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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Sure, I can agree to disagree. I see it as being moot for most relevant time scales, be it because we're not going to expand beyond 11 billion in a "business as usual" world (itself extremely unlikely), or because of clear technological pathways that also raise the carrying capacity by OOMs.

But I will say that the evidence that strong pro-natal propaganda doesn't work is also evidence that anti-natal propaganda doesn't work, it seems that the a decreased urge to have or raise children is a consequence of modernity as a whole, not concerted action by any particular interest group, barring a weird definition of interest group that would include like 5-6 billion people.

This isn't a "if she floats she's a witch, and if she sinks she's a witch" deal either, because I am transferring the probability mass to a third outcome, that having 1.8 kids is what most people raised in modern culture want to do, at least from revealed preferences. I don't think that something as broad as widely-conserved aspects of global culture ought to be described as propaganda, not merely things like condom distribution or sex ed classes. The latter is not outright anti-natalist, it only seeks to shift the window of fertility to a more stable part of a woman's life, even if in terms of outcomes it does likely suppress total birth rates. The teachers conducting them or the bureaucrats endorsing them don't care if their kids go on to have 3 or 4 kids, as long as they don't do it while in school.