I see it more like the way my great-grandmother managed during the Great Depression. They were poor even *before* the depression. I used to quiz my great-aunts about it, because it was fascinating to me. They all said they didn't notice the Depression, because you couldn't get any poorer than they were. So they just kept being poor is all.
My great-grandfather had a job as a part-time sheriff's deputy, and picked up odd gigs on the side whenever he could-- unloading banana boats (part of the pay was in bananas), driving a dump truck that wouldn't make left turns, working on WPA projects... until the older children started working, his income supported a very large family. They had eleven kids, none of them died or were malnourished, and all grew up to be decent law-abiding, productive members of the community. None of them attributed that to their dad (and I think he may have died before age 60). They talked about their mother like she could walk on water and heal the blind.
They lived for some time without plumbing in a tar-paper house. They made it through because my great-grandmother was a wizard at making ends meet-- a truly amazing woman. She sewed everybody's clothes and quilts, raised chickens, kept a huge kitchen garden, raised hogs and kept a milk-cow (they never considered themselves farmers-- they were homesteading). She shot ducks and possum for the table, fished, gigged frogs, and probably cooked the occasional snake. If the boys brought down a squirrel with a slingshot, it went into the stewpot. Everybody helped, and mother was the project-manager who made it all work, the nurse/EMT who kept them alive (successfully nursed a five-year-old through a snakebite that turned his whole arm black), and the moral backbone that kept them all on the straight and narrow. She baked bread, made pickles, butchered poultry, and grew sweet potatoes, collards, and corn.
I think a resource-poor future could look a lot like that past. Her work was far, far, from unappreciated. Everybody in the family knew they couldn't have survived without her. She didn't just keep them alive, she gave them *dignity* in it. You could not say the "P" word around her. She would say they were not poor, because "poor" is a state of mind, and if you worked hard, learned, stayed honest, and did right by your kin and your neighbors, you could not, ever, be truly poor. God helps those who help themselves ;)
She lived into her seventies, and spent her old age in a comfortable house with a huge garden and stocked fish ponds-- out of all the work she'd done over the years, the garden and the fishing were what she truly enjoyed, so she kept those. Her widowed eldest daughter and bachelor son moved in with her and took care of her, the house, and the property (while working their own careers) until her death. She was surrounded by devoted children and adoring grandchildren, and while I never had the privilege of meeting her (died before my time), she's something of a legend, with probably well over a hundred current living descendants, who all grew up hearing stories about her and the old homestead.
FWIW, whether effective contraception is available in our future or not, I don't think it'll be a case of smaller families. I think population will shrink, but we'll see a lot more people just not having kids at all (this used to be a fairly normal thing, particularly for men-- there were a lot of bachelor uncles, sailors, and single men who worked fish camps, logging camps, mining claims, etc), and some small subset of people like great-grandmother, who have quite a lot of surviving children. And probably also a fair number of families with a lot of not-surviving children :( Child mortality is the historic/global norm, and I expect it'll make a roaring comeback, along with TB, cholera, malnutrition, and a lot of other things "cured" by modern affluence.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2022-07-18 09:16 pm (UTC)My great-grandfather had a job as a part-time sheriff's deputy, and picked up odd gigs on the side whenever he could-- unloading banana boats (part of the pay was in bananas), driving a dump truck that wouldn't make left turns, working on WPA projects... until the older children started working, his income supported a very large family. They had eleven kids, none of them died or were malnourished, and all grew up to be decent law-abiding, productive members of the community. None of them attributed that to their dad (and I think he may have died before age 60). They talked about their mother like she could walk on water and heal the blind.
They lived for some time without plumbing in a tar-paper house. They made it through because my great-grandmother was a wizard at making ends meet-- a truly amazing woman. She sewed everybody's clothes and quilts, raised chickens, kept a huge kitchen garden, raised hogs and kept a milk-cow (they never considered themselves farmers-- they were homesteading). She shot ducks and possum for the table, fished, gigged frogs, and probably cooked the occasional snake. If the boys brought down a squirrel with a slingshot, it went into the stewpot. Everybody helped, and mother was the project-manager who made it all work, the nurse/EMT who kept them alive (successfully nursed a five-year-old through a snakebite that turned his whole arm black), and the moral backbone that kept them all on the straight and narrow. She baked bread, made pickles, butchered poultry, and grew sweet potatoes, collards, and corn.
I think a resource-poor future could look a lot like that past. Her work was far, far, from unappreciated. Everybody in the family knew they couldn't have survived without her. She didn't just keep them alive, she gave them *dignity* in it. You could not say the "P" word around her. She would say they were not poor, because "poor" is a state of mind, and if you worked hard, learned, stayed honest, and did right by your kin and your neighbors, you could not, ever, be truly poor. God helps those who help themselves ;)
She lived into her seventies, and spent her old age in a comfortable house with a huge garden and stocked fish ponds-- out of all the work she'd done over the years, the garden and the fishing were what she truly enjoyed, so she kept those. Her widowed eldest daughter and bachelor son moved in with her and took care of her, the house, and the property (while working their own careers) until her death. She was surrounded by devoted children and adoring grandchildren, and while I never had the privilege of meeting her (died before my time), she's something of a legend, with probably well over a hundred current living descendants, who all grew up hearing stories about her and the old homestead.
FWIW, whether effective contraception is available in our future or not, I don't think it'll be a case of smaller families. I think population will shrink, but we'll see a lot more people just not having kids at all (this used to be a fairly normal thing, particularly for men-- there were a lot of bachelor uncles, sailors, and single men who worked fish camps, logging camps, mining claims, etc), and some small subset of people like great-grandmother, who have quite a lot of surviving children. And probably also a fair number of families with a lot of not-surviving children :( Child mortality is the historic/global norm, and I expect it'll make a roaring comeback, along with TB, cholera, malnutrition, and a lot of other things "cured" by modern affluence.