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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?

There's lots of suggestions, most of them bad. For example, Scandinavian countries have been touted as "doing it right" by offering generous perks to families such as paid family leave. But these efforts, despite outrageous costs, have done little or nothing to stem the falling birth rate. Sweden's fertility rate is a dismal 1.66 as of 2020, and if trends hold, the rate among ethnic Swedes is far lower.

I think that, like everything, deciding to marry and have a family comes down to status.

Mongolia is a rare country that has managed to increase its fertility rate over the last 20 years, from about 2.1 children per women in 2004, to about 2.7 today. This feat is more impressive considering the declines experienced worldwide during the same period. It's doubly impressive considering the fertility rate in neighboring Inner Mongolia (China) is just 1.06!

What is Mongolia doing right? Apparently, they are raising the status of mothers by giving them special recognition and status.

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1827418468813017441

In Georgia (the country), something similar happened when an Orthodox patriarch started giving special attention to mothers with 3 children:

https://x.com/JohannKurtz/status/1827070216716874191

Now, raising the status of mothers is more easily said than done. But I think it's possible, especially in countries with a high degree of social cohesion like in East Asia. In Europe, a figure like the King of Netherlands could personally meet and reward mothers. In the United States, of course, this sort of thing would be fraught as any suggestion coming from the right might backfire due to signalling. Witness the grim specter of the vasectomy and abortion trucks at the DNC. But the first step to fixing a problem is to adequately diagnose the cause. To me, the status explanation is more compelling (and fixable) than any other suggestion I've seen.

Outside of the current Overton Window:

Crush zoning laws. We take it as a given that everyone will commute, but these are largely from zoning laws. Housing should have close access to groceries and cheap local services - ie, within walking or bike distance. If you have a pseudo-communal housing area, the community can hire maids to come clean houses and assist in the most labor-intense aspects of kids without significantly increasing the cost of living. Additionally, if fathers live less than 20 minutes from their places of work, then women will be more likely to discount the cost of having kids because their partners will be nearby in the event of emergency, et cetera.

Pay people a huge amount of money, like at least $100,000 for each child they have, then deduct a few tax points from their income tax.

Get rid of child car seat laws.

Legalize (paying for) surrogacy.

Completely deregulate childcare.

Make child care expenses and private school tax deductible.

Provide school vouchers.

Do all the housing deregulation economists recommend in order to make housing cheaper.

Aggressively focus on supply side economics to increase everyone's incomes since fertility starts to go up again once people make a lot of money.

An Israeli chimes in.

The TLDR is that fertility is essentially memetic: people have about as many kids as they see the people around them having. The theory is that the structure of Israeli society means that the high birthrate of the ultra-orthodox filters through to most people (even among the most secular groups), as there are enough conducting social layers between them that such memes can be transmitted between groups from one end of the religious-secular extreme to the other. Perhaps @pm_me_passion could comment?

The author compares this this with most other first-world countries, where there'll be highly fertile groups like The Amish, but who are (according to this model) too isolated for this to have much of an effect on anyone else.

0% tax rate for people with 3 or more children.

The ultra wealthy would game this to pay no taxes, which would also make 3+ families a sort of status indicator.

The main goal is making it high status to have kids. It honestly seems like this is already starting.

On immediate material things: tax breaks for “pro kid” businesses. If you are a restaurant, bar, coffee shop, etc. with a dedicated area for children to play, you get a tax break.

A paramilitary force to aggressively remove drug addicts and anti socials from child spaces like parks and playgrounds.

Death penalty for child abusers and child traffickers (as a social signal that we care about kids)

NGOs. Take a look at any other issue that is handled by an NGO network, and you’ll quickly realize that no state really has the political will to achieve what a disperse network of wealthy unaccountable independent actors can do.

Imagine for a moment, the immigration NGO-blob, but for parenthood:

  • organizations dedicated to improving the public image of parents and parenthood, pushing it through ads, media content, etc.

  • organizations dedicated to making parenthood as free and painless as possible, through free money, training, and even individual caseworkers assigned to families to assist them with any difficulties that may arise.

  • organizations that help “eliminate gender disparities” by establishing prestigious awards for accomplished mothers, special job positions for current and “retired” (empty-nester) mothers.

  • sex-positive education orgs that importantly note that having children as a result of sex isn’t a disaster, it’s a boon for society.

  • weird humanities degrees focused around the study of children, family-formation etc that gradually force the university as a whole to be extremely pro-parent.

  • development groups dedicated to redesigning urban areas in favor of large families

  • festivals, maybe even a whole month, dedicated to parenthood.

  • extensive lobbying groups to make sure that all of the above are not only legally favored, but funded with federal dollars.

There’s really no simple policy that could do the same.

France also has a program to reward mothers of large families- and their fertility advantage is not entirely or even mostly Muslims. Indeed, the medaille de la famille Francais doesn’t seem particularly like it overrewards Muslims compared to native French.

In the US, there’s some low hanging fruit that can be exploited to make existing families more likely to grow- ex, reducing or eliminating car seat laws. Changing status is both difficult in an Uber-diverse country and politically fraught in a country where any form of aspiration to motherhood is cast as dystopian fiction.

The focus should be on enticing those with 1 child to have 3, and those with 2 to have 4 or 5.

Tax credits, big tax credits, for married families where all children are the issue of the husband and wife. You should be clearing the way of obstacles for those who already want to have kids rather than trying to convince anyone.

I would also end all teen-pregnancy prevention programs, as they don't stop working when you turn 20.

The focus should be on enticing those with 1 child to have 3, and those with 2 to have 4 or 5.

Recently, on a podcast interview discussing this issue, the interviewee gave the statistic that back in the 80s, the average number of children per mother (note, not per woman, per mother) was 2.5. Now, that same figure is at… 2.6. I also recall reading, elsewhere, that the average number of children per mother did not actually rise much during the Baby Boom — it was pretty much entirely a "marriage boom."

In all cases, the issue seems to be getting not from 1 to 3 or 2 to 4, but from 0 to 1.

I would also end all teen-pregnancy prevention programs, as they don't stop working when you turn 20.

This. Aside from the fact that most of America's fertility drop has been due to a wildly successful campaign against teen pregnancy (and say what you want about red states and their goofy abstinence only sex-ed, but red states had the biggest declines such that Alabama's teen fertility rate today is about where Massachusetts was in 2005), people don't stop seeing themselves as "young" upon turning 18 or 22. In my "millennial who grew up watching "16 and pregnant" cohort, the change seems to happen around 30 (when people either have a fairly stable career or have figured out that it's unlikely to happen) if at all, with many either missing the boat entirely or having trouble conceiving that they wouldn't have had 10 years ago.

Aside from being unconvinced that any pro-natalist policy within the currently acceptable Overton window would work, I am simultaneously convinced that the best solution to the problem is to just get rid of the mountains of still existing anti-natal policy that we take for granted as normal. An example of this is the government attempting to reconcile the fact that college educated people are richer by spending tons of money to make more people college educated (a massively time-consuming, K-selected career path).

Change the structure of working environments. The dominant mode of employment in developed countries is calibrated around the assumption of either a childless worker or a parent (i.e. husband) who has no obligations that might interfere with working hours and a parent who stays home to take care of the kids and do domestic labor. Needless to say, while single-income households with children still exist (and were somewhat less universal in the past than is commonly supposed), it is no longer typical, especially as you move up the socio-economic ladder. This is problematic for TFR because a dual income household has to either pay for childcare for any young children (often cost prohibitive, eating up most of one partner's salary) or have a partner (almost always the wife) drop out of the workforce (highly non-normative for people in developed countries, especially middle class and up). Throw in some extremely high standards for what constitutes an acceptable minimum level of parental attention and you have a recipe for even fairly affluent couples deciding they can't afford more than one child.

If you're right-wing, you may favor more women leaving the workforce. If you're left-wing you may favor childcare subsidies. I think the former fails for normative reasons. It's going to be very hard to persuade women to go back to being housewives, even with big pro-natal propaganda efforts, and most people will find the proposal unacceptable in any event. The latter struggles on economic terms - the same people who advocate for childcare subsidies want childcare workers to be paid more and tend to push for a lower ratio of children-to-worker (basically, childcare is already very expensive for your average family and they want to make it even more expensive). In a world where we expect most people to have several children, you can't have everyone pay someone else to raise their kids.

This brings us to option 3: Retvrn, but not like that. For a very long time, it was normal to work out of the home for both men and women, so the question of who was going to watch your kids was straightforward. We can modernize the concept via a mix of encouraging permissiveness with respect to WFH and encouraging/requiring workplaces to be more accommodating to parents with young children. It should be entirely acceptable for a parent to bring their very young children to work with them and reasonable accommodations made for them. This reduces financial and attention pressures on parents. (If you don't like poor people, this has the added benefit of disproportionately favoring middle class+ families).

-

(Aside: a lot of pro-natal policies can be helped along by avoiding reactionary framing. Child tax credits are popular, taxing childlessness is not. This despite the fact that they're functionally the same thing).

Housewives aren’t the norm in the United States, but they’re not that rare, either. Liberal middle income women simply happen to be very very visible to the public, and this is the demographic least likely to stay home.

Housewives aren't unicorns, but women's prime-age LFPR is 75-80% (cf. ~90% for men). This isn't just professional women having outsized presence; the vast majority of adult women have jobs. And it's not just liberal women - the vast majority of working-age conservative women are employed as well.

Eliminate all welfare for single adults without children. If you don't need to take care of anyone, then you can take care of yourself. No possibility of a life without responsibility.

This is probably a bad idea, but that's where see the clearest link between cause and solution.

This isn’t that far off from how the US welfare state is structured. The results have been not great.

Traditional welfare benefits are already unavailable for people without children,nat least in the United States.

No, the link isn't clear at all because the people who should be having children aren't consuming welfare.

You have to hit/reward people where it's immediately noticeable for them, not where it might hurt them at some uncertain point far off in the future.

That might take care of the male homeless problem (by having them die) but it also gets you tons of knocked-up welfare moms (since baby = meal ticket). I think we've done this one.

Reduce the franchise to one vote per household who have at least two children between 0 and 18. The benefits:

  1. Strong societal pressure for marriage and children
  2. Shift vote from narcissistic youth and the obdurate aged towards those with the lowest time preference. We would see social security reform, housing and schooling reform, and a better mix of energy and maturity from our politics.
  3. Decrease in political activism: parents of 2+ children between 0 and 18 don't have the time.

Wouldn't this make voter registration a lot more complicated? How do you prove you're a parent?

I'm not necessarily in favor of such a policy (because said policy would open Pandora's box in terms of parties trying to engineer the franchise in their favor), and it would be more complicated than the status quo, but pretty much every parent files a state and local tax return in which they claim their children as dependents, so presumably it would be as easy as "anyone who claims a dependent child gets to vote".

Decrease in political activism: parents of 2+ children between 0 and 18 don't have the time.

Eh this wouldn't work. Then all the non parents would just become activists trying to convince the parents.

Personally.

This is the correct answer.

0-1. You need to severely weaken some of the gender-egalitarianism in context and law. We have to be willing to cultural and legally treat motherhood as something unique. 0-2. You have to be ok with the solutoin not being universally fair or an over focus on liberal-egalitarianism. Some people will be losers in a sheme that actually works. Some groups will feel 'marginalized'. (not racial groups, but groups based on sex, gender-identity, and marital status)

  1. Give extreme tax breaks / financial incentive to married families with children in their 20s. This has to diminish on a curve, so that people are incentivized to start appropriately early. A couple welcoming a child in their 30s should receive less than a couple in thier 20s, all other things equal.
  2. Married mothers over 21 with children under 5, should receive free college & graduate school tuition.
  3. Force legal work schemes via incentives for 'mom-time' jobs, that work as an onramp into full time work. An example would be a 20 hour work week with benefits.
  4. Give married men with stay-at-home wifes financial incentives; Make it not just legal, but encouraged or subsidized to pay family man bread winners more than their childless.

Together, it should be an extremely common and stable path for a woman. Consider this example life path:

A woman meets a husband in undergrad, get married and start having kids in her early 20s while her husband works. The wife takes part time graduate courses for free, and has a secure internship in her desired field. As her second or third child gets out of infanthood, she starts working 'mom-time' in her late 20s. say, 15 hours a week, in her chosen field.

By 32 or so, her third child is in kindergarten and she is working 30 hrs a week with flexibility around picking up her kids etc. By 35 she's working full time and has an entire 29 more years of full time career ahead of her before she starts collecting social security.

Epistemic Status: Befuddled. A little gobsmacked, even.

Every time a new major cause for low TFR is discussed, there seem to be decent counterexamples readily available. Is it chemicals in the environment? Sperm counts do seem to be going down. Purely a social phenomena? Or more broadly economic, where the increased expense of raising kids and the increased earning (and consumption!) potential of high IQ individuals makes kids less important since you don't need 10 of them to help you tend crops.

Status seems like the popular explanation du jour so I'm pretty enthusiastically exploring it. BUT I do now believe the problem is multifactor and there are likely hidden(?) feedback loops. But it can't be THAT tough a nut to crack? We've successfully produced hundreds of generations of humans, it is our default setting, it shouldn't be hard to put us back in that setting!

So my model of Western Women does work with the status argument. Women are perceiving that being a girlboss or free spirit are high status, and that motherhood inhibits pursuit of both those lifestyles, so their status-seeking instincts pull them into and keep them in a metastable position that diverts them from motherhood until some large force (possibly biological clock) knocks them back over to that portion of the graph.

And I sincerely believe that if we flooded the zone such that every commercial, every movie, every other T.V. show, and our news media in general, was promoting motherhood as an ideal, we'd see almost overnight improvement as women gravitate towards the Schelling point for high status.

But it is hard for me to believe that effective policies can be built that won't have huge second-order effects that we can't predict. And those second-order effects will emerge whether or not we achieve the actual policy goals. I'm just skeptical that social problems can be fixed with increasingly complex rulemaking! But it does seem obvious that current policies are bad, too.

Yet, another component of the problem is single motherhood. We can't just have women spurting out babies if they're going to be dependent on state resources their whole lives, and the well-known issues that children raised in single-parent homes tend to exhibit. So you have to glorify families and encourage men to stick around, on top of making motherhood high-status. And about 1-in-5 women in the U.S. is a single mom! (note: not controlling for race)

This likely means removing any subsidies or incentives for females to enter the workspace, and stop subsidizing degrees with little economic value, since those create the double-whammy where a woman ends up burning 4 or more (high fertility!) years on the degree, then gets stuck in a career path that almost certainly isn't economically productive enough to justify the loss of her childrearing years. I will go ahead and say that there certainly are cases where women are able to be economically productive in a career, and it is possible to balance career and childrearing!

I would hope that removing incentives, gender balance requirements, and subsidies is all it takes, but maybe there also have to be some kind of direct legal barriers to women entering careers and becoming Married to a Corporation that can give her everything she needs for a 'fulfilling' life... except kids. I'm hoping that the free market is still going to select for exceptional women to make economic and social contributions, but... exceptional women should also be passing on their genes, one hopes!

There would also have to be some goal of preventing women from becoming Brides of the State, where big daddy government is picking up the tab for her kids and making sure she never falls below a certain level of economic destitution even if she's disabled, not working, not married, and raising 3 kids, possibly all from different fathers.

So a side effect of keeping women out of the workforce is it would immediately make marrying and staying with a man more appealing because now there's a certain amount of 'necessity' to having a provider in the picture, since she can't rely on governments or a subsidized career path to support her forever. And remember, this is on top of raising the social status of motherhood!

(I would be willing to couple all of that with a one-time loan forgiveness act to give women who already made that choice a break. Probably tying it to conditions that they get/stay married for 5 years and have at least one kid during that time)

Also, women themselves need to shape up. Okay, very unfair to generalize, but also a blunt fact. Running the numbers on a superficial level shows a pretty damning picture, with Gen Z showing staggering amounts of obesity, absurdly high rates of LGBT identification, mental illnesses (I'm choosing to make those separate categories, but I daresay its related to the LGBT thing), attendant pharmaceutical dependence, and some indeterminate amount that have become sex workers via Onlyfans and such, which is all to say not very appealing as spouses.

AND they lack the sort of domestic skills that would actually make them good wives and mothers. So even if we raise the status of motherhood and marriage and stack the economic deck to encourage family formation, you have to make them an appealling prospect on their own if men are going to jump on the role of partner and provider instead of sticking with porn and video games. And yes, perhaps bans on porn and restrictions on video games should be on the table, as much as that offends my libertarian sensibilities, I think there's a major problem of superstimuli sucking young people into inescapable loops which partially explains the TFR problem.

I somewhat accept the argument that the mere act of having a child can encourage people to step up, so to an extent I'm willing to just say "SEND IT!" and let the chips fall where they may. I don't endorse that particular study, mind, and indeed assume its probably bullshit in some key way as most social studies seem to be.

And now the big one. I'm not sure how to solve it in real life, but the issue of so many women being childless does indeed have direct political implications, and these women seem to form the core political bloc that votes in favor of policies that destroy all the aforementioned incentives for family formation.

I don't necessarily want to say "repeal the 19th", but I worry about the incentives that come from targeting female voters and the ways that political actors will try to influence said voters with handouts and emotional pleas and the further incentive to keep these women childless and unhappy to ensure they continue to support the party.

This relates back to the 'Brides of the State' point above, to keep them from defecting from the pro-family arrangement they can't have outsize political power to vote for redistributive policies that will allow them to be single and childless (or unmarried but fruitful!) for their whole lives.

The best option I've really heard on this point is to give married persons some extra voting power, and maybe scale it by how many children they have. It literally does seem like we're going to have to create a sort of 'tiered' system wherein families with kids get treated better, politically, than everyone else, to keep the single and childless ones from dragging the system in a different direction.

But don't you worry, I'm not letting men off the hook, we gotta get dudes to rise to the occasion (there's a pun in there I'm not going to dig out) to help bring about more kids too, and be worthy of raising them and capable of defending them. And it so happens Dr. Faceh has a prescription for that!

I ALSO think we need to bring back the Basic Life Script that, if you follow it step by step, basically guarantees you'll never fall into poverty and will have a fulfilling if not extraordinary life, and make this the default expectation for young people coming up.

Religion offered a fully generalized method of keeping kids on such a script throughout their lives. I do not know how we're going to replace that with the overall decrease in religiosity. What the FUCK would a 'modern' Fertility Rite even look like, sans the religious undertones?

Males need good role models. Andrew Tate is the solution they've turned to because any "truly" Masculine Positive Role Model is simply disallowed in the current Zeitgeist. They need a reliable path/script to follow, and they need a meaningful, valuable reward to pursue. Family formation does a lot of the lifting here if men are willing to pick up the weight. An attractive woman is the short term 'reward' (so women need to be attractive, see above), then the kids provide the ongoing motivation.

Finally finally, all of this might not actually matter in the sense that low TFR may kill the globalized world, or AGI might kills humans before our population recovers anyway. Even if we could implement the right policies to fix birthrates, this all feels like angels dancing on the head of pins in terms of how it will effect our future trajectory, so much seems baked-in already.

PHEW. SO yeah, this is about the full state of my current thinking on the TFR problem and the broad gender split problem. To be sure it ties into other issues.

GUESS WHAT? Immigration and Diversity may depress TFR too!. I already know there's going to be a couple mottizens screaming at me "ITS THE IMMIGRATION STUPID! Deport all illegals and wages will rise, home prices will fall, and people will more readily form families!"

There's probably a chemical problem too. I read Slow Death by Rubber Duck in college and most of it seems to hold up, especially the parts about certain chemicals interfering with reproductive organs, testosterone, and fetal/infant development.

And yes there's probably an urban-rural factor, as almost every historical example shows that you increase density of humans and they have fewer kids. Yes yes we have to destroy the cities to save the humans. I didn't even discuss the Amish in this bit, but they're a relevant example.

As some people around here are fond of saying, it is possible that a FULL solution to the problem is 'coup-complete', and cannot be achieved without first overthrowing the governments of several countries. Shoutout to @Sloot in particular.

Please guys, I said right at the outset that its multifactor and I'm really uncertain about the major causes! I'm just proposing the policies I think most directly target the issue at hand. I really wish I had better things to do with my time than think about this at length and type long screeds to the internet. Better things like raising kids! That'd be really nice! BUT APPARENTLY I HAVE TO SOLVE ALL THE REST OF THIS to bring my chances up.

Damn. I really need to get laid.

I sense, from personal experience, booze and cocaine were the genesis of this one.

I very much doubt the chemical role in fertility decline. For the most part, it's not young people trying and failing to have kids driving the decline, it's people trying and failing to have kids at ever older ages.

It's not chemicals impacting the odds of pregnancy, but it's also not people trying and failing at any age. It's young people trying to not have kids and succeeding that's driving the decline. The birth control pill is released, and within a little over a decade the fertility rate (births-per-1000-women) falls roughly in half, a greater drop than the previous WWI-Great-Depression-WWII plunge. Total Fertility Rate is what we usually care about in the end, but it's an integral of that instantaneous births-per-woman rate over a lifetime, so somewhat obfuscates how rapid the effect was.

In the decades since then, it seems that older people trying to have kids are succeeding more, not failing! The birth rate among mothers 40-44 has more than doubled from 1980-2015 (from very very little up to very little...), the birth rate among 35-39yo mothers is up 150% (which in that case is a significant increase in absolute terms too), and the birth rate among ages 30-34 nearly doubled since 1975.

But at ages 25-29 the rate shows no clear trend downward until a 2006 peak, at 20-24 it's down 25% from the 90s, and at 15-19 it's down nearly 2/3rds.

Looking at provisional 2023 numbers ... the older age groups' birth rate rises have stopped and held mostly flat over the last decade (except that 30-34 might be on its way down now?), 25-29 is more clearly starting its fall, 20-24 is now down 50% from the 90s, and 15-19 is now down by more than 75%.

I suppose there could be chemicals impacting the human drive toward life-long pair mating? In the US marriage has been plummeting for all age brackets for generations. But I think we've got so many cultural factors contributing to that, Occam says don't even bother checking for chemicals right now.

Yes, but they both can play a role.

On the margins, lower sperm counts are going to make conception take longer which will make the problems of delaying the process even worse.

Like I said, there's probably 'hidden' feedback loops. Women go to college for 4 years, and delay childbirth, and get habituated to delaying childbirth, and there's no real social pressure to remind her that she's got limited time to act, and each year of delay is making it harder. Its a problem that ends up making itself worse, especially if feedback from other sources is included.

One policy I've tongue-in-cheek suggested is that every woman should be forced to wear a timer that counts down to the day she becomes infertile, so as to create some pressure to hurry up the process.

On the margins, lower sperm counts are going to make conception take longer which will make the problems of delaying the process even worse.

That's assuming that sperm counts are the limiting factor in a meaningful number of cases. Has time to conception meaningfully increased when controlling for age of both partners?

My understanding of reproductive stats is that they tend to be skewed by those who are struggling to conceive tending to meticulously document every attempt, whilst those who are fecund it just happens.

I've got a 5 month old daughter and I know it happened within about 2-3 sessions without protection with my partner, but that's never entering the medical record whilst somebody in their 40s who's exhaustively logging and trying supplementation will be reflected in the research body

Religion offered a fully generalized method of keeping kids on such a script throughout their lives. I do not know how we're going to replace that with the overall decrease in religiosity. What the FUCK would a 'modern' Fertility Rite even look like, sans the religious undertones?

The decrease in religiosity seems to be largely petering out once you adjust for smaller generation sizes, though.

The other concern is that extant religions are watering down and suborning to modern norms, rather than the reverse.

Also if you count Progressivism as a religion then technically we might be in a historic high for pure fervor.

Churches with non-negligible under fifty populations do not generally do this.

Well based on my understanding most churches are struggling to attract under-fifties AND most churches are watering down teachings in hopes of attracting the younger crowds.

So the number that DO have non-negligible under fifty populations AND keep to the old ways are presumably small both in absolute numbers and in their relative share of the churchgoing population. At least according to my priors. No data I've seen locally refutes that, I can say for sure.

Happy to receive new data to contradict this though.

I'm not letting men off the hook

And yes, perhaps bans on porn and restrictions on video games should be on the table

Why are the problems with society my duty to fix? I'm already being asked to finance Boomer entitlements and their massive deficits, and now you want to take away the ability for me to enjoy the things that have given me a very happy, inadvertently MGTOW life. We all know that if a system was proposed that punished both men and women, that the punishments targeting men would get the political capital to pass first, long before anything targeting women would come into effect. Both the left and the right think men are the source of all the world's problems. My response would be a simple "buzz off". Let me do my own thing

Somehow I figured in this screed that basically calls for Making Women Subservient Again someone would zero in on male side of it.

I'm sympathetic, I hope I got that across:

Males need good role models. Andrew Tate is the solution they've turned to because any "truly" Masculine Positive Role Model is simply disallowed in the current Zeitgeist. They need a reliable path/script to follow, and they need a meaningful, valuable reward to pursue. Family formation does a lot of the lifting here if men are willing to pick up the weight. An attractive woman is the short term 'reward' (so women need to be attractive, see above), then the kids provide the ongoing motivation.

I'm trying to make ways for guys to have meaning in their life. To get rewarded. Its in your blood. I'm never going to hold a gun to your head to take away what you love, but I am hoping to provide you a better offer.

I think the complaint comes down to the coup-complete aspect. If you could implement all these policies at once, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff: men and women each are given different sets of privileges and limits that offer them a fair expectation of equal happiness, for a net increase of happiness over rampant individualism (a tradeoff that creates more winners than losers, but there would still be losers).

In practice, though, the dynamics of politics and social change would bias the restrictions against men and the privileges toward women. The banning of porn and video games that make life seem a bit more bearable for losing men would happen first, and the rest would always be politically impractical.

I say this as someone who thinks that legal limitations on porn and video games would be beneficial for men, even without any offsetting privileges.

Yes, absent a serious upheaval in the vein of the Iranian revolution, incrementalism is the best/most realistic hope for getting stuff like this implemented. If you're going for one big upheaval, attacking full bore the political bloc of single women seems like the best 'all-in' approach. If you can restrict unmarried females' political power (and not just the vote, but their influence on almost every bureaucracy) then every subsequent policy proposal becomes easier to implement.

ALL THAT SAID, we'd 'only' be turning back the clock about 60 years, it seems like it would only take a single generation of incremental change to do so, if the will existed.

I wonder how much modern technology has made a return to previous settings impossible, though. Honestly, if I had to pick a policy I wouldn't ban video games, I would ban dating apps and severely restrict social media usage. That seems like it would be broadly beneficial if only by forcing more face-to-face interactions.

We've successfully produced hundreds of generations of humans, it is our default setting, it shouldn't be hard to put us back in that setting!

When in their lives do women without children want children most? Best I can tell, there's two times -- one, mid to late teens. The other, late 30s to early 40s. In other words, shortly after they first can and when time is running out. We've dedicated an enormous amount of effort to convincing women in their teens and early 20s that having a child will ABSOLUTELY RUIN YOUR LIFE. You'll end up broke, on welfare and/or dependent on some sort of abusive boyfriend. Turns out this messaging has an effect.

I think its that, COMBINED with messaging that makes Careerism and casual sex and travel appear to be 'high status' is a big factor, yes. Hence my triangular model of female ambition (the name is a work in progress).

If the biological urge to have kids is strong, it shouldn't be easy to scare them away from it. But get them engaging in activities that preclude childbearing for a while, and they might fool themselves into thinking "there's time for that later."

If the biological urge to have kids is strong, it shouldn't be easy to scare them away from it.

It's not, but we've worked REALLY hard to do it.

Fair point.

This brings in the uncomfortable idea that there might need to be punishments and negative consequences for these anti-family forces for all they've done.

I didn't touch on that one in the screed up there but, uh, there will probably be some portion of the population that will keep trying to undermine family formation, and our policies should also be keeping them at bay too.

our policies should also be keeping them at bay too.

Physical removal, so to speak?

I don't know if punishment is necessary; step one would be to get them out of the driver's seat and see what happens. The bigger problem is it's widely agreed that delay IS necessary; even among natalists, very few are going to think that a girl having a baby before finishing high school is a good idea. And that amount of delay might be tolerable. But I think expecting delay until after undergrad ends up just building in the habit of delay past the point of biological baby-craziness.

And if you want this to work without too many bad side effects, you're going to want the father to be married to the mother, too, which would be a big change as well; the model of the residential university would either go away or change a LOT. The larger problem may well be intractable.

And if you want this to work without too many bad side effects, you're going to want the father to be married to the mother, too, which would be a big change as well

I read this and think of my parents: Mom was fresh out of high school in the late 1970s when she married Dad, who is just two years older than her, and was already in the workforce (having dropped out of high school after 10th grade). Just a few years later, in the early 1980s, Mom pops me out a few weeks before her 22nd birthday; my first brother a year and a half later; and then my other brother, her youngest, just a couple of days after turning 26. And this family of 5 lived entirely off my Dad's handyman income, with Mom being a SAHM, and not entering the workforce proper until Youngest Brother was out of high school.

And this was just a few decades ago, not some ancient days of yore here. So really, I'd say the issue is simply the whole everyone-goes-to-college things. Is that bachelor's degree really necessary to do the job? If so, would it still be necessary if we hadn't devalued high school diplomas with "social promotion," grade inflation, and so on?

(Again, I keep coming back to how many of our problems would be solved if we got someone in power who went after Academia with an approach somewhere in the range from Henry VIII to Qin Shi Huang.)

the model of the residential university would either go away or change a LOT.

Not the most familiar with it, but I seem to recall someone describing to me that BYU is particularly supportive of students having families. I don't remember the details there, though.

Congrats, you’ve discovered why the modal marriage arrangement throughout history was ‘teenaged girl with an older man’.

If you think we’re going to bring that back, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The fact of the matter is that at least part of the reason that 20 year old brides are so rare is the dearth of young, college aged men ready to be husbands. I suspect destigmatizing age gap relationships would boost the fertility rate dramatically. So start a TikTok trend of bragging about silver Fox husbands or something, I don’t know how you’re going to replicate the social conditions(aka patriarchy) that convinced young women in historical societies to marry older men.

I don’t know how you’re going to replicate the social conditions(aka patriarchy) that convinced young women in historical societies to marry older men.

In a word? Inflation.

Sure, there's some snark there, but there's a lot of stories from the Depression about wild age gap relationships just due to economic realities.

I am close to convince that the American economy of the next 20 - 30 years is utterly bifurcated. Zero "middle class." An utter divide between permanently dependent on the state for near serfdom conditions, and the independently able who are literally starting companies with the help of AI overnight and have more money than they know what to do with. The upper class status games will start to get very strange.

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Congrats, you’ve discovered why the modal marriage arrangement throughout history was ‘teenaged girl with an older man’.

The age gap has rarely been more than 5 years, and you have to go back hundreds of years before average age of a woman at her first marriage was under 20. Teenagers weren't generally marrying "silver foxes" (though it happened).

There are times when prolonging the life of an organism is the correct decision, and times when it is not.

If an otherwise young and healthy person is afflicted by a serious but curable condition, then they should of course be treated to the best of our abilities. I don't fetishize "letting nature take its course" just for the sake of it. But when the elderly are sustained long past their expiration date - when there is nothing left to live for, when there is only the fear of death to struggle in vain against - then sometimes the most dignified option is to simply pull the plug.

When a particular cultural stratum, race, civilization, or species is failing to perform its basic functions (reproduction in this case), a similar analysis must be performed. Is it a temporary condition that can be alleviated? Or has the social organism simply exhausted its powers, put its best days behind it, and entered a stage of inevitable terminal decline?

All things die - ineluctably we will feel nostalgic for certain forms of life that we have become accustomed to, but this is no excuse for abandoning our sense of perspective. Let us simply hope that something new will be born to replace what is lost, and that this new form of life will be, if not "healthier" in an absolute sense, then at least more vigorous.

I know this is completely outside the scope of the conversation, but your comment put me in mind of those poor zoo employees wearing panda fursuits trying to convince pandas to fuck.

I feel like by the time someone's passed every filter to be in that position, they're probably pretty hyped for it. It's not like the summer intern shows up his first day and gets told "get in the fucking panda suit Shinji"

(See how common quiet bestiality is among dolphin researchers for example. You don't get to be there unless you really fucking love dolphins with those words in arbitrary order)

First, I want to mention that almost all population projections I'm aware of completely ignore even the possibility of evolution and selection. Plenty of them are just simple regressions that implicitly assume a homogenous population. This is, of course, complete bunk. The number of (surviving & procreating) offspring is literally the thing evolution selects on, and no human population ever has been homogenous across traits. So this is almost guaranteed to be a transient phenomenon, unless you deny evolution in general. Given that at least in my home country of germany we're already at a TFR of 1.6 again, population differentials in family size and heritability estimates for most traits being in the ballpark of 50%, it's probably a matter of only a few generations until we worry about too high population growth again instead.

That means, aside from having to deal with short-term issues such as a terrible working vs dependent/unemployed ratio for the next decade, the primary question should be: Who do we currently select for and who ought we select for? And there is some negative, but also some positive views on this front. On the negative side, we definitely select for unemployed and low time preference people who fail to take the necessary precautions to not become pregnant. On the positive side, we select for people who want to have children and are as such likely to treat them better and likely to prepare themselves better in general. We select to some degree against both hedonism and doomerism, since both inclinitations straightforwardly lead towards being childless, and instead in favor of certain kinds of optimistic long-termism, which includes in particular religiosity. We select somewhat against education in general, but also more specifically for pragmatic people that don't waste an endless amount of time getting stuck in dead-end endeavours (which includes certain educations) throughout their early adulthood. And so on.

Overall, I'm not entirely sure whether we really need to change anything. There are a few horror stories such as drug addicts with almost one heavily disabled kid per year (a colleague of mine works with such cases in a non-profit), but these are basically rounding errors in practice. Poor/unemployed people have slightly more kids, but not by a crazy amount, and these are still mostly pretty normal people. Down syndrome is a good example of positive development: In theory, the modern world enables heavily disabled people to have arbitrary numbers of children whereas they couldn't provide for them before. In practice, not only do the great majority of people with Down's have no children at all, we also massively reduced the number of de novo cases by screening, since even the people who want to have children don't want a heavily disabled kid.

That said, I think the current issues boil down to a few factors:

  1. We didn't evolve to actually want kids before we have them. We evolved to want partnership and sex, and then to nurture and protect any child that might arise from the union. Furthermore, men and women have very different want profiles on this topic. Unless we force people to have kids against their will, easily accessible, reliable contraceptives will always mean a substantially reduced TFR until we have had time to select in favor of wanting kids directly.

  2. Culturally, we spend an inordinate amount of time and pressure teaching kids to not get pregnant too early, but there often is no conception of having them too late or having too few children. My parents always told me that I should wait (when they heard about our first, their first words were literally "so soon?" I was 27!). TV showed me unhappy teen pregnancies on one side, and endless fun adventure for the childless on the other. Even doctors will misinform women that they can have kids whenever they want, in spite of the data clearly showing that even at only 35 there already is a substantial chance for pregnancies to fail, and an even higher chance for disability. School and university made clear that I ought to postpone children until after I'm finished. And finally, friends and acquaintances treat having children as just one lifestyle choice among many.

  3. We have seen an inversion in the economics of having children thanks to retirement. In the past, children were your retirement, the childless depending on the kindness of strangers or at best their neighbours and friends. Kids could help on the farm as early as the late single digits, and could be gainfully employed by 14. Today, having kids means earning much less money in the first place due to not being able to work as much and due to missing promotions, then of that reduced amount you have to spend substantial money to care for them, and then due to earning less you also have a reduced retirement. Child money across the west is peanuts compared to all this, in particular considering that all retirement systems absolutely require a sufficient number of new humans to function at all.

We can't do much about the first except wait, but for the second and third we can. We should inform people adequately about the biological risks of late pregnancies. Programs supporting grandparents to take time off work to help out with child rearing would also be quite positive, since they usually are in stable employment, will not miss promotions anymore and many have already passed their most productive years anyway. Education needs to be shortened and focus on things that are useful. Likewise wasting more than one or two years in early adulthood should be frowned upon much more. There should be less TV and media, and more activities like outdoors summer camps, since the former will always idealize childless adventuring, while the latter is almost intrinsically family-friendly. Retirement probably needs to be rehauled entirely so that that having kids - be it biologically or adopted - is similarly net-positive for your retirement prospects as earning decent money. We need to get rid of many "child protection" laws that sound good in theory but mean in practice that they can't do any paid work whatsoever. Lastly, I've found that a mentality of "hobbies and most fun activities are for kids" coupled with "adults are primarily allowed to engage in these as long as they do so for the benefit of kids" leads too a much more happy and family-oriented life, since on one side without this it's easy to oversaturate yourself with "fun" at the expense of long-term happiness, while on the other you look forward to having kids so that you can do these things more again. Doesn't mean that the childless aren't allowed to have any fun at all, but just that overindulgence in these things should be socially frowned upon.

When a trait is selected for for a long time, it's heritability ultimately drops to zero. If fertility has been strongly selected for, we should expect its heritability to be very low and, therefore, further selection should be very difficult. That said, heritability actually probably hasn't been selected for for very long because having as many children as possible doesn't make sense if you don't have the resources to support them all.

We didn't evolve to actually want kids before we have them.

Judging by the behaviour of some of my ex-girlfriends, this is obviously false.

We have seen an inversion in the economics of having children thanks to retirement. In the past, children were your retirement, the childless depending on the kindness of strangers or at best their neighbours and friends. Kids could help on the farm as early as the late single digits, and could be gainfully employed by 14.

This is a popular myth, but it's false. Empirical evidence shows that children have always been net recipients of resources from their parents over the course of their lives. If you think about it, it's the only thing that makes any sense evolutionarily. Parents who don't invest as much as possible into their offspring are a disadvantage to those that do. It makes no sense for old parents who don't reproduce to take resources from their children instead of letting their children invest those resources in their grandchildren.

Judging by the behaviour of some of my ex-girlfriends, this is obviously false.

"Some" is the key word here. If this was strongly selected for, literally everyone would desperately want as many kids as possible and take whatever necessary actions to achieve that. But only some people want them, and even then "only" normal numbers. This is clear evidence that wanting kids was in the past at best weakly selected for. Compare that to sex or partnership - asexuality is extremely unusual among males, while almost all women generally hate loneliness.

I also want to note here that significant variability is actually a prerequisite for fast selection - if nobody wanted kids intrinsically we would be fucked, as we would have to rely on de-novo generation of mutations and/or wholly new attitudes which are unreliable and then take a long-ass time to fixate in a population. But it's more like a two-digit percentage of the population already wants kids seriously, which only requires a few generations to mostly fixate.

This is a popular myth, but it's false. Empirical evidence shows that children have always been net recipients of resources from their parents over the course of their lives. If you think about it, it's the only thing that makes any sense evolutionarily. Parents who don't invest as much as possible into their offspring are a disadvantage to those that do. It makes no sense for old parents who don't reproduce to take resources from their children instead of letting their children invest those resources in their grandchildren.

Retirement in most countries is also a net recipient of resources over the course of most people's live - here in germany it is said we get less than half of the money we put in back! Our arguments don't really disagree. The point is that the children will care for their parents in old age when they can't fully provide for themselves anymore, which for most of history was only a few years. We know they did because we have records of them doing so. Still of course if you look over the entire life, children will have received far more resources from their parents than vice versa.

On the negative side, we definitely select for unemployed and low time preference people who fail to take the necessary precautions to not become pregnant. On the positive side, we select for people who want to have children and are as such likely to treat them better and likely to prepare themselves better in general. We select to some degree against both hedonism and doomerism, since both inclinitations straightforwardly lead towards being childless, and instead in favor of certain kinds of optimistic long-termism, which includes in particular religiosity. We select somewhat against education in general, but also more specifically for pragmatic people that don't waste an endless amount of time getting stuck in dead-end endeavours (which includes certain educations) throughout their early adulthood. And so on.

Is any of this based on data?

Unless we force people to have kids against their will, easily accessible, reliable contraceptives will always mean a substantially reduced TFR until we have had time to select in favor of wanting kids directly.

Okay, based on your model, how rapidly do you think you can select for this trait and how low do you think the world population would drop prior to leveling out? Why would you expect selection for 'wanting children' to be more robust than 'too irresponsible to use contraception?'

And most of all, given that you blame the precipitous drop in TFR on cultural factors, why would you focus so much on genetics when cultural shifts can obviously happen much more rapidly? By the same token that:

First, I want to mention that almost all population projections I'm aware of completely ignore even the possibility of evolution and selection. Plenty of them are just simple regressions that implicitly assume a homogenous population. This is, of course, complete bunk.

Your prediction relies on constant cultural conditions lasting ten? Twenty? Who knows how many generations it would take to select for fertility in the presence of contraception, modulo the kind of actual genetic engineering that today remains deep, deep science fiction.

Is any of this based on data?

To varying degrees. Some are easy to show and generally replicate well across countries (unemployed, religious & uneducated people have more kids, people who want kids have more of them than people who don't, if you explicitly ask people why they don't have children then (climate-)doomerism is among the top ideological reasons...). Some are difficult to conclusively prove but generally widely agreed upon - for example, that people who actually want kids are generally better prepared to have them, will be more patient with them, etc. is one of the few things conservatives, liberals and even those damn family therapists themselves all agree on. Some are my opinion - for example it's quite common for people to claim they can't afford kids, but then they go on 4 vacations per year, have 2 dogs and have multiple expensive hobbies they engage in. I view that as obvious hedonism.

Okay, based on your model, how rapidly do you think you can select for this trait and how low do you think the world population would drop prior to leveling out? Why would you expect selection for 'wanting children' to be more robust than 'too irresponsible to use contraception?'

On the first point: The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future. For those who don't have access, this is a paper showing that incorporating the heritability of fertility into models will already have substantial impact on population trajectories in the year 2100 time frame. On the second point, it's mostly my interpretation of the current situation - The only people who really completely fail to take contraceptives AND then fail to abort AND do so for multiple kids are drug addicts blasted out of their mind who nevertheless manage to survive multiple years, which are quite rare and if you've seen their children you'll know they are unlikely to repeat this fecundity. Irresponsible "normal" people usually have one, maybe two kids and then learned their lesson, and often at least attempt to drill into their children to not have children too early (with admittedly varying success). People deliberately choosing to have, say, 3-5 kids, telling their kids how great it is to have lots of grandkids, supporting them, etc. just seems like a much more stable arrangement.

Your prediction relies on constant cultural conditions lasting ten? Twenty? Who knows how many generations it would take to select for fertility in the presence of contraception, modulo the kind of actual genetic engineering that today remains deep, deep science fiction

They hardly need to be perfectly constant along all axis, as long as contraceptives are widely available & used we will select for people who are fertile in spite of them. Also, note that selection/heritability does not need to be strictly genetic - my point is that even without deliberate state intervention, we're already selecting for people who have family-friendly traits on both the biological and cultural level. We don't necessarily need to force the "correct" attitudes on people (especially given that we might end up wrong).

Given that at least in my home country of germany we're already at a TFR of 1.6 again

Is this number just for Germans or does it include immigrants too?

Afaik it include some immigrants that have a residential or citizen status, but not nearly all. The main origin countries are still poland (1.4), turkey (1.9) and russia (1.5), so the most recent waves from arab countries have not been (fully) incorporated as far as I can see. Also, the TFR of germans without migration background (which is not necessarily ethnic germans, though) has allegedly been increasing as well from the low of 1.4 to somewhere above 1.5.

Can you post a link to the data you're referencing? Overall TFR regardless of ethnic origin is down to 1.34 last year and the number of births so far projects out to a similar or lower figure for 2024. There was minimal upwards movement in the late 00s and early 10s, but this could plausibly be related to immigration, see the jump between 2014-2016. I don't see at all where you're getting the present upwards trend you've mentioned from.

Hmm, I was going by the numbers in the time frame 2016-2020 since I read an in-depth report which only included data up to 2020. I guess that means scratch the part about germany in particular, but the general argument primarily derived from The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future, doesn't really depend on it.

There was also a discussion last week about fertility = female status to check out too. I 100% agree. I don’t think people realize how completely the Hasidim in America debunk an environmental or economic cause. It can’t be environmental because they live in Brooklyn and Jersey. (A good researcher should look into microplastics and their garments however, perhaps how often they eat liver.) It can’t be economic because they are poor. It’s true that the Hasidic billionaires and millionaires subsidize the lives of the poor and that they all sorts of tax fraud schemes, but they are still poor, and in fact Hasidic women will work fully or part-time to support their husbands’ Talmud studies. So, what do they do? Having children is a status marker for both men and women; Hasidic girls at a young age learn about motherhood and how to value motherhood; they are completely cut off from America’s misogynistic culture of telling women that they need to sacrifice their life-potential to work.

It’s a mix of two things. (1) Status: I get fulfillment, social respect, attention, and conversation revolves around that; I am fulfilling God’s will by increasing the number of my people’s children; I am doing a good deed by increasing the number of my children because my people are oppressed. (2) Something we don’t have a word for: “the satisfaction in going through with the skills and stories you have heard from your youth”. It’s easy to do something you were trained in as a kid. Hasidic women don’t have to google anything about child birth or motherhood. They know everything already and what they don’t know will be explained by a wise elder over a cup of coffee (do they drink coffee? I actually don’t know). It’s not stressful or arduous at all. Not having children is stressful as you fall saliently behind your peers.

Japan was mentioned ITT as an example of a country that idolizes homemakers but has a low TFR and I think this misses something. It can’t be “you get respect from economic success and homemaking”, because then women will choose economic success. It has to be homemaking. By homemaking I mean raising children and all tasks associated with it. Japan is a consumerist culture, more so than America, and women have infinite distractions to enjoy which aren’t having children, and walking around as a mother does not grant you any status. In Hasidim, walking the streets as a mother of 16 kids would have you greeted like a saint for the blessings you have brought forth in the world.

“Artificial wombs” should be left out of this discussion entirely because it’s as ridiculous as believing in spontaneous generation. That isn’t going to happen. We are trying to raise healthy children, and they need mother-child contact for years.

I am doing a good deed by increasing the number of my children because my people are oppressed.

The primary outgroup for Hasidim isn’t gentiles at all, and their education doesn’t really stress that they’re oppressed by gentiles the way that some secular Jewish identitarians do. The primary outgroup is secular Jews, and the enemy are those raised orthodox who leave (apikorsim - heretics), who lack the excuse of ignorance. This makes sense when you consider that the main hubs for the ultra-orthodox are in or in close proximity to (in NYC and Israel) the largest populations of secular Jews, who believe you can still be Jewish and otherwise live a normal materialist, secular life with 1.5 (or zero) children, and without praying and making the Talmud central to your entire existence.

Hasidic education therefore stresses most constantly and most seriously the evils of abandoning religion and joining the sinners next door, up to the point that some question whether secular Jews are Jews at all in some spiritual sense, despite the fact that (at least by matrilineal descent) they are unquestionably Jewish according to Halacha. Chareidi commentary about the gentile world is often confused or limited, especially outside of Chabad and a couple other groups that engage with it; dissident rightists pick out the occasional choice quote, but in truth, it’s not something they think about much at all.

The outgroup of Hasidim is gentiles. Secular Jews are the subject of intense outreach attempts by Hasidic organizations. Hasidim would love nothing more than every maternally-born Jew to become Hasidic. They spend money attempting to do this. There’s a first person account of this in Postville: A Clash of Cultures in Heartland America (which is an amazing read). The head of a Hasidic dynasty (Rubashkin) personally made time to recruit a secular Jewish journalist, drawing a firm line between us (Jews) vs them (Iowan Christian Whites). There are abundant quotes by Rubashkin to that effect. Rubashkin had him put on teffilin, and at a dinner party spoke at length about how he should have lots of Jewish children. Rubashkin only ostracized this secular Jewish journalist when he learned that the Jewish journalist was sympathetic to the mistreatment of the gentiles by his Agriprocessors business. Once the Hasidic head realized the Secular Jew was siding with the gentiles, there was no more cameraderie and he was no longer a member of the ingroup. But for every moment before, he was greeted and invited and loved as a fellow Jew.

I can take screenshots of the book if you’d like. It’s probably the best single piece of evidence of the relationship between the workings of ultra orthodox Jewish ingroup vs outgroup dynamics. The Hasids truly hated the gentiles and likened them to animals, and they rejoiced at the prospect of scamming them. To the secular Jew they extended a sympathetic hand and beckoned them to join their side, all while advising him to have lots of children, criticizing him for only having one.

Now, compare this to the “new Orthodox Jews” of Colombia. Hundreds of Colombians converted to Orthodox Judaism, following every custom, but the head rabbi of Colombia has specifically excluded them from the eligibility of birth right. They are only “Jewish” as a parallel community that can’t taint the actual orthodox community of Colombia. https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2021/04/14/converts-judaism-colombia/#:~:text=The%20emerging%20Jews%20are%20not,They%20are%20a%20parallel%20community.%E2%80%9D

I don’t think Rubashkin’s story is really comparable. Of course he attempted (and failed) to convert a secular Jewish journalist, attempted conversion is precisely the kind of behavior that governs ingroup-outgroup relations (like politics in countries without extreme ethnic divisions). It’s the far group that you never even intend to convert, and that describes most relations between the ultra-orthodox and gentiles. Even in this case Rubashkin is a non-central example; the vast majority of Chareidim have few interactions, commercial, personal or otherwise, with gentiles, and do not regularly think of them except in some cases as they relate to their way of life.

True, Chareidim (to varying extents, it must be said) believe in a form of evangelical mission toward secular Jewry, which they consider debased and degenerate. But the implication that this means they consider secular Jewry the in-group is highly misplaced. In America and Russia, the masses of them are sheep corrupted by secular society, the rich ones sometimes paypigs at best and evil influences on their children at worst. In Israel, the Chareidim are happy for secular Jews to die for them in large numbers while their young men stay safely ensconced in kollels and yeshivas.

Rubashkin’s case is sad, but the exploitation of cheap illegal immigrant labor is hardly a particularly Jewish phenomenon in the United States. As for the situation with the Colombian Christians converting to Orthodoxy, I think you misunderstand. Chareidim are usually moderately tolerant of converts. But Colombian Ashkenazim are, even if nominally orthodox, closer to secular Anglo-American Jews than to Chareidim. They are not, with few exceptions, a highly observant population. Their hostility is to peasant evangelical Christians bored of Catholicism invading their social club and marrying their children. You may disagree with that impulse, but it is again not particularly Jewish in character.

The truth is, and I cannot stress this enough, that the ultra-orthodox are unconcerned by antisemitism. The Jews who are - neurotic, secular Jews, whether of the left of right - spend their time building huge fortunes to support Israel, or write and produce movies like Ben Hur, or establish great publishing and media empires, or plough fortunes into creating ‘museums of tolerance’ to teach children about the Holocaust.

The ultra-Orthodox do little to none of this. They are unconcerned by antisemitism, unconcerned by a defensible racial or ethnic homeland for their people, whom they do not even see in wholly ethnic terms anyway (in some cases even considering 100% halachic Jews who have converted to another faith gentiles). This is in fact why so many - almost all of them - died in the Holocaust, because unlike secular middle-European Jewry (a substantial proportion of which had fled by 1941), they didn’t leave. To the Chareidim, antisemitism is a force of nature, a fact of the universe, like gravity. They do not think about it, they do not challenge it. Secular Jewry is the outgroup, not the in-group.

By the description you’ve given- I think I’ve always had this instinct, but your description really made it click- it’s not only that ultra-orthodox are unconcerned about anti-semitism, they almost want it back? Ghetto laws and explicit discrimination would push more Jews towards stricter modes of observance.

IME very hardcore Jews(understand that there are not true Hasidim in DFW, but there are very strict modern orthodox who are probably similar) and Copts are the friendliest of the ethnic-exclusivist groups. That would track with what you’re saying as well.

Rubashkin and his underlings actively hated the gentiles. When Rubashkin was jailed for the largest illegal immigration bust in history, only brought to light because of their extreme torture of animals which didn’t even follow kosher regulation, the entire Hasidic world rallied around him in support and actually succeeded in getting him a presidential pardon. Dershowitz and other secular Jews were involved in that pardon. Their hatred of the gentile Christians stands in stark contrast to their acceptance of the Jewish secular journalist, who they wanted on their side. Let me give you an example from the book, Rubashkin’s right hand man Lazar talking to the secular Jew, already accepting him as the ingroup:

”I am a racist,” Lazar said, seemingly from nowhere. “Why is it that Israel has persisted to exist for so long? Why haven’t the Jews been extinguished after scores of attempts throughout history? There is only one answer. We are better and smarter.”

”The goyim will always be the goyim, no matter how nice they are to you. So what’s the point?” Lazar’s comment underscored the Hasidim’d contempt for non-Jews, which wasn’t limited to the Postville gentiles, but to all Christians. […] The Hasidim were waging a cultural holy war in Postville, Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Paris —everywhere. Their world was Jew vs non-Jew, and the dichotomy existed in everything they did […] If the city of Postville tried to enforce any ordinance the Jews disagreed with, the immediate cry was anti-semitism. You were pacing the way for the ultimate destruction of the Jewish people, the world’s Chosen People.

I don’t really know how much more outgroup the gentiles can be for the Hasids.

Chareidim are usually moderately tolerant of converts. But Colombian Ashkenazim are, even if nominally orthodox, closer to secular Anglo-American Jews than to Chareidim. They are not, with few exceptions, a highly observant population

What I sent you were gentiles intent on converting to Orthodox Judaism, and indeed following every rule and officially converting, but they are purposefully kept apart from the orthodox community, and are not considered Jews.

that the ultra-orthodox are unconcerned by antisemitism

I mean, I have an award winning book in my hand abundant with quotations showing this is not true. It is written by a Jew and features quotes from the head of a Hasidic sect. Antisemitism defines their religion!

I don’t really know how much more outgroup the gentiles can be for the Hasids.

Secular Jews created the modern (sympathetic) reaction to antisemitism and the Chareidim in this example are exploiting it to find loopholes in planning or employment regulation. That’s exactly my point, they created nothing. What have the Chareidim ever done to combat antisemitism among gentiles? This indicates a true, underlying lack of concern.

That they exploit some sympathies for Holocaust victims in an attempt to avoid dealing with the law doesn’t mean they care about antisemitism, no more so than putting one’s contracting company in one’s wife’s name for supplier diversity reasons indicates progressive political sympathies. If they cared about threats to the Jewish nation, they would fight for it. If they were concerned by antisemitism, they would do what secular Hollywood and ADL Jews do and at least try - cackhandedly and embarrassingly, of course - to mitigate or stop it by ‘educating’ people on how they were actually very nice and kind. They do none of this because they don’t care.

What I sent you were gentiles intent on converting to Orthodox Judaism, and indeed following every rule and officially converting, but they are purposefully kept apart from the orthodox community, and are not considered Jews.

And what I replied was a description of the reality of the Colombian Jewish community, as per the WJC:

Most of the communities are nominally Orthodox, although the great majority of Colombian Jews are not religiously observant.

That couldn’t be further from the reality of the Chareidim, for whom Jewish ritual and practice is, whatever you think of it, a deeply central part of daily life.

”The goyim will always be the goyim, no matter how nice they are to you. So what’s the point?”

This quote is literally the reason they don’t fight for Israel and didn’t flee the Second World War. As with Islamists, their material reality is not strictly important, and despite their fecundity, their concern with whether or not they get pogrom’d is actually substantially less than that of most other populations. I’m glad you posted this quote because it really illustrates my point about the deep ideological gulf between secular (including even moderately religious Zionist) Jewry and Chareidim perfectly.

The Haredi in this case are explicitly anti-goy, and they consider the Jews to be historically mistreated by gentiles, and they are very concerned about the Jewish people and Israel. This is evidenced by the quote I cited, which was said confidentially to a secular Jew. I can provide more quotes although it’s a bit annoying because I can’t ctrl-f (the book isn’t online). Your argument that the Haredi haven’t done anything to combat antisemitism and therefore they don’t care about antisemitism is speculative and non-central. It is speculative because we don’t know the extent of Haredi donations to holocaust propaganda or Combat Antisemitism or anything else. It is non-central because they are interested in increasing their size and political power, thereby increasing Semitic power, thereby decreasing the threat of antisemitism.

If they cared about threats to the Jewish nation, they would fight for it

In 140 years they will have a high enough population in NYC and NJ to rule over it politically. They already abused their political power to misuse one billion in educational funds in NYC or extract money via Cars 4 Kids. One of my favorite scams the Hasids did is when they attempted to blackmail financier Steve Cohen. The influential Balkany called Cohen, complimented his Kohanem status, told him he silenced a fellow Jew planning to report him to the SEC, and then requested millions of dollars for his Jewish school. In this case, Cohen ratted him out, but this wasn’t a one time scam. Balkany, by the way, was Rubashkin’s lawyer when he was charged with the largest illegal immigration employment violation in US history.

Most of the communities are nominally Orthodox, although the great majority of Colombian Jews are not religiously observant.

I think you are confused about the details of what I sent you. I provided you a link about an ultra orthodox community converting gentiles into an ultra orthodox lifestyle, with every law binding, while preventing them from intermingling with the real ultra orthodox or ever making Aliyah to Israel. In other words, a group of Colombians went to an orthodox Jewish rabbi, said they think they have a Jewish soul, the rabbi “converts” them, but they are kept segregated from the real Orthodox Jews. The existence of Ashkenazi in Colombia does not factor into this at all, as they are not parties to the aforementioned interaction. This is an example of how deeply the Haredi care about Jews as racial people, rather than Jews as ritual-practitioners. Were an Ashkenazi to wish to convert to ultra orthodoxy they would be welcomed with open teffilin.

The influential Balkany called Cohen, complimented his Kohanem status, told him he silenced a fellow Jew planning to report him to the SEC, and then requested millions of dollars for his Jewish school. In this case, Cohen ratted him out, but this wasn’t a one time scam. Balkany, by the way, was Rubashkin’s lawyer when he was charged with the largest illegal immigration employment violation in US history

So again, your stories are littered with countless examples of secular Jews ratting out Chareidim to secular and substantially gentile authorities and this proves…that the Chareidim consider them their in-group rather than an out-group they’d like to convert?

It is non-central because they are interested in increasing their size and political power, thereby increasing Semitic power, thereby decreasing the threat of antisemitism.

I don’t think that a rapidly growing ultra-orthodox population gaining more political power reduces the threat of antisemitism at all (if anything the opposite), but perhaps you disagree. In their brazen conduct, the Chareidim increase antisemitism, and the few who engage regularly with the outside world are almost certainly intelligent enough to realise it. They do it anyway.

It is speculative because we don’t know the extent of Haredi donations

We know that the Chareidim (whose perspective you can easily see on their forums, yeshivaworld etc) almost universally despise these secular Jewish organizations for their social liberalism out of the sincere belief that they are trying to corrupt their children in the same way that all similar religious conservatives do for secular progressive advocacy groups.

More comments

perhaps how often they eat liver.

I’m not confident but I think liver is explicitly not kosher. @2rafa?

I’m about as far as you can get from religious, my grandmother’s favorite food to cook was (pork) meatloaf, but liver is certainly kosher. I think it just has to be cut up, soaked in water, salted and broiled to remove all the visible blood first though, hence the relatively mediocre taste of chopped liver (which has to be mixed with a bunch of stuff to make it edible) versus more delicious pan fried liver or other liver dishes.

I agree with your overall point, but

Japan is a consumerist culture, more so than America

is a bold claim. What’s your evidence for this assertion?

I stopped worrying about potential dysgenic effects of boosting fertility among lower classes: if elite overproduction is a thing we should be worried about, low PMC fertility is a feature, not a bug.

One thing that's required is a massive propaganda campaign:

  • all fictional families shown in the media must have two or more children or regret not having them
    • their living conditions shouldn't be overinflated: children sharing bedrooms with each other or even with their parents must be portrayed as normal
  • getting married after high school and having children must always be shown in a positive light, at least 50% of the movies/series produced by every studio must feature such a family
  • dating app culture must always be shown in a negative light
    • to allay fears of missing out on variety and spice, married couples with children practicing swinging or BDSM must be shown in a neutral or positive light
  • empty-nesters refusing to help their children with acquiring housing (either staying in a large empty home or selling it and buying an RV, a boat or a fancy retirement home) must always be shown in a negative light
    • conversely, multi-generational homes or grandparents downsizing their home to help their children with their mortgage must always be portrayed in a positive light

I say propaganda, but this doesn't have to be outright censorship, measures like the National Minimum Drinking Age Act can be used to goad companies into compliance.

The propaganda campaign must be supplemented with additional economic measures:

  • additional income taxes on:
    • single people aged 21 or older ("if you're old enough to drink, you're old enough to settle down")
    • DINKs aged 26 or older
    • DISKs aged 31 or older
  • additional property taxes on residences greater than 350 sqft per person and vehicles designed for recreation owned by people 31 or older with no dependents

empty-nesters refusing to help their children with acquiring housing (either staying in a large empty home or selling it and buying an RV, a boat or a fancy retirement home) must always be shown in a negative light

This is interesting because wealthy red tribe consumption(and let’s be real, there’s not a lot of liberals buying powerboats) is as much about showing off family formation as it is a replacement. The median lake house purchaser does so to convince his son-in-law to bring the grands around more often.

I have to wonder at the Venn diagram between 1) thinking TFR is a problem and 2) belief in the efficacy of diverse/inclusive/woke media. Not valence, efficacy. There can’t be many who think replacing the Black hobbits with pregnant ones would have made Rings of Power tolerable.

More generally, the policies you describe form a continuum. At the close end, we certainly could bully companies into producing some Very Special Episodes about resisting the urge to buy a boat. They’ll run directly into the cultural antibodies developed by every other time the government has tried something similar.

At the far end, Hollywood and friends could in theory adopt this wholesale, saturating the media environment. Make vitalism birtherism natalism as universal as girl power. No, as ubiquitous as punching Nazis. Maybe that would have a chance of connecting with audiences. Except to reach that point, you already have to have won. Not just over the culture producers, but the consumers who pay for tickets and subscriptions. Such a media blitz isn’t the cause; it’s the effect.

What is practical won’t be effective, and what might be effective is wildly impractical.

1) thinking TFR is a problem and 2) belief in the efficacy of diverse/inclusive/woke media. Not valence, efficacy.

Efficacy for what? They were always justified with trying to increase tolerance / reduce ism, but they seem almost custom engineered to do the opposite, so how do we measure efficacy?

Then there's also the fact that bad propaganda also exists. Eastern commies were quite bad at it, for example, so they had to make up for the shortfall of hearts and minds with more conventional methods.

additional income taxes on:

single people aged 21 or older ("if you're old enough to drink, you're old enough to settle down")

Oh really? Yet we must recognize that even though your policy is phrased in a gender-neutral fashion, the onus is of course going to end up on men (as the onus for everything always does) to organize that settling, even though the other gender is fighting them every step of the way. This type of tax is completely unfair unless you address that.

If you want to get Pigouvian, start charging women 50 bucks every time they want to for example post a picture of their ass online/send it to anyone who isn't their husband, among all of their other anti-familial and anti-civilizational behaviors, and then maybe you'll have at least the rudiments of moral license to tax men for not settling down under the notion that it is their lazy, selfish choice to be freewheeling libertines in a sea of good, wholesome women just waiting to adore them as loyal wives, as opposed to them understandably not wanting to pledge their lives and souls to voluntary pieces of the world's sexual leftovers, rampant social media exhibitionists, misandrist "feminists" who would need cult deprogramming-level interventions to have any chance of being even remotely good wives to men who aren't completely pushovers, unfeminine tattooed oddjobs, etc. (which means you're left in most cases with hundreds of men playing musical chairs with one winner, a situation in which it's hardly fair to tax all of the losers for failing to achieve the impossible of them all winning instead).

You'll still run into a big problem even if achieve success there though: generation vs generation. Perhaps with your new measures you restore a superior breed of valuable female who does not possess a morality (unfortunately so common in modern women) that only 5 decades or so prior would not have been considered superior to your average prostitute. A new generation of 18, 19, 20, and 21 year old girls arrives fresh on the marriage marketplace with a feminine value and virtue unthinkable a decade prior, ready to settle down and have kids as soon as as they are courted in a fashion their based fathers deem appropriate. No thotty Instagrams, tattoos, or excessive drinking here, just quality feminine human capital, good mothers waiting to happen.

Of course men their own age will want them, given that they stand to be taxed if they don't have one anyway. But also of course... so will the millions of men in their late 20s, early 30s, and even beyond who were left behind by the post-60s/70s (and especially post-90s) increasingly twisted feminine Tinder wasteland in which managing to find a good, reasonably marriageable woman, especially a Western woman, became more and more like finding a needle in a shitstack, a small spring in an endless desert. So again, musical chairs.

And what to do with the old, wretched breed of women that is used up and no good? This is millions of people we're talking about here. You cannot justifiably in any sort of good faith punish men for not wanting to "settle down" with a former college party favor any more than you could justifiably punish them for not agreeing to permanently staple a bag of dog feces to their forehead. The limit of public policy is where people would rather accept any punishment you can reasonably enforce than comply, and trying to force men to LARP a happy tradlife with former campus bicycles is definitely past that limit for a not insignificant number of men.

That is, there simply aren't enough women worth settling down with for all the men who want to settle down (as there haven't been for a long time), there can't be even if you fix the women because of older men, and therefore only decades of eugenics favoring female births to dramatically affect gender ratios would change this. (And without a basically totalitarian-level of masculine control over society (that is excruciatingly violent against any wannabe suffragettes or whatever, basically the Taliban and White Sharia), this would inevitably backfire as these women would then use their greater numbers to bring about an even more feminine triflefeels-pandering anti-society.)

I just don't get why you people never address this with your pontificating about singles taxes. The gender ratio of births is basically the same as it ever was, and yet modern culture has rendered anywhere from 70%-95% of Western women as totally unacceptable marriage partners. What do you expect men to do? Sure, the non-Western world offers somewhat of a relief valve here (as this policy's most prominent supporter yet JD Vance shows with his own exotic import wife), but we're rapidly exporting Western whore culture to them to the point that that well is soon to dry up too. How can you justifiably tax 100 men for not being able to snag one of five available slices of cake? Why not just have states issue limited edition golden licenses/IDs, enough for 1% of the population, and then tax people for not owning those too? Same principle.

Here's some modifications to these kinds of proposals that are absolutely necessary (without which they would be wholly immoral and invalid and should only deservedly lead to responses like this from aging men who had already been born into one of the worst time periods ever in human history to be a man seeking the traditional birthrights of all men and then had even more injustice from a sneering society blaming them for its own failure heaped upon them):

  • Men born during a reasonably defined wasteland period for finding a good, stable, marriage-material wife must be exempt from any singles tax forever. (This is the least society could do for them. Realistically they deserve straight-up reparations, but one step at a time.) The only exceptions will be men who have engaged in above a certain threshold of sexual promiscuity (perhaps we'll say more than five sex partners in 20 years, which is fairly generous), who will be deemed to have contributed to the problem and taxed considerably.

  • Age gap relationships will be monitored, and so long as younger women are going for the again many older guys left behind by the wasteland, the singles tax on young men will be pushed back to around 26 or so. (Or rather, to make it more general: no man will be singles-taxed in a situation where there are too few marriage material women marrying men in their demographic to go around. Men will be singles-taxed for their choice to remain single, not merely being the unfortunate victim of a mathematical reality.)

  • The promiscuous men mentioned above will be banned from courting, marrying, etc. the newer breed of superior, chaste female as an additional punishment for their behavior. Instead, they will be expected to take their wives from the older breed of damaged goods women that they created. They will be expected to take multiple wives too. Their breeding however will be restricted to avoid promulgating genes that induce promiscuity and immorality. (Many of these men are already married with children, and of course you're not going to break up their marriages and kill their kids, so this won't be a punishment for those.)

These are just a few small modifications I thought of off the top of my head though. Realistically, if you're going this far you might as well just institute a straight up anti-"feminist" reactionary reign of terror. Anything below that is probably a half-measure that won't actually accomplish much anyway.

Point is, you can't just demand people couple and reproduce by presuming to tax them for not doing so, any more than you can just demand a square peg fit into a round hole and think it'll have to fit eventually if you tax it enough. You have to address the tens if not hundreds of millions of women who have destroyed any reasonable marriage/reproductive value they might have once had and the millions of men who have thus been left without reasonable prospects. (After all, what's the point of having kids just to have kids if it's with a whore? To raise whore kids and make society's problems even worse? Part of the problem here is that birthrate fanatics don't seem to understand that a higher birthrate is not always better and therefore a declining birthrate is not always a problem, but often rather just a naturally homeostatic process regressing to a more reasonable mean, returning to the baseline its current surrounding conditions can comfortably support.) That would require nothing less than a complete transformation of society, and even then you'll still be undoing the damage of the previous regime for longer than the likely lifespans (assuming no longevity takeoff or whatever) of most of those men affected (unless maybe if you find a way to buy nice virgin 18 year olds from Asia by the millions).

Consequently, our present society (or even one that makes any sort of effort to return to sanity) is (or would be still) already walking a tightrope of hoping that porn and video games sedates so many men so much that they don't effectuate a collective realization (which so many of them have already come to, even if they aren't moving to implement it in its most literal form yet) that realistically the better option for most of them is to burn it all down and see what treasures might be found in the ashes (dignity, for one). (I mean I say they're not implementing it yet, but again that's only not literally, as they actually are, albeit indirectly: They're for the most part not openly literally burning down anything yet, but they are quiet quitting, lying flat, whatever you wanna call it, overindulging in the porn and video games (as it turns out, when you use drugs to pacify people, you get addicts) and leaving the working, leading, and innovating parts of life that strong societies have always needed men to take the lead on to the "strong powerful womyn" who they've been told are better than them anyway, which predictably has led to the "competence crisis", a heretofore unknown malady in the West's post-industrialization history. This may not burn anything down ever, but it is quite likely to leave it to rot.) Punishing them with an unfair singles tax that charges them for society's failures is unlikely to help this goal.

The only real quick fix I see for this issue is wonderfully truly feminine AI/robot waifus (which realistically at this point will come from China unless you get US government funding for a counterinitiative, introducing its own national security risk that will need to be dealt with) with artificial wombs capable of baring biological children. Introduce this technology, and I think you will very quickly find that it was not ever your average man who was the one standing in the way of family formulation. (This would definitely introduce some new issues with a generation of children where a large percentage of them have artificial mothers, and yet this would still be superior to the potential "motherhood" offered by ruined wasteland women, if not just for the fact that it would satisfy the basic necessary criterion of actually inducing men to make mothers out of these women, artificial or not, in the first place. After all, if men won't play ball, it's not going to happen no matter what. Whatever deficit in open rebellion modern man has developed he's more than made up for with an expertise in slacking and shirking what authorities insist is his "duty". See: Chinese coronavirus lockdown/masking/etc. policy)

voluntary pieces of the world's sexual leftovers, rampant social media exhibitionists, misandrist "feminists" who would need cult deprogramming-level interventions to have any chance of being even remotely good wives to men who aren't completely pushovers, unfeminine tattooed oddjobs,

#1, #2 and #4 are in most cases no particular permanent issue if the social context is handwaved (as it is in your hypothetical). The only legacies of sleeping around that both can't be fixed and are serious (lol herpes/cytomegalovirus; lol hep B if you're vaccinated) are HIV and pre-existing stepkids; paternity tests and prenups basically eliminate the cuckold risk assuming a friendly legal environment, and the vast majority of STDs are curable. Tattoos can usually be removed, and unless the "unfeminine" comes from literally being an ex-transman, it's generally either changeable or is genetic i.e. would have been there in the 50s.

I'm not really seeing the "ruined forever" here for the rest of those categories.

(With regard to #3, I will add that if they bear sons there's a clusterfuck waiting to happen.)

Okay, my answer to the problem you've outlined is: I don't care. The tax might be unfair towards incels, but both they and the veterans of cock carousel will both have to pay up, social security doesn't grow on trees. Some of them might even enjoy the findom aspect of this.

JD Vance shows with his own exotic import wife

San Diego is right next to Mexico and might feel exotic to someone from Ohio, but is still an American city. I need more time to address the rest of your reply.

Ah, yes, San Diego, the traditional land of the Telugu Chilukuri clan.

Well, the traditional land of the hillbillies lies on the Anglo-Scottish border in this case.

You cannot justifiably in any sort of good faith punish men for not wanting to "settle down" with a former college party favor any more than you could justifiably punish them for not agreeing to permanently staple a bag of dog feces to their forehead. The limit of public policy is where people would rather accept any punishment you can reasonably enforce than comply, and trying to force men to LARP a happy tradlife with former campus bicycles is definitely past that limit for a not insignificant number of men.

Whew, this is a lot...There is also a precedent for it multiple times recent western history, from Jamestown to Australia, with my favorite being Parisian prisoners being offered freedom if they agreed to marry prostitutes and move to Louisiana. So yes we have punished men for not "stapling dogshit to their heads."

I also don't know if you went to college, but if you did you should know that most women aren't "bicycles", sure there were some, but that has always been the case.

The medieval church literally offered an indulgence for marrying a prostitute, as well.

Getting promiscuous women married even if that isn’t the preference of men has been a TPTB goal for forever.

Whew, this is a lot...There is also a precedent for it multiple times recent western history, from Jamestown to Australia, with my favorite being Parisian prisoners being offered freedom if they agreed to marry prostitutes and move to Louisiana. So yes we have punished men for not "stapling dogshit to their heads."

An offer of freedom isn't a punishment. If you're going to offer men bounties for marrying flawed modern women, then yes that's a whole different story. If instead of taxing singles you want to offer more for married couples and see how low men are willing to go for the rewards, then that's their choice and I have no problem with it.

I also don't know if you went to college, but if you did you should know that most women aren't "bicycles", sure there were some, but that has always been the case.

Obviously it depends on the college and the time period, but it's a fact that female promiscuity is a more prominent issue than ever before. Tinder isn't a wildly popular enterprise for no reason. The increasing amounts of (sometimes, increasingly less) softcore pornographization of themselves that women engage in on social media (and real life with their basic wardrobes) isn't without consequence. It's pretty obvious if you don't live in a willfully ignorant bubble.

I mean, forget any quibbling we could do over what constitutes a "bicycle": Any amount of past casual sex is too much for wife material, unless you are a cuckold, which I personally am not. Of course you might say, "This is the most fucked up time period for male-female relations perhaps in human history, and I will accept a bit of cuckoldry in exchange for not being alone forever.", and I won't judge you too harshly for that, but that's still the bargain if your wife has any sort of a casual sex history. You're trading cuckoldry for companionship.

An offer of freedom isn't a punishment. If you're going to offer men bounties for marrying flawed modern women, then yes that's a whole different story. If instead of taxing singles you want to offer more for married couples and see how low men are willing to go for the rewards, then that's their choice and I have no problem with it.

Taxing and incentives are exactly the same. If you don't marry a prostitute and people who do are getting extra cash every month. This is just a tax with extra steps. The people that don't marry prostitutes have to stay in jail, now not for their original crime but for refusing to marry a prostitute. This is punishment for refusing the offer.

Big Red Pill/Black Pill energy you've got going here as well, the user name alone is worth a chuckle. If you look at a lot of stats "modern" women are actually having less sex and fewer hookups than their parents generation, and fewer still than the generation before that. Why get pressured into sex at 16 at makeout point in a 68' chevelle when it is much easier to sit at home and snapchat with your friends and watch netflix after soccer practice. This trend has only accelerated over the last 10 years to the point where even major news outlets are picking up on it. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-08-03/young-adults-less-sex-gen-z-millennials-generations-parents-grandparents

Before AIDS it was a sexfest for 2 decades. Society is much less promiscuous than it was 50 years ago.

Surveys during the 1970s reported that by age nineteen, four-fifths of all males and two-thirds of all females had had sex

  • American Decades: 1970-1979: Vincent Tompkins, Judith Baughman, Victor Bondi, Richard Layman (1995)

People all caught up in this stuff never seem to have a very accurate view of the past. The rose tint of history tends to distort into whatever you imagine you would like it to be.

Also the definition of cuckold is raising another man's child. If you're not doing that you're not a cuckold. Maybe according to you you're dating or marrying damaged goods, but you're not a cuckold.

If you limit your dating pool to only confirmed virgins checked and confirmed intact by the royal court's physician. You're going to have a bad time.

If you limit your dating pool to only confirmed virgins checked and confirmed intact by the royal court's physician. You're going to have a bad time.

Particularly because the men ranting about this issue never seem interested in upholding their side of the bargain. The old social contract was a two way street.

I think there are a modest but meaningful number of men online, whether they were successful cads or not, who are coming to realize that rejecting Christian sexual ethics has been bad for people of both sexes. I wonder if they'll be the one group of irreligious moderns who will find the natural law persuasive.

Oh they are holding it up alright, just not on purpose.

Any amount of past casual sex is too much for wife material, unless you are a cuckold, which I personally am not. Of course you might say, "This is the most fucked up time period for male-female relations perhaps in human history, and I will accept a bit of cuckoldry in exchange for not being alone forever.", and I won't judge you too harshly for that, but that's still the bargain if your wife has any sort of a casual sex history. You're trading cuckoldry for companionship.

In all your writing, this is the closest you give for a rationalization as to why marrying a woman with (if you'll forgive my paraphrasing, feel free to replace with terms of your choice) a 'high body count' is bad. And yet, your meaning of the word cuckold doesn't comport with any definition I've seen used before - you're suggesting that in a monogamous marriage where neither partner has slept with anyone else since the wedding, the man is nevertheless a cuckold if his wife had casual sex in college? You're just trying to use the shock/meme value of the word cuckold to smear a perfectly healthy marriage.

Seriously - what is your concern with the situation outlined above? STIs? The woman may have a child prior to the marriage? Okay, set those aside for the moment and let's explore cases where neither of those apply. Explain to me what is so wrong with a woman who has casual sex in college, settles down in her late 20s and has a family in her 30s without resorting to broader arguments about society and fertility.

Seriously - what is your concern with the situation outlined above? STIs? The woman may have a child prior to the marriage? Okay, set those aside for the moment and let's explore cases where neither of those apply. Explain to me what is so wrong with a woman who has casual sex in college, settles down in her late 20s and has a family in her 30s without resorting to broader arguments about society and fertility.

He will not be able to explain this - he was banned right before you said this (I missed this too when I replied to his earlier post).

I actually think this is the correct answer. Idk if 'status' is the right frame, but the subtle propaganda of media showing the fun partying lifestyle as ideal, even for middle aged people, is incredibly harmful.

Not sure about the tax on single people, but tax on DINKs I guess... but then ppl would pretend to not be together to try and dodge the tax. Either way, probably a good idea.

It wouldn't help to pretend not to be together, since single people are also faced with additional tax.

Raising the status of mothers is the correct answer. When we have lived in close knit communities where my my wife's peers were other mothers with 3+ kids, my wife was very happy. When we've lived in metropolises where restaurants, transportation, and general social life are all very unfriendly to mothers with children, she was miserable. Simple as.

How to do at scale? It has become apparent to me that egalitarian liberalism is a civilizational injury that an ER doctor of nations would diagnose as "incompatible with life," so I'm blackpilled on the prospects of liberal democracies mustering the fortitude to sit up on their sick beds long enough to even begin to do something about this. In my own life, I'm preparing to participate in a more heavily armed version of the Benedict Option and to pour my human capital into strengthening that community and its mothers without regard for, or even at the expense of, the surrounding economic zone "nation."

This isn't my idea, I don't think it's a particularly good idea, and I have serious doubts that it will work to do much of anything, but the big brains in Japan have a plan to actually pay single women cash to leave Tokyo and marry men in rural areas. Presumably this will also get the lusty fires burning as these gals subsequently produce offspring.

This seems like the bizarre idea of a bunch of old men in a conference room, yes.

The "plan" was dropped after two days:

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/15409288

There's a phrase Onna gokoro wa wakaranai. (女心はわからない) which roughly translates to "(You) don't understand a woman's heart." Usually used as a retort when behavior causes a feeling of feminine revulsion but the reasons why are either too obvious or too vague to explain.

(You may know this phrase of course; I routinely underestimate people's knowledge of Japanese.)

In this case it might be said to the Japanese government, to no one's surprise.

Japanese politics never ceases to disappoint me. How things got so bad used to be a mystery until I began working for a Japanese company. "Wait, the entire society is just one gigantic bureaucratic logjam?" "Always has been."

It would be a lot cheaper to simply send a troublesome population Up To The Mountains And Down To The Countryside...

Please no, rent is already increasing enough out here as it is.

Wow, rents in the Japanese countryside are going up? Is the housing stock there finally decaying faster than the population, or have people been moving back out for retirement?

There are varying degrees of countryside. We live within several hours of a tier 1 city, and covid outmigration put upward pressure on rents. If you live somewhere tucked away in a valley 12+ hours away by train from any major city, rent is probably stable.

But you also have to consider that housing that's >20 years old (a generous estimate) is essentially condemnable in the minds of the Japanese public, so when there's upward rent pressure, it's on a small fraction of the housing market (recent construction) which magnifies the effect. I've seen apartments near the station in my medium sized town, which is in a prefecture that does not border a metropolis, that are now asking near the same rent as in the suburbs of a metropolis. Truly nowhere is safe in developed countries.

Apologies in advance for typos as I'm enjoying some fine sake this evening.

Mongolia and Georgia are very different from the average western country. Both countries:

  • have a large rural population (30%-40% compared to the 20% or less of western countries)
  • almost everyone who is not rural lives in a single city (50% of mongolians live in ulanbator, 30% of georgian live in Tblisi)
  • they both have net negative migration in living memory
  • they both have low life expectancy at birth

Additionally Georgia's population growth has been negative for the past 30 years, if you don't count the bump they got in the last two years from the war in Ukraine.

In my opinion the fertility crisis is 100% economic in origin, it would be interesting to see where the increase of fertility is happening in Georgia and Mongolia. If it's concentrated in rural/low density regions then all it's doing is convincing a few people that live in very-low-child-cost areas (in the case of mongolia possibly in negative-child-cost areas) to have more. If that is the case trying to do something similar in the west will yield no result at all.

If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?

What I wouldn't do is:

  1. No child subsidies. We're never going to be willing to spend the kind of money needed to make them work. Plus they are dysgenic, to make them not be dysgenic you'd have to make a regressive social program (rich people get more) and those are taboo.

  2. Taxing the childless. This is the exact same thing as 1 just framed as to appeal to conservatives. The only positive thing is that you can make this not be dysgenic.

  3. Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.

  4. Push religion onto people. Religion is positively correlated to fertility so we can trick people into taking an economically bad deal (having more children) by brainwashing them into believing god wants them to. I think the correlation of religion and fertility is a mirage, more religious people just tend to live in lower-cost-of-child areas (living within an extended family both provides free child care and also makes people opportunistically religious). This is too long to explain but I think religion by itself suppresses fertility.

I don't think the problem is actually tractable. It's intractability is likely the true reason behind the big push for immigration we've seen in the past 20 years.

My extremely long shot proposal is this: socially normalize and encourage women to have children while in college, out of wedlock and with no expectation that the relationship will last and then dump the child on their grandparents (of the woman). After the first 3-6 months she's not going to see the child at all outside of holidays and a few sundays. This places the economic burden of children on people that are better positioned economically to handle it, who can live in less dense areas of the country (because they don't have to be near a job), it mostly removes the negative impacts on career (because she's still doesn't have one) and child subsidies can be added to the pension system and thus be regressive, because the pension system is the only social security system that is allowed to be regressive (hopefully nobody notices that we are doing this).

There is a strong social stigma against having children before finishing school, that it will make you forever poor (because it currently does do just that), so this is extremely unlikely to work.

Push religion onto people. Religion is positively correlated to fertility so we can trick people into taking an economically bad deal (having more children) by brainwashing them into believing god wants them to. I think the correlation of religion and fertility is a mirage, more religious people just tend to live in lower-cost-of-child areas (living within an extended family both provides free child care and also makes people opportunistically religious). This is too long to explain but I think religion by itself suppresses fertility.

The religious parts of Holland and Ukraine maintain healthy TFR’s. Church attending TFR in the US is above replacement even without geographic segregation.

Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.

And yet we can somehow decide who needs to go into a 4 year degree and tens of thousands in debt when they're seventeen? We're already putting people in essentially extremely expensive and extended apprentice training!

Either we do have some way to tell, in which case we can use it. Or we don't and the huge amounts of support for a system that is not only costly but damaging to fertility (especially for people who don't then even end up with a useful degree, or a degree at all) becomes much more dubious.

Grandparents don’t have the energy to keep up with their grandkids.

A society that respects elders has kids naturally and almost subconsciously slow down to meet their speed. My grandmother took care of me and managed it because she knew to let us run sometimes and we knew when to behave.

The bigger problem is that a society full of people who're expected to move for work can count on grandparents less.

That and there was a lot of slack picked up by extended family that Americans may just not be able to depend upon both because of the moving and the small family size.

I’ve commented before how the “transplant” society makes it really lonely and isolating for stay at home parents

Grandparents also might not be available at that stage in life - by the time I had turned 18, God had succeeded in killing all my grandparents save one.

Again, the reactionaries are actually basically right - women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try. Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops, and as noted, even places like Mongolia are dropping and Hungary's attempts largely failed unless judged on a curve.

Also, as noted, because contraception is much better than even 20 years ago thanks to IUD's, teen pregnancy have fallen off a cliff in the US - something everybody to the right of Stalin was praising as a worthy goal 20 years ago. The Christian Right got what it wanted - far less pregnant single teen girls.

The difference is, as opposed to the reactionaries, I think it's good women have the right to control their own reproduction.

Mongolia isn’t really dropping though. It’s still much higher than 20 years ago even if there was a very slight drop the last couple years.

What the Christian Right wanted was for teenage girls not to engage in casual sex with the tacit approval of a permissive society and as a consequence not have babies out of wedlock. (They obviously had to coat their arguments with layers of bullshit in order to never draw attention to the fact that impoverished black girls from the Deep South were hugely overrepresented among those teen mothers, but whatever.) What they very obviously did not want was for venues of community life and social interaction to get eroded, social capital be destroyed and addiction to social media be normalized in a secular, atomized society to such an extent that teenagers don't even hang out together and as a consequence don't even have sex and, in turn, do not have babies out of wedlock. (Let's not pretend that the teenage birthrate is dropping mainly because teenagers have somehow just recently learned how to use contraception that has become fantastically effective. This is nonsense.)

This is a very crucial difference. I'm pretty sure you're also fully aware of all this yourself, but I think it bears mentioning here at least once.

Let's not pretend that the teenage birthrate is dropping mainly because teenagers have somehow just recently learned how to use contraception that has become fantastically effective. This is nonsense.

Eh, Plan B became OTC for 17 and over in 2006 and for all ages in 2014. Last I checked, a course on Plan B is $20 at your local Walmart. I'd say that counts as "recent" and "fantastically effective".

Am I to believe that the main reason the teenage pregnancy rate collapsed (supposedly) in the last 20 years (supposedly) is because over-the-counter morning-after pills became available? Really?

What's your opinion on how this will work out long term? If low fertility is the genuine preference of the average woman, as you say further down in this thread, and you don't approve of the more heavy-handed, right wing-coded measures that might have some success in pushing up birth rates, what will the solution be? As things stand, we will see massive problems with social welfare systems in particular and the entire economy in general in the next decades.

Projecting further out, because of large differences between birth rates between groups, the heavy-handed right wing-coded measures might be implemented anyway, because the vast majority of future people will be descended from disproportionately clannish, religious and generally non-Western-liberal demographics, and this will have obvious consequences on what society considers as the proper stance on things like women's reproductive rights etc. Given your stated preferences, this seems like an outcome that should be prevented, but I get the impression that you're more or less endorsing doing nothing.

I think the bigger factor is women in the workplace. Education might well be a correlation, but the rates of childbirth didn’t fall nearly so dramatically until women began to enter the workplace in substantial numbers. If mom is working, the external cost of a child go up dramatically, and the benefits (mostly spending time bonding with the child, and in some cultures prestige) are a lot lower. Tbf, the upshot is that we as a society need to choose either women work or they have babies. Very few women do both, and those who try have fewer kids.

It's all a simple case of cause and effect. Back in the days of the patriarchy, traditional monogamous marriage basically functioned as a sort of life insurance policy for women and thus a social safety net. No matter how ugly, dumb or lazy you were as a woman, someone was going to marry you - this was pretty much assured. From then on, someone else was responsible for you. Now that the patriarchy is smashed and traditional marriage is dismantled, all this goes out the window. With abortion legalized and normalized, shotgun marriages disappeared and you can no longer use your fetus basically as a tool of blackmail to keep the man in the relationship. (I wonder how many people even thought this through when abortion was legalized?) All this means that you need to become economically self-reliant as a woman as a backup plan.

I mean, I think the timing in the US is more coincidental and proof of other things going on, like the dramatic drop in teen pregnancy and general increase in access to good contraception. As I've said elsewhere, the overall birthrate slope lines up with pre-Depression rate continuing to drop, outside of the Baby Boom being an outlier. It's increased far recently, which may be a cultural thing, or like I said, things like IUD's being given to teenagers essentially eliminating a lot of accidental births, but the general shift was already happening when our grandparents were still children.

For example, in Iran, the percentage of women in the workforce reached a peak of 20% of the workforce (which means by simple math, a lot weren't) in the early 2000's, and hasn't significantly increased since then. Despite this, outside of a small 0.5 TFR rise in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, the birthrate continued to drop from it's heights to about 2.0 in 2002, but despite women in the workforce not increasing and by some measures, decreasing TFR has continued to drop.

Now, what has changed is education. The literacy rate has quadrupled, primary & tertiary school attendance went up a lot more. Also, and I think this is highly undervalued - maternal mortality rate has also dropped by 2/3 in the past 20 years from 45 to 15 - so from quasi-Third World to nearly first world numbers. Oh, and also, contraception usage is ~75%.

Sure, entering the workforce is probably part of it, but I use countries like Iran as an example as if a quasi-authoritarian religious state can't really pull this is off if they educate women for rational reasons, even if they have limited access to the workforce by Western standards, then nothing in the the Western world is stopping this.

We had women's education and contraception during the Baby Boom, and birth rates rose across the developed world. Hell, the Amish have basic women's (and men's) education and contraception right now and they still have high fertility.

I mean, maybe if we win a World War, and have a massive economic boom due to 1/2 the developed world being rubble, we can temporarily stop a birthrate drop that was already beginning for a decade or so.

Since, if you look at actually long-term brith rate charts, the Baby Boom is basically just a temporary front-loading of births that eventually evened itself out. If you actually took somebody who knew the shifts by even say, 1926 and asked them to guess the fertility rate (based on births per 1,000) based on the current tendencies, they'd actually likely get it pretty close.

Your understanding of the Baby Boom isn't quite right. It wasn't caused by WW2 (indeed, in the US, UK and Switzerland it started before the war) and it also occurred in countries that weren't involved in the war (like Ireland). Plus, it wasn't a case of delaying or bringing births forward. For the Baby Boom mothers, their lifetime fertility actually increased.

This article is a really good write up. TLDR: Childbirth became much safer, domestic work became easier due to new technology and there was a housing boom, which caused a marriage boom.

To answer Jeroboam initial question, my plan would be:

  1. Build lots of houses, specifically suburbs. Tokyo shows us that cheaper housing won't cause more people to have children if they don't have gardens and quiet.
  2. Glorify motherhood a la Mongolia
  3. Promote marriage like Hungary
  4. Promote free-range parenting. Modern parents spend a huge amount of time on childcare, far more than they did in the Baby Boom. Free range parenting lowers the cost of having kids, while also being psychologically healthier for the children.
  5. Give generous tax breaks to parents and married couples, coupled with tax-rises on singletons. We want to make getting married a rational economic choice.
  6. Drastically shorten the educational track. Limit university enrolment to about 10% of each cohort, and make it legally difficult for firms to list it as a job requirement. Maybe tax university graduates or give tax breaks to businesses employing non-graduates.

I agree, I will just note that I don't think that "women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try" is a particularly reactionary opinion. To me this opinion seems like it is actually kind of the consensus on all sides of the political spectrum. People just disagree on whether the education + contraception is a good thing or a bad thing.

Eh, there's still plenty of alternate hypothesis put out there by my fellow lefties and some centrists in recent years from housing prices to cultural and educational gaps between young people and so forth. Again, I don't think any of that is a 0 reason, but just like anything short of massive restrictions of contraception + women's education will lead at best to a .2 or .3 rise, I think housing, women getting more liberal and going to college more, and even Tinder is like a .2 or .3 thing if you add it all up.

Ironically, J.D. Vance's remarks from the past few years continually being brought up have actually accelerated the acceptance of, 'yes, it was birth control and that's a good thing, you weirdos.'

I think that in modern society the opinion that men should have more control over women's sexual decisions, other than potentially in the one case of abortion (because that one has potential moral implications beyond the woman) is just fundamentally loser-coded because the Internet has made it pretty clear that the majority of men who want to police women's sexual decisions are doing so out of sexual frustration. Of course there is a small minority of rationalist-types who genuinely care about the impact of women's sexual decisions on fertility rates or social cohesion out of a detached interest in supporting pro-social policies, but the modal guy online arguing for controlling women's sexual decisions is, assuming that he is not a genuine pro-lifer, pretty clearly doing it because he isn't getting laid as much as he wants.

Can you please explain what "policing women's sexual decisions" means in this context exactly?

I read it to mean compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.

Are we going to pretend that this is something that has traditionally been done by sexually frustrated men, and not by other women?

Certainly rakishness should be policed in men.

Traditionally the tools available tended to be more effective in women. Women being better responders to social pressure.

I mean, even many rationalists are coded as weirdos who aren't getting laid to plenty of people.

J.D. Vance is the person closest to be associated with the movement to actually get a national stage, and some of his views, that have been decently popular here and other rationalist or rationalist-adjacent spaces implode when in contact with actual voters. The guy's impressively below water approval wise, and is actually probably hurting Trump among secular swing voters in the Midwest.

I mean, even many rationalists are coded as weirdos who aren't getting laid to plenty of people.

This is often a problem with those people, as they are quite willing to call people they don't like who are married with multiple children of their own "incels".

Again, the reactionaries are actually basically right - women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try.

It's not about "education", unless you think it is impossible to have an education system that doesn't result in arrested development well into your thirties.

Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops, and as noted, even places like Mongolia are dropping and Hungary's attempts largely failed unless judged on a curve.

Nah, what they're finding out is that power is about a lot more than who sits on the throne.

The Christian Right got what it wanted - far less pregnant single teen girls.

What's up with the gloating? You want to solve the problem or you just want to confirm the strawman portrayal of the secular left was not a strawman at all?

It's not about "education", unless you think it is impossible to have an education system that doesn't result in arrested development well into your thirties.

This does seem to be the pattern to me. Education extends adolescence and then the education becomes a justification as to why you can't settle in a community where you have something other than your "dream job". So you had a few HS boyfriends, a college BF, then you are with another guy in a different place after college for a few years, then that gets broken off because one of you is moving from Columbus to Chicago for a high powered job and the other has to choose between their employment and the spouse, they pick employment and another few years of courtship have been wasted.

Generally speaking, people who think that education reduces fertility rates do not think that it mainly does this by making women have arrested development into their thirties, they think it mainly does it by giving women more options in the economy and thus making them more independent from a need to settle down with a man just to have a decent standard of living. Granted, the reactionary flavor of the argument does often talk about arrested development. But I think the reactionary flavor is currently a minority view.

options in the economy and thus making them more independent

Here's the thing though, I don't think it makes anyone more independent, neither men nor women. You're spending massive amounts of time idling to get a piece of paper, that will allow you to get a piece of paper, that will hopefully unlock some doors for you, sometime in the future. But all things considered, that's limiting your options, not expanding them.

Right. It turns out being able to work and not having your economic security tied to another human being is seen as a positive, especially even in say, parts of the world that aren't as advanced as the Western world on women's rights. Part of the reason a disproportionate number of people working in sweatshops in Asia were women (and was the same of say, New York in 1843), was that it allowed a degree of economic freedom that wasn't possible in basically the alternative of substantive farming, either in rural Vietnam in 2013 or rural New England in 1884.

I mean, yes, I think any form of education that's more than just 'be happy and have babies' for young women will lead to this, when there's any sort of political and societal freedom for women, along with access to consistent birth control.

Now, I know people will point to say, the 50's or early 20th century or whenever about educated women going happily into marriage, but again, if you actually look at what well-educated wives of lawyers, doctors, and so on actually did, they actually didn't dote on their five kids or whatever. I bet in reality, the median middle to upper middle class woman spent far less time actually parenting her four or five children did than the median PMC girlboss does today - no, she handed the kids off to servants, than went to the League of Women Voters, Women's Temperance Union, or whatever - aka, a bunch of things that are basically non-profit NGO's do today, run by basically the same groups of women.

You can prefer the set-up, but the college-educated women weren't happy housewives sitting at home, and I bet you the vast majority of them would've happily taken the pill...because massive amounts of their children and grandchildren did, before any real cultural revolution started. As far as the vaunted post-WWII period, look at what came as a result of having millions of college-educated women in suburbs with nothing to do - massive bits of activism on both the right and left, because a bunch of college-educated women were bored and not happy - both Betty Friedman and Phyllis Schlafly basically came from that millueu.

Also, I don't think there's really a "problem" so there's nothing to solve. Also, by all measures, my 'view' is the standard view outside of maybe the right-most 5-10%, that 18 year old unmarried girls having less babies is a positive for society, so yeah, I think secularism should be loud and proud - we did that.

I mean, yes, I think any form of education that's more than just 'be happy and have babies' for young women will lead to this, when there's any sort of political and societal freedom for women, along with access to consistent birth control.

Why would education lead to arrested development? I'm not talking just about reproduction, I'm saying the whole system is deliberately designed to minimize one's ability to support oneself until you are quite old.

Now, I know people will point to say, the 50's or early 20th century or whenever about educated women going happily into marriage, but again, if you actually look at what well-educated wives of lawyers, doctors, and so on actually did, they actually didn't dote on their five kids or whatever

I'd counter with pointing out you don't have to look back at the 50's. You can look at now, just somewhat above doctors, and lawyers. The most rich have lots of kids.

Not education, but delayed adult responsibilities. In college, outside of occasional study and attending classes, the students don’t have any responsibilities that a junior high kid living at home doesn’t have. The dorm is paid by his parents, as is his meal plan and so on. She can do whatever she wants with time not spent studying. The lifestyle is pure hedonism with very little to force the students to mature.

And what makes people mature is not age, but having to depend on oneself and having other people depend on them. This is the value of sports and other activities— you’re dependent on yourself being committed to the task at hand if you want to keep playing that sport. Your team depends on you to show up and perform. If you can’t live up to that, at best you’ll be benched and in more competitive leagues you might well be cut. So you learn to be that dependable person, you go to practice, you run and weight train and throw a ball around because your team needs you and you want to be on that team. Alternately, you can look to rural farm kids involved in 4H. They’re much more mature than others their age. They are capable of getting things done, they have a longer time preference, and they aren’t nearly as driven by emotion as kids who live in suburban neighborhoods and don’t work or play sports.

I mean, I'd actually bet that in 2024, the life of say, a 19-year old female psychology major at a mid-tier state school (aka, the average American college student) is actually less hedonistic in many ways the median non-college educated 19-year old in the United States, working a low wage job.

Also, well I'd question the actual type of person you described actually has the qualities you describe of if it's all anecdotal just-so stories based on cultural preference, the reality is by time those rural farm kids hit 40, it's extremely likely the supposedly hedonistic college kids are ahead of them by every standard that matters, including a lot of hedonistic measures, outside of those that increasingly smaller amounts of social conservatives care about deeply - ie. how many kids you have.

Now, I do think in reality, the actual best preforming person is probably the type of person much of this comment section would despise - a serious female high school athlete who goes to college but stops playing athletics and ends up being the type of corporate girlboss that has her eggs frozen at 40, but is married and successful economically, and indeed, probably doesn't have much of a hedonistic life unless not having as many children as you can is now considered hedonistic.

I mean college kids especially from upper class homes are often able to leverage social networking to get themselves in good positions to eventually get hired. Even if you’re a fuckup, having played dozens of games of beer pong with the son of a business owner is going to get you a leg up. That isn’t because playing beer pong is less hedonistic, but because frat life introduces you to your social peers who will eventually put in a good word for you.

I mean, I'd actually bet that in 2024, the life of say, a 19-year old female psychology major at a mid-tier state school (aka, the average American college student) is actually less hedonistic in many ways the median non-college educated 19-year old in the United States, working a low wage job.

He's talking about a specific subset of people who were able to take responsibility for themselves thanks to how their environment was structured, why are you responding like he meant all people earning a low wage?

Don't a lot of the latter grow up in exactly the environment you're advocating for, anyway?

He's talking about a specific subset of people who were able to take responsibility for themselves thanks to how their environment was structured, why are you responding like he meant all people earning a low wage?

The specific context of the hedonic lifestyle described by the OP is this: "The dorm is paid by his parents, as is his meal plan and so on. She can do whatever she wants with time not spent studying."

Compared to this, the "median non-college educated 19-year old in the United States, working a low wage job" is, of course, not hedonistic, because she (let's assume it's a woman) claims responsibility for herself and supports herself, and holds down a full-time job (we can assume).

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Well, the question was rhetorical, but thank you for answering, because this is exactly what I was hinting at.

What's 4H, by the way?

What's 4H, by the way?

4-H is a youth organization, very popular in rural US. They promote animal husbandry in particular. I go to the local 4-H Fair, where the kids show off their goats, chickens and such in very friendly competitions. Right after the fair, our local supermarket has 4-H Fair beef and lamb.

The children raise animals as food, not pets. There was quite a culture war controversy last year when a California girl put her goat up for auction in a 4-H Fair and then refused to give it up to the bidder.

$902.00 seems like way too much for a small meat kid goat. The max I have ever seen for those at our fair is like $250 and that is if you're going to breed them first. Unless that picture is from well before the goat was sold. Even then $902 for a finished meat goat direct to slaughter is too much.

I think it's good women have the right to control their own reproduction.

Women have far fewer children than they want and have lower life satisfaction though. Are they really getting what they want? Are they really in control?

I'm not convinced that you have to limit access to contraception to get birthrates to replacement rates but the current situation doesn't even seem preferable to the situation where access was more limited.

I think those studies are severely flawed, not that they're being fudges or anything but in that they assume those numbers women say are what they really want in their heart of hearts. Like, I say, I want to lose x pounds, but you know what I continue to do? Eat donuts and burritos because they're yummy, and I care about that more than losing weight. I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.

After all, the American people claim they want a smaller deficit, but a majority is against any kind of specific spending cut. Note, as a dirty leftist I'm fair about this - the American people also want a larger welfare state, but no rise in taxes on anybody but very, very rich people.

I think if you did everything reasonable pro-natalists want - you might push things up .2 or .3. But, short of massive restrictions on women's contraception, you're not getting any massive shifts, because has been pointed out, a lot of the actual change over the past 20 years is a massive drop in teen pregnancy that 90% of society was behind at the time.

As far limiting access, I'm not a woman whose ability to control her own reproduction would be affected, so I'm going to claim what would be better for that woman, even though I'm aware much of this site thinks they know what's best for women and shockingly, it lines up with their general political beliefs.

I think a lot of women say they want say three babies, and may even continue to say that after they have a kid, but when they faced with the mental cost of doing so, or other changes they'd have to make, they say no, even though they still might say they want three kids if asked in a stufy, but they also don't want to give up x, y, and z about their current life either.

I agree that the current TFR rate matches women's revealed preferences. I also recognize that those preferences depend on the social structures that make the choice of having children far too costly. So there are lots of women who would like to have children sooner, or have more children than they do, but who choose otherwise.

I used to work at a small liberal arts college in Southern California. Student body almost all traditional college age (18-22), 2/3 female. All lived on campus by default, with but a handful of exceptions. Many of the students planned to teach elementary school at least for some time (Teach For America or JET program), many of the female students said they planned to get married and have children themselves.

In my two decades working there, only a handful got married by the time they graduated. One gave birth towards the end of her senior year, and all the girls went ga-ga over the baby.

So here were a bunch of young women who wanted children, who biologically were in their prime for having children, who were mature and responsible enough to take care of children, but who overwhelmingly did not have them. And it's reasonable to ask: Why?

Why? Maybe because our college was not at all set up for families, or for women with children. We didn't even have a day-care on campus. The handful of women who married, and the one who gave birth, got dispensation to live off-campus and paid through the nose for rent, whereas our college gave generous means-based subsidies to students living on-campus.

Maybe it was because our bachelors program was clearly aimed for unattached young people: everyone had to take a semester abroad, impossible if you have a young child.

Maybe it was because it simply wasn't done. These were smart, responsible young people, and they have internalized the ideal pattern of college--then career-- then family.

Maybe it was because these women themselves come from parents and grand-parents that followed the same pattern, who therefore have older parents and even older grand-parents, with few siblings or cousins, and the idea that your mother, aunt, or sister looks after your toddler while you finish your education and start your career is no longer a viable option.

(As an aside: ever since I was fifteen, I worked hard to hide hangovers from my mom. She got way too excited whenever I threw up in the morning. Really wanted those grandchildren.)

(As a second aside: yes, I shoplifted booze. My older over-18-but-under-21 friends assured me that it's better that I do it rather than them, because at worst I would have juvenile detention.)

My point is that revealed preferences of women regarding children depend on the institutions that those women inhabit, and currently those institutions make it very costly for young, smart, responsible women to have their desired children during their peak fertile years, even though those women really want to have children.

Again, I'm sure stuff like lack of day care or the current housing situation and so on is the reason for some of the current drop in fertility rate. I just think it's a much lower percentage than people want to claim. Because again, there are European countries who support women having children much more and it hasn't made a dent either. Sure, all of what you said is why were' a 1.65 instead of 1.82 or whatever, but it's not why we're at 2.3.

Immediate happiness / life satisfaction is not the only scale on which outcomes should necessarily be measured. As I have said in the past, a 10 year old boy who believes in Santa Claus and has everything provided for him probably has more life satisfaction than the average 30 year old man who has to work for a living, but that does not necessarily mean that it is a bad thing for the 10 year old boy to become the 30 year old man. As women acquire more freedoms and responsibilities, naturally they will also in some ways become less happy. That is not a good argument for why the freedoms and responsibilities are a bad thing. There are so many men who understand this easily when it comes to other men, and even enjoy valorizing the idea of a sterotypically manly man sacrificing his happiness for some higher purpose, but then when they talk about women they make the argument that women should focus entirely on immediate happiness / life satisfaction delivered by things like pregnancy, without reaching for something that might be a maximum higher than the merely local maximum.

But that is exactly what is happening. People are going for immediate happiness over long-term satisfaction.

They're reaching for the local maximum by not having children.

While it might be true that for a majority of women, having children is actually the global maximum of satisfaction, there are also clearly many women for whom that is not true. It makes sense to support women's right to control their own reproduction so that women can make the choice on their own.

It also makes sense to pay attention to women material and social conditions so that they can do things that both make them satisfied and that is critical to the continued survival of society.

Just throwing our hands up in the air and saying that this is women's choice when it both seems contrary to their wishes and hurts society seems strange to me. Its not like we're asking people to give up all other pursuits and dedicate their entire life to just raising children, we're asking for 2-3 children per couple.

I mean, you still need to convince something more than a small sliver of the population that women basically choosing when they have children is hurting society. The problem this argument, societally, isn't so much left-wing college students at NYU, it's sorority girls at Alabama & LSU who are putting off kids almost just as much. Look at how quickly even an Alabama legislature had to scramble when one judge made that ruling on IVF.

Probably because the Alabama Republican's were hearing from their very own Trump-voting, pro-life, very conservative aunts, wives, and daughters to fix it, now.

Incentives decide this. Change the incentives and the behaviour changes. It could still be women's choice, just under a different incentive structure.

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I agree, but supporting women's having better material and social conditions is not incompatible with granting them more freedom to control their own reproduction. One can do both.

On that we agree then. What I object to is the framing of this being the result of what women "want", I don't believe it is.

That people are less satisfied than even under the previous bad system should be a massive wake up call.

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If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?

Assuming I have control over / loyalty of the CIA / all the other glowies, it's pretty easy. Bribe Taylor Swift, and all the other female role models, to start having kids (make the bribe dependant on staying within a marriage for good measure), bribe a few media outlets to cover it positively, and have anyone who covers it negatively meet an unfortunate accident.

Can Taylor Swift be bribed? Threatened, sure, but she's a billionairess. If anything I'd be more worried about her bribing the average glowie agent.

She could probably be threatened with an IRS audit.

Celebrities always get disproportionately targeted by tax authorities so I assume she’s paying what she should.

There are some things money can buy. For everything else, there's the CIA.

A few things to note: The tfr in Sweden as of 2023 was actually even worse and down to a new record low of 1.45. Furthermore, the tfr of foreign born women has historically been a good deal higher than native born women but that has now collapsed down to the same low level, suggesting to me that something is hitting all prospective parents hard, regardless of culture.

This extra low level of fertility is probably a temporary state of things that is both part of cyclical trends in Swedish fertility and the currently harsh economic environment with tough combination of very high housing prices (we were hitting a breaking point even before the pandemic), very high private borrowing to finance said high housing prices, interest rates increases that increased people's monthly payments for their housing by some +300%, an inability to sell your house/apartment to buy a new one (trapping prospective parents in too small housing) and high unemployment. If you're not already in the housing market (hopefully with locked in interest rates) and have a good job (unemployment is high and increasing) then you're fucked in the short/medium term. All this affects prospective parents the worst and they often can't wait too much because of delayed childbirth.

Going forward either fertility goes up as interest rates and unemployment goes down, like previous fertility dips associated with cost of living crises, or fertility stays low because our housing situation has become as fucked or worse than in places like Italy. There are arguments for both.

The 10th percentile Swede enjoys a style of life far more comfortable and luxurious than the 90th percentile Nigerian, but Nigeria's birth rate is way above replacement.

So I don't think that better housing or standards of living will increase fertility. Even if higher incomes temporarily lead to more children, expectations will increase even faster. At some point even extremely rich people feel like they don't have "enough". In fact, that's exactly where we are in Sweden today.

But perhaps this is a good insight into the priorities of the average person. When you have a world of amazing travel and luxury at your fingertips, consumption might seem like a plausible alternative to leaving a legacy. Really, the single young person does have it very good now.

It probably won't move the needle much, but punitive taxes for the single and childless seem in order, with corresponding rewards for parents. Free airplane tickets for children and double prices for those traveling without?

The 10th percentile Swede enjoys a style of life far more comfortable and luxurious than the 90th percentile Nigerian, but Nigeria's birth rate is way above replacement.

You are thinking about this the wrong way. The relevant variable is not how much money you have but how much does a child cost. Nigerian children are cheap but a Swedish couple doesn't want to raise their child like the average nigerian does (and they can not because it is illegal).

And that’s what Sweden needs to fix. The idea that the problem can only be fixed with more money is ludicrous. Expectations can always rise faster than material wealth.

I mean, part of "raising their child like an average Nigerian" is a 200x higher infant mortality rate, so yeah, even putting aside differences in culture or economic status, that's a pretty giant one. If Nigeria had Swedish maternal mortality rates, you'd probably get big drops in TFR as children became a more precious thing.

Perhaps I wasn't clear, it's not only the absolute rate that has collapsed but the relative rate as well. The fertility differential between natives and the foreign born has been remarkably stable over time, until now. The fob immigrants are now having as few children per woman as native swedes. If people from other countries have as different standards as you claim then the differential should have increased, not declined.

This isn't just some longer trend of fertility decline, something has happened, starting in 2019 or 2015, depending on how you look at things.

It probably won't move the needle much, but punitive taxes for the single and childless seem in order, with corresponding rewards for parents.

On this at least we agree, but if it isn't combined with reform of the housing market it risks being overly punitive. On the other hand if the punitive taxation comes first then pressure for land and planning reform (or some other "solution") would likely sharply increase as well.

If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?

Go all in on artificial wombs.

Massive state funding for research and development, be it mechanical, using modified livestock as surrogates, or something else. Do a mixture of in vitro-esque fertilization matching specific sperm and eggs for couples that want kids plus mass growing of people from donated sperm and eggs supplemented with cloning as needed. Broadly promote donation to the public to get a widespread cross section of the general population for mass producing subsequent generations. Establish state run nurseries and childcare centers to raise those grown to meet population requirements.

Adjust population size as needed, completely liberating women from the ravages of pregnancy if they wish to avoid that. The first country that gets artificial wombs running at scale is going to own the future. If bioethicists were all marooned on a island somewhere we'd probably already have working models, and definitely have human cloning operations.

You genuinely think that applying the model from plato's republic of separating production of children from the family unit would have good outcomes?

Artificial wombs as a tool to let couples have kids without the women have to deal with childbirth is one thing. But you think that creating a generation of children largely raised by the government without a family would be a good way to combat birth rate decline? Being raised by a mother and father, or at least paired parents, is pretty important for children. And my assumption would be that having a single committed parent tends to have better outcomes than being an orphan who is never adopted and makes it to 18 purely raised by government institutions.

Even within the bounds of a question that is an "if you were the all powerful sovereign" style question - I still have a hard time believing you think that would be a good idea.

I suppose I am predisposed to disagree, because if you succeeded in creating a protocol to raise children via institutions successfully, that would remove the family as a core unit of society, which to me appears to be the exact opposite of what should be our goal. I think that should be elevated as the core unit and the relevance of individuals should be decreased.

But even beyond that, the idea that you could achieve success with such a system seems totally wild. You're talking about implementing a system that, based on all existing stats would be a total disaster, and then trying to scale that to make it more optimal than normal family rearing. What makes you think that can be done? It's total utopian thinking.

I'm down to experiment with it if the goal is increasing birth rates. If it works out, great. If it doesn't work out, then close the program and back to the drawing board. Trying artificial wombs with conventional parents and making up for shortfalls with kids from donor stock avoids damaging women's rights and autonomy, undermining of secularism, punishing people for their intimate relationship choices, or that business about increasing teen pregnancy seen in other proposed solutions so far.

Calling things utopian doesn't dissuade me much. Many technologies, rights and ways of life accepted as normal in the present were once considered utopian; it is a process of people laying out ideas before they can be implemented that allows for efforts to develop that can bring about their implementation. Humans aren't even being cloned yet*, it's way too early to write off the idea of using vat grown people to make up for manpower shortages.

*As far as we know. Given that barriers are mostly regulatory rather than technological, I would not be too surprised if someone out there with a lot of wealth and expertise in a country with little oversight is already raising a clone.

There are many factors explaining the decline of fertility rates in the developed world, but one that I feel like I don't see mentioned often enough is the simple fact that across animals, favoring K-strategy as opposed to r-strategy in reproduction tends to be correlated with high intelligence. Whales, elephants, humans, all are relatively K-strategic compared to the average animal. So it is not surprising that the world's most highly developed human cultures are dominated by K-strategists.

Also keep in mind that the effectiveness of modern medicine has made being a hardcore K-strategist more viable now than it has ever been before in human history. In pre-modern times, you kind of just had to have multiple kids to make sure that some of them were still around a few decades later. That is no longer as much the case.

I think that significantly raising fertility rates without turning a society into a primitive shithole is a pretty tough problem. Many societies of various kinds of political persuasions have tried to use social engineering to raise fertility rates, but it seems to me that the results have been mixed and the successes were largely negated as soon as the society further developed towards something that resembles what we in 2024 would consider contemporary modernity.

One approach that might theoretically work is to maintain a culturally primitive but genetically relatively high-quality subgroup of society that the rest of society essentially farms for offspring. Imagine the Haredim in Israel, but if half of all their offspring were somehow seduced into becoming more fully functional members of society once they got old enough. So then you would have some subgroup of the population that the broader society basically uses as breeding stock. I have my doubts that this would work, though.

In general, centralized "command economy" style social engineering is a blunt tool that does not seem to have a good track record when used to try to address subtle issues. Social engineering is good at doing things like ethnically cleansing an unpopular social group and stealing their resources, or cracking down hard on crime, or mobilizing a society for total war, but it is not good at more subtle things like creating an efficient economy, and for somewhat similar reasons I'm not sure that it would be good at encouraging reproduction.

I think that significantly raising fertility rates without turning a society into a primitive shithole is a pretty tough problem.

But I'm not sure this explains things. For example, Western Europe in 1700 was a shithole. Birth rates were sky high. But by 1900, Western Europe very much wasn't a shithole.

So not did these high birth rates not cause shitholery, they reduced it!

Of course it's not so simple. When we look at what happened in Europe, we see massive downward mobility. Things got better because the rich had far more children than the poor for hundreds of years. And by 1914, the average working class soldier was writing literal poetry to their loved ones back home.

Now, of course, this process works in reverse, and our society grows ever courser.

One approach that might theoretically work is to maintain a culturally primitive but genetically relatively high-quality subgroup of society that the rest of society essentially farms for offspring. Imagine the Haredim in Israel, but if half of all their offspring were somehow seduced into becoming more fully functional members of society once they got old enough. So then you would have some subgroup of the population that the broader society basically uses as breeding stock. I have my doubts that this would work, though.

This could work and indeed has worked before. In the Roman Empire as in Medieval Europe, the cities suffered massive population loss due to poor fertility and disease. They were continuously replenished by immigrants from the countryside.

I mean, by 2024 standards, a lot of 1900 Western Europe was indeed a "shithole."

Maybe the rural parts. Major cities were already looking pretty nice, and with much lower crime and decay than today. Here's Berlin prior to WWI: https://youtube.com/watch?v=dZFulqdFgW0

And here are some letters from WWI soldiers, including enlisted men: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/letters-first-world-war-1915/

The average Western European in 1900 was far more literate than today. We're so obsessed with GDP that we don't see all the ways society has gotten worse.

1910-

In Germany, industrialization and urbanization went hand in hand, as individuals and entire families left the countryside and moved to cities in search of work. Living conditions were often miserable: working-class housing was dank, cramped, and overcrowded, with little fresh air or natural light. Entire families lived in narrow rooms without indoor plumbing. One such quarter on Berlin's Liegnitzer Straße is depicted here. The rent for this type of space would have consumed a large portion of a family’s income.

https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_image.cfm?image_id=1632

Literacy was great in germany and england and scandinavia, other places...not so much. I would think 99% of germans are literate now unless they have a learning disability. I understand your use to mean that they wrote with better vocab. But everyone can read still.

https://preview.redd.it/p8v0ewbb67u51.png?width=850&auto=webp&s=4176b957198c45f79a78ba7a3690c16473dcadf1

Industrial scale artificial births are the surest path to success, IMO. Orphans turn out alright, all things considered. Many of the problems with orphans are probably biologically rooted, their genes are probably closer to drug fiends than fantasy heroes. If you picked out good genes and ran a functional education system I think you'd get good results.

Even Mongolian TFR is declining from its peak of 3. I saw someone just today say that it had fallen 10% in the latest statistics.

https://x.com/Aaronal16/status/1830956670345978198

Alternately, maybe a cultural fix where parents get affirmative action in university and the workforce would stem the bleeding?

All of this will probably come too late to matter, since no major leaders are aggressive enough to make tough decisions. No country has stuck with a 'pick out good genes and run a functional education system' strategy for more than a few years even with regular people, let alone clones. South Korea is still mucking about with lame financial incentives.

I'd like to imagine that they are all secretly AGI-pilled. Realistically, it's probably eternal boomer syndrome: anything that takes more than 15 years to have serious effect will come after I'm retired. They can't blame me, it will be someone else's problem then!

Industrial scale artificial births are the surest path to success, IMO. Orphans turn out alright, all things considered. Many of the problems with orphans are probably biologically rooted, their genes are probably closer to drug fiends than fantasy heroes. If you picked out good genes and ran a functional education system I think you'd get good results.

I'm surprised that multiple people are suggesting this.

Orphans turn out alright, all things considered

Do they?

But even if you could create governmental institutions that could raise children from birth to 18 and create psychologically healthy people, the result seems catastrophic from a cultural perspective.

One of the core structural units of society is the family, whether that is the western mother-father-kids atomic option, or clans, or other arrangements I'm less familiar with. This is a pillar of every society ever. The differences between different family structures are defining features of different cultures.

It should be assumed that tinkering with family structure in any culture will lead to large outcomes. It's a very central node of society, messing around with it will have large effects. But you aren't just talking about tinkering with it, you're talking about eliminating it entirely. An entire layer of society and culture simply excised from the stack. Is it not obvious that that would have massive and unpredictable societal implications?

Lets say we build a system that can raise orphans successfully, and we artificially create a generation of highly optimized orphans that turn out psychologically healthy (which I question the viability of, but for the sake of argument) - imagine how that would change the political balance of power. Atomic family units as part of a larger network of families or in some places a full on clan, have a huge amount of sway in creating the political landscape. Your newly raised orphans will be completely devoid of any kind of familial association. They won't have any cultural heritage besides whatever is inculcated into the at the institution. No family history or values. Most children grow up to reflect their parents values and politics, well, not anymore, they don't have that.

This seems to totally remove a central break on the expansion of institutional power whether thats governmental or otherwise.

Whoever, or more realistically whatever, is in charge of raising the kids, will be a new cultural structure with enormous power. It will consume a huge chunk of the political power currently contained within family structures. Why would you want that? Who knows what it will look like?

I would have thought that reducing the atomization of humans in modernity was an obvious core goal held by most people raised in western nations in modernity, I have not really heard people argue that they are in favor of increased atomization. But it seems like that is what you are suggesting?. Do you consider the atomization of humans in modernity to be a good outcome? I mean that question sincerely, I think I may need to reconsider my assumptions.

Community has already disintegrated. Atomization has already happened.

I agree that replacing natural families with clones is a long shot. This would never happen in a functioning civilization. We are not a functioning civilization and thus we shall have to trade off wants for needs. I don't think the state should have such great powers. Nevertheless, all these things are wants, survival is a need.

You're talking about using a theoretical technology to prop up a civilization that is, by your description, not functioning. It is unlikely, but beyond that, not a good outcome.

Nevertheless, all these things are wants, survival is a need.

Then let the civilization collapse. If the civilization collapses, then we would return to the original ecosystem we evolved for, and the problem would be gone. If the requirement of maintaining our current high level of technology is raising children as orphans via institution, then wouldn't it preferable to abandon high technology and start over? What about high technology is so great as to be worth this trade off you offer.

I don't want civilization to collapse because I'm enjoying sanitation, electricity, digital technology, relative safety, fresh food from around the world via refrigerated supply lines.

I don't enjoy hard manual labour in fields, reading books by candle-light, starving as agriculture disintegrates (does anyone know how to do things with horses today) or getting massacred by gangs of looters.

And nor does anyone else. There are plenty of coercive things that the modern state can do, China has a history of interfering with reproduction.

Raising children en-mass != eliminating families.

There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement. You could even put them up for adoption, and while the demand for such isn't infinite, a good number of them would find their way into decent homes.

The alternative being discussed here is outright demographic collapse and the failure of technological civilization after all, while such methods of producing citizens might not be ideal, it beats a gerontocracy that can't support itself.

I suppose @RandomRanger and I would both agree that such measures are unlikely to be necessary if AGI shows up soon, with the automation of skilled and unskilled human labor table stakes, and then things like outright elimination of aging being on the agenda, at which point even very low TFRs become no big deal. (Leaving aside artificial families run by AI nannies and role models)

Still, I don't see this system as being worse than the alternative, and probably on par in terms of outcomes with situations like millions of children who are/were punted over to boarding schools for most of their lives and having disinterested parents. They do alright. The biggest issue with most orphans is the genes they've inherited, and we can fix that.

There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement. You could even put them up for adoption, and while the demand for such isn't infinite, a good number of them would find their way into decent homes.

I mean, we can already subsidize local fertility by importing migrants from areas with higher fertility. I don't think that replacement is a good thing. You're system would prevent that replacement and instead replace some amount of local family raised humans with institutionally raised humans. They will be more alien to me than foreign born humans, in so far as at least foreign born humans have a family.

There's no reason we can't have both, with people having children the old-fashioned way and then vat grown children to supplement the TFR to above replacement.

Having both is irrelevant. If the system gets off the ground you'll radically disrupt society to the point that it is unrecognizable. The lab grown kids will either be radically more effective than normal kids, in which case they will replace them. Or they'll be less effective than normal kids and fill the same role as replacing locals with immigrants, except instead of immigrants (who at least have the normal human background of being raised in a family are even more alien) you'll have the lower local caste replaced by clones with all the bizzare effects that would have. Bad outcomes either way.

Still, I don't see this system as being worse than the alternative, and probably on par in terms of outcomes with situations like millions of children who are/were punted over to boarding schools for most of their lives and having disinterested parents. They do alright. The biggest issue with most orphans is the genes they've inherited, and we can fix that.

How is this system better than total collapse? What does high technology offer that could possibly be worth replacing the family unit?

What does high technology offer that could possibly be worth replacing the family unit?

Do you have all day?

Honestly, this is not something I can expect someone who asks this kind of question to understand by being explained, not any more than you could explain to me why intelligent people adopt Christianity as adults in the year 2024. When you see the world not as an ineffable force of nature to cope with and accept, but as a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want, it is plainly obvious that such a system is, in fact, better than total collapse.

I do not like the "original ecosystem we evolved for", we could do better by changing both the ecosystem and the pressures by which we evolve to match it.

Do you have all day?

I have time. This is an asynchronous forum.

not any more than you could explain to me why intelligent people adopt Christianity as adults in the year 2024.

That sounds like a pretty interesting conversation to me, to be honest. We would disagree but we could still communicate I think.

I feel like that runs contrary to the purpose of this forum. Communication and argument across perspectives is what makes it interesting to be here.

When you see the world not as an ineffable force of nature to cope with and accept, but as a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want, it is plainly obvious that such a system is, in fact, better than total collapse.

For most of my life I had that standard nerd perspective that the world was improved by technology. It's only been experience that has lead me to question the upside of technology. Its only been experience that has lead me to the more conservative position that modernity is not so great.

I have nothing against attempting to manage nature as "a puzzle to mold into the optimal shape while attempting to keep as much of the original shape as you want" but in my experience that isn't what civilization has done. It has not made something optimal. There are some good things about advanced tech. Medicine maybe, and certainly space flight - the hope of creating extraterrestrial colonies still appeals to me deeply - but beyond that, is life for the individual improving due to technology?

I'm not a luddite. Technology is great. But if it is incompatible with human flourishing, I don't think I see the point. Replacing the standard system of humans being raised by parents seems to empower the technological system too much. Religion is, itself, a form of technology. If we have outrun our ability for our social technology to maintain a healthy social system due to rampant material technological growth, than perhaps we need a reset.

then things like outright elimination of aging being on the agenda, at which point even very low TFRs become no big deal.

Technically, no. Elimination of aging (and menopause) avoids the problem via drastically increasing TFR*, not by making very low TFR irrelevant. Even the Culture still needs a TFR of 1** to avoid dying out; it's just that 380 years of fertility make TFR 1 pretty easy.

*In particular, it moves female fertility from Mediocristan to Extremistan; even if only a small fraction of people decide to pop out four hundred babies, it has a rather-large effect.

**1 rather than slightly over 2, because all Culture citizens can bear children instead of slightly under half of them (they are sequential hermaphrodites).

Still, I don't see this system as being worse than the alternative, and probably on par in terms of outcomes with situations like millions of children who are/were punted over to boarding schools for most of their lives and having disinterested parents. They do alright. The biggest issue with most orphans is the genes they've inherited, and we can fix that.

In boarding schools, it's still the parents who choose the school and strongly influence what the child is taught and how it is raised. Before boarding school, the child was raised by the family or at least in very close proximity to the family. After boarding school, the child remains a member of the family. It's a looser form of familial organization, but it's still there. And even orphans ultimately grow up in a society founded and shaped by and still composed of and structured for the benefit of families. Having vat-grown humans as a large part or even the majority of a population will be fundamentally disruptive in unpredictable ways. I wouldn't discount @Crake's concerns so easily, even as I agree with your point that printing humans may be better than demographic collapse. Especially his point about the sheer degree of power invested the institutions that print and raise and educate those new and infinitely available humans. Take any concerns people might have about the faults of educational systems, propaganda or state control over society, and multiply by an arbitrarily large factor, and that's probably still not enough worry given the immensity of the monster that would be created there.

Counterpoint to the "status" argument- in Japan, being a mom/housewife is still considered a good, respectable job. Maybe not "high-status," but not low-status either, and it beats the hell out of working a terrible office job with insane hours. Young women there will unabashedly say "I want to become a housewife." But the birth rate there is still quite low, so apparently something is not working.

I wish I had a source for this, but I remember reading somewhere that the decline in birth rate is mostly coming from a decline in the teen birth rate. Women who wait until they've finished college and started a career to have kids are just not the sort of person to have large families. They'll have 1, 2 at most, and often zero. The younger they start, the more likely they are to have more kids. In part that's just biology (higher fertility), but also psychological, young people are a lot more likely to think "why not just do it" instead of agonizing over the decision for years.

My crazy idea would be to, essentially, abolish high school. Or at least, rework it to be very, very different. I think it's insane that we expect teenagers to learn calculus and biology as if they're all on track to become future scientists, while at the same time forcing them to follow the strict rules and low status of children. I would change it to be more of a "finishing school" experience, where they get taught how to live independantly, give them a job that's subsidized by the government so it's less brutal than most minimum-wage jobs, but still gives them some responsibility and spending money. Give them some freedom and independance from their parents. At that point they'll have time, money, and freedom to interact with the opposite sex, and things will just happen naturally. Then they can decide for themselves whether they want to continue "real school" by going to college, or just keep working and raising a family/dating.

One simple solution would be to make parents of young children Priority Candidates for all government jobs. In other words, to hire someone who doesn’t have at least one child under ten at home, you need to show there are no viable candidates who do.

The nice thing about this policy is that it could be sold to both left and right in different terms. For the left, it’d be about reducing the child-rearing associated with careers, and it pattern matches to affirmative action. For the right it’s about raising TFR.

The best thing about this is that I think it would encourage people to have children younger too. Very often climbing the early rungs of the ladder is more difficult because there are more viable candidates for any one position. You can imagine professional couples in their early or mid 20s saying things like “if we want a shot at the big leagues we should have kids before we’re 30.” And while this would only apply to government jobs in the first instance, soft pressure could be put on private employers to copy it.

give them a job that's subsidized by the government so it's less brutal than most minimum-wage jobs, but still gives them some responsibility and spending money

Subsidization is not necessary. I started working part time minimum wage jobs when I was 14, high schoolers are more than capable of handling minimum wage work. It’s not like they’ll be sent to the salt mines (for one thing, salt mining pays a lot more than minimum wage).

There's so many easy jobs for a site boy, which seems to be a completely vanished role now. I was doing "construction work" at 12, even though most of it was sweep, fetch, and carry with a bit of "show the kid how to do this" whenever there was a slow minute.
By the time I was 15 I had a reputation and was worth an adult's salary, which really helped out with the "girlfriends are fucking expensive" issue.

Come to think of it Obama's rules probably made that job very illegal. But if I'd knocked up my HSGF and not gone to college, I could have still made a decent living and been a highly paid specialist by 20.

It still exists, but it's filled by illegal immigrants getting paid scraps under the table.

Yeah, something like that sounds perfect! But it does illegal now, and even if it wasn't, I would have had no idea how to find a job like that as a 12 year old growing up in the upper-middle-class suburbs.

Contra @FlyingLionWithABook, I do think you'd have to subsidize and regulate it a bit though. The idea would be for everyone to get a job like that, or at least most people. Including the very below-average kids. I don't care whether they're actually "productive" at it though, the point would be to gently guide them into the workforce, sort of like how we have Kindergarten set up to get kids used to being at school without really testing them on anything. All of the part-time minimum wage jobs I had in high school were absolutely miserable, just forcing kids through the wringer doing the worst stuff with the expectation that we'd all quit before too long anyway. And some of the managers and older coworkers were downright sadistic about it.

I don't care whether they're actually "productive" at it though, the point would be to gently guide them into the workforce,

Actual employers and people who do productive work will violently hate and oppose this idea. Putting someone who needs constant supervision into a potentially dangerous workplace, or even one with a modicum of complication, is a massive burden that would require ruinous compensation. That super below-average kid who can't understand conditionals and violently assaults people for taking his nintendo switch away would be a net negative for any business saddled with his care. The very below-average kids aren't just unproductive, they're actively destructive in any kind of task that's worth doing. Even as a customer I don't actually want the super below-average forced into humiliating service positions they have no hope of ever performing adequately - hell, I don't want to have to see that as a human being.

The whole point of labor vs "education" is to let the useless fail out in a way schools don't allow (witness 95% graduation rates at schools with 0% math proficiency and 20% attendance).
Any top 60% teenager is going to be useful for something and quickly trainable to do a lot more. The 4th quintile is still usable in the right roles, and the faster the bottom quintile can be shuffled off to where they can't do any harm, the better. Could it be worse than letting them stab their teachers and fellow students for 19 years like we do now?

I already talked about my dad starting work early. He quickly got scouted by a (then) high tech company, who paid him to work 4 days a week and go to school for his engineering license requirements the other 3 days.

We have already had working systems for this in living memory. We're in that situation where we collectively forget how to do something and then come up with crazy explanations for why it must be impossible.

I don't have a problem with kids being able to take on some work or go get experience in the real world. Hell, I think that's a great idea - but the way that it is presented here has real problems and that's what I zeroed in on. Sure, your dad was a top performer and got scouted out super quick... but if he's super talented then he's by definition not part of the super below average cohort, who are the actual biggest problem with this proposal. Some people are just net negatives, and as someone who has been both an employer and an employee, I would violently detest whatever system decided to use my business as a daycare for some special needs kid whose interests are jacking off in public and physical violence. Of course, the other end of the bell curve has issues as well - if you discover the next Terence Tao, they should be studying advanced maths rather than cleaning out the deep fryer.

Ultimately I don't think the idea of having kids in school go out to join the workplace is a bad idea - I just think making it mandatory and forcing even the super-below average kids to go do humiliating jobs in service positions they can't even perform adequately is bad for everyone involved.

To be clear, I didn't mean kids who have severe mental issues- they probably belong in special-ed or juvenile detention. (but what will you do witih them after they turn 18....?) Just basic, normal kids who might sometimes misbehave or slack off a bit, but are perfectly capable of following simple directions. There's no reason to think they'd be any worse at doing most low wage jobs than the people currently doing them, other than lack of experience.

There's this weird wish among decent groups of all ideologies for basically tuning the clock back on actual advancement - whether it's my fellow lefties unhappy that America's a productive enough country we no longer can make cheap t-shirts here or conservatives upset the workforce is advanced that nobody would want to hire a 14 year old to do a manufacturing job.

It's actually a good thing for you to be a country where you're so advanced, 13 year old's are basically useless in the workforce! Sure, there are downsides, but there's a reason why the only places where there's massive amounts of low-productivity manufacturing work and cihld labor are some of the poorest places in the world.

13 year olds aren't meaningfully more useless than 18 year olds in many roles. Particularly when you are comparing an intelligent 13 y/o to a illiterate illegal 18 year old. What has happened is they've been regulated and credentialed out of competition. Plus once they are 16 or so, they are still being economically undercut by unregulate, illegal labor, meaning they can't get the entry level job that serves as a stepping stone to, for example, become a master carpenter. Thus the system pushes them into education because sheepskins is the only other way to get into those higher level jobs now.

I was going to say, a 13 year old can wash vegetables in the back of a grocery store as well as the 30 year old meth heads and illegals who do it now, and with fewer downsides.

Any with brains will be handling inventory and ordering in a year, once they learn the basics.

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You are literally replying to a thread about how that worked in practice.

Yes, it worked in a time when America was a less productive country doing lower quality work that was so less advanced an uneducated 13-year-old could pull it off.

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Sure, there are downsides

making the life of all teenagers completely pointless and utterly dependant on their parents for everything is one heck of a downside. It notably leads to a lot less people having children. Works OK as long as we can keep filling the gaps using immigrants to handle all the low-wage jobs, but we'll be in trouble if that source of cheap disposable labor ever goes away.

This is just an extension of the weird rationalist view that everybody hates school and it's pointless.

You bring the median American 13-year-old from 1924 to live the life of a median American 13-year-old in 2024 and they'd kill their own mother to stay in 2024, so it's not as if the previous generations loved working.

Plus, no, it'll mostly be technological advances. The reason why we don't need 13-year-olds to work at the factory anymore isn't Mexican's, it's that for there to be a cost-effective factory in the US, your workers actually need to be fairly intelligent and efficient, even without a college education.

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  1. Disable every ISP in the country. Eliminate Internet service everywhere. Overcome obstacles like VPNs and Starlink by imprisoning employees of companies that offer these services.

  2. Nationwide prohibition on abortion, contraceptives, and pornography.

  3. Institute a new government works administration, like something akin to the WPA or the Civilian Conservation Corps. Hire only young male citizens. Pay them at least the median nationwide individual income.

  4. Finance (3) by raising taxes on all businesses that employ more than 100 individuals. The marginal tax rate should be raised from 21 percent currently to 55 percent.

  5. Nationalize every large media corporation and film production studio. Replace the executives and the creatives with government employees. Task them with producing art in a Soviet realism chic. A cross between Fox News and the Hallmark channel should serve as a good template for how entertainment should be manufactured.

  6. Confiscate all foreign-owned financial and capital assets. Give them to domestic companies and individuals, or simply let the government manage them or liquidate them to reduce the national debt.

I predict that this would ruin the economy and the currency. It would transform the source of wealth from financialization back to manufacturing, and turn the country into a net producer and exporter. By necessity, more domestic manufacturing and government works jobs would raise the status of men and make them more appealing to women. The government’s authoritarian control over technology, entertainment, and family planning would also foment greater appeal for families and natalism. Poor people have more children, so the goal should be to impoverish the people while making the state strong and in control.

Perhaps it would simply be easier to nuke Moscow and let the chips fall where they may.

I've mentioned before that the solution is to get women to have sex with men they consider low status. If this was possible, peace in our time would be achievable and we'd have orbital elevators and be well on our way to harnessing the sun by now. (Alternatively, men lose the desire to achieve anything without women to compete for on a macro scale, we become happier unga bunga apes, but we never make it off this damn planet.)

The old adage "it takes a village to raise a child" is probably more true than anyone gives it credit for. It gives support, social structure, trusted neighbors you can safely leave the children with when mom and dad need some time to themselves, a whole network of mothers for advice and help, other parents who understand the difficulties, peers and other children that can help socialize the child and beat some unfortunate life lessons into it from an early age. Most importantly, a sense of community to belong to, draw help from, and contribute to in turn. Honor and shame cultures may differ in mechanisms, but there is a structure in place, with both benefits and disadvantages.

Churches are very good at building this kind of support network and social structure because it comes baked into the edifice. What we are seeing now is the extreme tail end result of the separation of church and state - the state would never allow any other alternative power structure to itself, and is worried about the ability of people to congregate, organize, and assemble in groups. Compounding this is the sharp increase in individual wealth, often at the expense of one's immediate environment.

Our current society is hyper-atomized, hyper-individualistic. Community values are alien to the modern professional working thirteen-hour days to make six figure salaries. Worse, as crime patterns shift and cultures clash and mix, the community becomes ever lower-trust and engaging with it confers no tangible benefits. Globalism lets the wealthy enough detach entirely from the community by moving anywhere with SWIFT access, so why would they invest in it other than guilt or a genuine sense of charity?

We can't reverse this: fix the society, fix the birth rate. If it were easy then burning it all down wouldn't look so attractive. Alternatively, take the wonk route and try to fix the men or women. Just try to keep attention away from all the stuff you fuck up along the way in your experiments.

But how to explain higher birth rates in places with low social trust like Nigeria? Or low birth rates in places like Spain, where many children have 4 grandparents doting over them exclusively.

I think you've identified many social ills but I think we can fix fertility without fixing them.

I've mentioned before that the solution is to get women to have sex with men they consider low status.

The status of men does seem to be key, as women are often dissatisfied with lower status partners.

I think status, at the societal level, is a chicken and egg problem. I'll use a sort of related historical example.

Through the 1960s and maybe 1970s, if a family had a son decide to become a priest, there was a good chance it would be met with esteem in the community. An honorable decision informed by faith seen as something to be respected if not quite emulated (after all, we want grandkids). Flash forward to today, and outside of religious sub-communities, it's probably looked at as an extreme personal journey decision. "Oh, wow, the Johnson boy went to the seminary." Community pillar? Not really. Invited to speak at the High School? Definitely not. Probably awkwardly danced around at supermarket aisle run-ins.

Why the change? This one's pretty obvious. Religiosity in America has declined precipitously since the 1960s/1970s. The society level value (and, therefore, status) has evaporated. It's not longer a "worthwhile'' decision.

Maternity is different because it's never (well, I hope) going to decline by 30-40% in one or two generations. Even in PMC circles today that make a lot of noise about not having children for environmental reasons, a public pregnancy announcement is always met with excitement (side note: if the pregnancy isn't announced publicly, there's a decent chance it isn't going to come to term for one reason or another. That's a different post). It's never going to be "oh, wow, really?" weird to be a mother.

That being the case, I'd gesture at trying to status boost a lot of maternity adjacent things - kids, first of all. But also "homemaking" pursuits, I suppose. I think the fundamental tension, however, is between women-in-relation-to-children and women-in-their-own-right. Is it possible to applaud a woman for her personal and professional accomplishments? Sure! But is this done at the expense of praise for family and maternal pursuits? The kneejerk reaction may be "No, of course not! We can praise a woman for being an accomplished scientist and a Mom!" ... but if you walk through the incentives in a hyper-individualistic society, it gets complicated and uncomfortable. As a quick example - I bet people know the best player on their favor sports team immediately, but can they name the official captains? (There's a bit of a hack in that, in a lot of cases, these individuals are one in the same, but the point still stands).

If you want to raise the status of a role that is fundamentally non-individualistic, you have to raise the status of communal accomplishment as a category in a society. I have no idea how to begin doing that in the west today.

It's never going to be "oh, wow, really?" weird to be a mother.

Not to be a mother, no, but in many circles, it already is to be a mother of more than two or at most three children. Several friends of mine have expressed frustration at the extremely negative reaction they received—even from family members!—when they announced they were expecting child four or five. Most of these friends also have stories of being scolded by strangers at Costco for being so stupid or selfish to have so many kids. I’m not so fortunate as to have so many kids myself, but I’ve repeatedly witnessed a bizarre resentment from even generally pro-natal folks when discussing these families.

When society looks so completely askance at anyone who has more than two kids, is it any wonder that we can’t keep the birth rate above replacement?

Thanks for this, it's a useful demonstration of revealed preference and attitudes in folks who will vocalize their support for "families" while demonstrating their true feelings later on.

Most of these friends also have stories of being scolded by strangers at Costco for being so stupid or selfish to have so many kids.

These strangers are monstrous and evil.

Yeah, what you described with the priest is clearly a vicious cycle. As the status of the priesthood goes down, fewer high status people become priests, making the priesthood even lower value, etc...

I think we've got the same thing with mothers, but in reverse. The best and brightest women tend to delay motherhood. So, if someone gets married and has kids at age 24, we wonder if there's something weird with her.

There is some hope. Among the very rich, having many children is a powerful status symbol, signalling as it does the wealth necessary to hire nannies and not need to work. But that's pretty hard to fake and far out of reach of the normies.

Sadly, a healthy amount of scorn for "cat ladies" and "wine aunts" may do what positive reinforcement cannot.

Yes but no but yes.

The Vance "cat ladies" comment was harshly received even by some of the most MAGA women in my social circle. My read is that it was seen as a general attack on women as opposed to the specific subcategory of women Vance meant to target. And this weaponized ambiguity will persist until women themselves decide to status boost / value re-orient. Again, I don't see how this happens without the equivalent of a modern day Women's Temperance League popping up. You can imagine what the popular response would be to that.

--- (EDIT) ---

Your comment also made me consider an interesting non-obvious culprit - teen pregnancy. Through the 80s and 90s, there was a major push to reduce teen pregnancy. This was a good idea as the correlation between teen motherhood and poor outcomes for the kids was pretty ironclad. I worry that that's extended in age range to the mid 20s.

As an intellectual exercise, how many women who do a typical four year college after high school are pregnant within 12 months of graduating? If you take out the selective sampling from explicitly Christian colleges, i'd wager that number rounds to zero.

Contrast this with one of my own grandmothers who dropped out of a state school after marrying my grandpa so that they could jumpstart the family. This was not at all seen as a mistake, but as a fortunate shortcut to her ultimate goal.

Pregnant = always good isn't quite the message you want to send for a lot of reasons, but planned pregnant at any age = always good might be.

I think a male near-equivalent of what Vance said about childless cat ladies would be if Walz literally said "the Republican party is run by a bunch of incels". Many Republican supporters would be fuming, maybe even more than about the whole "basket of deplorables" thing. People tend to get touchy when their reproductive success is criticized, or near-criticized.

People tend to get touchy when their reproductive success is criticized, or near-criticized.

They sure do. And men who publicly get touchy are simply labeled as "DOUBLE incel!"

"the Republican party is run by a bunch of incels".

Hasn't this been the messaging ("they're weird") of Harris-Walz since the convention? Funny how cleanly it maps to "When they do it, it's outrageous and wrong, when we do it, we're merely spittin' facts."

Well personally, I think it's the same thing no matter which side does it.

Seeing Musk get called an "incel" was certainly one of the "weirdest" things I've seen, considering we're talking about a guy who has had 11 12 children with 3 women.

Words versus symbols, right?

More-babies-than-rockets Musk can be called an incel because he's weird, nerd techy (instead of cool San Francisco VC techy), dresses sort of schlubby sometimes, and dances weird (Wow, that clip is truly painful).

Just as there's nothing particularly feline centric about "cat ladies." Instead, it's about symboling signalling a harsh, unattractive, bitter woman who is not only repulsive to men but unfriendly with other women.

Incel is another evolutionary branch of nice guy or neckbeard. Cat lady is the descendant of marm, spinster, and witch.

The central thing about male inceldom is failure with women. Calling Musk an incel isn't a correct application of a literally-incorrect label, it's just plain ludicrous, and no amount of both-sidesing will change that.

For me personally I imbibed the “pregnancy will ruin your life” message as a teen and wasn’t receptive to any counter programming for decades.

If your parents aren’t planting the seeds to make you desire a family, then the messaging you pick up elsewhere will dominate, and it’s almost all of the “pregnancy is a disaster” variety.

The post-college PMC corollary to this is _over_planning pregnancy. I've seen a number of friends over the past near decade have their first child, and the lead up to the pregnancy is this bizarre strategy consulting inspired plan. "As soon as (usually husband) makes VP, we'll move to (nice suburb) and (wife) will start to manage her work commitments so she can mostly operate from home. In Q2, we'll begin trying to conceive in earnest." It's hard not to see a eugenics-lite mindset. A pregnancy / child is another "project" on the PMC-life-success-progress meter.

Fortunately, a lot of this thinking evaporates once the child actually shows up and the parents find out how much they love being parents. If child number 2 comes along, the entire tenor changes. "(wife) is pregnant again. Hoping for a (girl/boy) this time." It's anec-data, but I've had a number of interesting conversations, especially with PMC fathers, that can be summarized as "If I knew how much more fulfilling fatherhood was than anything else, I would've started having kids way earlier." Anti-natal messaging really is one of the worst social biohazards of recent memory.

On the other side of the coin, those couples who just don't want to have kids for whatever reason have equally as intricate defense strategies ready to go for dinner parties. "Oh, well, with (husband or wife's) current case load, the time commitment is untenable, and (wife or husband) is also really taking on more responsibility at (something like FAANG or McKinsey). It's just a bad time right now, but we'll reassess next year maybe." It's the casual double speak of an overly refined PMC. I wouldn't mind if the response was as simple as "Yeah, we don't want kids." The "rational" defensive script comes across a somehow more insidious and spiteful. It's like a cover story for a double agent.

The Vance "cat ladies" comment was harshly received even by some of the most MAGA women in my social circle.

It's not a great way to win an election, and it's also cruel. But it cuts deep because it's true.

We do a disservice to our young people when we hide the facts of life from them. Many of us will die alone and unloved because of decisions of expediency made when we were young. Parents should teach their children about how to build a full life for themselves, starting with having children of their own.

When I was 10-13, I was not at all interested in the opposite sex, but was positively disposed to the idea of having children. That changed quietly at some point between 13 and 16, as preserved in that novel I wrote at the time where I suddenly questioned halfway through if the blatant self-insert character functionally parenting a couple of space-orphans was really compatible with my sense of identity. It could have been that abstinence-only presentation they put all the 8th-graders through, but I somehow doubt. I'd been surrounded by overpopulation memes forever; I'm really not sure what changed. Maybe the realization that I didn't have a community or social life or any fondness for the increasingly alienating environment around me? Some hormone balance suddenly shifting? Increased self-doubt? The realization that I was not sufficiently attracted to real people for reproduction to be remotely reallistic anyway?

I could go on. Lots of weird teenage crap that could tie into the rapid vibe-shift on the subject. At some point, all of that stuff went from a believable fantasy to something to fear, dread, or dislike. I like to think I was more reflective than average at the time, but clearly not enough to catch the transformation as it was happening.

I'd argue it wasn't so much propaganda as getting older and having a more realistic view of what raising kids actually look like. There's a reason why for instance, a series about a bunch of kids raising themselves in a boxcar was a YA series aimed at basically older elementary school, because as you get any older, even an average intelligence 13 year old starts thinking of some issues and plot holes.

Also, depending on the family the responsibilities you may have at 15 with a baby in the household, whether it's a younger sibling or a visiting cousin are probably different and closer to reality than you would've had at 9.

"Parents should teach their children about how to build a full life for themselves, starting with having children of their own."

You assume the parents think their children have had a positive effect on their lives, or more importantly, telling your kids at 18 to pop out some babies will overwrite the previous 18 years of complaining they've heard about the cost of raising them or getting in the way of their own lives, and so on.

You assume the parents think their children have had a positive effect on their lives.

I don't think that's an assumption.

, or more importantly, telling your kids at 18 to pop out some babies will overwrite the previous 18 years of complaining they've heard about the cost of raising them or getting in the way of their own lives, and so on.

Absolutely, end the schizophrenic messaging around children.

Upvoted four million times.

People often opt for short term emotional self-soothing even if that has led to worse and worse long term outcomes for them. The universe isn't cruel, it's ambivalent.

Why don't we just give parents a direct financial claim on a portion of their children's income? Obviously there will be some details that need to be ironed out (maybe this portion goes to the state when one's parents die, to prevent perverse dynamics), but this seems straightforwardly incentive-aligned.

It seems almost too obvious. Do any countries anywhere do anything like this, surely this is a cultural custom somewhere?

I don't think this approach would work on a broader scale at all. If you have the kind of happy family and upbringing where there children would do this themselves without the law, you don't need it to be mandatory. On the other hand, if a child would actually need the forceful hand of the state to make them support their parents, there's a decent chance they won't be able to really support them - and if they could, there's a decent chance that they would refuse to for reasons that could be entirely legitimate. A child being forced to pay a portion of their income to the father that raped them or the mother who prostituted them for drugs would, in my opinion, be justified in refusing to work if it meant that they would be supporting those people. At the same time, it isn't like sharp and serious political disagreements between parents and children don't happen either.

I wouldn't be surprised if this had a net negative effect on fertility.

The debt would come due when the adult children were thinking of starting a family of their own. That's completely different from the traditional situation of helping one's elderly parents for free while living in their house, or them moving into their grown children's house and helping with the grandkids. The better and more together parents would probably just give the money back, but there would be deadweight loss from it passing through government accounting. Plenty of parents are still helping their grown children out a bit now and then into their 30s, voluntarily. The ones to keep it would probably be toe worst quality parents overall, or their well off kids would offer to help them voluntarily.

In China the state can punish you for failing to take adequate care of your elderly parents.

Interesting, say more?

These are called filial responsibility laws, and they also exist in America. An interesting effortpost could be made by someone investigating the extent to which they are enforced here - something Wikipedia is kind of vague about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws?wprov=sfla1

Siphoning off children's income is too slow. Parents should be able to be able to take out massive loans using their young children as collateral. The debt gets passed on to the children if it isn't paid off. Would you rather be born into debt, or not be born at all?

Sounds like a quick way to create a generation willing to put the people in charge who say they're in debt the moment they're born around the nearest lamppost the moment they have the ability to do so.

the people in charge who say they're in debt the moment they're born

In the U.S., taxpayers are already each born into $269k of debt, yet there isn’t any popular sentiment to lynch old people, welfare recipients, or the politicians who arranged this.

This seems like a roundabout way to do things. Why involve the state at all?

One proposed reason for the fall in fertility is that people no longer think of children as an asset. When they get old, the state will take care of them. Of course, this is misguided and wrong and they will regret it when they're 80, but probably some people think that way.

But my kids will take care of me (I hope) because they love me, not because the state forces them to give me half their paycheck.

The dirty little secret was this basically failed in the US - rates of severe endemic poverty among old people were massive even pre-Depression, which is what led to support for Social Security in the first place. It turns out a lot of people either just don't care about their parents or are barely surviving on their own, that another mouth to feed may tip the scales.

So, yes, we have a less connected society, but severe endemic poverty among retirees basically doesn't exist and now there's a massive class of consumers who didn't exist. Win-win for the social democrats and the capitalists.

rates of severe endemic poverty among old people were massive even pre-Depression, which is what led to support for Social Security in the first place

I wonder how much of this is genuine econometrics/history, how much was and is pure political posturing (either to drum up support for programs like SS or to maintain that general zeitgeist), and how much is just "actually, basically everyone was just poor back then". Looking at figures like this, I lean toward "everyone was just poor back then". James T Patterson wrote:

If one applied the standards of 1977 (or even of 1937) to Hunter’s time [1900], only a very small percentage of Americans would be defined as living above the poverty line.

with some numbers that are in various year real dollars, comparing how different 'standards' for poverty have changed significantly over time. Were old people poor back then? Almost certainly; everyone was poor back then. It's the absolutely phenomenal success of American capitalism that has made us just absurdly wealthy in comparison that has been the major change. It's extremely difficult to 1) actually break out detailed age-based numbers in that era and tell a significant story about what did/didn't "work" in the context of universal poverty, and 2) have any sense for whether something "working/not working" in the context of universal poverty says much about a world where we have literally 10x more wealth.

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