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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   38750 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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I’m very curious what the executive order for beautiful buildings will do. More specifically, the Promoting Beautiful Federal and Civic Architecture order.

The order is super vague, the meat being:

Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government. Such recommendations shall consider appropriate revisions to the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture and procedures for incorporating community input into Federal building design selections.

What do you think will practically change from this, if anything? Back to baroque? Neo-classical Roman columns??

What would your personal favorite style be?

What would your personal favorite style be?

On the one hand, you'd want public buildings to be agreeable to look at from the inside and outside. Possibly even as an architectural example.

On the other hand, you know that any such building project will be an extravagant waste of taxpayer money every step of the way.

So I have no favorite. Anything the state builds for its own sake and that of its servants will be a horrible insult to the people.

On the other hand, you know that any such building project will be an extravagant waste of taxpayer money every step of the way.

There are many government buildings in the USA that prove you wrong. Somewhere after WWII the US just said fuck it to the concept of building beautiful and on time and budget. But it doesn't seem to always have been so.

It seems to me that at least 40 of those are not eyesores.

https://knightlifenews.com/26954/opinion/spectacular-legislatures-all-50-state-capitol-buildings-ranked/

Well fair enough, I was thinking more of Germany. I should probably preface all my posts with "Meanwhile, in the land of the Germans...". And our best and most beautiful buildings are usually survivors from the late middle ages, or baroque, and you can't exactly build that way anymore. Our immediately-post-war architecture is offensively ugly and our later buildings are so expensive that it makes you wonder how they could achieve such price tags without making the roofs out of solid gold.

https://knightlifenews.com/26954/opinion/spectacular-legislatures-all-50-state-capitol-buildings-ranked/

Looking at those, they are all somewhat pompous. Maybe that's appropriate though? Not that ours are any better, mind you. The predominant style there just doesn't appeal much to me personally.

The maker of that list has terrible taste IMO. And the pictures are often terrible. What a bad article.

He's not exactly an expert, judging by his mugshot and (lack of) bio.

our best and most beautiful buildings are usually survivors from the late middle ages, or baroque, and you can't exactly build that way anymore

Oh, come on. Gründerzeit architecture looks fine.

Chronologically, Jugendstil was next, and it's German form is also far better than the atrocities they built after. But yes, others did it better, particularly the Spanish.

"Fine" as in tolerable? Alright, I'll bite that bullet. It's a style I can live with, though not one I actively desire. A little too overdecorated and playful to my taste.

Fachwerk though. Mhmhmmm.

A little too overdecorated and playful

Wait, I thought you liked baroque!?

But yeah, I know what you mean. I mostly wish they would build Gründerzeit apartment blocks lining entire streets again. The bombastic staircases; the gigantic ceiling height; hardwood double doors through thick, solid walls; beautiful, tall, overdecorated windows... they built entire cities like that.

I don't really like baroque, no. What I meant earlier was that baroque, like Gründerzeit, produced tolerable buildings - not necessarily what I like, but something that I can pass by without cursing - unlike the abominations that are being built since the war. I was very unprecise about that up there.

I really do prefer the late medieval buildings. Towns that actually preserved their fortifications and integrated walls and castles rather than bulldoze them are especially pretty. Of course they're rare and impractical and impossible to build from scratch, but that's what I grew up with and everything else looks fake and gay by comparison.

Was that article written by AI or by an idiot who can't google things?

The entire complex is barely distinguishable from an office building and even the nearby Old Anchorage City Hall is more appropriate as a major government building than the current State Capitol.

Yes, the Old Anchorage City Hall 800 miles away is "nearby"

Similar to how Las Vegas overshadows the capital city of Reno

I realize Carson City is close enough to Reno that you could almost call them suburbs of each other but Reno ain't the capital.

I would love to see some nice brick (or brick-faced) buildings, but right now everyone building stuff out of brick follows the Rittersport mantra. I guess fancy brickwork is out of reach for modern masons, who only learn to lay horizontal rows and vertical walls.

The URL hit me like a ton of bricks.

Don't tell me you had to use their services.

beautiful buildings can be simple

Most old buildings were not palaces with intricate marble an complex art. Most old buildings were fairly simple boxes with good proportions that fit into their surroundings. In the photo above every building is a box. Yet tourists flock to the street and the property prices have soared through the roof. Arguably they are simpler than a lot of glass and steel designs.

Modernism's problem is that each building is trying to be a monument standing out instead of fitting into an urban landscape. The buildings try to stand out by having unnatural facades and flawed proportions. Fixing these issues isn't that complex. A brick, stone, or wood building can be a beautiful box without complicated construction.

other examples

or this

you can't exactly build that way anymore.

The laws of physics haven't changed. If your society isn't building beautiful buildings, it's not because it can't, it's because it won't (and the people who make those decisions have names).

Apart from a minor thought about how I'm not sure we actually still have all the know-how on how to build authentic medieval buildings (but we could probably make do with a little research and guesswork, if it hasn't been done already), that's what I mean. We can't do it because it's not up to code, nobody has time for that, most people don't want to live like that, etc.

Those are still all "won't" instead of "can't", though. If a building that has stood and remained in constant use for centuries isn't up to code, the fault is with the code, not the building.

Yes. We are in agreement.

Yeah I definitely worry that the goals of saving money and building nice stuff do conflict. We just don’t know how to build well anymore it seems.

respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage

I won't believe this until I see a NYC federal building that's decked out like a bodega.

Beaux arts for any building intended mainly for public use, collegiate Gothic for anything related to research or science, neoclassical or international modern for bureaucratic offices, and brutalism for law enforcement.

Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously? It's not just things like resource depletion and climate change that could cause something like this. Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable. I'll list a few below

  1. Resource Depletion/Peak Oil: Although we seem to have stemmed off global peak oil for about 50 years, it seems like the peak is finally actually coming into sight. Some say 2018 was actually the peak, others say it won't arrive until 2030. Whatever the case, it is an inevitability given the fact that discoveries of deposits have been outpaced by demand for the past fifty years. Barring a scientific miracle like effective hydrocarbon synthesis by bacteria, the alternatives don't look promising. Ethanol from corn has an abysmal energy return on energy invested (EROI). Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks, and even for passenger vehicles, we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars. It's not just oil: copper is being mined at extremely low-grades (because we have exhausted the high-grade deposits), uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves, and we've already hit peak phosphorous. Further reading: Art Berman, Simon Michaux, Alice Friedman

  2. Climate Change/Environmental Degradation: Anyone with two eyes can see that climate change is happening. It's not just that temperatures are getting warmer, but variation seems to be increasing as well, which is really bad for parts of our civilization that require fairly regular climatic conditions like agriculture. Here in Maryland we had one of the hottest summers on record, followed by an extremely warm fall. Now we're in the middle of one of the coldest winters in the last twenty years. Even if you don't believe that climate change is happening, other aspects of environmental degradation are harder to deny. For the past few summers we've had massive wildfires across most of the Northern hemisphere, and in California during the winter. Some of these are natural, but many are the result of poor management and ecological practices. We've contaminated our drinking water with birth control, our soils have been largely stripped of nutrients by industrial farming, and microplastics are literarily everywhere. None of this is sustainable

  3. Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture: Although COVID was likely a lab leak, one of the initial hypotheses as to its origin was a cross-over event from bats to humans at bushmeat market. We create millions of such crossover opportunities in our agriculture system every day, and it's only a matter of time before the current bird flu pandemic, which has decimated US chicken and cow populations (spiking the price of eggs to $6 / 12 eggs) crosses over to humans. This has happened before in both 1918 and in the 1960s.

  4. Birthrate collapse: Everywhere that modern Western society touches seems to experience a rapid and catastrophic decline in birth rates to far below replacement levels. There's been a lot of discussion of this issue at least here, and it seems like nothing any government does is effective at turning things around. While declining populations may be good for our resource consumption/pollution problems, without some kind of reversal in birth rates, there will tautologically be a death of Western culture. A somewhat related issue is the general collapse of community in the West, which is talked about a lot in books like Bowling Alone.

  5. Brainrot: modern society is incredibly complex and requires a lot of smart people at the helm keeping the systems that keep us alive going. Many of these people are aging out of the workforce, and there aren't many zoomers and millennials who can replace them. Part of this is an issue of desire: few people want to run a wastewater treatment plant or work as a mining engineer when you can just grift with things like crypto and OnlyFans. But I also think we're all just getting dumber to some extent. I put a lot of blame on addictive technologies on the internet (and so does Jonathan Haidt), but I'm sure there's also crossover with the issue of environmental pollution.

There's many more specific issues I could list, but I think you get the gist. Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient). I think it may have something to do with TheMotte severely overrating the utility of human intelligence in solving large scale problems, but I'm not sure. Is there something I'm completely missing here?

Further reading/listening. DoTheMath, Rintrah, The Great Simplification.

Rather I think there are many layers of various pillars of society going towards the shitter that I think makes some kind of collapse of Western Civilization inevitable.

Living in a material world under the known laws of physics makes the collapse of all civilizations inevitable.

History gives me strong priors that most such "collapses" are local and move slower than most individual human perception. By the standards of Western Civilization circa 1800, Western Civilization has already collapsed and been replaced with something comparatively grotesque, which we today call "Western Civilization." The prevalence of atheism, pornography, premarital and extramarital sex, illegitimate birth, etc. would shock most Westerners from the mid 20th century, never mind the 19th. By the standards of those days, we already live in a dystopian hellscape.

And yet if you spend much time talking to nonagenarians, you will often hear resignation to the idea that the world simply changes (though some will definitely tell you that the world has gone to hell in a handbasket). Humans are incredibly, almost comically adaptable. Just about anything can become a "baseline" experience for us, given sufficient exposure (and lack of exposure to alternatives).

Now, some of the more extreme climate eschatology, political alarmism, nuclear war worries, AI doomerism, etc. will be quick to remind that some collapses are more dramatic, sharp-edged, and/or final than others. This is surely true. But given the number and variety of collapses I can see through history, the collapse of Western Civilization as we know it is shaping up to be more of an evolution than a revolution, and sufficiently gradual that it will annoy me when I am a nonagenarian (knock on wood), but probably not kill me or even cause me very much suffering. At worst, it will inspire in me only deep disappointment.

At best, I will have alien descendants born on Mars, whose lives and lifestyles would shock and horrify me. But hey--Mars!

The end will come for humanity, eventually, too. It would be nice, I think, if we could escape that. But I do expect, to my sorrow, that I will not be alive to see how our story ends.

Yeah this is basically my take. Also the fact that doomsday predictions are always extremely common and 99% of them don’t pan out!

Remember the Population Bomb? All sorts of other doom predictions?

And ironically the panic over things often caused other problems.

And the ozone hole in 1991 that was going to give everyone in the Northern Hemisphere melanoma. Lots of scary articles, but when the hole disappeared, nobody thought that even worthy of mention.

The ozone hole is different in that the problem was real, and serious, but we fixed it. Acid rain and lead pollution are other examples of that type.

Most doomer predictions are based on problems which are either fake (like natural resource depletion) or grossly overexaggerated (like climate change).

The media doesn't report good news (and social media is not much better) so you don't get to hear the information that would allow you to distinguish between a fake problem and a fixed problem. (And occasionally a problem is both fake and fixed, like the Y2K bug).

Well that is because it hasn't yet. We'll get back to 1980's levels in about 15-20 years still.

"It confirms that 99% of ozone-depleting gases have been phased out. Projections from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) suggest the Antarctic ozone layer will recover to 1980 levels by around 2066, with recovery in the rest of the world between 2040 and 2045"

and

"A hole that opens annually in the ozone layer over Earth's southern pole was relatively small in 2024 compared to other years. Scientists with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) project the ozone layer could fully recover by 2066"

It's just slow steady progress at the layer being restored a little every year is not really news beyond niche publications.

Remember global cooling? When I was a kid there were some vague concerns that the Earth could enter a global cool period. It could be the weather of 1816 forever.

Living in a material world under the known laws of physics makes the collapse of all civilizations inevitable.

The universe is quite possibly infinite in size.

Even if the universe is infinite in size, as long as the speed of light is finite the slice of the universe any given civilization can access is limited.

I think this is somewhat dependent upon inflation. I very much only think, because it's been a loooong time since I took relativity. Yes, with constant positive inflation, there will be regions of an infinite universe forever inaccessible (with the relative sizes being dependent upon the magnitude of the inflation), but if, say, we didn't understand some dynamic of inflation, and suppose it actually ground to a halt. If inflation went to actual zero, then I think that an entire infinite universe would be, in principle, accessible, given sufficient time.

You need another premise to get that conclusion, specifically "light-cone-breaking FTL is impossible".

Nobody knows whether this is true. The "light-cone-breaking FTL = time travel to times before the creation of the time machine = lol where are the time travellers" issue is not a clear no-go, as current understanding of relativity and quantum physics suggests that any attempt to use FTL to build a time machine would fail due to the quantum vacuum misbehaving and collapsing your FTL method at the exact instant time travel becomes possible.

Infinite size with finite mass just means there is an infinite amount of nothing between any specks of interest.

The mass of the universe may be infinite. But as per the conversation below, due to the expansion of the universe, the amount of it we can ever access may be limited.

Big Crunch or Big Rip, which is it? Either there's an ending coming.

Why don't users on theMotte take the idea of societal collapse more seriously?

I do, but then I believe we live in a broken and fallen world corrupted by sin.

#4 I've done my best, I've four children with my wife and try to make it look good. The other enumerated issues, I do my best to withdraw my consortium, keep invested in God's kingdom and not in the systems of the world.

I believe man's created order will collapse perhaps already underway and the best path through is to prepare hyperlocally.

Preparing to be unburdened by what has been.

I do, but then I believe we live in a broken and fallen world corrupted by sin.

This is a good point. In some ways we already live in a collapsed society. Consider what Theodore Roosevelt would make of our current godless, weak, barren, and decadent society.

Yes, current year is already fairly dystopic, the future is now.

It's TEOTWAWKI, and I feel fine.

Here's my view: Doomerism overestimates the speed, globality and uniformity of collapse, and underestimates the ability of individuals and economies to adapt.

Proof: Every prediction of doom ever compared to the actual outcome.

Of course this will be true until it isn't, but so far it doesn't look to me like we'll be relieved of the burden of having to live in this grotesque dystopian hellscape (thanks @naraburns) anytime soon.

I think everyone is fatigued by the utter hysterics that get trotted out day after day related to all of these issues. Climate change alarmists keep making insane claims about the entire world being on fire or underwater or humanity going extinct in 5 years or whatever, and it keeps not happening.

In addition, most of the loudest alarmists have as their solutions to these problems "nothing short of total revolution and societal change" which is both not a serious possibility and invariably the same ideological wants they've been campaigning on for decades, which makes me think their assessment of it as a solution might be somewhat less than sincere and more than a little opportunistic.

So I don't exactly think the alarmists take these things seriously either, except as an opportunity to backdoor in their preferred social revolution under the guise of alleviating a different problem.

their solutions

Yeah such a happy coincidence for these people that the generic left wing social and economic changes they already wanted are the perfect cure for climate change.

uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves

It's more complicated than that. Current reactors are not breeders and as such throw away most of their actinides unburnt (and cannot use thorium); after accounting for fixing those inefficiencies (which are avoidable, just not currently economic because uranium is cheap) and for mining thorium as well, you can do about x300 on that. And that's assuming we can't harvest the uranium in seawater, which is like x20 again.

Why isn't this community more concerned about these kinds of issues, as opposed to worrying about AI (which is not profitable, or efficient).

This article is low-quality. Everyone keeps forecasting that LLMs will hit a wall, and then they don't.

Aside from maybe pandemics, I expect trendlines to get scrambled by some combination of WWIII and AI before these come into play.

And if we can't figure out efficient fusion after 3 centuries, we really don't deserve nuclear energy in the first place.

Okay where are they going to get more training data from? They've already used the entire internet. You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.

It's not helpful for you to say the article is low quality without providing examples.

With models like o1 and R1, they recursively improve themselves. Synthetic data works fine.

You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.

And this is a problem? Are their investors with hundreds of billions to offer running scared? They're aware, they don't care. Running out of money is not a problem for them.

It doesn't though. In the linked article, there's clearly evidence that synthetic data leads to hallucinations over time.

Then how to explain O-3 and Deep Seek R1? I believed the same as you until very recently and now I am questioning that.

What they do is hire people to make new training data. There's a few online platforms where you can get paid to do this. I've been paid to do this.

hire people to make new training data

That doesn't seem viable for the amount of data required by ML training in the current paradigm. I feel like the clear future is improvements in automated induction of data or just observation from reality.

Maybe they use the automatic conversation transcription technology that logs every conversation held in hearing range of a cell phone and transmits it to the government. Text transcripts of everything said in the United States for the past few years would certainly feed their data need.

It's been possible for a long time now, there's no way they aren't doing this.

This could be. Dystopian AF

I can guarantee you that transcribed illegal government wiretaps of everything heard by every cell phone are not in the training data.

I think that when they say they are out of training data, they mean they are out of legal training data. There's a lot of low-hanging illegal fruit they could pick. Goodle hasn't used everybody's gmail inboxes. I have about hundreds of thousands of pieces of input data they could harvest that way.

Also really dystopian. Would also explain the success of the new Chinese model. They don't give a shit about privacy.

Okay where are they going to get more training data from?

Probably somewhere. Or they'll make do without it. I doubt if we got all of the performance possible from LLMs within seven years of discovering them (that would likely be some kind of record).

Alternatively, you can cast your mind back to 1980, and imagine asking "how can microprocessors continue shrinking without solving [whatever problem deep UV excimer laser photolithography solves]?"

(Surprisingly on topic, check out the next article there: Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry was from 2019, and the performance improvements over that short of a time are stark.)

You also aren't accounting for the fact that OpenAI lost $5 billion last year.

They've got $500 billion more (sort of) lined up already, and you're worried about that? Those losses are trivially small.

The rejoinder here is — we aren’t actually addressing even obvious problems. We’ve known about climate change, peak oil, birth rate collapse, crime and loss of trust, etc. for nearly half a century, in many cares, a full century. Assabiya has been written about in one form or another since the time of Plato. Yet, no serious actions are undertaken. The cliffs get closer every year, yet every year our elected officials loot the treasury and do nothing for fear of being unpopular.

For almost any serious problem, so long as technology is increasing and wealth is increasing, it makes sense to wait as long as possible to address it, so that you can use the most efficient and effective versions of your tools.

Peak oil wasn't. Birth rate collapse will likely solve itself through natural selection (except perhaps in South Korea). Crime is at a bearable level.

Boethian Catholicism

What does this name come from?

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, author of "On the Consolation of Philosophy," which is referenced in the same post.

This all sounds like a lot of doomerism. Most things are going fine.

Energy

Resource "running out" is not a real thing that happens. Prices adjust. Uses become more limited, or alternatives are found.

We used copper pipping everywhere, and then copper got expensive, and we used PVC pipe instead.

Oil has gotten nominally cheaper over my lifetime of driving. Its basically never gone over $5 a gallon. There are lots of oil reserves, like Tar Sands. Its just that the oil becomes a little harder to extract. Fracking was an invention that drastically opened up oil availability in the US. "Peak oil" if it is a thing, is not a bad thing at all. It just means that oil usage is tapering off as other technologies replace it.

Ethanol is indeed dumb, and is just a subsidy for farmers.

Battery tech has been improving slowly. Flywheel engines might make more sense for cars. They are used to great effect in formula 1.

Climate Change

Most obviously not a big deal because no one is yet to get serious about large scale geo-engineering projects. Estimated costs for such projects are in the $10-100 billion range (space based sun shield, or atmospheric sulfur injection). Less than Afghanistan cost us.

Most disasters are solvable with more wealth. Hurricanes suck when you are poor. Earthquakes suck when you have no engineers and live in shoddy buildings. Tornadoes are bad when they are not predictable and you don't have a basement. Winter storms are mitigated with more plows on the roads.

Pandemics

Covid was the worst pandemic the world has faced in like a century, and basically everything that was bad about it was as a result of people overreacting to it. We shot ourselves in the foot. The actual mortality rate for covid after first infection or after vacination was stupidly low. Even before that the mortality rate for initial infection was still very low once hospitals figured out how they should be treating it (don't put people on ventilators). Deaths were almost certainly over-counted by hospitals for the sake of financial benefits.

Birth rate

Not great, but you are exaggerating the severity. The decline has been slow. And part of the main problem is again that we are shooting ourselves in the foot. Don't build pyramid scheme retirement systems that rely on larger numbers of young people. The worst outcome won't be societal collapse. It will be old people with no children getting shoved under the bus harder than they thought they'd be.

"Brain rot**

Luckily we are booting up the AIs to think for us. Might have its own negative side effects. Or it might allow us to brain rot to idiocracy levels without the accompanying decrease in standards of living.

There's purely one reason why I don't take societal collapse seriously. People have been saying society's about to collapse for my entire life, I cannot think of a single time in my life when people weren't saying that, and it never happened. And quite frankly, I got sick of worry about that sort of thing about 15 years ago. That's not to say it can't happen, but I've basically been chicken little'd out of the game.

This is how I've feel. I've decided I'm going to start worrying about society collapsing when people stop talking about society collapsing and start buying barbed wire and approaching their neighbors to discuss informal neighborhood defense pacts.

The world has ended twice. There is no reason why it cannot do so again.

uranium only has around 100 years of proven reserves,

That is a big part of your answer right there. There is an important distinction between reserves and resources.

Reserves are uranium ore that it is profitable to mine and process at current market prices with today's technology. Some reserves are being mined as I type; they are really there, with absolute certainty. Other reserves as less certain. One might want to drill a shaft and get some samples to check. Proven reserves meet a threshold for certainty set down by the financial regulators. Thinking of investing in a mining company? Reading about the proven reserves that they own? Proven is a term of art for investment grade certainty.

Resources are a guess about the amount of uranium that is actually there. In some sense. It needs to be possible to mine it and refine it, but it doesn't have to be profitable today. The guess work can include some guesses about technological advances in extracting Uranium.

It is the same for natural resources generally. The case of oil is notorious. Yes, back in 1920 we only have 30 years of oil reserves. (I've not checked the history, but it is well know that we have many times run off the end of oil reserves) Prospecting for oil is expensive. If an oil company wants to borrow money from a bank to build an oil refinery, the bankers will ask: will the oil run out. If the oil company only has 25 years of reserves on its books, it may be worthwhile prospecting for more. The bankers will take a risk, but for a price. How does the cost of prospecting compare with the price of risk? Bankers rarely look more than 30 years ahead. If the oil company has thirty years of reserves, paying prospectors to find more, and increasing that to 35 years, will not get the oil company a cheaper loan. It is not worth the money.

We only have thirty years of reserves because it is not worth looking for more, so we don't bother. Notice that the results of prospecting include discovering bodies of ore that fall a little short of what it is currently worth extracting. They count towards the resource. But not towards the reserve. However, prices can rise. If the electricity price rises, prices for oil and uranium to fuel power stations are likely pulled up. Now some of the resource becomes reserves. It is routine for reserves to fluctuate due to price changes elsewhere in the economy, independent of consumption and discovery.

You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of uranium resources. The logic of the argument is (maybe) valid, but since the premise is false the conclusion does not follow.

You can build an argument for collapse around the idea that there are only 100 years of proven reserves of uranium. Now the premise true, but the logic of the argument is invalid, and the conclusion still doesn't follow.

The equivocation between reserves and resources has been going on all my life, and I find most discussions of social collapse tainted by this.

This is a valuable comment and taught me something. But with that said, surely that's still just kicking the can down the road. We might have a few times as much uranium or oil as looking at current reserves makes it look, but we're still going to run out eventually. This lengthens the timescale on which scarcity can cause societal collapse, that's all. And I don't think "we run out of uranium in three hundred years" is terribly different as a doomsday prophecy from "we run out of uranium in two hundred years".

The sun is going to expand to beyond Earth's orbit in 7.5 billion years; the only thing we CAN do is kick the can down the road. Doesn't mean we shouldn't do it!

See my comment further down. Current reserves can be stretched out like 300x as far as current reactors do, and this is retroactive (i.e. you can bring back the "waste" of current reactors - the depleted uranium as well as the used fuel rods - and use it). If you project out a 5%-per-year growth rate then you get a 200-year timeline or so, but there are bigger issues than exhaustion there (specifically, that's projecting out electricity growth to the point that we hit Kardashev I, so we'd have to expand off-planet anyway just to deal with the waste heat).

As long as we kick the can hundreds of years down the road, that's plenty of time to transition toward renewable sources of energy. And then you can expand toward Mars, like Elon Musk wants.

Lithium and other such resources being themselves non-renewable make me skeptical of "renewable energy" as a long-term solution. Settling the rest of the solar system also doesn't seem like a real solution; maybe a solution for the long-term survival of the human species, but not for averting societal collapse for us Earthers, unless we're envisioning a full exodus. Even if space-faring tech massively increases I can't see it ever becoming practical to move massive amounts of resources back and forth between planets.

Personally speaking I don't think about it because I believe AI kills us first.

I don’t take societal collapse seriously because there’s not a lot I can do about it. Maybe society collapses, and then I’m either a post apocalyptic warlord or I’m dead, or it doesn’t collapse, in which case it’s irrelevant.

Pray, hope, and don’t worry -Padre Pio

Peak oil

Solar and wind + batteries are providing an increasing fraction of our energy consumption, including things that used to require oil (electric cars). Society wouldn't collapse if we had to cut our oil (and coal and gas) consumption by 3/4.

Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks,

Even if this is true, it's a solvable engineering problem.

we don't have enough lithium in the whole world to replace the current fleet of cars

There's a ton of lithium on the planet. The cost of mining it varies, so the cost of cars would go up if all oil disappeared, but that's not societal collapse.

Climate Change/Environmental Degradation

Even among mainstream progressive climate scientists, and in the IPCC, the consensus is that it's unlikely we're getting the civilization-destroying disaster climate change scenarios. Even if 1 in 10 of the places on the planet people currently live were rendered uninhabitable ... they can just move, that wouldn't come even close to threatening civilization, much worse has happened.

Pandemic risk from industrial agriculture

A 50% IFR and rapidly spreading pandemic is theoretically possible, sure. But, like, people would notice very quickly that was the case and stop going outside. It'd suck, but 50% of the population wouldn't actually die, and it wouldn't destroy civilization.

Birthrate collapse

This one's actually a problem - technology can, and has, lowered fertility rates faster than evolution can raise them. AGI's coming sooner though!

I mean, the actual answer is that AGI is going to be as or more significant a transformation than societal collapse, and even if I bought all of those ideas, which I don't, they're all coming after AGI.

Society wouldn't collapse if we had to cut our oil (and coal and gas) consumption by 3/4.

This isn't true at all, and I don't think you have an accurate understanding of exactly how reliant modern industrial societies are on fossil fuels. You wouldn't necessarily end up in Mad Max land overnight, but you must have an extremely strong estimation of modern levels of social cohesion. How, exactly, would this 75% cut in living standards be distributed? How would your hypothetical society be able to handle the rise of voices talking about how this is all the fault of those coastal elites/rural poors/rootless cosmpolitans/blacks/whites/mexicans/women/trans/gays/christians/hindus? Don't forget the massive increase in the cost of food and actual famines that would result from the sudden cutting of 3/4 of hydrocarbons that are used to produce fertiliser. If you did not implement sweeping, incredibly unpopular changes to the basic rules and fundamental contracts of society you would experience an involuntary collapse as various power/influence groups compete for their share of the pie.

Would society survive that kind of cut? Yes, it would survive - but if you define "collapse" as an involuntary loss of social complexity (which most writers on the topic do), a 3/4 cut in fossil fuel consumption would immediately qualify.

Even among mainstream progressive climate scientists, and in the IPCC, the consensus is that it's unlikely we're getting the civilization-destroying disaster climate change scenarios.

My take on it is the one proposed by Greer in "riding the climate toboggan". Even if you ignore the long term trends (which won't matter in your lifetime anyway) the short term problems that are encountered along the way are actually quite severe - notice any major natural disasters recently? Fires, storms and floods are all going to be on the rise, and even the doomers don't think that this will end society, but the economic costs associated with these adverse weather events are going to be another piece of pressure adding to the strain.

But, like, people would notice very quickly that was the case and stop going outside. It'd suck, but 50% of the population wouldn't actually die, and it wouldn't destroy civilization.

What were the economic impacts of the Covid pandemic? Sure, society doesn't collapse during pandemics like that - but there are measurable negative impacts from these events, and while those negative impacts aren't a big deal for a strong and healthy society... I don't think we're living in a strong and healthy society anymore, and I don't see it getting better in a world with a changing climate, greater levels of natural disasters and substantially more expensive energy/material resources.

I mean, the actual answer is that AGI is going to be as or more significant a transformation than societal collapse, and even if I bought all of those ideas, which I don't, they're all coming after AGI.

That's a big bet - and for everyone's sake, I hope that not only is it correct, but that the alignment issue is comprehensively solved well before the consequences of these current trends make it a necessity.

Electric motors are not powerful enough to run 18 wheeler trucks

The largest vehicles use electric motors specifically because electric transmissions gain more advantages over mechanical ones the more powerful your engine. We've been building locomotives, heavy panzers, and battleships with electric motors since the 20s. Ironically trucks use mechanical transmissions because they're too small to really benefit from the low speed torque and multi-axle power distribution advantages of electric motors.

Most catastrophizing is based on this sort of weird mix of misunderstandings, half-understood factoids spun into narratives, and linear projections to infinity.

The primary reason is founder effects. Being a part of the rationalist diaspora, this community started out with a disproportionate amount of techno-optimist libertarians and has mostly shrunk since then. There are ways to get here from the collapsnik corner of the internet, but the path is much less straightforward than from the tech world, especially these days. I came by that road once upon a time, but it has since become overgrown and the markers have been lost.

You'll find a more receptive audience in the comments section at John Greer's blog, assuming you're not already a regular. His posts about astrology and magic may be offputting to some (then again, we have a lot of kooky ideas floating around here ourselves), but he wrote most of what he needed to about collapse at his old blog (archived here and several other places) and seems like the kind of person you might have found posting in some alternate universe 70's environmentalist version of the Motte.

I'll give the response to your 5 points from Greer's perspective (I read every post of his for about a decade, so I have a pretty good sense of it) rather than my own, because my beliefs are both more uncertain and less interesting than his:

While it's true that our society is in a downward spiral, these things take many lifetimes to play out (insert a reference to The Long Emergency by Kunstler) and worrying about imminent doom is simply the inverse of the idea that the AI singularity will solve all our problems overnight and usher in an age of fully-automated luxury space communism. In both cases, it serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the future, since who cares what we do now if we'll all either die from climate change or be uploaded into a virtual utopia by our benevolant AI overlords?

What things will look like on the ground is that each successive generation will use a little less energy than their parents. There will be no abrupt discontinuity, outside of the wars and conflicts to which humans are prone in any age. The future won't look like a carbon copy of some period in the distant and barbaric past, as though you rewound the tape of history, but many innovations and inventions of our modern world will persist in some form, even if you falsely assume that all remaining nuclear or fossil fuels will be completely used up or inaccessible (the radio, the printing press, the bicycle, ultralight solar-powered aircraft, the germ theory of medicine, trains, hydropower, etc. don't need oil or coal to work). We aren't the first civilization to decline and we won't be the last; this cycle of birth and decay is something the Greeks, Indians, and Chinese all figured out and learned to live with thousands of years ago.

Climate change may render parts of the world undesirable to live in, but the Earth's flora and fauna, humans included, will rearrange themselves and find ways to adapt to this (in geologic terms) puny extinction event. Pandemics are nothing new either, and the Black Death didn't destroy Latin Christendom. If all our chickens and cows die from bird flu, then I guess that serves us right for factory farming, but it's not as though we'll run out of food (unless you're Jordan Peterson and on a carnivore diet or something). The birthrate problem is one that solves itself, as people who want to have children will quickly replace the ones who don't. Lastly, we won't have to worry about maintaining industrial civilization, because industrial civilization is by its nature unsustainable.

If you want someone else's very different thoughts on that last point, then check out Anatoly Karlin's series on Malthusian industrialism. The long and the short of it is that maybe dysgenics will trap us temporarily in a bad equilibrium where our descendants are just smart enough to preserve civilization but too dumb to make any advancements, living in crowded slums like third world megacities today, but this situation will itself provide eugenic selective pressure and bring IQ's back up enough to climb out of the hole.

Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik, and it seems that my post was too doomerish (judging from many other comments) to convey that. I share many of the perspectives that you write here as a Greer-sockpuppet. If I were to rewrite my original post reflecting this, I think I would probably reframe it terms of that perspective. Instead of the framing of "why aren't we more worried about these slow moving, natural, and impossible to stop problems", I would try and state instead: "why is the motte so concerned about things like AI/colonizing mars etc. when those things are energetically impossible pipe dreams?" I'm also not advocating we do nothing, but rather I see our resources (energy, but also human intelligence) as being misspent on futile treadmilling rather than "collapsing now to avoid the rush" as Greer might say. Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.

I would like to take the time to reply to a lot of those down thread, but I think, because of what you state in the first paragraph, there is not much point. We are looking at different the world through two completely different narratives. Inconvenient facts like declining EROI of every fuel source we are using and greater and greater dependence on fragile global supply change can be brushed away in the name of technological innovation or market efficiency. At the end of the day our system is predicated on infinite growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, and when we bump up against those limits there will be some kind of collapse.

Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik

Welcome to the club. I've been posting along similar themes on here for several years, and it is nice to see someone else taking his points seriously. I've personally eaten vast numbers of downvotes for advocating his position on nuclear energy, but a lot of his other articles have gotten decent receptions here.

Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.

I think that this is something that can only be done by people in their own individual lives. I'm personally doing what I can (though part of me protests and says I could be doing more...), and while it would be nice if society actually turned around and wanted to implement this, I don't think the incentive structures and interest groups that actually run and control western governments would endorse this in the slightest.

A societal collapse downstream from politics seems more likely than any of your first three.

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:

  • High-PMC who have a household income of $400k+ and are having 2-3 children.
  • Low-PMC who have a household income of $150k - $200k and are childless, or have one child and are baffled as to how they could afford more.

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.

  • Carpenter: Three bedroom house 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city costs around $200k. Husband and wife in the master, their three daughters share one bedroom and two sons share another.
  • Receptionist: Urban, subsidized apartment. Mother and baby share one bedroom, two girls in another room, two boys sleep in the living room on pull-out beds.
  • PMC: Cannot imagine having the millions it would take to afford a six-bedroom house in a tier-1 city.

2) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for education.

  • Carpenter: Stay-at-home mom is part of a homeschool pod with other families.
  • Receptionist: Sends her kids to the local public school in urban tier-2 city. The school is not good.
  • PMC: Would slit their throats rather than send their kids to the same public school as the receptionist. Intend to pay $25k-$40k/year/child for private school.

3) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for kids' stuff.

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Almost all of the clothes, toys, cribs, and other accessories that a child needs, their parents acquire for free. Hand-me-downs, Buy Nothing Facebook groups, friends/neighbors/family, etc.
  • PMC: Every kid needs brand-new everything. Sure, you might be able to get multiple uses out of your $800 crib or $300 car seat, but you are not shopping at Goodwill for little Charlotte.

4) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for enriching activities.

  • Carpenter: When the children are free they are either playing outside, playing inside (on screens), or doing chores. The older kids have part-time jobs. The kids do play sports through some homeschool rec-league I don’t understand. The parents spend very little, but the mom does have to drive the kids around for games.
  • Receptionist: Play outside of the apartment. Sometimes that's in the public library (video games on the library computers), sometimes that's the Boys and Girls Club, sometimes that's just out in the neighborhood. The mom spends $0 dollars and essentially no time on this.
  • PMC: $3,000 for Introduction to Data Science camp at Stanford, thousands of dollars between new gear and hotel rooms for travel sports (not to mention the hours spent driving), thousands for tutors in piano, math and foreign-languages.

5) High-fertility families start early. They have known no other adult life, besides being parents. Their tastes are quite modest.

  • Carpenter: Had their first kid at 20. Mostly cook in, occasionally go to casual-dining restaurants like Applebees, spend their vacations driving to state or national parks. Have never been to Disneyland and don’t think they’re missing out.
  • Receptionist: First kid at 17. Basically the same as the above, except doesn’t really vacation.
  • PMC: Spent their twenties eating at Michelin-starred restaurants and traveling overseas. Now, starting to have children in their early-to-mid-thirties, they simply do not have enough fertile years left to get to five children. And, furthermore, they cannot fathom bringing five kids to French Laundry nor buying that many tickets to Morocco.

6) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for childcare:

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Grandparents, friends, neighbors cost $0. The older children are expected to care for the younger.
  • PMC: $40k+/year for a nanny or $10k/year + an extra bedroom for an au-pair

7) High-fertility families pay very little for (and think very little about) healthcare

  • Carpenter: To be honest, I don’t know
  • Receptionist: Medicaid, cheapest possible pediatrician + the school nurse
  • PMC: Not only do they have excellent insurance through their employers, they also pay out-of-pocket for all kinds of treatments. Moreover, they spend a lot of time meticulously researching pediatricians, specialists, orthodontists, etc.

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.

  • There are, of course, a myriad of known-good solutions: from slashing regulations in order to increase housing supply, to improving transportation to make it viable to live in the ‘burbs and commute into the city.
  • Even if you cannot convince the PMC that each kid does not, in fact, need their own bedroom, by reducing the cost of that one marginal bedroom, you increase their fertility.

2) Improve the public schools

  • Imagine if an excellent education, in a safe environment! was commonly available in American public schools. Not only would more families choose to send their children to public schools over paying tens of thousands for private schools, you would also dramatically lower the cost of housing in those few school districts that actually do a decent job.

3) Decrease the cost stuff

4) Enriching activities:

  • No ideas. Competition here is zero-sum.

5) Starting early:

  • Wild first idea: perhaps make sex-ed a required course in college with a strong emphasis on fertility windows.

6) Childcare:

  • Ensure Middle America thrives so that young PMC don’t feel like they have to leave the heartland for the coasts where they don’t have grandparents + the same social network for childcare. Ha. Ha. Easy to say.

7) Healthcare:

  • Destroy the AMA’s supply-limiting bullshit, dramatically increase the number of doctors, dramatically decrease cost of healthcare.

We're Low-PMC with 4.

Bought the house with savings / inheritance from being DINK.

Wife homeschools kids.

Try to spend more like the carpenter and not fall into PMC debt traps.

Within my circle of friends and acquaintances, pretty much the only thing separating high-fertility (defined here as 4+) families from lower-fertility ones (1-2 kids, generally 1) is religiousness. Not all religious families I know are big but all the big ones are religious.

Is this copied from a post somewhere else?

Copied from a word processor where I first wrote it out. Not posted anywhere else, if that was the question.

One thing here might be whether carpenter and receptionists' lifestyles were borne out of them actually wanting to live that way, or rather borne out of necessity. If you get knocked up at 17 that leads into a life where you have a kid, and more come due to the first one effectively cutting off other choices in your life. And you don't have any choice of how to raise them, you basically have to do it the way you described them doing it. But is she as happy as she'd be be if she didn't get pregnant and lead that life out of necessity? And even if she is happy, would she choose those choices again, if she had the choice? It sounds like a tough life.

  1. Healthcare:

Destroy the AMA’s supply-limiting bullshit, dramatically increase the number of doctors, dramatically decrease cost of healthcare.

Reminder that physician salaries are a low percentage of healthcare expenses, that the AMA has nothing to with supply restriction, spots can be expanded by local governments and hospitals (and have been!), and that the AMA has been lobbying for a supply expansion for decades.

Interesting. I need to look into this. Perhaps my model of the world is wrong or out of date. I was under the impression that the AMA severely restricts the number of medical schools and the number of spots within those schools - such that the typical new doctor graduates with hundreds of thousands of student loan debt. Any links as to what drives healthcare costs?

Everyone points fingers at a variety of things but physician salaries are under ten percent of spending. A massive drop in doctor salary only gets you 3-4 percent less expensive healthcare.

The AMA historically was engaged in what you are talking about but then spent multiple decades lobbying for increased role for midlevel providers which is a de facto supply increase. It's finally moving away from that in the last few years but has yet to find a new passion lol.

Historically the limiting factor on doctor production has been residency spots which are mostly funded by the government, however plenty of states and private corporations will fund those spots because the labor is dirt cheap and they actually make a ton of money.

Additionally ability to increase spots in the higher paying/lower number specialties is limited because you need enough work to adequately train and all kinds of things have caused problems with that (ex: a reduction in surgical frequency secondary to an increase in medical technology meaning not enough cases). Lower paying specialties like FM and Peds have more room to grow but nobody wants to do them because of the poor (relatively speaking) pay.

I was under the impression that the AMA severely restricts the number of medical schools and the number of spots within those schools

The bottleneck in producing new doctors in America isn't the schools, it's the residencies. After graduation, all doctors go to some teaching hospital somewhere and serve a 4 year residency to learn how to actually practice medicine. This training program costs the teaching hospitals money, which is reimbursed by CMS. So in practice, the number of available residencies is determined by CMS; hospitals won't spend money out of their own pocket to train new doctors above and beyond what CMS reimburses.

The impact this has on healthcare costs, I don't know. I'm sure it's something, but is it a major component, or a drop in the bucket compared to other factors? I don't know.

"We won't train doctors to the regulatory standard unless taxpayers give us bundles of money to do so," is an obvious confluence of terrible interests in the private sector and government, especially when the industry has achieved significant amounts of regulatory capture. Surely, there is a better way.

Imagine this in other industries. Grocery stores get the government to set up a licencing requirement to stock shelves, with some boilerplate reasoning about food safety or something. The thing is, the only way to get licensed is to get a grocery store to give you the mandatory years of experience. And, of course, they refuse to have such positions unless the government pays them for it. I would predict that there would be fewer grocery store employees, their pay would be higher, industry profits would be higher, government outlays would be higher, prices to the consumer would be higher, and service quality would decrease.

I don't think you're wrong on the broad impact on industry here, but your analogy falls a little flat for me. The difference in impact for poorly trained doctors versus poorly trained stock boys makes the idea of licensing requirements for one desirable and ridiculous for the other. It's possible the regulations on doctor training are overly burdensome and could be loosened without a corresponding increase in medical error induced mortality rates, but I'm not certain that's true.

It's less about the exact content of training and more about the atrocious incentives involved and who has control over every step of the process. Think about higher education. Sure, one might want to know the meme question, "Is our children learning?" Perhaps it would be desirable to have some system in place. Lo and behold, we have a system called 'accreditation'. Who controls this system? Why, it's the existing universities, of course! Or for another example, I've known unis that wanted to add a PhD in a certain discipline. The big dog universities in the area played defensive power politics and managed to make it so they were supposed to have to "prove" that there was a "need" for it. How is it possible to do that? There's obviously no actual standard. It's gonna be based on atrocious hidden incentives. See also Certificate of Need laws for healthcare.

They play the same games over and over again. I get that you want well-trained doctors, but there's gotta be a better way than giving control over every step in that process to existing cartel entities and letting them make all the choices.

Let's put it this way - perhaps there is a "right" level of training for doctors, and perhaps there is a "right" level of training for grocery stores. Maybe the latter is much smaller than the former. Now, imagine we set up the system I described in my last comment for grocery store training. Do you think their incentives would lead to them selecting the "right" level of training?

It's less about the exact content of training and more about the atrocious incentives involved and who has control over every step of the process...

I get that you want well-trained doctors, but there's gotta be a better way than giving control over every step in that process to existing cartel entities and letting them make all the choices.

There's a lot of lemmings-off-of-a-cliff reasoning. It feels like you're assuming that some medical cabal is making decisions for the good of the group. But that's just not true in practice.

Incentives for residencies are individual and local. Most sufficiently large medical group/hospitals could open a residency and self-fund. However they don't. Because docs make money from seeing patients. Teaching a trainee takes away from seeing patients.

And the medicare funding issue is squarely out of our hands. For literally decades, medical associations and prospective/current residency programs have been asking for more funding for more slots.

The foreign medical grads is a whole other thing. I'll keep it brief, but mention a lot of cultural barriers. Perhaps best encapsulated by asking: Would unlimited free visas for indian/chinese phds be beneficial? The current limited system seems reasonable. But I think it's obvious how it could warp industries and training for the worse.

Most sufficiently large medical group/hospitals could open a residency and self-fund. However they don't. Because docs make money from seeing patients. Teaching a trainee takes away from seeing patients.

And the medicare funding issue is squarely out of our hands. For literally decades, medical associations and prospective/current residency programs have been asking for more funding for more slots.

All of this comes after the standards have been chosen in a way designed to allow you to play this exact game. What game are you playing here? The "we won't train people to the standard that we've selected unless you pay us more money" game. Everyone who isn't a doctor (as you clearly are) can tell that this game is just extortion.

Would unlimited free visas for indian/chinese phds be beneficial?

I don't know. What do you think? Why?

At the end of the day, all the dollars spent on healthcare end in someone's pocket. If not doctors (and I'll believe some aren't hugely compensated compared to their efforts), then who is keeping the dollars my insurance company (and I) pay the local "nonprofit" hospital for care? Obviously insurance gets it's share (capped by Obamacare). Their executives (doctors!) are compensated pretty well as far as I can tell.

A bunch of it is surely administrative bullshit.

Administrative bullshit maybe, administrators probably not.

A big piece of it is admin bloat, just as in academia the number of middle managers and other folks like that (assistant infection control nurse - whose job is to make sure we don't order any labs that may show signs of infection!). Also more general middlemen/industries of various kinds.

Examples: PBMs, billing staff, EMRs.

If you look at a surgery a small fraction of the cost is the surgeons professional fee - yes lots of labor costs but thats because their are literally scores of people involved. Supplies, instruments, equipment....all places where someone could be greedy (see: ortho vendors).

Executives in healthcare are increasingly MBAs or nursing and often have authority over the doctors that can lead to both increased cost and decreased quality (see: travel nursing).

Doctor supply issues may be a problem but they are pretty orthogonal to the overall cost disease problems.

I believe the actual answer to this is "Private Equity firms". Where the money eventually goes after that is incredibly complicated to track (by design), but last I checked they played a fairly important role in cost inflation.

Why does Private equity play such a big role in modern investing? Is it a new thing, or did some regulatory change happen, or is there some reason I hear them brought up in almost any economic discussion nowadays, or am I just misremembering a time before private equity was a talking point?

I don't think that private equity is a particularly new thing - it was how Mitt Romney made his money, after all.

My personal belief, which I freely admit has no actual verifiable statistical backing, is that the main reason you're hearing more about them is that the proboscises of parasitic capital are being turned inward. A lot of financial instruments and practices, whatever their legality or the finer points of how they work, essentially functioned as wealth pumps that funneled treasure from various parts of the world to the imperial core. But those wealth pumps develop constituencies and dependents, so they can't just turn off when the flow of lucre begins to slow, and as a result they're forced to target the interior of the empire. These engines of exploitation, which have for years been going into poorer countries and exploiting them for profit, are being forced to turn to the US heartland because that's where the easiest money is. Now, instead of buying hospitals and dramatically raising prices while lowering quality in the global south, they do things like buy Red Lobster and suck out so much capital it dies, or set up cartels in the firefighting equipment manufacturing sector, driving up costs of equipment massively while also simultaneously creating shortages in both repair parts and finished vehicles (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll).

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.

I definitely agree that status plays a big role here. And I sincerely have no idea how to fix things like Point 4: Enriching Activities because the competition there is zero-sum. However, I can genuinely imagine my low-PMC friends sending their children to public schools IF said schools were effective and safe. The difference between paying $30k/child/year and (roughly) $0/child/year is dramatic. Similar thing with housing: if transportation allowed more neighborhoods to reach the urban core <30 minutes, schools were better, streets were safer - the cost of housing in those few enclaves that currently have those features would decrease. All of a sudden, it becomes possible to buy a 3 bedroom house rather than a 2 bedroom condo...

I think oftentimes we focus too much on the PMC, in large part because it's the milieu that populates places of cultural production. And I think they're more or less a lost cause: they have plenty of agency to change their lives and they choose not to, and even if you promised them double their real income, it wouldn't move the needle much. There's no world in which they'd consider raising a child more prestigious than eating out at overpriced mediocre New American restaurants, and so they'll never have kids.

If we're concerned about increasing fertility rates, we should be focusing on the bulk of people who are not PMC, who already show a willingness to have kids at all, and so nudges there are likely to have a greater marginal impact.

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.

We had monogamy for 1500 years and it worked incredibly well. So well, in fact, that we built the world's most powerful empires on top of it.

You're talking about a newfangled dating market that harkens back to the polygynous world of premodern civilizations. I'll agree it's a troubling development, but people can (and do) opt out of it.

Interesting, semi-related article here:

https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/human-reproduction-as-prisoners-dilemma

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.

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?

while you desperately slog through night courses at the community college.

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.

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.

many of the common ones have a substantial safety net in place.

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.

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.

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.

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?

I don't know why the pro-tradwife folks aren't more interested in practical family risk-management considerations.

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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...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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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.

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.

It happens. Usually it seems to be either:

  • The husband is...vigorously sexual and will bear basically any cost for new chances to get his dick wet.
  • The couple married young, they were very sweet together but the man got rich/famous and eventually was unable to ignore the fact that he's way out of his wife's league.

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.

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.

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 vegetable fascist", "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?

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).

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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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.

For (2) I'd add "Provide more school choice". I live in a school district where the best public schools are barely adequate, but in Texas the state will also pay for charter schools, which makes a difference. Charter schools can't screen students by anything more than some combination of "the applicant is in our geographic area", "applicants with a sibling already attending get preference", and "random lottery", but it turns out that the implicit self-screening of "the parents are concerned enough with their kids' education to move schools" and "the parents are on-the-ball enough to be able to get kids to school without a bus driving to their house" is enough to concentrate the most motivated kids and avoid the most disorderly.

We may be getting vouchers for private schools soon, too, so we'll see how that works out. Support for a voucher program in general is at 55% among Texas Democrats, 65% for Texans as a whole.

The downside of school choice is more car traffic and less buses.

As a travelling technician, my quality of life is much lower during the school year. Urban planners trying to minimize car traffic hate this trampling of the commons. And a certain striver mentality is going to look down on parents taking shortcuts to go where the good schools are instead of applying "the grass is greenest where you water it" and actually getting involved.

It's all tradeoffs in the end. On the whole, I'm no fan of your solution.

But that striver mentality is retarded and destructive and needs to be discouraged.

Correct. Voice >> Exit Exit >> Voice; you can't make your local stabby school much better but you can move to a non-stabby district.

(Edit: damnit, got it backwards the first time)

For a certain income level & standard of living, yes. I know where the "good school districts" are in my state, and we don't earn enough to afford housing in them. Cheaper states are a net decrease in quality of life for commute time, job prospects, and quality of community. It's a local maximum with a lot of activation energy to find a new maximum.

I'm aware this is not your problem to solve. The incentives are greatest for me to make lemonade where I'm at, and uncover opportunities where I'm at.

Your objection to school choice is traffic? Of all the trivial and unimportant objections to the greatest good.

I drive my kid to school. I pay taxes, a very small portion of which are spent on roads. I paid for these commons and I'll "trample" my kid to school through them. I'm also entitled to use of public infrastructure.

There are more. It's the first thing I thought of.

It's also a self-inflicted isolation from one's neighborhood, and that carries knock-on effects where it becomes harder to put down roots. Less chance to see the talents of your neighbors, less chance to share your talents with their families, less Slack in your systems to absorb actual shocks.

Maybe you don't value that as much as I do. That's okay.

You drive your kids to school and also they play with neighbors. It is not either or. There's a small park with play equipment hundreds of feet from my house. Most houses on my street have children. We know them.

When I was a kid I had to bike a few miles to public middle school and high school. Selfishly trampling on the public commons. I also had friends in my neighborhood. There was no exclusive choice.

The grass, in this instance, doesn't grow nearly as quickly as my children do, and I'm not going to gamble their early education on the hope that I can unilaterally drag an underperforming school district out of the mire.

Who says it has to be unilateral? It's very unlikely you're the only one who wants better conditions. You may just not know your probable allies yet.

That's just it: I don't know who my probable allies are (or if they exist), and finding/mobilizing them will be part of my initially-unilateral effort. Meanwhile I have to live somewhere and send my kids to a school district today.

Good example of the strategy I described here https://www.themotte.org/post/1405/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/285720?context=8#context

Sure, you’ve noticed something pretty important about PMC fertility.

As a single person, you can live a “Yuppie” lifestyle in a big city on $120-150k a year. As a couple, you can live it on $200-$250k a year, which is even cheaper per-head.

As parents of 3 children, that same lifestyle goes from costing $200-250k a year to costing maybe $900,000 a year. You want to live in the same part of Manhattan? Your rent goes from $4k a month to $12k. Your kids cost $140k a year (post tax) to educate. Your summer trip to Europe goes from costing $10k to $40k, when you factor in needing three hotel rooms, 5 business class seats instead of 2 etc. You need a nanny, if both parents want to keep working which they usually need to. You need a housekeeper (not the same). You need to save for their college tuition, which will be insanely expensive.

Of course, nobody actually needs these things. Our couple who make $250k a year (by regular American standards a great household income) could move to the burbs, or perhaps to an MCOL state, buy a spacious McMansion, send their kids to a nice, safe, middle class public high school with good teachers. They could go skiing on the East Coast instead of to Aspen. They could go to a nice middle class resort in the US for a week in Summer instead of to Santorini or Positano for the IG slideshow. They could even spend two weeks in Europe if they were willing to fly economy and stay in a hotel that wasn’t five star. The likelihood is they would be no less happy.

But of course, they want to appear richer than they are, which is why they did all those things in the first place. And the number of jobs paying $900k (or even $450k) is in much shorter supply than the number paying $150k. So there we are. The people in this bracket who have many kids are the people so rich (either from working in one of the few jobs that pay this much, or having family money) they can live the lifestyle with kids, or the people who are willing to sacrifice the whole thing.

So how much of the red state fertility advantage do you think comes from the attitude that public schools are fine, actually, as long as they’re not in the ghetto, and public colleges are where normal people go(private schools are for oddballs or the genuinely highly exceptional)?

I think cheaper housing is almost certainly part of it, and that likely is too.

I think a lot of it, combined with cheaper housing like 2rafa said. The problem that afflicts the PMC is they value living an urban and high-status lifestyle over having children, and act accordingly. When they do have children, they stress them out pushing them to become petit elites through prestigious education, so they too can afford a shoebox apartment in Manhattan.

The other problem is a lot of the interesting careers for smart people require geographical clustering in urban areas — and more upper-middle-class people are interested in those careers. Work-from-home was a big plus for people whose main problem was this; it enabled people who were trained in a professional field to work in an area with red-tribe property values. A ton of the COVID-era population shift came down to WFH making it an option for moderate professionals to move from blue tribe areas to red tribe areas.

I’m critical of the impact of WFH on productivity, but I think some element of professional geographic distribution would be the greatest thing that could ever be done to get the PMC to consider having more children.

The really interesting thing about this is that the PMC lifestyle in Manhattan looks like poverty to rednecks with three kids- it's a shoebox apartment, after all. Public transportation might be nice if it was clean, orderly, and safe, but the subway is... not that. Materially, the people in a trailerpark outconsume them.

Agreed.

That being said, I think there’s a lot to say for an urban lifestyle — if, as you’ve said, it’s safe, clean, and accessible. My view is that our biggest problem is our country has so many great and historic cities, but we’ve allowed inner-city crime to absolutely gut and destroy them, so any and all who want that kind of life have to fight over the scraps that aren’t totally ruined. We’ve allowed the bad optics of arresting and detaining criminals and gangsters who happen to be black men to absolutely ruin the possibility of city people to live good lives in many places, which is a very sad way in which the Democratic coalition is at odds with itself. And meanwhile Republicans are just living their best lives out in the burbs or the country.

I have a question: of the two political parties in the USA, which one do you think is more likely to try and enact such policies as you have described?

"I want more babies in the United States of America"

So, just so we are talking about the same thing, you're saying you believe the Republican party is more likely to decrease the cost of housing, improve the public schools, decrease the cost of common goods, encourage community enrichment through programs, promote sexual education, promote livable wages and decrease the cost of healthcare than the Democrats?

In my experience in exclusively-Democrat Tier-1 cities, the Democrats have done the exact opposite of all of those things: made housing more expensive, destroyed the quality of public schools, increased the cost of common goods, promoted sexual misinformation, and increased the cost of healthcare. I'd give the odds of the Republican party decreasing the cost of housing, improving public schools, etc at 20% - doubled since the inauguration.

Republicans are usually better on school choice than Democrats and that's basically the only way to break the back of the school district industrial complex. That impacts housing prices too, as Elizabeth Warren pointed out in The Two Income Trap.

As for increasing wages, reducing costs,and reducing the cost of healthcare, neither party seems to be capable of actually enacting free market reforms that would improve the situation, so it's basically a wash.

In practice, republicans have done much better on housing costs than democrats.

Affordable five and six bedroom houses are simply not a realistic goal. The PMC fertility rate can’t be raised without changing the things they value- from ‘traveling’ that never gets off the beaten path to children.

You can plausibly do so by raising the prestige of having children.

  • encourage or enforce a policy that women on TV prioritize children over career. Make it a thing where a high powered career woman has a baby and stays home with it, and this is shown as a good and desirable things to do. Show other women as jealous of the mom at home raising her own child as they wage-slave over spreadsheets they don’t actually care about.

  • prioritize schools teaching home skills. Not just cooking and sewing, but simple repairs, budgeting, etc. teach women to do those things and let them realize just how creative one can be in homemaking. Teaching childcare is a given, especially when it’s explained just how important mothers and fathers actually are to children.

  • encourage generous family leave policies— at least a full year.

What family needs a five or six bedroom house? Sharing rooms has historically been the norm, and still is for most people who actually have big families (i.e. the poor).

There are no highly fertile people, only highly fertile women. Women alone make the decision, not couples. “Her body, her choice.” That is the way we have structured modern society. At the time, we didn’t know women would bail on their duty to reproduce. Instead of using the power they received wisely and dutifully, they abuse it to extort ever more resources, while failing to maintain even replacement-level fertility.

As you note, rationally speaking, they already have more than enough (public schools, free entertainment, essentially free healthcare, etc). Giving them even more would just encourage them to limit the supply of babies even more, like a cartel.

I know more women who want children than men. Where is this huge number of 20-30 year old men who want kids? There are many who want a girlfriend, or perhaps even a wife, meaning a hot woman who wants to have sex with them. But if you gave them the choice between a hot girlfriend on one side and a wife and two kids, the travails of pregnancy, waking up five times a night, looking after young children, buying clothes and food, doctor’s visits and cleaning up bodily fluids on the other, I think they would mostly pick the former.

If the president wants something, who cares what the vice president thinks? The buck stops with women. Stop blaming the closest male for what is 100% women’s decision.

A particular large category in my friend groups is single-parent women with one kid. A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid (as indicated by thousands upon thousands of memes on this topic on the Internet), and many of the rest will be of the kind that any sane mother would keep away from their kid's vicinity.

I think in the classes in which single motherhood is most common, having a ‘baby momma’ who already has a kid (or three) with another man or other men is pretty common. Also not hugely unusual in very bohemian circles, actors and theater people and whatnot. For the regular middle classes, I think many get divorced after they’ve had 2 or 3 kids, and in the case of 1 they can usually find an older man (usually 10 years older, possibly a kid or two of his own) to marry and have one more with.

I have heard that in the Nordics it is more common for respectable, non-bohemian people to have kids without marriage (still looked down upon in the Anglo world), though, and that couples will do things like live together for 10 years, have one kid, then split.

I have heard that in the Nordics it is more common for respectable, non-bohemian people to have kids without marriage (still looked down upon in the Anglo world), though, and that couples will do things like live together for 10 years, have one kid, then split.

Anecdotally, Scandinavians don't feel the need to marry to form stable relationships. The better Scandi cohabitations are more stable than the worse American marriages. I don't know whether anyone has looked at the overall stability of Scandinavian vs US couples.

Yes, it's generally true. In Finnish, while marriage is called avioliitto, a stable live-in relationship is termed avoliitto, and the closeness of the two words seems pretty deliberate. Generally speaking people in stable live-in relationships with kids get married at some point, but it can take quite a long time for them to do so.

A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid

When dating, I also considered single mothers out of the question. Their allegiances will (rightly) be with their children rather than their new partner. And the biological father will always be in the mix, too. Mostly I wanted my own kids, not to parent someone else's. Why is that wrong?

I don't think anyone's individual decision to refrain from dating anyone is wrong, per se. The bigger problem is that there's a whole memetic culture built around the idea that if you date a single mom then you've lost the game, increasing the chances that such women continue to be lonely (and without a chance to have more kids, which many of them do desire).

The original question wasn't about rights and wrongs anyway, it was about whether the fertility decision was women's and women's alone.

increasing the chances that [single-mom] women continue to be lonely...

The vast majority of such women were not involuntarily thrust into the status of single mother without a partner; there is a living male out there who fathered that child, with whom the woman cannot or will not maintain a satisfactory relationship. Some times that's for good reasons (though it does call into question the woman's judgment in procreating with such a guy to begin with), but most of the time it's a mixed-to-negative signal at best.

I don’t think it’s wrong, it just is. People take what they can get. One interesting thing, though, is that parenting another man’s child is probably less common today than it’s ever been, if only because historically orphanhood and widowhood were much more common, such that 150 years ago it would have been quite common in very large families to have one or two kids around who weren’t biological descendants of the patriarch, or perhaps related to him at all. My grandfather told me about his parents growing up around various orphans and so on in the family, people would come in and out.

Widows produce better outcomes than never married single moms.

There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.

The former is historically common and is a great situation for all around, this is a person who took til death do us part seriously and probably retains, despite her loss, the character and personality to maintain a healthy relationship.

In the latter two cases, there’s tremendous baggage, and a strong suggestion of poor relationship characteristics. If she couldn’t work things out with the father of her children, who’s to say she’ll be able to work things out with you when things get tough?

Spousal abuse and infidelity mix things up, and it really depends on how exactly that went down. But I suspect most cases of single motherhood in adults young enough to continue to have children have to do with poor relationship behaviors and poor character, things that should give someone pause even if children weren’t in the mix.

There’s a big difference between dating a single mom who’s single because her husband died, and dating a single mom who’s single because she had a kid out of wedlock or went through a divorce.

Granted, but the number of dating age single mother widows is to within an epsilon of zero compared to the number of dating age single mother high-time-preference-poor-planning-out-of-wedlock-dumpster-fires.

Widows are not single mothers. They are widows.

Widows are a tiny percentage of single mothers. The vast majority of single mothers fall into two categories:

  1. Women who had sex with a man whom any fucking idiot could have told you would be unwilling or unable to marry her and work hard to provide for the kids (criminal thugs, bohemian drifters, married men, etc.)

  2. Women who divorced a perfectly adequate man for the crime of not being Chad, excusing their decision to destroy their own lives, their husbands' lives, and their children's lives by saying that they were unhappy.

And the biological father will always be in the mix, too.

Not neccesarilly, and some people are genetics deniers.

A huge amount of men will consider them out of the question simply due to seeing them as used goods looking for an idiot to pay up for someone else's kid

That’s whitepilling and a case for optimism, if there’s a huge amount of Western men out there with some sense of self-respect and self-preservation. Hopefully, this will translate into other aspects of their worldviews in the coming years/decades.

If women’s feelings are valid when they get the ick from short, awkward, or low status men, men’s feelings are valid when they get the ick from single mothers. Men aren’t entitled to sex; women aren’t entitled to relationships. His body; his choice—a single mother already made hers when she had some other man’s kid(s).

Well, insofar as the original point that it's not just women who make the choice regarding fertility goes, QED?

Which original point? For example, I was responding to your comment in isolation and not to, say, @Tree's remark about "There are no highly fertile people, only highly fertile women. Women alone make the decision, not couples," which I didn't read at the time but I went back to find just now.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that statement by the letter. The world is a big place; I'm sure there there are couples out there where the wife wanted more children but the husband didn't. However, directionally and qualitatively it's true, that women are the gatekeepers of sex and children.

Ironically, though, your anecdote about the women in your friend groups supports @Tree's remark rather than rebuts it. Your single mother acquaintances made their reproductive choices: while they were younger, fresher, and childless, they chose to bear the children of men who preferred not to commit to them and/or the children that resulted. The "huge amount of men," or subset thereof, that would had otherwise come along later and be among the potential pool of suitors had nothing to do with it.

If in my town I put up a used car for sale at the asking price of a new car, and expected the buyer would help payoff loans I secured using the car as collateral when it was new, it wouldn't surprise me if my townspeople didn't see my totally generous offer as adding to the choices available in the town's automobile market, and would at most be interested in taking my car out for a test-drive for their amusement. I'd understand if they preferred to wait for new cars to open up in the marketplace, or opted to continue renting cars, or walking or biking in the meanwhile instead. QED, indeed.

simply due to seeing them as used goods

As @jeroboam mentioned below, it's not just that. There are other relevant factors also usually at play. I don't agree that the sire / biological father is always in the mix with various potential disadvantages and risks the new husband faces, but often he is. Also, his (the husband's) entire social circle is likely to look down on him as a loser, usually for a good reason. His wife is also likely to see him basically as a spare of secondary importance.

Also, his (the husband's) entire social circle is likely to look down on him as a loser, usually for a good reason.

Well, yes, exactly; it's not just down to people's individual preferences, there's an entire tendency in culture that's making people even less likely to consider single moms as a partner than otherwise.

There's a lot of truth to this, but it misses a bit of my perceived gender dynamics. In the past, the wife and both their families would pressure the husband to go ahead and have kids. That pressure is much rarer nowadays: it seems gauche for someone not in the couple to ask them to do something. And, for whatever reason, wives pressure their husbands about kids less nowadays. Everyone has shifted their preference away from the couple having kids, in favor of other priorities. Boomer would-be grandparents prefer their obligation-free vacations, wives prefer Michelin dinners, and husbands prefer ???.

The hot girl makes the choice between the two. She can merely withhold sex before commitment. The man can withhold the commitment as long as he wants if he is getting easy sex while burning through the sexual primes of one or more women.

I'd argue that the delay of marriage is mostly driven by women and not men in this particular social condition, and the resulting normalization of late marriage erodes young men's willingness to prepare themselves for marriage long-term.

"Men cannot go backwards sexually, women can't go backwards in lifestyle."

I've come to the conclusion that this isn't really a problem from my POV since I and my coreligionists are already living the carpenter lifestyle (despite being white collar). So I actually am against top down policy changes that make it easier for the status-obsessed, those ideologically opposed to me, and those who are too weak to self-sacrifice to have children. I want more children for those who share my worldview and who have the proper disposition to raise a family. I don't want to pay more taxes for a cultural reeducation campaign that doesn't address the core reasons why the PMC are ill-suited to reproduce (ideology and personality).

my coreligionists

Who are they?

My mother grew up in a two bedroom house with her parents and five siblings, and I remember how silly she found the American idea of each child having their own room. Since there is clearly no material limitation on PMC couples raising large families, the problem is entirely cultural and I doubt it can be addressed directly through government intervention.

I think a lot of it stems from the desire to have PMC children. They can live a much more relaxed lifestyle, like the one @2rafa outlined in another comment:

Our couple who make $250k a year (by regular American standards a great household income) could move to the burbs, or perhaps to an MCOL state, buy a spacious McMansion, send their kids to a nice, safe, middle class public high school with good teachers. They could go skiing on the East Coast instead of to Aspen. They could go to a nice middle class resort in the US for a week in Summer instead of to Santorini or Positano for the IG slideshow. They could even spend two weeks in Europe if they were willing to fly economy and stay in a hotel that wasn’t five star. The likelihood is they would be no less happy.

If the children of this couple are smart and ambitious, they will ascend to the PMC themselves. If they regress to the mean, they will live a comfortable middle-class lifestyle. But that's not enough for the parents! They imagine this as their own personal failure and they will do everything to ensure their children remain PMC. This means sending them to the right school, maintaining the level of consumption that lets them socialize with PMC and UC children, padding their college application with the right experiences, etc.

Voila, their children are now a single child, because that's all they can afford. And I don't think it's a bad thing. Low PMC fertility ensures that elite overproduction is not a threat: the class is continuously being refreshed by middle-class outliers.

Those couples DO exist; New Jersey and Killington, VT are full of them.


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