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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Defund higher education, focusing on female dominated degrees with little human capital value (eg. slash funding for psychology and education degrees to near zero, but things like medicine or veterinary are fine). Defund 3rd tier and below schools hard across the board, hopefully closing as many as possible altogether. Goals is to get people, and especially women, into adulthood as soon as possible.

Introduce very high tax benefits for married families with small children where mother is not working. Pair this with cuts in maternity leave benefits, might be needed to do these covertly to not increase uproar. Eg. cap the income paid out by social security, make it possible for small businesses to fire the employees who took the leave, in exchange for eg. making the paid leave period longer for the fired mothers, and restarting the paid period when another child is born during the leave. In short, the goal here is to make sure that get as many mothers out of employment as possible, so that they don’t have it lined up and waiting for them. When returning to work is not trivial as showing up at the end of the leave, you might as well have a second and third child, and only go back to work after you meet your fertility goals.

While we’re at it, high benefits and support to young married couples. Goal is to encourage people to marry early. This is the hardest part, not sure how to get good ROI here.

Covertly defund childcare subsidies for infants, and increase costs of private childcare by regulations. Freeze annual budget increases, regulate lower children-to-caretaker ratio to increase cost, increase credential requirements, compliance costs, reporting requirement etc. The idea is to make childcare by anyone other than mother rather silly and uneconomical choice for most people.

Overall, the guiding idea is to make people start having kids much earlier, and once they take the plunge, make having a second kid much smaller marginal cost/effort compared to returning to work ASAP. People should plan to first meet their fertility goals, before they start building their careers, because there is little to no support to having kids while you are having a career.

If you make motherhood and career as incompatible as possible don't you run the obvious risk of lots of women choosing careers over motherhood? You'd end up with lots of educated women disincentivized from having kids since once they do their career is over/paused until their kids are teenagers since they can't hire a nanny affordably. Low education women are more willing to do that, but the issue is that people tend to marry people of similar education and you'd have to give pretty massive subsidy to young couples for a low education man to be able to support multiple dependents comfortably.

I'd be kind of worried about a society where all the high income/prestige careers are occupied by childless educated couples and low education married couples with multiple dependents where women can't divorce or else they're impoverished.

Yes, I do, but this is already a status quo. Fertility is already lowest in the top quartile of income distribution, only recovering among the very wealthiest. In fact, I think the current situation is worse: many women do not realize that they are facing this choice, and implicitly choose career over fertility, often realizing this very late. Women’s stated desired fertility is, on average, way higher than their actual realized fertility, and even if you chalk some of it up as social desirability bias, I believe that if given an explicit choice between fertility and career, enough will choose fertility to keep the TFR high.

That’s also why it is so crucial to slash higher education and promote early marriage: if you’re adult by 19 instead of 23, you might as well meet your fertility goals before you start your career. Have the 2-3 kids you want early, so that by the time you’re 26-27, the youngest is 4, and so is not such a huge energy and time drain. A bonus point is that it makes you more attractive for employers, because you won’t disappear for long maternity leave, as you already have that behind you. Most of higher education is worthless anyway, especially the degrees that most women are getting. This is also why tax benefits for married men with non-working wives are so important, to make delaying their own career more palatable for highly intelligent and capable women.

Point is, women will still be able to have careers in the model I propose, they will just start them 2-4 years later, after they meet their other important goals in life. Goal is to make the choice more explicit, rather than lying to them by pretending that they can put off having family and children for decades, and still have it all anyway.

That’s also why it is so crucial to slash higher education and promote early marriage: if you’re adult by 19 instead of 23, you might as well meet your fertility goals before you start your career.

Will you do this for men as well? Because if you're a young woman with what society considers no education, you're not going to have a career when you're thirty and the kids are old enough to be in school most of the day. You're going to force women to choose between "do I want to leave school at 18, be pregnant at 19, and have no life until maybe I'm 40, or do I want to get a degree and a guaranteed good job so I don't have to depend on a man in order to make my living". And the choice may not work out - why do you think even lower-class women are working? They're not all single mothers, they didn't go to college, but in today's economy in order to have a house and kids you need two incomes. Making a family dependent on a single breadwinner requires making it that the breadwinner can earn enough to support a family. Unless you're Elon Musk, are we seeing that today?

And all the suggestions here are about forcing women to become brood mares. It takes two to tango - if a man doesn't want to be tied down with a dependent wife and five kids starting when he turns twenty, how are you going to get men to get married and become fathers? Cut off their choices too by making it impossible to get an education, reducing paid leave as much, and confining them to blue collar/manual labour work.

Because I can tell you this much: this won't work. Employers want 'productive' workers, which means ones who will make a lot of money for the company. The cleaner or the shop assistant isn't that employee so far as they're concerned, and that's the calibre of employee when you're talking about "graduated high school, immediately started popping out babies, has no education or qualification and hasn't ever worked outside the home in a full-time adult job":

A bonus point is that it makes you more attractive for employers, because you won’t disappear for long maternity leave, as you already have that behind you.

"do I want to leave school at 18, be pregnant at 19, and have no life until maybe I'm 40, or do I want to get a degree and a guaranteed good job so I don't have to depend on a man in order to make my living"

I do not doubt that many, perhaps even large majority of women today think in these exact terms. This is, however, not a frame of mind that necessarily follows from the assumptions I described above, but rather is a result of relentless cultural change, spearheaded by progressive activism. The reason I believe so is that only half a century ago, huge majority of women did, in fact, leave school at 18, median woman was married by 23, and very few had "being able to make a living independently of a partner" as even a secondary goal. As far as I can tell, large majority of women at the time was completely fine depending on their husband, and I believe (based on my personal experience) that this arrangement was better for their emotional well being (as long as, of course, the men kept their side of the bargain).

This is the crucial problem: the culture has changed, and it is simply hostile to the patterns of behavior conducive to forming stable, fertile families at a very fundamental level. Unlike /u/DaseindustriesLtd in his comment, I didn't even bother trying to come up with ways to change this culture, because, for one thing, I'm not really good at this, but even more importantly, I think that the setting of "populist center-right leader of a country, with a hostile progressive Cathedral that cannot be dismantled" makes a chance of successfully pulling off a cultural victory rather slim. Such complex programs of shaping narrative to make over entire social perception is simply not something that populist (or, for that matter, any) right is effective at. That's why what I propose can be easily instituted with a stroke of a pen, and doesn't require building entire self-perpetuating propaganda machine. This is also why so much of what I propose would be necessary to do covertly: if people understood what's actually going on, they'd likely oppose it, even if on some level they agreed with the ultimate goal.

But, yes, what about men. Well, they should also marry early, but not as young as women, maybe 2-3 years older, to give them a few more years to get more settled into their occupation, so that they can confidently provide for their new families, and take pride in it. The newlyweds should feel ready to have kids immediately,rather than put it off for a few more years to stabilize their economic situation.

in today's economy in order to have a house and kids you need two incomes

I simply do not buy it, sorry. I grew up in a society where two incomes bought you much less actual consumption than one regular job brings you in the States today. Now, if you said that these two incomes are needed in today's culture, I'd be in total agreement.

Observe, however, how all my proposals are designed to make two incomes simply not worth it, or harder to benefit from. High tax benefits for husbands of stay-at-home mothers mean enormous marginal tax on a second income. Cap on maternity leave income is another large marginal tax, and so is extension of leave upon birth of extra kids. Artificially high cost of childcare services means that most women will spend more on daycare than they'll earn from the second job.

Cut off their choices too by making it impossible to get an education, reducing paid leave as much, and confining them to blue collar/manual labour work.

In my proposal, I already cut tertiary education to minimum. Regardless of whether we condition the remainder on marriage/parenthood status, I don't think that this will push the needle much, given that this should affect only small fraction of people who actually enter universities. Now that you suggest it, however, I do think that this is an interesting and possibly viable idea: make universities expensive, but offer big scholarships to married parent students. I am also totally for diminishing the social status and economic perspectives of unmarried, childless men: I think strongly progressive income taxation for childless individuals would be highly successful here, but it might be hard to implement in the given setting. American cathedral has successfully diminished the status of white men in corporate setting through legal bullying based on Civil Rights, and supported by the federal government, but I suspect the setting does not allow us to run similar program.

The cleaner or the shop assistant isn't that employee so far as they're concerned, and that's the calibre of employee when you're talking about "graduated high school, immediately started popping out babies, has no education or qualification and hasn't ever worked outside the home in a full-time adult job":

My personal experience in the academia and the corporate worlds, alongside with general research into the problem, has led me to believe that formal education and qualifications are in themselves worth very, very little, and are only useful for the employers to the extent they serve as a signal of the latent quality of the individual. Remember, America has built industrial economy, ran Manhattan project and sent a man to the moon when less than 10% of the population had a college degree.

I think you greatly overestimate the value of the higher education, and judge its value based on comparing people who today obtain it with those who don't. This is a huge mistake. Today, anyone even remotely intelligent and capable gets a college degree, because it is stupid not to, but in a world I propose, most of them would just be intelligent, capable and productive immediately in their jobs, instead of being artificially delayed by 4+ years. This is not a pipe dream, this is the world of yesterday.

Might this also make careers in education attractive to top quintile women again?

I've 4 school aged children and the quality of elementary school teachers seems lower than my or my wife's experience.

None of them play the piano or other instrument, none are fluent in a second language.

If you make motherhood and career as incompatible as possible don't you run the obvious risk of lots of women choosing careers over motherhood?

No, lots of women have historically done economically-productive work while having kids. In fact, it gets easier to do so the more kids you have, as the elder can be entrusted with child supervision responsibilities over the younger.

What is really messing around with people is the extremely-extended adolescence that expanded access to tertiary education has wrought (well, it might actually just be the uniquely-weird position of the Millennial generation, which first had to deal with a glutted post-secondary job market thanks to the Boomers and offshoring, and then had to deal with a massively depressed post-tertiary job market due to the Great Recession, and so has been seriously behind in going through life's maturation steps like moving out, getting access to promotions and professional networks, and the ability to amass assets like housing stock.)

Yeah there's vast economies of scale with children which makes the current situation a bit weird, both in the sense of within a singular family unit and within an extended family it's easier to conduct childcare when you've got a bunch of cousins reproducing at about the same time.

Well, that assumes that extended families stay in generally the same place, and what with the youth flooding into the megalopoli to seek white collar prestige jobs I don't know that's a sound assumption anymore.