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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   30060 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.

His South Korean example points at the opposite of what he’s trying to get at. If a SK family had the resources to devote to another child, by his own logic they would because the child’s rank reflects on the mother, and more so if there are more kids. The bottleneck is thus resources, not culture.

There’s a lot of variables that go into fertility rates, but they’re not really that complex. Age of marriage, rate of marriage, and economic factors are obviously the most significant ones in western societies outside of some edge cases (Amish etc.). It’s not rocket surgery. The graphs this guy shows are not evidence one way or another because they don’t actually reflect the modal family’s economic status, and this should be obvious with a little thought.

But status is relative. If you increase everyone’s pay you haven’t changed the percent of income they devote to status. Everyone will just spend more money on that one kid’s opportunities. If Koreans get more money they will spend even more on ensuring one high status kid. So what is important is to value number of kids as a mark of success for half the living humans (all the women), to balance out status concerns.

Empirically that’s incorrect, since Korean families with 2 or even 3 kids do exist - they’re usually more well off than others. There’s a limit to how much resources you can pour into a single kid, and also not all Koreans will actually torture their kids like that.

I agree that helicoptering money on all parents will simply raise prices for everything, and tutoring specifically. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. My point is that the bottleneck for a specific family is still economic, even when the example is taken at face value.

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