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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.
... the latter of which, curiously enough, has the highest TFR of any country/territory in developed East Asia.
I'd actually forgotten that both of those countries had the highest TFRs in their respective regions(East Asia and Southern Europe- I'm excluding France from the latter), and the stablest ones too. But they're still a long way from replacement; a baby bonus of .1-.25 from 'women mostly stay home' does seem supported, but the average developed country needs much more than a .25 boost.
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