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The always-great Kaiser Bauch has a new article, this time on the (dis-)similarities between climate change and the fertility crisis. It's good and there's a lot to agree with, in particular the general gist: None of us will probably be able to do anything about either of those, and all we can do is adapt. Both are global issues that arise from the peculiarities of current-tech, current-culture modern societies, and may vanish or switch in another direction altogether with further increased tech levels or changed culture. Neither is likely to be an extinction-level problem. Both are politically polarized, with one side leaning towards doomerism and/or instrumentalisation, and the other towards denial and/or indifference.
Nevertheless, the article somewhat overstates its thesis, and furthermore I find it interesting to think about how and why the differences exist & are the way they are, as well as some related recent developments & discussions.
So, let's start with some of the most obvious differences. Climate change is a truly global problem in the sense that it's literally impossible to fix locally. This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate. Instead it not only is sold as an alternative to adaption, the rest of the world isn't doing the same anyway, and of course it isn't working well on its own merits, either.
See the AC discourse: I actually think myself that the weather is still tolerable enough that ACs make sense mostly for clinics and for the elderly, we don't even need general adoption. But no, instead EU media is putting out very general anti-AC messaging that we can't have nice things since it costs energy, and energy causes climate change. There was a notable incident where the EU Commission HQ shut down its AC - but only for the lower, peasant floors. Imo it could easily go into a Parks & Rec parody episode, if P&R was capable of looking in that particular direction. All a microcosm of the dysfunctions of the contemporary EU.
Likewise, the instrumentalisation of climate change usually takes a very specific form: Due to its very nature requiring communal solutions, it's easy to combine with general-purpose communitarian ideologies like communism, social justice or "mere" socialism. The "watermelon" (green on the outside, red on the inside) accusation strikes one as very adapt if you just skim through, for example, the Green New Deal wiki page, despite its very pro-slant. Take a look at the "Environmental justice" subsection. But honestly, it's already enough to talk with the average green voter to notice the commonalities. This also directly explains rightwing dismissal: If the most prominent green initiatives blatantly risk torpedoing the entire enterprise by tying it together with completely unrelated, highly contentious far-left pet projects, what does it tell you about how serious its proponents are on the original topic? Nothing good.
So in short, I'd characterize the climate change movement: We pour significant resources into fighting climate change, but in a way and direction that does not and can not fix it. Powerful groups can and do profit from this free money, however.
Let's now look at the fertility crisis. First, I want to to note that it is a fundamentally local problem, in the sense that any given society with a healthy TFR can just simply ignore global fertility dysfunctions (insert Tyler the creator cyberbullying meme, except it's about the fertility crisis and just having kids). It's global only in the sense that it seems to happen everywhere, merely on different timelines. That means that, irrespective of the details of any possible solution it is at least in principle solvable by any given nation state.
Let's now look at the nature of the problem. There's a few candidates: The rise of solitary entertainment (related to the "It's the phones, stupid") thesis, the opportunity cost thesis, or the loss of religion thesis, and a whole bunch of others. I won't go into detail on which I find the most likely, strongest factor, but it's hard not to notice that they are all fundamentally cultural and, in fact, down to personal choices. You actually can simply choose to forego solitary entertainment and spend more time with family & friends. You can just stay religious. You can just avoid education and choose a job that is easy to combine with a family. As the kids say (well, if you have them), you can just DO things.
This now makes the shape of the instrumentalisation obvious: Conservatives and rightwingers more generally have always looked at cultural change through the lens of moral decline, and in the case of the fertility crisis, this lens is actually matching pretty well. It fits even better if you search for contrafactuals: As Lyman Stone points out, conservatives have very broadly more kids than moderates, which have more than liberals. This becomes even more striking if you look at the highest fertility groups, which is basically identical with a list of known religious ultraconservative groups.
So the right tries to instrumentalize the fertility crisis to push for whatever part of these conservative cultures is their personal hobbyhorse, be it female disempowerment, increased marriage rates, or clamping down on modern sex & dating norms, without bothering to look too closely on whether the shoe really fits that well. Which also readily explains leftwing dismissals: It's easy to find stats for any of those issues, showing that each, at least in isolation, does not really fix anything. And if that is the case, and the guy arguing in favor is blatantly doing the same for just about any issue, what does it tell you about them? Again, nothing good.
Nevertheless though, it seems obvious to me that we are failing on fertility for the simple reason that we are hardly even trying. A single look into the lifestyle of the ultrafertile makes it clear that all the personal reasons seculars usually give are basically bullshit as well. The ultrafertile earn less, give more to charity and on top have more kids anyway. And their kids aren't, objectively, doing badly, either. Nor am I compelled by the pronatalists to do anything in any way, at least so far. The instrumentalisation, as it exists, is mostly secluded to online anon accounts or conservative sermons in church. Unlike climate change laws, I can easily ignore them.
One thing that annoys me about the term "adapt" here is that its assumed that the adaptation is gonna be gleeful, or wont involve any kind of major societal shift in a major direction that would be negative. I can adapt to diabetes by taking insulin, i can adapt to blindness by reading brail, but its a lot better for me if I avoid getting those in the first place, and said adaptations i can do while still being alive in those instances suck ass!
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Only tangentially related, but I enjoyed this article enumerating the ways in which family life is more costly in ways that don't show up in the statistics. Most of these points are already known here, but I thought it was a good consolidation of them.
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"At least for now" is doing a heroic amount of legwork here. To the extent it is true, today (and in some parts of the country it is even now false), it is not for lack of demand or intent. It is due to a set of political norms that have so far prevented the social conservatives from taking away others' liberties for their own instrumental ends. However, those norms are being intentionally dismantled as we speak. If they succeed, then the entire conceit of your post will rapidly become false.
As to the global/local distinction well.. the same people who handwring about TFR certainly don't see it that way. It is highly relevant to this group /which/ subpopulations have which tfr (either high or low) at the global level. Indeed we are talking about subpopulations at the level of nation state or higher, hundreds of millions of people. The "just use your personal freedoms" argument is hardly convincing to me, let alone (likely) anyone who worries about great replacement topics.
The opportunity cost argument is not cultural, it's largely about economic incentives.
There's no discrepancy here. "You can have more kids if you drive yourself into (relative) poverty" and "populations that face a lower opportunity cost for having kids have more kids" are just two sides of the same coin. The seculars' statement, "I need more income/resources to have kids and maintain my economic standing" is just the inside-view expression of that fact.
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I'm gonna come at this from a different angle and talk about climate change instead.
I'm actually fairly optimistic about our progress on fixing it. Already a third of new cars sold are electric and growing fast. Similarly solar is also on quite the rapid growth curve. I'm in the firm belief that in 20 years climate change will be treated like how we treat the hole in the ozone layer.
So, perhaps if climate change isn't so intractable, then neither is fertility?
It's worse than that. Nobody cares about climate change per se, it's just an apocalyptic hobbyhorse to push commie nonsense. It may or may not be happening, but nobody is going to do a thing about it because the things they want to do won't fix it. It's just eschatology. And when this one wears out, they will replace it with something else. In my youth it was acid rain and the Ozone hole. It was going to end agriculture and humanity shortly, but luckily we banned some chemicals a few years after the hole started closing up and immediately transitioned to Global Warming. Something else will replace Climate Change, and probably within a decade or two. You'll still have your C02 doomers, but eventually the jig will be up and we'll move on to something else as a society to fill our imaginations.
I don't know if you just didn't read my post but my entire point was that people are in fact doing something about it. They're doing so much about it that the issue is gonna be fixed relatively soon. Not to mention we solved it with capitalism, not communism. Very strange reply.
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Forgive me, but I think this perspective is broadly insane. The use of electric cars - or electric anything else - is a solution only to the extent that the electricity used comes from renewable sources. And those renewable sources need to be really renewable, not something that we can maintain for five years until there need to be mass replacements.
If you look at https://ourworldindata.org/energy-mix you see that the big story of the last few years is a massive upsurge in coal. Solar capacity may be growing but so far has managed only to propel world solar usage to the giddy heights of 2.8%. Scaling up to even 20% would produce massive issues in the manufacturing requirements (silver) and battery requirements.
In general I think there is this common problem where the battlegrounds over climate measures have been fought so intensely for so long that people have long forgotten the chains of reasoning behind them. For the forseeable future electric cars are just a more complex way of turning fossil fuels into movement, and one third of new cars being electric means diddly squat except more competition for cobalt.
Apology accepted, don't let it happen again ;)
Since electricity generation is your main point of contention, let me address that. I can't understand how you can look at that graph you posted and say there's been a surge in coal power. Over the span of 10 years coal went from 42000 to 45000 tw/h, which is actually misleadingly positive about coal cause that 42000 is after a dip from 44000, whereas over the same timespan solar when from 800 to 5000, growing more both in absolute and relative terms. Overall coal looks pretty stagnant to me. Also, about the 2.8% market share, to put that into perspective, the electric car market share was pretty damn close to that in 2019. It went from just under 3% to over a third in seven years. These kind of transitions happen faster than you may believe possible and the solar curve looks pretty similar to the electric car curve to me. As for the resource issues, I remember during covid when people where freaking out over a lithium shortage due to EVs that turned out to never happen. Capitalism is actually pretty good at solving these supply issues if you let it do it's thing.
Now, if I may engage in bulverism on why you think coal power is surging, conveniently the energy institute recently released it's world energy report for last year. To give the relevant numbers, global energy generation grew by 855 tw/h and renewables grew by 861 tw/h, yes you read that right, renewables grew more than global energy did. Part of the reason is because coal declined by 58 tw/h, which doesn't sound like a boom to me. However despite that co2 emissions rose by over 300 million metric tons. Where did this increase come from if globally fossil fuels are stagnant? Well, just under half of that increases is coming from the US and pretty much entirely from coal. If you are american I can therefore understand why you think coal is booming, based on your personal experience it probably is. But america is the only place is it booming and everywhere else it declined so much that americas coal boom wasn't enough to offset it (in energy terms if not in c02).
Finally, ever if the above was not true and clean energy never grew from where it is now EVs would still help reduce co2 because ~20% of electricity generation is clean energy which better than gas cars which are 0% clean energy.
I will never apologize for being a climate bloomer.
I was talking about the big surge in coal from 2000 to 2011 ('last few years' not very helpful), where it nearly doubles from 27k TWh to 45k TWh and then remained stable as you say. Natural gas has also heavily expanded.
FWIW your bulverism is incorrect, I live in the UK. My skepticism is that from where I'm standing in the UK these technologies are being incredibly pumped up by governments and institutions that believe buy-in is the most important factor for growth, so they're all operating on a fake-it-till-you-make-it mindset as well as subsidising like billy-o.
The EV sales figures you cited don't distinguish between true battery-powered EV vehicles and hybrids, and indeed almost nobody does. (Again, my suspicion is that this is to juice the numbers.) I therefore found it difficult to find a good source but https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/19/hybrids-having-their-moment-as-car-buyers-rethink-electric-vehicles.html suggests that true EV sales are broadly stable (and low) while hybrids are doing well. EV sellers like BYD are certainly having a moment and are visible in the market, but are nowhere near a third of all car sales, and that's before you start looking at takeup of used vs new cars.
I am not saying that you're completely wrong, or that this isn't somewhat good news rather than bad news. I'm saying that you're presenting pretty curves and I'm not willing to take it as-read that those curves are going to curve up till they hit the stars. It may happen, it may not. Reform UK had great growth last year, beating the Conservatives out of the park, but Reform has now broadly stabilised at a level significantly lower than they need to win elections outright.
Because nobody is actually buying battery-powered EVs.Sorry, that was mean :P What did happen? I am/was expecting higher battery demand to lead to supply issues.I don't understand why you thought a surge from more than a decade and a half ago would be proof of much of anything about the modern energy market. Technology has changed a lot. Theres a reason why the all the globes growth last year came from clean energy. Sorry about the bulverism. I will refrain from further assumptions about you.
I did not find it difficult for either europe or china. As you'll see it's mostly BEVs in both markets. America is once again the odd market out. You really shouldn't be using american stats as representative of anywhere else. Although there is a lot of variation between markets, with some having a lot of hybrids and others being completely dominated by BEVs.
This a particularly poor analogy. It's the nature of politics to blunt growth curves. In technology the kind of growth curve I'm talking about is the norm with the only notable exceptions being when a tech got cockblocked partway by an even better tech. Any if the curve ends because we find something even better than gas or electricity I'll be plum happy to eat salt on that one.
People anticipated the crunch and dug more lithium mines to meet expected demand. In fact supply increased so much that in spite of sky rocketing demand prices have continued to fall.
A note rather than a reply, but I've been looking into this and while I don't agree with you on everything I did learn multiple things I found interesting, so thanks for the conversation.
Hey thanks for giving me an excuse to sperg out about my interests. In fact, if you wanna do me a favor could you keep arguing with me so I can sperg out some more please?
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Surely the fundamental argumeny here would also include the relative efficiency of electricity used in EVs versus fossils used directly in EVs. Electricity has some transmission/generation loss, while ICE seems like it produces a lot of waste heat. How do these net out?
It does seem like a safe assumption that solar will rise in prominence.
I dare say it's probably net green on EVs but tbh I don't care to look up exact numbers as I expect the effect from this to be small potatoes.
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The problem with the women question is that the West has succumbed to the idea that it's empowering for people to give up their duty. It's a spiritual problem:
Most men are still expected to perform some kind of hard labor to survive, while women can just skip most of the pains of conception and child-rearing. The problem is that society is still setup in a way that transfers labor from men to barren women.
Taxpayers should not pay male cops to protect Planned Parenthood buildings, for example. That's a no-brainer.
If society is to be hyper-individualistic, we should be able to opt out from supporting a number of government-funded initiatives, like all the DEI programs to get more girlbosses in colleges, or even anything to do with women's healthcare. Let their dads and husbands pay for the birth control, let the girlbosses pay for their elderly care.
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If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the general advice is to stop digging. The current CO2 levels are not going to make humanity extinct, nor are higher levels. But that does not mean that there is no difference. While we can debate the validity if the IPCC report forever, the basic idea that our future behavior will affect how bad things will get does not seem exactly far-fetched.
In Germany, mitigation of climate change effects will not be that hard. From my observation, Germans are currently rapidly coming around on air conditioning. Berlin is not going to become hotter than Madrid is now (I think), and people manage to live in Madrid just fine. Likewise, a few meters (at most!) of rising sea levels are not really an insurmountable challenge for Europe. (To bad about skiing, though.)
However, people in the global south will likely be less lucky. As an utilitarian, I care about these people and am not indifferent between the QALY losses of different scenarios.
I can also make a motivated argument which is perhaps more accessible to the commentariat here.
I do not worry too much about mass immigration. (I do not think it is a helpful tool to reduce global wealth inequality. I also think it is plainly obvious that our health system would collapse without foreign workers, but that is admittedly an argument for some immigration, not letting everyone in who cares to come.)
I am reasonably sure that if climate change makes conditions unsurvivable in some countries, the people living there will not quietly resign to their fate and die, convenient as that would be. Instead, they will try to emigrate, and Europe will be very much on their destination list.
If we had the will to just not allow them in, that would not concern us (aside from pesky universalists like myself). They are very much not a military threat to us, we could probably drown half of Africa in the Mediterranean Sea on a few percents of our GDP.
But realistically, we will not do that. A decent chunk of our conservatives are Christian, and likely believe that first razing the commons and then keeping your neighbor out of your garden as he starves without them is bad behavior. Perhaps 10% of the population are sociopathic enough that they would be ok with simply blowing up boats, the rest will not stomach it. The 1940s are bygone and will not come back (here's hoping).
As I said, I very much prefer interventions (in the EA sense) in countries of origin to just trying to solve wealth inequality through migration. Anything which makes conditions in the Global South shittier is hindering this approach.
Obviously saying that we need to go to carbon neutrality immediately is not considering the economic trade-offs. But cutting our emissions seems like a no-brainer. (Personally, I would have gotten rid of bloody coal plants long before even considering if nuclear was vaguely bad or not, but that is not the German mentality.)
I deliberately avoided a few possible directions of discussion in the post to keep it from meandering too much, which includes what approach I personally consider ideal, some gender discussions, and a few others.
I also think we should reduce emissions (and I care about various environmental concerns), but most of your argument hinges on us in the EU having a significant impact, which we don't. From a short check, we're currently at around 6-8% depending on how exactly you count. We can go net-zero and it will literally not even reduce emissions by a tenth. We also increasingly have less international sway. All of this goes doubly for germany specifically, which I consider the worst offender in this regard. So adaption is mandatory, reduction is a nice-to-have bonus.
For reduction specifically, a pragmatic approach would be to further build out nuclear and stop coal as you say, to invest in solar only up to ca 20% (highly regionally dependent as well), to invest more in tech development and to never de-industrialize and offshore. The latter is an awful offender of the typical bureaucratic mistake of improving things on paper while making them worse IRL: Having factories in China instead of the EU means that the EU CO2 stats are better, but the former obviously cares much less about most environmental issues. Offshoring at best changes nothing overall, and imo most likely increases net-CO2. Solar subsidies are another perfect example of how not to do it: We give a general subsidy so solar cells are overproduced (which is itself bad for the environment), then we give subsidies for the solar energy to enter the grid even if it has literally negative value, and then we have to pay our neighbours to help us balance the grid. It's paying money for the purpose of paying money, and then at the end, we pay more money, with no benefit whatsoever at any particular point in time.
A lot of the arguments that climate change will make parts of the globe unlivable are quite questionable. Desertification in Africa, to take one common example, is primarily driven by awful, short-termist agricultural practices like excessive slash-and-burn. Increasing temperatures certainly makes slash-and-burn even worse, but the primary reason is still the practice itself, not the temperature change. Stopping that, and replacing it with a diametrically opposed afforestation strategy like what China is doing is much more important to keep these places livable.
Agreed. The 2 degrees change budget is around 1,000 gigatonnes of CO2 and even if we froze the situation globally as we are now (just stopping increases) - the global spending would reach this budget it in 25.7 years. If EU magically went net zero tomorrow, the global budget will be spent in 27.4 years. So at best the EU will delay the inevitable for around a year. The whole thing is impossible to solve. Even the COVID lockdown measures decreased the global CO2 emissions by around 17%, when everybody was at home. Even if we had these lockdowns perpetually, it would delay the 2 degree budget spending by around 3 years.
People underestimate the scale that is needed, nonexistent technologies necessary etc. The only thing that makes sense now is to just adapt either personally, in community or nationally.
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If this is true then it's possible to offer a mutually beneficial Singapore/Gulf-state style system in which Western countries pay 2-3x the prevailing developing world rate and don't offer meaningful migration/settlement pathways. As-is, there's so many permutations of this idea that are actively counterproductive. Unskilled care workers getting PR/Passport after 5 years of work, then being able to chain migrate their family and leave the care professions, is just flat-out dumb but is a cornerstone of a lot of countries at this point. Actual medical workers making up a couple % if that of immigration due to the family reunification efforts means that you tread water at best.
Sure, the Gulf model works, but it also creates a two-class society.
Keeping people as resident foreigners denies them representation (something people have historically gotten upset about), and is in the long run just isomorphic to an oligarchic system (especially without birthright citizenship).
The Gulf model is handled far less effectively than the Singapore model, largely since the Gulf types don't use foreign labor as a supplement due to their own staggering incompetence and disinclination towards work.
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There are two strong arguments against mass-migration for a smart liberal they need to consider provided they are open to HBD:
They want a European style welfare society. That doesn’t work if you have a large population with significantly lower productive and potentially higher crime rates ruin the commons to enjoy your European style welfare state lifestyle.
The Indian conundrum. I think at this point it’s obvious there are a lot of smart Indians. But domestically no innovation. Can having a society that’s 20% Einstein and 80% much lower productivity innovate? Or does dealing with social dysfunction sap a lot of a societies surplus to do tech/external things?
I don't think you need to believe in Human BioDiversity to see those as significant arguments, you just need to believe in Human Diversity. When one city full of Hispanics can have 100 times the murder rate of its immediately-adjacent city full of Hispanics, it's hard to blame that (and harder to blame that wholly) on genes, but it's also impossible to claim that that's just a wacky happenstance and what's a Central Limit Theorem anyway? There's obviously some kind of strong society-level condition at work here, one that can have effects on the scale of thousands of corpses per city per year created or avoided, and even if it's just cultural attitudes or social support for good institutions or whatever rather than genetics, it's still probably something that isn't entirely discarded and replaced when a member of that society crosses a national border.
If social outcomes were mostly or entirely non-genetic then there would be less of a worry about low levels of immigration, because the immigrants might then completely assimilate to the host culture. But, paradoxically, that might mean we aren't worrying enough about higher levels of immigration, because the ability to avoid assimilating is likely to be superlinear (the more similar immigrants you have around you, the less affected you and they are by the host culture) and will definitely have hysteresis (culture isn't just based on the demographics at the moment, but on how gradually those demographics were changed in the past), so observation of immigration at lower levels from a particular culture wouldn't extrapolate cleanly to predict the effects of higher levels from that culture.
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I'd also argue that the incoming AI reduction in employment rates is also something you've got to refute before you can justify importing bulk bodies
That I think would be fairly easy. The migrants would benefit from better rule of law and the higher productivity from robots would make giving more people American level wealth trivial.
But I’ve never seen a leftist deal with racial productivity differences mentally. They just yell racists.
Depends on the degree.
Infinite luxury communism robots sure, but any sort of half-grade solution where human labor isn't particularly cost-effective but also it's not infinity surplus for anybody and you can get wedged.
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All of this is so silly to me. The answer is women's education reduces women's fertility, and there's no real way around this problem. Women, when given the choice, do not choose children, and so by allowing them to support themselves and choose whether to have kids, they choose not to.
Everywhere education of women has increased has seen a precipitous drop in fertility. Women's education is genocide:
Meh, its not that, most data shows people not even pairing, despite evidence for the desire to do so.
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This is loading the question. I was thinking about it a lot and to me one of the major factor is that the whole society is built around women. Women are huge net negatives when it comes to direct welfare costs, they draw more than they pay in taxes. Moreover, women employment is largely in state or semi-state professions like teachers or bureocrats or bullshit jobs. Thirdly, women are using the whole state apparatus in their favor, I would not be the first one to note that in a sense women married state. Just name a government policy and it disproportionally benefits women: progressive taxation, public healthcare, welfare, public employment or even other things like military draft etc.
So in my eyes it is not a simple natural "choice", the whole environment is built so that women do not have any duties and do not shoulder any burden of society - they do not even reproduce. The choice of "hey, here is free stuff and no responsibility" is an artificially created one. They get stuff for themselves and then renege on any responsibility or duty. Just slash government spending to let's say 5% GDP and watch how women fall in line and start to actually plan and work for their security. Suddenly having family and social ties suddenly becomes more important.
I don't disagree with the problems you've listed, and I do think they are serious problems. However, I also am not sure that they would fix the problem. China has one of the worst birth rates in the world, but as far as I know, it has almost none of the same social welfare policies that we do; most Chinese citizens are on their own in regards to providing for their own welfare or paying for their own healthcare.
Of course, they're pretty different styles of country, liberal democratic republics versus authoritarian state capitalist "republics". Maybe the variables are different.
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So you're saying the problem isn't women's education, it's women voting, and that the two have never been thoroughly separated enough to notice?
Because the women are voting for those policies which benefit themselves. Women voted to marry the state.
It makes sense to build the entire environment around women, when they are having babies, no different than birds nesting. That's the wrench in the gears. Women have all this advantage because they are the ones who have to have children and that's a lot of work. But they take the advantage and don't fulfill their end of the bargain. They have abandoned their duty, so much that they don't even believe it is a duty any longer.
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Incorrect. Israel is interesting opposite case. They have large urban population, educated women and everything. And even secular population has TFR above 2. Education is important, but there are other things as well. Also there are logical things, for instance education may work indirectly - not indoctrination or that it educates women not to have children. In fact fertility has famous U shape as low income uneducated women have more children than middle class women, but upper class women rebound in around $100k and cross toward 2.1 TFR at income of around $200k. So there may be a different issue and indirect effects. As women spend the most fertile years at school and then they work to wipe out debt, they are not reproducing until after late 20ies early 30ies. Then they usually have smaller families as they spent 10 fertile years on school and work. Who knows, maybe there can be a system where women have children first and they will have something like GI bill when they will get free education if they have two or three children or some such. Like KaiserBauch mentioned, it is a complex problem.
The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.
The Byzantine Catholic belt in Europe has mostly replacement-ish fertility with generally educated women and high female LFPR- and some of the lowest fertility rates in the world on their borders. Conservative social norms and high importance of religion work, even when it isn't Jews.
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I really wish this stupid, vapid phrase would die. At the very least, I would have hoped no one would use it here, let alone as a standalone, low-effort response.
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In theory I agree, but I think one needs to ask how Israel got around the problem. Because I'm not so sure it's that easy for other groups to copy, at least right away.
Here's my hypothesis: Lots of factors cause TFR to drop, but the main factors are modernity and urbanization. Certainly it's easy to see why these would be expected to be significant factors. Before the industrial revolution, most people worked in agriculture and lived in rural areas. In such areas, arguably there was a direct financial incentive to reproduce: More children meant more free help on the farm. So arguably cultures developed which put a high value on fertility.
When industrialization comes in and people start moving to cities, there is significantly less incentive to reproduce and thus with modernity fertility predictably falls.
Arguably, modernity and urbanization are analogous to putting antibiotics in the Petri dish. Yes, it will have an effect for a while but eventually the effect wears off as you select for resistance to the antibiotic.
Arguably, Jewish people were one of the first, and perhaps the first, population to get hit with the antibiotic effects of urbanization. Even in pre-industrial Europe and the Middle East, Jews were heavily concentrated in cities. So it's reasonable to think that Jews have a head start on developing cultural and/or genetic resistance to the fertility-depressing effects of urbanization compared to other groups.
Which is why it may not be so easy for other groups to just copy Israel. Possibly those other groups are 100 years behind.
I think the example of Jews here is complicated because of events last century: "there are fewer Jews than there should be" is a sentiment that I've heard expressed multiple times even as an outsider, and seems broadly believed in the community (willing to hear closer accounts, if anyone wants to offer). That's a hugely pronatalist meme that probably outweighs things like urbanism and education.
It's unclear that there would be such a consensus on the issue without that shared generational trauma.
Both you and @omw_68 are wrong, for the simple reason that non-Israeli Jews have very low fertility. On the other hand, the nonzionism hypothesis- that Israeli society is set up so that everyone is trying to imitate a higher fertility group, even if indirectly- passes the immediate smell test.
I would have to disagree with this: The Jewish population in the United States is exploding. Certainly among the ultra-religious, but even among the somewhat religious there is steady growth.
I don't think this is inconsistent with my hypothesis.
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The best data I could find is a decade and a half out of date, so I'd be happy to be corrected by something newer, but the data there is not showing any opposite effect, just weaker and more restricted effects. TFR of older (40-44) Israeli women who have graduated college is about the same as those who only graduated high school, but both are significantly less than that of those who didn't finish high school.
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Your one counterexample is not going to disprove all the overwhelming other evidence of the trend. It's one outlier amid a sea of data points all pointing the same direction.
I suppose you could combine education with indoctrination so that you don't lose the fertility drop of educating women, but I doubt it, and certainly no one is trying.
Yes, I know, that's the problem in itself: education reduces fertility. There's never going to be enough rich women to make up the decreases at the lower ends, so the phantom right side of the U is just that: a ghost. If you scaled the graph by people, and not fertility per capita, then the U would disappear.
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Isn't that a distinctly Anglo problem? I suppose continental Europe also has private schools, but that's not what everyone is aiming for, and I've never heard of public-university-educated women being more fertile.
Not necessarily. There is often implicit understanding that after school you have to develop your carrier. Why study law or medicine when you then go straight toward part-time work and childcare? You will have gap in your CV and your opportunity may be lost forever as your social network moves on. It is a trap of school, carrier, maybe some real estate and material security. It is not only after 30 where some women feel secure to search for relationships, while others select to be childless to pursue their career more - it is not as if the treadmill stops after 5 or 10 years.
This is inherently male behavior, with huge caveat that men historically did that in families. Men could work 12 hours a day while their wife was at home with kids even when husband was 20. For women it is possible only if childless or with immense pressure and/or external help. The reverse situation where high powered attorney returns to work at 26 with her toddlers at home with her husband is exceptionally rare. It is not how things work, men and women are not interchangeable.
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What's the evidence that this is the true root cause, over or relative to any other number of competing explanations?
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Have we tried every possible way around it?
I can't recall precisely where I read it (I think it might have been on the Artist Formerly Known As Twitter?), but someone suggested that, if the educational environment were more accommodating of studentesses with babies, women would be less likely to postpone or forego reproduction for the sake of their education, and other women, upon seeing a classmate or three carrying a baby in her arms, might activate the wiring inside her that makes her want a baby of her own. (Cf. the attempts to deter teenage pregnancies by issuing realistic infant dolls to girls in secondary school, which had the exact opposite effect.)
(Also, even if one ignores the cost to women, increasing fertility by steering women away from education would still not be an un-alloyed victory, as the children thus produced would be growing up with less knowledgeable mothers.)
One, the education of women was not intended to prevent births; two, the people promoting women's education typically promote it for women of all ethnic backgrounds; three, the usual examples of genocide-by-preventing-births involve stopping women of the targeted group who wish to reproduce from doing so.
No, I don't think we have tried all the possible ways around it, but having identified the main problem, perhaps we could simply address the problem instead of trying out one farfetched kludge after another.
OK, but what about the men who are denied admission to those programs, and therefore are less able to provide for a wife and child? What, in other words, about the male doctors who never were, who were denied so females could go to medical school and quit working by 35?
The stated goal of many of these programs, and the way they measure success, is by reducing fertility. This is a holdover of the overpopulation, population bomb, thinking that was coincident with the push to promote women's equality worldwide.
Keeping women from being educated, even if it solves the problem of declining fertility, introduces two new problems:
I. A mother whose husband becomes abusive to her or her children will, if she has been denied education, be less able to provide for herself and her children without her husband's coöperation; this makes it much harder to stop domestic abuse.
II. A mother without a solid understanding of the world will be much more vulnerable to claims of "Your children are in grave danger from everything I don't like!" or "My magic beans will guarantee that your children enjoy perfect health!"
(At two he knew/the Bible through,/An infant prodigy;/His parents cried,/'Our joy and pride/we've raised on Q. R. V.' --Edward Gorey, The Universal Solvent)
Thus, if we are concerned about falling fertility rates, it would behoove us to figure out how to make women's education not reduce women's fertility.
What might help is if the more extreme of you guys could at least sound like you don't hate women.
I'm an outlier here, but were I a normal woman of around 25-30 considering marriage and kids, I wouldn't touch one of you with a ten foot barge pole, given the comments on here reeking of "we hate women". I'm going too far?
What do you call the laundry list of "women shouldn't get educated, women shouldn't be allowed vote, women shouldn't have a career (but at the same time women should not live off men), women shouldn't get a choice about who they marry, women shouldn't get a choice about having children, women should not be permitted to divorce (but if the man wants to divorce for a younger, more fertile woman to have more kids then that's fine)" and the other string of "what's wrong with the world? women!"
None of which sounds like "If we marry, I would respect and cherish you and work on a happy home and family" but rather "Your only function is to be my fuck-toy who gets knocked up on my schedule, and otherwise do everything to keep me happy, but don't bother me with your emotions or anything to do with raising the six kids I insist you have, as The Man and Head of the House I get to decide on everything including on whether you have any money of your own or not, and if I want to leave you penniless this is how it should be".
I'm always down for pushback against our resident misogynists not wanting to uphold the male end of the historic social contract. But I haven't actually heard one of them say that.
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I don't think there is any single person here that believes all those things. You're conflating the traditionalists with the black pillers so a lot of those conflict, and both stances combined are probably a minority opinion on here.
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What is a woman? There are plenty of likable women out there, but there are also tons of not-so-likable women. Creating new laws and regulation that favor women has led us to cratering birthrates, maybe we should try something else for once.
Where is that laundry list? Is that an unwarranted demand for rigor on my part here, or is such hyperbolic woman-hate really so prevalent on this website and the woman-skeptic web in general?
I am not going to trawl through past comment threads for the exact quotes because that's too damn disheartening, but yeah - previous discussions of "why isn't anyone having babies?" has devolved into "it's because women! the uppity bitches!" and solutions suggested include:
knowing their placebeing ready to be wives and mothers as soon as they hit twenty at the oldest)And then there are the guys who really don't like women and want to put them in their proper place.
*If you think I'm joking, no indeed past discussions have also gone "women should use their natural advantages to get ahead in the workplace so if Boss offers promotion in exchange for sleeping with him, go for it". No guy has said he'd let his boss fuck him for a promotion, but then again they are all Straight Manly Men of Talent who got ahead on pure merit, unlike women who only have their fleeting sexual attractiveness to offer, right?
Well I think we are all on a spectrum on all of these different assertions. Some of these are a little contradictory, depending on whether this is coming from a more traditional or non-traditional perspective.
I imagine that even the hardest of communists see an issue with running out of comrades if nobody in the world has any kids, even these evil conservatives whose kids we will all convert.
I hope we can both agree on some basic facts such as :
There are some other assertions that are more debatable, like
That one is more of a correlation/causation problem, maybe the inevitable fertility cliff was to happen no matter what with modernity, but [single] women do vote for policies that seem to decrease fertility.
I disagree with that one, but there is obviously a huge problem in how feminists vow to handle these nuanced matters. #BelieveAllWomen #NotCarolynBryantTho
Rare, but it happens. Lee Boo Jin / Im Woo Jae
Why are you so upset about this anyway?
Would it be okay if women were 100% legally allowed to pursue a career, go to college, etc -what we have now or better- but society was relentlessly shaming women who refuse to get married and have 2+ kids?
Or would you also be upset about that?
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Yes, solving one problem often involves creating other problems which themselves need to be mitigated.
That is not an excuse to avoid the problem, nor does it require that the new problem be of equal worth as the one solved.
Fertility is so much more important than anything you said that your complaints are trivial. There is nothing more important in the world than who is around to live in it.
By the way, I don't have a solution for people being vulnerable to charlatans. I consider it an unsolvable problem inherent to human nature, and even if it isn't, it's not so bad as to threaten extinction.
Exactly. If we assume, for the sake of argument, that your hypothesis is correct, then solving the 'women financially dependant on abusive husbands' problem has created the problem of 'the way we do education is destructive to fertility', which needs to be mitigated by rearranging the education system!
I hardly think 'this risks turning half the population into appliances for the other half' is a trivial complaint.
There may not be a perfect solution, that dispenses with the issue once and for all, but it is possible for the problem to be made lesser.
This maps very neatly onto what I suspect to be the motivations of many in the European governments who are backsliding on freedom of speech. The last time a European nation was run on the explicit ideology that 'those of our bloodline matter, other people don't' cost nearly forty million lives.
Both arguments posit a grave threat to humanity (fertility decline/mass warfare and genocide); both see solving them as easier without the constraint of having to respect the rights of individuals (women's equality/free speech); both claim that the issue with which they are concerned is so important that the trampling of Liberty is trivial in comparison.
Understand why you do not accept that argument from the Eurocrats, and you will comprehend why I do not accept it from you.
In absolute terms, no. By comparison to the extinction of the human race? Definitely.
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The state already pays for this or it gets the ex-husband to pay?
Does education even help here? Are women, or men for that matter, taught about what supplements might or might not have any benefit? Does the teaching sink in? Are the teachings actually correct? Everyone was taught a lot of nonsense about the food pyramid, saturated fat vs sugar vs whatever...
Some people are just stupid/unwise that can't be changed. Send a stupid, unwise person to school and they'll come out just as they went in.
Basic financial competence is not taught, nor is it required even for teaching or providing information to others. I know it's just an anecdote but apparently nobody thought that this woman is unsuitable for giving financial advice even after coming to worldwide prominence for spectacular financial incompetence. It's systemic, like how educators decide to teach their students badly (re phonics) because it's a fashionable fun fad in the education world.
Education can teach skills like engineering or mathematics but it doesn't seem to teach anything like these general life heuristics you're gesturing at. You'd think people would learn about compound interest and credit cards, the concept is pretty simple... But they don't!
And how many of those advocating for an end to women's education wholeheartedly support this?
I was thinking more along the lines of:
Less 'these are the precise steps to protect your baby' and more 'how the physical components of the world function, so that when someone makes a claim that doesn't line up with that knowledge, you can be on the look-out for what part of their anatomy they are speaking from'.
I think that most such people believe that there should be some payout/divorce mechanics for abuse, they just think that the standards for proving abuse are too low. No fault divorce means that there is scarcely any need to prove abuse. Also, there's a welfare state so that even if there were no such payments it's not forced destitution.
I think it'd be great if the education system taught this but they don't teach it, at least not effectively. Women are consistently more anti-nuclear than men, I guess it's innately male-coded. Women, on average, are more likely to support anti-nuclear Green parties.
Or consider astrology. Nobody taught astrology in schools but women are a lot more into it than men! It's not to say that men are more rational than women in a global sense, men do plenty of stupid things and die young. But there's a certain kind of rationality that men have and women, in general, lack and I don't see how education can fix this. Can young men be taught not to take risks? I doubt it.
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Just to be clear, for the argument to be valid, the majority of a given side has to support it, yes? And I can count on you to maintain this standard the next time we get into a conversation on trans issues, right?
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Her errors were not financial. Oddly, they were social. She trusted a random cold caller who had some of her easiest-stolen personal information and was running a con.
Handing over money to strangers by deception is a financial error primarily and only secondarily social. A social error would be a faux pas.
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This social vulnerability of Mrs. Cowles actually points to the real problem though.
Returning to our original concern:
The people pushing these kinds of approaches are generally not backing it with nearly-ironclad scientific literature that can be picked apart only with an advanced degree. At most there might be something that kind of looks like a study if you don't squint too hard at it. Usually it's a headline with zero backing: for an example, an anti-vaccine friend recently gave me a picture of a man in a doctor coat, with a label stating that six children died in the clinical trial for a particular vaccine. Attempts to find out what the study was, how big the sample size was, what the death count in the control was, etc. have been so far unsuccessful.
Mrs. Cowles' knowledge of the financial system didn't matter because she wasn't engaging on that level at all: there were undoubtedly financially-related red flags, but she wasn't applying that knowledge. And if our goal is to create mothers resistant to incorrect health decisions pushed by someone with an agenda, their degree won't matter because it's far easier to take an approach that bypasses the topical discussion in favor of social weaknesses, which don't seem to be remedied as part of a higher education.
Teaching bullshit detection in schools is probably fraught with culture war concerns (undoubtedly everyone will be attempting to teach only how to detect the outgroup's bullshit). But if we're not going to do that, I'm not sure a master's degree is going to change vulnerability to these kinds of arguments. It's the equivalent of an intimidating twelve-foot-high barbed wire fence, but the gate is secured with a cheap rusted combination lock set to 1234.
And is a mother with no education more likely, or less likely, to know that she should ask these questions, or understand the terminology?
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Yeah. Everyone says, when they hear about scams, "how stupid must that person be to fall for such an obvious trick! I would never be that dumb!"
But unless you're as cold-hearted and unsocial as I am, it's the entire script of con artists and scammers to lead people along and convince them bit by bit to do what, if they weren't being pressured and stressed deliberately and thought about it rationally, they would never ever do.
Most people never would be that dumb. With this kind of scam, as soon as the mark shows too much awareness, the con moves on to the next mark.
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What is "the group" here? I am going to presume you would say "white people," to which I would say that nobody is "imposing" college attendance on white women, to which you will likely bring up DEI, to which I will bring up that DEI is used to juice black university attendance as well. Is "the group" simply "humanity"?
The group is the gens, of course.
It works on everyone regardless of their race, but I will say that the stated goal of many of these programs, and one of the ways they measure success, is by reducing fertility and getting those women who have 5-10 kids to have 3-5, the 2-5 to stop at 2, and the 2 to only have 1.
Women's education is just as much genocide in Africa and India as it is everywhere else in the world, by the definition above.
Which gens?
Whichever one is having their girls educated, of course. The method works the same regardless of race or gens.
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It's not a hard and fast rule though. I have a BS, MBA, and have four kids. There are others like me. Do we have a gene or cultural meme that helps us choose to reproduce when given other options? If so, and it's inheritable, the world will eventually be filled with highly educated, fecund women.
You have four kids, but why not nine? I assert that you would always have been among the higher-fertility in your population, but the difference is that you think 4 is a lot and not the median.
Well, if it's the societal norm to have that many, you run out of space for all those people quite quickly. That's not a problem if a lot of them die in infancy and/or you're conquering a continent or two in the meantime, but the former condition is quite unpleasant and the latter is frowned upon nowadays (unless...?) Nevertheless, at some point the median* woman needs to be content with having just about 2.1 children, and neither rad trads nor radfems seem to be able to achieve that.
*Technically it'd be the modal woman, but if that's too far off from the median then you get a constant churn of intra-group population replacement, which doesn't seem like a basis for a particularly stable society.
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The number is set largely because I married 9 years ago, had a kid close to every other year, and now we're getting older. If we had more time, maybe we could wait a couple more years until the oldest two can go without car seats, then have room in a minivan/suv for a 5th-6th. Don't really want to go full-minibus but there are a few families at my parish who have them.
The point is, 4 is over replacement, and I did 4 even with education, starting late (by historical comparisons), and modernity. If 3/4 of my kids marry and reproduce 2-5 kids each (with other children of large families), over time my great-grand children will inherit the Earth.
My Maternal Grandma had 12, but that was a modern miracle of formula and sudden access to antibiotics and vaccines. My Paternal Grandma had 5. My mom had 3 (but 2 miscarriages). My aunts and uncles save a couple all have 2-6 kids. (and the couple who don't seem to have health issues)
My husband is one of five. His siblings have all had 2-4 kids. While dating, one thing that drew us to each other was the idealization of having grown up in a family with "the right amount" of kids. Which to us was at least 3 or more.
If there is a "have kids despite modernity" gene, I have a high likelihood of it and have a good chance of passing it along. If this gene also encourages such people to be drawn to each other, all the better.
I have listened to many such claims from men and women. In the end, majority of those cases were just excuses. The thing is, that these people are not having problem with dating or finding a partner. They have problems with any relationships, period. A normal social life works with Dunbar number where you have 1-2 intimate friends, 5 very good and reliable friends that help you, 15 friends that invite you for birthdays etc, 50 or so members of your tribe - people with whom you can create groups when necessary, who vouch for you in a new job or who will group with you if you meet them on vacation. The rest are at least good colleagues or contacts that will let's say write you a linkedin review if asked. However the way you develop this network is the other way around, you meet people and then move them closer to more intimate circles. You do not hookup and spread your legs to randos from internet every other day like a lottery. Life partner will not fall on your head from the sky, you don't order him from dating app according to your excel checklist - it requires constant work cultivating social network and relationships.
Most often people who whine about how hard dating is have problem with any relationships. I know literal loners who do not know anybody with whom to go out for a beer or who would invite them for birthday party. Heck, they often do not even think to call their own mothers for months. They are socially inept, they have anxieties even thinking about calling a call center. No wonder that these hermits cannot find any dates. Who would want to go to such an empty and parched social circle - and more importantly where would they meet them? Ordering doordash for her permanent homeoffice? Just look at reddit and nonstop threads of thing like "how to meet people"? What the heck? You are 30 years old and do not know how to meet people and make acquaintances or friends? This is something that 5 years old do naturally on playground, what is next - asking how to wipe your ass and wash you hands? It is depressing.
If your daughter had healthy social circle, then for sure some of her friends would either be male, or her female friends would have their own brothers or their boyfriend's friends she could naturally meet during social occasions such as birthday parties or any other activity. This social circle serves for vetting via gossip as well as matchmakers of potential mates in similar social and cultural milieu. If she was competent in social situations, it would be no trouble to find somebody interesting to have relationship with. But most likely she is incompetent, just guessing from her stance that dating is "waste of time". What a stupid thing to say - every social interaction has potential to develop into friendship or even dating and romantic relationship. It is opposite of wasting time.
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I've found complaints along these lines always questionable; Women aren't better at all, they just waste their time in different ways, such as social media. These time wastes are also itself a function of loneliness and go down once in a relationship, and go down even further once you have kids. I can understand being worried about loser gamer guys in, say, low-end service industries, but if you're in STEM already there really is no reason at all to consider gaming of all things a dealbreaker.
In general, as a dad now looking at young adults, both women and men seem inappropriately immature for their age to me, stuck in a prolonged state of juvenility, mostly due to ultra-long & easy education, and a general lack of obligations and challenges. But the young women nevertheless feel themselves superior to the men no matter how similar they are and, worst of all, are supported and coddled by society in this view.
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Is it gaming as a hobby that is the problem, or is it gaming to the point where it consumes your life and responsibilities? The latter she can definitely get around just by meeting enough men. Even in STEM, far from everyone has that problem. The former is a lot more difficult given just how popular gaming is these days. While she can go to bars or clubs (lower odds of gamers as they tend to stay home), those are less than ideal for the purpose of looking for an actual relationship. Looking for them at part time jobs and active hobbies is the main other way I can imagine you would filter them out.
That said, if her problem is with gaming as a hobby, maybe she should reconsider her standards. If a man is responsible and takes care of the things he needs to do, then why is it so bad that he spends his downtime gaming? If you need a man who not only has his life well put together, but are also only interested in those whose hobbies are high status, then your dating pool quickly becomes very small.
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And you don't tell your son with money problems to get a job, because he just doesn't believe in working?
I'm not sure if I understand your point but, yes, it is very common for American fathers to tell their sons they're sure there are jobs out there that will hire them, but not have any actually useful information about looking for them.
His point is that @fribble should tell his daughter to go to church; whether she believes in God or not is irrelevant.
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I lucked out by meeting my husband at work. I also am more naturally prone to end up in male-dominiated spaces, so I basically was the only women in a department of 20+ men. I had multiple options and picked the best of the bunch. Not sure how I'd have done it if I was more attractive than autistic.
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Nine kids is historically almost unheard of outside of high infant mortality areas.
The Quebecois were pretty close for a while, and they were 'normal for the nineteenth century' religious rather than the literal Amish.
We were more religious than most of the northern US and western europe. Something like southern europe would be a good analogy, until the 60s, where we caught up all in one shot. Having as many children as possible was heavily encouraged by the church, and was even regularly discussed as an act of resistance against the anglos, it was called "la guerre des berceaux" or "the crib war". And ultimately, it is probably why we managed to avoid what we refer to as "louisianisation".
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I don't know what the infant mortality was in 19th century Quebec, but it basically doesn't matter. Even if it was low, such cultures are the exception rather than the norm over 200,000 years of human history.
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My father was one of ten, he had seven, my siblings have from three to eight kids. Neighbor in high school had 23, seventeen with the first wife, who subsequently expired as one does. Nearly everyone in their social circle has 6-12 kids. It's not nearly unheard of, you just gotta live in the sticks with the plain folk.
It is indeed practically unheard of at the country level.
Sure, but "unheard of" and "practically unheard of at the country level" are two vastly different statements.
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My grandmother had seven; my grandfather had eight (the seven he had with my grandma and one illegitimate daughter that was raised alongside her half-siblings). I'm a millennial. These sorts of numbers were common a few generations ago.
From "Dégénération" by Mes Aïeux:
Or, as the English version puts it:
I wasn't an accident, but my sister was.
Seven, much less fourteen children, surviving to adulthood on a regular basis has never been the case. Here is a time series for "effective" fertility rate. For the UK and the US it only goes back to the early 20th century, but for Sweden it goes back to 1751. This has never exceeded 3.5 children in any of these countries.
Obviously there are families that buck the trend, but that doesn't take away from what's normal and what isn't.
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One might posit that it is not education in general that makes women not want children, but rather what specific lessons they are taught at institutions for higher learning. If I were a social scientist not worried about career suicide, I would look into whether there is a causative relationship between exposure to feminist ideology and not wanting a family. It would certainly make sense that an ideology whose prime thinkers take pride in criticizing motherhood, degrading men, and advising women to sleep around and postpone marriage would result in fewer marriages and children.
True! I went in for Mechanical Engineering, ended up in Information Science because I couldn't handle fluid dynamics. Even Information Science had a bit of woo in it, but I mostly avoided the real mind-killing stuff.
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I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
This doesn't really sound like the problem is with education, but more that the mothers have zero time to do stuff outside their immediate duties. Given modern work hours and convenient household appliances, part of me wants to question that premise. But taken on its face, I would assume poorly educated mothers should face a similar problem where they want to their life to have meaning beyond kids and use whatever skillset they have to attain status, but just can't find the time and energy to do so. In other words, what you are pointing out is a problem with the overall structure of society, not women attaining skills and knowledge at higher education.
Otherwise, what is keeping the intellectual women from organizing book clubs, starting a podcast, or using their skillset to discuss the state of the world over a glass of wine?
The limiting factor is mostly sustained attention. I brought my kids over to my friends house the other day to play with her kids, and it was nice, I'd like to do it more often, but a child needed something about every 5 minutes. I'm sure this gets to be less frequent as the youngest children are older, but it has been about 7 years of this for us now, which is certainly not nothing. Her husband was looking forward to returning to his trades job after a month of parental leave, because it was less chaotic and allowed more sustained attention.
The parents arguing on Substack seem to consist of some parents who want to vent, often because they're playing on hard mode. Their husband is gone until evening, they have six children spaced very closely together, the youngest is a baby or toddler, and they're homeschooling the other ones. Then someone pipes up and says: you can just teach your children to not be like that. Arguing ensues.
Have you considered hanging out with families that have kids who are a bit older? Little kids love teenagers and tweens and will prefer to bother them instead. And girls don't really need to be coaxed to not complain about it.
Sure, if I manage to befriend anyone. We were friends before having kids. My mom started making new mom friends when my brother and I got into 4-H.
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I think you can. Theoretically it's possible. If we raised cattle the way parents are expected to raise kids, nobody would ever get to eat beef. Easing the regulations on parenting and education would help the supply issue.
If the birth rate issue was serious, we probably shouldn't have any child protective services at all, as it should be pretty trivial to demonstrate that the fear of legal repercussions for accidental child harm prevents the average non-abusive parents from adding another child. Exhibit 1 on travel-related regulations reducing birth rate:
When the bureaucrats run out of peasants to feed them they'll find out that you can't eat paper. It's odd how millenials who literally grew up with the libertarian revolution of the web, birthing such bureaucracy-killers as uber, youtube, amazon or onlyfans, still hold dear to letting dead people decide how their life should be lived.
Unironically.
Maybe. "You could do things that are now technically legal, but everyone in your social group will think you're a crappy mom" isn't much of a pitch to have more children.
But I'm currently having an annoying summer break because my youngest, not yet two, needs to be chased down and grabbed everywhere we go, I'm sure I'll feel better about him again in a month.
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The women in my family were also teachers with university degrees and 3-4 children, at least three generations back. Which is what stability looks like in an era of low infant mortality; it's not like society even wants a bunch of 15 child underclass families anyway.
I don't have a theory for this. None of them moved to IQ shredder places like San Francisco or New York, and when two of my cousins did, they have in fact not had any children.
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The basic problem as I see it is the "life script" of society. However you want to hammer it out, everything in our culture points people to certain patterns of behavior and consumption. The general trend as I see it is toward atomization and commercialization. Everything is a service, a product, a subscription. You don't have a guy for things, you have an app. You leave home to go to school, then to college, then you move to the big city to make your career so you can be a success so you can get the fuck out the city and move back to a small town except for a richer class of person. You know, the American Dream. If you're smart enough and work hard enough you'll have enough money to never need other people.
This script is terrible for family formation, for family incentivization, and for family retention, which is the best outcome. As noted, it's mostly hyperconservative groups (like my faith-healing cult family) that buck the trend. You have to reject modernity in at least this script. You can have a car and a job and a degree if you want, but you can't base your life on Sex & the City and expect happy families or positive fertility as a group outcome. You have to value different things. You have to value family, you have to live near family, you have to rely on your family and that means you have a lot of people relying on you for things. The script calls this "oppression". People who value different things see it as a cheat code to get to the end.
You don't have to leave home and go on a thirty-year career as a stranger everywhere you live. You don't have to wait until retirement to live on a small farm in the country, or suburbia. You don't have to live far from family. No one is forcing you, and yet at scale, no one does this but the very religious.
This is because the script is how you get into the middle classes with the fantasy of making it into the ruling class. Cut yourself off from family, denounce religion, value academic rank and material success over community engagement. Join one of the mystery cults of the middle class; feminism, LBGTQ+, third worldism, marxism, climate hysteria, etc. etc. Ever notice all of these movements are hostile to religion and fertility? The one thing they can all agree they want less of is married majority couples at positive fertility.
You don't have to, but you give up huge potential future earnings by not doing so. "Move to the big city for economic opportunity only to see your fertility plummet" has been a thing for as long as cities have existed.
Exactly. If you value money, you should shred your fertility and make that cash so you can have a really nice nursing home.
Or you could get the same result a lot poorer, but the incompetents taking care of you are at least your family instead of illegal dominicans.
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Its the women. Any bottleneck on reproduction is almost entirely going to be defined by the population of reproductive-age women and their behavior. Phones, opportunity costs, education levels, loss of religion, literally ALL of those have demonstrably higher impact on female behavior than male. Given that we can't raise TFR without female participation (barring a future technological fix) seems silly to look elsewhere for solutions.
The other thing about the Fertility crisis is that it reads as an individual problem if you're unaware of the larger context.
Its difficult to think your individual failures are responsible for summer days getting warmer, or for icebergs disappearing. Although the political class really wants you to feel personally responsible, so some people do feel have such feeling.
But if you're having difficulty finding a partner to reproduce with, after giving it the ol' college try for a while, you will assume it has more to do with your local area, errors in your approach, or maybe you're not spending enough money or need to practice charisma, game, rizz, get in better shape, whatever to advance.
But digging into the stats and seeing its a struggle for the majority of the population, from a broad range of backgrounds, are experiencing the same issue and it does read as a larger, structural issue over which you have little control. And indeed, your ATTEMPTS to fix it will fail insofar as it increases competition in your local area.
I say again: Individual attempts to 'adapt' will make things worse.
Thats an unfortunate irony with the current dating 'meta.' The more men throw time, money, and effort into trying to reproduce (in direct competition with each other) the worse the overall equilibrium occurs because of how women adapt to this competitive environment. Having lots of people adopting individual strategies to try and get ahead makes the larger situation worse. Its a death spiral, in that regard.
Coordination around climate fixes is VERY VERY HARD, but if someone takes certain rational individual efforts to address it, that generally does not make the situation as a whole worse for everyone. Using fewer fossil fuels, reducing personal consumption has few externalities. Hell, if you think the crisis is inevitable, moving to a hardened bunker in an area safer from the damage doesn't hurt anybody else. Still, defection is very easy.
And on the flip side, of course, if you're convinced you don't want kids anyway, fertility rates won't register as an ongoing concern unless you're reading certain books and realize what a sub-replacement TFR means for globalized trade.
I do not think that it is that simple. A man who wants kids and does not find a partner locally certainly has options. He can import a mail-order bride. He can just pay a third-worlder for a surrogate pregnancy and raise his kid as a single dad. Even if China managed to get artificial wombs to work tomorrow, I don't think that half of the single men would embrace fatherhood overnight.
We used to live in a society where women were willing to take on a lot of hardships and give up a lot of opportunities to have kids, and men were mostly bankrolling the family. However, I do not believe that this is The Rightful Order Of Things.
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Sure. That's basically tautological, in that only women can have babies.
Much less clear. To pick one example, men secularised first and fastest over the 20th century.
The birth rate collapse isn't being caused by women being too picky. It's caused by less coupling, which is in turn caused by people socialising much less due to screens.
And yet, the discussion centers on men's failures, when by the precise definition you're pointing out, cratering tfr is a 'failure' on womens' part. That's my whole point, it makes no sense to add pressure to men as a 'solution.'
Society refuses to even consider any solution that might upset women in the slightest.
Men were always less religious on average, that was just standard understanding.
Until recently. Somehow this also coincides with various denominations allowing female pastors.
Once again, "loss of religion" very obviously impacts one gender more than the other.
Its the women.
Errm, no it doesn't? The three theses OP mentioned are neither about men nor women. Academic discussion doesn't focus on men (for the reason that the TFR data is mostly about women) and if you go somewhere like /r/natalism there's much more discussion about women than men, because women are the ones who have the babies.
Honestly, I have no idea where you got the idea that birth rate discussions focus on men. They really, really don't.
Throw a couple more 'reallys' in there and I still won't find that believeable.
"The Missing Men of the American Marriage Market."
and
Emphasis mine.
Two months ago.
"No one hates marriage. Women are just demanding better men."
Last month.
The "weaponized incompetence" meme has gotten some play too:
‘Weaponized incompetence’ can harm relationships. Here’s how to counter it.
Last December.
I have literally, in my entire life, never seen an article published claiming that female incompetence was ever to blame for relationship failure. Indeed, the mainstream narrative is that women are incorrectly viewed as incompetent as a barrier to their advancement.
These are extraordinarily easy to find. THAT'S where I 'got the idea.'
That's where all the other men are getting said idea too, just for the record. Its widely noticed, I just like to call it out.
Can you name a single policy proposal in any Western Country (hell, try non-Western) that tries to improve TFR by increasing restrictions on female behavior?
I can point out several that are paying women directly or otherwise offering bribes/incentives to women to get married and have kids.
China HAS recently tried some restrictions on women, funny enough.
How about if we look at objective source rather than you just pulling up some articles that annoyed you?
Google Trends data. Birth rates men vs birth rates women for the past five years. Searches for birth rates women are about four times as common. 'The discussion' about birth rates is predominantly about women, obviously. Always has been.
The fact that you can find lots of articles about women complaining about their relationships (also something they've been doing since time immemorial) isn't evidence to the contrary.
I can't name a single policy from any country, western or eastern, that tries to improve TFR by increasing restrictions on male or female behaviour (except in the roundabout sense that baby bonuses are going to be a net loss tax-wise for childless people). The only thing that comes to mind is abortion restriction in Poland or various US red states, which is a big restriction on female behaviour, although advocates don't tend to justify the policies by talking about birth rates.
Do you have an 'objective source' showing there was any significant impact on female behavior when 'various US red states' restricted abortion?
Just wondering.
I've no idea because I don't really care. I was only giving it as an example of policies which, even though they restrict women's actions, aren't designed around increasing birth rates. Because there aren't any illiberal policies directed at either men or women designed to increase birth rates.
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That would make sense, considering only women can give birth? The only info you would get out of searching for "birth rates men" is how men historically have less children or things about the gender ratio. I don't know that google trends is proving your point.
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Has the west tried restrictions on men, either? This could easily be the west’s preference for the carrot over the stick.
How precisely would you describe the male experience of the #metoo era?
Didn't we make a successful, upstanding male with an illustrious career go through a struggle session over a rape accusation from close to 30 years prior, and litigated fully in public, to the point he had to give an emotional entreaty in his own defense to finally get through to the audience?
What do you think the takeaway for males was, from that?
Wasn't exactly a freeing, empowering event for most men, even the non-predatory ones.
Politically and culturally, any move that elevated women almost necessarily was a de facto restriction on men when it came to, e.g. scarce, limited available slots for college admissions or jobs.
Anyway, here's a post from 5 months ago where I pointed out how the deck's been stacked against young men:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3493/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/403533?context=8#context
And the article that spurred discussion:
https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-lost-generation/
You responded to it back then, so you've seen this argument before.
Corporate policies and social norms have been slanted against young men for over a decade now, I think there's sufficient evidence of 'restrictions on men' that we've tried.
And of course TFR has continued to plummet over this time even as more benefits accrue to single ladies across the West.
Its the women.
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Literally the entire alimony regime limits the ability of men to reproduce (unless they go deadbeat, which perversely encourages the stupidest and poorest to breed over the intelligent and conscientious.) Talk about 'splinter in thine eye, sequoia redwood in mine'! The health insurance market is a transfer of wealth from men to women. The entire DEI structure is a transfer of wealth from men to women. Social security - from demographics and life expectancy - is a transfer from young men to old women. The west has not tried a bachelor tax, or literally enslaving men. But they very may well do so, in the near future!
But the most timid of social considerations (well, maybe women should consider family to be important) immediately gets shouted down. Not even the most reactionary of radicals has something like a 'female tax' on their agenda. Or even lifting the extraordinary privileges the feminists have given themselves. And you say that we should try more restrictions on men?
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I think the argument here would be that religious men are mostly pretty similar to secular men, while religious women behave very differently from secular women. It's higher impact on women than it is on men.
Yes, one must certainly ask what have women adopted in the place of standard religiosity.
I think its pretty obvious.
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I think that both problems are global and local at the same time. Climate Change can be adapted to locally or even individually - just move to a place less impacted by it. Countries can adapt to different climates, hundreds of millions of people in Middle-East, India and Southeast Asia already live in environments with prolonged wet-bulb situation of deadly heat+humidity. And they adapted and survive. The same with demographic crisis, you can move, you can create your own community and move over to self-sustaining or community system when the social situation inevitably collapses and autarky will rule the day.
Both of these also have unpredictable global impact such as migration, wars etc. But guess what also has unpredictable impact: migration, wars and plagues and the rest of it. We had two world wars even without Climate Change - although arguably both were brought about by demographic boom and relative adjustment of power of various countries. The same goes for current issues - for instance since end of WW2 the population of Africa increased seven fold from 200 million to 1.6 billion. This by itself causes strain on resources, there are much more severe issues than just climate change. Even regular environmental mismanagement and resource scarcity can create destabilization and huge issues.
I agree with KaiserBauch, there is not much to do other than to adapt. But this is not something new - imagine being born lets say in Austria in 1895. You had bad luck, your life saw such unpredictable changes and so much misery but also wonders that was impossible to prepare. The best you could do is to cultivate skills, social networks and self-sufficient mindset that could carry you and your family over in unpredictable situation when everything around you broke down and you could relay only on yourself, your friends&family and your ability to bribe and navigate the situation.
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One thing I point out about religious people in general is that they’re much less into hyper-individualism and hedonism than modern secular society. They view themselves as part of a much larger whole. A religious Jew sees himself as part of a group a tribe and a nation. A religious Christian sees himself as part of the Body of Christ. A secular progressive especially as you get into the far left end of things is much more an individualistic person concerned mostly about their own interests and lifestyle.
Babies are actually a pretty big lifestyle change. You cannot doa lot of things that single people or DINKs do. No staying out late, no spontaneous trips, no getting drunk every weekend or partying. You have to prioritize the baby and its needs. You have to make sure you have a good enough job to provide. You can’t just quit because you want to because you are responsible for the baby. This isn’t something that would be appealing to a hedonist. It’s not as much fun as partying and traveling and drinking and so on.
You’re suggesting that the far left, i.e. actual Communists, is too individualistic?
And that Christians are more collectivist not because of any particular commandment or selection effect, but because they have a particular conception of their kinship with Christ.
I think you’re overselling it in much the same way as Protestants used to oversell Catholic obeisance to the Pope.
There have been communitarian Communists, but nearly all modern Communists are out for themselves. They're not looking forward to the glorious future where we all pull together; they're looking to the glorious feast they would like to make for themselves of "the rich".
If you say so.
Do you hold the same skepticism for every other movement, or is it just the ones you hate?
In the case of Communists, I only have to look so far as to observe their rhetoric.
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Im not talking about politics, but culture, the way you think about the actual humans living near you — your family, your friends, your neighbors, etc. communists generally take a sort of dim view of communalism in the sense of people actually showing up in their life to help people who need it. A Christian community will give to charity quite often, they’ll run ministries to help people, they’ll show up to clean up after storms, and so on. In their personal lives, Christians tend to prioritize or at least consider how things that they want to do or want to avoid doing affects other people. A Christian woman will often choose to stay home with the kids. Not necessarily because her hedonistic desires really lean in the direction of “I an intelligent woman who can outwork a lot of men somehow pine after the life of changing diapers and cooking and keeping house”, I don’t think that’s true. They do so out of the sense that being a housewife is good, and good for the rest of the family and especially the kids.
Communists and the far left tend to believe that people need to be forced to do good things. I suspect they lack personal experience with communities that are more communal.
They literally subverted the word as usual: there is LGBT community and BIPOC community and Disability community and Neurodivergent community etc. This permeated the language even into mundane things like knitting community or running community etc. Literally everything is a community including people who don't want to be in that "community", except for an actual community. In an interesting paradox, community encompasses large collective, but at its core it is just an individual and often forced label.
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My experience is the opposite. Communists (the real life activists that is) often have experience with retreats or even small communities in which the participants would organize labor between them, and each person would do their fair share of work. They assume that this could be transferred onto larger society if only the boundaries of class and money were to be removed.
The issue they keep running into is that this communal lifestyle doesn't scale to the size of a modern city. When you no longer know everyone, it is much harder to care about them. Once you stop caring about everyone, it becomes harder to care as much about your duties. Add to that the fear that other people are abusing your work ethic to make bank or live in luxury. You have no way of knowing if someone on disability actually deserves the money. In a small group, you know that resources are given fairly to everyone, because everyone knows each other. A larger system is much easier to cheat, people suspect each other more easily, and thus you end up needing some controls.
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Plenty of Christian women who are educated and intelligent consider themselves fortunate to be able to stay home with their children rather than doing their duty, because this is a very common female preference. There is probably a very strong difference in the attitudes of Christian men on the subject, though- in real life thé man is typically the partner more opposed to the woman staying home.
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Arguably yes. Communists don't so much share as demand that the state share on everyone's behalf. Historically, communists were keen on dissolving any social bonds outside of the state, such as the family or churches.
The fact that religious people are higher trust and give more to charity is indisputable from the social science data. Whether or not that is strictly theological or due to more general social processes (e.g. meeting the same group of people every week) doesn't really change that.
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Interestingly, there are real differences in behavior between Catholic and Protestant countries, even when these are very similar countries(eg Germany and Austria), and Catholics having a less individualistic conception of their relationship with God is a very well supported mechanism.
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You personally having four kids won't stop your kids growing up in a society with an unsustainable dependency ratio, or (if this scenario turns out to be relevant) a society that has too small a population to defend itself against outsiders.
The pro-life movement in the US claims to be motivated partly by pronatalism, and is definitely in the business of coercing people on behalf of their unborn children. (The MoreBirths X account claims it hasn't worked, but this came as a surprise to almost everyone). I have seen sprawl zoning promoted as pronatalist policy, which is also coercive about how you use your own property.
You personally can have an extra kid and then rub him in the faces of childless friends- statistically, babies are contagious.
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Speaking of my experience in Canada: it never seems to matter that we can't even get the "other people get along". The argument seems to boil down to "we have to do something!" and the idea that if Canada did do something, it would inspire the Gentiles . After they have been so converted, I suppose you can then direct them towards whatever policy makes sense but you must first lead by example.
The inherent arrogance in the argument is not commented on.
Also, from the article:
What does he think has been happening in developed countries over the last few years? They have all been trying and failing to adapt. Yes, everyone can get together and do this. But it's a collective action problem precisely because everyone will not just vote themselves less right at the moment they're most vulnerable so they can die alone in their hot, AC-free bed in a hellish nursing home. Adapting is subject to the same political constraints as attempting a serious fix of the issue.
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