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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24510 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility: “Involuntary childlessness: prevalence, causes, treatment and consequences” As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/rapport/nr-4-ofrivillig-barnloshet-forekomst-orsaker-behandling-och-konsekvenser/

In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced. That's all well and good, and I'm sure it will help suffering couples – but I am also increasingly worried that the committee is losing the thread. These last two reports (the previous of which focused on economic differences between different family formations) have deftly dodged all the bigger questions at play in this crisis. Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities. I get the feeling this particular issue is getting a whole report's worth of attention not because it's key to a solution, but because it's conveninent and doesn't involve questioning anyone's life choices by wrestling with difficult and dangerous questions.

One of the difficult and dangerous questions I've wrestled with recently is a particular form of dissonance. It might surprise a few of you, but Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70. Everyone and their grandma really is expected to make significant sacrifices, perhaps even give their lives, in the event of war. In the information pamphlet the government regularly sends out to facilitate crisis-preparation there's a classic mantra (in the more literal Sanskrit meaning of that noun, man-tra, i.e. support or instrument for the mind) that I think has been included since centuries back – alla uppgifter om att motståndet ska upphöra är falska – all reports that resistance is to cease are false. Liberty or death. Noble stuff!

Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.

Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.

In short, the material focus in the debate is starting to worry me. I hope that the next reports will be a bit meatier and tackle the larger cultural and ideological questions at play.

Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo?

Would everybody do it, though? I think it's a very open question if your average Swede would risk his life vs. either leave or accept life under Russian occupation. The Ukrainian experience shows that quite a lot of men would say "no". I can't blame them; as an American I would keep my head down and/or flee were I in their shoes.

Apart from that, I'm also not entirely sure unreservedly making it even easier to postpone getting children is truly the right way to approach this problem. Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.

Yeah, a similar thought occurred to me. If it becomes possible to delay parenthood further, perhaps a lot of women will do so, and Sweden is back in the same boat except with a higher percentage of people with Schizophrenia, Autism, etc. Israel is pretty good about supporting fertility treatments, but that's combined with a strong pro-natalist zeitgeist.

Sweden actually has an extensive Total Defense Duty (yes, literal translation) technically applicable to all Swedish citizens between the age of 16 and 70

I strongly suspect that in this case "technically" means "we are going to pretend that the duty applies equally to men and women but in reality everyone knows that if there were an actual Russian invasion, women wouldn't seriously be expected to take up arms. Feminism would go right out the window, at least until the invasion was repelled. Then we would insist that women were the unsung heroes of the resistance."

In the case of government policy regarding fertility, I think it's important to keep this in mind. Because it's difficult to solve these issues without imposing burdens on women. And western governments, being intensely gynocentric, don't like to impose burdens on women.

In contrast to the other three reports previously released, this one actually got some major government attention, and shorly after it was made public an extra investment into fertility treatments was announced.

This is consistent with gynocentrism.

Sweden legitimately has a high percentage of women in the military.

Then they'll have a high percentage of soldiers who drop out when the fighting starts.

My last infantry regiment had a couple hundred women in support roles, we got orders for deployment, and in the four months between orders and deployment we lost a few dozen men and all but one woman. The men had to pretend to be gay or suicidal. The women mostly just got pregnant. You've never seen a baby boom like a military base with deployment looming. You've never seen an abortion boom like a military base the week after the unit deployed.

Only Big Red, a staff sergeant in the motor pool, deployed with us. And she was more of a man than most of us.

Sweden legitimately has a high percentage of women in the military.

According to Wikipedia, 23% of conscripts are female. I wonder how many of those are serving in front line combat roles. And of those, if an actual shooting war broke out, I wonder how many would decide it's a good time to get pregnant.

I think part of the reason is this: It's easy to imagine the supposed Russian threat. It is very unlikely that Sweden would fight Russia any time in the forseeable future, but pretty much anyone in Sweden over the age of 7 or so could imagine a war against Russia, and of course the idea of a war with Russia became much easier to imagine about 4 years ago than it had been before. Fertility rates, on the other hand, are something that only a small fraction of people think about. I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet. Personal fertility, sure, or the fertility of friends and family members. But not fertility rates. That's a topic the discussion of which is mostly confined to certain government circles and to certain usually right-leaning online spaces.

I don't think I have ever, in my entire life, heard anyone discuss fertility rates "in real life", outside the Internet.

Interesting, is this in the US? In Europe in general, but especially in France and Germany, the "demographic transition" has been a permanent fixture in the media and in public discourse for at least 30 years. I have childhood memories of seeing inverted age pyramids in newspapers.

Understandably, since the fertility rate (or "children per family", the more palatable euphemism) has cratered earlier here, and the financial scheme behind their social systems is reliant on young workers. Which means they are even more fucked than all the other countries with low fertility, so at least they are aware of the problem.

This is in the US. That is interesting, I did not know that Europe might have more discussion of the topic coming from "ordinary people".

I'd say it's more in terms of the strain on the pension system, the lack of enough nurses for old people etc. It's more framed as the aging society, and it's the justification for more immigration and there is also hope that robots will help in elderly care. The framing is not really about ending up with too few ethnically [German/French/Swedish/...] people in the long run, but the medium-term practicalities of the age pyramid imbalance. If you frame it in those ethnic terms, it's fringe and a no-no in real life in Western Europe too.

You’re right up my wheelhouse here and there’s too many issues to pick from in Sweden’s case.

Swedish women don’t want many kids because they say it restricts their freedom. It’s taken for granted that children are born when it’s most convenient for one’s career. In the middle class that usually means between 30-35 (which is old for that kind of thing). But the political elite women’s interest are allied with politically elite men’s interest. Nobody there ever discusses the concept of national “duties,” in this way. You simply won’t see it. In Germany 30% of all women are childless. For those with university degrees it’s 40%. Similar attitudes you find in the west. Not many people remember when Macron in France said, “Show me a well educated woman who has decided to have 7, or 8 or 9 children.”

The only real way the TFR problem has been approached offers two solutions: immigration or the Hungary policy. Back in the 30’s and 40’s Gunnar and Alva Myrdal talked about the birth rate even then because it had sharply fallen off as a result of the Great Depression. That was the foundation of the “Folkhemmet,” where preferential loans, subsidized housing, free healthcare and meals, etc., came into play. When their ideas actually got implemented the birth rate went from 1.8 to 2.7 in 10 years.

In Hungary, they follow similar policies. Hungarian parents who have multiple children to become eligible to receive mortgages with no interest by having at least three. If you have four or more, you’re exempt from paying income tax for life. You can also get a grant of eight thousand euros to buy a car but only if it has more than seven seats. In total it’s resulted in something like a 25% increase in children being born. Still below 2.1, but a reversal of the current trend.

You had members of the Swedish left-wing attacking Orban and calling his policies “offensive” and comparing it to Nazi Germany (predictably). You had Annika Strandhall (who’s the Swedish minister of social security) calling it right out of the 1930’s. But anyone of Orban’s stripe should be happy to accept the criticism. He’s a supporter of democracy as is most of his cohort. He’s not a supporter of ‘liberal’ democracy. Annika apparently doesn’t understand that in Hungary and Poland, their political leaders are appointed in general elections.

If I ever meet my relatives over there I want to ask them why in the hell they seem so desperate to emulate the worst aspects of American society? They’ve currently got a massive case of Shitlib Syndrome that’s only metastasizing.

He’s a supporter of democracy as is most of his cohort. He’s not a supporter of ‘liberal’ democracy. Annika apparently doesn’t understand that in Hungary and Poland, their political leaders are appointed in general elections.

Orban was a corrupt, out of touch wannabe autocrat who lost the election in a landslide despite having control over all the mainstream media. Don’t let the culture war stuff fool you, it was just a distraction so that he and his cronies could rob the country blind. He didn’t care about Hungary at all and was happy for the country to stagnate, suffer economically and to cause a brain drain due to his policies, so long as he was in power.

Orban was a corrupt, out of touch wannabe autocrat who lost the election in a landslide despite having control over all the mainstream media. Don’t let the culture war stuff fool you, it was just a distraction so that he and his cronies could rob the country blind. He didn’t care about Hungary at all and was happy for the country to stagnate, suffer economically and to cause a brain drain due to his policies, so long as he was in power.

You are basically just describing the Harris campaign. Not that wild.

This is low effort culture warring. Don't do this.

  • Avoid low-effort participation.
  • Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

If you are going to make this sort of comparison defend it or explain it.

I don't think it's an accurate comparison though. Orban, with all his faults, was the leader of his campaign and his domain. Harris was an obvious (and quite ridiculous) figurehead to allow The Machine to operate in the same way it already operated under Biden, where nobody is responsible for anything and things just happen. I am not sure which one is worse - authoritarian rule by an energetic kleptocrat or a by an amorphous anonymous blob - but I don't think they are the same thing.

despite having control over all the mainstream media.

Most Hungarians below ~50 or so, like in the rest of the (western) world, are now getting their news from social media, but certainly from online new portals as opposed to traditional mainstream media. Orbán took over a lot of the traditional media, like the county-level (online) newspapers, the public media obviously, but these mainly reach the old generation, pensioners. He did try to, and in some sense managed to, take over the most read news portal Index.hu, but basically when the transfer of ownership happened, the whole staff resigned and then promptly made a competitor Telex.hu, which is by now the second most popular behind Index.hu. And there are other online portals, many professional youtube channels who are against Orbán.

Orbán did try to manufacture social media influencers in a topdown way, this was called Megafon, where they basically received central messaging from the government, they were trained how to produce social media content etc, but it was very fake and weak. Then in the campaign they started the "Fight Club" which was about teaching Orbán-supporters to get into comment fights on Facebook to defend the government. Orbán made a WhatsApp group then a Facebook group for this, and he literally sent a list of topics to comment about, for some time every morning (to tens of thousands of group members, so it was not some super secret thing). Then they made the "Digital Civic Circles", which was basically "Fight Club"-light, basically thematic Facebook groups with some celebrities headlining them, but it was still about receiving a centrally crafted message and lists of Facebook post links that you were supposed to like and put comments on.

Orbán was basically begging people to just spend 10 minutes on this per day, even if this digital world is foreign to many supporters (they are mostly pensioners and rural people). Orbán himself still uses a dumbphone and works on printed paper with pen, and generally hates technology. So him pushing for this shows how much he noticed the problem.

All this to say, nowadays it's not so easy to control the media.

I think you have a pretty unbalanced and prejudiced view of him in totality. I’ve paid pretty close attention to him from all sides.

In the end, how did Hungary fare under his rule, when compared with the regional countries, like Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia? It doesn't seem that he had much of an effect in the direction you're saying. Those other similar, post-communist countries also didn't get flooded with migrants, I don't think there is much higher levels of wokeness in those other countries, however you'd measure it. Hungary has certainly no higher religiosity or churchgoing numbers, and no real tangible "conservatism" compared to those. The tangible effects are the highest food price inflation in the EU, the steepest rise of housing prices, very low economic growth numbers etc. both in comparison with regional and with overall EU countries. And as we saw, fertility is also back to baseline levels.

Orbán is just a great salesman and managed to sell this idea of the big antiwoke fighter to the MAGA people. In the net effect it's showbusiness, marketing, billboard propaganda etc. He's also a master of moving the party strategically in the political coordinate system. From the 90s onwards he has strategically shifted the party position several times. The latest one since around 2014 was aimed at pushing out the 20% strong extreme right Jobbik by shifting towards the far right. Jobbik seriously felt the danger, as their traditional topics were suddenly "stolen" from them and used by the government. So Jobbik shifted into the center, and eventually teamed up with the liberals. This move led to a break in Jobbik, and the radicals went on to found Our Homeland, which is still in parliament at about 5-6% support level. You can read plenty of critiques about Orbán's governing by Our Homeland party, they are quite dissatisfied with him, despite being also right-wing (though Our Homeland also had to find a new niche, and they've been focusing on globalist conspiracies, WEF, BlackRock, antivax etc).

How is it inaccurate to call him a corrupt kleptocrat? He didn’t lose the election over culture war issues, he was exposed by a conservative politician. How do you think him and his associates got so rich?

Now if you’re saying that the corruption was worth it, that’s a different argument. I suppose that’s how Americans currently defend the Trump circle’s insider trading, market manipulation and cronyism?

In Hungary, they follow similar policies. Hungarian parents who have multiple children to become eligible to receive mortgages with no interest by having at least three. If you have four or more, you’re exempt from paying income tax for life. You can also get a grant of eight thousand euros to buy a car but only if it has more than seven seats. In total it’s resulted in something like a 25% increase in children being born. Still below 2.1, but a reversal of the current trend.

The online right likes to repeat this, but it was a temporary effect and by 2025 Hungary's TFR dropped back to 1.31, which is lower than Sweden's 1.43.

Around 1991, it was around 1.87, then sharply fell to 1.28 in the economic turmoil of the system change, floating around 1.3, reaching a new low in 2011 with 1.23. Then as the economy started to recover and also with the measures you mention, it went up gradually to 1.61 in 2021, from which it sharply declined with the aftermath of the covid recession and then the Ukraine war's economic effects. Another possible reason is that people brought their plans forward, and simply had children earlier to get the money, leading to a frontloading of the numbers that would have been coming a few years later, leading to this sharp drop.

Regarding marriage rates, there was a sharp decline after the system change also. The number of marriages per nonmarried men was 47 in 1990 (36 for women), and it steadily dropped to a low of 17.0 / 13.7 by 2012, when Orbán's policies and the recovering economy managed to reverse the trend, reaching 33.4 / 28.1 in 2021, but the economic downturn also affected this and now it's back at 21.6 / 18.6, which matches both 2006 and 2015, but it's still only about half of 1990.

So the communists apparently did a much better job of this. And that wasn't though nationalist race-conscious rhetoric nor a stay at home tradwife lifestyle advocacy. Women had jobs, this was no 1950s Americana. But people saw things as more stable, homes were much more affordable, there was less anxiety around jobs and the basic life pattern was laid out and clear, while alternatives to it were not really promoted or thought about.

The issue is that today, if a country is held back based on economic problems, the economic improvements wouldn't lead to a steady reversal either, because then not only does having children become easier but it also becomes easier and more affordable and available to do other, more immediately fun things, like traveling, living an entertaining leasure life of going to concerts, nice bars and restaurants.

Now that Orban is ousted, it is to be seen what direction those policies take, since the winning Tisza party is a conglomerate of many ideologies. The liberals will push for what they see as non-discrimination of the childless, and they emphasize how these conditions limit women's autonomy, e.g. if you divorce, you have to pay back those credits, same as if you don't end up having the children you "promised" in order to access those funds (unless you get a doctor's paper about infertility - adoption is also accepted), you can always find some sympathetic stories about this. The center-right part of Tisza is probably satisfied with the programs. The less-talked-about undercurrent of the debate is how to target functioning families instead of mostly Roma people who will have many children for the welfare money and then live in terrible conditions. Orbán did it by framing most of the programs as tax cuts or as credit where you had to prove employment, no criminal record etc. as conditions, as opposed to simple welfare for the number of kids. The left typically criticises this as discriminatory against the poor and the Roma, and as helping only the already relatively well-to-do middle class.

So far this is in the program of the new governing party:

By 2035, we will halt population decline, and we will set the goal that from 2050 onward, Hungary’s population will once again grow above ten million.

  • To stop and reverse population decline, we are preparing a comprehensive program that will encourage Hungarians living and working abroad to return home, improve the health status of our citizens and increase life expectancy, while also encouraging childbearing.
  • The main components of the detailed program aimed at achieving a demographic turnaround are:
    • supporting the return of 200,000 Hungarians living abroad through the “Your Homeland Awaits!” program;
    • increasing life expectancy at birth to 80 years;
    • significantly increasing the number of births by expanding family support measures, improving the healthcare and education systems, and ensuring better access to fertility treatments.
  • The details of the program elements will be elaborated in the policy areas of economic development, healthcare, family policy, and women’s equal opportunities.

This doesn't seem very effective. The 200k Hungarians working in Western Europe won't turn things around in a country of 9.5m for sure. Increasing life expectancy will make the pensions system even more strained. Healthcare and education aren't really the things holding back people from having kids. And as we see in Scandinavia, more women's equality, even if good for other reasons, certainly isn't a measure that contributes to increased fertility, so it doesn't make sense to list in this section.

My prediction is that Hungary will inevitably converge and keep with Western Europe in these macro trends, because it's no longer isolated like under communism. Hungarians are tapped into the same memes, cultural products like movies and music and messaging as the rest of Europe. It's the same social media trends, young people know English, travel more often, take exchange semesters abroad etc. You can't have your little oasis that would work on an entirely different basis.

Yeah, I had a feeling someone was going to bring this up. I’m aware of most of what you’ve said here. My point more generally is that the push in this direction helps to keep things on the right track; but by itself it still proves to be inadequate when you project it out to where it should be. I’ve written on TM elsewhere why the approach the communists took proved to be more effective, but nobody should want to return the draconian type of policy regime that brought them that solution. The approach Tisza is taking is the wrong path and won’t go far enough, but at least Fidesz was on the right track.

Monetary incentives can bring up TFR a bit but not enough to get to replacement. Ultimately, raising 3+ children (without the children becoming criminals or prostitutes) needs to take center focus as a great achievement and honored by everyone is society. Local government officials should be hosting award ceremonies for elderly women who raised functioning children into adulthood. Something equivalent to medals in the military, like limited edition rings and other jewelry. Recognition of women's reproductive achievements is somehow nonexistent, at least in the US.

If I ever meet my relatives over there I want to ask them why in the hell they seem so desperate to emulate the worst aspects of American society?

Let me know how it goes, but I doubt you'll get more than a bewildered look. European libs see themselves as entirely opposed to American culture, even as they make their way to a BLM march in a > 99% white country.

even as they make their way to a BLM march in a > 99% white country.

BLM in Continental Europe was a single-digit number of people per country until it became an excuse for ignoring COVID lockdowns in summer 2020. After lockdowns were relaxed, it went back to being a single-digit number of people per country. BLM in the UK was less pathetic, but not by much. BLM in Australia was an Aboriginal-rights movement that was only nominally connected to BLM in the US.

Grassroots movements adapt themselves to local conditions - on both sides of the political fence. The culture war in Western Europe has Muslim immigrants as the n*****s, not black people.

until it became an excuse for ignoring COVID lockdowns in summer 2020

And how is it, pray tell, that this particular protest, and not any other homegrown cause, if European liberals aren't adopting the worst parts of American culture?

A single digit number of people or a single digit percentage? Because a single digit percentage is a huge amount, but on the other hand having the number of people be 9 or less seems excessively small.

They're entirely opposed to "Red Tribe, called America".

In practice yes, but they don't think there's a good kind of American, that they're imitating, even though they clearly are. That's the contradiction.

But BLM itself kind of sees itself as going against "that kind of" America. When European libs are opposed to "America" they are against the bald-headed-eagle, flag waving, monster truck and pickup truck riding gun obsessed fat rednecks who eat cheap burgers all the time and shop at walmart in a mobility scooter. BLM in Europe is seen as a revolt against that racist America. There is no contradiction.

But BLM itself kind of sees itself as going against "that kind of" America.

There isn't really a good kind of American to European libs, and BLM and all forms of wokeness was originally seen as weird and alien. There was even a common "it's just a couple of crazy kids on college campuses"-esque cope, that wokeness is just an American thing, and will never be relevant in Europe.

If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.

BLM in Europe is seen as a revolt against that racist America.

Nope, the criticism was also applied to European cultures, often in ways that make absolutely no sense. For example they apply anti-collonialist critique to Ireland, or try to claim that the descendants of Eastern European peasants, who just barely got out of communism, somehow inherited "white privilege".

If they did believe that there's good Americans as well as bad, than the question would make some sense. They would recognize the parts of culture he's talking about as American, and as being imported, and they could justify it, but I'm pretty sure they ,think it's homegrown by now.

To a considerable extent, it is homegrown. BLM was run by people claiming to be "trained marxists". Social Justice draws heavily on the theory of Continental Philosophers, and the "Internationalist" faction in American politics has always looked up to Europe for inspiration and social proof of their ideological project. And sure, it goes both ways, to the point that Europeans pick up American memes that on a first analysis make no sense in their context.

Is the WEF an American or a European project? I would argue that assigning it to either is a category error, but if forced, I would say European. In my view, the Enlightenment was from the start a European project, and Anglo-American participation is an outlier, albeit a significant one, but the distinction arguably elides more than it reveals. Organs like the WEF are part of a distinct, cohesive, long term socio-political construct, and that construct observably transcends national boundaries.

To a considerable extent, it is homegrown. BLM was run by people claiming to be "trained marxists". Social Justice draws heavily on the theory of Continental Philosophers, and the "Internationalist" faction in American politics has always looked up to Europe for inspiration and social proof of their ideological project.

Ok, sure I was being a bit reductive, and the whole thing was a bit of back-and-forth. You can even go further and point out that the specific people who kicked off the Social Justice movement in the US were airlifted out of Europe after the war. OTOH, Europeans could point out that we kept them locked up in their ivory towers, and they never amounted to much while they were under our custody. America truly turned out to be the land of opportunity, in a very ironic way. By the time these ideas made their way back to Europe, even the old-school Marxists cried out in horror.

Is the WEF an American or a European project? I would argue that assigning it to either is a category error, but if forced, I would say European

I agree, but even though there's overlap, the WEF is a different beast than the SocJus project. It's a totalitarian dictatorship wearing a smiley face mask, it doesn't get more European than that. SocJus is incidental to it, and they'll continue their project, even if it becomes completely discredited.

Are you from the US? I think Americans often have a distorted view of how Europeans view them, especially if they base this mostly on online stuff like Reddit. The recent animus towards the US is to a large extent about Trump, and there is certainly some longer term undercurrent even during Obama etc that the US is a bit cheap, overly capitalistic, materialistic, everything for sale, everything measured in money, lot of displays of religion, whatnot, but Europeans still follow and consume American cultural products overwhelmingly, often more than domestic ones. European universities are eager to copy the American academic fads (coastal, blue tribe). They might grumble about some aspects, but those are pretty much the same aspects that American blue tribers grumble about.

Nope, the criticism was also applied to European cultures, often in ways that make absolutely no sense. For example they apply anti-collonialist critique to Ireland, or try to claim that the descendants of Eastern European peasants, who just barely got out of communism, somehow inherited "white privilege".

Yes, but this is the "we're all living in America", fish in water thing. They just see this stuff being the current thing in Hollywood, Oscars, etc. You may underestimate how much Europeans live in an American-defined media environment.

Are you from the US?

Nope, European through and through.

but Europeans still follow and consume American cultural products overwhelmingly, often more than domestic ones. European universities are eager to copy the American academic fads (coastal, blue tribe).

I agree with this, I think this is the mechanism for what I'm describing, but in my experience Europeans don't tend to admit there are American cultural trends that are worth following. It just happens, precisely because of the "fish in water" thing.

Because of this, I believe that if Tretiak asked "why are you adopting the worst parts of American culture" he'd just be met with bewildered denial that any part of American culture is being adopted.

There are probably some who don't consume it directly, but through local intermediaries who make TikToks in their local language etc. It becomes a discussion topic and the third and fourth degree viewers are not aware of the origin (for BLM it's more concrete, but other woke topics it can seem blurry if it's organic European post-WW2 equality and justice development vs import from America). But even those that are, they just see it as global universal culture, not specifically American.

It's like asking European Taylor Swift fans why they are obsessing over an American celebrity. It's just a bewildering question. It's not like they predecided to obsess over an American. They just consume media, and they liked this celebrity and it's just very organic and obvious and just happens. Like the way in movies aliens always land near LA but certainly somewhere in the US. People are just used to international trendsetting happening in the US. I guess we are in agreement, I'm just elaborating. BLM was just put in front of people at a time when everyone was on their phones during covid. They didn't wake up one day saying "let's follow some American trends, I wonder what trends are going on there and which ones are worth following and which ones aren't". It's just shown to them and they have an emotional reaction to it that this is wrong and has to change and they can feel part of a movement of a morally right cause etc. American or not didn't factor into that chain of reasoning/emotion.

The other thing is that they may even deny there is a trend. It's not a trend. It's just being a decent human being. There is no such thing as woke, etc. etc.

It's like asking European Taylor Swift fans why they are obsessing over an American celebrity. It's just a bewildering question.

I disagree with this part. It's perfectly normal to bring up a question like that, and it's likely to produce ponderous murmurs about how we should invest more in our own, and not rely on Americans so much. It's not even limited to pop culture, you do this with literally anything, including industry and online platforms.

They just consume media, and they liked this celebrity and it's just very organic

And this as well. There was nothing organic about the spread of wokeness. Not in America, not in Europe. It relied on the suppression of opposing views on one hand, and it's own imposition through government institutions on the other, as well as entryism into critical private institutions.

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Which is kind of strange because the word is they don’t really see my aunts and uncles as “American” in that way, but fellow Scandinavians who live in the US. I sometimes wonder who’s going to fall first between Sweden and Germany.

The fourth report dropped a few weeks back, this time focusing on involuntary childlessness and infertility

I'm not very certain on this, but I understood that involuntary childlessness is a smaller factor in overall TFR declines than the reduction in the number of kids in each family. IOW, the problem is not the number of 0s.

I asked an LLM (also not a great marker of certainty) as well:

62% of the decline is driven by smaller family sizes among parents (fewer progressions to second, third, or fourth children).

38% of the decline is driven by an increase in lifetime childlessness (more people ending their reproductive years with zero children).

Unpopular though it might be among certain cohorts to point out, the solution to declining fertility reasonably also should somehow involve convincing women to have children while they're still young; not enabling every pregnancy to be geriatric.

Indeed, and that's why focusing on the childless is less productive. We should be focusing on getting the 1-kid families to 2, the 2s to 3 and so forth. One important factor there is making sure they start while they still have time.

Indeed, and that's why focusing on the childless is less productive. We should be focusing on getting the 1-kid families to 2, the 2s to 3 and so forth. One important factor there is making sure they start while they still have time.

This probably also works better in an evolutionary sense. "Forcing" people to have kids who would prefer not to and are dragging their feet, selects for a population that is statistically of a certain heritable temperament, who will pass on this type of psychological and personality profile and then the next generation will again prefer not to have kids on their own. But if you promote increased number of children for those who already self-select to having at least one child, they are more likely to be family oriented and also growing up with more siblings (or any at all) will also likely promote having children of their own.

Yet the most central part of ensuring the continued existence of a sovereign Swedish state, i.e. the creation of a new generation of Swedes, is apparently not even a moral, let alone a legal, duty on the part of the citizen? Everyone is expected to die fighting the Russians, but it's wholly acceptable to make choices whose aggregate consequences ends with Sweden going the way of the Dodo? That old Goldfinger-line pops into my head. "You expect me to have children?" "No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!" Really, what is the point of this gung-ho never-surrender sentiment, and for that matter all the increases in defence spending in Europe, if we're just going to allow death to conquer us all from within? There are ideas here which should be connected, yet they seem to lie strewn all about in disorder in a way that's both frustrating and disheartening to see.

So I was listening to Gad Saad on Joe Rogan recently, not really haven't heard about anything he's done since probably 2018 or so. And he's laying out his thesis about a parasitic idea. This thing you see that causes such a strong emotional reaction, it overrides your entire brain and even your survival instinct, and your priorities, even your identity, is replaced. And by example, he brings up Queers for Palestine. Joe, seemingly entirely missing the point, just rebuts "Yeah, but what if they've seen the images coming out of Gaza that are so upsetting, they feel irresistibly compelled to be angry about it and protest it?" With much sympathy for this perspective. Yes Joe, that is precisely the "parasitic idea" infection vector being described, thank you for participating. And he goes on missing the point for another 90 minutes or so.

But I digress. Everything about this national behavior sounds like a country hijacked by a civilization scale parasite. The country possesses zero survival instinct, even to propagate itself into another generation. And yet it happily throws it's blood and treasure away on... what exactly? Ukraine also committing suicide, but faster? Giving all the land to Africans faster? It's absolutely baffling.

It's a shame one way or another billions will die before either the parasite wins, or the parasite is exterminated with gigadeaths of collateral damage.

I think this is exactly what is happening.

For most of human history, the selection of cultural memes and biological genes has been more or less aligned. The most successful cultures were those that produced high birthrates, because creating more people was the best way for cultural memes to propagate themselves. Horizontal transmission of cultural memes between separate lineages was relatively rare; most cultural replacements were accompanied by population replacements. In this environment, cultural memes and genes were more or less symbiotic, and what was good for one was good for the other (with the exception of some edge cases).

Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.

We have no psychological immune system adapted for this. It's too novel, too powerful. It's like we're North Americans being exposed to European colonist diseases for the first time. However, this cannot go on forever. The parasitic memes are burning through hosts, and the remaining hosts are being selected for resistance to the parasites. The psychological immune system is beginning to take shape, but the process is too slow.

Over the last couple of hundred years, with the development of mass communication technology, the alignment of memes and genes has been breaking down. Today the most successful memes are those that transmit horizontally using technology, and so the selection pressures have shifted. The memes are becoming parasitic, because they no longer need their host to reproduce. In fact, the host spending time and resources trying to complete its life cycle is now directly opposed to the fitness of the memes, and so arresting development of its host in such a way that renders it literally or functionally infertile is now being selected for. These hosts then have nothing to live for except spreading the parasitic memes, and those memes then outproduce the older more symbiotic memes.

I've argued in the past that this could be a potential candidate for the Great Filter; that any civilization that develops radio — and thus could potentially be detected over interstellar distances — is quickly devoured by parasitic memes and collapses. Add that an industrial revolution is a once-per-planet event… (at best; another Great Filter candidate I like to propose is getting your planet's Carboniferous Period just right.)

Ukraine also committing suicide, but faster?

Ukraine is being killed, not committing suicide.

Ukraine was having a fertility crisis even before the war.

If I'm in an MMA match, and I'm put in an armbar, and I don't tap, did the guy I'm fighting break my arm, or did I make him break my arm?

What if NATO is on the sidelines yelling at me that I can still win this thing?

It's like you're in an MMA match, and the guy you're fighting is going to kill you if you lose (but he's going to walk away regardless).

Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?

Ukraine gets to choose between being Russia's puppet state and being used as a buffer between it and NATO, or being NATOs puppet state and filled with Africans. Such is the fate of minor nations. There will almost certainly be more Ukrainians in three generations under Russian dominion than NATO. Unless you stretch the definition of Ukrainian to mean anyone on Ukranian soil, but then what was the point of keeping Russians out if you can just change the meaning of words and suddenly everyone is Ukranian?

Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?

Yes. Numerous Russians, including Vladimir Putin and Aleksandr Dugin, have said that one of the goals of the war is the elimination of Ukrainian nationhood as an idea and making the Ukrainians understand that they are actually "little Russians". Dugin at least is a serious thinker, and this qualifies as genocide under the standard definition.

By that definition the America I grew up in has been genocided.

Which I do actually believe, but I'd appreciate if an ounce of worry for Ukraine was spared for the remnants of my peoples.

How do you figure it for a genocide? In almost any reasonable measure, both Russians and Ukrainians are Orthodox Christian Slavs. They’re probably as close as something like England and Australia or Canada. If England wants to end the idea of Australia, that may be terrible for all kids of reasons, but it would be hard to make one Anglosphere country invading another into a genocide simply because they’re ethnically the same. If you took DNA from random individuals from both countries, telling them apart is probably difficult. At least in Gaza, you can likely find enough difference between a Palestinian and Israeli to bolster the claim that it’s at least plausible as a genocide.

In the current year, there is a Ukrainian nation. If Putin succeeds in his political goal, there will not be. That is the meaning of the word "genocide". That you think there shouldn't be a Ukrainian nation is irrelevant, given that there clearly is - people don't fight this well for non-existent nations.

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There is no evidence that the west wants to fill Ukraine with Africans. Indeed, western European countries might quite reasonably believe that dumping Africans in Ukraine will just cause them to migrate from Ukraine to western European countries that are actually wealthier than Africa.

Is there any belief by any serious thinker that this is a war of genocide?

  1. We are supposed to treat seriously claims of "white genocide" because white people in the west can't breed. However, when Russia deports ukranian children and bans the ukranian language the G-word is totally unfitting.

  2. Very few wars are fought with the explicit aim of putting a bullet in the head of every citizen. Nevertheless, wars short of that can be existential for the state.

NATOs puppet state and filled with Africans.

Interesting. And Ukraine was being filled with Africans between 2013 and 2022, right? And e.g. Poland (also a nato puppet if there ever was one) is also filled with Africans?

Poland (also a nato puppet if there ever was one) is also filled with Africans?

South Asians, and at a somewhat slower pace than the wokest countries in NATO, but yes.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the Indian population of Poland is around 0.09%. Perhaps some sophistry can turn this into "filled", but I'm not impressed.

When responding, please keep in mind that Russia is 10%-15% Muslim.

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Do you apply that kind of thinking to all areas of life, including yours? That your enemies are blameless if they carry out the threats you did not submit to?

For an example with a very different valence, if somebody doesn't pay their taxes and they eventually end up in court and they refuse to settle in court, they eventually end up in prison. It wouldn't be usual to cheer them on and say, "Keep fighting! Don't let the bastards get you! Never give in to pressure!".

EDIT: since people are taking this to be an enthusiastic support of Russia's behaviour, my point was that "if you refuse to tap out under pressure, you're going to get hurt" and "you're not at fault for refusing to give into threats" are both pretty context-dependent. I should probably have been less gnomic but I have other things on my mind.

What if the person you're discussing has paid all their taxes? Do you still encourage them to pay again and again and again or do you encourage them to fight the case? That is Ukraine.

People are taking my example far too literally. I wasn't saying 'Ukraine trying to fight the Russians is like refusing to pay your taxes', I was trying to demonstrate to @sun_the_second that whether you should tap out in response to pressure, and whether you should blame people for forcefully subjugating resistance, can't be a universal principle you can decide once-and-for-all and base your entire life around.

Of course, one is expected to pay one's taxes every year :P

Likening the invasion of a sovereign nation to ordinary law enforcement seems incredibly bad faith. It is more like if a gang was trying to force you to join it under threat of stealing your belongings and killing you if you refuse. Depending on how you expect them to treat you should you accept, "Keep fighting!" is not unreasonable here. Especially if you have already managed to keep them at a stalemate for four years and the terms for surrender boil down to "give us all your stuff".

My point is that, as the libertarians like to say, there is not a huge difference between the government saying 'we will lock you in a box if you don't give us the money we've decided you owe us, even if you disagree' and a gang saying they want your stuff and they'll hurt you if you refuse.

It can simultaneously be the case that:

  • the justice of a demand is heavily debated, especially between demander and demandee
  • refusing will have predictably bad consequences

And the result is therefore some mixture of:

  • refusing to give in is morally foolish or reckless, given the way it affects those who depend on you
  • refusing to give in is morally noble and brave, given the way it discourages demands towards others

which varies case by case.

Ultimately context and viewpoint are doing 90% of the work here. Neither 'be reasonable!' nor 'always stick to your guns (metaphorically), son' are reliable ways of thinking that you can apply to all areas of life.

An MMA match consists of two willing participants. Ukraine never wanted war with Russia.

It depends on exactly who you mean by "Ukraine." There is literally footage of Zelensky telling Azov commanders to stop shelling Donbass before the war, and they basically laugh in his face and tell him to go jump in a lake.

The Ukrainian people voted for peace, yes, but their vote doesn’t really matter: what matters is whether the US State Department decides to pipeline weapons to the subgroups that do, and they did.

Please link me to this footage.

You're definitely right its a bad analogy.

But that just makes the realpolitik of the situation much clearer. No ref stoppage is imminent.

I don't think the theory of a civilization scale parasite is necessary. There is a simpler explanation: the vast majority of people simply don't see falling fertility rates as a problem. It's not that people would naturally see it as a problem but a memetic parasite is blinding them. It's that people generally don't see it as a problem unless something brings it to their attention. The vast majority of people have never have paid any attention to social-level fertility rates at all. People 1000 years ago had large numbers of kids because of very local and immediate factors: basically, the poor needed kids for labor and as a form of welfare in old age, the rich could afford to have a bunch of kids and then not work much to take care of them (servants could do it), contraception was primitive, women viewed having kids as more central to their identity than they do now, and so on. People were having many kids because of these immediate local factors, not out of a personal interest in their society's overall fertility. When you take people's basic disinterest in overall fertility rates and then remove the factors that previously kept fertility high, the fertility rate drops. The removal of the factors that had previously kept fertility rates high was not caused by some singular memetic parasite. It was caused by several separate things: technological change that reduced the importance of physical human labor, improvements in contraception, the feminist movement. Now of course, these things are related: the technological changes also helped to enable feminism to begin with, improvements in contraception were partly motivated by a feminist-leaning desire to help women, and so on. But to think of them all as being part of one social contagion is, I think, going too far. It overly compresses the actual complexity of the historical phenomena into one supposed dimension.

Now, one could certainly argue that there exists a widespread ideology that helps to make it harder for people to tackle the problem even once they begin to think of it as a problem. One can call it "leftism", or whatever. But even if one removed this ideology, that does not mean that people would automatically start to think of falling fertility rates as a problem. That's a separate thing. The "survival instinct" that you mention does not activate until and unless the problem becomes very visible. And we are not yet at that point. So falling fertility rates fall into the same class of problems as climate change: the vast majority of people do not have any sort of inherent tendency to pay attention to the problem. They only begin to pay attention to it either after individuals and groups put significant efforts, on a massive scale, into "raising awareness" of the problem, or after the problem has begun to create such obvious negative consequences that even the average person notices it.

Or rather: the parasite is not on us, but on the egregore we call "self-perpetuating stable society". Not even a parasite, really, but rather a failure of a few super-human memetic organs.

I don't think the theory of a civilization scale parasite is necessary. There is a simpler explanation: the vast majority of people simply don't see falling fertility rates as a problem.

It isn't sufficient either, if the parasite is anything to do with the culture wars. Fertility in first-world Asia crashes long before the western culture wars reach them. The parasite has to be something that existed in 1970s Japan.

I think there was a lot more emphasis on children by the entire culture in the past. Businesses and public places were designed to be much friendlier to children. Restaurants would have coloring sheets and crayons and little table puzzles for the kids. Sporting events were cheap enough that it wasn’t weird to see lots of kids running around the ballpark with parents. Parks had playgrounds. For that matter, people in general were much more okay with kids around in public, understanding of kids perhaps being mischievous or crabby in public without blaming parents for not having their kids behaving like little adults. Kids are now a burden, they cannot be allowed out of sight — even in their own yards. They are only allowed in public if they’re behaving perfectly, not being curious, not being bored, definitely not being crabby. Going on to entertainment, you really don’t have music and TV outside of specific streaming services that are geared to kids.

This is not my experience of my (recently gentrified, ethnically mixed) neighbourhood of London. Cheap chain restaurants absolutely have kids' menus with puzzles and colouring sheets on the back. Parks have more playgrounds than they used to. (I am aware that London is exceptional among top-tier cities in terms of the number and quality of our modern playgrounds). And the solidarity among parents that people with prestigious platforms talk about in the past tense still exists on the ground. When my autistic sons sperg out in public, I get sympathetic responses rather than judgemental ones.

Is that how things are where you live? I haven't noticed any of those things, for the most part.

  • Child friendly restaurants - check (conversely, parents did not go to upscale romantic restaurants with their young children in the past, either)
  • Can I take my kids to a cheap townie baseball game? Yes. There's still a pizza and baseball ticket reading program for kids too.
  • Do most of the parks around here have playgrounds? Sure. Or they can climb on boulders, which is also fine. Or they can wade in a stream or river, likewise perfectly fine.
  • Do people smile at the kids in public, and ignore them when they're throwing a fit? Mostly, yes.
  • Can my kids legally play in my yard without me? Yes, though for the toddler, it should probably be in the fenced part of the yard, and not in the canyon or the driveway. Or at least, it would be actually negligent to let a toddler play there.
  • Is there enough kid-centric entertainment? Yes! Good grief! Yes, of course there is enough entertainment for them, that's why everyone's been complaining about "iPad kids" these past several years.

Not that there aren't ways the culture is less child friendly than in some other times and places. The lack of friends within walking distance is a genuine concern.

the poor needed kids for labor

has anyone quantified this? What is "make even" age for a child, and how does it count considering that more than half of them die before 10 years? I think non-existing contraception is most factor here.

It used to be conventional wisdom that a child growing up on a farm and doing a usual share of the work had repaid their parents by the time they turned 15.

assuming zero mortality?

Breakeven age for child labor is quite low if your first one or two children are daughters, they become mini maids with household chores and help raise more children. My own mother raised her four brothers while my grandmother worked to supplement my grandfathers income.

It was a bit unfair for my mother though, she was and is highly domestic without much education. She took care of my grandparents in their old age. My uncles all had their post graduate professional education paid for and have highly lucrative careers. But it's not as if they contribute to my mother's financial security despite her partial parental role.

I'm not going to get into the whole cultural debate around declining TFR or putative causes. I am painfully pragmatic, and what I intend to demonstrate is that there is a technological solution to the problem (the best kind of solution, mwah):

A country as wealthy as Sweden can circumvent the dysgenic concerns raised by @sleepyegg through embryo selection. The primary costs are the IVF itself, which should be in the realm of affordability for the middle class and above (who suffer disproportionately from reduced TFR). If not, I think any sane government should be willing to spend enormous sums of money to prevent population collapse.

You can screen for a lot of things, including strong proxies for health/mutational load. The screening itself is a trivial fraction of the cost compared to the egg extraction, freezing and IVF, and as mentioned it's the IVF that's the costly part.

Further, implantation success rates are remarkably stable even for older women. It's the age of the ova itself that matters, someone using eggs they harvested at 25 when they're in their late 30s is way more likely to succeed (for a given number of cycles) than that person using recently harvested eggs.

In other words, the uterus can handle things just fine for a very long time. The eggs continue to degrade the longer they stay in the ovary. You're already born with all the eggs you'll ever have if you're a woman, or as man, though that depends on when you last went to the supermarket. The success rate for implantation or the dysgenic effects of mutational load on the viability or overall health of the eggs/children increase precipitously once you're in your 30s. It's no coincidence that the risk of Down syndrome shoots up with increasing maternal age around that time.

The problem is, of course, that few governments have crossed the minimum sanity threshold to do these things. The fruit couldn't hang much lower without already being in the dirt.

Recommended reading:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dxffBxGqt2eidxwRR/the-optimal-age-to-freeze-eggs-is-19

As a matter of fact, I would strongly recommend everything GeneSmith has ever written on the topic. I'd trust him to smith my genes, or those of my children.

I am painfully pragmatic, and what I intend to demonstrate is that there is a technological solution to the problem (the best kind of solution, mwah):

Have you read Dune? It makes a compelling case that's the opposite of true. Maybe people who are so bad that they won't reproduce until 35 should just stop existing. Why save them with technology invented for them? What's the point?

Have you read Dune? It makes a compelling case that's the opposite of true.

The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

You know what, maybe we shouldn't have invented treatments for malaria, chemotherapy for aggressive cancers, ozempic for the obesity epidemic. Maybe reducing infant-and-child mortality rates from the ~50% they hovered around for most of human history to the rounding error they are today was deeply misguided. Maybe doctors should all retire en masse and society should return to the state of nature, however we're defining that this Sunday.

If you disagree, then I think the arguments for trying to fix demographic collapse write themselves. If you don't, then we're not going to get anywhere.

The Logical Fallacy of Generalization from Fictional Evidence

Apologies for that, I was trying to speak to the audience. More seriously, it's not that Dune is empirical evidence, but that the author's underlying reasoning for Butlerian Jihad being good is itself a philosophical case for what I am arguing. My own case for it, without reference to fiction and with reference to real science, would lead me to write a book about dynastic aristocracies with supermen who control technology instead of letting technology control them.

You know what, maybe we shouldn't have invented treatments for malaria, chemotherapy for aggressive cancers, ozempic for the obesity epidemic. Maybe reducing infant-and-child mortality rates from the ~50% they hovered around for most of human history to the rounding error they are today was deeply misguided. Maybe doctors should all retire en masse and society should return to the state of nature, however we're defining that this Sunday.

We spend way too much on healthcare and it really doesn't improve human happiness much. These medicines have pros and cons. You seem to fixate on the pros without acknowledging any cons. Why is that?

In some cases the pros outweight the cons. You rush to cases where most people would say that's that case. I don't disagree that much. I would probably say that some chemotherapies are actually scams and I would like to think I would be one of the patients who follows through on that and just dies earlier instead of having a wretched 6 to 12 month life extension. Others are life-savers and cures. It depends on the type of cancer. In the case of malaria, the impact of the cure and its widespread free distribution depends on what you think about a billion subsaharan Africans existing. Can't get anywhere negative on that topic with normies because it is impolite thought crime. The one downside of ozempic is that obesity was a mark of shame for people with terrible self-control, but I think that tattoos and other vices neatly fill the obesity void, so I see it as a positive on net.

Ultimately with these technologies, you must judge the life-form they help and weigh the externalities of that life form against the costs of the aid. Yes, this is so mean to do, because everyone is exactly the same and equal and equally valuable and so on, unless you want to be impolite. But is truth always polite? Anyway, IVF is extremely expensive and basically works to perpetuate people who barely want to reproduce. That attitude correlates positively with other negative behaviors that punish those around them as well. The babies it makes are sicker on average. Why should we have more sick people who hate family life at such a high cost? Who does that benefit? I'm not seeing it pass the pros and cons audit.

My own case for it, without reference to fiction and with reference to real science, would lead me to write a book about dynastic aristocracies with supermen who control technology instead of letting technology control them.

I wish to note that I put serious weight on an oligarchic future where a few elites control AGI, and thus the rest of us. I am far more skeptical of genetic engineering being the primary driver behind the creation of a permanent underclass, for the same reason that cars went from being something that were the playthings of the rich to available to most. Everything I've described has gotten cheaper over time, often drastically so.

We spend way too much on healthcare and it really doesn't improve human happiness much. These medicines have pros and cons. You seem to fixate on the pros without acknowledging any cons. Why is that?

This is more reflective of your unfamiliarity with me. I mean that without insult. I've written on exactly that topic at length, multiple times, over years. I have very long effort-posts on the importance of using metrics like QALY/DALY and cost-benefit/cost-utility when it comes to dictating policy on medical care. If that weren't true, that would be a fair critique, but this is one of the rare occasions where I genuinely can't afford to be as thorough as I'd desire. I am not writing a policy white paper, I am crunched for time because of exams, and in all honesty, I shouldn't even be here in the first place. I have not pretended to have done a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis here, but I have linked to the work of people who have.

But considering my own output:

https://www.themotte.org/post/2899/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/359026?context=8#context

I'll run the numbers on grandma, even if I already know the answer. A $300,000 treatment (roughly £240,000) for a 60% chance at two months (0.16 years) of very low-quality life (let's generously say 0.2 QALYs) results in a cost per QALY that is astronomically high. The answer from the system is a clear, predictable no. Conversely, a treatment with the same price tag for a teenager that offers a high chance of fifty more years of healthy life would be approved without a second thought. The system is explicitly utilitarian. It prioritizes maximizing the total amount of healthy life across the population. It can and will spend millions on a child, but it will counsel a family against a futile and painful intervention for a demented octogenarian. This isn't some big secret either. I have had such discussions with dozens of families, and not a single one has had a problem with it, or withdrawn their relative to go elsewhere, as they are at full liberty to do.

For those who find this calculus unsettling (I do not know why the standard approach to handling scarce resources unsettles anyone) the system provides an escape hatch. The existence of the NHS does not preclude private medicine. The wealthy, or anyone with good private insurance, can opt out of the public queue and pay for the treatment the state has denied. You can, in effect, disagree with the state’s valuation of a life year and substitute your own. The state provides a robust, free baseline for ninety-nine percent of situations, while allowing a private market for those who want more. A similar model exists in India, a country with far fewer resources than the United States (citation available on request) which manages to provide basic care for free while supporting a thriving private sector.

In other words, I am the last person who you should accuse of not considering the diminishing returns to further healthcare expenditure. Also, note that diminishing returns are not the same thing as no returns, let alone negative returns. If you have a billion dollars and want to spend all of it on care that has a negligible chance of healing you, be my guest. I'm more concerned with public policy and public funds.

I am also a transhumanist, so I want medical technology to get even cheaper (which it mostly has), alongside society getting wealthier. The expected result is that we end up with cheaper, better treatments, and can provide them to more people. Be it privately or through public funding.

Anyway, IVF is extremely expensive and basically works to perpetuate people who barely want to reproduce. That attitude correlates positively with other negative behaviors that punish those around them as well. The babies it makes are sicker on average. Why should we have more sick people who hate family life at such a high cost? Who does that benefit? I'm not seeing it pass the pros and cons audit.

There is very, very good reason that I advocated for embryo selection above and beyond subsidized IVF. Consider that that cuts down the majority of your arguments at the knee. The "sicker IVF babies" finding is largely driven by maternal age, multiple-embryo transfers (now declining as standard practice), and underlying parental subfertility rather than the IVF procedure itself. You can't accuse me of not acknowledging that, when I have already offered a solution.

I also do not particularly care about whether people "barely want to reproduce", as long as the answer is more yes than it is no. I'm not a gynaecologist, but in general, if someone tells me that they want children, I support them. Even if it would be easy to scold them for being irrational or indecisive and making things harder for themselves. In psychiatry, it's all too common for depressed people to not want to be helped, because depression strongly correlates with reduced self-esteem and a sense of being unworthy of care. Many people show up in front of me who just care enough to get out of bed and see a psychiatrist. I treat them nonetheless, and I am happy doing so.

The IVF population is overwhelmingly composed of couples who want children intensely (often more than the median fertile couple) and whose biology has betrayed them, and that conflating them with "people who barely want to reproduce" is incorrect.

Humans are fallible, non-omniscient and imperfectly rational actors, and society should make some concession to those unfortunate facts.

If you disagree with this on moral grounds, be my guest. I am on Scott's side, in the sense that Society is fixed, Biology is mutable.

If you disagree with this on moral grounds, be my guest. I am on Scott's side, in the sense that Society is fixed, Biology is mutable.

Society is biology, so this is not literally true. Although changing the biology of 300 million people is much harder than changing the biology of one. And if you can change the biology of one cooperatively, you might be able to do the same for 300 million people, but if you need to change 300 million people uncooperatively, that's going to have a big, probably unreachable cost.

It's not that I think these people can be effectively bullied into reproducing earlier, if anything them failing to replace themselves is better. Because what they do is unnatural, it both costs a lot of money to fix, and it comes off as extremely ugly to other people. I believe their lives are unhappy and that it is wrong to delay reproduction to 35. In the meantime I would enjoy it if a government of people who think like me lower the status those who live that lifestyle through the trumpeting the virtues of reproducing naturally at the appropriate age. I also think the late-reproducing people have a ton of negative externalities on the rest. of us and as they fail to replace themselves those externalities will fade and all of the well-adapted people will be happier and wealthier.

I mean, I expect that selection pressure will eventually result in a return to normal or historical TFRs, if only because the high fecundity populations replace the ones who act like pandas in captivity.

I also think the late-reproducing people have a ton of negative externalities on the rest. of us and as they fail to replace themselves those externalities will fade and all of the well-adapted people will be happier and wealthier.

I am somewhat perplexed by how you, after telling me that I haven't done a basic cost-benefit analysis, happen to casually gloss over the rather catastrophic near to medium term economic and societal damage of societies with far more old people than children, or drastic population decline as projected.... in pretty much every developed country. And many developing ones.

I don't lose sleep over this, because I expect technological interventions like AGI+robotics, artificial wombs etc to reduce or eliminate the current coupling between population growth/composition and the stability of national economies. I genuinely don't think we're going to need humans for their physical or cognitive labor in a decade or change, possible less. It's the same reason I don't worry particularly hard about the worst case projections for global warming, if it gets that bad, someone is going to burn a billion dollars of sulphur or inject it into the stratosphere. Inertia only goes so far.

You do not seem as optimistic, nor even as open to technological solutions, and I do not see how you can reasonably claim that your distaste for nudging or assisting the sub-fertile into having more children (by any means) can compensate for decaying infrastructure or potential collapse in a generation or two. If it's business as usual with no major technological breakthroughs and serious social engineering (or even just the widespread adoption of the suggestions I've endorsed), I don't see how you account for the disaster that represents.

@self_made_human where does your optimism for near term AGI come from? I am practically ignorant of AI, but my totally uneducated impression is that it is unlikely to happen within the next 10 years. I would prefer to be wrong, though.

You mentioned in other comments on educational savings for children that you were somewhat certain in would happen within 5 years. Knowing you, you must have some sources you find reliable on AGI progress. Again, from my uneducated view it seems like promises of AI / AGI is merely slick marketing to separate wealthy investors from their money.

The most impactful part of AI on my life so far is the elimination of customer facing jobs on the phone, who have been replaced with AI chatbots which can never fix the unique problems I need addressed. I end up waiting longer to speak to a real person to get the work or chore done.

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I am somewhat perplexed by how you, after telling me that I haven't done a basic cost-benefit analysis, happen to casually gloss over the rather catastrophic near to medium term economic and societal damage of societies with far more old people than children, or drastic population decline as projected.... in pretty much every developed country. And many developing ones.

The solution to this is redistributing from the old to the young. He who does not work shall not eat. Easy.

I genuinely don't think we're going to need humans for their physical or cognitive labor in a decade or change, possible less.

That would be awesome. Can we design ourselves to be extremely beautiful, moral, and intelligent after that? Considering we will no longer will need the lower classes.

If it's business as usual with no major technological breakthroughs and serious social engineering (or even just the widespread adoption of the suggestions I've endorsed), I don't see how you account for the disaster that represents.

I think the people who made the disaster, so the old generation at that time, should suffer the consequences of their behavior. They are being told how to be good, by several voices at the moment, and they are not listening at all. That is wrong, and I'm fine with it if they pay the price. They deserve it.

I do think there are some technological solutions, but many of them have nothing to do with pregnancy. From my perspective as a stay at home dad and parent of 3, in a neighborhood full of kids, I think most parents are accurately estimating the number of kids they can have and then having that many kids.

Shout-out to @HereAndGone2's post below pointing out the difficulties involved in potential surgery options. Throwing out surgery options feels easy, but actually going through with it is generally scary.

I'll go through the list of blockers and how I think Tech is impacting them:

  1. Conception. I've known plenty of couples that have fertility problems. There does however seem to be some kind of "breaking the seal" effect. Where a woman gets pregnant once and then it is much easier to conceive after that. Its stopped very few that I know of. Mostly it slows them down on having an initial kid. Tech - is being used to alleviate this problem already. Don't think you get much delta out of increased tech.
  2. Pregnancy. It absolutely sucks for some women. Worst case scenario its as bad as going through Chemo. Nausea and vomiting in 1st trimester is likely, lingering effects less likely. 3rd trimester is physical discomfort and limited mobility. For working women this means burning a bunch of PTO or sick leave before the baby even arrives. Typically pregnancies seem to be the same level of struggle across multiple kids for one woman. So if you have one really shitty pregancy experience, its likely gonna happen again for other kids. Tech - limited in this area, dangerous to do medical experiments on women with children. Having babies via pods or external wombs is like far future tech that could help a lot.
  3. Birth. As they get older it gets more and more dangerous to have kids. Modern medicine does a hell of a job of keeping them alive, but its still scary as hell for everyone remotely involved. My wife lost one of her childhood friends when she was giving birth (some kind of infection that killed the mother and child). I have multiple friends where the mother had to be taken in for emergency C-sections for various complications. Having kids younger is maybe safer in the sense that having major surgery while younger is safer. But having major surgery is still a base level of dangerous and scary. Tech - already heavily deployed in this area. Modern medicine is really a miracle. We are probably close to maxed out on this.
  4. Transportation. Car seats are a hassle. The number you can fit in a car is way less than the total seats. Lots of cars claim three seats per middle/back row. Only two car seats can fit in a row, even in very large American cars. Car seats as contraception is a known issue. Tech - is decent on this but its mostly a regulatory issue. Car designs are limited by safety concerns. Car seats are required.
  5. 0-6 months child care. Baby is not very mobile. Is very dependent on caregivers for everything. Feeding, clothing, diapers, etc. Tech - mostly still primitive here. Plenty of parents and adults enjoy this part of raising a baby so there aren't really attempts to automate it away. The main difficulty is that it is a 24hr job. A humanoid robot nanny might be really effective here at minimum just to turn it into a 16 hour job instead of 24. Price of them would have to come way down, and safety would be a massive concern.
  6. 0.5 - 3 years child care. Kid is mobile, still in diapers for most or all of this time. Will start communicating, but communication is not super useful. Tech - this is where things get interesting. I think the biggest innovation in recent years has been remote work. This is a good age where you can set the kid down in a play area they can have fun with toys and entertain themselves to some extent (or sibilings around the same age can entertain each other). They need periodic supervision and help with meals and diapers. Some work can get done in those periods, maybe half as much as an unencumbered adult. But we aren't well setup to have employees doing 4 hours of money work in an 8 hour time period. Or you burn out the parent and have them do 8hr of money work and 8hr of parenting work in a 16 hour period. The latter is a hurdle and leads to less kids, the former is not generally available. Cheaper gadgets and devices that can entertain the kids helps a little. Cheaper and easier meal prep helps.
  7. 4-6 years child care. Out of diapers, more independant, but also with growing social needs. pre-school and day care costs a lot of money Tech - mostly still primitive here. Some help from internet stuff that has made coordination and finding childcare for this age easier. AI humanoid robots that could serve as guardians would be helpful. But there is also a significant contingent of adults that like kids in this age range. Mostly women of course, but certainly enough of them that the wages for this job have been driven into the dirt.
  8. Older kid transportation. Kids start having a bunch of activities all over the place that they need to get to. With more kids they are also in more locations. I spend some activity days driving for 2 hours. Nothing is more than 10 miles away from my house. Traffic is not great, but even if it was gone that might only shave off thirty minutes. Tech - 19th century tech, the solution is just drive everywhere. Self driving cars might help, but usually a parent still need to accompany the kids up into the mid teens. Possibly some version of vr tech might help here (so they don't have to go anywhere and can do activities at home). But so would having larger homes.
  9. Bureaucracy and existing. Just having your kid exist on paper is a challenge. Adults have this challenge too. Things to sign up for, accounts to manage, healthcare signup stuff, etc. If you love filling out forms this is great, for everyone else it sucks. Tech online signup has made a lot of life way easier, but its also made it easier for everyone to expect more information, more release forms etc etc. LLM AI agents seem like they might be a solution, but I think it will be the same as the internet, they won't lower the burden on the parents, they will just make organizations more comfortable asking for more stuff up until the burden on the parents is similar.
  10. Everything and everyone else. This list is getting too long, but this is really important. Parents are a subset of everyone. If you make life easier for everyone you also make it easier for parents. Especially when there are time savings. tech - Delivery services are great. Grocery delivery is amazing. Online shopping is super easy. Remote work reducing commutes has been awesome.

I'll just end with the general observation that if you give parents more money but there aren't areas where they can trade money for more time then the money doesn't help them. As a single person you might think of money as the incentive in and of itself. But the calculations change a bit when you are a parent. Money is fully a means to an end. The ends being providing childcare, and enjoying your children. Technology that allows for that tradeoff is good. Technology that cheapens that tradeoff rate is great. Technology that adds a new time burden as part of the rat race or through regulation is terrible.

its likely gonna happen again for other kids. Tech - limited in this area, dangerous to do medical experiments on women with children.

Is that really the case? I could see all kind of medical devices that would help, for example, implantable devices to support the pelvic floor. There's always that feminist argument that medications are not sufficiently tested on women. Probably because there is too much variability on hormonal profiles and so on, but with AI-enabled calculation power, it shouldn't be such a huge burden to take into account.

It's dangerous? So are oil fields, roofs, or highways. It's dangerous to the fetus? Not a concern when it's a woman's choice.

Perhaps we need some strong legislation and cash-in-hand to enable more widespread research into these issues. If the government was putting as much money into solving 'pregnancy is uncomfortable' as they do blowing up enemies of Israel, we'd have solutions.

Alternatively, if we want to get around this whole thing, we could just have a more painful culture. Get rid of probation or even detention in schools and replace them with cannings and lashings. If we want to get extreme, we could beat fornication, abortion and contraception out of people, but even without that, having experienced some physical pain and gotten over it would help young women get over the concept that childbirth is painful.

The human body is not really meant to be cut open. We have figured out ways to do it that minimize harm and damage, but the risk doesn't go away. Roll the dice enough and eventually some bad luck arises and someone dies or gets a life altering injury.

Doctors don't want to kill people, insurance companies and hospitals don't want to get sued, patients don't want to die or be disfigured. It's generally in everyone's interest to minimize the number of major surgeries or at least only do them when the danger of not doing them is greater.

An implantable pelvic floor device sounds exactly like the kind of thing that fails a risk reward test for surgery.

A government that overrides all the other people involved in the situation and says "do it anyway" is not going to be popular for saying that. If it's a democracy, they are likely to be replaced.

A government that overrides all the other people involved in the situation and says "do it anyway" is not going to be popular for saying that. If it's a democracy, they are likely to be replaced.

Just apply such media control that this can all be hand-waved away. It's 2020+6, this is a well-known playbook.

There's always that feminist argument that medications are not sufficiently tested on women. Probably because there is too much variability on hormonal profiles and so on

More likely that if the woman later gets pregnant, or turns out to be pregnant despite you not allowing pregnant women in your study, the child, who signed no waivers, has an unlimited right to sue.

Perhaps it's time for a total and complete shutdown of family law and birth-related regulations until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on.

Blue tribe just need a strong Dr Fauci-like leader and the usual media campaign to spin it into a world-ending emergency to exempt the relevant corporations from legal consequences. Shouldn't be a big deal, barely an inconvenience. 'We need bodies for Russia/China/Iran/...'

Your objections seem maximally hand wavey 'yeah just massively alter society to fit this new goal, democrats did it back during covid'

Collapsing birthrates are a much bigger problem than covid. You're the one who cares about democracy, presumably. You should use the available tools of democracy to further goals that allow democracy to exist in the future. I for one am fine with democracy-skeptical high-birth-rates minorities taking over the future.

Where did I say I care about democracy?

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Seems unworkable because while the process and technology is sound, the main barrier is individual lack of planning. Suppose you made IVF 100% subsidized and free, you still have to convince young women to undergo an invasive surgical procedure. Many women would probably delay it until it was too late to be worth doing. Countries like Israel which make heavy use of IVF have religious-cultural-social pressure for young women to bear children, so the women are more likely to freeze their eggs early.

Still, there would be some takers for free or partially subsidized IVF. Just need to convince the voting public it is worth the cost, a benefit for future generations that will not generate direct benefits for them.

Suppose you made IVF 100% subsidized and free, you still have to convince young women to undergo an invasive surgical procedure.

Young women, the demographic known to be particularly fond of cosmetic surgery? Hmm..

The easiest answer is to bribe pay them. I expect plenty of takers if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.

As far as I can tell, my proposal involves less demanding all-encompassing public propaganda or government intervention than any alternative I can name. Is it a perfect solution? Of course not, but praying away cratering TFRs might be cheap and also wouldn't work.

The easiest answer is to bribe pay them. I expect plenty of takers if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.

Guys, have you ever spoken to any women about how many kids they want to have, if they want to have kids, and why don't they want ten kids like their grandmothers' generation?

Any of you men who are not circumcised, would you get circumcised for $10k? Remembering, before you go "yeah sure why not?" that there is an anti-circumcision movement and plenty of men who are even going through expensive surgery to restore the foreskin (or at least an ersatz one) because of the perceived disadvantages?

Would you undergo circumcision for any money if it was a repeated operation?

It's not just "pay 24 year old Mandii to have a baby", it's that women even today still will be responsible for the majority of the childcare on top of looking after the house and holding down a job (even a part-time job). Men will be dissatisfied if their wife isn't feeling ready for as much sex after having a baby. Men will leave because "you pay more attention to the kids than me". This isn't simply "blame men for being selfish", it's complicated problems of intimacy, biology, societal structures, and the rest of it.

Put yourself into those shoes: you are now the person who goes back to work after maternity leave (only now we're saying paternity leave). You have a young baby to take care of, and to arrange that they are being taken care of while you work. If there's any problems, you are the one gets the phone call at work to sort it out. You are the one doing the lion's share of the child-minding and housework, even if your spouse is sympathetic and helpful. If you have a couple of kids, you are the one managing schedules around parent-teacher meetings, birthdays, extracurricular activities, taking time off to bring them to the dentist/doctor, whose salary is going towards paying childcare. Oh, and your partner still expects intimacy on a regular basis and will leave if they feel neglected. Do you think your current life and job as the man of the house can change around to accommodate all that? Would you change around to accommodate all that?

Try imagining being a mother and see how much of that life you want to devote to having four kids, when you could be "one and done" or even none, or put it off till you're forty and established in life.

Plenty of young women want children though. They just postpone it as they want to focus their early and mid twenties on partying, travelling, and education. Only to realise too late that finding a lover worth starting a family with is much harder than expected and can easily take years. Suddenly they find themselves in their mid thirties where pregnancy and childbirth is much more risky and their fertility lowers year by year.

I imagine this is the group @self_made_human is trying to cater to. Pay them to freeze their eggs while they are still young, so that they are more likely to still be able to get pregnant once they feel ready to start a family.

Considering that children is something they actually want, and supposing that this makes it significantly more likely, I could easily imagine that a lot of young women would actually be okay with this.

Then, when they have daughters, they can tell them about the experience, and this is how civilizations goes through various phases.

Guys, have you ever spoken to any women about how many kids they want to have, if they want to have kids, and why don't they want ten kids like their grandmothers' generation?

Why yes, I've had this conversation with my serious partners. The answer ranged between 0 and 3, with the modal value being 2.

Would you undergo circumcision for any money if it was a repeated operation?

Any money? Like, how much money we talking about here? I'd do it for $250k, maybe even $100k. Hell, if they were pretty reasonable and made sure I was well anesthesized, I'd do for it much less. Presuming the foreskin grew back, and this isn't just the equivalent of removing my dick with a cheese grater. I would charge at least a few hundred million dollars for that.

Sadly this must remain a hypothetical, since I was circumcised for medical reasons, and I didn't even get paid for it.

The biggest problem with the rest of your arguments is that they're emotive/rhetorical, not numerate or quantitative.

Men will leave because "you pay more attention to the kids than me".

How many men? How often? Ballpark figures, even? Because lurid anecdotes are not a good argument.

At the end of the day, I'm a weak policy pro-natalist. I do not make it a general point of going around ordering women to have kids. I think the government should encourage people to have more kids, for a form of encouragement that is closer to an anti-smoking campaign than it is to a breeding camp. Personally? I simply wouldn't marry a lady who didn't want to have kids, and I am perfectly willing to make the sacrifices necessary to support them. No hypocrisy here.

Well, I'd vote for $10k subsidies, but good luck to any politican who tries to get the public behind it. There would probably be serious opposition from women too old to benefit from it, and it would be reframed as a form of neo-patriarchal enslavement of wombs.

if it's a $10k one-off, with heavy government encouragement.

It's no longer a technological solution and has become a social and political problem, so you're kind of back where you began.

Why not cut out the middleman and pay them $10k for their first baby, no IVF required? Or $10k for each baby born before whatever cut-off age where IVF becomes relevant. There's a few dials you can adjust there and it seems like less government involvement and propaganda required than adding in the IVF step.

It's not paying for having a baby, it's the necessity to pay for childcare after the birth. Even when the child gets to be five years old, now they're going to school. Someone has to arrange to pick them up and bring them to the childminder after school, when both parents are working full-time jobs, until Mommy and Daddy get home.

There's a lot of expenses, and even more juggling around of schedules, to taking care of children unless you're full-time home-maker, and being a full-time home-maker is both low-status and only feasible if the main breadwinner is making huge money.

The average male wage in the USA is around $1k/wk, a perfectly doable household income for four people. People just don't prioritize having/being a homemaker as much. I'm given to understand that Scandi tax structures brutally penalize households for having adults outside of formal employment and so SAHMs straight up don't exist there as deliberate policy choice, regardless of partner income(but that much higher percentages of women work part time).

BTW, subsidizing childcare has very limited to nil effects on birthrates, although it does increase the labour force participation of mothers. This suggests that childcare costs do not feature strongly in decisions of whether or not to have kids.

I wish to note that my proposal is not mutually exclusive with anything you've said.

What differentiates $10k for egg-harvesting from a direct reward for natality?

  1. It particularly helps the middle class and UMC, who are the most likely to postpone fertility till it falls off a cliff.
  2. You get the eggs in hand, and the demographic that is most likely to experience severe hindsight regret gets optionality later.
  3. An actual child is much more inconvenient to produce. My recollection is there's strong empirical evidence that comparable cash awards for actual child birth have barely done anything at all, though I don't have the time to go digging right now. Exams.

So the real target for my proposal are people who want kids, but have a tendency to postpone things till it's way too late. At that point, having eggs preserved (preferably from way earlier) would be an absolute godsend. To contrast, if they wanted to get the $10k for the child then, it's far more likely that it's too late. That's true regardless of how badly they want the kids.

The benefit of the wider embryo-selection policy is that avoids or minimizes dysgenic effects. Even if $10k means a lot more to the poor, you can still screen and select for the higher quality potential children. Conveniently, the same markers that promise general good health also correlate positively with IQ. Follow the LW link for a better exploration of that point. You don't even need to do the politically difficult thing of actively selecting for IQ, you can just say you want healthier kids (by pretty standard definitions of health) and get IQ points as a happy little accident.

And even if there's no embryo selection? Well, at least we have good eggs for the IVF. That should make a difference. There's plenty of other things you could reasonably try, but I'm not writing a policy whitepaper here.

My recollection is there's strong empirical evidence that comparable cash awards for actual child birth have barely done anything at all, though I don't have the time to go digging right now

I honestly think this makes sense. There very much seems to be a fantasy where you can spend most of your 20s partying, travelling, and getting educated, and postpone children to later. Having a child early significantly interferes with your freedom to do whatever you want when you are young. In other words, the fantasy of extending your adolescence for as long as possible is worth much more than the state is willing to pay you to have a kid. $10k surely wouldn't cut it. You would need life-altering amounts of money to convince the average 21-year old middle class woman to give it up and pursue a family instead.

The state could pay for every expense associated with child rearing, from diapers to education to the sports they play in their free time. And young people would likely still not consider themselves ready to have kids.

Agree that fertility issues are a tiny part of modern birthrate woes, and probably a big chunk of those fertility issues have solutions more like 'wear boxers instead of briefs' and 'stop having the woman of the house clean out the litterbox' rather than expensive medical treatments. But- and I don't like IVF- modern states are political will limited, they're not money limited. Moar fertility treatments(and literally, I've spoken to people who had five children as soon as a doctor visited their home to figure out why they couldn't have kids. The answer? Preventive antibiotics from a cat born illness. Fertility treatments have some role) are likely to be more effective because they might actually happen. Sweden is a wealthy society which can throw money at healthcare very easily, but which can't encourage marrying your partner or having many children very easily, that's simply not done.

I do think the fertility crisis is still percolating towards the mainstream, and there are potential grandparents who still interpret potential overpopulation in Africa as the same thing as potential overpopulation for them. Also, there are still a bunch of millennials who think they have to be basically perfect, watch their kids constantly, play constantly, never lose their tempers, and so on in order to parent well. Propaganda against these viewpoints have barely been tried so far. It's mostly just a bunch of online rightists talking about it. The culture at large hasn't even stuck its toe in he discourse with fake babies and home ec at high schools, they're currently still below even the 90s in terms of acknowledging teenage girls might eventually become mothers.

I mean this is definitely not the US; what are Sweden's parenting norms? I know it's illegal to hit your kids there, and they genuinely helicopter parent less. I've heard that, like the rest of the nordics, there Are Issues with CPS. But what does the average Swede think they need in order to have kids?

From my PoV what the average Swede thinks they need in order to have kids is full time employment (which in many/most cases means a finished degree/post graduate degree as well) and being established in their respective careers for both parents and owning a sufficiently large home, likely a house, in a sufficiently decent area (IE. Not one with a ton of crime) and obviously a longterm relationship.

This means that you at the earliest would look at having children at about age 25. Many do not finish their degrees by that age, for many reasons, and housing is unaffordable in major metropolitan regions which pushes that date back significantly.

If you're in Stockholm this likely means you're only going to be ready at some point in your early thirties, unless you get a lot of money from your parents, assuming you have a longterm partner that is. This tracks relatively well with the age of first time mothers.

If people could choose freely I think people would have their first kid in their late 20s on average.

As for parenting norms i believe things are far more relaxed than what they seem to be in the US, that I have insight into anyway (coastal "elite"). Kids are out playing on their own all the time, both in urban and suburban areas. Parents aren't expected to arrange and drive their kids to playdates much beyond starting school. What is expected, at least for the middle class (but I assume for everyone but the lumpen proles), is to have your kids attend various kinds of activities like soccer and drive your kids to practice and games.

I personally never felt like the expectations placed on parents were that excessive. I think my parents generation had it worse with parental neuroticism and radical belief in tabula rasaism. Then again, that might be more my parents and where I grew up than a general thing.

To me the issue is the time it takes for people's lives to get started, which is a combination of too much education and too expensive housing. I refuse to believe that the price of housing increasing in real terms by some 500-600% the last 30 years had nothing to do with delayed family formation.

Most of the parents I talk to in Sweden seem to spend a lot (but not literally all) of their free time on their kids. Driving them to and from friends, sports, hobbies, helping with homework, cooking, etc. Many who have 2 kids have noted that they would have absolutely no clue how they would find time for a 3rd, even if they wanted one.

Sure, kids take a lot of work but my point was that it still seems better than in the US, with kids being more "self sufficient" earlier.

Many who have 2 kids have noted that they would have absolutely no clue how they would find time for a 3rd, even if they wanted one.

This is not something I've personally heard. The most common reason I encounter among other parents is that they feel like they've had the whole kid experience with two kids and feel 'done'.

The most common reason for having a third (or more) seems to be if people had the first two of the same gender and they want one of the gender they didn't have yet.

Sure, I hear they have better maternity leave than the US. I've also heard that Japan has been at least beginning to ask their people to form families.

On the ground in Japan, it seems like very little has changed in the last half decade. The child birth payment was raised slightly (an extra 10k yen I think, but that's one off and goes to medical bills) and the income restriction on childrearing money from the national government was removed, so even middle class people now get gubmint cheese for having kids. But all the structural problems -- long work hour culture (premium Friday was a failure), resistance to raising salaries for high performers, fixing zoning and real estate laws so that people can buy land for housing, breaking up the construction cartels so that people can build on their land without submitting to mortgage debt slavery, fixing the interest rate and letting zombie companies staffed by doddering boomers collapse so that banks are willing to lend money for small business expansion and so that the yen will strengthen -- none of that stuff is even being considered at all.

Solving infertility by supporting aging couples probably leads to increased genetic flaws in the general population over time. A sort of procrastination of dealing with the issue directly.

Whatever solution to bring up young women's fertility will involve older women policing the behavior of younger women, through a combination of carrots and sticks. It's the only way any religions or subcultures maintain high TFR.

Whatever solution to bring up young women's fertility will involve older women policing the behavior of younger women

What about young men? Because in the tradwife discussion on here in another thread, it's taken for granted that young men want to play the field and don't want to settle down to a life of boring monogamy age twenty-three or twenty-five.

So unless the young women are having babies outside wedlock - and you guys will criticise them for that - it relies on making young men get married and having kids as early as the young women.

Oh, but marry off the twenty-two year old girls to thirty-five/forty-five year old men, like the old days? Okay. Those guys are going to be virgins until marriage too, because the kind of responsible, faithful, and self-controlled girls you all want to be future wives (no risk of her cucking you with Chad and putting a cuckoo in the nest for beta loser to raise!) will not have sex with them before marriage. So the teen boys are going to have to wait until they're thirty to have sex with that boring life of monogamy.

How do we think this works out? Hang on, here we go again with prostitution, and the good old double standard roars back into life.

Men don't want a wife and kids until they've had their fun, but nobody considers that nature and the evolutionary drive to reproduce is as strong in young women and that's why we get the unhappy effects of "but he swore he'd marry me, now I'm pregnant and single".

First off, in traditional peasant societies both sexes married younger than that; for the peasantry these were mostly actual teenagers marrying twenty something or occasionally very early thirties men, the very large age gaps tended to be mostly elites with second marriages(either polygamous or serially monogamous). In old school urban societies it was more likely to be early twenties woman/late twenties men(who, yes, visited prostitutes before marriage). The twenty two year old and forty five year old has never been normal.

Secondly, hell yeah police young men. We know how to do that. Young men respond to incentives a lot more legibly, and the bottom quintile dropping out of the marriage market is A-OK to most reckonings. Men marrying in the near-term post college years is not some sort of rarity, although it may be passe in the liberal elite. It's quite common in red America.

but marry off the twenty-two year old girls to thirty-five/forty-five year old men, like the old days?

I can't think of any old day where the usual marriage structure had a median age gap between 13 and 23 years or a median age of male marriage between 35 and 45.

Not uncommon to have age gaps due to maternal mortality in childbirth with premodern medical care. Also common in polygamous societies where multiple wives were common. Any situation where virgin fertile women are in high demand but limited supply results in a older husband age because the woman usually prefers the wealthier man other factors being equal.

How do we think this works out?

Could always go for the Ancient Greek route: recreational bisexuality as the norm for young men until it's time for them to settle down and produce heirs?

The older women end up policing the young men too, but they don't need to try hard if the young women are already bought-in to the system. All young men want to play the field, few are capable of actually doing so. Historically, most men are satisfied with marrying while young into an exclusive monogamous relationship if it means sacrificing the ability to play a field that they probably would have failed at anyway. If the young women are willing to settle down early, expect the men to line up to make themselves eligible bachelors.

Nobody expects the older bachelors to remain virgins. Some will probably seek out prostitutes, yes, but men will do that no matter what unless they feel guilt or shame from the constraints of religion or culture. From a TFR perspective, it doesn't matter much if the young husband is 20 or 35. There will be substantial competition for eligible bachelorettes. Some of the teen boys will have to wait until they are 35 to be seen as better suitors, but the onus is on the teen boys to improve themselves quickly to avoid waiting too long, and men generally respond well to that kind of incentive.

As for the womanizers abandoning pregnant young mothers, we already come down pretty hard on that with child support. Part of young women's education will be the emphasis on no sex until marriage, as that is her primary leverage during courtship. Once married, a woman's rights to shared marital assets and income is much more secure, as it already is today.

Do fresh eggs in old women develop more closely to fresh eggs in young women or expired eggs in old women? The former seems more likely to me, though I've not looked into it. Genetic risks especially.

No, there are no fresh eggs in old women. Women are born with all the eggs they will have for their entire lifetime, they are just released slowly after puberty until menopause. This is why our conversation is about young women freezing their eggs to preserve their quality so they can use IVF to fertilize them later.

Biologically-related infertility is obviously an exceedingly small cause of declining fertility, and in any serious discussion it must be pretty far down the list of priorities.

I disagree. Age-related infertility is a major cause of couples with children having fewer children than they wanted after starting too late, and "couples with children not being able to have as many children as they wanted" is about half the fertility decline.

Unfortunately, "mum too old" is one of the harder fertility problems to fix with IVF.

is one of the harder fertility problems to fix with IVF.

actually, trivial if eggs are frozen when they are young

From "The Struggle to Conceive with Frozen Eggs":

Brigitte Adams caused a sensation four years ago when she appeared on the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek under the headline, “Freeze your eggs, Free your career.” She was single and blond, a Vassar graduate who spoke fluent Italian, and was working in tech marketing for a number of prestigious companies. Her story was one of empowerment, how a new fertility procedure was giving women more choices, as the magazine noted provocatively, “in the quest to have it all.”

Adams remembers feeling a wonderful sense of freedom after she froze her eggs in her late 30s, despite the $19,000 cost. Her plan was to work a few more years, find a great guy to marry and still have a house full of her own children.

Things didn’t turn out the way she hoped.

In early 2017, with her 45th birthday looming and no sign of Mr. Right, she decided to start a family on her own. She excitedly unfroze the 11 eggs she had stored and selected a sperm donor.

Two eggs failed to survive the thawing process. Three more failed to fertilize. That left six embryos, of which five appeared to be abnormal. The last one was implanted in her uterus. On the morning of March 7, she got the devastating news that it, too, had failed.

Adams was not pregnant, and her chances of carrying her genetic child had just dropped to near zero. She remembers screaming like “a wild animal,” throwing books, papers, her laptop — and collapsing to the ground.

“It was one of the worst days of my life. There were so many emotions. I was sad. I was angry. I was ashamed,” she said. “I questioned, ‘Why me?’ ‘What did I do wrong?’ ”

This egg-freezing meme needs to die.

This is like as far out on the right side of the bell curve you can go for 'maximum self-imposed difficulty' by freezing late thirties and trying to implant mid forties

froze her eggs in her late 30s

This cannot have helped. I wonder how her story would have changed, if she'd done it at 20?

We've trapped ourselves. We've made ourselves into societies where women spend years being artificially sterile, from at least the legal age of consent for sexual activity though increasingly below that, until they're 'ready' to have children. That can be in late thirties to early forties.

And after fifteen to twenty years of training the body not to get pregnant, now we expect it to change back on command? Very much more difficult.

You want more babies? Seriously? Then vote to repeal abortion. No exceptions (because pro-choice set will try and drive a coach-and-four through any exceptions and any limits). Good luck with that, liberal men raised to believe it's a human right.

how does any 20-year-old pay for storage fees? there's real logistical and economic considerations at play here even if biology only reserves it's kudos for the youngest candidates

And if they don't die, they need to change. The doctors know the stats, at the very least they could/should be frank with their patients.

A friend of mine was told during her first consult with the IVF clinic that a chance of success at "high confidence" would require a number of eggs equal to her age at implantation - so to prepare for 3 rounds of egg retrievals at the bare minimum, and as soon as possible. She got unlucky, and the first round only retrieved about 4, so the number of cycles was immediately upped. When she asked if they couldn't try those 4 first before cycling again, she was advised to not waste time and get the inventory as young/soon as possible, and to expect more setbacks.

Sounds like this lady did a single (more successful) retrieval cycle, and nobody showed her the math.

I think at this point artificial wombs, genetically engineered babies, AI making human labour obsolete, or even radical life extension and making geriatrics physically 20 year old again, are all vastly more realistic than any social engineering attempt at making the fertility rate go above 2.0 long term.

Or, cultures that restrict women will simply become more numerous and vital than those that don't. Robots And artificial wombs can't stave off civilizational exhaustion. Houellebecq's Submission is a more likely future.

Why? Secular Israelis and red tribe America(which is not based and trad barefoot and pregnant fundies) both manage replacement fertility through social engineering. Your solutions sound like science fiction, yes, but they also sound like a continuation of the trends that lead to below replacement fertility to begin with- they make kids 'less than the default'.

From what I looked up, secular Israeli women had a fertility rate of 2.0 in 2020, projected to decreased to 1.7 in 2030.

And the most democrat counties in the US have 1.3 children per woman vs 1.76 for the most republican.

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