The people planning for retirement are mostly past child raising age; the best way to have bugger families is to encourage low standards and unprotected sex amongst young adults, which is the exact opposite of the public health and morality pressure my entire generation and those that followed me have been on the recieving end of.

That said, medical tech is speeding up like everything else, so non-human surrogacy, artificial wombs, longevity meds, are all likely to impact this balance on similar timescales to such a cultural shift.

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thrownthatway 6 hours ago | parent [-]

> bigger families is to encourage low standards and unprotected sex amongst young adults

Factually incorrect.

The best way to ensure big families is to foster a culture getting marriage younger, stating married, and starting families younger.

Women have their best years of fertility from about 17 to their early thirties. Telling young women to prioritise long educations and a career over family is counter productive to carrying on a civilisation, and has largely gone on to be proven something many women regret - unsurprisingly.

Strong, cohesive, multigenerational families don’t come simply from encouraging young people to have unprotected sex, although yes that is a crude component of it.

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ben_w 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You have a western view of things. There are other cultures which have communal upbringing, e.g. Kibbutz, Hadza, and ǃKung; and while they have ceremonies which are called marriage, Europe has seen religious conflicts over the things smaller than the difference between ǃKung and Catholic marriage sanctity.

The fact is that marriage as it is understood in the west today bears little in common with the institution of the same name in the same place in the 1950s, which itself was different from the institution of the same name in the 1800s depending on if you were in a Catholic or Protestant area, all of which differ from the institution of the same name in the 1500s, all of which differ from the institution of the same name in the 1200s, which themselves varied from Roman and Greek marriage that were different from each other. In the present day, the Mosuo so-called "walking marriage" is essentially indistinguishable from what a European or American would call "teens dating and being allowed to stay the night".

> Strong, cohesive, multigenerational families

I didn't say any of those adjectives.

The Mosuo case demonstrates your claim is false, regardless.

Furthermore, when the fear is a concern of not enough workers in the next generation to pay out the pensions of the old, it is unclear why any of your list of adjectives matter.

	▲	thrownthatway 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You’re a cultural relativist. You think all cultures are equal? They’re not. Only one culture gave us pretty much everything the modern world enjoys today: Western European culture. Microchips, invented be Westerners. Electricity. Telecommunications. Space travel, space probes, space telescopes. We pioneered and perfected all of those things. First to end slavery. Universal suffrage, gay marriage. We did all of that. Modern medicine, antibiotics. First to solve HIV. Eradicated malaria, tuberculosis, polio. All Western achievement. Other than the Jewish tradition you mentioned, the others are merely irrelevant. Other then Israel in the Middle East, basically no one is queuing to get in to countries other then Western ones. Everyone wants to come to the advanced European economies, France and Germany, the UK, and the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia. Why? Because we’re awesome and everyone wants what we have.