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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.

The status competition in East Asia extends to the status of one's children. Even if you were to magically boost the status of women with more children (and even give housing and financial benefits on top), that won't fix the intense status anxiety when it comes to how their children do in life.

In East Asia, status rankings are universal, overt, and familial. And because status is a positional good, it naturally invites full investment of every expendable resource. If you have to divide your resources across n children, they'll lose out to families with m < n children, which reflects badly on your own status.

There are easy ways of solving this, like limiting admission to all elite universities and prestigious graduate jobs to young adults with at least two siblings.

Would that be "easy" though? It seems like political suicide to propose such a policy and coercing private institutions to implement it would be difficult. Then there are all of the perverse incentives toward gaming the system. There would likely need to be carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications from a prior birth or other health concerns, so lots of buying out diagnoses under the table. Some might adopt a strategy of having the threshold number of kids and still hyperinvesting in only one. Etc.

carveouts for people who experience decreased fertility due to complications

When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage? If people actually want to solve the problem, they have to bite the bullet and get it done even if it makes some people worse off. Now I know that South Korea doesn't want to solve the problem and so they're mucking about with tiny financial nudges and lame govt programs.

When the life and death of the nation is at stake, maybe it's time to skip the 'carve-outs for people who are unfairly disadvantaged by nature' stage?

How about we do that skipping for everything else first?

What's more important than the life or death of the nation? I said nation, not state. There are more important things in this world than raising the GDP figures and subsidizing the senescent.

I guess you have to smash the safety glass to get to the fire extinguisher... but that's included in the fire-extinguishing process.

I would say a large part of how we got here is by deciding that the "unfairly disadvantaged" must never be negatively affected by anything. But somehow it is only when those "unfairly disadvantaged" are a different group that we should skip those carveouts.

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