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Earlier this year the Swedish government appointed a state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and what it portends for Sweden going forward. Yesterday the Committee released its first report detailing the potential consequences of lower fertility, aptly titled The Silent Crisis. Here is a link on the off-chance you know Swedish, or on the very on-chance you want an AI to give you the key takeaways: https://framtidmedbarn.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Nr-1-Den-tysta-krisen.pdf
Really though, the key graph is on page 18 and you don't need to know Swedish or have Grok ready to read it, because it's more or less shock horror demography-gore. Given current (or, if you look at the orange graph, slightly worse) trends without mass immigration the Committee estimates a whopping 40% decrease in the Swedish population by 2100. In actual numbers this brings the population down from a small-but-respectable ten million Swedes to about six million which roughly corresponds to the Swedish population in the year 1940. Unlike what was the case in 1940 though, the relative quality of the population will be vastly inferior, and will in large past consist of 80+ seniors mostly incapable of doing serious productive work and in need not only of constant and large transfers from the working-age population via taxes, but also significant care efforts in homes for the elderly. The Committee estimates that every working citizen in the worst-case scenario will need to finance no less than 1.6 other people. The last but not least horrifying part is the merciless shift in public spending: many municipalities will have to downsize schools and kindergartens in order to build more homes for the elderly, which in turn reinforces the circle of demographic disaster and suicide. Instead of happy children playing in kindergartens we'll have non-sentient dementia patients as the primary receivers of care in our society! There is a real risk of not only Sweden, but every corner of the West, becoming a wasteland of retirement homes.
I recently read Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler and I really am quite struck by some of the similiarities between Spengler's moody prophecies and what seems to happening all over the West (and most of the westernized world). Somewhere in all the gobbledygook about the historical meaning of numbers or whatever Spengler theorizes that demographic decay is ever a symptom of a civilization beginning to die. The picture he paints is one of eine entsetzliche Entvölkerung, a terrible depopulation, beginning with die Weltstädte, the World Cities, sucking up most able-bodied and sound men and women from rural areas, followed by a rapid decline in fertility due to urban individual values making life in general and children in particular into something doubtful and baseless, followed in turn by even more rapid urbanization until the final swift conquest and sundering of the entire civilization from Civ-style roaming barbarians brings the whole enterprise to an ignominious end. To be fair Spengler was no great thinker, and he was probably just extrapolating from the demographic decline of the early 20th century which was actually eventually solved. The glove does seem to fit though, doesn't it?
Anyway, the dangers of demographic decline is nothing new to the Motte, but I found it refreshing to see the consequence of the current trajectory put in plain text and graph by a state-financed publication rather than whispered on forums. There was a post here a while back linking to an unpleasant and depresing anti-children essay talking about how the fertility crisis is inevitable when women are allowed to choose freely (link: https://kryptogal.substack.com/p/the-fertility-crisis-is-inevitable). I think proponents of that particular case need to take a little bit more responsibility for where their ideas actually lead, rather than brush everything off with weak optimistic rambling about how a declining, decaying and rapidly aging population is nothing to worry about, and how the failure of the West and unending reign of Umbar and the Shadow might actually be a good thing, really, if you look at it from Sauron's perspective! I for one prefer the thought of all the Free People of the West continuing to perpetuate, sustain and rule themselves, and I will not apologize for this view.
Still, I for one am not despairing quite yet. The report itself is a good sign! In Sweden many seem to be realizing that there is indeed another crisis looming over us now besides climate change, and that it is little use making the planet more livable if there's no one left to live on it. Swedes are not nearly as dumb or naive as right-wing media would have many believe, and there is a strong hatred for immigrations here now coupled with a new appreciation for Swedish culture which bodes well for the future. Besides that, all the usual attempts (such as a strong welfare state, generous parent leave, et cetera) have already been tried here, which means we don't have to go through a bunch of ineffective non-solutions before we can move on to more innovative attempts. I for one think it would be interesting with a tax break for families coupled with a big tax hike for rich childless women. This would both create good incentives as well as clarify what society sees as the most valuable form of femininity. Many have posted much about this subject before, but I think it's ready for one more round. What does the Motte think about this?
(P.S. Later in January a follow-up report will be releaed with suggestions on how to rectify the problem, and if the Motte is interested I might make a post about that report too when it releases).
I still haven’t seen a reasonable counter-argument to “learn from the Haredi”. They are the world’s most urban population, living in the costly areas of NY and NJ, often in poverty. They are as diabetic, unhealthy and sedentary as any American, and ingest as many microplastics as any American. Their lifestyle is a similitude of the American graduate student or office worker. If I were to comment about the high TFR of the Amish in Beliz or today’s increasing TFR in rural Afghanistan, there would be a ton of confounding variables, but there are no non-cultural confounders for the Haredim. What do they do? Number of children is a mark of status, as a commandment and blessing; girls are taught to value motherhood as their glorious purpose and value in the world starting at the youngest age; they pride-maxx about their heritage / peoplehood; they privilege men over women. We don’t have the studies to disentangle which of these elements are causal, but it’s going to be at least one of these things and possibly all of these things. Their lives are biologically and environmentally the same as ours, in fact they might actually be less healthy on average.
Also, any TFR strategy has to consider the longterm eugenic / dysgenic outcomes. What sort of Swedes are you selecting for if you offer a lot of money to have children? Probably not the most loving or the most interesting Swedes. Why not make giving birth an act of love and ultimate interest? Then you are selecting for the prosocial and intelligent Swedes.
A big aspect of Haredi culture, and Amish/Mennonite/etc culture, is that people can leave. There's a big outer world to exit to.
I couldn't find good numbers for Haredim in particular. For Orthodox Jews in general, 67% of Orthodox Jews raised in Orthodoxy remain Orthodox as adults, and 94% remain Jews with the difference moving to more mainstream forms of Judaism. The best estimates I found for Haredi were casual, but guesses were around 5-20%, which aligns pretty closely with the Amish. Amish communities typically lose around 15% of their youth during Rumspringa. Amish communities probably land a little higher, a core anabaptist value is free choice, kids must choose to be baptized as adults even if they are raised their whole lives in the religion. The Haredi are more strict about retention, that's kind of their whole thing, so I'd imagine they land higher, but 5-10% seems realistic.
I'm more familiar with the Amish, they're really my people when it comes to weird high-TFR religious minorities, and I'd imagine it's easier for an Amish to move from the farm in Intercourse to Bernville or Kutztown and live a life that's not too dissimilar to the one they left in structure of work and values, just a little less restrictive. Compared to a Haredi who has to adapt to a really different lifestyle, but then they're urban oriented so maybe it's easier. I'd guess most Haredi just become Orthodox Jews, and most Orthodox leavers become reform Jews, etc.
Now, for most religions 80-95% retention would be brilliant work. Tradcaths and Evangelicals would be thrilled with those numbers. But it's not 100% and this creates important things to think about.
Much like private school numbers are often disputed because they simply expel problem students, who then have to attend public schools. Strict religious minorities shed their problem children, their overly independent women, their dreamers and disruptors. They maintain stability by expelling the problem kids.
For comparison, about 11% of Americans report having a substance abuse problem at some point in their lives, about 14% will go to jail for any period, about 5% will go to prison, somewhere between 6-14% will experience some form of homelessness, about 6% will be diagnosed with a Severe Mental Illness. Probably most of those numbers overlap.
The existence of a functional high-TFR minority does not serve as proof of concept for a functional high-TFR country.
This wouldn’t be unusual for Europe or America before the 20th century, though. Problematic people were normally shunned from the community. This was done either through shunning them from polite society (simply never invited anywhere) or literally kicking them out of the town. Christians would have a certain place where the lifelong penitents would stay during mass, in some eras. Also, don’t we shun them now? We just put our mentally ill on the street. Why is this an argument against copying the Haredi TFR scheme, and more precisely, why would you believe this criticism weighs against civilizational catastrophe? When nations face civilizational catastrophe from war, they postpone freedom and force men to be warriors and then force them at gunpoint to march to certain death in the most degraded condition. Surely we can expend 0.01% of the stress and just orient culture toward pronatality.
I think you're missing my point, I'm not debating whether it is morally permissible to do what they do, I'm debating whether it would work without a much larger host culture that absorbs your cast-offs.
When nations face civilizational catastrophe, they've been known to try many things that don't work. It is important that we check to see if the thing we're trying will work before we waste time on it.
Right but today we just throw our mentally ill and drug-addicted onto the populous streets to haunt the low-wage workers who take public transportation. Intermittently they spend an expensive night in jail or take an expensive ambulance ride to an expensive hospital. Sometimes they kill each other or give each other AIDs or just die. It’s very costly as is. I imagine the religious extremist would just confine them somewhere for their own good, which results in a fraction of the social and economic costs and is also morally superior.
You can't just introduce random elements into your hypothetical haredi society and assume the breeding will stay constant.
It’s more that, and I get that you imply this, both the Amish and Haredim (the latter are more dysfunctional) are kind of quirky minorities who exist within the envelope or the umbrella of the wider, modern, largely secular societies they inhabit. In Israel where they’re only 10-15% of the population they are already causing a lot of problems, refusing to fight despite the country being surrounded on almost all sides by a billion Muslims who would, if their own governments let them, gladly give everything to destroy them, and the leading haredi politicians go on TV to say that young haredi men can’t be conscripted because they do as much for Israel by praying as the soldiers do by fighting (seriously, this is the current line). It’s not sustainable. The Amish are less parasitic, but again if they got to 15%++ of the population there would be more concerns about assimilation, participation in wider society, demands for a renegotiation of their social security exemption etc would be more common.
More obviously, if the Haredim were the overwhelming majority in Israel, Israel would either be destroyed or the Haredim would have to radically change their culture. This is the clearest point in favor of your argument.
I am curious if we'll see an increased defection rate from high-tfr subcultures into a low-tfr mainstream as the low-tfr mainstream ages and the value of young people increases. Arguably, this is already the dynamic of third world immigration to aging first world countries.
But I wonder if we'll see more young Amish or Haredi defect as they get a better "deal" from a mainstream culture desperate for young people.
When I buy pretzels from the Amish girls at the best pretzel stand in the world in Intercourse, PA; naturally one sometimes daydreams about marrying a pretty Amish girl in a bonnet. Theoretically, this is possible, to marry an Amish or Mennonite girl, but it rather seems not worth the effort. Right now, if I found myself single, like generations of wealthy but balding middle age professionals before me I'd get into my convertible and drive over to the local liberal arts college library and say "Whelp, nothing to worry about, they're still making them." But what if they stop making pretty undergrads? Then does the incentive to put a lot more effort into marrying the mennonite pretzel girl start to make more sense?
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As other comments downthread have said, replicating the Haredi is a bad idea. First, there is definitely a high level of welfare fraud. Second, much like the Amish and FLDS groups, the Haredi essentially get away with breaking a ton of Federal laws because "lol, they wear those funny hats!" or something.
Just walk around Williamsburg in Brooklyn. It is obvious that the apartments are not up to code, have too many people living in them to meet occupancy maximums, and are probably covered by rental "agreements" which would be laughed out of a basic contract law course at NYU.
But, again, NY/NJ and Federal prosecutors aren't going to destroy their careers by hauling a bunch of literal grey bearded Rabbis into court.
Replicating them secularly would not work at all -- any group trying to do all of this would get sued into oblivion. In a religious context, FLDS do this out west to an extent. The problem is that any Christian group who would be willing to live like the Haredi usually have a "imminent end of days" bent to them and so generally like to be off grid / separate from the modern world instead of .... embedded in Brooklyn.
It takes a special kind of cognitive athleticism to think "I despise this modern world and all of its impious distractions .... when is the darn N train going to come?"
Aren't you trying to be tradcath? Haven't you noticed the families double buckling, running illegal daycares in their living room, open carrying in blue states, putting seven kids in one room, running totally illegal rental schemes on a cash basis, having entire construction companies competitive on the basis of not pulling permits? All 100% autobiographical observations and going on in normal suburbs. I'm sure the same things happen in the protestant equivalents. The local Mexicans definitely do all of these things, and more.
As it turns out, you can just do things if you don't leave bodies on the ground and have a whole community to run cover for you. Could secular rationalists replicate it? Probably not. 'Federal law' is pushing it because most of these are local bylaws that no one really cares about; the haredi and FLDS do violate federal law, but mostly for welfare fraud.
FLDS violate a lot of federal (and state) laws about polygamy, rape, statutory rape etc. The outside world considers this victimful crimes against their own women, and is appropriately (given our own moral standards) outraged. So FLDS largely have to live sub rosa.
The only victimful crime Haredim commit is rorting the public fisc*, which a lot of Americans wrongly consider victimless when done by someone sympathetic. They can do this openly as long as their political machines can provide them with cover.
*Not just welfare fraud - Haredi-controlled municipalities like Kiryas Joel and the Haredi political machine in NYC commit a much larger range of rorts, many of which are technically criminal.
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I’m so not persuaded on this. Of course you can’t replicate the Haredi one-to-one, nor would this be desirable. But you can replicate the high TFR aspects of their culture. The young men might spend 8-16 hrs per day studying the Torah, and then they spend probably 90 minutes of their time doing rituals. In exchange for this strenuous labor, they receive welfare benefits which still amount to a low income lifestyle. We can totally imagine a Haredi culture where, instead of spending 8 hours learning all the laws about separately eating milk and meat, they spend 8 hours at an Amazon Warehouse. When they are done working, they still exist in a pro-fertile culture where status is judged by number of children &tc. And there are Haredi who work, they are big in Amazon fulfillment and places like B&H cameras. There working Haredi still have a high TFR. And they had a high TFR when they worked at Agriprocessors. So, while they do have a lot of schemes that give them benefits, those benefits are less than the money they would earn were they working for the same amount of time that they study.
Don't take this seriously, because I'm operating off "I seem to vaguely remember maybe reading this somewhere back when", but something about "why so many Jews in the diamond trade?" is because it allows the wives to run the business while the men devote themselves to study of the Torah, and is profitable enough to support such a lifestyle.
I don't think the Haredi men want to work in Amazon warehouses, they want to do what their culture tells them is the aim of life, and find a way to make enough money to support that life. Working eight hours a day in a manual labour job is not that way. If they push the wives out the door to do the warehouse shifts, large numbers of children in a family are not going to be possible.
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But you see what you've done, right? You've introduced a new method for building status -- wealth.
A couple Haredi start working at the AMZN warehouses and one of them gets promoted one day. He's now going to enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status with his male peers and, because of that, a choice of mates. Soon, all the other Haredi start competing for status via wealth games instead of Torah study and fertility games and, boom, you've got modernism.
The lack of work is intentional, not a weird outcome of degeneracy in this case. And this is the critical issue with pretty much all hardcore RadTrad visions of society -- they actually kind of glorify poverty.
Remember, I'm saying this as a Latin Mass TradCath myself. As much as I really do hate modernism, I also hate material, non-self assigned poverty (i.e. Monks don't count). Deprivation is bad all up and down the stack. Those without means don't suddenly become spiritually wealthy (again, setting aside those that make the willful decision to do that like Monks). Mostly, they become dangerous amoral creatures who act more and more anti-social.
So, no, don't try to copy the Haredi. Instead, live in the world but not of the world. Pay your taxes, but don't bilk welfare. Use computers to do your job better and to find high quality information, but not to ingest slop and ragebait. Get a job, get married, have lots of babies to solve your own TFR rate but don't worry too much about everyone else's TFR.
Haredi culture already has a zero-sum, winner-takes-all status competition reminiscent of capitalism in the form of obtaining Rabbinical positions, something that commends a man more status than being even a billionaire. That’s part of the reason the older guys still continue to study. Yet even with this ruthless competition over status, the TFR remains high, because of the aforenoted confluence of pro-fertile cultural attributes. The Haredi man with a lot of money has worse marital odds than a poor Haredi man at a good rabbinical school. But both are getting married and both are having children.
If everyone focused on this alone then it would cement the ruin of the entire civilization. Though I agree that’s the best advise for normal people, you actually do need people obsessing over TFR because our elites are lowkey retarded and senseless.
Doesn't the increasing population lead to an increased demand for rabbis?
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That's not how capitalism works. Free market exchange is inherently positive sum. When it becomes zero sum and / or rent-seeking, that means a market distortion (usually regulation) is to blame.
You and I often disagree, but your discourse is mostly of a far higher quality than smooth brained reddit "lulz late stage capitalism" tripe. Perhaps I caught you on an off day - you're also arguing strenuously that people replicate a subculture that selects for some of the worst physiognomy out there.
Capitalism enforces a zero-sum status competition, regardless of whether it is positive sum in its economic consequences or not; actors compete over obtaining more wealth than their peers and a greater position than their peers. As you said, “enjoy more wealth, a de facto higher status”, that’s a relative position which is zero-sum; having more wealth and prestige = more status = better marital outcomes.
The zero-sum status competition isn't enforced by capitalism. It's part of human nature, way down in the lizard brain; some direct descendants of dinosaurs are famous for it.
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Capitalism is an economic system, not a social or political one.
It's embedded with the politics and culture of whatever society under examination.
If you have a problem, you have a problem with the culture. You could fight about it in a kind of culture ... war.
But capitalism isn't the problem. You're committing and obvious, to the point of intentional, category error.
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And watch the fruits of your labor be taken from you (and your children) to pay for everyone else (including the Haredi) to have the lifestyle of their choice while you're busting your balls to make ends meet, dodging Child Protective Services because you don't have the requisite number of car seats, etc.
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It comes as a set.
Working at an Amazon Warehouse is very different than studying the Torah. It's backbreaking. There are cruel bosses who expect results, and the chance of getting fired. Studying the Torah all the time is basically just the ancient Hebrew version of playing videogames.
The set is unrelated to 10 hours a day of studying. That is outside the set and something which they just happen to also do. When people possess the true set of pro-fertility cultural properties, like the Mennonites who do back-breaking labor in South America, or 1930s Germany which had enormous TFR gains due to cultural policy, then they also have more children, without having to study for 10 hours a day. And when Haredi stop studying or stop studying early, they continue having high TFR.
Unfortunately, the only two good proofs of the necessity of pro-fertility cultural elements are religious Jews and the Nazis. This makes it very difficult to persuade normal people to follow your line of argument, because it makes you sound like a genuinely insane person. But consider the Nazis saw a 40% gain of TFR and the shift was highest in urban areas, not rural areas.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2768366
The birth rate continued to rise until the advent of war. Now consider that the Nazis, despite loving propaganda, probably had little idea how to create really good pro-motherhood culture, or that most of the larger effects would be delayed to when the indoctrinated come to age. Even their shoddy attempt at increasing TFR through culture worked, and they only got to see the smallest prelude of the TFR gains before extenuating circumstances nullified our chance to measure the gains.
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What if those requirements they are violating are part of the reason for the drop in fertility in the first place?
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Here's an argument:
Modern day Haredi are the result of a genetic and cultural selection process which started hundreds of years ago ago when Ashkenazim were the very first ethnic group to get whacked with modernity full on. It's well known that modernity is a fertility killer, analogous to putting an antibiotic into a petri dish full of bacteria. The expected outcome in such a situation is a drop in population followed by the emergence of a resistant strain.
When modernity hit Europe a few hundred years ago, its effects were concentrated in cities, i.e. the places where most Ashkenazim lived. Other ethnic groups in Europe had substantial components in the countryside and were not hit nearly as hard. In fact, I am pretty sure there was a documented Ashkenazi demographic decline in Europe in the 19th century. Which makes sense, because that's modernity does to people.
150 years later, Jews are the first group to start bouncing back from modernity-induced demographic decline. Thus, Israel is the only industrialized country in the world to have a TFR which is well above replacement.
The upshot of all this is that it might not be so simple to "learn from the Haredis." They are arguably the result of a selection process which has been going on for quite a long time.
The Haredi have always had a high birth rate, and there is no period in which they moved from the Ukrainian villages into the cities (1940s?) where they lacked a high birth rate. So there was no evolutionary selection or anything like that. And it’s also too little time for the Haredi to have evolved for it anyway. And we don’t even know if TFR has substantial genetic correlates.
I think you've seen Fiddler on the Roof too many times. European Jews have been concentrated in cities for literally hundreds of years. Haredi Judaism started in the 19th century. But let's assume for the sake of argument that you are right:
I usually don't trust AI summaries, but this seems pretty non-controversial:
In other words, it seems that the genesis, so to speak, of Haredi Judaism, was the rise of modernity in Europe. Put another way, Haredi Judaism is the result of the exact selection process I described in my previous post.
Who would join such a movement and stay in it? Logically, a small fringe which is tempermentally, culturally, and genetically okay with that kind of life. Haredi are significant in numbers today only because they've been reproducing like crazy for generations now.
The first Hasidic settlement is more like a town than a city, in contrast to urban Jewry at the time, unless I am mistaken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medzhybizh
Well, are you disputing the claim that "Haredi Judaism began as a 19th-century European movement opposing modernity and assimilation"?
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The Haredi are parasites; they support themselves by stealing from others through the welfare state. We need to find a sustainable, productive population with positive TFR and emulate it. I was hoping the Mormons would be it, but apparently their fertility has collapsed as well?
There's no shortage of religious sects with very high fertility rates. The dutch bible belt has many problems but it mostly supports itself while maintaining a 2.5ish TFR. Rad trads have a TFR of 3.6 and we don't use welfare other than social security.
But for a secular example, check the fertility rates of military or oil towns.
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I’m aware of every criticism against the Haredi but their TFR isn’t related to their welfare beneficiary status. The reason for their high beneficiary status is that the men insist on studying for an exceedingly long time. (That and they lobby well). Very little of their studying plausibly impacts their TFR because only like 1% of the readings are about having children or getting married. If they had normal education and normal work, but retained the pro-fertility cultural elements, which is possible, then they would still have a high TFR. In Israel you have the conservative / modern orthodox who have a high TFR while living a very productive technology-forward life.
I don't think you can assume that the cult will continue to function the same with a reduced emphasis on cult study and maintenance.
It probably does give them +10 points in allegiance and +20 in conformity, but you have very allegiant evangelicals all over America who do not have such TFR because they don’t have the pro-fertile cultural requirements
The evangelicals got mind-fucked by the combination of biblical traditional sexual mores and the middle class status competition games of suburban America. Having sex or children outside of marriage is a grave sin, but you can’t get married until you’ve gone to college and gotten established in your career. No I am not helping you financially if you drop out of college and have three kids in your 20s buster, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. So you are leaning on your kids to maintain virginity until their 30s, a psychologically unsustainable position, and not a very good outcome for quantity of children either.
Evangelicals do not marry in their thirties(although nor do they marry in their teens, there's an entire decade in between), nor do normie evangelicals make a huge deal out of avoiding premarital sex.
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Maybe not for Haredim but there are others ways to create adherence and allegiance if you were going to copy Haredi TFR values.
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Typically, more education doesn't correlate with being more likely to be on the dole.
Until very recently even secular Jews in Israel had above-replacement fertility so this proves little.
The so-called National-Religious having a consistent TFR of 4 actually proves a lot.
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I mean, the haredi cultural model seems very dependent on welfare fraud. I'm not sure you can separate the extremely high fertility rate from their whole way of life.
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Would they? If they had to work for a living, maybe they'd be less desiring of children (who, when you're a working person, cost money and make more work for you)
Also, in modernity, when people work for a living, their work (and their income) become a huge source of social status. In modern, secular, society, if you give people a choice between being (1) a successful doctor, lawyer, or business executive with 2 children; or (2) being a building porter with 4 children, most people will choose the first option.
If I've learned anything from my time on lesswrong, slatestarcodex, and themotte, it's that human beings are heavily motivated by the desire for social status. Even when they seem to be pursuing money, pleasure, and/or sexual gratification, there is usually a huge social status component lurking under the surface.
I'm pretty confident that in Haredi culture, having a large family brings social status in a way that's lacking in other subcultures.
I think your framing of the doctor/lawyer vs. building porter choice contains a hidden assumption worth examining, that this is actually a choice available to most people.
For the median building porter, "successful doctor, lawyer, or business executive" was likely never on the menu. The choice wasn't between high-status career + 2 kids versus low-status career + 4 kids. The realistic choice set was always constrained by cognitive ability, conscientiousness, family resources, and other human capital factors. The hypothetical only feels like a meaningful trade-off for people in roughly the 115+ IQ range with adequate executive function, maybe 15% of the population. For everyone else, the actual revealed preference is more telling. Given their realistic options, many still choose smaller families. This suggests status-seeking has become decoupled from its evolutionary function.
You're right that status motivation runs deep, but it's worth noting why it runs deep evolutionarily. For men, status-seeking is largely instrumental, it's the primary mechanism for attracting mates.
The Vox Day socio-sexual hierarchy (sigma/alpha/beta/gamma/etc.) captures this, there's a cohort of men who pursue visible status markers specifically as mating strategy, while others (the "sigma" archetype) achieve reproductive success through different pathways.
In an environment where status no longer reliably converts to reproductive success (because high-status people have fewer children), what exactly is being optimized for?
The drive persists, but it's become maladaptive, a stimulus disconnected from its original function.
Women competing for status in traditionally male professional hierarchies, is arguably doubly maladaptive. Professional status competition directly trades against peak fertility years. The opportunity cost is measured in children never born.
Unlike male status, female professional status doesn't meaningfully increase attractiveness to potential mates, and may actively reduce the pool of acceptable partners (since female hypergamy means high-status women often won't "marry down").
Women in this track pay the fertility cost that men pay, without receiving the mate-attraction benefit that men receive. They're running on hardware optimized for a different game.
This is why the Haredi example is so instructive. They've maintained a status system where large families are the status signal, aligning the status drive with rather than against reproductive fitness. It's not that they've suppressed the desire for status; they've just pointed it in a direction that doesn't defeat its own evolutionary purpose.
The secular West has essentially created a status game that selects against the players most committed to playing it.
I agree, which is why men going to actual productive jobs might seriously undermine the system. It's also worth noting that part of the Haredi "success" is likely to be in their genes. They seem to be okay with a life which, for most people, would be pretty miserable.
I like the idea of being reproductively successful, but there's a lot of things I would not do in order to achieve that success: Sexually assaulting someone; going to jail; lying to a woman in order to get her pregnant; etc. And that probably includes devoting my life to full time religious study.
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It's still above replacement, but yes it is dropping as well. Our new prophet (Dallin H. Oaks) mentioned the dropping fertility issues in both society as a whole and among members of the church in our most recent General Conference (back in October), so it's very possible the church will be trying to enact some changes (both culturally and policy-wise) to counteract this. We'll see what happens I suppose.
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The Haredi also commit massive welfare fraud, and even if they weren't committing such fraud would still be highly dependent on non-fraudulent welfare. The Amish are probably the better example to emulate here as they do far more to support themselves and to limit reliance on the rest of society. Unfortunately that leads to some rather anarcho-primitivist conclusions.
To state it more clearly, man cannot build and maintain civilization leaching from others - civilization must prosper and multiply.
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TFW no fecund Haredi welfare-scamming gf 😔
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