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What is the woman's responsibility towards low TFR?
Low TFR is the new hot topic. I'll use this post to continue the discussion started by @ffrreerree2 (Only 1 comment, if not an alt, welcome to the Motte.) on his post. Because the last week's thread is about to die off.
Also assumes fuck rate is tied to birth rate
I'll focus on the Iranian video discussed in the previous post. I think it's a good enough approximation of a conservative call to marriage/family building. It does well to highlight the individual failure mode of not having worked towards building a family, obviously "crippling" loneliness, lack of purpose, shitty QOL, yada yada.
That video still bugs me. For one, the right side of the video was entirely redundant. Everyone knows that if you have that wonderful magical trad-wife who other than wearing a hijab at home; gets up in the morning before you without an alarm clock, cooks labor-intensive dishes for not only breakfast but also for your packed lunch, combs your hair for you, and presumably organizes a surprise birthday party for you,
then fucks it's it up by spraying foam all over the cake., life is all gravy. Does the modal (regardless of Nationality) man need to be reminded of that dream? Doesn't the very next video by Taiwan hint at the notion that that very dream itself is 'problematic' because women are not only for the kitchen? I'm from the East and its an extremely common discussion trope/meme among young females that there exists no worse reality than being sentenced to the kitchen after marriage, and there are more than enough heuristics (how good-looking the guy is) to figure out if a potential suitor would be the kind to do that. Men around my parts go to extreme lengths to hide any and all desire for such a thing, some even convincing themselves that, that isn't actually a great deal for them all things considered.Now moving on to the left side. What was particularly wrong about the guy in the video if you look past the "this dude totally sucks" aesthetics? He woke up on time, has an apartment, has a job, has a car, looks the same as his alternate reality married version (despite the pizza coke and takeout), and isn't carrying any obvious grooming defects that a visit to the barbershop can't fix. He also has a pet tortoise. I guess him being rude to the girl selling flowers sealed his fate. Or that he turns his apartment lights off, totally can't fix that by.. turning the lights on.
How does the guy on the left become the guy on the right? The video presents an alternate reality side by side, and it's presupposed that left did something wrong along the way. But he is clearly not happy, I am sure he did not turn down the magical trad wife in the past to further progress his presumble software engineering (casual clothes at the workplace) career. He knows his life kinda sucks. Is the world really suffering from a lack of mediocre-looking software engineering men turning women from marriage? Does not literally 5 minutes on the internet or speaking to a man under the age of 25 reveal to you that it's quite literally the opposite?
So let's imagine an alternative video but this time the female is the protagonist.
On the left we have; Our female protagonist waking up to an alarm. She replies to the 58 notifications on her Snapchat, TikTok, and Instagram, she eventually musters up the courage to wake up and makes her way to the shower, brushes her teeth and then proceeds to spend 30 minutes putting on makeup because society demanded so, and because it makes her feel better. Having left her house ready to take on The World, but! only after she got her corporation-made coffee, no she doesn't have the time to make coffee at home. Finally, at work, she gets in her pre-email gossip at the breakroom for 25 minutes talking to her female coworker about the latest episode of that totally amazing new Netflix show. Midway through sending the emails the 'cutest guy at the office who is not particularly attractive' asks her how her weekend was, she tells him about how she went to an escape room and was so scared like it was a horror movie! The guy eventually wipes the sweat off his eyebrows during a strategic bathroom break during the conversation and asks her to go with him to this new escape room that he's heard all about next weekend. She declines the offer despite letting him know how that would be so totally amazing and sounds like a really fun plan. The guy contemplates changing jobs and then wonders did he remember to feed his pet turtle. After a hard day of work, she rushes home and reaches for the Beauty by Earth Makeup Remover - with Organic Aloe Vera & Witch Hazel, Use with Eye Makeup Remover Wipes or Cotton Pads, Gentle Non-Greasy Makeup Remover for Dry, Oily and Sensitive Skin Types(also vegan and cruelty free) makeup remover so she can apply it and then reapply another layer of makeup for her upcoming Tinder date, because society said so. She goes on the date talks about her ex, her cat, her totally crazy coworker who is insane enough to go on 10 tinder dates a month as opposed to the usual 5. After an exciting evening out, the couple to be arrives home and engage in unprotected sex because condoms feel like shit, after some pillow talk she says her goodbyes and makes sure to not forget to take the pill because pullout game only gets you so far. She unwinds by watching that totally amazing show on Netflix with the lights off and goes to bed.
Ofcourse the story above other than being terribly written is an exaggeration. The modal young woman isn't this vapid. She maybe goes on 1 date a month, might entertain the guys offer to go for the escape room, and sometimes reads novels instead of watching Netflix, and only uses a 5$ makeup remover instead of a 23$ one. But it's just a difference in magnitude not kind. Both of them do not entertain the idea of procreating with that guy from the office. Both of them are the Pams waiting for their Jim Halperts. They just can't find a good enough guy! And until you do that for them through whatsoever means, no amount of PSA videos is going to help your cause. Start off by thinking towards aiming the video at the right audience maybe. Maybe.
Can I ask all the men blaming women, the hussies, for not getting married at seventeen and pumping out a baby a year for the next ten years - are you fathers? Any of you? Do you have kids? More than one kid? If not, why not? "I always wanted six kids but I couldn't find a woman willing to have that big a family" or "Don't be dumb, I'm not forty yet, time enough for me to settle down after I build my career and have my fun along the way with as many hot chicks as I can persuade to let me bang them"?
Because I'm fed-up right now of this stream of comments as if women magically are the only ones having babies or not. Oh, all the eighteen year old men just aching to take on adult life as a husband and father, if only those trollops weren't busy painting their faces and working at jobs!
Excuse me if I don't believe that.
Let's turn the solutions that have been presented in previous comments around. Easy one first: no contraception. Men who have sex are going to become fathers, or else they can wait until a woman decides to marry them. And let's make it harder for men to waste their prime fertile years going to college. Get them working good honest blue-collar jobs out of high school, married to their childhood sweetheart, and having babies by the time they're twenty.
Men can wait ten or so years to have a career, they'll easily pick one up when they're thirty-plus and asking an employer to take them on for full-time white collar work for the first time ever. It's much more important that they be around to be the head of the house and raise the kids right. Women can take a year out to have a baby and then go back to work, but it's a full-time job for a father. And since women have it so soft and easy in this world, and it's easier for women to get degrees and white-collar jobs, let Mom be the worker but Dad should be there for his brood because who else is going to teach them the right ways?
Economic incentives for men to marry early, father lots of kids, and postpone further education/career-building will surely change the fertility slump! If it would work for a woman, certainly no man would object to having his freedom curtailed in this way - after all, his duty to society and the future trumps any petty personal ambitions, right?
EDIT: Yes, I am going to put this out there: unless you are a married father of at least three kids, shut your yap about this. You are as much part of the problem as the women. Any guy who is not married (if you're cohabiting, why the fuck aren't you getting married instead of lolling around getting free milk without buying the cow?) and not the father of kids (are you putting it off until "someday later"? "it's too expensive"? "it's not the right time"?) can't have the neck to say "oh why aren't those women getting married and having kids?"
Since @Amadan announced to the whole world that you are a woman, He actually did me a favor by allowing me to craft my response better (You and I are operating at from a massive inferential distance). And my response differs based on gender not because I think women are dumb (despite my frustration fuelled writing). But because there are certain experiences so obvious, so universal to a specific group they needn't be reiterated at all. For young men (like me) nowadays that experience is the difficulty in attracting a woman long term. The satirical story at the end is speaking to that audience of young men, men who I am quite confident know exactly what I am talking about. As a woman, you really do not understand that difficulty.
The tldr intention of the post was to convey that; Men keep on catching all the flak for all the worsening social fabrics. Young women live quite dysfunctional/unhealthy (physically and mentally) lives as well but there is just about no mention of that in any context. Exxagerating exactly how the modal modern young woman's life is ridiculous and antisocial was my attempt to discuss the specifics. Then I shoehorned in what I actually think that women hold they key to the TFR because they hold the key to reproduction, to begin with.
And I am sure you know this. But there is a sex recession. And the reason for that for those on the ground is clear as day. Women's standards have just become ridiculous. I catch a lot of flak for saying this from older/married users here but the modern Instagram/Snapchat/Tinder-injected dating scene is really something they are NOT used to.
So I am getting up on podium and saying; So what if you fix the economy, so what if you fix culture? What are you going to do about the fact that OLD made it such that instead of settling with the guy from college or the office, a good chunk of women think they deserve to marry and build a life with the 99th percentile men they get attention from on tinder (men will fuck anything within reason). The modern young woman thinks being able to bed a man of high status is a reflection of her own high status. This is not true! A man being able to bed a high-status woman is. It doesn't work the other way around, men will fuck anything, women only fuck equal or better. And the young women are okay with this arrangement, because once you go
black. No one will ever tell them otherwise. So what happens? This young woman goes on till shes 35 passing along every guy of equal sexual status.. because they did not match up to Tinder Date #7, well she doesn't match up to Tinder Date #7! The OLD cat is out of the bag and there is honestly no way to put it back in.I will just watch the decline and maximize my net worth in the meanwhile.
Sure. But unless you introduce literal sex slavery, you can downgrade the economic conditions for women all you like and still not be able to force them into "I have to marry the first guy that asks me and have six kids which he will have very little interaction with since he'll be busy with his career". Why do you think prostitution got started in the first place? Make it hard for women to get legitimate jobs, and the sex trade will flourish because Mr. Husband and Father with wifie at home looking after the six kids wants something different, something that won't be kid number seven, and all the tricks that his wife who married him straight out of high school doesn't know or doesn't want to do.
Maybe women now do have ridiculous standards. But so do men. The entire problem here is women acting like men act in the sexual marketplace. Don't like it? Well, this is why society used to be all about encouraging marriage. Are we laughing at the Victorians for being prudes now, or can we afford to laugh at them?
Women's marriage standards are "six feet, six figures, six inches." Men's marriage standards are "teenage virgin". These are not the same. Every woman was a teenage virgin once (modulo the few who got broken in as lolis). Most men never meet the three sixes. There isn't a possible world where most women get what they want (becoming the exclusive wife of a top man); there is a possible world where most men get what they want, and we lived in it from the abolition of polygamy until the sexual revolution.
Never forget what they took from you.
With DD boobs and who is a slut whore who will perform any sexual act he asks for, at the same time as being a teenage virgin. There are unrealistic expectations on both sides.
Those are preferences, not standards. Yes, obviously, every man would prefer a 10/10 supermodel with huge tits who will act like a lady in the streets and a whore in the sheets and never ask for commitment (or, better yet, two of them), but most are perfectly happy to marry the 6/10 girl next door as long as she is still young and virginal. Whereas women would rather be booty call #3 on Chad's phonebook than marry an average beta provider nice guy, and spend their teens and twenties doing just that.
From "The Archetypal Modern Woman" by Free Notherner:
And from The Dreaded Jim's Gab:
This brings to mind something I heard from some podcast by 2 women a long time ago. I forget what podcast and who, but the women would sometimes judge men's fuckability/marriageability using a score system, with the scores being 1 or 0. This is in contrast to the near-universal score system of 1-10 that straight men tend to assign to women. Obviously no one knows for sure, but I was told by a woman that the 1/0 scoring system is much more in line with how women in general tend to judge men. The sense that I get is that this is broadly true, and if we were to try to convert one scale to the other, that the bar for reaching a "1" in the former scale would roughly correspond to 8.5-9 in the other scale.
Red Scare podcast?
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I never proposed reducing womens economic prospects. I proposed to stop artificially inflating it. The major recepients of economically non productive higher education degrees are women. Those women majority fields are also overlap with fields that suffer from a lack of rigour. A psychology and an Electrical Engineering BSc are not created equal.
Also men dont have ridiculous standards, the top percentile of men might. But the pile of evidence shows that the average woman is equivalent to the 95th percentile man when it comes to dating power.
Did you class them as that when they were majority male?
The enternal Wordcell - Shape Rotator War knows nothing about sex or race, or any other petty category.
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Yes. I'm a libertarian who believes in HBD. I class just about everything that gets welfare/subsidies as economically nonproductive, if not being against the idea of subsidies altogether.
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Do you seriously claim that is how prostitution got started?
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I am both older and was dating on Tinder until 2 years ago (until I met my current girlfriend there). My experience of being a mid-fifties, pudgey, 5,11 (not even over the magical 6 foot barrier!) partially retired academic is that I was able to attract much younger, more attractive women than I would expect. Sure my British accent helps with dating in the US but I will give you an anecdote that was repeated across a large spectrum of the women I dated in that time.
Most were between 25 and 40, professional, smart and often making more money than I do. I'll call one Sandra. She was 30, a computer programmer earning 6 figures, graduated college at 18 and smart, beautiful and accomplished. On our third date I made her breakfast in the morning, and she burst into tears. It emerged that no man had EVER cooked for her. She had even lived with a serious boyfriend between 24 and 29 and he never once cooked, cleaned or did laundry. The fact I had a decorated place with a bed frame and not just a mattress on the floor was a marvel to her. The fact I could cook a few dishes (and I am far from the worlds greatest cook) was astonishing. That I could actually run my own life. I broke up with her because there were some compatibility issues, but she would be a terrific catch.
The 27 yo journalist from New York I dated had similar stories to tell. As did the 33 yo doctor and the 31 yo nurse. Their experience is that what they call high-value men are very rare. But to me what they were even looking for in high-value men is the bare minimum. So the proposition that emerges is that while women's standards may have increased, it seems equally possible that the standard of men has in fact decreased. They were clearly willing to date men who made less than they did, because I made less than virtually all of them. They were also willing to date less accomplished men from a life skills point of view because that is what they had been doing!
If you can cook at least a few basic dishes, make your home look like something livable, dress and groom yourself to a decent standard (including picking out a cologne/scent to smell good, which is in my experience really important) then you are ahead of a lot of men 25-35 in North East of the United States at least as far as I can tell. I'm a chubby, hairy man in my 50's who works part time and otherwise lives off my pension. I should not be able to compete with well put together 25-35yo men in the prime of their life for women who are significantly more attractive than I am. But there appear to be very few of those to compete with.
I courted my first wife when I was 19, 35 or so years ago, and her standards were high. Here and now, if anything women's standards on average appear to be lower as far as I can tell. Now it is quite possibly also true that there are fewer high value women as well, but it's fairly easy to filter for those you want. And at least if you work or live in a city, there are literally thousands to pick from.
I appriciate the hopium but you are aware that not a single one of those things can be conveyed through online right? After all they wont be able to tell if I can make a bed or cook from a photo.
When there is so much overwhelming data that only the top percentile attractive men have any sucess at all on OLD, I dont think any further conversation on the matter would be fruitful. Congrats on your success nonetheless.
My wider point was the damage done to the social fabric by the Internet. There are nth order effects. Imagine Sandra meets a guy and likes him her friend who is an OLD fiend might make a drunken remark about how Sandra could do better. Sandra could technically do better. Sandra gets marginally anxious about her status. But that comment wouldnt be made if the social fabric wasnt frayed. Sandra would have better friends, etc etc.
Sure they can, if you pick the right pictures. One of mine for example was a picture of me cooking. Another was of me helping a friend build a wall. In your profile, put that you are taking cooking classes and ask to swap recipes. Make a joke that you're only on Tinder to steal secret family recipes.
It may require different tactics, and you can't rely on meeting them and being charming while you are both half-sloshed but if a chubby old bastard like me can do it, then there is no reason most people with a lick of sense who want to date for marriage and are looking for someone the same can't. But you have to work at it. Spend time on your profile, and your pictures, stage em if you have to. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Have 5 or 6 openers ready to go, and check the profile and pics if you do get a match so you can come up with something witty.
Sure you might not match many and then 50% won't even respond and another 25% will peter out after hellos. But that 25% is still more than you get through by being introduced by friends in the old days. It's a numbers game in a very different way than traditional dating was when I was a lad. There the issue was finding someone available and getting close to them in the first place. But you only need one.
Thanks for the advice, but.
Very naive of to assume anyone ever reads bios. Countless experiments with literal pedophilic shit in dating profile bios have shown to still work if the pictures are sufficiently good enough. You are correct about the pictures that a lot more gets extrapolated from them than they should.
Sure. My match rate was 3/100 swipes, message reply rate 2/10,message -> date rate 0. Realistically this is still less time consuming than how it was done in ye old days. But it feels extremely degrading, just going window shopping and being rejected by 97% of the people. I settled on not working up the mental faculty to not let that get to me. Btw, the women I match with online are much worse than ladies I saw in real life. It's really not worth it.
And I don't want to. I plan on just trying irl after I am done with graduate school and can get a higher-paying job, which should improve my prospects. I don't want to put on a clownshow and have ready made lines and stage shit just to be considered worth having gone out with, that is not how humans operate. I am not ready to dispense all my sense of self-respect.
I think this is just an update of how we used to have to do it pre-mobile phones. You think you just approached a girl you really wanted on a wing and a prayer? You thought about what you wore, what you looked like, had some good lines, hell, maybe you brought a wingman to make you look good. None of this is new. It is exactly how people operate. You leveraged everything you possibly could. Sure if you just want to pick a girl up in a bar, for sex, then whatever, low pressure, though even there if you were going out with that in mind, you would definitely dress and plan accordingly, but we are specifically talking about looking for your marriage partner.
Your one job at the start is to get your foot in the door. And that means putting your best foot forward. Especially if you are aiming for someone high-value who therefore would have had a lot of approaches. The beginning stages of flirtation and courtship are all about making yourself look as good as you possibly can. If you're not willing to do that, then you will probably lose to the people who are. With my first wife, I fell for her the day I saw her, so I found out she was going to a mutual friends party and then I found out everything I could about her, talked to a couple of female friends about her, had my buddy there to wingman. A person to love is unlikely to fall into your lap. Working for it is going to increase your odds.
Now there is another option, after my first wife passed, I met my second wife through a group of friends and we were friends first, and dated second. That way your foot is in the door in a different way. That is a much lower pressure situation, but it's much less certain. It's a more passive approach (at least at first). But requires you to be able to tell when someone is interested in you (or hope she will take initiative which is a gamble). It's definitely still workable.
But OLD is a replacement for the first method, the cold pick up where you don't know the woman in advance, and that largely hasn't changed in how you have to get that first yes as far as I can tell having had experience of both. You have to work to signal you are someone worth paying attention to. And yes, being conventionally attractive reduces the amount of work you might have to do for sure, just to be clear.
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Yes she started settling at 30. Leaving her what, the opportunity to have maybe 3 (healthy) kids at best if he's lucky?
Some women get married at 18. She graduated early but too bad she was the wrong sex for that to matter for her romantic prospects. She had been rejecting marriage for over 12 years!
Who believes that? If he's serious he puts a ring on it within a year. Smart and beautiful woman gets strung along for 5 years. Many such cases! Sad! That must be the one lesson she skipped by spending so much effort on government school.
I know women in the same age range / cohort as these women who are currently married with children and cohabited with their future husbands for years, many of them for more than five years. One of them has been together with the same man for 22 years, and their first child is only 4 years old. Another one cohabited with her man for around 7 years before they had their first child. And so on. So this approach does actually work. (And no, expecting men to put a ring on it within a year is usually not a viable approach.) I’m not saying this is normal, or should be normal, because it takes abnormal levels of self-control, foresight and low time preference on both sides, but not only can it work, but I believe this is unfortunately the only viable approach in the current mating market for people who want to have a family.
However, one crucial aspect is that none of these women paired up with men who “never once cooked, cleaned or did laundry”, or displayed characteristics similar to these – instead, their partners gave obvious signals of willing to maintain a long-term relationship (which is why I find it strange that you left the second half of that sentence out when replying to it). Then again, noticing such signals and then attracting such men into relationships is something the average woman has been capable of doing for millions of years, so I’m sure it’s not that difficult. So yes, I agree that the smart and beautiful woman you mentioned was indeed foolishly strung along for 5 years.
Well being a functional adult seems like a prerequisite to get married since the point of marriage is to be in charge of children.
While it's possible to never have had to cook, 'learning how to prepare food' is as simple as watching a few youtube videos.
A woman with an aggressive approach to marriage should do just that (and not wait to be in her late 20s to get aggressive either).
For the 2015 woman I recommend joining alt-right circles. For the 2023 woman there's America First.
A woman that would go out of her way to find a man that is interested in cooking is actually a red flag in my point of view.
That means that she is either not too motivated to cook because she doesn't like it, she doesn't like the idea of pleasing her husband and family, is unconfident in her (poor) cooking skills...
Or that she expects her husband to shoulder a large share of cooking duty because her family is so non-traditional that she cannot expect any female relative to ever help when she is heavily pregnant, postpartum or sick.
That latter one is incredibly common and you should consider it carefully with the rest of that potential wife if you ever want a large family.
Unless you already have an incredibly supportive family which will provide more than enough help, but then why would you have any issue getting married, what did you do with that highschool sweetheart arranged by your parents before your birth?
What proper women should be looking for imo is a man that is capable of being a single income earner and provide moral guidance to the family.
Having a healthy supportive family is also very important but again, people like that get off the market really quickly.
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Correlation does not equal causation.
Yes, yes, we've heard it all before. 'Just have the skills of a functioning adult and women will flock to you'. Barring all the cases we've seen of where this is... not the case, just because I can make a cheesecake and cook steak with ease doesn't mean the random spawn chance for 'eligible and interested girlfriend' is magically going to bump up in percentage.
You yourself stated that you're partially retirted(IE, have lots of money), academic(IE, likely have a large amount of social skills), likely had your own domicile, exotic factor(british accent), and probably a large number of other factors you haven't mentioned. Congrats, you were a sugar daddy! Older man, lots of money, lots of social catchet, and you're wondering in confusion as to why you were able to pull younger women compared to men thier age?
Man, take the beam out of your own eye before you try to remove the splinter from others.
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I habitually cook and make all the other food-related decisions (ie. what to purchase, when to purchase it, where to go eat out etc.) in our family, and it amazes me how my wife reports that other women, including her mother, have gushed over this when she talks about it. It's fun, relaxing and means that since I take care of the entirety of a large sector of domestic housework I mostly get a free pass on others (chiefly cleaning, which I find fairly less relaxing), what's not to like? And it makes sure you're always in charge of what you get to eat.
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Have you considered going around with a hammer smashing (young) w*men's cell phones?
Is the censor some sort of anti-SEO, or...?
Using an asterisk to replace a letter in a word like that was originally used to censor slurs (think bleeping out parts of inappropriate words on tv), but has since been applied for humorous (your mileage may vary for if it is actually humorous) effect on words for groups of people which are not generally considered offensive.
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Well so far no one who actually is a father appears to have responded but a lot of people reported to the mods. That's pretty funny, though I expect eventually a father will respond. Has there been a demographic survey recently, does it ask about children?
Father here, don't have a ton of time to respond -- I need to think more about what I'd want to say here, but I think @FarNearEverywhere's rant is basically right. Putting together a family with lots of kids is a lot of work and requires a total mindset change and buy-in from both spouses. It's not fair to blame it on women in #currentyear when, as best I can tell, young men aren't remotely interested in the hard work it takes to be a good husband or father -- too easy to play vidya and watch porn and bang whoever swipes the right direction on Tinder (swipes left? I actually don't know).
Or ... as we've seen in at least two responses below, too easy to say "Oh we're gonna have a family for sure, just not yet because we're waiting on the right economic conditions / career to come along / degree to finish." etc. My wife and I got married right after undergrad and had three kids while I was doing a PhD and she was in nursing school. We had help from the grandparents to pay the rent, but no childcare -- nearest grandparents were 1,000 miles away. It can be done, but it requires real work and real sacrifice and I don't think anyone in #currentyear really wants that -- it doesn't maximize utility, or something.
Until you change the culture such that the sacrifice and hard work it takes to make a family actually seems worth it, you won't get buy-in from anyone ... men or women.
We have five kids now and one of them is special needs, low-functioning autistic. It's a lot of work, but I wouldn't trade it for anything.
This appears to be a common trope that has been endlessly repeated in mainstream discourse for decades without basis. Do many people actually believe that young men in droves are opting to binge online porn and video games instead of seeking long-term relationships with women because they’re just lazy and entitled, somehow brainwashed by bad actors into believing that such relationships are only for losers?
I am not sure about "droves." There is (or, was) a strain of thought in red pill/manosphere type places that long term relationships with women are a suckers game because she'll just divorce you and take all your stuff and so its better to have a series of casual relationships than settle down and be taken advantage of. At the extreme end this culminated in Men Going Their Own Way who would definitely agree that video games and porn are better than interacting with women.
I am not sure about the prevalence of these beliefs but they're definitely out there.
They are out there because it is a very real problem. Women consistently fail to date men in their same attractiveness percentile, and also much more often terminate relationships.
I am not sure how to interpret this part. Is it a bad thing for women to date men in a different "attractiveness percentile?" Why?
It is bad for them and society. Imagine a high school with 10 girls and 10 boys, they graduate, and pair off. Ideally, they'd find someone about as attractive and successful as them or some combination and you'd have 10 couples. What actually happens is that all 10 girls end up rejecting all but the top boy for dates. The one guy then bangs the 10 girls for a while until he ends up settling down with the #1 or #2 girl, and now there are 9 women who have spent ages 16-30 in meaningless relationships with a guy they never really had a chance with. Meanwhile, guys 2-10 have not gotten any dates at all, and now are 30 and depressed and the unlucky girls go running in search of the next version of #1 guy until they are 35 and settle for mr #5. Then they divorce him ten years later because they still, deep down, think they have a chance with Mr #1. Meanwhile guys 6-10 never get a date at all for the rest of time.
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Clearly far too few people here have read The Last Psychiatrist. And he was no fan of porn users.
I think TLP's model of addiction/escapism is correct. Men are heavy users of vidya and porn because they are failing otherwise, not failing because they are heavy users. Yes, there is a feedback loop at play here, But any guy in his right mind will ditch the vidya and porn the moment he sees a glimmer of hope. When all else fails, is when they get into the vidya and porn because what the fuck else are you going to do? booze? fentanyl?
You need to ease your mind somehow. God I hate the level of vilification video games get by serial twitter scroller and netflix watchers. Totally not the same waste of time, you are totally better than the filthy gamers.
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No I think they're doing it for the same reason all sorts of socialization is falling. Dating, going to church, joining a bowling league, requires upfront investment for uncertain return in the future. Church is super boring, most dates end in rejection, the other guys at the bowling league aren't actually that interesting. Opening up your phone to scroll social media, jack off, argue with the exact sort of online weirdo you like arguing with gives consistent instantaneous positive reward for minimal expenditure of time, money effort.
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This is a pretty uncharitable reading, Would it be fair for your father's generation to scold you for not having kids until all the way at the end of your extended academic lifr? It's not some vague excuse, we're going to have kids but we just bought our first home and have some shit to get together, nursing school is tough and all but residents work 10 hour days 6 days a week for the first few years and you would be the only person in your cohort doing the thing. We have a window that makes sense for us and plan. We are making the best of the hand we were dealt.
But really do you think the stuff you wrote after is even disagreeing with what the thread was saying? The culture is not the same as it once was - there are developmental markers either new or moved by economic reality. This is the topic at hand, you don't need to sneer at us to contribute. It's great for you that you were able to have kids in that window, you could probably afford to buy a house before your thirties too. This is not how things were/are for many of us. And it's not just the economics, social media changed how men and women meet/relate to each other, it's discussed in this thread, a huge amount of women are 100% not interested in the deal you proposed to your wife in your day and would reject it if you proposed it today. If you're assuming you'd have a like minded partner you've already bypassed the largest part of the issue. And I get it, letting the part of my brain constantly worried about my status around potential partners atrophy is one of my favorite parts of being in a long term committed monogamous relationship. But you seriously have no fucking idea what you're talking about, as if some 19 year old broke college student competing with grown men with expendable resources a tinder click away is supposed to by pure force of will find a partner with which to settle down immediately.
Yes, there are exceptions. But as a whole there are concerning differences between the landscape our generations have. The landscape my generation inherited is badly broken along family formation, and we didn't build it. you did.
In my particular case, it wouldn't be fair because it wouldn't be true. We got married after undergraduate and started having kids right away and we had three children while I was doing my PhD and my wife was doing nursing school. I'm not sure what the grandparents would have thought if we had waited; I think my folks would have been sad but understanding and supportive and I think my wife's parents would have been relieved -- they were convinced I was ruining their daughter's life by marrying her young and having kids right away, but they ended up liking being grandparents a lot more than they thought and now they make jokes about how they're they only people in their friend circle who even have grandkids. My wife's brothers are firmly in the "never going to get married or have kids because I'm having too much fun doing my own stuff" camp and they have committed girlfriends who broadly feel the same way as best I can tell.
By the by, I'm not sure how old you thought I am, but I'm 32. We got married at age 21 and you are completely, totally right about the landscape changing, trying to date nowadays with dating apps seems like a complete nightmare.
Upvoted for correctly calling me out on the snark. I appreciate the rest of your post, and I wrote my response quickly and without having read the rest of the thread in detail, so let me try this again:
The initial, top-level post was made in the larger context of how to fix declining TFR. My own perception is that the vast majority of responses center on changing incentives for women and critiquing their behavior and I don't see the top-level post in this thread as deviating much from that.
@FarNearEverywhere wrote a snippy (and, apparently, reported) response saying that it's very silly to complain about changing women's incentives and their role in the problem when it takes two to tango and you could just as easily complain about men's incentives and their role in the problem. I agree with other posters that there are some legitimate asymmetries here, but I am in complete agreement with FarNearEverywhere's sentiment because as best I can tell, modern men aren't exactly lining up to be husbands and fathers either. The post ended with a call-out saying if you aren't the married father of 3+ kids, you shouldn't be whining about women because you aren't pulling your weight either. I read that and thought I should reply at some point.
As the discussion developed, a few posters (you and someone else below) chimed in with their own situations of intending to have kids in a stable marriage, but wanting to wait out a particularly challenging time in someone's career / school. This is where I was the most sarcastic, so let me try to say this more clearly and with more charity:
My sense is that one reason TFR is low is because the culture writ large doesn't prioritize, reward, or glorify parenthood. I think this is true across both sexes. It takes a lot of hard work and a total mindset change and devotion to the your spouse and the family to be a good father or mother and it increasingly seems to me that modern men and women just aren't interested in that. The idea that you should make sacrifices generously of yourself in service of the larger goal of your family just ... isn't an idea out there, at the moment.
I think there's always going to be a sense in which kids are scary. There's always going to be some financial insecurity or relationship concern or thing you enjoy doing that you'd have to give up; you can always justify why it would be better to hold off for just a little bit longer. However, it was wrong of me to throw shade at your specific situation. We've had times of avoiding pregnancy and we've had times where we're actively trying to have another kid. Far be it from me to judge you without knowing the specifics and I'm sorry for doing that.
I think the broader point I'd try to make is that at the end of the day, if parenthood is something our culture wants to value, there has to be an overriding attitude of "Just have the kids anyway, it will be okay" because raising a family is a good valued above economic security or self-actualization or maximizing utility or what have you.
But right now, I don't think the culture or most individuals value raising a family in that way, men and women alike.
(posting without editing, because I gotta run and teach)
I regret getting snippy as well, there is something about being critiqued for not reaching mile stones you desperately wanted to reach earlier but were prevented for reasons that at least from a first person perspective don't appear as if they were within your control. Perhaps this is a source of @FarNearEverywhere's consternation as well.
I think we are broadly in agreement about the general shape of the problem, the culture simultaneously makes having kids before settling into a career swimming against the grain and at the same time has pushed that "settled into your career" date back further and further. There is a pervasive meme about getting knocked up young and it upsetting the compounding interests of your life, it's presented like eating the seed corn of your potential, this is present in tons of media and we're bombarded with sentiments like 'you should enjoy your youth and not be in a hurry to settle down'. I'm not sure where this meme comes from but it seems at least complementary to a set of clearly feminist derived memes pushing the importance of women having careers and grabbing and 'equitable' amount of power, as if raising the next generation is not a seat of immense cultural power. These memes vilify the past where men and women struggled mightily together to support families as some kind of trap women were caught in and women seem to have taken the lesson as avoiding getting caught.
At the same time their compliment mgtow/pua memes that also distort the picture and make supporting a wife seem like a bad deal to men. I think this is also wrong but would at least point to the total lack of institutional support of these memes while acknowledging that the likes of Tate are more widely followed than I'd like. It's all so toxic and I think it says bad things about western society that it sets the sexes against each other instead of leveraging or differences for the greater good.
But, and I understand this undermines the centrist framing I just established, but it really does seem like the balls is in the court of women. If a woman decides she wants to get married early and start a family the option is available to her in a way that it simply isn't for nearly all men. Men are certainly not perfect in making this as attractive of an option as they theoretically could, but I'd hazard it's at least as attractive as it's ever been. I can't just ignore that it is pretty obviously that case that if we want enough babies to continue our civilization then women need to make different choices than the ones they are largely making. Nothing men can reasonably expected to do can get around that fact.
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Very true, but what are you doing to fix it for the next generation? Family formation is a fundamental building block of society and it being broken is a symptom of a societal disease. Sure, you didn't catch the disease yourself, but your generation is content to let the disease continue.
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That is what I was griping about; the suggestions that "don't let women go on to college, just get them married out of high school". And who will they marry? Because if you want a 19 year old wife and mother who does not work outside the home, then the man being the breadwinner is going to have to be older, as in his thirties. So young men will still be out of luck on the dating/marriage front. They'll be going to college to get the good jobs to be able to afford to marry and set up a household, and in the meantime they will date - who?
This is just as ridiculous as the marriage bar put on young men by places like the Indian Civil Service (in the time of the Raj) where you weren't permitted to marry without permission, and that could take years as your career advanced. So of course the men took up with native mistresses. What will the equivalent be for the world of young wives and mothers? The double standard of whores.
Kipling has an entire story around this very topic:
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Father of four here and I am pretty much in agreement with you. It does make me sound old to complain about the young'uns of today not having what it takes but I suppose that is one of the few advantages of the passing years. I think the "women are too picky" is just an excuse just as much as the "Oh we're gonna have kids when the time is right"
If you really want a wife/husband and kids in the West, most people can, you just have to push for it, and prioritize it above other things.
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I'm very very anti the behaviour of modern progressive women but this here is absolutely true. Women shouldn't be expected to shoulder the burden for having children while men go off and be degenerate, if you want a tradwife you better be a tradhusband. The modern man truly deserves the modern woman.
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Not a father, but not for lack of trying. My wife and I started adoption paperwork recently.
I would have liked to have gotten married at around age 21 or 22 (so not long after returning from my missionary work) and would have happily had kids right away, or after graduation (age 23-24) at the latest. But God definitely had something else in store for me. I'm 34 now.
That said, I think OP is right about most men not wanting to have kids young. Non-religious men who want to have families at a young age are the exception, not the rule.
People who are married, want kids, and are trying for them - I have no problem there.
I realise I came on strong, but do the people suggesting how to fix the 'fertility problem' not realise who they sound like?
The Taliban. You are the Taliban. Stop women going to school. Train girls that their duties are to be good wives and mothers, and not outside the home. Discourage women from trying to step outside the home. Some of the wilder suggestions that women should be under the authority of their fathers and not allowed their own choice in mates, because women make bad decisions about wanting only the alpha males (or whatever).
You at least dangle economic advantage for being parents as the carrot, but there's plenty of stick there. I wanted to point out would men accept such restrictions? And if not, why think that women would? And that it takes two to tango, it was both sexes got us to the point where we are now, and it's all very well for men to talk about women not wanting to settle for Mr. Okay, to get married early, and to start having a lot of kids (though nowadays apparently four counts as "a lot"), when they're single/childless themselves.
Mote and beam, people. That's what I meant. I want marriage and motherhood to be restored to a place of respect, because I think both feminism and the views expressed often in these discussions that woman are leeches (either they don't want to marry, or a man is a fool to marry because the woman will divorce him and strip him of all he has earned) has helped destroy the idea of marriage and parenthood for both sexes.
You won't fix it by trying to shackle women to the kitchen sink, if men aren't willing to step up and take the same medicine of early marriage and early fatherhood.
I still am confused by your thought process. You think there are hordes of men unwilling to marry in their early 20s a girl who went to school with him either HS or college? The stats all say that 21 year old apprentice carpenter Joe can't even get a date with 21 year old hair stylist Jane. Instead she exclusively dates 28 year old attorneys in the top 10% of attractiveness, despite being average looking herself. Those 28 year old attorneys juggle 15 Janes up till Jane turns 31, then he marries 28 year old attorney and a 9.5/10 Jill and Jane is looking around wondering what went wrong. Meanwhile Joe has gone through 10 years of never getting a date.
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I'm sure the Taliban are more than willing to administer that medicine, so your accusation doesn't hold up.
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I got reported? I had no idea. Seems the ganders don't like the sauce they were prescribing for the geese 😁
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I guess I gotta drop a post from elsewhere here:
The population of females aged 18-29 in the U.S. is approximately 23.3 million (as of 2016)
Remove the obese ones (Almost 40%, apparently, so we’ve already DRASTICALLY cut down the field).
Remove the lesbians.
Remove the prostitutes, porn stars, strippers (Onlyfans counts for these purposes).
Remove the single mothers.
If you care to, remove the ones with an N-Count above, say, 5.
I’m inclined to also account for the prevalence of certain mental illnesses, but lets leave that aside for now.
Maybe we even choose to leave in the ones who have incompatible political views.
And then tally up the ones who are left that are NOT currently in committed, long-term relationships.
Suddenly the number of ‘marriagable’ women who might be geographically accessible to most men looks a LOT more constrained. “Plenty of fish in the sea,” but barely any that are safe to eat.
I can put numbers to each of the above if that helps.
Like, the statistics bear out two things:
The average woman is pickier than ever while bringing fewer things 'to the table' for the male than ever.
Women are ALSO more likely than ever to terminate the relationship, EVEN AFTER many years of marriage and multiple children.
So there's a relatively small pool of marriageable woman who are what would be considered 'wife material', and every single male, from ages 18-50, is competing for this pool. So men are exposing themselves to the same old risks (woman leaving at any time) for less possible reward.
All that a male can do is work as hard as possible to increase his competitive advantage and thus his odds of success. Which is something of a red queen's race since all other guys are competing just the same.
He can't do anything to increase the number of marriageable women, can he?
So it certainly does imply that women's behavior is at issue here.
Male and Female obesity rates are pretty similar roughly 40% in both but severe obesity is 7% in men and 12% in women so there's some difference there.
Men & Women are identify as homosexual at very similar rates. Every woman in a long term relationship is one less man in a long term relationship.
If the pool of potential mates for men is much smaller isn't that offset by being marriageable for 3x as long? Under your marriageability assumptions men's set of marriageable mates at age 18 is all women 29 to -14 (43 birth cohorts) since many women will become 18 over their time in the dating pool? Women's set at age 18 is all men aged 50 to 9, or 41 birth cohorts. It's true that in any given moment there are more men competing for women, but women are competing against women who will enter the pool in the future. The 29 year old trying to get a 30 year old guy to commit is implicitly competing with the 20 other cohorts of women who will turn 18 over his lifetime.
Also what percent of men make enough money to support a family? In 2016 the 50th percentile income for a 35 year old male was ~50k, 33rd percentile was 30k. It's not a "good deal" to keep yourself chaste and attractive so you can snag a guy making that much.
I think the core of it is that you're demanding the old bargain where women provided sex, domestic labor and paternity certainty in exchange for men who would "protect and provide". Well in a modern society male protection isn't particularly necessary, and the gender wage gap isn't huge and largely accounted for by women choosing more flexible careers so they can do childcare labor for their husbands, or jobs that pay less but that they find self actualizing. You can't demand an attractive, young, chaste wife with similar social background when she can earn 70-85% of that income and do whatever she wants.
The actual stats tend to elucidate the situation pretty clearly:
https://twitter.com/pewresearch/status/1623352132375302144
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2023/02/08/for-valentines-day-5-facts-about-single-americans/
63% of 18-29 year old men report being single.
47% of 18-29 year old women report being single.
So what explains this 16% difference other than some portion of those younger women dating older men?
I dunno what you want to make of that other than, for some reason or confluence of reasons, males 18-29 are simply having a harder time finding relationships.
You can grant that younger men will have the hope of eventually finding a younger woman when they get older, but those men are still losing years, possibly over a decade, they could be building wealth and raising kids with a committed partner.
We'd expect certain effects on the margins, at least, from such a shift.
The massive irony on top of all this is that despite all the advantages and privileges that have been obtained by/granted to women in the last few decades, women are less happy than they used to be:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w29893
Suffice it to say, women have gotten everything they allegedly want and have more financial and social freedom than ever before (overturning of Roe notwithstanding) and... they are overall miserable.
I don't know if this:
Is true if women are actually less happy than they were before. Maybe the failure to find a husband, even if it means 'settling,' is a psychological detriment. Maybe the stresses that come with having to provide for oneself simply wear harder than you'd expect.
Perhaps (I'm going on a limb here, admittedly) there are still psychologically and emotionally fulfilling factors in life that cannot be easily replaced simply by higher income and wealth.
Soft polyamory, FWB, Situationships, etc.
One lying fuckboi can quite easily have 3 women believing they have a boyfriend. Hell, nowadays it's not even about lying, it is about making vaguely boyfriend-like noises and the women will round it up to boyfriend in their head (and maybe on a survey).
On the flip side, a lot of young guys will be sleeping with a girl regularly, hanging out together constantly, escorting her to weddings/holidays/etc, and say "we haven't defined the relationship yet..."
So I suspect some percentage of this is essentially a bad survey question and imprecise language.
This is seemingly borne out in another thread:
https://twitter.com/datepsych/status/1625485234824261632
Where you can see that in the 18-25 demographic there's about 42% of women that claim zero sexual partners, about 43% that claim one sexual partner, and then looking at the male side, there's ~12% claiming at least 3 partners a year. Although one suspects the guys claiming 100 sexual partners a year are... exaggerating.
This would be relatively consistent with a view that many women are opting out of sex for want of a worthy partner and some smaller percentage of men are locking down multiple women from that remaining pool.
I'd actually assume gays could heavily skew this data. 100 is not impossible for some.
It's two sexual encounters with a novel partner per week. Some straight guys at the peak of their game who travel a lot could manage that, but distributionally, we're probably talking fairly out there in the long tail (e.g. wealthy airline pilot with a taste for prostitution). For gay guys, traveling a lot would also help, unless you live in NYC, Miami, SF, etc., but it's not nearly as extreme an outlier. There's also some difference between 100/year at a person's promiscuous peak, and 100/year averaged over a period of years, which is why frequent travel is a relevant variable--past a certain point, you need to go farther afield to find the low-hanging fruit, which is almost certainly more time/resource efficient than investing in a metaphorical ladder to pick the less accessible partners.
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When I see gaps like that, I always wonder if there is a Clintonian problem with defining sexual partner, that breaks down strongly on gender lines. The classic anecdotal examples are something like, a Babtist "virgin" at Liberty University whose nickname in high school was the Headmaster; and a college boy who claims he got laid when he prematurely ejaculated on the dance floor.
I wonder if it is a broader phenomenon, where men are consistently personally including activities that many people wouldn't include objectively (cybersex for example), while women are constantly excluding "last name sex" activities that most people would objectively include like oral sex or manual sex. Have you ever seen data on that?
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One other nudge is that basically every year, 5% more males are born than females, and by early twenties, there are still ~4% more 'excess males' (funny word choice in that PDF, with different contexts). By age 40 it's down to more like 2% more men still alive than women.
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Unless of course she wants babies, which is kind of the whole point. That's the missing enticement.
Society is well on it's way to providing this without the need for women to actually have to put up with a man.
IVF is popular here and with rationalist but have you actually talked to women about it? It seems unlikely to me that it'll catch on all that much, your average straight woman that wants a baby without a man attached will probably try and get it done the old fashioned way. It is not a pleasant process.
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Of course it is; it's just socialized. Who provides protection for women in modern society? Cops and soldiers. Who are those? Men. How do they get paid? Taxes. Who produces most taxable income? Men.
In other words, men are still providing protection for women, but now we do it collectively rather than individually, and we don't get any benefit out of it.
Same thing with women's so-called economic independence, which is heavily reliant on welfare, alimony, child support, affirmative action quotas, and anti-discrimination laws. Working men are still supporting women, but now we don't get anything in return.
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Sure he can. He can change his standards. There's no, like, Law Of Nature that makes it impossible to marry women with the characteristics you describe in the first half of your post. Indeed, I imagine a large number of women in those categories (lesbians excepted) end up married to men at some point in their life. I don't understand why this complaint isn't isomorphic to a conventionally unattractive woman complaining about how she can't get a 6/6/6 man to settle down with her. If you have set your standards such that no one whom you would date would also date you, that seems like a you problem.
A natural result of women's improved social and economic standing. As their alternative to being in a relationship improves some people are going to choose that option instead of forming a relationship they may otherwise have. When one's negotiating position is better, one can get a better deal.
It's also kind of amusing to me to complain about women's pickiness given the acknowledgement in this comment that your own criteria would exclude a large number of women from your marriage pool.
I think this overstates the degree of agreement on what constitutes "wife material" among men aged 18-50. I suspect many men in this group will end up happily married to women who don't fit your described criteria of "wife material."
The ways this can go wrong are numerous, not the least of which is her refusing to perform any cooperation in the relationship and divorcing him to take the kids and money anyway.
The bet is not just about the upside. A guy lowers his standards and accepts a less happy relationship and STILL doesn't get to count on loyalty, cooperation, and stability since the current rules say "she can leave whenever she wants."
So we're in a situation where the guy's risk/reward calculation is impacted by the fact that
A) There are fewer women who want to settle down, and
B) There are fewer women who are worth risking a long-term commitment with, and all the guys are fighting for them anyway.
Yes, because there are obvious reasons why those categories increase the risk associated with giving commitment. Obesity leads to health issues and possible complications in pregnancy. That's a financial, emotional, and eventually health risk. Various mood and psych disorders contribute to marital dysfunction, and likewise increase chances of divorce. If she's a single mother you're going to expend resources raising a kid that isn't yours, with no guarantees that you'll get to have one of your own. AND she's already demonstrated a certain amount of poor judgment if she picked a guy who wouldn't commit and had his kid.
So a guy can choose to widen his criteria and accept a woman that has certain, I'll use the term 'baggage,' and if it ends up not working out for him, what is he left with? How much risk is it reasonable for him to accept in exchange for possible upside?
"Marriagable" women imply that the risk/reward calculation goes in her favor. There's not going to be as many as factors like this become more prevalent.
So why is the marriage rate so low now?
https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/republicans/2020/4/marriage-rate-blog-test
Why are fewer people getting married at all, much less "happily" married?
I realize at some point this is a question of probabilities but it seems to me all the downsides you list about non-"marriagable" women also apply to "marrigable" women. They can tick off all your boxes and still "divorc[e] him to take the kids and money." Or still be lacking in "loyalty, cooperation, and stability." Even "marriagable" women can "leave whenever she wants."
I'm very confident that women also believe they have compelling reasons for having the standards they do.
If a guy marries a woman without any 'baggage' and it ends up not working out for him, what is he left with? I don't see how the woman's prior "marrigability" is relevant to this question.
It is up to each of us to decide that for ourselves. On the one hand, if one takes too much risk one may find oneself in a bad relationship. On the other hand, if one is too risk averse they may be without any relationship at all.
This depends entirely on the particular individuals weight of the factors in question.
Because increased social, legal, and economic equality mean women are less and less dependent on marriage as an institution to provide for themselves. When you drastically improve people's alternative to X (as has happened for women over the last century with respect to marriage) then fewer of them will choose X.
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I am not going to disagree with you on this point, but I think that there are in fact many men who will make sub-optimal choices. We know what the statistics are when it comes to smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, but both men and women continue to pick those habits up. Some of them may end up happy, and some of the people who smoke a pack of cigarettes a day won't get lung cancer. But that doesn't actually mean that non-smokers are idiots who passed up a happy, consequence-free life of nicotine-usage when they don't pick the habit up.
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Hello, I am a married young man (24) without kids, and I can speak to part of why we don't have them yet, despite my wife wanting them.
I have a high-paying, but very unstable job. It could disappear at any moment. My relationship with my wife is very strong, but I don't want to risk a possible divorce if I convince her to leave her job to have kids, then I lose my job, and we thus are forced to reduce our standard of living to continue paying for everything.
Realistically this is quite unlikely. Like I said, we're doing great. But I'd prefer to wait 1-2 years for kids rather than increasing the risk of divorce by 1-2 percentage points.
My experience with women has been that they are much less "constant" than men, in the sense that their opinions are simply a lot more malleable. When we got married she was quite progressive, but (in line with my own experience and what other commenters have said) over time her beliefs have basically grown to match mine completely. I think that this effect--and my ability to win her loyalty--will persist for as long as I have a good enough job or at least prospects. Without that, I hope my worth would still persist, but there is no longer any guarantee.
What I'm getting at is that the sexual marketplace will continue to force men into the workforce regardless of economic incentives. Incentivizing men to stay home and father will lead to an even worse fertility slump. Nobody really wants to work--I strongly suspect the driving factor behind women's higher average happiness is their lower workforce participation--and women stressed out by busy corporate jobs would be much less inclined to marry and have children than they are now.
If you force men to be even less attractive than they already are by denying them their main source of value, fertility can only plummet.
Yeah, I get it you have an excuse. A good excuse. And I have an excuse. And that's the point. Everybody has an excuse. My grandfather would have had a similar excuse, too, except he didn't make a lot of money and my grandmother didn't work at all. And yet they managed to have 5 kids between 1950 and 1963, because that's the way the culture was. If you were in the same position as you are now but it was 1953 instead of 2023, you'd have kids. The point I think the OP is trying to make isn't that your excuses are invalid, or that you're hypocritical, it's that eras with high fertility had high fertility because people didn't make excuses. A family wasn't something you meticulously planned, it's something that happened. And if you expect to raise fertility rates, bitching that women need to stop being so picky with dating apps isn't going to get you anywhere, because that isn't the problem.
Can confirm, I had 3 kids with my first wife, 1 with my second and maybe I will squeeze one more in with my (hopefully) 3rd wife before I turn 60. As long as you have the minimum level of space, you can cope. If you want kids, just have them. You can work things out, retool your lives and make it work.
You're kind of proving my point lol. It's very important to me that I stick with 1 wife. You can definitely have kids in any financial situation but I think that doing so if you're not stable is a good recipe for divorce. Not to imply that's what happened to you, but this is the sort of thing I want to be extremely careful about.
Well my first wife passed from cancer after 20 years of marriage and three kids. Which is not to make you feel bad, but just to illustrate, you cannot control the future. If you both prize kids above financial success thats unlikely to lead to a divorce. If you're on different pages, then thats the real problem.
Maybe it will add 1% to your divorce chance, but you have to trade that against the chance, the timing is never right,or something happens to one of you in the meantime.
Sorry about your wife. I agree that the timing is never perfect but there are certainly tradeoffs to starting earlier vs later, even if you disagree on where exactly that tradeoff lands.
For me the priorities are:
Have enough kids (3-6)
Don't have kids after my wife hits advanced maternal age
Don't have kids until completely financially stable
In that order. Since we're still pretty young, we're not yet constrained by 1-2, so may as well work on fulfilling 3. In a few years 1 and 2 will start to be actual constraints, so by then we'll be having kids whether or not 3 is met.
I think this is generally how people should be making these decisions--get your priorities straight and then act accordingly, rather than waiting for ill-defined life circumstances to line up correctly.
That doesn't sound unreasonable to me, especially at your age. The thing to look out for is if you start pushing that start time back. That can go more quickly than you think.
In any case i hope everything works out for you!
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I don't think you've really engaged with my point at all.
No I don't. I plan to have lots of kids, and I'm well-prepared to do so. There is nothing stopping me from having at least 5 children, we just haven't started yet, and plan to within a year or two. I mentioned my age already so you should know that this plan is perfectly reasonable, as opposed to the single mid-30's women who still plan on starting big families.
Yes, I would, but due to the factors I mentioned I'm not in the same position. I don't actually think money has much to do with whether you can have children, but I do think the sexual marketplace does, and that was my point throughout my comment.
I agree, but I think the same factors which led to picky women have also led to the fertility problem, which was what I was (perhaps unclearly) trying to get at. Thus, men complaining about how picky and unfertile women are are perhaps missing the point, but they're gesturing towards an obvious problem in our current society in a clear way. When your grandpa had kids in the 50's-60's The divorce rate was about half of what it is now and I suspect the "true" divorce rate was even lower comparatively, because nowadays many people just don't get married in the first place. You don't think this has anything at all to do with women being more picky?
There are plenty of other important factors too. People in the 50's (or even earlier) very rarely went to college, and often didn't even finish high school. That's like 4-8 extra years they had as a head start on starting a family. Jobs didn't require diplomas to nearly the same degree that they do now, so they essentially were in similar financial positions 4-8 years earlier than their equivalents nowadays.
I'll be more clear about my central point. Women have MUCH more power in nearly all heterosexual relationships, and this power disparity has been increasing over the years. When people say women are too picky on dating apps, this is what they are gesturing towards. My situation is similar--if I were in your grandpa's shoes I would start having kids immediately because I would be less worried about the strength of my relationship with my wife. This has nothing to do with culture (at least, childrearing culture), it just has to do with the different circumstances in which we find themselves.
"We just haven't started yet". And that's it, ladies and gentlemen, if we're talking about fertility levels. "Lord, make me fertile - but not just yet" to adapt the saying.
Right, if you're young enough "we haven't started yet" is perfectly reasonable. The reason it has taken on a negative connotation is because of all the single mid-30's people still saying it, which I already mentioned.
I'm nearing the older end of what I'd consider reasonable, but I think you're silly if you think starting at 25 is too late.
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And that sounds sensible and prudent and forward looking. Until finally you're both ready to have kids, but it doesn't happen. Or you find that you're never ready - there's always just one more thing, and then it'll happen, until it doesn't. Or you break up anyway and it's because you don't have kids. Or you get hit by a bus.
I'm not judging you. You're in the same boat as a lot of other people. But then it can't be easily put down to "the reason fertility levels have dropped is because women are too fussy and waiting too long to settle down and have kids".
Right, so until then, it's sensible. I get that this is a common failure mode, but given that I have concrete plans set in place to avoid it, and have taken all of the necessary steps to realize those plans, it's hardly fair to lump me in with people whose plans have failed. This is a fully general counterargument--you can't just say "people fail at this pretty frequently, therefore you will too" because there are plenty who really do succeed at making and executing these plans.
I agree that it's not just that women are too fussy; my point is that the factors which have caused that have also made it more difficult to have children in other ways.
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Eight reports and counting. Impressive. Two are for "quality-contribution," the others are for "antagonistic."
I would have been inclined to mark "approved" and ignore (as I usually ignore your explosions when you are re-reminded that the "bitches ain't shit" crowd you like to hang with as long as they are dunking on wokes includes you in that category) but your edit -
No. No, you don't get to tell people to shut up. You think guys who dunk on unmarried career women and non-virgins are being hypocritical if they aren't lawfully wedded and copiously progenating themselves? Go ahead and make that point. But don't try and play the "shut up and sit down" card just because it's your chromosomes that got gored.
Oooh baby, did I hurt your precious fee-fees?
Since that seems to be the level we are now operating at. I'm single and childless by choice (and circumstance, a lot more circumstance than choice) and although I don't owe you bozos an explanation, it's because I would be a terrible parent and my family genetics are too shit to inflict on a new generation. I don't give a fuck about my chromosomes, except as part of my shitty genetic heritage. Were I a man, I'd be the same if women were writing about how men were all cockhounds who don't want to settle down to be responsible citizens, husbands and fathers until they're worn out and shagged out and think a much younger woman is a magic elixir to rejuvenate them - they're wrong and unless they have skin in the game, shut up.
That's partly why I don't appreciate a bunch of childless guys telling me and other women that there's a fertility crisis and it's all our fault, men - the innocent little lambs - have nothing to do with it. So yeah, I damn well am going to say "Okay, if you're out there judging women for 'riding the cock carousel', what have you done to address the problem? Are you a husband and father? If not, why not?"
Shut up unless you have skin in the game. I'm Catholic. We're officially anti-contraception, anti-abortion, and anti-fornication. And I think the remedies suggested by some on here are stupid to the point of being indistinguishable from the Taliban. If the likes of me are saying "Cool it guys" due to sounding like that, consider you might be going a tiny bit too far.
"Bitches ain't shit crowd"? Excuse me while I laugh. You have no goddamn idea the level of misanthropic loathing I have for the rest of humanity, and I freely include myself in the "ain't shit" category. If you honestly think my ox or any cow, bullock or calf has been gored, you are living down to your user name.
Or did you not know what Amadán means as Gaeilge?
Ignore away, little man. I don't care a straw for your opinion of me.
You're kidding, right?
I don't care about your status and I have no idea how you read my warning as some sort of judgment of your life choices.
I'm telling you not to tell other people to shut up because you don't like their opinions. You have a pattern of thinking all's fair until something offends you personally, and that's the line in the sand where the rules don't apply. You are mistaken, and I'm informing you of that.
You're kidding, right?
When you're a mod, there's a difference to when you're one of the commenters.
Amadan: Mod hat on - neutral tone, statement of offence and punishment (if any), rationale for same
Amadan: Mod hat off - hey, stupid bitch, are your chromosomes gored?
See the difference? As a mod, you can't give pissy little snide remarks. When you're down in the mud with the rest of us as a mere commenter, you can throw your clothes off with the best of them.
And as regards your user name, no, I'm not kidding. Every time I see it that meaning is immediately what comes to mind. Such unfortunate coincidences do happen, and I am not at all implying nominative determinism is at work here.
I will take the point that the chromosomes crack was perhaps unnecessarily snide, but I reject the accusation of calling you (even by implication) a "stupid bitch."
What amazed me was that you might think I was unaware of the origins of a user name I've been using for about as long as I've been on the Internet.
Hard to know - think of the Chinese tattoo stories. If you know the meaning and are happy to use it, we salute you!
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But the Taliban won. The Taliban are still around, and will probably still be around in a 100 years.
Can the Western women say the same?
Here is what I like to say to anybody who opposes any tiny little setback to the feminist agenda:
it's us or the Taliban.
I haven't read the Handmaid's Tale, just saw some outraged comments about the tale.
Are the women in that fiction better or worse off than Afghan women under Taliban rule?
I don't think it can ever be much better than the current situation for feminism-minded Western women.
Western women had one job, making more Westerners. Now it's time for new solutions.
This is the face of the young right-wing, if this guy does not go through, then somebody that is slightly closer to the Taliban will try, until eventually they succeed, or Western people will just stop existing.
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Tone policing aside, this is definitely a valid point. As they sometimes note on PCM, "Everybody want a trad wife, nobody wanna be a trad guy." I get the sense that there are a lot of dudes who want to seethe about prisoner's dillemas online, and they're not actually wrong! But seething does nothing to fix the problem; you need large numbers of people, men and women both to actively and enthusiastically choose to cooperate. Unfuck yourself first, modern man.
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To expand on the above - a poem from 1914:
And that's a much more cheerful view than the one I possess.
When it comes to mods and commenters, what I have to do is respect your authority (Cartman not intended). We don't have to like each other or respect each other personally, it's a "salute the uniform, not the man" situation. But if I accept that you have the right and the position and the authority to mod me, it has to be done on a 'separation of powers' basis. So yes, you can and indeed should mod me for "reports of antagonism" or "intemperate language" or "boo outgroup" or whatever other reason. Even "dunking on the woke", God help us, is sufficient grounds. Adding in whinging about "ignoring explosions" or "bitches ain't shit crowd" or "chromosomes getting gored" just makes you sound like you got your dick caught in your zipper.
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Bringing OP's gender into it and announcing it to the world is bad form in a mod comment.
I don't care who knows my sex, but thank you for your courtesy. If he wants to engage in a mod war of words with me, nobody in my family ever had to be asked twice.
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I'm really not seeing this one. "Shut up" as bad language is third grader stuff. We get the "Women are irrational" "Women are vapid" "women are stupid whores" stuff constantly, normally with a citation to some bitter internet blog like it's an academic mathematical proof.
Are any of those dudes really going to feel stifled by being told to shut up? Is that consensus even modestly likely to be built? Are any of our local bitter singles going to say "Ohh, I was told to shut up by another commenter, guess themotte isn't the place to talk about this..."*
The consensus building rule does need to be weighted by what side the actual consensus is on. We're much more likely to be driving away posters with giant screeds about how women are responsible for all the world's problems than my learned friend in argument @FarNearEverywhere is to drive anyone away.
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Working on it, plan to be in the next 2 years or so. Fiancé wants to get through the most busy period of residency before starting. In response to the rest of the comment, there are actually meaningful asymmetries between the sexes that make these swaps not really work that.
In the society most of us actually live in women do pretty much get unilateral decision making on this topic.
I really think you're misreading the room if you don't expect this to be responded to with yeschad.
This is definitely not how male fertility works, and has about a 50% chance of getting a yeschad response anyways. There is nothing like a consensus on the importance of going to college in this place.
This survives reversal somewhat better but not all that well, it wasn't just some weird arbitrary coincidence that pretty much every culture in the world had mothers as primary caregivers and despite the artificial roadblocks men do still out earn women. I am open to and would like for where any fertility intervention to be fair to both sexes, I'm engaged to someone with two doctorates, but we do need to acknowledge that we are sexually dimorphic species. Your discomfort with the way this discussion is being had is well raised but I don't think you've actually done much damage to the argument.
Well, there you have it. At the height of the last real baby boom, advanced degrees weren't something the average middle class family had to worry about. Hell, it wasn't something the average middle class family had to worry about 30 years later. Then fast forward to the 21st century, when I can name a dozen kids off the top of my head (myself included) from my working class high school that was among the worst in the state who got advanced degrees. And when you and your fiance decide you're ready for children, I'd be willing to bet that neither of you is going to be willing to quit your job to stay home with the kids (especially not with 2 PhDs and a residency already invested), so that means daycare, and with 3 kids that alone can easily cost $100k a year. Which means that for women who want careers, they're either going to have to be willing to curtail them or limit the number of children they have. I agree with you that this is largely a good thing. But you can't say that couples should be able to spend an inordinate amount of time developing their careers and hobbies and then look shocked when they aren't having as many kids as before.
Right, I don't think the current system is working even if me and my fiancé seemed to have done not too badly given the shape of things, we'll have two or three kids and do our part but I won't say it wouldn't have been better if we had them during like college years. We have some but not as much as I'd like family nearby to help a bit but are still working out how daycare and the like will work. I'm a software engineer and have been playing around with the idea of reducing my workload and finding a purely work from home gig to be a stay at home dad. We're pretty blessed/privileged to have the kind of solvable problems we have and I do think we need more practical changes.
I am not pursuing a similar lifestyle to yours, but I've never actually understood why people even consider paying more for daycare than they would for a nanny(who is not in a position to make ~$100k/yr, or anything close). Kinda off topic, I know.
Maybe we would get a nanny, and I interpreted the 100k/year estimate as hyperbole. My ideal situation would be to have my and her parents take turns watching them on the ~3 days a week I go into the office. Realistically it's going to be an evolved system where we try things and learn.
Are you planning to spend the other two days WFH while multitasking the childcare? If so, don't. Some people (including my wife and I) did WFH with kids during the pandemic because they had no other options, and it was a disaster for productivity, kids, and sanity (we now have a nanny). Responsible employers are now asking WFH parents about childcare arrangements in order to make sure that people are not WFH with uncared-for kids in the house.
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I don't think you overcame that objection. We aren't an agricultural or early industrial society where male physical strength is determinant of earnings. Men out earn women but it's not that big and gets tiny if you control for years of experience and willingness to work overtime, the stuff women give up if they become mothers.
It can be true that satisfaction from raising kids is higher for women then for men and so it makes sense for most households to have women be the primary caretaker. But it doesn't follow that satisfaction from raising kids + satisfaction from delayed career > satisfaction from immediately pursued career for the majority of women. TFR seems to be lower among educated women with good job prospects improve which suggests to me women are not irrationally deluded but correctly optimizing for life satisfaction. Asking women to unilaterally lower their happiness because it's historical tradition doesn't seem like a successful strategy for raising fertility.
This doesn't really follow, it'd be like claiming people who don't open their parachutes make it fastest to the ground thus they know the best route, of course the women who invest tons of money and time into their careers and put off motherhood put off motherhood. For it to be otherwise would be quite strange.
But honestly this isn't really the point. I don't object to stay at home dads when that's the best option for a couple, it's a thing I sometimes think about doing. What I do object to is that we're really not being all that honest with women. A lot of women hit their thirties before realizing that they have way less time to do this family thing than they thought, and sunk cost prevents them from correcting. We as a society sell them on "having it all" and really really push careers as not just an option but the default option. The biggest dimorphism that still exists is fertility windows. And I totally reject that idea that women are making these decisions with all the facts.
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A very confusing reply. We all know the statistics associated with dating apps. Women are the filters for both first dates and second dates. We all know the statistics of divorce, women are the filer in the vast majority of no fault divorces. Extrapolating through the middle of those we can presume they are also the primary instigator of break ups of early courtship, long term relationships, etc without any actionable, articulated cause.
A man who attempted to follow your advice would end up homeless and without love.
Going outside and talking to people has great statistics.
In my experience it's been even worse than OLD for a good decade now. All social clubs have been subsumed by the internet and it's less socially acceptable to look for partners by randomly talking to people than ever. Where are those great stats exactly?
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I mean. I'm a dinosaur. Never even used an app.
Still, going around outside still shows me people of the fairer sex have trouble evaluating their dating prospects objectively.
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I'm pretty far-right when it comes to gender discussions, but it's hard not to basically agree with this response. From men's perspective most women are vapid and a bad investment, but it's very easy to turn it to women's perspective say bad things about men too. It's not fair to simply demand one gender change their behaviors; any lasting resolution would need to come from compromise like somehow reinstituting traditional marriage structures.
In my experience of current dating culture, having gone from a 2/10 to a 8/10 through a combination of aesthetic considerations and income improvements, I'm definitely of the opinion that the reluctance of women to date sideways/settle is the defining characteristic of the age. The attractive men that women complain about tend to act as they do due to being oversubscribed.
I'm also fairly confident the average guy would be more able to pick/actually date with what he'd consider 'wife material' characteristics than a girl trying to pick for maximal stable marital harmony in her partners.
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Why not? Those have been the demands, partially obtained, for years, just going the other way.
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But that's not a compromise. The fact that traditional marriage disintegrated basically everywhere in the world that shifted to a service based economy and saw an equalization between men and women's earning potential suggests that it actually requires substantial economic incentives for women to be willing to do it. You can't just go back to men protecting and providing in exchange for sex, chastity, and domestic labor when the value of male protection is nil and women can provide for themselves.
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This reads like a greentext post lamenting “this is what they took from us”.
There appears to be this belief in the U.S. (but not just there) that people usually got married straight out of high school back in the old days i.e. during the patriarchy. This was, in fact, never the case, and was only relatively widespread for a few years after WW2.
The median age at first marriage for women in the US was rangebound from 22 to 20 from 1890 until 1980. With, yes, the nadir just after WW2. This wasn't anything like "right after high school", partially because high school graduation rates didn't reach even 50% until the 1930s, but it's much younger than today (about 28). The gap between men's and women's age at marriage has shrunk also, from 4 years to 2.
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This is called "conditions that existed in the late 1950s US".
TFR was 3.0.
Teenage pregnancies were at an all-time high.
Graduating high school qualified you for the vast majority of jobs; heck, even passing grade 10 was enough.
People intermingled enough in sufficiently popular third spaces that there probably was someone there for you.
Effective contraceptives existed (the Pill was a late-50s invention).
The truth doesn't actually care whether or not you believe it.
Capital gender now has to compete with the wirehead, and labor gender has more freedom (from capital gender- female but empowered by a smaller male fraction) when wearing it. Monthly wage pays rent (or a mortgage), buys food and utilities, and keeps the wirehead running. The fact that the labor gender are sufficiently satisfied by this arrangement to just do it until they're dead may be an inherent problem with the labor gender... but it's a problem only the capital gender can ultimately solve. And being capital, they won't.
(For the record, I think a low TFR is neither unexpected nor undesirable- technology combined with our current social edifice means that very few people are required to run it, and the resultant economic forces are doing the rest. The wireheading and the general hostility of the parties doesn't help, but as TFR in the 20s and 30s was running down close to 2 neither is required for this to happen- not that the first thing women did after getting the franchise in the US was "destroy the most popular male third space", but I'm sure that was a one-off and not indicative of how political interactions between men and women in similar economic circumstances were going to go 100 years down the line.)
And do those conditions remain, today? How many couples can afford to have a non-working outside the home member? People make economic decisions based on what they would like, and what they can get. Mortgages for houses generally assume a dual-income couple. Renting is a problem as well (see housing shortages, space for kids, etc.) The cost of living requires that there is some kind of income stream from both spouses, which often leads to the ridiculous result that the wife's earnings largely go on paying for childcare so that she is free to work.
In some ways, I'd have no objections about going back to the 50s or 60s. But you can't stuff all women in a time machine and send them back, while leaving men in 2023. Both together, or not at all, else we won't fix anything and we'll be back at the 50s tradition also of men wanting to sow their wild oats before getting baby-trapped into marriage. Look, for example, at the 1960 movie (so right on the cusp of the turnover of the decade) The Apartment: it's described as a "romantic comedy" but what's so romantic about the premise? men will cheat on their wives because marriage is boring and dull:
The "romantic" part is that the characters played by Lemmon and MacLaine end up together, but what kind of augury is the rest of the movie for their marriage? Now he's one of those execs who want a bit on the side for some excitement, and she will either be the boring housewife who let herself go after marriage (so he's justified in having an affair) or she will cheat herself, given that she already has been engaged in adultery before marriage. The ending message tries to be "true love wins" but the rest of the time has been undercutting the very idea of marriage and fidelity: nearly all the men in it are adulterers, and the image of the "swinging playboy lifestyle" is what will be promulgated in the new decade.
And here we are after the Sexual Revolution, and I wish you well of it.
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You can have a society where women get married instead of finishing high school(I mean in the sense that it would be perfectly functional, not in the sense that anybody knows how to get there), but those societies as they actually exist do not have those women marrying their same age peers, they’re marrying older- and sometimes much older- men who can support them. What those kinds of societies look like is a solved problem, what a society where men bear the primary responsibility for child rearing and women are the main breadwinners is a thought experiment.
I mean, I would certainly argue that men not wanting kids and not being willing to commit to their romantic partners is a big part of the fertility problem, and that marrying teenaged girls as a solution is mostly tradlarping. But a society in which people are allowed to drink at their own weddings and have above replacement fertility is also a solved problem, historically speaking, even if the only modern day first world society that does that without being horribly dysfunctional is Israel. You can use a stick to make men commit to women they have romantic relationships with without engaging in biologically ignorant thought experiments(and, little known fact, anglosphere societies did up until comparatively recently- ‘seduction of a virgin’ and false promise laws were on the books and regularly enforced within living memory).
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I'm a father of two kids. There are multiple reasons why we won't/can't have any more, starting from the fact that my wife is 40 (our kids are 3 years and 5 months, it was not in any way given we would get even two).
I would not blame women myself, either. As I wrote here (originally a comment here, expanded to a blogpost with some other stuff included), the society places a huge amount of extra burdens on families that fall chiefly on the women and those almost certainly play a part of why so many people choose other things in lieu of kids.
Also, I've seen in my friend circles that there's a lot of single mothers with one kid who have evidently split up with their husbands or boyfriends after the kid has been born (maybe the guy has just left them, maybe for other reasons - I also know a lot of amiable separated couples who have no troubles doing co-parenting) and who basically then have to resign to a fairly low chance of ever having any more kids - due to time issues related to dating, sure, but also because they are now treated basically as a broken item, a second-rate price.
There are also a lot of "manosphere"/RW accounts that contribute to this idea - yes, of course, you deserve a perfect virginal tradwife, yes, "of course no guy wants to take care of another man's whelp!" and simultaneously affecting a concern on low fertility rates, not realizing that these sort of discourses might be just another part of the problem. Sure, it's rationalized as hard facts to make sure that women will stick with the fathers of their children and/or won't have premarital sex or whatever, but does it really work that way? It's not like women are the intended audience of manosphere accounts, after all.
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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.
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.
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.
I expect social security benefits to be paid by money printing.
We are become brown Argentina.
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.
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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.
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if people planned well and/or had wisdom, there wouldn't have been the creation of the welfare program in the first place
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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.
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All two of us? Meanhile, the other ~350 million Americans are congenitally incapable of imagining that a handout might end.
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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.
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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?
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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 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.
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.
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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.
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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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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 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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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Women's decisions are the big change but women's behavior is downstream of massive change to economic conditions. Gender norms that evolved in economic conditions where women were economically dependent on men, and where the opportunity cost of child raising was small aren't going to survive in a deindustrialized economy where nurses out earn factory workers.
Being the primary caretaker of children, as most wives end up doing, is a really bad career decision. You're committing to a part time job that doesn't build skills you can use in other careers, and you can't move easily between "employers"/husbands. Unlike other jobs where success increases your choice of employers, being a 10x mother probably isn't going to help you land the hot rich doctor if your husband turns out to be a wreck. Furthermore you're expected to make this long term choice at a young age with limited ability to predict the course of your partners future life.
Is signing a 20 year contract with a non-compete clause to do ~30 hours of unskilled work a week for a similarly aged peer in exchange for a share of their future earnings an advisable career choice? Only if you think their future income is much larger than yours would be if you pursued your own career.
Traditional cultures evolved in settings where men's superior strength at manual labor was really important and domestic labor was a time consuming full time job. Now it's not obvious that men always have higher earnings potential, domestic labor has been largely automated, and the nuclear family model means stay at home moms are often isolated. Travel and entertainment is cheap, healthcare education and housing are expensive. For educated people social status comes from career achievement, and available careers can be highly stimulating and meaningful rather than rote drudgery. The opportunity cost of motherhood gets larger and larger and so unsurprisingly fewer women are choosing it.
If the opportunity cost of marriage and motherhood relative to singledom keeps getting higher and higher is it unsurprising women have higher and higher standards for men? If cultural and gender norms evolved under conditions with massive disparities in economic power would we expect them to change if economic power equalized? Aren't men going to have to 'sweeten the pot' and offer a better deal in order to get women to sign that long term childcare contract?
My read on this is that economic power shapes relationships. We have millennia of human cultural evolution where men have had way more economic power and that has shaped the cultural models for relationships between men and women. Now that we have a few decades where economic power has been somewhat equalized those norms are going to start shifting slowly but surely. The question isn't why has women's behavior changed, that's obvious, it's how will men's behavior change to adapt.
It's not a given that there is anything men can do to adapt, I know there have been some bad eggs but the deal in the past was the man spends his labor to provide everything a woman needs to have children, it is definitely possible that there is just literally nothing men can do to adapt. But I don't quite buy that it's the economic power equalization and nothing social that is convincing women to make these decisions. There is a popular and powerful subculture that has defined the traditional child bearing lifestyle as toxic and is constantly warning women away from it. It is very possible that this is bad advice and women are taking it.
The social is downstream of the economic. In the past there was little prospect of women being able to support themselves, and so they had an economic dependence on men. This economic dependence resulted in social memes that encouraged and promoted women being reliant on men by way of justification for the status quo. As women have become more economically independent social memes have proliferated that encourage that same independence. If men want to adapt they'll need to accept a more equitable division of the labor of maintaining a household and raising a child.
In the choice between a life where one has a 24/7/365 job (raising a child) and is entirely reliant on another person (housewife) vs an 8/5 job where one is the master of their own destiny it is no surprise many choose the latter.
The social and the economic defy such simple modeling. What is the good life is socially mediated, if that conception includes kids I can't really say the woman is getting the worse deal, if it doesn't then it is a bad deal. Seeing as women can't really directly compare the two experiences they need to rely on the stories society tells to inform them, and society does not seem to be trying very hard to sell parenthood.
The group that does this, or at least advertises they'd be willing to do this, is having significantly less children than the group that doesn't put any effort into advertising this. And, frankly, the meme that men aren't pulling their weight in domestic tasks doesn't ring true to me at all, it seems like just an empty grievance from centuries past that only persists because of the women are wonderful effect. Men seem to be pulling their weight and the domestic tasks besides the ones directly involved with caring for the baby take only a handful of hours a week to maintain. I would know, I personally do nearly all of them each week while working from home just during calls. If your best idea about why women aren't having babies is that men aren't washing the dishes frequently enough then you have no ideas about why women aren't having babies.
No, especially with more than one child to handle.
I'm talking specifically if you're serious about being a housewife, not a part-timer who sends the kids off 6 hours a day to be handled by radical progressives.
If breastfeeding, that baby will wake you up 3-4 times a night or maybe just one after being sleep-trained.
Think special force bootcamp but do this over and over again for a decade if you're serious about having kids.
Then you're handling that baby, changing it, breastfeeding it during the day, and your other child(ren) are doing whatever they want in some other part of the home, and you end up having to clean up the same spot several times a day.
You can be very good at instructing/training kids, but you most likely won't have them tidy all the stuff they mess with before 5 yo.
Then you probably want to have your children wear clean clothes every day, that's a lot of laundry.
There is no day off in that career, and vacations can actually be more stressful (no you cannot just stuff your kids in a separate hotel room).
I don't disagree with those who say that men do less than women in the household.
Yet, I still have to deal with lack of sleep (to a lesser extent), family-related stress but I also have to remain competitive in the workplace.
I don't disagree with the assessment but I do think that it's easier for women to deal with that kind of life.
It seems to me in general that they get more out of being around little babies (or even little animals) than men do, or even organizing/arranging the house.
Their hormonal systems allow them to adapt to rapid changes in their body from pregnancy to breastfeeding back to pregnancy.
Their psychology is more prosocial, they are better at understanding and managing others' emotions, which is essential for small children.
On the other hand, the world of business discourages emotional display, as the men who created it see it as a nuisance in the way of getting things done.
The issue is that the people who complain about the unfairness of the burden placed on women are also the ones that have destroyed the social systems that made that burden lighter.
If HR departments were gutted and Western corporations were more sexist like Japanese ones or Western ones 100 years ago, how many women would find that they would rather have their water cooler gossip session at home around children?
I don't think we're in all that much disagreement, I did specify the non child rearing aspects like laundry. I think a lot of the gender expectation stuff starts breaking down around the direct child care aspects which is why I'm questioning what extra exactly men are really supposed to be offering here.
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Fair enough. What I mean to convey is the idea that our economic conditions to some extent determine which social narratives we find compelling. The idea is that ~everyone is presented with competing social narratives that explain their present (or future) life situation. What narratives we find compelling is, in part, a product of our actual experience. As the actual facts about individuals experience shift, so too do their decisions about what narratives are convincing explanations. Historically the nature of labor made it easy to accept the social narrative that regarded men as the productive worker and women as the child carer or homemaker. As economic conditions have shifted, so too have the narratives women (and men!) have found compelling.
I think this fact is due to other causal factors than this attitude, but fair enough.
Can you back up this "seems" with data? According to Gallup both men and women agree that women generally shoulder more of the burden with respect to domestic duties and child care.
I am a little confused. In another comment you say you are "working on" becoming a father, or pumping out babies. Do you currently have children? My impression (admittedly from my brother rather than personal experience) is that babies take much more than "a handful of hours a weeK" in care.
Even in that link when it gets broken down to both earn similar amounts there really isn't that big of a gap. The show it reducing both with newer generations and with both people earning similar amounts but not combined, both combined probably gives "both equally" a plurality. it's already 50% for "care for child on a daily basis" just with equal incomes. This is actually surprisingly egalitarian.
I do not, I'm referring to all domestic tasks besides the direct child rearing. Perhaps we're confusing terms, a lot of the discussion that does happen about domestic work refers to things like cleaning, laundering, cooking, and shopping. There actually isn't really that much public discussion at all about the proportion or types of time spent directly caring for the kids. Likely because no one really wants to be spending time doing the dishes but people have more complicated relationships with the time they spend directly caring for a kid. Which is at the same time some of the most meaningful time and frequently consisting of unpleasantness. It's the kind of thing divorced parents frequently fight viciously for more of.
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I mean the advent of work from home is relatively recent and has the potential to increase fertility among educated people. Even if directly caring for the child is not time consuming you still have to be physically away from work to do it.
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Also the question of what is meant by adaptation?
I've seen plenty of men adapt to maximize their chances of casual sex in the current environment and thereby get laid a bunch, but the alternate adaptation path that leads to actually reproducing seems a bit nebulous and confusing at this point.
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This is a really good comment, mostly because I dislike it's conclusion (viscerally) and yet it is well argued enough that I had to re-examine my own view.
This part in particular was a solid analogy:
And yet, even after consideration, I think it misses the mark on it's own terms.
Because it views marriage as an employer-employee relationship when it is perhaps better to consider it a co-equal partnership in a joint venture. After all, that 20 year contract w/non-compete applies to the other party just as strongly.
So what you're getting in exchange isn't just their future income, but it's a promise of stability in terms of your own employment. The idea is that by you taking over some portion of the duties that might otherwise fall to the other, you're enhancing their earning potential, and thus the share which you can expect to collect. Under truly ideal circumstances (not assumed, just making a point) it also gets your retirement plan squared away well in advance, as you will have decades of accumulated savings and someone to share it with at the end.
The way I view it, the economic case for marriage has always been based on the fact that you're intentionally splitting many costs and combining many expenses that would be larger if they were separate, so as to ease the burden on both parties. A marriage partner is a reliable 'roommate' who will (hopefully) never miss their rent payment. If you home cook meals regularly you're saving on eating takeout/delivery, you can get joint health insurance, you can share a vehicle, you can borrow the other person's belongings, their Netflix password, they are able to care for you if you're sick and otherwise complement your weaknesses. Basically it's incredibly valuable to have a life partner who pays a high cost for welching on any promises they make you. A guaranteed cooperative partner in the prisoner's dilemma to help you get to the better payoff.
And these benefits will compound over the course of the marriage assuming neither party goes off the deep end and does anything fiscally irresponsible. Which can absolutely happen!
But a consistent partnership over the course of decades can reap exponential benefits for the parties involved, which is the whole point.
Now, the point here:
Absolutely still stands. I just wanted to draw the analysis out a little further.
The issue is that there's no guarantee that the partnership will continue. Imagine a 23 year old woman who pairs with a similarly situated man and agrees with the traditional breakdown of labor. 10 years later, the man will be in a much more powerful position than her: if he reneges on the deal, he'll be better situated than she was and can take the large majority of the extra human capital that accrued due to the agreement to continue his job and find a new (younger, hotter, more in line with his ideal) partner. Alimony/child support/splitting of assets doesn't help the wife much there. And the woman will be older, have kids, and will have basically nuked her position in the job market; any future jobs or partners will be much worse than if she had not chosen to enter the initial agreement.
And that's a real risk. It's entirely rational for her to want to hedge her bets by building her career at the expense of fertility.
Most divorce courts will take account of the relative financial/wealth positions of the parties in parceling up assets and determining alimony. The goal is explicitly to keep the disadvantaged spouse at the standard of living they have become accustomed to.
But yes, the ability of the man to scurry off (maybe after the kids have left) with a new, younger lady is indeed a risk.
And that imposes a cost on younger single men as well by taking an otherwise eligible woman off the market for a time.
If we don't have strong social taboos on either adultery or men dating substantially younger, that would be a hard 'problem' to solve legislatively.
Personally, the way I'm looking at marriage now is something like "I am making an almost irrevocable 25-year commitment, I will accept heavy penalties for for breaching this commitment if you will do the same, and then at the 25 year mark, after the kids have been raised, we will discuss whether the partnership will continue." Perhaps both sides agree that some portion of the man's income should go into a trust which will be inaccessible to either party (except in dire emergencies) until the relationship hits the 25 year mark.
I honestly doubt that pure financial or emotional incentives suffice to replace the role that religion previously filled. It is a hard problem.
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I appreciate the comment.
I agree a long term childcare contract is a very different thing from a loving marriage, which has a variety of financial, psychological, and spiritual benefits. But the cost splitting benefits you bring up don't require having children and sacrificing careers. Specializing in childcare and domestic labor to support someone else's career only confers stability and "retirement benefits" if you correctly identify someone with high earning potential & stability. That means delaying marriage until a similarly aged man is credentialed, or marrying an older man which many women are uncomfortable with.
But even if the benefits of marriage are larger than the contract analogy portrays I think the key point is that the change over time in the "opportunity cost" women pay up front is increasing and the benefits are constant (if not falling due to the Baumol making everything needed for children expensive and living single and traveling the world cheap).
I don't think I agree with this, ultimately. Or, at least, I think what has happened is that women have been able to acquire an outsized amount of financial support/security at nearly every level of society, so there is almost, almost ZERO chance that any given woman will be left destitute and homeless if she doesn't get married.
That is, women have almost zero downside risk exposure from being single. Putting it bluntly (without adopting the point) the risk of being left broke and without prospects was a MASSIVE incentive for women to achieve stability by finding a reliable provider. Stability with a partner, even if they're not necessarily wealthy, still beats out living on the streets.
That incentive has been removed, while their upside opportunities have also increased.
So I think that the benefits have increased in many ways. The synergistic effects of getting and staying married are probably stronger than before. But the "penalties" for being unmarried are no longer so severe.
Yeah, and it's easier to identify such person if you have
A) Good examples in your own life to use as reference, and
B) are willing and able to have your parents, who are also very invested in the decision, have some input.
So many people growing up in broken families are probably less able to identify those high-value mates, which likely exacerbates the issue.
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Why do you portray motherhood/marriage as something like a rather shitty corporate job performed daily, solely for some entitled dudebro? Isn't it something that women normally do for the sake of their children, and also themselves?
Obviously being a wife/mother in a loving relationship is very different from being a long term childcare provider/domestic worker. I'm trying to illustrate motherhood's consequences for women's career trajectories/economic circumstances and in that way it's roughly analogous to signing a long term contract to provide childcare care with a non-compete.
Many, probably most, women want a loving relationship and children and are willing to pay a cost in terms of income and future career prospects in order to have them. Men pay a large cost in terms of income and autonomy to have children, as well. But if you're trying to explain the change in time in women's fertility preferences it's worth noting that the change in women's career prospects, and this the opportunity cost of motherhood, coincidences with the fall in TFR.
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Or if you care about things other than income in your life. This is a self-fixing problem.
The Amish have no issue reproducing and perpetuating their society. The career-women-enabling society only has about 10 generations in it, and we're reaching the end of it.
I contend that Amish women are happier than the average girlboss out there*, but this is due to several factors:
1- their family gave them a healthy upbringing giving them both the desire to have kids
2- and the skills to successfully raise kids (and a lot of them)
3- their community is supportive of child-rearing, with no CPS-caller, no drug dealer, no peddler of sterilizing hormones and surgery, jobs you can bring your kids on, other women willing to help with child care
While the modern tradwoman might have the 1st from a happy accident with cosplay, tumblr and what not, the 2nd is unlikely and the 3rd impossible for non-Amish adjacent.
Therefore their life might be just as stressful as the average spreadsheet-enjoyer.
*educated women are more likely to be alcoholic for example
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It's been a topic forever. i think the problem is sorta overblown. You sometimes see stats like "A minimum 2.1 TFR is needed to sustain the population, thus it's crisis is if it's below it." But the math of population growth is much more nuanced. Yes, a TFR of 0 is certain extinction within 2 generations, but even as little as a TFR of 1.0-1.5 can sustain a population for a looooong time with slow decline. Sometimes it's so slow that the population can keep rising after fertility peaks. It's fascinating how the math works out this way. Japan has been at sub 2 TFR for over 50 years yet its population has only fallen a bit, and this is with very heavily restricted immigration.
As I understand this issue and reading between the lines, the real concern is that with an inverse population pyramid the SS scam comes tumbling down, not so much that they become extinct.
This is silly, there will need to be some (moderate) increase in payroll taxes or means testing or (moderate) decrease in payments in the next decade or two to keep SS solvent in the long term, but it's nowhere near a 'scam'. Who is it scamming, it's working precisely as intended?
the scam is that it's considerably worse than a normal investment account.
So? It's not supposed to be. Whatever people say, it's more of a benefit than a public retirement account. After all, it's current revenues that pay for current expenditure.
When it's one of the biggest line items on a tax bill it kind of bears scrutiny. It's a 12.4% income tax that you see literally no benefit for until your sixties. This is a tremendous amount of money and I'm almost certainly going to see much less of it in my lifetime than I put in. It's the old taking from the youth. How people can defend it while shooting down UBI is beyond me.
Sort of, but everyone who lives to an old age benefits; you might well pay more in than you get out, but it exists as a safety net for everyone, so even if you find yourself impoverished at 65 you still have that security.
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Not to mention certain groups get a much higher payoff than others, depending entirely on lifespan. Statistically a black man paying into social security will only collect for a few years before death, while Asian and Jewish women will get a return many times greater by living to their late 80s.
Small differences in life expectancy turn out to be huge in terms of "years lived after age 65", and the inevitable raising of SS collection age will only make that worse.
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If anything, one would think the scam would be the confusing nature of sending some money every paycheck into the program, being required to have sent some amount over some number of years before being able to qualify for it but that the program is not and has never been anything like a personal account.
The scam is that after all of the smoke and mirrors you just described the money you can expect to be entitled to compares unfavorably to spending it on treasury bonds. It's billed as paying for your retirement but it's very much a wealth transfer.
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like a pyramid scheme.
How so?
for the system not to come tumbling down they need more people to be coming into it. If for some reason there is a deficit of people in the bottom of the pyramid compared to the top the system crashes.
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I think it's a little broader than that, in that it's not just social security. Younger people work more, are more economically productive, and so on. Older people are more likely to be retired and consumers. The net result is a society in some amount of decline. But I agree that that wouldn't necessarily be any disastrous thing to worry about, there is no chance of extinction or something due to this.
It may also reverse itself to some extent, since now that birth control exists, wanting kids plays a much bigger role than it used to, rather than wanting sex, and so there should be an increase over time in people who want kids, if that's at all genetic. (Or if not, I would think that the effect of generations being disproportionately raised by people who value children would itself have some amount of effect. Religiosity could also matter, since more religious families tend to have more children.) Since the loss of children in large part from people delaying and not wanting children, that would provide a check on that.
I'm curious as to what this will do for future generations politically and religiously. I think in general, the right in the US is more pronatalist than the left, which could shift what demographics look like a generation from now back rightward, unless the zeitgeist proves a large enough influence (which, given what Gen Z looks like politically, is very plausible).
Edit: This is all assuming that the way society works stays relatively similar to now, which, given the recent AI progress, could plausibly not be the case.
Religiosity is also hereditary, so I'd expect selection for religiosity to be a major factor. It's probably worth checking to see if elementary school teachers, scoutmasters, and the like have more kids, or are related to people with more kids on average, although I have no idea how you'd go about doing that.
I do think rural areas of France are probably a thing to watch, because their fertility transition happened long enough ago that it could feasibly have some mild selection effects by now and I think that small towns haven't been replaced by Arabs yet. Again, not sure how to check- try to correlate desired fertility with TFR in 1840?
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How much of that is the very idea of traditional retirement being kind of absurd in the modern era?
Retiring at 65 when there was a reasonable expectation of death by early-mid 70s after a life of actual hard labor and there wasn't obscene amounts of money poured into extending out the last 2-3 years of life was sustainable. The modern conception of retiring from a laptop or deskwork at 65 to just kind of aimlessly dodder around for 20-30 years has upset the whole system.
yeah, you are right in that aspect. But from the beginning it functions more like a pyramid scheme than anything else.
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TFR is a real, serious issue. But I don't think most people who worry about it really act in a way that's consistent with worrying about it.
If we are to have a real policy intervention to fix it, what are the trade offs that people are willing to make? Suppose there's no real way for the government to encourage traditional, two parent households with 3+ kids (entirely plausible, considering that previous attempts have mostly failed and no one seems to have any ideas). Would people be willing to subsidize low income, low education single mothers having lots of kids with multiple deadbeat baby daddies? They're the most likely for small financial incentives to influence outcomes; of the professional women I know, most would not take advantage of even a $100k grant to have a kid. But there are plenty of high school dropouts who'd be willing to start pumping out kids at $5k/pop.
Of course, it's far from ideal, but in the real world we have to prioritize. My sense is that few people are willing to bite that bullet, and a lot of worries couched in terms of TFR are really just complaints about the state of current gender dynamics of a certain class stratum.
People who even know about TFR as an issue are also usually concerned with dysgenics. I'm not really sure critiquing people for not acting like it's an issue makes sense, if we're going to accept flooding low iq people we might as well get the immigrants for free and pocket the money we'd spend on the nonproductive years of the kids. And really what are the individual actions you'd expect from people concerned with LFR? My investments take into account the likely lack of growth in certain markets, that's about all I can personally do beyond discussions.
On a social level, there's not much people can do individually. Someone can reasonably point at the single childless 30 year old professional concerned about TFR as somewhat hypocritical, but I agree: individually, we all must make do as best we can, and there's not much point in railing on individual choices.
When thinking of it as a social problem, though, if someone correctly recognizes it as a serious issue, I think it's reasonable to ask them what they're willing to give up to solve it. It's similar to environmentalists worried about climate change who refuse to even consider nuclear power: when faced with hard choices for them, they are just saying "I want all of what I want and refuse to make any trade offs." It reveals a great interest in signaling and a lack of any deep commitment to solving the Serious Problem.
The higher TFRs in the Philippines and Niger likely is driven by the lower classes and has a dysgenic effect, but despite that they're still likely to have higher growth rates than comparable countries with low TFRs.
There's going to be economic costs associated just with having a shrinking population so I'd be willing to spend economically. But yes, I both want the population not to shrink and to avoid dysgenics in solutions if possible. I guess my solution if we can't get an at least even rate of reproduction along socioeconomic classes would depend on the country, as an American my nation has more options than many in that we have the kind of market that lets us attract high quality immigrants and I'd push for far more of those as a fallback, but I would very much like to solve the social issue that is causing us to not have kids at the root over these other solutions.
I agree that the US is uniquely well positioned, though I think that high quality immigrants are going to be harder to come by, particularly in the quantity needed to reverse the costs of an aging population. My hope is that we try to reverse the culture of anti-fertility starting now and that technology will catch up in the next decade or so to help with the dysgenic effects.
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What's the point of subsidizing the reproduction of the underclass? Even if you can do it, those people don't work, don't create value, don't pay taxes, etc. They survive by parasitizing the wealth created by the actually productive classes in the form of crime, welfare, and prison.
It's like that joke about selling at a loss but making it up on volume. For society, each kid of a high school dropout single mother and a deadbeat baby daddy is a liability, not an asset. You are just accelerating the collapse.
There's a tradeoff: is it better to have a less inverted demographic age pyramid and lower average human capital, or to have a more inverted age pyramid and a higher average human capital?
The latter choice is essentially the position of the "do not worry about TFR" crowd; we'll be able to make do by making people more productive, so it's not a problem (or, at least, the cure is worse than the disease.) Which is a reasonable enough position, but it means TFR isn't really the important thing, as opposed to education/eugenics/whatever someone's main priority is.
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Not to be autistic on purpose, but I think it’s worth pointing out that this is basically a complete caricature of a traditional patriarchy. In fact, it’s fair to say that wifely duties/roles normally included breakfast preparation even in patriarchal societies only if the couple already had children, as they cannot be expected to prepare their on meals in the morning. (I’m pretty sure there was never a society where wives were expected to prepare warm meals for their childless husbands; certainly not labor-intensive ones.)
You seem to be saying that this is an example of a gender asymmetry in society, namely that young women are rather reluctant to accept traditional gender norms, but their male counterparts aren’t, supposedly?
Yes. Even in non western countries, in the current year outside of maybe very rural areas, women don't find traditional gender roles much appealing at all. Universal culture has made significant headway, there is a stark difference between my parent's generation and my generation.
But men do, you say?
Men for the most part are willing to mold into whatever women want.
That's not the issue here.
Do you think that young/single men, on average, find traditional gender roles more appealing than women, or not?
Part of traditional gender roles involves making personal sacrifices for the opposite gender. Women are effectively getting both the benefits of not having to perform their traditional gender role and the benefits of men still doing so, while men are getting both the downsides of making sacrifices for women in performing their gender role and lacking the benefits of women similarly sacrificing for them. Of course men find this arrangement less appealing than women.
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Hold up.
So the women you know partnered with men of the same age when they were 22-23? Because, as far as I know, that's a big outlier. I'm sure the men who start looking for a wife at ages 27-30 are normally seeking exactly women who are 22-23.
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I don't think the stats I'm aware of back any of this up.
Namely, the ones stating that males in the 18-29 year old bracket are more likely to be single than females in that bracket; and
That females are much more likely to be in a relationship with or married to a guy quite a bit older than herself.
This doesn't gel with the "men get married young, regret it, then go cheat on the woman or leave her to play the field" point you appear to be making.
Uhhh also doesn't gel with the classic women initiate the majority of divorces stat.
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That happens on either side. If you're that age, and you've been with someone for a while, a lot of people start hearing a tiny voice in their head saying "I'm still young, maybe I can do better".
This doesn't have to be about fucking randoms.
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As women mature, their demands from a man monotonically increase. She keeps "getting ahead" in a man's scale of life, and must always find a man that exceeds her own achievements. As she gets older, the pool of potential husbands decreases. Therefore, she must settle down early - if she went to college, then that's a great place to find a husband. If not, then quickly after or even during high school.
The man's role in all of this is to put a ring on it, then provide. The woman's role is to accept the best offer, quickly. Society's role in all of that is to enable the man to provide, and to not delude women about their available time.
Yes, exactly. It’s all really basic redpill stuff (well, OG redpill at least). If women were told all of it to their face, at a young age, maybe we’d have less bitter, lonely men and women around.
Your friend is one among many, of course, and even if she does settle down with someone now she’s well past her best child-having years. She won’t have many kids, if any, and will be an old tired mom if she does. Multiply that by a whole bunch and low TFR is an obvious outcome already.
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Uh, it seems to me that a propaganda campaign to convince women to have more babies/be stay at home moms would be about the joys of being a stay at home mom or having babies, and not about how vapid and stupid being a girl boss is.
Why not both?
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I would guess this is not true. I suspect that women's decisions are the proximate cause of TFR decline in the West, but it's about them not wanting kids (or not wanting them "now") and not about not wanting sex.
Iran, of course, has a very different culture. Maybe they really do have as a limiting factor guys who don't want the married life. Those guys probably aren't on the English-speaking part of the Internet.
Iranian law may be a relevant factor- restrictions on the freedom of women(don’t know how it shakes out in practice) could feasibly give men the ability to simply make lifestyle decisions for the couple.
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AGI will be here within the next two decades. I naively predict there'll be something equivalent to sex and procreation in our technological descendants. Things are are rough for humanity one way or another for the next short while so even though each of us bears huge responsibility it's hard to know what it amounts to.
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Well, it could always be worse.
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