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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26272 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

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Towards a grand unified theory of birth rate collapse

Ask someone without any interest in the topic why birth rates are collapsing globally or in their own country, and they will usually find some way of saying it's too expensive. Either wages aren't high enough, house prices are too high, childcare costs too much. Often they will bring in their own pet issue as a rationalisation (global warming, inequality, immigration, taxes).

They are of course, wrong. Global GDP per capita has never been higher, and global TFR has never been lower. Countries with higher GDP per capita numbers tend to have lower birth rates, although the relationship isn't necessarily causal. Clearly, 'we can't afford it' isn't factually true.

So what is causing it? There are certainly things that governments and cultures can and have done to encourage births on the margins. Cheaper housing does allow earlier household formation, which increases births. Dense housing suppresses birth rates, even if the dense housing lowers overall housing costs. Religiosity increases birth rates, all other things being equal. Tax cuts for parents increase birth rates. Marriage increases birth rates vs cohabiting. Young people living with their parents decreases birth rates. Immigration of high-TFR groups works until the second generation. Generous maternity leave and cheap childcare seem to help. However, none of these seem to be decisive. There are countries that do everything right and yet birth rates still continue to decline.

The universality of the birth rate collapse suggests that the main cause must be something more fundamental then any of the policies or cultural practices I have named. Something that affects every country and people (with a few notable exceptions that will be the key to working out what's going on).

Substacker Becoming Noble proposes that the birth rate collapse is caused by one thing:

Status

Specifically, I contend that the basic epistemological assumptions which underpin modern civilization result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings, and that this results in a population-wide hyper-sensitivity to any and all adverse factors which make having children more difficult, whatever these may be in a given society.

In such a paradigm, if a tradeoff is to be made between having children and another activity which results in higher status conferral (an example would be ‘pursuing a successful career’ for women) then having children will be deprioritized. Because having and raising children is inherently difficult, expensive, and time-consuming, these tradeoffs are common, and so the act of having children is commonly and widely suppressed.

I won't spend too much time summarising the article. It is excellently written and I wouldn't do it justice. The key thing to take away is that, within global culture, having children is neutral or negative for status.

But let's apply the hypothesis to various groups with unusually high or low birth rates and see if they match the predicition.

Becoming Noble gives the example of Koreans. Infamously, South Korea has the lowest birth rate on the planet. It is also hyper-competitive and status obsessed. Children spend most of their waking hours studying for the all-important college entrance exam, so they can get into the best college, to get into the best company from a small selection of prestigious Chaebols (the most prestigious is Samsung, as you'd imagine). According to Malcolm Collins, the Korean language even requires its speakers to refer to people based on their job title, even in non-professional settings. In a country which is defined by zero-sum status competition, the main casualty is fertility.

Of course, South Koreans aren't the only East Asians to have low birth rates. All East Asian countries have very low birth rates, and the East Asian diaspora also has very low birth rates, even in relatively high-TFR countries like the USA or Australia.

Richard Hanania proposes that East Asians, being particularly conformist, are particularly sensitive to the status trade-offs of having children. This would explain why we see similarly low TFRs among the diaspora.

So now we move on to groups with unusually high TFRs. The most famous are the Amish and the Hasidic/Haredi/Ultra-Orthodox Jews.

The Amish are rural, religious people, so we would expect them to have a relatively high TFR, but even compared to other rural Americans, the Amish stand out for extremely high fertility. They don't spend long in school, they marry young (and don't allow divorce) and stick to traditional gender roles. But according to this description of Amish life, the key factor is that among the Amish, being married and having a large family is high status, for both men and women. Amish culture is cut off from global culture in important ways. They are not exposed to television or the internet, they don't socialise much with the English, and they are limited in what modern status goods they can buy. So for young Amish, the only way to gain any status is to marry and have children.

Unlike the Amish, the Haredim are urban people. Instead of leaving school at 14, the young men spend their most productive years in Torah study, supported by their wives and government benefits or charity. Meanwhile, their women pop out children and work at the same time. Urban living, extended education, and a rejection of traditional gender roles should all suppress their fertility, but they don't. Tove (Wood from Eden) proposes that the religious restrictions on Haredi men reduce the worry from Haredi women that their menfolk might leave them. This, combined with a religiously-motivated rejection of global culture encourages them to focus their status-seeking energies on having large families. This also seems to have the knock-on effect of increasing Israeli birth rates among other Jewish groups there.

Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline. Pronatalist Daniel Hess argues that this is because these countries make motherhood high status in a way that most others don't. Their Soviet history and the fact that their languages don't use the Latin alphabet means that the populations are not very exposed to English-language global culture.

So what is to be done? There is of course no magic button that a president can push to make parenthood high status. But the most obvious thing would be for governments to simply tell their citizens that having children is pro-social. They should promote having kids the same way they promote recycling or public transport. Promoting marriage would likely help, as well as pivoting school sex education away from avoiding teenage pregnancy (which has essentially disappeared in the developed world) and towards avoiding unplanned childlessness.

As I’ve said before, it is possible to reduce declining fertility by making having more children higher status. It wouldn’t even be hard (to paraphrase Moldbug). But it would require:

  1. Blocking college admission to the 70th+ percentile of colleges for anyone with fewer than 2 siblings.

  2. Reserving 90% of seats on corporate boards (for major public companies), and cabinet positions, along with senior federal and state government jobs for adults with at least 3 children

  3. Implementing a 70% inheritance tax on adults with no children for all assets over $500k, which would fall by 20% per child. This encourages families with one or two children to have more so.

  4. Require all full professors at universities that receive any public funding to have at least 2 biological children; 70% should have at least 3.

  5. Require 75% of actors over 30 on all film and television productions that receive state tax credits and other incentives to have at least two children.

  6. Legally mandate 9 months of paternity pay (which can be split or taken all at once) per child at full pay for all American men, but only if married (and make it much harder to fire fathers under threat of federal civil rights investigation than it woul be to fire childless men).

I’m not advocating these things (necessarily). But low tfr is always a choice, and that should be remembered.

I’m fully in board with this, but I think going back to keeping married women out of high powered positions. This would reduce women going to college and therefore increase the likelihood that they end up marrying early and having more kids. Heck, as much as I as a woman enjoyed college, I think keeping women out would help here.

Within Finland (and as far as I know, other Nordic countries as well) there's a persistent pattern of women with high education having higher fertility rates than those with low education, which at least somewhat challenges the idea of education being universally disruptive to fertility. (Of course all these segments have fertility rates below replacement, but still, just limiting university education would not solve anything here, and there must be other factors keeping TFR low for those with lower education.)

Could this not be explained by women with high education marrying men with high or even higher education (i.e. wealthy men), which has a positive effect on fertility. Confounder?

I mean, I assume you want these babies born in wedlock, yes? Where do you think high-IQ women are going to meet high-IQ husbands at an early age if not college?

"Go to a school with a strong engineering program and pretend to struggle with your math homework in the engineering commons until a senior in the program helpfully explains what your professor couldn't" is and remains the best way for a middle class woman to become a tradwife. The Christian Nationalist Revolutionary Guard Corp is not coming to restructure our society, and the people who would have to staff this organization if it existed don't want to. We won't have arranged marriages outside of very small, insular subcultures that don't really care about the prevailing TFR.

Why would you want to keep top women away from college? They have just as much right as top men to contribute to the future of humanity. It's the middling women you want to discourage if anything because the top ones will by and large not fall for the negative messaging of college anywhere near the middling women will.

Unfortunately, saying that top women should have careers and middling women should have babies makes ‘not having a baby’ a status symbol. Which is how we got here.

Again, I’m trying to optimize births, and particularly high quality births. If a woman goes to college, she’s going to delay childbearing until after college, and if she’s highly intelligent and goes as far as she can, she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.

And if we’re shooting to simultaneously try to get high IQ people to have more kids, then the above is the worst thing to do. A woman with high IQ giving birth to 3-5 high IQ kids is likely to do more to raise the general IQ of the country than anything she could accomplish in the workplace. I’m sure there might be one or two high IQ women who will make life-altering contributions to science, but if you lost that and had that woman give birth to 3-4 high IQ kids who go on to do similar things you end up getting a better return.

she’ll get a masters so she’ll only begin to think about having children after she graduates from a Master’s degree programs at 24-25. Even if she doesn’t buy the negative messages, the loss of a good chunk of her fertility is going to mean that she’s probably at best having one child.

That would be true if masters degree programs ended in a woman's thirties. They don't. An average woman who marries at 25 is totally capable of having 3+ children and there's lots of examples known to me personally of this happening. Heck, there's an example downthread of a man whose wife had four children after finishing her residency first.

Yes, but people typically do masters degrees because they want masters-degree-level careers. The masters degree itself is probably only the first stepping stone; they will need to do oversubscribed entry-level jobs that may require them to move around a lot and/or devote lots of hours per day. If you get a masters and then start having 3+ children then I think you're either going to be a very absent mother or you might as well burn the diploma now. I would say it's going to be another 5 years until that woman feels stable enough to consider children.

contribute to the future of humanity

The best way for top women to contribute to the future of humanity is by bearing humanities future directly.

Ehhh... in the strictest sense yes, and it's inevitable that women will bear the brunt of childbearing/childrearing, but the burdens of both don't seem great enough to be any woman's sole occupation. It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children. With how trivialized housekeeping has become, it seems to me that intelligent, childbearing women would be well served by WFH positions so they can contribute to the household in a more tangible sense.

Besides, you be the one to tell a curious young woman that the boys get to do all the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys.

Often these stifling parents will only have one or two children. If the goal is four or more different styles of parenting are necessary along with greater demands on home making for a larger family.

Is it the top women selecting WFH positions? These typically don't have the challenge or prestige top women are looking for. The bulk of the WFH ladies are mid, many in fake email jobs.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit, as opposed to telling them that boys have to do all the boring, tedious, monotonous, and dangerous shit?

Like, sure, you can, but that's a weird framing to take for what even you concede as the strictly superior option for society. Why would a society want to approach persuasion in that way?

It's already well established that people massively overestimate how much work needs to be put into raising children, leading to terribly stifling parenting styles that are net negative for the affected children.

This is not the well established conclusion, since the comparison isn't terribly stifling parenting styles versus beneficent parenting styles, but rather terribly stifling parenting styles versus no parenting at all.

The repugnant conclusion of ethics is only repugnant if you think sub-optimization is worse than non-existence. Certainly the general child is not better off for having never been born to suffer parents (or worse, puberty). Those that disagree can and would resolve that issue themselves, but the survivors will- by definition- prefer the life with bad parents to no life.

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ. It is true that women have a certain baseline privilege, but with it comes a certain cap on their expected competence. It's a tradeoff that works to the favor of some, perhaps even most, but certainly not all women.

...why would they tell curious young women that the boys get to do all the cool shit

It's not explicitly said, but that's the message that at least one teenage girl got (though granted, perhaps she isn't a representative sample)

The male equivalents of the women in question aren't the ones doing the dirty work, we're talking >85th percentile IQ.

Again, this is reversing the paradigm to assume the conclusion. It's not about 'the male equivalents of the women in question,' it's how you are characterizing the jobs these women's spouses would be doing if they were expected to be breadwinners, i.e. "the cool shit while she gets to be the factory to make more boys."

Most bread-winning jobs are boring, tedious, monotonous, and/or dangerous because that is why they are paying you breadwinning wages in the first place. Higher wages aren't correlated with fun or excitement, but with the compensation required for people to take them, generally because the work is not generally desirable 'cool shit.' Quite often the greater the wage advantage the worse the desirability, because if it was highly desirable then other workers would want that job and be willing to do it for less.

Which returns to the question of framing bias.

Why would you insinuate to high IQ women that they should be envious of the often unpleasant jobs of their bread-winning spouses, while denigrating the alternative, except for the purpose of elevating the former over the later?

Aella is like the textbook example of a high-testosterone woman. She's definitely not a representative sample.

your mom finds you crying one night alone in your bed, crying in grief that god hadn’t made you be born a boy

This is not a thing that normal little girls do.

Also she does that stupid zoomer not using capital letters thing even though she's a millennial. Very annoying.

More comments

Very wealthy women already have more children than almost every other demographic.

Are these very wealthy women, or the wives / partners of very wealthy men?

Assortative mating means they are often both.

I'd guess there's an old money / new money cultural difference in the assortive pairings.

In my experience new money wealth marries young / hot not necessarily wealthy.

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