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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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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.

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