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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   31003 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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But pretty much every Western society recovered from having TFR crash to near-replacement or below in the 1930s to 2.5-3 in the 50s and 60s, ie. the baby boom. (See Sweden for an example.) This happened without a full totalitarian effort.

But pretty much every Western society recovered from having TFR crash to near-replacement or below in the 1930s to 2.5-3 in the 50s and 60s, ie. the baby boom.

TFR is synthetic parameter, and much noiser than the actual fertility, the advantage of TFR is that it's available now rather than 40 years later. If you look at actual total fertility, it's much smoother and shows no such crash.

Please explain the difference.

My thesis was the temporary victory of cultural conservatism that was necessary because of war struggle, collective action and anticommunism + tech innovation and huge economic growth. Delete the low hanging fruit of recovery and growth, and then in the 68 eliminate the antileftist culture, and you have it.

Countries like Sweden didn't go through the war, and the Communists (and socialist parties in general) were never as strong in Western Europe as after WW2 (countries like Italy, France and Finland most clearly, but most Western European countries saw stronger-than-ever numbers for the Communists in the immediate WW2 aftermath).

Every Western society is now more urbanized and educated, plus there's porn, video games and everything else people blame for the fertility decline. It's going to be much harder to do anything today than in the 50s or 60s. Implicit, unspoken social technology that worked then has now broken or been broken.

I mean, think about what was happening in the 50s, what caused it then? A prolonged period of wages growth would certainly help but there are plenty of countries with huge wages growth today and cratering fertility. There's no reason to expect that to result in success. In Sweden they'd just come up with the welfare state. We still have welfare states and there don't seem to be much gains to be made there in terms of fertility despite huge amounts of money sloshing around.

We're left with other aspects of the 50s and early 60s that are a harder sell for the general public.

The golden age of eugenics. Mad Men-style sexism. Nuclear family as standard. The mindset and assumptions that put all of these into practice. Plus an overt, explicit understanding of what the goal is, precisely what we want and why rather than free market fundamentalism. Something besides treating the fate of nations like inexplicable changes in the weather, to be observed and adjusted to rather than altered and improved. That's what we're missing I think.

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