site banner
-_-_-_-_-  2d ago (text post)   846 thread views

Fertility Crisis: Which women/couples should be having more children?

Often, when we look at disincentives for childbearing, we think of them in terms of opportunity costs for the individual. But if children are cumulatively being considered a societal good, we should also weigh the cumulative opportunity costs to the individuals as a societal tradeoff. It seems to me that Ron Hosh's substack (of "luxury belief" fame) generally lives up to its tagline of "general incoherence," but he raised this point/question in this post. The kids have to come from somewhere; what tradeoff(s) should society make?

Teenage pregnancy? Major tradeoff against developing the human capital of the parents and, thusly, the parents' ability to develop the human capital of the children. (And, if you want to follow the HBD line of inquiry, you might hypothesize dysgenic selection effects.)

College students? Lesser tradeoff than above, but same general issue.

20-something professionals? We're taking human capital out of the economy, just after investing in its development, rather than trying to maximize its compound interest.

Hosh also brings up geography and sexual orientation (same-sex couples using IVF is a thing), though I don't think the tradeoffs here are as clear.

Have any of you thought about this? My answer to "Which couples should be having more children" is "All the couples who don't have as many children as they want" which I don't think cleaves cleanly enough across any demographic to give a more clear tradeoff than the subsidies required to support the children not-conceived out of financial concern. But others here are more open to social engineering than I am.

1
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Ok. Cards on the table- I'm a little worried about population collapse. But only a little. My ingroup is above replacement; more economically successful outgroups pushing dogs in strollers instead of breeding means more opportunities for my children, and those of my friends and relatives. I'm sick of subsidizing public school systems from which I derive no benefit except relentless demands for more money- asking what they need it for being proof you hate children, of course. Not that I have any illusions that the public school system won't continue demanding ever more money even if it has 0 enrollment.

Who do I think should be having more children? Well, I recognize that while teenagers getting married to someone suitable and having babies isn't the end of the world, it's also not going to happen. My heart does go out to the normie women who sacrifice big chunks of their fertility by cohabiting for five+ years before marriage- cohabitation is a bad thing just in general, but wreaking vengeance like that is sad to see. I would like to see early-twenties marriages, not partnerships, come back into fashion by getting cohabitation replaced with marriage.

Teenage pregnancy? Major tradeoff against developing the human capital of the parents and, thusly, the parents' ability to develop the human capital of the children. (And, if you want to follow the HBD line of inquiry, you might hypothesize dysgenic selection effects.)

College students? Lesser tradeoff than above, but same general issue.

I doubt this bigly. Most jobs that we think of as requiring an education, don't really need it, and would do just as well with a few weeks of training, and accumulated experience handling the rest. They might require a certain amount of Not Being A Retard, which the education used to (but no longer does) filter for.

20-something professionals? We're taking human capital out of the economy, just after investing in its development, rather than trying to maximize its compound interest.

As others pointed out, this is akin to a farmer fretting over not being able to sell the seeds he's using to plant the next year's crops.

From a pure numbers perspective most of the drop in births per woman since 1976 is driven by women who do have children having fewer children, rather than women choosing to forego children entirely. The latter has increased from 10 to 17% but the former has decreased from 3.4 children per woman to 2.3.

On the topic of women having more children, society should pay women a competitive wage to do so. If it really is the case that the most valuable thing a woman can do is to bear and raise children, moreso than whatever other work they were doing, then society ought to be willing to compensate them competitively with that other work. This is how markets for labor ordinarily work. If I want someone to put their scarce labor power to my purpose instead of some other I need to pay them more! This isn't a new idea, of course, it's over 100 years old.

But is there any way of insuring a woman’s economic independence while child-raising is her chosen occupation? Or must she sink into that dependent state from which, as we all know, it is so hard to rise again? That brings us to the fourth feature of our program — motherhood endowment. It seems that the only way we can keep mothers free, at least in a capitalist society, is by the establishment of a principle that the occupation of raising children is peculiarly and directly a service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government. It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women unless this principle is accepted.

All women and couples who are doing well should be the ones having kids, modern economy works for techno capital at the cost of bio capital when it should be the other way around. The future is the traits and systems you pass on to it, having a hyper-competitive market environment where your own government will happily kick you out of a job to facilitate outsourcing is incompatible with the wishes for a higher tfr.

Tests, unis, and economics all exist for society, society does not exist for them. The current environmental pressures reward the lower IQ more ohrtodox religious kind which will make society worse. You want your unemployed people to have fewer kids for starters, same for hardened criminals yet they both have a lot of kids, enough to pass on the same traits whilst many professors go childless.

Another fact is that modern society will further reward nerds over any and every other class of people due to technological advancements. We do not need testosterone to sit behind a desk and manipulate Excel sheets nor do we need people to actually fight wars as much as we did before. So yeah, people who are really nerdy but also have some war-like traits would be ideal, maybe, I am not a biologist.

This issue plagues everyone, I know at least 10-20 30-plus dudes who are a part of the online-based right and only 2 of of them have kids. At some point you should just not plan, have as many as your wife can handle. Trying to find the rationality in when to have kids will always push them, very few people will knock up a girl in high school anyway. Because whilst you plan, the guy who you do not want to dominate society is going to have more kids who will perpetuate this cycle. Anyone who is in a stable job, has a good wife should be having kids

The current environmental pressures reward the lower IQ more ohrtodox religious kind which will make society worse.

I disagree (and, also, fuck you)

whilst many professors go childless.

This is a good thing. Low-T dorks with sinecure wordcel jobs shouldn't be reproducing.

Anyone who is in a stable job, has a good wife should be having kids

I agree! In fact, earning that stable job, and keeping it, should be the kind of behavior and life pattern that results in lots of mate choices.

But it isn't because of a whole host of anti-social and technology driven causes that have made hyper-individualism the basic mode of western human personal evolution.

This is exactly what @hydroacetylene is talking about - we're not reproducing enough because, at the median, everyone is stupid and selfish and not rewarding others' pro-social behavior and choices.

And this is the the issue-behind the issue of the fertility crisis - we're not really a pro-social society anymore. We like laws that say you can't shoot me in the face and you can't take my stuff, but we're not interested in creating communities (and a society, which is a meta-community) that serves a meaningful purposes. We want a shitload of personal level guarantees backed by the lethal force of the state so that we can laugh "HAHA ITS MY RIGHTS" through a mouthful of lard sandwich.

If you're a hyper-individualist, you dont really care about the people down the street so long as they aren't allowed to fuck with you and your shit. You certainly don't care about a hypothetical yet-to-be-born-maybe-baby (abortion on demand!) and you absolutely don't care about a conceptual future culture that outlives you be centuries. That's for the "lower IQ more ohrtodox religious kind" with their fake and gay ideas of absolute truth and divinity. What uncultured assholes. Trump voters, I'd bet.

What am I getting at here, besides a post-christmas eggnog fueled rant? Probably nothing. I'm closing in 1,000 comments on the Motte and I've found most of this effort to be be pointless. I've learned a lot from this website, and it gives me a lot of optimism that the Real Internet isn't dead. There are good thinkers out there.

I ran out of steam.

I mean, when the alternative is that your society ceases to exist, none of these sound like particularly big tradeoffs to me. One more meta-level consideration is the balance between different family structures, with the nuclear family probably reducing fertility rates relative to more communitarian/multi-generational systems, but perhaps producing a more independent-minded and creative citizenry.

The structure of PMC families as they exist in the US nowadays in particular i.e. move far away from home at 18, get married late and have one or two children, either spend a lot of money on childcare services or expend a lot of time and energy as a helicopter parent, your children have minimal exposure to extended relatives growing up, etc. seems designed to maximize the expense of raising children (e.g. grandparents are too old or far away, can't usually ask your neighbor to watch all the kids for the day for free) while minimizing the childcare experience of prospective parents (e.g. no more leaving 10 year olds alone at home to watch their younger siblings, if they even have any). Imagine throwing someone who had never even ridden in a car before behind the wheel on the highway; all the talk in the world about the wonders of car ownership would do little to soothe their anxiety.

Teenagers; they have the lowest opportunity costs directly if birthing and mothering a small child, but they are at tremendous risk of given up their training to do it, and in giving that up they leave themselves without a good fallback plan when the father of the children decides to end his commitment to the family after a decade.

But in today's western society it doesn't work because. They amd the father's of their children need iron clad marriage that forces both parties in the marriage to commit permanently and training that meets the needs of young mothers who could rejoin the workforce after their children reach school age.

iron clad marriage

MAD

The dissolution needs to be socially and economically destructive.

Also divorce is only in the event of sexual immortality.

children reach school age

Need to fix schools too. Most of the other parents we know with 4 or more are also homeschooling.

The dissolution needs to be socially and economically destructive.

It used to be, for women. Good luck convincing women there's anything men will do to make it so for them.

Also divorce is only in the event of sexual immortality.

My grandmother divorced my grandfather because he was an irredeemable alcoholic who when he was home beat them. There may have been, and probably was, infidelity. But in the 50s she would have, and been expected to, look the other way.

As much as I love my husband, I would not have married him or had a child with him if the options available to me if he hurt our child were the options my grandmothers had. I would leave him in a heartbeat if he hurt our child, but likely be able to find a path through sexual immorality. He has expressed similar to me.

If we want to look into drags on the economy and human capital, what about the insane cost of pensions and healthcare for the senescent? There's zero economic return for trillions in redistribution to people who can't work.

The underlying cause is that people don't want to do away with pensions and take money from grandma (stop grandma taking money from the young, there's no pot of gold that is waiting for her besides her own savings). It's an intergenerational transfer.

All politics is about giving and taking, costs and benefits.

Free cigarettes and brandy for retirees?

Pregnancy only needs to take you out of the economy for a few weeks. I really don't understand why its effect on women's careers is exaggerated so much.

Physically, sure. Mentally? By my 3rd trimester I felt stunningly stupid and that persisted through my child's early years. My coworkers and managers swore I was fine, I continued getting raises and promotions, but I felt like I was fighting through mental quicksand. It was harder for me to come up with elegant solutions for novel problems. I felt my brain come back online once I started getting decent sleep again and my body wasn't building and sustaining another person. If I were less capable (or in a career for which I was less suited) pregnancy definitely could have knocked me out of my career or paused it. And then after pregnancy there's the whole baby thing. You can't just seal them in a barrel. Even Mark Twain suggested not doing that til they're 12.

Uh, have you been around moms?

Okay, so the woman takes a few weeks off from her job to have the baby and recover. And then what? She goes right back to work and leaves the baby in a daycare? Great, so now much of her salary is going to that. And since she doesn't have time to feed the baby, she can buy formula and switch to take out when the kid is old enough for solid food. And speaking of old enough, once he gets to kindergarten age she can sink most of her remaining wages into a zero-sum competition for the scarce real-state with the good schools attached . And...

Or, you know, she could just cut out the middleman. Specially if she is planning to have more than one child.

What's the point of having a baby only to see it raised by strangers?

Children need mothers. They don't need girlbosses.

This is an argument for children being expensive, not for children being a big drag on women's careers.

But mothers can save most of those expenses by staying at home, thus making quitting those careers a much more attractive option. Put another way, children dramatically reduce the value of a woman's career.

It does perhaps create a career ceiling for high SES women until they are perceived as being "done" having children though. If you make a lot of money, you are at least somewhat indispensable, but your employer must consider that you will be out for a couple months 2 or 3 times over the next several years, so you can only become so indispensable. One solution to this is making paternity leave as robust as maternity, which has its own fun side effects of making 20-30 year olds of any gender who are likely to start families less attractive to employ.

That does seem like a good way to discourage the current massive discrimination against anyone over 40.

Although the equilibrium probably looks like "companies prefer to hire people who've made a visible precommitment to not having children, through public castration rituals and gleeful participation in anti-natalist subcultures."

So basically the same as right now really. HR had better see that funkopop collection when they check your Facebook bluesky page.

Yes, both of these are what I find funny! The anti-straight discrimination in high end consulting is very real, and it can be a good move in interviews to volunteer that you already have kids.

I wonder if some of the twitter posts about not hiring anyone over 30 (because they are probably aware of their value and will negotiate more aggressively) is also to do with the fact that so many professionals delay starting families until their 30s these days.

Only if you're thinking of very high SES women, who are likely to have the number of children they want already. But they still choose not to, because going back to work two weeks postpartum is awful.

Maybe I'm biased by the possibly unusual experiences of my close family members, but my mother for example had four children and that didn't stop her from being highly successful. From what I've heard it, she didn't find pregnancy difficult and couldn't wait to go back to work. But who said it had to be two weeks? You can take more than that off, but it doesn't need to be the whole year that some people take.

Who was your main carer as a baby?

I do know a decent number of families where a grandparent or father is the main carer. I've seen situations with the father as main carer when the wife is in a stable job with family insurance, such as teaching, and the husband is in a high variance job without benefits and with odd hours, such as professional musician or small business owner of a somewhat irregular business. My family is in that category. It's kind of stressful, but better than newborn daycare.

I guess you said "a few," which could, technically, mean more than two or three. I wouldn't generally interpret a few as six, the age at which commercial daycares will usually accept newborns. But, also, most people don't like sending a six week old to a commercial daycare, they feel bad about it. The last daycare I sent kids to has no early morning (before 8) coverage of children below four, and no coverage of babies that cannot yet walk. Another that I looked into did accept six week olds, but previous employees thought it not a very good environment, so we're continuing with the current arrangement until about a year.

They hired a housekeeper to babysit us and clean while my parents worked during the week. They sometimes worked late, but I not usually both on th same night and we had an older sibling who could babysit in the evenings. My grandparents did not live nearby.

With modern technology, the biological parent doesn't have to bear her own children. As a society we can use surrogacy to avoid the worst tradeoffs.

The root of the problem is that high-value people should be rewarded for creating biological children, because most of their high value is genetic. But no one of any status in society is willing to publicize the science and build consensus around genetics being real. If we could solve this problem then everything else becomes easy.

Even modulo selection effects, this doesn’t really solve anything: it’s just rearranging the pregnancy chairs on the Titanic.

Teenage pregnancy? Major tradeoff against developing the human capital of the parents and, thusly, the parents' ability to develop the human capital of the children.

The 1950s and 60s are an utterly massive refutation of this. The teenage mothers of that time (newly wed, mind you) went back to school in the 80s after their kids grew into adults; they seem to have done pretty well.

I've heard it referred to as an "eating the seed corn" situation at a societal level. A civilization can get high growth by having all its potential mothers do other things instead, but then in addition to not having enough children in the next generation, you also don't have as much social cohesion, because when the kids aren't absolute babies, those were the women volunteering for the churches, organizing social occasions, running the children and youth clubs, sending out cards to recognize everyone's birthdays and holidays and so on. Now, if you want those services, you get to pay market rate for it -- and the market rate is high!

Technological change is busy clearing out a bunch of female heavy positions just now, anyway. Society will lose nothing by a bunch of graphic designers running a household instead, for instance. If they want to. Running a household is harder than graphic design, and as there has been much opining about lately, harder to get status from. Some of the things making women not want to marry the men that would be willing to marry them seems a more pressing issue.

This another of those things on which the expert class utterly fucked up. When I grew up I was taught that this is the "demographic dividend" and that we modern people benefit from a more "sustainable" fertility rate. Only now that my parents' generation is about to retire, and the utterly predictable consequences set in, they panic and try to change things around last-minute.

Shouldn't society attempt to capture women for motherhood in leiu of being captured by top quintile universities?

This cohort seems to respond to incentives, what sort of incentives would be necessary to push them to motherhood instead of PMC / fake email jobs?

Incentives to marry earlier and then 4 or more children before 40.

People generally don't have as many children as they want, so there's no need to "capture" women.

And yet women that do have children are doing so later and more women are childless.

It seems that the average woman does not actually demand marriage that strongly. She enjoys motherhood immensely but does not know this about herself without direct experience; her sex drive is mediocre and she's simply not attracted to most men.

In a historical society where women live with their parents and face immense pressure to find someone suitable and get hitched from 16, that woman married. In today's society, she muddles along, missing something but not sure what. Yes, she'd be happier if her parents arranged a marriage for her with Mr. Good-enough. But they're not going to, and even if they want to do this they don't know how, and even if they did, she wouldn't know this is better in the long run. She could I suppose be wooed during college, but we're busy telling young men not to do this, that it would ruin their lives on both ends, and steadily demonizing the kinds of age gap relationships that could probably route around this. When this woman does partner up it's as a forever girlfriend who becomes immensely frustrated at the lack of marriage and babies but is not, herself, the driving force behind their absence(yes, yes, she could refuse to cohabit and fornicate. But almost definitionally the average woman has rather lackluster talents at denying social pressures).

It comes down to a lot of factors- there's lots of women who, sure, are unhappy over a long enough timeframe without a relationship, but that timeframe is long, they don't have the pangs of loneliness and empty unsatisfaction from the lack thereof enough to motivate them to do the mildly uncomfortable things entailed in putting themselves out there. But the modern west's relationship progression also just takes entirely too damn long; during the fifties baby boom courtships were measured in months on the long end. In today's world, people date for a year and then move in together for several years and then think about getting engaged eventually. This is a pure bad thing, obviously- there are no benefits to cohabitation, literally. But, you know, it's what we have to live with.

almost definitionally the average woman has rather lackluster talents at denying social pressures

Isn't this how they can return, if the pressures and incentives are re-aligned?

Yes. You can harshly stigmatize being a single woman, but it won't do anything if you don't also harshly stigmatize men for leading women into forever girlfriendship, because it is mostly not female choice that causes the late age of marriage in anglosphere countries- they would be perfectly happy marrying much earlier in a relationship.

You want a marriage boom, you stigmatize spinsterhood, yes. But you also need social pressure on men to go ahead and marry the girl. And the sexes' relative vulnerabilities to social pressures being what they are, I suspect that the pressures applied need be unequal.

Could men be motivated to marry via tax policy or free SUV if you fill it with a wife and kids?

Are there still jurisdictions where they prohibit cohabitation?

You could probably motivate cohabiting couples to marry with a house, I suppose.

Pressuring men to marry is both unnecessary and useless. One antisocial fuckboy can lead on thirty girls indefinitely.

Sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive; you guard what is expensive, not what is cheap.

Once you are willing and able to use physical force, social pressure, and economic privation to coerce women into only having sex inside of marriage, you will have plenty of hardworking beta providers lining up to marry the resulting virgin brides. Or, at least, you will if you also get rid of such nonsense as marital "rape" laws and no-fault divorce that understandably makes men afraid to get married.

(Imagine that the government passed a law that, at any moment, your employer can decide to stop paying you, and if you ever quit or get fired, he is entitled to steal half your assets; that's what marriage 2.0 is. What happens to the labor market in this scenario? Solve for the equilibrium.)

Access to sex was not the main factor motivating men to marry under a traditional patriarchy. Trad societies had widespread prostitution and didn't much care what, uh, disreputable women got up to with men. Your 1890's fuckboy plowed his way through the brothel, or carried on with women that didn't have much of a reputation to safeguard. This goes back quite far; the medieval Catholic Church noted that they couldn't stop men from sleeping with prostitutes until they were married no matter how hard they tried.

Instead men in trad societies were expected, and oftentimes pressured, to marry. If you wanted to court a respectable girl you had to have the intention of marriage. And that intention had to be followed through on. This is the main missing ingredient from 'trad' revivalists today- there's no dating allowed except to marry and it is enforced, usually by the women's parents(although intermediating social institutions also played a part). This is part of why 'the US had two sexual revolutions' sometimes gets trotted out- dating in 1950 wasn't really 'trad' in the sense that it would have been seen as proper when the couples' grandparents were young.

There's lots of Based Patriarchy types on the internet who advocate for restricting women's sexual freedom(and I would argue that that sexual freedom is bad for women, but whatever). There's a far smaller number who argue for reducing the social freedom of young people in general, but the former is not a stable equilibrium without the latter.

As for your point- there isn't a ton of evidence that fear of divorce is what's driving the male reticence to commit, inasmuch as young men just having a natural reticence to commit. IIRC punitive divorce laws actually drive specialization within marriage by writing gender roles into law. I will grant you that making divorce harder to get is probably a net good. But I would ask for actual evidence- not polemics- of divorce fear driving the male reticence to marry in a timely manner.

Certainly there exist societies(eg, in eastern Europe) with short courtships and very high divorce rates simultaneously.

Traditional patriarchy very much did pressure men to marry, and then some. The shotgun in a shotgun wedding was pointed at the groom's back.

No doubt there is added risk to modern marriage. I think improving incentives is a more achieveable goal than de-risking modern marriage.

I'd happily vote for the pro-marital rape, divorce is only for sexual immortality candidate, but that isn't a message I've heard.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats