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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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They have created a society in which people have less sex than ever, have fewer children than ever and can only dream of getting the housing their parents had at the same age. They have no idea how to fix it so the result is to find ways to make the people who point out the problems seem illegitimate.

Nonsense - as you imply, the problem is downstream of housing supply, and we know how to legalise housing - the laws banning it are visible on the books, have short titles, long titles, chapter numbers etc. and the process for repealing them is well-understood. Keir Starmer's people know this too - before the election he repeatedly talked (example) about the need to build more housing, including specifically his plans to relax planning laws and allow building on Greenbelt. One of the incoming government's first announcements was a consultation on a new planning policy framework.

There is an ongoing argument about whether the consultation has bottled it by reducing the housing target for London, but there is an offsetting increase in housing targets for the commuter belt around London, and in any case the previous target was not being met, and the new framework makes it a lot harder for local authorities to deliberately miss targets.

Do I think we are going to see the houses built? Probably not - the political logic of bottling it hasn't changed. But building 1.5 million houses in places where people want to live is almost certainly sufficient to unfuck the UK.

Nonsense - as you imply, the problem is downstream of housing supply

That's the idea that's nonsense. My parent's generation wasn't swimming in housing supply. I grew up in a flat that today can only pass for a studio apartment, my wife grew up in a bigger one, but with her grandparents, her aunt, uncle, and their children in the same flat. If you go back in history the conditions were often even worse than that.

The issues with housing in countries like America are a sign of it's visible decline, but that's not why they're not having sex and children. The insistence on neat systemic or material explanations for social phenomena is one of the terribly bad habits we inherited from the Rat community.

The insistence on neat systemic or material explanations for social phenomena is one of the terribly bad habits we inherited from the Rat community.

Because Scott put it best: society is fixed, biology is mutable. Dump $chemical into the water to improve things? Quite feasible! Contemplate modifying the human genome to improve humans in the womb? This isn't the 90's anymore, this isn't science-fiction! Create the Miracle Pill? Well, nowadays it feels like there's more candidates for the title than there were a decade ago!

Budge society into a healthier memeplex? You might as well ask for the sun to not rise.

I don't buy that, we've seen societies switch memeplexes, and you're describing all the miracle bio-hacks as "feasible" not "tried and proven effective and desirable".

Aside from that, none of it explains how housing is supposed to be the reason people don't start families, when they used to in worse housing conditions.