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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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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.

She also has never once thought about the male version of her life. Men are raised knowing that nobody will ever actually care about them. They know they have to earn everything. They know they are no allowed to ever show weakness. They’re striving because being a loser man is to be absolutely nothing, pathetic, and worthless. He strives to achieve because he’s been told since he was a baby that he’s the breadwinner, and he better get good grades and into a good school and into a good job because if not, he’ll be cast aside as a failed, pathetic man, and nobody will ever give a crap about him. If there’s a draft for the next war, he’s going, and if his limbs get blown off, nobody will care.

Women and I include myself just don’t get that stuff because society bends in half to accommodate them. Women get their own spaces (in part because of safety), where men’s spaces are open by default and the only way men’s spaces stay just for men is if they’re deliberately uncomfortable for women, and then you can bet someone will call men sexist for that. Other than that, you have to let women in, even if it’s the only place men can hope to get away from women so they can open up to other men, they can’t, be here comes the women. Women get to choose careers based on preferences, work hours, whether the job is fun, how close it is to their homes, etc. Men don’t get to, they will be the breadwinner, so they’ve been told since they were old enough to understand work that they don’t get to choose based on liking the job, they have to choose the money. If they best paying job they can get is dirty, disgusting, backbreaking, and has long hours, tough shit, you do it because if not you’re pathetic and a loser.

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

Not using capital letters is also an old internet thing. Jerry Yang, the old CEO of yahoo was famous for it.

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.

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