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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25843 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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His Excellency Joe Biden has declared March 31st a certain ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’, which has generated derision due to its simultaneity with the Western date of Easter Sunday. If this happened outside of Holy Week, it likely would have prompted the regimented groans from the right side of the isle, and that would be that; coincidentally, however, this ‘holiday’ (which has been declared such since 2009) happened to fall on the holiest day of the year for Christians, the group which is perhaps the biggest collection of resisters against transgenderism. Naturally, this has created a lot of controversy. Trump and his team even issued a statement calling for Biden to apologize for his ‘blasphemy’, which is probably a unique event all things considered (when’s the last time you’ve heard of a politician smear another one for blasphemy? In 2000+24, no less?) Such personalities as Caitlyn Jenner and Musk have responded with similar negative attitudes.

Now, I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Biden didn’t make this decision himself. It was definitely his team which did this, in order to show his support for the ‘marginalized’, even as he has declared this day one for ‘visibility’ years before in his term. It raises the question, though, on whether or not Biden actually has these thoughts of support for these people and their identities, with this support even superseding the remembrance of Christ’s resurrection (keep in mind that Biden is an 80 year old ‘devout Catholic’, allegedly). I really doubt he does, but I’m more interested in what he actually thinks about these developments. And, how would his team react to the fact that the black community would significantly oppose this, given their high rate of religiosity? Does Biden still think this is 1969, where if you were transgender you would probably lose your job and become exiled from all institutions in society? Thoughts?

Is there a reading of this that doesn't involve intentional spite on some level? Someone involved here surely knew what they were doing

No, calling Biden “his excellency” definitely involves intentional spite.

By the administration. Yes. The holiday was declared by some trans right activist years ago. It was a date on the calendar while Easter has its day move around.

The administration therefore couldn’t ignore a trans-holiday because too many of there people are trans religion but a lot of others are Christian religion. To celebrate trans day on a different day would disrespect trans-religion. So they were in a no-win position. The administration didn’t pick today for a trans religion holiday but it was assigned by trans religion.

Flying the trans flag during pride month at the Vatican Embassy was in my opinion far more disrespectful than what they did today which was a no-win situation for the politicians. That was truly disrespectful and obviously they would not try doing something like that in Saudi Arabia.

I can’t really describe trans/pride as anything other than a religion and since Scott describes it that way it feels like an acceptable view here. The politicians are just in a hard spot where they have two religions claiming the same day and the two religions both hate each other.

Edit: Lists of pride/trans related days some guy compiled on twitter. Significantly increasing my priors to spite. If they have this many holidays it’s a lot easier to not celebrate one of them when it’s another groups main holiday.

https://twitter.com/jarvis_best/status/1774115482255106479?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

So they were in a no-win position.

Joe could have ignored it. Joe could have wished a happy dual celebration of Easter and trans pride day. Joe could have not banned religious themes from Easter egg contests for military families at the same time.

To be fair, the statement about trans pride day was on March 29, while today he put out an Easter message in which he said the following:

Jill and I send our warmest wishes to Christians around the world celebrating Easter Sunday. Easter reminds us of the power of hope and the promise of Christ’s Resurrection.

As we gather with loved ones, we remember Jesus’ sacrifice. We pray for one another and cherish the blessing of the dawn of new possibilities. And with wars and conflict taking a toll on innocent lives around the world, we renew our commitment to work for peace, security, and dignity for all people.

From our family to yours, happy Easter and may God bless you.

Joe could have not banned religious themes from Easter egg contests for military families at the same time.

The Egg Board says this had nothing to do with Biden, though?

"The American Egg Board has been a supporter of the White House Easter Egg Roll for over 45 years and the guideline language referenced in recent news reports has consistently applied to the board since its founding, across administrations."

The embassy to the Vatican is in Rome, Italy. They didn't fly the trans flag inside Vatican City.

Is it really a difference? Vatican Embassy versus embassy to the Vatican?

I guess one implies it’s in the Vatican but it’s still a middle finger to a Priest whose going to the Embassy to deal with something.

Yes. The flagpole the trans flag was flown from primarily belongs to the Embassy to Italy, which is co-located with the administratively separate Embassy to the Holy See and Rome branch of the Embassy to the UN. A quick google suggests that the Embassy to the Vatican participated in Pride Month by hanging a rainbow flag (not the trans flag) above the entrance.

Transgender Day of Visibility

2009 sounds about right. You can tell this idea is from the early stages of the "woke" wave that crested from 2013-2021. It is a completely sincere expression of what the classical MtF desires above all else, positive attention. The point isn't the internal experience of the trans person himself, the point is the internal experience of everyone else as they are forced to deal with the "visibility" of trans people. Note the conspicuous lack of the modern pretexts that have evolved to counteract later anti-woke resistance. Indeed, the entire point is to not invoke tropes like anti-trans violence.

"Unlike Transgender Day of Remembrance, Crandall said, the day of visibility aims to focus on all the good things in the trans community, instead of just remembering those who were lost. 'The day of remembrance is exactly what it is. It remembers people who died,' she said. 'This focuses on the living. People have told me they love Remembrance Day but it really focuses on the negative aspect of it. Isn't there anything that could focus on the positive aspect of being trans?'"

He could have just said nothing. “Transgender day of visibility” is about as relevant as national pancake day. If national pancake day fell on Christmas, or maybe Labor Day or Memorial Day or something, it seems likely that Scranton Joe would simply say nothing about it

I don’t think these things are actually as benign as some are suggesting. Somebody with the power to speak on behalf of the president made this decision; they haven’t been fired, there has been no apology.

Perhaps there should be a national “draw Muhammad day” that coincides with the beginning of Ramadan. Would it be considered benign if president Trump sent out a statement (regardless of if he typed it himself or not) wishing everybody a happy draw Muhammad day?

Draw Muhammad day would actually be aligned with American values. Maybe this should be a new 4th of July tradition that the president celebrates? Presumably tolerant liberals would just call this a “coincidence”.

Are you contending that, right now, transgenderism is primarily motivated by sticking it to Christianity, in the way that a Draw Muhammad Day would be wrt Islam?

I'm not sure. There definitely does seem to be a thread of "we aim to radically alter society", and this case that society is a Christian one.

There is a draw Muhammad day and at least two would-be Muslim mass shooters were themselves shot trying to shoot up a draw Muhammad celebration. With bonus the FBI had a hand in the almost-enacted mass shooting and a couple FBI agents actually followed the terrorists on order to observe the shooting.

What’s with “Scranton Joe?” Is it meant to be some sort of crack about his humble roots?

Biden refers to himself as this; yes presumably to try and create an image of somebody with humble roots.

On one level, it's a silly, ridiculous political "scandal" for a slow news week.

On another, there is a lot of signaling going on there, on both sides. Politics isn't about politics, and this is as valid a battleground as any. It is interesting to see the positions being taken.

Boosting a niche thing like trans awareness over the prime holy day for (supposedly) 65% of the country is a little on the nose from a public relations standpoint. Christian-bashing has become so prevalent on the left that they sometimes forget it's a majority of the country they look down on.

For what it's worth Easter happens on a different day every year (somewhere within a ~30 day interval), while "Transgender Day of Visibility" happens on March 31st every year, was created in 2009 by activists, and was endorsed by Biden in 2021. Easter won't occur on March 31st for at least the next 25 years (sorry, my chart only goes to 2049).

The point being: the only "choice" Biden made in the last 3 years was to continue to proclaim his support for transpeople on a holiday he had already endorsed in the past, rather than staying conspicuously silent. "Democrat politician refuses to endorse leftwing holiday he's already endorsed three times" would certainly be something to talk about.

If "Biden endorses holiday for the 4th time (but this time it's on Easter!)" merits relitigating The Motte's favorite hobbyhorse, that says more about The Motte's desire to relitigate it's hobbyhorse than it does about any novel development in the real world.

Easter won't occur on March 31st for at least the next 25 years (sorry, my chart only goes to 2049).

Next occurrence is in 2086 (62 years hence).

Yes, but issuing the formal proclamation and ignoring that Obama already made March 31st a federal holiday for Cesar Chavez, from the Democratic president who was Obama's VP, is not the usual state of affairs. Personally, I don't think Biden had much to do with this announcement, apart from the usual 'yeah sure we endorse this' and it was the munchkins in the Adminstration who put this out there.

I must see what the announcement for last Trans Day was; okay, looks like this year is a Significant Anniversary, which is probably why they pushed the boat out:

In 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden proclaimed March 31 as a Transgender Day of Visibility, stating in part, "I call upon all Americans to join in the fight for full equality for all transgender people." Biden was the first American president to issue a formal presidential proclamation recognizing the event. Biden issued a similar proclamation a year later, welcoming Jeopardy! contestant and transgender woman Amy Schneider to the White House and announcing a set of measures intended to support transgender rights.

2024 marks the 15th anniversary of Transgender Day of Visibility with celebrations planned across the globe.

Yes, but issuing the formal proclamation and ignoring that Obama already made March 31st a federal holiday for Cesar Chavez, from the Democratic president who was Obama's VP, is not the usual state of affairs

You mean in 2021?

First, I thought there was already a Trans Day of Visibility, I see it plastered all over social media enough.

Second, while it's tin-eared to do it on Easter Sunday, it won't be Easter at the same date every year.

Third, others have pointed out that March 31st is already Cesar Chavez Day, and even better it was made a federal holiday by Obama, so seems like somebody is not being totally au fait with Latinx Representation 😀 I'm not blaming Joe for that one, I think all he had to do with this was "Sign this piece of paper we put in front of you, Mr. President. No, you don't need to read it, just sign it".

As far as I'm concerned, these kind of special days are on a par with National Potato Day or International Toothbrush Month so I don't care one way or the other, I will continue to live in happy ignorance. I imagine the La Raza set will be a bit miffed, though, and I'm quite happy to sit back with the popcorn as the Latinx and Trans sets of Kilkenny Cats start hissing and spitting at one another.

The only celebration was New York lighting up significant landmarks in trans pride colors.

Cesar Chavez Day is not a Federal holiday, it's just a day proclaimed by the President. Nothing's closed, no one has to do anything, it's just hot air.

It is a holiday in California - at least the schools are always off that day.

Ah, I thought it was. So all these proclamations are indeed just hot air? No day off? Nothing official? So there's not really any reason the White House PR team couldn't have waited until Monday to announce this, seeing as how Sunday was Easter Sunday?

They both seem to be ranked somewhere below Pi Day, where at least people bring pies into schools, and way below Cinco de Mayo, where people not only consume taco and margaritas, but also play music and make decorations.

It's probably because they're such BS holidays that they weren't transferred to Monday or Friday. A real federal holiday would have been.

There are more of these holidays that get limited governmental recognition than you can shake a stick at. Some congressmen proposes that March 22 is National Inland Waterway Workers Safety Awareness Day and it passes unanimously by joint resolution and nobody pays attention to it except a few trade organizations that want do distribute safety leaflets.

Perhaps the Latinx trans persons will feel extra validated. Cheers for intersectionality.

His Excellency Joe Biden

I believe you mean Generalissimo Biden.

Thoughts?

I'm not a theologist, but I'm pretty sure this means that until next Easter only trans people get into heaven.

No, seriously. You yourself note that this is a coincidence. I do find it to be a humorous example of how Republicans will complain about grievance politics while being its most prominent practitioners.

His Excellency Joe Biden has declared March 31st a certain ‘Transgender Day of Visibility’

It makes a sort of sense. Jesus died for their sins too. They are obviously burdened by this disordered behavior. Perhaps through 'visibility' they'll find shame and repentance, that they may go and sin no more.

That would only make sense if it were “Atonement Day of Visibility”, followed by “Judgment Day of Visibility”, because we would need to increase the visibility of the Transfigured rather than the transgendered.

I'm hopeful that atonement and judgement happen during pride month.

I had earlier classified Biden as an "old dog who still knows some tricks" in his vigorous efforts to keep petrol prices low.

I now retract this statement. What on Earth are they even thinking? This is political incompetence of the highest order. Surely they know that this is going to poll negatively? Does Trump win Hispanics by 20 points this time? The inmates are running the asylum.

I don't think Biden did have anything to do with this (apart from the 'sign the paper' bit). This is what people were talking about a while back here where they don't care if Biden is old and losing it, just re-elect him and the Administration will do all the actual governing.

Well, here's the Administration doing the governing, how do you like them apples?

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day so congratulations on pissing off at least part of the Hispanic voting bloc, and it certainly does seem like some of the shadowy figures doing the real governing while Joe is the figurehead do have an agenda going on. They just got careless this time round and stepped on the toes of one of the other "we are the party of women, gender and sexual minorities, and brown and black people" groups under the umbrella.

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day so congratulations on pissing off at least part of the Hispanic voting bloc,

Actual US Hispanics give so few shits about Cesar Chavez day that a new system of measurement would have to be invented to discuss it properly, although something like 98% celebrate Easter in the classic American manner with eggs and rabbits and children in cute church outfits with lots of pastels, that you prepare for by eating fish and chips(sorry, 'fish fry') at a buffet. Cesar Chavez day and trans day of visibility are both strictly activist holidays that rank below national pizza day and national slurpee day for the general public, and on par with pi day for the relevant activists, neither of whom will defect anytime soon.

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day so congratulations on pissing off at least part of the Hispanic voting bloc

Has the Hispanic voting bloc raised a stink, honestly?

As was mentioned, this clashes with Cesar Chavez Day

Holy shit! They are even dumber then I thought. Political malpractice.

Yes, I think this is clear evidence that Biden himself is a non-entity and that his staff is running the show. No one who has ever run for office would ever be so out of touch.

You are over egging this entirely. Approximately no-one cares about Cesar Chavez day, and 31st March has been both for quite some time without any problems. And it was established after the day of visibility itself (2009 vs 2014)

I predict this has basically zero impact on political outcomes and calling it political malpractice is exaggeration to the point of nonsense.

I don't know if Biden was involved or not (experience says he likely said yes when asked by a staffer should we do x) but its essentially about as small a deal as you can imagine.

All the actual polling, shows this issue to be an issue nobody outside of two parts of society care about - the normal reactionaries who hate all change and very specifically, conservatives and centrists who live in D+70 districts. Since a lot of conservative and centrists writers live in those areas, it becomes this supposed huge issue, all while in the real world, there's like 20 kids in all of Utah who supposedly want to play on the "wrong" high school sports team.

This doesn't mean people in red states care or are pro-transgender, it's that simply saying something is connected to transgenderism is enough to move their vote. They tried that in the various abortion referendums as a scare tactic, and it didn't work.

I suspect the people who came up with this have no idea anyone would object; they probably don't even know any "Easter Worshippers", aside maybe from their deplorable great-uncle.

Joe Biden was VP to a politician who emerged from the universe of big-city political machines run out of Black churches, and won the Democratic primary against several progressive candidates who were both more charismatic than him, largely based on the support of those same machines. Black Christians worship on Easter Day in the same ways as white ones, except given the increase in evangelical self-ID among white Republicans who wouldn't darken a church door, they are probably more likely to show up.

From the statement:

But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families...

That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply (see Google trends here. This is just absolutely wild to me how quickly this term has taken hold and how quickly people seem to have come to believe that this is something they pretty much always thought, that it's a good and normal thing, that this is medical care, and only a bunch of hateful extremists could think otherwise.

But pause. What exactly are "trans kids"? On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender. I don't understand how people are capable of holding these ideas in their heads simultaneously and that they've adopted these ideas that are so new, so utterly untested consequentially as not just right, but obviously morally right and opposed only by a bunch of bigots. My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.

I am disturbed.

they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.

I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is. In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with. Every trans adult was once a trans child. The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty because a central element of the condition is feeling as though they should have the body of the opposite sex and puberty greatly exaggerates these differences. If all of this was true and we could without error identify trans people in their youth it naturally follows that we should intervene and try to alleviate this condition through puberty blockers and cross sex hormones or at the very least allowing them to adopt the social social habits of the opposite sex. They further think that trans people are frequent targets of bullies and harassment.

I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth but their position and reasons for taking the stances they do are not mysterious.

In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with.

Yes, and what is that quality?

The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty

Frequently? So not always? So what else can we use to judge if a kid is "trans"? Dysphoria is hugely problematic (given kids desist) but at least concrete.

If we grant that there is an innate quality that we can easily distinguish, there is no problem. The point is that nailing this down in some definitive way seems to be difficult

Just as, if we accept that there is a trans-inclusive category called "women", there is no fundamental problem. Yet some random Daily Wire dad who dresses like an actuary has driven left-wingers into a frenzy trying to get an answer to this basic question.

This is a microcosm of this whole debate. All of this sounds good in the abstract. Once you start discussing it you not only get tough questions from traditionalists, but even feminists who ask how the markers of this innate quality are not regressive (it often boils down to stereotypes).

The above poster had a clearly wrong understanding of what trans advocates believe if they think they can't justify the term 'trans kid', they can. Whether the rest of the world view is actually reasonable is a different question.

If you tell me you believe in fluxberries and can define it and therefore I should do what you want but:

I have to wonder to what degree you believe you think you can justify belief in fluxberries - certainly you seem to believe in a distinct way to how you believe in say...policemen, or fish.

I don't see how OP's original point about the reluctance to square this doesn't apply:

My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.

Like, we know for a fact that some already do this with "woman", that one is not even debatable because Kentaji Brown did it in front of Congress - and all the same problems apply there. I'm supposed to grant extra charity on "trans child"?

You say:

You actively try to bully, discredit or destroy people who demand a coherent definition or raise questions about why this a slightly different colored berry is not, in fact, a "fluxberry"

OP said:

I have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is

I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth

I don't think OP is one of the people bullying and destroying.

Did you overlook when I said I don't hold these beliefs? I don't want to go into detail on any of these individual critiques because 1) it's out of scope for pointing out that the original person I was responding to was totally failing to model their theory of mind and 2) there are several different groups of trans activists that would approach each of these critiques from a different perspective. A "born in the wrong body" explanation can cleanly tell you what a fluxberry is and define it but that definition is going to be pretty different to someone who sees gender as some kind of a fluid thing. I don't hold any one of these sets of beliefs so I don't have an affinity for one or the other and am not very interested in litigated them out.

Did you overlook when I said I don't hold these beliefs?

I was using the generic you in the example. It was less about you holding the beliefs yourself, I disagreed on how much charity you were granting.

Like, I didn't assume that you personally were for bullying Rebecca Tuvel or any unfortunate who asked about transracials...

The steelman is that a lot of trans people are really obviously trans before they transition even socially (and sometimes even before they realize it themselves), and whether aware or not, a lot of these regulations can still impact them (or, less charitably, be reported as/forced into impacting them, a la Floridian teachers making news releases).

The ironman is that, while there's a lot of controversy about where and when the Correct minimum age for specific types of transition in minors is even among the broader LGBT movement, setting that as 18 for hormonal transition is a very far outlier, and that's been that way for a while. I'll point to Venus Envy as an example of early-2000s media covering transition of late high schoolers (and much of the exploration of the theme is focused on the contrast between Zoe going through conventional processes, and Larson as the problems of gray market self-administration), and that being completely unnoteworthy among readers.

That's not hugely honest to describe as kids, but it's not exactly dishonest, either.

The problem is that there's a genuine paradox, where the overwhelming majority of trans people can look back and honestly say it would have been better, easier, more complete, less traumatic, so on, if they'd realized and started transition just slightly earlier, and gotten just that small amount of more support. And then Zeno stumbles in like a drunken fool.

they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?"

Don't ask me, some of the people I see holding firmly to the view that a six year old can know their gender and be rock-solid on they're a girl not a boy, are also firmly of the view that a forty year old man dating a twenty-three year old woman is grooming and taking advantage of her, don't we all know your brain is not fully mature until you're at least twenty-five, this is abuse!

that a six year old can know their gender and be rock-solid on they're a girl not a boy

I'm pretty sure my two year old nephew knows quite well he's a boy and not a girl, and if asked how he knew would, if he was in a cooperative mood, pull his diaper down and point.

No, this is ridiculous because of the insistence that gender is something not intuitively obvious, which is essential to the trans project. I can tell by the logic of 'duh' that Caitlyn Jenner is a very confused male. You need to invoke mental gymnastics which probably requires at least teenage-level mental gymnastics to comprehend in order to justify anything else.

some of the people I see holding firmly to the view that a six year old can know their gender and be rock-solid on they're a girl not a boy

I mean, I would imagine there'd be no problem with a six year old girl assigned female at birth who's adamant that she's a girl and not a boy (and that it'd be horrible parenting to insist that no, she really is a boy, she just needs to wait until she grows up and she'll understand that she's been a boy all along), and same for a boy assigned male who's sure that he's a boy, for instance.

Yeah, just like a girl insisting that the sky is green (as in the color of grass, rather than playing word games with color names) might indicate she has an eye problem, while a girl saying it's blue would not. We do exist in a physical reality that is not arbitrary in it's nature, and inaccurately interpreting it's signals tends to be seen as a sign something is wrong. For good reason, I would argue.

I don't accept the whole "assigned X at birth" activism, so yeah. I'm going to say that a female child raised as female knows she's a girl. A female child raised as female declaring she is really a boy? I'm waiting to see on that one.

I'm going to say that a female child raised as female knows she's a girl. A female child raised as female declaring she is really a boy? I'm waiting to see on that one.

There's not exactly a shortage of trans men who can point to an upbringing and environment that required and enforced pretty strict gender norms for behavior. To the level of 'not allowed to wear pants' sorta thing.

That's not "assigning female". It might be "assigning girl / woman", if you want to do the sex vs. gender thing, but I'd just call it "not being allowed to wear pants".

I may not understand what you mean by "raised as female", then.

Good question... something like "being told by everyone around her, that she's a female", I suppose.

More comments

On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender.

I don't think this is a hard circle to square at all. A person who believes this might believe that:

  • Social transition for younger trans kids, and hormone blockers for trans kids entering puberty do an acceptably low amount of long-term damage to their bodies to serve as a first line treatment until they age into adulthood and decide whether they want to undergo hormone treatments and cosmetic surgeries.

Whether I personally accept that as true, I think that is a perfectly consistent thing to believe. I'm sure there's a doctor out there somewhere immediately jumping to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery for so-called trans kids, but I think that deviates from what even most trans activists say is the ideal course of treatment for minors.

That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply

I don't think this is surprising at all. I think one of the most rhetorically effective attacks on trans people on the right has been stopping kids from transitioning (especially in states where they can already do it without parental consent.)

Unfortunately, right or left "think of the children" always seems to be an effective tactic. I think this is just an example of Toxoplasma of Rage in action. The idea of "irreversible damage" to kids bodies complements the idea of "driving trans kids to suicide." Together they are a recipe for endless back and forth argument, since both sides can position themselves as the ones most concerned about children's well-being.

I'm sure there's a doctor out there somewhere immediately jumping to hormone treatments and cosmetic surgery for so-called trans kids, but I think that deviates from what even most trans activists say is the ideal course of treatment for minors.

I see you are fortunately ignorant of Dr Yeet The Teets:

Her feeds often fill with photos tagged #NipRevealFriday, highlighting patients like Michael whose bandages were just removed. On her office windowsill sits a framed nameplate with one of her best-known catchphrases on TikTok: “Yeet the Teet,” slang for removing breasts.

Dr. Gallagher said she performed top surgeries on about 40 patients a month, and roughly one or two of them are under 18. Younger patients are usually at least 15, though she has operated on one 13-year-old and one 14-year-old, she said, both of whom had extreme distress about their chests.

The surgeon said that most of her patients, teenagers and adults alike, found her on TikTok. Her online presence has drawn sharp criticism from right-wing media, as well as from some parents and doctors who say she uses the platform to market to children.

A countrywoman of my own, it seems, so I apologise on behalf of my nation that she decided the quickest way to make a buck was move to the USA and do vanity plastic surgery.

The idea of "irreversible damage" to kids bodies complements the idea of "driving trans kids to suicide." Together they are a recipe for endless back and forth argument, since both sides can position themselves as the ones most concerned about children's well-being.

Assuming that these are not rival empirical claims that can be investigated, yes.

I don't know. I've seen several trans skeptical people bite the bullet on trans suicide rates.

The attitude seems to either be "the threat of trans kids committing suicide is emotional blackmail meant to shut down the argument from society and parents and force them to go through with mutilating their child against their will" or occasionally even "if they commit suicide at higher rates, then completely ignoring the issue solves the issue (through the self-removal of trans people from the population.)"

I mean, there's nothing stopping both claims from being true (to the extent they're empirically testable.) It could hypothetically be that social contagion and permissive doctors are allowing large numbers of cis children to ruin their bodies through transition followed by inevitable detransition, and that from a purely medical perspective the most effective way to prevent the suicide of enduringly trans children is to allow them to socially transition and take puberty blockers until adulthood when they can make the choice of whether to undergo hormonal therapy and cosmetic surgery. In that hypothetical world, the difficulty would be with separating cis children from trans children in a reliable way that minimized overall harm to both groups.

The empirical case can only solve so much without models of what is happening. The DSM-V's intro talks about how it models mental disorders, and it basically says that they are useful perspectives for treatment and not necessarily a single "real" disease with a known cause or set of causes. That is, ADHD is "real" to doctors using the DSM to the extent that it has been found that patients coming in complaining about a common cluster of issues, tend to have those issues resolved through a common cluster of treatments. And it's no different for gender dysphoria. When it comes to a gender dysphoria diagnosis today, there is no need for brain tests or an "intersex brain" hypothesis or anything more empirical than, "have they had 2 out of these 6 listed symptoms for at least 6 months?"

It is good that you are disturbed.

It’s a trope in fiction of malign regimes requiring that a logical paradox be treated as official truth, such as 1984’s “two plus two equals five”, but it has a long history before that of being used to illustrate fashionable or politically advantageous absurdities. And of course, the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes is a tool to immunize children against swallowing such propaganda.

I have proposed facetiously that there be four categories for clarity: male men, female men, male women, and female women. Of course, nobody who accepts the trans paradox wants this; they want “trans woman” to be treated as the same type of category as “red-headed woman” and “short woman”, and anyone who disagrees to be shouted down for their offensiveness.

I actually have a question for you. Would you be more okay with a regime like the Weimar republic had of transvestite passes? They were doctor's notes that smoothed out the act of cross-dressing in public for people, and made it less of a hassle to interact with authorities.

They’d instantly complain it was like Jews being forced to wear yellow stars, despite the historical incongruity. And I wouldn’t blame them. As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives. Emergency responders need to know which set of internal organs to expect, of course, and police should be able to describe suspects by apparent gender. But gay civil unions and divorces (as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land) should be legal, as long as the state doesn’t force churches, wedding photographers, etc. to accommodate and celebrate things that are heretical to their faith or which fill them with loathing of repugnance.

I remember back before gay marriage was legalized in the United States. Toys were on color-coded aisles, blue for boys and pink for girls of course. In 2012, a group was founded in the UK called Let Toys Be Toys which pushes the agenda of the movement which urges toymakers, toy stores, publishers, and so on to reduce the gender coding of toys and the gender stereotypes in children's books, and toy playsets and commercials. Target later made national news by declaring it was no longer going to explicitly gender-code toy aisles.

This appeared to be an appeal to classical liberalism, in which the freedom of the individual is paramount. I agree with that part, though not the activism.

But almost as soon as the ink was dry on Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015, Cthulhu swam left and suddenly everything was about trans. It wasn’t long before we heard about parents using gendered toys to test which gender their toddlers or even babies identified as.

This was a whiplash pivot from freeing children from the “tyranny” of gendered toys to using the toys as a bed of Procrustes, carving their flesh to match which toy they picked, and declaring it genocide if they weren’t allowed to.

So no, I’d rather we not follow the literal Weimar Republic in using the power of the state to say who’s legally a woman. Who knows what the next lap of Cthulhu would be, and which moneyed powers would use it for lifelong medication paid by the state.

As I dive deeper into Ayn Rand’s minarchism, I see how little the government has the moral right to be doing in our lives.

I've read widely in the libertarian, minarchist and anarcho-capitalist traditions, and while I think they are often good at identifying certain problems of government, and I'm convinced by the arguments of Huemer's The Problem of Political Authority and Ellickson's Order without Law that these forms of government could potentially work in the real world, I still find myself more attracted to social democracy as a set of principles for organizing society, especially since it's actually been tried in the real world and seems to work reasonably well.

Don't get me wrong, I'm very sympathetic to the view of government that it is just the largest and most successful gang of thugs in an area, and that there is actually little moral grounding for the idea of political authority. But I'm a pragmatist and a consequentialist, and I'm more willing to shrug and say, "if the big bullies take care of the little bullies and make people more free, that's better than the alternative." I tend to agree with Noah Smith's argument in The Liberty of Local Bullies that there are many "intermediate" groups between the government and the individual that often have just as much power to reduce your liberty as the government does.

Imagine a devout Jehovah's Witness in high school refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because oaths are against their faith, and constantly being punished by their overzealous home room teacher for it. The only way to resolve the issue in a way that preserves the liberty of the Jehovah's Witness to not say the Pledge is to go over the teacher's head, via school administrators. But what if the school administrators support the teacher over the student? The only way to force the teacher to respect the student's religious freedom is to go a level higher to the government, and hope that they will force fines or other coercive measures in order to protect the student's rights.

I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom. Obviously, it would be foolish to claim that centralized governments with high state capacity always results in increased liberty, but most of the countries I can think of that are good places to live in are some form of liberal representative democracy with free markets and a government with enough state capacity to secure people's rights, and create money transfers and social safety nets (even the United States.)

I think for freedom to be meaningfully maximized you need a centralized government with enough state capacity to force the local bullies to respect freedom.

That’s the good intention which paved the road to Hell, the road we call the anti-trust laws. Alan Greenspan wrote a detailed yet eminently readable paper, later published by Rand, about the US government’s efforts to stop “monopolies” and the resulting unbridled growth of the bully state.

Outlaw unequivocally evil externalities, to be sure! But don’t let the law become non-objective, subject to whim or pull. If you give a man a gun and tell him he’s the defender of justice, pretty quickly he’ll think his job is to find the right time to pull the trigger. Find the proper size and role of government, and provide better incentives for it to protect the individual even at the cost of outcomes for pressure groups with sob stories or crocodile tears.

as well as contractual poly families as described in Heinlein’s Stranger In A Strange Land

You're thinking the of the line marriages and so forth in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress?

Stranger had polyamory too, was five years earlier, and (according to some accounts) kicked off the free-love Sixties as pop culture knows it.

https://old.reddit.com/r/polyamory/comments/23du3h/the_early_poly_movement_and_heinleins_stranger_in/

I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress? Women wearing trousers/pants were once upon a time regarded as "that is men's clothing" but now we accept that "no, it's women's clothing too". So for the people who want "skirt go spinny!", let's normalise it in the same way that dresses and skirts are men's clothing too. That way, you can wear the crop tops and fishnets and miniskirts and heels to your heart's content with nobody having to fight over "this is a woman, a Real Woman".

I acknowledge that for trans people, it's more than cosmetic. But it sure seems like a portion of the online set do treat it as "makeup and long hair and dressing like anime girls, wee-hee!" So let's go back to "this is a transvestite, not a transsexual/transgender person" and get that out of the way and sort out some of the confusion. Guys who like to dress up girly are not the same as "I feel that I am indeed a woman and suffer from not being recognised as such". Don't lump them all in the same basket and that way the more egregious cases won't have to be defended by the trans rights set for fear of "if we accept condemnation of this case, then we will be vulnerable to attacks on all trans people, so even if this is a fake, we have to support them".

You're not gender-fluid, Phil, you just like wearing dresses. Let's accept that some days you like to come to work in drag, that men can wear dresses the same way women can wear trousers, and nobody has to get into fights over 'are you a man or a woman or neither or both'.

I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress?

in theory, nothing. But I think these days porn has ruined it for everyone. It's like that Gore Vidal quote about how "turgid" belongs to the porn writers now. There's no way I can see a dude in a dress now and not think either (a) he's a trans person making a political statement or (b) this is fetish. Or possibly both.

There are in fact macho kilt makers, and if I had to bet of random trends to eventually become socially acceptable that would be one of my draft picks. That I personally think it's a rather dumb thing to get caught up on doesn't make the utilikilt a feminine garment; it would quite clearly look a bit butch on a woman whereas on a man it just looks a bit unusual and hipsterish. You know, goes with three days of stubble and an IPA.

Im going to plant my flag in the ground and say that dresses as a general class are awesome, and I would wear them in a heartbeat if it were socially acceptable to do so. By “general class,” I would include things like robes, kilts, togas, vestments, opera capes, and so forth. These are all much more aesthetically pleasing than modern clothing, even if they’re not always as practical. I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but your comment makes me wonder if some transgender people (those on the transvestite end of things) just feel the same itch and find that women’s dresses help them to scratch it. If so, it’s just too bad that wearing clothing styles of 200+ years ago just makes you look like a twat.

Actually, a second thought on that point: men used to enjoy dressing up in fancy dress in the Masons, Shriners, Knights of Columbus, etc., but now young men have no such outlet. Maybe they should.

I hadn’t ever thought about it before, but your comment makes me wonder if some transgender people (those on the transvestite end of things) just feel the same itch and find that women’s dresses help them to scratch it.

In that case, they are going way out of their way to alienate conservatives for no good reason, making it about sex rather than clothing. Even if people think it's kind of dorky to wear a robe just because you like it, almost no one thinks it's morally wrong, or threatening.

If someone were cool enough, they could probably bring back menswear that's open at the bottom. Women find kilts and such sexy (see, for instance, Outlander), but modern kilt-wearers weird, for reasons unrelated to the garments themselves.

I think that's because the people who wear kilts outside of, like, a renaissance fair, are in fact weird. Not due to anything about the garment; you can buy kilts that clearly look like men's garments, albeit hipsterish men's garments, but just because the man who makes that choice is at least a bit eccentric.

The people who wear them inside of a renaissance fair are weird too.

Isn't that just fashion, in general? Almost anyone who tries to wear a weird fashion is going to look weird because they are weird. The exception is rare, exceptional people who are very good looking, very charismatic, and very tuned-in to fashion trends, so they're able to pick up on new fashions and wear it and make it fashionable.

Women wearing trousers/pants were once upon a time regarded as "that is men's clothing" but now we accept that "no, it's women's clothing too".

We accept women wearing pants, but women don't wear pants in the context of getting sexual excitement from being women who wear pants. More generally, there's a difference between wanting to wear something of the opposite sex as clothes, and wanting to wear something of the opposite sex because it's from the opposite sex.

But I do think that transvestites have been folded in, as it were, to the transgender movement (the way Asperger's Syndrome became part of the autism spectrum) and that there is a sub-section of people who do want the dressing-up part but are not really transsexual, but now the push is on that "of course if you're not 100% gender compliant, consider that you're trans".

The contradiction around "gender roles are socially constructed, there's no such thing as gender" and the advice that "you can know if a child is trans by, for instance, if they pull open their onesie so it's like a dress" is irreconcilable for me. How do you match up the two parts? Gender is not real, and at the same time, strict gender roles show us if you're cis or trans.

One of the odder real life interactions I've had with a (presumably) trans woman was at a ranger station. Women rangers wear pants and don't wear makeup while at work. But this male one was wearing a skirt and makeup. Clearly he was making a statement, rather than trying to blend in with his female co-workers.

I want to ask, what is so wrong with being a guy in a dress?

This feels like it works best for middle and upper middle class trans/gender non-conforming (GNC) people, and terribly for every other kind of GNC person.

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job. Good numbers are hard to get, but there's plenty of anecdotal accounts from trans people who had trouble finding work because they were non-passing trans people, and I don't think there's any strong reason to doubt their accounts even without good hard data on discrimination that shows up in "legible" parts of society.

I seriously doubt affirmative action, and DEI initiatives have made things much better for all trans/GNC people in this regard. (I mean, isn't it common knowledge that the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action have always been cis white women?) Sure, a progressive tech firm might happily hire a trans woman as a software engineer, but for every company like that there's probably a dozen bodegas and fast food joints in more conservative areas that don't want to hire a teenage cross-dresser in their first job, and that lack of work experience might echo out into their job prospects down the line, amplifying the effects always present because of their status as a recognizable cross-dresser.

Part of the reason that Weimar transvestite passes looked interesting to me, is that they seemed like exactly the sort of legal vehicle that one could attach non-discrimination laws and cultural norms around. I know more libertrian or social conservative types would still have issues with such a regime, but I do think it would overcome the basic issue of "telling a societal lie" that many people claim is their main objection, and I think a world with transvestite passes and social norms of pronoun hospitality (enforced by social censure, and not legal censure) could get 90% of where trans advocates want things, and without any obvious "lies" or "metaphysical nonsense."

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job.

I think it's going to be a lot easier to move the needle towards "okay, boys can wear dresses too" the way we moved it on "okay, girls can wear trousers too" than inflicting on society that we must believe "in fact biology not real, you can be a girl or a boy or a girlboy or a no-gender if you just feeeeel it".

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job.

This doesn’t seem to me like that much of an imposition. “I really like wearing dresses, putting on makeup, and doing up my hair.” Okay, great, do that on your own time, not at work, and especially not at a job interview. I really like dressing casually, not caring what my hair looks like, and only shaving every couple of days, but I wouldn’t dream of going to an interview wearing blue jeans and sporting two days of stubble, and if I did, I definitely wouldn’t expect to get the job.

There’s this idea floating around that you need to be your “authentic self” 100% of the time, and everyone around you needs to accommodate that, which is absolute nonsense. Anyone who’s ever had a non-PC thought or who’s ever enjoyed a dirty joke knows he can’t get away with expressing either one at most work places, and everyone accepts that that’s right and proper. Or, going back to clothing, take that episode of The Office where Jim showed up in a tuxedo. The writers of that episode relied on the audience knowing that a tuxedo is inappropriate attire in an office setting. But if Jim had instead come in dressed like Marilyn Monroe, somehow that’s supposed to be fine. No. Wear a tux, wear a dress, or tell an inappropriate joke on your own time.

(And while I’m grousing about clothing, Zoomers need to stop wearing pajamas and athletic wear in public. Sweat pants are fine for lounging about the house, but there’s no reason you should be wearing them at work or out in public. Show some self-respect.)

At the moment it's inappropriate because that's not tolerated gender role behaviour. Great, if gender is socially constructed, let's change the roles. I hate makeup and wear as little as possible. If Johnny there loves it and religiously watches contouring tutorials on Youtube, let him doll himself up for work and let me just cover the worst of the red blotchy skin with a dusting of powder, and neither of us have to claim that "in fact I am a girl/in truth I am a boy" to be permitted to do this.

If after all that Johnny is still "no, I really am a girl", okay, let's examine that. But if Billy just wants to wear heels to work, that doesn't mean he's not a boy, then live and let live. I think it would be a lot less stressful on everyone, and we'd have the advantage that the narcissistic exhibitionists couldn't use the figleaf of "I am being oppressed" so we'd all know the ones who are trouble.

Whether it is technically legal or not, a male-bodied teenager who comes into a job interview with lipstick and a dress is likely not going to get the job.

Depending on the job, I'm going to go ahead and take the conservative position that, yes, this is inappropriate at an interview and should not be protected, along with very visible tattoos and facial piercings. There are still employers who think that it's cool anyway, just maybe not as mainstream. Especially the lipstick, if it's showy. This is partly aesthetics -- most men are not going to be able to pull it off with visual dignity. I don't have a problem with Billy Porter's tuxedo ballgown, because it looks cool. But, yeah, if it's a basically normal service job, and they come in looking like this, then they are absolutely signaling, not so much femininity, as high maintenance and potential social and legal trouble. In my experience, women who dress up and apply showy makeup significantly more than their female co-workers, especially if they are older and/or already married, also tend to be Bad News.

This is distinct from non-work contexts. People should have all kinds of freedom to wear lots of quirky things in general.

The transvestite pass seems either useless (nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing), or oppressive towards everyone else ("pronoun hospitality" sounds like an outside force telling people what pronouns to use without the trans person having to do anything particular to win them over).

nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing

While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person. While the so called "walking while trans law" law (properly the "loitering for prostitution" law) I'm most aware of in New York was repealed in 2021 after years of efforts going back to at least 2010, it wouldn't surprise me if there are several other jurisdictions where anti-prostitution laws accidentally catch innocent trans people in their nets.

I think part of the problem is that underclass trans women probably are more likely to be prostitutes, and a police officer is going to Notice The Pattern whether he wants to or not, and then he's going to act on his experiences and stop non-passing trans people more often as a result.

I fully admit that this issue could be solved with reforms to prostitution laws, without any reforms of existing legislation around trans people (including transvestite passes), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem for underclass trans women right now.

While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person.

Than the average person, sure. Than the average woman dressed similarly... I'd have to see evidence on that one.

underclass trans black women

I am absolutely willing to believe that things are really tough for this group in multiple ways, along all the intersectional axes.

I'm most familiar with South side Chicago, and was under the impression that current policing practices for underclass blacks were to try to do as little as possible within their own neighborhoods, but I suppose they would get unwanted law enforcement attention elsewhere in the city. I got some unwelcome cop attention for trying to visit a little beach next to a wealthy suburb, and I don't belong to any Concerning Groups. But I'm also slightly concerned that American police are currently being reformed into doing nothing at all, and if an innocent black trans woman is beat up by their local gang, I would probably like it to be investigated -- it seems like a very hard problem.

If you go check out some heavily progressive spaces, some seem to be against Biden for not being progressive enough. This is probably an olive branch to them in the lead up to the elections. Devout Christians are largely voting republican and I think he's gambling he will gain more votes than he loses. I'm guessing this is a pure election play. There is no way Biden's team didn't know that this would be antagonistic.

I don't know. This decision seems badly out of touch. Elite values are not the values of the average voter.

And while I'm sure white Boomers will be kept onside by NBC news fact checks that say "actually, Biden didn't make Easter into Trans Awareness Day", this group of mainstream news watchers is increasingly irrelevant.

Republicans can and should plaster this everywhere. How will this play in the black community? How will this play in the Hispanic community? This badly hurts the Democratic Party coalition and speeds along the party realignment.

Democrats might never win the Hispanic vote in a Presidential election again.

Democrats might never win the Hispanic vote in a Presidential election again.

Trump winning the Hispanic vote wouldn't surprise me. But this would have maybe 2% to do with trans awareness day(getting church attending Hispanic Catholics to vote as republican as similarly devout Hispanic protestants is a longstanding goal of GOP strategists and relatively reachable) and 98% to do with the price of groceries. There simply are not a lot of Hispanic values voters and none of them are swing voters anyways; most Hispanics are working class normies who happen to be of Latin descent. Neither based ultra-Catholics nor the next wave of DNC activist energy.

The Christians took over many pagan Holidays. Here’s a quick google summary. https://parkervillas.com/pagan-holidays-adopted-by-christianity/

Every upstart religion tries to conquor the old religion and that means incorporating the old Holidays so the plebs get their celebrations. This isn’t some accident we picked Easter it was bound to happen at some point. More a declaration of war.

If we all become trans religion then Good Friday is going under the knife day and Easter Sunday is rising a women.

Okay, that article is a bunch of crap. The first off the list is the good old "Christians took over Christmas from Sol Invictus" which is a story that has been examined in detail.

New Year's Day is not a Christian holiday. Indeed, the mediaeval 'New Year' started in March, on Lady Day (the feast of the Annunciation) and this is why tax years used to start in April in the British Isles. Fun fact, Tolkien fans, this is why the Professor has a lot of significant dates in LOTR happening on that date in March. In fact, New Year's Day is so not a Christian holiday, it's why the Presbyterians in Scotland pushed for it (as Hogmanay) to be the big celebratory winter festival, because traditional Christmas was too Papist.

Easter? Do I really have to go through the whole fucking "No, Eostre is not the goddess" thing once more?

'The Roman version of Halloween' is a new twist, but they got the facts backwards as usual.

May Day - day in honour of Maia, yes. Day repurposed to Mary, yes. But the entirety of May is dedicated to Mary, as are other calendar months dedicated to other Christian themes, e.g. June to the Sacred Heart, November to the Holy Souls. They're really scrabbling for some "Isis and Horus are the originals of Mary and the Child Jesus" parallels here, not to mention that if you're not Catholic, you are probably not celebrating May as the month of Mary. Plus, May Day as International Workers' Day has been dedicated to St Joseph the Worker

Epiphany - the Three Kings. And they take an Italian version of how it's celebrated and then claim that hey, them Christians picked it because it was sacred to Diana! You can well imagine that by now I have my head in my hands. Are we sure this isn't click bait produced by ChatGPT?

Diana is Befana is Santa Claus. Of course it is.

St John's Eve - Midsummer. I'm not going to deny that this was an existing festival repurposed by Christianity, but it's not as simple as "oh we're taking over the old gods".

This article suffers heavily from "we're selling villas in Italy, so we're going to link Italy = Catholicism, Catholicism = Christianity, Italian traditional festivals = Christian festivals = Pagan festivals" bias, since "All Christian feasts were originally Pagan" is something that hardcore Protestant apologists who were anti-Catholic, pagans who want to pretend that what they practice now is an unbroken link to the traditions of the past, and atheists all want to agree on, and it's a perennial favourite to trot out in the news media at Christmas and Easter "did you know these are originally Pagan festivals?" pieces.

Christians taking over pagan holidays in the case of Easter(or Christmas) is simply not true. There are historical records of Christian celebrating Easter from the very beginning and the date of Christmas is documented to have been calculated off of the feast of the annunciation.

To the extent that there are ‘pagan influences’, they’re utterly unrelated to the religious aspects of the feast and claims of the opposite make the most banal and parochial factual errors imaginable(no, Easter did not come from Ishtar, and this is easily disproven by the name of Easter in literally any language except English).

In any case the origins of Easter have nothing to do with trans activists’ inability to go literally five seconds without endless celebration on the most sacred day of the year of the largest religion in the country without threatening to kill themselves.

But as the OP says, this year it was on the date of Easter only coincidentally. Easter, as we know, is a movable fest - on a different date each year - while this particular day has been on March 31 since it was first declared in 2009.

Incidentally, one might note that Trump team itself managed to use the highly curious statement "Catholics and Christians" ("We call on Joe Biden's failing campaign and the White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only — the resurrection of Jesus Christ"), which sounds like, well, that they don't consider Catholics to be Christians.

More likely Trump is making a play for the Catholic vote specifically because it was a relative weakness in 2020 and he has a specific pitch(basically Biden's surveillance of actual IRL tradcaths and democrats are extreme on abortion). The dominant strain of conservative protestantism in the US considers being a real christian to be the result of an individual conversion which is entirely compatible with Catholicism.

Saying "Catholics and Christians" as though they were separate groups isn't the way to play to the Catholic vote. That's an obvious sign that the messaging is from an Evangelical who thinks we're heretics. As for TradCaths, they're a marginal group who are almost all voting for Trump anyway. I was raised Catholic (though my dad is a non-practicing Protestant), served as a Eucharistic minister, went to a Catholic college where half the faculty were priests and a lot of the students were conservative Catholics (and many of my friends became priests, or at least seminary dropouts), continue to attend mass semi-regularly, and I didn't even know TradCaths were a thing until a few years ago. I may have known vaguely of them but I couldn't differentiate them from the wackaloons who think that every pope since the Middle Ages is an antipope or the other wackaloons who ordain female priests. I went to a Latin Mass once when on vacation in South Carolina and while it was an interesting change of pace it wasn't something I'd want to replace the normal mass, more an interesting historical artifact that deserves preservation. The idea that this is a growing force in the Catholic church seems more an invention of internet conservatives than anything that has any serious influence in the church at large. My mother's much more devout than I'd be surprised if she's even knows these people exist.

The dominant strain of conservative protestantism in the US considers being a real christian to be the result of an individual conversion which is entirely compatible with Catholicism.

It can be, but it doesn't have to be. The sacraments of initiation begin shortly after birth, and confirmation is more a question of "do you want to continue being Catholic and complete your initiation" than "do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal savior". Most practicing Catholics are born into it and just go with the flow, and conversions aren't dramatic and require months of RCIA classes. My SIL converted from some Evangelical strain about ten years ago and she said the difference between the churches is stark, most notably the lack of altar calls, which most Catholics find weird as they put people on the spot and create subtle pressure to conform; she liked being in an environment where she could sit and mind her own business without feeling pressured. When I was a kid my mum would take us to "Road to Jerusalem"-type living history things, some of which were at these kinds of churches. My mother was pretty naive about Evangelicalism since it didn't really have a presence in Pittsburgh when she was growing up, and she was pretty taken aback by how aggressive the calls for conversion were if there was a prayer service involved. These were in stark contrast to the mainline protestant services we'd attended for various reasons over the years that were different but not outside our expectations for what church was supposed to be like, e.g. liturgy slightly different, more/less singing, longer sermons, different prayers, etc.

they don't consider Catholics to be Christians.

A sore point with some Evangelicals/Fundamentalists, because of strong Protestant anti-Catholicism. The Roman Church fell away from True Christianity (date at which this happened varies, some will go all the way to Constantine) and filled the pure Gospel message with man-made additions and traditions. The Reformers stripped all these away to get back to True Christianity (again, dissension over which denominations remained too Papist-influenced) and so long as Catholics continue to deny the Reformation and hold to their false doctrines, they can't be considered true Christians.

The traditional strain of American Evangelicalism is definitely not a fan of Catholicism, but it competes with a more ecumenical strain that sees Catholics either as perfectly valid Christians who happen to be wrong about some things (as all sects of Christians consider the others to be), or at least good allies against things opposed to their shared fundamental beliefs -- precisely the sort of situation being talked about here.

The big issue is, with the rapid rise of non-denominational Protestantism in the US, there really isn't a term that you can use to describe all Protestants that they would actually identify with except "Christians." And even that gets pushback from the "I'm not a Christian, I'm a Christ-follower" people. By far, the largest Christian group in the US that seems to still identify with a particular Church first is Catholics, thus the clunky term "Catholics and Christians," which really just means "Catholics and undifferentiated Christians." The trend elsewhere, outside of the LDS church and confessional Protestantism, is towards rebranding churches as just "X Church," instead of "X Baptist Church" or "X Bible Church" or even "X Methodist Church." And it's important to note that, if anything, evangelical Protestantism is more friendly towards Catholics than confessional Protestantism, who have explicit and very long catechisms and creeds that speak firmly against Catholicism and come from a time of literal warfare between the two groups.

If Trump's team wanted to pander to Catholics (as it seems he wanted to do) while communicating more effectively, they might have said "Catholics and Christians of all kinds," or something like that. But as it is I don't think it was designed to exclude Catholics, but explicitly to include them. It just sounds very clunky.

don't consider Catholics to be Christians

Papists or Romanists are a specific sort of Christian. The ecumenicism of current year contrasts with the sectarianism of much of our shared history.

Latter Day Saints and Jehovah's Witnesses are frequently on the outside. Would Luther include them in the synagogue of Satan with the Papists?

I mean... if we're going to go with the "Christians and other" framing (which we really shouldn't but whatever), it seems to me that it should be "Christians and Protestants". Since Catholicism is both the OG and the largest Christian group.

Catholics claim to be the OG. Some of the eastern traditions would like a word.

They are the largest.

I'm not competent to litigate the dispute of whether the Catholics split from the Orthodox or vice versa, so I will leave that be. But either way, they are the OG in comparison to the Protestants.

Certainly older than the Protestents. I wasn't thinking specifically about the schism but I'm reasonably confident the churches in Antioch or Alexandria predate Rome. I'm not sure the distinction of first is particularly useful in this context.

One could say that Catholics are the oldest group celebrating Easter today anyway.

As I recall, the ACX poll has categories of Catholic, Protestant, and Other Christians (e.g. Eastern Orthodox). That seemed basically fine.

I haven't listened to the audio, but a likely interpretation from Trump's comment is: This is an important holiday! It's important to Catholics! And it's important to other Christians too! That seems in keeping with his speech patterns that have made for uncomfortable sound bites before.

I checked and there's a Mormon category as well. I would certainly be interested if Scott would drill down even more, I'd like to see stats on EO vs OO -- and does he have any Church of the East peeps in his readership? (probably not)

(also I want to cross-reference this with Scott's "Have you thought about the Roman Empire in the past 24 hours" question)

The article carries a relevant message to a commonly held sentiment centered around the proliferation of 'race realism'.

Jarred Taylor should serve as a case in point demonstration that no matter how sane, reasonable and respectful you carry the torch of 'race realism', you will be hounded by people driven by powers that are in no way worried about the truth in any other sense than to suppress it. No matter how credentialled or learned you are, everything you say and do will be pulled into whatever context is needed to make you look bad. As demonstrated by the likes of Rushton and Jensen, or any openly HBD academic.

It's easy to agree with the author, that Cofnas is missing an obvious point: That knowing is only half the battle. But at the same time the author is, beyond recognizing the error of Cofnas, seemingly no better suited to deal with the actual problem. As is illustrated by one of the comments, which the author agrees with:

People reject genetics because they can't control it. Give them control, and the incentives change. Hereditarians should give up on culture, and instead focus on gaming out the economics and logistics of genetic engineering.

Regardless of how futile the fight for truth may have been, to speak from the perspective of the likes of Jarred Taylor or Cofnas, who bound hope to the proliferation of truth: It beats giving up.

What is the actual proposal here? Hope the third world designs their babies white? All this wisdom on obvious social dynamics doled out by the author brings us to... what? Crossed fingers and open legs for white sperm in India, China and Brazil?

As an aside:

I would have preferred something tangible. As I find myself constantly waiting for these bloglords, who talk about the burden of a heavy brain, to produce something actionable for us stupids to cling on to. So far they can't even manage to throw their weight around the conservative rhetorical sphere. As anyone who remembers the old 'cultural marxism' knows. I mean, that was an old meme resurrected. Hey, here's a new one: 'bio leninism'! Is there anything more corny in discourse than dropping a phrase you need to explain to your own side? Yes. See 'Moldbug' on Fox News.

Give us something new and cool. 'Woke' has gone stale a long time ago. I want a word that describes people who automatically ingroup browns and outgroup whites. Preferably as an ism or phobia, like it's a disease or something.

Beyond that, if there's anything I've learned from the modern right it's that every single serious right winger is a failed imitation of the NSDAP. The amount of words used just to not call the enemy Bolshevik jews is ridiculous. Is that too coarse? Too low brow? What is your alternative? Just don't participate? Then why have a blog at all? Why bother with anything when you're just going to hunker down and pretend you don't care about politics. I don't get this at all.

Until 20 years ago Europe didn't have a race problem, nor anywhere in Asia; yet hereditarianism has never ever been popular in the history of human thought.

Does he realize how the populations have changed in that time? 20 years ago Europe had twice the population of Africa, now the opposite is true. Of course those people are going to go where the money is.

This is obviously bonkers, and East Asian countries (South Korea in particular) are wasting a good third of their GDP in abusing their kids with cram school homework in the false belief that they'll grow more intelligent. A random Chinese will tell you very happily, especially if he has experience abroad, that Africans are congenitally dumber than Chinese are. But he will protest vehemently if you suggest that his kid isn't gonna grow any brighter by doing 5 hours of homework every day.

This seems like a gross misreading of how education works in East Asia. It's not supposed to make you smarter, it's supposed to (a) memorize a whole ton of useful facts and (b) prove that you're smarter than the other kids because you got a top score on the super difficult exam. They don't really have a general reasoning test like the SAT, their test is this: https://asiasociety.org/korea/south-koreas-life-defining-exam which expects you to know and remember all of the academic subjects.

I think you mean 60 years ago.

Double might be an exaggeration. But it really did flip in just the last 20 (edit- by 20 I mean since 2000) years: https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/910dxd/oc_un_world_population_prospects_2017_revision/

Oh that's Sub-Saharan Africa, if you include the whole of Africa then it's about 60 years: Africa was 284M to Europe's 605M back in 1960, today it's 1393 to 765 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_continents_and_continental_subregions_by_population

This doesn't really affect your thesis though.

True. I think it's valid to just focus on Sub-Saharan Africa though, since that really is a different culture and geography from MENA.

Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:

Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline

https://archive.is/T6thJ

Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.

After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.

But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.

Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.

The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.

Give every native man a house when they demonstrate they have finished some form of work related education, i.e. not arts or theater, and that they have worked for 2 years. Otherwise they would need to demonstrate they have been working for 5 years. The problem solves itself from that point.

Here is my policy suggestion

  • Inculcate in young girls’ a desire to have children. You do this with positive, aspirational media and experiences involving motherhood. Echoing RandomRanger’s insight downthread, require girls in the first three years of schooling to bring their dolls to school and engage in doll-oriented activity. The highlights of female education in the first 6 years of schooling should be: motherhood, cultivating the nurturing instinct, and homemaking skills. In high school, two years of required internships in which female students “babysit”, nanny, and helping out new mothers — which doubles as a cost-free program for new mothers.

  • Ban women from high stress professions. (Women in STEM is grossly dysgenic due to low birth rates. Instead, reserve the least stressful STEM-adjacent positions for the highest IQ women. This is highly eugenic.) Reserve society’s least stressed jobs for women.

  • Government grants to media which extol motherhood.

Raising girls as identical to boys has obviously failed. In history, the primary “skill” a girl learned was how to be a mother/wife. That’s because it’s an important, difficult, stressful 6-18 years of a woman’s fertile years. Feminism failed, we can move on. Another to note is that there is a lot of research showing that stressed mothers and mothers who cannot breastfeed or love their children properly have a much higher chance of having children who are mentally ill or autistic etc, or even have childhood obesity. So the thought that we would lose “money” with our MAMA agenda (Make American-women Mothers Again) is not necessarily correct. Tons of resources are spent on psychiatric and physical disability which is ameliorated through MAMA policy.

It’s kind of hilarious that we consciously destroyed the mothering instinct in girls who naturally gravitate to dolls and tea parties and so on, and then we look at ourselves shocked like that retarded Spider-Man meme when we realize women now don’t want children, want money and safety more than children, and are stressed at the prospect of children.

Ban women from high stress professions. (Women in STEM is grossly dysgenic due to low birth rates. Instead, reserve the least stressful STEM-adjacent positions for the highest IQ women. This is highly eugenic.) Reserve society’s least stressed jobs for women.

I don't have numbers, but my anecdotal observations are that this is culturally dependent. The Chinese and Indian women I work with take full advantage of the generous FAANG benefits to help produce and take care of children. Some white American women do, but not nearly as much. Family events put on by the company are full of mostly south and east Asian children. There are probably as many mixed white and east Asian kids as there are white kids.

A great deal of this is driven by family pressure to have kids. Maybe that's where policy would be most effective. Make white parents nag their children to have kids so that they can get access to some government benefit. Maybe offer full social security retirement benefits at an earlier age, or boost the benefit for each grandchild produced.

The Chinese and Indian women I work with take full advantage of the generous FAANG benefits to help produce and take care of children.

This is basically my plan on what I'd like me and my future wife to do once I get married and we have children. Basically I coach her (if she needs coaching, I can't imagine I would ever marry a woman who doesn't have it in her to get hired at a FAANG if pushed, even if she's a doctor or something) to get a decent job at one of these big companies (finance jobs don't work here, your ability to take from the company if you're not putting in is much more limited, you have to have a big institution where the system is not set up to deal with such a mindset and can't change easily to suck at the teat of), then she gets pregnant and has a child and we keep drawing her full salary plus large maternity benefits for us and then soon after she returns to work she gets pregnant again and we repeat the process. Rinse and repeat until our family is at the desired size. Getting paid FAANG money to raise kids is about as excellent a lifestyle as most women can hope for, plus all those years on maternity technically count as "experience" so if she does want to work once our kids are old enough she has a decent CV still present.

I'm very newly a father. My daughter is 3 days old. I'm turning 30 this year, and the general reaction I got from talking to my friends & strangers was very 'wow that's young to be doing it' or 'how can you afford this'. I was the youngest person in my highschool scholarship class in a good upper middle class suburb by about a year, 30 people of whom most have gone on to be Doctors, Dentists, Developers and other Desirable roles. I'm the only to have reproduced, and at this rate I'm the only one who even looks particularly close to it. My university cohort's fairly similar, with similar professional attainment.

The big themes I noticed when talking to people about why they haven't taken the leap are generally some combination of not owning housing, being stuck in the dating app treadmill, protecting their free lifestyles to do 'cool, spontaneous things' and versions of 'my potential children will inherit the apocalypse'

grats! sorry I don't have anything more substantive to say. but seriously, congrats!

Thank you!

Congratulations! Being younger makes it easier to raise young kids, I think. Obviously everyone has their own life situation, but I think it's good to start reasonably young if you can! Glad it is working out for you :) What percentage would you say of each of the themes you mention? Is there a lot of overlap?

Mind my asking what you do for a living?

Fairly high up in some interaction of gambling/crypto. It's not socially gainful but it is fairly lucrative.

Talking to my childless compatriots, I'd say one reason that's as common at least as those is "I have some form of mental distress and don't know if I can manage kids with them / don't want my kids to inherit it".

Perhaps you can suggest something like Orchid prenatal polygenic screening to them where they can choose to implant an embryo with low risk of inheriting the condition?

I'm going to guess the answers would be some combo of "that's eugenics" and "that's sounds expensive as shit, I can't afford that, especially if there's a baby coming".

This is pretty common I think. Makes for a potentially interesting connection with the prior post on Bad Therapy.

Maybe it's Seasonal Affective Disorder caused by magic dirt latitude and not anything inheritable?

Nah, we're pretty good at telling when it's SAD and when it's something else. Besides, SAD was already a regular affair in the 00s, when the TFR was much healthier than now, ie. around 1,8-1,9.

One of my best friends had a rough childhood and really struggled with depression and anxiety for while, so now that things are actually pretty good for him with a good partner, house and job; he doesn't want to have kids because he doesn't want them to have the same shit as him.

Very sad to me since I think he would be a great dad.

One thing that was proven to work is giving young women baby dolls to look after. The US tried that in an effort to reduce teenage pregnancies only to observe the opposite effect.

https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-pregnancy/

I think the tone is rather ghoulish here - how can we prevent people having children so they can move onto brighter futures? Ultimately this all comes back to Ehrlich and the Club of Rome - strong contenders for the biggest civilizational wrecker of all time IMO. The Population Bomb proposed all kinds of fertility-reducing interventions, many of which seem to have been taken up. One of the architects of China's One Child Policy went off to the Club of Rome, I trace that immense source of human misery back to their stupid ideas. There's a pervasive meme of overpopulation floating around - the very concept defies reason. More people means more innovation, production, efficiencies of scale. In a Malthusian model, ok sure overpopulation is a thing. The West does not live in a Malthusian world, not since Malthus's time. If we want more resources, let's go out and get them - the Arctic and Antarctic, the sea floor, the vast frontiers of space.

It's particularly pernicious to encourage socially responsible, highly educated smart people to throw their genes into the shredder by making it culturally 'irresponsible'.

One thing that was proven to work is giving young women baby dolls to look after. The US tried that in an effort to reduce teenage pregnancies only to observe the opposite effect.

It's funny that this didn't used to be a policy issue. Girls used to want dolls. Mattel made a fortune selling them dolls! Parents used to try and stop their girls from getting dolls, only for the girls to either make their own dolls, or start black market doll-exchanges at school.

More people means more innovation, production, efficiencies of scale.

Have you met people?

The problem is that people aren't fungible. Some people produce innovation, production, efficiencies of scale. The bulk of people do the ordinary work to keep civilization running and implement (if not originate) those innovations. A good chunk live on welfare, charity, and fraud and contribute far less than they take. And another chunk actively steals and destroys. Most incentives for fertility produce more of the last two groups, and even encourage people to leave the second group for the third.

Well ideally I'd like eugenics. But failing that, not encouraging dysgenics would be nice. The current system subsidises fertility for the poor and penalizes fertility for the responsible with the overpopulation meme. I'd also support executing the bottom end of the net-negatives, the drug dealers, burglars, scammers and so on.

I think affirmative action for university admissions based on family size would be a good move. The smartest kids and their parents really care a lot about uni admissions and high school grades, I've seen it with my own eyes. If having more children meant better chance of getting in or getting scholarships, that would change outcomes. South Korea would whiplash back to replacement rates in no time.

It’s very politically incorrect, but not technically difficult, to aim fertility incentives towards the productive middle class.

Now our society will never do it. But it’s not totally implausible that Italy might.

It is in fact, technically difficult, because the productive middle class are the ones paying for those incentives, and you're incentivizing them ultimately to be less productive.

I don't think it's impossible, but we need to be honest about what this would actually involve - a pretty significant drop in living standards. Are modern political systems capable of steering such a course?

The point is to make the childless bear the burden. Basically, tax childlessness heavily. It can be structured as heavy child tax credits to make it more politically palatable. It would immediately give childless incentive to join the other group: unaffordability makes for a weak argument when it is childlessness that makes you poor.

We need economies of scale.

Most incentives for fertility produce more of the last two groups

Well, many of the incentives are fixed or available to poor only, so it's by design. u RandomRanger did not offer any of such incentives.

My state offers heavily subsidized childcare and healthcare for pregnancy and young children to middle income families and below, which is not that hard to actually use. I looked up the fertility rate, and it isn't great.

But also, I like this visual tracker of US births by state 2005 - 2021, where is shows births per 1,000 women (15 - 44) going down noticeably every single year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fertility_rates.htm

It looks like more than just "we can't go out when we want." Arizona went from 80 to 55.5 in 15 years. Utah went from 93 to 64. 15 years ago, women went to college and worked, people also moved away from their parents to work, liked going on trips together, missed going on date nights when they had young children, used contraception, and had access to abortion. The trend remained pretty steady through Covid and the years after.

I'm not sure why it's so stark, but even very expensive taxpayer funded childcare, food, tax breaks, and healthcare programs don't appear to be doing anything about it. Certainly not trivial things like cheap (or even free!) diapers and formula.

IIRC most of the reduction in US fertility has just been the result of a very successful campaign to reduce teen fertility. Nobody wants to be a trashy mom trapped with a loser boyfriend like on 16 and Pregnant.

Arizona, for example, had their teen fertility drop by nearly 75% from 2005-2021. Texas had theirs drop by 2/3rds. Alabama today has a lower teen pregnancy rate than New York did in 2005.

The catch, it seems, is that it's hard to turn off that "You're fucked if you have kids before you're ready" propaganda merely by reaching one's early 20s. It doesn't help that young adults are spending more time in school than ever before.

The entire modern public education system seems like a giant psych-op to reduce teen fertility.

  • keep kids under supervision at all times
  • very early in the morning to punish the kids with an active nightlife
  • stops kids from having a job to get money to pay for dates
  • separate them by age group to stop the older boys meeting younger girls
  • all female teachers, with boys punished for showing masculine impulses
  • the teacher pay system heavily rewards seniority, so a lot of the teachers are these aged schoolmarms in their 50s and 60s who have never had any other job and never had kids
  • explicit sex-ed lectures where you tell them that sex will ruin their life
  • hardcore prep on getting a college degree, leading to a graduate degree, leading to a job, etc with marriage and kids waaay in the future

On the one hand, that sounds plausible.

On the other hand, for instance, Kosovo has continued living in large multi-generational families through hundreds of years of poverty and war, and still has heavy family involvement in marriages. Kosovo's TFR. Every Western and Asian country I've looked at has been something like that, whether they had a teenage pregnancy campaign or not.

My state offers heavily subsidized childcare

Free childcare is not actually an inducement to have children. It’s a subsidy for moms to work.

Moms have a strong revealed preference to work less and spend more time being a mom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a capitalist economy that results in some unfair-on-the-surface outcomes, and you can’t paper over them. It’s much easier to make mothers miserable so you can claim their career outcomes are where you want them.

There is no amount of social welfare that can convince a person to have kids. There are more important things that are aren't in place.

You need

  • Labor support (Retired parents and an extra room)
  • A stable partner (Time to date through your early 20s, rather than slog it out in your career)
  • Your own house (lol, good luck)

All govt. assistance ends up being fed to landlords downstream. Italy tops the list of western-european countries where 25-35 year olds still live with parents. Don't try anything another solution unless you fix housing first. Everything else is downstream.

I know a ton of people in their late-30s who're struggling to have kids / 2nd children becasue they're too old. The urge to be parents exists. Things just take a LOT longer to stabilize.

I'm confused about your list of needed things. I don't know anyone who grew up with all of them. Looking at just my family tree I have:

  • One set of grandparents had their first son on a US Base in West Germany. Moved back to the US to a part of the country far away from other family, bought a house in the suburbs, and had five kids all told. (Missing: house at first baby, labor support)

  • Other pair of grandparents had moved from Ireland, didn't have any relatives to help. Had 12 kids on a single policeman's salary. (I'm not sure when they bought their first house, but they were missing labor support.)

-My parents had me and my brother in a one bedroom condo, about a five hour drive from my father's parents. My parents both worked at the time and I was in daycare. After my brother's birth they moved to a lower cost of living state and bought a house. My father had a job lined up, my mother did not. She transitioned into a Stay at Home role, which ended up being mostly permanent. Three kids total, but my mom was 33 when she married so she did her best. (Missing: house at first baby, family support.)

-My husband and I rented a two bedroom in a quadplex when we had our first. We couldn't afford daycare in the region, nor could we afford for one of us to stay home. We worked split shifts that first year so we could watch our daughter. He started working at 5 AM, I worked from 1:30 PM to 10. We were far away from either of our families. Eventually we saved up, had promotions, rented a house, had three more kids with an au pair to watch them, and bought a house in a lower cost of living state.

Getting married is a common thread, but having a house or a nearby family caretaker is not as essential as you stated. My experience has taught me it's mostly a matter of wanting a child. I don't know anyone my age who wants a single child half as much as my husband and I wanted a big family.

It is about making it lucrative to those who are on the fence. The people with strong opinions on kids are not changing their opinions.

But for every person like me, there's someone living at their parent's house (parental support), that their parents own (home ownership), with a long term girlfriend. There isn't a material difference between them and the requirements you list. The things keeping them from having kids are attitude and perception.

It's interesting and also sad that Japan's birth rate isn't doing well, since their housing market is famously functional compared to ours (by reputation in libertarian circles at least, I don't really know).

East Asia is different because childhoods are just uniquely sucky there. I’ve got a regular rant about it, but basically people love raising happy kids and don’t like shoving them through a miserable rat race, and the latter is how East Asian childhoods work. So in oriental countries people are making a rational choice not to take on two decades of enforced suck.

Notably japan’s birthrate is the highest in east Asia(if you rationally consider North Korean statistics unreliable), and my impression is that Japanese childhoods are unpleasant Rat races compared to the west, but compared to South Korea or the sinosphere are rather idyllic.

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have ZERO work life balance. I don't think the average American can even fathom what 'zero' work life balance looks like. Americans think they work hard when compared to Europe. But East Asia is a whole another beast.

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have ZERO work life balance. I don't think the average American can even fathom what 'zero' work life balance looks like. Americans think they work hard when compared to Europe. But East Asia is a whole another beast.

I don't agree with this. I'm stereotyping here, and focusing mostly on Japan, but here's how I see it:

The stereotypical salaryman focuses on his work-life. He goes to work, works very hard, then socializes after work with his coworkers. They eat dinner together, drink together, maybe do some other stuff (maybe go to sex workers...). But it's a combination of work and friends. They put in "long hours" but they're not really working the whole time.

Meanwhile, the housewife takes care of everything else. She raises the kids, she manages the family budget, she cooks all the meals, she deals with family. EVERYTHING.

A lot of the "long hours" that asian workers work are just getting paid for stuff that Americans would do for free, to prove that we're a good feminist who balances the household work with our female partners.

I'd argue that the housing issue is actually downstream of the cultural issues. There are a bunch of large houses around me that could easily accommodate six or even eight people living them, but currently there are only two. People can and do raise children in their parents' house if it's respectable in their culture. One of the interesting things about current trends, is that it doesn't really seem to make much difference; countries with all different housing situations and acceptable arrangements are falling together.

Also, there are large areas of the US where it isn't all that hard to buy a house. I live next to a city of under a million people, and didn't bother saving any money in my 20s. I had a baby in a one room duplex, and we realized why families have houses, so we asked a local agency that helps people buy their first time home if we could buy one or not. They said, yes, up to $x. Then a year later we had bought a house, and it was all basically straightforward aside from a regionally specific appraisal issue on the first house we tried to buy. We aren't making a lot of money. It doesn't make any difference, birth rates are going down just the same.

downstream of the cultural issues

You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.

With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.

So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.

I lived in SF for a decade. It had strong sense of neighborhood but without neighbors. We’d make friends for a short time, but everyone moved on, literally - to Oakland, Portland, Austin, or even just the Outer Sunset. I live in suburbia now which is exactly the opposite. Some neighbors have been here for 50 years!

Ah, I see the problem. You don't just want inexpensive houses, you want inexpensive houses in Manhattan. Yeah, even Don Draper didn't live in Manhattan (or NYC at all).

I loved growing up in the suburbs. I knew everyone on my culdesac. We were a ten minute drive from various friends of my mother who had children around my age. We went to church activities every week, sports, library events, etc. We weren't bored or bereft of social interaction.

In NYC I feel like being friendly puts a target on your back. But it might just be that I was socialized for one type of friendly, and don't recognize other forms.

I recently moved to a suberb outside a small city in a flyover state. I was quickly invited to attend a Welcome New People catered dinner at my new church, where we were paired with another family who checks up on us all the time. I am constantly invited to more parish activities, including a program that just pairs families with similar aged kids to meet up at least once a month to do whatever they want.

The nearest coffee shop has a consignment store with crafts made by local patrons. There's a festival every week in the downtown. I know most people on my street.

I loved growing up in the suburbs. I knew everyone on my culdesac. We were a ten minute drive from various friends of my mother who had children around my age. We went to church activities every week, sports, library events, etc. We weren't bored or bereft of social interaction.

To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though. My parents have lived in Greenwich Village since the early 1980s (late ‘70s in my dad’s case) and sure enough they know all their neighbors, get greeted at their coffee place, brunch place, deli, cheesecake place etc by name, are part of many local organizations, can’t walk down the street on a busy warm weekend afternoon without meeting multiple people they know walking around.

But that’s a completely different experience to the one I have, let alone the one someone would have moving there from somewhere else with no friends.

Highly sociable people can make friends anywhere. If you were the kind of person in college who signed up to 20 clubs in the first week to see what they were about and to make friends then you’re never going to be friendless. But I think for the default person, who isn’t a recluse and enjoys company but who also isn’t highly motivated to make friends, living in a more atomized suburb exposes you to far fewer people in the natural course of daily life.

You talk a lot about your parish/church, but of course ever fewer people are involved in a local religious organization. I think generally you encounter more people in a city, and for people who are weirder there are also more likely to be others like you around relative to a small town where out of necessity social organizations are largely going to cater to the modal kind of person. Cities involve more incidental encounters with other people, for better or worse.

To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though.

My parents moved into the state when I was 4. Six years later, they moved into a new-build neighborhood. My mom talked up the opportunity with friends and a couple of her friends also moved into the same neighborhood. I. Those six years in between, she had made friends with dozens of families, just by exchanging phone numbers with other moms at the playground, meeting their friends, arranging play dates, going out to coffee, etc.

My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance. People don't even look each other in the eye, let alone learn each other's names. It's too intimate by default, so people take steps to create boundaries.

My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance.

This is greatly put, and matches my experience perfectly. Have people talking about how suburbs are isolating ever lived in a mid rise apartment building? Nobody ever talks to anyone else, people move every 1-2 years, your neighbors are entirely unknown.

On the other hand, when you live in a SFH neighborhood, just looking at people’s houses and yards and cars makes you wonder about the kind of people who live there. When you go out on a walk, you meet people who are your neighbors, and not random passersby, like you do in dense, busy areas. Because of lower density, you see the same people over and over, which facilitates remembering. When you ask them where they leave, they tell you something like “a green house with an American flag”, instead of “uhh in 1201”, which you’ll immediately forget.

There is nothing more alienating than living in a dense, vibrant city.

Gen Z has become homeowners at a rate higher than not only the Millennials, but also Gen X. In the US, homeownership complaints are a big thing among redditors who don't actually want to be tied down but it's not really the issue they claim.

I straight up don’t believe that 30% of 19-26 year olds own homes. That’s a ridiculously improbable number. I bought a house at 22 and my real estate agent- who was probably a top 10%, and definitely in the top 20%, by volume of sales- said I was his youngest ever successful sale, and that he doesn’t get many clients within a few years of me either. If he’s representative- and DFW is one of the larger housing markets in the country so he should be reasonably so- then just based on ages, that’s not happening.

Instead what I suspect happened with this- I can’t find the specific survey methodology- is that this was a survey of heads of household, which actually tells us that gen z is likely to live with parents/as roommates if they can’t afford to buy. This tracks very well with everyone’s lived experience that I’ve heard and is also much more plausible than lots of early-20s homebuying.

The oldest gen-Z is 26 years old. Their home acquisition numbers are reflective of inheritance and a minority with social media success. Addtionally, home ownership is a useless metric if you don't know their monthly premium. Home ownership is only 'liberating' if is is somewhat affordable.

Ah, if you don't like the numbers, just wave them away.

Median salary for a gen-Zer is about $38,000: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-age/

Assuming they have $40k for a down payment lying around, and ZERO debt, they can afford a $200,000 house. Townhomes in my semi-rural town in Utah are $250,000+. The numbers just straight up just don't pass the smell test.

Edit: Just checked Zillow, the cheapest listing I can find in my town (that isn't a trailer in a trailer park) is $265k, that's for a townhome.

Archive.is doesn't work for many people now (including me) so I can't comment.

But if they say 30% of people age 19-26 own homes then either they're wrong or family wealth is the reason. No way these people are buying homes with their wages.

The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical. We're not talking about the price of baby formula here, we're talking about six figure sums per person. And what you're essentially paying people to do is stay home, not work, and consume more. The better the program works, the more it costs and the less money you have to pay for it. And all this is also massively regressive if targeted at the middle class.

2rafa is on the right track here in terms of scale, but even big shovels can't turn the tide. You end up digging the earth out from beneath your feet. Do we really want to encourage parents to work more, and the childless to work less? Will young childless people sit still and let themselves be dragooned into working as nannies and cleaners for the fruitful and then taxed to pay for their own service?

And will any of this work? Low fertility is not a symptom of poverty, but of some of the richest societies to ever exist. Which then turn around and say - but not rich enough. Just a bit more money. can we really buy virtue, really bribe ourselves into having kids?

Low fertility is here to stay. It is a symptom of an industrial society that has refined every process of production except for human procreation. When we want cattle, we roll up our sleeves and make them. But human children are not even at the level of a medieval cottage industry. Maybe it's for the best that we don't see babies as commodities. But that is a choice, and it follows from that choice that we will not have very many of them.

It’s actually pretty easy to solve low fertility with money; it’s expensive and politically incorrect, but it’s very doable. You just need a big increase in male purchasing power relative to female, targeted at the reproductive years. It probably helps if you discriminate in favor of married couples. That’s basically the story of the baby boom.

Helpfully, everything about doing that is illegal.

Expensive and politically unfeasible make it sound hard, not easy. Perhaps it would be better to say that it's simple - depositing a hundred thousand dollars in the bank account of every pregnant woman would be very simple, but also very hard.

Ending all college subsidies would help it seems.

The fact that there are something like 25% more women in college then men is a huge problem. Women won't date down in status and college education is a heavy status signal.

The fact that there are something like 25% more women in college then men is a huge problem. Women won't date down in status and college education is a heavy status signal.

Yes; once a woman graduates college she thinks herself too good for a man without a degree.

The solution is to stop sending women to college.

The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical.

In the US, anyway, it's not that the money does not exist and is not currently being spent on children, but more some combination of:

  1. some parents are terrible at parenting, and would not spend the money on properly raising children, leaving them even more illiterate, innumerate, and unprepared for life in a civilization than currently
  2. The government isn't very good at telling the terrible parents apart from the decent ones in advance, and is obsessed with disparate impact.
  3. Most costs for having a stay at home mom (or equivalent) are fixed, such that even if a state were diverting all their education costs into the program, and that was $15,000 per year per child, and the family was totally fine raising 4 children for $60,000/year, it still doesn't quite work out temporally, since the children (and therefore the income) will likely be staggered about 2 years apart, and so the first child, especially, will put the family in a bad position.
  4. Most of the people in a position to take advantage of a program like that, because they're able to form a stable relationship (which would ideally be part of #2, but of course would go wrong for political reasons), are already having children anyway. It's the people practicing serial monogamy, looking for the ideal partner and maybe finding him at 40 or not at all, who should be having children but aren't.

It seems to me that expecting ASI in our lifetimes and worrying about fertility should be mutually exclusive. I fall in the camp that expects ASI, and it surprises me how many in rat-adjacent circles apparently fall in the other camp. If the intersection of these groups is actually non-empty and we have its representatives here, what is the cause of your concern?

For one, probabilities. If there is 50% chance of ASI in our lifetime, I still care about future worlds that fall in the other 50%.

We also have no idea what a world with ASI looks like. For one, there's a non-zero chance that we are already in the presence of superintelligence, either because the world is created by a deity/simulation or there are aliens monitoring us. This actually feels quite likely to me.

I think there's a good chance a superintelligent AI would just leave us alone or not interact with us meaningfully.

Finally, isn't this a general purpose argument for anything? Why care about the deficit? ASI. Eating healthy? ASI will come and save me. Meeting girls? Just wait for ASI and I'll have a whole harem of bots.

I mean, I mostly unironically agree with the thrust of your last paragraph. As you say, though, the probability we don't get ASI is not zero (though much less than 50% in my estimation) and you may want to hedge against it. But there is a cost to hedging and in many cases it's not worth it. Most people would be completely unprepared for survival if society collapsed, but they don't put in effort to be prepared, because it is a negative EV activity and the outcome is within their risk tolerance

Eating healthy? Absolutely, it improves your quality of life in the meantime as a nice bonus and it's not terribly difficult. Solving the fertility crisis? That is difficult and doesn't seem worth the effort. Similarly, I think the deficit is mostly irrelevant and isn't worth caring about, spending money you don't have is just too good. Meeting girls? Probably worth doing, you may find that you'll regret not having had "real" experiences, depending on the precise shape of the future.

That said, if I met someone completely neglecting their health and checked out of dating on the basis that "ASI is imminent", I wouldn't think of this as crazy -- just someone with somewhat different weights than me.

Lyman Stone just said on twitter that he had two papers in review finding substantial effects on birthrates of some policies that could be done, so I'll be excited to see what they are when they're out.

I will solve the childlessness problem hypothetically (amounts and currencies can of course be adapted to a country):

  1. 65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child. The tax drops by 15% per child for the first three children, with historic deductions so that people who still have 3 kids but do so late can claw back some of what they paid. Child deductions only available to couples married at (or within six months of) birth.

  2. Capital gains tax is doubled for those over 35 with fewer than two children, normal above. Normal rate only available to married or widowed people.

  3. Death/estate tax for childless people is 60% marginal on estates over $1m in net worth, falling by 20% and rising in threshold by $2m for each child until the fourth.

  4. 75% of roles on boards of directors must go to married parents of at least two children. 50% must go to married parents of at least three children. The same applies to Congressmen and women and to senior positions / positions of responsibility in all regulated industries, and to all cabinet positions in the executive. 90% of senior positions in the military, state department and justice department must be occupied by parents of at least two children.

  5. Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).

  6. To qualify for any tax credits, a movie or television production must show or imply that at least 65% of characters with more than 10 minutes of screen-time described or implied as over the age of 27 have children. The same, in real life, applies to cast members with the same screen time threshold.

  7. Entry to any selective schools (specialized high schools, gifted programs etc) requires a child to have at least one sibling. Priority is given to those with two or more siblings.

  8. For every child after and including the third under the age of 18, graduates of four-year college degrees can receive $8,000 per year in student debt forgiven. This stacks for married couples where both partners have student debt, and for graduates of medical schools or STEM programs at top-50 (US News) universities, it rises by an additional 50%, meaning that some PMC professional couples could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt completely wiped out, never paying anything, if they have three or more children. (Two doctors with 4 kids under 18 would see $48,000 per year of college debt wiped off).

  9. A 10% state levy on home sales by childless adults over 30 funds mortgage subsidies for married parents of three or more children on a variable basis depending on the money raised the previous year. Married parents of 2 or more children who have had a child within the last 48 months pay no capital tax on primary home sales.

  10. White House, senate and congressional internships, state-funded scholarships, Supreme Court clerkships and other prestigious positions for young people are limited to those with at least one sibling. A core part of pushing up birthrates is convincing parents of only children to have another, so it has to be stigmatized.

  11. For constitutional reasons, exemption from some policies is available for those “constitutionally incapable” of having children. These exemptions must be filed for with a $10,000 processing fee, do not apply to inability to bear children related to any decisions taken by the individual (eg. gender transition, voluntary castration) above the age of federal criminal responsibility (12), or to psychological or material conditions like ‘asexuality’ or just being ugly. All decisions have to be approved unanimously by a panel appointed 50% by congressional republicans and 50% by congressional democrats. The presumption is that in cases of genuine medical infertility that is likely from childhood (ie not discovered later in life) the state will know about it years before any exemption may be needed.

How would that policy handle people that intend to be childless fleeing the country? Could it be financially sustained if most of the people that are now going childless would mostly leave the country?

Most people don’t intend to be childless. They just end up that way. Ratcheting up the pressure is good.

Perhaps most people dont currently intend to be childless and just are, but when being childless is accompanied by debilitating taxes, wouldnt anyone that isnt currently married and expecting opt to live abroad, and if they get lucky and find a partner they might come back?

My main point is that policy cant exist in a vacuum. A lot of the policy points you mention act as if people cant choose alternatives, while in reality anyone that is upper middle class and above can leave the country. Especially any of the policy that targets people with millions of dollars...

You can probably create a large one time baby bump at comparatively modest cost if you’re willing to fuck up certain markets- eg, turning house rentals into rent to own agreements for newly weds, whether the landlord likes it or not.

The main thing is getting existing, stable, relatively happy couples in long term relationships (whether or not they’re technically married yet) to get married (if they’re not) and to have (many) kids. That requires making life with kids better, more fun and more affluent than life without them.

Locking off career progression and heavily taxing childlessness and only having one child, plus smoothing over some of the problems with having many children (eg. heavily subsidizing the purchase of 7-seat cars for large families) have to happen together to create a baby boom.

Heck, federal regulatory tweaks to require car seats to take up less space(so you can fit more of them in a backseat) would have an effect.

There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that hasn’t been tried. Personally I think we should try it before dramatically restructuring the tax structure to punish childlessness.

Now that's a proposal I could see actually bumping the birth rate. Wish the CBO would estimate its cost, just so we have a sense of it. I'd be interesting in single-penalties that scale depending on the severity of the problem: if the birth rate is lower than target, add more single penalties; if it's higher, lower them. Otherwise the exact levels can easily under or overshoot the targets. The only cost is making tax planning more difficult for singles, which isn't even a negative with the goals of the plan.

You have a combination of direct and symbolic policies. If you wanted higher birth rates and had to choose either the direct or symbolic policies, which would you go for?

65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child.

I am sure that Canada would love for the US to adopt this policy. Are you prepared to go full Walter Ulbrecht to make it stick?

Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).

I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.

Sure, a few people might get stuck in an abusive relationship because they can not prove to the standards of criminal justice that their partner is abusing them. But really serves them for marrying the wrong person, right?

And a few others might have a huge incentive to frame their partner for abuse to out of the divorce tax.

And I am sure that little Timmy will have a great intact family home if his parents are forced to stay together by economic necessity. Yes, perhaps there might be a lot of yelling, fighting and weaponizing kids, and perhaps both of his parents will bring their boyfriends/girlfriends home, but at least he will not be scarred for life by having to endure a divorce.

--

If you pass all these laws by some miracle, here is my business idea:

The company aims to provide tax benefits for people who are disinclined to raise children. For maximum benefits, unmarried men and women are sorted by state and will marry (potentially over zoom) in a minimal civil ceremony. Subsequently, a fertility clinic will be create a number of embryos from the germ lines of the couple, three of which will be implanted in surrogates in Mexico. After the births, the 'couple' will become the legal guardians of the children, getting full tax credits. As the parents, it is their legal right to task others with helping them to raise their kids, so they can just pay a Mexican orphanage to raise them. When they come of age, they will be US citizens who may or may not be eager to come work in the US. The parents pay the costs for the surrogates and however much it costs to raise 1.5 kid in rural Mexico.

--

Seriously, if you want to lower the costs of having a child to zero, I am ok with that. If you want to specifically incentive people who earn well to have kids (perhaps because you expect that by nature or nurture, their kids are more likely to be productive members of society) by also compensating them for lost earnings, I am okay with it.

But using tax cuts to bribe or bully people into having more kids feels deeply wrong. I believe that kids deserve parents who actually want to have them instead of parents who put up with them as an unfortunate side effect of some tax optimization scheme.

I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.

Chesterton's fence is a fence that it's not totally obvious what the reasoning for construction is. No fault divorce is a chesterton's well documented power line. One can very reasonably argue about what the line powers and the downstream implications but there is no doubt on the original motivations.

I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects.

No-fault divorce isn't a Chesterton's fence, it's what we got by knocking down the Chesterton's fence of requiring grounds.

We've had it since the 1960s. Please recalibrate what are proposed radical changes to long established norms.

What kind of "conservative" would consider a "fence" built in living memory to have any history at all?

Any time someone appeals to tradition you should ask whose tradition and when? Back in colonial New England civil divorces were granted for reason of spousal abandonment. So you could just bail on your spouse and they'd get a civil divorce in your absence.

Lots of things are like that. Interracial marriage wasn't common in 1750, but it was legal and accepted. But in 1950 it was very much illegal and almost universally opposed across much of the United States.

I'm not going to greatly respect the hallowed traditions of 1950 in opposition to 1650, 1750 and 1970. Norms and traditions drift in a variety of ways in various places. Then a modern 2024 Conservative cherry picks one they happen to like and declare it to be Tradition, can't be frivolously tearing down Chesterton's fence, etc.

Having no enormous respect for a carefully chosen set of norms and laws circa 1950, and since we're a few generations into the current set of laws and norms, I'm going to follow the good example of Conservatives and declare the current norms to be Tradition and warn everyone not to too easily tear down this fence.

No-fault divorce still loses on long enough time-frames.

That's an easy assertion to make. But I have no reason to think that is better than the previous norm of a married couple working together to contrive a fake at-fault divorce.

We knocked it down because it was starting to normalize perjury to the point where it risked the legitimacy of the entire justice system. When you need grounds but don't have them,. you're incentivized to invent them,.and it's easy to get away with it when both parties agree to the charade. Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.

Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.

And now she is entitled half your assets, plus alimony and child support; not exactly an improvement.

She isn't entitled to half of your assets, because when you're married there are no "your" assets, only "our" assets (excepting what you had before you got married). So before she leaves she drains the bank account and there's nothing you can do about it. In modern times it's considered fraud to take assets in contemplation of divorce, but since divorce doesn't exist in this scenario, what are you going to complain about? And forget estrangement, she's still entitled to live in the house, so what if she decides to stay and make your life a living hell? She could give her boyfriend blowjobs in your easy chair while you're home and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it, except surrender the territory and move out.

I think this would work, although it's of course it's impossible politically. It will be interesting to see if China actually goes for something similar.

No country has truly gone big on fertility. Critics have pointed out that small efforts to boost fertility have not worked so why try. My stance is that if small efforts don't work, much larger efforts are needed.

From a political perspective, we are of course doomed. The normie opinion is that if we want to boost the birth rate we need even more feminism. So instead of interventions that work, we'll get things that make the problem worse such as child care subsidies (which only encourage greater marginal female employment).

No country has truly gone big on fertility.

Ceaușescu's Romania doesn't count as "going big?" If not, then what does?

I guess Romania was doing something right. The results are actually pretty significant. Take a look at Romania vs. neighboring Bulgaria. Something changed in a big way in the 1966 and stayed that way until Ceaușescu was deposed.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=BGR~ROU

So what changed? Here's what Wikipedia says:

In 1966, in an attempt to boost the country's population, Ceaușescu made abortion illegal and introduced Decree 770 in order to reverse the Romanian population's low birth and fertility rates. Mothers of at least five children were entitled to receive significant benefits, while mothers of at least ten children were declared "heroine mothers" by the Romanian state.

The government targeted rising divorce rates and made divorce more difficult—it was decreed that marriages could only be dissolved in exceptional cases. By the late 1960s, the population began to swell. In turn, a new problem was created, child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population (see Cighid). Many of the children in these orphanages suffered mental and physical deficiencies.[30]

Measures to encourage reproduction included financial motivations for families who bore children, guaranteed maternity leave, and childcare support for mothers who returned to work, work protection for women, and extensive access to medical control in all stages of pregnancy, as well as after it. Medical control was seen as one of the most productive effects of the law, since all women who became pregnant were under the care of a qualified medical practitioner, even in rural areas. In some cases, if a woman was unable to visit a medical office, a doctor would visit her home.[31]

I don't know if this counts as "going big". Rewards for mothers who have 5 children!? That's a pretty tough bar to clear.

My guess is that it worked mostly out of patriotism. Reversing the decline in unpatriotic Western democracies might be harder. The civil religion has faded to the point where people no longer think their society has any value in preserving.

My guess is that it worked mostly out of patriotism. Reversing the decline in unpatriotic Western democracies might be harder.

Stories out of Ceaușescu's Romania suggest a decent amount of it was out of fear. Patriotism does not generally lead to a bunch of mothers bearing babies, then abandoning them to unusually miserable orphanages. Also, after the first two years, that's quite the steep plunge. Maybe the first two years were patriotism, and the next several decades were fear?

How many children ended up in orphanages?

I don't trust Western institutions to report on this issue fairly, especially as it deals with the hot button topic of abortion. It is in the interest of Western academics to exaggerate the harms to the greatest degree possible.

I do find it bizarre to think that the state would say "have children or else" but also "once you have the children feel free to dump them in an orphanage, no problem". If it was only threats driving people's behavior, then couldn't the state simply mandate they raise children too? Then again, Communist regimes are not exactly known for good state management.

I think the correct posture here is one of epistemic humility. The birth rate went up. This was due to state policy. Everything else is mostly noise.

I don't trust Western institutions to report on this issue fairly

...Well I'm not going to find original Romanian records.

The main personal stories I've heard from Romania in that era were through Orthodox priests talking to other priests and more visible Christians who had lived there, and the enforcement of atheism sounded pretty brutal, so my baseline is "enforcement of preferred state outcomes was pretty brutal."

I think the correct posture here is one of epistemic humility. The birth rate went up. This was due to state policy. Everything else is mostly noise.

To the extent that you're simply observing a fact, and not making any policy proposals, I suppose. And the USSR did make it through WWII intact and modernize significantly under Stalin. No judgement. Everything else is mostly noise.

There’s a case to be made that the historical fertility advantage for new world French populations comes from coercive fertility raising efforts in the founding population, as well.

And of course, let’s not forget Argentina, which had above replacement fertility until Covid because they so mismanaged their welfare system that single mother benefits were higher than prevailing blue collar female wages. I doubt it was intentional, but it was a thing.

Romania counted but it’s a poor example because Romania was an impoverished communist shithole in (seemingly) terminal decline. Life was miserable and there were no real incentives. So yes, people made do and within a few years had changed behavior to reduce fecundity. It’s like a Leninist state offering +-5% extra bread rations for whatever behavior, it’s not goin to move the needle because it’s a depressed, inefficient, ugly, impoverished society with zero vitality (something the West, for all its many problems, still has in part).

What we can say is that true incentives for fertility and disincentives for lack of it in prosperous capitalist societies have never been tried. Not even in the communist ‘never been tried’ meme way, but in the sense that nobody has ever actually tried to do it.

I think Argentina was still reasonably prosperous when they accidentally made single motherhood a rational economic decision.

This post kind of comes off as a self-indulgent power fantasy. You'd need God-empress level of political power to enact those policies, so the whole thing is basically implicitly assuming that you're infinitely stronk, and then writing a long detailed list of all the ways you'd use your unlimited power to put the screws on people whose life choices are (in your view) incompatible with the greater good of society.

And if we hypothesize some alternative society in which those policies would be popular, then would you even need them in the first place? Hm, maybe they would still be useful to fix the pro-natal attitudes and fight against any potential value drift.

Anyway, while I don't expect you to explain how you're planning on becoming God-empress, I'm still curious how would you roll out those policies? Would there be some transition period so for example people who were already old and infertile when the policies came into effect wouldn't get screwed up without any chance to avoid it, or would their unavoidable impoverishment be a sacrifice you'd be willing to make to keep things simple and on track?

That's not a sensible or fair criticism. The point of the post was to illustrate that effective policy solutions are certainly conceivable, they're just outside the Overton window.

And if we hypothesize some alternative society in which those policies would be popular, then would you even need them in the first place? Hm, maybe they would still be useful to fix the pro-natal attitudes and fight against any potential value drift.

On plenty of issues factions that are minorities impose their agenda on larger more disorganized majorities by capturing institutions of power and by creating organizations and lobby groups. Then they promote propaganda about those opposing their blatant actions being conspiracy theorists.

Also, after policies have been promoted by energetic factions with power, a certain % of people are willing to change their mind. We have seen this with gay marriage. This doesn't apply to all policies, some might be too extreme to not be disliked by the majority, but it does apply to many.

If natalist measures are implemented, then you are going to get people who go along with it who previously wouldn't have supported these kind of policies. Part of that might also be the power centers promoting propaganda.

And beyond just changing one's opinion, the policies, quotas themselves affect behavior.

I think it's a fine post. From a practical perspective we need to:

  1. Decide what must be done

  2. Decide how to do it

@2rafa has given us #1. #2 is probably impossible without god-empress status. So the alternative to their post is to throw up one's hands and say "it's impossible".

I am actually somewhat bullish on China solving this problem before the West because they actually have the state capacity to take the radical actions necessary.

My suspicion re. China is that a lot of senior communist party elites are very bitter about pro-fertility efforts because they themselves were only allowed one child (despite being in the ruling elite of one of the most powerful nations in the world). Eg. Xi himself only has one child, a daughter.

I think Chinese childhoods are also just horrible experiences all around, so people don’t want to have kids regardless of how well they’re being paid.

I don't think Chinese childhoods are horrible experiences all around, and upper class Chinese parents certainly don't think that.

Unfortunately, they probably won't want to take actions that penalize those currently in power, which makes some of these harder.

I have no intentions of coming to any kind of power. These are just an illustration of the fact that this isnt an impossibility issue, it’s a willpower issue. There are solutions, they’re merely considered undesirable.

One problem is that a job doesn't just provide money, it provides social status. Being a stay at home mom is just dull, repetitive drudgery but working in HR for $40k/yr is an exciting and challenging Career. Paying women to stay at home and have kids won't be enough if they'll be more respected for working a job. There needs to be a cultural change that makes having kids high status. I doubt there's a western government in existence that has the will and ability to make that happen though, maybe not a government anywhere given that Japan/China/Korea are doing even worse.

Another problem is that don't just want people to have kids, you want the right people to have kids. In the US we get a $2k/yr tax credit per child. That's a negligible amount of money if you're middle class and up so it really only incentivizes the poor. I'd prefer a deduction instead of a credit and make the amounts much, much higher so that a single income family with kids can have more or less the same lifestyle as a DINK family.

I can’t tell if sarcasm but people working in HR aren’t high status, doing anything interesting, or adding significant value.

Seems to me SAHM is boring because it is lonely, especially for wives in a higher economic bracket. There aren’t ten other women from the same social status that live nearby whom you can converse with while little Johnny and Jill play. That is, there is a collective action problem at work.

I was being snarky trying to portray the mindset of the type of people who put off kids to pursue mundane careers, but I should have been clearer. I don't think working in HR is better or more important than being a parent.

I can’t tell if sarcasm but people working in HR aren’t high status, doing anything interesting, or adding significant value.

They're subtracting significant value. But there's definitely status in being the ones who makes rules for and is feared by the productive people.

I guess. HR are looked down upon where I work.

It wasn’t as if the wife of a moderately successful professional man in 1910 was raising her own children or scrubbing kitchen floors the way modern “SAHMs” are expected to; she had maids to do that because wealth inequality was much higher back then and domestic staff much cheaper. Even a skilled artisan or low-level clerical worker would often have a maid in the house.

I'd also point out that college-educated rich women in 1910 were also doing basically non-profit work, they just weren't paid for it. There were many ideological varied movements being led by middle class and rich women of the time, no different from today. This idea there was a time when rich/UMC college-educated in urban areas were just sitting around, doing nothing but taking care of their kids has never really been true in like, the past probably 150-200 years, because of what you said.

In some ways, the 50's were the worst of both worlds, which is what led to feminism - technology has risen to where even middle class women didn't need to spend all day doing household work and because they were in atomized suburbs, there wasn't much to do but kvetch with your fellow other college-educated but at-home mothers about your life.

And they often needed that maid, because modern household appliances didn't exist yet.

Having kids is high status among the rich. I’m not sure how widespread this knowledge is but in wealthy social circles in NYC, London etc being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker, since each additional child (including the first) is a few million in costs (once larger housing, 15 years of private school tuition, more rooms on vacation, flights, clubs, college etc are accounted for). If you see a 32 year old secular mom who has 4 kids in Manhattan, you’re looking at someone who has a lot of money.

The problem is that as you say, a DINK couple making $350,000 a year together would have to make like $1m a year or more to have the same lifestyle with 4 kids, assuming they intend to raise them in the manner normal for the upper-middle class.

being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker

Because they've outsourced the child raising - a nanny is a must, and if you have more kids then maybe two nannies. An au pair. Some kind of domestic help. We're going back to the days of the parents only see their kids when they're brought down from the nursery to see Mama and Papa for a few minutes before dinner. To quote Belloc's satire on "The Nordic Man":

The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.

Towards the age of ten or eleven, the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man’s parents, especially by the Nordic Man’s mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the Classics and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.

Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes either to Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession (such as the Bar, or writing advertisements) or to residence upon his estate. This last he can only do if his father dies early.

The brutal truth is, if you want more babies, then ban abortion and contraception - see all the screaming** about forced pregnancy - and that didn't turn out too good for Romania either.

Economy is such that to be able to afford a house, or even renting, you need a dual-income couple. If Mom and Dad have Careers and not just jobs, it becomes more and more expensive to have kids. Cost of childcare* is high, but Mom needs childcare because she can't afford to stay at home looking after the kids herself. If you want your kids to do well in life, then increasingly they have to be "skilled knowledge workers" as someone in another thread said, and that means pouring resources into making sure they go to good schools and do the right extracurriculars to get into the good university for the degree that will open the door to the good jobs.

Being SAHM has been downgraded to the idea of being a drudge and indeed, hampering society - go out there and be Economically Productive in the Workforce! The same governments anxious about falling birth rates are also anxious about getting more women out to work.

*And it's high because it's not a simple matter of "put a bunch of babies in a room, give them the occasional bottle and nappy change".

**And I do mean screaming, see this breathless paper on the worst case scenarios where emergency care medical staff are now the equivalent of the French Resistance fighting the Nazi occupation because every single woman who can't get an abortion is now a medical emergency who will die from the nightmare event.

It's not the economy that makes owning a house unaffordable, it's the regulatory environment.

Sure you can build more homes. You just can't build a looming condo high-rise next to my house. Blotting out the sun, causing extreme traffic problems, causing enormously worse problems should a bus or light rail terminal be built by it, etc.

In fact the negatives of such a project are so certain and great in magnitude that my locality has strictly forbidden such a project. As have almost all localities across my entire continent. The local regulatory environment norms across a continent of hundreds of millions of people point in one clear direction: ban this thing.

And I wish they'd legalize it in a few special economic zones so new urbanists would go to them and stop trying to go against local sentiment in almost all places and trying to break the really nice thing we have going for us.

I agree - local places will ban such things. That's why you need state or federal preemption so politicians who aren't afraid of the 9 people who show up to every City Council meeting and complain about anything changing can actually write decent law.

I guarantee the home you live in was not wanted by somebody in the neighborhood when it was built.

I very much doubt that 9 or so motivated people in almost every locality all across the continent bent all zoning rules to their will.

Almost every local government independently decides to do this. It would be amazing if every locality had a small core of turbo NIMBYs forcing their will onto everyone else. All other people almost everywhere somehow helpless.

The fact that a very large number of independent elections converged on one policy makes me think the policy is popular among voters.

And I wish they'd legalize it in a few special economic zones so new urbanists would go to them and stop trying to go against local sentiment in almost all places and trying to break the really nice thing we have going for us.

Appeasement doesn't work. You can legalize it in special economic zones (e.g. in towns with a train station in NJ), and the New Urbanists will take that and demand more. They don't just love New Urban development (in fact, often they don't, or at least they don't make it economically viable and you get a New Urban ghost town) but also hate suburban development.

If you want your kids to do well in life, then increasingly they have to be "skilled knowledge workers" as someone in another thread said, and that means pouring resources into making sure they go to good schools and do the right extracurriculars to get into the good university for the degree that will open the door to the good jobs.

It really doesn't mean that at all, plenty of skilled knowledge workers have degrees from non-prestigious colleges. This is a myth that the PMC has bought into fully.

This is a myth that the PMC has bought into fully.

American PMC I would say -- there isn't really even such a thing as prestigious colleges in Canada/Europe. (I mean there kind of is, but nobody will hire you because you went to Queen's instead of UofA)

England is something of a special case in that the prestigious colleges are something of a class marker as well -- my impression is that this is mostly impactful only for certain types of job however.

American PMC I would say -- there isn't really even such a thing as prestigious colleges in Canada/Europe

McGill comes immediately to mind. They at least think they're prestigious.

Nobody cares that you went to McGill though -- maybe the odd lawyer who also went to McGill. It's the Harvard of Canada, but that doesn't make it Harvard.

Social engineering is not some impossible task, societies have been regularly, consciously selected for all kinds of things for the entire history of human civilization.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children. That is a question of incentives, most of them financial. Incentives and disincentives work, they’re why drink-driving rates have fallen by huge amounts for example, because of a feedback loop between high punishments, social stigma and shame. That same loop can be transferred to childlessness.

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens (neither of these are remotely new to Western countries).

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens

How do you make family life more appealing to degenerate hedonists than a DINK life of hedonism and degeneracy?

I'd focus on incentives to go from 2 to 4 or more. It's less of a lifestyle change. My fear would be that in current year instead of children conceived and born naturally from heterosexual marriage, incentives would be available to 'married' homosexual men using surrogates.

As long as they’re using first-world eggs, turning third world surrogates into baby factories for affluent Western gay men is of no significant population-level concern.

Depends on how heritable (exclusive) homosexuality is, I would think. If it's not very heritable it works fine, otherwise you're just pushing the problem to the next generation.

Because that's not creepy and corrupt? These sorts tend to be down with the globohomo ideology. Encouraging it's spread is a concern.

If your goal is to make more people, then why worry about gay people making them with sperm donations or surrogates? We're getting far into "feature, not a bug" territory if a policy makes gay people fertile.

I don't want people that badly.

My experience has been that the homosexuals that do this are all in on the globohomo (the other homo) ideology.

That they may do this on their own is bad. That they may be supported via some sort of policy intervention that was to increase hetronormative families is too far for me.

This line of argument reminds me of the "to get people to ride public transit, you don’t have to fix the issues with public transit, you just have to make the experience of traveling by car much much worse" argument I see sometimes.

They’re both true. A lot of US cities have a problem wherein public transport is seen as only for poor people and homeless, and once something becomes a negative class marker it has a stink that’s hard to shake off. Forcing middle class people to use public transport increases cleanliness and safety (because they lobby for it; in NYC the effort to clean up the subway has big support, whereas in LA and SF nobody gives a fuck since only the poorest of the poor use it) and in the long term makes for better transport systems. Countries like Germany and Finland where middle class people use the bus sometimes have a much higher standard of public transport than places like the US where it’s only for poor people without a car / license.

Obviously cleaning up the smelly / scary / dangerous / drug addicted scum is highest priority, as is general cleanliness, but some pressure is probably necessary to provide the initial impetus for a switch.

Taking wealthier people class hostage to improve public transit doesn't work. People just resign themselves to subways with smelly and occasionally aggressive bums in them. And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately.

And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately...

Stockholm has a clean, crime-free metro.. Since mass immigration altered Swedish demographics, this requires significant spend on graffiti cleanup and Metro-contracted security staff who are willing to use the necessary force to keep it that way. This continues to happen despite Swedish politics being what it is, because voters are neither morons nor masochists.

For the avoidance of doubt, so does every other sufficiently large Continental European or first-world Asian city. The fact that America can't police public spaces without a level of lethal violence that normies won't tolerate doesn't mean that it is impossible, just that America sucks at policing. The absence of research interest in "Why can't Americans convert taxpayer dollars spent on policing into an absence of crime the way other first-world countries can?" is exhibit A in why criminology as a discipline is a waste of space.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children.

How do you do that? It's time is the important thing here, see the complaints about "now my friends are married and have kids they can't come on nights out/trips with us anymore as everything has to be planned around the kids". Raising kids is a second job, and if you dump it all onto the mother, while Dad is the breadwinner - well, we've spent sixty years nuking the traditional family, good luck with getting that back.

If the prospect is "I have five kids and have to look after them" versus "I have one or no kids and pay more tax", some people will prefer to pay more tax and have the ability to "hey if I decide I want to hit the club tonight, I can do that!"

Think of the Parable of the Daycare Charge for Late Pickups.

It's possible to go from DINK to traditional family but you have to be realistic about the lifestyle differences especially with 4 or more children. We may have had 5 or 6 if we'd started earlier. The first 7 years of marriage we were busy being DINK with nights out/trips.

See, I absolutely think the major problem is that we've turned having children from something that naturally happens, 'well of course now you're married and having regular sex, pregnancy is going to occur', into something that needs to be planned like the D-Day Normandy landings. From the scaremongering around abortion (every child a wanted child, as unwanted children are going to be victims of abuse, so if you don't plan it out perfectly then you will be an unwilling parent who will physically and emotionally abuse the child you resent), to the idea that you must be ready so you need the education, the career-building, the having fun while you're young, then settle down to having the perfect kid at the perfect moment with the perfect trajectory for making them successful in life.

I'm not saying you shouldn't consider finances and time and the rest of it when having children, but fuck it. The best way to have more children is just to have more children. No planning. No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future. Just do it (to swipe a phrase).

EDIT: That's also part of my dubiousness around this enthusiasm for polygenic selection. We've already made having children, for the people who should be having more kids, so stressful and expensive and high-stakes, now we're going to throw another gallon of accelerant on the bonfire: what, Justin and Pippa, you mean you didn't undergo IVF to create a bunch of embryos that could then be selected for the optimum traits for a Better Baby? You just got pregnant like some Stone Age cavepersons? Ahahaha, surely you must be joking! You're setting up your unfortunate child to be a failure and loser in life with deleterious traits being freely expressed in their genome!

Yeah, that's going to encourage people that having three kids at a minimum is a feasible thing.

I agree absolutely. There's less expectation that children would/should follow naturally from marriage.

The difficulty for me was a working top decile spouse.

The best and brightest of the PMC ladies are indoctrinated very early with plans and pathways. Achievements and career milestones. It's challenging to move past the sunk cost even if continued career progression is unlikely to make you happy.

There was much less planning for 3 and 4 than for 1 and 2. Partly due to experience and mostly that my wife was already full time homemaker after 2.

No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future.

It used to be that the astrological charts were used by couples who wanted children and they weren't coming along.

That's crazy that an overwhelmingly catholic country can also have such a low birth rate!

Catholicism can lower birth rates.

Getting married is a big barrier to having children. Men aren't marriageable until they have finished their education, have a job and a place to live. In a country where 29 year old men can't afford their own place and are working as interns few men are going to be married at a fertile age. Unless young women start marrying substantially older men having a high fertility rate becomes unfeasible if marriage is a requirement.

There are really only three solutions:

Lower the social requirements to having kids. Aka single motherhood.

Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.

Adapt to a middle income country lifestyle. This is common among high fertility immigrants. They can live with six kids in a small apartment, never eat in a restaurant, live off rice and beans and pull teeth out by themselves instead of going to a dentist. Their lifestyle is still materially superior to the vast majority of humans who ever lived. With free school lunches, the children can stuff themselves and get enough calories to cover most of their needs. Humans can survive on a tiny fraction of what middle class people assume to be the limit of survival.

The combination of high requirements and a Catholic view of family means that a sizeable portion of men will never be fathers and those who do will only meet the requirements after age 35.

Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.

It seems like a simple intervention would be to massively increase property taxes for people with no children.

This would bring property prices down a lot.

In my opinion, the housing bubble is mostly caused by inflation expectations. If your house can only go up in value, then the best time to buy is always right now. The government should send a clear and unambiguous message that you will lose money by buying a home. It will accomplish this by applying a ratchet effect to property taxes. Any time that annual appreciation exceeds X%, the property tax rate will be raised.

I don't know about Catholics in Europe, but in America most sexually active Catholics use birth control. The hard ban on birth control is not much respected.

I take it many American Catholics are Catholic in name only and mean to say they are Catholic in a vague cultural sense but not in any way that inconveniences their lives.

Yeah, I guess I just associate catholicism with latin America, where it's a lot more strict. Plus just a general culture of big families. Ireland used to be like that too, and I think some Irish-Americans are still like that.

If you take a look at Brazil for example and compare it to the US, I think it seems likely that Catholicism, at least in its modern 20th century and onward form, has done essentially nothing to give Latin America higher fertility rates than the US. It is a non-factor, at least in Brazil. Same for Ireland.

All these graphs appear to be dominated by economic factors, with religious factors being very minor. Religion can definitely increase fertility rates, for example among Orthodox Jews, but 20th century and onward Catholicism seems to have only a minor effect.

While Catholicism probably suppresses promiscuity rates at lower levels of religiosity than Protestantism does, only particularly religious Catholicism has any effect on fertility rates, same as Protestantism. AFAIK the only example within Europe of this happening at scale is the Byzantine-Catholic belt in eastern Poland and Slovakia and western Ukraine having higher TFR’s than the rest of the country(and at least for Ukraine this was demographically visible pre-war, the Catholic percentage was rising due to high fertility rates). The tfr in rural Galicia was still pretty similar to that in the Dutch Bible Belt and the faroes, though, so we can assume that aside from the IRL tradcaths religious Catholicism and Protestantism have similar effects on fertility. And while American tradcaths have a claimed tfr of 3.6 with the possibility of it being an underestimate, it’s worth noting we’re a small, selected minority group everywhere in the country except for two towns, the larger of which is less than 10,000 people, and that we recruit partly by being attractive to pre-existing large families.

it’s worth noting we’re a small, selected minority group everywhere in the country except for two towns, the larger of which is less than 10,000 people

Ave Maria is one, but what's the second?

St Mary’s, Kansas is roughly 2/3 SSPX parishioners.

One of the most disheartening things about reading more deeply about the public politics of the past is you come to realize that, as often as not, people don't really win arguments (which are often just rhetoric anyway) so much as manage to marginalize their opposition to where no one can hear their arguments anymore. Facts might well play a role in that, but they're certainly far from determinative.

A while ago, probably in some dissident right space, I saw someone sharing the old, original conservative arguments against social security and other government provided pension programs, the arguments that were being offered against them before those programs were implemented. And the main argument I saw was something like "There are natural, organic ties between and across generations in families (illegible ties, you might say) that are crucial to nurture for the health of broader society, and having the government intervene in PROMISING to support the elderly is likely to do grave damage to the longer term building of those ties". I remember being struck at the time that I'd never seen the argument, nor had I seen anyone refute the concern. Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically. Those old discussions keep coming to mind, for me, every time I read these stories about cratering birth rates.

I don't think there's data here, but I suspect that liberals who have stronger personal ties with their grandparents than average don't have noticeably more children.

the health of broader society

The textbook example of such societies are the Malthusian in nature. If having kids is the only way to ensure you survive in old age, then it is in everyone's interests to breed like rats. The outcome is an exponential grows which periodically gets mowed down by the horsemen Pestilence, War and Starvation.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

The main problem with the pension system is that the working generation is paying the pensions for the previous generation, which works when the population is growing or stable. What we should do instead is make each generation pay into a fund which will eventually pay for their pensions. So even if the size of generations changes, the per capita funds will be stable.

Previous generations if nationalists worried a lot about having enough manpower to throw into the meat grinder of war. In the nuclear age, this is not much of a concern among superpowers any more.

Personally, I would predict a rebound of the TFR at some point, once space in the metropolitan areas becomes more affordable due to the shrinking population, people are likely to have more kids. But even if I am wrong, I would much rather that some robot nurse cared for me in old age than living in a society which puts undue pressure on people to have kids.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

But they are societies. Ceteris paribus, they'll survive forever. With our 'continuously declining sub-replacement fertility' model it's either replacement or extinction.

Yes. People don’t seem to realize that the one thing all states with low birthrates have - from Sweden to Saudi Arabia - is a welfare state.

Welfare state is a bit hard to define, but if one checks the table of OECD countries by social spending, the second-lowest is the famously low-fertility South Korea.

All OECD countries have highly developed welfare states. It’s not a “the more welfare, the lower the birth rates” argument, it’s that the existence of any advanced welfare state makes economic bonds between a community less necessary.

Well, a welfare state kind of necessitates being a developed country, unless you have some sort of a different definition from the one I have.

It would also seem to be a vicious cycle.

Lower birth rates =

Smaller family networks =

More demand for government safety nets =

Less value to family support =

Lower birth rates

Haredim are satisfied customers of the welfare states they live in.

Haredim are cynically exploiting the welfare states they live in.

I don't see the distinction.

Sure, and there are other ultra-niche groups like French tradcaths (who avail themselves very effectively of the generous incentives for children), those in the Dutch Bible Belt and so on for whom the same is true. But that takes an extraordinarily high-pressure traditionalist religious subculture that has had a lot of filtering and leaving. Many, possibly most descendants of shtetl dwellers secularized. Most descendants of Swiss mennonites in 1800 secularized. So did most high-tfr Catholics. This evaporation left highly fertile populations that survived.

We might say that unless you have an ultra-strong core of religious devotion to a community such that it persists even after it is no longer economically necessary, it seems that the arrival of the welfare state typically coincides with declines in fertility rates as other communal organizations and institutions like the extended family suffer.

There are natural, organic ties between and across generations in families (illegible ties, you might say) that are crucial to nurture for the health of broader society, and having the government intervene in PROMISING to support the elderly is likely to do grave damage to the longer term building of those ties"

The problem is this was a failure and seen so at the times which is why Social Security was immediately popular - as seen when you compare endemic elderly poverty rates in comparison to other groups pre-Social Security and now.

Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically.

That huge relief of visible suffering was the 'disproof' of the anti-social security argument. That is normally the way these things work: A huge and public argument goes on for quite some time on a particular topic, most often without being settled explicitly by public debate but, instead, by events. While the relation of such 'events' to the previous debate can often be quite tenuous in fact, in the perception of the public it is ultimately all that matters. It has ever been thus. Many public debates in the distant past were settled by the winner of a battle, not because might makes right, but because victory proves the favor of God/the gods. The entire rejection of the small central state/market oriented model in the United States came down to the disaster of the Great Depression, regardless of whether 'free markets' """caused""" the Depression or not.

Good information is expensive.

Well it is interesting in that perhaps small central governments underperform when you have Great Depressions (though seemingly caused by a central bank and worsened by FDR’s policies) but perhaps do better in the long run? That is, perhaps voters liked the immediate benefits and didn’t realize the long term costs.

Somewhat similar to some of the anti suffragist arguments. They weren’t all cartoon misogynists. Some made credible arguments that seem to be proved out. It makes you wonder how many good ideas were discarded for political reasons.

Yeah, on this topic, I find myself repeatedly recommending people read Jane Jerome Camhi's Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920 on this topic.

there used to be a very interesting article shared around on occasion about anti-suffragettes. Pointing out that a lot of suffragettes at the time used to assert ideas that expanding the vote would create World Peace because women would never vote for war and other now seemingly ridiculous claims. and that a lot of the actual convincing wasn't based around assuring people of the virtue of expansion so much as arguing the logical continuity of universal suffrage. A "might as well" convincement rather than a moral crusade. Or that there used to be a unique moral claim that women had when they did interefere because they were seen as apolitical. That the history of the movement as understand by the common man has been pretty much forgotten.

Of course I don't know whether it's true or not, but I've never been able to refind it. I'd love if anyone here still has a link to it.

Was it this one?

https://herandrews.com/2015/03/01/women-against-suffrage/

It was! Thank you so much! I'd thought it lost to me for good.

It's this article. https://kirkcenter.org/essays/a-cause-lost-and-forgotten/

The carrots are not working, so there should be sticks implemented. Not sure how, but we should make childlessness painful.

I am not opposed to a mixed carrot and stick approach but there are plenty of carrots that haven't been tried and things that aren't carrots but changing the current arrangement. I oppose maximizing the sticks as unnecessarily cruel and less likely to work than some more politically incorect changes that are also less about sticks. The compulsion policies should not just be directed at single people but also business, unviersities, and all sorts of powerful institutions.

Lets mention one issue that we could see positive change:

Our current model is that careerism and education is pushed as a model for the youth in their family formation years. Add to that female overepresentation in universities and desire to date up.

This is a result of plenty of subsidies and encouragement. Stopping this and strongly encouraging by various policies instead family formation as a priority, especially for women in that window would make much more sense. And we don't even have to exclude careerism and education as goals, just put them as less a priority. Especially for women.

But women always worked, and in the past it was a more village setting and also with less machines and globalized system of productions. So it doesn't make sense to go back to that, but our current model also doesn't make sense. We need greater prioritisation of family formation.

Beyond that, people can live long life. We should deal with overcredentialism and wasting time on those issues, but what is wrong with spending more time being educated in your thirties, delaying your career focus too in 20s and 30s, but having a family. From a perspective of the greater good, it is a better arrangement. Men becoming in such a situation higher economic status and more attractive for women will also increase the marriage rate.

And directly teach people in schools, and through television programs promoting large families, the value of larger families. Especially promote "propaganda" in the good sense especially towards women and girls which in fact is in line with their insticts, and also better inform them about the fertility window. For example bring along married mothers with their husband with multiple children in school for "family planning" school lessons and strongly encourage the model of a married family with multiple children through both the media and such experiences.

Also, it is obviously the case that pets have taken some of the role of the need for children for various people including some who do have children and might have had more without pets. I dunno what the correct policy response would be to that, but it is a factor.

Another thing that is politically incorrect is that to do this and other changes, you simply need to suppress the feminist and liberal establishment and anti natalist liberals in general which are not going to stand for this. They can go as far as support canceling pro natalist conferences. Many liberals do not want to solve this issue but want to downplay it and point to the inevitability of solving it. Because they oppose the more conservative, or anti-feminist changes, or also are hostile to stopping what facilitates the replacement of western populations, and are also hostile to those nativists who oppose the destruction of their nations through mass migration and low ferility rates. They are also motivated by the fact that liberalism will be blamed for the drop of fertility rates.

Imagine you are in a sinking ship which has a hole in it. And you got a part of the crew and passengers claiming that there is nothing to be done and they are discouraging those trying to cover it. You either sink, or you stop them and keep them out of influence and strip the demoralizing pro inaction crew from their position.

So if we want a stick, lets also talk about suppressing factions who oppose this, and promoting the pro-natalists. Because you are not going to get into the position of implementing serious carrots and serious sticks, without having natalists to capture power and suppress anti-natalists which are made especially by plenty of liberals. We could call this faction liberal fundamentalists/dogmatists, while maybe ideally we could get some people who sympathized or identified with liberalism, to break from it.

By directly promoting natalism and suppressing anti natalism you could get it through. It's how liberalism and its version called wokeness, and the Israel lobby and even Covid measures were promoted. Fundamentally, you can as a society through both authoritarian means and through education and having people capturing institutions that push certain agendas, get plenty but not all people to change their attitudes. Most importantly you can get policy changes in this way. So a change for natalism is possible. Although the point isn't just to change things from a bad direction, but to change things towards a wise direction. Which I believe would require a more multi-faceted approach than maximizing sticks in single areas. So you can't be maximally authoritarian without considering what you are promoting and being willing to adjust where you overreached. Although that is far from the current problem, and really being wise requires not being too impotent to act as well.

I think over-education is a problem for society in general and especially when it comes to family formation. When stable adulthood in both genders is pushed back farther (assuming 5 years post graduation to stable job and housing) to 26-27 years old, it’s simply too late for this couple to have more than 2 or 3 kids at reasonable spacing of 1-2 years. First kid at 27, second at 30, third at 33. And that’s pretty much the fertility window for most people. This assumes no difficulties in the schooling and job-seeking process, and marriage pretty much right after college. Go for a masters (additional two years) or have difficulty finding the first good job or housing and we’re talking 30 before we’re seeing the first baby.

The problem is the lengthening of childhood and preparation for adulthood phase of life into nearly middle age. Which shortens working and family life, and increases costs in ways that don’t necessarily produce better outcomes either economically or socially (in fact I think the opposite is true, extended childhood is creating a culture of narcissistic behavior).

Birthrates are dropping in Iran and Saudi Arabia - basically the only places where they aren't is some poor African countries and the Ultra Orthodox in Israel.

Even the vast majority of married conservative women with children in the US don't want Iranian or Saudi Arabian rules for women, so how are you guys going to pull this off?

It's worth noting that Iran's birthrates dropping was likely affected by deliberate action to that effect by the Iranian government.

The carrots are not working

The carrots are a big part of the problem.

I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.

The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.

so there should be sticks implemented

The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."

EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:

He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

Seems pretty counterproductive to me: marriage rates would plummet, reducing birth rates.

The trouble is that ban women working outside the home nowadays, and you'll restrict motherhood to the latest arm candy of Elon Musk's or whomever - women in arrangements (be that marriage or cohabitation) where the man earns a ton of money and can support a family on one wage.

I'm referencing another discussion elsewhere here where someone said that the middle-class assembly line worker who could afford the lifestyle on one wage are the jobs being hollowed out, and that's the truth of it. If you want women to have four kids as a family, which wasn't a crazy notion even thirty years ago, then you have to make it livable. The family where they have four kids and are in squalor are not going to be the solution, because they will be lost in petty crime and all the other problems we have today, even if they start off with middle-middle class parents/grandparents. If they're living six people to three rooms and can't afford dentist or doctor visits, then they're sliding down the class ladder and are not the replacement fertility children you want. The very rich may have status marker big families, but they're never going to be producing numbers enough to stem the decline. You need the vast bulk of the middle to be having more kids, and if they can't afford them already, then cutting down on family income isn't going to fix the problem.

Arguably if women left the workforce en masse it would lead to an increase in men's wages due to lower job competition. You'd have to put in some protectionist regulations to keep companies from just outsourcing for cheaper labor, but part (and definitely only part) of the reason it's so difficult to raise a family on a single income is precisely because women entered into the workforce en masse to begin with.

Women's rights are not a suicide pact, but feminism and leftism generally seem deadset on making them such.

But would it lead to a corresponding increase in cost for everything?

It'd be complicated, since women not having disposable income independent of their husbands would lower demand on the consumer side.

Sure, but the answer there is that if there is a labour squeeze because no women in the workforce, then you will get the push for bringing in migrants for cheaper labour, plus increasing automation, plus demands for productivity increases - if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job. That won't necessarily mean higher wages, either, unless you're in the kind of job where there's the expectation of good pay and conditions baked in.

And now because John is working longer hours and over the weekend, Jane is doing all the child-raising, and now there is dissatisfaction and unhappiness at home about "you don't do your fair share, the kids never see you" "well it's not my fault, I have to be the breadwinner, don't you think I'd love to be around more but it's not possible".

We're reaping what we sowed. The panic in the past was over "too many people! the earth can't support them all!" and that encouraged the decline in fertility, backed up by Malthusian fears. Now we're finding out that in fact, you need babies to replenish your population of working age adults, and Malthus was a false prophet to follow.

On the one hand, I'm laughing here because Paul VI has been vindicated. But I can't laugh too much, as the Zeitgeist has also corrupted Catholics who go along with the "sex is for fun and pleasure, you don't need to be married, don't get tied down with babies, use contraception to plan your family for when it is convenient for you" social messaging.

if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job.

That's a very simplified view of thing. For that to work, you have to assume that all jobs are fungible and their income perfectly matches their net production to the economy. The reality is uh... more complex.

Roko had a funny tweet about this on twitter: the net change from most women to GDP is negative

Look at the jobs most women get. Very, very few of them are doing something like hard labor or the skilled trades. Rosie the Riveter was a switchboard operator who the artist painted much larger than she really was, and with a fake rivet gun.

More often they work in very human-focused jobs, like teachers, waitresses, nurses, haircutters, and secretaries. A lot of that is just getting paid to do the same shit they would have done anyway as a homemaker, except now they're doing it for strangers instead of their living family. (prostitution comes to mind as a similar model...) You can teach your kids, make meals for them, cut their hair, and take care of them when they're sick, it's not rocket science. But of course it looks good for the economy to have it be paid instead of free, so more money moves around.

More perniciously, they also work in office jobs where they directly compete with men. And then the entire office has to adapt and change culture to accommodate them. No more dirty jokes with the lads. Not too much overtime. Someone will have to cover for her when she's sick or just too stressed out to deal. Everyone must reach "consensus" so not too much angry arguing. Power structures based on hidden cliques rather than clear, explicit rules and hierarchies. And we must promote women at equal rates to men, so we can't use any evaluation metrics that would make them look bad, and we must hire women into HR roles specifically focused on hiring other women.

I increasingly just see the world as a power struggle betweeen men and women. In the past men had more power, because of their earnings. And they used that power to get what they wanted, which was sex, which incidentally led to babies. No women have more power, and they use it to get baubles and attention without having to put out.

Banning women from the workforce makes such wages possible, because it more than doubles the labor bargaining power of men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs.

yeah, I thought this too back when I was fifteen. But why did companies go along with it, then? Because labour is the greatest cost for any business, and you want to keep your costs down as much as possible. If there's a shortage of workers, you may have to pay higher wages to attract them - if you can't wait them out, or replace them with cheaper labour, or automate the job away.

Look at the breaking of the power of the unions, when they got too cushy about jobs and pay and conditions. Governments backed this up. If it becomes too expensive to pay the men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs, then there will be a solution found to the problem.

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

I'm not sure, but now that I've found the article I was thinking of, Nowrasteh definitely has a lot more to say about the aforementioned "carrots." Economic opportunities are a part of that picture, but so are things like Netflix and video games and international travel. His argument, ultimately, was that deregulation is the answer, which seems a bit optimistic to me. But also moot, because there's basically no political will for deregulation at this point, at least not in America. Which is in turn partly because it's easier to fight a culture war if you're authoritarian about it, so American politics has become increasingly authoritarian as it has become increasingly factional.

This is probably related to what you're talking about here.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

That is certainly true. But porn, at least, is also directly related to the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, which was in turn substantially a product of feminism. In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America. Feminism and race relations and homosexuality and other left-of-center issues really became politically salient around that time, without significant historical precedent. America itself wasn't even particularly "multicultural" circa 1960, when the population was 85% white and 11% black.

I don't know where it ends, or how. I don't know how to resolve the problems we've inherited. If I look at history for guidance, problems don't appear to generally get solved so much as subsumed into whatever problems come next. Usually that seems to mean war, within or without. These days I suppose something approaching a technological singularity could also suffice. It's not clear to me that I want to still be alive when whatever happens next finally gets around to happening, except for the part where I'm curious to see how it plays out.

In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America.

That is undeniably true. Hell, it's such a cliche I think we all kind of accept it without even really thinking about how strange this situation is.

The more I read and think about history, the more I see is as being on the far right side of an exponential growth chart. Almost none of the stuff that dominates our lives has ever existed before. That's trivially true for recent inventions like social media and video games, but you can go back further and say that about anything. Like you said, the sexual revolution and civil rights era wasn't that long ago, it's within living memory, I've talked to my parents about it. Cars, TV, and telephones also only became common at that time.

Or go back further. The human population didn't used to grow so fast, until like 1850 when the developed nations solved child mortality and suddenly tripled in size in the span of a few generations. Then that spread to every other country on earth, until we all suddenly stopped having kids for some reason.

Or ocean travel. That didn't used to be a thing! Sailors would stay close to shore so they wouldn't get lost at sea. It was only a few centuries ago that humans learned to sail across the ocean, leading to the "age of discovery" when they could finally explore the world. Even then, it was normal for ships to crash and sink. Magellan and most of his sailors died on his expedition.

Before that, you have the bronze age and the metal age, when humans finally learned how to make metal. And it was a huge ordeal, requiring tons of skilled labor and maybe some slaves dying in the mines. That was still just a few thousand years ago, practically a blip in the human timescale, compared to the first humans from 2.8 million years ago. So for most of our history I guess we just used rocks and sticks, living in small tribes, leading a very violent dangerous life, and that's what we've evolved for. It's going to take some time to figure out how to live in in this modern world of technological miracles.

Oh, I don't know either. My girlfriend and I had a chat the other day where we were lamenting that people weren't involved in their communities, voluntary associations are dying out, people are lonely, everyone seems to hate each other. And then we just sat there in shocked silence as we pondered how we had no idea how to fix this. I think we both consider ourselves lucky to at least have each other.

Sometimes I feel like a sane man in an insane world (and other times an insane man in a differently-insane world, I guess that's how it goes). But there's something massively wrong with everything, and the internet seems to be making it meaningfully worse, filled with negativity (even deserved negativity!) and brutal comparisions. I'm certainly part of the problem. I've been on a death-spiral as of late that's consisted of hate-reading people's discussions on modern dating, and the only thing I've gained is unnecessary insecurity about what is really a very happy relationship with someone I love. Maybe that's what's going on -- there are real problems, things could be better, but everything people are engaging with is so harshly negative that it colors their perception of the world in ways that make the real problems seem worse, and even actually positive things that exist seem unstable. And since the problems are deeply connected to social trust and confidence, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophesy that makes the problems actually worse and the positive things that exist actually unstable. Nobody seems to be living in the real world, I'm no exception. I wish I could live in the real world. But how do I go about doing that? Am I so far gone, so deep into the rabbit hole that there isn't any way out? What is the real world? What is real? How do you define real? What is "online"? Do our minds make it real? A Roman official once said to a man he was about to execute, two thousand years ago yesterday: "What is truth?"

Marry your girlfriend and have children. Join a church and raise your children according to its teachings.

Are you and your girlfriend involved in a community? Do you have a community you know you could join, but haven't gotten around to it?

I have a basically functional community I could join, but due to some discontinuity, am having trouble joining again with very young children.

Time to unplug for a bit. Sounds like it is really getting to you. Go to real places and talk to real people. Most get along just fine.

Russia's birth rate has roughly followed US birth rate trends, except for the major dip during the 1990s, which happened for obvious reasons. What is noteworthy is that this is despite major efforts by the Putin government to incentivize people to have kids.

It's not clear to me that the state can really do much to incentivize people to have kids. To me, birth rates seem to be mainly driven by how much the economy incentivizes people to have kids and by the availability of contraception. A 19th century farming economy by nature highly incentivizes people to have more kids than a 20th century tech economy. Also, when the economy is doing well and people in general are making more money, birth rates tend to go up. But not by enough to make up for huge technology-driven changes such as the change from a farming economy to an information economy.

Birth rates are also driven by cultural attitudes, see the classic example of Orthodox vs non-Orthodox Jews.

Any other than a completely totalitarian state has very limited means to change any of these things. The ship has sailed on contraception. You will almost certainly never be able to effectively remove access to birth control in any modern Western country. Cultural attitudes have shifted too much in the last 70 years and there is no reason to think that they will shift in the other direction by any significant amount.

In any case, if you tried to make childnessness painful for me I would try to make the effort painful for you. So you also have to account for the large number of people who are very much passionately opposed to your program. And our lower birth rates are not going to change things fast enough to give you enough political power to freely enact your proposals, since a large fraction of your kids are always going to be coming over to our political side of these policy ideas and relatively fewer of ours will go over to your side, for similar reasons as to why people from Istanbul, Moscow, and San Francisco are generally speaking not moving to small rural towns en masse.

Any other than a completely totalitarian state has very limited means to change any of these things.

Robin Hanson has suggested making a financial asset out of future tax revenue, and giving some of that to parents.

That could reach the necessary scale, I think.

Source for anyone interested in the details

See also:

  • The Unincorporated Man, in which every person is "incorporated" at birth into tradable shares, of which the parents get 20 percent held jointly, the government gets 5 percent, and the person cannot sell the last 25 percent (which is enough for him to support himself in this high-productivity future setting; the percentage might have to be higher in the present day)

  • Income-share agreements

I see Hanson has two kids. Why didn't he have more? When someone is suggesting bigger family sizes, I think it's a legitimate question to ask.

Robin Hanson has suggested making a financial asset out of future tax revenue, and giving some of that to parents.

That used to be the case that the elderly parents would move in with or remain in the family home with the eldest son or other married family member who would then look after and support them, on the model of "they took care of you when you were unable to do so, now it's your turn to support them". But then socially we decided that we didn't want that, and if you take the model of "move to where the money and jobs are" (again, another debate on here recently), then families by default were broken up - parents in one state, children scattered all over, having their own families and own lives elsewhere.

We've done away with the expectations of supporting the parents and any suggestion of "I have to give a percentage of my wages directly to them, just because they decided they wanted to live on Easy Street and have kids to take care of them" is going to be resented. Besides, this is what we're doing currently with social security - you pay in, then in old age you get the benefits, but they come from the payments made by the younger workers. We don't have enough younger workers and there's already a lot of resentment about "Boomer voters going to vote in elections so they get a bigger slice of the pie".

Maybe I hate my parents, don't want to pay them back, so I deliberately fail at life in order that the "future tax revenue" is as small as possible. What are they gonna do, have a late-late-late term abortion?

I don't expect people are going to stop caring about their own life.

Also, he suggests that the asset can be sold and transferred, have financial derivatives made, etc.

That's why I think it's foolish. You're packaging up someone's life as a bundle of "we can make PROFIT off this" and that's not how it works. Who wants to be an indentured servant, even to their parents? And the experience we've had with packaging up and selling on and that bundle gets sold on etc. should make us wary. "I owe my soul to the company store, 21st century version" - the vulture fund that bought my future tax earnings is sending me to the salt mines.

I've never found Hanson a compelling thinker, and the more of his batshit 'let's just imagine for a second that you gently rape a sleeping woman' thought experiments I hear about, the less impressed I am.

But you literally already have to pay the money, just to the government.

Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.

Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”

My main issue with this line of thought is that we aren't running out of people, and reducing the population by 75% or more seems positively wonderful. The US was plenty capable of a very rich and successful society with far fewer people than today.

Why would we want more? Do you want 1.2 billion people in the US, with the accompanying congestion, resource usage, and garbage? Why is 330 million the magic number? Surely 75 million is sufficient?

Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?

Why not have one billion Americans (I haven't read it yet myself)? We are nowhere near constraints on space right now; the United States is on the low end for population density. There's so much space to grow.

Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?

The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse. Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people. If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen. Especially because developed countries are the ones where birthrates are falling the most, we could see us unable to maintain modern standards of living, and much less innovation. Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe. And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.

People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.

But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?

We are nowhere near constraints on space right now

No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people. Kowloon Walled City is the constraint on space. I don't want that.

The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse.

Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.

If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen.

The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement. This is part of why labor value has declined so precipitously. A farmer today can produce many multiples of the amount of food of one 80 years ago, with fewer people working to make that happen. Most of our economy is either providing service tasks (the demand of which obviously falls proportionally to the population) or performing largely pointless clerical tasks. You could achieve the same real output with far fewer people, and likely much higher on a production-per-capita ratio (which is the measure that actually matters).

Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people

I expect this is likely true for some comparatively small amount of time. Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare. Sucks for those that didn't have kids, sure. They made bad choices and can pay for them.

Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe.

80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.

And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.

The disuse of things currently in existence would have an infinitesimally small impact on the amounts of garbage compared to that produced by an extra ~650 million Americans.

People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.

No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.

But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?

Absolutely not. I will continue to tell people I care about that they should raise a family, I just don't know why I would want to increase the birthrate among the population at large in the meantime. The ideal scenario as far as I'm concerned is "literally no one but me and my family and friends has kids," but that's obviously not realistic.

No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people.

Do you have evidence you can point to for this?

Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.

I don't know that I'm convinced of this. The earth is not currently running up against Malthusian limits, so having the increased labor force allows for more work, more innovation (and so more technological progress), more division of labor, and so on. Of course, some parts of that depend on having decent institutions.

Anyway, average (arithmetic mean, I assume?) quality of life is not my sole concern, but I get that it's yours, so I'll assume it for the sake of the argument.

The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement.

Yes, and the current fertility rates are dysgenic with respect to IQ, at least in the US, though I don't remember to what extent. We need a smart enough populace for upkeep, at the very least.

Roughly the same can be said of the remainder of your paragraph.

Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare.

But this doesn't depend on public spending. With fewer people, and an inverted population pyramid, more of the total wealth will be devoted to supporting retirees.

80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.

Fair enough.

No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.

But demographic trends are currently removing the most productive people from the group, or at least moving in that direction.

I think decline in population also can lead to insufficiently maintained infrastructure and buildings.

I think I would take post-depopulation Detroit over ~late 70s/early 80s ditto, and the rural parts of Japan and Spain, for instance, seem quite nice.

The problem is that there can't be cruise ships and video games if there aren't enough people working good enough jobs to pay the tax revenues to support that life. Economic collapse due to lack of labour also means that the cruise ships don't get built and if built, can't be staffed, etc.

The problem isn't that there are fewer people. That's the good part.

The problem is that there are fewer Europeans.

I think a large fraction of the people who are in favor of reorganizing society for the sake of more fertility are not really concerned with how large the population will be in the future, they are just consciously or unconsciously trying to sneak in social conservatism (what they really want) by using the argument that "society will collapse if the fertility is low". It is similar to how some people who claim to want to fight anthropogenic climate change are really just trying to sneak in far left social and economic policies by appealing to people's fear of climate change.

There are also some who are mainly worried about their own ethnic group being outbred by other ethnic groups. That at least is a pragmatic and tangible argument, rather than being fundamentally an emotion-driven preference like I think the majority of social conservatives' social conservatism is.

Yeah i don't get it. I want fewer people. Not more!

Malta - a country that used to have a total ban on abortion until 2023, after which it relaxed it to allow abortion to save the life of the mother - has EU's lowest TFR.

Abortion bans are mostly worthless without contraception bans, as least as far as impact-on-tfr goes

Abortion bans are worthless when you’re a €60, two hour budget airline flight from somewhere with legal abortion.

We won't run out of people. Subpopulations with higher fertility rates will outcompete. In the short run, though, countries may shrink, and the burden of caring for the elderly fall on a smaller and smaller working population, which in turn makes it harder and harder for that population to also take care of kids of their own.

It's all a result of socialist policies allowing people to offset the cost of their choice to not have children onto others. We still sort of "punish" childrearing in the sense that governments are strongly concerned with the material welfare of the elderly, but not so concerned with the financial capacity of those providing for the elderly to have children of their own.

"The Italian government currently contributes around 30% of its overall annual public spending (net of interest expenses) to pensions."

"Government spending in Italy was last recorded at 56.1 percent of GDP in 2022"

Putting these figures together, working-class people are shouldered by the elderly with a tax burden equivalent to nearly 40 percent of their earnings. If they did not have to pay for these pensions (not to mention other large expenses such as medical care) their salaries would be 40 percent higher.

I don't have the time to make an effortpost about this right now but this is obviously the issue. These married couples already have the equivalent of many children to look after, through no fault of their own. A frugal, average-earning couple could probably get away with raising 3-4 children on less than 40% of their income. Before banning contraceptives etc. let's fix the broken system that forces poor couples at childrearing age to pay for the luxurious retirements of unrelated elderly people.

The higher fertility rate subpopulation thing does provide a chance of running out of productive workers, though. One of the killer hacks of avoiding the fertility decline associated with being a productive member of industrial civilization is to just call the bluff of the other members when it comes to willingness to let you starve.

In the US that would be basically just the haredim. Ghettos really don’t have that high a TFR anymore and other very high TFR subcultures are at least workers even if they’re not doing particularly skilled work.

It's all a result of socialist policies allowing people to offset the cost of their choice to not have children onto others.

I think it's not so simple. While it is true that the average social security recipient takes out more than he or she put in, this is to some extent balanced by the fact that people who have fewer children have more time and energy to be economically productive and are thus also in a way economically subsidizing people who have more children. One would need to analyze relative economic productivity between people with various numbers of children in order to get a clear view of what is happening.

Well, putting aside the selfish aspect of having kids (there are benefits that go along with the costs after all), I think generally raising kids is harder than putting more time into your job. On average those who have more kids will be working harder overall than those who don't and happen to make more money because they're more career-oriented.

Further, I very much doubt that in countries with such a large tax burden, those without kids are making nearly as much of a financial contribution as the kids themselves will. Three kids each making $100,000 per year will generate much more wealth for the state than the childfree couple making an extra $200,000 per year due to their decision, not to mention the exponential effects of those kids going on to have kids of their own.

So, yes, there are other factors to consider, but I'm confident that if we looked at the actual numbers we'd find this factor in particular pretty negligible.

This is the most dysgenic possible approach.

I think that honor goes to what the US has long done, taxing people who work to pay for the non-working non-elderly, and paying the latter extra if they have more kids.

If you want to use money to incentivize something requiring at least as much effort as full-time employment, you should expect to have to compensate people on a similar scale. As far as I know, no policy has come anywhere close to this yet. Before writing off carrots, try paying families 30-50% of the median personal income for each kid, every year, for the kid's entire period of minority. See what happens.

(I know, nobody wants to model parenting this way, because we like to believe it's some sacred endeavor set apart from crass commerce. But the reality is that it's in competition with the market for labor-hours, and it's in competition with everything supplied by the market as a source of utility. It benefits little from automation, so it's subject to cost disease, and becomes a little less attractive relative to alternatives that aren't every year.)

It is a combination of feminism and globalism. The first makes it hard for any particular mother to be a SAHM. Even if you solve the economic issues, there isn’t frequently a cohort of other women in the neighborhood to (1) help each other out and (2) socialize.

The second frequently involves kids moving away from where they grew up for economic opportunity. Extended family therefore are not heavily involved in family life which makes it harder for parents and less rewarding.

Maybe you could solve the first one (eg large tax breaks for mothers who drop out of the work force when they have kids) but the second is challenging. Remote work in theory could help but remote work itself has short comings.

New France fined men whose daughters remained unmarried after 16. Early 20th century Argentina fined bachelors.

Both societies(French Canadians and argentines) maintained high tfr long after declines had started everywhere else. This is because in most societies, the tfr issue is not due to DINK’s. It’s due to a high percentage of unmarried people. Even Japan and South Korea have stable married TFRs.

I’m not sure that fining unmarried people is the solution, but I am sure that fixing the lack of partnering is the solution- fines may not be the best answer, here. This is a deeper issue and I have an effortpost bouncing around in my head about gender polarization, but it’s likely to be a next month thing if I get around to it- as it has been for the last several months.

Please write it. I've had an effortpost about gender polarization and unrealistic expectations for relationships bouncing around in my head also. I think it may be in the top three biggest world issues right now, it seems to be happening everywhere.

Ok, I’ll try to get around to it.

If I compare the US' and Argentina's fertility rate trends over the course of the 20th century, I see that Argentina overall had a higher rate for most or all of that time, but the general trends are basically the same. Actually, in Argentina the rate halved between 1900 and 1950, whereas in the US it decreased by a similar but somewhat smaller amount (the US baby boom makes it hard to figure out where to put the "right" side (chart-wise) of the comparison in a way that is meaningful.

I have a few questions

1-Who is "we"?

2-What punishments are you thinking about dolling out to the childless?

3-What good are a ton of people going to do when AI and robotics do all the jobs?

Ah yes, so now if you're single you not only have to deal with the pain of nobody wanting to be with you, but you get punished by the government for not having children. Seems very reasonable and not at all cruel. Not to mention that punishing people for the state of their family is something a tyrant would do, not a reasonable government.

It's by design, 2rafa likes incels to suffer more.

  1. Don't put words in others' mouths.

  2. Especially when they aren't even involved. Did you reply in the wrong subthread?

sorry

On the positive side, it makes single people much more likely to find someone!

On the other hand, I think we need to make some tough decisions that will make life worse for childless people. A society that privileges its leafs at the expense of its roots will soon have neither.

On the positive side, it makes single people much more likely to find someone!

I've always wondered if it would make a funny reality TV show to take some incels and femcels and make them date and cohabitate. I think witnessing the children to come out of such relationships would be even funnier!

I don't personally think that the fertility rate is a problem, so I don't think a solution is needed. But if one is going to try to solve it, punishing childless people is just about the worst way I can think of. Like I said, a lot of people who have no children are that way not by their own choice (infertile or nobody wants to marry them). Punishing those people (who already are unhappy with their situation) is just plain cruel.

One of the biggest sticks is a pension divisor when under 4 grand children and I'd probably qualify that with taxpaying grandchildren.

That seems like poor policy. Even a pretty aggressive procreator is going to struggle to reach 4 21+ GC at 65, and it would in turn strongly penalise the family if the 21 year old grand daughters are forced into work and taxpaying instead of procreating.


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