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The always-great Kaiser Bauch has a new article, this time on the (dis-)similarities between climate change and the fertility crisis. It's good and there's a lot to agree with, in particular the general gist: None of us will probably be able to do anything about either of those, and all we can do is adapt. Both are global issues that arise from the peculiarities of current-tech, current-culture modern societies, and may vanish or switch in another direction altogether with further increased tech levels or changed culture. Neither is likely to be an extinction-level problem. Both are politically polarized, with one side leaning towards doomerism and/or instrumentalisation, and the other towards denial and/or indifference.
Nevertheless, the article somewhat overstates its thesis, and furthermore I find it interesting to think about how and why the differences exist & are the way they are, as well as some related recent developments & discussions.
So, let's start with some of the most obvious differences. Climate change is a truly global problem in the sense that it's literally impossible to fix locally. This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate. Instead it not only is sold as an alternative to adaption, the rest of the world isn't doing the same anyway, and of course it isn't working well on its own merits, either.
See the AC discourse: I actually think myself that the weather is still tolerable enough that ACs make sense mostly for clinics and for the elderly, we don't even need general adoption. But no, instead EU media is putting out very general anti-AC messaging that we can't have nice things since it costs energy, and energy causes climate change. There was a notable incident where the EU Commission HQ shut down its AC - but only for the lower, peasant floors. Imo it could easily go into a Parks & Rec parody episode, if P&R was capable of looking in that particular direction. All a microcosm of the dysfunctions of the contemporary EU.
Likewise, the instrumentalisation of climate change usually takes a very specific form: Due to its very nature requiring communal solutions, it's easy to combine with general-purpose communitarian ideologies like communism, social justice or "mere" socialism. The "watermelon" (green on the outside, red on the inside) accusation strikes one as very adapt if you just skim through, for example, the Green New Deal wiki page, despite its very pro-slant. Take a look at the "Environmental justice" subsection. But honestly, it's already enough to talk with the average green voter to notice the commonalities. This also directly explains rightwing dismissal: If the most prominent green initiatives blatantly risk torpedoing the entire enterprise by tying it together with completely unrelated, highly contentious far-left pet projects, what does it tell you about how serious its proponents are on the original topic? Nothing good.
So in short, I'd characterize the climate change movement: We pour significant resources into fighting climate change, but in a way and direction that does not and can not fix it. Powerful groups can and do profit from this free money, however.
Let's now look at the fertility crisis. First, I want to to note that it is a fundamentally local problem, in the sense that any given society with a healthy TFR can just simply ignore global fertility dysfunctions (insert Tyler the creator cyberbullying meme, except it's about the fertility crisis and just having kids). It's global only in the sense that it seems to happen everywhere, merely on different timelines. That means that, irrespective of the details of any possible solution it is at least in principle solvable by any given nation state.
Let's now look at the nature of the problem. There's a few candidates: The rise of solitary entertainment (related to the "It's the phones, stupid") thesis, the opportunity cost thesis, or the loss of religion thesis, and a whole bunch of others. I won't go into detail on which I find the most likely, strongest factor, but it's hard not to notice that they are all fundamentally cultural and, in fact, down to personal choices. You actually can simply choose to forego solitary entertainment and spend more time with family & friends. You can just stay religious. You can just avoid education and choose a job that is easy to combine with a family. As the kids say (well, if you have them), you can just DO things.
This now makes the shape of the instrumentalisation obvious: Conservatives and rightwingers more generally have always looked at cultural change through the lens of moral decline, and in the case of the fertility crisis, this lens is actually matching pretty well. It fits even better if you search for contrafactuals: As Lyman Stone points out, conservatives have very broadly more kids than moderates, which have more than liberals. This becomes even more striking if you look at the highest fertility groups, which is basically identical with a list of known religious ultraconservative groups.
So the right tries to instrumentalize the fertility crisis to push for whatever part of these conservative cultures is their personal hobbyhorse, be it female disempowerment, increased marriage rates, or clamping down on modern sex & dating norms, without bothering to look too closely on whether the shoe really fits that well. Which also readily explains leftwing dismissals: It's easy to find stats for any of those issues, showing that each, at least in isolation, does not really fix anything. And if that is the case, and the guy arguing in favor is blatantly doing the same for just about any issue, what does it tell you about them? Again, nothing good.
Nevertheless though, it seems obvious to me that we are failing on fertility for the simple reason that we are hardly even trying. A single look into the lifestyle of the ultrafertile makes it clear that all the personal reasons seculars usually give are basically bullshit as well. The ultrafertile earn less, give more to charity and on top have more kids anyway. And their kids aren't, objectively, doing badly, either. Nor am I compelled by the pronatalists to do anything in any way, at least so far. The instrumentalisation, as it exists, is mostly secluded to online anon accounts or conservative sermons in church. Unlike climate change laws, I can easily ignore them.
All of this is so silly to me. The answer is women's education reduces women's fertility, and there's no real way around this problem. Women, when given the choice, do not choose children, and so by allowing them to support themselves and choose whether to have kids, they choose not to.
Everywhere education of women has increased has seen a precipitous drop in fertility. Women's education is genocide:
It's not a hard and fast rule though. I have a BS, MBA, and have four kids. There are others like me. Do we have a gene or cultural meme that helps us choose to reproduce when given other options? If so, and it's inheritable, the world will eventually be filled with highly educated, fecund women.
You have four kids, but why not nine? I assert that you would always have been among the higher-fertility in your population, but the difference is that you think 4 is a lot and not the median.
Well, if it's the societal norm to have that many, you run out of space for all those people quite quickly. That's not a problem if a lot of them die in infancy and/or you're conquering a continent or two in the meantime, but the former condition is quite unpleasant and the latter is frowned upon nowadays (unless...?) Nevertheless, at some point the median* woman needs to be content with having just about 2.1 children, and neither rad trads nor radfems seem to be able to achieve that.
*Technically it'd be the modal woman, but if that's too far off from the median then you get a constant churn of intra-group population replacement, which doesn't seem like a basis for a particularly stable society.
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The number is set largely because I married 9 years ago, had a kid close to every other year, and now we're getting older. If we had more time, maybe we could wait a couple more years until the oldest two can go without car seats, then have room in a minivan/suv for a 5th-6th. Don't really want to go full-minibus but there are a few families at my parish who have them.
The point is, 4 is over replacement, and I did 4 even with education, starting late (by historical comparisons), and modernity. If 3/4 of my kids marry and reproduce 2-5 kids each (with other children of large families), over time my great-grand children will inherit the Earth.
My Maternal Grandma had 12, but that was a modern miracle of formula and sudden access to antibiotics and vaccines. My Paternal Grandma had 5. My mom had 3 (but 2 miscarriages). My aunts and uncles save a couple all have 2-6 kids. (and the couple who don't seem to have health issues)
My husband is one of five. His siblings have all had 2-4 kids. While dating, one thing that drew us to each other was the idealization of having grown up in a family with "the right amount" of kids. Which to us was at least 3 or more.
If there is a "have kids despite modernity" gene, I have a high likelihood of it and have a good chance of passing it along. If this gene also encourages such people to be drawn to each other, all the better.
My daughter is an only, my spouse and I were from families w/two kids.
My daughter used to say she wanted a big family, like half a dozen kids. But she's changed her mind having dated. By the time she views her male peers as mature enough to marry, she'll likely be in your position and be limited by age/decreased fertility due to age. She's entering her mid-20s and isn't sure it's worth wasting her time on dating. I tell her there are guys out there who don't spend all their time gaming, but have no idea where to point my daughter to find them (church is out, she's an atheist; work is challenging, young men in stem are... spending all their time gaming).
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Nine kids is historically almost unheard of outside of high infant mortality areas.
My grandmother had seven; my grandfather had eight (the seven he had with my grandma and one illegitimate daughter that was raised alongside her half-siblings). I'm a millennial. These sorts of numbers were common a few generations ago.
From "Dégénération" by Mes Aïeux:
Or, as the English version puts it:
I wasn't an accident, but my sister was.
Seven, much less fourteen children, surviving to adulthood on a regular basis has never been the case. Here is a time series for "effective" fertility rate. For the UK and the US it only goes back to the early 20th century, but for Sweden it goes back to 1751. This has never exceeded 3.5 children in any of these countries.
Obviously there are families that buck the trend, but that doesn't take away from what's normal and what isn't.
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One might posit that it is not education in general that makes women not want children, but rather what specific lessons they are taught at institutions for higher learning. If I were a social scientist not worried about career suicide, I would look into whether there is a causative relationship between exposure to feminist ideology and not wanting a family. It would certainly make sense that an ideology whose prime thinkers take pride in criticizing motherhood, degrading men, and advising women to sleep around and postpone marriage would result in fewer marriages and children.
True! I went in for Mechanical Engineering, ended up in Information Science because I couldn't handle fluid dynamics. Even Information Science had a bit of woo in it, but I mostly avoided the real mind-killing stuff.
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I've gotten sucked into the mommy wars section of Substack lately, and my impression is that it does go a layer deeper than that. College educated women want status for their ability to do things like write, reference interesting authors, articulate cultural and educational opinions, and so on. In the past, women educated in that fashion had nursemaids. Now, they drive their baby to daycare at four weeks old, and work. Their work does not produce much status, and neither do their children. But with everything going online, it's increasingly difficult to gain status from the things they go to college for either, so the popular ones are happy because they're popular, and bully the less popular ones, for saying unpopular things. This is not a good state of affairs, middle class women should be able to do a bit of cultural generation while their children are in daycare or school, and generate positive feelings about their lives. Feminists did not help with that, merely chaining them to fake desk jobs and bloated school systems instead of their kitchens. And the ones at home don't sound happy either, because they never get a break at all.
I, again, don't have a solution, but giving up on women doing classic feminine things like writing essays to each other, and making everyone nursemaids again seems like the wrong direction to be pushing in.
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The women in my family were also teachers with university degrees and 3-4 children, at least three generations back. Which is what stability looks like in an era of low infant mortality; it's not like society even wants a bunch of 15 child underclass families anyway.
I don't have a theory for this. None of them moved to IQ shredder places like San Francisco or New York, and when two of my cousins did, they have in fact not had any children.
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