reproduce. Let people who want kids have them, let people who don’t want kids not have any, it’s working out and population growth has slowed and hopefully population will decrease. That’s fine, yes many of us will be old at once, that’s not the fault of the non-reproducing people. There wouldn’t be fewer old people even if everyone had kids, it has to happen before things settle back out.
Very much agree. Besides, it is looking like we really are entering an era of significant human life extension if you believe all the longevity breakthroughs.
The crisis is that without enough babies, there will not be enough young people to support the older people.
So you didn’t read a word I said beyond the first sentence. Got it.
I do not understand your comment as my comment was building upon yours as you went down the billion support path and I just added the old age pension path.
I have a friend who left Russia to get away from bullshit like the Order of Maternal Glory.
Looked up. It is order of coutry that no longer exists. It is impossible to get one.
Maybe not exactly, but… https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
Mother Heroine (Russian: Мать-героиня, Mat’-geroinya) is an honorary title that was used in the Soviet Union and now Russia, awarded for bearing and raising a large family.
On 15 August 2022 Vladimir Putin signed a decree reviving the honorary title.[2]
Also Putins intent is to turn Russia back into the Soviet Union so it’s not at all surprising he’s re-using things like this.
Do not really see a problem with this one. Don’t most countries recognize families with X number of children and give some benefits? It doesn’t immediately mean everyone starts having 10 children families.
I know that in America they recognize it in the form of “thanks for the worker, here is financial assistance for diapers/food/etc if you meet under the poverty line of household income so your kids don’t clog up our hospital system with your uninsured, diaper-rash-turned-infection starving children, and have some child care tax credits either way.”**
In Sweden I think every newborn comes home with a huge box of diapers clothes formula if needed etc. And I think it’s a monthly box for X number of months.
But large families aren’t looked at as a status symbol like they’re trying to make happen in Russia, and as it was in the Soviet Union. Literal Military Metals of Honor 3 levels deep for the amount of children you had (Level 1 was highest honor, level 3 was lowest).
**Except maybe for some certain sects of certain religions, like some of Catholicism and Mormonism. But that’s for more messengers to spread the word of Jesus/Joseph Smith. That’s all the frame of reference I have.
Actual medal does seem weird, true. I think I have heard Finland having a similar care package, sounds pretty cool and probably the best option to first of all guarantee parents do not get a monetary allowance that could be spent elsewhere, booze for example.
Looked into my country laws and in Latvia you get a monthly allowance based on total count of children up to realistically 18 or 20 years (depends if you continue education)
- one child - EUR 25 per month
- two - EUR 100 per month (EUR 50 for each child);
- three - EUR 225 per month (EUR 75 for each child);
- four and more children - EUR 100 per month for each child.
If you have 3+ kids you also can get a card that has benefits / reduced cost for various services.
Let’s keep going until there’s a 1:39 male to female ratio. That’d be ideal. Not strange at all.
Let’s keep going until there’s a 1:39 male to female ratio. That’d be ideal. Not strange at all.
It’s not about the ratio, it’s about a total amount of bodies, regardless of gender, available to run/work the country, in the future generations.
They already took a big hit in World War II, and they’re taking another hit now, and most nations taking two pop hits in a row don’t recover well.
I mean, with Russia, it seems like it’s just been constant: WW1, revolution, WW2, Stalin’s reign, now this.
If anything, rather than WW2 and this being “in a row”, that time frame includes probably the biggest gap in the past century without a grievous population loss.
For as much as we (Americans) regard Russia (as a state) with an adversarial eye, as far as Russians (the actual common people) are concerned, I kinda feel for them. Seems like their entire history is dominated by difficulty, hardship, and death.
Then again maybe that impression is precisely the impression that the American education system has very carefully cultivated…
If anything, rather than WW2 and this being “in a row”, that time frame includes probably the biggest gap in the past century without a grievous population loss.
I’m speaking towards actual graphs I’ve seen before from education videos (RealLifeLore, etc.) on the subject that show specific peaks in population drops following war, and how they affect Russia directly.
I wasn’t trying to elaborate on the whole history of Russia, just that they’ve had large population drops because of death via war.
