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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.
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).
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.
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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.
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."
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.
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?"
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.
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?
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.
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.)
Conservatives don't have a solution to low TFR because Christianity, the European fertility cult for many hundreds of years at this point, is waning.
You know who has a fertility cult? The Jewish sects in Israel which have staggering TFR. Those sects have other problems, too, but it's proof positive for how our religious impulse directs our breeding behavior.
We need a post-postmodern, non-Abrahamic fertility cult, specifically one that esoterically targets, not just higher TFR in general, but a eugenic mate selection. Higher TFR for only high-quality people. Conservatives can't provide that.
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