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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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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.

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