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This post is a follow-on from a conversation with @Amadan, who observed that I wasn't reading his posts correctly. I thought that hiding an apology behind a button most wouldn't click through would be what the kids used to call a bitch move, so I decided to make it a top level post.
^^^I ^^^also ^^^didn't ^^^want ^^^the ^^^effort ^^^to ^^^go ^^^to ^^^waste
You know what, I went back and read through the thread and it turns out I was misremembering the order of things. I thought you rejected faceh's proposal about tightening college admissions with the browbeating comment. My mind gets a little clouded with this subject sometimes. I think I owe you an apology in the form of a bit more effort, so here goes:
My belief is that the TFR crisis can be broadly understood in terms of basic economics. Sure, there are a million billion variables that go in to the exact shape of the curves, but I believe the fundamental problem is that the supply and demand curves don't meet at a point that produces a longitudinally viable volume. Therefore, any proposed policy must influence those lines to move TFR upward. To put it bluntly, this involves coercing either bid up or ask down. Browbeating. And we need to do it while remembering the goal isn't just more children, but ones raised in wholesome environments that set them up for the social and economic success we need to operate our societies, so "pay women billion dollars per child" is out. I'll note that some of these solutions involve catching women up to around the level of browbeating that men currently experience, and I hope this doesn't run afoul of the standard because it doesn't involve much additional browbeating on men. Lastly, I'd comment that these are not my preferred solutions, mostly because they involve coercion, which is a game I believe when played under real cultural and political conditions will result in much male loss and few additional births to show for it—but more pragmatically because I believe they are impossible to implement on a timescale that matters. I think the only real way out is to quintuple down on our current strategy of hoping for technology deux ex machina.
However, if we were willing to implement some painful measures to buy ourselves some more time, here's what that might look like if it were up to me:
Demand side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for men:
Supply side measures, or, how to sweeten the deal for women:
If you haven't noticed, there's a strong pair of themes that run through these propositions. They mostly involve offering men a more durable ownership share in family formation, and women more durable guarantees regarding child-rearing. I know some readers are probably bursting at the seams to point out that a lot of this is just traditional marriage and romantic norms with extra steps. Why don't we just stop beating around the bush and go back to what works? Uh huh. How's that been working out? Mainstream conservatism has taken notice to how unpopular this position is and has largely adapted to this reality by promoting what I've take to calling neotraditionalism: offering a model of male obligation without the durable ownership. Good luck with that.
But this does cut to what I believe is the core of the issue. I think that advocating for any program that even smells like the above would get you accused of being a cryptopatriarch in a cool minute. The basic problem is that our civilization is emotionally allergic to a key active ingredient of the medicine, and that's not something any amount of sugar-coating can help. Take the religious shell away and put it in a container that's as secular and facelessly bureaucratic as we are, and I don't think it makes a difference to the overall reaction. There's also the question of societal patience. This is separate from the consideration of TFR and its consequences. As many including some here have contentedly noted, the current crop of men don't seem to bear an eagerness to form and maintain families that's just waiting to burst out given a few tweaks in policy and culture. This isn't something my program would change. I don't think any ever could. Men as a class have been subject to a campaign of demoralization and dispossession that began decades before I was born. Undoing this may very well require awaiting a completely new generation of men to come of age. This would require a level of patience with the male sex our civilization transparently does not possess, not even remotely close.
These are insurmountable problems. There's nothing to be done.
Would you like to hear about my $100T longevity moonshot instead?
The only developed country with above replacement rate tfr is Israel. This even includes secular Jews. The main differences I think is Israeli politicians always promoted reproduction versus the west falling under some kind of white people bad/for the environment bad argument. The second and similar reason would be Jews still viewing themselves as basically a tribe and growing the tribe has value.
I agree that's likely a factor, but I think there's something deeper going on, which is that Jewish people were the very first group to get whacked full-on by modernity and its effects on fertility. So that in the early 19th century, Jewish people were heavily concentrated in urban areas while other groups had large segments working in the countryside in agriculture. And the urban areas were where fertility declines due to modernity have always hit the hardest.
Logically, what happens when a group experiences some kind of fertility shock like this? Logically, it's going to be roughly the same thing that happens when an antibiotic is put into a colony of bacteria. It will have a big effect at first, but over time, the colony will develop resistance. And arguably what's what happened with Jews, i.e. Jewish people developed cultural (and possibly genetic) defenses. In fact, it was around this time that Haredi Judaism caught on. And in the last 200-300 years, these types of groups have grown to the point where they will soon be a majority of world Jewry.
It's interesting to note that in the last 5-15 years, Jewish fertility in Israel grew to the point where it exceed Arab fertility. Which is very interesting, since Arab leaders have been promoting population growth as a way of winning a demographic war. And certainly Arabs are not suffering from any kind of "Arabs are bad" delusion.
The difference, in my opinion, is that Arabs have hard far less time than Jews to demographically adjust to modernity. So that their TFR is dropping like every other group that encounters modernity.
Cities are IQ shredders theory I believe, except Jews were hit by it early so those with the highest fertility in urban environments have survived and now produce higher.
I think you mean to say that cities are fertility shredders. And yeah, I think it's very reasonable to hypothesize that (1) for hundreds if not thousands of years before the 20th century, if you lived outside of the city, chances are you and your family worked in agriculture; (2) if your family works in agriculture, there's a lot of incentive to have a lot of children since it means a very inexpensive source of labor for the farm; (3) if most of the community works in agriculture, then the culture will tend to value high fertility; (4) if a person (or a family) moves to the city, there is far less incentive to have a large family (and in fact there is the opposite incentive); (5) city culture can be expected to reflect this after a while, until of course cultural and genetic selection get you people and cultures who value large families even though it means cramped living conditions and spending a lot of time and money without much economic return; and (6) one would expect to see this change first in groups which have gone through the "fertility shredder."
That's why I think the idea of just copying Israel might not be all that effective as one might expect. Besides which, a large and fast-growing subset of the Israel population consists of ultra-religious types who don't contribute all that much to Israeli society.
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