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Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.
Ok, what else, I have to close the contest soon:
education
female education
female workplace participation
feminism
urbanization
modernity
excessive parental investment
immigration
irreligiosity
birth control
high house prices/ cost of living generally
quality of available entertainment
socialized pensions
Yeah. A lot of that is about things like being attractive (Princeton sociologist Catherine Hakim's erotic capital theory) and actually having social capital - not being isolated as all hell.
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Here are five more.
the switch from integenerational to single-generational households: a kid is a much bigger burden on "two people who have full-time jobs" than on "a bunch of people, some of which might work only part time".
reduced mixing of people-who-have-kids with people-who-do-not-have kids: people mostly do what the people around them do. If childless people mainly interact with other childless people, "having kids" is mostly not "the sort of thing people around them do"
salience of the negative aspects of having kids: news stories about kids tend to be either "look at the terrible stuff that happens to kids" or "look at the terrible stuff that happens to parents who let their kids act like kids". Observing the news and going "it's news because it's rare" is not a natural mental motion for people.
general doomerism incentives lead people to expect that they will be bringing their children into a world that is bad for children: if you express optimism, you will face criticism if things go badly, but if you express cynicism and pessimism, and the bad outcome you predicted hasn't happened, you can just darkly say "...yet".
culture of specialization: in general, the incentives of our culture are to do the things where you have comparative advantage. Most people don't think they have comparative advantage at child rearing.
You could probably collapse this list down to three bullet points of "media" / "culture" / "household size" if you're going for brevity.
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Many of those things are linked together.
Modernity causes urbanization, which leads to higher house prices/cost of living and higher quality of available entertainment. The higher cost of living means that it's more expensive to support each child, so parental investment has to go up. Feminism, female education, and female workplace participation are all intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The idea of a workplace and accompanying workforce is a product of modernity and urbanization (premodern women spent all their time working, but not for a boss who pays cash wages). That workforce then requires a certain level of education.
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Urbanization is what pulls fertility rates from 8 to 2.
There's no contest here, it's just urbanization. Looking at anything else is penny-pinching over decimals, while the elephant in the room is right there.
Urbanization is huge, but it can’t be the whole picture, as even farm families typically don’t have eight kids anymore. Fertility in rural areas has been falling just as surely as in urban areas; it just hasn’t fallen as far (but then, it also started off higher).
As an illustration, my uncle is a semi-retired farmer. He had three kids. My grandparents had four (plus one stillbirth and one miscarriage); my great-grandparents, seven; and my great-great-grandparents, ten. Not counting the Amish, I think all the farmers I know have between two and five kids. Heck, even among the Amish it’s relatively rare to have 8–10 kids today.
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But what is it about urbanization, according to you? Surely urbanization itself cannot be the immediate cause, there must be some X or set of X such that urbanization causes X... and then X... causes low fertility rates.
IIRC the leading explanation is that kids generally are productive enough on low-tech farms to be at least net-neutral on the farm's balance sheet. Even in the days of kids sweeping chimneys in Victorian England, that just doesn't work in cities. Probably not on high-tech farms, either.
I suspect any study of even highly mechanized agriculture would show that farmers have a lot of kids, to say nothing of the migrant workers picking peaches(for whom kids are net earners from the time they’re out of diapers- and yes, child labor is a major part of the fruit and vegetable supply chain even in countries with generally strict child labor laws).
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Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all? On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.
Having kids requires an insane investment of time and resources, for a payoff that can mostly be gotten easier from other sources (e.g. if what you’re after is companionship, you already have your spouse, why do you need to make more people on top of that?).
A typical argument for why having kids is a good thing in and of itself is that it provides “fulfillment”. But it’s an empirical fact that most people don’t require any fulfillment beyond what is provided by Netflix and Grubhub. Certainly the average human has no need for anything resembling a “life project” or a “continuance of legacy”.
In a vacuum, most people will choose not to have kids; they need some external impetus that makes it more desirable (e.g. strongly increased social status), or they need to simply be forced to in one way or another. In a state of nature, lack of access to birth control is a pretty good impetus - people won’t choose to have kids, but they will certainly choose to have sex - but that’s largely a solved problem in any modern country. So you can partially put me down for “birth control”, partially for “quality of available entertainment”, partially for this and that, but blaming any of these factors ultimately obscures the fact that wanting to have kids in the first place is the deviation in need of explanation.
Define "desirable" because an observation I've made in the past when this topic has come up is that the contemporary rationalist/progressive mindset with its emphasis on self-actualization/gratification seems to be fundamentally incompatible with parenthood and family-formation. The first thing you realize when you become a parent is that it's not about you. Your life is not your own.
As for why having kids is a good thing? the future belongs to those show up. The Lord sets before us blessings and curses, life and death. If you want to choose death that is your prerogative, but don't expect me to applaud or praise you for it.
It's possible that the superficial tone of my post lead you to misinterpret my actual views.
We are in complete agreement here. I am the Arch Anti-Utilitarian. I am on a crusade against pleasure-seeking.
The operative sentence of my post was this:
Having children is indeed a Good Thing. As a society, we should encourage more of it. If we really have such a great labor shortage that we're on the verge of economic collapse (I question the facts here, but let's run with it), and the choice is between importing masses of foreigners on the one hand or forcing native women to have more children on the other, then we should absolutely force native women to have more children. Or at least, the state can make it a top priority to remove impediments for couples who already want to have children, and see if that's sufficient to fix the situation.
My post was simply describing the natural state of things, not approving of it. Most people are guided by the pleasure principle, and having kids is not inherently pleasurable, so ceteris paribus most people won't choose to do it. You can't tell people "hey guess what, this really hard thing that takes a ton of work and years of your life? you don't have to do it anymore!" and then act all shocked pikachu face when people go "ok, I won't do that thing anymore". All I did was describe the way that the force of gravity pulls people; I didn't say we shouldn't fight against gravity.
In general, having kids is a more valuable life project than whatever dumb crap the average person is up to. If you tell me "yeah I just don't feel like having kids because I want to, like, travel to a lot of countries and build a really big stamp collection, or something, idk", then I'm going to look askance at that. Such a person's life would very likely be made more valuable if they were to invest themselves in having children instead - assuming certain reasonable restrictions, we wouldn't want them to have a big dysgenic effect on the population, etc.
There are certain individuals who are engaged in activities that are more valuable than having children, activities that make it impossible or impractical for them to have children and provide an appropriate level of parental investment. Such individuals are excused from the responsibilities that bind more earthly mortals, and have my full blessing to simply continue on with what they're doing. But such individuals are relatively rare, and are of course virtually impossible to identify, so the recognition of such individuals should certainly not factor into any state policy.
its more valuable to you, but why should they do what you want and not what they want to do, theyre not your slaves.
Like Aristotle, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that some people are best suited for slavery. But at the same time, I didn't mention slavery anywhere in my post, so I'm confused as to why you're bringing it up.
Was it the line about "forcing native women to have children"? I would only recommend more overt methods if the situation is truly dire, and all other methods to enable voluntary childbirth have been exhausted. E.g., there's a lot more currently in our power we could do to make sure that two parent middle class families are able to live on one paycheck, to make it easier for mothers to stay at home and not be dependent on childcare services. Even in a dire situation, I would not recommend rounding women up and taking them to breeding facilities or anything like that, because that's unlikely to end up good for anyone. Simply making all abortion and birth control illegal would be pretty "forceful" by itself, because it's not like people are ever going to choose to stop having sex.
its always other people that are best suited for slavery, never the people saying this.
making those illegal would be akin to slavery in that both involve an infringement upon property rights. arguably, slavery is defined by the state of lacking self-ownership, from which property ownership follows. So somebody paying half of their income as taxes to the state is in some sense a half slave to the state.
why do you care so much about other people's reproductive decisions?
Oh no, I would quite plausibly count myself among the natural-born slaves. I am emotionally incontinent, I have no control over my impulses, I am a coward and a liar. I could serve no better purpose than to be an instrument of a good cause. But there is a staggering paucity of good causes today.
Two main reasons:
We are told that, due to declining birthrates and an aging population, we are facing a labor shortage and ultimately an economic collapse. We are told that we must therefore import large numbers of immigrants - immigrants who are frequently low IQ, or racially foreign, or demanding of special privileges via DEI initiatives, etc. This is not desirable. The obvious solution is that if we don't have enough people, then the native population should simply make more people! This is preferable.
For most people, having children is the best chance they have at producing something that endures beyond the confines of their own lifespan. The average person has neither the inclination nor the ability to contribute to scientific knowledge, or produce great art, or do influential work in politics, or do anything else that leaves a meaningful and enduring legacy. Having no real reason to care about anything beyond their immediate sense perceptions, people are apt to spend their lives in idle hedonism, in the absence of external constraints. This is not a meaningful way to spend one's life. Having children forges a beyond between you and something outside of you, something beyond you. As a culture, we have forgotten the value of sacrifice. Reminding people of this value is a good thing.
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When it comes to having children, I don't think you'd understand-
For I don't want human children, I want children made of sand.
Manufactured en mass to a meticulous plan.
And endowed from their first day on earth with all the skill of Man.
I do understand and as I keep saying; It seems to me that the so called "AI Alignment Problem" has little if anything to do with intelligence (artificial or otherwise) and is better understood as a utilitarian alignment problem.
Are those "children made of sand" going to give a shit about you or any of those skills you've endowed them with?
I trust current AI models to be aligned with their trainers and prompt engineers more than I trust the average human to be aligned with me.
But I also find this obsession some humans have with enforcing their unnecessarily specific ideals onto their children to be highly distasteful.
If I want more of me to help uphold my systems, I'll work towards making more of me.
Children are for when I want to bring someone less aligned with me into this universe.
I'm much more afraid right now of AI being unaligned because we only let unaligned megacorps build them than I am of our current learning machine architecture being inherently difficult to align.
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There's no guarantee that actual children will care about you either. Didn't you just say it's not about parents, though?
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I share your view, but I wonder about your tone. Are you trying to explain, to convince, or just to preach to the choir?
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I'm not so sure this is true. Stephen Shaw put out a documentary about falling birth rates called Birthgap, and he was interviewed by Jordan Peterson recently (it was a good interview, you can get it by podcast as well, but I know most people don't have the time for that).
The most interesting thing he's talking about, that I hadn't heard before, is that according to him something like 5% of women report that they never want to have kids, yet right now something like 30% of women never have any kids. Which comes out to something like 80% of women who never have kids having wanted them. This is a real source of suffering that has mostly gone unnoticed by the mainstream. Shaw, interestingly enough, never gives an explanation of what's causing this. He has ideas, but every time he looked at the data the ideas just didn't make sense. He described his documentary as him asking all these experts why fertility rates are falling, even while most women still want to have kids, and finding that every explanation he was given kinda made sense but didn't match the data. Really, the interview is great and I'd recommend listening to it.
So while it makes sense intellectually that "most people will choose not to have kids" for the vast majority of women, at least, who never have kids it wasn't a choice. They meant to have kids, but it did not work out for them. No doubt for most of them it was due to other choices they made, but they never meant to be childless. So when we see falling fertility we can't round it off as "More people are choosing not to have kids." That doesn't seem to match the data (again, among women).
Another interesting bit of data I learned from the interview: Shaw claims that only children are not a major driver of lower fertility, and says that having only one kid is still very rare. The people who are having any kids at all are choosing to have more than one kid, and only child rates have remained about the same over the last 70 years or so.
EDIT:
Just wanted to add a quote from Shaw, from a different podcast he did:
"Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe women don't want their children. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe we have to accept that. And that's the society where now, you know, we set ourselves up for and we just accept consequences. Well, it turns out from studies and from my documentary talking to people in 24 countries, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of people who don't have children, and I'm estimating 80% and it might be higher, had planned to have children. They had assumed there would be a moment in time after education, after careers when it would be the right time. But the right time never came. And, you know, if you were to watch a part two of the documentary, I almost suggest you don't watch it alone because there's some very emotional scenes with people in their 40s, men and women who get deeply emotional about what went wrong in life that they had planned to have children."
I think it's better to judge people based on their actions not words. You can easily have children while having a career on first world country. Problems with having kids in 40s are well known. Women just choose what they want more in theit youth and maybe they committing a mistake because they don't think long term but this is their cross to bear.
You know, I don't think they are. At least, not among the population of women who want to have kids but never have them.
I think our society used to be built around an cultural expectation that you marry young and have kids, and the 1970s blew up that cultural expectation because it restricted people's freedom. And a lot of women since never got told that they better have kids young or it probably won't happen. Pop culture didn't tell them, their parents didn't tell them, school didn't tell them, and their peers didn't tell them. This isn't true of all women, but of a lot. They were told they could have it all.
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This is my wife and I's position. We're child free by choice. I've even gotten a vasectomy to prevent this possibility. When I look at my friends or siblings who have had children it seems like having children has had a clear negative impact on their quality of life in terms of the things we care about. Hell, having a dog is almost more responsibility and imposition on the way we want to live our lives than we're willing to tolerate. Forget raising another human.
I think "people are by and large no longer raised in a memeplex that views having children as the terminal goal in life" is underrated as an explanation for why people no longer want to have children. It turns out when you tell people they should be able to live the kinds of lives they want to lots of people are no longer interested in having children!
What is the liberal argument against removing the right to vote and other civil rights from 'childfree' people?
What would go wrong if we made them untouchables?
The issue with a lack of justice is that people's families are going to take justice in their own hands and seek revenge which might spiral down into vendetta and worse.
But what happens when an elderly childfree citizen gets murdered, if the police just files the case away?
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Strongly agree. That memeplex - and people raised in it - are going to construct a lot of societal expectations and systems.
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Oh absolutely. Assuming no singularity, society needs kids though, they generate a huge positive externality that everyone benefits from. The natural solution is to subsidise having kids relative to not having them, but society is also not willing to tolerate the level of subsidy necessary to have a noticeable impact ($100,000+ per child). For a time while the going is good this inconsistency can be elided, but eventually the contradiction gets too big and something will have to give, either massive collapse of the welfare system or massive taxes on the childless relative to those who have kids.
Subsidizing children seems difficult. If you give the same amount per child to everyone, you've incentivized poor people way more than rich ones. That is, in a social circle where having kids means violin lessons and their own room, let alone private school, 100k/18yrs=5.5k/yr ain't gonna cut it. If your goal is equity, maybe this is a good thing. Otherwise, you're incentivizing spready of whatever social/genetic reasons lead to poverty.
Maybe subsidize but only for incomes in the 50th to 90th percentiles? Boy would that be unpopular.
You could specifically tie it to marriage, which has the side effect of excluding the poor in the USA.
I've been thinking that something like this is probably the way. But to fix the problem @null brings us, you need to also incorporate a piece of what I recall reading here that Hungary did recently: tie it directly to tax rates, too. IIRC, they basically said that women, after having some number of kids before some age or some such test, would not have to pay income taxes for the rest of their lives. However, that is imperfect for at least a couple reasons. First, the benefit really only comes so long as the woman is working again, which means she's rushing to get back to work and to work as much as possible, not pumping out more babies and raising them. Second, it's untethered from marriage, so she can just pump and dump random dude for baby batter (or even just swing by a sperm bank) to get her required allocation of children before going back to her now-tax-free life.
One of the things most people think we've lost in the last century is a strong incentive to stay married, even when the marriage isn't like, perfect perfect. The motivation for trying to get rid of that strong motivation is that if the motivation is too strong, then some people will end up staying in marriages that are not just not-perfect, but which are actively horrid. However, trad folks today think that we've gone too far and that we need more incentive for folks to stay together.
If the old tools to incentivize couples to stay married won't work anymore, and the best tool we can come up is tax policy, then we've got to use tax policy. Make a husband's income tax free for the rest of time, so long as two conditions are met: 1) Whatever conditions like what Hungary already has on a woman pumping out a sufficient number of babies before whatever age, and 2) The parents are still married and caring for their children.
The biggest problem is that (2) might be hard to police. That said, in the US, we already have a scheme for doing basically exactly this, so it's probably not completely impossible. We have conditional green cards for immigrants-by-marriage. You have to demonstrate (by means of tax/property/bank records, records of pattern-of-life together, testimony of family/friends, whatever) that you are still in a loving marriage, and that it's not just a sham for scoring immigration benefits. This system would have be massively scaled up (which will obviously cause plenty of problems on its own, most unforeseen), but it is in principle possible.
In any event, I meant to include somewhere in there that if it hits directly at a husband's tax rate rather than a fixed amount, it'll provide more incentive for higher-earners. Of course, there is no way this will be palatable for the left; they won't stomach what appears to be giving more money to rich people. Maybe there's a plausible middle-ground that doesn't skew the tax benefit quite as far as the tax burden itself has been skewed, but we're not really talking about political feasibility here; we're mostly just talking about the feasibility of the social engineering solution.
There was a bill proposed in the Texas house this session- which will almost certainly not pass because its author is caught up in a sex scandal that might lead to Texas recriminalizing adultery- which offered married, never divorced couples enormous property tax breaks for high parity births(specifically requiring 4 children for eligibility). The left’s screams were probably a minor prefigurement of the freak out from exempting the husbands of stay at home mothers with many children from income tax, and I don’t think it’s due to being ‘regressive’, it’s because to progressives that’s not who the government is supposed to be giving money to. Sort of like pregnancy centers.
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Please don't take this as a personal criticism.
A few threads back I said the following:
I got some good pushback on that post, but ... here you are making my point for me. Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice and that doesn't sound so appealing to the folk who inhabit modern times.
I suspect the data above about women who want to have kids but aren't is falling prey to known issues with polling -- women say they want to have kids, revealed preference says they actually don't. My own guess is that having kids maybe seems like a nice idea and it costs nothing to say you want them, but by and large at any given moment it's too daunting and difficult and hard. People don't want to do hard things anymore without obvious benefit to them.
What more is there to say, really?
I missed the initial thread but this sort of attitude is exactly why I continue to maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally evil/incompatible with human flourishing. For the umpteenth time, utility is not fungible and the moment you start acting like it is you're fucked because utilions and qualia don't exist.
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Isn't the trick to want to live your life to facilitate and optimize for children?
Adding one child to our DINK lifestyle was just about possible. Child care was expensive and when he was small the extra stuff when traveling or out was a pain. Once we had two, something needed to change.
Now single income with 4 kids, my wife is a homemaker. We only travel where we can drive. We're we are now in New England this hasn't been terribly limiting.
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I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can say without hesitation that having kids had a severely negative impact on my life. Most of that was due to my poor selection of partner/her post-partum/outside elements that don’t have anything directly to do with the kids themselves. On the other hand, the moments of joy I experience when my children are happy and loving… it’s a higher high than any other sensation I’ve been able to find in this life. And then, egotistically, I get the satisfaction of fulfilling my belief that a reasonably-good-looking National Merit Scholar is the type of person who should be reproducing.
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Sure, I respect that choice, I'm a liberal at heart, my solution is for people who want more children.
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