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An interesting thread on Twitter about status underlying fertility declines
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.
What's significantly more complicated is that the two developed countries with the lowest female LFPR are Italy and Japan. Clearly, there's more going on here.
The only truly developed country with above replacement fertility is Israel. Georgia is a much poorer second world country with replacement-ish and stably rising fertility. There are regions and social strata elsewhere in the developed world with high fertility(Eg the Dutch bible belt), but nowhere else in the industrialized world is above replacement on the national level unless you count the gulf countries as industrialized, although a few Latin American countries and Turkey were fairly recently. These countries vary vastly. More than likely there's no magic bullet.
F-LFPR doesn’t tell us what the Japanese woman or the Italian woman values, how she sees her identity in the world, whether she was nurtured at a young age to want to nurture children, and whether she feels pride/shame relative to her participation in fertility, all of which relate to status. It’s not clear that there is more going on, I don’t think, at least not from F-LFPR. If there is something more complicated than this, we should see the answer in the Hasidim, who raise lots of children while living near-exclusively in urban and suburban environments. This eliminates any diet or environmental toxin -related etiology. What is left? There’s money, but the experiments in paying women to have kids don’t amount to anything. So what’s actually left besides “pro-fertile culture” which relates to female status?
(Israeli non-orthodox fertility is complicated by the existence of the ultra-orthodox, who raise up the religious scholars, affect culture, and a percent of the ultra-orthodox become merely “religious”. The Jewish religion probably also increases female fertility as a status signifier because it’s so worldly / material regarding “existence of the Jewish people” etc.)
How much did those experiments actually pay them? I would expect the pay to be a drop in the bucket compared to how much the cost of successfully raising children who "make it" has increased in the last 20 years, because otherwise we could have UBI (top-tier US college tuition fees can easily pay for three adults to have a comfortable life!). There's also the matter of inflation in attention and supervision children are expected to be given, which can't be made up for by just pouring in money. This is most obvious in the US near-prohibition on leaving even 12 year olds unattended, but even an Austrian family friend (young academic mother of two) reports malicious gossip from parents of classmates about her never picking up the kids after primary school because she has to work. What I gather from her stories is that mothers helicopter-parenting their children has become a status thing (it's naturally a luxury, since it means foregoing one income), even as legally it continues to be okay for children to be classic European levels of unattended.
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The hasidim truly and genuinely believe in a religion which forbids birth control, same as the tradcaths but without the latter's marriage rate problems.
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