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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12487 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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The 7 Habits of Highly Fertile People

I Background

Look into the comment section of any mainstream video or article on below-replacement fertility, and you will find a familiar refrain: it is simply too expensive to have children.

However, despite this common meme, the data do not bear it out. Plotting Total Fertility Rate (TFR) vs Household Income actually produces a U shape with peaks at household incomes <$20k and >$1m, and trough around $200k per year. 2012-2016, 2018-2022.

What is happening here?

My wife and I are members of the PMC, as are most of our friends. We are in our mid-thirties. We have noticed that our friends are branching into one of two forks:

  • High-PMC who have a household income of $400k+ and are having 2-3 children.
  • Low-PMC who have a household income of $150k - $200k and are childless, or have one child and are baffled as to how they could afford more.

Recently, I have had the opportunity to get to know well two families quite outside our social circle. The first is the family of a carpenter who makes $30/hour, lives in a rural area 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city, stay-at-home mom, five kids. The other is an urban family, headed by single-mom who works as a receptionist at a low-end hotel (making, I would guess $20-30k/year), also with five kids.

While these families are superficially quite different, when it comes to childrearing, they actually have a lot of beliefs and habits in common. And, these beliefs and habits stand in stark contrast to those of my peer group - folks who are making quite a bit more money and yet cannot imagine affording five children!

I document them below, mostly for myself:

TL;DR: High-fertility families structure their lives in such a way as to make children extremely cheap and dramatically less time-intensive.

II Habits of Highly Fertile People

1) High-fertility families do not believe that every child needs their own room.

  • Carpenter: Three bedroom house 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city costs around $200k. Husband and wife in the master, their three daughters share one bedroom and two sons share another.
  • Receptionist: Urban, subsidized apartment. Mother and baby share one bedroom, two girls in another room, two boys sleep in the living room on pull-out beds.
  • PMC: Cannot imagine having the millions it would take to afford a six-bedroom house in a tier-1 city.

2) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for education.

  • Carpenter: Stay-at-home mom is part of a homeschool pod with other families.
  • Receptionist: Sends her kids to the local public school in urban tier-2 city. The school is not good.
  • PMC: Would slit their throats rather than send their kids to the same public school as the receptionist. Intend to pay $25k-$40k/year/child for private school.

3) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for kids' stuff.

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Almost all of the clothes, toys, cribs, and other accessories that a child needs, their parents acquire for free. Hand-me-downs, Buy Nothing Facebook groups, friends/neighbors/family, etc.
  • PMC: Every kid needs brand-new everything. Sure, you might be able to get multiple uses out of your $800 crib or $300 car seat, but you are not shopping at Goodwill for little Charlotte.

4) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for enriching activities.

  • Carpenter: When the children are free they are either playing outside, playing inside (on screens), or doing chores. The older kids have part-time jobs. The kids do play sports through some homeschool rec-league I don’t understand. The parents spend very little, but the mom does have to drive the kids around for games.
  • Receptionist: Play outside of the apartment. Sometimes that's in the public library (video games on the library computers), sometimes that's the Boys and Girls Club, sometimes that's just out in the neighborhood. The mom spends $0 dollars and essentially no time on this.
  • PMC: $3,000 for Introduction to Data Science camp at Stanford, thousands of dollars between new gear and hotel rooms for travel sports (not to mention the hours spent driving), thousands for tutors in piano, math and foreign-languages.

5) High-fertility families start early. They have known no other adult life, besides being parents. Their tastes are quite modest.

  • Carpenter: Had their first kid at 20. Mostly cook in, occasionally go to casual-dining restaurants like Applebees, spend their vacations driving to state or national parks. Have never been to Disneyland and don’t think they’re missing out.
  • Receptionist: First kid at 17. Basically the same as the above, except doesn’t really vacation.
  • PMC: Spent their twenties eating at Michelin-starred restaurants and traveling overseas. Now, starting to have children in their early-to-mid-thirties, they simply do not have enough fertile years left to get to five children. And, furthermore, they cannot fathom bringing five kids to French Laundry nor buying that many tickets to Morocco.

6) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for childcare:

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Grandparents, friends, neighbors cost $0. The older children are expected to care for the younger.
  • PMC: $40k+/year for a nanny or $10k/year + an extra bedroom for an au-pair

7) High-fertility families pay very little for (and think very little about) healthcare

  • Carpenter: To be honest, I don’t know
  • Receptionist: Medicaid, cheapest possible pediatrician + the school nurse
  • PMC: Not only do they have excellent insurance through their employers, they also pay out-of-pocket for all kinds of treatments. Moreover, they spend a lot of time meticulously researching pediatricians, specialists, orthodontists, etc.

I am not trying to say that having five children is the only worthy goal in life. And, it is entirely possible that the progeny of the PMC will somehow be “better” than the progeny of the Carpenter or Receptionist - healthier, higher-IQ, more worldly.

III Policy Ideas for Increasing Fertility

It also occurs to me that, even if you cannot change the beliefs and habits of the PMC, you could still make policy decisions that increase their fertility:

1) Decrease the cost of housing.

  • There are, of course, a myriad of known-good solutions: from slashing regulations in order to increase housing supply, to improving transportation to make it viable to live in the ‘burbs and commute into the city.
  • Even if you cannot convince the PMC that each kid does not, in fact, need their own bedroom, by reducing the cost of that one marginal bedroom, you increase their fertility.

2) Improve the public schools

  • Imagine if an excellent education, in a safe environment! was commonly available in American public schools. Not only would more families choose to send their children to public schools over paying tens of thousands for private schools, you would also dramatically lower the cost of housing in those few school districts that actually do a decent job.

3) Decrease the cost stuff

4) Enriching activities:

  • No ideas. Competition here is zero-sum.

5) Starting early:

  • Wild first idea: perhaps make sex-ed a required course in college with a strong emphasis on fertility windows.

6) Childcare:

  • Ensure Middle America thrives so that young PMC don’t feel like they have to leave the heartland for the coasts where they don’t have grandparents + the same social network for childcare. Ha. Ha. Easy to say.

7) Healthcare:

  • Destroy the AMA’s supply-limiting bullshit, dramatically increase the number of doctors, dramatically decrease cost of healthcare.

I think a lot of it stems from the desire to have PMC children. They can live a much more relaxed lifestyle, like the one @2rafa outlined in another comment:

Our couple who make $250k a year (by regular American standards a great household income) could move to the burbs, or perhaps to an MCOL state, buy a spacious McMansion, send their kids to a nice, safe, middle class public high school with good teachers. They could go skiing on the East Coast instead of to Aspen. They could go to a nice middle class resort in the US for a week in Summer instead of to Santorini or Positano for the IG slideshow. They could even spend two weeks in Europe if they were willing to fly economy and stay in a hotel that wasn’t five star. The likelihood is they would be no less happy.

If the children of this couple are smart and ambitious, they will ascend to the PMC themselves. If they regress to the mean, they will live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But that's not enough for the parents! They imagine this as their own personal failure and they will do everything to ensure their children remain PMC. This means sending them to the right school, maintaining the level of consumption that lets them socialize with PMC and UC children, padding their college application with the right experiences, etc.

Voila, their children are now a single child, because that's all they can afford. And I don't think it's a bad thing. Low PMC fertility ensures that elite overproduction is not a threat: the class is continuously being refreshed by middle-class outliers.

Those couples DO exist; New Jersey and Killington, VT are full of them.

My mother grew up in a two bedroom house with her parents and five siblings, and I remember how silly she found the American idea of each child having their own room. Since there is clearly no material limitation on PMC couples raising large families, the problem is entirely cultural and I doubt it can be addressed directly through government intervention.

I've come to the conclusion that this isn't really a problem from my POV since I and my coreligionists are already living the carpenter lifestyle (despite being white collar). So I actually am against top down policy changes that make it easier for the status-obsessed, those ideologically opposed to me, and those who are too weak to self-sacrifice to have children. I want more children for those who share my worldview and who have the proper disposition to raise a family. I don't want to pay more taxes for a cultural reeducation campaign that doesn't address the core reasons why the PMC are ill-suited to reproduce (ideology and personality).

my coreligionists

Who are they?

There are no highly fertile people, only highly fertile women. Women alone make the decision, not couples. “Her body, her choice.” That is the way we have structured modern society. At the time, we didn’t know women would bail on their duty to reproduce. Instead of using the power they received wisely and dutifully, they abuse it to extort ever more resources, while failing to maintain even replacement-level fertility.

As you note, rationally speaking, they already have more than enough (public schools, free entertainment, essentially free healthcare, etc). Giving them even more would just encourage them to limit the supply of babies even more, like a cartel.

I know more women who want children than men. Where is this huge number of 20-30 year old men who want kids? There are many who want a girlfriend, or perhaps even a wife, meaning a hot woman who wants to have sex with them. But if you gave them the choice between a hot girlfriend on one side and a wife and two kids, the travails of pregnancy, waking up five times a night, looking after young children, buying clothes and food, doctor’s visits and cleaning up bodily fluids on the other, I think they would mostly pick the former.

I'd argue that the delay of marriage is mostly driven by women and not men in this particular social condition, and the resulting normalization of late marriage erodes young men's willingness to prepare themselves for marriage long-term.

The hot girl makes the choice between the two. She can merely withhold sex before commitment. The man can withhold the commitment as long as he wants if he is getting easy sex while burning through the sexual primes of one or more women.

There's a lot of truth to this, but it misses a bit of my perceived gender dynamics. In the past, the wife and both their families would pressure the husband to go ahead and have kids. That pressure is much rarer nowadays: it seems gauche for someone not in the couple to ask them to do something. And, for whatever reason, wives pressure their husbands about kids less nowadays. Everyone has shifted their preference away from the couple having kids, in favor of other priorities. Boomer would-be grandparents prefer their obligation-free vacations, wives prefer Michelin dinners, and husbands prefer ???.

A particular large category in my friend groups is single-parent women with one kid. A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid (as indicated by thousands upon thousands of memes on this topic on the Internet), and many of the rest will be of the kind that any sane mother would keep away from their kid's vicinity.

simply due to seeing them as used goods

As @jeroboam mentioned below, it's not just that. There are other relevant factors also usually at play. I don't agree that the sire / biological father is always in the mix with various potential disadvantages and risks the new husband faces, but often he is. Also, his (the husband's) entire social circle is likely to look down on him as a loser, usually for a good reason. His wife is also likely to see him basically as a spare of secondary importance.

Also, his (the husband's) entire social circle is likely to look down on him as a loser, usually for a good reason.

Well, yes, exactly; it's not just down to people's individual preferences, there's an entire tendency in culture that's making people even less likely to consider single moms as a partner than otherwise.

A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid

That’s whitepilling and a case for optimism, if there’s a huge amount of Western men out there with some sense of self-respect and self-preservation. Hopefully, this will translate into other aspects of their worldviews in the coming years/decades.

If women’s feelings are valid when they get the ick from short, awkward, or low status men, men’s feelings are valid when they get the ick from single mothers. Men aren’t entitled to sex; women aren’t entitled to relationships. His body; his choice—a single mother already made hers when she had some other man’s kid(s).

Well, insofar as the original point that it's not just women who make the choice regarding fertility goes, QED?

Which original point? For example, I was responding to your comment in isolation and not to, say, @Tree's remark about "There are no highly fertile people, only highly fertile women. Women alone make the decision, not couples," which I didn't read at the time but I went back to find just now.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that statement by the letter. The world is a big place; I'm sure there there are couples out there where the wife wanted more children but the husband didn't. However, directionally and qualitatively it's true, that women are the gatekeepers of sex and children.

Ironically, though, your anecdote about the women in your friend groups supports @Tree's remark rather than rebuts it. Your single mother acquaintances made their reproductive choices: while they were younger, fresher, and childless, they chose to bear the children of men who preferred not to commit to them and/or the children that resulted. The "huge amount of men," or subset thereof, that would had otherwise come along later and be among the potential pool of suitors had nothing to do with it.

If in my town I put up a used car for sale at the asking price of a new car, and expected the buyer would help payoff loans I secured using the car as collateral when it was new, it wouldn't surprise me if my townspeople didn't see my totally generous offer as adding to the choices available in the town's automobile market, and would at most be interested in taking my car out for a test-drive for their amusement. I'd understand if they preferred to wait for new cars to open up in the marketplace, or opted to continue renting cars, or walking or biking in the meanwhile instead. QED, indeed.

A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid

When dating, I also considered single mothers out of the question. Their allegiances will (rightly) be with their children rather than their new partner. And the biological father will always be in the mix, too. Mostly I wanted my own kids, not to parent someone else's. Why is that wrong?

And the biological father will always be in the mix, too.

Not neccesarilly, and some people are genetics deniers.

There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.

The former is historically common and is a great situation for all around, this is a person who took til death do us part seriously and probably retains, despite her loss, the character and personality to maintain a healthy relationship.

In the latter two cases, there’s tremendous baggage, and a strong suggestion of poor relationship characteristics. If she couldn’t work things out with the father of her children, who’s to say she’ll be able to work things out with you when things get tough?

Spousal abuse and infidelity mix things up, and it really depends on how exactly that went down. But I suspect most cases of single motherhood in adults young enough to continue to have children have to do with poor relationship behaviors and poor character, things that should give someone pause even if children weren’t in the mix.

Widows are a tiny percentage of single mothers. The vast majority of single mothers fall into two categories:

  1. Women who had sex with a man whom any fucking idiot could have told you would be unwilling or unable to marry her and work hard to provide for the kids (criminal thugs, homeless drifters, married men, etc.)

  2. Women who divorced a perfectly adequate man for the crime of not being Chad, excusing their decision to destroy their own lives, their husbands' lives, and their children's lives by saying they were unhappy.

Widows are not single mothers. They are widows.

There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.

Granted, but the number of dating age single mother widows is to within an epsilon of zero compared to the number of dating age single mother high-time-preference-poor-planning-out-of-wedlock-dumpster-fires.

I don’t think it’s wrong, it just is. People take what they can get. One interesting thing, though, is that parenting another man’s child is probably less common today than it’s ever been, if only because historically orphanhood and widowhood were much more common, such that 150 years ago it would have been quite common in very large families to have one or two kids around who weren’t biological descendants of the patriarch, or perhaps related to him at all. My grandfather told me about his parents growing up around various orphans and so on in the family, people would come in and out.

Widows produce better outcomes than never married single moms.

I don't think anyone's individual decision to refrain from dating anyone is wrong, per se. The bigger problem is that there's a whole memetic culture built around the idea that if you date a single mom then you've lost the game, increasing the chances that such women continue to be lonely (and without a chance to have more kids, which many of them do desire).

The original question wasn't about rights and wrongs anyway, it was about whether the fertility decision was women's and women's alone.

increasing the chances that [single-mom] women continue to be lonely...

The vast majority of such women were not involuntarily thrust into the status of single mother without a partner; there is a living male out there who fathered that child, with whom the woman cannot or will not maintain a satisfactory relationship. Some times that's for good reasons (though it does call into question the woman's judgment in procreating with such a guy to begin with), but most of the time it's a mixed-to-negative signal at best.

I think in the classes in which single motherhood is most common, having a ‘baby momma’ who already has a kid (or three) with another man or other men is pretty common. Also not hugely unusual in very bohemian circles, actors and theater people and whatnot. For the regular middle classes, I think many get divorced after they’ve had 2 or 3 kids, and in the case of 1 they can usually find an older man (usually 10 years older, possibly a kid or two of his own) to marry and have one more with.

I have heard that in the Nordics it is more common for respectable, non-bohemian people to have kids without marriage (still looked down upon in the Anglo world), though, and that couples will do things like live together for 10 years, have one kid, then split.

I have heard that in the Nordics it is more common for respectable, non-bohemian people to have kids without marriage (still looked down upon in the Anglo world), though, and that couples will do things like live together for 10 years, have one kid, then split.

Anecdotally, Scandinavians don't feel the need to marry to form stable relationships. The better Scandi cohabitations are more stable than the worse American marriages. I don't know whether anyone has looked at the overall stability of Scandinavian vs US couples.

Yes, it's generally true. In Finnish, while marriage is called avioliitto, a stable live-in relationship is termed avoliitto, and the closeness of the two words seems pretty deliberate. Generally speaking people in stable live-in relationships with kids get married at some point, but it can take quite a long time for them to do so.

If the president wants something, who cares what the vice president thinks? The buck stops with women. Stop blaming the closest male for what is 100% women’s decision.

Affordable five and six bedroom houses are simply not a realistic goal. The PMC fertility rate can’t be raised without changing the things they value- from ‘traveling’ that never gets off the beaten path to children.

What family needs a five or six bedroom house? Sharing rooms has historically been the norm, and still is for most people who actually have big families (i.e. the poor).

You can plausibly do so by raising the prestige of having children.

  • encourage or enforce a policy that women on TV prioritize children over career. Make it a thing where a high powered career woman has a baby and stays home with it, and this is shown as a good and desirable things to do. Show other women as jealous of the mom at home raising her own child as they wage-slave over spreadsheets they don’t actually care about.

  • prioritize schools teaching home skills. Not just cooking and sewing, but simple repairs, budgeting, etc. teach women to do those things and let them realize just how creative one can be in homemaking. Teaching childcare is a given, especially when it’s explained just how important mothers and fathers actually are to children.

  • encourage generous family leave policies— at least a full year.

I have a question: of the two political parties in the USA, which one do you think is more likely to try and enact such policies as you have described?

"I want more babies in the United States of America"

So, just so we are talking about the same thing, you're saying you believe the Republican party is more likely to decrease the cost of housing, improve the public schools, decrease the cost of common goods, encourage community enrichment through programs, promote sexual education, promote livable wages and decrease the cost of healthcare than the Democrats?

In practice, republicans have done much better on housing costs than democrats.

Republicans are usually better on school choice than Democrats and that's basically the only way to break the back of the school district industrial complex. That impacts housing prices too, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out in The Two Income Trap.

As for increasing wages, reducing costs,and reducing the cost of healthcare, neither party seems to be capable of actually enacting free market reforms that would improve the situation, so it's basically a wash.

In my experience in exclusively-Democrat Tier-1 cities, the Democrats have done the exact opposite of all of those things: made housing more expensive, destroyed the quality of public schools, increased the cost of common goods, promoted sexual misinformation, and increased the cost of healthcare. I'd give the odds of the Republican party decreasing the cost of housing, improving public schools, etc at 20% - doubled since the inauguration.

Sure, you’ve noticed something pretty important about PMC fertility.

As a single person, you can live a “Yuppie” lifestyle in a big city on $120-150k a year. As a couple, you can live it on $200-$250k a year, which is even cheaper per-head.

As parents of 3 children, that same lifestyle goes from costing $200-250k a year to costing maybe $900,000 a year. You want to live in the same part of Manhattan? Your rent goes from $4k a month to $12k. Your kids cost $140k a year (post tax) to educate. Your summer trip to Europe goes from costing $10k to $40k, when you factor in needing three hotel rooms, 5 business class seats instead of 2 etc. You need a nanny, if both parents want to keep working which they usually need to. You need a housekeeper (not the same). You need to save for their college tuition, which will be insanely expensive.

Of course, nobody actually needs these things. Our couple who make $250k a year (by regular American standards a great household income) could move to the burbs, or perhaps to an MCOL state, buy a spacious McMansion, send their kids to a nice, safe, middle class public high school with good teachers. They could go skiing on the East Coast instead of to Aspen. They could go to a nice middle class resort in the US for a week in Summer instead of to Santorini or Positano for the IG slideshow. They could even spend two weeks in Europe if they were willing to fly economy and stay in a hotel that wasn’t five star. The likelihood is they would be no less happy.

But of course, they want to appear richer than they are, which is why they did all those things in the first place. And the number of jobs paying $900k (or even $450k) is in much shorter supply than the number paying $150k. So there we are. The people in this bracket who have many kids are the people so rich (either from working in one of the few jobs that pay this much, or having family money) they can live the lifestyle with kids, or the people who are willing to sacrifice the whole thing.

So how much of the red state fertility advantage do you think comes from the attitude that public schools are fine, actually, as long as they’re not in the ghetto, and public colleges are where normal people go(private schools are for oddballs or the genuinely highly exceptional)?

I think a lot of it, combined with cheaper housing like 2rafa said. The problem that afflicts the PMC is they value living an urban and high-status lifestyle over having children, and act accordingly. When they do have children, they stress them out pushing them to become petit elites through prestigious education, so they too can afford a shoebox apartment in Manhattan.

The other problem is a lot of the interesting careers for smart people require geographical clustering in urban areas — and more upper-middle-class people are interested in those careers. Work-from-home was a big plus for people whose main problem was this; it enabled people who were trained in a professional field to work in an area with red-tribe property values. A ton of the COVID-era population shift came down to WFH making it an option for moderate professionals to move from blue tribe areas to red tribe areas.

I’m critical of the impact of WFH on productivity, but I think some element of professional geographic distribution would be the greatest thing that could ever be done to get the PMC to consider having more children.

The really interesting thing about this is that the PMC lifestyle in Manhattan looks like poverty to rednecks with three kids- it's a shoebox apartment, after all. Public transportation might be nice if it was clean, orderly, and safe, but the subway is... not that. Materially, the people in a trailerpark outconsume them.

Agreed.

That being said, I think there’s a lot to say for an urban lifestyle — if, as you’ve said, it’s safe, clean, and accessible. My view is that our biggest problem is our country has so many great and historic cities, but we’ve allowed inner-city crime to absolutely gut and destroy them, so any and all who want that kind of life have to fight over the scraps that aren’t totally ruined. We’ve allowed the bad optics of arresting and detaining criminals and gangsters who happen to be black men to absolutely ruin the possibility of city people to live good lives in many places, which is a very sad way in which the Democratic coalition is at odds with itself. And meanwhile Republicans are just living their best lives out in the burbs or the country.

I think cheaper housing is almost certainly part of it, and that likely is too.

For (2) I'd add "Provide more school choice". I live in a school district where the best public schools are barely adequate, but in Texas the state will also pay for charter schools, which makes a difference. Charter schools can't screen students by anything more than some combination of "the applicant is in our geographic area", "applicants with a sibling already attending get preference", and "random lottery", but it turns out that the implicit self-screening of "the parents are concerned enough with their kids' education to move schools" and "the parents are on-the-ball enough to be able to get kids to school without a bus driving to their house" is enough to concentrate the most motivated kids and avoid the most disorderly.

We may be getting vouchers for private schools soon, too, so we'll see how that works out. Support for a voucher program in general is at 55% among Texas Democrats, 65% for Texans as a whole.

The downside of school choice is more car traffic and less buses.

As a travelling technician, my quality of life is much lower during the school year. Urban planners trying to minimize car traffic hate this trampling of the commons. And a certain striver mentality is going to look down on parents taking shortcuts to go where the good schools are instead of applying "the grass is greenest where you water it" and actually getting involved.

It's all tradeoffs in the end. On the whole, I'm no fan of your solution.

Good example of the strategy I described here https://www.themotte.org/post/1405/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/285720?context=8#context

The grass, in this instance, doesn't grow nearly as quickly as my children do, and I'm not going to gamble their early education on the hope that I can unilaterally drag an underperforming school district out of the mire.

Who says it has to be unilateral? It's very unlikely you're the only one who wants better conditions. You may just not know your probable allies yet.

Your objection to school choice is traffic? Of all the trivial and unimportant objections to the greatest good.

I drive my kid to school. I pay taxes, a very small portion of which are spent on roads. I paid for these commons and I'll "trample" my kid to school through them. I'm also entitled to use of public infrastructure.

There are more. It's the first thing I thought of.

It's also a self-inflicted isolation from one's neighborhood, and that carries knock-on effects where it becomes harder to put down roots. Less chance to see the talents of your neighbors, less chance to share your talents with their families, less Slack in your systems to absorb actual shocks.

Maybe you don't value that as much as I do. That's okay.

You drive your kids to school and also they play with neighbors. It is not either or. There's a small park with play equipment hundreds of feet from my house. Most houses on my street have children. We know them.

When I was a kid I had to bike a few miles to public middle school and high school. Selfishly trampling on the public commons. I also had friends in my neighborhood. There was no exclusive choice.

But that striver mentality is retarded and destructive and needs to be discouraged.

Correct. Voice >> Exit Exit >> Voice; you can't make your local stabby school much better but you can move to a non-stabby district.

(Edit: damnit, got it backwards the first time)

For a certain income level & standard of living, yes. I know where the "good school districts" are in my state, and we don't earn enough to afford housing in them. Cheaper states are a net decrease in quality of life for commute time, job prospects, and quality of community. It's a local maximum with a lot of activation energy to find a new maximum.

I'm aware this is not your problem to solve. The incentives are greatest for me to make lemonade where I'm at, and uncover opportunities where I'm at.

I feel like this lends credence to the idea that fertility is linked to status.

If we made things cheaper for the low PMC, might they still face constraints? After all, their existing constraints are self-imposed. They feel like they need to live in prestigious neighborhoods and send their kids to prestigious schools. But these are by definition limited. What these people really want is higher status, not more material wealth, which they already have in abundance. But, sadly, status is a zero sum game.

Giving the already rich PMC even more money is unlikely to increase fertility.

What we need is to increase the status of parents, and decrease the status of the childless.

The idea of having lots of kids while living with low status breaks down when you realize that the women who agrees to this will most likely be fat and below average Iq. The dating market is a status game and with birth control people can afford to trade time for more status. Men can spend years going to grad schools, traveling, saving for an impressive condo etc while building their career to move up the stack of profiles on tinder.

Dropping out of the status game at 21 years old to marry a woman who is happy to have 5 kids in a three bedroom house, never travel and live a low status life means your kids would be dead if we had natural selection. The exception is men who have such high status that they have won the statusgame at age 21.

Eh, I think women are less status driven and more scared. They’re naturally a bit shy and fearful of men, yes, but fed a steady diet of hysterical fear porn about dependency on a man ruining their lives.

I suspect if you were able to convince young women that you could guarantee the man they drop out of college to marry would treat them well, there would be more 20 year old girls standing in line to take you up on it than there would be eligible bachelors to go around.

You can’t, so it’s academic. But ranting about how common domestic violence is and it’s caused by gender roles to elementary schoolers and then filling girls’ heads with fearmongering about getting raped from the time they get their first smart phone does like 10x as much damage as selfies at the amalfi coast.

While there certainly is fear porn, I think there really is more risk in some ways for modern women simply because being a deadbeat dad carries way less stigma than it used to, and everyone is highly mobile.

You can get married and have a kid with a guy who seems great. Then 5 years into the marriage he gets bored and cheats, there's some mild tut-tutting but in current year there is no shared, deeply-rooted community that you both belong to, and neither of you are particularly religious, so he has no reputation to preserve and suffers little to no personal, professional, or moral consequence. And what few consequences he does suffer simply evaporate when he moves two states away to live with his new wife and family. This is in fact exactly what happened to aunt of mine who was an all around decent middle class person. Her husband simply got bored and left, and that was it.

Uh, you know that up until very recently if you moved a state away there was absolutely no way for anyone to know what you did in the town you used to live in? "I moved to take a job- I heard the mill was hiring". Today due to facebook the 'avoiding your other family' is harder to hide, and outside of a small slice of the PMC Americans are less mobile, not more. In the fifties the guy who moved to town to see if the mill was hiring was commonplace; now it's limited to boomtowns like Midland. And of course back then there was no way for the average person to tell if his story was truthful or not.

'Shared, deeply rooted communities' are not some ancient tradition in America. They have, as far as anyone can tell, never been a thing here.

I often hear this trope about husbands getting bored and leaving their wives, but I have a hard time conceiving how that actually works. Surely he would be on the hook for child support at the very least, and if the impetus for him leaving was cheating-related, surely that would result in a very favorable judgement in the divorce. I'm aware that in many cases the man is "judgement-proof" in the sense that he has few assets or income to extract, but in this case you've mentioned that your aunt is a middle-class person, so presumably her ex-husband is as well, and therefore not judgement proof.

This is obviously not an ideal outcome for the woman, especially socially, but it's much better than is commonly portrayed, where a woman has pinned her entire economic future on a man only to see him abandon her and condemn her to a life of eternal poverty.

The problem is that good outcomes in the law go to people who can afford good lawyers. So maybe the divorce actually was cheating-related, but if he has control of all the accounts, a robust community network and is willing to pay up for the absolute best legal representation, then how is his wife going to afford enough representation to gather evidence and make that case? It sounds like OP's uncle was relatively easygoing and generous, but that is not the modal attitude among divorcing spouses.

Similarly, post-divorce, being awarded child support/spousal support and actually collecting said support are extremely different things, and I assume affording good representation makes a substantial difference there, too. There are a lot of ways that someone with good lawyers can bully a less well-connected person into making custody or financial concessions.

Even if child support is awarded and collected, it may or may not match the actual expense of raising the children, a gap which the ex-wife will struggle to close with the wages of the kind of low-skill, entry-level work you can pick up as a 42-year-old job-seeking for the first time.

I agree that good outcomes go to the well-resourced in both law and life, but the average wife is much better resourced than the average husband. The median American woman is, famously, much better socially connected than the median American man, and when we're considering a married couple, their wealth at the point of divorce is by definition equal. That, combined with the well-known bias for women and against men of divorce courts, should mean that the average woman is getting a better deal out of the divorce than the facts normally would suggest by the letter of the law. The common story that comes out of divorce court is that it's the men who are being bullied into making custody or financial concessions, not the women.

I don't know, I feel like there's a severe disconnect between what we perceive to be normal. Having non-joint accounts in a marriage, for example, seems insane to me unless both partners work and have similar earnings, and the other stipulations in your post seem like severe outliers that one could reliably detect ahead of time if a woman were truly afraid of being abandoned.

I've had relatives and friends who've gone through this, so I'm weighting their experiences. One friend was able to reclaim her life after her husband became abusive and floridly unfaithful only because she was the one who kept the family accounts, hence had access to funds to secure an attorney. She also took the advice of friends at work, could use her relative independence of movement to make the necessary consultations, knew something about the process and could assess the attorney's advice because she was well-educated, etc. Her husband continued to spiral downward and there was definitely no spousal support on the table, but after the divorce, she just kept working her existing middle-class job, got a nice little apartment and did fine.

I also have a friend who's a SAHM in a more patriarchal setup where the husband keeps track of the money (after all, it's his, he earned it) and doles out an allowance for household shopping, reads and pays his wife's credit card bills, works from home where he can incidentally observe her comings and goings, is the final word in decisions of household policy (his money, his call). Her husband is a nice guy and she's able to hold her own because she worked for a while before having kids and has a reasonable perspective on things. But if she had gotten married to him at 20, wrangled toddlers full-time for a decade or so and then encountered the family crisis that my first friend did? I really think she would have been screwed. At minimum, she would have stayed in a worsening situation for far too long out of sheer exhaustion, dearth of resources and fear of the unknown.

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I think your suspicion is reasonable, and I can't speak to how common my aunt's case was. But AFAIK he simply ate the child support costs and straight up handed over the kids to my aunt. I think they had a relatively amicable divorce because he gave my aunt most of their assets (house, car, etc). He had already knocked up his new girlfriend and has since started a second family. I admit I don't know how alimony works, but my aunt is middle class and white collar, while he comes from a working class background and, I suspect, made considerably less money than she did (during the time of the divorce -- I don't think it was so when they got married).

It happens. Usually it seems to be either:

  • The husband is...vigorously sexual and will bear basically any cost for new chances to get his dick wet.
  • The couple married young, they were very sweet together but the man got rich/famous and eventually was unable to ignore the fact that he's way out of his wife's league.

My point was slightly different—I fully understand why a husband would want to leave his wife, but what I don't get is how that leads to such a disastrous outcome for the wife that it warrants any significant amount of fear. It just seems to me that the relatively low odds of it happening combined with how mild the downside is means that it shouldn't be a major factor in a woman's decision of whether to marry.

It just seems to me that the relatively low odds of it happening combined with how mild the downside is means that it shouldn't be a major factor in a woman's decision of whether to marry.

Well, in the hypothetical that was brought up, there was infidelity involved -- which is obviously hurtful. I think restricting the possible downsides to the economic ones really limits your ability to understand how difficult this situation would be for people to handle. There are a lot of people who would rather be single and lonely than coupled and vulnerable to the hurt and rejection of infidelity or loss-of-love.

I think the risk is relatively low as well, but people are increasingly terrified even of small chances of hurt. And men do this too, I've heard of men breaking up with their girlfriends because they're terrified she'll use social media to hurt his reputation someday, for some unknown reason; just the raw possibility of a power imbalance is so fearful.

And there's that term again: power imbalance. We're living through a time where any and all power is being questioned, "the rapists are in the sacred institutions", "the media can't be trusted", "the deep state controls the world", "the President is a vegetable fascist", "the billionares are taking over the world", "the bosses are all entitled boomers", "you have to jump ship to get a promotion", "corporations want cattle and not pets"... the very concept of two people in a relationship that involves any sort of power relations instantly conjures to mind images of exploitation, unfairness, and abuse. The just leader is unthinkable. And the very nature of a marriage is that the two members hold power over each other: "For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does."

Given that we live in such a time of profound social doubt, isolation, and distrust in institutions and human virtue, is it any wonder that people have such fears about entering into a lifelong spiritual, sexual, and economic union with another human being?

Sorry, I misread you. Thought you were saying that the husband is on the hook so generally he won’t leave. Which is certainly sometimes the case, but as I say, not always.

Are you sure it's just "fearmongering about getting raped" that makes it seem like a high-risk life choice to enter lifelong, irrevocable financial dependency on a man, and commit your children to same?

In today's economy, a middle-class girl who quits college at 20 to get married and have somebody's 5 babies will find that she's made a life-ruining decision if absolutely any of the following happen:

-Husband falls out of love in a commonplace way and wants a divorce (43% of women and 46% of men are obese by their 40s and at least one poster upthread considers a fat wife strictly inferior to no wife at all; plus, skinny or fat, 100% of 50-year-old women are older than the hottest 20-something at the office).

-Husband's little vices worsen into a behavioral problem (with drugs, alcohol, gambling, porn, gaming, overspending, hoarding, whatever) that make him a misery to live with or a financial liability to the family

-Husband turns out to be physically/ sexually/ emotionally abusive

-Husband turns out to be selfish and won't spend money on the kids, so they limp along with the bare minimum

-Husband commits white-collar crime, goes to prison

-Husband has a midlife crisis and unexpectedly comes out as gay/ trans/ polyamorous/ into a distasteful fetish after a decade or two of marriage

-Husband gets sick in a permanent career-ruining fashion (depression, disability, accident).

-Husband's career unexpectedly implodes for any other reason

-Husband dies

Note that any of these would have a disastrous impact not just on the girl's life, but on the lives of her future children. And every one of those negative impacts could be substantially mitigated (although not removed) by the girl's having access to a decent middle-class job, to partly support herself and the kids in a pinch. Otherwise you live a life that's one negative event away from having to dump your kids with the dodgy babysitter while you desperately slog through night courses at the community college.

If you total up all those probabilities, can the girl really feel justly confident that she and her kids won't need that career someday?

A lot of these arent really points of conflict though. If the husband gets sick in a permanent career-ruining fashion, wouldnt he also wish they had a second income? And it would have been a problem in the old days, too.

He would, presumably. It seems like a decent reason why a pro-family middle-class woman might opt to finish college and establish first-job cred through 24-25 or so before having that first kid, rather than pumping out babies right out of high school. Mid-20s is still extremely fertile and still leaves a long childbearing window if that's what you're into. Historically there have been plenty of eras when it was the norm for both middle-class women and men to work and save up for a household through their mid-20s.

I don't know why the pro-tradwife folks aren't more interested in practical family risk-management considerations. Maybe it's just the sheer appeal of imagining a nubile 20-year-old wife who can't afford to leave even if she wanted to?

...and the women who want it are all kinksters I guess? And ~every man in the 50s though keeping her trapped was more important than financial security, no romatics who thought they didnt have to worry about that?

My point is that list entires that dont themselves have a conflict of interest dont predict a different interest from men and women. So insofar as you think those are a big part of why women dont want early marriage, you should reject this branches framing that men are there on offer and women dont want it.

Nah man, I assume that young men and young women in the 50s just fell in love and settled down to have babies early because they could afford to, the way everybody does in times of high economic opportunity for the middle classes. Women might have married at 20 in the midcentury, but men also married at a median of 23, after all.

OTOH I suspect the kinds of 2025 internet people who vocally fantasize about teen brides and argue for excluding women from the workforce, but somehow never consider what historically has happened to the kiddies if Daddy gets sick or his industry contracts, are not coming to this issue from a POV of direct practical interest in forming stable, resilient families.

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I don't know why the pro-tradwife folks aren't more interested in practical family risk-management considerations.

If they came up with such, would any significant number of people who claim to oppose early marriage as a result of such risks change their mind? My belief is no, this argument is a soldier, and its falling will make no difference.

There is a comprehensive set of scaremongering to convince girls that a ‘traditional’ marriage is incredibly dangerous and has an extremely high risk of them getting abused and abandoned, yes. You’re engaging in it right now.

In the real world, bad marriage outcomes are not distributed equally, and many of the common ones have a substantial safety net in place. I’m not some sort of MRA- it’s good that husbands retain some responsibilities for their wives and children in the event of a divorce. But the fact remains that in the rare event of a housewife with five children being divorced(and you do know most divorces are initiated by the woman, right?) she will not be left destitute and her children will be worse off, but not in a life ruining way that wouldn’t also apply if she was some kind of epic girlboss(broken homes are bad, but mama not working doesn’t make them worse).

Some of your list is exaggerating risks so tiny it’s not even worth addressing them- what fraction of middle aged men do you think suddenly discover they’re trans? I’ll cop to these guys being bad, but there’s so few of them your argument here is the equivalent of ‘kids shouldn’t go to school because of school shootings’. Others are solvable, greatly exaggerated problems, or problems which are real, but mainly bottom quintile phenomena- and I think we can safely assume that middle class girls aren’t marrying underclass men. And we live in a society that gives women substantial safety nets if they marry the guy before taking that deal. So yes, if we total up the possibility of ‘marry the nice guy your parents approve of and be a SAHM’ ruining your life, it’s small enough for a girl to be confident in her decisions.

many of the common ones have a substantial safety net in place.

What exactly is the safety net, beyond the noblesse oblige of the departing spouse? Favorable terms in a divorce go to the party with a good lawyer. Unless she's been very lucky and careful about secretly diverting money, SAHM has no means of hiring a shark attorney or a PI. Post-divorce, she has no resources to battle for payment of child support and spousal support, no economic slack to position herself favorably in the housing or job market. The likeliest scenario is she needs to quickly find some other man to support her and the kids, who may or may not be a good guy (stepfathers have a broadly bad reputation).

So in the event of a divorce mommy having a middle-class career is her safeguard against having to immediately remarry and subject her kids to some jerk, just to get by. Or else try to go it alone with child support plus a low-skill/low-wage job while the kids get raised by the internet.

And that's leaving out second-order consequences! Back in the golden age of what you call the "traditional marriage" (which is actually just the Victorian middle-class town marriage, not lindy at all), the husband got custody of the kids by default and the wife got absolutely nothing. Whatever safety net we currently have was developed because of women's greater economic leverage and participation in the public square, plus the added perspective of female judges/ lawyers/ lobbyists.

So yes, if we total up the possibility of ‘marry the nice guy your parents approve of and be a SAHM’ ruining your life, it’s small enough for a girl to be confident in her decisions.

OK, let's run rough numbers on the most common of these disaster scenarios.

  • 43% of first marriages end in divorce *31% of divorces initiated by husband= 13% chance the husband just up and dumps her at some point. You'd probably say that middle-class marriages are less subject to these risks; I don't see evidence of that, but fine, let's halve that to 6.5%.

  • Of remaining divorces, 35% of women cite their husband's infidelity, 24% abuse, 12% addiction as the reason for leaving. Assume there's some overlap and make it a total of 50% of wife-initiated divorces having one or more of these factors. So 43%*50%= 22% chance the husband eventually philanders, abuses, gambles, drinks or tokes enough to make her wish he'd dump her. Apply the classism correction, that's 11% chance.

  • Odds of her husband dying early run from .23%/year when he's 30 to .98%/ year when he's 55 (still too early to have fully adequate retirement savings, even with life insurance). Presumably it's not a linear increase, so say .35%/yr*25 yrs=9% lifetime chance her spouse dies and leaves her to support herself and the youngest of the kids.

  • Odds of her husband becoming semi-permanently unable to support the family owing to disability or job changes: this is annoying to figure out, but I'm seeing 3% unemployment, higher underemployment, 1% SSDI for working-age men with college degrees, so let's spitball 1% odds she becomes the family breadwinner by necessity.

To me, that looks like a roughly 28% chance that a married woman will eventually encounter one of the many commonplace disasters where her independent earning capacity would be a huge benefit for her and the kids. Not sure where you get the idea that these things don't happen to nice middle-class moms of 5, but every one of these scenarios, including husband's addiction, abuse, infidelity, early death, has happened to at least 1-2 of the few large families I know. Even if you think a lifetime 28% is still too high, it's fair to ask how just how low those odds would have to be to make it a responsible decision for a young woman to forgo the insurance of a decent career and instead chase an idealized 24/7 tradwife/cupcake fantasy.

And that's leaving out the lower-key negative changes in the family dynamic itself when one spouse has absolutely all the economic power and knows it. Many husbands stay kind and generous, but if not, a SAHM ends up quietly bearing a lot more borderline treatment of her and the kids, simply because speaking up would risk the disaster of her husband's leaving them unsupported. If you cruise by conversations of angry adult children who've cut contact with their parents, a common theme is "my dad was an asshole and my mom did nothing to stop it." A SAHM can't do anything to stop it, because her husband is doing her a favor just by letting her exist on his dime.

while you desperately slog through night courses at the community college.

We could always just remove the college part, have your 20s be for marriage/children and your 30s-40s for your career, like it was in the '80s. That way, you've already bought and paid for your kids by the time your [now-younger] husband starts going all weird and moldy on you, and you're still attractive enough at 30 that if you want to try again, you can.

By pushing out adulthood by 10 years, which is what college does (and, by extension, its purpose), you attach higher liability and higher stakes to things that tend to go wrong later in life- if vices are going to take hold at 35, it's better to have the kids be nearly adults when the inevitable divorce comes than for them to be 5 (less stupidity in custody battles because at that point they're a formality). Economic conditions for adulthood at 16-18 is something Boomercons benefited from greatly, and we should try to get back to that state because adulthood at that age is Good, Actually, and important for proper human development.

We won't do that, partially because it would kill the sacred societal cows that are graduation rate and female college representation, and academia is already a welfare system for older women who suffer from what you've listed above (so destroying it would be politically unviable anyway). But speeding up reproduction cycles so that women (and the men they marry) are raising families within their 25 year warranty period (even if things go sideways they'll still have the energy to fix them; 35 year old energy levels are not 25 year old energy levels!) would, I believe, have positive consequences... because they did for the generation born when that was normal.

We had monogamy for 1500 years and it worked incredibly well. So well, in fact, that we built the world's most powerful empires on top of it.

You're talking about a newfangled dating market that harkens back to the polygynous world of premodern civilizations. I'll agree it's a troubling development, but people can (and do) opt out of it.

Interesting, semi-related article here:

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/human-reproduction-as-prisoners-dilemma

I think oftentimes we focus too much on the PMC, in large part because it's the milieu that populates places of cultural production. And I think they're more or less a lost cause: they have plenty of agency to change their lives and they choose not to, and even if you promised them double their real income, it wouldn't move the needle much. There's no world in which they'd consider raising a child more prestigious than eating out at overpriced mediocre New American restaurants, and so they'll never have kids.

If we're concerned about increasing fertility rates, we should be focusing on the bulk of people who are not PMC, who already show a willingness to have kids at all, and so nudges there are likely to have a greater marginal impact.

I definitely agree that status plays a big role here. And I sincerely have no idea how to fix things like Point 4: Enriching Activities because the competition there is zero-sum. However, I can genuinely imagine my low-PMC friends sending their children to public schools IF said schools were effective and safe. The difference between paying $30k/child/year and (roughly) $0/child/year is dramatic. Similar thing with housing: if transportation allowed more neighborhoods to reach the urban core <30 minutes, schools were better, streets were safer - the cost of housing in those few enclaves that currently have those features would decrease. All of a sudden, it becomes possible to buy a 3 bedroom house rather than a 2 bedroom condo...

  1. Healthcare:

Destroy the AMA’s supply-limiting bullshit, dramatically increase the number of doctors, dramatically decrease cost of healthcare.

Reminder that physician salaries are a low percentage of healthcare expenses, that the AMA has nothing to with supply restriction, spots can be expanded by local governments and hospitals (and have been!), and that the AMA has been lobbying for a supply expansion for decades.

At the end of the day, all the dollars spent on healthcare end in someone's pocket. If not doctors (and I'll believe some aren't hugely compensated compared to their efforts), then who is keeping the dollars my insurance company (and I) pay the local "nonprofit" hospital for care? Obviously insurance gets it's share (capped by Obamacare). Their executives (doctors!) are compensated pretty well as far as I can tell.

I believe the actual answer to this is "Private Equity firms". Where the money eventually goes after that is incredibly complicated to track (by design), but last I checked they played a fairly important role in cost inflation.

Why does Private equity play such a big role in modern investing? Is it a new thing, or did some regulatory change happen, or is there some reason I hear them brought up in almost any economic discussion nowadays, or am I just misremembering a time before private equity was a talking point?

I don't think that private equity is a particularly new thing - it was how Mitt Romney made his money, after all.

My personal belief, which I freely admit has no actual verifiable statistical backing, is that the main reason you're hearing more about them is that the proboscises of parasitic capital are being turned inward. A lot of financial instruments and practices, whatever their legality or the finer points of how they work, essentially functioned as wealth pumps that funneled treasure from various parts of the world to the imperial core. But those wealth pumps develop constituencies and dependents, so they can't just turn off when the flow of lucre begins to slow, and as a result they're forced to target the interior of the empire. These engines of exploitation, which have for years been going into poorer countries and exploiting them for profit, are being forced to turn to the US heartland because that's where the easiest money is. Now, instead of buying hospitals and dramatically raising prices while lowering quality in the global south, they do things like buy Red Lobster and suck out so much capital it dies, or set up cartels in the firefighting equipment manufacturing sector, driving up costs of equipment massively while also simultaneously creating shortages in both repair parts and finished vehicles (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll).

A big piece of it is admin bloat, just as in academia the number of middle managers and other folks like that (assistant infection control nurse - whose job is to make sure we don't order any labs that may show signs of infection!). Also more general middlemen/industries of various kinds.

Examples: PBMs, billing staff, EMRs.

If you look at a surgery a small fraction of the cost is the surgeons professional fee - yes lots of labor costs but thats because their are literally scores of people involved. Supplies, instruments, equipment....all places where someone could be greedy (see: ortho vendors).

Executives in healthcare are increasingly MBAs or nursing and often have authority over the doctors that can lead to both increased cost and decreased quality (see: travel nursing).

Doctor supply issues may be a problem but they are pretty orthogonal to the overall cost disease problems.

A bunch of it is surely administrative bullshit.

Administrative bullshit maybe, administrators probably not.

Interesting. I need to look into this. Perhaps my model of the world is wrong or out of date. I was under the impression that the AMA severely restricts the number of medical schools and the number of spots within those schools - such that the typical new doctor graduates with hundreds of thousands of student loan debt. Any links as to what drives healthcare costs?

I was under the impression that the AMA severely restricts the number of medical schools and the number of spots within those schools

The bottleneck in producing new doctors in America isn't the schools, it's the residencies. After graduation, all doctors go to some teaching hospital somewhere and serve a 4 year residency to learn how to actually practice medicine. This training program costs the teaching hospitals money, which is reimbursed by CMS. So in practice, the number of available residencies is determined by CMS; hospitals won't spend money out of their own pocket to train new doctors above and beyond what CMS reimburses.

The impact this has on healthcare costs, I don't know. I'm sure it's something, but is it a major component, or a drop in the bucket compared to other factors? I don't know.

"We won't train doctors to the regulatory standard unless taxpayers give us bundles of money to do so," is an obvious confluence of terrible interests in the private sector and government, especially when the industry has achieved significant amounts of regulatory capture. Surely, there is a better way.

Imagine this in other industries. Grocery stores get the government to set up a licencing requirement to stock shelves, with some boilerplate reasoning about food safety or something. The thing is, the only way to get licensed is to get a grocery store to give you the mandatory years of experience. And, of course, they refuse to have such positions unless the government pays them for it. I would predict that there would be fewer grocery store employees, their pay would be higher, industry profits would be higher, government outlays would be higher, prices to the consumer would be higher, and service quality would decrease.

Everyone points fingers at a variety of things but physician salaries are under ten percent of spending. A massive drop in doctor salary only gets you 3-4 percent less expensive healthcare.

The AMA historically was engaged in what you are talking about but then spent multiple decades lobbying for increased role for midlevel providers which is a de facto supply increase. It's finally moving away from that in the last few years but has yet to find a new passion lol.

Historically the limiting factor on doctor production has been residency spots which are mostly funded by the government, however plenty of states and private corporations will fund those spots because the labor is dirt cheap and they actually make a ton of money.

Additionally ability to increase spots in the higher paying/lower number specialties is limited because you need enough work to adequately train and all kinds of things have caused problems with that (ex: a reduction in surgical frequency secondary to an increase in medical technology meaning not enough cases). Lower paying specialties like FM and Peds have more room to grow but nobody wants to do them because of the poor (relatively speaking) pay.

One thing here might be whether carpenter and receptionists' lifestyles were borne out of them actually wanting to live that way, or rather borne out of necessity. If you get knocked up at 17 that leads into a life where you have a kid, and more come due to the first one effectively cutting off other choices in your life. And you don't have any choice of how to raise them, you basically have to do it the way you described them doing it. But is she as happy as she'd be be if she didn't get pregnant and lead that life out of necessity? And even if she is happy, would she choose those choices again, if she had the choice? It sounds like a tough life.

Is this copied from a post somewhere else?

Copied from a word processor where I first wrote it out. Not posted anywhere else, if that was the question.

Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, pretty much the only thing separating high-fertility (defined here as 4+) families from lower-fertility ones (1-2 kids, generally 1) is religiousness. Not all religious families I know are big but all the big ones are religious.

We're Low-PMC with 4.

Bought the house with savings / inheritance from being DINK.

Wife homeschools kids.

Try to spend more like the carpenter and not fall into PMC debt traps.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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