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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Low effort but CW so it goes here. Its the end of the week anyways.

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/115vdud/looking_for_recommendations_on_sources_for_why/

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified. Of all those comments only 1 mention (hint) of group average IQ on why sub saharan Africa is poor??

Then theres the "woah how did you get here, you dont belong here" as a response to the guy who hinted at IQ. Does that guy even know whose blog he is in the subreddit of.

All I am saying is for those of you who still say /r/ssc is "smart", update your priors, this post is not an isolated case.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

For context, OP (Matt Lakeman) is an old ex-regular who has an amazing blog dedicated mostly to international travel, reading on historical stuff and self-experiments. He's been to the Dominican Republic, among other places. He was not impressed. As one can expect, there's a section on the Haiti, with passages like:

Haiti was my first destination choice for this trip. But when I Googled “Haiti,” the top news story was about 17 American and Canadian missionaries being kidnapped by a Haitian gang and held for $17 million ransom. So I decided it probably wasn’t a good idea to go to Haiti at the moment.

I don’t know why the two countries have diverged so dramatically. Noah Smith says no one knows the cause of the split, but it’s probably some combination of Haiti starting its independence with enormous national debt (as part of a settlement with former colonial master France), terrible land management policies, the ongoing toll of the U.S. occupation for twenty years (the Dominican Republic was invaded too, but only for eight years), constant regime change, and generally abysmal macroeconomic policy. One Dominican I talked to attributed the country’s success to mid-century dictator Rafel Truillo, who was authoritarian and oppressive (and renamed the capital after himself), but allegedly brought enough order to the country to attract foreign investment and jump start the modern tourist economy. Also, for geographic/climate reasons, Haiti gets hit far more and far harder by natural disasters than the Dominican Republic.

By chance, I spent some time with two European aid workers stationed in Haiti. Their strong consensus was that Haiti was even worse than I had imagined. Worse than anyone imagines. And it has no viable recovery plan. A few interesting things they told me:

[...]

Law and order is non-existent in the cities. There is no point in reporting crimes. The cities are essentially in a state of anarchy.

The lawlessness has gotten worse over the last few years. The two used to be able to go to restaurants and jazz clubs, but now they don’t leave their homes at night.

Taxes are not paid in Haiti (duh). But if for some reason someone wants to pay taxes in Haiti, they first have to bribe the security guards at the doors of the tax offices.

When the Haitian people get pissed off at the government, their only viable means of protest is to block roads. So they’ll cut down trees or light tires on fire and cut off major highways. There is literally no process in place for the Haitian government to clear these blockages.

The Haitian people are consumed by “fake news.” Rival political factions run radio stations and Whatsapp groups, and spread fake news to vilify the opposition and/or foreigners. The fake news is so rampant that the average Haitian seems to have a completely deluded view of politics and the world at large.

It's a mystery indeed!

By the way, Scott's trip to Haiti was what opened his eyes to biodeterminism. (this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative). Maybe Matt should've gone after all and written something in his usual manner.

...But also.

IQ is not a mechanistic explanation. All the politically correct stuff he asks about – governments, [inability to make use of] climate, culture – are in the end products of IQ but can be studied separately. IQ only tells us why it's so inescapably and consistently bad. But then an informed person would ask: why is Russia or Ukraine or Belarus like that? Why is China like that? Why is Iran like that? Sure it's not Sub-Saharan Africa, but aren't these people clearly smart enough to at least do better than what they show? And why are they worse than, like, Portugal? So IQ can't be the full story; and so long as this is the case, one has enough wiggle room to not notice the elephant.

As I've just argued, tabooing HBD destroys a great deal more than understanding of stuff that pertains directly to HBD. It lowers the effective IQ of the group, and much faster than dysgenics. Regarding the normiefication of the sub, you're obviously correct, but barely-challenged mentions of Jared Diamond, who is an utter fraud and a just-so storyteller, are even more telling. AskHistorians link is okay. Here's a good discussion of his GGS by that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective, if anyone is interested, I can... proofread Deepl/ChatGPT translation.

According to Wikipedia, which cites the IMF, Haiti's per capita GDP, in purchasing power parity, is $3,188. Jamaica's is $11,802, and Barbados's is $17,407. Something other than HBD is going on.

And, btw, describing Guns, Germs and Steel as a just-so story seems very odd. The book repeatedly discusses alternative theories, potential weaknesses in its evidence, and avenues for additional research which might confirm or refute his argument, none of which is the norm, especially in books designed for a popular audience. That doesn't mean he is correct, but it certainly isn't a just-so story.

The book is a very good just-so story with an honest author who more or less admits that's what he's telling.

It's particularly visible towards the end when it attempts to explain European dominance as opposed to Chinese, Arab or Indian dominance, but then admits that had one guy made a different choice (the emperor of China and the treasure fleets) then European dominance likely would not have happened.

You've got that backwards: He starts by saying that internal politics led to decisions which meant that China did not end up conquering the world,and then argues that that decision would have had less effect had China been divided into several regional states, and then presents a hypothesis of what role geography might have played in China's high level of political unity. But, regardless, that is basically irrelevant: It is 3 pages tacked on at the end on the subject of potential future avenues of research

that Russian biologist who wrote a Tolkien fanfic from Mordor's perspective,

Except that Tolkien wasn't thinking about Russia at all, in the slightest. If they really do think that the Orcs are a depiction of what the West thinks of Russia, they're barking up the wrong tree. If they then say "Okay, let's be Orcs! To hell with the West!", they're idiots (not to put a tooth in it): they'd rather cut their nose off to spite their face, and they still don't understand how irrelevant they are to most Western thought historically.

Do you believe we care that much about Tolkien's intentions in particular? Enough to engage in some post-mortem polemic, even? Our ressentiment is more interesting than your escapism, our literature is deeper than your fairy tales. Be flattered when they are used as a starting point, in the way Yudkowsky used Rowling's.

Russia and Ukraine and Belarus and Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and Venezuela are like that while Indonesia and Botswana and Costa Rica are not like that because the former set of countries are run by elites with Marxist assumptions that lead to retarded economic policies and general dysfunction, while the latter are run by elites who are normal and where dysfunctional are dysfunctional in predictable self interested ways. Botswana and Indonesia in particular benefit from keeping much of their colonial institutions from very functional countries instead of asking corrupt and ideologically driven marxists to design new ones.

A somewhat fanciful tangent, but that reminds me of the debate over Elon Musk commandeering Twitter on free speech fairness grounds only to end up promoting his own tweets.

I think a social media CEO tilting things in their individual favor is less terrible than abstract ideological shenanigans stacking the decks against rival or suspiciously off-the-grid political notions.

(this reminds me of that old text of a guy who became racist after going on a humanitarian mission to Africa, there was an incredibly parable-like bit where he helped some local set up a food stall with baked bread, but his relative came and said «you have bread! My family needs bread!», took everything – you can't deny your family – so the guy went bankrupt and never did business again; lost it again and search engines are... uncooperative).

Here it is. CW for, uh, emotional honesty if you follow the link.

If you're going to argue something outside the mainstream, you're going to have to do the work in explaining yourself. None of the "It's IQ" comments are doing that, even the ones that were removed. They're simply attributing the entire reason to IQ and leaving it at that, as if you can reduce all of SSA's failure to develop strictly on their national IQs.

Even if that were the case, you'd have to do a great deal more to explain that position. The comment about institutions cited multiple published books by respected researchers to illustrate its case.

Is this outside the mainstream? It’s not something acceptable to talk about but my gut is most people believe it is a primary contributor. Just the whole getting branded racists and talking about differences is a taboo. I put this ideas is the taboo but everyone basically believes them camp.

Is this outside the mainstream?

Yes. Whatever you want to attribute it to, the prevailing sentiments are like this one:

“Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person?” David S. Jones, a Harvard historian and medical ethicist, told Vox. “I can’t think of how that could actually be true. And the assumption that it is true just sounds like white supremacist racism to me. We need to subject any claims like this to really strict scrutiny.”

Not just, "well, that's one explanation" or "I doubt it, that's improbable", but "I can't think of how that could actually be true". Stating that you can't even think of how it could be true that people of different ancestries differ in average cognitive ability is Harvard medical ethicist thinking. Whether he's stating that cynically or honestly, that's where we're at. Do you want to be subject to really strict scrutiny on whether you're a white supremacist?

I don’t know that ‘people with differing ancestries have different IQ’s’ is the sentiment objected to so much as ‘it just doesn’t seem within the realm of possibility that entire countries are made up mostly of actually literally retarded people’ is the objection.

Sigh. A Harvard medical ethicist of all people ought to know the nosological difference between «actually literally retarded» and «very low IQ», because those are, in fact, different conditions.

Then again, maybe it's the opposite and his job is to not know the difference – who am I to tell, not being Harvard material myself? Like the Chinese say,

“We need to teach machines not only how to speak, but also how not to speak.”

And more is expected of experts.

If some people have cognitive impairment and low IQ and some have just low IQ and can function in society, I don't see why the cognitive impairment shouldn't be considered to be part of IQ in the first place. A meaningful measure of IQ would consider the person with cognitive impairment to have a lower IQ, because he has cognitive impairment.

You can also look at it from another angle: "Can learn the skills needed to function in society" should be most of IQ. If a 60 IQ person can function as well as an 80 IQ person but doesn't understand analogies, he should, by definition, have a 80 IQ, especially if the 80 IQ person barely understands analogies either. "Understands analogies slightly worse, but neither of them understands analogies well enough to use them" is not a large IQ gap under any useful definition of IQ.

(I'm not convinced that the whole distinction is even real. Are there studies that show that it's possible to have 60-IQ-with-impairment and 60-IQ-without-impairment for people who are otherwise under similar cultures and circumstances?)

That would defeat the premise of what an IQ score is, a metric trying to capture the latent g factor.

Why not just have a "societal functioning quotient"? The SFQ so to speak. It might even gain popularity over IQ and become the de facto "intelligence" metric (because that will be gameable unlike IQ). Be warned, it's not that easy to make what you are proposing, not to speak on will it be even useful for research or as a signal. There is a reason Academia gave so much weight to the SAT and GRE up until the recent past (It was a useful signal), Half the job openings for ETS (the company that makes the GRE) is for Psychometrics and Psychology PhDs.. I wonder why they need so many psychologists for a primarily Math and English test.

more is expected of experts

By who? I certainly don’t expect experts to speak truth to power, and I don’t expect the general public to be able to catch them lying or confusing terms to mislead or shutting down debate or whatever.

You actually hit on why I’m questioning whether HBD is mainstream accepted. Vox is a blue tribe probably aimed at around the 10-20% Iq area. Harvard is a 1% elitists spot. So people here would call it not mainstream because the people in their intellectual space don’t follow it. If I asked a 50 year old welder his views he would probably admit he thinks there are differences. It’s just that people in your social space don’t adhere to hbd.

The big logic for HBD being important is based on Garrett Jones arguments. A quick simplification is he thinks a nations average IQ is important and not as much being smart yourself. You have a better chance being well off being less intelligent in a high average IQ country than you would be super smart in a low average IQ country. Basically governance improves a lot if you have higher average IQ. All government need to get a consent of the governed to effectively function. Democracy especially is hard to do if the voters can’t understand policy. So that ends up making dictatorship better. But you still need a degree of the populace understanding what your doing to encourage good policy choices. And when things go wrong poorly informed citizens are more likely to turn to their in group leader and having a coup and hopefully sending more of their spoils to their own tribe.

Democracy especially is hard to do if the voters can’t understand policy

Countries with low IQs tend to do poorly no matter what system they adopt. The UAE is a possible exception because it pivoted to tourism and westernism in every other respect but government and religion. The quality of people tells you the quality of country. Liberal democracy seems to work best when you have a small, highly productive, high trust population, which pretty much excludes much of the world and even much of the US.

Most of the UAE's revenue is oil and its derivatives (You are confusing Dubai and UAE). The Arab Gulf states are National avg IQ vs GDPPc PPP, outliers. Simar to ex-communist states who are outliers in the opposite direction. Credit where credit is due, it's not like natural resource wealth can't be squandered (or not realized at all), the ruling elite of the UAE is the real deal.

The native modest IQ stock of the UAE is a minority at ~20% of the population. The entire rest of the population is much higher functioning imported expats who do all the serious work (and construction workers).

A 50 year old welder may not have a positive view of black people, but it’s the rare blue collar worker who thinks of IQ as the determining factor.

Blue collar workers who think there’s something wrong, genetically, with blacks are usually going to point to laziness, not IQ, being the differing hereditary factor.

How many Black friends do you have? Close friends, say minimum "pick you up at the airport" level of friendship on the Seinfeld scale

Two that meet that standard, but I probably wouldn't actually call them, "close friends". Close enough to be part of group get togethers at holidays and such though.

IQ is generally not in the Western mainstream. I've seen people express genuine shock at the idea that IQ is even heritable.

I strongly suspect that this is a "blue tribe midwit" phenomenon. I would also bet that most of those people think IQ is a fake statistic made up by racists in general, and that most of them would cite the "regatta" example as proof. That idea is much rarer among the people who don't even pretend they read the NYT. "Parents pass down traits like brawn and brains" is the sort of folk wisdom that everyone has... except for the people who've had that scooped out and replaced with something else.

The American working class mostly does not think IQ is particularly closely correlated with g, and is fairly likely to deny the influence of IQ on success in education.

That is completely antithetical to my experience. They think IQ is the measure of how smart someone is, so they think it obviously factors into success in education... even if that's not necessarily the be-all-end-all of general life success (book smarts versus practical smarts). They have never heard of g, and have also never heard of progressive cope lines around the topic.

The "American working class" has never even heard of Spearman's g.

In a freshman class in college many years ago we were basically fed anti-IQ propaganda. Including impuning people as racists. Good educated middling progressives have been inoculated against honestly considering the facts of heritability. That well has been thoroughly poisoned.

FWIW I made it to my late 20s working in philosophy and cognitive science before I encountered HBD. Most people, especially educated ones, will simply believe some combination of (i) IQ is a discredited old measure of intelligence, (ii) race is a social construct, and maybe (iii) insofar as we give IQ any weight at all, we should recognise it as highly mutable as demonstrated by stuff like the Flynn Effect.

This started to unravel for me when I began poking around and found that (i) was false. But most educated people won’t get to that point.

Well, what I don’t understand is that there are obviously some people who are smarter compared to other people. Just like there are people who are more attractive or more athletic or more consistently drunk. And shockingly these things seem to run in families.

That and we see that in animals we can breed certain outcomes.

Blank slatism just seems so difficult to believe given the above. The simpler solution is that genetics impact life outcomes. Not saying it is 100% but important. Once you accept that, then it seems once you have population A and population B separated by an obvious genetic difference it is perfectly within the realm of possibility to see a difference in group IQ.

Of course, I do think the problem is people oversimplify. There are African sub populations that are reasonably high IQ. Moreover, there is great variability within black populations. And white populations. And Asian populations. We need not abandon colorblindness as principle given HBD. But it can be a refutation of the claim that group differences re a result of oppression.

It is very easy not to see something when your viability within the system depends on not seeing it.

Well, what I don’t understand is that there are obviously some people who are smarter compared to other people. Just like there are people who are more attractive or more athletic or more consistently drunk. And shockingly these things seem to run in families.

People do not seem to follow up on observations about genetics, if they are even making them in the first place. That is, people will accept that you look like your parents, but don't consider if you can be smarter or dumber based on the genes your parents give you.

That and we see that in animals we can breed certain outcomes.

"Humans are different", "evolution stops before it reaches the brain", etc.

This feels like something where education makes you forgot something that was plainly obvious to children or lower educated people.

I knew the points you make were false when I was 8 year olds and saw a lot more people with more melanin playing the sports I liked to play professionally. Just seemed obvious races were not identical. Everyone I grew up knew that blacks people ran faster and jumped higher.

Not mainstream in... Scott Alexanders blogs subreddit?

It was maybe mainstream in the past. Definitely not now.

It seems to me the slatestarcodex subreddit has been fully normified.

It's Eternal September everywhere, and the SSC modteam barely exists on reddit anymore. Baj hasn't posted on reddit in five months, Cheeze occasionally moderates but was pretty low-participation already by the time I became a moderator, Zorba is busy with this place when he's not busy with life, Scott himself is a token mod to satisfy Bakkot's aesthetic, and Bakkot seems to be one of those people who refuses to ever give up control of anything even when he no longer contributes to its well-being nor even especially pays attention to it. HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.

The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse." Obviously you can't have the CW thread without that spirit, but I am increasingly persuaded that you can't have the spirit of open discourse with topic bans. You can't have Free Speech with an asterisk; the asterisk strangles the life out of the conversation, quickly or slowly. The whole enterprise withers on the vine; if anything does remain, it's mostly just virtue signalling.

It's frankly frustrating, because damned if I'm not tempted to slap some of the more annoying people around here with topic bans, sometimes! And there are still occasionally some good threads that crop up on the SSC sub from time to time, and in other places in the diaspora. But even Astral Codex Ten is a shadow of Scott circa 2015, because he's muzzled himself (or allowed himself to be muzzled) in spite of his increased freedom and wealth (or perhaps because of it--he now has something substantial to lose!). Respectability and stultification seem repeatedly to arrive hand-in-hand.

E: Ill remove if consensus building.

You specified that it "seems to me" and you didn't say "everyone knows," so I think you're good.

The topic of exiling the Motte from SSC has been done to death, but I think in retrospect what was exiled was not "the Culture War thread," it was "the spirit of open discourse."

I'm inclining more and more to the notion that what is needed is some of us stickle-backed old dinosaurs with right-wing and conservative views. The Schism was set up to accommodate those who felt they were being dog-piled by the righties, and to be more sympathetic to the left-wingers who were leaving, and it has settled down to being rather flat, in my opinion. Comment threads there don't get to the length as on here. Everyone pretty much murmurs "yes, how true" to the original post. SSC, from the rare times I dip back in, has gone the same way. The Culture War was purged, now it's comfortably leftie-progressive in its views. And stagnating, I regret to say.

(All opinions expressed above are the personal views of the author and are not to be taken as representative of The Motte).

Now, before anyone wants to remind me, I am very well aware of the danger of getting our own little right-wing echo chamber going here, and certainly there are opinions expressed that I do vehemently disagree with. But I think that is the benefit here - for whatever reason, be it that we're accustomed to seeing right-wing/conservative views decried as the most evil of evil, or whatever, I do think that (a) there is a spectrum, not a monolith, of conservative views and (b) right-wingers are a bit more thick-skinned when it comes to debate/argument. So where someone on the left of the centre might flounce off because "you are personally attacking me, this is hate speech and violence", I think someone to right of centre is more inclined to stick around and fight it out. I mean, I know I have views that would get me hanged as a bigot and a transphobe and a racist and I can't remember the entire list of badness, on other places on the Internet where any divergence from the current orthodoxy is pure evil (see Jesse Singal's travails, and he's more liberal than I am).

There is also the benefit that as an off-shoot of the original SSC, Scott's rules about niceness and charity are still being followed. This keeps things from degenerating to the level of just shouting insults at each other. If I want to express my full-flowing bosom about the likes of Felker-Martin, I'll head over to CultureWarRoundup (a very useful safety valve to vent). I'll try and keep on the civil side on here.

Everyone pretty much murmurs "yes, how true" to the original post.

This is not at all true, there have been substantive debates where people have made it clear they disagree with a top-level post for a variety of reasons.

Now, before anyone wants to remind me, I am very well aware of the danger of getting our own little right-wing echo chamber going here

It's not "get going here", that echo chamber is already happening. Almost every comment in this whole chain of comments, starting from the very top with OP, is people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology. We're not getting an echo chamber here, we're literally sitting in one right now.

This is a strange notion of an echo chamber. By this standard, any group that has reached effective consensus on a partisan issue is an echo chamber; in reality this is a necessary (arguably: in my view, 4chan/pol/ is an echochamber despite it being filled with contradictory bullshit of the same genre), but not a sufficient condition.

The only thing keeping those leftists out of here is generic moderation against uncouth tone (and their own disinterest, of course); the thing keeping us out of there is an explicit prohibition on discussing a not particularly fringe scientific hypothesis that's germane to the topic. We see their arguments. They don't see ours and are lost in their own echos.

The only thing keeping those leftists out of here is generic moderation against uncouth tone (and their own disinterest, of course); the thing keeping us out of there is an explicit prohibition on discussing a not particularly fringe scientific hypothesis that's germane to the topic. We see their arguments. They don't see ours and are lost in their own echos.

You're ignoring a pretty important point - the inevitable dogpiling when someone disagrees with this place's mainstream opinions. That has a tendency to drive people out as well, and it began all the way back when it was just a thread in the ssc subreddit.

I don't know about dogpiling. I've always felt that that was an intentional effect, a campaign: everyone is co-ordinated to drive off the heretic. I know I don't think like that when I'm responding to something that seems very egregious, even if there are already several other responses as well. I agree that it can be a problem when someone says X and gets ten replies all saying no, it's Y - but that is different to having a set-up where there is deliberate action to drive someone off. I don't think we have that here.

I don't know about dogpiling. I've always felt that that was an intentional effect, a campaign: everyone is co-ordinated to drive off the heretic.

When the Motte was still on Reddit, someone (my google-fu is abandoning me) came up with the idea of a distributed Gish Gallop, which I found rather insightful. Also, prospiracies are a thing, IMO.

The effect of a coordinated attack against the heretic, and just members of the majority opinion saying their opinion towards the minority, are identical if you're at the receiving end. And this seems to me the central problem, on /r/SCC and here, just with opposite polarities.

Distributed Gish Gallop

Earliest mention I see via camas.unddit.com is here back on the mothersub by @TracingWoodgrains; the original comment by /u/saladatmilliways is unavailable (Culture War Roundup for the week of June 25, 2018). Maybe there's some way to find a copy but a quick look didn't help.

Checking out that thread was interesting, and of course nostalgic. Much was lost.

I agree. But the effect is roughly the same because it's a largely a question of character, not perception, whether you bear repeated criticism. I don't blame any particular person because it's a collective action issue.

I am not a total relativist. What is the difference between dogpiling and fair criticism of intransigence? This depends on merits of the case, and a proper rationalist should at least entertain the possibility that he's egregiously wrong about a subject he has not studied, thus take an apparent dogpiling – or «mansplaining» or any other sin from the list of progressive anti-cognitive memes – in stride.

Anyone who disagrees with those posts can reply with either evidence to the contrary or just their personal opinion. And unlike on reddit it will not lead to <deleted posts> and the mods locking the entire thread because "y'all can't behave. It's basic human decency. Do better"

Anyone who disagrees with those posts can reply with either evidence to the contrary or just their personal opinion.

Sure, that could happen. But you don't see that happen. The amount of pushback against those positions is dwarfed by the amount that agree with those positions.

I think we are slightly more right here. The Schism was for those liberal/lefties who felt they were being persecuted, DSL ended up as the haven of the very right-wing, ACX is a mix of what the old SSC was like, and on here are the more centrist(?) righties. With the mass migration, I think it did shake out that those who remained on SSC behind after the Culture War thread split off on its own were more inclined to be on the left, and the various dispersions since then have only increased that effect.

It's like the sediment jar test, we've all settled into our various layers, though there is still an admixture.

This is not at all true, there have been substantive debates where people have made it clear they disagree with a top-level post for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes, I agree, that happens. But comment threads don't seem to get going over there and while that may be a function of "not many people were interested in transferring over" and so a smaller commentariat, it does seem to me, the times I drop in to see if anything interesting is going on, that they peter out because of the "yes, that is so" effect.

people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology

It's been a while since I did wander over to the original (what remains of it) SSC - I hung around The Motte back on Reddit and on here, I dipped in and out of DSL but moved away from there, and I waited for Scott's new place to get up and running, but mostly left with the rest of the diaspora after "we don't want no Culture War no mo" event. I've been very surprised by what it's like now, I have to say. But again, new blood came in after we moved out so it's their house now.

Sometimes, I agree, that happens. But comment threads don't seem to get going over there and while that may be a function of "not many people were interested in transferring over" and so a smaller commentariat, it does seem to me, the times I drop in to see if anything interesting is going on, that they peter out because of the "yes, that is so" effect.

I think you're leaving out the biggest factor - the sheer volume of top-level posts where people come to bring out their axes to grind. Anger drives posting in a way that's difficult for other emotions to do.

Almost every comment in this whole chain of comments, starting from the very top with OP, is people complaining that leftists are controlling the ssc subreddit because they want to banish any inconvenient truth that clashes with their ideology. We're not getting an echo chamber here, we're literally sitting in one right now.

If the ground shakes, a lot of people will say "Whoa, an earthquake". That doesn't indicate an echo chamber.

If you want to use that analogy, we have people here who hear T-Rex thumps like Jurassic Park 1 and assume it's always an earthquake, and everyone around them agrees.

Left wingers are in power; there's no particular need for them to argue with right wingers. They can just boot them out of any place they want to have a 'conversation', except for a few witch's dens which have no outside influence. (And maybe Twitter, for now).

I just intuited an observation on that. The Triessences of What, How, and Why occur in that order, and are the spirits of Republican, Libertarian, and Democratic discourse, respectively.

If you start with What, you can follow up with discussion on How and Why, but if you start with Why, you’ve already assumed the What and How.

I’ll add an expansion on these thoughts on political discourse dynamics in my Triessentialism thread sometime before Monday ends.

In Scott's last linkfest he hinted that he was no longer living in San Francisco. Not that that would help him much with an ability to return to his 2015 self, but I'm curious if he really is no longer in the area.

I also "didn't live in San Francisco" for years. I still lived in the Bay Area, like I believe Scott does.

I lived in Oakland for 10 years but would still see the condition of San Francisco, homeless or otherwise, due to sheer proximity.

I'm in San Francisco proper now, long after I've passed the age where it feels necessary to be here. Would have killed for this at 30 lol.

I would very happily take recommendations for new mods, for what it's worth. It's tricky because we've gotten burned a few times by giving good contributors the mod bit and then having them immediately stop participating, possibly because dealing with the worst posts is sometimes dispiriting (though really it's the edge cases which are more draining to deal with), so we don't want to simply offer the position to any good contributor - that's evidently a good way to get less participation from good contributors, which is the opposite of what we want. And while I'm sure there's lurkers out there who would be a good fit, there's no good way to find and vet them.

I would really like to be responsible for less of the moderating, but there would need to be other, more active mods for that to work.

In the previous two months which are all the mod log shows, I've taken about 600 actions, HarryPotter5777 has taken about 70, and other mods about 6. ("Anti-Evil Operations" has taken 3.) Keep in mind that most of these actions are approving comments which were reported but not quite over the bar of warranting action, removing spam, or otherwise invisible. (I've been unusually busy the last few months, which is reflected in my reduced use of reddit; I think the ratio was even more skewed before that.)

While I'm popping my head in, I should say that I'm not actually the one who added Scott (that was one of the very first other mods, since departed). He uses his mod bit exclusively to sticky and unsticky new threads for posts from the blog when he gets there before I do, so it's correct not to call him a mod in any real sense, though, yes.

I've taken about 600 actions, HarryPotter5777 has taken about 70, and other mods about 6. ("Anti-Evil Operations" has taken 3.)

Thanks for sharing--I apologize for drawing conclusions from limited evidence (your public posting histories; HP5777 has recent mod-hat comments and you do not) but of course I don't have access to anything else.

It's tricky because we've gotten burned a few times by giving good contributors the mod bit and then having them immediately stop participating

Yeah, that's been true of the Motte as well, and I daresay many other places besides.

Me and some others tried to speak up. The jannies censored our comments.

If you dislike this, consider organizing a pipeline from there to here, privately or publicly. Bakkot says:

As a reminder, culture war topics are forbidden. That includes "maybe these people are genetically predisposed to be lower IQ or otherwise less suited to build modern economies". I've removed a few subthreads to that effect. Please don't make any more of them. If you'd like to have a discussion about that particular hypothesis you'll need to go elsewhere.

This pissy attitude openly vilifying the very clear and well-argued line of thought in the corpus of writing of the guy he owes the community to is deserving of some pushback. I'm permabanned there (for mocking Kevin Bird's beliefs), but if I were not, I'd have written something like «and if you'd like to discuss whatever hypothesis seems best supported by evidence, you can check out this offshoot of the community». What's he going to do? There are no normie reddit rules against promoting other places, far as I know. Will he remove it as culture warring unto itself?

and if you'd like to discuss whatever hypothesis seems best supported by evidence, you can check out this offshoot of the community

Sounds good probably won't work. "Best supported by the evidence" translates to "The evidence I agree the most with (but is just as shitty, but in the opposite direction)" in the overwhelming majority of cases, anyone who hasn't defaulted to making that translation is less cynical than I. This is assuming you are trying to invite the HBD skeptics along aswell.

A superior advertisement (imo) would be "The theories discussed here are some of the theories but not all of them, visit this offshoot community to read what you read here, and more". This has the advantage of implying that you won't only see a set complement of arguments but a superset of them. However there is a failure mode that any invitation to an alternative discussion can be translated to "come join us at the flat earth society we have alternative theories!".

I honestly can't think of a perfect advertisement for someone who is (rightfully) skeptical and not on the fence already.

Yeah, could be phrased better. I referred not to the evidential superiority of my own opinion, but to the possibility to entertain any opinion you deem better-supported – not just the most plausible thing still allowed by Bakkot. They are explicitly prohibited from discussing HBD to any serious extent, beyond a snarky hint or a perfunctory denunciation. Sure, some of that is community sentiment. Consider such brilliant rationalist logic as:

Jumping straight to an IQ answer is antagonistic and uncharitable to a whole group of people, and more importantly, a thought-ending cliché that's likely making you stop looking for actual answers.

But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.

As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.

But not all of it. /u/plowfaster, /u/crowstep, /u/Throwaway6393fbrb, /u/uber_neutrino, /u/Possible-Summer-8508, /u/FDP_666, /u/Therncic, /u/Courier_ttf, and perhaps some of those already removed are more or less /ourguys/, I think at least 1 or 2 aren't here already. Why not offer them a way out of that circus. As for the rest... well, pseudo-erudite midwits can probably stay where they are. But wouldn't hurt showing them the other option.

This got me thinking if a place is sufficiently woke (not sure if it generalizes to all ideological conformity), then most of the modded/removed content won't be by people breaking non-political rules but by people who say something unwoke.

Thus writing a bot that scrapes the usernames off the red comments from unddit.com and sending them an automated message along the lines of

"We saw that your comment was removed from {woke sub}, there is a high probability you didn't break the discourse rules but instead said something unwoke, consider joining us at this { same community but not woke}, {summary of community}"

Might work as an excellent recruiting tool.

As an aside, I like that jannies do not remove blank slatism as «culture warring». They've entirely redefined Scott's idea to align with their distaste for witches, now «culturewar» = nonwoke, basically.

Lack of self-awareness is a hell of a drug. So is confusing aesthetics and morality.

Exactly my point.

Well, @ZorbaTHut, how's that for a recruiting pipeline? I gather you still haven't decided what to do. I foresee your objections along the lines of diversity, but people who still hang around captured subs might well be the closest thing to a leftie you can get.

Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V

Right now recruiting is not the biggest issue I see. Honestly, this thread itself is kind of a bigger problem; note that it's already been mod-warned, but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem". The thing I'm most concerned about right now is . . .

. . . okay right now it's dealing with the employment tangle I'm dealing with. But after that, the thing I'm most concerned about is tweaking moderation and figuring out a better way to gently-but-firmly shove the tone around, and that's what the volunteer-janitor stuff is for.

Once I've handled that, I plan to go back to recruiting efforts. However, right now the traffic honestly isn't bad - it's lower than it used to be but nowhere near lower enough that I think it's an immediate existential threat.

And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting. Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.

Sounds like a pretty bad approach honestly :V

I'm sure the approach is bad for a thousand reasons but if applied very judiciously to very specific places (NOT /r/politics and other stupid places) I don't see how it would run afoul of your concern. E.g users from that ssc thread.

And I think, if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting.

The Motte is not on Reddit because they couldn't read the room. Don't you think that ship has sailed?

I respect your vision and desire to attract "diverse-opinions", but that has never happened. It's not ever going to happen for various reasons.

Not until you fix (not saying you should);

"diverse opinion" haver joins Motte -> expresses opinion -> gets dogpiled -> leaves (after flaming out and letting us know that we are nazi shitlords)

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Well this went poorly. You look like you are going hard into your bonsai-trimming power trip. Do you plan to monetize this place of what?

but it's entirely "wow, such normie, very woke, what a problem"

Well, what else could we say – that it was a mistake to commit a stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast? I believe such regrets are expressed as silent evaporation.

Are you impressed with the intellectual culture Bakkot et al. have built? Get a load of those mod notes. Be honest. It is objectively a normie culture, a culture of shaming and shooing and unquestionable sanctified priors instead of rational discussion. When the choice is between scholarly epicycles in the manner of Marxist theory and a possibly more parsimonious explanation, they are being told to praise the amazing complexity of the former or shut up and «go elsewhere». Elsewhere where if not here?

I realize that «normie» is just a psychologically healthy normal Hajnali human, and as one of those you too might have a hard time distinguishing between very consistent «shame on you, cringe, do better, imagine your mom reading that, we do not need this, removed» etc. signals and a reason to value one's opinion less. But those are still different things and the former is still poison for any serious rationalist-ish place, and is still far less desirable than «dogpiling» in the form of tonally correct objections. At least that's how I see our value function.

if I were going to recruit people, "people who got removed from a community for not reading the room" is not the group I'd be targeting

Really? You would prefer people who «read the room» over people who can't – as in, who believe that «no culture war» should apply fairly and not privilege a side in it? The mods implicitly precommit to a culture war position that requires righteous combat, under the justification of «no culture war». This is a deceptive signal, and a profanation of all that the sub stood for. Are you saying you endorse that? If even we pick people who are adept in reading the room over autistics irritated with inconsistencies and double standards, where are people who are bad at that supposed to go – straight to nazi imageboards?

right now the traffic honestly isn't bad

It's not so much the traffic problem as diversity problem. And I do not mean political compass distribution but even just topic distribution. More people means less banding. For example, nobody has mentioned Turkish earthquake (okay, here) – a NATO state has suffered a major disaster, tens of thousands dead, possibly immense geopolitical ramifications, partially because Erdogan has appointed his fellow right-wing theologian grifters throughout the system. I might do a writeup as a community service and as the resident Turk, but more people could help with such stuff.

Especially people in that situation who would push the balance of this community further away from diverse-opinions.

Have you not understood my argument? People uncomfortable with /r/slatestarcodex modding are leftier than the median user here, and realistically as far left as you will get now, barring a complete reinvention of this place. You will never again get the «diversity» we had on Reddit by virtue of dipping into Scott's captive leftwing audience, unless you ruin TheMotte in the manner not much different from Bakkot's – and then, you'll probably just chase everyone away, like you've repeatedly threatened to do.

It is inevitable that the discussion evolves and some opinions disappear, while others emerge. This is what it means to have a honest non-compelled discussion. If you fetishize access to the frozen equivalent of Scott's captive audience from 2010's, with their particular distribution of opinion, over the value of this community where genuinely all hypotheses can be discussed and the worst that could happen is «dogpiling» – then you, like many people, are a rigid old fart fixed on the object level, unable to recognize the worth of your creation, and should stop wasting our time, much less soliciting our help and money. Pull the plug ASAP.

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Those three deleted top comments are really low effort. A drive by punchy one line comment is bound for deletion.

Other comments more thoughtfully discuss IQ and have not been deleted.

I just assume no HBD allowed on reddit, full stop.

As @DaseindustriesLtd said, the appearance of incompetence of the opposing side the intended outcome of censorship

Isn't, this, rather, an argument that Haiti is «HBD played straight»? This is how a democratic, or perhaps ochlocratic, nation with an average IQ of 67 functions: it doesn't.

It's those other nations which are deviations from the natural path, thanks to introgression of some elite material and its ability to withstand the pressure of the demos, which is not a given when eldritch powers side with the latter. And accordingly, African nations which have succeeded in humbling their elite castes – be those local Africans of another tribe, like with Tutsis, or Indians, or Arabs, or colonial remnants – are nations where the genetic factor is playing out in its purest form.

Uh, isn’t Rwanda improving rapidly while the rest of the Great Lakes region is perhaps not improving rapidly but still gradually getting better? S Africa is getting worse, true, but Botswana is getting much better.

Rwanda is ruled by Tutsis,no?

Could you explain the distinction between Tutsi and Hutu?

Previously I vaguely remembered colonial authorities basically made them up. So I looked into it a bit. Wiki e.g.:

They defined "Tutsi" as anyone owning more than ten cows (a sign of wealth) or with the physical features of a longer thin nose, high cheekbones, and being over six feet tall, all of which are common descriptions associated with the Tutsi.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

Both the Tutsi and Hutu had been the traditional governing elite, but both colonial powers allowed only the Tutsi to be educated and to participate in the colonial government.

🤷‍♀️

Is it the case where a few disparate groups were sublimated into either Tutsi or Hutu? Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group? Are "official" takes as distorted as e.g. HBD? I'm more familiar with Central Asia, where Kazakhs, Uzbeks and such were basically invented in the 1920s, almost whole cloth.

The Tutsis are mostly descended from East African Cushitic pastoralists. They have significant Bantu admixture, though. Hutus are almost all generic Bantus genetically. There has been no formal studies on this as the Rwandan government doesn’t allow it, but Razib Khan privately analyzed some samples he got from Rwanda years ago on his blog.

Huh I had no idea. I always bought into the party line of “Belgians invented them” I should’ve known better

I guess It's how Brits supposedly invented Brahmins to delegate them power over the oppressed proletarian masses. Turns out, made them genetically more Aryan too. And of course language families are spread by emancipated women who love traveling and acquainting themselves with fascinating diverse cultures – not with the edge of the battle axe.

Once you notice that those 20th century historians and anthropologists started from a very particular, very self-absorbed theoretical lens, you develop a certain... prior for every time you hear about some clearly hereditary group being a social construct.

That said, @veqq is correct that Soviets, who took that lens as both an explanatory framework for things that work and, logically enough, an instruction manual, did invent a bunch of peoples, or at the very least redefined their distinctions and populations –Tatars and Bashkirs are the most glaring example.

which would add any successful people into this, as if making "kulak" an ethnicity.

From my understanding the categories are remarkably genetically coherent since they measured different cultural groups/ways of life, but it wouldn't shock me if there was also an element of 'everybody doing 8/10 or better at life is now a Tutsi' at the fringes.

There's been a bunch of revisionism on the topic that's very much of the 'ethnic strife didn't exist prior to colonialism whatsoever' brand of hilarity.

Yeah, that's the standard excuse - Belgians did it because they elevated only one group. There was no trouble till whites came.

I don't really believe it in the slightest.

Or that the Tutsi were a coherent group?

They're probably largely descended from a coherent group that originated outside Rwanda.

E.g. from wikipedia:

The ability to digest lactose among African adults is widespread only among desert-dwelling nomadic groups that have depended upon milk for millennia. Three quarters of the adult Tutsi of Rwanda and Burundi have a high ability to digest lactose, while only 5% of the adults of the neighboring Shi people of eastern Congo can. Among Hutu, one in three adults has a high capacity for lactose digestion, a surprisingly high number for an agrarian people, which Mamdani suggests may be the result of centuries of intermarriage with Tutsi.[2]

EDIT:

Imo, the clearest reason why Rwanda went bugshit was, that even though it is an unusually fertile region, the population density was extremely high, resulting in privation:

Rwanda's population soared from 1,887,000 people in 1948 to more than 7,500,000 in 1992, making it the most densely populated country in Africa. Poor farmers were forced onto marginal land, where cultivation resulted in severe erosion. Reliance on firewood as a source of energy caused massive deforestation, and farmers were then forced to use straw and other crop residues for fuel, thereby damaging soil fertility. These factors led to a disastrous shortfall in food production, with two-thirds of the population unable to meet even the minimum food energy requirement of 2,100 calories per person per day.

I was under the impression is was a lot less Tutsi dominated than it used to be, but admit that I’m not totally up on my Central African politics.

The opposite is true - although Tutsis were generally richer than Hutus and more important politically, the RPF (Tutsi exiles) takeover of Rwanda during the genocide has led to the creation of an authoritarian government friendly to Tutsis, so overall their position is likely more secure.

I doubt the concept of the Tutsis, like the Igbo, being outliers is Sub - Saharian Africa is common knowledge much less commonly accepted.

The obvious question for me as a libertarian republican is, how was free-market capitalism treated in the school lessons learned by the children who grew up into the gangsters now dividing up the island? Were they taught to respect others’ property? Were they taught to deny a single one of their emotionally-driven urges to have and thus to take?

I’m “friends” with an autistic woman with an IQ of less than 100. She was raised by a WEIRD progressive mother in a highly permissive home. She was thoroughly educated about her rights as a human, a citizen, and a person with disabilities, but not her responsibilities as an economic unit. She is now a want-monster who argues until she gets her way, because she believes the world owes her, and money is just an excuse for people to reject her. She treats her help-staff as garbage and complains when they quit.

Why would you be friends with such a person?

Before I learned about codependency, I thought I could be the friend people needed. That got me four bad friends in a row who could not reciprocate in any meaningful way. They drained me and I suffered immeasurably. She’s the only one I’m still in contact with because she’s the only one with my phone number.

Not OP but, I am friends with a lot of basketcases. Most of them got "grandfathered in" as friends from middle school and my childhood neighborhood.

They are not bad people, if you can dispense your desire to have "deep" conversations with literally everyone you know ( I have other people to do that with), then they are perfectly fine to associate with and do (limited) things with such as play sports, video games, goof about, hold a cookout with, etc.

Also, "bad" people are not always universally bad to everyone. In certain cultures, the more of an asshole one is to "outsiders" the more loyal he is to his "family". My grandfather was one such example, An absolute menace to service workers of all stripes, but a gentleman of the nth order with his family.

If the elites were so elite, why did they lose, time and time again? You'd think that an elite class would catch on.

I feel like "Haiti's problems are caused by the masses preventing the mulatto elite from holding power" elides an important detail, which is that the instability and massacres weren't a bottom-up noir-peasant rebellion, they were driven by the mulatto elite themselves - generally by one faction (often financed by the Germans) hiring mercenaries to take out one leader and install their favored candidate instead. President's Sam massacre against leading mulatto families, however and barbaric and unjustified, wasn't due to racial animosity but to credible fears that this would happen again (as it had happened numerous times before) due to another incipient caco revolt fomenting around the opposition leader. From Max Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace":

Of 22 rulers between 1843 and 1915, only one served out his term of office. During those years there were at least 102 civil wars, coups d'etat, revolts, and other political disorders. The period between 1908 and 1915 was particularly chaotic. Seven presidents were overthrown during those seven years.

Most of these coups followed a familiar pattern. They were orchestrated by the mulatto elite that ran the black republic . . . A cabal of mulatre (mulatto) plotters in port-au-Prince, the capital, would become unhappy with the incumbent. They would select an alternative candidate - usually a noir (black) - and line up financing for him from the German merchant community, which expected to make a tidy profit on the investment out of public funds once the usurper came to power. The would-be president would journey to the wild, mountainous north of Haiti, where he would recruit to his cause tatterdemalion soldiers of fortune and part-time bandits known as cacos (after a local bird of prey) with promises of loot. The cacos would march south toward Port-au-Prince, plundering coastal towns as they went. Since the Haitian army was corrupt and ineffectual, there was little to slow their progress. Upon the cacos' arrival at the outskirts of the capital, the incumbent president would go quickly and quietly into foreign exile, taking a portion of the treasury with him. His successor would be elected by the National Assembly at gunpoint. The cacos would be paid off from the public treasury and happily return home, until a fresh revolutionary leader invited them to march again. It was, boasted one Haitian in 1915, "an efficient revolutionary system . . . the most intricate and elaborate system in the world"

There’s clearly more going on in Africa than just low IQ. Europe has had waves of migrants. At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling. And often these migrations were at knife point. For most of history people from places with civilization did not decide to move to Africa.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Africa

Fair I said this too strongly. And was more referencing the ancient regimes and movement of people.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

Still fairly limited considering Africa is closer than to Europe and the new world was largely settled first.

It's about over 2400 miles from northern France to Nova Scotia. The only sane way get to Nigeria would be by sea, which is nearly 5000 miles, which about the same as the distance to New York.

When you arrive in Nigeria, you are facing a land full of unfamiliar diseases, before vaccines. You are competing with many established civilisations. When you arrive in Nova Scotia, you arrive in lands that have already been considerably emptied by European diseases, and with diseases that have not been enhanced by urbanisation, and the nearest civilisations are thousands of miles to the south.

To put some numbers on that, estimates I could find put the African population at a lower figure of 50 million in 1500 (mostly Sub-Saharan, I think) whereas the North American population was 1 or 2 million.

Except the places that were settled quickly in the Americas were farther away and had higher populations like the Caribbean’s, Aztec/Mayan empires. 50 million for all of Africa is about the same estimates for the Americas.

There were special political factors in the case of the Aztecs that made colonisation easier. That's a long story, which you probably already know.

It's actually a very similar distance (by sea, of course) from Europe to the Caribbean vs. Europe to Nigeria. In terms of places where Europeans ultimately settled (South Africa, Zimbabwe) it is much further to Africa.

You’re probably overstating the attractiveness of South Africa to settler colonists. The boers were settled more to allow Dutch trading ships to the East Indies a convenient source of resupply than because holland had vast numbers of people clamoring to move to Africa.

At no point did white people decide that sub-Saharan Africa was worth settling.

The parts that weren't that hazardous like e.g. the fortuitously depopulated highlands in Kenya, or South Africa were settled.

By the time the tropical lowlands stopped being hazardous to health (1950s+), the population pressure in Europe had abated, and elite opinion was changed against colonisation.

Gotta love Wikipedia. After several paragraphs casting shade on the British for their dastardly deeds in stealing the highlands

Today, the region is at the heart of Kenya's economy. It is the country's best served region by road and rail and has many flourishing cities such as Nairobi, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kitale, Thika, Kericho and Nyeri.[6] Although covering only five percent of Kenya's total land area, it produces most of Kenya's agricultural exports, particularly tea, coffee, sisal and pyrethrum.[6]

Just a coincidence I'm sure.

And that in some form is basically true everywhere. The wealthiest and most culturally influential black group today is where they were slaves. Of course many groups do not notice these correlations when reading these articles.

Specifically, the tsetse fly made it difficult to maintain the herds of livestock euros relied on for agriculture, which meant Islam couldn’t expand southwards either even with lots of subsaharan African blood that granted some resistance to malaria.

Most places in sub-Saharan Africa were death sentences for European settlers due to various diseases that there were no good ways of avoiding before the late 19th century.

And "death sentence" often in a very literal sense: some European countries would exile troublesome individuals to their African trading posts / islands as a means of killing them without having to execute them.

It's generally understood that /r/ slatestarcodex is to the left of themotte, hence the fork a few years ago.

Second, we talking reddit here. Not exactly friendly to HBD overall. Posting 'red pills' about HBD incurs a non-trivial likelihood of being banned, either the individual or the sub.

The thing is, it's not just left: It's oblivious left. They demonstrate absolutely no awareness of then existence of obvious counterarguments to the ridiculous things they say. After the split, /r/SlateStarCodex didn't just move left. It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.

/r/SSC has been bleeding quality contributiors for years.

The vast majority of the really high quality blog posts were made between like 2012-2014, then there were a few years with much lower output but still the occasional high quality post and then almost nothing.

It's almost a decade since 2014, multiple community splits and a general ban on discussion on the topics that made both the forum and the blog popular.

Endlessly fascinating to me how hard the internet has accelerated the life cycle for nostalgia, I've noticed myself pining for the good ol' days of the internet with newgrounds, YTMND, SA, 4chan or even what YouTube used to be. These things disappeared or underwent fundamental changes to them not so long ago (a similar timeframe to paying off a car loan or meeting, courting and marrying a stranger) and yet everybody who remembers the internet before Facebook (at least those I've spoken with) all seem to share a similar sentiment. My favorite quote that encapsulates this was from a post from 2014 on one of 4chan's now-defunct text boards saying "2012 was so long ago, was i even alive back then. who knows."

Further viewing for anyone who cares about the phenomenal acceleration of nostalgia as much as I do. ALERT! YouTube link! (also contains what can be considered a very annoying pop song)

Go ahead and read the comments below; from what I can tell these are actual children, or at the very least young adults, waxing poetic on the halcyon days of their youth. This, to me, is just incredible. Literally! Imagine if you had told just about anyone across history that the unblooded youth of society would reminisce over their shared childhood, before they had even stepped into adult society proper. Maybe my priors on this are skewed by my neophyte-tier Cynicism and a knee-jerk tribal desire for RETVRN, but I can't help but wonder if this is something very, very new.

A fascinating topic to me, and one I don't have the requisite familiarity or ability to trawl through academic literature on this subject, or even know if there's been anything published that would cover this.

I don't know that the older generations aren't guilty of this also. Happy Days was from the 70's, That 70's Show was from the 90's.

But then, I am part of that generation that this video is probably targeting (millennials), and people of my generation have almost certainly done some time in adult society by now. Maybe the timeframes are shrinking, I do find myself longing for the days before social media was all-consuming (one such post here), but maybe we're all just reaching back to the last real big inflection point.

There's certainly a market for nostalgia, I won't deny that - I will say you've perhaps glanced at the decade and not the precise date. Happy Days is for sure a bit of a prick to my balloon, but That 70's Show aired originally in 98, nearly thirty years after the 70's began. Even drawing the time frame in as close as possible, you're comparing a show ostensibly set 18 years and some change before its air date, to a condensed nostalgia trip featuring a song that came out 12 years ago (peaked in popularity around 7-10 years ago) paired with clips from kids shows that aired up until three years ago. My more pressing point is about the audience's self declared ages (found in the comment section, a hoary place where few tread). There are easily dozens of remarks from individuals providing identifying information on their ages. A highly updooted comment explicitly states that nostalgia for this song, these clips means you experienced the best Gen Z had to offer.

While television programs and Online Content™ are admittedly apples and oranges, it's more the turnaround that has me impressed. Your last point is well taken too, part of my fascination with this video (not necessarily this one though I love it for its QED power, a cursory search for similarly themed videos will turn up comparable results, courtesy of the wackily overtuned algo) is the response it evoked in me. It almost grabbed me for a moment before my brain caught up with my reaction, started placing each reference next to the metaphorical calendar and immediately noticed that things weren't adding up.

Anything that tries to catch me on that sort of level without my permission is met with automatic suspicion so I'm not certain this isn't me reading signals from the noise, or if maybe this means they grew up on recycled content from the previous generation. Either way it seems off to me, to canonize your own past before you've even found yourself properly settled in the present.

It's censored left. There are HBD posts, most are already deleted is all.

I would like someone to poke Bakkot with a stick on whether it's «Culture War» to mention HBD in a discussion of African dysfunction, if only to see him squirm.

In terms of IQ, I would say themotte is 1/2 of a sd above /r/SlateStarCodex , surveys be damned. A lot of the smart people left.

It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.

Yes, look at this:

https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/116a0hi/the_crowd_gasps_audibly_and_outgoing_governor/j96s71h/

ever hear of google? Embarrassing...

Most people who got to know about HBD didn't look for it, myself included. I stumbled upon it. It did change my view on a lot of things, but I still think liberals have the correct take on a large number of issues. Plus I suppose it's just a matter of socialisation. As a lot of "intellectual heretics" have either departed or been banned off reddit, there is less pushback than ever there. I suppose the same can be said about this place. Ultimately, we're all worse off for it, because intellectual diversity keeps everyone on their toes rather than fragmenting into echo chambers.

Same here, only learned about HBD thanks to the long (long) discussions about it back on the old place. Hasn't changed my mind, since I think there's a heck of a lot of bad data floating around there (and Richard Lynn should be put in the pillory for spreading it around), a lot of environmental influences, and a certain degree of racism to be cleared out of the way before we can get onto "do some populations have lower/higher IQs?"

I think it's possible, indeed. Can we increase IQ by interventions? Once we get things like pollution, malnutrition, lack of access to education, etc. out of the way, if there still is a gap, then we need to think about genetics and how alterable (or not) they are. But the big problem remains a moral one - some people will indeed use HBD as an excuse to be persecutors, to keep people down, because "it's inalterable genetics, they're just inferior by nature, they have to be treated like sub-humans, I don't make the rules".

a lot of environmental influences, and a certain degree of racism to be cleared out of the way

How will we know when it's cleared out of the way?

we can get onto "do some populations have lower/higher IQs?

This is something you do actually have to ask yourself though if you want to reason about these things. If you choose to discard you still have made a choice.

How will we know when it's cleared out of the way?

Probably when we've got to the point of worrying about the Oompa-Loompas.

Who is 'we' to because it seems like we got to that point years ago.

Reddit ban is fairly easy to get now. You have to be quite careful-

I forgot myself for a while and caught a ban on reddit just like that, for mentioning the 30x difference in homicidality in the US between Asians and blacks.

Haha, it's been that way for ages. Last year there were people saying that there was no crime increase in 2020, the 30% increase was just random statistical noise and Scott was making it all up https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/vn40ma/what_caused_the_2020_homicide_spike/ie5ct2u/

And of course ranting about the fucking pigs deserved their bricks which somehow never triggered the new mods' culture war detectors.

It's been a long time coming, and was preventable at every step if the obvious subversives had been purged instead of being handed the keys. Don't make that mistake again.

Currently, both of those comments are downvoted to -3, while the responses are upvoted. So what are we supposed to conclude about the subreddit as a whole from them?

That the mods are responsible for selectively enforcing the "no violence, waging, or even discussing the culture war" rules to bring /r/communism_memes users into the sub.

Quoting naraburns:

HarryPotter5777 does most of the modding (which is not much) but this appears to be more a small extension of their moderation of other communities.

It's the standard reddit power-jannie entryist story.

It's funny, I literally just made a post to this effect in last week's Friday fun thread. As I said then, the dumbing down of the space is inevitable given the growth of the subreddit and the number of good posters who have simply moved to other spaces like here or DSL. I'm surprised people are only just noticing though, I'd say the decline has been obvious for 2+ years

Generally we'd prefer people didn't remove posts unless they really regret posting something.

I don't think this is consensus-building, but it is kind of failing to leave the rest of the Internet at the door. "Look at how stupid SSC has become" isn't exactly a genre of post we want to encourage.

There looks like there's now a comment there from a mod saying that those topics were removed.

Increasing the TFR is monumentally difficult and with your set of constraints just about impossible. A majority of the things anyone is going to suggest in this thread will be blocked by your hypothetical supreme court if that supreme court is the averaged-out federal judiciary of all current first-world countries.

Anyways, I think a lot of the policies I would have suggested (for them to be blocked anyways) are already covered. Mostly economic policies that make housing cheaper, remove subsidies towards women as a class, remove pressure from the middle class, etc. I think @wlxd's answer is excellently put.

Here's an alternative body of ideas to tackle the TFR problem. I'm just going to copypasta a reddit comment by u/jss78.

In Finland, my solution would be perhaps surprising: I'd try to help boys do better at school.

Finland has a peculiar problem where girls do a LOT better at school compared to boys. Most kids whose education stops after elementary school are boys. At high schools, 58% of students are girls, and the percentage remains similar at universities.

This leads to a multitude of social problems, not least because in a high-tech society the job options for the elementary-school-only educated boys are limited. Enter long-term unemployment, drugs, alcohol, depression, suicide.

But it's also suspected to contribute to Finland's remarkably low birth rate. Because girls pursue higher education more than boys, some problematic patterns emerge:

Small towns have an excess of poorly educated young men. Cities and university towns have an excess of highly educated young women.

So our young women and young men are, firstly, in different places, but also they live in very different social spheres. The urban, highly-educated women vote liberal and eat vegetarian, while the poorly-educated small-town men are the core base of right-wing populist parties. Obviously, these people are unlikely to even talk to one another, let alone procreate. (emphasis mine)

That's my #1. Apart from that, a better job market with better long-term employment prospects would help with financial confidence. The government support systems for families with children are already at a very high level compared to the rest of Europe.

I think this comment is directionally correct, if not to the mark. Of course, it had a lukewarm response in mainstream Reddit.

Intuitively, I think that one of the principal components between all first-world countries struggling with TFR issues is that females are given far too (IMO undeserved) much status (college being the end all be all is to blame). @wlxd's first paragraph somewhat brushes on this idea. Most female-dominated white-collar occupations are just glorified email jobs or secretary jobs with different names. And people can feel that, they won't say it but they will make memes about it.

In no sane world should a "human resources coordinator" with a Communications degree who sends out emails for a living, feel that the Electrician who wired up her house is beneath her. She is just as much of a 110 IQ boring, passionless midwit as she thinks the Electrician is, but at least one of them is useful to society.

My solution isn't to necessarily make boys better at school, it's to make girls worse. But anything that could knock some humility into the emailing class, let that be propaganda, defunding useless degrees (defunding education as a whole would be amazing, but that's reserved for the kingdom of God.), whatever.

Yes I do think increasing the "Fuck rate" will increase the birth rate. This will have all kinds of nth-order effects from increased "accidents" to those "accidents" making an email job not so appealing or unfeasible, just scratching the tip of the iceberg.

Wildcard: This entire enterprise might be outside the scope of politics to fix altogether. Population dynamics can be chaotic and that includes humans too, the premise that TFR could be increased at all is not written in stone.

In no sane world should a "human resources coordinator" with a Communications degree who sends out emails for a living, feel that the Electrician who wired up her house is beneath her.

Counter point - We lived for millennia without electricity, but communicating is a key factor in building community, consensus and indeed society. Creating and nurturing those bonds has been a female role for a long time (see who tends to organize church events et al even where the milieu is explicitly patriarchal). It is those artificial but carefully maintained social ties that are what have allowed us to scale tribes into cities, nations and overarching cultures. Those roles are high status because they are absolutely VITAL in a societal sense.

This is not to denigrate electricians, most of my uncles on one side of my family are electricians or plumbers (and most on the other side are teachers) but I think there is a tendency especially in the rationalish sphere to devalue just how important emotional and social cohesiveness is (possibly due to the fact that "normie" women are not exactly well represented either there or here). And from what I can tell in both my own and others marriages, and in every company and organization I have ever worked for it is nigh exclusively women in these "useless" communication roles that do that. There probably isn't much need for the Communications degree but building a corporate culture begins with communication that most men, again in my experience are not interested in. Women are heavily involved in the social shaming, rewarding and so on that is the foundation of our societies, top to bottom.

Which leads to the solution. If you want more babies, you have to convince enough socially influential women to shame and judge other women for not having enough kids. More easily said than done of course, but the only real answer. Social status, social shaming and judgement will outweigh any amount of financial incentives or law changes.

There probably isn't much need for the Communications degree but building a corporate culture begins with communication that most men, again in my experience are not interested in. Women are heavily involved in the social shaming, rewarding and so on that is the foundation of our societies, top to bottom.

"Communications coordinators" are the type of people who destroy corporate culture, not create it.

Great corporate culture is created from a groups of people working together to solve difficult problems. So to build this culture, you want to hire intelligent and conscientious people who are passionate about solving the types of problems your organization needs.

Having worked everywhere from blue chip tech companies to the civil service, I very much disagree. The high performing go getters are required but they don't care much about corporate culture, but the 90% of people in the organization who do the grunt work benefit from it highly.

Most work in most organizations does not involve solving difficult problems. Your high performing, high IQ, problem solvers will do great regardless of culture (though a great team with a great facilitator will do even better than one without). The work of billing and managing and the boring day to day work required for a company to survive benefits from cohesiveness and shared culture.

You're off topic. You were supposed to defend "human resource managers" by showing how they build corporate culture, and you're arguing whether or not high-achievers are more important than average workers.

I've also worked in a bunch of places, and never saw an HR activity that didn't feel like a communist rally. You march, you smile, you clap, because if you don't you get a one way ticket to Siberia.

I'd also like to note that we've had communication and community building without communication degrees for longer than we've gone without electricity.

Yes, and what do you think being judged for not going to church or not going to the rally is? It puts social pressure on you to conform. Thats what social cohesion is, limiting the options available.

You may not like the culture they are building and enforcing, just the way i don't necessarily like that small town America forced gay people ro stay in the closet but it is a step towards a more homogeneous culture. And often that is led by "church ladies" or the equivalent. HR are the church ladies of your company. They tell the pastor you were seen at a strip club or with a woman other than your wife, so as to shame you and enforce certain standards.

And i already noted the communication degree is probably not necessary.

Yes, and what do you think being judged for not going to church or not going to the rally is? It puts social pressure on you to conform. Thats what social cohesion is, limiting the options available.

Social cohesion is persuading me to work for the benefit of the group. You can make me go through the motions with threats of ostracism, but you're not going to make me walk the extra mile for you, not unless there's something in it for me. That's the opposite of cohesion.

Maybe you're an outlier but history shows us people will do a lot to avoid being ostracised. Fear and shame are strong motivators and every cohesive society uses them liberally. Because they work on most people.

We learn them as kids very early. You'll get mocked for having the wrong shoes or being a nerd, or nowadays not being a nerd, and most people react by publicly at least going along with it. Not everyone of course, but enough.

People here are likely to be more contrarian than average, but for most people thesectools are extremely effective.

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I'm baffled by the suggestion that voluntelling people to put their pronouns in their email signature, attend pointless diversity seminars and wear green ribbons on their lapels is somehow improving social cohesiveness within a company.

That isn't all or even most of what HR does however. But even so thatv is exactly what building social cohesion is like. Attending church, publicly espousing certain views, being judged for being outside those views, are all replicated inside organizations.

Social shame and social judgement is the building block of society. It's the reason we're so good at, it limits the differences accepted in a society, or in this case a company.

Of course all that "social cohesion" goes out the window when it turns out a plurality of your work force goes through the motions purely cynically.

Does it? People going to church still cheated on their wives and husbands. Some went to church and then secretly snuck out to a gay bar. Social cohesiveness is largely concerned that we publicly adhere to the shared values.

If you think a rule is nonsense but you follow it anyway, whether engaging in Church or at the DEI seminar you are still following the rules outwardly. You don't actually have to be a believer.

Does it? People hoingvto church still cheated on their wives and husbands. Some went to church and then secretly snuck out to a gay bar. Social cohesiveness is largely concerned that we publicly adhere to the shared values.

Yes, it does. We're not talking about believers going to church, but occasionally falling to the temptation of sin, we're talking about half of the congregation secretly following a completely different religion. Social cohesion is not people following the rules when they're afraid they might get caught, it's them following the rules even when they know they could get away with it.

Which is why God can see all and HR can read your emails and slack chats and anyone you talk to can inform on you.

Social cohesion is exactly people following the rules when they are afraid they might be caught. We're selfish individuals at heart, society has to fight against that and it has a lot of tools in its box to do it. The basic ones are fear and shame.

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Carefully creating and nurturing social bonds is a role that has historically been fulfilled by women through marriage and childcare i.e. assuming the role of wife and mother, mother-in-law, grandmother etc., forming communal bonds with other women in the context of childcare, motherhood and preparation for these roles.

Not through signing up for some bullshit job at a corporation.

But I think you already know that.

Yes, but roles adapt. A company of 1000 people needs those social bonds and culture just as a village of a thousand does.

A village of a 1000 is a community with traditions, a shared history, identity, familial/blood relations, tied to the soil etc.

A company of 1000 is just an urban office where mostly rootless people who otherwise have rather few things in common and usually have high turnover go to toil away for money in front of screens.

Precisely why it takes a lot of effort to create in the company.

A company is not a community, but, in the current context, a facilitator of corporate profit, nothing more.

Why would i be trying to be insulting? As far as I can tell you're agreeing with me?

Counter point - We lived for millennia without electricity, but communicating is a key factor in building community, consensus and indeed society. Creating and nurturing those bonds has been a female role for a long time (see who tends to organize church events et al even where the milieu is explicitly patriarchal).

This work may be important, but formalizing it and ranking it within the same hierarchy as male status is not inevitable, and in fact is historically fairly recent. In most pre-modern societies a young woman who helped facilitate social relationships in her village would not on that account consider herself to be of superior social rank to a blacksmith or a baker and therefore refuse to consider them as partners, the way the HR manager now considers herself the social superior of the electrician.

Rather, young people of both sexes would usually have the same social rank as their fathers. Because about as many male vs. female children would be born to families at each social rank, there was little possibility of an excess of women who couldn't find similarly-ranked men.

She probably would internally consider herself socially superior to an uncouth blacksmith even if she wouldn't say it.

But the very social pressures she uses are used on her by other even more socially influential women to promote marriage et al.

Tales of women having to put up with and improve poorly socialized men are age old. You can't fix that "Women are wonderful" effect so don't even try. You just make the alternative of spinsterhood even more shameful. Once she is attached to Perrin she can turn her talents to improving his status and thereby her own. Women wanting to "fix" a man is an age old stereotype, presumably for a reason.

The shaming by other women of being single and childless is your key factor to push the union. Assuming as per the OP's conditions we can't mandate arranged marriages at least.

I already replied below, but this bit up here caught my attention:

Which leads to the solution. If you want more babies, you have to convince enough socially influential women to shame and judge other women for not having enough kids. More easily said than done of course, but the only real answer. Social status, social shaming and judgement will outweigh any amount of financial incentives or law changes.

Women already shame and judge the fuck out of each other, to a frightening degree. What makes you think re-directing this age-old social weapon will be to anyone's benefit?

Because you can't stop it. Something will be shamed. The fact that it has existed for so long suggests its important as it is nearly ubquitous as you point out.

So its either pointed randomly, or pointed at things we like or things we dislike. But it will be pointed somewhere.

Where are all these college educated lonely women? I've been in the upper-middle urban class my whole life and I've never been in a space where there was an abundance of lonely women (Edit: until I moved to a developing country). I think this is a myth.

While the educational disparity might be one explanation for Finland's fertility rate, one thing to note is that for many years now, Finland (and other Nordics), unlike many other countries, have had a fertility pattern where the most educated are more likely to have kids than the least educated, both for women and men. If the issue was that women can't find spouses because they are more educated than men, this would presumably be the other way around for them.

We’ll have to focus on women. Either convince/bribe/force them, or revoke their power.

Women have the power over birth, kids and anything remotely connected to natality. We keep giving them more power and taking it from men. Natality keeps going down. Now correlation does not prove causation, but as they say, it does wiggle suggestively. So if natality going down is a problem, it might be a good idea to stop increasing women’s power, which I consider to be well past the point of state-backed privilege anyway.

Convince: End all government-mandated net transfers (until they are no longer net transfers) from men to women, outside of a nuclear family, including child support, alimony, maternity leave, paid university, pensions, welfare etc. If women want to live off men, then at least let it be for the kids, they should cooperate with men economically like they cooperated genetically. I expect men, now in a stronger relative position, to be more likely to vote for kids rather than finding yourself in a fun degree you will never use etc.

Bribe: Boring tax cuts? Increases linearly then drops sharply after the third child. Wouldn’t want a starving rabbit underclass.

Revoke: Right of the father to adopt instead of abortions.

Force: No. All measures compatible with legal equality and freedom of the individual.

We’ll have to focus on women. Either convince/bribe/force them, or revoke their power.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph, it's like none of you are over twenty. None of you clearly remember the days when men hated the idea of the "marriage trap" and being tied down to a wife and kids. Why the fuck do you think the Sexual Revolution happened? Men wanted sex without commitment. Before the Pill, if you fucked a nice girl, you ran the risk of getting her pregnant and that meant a shotgun marriage. Whether you believe the evo-psych story about men being wired to be promiscuous or not, it's certainly true that men want to be able to play the field until they're ready to settle down once older.

You can have all the women in the world ready to get married and become wives and mothers once they turn 17, but if men don't want to be tied down to be husbands and fathers, it won't work. If a man doesn't want to come home to a house full of six squalling kids, he'll either pack up and leave, or stay away as much as he can and take up with prostitutes and loose women for his fun times. That does not make for stable marriages or families.

Work on getting men to want to be married and fathers before they hit thirty, and then we can talk about increasing fertility.

And to be clear, this is why so many historical societies had arranged marriages with gigantic age gaps.

I should note that one of the big flaws with ‘eh, just have girls right out of high school marry 30 somethings’ is that the women themselves do not like this idea, not one bit. To get women to buy into big age gaps it takes a lot of social conditioning and they still prefer smaller ones. So then you’d basically need coerced arranged marriages. Good luck with that.

Women control reproduction in our societies, that's just a fact. A small part of the reason is biological, but the lion's share is legal. Working on men would be like jailing the passenger for the driver's drunken accident. Let's say all men already were fanatical natalists. They couldn't do anything about it, it would still be 100% women's decision. Personnally, I don't think this is normal or fair, but I can understand the contrary position, pointing to biological differences. But you refuse to even assume responsibility for the greater power granted to women. They decide, so if anyone is to be worked on, it's them. They've successfully reduced men to an 'advisory role' in natality and parenting, but according to you women still do not have agency, it's up to powerless men to act .

All measures compatible with legal equality and freedom of the individual.

Forcing a woman to carry a child to term so the father can adopt it isn't freedom

Only if you disagree with and/or igmore arguments that the unborn baby has rights that are being violated when the mother aborts.

It's the solution that offers the best compromise between the rights and freedoms of each. She did have unprotected sex while not intending to care for the resulting child, a few months inconvenience is the manageable consequence. I don't see why she should have the right to kill his child/clump of cells. In any case, artificial wombs should make that argument obsolete.

... do more men want children than women? That isn't at all the impression I get, whatever the social class.

this takes a bunch of surveys to claim that women generally intend to have more children than they do, but are held back by other factors. I lazily pick gss core ideal fertility because it seems like the easiest one to get, and plot time vs average ideal fertility for men and women. Women's are a little bit higher but they're mostly the same, which was my guess.

I don't think surveys are that valuable here, and what you're measuring isn't intent in any meaningful sense but dumb simulacra, but my anecdotal experience lines up with it.

can one embed images?

All time trends are correlated, so birth rates and female power being anticorrelated isn't any more surprising than birth control and male feminization increasing in tandem. Maybe the birth control's in the tap water, or maybe a lot of significant changes happen simultaneously over decades in a complex society, and seeming similar isn't enough to prove direct causation. That in this survey (and, I'd guess, the others) male ideal/desired children tracks those of women suggests other things are influencing both. Maybe birth control, a desire to better a few children with education rather than have many children, more desire for career or leisure than family, caring for children being an unfun burden, etc.

This is completely pulled out of my backside, but the impression I get is that men are serial fathers - they'll have a lot of kids, but generally by several women. Reading Wikipedia bios of various figures recently, I'm struck by the pattern of "married first wife - two kids - divorced - married second wife - another kid - divorced again - married third wife which lasted until his death - three kids with her". Not all the time, but generally men who have five or six kids are "married, divorced, remarried" not "six kids with my childhood sweetheart whom I married when we were both 18 and we stayed together till death parted us."

Again, impressions from a previous job, but men who split up with their spouses/partners and take up with a new (often younger) partner have a kid with her pretty soon, even if in their first relationship the family was 'complete'; part of this seems to be the woman making sure the new relationship is cemented, but part of it is also something something showing off virility something something for the men. So it seems if you want men to have lots of kids, you need to let them have access to lots of women.

I couldn't resist copying this exact question and asking our new AI Overlord.

Here`s what ChatGPT had to say:

As a populist center-right leader, your primary goal is to maintain the support of your base while implementing policies that align with your party's values. However, increasing the total fertility rate in your country requires more than just ideological alignment. Here are a few potential strategies you could use to achieve this goal:

Incentivize childbearing: One way to encourage people to have more children is to offer financial incentives. For example, you could provide tax breaks for families with multiple children, offer subsidies for childcare, or give bonuses to companies that provide paid parental leave. These types of policies may appeal to your base, who prioritize family values and may be more likely to have multiple children themselves.

Improve access to family planning services: While banning birth control would be deeply unpopular, you could implement policies that make family planning more accessible and affordable. This could include expanding access to contraception, offering free or low-cost fertility treatments, or providing education about natural family planning methods. By giving people more control over their reproductive choices, you may be able to reduce unintended pregnancies and increase the overall fertility rate.

Address economic barriers to childbearing: One reason people may delay or forgo having children is the high cost of living and the difficulty of raising a family on a single income. To address this, you could implement policies that make it easier for families to make ends meet. This could include increasing the minimum wage, offering subsidies for housing or healthcare, or providing job training programs that help people get higher-paying jobs. By addressing economic barriers to childbearing, you may be able to increase the number of families who feel financially secure enough to have children.

Promote pro-family values: As a populist, you have the ability to shape public opinion and promote certain values. By using your platform to promote the importance of family and child-rearing, you may be able to create a cultural shift that encourages more people to have children. This could include highlighting the benefits of large families, celebrating parents who have multiple children, or emphasizing the role of family in building strong communities.

It's worth noting that there are many factors that influence a country's fertility rate, and no single policy or strategy is guaranteed to be effective. However, by implementing a combination of these approaches and working to create a pro-family culture, you may be able to increase the fertility rate in your country over time.

Incentivize childbearing: [...]

Sorry ChatGPT, we keep doing that and it keeps not working.

Improve access to family planning services: [...]

On its face counterproductive, and you've offered no reason it wouldn't be.

Address economic barriers to childbearing:

Same as the first: We keep doing it and it keeps not working. Fails to address the U-shaped income/fertility curve.

Promote pro-family values:

Nice idea but ruled out by the conditions of the hypothetical.

Sorry ChatGPT, we keep doing that and it keeps not working.

Do we? My not-particularly-well-researched impression is that the cost of having and successfully raising children is growing faster than any subsidies provided for doing so.

Isn't that expected? Same thing happens when you subsidize education, healthcare, etc.

And if the costs are the reason fir thr liw borth rates, why is it the poorest who keep having most children?

Isn't that expected? Same thing happens when you subsidize education, healthcare, etc.

It may be expected, but that's unrelated to the question whether the observations actually give us any signal about whether sufficient levels of subsidies would work.

And if the costs are the reason fir thr liw borth rates, why is it the poorest who keep having most children?

I assume the subsidies you get do not scale with your own wealth all that much, and raising a poor child is (definitionally) cheaper than raising a middle-class child. Subsidies may be sufficient for the former but not the latter: if the subsidies let a person living in a moldy apartment, bagging groceries at a convenience store in a gang-riddled neighbourhood for a living and eating rice and beans every day raise a child also living in the moldy apartment, eating rice and beans every day and going to the public school those gangs recruit from, all this says is that they would also let a middle-class person raise a child in a moldy apartment, eating rice and beans and going to a gang-riddled public school. Having children with a significantly lower standard of living than yourself may be supported in the ethical frameworks of medieval noblemen and warlords, but I don't see it being something inhabitants of our culture could be persuaded of easily.

Having children with a significantly lower standard of living than yourself

That would only be the case during their childhood, you don't actually need to spend a lot of money for them to have a decent career. Maybe not being able to guarantee trips to Disneyland, or that everyone has their own bedroom (you're being a bit of a drama queen with eating rice and living in moldy apartments), is what keeps people from having kids, I can even get into that headspace, but ultimately I think it's precisely backwards. Let the little bastards experience some scarcity, so they don't get spoiled.

I don’t know how it is elsewhere but the American poor do often live in barely habitable apartments and eat terrible diets(although usually not literally rice and beans).

He's saying it's ok for them, because they're so poor the subsidies will be enough to make a difference, but that a childless middle-class couple would be propelled into similar squalor if they have a kid. That's what I'm skeptical of.

If the poorest women were up to stuff other than raising kids, they'd just be poor women, not the poorest.

That's far from certain. People are quite capable of blowing money on unimportant things.

ChatGPTs ideas were to increase the subsidies; that's what won't work. You can't outrace the costs because the subsidies are driving the costs. Subsidizing daycare, for instance, makes daycare more expensive.

By giving people more control over their reproductive choices, you may be able to reduce unintended pregnancies and increase the overall fertility rate.

It's like Winston after he's come out of the Ministry of Truth.

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

  1. An aggressive campaign remove any form of female affirmative action and similar policies, particularly in education and employment.

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.

  1. Destroy and disrupt social media as much as possible, especially dating apps.

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.

  1. For certain parts of the world, actively promote religious organizations (especially Catholic Church) and weaken the separation of church and state.

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'.

An aggressive campaign remove any form of female affirmative action and similar policies, particularly in education and employment.

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 comments

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.

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?

The quick answer, because it's the reverse of how the US knocked the last bit of fertility off, is to encourage teenage pregnancy. The trick is to get the NGO/academia/media matrix to do it to themselves. Maybe start railing against how some high school has so many students with babies that there's an unofficial day-care. Once the NGO/academia/media matrix knows my Trumpian majesty is against it, they'll be for it, and all I have to do is fight it badly.

The “matrix” already knows that right-wingers, even populist ones, are against teen pregnancy. I submit, as evidence, any article written about the takedown of Roe v. Wade.

Yet these devilish authorities aren’t trying to Make Adolescents Gravid Again. Perhaps because it’s obviously against their values, because it offends their audience’s sensibilities, or because there’s no real upside?

Your enemies aren’t stupid.

Right wingers love teen pregnancy as long as the teens are married (to each other).

That’s not true, though.

Right wingers don’t consider teen pregnancy unequivocally evil, worst thing that could ever happen, utterly catastrophic the way left wingers do. But they also don’t think it’s a good thing.

I suppose it's only true insofar as "right winger" means "hillbilly"--but even then, I think that Child Bride movie from the 1930's or whatever may well have memed "teenage marriage" out of existence in America for a time.

Do even hillbillies do teen marriage anymore? My prior is distinctly that legacy Americans doing teen marriages are tiny, isolated pockets, most of which are cults.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

The “matrix” already knows that right-wingers, even populist ones, are against teen pregnancy.

Yes, that's why it has a chance of working.

Trump on several occasions managed to drive the left to overreaction, sometimes in trivial ways (having them denounce Western Civilization when he praised it), sometimes in more impactful ones, like the pushing of trans ideology in schools (which may have lost them the Virginia governorship). I'm not suggesting pushing the left to openly Make Adolescents Gravid Again, only to take action which will result in that even as they swear it won't.

Getting the media to denounce something is easy. Getting an overreach on gender is…I don’t know that it’s easy, but I also don’t think Trumpism deserves credit/blame for that one? I guess he really inspired various forms of idpol opposition, so maybe that let Virginia’s curriculum get off the ground. Not sure.

Regardless, boosting teen pregnancy seems like a much more difficult outcome. Words are cheap, social trends are expensive. What mechanism do you think a Trump-deranged opposition would set in motion?

Figure out which sorts of programs actually caused the drop in teen pregnancy. Then promote them. For instance, if programs with the message that it's hard to go to college with a kid worked, push them, in such a way that the opposition will insist that it's actually no problem and desirable for a women to have a baby while getting a degree. Yes, this is a very high degree of derangement, but I believe a Trump-like figure could cause it.

I'm not sure why the center-right part is important, are you not interested in solutions that would also please the left?

Among many other schemes already mentioned, I would try and facilitate surrogacy tourism/immigration.

If foreign women sign a surrogacy/reproduction contract with a citizen, they are granted citizenship and subsidies. We could also cut red tape around live-in nannies to make it easier for these women to live with their clients. Presumably these women can also offer low-skill labour, and could become nannies or cheap child-care workers. Cutting the red-tape around these contracts would also be great, it would be nice if middle-class couples/individuals could just find a surrogate using a simple friction-less online-matching service.

I've shared this idea with people, it sickens leftists to think of the inequality these women experience. It sickens conservatives to think how strange the family changes around this new opportunity. Personally, in accordance with libertarian philosophy, I think giving people additional opportunities is generally a good thing. However I feel bad for the foreign men who can't immigrate because they don't have wombs. Also, I suppose womb-draining low-income countries would qualify as eugenics.

Also, I suppose womb-draining low-income countries would qualify as eugenics.

The likelihood is that this scheme would lower the average IQ in both the host and donor nations.

Why do you think it would impact the host nation?

Do we have evidence to suggest the surrogate's IQ is important in determining the child's IQ? These surrogates would certainly be less conscious of detrimental factors like smoking and drinking, but that's what contracts are for. Even better if they're closely monitored by their clients.

Lower income nations have (on average) lower average IQs than high income nations. Adding surrogates from, say, Somalia, would tend to lower the average IQ in Norway.

That's correct, but if these women are birthing at least one child according to my scheme, that child would eventually have an IQ higher than the host nation average (because clients would be upper/middle class). Many of these women would get multiple contracts or contracts for twins, so I would think it would actually raise the mean IQ of the host nation.

I'm not sure why the center-right part is important, are you not interested in solutions that would also please the left?

I think the intent is to find solutions which aren't the obvious "mass immigration" one currently being used.

That wouldn't solve fertility really, it'd just fix the demographic problem

Unless the immigrants maintain their much higher birth rates. I don’t know if this is historically the case or not.

At least in the US it’s not. Historically the only groups that have resisted assimilation into mainstream US culture have been religious.

Defund higher education, focusing on female dominated degrees with little human capital value (eg. slash funding for psychology and education degrees to near zero, but things like medicine or veterinary are fine). Defund 3rd tier and below schools hard across the board, hopefully closing as many as possible altogether. Goals is to get people, and especially women, into adulthood as soon as possible.

Introduce very high tax benefits for married families with small children where mother is not working. Pair this with cuts in maternity leave benefits, might be needed to do these covertly to not increase uproar. Eg. cap the income paid out by social security, make it possible for small businesses to fire the employees who took the leave, in exchange for eg. making the paid leave period longer for the fired mothers, and restarting the paid period when another child is born during the leave. In short, the goal here is to make sure that get as many mothers out of employment as possible, so that they don’t have it lined up and waiting for them. When returning to work is not trivial as showing up at the end of the leave, you might as well have a second and third child, and only go back to work after you meet your fertility goals.

While we’re at it, high benefits and support to young married couples. Goal is to encourage people to marry early. This is the hardest part, not sure how to get good ROI here.

Covertly defund childcare subsidies for infants, and increase costs of private childcare by regulations. Freeze annual budget increases, regulate lower children-to-caretaker ratio to increase cost, increase credential requirements, compliance costs, reporting requirement etc. The idea is to make childcare by anyone other than mother rather silly and uneconomical choice for most people.

Overall, the guiding idea is to make people start having kids much earlier, and once they take the plunge, make having a second kid much smaller marginal cost/effort compared to returning to work ASAP. People should plan to first meet their fertility goals, before they start building their careers, because there is little to no support to having kids while you are having a career.

If you make motherhood and career as incompatible as possible don't you run the obvious risk of lots of women choosing careers over motherhood? You'd end up with lots of educated women disincentivized from having kids since once they do their career is over/paused until their kids are teenagers since they can't hire a nanny affordably. Low education women are more willing to do that, but the issue is that people tend to marry people of similar education and you'd have to give pretty massive subsidy to young couples for a low education man to be able to support multiple dependents comfortably.

I'd be kind of worried about a society where all the high income/prestige careers are occupied by childless educated couples and low education married couples with multiple dependents where women can't divorce or else they're impoverished.

Yes, I do, but this is already a status quo. Fertility is already lowest in the top quartile of income distribution, only recovering among the very wealthiest. In fact, I think the current situation is worse: many women do not realize that they are facing this choice, and implicitly choose career over fertility, often realizing this very late. Women’s stated desired fertility is, on average, way higher than their actual realized fertility, and even if you chalk some of it up as social desirability bias, I believe that if given an explicit choice between fertility and career, enough will choose fertility to keep the TFR high.

That’s also why it is so crucial to slash higher education and promote early marriage: if you’re adult by 19 instead of 23, you might as well meet your fertility goals before you start your career. Have the 2-3 kids you want early, so that by the time you’re 26-27, the youngest is 4, and so is not such a huge energy and time drain. A bonus point is that it makes you more attractive for employers, because you won’t disappear for long maternity leave, as you already have that behind you. Most of higher education is worthless anyway, especially the degrees that most women are getting. This is also why tax benefits for married men with non-working wives are so important, to make delaying their own career more palatable for highly intelligent and capable women.

Point is, women will still be able to have careers in the model I propose, they will just start them 2-4 years later, after they meet their other important goals in life. Goal is to make the choice more explicit, rather than lying to them by pretending that they can put off having family and children for decades, and still have it all anyway.

That’s also why it is so crucial to slash higher education and promote early marriage: if you’re adult by 19 instead of 23, you might as well meet your fertility goals before you start your career.

Will you do this for men as well? Because if you're a young woman with what society considers no education, you're not going to have a career when you're thirty and the kids are old enough to be in school most of the day. You're going to force women to choose between "do I want to leave school at 18, be pregnant at 19, and have no life until maybe I'm 40, or do I want to get a degree and a guaranteed good job so I don't have to depend on a man in order to make my living". And the choice may not work out - why do you think even lower-class women are working? They're not all single mothers, they didn't go to college, but in today's economy in order to have a house and kids you need two incomes. Making a family dependent on a single breadwinner requires making it that the breadwinner can earn enough to support a family. Unless you're Elon Musk, are we seeing that today?

And all the suggestions here are about forcing women to become brood mares. It takes two to tango - if a man doesn't want to be tied down with a dependent wife and five kids starting when he turns twenty, how are you going to get men to get married and become fathers? Cut off their choices too by making it impossible to get an education, reducing paid leave as much, and confining them to blue collar/manual labour work.

Because I can tell you this much: this won't work. Employers want 'productive' workers, which means ones who will make a lot of money for the company. The cleaner or the shop assistant isn't that employee so far as they're concerned, and that's the calibre of employee when you're talking about "graduated high school, immediately started popping out babies, has no education or qualification and hasn't ever worked outside the home in a full-time adult job":

A bonus point is that it makes you more attractive for employers, because you won’t disappear for long maternity leave, as you already have that behind you.

"do I want to leave school at 18, be pregnant at 19, and have no life until maybe I'm 40, or do I want to get a degree and a guaranteed good job so I don't have to depend on a man in order to make my living"

I do not doubt that many, perhaps even large majority of women today think in these exact terms. This is, however, not a frame of mind that necessarily follows from the assumptions I described above, but rather is a result of relentless cultural change, spearheaded by progressive activism. The reason I believe so is that only half a century ago, huge majority of women did, in fact, leave school at 18, median woman was married by 23, and very few had "being able to make a living independently of a partner" as even a secondary goal. As far as I can tell, large majority of women at the time was completely fine depending on their husband, and I believe (based on my personal experience) that this arrangement was better for their emotional well being (as long as, of course, the men kept their side of the bargain).

This is the crucial problem: the culture has changed, and it is simply hostile to the patterns of behavior conducive to forming stable, fertile families at a very fundamental level. Unlike /u/DaseindustriesLtd in his comment, I didn't even bother trying to come up with ways to change this culture, because, for one thing, I'm not really good at this, but even more importantly, I think that the setting of "populist center-right leader of a country, with a hostile progressive Cathedral that cannot be dismantled" makes a chance of successfully pulling off a cultural victory rather slim. Such complex programs of shaping narrative to make over entire social perception is simply not something that populist (or, for that matter, any) right is effective at. That's why what I propose can be easily instituted with a stroke of a pen, and doesn't require building entire self-perpetuating propaganda machine. This is also why so much of what I propose would be necessary to do covertly: if people understood what's actually going on, they'd likely oppose it, even if on some level they agreed with the ultimate goal.

But, yes, what about men. Well, they should also marry early, but not as young as women, maybe 2-3 years older, to give them a few more years to get more settled into their occupation, so that they can confidently provide for their new families, and take pride in it. The newlyweds should feel ready to have kids immediately,rather than put it off for a few more years to stabilize their economic situation.

in today's economy in order to have a house and kids you need two incomes

I simply do not buy it, sorry. I grew up in a society where two incomes bought you much less actual consumption than one regular job brings you in the States today. Now, if you said that these two incomes are needed in today's culture, I'd be in total agreement.

Observe, however, how all my proposals are designed to make two incomes simply not worth it, or harder to benefit from. High tax benefits for husbands of stay-at-home mothers mean enormous marginal tax on a second income. Cap on maternity leave income is another large marginal tax, and so is extension of leave upon birth of extra kids. Artificially high cost of childcare services means that most women will spend more on daycare than they'll earn from the second job.

Cut off their choices too by making it impossible to get an education, reducing paid leave as much, and confining them to blue collar/manual labour work.

In my proposal, I already cut tertiary education to minimum. Regardless of whether we condition the remainder on marriage/parenthood status, I don't think that this will push the needle much, given that this should affect only small fraction of people who actually enter universities. Now that you suggest it, however, I do think that this is an interesting and possibly viable idea: make universities expensive, but offer big scholarships to married parent students. I am also totally for diminishing the social status and economic perspectives of unmarried, childless men: I think strongly progressive income taxation for childless individuals would be highly successful here, but it might be hard to implement in the given setting. American cathedral has successfully diminished the status of white men in corporate setting through legal bullying based on Civil Rights, and supported by the federal government, but I suspect the setting does not allow us to run similar program.

The cleaner or the shop assistant isn't that employee so far as they're concerned, and that's the calibre of employee when you're talking about "graduated high school, immediately started popping out babies, has no education or qualification and hasn't ever worked outside the home in a full-time adult job":

My personal experience in the academia and the corporate worlds, alongside with general research into the problem, has led me to believe that formal education and qualifications are in themselves worth very, very little, and are only useful for the employers to the extent they serve as a signal of the latent quality of the individual. Remember, America has built industrial economy, ran Manhattan project and sent a man to the moon when less than 10% of the population had a college degree.

I think you greatly overestimate the value of the higher education, and judge its value based on comparing people who today obtain it with those who don't. This is a huge mistake. Today, anyone even remotely intelligent and capable gets a college degree, because it is stupid not to, but in a world I propose, most of them would just be intelligent, capable and productive immediately in their jobs, instead of being artificially delayed by 4+ years. This is not a pipe dream, this is the world of yesterday.

Might this also make careers in education attractive to top quintile women again?

I've 4 school aged children and the quality of elementary school teachers seems lower than my or my wife's experience.

None of them play the piano or other instrument, none are fluent in a second language.

If you make motherhood and career as incompatible as possible don't you run the obvious risk of lots of women choosing careers over motherhood?

No, lots of women have historically done economically-productive work while having kids. In fact, it gets easier to do so the more kids you have, as the elder can be entrusted with child supervision responsibilities over the younger.

What is really messing around with people is the extremely-extended adolescence that expanded access to tertiary education has wrought (well, it might actually just be the uniquely-weird position of the Millennial generation, which first had to deal with a glutted post-secondary job market thanks to the Boomers and offshoring, and then had to deal with a massively depressed post-tertiary job market due to the Great Recession, and so has been seriously behind in going through life's maturation steps like moving out, getting access to promotions and professional networks, and the ability to amass assets like housing stock.)

Yeah there's vast economies of scale with children which makes the current situation a bit weird, both in the sense of within a singular family unit and within an extended family it's easier to conduct childcare when you've got a bunch of cousins reproducing at about the same time.

Well, that assumes that extended families stay in generally the same place, and what with the youth flooding into the megalopoli to seek white collar prestige jobs I don't know that's a sound assumption anymore.

What country are we imagining, here? In the USA, my answer is-

Allow married women access to social security for up to the first two years after childbirth as a replacement for earned income. You can get this done, although it would technically have to be gender equal, by making it dependent on a working spouse’s social security number.

Offer student loan forgiveness with marriage and childbirth. For best results, I’d probably do $10,000 forgiven at marriage, 20k for the first child, and everything wiped out after three, with a smaller payout for child number 2. Have this with no sunsetting.

Require states to make a no-frills childbirth free through medicaid with no means-testing.

Preempt local car seat requirements for children five or older.

Preempt local car seat requirements for children five or older.

Sounds funny, but this is directionally among the best pieces of advice here. My SO and I (we met in grad school in the US) discussed the possibility of having children in the future before, and quickly concluded that we like the idea iff we do not return to the US, because safetyism is enshrined in the law and culture to the point that depending on the state you are expected to provide your children with 24/7 minders up until age 14 or so, and still can get CPSed for something random that a neighbourhood busybody happened to dislike (no child seat? unfiltered internet access? allowed to climb a tree? slapped for throwing a tantrum?). And then there's the ridiculous costs, both for satisfying safety demands (babysitters and what-not) and for obtaining anything resembling decent schooling.

Sounds funny

It's not just a joke. The cost of not preventing 8000ish births is that you also don't get to prevent 60ish deaths, though.

It's kind of weird that we have reason to patch up our car's seats post-hoc at all, though, isn't it? That there isn't a standard seat-belt adjustment for them? At some point around "all new vehicles must have dual front airbags" (1998) or at least by "all new vehicles must have backup cameras" (2018), you'd think "all new vehicles must be able to buckle up a toddler without inserting a third-party Rube Goldberg contraption" should have been on the table.

Either the auto industry shot down the idea, or it genuinely isn't physically feasible. Or, pure failure of the imagination and somehow nobody thought of it. I dunno, those baby seats must be doing a hell of a lot to have so much instituional inertia.

I remember built in car seats in mini vans when I was in elementary school, but it’s probably not physically possible to have the same seat securely accommodate a small child and an adult. The size difference is too big.

a few things spring to mind- at the highest end, wealthy people don't care and can just buy a super nice kid seat, at the lower ends people want a vehicle that will last 10+ years. Removability of the child seat is a feature. Secondly, resale value on cars with permanent child seats would plummet, because who wants to buy a car knowing that its had shitty snotty kids in it for the last however long.

Specifically I recall some kind of flip-down contraption built into the seats for easy convertability. While they feature in my memories predominantly as being impossible to clean to the point of the filth motivating me to get out of car seats ASAP, my suspicion is that the real reason for their disappearance is a change in minimum required standards for car seats.

The safetyism is dumb and annoying but the ridiculous costs argument is also not totally true- the median public school is on par with its equivalent in other developed countries. There’s a few really really bad schools that coast on fraud and really low standards, and they’re fairly easy to avoid.

Certainly my working class neighbors don’t feel any need to supervise their children 100% of the time or refrain from corporal punishment.

Remittances will not work, at least not within reason, because childlessness is motivated by status and careerism. The poorest of families consistently have the most children, as do the richest who do not need help anyway. I would not worry much about it. the falling fertility rate will eventually stabilize to a lower population but a richer one. I don't think there is anything that can be done within the constraints given except some remittances which will not help much and likely the economic benefit of more people will be negated by debt and dysgenic effects.

Some of the replies below seem to be ignoring the conditions:

NGO/academia/media matrix exists and likely can’t be dismantled. Radically conservative policies will be blocked by the Supreme Court,

This is not raise fertility by being a dictator, but within the constraints of democratic government

the falling fertility rate will eventually stabilize to a lower population but a richer one

Until you hit the demographic crisis where you're counting on the labour of one grandchild to sustain four grandparents.

Until you hit the demographic crisis where you're counting on the labour of one grandchild to sustain four grandparents.

Then those grandparents die off . It's not ideal but the problem does correct itself

‘Lower population but a richer one’ doesn’t seem right.

Fertility trends in most of the world are dysgenic, so the shrinking population also has less human capital per capita.

childlessness is motivated by status

I think there's a fair amount of room for soft power to define what "high-status" means. I can't see it happening in the immediate future, but the idea of a society where the zeitgeist treats having children early and (slightly more) often as normal and respectable seems like something that could exist. Having movie protagonists choose (and juggle) parenting as something other than a minor side plot could occur more often. There was a moment where Lean In-style feminism might have encouraged this, but that seems to have faded.

Honestly, if you could wrangle the sorts of soft power that various activist groups wield fairly regularly you could probably make measurable progress at a goal of "have [a few] more children".

That poorer people have more children is not true for all countries. Among Swedish woman the correlation between income and fertility is positive at all levels. I believe the situation is similar in the other nordic countries.

If China can't raise it's fertility, what hope does a democracy have?

In two words? Psychological warfare.

Women are the meme sex. They're shockingly vulnerable to memetic infection. Peer-pressure, social contagion mental illnesses, god awful fashion trends... Cutting didn't meaningfully exist before the 90s and now a double digit percentage of girls have done it at some point.

Remember that sex ed class exercise from film/tv where students would be paired up and have to look after like a bag of flower for a week as if it was a baby? Ever notice how after the 2000s that just stopped? (I never did it in highschool) Studies were showing this teen pregnancy deterent was INCREASING teen pregnancy and subsequent births... Girls were memeable enough that merely acting out motherhood with a bag of flower made them uncontrollably want kids.

You could boost fertility rates just by subtly changing the sex ed and school curriculum to encourage fertility instead of discourage it, stretch out sex ed/pe to all 4 years of school (will make kids more attractive too) pay young, stay at home, new mothers (selected for perceived attractiveness and status, must be superior to the professional woman teachers) to come in with babies and talk to the girls about their experiences and just ensure every 14-18 year old girl is interacting with a baby at least once a month...

aside from that there's lot of finacial and career jiguring you could do around the side, end all state funded girls scholarship/replace with boys ones, subtly change antidescrimination law so employers can once again subtly refuse to hire/promote women on the assumption they'll get married/pregnant and training will be wasted... which will become a self-fullfilling prophesy as women fall ehind their male peers... use the security states defacto control of the media to make sure that instead of every Teen Comedy and TV show having a requisite 1/6 characters be gay, instead 1/5 characters must be pregnant at all times... Hell if you just replaced every coming out storyline with a pregnancy story line, we'd be back at replacement fertility.

Subtly change highschool and university mandates to have 3x the dances, coed sleepaway trips, and as many social events as possible... With free tution, volunteer opportunities, preferential hiring, high status make work etc, to pregnant/recent mothers to get as many big bellies and babies in highschools and on campus as possible so that girls are constantly seeing slightly older, wealthier, higher status girls swelling, nursing, tending, and cooing at all hours of the day, every day.

They should see it in school, on TV, around campus, in the classroom, with a goal that by the time a girl is 20 she'll have interacted with 100 pregnant women of higher status than herself and 100 babies.

Before the 80s most women got married and had kids ages 18p22... this should be the goal. To effect a real change we should be aiming to meme women into getting pregnant in that age bracket.

Given how many girls still feel compelled to get pregnant and have kids in their teens, despite society waging an endless propaganda campaign not to and instead to become some aging girl-boss middle manager ... merely inversing the propaganda and who they're exposed to on "career" day should reverse the trend very quickly and then become self-fullfilling as more and more of their friends and classmates become memetic vectors themselves.

Mandatory emilpost for the flour baby thing, just in case it was never posted here: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2023/01/the-infant-simulator-fiasco/

Even if I thought your ideas did generally provide the correct outcome, you basically just entirely ignore the actual practical implementation of such policies. How are exactly are you going to engage and destroy the liberal memeplex, which already controls most of media and cultural institutions, and win?

How realistic is this? One thing I remember clearly from childhood was how incredibly bad adults were at making things cool. The absolute least cool thing in the world was something an adult was trying to make you think was cool.

By the way, I know lots of young women who want kids, but they don't have them because they can't find a man up to their standards who wants to have kids with them. That seems like it could be just as big of a problem as women wanting fewer kids.

Before the 80s most women got married and had kids ages 18p22... this should be the goal.

That's not true. The average age that a woman had her first child dropped to 22 in some countries during the baby boom. But that was unusual, and it was never as young as 18.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Mean-age-of-mother-at-first-birth-selected-countries-1950-2007-Sources-Council-of_fig1_51708846

It's probably not worth detailing every one of those minor disagreements, but it's weird to read kulakposts where a broad claims is spot on - "Women are the meme sex. They're shockingly vulnerable to memetic infection", yeah - but then all the stuff used to support it are not.

Also, you can't just say "subtle" and then describe a massive change.

Argentina maintained above replacement TFR for decades by doing that, albeit unintentionally.

If men were not as vulnerable to memes as women, the US military would not spend any money on advertising to teenage males.

Deport enough immigrants to the point it starts impacting housing prices. Fire a bunch of women who have government jobs taking care of immigrants.

Pushing women out of the workforce, in general, would plausibly be effective. I doubt that any government employs enough specifically in immigration to make a dent.

Also, this might be the first time I’ve seen illegal immigrants blamed for housing demand. Unless you’re suggesting they restrict supply, presumably by making more areas undesirable?

Also, this might be the first time I’ve seen illegal immigrants blamed for housing demand.

I'm not sure if this is how it goes in the US, but in Europe illegal immigrants quickly become asylum seekers who the government must provide accommodation for.

In America this almost never happens. Illegal immigrants show up to make minimum wage scrubbing toilets, killing chickens, flipping burgers, picking strawberries, and doing construction. When those opportunities get harder to come by, they quite simply leave. A minority live by crime of some description(usually drug dealing or prostitution), but none are dependent on the government unless they’re being held against their will.

Illegal immigrants actually tend to make life cheaper for locals, in particular lowering the price of meat and raising neighborhood quality at the bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum.

I'm not talking about "illegal immigrants", I'm talking about all immigrants who have been permitted to reside in the hypothetical "a Western country". In London, non-natives are somewhere like 35% of the population. Are you under the impression this does not impact housing prices?

In my (European) country, the majority of the people employed by the government in services related to unemployement and payments related to that are women, and the majority of users of those services are immigrants or descendants of immigrants. I think immigrants take up a disproportionate amount of government work hours and talking specifically about those who work in immigration is shortsighted. Again, we're talking about "a Western country", so I'm not too concerned about the specifics of what happens in the US.

Understood. Yeah, I can see how that’d reduce the number of female-dominated jobs.

Female education is strongly negatively correlated with fertility. I'm guessing civil society won't let me target this, but perhaps I could greatly reduce the total number of people going to college.

But why is an ever climbing population still so idealised? Surely, having slightly less people over the next few generations shouldn't be a disaster. The key issue is the composition of the population, poorer sections and criminals having higher birthrates.

Can't speak for everyone concerned about fertility, but it's not about an ever-climbing population. For all the shit we've been giving China all these decades, I'd be a lot happier being on the receiving end of a one child policy, than being psy-opped into not wanting kids only to change my mind 3 minutes to midnight, so to speak, and then having to listen to The Experts telling me how I need to be open to immigration to make up for the shortage in qualified workforce (and I say that as a "qualified workforce" immigrant).

The key issue is the composition of the population, poorer sections and criminals having higher birthrates.

Oh sure, I'd love to give the people who are pushing Critical Race Theory and Drag Queen Story Hour, who are censoring my access to information, my ability to speak, and conduct financial transactions, the power to decide the composition of society.

These people by and large aren’t deciding the composition of society. Conservative(this does not refer to voting patterns) hispanics and red tribe whites are the only relevantly-sized above replacement TFR groups in the USA Today- you think the people pushing drag queen story hour decided that?

Increasing TFR by 0.3 in a Western country means approaching something like stable demographics; it's hardly an idealization of the ever-climbing population count.

This is a fun thought experiment! I believe that the largest issue plaguing birthrate is the segregation of the sexes - males and females are increasingly segregated based off of everything ranging from political opinion to success in schools and jobs. Likewise, the social incentive structures prioritize selfish consumption over building a family unit. The most important group is the poorest class as they're the largest population pool.

  • Prison reform: Prison reform would involve several things: Firstly, legalization and pardon of all criminals with possession charges and other misdemeanors (such as an overcharged bar fight, some thefts, etc.) This means decriminalizing Marijuana as well. I generally dislike recreational drug use, but I have to admit that minimizing felony charges for certain drugs will prevent physical separation from fathers from their children.

But it's not enough to simply release the previously incarcerated - there would be mandatory work-release programs. Released prisoners would have subsidized pay from the federal government (i.e. farm pay + government subsidy pay to be paid a living-enough wage). These will be basic skill jobs ranging from farm labor to basic construction to cooking to more advanced jobs (military) based off of intelligence and affinity. Missing work will result in reincarceration.

Prison sentence limit - prison sentences would be limited to 10 years. However, this will not be just wasting away in a jail cell - low and medium level prisoners will required to complete a GED if possible to be rereleased into work study programs for the remainder of the sentence. The goal of prison is not incarceration but reeducation on a general level. The overall goal will be avoiding institutionalization by any means necessary.

Bringing back corporal punishment and the death penalty - However the above will not prevent truly psychopathic or antisocial individuals - Those deemed irredeemable or incapable of reentering civil society will be removed from society not through permanent incarceration but execution. At the end of 10 years if they are still in the system, they are eliminated to prevent clogging the system and allowing dangerous individuals from reentering society and to prevent prison from being a place for institutionalization again.

  • I touched on drug use earlier, and while I'm lenient on legalizing marijuana, all other addictive recreational substances, especially intent to distribute, will be dealt much more harshly. The borders in the country will be heavily controlled and regulated to prevent drug trafficking. The DEA would be approved to use unusual and deadly force to eliminate drug pushers and gangs from society. Countries that do not actively fight against drug use in their country or cannot fight the drug kingpins in their country will have all aid cutoff unless they can open their border and allow my country to forcibly eliminate and act with impunity to eliminate illicit addictive substances. The Opium Wars will look tiny compared to the lengths I would go to eliminate addictive drugs.

Since that is drug and prison reform, I would also look at social security reform. Right now, single parenthood gives greater social benefit than married couples - we need to reverse the incentive system at the lowest levels to mid levels to increase the incentive for couple to stick together. Probably a ranging social security credit depending on number of children, maxing out payment per child 3 children per married couple up to 5 children per married couple for incomes less than ~70k combined income from both parents.

  • For couples with incomes greater than 70k - a substantial child tax credit, subsidized (to free) hospitalization bills for the first 3 children, perhaps housing bonus incentives as well for married couples only to reduce the general cost of childcare. I also like hydrastinine's student loan forgiveness idea - though I would conditional all this incentive with married living together families.

  • End 'no child left behind' education, change education to be more equitable for all sexes. One of the main reasons is that men have the deck stacked against them so much that it's becoming impossible for men to be providers and caretakers. Serious education reform is necessary to prevent men from dropping out of society

  • Start social mixers and reduce work hours - we work longer and longer hours which prevent bonding. There needs to be more non-online opportunities to let men and women intermingle in a non-work environment where unwanted advances result in firing or repercussions.

There are so many different needs to be addressed in society it's difficult to write something comprehensive, but these would be a number of my first steps.

What does the drug thing have to do with fertility, and why do you single out marijuana as acceptable? It seems to me that there are plenty of addictive recreational substances out there that, if legalised, would be more conducive to fertility than marijuana.

Drugs cause developmental defects in children and prevents stable families and jobs that allows children to flourish. Drug addicted adults may have more children from sheer negligence, but those children will have significantly worse lives for a myriad of reasons. I assume the question isn't to have increased population growth but have all children be crack babies (if in fact there's any evidence to imply drug addicts have more children in the first place).

All human goals flow from other goals. A conservative doesn't want to increase the fertility rate to increase the total number of cells with human DNA in human-shaped assemblies, they want to - (depending on the person) - grow their nation's power, allow more people to experience their culture, create more happy families. Those in jail for fraud, petty theft, assault are not as useful for that as a randomly-selected person. They may even be counterproductive - whether you think it's genes. That's certainly less true of those in prison on drug crimes, but a shade still applies. And the US's incarceration rate, .5%-.7% (didn't look that hard), is very high compared to other countries - even a 1.4% birthrate boost from freeing literally every prisoner (because they're all male) is not that much, and other western countries', e.g. france at 100/100k or germany at 67/100k, wouldn't even notice.

This is purely hypothetical; the research done in this mind experiment was 0 so I assumed increasing familial and financial stability of the most poverty-stricken (also the largest population pool) individuals would be the best method of increasing population growth.

Remove all retiree entitlements and pass the savings onto the middle-class with tax cuts. If people want health care and income when they’re old they have to either save money themselves while they’re young or have kids to take care of them.

Underrated answer. A girl I've been dating asked me, "who will take care of you [when you are a childless old man]?" and it really took me aback. I've never imagined that having a child would actually be an economic advantage to me, but she probably never imagined that a child would be such an economic burden, because in a poor country, children are not a burden.

I mean, the actual answer to this is, "probably the same as if I had a child - somebody being hopefully paid a decent wage to do so."

ideas:

  1. Mom-time employment: something like 15-25 hrs/week + benefits available only to partnered women with children under 10 yo. Companies who hire on this get substantial gov subsidy

  2. Undergrad is free for women who have children inside of a marriage.

  3. One time Free / substantially subsidized car for (in-tact) families with third child.

All three aimed to lessen the modernist opportunity cost for women having children younger. Women can get married and have kids before establishing a career. Moms with a career can keep working, and companies are incentivized to hire them. Counter carseat laws' birth control effects without sacrificing safety.

3 might be cheaper if you just reverse car seat laws.

agreed and my first thought, but I was trying to think of a way around bias toward safetyism. rolling back 'safety' laws seems less politically achievable to me than spending money

Having children should be made a prerequisite for graduate degrees, professional licenses and public sector employment.

graduate degrees

Good thing I had the foresight to go to grad school before becoming a father. I have a job and a kid now. I'm too busy now.

What extent of dismantling of the welfare state would count as "radically conservative" in this context?

Yep, destroy the welfare state and go back to children (own and children of close family members) being people's old age insurance and the problem will sort itself out pretty quickly.

Is this specifically about the Netherlands or are all countries like this now?

Are you Dutch? I'm not sure why you'd feel call out it so; I certainly don't. If Rutte is trying to raise TFR, I haven't noticed it.

Plan A

-astroturf a leftist movement objecting to immigration on egalitarian grounds (we treat immigrants like dirt! Immigration = slavery!) and oppose it as clumsily as possible. (Being exploited by us is a human right!)

-Make sure they get their goal: a massive set of payments that equalize opportunity for immigrants and existing nationals, say $500k towards education, housing etc per head, (mostly in services, negotiated with a new govt agency single-payer style) paid over a decade or so.

-This will be ruinously expensive at current immigation levels; immigration will have to be curtailed, on moral and practical grounds. ^_^ It has a second silver lining of enabling some extreme cream skimming.

-this will be paid for out of a new tax on individuals, which will be punishingly high but accepted as a moral neccessity

-with a loophole: expenditures on your own kids are deductable. A portion of family housing costs & food, plus 100% of accredited sports and activities, education, childcare, lost wages due to parental care (after passing a test showing you're competent to do so - more money for better results!), parental education, plus bonuses for hitting milestones like literacy and psychological good health, plus a big 'successful launch' bonus at age 18. Babies are just immigrants from heaven! :^)

Downside is lots of nanny-state intrusion into childrearing, but you're the conservative government & can bake in a bunch of universalism at the start.

Plan B

Start a big war. Nothing like material privation and a wartime economy to make babies happen.

Is it just me or is A just a bachelor tax with extra steps?

Well, what would be examples of actual countries that have done this? Clicking around, I've found a number after 2000 (in Europe, at least, there might be some others that I've missed):

  • Estonia, 2002-2006, 1.3 -> 1.7

  • Latvia, 2002-2008, 1.3 -> 1.6 and 2011-2017, 1.3 -> 1.7

  • Czech Republic, 2002-2008, 1.2 -> 1.5 and 2011-2017, 1.4 -> 1.7

  • Hungary, 2011-2017, 1.2 -> 1.5

  • Romania, 2003-2009, 1.3 -> 1.7 and 2013-2019, 1.5 -> 1.8

  • Bulgaria, 2003-2009, 1.3 -> 1.7

  • Slovenia, 2003-2009, 1.2 -> 1.5

  • Ukraine, 2002-2008, 1.1 -> 1.5

I might have missed some, but these all share same features, namely being Eastern European countries recovering somewhat from a post-Soviet-era fertility slump. Most of these (apart from Ukraine, all of them, I think) joined the EU in the 2004 or 2007 enlargement rounds, which probably gave them an economic boost and made the general future outlook rosier than previously. Some of these had social-democratic, some liberal and some conservative governments during this period. I'm not sure what sort of family policies they had or how much they contributed. Of course, as is evident, in some cases the fertility rose considerably, then slumped again and then rose again.

So the best strategy is to start from a low base.

I would focus my efforts on substantially increasing the country's housing stock and limit immigration to mostly construction workers.

Something it seems most (all?) people here miss is that this isn't a new problem and recent social trends are likely less important than you think.

Fertility rates have been atrocious in cities since as long as we have been keeping track and long before mass adoption of higher education and/or female professional employment. What has changed is that countries have urbanised and the previously fecund rural population adjusted to urban fertility rates.

I'm inclined to believe that the issues actually are mostly material but that the things that have been done is like applying bandaids to chopped off limbs at best and actively harmful at worst.

Either we need to make people leave the cities or make cities provide much better conditions for raising families in (at an affordable price for the average person).

A very substantial flat decrease in tax rate for all couples with at least one child (maybe with some soft cutoff for the age of the parents so we don't lose revenu from people in their 40s and 50s). The average child per mother in western countries has actually increased since the 80s, it's just that women aren't having that first child anymore at the same rates, so encouraging the first child should be sufficient.

Deregulate housing/zoning, cut taxes, increase rural infrastructure, implement a land value tax, and support other policies which would incentivize moving away from the densest urban areas. If you can get something more radical through then the next policy would be something like removing taxes for married women who have 3 children with the same man. I don't think you could get that passed in any country though. You could probably get small short term bumps in pregnancy rates by welfare/paid leave policies but in the longer term they'd crater birth rates harder because it incentivizes or normalizes single motherhood which produces unproductive members of society and all the other social burdens that accompany that.

Ban no-fault divorce, and add a huge increase to the tax benefits of both marriage and parenthood. In effect, a tax on being single, childless, or old.

Large scale immigration from high fertility groups with preference for recently married couples. Can be sold to the centre right politicians as being pro business and rectifying the ratio of working age people to pensioners. The general public will complain but who gives a shit about them, the alternate offering is the left (your party having a majority instead of a coalition implies we're in a two party system) which will do the exact same thing but with an air of superiority towards your voter base that they'll like even less.

Problem solved.

Well with any luck I'd still be aware that as a middling Orban-esque character I'm almost infinitely better at maintaining my grip on power and installing my cronies throughout legacy institutions than at positive social engineering, and would have outsourced the task to someone smarter. I'd have weaved the problem into unimpeachable bipartisan causes (Oh no, The Health Crisis of older motherhood! A poor careerist woman had IVF implantation failure, how tragic! We need a round table, a National Infertility Strategy!) and created a think tank, building its backbone of pronatalist anticredentialist people like Bryan Caplan. We'd investigate prior art in a principled manner to account for costs and tail risks – from Ceausescu Romania to Kazakhstan to Iran to Israel to Japan-Korea-China, and from the national level to specific denominational sects, castes, villages and families.

But assuming we go with my current understanding that stops roughly here and here. My goal would be to set processes into motion that will be indifferent to my own removal; and I do not have any faith in doing that via the legal system. Unpopular laws will be overturned or worked around. Stealing the argument from the ML discussion, legal procedure is the smiley mask the shoggoth that is the society wears; when it assumes an alien enough shape, the mask will shatter anyway. Our goal should be changing the shoggoth.

I also do not buy the economic story at all. I hear it most commonly from upper-middle-class highly educated people who are the least stressed economically (consider the attached Moscow meme, no translation needed Edit themotte failed me with attaching it, here you go); and those few of them who have ideological commitments to large families (far-right Pagans, Old Believers, for example) easily afford as much. Others strive to imitate the lifestyle of those prestigious classes anyway and sacrifice fertility for that; but they wouldn't have if low fertility were coded low-class. Therefore I also do not expect great returns from redistribution of money or formal status (that can otherwise be bought, and will be goodhearted with more interventions). Generic amenities for secular families with children can be cribbed from France and Nordic states, they're sufficient. Stuff like defunding education, on the other hand, is not feasible. Housing stuff depends on local specifics. @wlxd and @f3zinker among others propose sensible programs.

I think this is almost entirely a cultural issue, and there are low-hanging fruit which are only left untouched because of their high political cost – the problem is not one of unfortunate unaligned incentives but one of malice, albeit emergent, and it must be fought with malice. When you say the Cathedral cannot be dismantled, you mean it'll restrict my moves to ridiculous boomer economic flailing that doesn't offend their sensibilities. Even your eugenic diploma scheme is hard to implement. Well, that's totally hopeless then, so let's discuss low-hanging cultural interventions, as if we could fund and recruit semi-talented people for making documentaries, running influence campaigns, dominating the local Fox News equivalent at least.

The crucial fact is that the society still quietly despises and looks down upon childless women over 30. There's some pity to it, but also condescension; it's a suppressed sentiment but an instinctive and thus easy one to rekindle, leaving aside the political animosity of those women and their allies – a formidable force, to be sure, but the TERF case shows it's not unbeatable on its own. Now your argument is that almost every woman eventually marries and has a child, and it's rather single-childlessness that's the problem, but bear with me. First, the later the first birth happens, the lower is the probability of children №2+. Second, this is but the beginning of the slippery slope.

The specific way to rekindle the sentiment is ideally a product of my think tank's research. Broadly it's easiest to initiate with conspicuous worry. The idea of a single woman should be subtly made problematic. Not strength but «resilience», not independence but «coping with adversity and loneliness», not healthy at every size but «fat women are women»; no pet parent but «emotional support animal user» (we can provide one from the shelter! Broken humans and animals can heal each other!). The whole feminist rhetoric and those nauseating stock images with grinning pantsuit ladies must be associated with indomitable will in the face of chronic illness and disability. Brightly smiling cancer and HIV survivors – speaking of which, maybe we should publish a tacky book about surviving rape and abuse, leaning into a superficially scientific idea that such degrading experiences in school explain a proportion of promiscuity and unwillingness to have a traditional family. Special Olympics champions, refugees; we should wear the spin doctor's hat and the skin suit of an ally. Women love to pity themselves, so with any luck they may be hooked before we start pounding on the off-putting aspects of the framework. They also love to shit on each other – so graduating from the support network into the group that can express condescension from above will be in high demand, if this works well.

The other part is similarly patologizing the whole host of modern liberal copes. The way natalism and familism are coded low-class is by emphasizing old age, backwardness, poverty, bigotry – and showing bright, sexy, nimble, educated urbanites who don't even have to douche for anal in contrast to them. This... isn't really an accurate portrayal of reality. We could do a devastating job just by cherry-picking some cases to burn archetypes of failure into the collective consciousness. One of the cruelest Russian movies I know is Dust; it's just a realistic (i.e. not poisoned by the feminine and political partisan narrative) portrayal of an incel with no future. We could do similarly here for people who are properly integrated into the atomized social framework that does not reward childhood, building on the foundation of imageboard memes and shorts by, say, MilleniaThinker (1, 2). There's plenty enough to mock, and to contrast with (partly imaginary) haughty multigenerational familial clans, with proud mothers who do not have to keep desperately putting on a teenager face to stay relevant at 45; the media is just constitutionally incapable of touching it.

A separate line would be anti-education propaganda, basically mockery of the extreme K-selected strategy that Asians excel at and everyone else is stupidly aping. Unfortunately saying that heredity is all-powerful and Caplan has it right is impossible, but showing the immiserating, nervous rat race nature of credentialism with something like DeBoer's argumentation, and happy families who've given up on that, is perhaps workable. Seeing as I'm a populist: a program of guaranteeing access to public schools with a focus on Law and Order rather than expenditure could be popular. It could be cheaper to just rebuild neighborhoods around a few such exemplary schools, and invite only people interested in the natalist project.

And again, populism... even more extreme would be to take a lesson from Israelsi and play up xenophobia. It seems that the sense of demographic competition, fear of replacement, increases fertility. But Western media is very intent on persuading people that the replacement doesn't happen and if it does that's a good thing. Challenging this directly would be hard. Maybe import some Pakistanis to dispassionately report on grooming gangs, show in HD how a vigorous, growing tribe takes control over a dying village, beats the local cops into submission, how their cackling children cast stones at some sentimental old-timey grandma, bent by age, whose only child has gone to the big city? Too mawkish, you might say, and sure it is, but it's not like normies understand nuance.

A more ambitious project would involve increasing the prestige of some state-friendly yet not utterly hollowed-out religious denomination. That's for the next generation, when germs of this strategy blossom, perhaps.

Massive refundable income tax credits for each child combined with much stronger parental rights.


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