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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?
This isn't exactly true; on a quick Google around half of US states treat substance abuse while pregnant as a form of child abuse.
This does work within the communities that practice it. Red states are attracting more children than blue states; devout religious conservatives are ~at TFR. You correctly point out the problems with packaging this in a secular model but it works well in a religious model where accusations of cryptopatriarchy are the cost of doing business.
If you extrapolate wildly and irresponsibly from current trends, what's being done is precisely what needs to be done: the evangelical non-denoms, Pentecostals, and Jews will slowly convert the entire population of the United States and then birthrates will stabilize nicely at about replacement, carefully husbanded by religious traditions with centuries of time to refine their methods for dealing with human mess.
Of course I don't think it's as simple as that; nothing is as simple as that. But I think it's important to realize in the TFR/birthrates discussion that the United States isn't a monoculture, it is a teeming ecosystem of competing subcultures, and some of them are radically out-competing the others. (And of course I assume this is true elsewhere as well.) If you want to boost birth rates, you can try to identify what works in those subcultures (or, if you're a genetic fatalist, you can probably relax because they will win in the end eventually anyway).
One parting note: I do think there is a distinct danger of trying to boost TFR by elevating high-fertility subcultures. I suspect that outside threat sensation boosts fertility rates - see Israel's extremely high TFR; it may not be a coincidence that evangelicals, which have had a persecution complex for decades, have a higher fertility rate than mainline Protestants even with similar beliefs (see my second link). So, as in other ecological endeavors, attempts to preserve or expand an ecosystem might backfire and end up destroying it.
So in other words, it doesn't work.
The scope of the consideration here was solutions that might cause a widespread meaningful rise in TFR. If you're not invested in that, then sure, it not working isn't a problem for you.
Over what time span? Over a long enough time span, the problem as currently projected is likely to very slowly fix itself because those higher-fertility communities are growing. Of course I don't trust those projections to continue indefinitely but it seems just as wrong to assume that births will go to zero as it does to assume tradcons will go to 100.
Short of shotgun gestation, there's nothing that will fix TFR immediately. I expect you could fix it in about ten-twenty years in the States with a whole-of-society effort. I suspect free (state-subsidized) births (cheap, I suspect), school propaganda (~free), media propaganda (cost+), perhaps some housing subsidy-type arrangements could drag it back past 2.1. Throw in building 1000 nuclear reactors (expensive but we need 'em anyway) to boot. I don't think that's undoable by any means, but it would be hard and the social conditions aren't there to galvanize it yet. Maybe in a decade.
I don't think some of the gender-related stuff you talk about would hurt and it might help but I suspect that it would pale (particularly in terms of cost-effectiveness) in comparison with kids being told in school and on television "you will be a failure in life if you don't graduate high school, get married, get a job, and have 2 - 3 children." Maybe I am wrong, but people forget that there was a concerted anti-natalism campaign in the West in media and elite circles, and I do think that saw results. The tweaks you are proposing, to make men feel more "ownership," will also work, but slowly, because people work via vibes, and it might take some time for your legal tweaks to nudge the vibes - at which point, frankly, I think the nudge will be weaker than "wow energy is free and the housing is cheap." I broadly agree with you wrt pregnancy-related expenses although eliminating those would of course come out of someone's pocket. Ultimately I suspect "tough marriage policy" - the stick - would help, but not as much as a carrot, and you do that by making it easy to get a job and a 4 bedroom 3 bathroom white picket fence and lawn forever home at 24.
A big question, to me, is if a crash course in boosting fertility based on massive government intervention is sustainable. People are very susceptible to social pressure but it tends to breed backlash and resentment. I don't want a massive baby bump in 20 years followed by a massive crash and backlash in 50.
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