RenOS
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User ID: 2051
No offense, but you're roughly two decades behind the state of the discussion. The rough trajectory goes like this (I'll use germany as the example since I'm most familiar with it, but afaik it's quite similar for many different western countries, save maybe a decade or so earlier or later):
60s: Germany is on a high due to the baby boom with a birth rate of ca 2.3. It switches to an overtly pay-as-you-go pension system, which works very well due to the circumstances. Some already point out that it will only work if birth rates keep stable and say we need to have policies to ensure that it does (of course, this is actually true of almost any economic system, but pay-as-you-go makes it overtly obvious). Chancellor Adenauer dismisses them stringently with "children will always be had" and this is also the public sentiment, so nothing is done.
80s: Birth rates went done substantially to ca 1.5. However, it's generally chalked up to be more an issue of delayed children rather than not having them at all. (Also, as a note: Germany already had rather generous maternity leave during this time already)
00s: The first generation of women has become old enough with a low birth rate so that it's clear that delaying is not the reason - people really have significantly less children overall (only 1.3, even). This coincided with a great increase in women employment, which was an amazing economic boon. When asked, women directly say the reason is economic - not enough money, not enough protection from discrimination after maternity leave, not enough family accommodation, ... and so on. Obviously, people are reluctant to rock the boat too much when times are good. So the focus is on increasing the (economic) benefits over the years in the expectation that the birth rate will go up again. People aren't terribly worried and the discussion is not really big in the public. The only who are worried a lot are, more often than not, literal nazis, so they are still easy to dismiss. <--- you are here.
10s: The birth rate didn't change, at all. More people get worried, since at the current rate there will be a big crunch in the 30s when the baby boomers retire. But in 2015 a new possible saviour turns up: Immigration! The immigration of earlier years usually was too small to be demographically notable, the large waves now were so massive that they actually could plausibly make up for the crunch. While this wasn't the primary reason that we opened the borders, it was mentioned multiple times by the left wing and made it hard for the then-mostly economic right to argue against it (it went roughly like this: "We worry about having not enough workers in a few years, now we are gifted plenty of young people, what are you complaining about!"). So policy doesn't change much, especially since accommodating the immigrants is too expensive to plausible further increase child benefits.
20s: It becomes very clear that the immigrants are actually an additional drain, not a benefit, to the economy. Birth rates also pretty much didn't change, except a short-term anomaly around covid. Now there actually isn't enough time left to solve the problem until the 30s - kids born now would only be teenagers. In fact, the negative impacts already become noticeable since some boomers already scale back work or even retire early, and the general economy is bad enough that people get unhappy. As usual, this is the moment the wider public really groks that there is a problem at all. Behind the scenes for the last decade, lots of overwhelmingly progressive, optimistic scientist have been looking for any policy, anywhere in the world, that increase the birth rates. There are none. All known developed countries have low birth rates. The discourse gets pretty gloomy, and the only reliable relationship that anyone can find across most countries is a negative one between female employment and birth rate. This coincides with a general rise of the right-wing across the entire west.
It's not terribly surprising here that some are jumping to coercive measures, and it's definitely not coming out of nowhere. My personal opinion is most close to pronatalist Lyman Stone (and to a lesser degree the Collins), which is that the problem is cultural and can't reasonably be solved economically. As a father who shares family obligations equally, I can tell you that especially small ones are a lot of fucking work (and money), and they will not only reduce your immediate work time, they also reduce your career opportunities and your free time. It's almost impossible to redistribute so much that having kids becomes economically beneficial. If you tell women that careers are important to them, they will not have kids, bc you can't have both and everyone knows it. Men will generally not blow up their career, either, especially since women don't actually respect house-husbands. A culture that idealizes self-actualization also suppresses child-rearing, since they are in the way. Etc. That doesn't mean coercion, but pretty much everything you propose has been tried in one country or another and found wanting. Of course the old arrangement (male main breadwinner, women part-time worker + child care) still works, but there is an ever-increasing portion of the population who is not willing to do that anymore. And once you've changed to the new dual-income model, the margins become quite thin so making a family work on top of that will include quite a lot of sacrifices. Worse, you have to outright compete with the DINKs.
RenOS
something is wrong
4d ago
Sorry for talking a while. It seems I slightly misremembered it. The kids-bleeding-out part is something he allegedly said, not wrote, but it is referenced in the text you quoted ("you were talking about hoping jennifer gilbert's kids would die" -> "Yes I've told you this before. Only when people feel pain personally do they move on policy").
RenOS
something is wrong
4d ago
Yeah, I agree with this. An owner kicking a drunkard out of his restaurant is, strictly speaking, a form of discrimination. Just one most people would approve of. But it's easy and convenient to just jump to "well it's not REAL discrimination when we do it".
RenOS
something is wrong
5d ago
It makes some sense. First, the design somewhat lends itself to this, since they use a very broad category (TGD can mean almost anything). Second, it's the group with highest percentage of males, and the rapid-onset worry was specifically about teenage girls that have shown no or very little indications beforehand. Most importantly however, it's clearly the most ego- and status-protecting option; I've heard about cases where a detransitioner would lose large parts of their social environment since their decision was seen as a direct attack on the shared worldview. Saying, in essence, that you didn't really change, you just chose to discontinue your transition due to discrimination gives you a gentler way out.
Personally, my biggest concerns is orthogonal, if not opposite, to detransitioners; I think that the concept of "gender" as-used in the social sciences is mostly bunk and better seen as "social realization of sex-based differences". For example, woman prefer interacting with/caring for people over other activities. In some (especially ancestral) societies this is realized through informal, usually familial, caring and organizing behaviour which is not directly paid but there is instead a general expectation for the men to provide for the women. In others (especially in modern), it's realized as formal, paid caring and organizing work. The basic underlying needs/expectations, and often even the actual behaviour, can be near identical, just the framework it's embedded in is different.
And I know they hate it, but most trans-individuals I've met fit in much better with their biological sex in both interpersonal interaction and general choice of occupation/hobbies. Using female-only pilots, painting your battlemechs in bright colours, creating large, detailed spreadsheets to optimize your firepower and occasionally making comments about the hot steaming yuri sex you want to have is just not very feminine (not making this up, I swear, though it's admittedly a particularly extreme example). Neither society nor them really benefits imo from enabling their delusions. That's not to mean that they necessarily are perfectly average manly men; They just certainly aren't female in a meaningful sense, either.
Worse, it has been quite conclusively shown that at least a substantial part of these needs/expectations come from sex-specific changes in puberty modulated by your hormonal state. That means if you screw with that, people biologically become sort-of intersex and will struggle even harder to fit in with either side of the natural sex dichotomy. You can't actually postpone puberty indefinitely, so after a while you get locked into an irreversible intermediate/undeveloped state. At that point, it's actually de-transitioning that becomes delusional; it's a one-way street. So, I don't actually expect a large number of de-transitioners to begin with, despite viewing the entire enterprise as rather questionable.
Overall, the data is better, but the results don't really seem notable enough to change anyones view on this, I'm afraid.
The article is from 2018 and talking about specifically post-2015 increases. That just-so-happens to be the timing of the largest migration waves ever to enter germany. It even itself admits that the only group which plausibly stayed structurally the same - mothers with a german passport - had only a change from 1.43 to 1.46, which they call "notable" but which most would call "pretty much nothing". Attributing these changes to policy is, to be frank, imo bordering on willful misinformation. In general including foreigners/immigrants in most modern stats leads to nonsensical results, since everything gets drowned in composition effects. It's the equivalent to comparing test scores between a rich kid prep school and a public school in a poor district and claiming that it's due to this or that teaching approach; No, it's 100% due to differences in the populations (which, btw, don't need to be genetic; I know quite well how much difference simply highly motivated & supportive parents make).
You can see the stark differences quite well here. Again, note that the foreign population, at different times, included substantially different percentages of a) turkish majority-muslim migrant workers, b) italian majority-catholic migrant workers, c) syrian majority-muslim asylum seekers, d) north african asylum seekers (often, but not always masquerading as syrians), e) Ukrainian majority-orthodox asylum seekers and a million other smaller groups. Concluding anything from those numbers except the composition is pure insanity.
So that leaves us with german mothers subgroup. Now, there is an argument that you can see a very slight increase from around 1.3 in the 90s to a top of almost 1.5 in the mid 10s (note that the timeframe of the DW article is actually flat), and that this is due to policies. That's prima facie plausible, but firstly as you point out generally considered not nearly enough, and secondly doesn't match very well with the timing of the actual policy changes usually considered major. The biggest was the 2007 Elterngeld, which was deliberately designed to benefit working mothers and families in general as well as increase male investment into children. Can you see it in the plot? I can't, not as a one-time, not as a rate-increase, nothing. The second was the Elterngeld Plus in 2013, which accomodated part-time work in early childhood specifically. There is a modest increase here between 2013->2014, but it's still small, also looks more like a continuation of a former trend and worse, the line flattens shortly afterwards anyway. Another problem is the covid bump and the post-covid downturn; Family policies in germany are still very generous and didn't really change during covid, but the overall change observed easily drowns out all the other changes. Neither does it fit with economic or general anxiety; those were, if anything, especially high, not low, during covid.
And finally, even the german mothers actually have a significant problem with composition effects, even if they're not quite as strong. See the large increase in foreign births vs a corresponding small decrease for german mothers in 2011? This isn't an immigration wave nor policy effects, it's entirely due to the Zensus 2011 re-counting of who belongs into which group. Most immigrants stay in western countries nor is getting a passport particularly hard, and germany is no exception to that rule. So culturally noticeably different foreign groups with non-western marriage/family patterns get increasingly counted as german. Btw, afaik France's high official birth rates are for example almost entirely due to this as well, thanks to comparatively early postcolonial immigration waves.
And this even applies to rather old immigrant groups, and even non-immigrants. The region where I'm from has a specific town with a large church of pentecostals who fled from Soviet Russia long ago. Back then, however, it was a very small group. When I grew up (90s to 00s), they were already a substantial percentage of a specific town. Nowadays they are literally half the population (I can send you a DM with a link if you do not believe it, but don't want to share it publicly for OPSEC). They have consistently high (6-10 children is not exceptional) birth rates, high cultural cohesion and high retention rates, similar to Hasidic Jews in Israel. They are large enough so that our entire region is among those with the highest birth rates in germany, and has at multiple times been number one. Though admittedly my heritage (conservative catholics) isn't doing badly there, either (I literally do not know how many cousins I have; it's around 30-40).
Which leads to the explanation that makes by far the most sense to me: Culture. The pentecostals do not earn well (in fact, substantially below average). They do not have better family benefits. But what they have is social structures that consistently, consciously and openly advocate for and support marriage and family formation, while suppressing all influences that plausibly reduce it, such as casual dating, the focus on self-actualization, abortion and birth control, non-standard sexualities, education, female careers .... the list is long. It's a matter of priorities; Having children is hard and expensive, and no entry on the list is in itself mutually exclusive with high birth rates, but our culture just has a low status and low priority for #children, so almost any competing topic or enabling technology plays a part in the reduction..
If somebody put a pistol to my head and said I have to do something that reliably gets us back to >2.1 TFR, fast, I'd absolutely go with the right-wingers. Ultraconservative religious groups exist all across the western world and still have extremely high birth rates; If we become more like them, we will, too, have a higher TFR again, QED. Family benefits policy nerds are almost exclusively using bullshit composite stats and are thus ignorant about very basic realities. That doesn't mean, however, that I WANT us to do this; As it happens, I'm best described as a technoutopian transhumanist, and I do think we would have to pay a large price in technological progress if we were to attempt this, let alone my libertarian distaste for coercive measures. Me and my wife are trying our best to find a modern synthesis, where we consciously sacrifice what is necessary to have the number of children we desire while still keeping the parts we value about the modern system. But that doesn't make the right-wingers wrong on the facts.
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