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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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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

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