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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.

I saw a thread om twitter explaining that low fertility in South Korea is due to parental investment competion:

It's amazing how far people go not to point out every Korean born requires >9k hours of costly test prep for a chance at "good" college otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I have to wonder if there's a taboo.

In high fertility countries, slightly older kids raise their siblings.

That's the answer. It's not a hard mystery.

17 y/o Koreans can't help raise their 15 y/o siblings, because Korean teens are preparing for college exams, which only expensive adults can help with.

That's it.

Do people even bother asking Koreans?

Surely any married Korean couple, if you ask them why they don't have four kids, will surely bring up the nightmarish prospect of ensuring that all of them are "properly placed"?

"Have the older kids tutor the younger ones" yeah, right!

https://x.com/anarchyinblack/status/1817684593908080960

otherwise you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die.

I know this is indeed the root of the problem, but if this is indeed the social reality, it's baffling how a society can end up with norms such as this.

This sort of norm can only be sustained when there is plenty of human potential to waste in the first place. So it causing low fertility is probably a feature, not a bug: if success above the very lowest level is a high-cost tournament, there's probably too many people.

I'm not sure that really explains the phenomenon. Singapore has much higher population density than Korea, but parental investment seems much smaller. It's also not clear why there should be so much human potential to waste, especially in the era of globalization.

Perhaps Singapore's economic system can just use more people (proportionally) at those higher levels of achievement.

South Korea is very prosperous, though. The competitiveness doesn’t seem to match other developed countries with similar income rates, it’s not like in Britain or Germany people have to win an insane rat race or be Amazon warehouse workers.

All the OK-paying middle class jobs that pay just fine in every developed country exist in South Korea, and wealth inequality is average. It’s not India where life outside the top 5% sucks. The focus on the elite rat race is bizarre. The US has niche credentialist PMC status games for medicine or finance or big law or academia, but they are way outside of the life experience of most Americans.

South Korea is very prosperous, though.

Not compared to Singapore, Britain, or Germany. My thought about Korea (and Japan, which has a somewhat similar system) is it just isn't dynamic enough to accept more people at higher levels. If Samsung/LG/Daewoo/Hyundai can only use N such people each year, persons N+1 on through infinity are going to be sweeping floors.

It just doesn’t track with lower inequality levels compared to most Western countries in Korea and Japan though. There isn’t a tiny elite who pass the meritocracy test and go to elite colleges who are making tons of money while everyone else is poor (like in India with the IIT system), that’s not the distribution in these places.

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