Permanently Deleted
Your high-school teacher lied, welcome to propoganda baybee. The only real factor missing from your college perspective is the economic: things were really secure and one person’s wages could comfortably cover house, food, and bills for a house of 5. Good luck doing that now.
I don’t know what surfaced this memory, but when I was in elementary school, they had us singing the shitty version of Solidarity Forever. The version with the railroads and shit. That was pretty propagand-y.
What is that version? I’d never heard Solidarity Forever until after I became a socialist.
It is all, always, material conditions.
Liberals will ignore the obvious question of ‘can a prole household afford more than 2 kids’ and conclude that increasing economic development leads to lower fertility, even though the USSR was in a permanent baby boom of >2 children per woman all the way until 1989, when for some reason it dropped to about 1.5. And China had a persistently high fertility rate despite continuous development and had to stop it through the one-child policy.
The problem with capitalism is that eventually you run out of people.
That’s not true about the USSR. Birthrate was rapidly decreasing starting in 1910, with a brief post war boom (from like 2.5 to 2.8), then continued decreasing, reaching 2 in 1970, then stabilizing (with a slight dip under 2 for a few years) till 89, at which point it crashes to 1.25 and has been recovering since, now around 1.82.
China’s fertility rate was also decreasing before the one child policy, however the govt viewed it as not fast enough. It peaks in 65 at like 6.4, then rapidly decreases to 2.6 by 1980 when the policy is implemented I presume to force it under 2, which it does by 1992.
The US baby boom was a boost from 2 to 3.5 over 1940 to 60, then a rapid crash back to 2 by 1970, continues falling till the 80s around 1.8, gets back to 2 in the 90s, and then has dipped back down to 1.8 since then.
I’m not quite satisfied with the economic argument for the US boom either, like the material conditions of the 60s were not that different from the 50s, but the availability of birth control was, and the drop from 60 to 65 is massive, and before 1940, increasing industrialization and material conditions had a super clear trendline with decreasing birthrate from 1800 when the birthrate was 7, to 2 by 1940 (with a slightly sharper drop in the 1930s due to the great depression).
Michael Parenti has a very good materialist analysis of the Baby Boom that I can’t find, so I’ll paraphrase it here.
There were three main factors that led to the Baby Boom:
-
During the war, very few consumer goods were being produced, as most factories were turned to manufacturing supplies. Having nothing to purchase allows workers to build a bit of a nest egg.
-
The GI Bill of Rights and the enormous benefits it provided.
-
The US Constitution prevents the State from directly controlling production. What it can do is let everyone know that it’s buying infinite guns and tanks, thus turning the war economy into a semi-permanent jobs program.
I just thought it was all the people coming back from the war finally fucking.
