This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Fertility is a wicked problem, and I'm not sure what you're asking is even possible, as I think the underlying social/cultural issue can't really be solved by a lone conservative head of state/government in an otherwise hostile liberal democratic global culture though executive political action. But I will attempt to answer the question as a thought experiment nonetheless.
Firstly, I'm going to constrain any potential actions to something that is 1) practical 2) politically feasible and 3) sustainable (so it can't just be easily overturned/revoked as so as you're out of office).
It's easier to highlight incorrect or misguided ideas than it is to identify correct ones so I'll do that first. Economic solutions and incentives do not work. This is not to say they don't have any impact (it can slightly increases it), but they are not going to remedy what is a long term social and cultural issue. As I've pointed out before, the fertility rate of the US was higher under the worst period of the Great Depression than it is today.
Specifically, child care support/subsidies is a complete red herring. While I have no hard evidence to support this (it's not something anyone has ever bothered to study), but I strongly suspect child care support might counter-intuitively have negative effect of fertility rate. I believe that child care support actually encourages women who already have children to start or restart working, and thus lower their long term fertility (have one or two kids, go back to work), rather than the often stated goal of encouraging or helping working women to have kids. In other words, child care support is more aimed at getting young mothers to work (and become 'economically productive') rather helping working women become mothers.
Okay, now for policies that improve fertility and are feasible
This is potentially politically feasible because it's theoretically possible by using the liberal ideology against itself. The most obvious example of this is Title XI lawsuits in the USA used by men to stop women-biased policies and affirmative action (though I must say this is an extremely uphill battle). It's sustainable because it exists within the liberal legal framework already. It's not trivial to overturn a Supreme Court ruling. Though this will heavily depend on the given country's political system. Also, while I say it's feasible, that doesn't mean it's easy or likely. Fighting against gamma bias is extremely difficult. Going any further than this (e.g. actively discriminating against women) is completely unfeasible and any suggestions about this are pointless.
An even more aggressive approach would be to somehow take back control of the education system and academia from woke stranglehold, but I'm not even sure how you would go about it, short of burning the whole thing to the ground and rebuilding, but I don't think that's feasible.
This is less about improving the fertility rate, but actively halting what I think is a massive compounding factor to its decline. Social media, especially dating apps, are not at all conducive to the formation of traditional family life, no matter how many people say they found the love of their life on Tinder. Social media more generally is also a vector for political and social ideas that are not at all helpful to the goal, to put it lightly.
The most practical way to go about it would probably be to invoke anti-trust/anti-monopoly laws and attempt to break up the social media/tech companies and extremely weaken their networking effects that way. But this would be a huge effort. It could probably would be possible through playing on existing left-liberal fears of social media and tech companies. The best bit is that there is already a push to regulate dating apps to 'protect women' but this mostly just means to put more burden on to men (usually wanting men to have to provide id to sign up to dating apps), because who would actually want to stop the meaningless casual sex? It would be possible to turn this into just straight destroying the dating apps though in the name of protecting women.
This is only feasible certain parts of the world (for example, Latin America and some parts of Eastern Europe), and presents a double edge sword (or even a Faustian bargain if you're so inclined). Weakening the separation of church and state will result in a whole host of other non-fertility related problems, but is a potential strategy for the question being asked. Churches remain some of the only prominent conservative cultural institutions left, so obviously promoting their influence and status would work towards the goal. The big caveat is that even churches are not immune left-liberal cultural take over, and that includes even the Catholic Church. Not sure about long term sustainability.
I might think of some more ideas later.
Ultimately, I think what's needed is a new traditionalist-conservative vision that leads to a new conservative movement, one that isn't tied to right-liberation ideology (thanks America). I have some vague sense about what it might include, and I think it will happen at some point, but I think it's impossible to know it until it happens. I think it will necessarily have to acknowledge and rebuke both all the liberal and post-modern leftist arguments (post-post-modernism?). In essence, something along the lines of 'yes, we have heard all your arguments about how society should be and found them lacking. The stable traditional family and lifestyle remains the contested champion of the basis to build a functioning, just, prosperous society'.
There are plenty of countries in Eastern Europe etc. where the governments actively promote religious organizations and which have high rates of religious identification but which nevertheless have low fertility. Poland, Ukraine and Russia come to mind.
One of the sticky issues of fertility is that, yes, religiousness is associated with fertility, but it's also damnably hard for governments to promote "real" religiousness, instead of cultural identification with religion.
In general, I agree that promotion of fertility is very difficult. I wouldn't dismiss monetary incentives, but especially actually becoming a parent there have been some issues I've thought of that make even having two kids more difficult than it might have been in previous societies:
Often, the issue is not money but the lack of networks. It has become almost a rite of passage in our society to move away from parents - not just their home, but often to a whole new, presumably bigger - city after you become adult. This means a new amount of freedom during young adulthood (you can do anything and there's little chance your parents catch you doing it!) and it's a chance to reinvent yourself and find a new group of friends and party with them - but once you settle down and have kids there's a problem; you often need a helping hand.
Suddenly you notice that your friends of same age aren't as much help as you might guess; they might not want to trouble themselves with your kids, and even if they do, if they are childless you don't necessarily trust them to handle all the tasks and if they do have kids those kids are often the same age as yours, which makes them good for playdates but is less than ideal when your kids are sick, since their kids might be sick as well or they don't want their kids to catch the same disease as yours. And so on.
Historically, in those special situations - sickness, injury, new pregnancy, one or more kids are just acting up a lot etc. - it's been your family that has come to help you, but it's not so easy if they live on the other side of the country, or if they no longer live (or, after having you at 35-40 and with you having your kids at 35-40, are now pushing 80 themselves), or if you have been an only child and haven't got sisters and brothers, or so on. We are lucky, since I have a sister who can come help me at times and my wife's parents, while old, do likewise, but these both live in different cities and can only come so often.
The state cannot really offer these networks, but, for instance, cities could offer some level of services for crisis situations (as they do already, in Finland, though the availability varies), and they could offer tax breaks for nannies and such.
There just plain seems to be more demands and regulations - costing time, money and mental effort - put on parents, chiefly mothers, than before. Of course, a lot of these are legislative (car seats have been already mentioned!). Some are institutional - the various maternal clinics and such are helpful, but they often also give parents a lot of advice that is clearly meant to make sure that complete idiot parents don't do something obviously moronic like getting totally drunk and forgetting to feed the kids, but which might make conscientous parents worried that having one glass of wine makes them an alcoholic whose kids are about to be taken away. And so on.
Apart from those, though, the mother-related social media - I'm not directly exposed to it, just through my wife - seems like a horrorshow, full of mothers who are perfectly ready to ream each other's maternity choices at the slightest provocation (Often using passive aggression - "Oh, your family's screen time is hour per day? Our little Ian never looks at screens). This, too, doesn't seem to be a tribal issue, I've seen this sort of behavior as much from "blue-tribe-(equivalent)" as "red-tribe-(equivalent)" parents. Indeed, there seems to be a large amount of "crunchy" tradmommies who both espouse having a lof ot kids as a highest virtue and are also convinced that if you use anything that a rural peasant from the 1700s wouldn't be using and which might make your life easier (formula! birth at hospital! screens! daycare!) then you might as well just submit to them being ruined anyway.
Any sort of a longterm pro-family program, I feel, would entail having a good look at the modern parental demands and standards culture and try to find ways to tell people that they can actually relax a bit, they are almost certainly not going to kill their babies and kids even if they don't do everything by the book, and there are many ways to raise kids and that social media mommy bloggers are just presenting an image to sell a product and aren't a good standard to compare yourself to.
One thing that might keep people from becoming parents is just the general societal lack of horizon. If one looks at Finland's fertility rates, they were actually quite decent - not replacement rate, but not too far way, somewhere around 1.8 - until 2010, and after that they fell off the cliff.
I'm not sure if there's an exact cause, but I think that it's not an accident that this happened just after the euro crisis. Of course the euro crisis happened all around Europe and didn't affect fertility in all nations at the same way, but my subjective opinion is that it led to Finnish political narrative becoming all about crisis and looming disaster after disaster on the horizon (due to debt, taxes, failing services, even the fall of fertility rate itself). Before 2010, there had been a certain confidence around Finnish economy, even triumphalism.
Of course this was connected to Nokia serving as a national flagship company. As one can see in the revenue statistics, 2009 also represented a high watermark for Nokia, and while its fall led to fired engineers soon establishing or finding new companies, what was important was the idea of Nokia being the symbol of Finland as a cutting-edge technological nation, a nation of engineering genius that would brave the challenges of the new economy here and afterwards. 2010 also represented a blow to this mythos and contributed to the general, gloomier atmosphere after this.
Again, this is very speculative, but how much is fertility simply related to whether people feel confident and optimistic about the future, and how much they feel gloomy and uncertain? As mentioned here, many Eastern European countries had fertility rates down in the dumps after the end of the communist period, with those fertility rates picking up when they joined the EU. The prospect of joining the EU, or EU making poorer countries equivalent to richer ones, has servedas one potential source of confidence and optimism. We can see this in Ukraine, for example - there, no lie, probably many Ukrainians who specifically conceive of their battle against Russia as a battle for eventual Ukrainian EU membership.
Beyond economic matters, culture war in Europe is often also a clash of different disaster scenarios. I remember it once being described that these days, whether you're (culturally) left-wing or right-wing is a question of whether you are more likely to think it an urgent political matter to prevent Europe from going through a climate disaster or an urgent political matter to prevent Europe from going through the Great Replacement. The idea that climate worries are preventing people from having kids is a well-known one, but I'm not sure it's very healthy when the other side to keep harping on about Europe falling under the brown immigrant hordes and this being an unavoidable destiny unless their particular nationalist party gets over 50 % of votes, which it probably is not getting. It's catastrophizing either way, and many might think - why have kids if you think that their lives are going to suck anyway, whether it's due to economic collapse, environmental disaster or becoming a minority in your own country?
More options
Context Copy link
Church attending Christians in America are above replacement fertility(albeit not by enough to balance out their apostasy rate). And IIRC there’s a nearly one to one relationship between the fertility rates of Ukrainian oblasts and the percentage of the population which belongs to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah. It seems unavoidable that in order to boost fertility you will need to tamp down rates of female employment, and likewise on females pursuing higher education. Can't have women spending 4+ of their most fertile years receiving education which will ultimately push them towards a career that will further interfere with their ability to rear kids.
Funny enough, though, you could probably achieve most of this goal without a policy that directly restricts women's ability to attend college by simply tying school funding and loans to employment rates and salary of graduates.
That is to say, the degrees which men tend to favor should be the easiest to obtain financial support for, and the ones pushed most heavily, and the female-centered fields would almost universally be ones that will be harder to finance, so women would be discouraged from higher education simply by the financial
Which is not the same as encouraging her to marry and have kids, but you've at least diverted some women from a path that would largely preclude their raising kids.
Congratulations, you’ve gotten future English teachers to study education rather than English lit.
And?
It doesn’t actually change what you want it to change.
Are you suggesting that the same number of women will go to college even if it is more difficult to get financing for the degree?
Pointing out side effects?
Speak your plain meaning and tell where you disagree, if you would.
I’m saying that the same number of women will go to college and simply change their majors, mostly towards high demand low intellectual challenge fields like education.
I dunno, it's not clear to me that the same amount of women would willingly swap into 'education' such that the net number of women attending college is more-or-less the same.
Indeed, as a direct result of declining demographics, we'd expect education to be less in demand as time goes on (i.e. there are fewer children to educate as the current generation grows up)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/185334/number-of-bachelors-degrees-by-field-of-research/
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-female-shares-of-ba-degrees-by-major-1971-to-2017/
Especially given the salary constraints on teachers.
I also wonder where all those art/performing art majors would go instead, if their degree is financially nonviable.
I could see a lot of women swapping into healthcare/nursing, though, which will have a higher salary cap.
But if you're accurate, and what women really want is to earn degrees to become teachers, then that brings up an obvious second prong in the attempted fertility boost policy, and that's to go after public school funding, and incentivize home-schooling, especially.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link