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I was following the latest flame war regarding the human mating marketplace on this board (see here and here, for those that are unaware) with mild interest and was considering posting some dudebro take on the matter by using as an educative example the story of the now largely defunct Christian men’s identitarian group in the US who called themselves ‘Promise Keepers’, of whom I learned a long time ago completely by accident. Then I realized this may not be the best idea, as I imagine only relatively few people are even aware of their (past) existence. So before I decide to proceed I’ll ask this very question: how many of you have ever heard of this particular sad bunch?
I remain perpetually confused as to how a group of Tough Minded Rationalists™, who believe in the invisible hand of the free market and facts over feelings, can be so concerned about birth rates.
Organisms that can adapt to their environment will reproduce. Those that can't will die off. So it always has been, so it always will be.
Why so much ire over nature taking its course? Any attempt to engage in large scale social engineering that would cause civilization to deviate from its current course in order to force it to align with an abstract values framework starts to sound a bit... socialist-y.
I've only ever encountered birth rate concerns in the predictable context of "p.s. they should get out of my workplace and onto my dick"-type sentiments, but I also remain confused as to why this whole weird part of the discourse cropped up, mushroom-like, seemingly overnight.
Tinfoil-hat read is that the whole fertility panic was deliberately astroturfed on Twitter as a way to lay the groundwork for "....so this is why we need to invest heavily in artificial wombs," with incels as useful water-carriers for the interim messaging. I can certainly think of entities who'd plausibly want to push that based on stated values, but speculating about end goals gets too bizarre to waste much time on.
I don't find it so tinfoil-hatty because I do believe artificial wombs need to be invested in. It seems like things that are meaningfully different about the West and made it good inevitably lead to things that make people find something better to do than coerce half of the population into being the means of reproduction and little else.
I think it's instructive that the debate has already baked in "coerce" and "means of reproduction and little else," though, which feel like complete non sequiturs. If women increasingly delay childbearing through (imho entirely reasonable) economic anxiety and difficulties finding a suitable partner, it's weird that people jump to "so dumb 'em down and marry 'em off by force, or if you don't want to, guess we'll just have to replace all y'all hoes with robot uteruses," rather than, you know, making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years, or figuring out why young men are under-socialized, undermotivated and underpaid, or whatever.
I know plenty of mid-20s women who would love to find a kind, conscientious guy to have three kids with, followed by a nice Boomer-style dual-career middle age. I know absolutely no real-life girlbosses wishing someone else would pop eggs into a slow cooker so they could get back to those late-running meetings with Marketing. Thus, the fact that the discourse keeps presuming the latter rather than the former feels like an artificial move to guide the conversation to a place it wouldn't normally go.
No offense, but you're roughly two decades behind the state of the discussion. The rough trajectory goes like this (I'll use germany as the example since I'm most familiar with it, but afaik it's quite similar for many different western countries, save maybe a decade or so earlier or later):
60s: Germany is on a high due to the baby boom with a birth rate of ca 2.3. It switches to an overtly pay-as-you-go pension system, which works very well due to the circumstances. Some already point out that it will only work if birth rates keep stable and say we need to have policies to ensure that it does (of course, this is actually true of almost any economic system, but pay-as-you-go makes it overtly obvious). Chancellor Adenauer dismisses them stringently with "children will always be had" and this is also the public sentiment, so nothing is done.
80s: Birth rates went done substantially to ca 1.5. However, it's generally chalked up to be more an issue of delayed children rather than not having them at all. (Also, as a note: Germany already had rather generous maternity leave during this time already)
00s: The first generation of women has become old enough with a low birth rate so that it's clear that delaying is not the reason - people really have significantly less children overall (only 1.3, even). This coincided with a great increase in women employment, which was an amazing economic boon. When asked, women directly say the reason is economic - not enough money, not enough protection from discrimination after maternity leave, not enough family accommodation, ... and so on. Obviously, people are reluctant to rock the boat too much when times are good. So the focus is on increasing the (economic) benefits over the years in the expectation that the birth rate will go up again. People aren't terribly worried and the discussion is not really big in the public. The only who are worried a lot are, more often than not, literal nazis, so they are still easy to dismiss. <--- you are here.
10s: The birth rate didn't change, at all. More people get worried, since at the current rate there will be a big crunch in the 30s when the baby boomers retire. But in 2015 a new possible saviour turns up: Immigration! The immigration of earlier years usually was too small to be demographically notable, the large waves now were so massive that they actually could plausibly make up for the crunch. While this wasn't the primary reason that we opened the borders, it was mentioned multiple times by the left wing and made it hard for the then-mostly economic right to argue against it (it went roughly like this: "We worry about having not enough workers in a few years, now we are gifted plenty of young people, what are you complaining about!"). So policy doesn't change much, especially since accommodating the immigrants is too expensive to plausible further increase child benefits.
20s: It becomes very clear that the immigrants are actually an additional drain, not a benefit, to the economy. Birth rates also pretty much didn't change, except a short-term anomaly around covid. Now there actually isn't enough time left to solve the problem until the 30s - kids born now would only be teenagers. In fact, the negative impacts already become noticeable since some boomers already scale back work or even retire early, and the general economy is bad enough that people get unhappy. As usual, this is the moment the wider public really groks that there is a problem at all. Behind the scenes for the last decade, lots of overwhelmingly progressive, optimistic scientist have been looking for any policy, anywhere in the world, that increase the birth rates. There are none. All known developed countries have low birth rates. The discourse gets pretty gloomy, and the only reliable relationship that anyone can find across most countries is a negative one between female employment and birth rate. This coincides with a general rise of the right-wing across the entire west.
It's not terribly surprising here that some are jumping to coercive measures, and it's definitely not coming out of nowhere. My personal opinion is most close to pronatalist Lyman Stone (and to a lesser degree the Collins), which is that the problem is cultural and can't reasonably be solved economically. As a father who shares family obligations equally, I can tell you that especially small ones are a lot of fucking work (and money), and they will not only reduce your immediate work time, they also reduce your career opportunities and your free time. It's almost impossible to redistribute so much that having kids becomes economically beneficial. If you tell women that careers are important to them, they will not have kids, bc you can't have both and everyone knows it. Men will generally not blow up their career, either, especially since women don't actually respect house-husbands. That doesn't mean coercion, but pretty much everything you propose has been tried in one country or another and found wanting. Of course the old arrangement (male main breadwinner, women part-time worker + child care) still works, but there is an ever-increasing portion of the population who is not willing to do that anymore. And once you've changed to the new dual-income model, the margins become quite thin so making a family work on top of that will include quite a lot of sacrifices. Worse, you have to outright compete with the DINKs.
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You believed an innovative solution would come from
what passed for progressive thought 50 years agotraditionalist thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is just mostly just men being butthurt.You believed an innovative solution would come from
what will be traditionalist thought in 50 yearsprogressive thought, especially when parroted completely uncritically? This is mostly just women being butthurt anyway.There are no table stakes. We're not interested in investing in youth outside of how much interest that student loan is going to generate, we banned all development that would make their current salary appropriate, and we're too invested in "teach men to not rape" to make sure that those who weren't going to do that anyway aren't getting treated as pre-emptively guilty (we have taxed their virtue to redistribute it to rapist men and stupid women, and now wise men don't want to exercise that virtue or see doing so as too risky? And now they have anxiety and won't come out of their room(s)? couldn't have seen that coming).
Sure, there seems to have been a cohort of hyper-conscientious Millennial men of ~Scott Alexander age that got traumatized by Title IX culture and now complain about it. But those men are now aging out of family-starting age, anyway. And Title IX was never actually about gender relations, just about a parasite class of university administrators finding an excuse to justify swelling their retinues.
I don't see grounds for presuming that "teaching men not to rape" has created any more recent crop of hikikomori-style dropouts, if that's what you're arguing. I haven't heard a Zoomer say they didn't want to date because rape accusations, just that dating feels awkward, is a PITA and they worry the girl would be judging them. I can spin about ten different just-so stories for why they might increasingly express those feelings, but "because they were taught not to rape" is pretty low in the plausibility ranking. Certainly it's far below "too little free play as kids, now permanently anti-social"; porn fucking up sexual desire and behavior; Netflix, weed and videogames fucking up attention and motivation; collapsing economy fucking up developmental pathways; anti-family culture fucking up availability of role models; and youth mental-health memetics destigmatizing "I can't, I have anxiety" as a life narrative.
On the other hand, assuming that Anti-Rape-Culture Did It means you can blame the whole thing on girls being so darn sensitive, so there's that.
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Is it not possible that the fact that you think these are the bounds of the debate is the result of negative polarization in a world where practically everyone who has heard of the problem has spitballed their own cause and solution? People retweet the most ghoulish posts by their outgroup back to their ingroup, not the reasonable proposals.
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Countries with maternal laws/customs have even lower fertility than the US though. The modern/western society didn't find an answer aside from going back to past patriarchy vs sci-fi solutions.
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This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...
The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.
I mean, to some extent, all 4 of 1-4 are already happening:
Most countries have at least some form of policy that incentivizes being coupled off with children; Canada, at least, directly pays parents via the Canada Child Benefit. I'm fairly confident that the US has options to file jointly or single for couples, enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes. This means that people who are single are either paying more than their fair share, or couples are paying less than their fair share (depending on your viewpoint).
In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way, parents (as in, working parents) are forced to spend their income on programs that are intended for the welfare of the elderly, or to support single mothers; most of these elderly have had children, so the labor of working parents is subsidizing the lifestyle of parents who are not working.
And it is currently illegal in Canada to discriminate against a pregnant woman; I ran into this as a kid when my teacher left for maternity leave, they hired a pregnant substitute, who also left for maternity leave.
I don't really have any point to this "well, acktually"-ing, just thought it was kind of funny.
To the extend that child tax credits directly help parents, they're unfair... But I'm not heartless enough to deny support to the blameless children. On net I think we'd have a lot less need for them if we removed elder-support programs and therefore let working parents keep more money in their pockets.
The american tax code is designed to help families in a "working parent/homemaker" situation but ironically punishes cases where you have two high-earning adults. I've got some DINK friends who had to pay more taxes after getting married. TBH, I also think that's unfair. They shouldn't get elder assistance in their old age, but also they should be able to save and invest more of their taxes now so that they don't need it. Basically, our society can let people decide of their own volition whether investing in children or career advancent is their best retirement bet. Anyone who chooses to be both unproductive and childless can suffer the consequences and resign themselves to either poverty or becoming such a pillar of their community even unrelated adults are willing to help thm.
That's kind of exactly what I meant, actually. By removing the need to pay for unrelated elders, adults can focus on supporting their own parents. Reciprocally, that also increases the incentive for elders to help their adult children with childcare. My grandmother helped my mom with me while my mom was doing her PHD; in return, my mom has helped her quite a bit through the years with remittances. That all winds up with a greater incentive for adults to have children, and in particular to raise them well so that the children will be happy to take care of them.
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This seems like an unnecessarily fatalist take on an already very solved problem. We already have working structures to encourage people to enter the military while ensuring that their time in service won't work against their employment prospects when they return. Vets are also people who have not necessarily been gaining experience that's 100% relevant to the civilian workplace experience during their time away, but who have been building job-adjacent skills and demonstrating conscientiousness while away, as well as sacrificing pleasure to serve the greater good. I haven't noticed that mild preferential hiring standards for vets have caused every business to collapse, and employers aren't forced to give vets credit for more experience than they possess, just forced not to use their work gap to freeze them out versus other similarly-experienced candidates. It seems to me that most mid-20s professional women leaving the workplace to raise young children would be happy simply to reenter at the same step on the ladder, the way veterans get to; what I've seen in practice is that employers just arbitrarily won't even consider them, so they have a terrible time reentering at all.
If preferential hiring for returning moms seems like an unthinkable drain on productivity while you don't feel the same way for returning vets (notwithstanding high rates of PTSD, etc., etc. that make vets at least as empirically risky to hire), then I think that intuition merits some extra scrutiny. Is it possible that we don't really believe increasing the TFR is actually a contribution to the public good, the way bombing villages in Afghanistan was? In which case, it's a fair question why that same TFR would then require public investment in robot wombs.
Or is it possible that we don't actually believe that raising small children is a respect-worthy task for a talented person to spend time on, the sort of thing that should look good on a resume the way military service does? In which case, wouldn't the feminists be correct that people pushing momhood are mostly doing it as a way to demean women?
Not all work experience is universally applicable in every other domain. Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs. Experience as a mother is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to determine your own schedule and manage small children. That admittedly does prove useful in stuff like hr/people manager/project management roles. (Basically all the managers I've ever had have been parents, and I think that makes perfect sense.) But the supply for those roles is much greater than the demand, so rationally self-interested companies filter for accumulated domain knowledge, which disadvantages mothers. Meanwhile the most numerically common jobs that benefit from experience as a mother are childcare and teaching related, but those jobs have a whole ton of structural problems that prevent them from accurately renumerating employees based on the quality of their work. The incentives of school district administrators are poorly aligned at best with actually maximizing learning, and any attempt to assess teacher skill and renumerate appropriately will piss off so many entrenched groups.
There are a few fields-- like nursing, for example-- that avoids the problems I've mentioned... but if you just compare the number of veterans versus the number of order-following jobs, and the number of mothers versus the number of caretaking jobs, and you see why things get to be the way they are.
Really? Slavishly following orders and following repetitive protocols under conditions of extreme physical stress sounds more like McDonalds jobs to me. And one could argue that running a household with small children is far better preparation for C-suite roles that require big-picture strategy, critical thinking about efficient use of limited resources, thoughtful design of people-friendly processes and institutional structures, etc. But both sides are just special pleading, because of course there are many military tasks and many mom tasks that will cross-apply to any given job, and many others that won't. The point of preferential hiring is not that the person is inherently more qualified for every position; it's that their resume gap was undertaken in order to render something of value to the public, so they shouldn't be disadvantaged for it versus a similarly-qualified person who didn't serve.
But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring? The claim about how women with children should be unhireable lest they eventually bear more children makes no sense unless you're rationalizing a general sense of "moms, eeeeeeew": men could similarly acquire health problems or decide to become stay-at-home dads at any time, and statistically a childless man is far likelier than a female hire to eventually create expensive workplace issues through drug and alcohol problems, running-off-with-a-floozy problems, white-collar or violent-crime problems. But better to hire Schroedinger's embezzling coke addict than... a lady who's at some point changed a diaper, I guess. On account of the mom ick.
So yeah, this is kind of an illustration of the problem: if raising children well is not respectable professional labor, just base "caretaking," and if moreover being a mom at any point condemns you to be fit for nothing but caretaking scutwork jobs ever after, regardless of your pre-childbearing education and professional skills, then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved. Seems like a little open-mindness would fix the whole thing, but I guess there must be a lot of people who don't respect their moms.
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I thought usually vets are people who've served in the military and then moved on to civilian life, and, as civilians, they get casual nepotism from fellow vets and non-vets who have high regard for military service, but otherwise are hired based on their merits. Akin to, say, a company that's run by a mother or a non-mother who has high regards for mothers who might give casual nepotism towards a mother in terms of hiring, but otherwise judges potential employees on their merits.
But where I'm not sure how the comparison works is where vets generally aren't expected to take time off to go back to their military service, possibly multiple times and unexpectedly (well, with around 9 months of lead time, anyway). I think that, once they return to civilian life, vets are generally expected to keep working like a regular civilian. This can't be said for any given woman in a certain age range with respect to motherhood. A vet's ability to perform the job can be assessed before hiring and then, if they get hired, the employer can generally rely on them to behave like any other employee; in the case of potential mothers, that's not the case. Mothers who have aged out of birthing more children and have already spent their time raising them before they apply to the job, perhaps, is a better analogue. But those aren't the mothers that are under discussion.
There's also the issue that, as best as I can tell, there's very little empirical reason to believe that extra maternity leave would have any meaningfully positive impact on fertility. It certainly could, and we could try it out, but if the predictable happens and it has no positive impact, then it becomes an arbitrary handout that's basically impossible to revert, leading to high costs for no gain. Of course, there's the gain of mothers having more time with their babies as they grow up, which is a positive in its own right, but it's also a different issue than fertility and one that needs to be argued on its own merits separately.
Reservists have to leave their jobs to fight
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Unfortunately, it seems like replacing the shoggoth of Capitalism with a simpler, cruder social system or inventing artificial wombs is easier for people than things like
, even if I would prefer that too. Also, it seems a waste to not root for glorious transhumanist destiny in the age when it seems most possible yet.
In general, I think the debate has baked in coercion because many people in the debate have concluded that the reason for unmotivated young men is no steady gf, and no steady gf is because divorces and tinder. Which are large-scale enough factors that some coercion would be required to attack them.
Serious question, how would one gather evidence on which way the causal arrow runs between "no motivation, poor social skills" and "no gf"? "I would do it if they changed" is just the default narrative for people with external-locus-of-control, same as the /r/antiwork people who would totally work hard if someone made them a tenured professor of philosophy.
Legions of awkward, self-indulgent, self-absorbed Gen Z men complain that girls are too picky about sex, sure; and legions of plump, vain Gen Z women complain that boys are too withholding about relationships. When both sides in a stalemate plaintively assert that it's the other side's fault, and when both have what the other side claims are unrealistic expectations of what's owed to them, what's a good method for adjudicating where the actual ZOPA should lie?
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But is that true? How much of the female withdrawal from the dating market is driven by the incredible level of fearmongering about male bad behavior? I mean, there's the family guy clip about campus sexual assault training, but tiktok is just way way worse at playing up female neuroticism than liability-minimizing bureaucrats.
How much of it is simply that a far higher percentage of young women are unattractive as GF's, mostly due to higher obesity rates?
Sure, you can throw tiktok in, too. Tinder does take up some of the "fearmongering about male bad behavior" space with all the low effort dick pic guys, or so I'm told.
I don't think obesity is a factor for most guys in question. The sentiment I observe is usually "no one is interested in me", not "only the fatties are interested in me".
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