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Notes -
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.
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
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.
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!
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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