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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.
I think status, at the societal level, is a chicken and egg problem. I'll use a sort of related historical example.
Through the 1960s and maybe 1970s, if a family had a son decide to become a priest, there was a good chance it would be met with esteem in the community. An honorable decision informed by faith seen as something to be respected if not quite emulated (after all, we want grandkids). Flash forward to today, and outside of religious sub-communities, it's probably looked at as an extreme personal journey decision. "Oh, wow, the Johnson boy went to the seminary." Community pillar? Not really. Invited to speak at the High School? Definitely not. Probably awkwardly danced around at supermarket aisle run-ins.
Why the change? This one's pretty obvious. Religiosity in America has declined precipitously since the 1960s/1970s. The society level value (and, therefore, status) has evaporated. It's not longer a "worthwhile'' decision.
Maternity is different because it's never (well, I hope) going to decline by 30-40% in one or two generations. Even in PMC circles today that make a lot of noise about not having children for environmental reasons, a public pregnancy announcement is always met with excitement (side note: if the pregnancy isn't announced publicly, there's a decent chance it isn't going to come to term for one reason or another. That's a different post). It's never going to be "oh, wow, really?" weird to be a mother.
That being the case, I'd gesture at trying to status boost a lot of maternity adjacent things - kids, first of all. But also "homemaking" pursuits, I suppose. I think the fundamental tension, however, is between women-in-relation-to-children and women-in-their-own-right. Is it possible to applaud a woman for her personal and professional accomplishments? Sure! But is this done at the expense of praise for family and maternal pursuits? The kneejerk reaction may be "No, of course not! We can praise a woman for being an accomplished scientist and a Mom!" ... but if you walk through the incentives in a hyper-individualistic society, it gets complicated and uncomfortable. As a quick example - I bet people know the best player on their favor sports team immediately, but can they name the official captains? (There's a bit of a hack in that, in a lot of cases, these individuals are one in the same, but the point still stands).
If you want to raise the status of a role that is fundamentally non-individualistic, you have to raise the status of communal accomplishment as a category in a society. I have no idea how to begin doing that in the west today.
Yeah, what you described with the priest is clearly a vicious cycle. As the status of the priesthood goes down, fewer high status people become priests, making the priesthood even lower value, etc...
I think we've got the same thing with mothers, but in reverse. The best and brightest women tend to delay motherhood. So, if someone gets married and has kids at age 24, we wonder if there's something weird with her.
There is some hope. Among the very rich, having many children is a powerful status symbol, signalling as it does the wealth necessary to hire nannies and not need to work. But that's pretty hard to fake and far out of reach of the normies.
Sadly, a healthy amount of scorn for "cat ladies" and "wine aunts" may do what positive reinforcement cannot.
Yes but no but yes.
The Vance "cat ladies" comment was harshly received even by some of the most MAGA women in my social circle. My read is that it was seen as a general attack on women as opposed to the specific subcategory of women Vance meant to target. And this weaponized ambiguity will persist until women themselves decide to status boost / value re-orient. Again, I don't see how this happens without the equivalent of a modern day Women's Temperance League popping up. You can imagine what the popular response would be to that.
--- (EDIT) ---
Your comment also made me consider an interesting non-obvious culprit - teen pregnancy. Through the 80s and 90s, there was a major push to reduce teen pregnancy. This was a good idea as the correlation between teen motherhood and poor outcomes for the kids was pretty ironclad. I worry that that's extended in age range to the mid 20s.
As an intellectual exercise, how many women who do a typical four year college after high school are pregnant within 12 months of graduating? If you take out the selective sampling from explicitly Christian colleges, i'd wager that number rounds to zero.
Contrast this with one of my own grandmothers who dropped out of a state school after marrying my grandpa so that they could jumpstart the family. This was not at all seen as a mistake, but as a fortunate shortcut to her ultimate goal.
Pregnant = always good isn't quite the message you want to send for a lot of reasons, but planned pregnant at any age = always good might be.
I think a male near-equivalent of what Vance said about childless cat ladies would be if Walz literally said "the Republican party is run by a bunch of incels". Many Republican supporters would be fuming, maybe even more than about the whole "basket of deplorables" thing. People tend to get touchy when their reproductive success is criticized, or near-criticized.
They sure do. And men who publicly get touchy are simply labeled as "DOUBLE incel!"
Hasn't this been the messaging ("they're weird") of Harris-Walz since the convention? Funny how cleanly it maps to "When they do it, it's outrageous and wrong, when we do it, we're merely spittin' facts."
Seeing Musk get called an "incel" was certainly one of the "weirdest" things I've seen, considering we're talking about a guy who has had
1112 children with 3 women.Words versus symbols, right?
More-babies-than-rockets Musk can be called an incel because he's weird, nerd techy (instead of cool San Francisco VC techy), dresses sort of schlubby sometimes, and dances weird (Wow, that clip is truly painful).
Just as there's nothing particularly feline centric about "cat ladies." Instead, it's about
symbolingsignalling a harsh, unattractive, bitter woman who is not only repulsive to men but unfriendly with other women.Incel is another evolutionary branch of nice guy or neckbeard. Cat lady is the descendant of marm, spinster, and witch.
The central thing about male inceldom is failure with women. Calling Musk an incel isn't a correct application of a literally-incorrect label, it's just plain ludicrous, and no amount of both-sidesing will change that.
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