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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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?
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.
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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