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Notes -
The 7 Habits of Highly Fertile People
I Background
Look into the comment section of any mainstream video or article on below-replacement fertility, and you will find a familiar refrain: it is simply too expensive to have children.
However, despite this common meme, the data do not bear it out. Plotting Total Fertility Rate (TFR) vs Household Income actually produces a U shape with peaks at household incomes <$20k and >$1m, and trough around $200k per year. 2012-2016, 2018-2022.
What is happening here?
My wife and I are members of the PMC, as are most of our friends. We are in our mid-thirties. We have noticed that our friends are branching into one of two forks:
Recently, I have had the opportunity to get to know well two families quite outside our social circle. The first is the family of a carpenter who makes $30/hour, lives in a rural area 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city, stay-at-home mom, five kids. The other is an urban family, headed by single-mom who works as a receptionist at a low-end hotel (making, I would guess $20-30k/year), also with five kids.
While these families are superficially quite different, when it comes to childrearing, they actually have a lot of beliefs and habits in common. And, these beliefs and habits stand in stark contrast to those of my peer group - folks who are making quite a bit more money and yet cannot imagine affording five children!
I document them below, mostly for myself:
TL;DR: High-fertility families structure their lives in such a way as to make children extremely cheap and dramatically less time-intensive.
II Habits of Highly Fertile People
1) High-fertility families do not believe that every child needs their own room.
2) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for education.
3) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for kids' stuff.
4) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for enriching activities.
5) High-fertility families start early. They have known no other adult life, besides being parents. Their tastes are quite modest.
6) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for childcare:
7) High-fertility families pay very little for (and think very little about) healthcare
I am not trying to say that having five children is the only worthy goal in life. And, it is entirely possible that the progeny of the PMC will somehow be “better” than the progeny of the Carpenter or Receptionist - healthier, higher-IQ, more worldly.
III Policy Ideas for Increasing Fertility
It also occurs to me that, even if you cannot change the beliefs and habits of the PMC, you could still make policy decisions that increase their fertility:
1) Decrease the cost of housing.
2) Improve the public schools
3) Decrease the cost stuff
4) Enriching activities:
5) Starting early:
6) Childcare:
7) Healthcare:
I feel like this lends credence to the idea that fertility is linked to status.
If we made things cheaper for the low PMC, might they still face constraints? After all, their existing constraints are self-imposed. They feel like they need to live in prestigious neighborhoods and send their kids to prestigious schools. But these are by definition limited. What these people really want is higher status, not more material wealth, which they already have in abundance. But, sadly, status is a zero sum game.
Giving the already rich PMC even more money is unlikely to increase fertility.
What we need is to increase the status of parents, and decrease the status of the childless.
The idea of having lots of kids while living with low status breaks down when you realize that the women who agrees to this will most likely be fat and below average Iq. The dating market is a status game and with birth control people can afford to trade time for more status. Men can spend years going to grad schools, traveling, saving for an impressive condo etc while building their career to move up the stack of profiles on tinder.
Dropping out of the status game at 21 years old to marry a woman who is happy to have 5 kids in a three bedroom house, never travel and live a low status life means your kids would be dead if we had natural selection. The exception is men who have such high status that they have won the statusgame at age 21.
Eh, I think women are less status driven and more scared. They’re naturally a bit shy and fearful of men, yes, but fed a steady diet of hysterical fear porn about dependency on a man ruining their lives.
I suspect if you were able to convince young women that you could guarantee the man they drop out of college to marry would treat them well, there would be more 20 year old girls standing in line to take you up on it than there would be eligible bachelors to go around.
You can’t, so it’s academic. But ranting about how common domestic violence is and it’s caused by gender roles to elementary schoolers and then filling girls’ heads with fearmongering about getting raped from the time they get their first smart phone does like 10x as much damage as selfies at the amalfi coast.
While there certainly is fear porn, I think there really is more risk in some ways for modern women simply because being a deadbeat dad carries way less stigma than it used to, and everyone is highly mobile.
You can get married and have a kid with a guy who seems great. Then 5 years into the marriage he gets bored and cheats, there's some mild tut-tutting but in current year there is no shared, deeply-rooted community that you both belong to, and neither of you are particularly religious, so he has no reputation to preserve and suffers little to no personal, professional, or moral consequence. And what few consequences he does suffer simply evaporate when he moves two states away to live with his new wife and family. This is in fact exactly what happened to aunt of mine who was an all around decent middle class person. Her husband simply got bored and left, and that was it.
Uh, you know that up until very recently if you moved a state away there was absolutely no way for anyone to know what you did in the town you used to live in? "I moved to take a job- I heard the mill was hiring". Today due to facebook the 'avoiding your other family' is harder to hide, and outside of a small slice of the PMC Americans are less mobile, not more. In the fifties the guy who moved to town to see if the mill was hiring was commonplace; now it's limited to boomtowns like Midland. And of course back then there was no way for the average person to tell if his story was truthful or not.
'Shared, deeply rooted communities' are not some ancient tradition in America. They have, as far as anyone can tell, never been a thing here.
People used to live in the same community for most of their lives and moving was uncommon for most of human history.
I was referring to the 1950’s, not the 1650’s. If you go far back enough nobody went very far from their house, but 1950’s America saw very high mobility to staff industrial booms, much higher mobility than today for working class Americans. Escaping your filter bubble was easy and commonplace.
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I often hear this trope about husbands getting bored and leaving their wives, but I have a hard time conceiving how that actually works. Surely he would be on the hook for child support at the very least, and if the impetus for him leaving was cheating-related, surely that would result in a very favorable judgement in the divorce. I'm aware that in many cases the man is "judgement-proof" in the sense that he has few assets or income to extract, but in this case you've mentioned that your aunt is a middle-class person, so presumably her ex-husband is as well, and therefore not judgement proof.
This is obviously not an ideal outcome for the woman, especially socially, but it's much better than is commonly portrayed, where a woman has pinned her entire economic future on a man only to see him abandon her and condemn her to a life of eternal poverty.
The problem is that good outcomes in the law go to people who can afford good lawyers. So maybe the divorce actually was cheating-related, but if he has control of all the accounts, a robust community network and is willing to pay up for the absolute best legal representation, then how is his wife going to afford enough representation to gather evidence and make that case? It sounds like OP's uncle was relatively easygoing and generous, but that is not the modal attitude among divorcing spouses.
Similarly, post-divorce, being awarded child support/spousal support and actually collecting said support are extremely different things, and I assume affording good representation makes a substantial difference there, too. There are a lot of ways that someone with good lawyers can bully a less well-connected person into making custody or financial concessions.
Even if child support is awarded and collected, it may or may not match the actual expense of raising the children, a gap which the ex-wife will struggle to close with the wages of the kind of low-skill, entry-level work you can pick up as a 42-year-old job-seeking for the first time.
I agree that good outcomes go to the well-resourced in both law and life, but the average wife is much better resourced than the average husband. The median American woman is, famously, much better socially connected than the median American man, and when we're considering a married couple, their wealth at the point of divorce is by definition equal. That, combined with the well-known bias for women and against men of divorce courts, should mean that the average woman is getting a better deal out of the divorce than the facts normally would suggest by the letter of the law. The common story that comes out of divorce court is that it's the men who are being bullied into making custody or financial concessions, not the women.
I don't know, I feel like there's a severe disconnect between what we perceive to be normal. Having non-joint accounts in a marriage, for example, seems insane to me unless both partners work and have similar earnings, and the other stipulations in your post seem like severe outliers that one could reliably detect ahead of time if a woman were truly afraid of being abandoned.
I've had relatives and friends who've gone through this, so I'm weighting their experiences. One friend was able to reclaim her life after her husband became abusive and floridly unfaithful only because she was the one who kept the family accounts, hence had access to funds to secure an attorney. She also took the advice of friends at work, could use her relative independence of movement to make the necessary consultations, knew something about the process and could assess the attorney's advice because she was well-educated, etc. Her husband continued to spiral downward and there was definitely no spousal support on the table, but after the divorce, she just kept working her existing middle-class job, got a nice little apartment and did fine.
I also have a friend who's a SAHM in a more patriarchal setup where the husband keeps track of the money (after all, it's his, he earned it) and doles out an allowance for household shopping, reads and pays his wife's credit card bills, works from home where he can incidentally observe her comings and goings, is the final word in decisions of household policy (his money, his call). Her husband is a nice guy and she's able to hold her own because she worked for a while before having kids and has a reasonable perspective on things. But if she had gotten married to him at 20, wrangled toddlers full-time for a decade or so and then encountered the family crisis that my first friend did? I really think she would have been screwed. At minimum, she would have stayed in a worsening situation for far too long out of sheer exhaustion, dearth of resources and fear of the unknown.
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I think your suspicion is reasonable, and I can't speak to how common my aunt's case was. But AFAIK he simply ate the child support costs and straight up handed over the kids to my aunt. I think they had a relatively amicable divorce because he gave my aunt most of their assets (house, car, etc). He had already knocked up his new girlfriend and has since started a second family. I admit I don't know how alimony works, but my aunt is middle class and white collar, while he comes from a working class background and, I suspect, made considerably less money than she did (during the time of the divorce -- I don't think it was so when they got married).
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It happens. Usually it seems to be either:
My point was slightly different—I fully understand why a husband would want to leave his wife, but what I don't get is how that leads to such a disastrous outcome for the wife that it warrants any significant amount of fear. It just seems to me that the relatively low odds of it happening combined with how mild the downside is means that it shouldn't be a major factor in a woman's decision of whether to marry.
Well, in the hypothetical that was brought up, there was infidelity involved -- which is obviously hurtful. I think restricting the possible downsides to the economic ones really limits your ability to understand how difficult this situation would be for people to handle. There are a lot of people who would rather be single and lonely than coupled and vulnerable to the hurt and rejection of infidelity or loss-of-love.
I think the risk is relatively low as well, but people are increasingly terrified even of small chances of hurt. And men do this too, I've heard of men breaking up with their girlfriends because they're terrified she'll use social media to hurt his reputation someday, for some unknown reason; just the raw possibility of a power imbalance is so fearful.
And there's that term again: power imbalance. We're living through a time where any and all power is being questioned, "the rapists are in the sacred institutions", "the media can't be trusted", "the deep state controls the world", "the President is a
vegetablefascist", "the billionares are taking over the world", "the bosses are all entitled boomers", "you have to jump ship to get a promotion", "corporations want cattle and not pets"... the very concept of two people in a relationship that involves any sort of power relations instantly conjures to mind images of exploitation, unfairness, and abuse. The just leader is unthinkable. And the very nature of a marriage is that the two members hold power over each other: "For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does."Given that we live in such a time of profound social doubt, isolation, and distrust in institutions and human virtue, is it any wonder that people have such fears about entering into a lifelong spiritual, sexual, and economic union with another human being?
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Sorry, I misread you. Thought you were saying that the husband is on the hook so generally he won’t leave. Which is certainly sometimes the case, but as I say, not always.
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Are you sure it's just "fearmongering about getting raped" that makes it seem like a high-risk life choice to enter lifelong, irrevocable financial dependency on a man, and commit your children to same?
In today's economy, a middle-class girl who quits college at 20 to get married and have somebody's 5 babies will find that she's made a life-ruining decision if absolutely any of the following happen:
-Husband falls out of love in a commonplace way and wants a divorce (43% of women and 46% of men are obese by their 40s and at least one poster upthread considers a fat wife strictly inferior to no wife at all; plus, skinny or fat, 100% of 50-year-old women are older than the hottest 20-something at the office).
-Husband's little vices worsen into a behavioral problem (with drugs, alcohol, gambling, porn, gaming, overspending, hoarding, whatever) that make him a misery to live with or a financial liability to the family
-Husband turns out to be physically/ sexually/ emotionally abusive
-Husband turns out to be selfish and won't spend money on the kids, so they limp along with the bare minimum
-Husband commits white-collar crime, goes to prison
-Husband has a midlife crisis and unexpectedly comes out as gay/ trans/ polyamorous/ into a distasteful fetish after a decade or two of marriage
-Husband gets sick in a permanent career-ruining fashion (depression, disability, accident).
-Husband's career unexpectedly implodes for any other reason
-Husband dies
Note that any of these would have a disastrous impact not just on the girl's life, but on the lives of her future children. And every one of those negative impacts could be substantially mitigated (although not removed) by the girl's having access to a decent middle-class job, to partly support herself and the kids in a pinch. Otherwise you live a life that's one negative event away from having to dump your kids with the dodgy babysitter while you desperately slog through night courses at the community college.
If you total up all those probabilities, can the girl really feel justly confident that she and her kids won't need that career someday?
A lot of these arent really points of conflict though. If the husband gets sick in a permanent career-ruining fashion, wouldnt he also wish they had a second income? And it would have been a problem in the old days, too.
He would, presumably. It seems like a decent reason why a pro-family middle-class woman might opt to finish college and establish first-job cred through 24-25 or so before having that first kid, rather than pumping out babies right out of high school. Mid-20s is still extremely fertile and still leaves a long childbearing window if that's what you're into. Historically there have been plenty of eras when it was the norm for both middle-class women and men to work and save up for a household through their mid-20s.
I don't know why the pro-tradwife folks aren't more interested in practical family risk-management considerations. Maybe it's just the sheer appeal of imagining a nubile 20-year-old wife who can't afford to leave even if she wanted to?
...and the women who want it are all kinksters I guess? And ~every man in the 50s though keeping her trapped was more important than financial security, no romatics who thought they didnt have to worry about that?
My point is that list entires that dont themselves have a conflict of interest dont predict a different interest from men and women. So insofar as you think those are a big part of why women dont want early marriage, you should reject this branches framing that men are there on offer and women dont want it.
Nah man, I assume that young men and young women in the 50s just fell in love and settled down to have babies early because they could afford to, the way everybody does in times of high economic opportunity for the middle classes. Women might have married at 20 in the midcentury, but men also married at a median of 23, after all.
OTOH I suspect the kinds of 2025 internet people who vocally fantasize about teen brides and argue for excluding women from the workforce, but somehow never consider what historically has happened to the kiddies if Daddy gets sick or his industry contracts, are not coming to this issue from a POV of direct practical interest in forming stable, resilient families.
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If they came up with such, would any significant number of people who claim to oppose early marriage as a result of such risks change their mind? My belief is no, this argument is a soldier, and its falling will make no difference.
It's not a matter of flipping people who were firmly against it, it's a matter of advising, and/or addressing the concerns of, open-minded people and/or fencesitters. For example, I have a sincere interest in the topic (fewer children than I or my husband wanted, considering how to raise and advise the offspring we do have) and from my vague memories of @Terracotta 's other comments, I suspect she does too.
I want the best for my daughter. You have an opportunity to suggest to me what is best for her.
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There is a comprehensive set of scaremongering to convince girls that a ‘traditional’ marriage is incredibly dangerous and has an extremely high risk of them getting abused and abandoned, yes. You’re engaging in it right now.
In the real world, bad marriage outcomes are not distributed equally, and many of the common ones have a substantial safety net in place. I’m not some sort of MRA- it’s good that husbands retain some responsibilities for their wives and children in the event of a divorce. But the fact remains that in the rare event of a housewife with five children being divorced(and you do know most divorces are initiated by the woman, right?) she will not be left destitute and her children will be worse off, but not in a life ruining way that wouldn’t also apply if she was some kind of epic girlboss(broken homes are bad, but mama not working doesn’t make them worse).
Some of your list is exaggerating risks so tiny it’s not even worth addressing them- what fraction of middle aged men do you think suddenly discover they’re trans? I’ll cop to these guys being bad, but there’s so few of them your argument here is the equivalent of ‘kids shouldn’t go to school because of school shootings’. Others are solvable, greatly exaggerated problems, or problems which are real, but mainly bottom quintile phenomena- and I think we can safely assume that middle class girls aren’t marrying underclass men. And we live in a society that gives women substantial safety nets if they marry the guy before taking that deal. So yes, if we total up the possibility of ‘marry the nice guy your parents approve of and be a SAHM’ ruining your life, it’s small enough for a girl to be confident in her decisions.
What exactly is the safety net, beyond the noblesse oblige of the departing spouse? Favorable terms in a divorce go to the party with a good lawyer. Unless she's been very lucky and careful about secretly diverting money, SAHM has no means of hiring a shark attorney or a PI. Post-divorce, she has no resources to battle for payment of child support and spousal support, no economic slack to position herself favorably in the housing or job market. The likeliest scenario is she needs to quickly find some other man to support her and the kids, who may or may not be a good guy (stepfathers have a broadly bad reputation).
So in the event of a divorce mommy having a middle-class career is her safeguard against having to immediately remarry and subject her kids to some jerk, just to get by. Or else try to go it alone with child support plus a low-skill/low-wage job while the kids get raised by the internet.
And that's leaving out second-order consequences! Back in the golden age of what you call the "traditional marriage" (which is actually just the Victorian middle-class town marriage, not lindy at all), the husband got custody of the kids by default and the wife got absolutely nothing. Whatever safety net we currently have was developed because of women's greater economic leverage and participation in the public square, plus the added perspective of female judges/ lawyers/ lobbyists.
OK, let's run rough numbers on the most common of these disaster scenarios.
43% of first marriages end in divorce *31% of divorces initiated by husband= 13% chance the husband just up and dumps her at some point. You'd probably say that middle-class marriages are less subject to these risks; I don't see evidence of that, but fine, let's halve that to 6.5%.
Of remaining divorces, 35% of women cite their husband's infidelity, 24% abuse, 12% addiction as the reason for leaving. Assume there's some overlap and make it a total of 50% of wife-initiated divorces having one or more of these factors. So 43%*50%= 22% chance the husband eventually philanders, abuses, gambles, drinks or tokes enough to make her wish he'd dump her. Apply the classism correction, that's 11% chance.
Odds of her husband dying early run from .23%/year when he's 30 to .98%/ year when he's 55 (still too early to have fully adequate retirement savings, even with life insurance). Presumably it's not a linear increase, so say .35%/yr*25 yrs=9% lifetime chance her spouse dies and leaves her to support herself and the youngest of the kids.
Odds of her husband becoming semi-permanently unable to support the family owing to disability or job changes: this is annoying to figure out, but I'm seeing 3% unemployment, higher underemployment, 1% SSDI for working-age men with college degrees, so let's spitball 1% odds she becomes the family breadwinner by necessity.
To me, that looks like a roughly 28% chance that a married woman will eventually encounter one of the many commonplace disasters where her independent earning capacity would be a huge benefit for her and the kids. Not sure where you get the idea that these things don't happen to nice middle-class moms of 5, but every one of these scenarios, including husband's addiction, abuse, infidelity, early death, has happened to at least 1-2 of the few large families I know. Even if you think a lifetime 28% is still too high, it's fair to ask how just how low those odds would have to be to make it a responsible decision for a young woman to forgo the insurance of a decent career and instead chase an idealized 24/7 tradwife/cupcake fantasy.
And that's leaving out the lower-key negative changes in the family dynamic itself when one spouse has absolutely all the economic power and knows it. Many husbands stay kind and generous, but if not, a SAHM ends up quietly bearing a lot more borderline treatment of her and the kids, simply because speaking up would risk the disaster of her husband's leaving them unsupported. If you cruise by conversations of angry adult children who've cut contact with their parents, a common theme is "my dad was an asshole and my mom did nothing to stop it." A SAHM can't do anything to stop it, because her husband is doing her a favor just by letting her exist on his dime.
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We could always just remove the college part, have your 20s be for marriage/children and your 30s-40s for your career, like it was in the '80s. That way, you've already bought and paid for your kids by the time your [now-younger] husband starts going all weird and moldy on you, and you're still attractive enough at 30 that if you want to try again, you can.
By pushing out adulthood by 10 years, which is what college does (and, by extension, its purpose), you attach higher liability and higher stakes to things that tend to go wrong later in life- if vices are going to take hold at 35, it's better to have the kids be nearly adults when the inevitable divorce comes than for them to be 5 (less stupidity in custody battles because at that point they're a formality). Economic conditions for adulthood at 16-18 is something Boomercons benefited from greatly, and we should try to get back to that state because adulthood at that age is Good, Actually, and important for proper human development.
We won't do that, partially because it would kill the sacred societal cows that are graduation rate and female college representation, and academia is already a welfare system for older women who suffer from what you've listed above (so destroying it would be politically unviable anyway). But speeding up reproduction cycles so that women (and the men they marry) are raising families within their 25 year warranty period (even if things go sideways they'll still have the energy to fix them; 35 year old energy levels are not 25 year old energy levels!) would, I believe, have positive consequences... because they did for the generation born when that was normal.
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