This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
All good things should be going up by default, as technology advances and more wealth is created. There's supposed to be more and better food, art, housing, more leisure time and so on. If life expectancy is plateauing (declining in the US presumably due to COVID), if people are getting fatter and more depressed, if murder rates are rising... that's a bad sign.
If good things are actually going down despite material improvements, then we're faced with a pretty confronting set of explanations:
Most importantly, nobody is having children anymore. Our civilization is literally unsustainable with > 2.1 fertility and it seems to still be declining. If that's not a disaster, what is? IMO the massive decline in fertility is a direct result of the sexual revolution. There were other causes like urbanization but the sudden drop in the 1970s is staggering. It's well-established in the literature too - female empowerment, labor force participation and female education are agreed to reduce fertility. Hundreds of millions never born and a declining civilization is bad enough to condemn the Sexual Revolution, putting everything else to one side.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-gender-equality-lower-fertility
Are you for real?
There was no World War in the 1970s, no Great Depression. It was a time of peace and prosperity and yet fertility went to replacement and then below.
How hard is it to understand this? It's RIGHT THERE in a clear academic consensus, all these sources pointing out that female empowerment and education reduces fertility, how they observe this all over the world. There are all these charts showing what can be easily deduced from common sense - that if women are joining the workforce and higher education en masse they're having fewer children. And yet people still try to confuse this blindingly simple issue. The more empowered women are, the more they choose to do other things than having children. Broadening one's view from the sexual revolution (which neatly arrives right as the post-war baby boom ends), we can look at the whole 20th century. You have female enfranchisement happening all across the West and fertility declining. Countries without female empowerment like pre-1945 Japan lack this trend: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1033777/fertility-rate-japan-1800-2020/
What explains TFR declines beginning in the 18th and certainly early 19th century in some countries then?
I said there were other causes like urbanization above. Wars and the economic situation also have an impact. It's not a monocausal thing.
More options
Context Copy link
Industrialization driving humans out of the farms and into the cities and removing the competitive advantage of having lots of kids as free labor.
Extremely high TFR was largely ascribed to the needs of labor-intensive agricultural work.
I'd actually say the 1920s (from a modern lens) had extremely low TFR, more than the numbers would suggest. If the US had a TFR of 2.3 (2.0 in the 1930s) and was 50% rural, and rural areas were bringing up that average, then TFR in urban areas would have had to be somewhere around current South Korean birthrates.
I think we are, socioeconomically, simply returning to those conditions (even though rural areas still have more kids these days, modern TFR is by and large functionally just urban TFR, but older TFR numbers very much aren't).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Man, the graph has been going down steadily for 200 years barring the post war bump.
Can you guess what it has gone down in inversed tandem with? It is not female labour participation.
The same thing goes for Japan. The fertility collapse predates liberalisation and workforce participation.
Also, why did Swedens ferility rate recover in the late 80s/90s and again in the 10s? I assure you that women didn't get less liberalised or educated, and it's not because of immigration either.
The status of women was advancing all throughout the 19th century in the US plus there are other factors involved.
No it doesn't, go look at the graph. There's a brief fall due to the chaos of the Meiji Restoration then fertility goes back up. A fall with the Great Depression and WW2, as you (or at least I) would expect. Then it nose-dives after equality of the sexes is introduced. Same story in South Korea - static for decades under Japanese rule, then legal equality of the sexes, then straight down as the effects of that decision become clear. At the same time of course, South Korea is urbanizing. But it's not like urbanization started in 1950, that there was no urbanization from 1900-1950.
At no point did I say that 100% of fertility was determined by female empowerment. There are other factors involved, the state of the economy, politics, cultural quirks and so on. What I am saying is that female empowerment lowers fertility. Speaking broadly, Sweden has empowered women and low, sub-replacement fertility, it's not a hole in my argument.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah the decline in fertility can't be attributed to any single known cause, even Saudi Arabia has below replacement fertility now and they certainly haven't had a sexual revolution.
I thought that educational attainment especially on the college/university level was correlated with the decline in ferility levels?
Seems like women in Saudi Arabia are getting a good chunk of the bachelor's and master's degrees: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1195186/saudi-arabia-share-female-graduates-by-degree/
As for what percentage of the drop in fertility levels can be attributed to education that's difficult to answer. There is this study and it might have numbers in there but it costs money to access: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00324728.2022.2130965
I imagine if a woman is pursuing a university education she is also more likely to pursue a career, giving less time/effort/motivation for wanting children. There is also just simply less economic incentive to get married and have children if you can provide for yourself. Also raising children is hard work, and pursuing a career is hard work, can't imagine having to do both. It's the plight of young women today, especially given the short time window to have children.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Life expectancy is inevitably going to plateau, at least until LEV.
This is pretty straightforward. In the developed world, good-tasting food is cheaper and more plentiful than ever, and manual labor is less necessary than ever. Why would people not be getting fatter.
As noted in the OP, if this is a real phenomenon, it appears to be localized to the US, and not present in other countries that have experienced modernity.
Murder rates had been falling since the 90s, prior to 2020.
It's not actually clear that everything is getting worse.
Worrying about whether or not there will be enough children in 50 or 100 years is like those people in 1900 who worried about the cities of the future being buried in horse manure (that's actually a myth but you get the point). The world then is almost certainly not going to look or be configured remotely as it is now.
For me this is an argument against fertility rather than an argument against female empowerment and education.
Why should it plateau until it goes up? Nobody expects an economic plateau before the singularity.
Couldn't people exercise a little self-control and buy quality nutritious food as opposed to artificial slop? I won't demand organic kale and non-GMO quinoa but what about bread, vegetables, fruit, fish, lamb... as opposed to high fructose corn syrup and mystery chemicals? The US is a rich country, it should be possible for its citizens to buy normal food as opposed to calorie-maxxing from low-quality food. Is there no money for education, no capacity to subsidize normal food, no technical capacity to distinguish between good and bad food?
If wealth naturally turns people into disgusting flesh piles dependent upon mobility scooters and diabetes medication then that sounds like an argument against wealth.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. Murder should've been falling consistently, not going up and down. Medicine gets better over time, more murders are turned into assaults. There's better forensics, more wealth. The US is an older country, so there are fewer young people to go around killing... and yet murder is still higher than it was in 1950 or 1960.
Yes, we may get massively transformative AI any day now. But it will be young people who make these technologies. We need young people.
Well, you can argue against fertility. But those who reproduce will have the final word.
The relationship between medicine and homicide isn’t necessarily clear cut because presumably many ‘survivors’ who return to their previous lives after being treated for gunshot/stab/etc wounds end up killed anyway. People can be ‘harder to kill’ without that guaranteeing a decline in homicide rates in very high crime communities.
More options
Context Copy link
Because the maximum human lifespan has not been increasing, only the average. Unless something fundamental changes, life expectancy is going to plateau somewhere around a century.
More options
Context Copy link
idk why I said, 'inevitably,' that's not true. It does seem plausible though that we will or will soon hit diminishing returns short of some breakthrough technology.
At least in the modern west, you can opt out of eating 6,000 calories a day, while in the premodern world you couldn't opt out of the terrible effects of poverty and disease.
I am familiar with this point, and it seems undeniable that it's true to some extent, though homicide in the 50s was unusually low even by historic standards. Though I would postulate that plausibly, this is offset to an extent by more widespread access to killing tools, since guns per capita rate has increased pretty steadily in the US for the better part of a century. I wonder how much of the rise in homicide is down to urbanization.
IIRC this is driven by a smaller percentage of the population having more of them, so it should be more than balanced out by a declining share of the population owning guns.
But it means at the end of the day there are more guns floating around, and most illegal guns were legal guns at one point.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link