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Notes -
A note on motivations.
I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it. Of course I want living standards to continue to be good during my generation at least, but that doesn't mean that I have any attachment to the idea of wanting to maintain human civilization 100 or 1000 years from now. And if human civilization continues after me, I'm fine with that too. I don't care much one way or the other.
Humanity has been doing this whole reproduction thing for hundreds of thousands of years now. Repetition and quantity is not the same thing as quality.
I get that it feels different if you have kids, which I don't. I might be interested in having kids, but I'm not sure if I want any or not yet.
In any case, if you have kids, I didn't force you to have kids. I hope your kids do well, but it doesn't change my fundamental calculus.
I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way. I love the smell of flowers, the look of sunshine in the sky. I just see no clear positive advantage to continuing the species. Or to ending it. Like I said, I'm neutral on the matter. If the species continues, cool. If it ends, cool. I don't want to end, and I don't want any currently alive humans to end, but to me the idea of continuing the species beyond that is very abstract and I really don't care about it.
It requires empathy to care about civilization. Because it means understanding that there are people just like yourself who will be living in the far future, though they do not yet exist, and they matter as if they were your friend or cousin. Humans come equipped with an interest in securing the wellbeing of those who are like themselves, though there have been some mutations which express other inclinations usually deemed antisocial. If civilization, then their happiness is secured. If barbarism, then doom —
Also, interest in civilization is usually a proxy for intergroup competition. The failure for your group to be fruitful simply means that another group will dominate yours. This will probably be the Chinese when they eventually realize how easy it is to increase TFR. All of your descendants will be less happy, just as the celts were less happy when the Anglo-Saxons ruled over them. Many of their descendants will beg and prostitute themselves. A well-tuned empathy makes you feel about future members of your tribe in the same way you feel about your own child. This is why Kings with paternal feelings toward his subjects were beloved in history; it is probably evolution’s favored form of governance, given that the primates the dominant member shares food and protects the lesser members.
If you truly
you would recognize there is a chain of empathy descending from “caring about someone who has kids”, to “caring about their kids”, to “caring about their grandkids”, all the way down. Because if you care about them then you also have some care for their terminal values, which is going to be their children. Our present happiness is related to our future predictions, so it’s reasonable to feel unhappy if your civilization is trending toward doom.
Easy ... how?
Countries have tried in both recent and historic times, but AFAIK the only time a national policy has significantly increased TFR (from sub-replacement to above 3) was in Ceausescu's Romania, via "outlawing abortion and contraception, routine pregnancy tests for women, taxes on childlessness, and legal discrimination against childless people". Lots of countries have tried various "carrots" to little effect; it seems like only such big "sticks" work. You'd think China would be uniquely positioned to be that oppressive today, but even for them it might not be possible soon - they only ended the One-Child Policy a decade ago, and it'll be embarrassing (and hence politically risky) for the old guard when they have to admit that continuing it so long was a mistake big enough to require a similarly hard push in the opposite direction.
Even in Romania, fertility didn't stay above 3 for long, though - it was below 2.5 in a few years, and dipping below replacement again well before the policies ended - though it plummeted to 1.5 after, so it's not like the polices weren't still doing something, they just weren't doing enough.
The strongest correlate to fertility is probably the inverse correlation with years of education for females, but I don't know if China is the type of brutal to try fiddling with that. They're certainly not a gender equality utopia, but in higher education women there now outnumber men, despite solidly outnumbered by men in that age range.
It is trivial to change TFR and eventually China will realize it, and they will be able to solve it via totalitarianism while we are unable to follow suit. You (1) judge the social value of girls and women exclusively by their aptitude and progress in motherhood; (2) inculcate pro-fertile values in adolescent girls (eg media, stories, idols), (3) train girls in the skills for motherhood.
The reason the Haredi female TFR is so high regardless of country or income is because they do this. The reason that you have some fundamentalist Christian families with high TFR is because they do this. The reason the Gypsy TFR is 1.5 to 2x the national average of whichever country they live in, despite being urban-dwelling, is that they do this. The reason I have cousins on one side of family who are going to average 4 kids each is that I know their parents so this. There was a longitudinal study where girls were given a fake baby that they had to mother throughout school; the longterm effect was 1.5x higher TFR. (I think I found this on themotte but forgot the poster).
Women care so much about their social valuation that they will starve themselves to gain more more of it; they will spend two hours a day decorating their face and hair and wardrobe; they will even go through a miserable period of hard work and stress with little monetary reward only because it secures status (we call this “academia”). In more fertile eras, these pressures were toward motherhood; a woman who wanted to be an academic would be laughed at and derided.
Anyway, China will realize this, they will totalitarianly implement changes and likely in such a way that it targets high IQ Chinawomen, and we will be fucked (impotently) because we are ruled by entertainment and corporations, not a centralized communist party.
(also paging Mr @hydroacetylene)
As if you can snap your fingers and just do it. As if you can make women incapable of looking around them and seeing every large family poor and miserable. How many instances throughout world history can you find where social status was not tied to material wealth?
Is that the cause? Or is it that they are a welfare class engaged in a holy war?
Is that the cause? Or is it that gypsy children are an economic resource to gypsies?
You can if you’re China or some other centralized totalizing social environment. China can snap their fingers and mandate films, books, adverts, lessons, and class trips. These can successfully change norms so that women are socially judged by their motherhood + pre-motherhood behaviors.
In any with strong religious norms, a childless woman was seen as beneath a woman who had many kids. Religious communities do a good job at redirecting social status, but so can any totalizing social environment. In America you have the enormous problem of capitalism / consumerism which will need to be fixed for any national solution to occur, because you have some of the smartest people continually telling women that their social value is determined by buying and experiences things, with universities (effectively all of them behaving as businesses) telling them they need to be educated. And so lots of smart people actually think it’s higher status to be a poor academic (or even a struggling artist) than having a lot of money. If you’re at a party and there’s a poor artist, a prestigious academic, and then a plumbing company owner who makes $400k yearly, the status is not dictated by the one who makes more money. Heck, someone owning a cute coffee shop that barely turns a profit is going to have more social status in many circles than someone who does slant drilling and turns $500k a year. This is because our culture’s media / stories signal that these things are high status.
Their leaders are engaged in a holy war but the average member is just a normal person doing what their culture says to do, and in this culture the number of children is prized over everything. Both men and women are judged harshly or celebrated strongly based on their fertility. It’s seen as both a commandment and a blessing. The average member isn’t having kids for a nefarious reason, they are just taught through custom that it’s prized.
Unlikely now that Gypsies are forced into schools in Europe. And look at historical figures: Ben Franklin’s father made candles, was his 17 children necessary for the candle business in an era with slaves and indentured servants? Of course not. Albrecht Dürer‘s parents were goldsmiths, did they need to have 18 children? Of course not. “Economic resource theory” never made any sense because you can look at rich non-farmers in history and see high fertility.
I believe the theory that Gypsy kids are an economic resource to their parents is due to their utility for typical Ziganeur activities like welfare exploitation, petty crime(which can combine with schooling pretty well), and charity scams.
And I'm going to talk a bit about ultra-religious communities, because I can tell you don't actually live in one- the highest status thing in an ultra-religious community is to become a member of the structure of the religion. This is why Haredi families gamble on their boys becoming rabbis even though the supply exceeds the demand and yeshivas provide no secular education whatsoever(and ultra-islamic families do the same thing with madrassas). For tradcaths grandmotherhood is higher status than having single adult children, but not as high status as having nun/priest children. The desire to be mothers comes from exposure to babies and small children, not from social status(which pushes young women towards the convent). You could not replicate this effect in a society where people don't already have 5+ children. Now of course there is no option for tradcaths to drop out of education at the age of 7 or 8 and enter full-time preparation for the cloister, so it kinda comes out in the wash(and haredi women seem like an afterthought/ultra-islamic women like property).
I’m familiar with the social ecosystem of the Haredim. It’s super interesting. The women are not involved in religious learning, they are raised to support their husband. Because the Rabbi credential is socially important, the women work to support their husband pursue it. But just as important to this is that the women have children. This is going to be the first question asked to married Haredi women. This is why they have a lot of children. What the men learn in their Yeshiva is that having children is a mitzvah, and so they fulfill their nocturnal obligations. This is an easy ask because all childcare duties fall on the women. The Rabbi credential system is not as competitive as, like, getting into a PhD program, because the big Rabbi positions are handed down via nepotism; my understanding is that it’s often a factor of showing up.
Lol no
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10680-019-09525-0
Do you really think that a Haredi woman who happens (due to some cosmic accident) to be an only child herself, will not go on to have many children? My intuition tells me she will have a lot; perhaps not as many as her many-sibling peers, but still way more than an American with four siblings
I would consider this a perversion of the religion. The Epistle to Timothy is clear that women “will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith and love and holiness with self-control.” These are bad Christians if they are giving a woman status for raising a priest instead of a dozen kids. I actually find Catholicism horrifically anti-natal because the most devout are pressured into producing impotent clerical heirs. It made sense in Malthusian times for the youngest male without property to join the church. It doesn’t make sense now. In more traditional, medieval Catholicism, even these priests had concubines
https://www.medievalists.net/2012/08/clerical-concubines-in-northern-italy-during-the-fourteenth-century/
https://www.medievalists.net/2011/08/priestly-marriage-the-tradition-of-clerical-concubinage-in-the-spanish-church/
I don't claim that my co-religionists are perfect- and it's worth noting our actual religious elders don't either, undue pressure on your children to have a religious vocation is explicitly a sin.
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