A theory im playing around with that the apparent Vulgarity and crudeness of American country/redneck/Conservative culture is actually an adaptive mode of Counter signaling akin to Orthodox Jewish or Amish cultural adaptations to maintain high birth rates and internal cultural coherence in the face of the homogenizing anti-natalist effects of Mainstream Global-liberal-urban monoculture...
American redneck/conservative culture, and Orthodox Jews especially are unique in being the only wealthy cultures to maintain high birth rates beyond the global middle-income, and that both adapted and are defined by their hostile largely hostile relationship with the the most advanced strains of the global mono-culture found in Urban America and the Urbanized anglo-world.
Nations as far afield as Hungary, China, and Iran are trying to save themselves from declining birthrates... Should they try to import American Country culture?
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Notes -
I think Kulak is on to something with the idea that red tribism is a kind of adversarial culture. Its not just that the red tribe hates the blue tribe and its cultural signifiers like the trans flag, its that the red tribe lives that opposition to some extent with costly-to-fake counter-signalling via objectively poor behaviour. Red tribe whites are really fat and unhealthy ("those vegans are effeminate soyboys"), they have a culture of honour which comes with attendant crime and disagreeability (poorly adapted to modern workplaces), etc.
I think red tribism has adversarial cultural strains which preserve high fertility. The strains are religion, patriotism and ethno-nationalism and are really the same strain in different aspects. You can think of it as somewhat randomly assigned. Some adversarial cultures like lower class blacks, don't have these strains to the same degree. In other words, I don't think that this is in any way conscious, but its existence ensured that red tribism remained a vital cultural strain in America because the children of this worldview showed up for the future.
Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institution has an anecdote that he once met a secular Israeli Jewish woman with a bunch of children and asked her why did Israelis have so many children even if they didn't feel the need to satisfy their creator's wishes. She (allegedly) said "because Israel is a cause". This is the crucial element which separates ultra-low fertility whites, who actively hate their own kind, from everyone else, especially from conservatives who view their people (i.e. ethnic group) as intrinsically good and worthy of propagation and on some level that they have a duty to that propagation. Right wingers see their civilization as a cause (perhaps a Lost Cause) and its continuance requires at minimum that subsequent generations exist for it.
I am increasingly of the view that ethnonationalism is a prerequisite for above-replacement fertility among ethnic majorities in the modern world. I'll leave what this implies for optimal immigration policy as an exercise for the reader.
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No. You don't need a replacement birthrate of humans in the short term. You just need replacement productivity. It will take 10 years minimum for new children to be useful.
Other forms of productivity replacement can get there faster, and having a diminished workforce drives that innovation.
Human birthrate will level out once population is low enough, it's not an extinction threat.
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I think kulak you’re overlooking a hugely relevant variable- people have kids when they expect to enjoy raising them.
The lowest fertility rates in the world are in East Asian countries where childhoods are by all accounts horribly unpleasant for all involved and middle income trapped postsoviet crapholes where grinding poverty combines with anti-natal memes to make raising children suck.
American red tribers love raising kids, being ‘fun/cool aunts/uncles’, babysitting, being youth mentors, etc. Yes, including the women- being a mom is high status and redneck girls’ instagram is basically Morgan Wallen and mom-influencers posting their kids being cute. Charities to connect at risk youth with mentorship advertise on the fishing channel for a reason, too.
I have no direct experience with Israel or much with conservative Jewish culture, I do not speak Yiddish or Hebrew, but it’s worth noting that Israel has the highest alloparenting rate in the world- parents report getting more help from friends and family. This seems like it gestures towards something similar.
One of the lowest native tfr countries is Austria. Austria is a wealthy Western (in the iron curtain sense) European country with extremely generous welfare. Day care and kindergarten are provided by the state. There are generous incentives to have multiple children, including huge tax deductions that not only scale per-child but actually increase by more with each additional child up to four. What’s more, Austrians receive extensive vacation time of 36 days per year, work an average of 35 hours per week and have comparatively cheap housing and transport costs, with high quality, highly-subsidized housing in major cities like Vienna.
Objectively, Austria is a great place to raise children and a good place for children to grow up. They still have rock bottom birth rates that have only been boosted in recent years by migrants.
But do Austrians culturally look forwards to being parents? Because rednecks do, male and female both.
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Yes and the fact that red tribe people living in middle America are in a sense a residual population once the high-neuroticism portion moved to big cities to find themselves or chase careers. Controlling for everything else, I'd expect people who have a low propensity to worry to be among the best adapted to modern fertility and parenting.
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Countries will try what they can to reverse declining birthrates, but it won't save them ultimately. There are macro reasons for declining birthrates, larger than countries or culture. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet. You'll eventually run out of resources and/or your toxic byproducts will kill you. And people are already feeling both. Everything is becoming more expensive. That trend won't stop. People want to maintain their standard of living. So they'll have fewer children. Because children are expensive. And they might actually care about the quality of life of their children. And of what use are children if there is no environment to sustain them?
This is true.
This is dubious. Every income quintile is still growing (even inflation-adjusted). Some things are becoming more expensive faster, but they're things like "hospital services" and "college tuition" that are obviously due to social-structural issues, not due to the planet running out of insulin or chalk.
Varying your fertility according to your wealth and income is generally the smart thing to do, which makes it a little sad that approximately nobody does so. "There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations." (flabbergasted highlighting mine) There's a bit of an uptick in the number of children that the very rich have, but for the most part poorer people have more kids than richer people, and poorer countries have way more kids than richer countries.
Their calibration of quality-of-life might be part of the paradox. In the modern developed world most of your economic value doesn't come until after your fertility does. If you're following the exact same average economic trajectory your parents are, then when you're 25 and they're 50 they're making twice what you do, and that sure doesn't feel like "exact same", it feels like "Everything is becoming more expensive".
I have a theory to partly explain the fertility pattern we see: Fertility depends on both the means to support children, and the intellectual capacity to carry out family planning.
-Low income people generally rate lower in IQ and self-control, and may be more likely to fail at using birth control or fail to realize that they can't afford kids. So even if they don't have the means to support children, they end up having children anyway.
-Middle class people generally have the IQ and self control to assess their finances and control their fertility. So they end up having 1-2 kids, which is ideal if you want to follow the strategy of pouring all your money into your kid's education.
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The assumption here is that we are approaching the growth limit, while in reality we’re nowhere close to depleting the resources especially considering the possible technological advances. The current population was thought to be unsustainable pre-green revolution.
The decline in the standards of living, the cost disease, etc. is essentially artificial and caused by the nature of the modern regulatory state.
For millenia people somehow managed to have multiple children, without having access to the modern technology — no washing machines, no diapers, no microwaves, no medicine, no agricultural machines that allow us to grow food on massive scale, no nothing — yet they somehow did that through wars, famines, plagues to this day; and somehow the modern western people fail to do that becase children are "expensive", despite that not a single thing related to raising children should be expensive given the capabilities of modernity.
For most of that time, when people had lots of children, many of them died in said wars, famines, and plagues, or just from everyday diseases. The mother often died in or after childbirth as well.
What is the saying? Consumption always expands to meet the income available? Children are just one example of this--possibly one of hte clearest examples, in fact. Obviously calories are cheap, and people are rich enough to afford much more space per person. But if you tried to raise a child like an 1800s farmer (minimal or no schooling, having them work on your farm from a young age, 12 people in a 1 room house, everyone sleeping on the floor, no electricity or running water, letting them walk to a neighbor alone, etc) you'd be locked up for child abuse (and they wouldn't be set up to do very well in the modern world).
Even if you think about these labor saving devices... many of them correspond to tasks that weren't done at all or were much easier in the past. When your house is small and 1 room, cleaning is much easier than when it's large with many rooms. A simple wood floor is easier to sweep than if you have a mix of tile, wood, carpet, etc. You don't need a dishwasher or laundry machine if you have the absolute bare minimum of dishes and clothes. Or take medicine: If the only medicine you could possibly access is what you can make from herbs, well that's certainly cheaper than buying something expensive at the pharmacy! It just might be completely useless and your child might die.
Yeah, the thing is, you don't have to live as 1800s farmer given that you have access to 2000s technology.
They didn't have tower cranes, mass production industrial factories, reinforced concrete, CAD software, modern materials science, etc..
By all accounts building a separate room for each one of your 12 children should be very cheap but yet it isn't. Same for everything else material.
Just see how cheap electricity production was butchered in the last years, first by shutting down nuclear plants and now by restrictions on oil and gas trade. Energy prices could have been much lower without expending a single thought and brought down even further if the humanity started mass producing nuclear reactors at scale.
Take a look: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5859811/. Essential pharma is in fact dirt cheap to produce.
Even the Romans did it!! 2000 years back from now.
Yeah, that's the problem right there.
The website seems to have eaten my comment, so I'm going to be lazy and summarize a bit. Feel free to ask for more details.
Yes, for all of these categories, you could consume them at an 1800 level for relatively cheap (I could pedantically debate this, but I won't because I don't think the overall point is affected). However, we consume vastly more per person. We use more energy per person, for controlling the temperature of our buildings, for transportation, for shipping goods all over the world. We have more advanced medicine. Yes, some additional cost is artificial, but some of it is because people want things that didn't exist in 1800. Building the same building now is probably easier than in 1800, but we're not talking about that, we're talking about replacing a one-room log-and-thatch cabin with a multi-story structure with many rooms, electric wiring, plumbing, glass windows, etc.
And, even if it were legal to raise a child in 1800s conditions, most people would freely choose not to, I think. Of course, there's also no need to have 12 kids, since survival rates have improved (one of the effects of consuming more per child!). Overall, I don't think there's any confusion as to what people mean when they say that kids are expensive, or why this is the case.
The central point of my argument is that these additional costs are massive, mind-boggling, enormous. If you got rid of insane bureaucratic overhead in every facet of modern production and business, and made different trade-offs on safety, and selected personnel via nothing but ruthless market competition as opposed to credentialism or quotas or whatever else, then you'd get a world as alien to us as our world is to someone from 1800s.
It's a pity that the verbose version of your comment got lost because I think this difference in worldviews can be only productively discussed in details, diving deep into a particular industry, dissecting it's practices, costs, regulations, etc.
Yet somehow when it comes to raising children we manage to get it worse than these 1800s people
These things aren't that hard, I could literally do most of them on my own..
Probably the hardest part is to build the structure itself, but it is my understanding that the modern tech allows to do that really fast and cheap too... especially if you design a building once and mass produce it.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchevka and this was in 1970s - they've built a shit ton of them - under a less than efficient economical system, so to speak.
The fact that a so-called "middle class" man often needs to work several years to buy a property that's barely suitable for a family with e.g. 3 children, is obscene by itself.
On the other hand the construction industry is regulated to hell and back, not to mention their suppliers, which is the one and only real cause of high housing costs.
Why didn't they choose that back then, in such case?
Bumping up survival rates to modern rates is simple and cheap. Hygiene, vaccinations, antibiotics, plentiful food, vitamins, C-sections... what did I miss?
(see e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2665340/) for a sample of child mortality causes in the Middle Ages.
Sure, but I think even in the hyper-competitive world you describe, raising each child would still be much more expensive than it was in the 1800s. I suspect that if you freed up that income, most people would default to using it on more consumption for themself and their few children, rather than having many children.
I can recreate most of what I had, I just don't know if it answers your particular questions:
Energy is very cheap, and we consume a lot more of it. Do you want to drive your kids to school, activities, a friend's house? Do you want goods from all over the world shipped to your local stores? Do you want heating, cooling, electricity, hot and cold water running water on demand? It could be even cheaper, yes, but would that result in people having more kids, or using more energy on what they already have?
Yes, many aspects of medicine are cheap, and the industry as a whole is massively regulated with tons of waste and bullshit. But A) most of the expensive things are still things that people want, even if the marginal value per dollar is less than the basics (medicine is probably a luxury good, and B) I once again suspect that additional income would mostly not go toward having more children.
Did the Romans have hot and cold running water, under pressure, in every house and apartment?
Now to the rest of this comment:
You may have these skills, but most people don't, and in any event doing them for an entire house is time consuming.
Sure, and many of the early Levittown suburbs were built this way, effectively on a production line. Why did we stop doing it? I would guess because once people could afford it, they wanted homes that were more custom, although I have no data here. Home construction is labor-intensive and thus subject to Baumol's cost disease.
I agree that this situation is obscene, but it is absolutely not the only cause, unless you are including all of the restrictions on what you can build where (zoning, environmental review, parking minimums, etc.)
I have no idea what you're asking. In 1800 most people had no choice.
We didn't, really. We upgraded a bit to where there are a handful of floor plans and some modularity, but the vast majority of new developments are cookie-cutter repetitions of their neighbors, pre-cut and packaged, to be assembled simply.
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Why would it be much more expensive, or indeed more expensive at all, if every single thing a child needs can be done both massively cheaper and better in modern times?
You know I agree, certainly the causes of low birth rates are both materialistic and cultural. After all it is known that having children is bad for the environment, racist, and detrimental to building a successful girl boss career. But for that particular malady, Kulak has already prescribed a medicine.
If energy is cheap then how come they have an "energy crisis" in Germany (a supposedly first world rich country)?
Remember that your residential heating, cooling, electricity and so on is the tip of the iceberg. Every single industry has energy as one of it's inputs. Whenever you buy anything you pay for energy multiple times over, the company that produced the thing paid for it and included it in the price, every single supplier that they used paid for it and included it in the price, every single supplier of these suppliers... you get the idea. It's not just your 100$ monthly electricity bill.
They provided water to public bath, fountains, and to private houses whose owners paid for that service, yes. Sure that may be far from every house, but remember that the tools and knowledge the Romans had, were laughably inferior to what we have now.
The price of real estate compared to the income of middle class people is often massive. You wouldn't overpay years of your savings just for the privilege of having your house built in an idiosyncratic way. In my experience the only people who care about these things are the rich and the home building enthusiasts. For everyone else, the choice is dominated by other, more pragmatic, considerations, such as size, building quality, location, etc.
Thus I find your assumption hard to accept, especially so without evidence.
Good question in fact, I think I'll look into that particular case, one of these days. Thank you for pointing it out.
"Cost disease" is just another way of saying "bureaucratic overhead in adjacent industries".
I am deeply convinced that this is the only real cause. Prove me wrong.
Of course I mean all the restrictions! Not only in construction but also in all the industries construction relies on, and all the industries they rely on.
Sure you can keep the 1% of them that are honest to God sane and neccessary, like maybe not demolishing unquie historical monuments or not causing extreme environmental disasters. Everything else has to go.
I feel like I've already expressed my answer to this question: Because of a combination of wanting to advantage their children (which in the modern world means substantial education among other things), preferring high consumption to themselves and a small number of children to having more children, and of the existence of many things which people want (or at least, are willing to buy/do) that didn't exist in 1800.
Well that's a fairly horrifying way of thinking
Cheap is relative. What did energy cost in 1800? What did it cost compared to the median salary? The median German is still going to consume vastly more energy in total this year than his great-great-great-grandfather did in his whole life. In any event, Germany right now is clearly an outlier both compared to other developed regions and compared to its own recent history.
Yes, I'm well aware, and this is my point. Total energy consumption has vastly increased. We could choose not to travel outside walking distance, but people like the ability to quickly and conveniently travel, provided by trains, planes, cars, etc. We could choose to sit in the dark after sunset, but people like having lights. We could choose to only buy goods from the immediate vicinity of where we live, but we like that we can buy a computer from Korea, get fresh fruit from South America in winter. And we like to provide all of these same things to our children.
So every home in the US today, except maybe the very poorest, has what only rich Romans did. Tools and knowledge makes this possible, but it doesn't make it free.
As I said, this is a guess. There's probably multiple reasons. Many houses pre-date the aforementioned process, and it is not cheaper to demolish and rebuild them. Maybe the production lines are not viable in areas that are too spread out, or have varying/hilly geography or other physical complications, and we've already exhausted locations that are amenable. Maybe they're in more use than I think they are (although I suspect that plenty of people are willing to overpay for their "dream home").
No, these are different. The latter increases costs as well, but Baumol's cost disease is simply the observation that if the productivity in some industries increases, then prices will increase in industries that don't see the productivity increase (or see less of one). The textbook example is a live band, which requires the exact same number of people for the same time to play one concert as in 1800, but the salary for musicians has to increase or no one will be a musician when being an unskilled laborer suddenly gets you 10x the income.
It sounds like we don't disagree that much here. I think there is a case to be made that there are financial and/or cultural, although the ways these manifest is often as supply regulations (e.g. local zoning gets imposed because existing homeowners want to make more of a return).
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You're just describing the Amish. They do just fine.
The Amish strike a different balance between 1800s living and modern living. They do fine, although they also give up a lot of modern amenities that many people don't want to live without. These things cost money, but trying to compare the cost directly to the past is pointless because they didn't exist at all.
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If you believe Albion's Seed, the proto-hillbillies (the Scotch-Irish borderers) were already lewd and vulgar when they stepped off the boats.
And I'm not even sure that half your hypothesis (white Christian conservatives have an above replacement tfr) is true. Depending on how you define them, this article suggests there are almost no Christian groups with a tfr above two.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
The only white (or any, for that matter) Millennials I know with lots of kids are either well off Mormon tradcon types (I don't know if he's literally Mormon, but he might as well be.) or trashy rednecks (The two I'm thinking of are indeed from Appalachia, Kentucky and West Virginia specifically, but that could be coincidence as much as anything else.) who identify as Christian but don't actually attend church regularly, but they're in the minority of both groups. If anything, the hillbillies might've retained fertility higher than northern yankees for a generation or so due to being more rural, but even rednecks generally are more exurban than rural these days.
In my experience, even "fuck it" tier rednecks are capable of shelling out $20 at Walmart for Plan B to avoid single motherhood or child support payments. Likewise, the biggest story in American demographics has been the collapse of Hispanic fertility. There's no need for 16 and Pregnant these days, because teen pregnancy has crashed from it's W era uptick, and for all the mockery of red state sex ed or lack thereof the decline has been nationwide.
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hmm..Orthodox Jews are among the poorest groups in the US. Same for Southern whites. high birthrates does track lower SES overall.
You may be thinking about
super sayiinultra orthodox/hasidic/haredi Jews, who are a minority of orthodox Jews (I think), who are a minority of Jews (I think). Orthodox Jews are wealthy:Wikipedia claims this is currently true in Israel, but not in the US.
This seems to be true for the largest populations (for now; extrapolating demographic and conversion rates to the future is fraught).
The modernist branches, at least. The survey sourced there only interviewed such branches (and even their most conservative "right centrist" subgroup was averaging $140K!).
But ... surveys of Haredi also show household incomes averaging $136K!? There's a much wider discrepancy from their not-ultra Orthodox kin when considering wealth rather than income, and there's some speculation about ultra ultra-Orthodox who couldn't even be reached to survey, but even if so, at the point where we need to divide down to a subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup of a subgroup of Americans how broad a conclusion can we draw?
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Neither the core Red Tribe nor the Haredi/Hasidic/etc. strains of Orthodox Judaism are a good model for whole countries because they are dependent on outside money to maintain a first-world standard of living (even if you accept the Red Tribe cope that the net flow of transfer payments to red states goes entirely to African-Americans, getting paid to fight the Blue Tribe's wars isn't a business model which works for a sovereign state). The Modern Orthodox in the USA appear to be fiscally self-sustaining - whether or not they are in Israel is a ranting issue over there.
There are a few examples (like the Amish) of high-fertility, low-productivity communities which don't suck on the fiscal teat, but the Amish are poor enough that they would not be an attractive model to a middle-income country like China.
The best example of a high-fertility, high-productivity religious subculture is probably Mormonism. Also, secular Jews in Israel have a TFR which seems to hover around replacement level, which is quite impressive for a group selected for being irreligious.
Re. your original point, I don't think the dates line up for the thesis that Red Tribe vulgarity is a defence against anti-natal Blue memes. The Red Tribe starts seriously trying to fortify itself against anti-natal Blue memes in the late 1970's with the foundation of Christian orgs like Focus on the Family and the Moral Majority. The Red Tribe doesn't become ostentatiously vulgar until well into the 21st century - the Falwell-Robertson era Christian right set a huge amount of store on being politer than their opponents, as the Mormons do now.
I think the vulgarisation of the Red Tribe is driven by secularisation. How many Red Tribe thought leaders in the 1980's truly embraced Jesus Christ as their Lord and Saviour (rather than just ticking the "Evangelical" box on the census and going to church on Christmas, Easter, Mothers' Day and when running for office)? Almost all of them. How many now? Pretty much just Mike Pence and Amy Coney Barret.
The red tribe is over represented in military service, but the majority of their economic activity is in agriculture, transportation, manufacturing, and extractive industry with some skilled trades and small businesses on top. This is a perfectly reasonable economic base for a sovereign country.
In any case, while Mississippi is about as poor as Britain, that’s still only about as poor as Britain. No doubt it’d be a bit poorer without the influx of federal money, but there’s kind of a long way for it to fall before it stops being a very wealthy country. If the US collapsed into 50 different states tomorrow Mississippi in ten years would still be much wealthier than any country south of the border, with the possible exception of Uruguay.
That Mississippi is wealthier than Britain is an indictment of Britain but it says nothing about Mississippi’s quality as a state, only about the fact that it’s a core part of the richest country in the world with extensive fiscal transfers to poorer states and both open borders and open markets with much wealthier ones. Mississippi is ‘rich’ for the same reason that Poland has done so well since joining the EU and for the same reason that the UK would be much wealthier in 20 years if it became the 51st state tomorrow. As a counter example, consider Southern Brazilians of German descent in cities like Florianopolis. They’re much poorer than Germans or Americans, and it’s because of the country they’re attached to rather than anything else.
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What is the birthrate of "American redneck/conservative culture"? Low confidence, but my prediction is that the fertility rate for Trump-voting young women is below replacement. It may even be lower than the U.S. average given the racial demographics.
Outside of specific religious groups, is there ANY white subgroup in the world whose fertility rate is above replacement?
There is actual evidence to support that Republican whites in the US have a replacement birthrate.
Is it stable or rising, though?
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I'm not sure what this is supposed to imply as "married with kids" is one of the strongest predictors of political leaning in the US and has been for decades now.
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As counties get closer to 90% trump support they peak up above replacement. On the larger trends controlling for "Conservatism" Conservative women have something around 2.5 children per woman.
https://www.aei.org/articles/the-conservative-fertility-advantage/
He made America ejaculate again.
LOL
“As American as Cream Pie” 🦅 🇺🇸
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