6.1.24

Creation. Immortality.

I keep reading about the impending demographic shift to a world in which our population goes into severe decline as a result of falling birth rates in most developed nations. South Korea, for example, has averaged .7 births for every two people over the last few years; in order words, not nearly enough to sustain population, and certainly not to grow it. So the Earth’s population in the developed world is in decline.

And since choosing not to reproduce tends to correlate with higher net worth, because you can obsessively throw yourself into work, because children are expensive, and so on… We are moving towards a world in which the rich world is likely to increasingly buy the children they end up wanting rather than going through the messy process of sex, pregnancy, delivery, and the terrible twos.

The pharaonic inequality of wealth distribution only continues to grow.

Children will grow ever more valuable as there are fewer of them.

Clearly this will lead to a world in which the wealthy increasingly buy children.

(This is not a new idea; the barren well-to-do have been buying Russian adopted babies for a while. But we should expect this practice to increase considerably as a total percentage of children on earth.)

What will the double-sided market for children look like by 2050?

If I buy a thing, then nurture it, did I create that thing?

Hardly seems to convey the same sense of immortality that passing on your own genes does, does it?