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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 16, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has anyone run into a really good case against the Great Replacement theory?

It's not the newcomers' fault if the ancestral population won't reproduce. Great Cohabitation Theory sounds a lot less ominous.

GRT doesn’t claim that immigrants are at fault, though. GRT claims that domestic leadership is at fault. The leadership is at fault by (1) ignoring the realities of race and culture or the projected statistics on fertility rates, (2) beholden to an anti-white “conspiracy”, which (2a) is influenced by anti-white academics sometimes or (2b) is influenced by Jewish groups that benefit as they retain strong in-group biases while everyone else de-homogenizes.

One argument against (2b) in Europe is that the Muslim migrants generally do not like Israel and are already exerting influence to reduce their country’s alignment with Israel.

‘Replacement' reverses the causality between two phenomenas: Natives aren’t having kids, and immigrants are coming in greater numbers. The latter is supported by elites, but in large part because of the former. The emotional salience of the issue, the 'oh no, we're disappearing' realization, also stems from the former. Native reproduction rates is the dominant problem here. “We will not be replaced”’s obvious solution is not "let’s stop immigration", it’s “let’s have more kids”. I’m not a fan of unfiltered immigration, but GRT just externalizes the real problem.

But this is incorrect. Without immigration, native wages and bargaining power would increase, meaning birth rates would increase. Without immigration, the government would need to incentivize births, or consider the real (feminism-related) issues. As is, immigration is the exact thing that the government is using to prevent any real discussion (let alone policy) on birth rates.

native wages and bargaining power would increase, meaning birth rates would increase.

Will native wages increase to the $300K/year level? That's where the U-curve of white American TFR gets above self-replacement levels again; for most of the 95ish percent below that, the correlation between (lifetime) fertility and income ranges from barely positive to greatly negative. Non-white American TFR goes above replacement at a mere $200K/year, but that might be skewed by recent immigrants who haven't yet assimilated to modern American pandas-in-captivity attitudes toward breeding. Even if not, that's probably still above what you're going to hit by just keeping out all the new immigrants.

And remember that, while having fewer poor immigrants increases the bargaining power of native poor people vs people with capital, childcare workers are closer to the poor-people group. It's entirely possible that, while 95% of the population sees their birth rate go down because that's what most modern people do as they make more money, the other 5% might also see their birth rate go down because that's what rich modern people do when they're having more trouble finding a nanny.

the real (feminism-related) issues

The biggest inverse correlation with fertility I've seen is national level of women's education, I'm sad to say, and if there's a version of feminism that manages to break that connection I'd like to see it. But anti-feminism doesn't seem to be immune to modernity either. The LDS church is a literal patriarchy, and Mormon TFR still plummeted, just not quite as soon as that of non-Mormons.

The biggest inverse correlation with fertility I've seen is national level of women's education

The root cause is mechanization. Remember that 1920 and 2020 aren't meaningfully different when you look at TFR compared to the proportion of population that lives in a city- actually, I'd argue that in 1920 it was worse because it was near 2.0 even though the country was 50% rural. We have a ways to go before we get (back) to South Korea/Taiwan TFR.

Women's education is related, but mechanization causes women's education and not the other way around.

This was temporarily reversed in the 1950s and 60s (in the US) because of the post-war economic boom that uniquely benefited male labor, but as soon as that was over (and also that the cheap oil disappeared!) its value went right back into the toilet. And by the time we had cheap energy again, Chinese slaves free trade had permanently displaced those men.

You want to reverse this effect, you need a similar technological shift. AI might get there someday, but it'll need to be a compelling and overwhelming technological force (that somehow survives getting lawfare'd into oblivion; not that lawfare isn't the reason a lot of objectively-unnecessary women are employed to begin with) that devalues their biological advantages so hard that the life path that involves having kids has a better return on investment for the overwhelming majority of women.

The other way is to just go full Handmaiden's Tale, but if you wanted that you have to forsake mechanization (and thus restore the biological advantage human doings have over human beings), and nothing lies that way but ruin: remember, the Spartans lived in fear of a Helot uprising, and given where the power lies in mechanized societies that's why women tend to be hysterical about the possibility of men doing the same thing to them despite the pains they take to make sure they don't.