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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.
Epistemic Status: Befuddled. A little gobsmacked, even.
Every time a new major cause for low TFR is discussed, there seem to be decent counterexamples readily available. Is it chemicals in the environment? Sperm counts do seem to be going down. Purely a social phenomena? Or more broadly economic, where the increased expense of raising kids and the increased earning (and consumption!) potential of high IQ individuals makes kids less important since you don't need 10 of them to help you tend crops.
Status seems like the popular explanation du jour so I'm pretty enthusiastically exploring it. BUT I do now believe the problem is multifactor and there are likely hidden(?) feedback loops. But it can't be THAT tough a nut to crack? We've successfully produced hundreds of generations of humans, it is our default setting, it shouldn't be hard to put us back in that setting!
So my model of Western Women does work with the status argument. Women are perceiving that being a girlboss or free spirit are high status, and that motherhood inhibits pursuit of both those lifestyles, so their status-seeking instincts pull them into and keep them in a metastable position that diverts them from motherhood until some large force (possibly biological clock) knocks them back over to that portion of the graph.
And I sincerely believe that if we flooded the zone such that every commercial, every movie, every other T.V. show, and our news media in general, was promoting motherhood as an ideal, we'd see almost overnight improvement as women gravitate towards the Schelling point for high status.
But it is hard for me to believe that effective policies can be built that won't have huge second-order effects that we can't predict. And those second-order effects will emerge whether or not we achieve the actual policy goals. I'm just skeptical that social problems can be fixed with increasingly complex rulemaking! But it does seem obvious that current policies are bad, too.
Yet, another component of the problem is single motherhood. We can't just have women spurting out babies if they're going to be dependent on state resources their whole lives, and the well-known issues that children raised in single-parent homes tend to exhibit. So you have to glorify families and encourage men to stick around, on top of making motherhood high-status. And about 1-in-5 women in the U.S. is a single mom! (note: not controlling for race)
This likely means removing any subsidies or incentives for females to enter the workspace, and stop subsidizing degrees with little economic value, since those create the double-whammy where a woman ends up burning 4 or more (high fertility!) years on the degree, then gets stuck in a career path that almost certainly isn't economically productive enough to justify the loss of her childrearing years. I will go ahead and say that there certainly are cases where women are able to be economically productive in a career, and it is possible to balance career and childrearing!
I would hope that removing incentives, gender balance requirements, and subsidies is all it takes, but maybe there also have to be some kind of direct legal barriers to women entering careers and becoming Married to a Corporation that can give her everything she needs for a 'fulfilling' life... except kids. I'm hoping that the free market is still going to select for exceptional women to make economic and social contributions, but... exceptional women should also be passing on their genes, one hopes!
There would also have to be some goal of preventing women from becoming Brides of the State, where big daddy government is picking up the tab for her kids and making sure she never falls below a certain level of economic destitution even if she's disabled, not working, not married, and raising 3 kids, possibly all from different fathers.
So a side effect of keeping women out of the workforce is it would immediately make marrying and staying with a man more appealing because now there's a certain amount of 'necessity' to having a provider in the picture, since she can't rely on governments or a subsidized career path to support her forever. And remember, this is on top of raising the social status of motherhood!
(I would be willing to couple all of that with a one-time loan forgiveness act to give women who already made that choice a break. Probably tying it to conditions that they get/stay married for 5 years and have at least one kid during that time)
Also, women themselves need to shape up. Okay, very unfair to generalize, but also a blunt fact. Running the numbers on a superficial level shows a pretty damning picture, with Gen Z showing staggering amounts of obesity, absurdly high rates of LGBT identification, mental illnesses (I'm choosing to make those separate categories, but I daresay its related to the LGBT thing), attendant pharmaceutical dependence, and some indeterminate amount that have become sex workers via Onlyfans and such, which is all to say not very appealing as spouses.
AND they lack the sort of domestic skills that would actually make them good wives and mothers. So even if we raise the status of motherhood and marriage and stack the economic deck to encourage family formation, you have to make them an appealling prospect on their own if men are going to jump on the role of partner and provider instead of sticking with porn and video games. And yes, perhaps bans on porn and restrictions on video games should be on the table, as much as that offends my libertarian sensibilities, I think there's a major problem of superstimuli sucking young people into inescapable loops which partially explains the TFR problem.
I somewhat accept the argument that the mere act of having a child can encourage people to step up, so to an extent I'm willing to just say "SEND IT!" and let the chips fall where they may. I don't endorse that particular study, mind, and indeed assume its probably bullshit in some key way as most social studies seem to be.
And now the big one. I'm not sure how to solve it in real life, but the issue of so many women being childless does indeed have direct political implications, and these women seem to form the core political bloc that votes in favor of policies that destroy all the aforementioned incentives for family formation.
I don't necessarily want to say "repeal the 19th", but I worry about the incentives that come from targeting female voters and the ways that political actors will try to influence said voters with handouts and emotional pleas and the further incentive to keep these women childless and unhappy to ensure they continue to support the party.
This relates back to the 'Brides of the State' point above, to keep them from defecting from the pro-family arrangement they can't have outsize political power to vote for redistributive policies that will allow them to be single and childless (or unmarried but fruitful!) for their whole lives.
The best option I've really heard on this point is to give married persons some extra voting power, and maybe scale it by how many children they have. It literally does seem like we're going to have to create a sort of 'tiered' system wherein families with kids get treated better, politically, than everyone else, to keep the single and childless ones from dragging the system in a different direction.
But don't you worry, I'm not letting men off the hook, we gotta get dudes to rise to the occasion (there's a pun in there I'm not going to dig out) to help bring about more kids too, and be worthy of raising them and capable of defending them. And it so happens Dr. Faceh has a prescription for that!
I ALSO think we need to bring back the Basic Life Script that, if you follow it step by step, basically guarantees you'll never fall into poverty and will have a fulfilling if not extraordinary life, and make this the default expectation for young people coming up.
Religion offered a fully generalized method of keeping kids on such a script throughout their lives. I do not know how we're going to replace that with the overall decrease in religiosity. What the FUCK would a 'modern' Fertility Rite even look like, sans the religious undertones?
Males need good role models. Andrew Tate is the solution they've turned to because any "truly" Masculine Positive Role Model is simply disallowed in the current Zeitgeist. They need a reliable path/script to follow, and they need a meaningful, valuable reward to pursue. Family formation does a lot of the lifting here if men are willing to pick up the weight. An attractive woman is the short term 'reward' (so women need to be attractive, see above), then the kids provide the ongoing motivation.
Finally finally, all of this might not actually matter in the sense that low TFR may kill the globalized world, or AGI might kills humans before our population recovers anyway. Even if we could implement the right policies to fix birthrates, this all feels like angels dancing on the head of pins in terms of how it will effect our future trajectory, so much seems baked-in already.
PHEW. SO yeah, this is about the full state of my current thinking on the TFR problem and the broad gender split problem. To be sure it ties into other issues.
GUESS WHAT? Immigration and Diversity may depress TFR too!. I already know there's going to be a couple mottizens screaming at me "ITS THE IMMIGRATION STUPID! Deport all illegals and wages will rise, home prices will fall, and people will more readily form families!"
There's probably a chemical problem too. I read Slow Death by Rubber Duck in college and most of it seems to hold up, especially the parts about certain chemicals interfering with reproductive organs, testosterone, and fetal/infant development.
And yes there's probably an urban-rural factor, as almost every historical example shows that you increase density of humans and they have fewer kids. Yes yes we have to destroy the cities to save the humans. I didn't even discuss the Amish in this bit, but they're a relevant example.
As some people around here are fond of saying, it is possible that a FULL solution to the problem is 'coup-complete', and cannot be achieved without first overthrowing the governments of several countries. Shoutout to @Sloot in particular.
Please guys, I said right at the outset that its multifactor and I'm really uncertain about the major causes! I'm just proposing the policies I think most directly target the issue at hand. I really wish I had better things to do with my time than think about this at length and type long screeds to the internet. Better things like raising kids! That'd be really nice! BUT APPARENTLY I HAVE TO SOLVE ALL THE REST OF THIS to bring my chances up.
Damn. I really need to get laid.
When in their lives do women without children want children most? Best I can tell, there's two times -- one, mid to late teens. The other, late 30s to early 40s. In other words, shortly after they first can and when time is running out. We've dedicated an enormous amount of effort to convincing women in their teens and early 20s that having a child will ABSOLUTELY RUIN YOUR LIFE. You'll end up broke, on welfare and/or dependent on some sort of abusive boyfriend. Turns out this messaging has an effect.
I think its that, COMBINED with messaging that makes Careerism and casual sex and travel appear to be 'high status' is a big factor, yes. Hence my triangular model of female ambition (the name is a work in progress).
If the biological urge to have kids is strong, it shouldn't be easy to scare them away from it. But get them engaging in activities that preclude childbearing for a while, and they might fool themselves into thinking "there's time for that later."
It's not, but we've worked REALLY hard to do it.
Fair point.
This brings in the uncomfortable idea that there might need to be punishments and negative consequences for these anti-family forces for all they've done.
I didn't touch on that one in the screed up there but, uh, there will probably be some portion of the population that will keep trying to undermine family formation, and our policies should also be keeping them at bay too.
I don't know if punishment is necessary; step one would be to get them out of the driver's seat and see what happens. The bigger problem is it's widely agreed that delay IS necessary; even among natalists, very few are going to think that a girl having a baby before finishing high school is a good idea. And that amount of delay might be tolerable. But I think expecting delay until after undergrad ends up just building in the habit of delay past the point of biological baby-craziness.
And if you want this to work without too many bad side effects, you're going to want the father to be married to the mother, too, which would be a big change as well; the model of the residential university would either go away or change a LOT. The larger problem may well be intractable.
Congrats, you’ve discovered why the modal marriage arrangement throughout history was ‘teenaged girl with an older man’.
If you think we’re going to bring that back, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The fact of the matter is that at least part of the reason that 20 year old brides are so rare is the dearth of young, college aged men ready to be husbands. I suspect destigmatizing age gap relationships would boost the fertility rate dramatically. So start a TikTok trend of bragging about silver Fox husbands or something, I don’t know how you’re going to replicate the social conditions(aka patriarchy) that convinced young women in historical societies to marry older men.
In a word? Inflation.
Sure, there's some snark there, but there's a lot of stories from the Depression about wild age gap relationships just due to economic realities.
I am close to convince that the American economy of the next 20 - 30 years is utterly bifurcated. Zero "middle class." An utter divide between permanently dependent on the state for near serfdom conditions, and the independently able who are literally starting companies with the help of AI overnight and have more money than they know what to do with. The upper class status games will start to get very strange.
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