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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24386 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 15, 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. We've already reached the fifth report in the series, this time analyzing how fiscal policy and social welfare affects childrearing, and what reforms have potential to raise the birth rate. 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-5-ekonomisk-politik-och-fodelsetal-en-analys-av-effekter-och-evidens/

This is a significantly stronger and more refreshing report than the last two. It gets deeper into the nitty-gritty of the research in this field, while also being less hand-wringingly faux-neutral. One of the key take-aways is that the problem isn't merely one of spending more resources: Finland and Sweden both spend about equal amounts of government dough on child-friendly policies, yet Finland's birth rate is far worse than Sweden’s. The report instead suggests it's a matter of how you spend the money rather than how much money you spend.

In an especially striking and interesting part of the report, it actually hints at some relatively fresh and semi-radical new solutions. Becoming a parent, muses the report, is most difficult for younger people around 25-35 who are less securely established both in career and life-situation, but who have the highest fertility and the best chance of a good outcome if they do have a child. Yet current policy sprinkles benefits over time rather than concentrating it in the hands of the young who need it most: so concentrate the benefits! Give new young parents a bigger concentrated dose of total spending instead of spreading them out over time. The logic’s pretty good! When the kid turns 14, the parents are likely to be in their 40's, well-established and hardly hurting for money — quite different from the situation when the child was a newborn! Nothing is certain, but the report produces some tentative evidence that it might be possible to slightly raise birth rates by ensuring such economic support to younger new parents.

There's actually a natural experiment supporting the theory that large endowments to young people can raise birth rates — namely, longevity! It wasn't long ago that people mostly kicked the bucket when they were 60-70 years old, thus naturally boosting the economy of their offspring who were likely to be 25-35. With the average life span in Sweden now well above 80, fewer young people today can count on that sort of windfall during their child-rearing years. It might be an idea to try and restore that natural transfer from the older improductive generation to the fertile younger one. The children, after all, are the future, and if there’s anything in the world worth preserving they’re the ones who are going to have to do it.

In passing, I have lately become more and more skeptical towards the term longevity itself. We indeed live longer, but we haven’t so much prolonged our lives as we have diluted them. What is life, and what is death? A long-sickly 95-year old woman whose country and family are straining and sundering keeping her and many like her alive through exorbitantly expensive care – does she live? And conversely, someone who died when he was 75 but lived honourably and left behind an untarnished memory and a future full of promise for his nation and family – is he dead?

Dilution of the lifespan in fact seems to be the secret culprit behind a lot of factors in the fertility-decline – older people living in large houses 20 years longer, the wealth transfer to the new generation being significantly delayed, et cetera – and it seems to me that the solution often involves counteracting these negative effects in various ways. Something worth pondering, to be sure.

In an especially striking and interesting part of the report, it actually hints at some relatively fresh and semi-radical new solutions. Becoming a parent, muses the report, is most difficult for younger people around 25-35 who are less securely established both in career and life-situation, but who have the highest fertility and the best chance of a good outcome if they do have a child. Yet current policy sprinkles benefits over time rather than concentrating it in the hands of the young who need it most: so concentrate the benefits! Give new young parents a bigger concentrated dose of total spending instead of spreading them out over time.

That makes sense.

Society already provides a lot of benefits to school children, in the form of daycare, education, socialization, food, and other extraneous school related things. It provides surprisingly little to new parents, maybe healthcare and a small tax benefit, but sometimes not even that.

The problem of people not seriously pairing up remains unaddressed, though, and it seems to be the bigger issue. Especially, dating apps are for gay men and women who are fine with behaving like gay men because sex with sexy men is fun. Reports are poor in terms of actually establishing relationships likely to result in children, even heavily subsidized from birth children.

I'm personally in favor of increasing gender segregation in most spaces, including work, with the implication that mixed gender spaces are fair game for establishing romantic relationships. The current arrangement where almost all spaces are co-ed, but asking anyone out is fraught is retarded.

Cash only matters to fertility if you give it to men. If you give women money it decreases their fertility. (Income levels don’t represent this because they have class and health baked in, so they’re not equivalent to cash infusions). There is no feminism-tolerant solution to the demographic decline. The closest is to hyper-venerate motherhood and censor media and education accordingly. This gives women a status advantage, even an advantage over men, eg men will always be sweet and helpful to women and they would be helped first in crises as in the Victorian era. But women would then need to be restricted from obtaining status via non-maternal means, ie they need to be shamed if they have a good job.

current policy sprinkles benefits over time rather than concentrating it in the hands of the young who need it most

Benefits are opaque. How much does the colleague with four kids get with tax credits or child benefits for this and that program? No idea. Instead reverse the positions: tax and penalize having few children. Print on the tax return every year the extra malus one has to pay into social security. Make childless people fill out annoying and complicated forms to get a small tax return (while people with +3 children are getting them by default), instead of making families fill out forms to get benefits.

Also do DEI/affirmative action for people with children. The state should hire/promote for public servant positions the person with more children (would be counter to meritocratic idea, but the state is not trying to be efficient anyway). Let the intelligentsia compete for prestigious leadership positions/sinecures by having the bigger family first and education inflation second.

Instead reverse the positions: tax and penalize having few children.

As I said last time this idea came up. Punishing people for not having children is a bad idea. If you are single woman, a harsh tax + good benefits is going to result in you having children out of wedlock. Which is dysgenic for society anyway. If you are a single man, you are just fucked. There is nothing you can do to have children on your own, and if you can't get a partner by normal means, you'd have to commit horrendous crimes to do so. The vast majority of people are not Chad + Stacy, sucking and fucking around and never settling down. Punitively targeting everyone as if they are is just revenge porn dressed up as a policy.

Punishing people for not having children is a bad idea. If you are single woman, a harsh tax + good benefits is going to result in you having children out of wedlock.

There is no material difference, single people will be always punished. It does not matter if you let's say have $10k tax for both and give tax credit of $5k to family with children or if you have tax $5k and gather extra $5k tax from childless family. Single person pays $10k and family pays $5k in taxes in either case.

"Punishing" for the purposes of tax policy is always a bit vague: are EV and solar credits "punishing" dinosaur car owners? Kinda, but the distinction seems a bit unclear. It's not an uncommon structure in tax code, either.

Tweaking some combination of the child tax credit, tax rates, and the standard deduction could feasibly punish raise taxes on households with less than two children.

Not endorsing, just observing how it could be implemented.

I think about it as rewarding for taking an action vs imposing a penalty for not. There's a third axis for how easy/capacity to take that action is. I think its probably more permissible to impose penalties for taking an action if it requires a conscious single decision to take that action, for example littering. Or if the action you want people to take is very easy to do. The ACA "tax" is somewhere there, though it was mildly contentious. EV and solar credits are rewarding a particular behavior. The problem stems from imposing a penalty for not taking an affirmative action, made worse by that affirmative action being downstream of other affirmative actions that additionally require another party to also take those same actions. Since person A can't control what person B is doing and requires person B to also do it so that person A can, punishing person A for not doing it is fairly tyrannical.

I'd say something like raising the overall tax rate and then giving a cut is not really a punishment. We understand the side eye thats really happening but theoretically its just raising the tax rate to pay for the deficit, and then lowering for people that are making "future taxpayers" as a reward for the socially approved behavior. But you'd have to do a blanket increase, doing targeted increases is just punishment. Last time this came up there were even more draconian punishments for the childless.

Tax credit for having kids or tax penalty for not having kids are functionally identical policies economically

One just makes people mad and one doesn't

If they are the same then it should be easy for people to stop suggesting the penalty. For some reason they can't, suggesting there is an emotive component that they prefer to punish people they disagree with, rather than benefit people they agree with.

Also do DEI/affirmative action for people with children. The state should hire/promote for public servant positions the person with more children

Since DEI/Affirmative Action is most impactful and least harmful at earlier opportunity stages rather than at executive stages, I would say the correct aim should be to do Affirmative Action for kids with siblings. If you make having more siblings a major plus for getting into Harvard, and having enough siblings a near-guarantee of significant college scholarships, you get two birds stoned at once. Rather than the optimal meta being to focus parental investment on one kid to get them into Harvard, the optimal strategy becomes having a bunch of kids to boost all their odds. It subsidizes one of the major cost concerns for having middle-class kids, education. It taps into existing status hierarchies rather than trying to create new ones from whole cloth.

Dilution of the lifespan

This topic has seen significant scholarly discussion under the name "rectangularization of the survival curve".

Example 1

Rectangularization is defined as a trend toward a more rectangular shape of the survival curve due to increased survival and concentration of deaths around the mean age at death.

Example 2

Outer rectangularization is the standard perspective of rectangularization, and captures progress in mean lifespan relative to progress in maximum lifespan.

Inner rectangularization adds a new perspective. In contrast to the outer rectangle, we seek the largest rectangle under the survival curve.

My personal guess is that social status is a far larger driver of fertility than economics. Problem is government is a terrible tool to try to selectively raise social status. In the past, religions were free to keep birthrates high, but since the left ended the separation of church and state by making the state their church, it turns out their religion is anti-natalist.

We do not need more governmental action to increase birthrates. All we need is the government to stop funding anti-natalist propaganda, respect the boundaries of state and church. In terms of actual governmental policy, just having a strong economy for young workers is probably the biggest thing. The government is never going to hit on the perfect amount of money to make women want kids when their whole friend group will think they're weird if they get married before 30.

I've posted here previously I how I strongly suspect that childcare subsidies, maternal leave and similar economic policies actually counter-intuitively maybe be actually lowering, or to be precise limiting fertility.

The economic approach bakes in assumption that mothers should be working, actually quite insidiously. Maternal leave has a defined period, even if generous. It says to mothers 'great, you've had your generous months with your newborn, now get back to work and put your child in childcare'. Childcare subsidies obviously only make sense in a scenario when a mother is working and not caring for her kids herself. That you should have maybe one or two children then go back to work, and not make childrearing a central part of your life and identity. So economic incenitives end up implicity actually push mothers towards working and reinforce the two-income trap.

In otherwords, I think economic incentives encourage mothers to start or continue working, limiting their fertility, rather than encouraging working women to be mothers.

It is completely a status thing. Modernity is actively hostile to children and childrearing. The worst period of the Great Depression had a higher fertility rate than today.

correct - regardless of subsidies there are no economies of scale to having more kids if you work. Whereas if you have a stay at home parent each kid gets progressively easier. You are still adding net difficulty but the difficulty/expense added goes down, indeed, in some cases the work in total decreases once kids get old enough - they play with each other more and can start to help out around the house.

The middle class is a fertility shredder. The religion foisted upon them as the price of social advancement is antinatalism.

It is the nature of empire states to need competent administrators who cannot pass down their privileges to their children (at least at replacement levels). The Ottomans used eunuchs, Europe used monks, and we use gay transgender feminism.

Ottomans used eunuchs only to guard their harems. For administration eunuchs, you are thinking of China. Ottoman administrators were traditionally specially educated Balkan slaves or dynastic families.

I was speaking very generally. To staff their military, administrative posts and sensitive staff like harem guards, they used slaves who at least early on could not pass down property for one reason or another. Some were physically made eunuchs, Janissaries early on were forbidden to marry, etc. Over time these restrictions broke down as the slave class gained power. Point is, the Ottomans had a pipeline of carefully selected, above average slaves directly owned by the Sultan and educated at great expense for personal loyalty and professional competence. That's the sort of selection process you need to staff an empire, but it isn't stable long term.

My point is that all these societies are trying to solve the same problem. You need competent and relatively low-corruption staff, preferably not from the existing elites and preferably not that can pass on anything they do accumulate to any family. How you get there is any combination of sterilization, religion, legal restriction etc. It often changes over time, as everyone wants to make a little something to pass on to their kids, and no system is totalizing enough to prevent all offspring. It just needs to be a high enough rate of churn in this administrative class to keep it from becoming its own political entity. Of course, this never works long term, and isn't in our case or that of the Ottomans.

But it is a problem that has to be solved to even have an empire past the lifetime of one great man. This is what Alexander and Ghengis Khan lacked. The jump from feudally-organized personal loyalty of military commanders to ability-selected and specially trained professional bureaucrats. This is why Rome, Egypt and China created lasting civilizations, while Alexander and Ghengis changed out the CEO for a generation. There was no underlying structure loyal to the state itself.

Point is, the Ottomans Party had a pipeline of carefully selected, above average slaves Outer Party members directly owned by the Sultan Big Brother and educated credentialled at great expense for personal loyalty and professional competence. That's the sort of selection process you need to staff an empire, but it isn't stable long term.

Note that Orwell's most famous book was about how this could be made stable.

It just needs to be a high enough rate of churn in this administrative class to keep it from becoming its own political entity.

Democracy complicates this because it gives this administrative class far more political power than it should have, especially when it's universal (also, "all bureaucrats are female regardless of their actual genitals" has a lot of very interesting implications, the least interesting of which trivially explains the politics of that class). The US made an attempt to strip bureaucrats of political power- that's why DC isn't a state- but it didn't go anywhere near far enough. Stripping all government workers of the right to vote in relevant elections would likely improve any Western democracy significantly.

Stripping all government workers of the right to vote in relevant elections would likely improve any Western democracy significantly.

That would be pointless, as they'd simply become government contractors with the same incentives. Besides, it's less the individual workers and more their unions (and similarly, NGOs) that enable small organized groups to wrest control of their collective power.

The worst period of the Great Depression had a higher fertility rate than today.

I actually don't believe this proves much as the number would imply. Yes, TFR was 2.1, but the country was also far more rural at the time and mechanization hadn't quite replaced the child as unit of labor on farms yet.

If you assume rural families (50% of the country at the time) were still having 3.0 kids for that reason, that necessarily means urban areas were at 1.0, which is above modern South Korea but below the rest of the modern West.

Are you sure about the 50% figure?

I actually don't believe this proves much as the number would imply. Yes, TFR was 2.1, but the country was also far more rural at the time and mechanization hadn't quite replaced the child as unit of labor on farms yet.

Also infant mortality was higher then, so TFR 2.1 was sub-replacement. I can't find the source now, but someone published estimates of infant-mortality-adjusted TFR for the US going back as long as the data existed and, assuming their numbers were correct, adjusted TFR was higher during the post-WW2 baby boom that at any other time in history.

"What caused the Baby Boom?" seems to be an under-asked question among people who care about fertility.

Like @hydroacetylene says it was a big expansion in male earnings and rapid improvements in quality of life, but that’s not the whole story. Quality of life and male earnings increased rapidly in countries like Saudi Arabia and Vietnam while birth rates collapsed, for example. Eastern European countries saw small bumps in some cases as the post-1990s recovery went on, but rarely anything spectacular.

I suspect it was in large part suburbanization and pent-up demand. The former had both push and pull factors (like white flight in the former case) but also meant large numbers of white people - especially’ the US where the boom was most pronounced - left fertility shredder cities and moved back out to lower density housing. If going from rural low density environments to squalid tenements kills tfr, then it stands to reason a partial reversal might temporarily boost it. In addition, labor saving devices made domestic work far easier than it had been.

As for pent-up demand, it is an interesting fact that when people from many very poor countries move as refugees / migrants to the West, their fertility rate briefly spikes. For a time (I haven’t checked recently) first generation Libyans, Bangladeshis and other groups actually had higher birth rates in Britain (even adjusted for age of migrants) than in their home countries. These usually come back down in the second generation but there is a built up demand unfulfilled out of extreme poverty that expands into the available prosperity of the new host country, welfare etc.

The move to the suburbs and higher incomes provided this during the baby boom. People who had only two kids in the urban tenements suddenly had three or four because they had the space or money. When their children went back to having two kids, it was cultural, not financial. Either the unfulfilled demand wasn’t the same, or standards had increased. Imagine if everyone in the middle class suddenly attained the material living standard that, say, a successful surgeon has today, and got a big new cheap house. That might cause a tfr rise.

Thats why there aren’t any easy lessons from the baby boom, other than maybe that if every American could afford a 6,000 square foot McMansion, a robot nanny and butler, and could make the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $500k a year forever, they would have more kids. And indeed the higher birth rates we’ve seen among those making more than $800k a year in recent years largely prove this true. When you reduce the lifestyle impact of children to basically frictionless status, people are willing to have unlimited kids. Elon Musk kind of shows this too.

As for pent-up demand

I've definitely seen the argument that the Baby Boom isn't a real high-fertility period, just catch-up from delayed fertility during the Depression and WW2, with the high measured TFR coming from overlapping generations having kids at the same time. (Because of the way TFR is measured, this leads to a measured TFR that is higher than the experienced fertility of either cohort).

Elon Musk kind of shows this too.

I thought Elon only had two children per woman, which is not going to solve anyone's fertility problems.

Very large expansion in specifically male earnings coupled with selective weakening of sexual norms and strong social pressure to marry at all costs.

This is the highest tfr of any self supporting stratum in an industrial society, ever. Modern high fertility minorities are at about the same TFR.

My personal guess is that social status is a far larger driver of fertility than economics

You're right, but to quote demographer Lyman Stone, the solution to a problem doesn't need to reverse the cause of the problem to be effective.

Poor eyesight is caused by genetics, but we don't treat it with genetic engineering. We treat it with glasses, contacts or laser eye surgery.

Similarly, if modern status hierarchies are suppressing fertility, that doesn't mean we can't fix it with money. If every newborn came with a $1 million cheque, you'd bet the US birth rate would skyrocket. Suddenly all the people who were ambivalent about having kids would become enthusiastic parents.

It's a toy example, but it demonstrates the obvious fact that there is an amount of money that will work. There's even a calculator online to see how much, and what kind of fertility policy it would take to get birthrates up, with all the data based on studies of real policies.

And of course, if taxpayer money does succeed in increasing birth rates, that also strengthens the norm of having more kids, which builds on itself.

If every newborn came with a $1 million cheque, you'd bet the US birth rate would skyrocket. Suddenly all the people who were ambivalent about having kids would become enthusiastic parents.

No, that's not fixing the problem. In the discussion about aborting Down's Syndrome children, one of the responses I got about having kids was that it was much more expensive today because it had to be. You had to pour all these resources into your one, absolute max two, child in order to get them on the ladder. You had to have the house in a good school district and the separate bedrooms and right schools and right extracurriculars and all the expensive, time-consuming, helicopter parenting because my god, the horror of having a child who wasn't upper middle class!

You hand out a $1 million cheque with every newborn, and that money will go to the one, absolute max two, kids that have to have all the resources poured into them because now the Red Queen's race got even hotter with all the money that can be poured into the meat grinder.

The solution to having kids is easy enough, poor(er) people have kids without the resource sinks. But I don't want my genetically maximised, embryonically selected, implanted into a surrogate via IVF child to be one of the - ugh! - lower middle or middle middle class! Little Valerius must be PMC and higher, one of the high value human capital economically productive post-AI winners! And if I don't sink the guts of $500,000 into having him, then the entire project will be a failure!

Have kids. Have your kids share a bedroom in your modest house. Get them into a decent school, I agree about that, but they don't need 'summer camp at NASA enrichment extracurriculars Mom and Dad are writing your Ivy League application essay when you're six' raising. Have more kids and hang the expense. Somehow they, and you, will muddle through. AI may put us all out of a job by the time they're college aged so we'll all live on abundance UBI (or we'll all be soylent green), so don't think too far ahead.

You hand out a $1 million cheque with every newborn, and that money will go to the one, absolute max two, kids that have to have all the resources poured into them because now the Red Queen's race got even hotter with all the money that can be poured into the meat grinder.

That isn't what the studies show. What the studies show is that governments can increase birth rates with financial incentives.

Korea is the perfect example of the Red Queen race you're talking about, where families spend huge amounts of their income on private schooling. So if the Korean government introduces marriage and baby bonuses, you shouldn't expect it to have much effect, right?

Korea's March Births Surge 19.4%, Largest Jump in 33 Years. Births rising 21 months straight. Marriages also up 10% . And Korea didn't spend nearly as much as $1 million per child. Lyman Stone estimates that if Korea increased its tax rate to the standard found in European countries, it could reach replacement fertility. And Korea is playing on the hardest difficulty level. For more normal countries, it is absolutely possible. America spends 7x as much on old people as it does on children. Change that ratio even slightly and watch the baby boom happen. The reason governments don't do this isn't because it won't work, but because pensioners vote and unborn children don't. Governments had tried (almost) nothing, and they're all out of ideas.

In complete seriousness, I don’t think you understand the visceral worries that parents have of whether their children will do well.

Your economic analysis of what would happen to the money is correct but I know enough parents to know many are genuinely trying to do their best for their children rather than living out some pompous caricature of the PMC, and are desperately afraid their children will fall into an unhappy state.

You may think those fears are misguided but parental worry is something that it’s hard to reason away.

Counter-anecdote: My wife and I live on a single salary and our 4 children sleep in the same room together. We are a respectable middle class family. We are surrounded by a mix of the people @HereAndGone2 describes: 1-2 child striver families as well as 2-3 child "laid back" families. The striver mindset is a choice, and AFAICT it is indeed rooted in parental ego. Plenty of loving parents raise their kids without the anxiety of helicopter or tiger parenting.

Personally, I have decided to opt out of the striver rat race as I think it is spiritually and mentally destructive, and I'm also not sure what sort of white collar work or which credentials will matter in 20 years anyway. I would rather my kid be a well adjusted mechanic or UPS driver who relates to people and culture normally instead of a status- and achievement obsessed quasi-human with an Ivy league diploma. I do have visceral worries about my children's wellbeing, but they're more about whether they're developing a healthy conscience and positive personality traits like conscientiousness.

My wife and I live on a single salary and our 4 children sleep in the same room together. We are a respectable middle class family.

In a first-world country, even one with a housing shortage like the UK, 4 children sharing a bedroom is not compatible with the normie version of middle class respectability. In the UK, anything more than 2 same-sex children sharing would attract the attention of curtain-twitchers and social workers.

That said, I agree with your underlying argument.

Your economic analysis of what would happen to the money is correct but I know enough parents to know many are genuinely trying to do their best for their children rather than living out some pompous caricature of the PMC, and are desperately afraid their children will fall into an unhappy state.

What's the conflict here? IME the PMC caricature is basically on the money. It probably doesn't even go far enough. People out there literally believe that it's abusive to have kids share a bedroom, and this has nothing to do with ensuring that your kids escape the permanent underclass. It's just pure competition.

Sure, but being so scared you don't have kids because woah, the pressure, the responsibility? Handing out cash inducements or penalising the childless will not overcome that. If we want more babies, we need to relax the pressure. So what if Junior does not in fact become that software engineer? So long as he's healthy and happy and has some kind of job, even if it's a stupid dumb job, then that's okay.

I have two work colleagues whose adult (20s) kids died. One in a car accident coming home from a work shift in the early morning, one who died of sudden cardiac death. All the worries about the right university and the right career and the rest of it are meaningless against that, because we can't see the future and we can't control it. Have babies. Love them. Don't try to foresee thirty years ahead.

Thanks for the link! It turns out that I would raise the TFR to 1.89 and drop the deficit to negative 1.8 trillion. (And then I would be assassinated for pissing literally everyone off.)

I wish I could do stuff like model the effects of lower income taxes and a UBI... My ideal is something like, "zero SS, healthcare for all (but with negotiating powers and death panels), substinence-level UBI, virtually no income taxes for most people+much-reduced reporting requirements so willingness to hire-and-work is way more elastic, infant and toddler care subsidized with vouchers... Paid for by pigouvian carbon taxes and a muscular LVT."

Yes Status is more important than money. People will sacrifice a lot more for respect than money.

Re-instating Mrs. as a social norm for married or with kids does more for increasing the birth rate than sending checks.

Re-instating Mrs. as a social norm for married or with kids does more for increasing the birth rate than sending checks.

I'm all for it (reserve it for with kids). And to appease the feminists, I propose we introduce an equivalent to Miss for young men without children. Maybe "Squire", or "Cadet".

The Prussians used to do that, young lords were addressed as "Junker" instead of "Herr".

I propose we introduce an equivalent to Miss for young men without children. Maybe "Squire", or "Cadet".

We already have that in British English for unmarried men, it's 'master'. As in 'young master William'. Of course, it doesn't work so well since it abbreviates to the same as Mister.

I always assumed young master was specifically for preadolescent boys- in my dialect (mostly rural/old)people would call a teenaged boy Mr smith in a formal context. An unmarried adult man might be Mr John instead of Mr smith, though.

I have always heard that it is extremely rude to refer to any boy who has reached his teens as “Master.” Wikipedia backs me up on this.

I was always familiar with this as a real thing, though nobody I knew used it. Generally dropdowns that offered honorifics would include master as an option, even in the states.

Though it is more associated with fictional British butlers in the minds of Americans.

Took me a long time to get that off my default name for airline bookings. Gets you some funny looks in the States.

Especially if one's surname is 'Bates'.

Lol yes, though generally it's used as "Master [full version of first name]", so little Billy Bates is "Master William". It's an old hangover from the British class system that's still used, as far as I can tell, because it's cute to formally address little kids like that.

I was taught that "Master + firstname" originated as a way for middle-class teachers (and private tutors) to address upper-class schoolboys that respected both of the opposed social class and authority gradients. But I think this is BS - actual practice at English public schools was to use surnames with no honorific regardless of Daddy's title*. (Brothers were distinguished with suffixes like "Major" and "Minor" though the exact details varied by school).

Interestingly, "Mister" is this trope - it is a corruption of "Master" used (at least as early as the Tudor period) as a respectful form of address by peasants speaking to minor gentry who didn't have a higher title like "Esquire".

* Though children of Dukes and royalty use Daddy's title as a surname instead of the family name. So Prince William was "Wales" at Eton rather than "Mountbatten-Windsor".

"Lad"/"Fella"/"Dude"

"Bruh"

I thought about that, but that makes going full Jesuit and also changing "Mr." to "Father" the obvious move.

... or "Daddy", I suppose, if we keep the zoomer spelling.

The Church of Sweden was a state church until 2000, so at least in Sweden, the separation of church and state is a recent innovation.

Interestingly enough, this separation coincided with a low point in Swedish fertility rates. @DoktorGlas, do you have any idea why the birth rate plummeted and then somewhat recovered? Was the recovery just due to immigrants having more kids? (My apologies if you’ve already covered this in a previous post.)

The immigrants mostly arrived after that bump.

Sweden had a severe financial crisis in the mid 90s and then got hit hard by the IT-bubble. I'd say it's just general economic recovery and possibly catch-up fertility after the bad years.

I think it's past that now. I'm not sure the church is strong enough. Maybe in Sweden, which I'm ignorant of beyond some basics.

And besides, the government doesn't just fund propaganda. It funds actual increases in the status of women, e.g. the support for college loans in the US where women make up >60% of the debt and pay it off slower than men. It's worse: Biden has already made moves to forgive these loans so the government may move towards more subsidies that raise female status.

Women are around 60% of college students in the US. So it makes sense that they have something like 60% of college debt.

Women have more loans and higher balances even accounting for that.

The church has had very limited social power in Sweden for my entire life and the population has been supermajority non religious since at least the 80s. If anything, the social power was lower when the fertility was higher.

someone who died [...] – is he dead?

Yes.

I don't believe economy is at all important regarding fertility rate compared to culture.

The Scandinavian countries generally do well on the economic side. Having a child is very doable for most couples and is not going to ruin your life. Provided that you are reasonably good with budgeting, even full-time students with no savings can provide a good childhood for their kids due to various government subsidies.

Yet looking at the stats, the Scandinavian fertility rates have declined alongside everyone else, never looking particularly impressive compared to others in the EU.. If it was true that people would be having kids if only they were not such an economic burden, then we might expect falling fertility rates in countries like the US and China. But Scandinavia, with their immense social safety nets, ought to be booming. Yet there is seemingly no effect.

What has spread basically all over the EU is a narrative of self-actualization and viewing children and family formation as something that keeps you from living your life to the fullest. If you want to travel or build a career you must do so before having kids. This is notably not actually true. As I wrote above, the Scandinavian nations are prime examples of career-building while having kids being possible. But it is what most students believe, and so is ultimately what guides their decision making.

Then you have dating norms on top. American norms have been successfully imported here, which means that long term relationships too are increasingly seen as sacrifices by young people that will prevent them from living the ideal lifestyle of partying, travelling, and hooking up. Dating is superficial, exclusivity cannot be assumed without explicit negotiation, people are increasingly scared of committing to a relationship, and gen Z spends less time in third spaces than any before generation prior, making it difficult to build organic connections.

So while it may well be true that money could be allocated more efficiently by giving a larger share to young parents, I doubt that it would help fertility much. What we need is to change the narratives around children, families, and growing up.

The hedonistic single lifestyle needs to be seen as an unfulfilling treadmill. Raising your children needs to be regarded as a path to self fulfillment on its own. Building a life with someone you love needs to be a goal that is prioritized by young people. The more these are seen as sacrifices that will limit your life, the less people are going to choose them. We need family-formation and child rearing to be perceived as viable paths towards happiness and fulfillment. Right now they just aren't, and so there is no way any government is willing (or capable) of paying enough money for young people to do what amounts to giving up on their dreams for the sake of society.

Is "the problem would not exist in a hypothetical situation we have no means of reaching" a useful insight, or does it even achieve anything apart from lazy demoralisation of those who do try to find something they can do to solve it?

The useful insight is that throwing money at parents clearly doesn't seem to work, so let us do something else. That starts by figuring out why people are actually not having kids. Whenever I speak to other young people about parenting, they usually give one of the following reasons:

  1. Lack of ability to raise a child. This is less related to money and more so to basic parental skills. Patience, the willingness to consistently prioritize the baby above yourself, the ability to keep your home clean and baby safe, and so on. Usually this is from people aged 22 and below.
  2. It will get in the way of my career or keep me from doing all the things I want to do when I am still young (travelling, partying, etc.). This one is usually from people in their mid twenties and above. They may want children, but not before at least finishing their studies and getting started on their careers. Of course, this just kicks the can down the road, as children are also detrimental to your career progression, and you probably won't have finished your bucket list upon hitting your thirties.

Clearly, these issues are not about money. The problem is that raising a child takes time and energy that could have otherwise been spent on living the young adult dream of getting a degree and otherwise living a carefree life in your twenties. Unless you want to give every young family a full-time maid, or have the government adopt the newborn baby in exchange for a pile of cash, then you are not going to solve this by throwing money at people.

When parenthood is seen as a side objective at best, and at worst a straight up hindrance to your own happiness/fulfillment, then of course birth rates are going to fall. I don't see a solution that doesn't involve changing the narrative.

It seems backwards to me that you think cultural changes are harder to implement than policy changes. Its a form of Democracy propaganda that I see often enough that its worth addressing.

Changing culture is hard and slow, it involves talking to a lot of people, convincing them, having role models to hold up who are paragons of the change you want. If you are pushing against specific incentives or people then they will try to reverse the cultural changes you are making.

How do you get a democratically elected government to change policy? You have to change base cultural desires of the people so that they change their voting habits often and consistently enough. And you need to tailor the policy to make it survive through whatever political process exists in the country.

Cultural change also has the benefit of snowballing effects. If you have some good ideas and good culture it self advertises as it spreads. Democracy requires a minimum 50%+1 starting point. So good ideas and terrible ideas have somewhat equal chances to getting implemented.

I'm not sure changing culture is hard and slow as opposed to perhaps poorly understood? Culture sure changed fast in March 2020, and against in May/June 2020.

Changing the culture is very fast and very easy to do when the government wants to do it. Look at any communist revolution, or look at the way every modern TV show has an unnecessary gay character.

Most people are Havel's Greengrocer. There is not a political thought in their heads. When the party line changes, they change along with it, and don't even notice the difference. Orwell had them pegged. Animal Farm and 1984 are not novels; they are documentaries.

In the age of mass media and compulsory education, culture is imposed from the top down, not bottom up. Public opinion is a function of whose army is guarding the TV station.

Democracy is a sham. It doesn't matter who gets elected, the bureaucrats remain the same, the teachers remain the same, the university professors accrediting the teachers remain the same, and the people making movies remain the same. So, of course, nothing changes; it's the same government! Voting for the other party is voting for a change of décor.

Changing the culture is a coup-complete problem.

Animal Farm and 1984 are not novels; they are documentaries.

Animal Farm was a documentary. Nineteen eighty-four was not - it was a warning, and one that has so far been effective in preventing the thing warned about. The USSR never managed to achieve the level of social control you see in Oceania, and not for want of trying.

1984 overestimates the competence and underestimates the infighting of a large organization. The Party wants to control and monitor citizens so it can do what exactly? Even "for power" ignores certain Party members vying for power over others, threatening the entire system because it gives them an advantage. (I didn't finish the book, so if it actually explains this, sorry.)

I doubt even AI will solve this problem.

Part of what Nineteen Eighty-Four shows is that the Party spends far more time monitoring its own members than it does monitoring the proles. You don't see the internal politics of the Inner Party "on-screen" (O'Brien is the only Inner Party member we see, and for the first two thirds of the book he is putting on an act to entrap Winston Smith - in particular we know that the telescreen was still recording while "turned off"), so you don't know how the Inner Party monitor each other. But a large part of the book is about how the Inner Party manage the Outer Party (through constant surveillance and loyalty testing) vs the proles (with bread and circuses on one hand and exaggerated foreign and domestic threats on the other).

"The Book" (in-universe title "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism") purports to be written by Emmanuel Goldstein, the leader of the clandestine opposition, but Winston Smith gets it from O'Brien so we don't know who actually wrote it. It functions as an author tract describing the nature of the Party regime, although it is of dubious reliability as a factual description of Oceanian politics. "The Book" says that ambitious, able and demonstrably loyal (with a subtle hint that part of demonstrable loyalty is being an unprincipled sadist) Outer Party members can join the Inner Party by competitive examination, but that most ambitious Outer Party members get wiped out by the Thought Police. Most, but not all, Inner Party members are children of Inner Party members, although this isn't official policy and the authors of "The Book" think that it isn't unofficial Party policy either, just normal nepotism. "The Book" also says nothing about the internal politics of the Inner Party, and is ambiguous about whether Big Brother is actually real (Stalin's dictatorship) or not (Breznhevian oligarchy).

I think it's actually pretty spot on. The woke aren't terribly competent, and they have lots of infighting, but they're able to reproduce the Party structure from the book pretty faithfully. The only thing missing for them is the technology / infrastructure.

The party structure of the book was based off of actual Communist party structures, was it not? The woke may simply be getting it passed down from the original sources.

The woke aren't nearly as successful as the Party: while they have significant influence, Trump's faction exists, this site exists, and even on Reddit (outside the most extreme echo chambers) and in-person interactions with left-leaning people, I consistently see and hear the most extreme woke ideas (analogous to 2+2=5) repudiated by the majority.

You can find analogies to everything in 1984 (Two Minutes Hate, doublethink, etc.), today and in Orwell's time. But as bad as our society is wrt. conformity and top-down control, it's nowhere near 1984. I do note that mass surveillance is gaining in certain places (e.g. the UK), but it's stalling in others, and I suspect only a matter of time before it gets crippled because some group uses it for something stupid.

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That's not because the warning was effective, that's because the technology didn't exist. Now that it does, China happily jumped in head-first, but more interestingly, Europe, after spending decades wagging their finger at China, are now eagerly creating their own infrastructure for mass surveillance and control.

I think that goes too far.

There are some cultural issues where I do believe the government exerts significant cultural force.

It tends to be on issues that question the legitimacy of the state, the tax apparatus, and democracy itself.

But there is plenty of cultural leeway on things they don't care much about. And there are things they sort of care about where they exert some minor pressure.

I think natalist stuff is something they sort of care about. They prefer you having kids that go to government schools and drink the cool aid of system indoctrination. Homeschoolers fought an uphill battle, but have mostly been slowly winning in a bunch of states.

Child tax credits didn't have any major detractors. "Pro choice" doesn't call themselves pro abortion or anti natalist.

I just don't think the model of natalist culture as a government defended cultural view is accurate.

Democracy is a sham. It doesn't matter who gets elected, the bureaucrats remain the same, the teachers remain the same, the university professors accrediting the teachers remain the same, and the people making movies remain the same. So, of course, nothing changes; it's the same government!

This seems like you redefining influential members of the culture as the real government in order to argue that the government controls the culture. Of course you aren't going to think the government is weak if you redefine anyone with power as part of the unofficial government. But someone who agrees with you but is using normal definitions is going to say that the the control of the U.S. government over culture is weak, and when they coincide it's generally because an influential cultural faction controls the government rather than the other way around.

Definition issues aside, I think you're also very mistaken about it being top-down. I saw the rise of SJW ideology, and it didn't originate from film-makers or bureaucrats or teachers. It was developed, refined, and spread by posters on websites like Tumblr and Something Awful. The influence over institutions like media outlets came later. Some of the words and ideas originated from academia decades earlier, but plenty was altered or brand new. "Demisexual" originated from a young teen girl on a play-by-post roleplaying forum (used to explain why her slutty RPG character had sex with some characters but not others) and spread when another poster from the same forum made a Tumblr post about it as a joke. Now plenty of big official institutions and university professors and so on take it seriously. (The original girl now identifies as demisexual herself, having "discovered" that she was projecting it onto her character, while the Tumblr poster regrets having accidentally unleashed it on the world.)

The rapid rise of SJW ideology had less to do with the power of the people creating or spreading it and more to do with a sort of selective memetic immunodeficiency among institutions and much of the public, with the internet serving as a breeding ground for ideas that maximally exploited those openings. To the extent that specific people were influential at all it was by being the sorts of weirdos who posted on the internet a lot and/or became skilled at internet posting. Not every change in culture is going to follow that pattern, but in the internet era I think such changes tend to be grassroots.

Look at any communist revolution

The government can influence culture a lot more if it's killing anyone who publicly disagrees and engaging in very extensive and relatively successful censorship. That doesn't mean every country (or the world as a whole) works the same way, or that establishing a totalitarian government is easier than influencing culture in other ways. There are multiple communist groups in the west who think engaging in normal politics is a waste of time because communism can only be achieved through violent revolution. Needless to say they're a lot less influential than the Something Awful posters who spent a decade refining their shitposting skills to amuse a few hundred other forum posters, then discovered those skills were transferable to influencing millions of people on social media. Which isn't to say that direct mass-appeal on social media is the only way, Scott Alexander demonstrates another approach.

What we need is to change the narratives around children, families, and growing up.

Yep. And, counter to the suggestions in other comments about "having siblings gets you into Harvard", invest heavily in support during pregnancy and after the birth up to about four or five years of age. Childcare, but not just childcare: advice for the new parents so they're not left on their own trying to ask Claude "is my baby sick with something serious?", social supports of all kinds, making it feasible for men to take time out to help look after the baby and not have their career nuked, the whole nine yards. Very damn expensive and resource-intensive, but if you want people to have babies, then you need to make it - and I hate to use the phrase, but it fits here - 'it takes a village to raise a child'. Change it so that no, you won't be stuck in the house on your own with a screaming newborn while your husband flees to his job as a refuge, both of you won't be missing out while your child-free friends are having fun and zooming ahead in their careers, you won't be struggling with "okay so we're thinking of having a baby, what should we do now - vitamins? what baby book advice is best? how the hell do we manage this, anyway?" and nowhere to turn.

Because we've chopped away a lot of the previous supports and now new parents are faced with "congrats, here's your baby, now drive home and figure it all out yourself on your own", so why would anyone want to saddle themselves with three kids by the time I'm thirty and I have no life?

Scandinavia does all that(men are actually required to take parental leave).

The highest fertility rates in the EU remain France and Czechia- although outside the EU, the faroes and Georgia have them beat.

You're not required to take parental leave. 90 of the 480 available days of are exclusive to either parent but you don't have to use then if you don't want to, which is something that happens in very unequal earning situations or small business owners.

For France does that include the European French or is that entirely driven by immigration?

A lot of it is driven by the catholics in France, who have a tfr of some 2.4, are ~40% of the population. Only some 10% of immigrants are Catholic.

Good question.

There’s certainly pockets of native high fertility in France. But the same is true for holland, Switzerland, etc, which do not have a fertility advantage, so it’s probably not just them- and there’s lots of immigrants in places like Sweden and holland as well.

France’s fertility mix looks similar to other parts of Western Europe- but it has final results in between red and blue states, rather than average for the continent. The precise demographic breakdown can’t be all high-TFR minorities(and France has a few that are native Europeans), because other countries without the TFR advantage have them too. So normie French Europeans have to have some fertility advantage compared to other parts of Europe- but it’s certainly less than, say, conservative Americans or even Afrikaners.

Two things:

  1. The purpose of and design of the social safety nets were never to boost fertility but to boost female labour force participation, something that people usually think depresses fertility.
  2. I don't know what people consider impressive but Scandinavia maintained a 10-20% higher fertility rate than the rest of western Europe despite having a 15-25% higher female labour force participation rate.

Something was clearly working to some degree, what exactly was unclear. Was it culture? Was it the social safety net? Was it the lower housing costs compared to income? Was it a bit of everything? Who knows.

It is a bit curious that the fertility collapse coincided with the proliferation of smartphones though, but it also coincided with a massive financial crisis and rapidly rising housing costs as well.

The safety nets still exist. Maybe they do have some effect. It makes sense that people wouldn't want children without the means to properly care for them. However, if money was the main reason then fertility rates in Scandinavia would not be as low as they are since the safety nets still exist.

Or they had an effect until something changed in the 2010s.

One materialist explanation is that this has to do with housing, which has increased by some 5-600%, which the safety nets don't help with at all unless you're truly destitute.

Or there is a non-materialist explanation. Or some combination.

One materialist explanation is that this has to do with housing, which has increased by some 5-600%, which the safety nets don't help with at all unless you're truly destitute.

This is kind of like saying the house collapsed because there was a stronger than normal wind. I mean, sure, that may be the proximate cause, and if the wind were a little lighter that day then the house would not have collapsed. But, fundamentally, the problem is not really the wind but the extremely poorly built and fragile house. Until yesterday, human fertility rates were incredibly robust across time and place under myriad different circumstances such that everyone agreed that overpopulation was an impending catastrophe, but then suddenly it all collapsed because the wind changed direction.

Most of these policy wonk discussions set the implicit frame as "the last domino fell, so how do we prop it back up?".

I don't think so. Housing is by orders of magnitude the biggest expense of a person's life. It has also tracked wage and inflation as far back as we have kept track but suddenly 30 years ago it started rapidly decoupling from wage growth and inflation.

If this didn't start breaking things then that would be a far bigger surprise than if it did.

It didn't start breaking things. It doesn't even correlate.

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