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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.
Mainstream liberalism has few answers to the fertility question at this point, and I think it's likely to loom larger as an issue over the rest of this decade. However, I think there are lots of options besides raising female fertility. Some examples -
(a) Wind down/end entitlements for the elderly. No more state pension. Require everyone to have saved enough to cover their own retirement and associated medical costs or have had enough economically-active children to cover them. End mandatory retirement ages so the fit but impecunious elderly can at least work for a living. While this option doesn't remove all problems associated with an aging population (e.g., shortage of military age men) it covers the most important one.
(b) Push hard on anti-senescence treatments. I think we've got a great shot at an outright cure for Alzheimer's by 2030, and many other diseases of aging by 2040. Perhaps combined with a radical revision of our attitude towards work and retirement, this could help smooth out the transition to a lower birthrate society.
(c) AGI/Mass automation. Personally my timelines on transformative AI are pretty short - I expect most white-collar jobs will be automatable with minimal sacrifices in performance by 2035, and I feel I'm being conservative. Blue-collar jobs and more pertinently healthcare/eldercare jobs are a lot more uncertain. I am optimistic that the second half of the 2020s will see improvements in robotics to mirror the improvement in non-embodied AI we've seen in the first half. If this transpires then our whole economic model will need revision, and low fertility/top-heavy population pyramids won't be a critical problem.
(d) Biotech revolutions. In utero genome editing and improved fertility treatments could definitely help here. If you can guarantee fertility late into middle age and flatten the higher risk of developmental/genetic disorders associated with it, that will definitely help. Artificial wombs would obviously be a gamechanger but I think we're still a couple of decades out on that score.
(e) Degrowth. Obviously like most people here I'm not a fan of the degrowth movement, but there are versions of it that I'm more open to. For example, a movement that prioritised increasing GDP/capita at the expense of raw GDP seems not unreasonable to me, though it would require tech trends like those above. If we're headed for a post-scarcity society in which most humans don't work, then dysgenics aside, fewer humans doesn't strike me as obviously bad.
So, all in all I'm not massively worried about declining TFR as a long-term issue. There are lots deep trends that would make it less pressing, and while I wouldn't bet the farm on all of them or any specific one, something in the mix will come good. I expect the main headaches are going to be in the short-term, (e.g. labour shortages, dependency ratios) and while they're worth taking seriously, they're not going to be addressed by fertility-boosting policies in the time horizons that matter.
The retirement problem is not a problem of "saving". All pension systems are just redistribution of current production, it does not matter if it is "financed" by taxes or selling some assets or in any other way such as coerced slave labor of future productive population. The problem is that you as an elderly will need things in the future: you will need fresh bread, a surgery, working power lines and maintained house. These things can only be provided by productive people that are being born right now. You cannot have a surgery now in reserve for the future, you cannot store electricity in order to have it in 50 years when the blackout happens due to insufficient maintenance. If there are not enough people born to be future doctors, bakers, linemen etc. - then you will not get product of labor of these unborn people. Whatever you save will be eaten by inflation.
Okay, so we will all live in in Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism utopia in 20 years. And we will also have endless electricity from nuclear fusion any time soon. Also as a sidenote - not many people really believe this, otherwise they would just sell their assets now when they still have value, to enjoy some hookers and booze - since they will have robot hookers and endless booze in 20 years. So they should smooth out their lifetime consumption, that would be the most logical strategy, right? Like people selling their houses if they believe that apocalypse will arrive in 5 years. I am curious if you are doing so, since you are so sure about these utopian predictions about AI and automation.
Of course, another technological solution is around the corner.
What an euphemism for economic and societal collapse. It will just be nice "degrowth" landing, no other issues as people are just dying on the streets in the middle of blackouts and wars for shrinking resources. A little bit of population and economic "degrowth" will not hurt anybody.
I am, mostly because TFR is collapsing, and collapsing fast. Many people point out to South Korea as an example where the TFR dropped to record low of 0.68 in 2023, while already being bellow 1.2 for over two decades already. And it may not be the bottom, TFR in Seoul was 0.55 and is also falling. So let's look at simple math if TFR remains at this 0.7 level. One hundred young Koreans will have 35 children and 12 grandchildren. That is almost 10 times drop of young population in just two generations, this is catastrophic level of population collapse, way more than Black Death that ravaged Europe in 14th century resulting in 50% drop of population. The "nice" thing about demography is that it is baked in. There were just 230 000 babies born in South Korea in 2023. This means that there will be at most 230 thousand young 20 years old Koreans in 2044 who may go on and do all the necessary jobs that the country will require of them in two decades, like soldiers to stop North Koreans, firemen, policemen, scientists and everything else. There will be no more of them in next couple of decades.
It's funny, usually the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant is pro-grasshopper. But then when the issue of retirement comes up, people see the grasshoppers around, it's all "no, there's no such thing as saving, you have to be an ant until you die".
It is still an apt parable. Go and buy canned food, with this inflation you would be king. The key thing is that good ant would also invest in his children to take care of him if he can no longer work thus “storing” and “saving” the labor.
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