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Epistemic Status: Befuddled. A little gobsmacked, even.
Every time a new major cause for low TFR is discussed, there seem to be decent counterexamples readily available. Is it chemicals in the environment? Sperm counts do seem to be going down. Purely a social phenomena? Or more broadly economic, where the increased expense of raising kids and the increased earning (and consumption!) potential of high IQ individuals makes kids less important since you don't need 10 of them to help you tend crops.
Status seems like the popular explanation du jour so I'm pretty enthusiastically exploring it. BUT I do now believe the problem is multifactor and there are likely hidden(?) feedback loops. But it can't be THAT tough a nut to crack? We've successfully produced hundreds of generations of humans, it is our default setting, it shouldn't be hard to put us back in that setting!
So my model of Western Women does work with the status argument. Women are perceiving that being a girlboss or free spirit are high status, and that motherhood inhibits pursuit of both those lifestyles, so their status-seeking instincts pull them into and keep them in a metastable position that diverts them from motherhood until some large force (possibly biological clock) knocks them back over to that portion of the graph.
And I sincerely believe that if we flooded the zone such that every commercial, every movie, every other T.V. show, and our news media in general, was promoting motherhood as an ideal, we'd see almost overnight improvement as women gravitate towards the Schelling point for high status.
But it is hard for me to believe that effective policies can be built that won't have huge second-order effects that we can't predict. And those second-order effects will emerge whether or not we achieve the actual policy goals. I'm just skeptical that social problems can be fixed with increasingly complex rulemaking! But it does seem obvious that current policies are bad, too.
Yet, another component of the problem is single motherhood. We can't just have women spurting out babies if they're going to be dependent on state resources their whole lives, and the well-known issues that children raised in single-parent homes tend to exhibit. So you have to glorify families and encourage men to stick around, on top of making motherhood high-status. And about 1-in-5 women in the U.S. is a single mom! (note: not controlling for race)
This likely means removing any subsidies or incentives for females to enter the workspace, and stop subsidizing degrees with little economic value, since those create the double-whammy where a woman ends up burning 4 or more (high fertility!) years on the degree, then gets stuck in a career path that almost certainly isn't economically productive enough to justify the loss of her childrearing years. I will go ahead and say that there certainly are cases where women are able to be economically productive in a career, and it is possible to balance career and childrearing!
I would hope that removing incentives, gender balance requirements, and subsidies is all it takes, but maybe there also have to be some kind of direct legal barriers to women entering careers and becoming Married to a Corporation that can give her everything she needs for a 'fulfilling' life... except kids. I'm hoping that the free market is still going to select for exceptional women to make economic and social contributions, but... exceptional women should also be passing on their genes, one hopes!
There would also have to be some goal of preventing women from becoming Brides of the State, where big daddy government is picking up the tab for her kids and making sure she never falls below a certain level of economic destitution even if she's disabled, not working, not married, and raising 3 kids, possibly all from different fathers.
So a side effect of keeping women out of the workforce is it would immediately make marrying and staying with a man more appealing because now there's a certain amount of 'necessity' to having a provider in the picture, since she can't rely on governments or a subsidized career path to support her forever. And remember, this is on top of raising the social status of motherhood!
(I would be willing to couple all of that with a one-time loan forgiveness act to give women who already made that choice a break. Probably tying it to conditions that they get/stay married for 5 years and have at least one kid during that time)
Also, women themselves need to shape up. Okay, very unfair to generalize, but also a blunt fact. Running the numbers on a superficial level shows a pretty damning picture, with Gen Z showing staggering amounts of obesity, absurdly high rates of LGBT identification, mental illnesses (I'm choosing to make those separate categories, but I daresay its related to the LGBT thing), attendant pharmaceutical dependence, and some indeterminate amount that have become sex workers via Onlyfans and such, which is all to say not very appealing as spouses.
AND they lack the sort of domestic skills that would actually make them good wives and mothers. So even if we raise the status of motherhood and marriage and stack the economic deck to encourage family formation, you have to make them an appealling prospect on their own if men are going to jump on the role of partner and provider instead of sticking with porn and video games. And yes, perhaps bans on porn and restrictions on video games should be on the table, as much as that offends my libertarian sensibilities, I think there's a major problem of superstimuli sucking young people into inescapable loops which partially explains the TFR problem.
I somewhat accept the argument that the mere act of having a child can encourage people to step up, so to an extent I'm willing to just say "SEND IT!" and let the chips fall where they may. I don't endorse that particular study, mind, and indeed assume its probably bullshit in some key way as most social studies seem to be.
And now the big one. I'm not sure how to solve it in real life, but the issue of so many women being childless does indeed have direct political implications, and these women seem to form the core political bloc that votes in favor of policies that destroy all the aforementioned incentives for family formation.
I don't necessarily want to say "repeal the 19th", but I worry about the incentives that come from targeting female voters and the ways that political actors will try to influence said voters with handouts and emotional pleas and the further incentive to keep these women childless and unhappy to ensure they continue to support the party.
This relates back to the 'Brides of the State' point above, to keep them from defecting from the pro-family arrangement they can't have outsize political power to vote for redistributive policies that will allow them to be single and childless (or unmarried but fruitful!) for their whole lives.
The best option I've really heard on this point is to give married persons some extra voting power, and maybe scale it by how many children they have. It literally does seem like we're going to have to create a sort of 'tiered' system wherein families with kids get treated better, politically, than everyone else, to keep the single and childless ones from dragging the system in a different direction.
But don't you worry, I'm not letting men off the hook, we gotta get dudes to rise to the occasion (there's a pun in there I'm not going to dig out) to help bring about more kids too, and be worthy of raising them and capable of defending them. And it so happens Dr. Faceh has a prescription for that!
I ALSO think we need to bring back the Basic Life Script that, if you follow it step by step, basically guarantees you'll never fall into poverty and will have a fulfilling if not extraordinary life, and make this the default expectation for young people coming up.
Religion offered a fully generalized method of keeping kids on such a script throughout their lives. I do not know how we're going to replace that with the overall decrease in religiosity. What the FUCK would a 'modern' Fertility Rite even look like, sans the religious undertones?
Males need good role models. Andrew Tate is the solution they've turned to because any "truly" Masculine Positive Role Model is simply disallowed in the current Zeitgeist. They need a reliable path/script to follow, and they need a meaningful, valuable reward to pursue. Family formation does a lot of the lifting here if men are willing to pick up the weight. An attractive woman is the short term 'reward' (so women need to be attractive, see above), then the kids provide the ongoing motivation.
Finally finally, all of this might not actually matter in the sense that low TFR may kill the globalized world, or AGI might kills humans before our population recovers anyway. Even if we could implement the right policies to fix birthrates, this all feels like angels dancing on the head of pins in terms of how it will effect our future trajectory, so much seems baked-in already.
PHEW. SO yeah, this is about the full state of my current thinking on the TFR problem and the broad gender split problem. To be sure it ties into other issues.
GUESS WHAT? Immigration and Diversity may depress TFR too!. I already know there's going to be a couple mottizens screaming at me "ITS THE IMMIGRATION STUPID! Deport all illegals and wages will rise, home prices will fall, and people will more readily form families!"
There's probably a chemical problem too. I read Slow Death by Rubber Duck in college and most of it seems to hold up, especially the parts about certain chemicals interfering with reproductive organs, testosterone, and fetal/infant development.
And yes there's probably an urban-rural factor, as almost every historical example shows that you increase density of humans and they have fewer kids. Yes yes we have to destroy the cities to save the humans. I didn't even discuss the Amish in this bit, but they're a relevant example.
As some people around here are fond of saying, it is possible that a FULL solution to the problem is 'coup-complete', and cannot be achieved without first overthrowing the governments of several countries. Shoutout to @Sloot in particular.
Please guys, I said right at the outset that its multifactor and I'm really uncertain about the major causes! I'm just proposing the policies I think most directly target the issue at hand. I really wish I had better things to do with my time than think about this at length and type long screeds to the internet. Better things like raising kids! That'd be really nice! BUT APPARENTLY I HAVE TO SOLVE ALL THE REST OF THIS to bring my chances up.
Damn. I really need to get laid.
I sense, from personal experience, booze and cocaine were the genesis of this one.
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I very much doubt the chemical role in fertility decline. For the most part, it's not young people trying and failing to have kids driving the decline, it's people trying and failing to have kids at ever older ages.
It's not chemicals impacting the odds of pregnancy, but it's also not people trying and failing at any age. It's young people trying to not have kids and succeeding that's driving the decline. The birth control pill is released, and within a little over a decade the fertility rate (births-per-1000-women) falls roughly in half, a greater drop than the previous WWI-Great-Depression-WWII plunge. Total Fertility Rate is what we usually care about in the end, but it's an integral of that instantaneous births-per-woman rate over a lifetime, so somewhat obfuscates how rapid the effect was.
In the decades since then, it seems that older people trying to have kids are succeeding more, not failing! The birth rate among mothers 40-44 has more than doubled from 1980-2015 (from very very little up to very little...), the birth rate among 35-39yo mothers is up 150% (which in that case is a significant increase in absolute terms too), and the birth rate among ages 30-34 nearly doubled since 1975.
But at ages 25-29 the rate shows no clear trend downward until a 2006 peak, at 20-24 it's down 25% from the 90s, and at 15-19 it's down nearly 2/3rds.
Looking at provisional 2023 numbers ... the older age groups' birth rate rises have stopped and held mostly flat over the last decade (except that 30-34 might be on its way down now?), 25-29 is more clearly starting its fall, 20-24 is now down 50% from the 90s, and 15-19 is now down by more than 75%.
I suppose there could be chemicals impacting the human drive toward life-long pair mating? In the US marriage has been plummeting for all age brackets for generations. But I think we've got so many cultural factors contributing to that, Occam says don't even bother checking for chemicals right now.
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Yes, but they both can play a role.
On the margins, lower sperm counts are going to make conception take longer which will make the problems of delaying the process even worse.
Like I said, there's probably 'hidden' feedback loops. Women go to college for 4 years, and delay childbirth, and get habituated to delaying childbirth, and there's no real social pressure to remind her that she's got limited time to act, and each year of delay is making it harder. Its a problem that ends up making itself worse, especially if feedback from other sources is included.
One policy I've tongue-in-cheek suggested is that every woman should be forced to wear a timer that counts down to the day she becomes infertile, so as to create some pressure to hurry up the process.
That's assuming that sperm counts are the limiting factor in a meaningful number of cases. Has time to conception meaningfully increased when controlling for age of both partners?
My understanding of reproductive stats is that they tend to be skewed by those who are struggling to conceive tending to meticulously document every attempt, whilst those who are fecund it just happens.
I've got a 5 month old daughter and I know it happened within about 2-3 sessions without protection with my partner, but that's never entering the medical record whilst somebody in their 40s who's exhaustively logging and trying supplementation will be reflected in the research body
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The decrease in religiosity seems to be largely petering out once you adjust for smaller generation sizes, though.
The other concern is that extant religions are watering down and suborning to modern norms, rather than the reverse.
Also if you count Progressivism as a religion then technically we might be in a historic high for pure fervor.
Churches with non-negligible under fifty populations do not generally do this.
Well based on my understanding most churches are struggling to attract under-fifties AND most churches are watering down teachings in hopes of attracting the younger crowds.
So the number that DO have non-negligible under fifty populations AND keep to the old ways are presumably small both in absolute numbers and in their relative share of the churchgoing population. At least according to my priors. No data I've seen locally refutes that, I can say for sure.
Happy to receive new data to contradict this though.
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Why are the problems with society my duty to fix? I'm already being asked to finance Boomer entitlements and their massive deficits, and now you want to take away the ability for me to enjoy the things that have given me a very happy, inadvertently MGTOW life. We all know that if a system was proposed that punished both men and women, that the punishments targeting men would get the political capital to pass first, long before anything targeting women would come into effect. Both the left and the right think men are the source of all the world's problems. My response would be a simple "buzz off". Let me do my own thing
Somehow I figured in this screed that basically calls for Making Women Subservient Again someone would zero in on male side of it.
I'm sympathetic, I hope I got that across:
I'm trying to make ways for guys to have meaning in their life. To get rewarded. Its in your blood. I'm never going to hold a gun to your head to take away what you love, but I am hoping to provide you a better offer.
I think the complaint comes down to the coup-complete aspect. If you could implement all these policies at once, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff: men and women each are given different sets of privileges and limits that offer them a fair expectation of equal happiness, for a net increase of happiness over rampant individualism (a tradeoff that creates more winners than losers, but there would still be losers).
In practice, though, the dynamics of politics and social change would bias the restrictions against men and the privileges toward women. The banning of porn and video games that make life seem a bit more bearable for losing men would happen first, and the rest would always be politically impractical.
I say this as someone who thinks that legal limitations on porn and video games would be beneficial for men, even without any offsetting privileges.
Yes, absent a serious upheaval in the vein of the Iranian revolution, incrementalism is the best/most realistic hope for getting stuff like this implemented. If you're going for one big upheaval, attacking full bore the political bloc of single women seems like the best 'all-in' approach. If you can restrict unmarried females' political power (and not just the vote, but their influence on almost every bureaucracy) then every subsequent policy proposal becomes easier to implement.
ALL THAT SAID, we'd 'only' be turning back the clock about 60 years, it seems like it would only take a single generation of incremental change to do so, if the will existed.
I wonder how much modern technology has made a return to previous settings impossible, though. Honestly, if I had to pick a policy I wouldn't ban video games, I would ban dating apps and severely restrict social media usage. That seems like it would be broadly beneficial if only by forcing more face-to-face interactions.
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When in their lives do women without children want children most? Best I can tell, there's two times -- one, mid to late teens. The other, late 30s to early 40s. In other words, shortly after they first can and when time is running out. We've dedicated an enormous amount of effort to convincing women in their teens and early 20s that having a child will ABSOLUTELY RUIN YOUR LIFE. You'll end up broke, on welfare and/or dependent on some sort of abusive boyfriend. Turns out this messaging has an effect.
I think its that, COMBINED with messaging that makes Careerism and casual sex and travel appear to be 'high status' is a big factor, yes. Hence my triangular model of female ambition (the name is a work in progress).
If the biological urge to have kids is strong, it shouldn't be easy to scare them away from it. But get them engaging in activities that preclude childbearing for a while, and they might fool themselves into thinking "there's time for that later."
It's not, but we've worked REALLY hard to do it.
Fair point.
This brings in the uncomfortable idea that there might need to be punishments and negative consequences for these anti-family forces for all they've done.
I didn't touch on that one in the screed up there but, uh, there will probably be some portion of the population that will keep trying to undermine family formation, and our policies should also be keeping them at bay too.
Physical removal, so to speak?
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I don't know if punishment is necessary; step one would be to get them out of the driver's seat and see what happens. The bigger problem is it's widely agreed that delay IS necessary; even among natalists, very few are going to think that a girl having a baby before finishing high school is a good idea. And that amount of delay might be tolerable. But I think expecting delay until after undergrad ends up just building in the habit of delay past the point of biological baby-craziness.
And if you want this to work without too many bad side effects, you're going to want the father to be married to the mother, too, which would be a big change as well; the model of the residential university would either go away or change a LOT. The larger problem may well be intractable.
I read this and think of my parents: Mom was fresh out of high school in the late 1970s when she married Dad, who is just two years older than her, and was already in the workforce (having dropped out of high school after 10th grade). Just a few years later, in the early 1980s, Mom pops me out a few weeks before her 22nd birthday; my first brother a year and a half later; and then my other brother, her youngest, just a couple of days after turning 26. And this family of 5 lived entirely off my Dad's handyman income, with Mom being a SAHM, and not entering the workforce proper until Youngest Brother was out of high school.
And this was just a few decades ago, not some ancient days of yore here. So really, I'd say the issue is simply the whole everyone-goes-to-college things. Is that bachelor's degree really necessary to do the job? If so, would it still be necessary if we hadn't devalued high school diplomas with "social promotion," grade inflation, and so on?
(Again, I keep coming back to how many of our problems would be solved if we got someone in power who went after Academia with an approach somewhere in the range from Henry VIII to Qin Shi Huang.)
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Not the most familiar with it, but I seem to recall someone describing to me that BYU is particularly supportive of students having families. I don't remember the details there, though.
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Congrats, you’ve discovered why the modal marriage arrangement throughout history was ‘teenaged girl with an older man’.
If you think we’re going to bring that back, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The fact of the matter is that at least part of the reason that 20 year old brides are so rare is the dearth of young, college aged men ready to be husbands. I suspect destigmatizing age gap relationships would boost the fertility rate dramatically. So start a TikTok trend of bragging about silver Fox husbands or something, I don’t know how you’re going to replicate the social conditions(aka patriarchy) that convinced young women in historical societies to marry older men.
In a word? Inflation.
Sure, there's some snark there, but there's a lot of stories from the Depression about wild age gap relationships just due to economic realities.
I am close to convince that the American economy of the next 20 - 30 years is utterly bifurcated. Zero "middle class." An utter divide between permanently dependent on the state for near serfdom conditions, and the independently able who are literally starting companies with the help of AI overnight and have more money than they know what to do with. The upper class status games will start to get very strange.
I certainly don’t think there’s nothing to this- my great-grandparents married at 17 and thirty because he was a millionaire in the early depression- but the pattern of ‘young woman seeks marriage to established man for economic reasons’ is one that our culture lacks the inclination towards- we have near-unlimited personal debt, a constant diet of TikTok fear porn about abusive men, and a much smaller gap in gender based economic prospects.
I also strongly doubt the narrative that artificial stupidity will be an economic wonderwaffe- a few people, disproportionately already very wealthy, will become even more wealthy from selling it as customer service improvements and it still won’t be able to turn on a wrench or supervise a construction site or get around all sorts of occupational licensing barriers.
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The age gap has rarely been more than 5 years, and you have to go back hundreds of years before average age of a woman at her first marriage was under 20. Teenagers weren't generally marrying "silver foxes" (though it happened).
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