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