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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29388 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines

S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?

[Status] finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth). Status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce. People kill themselves over loss of status.

In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from 50,000 to 64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How? The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).

Will Storr describes: "In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status.

[Post-enlightenment things began to change.] We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

I find that small “status is relative” comment valuable for understanding fertility trends. It’s obvious, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle easy to ignore. There is a limited amount of status to go around, and we disperse status points as if we are in a video game dispersing points on a skill tree. We can only increase certain behaviors at the expense of other behaviors (through omitting esteem and interest, ie status). With that acknowledged, let’s remember that motherhood is a complicated and arduous 6-year process per baby (overlapping) which requires specific skills and a specific interest (nurturing a young human). This means that even if we did esteem motherhood as highly as women working traditional male jobs, that wouldn’t affect fertility because of the additional contingent pleasures of the workplace (socializing, disposable income, a familiarity of work skills via schooling and no familiarity with homemaking and motherhood skills). And so what is actually essential is to, well, actively dislike women working. To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to be degraded, demeaned, or at least lowered relative to women focusing on the life required to be mothers. This would appear to be necessary to increase fertility according to basic human psychology: the importance of status and reward-contingency as a necessary component of reinforcement. As long as women obtain status from work, it’s unlikely that attempts to hack together a high-status motherhood culture will work. If a guy can get status from video games or war, he will choose video games, right? Motherhood is more difficult and more important, so the status associated with and the lifestyle which precedes it needs to utterly dwarf the Industrial GirlBoss Complex.

Absolutely spot on. This 100% matches my observations.

If it's as accurate as I think it is, we're fucked. Status is not something that can be conferred from above in a liberal western country.

If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, with no prospects of a better future or any chance at reproduction, you are an evolutionary dead end. Alternatively, you pick up a rifle...

If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, I'm sure you're actually less likely to be an evolutionary dead end than those of your countrymen who got into college.

Probably not.

In the West, the people who have lots of kids are the very religious, and the absolute underclass. The latter simply act on their impulses all the time without considering the future, resulting in constant pregnancies (as well as a host of social problems). Probably in the olden days these kids would just die for the most part from not being looked after. The former do consciously decide to have kids, but do so because of their religion.

Someone who folds boxes at a steelworks his entire life can hold a job, so he isn't in the underclass. If you can't or won't consider the future and restrict your impulses, you won't be employed for long, certainly not until you die. South Korea is culturally homogeneous, so there's no reason to expect his attitude about having children to differ significantly from his better-educated countrymen.

That just leaves the fact that he's poorer than them, and when you control for culture and discount the underclass, poorer people have fewer kids than richer people, because they can afford less.

Here's how I see it: if you're a college-educated Korean man with a girlfriend/wife, who presumably is also college-educated and middle-class like you, your social circle will put enormous pressure on you to have exactly one child, preferably a boy, and make every conceivable sacrifice to try getting him into one of the top 5 or so universities because there's like a 5% chance that he'll succeed and that's more than zero. Of course, this all seems rather daunting to the average man in such a situation, and even more so to the woman, so they reject this idea in many cases. After all, there's a reason why the South Korean TFR is not even 1 but 0.8 or so.

However, if "you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die", no such pressure exists. Even if we don't categorize it strictly as underclass, it's still rather close. It certainly counts as the precariat, and when you belong to that social class as a woman, everyone in your environment implicitly understands that having children is the single most important thing you'll ever do in your life, and the only thing you'll ever be respected for, if that.

Status is not something that can be conferred from above in a liberal western country.

You might be understanding something different by "from above" than I do, but this seems flatly wrong. Wokeness didn't become high-status from the bottom-up, and for that matter neither did motherhood become low-status this way. I might I agree if what you mean is something like "you can't legislate status".

I agree. No human society could even exist in the first place without the ability to confer status from above. My guess is that the OP means that status in a liberal Western country cannot be sacramental - as opposed to Georgia, for example - and that it cannot stem from fertility under the current conditions.

Yep, what I was referring to.

When the western liberal government tries to advocate for something it nearly 100% of the time ends up doing the opposite. Nobody believes it, and nobody buys it. The only way they can conceivably transfer status is through transfer of power and resources within the Cathedral, which they generally try not to do for fear of power dilution.

Breeding propaganda in the liberal west will go over about as well as a lead balloon. Unlike OP I don't think culture can be improved in this direction, because we're too far down this route. If society devolves a bit, I think we'll get TFR back quite quickly - but I'm quite attached to society, and I'd rather it not get worse.

Alternatively we find a way to grow productive, state-compliant pod people who pay taxes, at a sustainable rate, as has been the remit of every government.

My takeaway from the discussion a year ago you linked is not that we're fucked. It's that things are bad, but bad in a way that's contingent on cultural factors that could absolutely change, even if it's hard.

I particularly liked @SpoonOfSugar's comment:

Both men and women are open to long-term committed relationships only if they get a great deal. People who marry often think that they both got lucky in the sense that they self-rate as a 6 but rate their partner as a 9. Of course this doesn't happen all that often.

This checks out to me. The most successful relationships in my life have been ones where explicitly, repeatedly, both my partner and I demonstrated that we thought higher of the other than we thought of ourselves. In other words, we both thought we were punching above our weight. But I question whether this not happening very often is a permanent fixture of human mating or whether there's something going on specifically in the 21st century. It used to be that people could see "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt."

I also liked @Forgotpassword's comment:

I feel like a huge amount of [men playing the field] is the sheer grind required to 'ascend' and the rejection along the way, especially in the modern dating app sphere. IMO the majority of both gender rock up with more-or-less good intentions, but it only takes a little bit of exposure to the current culture to reach a state of Fuck You.

I genuinely believe the core of the problem is the prevalence of online dating, which transforms dating from a personal test of compatibility into a meat market where women are overloaded by offers of cheap sex. This distorts people's perceptions of their actual attractiveness while also incentivizing sociopathic behavior. Women are incentivized to offer early sex to high-quality men (because they won't give them the time of day otherwise), and high-quality men are incentivized to avoid commitment (because they already got the milk(shake) for free) and proceed to avoid committing to them.

So then these unfortunate women's barometers for men's attractiveness are set on 'high' and they don't find more average partners attractive or interesting, which means, like a pornsick man, they can't bring themselves to find happiness with a suitable partner and they become disgusted and revolted by how "all men [who I am still capable of seeing as a sexual being] are like that."

And these are the women the unfortunate men on online dating have to try and woo, and because they don't see the men as attractive or valuable they make excessive, deranged, and unrealistic demands of them, and the men find themselves unable to find happiness with a suitable partner and become disgusted and revolted by how "all women [who haven't already found a suitable partner and are still on online dating after years] are like that."

With online dating taking over, we've also eliminated the other cultural opportunities where people meet spouses by labeling them sexual harrassment or stigmatizing them. The decline in voluntary associations has also played a role.

I can't tell you how many stories I have in my family of the average guy marrying the girl next door. When your dating circle is limited, and tied to your fixed community, you connect with people, and consider your potential partners part of your sphere of concern. You care about even the people you reject.

To fix dating, we need to rebuild communities. I realize that's basically the "draw the rest of the owl" argument. But we need to draw the rest of the freaking owl. I don't know how we do that, I don't know how we get people to talk to each other again, I don't know how we make people see others as part of their sphere of concern, I don't know how we do it. But we have to do it. Deus vult, deus vult, deus vult.

I don't think this is the entire picture, since there's also an incentive on the part of a man who 'knows how to play the game' to pose as a viable longterm prospect and then dip and/or incompatibilities are found during the trial period and it's donezo. I've seen in my friendgroup both men and women in their late twenties join dating apps with 0 meaningful relationship experience prior.

For most men the immediate response is crickets and zero interest (assuming introverted nerdy type) which then requires considerable personal development to grind through. For the women, the result tends to be getting played a few times and then pivoting hard to PVP mode or just opting out.

For most men the immediate response is crickets and zero interest (assuming introverted nerdy type) which then requires considerable personal development to grind through. For the women, the result tends to be getting played a few times and then pivoting hard to PVP mode or just opting out.

Well… yeah? I’m not completely sure where you’re disagreeing, that’s my point… many women get played and conclude “all men are like that” and many men are left with either women in PvP mode or no traction at all, and they conclude that “all women are like that.”

Maybe I'm just surrounded by giga-chads but that has not been the issue for any of the men around me IRL, whether they found their partner the old fashioned way or through online dating, but it's a complaint I hear repeatedly online. Then again, people in places like the ww threads here and elsewhere frequently have bizarre stories of their issues dating which suggest to me that they are not just slightly below the median in mate attractiveness but very much so.

I think the issue here is that the internet amplifes the voice of the bitter losers that always have had issues, but were just invisible before. People like to trot out the graph of recently increasing sexlessness among young men but that has since rebounded.

As for why people don't have kids, I always come back to historic fertility trends and note that urbanism killed fertility a hundred years before feminism or modern dating markets, and it's remained remarkably consistent throughout time and place and the primary thing that has changed is the rate of urbanisation.

It seems to me that some combination of children being a major economic drain rather than a boon, delayed pair bonding, higher cost of living (particularly sufficiently large housing in safe areas with jobs), access to entertainment and maybe female labour force participation (lots of evidence against this being a major factor though) are the real culprits.

Mainstream liberalism has few answers to the fertility question at this point, and I think it's likely to loom larger as an issue over the rest of this decade. However, I think there are lots of options besides raising female fertility. Some examples -

(a) Wind down/end entitlements for the elderly. No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them. End mandatory retirement ages so the fit but impecunious elderly can at least work for a living. While this option doesn't remove all problems associated with an aging population (e.g., shortage of military age men) it covers the most important one.

(b) Push hard on anti-senescence treatments. I think we've got a great shot at an outright cure for Alzheimer's by 2030, and many other diseases of aging by 2040. Perhaps combined with a radical revision of our attitude towards work and retirement, this could help smooth out the transition to a lower birthrate society.

(c) AGI/Mass automation. Personally my timelines on transformative AI are pretty short - I expect most white-collar jobs will be automatable with minimal sacrifices in performance by 2035, and I feel I'm being conservative. Blue-collar jobs and more pertinently healthcare/eldercare jobs are a lot more uncertain. I am optimistic that the second half of the 2020s will see improvements in robotics to mirror the improvement in non-embodied AI we've seen in the first half. If this transpires then our whole economic model will need revision, and low fertility/top-heavy population pyramids won't be a critical problem.

(d) Biotech revolutions. In utero genome editing and improved fertility treatments could definitely help here. If you can guarantee fertility late into middle age and flatten the higher risk of developmental/genetic disorders associated with it, that will definitely help. Artificial wombs would obviously be a gamechanger but I think we're still a couple of decades out on that score.

(e) Degrowth. Obviously like most people here I'm not a fan of the degrowth movement, but there are versions of it that I'm more open to. For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me, though it would require tech trends like those above. If we're headed for a post-scarcity society in which most humans don't work, then dysgenics aside, fewer humans doesn't strike me as obviously bad.

So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue. There are lots deep trends that would make it less pressing, and while I wouldn't bet the farm on all of them or any specific one, something in the mix will come good. I expect the main headaches are going to be in the short-term, (e.g. labour shortages, dependency ratios) and while they're worth taking seriously, they're not going to be addressed by fertility-boosting policies in the time horizons that matter.

No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them.

The retirement problem is not a problem of "saving". All pension systems are just redistribution of current production, it does not matter if it is "financed" by taxes or selling some assets or in any other way such as coerced slave labor of future productive population. The problem is that you as an elderly will need things in the future: you will need fresh bread, a surgery, working power lines and maintained house. These things can only be provided by productive people that are being born right now. You cannot have a surgery now in reserve for the future, you cannot store electricity in order to have it in 50 years when the blackout happens due to insufficient maintenance. If there are not enough people born to be future doctors, bakers, linemen etc. - then you will not get product of labor of these unborn people. Whatever you save will be eaten by inflation.

AGI/Mass automation

Okay, so we will all live in in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism utopia in 20 years. And we will also have endless electricity from nuclear fusion any time soon. Also as a sidenote - not many people really believe this, otherwise they would just sell their assets now when they still have value, to enjoy some hookers and booze - since they will have robot hookers and endless booze in 20 years. So they should smooth out their lifetime consumption, that would be the most logical strategy, right? Like people selling their houses if they believe that apocalypse will arrive in 5 years. I am curious if you are doing so, since you are so sure about these utopian predictions about AI and automation.

Biotech revolutions

Of course, another technological solution is around the corner.

Degrowth

What an euphemism for economic and societal collapse. It will just be nice "degrowth" landing, no other issues as people are just dying on the streets in the middle of blackouts and wars for shrinking resources. A little bit of population and economic "degrowth" will not hurt anybody.

So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue.

I am, mostly because TFR is collapsing, and collapsing fast. Many people point out to South Korea as an example where the TFR dropped to record low of 0.68 in 2023, while already being bellow 1.2 for over two decades already. And it may not be the bottom, TFR in Seoul was 0.55 and is also falling. So let's look at simple math if TFR remains at this 0.7 level. One hundred young Koreans will have 35 children and 12 grandchildren. That is almost 10 times drop of young population in just two generations, this is catastrophic level of population collapse, way more than Black Death that ravaged Europe in 14th century resulting in 50% drop of population. The "nice" thing about demography is that it is baked in. There were just 230 000 babies born in South Korea in 2023. This means that there will be at most 230 thousand young 20 years old Koreans in 2044 who may go on and do all the necessary jobs that the country will require of them in two decades, like soldiers to stop North Koreans, firemen, policemen, scientists and everything else. There will be no more of them in next couple of decades.

The retirement problem is not a problem of "saving". All pension systems are just redistribution of current production, it does not matter if it is "financed" by taxes or selling some assets or in any other way such as coerced slave labor of future productive population.

It's funny, usually the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant is pro-grasshopper. But then when the issue of retirement comes up, people see the grasshoppers around, it's all "no, there's no such thing as saving, you have to be an ant until you die".

It is still an apt parable. Go and buy canned food, with this inflation you would be king. The key thing is that good ant would also invest in his children to take care of him if he can no longer work thus “storing” and “saving” the labor.

I think the underlying assumption here is that the majority of the population won't save nearly enough so they will be forced to work longer and/or drastically cut consumption when they retire.

That is beside my point. There are things you can meaningfully save, mostly durable goods. You can build a house, buy pots and other goods that can last your lifetime. You could store some canned goods and so forth. You can also do this on larger scale of building national capital: highways, bridges, factories that may work a long time.

However unavoidably you cannot save labor. It has to be provided when you need it. Your house and highways etc. need to be maintained, the factory needs labor for production. You can sell your assets when old to current population in presence of rule of law and get labor of youth in exchange. But if there are less workers, then your assets will buy less. That is the problem in any society to be solved.

In the extreme situation of the movie “Children of men”, where all that is left is 70+ old infirm people, they are fucked. There are no firemen and policemen and bakers and linemen and nurses and doctors and all the other essential workers to sell your gold to. The same it happens in wars and civil unrest where your gold necklace will buy you loaf of bread. You will die of hunger in your bed. Technically, you individually could save more, but it would be impossible society wide.

The same logic applies in 50% or 90% young population collapse scenario. That is the point.

Perhaps we're misunderstanding each other, when I say drastically cut consumption then I mean that they barely get any healthcare and no elderly care, most will work until they die. Retirement is consumption.

You can sell your assets when old to current population in presence of rule of law and get labor of youth in exchange. But if there are less workers, then your assets will buy less. That is the problem in any society to be solved.

It's usually solved by the Grim Reaper. There's more young than old. Crashing birth rates make that a problem, but there's enough slack in the system to allow a build-down of the population (at US birth rates, if not South Korean). Provided the young people don't see the old people with assets, decide they'd rather take than trade their labor for them, and do so. Unfortunately that's likely to be what happens, once the Boomers are out of the way.

For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me

I'm not actually aware of many folks that do the latter. Most presentations I've seen of why GDP is a useful number at all actually reason about GDP/capita, saying that this tends to correlate well with general living standards. Not perfectly, of course, and those folks will be quick to point out areas where it's still an imperfect measure.

I think the main argument for raw GDP would be on a national scale. Raw GDP on a national scale tends to correlate with state capacity to wage war. This obviously has its own benefits, but it's definitely a sideshow for any country that doesn't have significant security concerns. For countries that have significant security concerns, I can't imagine that any form of degrowth could possibly have much purchase.

Perhaps an argument could be made for tech development, in that having a significant pool of economic activity/capacity is an enabler. Robin Hanson is probably the closest to this, but I think his model heavily weighs just raw population, though I could imagine that if you pressed him on edge cases, he would say that some factor or threshold on GDP, GDP/capita, or something or other is potentially in play.

Thats an interesting point. Everyone who wouldn't hit the button marked "3d print another billion slum-dwelling Bomali Rickshawaroo™ pullers who increase GPD by $10 a year" is a degrowther in the sense of prioritizing things above economic growth.

It's worth doing more theoretical work to distinguish lifestyle-improving GDP deprioritization from "we must ban air conditioning in the Bomali slums because human suffering appeases Gaia's wrath" degrowthism.

Ah, degrowthers calling for "sacrifice". Reminds me of the classic demotivational poster. "Your role may be thankless, but if you're willing to give it your all, you just might bring success to those who outlast you."

I honestly just don't see the problem with lower birthrates long term. Yes our current economic and retirement system is an unsustainable pyramid of overlapping obligations all pinned on neverending population growth.

But that ain't good! Every nice place on the planet is already overpopulated (even a lot of the shitty ones) and every great city and historical or natural wonder is being destroyed by mass tourism. We'll have bots or artifical wombs before the century is out, so all this hand wringing seems a touch performative in a kind of "it aligns with my right wing beliefs about society and women" sort of way.

I firmly believe it is a good thing to have a smaller world population than 8 billion or 10 billion people, we can increase it later if we start exploring the stars or some such. That is simply too many people that all want the same resources, it makes things shitty for a lot of them, if nothing else it makes it crowded at all my favorite spots. I don't like that.

Other groups have high birth rates. These groups are different from your group and have different values. It makes no sense to work for a future in which all of your labor will go to a group replacing you. Sadly birth rates are conflict theory stuff. There are 300k Hasidim in America with a population that doubles every 20 years, so there will be 10 million in 100 years, mostly in and around NJ / NYC, and they already possess extreme political power. Factor in the other groups: Amish, Salafists, etc.

The world will be a very different place in 100 years, to the point where I can't imagine that kind of thing mattering unless we get set back by an asteroid strike or nuclear war. If you think 100 years is too optimistic then think about the world in 1000. None of this kind of thing will have any bearing on the future once machines can outthink and outwork us at every level and in every field. So, work, don't work, whatever your doing don't do it for your in group values to be present in 100 years, they won't be.

I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.

For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.

Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.

None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.

I think economics are part of it, but I really don't think raising a kid is as expensive as people think. Like the Korean test prep mentioned in the threat, the things that seem expensive are things besides the actual raising of the kid (e.g. swim lessons, private school, tutoring...)

But just "having a child and raising them to adulthood" is not that expensive from what I can tell.

Yeah I'm 6 months into fatherhood (and whilst there's a bunch of schooling etc. fees that I'm obviously not paying yet). My partner and I are reasonably frugal/happy to procure second-hand things from marketplace and I'd be surprised if my daughter has cost us more than a thousand or two so far. We've probably come out far ahead considering savings on stuff we'd normally be spending.

I mean, to be fair, it's easy to be cheap when the kid has no real personality or interests yet.

True but there's been plenty of opportunity to spend up if we'd wanted to buy first-hand.

Walk around your average baby store and it's amazing how much you can drop on a stroller and a bed.

None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.

It’s not just Georgia, you know- in America church attendees are above replacement. In Holland and Ukraine religious fundamentalists are growing as a share of the population through differential fertility- and yes both dutch Calvinists and the UGCC are fundamentalist groups. Religion, or at least abrahamaic religion, really does improve fertility.

convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature

Same here. Societal shifts around 'status' or 'what we value' are necessary, but they will never gain traction unless the economic incentives align as well. Economics is about money, Money is about labor, Labor is about time.

Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP

These statistics are misleading, because it doesn't measure what qualitative changes it seeks to drive.

Can women return to the workforce in high-status roles after being out of the market for 5-10 years ? Can they take long maternity breaks without being fired ? Do the fathers gets long paternity breaks to contribute to housework ? Can they afford to add another room to their house without breaking the bank ? Is it possible for the kids to set your kids up for strong economic outcomes without dooming them to a horrible rat race ?

This is just motherhood. But you have to see economic incentives for long term romantic partnerships too. Can you stay in the same city longterm without affecting career prospects ? Do you have time for dating in your 20s, or is there immense pressure to be in the office instead ?

No amount of money is going to make up for misaligned incentives on these primary questions.

The trads complain about changing values which disincentivize motherhood. Free-market capitalists talk about bad economic incentives. Both have a point. But, the latter is lot easier to fix than the former. To top it off, capitalists have economic power, while trads are bleeding social power like a slit aorta. So, pretty large difference in agency as well.

Ofc, govts pick the worst of both worlds by spending money on bad economic outcomes and accommodating some real crazies who keep moving the value system further away from the metaphorical God's light.

P.S: Alongside economics, building environment and infrastructure also plays a huge role here. That's a topic for another day.

Our insane economic success (in markets that aren't completely whack to to TRBL gov't intervention like healthcare, education, and housing) has allowed people's standards for how much they spend on children to go through the roof, rather than standards magically rising on their own beyond our economic means. Perhaps one could argue that child rearing is one of the few areas where there's a one-way ratchet, such that any increases in standards are 'locked in', such that any decreases in economic ability present significant challenges and drive huge decreases in fertility, but it really seems quite unlikely, especially given that we're still not significantly struggling economically by almost any real measure and that TFR doesn't really track things like recessions all that well. I'm much more likely to believe that it's general cultural/status factors.

Children are expensive, and have become far more expensive over the past century, in currencies which we have not become wealthier in, namely time and effort. Once responsibilities are non-delegable, no amount of money can make them lesser, and anyway cost disease and regulation has made most delegation of even the reasonably delegable parts of childcare out of reach to all but the wealthy. Except for the underclass, who simply fail to pay the extra costs.

I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'. That seems plausible to me, perhaps even likely. It's a similar explanation to what I've heard given as the reason why people seem to think they're always "busy"; they just have so much damn money and economic power/opportunity that choosing to not spend your time traveling, skiing, whatever, has a higher opportunity cost.

But I would stress that this is not strictly lack of material wealth or access to affordable goods. In any event, I had forgotten about this explanation, and would consider it a contender with other murkier cultural/status factors.

I think the economic term for the phenomenon you're describing is 'opportunity cost'.

You can look at it that way, but I don't think it gets to the point. Parenting children is a lot of non-delegable work that takes up time. It's less that you could be doing other things in that time and those other things have become more valuable (which is "opportunity cost") than that the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased. That's an issue even if the only thing you could do with the time was no more valuable than it was a century ago.

the time has increased, and the attention required during that time has increased

I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things. That's kind of a sub-phenomenon of the general opportunity costs -> more "busy" result. Since people are so productive and so wealthy, they feel like they have to "do stuff" with their time (stuff that costs all that money they're making), and whether that's taking a fancy trip or taking your kid to fifty-three activities, it all feels like the same phenomenon to me.

Backing out, though, it really is just a different claim to say that children are more expensive, monetarily, in terms of the purchases required (with the intermediate step being that material wealth hasn't kept up with the increased monetary requirement) and saying that people are so wealthy that the real resource being budgeted and subject to opportunity cost is time. It brings us to substantially different conclusions about the underlying dynamics and possible policy considerations.

I don't know why this would be the case. In papers I've read that analyze the results of the American Time Use Survey over time, they do observe that time spent has gone up, but they mostly attribute it to people feeling like they have to take their child from one activity to another and do all the things.

That time counts!

I assume in bygone times the normal method of acquiring children's clothes was for the women in the family - especially grandmothers and spinsters - to make them by hand, and this distorts such calculations.

Those bygone times are more than 50 years ago.

Putting aside deeply illiberal solutions that both sides refuse to even consider, it seems like the most viable solution suggested by your post is to simply cut down on college as a necessary rite of passage.

How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?

How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?

Increasingly, anyone who wants to do anything better-compensated or more-dignified than working at McDonald's or stocking shelves at Walmart. But that's only if we exclude trade apprenticeships or 2-year technical degrees, which I'd count under "college."

But the road to success for non-college-educated has eroded.

But that's only if we exclude trade apprenticeships or 2-year technical degrees, which I'd count under "college."

Isn't that a bit far-fetched?

I'm not completely sure what you mean. You could make a good argument for trade apprenticeships not being college, but people who get associate's degrees in HVAC or IT or aviation maintainence get them at community colleges, and they're counted as college degrees.

I know I worded it weirdly, what I was trying to say is, "While four years may be unnecesary for many, some sort of post-secondary education (whether an apprenticeship or two-year degree) is ultimately necessary for most people who want to progress farther in a career than low-skill service jobs." I'm not saying we should get rid of 2-year degrees, or anything like that. In fact I think they're a great alternative to a lot of four-year programs for many people.

I'm not completely sure what you mean.

I meant that it doesn't fall into the category of overall life experiences and phase that average people normally associate with the word.

Sure. But even cutting a lot of degrees down to 2-years would be a not-insignificant gain.

And I'm unconvinced that certain non-technical fields especially need a long stint in college.

I definitely agree that a lot of white-collar jobs don't actually require higher education -- just some interpersonal skills and Microsoft Office expertise. IMO very few non-technical fields actually require the level of education provided by 4-year degrees. Very little of it is retained, anyway, particularly if it isn't being used.

Ultimately what I believe is going on is that employers are using college education as a proxy for conscientiousness and IQ, whether consciously or unconsciously. You want to hire people for your office positions who are genuinely better employees than fry cooks. And testing directly for the desired traits is either illegal or too gauche. You try convincing Linda the HR lady you want to ignore qualifications and hire based on IQ tests. So college performance becomes the acceptable proxy, and it includes the relevant payoffs to interest groups like under-represented minorities and women that are the cost of doing business.

Yes. This is the standard response I get, and it seems plausible (though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests).

I guess the only real response is "I said 'most viable', not 'easy'". Yes, cutting away whatever makes businesses unwilling to do straight IQ testing and starving the large administrative sector attached to colleges is not going to be easy. And huge swathes of the educated populace are not in favor of it for both self-interested and ideological reasons.

But, if the government is going to be involved in backing and forgiving loans, there has to be rationing. Much stricter rationing.

I can see employers get more legal leeway on IQ tests and other disparate impact bait before you actually roll back women in the workplace or actually pay to fully compensate people for their perceived economic loss they suffer when they have kids

It's not just about IQ. I know plenty of smart people -- people smarter than me -- who couldn't finish college, because they kept on sleeping through class and missing deadlines. It's about IQ, and conscientousness, and either having low neuroticism or enough coping mechanisms to maneuver through the neuroticism you have, and being pro-social. Heck, conscientiousness might be more important than IQ for most things.

though one wonders why less "woke"/diverse nations don't simply institute IQ tests

They do! We're talking about South Korea's fierce competition down below. And East Asian Confucianist competition is nothing more than an elaborate proxy for IQ, conscientiousness... and all of the aforesaid traits.

It needs to be grueling and competitive, because we know of no other way to test for industriousness other than actually putting people to work and seeing who sticks to deadlines and persists and who doesn't. There is no lab test we can do to measure that value, everything in the short term reduces to IQ. But for employment, it's the long term we care about.

The only other way we have to measure that part of people's personality is by straight up asking them -- "Do you keep deadlines?" "Is it important for you to work?" "Are you lazy?" -- and the second we try to measure a property by self-report and tie it to outcomes anyone with an above-room-temperature IQ will start simply lying.

College is just the West's version of Confucian examinations. Only the actual competition comes in secondary school, before anyone submits an application to any university, and we don't publicize the fact beforehand so most of the population doesn't realize how much their petty high school activities and extracurriculars will define the course of their life. And unlike the Confucian system, it's explicitly designed to favor children of the elite, while letting in some token minorities so the college brochures don't look 'too white.' China can point to the Western university and say, "not only is this fundamentally less valid as a measurement than our traditional form of examination, but it is an affront to our socialist value of equality." And I'm sure they do. A lot.

China can point to the Western university and say, "not only is this fundamentally less valid as a measurement than our traditional form of examination, but it is an affront to our socialist value of equality." And I'm sure they do. A lot.

Not to make a snide quip, but I doubt they do, because they seem fine with sending their kids to our colleges--because, for all of Western education's sins, there's still enough value in it for it to be a potential matter of geopolitical strategy.

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How many people really need to spend four years (and an increasingly large amount of money) on a degree, if we're being honest?

They want to spend 4 years drinking and fornicating. The diploma is just a side effect.

And their parents want them to spend 4 years establishing a social circle with other college students of similar background, and to marry one of those students. Which is basically the same thing, with the diploma indeed being of secondary importance.

Admirable goals. But if you can't actually pay for your rumspringa yourself some pragmatism has to seep in.

Maybe two years of fornicating and drinking and less debt to worry about is a good compromise.

The 18 years old horny guys and gals, brainwashed by numerous films about the party life and the whole society to follow their dreams are hardly the most levelheaded and pragmatic demographic.

I think Europe has a better solution - not so lavish student lifestyle, but heavily sponsored. Where I live the cost per semester for EU nationals is around the median monthly salary. And that is if you pay out of pocket. If you actually do well on the exam you can get subsidized which is roughly in half. Of course for foreigners it is a lot more expensive. So it is totally doable to study and work and be financially self sufficient.

For some of us it's a matter of work hard play hard. Hedonism and ambition can be made compatible.

His South Korean example points at the opposite of what he’s trying to get at. If a SK family had the resources to devote to another child, by his own logic they would because the child’s rank reflects on the mother, and more so if there are more kids. The bottleneck is thus resources, not culture.

There’s a lot of variables that go into fertility rates, but they’re not really that complex. Age of marriage, rate of marriage, and economic factors are obviously the most significant ones in western societies outside of some edge cases (Amish etc.). It’s not rocket surgery. The graphs this guy shows are not evidence one way or another because they don’t actually reflect the modal family’s economic status, and this should be obvious with a little thought.

But status is relative. If you increase everyone’s pay you haven’t changed the percent of income they devote to status. Everyone will just spend more money on that one kid’s opportunities. If Koreans get more money they will spend even more on ensuring one high status kid. So what is important is to value number of kids as a mark of success for half the living humans (all the women), to balance out status concerns.

Empirically that’s incorrect, since Korean families with 2 or even 3 kids do exist - they’re usually more well off than others. There’s a limit to how much resources you can pour into a single kid, and also not all Koreans will actually torture their kids like that.

I agree that helicoptering money on all parents will simply raise prices for everything, and tutoring specifically. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point is that the bottleneck for a specific family is still economic, even when the example is taken at face value.

The status competition in East Asia extends to the status of one's children. Even if you were to magically boost the status of women with more children (and even give housing and financial benefits on top), that won't fix the intense status anxiety when it comes to how their children do in life.

In East Asia, status rankings are universal, overt, and familial. And because status is a positional good, it naturally invites full investment of every expendable resource. If you have to divide your resources across n children, they'll lose out to families with m < n children, which reflects badly on your own status.

There are easy ways of solving this, like limiting admission to all elite universities and prestigious graduate jobs to young adults with at least two siblings.

Would that be "easy" though? It seems like political suicide to propose such a policy and coercing private institutions to implement it would be difficult. Then there are all of the perverse incentives toward gaming the system. There would likely need to be carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications from a prior birth or other health concerns, so lots of buying out diagnoses under the table. Some might adopt a strategy of having the threshold number of kids and still hyperinvesting in only one. Etc.

carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications

When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage? If people actually want to solve the problem, they have to bite the bullet and get it done even if it makes some people worse off. Now I know that South Korea doesn't want to solve the problem and so they're mucking about with tiny financial nudges and lame govt programs.

When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage?

How about we do that skipping for everything else first?

What's more important than the life or death of the nation? I said nation, not state. There are more important things in this world than raising the GDP figures and subsidizing the senescent.

I guess you have to smash the safety glass to get to the fire extinguisher... but that's included in the fire-extinguishing process.

I would say a large part of how we got here is by deciding that the "unfairly disadvantaged" must never be negatively affected by anything. But somehow it is only when those "unfairly disadvantaged" are a different group that we should skip those carveouts.

If this is correct (and I am sure the real picture is at least slightly more complicated) than low fertility becoming an elite concern will likely boost the status of having children.

I think part of the reason for a lack of children in the Western world was the media emphasis on Malthusian thinking and the difficulties of having children. If the elites double back it seems likely that fertility will also double back, although I doubt it will rise to the same degree.

What's significantly more complicated is that the two developed countries with the lowest female LFPR are Italy and Japan. Clearly, there's more going on here.

The only truly developed country with above replacement fertility is Israel. Georgia is a much poorer second world country with replacement-ish and stably rising fertility. There are regions and social strata elsewhere in the developed world with high fertility(Eg the Dutch bible belt), but nowhere else in the industrialized world is above replacement on the national level unless you count the gulf countries as industrialized, although a few Latin American countries and Turkey were fairly recently. These countries vary vastly. More than likely there's no magic bullet.

F-LFPR doesn’t tell us what the Japanese woman or the Italian woman values, how she sees her identity in the world, whether she was nurtured at a young age to want to nurture children, and whether she feels pride/shame relative to her participation in fertility, all of which relate to status. It’s not clear that there is more going on, I don’t think, at least not from F-LFPR. If there is something more complicated than this, we should see the answer in the Hasidim, who raise lots of children while living near-exclusively in urban and suburban environments. This eliminates any diet or environmental toxin -related etiology. What is left? There’s money, but the experiments in paying women to have kids don’t amount to anything. So what’s actually left besides “pro-fertile culture” which relates to female status?

(Israeli non-orthodox fertility is complicated by the existence of the ultra-orthodox, who raise up the religious scholars, affect culture, and a percent of the ultra-orthodox become merely “religious”. The Jewish religion probably also increases female fertility as a status signifier because it’s so worldly / material regarding “existence of the Jewish people” etc.)

How much did those experiments actually pay them? I would expect the pay to be a drop in the bucket compared to how much the cost of successfully raising children who "make it" has increased in the last 20 years, because otherwise we could have UBI (top-tier US college tuition fees can easily pay for three adults to have a comfortable life!). There's also the matter of inflation in attention and supervision children are expected to be given, which can't be made up for by just pouring in money. This is most obvious in the US near-prohibition on leaving even 12 year olds unattended, but even an Austrian family friend (young academic mother of two) reports malicious gossip from parents of classmates about her never picking up the kids after primary school because she has to work. What I gather from her stories is that mothers helicopter-parenting their children has become a status thing (it's naturally a luxury, since it means foregoing one income), even as legally it continues to be okay for children to be classic European levels of unattended.

The hasidim truly and genuinely believe in a religion which forbids birth control, same as the tradcaths but without the latter's marriage rate problems.

the two developed countries with the lowest female LFPR are Italy and Japan

... the latter of which, curiously enough, has the highest TFR of any country/territory in developed East Asia.

I'd actually forgotten that both of those countries had the highest TFRs in their respective regions(East Asia and Southern Europe- I'm excluding France from the latter), and the stablest ones too. But they're still a long way from replacement; a baby bonus of .1-.25 from 'women mostly stay home' does seem supported, but the average developed country needs much more than a .25 boost.

I saw a thread om twitter explaining that low fertility in South Korea is due to parental investment competion:

It's amazing how far people go not to point out every Korean born requires >9k hours of costly test prep for a chance at "good" college otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I have to wonder if there's a taboo.

In high fertility countries, slightly older kids raise their siblings.

That's the answer. It's not a hard mystery.

17 y/o Koreans can't help raise their 15 y/o siblings, because Korean teens are preparing for college exams, which only expensive adults can help with.

That's it.

Do people even bother asking Koreans?

Surely any married Korean couple, if you ask them why they don't have four kids, will surely bring up the nightmarish prospect of ensuring that all of them are "properly placed"?

"Have the older kids tutor the younger ones" yeah, right!

https://x.com/anarchyinblack/status/1817684593908080960

At this point, I wonder if we in the US could somehow shift our immigration strategy to target South Koreans. We receive people who will be good citizens and diligent workers, they get a society that isn't as insanely high-pressure.

As someone currently living in S Korea, I don't agree. Or at least, it's not that simple.

Korea has had a low birth rate for a while now, since the 80s, but it's only recently that's crashed into "OMG", sub-1 levels. Something has happened more recently. And it's not the tiger moms. If anything, I think they've eased up a bit on the childhood hardcore test prep stuff. I see more kids and teens hanging around now in malls and arcades, goofing off, or going to "fun" schools for things like drawing and sports, while the old-school test-prep schools are kinda languishing.

If anything, it might be a generational trauma kind of thing. In the 80s and 90s, people really did feel like they needed to study hard-core to get into a good college to have any chance of a good life. Now the country is much less poor, and there are a lot more options, including "alternative" paths like k-pop singer or esports streamer for kids who are not conventionally good students but have other talents. But people still remember the miserable childhood they had, and feel like "having kids = misery."

"Just ask any couple why don't have kids," well, it's not that simple, because people don't always open up about their deep emotional issues, you know? They'll probably just say "the economy" because that's a nice safe excuse. Doesn't really explain why the birth rate always seems to go the opposite direction as the GDP.

Why are you saying that South Korea was 'poor' back then as compared to know, relatively speaking? I don't think it was. This was before the Asian financial crisis of 1998, when SK was considered one of the Asian tigers. I mean I'm rather confident that one could make a decent living in South Korea without a college degree back when the manufacturing sector was booming.

they were a "tiger" because they grew so quickly, not because they started out as some wealthy financial center. Their inflation-adjusted gdp per capita in 1980 was $4000. Which, ok, isn't as dire poverty as some nations, but certainly made it hard to find a middle-class job. Compare Japan which was at $19,000 in 1980.

they were a "tiger" because they grew so quickly

Yes, that's what I meant. (Supposedly the tiger metaphor originates from tigers being able to jump really far.) I'd assume that a growing economy a) creates a large number of jobs in manufacturing and industry that are available to people without college degrees b) gives average people a sense of optimism, because one can believe that prosperity has increased, and will continue to increase.

otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I know this is indeed the root of the problem, but if this is indeed the social reality, it's baffling how a society can end up with norms such as this.

This sort of norm can only be sustained when there is plenty of human potential to waste in the first place. So it causing low fertility is probably a feature, not a bug: if success above the very lowest level is a high-cost tournament, there's probably too many people.

I'm not sure that really explains the phenomenon. Singapore has much higher population density than Korea, but parental investment seems much smaller. It's also not clear why there should be so much human potential to waste, especially in the era of globalization.

The TFR in Singapore and South Korea are roughly equal though.

Singapore is like 40% higher.

I've seen worldwide data online 5-10 years ago. Singapore was shown with the lowest TFR in the entire world while S Korea was the 3rd lowest or so, tied with Hongkong and Taiwan, roughly.

That was true 5-10 years ago and is no longer true.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=2002..latest&country=SGPKORTWNMACHKG

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Perhaps Singapore's economic system can just use more people (proportionally) at those higher levels of achievement.

South Korea is very prosperous, though. The competitiveness doesn’t seem to match other developed countries with similar income rates, it’s not like in Britain or Germany people have to win an insane rat race or be Amazon warehouse workers.

All the OK-paying middle class jobs that pay just fine in every developed country exist in South Korea, and wealth inequality is average. It’s not India where life outside the top 5% sucks. The focus on the elite rat race is bizarre. The US has niche credentialist PMC status games for medicine or finance or big law or academia, but they are way outside of the life experience of most Americans.

South Korea is very prosperous, though.

Not compared to Singapore, Britain, or Germany. My thought about Korea (and Japan, which has a somewhat similar system) is it just isn't dynamic enough to accept more people at higher levels. If Samsung/LG/Daewoo/Hyundai can only use N such people each year, persons N+1 on through infinity are going to be sweeping floors.

It just doesn’t track with lower inequality levels compared to most Western countries in Korea and Japan though. There isn’t a tiny elite who pass the meritocracy test and go to elite colleges who are making tons of money while everyone else is poor (like in India with the IIT system), that’s not the distribution in these places.

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Uh, isn’t South Korea at basically-western-European levels of prosperity? Like there’s no reason life can’t be perfectly decent for people who aren’t 90th percentile.

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To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to have status lowered relative to motherhood.

I've never understood why Congress doesn't create an award specifically designed to raise mother's status, maybe after a certain number of kids. Give them a little ceremony and a title like gold star families. It costs nothing and is a simple way to boost status.

National awards have an Old World feel to them that doesn't jive with American culture. It is more in line with American culture for such awards to be handed out by associations organized at the local level.

There's Presidential and other government-given awards, though, no?

Well for one thing, an award like that would have very powerful totalitarian connotations, since both Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR did very similar things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_Mother

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine

Closer to the modern day, Putin's Russia is also doing things like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/18/russia-offers-mother-heroine-medal-and-16800-for-having-10-children.html.

It is worthwhile, I think, to note that even though Putin's Russia has been trying to encourage the fertility rate to go up for many years now, the fertility rate has been recently slumping after hitting a peak around 2014: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1010528/number-of-live-births-in-russia/. Perhaps not coincidentally, that slump coincides with a slump in GDP per capita: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=RU.

France has a similar decoration as well though.

The 2014 slump is an exchange-rate matter. The Russian economy did not actually shrink 40% in a couple of years.

Congress will not do this because republicans are distrustful of government action and progressives like to say that they support large families but will actually fight anything which celebrates marriage and childbearing for women tooth-and-nail. That leaves moderate democrats, who lack the numbers.

That wouldn’t boost status. Status is a real, felt, living social reality. What confers status is genuinely sought after. No status is conferred from participation medals or competitions where there are not losers. A congressional medal is pretty much worthless. You need “potentially valuable social others” to genuinely value you more highly as a result of the criterion of status. So what is required is a totalizing social change, not something fake. (“Gold star families” as a phrase fills me with utter disgust; it connotes kindergarten activity points and does not actually honor the families of dead soldiers).

Boy howdy is your opinion of the ‘gold star families’ concept outside of the red tribe norm, and probably far from the median American.

You think that the median American gives actual extra honor to the families of fallen soldiers? “We have to invite James to this function, he’s a gold star family member”; “You should really date Dave, his brother died in Iraq”. I think there is some pity to these families, but I would be surprised if their honor has substantively increased meaningfully as a result.

Here's a simpler* one: parental income is divided by the number of children for determining financial aid.

If your parents have an income of $200k and you have two siblings, you would be treated the same as an only child with $83k-income parents. I know that many costs scale sub-linearly with the size of the family (never mind just the number of children), but it wouldn't be very effective program if it was merely cancelling out an existing bias.

* Simpler isn't always better, of course.

The correct approach would be to directly attack feminism as the source of societies woes, since that’s the ideology of the working female. I have no idea how that could be coordinated though. It would take a societal and economic collapse due to low birth rates for it to happen, and maybe not even then.

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