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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
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.
Something I've been thinking about writing an effort post on is the seeming death of "the adult", and the issue of delining issue seems directly related.
My 30-second elevator pitch is that the people talking about dysigeninics and raising the status of big families are either burying the lede or missing the point. That lede/point being that the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families and rearing of children.
In the immediate aftermath of the election there was a user here asking who were the 40-something percent of women who voted for Trump because the didn’t know any. In contrast the answer seemed obvious to me because I know many women who voted for Trump, and the answer was "Moms".
The reason big families are "low status" is that they signal a rejection of many core secular liberal beliefs. A married couple with multiple car seats in the back of thier vehicle may as well be screaming "the things you care about are not the things we care about" at every member of the intellectual, activist, and managerial classes they drive past.
You have a "fur-baby"? That's cute, call me when you're ready to stop playing the game on "beginner mode".
I mean, you'll get engagement from me, at least.
But you won't quite get what you're expecting; I'm going to posit that the people who do raise families are not properly equipping their children as a direct response.
The active anti-adult memes are part of this, but they don't entirely explain it among the children; the typical failing of the wise parent is that they refuse to delegate and make time for delegation, because they're too busy believing the meme about their kids not becoming fully human until way later than it actually happens. I've seen this first hand from parents I consider to be pretty wise, but at the same time they're failing their children because they didn't grow up in a memetic/economic environment that's far more blatantly hostile to human development (and no, it's not 'social media' or 'video games' or other purely reactionary Boomer cope; if anything, they're more popular than they otherwise would be because every other avenue of "actually doing something" has been shuttered for safety or cost reasons- it's not a surprise they spend every waking hour in the only free space they're allowed [for now] to participate in).
So's a 10 year old walking down the street or riding his bike unsupervised. He screams that his parents don't put an absurd value on safety and hiding under the bed from all risk whatsoever.
The PMC, and people with that mindset, respond in kind; the fact they're allowed to is kind of the central issue there. Safety arrests development; and kids are inherently a very unsafe thing to do. Hence fur-babies, where you're [for now] allowed to kill them or otherwise dispose of them if they turn out wrong, can send them to multi-day daycare whenever you want, can keep them in a cage to prevent them from wrecking the house, and their purpose [to us] generally matches their intellectual capabilities quite well- something that it's a meme for parents to bemoan without end the minute this stops being true for their children ('teenagers').
Sure, you can always blame the parents but that's also part of what I'm talking about when I say that "the modern secular European blue/grey-tribe mindset is just not conducive to, and in many respects actively hostile towards, the forming of families". You see, I actually agree with you that having kids is inherently "unsafe", and therein lies the rub. Because if there's anything in the world that the modal secular blue/grey-tribemember seems desperate to avoid, it is personal risk, or more pointedly blame.
I believe this aversion is at the root of many modern pathologies including the seeming death of the adult. That desperate desire to avoid or minimize risk/blame ultimately bleeding over into a more generalized aversion to anything resembling personal responsibility or agency, and ultimately emotional and cognitive infantilization.
Furthermore I am positing that the collapse in birth rates is largely downstream of this phenomenon.
Used to be the opposite. Not having kids was how to be unsafe. Kids were your safety net.
You're not wrong.
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