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Notes -
Maybe we ought to just accept the world's population contraction. Who knows, maybe there really is some sort of equilibrium where this mysterious negative feedback mechanism we can't identify will taper off. If we are completely allergic to placing demands upon our women on a societal level, which we clearly—and astonishingly suddenly—are, I just don't see a way to a future with more kids.
The hypothetical case of a domineering, asshole husband is just too rhetorically powerful. I have conservative friends who agree that no-fault divorce was a mistake, but always with the reflexive ritual mitigation: of course any system that doesn't afford each woman an easy, automatic penalty-free exit from the marriage, so long as it's deemed abusive, is a non-starter. Just how common a problem was this? I have no idea. Sure enough stories from the Bible and historical accounts from hundreds of years ago are filled with examples of husbands taking counsel from their wives, being convinced this way or that. Instead of noble agents fulfilling an ancient and proud feminine role, however, these women may today be considered "hidden figures" who were repressed and prevented from participating in public affairs first-hand.
I mean, the obvious natural counterforce is "without state-enforced indoctrination to break their retention rates or some form of genocide, insular subcultures like the Amish and Orthodox Jews - possibly also their Muslim equivalents - will outbreed everyone else".
Note the caveats on that statement, though, and the rather-drastic nature of that transition even if it's allowed to happen.
It remains to be seen what the long term trajectory of both of those cultures will be, since both have existed in their modern incarnations for fewer than 150 years. I mean modern ultra-fertile Ultra-Orthodox Judaism is partially a postwar thing, to some extent it’s an invention of the twentieth century. And even if you zoom out to ‘all’ Orthodox Jews or Mennonites, many modern secular, very low birthrate Jewish and Swiss people emerged from those ‘trad’ cultures, it could happen again.
Drawing a curve that assumes all these people will have six kids who have six kids who have six kids is historically the worst way to project future population growth.
Oh, they're not 100%-retention, but they don't have to be. They just have to be high-enough retention to perpetuate themselves. And while yes, something might change internally to them (although with the Amish it's not really a good bet), anything that didn't get all of them would just start the cycle over again in microcosm.
My overall point is this: you can beat natural selection - Azathoth, as Eliezer called it, although frankly Shub-Niggurath's a better fit from what I know - but you're not going to beat it by accident for long enough to actually die out. Shub-Niggurath doesn't always win, but she always wins by default - you have to actively try if you're going to hold her down. I noted above that such an attempt could indeed be made to destroy the Amish, and of course "not actually the end of the species" is some damnation with faint praise indeed, but keep your head about you.
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Hasn't it only been about 5 years now that society has been worried about population collapse?
My mother remembers Population Bomb rhetoric when she was younger. Google says China only ended their one child policy in 2016. The trends are probably just moving too fast. If you tell a whole generation they're destroying the world by having children, it surely takes some time to pull that back with "we didn't mean you, women who were already having 2.5 children! We meant the Nigerian ones having 7 children in desperate poverty! (But, also, global warming is a very terrible disaster, you should feel bad)"
I think the Christian perspective is something like that marriage is hard, but it's alright to ask hard things of people. Traditional cultures also ask people to do things like serve in the military, fast, and stand multiple hours for public ceremonies. Orthodox churches have crowns instead of vows, and one of the several symbols involved is "crowns of martyrdom." Is staying married to an angry, unpleasant man and bearing his children as hard an ask as fighting in a war? I don't know, I've never done either, but maybe it is! And if we have a norm of people in general never needing to do hard things, it isn't surprising that the same would be true of marriages.
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