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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.
Industrial scale artificial births are the surest path to success, IMO. Orphans turn out alright, all things considered. Many of the problems with orphans are probably biologically rooted, their genes are probably closer to drug fiends than fantasy heroes. If you picked out good genes and ran a functional education system I think you'd get good results.
Even Mongolian TFR is declining from its peak of 3. I saw someone just today say that it had fallen 10% in the latest statistics.
https://x.com/Aaronal16/status/1830956670345978198
Alternately, maybe a cultural fix where parents get affirmative action in university and the workforce would stem the bleeding?
All of this will probably come too late to matter, since no major leaders are aggressive enough to make tough decisions. No country has stuck with a 'pick out good genes and run a functional education system' strategy for more than a few years even with regular people, let alone clones. South Korea is still mucking about with lame financial incentives.
I'd like to imagine that they are all secretly AGI-pilled. Realistically, it's probably eternal boomer syndrome: anything that takes more than 15 years to have serious effect will come after I'm retired. They can't blame me, it will be someone else's problem then!
I'm surprised that multiple people are suggesting this.
Do they?
But even if you could create governmental institutions that could raise children from birth to 18 and create psychologically healthy people, the result seems catastrophic from a cultural perspective.
One of the core structural units of society is the family, whether that is the western mother-father-kids atomic option, or clans, or other arrangements I'm less familiar with. This is a pillar of every society ever. The differences between different family structures are defining features of different cultures.
It should be assumed that tinkering with family structure in any culture will lead to large outcomes. It's a very central node of society, messing around with it will have large effects. But you aren't just talking about tinkering with it, you're talking about eliminating it entirely. An entire layer of society and culture simply excised from the stack. Is it not obvious that that would have massive and unpredictable societal implications?
Lets say we build a system that can raise orphans successfully, and we artificially create a generation of highly optimized orphans that turn out psychologically healthy (which I question the viability of, but for the sake of argument) - imagine how that would change the political balance of power. Atomic family units as part of a larger network of families or in some places a full on clan, have a huge amount of sway in creating the political landscape. Your newly raised orphans will be completely devoid of any kind of familial association. They won't have any cultural heritage besides whatever is inculcated into the at the institution. No family history or values. Most children grow up to reflect their parents values and politics, well, not anymore, they don't have that.
This seems to totally remove a central break on the expansion of institutional power whether thats governmental or otherwise.
Whoever, or more realistically whatever, is in charge of raising the kids, will be a new cultural structure with enormous power. It will consume a huge chunk of the political power currently contained within family structures. Why would you want that? Who knows what it will look like?
I would have thought that reducing the atomization of humans in modernity was an obvious core goal held by most people raised in western nations in modernity, I have not really heard people argue that they are in favor of increased atomization. But it seems like that is what you are suggesting?. Do you consider the atomization of humans in modernity to be a good outcome? I mean that question sincerely, I think I may need to reconsider my assumptions.
Community has already disintegrated. Atomization has already happened.
I agree that replacing natural families with clones is a long shot. This would never happen in a functioning civilization. We are not a functioning civilization and thus we shall have to trade off wants for needs. I don't think the state should have such great powers. Nevertheless, all these things are wants, survival is a need.
You're talking about using a theoretical technology to prop up a civilization that is, by your description, not functioning. It is unlikely, but beyond that, not a good outcome.
Then let the civilization collapse. If the civilization collapses, then we would return to the original ecosystem we evolved for, and the problem would be gone. If the requirement of maintaining our current high level of technology is raising children as orphans via institution, then wouldn't it preferable to abandon high technology and start over? What about high technology is so great as to be worth this trade off you offer.
I don't want civilization to collapse because I'm enjoying sanitation, electricity, digital technology, relative safety, fresh food from around the world via refrigerated supply lines.
I don't enjoy hard manual labour in fields, reading books by candle-light, starving as agriculture disintegrates (does anyone know how to do things with horses today) or getting massacred by gangs of looters.
And nor does anyone else. There are plenty of coercive things that the modern state can do, China has a history of interfering with reproduction.
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