This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I thought Elon only had two children per woman, which is not going to solve anyone's fertility problems.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link