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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26164 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Towards a grand unified theory of birth rate collapse

Ask someone without any interest in the topic why birth rates are collapsing globally or in their own country, and they will usually find some way of saying it's too expensive. Either wages aren't high enough, house prices are too high, childcare costs too much. Often they will bring in their own pet issue as a rationalisation (global warming, inequality, immigration, taxes).

They are of course, wrong. Global GDP per capita has never been higher, and global TFR has never been lower. Countries with higher GDP per capita numbers tend to have lower birth rates, although the relationship isn't necessarily causal. Clearly, 'we can't afford it' isn't factually true.

So what is causing it? There are certainly things that governments and cultures can and have done to encourage births on the margins. Cheaper housing does allow earlier household formation, which increases births. Dense housing suppresses birth rates, even if the dense housing lowers overall housing costs. Religiosity increases birth rates, all other things being equal. Tax cuts for parents increase birth rates. Marriage increases birth rates vs cohabiting. Young people living with their parents decreases birth rates. Immigration of high-TFR groups works until the second generation. Generous maternity leave and cheap childcare seem to help. However, none of these seem to be decisive. There are countries that do everything right and yet birth rates still continue to decline.

The universality of the birth rate collapse suggests that the main cause must be something more fundamental then any of the policies or cultural practices I have named. Something that affects every country and people (with a few notable exceptions that will be the key to working out what's going on).

Substacker Becoming Noble proposes that the birth rate collapse is caused by one thing:

Status

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.

I won't spend too much time summarising the article. It is excellently written and I wouldn't do it justice. The key thing to take away is that, within global culture, having children is neutral or negative for status.

But let's apply the hypothesis to various groups with unusually high or low birth rates and see if they match the predicition.

Becoming Noble gives the example of Koreans. Infamously, South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet. It is also hyper-competitive and status obsessed. Children spend most of their waking hours studying for the all-important college entrance exam, so they can get into the best college, to get into the best company from a small selection of prestigious Chaebols (the most prestigious is Samsung, as you'd imagine). According to Malcolm Collins, the Korean language even requires its speakers to refer to people based on their job title, even in non-professional settings. In a country which is defined by zero-sum status competition, the main casualty is fertility.

Of course, South Koreans aren't the only East Asians to have low birth rates. All East Asian countries have very low birth rates, and the East Asian diaspora also has very low birth rates, even in relatively high-TFR countries like the USA or Australia.

Richard Hanania proposes that East Asians, being particularly conformist, are particularly sensitive to the status trade-offs of having children. This would explain why we see similarly low TFRs among the diaspora.

So now we move on to groups with unusually high TFRs. The most famous are the Amish and the Hasidic/Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox Jews.

The Amish are rural, religious people, so we would expect them to have a relatively high TFR, but even compared to other rural Americans, the Amish stand out for extremely high fertility. They don't spend long in school, they marry young (and don't allow divorce) and stick to traditional gender roles. But according to this description of Amish life, the key factor is that among the Amish, being married and having a large family is high status, for both men and women. Amish culture is cut off from global culture in important ways. They are not exposed to television or the internet, they don't socialise much with the English, and they are limited in what modern status goods they can buy. So for young Amish, the only way to gain any status is to marry and have children.

Unlike the Amish, the Haredim are urban people. Instead of leaving school at 14, the young men spend their most productive years in Torah study, supported by their wives and government benefits or charity. Meanwhile, their women pop out children and work at the same time. Urban living, extended education, and a rejection of traditional gender roles should all suppress their fertility, but they don't. Tove (Wood from Eden) proposes that the religious restrictions on Haredi men reduce the worry from Haredi women that their menfolk might leave them. This, combined with a religiously-motivated rejection of global culture encourages them to focus their status-seeking energies on having large families. This also seems to have the knock-on effect of increasing Israeli birth rates among other Jewish groups there.

Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline. Pronatalist Daniel Hess argues that this is because these countries make motherhood high status in a way that most others don't. Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture.

So what is to be done? There is of course no magic button that a president can push to make parenthood high status. But the most obvious thing would be for governments to simply tell their citizens that having children is pro-social. They should promote having kids the same way they promote recycling or public transport. Promoting marriage would likely help, as well as pivoting school sex education away from avoiding teenage pregnancy (which has essentially disappeared in the developed world) and towards avoiding unplanned childlessness.

So, I had some thoughts on this topic come up when watching the Nostalgia Critic review tv commercials from the 80s and 90s — specifically, the “baby doll” commercials. Ads for dolls that cry, and wet themselves, and such; with those all held up as selling points for the toy. In particular, the 1996 “Take Care of Me Twins,” with their burping, drooling, runny noses, etc., and how stressed out the girl in the ad looks — and this is intended to make girls want these dolls? And yet…

Which reminded me of the 2016 Australian study discussed here, about how baby simulator dolls intended for education programs discouraging teen pregnancy — replacing the old “haul around a bag of flour for a week” method they used back when I was in “health” class — actually increased a girl’s probability of having a kid by age 20 (and, interestingly, also “a 6% lower proportion of abortions, compared with the control group”). This raises a few points, starting with the fact that as family sizes have gotten smaller, society has become more atomized, birthrates have fallen, and childcare has been increasingly professionalized, the amount of exposure people — particularly young people — have to babies and infants has definitely declined.

First, like the article notes, there’s nothing that triggers “baby fever” in some woman like spending time around babies — or even just a quality simulacrum of one. But with no extended family, fewer siblings (and siblings closer together in age), no babysitting the neighbors’ toddler for a couple hours as a teen, fewer of the women in their friend group having kids and bringing the baby around for everyone to coo over, and so on, how many people these days can go most of their life with minimal exposure to cute young humans? So many women end up with their only exposure to maternal-instinct-triggering-stimuli being small animals, and then we wonder why they end up with “fur babies” instead of children? (It’s a sort of feedback loop.)

Relatedly, people have mentioned the decline of alloparenting in the context of not having Grandma around to help with the kids anymore. But go far enough back, and plenty of alloparenting used to be done by younger relatives too. Back when you could have families of five, six, or more siblings, spread out across a decade or more. You’d have the older girls as teenagers helping out with their younger siblings, and then the younger girls as teens helping their older siblings out with their nieces and nephews. Teenagers babysitting younger kids. Many more girls would end up with some level of experience in child care before becoming mothers themselves. Now, how many women have no experience whatsoever before having a kid, making parenthood a sink-or-swim prospect of plunging straight into the metaphorical deep end?

Then, of course, there’s the messages that those anti-teen pregnancy education programs mentioned above end up sending. Sure, they’re supposed to be about delaying parenthood, but the actual message ends up being pretty antinatal. A lot about waiting to have kids “until you’re ready,” but nothing about what that readiness looks like. A lot about being too young to become a parent, but nothing about ending up too old to become a parent. The message is all “BABIES ARE HORRIBLE! HAVING ONE WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE FOREVER! PARENTHOOD IS SCARY! SCARY! SCARY!” We make the prospect of motherhood terrifying, give no opportunity to prepare for it, encourage delaying it until conditions are absolutely perfect… and then wonder why people aren’t having kids. Particularly when you add in everything discussed in this thread about safetyism and allergy to responsibility.

Note that this suggests another way we can help address the birthrate issue, by addressing the education issue here. Note, to some degree it’s simply a change in emphasis. That is, go from “don’t have kids (until you’re ready)” and “(teen) parenthood is awful” to “don’t have kids until you’re ready” and “teen parenthood is awful.” And, as noted above, it used to be that we could count on families and communities to teach people parenting skills prior to becoming one (making the prospect less scary), but, as also noted, social atomization and the decline itself have deprived us of this. Hence, the need for institutions to step in to fill that gap, and provide a way for young people to be taught and given practice in basic child care.

All of this, of course, is not to say that many of the other factors people point to — housing, the modern hyper-moble job market, the two-income “trap”, safetyism, decline of religion (or even just positive visions for the future) — don’t also matter quite a lot; nor that fixing middle school sex ed will reverse it entirely. But, as the old saying goes, when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you do is stop digging it deeper.

I think that this is a very good take, but I would further add that I think "teen pregnancy" as a snarl phrase is a malformed or malicious meme to begin with, antinatalist in itself even before the emphasis is added. We should be trying to discourage unwed pregnancy, while encouraging women to have children inside of wedlock both early and often. Surely our society would be in much better condition than it is now if it was seen as a terribly unfeminine thing for a woman to be unmarried or childless at 16. It might seem gross, backwater, Muslimesque - but what did being liberal and feminist get us?

We should be trying to discourage unwed pregnancy, while encouraging women to have children inside of wedlock both early and often.

Agreed. (The decline of the "shotgun wedding" has probably been a net negative for society.)

I think that this is a very good take, but I would further add that I think "teen pregnancy" as a snarl phrase is a malformed or malicious meme to begin with

In support of this, I'd note that at least some of the statistics on "teen pregnancy" define "teen" in the numerical sense rather than the conventional — that is, they count any female getting pregnant before age 20 ("Nineteen is in 'the teens,' so it counts!"). Thus, a woman marrying the summer after graduating high school at 18, and expecting her first child a year later, gets counted as a "teen pregnancy."

In spite of being exposed to a bunch of supposedly relevant data in the past few weeks, I feel compelled to ramble about myself / my family / other narcissism-flavored anecdata.

So first of all, divorce would appear to run in my family. My maternal grandmother maried at least thrice, and my paternal grandparents maried young and died single. As my parents were maried 3 months before I was born, well, grandma was starting on marriage 3 at the same time, so I'm not sure that "shotgun marriage" is accurate, but...

Then my parents divorced before my episodic memory kicks in, and I remember things (and remember remembering things) from before I was 2 (with evidence, and yeah, there were times when my memory and the evidence disagreed, but that's a whole other ramblement.) I don't remember a time when my dad wasn't dating his current wife / my stepmom, but I do remember when they were dating and vague images of their wedding. My mom took longer to find a second husband, but seemed to always be dating someone in the interim. She's currently on #3, after dating him for several years.

My paternal grandparents had 6 children, 18 grandchildren, and when my grandmother died at 71, 42 great grandchildren and 1 great-great grandchild. My maternal grandparents are harder to figure, because they didn't talk much about family members I didn't know, so ... 2 or 3? Maybe 4? I actually did meet my great grandmother on my mother's side, and it seems she had close to as many children as Grandma, ±- 1. That side of the family did a lot of migrating, so has been harder to keep track of. Stepmom is the oldest of 2, and her sister is still childless.

On my great grandmother's deathbed, my mother and her sister-in-law both promised her they'd have another child. Mom did; aunt did not. My mother's stated goal was to keep having children until she got a girl. She got 3 boys, and then a broken work/life balance, turned out second husband was abusing my brothers, ... wait did she pay for that big roadtrip we took in 2002 with divorce money? :O I just realized that makes a bunch of sense. ... anyway, then she had to have a hysterectomy, so has 3 boys and last I heard, 1 grandchild from the middle brother.

My dad and stepmom had my sister, then my dad got a vasectomy... then they got two more kids, because my cousin went to prison and they were the only family members responsible enough and healthy enough to trust with them. We've always lived closest to my dad's extended family, though on the opposite side of town. Stepmom's family are in the same general area, maybe 30min away by car. Mom's family is a lot of military people who have moved around a lot, but somehow they always arranged it so Grandma was around to help.

So going any further without tripping over my weird identity crap is tricky, particularly as I'm starting to suspect the subjects are somewhat related... But by the time I got to puberty, I defaulted to wanting children. However, I was not at all interested in finding a partner, and one of the earliest instances of me imagining myself with kids I remember, I just kinda handwaved away their mother with "we probably got divorced; everyone gets divorced." I had one flash-in-the-pan crush in high school that lasted all of until I found out she already had a boyfriend. Plus, my dad told me in no uncertain terms that I should not mess with girls until college. I got to college, and was not interested in anyone there, even though the hormones would not STFU.

By that point, I'd flipped on the subject of children. Theidea was terrifying, and luckily the antinatalists and environmentalists had given me pre-made rationalizations. It wasn't until I got out of college, was exposed to the likes of Lesswrong, and started questioning even more that I concluded that, no, I always wanted children, but when I got enough wisdom to realize how big a responsibility it is, and how antiprepared I was, and also the conflicts with my special snowflake identity crap, I recoiled in panic and took shelter in rationalizations.

Oh, and my sister has one kid, and finds it so stressful that she's got a progesterone implant and stepmom encourages brother-in-law to get a vasectomy (he is not comfortable with the idea).

My dad is the only of his siblings to avoid jailtime, avoid substance abuse, get out of the white trash ghetto, go to college, hold a long-term job and own multiple businesses, and send 3 of his four kids to college (the other took up welding and farming). Though he is a bit more pronatal than stepmom, his branch of the family appears to be an evolutionary dead-end. It kinda pisses me off when I think of it that way. He did everything right, lived the American Dream and pulled himself up by his bootstraps when that was going out of style, but unless my nephew single-handedly raises family TFR, it seems to have all just been converted into a Disney Vacation Club membership. ... OK, now I'm more sad than pissed.

But for me, personally, that "wants children, but is repelled by the things that go into making them" thing, combined with the super atomized and isolating social situation, renders that super unlikely. Even were I to go back to HS or earlier, I doubt I'd have much success overcoming that, unless a magic marriage candidate just randomly appears.

... So, about that time a magic marriage candidate appeared, and I couldn't convince myself it would work long-term, or be worth the sacrifices (she was clearly not planning to live anywhere near me, so I'd functionally be giving up everything I couldn't bring with me on a gamble that it would work out)... At a not-to-be-repeated 9-month training center that was bizarrely effective at constructing a halfway functional temporary community.

What is the unifying factor in all that mess? ... IDK; economics? Social pressures? Too much aspiring to travel? Parenting failing to adapt productively to the changes in technology resulting in Boomers, GenX, Millennials, and GenZ all having unique excuses that are probably manifestations of an underlying unifying principal?

I think people are still in willful denial about how much the unforced costs of childrearing have increased in the past decades. Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore). Starting around age 7, I would spend large stretches of the day home alone, or playing outside (in the streets, or the abandoned gravel pit beyond our housing development) alone or with any number of neighbourhood kids who were also outside unsupervised or could be easily summoned by just walking up to their apartment block and ringing the doorbell. (Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries.) If I needed something from my parents, I would take the bus into town to find them at work (another CPS case?), where they would probably get me some food at the university cafeteria and then drive me home (in a way that is no longer legal, since Germany now mandates child seats in cars up until age 12 (!?)). I got into a good free public school just based on an admissions exam, and into a series of very good universities just on strength of grades and math/science olympiad participation; nowadays I gather you have no chance without an array of eclectic extracurriculars that also need to be found, organised and paid for by your parents. As a result of this increase in safetyism and credentialism, I now see little possibility to raise children and give them remotely as good a life as I had without investing a much larger fraction of my money and time than my parents (really: my single mother and her series of boyfriends) had to for me.

"Status" is only relevant insofar as I think it would both be low-status to raise kids that are obviously miserable and have no prospects, and we would also coincidentally have to sacrifice other things that convey us status (like having full-time academic jobs) to make it not so. To overcome this, you wouldn't just need to fix some putative recent drop in the status conveyed by parenthood; rather, you would need to socially engineer a status reward for it that exceeds all the novel status penalties, which would require entirely new and hypothetical types of machinery. To roll back the cost increase seems like a hopeless ambition - while there may be groups of people (especially here) who could be convinced to oppose the credentialism ratchet, the consensus for safetyism is entrenched to the point that the tribes mostly wage war against each other in the language of harms and dangers that their opponents have not done enough to address.

Starting around age 2, I would routinely be left with a grandparent for the day or multiple days while my mother went to work (harder nowadays since mobility in upper strata of society increased, and nobody I know lives within 100km of their parents anymore).

This made me wonder how many American TV series with multigenerational non-Hispanic White households I could come up with. And the number is... zero? The protagonist of Hey, Arnold is an orphan who has to live with his grandparents. Chris Hansen's Jim Henson's Dinosaurs weren't dinosaurs of color quadrupedality, so I guess they should count?

The Waltons (of course)

Mama's Family (very dysfunctional, but happy families make bad sitcoms)

ChatGPT suggested The Waltons as well, but it's a series from the seventies about the Great Depression. Are there really no series about the Great Recession instead, with a Millennial couple forced to start a family in the same house one of them grew up in?

Here where I live, in the same damn village I grew up in, kids get to play outside unsupervised just like they used to. But good luck convincing my wife that there isn't a ruthless violent pedophile lurking behind every bush - our daughter will never be allowed to go outside without a chaperone.

Social media and anxiety disorders fuck people up.

Funny enough, when I was in primary school (this was in Germany, though probably further north than your username suggests), perhaps around 3rd grade (though memory is fuzzy on that), we had an incident when several girls actually reported having a stark naked exhibitionist jump out from the bushes in front of them on the way home from school. This resulted in some evening information session for parents and a special lesson where we were told to run away and scream for the kids, but at least as far as I remember it put no long-term dent in the frequency of kids (of either gender) playing in the gravel pit, which was right next to unpaved road (cutting through some fields) where the flasher flashed.

My daughter's in college, and based on the Facebook parent groups, having your daughter tracked with a phone app is completely reasonable, and not some bizarre invasion of privacy for an 18-22 yr old. I understand we've extended childhood, but if my 18-22 yr old can't navigate college without me knowing her location every single second, I've failed. When young adults, who should still be in their "nothing can harm me" phase, are so willing to surrender independence in the name of safety, it seems to signal something seriously wrong.

And back to the child thing. How does a 22 year old go from "my parents are tracking me on my phone" to "I'm ready to marry and be totally responsible for an infant" without it taking years?

That’s basically the status quo for traditional multi generational households, except the mother in law actually provides physical benefits, like a floor of the house, pooled cooking, and childcare.

I mean, we let very young teens babysit. ‘Taking care of a baby’ is not actually beyond the capacity of a 22 year old being tracked by her parents.

No one in my experience of raising my child let very young teens babysit. I babysat when I was young, but I am genx. I would have been considered a neglectful mother if I had ever allowed someone younger than college aged and infant/child CPR certified to watch my genz child. Several of her peers - a couple of whom are now in Ivy League schools - weren't allowed to cook anything on the stove in HS ... You think those parents would have allowed a 14 yr old to babysit a 2 yr old (with their child on either side)?

We live in very different worlds.

Wasn't the latchkey kid phenomenon basically peculiar to Generation X and thus a historical anomaly in the grand scheme of things?

Also, I just had to look up that car seat thing on the interwebz and actually found this: "German law requires children up to 12 years of age who are less than 1.5 metres (59 inches) to ride in an approved car seat or booster. If all other restraints are being used by other children, the child may ride in the back seat with a seat belt."

Maybe in the US? I'm pretty much core millennial, but nothing I heard in Europe suggested that children were supervised more at any point since WWII.

To begin with, "latchkey" seems to suggest that you go home and stay home alone. We were playing outside alone, and maybe half the time the parents were actually home - it's not that they couldn't supervise the children, they just didn't choose to.

"Latchkey kids" were called as such because they had to enter the house with a key when they got home because nobody was home yet, as both parents were / the single parent was working late i.e. the kids had to spend a couple of hours on their own everyday. Neither the parents nor the grandparents were around to supervise them, as the latter usually lived somewhere distant etc. They would normally go outside to play actually, because PC games weren't around much yet, cable TV wasn't that widespread and safetyism wasn't yet the social norm. And they often carried the key around their necks to make sure it didn't get lost.

Again, I think it was a peculiar phenomenon facilitated by a combination of social factors that mostly aren't around anymore.

Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries

It's more of an Anglosphere (particularly American) thing. In continential Europe children have tons of freedom. Here's Norway, the Netherlands, France, Japan (admittedly not western, but still WEIRD).

Japan seems much, much less WEIRD than Western Europe, similar to the deep deep red dirt part of the red tribe or Galicia or something. It just emphasizes education to a peculiar degree.

I think it registers as clearly WEIRD on the one fairly culture-independent marker of weird self-actualization (as in Scott's "black people less likely"), perhaps in excess of any Western demographic apart from White Americans. As for the rest, the congeniality to the red tribe is being severely overstated in part due to American culture war projection, turning Japan into some sort of anti-Sweden in American memespace (which is funny because, having pretty deep familiarity with both, I keep being surprised at how similar they turn out to be to each other in random aspects). There are some aspects of Japan that code right wing in the American scheme, but all in all it's very "blue-and-orange morality" to the black-and-white of the Western left-right divide.

Surely Japan is, by global standards, and even compared to Western Europe, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (that last one is debatable). It’s hard to argue that they’re on the whole more Westernized than Western Europe, the literal birthplace of Western-ness, but certainly in some respects Japan is very Westernized.

I think you are arguing that Japan is not as woke/culturally Blue as Western Europe, which seems broadly true to me. But this is, strictly speaking, distinct from WEIRD-ness, and more importantly there are senses in which Japanese culture displays the same lack of memetic antibodies against wokeness as Western European cultures (namely, relatively low emphasis on extended family/clan relationships, and “pathological altruism”).

I’m really struggling to see how Japan is culturally much closer to deep Red Tribe. Respect for ancient traditions perhaps? But Red Tribe (like all of America) doesn’t really have much in the way of ancient traditions. And if Japan is so culturally, whence their much-lower-than-US-Red-Tribe TFR? Do you think that’s entirely explained by their greater emphasis on education?

It’s far less individualistic than Europe or the Anglosphere; the idea that an adult can be obliged to obey a family member is normal there. It’s not western and is generally socially conservative.

My comparison was of degree, not kind.

The discussion is really about how to fix the fertility crisis. Talking about what's caused the fertility crisis is distracting and drives me a little nuts, because the cause simple and obvious: increasing access to safe, cheap, effective contraception depresses fertility.

Imagine if humans, historically, could just choose when to have children. All else being equal, our ancestors never would have made it out of their tiny niche. The only reason we flourished was our sex drive, which obliterates our intentions and exerts irresistible pressure to reproduce. (Hormones, oxytocin, etc. play a complementary role, but couldn't have carried the day alone.)

The solution that suggests is also simple: the Ceaușescu regime demonstrated that outlawing contraception can get the job done: Romania raised TFR, from 2 to 3.5.

Simple, but not sustainable. Ceaușescu also showed how difficult it is to maintain those policies: a sharp decline quickly followed. By the 80s, Romania's TFR was hovering just above replacement-level and trending downward. When the regime fell, so did the restrictions and TFR went down to 1.3. It has recovered, but has not ever reached replacement since.

Where does that leave us? The Romainians offered economic incentives for larger families, but those programs shouldn't get much credit, since they have been tried many other places to little effect. Sure, economic and status incentives can help on the margin: relaxing car seat mandates will improve things a bit, for example, and would be good in itself. Maybe we can even find a few dozen policies like that, which could add up to a measurable but inconsequential boost. Ultimately, though, there's nothing that's going to make large numbers of young people in WEIRD countries to consider their lives and say "yes, a(nother) baby will make my life better". Dreaming of a cultural solution is a dead end: we do not engineer specific outcomes via cultural change. Cultural change and its outcomes are emergent.

But I'm not here to call for a ban on contraception. Restriction proponents are like anti-auto crusaders and other activists unable to accept a new technology. There's no turning back on technologies that profound, immediate positive effects on people's lives, whatever the tradeoffs or externalities. Mail-order Mifepristone is the 3d printed gun of the left.

If there is an answer, it's to go deeper. We have ample survey data that tells us people (well, Americans) want more children. There's some reason to be skeptical of that survey data: we clearly want other things more than children. But at least it suggests a plausible path for the future of humanity. I think the most likely solution involves enlisting human desires instead of restraining them, which means improving fertility-extension technologies is our best hope (and perhaps easing the process of giving birth).

There's no turning back on technologies that profound, immediate positive effects on people's lives,

If that were true, most electricity would be nuclear and I'd have plastic straws right now.

Cultural campaigns can have lasting effect.

In the long run, Luddism is fated to lose because your society stops to exist if it doesn't adopt better technology. But for the specific case of technology that causes your society to become unsustainable, it is fated to win.

Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth. I welcome our new Islamo-Mormon overlords and their actual concern for family life.

Both Mormon and Muslim TFR are in extreme, rapid decline worldwide.

A quick google suggests that the same is true for secular Jews in Israel, leaving Modern Orthodox Jews (in Israel and the west) as the only group capable of maintaining above-replacement fertility in a way compatible with modernity.

Everyone's is, worldwide. But there's spots where it isn't, and all the ones I know about are radically religious compared to the average.

Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth.

There's a reasonable chance this is right. I can't find the comment, but someone here recently summed up that position as "evolution works". Correct! But it just means that negative-fertility species will lose (on a geological timescale), not necessarily that the fundamentalists will win. Most of the fundamentalist groups have a problem keeping children onside, and even their fertility is in decline, with a few notable exceptions.

Surely Romania disproves your argument? You claim that contraception caused the fertility crisis, and then point out that Romanian TFR collapsed in spite of contraception being illegal.

Meanwhile, the baby boom happened across the western world while contraceptives were freely available.

Imagine a world where condoms, the contraceptive pill and hormonal implants don't exist, but where credential inflation, atomisation, the internet and social media do exist. In my mind that world would have the same crisis that our current one does. After all, Japan didn't get the pill until 1999 and yet birth rates were barely at replacement in the 1950s and 60s, only to decline below it in the 1970s. Even hunter gatherers have effective methods of birth control that don't require contraception (long periods of breastfeeding, timing, the withdrawal method and infanticide, primarily).

Meanwhile, both the Amish and the Haredi Jews can and do use contraception. They just prefer to have larger families because their cultures assign high status to having a large family.

I don't think this responds to my claim, which are that the default human position on kids is "not worth the trouble" and therefore making contraception cheaper, more effective, or more accessible mechanically reduces fertility.

I agree that there are legal regimes, beliefs, and customs that foster fertility. I'm just annoyed whenever people write about what "caused" the fertility crisis. There's no theory that makes sense or matches history apart from "people don't want kids and will take measures to avoid having them" except "mo' better contraception."

Japan didn't get the pill until 1999 but its TFR fell from 5 to 2 between between 1925 and 1960. What happened?

Sparked by the visit of Margaret Sanger to Japan in 1922, and through the dissemination of printed information, and the opening of clinics, birth control became widely understood by the general public.

The article goes on to say "Governmental thinking of population as a marker for national power and international strength, however, remained steadfast and led the Japanese government to ban the sale and use of birth control in the 1930s, considering it harmful to the user." I freely admit that there are innumerable confounding factors, but I'm going to take "the introduction of a new technology did exactly what it promised to" as the null hypothesis. (Also, wow, what shitty prose. Do better, Wikipedia.)

Or read Cremieux's post about Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, "The Fruits of Philosophy". TLDR: family-planning advocates disseminate information out to the English population, fertility craters.

Romania only proves that it's hard to stop people from practicing contraception for long.

The Amish and Haredi communities are interesting and useful, but they don't contradict what I'm saying. In fact, the Amish formally prohibit contraception. People infer that some Amish communities quietly accept contraception use, based on differential fertility rates between communities where more conservative communities have higher fertility rates.

The Haredi might prove me wrong, in some sense, but they are also a world-historical outlier that are not obviously reproducible (pun intended).

At any rate, I'm not saying we shouldn't look at communities and societies that have done better. I'm just pessimistic that we can overcome the default human bias by copying them.

People infer that some Amish communities quietly accept contraception use, based on differential fertility rates between communities where more conservative communities have higher fertility rates.

Rad trads ban contraception without quietly using it anyways, and have an overall TFR from our shitty internal data of 3.6. Not 7. There’s lots of different practices that can make big differences in ‘natural’ fertility rate. Female age of marriage, for one thing. Or acceptance of men spending lots of time away from home doing travel jobs; less time with their wives makes a difference at the margins.

I would argue it's just feminism. And I don't mean that in a bad way. Pregnancy sucks for women, it takes 9 months and does permanent damage to their body. It's only natural that as women gain more power in society, they make the rational choice to not have kids and do other things instead.

It jumps out at me that all the high fertility socities you list- Mongolia, the Amish, the Haredim- are, uh, not very feminist groups. I think people get distracted looking at the economy, because most socities get more feminist as they get wealthier.

I know some people will argue with this by saying "but what about Korea!" And I would argue that Korea is actually a very feminist society now, maybe not in the same way as the US, but in the sense that women have a huge amount of social power there. Notably, they elected a woman president, while still excluding women from the draft. The men are killing themselves at work just so they have a chance at getting married, but the women are under no obligation to produce a baby.

Japan, South Korea and China aren't exactly bulwarks of feminism compared to western countries and yet they have even lower birth rates than most European countries.

this is one of those things that gets 10000x updoots on reddit and yet no one can ever show the work to actually prove it. why do you think that east easian countries are all horribly unfeminist?

I guess I remember reading about sexual harassment in Japan being more common, like women getting groped on the subway and stuff. But yeah, to be honest, I don't really know why the idea is my in head that they are less feminist now that I think about it.

This did get me thinking on how you would quantify feminism in a country. There are things like the Global Gender Gap Report and the Gender Inequality Index, but I am generally pretty sceptical of these types of reports, because they tend to oversimplify the matter at hand. For what it's worth, the Global Gender Gap Report has the East Asian countries a bit lower than Western countries but the Gender Inequality Index has Japan and South Korea right up there with Western European countries.

However, my argument might still stand with other examples. Eastern European countries tend to have low birthrates as well, if anything usually lower than Western European ones. Although it is anecdotal, I do know some people from various Eastern European countries and have discussed cultural differences with them and as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.

as best I can tell, countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Ukraine all have low birthrates as well despite having generally much more conservative ideas about gender roles than say Sweden or the Netherlands.

Eastern European countries had and have much more progressive ideas about gender roles thanks to socialism. However, their birth rates were higher due to the elimination of the rat race:

  • they had a relatively solid QoL floor: if you had more kids you were entitled to a bigger apartment and even a car, you had ubiquitous daycare and your old position was reserved for you at your job
  • they had a relative solid QoL ceiling as well: if you weren't a cunning wordcel planning to climb the party ranks, you had no real reason to delay childbirth: your salary by the time you retired could be 200% of your starting one or it could be 190%, not really worth it

When the Iron Curtain came tumbling down, all these limits were gone as well. Forget about doubling your income by retirement. You could double it EVERY YEAR. Worse, you HAD to double it every year because hyperinflation. And at the same time, there were no glass ceilings like in the West: while some heavy industrial jobs were verboten for the weaker sex, women managers were the norm.

I was writing a reply about my anecdata that led me to the view that Eastern Europe is less progressive about gender than Western Europe, but when I was trying to fact check some related claim I wanted to make I stumbled across the Eurobarometer about Gender Stereotypes. Quickly scanning through some of the results, it doesn't actually seem like there is a clear trend of EE being more or less sexist than WE.

Interestingly, Galicia(Ukraine) is likely the most conservative area of the Christian world about stuff like that, and is a fertility bright spot in Europe despite the overall Ukrainian fertility rate being east asia tier.

Thanks, that's a good response. I don't know how to quantify it or prove it either. I've just noticed that a lot of people on the internet seem to think "oh, those east Asian countries are all so sexist" to the point where its becoming a stereotype.

Eastern Europe I think is more of an economic problem. A lot of this countries really cratered with the end of the USSR, but have since recovered a bit

But they are bulwarks of feminism compared to 1920s America, as is everywhere else in the developed world.

"Permanent damage to your body" is something millions of people will willingly do if the STATUS incentive is high enough:

  • Military Special Operations
  • Professional Athletes
  • High stress jobs with extreme levels of compensation (Banker, High end Surgeon, big Litigator etc.)

In fact, what I just listed above are some of the tippy-top status markers for men. Personal health is not at all sacrosanct (flip the coin; millions of people smoke, drink too much, eat too much, and never exercise).

"millions" means about 0.1% of world population yet we want >80% women to become mothers.

I don't think I see your point and, to the extent that (I think) I do, I reject it.

Are you saying that it's unreasonable to expect 80%+ of women to go through pregnancy and labor? I mean, I get it, it's not like this is a species level existential issue - oh, wait, that's exactly what we're talking about.

This is a deeply values based discussion. Pregnancy and childbirth might "suck" and "ruin your body" but the end result is the creation of a human life and, if done during peak fertility years, decades of love and joy. Furthermore, it's necessary for the species to continue itself.

That this observation (about minority of men) is a very weak evidence whether median woman would be affected by it

I can't make heads or tails of what you're saying.

Are you saying that it's unreasonable to expect 80%+ of women to go through pregnancy and labor?

It's obviously unreasonable to expect 80% of women to be held to the same standards of special military operators or pro athletes, and, if that's not relevant, why did you bring it up?

This is an amazing conflation of two points. I wouldn't want to debate you in person as you seem adept at twisting an argument.

Point 1: Incentives matter. People will put themselves through extreme hardships given proper incentives (this was the Special Ops / pro military argument)

Point 2: We should expect the overwhelming majority of women to go through childbirth as the species is dependent upon it.

Your franken-counter-assertion "We are demanding that women be like special operations!"

I see what you did there. It was well done, my congratulations.

That’s more succinct than what I was going to say, but yes. More than half of women are still having children.

It’s a bit odder in Korea, which still has mandatory conscription for men, but fewer than half of women are having babies. Seems related to almost their entire childhood being stressful, not just a year here or there.

Yup.

You can convince a young guy to literally endure repeated blows to the head if the payoff is high enough.

I have yet to see evidence that reticence about pregnancy and childbirth is responsible for more than a non-negligible percentage of the fertility decline, although I suppose you can say every little bit adds up.

Instead I think people don’t want babies, rather than not wanting pregnancy. People don’t look forwards to sleepless nights and changing diapers(yes I’m aware this isn’t a huge deal in practice), they want the flexibility to not have to worry about childcare arrangements, they dread paying for daycare or remember parts of their own childhoods that sucked(and I think this is underdiscussed- by all evidence a big part of the conservative fertility advantage is literally republicans looking forwards to going to t-ball games), they’re afraid the man in their life isn’t committed enough(and extended periods of premarital cohabitation are an increasing problem).

Sure, babies too. the whole package deal is kind of a crappy deal when you think about it logically. worst deal in the history of deals, etc. It's not surprising that women are choosing not to take it.

the whole package deal is kind of a crappy deal when you think about it logically.

I think you ought to stop and examine exactly why you think this, i suspect the answers may surprise you.

i can't find it right now, but someone linked a substack here a few months ago that laid out in brutal detail just how bad the entire process of childbirth is for women. Of course maybe it pays off in some longterm, ineffable, spiritual joy, but you should be able to appreciate why a lot of women wouldn't willingly take that deal.

Nobody I know who has children thinks the suffering of pregnancy or childbirth is on the same order of magnitude as the benefits of having children

Presumably those were all people who had a choice to have kids? At least the choice to not abort. You might hear differrently from women in 3rd world countries where they really don't have a choice (if you can even get them to speak honestly)

Uh, it pays off not in some long-term, ineffable, spiritual joy but in a baby.

I remember the piece you're talking about. It was of course, written by a woman who has never had children.

Meanwhile, women who have children usually have more than one.

do you have a link to it, or remember the author's name? I wanted to read it again but I can't remember it.

Again I think you ought to stop and examine why you would believe such a thing seeing as (as @Gaashk observes) childbirth is arguably a "better" deal than it has ever been in human history and yet birthrates have declined. What do you think is up with that?

On the other hand, birth rates have been dropping especially fast over the past decade, when women have had choices for generations, and things like ultrasounds, epidurals, prenatal testing, formula, c-sections for the convenience of the doctors, and whatnot have been improving. Childbirth is less bad than before. Even feeding babies is less bad than before. Freedom of women is about the same, at least in the anglosphere. Yet birth rates continue to drop.

As you said, the birth rate has dropped despite healthcare getting better, which suggests that it's not a simple matter of healthcare. But while women might have had the same legal rights for a while now, their social and economic power continues to increase.

But while women might have had the same legal rights for a while now, their social and economic power continues to increase.

That's one way to look at it.

Another way to look at it, however, is that as wages are equalized, the wife's income is more likely to be essential to the household budget, such that she is expected and needed to go back to work as soon as possible.

Also, the prenatal programs are pushing breastfeeding. So she's expected (not able, I mean expected) to work until she gives birth, then breastfeed for a month or two, then drop her infant off at daycare and pump at work, and still get up in the middle of the night to feed her infant, while also working a full day outside the home. Even elementary teachers are struggling with this, with a generally easy schedule/ They hide their children in windowless offices on "professional development" days, for instance, because they aren't allowed to organize childcare amongst themselves.

Maybe making childbirth safer, easier, and more delayable has led to women putting off having a baby, because now it's not a now-or-never, might-as-well-get-it-over-with kind of thing like it was?

This appears as you typical minding to me. Honestly, the more I think about the deal, the more it appears to be, logically, the best deal in the history of deals, and someone who can make deals that are better than that one is someone who must be in an almost unimaginably privileged position.

not have to worry about childcare arrangements, they dread paying for daycare

This is only a reason if both parents work outside the home. If one parent is a homemaker no daycare is required.

If lack of daycare / affordability was impacting fertility I'd expect to see higher tfr in countries that have improved access / lower cost care available. Is this what we see?

My suspicion is that what they want is the flexibility to not have to worry about children. The cohort of childless or low fertility women I've the most exposure to other than the lesbians, would see themselves dipicted in fiction as the women from 'Sex in the City' or the strong capable lady doctors of 'Grey's Antotomy'. Free childcare would be unlikely to promote children in this cohort.

Whether free childcare raises the TFR is a question with an answer that depends on how you adjust for confounders IIRC, which almost certainly means that even if it does work it doesn’t work very well. But that’s one thing in a list and I mostly agree with you about what it actually codes for.

That would be a lot more convincing if we didn't incur permanent damage to our bodies merely by staying alive.

As it happens, "why bother caring about my body's state if I'll die anyway" is in fact not very convincing counterpoint to me.

It is a different situation.
It's like I'm asking you to spend money on something I think is worthwhile, and you say "but then I will have less money" except the government keeps the printer on 24/7, you know?

Preserving one's decaying youth at the price of preventing the next generation is literally fairy tale evil queen levels of morality.

I believe the canonical fate for people who make such a bargain is to be cast in a bottomless abyss.

Not exactly esoteric symbolism. But there are few moral choices that are less universalizable than this one.

It's a fertility crisis, not a parenting crisis. Can it really be called selling out your children if you never have any?

Well it's not exactly leaving hungry kids in the woods to fend for themselves but it certainly is selling out the future for the present.

As it happens, there are tons of thing people do to their body regularly that incurs damage. The idea that pregnancy is unique is the outlier position.

I'm not sure the concept of 'status' as this drive we semi-unconsciously pursue adds any explanatory value. The reason that having kids isn't 'high status' anymore is that the moral values we hold and express have shifted away from ones that name having children and a family as a duty, and a good, to ones that name 'freedom' from the coercion of patriarchy as a good. So if people are having fewer children, it's because they value them less. That it's higher status in Amish and Haredi communities to have children is just a direct consequence of them valuing children more! A reasonable number of people in liberal communities have two children, and some have 3+, because they, personally, value it, even though it's 'low status'.

I think removing that layer explains why this is harder than the government merely telling citizens they should have children - the reasons we value children less are very deep ideological ones tied with the growth of liberalism and progressivism over the past few centuries. And the reason the government isn't doing that is because the people in government, and the voters, don't value having more children. If everyone (or even all elites) valued having children as much as you or Elon do, the game would already be over!

I've seen that article before. It's plausible, I suppose, but I don't think that in countries like the US, the government confers much status, so there's not much to do there. The Trump administration probably confers anti-status.

There's a lot about this on the message boards this week, including a link to a fairly interesting article on the Reddit (by CanIHaveaSong, who sometimes used to post here). DSL is going on about nannies and au pairs, because they're upstanding citizens like that.

Clearly, the transition to a post industrial economy has been bad for birthrates everywhere. But, also, the population of many of these places doubled in living memory, while the political entities, "good jobs," and "good colleges" did not double. At least agricultural output more than doubled, so we don't have famine, but if we really want to sustain the current population level, we should probably have more top tier institutions, more cities, more high quality corporate jobs -- twice as much of the things people aspire to and work for. Apparently Georgia's population sank by a million from 1993, and is about the same as 1960. Mongolia's rose, but the country still has fewer people than the Phoenix metro area.

The Trump administration probably confers anti-status.

Except among the 40% of the country which supports him, I suppose.

It's very plausible that Trump can raise their TFR by somehow making babies higher status among that subset. It doesn't seem like he will actually do this, obviously, but it doesn't seem like there's any reason he can't.

It's very plausible that Trump can raise their TFR

Believe it or not, that already happened in 2016. I'd put money on it happening again, since the conservative-liberal fertility divide has deepened since then.

Most of my immediate family voted for Trump, but I'm still having trouble imagining anything he says or does increasing the social status of parents.

I guess if he actually succeeded at revitalizing jobs by which a man of modest ability can support a family of five. But even among the evangelicals and Christian homeschoolers of my youth that ship had already sailed, and the families with decent status needed the father to be an engineer at least, so that he could support his six children and still go on retreats that cost some amount of money, and send his wife and children likewise. Several of my friends also have at least three children and may have voted for Trump, and I still feel like if we got awards we would all laugh and think "that's so weird."

But you have several children in an environment where you're bucking the trend. Maybe such a recognition would be more aimed at encouraging people like me (one and done) to have more? Wouldn't have worked. I know my limits. But I know folks who wavered on the second/third who might have been budged by messaging that doing so was "good" in some way. I wonder though if making access to fertility treatments cheaper/easier might not work more if you want more kids. While having kids younger would make some of that less necessary, at our current state of later marriages and child bearing, it has to play a significant role.

Yeah. I had a second partly because I wanted someone to eventually play with my older daughter. But I'm living in a 2500 sq ft mobile home on a half acre, with a wagon/SUV that fits three child car seats already, so have different costs/benefits than someone in a dense city with expensive housing.

I guess if he actually succeeded at revitalizing jobs by which a man of modest ability can support a family of

I'm not sure this is possible? The reason one can't support a family of five is that our standards have gone up. All the material goods you need to support a child are cheaper relative to median income than 100 (to say nothing about 200!) years ago.

Yeah, that's why I don't think it's likely to work out.

laugh and think "that's so weird."

I have four children and I'm with you on this. Yet I think there may be something to the discomfort in accepting the thanks / reward for doing something pro-social that not enough capable people are doing.

What is the source of the "that's so weird" discomfort? It feels a bit like embarrassment to me. I'd rather heap shame on the childfree.

It's probably related to America not generally having many meaningful awards outside of the military, so it would kind of feel like it was coming out of left field. It would seem less weird to be part of some sort of ceremony involving the Georgian patriarch, even as an American, since he already belongs to an extremely ceremonial church (and culture more generally).

I think that's part of it, to some it sounds like the, Ehrenkreuz der Deutschen Mutter, something Nazi's would do.

Is there a form it could take that would be not weird?

If the award was a free 7 or 8 passenger SUV that let you buy untaxed fuel and park in handicapped parking spots or a license to buy gold from the gold window at 1971 prices.

If it had real tangible benefits to the recipient is it less weird?

It would be less weird, but much, much more expensive.

I'm not sure what the government could do at this point to get me to have another child. Maybe a year of maternity leave at my full salary and a vehicular upgrade. I absolutely did not like going back to work with a month old newborn, and having to hand deliver a check to pay back their side of my insurance for that time.

There are countries with significantly more maternity leave and public health care, still with low fertility.

Could you be tempted to have four or more children if the government canceled / retired your student loans / and or mortgage debt? No income tax for the rest of your life? The elderly giving up their seats for you on public transit, boy scouts, police and other public servents saluting you? You get the veterans and first responders discount at Lowe's?

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I mean, lots of people would take a free car and $.40 off per gallon no matter how weird it is.

Something I've been thinking about writing an effort post on is the seeming death of "the adult", and the issue of delining issue seems directly related.

My 30-second elevator pitch is that the people talking about dysigeninics and raising the status of big families are either burying the lede or missing the point. That lede/point being that the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families and rearing of children.

In the immediate aftermath of the election there was a user here asking who were the 40-something percent of women who voted for Trump because the didn’t know any. In contrast the answer seemed obvious to me because I know many women who voted for Trump, and the answer was "Moms".

The reason big families are "low status" is that they signal a rejection of many core secular liberal beliefs. A married couple with multiple car seats in the back of thier vehicle may as well be screaming "the things you care about are not the things we care about" at every member of the intellectual, activist, and managerial classes they drive past.

You have a "fur-baby"? That's cute, call me when you're ready to stop playing the game on "beginner mode".

the seeming death of "the adult"

I mean, you'll get engagement from me, at least.

But you won't quite get what you're expecting; I'm going to posit that the people who do raise families are not properly equipping their children as a direct response.

The active anti-adult memes are part of this, but they don't entirely explain it among the children; the typical failing of the wise parent is that they refuse to delegate and make time for delegation, because they're too busy believing the meme about their kids not becoming fully human until way later than it actually happens. I've seen this first hand from parents I consider to be pretty wise, but at the same time they're failing their children because they didn't grow up in a memetic/economic environment that's far more blatantly hostile to human development (and no, it's not 'social media' or 'video games' or other purely reactionary Boomer cope; if anything, they're more popular than they otherwise would be because every other avenue of "actually doing something" has been shuttered for safety or cost reasons- it's not a surprise they spend every waking hour in the only free space they're allowed [for now] to participate in).

A married couple with multiple car seats in the back of thier vehicle may as well be screaming "the things you care about are not the things we care about" at every member of the intellectual, activist, and managerial classes they drive past.

So's a 10 year old walking down the street or riding his bike unsupervised. He screams that his parents don't put an absurd value on safety and hiding under the bed from all risk whatsoever.

The PMC, and people with that mindset, respond in kind; the fact they're allowed to is kind of the central issue there. Safety arrests development; and kids are inherently a very unsafe thing to do. Hence fur-babies, where you're [for now] allowed to kill them or otherwise dispose of them if they turn out wrong, can send them to multi-day daycare whenever you want, can keep them in a cage to prevent them from wrecking the house, and their purpose [to us] generally matches their intellectual capabilities quite well- something that it's a meme for parents to bemoan without end the minute this stops being true for their children ('teenagers').

I'm going to posit that the people who do raise families are not properly equipping their children as a direct response.

Sure, you can always blame the parents but that's also part of what I'm talking about when I say that "the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families". You see, I actually agree with you that having kids is inherently "unsafe", and therein lies the rub. Because if there's anything in the world that the modal secular blue/grey-tribemember seems desperate to avoid, it is personal risk, or more pointedly blame.

I believe this aversion is at the root of many modern pathologies including the seeming death of the adult. That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.

Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.

I enjoy theories like this, but personally I separate:

1: The anxiety of intelligent (and often autistic) people, who feel like they need to control the world and make everything legible and predictable, because they hate risk.

2: The mentally fragile, who is afraid of being a "bad person", afraid of being judged, and afraid of anything which might push them out of the category "mediocre" because such things poses a social risk.

Group 1 tend to be individualistic and unafraid of questioning the narrative, whereas group 2 is the polar opposite of this. Group 1 is neurotic and tends to have low EQ, whereas group 2 has high EQ but avoids risk because they have very little faith in themselves as individuals, and they need to be part of something bigger in order to act, so they're always looking for some cause or group to be a part of. Group 1 are often childish and sort of naive in that they trust people too easily, and they're higher in the trait "openness" which allows them to believe in more far-out ideas, part of this naivety is likely that they dislike lies, and project this onto others, and another cause is probably spending a lot of time alone, so that they more easily retain childhood naivety. Group 2 are are childish and naive in that they are afraid of negative emotions and anything else which might aid their personal growth. They tend to consume whatever helps distract them from reality (modern entertainment), and they have plenty of friends who will aid them in keeping their delusions intact (You're so valid! Being a little chubby is okay! Being triggered over mean words is totally normal!)

It's hard to cut these two groups perfectly in two, but if I had to try, group 1 are rigid and logical people in an illogical world which requires flexibility, and group 2 are flexible but weak-willed normies who live in shared social delusions (blank slate, etc) and care more about emotions and social reality than they care about objective reality.

Yep, another way to say this is that our response to shame is dramatically over exaggerated exaggerated.

having kids is inherently "unsafe"

Used to be the opposite. Not having kids was how to be unsafe. Kids were your safety net.

You're not wrong.

Isn't this death of the adult the same as described downthread here https://www.themotte.org/post/1199/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/257235?context=8#context

By

@jeroboam as

government competency crisis

And

@Capital_Room as

Weber's "rationalization," it's a hallmark of "modernity,"

And

@The_Nybbler as

the essence of modern management theory

All describe the same aversion to agency and personal responsibility.

I would say that what @WhiningCoil, @jeroboam, @Capital_Room, @The_Nybbler, Et Al. are describing is the downstream effects of what I am describing. IE the afore mentioned "modern pathologies"

And @Capitol_Room as

It's Capital_Room, with "capital" as in letters, city, or punishment, not "capitol" as in legislative building.

And I'd agree that, yes, these do all point toward the same thing.

I've fixed it.

Sure, you can always blame the parents

Well, and in fairness that's not the complaint I'm answering (or rather, it's the far more complicated version of "protect your kids from hostile social memes" that, unless you have time [and most parents don't], you won't have neither the presence, energy, or finances to combat it correctly- which is part of why parental rights are a dead letter these days, but I digress).

That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.

Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.

Humorously, the people blue tribe love to import have a much healthier relationship with risk than the natives do (risk-taking is obviously selected for when immigration is illegal). And then blues are shocked when their imports won't vote for the party of risk-aversity.

or more pointedly blame

2 thoughts (that say mostly the same thing):

First, when blame (and failure) becomes rare, the ability to assign it (or threaten such) becomes a far more powerful force than it otherwise should be relative to the objective risk.

Perhaps, in economic booms, there are very few ways to truly fail, so the ability to properly weight failure is diluted; then, when that boom ends and more ways to fail appear, the people who grew up in the 'too much opportunity to fail' times can't handle weighting risk correctly. After that, if the bust continues for long enough, you'd get another generation passing on that problem, and the negative feedback loop of "too scared to do anything" continues until the next generation has more opportunity than the last.

Second, we did such a good job (in that boom time) engineering all risk (and the human factor in general- WEIRD people automate everything, it's just how we are) out of our systems that when something does blow up, now it's a big deal.

It is, quite literally (on a social level) an allergy to risk; then, when kids are born into a society that has such an allergy that metastasizes into an allergy to blame.

2 thoughts (that say mostly the same thing)

These are legit points that I l will have to bring up if/when i get around to writing said effort post.

Global GDP per capita has never been higher Well, some part of GDP increase is fake and some part of GDP is not owned by population at fertile years. A hairdresser doing same work in 2020 as in 1950 is counted as higher GDP but you can't eat it.

Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture. Kazakhstan actually switched to Latin recently. The common in these countries is nationalism.

As I’ve said before, it is possible to reduce declining fertility by making having more children higher status. It wouldn’t even be hard (to paraphrase Moldbug). But it would require:

  1. Blocking college admission to the 70th+ percentile of colleges for anyone with fewer than 2 siblings.

  2. Reserving 90% of seats on corporate boards (for major public companies), and cabinet positions, along with senior federal and state government jobs for adults with at least 3 children

  3. Implementing a 70% inheritance tax on adults with no children for all assets over $500k, which would fall by 20% per child. This encourages families with one or two children to have more so.

  4. Require all full professors at universities that receive any public funding to have at least 2 biological children; 70% should have at least 3.

  5. Require 75% of actors over 30 on all film and television productions that receive state tax credits and other incentives to have at least two children.

  6. Legally mandate 9 months of paternity pay (which can be split or taken all at once) per child at full pay for all American men, but only if married (and make it much harder to fire fathers under threat of federal civil rights investigation than it woul be to fire childless men).

I’m not advocating these things (necessarily). But low tfr is always a choice, and that should be remembered.

I don't think it would take that much to merely reduce declining fertility. If you treat "conservatives" in the United States as a social group, they reproduce at or above replacement rates. Partially I think this is because kids make people conservative, but partly because in their circles having children is an honorable thing that is encouraged.

People forget there was a lot of anti-natal propaganda in schools, television, etc. I suspect that simply running that experiment, but reversed, on another generation of kids would get birth rates to rise/decline more slowly.

It seems possible that bigger-stick stuff like what you lay out would be better at getting to quicker rates more rapidly.

It's because conservatives live in rural areas, close to their extended families from which they receive millions of dollars in free child care.

So perhaps what you're suggesting is making pre-K childcare free would boost fertility? I'd buy that.

Working/middle class families in the US already get free pre-K(not younger though) and Children’s health insurance through means testing.

No, all the way until they are like 14.

I agree this would work, but I'm not even sure it's the hard part. The hard part is convincing the 'best people', those that drive culture and policy, that it's necessary. But if you've done that, it'll probably already trickle down to the masses anyway (and not just via pure cultural diffusion, but because if a set of ideas has convinced most of the 'best people', it's probably a very convincing set of ideas, and it'll probably work for others too! I also think this is a general way in which the influence of the elites on culture is somewhat overstated.)

The issue with this idea is that it encourages all the super high powered innovators etc. who would otherwise have created massive new companies to emigrate to another country without these laws if they don't want to have children.

One solution would be to have the laws only apply to the half of the population that has traditionally focused on child rearing, while the half of the population that has traditionally focused on innovating and building companies would be exempt.

But that's certainly a conversation that no one wants to have.

You can have that conversation, but it would lead to a lot of aimless women rather than many more children because most 24 year old men don’t want to be married with three children at that age.

most 24 year old men don’t want to be married with three children at that age.

24 year old men, for the overwhelming majority of human history, absolutely wanted to be married with multiple children. Modern society is the exception, not the rule. Now, let's not resists temptation to hit the RETVRN button.

Instead, let's figure out how to encourage earlier family formation while still enjoying the benefits - and avoiding the pitfalls - of modern technology and industrial capacity.

Uh, in human history most men did not marry by 24, and there isn’t a lot of evidence that they wanted to.

Non-WEIRD societies had a typical marriage of teenager+30 year old. Europeans in the late medieval and early modern era married later as women, but not earlier as men. The fifties saw most 24 year old men married and having children.

There's no law of nature saying women can't marry older men. I suspect that if women actually had strongly restricted prospects they would do just that, because it's what women do in societies where there prospects are strongly restricted.

In many conservative Muslim countries both men and women marry older, and in most trad communities men aren’t significantly older than women at age of first marriage. What examples are you thinking of?

The US, circa 1900.

But that's certainly a conversation that no one wants to have.

Oh? I hear the faction of childless unmarried women talk about what you’ve described- equity, not equality- all the time.

They know what the solution is, it’s just that if it was implemented correctly they’d be in the crosshairs.

Would be bad in Britain. But America can afford it, there is nowhere else like it.

Wouldn't rich people just adopt an adult, Japanese style, in order to avoid the penalty. They could pay the adoptee a small amount for their trouble and leave the rest to the Richburger Fund For Getting Skinsuited By Activists like they all do now.

“Couldn’t people just lie to the IRS?”. Yeah, sure, but you scare a few people with enforcement and make sure the rules include “the spirit of the law” (as they do with tax) and violation will be limited.

That's not lying to the IRS though. They're legally your heirs, they're your children, and iirc at least in the US you can still give them $50k for their trouble and do whatever you want with the rest. Unlike France, say, where they could sue for an equal share.

Sure but if you are already talking about a sweeping legislative change with the explicit goal of increasing the number of children born, it seems like the political will to say, no you can't adopt adults to get around it, should not be very hard to find, relative to the will needed to actually do all the other stuff in the first place.

Seems like the solution is to allow children in the US to also sue for an equal share.

I’m fully in board with this, but I think going back to keeping married women out of high powered positions. This would reduce women going to college and therefore increase the likelihood that they end up marrying early and having more kids. Heck, as much as I as a woman enjoyed college, I think keeping women out would help here.

Within Finland (and as far as I know, other Nordic countries as well) there's a persistent pattern of women with high education having higher fertility rates than those with low education, which at least somewhat challenges the idea of education being universally disruptive to fertility. (Of course all these segments have fertility rates below replacement, but still, just limiting university education would not solve anything here, and there must be other factors keeping TFR low for those with lower education.)

Could this not be explained by women with high education marrying men with high or even higher education (i.e. wealthy men), which has a positive effect on fertility. Confounder?

I mean, I assume you want these babies born in wedlock, yes? Where do you think high-IQ women are going to meet high-IQ husbands at an early age if not college?

"Go to a school with a strong engineering program and pretend to struggle with your math homework in the engineering commons until a senior in the program helpfully explains what your professor couldn't" is and remains the best way for a middle class woman to become a tradwife. The Christian Nationalist Revolutionary Guard Corp is not coming to restructure our society, and the people who would have to staff this organization if it existed don't want to. We won't have arranged marriages outside of very small, insular subcultures that don't really care about the prevailing TFR.

Why would you want to keep top women away from college? They have just as much right as top men to contribute to the future of humanity. It's the middling women you want to discourage if anything because the top ones will by and large not fall for the negative messaging of college anywhere near the middling women will.

Unfortunately, saying that top women should have careers and middling women should have babies makes ‘not having a baby’ a status symbol. Which is how we got here.

Again, I’m trying to optimize births, and particularly high quality births. If a woman goes to college, she’s going to delay childbearing until after college, and if she’s highly intelligent and goes as far as she can, she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.

And if we’re shooting to simultaneously try to get high IQ people to have more kids, then the above is the worst thing to do. A woman with high IQ giving birth to 3-5 high IQ kids is likely to do more to raise the general IQ of the country than anything she could accomplish in the workplace. I’m sure there might be one or two high IQ women who will make life-altering contributions to science, but if you lost that and had that woman give birth to 3-4 high IQ kids who go on to do similar things you end up getting a better return.

she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.

That would be true if masters degree programs ended in a woman's thirties. They don't. An average woman who marries at 25 is totally capable of having 3+ children and there's lots of examples known to me personally of this happening. Heck, there's an example downthread of a man whose wife had four children after finishing her residency first.

Yes, but people typically do masters degrees because they want masters-degree-level careers. The masters degree itself is probably only the first stepping stone; they will need to do oversubscribed entry-level jobs that may require them to move around a lot and/or devote lots of hours per day. If you get a masters and then start having 3+ children then I think you're either going to be a very absent mother or you might as well burn the diploma now. I would say it's going to be another 5 years until that woman feels stable enough to consider children.

contribute to the future of humanity

The best way for top women to contribute to the future of humanity is by bearing humanities future directly.

Ehhh... in the strictest sense yes, and it's inevitable that women will bear the brunt of childbearing/childrearing, but the burdens of both don't seem great enough to be any woman's sole occupation. It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children. With how trivialized housekeeping has become, it seems to me that intelligent, childbearing women would be well served by WFH positions so they can contribute to the household in a more tangible sense.

Besides, you be the one to tell a curious young woman that the boys get to do all the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys.

Often these stifling parents will only have one or two children. If the goal is four or more different styles of parenting are necessary along with greater demands on home making for a larger family.

Is it the top women selecting WFH positions? These typically don't have the challenge or prestige top women are looking for. The bulk of the WFH ladies are mid, many in fake email jobs.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit, as opposed to telling them that boys have to do all the boring, tedious, monotonous, and dangerous shit?

Like, sure, you can, but that's a weird framing to take for what even you concede as the strictly superior option for society. Why would a society want to approach persuasion in that way?

It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children.

This is not the well established conclusion, since the comparison isn't terribly stifling parenting styles versus beneficent parenting styles, but rather terribly stifling parenting styles versus no parenting at all.

The repugnant conclusion of ethics is only repugnant if you think sub-optimization is worse than non-existence. Certainly the general child is not better off for having never been born to suffer parents (or worse, puberty). Those that disagree can and would resolve that issue themselves, but the survivors will- by definition- prefer the life with bad parents to no life.

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ. It is true that women have a certain baseline privilege, but with it comes a certain cap on their expected competence. It's a tradeoff that works to the favor of some, perhaps even most, but certainly not all women.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit

It's not explicitly said, but that's the message that at least one teenage girl got (though granted, perhaps she isn't a representative sample)

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ.

Again, this is reversing the paradigm to assume the conclusion. It's not about 'the male equivalents of the women in question,' it's how you are characterizing the jobs these women's spouses would be doing if they were expected to be breadwinners, i.e. "the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys."

Most bread-winning jobs are boring, tedious, monotonous, and/or dangerous because that is why they are paying you breadwinning wages in the first place. Higher wages aren't correlated with fun or excitement, but with the compensation required for people to take them, generally because the work is not generally desirable 'cool shit.' Quite often the greater the wage advantage the worse the desirability, because if it was highly desirable then other workers would want that job and be willing to do it for less.

Which returns to the question of framing bias.

Why would you insinuate to high IQ women that they should be envious of the often unpleasant jobs of their bread-winning spouses, while denigrating the alternative, except for the purpose of elevating the former over the later?

Aella is like the textbook example of a high-testosterone woman. She's definitely not a representative sample.

your mom finds you crying one night alone in your bed, crying in grief that god hadn’t made you be born a boy

This is not a thing that normal little girls do.

Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.

More comments

Very wealthy women already have more children than almost every other demographic.

Are these very wealthy women, or the wives / partners of very wealthy men?

Assortative mating means they are often both.

I'd guess there's an old money / new money cultural difference in the assortive pairings.

In my experience new money wealth marries young / hot not necessarily wealthy.

Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline

Kazakhstan fertility rate is declining. You are thinking of Mongolia and Georgia. I already talked about them two months ago they are very unusual countries and the reversal in TFR is probably just a fluke.

The reason for the fertility rate decline is simple: the cost of children greatly outpaced growth in wealth for various reason deeply rooted in how modern western societies are organized. It can't be fixed without some deep changes nobody is willing or capable of making. Telling people something is high status doesn't work, you actually have to make them perceive the high status and in a capitalist society high status roughly correlates with more disposable income, therefore you either have to abandon capitalism or shower parents with so much money that having a child is a cash positive decision at any level of income.

Mongolia and Georgia share the common thread of awards to big families from widely respected institutions playing a big part of their story.

Yes, this is completely correct.

American pop country music has lots of pro-natal messages, and while country music listeners would have a higher TFR anyways(because ruralness etc), you also tend to see higher fertility rates in situations where you wouldn’t already expect it.

So the question becomes ‘what else can the government do to make large families high status’. You could hand out awards for having large families, as Mongolia does. You can meddle in entertainment; it shouldn’t be hard to find a 19 kids and counting family that doesn’t come with the baggage and ridiculousness of the Duggars. You can reach down increasingly lower to reward large families with the tax code- no property taxes for families with 3+ kids, for example.

I don’t think any of these will be enough for the general population. Let’s face it, the fertility success stories are mostly populations that are ruraler and more religious and conservative anyways(Mongolia, Georgia the country, the stans, the faroes, Byzantine Catholics in Europe, and maybe Afrikaners and conservative Americans). You would, I think, have to make religion high status somehow- Byzantine Catholics, Georgia the country, and the stans saw this as a major driving factor for their fertility booms, and it’s certainly where I would look to explain the faroes continuing high fertility.

One small anecdote in favor of the status explanation. About ten years ago, my wife's cousin (around age 9 or so at the time) was in elementary school and the teacher had each student say what they wanted to be when they grew up. My wife's cousin said she wanted to be a mom, and this was apparently concerning enough that it earned her parents a call from the teacher after school that day. The teacher was concerned they weren't "encouraging" her enough. Today she identifies as a lesbian.

I wonder what the teacher would have said to a boy who said he wanted to be a dad.

She probably would have started making veiled hints about homosexuality and said that she’d be happy to talk to him about his confusing feelings.

I’m puzzled by this response. Why would a kid who wants to grow up to be a dad be presumed by anyone to be gay, when gay men are less likely to have kids than straight men?

Since stay at home dad is even less a long term plan than stay at home mom, it comes across as non sequitur in the context of school. Kids know that by 9, even four old boys all say things like "firefighter" or "policeman" (the girls said "princess" at my child's pre-K). So they must be odd in some way, possibly effeminate or gay?

So they must be odd in some way, possibly effeminate or gay?

Exactly. The progressive's response to a kid who is different is that he must be gay or trans or something. In fact, the teacher may even be hoping for this outcome!

It's of course perfectly fine for a kid to want to be a dad, or to just be different, without a label getting stuck on the them.

Same thing adults have been telling boys for millennia: "Insufficient".

Status is key, however there is another mechanism that is playing in here.

With hypergamy and women not needing men for protection and provision women can seek higher status men. Men can achieve higher status by spending more time. Even if you wanted to just have kids at a young age it is going to be hard to find an attractive wife without going to college, without traveling, without buying a nice house etc. The status that you get from getting a low skilled labour job and from renting a place that a 22 year old can afford doing unqualified labour is shooting yourself in the foot on the dating market.

There is no time pressure to have kids. We have effective contraception and people are pushing through grad school, trying to buy a place in the right side of town or trying to take the right tinder pics on Bali so they can get an attractive partner. If people were more naturally paired up more kids would be born.

This is only true because our culture does not like age gaps, though.

Old women do not like age gaps. Young women and older men are happy enough with them. And nobody cares what young men want.

And nobody cares what young men want.

Only prosperous societies care about that; whether or not that's causal or a consequence is still up for debate.

Young women mostly don’t like the idea of age gaps, though, even if they’re happy enough with them in practice.

I think there’s another factor here. The Western WEIRD culture actually discourages having kids young. Both parents are highly pressured to go through 4 years or more of college, then work for a few years before getting married. Then you spend a few years building up a nest egg and a career before you start thinking about kids.

Given the relatively short real fertility window, the delay in childbearing means fewer kids just because of biology. A woman’s best fertility is between 18 or so and 25. So she might well be too old to have kids by the time that she’s secure enough to think of having them. She’s not even getting married until 22 at minimum. Three years after that, her fertility is starting to decline, but she’s not yet getting pregnant.

Getting married at later than 22 wasn't uncommon as a historical norm. Although I agree that people often don't think clearly about biological realities, we know that getting married in the mid-twenties on average wasn't by itself a barrier to population growth.

Uh, who waits for years after getting married to start having babies? Is it really something that's common in the blue tribe?

Like even very secular people I know, or know of, do not do this- if they're dead set against having kids for years, they do not get married.

Uh, who waits for years after getting married to start having babies? Is it really something that's common in the blue tribe?

Yes, very.

The marriage is a big, self-referential celebration of Disney style True Love. Marriage inside of an actual church is less and less common and, for the couples that are doing it because Mom and Dad would be otherwise displeased, the "ceremony" is one reading and the vows. The real ceremony is always the reception which is a strange bacchanalia devotion to the Wife. The husband is pretty much a slightly drunk usher. The "best" weddings are the ones where everyone gets incredibly hammered, but there is no violence, vomiting, or immediately broken vows.

Usually it's about 2 years before the first kid.

Narcissism is strong.

Had our first around 4/5 years after our wedding. Despite what I was taught by Risky Business, it's not always that easy to get a woman pregnant.

Sure, fertility issues are understandable. I’m confused more by people who marry with the intention of delaying childbirth.

To clarify, do you find this more confusing or uniquely confusing compared to not marrying until later?

I find it confusing that a non-negligible number of people marry without intending to go ahead and have babies whatever the cost. Delaying marriage because you don’t want no baby seems pretty easy to wrap my head around. Having a baby and stopping at one because you don’t think you can handle more seems easy to grasp. Going ahead and getting married with the intention of not having a baby for years just seems confusing.

I loved my husband. He loved me. We wanted to spend our lives together. Marriage provided a legal structure to that decision, and offered protections that living together wouldn't. We didn't even have the "do you want kids" conversation until we'd been married several years, and were fortunately on the same page when we got to it. OTOH, both of our siblings married specifically with child-bearing in mind.

IME, religious weddings seem to focus a lot more on the idea that marriage exists for kids. Health insurance, property inheritance, SS, medical care decisions, and specifically committing to building a life together with someone you love and respect were plenty of motivation for us.

I had my kid about 10 years after I got married. I wouldn't say it's common to wait that long after marriage but if you add dating + marriage, several friends fall into a similar time frame. I am not blue tribe, some friends are, some aren't. It's not that weird to marry to commit to your spouse, especially for those of us who are secular. Children are a separate choice.

Most people (I know) don't view the purpose of marriage to be producing kids, and therefore don't think it's weird to get married without any intention of producing kids.

We 'waited' seven years. We'd likely have more than 4 if we started earlier. My wife was trying for a top decile career.

Not blue tribe in any sense.

....Why? Is it really impossible to have children and be a lawyer or a doctor or what have you?

It's just mindboggling that people actually do this.

@hyrdoacetylene

Can you share your most commonly seen models of family formation and early child rearing where you are? Genuine question / curiosity.

People don’t marry when they don’t intend to have children fairly quickly. They might date ‘for fun’ but not ‘seriously’ up until that point. The woman’s parents can veto a prospective groom; family goes to the wedding along with a few close friends. When the woman’s father begins referring to them as ‘engaged’ is an inflection point in the relationship that comes well before the actual proposal, or even the prospective groom speaking to him about it. If the couple has a ‘church home’ that’s where they marry, if they don’t then they marry outdoors with a clergyman in someone’s extended social circle officiating, the denomination is irrelevant, using classic Christian vows and following a brief prayer service- even if they only go to church a couple of times a year. The bride’s parents would not allow the wedding if they didn’t think both parties meant every word of their vows. Child free weddings are not a thing, and the reception afterwards allows considerable latitude for teenagers and older children to do things normally not allowed on account of age(eg sneak a few beers, stay up very late). There is a dance floor and some toasting, it’s normal to get a bit tipsy. The maid of honor catches the bouquet and the garter is caught by a photogenic preadolescent boy.

Babies come quickly after marriage. It’s not a sin to marry poor or have babies poor, it is a sin to neglect them. The grandparents are very involved and usually a young couple has a female relative come stay to help for a few weeks after the first and second baby. Not having at least two is weird. It’s ideal for a woman to stay home until her youngest is at least out of diapers, or maybe in elementary school if she can swing it, but if not childcare from relatives or on the market has to do. The children have to come before the parents’ wants or ambitions, and it weighing heavier on the woman is just the way the world works.

It would be better if people could marry young, but they are no longer as wise, selfless, mature, and virtuous as they were in the fifties, and particularly young men take longer to grow up these days. Some of that’s their fault and some of it isn’t. It is normal for parents and grandparents to provide extra help to try to overcome this by co-signing loans or making gifts, to try to get around the socioeconomic factors like high housing costs. An elder who cannot see when doing this is destructive rather than constructive has a serious character flaw for co-signing on a corvette purchase or giving money to a wastrel who will lose it sports betting or what have you. Most women will not accept a large age gap, so people are into their twenties before they marry.

That’s more or less a description of the extended branches of my extended family doing things.

It's not impossible. It is hard. I have one kid. I am a programmer, so work in male dominated environments. There was no work support for a lactating mother. Fortunately I was senior so had flexibility in schedule and an office. But I had to pump every 2 hours. I could do that because my job allowed for it. A litigator would have had a much harder time. I could bail on work for random sick or injured kid needs (spouse work wasn't as flexible). When we had a childcare problem, my 4 yr old spent a month at work with me, hanging out under my desk until I got it sorted. Doctors or lawyers would likely have had a harder time with that. These things are the sorts of things that kill a woman's career. I could struggle through with one. More than one? Unlikely. I could struggle through as a senior in a flexible career. Not a senior or in a less flexible career? Unlikely. If my spouse had had a less demanding career and was able to be more helpful it would have been easier, but in my experience women with excellent career options tend to be married to men with equivalent or better options.

I'm not going to say it's impossible, but there wasn't an abundance of successful examples.

Despite the efforts to reduce the working hours of junior doctors, it's still alot of work frequently at odd hours. If the program has an academic commitment or requirement this is often on-top.

We were fortunate that there was no school debt.

We were also fortunate to have a very easy time conceiving.

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