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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   29608 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 15, 2025

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Well it's not strictly wrong but nobody has ever found out how much money you have to offer to make it happen.

My guess is there isn't enough money in the world, unless you want to subsidize the fertility of the worst of the worst. That is, you can't transfer enough money to increase the fertility of the working class and above without reducing it among those you're taking it from more than enough to make up for it.

Better would be to reduce the cost (especially the non-delegable cost) of having children, but no one knows of a feasible way to do that. We keep doing the opposite with the expected results, and I expect there's a positive feedback loop -- as children become rarer, we insist on more parental investment per child, which discourages children even more. I call this a "K-selection spiral" (or "death spiral") -- please make this the title in any Index of Crackpot Theories.

I like your term 'k-selection spiral'. But I want to point out you're looking at it wrong in terms of resources. It's not 'amount' of resources, it's 'how they're distributed'. People in the literal poorest countries in the world have lots and lots of children, and they live in like Niger and Chad. You see fertility bumps around oil towns and military bases, too, because young women's best economic prospect is to marry a man employed by the thing that makes their town notable.

Are you sure those "fertility bumps" in oil towns and military bases don't go away when age-adjusted?

Yeah, people in poor countries have lots of children. They don't have to put them in the best daycares or supervise them 24/7 until they're in school, or any of the other things Westerners do.

You can do it cheap. Let's say 50000 $ per human being. You buy sperm, eggs and surrogate mothership you can make it in the third world for this sum. Create a system of professional mother and fathers - fool time job. Yeah it will be somewhat weird families - with 10 or 12 kids, but not that weird.

See the recent controversy over Chinese billionaires who allegedly are buying literally hundreds of surrogate children in the US.

Some Chinese parents, inspired by Elon Musk’s 14 known children, pay millions in surrogacy fees to hire women in the U.S. to help them build families of jaw-dropping size. Xu calls himself “China’s first father” and is known in China as a vocal critic of feminism. On social media, his company said he has more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S.

Another wealthy Chinese executive, Wang Huiwu, hired U.S. models and others as egg donors to have 10 girls, with the aim of one day marrying them off to powerful men, according to people close to the executive’s education company.

The market has grown so sophisticated, experts say, that at times Chinese parents have had U.S.-born children without stepping foot in the country. A thriving mini-industry of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services—even to pick up the newborns from hospitals—has risen to accommodate the demand, permitting parents to ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.

One wealthy businessman in China, who like Wang is also in the education business, wanted more than 200 children at once using surrogates, envisioning a family enterprise, [Nathan] Zhang[, founder and CEO of IVF USA,] said. “I asked him directly, ‘How do you plan to raise all these children?’ He was speechless,” said Zhang, who said he refused him as a client.

Other surrogacy professionals described similarly head-spinning numbers. The owner of one agency in California said he had helped fill an order for a Chinese parent seeking 100 children in the past few years, a request spread over several agencies.

A Los Angeles surrogacy attorney said he had helped his client, a Chinese billionaire, have 20 children through surrogacy in recent years.

Amanda Troxler, a Los Angeles-based surrogacy lawyer, said her firm consulted with a hopeful Chinese parent who said she wanted eight or 10 surrogacies and asked for a discount. “I was like, ‘No, we’re not Costco,’” said Troxler, who didn’t take the client because she rejects those looking for more than two surrogacies at once.

Last month, Xu’s ex-girlfriend, Tang Jing, alleged in a post on Weibo that he had 300 children, living across numerous properties in multiple countries. Xu has previously accused Tang of theft and the two have ongoing lawsuits. Tang didn’t respond to requests for comment.

In a statement on Weibo at the time, [Xu's company] Duoyi Network said the 300 figure was wrong but confirmed a stunning fact: “After many years of effort” through surrogacy in the U.S., Xu has “only a little over 100” children.

Later in November, the [pseudonymous Weibo] user linked to Xu posted a video of more than a dozen toddler or early grade-school-age children playing on an outdoor patio in an unknown location. “What the truth is, everyone can see for themselves,” the user posted.

As the camera panned around the patio, the children—who appeared to be mostly boys—began running toward it. “Daddy!” they yelled. “Daddy!”

The idea is to increase fertility generally, not to create some weird cult. I am skeptical that your approach would work on the small scale (trying to do ANYTHING in the Third World is difficult), and do not believe it could be scaled up at all.

Doing anything in the third world is fairly easy. It just requires some bribes. Buying eggs and sperm from the origin country is easy for said origin country, shipping the embryos to bumfuck Africa to be carried to term - ditto. Then the state has a huge network of kindergardens and school to raise them. Almost any first world country has a system for orphans - scaling it will be hard but not impossible. Not talking about a cult - talking about the state producing the birth rates it needs directly without the participation of the citizenship.

Do you think this is desirable?

No. But non gulf style immigration is even less desirable.

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