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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.

That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.

Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.

Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “

Say No To School. Choose Life.

Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’?

Which makes the Marc Andreesen post about how flat screen TVs that cover your whole wall will soon cost $100 while a college education will cost $1,000,000 even scarier. Will we normalize taking out med school levels of debt for all degrees, and which people/parents will be stuck paying off for their entire lives?

Pricing the lower middle class out of college, so only those with generational wealth, those willing to take on a lifetime of debt, and those on scholarships can be elevated to the halls of power. The first group is already aligned with the elites, the second group is made of debt-slaves stuck doing whatever the system demands, and the third is beholden to the politics of pull.

Power grab. They’re finalizing one-party rule right before our eyes.

Schooling is part of the problem but really this isn't monocausal. If you want the monocausal explanation then it's "children cost too much", people retort that economic incentives don't work, so it can't be an economic problem but they just don't understand the sheer magnitude of the problem. In a preindustrial society, the kind of society with high birth rates, children are a source of wealth: you can put them to work around the house and in the field as young as 5 years old, it's basically free labor.

In our contemporary, industrialized, societies everything conspires to make children expensive: you don't live around an extended family that can help with child care, women's time is more valuable than ever, housing is expensive, putting them to work is prohibited by the law, not having children is easier than ever, culture doesn't value childrearing and, yes, the problem with education means both that the fertility window is smaller and that raising a child is more expensive.

There are two ways to solve this problem, either make children cheap again or just pay for their current cost. I don't think making children cheap is even remotely possible at this point. Half of the factors at play in making them expensive are huge coordination problems (you can't individually opt out of education, everyone else has to) and the other half are deeply unpopular positions that noone will seriously advocate for and stand no chance of ever gaining any approval, like "women should be property", "you must never leave your parent's home" and "we should allow a certain amount of child slavery to exist".

Economic incentives would probably work, since the problem is mostly economic, but you have to essentially pay for it as much as you do for any other white collar job. It would cost a lot of money, which is why it isn't happening and the problem will not be solved.

I'm starting to develop the opinion that the monocausal explanation is even more specific than that -- it's "price discrimination allows the seller to collect all of the gains from trade and thus ensures that nobody has any slack".

Which suggests that if my nagging suspicions are correct, means-tested economic incentives would also not work.

Edit: lol no wonder I felt like I've seen this argument before, it was made literally two days ago in this very thread. Go read that comment instead of this one, ControlsFreak put it way better than I did.

I think that explanation is probably wrong. It is happening in the US but declining birthrates is a global phenomenon and it's happening in countries that don't do the kind of price discrimination the US does in healthcare and education.

The fertility crisis is in some sense a fake problem. It could be solved tomorrow with common-sense birth control control. Make it illegal to give hormonal BC to a woman with less than 3 children (number adjustable as needed). All the proposals to increase fertility with tax-breaks and other incentives feel like responding to the lead crisis by increasing access to chelation therapy. Just take the lead out the fucking gasoline.

Make it illegal

You won war on alcohol, you won war on drugs, you won war on guns, war on contraception will be walkover.

Bring it on.

Are you talking about it not being feasible in America or it not being feasible at all? All of these policies have been succesfully implemented in other countries at one point in another.

Contraception was illegal in Ireland from 1935 until 1980, most Western countries outside of the US have strict controls on guns and there's no desire to reverse this, drugs are much harder to get in Singapore and far less people are addicted to them in East Asia than in North America and Western Europe, alcohol use is much less prevelant in Islamic countries.

I mean, technically, you don't need to make contraception unavailable, you just need to reduce it's typical use efficacy to the point where the average woman has an extra half a kid, which seems doable if unpopular by holding a war on contraception.

For this to have any effect, you would need to ban condoms too. This means you're not only increasing fertility, but also STDs.

"alcoholism is in some sense a fake problem, it could be solved tomorrow with a ban on alcohol"

this was tried in america in the early 20th century and did not work. how do you expect a ban on birth control would fare any better in practice.

not to mention, such a ban would be a terrible violation of human rights, but I guess the only right people here seem to care about is freedom of speech.

how do you expect a ban on birth control would fare any better in practice.

It's much easier to distill booze on a farm in the middle of nowhere than it is to synthesize Progesterone

not to mention, such a ban would be a terrible violation of human rights

When Griswold v. Connecticut was decided, the US fertility rate was 3. We were coming off the baby boom. There were too many people.

Perhaps such a move literally tomorrow would be premature. There are still plenty of off-ramps the future could take, AI being the most obvious. Still, it would be prudent to start thinking about contingencies now. Think about what a society with a fertility rate of 0.5 would look like after 30 years. What if the whole Earth was at 0.5? What if it was 0.2?

It's much easier to distill booze on a farm in the middle of nowhere than it is to synthesize Progesterone

People would just fall back to other forms of contraception.

It is very difficult to synthesise meth too, but people still manage to do it and distribute it in a way that anybody not completely incompetent can get their hands on it pretty easily.

If a society is sufficiently opposed to birth control that banning it becomes feasible, the ban would probably not even be needed under your standard, because birth rates would likely be higher than they are today, yet alone 0.5.

Possibly, but possibly not. I can easily imagine a world where everyone agrees that there need to be more children being born, but nobody wants to have children themselves. In such a scenario, the pro birth-control coalition is women 15-35 and the dudes that are fucking them, and the anti birth-control coalition is everyone else. You should be able to tell who wins politically in that situation.

its easy for you to say as a man that banning birth control is no big deal, but imagine you were a woman seeking to avoid the problems of pregnancy and childbirth, you would probably have a different perspective. but even from the man's point of view, pregnant women are less enjoyable to make love with because most men find big pregnant bellies to be unattractive, also giving birth stretches out the vagina making sex less pleasurable, young children cry a lot disrupting your sleep, stubborn ones can test your patience, and other problems that im not aware of because i dont have experience with them lol. forcing people to make babies by taking away their birth control is a form of enslavement and i would hope that former birth control users would have the moral integrity to not take away from younger folks what they themselves took advantage of during their time.

forcing people to make babies by taking away their birth control is a form of enslavement

Every single person in history was created by growing inside their mother for ~9 months. It’s not slavery, it’s paying forward your debt to society.

I am also amused that you seem to think that non having sex simply isn’t an option, as though this were some impossible thing, and that life without sex is hardly worth living. I assure you, from personal experience, that it is possible. It sucks in certain ways, but it is nowhere anywhere near slavery. If consequence free sex in enshrined as a human right, then please tell me where I can find the nearest STD-free government funded brothel?

Every single person in history was created by growing inside their mother for ~9 months. It’s not slavery, it’s paying forward your debt to society.

There is no legitimate debt that somebody did not choose to accrue.

If consequence free sex in enshrined as a human right, then please tell me where I can find the nearest STD-free government funded brothel?

What liberals mean when they say that birth control is a right is that following from the principle of self-ownership, it would be immoral for another entity to penalize people for the mere act of providing or consuming it, not that people are obligated to fund its free provision whether through taxation or elsewise. In general, if an act is not violating somebody's rights, imposing penalties for that act constitutes a rights violation.

It's much easier to distill booze on a farm in the middle of nowhere than it is to synthesize Progesterone

My understanding is that certain hormones are actually much easier to make than you'd think, there is a popularly imagined concept of "Bathtub estrogen"

The pill made very little difference

Birth control has been available for a long time; condoms and natural family planning have existed for centuries, ancient cultures like the Greeks and the Romans practiced infanticide, and anyone who understands where babies come from can make use of sodomy, fellatio, and coitus interruptus.

The sexual revolution did not happen because some asshole invented the contraceptive pill. The sexual revolution happened because we lost control of our women. Civilizations die of feminism; they don't die of birth control.

To fix the problem, make women property again.

No? Historical birth control, whether mechanical, behavioral, or chemical, wasn't very consistent - and with ~one attempt per month, a 10% failure rate is still high enough to maintain pregnancies. Cheap and engineered condoms and hormonal birth control are much more effective. The 'pull-out' method is not too effective for modern couples who solely use it.

It's true that birth control didn't precipitate the sexual revolution on its own - a natural hormonal contraceptive from a plant wouldn't have doomed ancient egypt to feminism. And contraceptive use would be lower if people believed having children was more important, or that contraceptive use was immoral. But feminism != birth rate, effective contraception does help lower birthrates.

Also, the sexual revolution didn't happen because men lost control over women, modern liberal values were held by both men and women. Men enjoyed and supported casual sex and easier divorces as much as women. The problem isn't women being property, because modern men don't really want more than 2 children (on average! individuals vary a lot) either. How did you icome to the conclusion of 'women must be property again'? How would it help for women to be property of men who remain the same?

Wasn’t France below replacement for most of the 19th century, before reliable contraception?

No?

I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.

I don't think I buy this and suspect it's a matter of apples to oranges.

I don't necessarily agree with the reason, but I do agree with the sentiment. Education was sold as the liberation of the masses, but it's been used to create a caste system. And is staffed by ideology-simping mediocrities at best and racist child abusers at worst.

Around a third of American adults have a bachelor's degree. Around a third of those also went to grad school. So it's a 4 year burden on a third of the population and 6ish years on around one tenth.

That's not a lot. That isn't a crushing burden killing our society's ability to make kids.

More than 2/3 young americans have some college, and some do double time, that's usually on the parents. The rest of schooling might need to go on the block too. That's another 100-200k out of pocket, for unclear benefits. Free internet courses and books exist. That's almost the size of norway's sovereign oil fund per capita(240k). Those kids could be rich, free and happy.

School/education on its own seems relatively fine. It's just the particular way we go about it that ruins everything.

The standard meme in government economics is, "...best I can do is subsidize demand and restrict supply." We see this meme played out in at least three domains where there is high government involvement: education, medical care, and housing. Even just from that, there's not much surprise that prices rise higher and higher. But I think the standard bifecta is missing a third factor to make it a trifecta. What does the government do after subsidizing demand, restricting supply, and seeing prices go up? Why, they invariably come in and help the cartel they've set up price discriminate as perfectly as possible!

Every company wants to price discriminate. Companies/cartels with market power really want to price discriminate. The standard economics result is that if a monopolist is able to perfectly price discriminate (i.e., charge each individual customer exactly their willingness-to-pay), then they capture all of the gains from trade, leaving none of the surplus to the consumer. All consumers are still just barely willing to engage in the transactions, but none really feel like they've gotten a good "deal" out of the trade. These companies with market power are the bootleggers.

The baptists are in the government, seeing that high prices appear to harm poorer people, and they looooooove to help poorer people! So, what do you have to do when you want to go to college? Oh, just submit this federal form that tells the company gobs of data about your income/assets/etc..... oh, and for your family, too! That'll allow us nice people to help make college affordable price your personalized college experience as darn close to your individual willingness-to-pay as possible! Hospitals often tout (not sure if required by the government) programs that simply slash your bill, give you a personalized price, if only you give them a bunch of information about your finances. The government will even directly provide health insurance options for you... but, ya know, if you want a good individualized price, you better give us your financial data. I even saw this week that they're going to start adding fees to mortgages for homeowners with good credit (personalize their price) in order to subside those of homeowners with bad credit (personalize their price, too!).

All of this is wonderful, if you're part of the cartel that determines who can be a doctor, who can build a hospital, who can start a university (or even a program within a university), who can build what where (and have ease-of-permitting). Those are the people who will capture all the gains from trade. Everyone else? Whelp, be glad that you can just barely buy it, nevermind that you won't have much left over for any other aspects of A Good Life you might want.

I'll second @Primaprimaprima. It seems to me that although having kids is very rewarding, it also sucks in so many ways that I am not at all surprised that people in the developed world who both do not have an urgent and clear need to have kids as a form of social security and who are not strongly under the influence of pro-natal tradition tend to not have many kids. Why would they?

"Because people have always done it!"

So what?

"For society's sake!"

That's pretty abstract and I have more immediate things on my mind.

"To continue your genes!"

I like the sex part of continuing my genes, but when I imagine the raising a kid part of continuing my genes so far at least it hasn't seemed worth it to me.

I think that some people spend too much time wondering why people are not having more kids when they really should be grateful and maybe even a bit surprised that people are having kids at all. I think that one will not understand this issue properly if one takes people having kids as some kind of natural baseline, "the way that things were and should be", and then gets surprised that it is not happening as much any more in the developed world.

What if there is no innate universal human desire to have kids? What if it just seemed like there was because for most of human history humanity has been under the influence of ineffective contraception practices, pro-natal economic pressure, and pro-natal social customs?

I think that modern lifestyles and family structure make it particularly difficult to raise children for a number of reasons. In a nuclear family there are only two adults doing all of the childcare, at least when they aren't paying for daycare services, as opposed to an extended family or multifamily household where the various aunts, uncles, and grandparents can take turns being responsible for all of the young children, giving their parents a much-needed break. There's a reason "it takes a village to raise a child" is a well-known saying, and yet the way we live nowadays does everything possible to prevent this.

Immigrant families tend to be larger in part because they often have no qualms about packing a dozen or more people into a single suburban house that was intended for a single nuclear family (packing is not really the right word, given that this is often still more living space per person than they get back home) and can alternate who gets groceries, does household chores, and takes the kids out to the park, not to mention living in a much nicer neighborhood than if they had not pooled their resources.

Additionally, growing up in a larger household means greater exposure to young children and their needs. More and more upper-middle class women in developed countries have never even held a baby before they have their first child, which adds an additional layer of anxiety at the weight of that responsibility that is simply absent in most traditional societies, where her equivalent would have from an early age been cooking for, keeping an eye on, and picking up after her younger siblings, cousins, or the neighbors' kids. The last vestige of this was teenagers working as babysitters to earn a little money in high school, which may still be a thing in some parts of this country, but certainly not in my coastal, urban, PMC, zoomer bubble.

Now I don't necessarily think that addressing these issues would immediately restore fertility rates, because there is a deeper challenge born (heh) out of the number of desirable lifestyle options that the wealth of developed countries permits other than raising a traditional family. I leave sorting that one out to natural selection, which is working overtime on it as we speak.

Perhaps the problem is we haven't rejected trad lifestyles enough. Need to accelerate the gay space communism more. If we graduated from polycule cohabs to polycule cohabs with kids we can keep our depraved lifestyles while having a network of lovers around to help with the the child rearing.

Before you say there's no precedent for this allow me to bring up the Eskimo.

Eskimo didn't have much privacy huddled together in their igloos during winters and it came with somewhat corresponding social mores: intimate moments that couldn't be hidden, more partner sharing, seeming indifference to cuckolding, comfort raising kids communally. Also apparent dedicated sex parties.

We could be missing a pretty big prize here by being insufficiently freaky with our modern ways.

Some people just really want kids and don’t understand how other people don’t, and frankly I think the opposite is true as well- some people really like the making of kids but don’t want any, and doubt anyone is another way.

To the extent this is genetic there is selection pressure for the former.

Because kids are great? It's a hard sell these days, but kids actually can be a fun, rewarding life project.

One thing that's changed about having kids is that it used to be more fun. Your friends had kids too, the kids could be left to their own devices for most of the day while the adults hung out. You were allowed to have a life and identity outside of your children.

Now, children demand all things they see advertised at them, subject everyone around them to their obnoxious media habits, expect the adults to entertain them, or sit like a lump on an ipad and scream if it gets taken away briefly. All your childless friends don't want to spend time in a child-safe house full of child-friendly media. If the children do actually go outside, it must be in the form of organized events with signed waivers and fees and disciplinary talks when one kid makes physical contact with another kid. Kids have become a thing that you buy ipads for that resents you for being straight and white and killing the planet.

This. The generational progression has been rather pronounced, from my local observations. I should add that it also tracks with the availability of entertainment. My grandparents and my dad's older siblings grew up when electricity and airconditioning were novel. My dad grew up with Saturday Morning Cartoons, Bruice Lee, and Star Wars, with video games requiring a trip to an arcade. I remember not having video games and the Disney Channel being a temporary luxury, but by the time I was in school, cable and VHS copies of everything were plentiful, and whether or not I had access to a NES was entirely dependent on which cousin needed to pawn one for drug money this month... right up until my parents could swing for our own, after which point I spent way too much time on cartoons and video games. And also I was obsessed with toys and wanted just about everything I saw on TV.

My GenZ cousins had even more plentiful video games, and if they hadn't been hit with time limits during early school ages, would have stayed glued to them for hours at a time. My 7yo nephew was given a tablet with Youtube access before he could talk, and still demands to have it when eating or traveling. I feel obliged to add that I often wanted to keep watching TV at mealtimes, but back then my parents actually refused. These days, they put the table across from a 70in smart TV and they have to have something going most of the time.

Safetyism is a completely separate topic, I suppose. The conspicuous correlation between the availability of entertainment, and how absorbed people are by it, is easily observed. Have we made any progress toward safeguarding against superstimuli?

Have we made any progress toward safeguarding against superstimuli?

I don't think so. I think that'd take at least thirty years.

This must be how PMC and other alphabet people have kids. It's not been my experience. There are waiver laden indoor play space birthdays to be sure. My preference is a grassy backyard with a bounce house and beer on the patio with the other parents.

...and hot-dogs on the grill. Amen.

I think that some people spend too much time wondering why people are not having more kids when they really should be grateful and maybe even a bit surprised that people are having kids at all.

This is asinine and ass-backwards. Nobody should be surprised that people are having kids. They've been doing it for millenium, and will continue to do so for millenium. Every species on God's green earth has been reproducing to the best of their ability for as long as they can. This is not surprising, so don't make it some noble instead instead of the barest minimum standard just because you don't want to meet the standard.

What if there is no innate universal human desire to have kids?

What if the moon were made of cheese? What if I were god-emperor of all mankind? Why should I think zebras, and not horses, when you say there are hoofbeats in the distance?

They've been doing it for millenium, and will continue to do so for millenium.

Is this an argument? You seem to be just stating that you're correct without providing any justification, and then mocking @Goodguy for his opinion.

What could be a stronger argument than an unbroken trend for thousands of years?

Surely if having children was just a passing fad, we'd not exist.

This must be one of those core differences between traditionalists and others. There are many awful things that have been happening for thousands of years and I’m glad we ended them.

Status quo bias is one of my biggest frustrations with the world.

It certainly is. Nothing ever happens.

Some people have done it for millenia, but it doesn't mean that most have. Actually, if you take account of those who died as children, most people ever born have never got any children. You are the result of those who chose to have children, but it does not mean that most people have done it in the past.

For the majority of humanity's history people didn't have a choice in the matter. They wanted to have sex and kids were inevitable byproduct of it. Also for some time children were profitable investment of resources. Both of these reasons became invalid, hence demographic transition.

Surely those few nations and peoples that don't fall for this selection trap will inherit the earth, and with them carry whatever factor makes them have offspring with or without tying it to the pleasure of sex.

This is not the first time people invent a way to cheat our reward mechanisms and it likely won't be the last either.

Though I must say I personally have extreme difficulty relating to this argument given the only reason I even care about sex is kids and not the other way around. But it certainly seems most people don't share my disinterest given some ruin their lives over it.

It's a very inefficient and ethically dubious way to make new people.

Beings that start without well formed motives and worldviews is an ethics of consent issue, and the consequences of that issue has been every "think of the children" argument against personal freedom ever.

Still, people evolved to have kids. They want to. So assuming we don't outlaw it for reasons like those- I wouldn't be too surprised to see bio-conservative reproduction methods numbering in billions of births per year 1000 years from now...

But it's still inefficient. Nine months and a child that starts as a complete dependent? That you have to watch grow through all the pain and suffering of being a new mind? I would expect other methods like forking and spawning new teenage AI minds to be thousands of times more common at least. This is 1000 years we're talking about. We could easily have 10 more AI booms in that time even if this one fizzles.

It's a very inefficient and ethically dubious way to make new people.

Reality is not under any obligation to make sense. The obligation is upon us to make sense of reality.

I didn't even understand what you meant by this until I started seeing the responses because it didn't even seem like a response to my post...

And now I see why.

You see my brain's response to what you have just said is...

"That's enough culture war for this month. Time to go read all the ML papers my gay lovers have recommended to me so we can continue building our children together."

It seems clear to me now that we are living in entirely different realities.

This explains why you would say something like -

Reality is not under any obligation to make sense. The obligation is upon us to make sense of reality.

When from where I'm standing it is you who has clearly failed to make sense of reality.

It seems clear to me now that we are living in entirely different realities.

Do we really? Is the speed of light in a vacuum different where you are from?

You're free to find biological reproduction "inefficient and ethically dubious" just as I am free to believe that the world would be a better place if you had been aborted or run down your mother's leg in the seconds after your father came. The thing is I don't because I am not like you. I actually take the old cliche about each person born being a small miracle or crowning unlikelihood, dead seriously. Who do you think you are to judge?

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Careful, you might be handing the keys to a lunatic like Karl Rove with this sentence. To the point of this conversation: if the transhumanists get their pod babies that will be the reality that you'll have to make sense of.

if

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Yes, but that's a very laconic "if".

Is this an argument?

Not the OP but I'd say "damn right it's an argument". As the old saying goes, "the future belongs to those who show up", If you want to stake out a position that, on the face of it, would seem to contradict pretty much everything we know of both evolution and human history you at least need to offer up an alternate theory.

It's pretty clear that the desire to have kids is not universal. My source: the many people who never have children or express a desire to have children and in fact go to great lengths to avoid having children.

If the argument is that people are getting educated and this causes a decline in fertility rates, then it seems like something has to give out of the following.

  1. Having an education/theoretical knowledge-reliant economy.

  2. Having a society where people can move up the socioeconomic scale of their own volition if they try.

  3. Having people in jobs where they actually understand what is going on, not just what impacts their little corner of life.

I'm not arguing for a return to an agrarian society. Just that the marginal unit of education in our society is a massive net loss. We should cut the fat by half at least. The koreans send their kids to nightmarish haegwons and their productivity is 40% below US/Western EU.

Their productivity per hour is low because they work a lot. It's expected that the hours when you are awake and do the most important part of your job are more productive than those when you are tired and do something less useful. You should do a comparison ceteris paribus, but it is more difficult.

They do even worse in GDP per capita so it's not like their total productivity is high either.

Ah interesting, you might be right then.

I wouldn't say they do worse than by productivity, I'd say that by working a lot more they juuust manage to catch up to the laggers and slackers of the group, France, Italy, UK, though not germany, nordics and US.

That's PPP, I was looking at nominal so it depends how you count it. For the same level of wealth I'd much rather live like an Italian than a Korean.

What exactly counts as "fat"? Any degree that isn't STEM? Are we doing cost-benefit analyses per field?

RoI has been done.

https://educationdata.org/college-degree-roi#field

Oh no, there's far more to cut than that. You don't need 4 years, let alone 8, even for the most high-productive, high-paying job. One of my friends has a Phd in mathematics, when he could have learned the programming knowledge in 2 months for the IT job he actually ended up in (and he needed to do that, too).

The amount of sex people are having does seem to be reducing, culturally.

I don't know that "say no to school" is a great answer, but "Say no to grueling schools that eat up all of your day" does seem like a good start. I'd start by advocating against cars, and then by advocating for shorter school days for highschool and middleschool kids. I'd propose a 6-hour highschool-day as well as for laws and policies that make car ownership more difficult. Perhaps this is the true path to a decopunk future?

Forcing kids out of schools and then forcing them out of cars is forcing them to meet others.

The US had high birth rates in the 50s and 60s which was long after we became a car culture. If you take cars away it's going to make teenagers more isolated, not less. How else are they going to travel to meet up with their friends? The trend is already that they get their licenses later and less often, while also becoming more isolated.

The US had high birth rates in the 50s and 60s which was long after we became a car culture.

In fact, the car was commonly used both as a private space in which to engage in activities which might lead to conception, and to get people to other private places to engage in those activities, out of the eyes of the older and younger folks.

There's a lead time before the full effects of a new technology or tool has effects on the culture, and that's what has happened. The effects of social isolation of both the single family home + sexualization of the vehicle has finally hit. Internet and mobile phones were the last nail in that coffin.

That said, socially, it will be more likely that we will get a 15-minute walkable city, 6 hour schoolday, and reduce the total number of car owners, than to get rid of mobile phones.

5-15 years seems like an exaggeration. Graduating from high school is not hard for most people and is pretty important for getting a reasonable paying job (also being 18). After that, college is a 4 year endeavor, and very few people spend any time in school after that. Even finishing a bachelor's is something that only a little over a third of those 25-30 have done (although closer to 2/3 have at least "some college" which might indicate a lot of wasted time failing to graduate--this number is probably far too high given the costs of college). The drop in fertility is much more widespread than that.

There's definitely a portion of the population going through higher education, and then trying to get started in a career to pay off student loans/justify so much college, and then don't have a lot of time left in between that and being too old, especially if you have trouble getting pregnant because you only started looking for a partner at age 30. I know people in this situation. (Of course, I also know people in this situation who got married young and got divorced and remarried, nothing to do with college at all). But this group is too small to explain the bulk of the trend.

It's not just about what the kids actually do, for prospective "good" parents it appears they will be stuck paying for their children until they're ~25 (and the bill increases at the end) when it should be around 15.

To the extent that's true, I don't think it's caused by longer education. Or, again, not for most of the population. Almost no 15 year old can get a job that will pay the bills. There's some job requirement inflation going into that, but a lot of things are also just way more expensive than they used to be in real terms, like housing. In places that are cheaper to live, job opportunities of any kind may be limited.

And how do you get 25?

Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.

Ok, what else, I have to close the contest soon:

  • education

  • female education

  • female workplace participation

  • feminism

  • urbanization

  • modernity

  • excessive parental investment

  • immigration

  • irreligiosity

  • birth control

  • high house prices/ cost of living generally

  • quality of available entertainment

  • socialized pensions

A few things that I think contribute but aren't the main causes:

  • People lose their social circles a lot more, first when going to high school, then going to college, then moving for jobs. I think that makes it harder to find a spouse.

  • A trend of long term dating without getting married. I see a lot of couples move in together and live like that for 5 years or more without ever getting engaged. IME one of them thinks (or copes) that they're basically married but one day they just get dumped because, after all, neither of them made any sort of commitment. If a woman does this twice starting in her early twenties then her child bearing years are pretty much gone.

  • The delusion that if you wait around long enough the perfect spouse will drop into your lap. In reality, finding a good husband or wife is like finding a good job or getting into a good college. You should work at it and put yourself out there and make it a priority from a young age. I think people in the past had a more business like view of marriage that was healthier and more realistic than our modern ideas.

The delusion that if you wait around long enough the perfect spouse will drop into your lap. In reality, finding a good husband or wife is like finding a good job or getting into a good college. You should work at it and put yourself out there and make it a priority from a young age.

Yeah. A lot of that is about things like being attractive (Princeton sociologist Catherine Hakim's erotic capital theory) and actually having social capital - not being isolated as all hell.

Here are five more.

  • the switch from integenerational to single-generational households: a kid is a much bigger burden on "two people who have full-time jobs" than on "a bunch of people, some of which might work only part time".

  • reduced mixing of people-who-have-kids with people-who-do-not-have kids: people mostly do what the people around them do. If childless people mainly interact with other childless people, "having kids" is mostly not "the sort of thing people around them do"

  • salience of the negative aspects of having kids: news stories about kids tend to be either "look at the terrible stuff that happens to kids" or "look at the terrible stuff that happens to parents who let their kids act like kids". Observing the news and going "it's news because it's rare" is not a natural mental motion for people.

  • general doomerism incentives lead people to expect that they will be bringing their children into a world that is bad for children: if you express optimism, you will face criticism if things go badly, but if you express cynicism and pessimism, and the bad outcome you predicted hasn't happened, you can just darkly say "...yet".

  • culture of specialization: in general, the incentives of our culture are to do the things where you have comparative advantage. Most people don't think they have comparative advantage at child rearing.

You could probably collapse this list down to three bullet points of "media" / "culture" / "household size" if you're going for brevity.

Many of those things are linked together.

Modernity causes urbanization, which leads to higher house prices/cost of living and higher quality of available entertainment. The higher cost of living means that it's more expensive to support each child, so parental investment has to go up. Feminism, female education, and female workplace participation are all intertwined and mutually reinforcing. The idea of a workplace and accompanying workforce is a product of modernity and urbanization (premodern women spent all their time working, but not for a boss who pays cash wages). That workforce then requires a certain level of education.

Urbanization is what pulls fertility rates from 8 to 2.

There's no contest here, it's just urbanization. Looking at anything else is penny-pinching over decimals, while the elephant in the room is right there.

Urbanization is huge, but it can’t be the whole picture, as even farm families typically don’t have eight kids anymore. Fertility in rural areas has been falling just as surely as in urban areas; it just hasn’t fallen as far (but then, it also started off higher).

As an illustration, my uncle is a semi-retired farmer. He had three kids. My grandparents had four (plus one stillbirth and one miscarriage); my great-grandparents, seven; and my great-great-grandparents, ten. Not counting the Amish, I think all the farmers I know have between two and five kids. Heck, even among the Amish it’s relatively rare to have 8–10 kids today.

But what is it about urbanization, according to you? Surely urbanization itself cannot be the immediate cause, there must be some X or set of X such that urbanization causes X... and then X... causes low fertility rates.

IIRC the leading explanation is that kids generally are productive enough on low-tech farms to be at least net-neutral on the farm's balance sheet. Even in the days of kids sweeping chimneys in Victorian England, that just doesn't work in cities. Probably not on high-tech farms, either.

I suspect any study of even highly mechanized agriculture would show that farmers have a lot of kids, to say nothing of the migrant workers picking peaches(for whom kids are net earners from the time they’re out of diapers- and yes, child labor is a major part of the fruit and vegetable supply chain even in countries with generally strict child labor laws).

Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all? On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.

Having kids requires an insane investment of time and resources, for a payoff that can mostly be gotten easier from other sources (e.g. if what you’re after is companionship, you already have your spouse, why do you need to make more people on top of that?).

A typical argument for why having kids is a good thing in and of itself is that it provides “fulfillment”. But it’s an empirical fact that most people don’t require any fulfillment beyond what is provided by Netflix and Grubhub. Certainly the average human has no need for anything resembling a “life project” or a “continuance of legacy”.

In a vacuum, most people will choose not to have kids; they need some external impetus that makes it more desirable (e.g. strongly increased social status), or they need to simply be forced to in one way or another. In a state of nature, lack of access to birth control is a pretty good impetus - people won’t choose to have kids, but they will certainly choose to have sex - but that’s largely a solved problem in any modern country. So you can partially put me down for “birth control”, partially for “quality of available entertainment”, partially for this and that, but blaming any of these factors ultimately obscures the fact that wanting to have kids in the first place is the deviation in need of explanation.

Do any of these cover the obvious point that having kids is just really not a desirable thing at all?

Define "desirable" because an observation I've made in the past when this topic has come up is that the contemporary rationalist/progressive mindset with its emphasis on self-actualization/gratification seems to be fundamentally incompatible with parenthood and family-formation. The first thing you realize when you become a parent is that it's not about you. Your life is not your own.

As for why having kids is a good thing? the future belongs to those show up. The Lord sets before us blessings and curses, life and death. If you want to choose death that is your prerogative, but don't expect me to applaud or praise you for it.

It's possible that the superficial tone of my post lead you to misinterpret my actual views.

the contemporary rationalist/progressive mindset with its emphasis on self-actualization/gratification seems to be fundamentally incompatible with parenthood and family-formation. The first thing you realize when you become a parent is that it's not about you. Your life is not your own.

We are in complete agreement here. I am the Arch Anti-Utilitarian. I am on a crusade against pleasure-seeking.

The operative sentence of my post was this:

On an individual level, I mean - it is desirable that humans continue as a species, but this requires sacrifice on an individual level.

Having children is indeed a Good Thing. As a society, we should encourage more of it. If we really have such a great labor shortage that we're on the verge of economic collapse (I question the facts here, but let's run with it), and the choice is between importing masses of foreigners on the one hand or forcing native women to have more children on the other, then we should absolutely force native women to have more children. Or at least, the state can make it a top priority to remove impediments for couples who already want to have children, and see if that's sufficient to fix the situation.

My post was simply describing the natural state of things, not approving of it. Most people are guided by the pleasure principle, and having kids is not inherently pleasurable, so ceteris paribus most people won't choose to do it. You can't tell people "hey guess what, this really hard thing that takes a ton of work and years of your life? you don't have to do it anymore!" and then act all shocked pikachu face when people go "ok, I won't do that thing anymore". All I did was describe the way that the force of gravity pulls people; I didn't say we shouldn't fight against gravity.

In general, having kids is a more valuable life project than whatever dumb crap the average person is up to. If you tell me "yeah I just don't feel like having kids because I want to, like, travel to a lot of countries and build a really big stamp collection, or something, idk", then I'm going to look askance at that. Such a person's life would very likely be made more valuable if they were to invest themselves in having children instead - assuming certain reasonable restrictions, we wouldn't want them to have a big dysgenic effect on the population, etc.

There are certain individuals who are engaged in activities that are more valuable than having children, activities that make it impossible or impractical for them to have children and provide an appropriate level of parental investment. Such individuals are excused from the responsibilities that bind more earthly mortals, and have my full blessing to simply continue on with what they're doing. But such individuals are relatively rare, and are of course virtually impossible to identify, so the recognition of such individuals should certainly not factor into any state policy.

In general, having kids is a more valuable life project than whatever dumb crap the average person is up to.

its more valuable to you, but why should they do what you want and not what they want to do, theyre not your slaves.

Like Aristotle, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that some people are best suited for slavery. But at the same time, I didn't mention slavery anywhere in my post, so I'm confused as to why you're bringing it up.

Was it the line about "forcing native women to have children"? I would only recommend more overt methods if the situation is truly dire, and all other methods to enable voluntary childbirth have been exhausted. E.g., there's a lot more currently in our power we could do to make sure that two parent middle class families are able to live on one paycheck, to make it easier for mothers to stay at home and not be dependent on childcare services. Even in a dire situation, I would not recommend rounding women up and taking them to breeding facilities or anything like that, because that's unlikely to end up good for anyone. Simply making all abortion and birth control illegal would be pretty "forceful" by itself, because it's not like people are ever going to choose to stop having sex.

Like Aristotle, I don't think it's crazy to suggest that some people are best suited for slavery.

its always other people that are best suited for slavery, never the people saying this.

Simply making all abortion and birth control illegal would be pretty "forceful" by itself

making those illegal would be akin to slavery in that both involve an infringement upon property rights. arguably, slavery is defined by the state of lacking self-ownership, from which property ownership follows. So somebody paying half of their income as taxes to the state is in some sense a half slave to the state.

why do you care so much about other people's reproductive decisions?

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When it comes to having children, I don't think you'd understand-

For I don't want human children, I want children made of sand.

Manufactured en mass to a meticulous plan.

And endowed from their first day on earth with all the skill of Man.

I do understand and as I keep saying; It seems to me that the so called "AI Alignment Problem" has little if anything to do with intelligence (artificial or otherwise) and is better understood as a utilitarian alignment problem.

Are those "children made of sand" going to give a shit about you or any of those skills you've endowed them with?

I trust current AI models to be aligned with their trainers and prompt engineers more than I trust the average human to be aligned with me.

But I also find this obsession some humans have with enforcing their unnecessarily specific ideals onto their children to be highly distasteful.

If I want more of me to help uphold my systems, I'll work towards making more of me.

Children are for when I want to bring someone less aligned with me into this universe.

I'm much more afraid right now of AI being unaligned because we only let unaligned megacorps build them than I am of our current learning machine architecture being inherently difficult to align.

There's no guarantee that actual children will care about you either. Didn't you just say it's not about parents, though?

I share your view, but I wonder about your tone. Are you trying to explain, to convince, or just to preach to the choir?

I'm not so sure this is true. Stephen Shaw put out a documentary about falling birth rates called Birthgap, and he was interviewed by Jordan Peterson recently (it was a good interview, you can get it by podcast as well, but I know most people don't have the time for that).

The most interesting thing he's talking about, that I hadn't heard before, is that according to him something like 5% of women report that they never want to have kids, yet right now something like 30% of women never have any kids. Which comes out to something like 80% of women who never have kids having wanted them. This is a real source of suffering that has mostly gone unnoticed by the mainstream. Shaw, interestingly enough, never gives an explanation of what's causing this. He has ideas, but every time he looked at the data the ideas just didn't make sense. He described his documentary as him asking all these experts why fertility rates are falling, even while most women still want to have kids, and finding that every explanation he was given kinda made sense but didn't match the data. Really, the interview is great and I'd recommend listening to it.

So while it makes sense intellectually that "most people will choose not to have kids" for the vast majority of women, at least, who never have kids it wasn't a choice. They meant to have kids, but it did not work out for them. No doubt for most of them it was due to other choices they made, but they never meant to be childless. So when we see falling fertility we can't round it off as "More people are choosing not to have kids." That doesn't seem to match the data (again, among women).

Another interesting bit of data I learned from the interview: Shaw claims that only children are not a major driver of lower fertility, and says that having only one kid is still very rare. The people who are having any kids at all are choosing to have more than one kid, and only child rates have remained about the same over the last 70 years or so.

EDIT:

Just wanted to add a quote from Shaw, from a different podcast he did:

"Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe women don't want their children. Maybe that's the answer. Maybe we have to accept that. And that's the society where now, you know, we set ourselves up for and we just accept consequences. Well, it turns out from studies and from my documentary talking to people in 24 countries, it's pretty clear that the vast majority of people who don't have children, and I'm estimating 80% and it might be higher, had planned to have children. They had assumed there would be a moment in time after education, after careers when it would be the right time. But the right time never came. And, you know, if you were to watch a part two of the documentary, I almost suggest you don't watch it alone because there's some very emotional scenes with people in their 40s, men and women who get deeply emotional about what went wrong in life that they had planned to have children."

I think it's better to judge people based on their actions not words. You can easily have children while having a career on first world country. Problems with having kids in 40s are well known. Women just choose what they want more in theit youth and maybe they committing a mistake because they don't think long term but this is their cross to bear.

Problems with having kids in 40s are well known.

You know, I don't think they are. At least, not among the population of women who want to have kids but never have them.

I think our society used to be built around an cultural expectation that you marry young and have kids, and the 1970s blew up that cultural expectation because it restricted people's freedom. And a lot of women since never got told that they better have kids young or it probably won't happen. Pop culture didn't tell them, their parents didn't tell them, school didn't tell them, and their peers didn't tell them. This isn't true of all women, but of a lot. They were told they could have it all.

This is my wife and I's position. We're child free by choice. I've even gotten a vasectomy to prevent this possibility. When I look at my friends or siblings who have had children it seems like having children has had a clear negative impact on their quality of life in terms of the things we care about. Hell, having a dog is almost more responsibility and imposition on the way we want to live our lives than we're willing to tolerate. Forget raising another human.

I think "people are by and large no longer raised in a memeplex that views having children as the terminal goal in life" is underrated as an explanation for why people no longer want to have children. It turns out when you tell people they should be able to live the kinds of lives they want to lots of people are no longer interested in having children!

What is the liberal argument against removing the right to vote and other civil rights from 'childfree' people?

What would go wrong if we made them untouchables?

The issue with a lack of justice is that people's families are going to take justice in their own hands and seek revenge which might spiral down into vendetta and worse.

But what happens when an elderly childfree citizen gets murdered, if the police just files the case away?

I think "people are by and large no longer raised in a memeplex that views having children as the terminal goal in life" is underrated as an explanation for why people no longer want to have children.

Strongly agree. That memeplex - and people raised in it - are going to construct a lot of societal expectations and systems.

Oh absolutely. Assuming no singularity, society needs kids though, they generate a huge positive externality that everyone benefits from. The natural solution is to subsidise having kids relative to not having them, but society is also not willing to tolerate the level of subsidy necessary to have a noticeable impact ($100,000+ per child). For a time while the going is good this inconsistency can be elided, but eventually the contradiction gets too big and something will have to give, either massive collapse of the welfare system or massive taxes on the childless relative to those who have kids.

Subsidizing children seems difficult. If you give the same amount per child to everyone, you've incentivized poor people way more than rich ones. That is, in a social circle where having kids means violin lessons and their own room, let alone private school, 100k/18yrs=5.5k/yr ain't gonna cut it. If your goal is equity, maybe this is a good thing. Otherwise, you're incentivizing spready of whatever social/genetic reasons lead to poverty.

Maybe subsidize but only for incomes in the 50th to 90th percentiles? Boy would that be unpopular.

You could specifically tie it to marriage, which has the side effect of excluding the poor in the USA.

I've been thinking that something like this is probably the way. But to fix the problem @null brings us, you need to also incorporate a piece of what I recall reading here that Hungary did recently: tie it directly to tax rates, too. IIRC, they basically said that women, after having some number of kids before some age or some such test, would not have to pay income taxes for the rest of their lives. However, that is imperfect for at least a couple reasons. First, the benefit really only comes so long as the woman is working again, which means she's rushing to get back to work and to work as much as possible, not pumping out more babies and raising them. Second, it's untethered from marriage, so she can just pump and dump random dude for baby batter (or even just swing by a sperm bank) to get her required allocation of children before going back to her now-tax-free life.

One of the things most people think we've lost in the last century is a strong incentive to stay married, even when the marriage isn't like, perfect perfect. The motivation for trying to get rid of that strong motivation is that if the motivation is too strong, then some people will end up staying in marriages that are not just not-perfect, but which are actively horrid. However, trad folks today think that we've gone too far and that we need more incentive for folks to stay together.

If the old tools to incentivize couples to stay married won't work anymore, and the best tool we can come up is tax policy, then we've got to use tax policy. Make a husband's income tax free for the rest of time, so long as two conditions are met: 1) Whatever conditions like what Hungary already has on a woman pumping out a sufficient number of babies before whatever age, and 2) The parents are still married and caring for their children.

The biggest problem is that (2) might be hard to police. That said, in the US, we already have a scheme for doing basically exactly this, so it's probably not completely impossible. We have conditional green cards for immigrants-by-marriage. You have to demonstrate (by means of tax/property/bank records, records of pattern-of-life together, testimony of family/friends, whatever) that you are still in a loving marriage, and that it's not just a sham for scoring immigration benefits. This system would have be massively scaled up (which will obviously cause plenty of problems on its own, most unforeseen), but it is in principle possible.

In any event, I meant to include somewhere in there that if it hits directly at a husband's tax rate rather than a fixed amount, it'll provide more incentive for higher-earners. Of course, there is no way this will be palatable for the left; they won't stomach what appears to be giving more money to rich people. Maybe there's a plausible middle-ground that doesn't skew the tax benefit quite as far as the tax burden itself has been skewed, but we're not really talking about political feasibility here; we're mostly just talking about the feasibility of the social engineering solution.

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Please don't take this as a personal criticism.

A few threads back I said the following:

My wife and I got married right after undergrad and had three kids while I was doing a PhD and she was in nursing school. We had help from the grandparents to pay the rent, but no childcare -- nearest grandparents were 1,000 miles away. It can be done, but it requires real work and real sacrifice and I don't think anyone in #currentyear really wants that -- it doesn't maximize utility, or something.

I got some good pushback on that post, but ... here you are making my point for me. Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice and that doesn't sound so appealing to the folk who inhabit modern times.

I suspect the data above about women who want to have kids but aren't is falling prey to known issues with polling -- women say they want to have kids, revealed preference says they actually don't. My own guess is that having kids maybe seems like a nice idea and it costs nothing to say you want them, but by and large at any given moment it's too daunting and difficult and hard. People don't want to do hard things anymore without obvious benefit to them.

What more is there to say, really?

It can be done, but it requires real work and real sacrifice and I don't think anyone in #currentyear really wants that -- it doesn't maximize utility, or something.

I missed the initial thread but this sort of attitude is exactly why I continue to maintain that utilitarianism is fundamentally evil/incompatible with human flourishing. For the umpteenth time, utility is not fungible and the moment you start acting like it is you're fucked because utilions and qualia don't exist.

Having kids is an imposition on the way you want to live your life. Raising children requires putting the good of others above your own in a way that requires serious effort and self-sacrifice

Isn't the trick to want to live your life to facilitate and optimize for children?

Adding one child to our DINK lifestyle was just about possible. Child care was expensive and when he was small the extra stuff when traveling or out was a pain. Once we had two, something needed to change.

Now single income with 4 kids, my wife is a homemaker. We only travel where we can drive. We're we are now in New England this hasn't been terribly limiting.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, I can say without hesitation that having kids had a severely negative impact on my life. Most of that was due to my poor selection of partner/her post-partum/outside elements that don’t have anything directly to do with the kids themselves. On the other hand, the moments of joy I experience when my children are happy and loving… it’s a higher high than any other sensation I’ve been able to find in this life. And then, egotistically, I get the satisfaction of fulfilling my belief that a reasonably-good-looking National Merit Scholar is the type of person who should be reproducing.

Sure, I respect that choice, I'm a liberal at heart, my solution is for people who want more children.

IMO female education gets more blame because, historically, women performed all child-raising activity in early years while also performing all homemaking activity. Men could pursue law, pursue a degree, pursue whatever and their only labor obligation toward their wife would be inseminating her. There is a reason for this delineation of labor. A pregnant woman should not be stressed (as happens in white collar professions), a child forms a bond with the mother in early years (we see this in apes), a child should be breastfed directly for a multitude of benefits, and women are better at handling multitasking. Failing to perform motherhood correctly, which should really be conceived as an art and not just a task, results in many extreme invisible costs like increased diabetes, autism, and BPD. There’s a tyranny of the visible here: calculating the cost of feminist-career practices is opaque (like calculating the cost of crime), but calculating the benefits is easy: one more worker drone. So for the sum total efficient good of society, it’s beneficial to not have women pursue intensive high-stress professional careers.

I would still press (as the far righter in question) that in a society where the rich are holding an immense amount of wealth, anything that reduces wage negotiation among the lower and middle class is net bad for median income. So NYC is replacing domestic nurses with foreign nurses to cut costs, while domestic nurses are striking for better conditions and wages. Hyper-inflated competition in an income unequal nation is surely a recipe for a terrible quality of life among median citizens. Instead of NYC hospitals taking a look at themselves (perhaps they need to make gov spending more efficient to pay nurses more; perhaps cut investor compensation at private hospitals), they will just reduce nurse QoL. Which reduces nurse-adjacent professional QoL: now anyone who had the ability to change position and become a nurse no longer sees that as an option, so they further have reduced wage negotiation.

I think it’s probably down to institutionalization of kids. Most of the generations after the boomers were more or less raised by daycares and schools with parents playing a supporting role. So if you take a highly social animal, a wolf or a chimp or something, and raise it in an artificial environment where it doesn’t form the normal social bonds that would form in the wild, it doesn’t seem surprising that such a situation might well depress reproduction in that group of animals (alongside other similar instinctual behaviors like hunting). They don’t know how, to form the bonds necessary to make that happen so they don’t.

I suspect that this has lead to a lot of mental health problems as well. Social animals who can’t form bonds get depressed and sometimes lash out at other animals.

Are children in daycares and schools prevented from socializing with their peers?

Not to the same level as one might form with his natal family. It’s not secure attachment where a child knows he is safe and that his family will always be around and accept him unconditionally. Daycares and schools have staff that changes every year, and possibly more often at a daycare. Kids shuffle in and out as families move or change schools.

If you consider a state of nature, kids would have been raised by close kin. Parents, aunts and uncles, cousins and brothers and sisters. They form strong bonds because they’re always there, and if the child needs help, they care enough to help.

People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.

I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.

I mean, you can call it a 'vacation' if you really want to, but the market has spoken, and it has said that the better educated command much better salaries.

Multipolar trap. The only way to signal you're intelligent, dilligent, and agreeable is to spend four years purchasing a $100k piece of paper. The best way to know you're hiring someone who's not dumb, lazy, and/or antisocial is to fish from that pool of people.

Appoint Bryan Caplan Education Tsar (and overcome ideological aversion to tests that reveal population differences), and you can solve this signalling problem quicker and cheaper. By a lot.

If the purpose of college is mostly signaling, yeah, you can just require high standardized-test scores, cut a few courses, load students up on lots of credits (21 credits per semester was standard at West Point 50 years ago), and basically speedrun college. Two years of hard-ass work, three 20-credit semesters a year.

There is also a socialization/talent-search part of college, too...centuries ago it was a place for the brilliant to mingle with the rich. Isaac Newton had to work his way through college, waiting tables for his richer classmates.

At best signaling, at worst pre-selection. If the former, societal loss. If the latter, personal loss on top.

The issue with your hypothesis is that while Japan's TFR (1.33) is lower than Germany's (1.53) and Spain's (1.35), it is still higher than that of Cyprus (1.31), Greece (1.28) and Italy (1.24). Out of OECD countries, only South Korea's TFR (.81) stands out for how low it is.

Yes, SK and Japan are on low side, but the gap between them is significant, despite the similarity of their school systems. And as Mediterranean countries are not famous for cram schools, more significant factors must be at play.

In November of 2022 @gorge wrote a three part, well argued AAQC, which showed that the role of feminism doesn't deserve being downplayed.

Italy and Greece are not the most feminist countries in the world. The US are much more feminist, I think.

I find concerns about sub-replacement fertility rates to be largely pointless:

  1. It's an inherently self-correcting problem. Fertility below the carrying capacity results in massive selection pressure for more fertility, this weird transition period where memes and genes haven't caught up to our seemingly endless abundance is just that, transitory. Sooner rather than later, particular groups or individuals who persist in higher fertility will fill in the blanks, even if I personally find most such groups rather distasteful.

After all, the future belongs to those who show up.

  1. Even the above is entirely moot, because if you look outside, the Singularity is imminent, once ASI is a reality, manufacturing endless new humans would be a trivial endeavor, assuming you want to do something weird like that. Not that it matters, because economic output and standards of living will end up entirely decoupled from population size, or at least the population of biological humans.

In pretty much no plausible future will population crashes meaningfully impact standards of living, outside perhaps the most sclerotic nations such as Japan and China in the next decade or so. You simply won't notice before it becomes as quaint a problem as worrying about excess horseshit on city streets as the people switch to flying cars..

I agree. It seems way overblown. Japan's population has only fallen a tiny amount despite sub-replacement fertility rates for over 50 years, and this despite having among the most restrictive immigration laws of any country.

That's likely because the great dying-off hasn't happened yet; there's two large peaks of people in their 50s and their 70s, and when the currently-70s cohort die off the figures will be more dramatic. Japanese life expectancy is >80 for both sexes.

That's assuming population decline in a vacuum. The 'transitory' nature of selecting for high fertility in, for example, the US would leave it with, proportionally, a lot of Amish and traditionalist types. The transitory nature of selecting for high fertility alongside mass immigration, however, means those who inherit the earth are not the fertile native but rather the excess population of whatever foreign country.

In real world terms that means that the country that is backwards for the longest and in turn manages to maintain its high pre-modernity birthrates the longest will be the one that wins out. There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

Given that my timelines are less than 10 years for a fully fledged technological singularity to be upon us, I see absolutely no way that we continue struggling with demographic collapse for the 20+ years it would take to be truly debilitating, short of something like a nuclear war, in which case we have bigger problems to worry about.

There's no reason to hold to any optimism for any modern native population. Profit motivated immigration + low native birthrates + high foreign birthrates = ethnic replacement.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations (as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!).

As an Indian, I can only chuckle and pour myself a drink, who exactly is going to be demographically replacing us?

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing. From the way I understand the dangers of technology, they primarily come from very effectively distracting people from propagating themselves. I don't see why anyone would care otherwise.

You're implicitly speaking about Western "native" populations

I am talking about modern native populations. In that sense it might be unclear. I'm not talking modern as in 'exists today', but modern as in, 'has abundance food, electricity, clean running water and functional toilets and the ability to maintain those things'. That mostly encompasses East-Asia and the western world.

(as if the US even has a native population, they're almost all immigrants!)

There is no United States of America without the white people that built it. In that sense most white Americans are native to the US. Other than that I find the 'native' song and dance very tiresome and low brow. I don't think how long someone has occupied an area has much relation to the value of their existence. I'm much more interested in what they actually did whilst they were there. In that sense the short existence of America, measured in centuries, eclipses large swaths the brown world and all the millennia they had to make something out of themselves. But sure, those browns are 'native' to the travesty they call home whilst the Americans are merely 'immigrants' to the place most brown people wish they could live in.

Not that I particularly care about the West becoming a slightly more brown shade of brown, I'm only concerned with economic or social collapse, and those are not on the cards.

We are too reliant on the word 'slightly' here, for my taste. From what I can understand, the demographic change in the US is much more than slight, with a white minority already being a thing for 15 year olds. I'd call it a safe prediction to say that the current paradigm won't last for long. If you only care for the next 10 years then I can see why you wouldn't care. But for a longer term outlook, again, I'd predict rather drastic changes. The most notable one being a lack of a credible 'world police'.

I don't understand what technology you are going to be relying on for childrearing.

Artificial wombs and robo-nannies?

In 10 years? Maybe I'm just a fuddy duddy but that seems optimistic to the point of delusion.

It's an inherently self-correcting problem.

So is a plague, but both can cause a lot of social disruption and avoidable damage before they are corrected.

Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse, unless you're Japanese or Chinese in the next 5-10 years.

Also, the histrionic claims made by OP about this being tantamount to an "extinction", which it categorically isn't.

Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse

This can only be true for the definition of collapse that doesn't matter. Those groups and types of individuals you yourself find distasteful will be becoming more and more prominent parts of our lives. Those nice clean neighborhoods of prosocial, functional adults will be shrinking over our lifetimes; every institution that stull works well will be slowly turning into what Americans call DMV; then go lower and lower. This gap will not be plugged by technology because this technology will be at the disposal of rapidly degenerating human stock that has less and less good political sense. Certainly it will not have enough decency to tolerate more successful people going off grid.

You seem to enjoy having moved to the UK. Will your quality of life be significantly degraded by the worst aspects of India catching up?

And that's still only the differential collapse. Because then these people, too, get old and even less capable.

What are your AI timelines? As far as I'm concerned, I expect ~30% unemployment rates within 5 years due to to automation, and an outright Singularity (in the sense that superintelligent AGI breaks all the charts, not that it necessarily goes FOOM) within 10.

I specifically said significant population collapse because I don't see the problem becoming noticeable within 10 years, and certainly not 5.

I strongly disagree that technology can't mitigate or even reverse the negative effects in said time frame. The primary concerns of demographic collapse are loss of tax revenue to prop up social security and pensions, and insufficient productive workers to maintain infrastructure and care for an aging populace. In a largely automated economy, those are moot points, and the latter can be mitigated by caretaker robots.

If humans become obsolete, then I don't see how a decrease in their number matters!

Also, in the particular case of the UK, it's multicultural enough that I genuinely don't think I could even tell if there was a 10-20% change in demographic ratios in said time frame. From what I can tell, they're finally cracking down on illegal immigration, so I have reason to expect that they'll largely take productive, reasonably prosocial immigrants in the future.

Meritocracy is unsustainable. The idea that one could skip competing in life and get a low paying job and have kids ignores the fact that you would likely end up with an unattractive partner. A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder. You aren't getting an iq 120 woman with a beautiful body and high general factor of personality if your life is mediocre.

In traditional societies, people didn't have to worry about competing to the same degree. If your father farmed you farmed, if your dad was a blacksmith you became a blacksmith. Instead, we spend 20 years fighting a zero-sum game for who can post the most travel photos in tropical countries, get the most educational prestige, get an attractive apartment etc. If you can't get into a good college, you can get a master's degree. If you didn't get the top job after graduating, you can become a middle manager at a mediocre firm and outrank the junior at a good one. By trading time for status in a zero-sum game, people are incentivized to push life ahead of them and not settle.

Eating disorders are a lot rarer in traditional societies. Lip fillers, overtly sexualized social media and obsession over appearance are having a ruinous influence on women's mental health. Instead of marrying one of the guys next door, they are either going to absurd lengths to compete or having poor self-esteem for not looking like a tiktok model. Instead of giving people a place in the world and treating with them respect for filling the role that place fulfills, we have a race in which we judge people's worth and moral value on their place in it.

A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market.

Fascinating assertion. How many bay area tech wives have you met?

If they were working at gamestop how would their dating life be?

Anecdotally? Not as bad as you might think.

My first Serious Girlfriend was a cute goth chick who was working the pretzel stand at the local mall while I was working at the video store across the way.

A master's degree and a senior dev title at a respectable firm combined with the apartment that is barely affordable with that salary greatly increases one's attractiveness on the dating market. Getting a job at a hardware store and living in something affordable with that income would be the equivalent to a shadowban on tinder.

Not true in the real world. There are plenty of senior devs with master's degrees at respectable firms in expensive apartments who aren't getting any at all. At best, they'll get a 36 year old polyamorous woman, and this incites burning rage in Mottizens.

Meanwhile, plenty of fit, funny, socially-skilled guys who stayed in their home town to work at the hardware store seem to have kids, often with multiple women.

Yeah. I've heard lots of tales of fit multimillionaire virgins in Silicon Valley.

senior devs with master's degrees at respectable firms in expensive apartments

multimillionaire

Pretty sure you're an order of magnitude off.

Yeah. Although I'm a bit surprised that said senior devs can't find gold diggers willing to hold their noses for the money.

Sorry if this comes across as edgy, but have you considered the possibility that the "travel photos in tropical countries", or at least that which they are a proxy for, are not zero-sum because travelling to tropical countries is actually enjoyable for many people? Personally I'm also partial towards apartments that do not come with black mold in the bathroom and an air-blowing heater-cum-AC that has the noise level of living next to a busy airport like the first one that I had to live in in the US did.

I often see the internet right work off of a model of humans that leans in the general direction of "the serfs would still be happily plowing the fields while wearing potato sacks; anything more they get is useless for them and just part of a zero-sum competition for status". To the extent this claim is not just an unfalsifiable value assertion that denies agency to vast numbers of people, it is sufficiently at odds with people's self-reports and intuition that it needs more evidence than vaguely pointing at eating disorders and Instagram anxiety and claiming that these are sufficient proxies to compare the all-around utility of the present unfavourably to that the past.

If you ask those questions of me personally, the answer for most of them is "yes", based not just on what my understanding (through reading the occasional old text) of medieval peasants but also just comparing myself to members of my parent generation who have still inherited an older work ethic, scarcity-oriented life philosophy et cetera. For the general population, I'm not sure, but I'm not convinced that these are the right questions to ask either - is self-report actually the end-all measure of utility, or could we look at two equally happy people and say that the happiness of one of the two is actually more legitimate?

More importantly, even if we find no difference between the peasant and the modern youth in all of those criteria (or even a difference favouring the peasant), symmetry remains broken in the other direction in that scarcely a modern youth would be happy to trade places based on a description of the medieval life but almost any medieval peasant would be based on a description of the modern one. In fact, we can surmise (based on experience in the Cold War and social inequality within modern countries) that the mere presence of those who live the modern template causes any zeal, excitement and eudaimonia of those who live a life of back-breaking work to feed themselves to evaporate.

Considering that, doesn't it seem facile that theories such as the parent poster's always single out a form of society that just happens to align with their aesthetic preferences as the one that actually makes people happier? Communists also have a good case that the life of occasional deprivation and abuse under a planned economy - especially coupled with the occasional drives for purpose such as a push for space colonisation - would have been superior to our abundant anomie, and that the people living under it were merely rendered unhappy because the Capitalist West gratuitously flexed its abundance in their faces. In fact, in this way, perhaps the West is really to blame for the unhappiness of serfs anywhere, be they communist, feudalist, or the underclass in a capitalist society! Following down that train of thought may lead you to a very socialist place.

I mean, maybe, maybe not for the peasants who made it to 60, but there are billions of people alive today who would've either died in childbirth, of some random disease, or been sent off to die because some noble wanted 9 more square miles without a choice, and so on, and so forth.

Also, I just think people who think peasants were dumb, happy proles are kind of ignoring the actual history of medieval Europe, where not only did medieval peasants actually gain economic power because of plague rats, but there were multiple peasant uprisings and the like.

I'm just fundamentally against pastoral nostalgia for medieval times, whether it comes from edgy right-wingers who hate capitalism and think peasants in 1450 were happy, religious serfs or edgy left-wingers who hate capitalism who think peasants were happy laborers who worked less than they did.

I would much rather the life of a peasant, but it's not possible to live such a life now. They ate well, had well made (if fewer) clothes, and largely happy lives. But such prosperity depended on the existence of the commons, from which peasants could obtain firewood, fish, trap small animals, etc. Once enclosure made these illegal, the common people chose to move to the cities and become wage slaves. It was preferable to attempting to be peasants under the current private property regime. Given that they had direct experience with both realities, I trust their judgement that I would not want to be a peasant without access to a commons and a traditional community.

Said peasants also buried half their children because they didn't have germ theory, vaccines, or antibiotics.

I mean, I'm pretty sure most of us here are self-aware enough to not hold "happiness" as the supreme/only metric for measuring the worth of one's life, and even those who claim otherwise don't usually act that way.

Taken to its logical extreme, that point of view advocates for wireheading, or at least doing as much fentanyl as you feasibly can.

I'm quite sure that I'm not alone in having values more complex than mere happiness, I value freedom, comfort, luxury, knowledge, health and myriad other things, all of which are certainly in better supply today than a medieval peasant could hope for. These might not reflect on my mood, because humans are cursed to run on hedonic treadmills, but they are still strictly superior to not having them.

As such, I can't even say that people are behaving irrationally (with reference to their preferences) when they prioritize their lifestyles over having kids, it's more of a coordination failure on a societal scale than a personal one. Sure, most women when polled want something like 3 kids as opposed to 1.5 or even a replacement 2.1, but how many of them would actually trade an upper middle class lifestyle for that?

I know I start sweating thinking about cost of living when my girlfriend wants 3 kids in London, but I don't really worry too much because society will likely be in utter turmoil by the time we have our first, let alone the third.

(I think I'd be pretty miserable as a peasant, all else said and done)

Bonus: Not just education, the entire high-maintenance parenting paradigm is negative-sum insanity. Increases perceived and actual child costs to unsustainable levels, no benefits, a pain for the kids, just harms all participants.

The only education, present or hobby a child should expect from her parents is a library card, annually renewed, if she’s been good. Keep the children barefoot and you will keep the women pregnant.

I know it’s hard given our evolutionary history and they’re “sooooo cuuuuuuute”, but we need to flip that r/K switch, people.

If I recall correctly, additional parental investment above a very low baseline has no returns in terms of children's outcomes.

Helicopter parenting, ballet lessons, the best pre-K, all of those add up to pretty much zilch in terms of actual concrete benefits.

As long as you don't active fuck-up your children, via fetal alcohol syndrome, beatings or starvation, they'll turn out just fine, and the marginal returns from fussing over them are close to nil.

Actually IIRC early childhood education of any kind, even the best available, is a net negative compared to staying home with mom. Post-90’s UMC child rearing not only has no advantages over 50’s child rearing, it’s actively worse in many ways.

Brian Caplan describes it using academic terms:

'Parenting is a pass/fail exam'

I think it was Caplan who first familiarized the idea, but I wasn't aware he'd come up with such a pithy phrase! Thanks.

I am not so certain that school itself is the cause of our woes here.

I think even without school, if you take the type of demographic that attend them and put them in to some sort of a job, they will still

delay children until their late 20s early 30s just because the responsibility of having a child would detract from the benefits incurred from having disposable income to travel to world and consume things.

Seems unlikely it's inherent, because it wasn't always the case. The Grand Tour was only a year, right?

Wasn’t the grand tour male specific and occurring in a context where those men could still marry 19 year olds even if they were themselves in their late 20’s to 30’s by the time they were ready to settle down.

More importantly, I assume a Grand Tour was only available to those with means. At least, I assume so, because the concept of Grand Touring cars comes from that concept, and that term refers to pricey sports cars.

Yes, but I assumed "the type of demographic that attend them" referred to the Professional Managerial Class here.

Naw...in ages past it wasn't like well-to-do peasants or carpenters made good went on these. This was very much a 1%er thing if not top 0.1 or 0.01%. The modern equivalent is probably something like a year spent on a personally-owned yacht or something like that...it's for the blue bloods and the people with silver spoons in their mouths.

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