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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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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.