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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.
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 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.
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.
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