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If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?
There's lots of suggestions, most of them bad. For example, Scandinavian countries have been touted as "doing it right" by offering generous perks to families such as paid family leave. But these efforts, despite outrageous costs, have done little or nothing to stem the falling birth rate. Sweden's fertility rate is a dismal 1.66 as of 2020, and if trends hold, the rate among ethnic Swedes is far lower.
I think that, like everything, deciding to marry and have a family comes down to status.
Mongolia is a rare country that has managed to increase its fertility rate over the last 20 years, from about 2.1 children per women in 2004, to about 2.7 today. This feat is more impressive considering the declines experienced worldwide during the same period. It's doubly impressive considering the fertility rate in neighboring Inner Mongolia (China) is just 1.06!
What is Mongolia doing right? Apparently, they are raising the status of mothers by giving them special recognition and status.
https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1827418468813017441
In Georgia (the country), something similar happened when an Orthodox patriarch started giving special attention to mothers with 3 children:
https://x.com/JohannKurtz/status/1827070216716874191
Now, raising the status of mothers is more easily said than done. But I think it's possible, especially in countries with a high degree of social cohesion like in East Asia. In Europe, a figure like the King of Netherlands could personally meet and reward mothers. In the United States, of course, this sort of thing would be fraught as any suggestion coming from the right might backfire due to signalling. Witness the grim specter of the vasectomy and abortion trucks at the DNC. But the first step to fixing a problem is to adequately diagnose the cause. To me, the status explanation is more compelling (and fixable) than any other suggestion I've seen.
Again, the reactionaries are actually basically right - women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try. Iran & Saudi Arabia are having big drops, and as noted, even places like Mongolia are dropping and Hungary's attempts largely failed unless judged on a curve.
Also, as noted, because contraception is much better than even 20 years ago thanks to IUD's, teen pregnancy have fallen off a cliff in the US - something everybody to the right of Stalin was praising as a worthy goal 20 years ago. The Christian Right got what it wanted - far less pregnant single teen girls.
The difference is, as opposed to the reactionaries, I think it's good women have the right to control their own reproduction.
I agree, I will just note that I don't think that "women's education (and I mean, like basic education, not whatever you think the evil modern western college is) + available contraception = a dramatic drop in birth rates no matter what else you actually try" is a particularly reactionary opinion. To me this opinion seems like it is actually kind of the consensus on all sides of the political spectrum. People just disagree on whether the education + contraception is a good thing or a bad thing.
Eh, there's still plenty of alternate hypothesis put out there by my fellow lefties and some centrists in recent years from housing prices to cultural and educational gaps between young people and so forth. Again, I don't think any of that is a 0 reason, but just like anything short of massive restrictions of contraception + women's education will lead at best to a .2 or .3 rise, I think housing, women getting more liberal and going to college more, and even Tinder is like a .2 or .3 thing if you add it all up.
Ironically, J.D. Vance's remarks from the past few years continually being brought up have actually accelerated the acceptance of, 'yes, it was birth control and that's a good thing, you weirdos.'
I think that in modern society the opinion that men should have more control over women's sexual decisions, other than potentially in the one case of abortion (because that one has potential moral implications beyond the woman) is just fundamentally loser-coded because the Internet has made it pretty clear that the majority of men who want to police women's sexual decisions are doing so out of sexual frustration. Of course there is a small minority of rationalist-types who genuinely care about the impact of women's sexual decisions on fertility rates or social cohesion out of a detached interest in supporting pro-social policies, but the modal guy online arguing for controlling women's sexual decisions is, assuming that he is not a genuine pro-lifer, pretty clearly doing it because he isn't getting laid as much as he wants.
Can you please explain what "policing women's sexual decisions" means in this context exactly?
I read it to mean compelling or aggressively encouraging women to not be floozies.
Are we going to pretend that this is something that has traditionally been done by sexually frustrated men, and not by other women?
Certainly rakishness should be policed in men.
Traditionally the tools available tended to be more effective in women. Women being better responders to social pressure.
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I mean, even many rationalists are coded as weirdos who aren't getting laid to plenty of people.
J.D. Vance is the person closest to be associated with the movement to actually get a national stage, and some of his views, that have been decently popular here and other rationalist or rationalist-adjacent spaces implode when in contact with actual voters. The guy's impressively below water approval wise, and is actually probably hurting Trump among secular swing voters in the Midwest.
This is often a problem with those people, as they are quite willing to call people they don't like who are married with multiple children of their own "incels".
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