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Sure, and I don't have any disagreement with the idea of encouraging the good in principle.
But the more of an investment something is, the more it'll determine someone's life, the more pressure it needs. It seems relatively easy to enforce ludicrous norms , but often that's because those norms cost less. People bend because they can easily retreat later on. Not so with kids.
Some people may legitimately just be bad at forecasting what'll make them happy and would benefit from some Caplanesque education, but I think this is a thorny problem for a reason: if people perceive the costs to be too high it's hard to see them being educated out of it without some seriously novel tactics that haven't been tried by the most educated and powerful nations in the world, who have every incentive to fix this problem.
The reality is that these nations haven't tried these tactics and humanity is lead by abysmally awful leadership on the natalist question. Our elites and our civilization in general on this issue deserves an F.
I am not recommending Caplanesque education.
I actually think that the current trajectory comes with massive sacrifices and does include a decent % of true believers and others who go along.
In rgards to the sacrifice part of raising children that relates to focusing on the sacrifice part and not the reward part. But if people see monogamous families as a reward for which the sacrifice is worth it, that would effect their choices.
We should also not forget that overpopulation was once seen as a problem and certain policies were advocated that were implemented to reduce fertility rates which they did.
I think we should be pragmatic but act based on a goal and modify things accordingly to the results. The social technology that results in a sustainable civilization has existed in much of human history, and we can pick even a mix of that which includes some amount of "liberalism" so we could try enforcing the mores of the past and gatekeep them. So the fact that this has happened makes the idea of an insurmountable problem mistaken. And modern Israel also is doing this.
My experience reading liberals and the zeitgeist influenced by them is that they put their dogma first and have an attitude of not wanting to change things from the dogma and its limits even if it would be good to do so.
What do you think should be done? Its all hopeless and humanity should admit that it will go extinct? Let us all be replacement by the projected to be demographically growing blacks, unless their fertility decline too? Should robots run the planet?
Or do you have a different idea? I pretty much suggested most of the things that seem like they would work, including discouraging education in the 20s. I am sure other people can also articulate such plans with plenty of crossover and put even more detail if they want.
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