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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   6668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable.

Will the implications ever become unignorable?

I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.

If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?

Because we have agency in shaping that environment to a significant extent, and we can steer it towards (expected) outcomes that align with our values and preferences. Are you similarly confused about eco-conscious people who say we should e.g. try to consume less oil? Like, what's the big deal here, once the oil runs out or the Earth becomes uninhabitable the industrial economy causing this in the first place will collapse, so all's well, it's just selection at work, right? No, obviously most people would prefer that we could somehow alter conditions such that we aren't slaves to a selection process that will consume a lot of things that we value pretty strongly.

The danger is pension schemes result in a siphoning of scarce youth labour to subsidise the abundant elderly, rendering it even more difficult for the young generation to reproduce.

I think these cascading effects are very dangerous. People just assume the situation will sort itself out, but it can just… not. Civilisations and species can just be wiped off the face of the earth forever. It happens all the time.

It will sort itself out, eventually. But for a period of a couple decades, things will be really rough. Since I'll be living and retired for those decades (and my kids will live through it!), I'm very concerned. Best case scenario, we take the iceberg approach to the elderly for the interregnum; worst case, we tax the kids to take the large majority of their income so the elderly can have a dedicated ass wiper.

That choice is kind of baked in at this point (unless AI saves us all), but maybe we can make it a bit less painful.

I'll make the non-standard argument that a lot of non-reproducing genes are good for other values, but that's probably just my own preferences.

The intermediate problem is that many of the environmental constraints here are less 'meme' or 'environment' and more result of TFR-buzzsaw policies. Whether they're intentional or not, they're probably not going to be as stable as human genetic code, and there's a non-zero chance they're going to just focus on the next least-desirable group.

The more serious problem is that modern industrial society doesn't scale down to one person, or ten thousand people, or a million, and I wouldn't want to bet too hard on a half-billion. Even assuming that the TFR-buzzaw ends somewhere, it might not stop at a point where we can still do things like 'build integrated circuits' or 'get to space' -- and if we fall below 'produce and refine fertilizer', you get some bad problems that might shove you down the path further. That's not a likely problem, but it's the sort of problem that comes up all at once.

If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out

You should not expect that we will do absolutely nothing, though, you should expect that we will continue to progressively structure society around the needs of the elderly as they age because a democratic society with an inverted population pyramid is a society where the elderly have the advantage of both wealth and rank and numbers. And so it will be that the children of the people who are having kids will be forced to support not only their parents but also the people who had no kids in their dotage as well. In so doing we will discourage the birth of further children, as those in their prime childbearing years are laden by heavier and heavier financial burdens to care for the needs of the aged, which increasingly will be thrown back on society as the generations that had children give way to generations that have no natural support in their old age.

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