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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   829 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 23, 2026

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I just saw a tweet and I don’t care if it’s factually true because a it’s definitely directionally true but it seems like Humans overall just hit below replacement fertility. That would seem existential at some point. Shouldn’t we be considering radical policy choices. One big issue is men dropping out of the labor force. One radical thing we could do would be positive male discrimination. Make firms hirer men whenever possible. There are probably a lot more radical policies but more stable male careers would definitely seem to help. Not saying we should do that specifically but it probably should be inside the Overton window.

Seems like this might be worth a top level post in the culture war thread. 'Affirmative action for men to solve the fertility crisis' is a fairly big topic.

The radical policy choice will be what religion of marauding barbarians your descendants choose to lose to. They'll have fixed the fertility issue, probably in the most straightforward manner.

https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8yG0N6HnOy8g/2d3c25c3-b784-4c9c-454f-14d8d304ee00/w=1350

There are billions of humans on the planet. There are going to be billions of humans on the planet for the next hundred years. A tiny blip below replacement means the number might shrink very slowly for a decade or two. It is concerning economically for a society built around the assumption that each generation will be exponentially larger than the previous one. It is concerning culturally for ethnic and cultural groups which are below average and worried about being replaced by groups which are above average. It is NOT an existential risk to the human race. There are a bunch of people who have lots of children, and if low birth rates become an existential risk to certain groups then the ones having more children will become more prominent and more confident in their belief structures that cause them to have more children. (This includes but is not limited to minorities. See Malcolm Collins and the pro-natalist movement).

Humanity will adapt and survive, as it always does.

Yes agree. I almost added a sentence on this. Today it’s more of a worry about maintaining advanced civilization as tfr is most acute amongst those groups. And even then you likely have 100-200 years.

Supposedly Rome had the same issue around the time of Augustus and they tried to reverse the tfr fall with legal changes. The decline will take centuries, but what comes after a dark age is concerning.

I think it's well-within the Overton window if you're a conservative or at least "family oriented." The problem is that it's verboten among most blue-tribers, for whom any incentives, no matter how gentle, toward more traditional family structures are equated to regressive coercion. The best they can do is support cheaper/subsidized childcare, which isn't nothing. However, if the Nordic countries where that already exists are any reference, cheaper childcare alone does little to promote additional births.

It does help. Cheap childcare, social safety nets, and generous parental leave are commonly cited as reasons for why the birthrate in those countries are higher than their neighbors. It just isn't quite enough, as there are problems related to birthrate that seemingly cannot be solved just by throwing money at them.

Things working out relatively fine in the Nordics until sometime in the 2010s. Things only really collapsed in the wake of Corona.

It seems to me that the various family friendly welfare interventions did something if we look at fertility in the wake of their introduction in the ~70s but now there is some different problem(s) driving the collapse in fertility. So while a nation like the US could possibly get some kind of benefit from introducing something similar, it's also extremely unlikely to actually get close to solving things.

Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?

Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?

The Nordics, like most countries, saw a collapse in marriage that caused the collapse in fertility. The timing does suggest that smartphones were the cause (although this demographer thinks that the pre-2012 collapse was due to the recession whereas post-2012 is due to dating apps and shortform video). Interventions in the US would probably be more effective because there is a population of religious Americans that already want to marry and have children, so the incentives would be more effective. Whereas in secular Scandinavia paying people more money to have children won't do much if kids interfere with their expressive individualism.

I'm not sure that's accurate for Sweden. While marriage rates have declined, they don't seem to correlate particularly well with fertility over the longer term, and I don't think the Swedish data supports a declining marriage -> declining fertility explanation.

Sweden's fertility rate was 1.68 in 1980, rose to 2.14 in 1990, fell to 1.55 in 2000, and rose again to 1.98 in 2010. What has changed very dramatically is the age of first marriage. For women it went from about 26 in 1980 to around 35 today.

But marriage hasn't really been a prerequisite for having children in Sweden for a long time. By the mid-1970s, first births were already happening earlier on average than first marriages. Long-term cohabitation, usually called a sambo relationship, is completely normalised, including for raising children. Births outside marriage increased from 39.7% in 1980 to 47.0% in 1990, while fertility rose from 1.68 to 2.14 over the same period. That seems pretty hard to reconcile with declining legal marriage itself being the cause of lower fertility.

I'd be cautious about cross-cultural comparisons of marriage rates for this reason. Marriage doesn't have the same cultural valence everywhere, and "unmarried" in Sweden doesn't necessarily mean someone isn't in a stable relationship, unready to have children or that they would be negatively socially affected by having children. It might still be a causal mechanism somewhere else but it doesn't seem to be in Sweden.

There's also a problem with looking at the proportion currently married. If someone has children in their early 30s and divorces at 45, that later divorce lowers the marriage rate without having anything to do with whether those children were born. What we'd really want to know is how many people are in stable relationships at childbearing ages and how likely those couples are to have children.

Interestingly, during Sweden's fertility decline in the 2010s, first-marriage and first-birth rates both fell while entry into cohabiting relationships remained remarkably stable. So people don't seem to have stopped forming relationships. Rather, people already in relationships became less likely to make the transition to either marriage or parenthood. Combined with the earlier information, that suggests that both marriage rates and relationship formation are probably a fairly poor proxies for whatever is actually driving the fertility decline.

Also curious is that the desire to eventually have children seems to have remained fairly stable in the Nordic countries over the last 50 years, with two or three children still being the typical desired number, even as actual fertility has declined substantially.

Something is causing the decline in fertility but I strongly doubt it is lack marriage and even relationship formation, in Sweden at least.

Perhaps it's smartphones, perhaps it's a whole host of things reaching some critical point of delaying family formation. Who knows?

My bet, as always, is on a combination of industrialization, urbanization, welfare state, electronic entertainment, propaganda and the inevitably declining value of labor. Good luck reversing all those! The world of tomorrow will not be the world of yesterday, and human life will not be what it was.

inevitably declining value of labor

For at least this I think it's the opposite that is the issue. The value of labour is increasing which means that the opportunity cost of having children is increasing as society gets richer. Generous parental leave doesn't really solve this and might even make it worse.

Since there is zero sun competition for some scarce resources, like housing, this leads to delayed family formation.

Cheaper childcare is, literally, nothing*. It's a subsidy for moms to work, which is why progressives are OK with it.

*in high income countries

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