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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32831 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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Glossing over the more schizophrenic parts of this…argument? narrative? since you appear to still be editing:

TFR doesn’t have to be the new hot topic. If it’s going to be, I’d like to see some discussion on the actual moral grounding. Why should I care if my one child is outnumbered by less intelligent, more credulous, or other colors of children? Quality over quantity.

Otherwise, this thread will devolve into handwringing about how poorly Western society treats its straight white males. Just like the last couple.

Well because however you structure your system of work and benefits, a society a growing share of which is composed of those no longer productive and a shrinking share of those in work is clearly going to run into problems down the road. Now, I would say that immigration can help to make up some of the gap but I imagine that isn't a view amenable to most here so trying to raise TFR (though I should say I don't really think it's possible to arrest its decline) is the only other road out.

Sub-replacement fertility is a big deal because of a couple of factors that are completely independent of race, religion, or dysgenics:

  • In the short term, you have an aging population supported by an ever-shrinking workforce. This is likely to affect you personally when you approach retirement years, or if not you, definitely your one child.

  • In the medium term, it's uncharted territory. I'm open to correction, but to the best of my knowledge, there is literally zero historical precedent for societies surviving and reversing extended population decline. Perhaps an extended decline propped up by mass immigration and automation won't cause any issues, but I wouldn't count on it.

  • In the long term, anything that cannot continue will not. If the modern, industrialized way of life can't produce enough children to sustain itself, it will eventually be replaced by something that can. Whether it's the Amish or Brave New World or Handmaid's Tale or something else entirely, nobody has any idea. And I find that idea disheartening, because I like the modern way of life.

If you care about having kids, having descendents, etc, then having just one leaves you vulnerable to black swan events. You can spend 22 years pushing all your resources into getting your kid into Harvard Law, and then lose your entire genetic line to a car crash.

But I think a lot of the consernation is about the general vibe/aesthetic of people who like kids vs people who don't want them. One of my good friends is determinedly child free, and I generally like and respect him alot. But a part of me is still condescendingly rolling my eyes every time he and his long-time girlfriend bounce to Orlando to spend another weekend getting drunk at Epcot. But I'm sure he's doing the same to me every time I have to go home early on a Friday night because the boy has a travel basketball game at 9AM.

getting drunk at Epcot

Why, why, why? Including airfare, overpriced on-property hotel, park tickets, and overpriced park food you could just buy a bottle of Chateau Lafite and get drunk in home in style.

Besides, Epcot sucks if you can travel to the actual countries that World Showcase butchers (even Disneyland Paris >> the French pavilion, let alone actual Paris) - and if you are living the DINK lifestyle you can.

TFR doesn’t have to be the new hot topic. If it’s going to be, I’d like to see some discussion on the actual moral grounding. Why should I care if my one child is outnumbered by less intelligent, more credulous, or other colors of children?

Hard agree. There's no reason to care about TFR, and the handwringing is something I find pointless at best. It's not relevant, move on to something that is. Granted I can just not click on the threads, but I agree that it's incorrect to assume everyone cares about this topic.

You can't have solvent inflation-adjusted universal pensions without a growing population or a larger more stable economy to invest.

And before you say fine, realize that the modal pension recipient looks a lot more like the guests on Caleb Hammer's youtube than you, how are they going to eat when they can't work?

Do you just intend to fix it with immigration? Surely you must admit that this will cause some problems just on economic grounds.

In fairness you could also cut entitlements. I won’t hold my breath on it though.

Even with cut entitlements what do we do with the infirm? Changing the 'people in training : people working : retired people' ratio is probably one of the biggest changes you can make to an economy and you can only really make marginal changes with policy.

You don’t. Part of cutting entitlements is leaving people to die when they would otherwise be entitled to something, like if they’re old or disabled.

I mean you could also be Canada, I guess.

I honestly see MAID as a good thing. It would be a net benefit to the world if the people who themselves decided they wanted to die were allowed to do so with dignity and minimal pain. Also a good way to fix the greying population, always let the infirm know that MAID is an option that will end their pain and suffering so that we don't spend hundreds of thousands prolonging their life by an extra two years.

Runaway inflation caused by a fucked up dependency ratio certainly cares about you. Unless you think anyone can cut social security.

Social security is going to run out of money, so what? Anyone with wisdom has been planning to not get anything back out of it for ages.

This overstates the case considerably. The report of the trustees in 2022 estimates (rough estimates of course but the best ones we have so they'll do) that all the way through to 2096 SS benefits at 74% of the current level would be sustainable with no changes at all in tax law. That's a big gap, but not a completely irresolvable one with some changes here and there. A couple of percentage increase in payroll taxes eliminates the problem entirely, and while there may not be political will for that at this juncture when the problem starts to come into closer view by the 2030s it's hardly out of the question.

The important point to remember is that the OASDI trust fund is huge and generates its own income so a moderate deficit between income and outgoings in not a particularly large problem; in the coming decades it will start to be exhausted if no changes are made, but as I say those changes don't have to be revolutionary for the problem to be resolved.

if people planned well and/or had wisdom, there wouldn't have been the creation of the welfare program in the first place

I expect social security benefits to be paid by money printing.

We are become brown Argentina.

I would bet heavily on means testing as the primary solution.

It is extremely optimistic to assume there will be a solution, as opposed to periodic bailouts paid for by money printing and brought about by one party shutting down the government until the other gives in.

That is the first time in at least a decade someone has called me optimistic. Perhaps there is hope left!

Sure, they'll try to hold it together with string and bubblegum. I just think that "tax the fat cats" (of whom there will be ever fewer) is historically the option most often chosen.

I grant that it's possible. I don't think it will happen though. I think they'll admit bankruptcy first.

You expect a government to admit when they screwed the pooch?

In this case yes, because they'll get put through the wringer worse if they don't.

Anyone with wisdom has been planning to not get anything back out of it for ages.

All two of us? Meanhile, the other ~350 million Americans are congenitally incapable of imagining that a handout might end.

Why should I care if my one child is outnumbered by less intelligent, more credulous, or other colors of children? Quality over quantity.

It literally doesn't work that way when it comes to genetics. Maybe in the scope of different species and niches, but within a single species, it's simply incorrect. There is no amount of quality to overcome the inevitability of quantities.

As for why. Do you think you are a good person? Do you want more people like you, or fewer people like you? Most people want more people who they like, and fewer people they don't like. You're basically saying you want fewer people you like, and more people you don't like. That's backwards, and deserves justification in itself, especially if you want anyone else to share the sentiment.

Unless you hate yourself, hate your family, hate your people, you should want more of them, not less of them, in the future. And if you do truly hate yourself, well, I'm not going to stop you from solving that problem, but I'm also not going to listen to what you have to say.

I want people like me. Fortunately, the floor for that is pretty low. I’d be satisfied with one family unit, though it would be nice to have more for security.

That’s what I mean by quality—I don’t really care if the rest of the population doesn’t carry my genes. Not so long as they are carried. They’re pretty nice genes; I’m rather attached to them, but I expect they’ll do alright.

The people terrified by a future that includes their descendants, just not enough of them, are delusional. Perhaps they’re not confident about getting to stay in the gene pool. Or they could misunderstand exactly how far their kinship circles extend today. I know some of them subscribe to a bizarre counterpart to Marxism, where racial interests supersede class, culture and self-interest.

Unless you hate yourself, hate your family, hate your people, you should want more of them, not less of them, in the future.

You're drawing this false dichotomy between "want more" and "want less". I would wager that the majority of people who don't want more of their people simply don't care if there are more or fewer, not that they want fewer.

Frankly I don't find your argument compelling either. Who gives a shit what future generations look like? I'll be dead, it's got nothing to do with me. I don't care if people who live after me share my values, and I don't really understand why anyone would.

I'll be dead, it's got nothing to do with me.

I mean, you can certainly go full nihilistic hedonism if you like, but then you won't mind if the people who do care what happens after they are gone try to mold the world into the image they desire.

I don't particularly care. I said as much.

I think he meant "quality over quanitity" as bringing up the idea of: why try to increase the TFR of the other colors/less intelligent, causing them to (relatively) outnumber your children? It doesn't obviously benefit your genes.

And "if you disagree with me, it's because you hate yourself and your people, so you should off yourself." isn't charitable, or interesting. Maybe something poetic instead, about not reproducing = casually discarding a project a thousand generations in the making, idk.

No, I was trying to head off the argument that we have to boost (white) TFR to keep the barbarians off the gates. That the West will fall apart without a nice supply of white babies. It assumes a level of race-to-the-bottom racial spoils which I find overblown.

I’d be satisfied if I had one family of descendants alive 1,000 years from now. That’s success! Doing better than that is a bonus, but not one worth handwringing over.

Oh. Even if it's not what most who care about birth rates believe, the non-racial 'steelman' is that fertility rate decline seems to be coming for almost every population worldwide, so we should start trying to stabilize somewhere modern now - any racial immigrants we have assimilate to our culture quickly and have low birthrates, and even birthrates in africa are declining rapidly, especially in urban environments. It's a less urgent argument, but with a TFR of 1.6 the decline-based fertility rate argument in the US isn't urgent either.

There's a separate argument that, independent of a current decline, more people (whether of some quality or people in general) is good morally, so one should raise the TFR anyway.

It assumes a level of race-to-the-bottom racial spoils which I find overblown.

Are there good examples of multi-ethnic democracies where this has resoundingly not occurred?

Mexico and Brazil and the Philippines. Singapore. Turkey was an example when it was still a democracy. Canada up until recently.

Singapore literally only exists as a sovereign nation because catastrophic ethnic conflict happened between that city and the rest of Malaysia, and then it had a dictator impose authoritarian segregation rules which still bind for the exact purpose of keeping ethnic tension under control. It's not a good example of ethnic tension not being a huge deal.

"Up until recently" is also an anti-example; @netstack was claiming the bailey of "it won't happen ever", not the motte of "it won't happen within a few years", and contesting the bailey is valid.

Anti-segregation rules, not segregation rules. HDB allocation enforces ethnic balance at the block level.

I mean, the cases I was thinking of were the illegality of proselytisation (which seems to me an attempt to both reduce interracial annoyance and avoid the rapid demographic shifts which evangelism enables and which can lead to people deciding violence is a good solution), and to the at-least-partial school segregation I observed the one time I was there (I was representing Australia in a maths competition run by Singapore's Chinese High School, and, um, that's actually its name), though admittedly I don't know to what extent the latter is actually a legal thing.

Thanks for the additional info, though.

Does anyone know how to selectively increase tfr for high IQ populations?

There are like a dozen ways. Some of them aren't robust to people faking low IQ, but others (e.g. "$500,000 per year per child for high-IQ woman with high-IQ father") are more so.

The problem is that unless you're really fucking subtle about it, it's political suicide, because advocating eugenics (and this inherently is a eugenics project) gets you called a Nazi.

Providing academically segregated primary schools with extended hours (so mums can work a regular 40hr/wk professional job without paid childcare, even if they can't work a 50+hr meritocratic elite job) would be the simplest option. You can identify the top 20% of the IQ distribution at 4-ish - you need to wait to identify the tip-top, but I don't think you even want to distinguish between the 1% and the 19% if you are doing eugenics.

I don't think this would work. The parents don't know whether the kid will be in the top 20% before having him/her, so it'll only have a very-slightly-different effect on high-IQ parents vs. low-IQ parents.

I was reading my mum's university textbooks at 3, so I think you can have a fair idea about the higher end quite early.

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