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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27349 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves.

China used to have very high fertility. As did Japan, India, South Korea and so on... How did they become so populous in the first place if mistreating women lowers fertility? They used to treat their women far worse than they do now. See footbinding, see women being legally property in Japan until 1945... I got into a big argument with some people over whether South Korea is a feminist country, despite gender equality being written into its constitution and an actual govt ministry supporting it... anyway it's indisputable that it's much more feminist now than ever in the past.

Mistreating women is not the cause of low fertility, indeed it's the opposite. If you look at the literature, female education immediately appears as a primary reducer of fertility.

There's a certain kind of mistreatment of women that results in very high fertility - the kind where there are actually intense, binding social expectations about their role in the family, limited education and serious patriarchal norms. Binding social expectations, backed by credible threats of violence. Label this 'actual patriarchy' - Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, pre-1945 Japan and so on. Actual patriarchies have very high fertility, even in harsh conditions Japan was at 4.0 in 1943 and 1944 despite total war, total mobilization, millions of men at the front...

Then there's a kind of mistreatment of women that results in very low fertility, the kind you're talking about. Men not wanting highly educated wives, or viewing women in their 30s as undesirable, or expecting them to leave the workforce once they marry. These aren't binding social expectations, not like in actual patriarchy. You can see that the women choose to ignore them, like you say they have other options. It's paper-mache patriarchy. There's no actual effort to suppress female education like there is in Afghanistan, not in South Korea. In paper-mache patriarchy you see these materialistic efforts to increase fertility by giving a token payment, you see feminist groups that aren't suppressed by the state, you see lip-service to gender equality, laws against gender discrimination. You see lots of men who are unhappy with feminism and hold patriarchal views yet these views are not actually enforced and implemented.

I also note that fertility is not very high in the richest, most feminist states like Sweden. They're around 1.8 which is better than South Korea but probably propped up by births amongst non-assimilating migrants. Canada is at 1.5, Finland 1.4, Germany 1.6... Feminism clearly doesn't raise fertility.

Real pathways to raise fertility:

  1. Return or move closer to actual patriarchy
  2. Mass cloning/AI/eternal youth technical fix
  3. Return to devout religiosity as with Mormons of old and certain Jewish sects

Real pathways to raise fertility:

  1. Return or move closer to actual patriarchy
  2. Mass cloning/AI/eternal youth technical fix
  3. Return to devout religiosity as with Mormons of old and certain Jewish sects

I quite enjoyed this recent piece from the vice president for economic and social-policy studies at The Cato Institute, Alex Nowrasteh. Specifically this bit:

He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

Even the Mormons are falling below replacement rate, though for all I know that is due to secularization. A "return to patriarchy" could work if it specifically limits women's opportunities, but part of Nowrasteh's point seems to be that with the luxury of ubiquitous electronic entertainment, even excluding women from the workforce would likely be insufficient to push the opportunity cost balance back toward fecundity.

Nowrasteh's proposal is deregulation to reduce the cost of raising children, but in my experience children are already pretty affordable--at least until they get to college! Rather, the benefits of having children are often poorly communicated or even perhaps outside the Overton window, and when they are understood those benefits still take decades to really come to fruition. Having a close-knit family is an extremely effective risk-mitigation strategy on numerous fronts, but it takes a lot of work to build such a thing, and it takes a lot of cultural input to get people believing it's even possible.

massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household

This just leads to a massive drop in household formation where a man and a woman who both have a job they like decide to keep everything casual and live separately to avoid these massive taxes instead of moving in together. Of course, this lack of household formation will probably lead to lower birthrates too.

Yeah, what should be taxed is obviously childlessness.

"We'll tax and tax people until we get the results we want!"

A popular view. Not one I'm fond of and I really doubt it is good for anything other than making "vices" too expensive for most people. I don't think we can tax our way into broad positive social changes such as boosting fertility rates.

Which leads to a drop in fertility as couples are now unable to save enough to become comfortable financially with having a child. Yes, I know, you work around this one by putting age limits on the tax. But at some point in the epicycles you should probably figure you've got a wrong approach.

None of this will work because the amount of taxation which would make it worthwhile to have a kid isn't viable; you'll drive a massive black market instead. The problem is on the other end -- children are too expensive for too long, both in financial and non-fungible terms.

None of this will work because the amount of taxation which would make it worthwhile to have a kid isn't viable; you'll drive a massive black market instead. The problem is on the other end -- children are too expensive for too long, both in financial and non-fungible terms.

We could change the social norms so that kids are allowed to mostly roam free, from a much younger age, instead of being in paid and adult-chaperoned activities all the time. That would also probably have the effect that some of the males get killed off from taking dumb risks, and more teenage pregnancy. Not sure if that's a good thing but... it does solve the fertility drop.

for all I know that is due to secularization

Mormonism is not what it was. See 'jump humping' and 'soaking' for example.

even excluding women from the workforce would likely be insufficient to push the opportunity cost balance back toward fecundity

Good point. Now I think about it, even if you did have an actual patriarchy, modern contraception might result in your male household heads deciding to have fewer children and spend more on luxuries. You'd probably need to suppress contraception too, which is not that hard considering you've already launched a cultural revolution to get there in the first place.

He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

I remember proposing something similar in one of the previous discussion threads, capping total hours worked at 20 hours per week per adult person in a household and uncapping them after the second (60) and the third (80) minor dependent.

Yeah, this is the ‘best’ (most efficient) option since it makes living on your own dependant on marriage for most young people.

You're a little off track, my comment wasn't about fertility per se it was about gender balance. Related, and I can see where you jumped off, but not the same. The Asian countries outlined combine a pervasive social bias against females with modern freedoms, which suppress fertility, lead to sex selective abortion, and gendered immigration patterns. My example of Singapore was meant to show that tension: Singapore under LKY and his successors wants to have talented students, male and female, travel abroad for university education they see this as a net beneficial policy; but they disproportionately lose female university students to emigration abroad. Similarly, if you have a pervasive bias against female children, the scientific/medical base to test for gender early, and abortion on demand to abort female children, you get pervasive sex selective abortion, which drives the gender imbalance to unworkable levels. If you provide women with modern escape hatches from patriarchal expectations, you can't expect them to choose child rearing, they'll utilize the escape hatches to get away. If you need the escape hatches in order to operate as a modern economy for various reasons, then it's the patriarchal expectations that are going to have to shift.

China used to have high fertility, but when exposure after birth was the only method to cull female children it was much less common and the gender balance stayed pretty average. With early testing and abortion available, there are 120 male births for every 100 female births. That represents a society in a severe state of dysfunction, regardless of fertility levels.

Further, on the subject of Fertility:

I also note that fertility is not very high in the richest, most feminist states like Sweden. They're around 1.8 which is better than South Korea but probably propped up by births amongst non-assimilating migrants. Canada is at 1.5, Finland 1.4, Germany 1.6... Feminism clearly doesn't raise fertility.

Feminism suppresses fertility from pre-feminist norms, but it seems clear that the worst places to be are the halfway houses of East Asia: feminist enough to remove patriarchal restrictions, insufficiently feminist to remove patriarchal expectations. It's a uniquely toxic mix. Highly feminist countries have sub replacement TFRs, but South Korea is at half of Germany. That's not a minor gap, that is huge. That's the difference between a society slowly shrinking, in a way that is likely sustainable with moderate assimilable immigration, and a society in free fall. China is still higher but significantly lower than the West, and those numbers are widely believed to be massaged.

China used to have high fertility, but when exposure after birth was the only method to cull female children it was much less common and the gender balance stayed pretty average. With early testing and abortion available, there are 120 male births for every 100 female births. That represents a society in a severe state of dysfunction, regardless of fertility levels.

I don’t think you can separate China’s possibly uniquely bad gender ratio at birth from its possibly uniquely bad One Child Policy. If that policy had never been implemented, I’m guessing you’d see a much smaller gender disparity. The problem is that they kept a patrilineal society but forbade parents from having multiple children, when if they wanted to adopt the latter policy, they needed to first take an axe to the former tradition. Of course Chinese parents want a boy; it’s how their family line is passed down! Sure, they’ll happily have a girl as a second or third child, but if that option is closed off to them, they’ll settle for just one boy. If anything, I’m surprised the ratio isn’t even more skewed.

Here's the thing: India is nearly as bad on a national level, and on in certain localities as bad or worse, without the one child policy. The throughline isn't the one child policy, it is female children being devalued (such as through strict patrilineal descent or dowry traditions). The one child policy might have made the issue more acute, but it did not create the issue single handed.

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/03/02/son-preference-and-abortion/#:~:text=Over%20time%2C%20the%20Indian%20government,the%20sex%20of%20the%20fetus.

What about Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait, etc?

It's seems more like tfr correlates with being a poor, unstable, agrarian shithole than it does with patriarchy.

Iran is a victim of its own highly successful population control policy.

Iran has a flourishing feminist movement, see the huge protests last year and in 2017 over hijab-wearing. True, the state does suppress feminism in Iran but their suppression efforts clearly aren't sufficient. Plus there's a very substantial presence of women in higher education:

Enrollment of women in universities jumped from 3% in 1977 to 67% in 2015, according to the World Bank statistics.

UAE and Kuwait have all kinds of weirdness with regard to demographics because of the large non-citizen population. Plus UAE, Saudi Arabia and so on apparently rank rather highly in these gender equality statistics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Inequality_Index

I would not classify Iran or even Saudi Arabia as an actual patriarchy like Afghanistan. True, the real patriarchies tend to be poor, unstable agrarian shitholes today.

It's also surprisingly irreligious. Especially for a nominal theocracy, which I suppose explains in part the insecurity of its ruling elite.

I know quite a few Iranian immigrants. One is a practicing Muslim, goes to mosque, etc.

All the others, as best I can tell, are non-religious. They also all drink alcohol and the women don't cover their hair. So Muslim cultural norms didn't stick.

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