Crowstep
1yr ago
Would TheMotte really be here condemning Trump if he pardoned Don Jr. in a tax fraud case? Be honest now.
TheMotte is not a person. But yes, I am happy to condemn both Trump and Biden for pardonning their family members. Rule of law means that everyone is subject to the law, not just those who sit outside the ruling family (which itself is a bizarre thing to have to say about a republic).
This is just corruption. Biden is less corrupt than Trump, but as we see here he is clearly somewhat corrupt.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Because he explicitly said that he wouldn't pardon him.
And because rule of law requires everyone to be subject to the same laws, and not to have members of the ruling family treated differently. America is a republic, not a monarchy where the president has the divine right of kings.
This isn't a case of the president correcting an obvious miscarriage of justice, as pardons are generally used in the free world. This is pure corruption/nepotism. It is, dare I say, Trumpian.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I remember the piece you're talking about. It was of course, written by a woman who has never had children.
Meanwhile, women who have children usually have more than one.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Much of this is probably illegal an/ord might result in loss of parenting rights nowadays in most Western countries
It's more of an Anglosphere (particularly American) thing. In continential Europe children have tons of freedom. Here's Norway, the Netherlands, France, Japan (admittedly not western, but still WEIRD).
Crowstep
1yr ago
Surely Romania disproves your argument? You claim that contraception caused the fertility crisis, and then point out that Romanian TFR collapsed in spite of contraception being illegal.
Meanwhile, the baby boom happened across the western world while contraceptives were freely available.
Imagine a world where condoms, the contraceptive pill and hormonal implants don't exist, but where credential inflation, atomisation, the internet and social media do exist. In my mind that world would have the same crisis that our current one does. After all, Japan didn't get the pill until 1999 and yet birth rates were barely at replacement in the 1950s and 60s, only to decline below it in the 1970s. Even hunter gatherers have effective methods of birth control that don't require contraception (long periods of breastfeeding, timing, the withdrawal method and infanticide, primarily).
Meanwhile, both the Amish and the Haredi Jews can and do use contraception. They just prefer to have larger families because their cultures assign high status to having a large family.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Looking at her other Substack posts, it seems like she only did it for that particular post. I guess she was trying to evoke Zoomer angst.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Aella is like the textbook example of a high-testosterone woman. She's definitely not a representative sample.
your mom finds you crying one night alone in your bed, crying in grief that god hadn’t made you be born a boy
This is not a thing that normal little girls do.
Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.
Crowstep
1yr ago
It's very plausible that Trump can raise their TFR
Believe it or not, that already happened in 2016. I'd put money on it happening again, since the conservative-liberal fertility divide has deepened since then.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think it's because the 'chief' in CEO is an adjective rather than a noun. The brain processes the two categories of word differently, even if they are homonyms.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Towards a grand unified theory of birth rate collapse
Ask someone without any interest in the topic why birth rates are collapsing globally or in their own country, and they will usually find some way of saying it's too expensive. Either wages aren't high enough, house prices are too high, childcare costs too much. Often they will bring in their own pet issue as a rationalisation (global warming, inequality, immigration, taxes).
They are of course, wrong. Global GDP per capita has never been higher, and global TFR has never been lower. Countries with higher GDP per capita numbers tend to have lower birth rates, although the relationship isn't necessarily causal. Clearly, 'we can't afford it' isn't factually true.
So what is causing it? There are certainly things that governments and cultures can and have done to encourage births on the margins. Cheaper housing does allow earlier household formation, which increases births. Dense housing suppresses birth rates, even if the dense housing lowers overall housing costs. Religiosity increases birth rates, all other things being equal. Tax cuts for parents increase birth rates. Marriage increases birth rates vs cohabiting. Young people living with their parents decreases birth rates. Immigration of high-TFR groups works until the second generation. Generous maternity leave and cheap childcare seem to help. However, none of these seem to be decisive. There are countries that do everything right and yet birth rates still continue to decline.
The universality of the birth rate collapse suggests that the main cause must be something more fundamental then any of the policies or cultural practices I have named. Something that affects every country and people (with a few notable exceptions that will be the key to working out what's going on).
Substacker Becoming Noble proposes that the birth rate collapse is caused by one thing:
Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.
In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.
I won't spend too much time summarising the article. It is excellently written and I wouldn't do it justice. The key thing to take away is that, within global culture, having children is neutral or negative for status.
But let's apply the hypothesis to various groups with unusually high or low birth rates and see if they match the predicition.
Becoming Noble gives the example of Koreans. Infamously, South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet. It is also hyper-competitive and status obsessed. Children spend most of their waking hours studying for the all-important college entrance exam, so they can get into the best college, to get into the best company from a small selection of prestigious Chaebols (the most prestigious is Samsung, as you'd imagine). According to Malcolm Collins, the Korean language even requires its speakers to refer to people based on their job title, even in non-professional settings. In a country which is defined by zero-sum status competition, the main casualty is fertility.
Of course, South Koreans aren't the only East Asians to have low birth rates. All East Asian countries have very low birth rates, and the East Asian diaspora also has very low birth rates, even in relatively high-TFR countries like the USA or Australia.
Richard Hanania proposes that East Asians, being particularly conformist, are particularly sensitive to the status trade-offs of having children. This would explain why we see similarly low TFRs among the diaspora.
So now we move on to groups with unusually high TFRs. The most famous are the Amish and the Hasidic/Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox Jews.
The Amish are rural, religious people, so we would expect them to have a relatively high TFR, but even compared to other rural Americans, the Amish stand out for extremely high fertility. They don't spend long in school, they marry young (and don't allow divorce) and stick to traditional gender roles. But according to this description of Amish life, the key factor is that among the Amish, being married and having a large family is high status, for both men and women. Amish culture is cut off from global culture in important ways. They are not exposed to television or the internet, they don't socialise much with the English, and they are limited in what modern status goods they can buy. So for young Amish, the only way to gain any status is to marry and have children.
Unlike the Amish, the Haredim are urban people. Instead of leaving school at 14, the young men spend their most productive years in Torah study, supported by their wives and government benefits or charity. Meanwhile, their women pop out children and work at the same time. Urban living, extended education, and a rejection of traditional gender roles should all suppress their fertility, but they don't. Tove (Wood from Eden) proposes that the religious restrictions on Haredi men reduce the worry from Haredi women that their menfolk might leave them. This, combined with a religiously-motivated rejection of global culture encourages them to focus their status-seeking energies on having large families. This also seems to have the knock-on effect of increasing Israeli birth rates among other Jewish groups there.
Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline. Pronatalist Daniel Hess argues that this is because these countries make motherhood high status in a way that most others don't. Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture.
So what is to be done? There is of course no magic button that a president can push to make parenthood high status. But the most obvious thing would be for governments to simply tell their citizens that having children is pro-social. They should promote having kids the same way they promote recycling or public transport. Promoting marriage would likely help, as well as pivoting school sex education away from avoiding teenage pregnancy (which has essentially disappeared in the developed world) and towards avoiding unplanned childlessness.
Crowstep
1yr ago
There's an author I like (David Mitchell) whose novels are all loosely connected and part of the same universe.
His first big hit and arguably his opus, Cloud Atlas, had a section set in a post-apocalyptic earth. Within the book, the end of industrial civilisation comes about due to peak oil. In 2004 when the book was written this wasn't an unreasonable thing for someone like Mitchell to believe.
Unfortunately, since all his books are within the same universe, he then revisited how the end of civilisation came about in his 2014 book The Bone Clocks.
This leads to the situation where the characters watch civilisation die around them in the 2050s because they are running out of diesel.
Crowstep
1yr ago
In Putin's mind, 'denazificaton' really just means the eradication of Ukrainian national identity. I'm not sure it translates within a nation-state, especially now that the American right has become a multiracial working class coalition (at least for now).
Crowstep
1yr ago
Hogwarts
Definitely woke, even if it was inspired by the works of a woman who later became a wrong-thinker. 1890s rural Scotland having the same demographics as UCLA, plus the deliberate inclusion of a wizard in a dress witch with a croaky voice.
It's worth remembering that JKR was very politically correct back when it was called that. She retroactively made Dumbledore gay, and in the stage show made Hermione black (and then tried to gaslight her fans into believing she always was).
Of course, the success of the game in spite of the attempted woke boycott probably strengthened the belief among dev companies that they can just ignore an angry twitter X Bluesky mob and sell games anyway.
Crowstep
1yr ago
fireinabottle.net has some really interesting posts about historical calorie consumption. One I remember was about consumption in New York. I don't know if it ever got to 5000 calories, but it was certainly a high number. And he's also written about body temperatures declining over time. He attributes it to increased PUFA consumption from vegetable oil.
Annoyingly, the site seems to be down now, so I can't point to any actual posts.
My only experience with a NP was getting misdiagnosed with asthma when I had whooping cough. The actual doctor (when I did see her) diagnosed me correctly in about a second. Prior to that I didn't really know what a nurse practitioner was.
I certainly agree that the doctors' cartel (the British Medical Association) are a gang of scoundrels though. The UK has a chronic shortage of doctors and a chronic oversupply of students who want to be, and are smart enough to be doctors. But the BMA artificially limits places at medical schools to keep their wages up, leaving the UK reliant on imported doctors who are objectively worse (with no disrespect to @selfmadehuman, I'm sure you're great).
Crowstep
1yr ago
Crowstep
1yr ago
How does it do for opening messages? I remember when I was dating and my lack of creativity really held me back there.
Crowstep
1yr ago
If you support enforcing current immigration law, you support denying millions the chance to live and work in the U.S. for no other reason than they were born outside of it.
Yeschad.jpg
Less flippantly, all but the most extreme open-borderers are comfortable with the idea that most people in the world won't be able to move to their country. To believe otherwise would be to be comfortable with the idea that billions of people could move from the poor world to the rich world just by patiently filling out a few forms. The fact that legal immigration is highly selective is the point.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think I first heard it in full in a teaser trailer for Breaking Bad, although I probably would have been familiar with it before then.
I also had a brief period where I would try memorising poems. It was the first one I successfully memorised.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think it's probably that people just have fewer friends and social interactions now. Therapy has jumped in to fill the gap that socialising, communal worship, hobbies and sports have left. Combine that with safetyism and I can see how we'd end up with a situation where a young person feels lonely or like his life lacks meaning and will end up talking to a state sanctioned professional, when what he really needs is to hang out with his friends more.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Stop worrying about people not having kids! Like, if you're reading this and that is something that you were worried about, I'm begging you, please, it'll be alright. Evolution works! It doesn't need your help!
I'm not worried about 'evolution' doing okay. I'm worried about myself, my friends and family, and human civilisation. I know that humans as a species will survive, but I'd rather that every country in the world not turn into South Africa in the meantime. I think industrial civilisation is good and I want to maintain it.
Like sure, I guess I can admire your extremely long view from a certain perspective. But what can I say, I'm just a parochial worry-wort who doesn't want humanity living in mud huts and bashing eachother with rocks again.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Dursleys were middle class social climbers (the most universally despised class).
I always got the impression that JK was channeling Hyacinth Bucket when she wrote Petunia.
OP's post lead me on a minor rabbit hole about government pardons. Apparently we do have them in the UK, although they are rarely used. The last couple were Alan Turing (posthumously) and Steven (nominative determinism) Gallant, a convicted murderer who, while on day-release, fought against the jihadi who carried out the London Bridge attack in 2019.
Although if I'm honest, pardoning a relative totally feels like something Boris Johnson would have done.
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