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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   26120 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Earlier this year the Swedish government appointed a state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and what it portends for Sweden going forward. Yesterday the Committee released its first report detailing the potential consequences of lower fertility, aptly titled The Silent Crisis. Here is a link on the off-chance you know Swedish, or on the very on-chance you want an AI to give you the key takeaways: https://framtidmedbarn.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Nr-1-Den-tysta-krisen.pdf

Really though, the key graph is on page 18 and you don't need to know Swedish or have Grok ready to read it, because it's more or less shock horror demography-gore. Given current (or, if you look at the orange graph, slightly worse) trends without mass immigration the Committee estimates a whopping 40% decrease in the Swedish population by 2100. In actual numbers this brings the population down from a small-but-respectable ten million Swedes to about six million which roughly corresponds to the Swedish population in the year 1940. Unlike what was the case in 1940 though, the relative quality of the population will be vastly inferior, and will in large past consist of 80+ seniors mostly incapable of doing serious productive work and in need not only of constant and large transfers from the working-age population via taxes, but also significant care efforts in homes for the elderly. The Committee estimates that every working citizen in the worst-case scenario will need to finance no less than 1.6 other people. The last but not least horrifying part is the merciless shift in public spending: many municipalities will have to downsize schools and kindergartens in order to build more homes for the elderly, which in turn reinforces the circle of demographic disaster and suicide. Instead of happy children playing in kindergartens we'll have non-sentient dementia patients as the primary receivers of care in our society! There is a real risk of not only Sweden, but every corner of the West, becoming a wasteland of retirement homes.

I recently read Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler and I really am quite struck by some of the similiarities between Spengler's moody prophecies and what seems to happening all over the West (and most of the westernized world). Somewhere in all the gobbledygook about the historical meaning of numbers or whatever Spengler theorizes that demographic decay is ever a symptom of a civilization beginning to die. The picture he paints is one of eine entsetzliche Entvölkerung, a terrible depopulation, beginning with die Weltstädte, the World Cities, sucking up most able-bodied and sound men and women from rural areas, followed by a rapid decline in fertility due to urban individual values making life in general and children in particular into something doubtful and baseless, followed in turn by even more rapid urbanization until the final swift conquest and sundering of the entire civilization from Civ-style roaming barbarians brings the whole enterprise to an ignominious end. To be fair Spengler was no great thinker, and he was probably just extrapolating from the demographic decline of the early 20th century which was actually eventually solved. The glove does seem to fit though, doesn't it?

Anyway, the dangers of demographic decline is nothing new to the Motte, but I found it refreshing to see the consequence of the current trajectory put in plain text and graph by a state-financed publication rather than whispered on forums. There was a post here a while back linking to an unpleasant and depresing anti-children essay talking about how the fertility crisis is inevitable when women are allowed to choose freely (link: https://kryptogal.substack.com/p/the-fertility-crisis-is-inevitable). I think proponents of that particular case need to take a little bit more responsibility for where their ideas actually lead, rather than brush everything off with weak optimistic rambling about how a declining, decaying and rapidly aging population is nothing to worry about, and how the failure of the West and unending reign of Umbar and the Shadow might actually be a good thing, really, if you look at it from Sauron's perspective! I for one prefer the thought of all the Free People of the West continuing to perpetuate, sustain and rule themselves, and I will not apologize for this view.

Still, I for one am not despairing quite yet. The report itself is a good sign! In Sweden many seem to be realizing that there is indeed another crisis looming over us now besides climate change, and that it is little use making the planet more livable if there's no one left to live on it. Swedes are not nearly as dumb or naive as right-wing media would have many believe, and there is a strong hatred for immigrations here now coupled with a new appreciation for Swedish culture which bodes well for the future. Besides that, all the usual attempts (such as a strong welfare state, generous parent leave, et cetera) have already been tried here, which means we don't have to go through a bunch of ineffective non-solutions before we can move on to more innovative attempts. I for one think it would be interesting with a tax break for families coupled with a big tax hike for rich childless women. This would both create good incentives as well as clarify what society sees as the most valuable form of femininity. Many have posted much about this subject before, but I think it's ready for one more round. What does the Motte think about this?

(P.S. Later in January a follow-up report will be releaed with suggestions on how to rectify the problem, and if the Motte is interested I might make a post about that report too when it releases).

Here's a proposal:

Upon the birth of a third child to a married couple, the government gives them a down payment equal to 20% of the median US 4 bedroom single family home. They still have to qualify for a mortgage on their own and the money can only be used for this purpose. This applies even if the family owns a smaller sqft home

Pros:

  • Incentivizes marriage.

  • Incentivizes having kids young.

  • Incentives home building if there are more buyers? But only if obstacles to home building decrease.

Edit: Feel the need to elaborate on that last one since it's contrary to typical market wisdom. But it would be similar to the Government subsidizing college - lots of colleges popped up to support the increased demand. Prices also rose, which brings me to the Cons)

Cons:

  • Inflates home prices, but the couple still has to have sufficient income to qualify for the monthly payment so hopefully not by that much.

This is right in line with standard government policy on all products:

Restrict supply and subsidize demand.

The end result is skyrocketing prices.

The opposite would look like:

only families with kids under 18 get to buy single family homes. - restricting demand

Housing construction companies get massive tax write-offs for each house they construct. - subsidizing supply

I guess that's closer to China policy.

But the end goal isn't lower-priced houses, it's more children. If the only way to afford a single family home became to have 3+ children, more people would have them? Also, I don't think you're taking into account that people would still need to qualify for the mortgage, meaning the total house value can't be so high that the two parents can't afford it. This policy just takes out saving up for it which is onerous given that the mid 20s is the best biological time for babies.

Though my policy combined with something like:

  • All houses with 4+ rooms and 0 residents under 18 for 5 consecutive years is subject to a 200% property tax increase.

Would help move the current housing stock around and help to some extent.

The issue is that the more you push policies that are "fuck you for not having a girlfriend" at young men, the more likely you are to get young men who choose violence. If a man can't afford housing, so can't actually end up in a stable enough situation to attract a partner and have kids, then there isn't a good reason to not just rebel against the entire system.

If we're going to punish men who don't have a partner more than not having a partner is a penalty in and of itself, we're going to disproportionately be punishing men who are more educated (quick googling shows that men who have higher education levels are more likely to be both unmarried and virgins).

Except women are also punished for not marrying in this scenario. Which would help a bit with pair bonding early on.

Demand is mostly consumers, supply is mostly corporations.

People (consumers) really don't like the government telling them they can't do stuff. Corporations are much more used to it, and it's professional so their employees don't care so much.

This is one of those things that sounds nice but won’t actually work. There’s lots of countries giving handouts to big families. Only in Georgia do these incentives do anything.

Instead, you need to target interventions earlier on. The military is a pro natal culture just by incentivizing it’s members to marry instead of cohabit.

Actually it looks like, in Hungary, the thing that improved TFR the most was housing subsidies:

https://hungary.representation.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-12/hetfa_fertilitymodels_20190913.pdf

Panel A indicates a significant positive effect of home ownership support in the third year. The parameter estimate indicates that a 1%point increase in home ownership support would lead to a 0.00047 (1.2% compared to baseline birth probability 3.87%, which is equivalent with 1099 additional births per year) increase in birth probability.

There was a post here a while back linking to an unpleasant and depresing anti-children essay talking about how the fertility crisis is inevitable when women are allowed to choose freely (link: https://kryptogal.substack.com/p/the-fertility-crisis-is-inevitable).

I searched for the blogger's name. It seems to be this discussion initiated by @Hoffmeister25.

Either way the name "Investigative Committee For a Future with Children" is probably rather based in a Swedish context.

The answer to the question is easy, simple and very difficult to produce with laws or tax policy. Status.

Society has to value the production of productive children higher than it does whatever else the parents do. This can be influenced, but can't be forced by the government, or religion, or propaganda.

It's not really about economics or politics, although that plays in. It's about expectations and values.

There's a couple of solutions. First, there's the maximally cynical solution- minimum cigarette and hard liquor consumption for elders to receive their pensions. Second, you could raise the fertility rate somehow, but nobody knows how to do that... except there are examples in the secular western modern first world which successfully do this at scale. Military and oil towns in the US, for example, do this quite effectively just by raising average male wages relative to female in the relevant age brackets. We could easily replicate this with fairly mild discrimination in college admissions, or a special tax on female labour, or etc. Modern western society won't, of course, but we could. It wouldn't be that hard. Thirdly, there's what will probably actually happen- lowering the quality of elder care, systemically lying about it, and printing money to cover the deficit necessary to keep it financed. Obviously, persistent inflation but society can handle that, with grumbling.

Military and oil towns in the US, for example, do this quite effectively just by raising average male wages relative to female in the relevant age brackets. We could easily replicate this with fairly mild discrimination in college admissions, or a special tax on female labour, or etc.

Why does this mechanism of action work and how do you think either of those solutions would make anything better instead of causing South Korean-esqe meme levels of gender dysfunction

Isn't this just a matter of sex ratio? The denominator in TFR is the number of women and ignores men. Societies as a whole have a 1:1 effective sex ratio, so this doesn't normally matter when comparing. But individual communities which don't reproduce biologically can have unbalanced sex ratios. Oil towns and military base communities have a lot of surplus men, so if the limiting reagent for family formation is mostly rather than entirely female, then they will naturally have more kids per woman.

In Western culture, polygyny and bastardy are (very) low status, and the main reason women give for having fewer children than they claim to want is a lack of quality men to have them with. If this is even partly true, then it is obvious how "have enough spare men around that all women who want kids can get a man who wants kids, and a crappy woman can nail down a mediocre man and a mediocre woman can nail down a decent man" increases births-per-woman.

I suspect something similar is going on in the other direction with collapsing Mormon fertility. Monogamy norms are even stronger in post-1904 Mormonism than in the wider society, and the Church has a problem with male defection meaning that the sex ratio is female-heavy. Anecdotally, babies-per-marriageable-couple is still high among Mormons, but babies-per-woman is falling off a cliff as not every woman can get married.

Marriage is earlier, basically. When women's standard of living benefits more from marriage than from career investment both sexes marry at high rates.

I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.

I think we'll see some level of SRDS - Sudden Retiree Death Syndrome. Essentially "suicide by willful negligence" on the part of some boomers. "Forgetting" to take necessary meds, going for a nice little midnight walk by a bridge, getting interested in at-home amateur electrical work all of a sudden.

I don't think this will be anywhere near the majority. I expect it to be a small enough percentage that it is largely overlooked. Still, when the boomers are well into their 80s, they'll come fact to face with the fact that 1) Raisin ranch existence isn't actually fun or meaningful and 2) Their own children and grandchildren are, yet, still footing the bill for it.

I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.

This study suggests that about 10% or less of SIDS cases are infanticide.

I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide.

Conspiracy?

My impression could be off, but I was under the impression that it has actually been the mainstream scientific consensus for years now that SIDS is, for the most part, a made up thing. A made up thing that's been allowed to persist as an open secret since doctors don't want to be mean or accusatory in blaming parents (in particular, mothers) for their infants' mostly accidental deaths, especially when those with SIDS-experiencing-infants tend to be black and Amerindian (BIPOC unity before the phrase "BIPOC" was even coined).

According to the new parents' class my wife and I took long ago: most SIDS is probably accidental suffocation. Like a parent falls asleep holding their baby and rolls slightly pressing against their baby's face. Something like that.

Based on how boomers approached their youth, middle age, and early old age, I can only assume that they will have a massive Golden Throne constructed in a Florida retirement community at taxpayer expense. One thousand Zoomer and Millenial psykers will be sacrificed every day so that psychic energy can maintain the Golden Throne and allow boomers to live for the next 40,000 years.

GenX erasure yet again (sigh).

They're hoping no one is noticing that they're operating the psyker cattle cars.

Too young to be emperor, too old to be fodder - probably the sweet spot 😁

Anyone older then a Millennial is a "boomer". That includes Gen-X, Silents, WWII, Lost Generation, and even the unnamed generations prior. Years from now the Zeds, Alphas and Betas will be calling the Millennials "boomers", much to their irritation.

You are correct!

Yeah, actually, this does make more sense. I think you're right.

I am several decades (hopefully) away from making such a decision, but that is my plan. I saw the burden my dad's decline put on my mother, and the burden my wife's parents put on her and have no desire to do that to my loved ones. I just hope I have the courage when/if the time comes.

Although I don't know that I care whether it looks like an accident or not. I don't expect there to be any life insurance in play by that point (again, hopefully) and bullets are much quicker and more sure.

Read into the policy before you do anything stupid but my understanding is that, after some lock out period, suicide doesn't actually invalidate life insurance policies.

I stumbled across a twitter thread on the idea that SIDS is a conspiracy and actually just a way of covering up infanticide. I can't say whether I believe it not, but the story was at least internally consistent.

I have always felt this. I wouldn't say infanticide but more like negligence and accident. I think doctors understand that new parents can be tired and stressed and shit happens. You are breastfeeding your baby in bed, you fall asleep, roll over, blankets smother baby. I think a doctor looking at that would say "Why ruin this parent's life with guilt when it was really an understandable mistake?" And so they give them a medical-sounding description that connotes a random medical event, like the baby just mysteriously had a stroke or something (even though the definition of SIDS makes no such claim, it is totally consistent with accidental smothering), mostly to allow them to just move on with their lives and treat it as an act of god.

Testable predictions if my theory is true: SIDS rates will be higher among lower IQ parents and higher among blacks, probably also higher among single mothers.

This is correct, it's really a very open not-so-secret secret. A buddy of mine from college works as a volunteer fireman/emt, he told me that they get calls pretty frequently about dead babies, most commonly parents who fell asleep with the kid on their stomach, in bed with them, etc and got smothered. Standard Operating Procedure is generally to just file it all as SIDS to avoid any legal ramifications, unless the negligence was exceedingly egregious (eg they were stoned and accidentally left their infant in the tub to drown). As he said, being sentenced to live with the fact that you killed your kid is enough.

This was more or less stated in a new parents' class I took long ago. Presented as advice to put your baby to bed properly even if you are really tired. Don't fall asleep in a chair holding them.

And so they give them a medical-sounding description that connotes a random medical event

The problem with this, of course, is that parents that are diligent/intelligent but aren't in on the joke will treat SIDS like it actually could happen to them. So they end up taking a bunch of steps they don't need to, and are improperly convinced their babies are far more fragile than they actually are; this attitude then extends into childhood and they just get smothered a different way.

This is actually an argument I had a couple of times in groups of new parents, almost every single time with American expatriate families. They seem absolutely terrified of SIDS in a way that none of the other Europeans or 3rd worlders I know are. And it sucks because some of the "precautions" make it very difficult to take care of a small baby sometimes.

Yeah though on a societal level is it better if people are overcautious about their infants or undercautious? I agree there's likely a ton of anxiety created through current 'SIDS as act of god' messaging, plus the breadth of human history contains a lot more infanticide than people are probably aware of, but on the other hand I think it could be a net good if people are checking their infant constantly rather than taking it too relaxed.

Then again I'm a parent and I've got a 2nd baby due in a couple months and I feel like I'm going to be a lot more laissez faire with #2 in the infant stage than I was with #1. Just having already gone through it and not everything being a crazy novelty.

Yeah though on a societal level is it better if people are overcautious about their infants or undercautious?

What are you optimizing for? If you're optimizing for percentage of infants who survive infancy, more caution looks good. If you're optimizing for total number of infants who survive infancy, it might look a lot less good.

On a societal level, undercautious.

Otherwise, you start to get problems with people who aren't parents starting to think they're entitled to enforce caution by proxy because "don't you know all babies are at risk of randomly exploding?", and would-be parents thinking the same and either spend more resources solving an imaginary problem or judge having to deal with an exploded baby too risky and then fail to become parents. This is more important when the first baby a prospective parent encounters is their own, since there's no way to reliably calibrate risk any other way.

It's not the only thing that causes that socially destructive behavior (I'd argue "don't you know your kid could just get randomly snatched?" is the biggest one- that isn't really random either, of course), but it is a contributor.

Testable predictions if my theory is true: SIDS rates will be higher among lower IQ parents and higher among blacks, probably also higher among single mothers.

..... (sadly) ding, ding, ding.

lowering the quality of elder care

clankers teleoperated by third worlders coming near you

1.6 other people

Horrifying? I notice that this is actually less than the 2.1 which one would need to support for replacement fertility. 3.1, if the tradcons get everything they want. Most elders aren’t going to live a full 18 years past retirement, either.

Elder care is a facile justification for pro-natalism. You are assuming away all the difficult questions.

What are the relative population sizes in that 1.6 model? What’s the break-even point at which one generation’s children makes enough money to care for them? Most importantly, what fertility rate would be required to hit that ratio? Because if it’s above 2.1, Malthus is laughing at your solution. If below, why are we even having this argument?

I still have two grandparents. Watching them age and withdraw from the vital, loving characters I remember from my childhood has been heartbreaking. But they had three children, each of whom had at least three in turn. They have avoided all the standard pitfalls of modern demographics. It hasn’t saved them. We cannot save them. Our money, our love, is not the limiting factor here. Why should it limit the broader population?

You're misunderstanding the 1.6 number. That's the dependency at a given time not some notion of over a lifetime. 2.1 kids would, on it's own, give you a dependency ratio of <0.5 (2 parents, working for 40+ years, vs. 2.1 kids for 18 years each). If based purely on children a dependency ratio of 1.6 would ~ match up to an average of 7 kids per family.

For historical comparison, the US peaked at 0.68 in 1961 (baby boom) fell to it's lowest point 0.48 in 2007 and is currently 0.54 (baby boomers retiring). The highest in the world right now is 1.05 in the Central African Repubiic (lots of kids). 1.6 is really high...

Are you sure that's the same statistic? Why would it be higher in a poor country with tons of kids?

edit: duh, it's the kids plus the retirees. plus, i assume, some population of disabled people, etc. I can't help but suspect the man funding 3 kids feels pretty different than the one funding 3 retirees.

Kids are also a lot cheaper to take care of.

Agreed on "I can't help but suspect the man funding 3 kids feels pretty different than the one funding 3 retirees." Especially since the later will mostly be funded by taxes (the whole problem is that lots of folks aren't having kids and the state has more or less taken over the inter-generational transfers to the elderly), whereas the former is more mixed (a lot of 'funding' there is paying for your own kids, though taxes do come into play for schooling etc.).

I mean kids for the most part don't really incur the 'massive medical expenditure to win another year of quasi-life' issue that the elderly do. Part of the equation is that the current level of elder care is just unsustainable unless a precipice is reached for genuine productive longevity instead of elongated fragility.

Maybe this is a tangential ramble at best, but it gives me a moment to take my mind off of other matters.

There are a lot of replies down-thread that boil down to "just have kids bro", that seem to be dripping with a kind of smugness that suggests that it truly is that easy, and any complications that come along with it are speed bumps at best.

I think a lot of people here forget that this forum is wildly unrepresentative of the broader (US) population. By and large the average poster here is:

  • Physically healthy
  • Extremely high income, and high net worth.
  • Mentally functioning, either by being sane, peculiar in a way that can work well in some environments (hello fellow autistic software developers), or wealthy and/or insured enough to be under treatment.
  • High in conscientiousness ratings.

All of those things together are a great set of qualities for people who intend to be parents. My father and his wife are like that, and my youngest brother is growing up to be an exceptional young man.

The thing is, my father is dying, and we're not sure if he'll live to see my brother graduate highschool. He's done what he can, but the rest of us are going to have to try and fill a gap in his life that can never be filled. No man can truly know the hour of his departure, but the average life expectancy for men in that side of my family is about 63. I'm old enough now that even though I am in a stable, committed relationship, I simply don't know if I will live long enough to properly raise a child.

On the other hand, you have me, my brother and sister on my mother's side. My mother lacks any formal diagnosis, but she is crazier than a shit house rat. She casually lets it drop that "the angels" are giving her advice these days (though it's generally good advice so we don't fight her on it), she's had a lifetime of substance abuse problems, she's had a history of violence and abuse towards me and my sister, and she's never really been able to hold down a job in any meaningful way.

As a result of all of that, none of us really have any idea of how to be a proper parent. There aren't exactly "how to not stab your own kids" lessons regularly available at the local library, so my brother and I are both terrified of having a child and fucking it up.

My sister has two kids, but she is, more than anything, a cautionary tale. She's not just crazy, but evil in a pure way that almost makes me believe that demonic elements can truly hold sway in this world. She has absolutely no compunctions about lying, cheating, using physical violence, or stealing to get her way, and sometimes she will do it just because she thinks it's funny. Her older child is schizophrenic and has been in and out of involuntary committals since he was a teenager, when he's not being held on drug charges. He's tried to kill my sister and her husband at least once already. I haven't spoken to any of them in many years after she tried to have multiple family members arrested on (false) human trafficking charges and attacking my brother with a brick.

I did my best to raise and protect my brother growing, but it was a case of the lost leading the lost. At present, he's kind of drifting through life working a retail job and living with his dad after a bad breakup. He's keeping out of trouble and keeping his head above water, but only barely.

The difference between me and those two is my father. He met all those criteria later in his life and did his best to impart those values in me. I was already damaged, so it didn't all stick. Even still, I've absorbed the virtues of hard work, tact, thrift, and reliability in a way that has allowed me to carve out a small life where I'm not constantly in fear of going to sleep hungry or without a roof over my head.

My sister got none of that. She's a mess. My one brother got a little of that. He's doing better than her. My youngest brother got more of that than I ever did from a loving, supportive network of family and friends. God willing, he'll do better than I ever will.

I probably won't have children. I'm too old. I found a partner late in life, and she can't have kids due to a medical condition that has rendered her infertile, and I don't really believe there's anyone else out there for me. Even were it possible, I am terrified that I would do it wrong. I don't really have any example of what doing it right looks like.

For people who say "just have kids bro", what do you do when the people like my mother and sister have kids? What do you do to make sure those kids even have a chance? Are they simply meant to fall through the cracks so long as the overall metrics look good? Do you try to disincentivize that from happening in the first place?

On the other side of the coin, what do you do with people like me? I've lived below my means my entire life (no vacations, extensive savings, retirement) so as to not be a burden on others. I've tried to do what good I can in raising my brother, but I have no biological children of my own. Should I be left to rot in my old age, like some of the replies suggest?

What do you do?

As a result of all of that, none of us really have any idea of how to be a proper parent. There aren't exactly "how to not stab your own kids" lessons regularly available at the local library, so my brother and I are both terrified of having a child and fucking it up.

I don't want to oversimplify, but from everything I've read and experienced, the answer to raising healthy children can be summed up as 'spend time with them'. Children can be raised with all manner of philosophies, and as long as they have adults who care about them and give them attention, they'll almost certainly be okay.

That gives you an easy answer for what you should do as well. If you want to adopt, or by miracle conceive with your partner, you'll have to sacrifice what your life looks like now to make space for the child - and that's it. Whatever else you decide to do will probably be fine. Likewise, if you don't have a child of your own, you can make an effort to be part of the lives of children in your family or your community. Maybe it's too late for your sister's kids, but children at large are in desperate need of responsible adults who give a damn about them. As for rotting in old age - I dunno, if you don't want to connect with the younger generation, I guess you could make friends?

What do you do?

If you're asking me, personally (as opposed to the state) I say "Fuck it we ball".

If your partner is infertile, that is unfortunate, but miracles do happen. Things like adoption as well as integrating yourself into the lives of your nieces and nephews, or becoming a godparent to the children of your friends are also options you could pursue. Heck, you could even coach little league.

I do not want to come across as dismissing your fears out of hand but I am going to dismiss them. My early life was not as rough as yours, but it was also not without it's trauma and drama. I was a bit of a delinquent in my youth, and I know all too well the "joys" of sharing a family with addicts, alcoholics, and paranoid schizophrenics. Much of my adult life has been shaped by a desire to prove that I am not like them, and that I could turn things around. The fact that you are scared is a sign of a healthy outlook. You know who isn't worried about fucking up her kids? Your fucked up sister.

My first was an accident, completely unplanned, and I was scared shitless when I found out. I shared many of your concerns and your uncertainty. However, with the benefit of hindsight I also recognize that if my partner and I had waited till we were "ready" it would have never happened. Our first is now in middle school and has since been joined by multiple siblings, the youngest of whom we welcomed into the world just a few weeks ago. I'm still scared shitless but I'm also used to it now. What I've learned is do not let fear stop you from doing things that need to be done.

To echo @BreakerofHorsesandMen, for better or ill, the choices that will define your old age are on you. It is OK to be afraid, but do not let fear stop you from making those choices.

Great post. I used to have these questions too, when I was more dysfunctional. I do think the destruction of stable families is upstream of a lot of the fertility crisis.

I think it's not just stable families, but stability more generally. Having and raising a kid has a 20 year time horizon. I have a hard time even picturing what 2045 is going to look like.

what do you do when the people like my mother and sister have kids? What do you do to make sure those kids even have a chance? Are they simply meant to fall through the cracks so long as the overall metrics look good? Do you try to disincentivize that from happening in the first place?

On the other side of the coin, what do you do with people like me? I've lived below my means my entire life (no vacations, extensive savings, retirement) so as to not be a burden on others. I've tried to do what good I can in raising my brother, but I have no biological children of my own. Should I be left to rot in my old age, like some of the replies suggest?

What do you do?

You (the State in its formulation as society, which is clearly the you being referenced here) don’t do anything. That’s the hardest answer of them all. You just don’t touch it, the good and the bad. Your mother and sister will have kids, and it isn’t the responsibility of the State or any other formulation of the general “you” to do anything about that. You have to stop interfering and be willing to let things play out organically. We see this perhaps most pressingly with immigration questions these days. High modernist planners at the highest levels of government realized that there was going to be natural decrease in the fertility rate after the baby boomers, and that this would create an eventual national crisis, so their solution was to import foreigners, based on their belief that all humans are fundamentally similar enough to be economically interchangeable.

This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.

All of that could have been avoided by the planners packing up their notebooks, going home, and letting natural civilizational cycles of rising and falling fertility play out. Those might have been the original bullshit jobs, as it were, a job that would be better done by not doing it.

But all of the modern state is like this. Its tendrils are so thick into everything that people ask “Should I be left to rot?,” rather than “What have I done so that I won’t rot in my old age?”

The State shouldn’t even be perceived as “leaving you to rot” in your old age. Your choices are the ones that should define your old age. If you don’t have descendants, do you contribute enough to a community that they think it’s worth helping you out? Are you a beloved Grandfatherly figure or are you the local crotchety hermit? Etc etc through all of our choices all through life.

I don’t blame the average person for this kind of thinking, because the State, by shoving itself into everything actually closes down the possibilities for people. Maybe you and a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age. That would be laudable, if someone on the Motte right now were doing that I would have serious respect for them, whatever their reasoning behind not having kids. But the State will come and interfere. Are your houses big enough? Is the road sized appropriately for emergency vehicles? Is your private group a little too racially homogeneous about letting new people in? Etc etc.

And the squashing of that ability to just do things, to organically arrange things, for better or for worse at the lowest level and move up from there, that’s crushing to the soul of a civilization, to a people, to individual persons. I actually think this is a discussion where many lefties might find themselves agreeing with me, in that most complaints about crony capitalism stem from this kind of State over-regulation of everything.

But to answer your question, you should be the one to make the choices that define your old age, without expecting someone in far away location to contribute. You, and everyone else, should be freed to make decisions and suffer consequences, the good and the bad.

I want to emphasize how much I like this post. It's such a compelling illustration of what small c-conservatism believes. A lot of the writing around it gets gummed up in some, frankly, high falutin' verbiage (Scruton, Kirk, Buckley) and, so, the point is obscure.

But this nails it. "You should be the one to make the choices that define your old age" and "But all of the modern state is like this. Its tendrils are so thick into everything..." are particularly vivid.

I don't want guarantees from the State for anything. Because any sort of guarantee in that context is actually a pretty profound limitation of my ability to determine my own future.

The State shouldn’t even be perceived as “leaving you to rot” in your old age. (…) do you contribute enough to a community that they think it’s worth helping you out? Are you a beloved Grandfatherly figure or are you the local crotchety hermit? (…) Maybe you and a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age.

But in principle, isn't "the State" what organically arises from the latter arrangements scaling up and coming to rely on common record-keeping infrastructure to reduce friction cost for all involved?

It starts with a tribe or a village. Old Greybeard is a font of good advice, so of course, everyone chips in to get him some fruit and cured meat in the winter. And maybe they do the same for Old Bald Bastard who curses out anyone who comes near his hut; no one likes him, but… the current best hunter's pretty cranky too, and he isn't stupid. If he sees that O.B.B.'s left to rot, he'll leave the tribe in the lurch and look for some place where he can expect better rewards for his years of good service once his teeth start to fall out. Wait a few generations. The village gets bigger - now there are a lot of old mouths that a majority of townsfolk wants to see fed for one reason or another, but it would just be inefficient to collect separate donations for each old geezer individually. So a guy takes it upon himself to collect bulk donations from each household, and divide them up equally to all the elders. So far so good.

Except, what if it turns out there's another guy doing the same thing for contributions to the town bridge-building budget, and yet a third guy who collects the money for the town watchmen to buy themselves weapons they use to defend the whole community? Not only is this more work for everyone, but some of the less well-off households keep having to explain that they can't give to the Elders Feeding Fund because they already gave all their spare grain to the Soldiers Feeding Fund. Pretty soon, everyone agrees it's more convenient for those guys to work together and create a single list, and for each household to make one donation a year, that gets divided up between the different useful community functions.

All perfectly sensible, but suddenly you have something that looks an awful lot like taxes and social welfare.

Presumably your libertarian alarm bells start going off at the step in all this where it stops being optional for a given household to give to the "charitable" fund. Now, I would personally say that it's fair enough of the majority to take the trade-off of "a given household can no longer opt out of the yearly donations without leaving the tribe altogether; but in exchange the collection process will be (relatively) hassle-free for everyone". Of course, I can respect the classic ethical objection - "coerced giving is theft, end of story, it doesn't matter if it's more 'efficient'". But it sounded more like you were concerned about the overall inefficiency of government intervention than taking a principled stand against taxation even at the cost of potentially suboptimal outcomes. And if that's your position, then... I don't think it's coherent. Every step I outlined is just a rational iteration upon the previous status quo, making things smoother and more efficient for everyone. The solutions you advocate aren't really an alternative to a social welfare state. They amount to little more than doing social welfare in patchy, inefficient ways while depriving yourself of the centralized record-keeping tool which thousands of years of cultural evolution created for exactly this purpose: the State.

(There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence. Even if you're really doomer-pilled about full-sized, modern governments, however, I think the above argument still illuminates the fact that it's not uniquely strange or sinister for Big Government to try and screw up attempts like the one you describe to create "mutual support networks". Fundamentally, that's just the perfectly healthy reaction of an established State trying to nip de facto secession in the bud; no State, good or bad, can tolerate the creation of a rogue mini-State within itself.)

There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence.

The founding fathers presaged this and wrote The Federalist Papers specifically to address it.

TLDR; Far, far more power should be delegated to states and localities. This is what the tenth amendment says. Like, lit-ra-lly;

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The cascading usurpation of this began with the 14th amendment and then was wildly expanded by the Civil Rights Act. Strange how that lines up with the cultural revolution of the 1960s, ya?

You now - or, until recently - had Offices of Civil Rights in almost every executive agency who's express job was to try and find the hidden racisms in ... anything ... so that some sort of amorphous yet far reaching suit could be brought in federal court.

And, of course, any congress person who would voice a concern with the 1964 CRA, despite the fact that his metastasized multiple times in every decade since its original passage would instantly bet met with breathless cries of "the racisms!".

All of this is to repeat the apocryphal story about Ben Franklin;

When Elizabeth Willing Powel asked Frankling, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

And, slowly, over time, under the cover of "righteous intent", we've decided to abandon the republic in favor of a centralized capital-S State that reaches down to wrap it's testicles tentacles around each one of us all.

I’m not even a huge libertarian. I think that theft is a perfectly valid way of acquiring wealth, society to society. That’s what conquest is, after all, and I think conquest is a perfectly valid way for nations to go about dealing with each other. Internally in a society, theft will destroy it, but that’s just ingroup/outgroup dynamics at the vast scale of peoples and nations. Externally, it can improve it dramatically, ergo all the IP theft that China does, and which young America did a fair amount of from the British. The non-aggression principle is incoherent.

There is obviously a conversation to be had about novel and grievous failure modes that arise when you scale our little town-sized setup all the way to a polity of 350 million people. Hell, I sometimes wonder if on some level this isn't just a basically insane thing to even attempt. Maybe the Ancient Greek-style city-state is the maximum size at which you can really run any state properly, and we could fix the world's ills by giving all regional metropolises total fiscal independence. Even if you're really doomer-pilled about full-sized, modern governments, however, I think the above argument still illuminates the fact that it's not uniquely strange or sinister for Big Government to try and screw up attempts like the one you describe to create "mutual support networks". Fundamentally, that's just the perfectly healthy reaction of an established State trying to nip de facto secession in the bud; no State, good or bad, can tolerate the creation of a rogue mini-State within itself.)

This is more like where I am. Technology probably lets us have sleek, attentive and relatively homogeneous polities bigger than Ancient Athens, but the reality is that I know jack shit about New York and so, in a perfect world, my opinion about what they get up to over there should be completely impotent to change anything there. And of course, vice versa. Patchy, inefficient ways are better.

Also, Big Government doesn’t need to be strange or sinister. Plenty of bad decisions are made by the smartest people with the best intentions. They just need to be wrong and do their damndest to prevent any possible alternative from ever arising. All of which can be done out of the purest hearts.

Also, Big Government doesn’t need to be strange or sinister (…)

Well, amen to that - but I got the impression from your OP that you were presenting government interference as a kind of aberration, that the State's interference in things like the mooted mutual-support-network-of-elderly-bachelors was inherently overreach and not the proper purpose of the State. In contrast, then, I was arguing that providing this kind of service is exactly the purpose of a state, and squashing internal competition comes hand in hand with that. In this framing, we might say that a given government - say, the 21st century US Gov - has grown so cancerous and counterproductive that it ought, at this point, to be circumvented and replaced from within; but statements like "The State shouldn’t even be perceived as 'leaving you to rot' in your old age" still come across as self-contradictory. If it were functional the State absolutely ought to deal with that sort of thing, in fact that is exactly what it means for it to be "the State"; it just might be the case that it's so bad at it currently that it ought to be prevented from fulfilling this natural purpose.

Also, side-track, but:

The non-aggression principle is incoherent.

Well, now, I wouldn't go that far. It's not optimal for national flourishing, but then, no one ever said morality had to conveniently be isomorphic to the optimal strategies for material success. It may be (whether because God wishes to test His children on virtues orthogonal to profit maximization, or because there is no God) that doing the ethical thing leads to material ruin - that doesn't ipso facto prove it isn't the ethical thing.

I'm not sure what to call the fallacy I think you're making, but it seems like you're drawing lines about what is and isn't state intervention in a way that's intended to benefit your point, rather than deriving logically from some coherent first-principles definition. For example--

We see this perhaps most pressingly with immigration questions these days.

You complain about immigration as if the default state of the world is "no immigration" and state intervention is required and responsible for migration. But imagine a world where national policy isn't concerned with immigration at all. Yes, that would mean a reduction in government-sponsored pull factors like welfare and resettlement initiatives for immigrants/refugees, but also a complete lack of enforcement of any sort of border controls. What do you think migration looks like, in this world? Personally, I think we'd see fewer refugees, but even more economic migrants, which seem to be the sort that you're complaining about. Why not let these "natural civilizational cycles" play out here?

Similarly you propose, "a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age" as an alternative to government, but... that seems essentially like a government to me.

Giving you maximal charity, I think I agree with the weak form of the point you intend to make, which is (to the best of my understanding) that particular forms of higher-order, nonlocal government preclude and interfere with individual and local control in a negative way. With some caveats, I'd also agree with,

But to answer your question, you should be the one to make the choices that define your old age, without expecting someone in far away location to contribute. You, and everyone else, should be freed to make decisions and suffer consequences, the good and the bad.

But I think it's worth being precise about what levels and what kinds of government result in these negative outcomes so as to adequately identify why these problems occur and how they can be prevented. There's no point devolving power to local governments if they're going to be just as stupid, and it's worth noting that a wide variety of modernist problems have direct analogues in smaller local communities. Local communities just happen to benefit from survivorship bias and fewer historical records.

But imagine a world where national policy isn't concerned with immigration at all. Yes, that would mean a reduction in government-sponsored pull factors like welfare and resettlement initiatives for immigrants/refugees, but also a complete lack of enforcement of any sort of border controls. What do you think migration looks like, in this world?

We used to have those and they looked like the Migration Era. And to be honest, if the Central Americans can pull off a Migration Era conquest of the rich land to their north, they deserve their winnings.

What were you envisioning? A world of huge masses of people just move around freely and frictionlessly? Because that’s what requires massive state intervention to accomplish.

Why not let these "natural civilizational cycles" play out here?

That would be better than the current situation, so if they were actually allowed to play out with all the violence accompanying it(and not the weird Libertarian vision of people just freely going wherever while the current residents just bend over and take it), I would be fine with that. If that means all of India and Africa builds a navy and comes over here, conquering and pillaging as they go, well, the West had a good run. But at least they actually had to build their navy, instead of just being escorted straight into our airports.

Similarly you propose, "a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age" as an alternative to government, but... that seems essentially like a government to me.

I’m pretty sure I used the word State as my hate object, which is a kind of government but not synonymous with government in general, a point it seems like you understand in the very next paragraph, so I don’t understand what point you’re trying to make here.

There's no point devolving power to local governments if they're going to be just as stupid

Of course there is. It’s because you don’t actually know what’s stupid. Or rather, we have no idea what the fifth order consequences of our actions are going to be. Nobody who was working on the internal combustion engine in the 19th century had the foggiest idea that it was going to produce Greta Thunberg. The American post-war consensus was a huge boost to the worldwide economy, but it appears to me that a slow decay of the population’s dynamism and a societal Balkanization might have very negative effects later on.

You might think it’s stupid for people to have a purposely all white community, or to have a community that’s all Catholic by law. You could be right, even. I might think a society that transes kids is stupid. I could be right. But we’re not going to know in the long run if my ideas are stupid, or if yours are, when the State shuts down every community it doesn’t like.

And that of course is the crux of the original discussion here. The State has decided that the allegedly best thing for the original population is to let in more than 76 million immigrants, in the belief that this is what’s best for the population it was empowered by.

Because of that, cities and states are allowed to be sanctuaries for these immigrants, but nowhere is allowed to be an anti-sanctuary, actively stopping immigrants at the edge of town. There’s no way to really know which choice is stupider, if such a concept could ever even really be agreed upon.

This is just an example, of course. One could even argue that the State would be betraying its original clients by stopping massive transfers to old people. That’s certainly looking out for their interests, after all, and they were around before the young, so first come first served. That’s a fair argument. Totally destructive for the society as a whole, of course, but a fair argument.

But we’ll never have the opportunity to actually know if stopping transfers of wealth from the young to the old would make a thousand fetuses bloom, because no one is allowed to try it.

We’re just stuck here, asking ourselves “Who will take care of me, if not the State?”

What were you envisioning? A world of huge masses of people just move around freely and frictionlessly? Because that’s what requires massive state intervention to accomplish.

Not "frictionlessly," but at least with respect to particular, rich, hard-to-legally-immigrate-to countries like the united states much less friction-full than currently. Of course, the overall makeup of immigrants would change, in ways I think both of us would find positive-- more hardworking mexicans, fewer lazy venezuelans*, for example. But I predict more immigration than we have now.

I’m pretty sure I used the word State as my hate object, which is a kind of government but not synonymous with government in general

I guess we're using these words in different ways, here. I would agree that not all governments are states, but would say that any organized monopoly on violence is at least state-like, becoming more stateful the more organized and monopolistic it is. In particular, you imagined your mutual aid group being denied because of state-enforced ethnic heterogenity. But having community-enforced ethnic homogenity just transfers the "stateness", rather than destroying it. Being maximally charitable, you're imaging a case where the mutual-aid ethnic community doesn't exclude outsiders, but merely declines to offer them aid-- and yet, the very enforcement of the property rights required to keep that mutual aid mutual instead of being expropriated has what I would call the essential character of a state.

That is, I think, our essential disagreement here-- how we're using the words "state" and "government" and the lens through which we're analyzing the behavior and advantages/disadvantages of each. We also have some factual disagreements about e.g. immigration but I think they're noncentral to what we're spending a lot of ink discussing. Basically, you have a definition of these words such that the question,

We’re just stuck here, asking ourselves “Who will take care of me, if not the State?”

..is non-tautological. But to a first degree of approximation, I believe any group of people taking care of you is more-or-less "The State" in the first place. To greater or lesser degrees, obviously... It's useful to analyze the ways in which a religious community, school, or job become state-ish to enforce their delegated monopolies on particular varieties of violence, but I wouldn't confuse them with getting put in jail for failing to pay taxes or losing fingers for failing to pay protection money. I would, however, confuse a city or (american federal) state that is an "anti-sanctuary" for the State if they prevented anti-anti-sanctuaries within their borders. Therefore, taken on its face, an argument for always devolving power from the state generalizes recursively to any sub-sub-sub-(etc)-community. I don't think that's the argument you're actually making, and I don't want to argue against a strawman. At the same time, I think the strong form of the anti-state vibe you're suggesting is wrong but can't pick out exactly what qualities/levels of a government/state you're criticizing so I can argue against them.

or to have a community that’s all Catholic by law

That would be based, actually, depending on what exactly, "by law" means. If it means we prevent non-catholics from joining, it would be cringe. But if it meant mandatory indoctrination I would be very happy. Aside from the economic benefits, I'm pro-immigration not despite, but because I think some cultures are better than others. It's the god-given duty of enlightened peoples to convert the backwards and spiritually destitute. For that reason, I don't flinch from the ideological necessity of imposing and enforcing a state. Consequently, I blame the people that compose the State for having values that are bad-- but don't blame them for imposing those values to the best of their ability to do so.

This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.

Countries like South Korea and Japan have had far less immigration than the US and most of Europe, yet their TFR is even lower. Romania has ~97% native born population with the small number of immigrants mostly labourers from Moldova who speak the same language, and yet, the lowest fertility rate in Europe.

“Other states implemented different centralizing solutions to perceived problems and have experienced a similar crisis of modernity” is no different than what I’m saying.

Also, when coming at what was revealed to the reactionary in a dream, the facts presented must at least be factually correct.

Ukraine has the lowest TFR in Europe at 0.99, and that rate does in fact have a lot to do with immigrants.

Romania has a 1.71 fertility rate, making it #6 in Europe.

As for South Korea and Japan, they have their own problems of organic processes being interfered with. The Japanese people have always had a small and not particularly giving batch of islands to work with. The spiritual human carrying capacity on those islands might be as low 50 million people, maybe as high as 90 million. It is almost certainly not 129 million, where the population peaked. The solution to this is for the government to just not touch it. The Japanese government doesn’t actually have to pay old people. It doesn’t have to bring in waves of immigrants, either elite or lowly. It can just let the Japanese people find their own carrying capacity and then work with what is given it in terms of human capital.

Korea’s situation is even worse, and TBH they may be so far gone as a result of culture and government that they’re going to get rolled by North Korea one day, despite North Korea also having a declining population.. That would be a key marker of what the world’s future is going to look like, it it were to happen this century.

Ukraine has the lowest TFR in Europe at 0.99, and that rate does in fact have a lot to do with immigrants.

Ukraine’s problem is the same as Mexico’s: you only have to jump one border to get a massive increase in standard of living. Also like Mexico, jumping that border reduces your risk of dying horribly by quite a bit.

I did pick an outdated or possibly wrong map for that statistic, but the point still stands: immigration like you described does not seem to correlate with TFR.

If you look at the countries with the lowest number of foreign born residents in the EU, i.e. Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, they have TFRs of 1.31, 1.57, 1.71, 1.6, 1.50, they are not doing any better the ones with the highest amount of immigration.

Ukraine's TFR was already very low before the war, you can't blame the recent rapid Russian "immigration" for that.

Are you under the impression that I think what I described applies to Bulgaria? It may or may not. I have no idea and don’t care, because I’m not Bulgarian. I’m sure this will shock you, but the USA is different from Bulgaria. I don’t care about Bulgaria and didn’t mention it.

I’m concerned about White people in America, and our fertility is 1.75, and we keep being given the chance to welcome new immigrants with a 2.19 TFR into what is rapidly becoming not our country anymore.

You can think that that’s a good or a bad thing, but your argument is not arguing about what I’m actually saying.

What I am saying is that, in 1965, the United States government, staring down the barrel of the already massive drop in TFR from the pill, should not have passed the Hart-Cellar Act in an attempt to goose the numbers, because opening the floodgates to immigration made the problem worse for the native population in America.

That’s why your references to “Well, Bulgaria has a low TFR” hold no power here. Because at least that’s the TFR the native Bulgarian population is settling on. You can’t tell me what the TFR of the native German population is, because the national stats are full of Turks and Arabs now. These stats are meaningless and say nothing about the effects of immigration.

You (the State in its formulation as society, which is clearly the you being referenced here) don’t do anything

But to answer your question, you should be the one to make the choices that define your old age, without expecting someone in far away location to contribute.

My original intent was the much more personal question. I appreciate that you took the time to answer both.

Sorry to have misinterpreted you, glad that I managed to answer your question anyway.

I still haven’t seen a reasonable counter-argument to “learn from the Haredi”. They are the world’s most urban population, living in the costly areas of NY and NJ, often in poverty. They are as diabetic, unhealthy and sedentary as any American, and ingest as many microplastics as any American. Their lifestyle is a similitude of the American graduate student or office worker. If I were to comment about the high TFR of the Amish in Beliz or today’s increasing TFR in rural Afghanistan, there would be a ton of confounding variables, but there are no non-cultural confounders for the Haredim. What do they do? Number of children is a mark of status, as a commandment and blessing; girls are taught to value motherhood as their glorious purpose and value in the world starting at the youngest age; they pride-maxx about their heritage / peoplehood; they privilege men over women. We don’t have the studies to disentangle which of these elements are causal, but it’s going to be at least one of these things and possibly all of these things. Their lives are biologically and environmentally the same as ours, in fact they might actually be less healthy on average.

Also, any TFR strategy has to consider the longterm eugenic / dysgenic outcomes. What sort of Swedes are you selecting for if you offer a lot of money to have children? Probably not the most loving or the most interesting Swedes. Why not make giving birth an act of love and ultimate interest? Then you are selecting for the prosocial and intelligent Swedes.

I still haven’t seen a reasonable counter-argument to “learn from the Haredi”.

A big aspect of Haredi culture, and Amish/Mennonite/etc culture, is that people can leave. There's a big outer world to exit to.

I couldn't find good numbers for Haredim in particular. For Orthodox Jews in general, 67% of Orthodox Jews raised in Orthodoxy remain Orthodox as adults, and 94% remain Jews with the difference moving to more mainstream forms of Judaism. The best estimates I found for Haredi were casual, but guesses were around 5-20%, which aligns pretty closely with the Amish. Amish communities typically lose around 15% of their youth during Rumspringa. Amish communities probably land a little higher, a core anabaptist value is free choice, kids must choose to be baptized as adults even if they are raised their whole lives in the religion. The Haredi are more strict about retention, that's kind of their whole thing, so I'd imagine they land higher, but 5-10% seems realistic.

I'm more familiar with the Amish, they're really my people when it comes to weird high-TFR religious minorities, and I'd imagine it's easier for an Amish to move from the farm in Intercourse to Bernville or Kutztown and live a life that's not too dissimilar to the one they left in structure of work and values, just a little less restrictive. Compared to a Haredi who has to adapt to a really different lifestyle, but then they're urban oriented so maybe it's easier. I'd guess most Haredi just become Orthodox Jews, and most Orthodox leavers become reform Jews, etc.

Now, for most religions 80-95% retention would be brilliant work. Tradcaths and Evangelicals would be thrilled with those numbers. But it's not 100% and this creates important things to think about.

Much like private school numbers are often disputed because they simply expel problem students, who then have to attend public schools. Strict religious minorities shed their problem children, their overly independent women, their dreamers and disruptors. They maintain stability by expelling the problem kids.

For comparison, about 11% of Americans report having a substance abuse problem at some point in their lives, about 14% will go to jail for any period, about 5% will go to prison, somewhere between 6-14% will experience some form of homelessness, about 6% will be diagnosed with a Severe Mental Illness. Probably most of those numbers overlap.

The existence of a functional high-TFR minority does not serve as proof of concept for a functional high-TFR country.

This wouldn’t be unusual for Europe or America before the 20th century, though. Problematic people were normally shunned from the community. This was done either through shunning them from polite society (simply never invited anywhere) or literally kicking them out of the town. Christians would have a certain place where the lifelong penitents would stay during mass, in some eras. Also, don’t we shun them now? We just put our mentally ill on the street. Why is this an argument against copying the Haredi TFR scheme, and more precisely, why would you believe this criticism weighs against civilizational catastrophe? When nations face civilizational catastrophe from war, they postpone freedom and force men to be warriors and then force them at gunpoint to march to certain death in the most degraded condition. Surely we can expend 0.01% of the stress and just orient culture toward pronatality.

I think you're missing my point, I'm not debating whether it is morally permissible to do what they do, I'm debating whether it would work without a much larger host culture that absorbs your cast-offs.

When nations face civilizational catastrophe, they've been known to try many things that don't work. It is important that we check to see if the thing we're trying will work before we waste time on it.

Right but today we just throw our mentally ill and drug-addicted onto the populous streets to haunt the low-wage workers who take public transportation. Intermittently they spend an expensive night in jail or take an expensive ambulance ride to an expensive hospital. Sometimes they kill each other or give each other AIDs or just die. It’s very costly as is. I imagine the religious extremist would just confine them somewhere for their own good, which results in a fraction of the social and economic costs and is also morally superior.

You can't just introduce random elements into your hypothetical haredi society and assume the breeding will stay constant.

It’s more that, and I get that you imply this, both the Amish and Haredim (the latter are more dysfunctional) are kind of quirky minorities who exist within the envelope or the umbrella of the wider, modern, largely secular societies they inhabit. In Israel where they’re only 10-15% of the population they are already causing a lot of problems, refusing to fight despite the country being surrounded on almost all sides by a billion Muslims who would, if their own governments let them, gladly give everything to destroy them, and the leading haredi politicians go on TV to say that young haredi men can’t be conscripted because they do as much for Israel by praying as the soldiers do by fighting (seriously, this is the current line). It’s not sustainable. The Amish are less parasitic, but again if they got to 15%++ of the population there would be more concerns about assimilation, participation in wider society, demands for a renegotiation of their social security exemption etc would be more common.

More obviously, if the Haredim were the overwhelming majority in Israel, Israel would either be destroyed or the Haredim would have to radically change their culture. This is the clearest point in favor of your argument.

I am curious if we'll see an increased defection rate from high-tfr subcultures into a low-tfr mainstream as the low-tfr mainstream ages and the value of young people increases. Arguably, this is already the dynamic of third world immigration to aging first world countries.

But I wonder if we'll see more young Amish or Haredi defect as they get a better "deal" from a mainstream culture desperate for young people.

When I buy pretzels from the Amish girls at the best pretzel stand in the world in Intercourse, PA; naturally one sometimes daydreams about marrying a pretty Amish girl in a bonnet. Theoretically, this is possible, to marry an Amish or Mennonite girl, but it rather seems not worth the effort. Right now, if I found myself single, like generations of wealthy but balding middle age professionals before me I'd get into my convertible and drive over to the local liberal arts college library and say "Whelp, nothing to worry about, they're still making them." But what if they stop making pretty undergrads? Then does the incentive to put a lot more effort into marrying the mennonite pretzel girl start to make more sense?

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As other comments downthread have said, replicating the Haredi is a bad idea. First, there is definitely a high level of welfare fraud. Second, much like the Amish and FLDS groups, the Haredi essentially get away with breaking a ton of Federal laws because "lol, they wear those funny hats!" or something.

Just walk around Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It is obvious that the apartments are not up to code, have too many people living in them to meet occupancy maximums, and are probably covered by rental "agreements" which would be laughed out of a basic contract law course at NYU.

But, again, NY/NJ and Federal prosecutors aren't going to destroy their careers by hauling a bunch of literal grey bearded Rabbis into court.

Replicating them secularly would not work at all -- any group trying to do all of this would get sued into oblivion. In a religious context, FLDS do this out west to an extent. The problem is that any Christian group who would be willing to live like the Haredi usually have a "imminent end of days" bent to them and so generally like to be off grid / separate from the modern world instead of .... embedded in Brooklyn.

It takes a special kind of cognitive athleticism to think "I despise this modern world and all of its impious distractions .... when is the darn N train going to come?"

Aren't you trying to be tradcath? Haven't you noticed the families double buckling, running illegal daycares in their living room, open carrying in blue states, putting seven kids in one room, running totally illegal rental schemes on a cash basis, having entire construction companies competitive on the basis of not pulling permits? All 100% autobiographical observations and going on in normal suburbs. I'm sure the same things happen in the protestant equivalents. The local Mexicans definitely do all of these things, and more.

As it turns out, you can just do things if you don't leave bodies on the ground and have a whole community to run cover for you. Could secular rationalists replicate it? Probably not. 'Federal law' is pushing it because most of these are local bylaws that no one really cares about; the haredi and FLDS do violate federal law, but mostly for welfare fraud.

FLDS violate a lot of federal (and state) laws about polygamy, rape, statutory rape etc. The outside world considers this victimful crimes against their own women, and is appropriately (given our own moral standards) outraged. So FLDS largely have to live sub rosa.

The only victimful crime Haredim commit is rorting the public fisc*, which a lot of Americans wrongly consider victimless when done by someone sympathetic. They can do this openly as long as their political machines can provide them with cover.

*Not just welfare fraud - Haredi-controlled municipalities like Kiryas Joel and the Haredi political machine in NYC commit a much larger range of rorts, many of which are technically criminal.

I’m so not persuaded on this. Of course you can’t replicate the Haredi one-to-one, nor would this be desirable. But you can replicate the high TFR aspects of their culture. The young men might spend 8-16 hrs per day studying the Torah, and then they spend probably 90 minutes of their time doing rituals. In exchange for this strenuous labor, they receive welfare benefits which still amount to a low income lifestyle. We can totally imagine a Haredi culture where, instead of spending 8 hours learning all the laws about separately eating milk and meat, they spend 8 hours at an Amazon Warehouse. When they are done working, they still exist in a pro-fertile culture where status is judged by number of children &tc. And there are Haredi who work, they are big in Amazon fulfillment and places like B&H cameras. There working Haredi still have a high TFR. And they had a high TFR when they worked at Agriprocessors. So, while they do have a lot of schemes that give them benefits, those benefits are less than the money they would earn were they working for the same amount of time that they study.

Don't take this seriously, because I'm operating off "I seem to vaguely remember maybe reading this somewhere back when", but something about "why so many Jews in the diamond trade?" is because it allows the wives to run the business while the men devote themselves to study of the Torah, and is profitable enough to support such a lifestyle.

I don't think the Haredi men want to work in Amazon warehouses, they want to do what their culture tells them is the aim of life, and find a way to make enough money to support that life. Working eight hours a day in a manual labour job is not that way. If they push the wives out the door to do the warehouse shifts, large numbers of children in a family are not going to be possible.

But you see what you've done, right? You've introduced a new method for building status -- wealth.

A couple Haredi start working at the AMZN warehouses and one of them gets promoted one day. He's now going to enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status with his male peers and, because of that, a choice of mates. Soon, all the other Haredi start competing for status via wealth games instead of Torah study and fertility games and, boom, you've got modernism.

The lack of work is intentional, not a weird outcome of degeneracy in this case. And this is the critical issue with pretty much all hardcore RadTrad visions of society -- they actually kind of glorify poverty.

Remember, I'm saying this as a Latin Mass TradCath myself. As much as I really do hate modernism, I also hate material, non-self assigned poverty (i.e. Monks don't count). Deprivation is bad all up and down the stack. Those without means don't suddenly become spiritually wealthy (again, setting aside those that make the willful decision to do that like Monks). Mostly, they become dangerous amoral creatures who act more and more anti-social.

So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.

Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions, something that commends a man more status than being even a billionaire. That’s part of the reason the older guys still continue to study. Yet even with this ruthless competition over status, the TFR remains high, because of the aforenoted confluence of pro-fertile cultural attributes. The Haredi man with a lot of money has worse marital odds than a poor Haredi man at a good rabbinical school. But both are getting married and both are having children.

Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.

If everyone focused on this alone then it would cement the ruin of the entire civilization. Though I agree that’s the best advise for normal people, you actually do need people obsessing over TFR because our elites are lowkey retarded and senseless.

Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions

Doesn't the increasing population lead to an increased demand for rabbis?

zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism

That's not how capitalism works. Free market exchange is inherently positive sum. When it becomes zero sum and / or rent-seeking, that means a market distortion (usually regulation) is to blame.

You and I often disagree, but your discourse is mostly of a far higher quality than smooth brained reddit "lulz late stage capitalism" tripe. Perhaps I caught you on an off day - you're also arguing strenuously that people replicate a subculture that selects for some of the worst physiognomy out there.

Capitalism enforces a zero-sum status competition, regardless of whether it is positive sum in its economic consequences or not; actors compete over obtaining more wealth than their peers and a greater position than their peers. As you said, “enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status”, that’s a relative position which is zero-sum; having more wealth and prestige = more status = better marital outcomes.

The zero-sum status competition isn't enforced by capitalism. It's part of human nature, way down in the lizard brain; some direct descendants of dinosaurs are famous for it.

Capitalism is an economic system, not a social or political one.

It's embedded with the politics and culture of whatever society under examination.

If you have a problem, you have a problem with the culture. You could fight about it in a kind of culture ... war.

But capitalism isn't the problem. You're committing and obvious, to the point of intentional, category error.

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So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.

And watch the fruits of your labor be taken from you (and your children) to pay for everyone else (including the Haredi) to have the lifestyle of their choice while you're busting your balls to make ends meet, dodging Child Protective Services because you don't have the requisite number of car seats, etc.

But you can replicate the high TFR aspects of their culture.

It comes as a set.

We can totally imagine a Haredi culture where, instead of spending 8 hours learning all the laws about separately eating milk and meat, they spend 8 hours at an Amazon Warehouse.

Working at an Amazon Warehouse is very different than studying the Torah. It's backbreaking. There are cruel bosses who expect results, and the chance of getting fired. Studying the Torah all the time is basically just the ancient Hebrew version of playing videogames.

The set is unrelated to 10 hours a day of studying. That is outside the set and something which they just happen to also do. When people possess the true set of pro-fertility cultural properties, like the Mennonites who do back-breaking labor in South America, or 1930s Germany which had enormous TFR gains due to cultural policy, then they also have more children, without having to study for 10 hours a day. And when Haredi stop studying or stop studying early, they continue having high TFR.

Unfortunately, the only two good proofs of the necessity of pro-fertility cultural elements are religious Jews and the Nazis. This makes it very difficult to persuade normal people to follow your line of argument, because it makes you sound like a genuinely insane person. But consider the Nazis saw a 40% gain of TFR and the shift was highest in urban areas, not rural areas.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768366

Preliminary vital statistics for 1934 show that in the Western world there was a general arrest in the decline of the birth-rate which had been going on for a decade or more. In Hungary the birth-rate decreased from 1933 to 1934 less than half as much as it did a year earlier, and in Norway only one-fifth as much. In Poland the rate of 26.5 per 1,000 in 1934 represented no change from 1933, in contrast to a decline of 2.2 from 1932 to 1933. In Great Britain the birth-rate in 1934 is estimated provisionally at I4.8, slightly above the 1933 rate of 14-4, which in turn was well below that of I5.3 in 1932. In the United States the rise from 16.4 in 1933 to 17.1 in 1934 almost brought the birth-rate back to the 1932 figure of I7-3.? These changes are dwarfed, however, by Germany's experience. There the birth-rate was 15.1 in 1932, I4.7 in 1933, and 18.0 in 1934.

According to Nazi leaders, the suppression of abortion, the restrictions on giving birth-control information, and the offering of the various economic inducements have had less effect together on the birth-rate than the psychical revolution which has followed the Nazi rise to political power. They say that formerly the individual was considered the important unit, so it was natural that each person should think he should control his own body and decide the question of parenthood from his own point of view. Under Nazi leadership, however, the predominant importance of the state has been empha-sized. As a result it is claimed that a large proportion of the population already has come to feel that the body belongs only in part to the individual, and that the need of the state for children is the first factor to consider in deciding on the proper size of family.

The Nazis say that under the individualistic point of view a pregnant woman was treated with a certain amount of derision and scorn; she was foolish to undergo pregnancy; she and her husband would be more sensible to buy an auto or spend money on themselves in other ways rather than to incur the expenses connected with raising a family. This general attitude has been changed, the leaders claim, so that now child-bearing is considered holy and a pregnant woman is shown the utmost consideration as one unselfishly doing her part for the good of the state. Children are extolled as worth far more than material comforts. Even in the schools the youth are being incul- cated with these beliefs. Most important of all the psychical changes, according to the Nazis, has been the reviving of self-respect among the German people, and of their faith in the future of Germany. They claim that both feelings were dying out under the previous regime, and that people were becoming increasingly unwilling to raise children in such an atmosphere. With the change in policy under the present government Germany has again taken her place as an equal among neighboring nations and has indicated that she will maintain it. This has led to an emotional rebirth of the German people, for the future now appears rosy to them where before it was black. They feel again that theirs is a nation with a mission-one in which it is worth while to raise a family.

In the larger cities the birth-rate of I933 was above that of I932 for the first time in the third quarter, and the differential has steadily become larger up to the last quarter of I934. These turning-points in the birth-rate correspond to changes in the rate of uninterrupted conceptions nine months earlier, for the nation in the quarter following Hitler's accession to power and for the larger cities in the quarter preceding

the twelve states with the higher proportion of Catholics had an increase in birth-rate of 17.3 per cent compared with 21.1 per cent in the other thirteen states. [subtly important stat here; Catholics were less likely to be on board with Nazism, and so if the cultural elements of Nazism increases TFR, then we should expect that Catholics would not see greater gains; they are in a slightly different cultural ecosystem]

On the whole, therefore, it may be said that the forces tending to raise the birth-rate had least effect on Catholics and agricultural people-those least affected in previous years by the forces tending to lower the birth-rate [another subtly important stat. The agricultural were far less likely to be in an area where Nazi propaganda was present and powerful]

Berlin is well in the lead with a I934 birth-rate 48 per cent above that of I933, while at the other extreme Beuthen (in Silesia, very near the Polish border) shows an increase of only I2 percent

The birth rate continued to rise until the advent of war. Now consider that the Nazis, despite loving propaganda, probably had little idea how to create really good pro-motherhood culture, or that most of the larger effects would be delayed to when the indoctrinated come to age. Even their shoddy attempt at increasing TFR through culture worked, and they only got to see the smallest prelude of the TFR gains before extenuating circumstances nullified our chance to measure the gains.

It is obvious that the apartments are not up to code, have too many people living in them to meet occupancy maximums, and are probably covered by rental "agreements" which would be laughed out of a basic contract law course at NYU.

What if those requirements they are violating are part of the reason for the drop in fertility in the first place?

I still haven’t seen a reasonable counter-argument to “learn from the Haredi”.

Here's an argument:

Modern day Haredi are the result of a genetic and cultural selection process which started hundreds of years ago ago when Ashkenazim were the very first ethnic group to get whacked with modernity full on. It's well known that modernity is a fertility killer, analogous to putting an antibiotic into a petri dish full of bacteria. The expected outcome in such a situation is a drop in population followed by the emergence of a resistant strain.

When modernity hit Europe a few hundred years ago, its effects were concentrated in cities, i.e. the places where most Ashkenazim lived. Other ethnic groups in Europe had substantial components in the countryside and were not hit nearly as hard. In fact, I am pretty sure there was a documented Ashkenazi demographic decline in Europe in the 19th century. Which makes sense, because that's modernity does to people.

150 years later, Jews are the first group to start bouncing back from modernity-induced demographic decline. Thus, Israel is the only industrialized country in the world to have a TFR which is well above replacement.

The upshot of all this is that it might not be so simple to "learn from the Haredis." They are arguably the result of a selection process which has been going on for quite a long time.

The Haredi have always had a high birth rate, and there is no period in which they moved from the Ukrainian villages into the cities (1940s?) where they lacked a high birth rate. So there was no evolutionary selection or anything like that. And it’s also too little time for the Haredi to have evolved for it anyway. And we don’t even know if TFR has substantial genetic correlates.

The Haredi have always had a high birth rate, and there is no period in which they moved from the Ukrainian villages into the cities (1940s?) where they lacked a high birth rate.

I think you've seen Fiddler on the Roof too many times. European Jews have been concentrated in cities for literally hundreds of years. Haredi Judaism started in the 19th century. But let's assume for the sake of argument that you are right:

I usually don't trust AI summaries, but this seems pretty non-controversial:

Haredi Judaism began as a 19th-century European movement opposing modernity and assimilation, formed from traditionalist backlash against the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and Reform Judaism, crystallizing around figures like Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin and Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan. It formally organized with the 1912 creation of Agudat Yisrael, uniting rival Hasidic and Mitnagdic (Lithuanian) groups against secular trends

In other words, it seems that the genesis, so to speak, of Haredi Judaism, was the rise of modernity in Europe. Put another way, Haredi Judaism is the result of the exact selection process I described in my previous post.

Who would join such a movement and stay in it? Logically, a small fringe which is tempermentally, culturally, and genetically okay with that kind of life. Haredi are significant in numbers today only because they've been reproducing like crazy for generations now.

The first Hasidic settlement is more like a town than a city, in contrast to urban Jewry at the time, unless I am mistaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medzhybizh

The first Hasidic settlement is more like a town than a city, in contrast to urban Jewry at the time, unless I am mistaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medzhybizh

Well, are you disputing the claim that "Haredi Judaism began as a 19th-century European movement opposing modernity and assimilation"?

The Haredi are parasites; they support themselves by stealing from others through the welfare state. We need to find a sustainable, productive population with positive TFR and emulate it. I was hoping the Mormons would be it, but apparently their fertility has collapsed as well?

There's no shortage of religious sects with very high fertility rates. The dutch bible belt has many problems but it mostly supports itself while maintaining a 2.5ish TFR. Rad trads have a TFR of 3.6 and we don't use welfare other than social security.

But for a secular example, check the fertility rates of military or oil towns.

I’m aware of every criticism against the Haredi but their TFR isn’t related to their welfare beneficiary status. The reason for their high beneficiary status is that the men insist on studying for an exceedingly long time. (That and they lobby well). Very little of their studying plausibly impacts their TFR because only like 1% of the readings are about having children or getting married. If they had normal education and normal work, but retained the pro-fertility cultural elements, which is possible, then they would still have a high TFR. In Israel you have the conservative / modern orthodox who have a high TFR while living a very productive technology-forward life.

I don't think you can assume that the cult will continue to function the same with a reduced emphasis on cult study and maintenance.

It probably does give them +10 points in allegiance and +20 in conformity, but you have very allegiant evangelicals all over America who do not have such TFR because they don’t have the pro-fertile cultural requirements

The evangelicals got mind-fucked by the combination of biblical traditional sexual mores and the middle class status competition games of suburban America. Having sex or children outside of marriage is a grave sin, but you can’t get married until you’ve gone to college and gotten established in your career. No I am not helping you financially if you drop out of college and have three kids in your 20s buster, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. So you are leaning on your kids to maintain virginity until their 30s, a psychologically unsustainable position, and not a very good outcome for quantity of children either.

Evangelicals do not marry in their thirties(although nor do they marry in their teens, there's an entire decade in between), nor do normie evangelicals make a huge deal out of avoiding premarital sex.

Maybe not for Haredim but there are others ways to create adherence and allegiance if you were going to copy Haredi TFR values.

The reason for their high beneficiary status is that the men insist on studying for an exceedingly long time.

Typically, more education doesn't correlate with being more likely to be on the dole.

In Israel you have the conservative / modern orthodox who have a high TFR while living a very productive technology-forward life.

Until very recently even secular Jews in Israel had above-replacement fertility so this proves little.

The so-called National-Religious having a consistent TFR of 4 actually proves a lot.

I mean, the haredi cultural model seems very dependent on welfare fraud. I'm not sure you can separate the extremely high fertility rate from their whole way of life.

Very little of their studying plausibly impacts their TFR because only like 1% of the readings are about having children or getting married. If they had normal education and normal work, but retained the pro-fertility cultural elements, which is possible, then they would still have a high TFR.

Would they? If they had to work for a living, maybe they'd be less desiring of children (who, when you're a working person, cost money and make more work for you)

Would they? If they had to work for a living, maybe they'd be less desiring of children (who, when you're a working person, cost money and make more work for you)

Also, in modernity, when people work for a living, their work (and their income) become a huge source of social status. In modern, secular, society, if you give people a choice between being (1) a successful doctor, lawyer, or business executive with 2 children; or (2) being a building porter with 4 children, most people will choose the first option.

If I've learned anything from my time on lesswrong, slatestarcodex, and themotte, it's that human beings are heavily motivated by the desire for social status. Even when they seem to be pursuing money, pleasure, and/or sexual gratification, there is usually a huge social status component lurking under the surface.

I'm pretty confident that in Haredi culture, having a large family brings social status in a way that's lacking in other subcultures.

I think your framing of the doctor/lawyer vs. building porter choice contains a hidden assumption worth examining, that this is actually a choice available to most people.

For the median building porter, "successful doctor, lawyer, or business executive" was likely never on the menu. The choice wasn't between high-status career + 2 kids versus low-status career + 4 kids. The realistic choice set was always constrained by cognitive ability, conscientiousness, family resources, and other human capital factors. The hypothetical only feels like a meaningful trade-off for people in roughly the 115+ IQ range with adequate executive function, maybe 15% of the population. For everyone else, the actual revealed preference is more telling. Given their realistic options, many still choose smaller families. This suggests status-seeking has become decoupled from its evolutionary function.

You're right that status motivation runs deep, but it's worth noting why it runs deep evolutionarily. For men, status-seeking is largely instrumental, it's the primary mechanism for attracting mates.

The Vox Day socio-sexual hierarchy (sigma/alpha/beta/gamma/etc.) captures this, there's a cohort of men who pursue visible status markers specifically as mating strategy, while others (the "sigma" archetype) achieve reproductive success through different pathways.

In an environment where status no longer reliably converts to reproductive success (because high-status people have fewer children), what exactly is being optimized for?

The drive persists, but it's become maladaptive, a stimulus disconnected from its original function.

Women competing for status in traditionally male professional hierarchies, is arguably doubly maladaptive. Professional status competition directly trades against peak fertility years. The opportunity cost is measured in children never born.

Unlike male status, female professional status doesn't meaningfully increase attractiveness to potential mates, and may actively reduce the pool of acceptable partners (since female hypergamy means high-status women often won't "marry down").

Women in this track pay the fertility cost that men pay, without receiving the mate-attraction benefit that men receive. They're running on hardware optimized for a different game.

This is why the Haredi example is so instructive. They've maintained a status system where large families are the status signal, aligning the status drive with rather than against reproductive fitness. It's not that they've suppressed the desire for status; they've just pointed it in a direction that doesn't defeat its own evolutionary purpose.

The secular West has essentially created a status game that selects against the players most committed to playing it.

This is why the Haredi example is so instructive. They've maintained a status system where large families are the status signal, aligning the status drive with rather than against reproductive fitness. It's not that they've suppressed the desire for status; they've just pointed it in a direction that doesn't defeat its own evolutionary purpose.

I agree, which is why men going to actual productive jobs might seriously undermine the system. It's also worth noting that part of the Haredi "success" is likely to be in their genes. They seem to be okay with a life which, for most people, would be pretty miserable.

I like the idea of being reproductively successful, but there's a lot of things I would not do in order to achieve that success: Sexually assaulting someone; going to jail; lying to a woman in order to get her pregnant; etc. And that probably includes devoting my life to full time religious study.

I was hoping the Mormons would be it, but apparently their fertility has collapsed as well?

It's still above replacement, but yes it is dropping as well. Our new prophet (Dallin H. Oaks) mentioned the dropping fertility issues in both society as a whole and among members of the church in our most recent General Conference (back in October), so it's very possible the church will be trying to enact some changes (both culturally and policy-wise) to counteract this. We'll see what happens I suppose.

The Haredi also commit massive welfare fraud, and even if they weren't committing such fraud would still be highly dependent on non-fraudulent welfare. The Amish are probably the better example to emulate here as they do far more to support themselves and to limit reliance on the rest of society. Unfortunately that leads to some rather anarcho-primitivist conclusions.

To state it more clearly, man cannot build and maintain civilization leaching from others - civilization must prosper and multiply.

TFW no fecund Haredi welfare-scamming gf 😔

I don't think low birth rates can be fixed through policy. If you look at historical or current pro-natalist policies, how many of them have succeeded? Norway has excellent compensation for parents, but the birthrate is still falling. Romania's Decree 770, making abortion illegal in all but a few rare instances, and higher income taxes for the childless, did lead to a temporary baby boom, but the consequences were not positive with high maternal and infant mortality, and the birthrate started to decline again anyway. Wealthy women bribed doctors while poorer women had risky illegal abortions, and many children were abandoned in orphanages.

I don't think there's any way out of this problem for Western civilisation as we know it. The cost of children is not only financial, but also biological, social and emotional. Either religious groups with high fertility rate take over (although even the Muslim world is having declining birth rates) or technological advances make the whole problem go away. If you automate the vast majority of human labour, then nearly your entire population is non-productive dependents whether they're young and able bodied, or old and infirm.

They can absolutely be fixed by policy. People aren't going to have kids because they get paid. They will have kids because the family is their support structure and they need it.

Cut all money to unmarried or divorced women from the government. Promote the family as the pension system. Have a culture that instills family values instead of individualism.

Modern women are married to the state. The marriage to the state is fruitless one. This form of marriage needs to be abolished and the other form needs to be promoted.

One big thing I see missing from all these "the solution is simple: force women to have children by coercion!" answers is - are men ready to be fathers?

Parenting is not just "I knocked the bitch up, that's my job done, now I should be able to live as I please without being asked to do anything with the squalling brats except pay the minimum out of my wages to feed and clothe them".

Are men today able, and ready, to be a father to a family of three, four, or more children? Are they ready to make sacrifices? Because even with all the laments over how women divorce and bleed men dry, men very easily drop their existing family to go off and start with a new partner (and maybe a new baby). They don't have relationships with their children, see the arguments over "what if you found out the kid wasn't yours?" and several men have no problem that after being the father for ten or more years, now the child means nothing to them and they don't love it and don't care if it dies and don't care if they're the only father it has ever known, that tie is severed.

You can't have big families where it's all on the woman. That's how we got 'married to the State' in the first place; men were willing to fuck around, not so willing to be parents. Or even would be disasters if permitted to be in the life of the family.

Being a husband and father involves a lot more than just "I married her and got her pregnant, job done".

One big thing I see missing from all these "the solution is simple: force women to have children by coercion!" answers is - are men ready to be fathers?

I mean, isn't that a solved problem? You coerce them too.

Right. This is an asked and answered question. We already throw men into Definitely Not Debtors Prison if they refuse to participate. What reason do we have to believe this couldn't be trivially scaled up and out?

My position on this issue is that men as a demographic should be extremely careful when proposing coercive measures to solve this problem, as virtually all of this coercion is all but guaranteed to fall on their own heads. Men can be conscripted, both into war and child rearing, and women cannot. If you peel back the (philosophically) liberal live-and-let-live sentiments many in our culture harbor, you'll find nothing but contempt and scorn for what little freedom men have in this domain. Do you think this is likely to change any time soon?

If you peel back the (philosophically) liberal live-and-let-live sentiments many in our culture harbor, you'll find nothing but contempt and scorn for what little freedom men have in this domain. Do you think this is likely to change any time soon?

Yeah, I think that this is a big part of the reason fertility issues seem like they would be straightforward to address with policy changes but in practice are very difficult to solve by means of public policy. Because at the end of the day, addressing fertility requires enacting policies which will (1) be coercive towards women; and (2) will in many cases treat women unfairly. And Western societies, although very much willing to bring the hammer down on men, are far more reluctant to do so to women.

But this still doesn't address the bread and butter issue. More men than women in Japan don't want kids. What do we do about the high costs and salaryman culture? Aspiring parents need to get on daycare waiting lists ahead of conception. FWIW this is as many people as our planet can take, maybe we finally set up those space colonies?

But this still doesn't address the bread and butter issue. More men than women in Japan don't want kids.

By gender, it found that 53.0 percent of men and 45.6 percent of women are not interested in becoming parents,

Assuming for the sake of argument that this one study is valid, significant, and representative of attitudes throughout the Western world, I don't think that really matters. Because (1) most men desperately want female validation; and (2) society has no problem imposing coercive and unfair policies on men as a group.

What do we do about the high costs and salaryman culture? Aspiring parents need to get on daycare waiting lists ahead of conception.

If women want to marry and have children enough, it will happen despite the costs. Both historically and today, people bring up large families in conditions much poorer than those offered by a median Japanese worker.

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Giving money to people who have children and taking money away from people who don't is just a difference in framing, in practice it's the same thing. Any money you give to people who have children is going to come from people who don't: either in the form of missing tax breaks, unaccessible benefits or extra taxes.

It seems better to you because you prefer framing it as punishing people who don't behave the way you like (right wing) rather than framing it as rewarding those who do (left wing). But it really is just a framing. The only real variable is the size of the money transfer.

Not sure where you're getting the "married to the state" idea from. Where I live, women aged 16-24 are out-earning men and the majority of NEETs are men, and 10x less likely to be raising children compared to their female counterparts. If you're suggesting cutting welfare to parents - the main source of welfare women are getting more than men, AFAIK - that seems to be the opposite of a pro-natal policy.

Plus, if you look at stats, fertility rate and income generally follows a U shape where the poorest people on welfare have more children than the middle-class, and are generally less likely to be married as well, so not sure what you'd be accomplishing there.

Promote the family as the pension system.

How is this supposed to work? Older middle class and upper people have private pension funds and own homes that have appreciated to multiples of their initial values. Poor people will struggle to help their parents, making raising children even more difficult and unaffordable.

The average parent spends a total of ~$200k per child here. In the absence of a state pension, it would be more rational to add that money to your retirement fund than to hope your child will be generous enough to give you a monthly stipend in your old age.

If most women out-earn men, and women have a well-documented desire to only date men who earn more than them, how do we expect anyone to form relationships and start families?

That desire isn’t necessarily localized in the kind of woman who is actually earning more, is it?

Assuming that it is, though, the answer is easy enough. Marry older men. This comes up enough on this Godforsaken forum; I’m almost surprised you didn’t think of it.

Then we get the resentful younger men saying women are all gold-diggers and the State should force Stacy-Anne to be my girlfriend.

They don't want to do that either.

I don't think there's any way out of this problem for Western civilisation as we know it. The cost of children is not only financial, but also biological, social and emotional.

I think one problem is looking at it as a purely financial issue. Sure, that's an element of it: families unable, or sometimes just unwilling, to take on the financial burden of child-rearing, which we've managed to raise in various ways like requiring car seats and larger vehicles or an expectation of how many kids fit in a given room. But it's also a cultural one: we need to convince people that the costs and burdens of raising kids are worthwhile. Governments like to treat every problem as a financial one, and that's certainly one facet to approach, but I think culture leaders and trendsetters need to play a part too. How many kids does the average popular fiction character have? Of the 7 hero characters in The Avengers (2012), one is shown to have kids. I realize child actors are difficult to work with (for well-intentioned reasons), but I feel like there's a big space for positive portrayals of "family" (maybe I'm ignoring The Fast and the Furious franchise?) in the stories we tell each other beyond kids movies.

Perhaps we could actually try to make having children the financially preferable choice (or even just equivalent!) instead of an immense burden relative to childlessness/having too few children before we throw up our hands and declare defeat?

There are massive financial incentives, caused by the state, to not have children and the current transfers are pathetically small compared to those.

Perhaps we could actually try to make having children the financially preferable choice instead of an immense burden relative to childlessness/having too few children before we throw up our hands and declare defeat?

We can't. Essentially everyone wants them, especially those who have children. Removing them would mean making children somehow less safe and protected. This is everything from child labor laws to car seats to occupancy restrictions (on number of children in a room) to expensive requirements on child care providers, and much more.

Of course we can, gradually increase taxation for the childless with commensurate tax rebates for those with children. Have the exact rates depend on the fertility rate.

Easy peasy. Perhaps you don't want to do this but its well within the capacity of the state to do.

ly try to make having children the financially preferable choice (or even just equivalent!) instead of an immense burden relative to childlessness/having too few children before we throw up our hands and declare defeat?

Something like, special yearly levy on childless adult, then split the earning from this levy to every child so that people are encouraged to have at least 1 kid to avoid the tax, while poor people can continue to spawn kids to get more benefit from this tax

And what of those who aren't able to have kids, would be terrible parents if they did have kids, or aren't earning enough for the levy to be worthwhile? Here's a charming story of a married couple with six children who were abusive scum to those kids. Yes, how lovely to contemplate a future filled with such happy thriving families!

If you make it a condition that "everyone has to be the parent of one child", then you will get "hello, me and Joe agreed to have a baby, here's the baby, we're giving it up to social services because neither of us wants to raise a kid, can we have our certificates of child-production stamped for the tax office, please?"

Surely you realise it would be trivial to design policy around this?

This is easy to say, but very hard to demonstrate that it actually works. It certainly is not a mathematical inevitability.

Perhaps, but why give up before giving even a shadow of a try?

Why continue massively subsidising civilisation destroying anti-social behaviour?

So are you the parent of fifteen children? Walk the walk before you demand the right to control others over when and how they have children. That's what annoys me the most about these blithe theoretical solutions: the people putting them forward are also the ones saying they're not married yet, have no kids, etc.

Perhaps, but why give up before giving even a shadow of a try?

Because we already have. There are lots of policies which transfer money to people with children. Most directly in the US, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the tax deduction for dependents, but many, many others. As these policies have proliferated, fertility has dropped.

And yet it's more and more financially preferable to not have children. What we have done is like noticed that car sales a dropping and handed out 10$ vouchers and wonder why that doesn't have an impact on car sales.

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They'll go on welfare though. Lacking the need to provide, they don't have much motivation already. Just video games all day, TV for the women, fooling around in between. They'll be like the blessed teenagers of Omelas.

So tie welfare to children as well if it becomes an issue. We do this shit all the time.

We've made parenthood and family size a moral issue, where having more than two children is a sin against blessed Gaia, and moreover a sign that you're a fool to waste your prime years having babies instead of having fun, and this also means that you must be poor, stupid, inferior human capital since everyone knows it's the underclass that is the most fertile.

You're not going to wind back fifty years of "having babies is irresponsible and selfish" by promising "hey, we'll give you twenty dollars coupon every month for each kid up to the age of seven!"

Children's allowance is indeed a thing, and indeed a very necessary thing. But so is abuse of the system, and for all the scorn about the 'welfare queens' political sloganeering, I've seen myself people cheating the system.

Changing social attitudes is like turning an oil tanker. You can do it, but it'll take a lot of time and careful manoeuvring. Plus men being unwilling to marry a woman who already has children - and remember, single mothers also includes widows and divorced women. So there's little incentive to have a lot of kids unless you're sure your spouse will never leave you, and that's not 100% any more since we've reduced marriage to "if at least two people (but maybe we can legislate in the future for more partners) want to live together, but only so long as they want to live together and are 'in love', no more than that".

If your choice is to be single mother with young children, or single woman with no children, after your relationship/marriage breaks down, then option B is better for dating/getting a new partner. I'm making a large assumption on that one, the first study I could find about remarriage after divorce is from 2015 for the period 1979-2010, and that makes the data fifteen years out of date:

Previous studies have identified several consistent predictors of remarriage for divorced women (Bramlett & Mosher, 2002; Folk, Graham, & Beller, 1992; Goldscheider & Sassler, 2006; McNamee & Raley, 2011; Shafer & James, 2013; Stewart, 2010). These predictors include being young at the time of divorce, having a college education, being employed, and living in the southern region of the United States. In addition, remarriage is less common for African Americans, the poor, and mothers who conceived or gave birth prior to marrying. It is not clear whether having children affects the likelihood of remarriage. Some studies show that remarriage is more likely when women have children, some studies show that remarriage is less likely, and yet others suggest that the association is contingent on other factors. These discrepant findings may reflect conflicting effects of children. On the one hand, some custodial mothers may be motivated to remarry because their new husbands can assist with the economic support and supervision of children (Morrison & Ritualo, 2000; Smock, Manning, & Gupta, 1999). On the other hand, some men may be reluctant to take on the economic and social responsibilities of the stepfather role, thus decreasing the attractiveness of mothers in the remarriage market.

...Our results cast some light on the notions that marriage is a “package deal” and that men “exchange children” when they remarry (Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1991; Tach, Mincy, & Edin, 2010). This idea is based on the assumption that men are connected to children primarily through their spouses and partners. Consequently, when men remarry they become less involved with children from their former marriages and more involved with their stepchildren. Because the current study does not have data on stepfathers’ relationships with children from previous unions, our findings do not provide direct evidence either for or against this idea. The current study does show, however, that men are more likely to marry when the fathers of their new partners’ children are highly involved. It appears, therefore, that many stepfathers prefer to “share” rather than “exchange” children.

Romania's Decree 770, making abortion illegal in all but a few rare instances, and higher income taxes for the childless, did lead to a temporary baby boom, but the consequences were not positive with high maternal and infant mortality, and the birthrate started to decline again anyway.

Romania's attempt failed because they lacked the will to actually continue enforcing it, not because the policy itself didn't work.

How you solve for lack of will to enforce such policies is a whole other problem, but the policies themselves work. People still fuck, a lot, and if there is little to no access to birth control and abortion that fucking is going to result in children.

If you don't care about dysgenic solutions then the easiest one is to import as many third worlders as possible, eventually you'll stumble on some ethnicity with low enough impulse control. It might sound like it sucks but really banning contraception does the same thing on a slightly longer timescale. The challenge is finding a non-dysgeinc solution in an environment where having children is an objectively stupid decision on an individual level.

The challenge is finding a non-dysgeinc solution in an environment where having children is an objectively stupid decision on an individual level.

Putting it this way suggests another solution: Make it so having children isn't a stupid decision on an individual level. But paradoxically this means treating children as less valuable, not more, so there's no way to get there from here.

People still fuck

They literally don't.

That's still a lot of fucking going on in those charts, just comparatively less

If the government bans condoms and the pill, watch that number go down even further. People didn't have porn and video games back when TFR was high and birth control illegal.

Then the Amish and breeding fetishists will inherit the earth.

If a communist dictatorship couldn't enforce the policy, what chances does a liberal western democracy have? The War on Condoms will be even less effective than the War on Drugs.

My take is that those who don't have to spend 9 months pregnant if they wish to perpetuate the species don't really have much right to complain about low fertility rates.

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You frame it as if the birth rate collapse is being caused by women choosing not to have children.

It's not, mothers are still having as many children as they did in the 1970s. The issue is that fewer women are becoming mothers. And it's not because they are choosing not to. Childless by choice women have always existed, but they've always been a tiny proportion.

The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.

And given that men make up 50% of the non-forming couples, I think we are perfectly entitled to talk about it.

The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.

As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women are choosing not to have children.

I think it's not directly "women choosing not to have children", although it kinda is that in a less-direct way.

There are two big effects I can see. One is that dating moved onto dating sites, which are low-trust lemon markets that fail for Economics 201 reasons (because those that don't know it's a lemon market will reliably pick the apparently-excellent deals - i.e. the fake ones, because if you're centrally lying you might as well go the whole hog - over the actually-good deals, and a lot of those that do know it's a lemon market - and aren't themselves selling lemons - will just leave). The other is that feminists declared men chasing women to be punishable aggression (unless she wants it, which the man doesn't know in advance), men (and especially good men) mostly chose to respect the short-term incentives this creates, and women mostly failed to chase to fill the hole, resulting in deadweight loss.

That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children. If every woman had as many children as she wants, every country barring a few would have above-replacement fertility.

But young people aren't coupling up, and that's obviously not 100% women, how could it be? That would have to mean that young men are asking out as many women as they always have, but the women are all saying no for some reason.

In reality, both men and women are socialising much less, and the effect is more pronounced among men than women.

That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children.

Surveys don't mean much. If women aren't having children, it's because they don't want them, they biologically can't have them, or because they can't find a man to impregnate them. Infertility happens but there's no evidence it's increased anywhere near enough to explain the drop in TFR. The last is not credible.

Surveys don't mean much.

I tend to agree, at least on this issue. The question is not whether women want to have children. Rather, the question is how much they want to have children compared to other options.

Similarly, the question is not whether women want to marry. The question is how much women want to marry a man who is realistically available to them for marriage, compared to the alternatives.

And this also assumes that people respond truthfully to this sort of survey. It's well known that women's responses to this sort of question are intensely colored by social acceptability bias.

they can't find a man to impregnate them

Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. Young people are failing to couple up which has caused the recent birth rate collapse. But that's not a unilateral decision on the part of any individual woman or man. It's a coordination problem. Leaving aside the fact that blaming 'women' is incoherent because 'women' cannot make a collective decision as billions of autonomous individuals, you seem to be ignoring the fact that it takes two people to have a baby. The average young woman wants to get married and have children, but no woman can do that on her own. She needs to find a man who wants to do the same, and do it with her. The coordination mechanisms we used to have for this (in person socialising in most societies) have broken down, so the birth rate has collapsed.

Blaming individuals for systemic problems, or blaming one sex for a problem that involves both sexes, is a lazy copout.

In my experience, when a woman claims that she is unable to find a husband, it's almost always because she has standards which are mathematically unreasonable. e.g. she is a 5/10 in desirability but wants a man who is an 8/10 in desirability.

Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?

Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.

'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.

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As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women have, increasingly, been choosing "none of the above". Societally, it is anathema to even consider that women's choices may be the problem, so we get this shifting of the responsibility back to men... but this is a problem men can't solve short of going Full Roman, which isn't going to happen.

Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?

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My take is that those who don't have to spend 90-hour weeks as a junior analyst if they wish to get their bonus don't really have much right to complain about the financial sector.

The mythical man month applies to human reproduction, in that nine men and one women can only make a single baby a year, no matter how hard the men work in vigorously impregnating her. If you think that men are the sex that is the bottleneck of babymaking then you are very silly. What are we supposed to do? Wait for the girlbosses to deign to save the human race? Why aren't they doing it already?

And the WEF considers women living approx 5 years longer than men to be "gender parity" in life expectancy. I don't see why women have much right to complain about having to spend 30% of that extra time on earth pregnant to perpetuate the species given they still net approx 3.5 years over men.

This is a common retort, but I don't think it's nearly as good a 'gotcha' as it seems at first glance.

I grant you the entire underlying premise here: let's say pregnancy, childbirth et cetera really is so plain fuckin' awful that women won't go through with it in required numbers unless coerced, and any man with empathy ought to shut his pie hole about this whole demography thing. I won't contest it at all. You win that round.

It seems to me, however, that the most relevant part of the preceding idea, is unless coerced and ought. Well, not everyone does as they ought, and there are still men in the world who do not shy away from coercing women. And wouldn't you know it – their countries also have exceptionally high fertility! Afghanistan for example has a current fertility rate of around 4 children per women. That's enough for a continued quite impressive growth well into the 22th century, and the Talibans are showing no signs of giving up. Indeed, the official position of the Taliban government is that contraceptives and feminism are a Western plot to destroy the country – and if we grant you your premise they are absolutely correct and will indeed win out in the long run: longer if we're lucky, shorter if we're not. The Afghan goat-herder inherits the Earth while the last European lies whittling away in a retirement home because he took your advice and didn't complain.

I honestly don't see how you get around these implications without resorting to artifical wombs or some similar sci-fi tech, and this view on female psychology and willpower is damning, well beyond the most extreme misogynist positions I have ever heard espoused. Given that, I think I'll keep complaining.

This is a boring gotcha.

This just gave me a thought: All of the UBI advocates and discourse around post scarcity and the obsolescence of human labor are totally wrong. After demographic collapse we will need every single able bodied person working extra hard, even with the assistance of AI, automation, and all other productivity enhancing technology, just to have a chance at supporting all of the old people. Even if 90% of all jobs are fully automated away, that will be barely enough to keep society functioning

Swedes are not nearly as dumb or naive as right-wing media would have many believe, and there is a strong hatred for immigrations here now coupled with a new appreciation for Swedish culture which bodes well for the future.

hahahahaha of course it doesn't matter what the people think, the government will continue to import infinite foreigners.

I for one think it would be interesting with a tax break for families coupled with a big tax hike for rich childless women. This would both create good incentives as well as clarify what society sees as the most valuable form of femininity.

Monetary incentives don't work, so we just need to make them even bigger.

Well it's not strictly wrong but nobody has ever found out how much money you have to offer to make it happen.

Well it's not strictly wrong but nobody has ever found out how much money you have to offer to make it happen.

My guess is there isn't enough money in the world, unless you want to subsidize the fertility of the worst of the worst. That is, you can't transfer enough money to increase the fertility of the working class and above without reducing it among those you're taking it from more than enough to make up for it.

Better would be to reduce the cost (especially the non-delegable cost) of having children, but no one knows of a feasible way to do that. We keep doing the opposite with the expected results, and I expect there's a positive feedback loop -- as children become rarer, we insist on more parental investment per child, which discourages children even more. I call this a "K-selection spiral" (or "death spiral") -- please make this the title in any Index of Crackpot Theories.

I like your term 'k-selection spiral'. But I want to point out you're looking at it wrong in terms of resources. It's not 'amount' of resources, it's 'how they're distributed'. People in the literal poorest countries in the world have lots and lots of children, and they live in like Niger and Chad. You see fertility bumps around oil towns and military bases, too, because young women's best economic prospect is to marry a man employed by the thing that makes their town notable.

Are you sure those "fertility bumps" in oil towns and military bases don't go away when age-adjusted?

Yeah, people in poor countries have lots of children. They don't have to put them in the best daycares or supervise them 24/7 until they're in school, or any of the other things Westerners do.

You can do it cheap. Let's say 50000 $ per human being. You buy sperm, eggs and surrogate mothership you can make it in the third world for this sum. Create a system of professional mother and fathers - fool time job. Yeah it will be somewhat weird families - with 10 or 12 kids, but not that weird.

See the recent controversy over Chinese billionaires who allegedly are buying literally hundreds of surrogate children in the US.

Some Chinese parents, inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children, pay millions in surrogacy fees to hire women in the U.S. to help them build families of jaw-dropping size. Xu calls himself “China’s first father” and is known in China as a vocal critic of feminism. On social media, his company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.

Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired U.S. models and others as egg donors to have 10 girls, with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men, according to people close to the executive’s education company.

The market has grown so sophisticated, experts say, that at times Chinese parents have had U.S.-born children without stepping foot in the country. A thriving mini-industry of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services—even to pick up the newborns from hospitals—has risen to accommodate the demand, permitting parents to ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.

One wealthy businessman in China, who like Wang is also in the education business, wanted more than 200 children at once using surrogates, envisioning a family enterprise, [Nathan] Zhang[, founder and CEO of IVF USA,] said. “I asked him directly, ‘How do you plan to raise all these children?’ He was speechless,” said Zhang, who said he refused him as a client.

Other surrogacy professionals described similarly head-spinning numbers. The owner of one agency in California said he had helped fill an order for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the past few years, a request spread over several agencies.

A Los Angeles surrogacy attorney said he had helped his client, a Chinese billionaire, have 20 children through surrogacy in recent years.

Amanda Troxler, a Los Angeles-based surrogacy lawyer, said her firm consulted with a hopeful Chinese parent who said she wanted eight or 10 surrogacies and asked for a discount. “I was like, ‘No, we’re not Costco,’” said Troxler, who didn’t take the client because she rejects those looking for more than two surrogacies at once.

Last month, Xu’s ex-girlfriend, Tang Jing, alleged in a post on Weibo that he had 300 children, living across numerous properties in multiple countries. Xu has previously accused Tang of theft and the two have ongoing lawsuits. Tang didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In a statement on Weibo at the time, [Xu's company] Duoyi Network said the 300 figure was wrong but confirmed a stunning fact: “After many years of effort” through surrogacy in the U.S., Xu has “only a little over 100” children.

Later in November, the [pseudonymous Weibo] user linked to Xu posted a video of more than a dozen toddler or early grade-school-age children playing on an outdoor patio in an unknown location. “What the truth is, everyone can see for themselves,” the user posted.

As the camera panned around the patio, the children—who appeared to be mostly boys—began running toward it. “Daddy!” they yelled. “Daddy!”

The idea is to increase fertility generally, not to create some weird cult. I am skeptical that your approach would work on the small scale (trying to do ANYTHING in the Third World is difficult), and do not believe it could be scaled up at all.

Doing anything in the third world is fairly easy. It just requires some bribes. Buying eggs and sperm from the origin country is easy for said origin country, shipping the embryos to bumfuck Africa to be carried to term - ditto. Then the state has a huge network of kindergardens and school to raise them. Almost any first world country has a system for orphans - scaling it will be hard but not impossible. Not talking about a cult - talking about the state producing the birth rates it needs directly without the participation of the citizenship.

Do you think this is desirable?

No. But non gulf style immigration is even less desirable.

It seems unreasonable to expect the current social infrastructure supporting old people to continue indefinitely into a future where it no longer manes sense (it no longer makes sense now in my opinion, but clearly the problem will get worse). Young people might be willing to support their own parents or grandparents, but why would they put up with an army of unloved, childless geezers leaching off of their productivity?

This dovetails nicely with the army guy’s post below. Even in a democracy, citizens only exercise power because the men with guns let them exercise power. At some point, the idea will be proposed to euthanize childless elders who are not financially independent, and nobody physically capable of pushing back will be on the other side of that proposal.

You're not accurately modeling the level of evil.

It's not that the government will euthanize the eldery. It's that society will encourage the elderly, gently, to kill themselves.

This is why you're seeing discourse around assisted suicide and "death with dignity" popping back up. But, you now what, it's probably not a big deal, I mean, that's only a fringe element of people who---

1 in 20 deaths in Canada is assisted suicide.

Oh.

So we've got a 5% "rank and yank" quota going on. Bump it up to 10%, concentrated in the elderly and "differently abled" and, all of a sudden, we've got a nice little euthanasia-eugenics garbage collection app for society. Go Team!

If there is not a fundamental sacred respect for life in a society, then that society defaults to a pro-eugenic stance. Over time, with subtlety, that society will ruthlessly select for its preferred characteristics like a breeder surveying new born puppies.

1 in 20 deaths in Canada is assisted suicide.

Around 96% of recipients identified as white people, who account for about 70% of Canada's population. It is unclear what caused this disparity.

To be fair, it's probably age.

At some point, the idea will be proposed to euthanize childless elders who are not financially independent, and nobody physically capable of pushing back will be on the other side of that proposal.

Why would financial independence matter? I'm fairly sure some of the fertility-demanders here have said that old people saving money doesn't count because the actual products and services have to be provided by younger people anyway. Euthanizing the childless who do have assets also has the bonus (from the viewpoint of the euthanizers) that they get the assets away from those hated geezers and crones.

That is certainly a possibility, but it would be simpler logistically for the government merely to stop covering all prescriptions and services apart from intravenous sodium thiopental.

If society announces its intent to withhold support from the childless elderly, it is perhaps rather optimistic to expect that young people will be incentivised to have children before growing old. Another possible outcome is an uptick of antisocial behaviour from those who expect to remain childless, whether by choice or not, as they hear the message that society does not care for them (but still do not consider the incentive sufficient to switch into a class for which society does care). This itself could be plenty damaging for high-trust societies like Sweden.

Another possible outcome is an uptick of antisocial behaviour from those who expect to remain childless, whether by choice or not, as they hear the message that society does not care for them

This is what I'd do, for sure. I'm all in favor of cutting benefits for the olds, but detest the fascist-feminist synthesis that its all men's fault for not "stepping up" or some nonsense, and that the best remedy is social harassment.

I mean, you could just stop subsidizing it, rather than actively punishing the elderly who do not have children.

In Canada, we have programs that are explicitly a transfer from the working aged to the elderly (OAS); these programs have insane cutoffs (OAS is only fully cut off at an income of $180k/year, and doesn't check existing assets; it's very possible for someone elderly to own a $3m+ house, and still receive the full amount of the OAS). Cutting that off would increase the amount of money in the pockets of the young, improve housing availability (as it forces the elderly to sell their oversized homes to have funds), and not punish those who didn't have children; but instead just punish those who chose not to plan for their retirement.

Seriously, I'd be homeless and living on the streets if I were jobless - why are we saying that the least productive members of society get immunity, and to keep their assets, while the most productive (by which I don't mean me, but the young in general) have no safety nets at all?

In the US the OAS-equivalent (Social Security old-age benefits) is notionally (though not actually) funded by a tax paid during your working years. This (by design) makes it hard to make the case you're making here about transfers -- it's hard to make the case that people who paid 6.2% (and whose employers paid the same) on their earnings all their life specifically for this purpose deserve nothing when they actually do reach old age.

The fun part is that Canada's is also notionally (though not actually) paid by a tax paid during your working years; the issue is that like any government, ours spent all the money that was supposed to be used for it on other things.

Perhaps a valuable lesson can be learned here about voting for people who spend more than the country makes, and have to take the money they promised you to fund it is in order here.

Unlike what was the case in 1940 though, the relative quality of the population will be vastly inferior, and will in large past consist of 80+ seniors mostly incapable of doing serious productive work and in need not only of constant and large transfers from the working-age population via taxes, but also significant care efforts in homes for the elderly. The Committee estimates that every working citizen in the worst-case scenario will need to finance no less than 1.6 other people.

Hopefully, some nation somewhere will have the epiphany that, in fact, there is not a need to transfer large sums of money to the elderly.

Based on the demographic decline, it can be assumed that some significant amount of these elderly will have had no kids. Which means they had their fun spending on themselves in their youth. That is to say, they have had their cake, and there is no need to then let them eat it too.

Those who have had kids can be supported by their descendants, who will at least be freed up from having to pay for somebody else’s old person.

there is not a need to transfer large sums of money to the elderly

Pensions are old men cutting trees down.

In general, the social state is fundamentally corrupt, divorcing people from their action's consequences. (Alas, we don't have to imagine the block voting to increase their privileges... We're already stuck in a doom loop.)

Pension/Social Security is just deferred compensation with the usual government fuckery.

Pension/Social Security is more like young men planting trees, but the government confiscates many of those trees under the pretense of insurance/Equity. Then, several decades later when a given former young man (now not such a young man) would like to retire, the government will return some lumber, that may or may not correspond to the present value of the trees the man planted when he was younger.

I have nothing against older men who would like to recoup their deferred compensation.

But most people do in fact not plant trees. The vast majority of economic activity produces things that are either consumed almost immediately or can't be conserved for the time scales relevant to retirement. A worker in a power plant can't store up lots of kilowatt hours to then use them up over his retirement 30 years later, for there to be electricity at that point there needs to be a new, younger worker taking his spot and giving up a share of his production.

Financial abstractions like saving only work out if the material economy on which the financial stuff is making a claim on continues to exist up to the point in time where the saver wants to convert green paper into actual goods or services. The causal mechanism isn't saving, it's having children and ensuring that they become productive participants of the economy.

Also massive amounts of the population don't cover what they take out of the public spending apparatus especially when it involves a lengthy retirement period with significant medical support.

The problem with making older men whole on their social security contributions is that

  1. That money is gone, long since spent on whatever stupid shit the government does (by this point, social security is old enough that the money has chiefly been spent paying out social security benefits to even older men, who are now dead).

  2. Social security always promised more out in benefits than was paid it. It was structured like a pyramid scheme, and inherently reliant on forcing every new member of an exponentially increasing population to enroll at gunpoint. So when fertility collapsed...

The only ways to keep giving old people their promised benefits is one of:

  1. Keep borrowing money until nobody is willing to lend anymore. We already owe Lord Tywin three million gold; what's another 80,000?

  2. Keep printing money to inflate away the entitlements. Sufficiently high inflation is indistinguishable from a default.

  3. Keep importing immigrants to pay for the benefits, replacing your people to kick the can down the road a few more years. Except, a lot of those immigrants are going on welfare and making the problem worse. Hispanics and H1-Bs are productive; Sub-Saharan Africans, MENAs, and Haitian refugees are not.

I have nothing against older men who would like to recoup their deferred compensation.

If that's all it was, sure. The problem is that Social Security is effectively a ponzi scheme. Total payouts are far greater than total contributions, with many retirees able to claim roughly 250% of what they paid in as benefits. Social Security was (and is) dependent on population growth because there need to be more people paying into it than receiving it. The only way to fix this is to dramatically lower the amount that retirees get from SS, and that's a political non-starter even after all the boomers die because that means gen x and millennials will be the ones who paid in significant amounts that they won't ever get back.

https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/lifetime-social-security-benefits-and-taxes-2023-update

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