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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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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).