奇葩言论：婴儿出生率低是因为孩子越来越“没用”_BEC初级作文

奇葩言论：婴儿出生率低是因为孩子越来越“没用”

Parental control of children’s sexuality and marriage does not last long once children have been transformed into persons, and with it goes the right to collect bride price, formerly a compensation for the burden of raising a female child. Even in dowry societies, dowry is increasingly supplemented or replaced with education, Caldwell notes, as a wealthy but uneducated woman is not seen as marriageable by Westernized elites. But this is only one aspect of the fertility transformation, rather than the prime driver; in a few countries, parental control over children’s marriage survived long after the fertility decline.

Industrialization negatively affected women’s productivity earlier than men’s productivity, usurping traditional female work from spinning and weaving to food production. The declining economic value of both women and children necessitated that they be granted symbolic value instead. The “cult of motherhood” beginning in the 1820s in England was a response to this – granting motherhood special status as a full-time occupation, and as a fulfilling life’s work. Similarly, as the economic value of children fell, their sacred value increased. Both of these value transformations are not spontaneously occurring, but culturally transmitted; and the vector for their transmission is mass Western-style education. Literature for the masses, from pamphlets of the 1820s to television, also plays a major role.

For many decades prior to the 1970s, the value of an adult (in terms of his productivity and real wages) rose; but the economic value of even an adult person has fallen in recent decades, as real wages attest. Fertility trends do not track the economic value of a human, as they might be expected to do if parents could realize a portion of the value of their offspring. Fertility trends can only respond to that share of the value of a person that a “producer of children” can recover – and the memetic transformation occasioned by mass education has essentially eliminated this share. Governments, meanwhile, claim an ever-larger share of their citizens’ resources. And accessing parental money by catering to (and creating, if necessary) the “needs” of children remains a profitable business plan.