Adapted for the Internet from:

Why God Doesn't Exist
An urban woman doesn't
have the privilege or
need to have a family

    1.0   Urbanization changes culture

    Morgan [1] and Engels [2]  were among the first to associate a general mode of production and a family type with a general
    political and economic epoch. They matched slavery with the agricultural age, serfdom with feudalism, and the proletarian
    with capitalism. In a parallel trend, they associated the clan with huntergathering, the extended, patriarchal family with
    agriculture, and the traditional nuclear family with the industrial phase. I will now add a fourth and final leg to this last series.
    The ‘mode of production’ in our days is the service economy. The typical family is either the single parent or the bachelor.
    There is simply no room for families and children in our modern, high-density, urban economy.

    An agrarian economy stimulates reproduction and encourages large families. Rural women live in a low
    density environment, with lots of empty land and ample food production. Two hundred years ago, our culture was in tune
    with these economic realities. The idea was to produce as many offspring as possible and to conquer territory before your
    neighbors or enemies had a chance to do it. Having children had little to do with women being ignorant (as people believe
    today). It had to do with building empires, colonizing the empty land, having at least one child and if possible many children
    to take care of you when you were old. Having children was synonymous with influence and power. You had no one to
    bequeath your empire to if you had no descendants; your life had been in vain. In fact, the populous families were the rich
    families, not the poor ones as people are led to believe today. Plants do no differently. They attempt to conquer as much
    space as possible as quickly as possible. The idea is to muscle out the competition before it gains strength. This process
    does not necessarily involve a conscious decision. A plant absorbs as many resources as it has at its disposal. The next
    plant is compelled to grow under a regime of fewer resources and has to adjust its economy accordingly.

    The modern urban society compels women to live under a radically different regime than their agricultural great-
    grandmothers grew up in. All the relevant variables of our contemporary society work against fertility; not one aids it.
    Specifically, a proletarian has nothing to bequeath except rent and utility bills and debts. The state or private businesses
    take care of the very young and the very old. Thus, having children no longer has the purpose of conquering or colonizing
    more territory or of providing for the elderly. Indeed, having children has no practical or economic purpose any more. That’s
    why we stopped having them. If you look around your city, you will notice that apartment buildings dot the landscape. Where
    have all the houses gone? The fact is that a city has no use for houses. Houses are for kids. Apartments are for grownups.
    Can you imagine 10 kids in an apartment? Even worse, can you imagine having 10 children in the first place? Considering
    that having a dozen babies was routine 200 years ago, that’s what I call a radical shift in culture. Our forefathers were nothing
    like us at all!

    Again, what has happened is that we concentrated millions of people in small areas called cities, and a city is definitely not a
    place to raise a family. A city is a place for individuals. Families are a thing of the past. The nominally monogamous extended
    and nuclear family types developed in response to the question of inheritance. [3]  The biblical patriarchs Abraham, Isaac,
    and Israel were concerned about the future. ‘Who will inherit my land, my cattle, my wealth? What did I toil for all of these
    years if I can’t take anything with me?’

    Abraham ["a father of many nations have I made thee" (Gen 17:5)],

    Isaac ["Isaac intreated the LORD for his wife, because she was barren...
    and Rebekah his wife conceived" (Gen. 25:21)],

    Israel ["be fruitful and multiply; a nation and a company of nations shall
    be of thee, and kings shall come out of thy loins" (Gen. 35:11)]

    Ergo, children were not only expected, but also demanded. If not, the male had his way with a ‘surrogate’. [Abraham with
    Hagar (Gen 16:4) and Keturah (Gen 25:1); Israel with Zilpah (Gen 30:9-10) and Bilhah (Gen 30:4-5)] There was a purpose and
    a need for children under these regimes.

    People have radically different concerns and ask much different questions today:

    ‘ What will you do if he cheats on you?’

    ‘ She is pregnant, so I advise you to tell her to get rid of it.’

    ‘ You know that you could die in labor. Anyways, why go through labor pains when
       you can live a freer life as a single? You can have sex with whomever you like,
       advance in your career, go on vacation anywhere you want, and save more money
       for personal stuff.’

    ‘  Company? Sure, why not? But not sharing my bank account. If she loses interest in
       7 years as is the norm, I don’t want to have to go to court to defend my nest egg.’

    Can you even imagine Abraham or Isaac harboring such thoughts? They were founders of empires. Their lifelong dreams
    were to populate the land and build a name for themselves that would forever be etched in heaven. We look out for number
    one. That’s how much culture has changed with economics. It is not by chance that the typical family is becoming a mixture
    of bachelors, single parents, and odd pairs of gay and lesbian partners. There is no genuine purpose for having children
    anymore other than ‘it would be nice to experience what it’s like’. The urban generation has grown skeptical and cynical
    about long-term commitments. What has changed from the days of our great-grannies is not only the per-capita fertility, but
    the level of trust. And the results are visible. Reproductive sex has given way to recreational sex.

    Other urban socio-economic factors that also work against reproduction include:

    1.       People have few assurances about the economic future. Unemployment is high.
    Layoffs can happen at any moment. Jobs are hard to recover. If hunter-gatherers
    had one advantage over civilized Man it is that they had no unemployment. Thus,
    the process is self-sustaining. People move to the cities. They saturate the
    ‘necessary goods’ market. They get shoved over to services, none of which
    contribute to wealth. They refrain from long term relations, and this causes a
    further drop in demand. So just in case, let’s not have a baby until the slump
    ends and the economy turns the corner (which, it turns out, always remains a
    promise).

    2.       The old live longer, hold on to their jobs for longer, and crowd out the young
    from the workplace. No job, no money. No money, no honey.

    3.       Young wage earners are heavily taxed to pay for the retirements of the old. The
    young cannot change the laws because the old are better organized, have more
    money and influence, and make their inordinate presence felt at the voting booths.
    The old are crowding out the young!

    Therefore, it should not surprise us that women are foregoing motherhood. The urban socio-economic environment
    pro-actively discourages it.


    2.0   The rich may spawn, but don't; the poor would spawn, but can't

    Let’s now analyze the problem from a statistical perspective. Hopefully, this analysis will reinforce that infertility has little
    to do with education and all to do with economics. I will refer to a woman who is rich as lucky and to a woman who is poor
    as unlucky. There are three general types of women across this broad spectrum:

    1.      The very wealthy woman in contemporary society has a wide horizon. Above all,
    money buys her freedom. She has many opportunities at her disposal. She may
    travel anywhere and live wherever she likes. She can work if she wants to or be
    totally idle. She also has the freedom to choose whether she will have a child. The
    resources at her disposal are so vast that she doesn’t even consider economic
    factors. Having a baby is strictly a matter of whim. She may decide to go through
    the process just for kicks, perhaps to experience what it is like to have a child, or
    simply to see what the baby would look like.

    2.       A less fortunate woman that is not sinfully wealthy, for example a professional
    earning a high salary, is in a significantly different position than our blue blood.
    Her living space is still quite generous and she enjoys access to a great range of
    freedoms and opportunities, most of which are denied to the common man and
    woman. However, deciding whether to have a baby is usually not a decision that
    depends on the same factors as the wealthier socialite. Having a baby is definitely
    a bad career move. It changes her lifestyle radically and restricts her activities.
    She may be a traveling businesswoman, or a party girl, or a dedicated vacationer,
    or a sportswoman. A pregnancy would change all that. She would have a very
    tough choice to make, and many if not most women in this category predictably
    stick with their careers. There is simply too much at stake. She cannot just drop
    everything she worked so long to erect and decide to start a family.

    3.       An unlucky woman is one who has no opportunities or range of options. She is a
    proletariat, a working woman. She earns a wage or salary that is sufficient to meet
    her needs or, in many cases, she is probably not even this fortunate. Having a baby
    is typically not an option. She can barely make ends meet. Will she make her
    situation even more precarious by bringing another mouth into this world?

    Statistics come into play because the overwhelming majority of urban women in the world are ‘unlucky’. For one woman
    that is wealthy, there are perhaps 100 women who are highly-paid professionals, and 10,000 women who barely make ends
    meet. Thus, the decision to have a baby in most cases is based on economic factors. There may be accidents here and there,
    and there will be women who decide to have babies in spite of their precarious situation, but density-dependent birth rates
    are not a function of individual behavior as Bailey suspects. They have to do with culture. Behavior is what one individual has.
    When that behavior is shared by at least one other individual we have culture. Density-dependent birth rates are by definition
    phenomena that have a statistical nature. One woman can choose to have a baby if she wants. This decision is unpredictable.

    However, most unlucky women will certainly choose not to have a baby, meaning that the outcome of the collective decision-
    making process is predictable.


    3.0   Conclusions

    We have control over education, but education is not what leads to infertility. It is urbanization that leads the average woman
    to halt reproduction. Fertility and birth rates are a function of density. If all women were rich and wealthy, many would choose
    to have babies. Unfortunately, few working woman can afford such luxuries. Since most women are proletarians, most women
    will either decide not to reproduce or at best contribute a single offspring. This necessarily reduces the birth and fertility rates.
    When that happens, the population pyramid of a species necessarily overturns. This analysis reinforces the argument raised
    by Morgan and Engels: a general type of family is associated with a general type of economy. The single, childless proletarian
    of the urban service economy is the last type of family that we will see. Women will never again go back to having 15 children.
    Culture (our collective behavior) is indeed a function of economics, and a particular economic arrangement dominates each
    demographic phase. We have no way of avoiding these relations.

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    Last modified 03/03/08


        Copyright © by Nila Gaede 2008
I can't afford to
get pregnant like
you, Mary.
I gotta work!