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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26629 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:

Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline

https://archive.is/T6thJ

Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.

After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.

But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.

Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.

The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.

Give every native man a house when they demonstrate they have finished some form of work related education, i.e. not arts or theater, and that they have worked for 2 years. Otherwise they would need to demonstrate they have been working for 5 years. The problem solves itself from that point.

Here is my policy suggestion

  • Inculcate in young girls’ a desire to have children. You do this with positive, aspirational media and experiences involving motherhood. Echoing RandomRanger’s insight downthread, require girls in the first three years of schooling to bring their dolls to school and engage in doll-oriented activity. The highlights of female education in the first 6 years of schooling should be: motherhood, cultivating the nurturing instinct, and homemaking skills. In high school, two years of required internships in which female students “babysit”, nanny, and helping out new mothers — which doubles as a cost-free program for new mothers.

  • Ban women from high stress professions. (Women in STEM is grossly dysgenic due to low birth rates. Instead, reserve the least stressful STEM-adjacent positions for the highest IQ women. This is highly eugenic.) Reserve society’s least stressed jobs for women.

  • Government grants to media which extol motherhood.

Raising girls as identical to boys has obviously failed. In history, the primary “skill” a girl learned was how to be a mother/wife. That’s because it’s an important, difficult, stressful 6-18 years of a woman’s fertile years. Feminism failed, we can move on. Another to note is that there is a lot of research showing that stressed mothers and mothers who cannot breastfeed or love their children properly have a much higher chance of having children who are mentally ill or autistic etc, or even have childhood obesity. So the thought that we would lose “money” with our MAMA agenda (Make American-women Mothers Again) is not necessarily correct. Tons of resources are spent on psychiatric and physical disability which is ameliorated through MAMA policy.

It’s kind of hilarious that we consciously destroyed the mothering instinct in girls who naturally gravitate to dolls and tea parties and so on, and then we look at ourselves shocked like that retarded Spider-Man meme when we realize women now don’t want children, want money and safety more than children, and are stressed at the prospect of children.

Ban women from high stress professions. (Women in STEM is grossly dysgenic due to low birth rates. Instead, reserve the least stressful STEM-adjacent positions for the highest IQ women. This is highly eugenic.) Reserve society’s least stressed jobs for women.

I don't have numbers, but my anecdotal observations are that this is culturally dependent. The Chinese and Indian women I work with take full advantage of the generous FAANG benefits to help produce and take care of children. Some white American women do, but not nearly as much. Family events put on by the company are full of mostly south and east Asian children. There are probably as many mixed white and east Asian kids as there are white kids.

A great deal of this is driven by family pressure to have kids. Maybe that's where policy would be most effective. Make white parents nag their children to have kids so that they can get access to some government benefit. Maybe offer full social security retirement benefits at an earlier age, or boost the benefit for each grandchild produced.

The Chinese and Indian women I work with take full advantage of the generous FAANG benefits to help produce and take care of children.

This is basically my plan on what I'd like me and my future wife to do once I get married and we have children. Basically I coach her (if she needs coaching, I can't imagine I would ever marry a woman who doesn't have it in her to get hired at a FAANG if pushed, even if she's a doctor or something) to get a decent job at one of these big companies (finance jobs don't work here, your ability to take from the company if you're not putting in is much more limited, you have to have a big institution where the system is not set up to deal with such a mindset and can't change easily to suck at the teat of), then she gets pregnant and has a child and we keep drawing her full salary plus large maternity benefits for us and then soon after she returns to work she gets pregnant again and we repeat the process. Rinse and repeat until our family is at the desired size. Getting paid FAANG money to raise kids is about as excellent a lifestyle as most women can hope for, plus all those years on maternity technically count as "experience" so if she does want to work once our kids are old enough she has a decent CV still present.

I'm very newly a father. My daughter is 3 days old. I'm turning 30 this year, and the general reaction I got from talking to my friends & strangers was very 'wow that's young to be doing it' or 'how can you afford this'. I was the youngest person in my highschool scholarship class in a good upper middle class suburb by about a year, 30 people of whom most have gone on to be Doctors, Dentists, Developers and other Desirable roles. I'm the only to have reproduced, and at this rate I'm the only one who even looks particularly close to it. My university cohort's fairly similar, with similar professional attainment.

The big themes I noticed when talking to people about why they haven't taken the leap are generally some combination of not owning housing, being stuck in the dating app treadmill, protecting their free lifestyles to do 'cool, spontaneous things' and versions of 'my potential children will inherit the apocalypse'

grats! sorry I don't have anything more substantive to say. but seriously, congrats!

Thank you!

Congratulations! Being younger makes it easier to raise young kids, I think. Obviously everyone has their own life situation, but I think it's good to start reasonably young if you can! Glad it is working out for you :) What percentage would you say of each of the themes you mention? Is there a lot of overlap?

Mind my asking what you do for a living?

Fairly high up in some interaction of gambling/crypto. It's not socially gainful but it is fairly lucrative.

Talking to my childless compatriots, I'd say one reason that's as common at least as those is "I have some form of mental distress and don't know if I can manage kids with them / don't want my kids to inherit it".

Perhaps you can suggest something like Orchid prenatal polygenic screening to them where they can choose to implant an embryo with low risk of inheriting the condition?

I'm going to guess the answers would be some combo of "that's eugenics" and "that's sounds expensive as shit, I can't afford that, especially if there's a baby coming".

This is pretty common I think. Makes for a potentially interesting connection with the prior post on Bad Therapy.

Maybe it's Seasonal Affective Disorder caused by magic dirt latitude and not anything inheritable?

Nah, we're pretty good at telling when it's SAD and when it's something else. Besides, SAD was already a regular affair in the 00s, when the TFR was much healthier than now, ie. around 1,8-1,9.

One of my best friends had a rough childhood and really struggled with depression and anxiety for while, so now that things are actually pretty good for him with a good partner, house and job; he doesn't want to have kids because he doesn't want them to have the same shit as him.

Very sad to me since I think he would be a great dad.

One thing that was proven to work is giving young women baby dolls to look after. The US tried that in an effort to reduce teenage pregnancies only to observe the opposite effect.

https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/25/infant-simulators-teen-pregnancy/

I think the tone is rather ghoulish here - how can we prevent people having children so they can move onto brighter futures? Ultimately this all comes back to Ehrlich and the Club of Rome - strong contenders for the biggest civilizational wrecker of all time IMO. The Population Bomb proposed all kinds of fertility-reducing interventions, many of which seem to have been taken up. One of the architects of China's One Child Policy went off to the Club of Rome, I trace that immense source of human misery back to their stupid ideas. There's a pervasive meme of overpopulation floating around - the very concept defies reason. More people means more innovation, production, efficiencies of scale. In a Malthusian model, ok sure overpopulation is a thing. The West does not live in a Malthusian world, not since Malthus's time. If we want more resources, let's go out and get them - the Arctic and Antarctic, the sea floor, the vast frontiers of space.

It's particularly pernicious to encourage socially responsible, highly educated smart people to throw their genes into the shredder by making it culturally 'irresponsible'.

One thing that was proven to work is giving young women baby dolls to look after. The US tried that in an effort to reduce teenage pregnancies only to observe the opposite effect.

It's funny that this didn't used to be a policy issue. Girls used to want dolls. Mattel made a fortune selling them dolls! Parents used to try and stop their girls from getting dolls, only for the girls to either make their own dolls, or start black market doll-exchanges at school.

More people means more innovation, production, efficiencies of scale.

Have you met people?

The problem is that people aren't fungible. Some people produce innovation, production, efficiencies of scale. The bulk of people do the ordinary work to keep civilization running and implement (if not originate) those innovations. A good chunk live on welfare, charity, and fraud and contribute far less than they take. And another chunk actively steals and destroys. Most incentives for fertility produce more of the last two groups, and even encourage people to leave the second group for the third.

Well ideally I'd like eugenics. But failing that, not encouraging dysgenics would be nice. The current system subsidises fertility for the poor and penalizes fertility for the responsible with the overpopulation meme. I'd also support executing the bottom end of the net-negatives, the drug dealers, burglars, scammers and so on.

I think affirmative action for university admissions based on family size would be a good move. The smartest kids and their parents really care a lot about uni admissions and high school grades, I've seen it with my own eyes. If having more children meant better chance of getting in or getting scholarships, that would change outcomes. South Korea would whiplash back to replacement rates in no time.

It’s very politically incorrect, but not technically difficult, to aim fertility incentives towards the productive middle class.

Now our society will never do it. But it’s not totally implausible that Italy might.

It is in fact, technically difficult, because the productive middle class are the ones paying for those incentives, and you're incentivizing them ultimately to be less productive.

I don't think it's impossible, but we need to be honest about what this would actually involve - a pretty significant drop in living standards. Are modern political systems capable of steering such a course?

The point is to make the childless bear the burden. Basically, tax childlessness heavily. It can be structured as heavy child tax credits to make it more politically palatable. It would immediately give childless incentive to join the other group: unaffordability makes for a weak argument when it is childlessness that makes you poor.

We need economies of scale.

Most incentives for fertility produce more of the last two groups

Well, many of the incentives are fixed or available to poor only, so it's by design. u RandomRanger did not offer any of such incentives.

My state offers heavily subsidized childcare and healthcare for pregnancy and young children to middle income families and below, which is not that hard to actually use. I looked up the fertility rate, and it isn't great.

But also, I like this visual tracker of US births by state 2005 - 2021, where is shows births per 1,000 women (15 - 44) going down noticeably every single year: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fertility_rates.htm

It looks like more than just "we can't go out when we want." Arizona went from 80 to 55.5 in 15 years. Utah went from 93 to 64. 15 years ago, women went to college and worked, people also moved away from their parents to work, liked going on trips together, missed going on date nights when they had young children, used contraception, and had access to abortion. The trend remained pretty steady through Covid and the years after.

I'm not sure why it's so stark, but even very expensive taxpayer funded childcare, food, tax breaks, and healthcare programs don't appear to be doing anything about it. Certainly not trivial things like cheap (or even free!) diapers and formula.

IIRC most of the reduction in US fertility has just been the result of a very successful campaign to reduce teen fertility. Nobody wants to be a trashy mom trapped with a loser boyfriend like on 16 and Pregnant.

Arizona, for example, had their teen fertility drop by nearly 75% from 2005-2021. Texas had theirs drop by 2/3rds. Alabama today has a lower teen pregnancy rate than New York did in 2005.

The catch, it seems, is that it's hard to turn off that "You're fucked if you have kids before you're ready" propaganda merely by reaching one's early 20s. It doesn't help that young adults are spending more time in school than ever before.

The entire modern public education system seems like a giant psych-op to reduce teen fertility.

  • keep kids under supervision at all times
  • very early in the morning to punish the kids with an active nightlife
  • stops kids from having a job to get money to pay for dates
  • separate them by age group to stop the older boys meeting younger girls
  • all female teachers, with boys punished for showing masculine impulses
  • the teacher pay system heavily rewards seniority, so a lot of the teachers are these aged schoolmarms in their 50s and 60s who have never had any other job and never had kids
  • explicit sex-ed lectures where you tell them that sex will ruin their life
  • hardcore prep on getting a college degree, leading to a graduate degree, leading to a job, etc with marriage and kids waaay in the future

On the one hand, that sounds plausible.

On the other hand, for instance, Kosovo has continued living in large multi-generational families through hundreds of years of poverty and war, and still has heavy family involvement in marriages. Kosovo's TFR. Every Western and Asian country I've looked at has been something like that, whether they had a teenage pregnancy campaign or not.

My state offers heavily subsidized childcare

Free childcare is not actually an inducement to have children. It’s a subsidy for moms to work.

Moms have a strong revealed preference to work less and spend more time being a mom. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in a capitalist economy that results in some unfair-on-the-surface outcomes, and you can’t paper over them. It’s much easier to make mothers miserable so you can claim their career outcomes are where you want them.

There is no amount of social welfare that can convince a person to have kids. There are more important things that are aren't in place.

You need

  • Labor support (Retired parents and an extra room)
  • A stable partner (Time to date through your early 20s, rather than slog it out in your career)
  • Your own house (lol, good luck)

All govt. assistance ends up being fed to landlords downstream. Italy tops the list of western-european countries where 25-35 year olds still live with parents. Don't try anything another solution unless you fix housing first. Everything else is downstream.

I know a ton of people in their late-30s who're struggling to have kids / 2nd children becasue they're too old. The urge to be parents exists. Things just take a LOT longer to stabilize.

I'm confused about your list of needed things. I don't know anyone who grew up with all of them. Looking at just my family tree I have:

  • One set of grandparents had their first son on a US Base in West Germany. Moved back to the US to a part of the country far away from other family, bought a house in the suburbs, and had five kids all told. (Missing: house at first baby, labor support)

  • Other pair of grandparents had moved from Ireland, didn't have any relatives to help. Had 12 kids on a single policeman's salary. (I'm not sure when they bought their first house, but they were missing labor support.)

-My parents had me and my brother in a one bedroom condo, about a five hour drive from my father's parents. My parents both worked at the time and I was in daycare. After my brother's birth they moved to a lower cost of living state and bought a house. My father had a job lined up, my mother did not. She transitioned into a Stay at Home role, which ended up being mostly permanent. Three kids total, but my mom was 33 when she married so she did her best. (Missing: house at first baby, family support.)

-My husband and I rented a two bedroom in a quadplex when we had our first. We couldn't afford daycare in the region, nor could we afford for one of us to stay home. We worked split shifts that first year so we could watch our daughter. He started working at 5 AM, I worked from 1:30 PM to 10. We were far away from either of our families. Eventually we saved up, had promotions, rented a house, had three more kids with an au pair to watch them, and bought a house in a lower cost of living state.

Getting married is a common thread, but having a house or a nearby family caretaker is not as essential as you stated. My experience has taught me it's mostly a matter of wanting a child. I don't know anyone my age who wants a single child half as much as my husband and I wanted a big family.

It is about making it lucrative to those who are on the fence. The people with strong opinions on kids are not changing their opinions.

But for every person like me, there's someone living at their parent's house (parental support), that their parents own (home ownership), with a long term girlfriend. There isn't a material difference between them and the requirements you list. The things keeping them from having kids are attitude and perception.

It's interesting and also sad that Japan's birth rate isn't doing well, since their housing market is famously functional compared to ours (by reputation in libertarian circles at least, I don't really know).

East Asia is different because childhoods are just uniquely sucky there. I’ve got a regular rant about it, but basically people love raising happy kids and don’t like shoving them through a miserable rat race, and the latter is how East Asian childhoods work. So in oriental countries people are making a rational choice not to take on two decades of enforced suck.

Notably japan’s birthrate is the highest in east Asia(if you rationally consider North Korean statistics unreliable), and my impression is that Japanese childhoods are unpleasant Rat races compared to the west, but compared to South Korea or the sinosphere are rather idyllic.

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have ZERO work life balance. I don't think the average American can even fathom what 'zero' work life balance looks like. Americans think they work hard when compared to Europe. But East Asia is a whole another beast.

Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have ZERO work life balance. I don't think the average American can even fathom what 'zero' work life balance looks like. Americans think they work hard when compared to Europe. But East Asia is a whole another beast.

I don't agree with this. I'm stereotyping here, and focusing mostly on Japan, but here's how I see it:

The stereotypical salaryman focuses on his work-life. He goes to work, works very hard, then socializes after work with his coworkers. They eat dinner together, drink together, maybe do some other stuff (maybe go to sex workers...). But it's a combination of work and friends. They put in "long hours" but they're not really working the whole time.

Meanwhile, the housewife takes care of everything else. She raises the kids, she manages the family budget, she cooks all the meals, she deals with family. EVERYTHING.

A lot of the "long hours" that asian workers work are just getting paid for stuff that Americans would do for free, to prove that we're a good feminist who balances the household work with our female partners.

I'd argue that the housing issue is actually downstream of the cultural issues. There are a bunch of large houses around me that could easily accommodate six or even eight people living them, but currently there are only two. People can and do raise children in their parents' house if it's respectable in their culture. One of the interesting things about current trends, is that it doesn't really seem to make much difference; countries with all different housing situations and acceptable arrangements are falling together.

Also, there are large areas of the US where it isn't all that hard to buy a house. I live next to a city of under a million people, and didn't bother saving any money in my 20s. I had a baby in a one room duplex, and we realized why families have houses, so we asked a local agency that helps people buy their first time home if we could buy one or not. They said, yes, up to $x. Then a year later we had bought a house, and it was all basically straightforward aside from a regionally specific appraisal issue on the first house we tried to buy. We aren't making a lot of money. It doesn't make any difference, birth rates are going down just the same.

downstream of the cultural issues

You are techincally correct. The last couple of generations grew up in the suburbs and hated it. Now they don't want to go back.

With the demise of organic in-person culture, suburbs and small cities can feel isolating. Other than a few places like NYC, you'll quickly find yourself isolated because you never meet anyone. NYC forces you to collide with people like almost nowhere else in the US. The other big cities also achieve this to a small degree. But past that, every other place in the US makes a newcomer feel like they're trapped in their own head. Now newcomers suffering didn't used to matter as much, but pretty much every young professional is being forced to move into some other city as a transplant. They all get shuffled around, each getting more and more isolated.

So yeah, people want housing and they want it in a place where they won't be miserable.

I lived in SF for a decade. It had strong sense of neighborhood but without neighbors. We’d make friends for a short time, but everyone moved on, literally - to Oakland, Portland, Austin, or even just the Outer Sunset. I live in suburbia now which is exactly the opposite. Some neighbors have been here for 50 years!

Ah, I see the problem. You don't just want inexpensive houses, you want inexpensive houses in Manhattan. Yeah, even Don Draper didn't live in Manhattan (or NYC at all).

I loved growing up in the suburbs. I knew everyone on my culdesac. We were a ten minute drive from various friends of my mother who had children around my age. We went to church activities every week, sports, library events, etc. We weren't bored or bereft of social interaction.

In NYC I feel like being friendly puts a target on your back. But it might just be that I was socialized for one type of friendly, and don't recognize other forms.

I recently moved to a suberb outside a small city in a flyover state. I was quickly invited to attend a Welcome New People catered dinner at my new church, where we were paired with another family who checks up on us all the time. I am constantly invited to more parish activities, including a program that just pairs families with similar aged kids to meet up at least once a month to do whatever they want.

The nearest coffee shop has a consignment store with crafts made by local patrons. There's a festival every week in the downtown. I know most people on my street.

I loved growing up in the suburbs. I knew everyone on my culdesac. We were a ten minute drive from various friends of my mother who had children around my age. We went to church activities every week, sports, library events, etc. We weren't bored or bereft of social interaction.

To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though. My parents have lived in Greenwich Village since the early 1980s (late ‘70s in my dad’s case) and sure enough they know all their neighbors, get greeted at their coffee place, brunch place, deli, cheesecake place etc by name, are part of many local organizations, can’t walk down the street on a busy warm weekend afternoon without meeting multiple people they know walking around.

But that’s a completely different experience to the one I have, let alone the one someone would have moving there from somewhere else with no friends.

Highly sociable people can make friends anywhere. If you were the kind of person in college who signed up to 20 clubs in the first week to see what they were about and to make friends then you’re never going to be friendless. But I think for the default person, who isn’t a recluse and enjoys company but who also isn’t highly motivated to make friends, living in a more atomized suburb exposes you to far fewer people in the natural course of daily life.

You talk a lot about your parish/church, but of course ever fewer people are involved in a local religious organization. I think generally you encounter more people in a city, and for people who are weirder there are also more likely to be others like you around relative to a small town where out of necessity social organizations are largely going to cater to the modal kind of person. Cities involve more incidental encounters with other people, for better or worse.

To some extent this is just what being settled in a place looks like, though.

My parents moved into the state when I was 4. Six years later, they moved into a new-build neighborhood. My mom talked up the opportunity with friends and a couple of her friends also moved into the same neighborhood. I. Those six years in between, she had made friends with dozens of families, just by exchanging phone numbers with other moms at the playground, meeting their friends, arranging play dates, going out to coffee, etc.

My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance. People don't even look each other in the eye, let alone learn each other's names. It's too intimate by default, so people take steps to create boundaries.

My experience with cities, apartments, and dorms is the physical proximity creates emotional distance.

This is greatly put, and matches my experience perfectly. Have people talking about how suburbs are isolating ever lived in a mid rise apartment building? Nobody ever talks to anyone else, people move every 1-2 years, your neighbors are entirely unknown.

On the other hand, when you live in a SFH neighborhood, just looking at people’s houses and yards and cars makes you wonder about the kind of people who live there. When you go out on a walk, you meet people who are your neighbors, and not random passersby, like you do in dense, busy areas. Because of lower density, you see the same people over and over, which facilitates remembering. When you ask them where they leave, they tell you something like “a green house with an American flag”, instead of “uhh in 1201”, which you’ll immediately forget.

There is nothing more alienating than living in a dense, vibrant city.

Gen Z has become homeowners at a rate higher than not only the Millennials, but also Gen X. In the US, homeownership complaints are a big thing among redditors who don't actually want to be tied down but it's not really the issue they claim.

I straight up don’t believe that 30% of 19-26 year olds own homes. That’s a ridiculously improbable number. I bought a house at 22 and my real estate agent- who was probably a top 10%, and definitely in the top 20%, by volume of sales- said I was his youngest ever successful sale, and that he doesn’t get many clients within a few years of me either. If he’s representative- and DFW is one of the larger housing markets in the country so he should be reasonably so- then just based on ages, that’s not happening.

Instead what I suspect happened with this- I can’t find the specific survey methodology- is that this was a survey of heads of household, which actually tells us that gen z is likely to live with parents/as roommates if they can’t afford to buy. This tracks very well with everyone’s lived experience that I’ve heard and is also much more plausible than lots of early-20s homebuying.

The oldest gen-Z is 26 years old. Their home acquisition numbers are reflective of inheritance and a minority with social media success. Addtionally, home ownership is a useless metric if you don't know their monthly premium. Home ownership is only 'liberating' if is is somewhat affordable.

Ah, if you don't like the numbers, just wave them away.

Median salary for a gen-Zer is about $38,000: https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/average-salary-by-age/

Assuming they have $40k for a down payment lying around, and ZERO debt, they can afford a $200,000 house. Townhomes in my semi-rural town in Utah are $250,000+. The numbers just straight up just don't pass the smell test.

Edit: Just checked Zillow, the cheapest listing I can find in my town (that isn't a trailer in a trailer park) is $265k, that's for a townhome.

Archive.is doesn't work for many people now (including me) so I can't comment.

But if they say 30% of people age 19-26 own homes then either they're wrong or family wealth is the reason. No way these people are buying homes with their wages.

The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical. We're not talking about the price of baby formula here, we're talking about six figure sums per person. And what you're essentially paying people to do is stay home, not work, and consume more. The better the program works, the more it costs and the less money you have to pay for it. And all this is also massively regressive if targeted at the middle class.

2rafa is on the right track here in terms of scale, but even big shovels can't turn the tide. You end up digging the earth out from beneath your feet. Do we really want to encourage parents to work more, and the childless to work less? Will young childless people sit still and let themselves be dragooned into working as nannies and cleaners for the fruitful and then taxed to pay for their own service?

And will any of this work? Low fertility is not a symptom of poverty, but of some of the richest societies to ever exist. Which then turn around and say - but not rich enough. Just a bit more money. can we really buy virtue, really bribe ourselves into having kids?

Low fertility is here to stay. It is a symptom of an industrial society that has refined every process of production except for human procreation. When we want cattle, we roll up our sleeves and make them. But human children are not even at the level of a medieval cottage industry. Maybe it's for the best that we don't see babies as commodities. But that is a choice, and it follows from that choice that we will not have very many of them.

It’s actually pretty easy to solve low fertility with money; it’s expensive and politically incorrect, but it’s very doable. You just need a big increase in male purchasing power relative to female, targeted at the reproductive years. It probably helps if you discriminate in favor of married couples. That’s basically the story of the baby boom.

Helpfully, everything about doing that is illegal.

Expensive and politically unfeasible make it sound hard, not easy. Perhaps it would be better to say that it's simple - depositing a hundred thousand dollars in the bank account of every pregnant woman would be very simple, but also very hard.

Ending all college subsidies would help it seems.

The fact that there are something like 25% more women in college then men is a huge problem. Women won't date down in status and college education is a heavy status signal.

The fact that there are something like 25% more women in college then men is a huge problem. Women won't date down in status and college education is a heavy status signal.

Yes; once a woman graduates college she thinks herself too good for a man without a degree.

The solution is to stop sending women to college.

The issue therein is that the amount of money you'd need to pay to move the needle is uh, astronomical.

In the US, anyway, it's not that the money does not exist and is not currently being spent on children, but more some combination of:

  1. some parents are terrible at parenting, and would not spend the money on properly raising children, leaving them even more illiterate, innumerate, and unprepared for life in a civilization than currently
  2. The government isn't very good at telling the terrible parents apart from the decent ones in advance, and is obsessed with disparate impact.
  3. Most costs for having a stay at home mom (or equivalent) are fixed, such that even if a state were diverting all their education costs into the program, and that was $15,000 per year per child, and the family was totally fine raising 4 children for $60,000/year, it still doesn't quite work out temporally, since the children (and therefore the income) will likely be staggered about 2 years apart, and so the first child, especially, will put the family in a bad position.
  4. Most of the people in a position to take advantage of a program like that, because they're able to form a stable relationship (which would ideally be part of #2, but of course would go wrong for political reasons), are already having children anyway. It's the people practicing serial monogamy, looking for the ideal partner and maybe finding him at 40 or not at all, who should be having children but aren't.

It seems to me that expecting ASI in our lifetimes and worrying about fertility should be mutually exclusive. I fall in the camp that expects ASI, and it surprises me how many in rat-adjacent circles apparently fall in the other camp. If the intersection of these groups is actually non-empty and we have its representatives here, what is the cause of your concern?

For one, probabilities. If there is 50% chance of ASI in our lifetime, I still care about future worlds that fall in the other 50%.

We also have no idea what a world with ASI looks like. For one, there's a non-zero chance that we are already in the presence of superintelligence, either because the world is created by a deity/simulation or there are aliens monitoring us. This actually feels quite likely to me.

I think there's a good chance a superintelligent AI would just leave us alone or not interact with us meaningfully.

Finally, isn't this a general purpose argument for anything? Why care about the deficit? ASI. Eating healthy? ASI will come and save me. Meeting girls? Just wait for ASI and I'll have a whole harem of bots.

I mean, I mostly unironically agree with the thrust of your last paragraph. As you say, though, the probability we don't get ASI is not zero (though much less than 50% in my estimation) and you may want to hedge against it. But there is a cost to hedging and in many cases it's not worth it. Most people would be completely unprepared for survival if society collapsed, but they don't put in effort to be prepared, because it is a negative EV activity and the outcome is within their risk tolerance

Eating healthy? Absolutely, it improves your quality of life in the meantime as a nice bonus and it's not terribly difficult. Solving the fertility crisis? That is difficult and doesn't seem worth the effort. Similarly, I think the deficit is mostly irrelevant and isn't worth caring about, spending money you don't have is just too good. Meeting girls? Probably worth doing, you may find that you'll regret not having had "real" experiences, depending on the precise shape of the future.

That said, if I met someone completely neglecting their health and checked out of dating on the basis that "ASI is imminent", I wouldn't think of this as crazy -- just someone with somewhat different weights than me.

Lyman Stone just said on twitter that he had two papers in review finding substantial effects on birthrates of some policies that could be done, so I'll be excited to see what they are when they're out.

I will solve the childlessness problem hypothetically (amounts and currencies can of course be adapted to a country):

  1. 65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child. The tax drops by 15% per child for the first three children, with historic deductions so that people who still have 3 kids but do so late can claw back some of what they paid. Child deductions only available to couples married at (or within six months of) birth.

  2. Capital gains tax is doubled for those over 35 with fewer than two children, normal above. Normal rate only available to married or widowed people.

  3. Death/estate tax for childless people is 60% marginal on estates over $1m in net worth, falling by 20% and rising in threshold by $2m for each child until the fourth.

  4. 75% of roles on boards of directors must go to married parents of at least two children. 50% must go to married parents of at least three children. The same applies to Congressmen and women and to senior positions / positions of responsibility in all regulated industries, and to all cabinet positions in the executive. 90% of senior positions in the military, state department and justice department must be occupied by parents of at least two children.

  5. Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).

  6. To qualify for any tax credits, a movie or television production must show or imply that at least 65% of characters with more than 10 minutes of screen-time described or implied as over the age of 27 have children. The same, in real life, applies to cast members with the same screen time threshold.

  7. Entry to any selective schools (specialized high schools, gifted programs etc) requires a child to have at least one sibling. Priority is given to those with two or more siblings.

  8. For every child after and including the third under the age of 18, graduates of four-year college degrees can receive $8,000 per year in student debt forgiven. This stacks for married couples where both partners have student debt, and for graduates of medical schools or STEM programs at top-50 (US News) universities, it rises by an additional 50%, meaning that some PMC professional couples could have hundreds of thousands of dollars of college debt completely wiped out, never paying anything, if they have three or more children. (Two doctors with 4 kids under 18 would see $48,000 per year of college debt wiped off).

  9. A 10% state levy on home sales by childless adults over 30 funds mortgage subsidies for married parents of three or more children on a variable basis depending on the money raised the previous year. Married parents of 2 or more children who have had a child within the last 48 months pay no capital tax on primary home sales.

  10. White House, senate and congressional internships, state-funded scholarships, Supreme Court clerkships and other prestigious positions for young people are limited to those with at least one sibling. A core part of pushing up birthrates is convincing parents of only children to have another, so it has to be stigmatized.

  11. For constitutional reasons, exemption from some policies is available for those “constitutionally incapable” of having children. These exemptions must be filed for with a $10,000 processing fee, do not apply to inability to bear children related to any decisions taken by the individual (eg. gender transition, voluntary castration) above the age of federal criminal responsibility (12), or to psychological or material conditions like ‘asexuality’ or just being ugly. All decisions have to be approved unanimously by a panel appointed 50% by congressional republicans and 50% by congressional democrats. The presumption is that in cases of genuine medical infertility that is likely from childhood (ie not discovered later in life) the state will know about it years before any exemption may be needed.

How would that policy handle people that intend to be childless fleeing the country? Could it be financially sustained if most of the people that are now going childless would mostly leave the country?

Most people don’t intend to be childless. They just end up that way. Ratcheting up the pressure is good.

Perhaps most people dont currently intend to be childless and just are, but when being childless is accompanied by debilitating taxes, wouldnt anyone that isnt currently married and expecting opt to live abroad, and if they get lucky and find a partner they might come back?

My main point is that policy cant exist in a vacuum. A lot of the policy points you mention act as if people cant choose alternatives, while in reality anyone that is upper middle class and above can leave the country. Especially any of the policy that targets people with millions of dollars...

You can probably create a large one time baby bump at comparatively modest cost if you’re willing to fuck up certain markets- eg, turning house rentals into rent to own agreements for newly weds, whether the landlord likes it or not.

The main thing is getting existing, stable, relatively happy couples in long term relationships (whether or not they’re technically married yet) to get married (if they’re not) and to have (many) kids. That requires making life with kids better, more fun and more affluent than life without them.

Locking off career progression and heavily taxing childlessness and only having one child, plus smoothing over some of the problems with having many children (eg. heavily subsidizing the purchase of 7-seat cars for large families) have to happen together to create a baby boom.

Heck, federal regulatory tweaks to require car seats to take up less space(so you can fit more of them in a backseat) would have an effect.

There’s a lot of low hanging fruit that hasn’t been tried. Personally I think we should try it before dramatically restructuring the tax structure to punish childlessness.

Now that's a proposal I could see actually bumping the birth rate. Wish the CBO would estimate its cost, just so we have a sense of it. I'd be interesting in single-penalties that scale depending on the severity of the problem: if the birth rate is lower than target, add more single penalties; if it's higher, lower them. Otherwise the exact levels can easily under or overshoot the targets. The only cost is making tax planning more difficult for singles, which isn't even a negative with the goals of the plan.

You have a combination of direct and symbolic policies. If you wanted higher birth rates and had to choose either the direct or symbolic policies, which would you go for?

65% (deductible) federal income tax for all income over $50,000 for anyone over 30 with fewer than one child.

I am sure that Canada would love for the US to adopt this policy. Are you prepared to go full Walter Ulbrecht to make it stick?

Divorce comes with a 10-year additional tax penalty except in cases of (convicted) domestic violence or other abuse (in which case all marital benefits can continue for the victim).

I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.

Sure, a few people might get stuck in an abusive relationship because they can not prove to the standards of criminal justice that their partner is abusing them. But really serves them for marrying the wrong person, right?

And a few others might have a huge incentive to frame their partner for abuse to out of the divorce tax.

And I am sure that little Timmy will have a great intact family home if his parents are forced to stay together by economic necessity. Yes, perhaps there might be a lot of yelling, fighting and weaponizing kids, and perhaps both of his parents will bring their boyfriends/girlfriends home, but at least he will not be scarred for life by having to endure a divorce.

--

If you pass all these laws by some miracle, here is my business idea:

The company aims to provide tax benefits for people who are disinclined to raise children. For maximum benefits, unmarried men and women are sorted by state and will marry (potentially over zoom) in a minimal civil ceremony. Subsequently, a fertility clinic will be create a number of embryos from the germ lines of the couple, three of which will be implanted in surrogates in Mexico. After the births, the 'couple' will become the legal guardians of the children, getting full tax credits. As the parents, it is their legal right to task others with helping them to raise their kids, so they can just pay a Mexican orphanage to raise them. When they come of age, they will be US citizens who may or may not be eager to come work in the US. The parents pay the costs for the surrogates and however much it costs to raise 1.5 kid in rural Mexico.

--

Seriously, if you want to lower the costs of having a child to zero, I am ok with that. If you want to specifically incentive people who earn well to have kids (perhaps because you expect that by nature or nurture, their kids are more likely to be productive members of society) by also compensating them for lost earnings, I am okay with it.

But using tax cuts to bribe or bully people into having more kids feels deeply wrong. I believe that kids deserve parents who actually want to have them instead of parents who put up with them as an unfortunate side effect of some tax optimization scheme.

I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.

Chesterton's fence is a fence that it's not totally obvious what the reasoning for construction is. No fault divorce is a chesterton's well documented power line. One can very reasonably argue about what the line powers and the downstream implications but there is no doubt on the original motivations.

I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects.

No-fault divorce isn't a Chesterton's fence, it's what we got by knocking down the Chesterton's fence of requiring grounds.

We've had it since the 1960s. Please recalibrate what are proposed radical changes to long established norms.

What kind of "conservative" would consider a "fence" built in living memory to have any history at all?

Any time someone appeals to tradition you should ask whose tradition and when? Back in colonial New England civil divorces were granted for reason of spousal abandonment. So you could just bail on your spouse and they'd get a civil divorce in your absence.

Lots of things are like that. Interracial marriage wasn't common in 1750, but it was legal and accepted. But in 1950 it was very much illegal and almost universally opposed across much of the United States.

I'm not going to greatly respect the hallowed traditions of 1950 in opposition to 1650, 1750 and 1970. Norms and traditions drift in a variety of ways in various places. Then a modern 2024 Conservative cherry picks one they happen to like and declare it to be Tradition, can't be frivolously tearing down Chesterton's fence, etc.

Having no enormous respect for a carefully chosen set of norms and laws circa 1950, and since we're a few generations into the current set of laws and norms, I'm going to follow the good example of Conservatives and declare the current norms to be Tradition and warn everyone not to too easily tear down this fence.

No-fault divorce still loses on long enough time-frames.

That's an easy assertion to make. But I have no reason to think that is better than the previous norm of a married couple working together to contrive a fake at-fault divorce.

We knocked it down because it was starting to normalize perjury to the point where it risked the legitimacy of the entire justice system. When you need grounds but don't have them,. you're incentivized to invent them,.and it's easy to get away with it when both parties agree to the charade. Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.

Even in the best case scenario where no one does this, you still have estrangement, with the added disadvantage of spousal rights remaining intact. So if your spouse decides to move out and abandon you, she's still entitled to the spousal share of your estate because in most states you can't just disinherit your wife.

And now she is entitled half your assets, plus alimony and child support; not exactly an improvement.

She isn't entitled to half of your assets, because when you're married there are no "your" assets, only "our" assets (excepting what you had before you got married). So before she leaves she drains the bank account and there's nothing you can do about it. In modern times it's considered fraud to take assets in contemplation of divorce, but since divorce doesn't exist in this scenario, what are you going to complain about? And forget estrangement, she's still entitled to live in the house, so what if she decides to stay and make your life a living hell? She could give her boyfriend blowjobs in your easy chair while you're home and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it, except surrender the territory and move out.

I think this would work, although it's of course it's impossible politically. It will be interesting to see if China actually goes for something similar.

No country has truly gone big on fertility. Critics have pointed out that small efforts to boost fertility have not worked so why try. My stance is that if small efforts don't work, much larger efforts are needed.

From a political perspective, we are of course doomed. The normie opinion is that if we want to boost the birth rate we need even more feminism. So instead of interventions that work, we'll get things that make the problem worse such as child care subsidies (which only encourage greater marginal female employment).

No country has truly gone big on fertility.

Ceaușescu's Romania doesn't count as "going big?" If not, then what does?

I guess Romania was doing something right. The results are actually pretty significant. Take a look at Romania vs. neighboring Bulgaria. Something changed in a big way in the 1966 and stayed that way until Ceaușescu was deposed.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un?tab=chart&time=1950..latest&country=BGR~ROU

So what changed? Here's what Wikipedia says:

In 1966, in an attempt to boost the country's population, Ceaușescu made abortion illegal and introduced Decree 770 in order to reverse the Romanian population's low birth and fertility rates. Mothers of at least five children were entitled to receive significant benefits, while mothers of at least ten children were declared "heroine mothers" by the Romanian state.

The government targeted rising divorce rates and made divorce more difficult—it was decreed that marriages could only be dissolved in exceptional cases. By the late 1960s, the population began to swell. In turn, a new problem was created, child abandonment, which swelled the orphanage population (see Cighid). Many of the children in these orphanages suffered mental and physical deficiencies.[30]

Measures to encourage reproduction included financial motivations for families who bore children, guaranteed maternity leave, and childcare support for mothers who returned to work, work protection for women, and extensive access to medical control in all stages of pregnancy, as well as after it. Medical control was seen as one of the most productive effects of the law, since all women who became pregnant were under the care of a qualified medical practitioner, even in rural areas. In some cases, if a woman was unable to visit a medical office, a doctor would visit her home.[31]

I don't know if this counts as "going big". Rewards for mothers who have 5 children!? That's a pretty tough bar to clear.

My guess is that it worked mostly out of patriotism. Reversing the decline in unpatriotic Western democracies might be harder. The civil religion has faded to the point where people no longer think their society has any value in preserving.

My guess is that it worked mostly out of patriotism. Reversing the decline in unpatriotic Western democracies might be harder.

Stories out of Ceaușescu's Romania suggest a decent amount of it was out of fear. Patriotism does not generally lead to a bunch of mothers bearing babies, then abandoning them to unusually miserable orphanages. Also, after the first two years, that's quite the steep plunge. Maybe the first two years were patriotism, and the next several decades were fear?

How many children ended up in orphanages?

I don't trust Western institutions to report on this issue fairly, especially as it deals with the hot button topic of abortion. It is in the interest of Western academics to exaggerate the harms to the greatest degree possible.

I do find it bizarre to think that the state would say "have children or else" but also "once you have the children feel free to dump them in an orphanage, no problem". If it was only threats driving people's behavior, then couldn't the state simply mandate they raise children too? Then again, Communist regimes are not exactly known for good state management.

I think the correct posture here is one of epistemic humility. The birth rate went up. This was due to state policy. Everything else is mostly noise.

I don't trust Western institutions to report on this issue fairly

...Well I'm not going to find original Romanian records.

The main personal stories I've heard from Romania in that era were through Orthodox priests talking to other priests and more visible Christians who had lived there, and the enforcement of atheism sounded pretty brutal, so my baseline is "enforcement of preferred state outcomes was pretty brutal."

I think the correct posture here is one of epistemic humility. The birth rate went up. This was due to state policy. Everything else is mostly noise.

To the extent that you're simply observing a fact, and not making any policy proposals, I suppose. And the USSR did make it through WWII intact and modernize significantly under Stalin. No judgement. Everything else is mostly noise.

There’s a case to be made that the historical fertility advantage for new world French populations comes from coercive fertility raising efforts in the founding population, as well.

And of course, let’s not forget Argentina, which had above replacement fertility until Covid because they so mismanaged their welfare system that single mother benefits were higher than prevailing blue collar female wages. I doubt it was intentional, but it was a thing.

Romania counted but it’s a poor example because Romania was an impoverished communist shithole in (seemingly) terminal decline. Life was miserable and there were no real incentives. So yes, people made do and within a few years had changed behavior to reduce fecundity. It’s like a Leninist state offering +-5% extra bread rations for whatever behavior, it’s not goin to move the needle because it’s a depressed, inefficient, ugly, impoverished society with zero vitality (something the West, for all its many problems, still has in part).

What we can say is that true incentives for fertility and disincentives for lack of it in prosperous capitalist societies have never been tried. Not even in the communist ‘never been tried’ meme way, but in the sense that nobody has ever actually tried to do it.

I think Argentina was still reasonably prosperous when they accidentally made single motherhood a rational economic decision.

This post kind of comes off as a self-indulgent power fantasy. You'd need God-empress level of political power to enact those policies, so the whole thing is basically implicitly assuming that you're infinitely stronk, and then writing a long detailed list of all the ways you'd use your unlimited power to put the screws on people whose life choices are (in your view) incompatible with the greater good of society.

And if we hypothesize some alternative society in which those policies would be popular, then would you even need them in the first place? Hm, maybe they would still be useful to fix the pro-natal attitudes and fight against any potential value drift.

Anyway, while I don't expect you to explain how you're planning on becoming God-empress, I'm still curious how would you roll out those policies? Would there be some transition period so for example people who were already old and infertile when the policies came into effect wouldn't get screwed up without any chance to avoid it, or would their unavoidable impoverishment be a sacrifice you'd be willing to make to keep things simple and on track?

That's not a sensible or fair criticism. The point of the post was to illustrate that effective policy solutions are certainly conceivable, they're just outside the Overton window.

And if we hypothesize some alternative society in which those policies would be popular, then would you even need them in the first place? Hm, maybe they would still be useful to fix the pro-natal attitudes and fight against any potential value drift.

On plenty of issues factions that are minorities impose their agenda on larger more disorganized majorities by capturing institutions of power and by creating organizations and lobby groups. Then they promote propaganda about those opposing their blatant actions being conspiracy theorists.

Also, after policies have been promoted by energetic factions with power, a certain % of people are willing to change their mind. We have seen this with gay marriage. This doesn't apply to all policies, some might be too extreme to not be disliked by the majority, but it does apply to many.

If natalist measures are implemented, then you are going to get people who go along with it who previously wouldn't have supported these kind of policies. Part of that might also be the power centers promoting propaganda.

And beyond just changing one's opinion, the policies, quotas themselves affect behavior.

I think it's a fine post. From a practical perspective we need to:

  1. Decide what must be done

  2. Decide how to do it

@2rafa has given us #1. #2 is probably impossible without god-empress status. So the alternative to their post is to throw up one's hands and say "it's impossible".

I am actually somewhat bullish on China solving this problem before the West because they actually have the state capacity to take the radical actions necessary.

My suspicion re. China is that a lot of senior communist party elites are very bitter about pro-fertility efforts because they themselves were only allowed one child (despite being in the ruling elite of one of the most powerful nations in the world). Eg. Xi himself only has one child, a daughter.

I think Chinese childhoods are also just horrible experiences all around, so people don’t want to have kids regardless of how well they’re being paid.

I don't think Chinese childhoods are horrible experiences all around, and upper class Chinese parents certainly don't think that.

Unfortunately, they probably won't want to take actions that penalize those currently in power, which makes some of these harder.

I have no intentions of coming to any kind of power. These are just an illustration of the fact that this isnt an impossibility issue, it’s a willpower issue. There are solutions, they’re merely considered undesirable.

I can’t tell if sarcasm but people working in HR aren’t high status, doing anything interesting, or adding significant value.

Seems to me SAHM is boring because it is lonely, especially for wives in a higher economic bracket. There aren’t ten other women from the same social status that live nearby whom you can converse with while little Johnny and Jill play. That is, there is a collective action problem at work.

I can’t tell if sarcasm but people working in HR aren’t high status, doing anything interesting, or adding significant value.

They're subtracting significant value. But there's definitely status in being the ones who makes rules for and is feared by the productive people.

I guess. HR are looked down upon where I work.

It wasn’t as if the wife of a moderately successful professional man in 1910 was raising her own children or scrubbing kitchen floors the way modern “SAHMs” are expected to; she had maids to do that because wealth inequality was much higher back then and domestic staff much cheaper. Even a skilled artisan or low-level clerical worker would often have a maid in the house.

I'd also point out that college-educated rich women in 1910 were also doing basically non-profit work, they just weren't paid for it. There were many ideological varied movements being led by middle class and rich women of the time, no different from today. This idea there was a time when rich/UMC college-educated in urban areas were just sitting around, doing nothing but taking care of their kids has never really been true in like, the past probably 150-200 years, because of what you said.

In some ways, the 50's were the worst of both worlds, which is what led to feminism - technology has risen to where even middle class women didn't need to spend all day doing household work and because they were in atomized suburbs, there wasn't much to do but kvetch with your fellow other college-educated but at-home mothers about your life.

And they often needed that maid, because modern household appliances didn't exist yet.

Having kids is high status among the rich. I’m not sure how widespread this knowledge is but in wealthy social circles in NYC, London etc being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker, since each additional child (including the first) is a few million in costs (once larger housing, 15 years of private school tuition, more rooms on vacation, flights, clubs, college etc are accounted for). If you see a 32 year old secular mom who has 4 kids in Manhattan, you’re looking at someone who has a lot of money.

The problem is that as you say, a DINK couple making $350,000 a year together would have to make like $1m a year or more to have the same lifestyle with 4 kids, assuming they intend to raise them in the manner normal for the upper-middle class.

being able to afford 4 kids is probably the biggest status marker

Because they've outsourced the child raising - a nanny is a must, and if you have more kids then maybe two nannies. An au pair. Some kind of domestic help. We're going back to the days of the parents only see their kids when they're brought down from the nursery to see Mama and Papa for a few minutes before dinner. To quote Belloc's satire on "The Nordic Man":

The Nordic Man has a nurse to look after him while he is a baby, and she has another domestic at her service. He has a night and a day nursery, and he is full of amusing little tricks which endear him to his parents as he grows through babyhood to childhood.

Towards the age of ten or eleven, the Nordic Man goes to a preparatory school, the headmaster of which is greatly trusted by the Nordic Man’s parents, especially by the Nordic Man’s mother. He early learns to Play the Game, and is also grounded in the elements of Good Form, possibly the Classics and even, exceptionally, some modern tongue. He plays football and cricket; usually, but not always, he is taught to swim.

Thence the Nordic Man proceeds to what is called a Public School, where he stays till he is about eighteen. He then goes either to Oxford or Cambridge, or into the Army. He does not stay long in the Army; while from the University he proceeds either to a profession (such as the Bar, or writing advertisements) or to residence upon his estate. This last he can only do if his father dies early.

The brutal truth is, if you want more babies, then ban abortion and contraception - see all the screaming** about forced pregnancy - and that didn't turn out too good for Romania either.

Economy is such that to be able to afford a house, or even renting, you need a dual-income couple. If Mom and Dad have Careers and not just jobs, it becomes more and more expensive to have kids. Cost of childcare* is high, but Mom needs childcare because she can't afford to stay at home looking after the kids herself. If you want your kids to do well in life, then increasingly they have to be "skilled knowledge workers" as someone in another thread said, and that means pouring resources into making sure they go to good schools and do the right extracurriculars to get into the good university for the degree that will open the door to the good jobs.

Being SAHM has been downgraded to the idea of being a drudge and indeed, hampering society - go out there and be Economically Productive in the Workforce! The same governments anxious about falling birth rates are also anxious about getting more women out to work.

*And it's high because it's not a simple matter of "put a bunch of babies in a room, give them the occasional bottle and nappy change".

**And I do mean screaming, see this breathless paper on the worst case scenarios where emergency care medical staff are now the equivalent of the French Resistance fighting the Nazi occupation because every single woman who can't get an abortion is now a medical emergency who will die from the nightmare event.

It's not the economy that makes owning a house unaffordable, it's the regulatory environment.

Sure you can build more homes. You just can't build a looming condo high-rise next to my house. Blotting out the sun, causing extreme traffic problems, causing enormously worse problems should a bus or light rail terminal be built by it, etc.

In fact the negatives of such a project are so certain and great in magnitude that my locality has strictly forbidden such a project. As have almost all localities across my entire continent. The local regulatory environment norms across a continent of hundreds of millions of people point in one clear direction: ban this thing.

And I wish they'd legalize it in a few special economic zones so new urbanists would go to them and stop trying to go against local sentiment in almost all places and trying to break the really nice thing we have going for us.

I agree - local places will ban such things. That's why you need state or federal preemption so politicians who aren't afraid of the 9 people who show up to every City Council meeting and complain about anything changing can actually write decent law.

I guarantee the home you live in was not wanted by somebody in the neighborhood when it was built.

I very much doubt that 9 or so motivated people in almost every locality all across the continent bent all zoning rules to their will.

Almost every local government independently decides to do this. It would be amazing if every locality had a small core of turbo NIMBYs forcing their will onto everyone else. All other people almost everywhere somehow helpless.

The fact that a very large number of independent elections converged on one policy makes me think the policy is popular among voters.

And I wish they'd legalize it in a few special economic zones so new urbanists would go to them and stop trying to go against local sentiment in almost all places and trying to break the really nice thing we have going for us.

Appeasement doesn't work. You can legalize it in special economic zones (e.g. in towns with a train station in NJ), and the New Urbanists will take that and demand more. They don't just love New Urban development (in fact, often they don't, or at least they don't make it economically viable and you get a New Urban ghost town) but also hate suburban development.

If you want your kids to do well in life, then increasingly they have to be "skilled knowledge workers" as someone in another thread said, and that means pouring resources into making sure they go to good schools and do the right extracurriculars to get into the good university for the degree that will open the door to the good jobs.

It really doesn't mean that at all, plenty of skilled knowledge workers have degrees from non-prestigious colleges. This is a myth that the PMC has bought into fully.

This is a myth that the PMC has bought into fully.

American PMC I would say -- there isn't really even such a thing as prestigious colleges in Canada/Europe. (I mean there kind of is, but nobody will hire you because you went to Queen's instead of UofA)

England is something of a special case in that the prestigious colleges are something of a class marker as well -- my impression is that this is mostly impactful only for certain types of job however.

American PMC I would say -- there isn't really even such a thing as prestigious colleges in Canada/Europe

McGill comes immediately to mind. They at least think they're prestigious.

Nobody cares that you went to McGill though -- maybe the odd lawyer who also went to McGill. It's the Harvard of Canada, but that doesn't make it Harvard.

Social engineering is not some impossible task, societies have been regularly, consciously selected for all kinds of things for the entire history of human civilization.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children. That is a question of incentives, most of them financial. Incentives and disincentives work, they’re why drink-driving rates have fallen by huge amounts for example, because of a feedback loop between high punishments, social stigma and shame. That same loop can be transferred to childlessness.

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens (neither of these are remotely new to Western countries).

It is possible to make PMC life with kids more immediately attractive than PMC DINK life. But it requires hefty, substantial redistribution and engineering of tax burdens

How do you make family life more appealing to degenerate hedonists than a DINK life of hedonism and degeneracy?

I'd focus on incentives to go from 2 to 4 or more. It's less of a lifestyle change. My fear would be that in current year instead of children conceived and born naturally from heterosexual marriage, incentives would be available to 'married' homosexual men using surrogates.

As long as they’re using first-world eggs, turning third world surrogates into baby factories for affluent Western gay men is of no significant population-level concern.

Depends on how heritable (exclusive) homosexuality is, I would think. If it's not very heritable it works fine, otherwise you're just pushing the problem to the next generation.

Because that's not creepy and corrupt? These sorts tend to be down with the globohomo ideology. Encouraging it's spread is a concern.

If your goal is to make more people, then why worry about gay people making them with sperm donations or surrogates? We're getting far into "feature, not a bug" territory if a policy makes gay people fertile.

I don't want people that badly.

My experience has been that the homosexuals that do this are all in on the globohomo (the other homo) ideology.

That they may do this on their own is bad. That they may be supported via some sort of policy intervention that was to increase hetronormative families is too far for me.

This line of argument reminds me of the "to get people to ride public transit, you don’t have to fix the issues with public transit, you just have to make the experience of traveling by car much much worse" argument I see sometimes.

They’re both true. A lot of US cities have a problem wherein public transport is seen as only for poor people and homeless, and once something becomes a negative class marker it has a stink that’s hard to shake off. Forcing middle class people to use public transport increases cleanliness and safety (because they lobby for it; in NYC the effort to clean up the subway has big support, whereas in LA and SF nobody gives a fuck since only the poorest of the poor use it) and in the long term makes for better transport systems. Countries like Germany and Finland where middle class people use the bus sometimes have a much higher standard of public transport than places like the US where it’s only for poor people without a car / license.

Obviously cleaning up the smelly / scary / dangerous / drug addicted scum is highest priority, as is general cleanliness, but some pressure is probably necessary to provide the initial impetus for a switch.

Taking wealthier people class hostage to improve public transit doesn't work. People just resign themselves to subways with smelly and occasionally aggressive bums in them. And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately.

And Stockholm Syndrome makes them turn on anyone who does anything about it privately...

Stockholm has a clean, crime-free metro.. Since mass immigration altered Swedish demographics, this requires significant spend on graffiti cleanup and Metro-contracted security staff who are willing to use the necessary force to keep it that way. This continues to happen despite Swedish politics being what it is, because voters are neither morons nor masochists.

For the avoidance of doubt, so does every other sufficiently large Continental European or first-world Asian city. The fact that America can't police public spaces without a level of lethal violence that normies won't tolerate doesn't mean that it is impossible, just that America sucks at policing. The absence of research interest in "Why can't Americans convert taxpayer dollars spent on policing into an absence of crime the way other first-world countries can?" is exhibit A in why criminology as a discipline is a waste of space.

If you want smart people to have more children, all you need to do is make life without or with few children less pleasurable, fun and exciting than life with many children.

How do you do that? It's time is the important thing here, see the complaints about "now my friends are married and have kids they can't come on nights out/trips with us anymore as everything has to be planned around the kids". Raising kids is a second job, and if you dump it all onto the mother, while Dad is the breadwinner - well, we've spent sixty years nuking the traditional family, good luck with getting that back.

If the prospect is "I have five kids and have to look after them" versus "I have one or no kids and pay more tax", some people will prefer to pay more tax and have the ability to "hey if I decide I want to hit the club tonight, I can do that!"

Think of the Parable of the Daycare Charge for Late Pickups.

It's possible to go from DINK to traditional family but you have to be realistic about the lifestyle differences especially with 4 or more children. We may have had 5 or 6 if we'd started earlier. The first 7 years of marriage we were busy being DINK with nights out/trips.

See, I absolutely think the major problem is that we've turned having children from something that naturally happens, 'well of course now you're married and having regular sex, pregnancy is going to occur', into something that needs to be planned like the D-Day Normandy landings. From the scaremongering around abortion (every child a wanted child, as unwanted children are going to be victims of abuse, so if you don't plan it out perfectly then you will be an unwilling parent who will physically and emotionally abuse the child you resent), to the idea that you must be ready so you need the education, the career-building, the having fun while you're young, then settle down to having the perfect kid at the perfect moment with the perfect trajectory for making them successful in life.

I'm not saying you shouldn't consider finances and time and the rest of it when having children, but fuck it. The best way to have more children is just to have more children. No planning. No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future. Just do it (to swipe a phrase).

EDIT: That's also part of my dubiousness around this enthusiasm for polygenic selection. We've already made having children, for the people who should be having more kids, so stressful and expensive and high-stakes, now we're going to throw another gallon of accelerant on the bonfire: what, Justin and Pippa, you mean you didn't undergo IVF to create a bunch of embryos that could then be selected for the optimum traits for a Better Baby? You just got pregnant like some Stone Age cavepersons? Ahahaha, surely you must be joking! You're setting up your unfortunate child to be a failure and loser in life with deleterious traits being freely expressed in their genome!

Yeah, that's going to encourage people that having three kids at a minimum is a feasible thing.

I agree absolutely. There's less expectation that children would/should follow naturally from marriage.

The difficulty for me was a working top decile spouse.

The best and brightest of the PMC ladies are indoctrinated very early with plans and pathways. Achievements and career milestones. It's challenging to move past the sunk cost even if continued career progression is unlikely to make you happy.

There was much less planning for 3 and 4 than for 1 and 2. Partly due to experience and mostly that my wife was already full time homemaker after 2.

No erecting astrological charts to decide the optimum moment for conception and then forecasting the future.

It used to be that the astrological charts were used by couples who wanted children and they weren't coming along.

That's crazy that an overwhelmingly catholic country can also have such a low birth rate!

Catholicism can lower birth rates.

Getting married is a big barrier to having children. Men aren't marriageable until they have finished their education, have a job and a place to live. In a country where 29 year old men can't afford their own place and are working as interns few men are going to be married at a fertile age. Unless young women start marrying substantially older men having a high fertility rate becomes unfeasible if marriage is a requirement.

There are really only three solutions:

Lower the social requirements to having kids. Aka single motherhood.

Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.

Adapt to a middle income country lifestyle. This is common among high fertility immigrants. They can live with six kids in a small apartment, never eat in a restaurant, live off rice and beans and pull teeth out by themselves instead of going to a dentist. Their lifestyle is still materially superior to the vast majority of humans who ever lived. With free school lunches, the children can stuff themselves and get enough calories to cover most of their needs. Humans can survive on a tiny fraction of what middle class people assume to be the limit of survival.

The combination of high requirements and a Catholic view of family means that a sizeable portion of men will never be fathers and those who do will only meet the requirements after age 35.

Make becoming a husband more achievable. Aka make it possible for young men to get a stable job and buy a four bedroom home.

It seems like a simple intervention would be to massively increase property taxes for people with no children.

This would bring property prices down a lot.

In my opinion, the housing bubble is mostly caused by inflation expectations. If your house can only go up in value, then the best time to buy is always right now. The government should send a clear and unambiguous message that you will lose money by buying a home. It will accomplish this by applying a ratchet effect to property taxes. Any time that annual appreciation exceeds X%, the property tax rate will be raised.

I don't know about Catholics in Europe, but in America most sexually active Catholics use birth control. The hard ban on birth control is not much respected.

I take it many American Catholics are Catholic in name only and mean to say they are Catholic in a vague cultural sense but not in any way that inconveniences their lives.

Yeah, I guess I just associate catholicism with latin America, where it's a lot more strict. Plus just a general culture of big families. Ireland used to be like that too, and I think some Irish-Americans are still like that.

If you take a look at Brazil for example and compare it to the US, I think it seems likely that Catholicism, at least in its modern 20th century and onward form, has done essentially nothing to give Latin America higher fertility rates than the US. It is a non-factor, at least in Brazil. Same for Ireland.

All these graphs appear to be dominated by economic factors, with religious factors being very minor. Religion can definitely increase fertility rates, for example among Orthodox Jews, but 20th century and onward Catholicism seems to have only a minor effect.

While Catholicism probably suppresses promiscuity rates at lower levels of religiosity than Protestantism does, only particularly religious Catholicism has any effect on fertility rates, same as Protestantism. AFAIK the only example within Europe of this happening at scale is the Byzantine-Catholic belt in eastern Poland and Slovakia and western Ukraine having higher TFR’s than the rest of the country(and at least for Ukraine this was demographically visible pre-war, the Catholic percentage was rising due to high fertility rates). The tfr in rural Galicia was still pretty similar to that in the Dutch Bible Belt and the faroes, though, so we can assume that aside from the IRL tradcaths religious Catholicism and Protestantism have similar effects on fertility. And while American tradcaths have a claimed tfr of 3.6 with the possibility of it being an underestimate, it’s worth noting we’re a small, selected minority group everywhere in the country except for two towns, the larger of which is less than 10,000 people, and that we recruit partly by being attractive to pre-existing large families.

it’s worth noting we’re a small, selected minority group everywhere in the country except for two towns, the larger of which is less than 10,000 people

Ave Maria is one, but what's the second?

St Mary’s, Kansas is roughly 2/3 SSPX parishioners.

One of the most disheartening things about reading more deeply about the public politics of the past is you come to realize that, as often as not, people don't really win arguments (which are often just rhetoric anyway) so much as manage to marginalize their opposition to where no one can hear their arguments anymore. Facts might well play a role in that, but they're certainly far from determinative.

A while ago, probably in some dissident right space, I saw someone sharing the old, original conservative arguments against social security and other government provided pension programs, the arguments that were being offered against them before those programs were implemented. And the main argument I saw was something like "There are natural, organic ties between and across generations in families (illegible ties, you might say) that are crucial to nurture for the health of broader society, and having the government intervene in PROMISING to support the elderly is likely to do grave damage to the longer term building of those ties". I remember being struck at the time that I'd never seen the argument, nor had I seen anyone refute the concern. Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically. Those old discussions keep coming to mind, for me, every time I read these stories about cratering birth rates.

I don't think there's data here, but I suspect that liberals who have stronger personal ties with their grandparents than average don't have noticeably more children.

the health of broader society

The textbook example of such societies are the Malthusian in nature. If having kids is the only way to ensure you survive in old age, then it is in everyone's interests to breed like rats. The outcome is an exponential grows which periodically gets mowed down by the horsemen Pestilence, War and Starvation.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

The main problem with the pension system is that the working generation is paying the pensions for the previous generation, which works when the population is growing or stable. What we should do instead is make each generation pay into a fund which will eventually pay for their pensions. So even if the size of generations changes, the per capita funds will be stable.

Previous generations if nationalists worried a lot about having enough manpower to throw into the meat grinder of war. In the nuclear age, this is not much of a concern among superpowers any more.

Personally, I would predict a rebound of the TFR at some point, once space in the metropolitan areas becomes more affordable due to the shrinking population, people are likely to have more kids. But even if I am wrong, I would much rather that some robot nurse cared for me in old age than living in a society which puts undue pressure on people to have kids.

You might call such societies 'healthy', I call them hellish.

But they are societies. Ceteris paribus, they'll survive forever. With our 'continuously declining sub-replacement fertility' model it's either replacement or extinction.

Yes. People don’t seem to realize that the one thing all states with low birthrates have - from Sweden to Saudi Arabia - is a welfare state.

Welfare state is a bit hard to define, but if one checks the table of OECD countries by social spending, the second-lowest is the famously low-fertility South Korea.

All OECD countries have highly developed welfare states. It’s not a “the more welfare, the lower the birth rates” argument, it’s that the existence of any advanced welfare state makes economic bonds between a community less necessary.

Well, a welfare state kind of necessitates being a developed country, unless you have some sort of a different definition from the one I have.

It would also seem to be a vicious cycle.

Lower birth rates =

Smaller family networks =

More demand for government safety nets =

Less value to family support =

Lower birth rates

Haredim are satisfied customers of the welfare states they live in.

Haredim are cynically exploiting the welfare states they live in.

I don't see the distinction.

Sure, and there are other ultra-niche groups like French tradcaths (who avail themselves very effectively of the generous incentives for children), those in the Dutch Bible Belt and so on for whom the same is true. But that takes an extraordinarily high-pressure traditionalist religious subculture that has had a lot of filtering and leaving. Many, possibly most descendants of shtetl dwellers secularized. Most descendants of Swiss mennonites in 1800 secularized. So did most high-tfr Catholics. This evaporation left highly fertile populations that survived.

We might say that unless you have an ultra-strong core of religious devotion to a community such that it persists even after it is no longer economically necessary, it seems that the arrival of the welfare state typically coincides with declines in fertility rates as other communal organizations and institutions like the extended family suffer.

There are natural, organic ties between and across generations in families (illegible ties, you might say) that are crucial to nurture for the health of broader society, and having the government intervene in PROMISING to support the elderly is likely to do grave damage to the longer term building of those ties"

The problem is this was a failure and seen so at the times which is why Social Security was immediately popular - as seen when you compare endemic elderly poverty rates in comparison to other groups pre-Social Security and now.

Those holding those concerns just lost and were marginalized because giving destitute elderly people in the 30s free money was, in the immediate term, a huge relief of visible suffering and was thus understandably hugely popular, politically.

That huge relief of visible suffering was the 'disproof' of the anti-social security argument. That is normally the way these things work: A huge and public argument goes on for quite some time on a particular topic, most often without being settled explicitly by public debate but, instead, by events. While the relation of such 'events' to the previous debate can often be quite tenuous in fact, in the perception of the public it is ultimately all that matters. It has ever been thus. Many public debates in the distant past were settled by the winner of a battle, not because might makes right, but because victory proves the favor of God/the gods. The entire rejection of the small central state/market oriented model in the United States came down to the disaster of the Great Depression, regardless of whether 'free markets' """caused""" the Depression or not.

Good information is expensive.

Well it is interesting in that perhaps small central governments underperform when you have Great Depressions (though seemingly caused by a central bank and worsened by FDR’s policies) but perhaps do better in the long run? That is, perhaps voters liked the immediate benefits and didn’t realize the long term costs.

Somewhat similar to some of the anti suffragist arguments. They weren’t all cartoon misogynists. Some made credible arguments that seem to be proved out. It makes you wonder how many good ideas were discarded for political reasons.

Yeah, on this topic, I find myself repeatedly recommending people read Jane Jerome Camhi's Women Against Women: American Anti-Suffragism, 1880-1920 on this topic.

there used to be a very interesting article shared around on occasion about anti-suffragettes. Pointing out that a lot of suffragettes at the time used to assert ideas that expanding the vote would create World Peace because women would never vote for war and other now seemingly ridiculous claims. and that a lot of the actual convincing wasn't based around assuring people of the virtue of expansion so much as arguing the logical continuity of universal suffrage. A "might as well" convincement rather than a moral crusade. Or that there used to be a unique moral claim that women had when they did interefere because they were seen as apolitical. That the history of the movement as understand by the common man has been pretty much forgotten.

Of course I don't know whether it's true or not, but I've never been able to refind it. I'd love if anyone here still has a link to it.

Was it this one?

https://herandrews.com/2015/03/01/women-against-suffrage/

It was! Thank you so much! I'd thought it lost to me for good.

It's this article. https://kirkcenter.org/essays/a-cause-lost-and-forgotten/

The carrots are not working, so there should be sticks implemented. Not sure how, but we should make childlessness painful.

I am not opposed to a mixed carrot and stick approach but there are plenty of carrots that haven't been tried and things that aren't carrots but changing the current arrangement. I oppose maximizing the sticks as unnecessarily cruel and less likely to work than some more politically incorect changes that are also less about sticks. The compulsion policies should not just be directed at single people but also business, unviersities, and all sorts of powerful institutions.

Lets mention one issue that we could see positive change:

Our current model is that careerism and education is pushed as a model for the youth in their family formation years. Add to that female overepresentation in universities and desire to date up.

This is a result of plenty of subsidies and encouragement. Stopping this and strongly encouraging by various policies instead family formation as a priority, especially for women in that window would make much more sense. And we don't even have to exclude careerism and education as goals, just put them as less a priority. Especially for women.

But women always worked, and in the past it was a more village setting and also with less machines and globalized system of productions. So it doesn't make sense to go back to that, but our current model also doesn't make sense. We need greater prioritisation of family formation.

Beyond that, people can live long life. We should deal with overcredentialism and wasting time on those issues, but what is wrong with spending more time being educated in your thirties, delaying your career focus too in 20s and 30s, but having a family. From a perspective of the greater good, it is a better arrangement. Men becoming in such a situation higher economic status and more attractive for women will also increase the marriage rate.

And directly teach people in schools, and through television programs promoting large families, the value of larger families. Especially promote "propaganda" in the good sense especially towards women and girls which in fact is in line with their insticts, and also better inform them about the fertility window. For example bring along married mothers with their husband with multiple children in school for "family planning" school lessons and strongly encourage the model of a married family with multiple children through both the media and such experiences.

Also, it is obviously the case that pets have taken some of the role of the need for children for various people including some who do have children and might have had more without pets. I dunno what the correct policy response would be to that, but it is a factor.

Another thing that is politically incorrect is that to do this and other changes, you simply need to suppress the feminist and liberal establishment and anti natalist liberals in general which are not going to stand for this. They can go as far as support canceling pro natalist conferences. Many liberals do not want to solve this issue but want to downplay it and point to the inevitability of solving it. Because they oppose the more conservative, or anti-feminist changes, or also are hostile to stopping what facilitates the replacement of western populations, and are also hostile to those nativists who oppose the destruction of their nations through mass migration and low ferility rates. They are also motivated by the fact that liberalism will be blamed for the drop of fertility rates.

Imagine you are in a sinking ship which has a hole in it. And you got a part of the crew and passengers claiming that there is nothing to be done and they are discouraging those trying to cover it. You either sink, or you stop them and keep them out of influence and strip the demoralizing pro inaction crew from their position.

So if we want a stick, lets also talk about suppressing factions who oppose this, and promoting the pro-natalists. Because you are not going to get into the position of implementing serious carrots and serious sticks, without having natalists to capture power and suppress anti-natalists which are made especially by plenty of liberals. We could call this faction liberal fundamentalists/dogmatists, while maybe ideally we could get some people who sympathized or identified with liberalism, to break from it.

By directly promoting natalism and suppressing anti natalism you could get it through. It's how liberalism and its version called wokeness, and the Israel lobby and even Covid measures were promoted. Fundamentally, you can as a society through both authoritarian means and through education and having people capturing institutions that push certain agendas, get plenty but not all people to change their attitudes. Most importantly you can get policy changes in this way. So a change for natalism is possible. Although the point isn't just to change things from a bad direction, but to change things towards a wise direction. Which I believe would require a more multi-faceted approach than maximizing sticks in single areas. So you can't be maximally authoritarian without considering what you are promoting and being willing to adjust where you overreached. Although that is far from the current problem, and really being wise requires not being too impotent to act as well.

I think over-education is a problem for society in general and especially when it comes to family formation. When stable adulthood in both genders is pushed back farther (assuming 5 years post graduation to stable job and housing) to 26-27 years old, it’s simply too late for this couple to have more than 2 or 3 kids at reasonable spacing of 1-2 years. First kid at 27, second at 30, third at 33. And that’s pretty much the fertility window for most people. This assumes no difficulties in the schooling and job-seeking process, and marriage pretty much right after college. Go for a masters (additional two years) or have difficulty finding the first good job or housing and we’re talking 30 before we’re seeing the first baby.

The problem is the lengthening of childhood and preparation for adulthood phase of life into nearly middle age. Which shortens working and family life, and increases costs in ways that don’t necessarily produce better outcomes either economically or socially (in fact I think the opposite is true, extended childhood is creating a culture of narcissistic behavior).

Birthrates are dropping in Iran and Saudi Arabia - basically the only places where they aren't is some poor African countries and the Ultra Orthodox in Israel.

Even the vast majority of married conservative women with children in the US don't want Iranian or Saudi Arabian rules for women, so how are you guys going to pull this off?

It's worth noting that Iran's birthrates dropping was likely affected by deliberate action to that effect by the Iranian government.

The carrots are not working

The carrots are a big part of the problem.

I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.

The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.

so there should be sticks implemented

The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."

EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:

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 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.

Seems pretty counterproductive to me: marriage rates would plummet, reducing birth rates.

The trouble is that ban women working outside the home nowadays, and you'll restrict motherhood to the latest arm candy of Elon Musk's or whomever - women in arrangements (be that marriage or cohabitation) where the man earns a ton of money and can support a family on one wage.

I'm referencing another discussion elsewhere here where someone said that the middle-class assembly line worker who could afford the lifestyle on one wage are the jobs being hollowed out, and that's the truth of it. If you want women to have four kids as a family, which wasn't a crazy notion even thirty years ago, then you have to make it livable. The family where they have four kids and are in squalor are not going to be the solution, because they will be lost in petty crime and all the other problems we have today, even if they start off with middle-middle class parents/grandparents. If they're living six people to three rooms and can't afford dentist or doctor visits, then they're sliding down the class ladder and are not the replacement fertility children you want. The very rich may have status marker big families, but they're never going to be producing numbers enough to stem the decline. You need the vast bulk of the middle to be having more kids, and if they can't afford them already, then cutting down on family income isn't going to fix the problem.

Arguably if women left the workforce en masse it would lead to an increase in men's wages due to lower job competition. You'd have to put in some protectionist regulations to keep companies from just outsourcing for cheaper labor, but part (and definitely only part) of the reason it's so difficult to raise a family on a single income is precisely because women entered into the workforce en masse to begin with.

Women's rights are not a suicide pact, but feminism and leftism generally seem deadset on making them such.

But would it lead to a corresponding increase in cost for everything?

It'd be complicated, since women not having disposable income independent of their husbands would lower demand on the consumer side.

Sure, but the answer there is that if there is a labour squeeze because no women in the workforce, then you will get the push for bringing in migrants for cheaper labour, plus increasing automation, plus demands for productivity increases - if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job. That won't necessarily mean higher wages, either, unless you're in the kind of job where there's the expectation of good pay and conditions baked in.

And now because John is working longer hours and over the weekend, Jane is doing all the child-raising, and now there is dissatisfaction and unhappiness at home about "you don't do your fair share, the kids never see you" "well it's not my fault, I have to be the breadwinner, don't you think I'd love to be around more but it's not possible".

We're reaping what we sowed. The panic in the past was over "too many people! the earth can't support them all!" and that encouraged the decline in fertility, backed up by Malthusian fears. Now we're finding out that in fact, you need babies to replenish your population of working age adults, and Malthus was a false prophet to follow.

On the one hand, I'm laughing here because Paul VI has been vindicated. But I can't laugh too much, as the Zeitgeist has also corrupted Catholics who go along with the "sex is for fun and pleasure, you don't need to be married, don't get tied down with babies, use contraception to plan your family for when it is convenient for you" social messaging.

if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job.

That's a very simplified view of thing. For that to work, you have to assume that all jobs are fungible and their income perfectly matches their net production to the economy. The reality is uh... more complex.

Roko had a funny tweet about this on twitter: the net change from most women to GDP is negative

Look at the jobs most women get. Very, very few of them are doing something like hard labor or the skilled trades. Rosie the Riveter was a switchboard operator who the artist painted much larger than she really was, and with a fake rivet gun.

More often they work in very human-focused jobs, like teachers, waitresses, nurses, haircutters, and secretaries. A lot of that is just getting paid to do the same shit they would have done anyway as a homemaker, except now they're doing it for strangers instead of their living family. (prostitution comes to mind as a similar model...) You can teach your kids, make meals for them, cut their hair, and take care of them when they're sick, it's not rocket science. But of course it looks good for the economy to have it be paid instead of free, so more money moves around.

More perniciously, they also work in office jobs where they directly compete with men. And then the entire office has to adapt and change culture to accommodate them. No more dirty jokes with the lads. Not too much overtime. Someone will have to cover for her when she's sick or just too stressed out to deal. Everyone must reach "consensus" so not too much angry arguing. Power structures based on hidden cliques rather than clear, explicit rules and hierarchies. And we must promote women at equal rates to men, so we can't use any evaluation metrics that would make them look bad, and we must hire women into HR roles specifically focused on hiring other women.

I increasingly just see the world as a power struggle betweeen men and women. In the past men had more power, because of their earnings. And they used that power to get what they wanted, which was sex, which incidentally led to babies. No women have more power, and they use it to get baubles and attention without having to put out.

Banning women from the workforce makes such wages possible, because it more than doubles the labor bargaining power of men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs.

yeah, I thought this too back when I was fifteen. But why did companies go along with it, then? Because labour is the greatest cost for any business, and you want to keep your costs down as much as possible. If there's a shortage of workers, you may have to pay higher wages to attract them - if you can't wait them out, or replace them with cheaper labour, or automate the job away.

Look at the breaking of the power of the unions, when they got too cushy about jobs and pay and conditions. Governments backed this up. If it becomes too expensive to pay the men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs, then there will be a solution found to the problem.

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

I'm not sure, but now that I've found the article I was thinking of, Nowrasteh definitely has a lot more to say about the aforementioned "carrots." Economic opportunities are a part of that picture, but so are things like Netflix and video games and international travel. His argument, ultimately, was that deregulation is the answer, which seems a bit optimistic to me. But also moot, because there's basically no political will for deregulation at this point, at least not in America. Which is in turn partly because it's easier to fight a culture war if you're authoritarian about it, so American politics has become increasingly authoritarian as it has become increasingly factional.

This is probably related to what you're talking about here.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

That is certainly true. But porn, at least, is also directly related to the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, which was in turn substantially a product of feminism. In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America. Feminism and race relations and homosexuality and other left-of-center issues really became politically salient around that time, without significant historical precedent. America itself wasn't even particularly "multicultural" circa 1960, when the population was 85% white and 11% black.

I don't know where it ends, or how. I don't know how to resolve the problems we've inherited. If I look at history for guidance, problems don't appear to generally get solved so much as subsumed into whatever problems come next. Usually that seems to mean war, within or without. These days I suppose something approaching a technological singularity could also suffice. It's not clear to me that I want to still be alive when whatever happens next finally gets around to happening, except for the part where I'm curious to see how it plays out.

In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America.

That is undeniably true. Hell, it's such a cliche I think we all kind of accept it without even really thinking about how strange this situation is.

The more I read and think about history, the more I see is as being on the far right side of an exponential growth chart. Almost none of the stuff that dominates our lives has ever existed before. That's trivially true for recent inventions like social media and video games, but you can go back further and say that about anything. Like you said, the sexual revolution and civil rights era wasn't that long ago, it's within living memory, I've talked to my parents about it. Cars, TV, and telephones also only became common at that time.

Or go back further. The human population didn't used to grow so fast, until like 1850 when the developed nations solved child mortality and suddenly tripled in size in the span of a few generations. Then that spread to every other country on earth, until we all suddenly stopped having kids for some reason.

Or ocean travel. That didn't used to be a thing! Sailors would stay close to shore so they wouldn't get lost at sea. It was only a few centuries ago that humans learned to sail across the ocean, leading to the "age of discovery" when they could finally explore the world. Even then, it was normal for ships to crash and sink. Magellan and most of his sailors died on his expedition.

Before that, you have the bronze age and the metal age, when humans finally learned how to make metal. And it was a huge ordeal, requiring tons of skilled labor and maybe some slaves dying in the mines. That was still just a few thousand years ago, practically a blip in the human timescale, compared to the first humans from 2.8 million years ago. So for most of our history I guess we just used rocks and sticks, living in small tribes, leading a very violent dangerous life, and that's what we've evolved for. It's going to take some time to figure out how to live in in this modern world of technological miracles.

Oh, I don't know either. My girlfriend and I had a chat the other day where we were lamenting that people weren't involved in their communities, voluntary associations are dying out, people are lonely, everyone seems to hate each other. And then we just sat there in shocked silence as we pondered how we had no idea how to fix this. I think we both consider ourselves lucky to at least have each other.

Sometimes I feel like a sane man in an insane world (and other times an insane man in a differently-insane world, I guess that's how it goes). But there's something massively wrong with everything, and the internet seems to be making it meaningfully worse, filled with negativity (even deserved negativity!) and brutal comparisions. I'm certainly part of the problem. I've been on a death-spiral as of late that's consisted of hate-reading people's discussions on modern dating, and the only thing I've gained is unnecessary insecurity about what is really a very happy relationship with someone I love. Maybe that's what's going on -- there are real problems, things could be better, but everything people are engaging with is so harshly negative that it colors their perception of the world in ways that make the real problems seem worse, and even actually positive things that exist seem unstable. And since the problems are deeply connected to social trust and confidence, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophesy that makes the problems actually worse and the positive things that exist actually unstable. Nobody seems to be living in the real world, I'm no exception. I wish I could live in the real world. But how do I go about doing that? Am I so far gone, so deep into the rabbit hole that there isn't any way out? What is the real world? What is real? How do you define real? What is "online"? Do our minds make it real? A Roman official once said to a man he was about to execute, two thousand years ago yesterday: "What is truth?"

Marry your girlfriend and have children. Join a church and raise your children according to its teachings.

Are you and your girlfriend involved in a community? Do you have a community you know you could join, but haven't gotten around to it?

I have a basically functional community I could join, but due to some discontinuity, am having trouble joining again with very young children.

Time to unplug for a bit. Sounds like it is really getting to you. Go to real places and talk to real people. Most get along just fine.

Russia's birth rate has roughly followed US birth rate trends, except for the major dip during the 1990s, which happened for obvious reasons. What is noteworthy is that this is despite major efforts by the Putin government to incentivize people to have kids.

It's not clear to me that the state can really do much to incentivize people to have kids. To me, birth rates seem to be mainly driven by how much the economy incentivizes people to have kids and by the availability of contraception. A 19th century farming economy by nature highly incentivizes people to have more kids than a 20th century tech economy. Also, when the economy is doing well and people in general are making more money, birth rates tend to go up. But not by enough to make up for huge technology-driven changes such as the change from a farming economy to an information economy.

Birth rates are also driven by cultural attitudes, see the classic example of Orthodox vs non-Orthodox Jews.

Any other than a completely totalitarian state has very limited means to change any of these things. The ship has sailed on contraception. You will almost certainly never be able to effectively remove access to birth control in any modern Western country. Cultural attitudes have shifted too much in the last 70 years and there is no reason to think that they will shift in the other direction by any significant amount.

In any case, if you tried to make childnessness painful for me I would try to make the effort painful for you. So you also have to account for the large number of people who are very much passionately opposed to your program. And our lower birth rates are not going to change things fast enough to give you enough political power to freely enact your proposals, since a large fraction of your kids are always going to be coming over to our political side of these policy ideas and relatively fewer of ours will go over to your side, for similar reasons as to why people from Istanbul, Moscow, and San Francisco are generally speaking not moving to small rural towns en masse.

Any other than a completely totalitarian state has very limited means to change any of these things.

Robin Hanson has suggested making a financial asset out of future tax revenue, and giving some of that to parents.

That could reach the necessary scale, I think.

Source for anyone interested in the details

See also:

  • The Unincorporated Man, in which every person is "incorporated" at birth into tradable shares, of which the parents get 20 percent held jointly, the government gets 5 percent, and the person cannot sell the last 25 percent (which is enough for him to support himself in this high-productivity future setting; the percentage might have to be higher in the present day)

  • Income-share agreements

I see Hanson has two kids. Why didn't he have more? When someone is suggesting bigger family sizes, I think it's a legitimate question to ask.

Robin Hanson has suggested making a financial asset out of future tax revenue, and giving some of that to parents.

That used to be the case that the elderly parents would move in with or remain in the family home with the eldest son or other married family member who would then look after and support them, on the model of "they took care of you when you were unable to do so, now it's your turn to support them". But then socially we decided that we didn't want that, and if you take the model of "move to where the money and jobs are" (again, another debate on here recently), then families by default were broken up - parents in one state, children scattered all over, having their own families and own lives elsewhere.

We've done away with the expectations of supporting the parents and any suggestion of "I have to give a percentage of my wages directly to them, just because they decided they wanted to live on Easy Street and have kids to take care of them" is going to be resented. Besides, this is what we're doing currently with social security - you pay in, then in old age you get the benefits, but they come from the payments made by the younger workers. We don't have enough younger workers and there's already a lot of resentment about "Boomer voters going to vote in elections so they get a bigger slice of the pie".

Maybe I hate my parents, don't want to pay them back, so I deliberately fail at life in order that the "future tax revenue" is as small as possible. What are they gonna do, have a late-late-late term abortion?

I don't expect people are going to stop caring about their own life.

Also, he suggests that the asset can be sold and transferred, have financial derivatives made, etc.

That's why I think it's foolish. You're packaging up someone's life as a bundle of "we can make PROFIT off this" and that's not how it works. Who wants to be an indentured servant, even to their parents? And the experience we've had with packaging up and selling on and that bundle gets sold on etc. should make us wary. "I owe my soul to the company store, 21st century version" - the vulture fund that bought my future tax earnings is sending me to the salt mines.

I've never found Hanson a compelling thinker, and the more of his batshit 'let's just imagine for a second that you gently rape a sleeping woman' thought experiments I hear about, the less impressed I am.

But you literally already have to pay the money, just to the government.

Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.

Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”

My main issue with this line of thought is that we aren't running out of people, and reducing the population by 75% or more seems positively wonderful. The US was plenty capable of a very rich and successful society with far fewer people than today.

Why would we want more? Do you want 1.2 billion people in the US, with the accompanying congestion, resource usage, and garbage? Why is 330 million the magic number? Surely 75 million is sufficient?

Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?

Why not have one billion Americans (I haven't read it yet myself)? We are nowhere near constraints on space right now; the United States is on the low end for population density. There's so much space to grow.

Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?

The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse. Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people. If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen. Especially because developed countries are the ones where birthrates are falling the most, we could see us unable to maintain modern standards of living, and much less innovation. Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe. And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.

People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.

But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?

We are nowhere near constraints on space right now

No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people. Kowloon Walled City is the constraint on space. I don't want that.

The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse.

Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.

If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen.

The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement. This is part of why labor value has declined so precipitously. A farmer today can produce many multiples of the amount of food of one 80 years ago, with fewer people working to make that happen. Most of our economy is either providing service tasks (the demand of which obviously falls proportionally to the population) or performing largely pointless clerical tasks. You could achieve the same real output with far fewer people, and likely much higher on a production-per-capita ratio (which is the measure that actually matters).

Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people

I expect this is likely true for some comparatively small amount of time. Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare. Sucks for those that didn't have kids, sure. They made bad choices and can pay for them.

Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe.

80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.

And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.

The disuse of things currently in existence would have an infinitesimally small impact on the amounts of garbage compared to that produced by an extra ~650 million Americans.

People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.

No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.

But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?

Absolutely not. I will continue to tell people I care about that they should raise a family, I just don't know why I would want to increase the birthrate among the population at large in the meantime. The ideal scenario as far as I'm concerned is "literally no one but me and my family and friends has kids," but that's obviously not realistic.

No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people.

Do you have evidence you can point to for this?

Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.

I don't know that I'm convinced of this. The earth is not currently running up against Malthusian limits, so having the increased labor force allows for more work, more innovation (and so more technological progress), more division of labor, and so on. Of course, some parts of that depend on having decent institutions.

Anyway, average (arithmetic mean, I assume?) quality of life is not my sole concern, but I get that it's yours, so I'll assume it for the sake of the argument.

The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement.

Yes, and the current fertility rates are dysgenic with respect to IQ, at least in the US, though I don't remember to what extent. We need a smart enough populace for upkeep, at the very least.

Roughly the same can be said of the remainder of your paragraph.

Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare.

But this doesn't depend on public spending. With fewer people, and an inverted population pyramid, more of the total wealth will be devoted to supporting retirees.

80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.

Fair enough.

No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.

But demographic trends are currently removing the most productive people from the group, or at least moving in that direction.

I think decline in population also can lead to insufficiently maintained infrastructure and buildings.

I think I would take post-depopulation Detroit over ~late 70s/early 80s ditto, and the rural parts of Japan and Spain, for instance, seem quite nice.

The problem is that there can't be cruise ships and video games if there aren't enough people working good enough jobs to pay the tax revenues to support that life. Economic collapse due to lack of labour also means that the cruise ships don't get built and if built, can't be staffed, etc.

The problem isn't that there are fewer people. That's the good part.

The problem is that there are fewer Europeans.

I think a large fraction of the people who are in favor of reorganizing society for the sake of more fertility are not really concerned with how large the population will be in the future, they are just consciously or unconsciously trying to sneak in social conservatism (what they really want) by using the argument that "society will collapse if the fertility is low". It is similar to how some people who claim to want to fight anthropogenic climate change are really just trying to sneak in far left social and economic policies by appealing to people's fear of climate change.

There are also some who are mainly worried about their own ethnic group being outbred by other ethnic groups. That at least is a pragmatic and tangible argument, rather than being fundamentally an emotion-driven preference like I think the majority of social conservatives' social conservatism is.

Yeah i don't get it. I want fewer people. Not more!

Malta - a country that used to have a total ban on abortion until 2023, after which it relaxed it to allow abortion to save the life of the mother - has EU's lowest TFR.

Abortion bans are mostly worthless without contraception bans, as least as far as impact-on-tfr goes

Abortion bans are worthless when you’re a €60, two hour budget airline flight from somewhere with legal abortion.

We won't run out of people. Subpopulations with higher fertility rates will outcompete. In the short run, though, countries may shrink, and the burden of caring for the elderly fall on a smaller and smaller working population, which in turn makes it harder and harder for that population to also take care of kids of their own.

It's all a result of socialist policies allowing people to offset the cost of their choice to not have children onto others. We still sort of "punish" childrearing in the sense that governments are strongly concerned with the material welfare of the elderly, but not so concerned with the financial capacity of those providing for the elderly to have children of their own.

"The Italian government currently contributes around 30% of its overall annual public spending (net of interest expenses) to pensions."

"Government spending in Italy was last recorded at 56.1 percent of GDP in 2022"

Putting these figures together, working-class people are shouldered by the elderly with a tax burden equivalent to nearly 40 percent of their earnings. If they did not have to pay for these pensions (not to mention other large expenses such as medical care) their salaries would be 40 percent higher.

I don't have the time to make an effortpost about this right now but this is obviously the issue. These married couples already have the equivalent of many children to look after, through no fault of their own. A frugal, average-earning couple could probably get away with raising 3-4 children on less than 40% of their income. Before banning contraceptives etc. let's fix the broken system that forces poor couples at childrearing age to pay for the luxurious retirements of unrelated elderly people.

The higher fertility rate subpopulation thing does provide a chance of running out of productive workers, though. One of the killer hacks of avoiding the fertility decline associated with being a productive member of industrial civilization is to just call the bluff of the other members when it comes to willingness to let you starve.

In the US that would be basically just the haredim. Ghettos really don’t have that high a TFR anymore and other very high TFR subcultures are at least workers even if they’re not doing particularly skilled work.

It's all a result of socialist policies allowing people to offset the cost of their choice to not have children onto others.

I think it's not so simple. While it is true that the average social security recipient takes out more than he or she put in, this is to some extent balanced by the fact that people who have fewer children have more time and energy to be economically productive and are thus also in a way economically subsidizing people who have more children. One would need to analyze relative economic productivity between people with various numbers of children in order to get a clear view of what is happening.

Well, putting aside the selfish aspect of having kids (there are benefits that go along with the costs after all), I think generally raising kids is harder than putting more time into your job. On average those who have more kids will be working harder overall than those who don't and happen to make more money because they're more career-oriented.

Further, I very much doubt that in countries with such a large tax burden, those without kids are making nearly as much of a financial contribution as the kids themselves will. Three kids each making $100,000 per year will generate much more wealth for the state than the childfree couple making an extra $200,000 per year due to their decision, not to mention the exponential effects of those kids going on to have kids of their own.

So, yes, there are other factors to consider, but I'm confident that if we looked at the actual numbers we'd find this factor in particular pretty negligible.

This is the most dysgenic possible approach.

I think that honor goes to what the US has long done, taxing people who work to pay for the non-working non-elderly, and paying the latter extra if they have more kids.

If you want to use money to incentivize something requiring at least as much effort as full-time employment, you should expect to have to compensate people on a similar scale. As far as I know, no policy has come anywhere close to this yet. Before writing off carrots, try paying families 30-50% of the median personal income for each kid, every year, for the kid's entire period of minority. See what happens.

(I know, nobody wants to model parenting this way, because we like to believe it's some sacred endeavor set apart from crass commerce. But the reality is that it's in competition with the market for labor-hours, and it's in competition with everything supplied by the market as a source of utility. It benefits little from automation, so it's subject to cost disease, and becomes a little less attractive relative to alternatives that aren't every year.)

It is a combination of feminism and globalism. The first makes it hard for any particular mother to be a SAHM. Even if you solve the economic issues, there isn’t frequently a cohort of other women in the neighborhood to (1) help each other out and (2) socialize.

The second frequently involves kids moving away from where they grew up for economic opportunity. Extended family therefore are not heavily involved in family life which makes it harder for parents and less rewarding.

Maybe you could solve the first one (eg large tax breaks for mothers who drop out of the work force when they have kids) but the second is challenging. Remote work in theory could help but remote work itself has short comings.

New France fined men whose daughters remained unmarried after 16. Early 20th century Argentina fined bachelors.

Both societies(French Canadians and argentines) maintained high tfr long after declines had started everywhere else. This is because in most societies, the tfr issue is not due to DINK’s. It’s due to a high percentage of unmarried people. Even Japan and South Korea have stable married TFRs.

I’m not sure that fining unmarried people is the solution, but I am sure that fixing the lack of partnering is the solution- fines may not be the best answer, here. This is a deeper issue and I have an effortpost bouncing around in my head about gender polarization, but it’s likely to be a next month thing if I get around to it- as it has been for the last several months.

Please write it. I've had an effortpost about gender polarization and unrealistic expectations for relationships bouncing around in my head also. I think it may be in the top three biggest world issues right now, it seems to be happening everywhere.

Ok, I’ll try to get around to it.

If I compare the US' and Argentina's fertility rate trends over the course of the 20th century, I see that Argentina overall had a higher rate for most or all of that time, but the general trends are basically the same. Actually, in Argentina the rate halved between 1900 and 1950, whereas in the US it decreased by a similar but somewhat smaller amount (the US baby boom makes it hard to figure out where to put the "right" side (chart-wise) of the comparison in a way that is meaningful.

I have a few questions

1-Who is "we"?

2-What punishments are you thinking about dolling out to the childless?

3-What good are a ton of people going to do when AI and robotics do all the jobs?

Ah yes, so now if you're single you not only have to deal with the pain of nobody wanting to be with you, but you get punished by the government for not having children. Seems very reasonable and not at all cruel. Not to mention that punishing people for the state of their family is something a tyrant would do, not a reasonable government.

It's by design, 2rafa likes incels to suffer more.

  1. Don't put words in others' mouths.

  2. Especially when they aren't even involved. Did you reply in the wrong subthread?

sorry

On the positive side, it makes single people much more likely to find someone!

On the other hand, I think we need to make some tough decisions that will make life worse for childless people. A society that privileges its leafs at the expense of its roots will soon have neither.

On the positive side, it makes single people much more likely to find someone!

I've always wondered if it would make a funny reality TV show to take some incels and femcels and make them date and cohabitate. I think witnessing the children to come out of such relationships would be even funnier!

I don't personally think that the fertility rate is a problem, so I don't think a solution is needed. But if one is going to try to solve it, punishing childless people is just about the worst way I can think of. Like I said, a lot of people who have no children are that way not by their own choice (infertile or nobody wants to marry them). Punishing those people (who already are unhappy with their situation) is just plain cruel.

One of the biggest sticks is a pension divisor when under 4 grand children and I'd probably qualify that with taxpaying grandchildren.

That seems like poor policy. Even a pretty aggressive procreator is going to struggle to reach 4 21+ GC at 65, and it would in turn strongly penalise the family if the 21 year old grand daughters are forced into work and taxpaying instead of procreating.

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