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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.
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.
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