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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27243 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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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.

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