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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34365 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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I'm going to use this text, posted in last week's thread, as a jumping off point to make a little effortpost on a boring area that's actually kind of important, and where I know a little bit: treasury management!

If the FDIC or other banking entity does not cover deposits, any business that depends on SVB and has a

$125K bimonthly payroll will have to do furloughs or layoffs. That's basically any business above ~15-20 people.

... From a survey of my VC and startup friends, it seems reasonable to assume that 25% of that are extremely dependent on SVB (e.g. payroll, no cash sitting elsewhere, and incoming customer payments aren't going to cover anything).

This will only happen if your CFO is incompetent and doesn't do treasury management.

Treasury management - the most basic practice of any corporate finance department - is the practice of managing corporate cash in order to earn interest on what isn't being used , ensure that whatever cash is needed by the business is available, and also minimize tail risks like your bank going belly up.

Step 1 is observing that you can get 4.5% on 4 week treasuries. These are, regardless of amount, backed by full faith and credit of US Gov.

Now suppose you are a business with $500k of biweekly expenses ($500k due on Mar 15, $500k due on Mar 31). You have $20M in venture capital remaining which gives you about 1 year 8 months of runway.

All of that - minus $500k or so needed for short term investments - goes into 4-8 week treasuries which you reinvest whenever they mature. This earns 4.5% or about $900k/year in essentially free money. Money sitting in government bonds with duration < 90 days is called cash equivalent by corporate finance people.

Your not incompetent CFO just extended your runway to 1 year 9 months.

Step 2: ensure that the maturity dates of these cash equivalents line up to your payroll dates. $500k cash is due on Mar 15 for payroll/etc. Fortunately, $500k worth of your 4 week treasuries got turned into cash on Mar 9 (typically the maturity date is thurs).

Another $500k cash is due on Mar 31. You have another $500k worth of 4 week treasuries maturing into your bank account on Mar 30 (a thurs) or maybe Mar 23 (also a thurs) if you really want to be safe.

Step 3: line up a short term credit facility.

Some expenses are less predictable. Part of the job of CFO is to project these expenses, come up with upper bounds, and inform the CEO what it will cost if these bounds are exceeded. Then the CFO goes to a few banks and lines up credit facilities - a $2-3M line of short term credit backed by cash equivalents from step 2.

Step 4: have a few bank accounts including one at a "too big to fail".

That's treasury management, obviously oversimplified.

Now suppose your CFO actually did his job. It's Mar 13 and SVB just imploded. You had $500k sitting in SVB for Mar 15 payroll and that's locked up. Here's what you do:

Mar 11: Quickly call up your credit facility and tell them to wire $500k to your payroll provider on Mon. Call your payroll provider and tell them to confirm with the bank that this is happening to avoid any snafus.

Mar 13-14: As soon as SVB allows it, wire the $250k FDIC insured money to your credit facility. Also redirect treasury maturity payments to said account, and take another $250-270k of cash equivalent and don't reinvest them.

Mar 16 or Mar 23 (a thursday when your maturity payment gets deposited): get $270k worth of 4 week treasury maturity payments from the US govt. Wire this money back to your credit facility.

Net result is that you make payroll with no interruption. You just lost $250k to SVB's errors and paid your credit facility $20k in interest. The end.

your CFO

My impression from reading Hacker News comments this past weekend is that even having a CFO is an unfair expectation to levy against a fledgling startup.

I'm kind of wondering what value add VC's provide if not giving founders advice on basic skills like this.

The value add is having lots of money and picking which projects they go to. I'm sure the good VCs also provide lots of useful advice but their main economic role is money man.

Tech world is really coming off as a bunch of little over paid children right now.

Because a massive bank lied to them and because incompetent federal regulators didn’t catch it?

Should they just have already assumed the government was made up mostly of completely useless rent seeking tyrants? Keep in mind a lot of them are pretty young and may not have figured that out yet.

Should they just have already assumed the government was made up mostly of completely useless rent seeking tyrants? Keep in mind a lot of them are pretty young and may not have figured that out yet.

I'd argue being young is even more reason for them to know. My wife's boomer parents are still living on in the shadow of their upbringing, where they assume the institutions (at least the ones run by Democrats) are unquestionably good, honorable, trustworthy and competent. The continuous rolling systemic weaknesses and disasters of the last 20 years have done absolutely zero to disabuse them of that notion. Where as, I've seen numerous polls that show young people who've grown up knowing nothing but the the absolute clusterfuck of the last 20 years have record low levels of trust in institutions.

All that said, I found this data point which makes me question a lot of that, and maybe come around to your side.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1078192/trust-government-generation-us/

Some of the data points are funny. Like in 2009 after Obama won the presidency, Millennials had a 43% trust in government. That doesn't last. Biden being elected in 2020 results in a fairly large bump in trust for every generation except Millennials. Weirdly enough the data skips straight from Oct 2015 to April 2017, so we don't get a snapshot of the post Trump trust score.

So I donno, looking over the data, it may be hard to tease apart age cohort from political party in power, with younger cohorts generally trusting D's more, and older cohorts seeming to trust R's more. With the seemingly notable exception of Biden. In fact, when I really look at Millennials on the last 20 years of the graph, they do seem abnormally trusting. Once again, with the giant glaring exception of Biden winning office. What's up with that?

I’m late GenX, and I took “government” class in high school. I’ve heard Boomers talk about “civics” class, but my cohort and younger talk about “social studies” classes. Not a comprehensive answer, just an anecdote which might be a piece of the puzzle.

Back in my day we had “social studies” in elementary/middle and “government” in high school. The former was state and national history. Looks like the current requirements have a “social studies” category including history, government, geography and sometimes economics.

I think it’s a catchall term, not a shibboleth.

Millennial here (or at least definitely somewhere between GenX and Zoomer), we indeed had Social Studies (mostly history, maybe also literature) when I was in public school. When I transferred to a charter school, I had more specific history classes. Didn't exactly have civics.

Things started notably unraveling under fairly recently and Biden took the blame.

The bank didn't lie to them, they published their 10-K (with a full balance sheet on page 95) that clearly showed unrealized losses on their HFM portfolio of $15 billion that nearly exceeded their owners equity of $16.295 billion showing they were nearly insolvent using market prices on Dec 31, or if they were ever forced to sell. Maybe my expectations are too high but if I had more than a million dollars in uninsured assets in a bank I'd be arsed to read through their annual report and be able to do arithmetic.

The issue here isn't the government. It's running a business with $millions in cash but not having a person familiar with basic corporate finance to help them manage it, as well as not spending a bit of time on investopedia to learn it themselves.

Banks fail. The government has rules in place as to what happens when they do, they require banks to disclose these rules (e.g. FDIC insured up to $250k) and these rules are enforced. Is it your belief that SVB stopped disclosing FDIC insurance limits? SVB is only minimally a story of government being useless/corrupt - at least, it wasn't a story about govt corruption until Yellen/Biden decided to take money from workers and give it (indirectly) to wealthy venture capitalists.

it wasn't a story about govt corruption until Yellen/Biden decided to take money from workers and give it (indirectly) to wealthy venture capitalists.

The money to make depositors (who are mostly employers, not VCs) whole is coming from a fund paid into by banks, not taxpayers.

My mistake on whether the funds will be taken from workers or people who deposit money in banks that engage in prudent risk management.

But I guess going forward, there's no point bothering to put your deposits into the reliable banks.

The money to make depositors (who are mostly employers, not VCs)

Who owns these depositors, and has been furiously lobbying the government to protect their asset over the weekend?

That’s basically the same thing as taxpayers. People who didn’t invest in shit bank have to pay for shit bank.

And the correlation between pays a lot in taxes and has a lot of deposits is likely quite high.

I mean really, is a safe full of one pay-period worth of physical cash too much to ask? Is this how financially illiterate we have become?

These motherfuckers need to eat shit. CFOs won’t get it until they see Roku employees setting up GoFundMe’s for lunch money.

I mean really, is a safe full of one pay-period worth of physical cash too much to ask?

Yes.

In this scenario is HQ going to mail me an envelope stuffed with cash or do I have to fly to San Francisco and pick it up?

George Bailey will be waiting for you in the Bay Area asking if you can hold out a bit

Money orders only, sorry.

There was a woman at my grandmother’s retirement home who’d worked in a Saudi hospital in the 80s or 90s. She oversaw their payroll switch from carrying in a literal sack of money to the exotic technology of checks. People weren’t used to working with them, but they were a way more efficient solution than handing out cash.

Judging by the response to SBF, there are lots of pundits who would likely bite that bullet.

The tech world is millions of people in the US alone and not entirely in silicone Valley.

A brand new company consisting of 10 tech workers lacks a mature corporate structure and a full C suite. I don't know what else we expect.

Acting like adults. We are talking about Stanford types probably one older mba.

But also referring to all the VC crying on twitter.

So I’m starting to just assume there’s zero reason for regional banks to exists. They don’t have proprietary advantages like the big banks. GS with complexity/cap markets, C with scale ability to do transactions anywhere etc.

I don’t see any reason for a person to keep deposits in no edge regional banks. They pay you barely anything. Seems like on the lending side they don’t have any market advantage to generate enough yield. Business models seem dependent on 0% deposits which no one should own.

Depending on deposits just seems like a bad business model to me going forward. And 0% deposits allowing you to make bad financial decisions.

The market seems to agree with you

Regional banks do have proprietary advantage - domain specific knowledge of regional industry and real estate as well as local relationships. JPM or BofA need to have fairly uniform underwriting rules and these rules will not necessarily allow them to service some particular industry with weird cash flow patterns (such as startups). Rapidly scaling SAAS is a very good example of this.

Another great service SVB provided is a degree of self dealing/moral hazard - founders can get a mortgage backed by illiquid equity if they do corporate banking with SVB. This sort of self dealing is a problem for startups, but it is not really a problem and is a useful feature for family offices.

But how is that translating into good risks adjusted returns? They bought treasuries for size.

And the other business seems like a we give you good terms on loans so you deposit them with us. And then invest ??? For returns others can’t get. That all works if you can (1) get higher returns from relationships (2) have some real business diversification so your not overly exposed to one risks. Neither of these things seem true.

But the larger issue a deposit based bank which regionals seem to be heavily dependent on can’t function in this new world. Deposits move too fast. The whole business model seemed based on cheap loans (no edge here) to get deposits (no value anymore).

As a small business owner I couldn't imagine trying to deal with a bank like Citi or BoA. The general rule of thumb is that you want a bank big enough to offer the kind of products you need but no bigger. I use a regional (though I could probably use a small local) and if I have a problem I can call the girl who handles my account from the number in my Rolodex and usually get an in-person meeting scheduled for the same day. IF I'm dealing with some huge national I'm stuck calling a customer service line where I spend half the afternoon on hold and the other half trying to explain my problem to someone who has limited power to solve it and whose evaluations are based on how quickly they can get me to hang up.

Yeah, I'm only exposed to the small business's accountant's side of dealing with the banks when there's tech issues, but there's absolutely practical day-to-day benefits of smaller banks.

Judging by how we prioritized fixing post-cutover bugs at the bank I worked for, the best bank is the one where your CFO can call their CEO at 6am (time zones!) and start the conversation with "What the flying fuck?"

So I’m starting to just assume there’s zero reason for regional banks to exists.

This whole affair has actually convinced me of the exact opposite - there's no reason for gigantic banks which can cause the entire economy and unrelated businesses to go under/suffer when placed under stress. There shouldn't be any banks which are systemically important and require bailouts in order to prevent the collapse of the entire economy. Beyond the incredible fragility induced by having corrupt financial institutions with broken incentives (note the people actually profiting off these issues and selling stock in SVB before the news broke), the sheer concentration of wealth and power that occurs in those banks gives them far more influence over the levers of national power than is healthy for society.

So then why have GSIBs losts. They have higher capital ratios. They’ve lost every regulatory fight for a decade. The shit SVB did would never be allowed at the mega banks.

Being that SVB was deemed systematic and got a full bailout it’s obvious banks like them were benefiting from easier regulations while still being systematic.

I guess the solution is the regionals are treated like the GSIBs. So they need to raise their tier one capital about 50-80% right now to fit the same standards as the GSIBs. And we just drop the asset cap down to 10 billion for regulatory reasons since these guys are claiming their depositors need protected.

GSIB

Could you please explain this acronym?

Global systematically-important bank.

“Too big to fail” (without bringing down everything else too)

I'm sorry but could you please reword your comment? I have no idea how to parse the sentence "So then why have GSIBs losts." and the grammar errors elsewhere leave me unwilling to talk in depth on a technical subject.

@sliders1234 appears to be arguing: if GSIBs are so powerful, we should expect them to have less regulation. Mid-sized banks like SVB are dodging regulations which (hopefully!) apply to full-size ones, but are still getting the benefits of bailouts. If we are giving them the benefits they should also be paying the costs.

I don’t know what the bit about “asset cap” means.

$250 billion in assets was trigger for tighter regs.

Yeah, seems like SVB's core competency was supposed to be "we do your treasury management for you for a fraction of the cost of a CFO" (they were paying treasury like rates on corporate money market accounts). Unfortunately, they were incompetent (they had long dated treasuries/agencies and no hedges).

Money market accounts != treasury management.

However, robo-treasury management (taking 10bps off the top and automating some projections) might well be a useful niche and I should investigate if it exists.

Something like that exists. Raymond James gives you $50 million fdic. They do this by taking your account and putting it in 200 banks.

It was hard for me to wrap my head around this, until I got it into my noggin that all the alarm about start-ups really is about start-ups. This was the start-up bank. So you had someone who decided that "Internet of Things for your parrot" was a great idea, they pitched it, some VC threw money at them, they put that into SVB and relied on it for everything. They weren't generating any profit yet, so any customer payments or subscriptions were in effect meaningless. They were running the business on cash injections from their backers. And when SVB went "poof!" all the money is now frozen there, there isn't any money coming in otherwise, so they literally can't pay wages etc. and may have to go bust.

And the problem from SVB's side seems to be: loads of money coming in as deposits. Can't lend this out and make money off it (because this is a start-up bank, nobody is in a position to borrow money, they're living off their fairy godmothers) so they bought some kind of bonds? (unclear on this because I'm ignorant) which, because of interest rate hikes, now became unprofitable. Somebody got panicky, started drawing money out, and that started a bank run, and here we are. More or less, this is how I understand it, could be totally wrong.

Pretty much you hit the major points. Of course the whole point of being a niche bank is that you can charge higher service fees. And being a niche bank means that you can't hedge the risk completely of all your customers going down at once - so you really need high liquidity investment portfolio.

Thanks for the writeup, I at least found this interesting. Don't get much exposure to finance.

All of that - minus $500k or so needed for short term investments - goes into 4-8 week treasuries which you reinvest whenever they mature. This earns 4.5% or about $900k/year in essentially free money. Money sitting in government bonds with duration < 90 days is called cash equivalent by corporate finance people.

Is this a function of the current ahistorically (at least in my lifetime...) high interest rates? Were people still buying 4 week T-bills even when interest rates were shit, or in 'normal times' are there better short-term investments?

People were buying a mix of 4 week t-bills and other short term debt in order to put their money to work. It was not always paying 4.5% interest though, a while back it was maybe 0.1-0.2% + protection against tail risks of your bank shutting down.

Not sure about details but I logged in to work this morning and saw an announcement from our hopefully-not-incompetent CFO that this was basically what we are doing. Yay, I keep getting paid until the world financial system collapses. (which may be tomorrow, alas)

There are services that help automate treasury management for smaller companies now, like Vesto.

Until last year T-Bills were paying ~nothing, and it had been that way since 2008, an eternity in the startup world. There was no direct financial incentive to do anything more complicated than park your money in a checking account. Sure, ideally everyone should have been actively managing things to hedge against bank failure, but startups have a zillion things to worry about. SVB's pitch was basically that they were experts on startup finance and would relieve you of having to worry about this yourself. The social proof of these claims was impeccable.

So, yes, many startups screwed up. It turns out that safeguarding $20M isn't entirely trivial. But it's a very predictable sort of screwup. There wasn't really anyone within their world telling them this, it wasn't part of the culture, nobody knew anyone who had been burned by it.

And, well, maybe it should be trivial to safeguard $20M? "You have to actively manage your money or there's a small chance it might disappear" is actually a pretty undesirable property for a banking system to have. The fact that it's true in the first place is a consequence of an interlocking set of government policies — the Fed doesn't allow "narrow banks" (banks that just hold your money in their Fed master accounts rather than doing anything complicated with it) and offers no central bank digital currency (so the only way to hold cash that's a direct liability of the government is to hold actual physical bills). Meanwhile the FDIC only guarantees coverage of up to $250K, a trivial amount by the standards of a business.

The net result of these policies is that the government is effectively saying "If you want to hold dollars in a practical liquid form you have to hold them in a commercial bank. We require that bank to engage in activities that carry some level of risk. We'll try to regulate that bank to make sure it doesn't blow up, but if we fail, that's your problem."

"WTF?" is a reasonable response to this state of affairs. If these companies had had the option to put their money into a narrow bank or hold it as a direct liability of the government, but had nonetheless chosen to trust it to a private bank because they were chasing higher returns, I'd have zero sympathy for them. But our system declines to make those safer options available.

How do you allow a narrow bank without collapsing the entire banking system? Once you can put your cash in a place that has no risks aside from actual fraud and sovereign default, why would you put it anywhere else? And if you won't put it anywhere else, how do private loans get made? This is made worse by the fact that a narrow bank today would pay more than savings, but even if a narrow bank paid zero, the fact that the risk was literally as close to zero as possible would likely result in most commercial bank deposits vanishing, and then who would make loans?

Wouldn't banks just increase their interest rate to attract depositors? It's self correcting: some people would choose the least risky option, their money would no longer be available for risky investments, and so the remaining people with less risk aversion would get greater returns.

I think risk aversion is strong enough that the banks would not be able to increase their interest rates sufficiently while still loaning money profitably. That is, fractional reserve banking (and thus the whole financial system) is based on fooling people into taking more risk than they'd like.

I'd imagine the banks that make money off your deposits would actually have to give you a cut of the pie as enticement. And really, why shouldn't they?

In theory. But in practice the federal government bails out “risky banks” so question is whether there is much juice to be squeezed.

Once you can put your cash in a place that has no risks aside from actual fraud and sovereign default, why would you put it anywhere else?

Even a small yield on things like private loans would be worth it for larger sums. I'm sure that there's a certain subset of business that would take 0% yield for 0% risk, but I don't think that's everyone.

Commercial banks could offer higher interest rates on deposits, lend out their own capital, or issue bonds. If this didn't provide sufficient funding for whatever amount of lending the government wanted to see, the government itself could loan money to banks to re-lend.

Really though, the easiest patch to the system would just be for FDIC insurance to (officially) cover unlimited balances, or at least scale high enough that only the largest organizations had to worry about it. It makes no sense to require millions of entities (if you include individuals of moderate net worth) to constantly juggle funds to guard against a very small chance of a catastrophic outcome that most of them aren't well positioned to evaluate the probability of. That's exactly the sort of risk insurance is for.

If the concern is that this will create moral hazard because banks that take more risks will be able to pay higher interest rates and fully-insured depositors will have no reason to avoid them, the solution is just for regulators to limit depository institutions to only taking on risks the government is comfortable insuring against. Individuals should be allowed to take on risk to chase returns, but there's no compelling reason to offer this sort of exposure through deposit accounts in particular. Doing so runs contrary to the way most people mentally model them or wish to use them.

Why not require banks to buy insurance instead of government regulation? Get market pricing on risks instead of government fiat?

Who are you going to buy global financial collapse insurance from? What counterparty can be relied on to pay out in such a scenario?

In the case of global financial collapse the dollar is probably worthless so who cares?

Who are you going to buy global financial collapse insurance from? What counterparty can be relied on to pay out in such a scenario?

You gotta have physical. Physical gold, yes. But also physical land you can reach, physical guns, and a physical body of followers you can trust.

Why not require banks to buy insurance instead of government regulation?

Forcing banks to buy insurance still is government regulation.

Yes it is. I should’ve made it clear. One is command and control (ie you must do XYZ). Think old school environmental regulation. The second is more like a carbon tax. It regulates via pricing arguably allowing a more accurate risk.

Insurance is a key if not the main function of the US government and many other governments. They can print money. There’s no insurance company big enough to insure. SVB. Maybe a consortium could also insure a little. But the insurance industry is not bigger than the banking industry. They couldn’t insure a bank issue that is systematic with multiple failing. You would move the stystematic risks for bank failure to banks failure causing insurance failure. AIG had a quant insurance unit that insured some financial risks and surprise surprise they sold it too cheap and blew up.

This results in a fully socialized lending system with the government making all the decisions. Which is likely where we're headed ANYWAY, I'll grant, but it seems like a bad end.

Once you can put your cash in a place that has no risks aside from actual fraud and sovereign default, why would you put it anywhere else?

In ye olden times also known as "the late 80s", it was common (at least in Northern Europe) for bank accounts to pay actual interest, particularly for fixed term deposits. This would be that same thing expect instead of a fixed term, the depositer would be taking some minor risk in exhange for return on their deposit. Fully guaranteed accounts might in turn pay no or even a small negative interest (eg. you have to pay an annual fee for the bank to safeguard your money).

Since when have banks been banned from owning Tbills? They can 100% hold safe cash like instruments that can be liquidated quickly.

The phrase "Narrow Bank" is the name of an actual bank that the Fed shut down because it did not lend out money and just held 100% safe reserves.

https://archive.is/TqCJX

The issue there is more that the Fed pays interest on excess reserves and that bank was just trying to abuse that system. The fact they could abuse it shows how much of an abomination the whole reserves system has become; but, I don't think an actual 100% reserves bank that just held required reserves at the Fed and kept the rest in T-bills or money in its own vaults would get in trouble.

No, the explicit reasoning of the fed in blocking TNB is that it would discourage people from putting money into institutions that lend.

That is not at all my interpretation of the Fed's statement. I read it as more in line with my interpretation. They explicitly state many times in their statement that the issue is over what institutions should receive interest on reserves. If The Narrow Bank did not receive interest on reserves the Fed wouldn't care IMO. The article in the archive link above also explicitly makes note that The Narrow Bank was trying to do arbitrage on the Fed's policy of paying interest on reserves. I think you are just mistaken.

Nah it really must be more ideological, or something else like that. To the extent any journalist or economist was speculating that the Fed wants to avoid paying interest on excess reserves, they would be flatly incorrect. Central bank reserves are a closed system, so to the extent that a narrow bank is attracting them, that's just a flow from other banks where they were beforehand. The central bank is paying the same interest out either way. Other non-depository institutions (who aren't eligible for IOR) using reverse-repos to get (nearly) the base interest rate is just a workaround to help smooth out the system (ineligible because of congressional rules; the central bank would almost certainly prefer to pay it out in as simple a fashion as possible).

And the central bank is not trying to avoid paying out interest -- it's a policy choice in the first place to pay IOR (that's the whole rate maintenance regime now: instead of using open-market-operations to maintain a positive interest rate, they simply flood the system with excess reserves and pay interest on them directly, which is way simpler). It sounds like the Fed had been narrowing the gap between ceiling and floor rates anyway, because they never were using that lower rate to try to really save money or whatever.

To be explicit, the Fed Reverse's refusal (and later notice of rulemaking) was about The Narrow Bank (and other) being able to access the interest on excess reserve rate accounts (possibly only at full rate? I can't find the final rule, if there ever was one). The Narrow Bank was chartered in Connecticut and still has a cert good til August of 2023, though I think their specific business model is focused very heavily on those rates and thus they haven't opened for accounts yet.

((I expect groups like the Narrow Bank and Custodia are probably more about the philosophical point, anyway.))

They could have put their money in larger more diversified bank subject to more regulations including liquidity stress tests that SVB successfully lobbied to be exempted from. The VC world and their startups weren't seeking maximum safety and unfairly barred from seeking it. They sought out a smaller bank with less regulatory oversight that specialized in their industry presumably because that offered benefits.

Would those stress tests actually detect any issues, or would SVB have been fine either way, with or without the changes they lobbied for? Has anyone actually checked that, or is this just an empty pro-government regulation talking point?

I am not an expert on how the Dodd Frank Act Stress Test is conducted and I don't know whether it would have caught this. Forbes says that "will we get fucked if the fed raises rates" is a basic scenario they should have been testing for and that they were exempt from disclosing whether they had enough high quality liquid assets to cover 30 days of distressed cash flow. I don't know whether the standard definition of distressed cash flow includes this sort of bank run. I suspect someone who is an expert on all this will do a big analysis in the next week or so.

I'm suggesting that the VC & startups were not maximally risk averse in their banking selection. Even if you think regulation adds no security, "hey let's put all our money in a bank specializing in one industry" seems obviously more risky than "let's deposit in a massive diversified bank like BoA. The idea that because The Narrow Bank was shut down they had no safer option than SVB doesn't make much sense to me.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/mayrarodriguezvalladares/2023/03/11/warning-signals-about-silicon-valley-bank-were-all-around-us/amp/

The burden of proof is on people calling for regulation and complaining about SVB lobbying to actually show that the stress tests they were allegedly exempt of would actually have prevented the situation. Otherwise, this is just pure partisanship without any substance: if you claim the problem here is lack of regulation and stress test, you better show that what you propose is more than empty quasi-religious ritual to appease the regulation gods, and that it would actually causally achieve substantial outcome.

+1

Elizabeth Warren sent up her offering the regulations Gods in this morning's NYT.

Which also means she had her staff write the op-ed over the weekend. What a great boss.

Greg Mankiw says that the stress tests probably wouldn't have caught this, although I imagine that they'll be modified to cover this scenario in the future.

The quality contributions roundup has a lot of discussion of fertility. I found it pretty disconcerting to read, since it all seemed to assume that the only way to get women to have kids is to enforce a top down dystopia. This is not my personal experience in my social surroundings★, but of course I live in Israel so I don't count‡.

Anyway, here is my follow-up question:

If you had the ability to set policies that will encourage increased fertility, what policies would you be implement across the board for both men and women simultaneously?

In other words, not "women can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children", but "people of child-bearing age can't be allowed access to higher education until they've had at least two children". Or "new parents of children are given twenty additional paid vacation days", or whatever. Are there any such policies you think could actually be effective?

★ if anything what I see is women regretting not being able to have more kids

‡ In Israel, fwiw, having kids is simply by default assumed to be a shared responsibility of men, women, and society. It is expected that men take (government paid) sick days to stay home with sick kids. It is not blinked at for the manager to show up to a meeting remotely with a sick kid in his lap. It is expected that men will leave work early several times a week to pick up kids from school — at least in all the places in Israel I have lived I have seen reasonably close sex splits of the parents at pickup/dropoff. I am not clear on whether or not this is equally the case in America — I don't get that impression, but as my knowledge of America is limited to TV and internet discussions, I could be wrong. But I see fathers at the park supervising their kids all the time, and the internet discourse re America is about men getting assumed to be pedophiles for being around kids... So I assume there must be some difference...

In my very limited experience, the one difficulty of having kids is limited grandparent help. Granted, we live somewhat far from grandparents (eg 3 hours). This was very different from when I grew up when (1) I spent significant time with my maternal grandparents but of course we lived (2) five minutes from them.

I'm libertarian adjacent in my views so top down policy is something I always have some trouble endorsing. The suggestion from recent threads that I found most compelling was doing things to nudge up the status of parents and down the status of single people somewhat and double income no kid(dinks) significantly. Less twenty something singles dramas, more happy family sitcoms. Anywhere we're giving people bonuses or better deals for being a veteran we should also be giving better deals and bonuses for being a parent. Make them stack! Make every dude in media who just sleeps with women and doesn't commit look like a shifty sleezbag instead of Neil Patrick Harris. Less scare stories of getting knocked up at 18 and being a single mother with no prospects and more scare stories of having a 35th birthday party that no one shows up to because your friends no longer relate to you because you never had kids.

As far as actual top down policy end all public funding that might somehow find its way into propping up and college department devoted to grievance studies of any kind.

I actually agree with this, from a somewhat different perspective, which is that I find it so deeply weird how blue Americans react to larger families as an exotic and bizarre species. Meanwhile, at least on Facebook, I see loads of blue tribe women wishing they could have another baby but feeling like it's too socially unacceptable or having no mental model for how it would work logistically. This seems very fixable: Start a concerted propaganda campaign making 3-4 kids the "normal" family size and < 3 kind of sad and pathetic and weird, and given how much human nature seems to anyway want >2 kids I bet you could get somewhere with it.

(No bets for Europe, where having kids at all has tanked. But once you've had one baby they tend to be contagious, and Blue America still really wants babies...)

But this is circular - a 'status nudge' requires either 'everyone' or 'the high-status people' to think having kids is very good and promote it, and convincing them is just the original problem, again. The combination of contingency, individual action, the many dramatic changes in modern society, and whatever else that led to both tastemakers/the media/other influential people not supporting having many children is the problem then, and 'they should promote having more kids' isn't much better than saying 'everyone should have more kids'

The elites actually have not too bad fertility. Yes this nudge would require something as lofty as a total shift in culture, no one was under the impression this would be an easy problem to fix surely?

The elites actually have not too bad fertility

The elites have figured out how to have "marriage"' in a way that suits them (even then, there's a baby price for a woman choosing to stay at home that might keep the fertility rate amongst the elite from truly booming)

But the actual businesses they sit high up in value the anti-fertility ethos of "I define myself by my work", for obvious reasons.

It's not so much that your plan is hard and more that it doesn't attempt to explain why the original culture shift worked, so it's unclear that your new one can replicate it.

My theory?

Liberal feminism (aka "do what you want", "women can do anything men can do") always seems to win, even against more radical (in some ways, anyway) feminisms. Why? Because it suits people trying to succeed or exploit in the marketplace - turning women into fungible widgets makes them easier to plug into your system.

Your high fertility Hollywood is nowhere near as good a handmaiden for capital so, if you believe material factors and elite interests determine cultural production, why would we assume it's even doable?

I feel like there's an issue of the tastemakers generally being of demographics that don't reproduce especially frequently. Gay, single women, urbanites etc.

I mean, a poor to working-class high school kid who had dreams of going to college and being a doctor/teacher/whatever is always going to by more sympathetic than a 30-something without a lot of friends, including to other 30-something without a lot of friends.

I'm coming around to the belief that nothing can or should be done. What, exactly, are we trying to save? Groups that choose not to reproduce will die off and be replaced by those that do. Same as it ever was. Why should society, at immense cost, prop up genetic dead ends. The amount of intervention necessary would be staggering and as far as I know has never been successful.

Post-AI the future of humanity looks weird anyway.

Personally, if you care, you should have as many kids as you can reasonably tolerate.

Because if this ai thing doesn't take off and fertility doesn't make a U-turn and quick the economies of every major nation on earth are going to collapse in like 30 years. It's such a straightforward and obvious reason I'm baffled why it gets asked every thread. We don't have anything like the timescale needed to make a Mormon and Amish dominated society work. We just don't.

I think that's hyperbole. The economies of major countries won't collapse, they will adjust as they always have, perhaps with a small decrease in standard of living. With an average age of 48.1, Japan is already 30 years further progressed than the United States on this timeline. They are doing just fine economically. Arguably, they have a higher quality of life than the U.S.

Honest question, what exactly is meant by economic collapse here? It's not obvious to me why a lower birthrate would be so disastrous. Even if production output goes down there's less people to produce for, right?

It's the ratio of dependents to earners, not the aggregate number of people. At least, that's what I'm concerned about. It has the potential to lead to a death spiral: working taxpayers have to pay more to support more non workers, the incentive to work dissipates, and the world is made much poorer.

The proportion of people retired and thus not producing and just consuming becomes much larger. Imagine the difference in your personal life if you and your partner had to both support 3 sets of parents each instead of one each. Yes, I know taxes do that in practice but it's the same result. And this extra pressure on the younger generation further compounds and makes it harder to reproduce in future generations. And it's hard to build wealth without inheriting it because the next generation will be too small to absorb all of the current generation's capital investment.

To reply to both you and @ThenElection , as repugnant as it would be to say, the historical(?) solution to population burdens has been to simply...reduce...the number of mouths to feed.

Covid-19 was supposed to help with that.

Old people don't work (or work much less efficiently if you force them to). The more old people compared to yoing people you have in your society, the more people you have to provide for and the less people are able to provide.

Look at South Korea, currently with a fertility rate of 0.78 (!) If this rate continues, this means there will be 5 grandparent/old person for every grandchild. It means the next generation will be 40% (!) the size of the previous generation. This is a doomed society, it is completely unsustainable.

Where I disagree slightly with @aqouta is that it's not even a matter of taxes and wealth, not that they don't matter, but it's a red herring. It's really a question of labour. There simply won't be enough labour to actually do shit that needs to be done, wealth be damned.

Accumulated wealth is meaningless if you can't actually find or have enough anyone to pay to do things. If you don't have kids or grandkids to look after you, it's going to have be someone else's kids that wipes your geriatric arse. And they can charge a lot for the pleasure, because the demand will be sky-high. Assets and capital actually need someone to use them. It all comes back to labour. Again, you need people to actually do shit, and not have a signifant percentage of the manpower taken up by caring for older generations, which drains wealth from society, it doesn't generate it.

Also, in many countries, generational wealth stored in property, and the property market will crash as the population shrinks and demand crashes. The value of many assets and wealth in general will crash - the idea that the older generations can used their accumulated wealth (perhaps substainal due to not having kids) to pay for people to look after them comfortably is an illusion, a lie. (Don't get me started on national debts which will have absolutely no way to pay off with a shrinking labour pool).

I suppose we can just hope robots and AI bail us out. Although that might just cause its own not dissimilar issues.

You run into a ton of problems where costs are structured and can't change as quickly as the population. National pensions heavily depend on growing populations, national debt doesn't but servicing it becomes an increasing burden as the population shrinks, many businesses are similarly more leveraged than survivable. You also have the problem of every pension wanting more income producing assets as all the demand for loans sinks and collateral drops rapidly in value.

Yes, a Japan-style economic malaise seems likely. I'm okay with that personally. I do think it's funny that the complete replacement of a population is "meh" to most people, but pensioners taking a 20% pay cut is a disaster of epic proportions.

Well, I guess it is a slow day.

I’m in favor of balanced parental leave and related benefits. But I also group them roughly in the category of subsidies, and I thought those didn’t have much effect on fertility.

You might see some effect from rolling back no-fault divorce. I argued before that “really strongly socially enforced monogamy” was fundamentally illiberal, and I’ll stick with that, but it does oppress both sexes equally.

For an even more drastic shift, bring back heavy industry. Women are just as good as men at the service economy. They aren’t so good at hammering steel. Unfortunately, automation and outsourcing makes this an implausible intervention, but if the American economy looked more like 1950, so would the households.

You might see some effect from rolling back no-fault divorce.

I actually think this is one of those "can't put the genie back in the bottle" situations. If we went back to requiring cause for divorce today I suspect what would not happen is a return to traditional marriage. What would happen instead is marriage rates would crater. My impression is understanding of the downsides of this arrangement are well known and lots of people, women especially, would not be interested in risking it.

That’s a fair point.

Women are not the people you need to convince to get married - men are.

But that said, I don't think "requiring cause for divorce" is really what the trad people want - that's one component of it, but it still wouldn't fix the problems with marriage as it exists now. I think you can make a compelling case for bringing traditional marriage back, but just taking bits from it and the modern equivalent piecemeal seems to me like it could create some horrific outcomes.

Trads don’t like social engineering anyways, and they mostly just have a revealed preference for favoring people who do things the right way(according to them).

Trads don’t like social engineering anyways

Are you sure? Traditional social structures are a form of social engineering and I'm pretty sure the trads are very big on those.

women are not the people you need to convince to get married — men are

Is that true? The research is that men benefit more from marriage and are much, much more likely to remarry if a marriage ends (in death or divorce). I can't find polls for first marriages/singles but I'd be curious how they relate.

I don't think that either of those claims really defeat the argument being made - but I didn't provide any evidence myself so good enough. I think that men being more likely to remarry reflects the difference in "relationship market value" between the two. Men who are high quality enough to have already married and then lost a wife to disease or accident are much more valuable than women who already have children and other obligations, who are most likely going to have a harder time finding a partner.

That marriage is good in the longer term for men is a more difficult question, and one that I don't think you can really quantify statistically - but even if you did, saying that it would be optimal for men to marry doesn't actually make them more likely to marry. You could apply the same logic to drug addicts - being a heroin addict is extremely bad for your quality of life, and the optimal decision is to stop being a heroin addict immediately... but we don't actually see that happening and heroin addicts still exist.

I should have specified further that not only do men remarry more, they also express a desire to remarry more. This could of course be a sour grapes type situation where women claim to not want to remarry because they're aware they'd have difficulty doing so if they wanted it.

In any case, if anyone has statistics about desire for a first marriage among men vs women it would be interesting to see numbers.

I really don't think it is possible to get a statistical answer for this - there's also the hypothesis that women get married to secure resources, and a divorced woman still has access to her partner's resources and hence does not actually need to remarry (while the man, who is no longer getting any action, does need to get into a new relationship to meet his needs). There are a lot of confounding factors, although if there is real and rigorous data on this I'd love to see it.

How do men benefit more from marriage and what research are you referring to?

Keeping in mind that men are uniquely screwed over by divorce/family courts and that ~80% of divorces are intiated by women (of the top of my head).

Divorces being initiated by women would support the claim that it's not men who need to be convinced to be married. The benefits I was referring to was married men living longer, reporting higher life satisfaction, etc, than single men (the opposite direction was true of married women)

Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone, and in that case being married/not married is irrelevant, as not being married to the mother of the child you are claiming paternity for doesn't release you from child support payments or grant you more visitation rights.

Or the claim that women are more interested than men both in getting married, and also in getting divorced afterwards? That tracks with stereotypes, at least.

Likewise, pretty sure the divorce courts can screw you over even without kids, and the combination of marriage and kids can lead to worse outcomes from separation than either alone.

it's not men who need to be convinced to be married

I agree with you on this point

(the opposite direction was true of married women)

I straight up don't believe this unless you have a source.

Being screwed over by family courts is only relevant if you're having kids with someone

Alimony and asset splits can be and often are brutal to the husband even if no kids are involved. Kids just make it worse.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/may/25/women-happier-without-children-or-a-spouse-happiness-expert

Standard caveat re replication crisis, bad science reporting, etc.

More comments

That is certainly the stereotype but I'm not sure how true it is. According to Pew (at least back in 2020) fewer single women than single men (in every age group) were looking for a relationship of any kind, though a larger fraction of single women were looking for a committed relationship than single men. More recent data shows an even further decline among singles looking for relationships, though mostly among single men.

The libertarian solution is to abolish blanket entitlement programs for the elderly and repeal child-labor laws. In essence, make children profitable again. A large motivation for wanting higher fertility is to maintain the economy, so why not internalize those gains onto the people who make the children?

Start banning/heavily, heavily restricting children from using any kind of social media. We're standing on the very precipice of AI induced mass wireheading that will probably cut the fertility rate in half. The weird tech induced neuroses that lead to (incels/Tate/west elm caleb/FDS/simping for e-girls/insert your favourite zoomer/millenial social pathology) are going to be supercharged once we have kids raised in front of screens since they were toddlers mixed with an endless fountain of hypertarged AI genned content that can feed off an entire lifetime of mass data harvesting. There are no liberal solutions to this IMO.

Israel has a great many advantages in terms of parenting that we can export to the rest of the world! Not just culturally, but also in terms of policy:

  1. A healthcare system using the voucher system, paid by the government, rather than tied to employment. This is more related to the US than anything.

  2. A voucher system for maternity wards. Hospitals compete to get the most births, and as a result the maternity ward in most hospitals is really nice.

  3. Healthcare includes a large battery of tests & information kits during pregnancy.

  4. Facilities to monitor & help with babies' and toddlers' growth, and vaccinations (Family Health Centers / Tipat Halav).

  5. Pre-school and elementary school operates 6 days a week, leaving parents with 1 day / morning a week to make more kids.

  6. We don't do this in Israel, but it's really important - build more housing units. High prices seem a-priori bad for fertility.

Hospitals compete to get the most births, and as a result the maternity ward in most hospitals is really nice.

Huh. Interesting. This made me wonder if Israel might have unusually high quality of maternity care as regards how birthing mothers are treated on a personal level. Looking it up, the country apparently has the lowest rate of C-sections per 1,000 live births. Impressive. This is a potentially under-rated way of increasing birth rates, in that people with less birth trauma are more likely to give birth again.

It both reduces birth trauma and reduces health risks of further births — once you have a cesarean section it becomes progressively more and more dangerous to get pregnant with each subsequent c-section. (This is why some people try to have vaginal birth after c-sections)

.... In writing this comment, it occurs to me to wonder if this is an underappreciated factor in lower fertility rates in modern times. One reason Israel tries hard to avoid c-sections is because they assume it will be upsetting to mothers to have their fertility curtailed by having them. My understanding from people I know in the states is the attitude towards c-sections is much more cavalier, since it's no big deal it ends up meaning you can't have more than one kid after this. This must obviously have at least some depressing effect on birth rates...

I agree. It is also worth noting that doctors will recommend limiting births after a c-section, since a woman can only have a limited number of them (2-3, depending on doctor and the hospital's policy from my limited experience) and one c-section increases the chance of needing another c-section dramatically. Some places don't even risk vaginal birth after c-section (VBAC) and will automatically schedule a c-section for women that already had one. On the margin, I do expect a higher c-section rate to decrease TFR, then, even divorced from birth trauma - which is also very very real.

However, I'm not sure how much of that can be credited to the healthcare system, rather than other factors. C-sections IIRC are more commonly needed for older mothers. In Israel, a large portion of births are from the ultra-orthodox community which starts very young. That alone can explain some of the difference. Some more of it might be explained by the stricter monitoring pregnant women undergo here, but I'm not familiar of any data on that specifically.

There is definitely policy-level pressure to reduce c-section rates/hospitals proudly citing their low C-section rates/other things going in with the C-section rate aside from younger mothers. And lots of support for VBAC and even for VBA2C

As a counterexample, Finland has equally good policies in the field of healthcare/childcare, but their TFR is abysmal. I get closer and closer to the conclusion that it's the Jewish memeplex that preserves Israel's TFR, not anything else.

There are probably more examples of low TFR with good healthcare than high TFR with good healthcare. Other than Israel, I can't even think of any for the latter.

That said, I think the general direction of causation is both (modern country/culture) --> (low TFR) AND (modern country/culture) --> (good healthcare), rather than (good healthcare) --> (low TFR). I do think you can increase TFR with better healthcare policy, but I admit I have no empirical data to back that up, only personal experience. I'm also not familiar enough with the actual workings of European healthcare, so I don't know if their policies actually match my suggestions or not.

What would I do to make myself have more children? Hmm. At the age of 24, the barriers preventing me from having children with my boyfriend are;

  • I do not have enough money to afford diapers, much less food for another person, so I would increase the minimum wage to the proper rate it should be, which is $20 an hour. I would, in the same vein, eliminate tipping as a substitute for wages as well to eliminate the hostile tipping environment and poor wages encouraged by my state’s poor labor laws. That would include eliminating all Republicans from my state’s government, as they have opposed all measures to do what is listed above.

  • I am not confident that, should I approach trying to build a career in my state with a child, that I have protections from corrupt, lazy and immoral business owners who would abuse their position of authority over me to compromise my work/life balance. So, I would replace my state’s labor laws with laws similar if not exactly to California, so that I could, for example, have a lunch break and maternal leave for my post-pregnancy complications.

  • I cannot afford medical care for myself, much less my children. I suppose with higher wages that would be solved on it’s own, but if not, I would change whatever policies need to be changed to decrease the cost of medical care. I am not too verbose on medical care policies to know what the causes for high costs are and how to solve them.

  • My social network is dangerous for children, as it consists of social conservatives who will try to shame my children into gender roles and disrespect my choices as a parent, and I would not want to reach out for help from them in an emergency. If I had higher wages, I would not need to work so much and I could spend time developing friendships to replace my network. If not that, reducing the cost of interstate travel so I could move to a state with a locale more suitable to my personality would solve that problem. I am not too sure what policies need to be enacted to solve high-cost interstate travel, as I am not verbose in those policies as well.

  • Emotionally, me and my boyfriend are recovering from the effects of growing up in an abusive, socially conservative household, and need therapeutic services to confirm we won’t pass our issues to our children. I supposed lowering the cost of therapists falls in the same category as “decrease medical costs”.

  • -14

My social network is dangerous for children, as it consists of social conservatives who will try to shame my children into gender roles and disrespect my choices as a parent,

Sorry, but I can't help but think you're mistaken here - the statistics and science are extremely clear on this point. By encouraging your children to adopt binary gender roles and preventing them from becoming trans or non-binary, they're actually helping to protect your children, rather than making the environment more dangerous. Trans people encounter all sorts of negative outcomes when compared to their cis cohorts, and making sure that your child does not grow up trans is not just going to protect them from those deleterious outcomes, but also save them from the rampant transphobia encountered all through society. You should actually be thanking these social conservatives - the difference in life expectancy, suicide rates, etc for trans people is so stark that keeping your children cis is one of the most powerfully positive things you can do for their life outcomes.

Trans people encounter negative outcomes from social conservatives attempting to enforce a gender binary, so if I wanted to protect my trans children from transphobia, I ought to keep them away from social conservatives, not ko-tow to them. I can do nothing about my children being trans, because it is not a choice. And if my children were not trans, social conservatives would emotionally and verbally abuse them for stepping outside of the gender binary. My sons would grow up misogynistic with little success with women, emotionally closed off from himself, his friends and his family, abusive (see misogyny) and lonely like I have seen every single conservative son of conservative parents turn out as. My daughter would have poor self esteem, be victim to abusive relationships due to that, anger issues and extreme emotional immaturity, like every conservative daughter of a conservative father I have seen.

  • -15

Just to be clear, are you saying that all conservatives raised in conservative households are abusers/abuse victims based on their gender? This is such a comically uncharitable view(all members of my outgroup are mentally ill and morally repugnant) that I cannot believe you are posting here in good faith.

"My outrgroup are uniformly engaged in a crime" is a position you can definitely hold and argue in good faith. I think all culture wars in history have basically been about that.

I am operating under the assumption that justawoman is a liberal (they have said as much, so I don't think this is being uncharitable) - and that does actually preclude you from making the argument that she just made in good faith. Social conservatism is essentially the norm outside of WEIRD nations, so when she says that all conservatives are mentally ill abusers she's also making some incredibly racially inflammatory and culturally insensitive claims. As someone who has experience with a lot of people from different cultures, I think most of them would find the idea that they don't actually like their culture and have essentially been tricked into not being a western liberal because they're abuse victims deeply offensive. The idea that every single woman who was raised in a traditional buddhist culture has poor self-esteem, anger issues and extreme emotional immaturity is just farcical.

That argument and conclusion absolutely do not match what I see liberals believing and arguing, which is why I expressed my doubt as to that argument being made in good faith and hence asked for clarification.

Every single woman who is raised to believe that they are lesser than others and grows up to believe they are lesser than others for no other reason than their biology has poor self esteem, that is my belief yes. That goes the same for a man. I think that all men and women are equally capable of the same range and rate of thoughts and feelings, and so to be told otherwise and lead to believe otherwise leads to natural misery.

I think that all men and women are equally capable of the same range and rate of thoughts and feelings

I don't believe you're correct. I have a disability which means that a certain type of feeling is forever closed off to me - my body is imperfect, and as such I am fundamentally incapable of certain perceptions. In my case, to believe that I am not handicapped in this way would actually lead me to greater suffering as I attempted to perform tasks which I am simply congenitally unable to do. Not recognising my own limitations is actually far more dangerous, whereas appreciating and accepting them allows me to account for my limitations and live a more satisfying life within those bounds. Similarly, I think that if I tell a small filipino woman that she is just as capable of lifting heavy weights as an icelandic bodybuilder (or getting to experience what that feels like) then I am actually harming her if she tries to act on that information. There are actual physiological differences between men and women, and a lot of feelings and thoughts are downstream from that.

Based on their gender? No. But yes, I believe that the parenting style advocated by social conservatives is inherently emotionally (ex: shaming children for stepping outside of the gender binary), verbally (ex: it is suitable to tell children you want to be quiet to be "seen and not heard") and physically (ex: spanking) abusive, and therefore people raised in a conservative household are victims of abuse, and people who raise children in a conservative household are abusers, although the rate at which the abuse is a) deliberate and b) realized varies. I don't think most conservatives and therefore people *want * to abuse or be abused, but it is an unfortunate side effect of the tenets of social conservatism.

I may have been unclear with that "Based on their gender" comment - I was referring to the abuser/abuse victim distinction.

However your post does actually make the critique that I made in reply to another comment more impactful, especially considering you are still using social conservative rather than republican. Social conservatism is essentially the norm outside of WEIRD nations, so when you say that all conservatives are mentally ill abusers you're also making some incredibly racially inflammatory and culturally insensitive claims. As someone who has experience with a lot of people from different cultures, I think most of them would find the idea that they don't actually like their culture and have essentially been tricked into not being a western liberal because they're abuse victims deeply offensive. The idea that every single woman who was raised in a traditional buddhist culture has poor self-esteem, anger issues and extreme emotional immaturity is just farcical.

This is why I believed you were not posting in good faith - your argument is essentially claiming that the majority of non western and non-white cultures are just systems of perpetual abuse, and that's so intolerant that it makes Donald Trump look left-wing.

My father was also conservative, as was his father. I am sharing my opinions on social conservatism and the effects it has on parents and children based on my anecdotal evidence, which is that I have yet to meet a daughter of a conservative father I did not consider nor failed to witness as I described earlier, to include myself. I had a great deal of internalized misogyny which manifested into self hatred because, of many things, my father punished me for stepping outside of my gender binary and made my natural instincts and desires feel wrong. My brother is severely emotionally stunted because my father adhered to Western concepts of masculinity which encourages stoicism over vulnerability.

I am not too sure how it is any more objectively "dunking on my outgroup" to say these things than the many men here who have made antagonistic statements about women based on *their * anecdotal evidence. Subjectively, though, I can understand the reactions to my opinions, although I am not too sure what "defending the honor of our gender" means. I speak for no woman except for myself, because I believe the only thing you and I have in common (assuming you are a woman from "we") by us both being women is similar biological functions. I pushback against broad generalization of both men and women, because I find both to be equally capable of everything sans some physical capabilities which can be remedied with science.

It is interesting to me that you find more offense at anecdotal generalizations about conservatives than anecdotal generalizations about women. I take generalizations as insults here because the baseline for evidence is subjective anecdotes, which is far from the "leave you identity at the door and deal with the facts" discourse I would prefer.

I announced myself as a woman because I do not trust that a man here who disagrees with me, upon finding out I am a woman, won't instantly discredit my arguments as some side effect of being a woman.

I can do nothing about my children being trans, because it is not a choice.

You don't know this. There is no conclusive evidence that this is true.

No, discredited or stratight up retracted brain scan studies with tiny samples when you'd need huge ones to get anything that isn't noise do not count.

The latter points about conservative education are just instantly disproven by any glance at an Islamic country and its rates of marriage and births. The criticism you're levying here isn't based in any practicality. It's 100% moralist grandstanding.

Well, when I glance at Islamic countries, I see a national social crisis because women are being arrested and beaten to death for not wearing a head scarf properly. I don't know if theocratic authoritarian Islamic countries are the epitome of any healthy civilization, much less the epitome of what marriage and parenting is like.

I do know that being trans in not a choice, because gender dysphoria is a medical condition, not a lifestyle choice.

And yet, people there are having more children than in the West, by a large margin. Calling Magians unhealthy from your standpoint is throwing stones in glass houses. And I notice again, the things you're objecting to are entirely based on your moral outlook and not practical considerations of survival.

We'll see who is still there to call who unhealthy in a century.

As for the trans question, I hold it to be a religious matter. Paraphilias and dysphoria are not a choice but only in the sense that "lifestyle choice" is a nonsense concept that refers to nothing real or important borne out of pure enlightenment ideology. All these can very well be socially conditioned, as I bet you recognize in any other setting where it is politically useful, and this equivocation of medical condition and truth about the soul is not coherent.

I do not have enough money to afford diapers, much less food for another person, so I would increase the minimum wage to the proper rate it should be, which is $20 an hour.

This would at least insure plenty of unemployed people to take up a stay at home parent role so it might just work.

I do not believe any of your complaints are relevant because they not only apply, but apply much harder, in countries with high fertility rates.

If anything, a blind adherance to the data would show that the exact opposite of your prescriptions would be useful, if increasing fertility is the only value we're optimizing for. Make people poorer, more conservative and intolerant, add corrupt and dysfunctional governments, remove welfare and social comforts, etc.

EDIT: I should clarify that your complaints may be valid for other reasons, but in terms of increasing fertility, the variables you're suggesting tweaking not only are unrelated but inversely correlated with the desired effect.

EDIT 2: Actually, to avoid being guilty of the same thing I suspect you of, I should clarify that I think you're playing dumb and are putting forth spurious arguments to passive-aggressively poke the bear here.

I think you're playing dumb and are putting forth spurious arguments to passive-aggressively poke the bear here.

These are all, like it or not, probably the median opinion among 20-something year old liberals. There's definitely a tension in modern society where prime biological fertility corresponds to the most financially vulnerable and lowest-earning part of a typical career. Its also well known that young healthy people are overcharged for health care in order to prop up the insurance market.

Purely economically speaking, points #1 and #3 are common. But if you read past that, each of the points has an element of "conservativism is the root cause of low fertility", which seems to me like a frustrated parody of "feminism is the root cause of low fertility", something people do unironically believe. I think point #5 in particular stands out as something even the most progressive of progressive would not blame on low fertility rates. "The problem is, religious bigotry such as my parents subjected me to is supressing birth rates" is an argument that is both bizarre on the surface, and one I have never heard anyone make. Even very very anti-religious people will concede social conservatism tends to pump out the babies.

"The problem is, religious bigotry such as my parents subjected me to is supressing birth rates" is an argument that is both bizarre on the surface, and one I have never heard anyone make. Even very very anti-religious people will concede social conservatism tends to pump out the babies.

You're thinking too meta. Having a bad relationship with your parents almost certainly makes you less enthusiastic about becoming a parent yourself.

Hm... I think you're being a bit of a quokka here, but let's wait and see. She just concluded a fairly heated debate with @f3zinker in the previous thread and I get the impression she's kinda done with us. Would love to be wrong though.

No, I am not done with ya'll. I just don't know what you mean by "wait and see".

No, I am not done with ya'll. I just don't know what you mean by "wait and see".

There's a bit of a pattern among left-leaning users who depart here that, before they leave in a huff, they'll start posting provocative inflammatory things that parody the tone and style of the people they're fighting with. @PmMeClassicMemes is a recent example, but unfortunately they deleted their profile so I can't show you.

"Wait and see" means that, if I see you continuing to debate in good faith, I'll know I was wrong and your blaming social conservatives for low fertility rates was a sincere belief rather than a dig at redpillers who blame feminists.

More comments

Im smelling the same thing you are smelling.

Yeah, even if it's just someone trolling, it's still interesting to respond seriously to the arguments, they're pretty similar to what left-leaning people actually believe

If you think I am playing dumb and lying, I am confused about the tone of conversation your response has. Why would you want someone who you think is playing games to respond to you?

I suppose if the true goal is numbers, your proposition would work. But I consider fertility to include "successfully raising children into adulthood so they have more children". If people are having kids, but their children are dying early due to poor health standards and abuse, is that raising the fertility?

I suppose if the true goal is numbers, your proposition would work. But I consider fertility to include "successfully raising children into adulthood so they have more children". If people are having kids, but their children are dying early due to poor health standards and abuse, is that raising the fertility?

The most extreme far right of social conservatives seem to want to return the world to about 1919. (The year before the nineteenth amendment.) In that year child mortality was about 180/thousand, compared to today's 7/thousand. (Let's assume that this is 100% the fault of economic and social institutions, rather than medical technology.) At that same year the fertility rate was 3.3 compared to today's 1.8. The math definitely works out in favor of 1919.

Of course, the "sweet spot" seems to be during the baby boom in the 1950s, when the fertility was also about 3.3 and the child mortality was 30/thousand.

If you think I am playing dumb and lying, I am confused about the tone of conversation your response has. Why would you want someone who you think is playing games to respond to you?

Why should I be an asshole unless I'm entirely sure you're picking a fight? Even if I were sure. It costs nothing to be civil on a semi-anonymous internet forum.

Do you think telling me you think I am playing dumb and lying about my beliefs to be civil?

Do you think telling me you think I am playing dumb and lying about my beliefs to be civil?

Yes, I believe I phrased my doubts civilly.

In other conversations, you seem not to separate the content of a belief from whether it's being argued fairly. Elsewhere, you say:

I am making it all about myself because I am a woman, and every generalized comment about women is therefore directed at me. When you say men are funnier than women, you are also saying you are funnier than me, for no other reason than because of your body. The "big deal" of you holding that opinion is that I find it's a rather illogical and mean one,

So, in your view, the opinion "Men are funnier than women" cannot be held or argued without it being an insult. I do not see it that way. I also do not see "Men are immoral" as an insult. And unless I'm grossly misunderstanding the rules, neither does The Motte. You would be closer to the bone accusing lack of charity, but you'll find I did respond to your arguments as you stated them, while leaving that I doubted your good faith as a sidenote disclosure.

You're really getting your punches in against those wicked Republicans. Do you actually want kids or do you want to dunk on Republicans for a bunch of unrelated reasons and this was a convenient excuse? I mean, tipping culture and the general existence of elected Republicans? Those are really factors in your personal choice to not be a mother?

I'm a father and lack of taxpayer paid therapy and the existence of restraunt tipping hasn't impeded me yet.

Yes. My state has terrible labor laws put in place by Republicans and upheld by Republicans. One of those labor laws allows businesses to substitutes tips for wages, and in the 10 jobs I have had in this state, 5 of them supplicated my wages with tips. I find that type tipping culture present in a company to be extraordinarily indicative of a corrupt and unethical business owner, and with the knowledge 50% of my jobs had corrupt and unethical business owners, it makes me nervous to lose my job and have to find a new one in a state where I have a 50/50 chance of having a boss who will try to sabotage my work/life balance with unethical and corrupt decisions.

And yes, I find the existence of the Republican party as an active threat to the safety of everyone, including my future children I very much want to have. I am, no kidding, the 57th great-great granddaughter of the first king of Norway, and it would be a shame to end the royal line.

  • -14

I am, no kidding, the 57th great-great granddaughter of the first king of Norway, and it would be a shame to end the royal line.

Bro, you can't go this mask off in trolling. Come on, bro.

I'm not trolling. If you'd like to message me privately, I can send you proof of the genealogical book my grandmother wrote that traces my ancestry back to the mid 1500s starting with the owner of Sud-Bjorntuft Farm, Taraldson Bjorntuft (earlier than that and I will have to get my grandmother to send me some PDFs for you).

You mention being 24, so I was curious if you'd ever seen The Life of Julia. It was heavily criticized at the time for taking a "nanny state will care for me cradle to grave" approach.

Now honestly... in a hypothetical world where all of these items were attained, do you honestly think you'd even want children?

Yes! I think that a world like that would be wonderful, and I would likely have many more children than I plan to have. Maybe have them forever. The life of Julia is a life that had a robust system of safeties designed to help her when she fails and when she suceeds, such as healthcare coverage until she turns 26 to help with sudden medical emergencies and programs like Head Start to protect her from the effects of abusive parents. If any of these government programs actually forced Julia to do something she didn't want to do, I would agree that The Life of Julia promotes a "nanny" state, but nowhere did I see any federal agency or legislation that forced Julia to make a life choice. I see, in fact, Julia has many more choices and freedoms given to her with the strong social safety net I believe those programs provide.

Can you think of any countries in, say, Europe, who have many or all of these policies you say would encourage you to have more children where women actually go and have more children?

I am not familiar with countries in Europe, much less their economic policies, so I cannot think of any.

I mean, I'm not sure I believe it totally, but I wouldn't totally throw out an argument that the reason why countries in Europe aren't at South Korean-levels of fertility are those programs, and if they had a less robust US-style welfare system, they'd even be lower. Obviously, impossible to prove a negative, but yeah, considering our increase religiosity as a country, etc., if the US had European-style welfare, I could see our TFR being a notch or two higher. Not high enough for natalists, but better overall.

This sounds vaguely reasonable on paper (aside from shoehorning in some unnecessary snipes at political enemies). It rationally makes sense that if you'd want to be economically secure before starting a family.

But I don't think it stands up to millennia of people in much worse economic conditions having many many children. In fact, poor people tend to have many more children than middle class people do. Even lower class people in the first world are massively wealthier than most people in the rest of the world, in the present or future. And yet they tend to have large families anyway.

Is it just having higher standards? Access to birth control? Maybe poor people having large families makes them even more poor and potentially more miserable, but they do it anyway because they're used to being poor and just tolerate the problems more children causes? Or just don't have birth control and don't really plan it on purpose? Or maybe being intelligent and vaguely upper-middle class in bearing but earning lower-middle class amounts creates a mismatch between standards and income, while traditional poor people expect to be poor so don't see a point in waiting?

Given this trend across human populations, logically it must either be the case that if you and people like you had more money you still wouldn't have children and the economic argument is an excuse, or that you are in a meaningfully different scenario than most other poor people who have many children anyway. I don't purport to actually know, but am interested in how you would explain this discrepancy.

I can confidently say for a majority of births from people who can't afford children comes from impulsive sex without birth control due to poor judgement, improper use of birth control due to poor education, the cycle of poverty (which yes, would be traditionally poor people giving up hope of saving money to move out of their class), or the same shitty fairy that comes out of that 0.1 percentile to strike at horny lovers. If I could have as many children as I wanted and support them all and myself, what's to stop me from having 19? I could start an entire dynasty.

But I don't think it stands up to millennia of people in much worse economic conditions having many many children.

Because kids were useful labour that'd help you be more secure during the times when agriculture sucked up most of the human capital.

Does this imply that eliminating child labor laws (and ignoring the ethical issues therein) would drastically increase fertility? Or is there not enough productive labor that children could accomplish in the first world, even on farms? But even then, reducing/eliminating minimum wage for them would allow the market to find some sort of niche. Like, if a poor family could just have a bunch of children and send them off to McDonalds for $6 an hour, 40 hours per week (after school and on weekends would allow this), that's $12,480 per year per kid. I'm sure lots of minimum wage jobs would hire children if they could pay them less than they had to pay adults, and could avoid public controversy. Have 10 children? That's 124,800 per year. Granted, you would have to feed and house and clothe all of those children which would eat most of that money, but that's kind of the point. Have as many kids as you want and the costs and you're just as economically stable as you would have been without them, if not slightly more.

I'm not at all actually advocating for this. I don't know that we want a society where poor children are forced to work 40 hour weeks at fast food restaurants, and poor people literally create children for the purpose of earning a profit. But it seems like it would solve the fertility issue in exchange.

Does this imply that eliminating child labor laws (and ignoring the ethical issues therein) would drastically increase fertility?

Not necessarily, because there's been a long-term process of industrialization and urbanization that means we need fewer and fewer people to work agriculture and many of those families' descendants just don't live on farms where they need the labour or necessarily have the land (apartments aren't good for large families)

Like, if a poor family could just have a bunch of children and send them off to McDonalds for $6 an hour, 40 hours per week (after school and on weekends would allow this), that's $12,480 per year per kid.

Now that's an interesting question. It's possible that would help. Some would argue that the US already encourages poor kids to have babies via welfare.

I would need to know more about how much current policies that pay people for kids (and are apparently middling at best at providing long-term results) offer.

I think there's reason to be somewhat skeptical; having kids is not costless and, as you say, a lot of the money would get eaten up which might put it under the "worth it" threshold.

I've also heard an argument that Social Security and nursing homes are to blame. It used to be that having kids was how people saved up for retirement. You spend 18 years paying for a child, and even if they earned you some money that just reduced the economic burden without removing it, but then they love you and are loyal to you and when you're old they take care of you and pay for you. Which, especially if you have an agrarian society where most of your wealth and income is physical goods not just cash, makes it hard to invest in a retirement account the same way we do now.

I don't think there's way to even possibly actually move the clock back on that though. Even if you ruthlessly cut social security and all financial assistance for elderly people, they could still take the money that would be spend on children (and the resulting decrease in taxes) and invest it in a retirement account.

But if you combine it with the reduced labor laws, together they might add up to being worth it.

I mean, the issue is there were a lot of families who didn't or couldn't do that, and it led to insane levels of endemic deep elderly poverty.

Social Security was a win-win. For lefties like me, it basically ended endemic deep poverty among elderly people. For more conservative people, it created a whole new class of consumers, who bought RV's, homes in Florida, et al. Plus, ya' know, actual retired people seem to like the freedom, instead of being free labor for their kids.

Having children work in fast food restaurants for less than minimum wage is a lot more similar to Victorian London than to a high-fertility agricultural community. The difference is that in the latter case the work done by the children can be performed at or near home, visibly contributes to the family, and allows them to act as surrogate parents for their younger siblings at the same time. This reduces the burden on their parents and also prepares them for future parenthood, as it won't induce the same terror it might in a 25-year old college graduate who has never held a baby in their life. The former provides some financial incentive but none of the social or household management benefits.

I think some combination of work from home, homeschooling, and building more walkable communities is the most reasonable path towards increasing fertility in developed nations if natural selection is too slow for one's liking.

  • I haven't ever worked as a server, and there a bunch of people online talking about tipped positions raking in the cash, making $20 - $50/hr. I assume based on this it's not true where you live? Does your romantic partner have that issue as well? It's not like it makes financial sense to immediately return to a low wage, physically demanding position six weeks after giving birth anyway, and put a month old baby into childcare. Also, there are people willing to donate diapers, if that's actually a problem. They cost about $40/month.

  • It sounds like you've had some bad experiences with employers. Working for a bad boss can be horrible. That seems like something that has to be figured out regardless of children, though, since working another 30 years for someone who takes advantage of you and you don't respect would be terrible even without kids. Also, first point

  • I was surprised how easy it was to get pregnancy and infant medicaid, which covers all costs, including a choice of hospital of midwife in my state.

  • I've moved states a lot. There isn't a high cost to interstate travel? I'm not sure why you would think that? Like, yes, you have to wait until a lease is up or negotiate with the landlord, get rid of all your furniture, and pack everything into your car or a rental truck that you're able to drive yourself, but that's a willingness, not exactly a cost. I moved cross country with my husband and baby in a small SUV a couple of years ago. It was a bit stressful, but basically fine.

  • There's probably no way to confirm, ahead of time, that you won't pass your issues along to your children, seeing as how issues are just about universal among humans. That isn't to say the therapist isn't worthwhile, maybe they are, but the idea of getting one's whole emotional and financial life in order before having kids is probably not realistic. I'm a decade older and still not in perfect order, but am still glad my daughters exist, and they also seem glad they exist.

Servers making $20 - $50 an hour is so rare I have never met a server IRL who has made that money consistently and instead on a handful of holidays throughout the year. Tips, in my opinion, are compliments by customers to their servers, not gambling percentages meant to help owners from paying livable wages. It creates a hostile relationship between the customer and the server.

Working for a bad boss is inevitable, I agree, but I believe living in a state with strong labor laws gives you more options to respond to that than what I found here, which is "suck it up" or "quit and get no unemployment". It prevents bad managers and owners from ruining their own businesses with high turnover rates - and therefore ruining the income of multiple people - by having laws that protect employees in hostile work environments.

I'm glad you were able to find help easily. It's not the same for others in my experience.

There is generally a high cost in my opinion as someone who has lived in 4 states. The only reason my family was able to move was because my father had a high-paying career that allowed us to rent out all the necessary services to successfully move a family. I am considering in having children what my freedoms are in terms of movement. What if a state passes hostile laws that force me to relocate?

There is no way to confirm, yes, and there will always be something to get in order, but there are fundamental problems with patience, kindness and positivity that are a result of growing up with incredibly negative and angry parents who constantly fought because their social conservatism told them women were children, men were rapists, marriage counselors were quacks and divorce was admitting weakness. I definitely have checkpoints I intend to reach in emotional maturity before I deal with the emotions of another person, much less my children.

Your 30x-great-grandparents didn't have diapers, and any cloth their child wore, the woman probably had to spin or weave herself. Food was available, but instead of being "$1/lb of lentils", had to be sown and harvested by hand (unless a bad season came, in which case, hopefully you have enough preserved). Instead of 'decent, but not ideal labor laws' - maybe you were a serf. Medical care was often counterproductive in the 1800s, to say nothing of the 1600s, and ~ half your kids would die before adulthood - vs today, where advanced medical technology built on millions of man-hours of basic research and 'big pharma' development is available to both the poor and the rich, and the gap continues to close (even things like 'obamacare' helped a little!). With within-state freedom of movement, a functioning rental market, a, by any historical standard, class-free and socially permissive society, and the internet, 'replacing a network' is easier than ever - 'moving to a new city' isn't a catastrophe. Historically, 'plane tickets' or 'moving truck rentals' weren't available to people of any class. Interstate travel is, today, incredibly cheap in any sense. Historical people lived in a society 100x more backwards and reactionary than ... even the backwards evangelicals of 2000. Instead of a therapist, a priest?

Despite all of that, said grandparents would, given the calories available, and after accounting for childhood mortality, have a TFR of 3 or higher. This is both because birth control didn't exist, because children became economically useful quickly, and because it was heavily socially valued. Every point you made is on a strong trajectory towards 'less of a burden' - yet you just don't prioritize having children over them!

You say all of this is easy...and yet if I got pregnant tomorrow, I would not be able to make enough money in nine months to pay for my child's daycare, clothing, food, and my own needs. I would have to surrender my child to the state, because I would also have medical debt on top of that for the not-free doctors I would have to see while pregnant, unless I wanted to avoid doctors and attempt to induce a miscarriage by negligence, which could be life threatening to me or hurt my fertility. You say interstate travel is incredibly cheap, but the amount of money required to move myself from a one-bedroom apartment to anywhere else is far from cheap for my wages.

So, I am not too sure where "you don't prioritize having children" comes in.

A person who very strongly valued children would dramatically cut back other expenses, whether they be 'travel', 'restaurants', 'not living in a low COL area', 'daycare' (when mom and dad were working the fields, they couldn't exactly hire childcare. maybe live near grandparents or something?). They would not choose to not have children over potential medical difficulties.

but the amount of money required to move myself from a one-bedroom apartment to anywhere else is far from cheap for my wages.

I'm not sure what your wages are, but I'm confident it's doable. If you and your bf/husband thought it was essentially necessary to have and raise children, these issues would be less!

--

Okay, that's 'extreme' to a modern ear, but - how do bottom 5% income americans have children? Or, for that matter, extremely poor urban africans or south asians? Surely every problem you have is worse for the poorest americans and 10x worse for poor africans/south asians, yet their fertility rates are higher than ours.

(Slightly tongue-in-cheek because I kind of used up my battery on another post ... so, remember to laugh)

Bring back 8th grade bullying.

Not the sadistic / sexual embarassment kind, but the slightly barbed ribbing about "not being able to get a girlfriend" or "no boy is going to ask you to the dance." (Remember! Tongue-In-Cheek!)

The more serious version underlying this is; we have to teach adolescents and young the skills for an imperfect information, yet cooperative mating strategy - and call out the ones who fail to do so. Society wide fertility is a society wide responsibility. Part of growing up through adolescence is mimicking adult behavior, failing, learning, and improving on the next iteration so that when you are able to make serious life decisions, you've got some practice behind it. The "radical acceptance" and "zero bullying" mentality completely ruins this to the point that when young men and women date in college or afterwards, this may literally be their first relationship but nowhere near their first sexual experience. That lack of symmetry is disaster for fertility because a big part of fertility is both parties (but especially the woman) being comfortable in the long term stability of the relationship (that's hard-wired into the brain).

Quite side note: A male-only version of this is fighting. It's important to get into a few scuffles in High School when you're still underdeveloped physically and no one knows how to fight. I've seen bar fights between 25 year old dudes where neither knew what he was doing turn out fucking awful for both parties simply because they didn't know how to throw punches, or how to go down and cover up, or to stop hitting someone when their arms go stiff.

A lot of the other policy recommendations in this and other threads are good from the incentive-seeking rational actor standpoint, and I do support them (sort of generally, not each one individually without exception). But, from a learned behavior perspective, I think they would underperform simply because people's interpersonal development is getting extremely weak because of the super-importance of personal development-of-the-self without regard to society.

If the only way we can survive is through both sexes being terrible to each other, either though physical or psychological violence, maybe we don't deserve to continue on.

the internet discourse re America is about men getting assumed to be pedophiles for being around kids

Which let me say as an American father is bullshit. I've never even second hand heard of a father accused of anything because he took his kids to the park.

Myself and other fathers commonly bring their kids to parks and no one minds. Internet talk about pedophile hysteria is apparently exaggerated.

Good to know, thanks. It sounded pretty horrifying to me, but I never can gauge what internet stuff about far off places is real or not...

Since I have you here anyway — Is there general expectation of/support for high levels of paternal involvement like I described?

Yes. At least for middle class professionals. Dads drop their kids off at school, play with them, etc. My dad was involved in my life and did his share of work around home.

It obviously varies by family, but significant fatherly involvement is the norm.

Hmm. There’s basically two approaches here- focus on whales, or make more mackerels. And they’re different enough to be worth discussing separately even if they aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.

To focus on whales, you get existing replacement or above families to have more kids. Longer parental leave, more generous tax breaks for large families, etc, etc. essentially you want to optimize what Hungary is doing. I like the idea of tying student debt forgiveness to fertility; 100% forgiveness at 4 kids, two year pause on interest and payments for each birth, and maybe a 50% forgiveness at 3 kids ought to be helpful.

To make more mackerels, you get more people to form replacement families. You could do this with matchmaking, offering marital leave, and making housing stock more available- in particular, I suspect a program to offer very low interest mortgages to newlywed couples would probably boost fertility. Remember, in this view, the goal isn’t so much larger families as more families.

Last year secular Jews fertility rate in Israel declined for the first time below replacement level (slightly under 2.0). They still do get more kids then their peers in the west, but conservative/traditional families still get more.

Any theories as to what would be causing this? Was this just a temporary decline? What I see around me socially is still a strong expectation of a 3 kid family (especially if you're more rural*), perhaps 2 if you're urban and too poor to afford the third (or a single mother by choice, where 2 also seemed to be the default number they all wanted).

*(The same rural/urban split seems to appear - again, by anecdotal observation only - among religious non-haredi families, where 4 or 5 is an acceptable urban amount but sad and small in a rural context. However, there's too much noise coming from

  1. If you want to have a larger family and "quality family life" you are more likely to move out of the city (ads for rural areas explicitly target this)

  2. Zionist religious families strongly tend to be more religious the more rural they are)

I looked a source up, ignore the tweets, the picture with the graph is from the Economist:

https://twitter.com/NxlAnglo/status/1616874516566736900

You are right, Jewish fertility are astonishingly stable if one looks at the last 40 years instead of zooming into recent trends. In the 90s secular fertility also dipped under 2.0, so is not a new thing. But 10 years ago it was again slightly above.

The discrepancy between the normalcy of 3 kids families and a fertility rate of a third less, is I guess because childless women are less visible? Maybe they also emigrate?

This website (that I found via Google and don't know anything else about, so no clue re reliability) claims childless rate in Israeli Jewish women is only 6.4% (in a sample of women aged 45-60)

https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptional-fertility/

That only gets us from 3 to 2.8 or so

But for example if 44% of women have 3 kids, 30% have 2, and the remaining non-childless have 1, we'd get reasonably close to 2.1, while still having 3 kids be the plurality most common number. (in practice I'm cheating since I'm excluding 3+, which obviously also exists although IME is pretty rare in secular circles. Whatever, it's just a general example.)

You're right, I meant to reply to your original comment. My mistake.

I'll delete and repost where it is meant to go.

I don't appreciate the vitriol, especially from a day-old account. Maybe lurk more before breaking out the invective.

Even though you claim you didn't mean to reply to this comment, you quoted the question I asked in this comment, not in my original comment.

And it felt like a very obvious attempt at a derail, hence my lack of patience with it. I have, nonetheless, deleted my comment, and we can continue the discussion where you say you intended it to be.

Women's education, and contraceptives are the main factors, so the most effective policies are not going to be evenhanded. The former leads to the latter, so I would consider it upstream. It's glib, but educating girls is a form of genocide.

In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

Killing members of the group;

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

As we know that educating women reduces birthrates (We found that women's attainment of lower secondary education is key to accelerating fertility decline; In a nutshell, data show that the higher the level of a woman’s educational attainment, the fewer children she is likely to bear.), and is in fact intended to decrease birthrates. This is usually seen as a good thing, but I wanted to address the weasel word of 'intended' in advance. There are plenty of people and groups trying to reduce birthrates around the world, and their two primary tools are educating girls and distributing contraceptives. These groups are genocidal by definition.

This explains the suggestions you found distasteful. You can try to incentivize women to have children all you want, but it's more effective to simply not educate them as children and deny contraceptives as adults. It's the rule of holes: if you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, first stop digging.

So in short: you find the premise of the question inherently flawed, and if given the option to implement a policy but with the requirement that it be even-handed, would have absolutely none to suggest?

Yes, the premise is flawed, since treating women and men as equivalent when it comes to reproduction is an aesthetic choice more than a necessary one. They are neither equivalent nor interchangeable when it comes to reproduction, so an even-handed requirement is applying restrictions to preclude the most effective actions. That leaves you with ineffective actions, of course, which seems to be by design. I could have complied with the letter, if not spirit, of your question by simply suggesting we ban contraceptives for women and men, but that would have been dishonest, and I'd rather get to the heart of the matter rather than play word games. "The law, in its majestic equality, equally forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread," as the quote goes.

When men can give birth and women can impregnate them, then equally applied laws will make sense and appropriate. Until then, we are left with the ugly truth that women control reproduction, and that when they control themselves they choose not to reproduce. When they are educated and have the tools available, fertility rates plummet. I don't see a way to untangle this knot, so I say cut it or leave it be and make peace with that decision.

But we see that, eg, religious women who are highly educated still have more kids. So there are clearly some things that can at least ameliorate the trend.

(I'm also not entirely convinced the problem is education qua education and not the incredibly delayed entry into adulthood. What I see a lot of is women feeling like they are finally "ready"/at a socially acceptable stage to have kids, and then starting to have kids - ie, wanting to reproduce - and continuing to want to have kids, but running out of time to have more of them. This is entirely anecdotal, of course, but I see this pattern incredibly frequently, where women describe badly wanting N+1 kids where N is the current number they have, and they'll iterate on this until eventually they have to give up on it because they're too old, their husband is opposed, etc. That's not "women don't want kids", its "women make decisions, especially when young, that aren't conducive to having more kids, and end up bearing the consequence via having fewer kids than they would have otherwise chosen to have")

Anyway. It's not as if we need to get back to fifties level reproduction, nudging things upwards a bit would already help.

(Actually, in that vein, what are the differences between low fertility and extremely low fertility countries? Are there any trends there?)

You seem to have missed the first sentence in your quotation. For any of these actions to constitute genocide, they must be done "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such".

The "people and groups trying to reduce birthrates around the world" are not trying to destroy any national, ethnic, racial or religious group; they are trying to improve the groups' standards of living. And yes, having half the population reduced to the status of illiterate baby-making machines does tend to decrease a country's standard of living.


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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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