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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   27174 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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Just saw this geographic fertility map of Turkey on reddit. The statistics were released yesterday:

https://old.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ctccjz/turkish_fertility_rate_20162023_comparison_oc/

Population map for comparison (urban rate is a whopping 75%):
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/Visualizing-Population-Density-in-Turkey-Full-Size.html

In 7 short years FTR crashed from 2.11 in 2016 to 1.5 in 2023.

https://ilkha.com/english/health-life/turkiyes-birth-rate-declines-despite-ranking-high-in-europe-393736

Women get children later (average is now 29 years; which is older than in the US (27 years in 2021)) and there is an increase in one-person households (14.4% -> 19.7%)

And despite President Erdoğan being more powerful and way more conservative (out of touch?) than other leaders:

https://www.turkishminute.com/2024/05/16/turkey-records-dramatic-decline-in-its-fertility-rate-official-data/

The alarming decline in Turkey’s birth rate comes against the backdrop of frequent calls from President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who advises families to have at least three children to boost the country’s population, drawing the ire of feminist groups and women’s rights associations. He also advises “Muslim families” not to use birth control or family planning and opposes C-sections as well, angering the same organizations.

The solution is simple. If the state wants women to give up their careers, their education, their financial independence so that they will have and raise children then the state needs to adequately compensate those women for what it is asking them to give up. No state on earth is prepared, or could afford, to do this, which is why functionally all efforts to increase fertility fail.

We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.

Why could this work historically? Partially because much more of women's labor was needed inside the home (and so unavailable for work outside the home) and partially because there were actual legal restrictions on the work women (especially married women) could do outside the home.

There are other things important than just GDP. But even from that perspective, it is better from a non short-term point of view for women to have children and careers and sacrifice the later to an extend for the first. Society will be richer and not poorer in that case, as there won't be declining number of human capital. This applies especially in some of the richer countries with high human capital level of population. For an individual company of course it doesn't benefit them for their female workers to work less, so there might be a certain tragedy of the commons.

Actually women can live long enough that we can easily get both children and economic productivity from them, even if children are the bigger priority. I don't see what is wrong with mothers spending some more time at home while their children are younger. The cost vs benefit is in favor of sacrificing some career years. There are in fact women who do what I suggest already, just less than they existed, in part due to the relative decline of male wages. A minimum painless thing to be done that wouldn't be sufficient to reverse things but is a start should be to stop any pro female AA policies.

Additionally, it isn't as if other lifestyle aspects aren't eating time spend raising children. Trying to promote childbirth as a current issue, in a hardcore enough manner and focusing on influencing cultural preferences would probably work. And it is better alternative than doing nothing. This is something that is going to result in supporting projects and individuals and groups that are pro-natalist and benefiting them over those opposing it and then selling it as a lifestyle. Not everyone but plenty of people, especially women seem to be able to get onboard with projects promoted aggressively and consistently enough by the goverment and media and various NGOs. Why not use such forces to promote something actually good for a change?

I mean, were talking like 0.5-1 more kids per woman, it isn't that big a change. We've lived in that world and with the same FLPR.

Also, the state doesn't necessarily have to compensate people, it could punish them instead. Currently we only have (tiny) carrots but perhaps we should introduce some sticks as well and possibly increase the carrots for those that actually contribute until we reach something sustainable.

Or try any number of other ideas a Instead of throwing up our hands and declaring that we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.

I mean, it's not that big of a change, like, numerically. I bet it would be a pretty big change in the lives of the women having the children. It's true the state could punish people but, being a liberal, I am pretty averse to that as a strategy.

Indeed. You can't have one half of a child. If you have a child, it's at least one. (I'm so smart, right?) It's a relatively small change in the life of the mother only if she has 3 or more children already, assuming there are zero health complications, which is not realistic in many cases sadly.

Three to four can be bigger than two to three, because that's when you have to buy a mini van, at least. Or one of those huge extra row SUVs, but it's pretty difficult to access kids in the back row to help with buckles and whatnot.

The normal sedan can accommodate two car seats at the back, but not three (I remember reading a surprisingly informative post about this whole issue on the old subreddit). Also, two double-bed rooms are no longer sufficient during a family vacation with three children instead of two. So I'd argue the big change is from two to three in terms of effect on the whole family.

Looks up relevant laws.

Well, I'm still not buying another vehicle, so will apparently just have to live in mild violation of the law for a year and a half.

My friends with many children(I have many friends with normal-for-tradcaths family sizes) say that they have to buy special slim fit car seats to use a sedan for three children. I don’t know where these car seats are sold, and also wonder why slim car seats aren’t simply the default due to their occupants being, definitionally, small.

Of course no one is actually going to question a mother about the age of her children if there’s any room for doubt at all; my friends who do that pretty much all have 3 under five or something like that.

The normal sedan can accommodate two car seats at the back, but not three. (I remember reading a surprisingly informative post about this whole issue on the old subreddit.)

Study

We estimate that car-seat laws prevented only 57 car-crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.

LessWrong article

In the context of Sweden, which has very generous parental leave benefits, an extra child per woman would amount to ~0.75 lost work years per person over their lifetime.

Personally, going from 1->2->3 kids werent big changes and I feel like I share the parenting equally with my wife. The big change was going from 0->1.

I agree that the opportunity costs are much lower if women work while also raising kids but I've been operating on the assumption people want women to become full time homemakers, which I think is much more disruptive. I do not have any kids of my own but your experience makes sense to me. I'm under the impression there are a lot of up-front cost for kid 1 that can probably be re-used for subsequent kids (toys, clothes, etc).

Things like toys and clothes aren't that expensive in rich countries. Time and personal attention are. The main upfront cost is not having the freedom to go do adult things without a babysitter, and having to plan everything around the children. It's a sunk cost, and the second child might play with the first, slightly lowering the attention burden at some point in the future. On the other hand, if the parents are paying for daycare, that adds up very quickly, and to have a fourth child, parents have to change vehicle class, which is not just expensive, but can also be quite inconvenient.

Why would you assume that? Or are you talking about people here specifically?

I think people concerned about TFR often advocate it as a mode of social organization and I had received some other replies downthread suggesting it was the way we ought to be going to boost TFR. So, mostly people here I think.

generates more economic value

Actually we can’t say this. At least not what it really denotes. Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems. Stressed and older women and women who do not breastfeed correctly or nurture correctly are more likely to have children with autism. Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent, and the productivity gains from the very intelligent are outsized. Although there is not a study on this next one, it’s likely that stressed working women lead to unhappier, less healthy husbands, which cuts the productivity of all men, while also sapping their political participation due to household multitasking.

It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers. For the best of both worlds, restrict the lowest stress occupations to young women. And then if we really cared about wealth (what economic productivity ought to denote) we can ban makeup and so on. It’s truly dystopian to think that there are double doctor households where the male doctor is more stressed because he doesn’t have a homemaker to rely on, the female doctor (an intelligent woman who you want having lots of children) is delaying childbirth and then having only 1-2 less healthy and less intelligent children with a high rate of autism, and at the end of the day they are both unhappy despite being “economically productive”, and the naive economists think this is somehow a net gain for the country because their profession is narrow minded.

Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems

I presume by this you mean "mothers being stressed causes their children to be less healthy and less intelligent" rather than "those women who are likely to have less intelligent, less healthy children are also more likely to be stressed". Do you have a source and an estimate of the effect size? Based on the sorts of things I've seen (example), the effects exist but are usually quite small. For example, the highest effect size I found in that study was r=0.16 for maternal exposure to a natural disaster, which explains about 2.5% of the variance in outcomes -- and most of that effect size came from a single n=20 study about an ice storm, so I expect the effect size in practice is even smaller than that.

Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent

I expect this is almost the entire effect in practice.

It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers.

From a purely economic viewpoint I doubt that. I think the opportunity cost of being a homemaker is genuinely higher now than it used to be. Also the benefits are both distributed across society, and the benefits of choosing the homemaker route are not as legible as they could be to the women making that decision.

I am not sure if a 40-day ice storm can be compared with years of chronic stress occurring pre-pregnancy, during pregnancy, and in the post-pregnancy years crucial for childhood development. Table 2 in your study shows a .24 effect size for cognitive development due to ice storms however. What I do is plug in “maternal stress [serious problem]” into google scholar and consider those results. I have never come across a study that attempted to unify all of the different provlems caused by stressed mothers. We have:

The above are for prenatal stress, and so don’t factor for stress during motherhood, breastfeeding technique, extent of breastfeeding (huge differences in yr+ exclusive feeding and gradual weening)

I read him to mean older mothers are likely to have less intelligent kids because egg and sperm quality degrades as humans age. Not sure if it is true though it seems plausible. I’m not sure I would really trust the science here since the result is clearly politically salient.

Even if none of that is true, you’re also dealing with the added costs associated with outsourcing child-rearing. Daycare generally costs enough that the second income doesn’t go as far as it would on paper.

I am not sure where your quote is coming from, I didn't say anything about "more" economic value compared to some other state of affairs.

In any case if your argument is correct it suggests my proposal would be a Kaldor-Hicks improvement. We can simply tax away part of the social gains of raising children and remit it to the women doing the raising and we will all come out better off. Let's get it done!

I think the argument is that it increases overall utility; not money. So whilst kaldor hicks efficient it may be hard to compensate the losers with a tax on the winners if there is less pecuniary wealth.

Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.

It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.

Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.

Social media turned a not insignificant faction of young girls into Hamas lovers so I would bet on social media being able to make young girls obsessed with cute little humans.

Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.

So I've heard a sort of interesting argument regarding these incentives in general. What they are mostly designed to do anywhere they are enacted is convince couples in stable marriages with one child to have a second one. That's it. It's because it's the one incentive the majority of citizens are still willing to support, because just handing out wads of cash to women for birthing babies isn't politically acceptable anywhere. So of course they won't end up doing much, because the people they're meant to help are not the majority to begin with.

Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline

Have they tried economic incentives that are at least a 2 digit percentage of the opportunity cost of having additional children?

Hungary spends 5% of gdp on boosting fertility. So yes they cross that threshold. Without verifying that number it’s going to be very hard for governments to go any higher than 5% of gdp. Countries need to do a lot more things than subsidize fertility.

https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-populist-right-want-you-make-more-babies-viktor-orban/

What they need to do is guarantee mothers the same career income they would otherwise have. So, eg. if a female doctor aged 28 has three children, she receives $2m in cash over a certain number of years. If a shop assistant of the same age has three children, she receives only $200k. No country subsidises kids to the extent that an even moderately successful woman would notice the difference.

This wouldn't work at all, women would just get whatever degree would "pay the most" and then have 3 kids starting at 22. It would bankrupt the system in no time.

It wouldn't happen if the guaranteed subsidy to mothers was calculated according to their actual income before conception.

Medical school places are limited and handed out based on intelligence and conscientiousness, that isn’t a flaw with the system at all.

I can imagine the admissions scandals already. It's already bad enough that people think that there's a vague but strong-enough link between getting a degree from a particular school/program and expected lifetime earnings. Can you imagine if there was a literal government-backed guarantee of a multi-million dollar payoff?

And after admissions, hooo buddy. I went to school in what was considered a difficult field of study. A couple other students stick out in my memory as being relevant here. I remember right after one guy gave his capstone senior presentation; it was atrocious. Just hilariously bad. By that point, I had a pretty decent relationship with the assistant department chair, and we were talking right after it. I think I was remarking on how it was possible that he was even getting a degree. I think I even pointed out that my view was that giving such folks degrees devalues my own degree, because if people in the market hire guys like him and start thinking, "This is the kind of people we get from Program X?!" they're going to think we all suck. His comment was, "His GPA is ___. Who the hell is going to hire him?" [Yes, he literally told me the kid's GPA. Yes, I know that's totally not supposed to be allowed.] The message is, of course, there is very little incentive to not go ahead and give people a degree, so long as they can just barely sneak through (aided by rampant grade inflation and such).

The second example is a girl who pretty honestly told me that she wasn't really planning on using her degree in the workforce. It was an interest, a hobby, maybe even a status symbol that look at how smart and cool she is to have gotten such a difficult and neat-sounding degree. She legit was planning to be a mother. Sure enough, within a couple years of graduation (I don't recall exactly how long), she was a stay-at-home mother. I don't believe she's ever used her degree in the workforce. [FYI, I think she was actually mostly interested in the subject matter, and she wasn't an atrocious low-performer; she was actually reasonably smart. But I kinda don't think she was always the most motivated to really push herself all the time like some of the other students; she really was able to just sort of focus on the stuff she was interested in and then sort of skate by on the stuff she wasn't.]

In any event, putting them together, a multi-million-dollar government guaranteed payout would cause some hella targeting of programs. I'd say that I could imagine an underground website that details exactly how much a degree from every specific program out there is guaranteed to be worth, but it wouldn't have to be underground! It's the government! They'd have to use a public formula and make determinations, in public, of which programs are in/out of which pay bracket. Once you've gotten in, by hook or by crook or by bribing the admissions department, what incentive is there to not graduate you? Like both of my examples, everyone knows what you're doing and what the outcome will be. Everyone knows that you're not, like, actually going to be out there performing surgery on people or whatever. "Nobody's going to hire you," and you don't even want to get hired anyway. And since you're probably not going to cause any harm anyway, do we really want to be jerks and get in the way of a poor young woman's multi-million-dollar payout? If we try, she might even protest or sue or do any number of things that cause extensive paperwork and unneeded headache. Much easier to just let it go.

If you move it to, "Well, you have to at least get hired and have a salary," that helps with part of the problem, but would almost certainly contribute to hiring discrimination, combining features that already currently exist, from parental leave policies to affirmative action. It will almost certainly give a company pause when considering hiring a brand new female grad if they think some combination of, "On top of having weeks/months of leave if she gets pregnant; she has a literal multi-million-dollar payout coming to incentivize her getting pregnant," and, "Does she really even want to do this job? Did she just do enough to get into/through school, so she could max her payout?"

More comments

Solution isn’t simple. Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline.

This is because the economic incentives they offer are pitiful compared to the costs they are asking people to bear. Defraying tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs and lost income with tiny payments.

It also introduces a huge deadweight loss of higher taxes. Since most of these ideal heavily bread females would be supported by heavily taxed men who are their husbands it’s wooing just further depress economic activity. The past would have expected the man to man up and work 80 hrs a week if he needed and transfer directly to his wife instead of using the government as a middleman.

I am skeptical that doubling the hours of work men do would totally compensate for the loss of all the extra workers in the form of women. Structuring the transfer this way also requires a women become almost totally dependent on a man, which has its own issues.

Probably far easier to propandize all the Instagram executives. Instead of filling young females with attractive girls traveling to Bali bombard them with pretty pregnant chicks with 5 children and a dutiful loving husband. You can change economic incentives sure but changing what people value changes how the evaluate incentives. If real life hot pussy is begging men to man up I am guessing there is no shortage of men willing to work 80 hours a week for that deal.

I am skeptical about the number of men who would sign up for this, or the extent to which women could be propagandized into it. We had this kind of arrangement once. We ceased having it for a reason.

You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids. Now it sounds like you are arguing being a mother sucks so we need to pay them a lot of money? How much like a million a kid? More? Obviously we do not have that much government money. So government paying women money to have kids instead of worker would not be viable. At the end of the day women being homemakers and taking care of children has to be funded by basically the earning capabilities of one man (whether direct or indirect thru taxation of men). It sounds like your saying one man can’t make enough money to fund a women staying home which means we should just accept low fertility.

If women prefer being boss babes and going to Bali instead of motherhood then just isn’t a solution. Personally I think the current viewpoint is the propaganda and most would prefer motherhood if society did not pressure them to oppose it. But if Bali is preferred to babies there really is not a solution. Motherhood is evolutionary programmed into females since well it’s necessary to survive so I think it’s the other side doing the propaganda.

You said it was a simple solution to just pay women to have kids.

I imagine there's actually no society anywhere that'd even want to do this. And for good reasons.

I am down with it. It’s the one thing that would make communism better than capitalism. The ability to force your tfr higher.

If the choice is national suicide or communism then communism is better. And as we discussed in the taxes needed to fund a sufficient incentive it would basically take communism to raise that level of money.

Commies tried it in Romania, but they didn't have the political will to keep enforcing it (and it led to a massive amount of orphans, though again that could arguably be solved with sufficient political will)

Decree 770 did boost the fertility rate, but it didn’t do so by paying women for motherhood- it did so by banning contraception unless you already had 5 kids.

It's not that motherhood "sucks" as an activity, but being a stay at home mother does have significant opportunity costs in the form of lost income and other expenses. A million a kid is probably far too much. I suspect you would raise fertility pretty significantly if you paid women merely they wages they would have had if they had not stopped working in a kid-independent way.

So like $2 million a kid? For the people you want breeding the most. IQ >110. That’s a yearly income of probably $150k give or take which capitalizes to $2 million plus or minus.

Having someone carry your biological kid for you thru pregnancy runs 50-150k and that’s recruiter lower class. Doesn’t include the 18 years of motherhood. I don’t think we have anywhere close to enough money to boost tfr at the rates you imply by paying people. You need people to desire motherhood as it’s own reward.

Maybe $2 million for some people, true. Most would be much less. According to FRED the median US personal income in 2022 was $40,480. According to the US census there are about 74M women between the ages of 15 and 50 (the age categories used for calculating TFR). Let's say we get half of them to have a child (that would boost US TFR to ~2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to about $1.5T per year. That would be about 15% of the US federal budget, 10% more than we spend on Social Security. This is much less than I expected it to be!

IMO at least some of that should be back-loaded. For example, count child-rearing years as median income or last earned income (whichever is higher) * number of children for the purpose of calculating social security benefits. Advantage: selects for low time-preference. Advantage: Defers payout contingent on future taxbase able to support it. Advantage: Provides the long-term spousal independence that women seem to crave.

Explain your math I’m not following. Also would be reducing taxes by a lot.

If half of women had one child you would have a tfr of .5.

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Japan and Italy have very low female labor force participation rates. Israel has a high one.

Numbers are only useful if we know occupational breakdown of women. Obvious a part time service work position is not going to impinge on birth rates.

Indeed obvious.

65% of Israeli female workers work full time: https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/gender-differences-in-the-labor-market-wages-and-employment-polarization/

40% of Japanese female workers work full time: https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Datawatch/Women-s-working-hours-underscore-gender-disparity-in-Japan

Even among those with full-time jobs, women work fewer hours than men: averaging 43 hours a week, compared to 47 hours on average for men (2015). Among full-time employees in Israel, the difference in work hours between men and women is among the highest in the OECD.

Now we just need a number on real (not necessarily reported) Japanese work hours

I'm not sure there exists a statistic real enough if it's not in the direction you expect.

There are other factors than just “checks off working full time”: difference in what full time hours mean and difference in reported/worked because of Japanese culture

We're not talking about checking anything off, we're talking about a number of hours reported.

You are of course welcome to reject reality and substitute your own, but it's a sign of epistemic closure when you don't update at all in the face of evidence.

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What counts as "low?" According to the World bank Japan has a female LFPR of 55%, Italy's is 41%, and Israel's is 61%. This is compared to, say, the United States at 53% or Afghanistan at 5%. Israel is an outlier in terms of TFR but I'm given to understand that's heavily driven by population subgroups that mostly don't work.

I was wrong about Japan, it appears, but Italy, Greece and Romania all have anomalously low female LFPR for the developed world with still southern-European TFR.

And as for Israel, secular Jews have a TFR that’s still higher than any majority population in the developed world, unless you count the American red tribe which is roughly at parity. Modern Orthodox Jews(who still work) have a TFR like America in the height of the baby boom. The ultraorthodox are the only ones who don’t work.

The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value.

Well, SOME women's work.

It would absolutely fair to study and figure out if there are areas where female-dominated industries (and/or certain departments within an industry/company) are in fact creating an economic net negative. I am specifically thinking of the massive increase in bureaucracy and administrative costs which are endemic to certain sectors of the economy, such as education, healthcare, and, increasingly, finance. A whole lot of what females produce for the economy is actually designed to slow down some other sector of it.

We could slice these sectors out of the economy tomorrow and immediately see increased productivity and less waste. And we'd also see hundreds of thousands of women unemployed.

You're making a sweeping claim that isn't inherently backed up by data. I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.

This is especially obvious if you look at the gender makeup of those jobs that are either fundamental to society (energy production, mining, farming, construction, heavy industry) or that are producing the most marginal value (designing computer chips, computer programming, maintaining the tech stack that enables the internet to continue existing).

If females by and large aren't doing the work that enables society to exist at all (childbearing/rearing notably being the exception), and aren't doing the work that produces the most excess wealth, then how productive are they, really?

I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')

The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.

That is, if a given family is paying $3000/month on average for childcare tasks that could be handled by the mother (or, to be fair, the father), then she would have to be producing $3001/month in value on average to actually be producing a net economic value.

I'm not convinced that >50% of women currently in the workforce are in fact producing more value than they would produce if they were instead taking on the childcare role themselves.

I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')

Pretty soon, I imagine. First thing you'd probably hear about is a lot of people dying in hospitals as the majority of nurses disappear. Or you'd see most activity in the retail sector comes to an abrupt halt because few stores have enough staff on hand to handle purchases. A huge recession as public demand drops due to half the adult population suddenly finding themselves without a source of disposable income. And so on.

How many people die in hospitals normally?

Why would retail activity halt? Isn't a huge portion of such shopping done online?

How much "disposable" income is really being lost, exactly?

I mean, I think the prima facie case is pretty simple: entities that have an incentive to be profit maximizing have decided that paying these women to do the work they do is, on margin, worth it. The market is not perfectly efficient, of course, but I am not sure why I should believe you are more likely to be correct than the people actually making the decision to hire them.

I think that generally speaking creating tons of economic productivity is what frees up women from household tasks so they can in fact find full-time employment, it is NOT necessarily more women working which frees up tons of economic productivity.

I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.

I am asking with complete sincerity. How quickly would we notice if every single female quit their job overnight? (Let me be more specific, by 'notice' I mean 'what parts of society would actually grind to a halt such that economic activity was seriously disrupted?')

Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?

The real question is how much excess value a given female produces for the economy over and above the value she would produce if she were instead raising kids and maintaining the household. Childcare costs are 'internalized' if she takes over this role, but it still counts.

Yes, hence my proposal. One disparity here is that the value produced outside the home is partially returned to the women in question in the form of money she can use to acquire shelter, food, and all the necessities of life. If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.

Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?

ALMOST making my point here.

Who would notice if nurses and physicians disappeared? People with doctor's appointments, or the elderly and infirm who depend on nursing care.

Most people wouldn't notice right away because most aren't going to see a nurse or doctor very often.

Compare that to say, if your local power plant shut down because all the staff left. Who would notice? Literally every person whose electricity just switched off.

In the case of physicians, the economic impact wouldn't be immediate because economic activity could still continue even as the healthcare system suffered from a huge backlog. We kinda 'proved' this during Covid. Work continues even if the hospitals are overwhelmed.

In the case of energy production, or internet infrastructure, tons of economic activity would INSTANTLY cease because those inputs are NECESSARY to said activity. So we'd "notice" immediately.

10% of construction workers would indeed be a hit, but with some reshuffling construction would continue.

Also, it is of course likely that just because they make up some significant portion of the workforce, it does NOT imply they're actually responsible for the same share of actual productivity.

If the female 36% of all farmers are only producing 10% of the food, the actual felt impact is less severe than the first number would imply.

And that's a good distillation of my point. Its likely that 80% of economic productivity is the result of the efforts of 20% of the people. And I'd bet my left testicle that the most productive members of the economy are mostly male.

So if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce, I would guess we'd lose closer to 10% of economic productivity. Which is to say... we'd survive.

And if females quit working and we lost 50% of the workforce but actually devoted themselves to raising kids such that all childcare costs were internalized, the actual hit would probably be negligible.

If she quits working outside the home to raise a child very little of that value comes back to her in a form that can be spent to sustain herself. If the state wants more women to choose raising children then more of the value that action produces needs to come to them in a form they can use to sustain themselves.

I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.

I think it is, more specifically, technological development. It reduces the amount of labor needed to perform household tasks, freeing that labor up for other uses, and increases economic productivity at various tasks outside the home. Technological development simultaneously increases the benefits and reduces the opportunity cost of working outside the home.

The huge glaring irony, though, is that almost any female-centric industry can be to some extent 'replaced' by technology (I will grant that this is NOT the case for Nursing)... except bearing and raising kids.

Like, any job that a female can do, a male with the right tools, automation, and basic support can presumably also do. EXCEPT THE PRECISE JOB THAT FEMALES EVOLVED OVER MILLENNIA TO PERFORM, which men still struggle with despite better tech. In the case of bearing children, men are literally incapable of doing it.

So it seems like steps toward a solution require us to 'un-taboo' the idea that females bearing children is in fact a good social priority and women should be encouraged to become mothers.

I think to make this proposal make sense, it would be simpler to say that the male whose sperm produced the child she's caring for is on the hook to pay her for her work caring for the child. Rather than the government taking the male's money via taxes and distributing it to women as some kind of subsidy just give her a direct claim to the guy's money as compensation.

Surely the play is to give her a portion of her offspring's income, no?

Maybe? Seems likely to produce some real disincentives.

Like what? In essence this already happens in a round about way through social security.

Worst case, if we accept that males are likely to make more money over their lifetime than females, there's a bias towards having male children.

It certainly places the children in a situation where they may decide to earn less salary since some portion of it is being taken away from them with no promise of return.

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Almost all of them? Even in the heavily male dominated industries you mention women are somewhere between 10 and 30% of all workers. Do you think if 36% of all farmers disappeared no one would notice? What about 10% of all construction workers? Or hell, how about healthcare. Would no one notice if 88% of all nurses disappeared overnight? What about 38% of all physicians?

You're equivocating between "wouldn't notice" and "wouldn't grind to a halt".

Fair, I was working from the OP's statement about whether economic activity would be "seriously disrupted." I'm not sure how serious it would have to but I think all the examples I give would qualify.

The market is not perfectly efficient, of course, but I am not sure why I should believe you are more likely to be correct than the people actually making the decision to hire them.

Not OP, but the obvious rejoinder is that the company but outsources all of the opportunity cost to the employees. The real question is why the prospective employee is so heavily discounting the opportunity cost.

Ding ding.

There seems to be a situation where a corporate job is, dare I say, a substitute good for a committed husband. A woman getting a corporate job is given healthcare, a retirement account, oftentimes food and transport are subsidized, she gets a social life and maybe some travel attached to work, and is REWARDED for giving up her prime childbearing years to produce extra value for the shareholders. Many of the reasons women have 'settled down' with men in the past are satisfied by a decent job that provides baseline benefits as part of the package.

But a corporate job can't provide her with a kid. So while all the above 'benefits' are legible, the opportunity cost of NOT having a kid is not concrete until, say, 15 years down the line where she's got a career but she's still single and childless and her bio clock is punishing her for not reproducing.

Looking at it that way, males are in direct competition with megacorps to attract mates who will want to raise kids. They have to offer a 'better deal', which is to say they have to make enough money to provide shelter, healthcare, retirement, food, transport, etc. And if the female isn't explicitly incorporating 'bear and raise children' into her calculation then the corporate job looks like a solid choice.

So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?

I think it’s because they don’t trust men to do what they say they’ll do. The feminist attack on Harrison butker- aimed at their own audience- wasn’t ‘you deserve a career’. It was an evidence free assertion that he beats his wife. A lot of the ‘why do women give up X to not be dependent on a man’ has an answer, and that answer is ‘they think a man will abuse them if they’re dependent, or otherwise not fulfill his side of the bargain because he thinks he can get away with it’. This belief may be neurotic and unfounded, but it’s hard to argue that it doesn’t exist and inform the behavior of a lot of very risk averse people.

I encourage you to go talk to the socially conservative housewives in whichever sect that practices female domesticity is easiest to access; they will tell you that their particular sect has figured out how to make men behave, but women out in the world have to go into the corporate world, poor things, because they can’t depend on their men.

This is where fathers (and to a lesser extent brothers and uncles) are supposed to provide that safety net. I need to be wealthy enough to take care of my girls if they get into a bad situation with a future husband.

I'd argue your father, brothers and uncles are actually supposed to provide you with a safety net if you get into a bad situation with your fiancé/husband by giving him a severe beating.

I can second that, and I've heard exactly the same sentiment from my wife (who is very successful in her well-paid career). This was instilled in her by her mother, who worked a fake government job helping applicants fill paperwork for farm subsidies. She was paid peanuts compared to her husband, but she prided herself at being independent (even though everything was actually paid for by her husband).

Women just don't want to be dependent on their husbands, because they heard a lot of horror stories of abusive husbands, and so they want to maintain a put option ready to exercise. Usually, however, they suck at pricing this option, especially the theta.

You're both right. At the end, this is what all this eventually boils down to.

So yes, WHY are women discounting the sacrifice of their childbearing years so heavily? Are they actually aware of the opportunity cost there?

Maybe this comes down to a drive for status and status alone? If they are encultured in a society that gives less status to mothers/housewives than it does to those in corporate positions, moving up the corporate pecking order would be the rational choice for a status-seeking agent. The exceptions—Mormons, traditional Catholics, Amish, etc.—are cultures that afford status to mothers of larger broods of children.

It's not a drive for status. It's a terror of being dependent on men. Mormons, tradCaths, Amish, etc have gotten around this by convincing their women and girls that their men will treat them well, it's the ones outside, out in the world, that you should scared of. Obviously that's harder to do on a society wide scale.

Or perhaps by convincing their men to actually treat them well?

If the rumors of (for instance) the Black community are remotely true, then, yes, it's better to be dependent on the US government, despite its flaws.

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My model of modern western women™ is basically this:

They have a set of three roles they want to be 'seen' fulfilling:

  1. High-powered career woman (Girlboss).
  2. Freespirited, cultured, 'independent' woman. That is, one who travels everywhere, has a fun and carefree life, and flits from party to party.
  3. Devoted and effective mother.

They may re-order the priority and emphasis they put on it (or if its a triangular graph, they may land on some different space on it), but its the rare woman who doesn't have one of these three as their primary concern when it comes to status-seeking. You watch Tiktok, these are effectively the three 'genres' of women you'll find, if you ignore the e-prostitutes (which are technically a subset of 2). They want to project the image that they have an important, powerful job, or that they're constantly traveling, partying, and 'living life,' or that they're supermom, handling everything in life with grace and wisdom.

Modern Western Culture heavily emphasizes 1) and 2) as desirable options, heavily de-emphasizes 3). So women naturally start clumping more towards those two points on the graph. Once they've moved too far along towards that side of the graph (i.e. they've spent their twenties girlbossing, partying, travelling, etc.) it becomes VERY HARD to move out of that section of the graph to the one where they can become a devoted mother... and so they declare 1) and 2) are high status, and 3) is low status, and claim high status for themselves, accordingly.

If we limit ourselves to strictly social explanations, I think this one sounds pretty good. As you say, cultures that emphasize 3) will confer more status on motherhood, so it'll draw more women towards that point on the graph, and thus you'll have more attraction towards that section.

Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her endeavours in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed. But the subtext of the current culture is that women should be able to do all three WITHOUT male support, somehow.

Also, the 'irony' is that a woman can genuinely have all it all if they locate a reliable husband and lock him down early in life, since he can support her ambitions in ALL THREE of those roles. He can give her kids, support her raising them, take her on trips and parties and generally have fun, and support her career ambitions where needed.

This is my lived experience, but it took my wife entering a well-compensated corporate position in her mid '30s where her superiors were mothers of young children for her to entertain the idea of kids. Before that (and I mean, from her late-teens when I first met her), she had a laser-focus on her career.

I think I touch on this in my last paragraph. From the perspective of the person choosing to have children (or not) a lot of the social benefit of having and raising a child comes in the form of a positive externality they don't receive. Maybe it's an opportunity cost for society to, in some sense, have someone work rather than raise children but that externality isn't an opportunity cost for the people doing the choosing, they were never going to receive that benefit anyway.

We might further ask: why can't states do this? The answer here is also simple. Women's work outside the home generates a lot of economic value. The issue at the heart of raising fertility by having women work less is that society will be poorer, which people are generally opposed to.

If you take a plot of land with a healthy ecosystem and burn it all down, you'll create farmland that is incredibly productive for a few cycles, after which it becomes a barren wasteland in which nothing can grow.

Feminism is civilizational slash-and-burn.

Feminism is a symptom, not a cause. The cause is more fundamental: human want. People want nicer houses, nicer cars, nicer food. They want financial security and control over their own lives. Human wants are unlimited and they are the fundamental force pushing towards the efficient utilization of human labor.

Did humans just suddenly start wanting recently? Do humans not want in places and cultures where they still have significantly higher fertility rates? This seems like it has poor explanatory value.

No, humans have wanted forever. Another key ingredient is technological development. Specifically labor saving devices that reduce the number of hours required to maintain a household and make women more productive outside the home.

Those aren't wants, they're needs, from a genetic and generational standpoint. High-quality mates are positional goods and everyone is in competition with everyone else for those. It's not the bigger house or the nicer car that they want -- not enough to sacrifice all the amazing things only made possible by non-working women -- it's the status which will enable them and their offspring to outcompete others for high-quality mates and thus progeny which will outcompete others in turn. It is survival itself.

Competition for scarce resources is what defines almost every aspect of human reality. It's not somehow decadent for a person to pursue status symbols if that means ensuring a better future for their children, and as I said above, status symbols are positional. These needs cannot be satisfied without fundamentally altering human nature, turning us into something... else.

Within this hellscape, we can coordinate to make things better, c.f. Meditations on Moloch. People want other things, too, such as stable families, well-raised children, healthy food made with love, thriving communities, and so on. Women are the social fabric that enables all of these things, which they can't do if they're working full-time. Just like we coordinate to prevent children from being put to work too early or too rigorously, we could coordinate to protect women and safeguard all the many wonderful things which flow from recognizing that hammering women into masculine-style productivity is putting them to poor use.

I did not intend to denigrate them by calling them wants instead of needs, sorry if it came off that way. I agree those things cannot be satisfied without some kind of fundamental change in human nature. I'm interested in what this coordination end looks like.

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