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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.
Absolutely spot on. This 100% matches my observations.
If it's as accurate as I think it is, we're fucked. Status is not something that can be conferred from above in a liberal western country.
If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, with no prospects of a better future or any chance at reproduction, you are an evolutionary dead end. Alternatively, you pick up a rifle...
If you fold boxes or stack shelves at Gwangyang Steel Works until you die, I'm sure you're actually less likely to be an evolutionary dead end than those of your countrymen who got into college.
Probably not.
In the West, the people who have lots of kids are the very religious, and the absolute underclass. The latter simply act on their impulses all the time without considering the future, resulting in constant pregnancies (as well as a host of social problems). Probably in the olden days these kids would just die for the most part from not being looked after. The former do consciously decide to have kids, but do so because of their religion.
Someone who folds boxes at a steelworks his entire life can hold a job, so he isn't in the underclass. If you can't or won't consider the future and restrict your impulses, you won't be employed for long, certainly not until you die. South Korea is culturally homogeneous, so there's no reason to expect his attitude about having children to differ significantly from his better-educated countrymen.
That just leaves the fact that he's poorer than them, and when you control for culture and discount the underclass, poorer people have fewer kids than richer people, because they can afford less.
Here's how I see it: if you're a college-educated Korean man with a girlfriend/wife, who presumably is also college-educated and middle-class like you, your social circle will put enormous pressure on you to have exactly one child, preferably a boy, and make every conceivable sacrifice to try getting him into one of the top 5 or so universities because there's like a 5% chance that he'll succeed and that's more than zero. Of course, this all seems rather daunting to the average man in such a situation, and even more so to the woman, so they reject this idea in many cases. After all, there's a reason why the South Korean TFR is not even 1 but 0.8 or so.
However, if "you sweep floors or fold boxes at the Gwangyang Steel Works until you die", no such pressure exists. Even if we don't categorize it strictly as underclass, it's still rather close. It certainly counts as the precariat, and when you belong to that social class as a woman, everyone in your environment implicitly understands that having children is the single most important thing you'll ever do in your life, and the only thing you'll ever be respected for, if that.
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