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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   32488 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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So, motteizeans, thought experiment- you’ve been hired by the government of a country you’ve conveniently never noticed before, let’s call it genericland. Genericland has a problem- they have an economy dependent on high tech manufactured exports using highly skilled labor that can’t be imported, it has to be homegrown, and has had a TFR of 1.5 for long enough that the government is seriously worried about a labor crunch taking them from an upper to a middle income economy in 20 years or so. They’ve hired you to raise the birthrate enough to save the economy in the long run, and are willing to spend .5% of GDP to get it to 1.8 or 1% to get it to 2.1. You don’t have reserve currency status, but genericland has excellent credit ratings. The government is dominated by long-running consensus politics and will stick with your recommendations long term. They aren’t concerned with feminism, but are dependent on remaining in American good graces and are well aware that they cannot get away with saudi-level black sheep behavior. The population is homogenous and speaks a language not spoken elsewhere, but 90% are fluent in English. Family norms are perhaps slightly more conservative than PMC American ones, but not by a wide margin. And, of course, because the government wants future factory workers, it’s strongly preferred if the fertility increase doesn’t come from genericland’s underclass and doesn’t care how it affects the elites, it needs to target the working to middle classes.

What do you do?

For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week. Renters who get married have access to a government loan to buy the apartment or house they rent, and the government issues loans to couples having a 3rd child to help buy a bigger home. At a fifth child these loans are forgiven and payments pause for three years after a fourth. The ministry of culture is directed to work with generican-language pop culture producers to promote pro-family memes, female pop stars are paid to give interviews and sing about how much they love being a mom. High schools now require ‘family formation’ classes to graduate in which teens assist existing families with childcare(particularly for girls this is strongly associated with wanting kids) and learn social skills for forming relationships, along with some basic home ec. New fathers get an automatic 5% raise regardless of employer. Female civil servants have the option to go part time if raising a child, and genericland’s many factories are enrolled in a subsidy program that pays them to allow female workers with a child under ten to work part time.

Push whatever the local fairly mainstream brand of conservative religion is. Larger tax breaks for kids, provided that a family is earning more than 80 percent of the median household income. I suppose more single-sex and/or religious schools.

I kind of want to try an out there idea of the government just raising the children itself basically. Make it an actual job to have children and then raise them, and pay women a salary to do it. And that's their full time job, raising and teaching all their children. I want the genetic mothers to stay with their children and not just hand them off because I think people are genetically inclined to raise their own children much better. And allow regular parents to drop their kids off at the facilities for free daycare and schooling.

Some funny ideas in here, so I'll throw in my own:

Put a ban on keeping children out the workplace. Child labor is formally still banned, but strictly prohibit any workplace from keeping out children: you must be allowed to bring your child along on pain of torture and dismemberment. The carrot to this stick is, of course, money: a parent who brings their child to work any given amount of days sees their employer collect the same money the child's school would have done for the effort.

In general, the degree to which family and work are separate is something I find modernity does poorly. Being around kids more and not shunting them into cramped schools everyone ends up hating is a scourge.

and are willing to spend .5% of GDP to get it to 1.8 or 1% to get it to 2.1

Is this referring only to direct spending by the government, or also economic losses produced by whatever social changes?

Direct spending, including economic subsidies to make up for whatever losses are caused by social changes.

Genericland has a problem- they have an economy dependent on high tech manufactured exports using highly skilled labor that can’t be imported, it has to be homegrown, and has had a TFR of 1.5 for long enough that the government is seriously worried about a labor crunch taking them from an upper to a middle income economy in 20 years or so.

I'm laughing, because this is Ireland, more or less. We don't have a fertility crunch as of yet - in fact, our population is finally increasing since Famine levels. But I also remember a late government minister in the 80s saying that we had to emigrate, that the country was too small to support the population (around 3 million at the time). Our replacement rate does seem to be low, but it's still pretty good for Europe:

Although below the replacement fertility rate - the average number of children which must be born per woman in order to maintain the population to the next generation - of 2.1, Ireland's rate of 1.8 was joint-highest in the EU, matching France, Romania and the Czech Republic.

So it's not fertility that is the problem, it's being held hostage to foreign investment instead of developing your own native industries that won't collapse as soon as a global recession hits or the headquarters back in the USA decide to do some belt-tightening and close down overseas branches.

My advice, such as it is (based on Ireland):

  1. Do NOT concentrate everything in one major city so the rest of the country is living on scraps

  2. Solve your goddamn housing crisis

  3. Make wages liveable so that people can get married and have kids and one partner can be the full-time home maker (or do part-time work)

  4. This means making sure employment opportunities are not all concentrated in one major city (see point 1 above) or in a few scattered locations around the country. If you want people to live adult lives, you have to give them the chance not to hollow out the rural/small town communities by all moving to the capital or even emigrating.

  1. Labor policies designed around maintaining a healthy work/life balance and encouraging participation in society. The whole "on-call 24/7" thing for low-wage workers simply isn't sustainable.

My goal with genericland was to be able to cover Japan, Ireland, South Korea, or Italy with sort of the same scenario, so I’m rather pleased that it got pegged as both an Ireland and Japan analogue.

Ban women from going to college, ban single women from living alone or with non-relatives.

They want factory workers, so that means both sexes. Ban men from going to college (unless their parents are the upper-middle/upper class), ban single men from living alone or with non-relatives. Then maybe you get men marrying women and starting families.

Except that the government wants workers, not stay-at-home mothers. So the women will have to have babies as well as going out to be the high-tech labour force, and that is the problem in a nutshell. Do you want bodies on the production lines, or do you want wives and mothers?

Except that the government wants workers, not stay-at-home mothers. So the women will have to have babies as well as going out to be the high-tech labour force, and that is the problem in a nutshell. Do you want bodies on the production lines, or do you want wives and mothers?

Women can replace men in factories, but men can't replace women as childbearers and primary nurturers. You want high IQ, high conscientiousness women bearing most of the children, and raising them to be high-conscientiousness citizens. I don't think it's possible (or desireable, frankly) to put the genie back in the bottle in terms of women in the workplace, but I think you can create a middle ground that encourages motherhood and family while also allowing women to succeed professionally.

Public Policies to adopt:

  1. Abortion is illegal outside of rape, incest, congenital disease, or life of mother exceptions, and requires prompt reporting of rape and DNA testing of incest reasons.

  2. A conviction for incest means lifetime incarceration.

  3. Primary and Secondary schools are year-round and align with typical work-weeks. Teacher compensation increased to reflect higher workload.

  4. School curricula focused on STEM education, basic literacy, civics, physical education and vocational classes.

  5. College-level online courses free to all citizens on STEM and vocational classes - no other higher education is subsidized.

  6. Government pays for all pre-natal and pediatric medical care.

Grant tax incentives to:

  1. Companies with very generous mat leave up to two years.

  2. Companies who offer work schedules for mothers and single caregiving fathers to align with school hours and holidays.

  3. Families with two parents with children. The benefits don't expire when the children reach age of majority.

  4. Married couples who adopt.

  5. Single mothers who give up their infants for adoption, doubled if it is their own parents or relatives adopting the child.

  6. Community beautification services or other civic engagement.

  7. Military service - lifetime supplemental stipend assuming an honorable discharge.

Add tax penalties for:

  1. Parents whose children are convicted of felonies and incarcerated, by canceling the tax incentives above.

  2. Families with school-aged children where both parents work full-time.

  3. Divorce. In the case of provable unilateral adultery, the adulterer suffers the tax consequences for both partners.

loan to buy the apartment

Generally speaking, pouring all your hard earned money into a deteriorating asset is a terrible idea. So the local populace responds by limiting supply and making their terrible investment look amazing through hoarding and supply crunch. Afterall, their entire life savings are invested in this 1 asset who material value is a lot lower than what you pay for it. Allow building of more housing, and housing prices themselves will stay low enough such that loan amounts are proportionally lower. Just providing loans is insufficient and sometimes quite harmful.

pop culture producers to promote pro-family memes

This will fall so flat on its face, that it will be laughed at for decades to come.

fifth child these loans are forgiven

In the short term, It's effectively a wealth transfer from those in their 20s to those in their 30s & 40s. How do you avoid losing a massive part of your young workforce to out-migration ? anything more than 2 children means guaranteed stay-at-home mom. Why will women want to live in this society that penalizes them for working ?

5% raise

Assuming most men end up becoming fathers, will it mean a corresponding ~3%-point increase in tax rates ?

Some ideas:

  • Mandatory conscription for all for 2 years. Involves anything for social service, working in schools, being a nanny, etc.

    • exposure therapy is the best way to get people to want kids & community. Show, don't tell.

    • mandatory conscription is soft way to control in and out migration

    • It also makes men grow into men. Never met a completely socially inept Singaporean or Israeli. Plenty of those among Chinese and American Jews.

    • allows both sexes to fuck around, and enter university with a degree of seriousness

  • Generous paternity and maternity leaves for sure. But even more generous 'return to work' programs. Have grad school be seen as a 'return to work' program for all genders.

  • Make housing dirt cheap by scaling up middle rise dense housing.

  • Mother-in-law home subsidy

    • If grand-parents move to couples town by selling a house to buy another, then don't have to pay capital gains on old house that was sold

  • Propaganda around

    • Climate change optimism / Tech optimism

    • IVF (higher twin rates)

    • Kids achievements over adult achievements. Youth teams, Teen competitions glamorized more.

  • short-distance policies

    • policies to allow couples to go to same universities & common conscription programs (exploitable, but this isn't a scarcity society, so maybe not?)

    • generous WFH policies across the board for all

Mandatory conscription for all for 2 years. Involves anything for social service, working in schools, being a nanny, etc.

Have you seen the sorts of "communities" that get social service? You want to get the birth rate down to 0, this is a great way to do it.

Make housing dirt cheap by scaling up middle rise dense housing.

As E.O. Wilson said, great idea, wrong species.

Have you seen the sorts of "communities" that get social service? You want to get the birth rate down to 0, this is a great way to do it.

I meant it as an umbrella term. I am guessing that this presently utopian nondescript nation does not have Tenderloin/Seattle/Skidrow level of social deterioration.

As E.O. Wilson said, great idea, wrong species.

Could you elaborate on why you think that ? Separated Single Family Housing only exists for North America, villages & millionaires. Everyone else in most of the world lives in apartments, and quite happily too.

Everyone else in most of the world lives in apartments, and quite happily too.

But not happily enough for the TFR of their countries to exceed that of North American countries, the average [African] village, or millionaires.

I can't explain the Netherlands

The Netherlands is a fairly urban place, and one of the most densely populated places in Europe, which is already more densely populated than the USA.. But unlike the USA or even most other places in Europe, that density is spread around the country uncommonly much. I know of no other country with our number of inhabitants (seventeen million) while lacking a city of even a single million: Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Denmark, Belarus, Serbia, and Hungary are countries with fewer people on net but bigger capitals.

Mind you, even so, that Dutch houses tend to be a good deal smaller than detached American suburban houses are. Those are considered a luxury good and few normal people will live in or own one.

Mind you, even so, that Dutch houses tend to be a good deal smaller than detached American suburban houses are

I feel like the Netherlands at least compensates by having safe streets/parks almost everywhere that the average kid can play without supervision. I always had the feeling that this matters even more and large houses are just a compensation tool if kids cannot be outside on their own because of crime/dangerous roads/it is literally illegal.

Maybe so, but I don't know that we're unusually safe by (Western) European standards. The commons being unsafe for children seems more American than really 'Western'; they're the weirdos here, not us.

No one seems to have mentioned sperm quality and physical fitness. While I cant guarantee how much it will raise the birth rate, its very obvious that much fewer children are born by chance today than in the past. I think this is likely due to lower sperm quality and lack of physical fitness in both genders. In addition many people go through costly infertility treatment, again often due to environmental factors that lower fertility.

So my suggestion are:

  1. Make childhood obesity a borderline crime, meaning if a child is overweight, the CPS/medical support systems gets involved. These children get sent to specific schools with focus on healthy food and exercise. The family gets support and educational help, but if nothing helps, the get fines and eventually the child can be taken from them.

  2. Make computer games illegal, or heavily regulated. Control the internet so its boring and people cant spend hours entertaining themselves on youtube.

  3. Take a serious look at chemical factors that can be causing the fall in sperm count/testosterone, and outlaw them.

  4. Children are tested for physical fitness, and if they are too unfit, they are sent to digital detox camps with focus on physical fitness.

  5. Make housing developments in the most attractive areas only available for families with children

  6. Give plenty of support to students who become pregnant, also the single ones.

  7. Affirmative actions for both parents AND grandparents. If a grandparent wants to move jobs/houses to be closer to their kids to help with childrearing they get preferential treatment. Many of the most high status jobs are only available to people with children (the medically infertile can adopt).

  8. Make being young and/or a single parents less stigmatizing. Students who have children get their student loans forgiven.

  9. UBI for children, maybe something like 500 USD for the first 2, and then gradually lower it.

  10. Some sort of matchmaking for gays and lesbian couples so they can have children together. Similar types of matchmaking for singles over 30 who want children but dont want to be in a relationship.

its very obvious that much fewer children are born by chance today than in the past

I'd argue that's got a lot more to do with birth control than just pure impregnatory anatomy.

I've noticed/remarked on a bunch of my friends who are in their late 20's/early-30s that now gearing up to have children is actually a conscious choice, a lot of people don't feel confident in actually swapping gears and trying for a baby. Compared to ye olden days where there was a far higher rate of passive conception, which IMO stopped a lot of the multi-year go-nowhere situationships that you see these days.

UBI for children, maybe something like 500 USD for the first 2, and then gradually lower it.

Yeah, that's called children's allowance or the more modern name, child benefit.

I can't seem to find my comment that I wrote the last time we had this discussion, but basically nothing developed countries have tried works, with the exception of having a giant persecution complex coupled with a breeder underclass. If you can sell the idea that countries surrounding Genericland hate them and want to exterminate them, that as soon as the population of Genericland is small and old enough they will pounce on it and put everyone into death camps, that having children is your sacred duty, then you might boost the TFR enough. No idea if this will work if you don't also create a religious sect that considers having lots of children and living on the dole the best outcome for a pious member.

As for "out-there" ideas, banning anyone from working more than 20 hours a week unless they are married to a stay-at-home partner, raising the retirement age to 75 and lowering it by 5 years per child.

Were you the person who mentioned hypothesis if the ru-ua war is an attempt by Russian regime to make Russians breed more?

That's far too galaxy-brained to be my hypothesis.

I'm sure I saw that here or at twitter

We had a similar post (now deleted) three months ago here

It's still on archive.today and Internet Archive. It read:

You are the populist center-right leader of a Western country. Your party, which broadly supports you but which also contains many people on the center-right elected before your rise to power, has a majority in the country’s parliament. Civil society ie. NGO/academia/media matrix exists and likely can’t be dismantled. Radically conservative policies will be blocked by the Supreme Court, which you can slowly influence but probably not wholly conquer. The population is broadly further right than the mainstream media but not itself particularly religious, chaste or socially conservative, and you want to maintain their general support as a populist, so things like banning birth control would be deeply unpopular.

Assuming no significant challenges to your rule from external powers, and six years in power, how would you raise (by 0.3 or greater) your country’s total fertility rate?

huh, we are archived quite a bit. some of it is from commoncrawl, which is just general untargeted web crawling, but a lot of it is from 'save page now' which is people individually requesting pages.

Someone appears to be, uh, keeping tabs on a specific user.

I introduce affirmative action for parents in university and job admission. Quotas and everything, the whole shebang.

High-tech manufactured exports and highly educated labour means there's high status for education and employment. People are presumably studying night and day so they can work in the widget-production industry. Studying the arcane lore of mathematics and widget production isn't exactly natural to people but we do it to get money and status. Having children is much more natural. If status is provided, people will fuck.

This policy minimizes dysgenic effects compared to child benefits since it targets people who really want well-paying, demanding jobs (I'm not totally overthrowing meritocracy here, people can still be fired if they're bad at their jobs) and university entrance, not just people who want money. As a secondary step, we tie the quality of one's children (in terms of school grades, criminality and eventually whether they have their own children) to the number of the quota points people get. So if you have a bunch of kids and neglect them, it will harm your career. If you're a good parent, you're rewarded.

Affirmative action is cheap and it works.

Imagine your dad getting fired because you want to pursue a music career and don't focus on your grades. Sounds fun.

I think the core issue is that you have to heavily subsidize the very concept of childraising. Having children is horrendously expensive, to a point where you can't simply subsidize it by giving money to the people having kids, you have to build systems that make childraising cheaper. And that's not just expensive in a monetary sense, that's expensive in a time sense and an effort sense.

I think, if I were going to try this, I'd be aiming at essentially building an entire new culture around larger familial units; "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together, with a designated subsidized night caretaker and one or two full-time employees to handle things like food and cleaning. Make it clear that living in these places is easier, in a way that extends beyond simply "having money", but that they're available only for people with kids.

Honestly, this would kinda be aimed at a modern reinvention of tribal living.

For myself, all women with white collar jobs get two year’s entitlement to WFH after every childbirth in addition to parental leave, in which they can’t be required in the office more often than 1x week.

The problem is that people today want careers, and what you're basically offering here is the government guaranteeing that you can cripple your career for your kids if you want. I'm not going to say that's bad - having that available would help - but it doesn't really solve the problem, which is that people don't want to cripple their career for their kids.

I mean the thing with your idea is that it rounds to being either a mass dormitory(which westerners don’t want to live in) or an apartment complex(which we’re assuming there’s plenty of).

it rounds to being either a mass dormitory(which westerners don’t want to live in)

I'm not sure there's really an option for this - how many places are really set up for multiple families to live? Mass dormitories, in my mind, map to "row of bunk beds in a room, low quality food", not "each family has three bedrooms and a private living room, plus there's a kitchen for every four families". And apartment complexes are generally set up without coherent common areas; you step out of your room and you're in a hallway whose sole purpose is to be a hallway.

As an extremely rough example, I'm kinda envisioning something with this basic concept. Bottom-left chunk is one family area, with three bedrooms and a private living area; there's four of those surrounding the common area (pretend that's copy-pasted, I couldn't find a copy-paste tool on this site), common area includes kitchen and relaxation areas and play areas. Maybe stack two to four of these on top of each other. The proportions are completely wrong and also I didn't put in, like, bathrooms, so obviously this is not a finished version, but that's the basic idea; get people interacting together.

(I'd probably want to set up some way that people could easily open their Private Living Area to the main area if they wanted, like, maybe just turn that into a sliding wall or something, I don't know. Something to make it feel less like a wall with a door in it but still closeable for privacy. This is not an easy thing to solve.)

(edit: this specific plan comes out to ~10,000 square feet for four families, which is actually not as far off from "reasonable" as I'd expected)

which we’re assuming there’s plenty of

Man, if only.

Sadly the link is a 503 error. If it's back up when you see this message, let me know and I'll take another look. But I did do a Google search, and, yeah, it seems similar at least.

I think a big problem with things like this, on a small scale, is that there isn't really a good way to find compatible people. If you're looking for someone to date you can choose from millions of people; if you want to form a baugruppen, assuming you're even aware such a thing exists, you not only have very few people to choose from, you probably have to convince people that the idea even makes sense. If there were exactly one person in the world interested in romance, what's the chance you'd be compatible with them?

So if this were done on a national scale, if we said "yes, we will build a hundred baugruppen in every major city, here is the big online matchmaking system we have built, there are major incentives to be involved with this", then suddenly you're going from Only One Other Person In The World Is Interested In Romance to Online Dating Sites Now Exist. Which makes it a lot easier to find, in the metaphor, a partner, and outside the metaphor, compatible families.

Which is not to say it'd work, but rather, I don't think the spotty success of the times it's been attempted is good evidence that it wouldn't work.

I mean there’s not really a solution to ‘having kids hurts your career if female’, so I focused on trying to make it so women could hurt their careers without it being crippling.

I am jaw-dropped at the picture this paints of modern atomised American life - "houses" specifically designed for ten to twenty families living together".

What about, you know, having the grandparents living with their adult children, maybe unmarried siblings as well, or at least extended families living in relatively close proximity so you can go visit your sister/aunt/cousin and their kids and you get advice, help, and child minding where it's not you and your partner on your own with your first baby and only freakin' self help books to tell you what to do?

The idea of "solve this problem" by making it so that a bunch of unrelated strangers all live in an apartment block is making me shake my head here. Okay, so maybe you don't want the in-laws breathing down your neck so you don't have the granny flat - but you are not having to move halfway cross the country for work away from your family support system! Honestly, the impression I get of the American notion that "at eighteen you go to college so this means you move out of the family home and never return again, because when you graduate you get a job and live independently and probably move far away" is so alien.

Let me pull this up about the reasons why people refuse offered social housing:

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/too-small-no-garden-unsuitable-location-bad-internet-why-one-in-five-on-waiting-list-rejected-social-home/a1162198261.html

The property may also be too far away from the support network of extended family.

“For privileged people it is probably hard to understand that this is a legitimate reason to turn down accommodation, because if you have enough income to buy everything like childcare or healthcare, then you can choose to live where you want,” said Mr Hearne.

“But if you are on lower income, you tend to rely more on family support networks for childcare and basic social networks.

If you want more babies, you are going to have to budge on a return to a more traditional sort of extended family network.

What about, you know, having the grandparents living with their adult children, maybe unmarried siblings as well, or at least extended families living in relatively close proximity so you can go visit your sister/aunt/cousin and their kids and you get advice, help, and child minding where it's not you and your partner on your own with your first baby and only freakin' self help books to tell you what to do?

Sure, you could do this.

But this only kind of helps in some ways, and really hurts in others. Kids play well together; like cats, the difficulty of taking care of kids scales up nonlinearly. And many many people have iffy relationships with their families. One of the strengths of US life is that you don't have your parents breathing down your neck, which lets you make your own life and forge your own path and not constantly be taking care of your elders.

Finally, this exists in many parts of the world and empirically it is not working. If we're trying to solve the fertility problem, then I don't want to waste time and money on solutions that already aren't working.

The idea of "solve this problem" by making it so that a bunch of unrelated strangers all live in an apartment block is making me shake my head here.

The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It doesn't take too much raising-children-together for those people to start feeling a lot like family; the tricky part, I think, would be figuring out how to match those people up in the first place.

The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb

That’s a made up saying from the 1990s lol

OTOH people have been saying blood is thicker than water since the 1600s

Makes sense in our atomised age that people look for made-up idioms to justify their atomization.

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/147902/is-the-alleged-original-meaning-of-the-phrase-blood-is-thicker-than-water-real

That’s a made up saying from the 1990s lol

Maybe a bit gentler, if you please.

Beautiful idea on renovating living spaces. I’d even add in playgrounds, libraries, hell maybe a gate in certain neighborhoods/cities where there’s a lot of crime. The hidden costs of childcare are often overlooked in these discussions, as you mention time is a big one.

You could also create stores specifically designed to supply children that are heavily subsidized by the government. Make baby food, diapers, clothes etc very cheap. Have caretakers not only for food and cleaning but laundry as well. If we go on your design where many families are living in a dense area, this wouldn’t even be that expensive as the density could defray the cost quite a bit.

Beautiful idea on renovating living spaces. I’d even add in playgrounds, libraries, hell maybe a gate in certain neighborhoods/cities where there’s a lot of crime. The hidden costs of childcare are often overlooked in these discussions, as you mention time is a big one.

I think if I was going whole ham on this, I'd be putting multiple of these megahouses together with a playground in the middle.

You could also create stores specifically designed to supply children that are heavily subsidized by the government.

Ironically I don't even think you'd have to; if you're in a house with twenty other families that you get along with, hand-me-down clothes are going to be traded back and forth constantly.

Baby food and diapers, though, absolutely - bulk delivery helps a lot there.

(I will note that Amazon has done a spectacular job of providing cheap diapers.)

My own reservation (cough) regarding this constructed community is that it would relatively quickly become class-based and such places would acquire the status of, say, what in the US would be called section 8 housing, or 'government projects.' In other words subsidized housing for, at one extreme, the shiftless, and at the other, working poor trying to climb their way to something better. The kiss of death for any such venture if one is trying to lure in the middle class. How would you suggest staving off that kind of perception?

I dunno!

I think one answer to that, honestly, is just to not worry about it all that much. Consumption is always going to be idolized, and providing ways to have a good life for cheap is always going to be looked down upon, but is that a good argument for not doing so? I'd say we do so, and thereby improve the reproduction rate of people who don't idolize consumption, and maybe that's fine.

Note that the only part we're subsidizing here, by this description, is a small number of permanent helpers, kind of similar to how apartment buildings have janitors and maintenance people. Maybe if this gets off the ground, that subsidy can be removed and just make it a part of the group community.

None of the proposed solutions will work with the constraints given. However, I have a solution that will work for far less money than the budget you are asking for.

To raise the TFR from 1.5 to 1.8 it will only be necessary to tamper with birth control pills to a sufficient extent.

I wonder if there are any known health effects on the fetus from getting pregnant when you are using pills with hormones meant to mess with your womb. Sounds sketchy to me

Would it be easier to alter the regulations on birth control in ways that look like poorly justified technocracy in ways that push the population towards less effective methods?

You can't bribe people into having more children with government subsidies when it was becoming wealthy that caused this situation in the first place, and the population of any developed country will see right through any natalist propaganda for the pitiful attempt at cultural engineering that it is. This issue will never and can never be addressed by the tools of the state, outside of implausible scenarios like spending your entire nation's R&D budget on artificial womb technology and robot nannies, going full 50 Handmaid's Tales (Saudi Arabia is not nearly theocratic enough to prevent dropping birth rates), or the simplest route of nuking oneself and returning to a pre-industrial agricultural state.

the population of any developed country will see right through any natalist propaganda for the pitiful attempt at cultural engineering that it is.

If it's possible to "culturally engineer" people to focus on their careers, why not culturally engineer them to focus on family instead?

But there was no centrally-planned effort to create modern, career-focused people; it was simply an emergent property of industrialization. Our current demographic troubles will resolve themselves in a similar way, as high-fertility subpopulations and individuals replace those of us who are unwilling to reproduce. The intervening strife can be managed more or less successfully, just as countries around the world dealt with the social fallout of the industrial revolution in more or less effective ways, with some managing a relatively smooth transition while others succumbed to communist revolutions and other ills, but it cannot be prevented entirely.

But there was no centrally-planned effort to create modern, career-focused people;

This is only true if you're going to be strictly literal. Yeah, it wasn't "centrally planned", but the elites, from the Rockefellers to Bill Gates, have been fretting over population control for over a hundred years, and they were sponsoring psy-ops to achieve it out in the open.

it was simply an emergent property of industrialization.

Interesting hypothesis. Please provide as much evidence for it, as you'd expect from people you disagree with on the issue.

The demographic transition in the US was essentially complete by the late 1960s when the overpopulation panic set in, so the damage it did was primarily to China and India in the form of the one-child policy and forced sterilizations. However given that nearby countries like South Korea and Japan have just as low or even lower fertility rates today I'm not sure even that changed very much in the grand scheme of things.

Industrialization reduces the value of the kind of manual household labor children were responsible for in agricultural societies. Farming is done by massive combine harvesters, laundry done by washing machines, and food comes prepackaged at the supermarket. In the past, a child "earned their rent" starting when they were barely 5 or 6 years old, now they are a money sink until adulthood or even longer if they go to college.

Wealth gives people options, and most of them are more immediately pleasant than raising a child. Why change a diaper when you could take a vacation to the Caribbean instead? If you offered people the option of suddenly having an adult child who was already independent, came home to visit on holidays, and would take care of you in old age nearly everyone would take it in a heartbeat, but for many today their time horizons are not long enough to tolerate the years of effort needed to get there in reality.

This trend is not even necessarily linked only to industrialization, but rather urbanization more generally. Modern Italians are not descended from imperial Romans because those Romans didn't reproduce themselves, and as far as I know there was not any population control conspiracy going on in the 1st century AD.

The demographic transition in the US was essentially complete by the late 1960s when the overpopulation panic set in,

That's multiple decades after the elites started freaking out about it.

This trend is not even necessarily linked only to industrialization, but rather urbanization more generally.

Those are interesting arguments, but I wouldn't call them evidence. Evidence is a material fact that points to one argument being true over another. This one in is particularly interesting because on hand I'm tempted to agree - cities seem like alienation machines driving people into despair and therefore childlessness, but OTOH I'm old enough to remember where they weren't so. At least where I'm from even big cities had a distinct community spirit focused around each of their districts and neighborhoods.

because those Romans didn't reproduce themselves, and as far as I know there was not any population control conspiracy going on in the 1st century AD.

I never said all population collapses in history are a result of a conspiracy, though it does look like the current conspiracy took some lessons from the fall of Rome.

Gender segregate k-8 schooling, preferentially hire new mothers(ideally married) and expectant mothers as the girl's teachers and co-locate state sponsored daycare for faculty mothers with the girl schools. All mothers at the school are given significant amounts of breaks to be with their babies and infants during the day comingled among the students. The girl's schools have an elective period where the students can help care for the children with some kind of status attached to it. You want this to be paid well enough to be a very attractive option for young couples that would normally be right on the edge of two income households being viable. Don't skimp on the math and career useful subjects, this is not a sham school, it's just infused with high status instances of maternity while at the same time making motherhood look communal and safe rather than isolating and scary.

Fashion the boys school such that the boys start a year later and are put in a much more competitive upbringing, really go wild with the ability to tailor a school experience that helps young men excel and be prepared to take on responsibility. This part doesn't really matter as much, as long as they enter integrated highschool a little older than their female classmates.

Honestly I don't think this would cost you call that much and I think it would have the largest impact of anything realistic I can imagine.

while at the same time making motherhood loot communal and safe rather than isolating and scary.

I am beating my head off the desk here because FAMILIES, DO NONE OF YOU PEOPLE HAVE FAMILIES? AUNTS, COUSINS, RELATIVES LIVING IN THE SAME TOWN WHERE YOU PLAYED WITH A RAKE OF COUSINS AND KNOW ABOUT BABIES BECAUSE PEOPLE IN YOUR FAMILY ARE HAVING BABIES AND GETTING MARRIED AND SO FORTH?

If you lot have created the nightmare scenario of "nobody has siblings, nobody has cousins, nobody lives near their family" then why the hell are you surprised about dropping birth rates?

It's not quite so bad as you say but it is in that direction and that's kind of the thing I'm proposing to help with. My family is scattered across several cities separated by hundreds of miles, I live near some family but it really isn't a critical mass that if we had a little girl she'd be consistently exposed to women going through pregnancy and motherhood. Growing up neighbor kids were more likely to be more playmates than cousins who I would see on most holidays but lived a number of miles away.

Remember genericland has had 1.5 tfr for generations in this scenario and most people’s extended families are either not very extensive or awfully distant.

No. This is the exact issue under discussion.

However, places with less WASPy norms around extended family homes are also not having children at or above replacement. If you and your siblings are, go ahead and talk about that, it could be a useful perspective.

As someone with 4 siblings and who ideally wants 12 children of my own (my father had 11 siblings!) I think I can offer some perspective. Me and my siblings are basically going through the gamut of possibilities, which I find very interesting

My eldest brother moved away, currently works in some sort of research support role, and is part of a poly-amorous relationship. He drank the Blue-aid as deeply as possible, and he has no intentions of ever having children. If pushed he'll say something like "when I can afford it," but he doesn't seem to be too interested in saving up to do so. He takes international vacations, he lives in the core of a big city, and he spends what he makes. He is also perpetually miserable, God knows why.

My second eldest brother is severely physically disabled, and he has no real shot at procreation. He exists by still living in the childhood home, cared for by our mother. Sad, but he does okay. He actually tries his hand at creative projects quite frequently, but he's not particularly capable mentally either (though not retarded.)

My younger brother is the only one of the family who grappled with the challenges to religion and kept the faith, and he is in the process of steadily working himself into a well-paying trade job, buying some land in the middle of no-where, and intends to have a large family with the girlfriend he has had since he was a young teenager.

Then there is my younger sister. She wants to farm, and she does so. By the age of 10 she had convinced her parents to buy her a few dairy goats, which is now a sizable herd with impeccable lineage. She has maintained a rigorous schedule for as long as I remember, and refuses to break it for anything. I don't know what her plans are for children. I don't know if she's considered them. She just wants to farm.

Then there's me. I intended to become a journalist, run away to a foreign country, and experience interesting places and things. Once I learned that the whole field was rotten, discovered I hate working for other people and returned home, I have gradually grown in my desire to have children. I think part of it is being around a place where I have childhood memories. Part of it is knowing that I can bring them into a world where they have a future of something better than [school (which I hated and was worthless) --> college (same) --> Drone job (same).] Part of it may be reconnecting with family history, which I have records of going back a straight 130 years (not just names, but business records, letters, all sorts of things.)

More than anything though, I think my desire just grew as I began to hate life less. All these convoluted schemes seem to be missing the core idea that "people who are miserable and think life is meaningless don't really want to perpetuate that." But that's getting too into my own analysis, which I can share separately if anyone cares.

Thanks for sharing, that's interesting.

My father in law also had (19?) siblings, but had fewer children himself. Would you be giving birth to these children? I've given birth to two children, and it was fine, but I certainly wouldn't want to have 12, even if I were much younger! Maybe if we were a bit younger, four? Some friends are having a third in their mid thirties, and we're wondering if we should too, but not strongly enough to actually go in and remove the birth control. Low hanging fruit for slightly increasing birth rates might be for birth control implants to last two years instead of five. These friends are wondering if they should homeschool, or planning to do that. I was homeschooled, but do not want to, at least for elementary school. My older daughter is much more talkative than me, and I don't want to be either ignoring her or driving her to social events all the time.

It's interesting to hear you're still interested in a large family with a disabled sibling living at home. One motivator for my not wanting a third child is worry over having a baby with health problems as I get older, and not wanting to be in the position of either terminating a pregnancy, or raising a disabled child.

We aren't likely to move to be with extended family. Both sets of grandparents are quite old, and would be willing to help out a moderate amount, but are in places we don't want to live, or would have trouble living, and aren't willing to move. My brother isn't likely to have children, and one brother in law does, but in a place we don't want to move, and we don't get along all that well with his wife.

Neither of us has careers where we feel competent or any kind of career trajectory, and we're wondering what to do about that. I went back to work a month after both births, and it was very stressful for my husband to be at home with an infant for multiple years, so that's also something of a limiting factor. It was also quite stressful to be working full time and breastfeeding as well. We met living in a foreign country, and would like to take the children and live somewhere similar to where we met, but don't really know anything about how to do that as part of a family unit, most opportunities are for single people. The only people I've known who have managed, at least for a while, have been missionaries, or maybe in the State Department (but that didn't seem to be working out so well for their families). Part of our interest is missing life in actual, functional, historical villages, where women watch each other's kids, and they can play on the street with the neighbor kids.

so Japan. I recall someone here raised this hypothetical four-six or so months ago. There were no answers/solutions within the framework of liberal democracy. The problem is people are motivated by relative social status. Govt. incentives will never be good enough. Aid is good for raising the bottom, but dos not help the top 10 percent who want to join the ranks of the top 1 percent. The issue is is not scarcity of money but scarcity of status. forcing people to do things crosses into the line of authoritarianism.

The issue is is not scarcity of money but scarcity of status.

Exactly. People today are unimaginably wealthy compared to 150 years ago, yet the fertility rate in the United States has fallen from 4.5 to under 1.8 today. (The true decline is even worse because generations have lengthened as well).

Efforts to provide financial stimulus for parenthood won't move the needle much because money has never been the issue. To really change things, you'd have to take extreme measures, like outright banning non-parents from desirable cities.

The cost of having kids has gone up even faster than wealth has. Kids used to be an economic net positive after a certain age, now they're net negative at least until they leave home. Having kids used to make your life better in non-economic ways (even excluding sentiment) after a certain age; now they're a burden until they leave home.

The issue with this I think is that they don't have to be. Many of the costs of children provide no net benefit to anyone in the long run and you can simply not pay them. Maybe people don't know this? Perhaps simply a nationwide education program about it would suffice.

Could you be more specific? What large costs are common people making that doesn't actually help their kids or the parents dealing with kids?

Effectively all of them. Getting kids into expensive private schools? Twin studies have demonstrated them to be pointless. They end up exactly as successful and happy by the age of 35 regardless. This is also true of special early education, fancy extracurriculars, cool vacations, neat gadgets, a nice first car etc. This is all generally verifiable from twin studies. Nature wins, nurture... sort of helps, at least as far as "don't lock your kids in a basement and starve them."

As someone who personally grew up for extended periods of time without running water or electricity it was just sort of fine. Didn't really have a massive impact on my life, got me outside more, spent some more time with friends, etc. Occasionally annoying but like: you wash your hands in a bucket instead of the sink, you haul drinking water from the well (exercise), and you don't brain-drain in front of a screen. Frankly seems pleasant compared to how my college roommates lived.

You want to have your kids do better than you? Marry up, don't starve them, provide a very basic level of opportunity, and you're good to go. The sad reality of parenthood is there's very little you can do. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. It's been known for a long, long time.

That basically leaves as expenses: diapers, food, gas for driving them to school, clothes. That's practically covered by tax benefits alone. Medical expenses are a legitimate concern, but they can be dealt with (or just ignored, if you're lower class and have already acquired a mortgage!) If the wife's career is an issue, I can't really speak to that. That's just never been an issue in any of the relationships I've known as all the women happily jumped on being a stay-at-home-mom when it was an option (as my own girlfriend wants to, and is ready to drop her career plans at a moments notice,) so I've no experience with it.

I'm phone-posting, but for sources I'd look into 'Selfish Reasons' For Parents To Enjoy Having Kids by Brian Caplan, which is very good, and just general twin studies. SSC has some good old posts about it as well I believe if you dig.

Demolish genericland's infrastructure so that the survivors of the resultant famines and civil wars are forced to return to subsistence farming. TFR ought to skyrocket within the next couple of years.

I think the main reason fertility is crashing, and has been crashing for the past two centuries at least, is just because people don't actually wanna have kids that much. Having kids is hard and unpleasant and a lot of people just don't want to. The industrial revolution, and especially birth control and abortion have made it so you don't have to have kids if you don't want to. Intuitively this makes sense to me, as I don't see why humans would be selected for wanting to have kids rather than wanting to have sex in an environment where the two are inseparable. I don't think government interventions short of enslaving people in dystopian sci-fi breeding farms or the aforementioned undoing of the industrial revolution will really make much of a dent in things.

people don't actually wanna have kids that much.

The drop in fertility seems largely related to marriage rates: https://ifstudies.org/blog/no-ring-no-baby

People also have fewer kids than they want.

I assume people who are more likely to want kids are also more likely to want to get married.

People also have fewer kids than they want.

People do say "oh I want X many kids" but to me this just feels like throwing out a number for pollsters. I don't really take it that seriously.

I have three kids. We are on the fence about a fourth. I couldn’t imagine having just one kid. Kids are hard but most worthwhile things are hard.

Realistically even in low fertility European countries(with the exception of eastern ukraine) single children are rare and the fertility decline is driven by childlessness.

I think the main reason fertility is crashing, and has been crashing for the past two centuries at least, is just because people don't actually wanna have kids that much. Having kids is hard and unpleasant and a lot of people just don't want to.

yeah this. the widespread use of birth control tells us what people's actual/revealed preferences are.

The problem with relying on solely revealed preferences here is that people are also sold a bill of falsities on fertility. Particularly women aged 12-25 are consistently misinformed by the education system, media, and related sources. No one respectable is out there correctly informing them that they are on a very strict clock, and are actually already halfway to prune status by 25.

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