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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23575 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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I've previously posted on the Motte about the Swedish state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and suggest solutions to the problem. Another report has dropped, this time analyzing the broader effect the declining fertility will have on the Swedish state budget – and reaching some surprising conclusions! As before, here's a link in case you know Swedish or want to use an AI to give you the uptake. https://framtidmedbarn.se/nyhet/utredningens-nya-skrift-lanceras-farre-barn-och-fler-aldre-vad-hander-med-sveriges-offentliga-finanser/

After a few poor showings the reports have really returned to form, and this is another excellent and informative review. The main insight – which is obvious after you've thought about it, but significantly less obvious before it's been shown to you – is that declining fertility and aging population is indeed very bad for both the government budget and the broader economy long-term, but in the short-term it actually benefits the government fiscally. This is because another little baby child that's born in the ghetto is an immediate drain on the state or municipal budget, while the long-term drawbacks of, y'know, having an entire population which can't fucking work only become apparent 20 years down the line when those baby children were supposed to be grown-ups doing grown-up-things (i.e. paying for the two or three generations who are now retired and demanding pensions).

In a way this is good, because it means many states will soon be facing a slight cost-relief, potentially providing an opening to solve the situation through increased spending. In another and probably more important way though it's very bad – mainly because it makes the negative effects of low fertility a lot more insidious and difficult-to-show than if the economic consequences were immediate. It's also bad in that the government and municipalities have major incentives to cut costs on schools and kindergartens in the short term, which in turn is liable to exacerbate the situation long-term. I actually reckon that this is a big part of what's happend and is happening in South Korea and Japan – perversely, their unsustainable fertility rates are economically sustained by the momentum of declining fertility itself, sort of like when Wile. E. Coyote runs off a cliff but refuses to fall because he won't look down.

Between the lines, the report more than it did previously hints that immigration could be one way to compensate for the decline in fertility. This is an argument I expect all Europeans will soon be hearing a lot more often again – I reckon the Spaniards used it to justify their completely insane amnesty for illegals. Sweden will soon hold an election and the current right-wing government seems prone to lose to the Social Democrats, and for that very reason I am displeased with this new direction the report seems to be taking. There's a small but non-zero risk that the left-wing parties, if they seize power, will again open the floodgates of mass immigration, once and for all drowning Sweden in third-world dysfunction beyond hope of repair. This would be very sad, and I sincerely hope it does not come to be; and for that same reason I hope the Committe doesn't sway from its goal (solving the fertility crisis) if and when the current government does get ousted.

A few comments, general and specific. Let me start with the general: It strikes me that the economic problems created by fertility problems (fewer children > fewer adults > less productivity > less value created and monetized > smaller treasure chests to pay the pensions, healthcare and other requirements of older generations) are contingent on two completely unsustainable norms: (1) convincing a significant section of the population that it’s a legitimate expectation that they should be able to “retire” for perhaps 30-40 years after (often) 25-30 years (and sometimes even less) of work that in many cases was a public service, or sideways related to public service, and therefore not actually productive of much value/monetary return in the first place and (2) expansion of lifespan without much expansion of healthspan, and sometimes even significant diminishing of healthspan, creating another unsustainable reality that older people are draining resources for years or decades, and sometimes medication and the “health system” keeps them alive in much reduced quality of life circumstances in a way that a cold skeptic might describe as profiteering on the pain of the populace.

Without these two unsustainables, and given continued expected technological progress (I appreciate there is irony here) underpopulation or declining fertility rates are much less of a problem.

I do concede that more should be done to make families and child-bearing popular again, but not for broader economic reasons. Rather, places that are full of older people are not pleasant places to be.

On the specifics:

1

After a few poor showings

Can you say more on this? Were they bad reports, or reports you disagreed with?

2

Between the lines, the report more than it did previously hints that immigration could be one way to compensate for the decline in fertility. This is an argument I expect all Europeans will soon be hearing a lot more often again

I was in Italy recently, and at one train station on a Saturday afternoon the train was overwhelmed by approximately 100 young people (~12-16 years old) who were all north or central African either by birth or origin. They were noisy but not unpleasant and it looked like none had a ticket, because a ticket inspector appeared on the train and they all disappeared in the opposite direction, presumably getting out at the next stop.

I looked up Italian immigration numbers and found that Italian national statistics office reports that said immigration levels are almost exactly replacing the declining population rate, and that Italian women are now having the lowest number of children in history (from memory I think it was 1.2 or perhaps 1.4 on average). I thought that was interesting at the time, and that it wouldn’t take too many years of that reality to completely change what Italian society looked like.

I strongly agree with your general sentiment here. I think the real elephant in the proverbial delivery room is in fact our newly-acquired longevity. Smartphones and liberal anti-dharma-thinking are all well and good as partial explanations, but the real paradigm which has shifted is that we now routinely live 40% longer than we did just a century ago, and that the majority of this extended life span is funded by the working young. No one has looked at this seriously because of the implications, but this has to be both one of the causes of declining fertility, and also the reason this decline is set to be so terrifyingly destructive.

As regards your question about the reports, you can read through my previous posts on the subject. In short, after a strong initial showing we had a few reports which mostly attacked peripheal questions (such as access to fertility treatments) and generally skirted around the bigger questions. We're now back to form with reports that add super-useful data and provide interesting perspectives on the most pressing issues (though we've yet to have one taking a good hard look at the longevity-question).

This is because another little baby child that's born in the ghetto is an immediate drain on the state or municipal budget

And a major source of emotional strain on the mothers of said children, I’m sure.

Indeed. In fact, I have it on good authority their mothers actually cry, owing to the fact that another hungry mouth to feed is something that their situation allegedly does not require.

In the ghetto

Not speaking for Sweden in particular, but a big part of the problem is people who want to be child-free but very much resent the implication of selfishness and so claim the reason is that they can't imagine bringing kids into the world as it is today. Previous generations the excuse was nuclear war and overpopulation, today it's climate change and the horrible conditions that will be in place once the kids are twenty or so.

That's just something people who don't want kids say. "Amg, I couldn't possibly bring a child into a first world country with a planetary top 5% wealth because god is about to smite us all"

perversely, their unsustainable fertility rates are economically sustained by the momentum of declining fertility itself, sort of like when Wile. E. Coyote runs off a cliff but refuses to fall because he won't look down.

Very cool. I never thought of this but it makes a ton of sense. Kids take a ton of resources for 20 years without providing a drop of productivity, so if a society stops having kids they suddenly feel very rich. But 20 years later they'll feel the pain immensely.

Yeah, but the resource consumption provides jobs elsewhere - like adults, kids have to be clothed, fed, housed, and receive medical attention. On top of that is childcare and education, and things like toys and products aimed at kids. Close down all the toy factories because no market, and the jobs have to be found elsewhere (they could be, of course, but there's an entire economic sector there that isn't simply "kids take all resources and give nothing back").

This is just the broken window fallacy but for kids.

Which "Broken Window Fallacy"? The Rudy Giuliani version or the Jean-Baptiste Emanuel Zorg version?

dude i am so excited to go see The Fifth Element on the big screen this weekend.

Same! Taking the kids this sunday.

The first is a theory, not a fallacy. The fallacy is due to Bastiat.

Edit: Zorg clearly read Bastiat and got the wrong message.

I find it very odd that there seems to be this sense of doom where no one can even imagine a world where once the consequences of the birthrate crisis actually hit Liberalism itself sufferers an axiomatic loss of legitimacy.

Can you elaborate? Are you saying that the odd thing is the doomer who thinks this is an extinction-level event whereas the more likely outcome is a continued, illiberal humanity? Maybe it's as simple as people saying "extinction-level event" are always exaggerating? See: climate alarmism, AI-doomerism

Not extinction just the opposite I think we agree. People seem to think that liberalism itself won't feel any signifigant upstream pressure from the fertility crisis when I can't imagine that being the case.

They have always been exaggerating... so far. Anthropological argument &c.

Immigration isn't going to be a viable solution for much longer. Every country outside of Africa pretty much has a below 2.0 fertility rate. Even if it does work out it's just can kicking.

If we do somehow figure out how to raise fertility rates (unlikely) the generation that manages to do so is going to have a very rough time because of sky high dependency ratios (both more kids and more elderly people).

Immigration isn't going to be a viable solution for much longer

I saw on twitter someone describe immigration as a solution to declining birth rates as being like trying to turn a shredder into a printer by shoving in more paper.

Tar paper. Not because color, but because it jams up a system not built for it.

There is a very simple solution - decrease the extra care elderly people receive. It seems unpalatable now, because who wants to let grandma develop bed sores and die? But the proportion of old people who do not have descendants will increase, and the people who are working and paying taxes will not have strong emotional ties to the childless old people. I can see Social Security and Medicare being gutted in favor of people caring for their own elderly relatives themselves.

Alternative solutions are to increase working years through outbreaks in medicine - retirement age is 100 if the median life expectancy reaches 110. Or automation/robotics gets to the point where 90% of jobs are taking care of the young and old (the remaining 10% being managing the robots).

Or automation/robotics gets to the point where 90% of jobs are taking care of the young and old (the remaining 10% being managing the robots).

I would expect some resistance to robots to change an infant's diapers, but less to changing grandma's.

There is a very simple solution - decrease the extra care elderly people receive.

I'm not sure it would work like that. We've seen with the pension age debates that young people are perfectly willing to defend more goodies for the old, because young people will be old one day too.

The relative weakness of the youth vote vs the grey vote in the UK is why the government is raising the retirement age but not removing the triple lock, which is mathematically unsustainable.

I suspect we'll see more countries go that route. Maintain generous pensions but with higher pension ages, which to be fair was the initial idea for pensions. 20th century politicians didn't imagine people living 30+ years in retirement.

We've seen with the pension age debates that young people are perfectly willing to defend more goodies for the old, because young people will be old one day too.

I think it's more that all the proposals so far are complete shit from a young person's point of view. The ones I've seen come down to

  1. The productive working age people keep paying for pensions at approximately current rates
  2. We wind down pensions over time so there's nothing left by the time those people are at retirement age

I suspect we'll see more countries go that route. Maintain generous pensions but with higher pension ages, which to be fair was the initial idea for pensions. 20th century politicians didn't imagine people living 30+ years in retirement.

Exactly, and the sort of work that dominated in the era that 65 was originally grabbed as a good age for retirement was far more physical in nature and had way greater impacts on bodies. The current metagame of '65 then a decade or two of meandering cruises until eventually you roll a Natural 1 and hit the final 3 year slope of increasing disability but massive medical expense' is not what retirement was designed for.

It’s not even a decade or two at this point, people are hitting 3 decades fairly commonly

The current metagame of '65 then a decade or two of meandering cruises until eventually you roll a Natural 1 and hit the final 3 year slope of increasing disability but massive medical expense

This is poetry

Even if you do have strong ties to your grandparents, if you're an only child of only children there's no way you're going to end up taking care of 4 different grand parents well all of your own dime once your parents retire. If your spouse is the same that's 8 people being sustained off of the two of you, and this is before we get to any children.

Simple enough solution - which grandparent do you get along with more?

Real Charlie Bucket hours.

Grandpa Joe was malingering while his daughter-in-law was working herself to the bone trying to stretch one income to feed seven people.

well if it's a trip to the chocolate factory I suddenly feel just fine

If only everyone had their own Mysterious Magnate gifting them a chocolate factory maybe western countries wouldn't be in this mess...

Mysterious Magnate gifting them a chocolate factory maybe western countries

Captains of industry aren't allowed to 'rescue' black pygmies living in the African jungle living in treehouses and eating a miserable diet of mashed caterpillars. Shipping an entire tribe to their factories in ventilated packing crates, paying them in cacao beans, anymore.

There is a very simple solution - decrease the extra care elderly people receive. It seems unpalatable now, because who wants to let grandma develop bed sores and die? But the proportion of old people who do not have descendants will increase, and the people who are working and paying taxes will not have strong emotional ties to the childless old people.

These systems don't last because of pity. They last because the old are more numerous because of the baby boom and they can vote. How many do you need to die off before the young (who themselves are delusional about benefiting from these systems) can actually vote them down?

Especially in countries that don't have a large Millennial cohort (iirc America is better off here). They're fucked.

If you have the young enforcing the laws, the young paying the taxes, the young doing everything, what power do the old people have? The power of the state? But the state is powered by the young.

Eventually there wont be enough to go around. When that happens, force comes out and the young have a monopoly on force.

People always say this. The manosphere likes to point out that men are the enforcement arm of every government, so this whole feminism thing is parasitical. Women don't really have rights, the logic goes, since those rights depend on male tolerance and enforcement.

Maybe (in that sense fat Mottizens like men don't really have rights either) and yet it lasts for now. Because enough men are willing to fight for the system.

And technological advances mean the bar for "enough" can drop pretty fast. How many people do you really need to run an AI-powered surveillance state?

Men still have strong ties to women - we are your mothers, your sisters, your wives. We are necessary to the continuation of the species. We are still economically and socially useful, as a gender.

I don't think we've given as much thought as it deserves to the concept of a group that is just useless. A group of people who do not reproduce, have weak friendships and no family ties. What happens to them when they retire and leave the workforce? I think there is something significant here that people need to pay attention to, because it's going to be a big shift in the coming decades.

can actually vote them down?

At a certain point if the bottom 30-50% of young(er) people get pissed off and poor enough, the protests up to and including genuine physical violence to seize the reins of power could be in play.

Old people can outvote the young handily, and that won't change for ~100 years given current demographics. But their power is only on paper, a revolution, where physical power rules, is much less favorable.

I'm not advocating for a butlerian jihad against Simon & Linda, but at the extremes it is a possibility

Why do you think the west is legalizing weed? So the lumpenproles in dire straights don't wreck shit when they demand change. You can deal with stupid hippies by turning on the firehoses, if they switch from beer and pipe glue they're less willing to fight the cops(and cops will be taken care of, governments aren't stupid).

Why do you think the west is legalizing weed?

Because policing it is retarded?

But yeah the soma aspect isn't a downside

A specter haunts Europe. The specter of Nicolas (30 ans).

At a certain point if the bottom 30-50% of young(er) people get pissed off and poor enough, the protests up to and including genuine physical violence to seize the reins of power could be in play.

Also seems a potential risk of a large immigrant body where suddenly they don't have any particular affinity or affiliation for the current crop of elderly people and seem more interested in bloc-voting in their own interests than native-born Westerners.

On a similar note, I am extremely curious to see how the Native American Government Funding Extraction Industrial Complex in Canada is doing in about 10 years.

They're absolutely raking in settlement, etc cash right now.

But once Canada is ~50% Indian, I'm curious how that will play.

Sandeep et al have a pretty good argument for why they shouldn't have their tax dollars paying to endlessly rebuild water treatment plants in rural Canada, they were being oppressed by the British at the same time the Indigenous people were!

As a recent immigrant-settler myself I have zero sympathy for the next unelected band leader whining about not getting a veto on infrastructure projects or people demanding more than the tens of billions that has already gone to reconciliation.

I have zero emotional attachment to reconciliation it's just that I am a guest and so it's the wypipos problem. If that ever changes...

There are many things in Canada whose future is interesting to contemplate.

Imagine the Ubermensch: half-Indian, half-Chinese, stronger than both. 6 feet, 200 IQ, fluent in English,Mandarin and Hindi. Able to converse with the major ethnic groups in the county and the majority of the world...except they can't speak French. Are they just not allowed to go into politics or run major corporations like Air Canada?

Will this just be the case forever?

Between the lines, the report more than it did previously hints that immigration could be one way to compensate for the decline in fertility

It doesn't though? We have the stats from the Netherlands, non-Western, non-East Asian migrants are usually net losses in tax, they comprise the bulk of the migrant pool. Mass immigration is expensive!

The US will hoover up the high-quality immigrants with their high wages, why would anyone highly skilled want to go to cold, dark, high-tax Sweden? The most compelling reasons are attractive Swedish women and welfare - neither of which are good for Sweden.

Furthermore, adding more labour disincentivizes mechanization and robotization, lowers wages and productivity.

The economic arguments for mass immigration don't make sense. Increasing the total size of the economy doesn't benefit natives, only raising productivity can do that. Sweden is already a very high productivity area with higher STEM Nobels per capita than the United States! Swedes make jet fighters, machine tools, video games like Minecraft: very capable people.

High-quality immigrants are rare and hard to distinguish from cheats. Low-quality migrants can do food delivery, meat processing and Uber, prime targets for automation. And all immigration imposes further pressure on public services and infrastructure, which is invariably expensive to build out in modern Western country.

Mass migration proponents, besides some libertarians, are not motivated primarily by economics at heart IMO. It's a transformational/aspirational/teleological project, it's about getting rid of racism by abolishing distinction. I had one come up to me and tell me this at one point impromptu about how he hoped everyone would interbreed and then we'd all be brown.

The US will hoover up the high-quality immigrants with their high wages, why would anyone highly skilled want to go to cold, dark, high-tax Sweden? The most compelling reasons are attractive Swedish women and welfare - neither of which are good for Sweden.

I mean I live in a middle-income country (Malaysia) where approximately 5-10% (2 Millionish people) of the population is illegal immigrant workers from the absolute bottom of the global economy (Indonesia, Bangladesh mainly) and they receive no social benefits plus very enthusiastic deportation efforts. Acquiring citizenship in Malaysia as a foreigner is essentially impossible, with approximately 100 granted a year and generally only for stuff like being a National-Level Athlete. They're doing this for pursuit of bottom-end minimum wageish jobs in an economy that has roughly a 15k GDP per capita. The vast majority of 'If we don't let the temporary workers bring in their extended family and have a citizenship pathway, they won't come here' in the West is absolutely ridiculous. The Gulf Arabs have a ridiculous amount of Filipinos and Subcontinentals who they barely even treat as human, the current carrot that Western governments assume they need is about 500 times larger than it needs to be.

As far as I'm concerned most Western economies could easily figure out a scalable dorm system, add temporary working visas at about minimum wage for their countries (and maybe a distant offer for PR if you've been there 20 years and cured cancer like Singapore and Dubai do) and have unlimited resourcing for unskilled and low-skilled work. Meanwhile a bunch of Western countries are trying to run some variant of 'Bring in unskilled labor to do care work for 5 years, then grant PR, then let them bring in 10 family members' which fails to even tread water.

Yep. Illegal guatemalan workers in the US don't expect citizenship(they think that if they have retirement savings they'll enjoy them in... Guatemala, whether or not that's true). They work crappy jobs for the higher wages compared to their home countries, not because they expect to bring their families up here(some of them do, but it isn't the draw).

Birthright citizenship makes it easier for poor Hispanics to get a foothold, though. Plus complicates the process of deportation

Yes, America really likes "bring my your tired, your poor, your masses yearning to be free", and hates sending crying mothers away. A bunch of Americans are actually sad every time someone is visibly deported. Which isn't sustainable when there are billions of huddled masses and they'd overwhelm the country, but many Americans are in denial about that.

Increasing the total size of the economy doesn't benefit natives

I agree with a lot of this, but the above sentence is incorrect.

There are increasing returns to scale in an economy. It's a large (hah) reason why the US and China are as successful as they are. It's a reason why the EU exists, etc.

I half agree. The US and China enjoy huge swathes of high quality land though, whereas Sweden's hopes for land empire ended at Poltava.

If Sweden could somehow find a few million more Swedes I think that would increase the standard of living and national power. More cultural output by one's countrymen is a good thing. But there is no such reserve of Swedes ready to move to Sweden. There are only a small number of Germans, Brits who'd move to Sweden. But an enormous number of Syrians, Somalians who'd like to head for Sweden.

Suppose the US annexed Mexico peacefully, somehow. In returns-to-scale theory it ought to make America a lot stronger. The US gets a whole country's worth of land + all these people, so it's better than just immigration!

In practice I'd expect immense political strife, immense problems with crime, populist socialists to be in the permanent ascendency, massive racial conflict. GDP would go up about 10% but that wouldn't really matter. American-Americans would see a massive rise in the deficit from all the transfer payments, social security imploding like a dying star, dizzying demographic change in their communities...

The core of US strength and prosperity is the highly capable people that produce the innovation and wealth. There aren't so many of them in Mexico. Not to mention that a lot of Mexicans hate the US, their national identity is defined by opposition to the US to a certain extent, given the history of US-Mexican wars.

I think mass immigration is more analogous to annexing Mexico than smooth growth in the economy unlocking economies of scale and market size. All the other complicated demographic factors predominate. Few things are worse for the economy than internal strife. Even the risk should be avoided. While the gains are marginal. Is Canada or Britain gaining much from mass migration economically? Australia's importing many more people than the US proportionately and is in the doldrums for growth.

Mexico is experiencing huge economic growth and latin countries in practice tend to cycle between electing mano dura rightist tough on crime populists and pro-indigenous semiwoke quasisocialists(they're a lot wooier than the US version)... a lot like the USA is shaping up to start doing. The difference is that Mexico under US administration could plausibly carry out a mano dura crackdown on cartel violence in a way the Mexican authorities are incapable of.

Per the World Bank, Mexican growth is mediocre at best:

Over the past three decades, Mexico has underperformed in terms of growth, inclusion, and poverty reduction compared to similar countries. Between 1980 and 2022, the economy grew by just over 2% annually on average, limiting progress in convergence with high-income economies.

Mexico’s economic growth is projected to be 1.3 percent in 2026, with a gradual recovery reaching 1.7 percent by 2027, a level below the average growth rate of the past three years

The US was growing at about 2.5% over the last 30 years from a much higher baseline.

US administration isn't sufficient to squelch the open-air drug markets in major cities, nor the teen takeovers or gang violence already on US soil. Surely it would be easier to clean up St Louis, Memphis and Washington DC of all places than Colima or Tijuana.

US governance is overburdened already, it really doesn't need 140 million new people to administer. Who would want to go in and deal with cartels on their home turf, what trustworthy American would want to live down there?

There are so many wrong things here that I don't even know where to start.

cold, dark

The climate is milder than much of the north of the US, but Boston and the PNW are not exactly unpopular.

high-tax

Lower tax than most other places in Western Europe, surprisingly.

welfare

...also comparing unfavourably to much of the rest of Europe. The medical system is every bit as much of a wreck as the British NHS, and unemployment insurance is anemic and opt-in.

Swedish women

Consensus among foreigners (spent several years working there) was that Swedish women are very mediocre, and it's actually the men who tend to be much more attractive than those elsewhere. That meshes well with the preexisting native culture warring about Swedish men taking Thai wives.

food delivery, meat processing and Uber, prime targets for automation

This seems to be based on the human intellectual arrogance based view that got thoroughly demolished in the last few years. The best estimate to make now is that research/writing/office work/management/anything white-collar are the prime targets for automation, and food delivery, meat processing and Uber are going to be the last human holdouts because meat has a competitive advantage at navigating the mess that is the 3D world. We got AI solving big open problems in maths before we got self-driving cars that can cope with a Swedish city (as opposed to a handful of American easy-mode desert town street grids).

Sweden is cold. Anywhere that has boilers in houses is cold. Winters with average temperatures around freezing are cold.

Lower tax than most other places in Western Europe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue

Sweden is 10th in the world in tax revenue as % of GDP, behind the UK, Norway and Denmark. Sweden is high tax!

Swedish welfare spending is indeed lower than much of Europe. However it is still gigantic compared to the welfare spending in third world countries.

Consider also the beauty of Swedish women to say, Guatemalans. Or Bangladeshi women. Or Tanzanian women.

I think you're looking at Sweden from an insanely skewed perspective.

This seems to be based on the human intellectual arrogance

There are robots doing food delivery in Moscow right now. Furthermore, raising the price of these roles by restricting immigration accelerates automation.

Are AI/robotics companies going to try and disrupt an $8 per hour labour meat-processing industry or focus more on the $50-60+ software industry? Price signals guide automation, alongside the actual structural difficulties of course. Cutting up meat is really not that hard but we've adopted this insane economic system where cheap, low-productivity labour is subsidized by the taxpayer in pensions, progressive taxation, social services.

Sweden is 10th in the world in tax revenue as % of GDP, behind the UK, Norway and Denmark. Sweden is high tax!

Quibble, but the World Bank figures on the left-hand-side of that table are worthless, because they exclude state and local taxes, and taxes labelled as "social security contributions" or similar. Using the more accurate UN figures on the right-hand-side (which still look too low when eyeballed), Sweden is 4th, and the UK at 20th is in the middle of the pack of first-world countries. The Nordic countries and France have very high taxes, even by Euroleftie standards. I'm not sure what is going on with New Zealand.

The UK shows up as very high tax on the World Bank table because essentially 100% of our taxes are collected by central government.

Yes, pains me to say this but in 2 years time a qualified plumber may well be worth more to countries for immigration purposes than a senior staff level engineer at Google.

Honestly meat processing needs to be paid much much more than it is at the moment. It's a very "dirty" job that still requires a decent amount of knowledge and skill (do you know your beef cuts? I don't know my beef cuts...) and the people doing it and suffering aren't any less human than middle manager Becky in HR with her mediorce degree and unmemorable experience managing a team of 4 people.

If this means Becky from HR gets to eat steak at a restaurant less often then so be it.

From my memories of paying to get deer processed(granted, it's been a few years, I've DIY'd 100% since the pandemic), labor in the packing plant is a relatively minor contribution- I remember it still being a third to half of the price as buying beef in the grocery store.

Not saying raising meatpacking wages won't raise prices. But probably less than you'd think- the price of the animal dominates the price of the meat in the store, not the price of the labor to process it(further evidence- the cheapest meat comes from chickens, then pigs, then cows. For economy of scale reasons, you should expect labor to be lowest per unit of meat on a cow and highest on a chicken).

Chickens a lot less skill and effort involved in butchering, though? Far more whole chickens get sold then whole cows

Turkeys are easier than deer, but on an effort per unit of meat basis I tend to get a much better return from deer. Not a perfect analogy for chicken/beef, but it does point to economy of scale being a bigger deal than effort per animal. The parolees at the kill side of the slaughterhouse can probably produce more pounds of beef per hour, even if it comes from fewer animals.

FWIW my experience of at-home butchery is that pigs give the most meat poundage per hour invested, then lambs/sheep, then deer, then pigeons, then fowl. No doubt that the slaughterhouse has some technology and automation to make this less stark, but I'd still expect economy of scale to wash it out.

he hoped everyone would interbreed and then we'd all be brown.

Such a weird thing to fetishize, as if brown people aren't racist against each other and everyone else. Ask a Mexican about Guatemalans, FFS.

If we're going to have racism, it should at least be refined competitive racism based on nation and beer preferences and clothing, not casual "darker skin bad" racism.

Racism based on beer preferences has the advantage that we can make Bud Light the n****r of beers and put normie Americans on the bottom of the racial hierarchy for once.

Normie Americans don't drink bud light. The most popular beer in America is actually Modelo.

I've got some news for you about the average American of beer-drinking age...

America is 60% white and older Americans are whiter on average. The 12 pack a day Hispanics drink bud(because it’s cheap). Among minors whites and Hispanics are of roughly equal numbers.

Do you know of even one person in the world who is racist strictly on skin tone? Nobody hates melanin, man.

A week ago I saw a domestic worker from the Philippines and a domestic worker from Indonesia aggressively arguing that the other was darker complexioned and that that was a bad thing. Both of these women were very dark by Western standards

There's a reason the South Koreans have the best sunscreen tech in the world and to be very clear that reason is racism / colorism

Congratulations to your big beautiful bubble shielding you from the global majority.

Prejudice due to skin color alone is normal in most of the world, especially in dark complexioned countries where no one heard about bell curves.

Search for "colorism" and be enlightened/horrified.

There is a reason why there is, in the third world, huge market for various skin whitening substances, no matter how dubious.

I do not find the rest of the world being morally and intellectually degenerate to be a compelling reason to adopt their ways.

No one is calling you to adopt thirld world ways.

The widespread colorism shows that despite all fears, it is brown skin that is doomed, not white one.

Once embryo gene editing becomes cheap enough to be embraced by Latino, African and Indian masses, everyone picks genes for white skin.

World of the future is beautiful White world from pole to pole, dream of William Luther Pierce will come true (not exactly as he expected, but he will still smile and be happy when he will watch it from Valhalla).

This is the same insane fantasy as 'women will dispense with fatherhood and raise their children communally after conceiving by IVF'. Actually, that's more likely to generate a 100% Aryan world, given who tends to be preferred as a sperm donor. Most children will be born by essentially natural methods, for the same reason the orientals don't breed now- anything that makes children more of a uber-high-investment optimized decision is going to have fewer of them.

Not strictly on skin tone, but it is a marker for other factors, and it is making things all too easy for aspiring racists. No one cares to learn the subtle class markers like wearing your hat the wrong way or peasant pronunciation of certain vowels when you can just look at their face and instantly determine they are likely to be of a lower socio-cultural-intellectual-spiritual-economical class.

Then let me tell you a little tale about context. Far up north, where the trains don't run and the law is weak, live my in-laws. Dying small town, full of white and native trash. In that town, the only black people are the Jamaican doctors who are the only MDs who will work in a town like that. They're the richest and brightest people in town. So super-black Jamaicans are top of the SES heirarchy, but the rare less-black guy from downstate is considered a degen and likely thief. Nobody has any trouble telling them apart.

I am entirely unsurprised that small town people can remember the few exceptions to the rule.

If there's exceptions, it isn't "darker skin bad". This is the point.

More comments

We have the stats from the Netherlands, non-Western, non-East Asian migrants are usually net losses in tax, they comprise the bulk of the migrant pool. Mass immigration is expensive!

I suspect the solution from many of these countries will be to pivot to Indian immigration. Most of the culture war in Europe is focused on muslims more than immigrants as a whole, and the thought leaders on the right seems quite comfortable with Indians.

I've been hearing more and more angry anti-Indian sentiment lately.

Canadian post-COVID immigration was primarily Indian and even that caused backlash. And this is a country that's up there in terms of tolerating immigration. 1% per year for a decade with nary a peep.

The more you take the more you weaken selection effects and deal with the things people don't like about India.

Doesnt mean they wont try.

The more you take the more you weaken selection effects and deal with the things people don't like about India.

Exactly. Trying to compare data from decades prior when you were literally taking the top 1% (In intelligence, family wealth and cosmopolitanism) of Indians who had to hustle and grind every day to get out of India, when now there's scope for the truly Middle Class Indians to get out without moving heaven and earth and in sufficient numbers to easily form enclaves.

I'm surprised you didn't know this. It is called demographic dividend internationally. At least in germany, I distinctly remember being told about how great reduced fertility rates are due to it already in my childhood.

Immigration was also explicitly sold as a solution during the refugee crisis already. It seems the report just tries to warm up old talking points, which is unsurprising since these are the only acceptable conclusions based on the contemporary western worldview.

Broke: Destroying the ethnostate of Israel to end the apartheid of Palestine.

Woke: Destroying the ethnostate of Israel to ensure a source of white, high-fertility immigrants to Europe.

That’s why the Soviets were always vaguely butthurt about Zionism. They were well aware that a lot of their luminaries were Jewish and that an ethnonationalist movement catering specifically to them could very easily sap the USSR’s vitality, which it did. Thankfully Burgerland has Miami so this will never be a problem.

Wouldn't NYC or even Los Angeles be more relevant than Miami for keeping Jews in Burgerland? What's special about Miami?

Obviously I was speaking somewhat in jest, but LA and NYC are getting lame, Miami is still vital. And Israeli VIPs seem to like vacationing in Miami in a way they don’t in the other two places.

The better question is "what's wrong with NYC?" and the answer is a lot.

Bespoke: Destroying the ethnostate of Israel so Indians and Filipinos can settle in Israel and marginally increase global GDP.

Happy Trudeau noises

I know that I'm beating a dead horse, but if you're going to keep bringing it up, i'm going to keep saying it...

The root problem is that the beliefs and values of modern (ie post-modern) liberalism are not conducive to, and in some respects actively incompatible with, forming healthy and stable relationships. The decline in marriage and birth rates is a direct consequence of this, and I do not believe that this is something that can be solved via legal or economic interventions, you need to change the culture.

The root problem is that the beliefs and values of modern (ie post-modern) liberalism are not conducive to, and in some respects actively incompatible with, forming healthy and stable relationships.

Before 2010, birth rates were going up across the developed world, and either reached or came close to reaching replacement level.

We'll never know, but it may well be the case that modernity minus the smartphones, social media and dating apps could have been fine. This paper suggests that it is specifically short form video and dating apps that are the problem, but not video or social media in general (Facebook and Youtube don't seem to have affected birth rates, while Tinder, Tiktok and Instagram did).

Before 2010, birth rates were going up across the developed world, and either reached or came close to reaching replacement level.

What? That's not even close to correct. I was going to ask if you somehow mistook "undeveloped" for "developed," but even if you did, that's wrong too. This has been obvious, and well-discussed, for ages; fertility collapses as people move to modernity. Even if you confused the post-WWII "Baby Boom" (itself only a fleeting return to pre-WWII fertility rates), we watched this play out in real-time with South Korea, as even the devastation of the Korean War was only sufficient to drop them from over 6 per woman to just over 5, before a post war recovery, but Park Chung Hee's development plans in the late 60s pushed that off a fucking cliff, where it has bottomed out at around .75, with a recent dead cat bounce getting massive media play, as though it changes anything.

Smartphones are, at worst, just the developed world refusing to stop digging holes; even if you could wave a magic wand and not only make smart phone technology disappear, but fog people's minds to such an extent that they wouldn't even think to invent them again, you would not come close to solving the problem of "narcissism is a generational pathology; people are not looking to find a spouse, they are looking for actors to play the role of "my spouse" in the movie that is "my life"

(itself only a fleeting return to pre-WWII fertility rates)

This is technically correct, but misleading. If you adjust fertility for infant mortality, you see that the Baby Boom had the highest "first birthdays per mother" since the introduction of reasonably reliable birth records. When TFR was 3.5 in the Baby Boom, it was normal for a mother of four to see all four of them survive.

Global birth rates were declining in the 2000s, certainly (which is what your first chart shows). But if you narrow it down to the richest countries at the time, most were seeing mini-baby booms. The US, UK, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, China, Canada and Russia (plus a bunch more) all saw TFRs increase between 2000 and 2010.

These researchers estimate that the introduction of the iPhone specifically reduced TFR in the USA by 33-52%.

'Modernity' doesn't really fit as an explanation. After all, the 1950-70s were definitely more 'modern' than the 1930-40s, but that's when the Baby Boom happened. The Industrial Revolution (arguably the beginning of 'modernity') caused the global population to explode as it left behind the malthusian limits of agriculture.

Of course, perhaps framing it as 'narcissistic culture vs smartphones' is the wrong way to go about this. Lyman Stone makes a convincing case in the second half of this article that the kind of self-centred culture you criticise was created by the technology shock of digital entertainment (of which smartphones seem the most powerful part).

To that end, we should not see the “long decline” graph as a rebuttal to cell phones, nor should we see digital technology as a mere “accelerator of the trend.” The new selfishness is only a viable ideology because digital technologies made it viable. Sitting at home wouldn’t be appealing without the digital technologies! These norms would not have reached scale without the specific vehicles to propel them, and because socializing is a cooperation problem, even individuals who do not share emergent selfishness norms lose out on potential socializees. People don’t RSVP to the party because they are at home chatting to their AI girlfriend. Even people trying to live in the real world are impacted.

seeing Mini-baby booms

Japan didn't. The US had a dead cat bounce around the late 90's-early Aughtsas the Boomers had half as many kids as their parents; note that this did not manage to reach replacement level, even at its peak, before collapsing downward again. The trend has continued down since. Ditto the UK. These "mini-baby booms" - and dramatic emphasis on "mini" - are artifacts of the Boom generations finally getting around to having kids, having both delayed and having far fewer children than preceding generations, and the trends for subsequent generations fit the pattern.

There's a reason why Lasch felt the need to publish The Culture of Narcissism in '79, as by that point the writing was sufficiently on the wall that it could no longer be ignored.

'Modernity' doesn't really fit as an explanation. After all, the 1950-70s were definitely more 'modern' than the 1930-40s, but that's when the Baby Boom happened. The Industrial Revolution (arguably the beginning of 'modernity') caused the global population to explode as it left behind the malthusian limits of agriculture.

As I mentioned in my post, the Post WWII "Baby Boom" was more a return to normalcy after the Great Depression and the boys being shipped out to war; total births peaked in 1957, and TFR peaked in 1960 (note the free-fall immediately after '60). Worth noting that the term "Parasocial Relationship" was coined in 1955; bored suburban housewives whose kids were in school all day and had no immediate relatives nearby began thinking the characters on the TV were their friends. This happened 60+ years before we started asking why kids thought Twitch streamers were their friends; the smartphone didn't do this, atomization did.

The Industrial Revolution caused the population to explode by dramatically reducing childhood mortatility and letting people live far longer; it did not due so by making Jack and Diane fuck more often than rabbits. In fact, cities still showed lower births per family, as they have always historically done. This is so consistent that Spengler mentions it as a law of civilizations in The Decline of the West, and he was basing this on antiquity, long before even television, let alone smartphones.

The most we can say about technology - and also the favored bugaboo, financial precariousness - is that it's not helping things, but it's not the cause. I'd go so far as to say tech is downstream of the root cause; we were already atomized, and demanded amusements be made for us

Liberalism has been around for hundreds of years. The internet killed fertility rates. And evolution will take care of that in a generation or two if we don't nuke ourselves or singularity ourselves out of existence. The people that can keep having kids while taking cheap dopamine hits will pass on those precious horny doomscrolling genes. And life will continue.

Liberalism has been around for hundreds of years.

It obviously hasn't. Not in this form.

What are these beliefs and values of modern liberalism, as you understand them?

Specifically i think that liberalism's emphasis on individual emancipation and self-actaualization when coupled with the post-modernist desire to offboard agency and responsibility to impersonal forces results in a worldview that actively incentivizes social atomization while amplifying and exacerbating "cluster-b" personality traits.

That's an interesting take, are you willing to write more about your reasoning?

I probably should should write a longer effort-post on the topic at some point but the short version goes something like this...

Starting a family or being in a committed relationship means chosing to be bound to another person and accepting that your interests are no longer solely your own. This is a difficult pill to swallow for someone who's been raised on a cultural diet of "Follow your bliss" and radical emancipation, which is why so many are reluctant to do it.

This difficulty is in turn compounded by the offboarding of agency and responsibility because even if the are able to recognize the pill as something they need, they still need to actually make the choice, and that's not going to happen if they can't accept the choice as theirs to make.

What is the concrete difference between liberalism's emphasis on "individual emancipation" if in fact people delegate "agency and responsibility" to The System? This tension sounds like a contradiction to me, so I must be missing something.

It just sounds like many people in fact do not want committed relationships.

It just sounds like many people in fact do not want committed relationships.

That's precisely, my point.

You can be a good liberal who wants all the things a good liberal is supposed to want, or you can be a person who wants to be in a committed relationship. You can not be both because being one ruins you for the other.

There does seem to be a general trend that whenever you elevate a single aspect of a culture or a single ideology to define an entire society, that society breaks down. To give an example, if you look at most historic western countries post 1776/1789, they tended to function on a mix of liberalism, local denominations of christianity, nationalism (which was historically tied to liberalism), regionalism, and tons of other local values and traditions. It's the same everywhere; all societies inherit tons of different values that are in negotiation with each other. When you try and elevate a singular value system to dominate all the others or erase all the others, that's when you have problems.

Sometimes it can be clearly disastrous, like in the case of Communism or Nazism, but other times the damage is more insidious. "Hypocrisy" often is not just someone lying for self interest; it's often a thoughtful and useful compromise between two or more values both of which are important.

This is just the natural tendency of power, whose ultimate destiny is always a doomed totalitarianism.

Power centers are insecure and thus always looking to destroy their competition, in doing so creating new competition. But in the process they grow larger and never really shrink. Eventually one power center takes up everything, and it is impossible to rule over everything, or if it is, one grows larger until it is impossible.

Then that one power center collapses in on itself leading to a new wildly competitive landscape, starting the cycle anew.

China's alternation between eras of hegemony and warlords is perhaps the best example of this phenomenon but it permeates every human society from the largest Empire to your bowling club.

I feel it's like trying to convince pandas in the zoo to fuck, when they just want to sleep and eat bamboo. Maybe it makes more sense to import some white dogs and paint them to look like pandas. If a lineage doesn't want to sustain itself, there just... isn't much to be done.

Are the little ghetto babies a drain on government finances or not? I'm confused by your logic. Maybe a missing word somewhere?

I interpret OP to mean that little ghetto babies are a drain on government finances in the short term, as resources need to spent raising them, but they are not a drain in the long term, as they (theoretically) will be fully grown adults who can support themselves with minimal government assistance. I don't think OP missed any words.

It seems like an odd thing to focus on -- I thought that they were also the most likely children to grow into adults who are also a net drain?

You are correct but the majority of poor people aren't criminals and do actually provide goods and services to the economy, while also purchasing other goods and services.

On the balance of the odds, a "little ghetto baby" will be a net positive impact on society, in that they're a human who will have relationships, experience joy, and be a semi-productive economic net gain

They provide some goods and services, while consuming more than they provide, on average.

So they're likely to be net negative economically, but God loves them even so.

This was my understanding as well. Don't ghetto babies usually become ghetto adults who are an even greater net drain on the country in terms of crime, prisoner maintenance, etc? A country should avoid increasing the amount of ghetto adults, you reduce future ghetto adults by avoiding ghetto babies in the present.

The ghetto adults would have not contributed much labor or taxes to the retirements of normal retired adults in many situations.

Most adults in the ghetto are not within the justice system. Welfare might be an argument though.

The "ghetto baby child" was more of a joking allusion to the old Presley song rather than a serious proposition that specifically ghetto kids is good for the state. They generally aren't.

Out of curiosity, have any of these reports so far suggested that birth control access, abortion, and women's liberation generally might be a contributing factor to the decline in fertility? And have they suggested any solutions to such things that might go against the modern liberal feminist views on such things?

While its true various causes are "contributing factors" to some effect, socially speaking when you say something is a cause, you are implicitly saying it is to blame, or should be changed. Take this report, for example, discussed today on Twitter:

Even though women’s enhanced agency is an important factor in determining fertility in most developed nations today, its role in altering birth rates has depended on a related element. That factor is the ability of women to be assured they can reap the financial and personal rewards from their education while raising their children. The more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable “dads” and not disappointing “duds,” the higher will be the birthrate in the face of greater female agency.

Therefore, even though the major factor in the decline of fertility is increased women’s agency, the real downside or obstacle is the need for husbands and fathers to reliably demonstrate their commitment. I will provide two related models that make the point that the real problem is a mismatch between what women need to enjoy the fruits of their autonomy and what credible commitments men can make.

This excerpt uses a mix of descriptivist language like: "important/major factor", "role", "related element", and carefully phrases the prescriptivist language ("real downside/problem", "obstacle") to prescribe the conventional modern liberal solutions.

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