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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28507 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Adding to the interminable hand-wringing conversation in these parts around the “fertility crisis” and what to do about it, I’ll submit an interesting Substack piece I stumbled upon today. The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.” That no amount of cajoling, cultural/media propaganda, government-provided financial incentives, etc. will prevent an intelligent and perceptive woman from noticing this basic fact about biology and doing whatever is in her power to limit her risk of being forced to do something that she’s going to hate.

Now, certainly this author is far from the first woman to make this case, nor even its most effective advocate. However, her piece resonated with me simply because it closely mirrors statements that have been made to me by multiple women in my life whom I respect and value. One of them is my younger sister, who has said explicitly and in no uncertain terms that she will not be having children. She has even discussed with my (aghast and befuddled) mother the possibility of undergoing a tubal ligation (“getting her tubes tied”) in her early thirties to prevent any further concern about the possibility of becoming pregnant. My sister is in a happy cohabiting relationship with an intelligent, well-paid, all-around great guy; her concerns have nothing to do with the fear of being an abandoned single mother, or of being poor and struggling, or anything like that. She just recognizes that having a child would represent a considerable and arguably permanent deduction in her quality of life. It would substantially decrease her freedom to travel, to make decisions without intensive planning around childcare and child-rearing costs, etc.

Our brother has three daughters, ages four, two, and infant. I love them to pieces and am extremely grateful to have them in my life. I envy my brother, and my desire to have children of my own gnaws at me daily. However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare. He is very fortunate to still live in the same city as both our own father and his wife’s mother, which provides access to free childcare; I cannot imagine how much more constrained his life would be if he and his wife had to pay for childcare every single time he had to leave the children unattended. Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children. His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror. I am so happy for my brother that he gets to experience fatherhood (and again, I fervently hope to experience it myself in the future) but I admit that it has negatively impacted my relationship with him in a number of important ways. And my sister sees that - and sees how even more constrained our sister-in-law’s life has become - and has, understandably, said, “No thanks, I’ll pass.”

At least his children are healthy and his wife seemingly content and well-adjusted, though. My very good friends - well, formerly my very good friends - had a far worse experience. I’ve known these two since high school; we were inseparable friends for over a decade, both before and after the two of them got married. My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age. (My brother and I would, sheepishly and in secret, occasionally sing a certain Stephen Lynch song and he would smugly crow about how much better-looking his own newborn daughter was than theirs.) Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives. The experience of childbearing was so taxing and so confoundingly disappointing for them - and for her especially - that she has recently undergone a hysterectomy. They moved to a different state years ago, just before having that child, and my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation. It was so damaging for them, and I guarantee if she could go back in time and undo the whole thing she would. Hell, I hope she would. Surely many women are profoundly and justifiably terrified by the possibility that something like this could happen to them.

I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them. And once we admit to ourselves that white and East Asian women are probably never again going to organically desire large families, we can then focus on reducing fertility in the third world, since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.

I'm quite whitepilled on this particular issue. In no particular order,

-This is definitely a cultural evolution issue. It will sort itself out, and not by 'replacement by the Amish' - high TFR subcultures will emerge from every group, and the ones that are also highly functional (eg, not the Amish/Hasidics/islamists) will dominate. You need to be isolated, limited in total population and insular to commit cultural suicide via celibacy and our culture is none of those. This is actually nothing to be too excited about, low TFR is a much less pressing problem than Malthusian collapse and I'm not eager to jump back on that heading.

-I'm very much not afraid of the developing world. I'm afraid for them, but probably their TFR drops fast enough that populations level out before coming to a very unpleasant head. Immigration is somewhat more complicated, but I think it is likewise self-correcting: pretty soon developing countries are going to have less surplus people and start seeing foreign poaching of their most able young people as the beggar-thy-neighbor strategy that it is. As usual this will be mostly bad for the people in developing countries (exit restrictions are bad) instead of us.

-There's definitely an element of 'making babies is extremely hard for women' that is understandable and understated. This can be broken down into 'pregnancy and childbirth suck', 'children are hard' - both are solvable!

Artificial wombs could exist quickly if there was political will for their development. Lacking them, the state could subsidize surrogacy (or outright fund it themselves), while building infrastructure for and normalizing same. Nations have experimented with communal child rearing (orphanages, kibbutzim) and the outcomes tend to be worse than nuclear families, but this seems solvable too. I'm especially bullish on AI taking a big role in this regard - even if a cold machine can never show a mother's love (#doubt), it can definitely take a big role in the baseline supervision role that parents spend a huge chunk of their time on, and be better at it too. (eg - kids at the park are much safer with an AI drone keeping ceaseless watch on them than with a parent glancing up from their phone every five minutes) Then you can focus on getting humans to provide the active nurturing - the actual fun part of parenting!

-Maybe this leads to us becoming very different that we currently are - more hedonistic, even less in touch with nature (eg: meat comes from the store), less responsible for the powerless in our care. But the same is true for every technology to some degree - suffering builds character, but we're still pretty happy about eradicating polio. Future humans aren't going to be shackled to my values, whether I like it or not, and this doesn't seem like an unreasonably dystopian outcome, especially compared to the other likely options.

-TFR is cratering just as longevity technology seems to be taking off. This is a happy coincidence!

-technological singularity more generally obviating any problem that only really gets bad 20/50/100 years from now

Well, it turns out the kid has pretty severe autism. She’s now four years old and can barely speak. She’ll likely never know more than a handful of words. She’ll need lifelong intensive care and support, which will consume the rest of their lives.

I might never quite understand why it isn't commonly agreed upon that euthanasia should be acceptable in such cases, and that there should be no fear or shame in it. Instead we must have suffering, suffering, and more suffering, without purpose. It makes me angry.

This is one of those situations where it is probably best to have a Chesterton's fence that is as strict as possible because there are no real limiting principles to say when to stop extending Euthanasia to people, even when it becomes a major negative.

That said, it wouldn't surprise me if a more advanced alien race observed us and said "Wait, rather than throwing all your spare resources into fixing conditions that deprive humans of quality of life, you're just keeping nonsentient humans alive indefinitely while ignoring the problem that caused it? Why aren't you killing off the resource drains and working frantically to save billions of future lives from their fate?"

To make my point clear, I would be much more inclined to accept 'widespread' Euthanasia policies on the basis of preventing suffering and wasting resources IF ALL OF THE RESOURCES THAT WERE PURPORTEDLY SAVED WERE BEING DEVOTED TO TRYING TO SOLVE THE UNDERLYING PROBLEM.

That is, if severe autism is so bad that someone wouldn't want to live with it, then we should be aggressively pursuing an actual means of preventing, avoiding, or even 'curing' the condition! Same with so many other things.

Instead, it comes across like we're basically trying to off people for purely for our own convenience, not giving a care about all those potential future lives that might end up with the same fate.

This is one of those things where my real life observations don't match up with what everyone is saying online.

My wife is pregnant with our third kid. I live in a single family home neighborhood but the bus stop right outside my house has about three dozen kids spread over 5 busses. (For some reason the neighborhood is split between two school districts for elementary and middle school).

Over the five years I've been in the neighborhood I've made friends with many other parents that have young children. Most of them just two kids. But quite a few with more than two, including two families with five kids.

My older brother has three kids. My younger sister only has one, but that kid is less than a year old and she has spoken about having three.

I had Bryan Caplan as a professor in college when he was collecting information and anecdotes for his "have more kids" book. I met his kids when they were young, because Caplan was willing to invite people to his house for a big Caplacon board gaming event.

My wife's cousin's are all having kids, the ones that aren't are having trouble conceiving, not choosing to abstain. My cousin's are mostly not old enough to be married, but the few that are only one of the three married ones is choosing to not have kids.

Most of my older coworkers have kids. Most of my wife's older coworkers ha e kids.

Basically my life is filled with being around families with kids.

I know its possible to be in a social bubble, but in so many other ways I straddle social bubbles. Of all the people I've described their living situation ranges from dense urban to no one within miles rural. Their political views are all over the map, all types of conservatives, liberals, and libertarians.

It takes me a while to come upon the problem. Its a problem of margins. Each family with kids is slightly smaller than they used to be. And there are slightly more people not having kids. And it's fully possible that most of these changes are happening with people outside of my large social bubble.

So I have no real intuition on why fertility rates are a problem. My wife and I like having kids. I find them generally less restrictive on my social life than a pet. In fact most of my social life is because I have kids. I meet new dads at the park and the pool where my kids play. There is a wine tasting I'm going to tomorrow with a bunch of neighborhood parents at the neighborhood pool.

Yah childbirth is objectively not a fun time. My wife is a geriatric pregnancy and the first trimester has been filled with her not feeling good. Mostly she jokes with other moms about how they seemingly totally forget the annoying parts of child birth. She has maintained a career through it all, and has more of an active job than I do.

I think there is a general neuroticism in the population that makes them worry too much about things. A lot of people kind of freak out about parenthood. My inside take is that it's not that hard and not that big of a deal. If you are placed into a situation you tend to figure things out. But if you spend all your time freaking out about the thing and avoiding it then yah you'll prove yourself right and not be able to do it.

It takes me a while to come upon the problem. Its a problem of margins. Each family with kids is slightly smaller than they used to be. And there are slightly more people not having kids. And it's fully possible that most of these changes are happening with people outside of my large social bubble.

I think it's probably happening everywhere, people just don't realise it. The fertility rates outside of east Asia generally aren't catastrophic, just mildly below replacement. I'd imagine that a large factor is that people are aiming for two kids, which in itself isn't sustainable but when you combine that with some people not being able to have kids and delayed adulthood/parenthood (due to various reasons) and some just get to it too late and end up with just one kid, then you end up with a fertility rate drifting slowly downward while at the same time everyone feels like they're having kids, and having a "normal" amount, but on aggregate they aren't. The goal for the average family needs to be 3+ not 2, otherwise there are less than no margins.

Nevertheless, we see him more rarely, and get less quality time with him, than we would if he didn’t have children.

my relationship with them has cratered, partially because the stress of the experience and the extreme impact on their lives made them so stressed-out and insular. It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays?

You under-estimate how lopsided this is from the other side. Sure your brother loves you and would like to spend more time with you, but the tragic loss of extended adolescence, and 'hanging out' with friends and family is a drop in the ocean of purpose and life direction for parents.

The problem I have with these kinds of observations, and those made by childless women is that parents have experienced both worlds, but the childless haven't seen the other side yet. This used to be solved with social obligation, because the other side is scary. But its a transformative way of being that's not fully modellable on the front side.

I have very good friends who do not have kids, who I very much enjoy seeing when I can. Of course the time I spend with them and the overall depth of our friendship had diminished. In a world without time scarcity, sure I'd love to see them more. But in this world, I'm sorry, it's a rounding error. The time I do go out of the way to see them is mostly for them. It's not for me.

You're not a fish, so you don't notice the water you're not swimming in. Once again, that water is community, and that community gives you values.

When Shakespeare says "there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so", he is echoing everyone from the Stoics to the Buddha.

Your sister says that without kids gets she gets to travel, but with kids she'd be stuck at home with a family, and that's sad.. In every non-WEIRD culture, they would say that if she has kids she gets to spend time with a family, and without kids she'd just be some sad woman alone on an airplane.

You say that now that your brother has kids, he's isolated because he has to bring his family everywhere. In a culture where having families and having families young is the norm, your (many) brothers would say that you've isolated yourself from them by being the one weird childless uncle.

Your niece runs around needing adult attention. In the culture of merely fifty years ago, she would be playing with all the other kids, and told not to bother the adult's table. We don't even have kids tables anymore, because we don't have enough kids to fill one.

We're having less kids, because thinking made it so in the last ten years. The values of the childless replaced the values of the family, and the things childless people do are now seen as valuable instead of childish.

We can dismiss the motivated reasoning of the feminists (childcare is hard) and the incels (women are only going out with six foot three billionaires), because childcare and dating were just as hard in the old days of 2015. We can dismiss the locally-based ones (US abortion laws, Korean hagwons, European economic stagnation), because the entire world minus sub-Saharan Africa suddenly had a huge fertility drop between 2015 and now.

So let's ask that question: Why 2015, and why not SSA? To quote Jonathan Haidt, "It's the phones, stupid".

2015 is when social media on phones came out, and they couldn't afford smartphones with front-facing cameras in SSA.

I think it's almost impossible for a forum full of autistic men to understand just how mimetic young women are. Young women naturally connect, imitate and seek acceptance from each other. Social media amplifies this normal mammalian instinct to an unimaginable level. Every action taken by a socially-deprived young woman is motivated by one thing: "will it look good on Instagram". Young women don't actually want to "travel" to Machu Eiffel, they just want to have pictures taken there.

I keep running across articles about how hard modern motherhood is, and how high the expectations are. They're not about how the kids turn out though, because who cares about that. They're about mom influencers. Every article is the same - modern motherhood is hard because it's impossible to look presentable while having kids. Kids won't stand still for pictures. It's hard to keep a house artfully messy, let alone keep a house clean. Instagram mom influencers are harming your mental health.

It's not the childcare or the average man's wages or anything so pedestrian. The popularity of momfluencers shows that motherhood is still incredibly aspirational. All the celebrities flaunt their enormous families, nannies just a couple pixels out of frame.

It's Instagram. Having kids and an Insta-perfect life is impossible, and Instagram is reality so Instagram wins.

This sounds like a just so story. Have you observed it? The 30 year old women of my acquaintance who seem like maybe they should be settling down but are instead running 5ks, climbing mountains, and drinking fancy cocktails do not necessarily have strong Instagram presences. Also, engagements, marriages, babies, and cute little kids get a lot of positive attention on social media. More than anything other than running social media as an actual business. The mom influencers are generally pro-natal -- they make having children look more aesthetic than it really is.

I don't buy into this story that social media is to blame for the drop in fertility. (In the US, most of the dip happened before the 21st century.)

But I will say that I've seen a tendency for moms I know to almost "brag" about how tough their kid is to take care of, and to make things more difficult for themselves than it needs to be.

In the hospital, they made us watch some educational videos after my first daughter was born. There was a video called something like "Don't Shake the Baby" where the real thesis of the video is that it's okay to ignore the baby for a bit. If she's being annoying and you need a break, put her somewhere safe and then walk away for a few minutes. She'll be fine. But walking away is something new mothers struggle with.

Now don't get me wrong - kids are tough. It takes a ton of work to make one. But it's the pregnancy, the birth (oof), and those first months where you have to wake up multiple times during the night to feed them that are the tough part. Beyond that, the difficulty should be about on par with taking care of a dog. And if it's a lot tougher, you have to give yourself permission to put in less effort. The kids will be fine.

Yeah, I could see that.

I will say that mothers of infants have a bunch of hormones going off, oriented towards getting them to treat a crying baby as an emergency. Breastfeeding mothers, especially, won't necessarily benefit from putting the baby off, they get dripping hurting breasts, a baby who's flailing around in all directions, and general mayhem. Many babies like to cluster feed, and will cry until they get to, and it's awful. Baby #3 is getting 6 oz formula a day during evening cluster feed before bed time (out of ~24 oz total), and it is making a noticeable improvement in quality of life.

Currently the three week old is lying on the floor crying about tummy time while I'm commenting here. Various articles suggest that I could "play" with him, or lay next to him and cheer him on. But I don't want to do that, and attempts to try with his older sister suggest that the crying lasts about as long either way. He would probably not even exist if I really thought following all the interactive suggestions from various articles was mandatory.

On the other hand, I have found our older child legitimately very difficult as a baby and toddler, for reasons that seem to come down to energy level. She was born in a one room apartment without an enclosed yard or playground within walking distance. I do have some sympathy for why many people would prefer not to do that, because it was kind of terrible. If she got woken up in the evening, she would proceed to scream for the next two hours, and nothing we could do would stop her. My husband had to take care of her for several months, and she would refuse a bottle, then proceed to scream at him for hours about how he didn't have any milky breasts. She learned to speak at 2, and has been chattering nonstop ever since. Now she's 5, we have an expansive yard with different whole areas in it, and I have a lot of sympathy for the kind of parent that locks their kid out of the house for outside play time.

I have no intention of ever owning the kind of high strung dog that wants to be taken for walks twice a day and keeps jumping the fence. We don't have a dog, actually, because they're too much effort, in some ways more than children. At least if we go on a trip we can take the children with us, and if they step on thorns we can tell them to wear shoes. The children would like a dog, but we don't have anyone to look after it if we're away, and we are away at least several weeks a year.

Well that all sounds immensely fun. No honestly, I mostly think it’s important to know what you’re getting yourself in for. But maybe it’s best not to know. Reading that does not make me want to have children, even though I very much do. I think that’s the thing, if everyone has children and it’s inevitable and it just happens after you get married (which you do between 19 and 23 because everyone does) and then you get pregnant and then you have to deal with it and suffer through it and then it’s fine then you just do it. If you have to think about it, like I’m doing now, then you doubt.

I realize this is an old comment- I make a point of reading comments under AAQC's from the past month- but observed reality is that women familiar with the reality of taking care of a baby/infant are more likely to have kids.

Baby and small child problems might not be a very productive line of conversation.

The current status quo of everyone having quite effective birth control all the time is probably not a good idea. I was newly married and on contraceptive pills that I didn't manage to renew quite on time when first baby was conceived. Maybe subconsciously I wasn't trying very hard to keep on top of the birth control, but was still surprised, because it was only for a couple of days and I was past 30. The other two children I had to go to a doctor and remove an implant, so more intentional (and I was clearly not put off having more children), and then I was pregnant two months later. If I were more conscientious, I would probably have waited another couple of years and only ended up with only two, confirming society is probably selecting for not very conscientious mothers who conceive quickly.

Pregnancy is really really hard on my wife. My wife does not have diabetes. But she does while pregnant.

Also it turns out pregnancy permanently increases many women's foot sizes. My wife can't wear her old shoes. A coworker complained about the same problem.

Anyways. No more kids for us. We made the right choice starting a family. But it is much physically easier on me than on her.

My wife can't wear her old shoes.

Am I the asshole for thinking this isn't that big of a problem?

No. But she is not pleased about that. Also my old coworker unhappy that all her old shoes don't fit.

The diabetes and other health complications were the real physical issues here. The shoes thing was an unpleasant surprise.

My sister likewise has no intention of having kids. She just recently got to the other side of 40, so I'm extremely certain it's a permanent decision.

And indeed she moved to England years ago, has a great job in the arts, married to a great guy. Loves to travel as well.

(I feel like for women, if you don't have a great career, have a family. Men have to have a good career to have a family, otoh.)

Men have to have a good career to have a family, otoh.

Oh, definitely not. There are all kinds of men who don't have good careers - some don't even have jobs - who still have families. And I don't mean they fathered kids they abandoned, I mean that they are actually around as part of the family.

Forgive me for being a monday-morning quarterback here.

His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare.

Can his... wife not watch the kids? There's this insane sickness among parents where it's impossible for one of them to go out and do something without bringing everyone else along. It's not difficult for an experienced parent to handle all their kids while their spouse grabs a couple drinks with friends after dinner, but everyone acts like it's splitting the atom.

His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror.

Every kid and parent is different yadda yadda yadda, but I can't imagine tolerating this. My oldest is perfectly happy to be a chatterbox and be passed around to multiple adults for conversations, but at the end of the day if he needs to chill and listen he will. I suppose I've seen this problem more so with girls but.. jeez.

I don't think it even has to be this hard. If your kids are trained to crash in a pack-n-play at a house party and get to sleep even if a movie is on downstairs, your life gets so much easier. People seem so obsessed with making shit difficult.

Can his... wife not watch the kids? There's this insane sickness among parents where it's impossible for one of them to go out and do something without bringing everyone else along.

Or get a friend / relative to help?

My brother's wife has an event coming up and I was "roped into" helping for that evening. IOW my brother sent me a message "Are you free on X? I could use some help with the kids." to which I naturally replied "Sure, I'll come". This does mean I have to cut a hobby a whopping half an hour shorter... The horror!

Obviously having kids will limit the kinds of things you can do but it's far from a social death sentence.

I'm reminded of an observation I made a long time ago when I noticed quite a few people were using pairing up (without any kids even) as an unvoiced excuse to start hanging at home and stop going out or seeing friends and where any social event would suddenly require weeks of planning in advance. Having even minor responsibilities at home just became a convenient excuse and alternative to having to actually go out and spend any effort at having a social life.

Exactly. I kicked off a babysitting co-op in my neighborhood for exactly this reason. I can read a book or watch a movie at a friend's house while they go out on a late-night date. The kids are in bed by 7:30 anyway.

I noticed quite a few people were using pairing up (without any kids even) as an unvoiced excuse to start hanging at home and stop going out or seeing friends

I've seen this too. Thankfully, most of the people who use this tack don't complain about being lonely but... many do. I visited my midwestern friends recently and tried to connect them with one another (identical hobbies, great fits) to no avail. Some people just like being homebodies I guess.

I can't imagine tolerating this

I have revised downward my priors for your having had children.

Edit: Missed the part where you mention "My oldest". I have now revised substantially upward.

I do recognize my kids are "above average" good. My wife has been bred from a line of rule followers (the 4yo freaking cleans his room sometimes) so maybe I'm being a little unrealistic.

I suspect as they get older, though, I'm going to have to deal with a surge of rebellion and disobedience. We'll see!

Every kid and parent is different yadda yadda yadda, but I can't imagine tolerating this. My oldest is perfectly happy to be a chatterbox and be passed around to multiple adults for conversations, but at the end of the day if he needs to chill and listen he will. I suppose I've seen this problem more so with girls but.. jeez.

Four year old girl, she probably does do this- and it's entirely because the adults around her accommodate it. Another four year old would solve it- so would a stern auntie who makes her gambol around her skirt(or otherwise interact in a non-distracting manner) while she has an adult conversation.

I'm reminded of this bit Bill Burr used to do before he got married, that he felt he'd just been single too long. He'd just habituated to not taking other people's feelings into consideration. He's been married for ages now, and has two kids, so it's a very old bit. Either from his first or second special I think, when he did a lot more comedy at women's expense.

He was also a lot funnier. Alas.

When I had my own child, I was reminded of someone saying that when you have a child, it's like your heart is now outside your body, and it's terrifying. I felt that immediately. The change from non-parent to parent was more profound than anything else in my life. Graduating college, losing my virginity, getting married, buying a house, the death of my father.

But I wonder if, not unlike Bill Burr who wondered if he'd just become too habituated to ignoring other's feelings, women become too habituated to being the center of attention in their relationships and can't give it up. Because while having a child was the most profound change in my life, it was a subtle change. My life went from trying primarily to take care of my wife, to primarily trying to take care of my daughter with my wife being a close second. For my wife, it went from being the center of attention, even her own, to having to give that all up for an infant.

I say women, because they overwhelmingly are the center of attention in relationships. Virtually every piece of relationship oriented media puts the man in the role of pleasing the woman. Ever step foot in a relationship counselors office and it's much the same. They will tell you to your face that it is their professional opinion that your needs don't matter and you need to sack up and meet your woman's needs if you want to "save" the relationship.

It's a good gig if you can get it, and in a world where Women are Wonderful, it's obvious why they wouldn't give it up for as long as possible, even if that turns out to be too long.

it is their ... opinion that your needs don't matter

It is my opinion that if you ever find yourself telling someone this, you should take a long look in the mirror (assuming that you show up in one).

Thing is, nobody ever gets fired or cancelled or arrested for coming to the defense of a woman, be she deserving or not.

Whereas getting the reputation as the person who thinks women should sacrifice for men sometimes, even if they don't want to, will get you some sidelong glances at best, and fired, cancelled, and possibly arrested at worst.

The change from non-parent to parent was more profound than anything else in my life. Graduating college, losing my virginity, getting married, buying a house, the death of my father.

I think the closest thing is puberty.

As a man, or a boy perhaps, puberty feels like it doesn't count until you finally get laid.

Random question, but are you female? I've noticed that women tend to give a far, far higher signifigance to puberty than men. For most men it's just a few years of aching from growth spurts, getting made fun of when your voice cracks, and constant no reason (and yes reason) boners.

What @5434a said - I'm not talking about the physical changes. I'm talking about a total mental shift on how one sees, e.g., the opposite sex, one's place in the world, all kinds of new feelings and motivations.

You probably don't think "oh wow nothing will ever be the same" in the same way you might after singular discrete events, but nothing will ever. Post puberty you will never be seen the way you were before, and you will never see the world the way you did before, and the change is physically evident and inconcealable in a way that those other changes aren't. Whether we assign it significance or not is moot.

When I met my girlfriend in college, she told me in no uncertain terms that she never wanted to have biological children -- but she might consider adoption. Her reasoning was that she was deathly afraid of pregnancy, and never wanted to go through it.

Of course, I was a 20 year old guy, I didn't know what I wanted, and I certainly wasn't thinking about having children at the time. So I just kind of shrugged.

Oh, how times change.

It was gradual, but I do think she hit 24 or something like that and immediately developed an irresistable urge to bear children. Whenever we go to a store and we happen to walk by the baby clothes, she can't help herself but wander over to them and point out the cutest ones, and then look at me with those puppy dog eyes that look suspiciously like fuck-me eyes. She tells me frequently that I'm going to have to put a baby in her soon. And our theoretical children who haven't even been theoretically conceived yet already have names: first, middle, and last.

(We both independently had the same idea for our son's name long before we met each other, she liked the name so much that in high school she named her dog with it. So my heir is going to have the name of my girlfriend's literal dog. "You were named after the goodest dog I ever knew.")

When I bring up that she once disavowed the idea of ever bearing a child, she says just exactly what everyone here is saying: not only her mother but her mother's mother's mother's mother did it, some of them several times, and if they could do it under social and medical conditions much worse than we have now, she can do it too. But also she just really wants a child, and she wants them to be her own.

I do wonder if what's happening is that Pope Francis had a rare moment of being unfathomly based and some women are redirecting all of their maternal instincts and desires towards animals, leading to the "Dog mom" effect.

No, Susan, your corgi is not your son, and you're doing a disservice to both yourself and your dog if you treat them like a member of a species that they're not. I'm especially satisfied with this claim because the author of the original post describes herself by saying her favorite things are her "fam & pets", because heaven forbid her human companions get more letters to describe them than the animals who don't understand a damn word she's ever said to them.

But also, my interpretation of the past hundred years of human history is that disagreeable women (I'm using this not as a term of abuse but purely descriptively, to describe women low in OCEAN-trait-agreeableness), who for various personality-based reasons are much less likely to find satisfaction and enjoyment from caring for children, have taken the reins of what describes womanhood and shifted it massively in their favor. The Wikipedia article for trait Agreeableness literally has as its illustration a painting of a woman with her daughter entitled "Agreeable Burden," and I find this so unbelievably apropos that I'm afraid I'm on a hidden-camera show.

The author of the original piece has another post where she describes her belief that "masculinity is real, but femininity is invented" -- this is a sure indication to me that this is a disagreeable woman, someone who doesn't statistically "fit" in her sex, which averages higher than men in agreeableness. I believe women like the original poster commit the typical mind fallacy, and believe that because they are a woman with the personality they have, that women who naturally do have a strong inclination towards sacrificing for others and putting the needs of their children first are simply disagreeable women being suppressed by The Patriarchy. It's sort of like the Western conception that people all across the world are simply liberals being repressed.

I mean, we really absolutely hate that we have to be feminine for you, and you guys just don’t understand this. You think that’s just the awful feminists. The cunty man-haters. It’s why you want a nice trad wife who just LOOOVES being feminine. Guess what? She doesn’t. It’s all bullshit. No woman likes it. She’s just putting more chips on betting she can get more out of you, faster, with less effort.

The above is an actual quotation from that other post, and I edited it in after the fact. Frankly, I'm not convinced this woman isn't an actual psychopath, with that kind of deranged and zero-sum take. And why would I listen to what a psychopath has to say about companionship or self-sacrifice?

Sorry, Kate, but you haven't met my mom, and you probably wouldn't like her if you did. But she's the greatest and most wonderful human being of either sex I've ever known, and I respect her a great deal, because she always respects and considers the needs of others. I frequently tell her that she's the best mother in the world, and I mean that literally. If anyone deserves a "Medal of Honor" for motherhood it's her, and it's precisely because she'd never ask for one that she deserves it. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

Only the fittest will survive the coming population decline, and we can only hope that people (either male or female) so disagreeable and self-oriented that they'd begin their post on childbearing with a Barbie-movie meme that insinuates parents waiting for their children to get out of school are chumps, won't make it. Blessed are the agreeable, for they shall inherit the earth.

I didn't intend this to be a personal attack, but I believe it's more fruitful to describe these things in terms of personality differences than to make it about the cost-benefit analysis of childbearing, and the more I dug into this author the more intensely I realized how utterly spot-on all of my asssumptions about her personality were. If your children are the result of a cost-benefit analysis to you, then you shouldn't have them, and I wish people like Kate well in their free choice -- I mean that.

It was gradual, but I do think she hit 24 or something like that and immediately developed an irresistable urge to bear children.

I experienced something similar. I mean, it's got to be mostly just changing circumstances and life experience, but more than once I've wondered if there's something biological going on. Some process that adds a second baby-making instinct just in case the first one from puberty wasn't enough.

I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children. And rather than bending over backwards and tying itself into knots to figure out how to psyop them out of this perfectly understandable risk-benefit calculation, perhaps a healthy 21st-century society just needs to put all of its eggs into the basket of figuring out how to have a successful low-TFR civilization. Whether that’s robots, or AI, or artificial wombs, I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.

Or, you know, we can just admit that this whole feminism thing is not working out and go back to what worked for the past 5,000 years.

All empirical evidence is that letting women control their own reproductive choices is literally suicidal on a civilizational level.

Late response, but...

The world's cultures are massively heterogenous at any specific point in time, and 5000 years of unprecedentedly rapid social change only increases the heterogenity. What "worked" for the past 5000 years wasn't any fixed culture, but a massive variety of intermeshed cultural niches developing in both cyclical and progressive ways. Even trying to reason from some sort of hypothetical majority culture is fallacious. Some adaptations become useful precisely because they're in a minority. Raiding farmers from horseback stops working if you kill all the farmers, but that doesn't mean you should become a farmer yourself.

...what worked for the past 5,000 years.

Worked for whom?

I think a lot of women would dispute that it worked for them!

(But the soul is still oracular; amid the market’s din

List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within

They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.)

(“It’s not a ‘compromise with sin’, per se, just denying the humanity of half the world.”)

(…)

(“Okay, fine, whatever, maybe it’s kind of a compromise with sin.”)

Do the current norms work better for women than the previous ones? (I'd be quite interested if there's any way to measure, but I doubt it.)

Anyway, Unsong and The Present Crisis are both fantastic.

From "The Pragmatics of Patriotism" by Robert A. Heinlein:

Since survival is the sine qua non, I now define "moral behavior" as "behavior that tends toward survival." I won't argue with philosophers or theologians who choose to use the word "moral" to mean something else, but I do not think anyone can define "behavior that tends toward extinction" as being "moral" without stretching the word "moral" all out of shape.

Or, as @HlynkaCG put it:

You claim that extinction is the morally correct choice. But that's absurd because morality is a property of consciousness and an extinct breed has no morals, correct or otherwise.

The only morality is civilization.

Then Heinlein has defined morality wrong. Indeed, if morality was the same as survival then there is no need for the separate word, and yet we incessantly find the need to define it separately.

The men from his example who tried and failed to save the woman from the train certainly acted in a noble way. "We will remember them", he writes, yet the act would have been no lesser if they were forgotten in an instant. Morality does not belong to a breed, it is individual, and as momentous as consciousness is. A civilization does not exist if there is no one to see it; clearly the value of civilization is in the people. A civilization, or a breed more generally, that keeps its constitutients in the negatives (inasfar as they are conscious and are able to perceive negatives), is nothing more than an egregoric parasite.

Any individual can see in an instant the difference between value and survival when he is struck by locked-in syndrome; so it is for civilizations.

I value the comforts of modern society too much. No chance of going back, no matter how many captured raid slaves you throw at me.

The jump in fertility from 1950-1970, and that jump being higher relative to the cratering of urban fertility before feminism became a viable political movement, appears to me to be relatively solid evidence otherwise.

TFR goes up when the status and wealth of the young, particularly young men, increases relative to that of the old. When that is not true, the carrying capacity of society, reflected by TFR, goes down. Perhaps a TFR of 2.0 represents power between young and old being balanced (though it's possible for that link to break through things like war or mass immigration), that a TFR below that means the old have too much, and that a positive TFR will inevitably end as the young grow older and balance is restored.

One issue that’s lurking in the background of your post is that most parents in the West massively overindex on the marginal impact of parenting, largely due to major misconceptions about the relative contributions of genes versus environment. The best act you can ever do for your kids is picking a high quality spouse to have them with. As for parenting time… did you know that contrary to the public handwringing about kids growing up zombified by TV and YouTube, parents in the West today spend roughly twice as much time with their kids as parents did 50 years ago?

While you can definitely fuck your kids up, there’s minimal difference on children’s outcomes between good and great parenting (though there’s a caveat here I’ll come to in a second). This is the whole thrust of Bryan Caplan’s book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids and I agree with his big picture.

I honestly think most kids today are horribly overparented, mostly to the detriment of their parents’ free time, but also a little to the kids’ detriment insofar as they don’t acquire autonomy and self-confidence as easily. I have lots of friends whose lives have been transformed by having kids in ways that don’t seem very fun. They live by a rigid schedule of violin practice, swimming lessons, reading hour, and so on, and they don’t have any spontaneity. My wife and I by contrast are lazy as fuck parents. Our kids learned early on that “mum and dad have their own lives and priorities” and they should too. Obviously we cook for them and clean for them and have fun family days out, as well as lots of nice spontaneous family time, but my average day isn’t drastically different from how it used to be before the kids arrived. Other parents are often amazed at how much free time we seem to have and honestly a big part of it is because when my wife and I are watching a movie we just tell the kids to buzz off and go for a bike ride or read a book.

To go back to my point about overindexing on impacts of parenting, I think the real problem is that people are over indexing on the wrong thing, long-term childhood outcomes, with empirically dubious motivation. Instead life is much better if you prioritise “how can my spouse and I and the kids have a fun chill time.” Of course that assumes you’re a competent adult whose idea of a fun time isn’t shooting up fentanyl or getting blackout drunk every night but with that proviso I think it’s a good parenting mantra. And I also think if people could learn to just relax about parenting rather than treating it like another demanding job then that would help at least slightly boost TFR.

Furthermore, if you structure things right, having your kids go to various activities isn't much of a bother and can often even be a break for you as a parent. Key here is that the activities need to actually fit kids, are group activities, and are close to home/school.

Damn, dude.

I always really liked your posts. Their relative infrequency also made me pretty stoked when I saw a new one. "Oh, shit, Hoffmeister just dropped a new track!"

For a long while, you actually owned the GOAT'ed (quantitavely by upvtoes) Motte post.

I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.

But this just doesn't make any sense. Like, srsly bro, whutt?

It's more than anec-data, it's close to a human universal that women (and men, but whatever) tend to go "holy shit, my life changed after I have kids and I won't trade them for the world." It's kind of like, I don't know, wired into us as a species or something.

The thought-piece articles by largely PMC mothers who openly opine about "being better off" if they didn't have kids is exactly the backwards anti-social and hyperindividualistic status games that some of the threads you alluded to were trying to deal with. The women complaining about counterfactuals aren't at all representative of the species or society. Furthermore, they're being incredibly arrogant in their thinking; do they truly believe they're the first women in history to go, "Oh, shit, kids are kind of a big commitment, maybe I should think this through?" It's deeply embedded in the language; going through childbirth can be "traumatizing" - this assumes you make it through childbirth. Up until the 20th century all over the world (continuing in much of it today) pregnant women were aware that they might not make it out of delivery alive. The very assumption that "post childbirth life" could be "worse" is actually a verbal demonstration of how much better and easier than it ever has been to be a mother.

Aside from that, there are real difficulties in raising children that are specific to current society that ought to be address. I agree on the childcare hassle points - a lot of the proposed solutions had to do with massive tax incentives for childbearing couples so that we can bring back a one income household.

Delaying childbirth past 30 is, unfortunately, kind of a risky move even with modern medicine. Again, lots of solutions had to do with incentivizing earlier family formation and having children (side benefit for the dudes out there: being married and cohabitating with wife and children does great things in terms of your "likeliness to get arrested" quotient).

The deeper question that your posts raises by implication, however, is around the costs of childbirth outweighing its benefits on some sort of happiness rubric. Your brother can't hang out with the boys as much - ok, does 10 more years of football and beer really mean a whole lot? Women can't travel and pursue their careers if they have children - do instagram photos in Amalfi and being promoted to associate director of spreadsheets really actualize your inner Girlboss? If life's mission is happiness (side note: I don't think it is) then it stands to reason people should try to find the deepest and most durable source of happiness possible. Wouldn't you know it, for most folks that's close interpersonal relationships, specifically; their family.

The diabolic sleight of hand of modernist pseudo-philosophy was that "following your bliss" and maximizing personal happiness was some sort of self-evident Permanent Truth and Totally Right. Besides being wrong on a moral level, it's wrong in its own terms! The things you think are going to make you happy don't and the one's that really do have been the cornerstones of society forever.

I always really liked your posts. Their relative infrequency also made me pretty stoked when I saw a new one. "Oh, shit, Hoffmeister just dropped a new track!"

Sorry if you think I fell off.

For a long while, you actually owned the GOAT'ed (quantitavely by upvtoes) Motte post.

Is this genuinely true? I had no idea. Do you remember what the post was about?

Women can't travel and pursue their careers if they have children - do instagram photos in Amalfi and being promoted to associate director of spreadsheets really actualize your inner Girlboss?

There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally. As for your question about careers: You are, I hope, aware that there are some (presumably large) number of women who do actually have fulfilling, important jobs which give them a sense of purpose and self-actualization? Sure, there are plenty of women in bullshit jobs - and plenty of men, myself included! - but the idea that every woman, or even the lion’s share of women would be more fulfilled by motherhood than by a career… that seems like the real “typical mind fallacy” here.

I think I’m just starting to return to my primordial wariness and contrarianism about “what human beings are hard-wired to be like” because of the recent and unrelenting discussion in online right-wing spaces about how “within every man there is an innate and burning desire to conquer, to struggle, to do great violence and to hear the lamentation of the enemy’s women”. I get told that my life is meaningless and empty and degenerate - that I’m a bugman - because I would rather attend classical music concerts than get my arm hacked off in a muddy field, or get blown to smithereens by an artillery strike. And that this should just be instinctively obvious to me as a human man, and that there’s something broken and mutated within me if it’s not. Dealing with that has made me quite a bit more sympathetic to the plight of a woman who is similarly atypical or who dreams of transcending the often unimaginable suffering endured by humans living under traditional models of society.

I think there’s a huge amount to glean from the past, and I recognize the value of respecting time-honored understandings of humanity. I also recognize, though, the extent to which so much of life under those traditions was simply a matter of making the best of the things we had no power to affect or change. But what happens when we do gain that power? When agency can be effectively applied to reducing suffering? Surely nobody here would voluntarily refuse anesthesia during surgery simply because “suffering inculcates virtue” and “sometimes the hard thing needs to be done.” When humans have the opportunity to reduce pain and inconvenience, we eagerly do so, and that’s a great thing! It’s one of the things that elevates us above the beasts, who are mere slaves to their evolutionary programming. And if - I get that this is a very big if - we can figure out a way to carry on the species without subjecting women to the horrors that this author points to, then I think we need to be open to exploring ways to do so.

Yes, it's now the second highest (Trace's Gerard piece beat it out). On asshole filters.

You can see all the comments, and sort as you please, at themotte.org/comments.

Me looking at my magnum opus and immediately noticing multiple typos and a naked link: 😭

There is a lot more to be gained from travel than just an album of Instagram thirst trap photos. I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally.

I genuinely don't understand this and I've tried to. Maybe it's just innate human variability and some people are like me and incapable of 'getting it'. I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing so I may just be weird. But I just don't understand what I'm supposed to find compelling about going to some place that I could already get the gist of in picture. I feel invariably like either a burdensome tourist or a mark for scams whenever I travel. Events or meeting specific people I understand. But I can't shake the feeling that events and meeting people would be strictly better if they came to me without the travel element.

Enh, I consider travel to be the great equalizer.

When you travel somewhere with an alien language, culture, and customs, and you are forced to engage with that culture on its own terms, your world expands. You learn about your preconceptions and biases, you get to challenge your worldview in a way that brooks no defense because you are literally in it. You could do the same at home, of course, or through a picture, but the layers of abstraction and distance that prevent you from doing so act as defense mechanisms.

There's nothing like it. I recommend everyone do it at least once, to spend an extended amount of time where you don't speak the language. Suddenly what is taken for granted falls away, and it's like rediscovering communication from first principles. What are the critical things, the meaningful things? What is helpful and useful, what is not? What is good - and not just good because I deem it so - what does this culture value, and how did they arrive at that belief?

Whether it is compelling or not is not a factor. You may even hate where you go, an experience I've had in several journeys. But it has left me with a greater appreciation for many things around me and an understanding that we were never going to be ready for the destabilizing effect of near-instantaneous global information transmission. It doesn't take a genius to value clean drinking water, but you will not quite look at it the same way as someone who's worn a stillsuit.

There's nothing like it. I recommend everyone do it at least once, to spend an extended amount of time where you don't speak the language. Suddenly what is taken for granted falls away, and it's like rediscovering communication from first principles. What are the critical things, the meaningful things? What is helpful and useful, what is not? What is good - and not just good because I deem it so - what does this culture value, and how did they arrive at that belief?

This just isn't my experience with travel, but I also haven't had the opportunity to live somewhere totally foreign for extended periods of time. Unless you have some cause, like a job or exchange program, this just kind of isn't practical. What is practical are a week or two of being a tourist which I have zero interest in and also what people are actually talking about when they say they love travel.

I don't quite get your complaint - you're saying you don't get the point of tourism and then you limit the definition of tourism to one that you personally don't agree with. It's entirely practical to spend a week or even a couple of days being immersed in a foreign culture. There are many ways to get immersed in an alien culture, many of which don't depend on any extended period of time, and best of all, they vary widely in price depending on how much you like yourself.

The point of tourism is to be a tourist. If you don't do any touring, then you're essentially paying a premium to fly in the sky and live in a serviced apartment. Granted, I enjoy traveling alone and not having to make allowances for anyone else, but I consider that part of the experience maintenance or work. Many people do indeed pay a premium to fly in the sky and live in a serviced apartment, but spending a tour with that sort of person for any length of time would give me allergic reactions.

I also feel this way about most poetry and a dancing

Maybe you're low in Big 5 trait Openness, though I think that's unusual among people who spend their free time on free speech message boards. Apparently they've found two aspects that aren't entirely dependent -- aesthetics and intellect, so maybe you're pretty low on the aesthetics side. Or you just haven't traveled to places that are right for you?

Tomorrow we might try taking the kids to a mountain, a ruin, and a lava field. My whole family gets depressed and angry if we stay near home for too many days in a row.

My understanding is that I'm quite open in that sense. I'm really open to the idea that there is some there there which I'm not getting. But poetry for instance. Mostly it's trying to express views I already basically understand into compressed formats. Cool, I appreciate it in the way I appreciate that certain picture formats take up less space on my hard drive. Instrumentally useful and when communicating very large ideas I will make use of its techniques. I even find some poetry useful as short hand. But I've never really been moved by poetry. Although I often struggle to even define what poetry is.

I'm not hugely into poetry, but my impression from the poetry I do like is that it's more like tuneless song, and that in the ancient world it was often chanted or intoned, and also used to aid memory. I really enjoy Byzantine and Arabic liturgical forms, for instance, traditionally chanted in 8 tones on a rotating schedule. There's an akathist tea I hope to be able to rejoin sometime, where women get together, publicly read an akathist in a circle, and then all have lovely aesthetic tea cakes with pretty cups and loose flowers steeping in glass teapots. Among somewhat modern poets, my favorite is TS Eliot, mostly because the words just sound so good, but even he has to be read aloud. Fundamentally, I think that poetry is more or less liturgical, rather than trying to express views in compressed formats -- it's meant for public ceremonies, and even things like preforming Shakespeare are more that than they are just hearing a story. My favorite Shakespeare class consisted almost entirely of just reading plays about King Henry around the room and then sitting there and letting the sound of the words sink in.

I’ve found travel to be one of the most enriching experiences of my life, personally.

I was pointing to the memetic desire of travel. A lot of women "like" travel because they think it is the right thing to like. A lot of men "like" sports for similar reasons (or any of a host of other domains, for both men and women).

You are, I hope, aware that there are some (presumably large) number of women who do actually have fulfilling, important jobs which give them a sense of purpose and self-actualization?

Here's the thing - No! I am not. That's kind of the point of a lot of these threads. It's the entire point of this Last Psychiatrist post.

Women (again, and Men) may self-report that their job is fulfilling and important. The argument I'm making is that this largely a cope. Most jobs do, in fact, suck. People do these shitty jobs because of the meaning they find elsewhere. That could be a "mission" oriented meaning (i.e. being a public defender because they believe in helping those who cannot afford an attorney etc.). It could be a means-to-and-end motivation (i.e I'll work the midnight shift at McDonalds because I think it'll show initiative and maybe lead to a path to manager). Or, most commonly, family motivation (Homer, from the Simpsons, has a famous episode wherein the camera pans over his desk at the power plant to reveal a photo of Maggie, his daughter, captioned with "do it for her.")

The point is that it is extremely unlikely for either men or women to truly believe that their primary job gives them a superabundance of transcendental meaning. A job can be part of that sense of meaning but there's usually something else.

Family is a really good "something else" for reasons I covered in my initial response. It's a really good something else for both men and women. Gee, wouldn't it be fantastic if there was a way for men and women to start a family and then agree upon a positive sum system for raising that family? That's what these threads are arguing for - that what makes people truly happy is very different from what current ideologies say makes people happy and the downstream negative impacts on society are kind of a big deal (to wit; declining fertility rates).

Dealing with that has made me quite a bit more sympathetic to the plight of a woman who is similarly atypical or who dreams of transcending the often unimaginable suffering endured by humans

Childbirth can be dangerous and is always painful. But calling it "unimaginable suffering" or a "horror" seems to be hyperbole to me. Hyperbole caused by motivated reasoning, is my suspicion.

It’s one of the things that elevates us above the beasts, who are mere slaves to their evolutionary programming.

I think I meet you half way on this one.

Evolutionary programming is literally a set of skills that has resulted in evolutionary success. I am very happy that I am a slave to "fire is hot don't touch it" evolutionary programming. I am very happy that I am a slave to "I can run upright for long periods of time because I am a low body-hair bipedal" even though that means I will never, ever, ever bench what a juvenile chimp can. The gift of human insight and introspection is wonderful for humans and a large part of societal organization is used to control unruly evolutionary programming, but that doesn't make or evolutionary programming or instincts fundamentally wrong. If you follow that slippery slope long enough, you get to gender / sex abolition and all of its accompanying WTF-ery.

And if - I get that this is a very big if - we can figure out a way to carry on the species without subjecting women to the horrors that this author points to

If we designate childbirth as a "horror" for all of society, we are committing ourselves to eventual species level slow suicide. Sure, sure, "artificial wombs" and Magic Technology Stuff will save us. It won't. Society is social and ideas matter.

The revealed preferences of everything eventually goes to hedonistic thinking. That’s how we get people who’d rather get welfare than a job, obesity, partying, overspending, and so on. I think society as a whole quite often needs to enforce cultural norms and values that counteract the tendency to choose the hedonistic option or the one that requires the least sacrifice. The revealed preference of most men is not to work dirty and dangerous jobs. They do so if necessary because society will deem an able bodied man with no job as a loser. Even things that are liked by men who don’t want to work gets stigmatized heavily. The same thing should be in play for women in this instance. A woman who doesn’t want children is a loser as much as a man sitting home playing COD instead of going to work. And I’d say the same of obesity. Shaming people who overeat and don’t exercise is a good thing. Shaming kids who would rather play than study is good as well. Shaming and shunning enforces social norms against various forms of hedonism. Within limits, hedonism is okay, but it’s still much better for everyone if people are shamed for not doing their duties.

Putting aside the weird "save the white and Asian race from dominance by the scary blacks and browns" at the end, I think here's the issue why the people in this thread aren't getting it.

There's the population of women.

There's the population of women that are OK w/ the pain of childbirth (or maybe they're lucky it's less painful for them) and the worries, because they enjoy being a mother that much more, and so on.

Then there's the population of women that thinks the pain is too much, doesn't want children, whatever.

It used to be the latter population was basically forced to be mothers, because that was their only option in society, outside of spinsterhood. Now, they don't, or maybe instead of having five by 27, they have one at 37.

Nobody among the latter group is saying the former group should stop having children. They just don't want to be forced (or "forced") to have more children by the state or society. Group B always existed in one form or another - they just never had a voice before, and if you're used to a society where all women either legitimately or have to act like they want to be mothers, it can sound fake or like some plot or whatever.

I wonder if we would see a difference between countries that were Catholic for longer periods of time, and the percentage of women who genuinely want kids.

I say this because Catholics are more likely than Protestants to encourage women to live in celibate communities, and this would give women in the second group a way to select out of the gene pool.

I think I saw somewhere that, in Europe, more Catholic countries have lower birthrates than more Protestant countries. Of course, they're all fairly godless now.

Convent membership has disastrously crashed. They're importing African nuns since approximately no Westerners want to join.

In decades past this could be a good measure. But not so much today or the past couples decades or so.

I mostly mean for the past few centuries, does it have impact now?

Now we have birth control and secular women who don't have kids, so it's a different bottleneck today.

TFR in southern Europe and Latin America is generally lower than comparable countries. Catholicism does seem to suppress single motherhood among whites even as it doesn’t do anything else in low doses, though, so maybe it’s just that?

I think the population of women who don’t want to have kids isn’t really all that big. It’s pretty small actually. The reason so many women are childless, according to survey data, is that they haven’t met the right partner. Unfortunately one side effect of feminism is that it makes a large number of men suddenly unappealing. Perhaps they were always unappealing partners on some level, but we are now seeing the rise of working-class childlessness, which seems especially bleak - no, you’re not avoiding sacrificing vacations and material wealth and leisure time. You never get any of those anyway. Life for you is a true slog and when you’re elderly you’re gonna feel truly destitute of meaning. Your underpaid secretary or pink collar job won’t give you any meaning or satisfaction whatsoever. Probably this is why we are seeing alcoholism skyrocket among women.

I think the population of women who don’t want to have kids isn’t really all that big.

It's certainly risen in the past few years, ideologically.

I think that’s more sour grapes than anything

Some of this is surely due to a decline in the quality of the average man, I suspect. 'Pass' is a valid selection and, say, a ghetto black woman opining that she can't find a suitable man to partner with is likely speaking the truth... and a truth which would not have been true in 1950.

And yet you don't see ghetto black women fighting over the passable black male with a fulltime job at McDonald's, you see them fighting over the edgy drug dealers and sexy fuckboys that eventually become their baby daddies.

I mean, there are no men available to them who aren’t in the bottom quintile. It’s perfectly reasonable to pass up a relationship if it has to be with someone in the bottom quintile. Being a criminals mistress, on the other hand, often comes with short term benefits.

To me this is a similar (and expected) style of thinking to "poverty finance"

Why do poor people buy lottery tickets or gamble when the expected return is zero? Consider the alternative; "saving" but with poverty levels of cash.

Say you are barely making ends meat but manage to come up with $10 a month which you dutifully deposit into some online broker account (leave aside that it might be difficult for you to open one of these accounts).

$10 / month for 20 years at an assumed 7% annual return (within the accepted range for the SP500)

You will have $5,209.27 in 20 years.

Yeah.

20 years of diligence to have enough for a down payment on a car? It takes quite a bit of delayed gratification and discipline to stick to it. So, instead, shoot for the moon! Lotto tickets, semi-legal gambling, or just hedonic indulgence.

If you're a woman sifting through bottom quintile men, perhaps you can convince yourself to stick it out with a guy who's only ever semi-employed and semi-sober in the hope that over the next 20 years you'll make it work and build a modest home?

Or, you say "fuck it" and fuck the local drug dealer so you can enjoy a certain "lifestyle" for a few months or a few years.

I've never accepted the idea that poor people are just "stupid." A lot of them make a host of bad decisions (often repeatedly) but they are operating in a different context. The average PMC household has the means to give each of their children a four year vacation masquerading as an "education." That creates a lot of different time preferences and relative value calculations than when you're bouncing checks to pay rent and put gas in the car. Asking the latter group to employ what is top 10% levels of focus, discipline, and self-denial is like admonishing a functional illiterate to "crack the books and study to pass the bar."

The same can be said for men who say “pass” (although it’s mostly women who are selectors), women of the working class are majority obese. The main reason a man wants to be with a woman is her physical attractiveness but so many women lack even a basic level due to diet. I have a couple working class male friends who have long term partners and by their 30s they’re honestly kind of shrek-like

This resonates with the way people I know actually seem to talk and think in a way the "status" conversation doesn't.

I have some friends who can't have a biological child because of health issues the wife is facing. They're otherwise parentally inclined, and have been fostering unrelated children the past several years, and this is a really sad thing for them. But not as sad as dying in childbirth or becoming permanently disabled, so they probably wouldn't prefer the world where the options were to join a convent or roll the dice.

Another friend from a while back didn't want children because she had a ton of mental and physical health problems in just about every member of her family, and that seemed reasonable to me. As far as I know she hasn't married, and might not. That's also sad, but then so is raising a child only for them to turn into a crazy homeless person or take up everyone else's entire life managing their psychosis.

It doesn't really help to inflate the misery of childbearing, though. Personally, I didn't mind being pregnant, and the worst part of babies was/is feeding them. Inconveniently, it's hard to know how things will go until trying, and bad results can really mess up a person's life.

Agree with others that having to entertain a 4 year old all the time is some combination of poor choices on the adults' part and an unfortunate consequence of being the only person there with a child around that age. Possibly with a side of talking a lot about incomprehensible far away things as a social default, vs cooking or hiking or something that makes sense to children. Not that I don't have sympathy for having to deal with constant interruptions, but it's not helpful to think of guiding children through learning social skills as "entertaining" them. I am constantly annoyed that I have a large, interesting yard, and my 5 year ld mostly just wants to talk to me about her virtual cupcakes or something. That is, unfortunately, largely my own fault though.

My buddy always talked about wanting a large family; his mother was one of nine siblings, and he dreamed of having a similarly-sized brood. However, his wife is small-framed, physically fragile, and somewhat sickly. It was always clear to me that she was not built for having lots of children. And, in fact, when they had their first child, it totally wrecked her, both physically and mentally. She was briefly hospitalized for postpartum depression. Probably a large part of that depression was due to the fact that her baby clearly had something wrong with it even from an early age.

That's very sad. Like the discussion on the Wellness Wednesday thread about dementia, some experiences are tragic, in a society that tries to ignore that kind of small everyday tragedy.

It also rendered them somewhat unrelatable to me; what could I possibly talk about with them nowadays? Their whole lives are about caring for this broken child, with whom I can’t even have a rudimentary conversation.

This part is probably unnecessary, though. I knew some teenage girls once, with a sister who had profound health challenges, which kept her homebound and in need of constant support. Because finding a home health aid was too difficult, the sisters had to learn to be nursing aids at a young age, and often missed school to care for her. Their father hated it, and moved to another state. Last I heard one of the girls had moved to her father's house. It was both very sad, and looked from the outside like some poor choices had been made, perhaps pressed upon people. We seem to be in a healthcare uncanny valley for some conditions, where people are kept alive at the expense of everyone around them when in previous generations they would have gotten a fever and died young, and maybe at some point in the future they could be cured. That's not an unmitigated good.

It's almost never a good idea for a family to let everything revolve around even a very miserable, sickly, disabled child. It's too bad she couldn't have more non autistic children, more going on in the household, maybe eventually they'll figure out how to not let their whole lives be ruled by caring for that child.

I don't know if the "fertility crisis" is a crisis or not. It's unsurprising that in a civilization with very little mandatory difficult and dangerous work, women would be opting out of having children as well. But for most, it's probably not for the best long term.

I just told my wife (2 kids and counting) about this article and her reaction was (roughly translated): "weird how many women have multiple". There is not much to add here; The only people having actual experience on the matter, i e. mothers, will happily choose to go through this allegedly grueling experience again. While people with zero experience, such as the childless author, will make these wild, outlandish claims. It should have been instructive for you that your mother, who knows exactly how bad pregnancy/childbirth is or isn't, was exasperated.

Indeed. My wife has a few childless friends, some are happy about it, some are not (one was explicitly flipped from the former to the latter by hanging out with my son). This "dangerous" part isn't really it. Its far more about the "doing stuff" bit. The ones who are happy about it are "scared" of not being able to jet off to Europe on a whim. The stats also say that most of these people live to regret their short term thinking in their 20s and 30s. Children are an investment. For most people the early pain ends up being paid back surprisingly quickly. Now, a small subsection of parents dislike their kids. I'd argue many of them dislike the kid because they dislike themselves and made a kid in their image.

I just told my wife (2 kids and counting) about this article and her reaction was (roughly translated): "weird how many women have multiple".

This seems like a good avenue of research if we take the notion of revealed preferences seriously. Among the population of mothers with 1 child and with the opportunity for a 2nd, how many of them go on to get a 2nd? Defining what that "opportunity for a 2nd" in an objective way would be basically impossible, since where to draw the line in terms of financial and other logistical constraints is highly subjective. But it'd still be interesting to see what the results would be depending on different places the line is drawn. If it turns out that some significant proportion of such mothers go on to have (or at least attempt) a 2nd child, then that would provide at least some support for the notion that, as a non-mother without first-hand experience, the author of the essay has an inaccurately severe view of the pain and suffering that childbirth involves for the mother.

There would be other explanations as well, of course, such as childbirth causing amnesia in the mother, or that the benefits of being a mother of 2 is so much greater than being a mother of 1 that the calculation is very different than from going from 0 to 1. Or that the women who give birth to 1 child are already filtered for women with lots of courage to go through with giving birth. But I think the explanation that someone who hasn't experienced giving birth is catastrophizing it in a way that isn't reflective of the actual experience of the women who have experienced it is a pretty simple one that ought to be given a lot of weight.

Among the population of mothers with 1 child and with the opportunity for a 2nd, how many of them go on to get a 2nd?

I'd add that's a very relevant question, because wherever pro-natalist policies exist, I think this is their main real goal.

The cost of childbirth is basically the same (source — my wife with whom I’ve had multiple kids).

The real difference is that there is a diminishing marginal cost to each kid. Your lifestyle changes going from 0-1. Not a big change going from 1-2. Even smaller change going 2-3, etc). Also you can spread financial costs amongst a larger family more easily.

So if child birthing costs are similar and post child birth costs are lower compared to first, provided you get the same benefit out of the next you’d be inclined to have another kid.

I don’t think my wife thinks this way (and no do the other moms of multiples that I know) so I think OP doesn’t know what she is talking about.

Even smaller change going 2-3, etc)

I'd argue the opposite is true. Do you happen to remember that child car seat study that was referenced here a couple of times? Also, your accommodation expenses double when you go on vacation with 3 kids instead of 2.

The car seat is real (we just switched to a three row SUV).

Yes vacations get a bit more expensive but there are a lot of other savings.

Car seats are annoying. We're going to have to get one without arm rests, doing the seatbelt buckles are just too frustrating.

It also is crazy how long kids need to be in car seats these days. I understand the NHTSA data. But it does add annoyance.

It depends a lot on your lifestyle. Plenty of early parents still cling to some vestiges of the childless lifestyle.

Among our acquaintances, it's not unusual to not even own a car anyway, or the other way around to already have a seven-seater. Likewise vacation is extremely variable; Some still regularly go on "full" vacations that require booking a flight seat per person, hotel rooms of appropriate size, etc. while others mostly just go camping a few miles from the city. Unsurprisingly, the former often have a single kid and think they "can't" afford more, whereas the latter can easily have 5 kids without much trouble even as they earn less.

The essay reminds me quite strongly of an old quote from the Swedish author Hjalmar Söderbergs best and most well-known work Doktor Glas:

"Ett nyfött barn är vedervärdigt. En dödsbädd gör sällan ett så ohyggligt intryck som en barnsbörd, denna förfärliga symfoni av skrik och smuts och blod."

"A newborn child is hideous. A deathbed seldom makes so terrible an impression as a childbirth, this horrific symphony of screams and filth and blood."

Pregnancy and childbirth truly are among the most hideous physical processes in existence. Everytime I watch a hospital series and a birth scene comes on, I feel the same revulsion as if they'd switched to a snuff film. It's telling that the Old Testament felt the need to explain pregnancy and childbirth as a punishment from God for an espeically egregious sin, and in a broader metaphysical sense the old story of the Apple of Knowledge and the plight of the female pelvis carries deep metaphorical truth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrical_dilemma

This is an existential problem which haunts me, and more so than usual lately. I see no solution – that is to say, a solution which cuts to the heart of the matter – to this, short of maybe artifical wombs followed by abolishing women as a sex. That idea has a lot of merits, and it would make the natalist position a lot more appealing if we could at least make it less of a travesty to create new people; but it is also a pipe dream which will obviously never become reality. I am at least grateful for the fact that I was born a man, and that I was thus spared the fate of being a sacrificial lamb of human reproduction.

Despite all this, it's unfortunately difficult to feel particularily sorry for women. The Female of the Species is more deadly than the Male, as the good Kipling wrote, and through their harsh sexual selection women have created what they are now complaining about (this is, again in a metaphorical sense, the aforementioned sin for which they are now all collectively being punished). Men obviously fare only a little better in the equation. The truth is, my friends, we are dumb and evil animals and for that reason we all deserve to be miserable – and so we are.

I end with another classic Doktor Glas passage:

"Jag hade alltid känt ett stort förakt för de dåliga gossar, som brukade rita fula ord på väggarna och planken. Men i den stunden var det mig som om Gud själv hade ritat något fult på den blå vårhimmeln, och jag tror egentligen att det var då jag först började undra, om det verkligen fanns någon gud."

"I had always felt great contempt for the scoundrel boys who used to draw ugly words on walls and planks. But in that moment it seemed to me as if God himself had drawn something ugly on the blue spring sky, and I think it was a that moment I began to wonder, if there really was a God."

I do not wonder. There is no God. We are alone.

You've cheered me up immensely and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter! Swedes are delightful people, just rays of pure sunshine.

As blackpilled as I am, I think you're wrong, by the way. Not because of any ideological reason, but because living as if those things were true makes me less attractive to women, and as someone who likes women and is already quite challenged in that area, I'd like as few debuffs as possible.

The idea that anyone deserves anything at all was beaten out of me long ago. We may be dumb, evil animals, but even the dumb and the evil can be happy in their own way. Self-flagellation is only fun if there's an audience.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to use this clip

Posting a clip to a YouTube video calling something gibberish is not better than directly calling something gibberish. (Worse, because you made me go watch the clip to see what it is you're saying.)

Calling someone's post gibberish is pretty antagonistic, which means we're going to expect you to do more than just say so (with or without a YouTube video). Since I can read the post and understand what his point is (not saying I agree with it, nor am I judging the quality of his writing, just saying it is clearly not "gibberish"), you have failed to meet the threshold to justify such antagonism.

You have a bunch of AAQCs. You also have a bunch of warnings for this kind of low-effort insult and culture warring. The first gives you more slack for the latter, but it's not a one-for-one relationship where earning an AAQC gives you one free cheap shot. Please stop doing this or steeper consequences will ensue.

“...pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”

It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.

There is a massive blind spot in both the linked article, and the post here, which is the refusal to contemplate that perhaps it is the modern paradigm - that having a family is bad, but having a career is good - might, just might, be [what was psyopped into existence] (https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/03/dont_hate_her_because_shes_suc.html). Make note; the system didn't just have convince women that having children was negative, but it also had to convince them that this belief came from within; that's why all the talk of "revealed preferences" only reference the modern era - a couple generations back at most - but not the "revealed preferences" of the past couple hundred thousand years.

I think this ignores the human capacity for imagination and reason. No other animal even understands the connection between sex and pregnancy, it is all just biological drives. Humans are special in that we have evolved beyond being slaves to our biology.

In the past couple of hundred thousand years humans were not much different than some animals in that we didn't really have the capacity to stop pregnancies easily and for many of those eons seemed not to really understand the sexual process and resulting children all that well. Children were also a value add for the tribe, community, family in that they were needed for labor and warfare and continuity and you could see those effects in front of your face.

We are now very detached from any economic positives from our own children but very exposed to all of the negatives. The balance for the individual has shifted, you should really only have kids now if you think you'll enjoy it. Imagine if a mother octopus knew what was coming, I think the species would be dead in 10 years.

This ignores how much women's agency has increased over the last 100 years. It might have always looked like a bad idea to bear kids but they didn't have much of a choice.

Your point is more interesting if you use it to extrapolate into the future

  • There will be humans in the future
  • This means babies are being born
  • Natural selection means groups averse to having kids are going going gone
  • Does this mean (most of) the remaining women will have had their status downgraded to ancient times (or modern cultures that maintain high birth rates) or we will have invented artificial wombs, or we will have changed the incentive structure sufficiently, or other?

It is absolutely impossible for natural selection to cause a species to not want to have children. No, it is emphatically not natural that women would desire to have no children, and instead have to be forced into it, throughout all of human history. The "logic" proffered borders on absurd; "well, people tend to avoid pain and inconvenience, so logically it must be the case that they would also avoid such in childbirth as well!" reasoning from first principles while obstinately avoiding all of known history that shouts otherwise. One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.

Why not? It's well accepted science that humans are exceptionally bad, among animals, at having children. We are terrible at giving birth. Humans evolved a large brain, but that large brain comes at a terrible price. A very long incubation period, a horrifically painful pregnancy, and then years of being a helpless baby. No other animal species puts anywhere near that much effort and pain into having kids, because no other species evolved giant brains. And unfortunately the modern world puts even more premium on the brain so... here we are, I guess. The Great Filter of human extinction is our own brain.

None of which suggests that women would evolve to not want children, which violated the most fundamental law of natural selection - alleles that lower reproductive fitness get weeded out. It's a tautological - anything that hinders reproductive fitness had better be making it up somewhere or it's gone.

or it's gone.

Bear in mind that evolution works exceedingly slowly. Like, over millions of years. "Modern" human civilization- meaning like, agriculture- is only like 10,000 years old. Maybe we're now in the "it's gone" phase of human evolution.

This is not true. Evolution can work quite fast. So fast to the extent that, back in the day, it had paleontologists and paleoanthropologists tearing their hair out as to why transitory specimens ("missing link(s)") were so lacking in the fossil record.

For example, lactase persistence has went from zero to substantially non-zero, the majority, or even near 100% quite a few times within the time-scale of a few hundred to a few thousand years in various Eurasian populations, possibly even a few dozen years in some cases.

Speaking of 10,000 years, in The 10,000 Year Explosion, Cochran and Harpending discuss not only human evolution, but accelerations in human evolution, since the agricultural/civilization era.

Excellent. AAQC'd

Avoid low-effort applause signals, please.

One would think we would see evidence of such "nature" prior to the Sexual Revolution, were it so.

Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Countless women throughout history have sought methods to prevent pregnancy. The fact that these methods were often crude, unreliable, ineffective, or only available to women of considerable means is certainly one reason why such women so often ended up still having children despite their best efforts.

What made the Sexual Revolution so incredibly society-altering is that it went hand-in-hand with mass availability of The Pill - the first widely-available, affordable, safe, wildly reliable and effective contraceptive ever created. The first time that sexually-active women could exert anywhere near this level of control and agency over whether or not they would become pregnant. And within a few decades of its introduction it had become nearly-ubiquitous in every society able to reliably produce and/or distribute it. If this isn’t a textbook example of revealed preferences, I don’t know what is. What reason do we have to believe that if the Pill had been invented in Victorian England, women wouldn’t have adopted it en masse?

Appealing to what evolution has created doesn’t hold much weight with me, because evolution has produced all sorts of utter horrors for the various species of the world. If the male praying mantis had the ability to conceive of and actively choose whether he would still like to reproduce, knowing full well that it will nearly-inevitable lead to him being violently decapitated, do you think we’d still see comparable mantis TFR numbers? Or how about male bees, whose dicks straight-up fatally detach during the act of conception? How many of them do you think would still answer nature’s call, given the knowledge and ability to choose otherwise?

In the modern era when much of traditional social structures had been drastically reduced and there was little social stigma to women having recreational sex and not becoming pregnant. After we created the modern welfare state, lots of people decided that labor wasn’t for them.

I think given that, no, Victorian women would not be choosing not to have babies because their status would increase as a mother, particularly of a son. This was even more pronounced in earlier generations. Culture matters. Our culture says “careerist women are superior” and women do what they can to meet that standard.

"Use of herbal and mechanical contraception is well-attested as early as very ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia."

Attested to by women of all stripes and social status, or attested to by women caught in status traps?

That cities are population sinks doesn't tell us that humans evolved to avoid having offspring (again, such a thing would be impossible for natural selection); we see frequently in history that the moment you get cities, you get reduced fertility as people get caught up in status games, behavior which doesn't happen muich in lower-scale societies where social trust is much higher, and social pressure can much more easily tamp down on defectors. This is because cities - civilization in general - are not conducive to healthy families, not that humans inherently don't want families.

Not familiar with Egyptian/Mesopotamian sources, but in classical antiquity contraception was well attested as a thing that existed and associated with a full spectrum of urban women- from prostitutes to upper class married women.

The true problem for 'it's inherent for women to want to have babies' arguments isn't PMC girlbosses in suburban Virginia or whatever people may think are destroying society. It's that even in places like Iran or Saudi Arabia, where women continue to be very socially conservative in a variety of other ways - marrying early, openly religious, and so on, are also happily controlling their own reproduction instead of just jumping into babies as quickly as possible.

are also happily controlling their own reproduction instead of just jumping into babies as quickly as possible.

How does this even rise to the level of an argument against the idea that women inherently want babies? I have an inherent need to eat, but I don't scarf down the first bit of food that I can see as quickly as possible. I make conscious decisions like "I'm going to cook pasta for dinner tonight" and happily control my own consumption of food and I don't see any contradictions between those two positions.

His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror.

Let me guess, there aren't any other kids near her age in the family? I can tell you, my own four-year-old demands attention like that when she's the only kid present, but when there are other young children around for her to play with she'll happily run around with them and only occasionally require attention from the adults. (Yet another reason why parents socialize with their kids' friends parents - you actually get to socialize.)

This is one of the widespread consequences of demographic implosion which people don't normally address.

Childbirth being painful is a universally known fact. The fact that women do it anyway is one of the many miracles of our biological condition. Such is the power of hormones and the genetic compulsion to reproduce.

What I suspect is happening here is that she doesn't want children, began that as her conclusion, and intellectualized herself into her preferences. And that's fine. Many people perform the backwards scientific method all the time when it comes to core beliefs. But if her reasons become mainstream - well, our species would soon cease to be.

We are all descended from either careless women, who had babies by accident, or feckless ones, who were brave enough to do it anyway despite the danger. I remind everyone to thank your mothers the next time you see them.

We are all descended from either careless women, who had babies by accident, or feckless ones, who were brave enough to do it anyway despite the danger. I remind everyone to thank your mothers the next time you see them.

Instructions unclear; just thanked my mother for being careless and feckless.

I also thanked her for the same.

Well it's not so much a miracle as the natural process that those that refuse to do it and their genetic patrimony cease to exist over time.

It may very well be that having children is an irrational decision that is not in the interest of any individual woman. But unless you want to commit the civilizational equivalent of suicide, you have to impose this duty on them.

This isn't the only thing we do that is configurated like so. Men's duty to fight in war is exactly the same, desertion is unquestionably in your individual interest but it's also destroying the commons so we have to have strong norms against it.

We've destroyed the strong norms around the duty to bear children in a mistaken belief that people would do it for the sole enjoyment that children bring into their lives, but that was wrong, at least in the short term.

In general, we've abandoned notions of duty, so solving problems that require people taking a hit for the sake of greater things has become impossible. Time will fix this, either by slowly erasing our civilization one death at a time or by selecting those few people that do not think in the ways this essay does, whether or not that means abandoning reason.

However, I have to acknowledge that a great many things about my brother’s life became infinitely more constrained, more stressful, more irritating, when he had children. His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare.

But childlessness isn't yet(?) that normalized in general. Wanting to hang out with other singles will be more or less frowned upon as you age. The basic message you'll get is that "hanging out" is what the youngsters generally do. If you want to keep living that lifestyle you'll eventually lose most of your social circle, because people'll just move on. You'll no longer get invited to events etc. Being a parent is rightfully seen as a new chapter in life - you lose old habits and acquire new ones, your priorities and social environment change, you lose something old and gain something new etc.

since the TRF differential between advanced and non-advanced countries is the real problem that we as a global species need to deal with.

I wonder if there may be entire industries and ways of life whose realization depends on economies of scale.

In other words there may be a limiting number of people such that for any smaller amount, it becomes uneconomical for i.e. advanced microchip research to continue.

Unlikely, I’d say.

You spend years feeding the blacksmith’s apprentice, you expect to get a lot of nails at the end of it. More than any one person could use. This overhang is what makes it uneconomical to run an industry for one person. Your supply and demand curves meet at zero quantity.

How do you avoid the overhang? Option one is moving the demand curve. More population, more aggregate demand, until you can collectively afford a smithy.

The other option is moving the supply curve. That means cheaper capital or cheaper unit cost. In the extreme, if someone can do the job with zero training, it costs you nothing to have the industry around.

I think the latter trend has been more important since the Industrial Revolution. I don’t see that getting worse in an age of improved transport, information access, and automation.

There are also population diseconomies of scale: higher resource requirements require extracting more resources, at higher and higher marginal cost. Though, if it's just a matter of technological development, then the economies of scale might more than compensate for that. Higher population might also mean higher level coordination mechanisms developing, which seem to take the form of more bureaucracy.

Regarding your first point and the blog post, this runs very counter to my lived experience so I'm inclined to believe this is either strongly socially mediated so that it isn't an underlying unchangeable reality or that it's a fringe opinion mostly held by internet wierdos.

In my experience many women fear the pain of childbirth but this doesn't hinder them from seeking natural born children. Furthermore, it's practically always the women that push for having children earlier or having more children. Its the men that want to get back to doing activities like you want to with your brother, or fear losing that by having children, not women.

My impression is that its the demands and costs of modern life that prevents women from having more children, and that the "revealed preference" mostly reveals what society strongly selects for, not what women want. The fact that Korean children study 16 hours a day doesn't "reveal" that is what they really want, it reveals that they're trapped in a destructive zero-sum game that hurts everyone.

“pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”

I think we really need to grapple with the fact that the revealed preference of nearly every intelligent and high-quality woman is for having few if any children.

Ah, fuck it. I'll be blunt on the point. Yes, childbirth isn't pleasant, nor are certain elements of the pregnancy process.

But generally speaking society expects men to take on tasks entailing similar levels of discomfort (military service?) and for much longer durations than asked of pregnant women, in the end. And the guys might not even have a reward to show at the end of it all. The least a woman can do if a man pledges his eternal love and support to her, even if it means he has to work his ass off at an unpleasant job for almost his entire life, is go through the pregnancy process and give him a kid or three.

And "women can't overcome their fear of temporary discomfort to do the thing that ensures the survival of the species and can produce a lot of long-term benefits for her" is NOT EXACTLY A STRONG ARGUMENT FOR LISTENING TO THEIR CONCERNS ON THIS MATTER. If she wants to make the case that yeah, pregnancies can go badly, kids can be a nightmare, she has other priorities she wants to pursue that's fine, but I suspect the raw statistical analysis isn't going to overcome the fact that every single generation before her had kids. Many, many good things can only be attained by absorbing short-term pain or even extreme, drawn out discomfort. Being unwilling to bring new life into the world because it might hurt for a bit seems... immature... on the face of it.

Of course, we can agree that she is allowed to make her individual choices! But I think we should also agree she, as an intelligent, high-quality woman, should be internalizing all the costs of that decision.

That is why in my screed yesterday I suggested that we need to stop subsidizing women in the workplace and with welfare, so that the 'cost-benefit analysis' of finding a husband and giving him a kid falls more in favor of the family formation.

In which case, an "intelligent and high-quality woman" might be able to do the math and decide the discomfort of childbirth is worth all the benefits it would bring.

Because as I've pointed out, a woman who lands a high-quality man early on can literally have it all. He can take her on trips and out to parties, he can give her a career boost as needed, and he can give her kids and help her raise kids.

Attempting to do it all on her own seems like a real self-defeating premise when the historical model through which she can get support and companionship for her entire life is always available.

Anyhow, my brother and his wife had their first child just about a month ago, and having met her now, I can say that I would happily kill to protect her even though she shares a somewhat smaller portion of my genes than a child of my own would. Its crazy how much evolutionary wiring there is to make us attached to babies and find joy by merely holding or looking at them. The value of such experiences that are tied deep into our biology shouldn't be flippantly discarded.

I apologize if you’ve made this clear before, or if I’m confusing you with someone else, but I have to ask.

Were you conscripted at some point? Did you, in some other way, find yourself coerced into violent service in the manner you describe? Perhaps you “volunteered” under the tremendous social pressures acting on men, but now regret it?

Because it’s easy for me to view discomfort with childbirth and objection to the draft as two sides of the same liberalization of society. An assertion that the existence of an option does not oblige any man or woman to take it. That, knowing the risks and benefits, one might choose to reject the bargain, cutting a different path, so long as he promulgated the liberal principles which allowed him a choice in the first place.

And I know you’re someone who understands the masculine urge for violence. This is probably my favorite thing you’ve written. Men are clearly getting something out of the voluntary side of dirty, violent, tough jobs. Even setting aside the prospect of pay.

But here you’re suggesting that can’t be enough. That men, as a class, aren’t seeing the same benefits from liberalization. That the prospect of coercion or even just discomfort washes out any benefits men might claim. And that the least women can do to remedy this, the only way to make up for the hardships they’re imposing, is to “give him a kid or three.”

I don’t understand you.

objection to the draft

I don't know anyone, regardless of political opinion, who thinks (in the US) that the Draft is even viable. Everyone would ignore it and the president who implemented it would quickly be found on a lamppost.

Right - the US Draft is like the Queen's/King's Assent in UK. Sure, in theory, they could veto something, but the monarchy would be effectively over the next day in an overwhelming vote supported by strong majorities of every party.

Anything that would require a draft would be met with unequalled volunteers anyway. I realize this part of the Internet thinks all of the Red Tribe thinks the military is all woke and ran by transgender furries and woke anti-racist generals, but the actual cause of the downtown is the best ecoonmy for low wage workers since the late 90's and much higher actual standards of recruits. But, if China or Russia actually did do some wild attack or whatever, and we needed recruits, they would come.

I would agree thats about how it would play out.

Men are clearly getting something out of the voluntary side of dirty, violent, tough jobs.

Yes. Status and achievement. Which is useful for...acquiring and providing for a family. Men have these drives because sitting around is probably a less successful strategy towards those goals.

There's a reason one of the benefits of jihad is a bevy of heavenly hotties. There's a reason the "cliche" male action movie involves bravery and/or violence followed by being rewarded by a objectified love interest. There's a reason many societies become less stable and men engage in more risk-seeking behavior when the number of available partners are low.

Most people don't get whatever sort of grand satisfaction from their job elite feminists think all women are being denied by being reduced to mothers and partners. It's a toll to secure status, life and family. Men do certain difficult jobs because it's just a niche they in particular can slide into to pay their way.

Men are clearly getting something out of the voluntary side of dirty, violent, tough jobs. Even setting aside the prospect of pay.

Because it helps them work towards something. Same reason young guys might join gangs, even though the ends of such a group are antisocial, because it feels like a purposeful life. Controlling territory, feuding with rivals, terrorizing the countryside. We can't easily separate the male from his violent nature, but we can prevent it from falling into destructive patterns.

And that the least women can do to remedy this, the only way to make up for the hardships they’re imposing, is to “give him a kid or three.”

Kids intrinsically provide you with purpose, once you're 'saddled' with the responsibility of protecting these hapless, defenseless little humans from a fairly dangerous world. And in most cases you DON'T need to enact violence to keep your own kids safe (although if the need arises, you better have prepared for it, you won't pull John Wick skills out of your ass), but having CONFIDENCE in yourself, being able to stare down any problem without flinching, and defending your family from those that would harm it requires one HELL of an ironclad mindset, which I daresay most flabby 'soyboys' simply aren't able to cultivate.

Some people develop that motivation after the kids, but in my mind the capacities should be developed as part of becoming a worthy partner, and being able to demonstrate the 'value' to a mate.

And so I want to build up men who are capable of violence, but also capable of controlling it, reining it in, and deploying it only where necessary. And once that's done, you've got a male who is more secure in their ability to operate in society because he does not cower due to the everpresent risk of physical confrontation. And THAT is the sort of guy who is 'worthy' of finding a high value woman.

And I want to give those guys a PURPOSE to pursue. I do not want to loose a cadre of violence-trained men on a world without direction, goals, or purpose. But there are exceedingly few purposes that are going to appeal to such men other than those inbuilt instincts to procreate, build a family, and defending a homestead.

The male urge to be violent works to get them hyped up to go and kill the hated enemy in military operations, especially if you tell him he can plunder wealth in the process. On the homefront, you also have to appeal to his instincts to protect his family, his kin, his property, and give him enough direction that he doesn't HAVE to go around killing to assert his masculinity.

Or if you like, you have to balance the Testosterone with Oxytocin.

The value of such experiences that are tied deep into our biology shouldn't be flippantly discarded.

This describes an attitude that comes up in the conversations well. It's like an anti-naturalistic fallacy. Just because it is in our nature to pair bond and such doesn't mean those bonds are any less real or meaningful.

I guess the 'rational' way to describe it is that to the extent we have base instincts that form part of the variables of our utility functions, and while it is certainly possible that other aspects of the utility function can override or counteract those, it is also possible that neglecting them entirely will make us much less happy than we would be if we 'indulged' them.

Like by all means, make childbirth less painful, but the joy of having children seems to be a top 3 source of pure happiness for humans.

Because as I've pointed out, a woman who lands a high-quality man early on can literally have it all. He can take her on trips and out to parties, he can give her a career boost as needed, and he can give her kids and help her raise kids.

What percentage of women can land a relationship with a high-quality man? Which apparently means a man who earns enough to support a household; who substantially helps with the kids; who has the time and money and inclination to go out on vacations and parties. To say nothing of at least half a dozen other attributes (willing to marry early and for life, attractive, etc) that are probably relevant.

Now, I'm not saying this in a "men need to step up" kind of way. It just doesn't seem accessible to the bulk of women today, and if that's the trade you're offering women, they'll implicitly calculate the risks and decide what path to take based on that.

What percentage of women can land a relationship with a high-quality man?

This is a function of how many high-quality men there are, which is probably somewhat a function of how many men are raised in intact families and instilled with the necessary discipline, commitment, and common sense needed to maintain a family from an early age. And having family resources on tap in a pinch is probably a major help too.

In olden times, a father might not have let his daughter be married off to a guy who didn't have the proven resources to support her! It seems like we've removed this kind of guardrail and haven't replaced it with anything, thus leaving it to the women herself to correctly ascertain the quality of her suitor. Which is a task she may not be well adapted for.

Bit of a feedback loop, in that respect. Men raised by single mothers, in particular, are less likely to become 'high quality men' later in life, and will certainly be at a deficit when it comes to their assets. More intact families = more high quality men. More high quality men should, likewise, correlate with more intact families.

Now, I'm not saying this in a "men need to step up" kind of way.

I am.

At the very least ensure there's a Basic Life Script for them to follow which gets them some kind of reward for making reasonable sacrifices along the way and shouldering the responsibility of creating a family.

It feels like we're in the middle of oscillating social defections where both men and women are refusing to 'improve' for the other sex because they perceive the other sex isn't willing to improve for them. Men, for example, perceive that many women aren't good at cooking, aren't willing to clean, and may decide to divorce them on a whim and take away their children and wealth. Women perceive that many men are childish and just want a live-in maid/mother substitute who will basically care for them while they indulge in meaningless hobbies. They're both right to an extent.

Men aren't willing to step up and sacrifice their independence for a woman with zero domestic skills or willingness to help maintain a household. A guy may as well get a male roommate if that's all a woman will provide.

Women aren't willing to learn domestic skills for a guy who isn't going to handle his own business, support her, raise her status, and execute on all his husbandly duties. She may as well be taking care of a child in that case.

I think that men are going to have to start making the first move here in asserting higher standards across the board, but if women don't reciprocate, what other options do men have?

It's a pile of complicated, interacting feedback loops.

I wonder if the initial solution might be less providing a happy path through a Basic Life Script and more curtailing a bunch of the dead end paths young adults find themselves on. A Basic Life Script requires things the government can't provide (at least directly). But there are lots of things in the modern world that are literally engineered to pull people on valueless, counterproductive paths. For men, video games, porn, gambling. (Elsewhere IIRC you mentioned social media for women, which I think would also qualify.) Limit those dead ends, and you might divert people who whose lives are degraded by them toward paths that lend themselves to the Basic Life Script.

Now that I go back and read your comment from a couple months ago, I realize that you basically said all that.

But there are lots of things in the modern world that are literally engineered to pull people on valueless, counterproductive paths. For men, video games, porn, gambling.

Yep. I've commented on the Superstimulus issue. Superstimuli are much more prevalent now than ever before, I don't think anyone can deny that. Livestreaming platform Twitch (a Gen Z staple) has been informally taken over by people pushing gambling websites or e-prostitutes hawking their wares. EVERY mainstream game played by literal twelve-year-olds has some kind of subtle or not-so-subtle gambling mechanics in them.

I think its fair to say that Gambling is more ubiquitous, drugs are more potent (and, potentially, deadly), porn is more mainstream, and outright scams are a constant danger. Hell, FOOD is more delicious and probably more fattening with sugar being in basically EVERYTHING. And getting sucked down any of those rabbit holes can be nigh impossible to escape, because they're much better adapted at keeping victims trapped than we are adapted to escape.

"Who would win, a literal child whose brain hasn't even developed higher reasoning, with a smartphone and internet access, or a remorseless, massive corporation that has spent millions upon millions of dollars optimizing its products and services for extracting money from every single person it gets its clutches on?"

Yeah, if we can, we should be trying to snip off the major downside risks that can ruin a guy if he strays just a little from the Basic Life Script at a young age.

But generally speaking society expects men to take on tasks entailing similar levels of discomfort (military service?) and for much longer durations than asked of pregnant women, in the end.

Which society expects military service of men? As far as I’m aware, there are only a handful of countries on earth with compulsory military service, and most of those impose the same requirement on women! American society, maybe outside of some fairly insular subcultures with a multigenerational history of military service, absolutely does not expect, let alone demand, military service of men. This is made obvious by the fact of how few American men serve in the military; I can’t imagine how much smaller the percentage is in other Western countries.

Modern Western society instead makes pretty much the exact same demand of both men and women: go to college, get the most remunerative job you’re able to, and work it until retirement age. American society very explicitly looks down upon women who are financially dependent on men, and mocks men who allow “gold diggers” to leech off of them financially. I think this myth that society demands everything of men and nothing of women is bizarre and clearly incorrect.

Most of the countries that no longer have mandatory military service still have some formalities to register yourself for a draft. And if engaged in sustained warfare that would require it, do draft people.

There is some ideological consistency here since the same movements that wanted to abolish or nullify the draft also wanted to do the same to motherhood as an obligation, but this is just the general consequences of a lapse in everyone's duty.

The army can't find recruits, people aren't having enough children anymore and society is a free for all with no cohesion. This was a predictable and predicted end of such policies.

Military Service.

Mining.

Policing.

Construction.

Firefighting.

Relevant Tweet from EndWokeness who is not a preferred source but put all the info in one place.

The most miserable, uncomfortable, physically demanding jobs are inherently male-dominated. As it really should be, given that the role of producing new humans is exclusive to women, and men have to make sure they have a safe, functional society to give birth and raise kids in!

And here's a response to EndWokeness that proves the point, unless you think seamstresses and makeup artists are critical social infrastructure that are miserable to perform.

Are men expected to "internalize the costs" for not picking such a job? Excepting military service in countries where conscription is in effect, of course.

They're going to end up homeless and alone of they can't find some way to produce value, that is all but certain.

And here's a response to EndWokeness that proves the point, unless you think seamstresses and makeup artists are critical social infrastructure that are miserable to perform.

She's...in on the joke, right? She can't possibly believe that 'bridal shop owner' is a similarly essential job as plumber?

Looking through her Tweets, I'm thinking she's in on it (or at least just farming engagement). Says she isn't into politics, most political thing said being that she stands with Israel, references God a fair amount, seems to like Elon.

It seems she's some kind of digital content marketer/entrepreneur.

You tell me! It sure looks like she thinks she just made a blistering rebuttal.

As far as I’m aware, there are only a handful of countries on earth with compulsory military service, and most of those impose the same requirement on women!

Objection, arguing facts not in evidence. Only seven countries conscript women, and even then they aren't put in roles that are likely to see combat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription#Drafting_of_women

Also almost every single country on earth has conscription or a draft.

How much of that conscription is truly conscription, as opposed to a volunteer army with extra steps? I know the Mexican and Russian drafts are incredibly easy to dodge, or at least were before the war in the latter case. I’ve certainly heard that the draft in Brazil is basically a meeting with a recruiter who just checks ‘not suited for military service because of low motivation’ if you don’t want to enlist. My guess is that outside of Finland, the koreas, and Israel, the draft is avoidable for middle class males who simply don’t want to go.

I’ve certainly heard that the draft in Brazil is basically a meeting with a recruiter who just checks ‘not suited for military service because of low motivation’ if you don’t want to enlist. My guess is that outside of Finland, the koreas, and Israel, the draft is avoidable for middle class males who simply don’t want to go.

It was this way in Germany too, up until Conscription was cancelled.

IIRC in Turkey you can opt to spend your conscription period in the reserves. I'm quite confident that the vast majority of middle and upper income societies have some sort of loophole like that, and lower income countries are so crappy that A) the army is probably a better deal than whatever the alternative was and B) there probably isn't enough state capacity to actually do anything about it if you just ignore the draft officer 99% of the time.

Well! I readily acknowledge that I was wrong, by an order of magnitude, regarding how many countries still have active conscription. I have to imagine that my somewhat Euro- and Asia-centric news diet caused me to not really give much thought toward how African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries handle conscription.

Still, I think my point about expectation of military service absolutely still stands as it pertains to First World countries. Of the European and East Asian countries, only a handful practice active and enforced conscription, and of those, several do conscript women. While it’s undeniably true that those women are overwhelmingly shunted toward non-combat roles, few of those countries is currently at war, so the men aren’t seeing any combat either.

However you have completely and utterly failed to demonstrate your main point:

But generally speaking society expects men to take on tasks entailing similar levels of discomfort (military service?) and for much longer durations than asked of pregnant women, in the end.

Unless you have anything else to introduce, this statement is just as absurd and plainly false as before.

Please direct this comment at the person who made this claim, rather than to me.

The author, a woman, makes a reasonably well-articulated case about why women don’t want to have babies, and it amounts to “pregnancy and childbirth are just an absolutely brutal experience for most women, and it’s totally natural and inevitable that they should wish to avoid going through it.”

This is true and definitely under-discussed by both men and women. Men don't appreciate it, and women prefer to blame external factors (lack of male support, housing prices, etc.) then admit that they simply don't want to endure the same struggle their female ancestors endured.

But -- this explanation has its limits. Modern women endure many painful undertakings at a high-rate, from training for marathons, to grinding for grades, to getting ACL tears from competitive sports, to climbing the corporate ladder, to pulling all-nighters for law school, etc, and they do this because they are told this is what good girls do and this is what gives them status. Even something like, "travel" is often unpleasant but considered worthwhile because of the benefits of the experience.

We shouldn't underestimate just how much modern schooling and culture is careerist. From the moment girls enter kindergarten its, "what do you want to be when you grow up?" Thus they are encouraged to struggle for the status of career, whereas motherhood is treated as an optional hobby. If treated as an optional hobby, and not a worthy struggle that is an essential part of a life well-lived, then of course many women are going to pass. Not going to college is an unthinkable failure -- but not becoming a mother is a "choice" that must be respected and no one has the right to pressure or shame women about this very personal choice.

His ability to hang out with us, to do any activity or attend any venue that is not friendly to small children, is massively constrained by access to childcare.

Perhaps this is cope on my part, as I have kids and don't get out much any more -- but kids also completely reset what one thinks as important. Much of the "going out" I did in my 20s, from trivia nights at the pub to going to the movies to trying out the new exotic restaurant now seems frivolous and uninteresting. At a deeper level, a lot of young adult socialization is about forming networks that allow us to access status and ultimately money and sex. Having reached a stable level of both, socialization becomes a lot less interesting, and most of my socialization is now with fellow parents, since we have more common goals.

It's also nigh impossible to convey the wonderful parts of being a parent to a non-parent. Think of how much people used to look forward to the new Pixar movie. Now imagine having the cutest thing imaginable -- the thing that the cute character in the movie is only a pale imitation of -- and this cute creature is doing new and interesting things in your own home every single night. Why go "out"?

His oldest daughter is at an age where she constantly demands and monopolizes attention, such that any gathering which includes her inevitably requires at least one person to be fully attentive to entertaining and indulging her, lest she become a terror.

Part of the problem here is that modern parents absolutely suck at discipline. Most parents never learn or never feel empowered to tell their kid "Go play by yourself and if you interrupt me or pester me you will get a punishment." Modern parents are grudgingly allowed to punish kids for blatant infractions like hitting or stealing. But it has become unthinkable to punish kids for pestering or interrupting. This really needs to change. With proper discipline, most four year olds are perfectly capable of playing by themselves and not interrupting for an hour.

I don’t know, but honestly I just don’t see a viable path forward for forcing a critical mass of women to do something that’s manifestly going to wreck the lives of so many of them.

Well certainly in the confines of existing American democratic politics, no, nothing can be done. But the existing political situation is not long-term stable, and under a new paradigm many things could be possible. The question is whether returning to above replacement fertility is a regime-complete problem -- or a civilization-complete problem.

From the linked substack:

women did not have the information and/or power to do anything about it. Now they do, so that’s that...So right-leaning men should stop being in denial about this fact, and more specifically, about the source of their feelings....What you do with that information is another question, but please at least admit that is is a biologically wired-in divergence, and not something that's strange or confusing or a symptom of cultural malaise. It's merely exactly what we should expect to see, even if one was an alien who knew nothing whatsoever about humans other than how their reproduction works....This will happen in every culture and community where women have access to facts, and enough options and agency to make decisions about their own lives. All over the world. Yes, even the mormons. So stop trying to find a magical cultural or memetic solution. There isn’t one.

This is an interesting instance of "woke more correct" or of horse-shoe theory. She is making the same argument that ultra-rightist Dread Jim makes -- women are not hard-wired to preserve civilization or to choose reproduction. Every historical instance of women's liberation has led to cratering fertility and the destruction of that society. Therefore the rightist must go all the way: either women's emancipation gets rolled back or Western civilization will die.

More from the substack

I’ve set forth below the sex-based risks and costs that are fairly standard, and relative risk level. I haven’t included the rare, freakish things that happen to some women, nor all the risks. ...I did not intentionally try to get this to come out at a million dollars. I was just putting in guesstimates about what I thought was a reasonable amount an average man would need to be paid to accept the risks, and only tallied it up after the fact.

One million dollars? Your offer is acceptable.

Perhaps this is cope on my part, as I have kids and don't get out much any more -- but kids also completely reset what one thinks as important. Much of the "going out" I did in my 20s, from trivia nights at the pub to going to the movies to trying out the new exotic restaurant now seems frivolous and uninteresting. At a deeper level, a lot of young adult socialization is about forming networks that allow us to access status and ultimately money and sex. Having reached a stable level of both, socialization becomes a lot less interesting, and most of my socialization is now with fellow parents, since we have more common goals.

I'm not a parent but I've been on the other side of that way too often. I definitely get that impression, from people that I used to think were my friend, that now they think of my friendship as something temporary, trivial, and meaningless. The only thing that matters to them is their children.

It's... I don't know, I'm conflicted. Maybe you and them are right, that family is something "higher" that makes everything else seem small in comparison. But from my perspective, it's more like all of my friends are being brainwashed by a cult that forces them to drop connections to anyone outside the cult. They can now only socialize in approved "play dates" with other parents of children the exact same age as their own. And that's, like, 2 hours a week. Most of their time is spent in "family time" which I strongly suspect is just them sitting on the couch watching inane g-rated cartoons with the kids.

Maybe you and them are right, that family is something "higher" that makes everything else seem small in comparison. But from my perspective, it's more like all of my friends are being brainwashed by a cult that forces them to drop connections to anyone outside the cult. They can now only socialize in approved "play dates" with other parents of children the exact same age as their own. And that's, like, 2 hours a week. Most of their time is spent in "family time" which I strongly suspect is just them sitting on the couch watching inane g-rated cartoons with the kids.

I think it's a combination of things:

  1. the fun things we did in our 20s have gotten old and seem much less appealing or interesting once we are older and have kids.
  2. there is new friction in organizing get-togethers because you must always check with your spouse to make sure they can handle pick-up from childcare and watching the kids for the evening
  3. most modern women seem to give their husbands small guilt-trips every time they want to take a night out. This adds friction. Worse, if the kids end up being rotten that night and wifey is stressed out, then the husband comes home to a very cranky wife and a big guilt trip. Fear of this adds even more friction.
  4. Home entertainment has become much better. I can have more interesting conversations over the internet than I can have with most of my neighbors. The insights and jokes about the local sportsball team I get from listening to podcasts as I do the dishes are actually better than the jokes and insights I get from friends and neighbors at the bar.
  5. All of these are multiplicative -- if you want to meet-up with three other guys they are all facing these same frictions and so you end up with long, multi-day text threads just to get dinner or something.

That's a good breakdown. But I have to say, when you lay it all out like that... it sounds of grim, doesn't it? Not to go all "men's rights activist" but... it sounds like the typical modern man is in a marriage where he needs permission from his wife to go outside, feels guilty for everything, and relies on parasocial internet relationships to replace real-life friendships. Pretty dark. As a cope he says "Oh, I no longer need to spend time with real life frends like I did when I was in my 20s. Now that i'm older, it's so much more satisfying to stay at home by myself." And then he drinks himself to death.

But from my perspective, it's more like all of my friends are being brainwashed by a cult that forces them to drop connections to anyone outside the cult.

I'm on the same side of the "being a parent" divide, so it's not that I don't sympathize, but I can't help but notice that this is exactly what it felt like when my older friends suddenly started obsessing over girls. Maybe this time for sure it's the natural course of human development that's wrong, but I wouldn't count on it.

I also remember that time from middle school. But uh, isn't that just a temporary phase? Most guys eventually learn to balance having a girlfriend with having friends. It's incredibly cringe how some guys will betray their closest friends and become completely pussywhipped by a girl they just met the day before. We don't need to encourage and reward that sort of behavior. But it seems like so much of modern American life is built around this ideal of "the nuclear family" where the father comes straight home from work, sits in "the family room" with his kids, watching TV, and has no friends or hobbies outside the house.

But uh, isn't that just a temporary phase?

Yeah, and in my experience so it is with parents as they learn the ropes, and the kids grow up an become less absorbing. But I think it's understandable that new parents get completely overwhelmed.

It's incredibly cringe how some guys will betray their closest friends and become completely pussywhipped by a girl they just met the day before. We don't need to encourage and reward that sort of behavior.

Sure, but discouraging these sort of behaviors went both ways. Getting pussywhipped was cringe, but so was "scaring away the hoes" or whatever the kids call it nowadays.

But it seems like so much of modern American life is built around this ideal of "the nuclear family" where the father comes straight home from work, sits in "the family room" with his kids, watching TV, and has no friends or hobbies outside the house.

I come from more of a clan culture, so the "nuclear family" thing looks weird to me as well. Not saying there's nothing in the culture around parenting that can't be improved, but no matter the improvements, the childless are still going to feel left behind, much like the girlfriendless.

Part of the problem here is that modern parents absolutely suck at discipline. Most parents never learn or never feel empowered to tell their kid "Go play by yourself and if you interrupt me or pester me you will get a punishment." Modern parents are grudgingly allowed to punish kids for blatant infractions like hitting or stealing. But it has become unthinkable to punish kids for pestering or interrupting. This really needs to change. With proper discipline, most four year olds are perfectly capable of playing by themselves and not interrupting for an hour.

I just want to underscore this -- this is absolutely correct. Modern parenting (or "gentle" parenting, as the meme goes) makes life SO much harder than it needs to be. Kids do not need their parents (or a screen) to be entertained and you are a fool if you cater to their whims in this way.

I'd also gesture at the great work Jonathan Haidt has been doing calling attention to the dual problem of social media + complete lack of independence and freedom in childhood, but that's a whole other (huge) topic.

Agree and I will elaborate. My son is illiterate. This is fine, he is too young to be literate. He is just barely mastering speech of a very finite vocabulary (and is doing so speedily according to the doctors). But he still will just let me do the dishes while he sits down and "reads" books. Certainly he knows his favorite books (they involve large machinery). He grabs them intentionally off the shelf and peruses them for enough time for me to finish all sorts of minor tasks.

Now, could I work from home, alone, for a whole day and expect this behavior for a whole day? No that is insane. He has the energy of a greyhound and needs to go outside and get his 10k steps. He needs to climb at some point. But if you cant manage that at a FAMILY party what is wrong with you and your family? Can none of them be trusted to not kick him down the stairs? Do you all have houses full of vases and knives in every room? Last family party I attended I supervised 4 under 4 easily for an entire morning with only a few interventions by parents of those other than my son to change diapers (which I still could have done if I had the right size with me, b/c I did for him).

I think another dimension of this is many people seem to have somehow, magically forgotten that it’s not only okay but ideal to treat kids differently based on their age. I had a very frustrating conversation recently about how or if we should be talking to kids about the “bad” parts of history, and it was kind of shocking to realize that they didn’t realize that for example a 5th grader is physiologically incapable of the same complexity of thought as a teenager or an adult. That echoes over to discipline where they also don’t realize that again, a child’s brain is both highly plastic as well as not yet mature in a deep and fundamental way. Being strict and firm are not the same things… and yes, shoving a phone in front of your kid and going “they entertain themselves, how great!” is terrible for development.

magically forgotten

A social policy of segregation will do that. Age cohorts are relatively strictly segregated in modern society, and from 15-30 most women and nearly all men will have observed zero children in a casual context (teaching doesn't count); not a surprise they have to learn from scratch when they have them.

Add to that the fact that most parents who become parents are going to lack the required experience in having authority, and you get a populace who doesn't know how to exercise it, don't know when it needs to be exercised, or have no experience with authorities that aren't arbitrary/capricious. So they're going to try and get by without it, because that's how they interact with everyone they know; why would smaller human be any different?

that it’s not only okay but ideal to treat kids differently based on their age

Maybe, but (and partially because of the above) the ages at which it's ideal to treat kids in certain ways are blown so hilariously out of proportion that there exist people who take seriously the notion that anyone under 25 is physiologically incapable of any adult thought. (The people who most loudly agree with this notion are usually 26.) I've seen 14 year olds with bedtimes on vacation, and it was fucking absurd.

Parents reacting to parents who [over]do the above are most likely the ones to try and be 'gentle' parents, but miss the fact that if you're going to do that, you have to be capable (and if you actually are capable of doing it, your kid is more than likely capable of working with it- which is also something parenting advice always forgets to mention especially when it comes to "a child's brain"), and most aren't. Same thing with liberal proponents of casual sex who had a traditionalist upbringing- you actually have to have a high level of emotional detachment with sex, because if you're lying to yourself you're going to get hurt and would have been better off the traditionalist way.

about how or if we should be talking to kids about the “bad” parts of history

Fifth-graders participate in the bad parts of history, and are made aware of that if they turn on a TV. Probably best if they know how to avoid participating (a 5 year old would have no choice and this would be a net negative, but thinking that a 10 year old should still believe this doesn't happen to them is also absurd).

That's a good read. It's a pretty nifty bit of persuasive writing and a good perspective for men to be thinking about, especially if they haven't seen pregnancy and childbirth firsthand.

Much of the suffering involved in pregnancy / childbirth was known to me already as I "coached" (or whatever the term is) my wife through three deliveries with no painkillers (she wanted a natural birth and got one) and then two more with epidurals ... the latter were strange experiences; going from relaxedly playing a board game to pushing within the span of thirty minutes is a trip.

I've written about parenthood before (1, 2, 3, 4) and about my experience raising a special needs child on DSL so I think I have some credibility on this topic.

The Princess Bride has a great related quote:

Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.

Pregnancy is hard. Childbirth is hard, occasionally horrifically so (in a previous century my wife might have bled to death after our second child -- modern medicine is a wonderful thing). Parenting is hard and cramps your style in a major way. Marriage is hard.

But ... damn it, you have to do hard things in life. Living an authentically good and virtuous life requires sacrifice of yourself in the service of greater things. We used to understand this. Hedonism and the pursuit of pleasure and utility above all else are absolutely toxic to the project of building a family, building a community, and building a country.

I realize this is a controversial claim, but I think the "fertility crisis" is ultimately a crisis of spirit. I fully acknowledge that the modern world makes the project of having and raising children difficult in important ways including but not limited to:

  • The wasteland of modern dating and dating apps
  • The tremendous increase of housing / education / healthcare / childcare costs relative to inflation and income
  • Cultures as a whole not conferring status upon mothers and fathers and institutions seemingly going out of their way to discourage parenthood

However, I increasingly feel like the ultimate failure is one of selfishness. Raising a family requires tremendous sacrifice from both mother and father (although as a father of five I will readily admit my wife has it "worse" in many ways and I think as a good husband one of my primary duties is to support and offer assistance in recognition of that fact).

I really think the fundamental problem is that people are increasingly uninterested in anything that requires them to make sacrifices. Shying away from having and raising kids is just one example of this.

A lot of your well told story about rasing your son, from an outside perspective, seems like the same thing that happens to anyone who manages to cope with hard life circumstances, such as personal disability or family menbers that require constant care.

It must be worth it and it must be good and I must love it and it must be for a reason... because it is so hard. It reminds me of a Benjamin Franklin quote about borrowing books and asking favors to get people to like you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Franklin_effect Your special needs child is a verson of a favor asking Franklin.

It just happend, bad luck as you say, and your child's life and your own would be better had it not.

I also don't see a drop in fertility as a crisis as we are going into serious automation of most things in the next 100 years. A benifit if anything. Many overpopulated counties already have high unemployment even spain is over 10%. Imagine what that will be when the value of human labor drops even lower!

The problem with revealed preferences is that women, in particular, don't properly understand the long-term tradeoff of not having children. And there's nobody to inform them of that tradeoff, but there are innumerable cultural signals which will point out to them all the downsides and horror stories of having children. Cultural memetics is supposed to be the roundabout way to warn women of that tradeoff.

The most miserable woman I know is childless- she's fat and ugly and absolutely hates men and is constantly negative. She calls her dogs her children, unironically. Obviously, she is absolutely miserable. But the risk of that type of existence in the decades following fertility- single, aging, ugly, childless, must be weighed against all the risks you pose here, but it isn't in the life of a Gen Z girl.

It's true that quality matters more than quantity. Low TFR is not a problem compared to a dysgenic TFR, which is actually an existential crisis. But I think it's a stretch to say that women's "revealed preferences" couldn't be heavily influenced by culture, or that their "revealed preferences" are not already a function of that culture rather than an objective response to wealth or something.

The problem with revealed preferences is that women, in particular, don't properly understand the long-term tradeoff of not having children. And there's nobody to inform them of that tradeoff, but there are innumerable cultural signals which will point out to them all the downsides and horror stories of having children. Cultural memetics is supposed to be the roundabout way to warn women of that tradeoff.

Did you read the piece Hoff linked to? That woman, at least, clearly does understand the long-term tradeoffs. She goes out of her way to talk to her right-leaning readers and say "Yes, I understand all the arguments you are making, I've heard them, now please consider the counterarguments."

You can disagree with her that the cons are as bad as she says (some of her commenters do just that), you can insist that she undervalues the pros and would change her mind if only she had hatched eggs of her own (maybe, though I think a lot of people assume that all women are naturally made to be mothers and underestimate how many just... aren't), you can say "Most women aren't as smart or as thoughtful as her and are just living their hedonistic future-cat-lady lives" (possibly true), but the only people who insist women "aren't being warned" about the long-term tradeoffs are people who fundamentally don't believe women are capable of thinking.

If our culture was more "traditional" and valued childbearing more, yes, we'd probably see more women choose to have children. But a lot of things would have to happen to make that effective, not just pumping the media full of memes and shows about how great motherhood is. Most of those things would involve either greater support for childrearing (at a financial cost most conservatives balk at), or constraining the ability of women to opt out (an option that is popular with conservatives, but understandably not popular with women).

or constraining the ability of women to opt out (an option that is popular with conservatives,

Not IRL. I live in a filter bubble where opposition to women’s suffrage is a non-lizardman’s constant idea. Support for guardianship laws, arranged marriages, etc is uncommon even among that subset.

I think you're actually correct, in the general sense that fairly socially conservative people support contraception, IVF, et al (see Alabama quickly changing the law), plus a general libertarian-leaning view about abortion among a lot of Republican's (see pro-life referendums losing by large margins even in Kentucky) but stuff like that is a disproportionate view among the 'coastal elite' of conservatives/right-wing rationalists.

See the general reaction to JD Vance, even among a decent amount of Republican's.

JD Vance does not, in fact, support turning women into breeding chattel outside of progressive imaginations. He has fairly standard pro-life views and likes to use cat lady as an insult(including against men). He’s unpopular with republicans because he’s an Ivy League educated hedge fund manager who got national fame by writing a book blaming his family for being shitty.

id you read the piece Hoff linked to? That woman, at least, clearly does understand the long-term tradeoffs. She goes out of her way to talk to her right-leaning readers and say "Yes, I understand all the arguments you are making, I've heard them, now please consider the counterarguments."

Yes, I did, and I noticed that her calculator estimating the cost for a woman to have children doesn't even attempt to place a value to a woman on having a child. Just the inconveniences like nausea. But her calculator includes no consideration of the cost of being a miserable, old, ugly cat lady with a gaping hole in her life she can't fill with all the wine and cats in the world. And that outcome is closer to the modal childless woman than the sad story of parents who get stuck with a non-verbal, autistic child.

If her calculator attempted to estimate the dollar value the average woman places on her child, and subtracted the average misery of the typical childless cat lady, she would come out of her analysis with an entirely different conclusion. Her "million dollar shortfall" shows she hasn't actually thought it through, and she does exactly what I am accusing childless woman of- being hyper-conscious of the benefits of remaining childless while being aggressively oblivious to the costs... which just happens to align with the pattern of cultural signals young women are bombarded with. It's not independent thinking.

Yes, I did, and I noticed that her calculator estimating the cost for a woman to have children doesn't even attempt to place a value to a woman on having a child.

She talks quite a bit about the arguments in favor of having a child. Do you really think "Did you know that some women actually enjoy having children and find motherhood to be an enjoyable and fulfilling experience" is a mind-blowing thought she never had? She's making a point about the costs that men arguing for children frequently don't consider, not saying "Having children is miserable for everyone and no one would want to do it if they considered the costs."

But her calculator includes no consideration of the cost of being a miserable, old, ugly cat lady with a gaping hole in her life she can't fill with all the wine and cats in the world.

That's your assumption, which requires you to assume that you know what people experience internally better than they do. Her argument is that in fact some "cat ladies" are actually pretty happy and are not the miserable, bitter hags you wish to believe they must be. Of course it is possible that she really is miserable and lonely and just coping, but I'd trust her account of what she actually feels over yours.

It's not independent thinking.

Writing a defense of an opinion that many people share does not mean they are bots writing effortposts like an LLM, which is basically your assertion. Do you think that in the world you want where women are pressured to have as many children as possible and told this is their natural and most fulfilling role, a woman who wrote an essay about the joys of motherhood and why everyone should do it would be exercising independent thinking? Or would you just say "Well no, because women can't do that, but it would be good because she's been properly programmed according to values I agree with?"

Do you think that in the world you want where women are pressured to have as many children as possible and told this is their natural and most fulfilling role, a woman who wrote an essay about the joys of motherhood and why everyone should do it would be exercising independent thinking? Or would you just say "Well no, because women can't do that, but it would be good because she's been properly programmed according to values I agree with?"

Obviously in that case a woman would not be engaging in independent thinking. No more than if she wrote a "racism is bad" Substack essay listing all the reasons racism is bad according to the prevailing cultural wisdom. The notion she reached that conclusion independently of cultural signals is hilariously naive.

Or would you just say "Well no, because women can't do that, but it would be good because she's been properly programmed according to values I agree with?"

You don't get it, there is no "don't program women, let them think independently" option. It's only a question of how we program them. This applies to men as well to a somewhat lesser extent, but women in particular are highly susceptible to the social memetics that get naively mistaken as independent thought. Humans are a pack animal and hive mind, "independent thought" does not exist, there only exists variation within a collectively-shared distribution.

"I thought about it, and decided being a childless cat lady won't be so bad" is not independent thought, it's downstream of all the cultural signals she's internalized her entire life.

Pretty much nobody reaches conclusions "independently of cultural signals." Do you think you came to your beliefs entirely through independent research and reasoning from first principles?

Do you think absent "cultural signals", there would be zero women who would actually prefer being cat ladies over being mothers?

Do you think absent "cultural signals", there would be zero women who would actually prefer being cat ladies over being mothers?

Did you read my comment? There is no "absent cultural signals." We are a hive mind. There's no "what would women prefer if they weren't programmed one way or another." The question isn't if we should program women to have a certain perception of motherhood, it's just a question of how we should do it.

But I do think even in the presence of strong cultural signals in favor of Motherhood there would be some women who would prefer to be cat ladies. A lot of them were probably burned at the stake in Old Europe on the accusation of Witchcraft, as that decision would have been regarded as highly anti-social and low-status. It's quite ironic that the cultural Witchcraft movement on Reddit and the like is closely associated with childless advocacy as well. Witches exist, and they do mean to tear apart the fabric of our society.

In Defense of Witches takes witches — unmarried, childless, strong, independent women in control of their future, their time, and their sexuality — and uses those elements to explore how women who possessed those attributes, or who simply failed to comply with what men wanted of them, were accused of witchcraft and persecuted. Then the book focuses on how modern women who are independent, childless, and elderly must still deal with some of the same pressures as the witches of old did.

Okay, so we agree her opinions didn't come out of the aether. Since her opinions are as well-formed and independent as yours, no more, no less, you have only object level disagreements with her (namely, you'd prefer she not persuade other women to think like her).

Obviously it would be bad if all women decided to be cat ladies. But she's addressing people who think she can't possibly be happy and that women shouldn't really have that option. (Not necessarily in the sense they should be forced to breed, though at least here on the Motte that viewpoint is certainly represented, but in the sense that a lot of conservatives' "solution" to low TFR would be to impose steep social and economic costs on women who don't.)

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I would add that a disturbing number of the so-called "solutions" suggested in that thread involved imposing additional burdens on women that they would never tolerate themselves. These people would never tolerate a society where men were the ones required to make all the sacrifices. Suppose the tradeoff was that the woman bears all the physical risk of bearing the child, and in exchange the man gives up his career, financial independence, and political rights to become a full-time caregiver? And they should also be more willing to date low status women as well. You don't want to support five kids in the salary of an obese trailer trash hairdresser? Well, your only other option is to live with your parents and push a cash register until they're old enough that you need to stay home and change their diapers. If that were the necessary tradeoff for solving the "fertility crisis", I imagine that fertility rates would suddenly seem unimportant.

These people would never tolerate a society where men were the ones required to make all the sacrifices.

Wait... we don't? By nearly every metric we have (life expectancy, workplace fatalities, military draft, family court nonsense) that is exactly the world we live in. Women have choices, men have responsibilities. I've watched men attempt to make the argument that men should have choices too and fail. Can't blame them for going the other route and insisting that gasp women should also have responsibilities.

All I'm asking is if you're willing to make the tradeoff yourself. Would you, personally, prefer to take the status of the woman in this arrangement? Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them? At the very least, it would eliminate the risk of any workplace fatalities, and no family court would award the woman primary custody in this situation.

Honestly that sounds like a dream, lots of leisure time, surrounded by little people who love me, no work stress. Of course, in the real world women dislike outearning their husbands and hate being the sole breadwinner, so perhaps a better question would be to ask if WhiningCoil would be willing to do this if he were a woman, or if women's marital preferences were different.

Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them?

This has been the primary motivation for me to continue working a sometimes-hard job instead of downsizing into an easier but lower paying one, to give my future self the optionality to fatfire and stay at home with a squadron of kids.

When that day comes, if married, I might keep working anyway to satisfy the future wife’s hypergamous/what-have-you-done-for-me-lately/it’s-not-enough-for-me-to-live-well-my-husband-has-to-suffer instincts, but at least having the financial optionality to fatfire and SAHD would be clutch.

Would you, personally, prefer to take the status of the woman in this arrangement? Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them?

I find this mindset fascinating, of asking a question like this in an apparent expectation that the answer would be obviously no. It would be pretty difficult for me to find a man in my life who would say no to such a deal; in fact, it would be the rare man who wouldn't consider this the relationship equivalent of winning the lottery, in terms of how good a deal they would see it as.

I agree, Rov_Scam seems to have forgotten to include any tradeoffs that would make such a situation as undesirable as the reverse seems to be for many women. Consider the following:

  • in this scenario the man is implicitly offered a stable long-term relationship when many (younger) men don't have one, and a significant number don't have any relationship but would want one

  • having many children means having lots of sex, and men appear to value sex more than women and have lower bars for attractiveness

  • men are physically stronger and have accordingly less to fear from domestic violence

  • men are more valued on the job market and would accordingly have an easier time returning to supporting themselves if the deal doesn't work out

  • the cost of bearing the children is still on the woman

Bullets 1 and 2 don't apply, since the implicit comparison is to marrying her without the unusual features stipulated.

I didn't think of 3 or 4. So only 5 seems to be of much weight.

men are more valued on the job market and would accordingly have an easier time returning to supporting themselves if the deal doesn't work out

This is the kind of thing that seems to be repeated often but for which there's basically no actual evidence.

In any case, one thing that's clear to me, at least about the men I'm familiar with, is that you could negate all such advantages, real or imagined, and even tack on a few extra disadvantages (of which there already are plenty which also haven't been mentioned here, but IMHO trying to go through some laundry list of stuff and weigh them properly is a fool's game whose conclusions depend entirely on the biases of the writer and none on the actual reality of the situation), and it would still look like a far better deal than what they're getting right now.

Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them?

Do you think this is some kind of a dunk? Every father I know, including myself, wishes they could do exactly that.

Would you, personally, prefer to take the status of the woman in this arrangement? Would you marry a woman if, under no uncertain terms, she told you she wanted to have a lot of kids but you would have to give up your career to stay home with them?

I literally fantasize about this.

Probably! Staying home with your family is awesome. And past a certain point, the kids keep each other entertained. I work from home and it feels like the best of both worlds, taking lunch breaks to read The Hobbit to my daughter. I'd much rather do more of that and less pointless stitching together of web libraries for more money than I probably deserve.

I would add that a disturbing number of the so-called "solutions" suggested in that thread involved imposing additional burdens on women that they would never tolerate themselves.

The only societally acceptable solutions are those which only put more burden on men or less on women. That is why the problem will not be solved.

I agree this is directionally true, at least in feeling. How true is it if we do the math? One counter example was women falling out of the workforce during Covid. Although that was decentralized decision making.

The question you posed is much more interesting than the actual topic.

Except the median mother is happy about her decision to have children, enjoys being a mother, and in fact IIRC desires more children than she’s likely to have. Convincing young people and especially women that the trade offs aren’t worth it is itself the result of a propaganda campaign, which is effected in part by separated non-mothers from mothers.

This seems analogous to the obesity epidemic that's also been called a "crisis" in many Western nations. The revealed preference of many people is that they would prefer to indulge in high calorie foods and lack of exercise, and then they suffer health issues including possibly early death later on. This is an eminently reasonable preference, especially in modern Western nations, where the deliciousness and diversity of food is at incredibly high levels and the importance of physical fitness and downsides of bad health issues are at incredibly low levels. It seems that at least some of these obese people regret their eating/exercise decisions that caused their health issues, but then all that means is that their revealed preference is to indulge in their youth, then later on suffer the negative consequences including regretting those indulgences, rather than to not indulge and to not suffer health consequences of obesity by not being obese.

I suppose this points to the difficulty of figuring out how exactly to weight revealed preferences when that preference includes both a decision and regretting that decision. In those cases, do we just say that everything is hunky dory, since they're meeting their preference of regretting their present decision in the future? Or do we say that something has gone wrong, because preferring to regret something is a concept that's in tension with itself?

I'm sure exceptions exist, but in my experience, most obese individuals I’ve encountered fit one or more of the following categories:

a) They struggle with poverty,
b) They deal with depression or isolation, or
c) They're part of a family with substance abuse issues, like alcoholism.

Revealed preferences are not a great way to model addictive or stress-driven behavior. Overeating, for example, may appear to be a revealed preference of someone who is depressed, but this behavior is highly contextual. It often vanishes when the individual is removed from those circumstances.

Furthermore, individuals aren't monolithic. Everyone is more like a collection of competing drives wrapped in a trenchcoat. "Revealed preferences" are often better understood as the final outcome of an internal, contingent battle between various drives and impulses, rather than the true essence of a person. What we observe as a preference in the moment may simply reflect which drive happened to win out in that context, not a consistent, rational choice.

As people age, they often gain the wisdom and self-determination to step back and recognize these internal conflicts. They realize that their earlier choices—made when their short-term drives held more sway—were myopic and not aligned with what they genuinely value in the long term.

As people age, they often gain the wisdom and self-determination to step back and recognize these internal conflicts. They realize that their earlier choices—made when their short-term drives held more sway—were myopic and not aligned with what they genuinely value in the long term.

Yes, and that's the rub, isn't it? In such cases, do we say that someone's myopic short-term drives are their "true" preferences that ought to override whatever they genuinely value in the long term, or do we say that what they genuinely value in the long term are their "true" preferences that ought to override their myopic short-term drives?

If it turns out that some significant proportion of women who choose not to have children when they can end up regretting it when they age up to when they no longer can - a big if, IMHO - then should the next generation of young women celebrate them and follow in their footsteps, since those older women got to live out their short-term drives in their youth, short-term drives that they would have had considerable difficulty living out even just 100 years ago due to the lower freedoms and opportunities offered to women back then? Or should the next generation of young women see these older women as warnings for how they could end up suffering in the long run due to following their own short-term drives? I could see different people having different answers to these depending on their values.

Convincing young people and especially women that the trade offs aren’t worth it is itself the result of a propaganda campaign...

You don't need any such campaign to convince people the trade offs aren't worth it. It's blatantly obvious that parenting is full of unpleasantness, and not at all obvious that there's any upside. If anything, you need a propaganda campaign to convince young people "no really, you'll be glad you had children in the end".

It is obvious to young women(or anyone else) who are around mothers and identify with mothers that mothers like and enjoy being mothers and consider the trade offs worth it. But that’s not the information diet of young women/girls- the information diet is a stream of exaggeration about how much it sucks.

I’m reminded of the Australian study about the girls who were required to care for a doll programmed to cry and the like in order to try to convince them not to get pregnant. They wound up getting pregnant at higher rates, because their information diet was unrealistically negative about having babies and it was a needed corrective.

It is obvious to young women(or anyone else) who are around mothers and identify with mothers that mothers like and enjoy being mothers and consider the trade offs worth it.

I have been around plenty of mothers in my day. That is not at all obvious to me. So no, I don't agree with your argument that its obvious and that our culture is just suppressing that.

When mothers express woe, it is difficult to discern ...

  • what is just complain-bragging and they actually do really enjoy being mothers
  • what is real pain, but not inherent to motherhood, but rather a result of modern parents and especially mothers being terrible at discipline.
  • what is real pain and unavoidable even with better parenting know-how

unavoidable

I mean, women are figuring out how to avoid it, it turns out.

It's blatantly obvious that parenting is full of unpleasantness,

A lot of parenting issues that look very unpleasant from the outside are far more rewarding when actually experienced as the parent, because it is your child. Even holding my two-year old in my arms while he throws a tantrum is rewarding for me, even if unpleasant to the person passing me in the store.

I don't think most parents enjoy that. You may be a statistically odd person for enjoying a public tantrum.

It's clear a lot of people are basically entirely replaced by some sort of parent-version of themselves once they have a child. But the non-parent version doesn't have much reason to believe this will happen... or, more importantly, to desire it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky's ex-wife wrote a cute story about that, "Attunements".

But being afraid of one's values and personality being altered by parenthood seems like a boy being afraid of having his values and personality altered by puberty; it's a fundamentally natural part of our lifecycle, and the alternative is to remain stunted forever.

If anything, you need a propaganda campaign to convince young people "no really, you'll be glad you had children in the end".

The data bears this out as being true. That's why you do need a propaganda campaign, to convince young people to make the decision which heavily weighs towards deferred gratification and, more importantly, societal health.

It’s certainly true that many women in their forties and fifties wish they’d had another child (my mother had three and has said this, and many other older women I’ve known have said this too). But at the time they didn’t, even when they often could have. Often this is a kind of wistful feeling, because when your children are grown you miss the people they were when they were younger and you wish you were still in that phase of life - it’s tied up with a lot of things, and I don’t know that I’d say it tells us much.

A good point. When you put it that way it’s similar to the lament “I wish I’d worked harder at school” which always sounded to me like “now that it’s reaping time I wish I’d done more sowing”, privileging the wants of your current self over those of your past self.

Yes, another classic is “I wish my parents had been tougher on me”.

Pay it forward by being tough on your kids!

It does tell us a lot. How many people say "I wish I had 2 instead of 4 so I could have had more free time in my 30s or gone out more". Never heard that in my life. "I wish we had X more" I have heard several times.

Imagine "I wish I had more children" compared to "I wish I had more free time in my 30s." The former is so much more tragic than the latter.

To be fair... it's not really socially acceptable to say "I wish I didn't have kids, so that I could spend more time drinking/sleeping around." But that might be true! people are complicated.

Part of it is that most kids turn out fine enough and that as an adult in late middle age or old age your children are mostly nice people who love you and come over once in a while to hang out, whose lives you follow and cherish, who bear you grandchildren and who might help you out around the house and/or financially too. It’s kind of the inverse of the younger person overfocusing on diapers and vomit and screaming babies and sleepless nights.

Your friends' scenario is probably my single biggest fear in life. My cousin is disabled in the same way, and it destroyed my aunt's marriage. She'll spend the rest of her life taking care of her, and then her oldest daughter will inherit the job once she dies. She is in her thirties and has the mental capacity of a third grader, has a host of health issues, and will never be independent. The whole situation is a nightmarish black hole that there is no escape from. It's hitting especially close to home as I'm nearing my late twenties and have been talking children with the woman I'll be marrying. If it were fully up to me, I would terminate a pregnancy if our child were to have some kind of developmental disability out the gate, but she has a Catholic upbringing and obviously does not feel the same way, so I'll just have to roll the dice when we have ours.

I do want to push back on the part about social opportunities, though. I recently went on a trip with with my parents, girlfriend, two of my friends, one of their girlfriends, and their parents. Our families are close, and we met by me becoming friends with one of the sons in middle school. As we became friends and hung out after school, my parents met his, and befriended them. Now, years and years later, my parents know dozens of people in the area purely through that initial connection. I think, if you live in the suburbs, one of the only ways to build a functioning social network in your middle years is by having kids and connecting with their peers' parents. Obviously this can only really happen once they get a bit older though. I know you're more of an urbanite, so I'm not sure how much this would apply to you or your brother.

think, if you live in the suburbs, one of the only ways to build a functioning social network in your middle years is by having kids and connecting with their peers' parents.

This is true, and is also what I hate about the suburbs. There's no authentic, direct, adult connection. it's all "oh little timmy is in the same club as your little jimmy, and isn't that nice?" It turns all the adults into glorified babysitters who have no identity of their own outside their kids.

I think the truth of the crisis is a kind of trifecta of the three most common reasons here - that motherhood is no longer particularly high status for women; that there are now many other more fun hedonistic things to do that didn’t exist in the same way to normal people a hundred years ago; that a combination of ever more time spent in education and a status-obsessed rat race (the consequence of popular meritocracy, which is one of the worst inventions of all time) mean that people don’t get round to having kids until they’re not going to have more than one or two - plus a little bit of this, although I don’t think it’s the main reason.

The main reason though is 2. Think of the average white collar worker today, say a software engineer. Now compare to the equivalent 120 years ago, say a mid-level accounts clerk at a large company. The truth is the engineer is going to experience a much bigger fall in living standards from having four kids than the accounting clerk did in 1904.

the consequence of popular meritocracy, which is one of the worst inventions of all time

I usually understand the motivation behind people's opinions here even if I don't agree with it, however I'm utterly lost on this one. Other than fertility dropping, is there any other reasons you're so negative about meritocracy?

There's a great comment on the communism thread about how an arbitrary but efficient procedure is better than a fair procedure that eats up arbitrary amounts of resources to calculate:

The first is a simple question about your morning commute. You come up to an intersection, and other cars come up to the same intersection at about the same time. Who should get to go first? Well, right now, you might think that it's just whatever the stoplight says or some local custom about how to deal with stop signs, but is that fair?! You're going to work, which you need to do to feed your family. Surely, you deserve to be able to pass through before some high school senior who's off on summer break and just picking up some coffee and donuts before spending his day just hanging out in the park, maybe playing some volleyball with his friends or something. At the same time, someone else may have more of a need. Their somewhat-senile elderly mother just called them, and they're worried that she's going to accidentally cause harm to herself with what she's up to. So, how do we figure out the fair way to make sure everyone in the intersection gets proper priority? We could have everyone get out of their car and have a little discussion about where they're going and why and then implement some group decision-making procedure in order to allocate priority fairly. Then repeat at the next intersection, and the next intersection, and the next intersection, all the way to work. Even normies can realize that this would be ridiculous. Really press them to make sure that they agree that they are willing to be "not fair", to make the guy going to his mother wait for the high school kid at the light, because the light system is vastly more efficient at moving everyone to their destinations, even if it's "not fair".

(A bonus here is if you can find a suitably shortened clip of a guy asking a commie prof if he can have a playstation in the prof's commie world. Commie prof was all like, "Well, we'd have to have a societal conversation..." and just point out that this is for everything. Stop and have a societal conversation when you want a playstation, when you want to buy a new game, when you want some DLC, when you stop at a traffic intersection, hell, even if you want to pick up some more charcoal for your grill, you're gonna need to stop and "have a societal conversation" about whether "society" is willing to let you have any of those things.)

Making everybody spend seventeen fucking years in the school system so that we can determine who most deserves the high paying, high status jobs is the meritocratic equivalent of having a societal conversation every time two cars arrive at an intersection instead of using traffic lights and stop signs. Literally reserving those positions for a hereditary aristocratic caste would be better than what we have now, because then people could know where they stand and get on with their damn lives instead of grinding themselves to the bone trying to compete with everyone else in the all-consuming zero-sum red queen's race.

Okay, I think I understand the point now, but what I find to be the real issue is that if we were completely honest there's no need for "seventeen fucking years" to determine stuff like who should go to what college and etc. We can determine who is suited for what job with much simpler metrics like IQ, OCEAN personality traits, etc. The whole problem of inefficiency in the current "meritocratic" rat-race is that we lie by saying that "everyone can potentially become anything if they work hard enough for it", therefore subsidizing for example teaching non-basic math to kids that have neither interest or talent for it, making them also suffer through the process. We currently think of "meritocracy" as "giving everyone equal opportunities to compete" rather than "giving those that stand a chance opportunities to compete", the latter being much more efficient and still a "meritocracy" to me.

There's much better aptitude tests we could create if we were willing to throw out of the window two very important principles in the western hemisphere, namely "Everyone is equal" and "Hard work is more important than natural talent". They're very bitter pills to swallow though so I guess we just don't. The current education system is a very long, inefficient and expensive (but "fair") aptitude test, I agree on that.

Competition for resources or general adversity are the main factors that drives improvement not only in economy but in natural evolution too as far as I understand it (improvement in evolution being something like maximizing reproduction/survival efficiency in a given enviroment), a hereditary system removes or undermines those two factors and seems prone to stagnation/atrophy in the long-term.

If you told me then that we would make this "aristocratic caste" a large enough part of the population that it would still allow plenty of competition within it for higher paying positions, I would agree with you that it would be a better system than we've today but it would still feel like "meritocracy" to me, as long as "new aristocratic families" could join the club if they were more fit to compete rather than an "old aristocratic family" that somehow had a downturn in the metrics for consecutive generations. You would also have to ban marriage outside of the "caste" I guess which again also means you need it to be large enough to have enough genetic diversity.

So, on my part I conclude that hereditarism is perhaps a short-term improvement in efficiency but long-term decline in efficiency if we want to maximize results/achievements. Would be interested to see what you think of my logic here.

An endless and unnecessary rat race when heredity / “nepotism” (ie children of doctors becoming doctors, children of actors becoming actors and so on) is a perfectly effective way of sorting people into an occupation in life.

I replied to @erwgv3g34 that had a similar way of thinking and would also be interested to read what you've to say to that if you're willing. In regards to "children of doctors becoming doctors" especifically, how would that work out over generations? Would families of doctors only be allowed to marry other doctors? If the family of doctors married to a family of actors should the kid be able to choose between becoming a doctor and an actor? Would the children of mixed occupation families really be that good in either of their "original" occupations?

Even if we assume that over a long period of term those families wouldn't potentially stagnate or atrophy due to progressive genetic mutation and lack of competition/adversity, it still seems like either a very rigid system (families of a given occupation can only marry their offspring to families of other similar occupations) or a looser system that I would question the efficiency (families, even if only in "high prestige" positions, could mix with not necessarily similar occupations like doctors and actors which may not bring out some of the best doctors or actors especially in the long-term). I'm not sure making the process of selection easier would be a good thing when balanced with my perceived negatives of this system.

It's like, eugenic and functional enough but prone to be overthrown by a system that ensures long-term improvement more assuredly?

Even if we assume that over a long period of term those families wouldn't potentially stagnate or atrophy due to progressive genetic mutation

To my recollection, it doesn't take much of an effective population size to prune out deleterious mutations. Something on the order of the square root of effective population size, just like how a portfolio of 10,000 stocks by market value yields little diversification benefit compared to 1,000 stocks, and surprisingly little diversification benefit compared to 100 stocks.

You misunderstand. I’m not proposing some kind of ultra-authoritarian society in which a caste-based profession system is legally mandated and in which people are required to marry within a profession.

I’m proposing a society that looks a lot like our own, with the sole difference that the expectation of heredity is the default principle in employment. That is to say that there is no law barring children of non-doctors from medical school, but that it would be normal and expected for, say, 80% of medical school students to be the children and/or grandchildren of doctors, and it would be seen as peculiar and strange for someone with no family connection to seek to join the profession, and they would face a tougher time applying (because the 80% would mostly go on to practice in the same areas as their parents, joining their hospitals and practices).

That highly ambitious and smart people of humble origin will make their way in the world has always been true, and it’s a great thing. There would be nothing to prevent someone smart starting a business, making money, and then paying or persuading someone in the professions to take on their child as an apprentice banker, or corporate lawyer, or doctor for that matter. Maybe your childhood best friend comes from a family of engineers, and becomes one too, so you send your own that-way-inclined child to follow that path with his (official) recommendation. These things are all good and normal. What is not normal is the masses being forced into the rat race for no real reason, forced to become grasping, desperate people in search of a profession.

Most people are happier with a path in life than with the endless (and mostly unrealized) possibilities of meritocracy. And they matter more than a few ultra-ambitious psychos who we have geared our entire society around allowing to ‘ascend’ to MIT and then Wall Street / FAANG via two decades of sorting.

I see, that sounds much more reasonable, apologies for misunderstanding.

I still can't quite get behind the idea due to details that I won't bother explaining too much (the most important one being that I would hate having "a path" laid out to me, especially if it was my father's), but I can certainly understand why someone could think like you. Either way, thanks for explaining!

No problem, it’s always an interesting question.

That's a real problem when new job categories appear or old ones vastly shrink. I mean, my father was a computer programmer, but nobody in his father's generation was. And the 2500 or so ditch-diggers who built the Delaware Canal... well, their descendants would have been out of luck thanks to Caterpillar.

It’s not like there’s a permanent prohibition on changing jobs, or even that highly capable and ambitious individuals can’t make their own luck - that’s always been the case. In 1650 it was hardly unheard of that a blacksmith might not be the son of a blacksmith; perhaps one required an extra apprentice and took on a boy from the village, or an orphan. Jobs were still created and destroyed. But the presumption of ‘career choice’ didn’t really exist, even for the urban artisanal and nascent middle classes.

Even if we wanted to sort most efficiently (something I would oppose for many reasons), we would be better just giving everyone an IQ test and sorting them into a future profession aged 10 and being done with it.

How can you not select for efficiency and not be defeated by an enemy that selects for efficiency unless we all agree to not be efficient which is a classic case of a molochian trap? Unless you don't think being defeated in the long-term is a big deal?

Maybe you think it would be "efficient enough" I guess?

Hear me out, you could group jobs into categories by the mental requirements, which would also allow associative mating between professions with similar skills.

Even better, you could have dress codes for the different castes to reinforce the division. And you could solve the rapid scaling problem by growing babies quickly in hatcheries.

It would be a world of Community, Identity, and Stability

Right, this is where it once again becomes clear that Huxley utterly failed to write an actually dystopian world, and had to resort to the cheap tactic of making things gratuitously and unnecessarily ugly to make sure readers understand that the Brave New World is supposed to be bad, actually.

You have it backwards, he was writing his utopia and had to cover it up with the thinnest veneer of criticism, so people don't show up at his door with torches and pitchforks.

I love you man, but you're never beating the closeted leftist allegations

At this point I no longer care whether people think I’m right-wing enough. As this recent post of mine probably makes clear, I’m getting increasing disillusioned with a number of trends that I see congealing on what passes for the “intellectual Right” these days, and I’m searching for a sphere that’s far more akin to the early-20th-century “Progressive” intellectual movements that inspired works like Brave New World. Thinkers who had a profound optimism about humanity and technology, instead of the dour, overly-cautious naysaying of the Christian conservative right - a movement I’ve explicitly distanced myself from many times. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that I’m a techno-optimist who wants to live in a hyper-modern mega-city on Mars surrounded by effete Hapa urbanite aesthetes, because I’ve said that openly more than once.

Authleft and authright are always going to have more in common with each other in certain ways than with many small-l liberal ideologies.

around the “fertility crisis”

Why the scare quotes?

Because, as I hope I made clear in my post, it’s not clear to me that low fertility is necessarily a long-term crisis.

It seems pretty clear that the economics of it doesn't work out for modern states. In the very long term a negative fertility rate has a 100% chance of ending a society. I'm not sure what term length you're optimizing for that having a population that halves every few decades isn't a crisis.

Because whether a significant decline in fertility is a “crisis” is a matter of opinion. One can make the argument (and I’m not necessarily making it) that with mass automation Japan declining in population from say 125 million to 20 million people wouldn’t really be a ‘crisis’.

The two problems are a) it's not clear mass automation is getting there, and b) it's very far from clear that whatever's causing the fertility drop will stop at after a few or even few dozen halvings of the human population. Especially if you think there's some critical number of humans necessary to keep that automation infrastructure working, there's a lot of ways this pathway goes that don't have directions out.

((I'll ignore the financial clusterfuck, since tbh even with saner fertility numbers it's still gonna be a clusterfuck.))

The two problems are a) it's not clear mass automation is getting there, and b) it's very far from clear that whatever's causing the fertility drop will stop at after a few or even few dozen halvings of the human population.

The supply chain for high-end semiconductors includes multiple single-supplier components, with the single suppliers being spread across three continents. It seems more likely than not to me that we really need a whole planet to support a 3nm fab, and that 3nm fabs would cease to exist if the number of high-IQ people in first-world countries halved.

If there's a genetic component that contributes to propensity to have children, then that will end up rapidly spreading through the population. So, give it a millennium or so, and the problem will have solved itself.

(Some here might say there's a dysgenic aspect here--high time preference winning over low time preference, for example--but if it ends up out competing, isn't that ipso facto eugenic?)

if it ends up out competing, isn't that ipso facto eugenic?)

It would be ipso facto selected for and evolutionarily sound But eugenics is the selection of genes that people find good, meaning literally good genes, not just another word for what gets selected for.

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