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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34909 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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But this is circular - a 'status nudge' requires either 'everyone' or 'the high-status people' to think having kids is very good and promote it, and convincing them is just the original problem, again. The combination of contingency, individual action, the many dramatic changes in modern society, and whatever else that led to both tastemakers/the media/other influential people not supporting having many children is the problem then, and 'they should promote having more kids' isn't much better than saying 'everyone should have more kids'

I feel like there's an issue of the tastemakers generally being of demographics that don't reproduce especially frequently. Gay, single women, urbanites etc.

The elites actually have not too bad fertility. Yes this nudge would require something as lofty as a total shift in culture, no one was under the impression this would be an easy problem to fix surely?

The elites actually have not too bad fertility

The elites have figured out how to have "marriage"' in a way that suits them (even then, there's a baby price for a woman choosing to stay at home that might keep the fertility rate amongst the elite from truly booming)

But the actual businesses they sit high up in value the anti-fertility ethos of "I define myself by my work", for obvious reasons.

It's not so much that your plan is hard and more that it doesn't attempt to explain why the original culture shift worked, so it's unclear that your new one can replicate it.

My theory?

Liberal feminism (aka "do what you want", "women can do anything men can do") always seems to win, even against more radical (in some ways, anyway) feminisms. Why? Because it suits people trying to succeed or exploit in the marketplace - turning women into fungible widgets makes them easier to plug into your system.

Your high fertility Hollywood is nowhere near as good a handmaiden for capital so, if you believe material factors and elite interests determine cultural production, why would we assume it's even doable?

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