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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30059 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines

S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP. Both are failing. Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?

[Status] finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth). Status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce. People kill themselves over loss of status.

In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from 50,000 to 64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How? The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).

Will Storr describes: "In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic. In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status.

[Post-enlightenment things began to change.] We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport). Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

I find that small “status is relative” comment valuable for understanding fertility trends. It’s obvious, but it’s an essential piece of the puzzle easy to ignore. There is a limited amount of status to go around, and we disperse status points as if we are in a video game dispersing points on a skill tree. We can only increase certain behaviors at the expense of other behaviors (through omitting esteem and interest, ie status). With that acknowledged, let’s remember that motherhood is a complicated and arduous 6-year process per baby (overlapping) which requires specific skills and a specific interest (nurturing a young human). This means that even if we did esteem motherhood as highly as women working traditional male jobs, that wouldn’t affect fertility because of the additional contingent pleasures of the workplace (socializing, disposable income, a familiarity of work skills via schooling and no familiarity with homemaking and motherhood skills). And so what is actually essential is to, well, actively dislike women working. To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to be degraded, demeaned, or at least lowered relative to women focusing on the life required to be mothers. This would appear to be necessary to increase fertility according to basic human psychology: the importance of status and reward-contingency as a necessary component of reinforcement. As long as women obtain status from work, it’s unlikely that attempts to hack together a high-status motherhood culture will work. If a guy can get status from video games or war, he will choose video games, right? Motherhood is more difficult and more important, so the status associated with and the lifestyle which precedes it needs to utterly dwarf the Industrial GirlBoss Complex.

To increase fertility, we have to improve culture by only esteeming women who specifically focus on motherhood. Women working needs to have status lowered relative to motherhood.

I've never understood why Congress doesn't create an award specifically designed to raise mother's status, maybe after a certain number of kids. Give them a little ceremony and a title like gold star families. It costs nothing and is a simple way to boost status.

Here's a simpler* one: parental income is divided by the number of children for determining financial aid.

If your parents have an income of $200k and you have two siblings, you would be treated the same as an only child with $83k-income parents. I know that many costs scale sub-linearly with the size of the family (never mind just the number of children), but it wouldn't be very effective program if it was merely cancelling out an existing bias.

* Simpler isn't always better, of course.

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