deadpantroglodytes
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User ID: 568
deadpantroglodytes
18d ago
It's more accurate to say that your comment shows how the Oz comparison makes no sense.
(Though it is a useful heuristic for the ITT.)
Turok's previous writing is almost perfectly incompatible with the goals of the Motte. It's often witty but insincere (I enjoy his trolling of r/AITA quite a bit). It's also marred by elliptical insults that are often rooted in failed cold reads. For example, the "didn't you see 'Alt' in my flair?" schtick presumes an interlocutor easily gulled by shibboleths that aren't really a thing here.
This seems correct to me, with two addenda.
First, there's been an explosion of oppressed identities accessible to the majority, in the form of disabilities, queerness, plus esoteric sexualities and genders. This vastly increased the surface of potentially receptive people that would have previously considered themselves targets.
Second, the development of social media, especially Tumblr (as Katherine Dee has documented) provided a vector for the reemergence of political correctness as wokeness.
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
I don't think this responds to my claim, which are that the default human position on kids is "not worth the trouble" and therefore making contraception cheaper, more effective, or more accessible mechanically reduces fertility.
I agree that there are legal regimes, beliefs, and customs that foster fertility. I'm just annoyed whenever people write about what "caused" the fertility crisis. There's no theory that makes sense or matches history apart from "people don't want kids and will take measures to avoid having them" except "mo' better contraception."
Japan didn't get the pill until 1999 but its TFR fell from 5 to 2 between between 1925 and 1960. What happened?
Sparked by the visit of Margaret Sanger to Japan in 1922, and through the dissemination of printed information, and the opening of clinics, birth control became widely understood by the general public.
The article goes on to say "Governmental thinking of population as a marker for national power and international strength, however, remained steadfast and led the Japanese government to ban the sale and use of birth control in the 1930s, considering it harmful to the user." I freely admit that there are innumerable confounding factors, but I'm going to take "the introduction of a new technology did exactly what it promised to" as the null hypothesis. (Also, wow, what shitty prose. Do better, Wikipedia.)
Or read Cremieux's post about Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, "The Fruits of Philosophy". TLDR: family-planning advocates disseminate information out to the English population, fertility craters.
Romania only proves that it's hard to stop people from practicing contraception for long.
The Amish and Haredi communities are interesting and useful, but they don't contradict what I'm saying. In fact, the Amish formally prohibit contraception. People infer that some Amish communities quietly accept contraception use, based on differential fertility rates between communities where more conservative communities have higher fertility rates.
The Haredi might prove me wrong, in some sense, but they are also a world-historical outlier that are not obviously reproducible (pun intended).
At any rate, I'm not saying we shouldn't look at communities and societies that have done better. I'm just pessimistic that we can overcome the default human bias by copying them.
Religious fundamentalists who anathemized contraception will be proven right and their children will inherit the Earth.
There's a reasonable chance this is right. I can't find the comment, but someone here recently summed up that position as "evolution works". Correct! But it just means that negative-fertility species will lose (on a geological timescale), not necessarily that the fundamentalists will win. Most of the fundamentalist groups have a problem keeping children onside, and even their fertility is in decline, with a few notable exceptions.
The discussion is really about how to fix the fertility crisis. Talking about what's caused the fertility crisis is distracting and drives me a little nuts, because the cause simple and obvious: increasing access to safe, cheap, effective contraception depresses fertility.
Imagine if humans, historically, could just choose when to have children. All else being equal, our ancestors never would have made it out of their tiny niche. The only reason we flourished was our sex drive, which obliterates our intentions and exerts irresistible pressure to reproduce. (Hormones, oxytocin, etc. play a complementary role, but couldn't have carried the day alone.)
The solution that suggests is also simple: the Ceaușescu regime demonstrated that outlawing contraception can get the job done: Romania raised TFR, from 2 to 3.5.
Simple, but not sustainable. Ceaușescu also showed how difficult it is to maintain those policies: a sharp decline quickly followed. By the 80s, Romania's TFR was hovering just above replacement-level and trending downward. When the regime fell, so did the restrictions and TFR went down to 1.3. It has recovered, but has not ever reached replacement since.
Where does that leave us? The Romainians offered economic incentives for larger families, but those programs shouldn't get much credit, since they have been tried many other places to little effect. Sure, economic and status incentives can help on the margin: relaxing car seat mandates will improve things a bit, for example, and would be good in itself. Maybe we can even find a few dozen policies like that, which could add up to a measurable but inconsequential boost. Ultimately, though, there's nothing that's going to make large numbers of young people in WEIRD countries to consider their lives and say "yes, a(nother) baby will make my life better". Dreaming of a cultural solution is a dead end: we do not engineer specific outcomes via cultural change. Cultural change and its outcomes are emergent.
But I'm not here to call for a ban on contraception. Restriction proponents are like anti-auto crusaders and other activists unable to accept a new technology. There's no turning back on technologies that profound, immediate positive effects on people's lives, whatever the tradeoffs or externalities. Mail-order Mifepristone is the 3d printed gun of the left.
If there is an answer, it's to go deeper. We have ample survey data that tells us people (well, Americans) want more children. There's some reason to be skeptical of that survey data: we clearly want other things more than children. But at least it suggests a plausible path for the future of humanity. I think the most likely solution involves enlisting human desires instead of restraining them, which means improving fertility-extension technologies is our best hope (and perhaps easing the process of giving birth).
deadpantroglodytes
10mo ago
I don't think Yglesias is committing the pundit's fallacy, exactly. Instead, in the intro to his Common Sense Manifesto he writes:
when you lose an election, a leadership void opens up. And that void will be filled — with people and institutions and, hopefully, with ideas — and I would like the ideas that fill the current void to be good.
One way to read that is "my ideas would have won the election and they'll make us popular", but I think he's going for something more like "my ideas are good, so if we take control of the party that already gets 45% of the vote by default, we'll have a shot at making good things happen."
I think that's all your right as a business owner. That's distinct from campaigning for other people to enforce one's judgements.
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