This topic fills me with some kind of unexplainable Lovecraftian dread. The problem feels a lot more viscerally real than say Global warming. Maybe because it's kind of close to home for me.
I see all these attempts to turn the tide around as the last stand of a dying society. This is not going to work.
I think about the conditions that most seem to work toward producing children and I have three that seem to be in common: optimism about the future, cheap to live, and at least one parent that can be an at home caregiver. Religion tends to solve for the first one — if you believe, then God runs the universe and things will ultimately work out, and God will provide for your needs. It also, in traditional forms tends to prioritize the creation of the third by promoting women acting as caregivers. The second seems to be an economic problem— make it cheap enough that a family can have and maintain multiple children on a single income. In the country land is generally cheaper and thus getting enough space for a large family is less of a problem, and if good jobs are available that allow a single earner to provide so that the other can stay home and raise the kids, this seems ideal.
This list is fairly good, but it's missing something important: men and women getting married in the first place. Maybe you bundled this into your third point but I'd say it deserves explicit mention. The marriage rate has been collapsing due to a variety of factors, and this poses a huge issue to solving the problem. We could have the most optimistic future, cheap living standards, and people who are so rich that they could afford to stay at home, but none of that matters if men and women hate each other and refuse to form long term commitments with each other. I guess some women could become single moms by going to sperm banks, but that hardly seems like a society-wide solution.
I saw the trailer for this conference. This was held last year in Austin. I am a father, and before I was a father I could not have afforded a trip to attend this. I expect their target audience are HENRYs & PMCs, not tradesman.
I've wanted to be a father for a very long time. I could imagine my kids, but for a very long time I couldn't picture the woman who would want to have mine. After I bought a house, I couldn't find a local woman who wanted my children.
I don't care how beautiful the rhetoric is. They're not talking to me. I already kinda buy in, but I'm not who they want to sign on.
It sucks to be looked past. And I recognize Sean Hannity in the series of audio quotes. "Beyond politics", my ass.
I expect their target audience are HENRYs & PMCs, not tradesman.
I don't care how beautiful the rhetoric is. They're not talking to me. I already kinda buy in, but I'm not who they want to sign on.
Respectfully, does this matter? They're not trying to tell people to have more children. They're trying to tell the movers and shakers to make life easier for those who want to have more children. A "have more kids" conference would be all about the wonders of parenthood, financial preparation, resources, etc. which is obviously not what this is.
Seems like you've correctly identified their target audience but ascribed it to malice or selfishness rather than pragmatism.
I've wanted to be a father for a very long time. I could imagine my kids, but for a very long time I couldn't picture the woman who would want to have mine. After I bought a house, I couldn't find a local woman who wanted my children.
I was in the backyard of my grieving stepbrother. He was a widower due to a vehicle accident and not even 40 yet. I hadn't seen him face-to-face in about 15 years. But we reconnected over video chat during the pandemic.
Because I knew I was only going to know our parents there, I made it my mission to talk to everyone & be curious about them. I had enough surface-level knowledge to engage with anyone. That caught the eye of the most bookish of the bunch, a coworker of the deceased.
Less than 2 years later we became parents, and she packed up her belongings and moved 1000 miles away to live with me. It's an imperfect arrangement, a local maxima, but it works for now.
Crazy off-the-cuff idea: Since apparently none of this birthrate-encouragement is going to work, just have the government make kids itself and cut out parents entirely. Legalize trade in surrogacy and egg/sperm cells, make as many kids as required then house them in "orphanages" until they're adults.
How would one find that many women to be surrogates? Africa, probably; it won't take too much money until a paid 40-week vacation in e.g. the Korean countryside will seem an attractive option to many. (The median wage in Nigeria is about $9000/year, and just paying that on conclusion isn't much all things considered.)
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
Orphanages and foster care are, by any objective look, terrible places where neglect is standard and severe child abuse is common place.
I’m not throwing shade at foster parents or orphanage workers here; everything we know about these places is that they jack up the kids even when run by people more competent than the government. And paying Nigerian teenagers $20k to have Korean designer babies won’t change that, either, because it’s an inherent feature of orphanages that they’re dramatically worse than nuclear families.
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
These British kids are heirs to something, orphans won't get anything from their parents by definition.
But in this hypothetical at least they could from the government. If the state is so desperate for new citizens it is paying for babies, I don't think we can rule out the system in which they are raised might also be much better funded and run. They will be valuable if nothing else.
One thing I genuinely wonder about re: current and future birthrates is if the selection pressures stay relatively consistent. People always talk about the current bottleneck selecting for people who still choose to reproduce under modernity but do those selection pressures change too quickly to effectively select for anything? Things have changed so radically culturally and technologically just in my short lifetime. Are current births selecting for the same type of personalities as in the 2000s? What about now vs the 2030s and 40s? Maybe the type of personality that become DINKs in the 2020s would’ve had four kids in 1990 or will in 2040. For example right now (in the US at least) actually practicing a religion makes one much more likely to reproduce but could that reverse?
I genuinely don’t know. It makes it even harder to make any serious predictions
or example right now (in the US at least) actually practicing a religion makes one much more likely to reproduce but could that reverse?
Why?
All established religions stress family life and promote having children. At least the Abrahamic ones, I've no idea about buddhism as actually practiced.
Notoriously, the ones that didn't- Quakers who made marriage difficult and saw sex as sinful, Shakers who abstained from sex and procreation etc are all gone.
Quakers still exist. But you are directionally correct.
There are like 100k Quakers left in the entire US. Even fewer depending on how important you judge continuity of method to be.
But yes. Quakers used to be something like 2/3rds of Pennsylvania and now they are a drop in the bucket and mostly old and dying.
It’s true, and I don’t see any good reason why this would change but the future is always uncertain. I couldn’t have predicted 2024 ten or fifteen years ago
That said I think the role of religion in fertility might even be underestimated. I know I know anecdotal evidence but I see so many families with 4+ kids at church and knowing what birth rates are like these days thats very unusual in the general population. According to this women who attend religious services weekly or more are right at replacement with 2.1 kids per woman, while women who never attend are 1.3. Women who sometimes attend are in the middle. And this pattern has persisted for at least 40 years in the US so it’s a reasonably good bet that it’ll continue.
It's obviously not high quality data and it's easy to think about how it could be biased downwards and not easy to think about how it could be biased upwards. But, communities living in the modern world(as opposed to Amish, Hasidim, etc) are probably not beating the tradcaths on fertility, so we can treat it as a reasonable upper bound.
I think this is an important (and under-discussed) aspect of the birthrate discourse. Say you wound the clock back to 1923 and projected 2023 demographics on the basis of 1923 brith rates. How accurate would you have been? My impression is not very accurate. More generally, for how many century-long periods were birth rates at the beginning of the century predictive of demographics at the end of the century? My impression is not very many. And yet we're expected to believe birth rates in the present day are predictive of demographic composition in a century. Seems unlikely!
I feel like most of the discussion surrounding this topic is predicated on two assumptions. That "Demographics are Destiny" (IE that you can predict 2023 based on 1923 birthrates) and that social sciences is especially hard and rigorous field that increases our understanding of the world and promotes capital-T Truths.
I'm not convinced that either of these assumptions are true.
I'd also be quite interested. From my own impression at least, "old" birthrates are predictive of "new" birthrates, but directionally not absolutely. My parents were 4 siblings and 7 siblings, respectively, my grandparents afaik also had 6+ siblings for the most part, and my cousins usually were around 3 siblings. These cousins now also seem to mostly have 2-3 kids, with very few childless. So while there is a clear downward-pointing arrow, at any time point we're consistently above the average. At the same time, my childless acquaintances seem to primarily come from academic families that rarely had more than 2 children even in the past. All with considerable variance of course, so I'm open to the possibility that this predictivness is quite weak.
How accurate would you have been? My impression is not very accurate.
But it's actually very accurate (outside of certain kinds of immigration), given that 1923 birthrates are nearly identical to modern birthrates (though the shift to urbanization kind of throws this off; 1923 had 50% rural whereas 2023 only has 20% rural, and rural areas tend to have more kids for farm labor reasons and because there's nothing else to do) and far lower than one or two generations before that.
I assert that the financial conditions and constraints on the average potential kid-haver is probably the same, because the same thing is happening- rural centers hollowing out for centralized urban industry- and aside from cheap land, cheap transportation, and an abundance of well-paying low-credential labor becoming available in the 50s and lasting until about 1973 or so that drove this trend backwards (and led to the significant outwards expansion of cities into suburbs) we've regressed to the mean for Western nations.
Yeah I think people have the impression that birth rates were high in the early 20th century and then dropped steadily until today. In fact we already had low birth rates in the 1920s and the only thing that saved us was the baby boom, which was totally unexpected and still I've never seen a really satisfying explanation for what caused it or how we could make something similar happen today.
I've never seen a really satisfying explanation for what caused it or how we could make something similar happen today.
I was under the impression the baby boom was actually pretty well explained by a very high and early marriage rate driven by a drastic increase in young male wages that wasn’t available to women?
This is the most plausible explanation I’ve seen. It was perhaps really a marriage boom driven by upward mobility from men and increasing divergence between male and female wages in favor of men. Sadly it’s also probably the bleakest explanation in terms of future demographics given that people are getting married less and less and women are pulling away from men in college enrollment
Actually it’s not implausible that high interest rates and finicky, unreliable automation drive another baby boom- the making and fixing things part of robotics and AI is gendered pretty male and quite well paid, and the operation and routine maintenance is also gendered male and usually better paid than the labor replaced, and sustained high interest rates will probably be absolutely brutal to female-gendered work.
It was project managers and HR the tech companies laid off, after all.
I'd say that's not impossible, but certainly implausible. The most plausible result from that circumstance seems to me that we'll seen continued increase in de facto quota for women in those technical roles such that the people who were laid off get funneled into those development, operation, and maintenance roles.
I mean you’re not wrong in that large portions of society will do everything in their power to prevent that from happening, and large numbers of zillennial men would rather drive for Uber than take a job with schedules and drug tests, but it’s more plausible that at least some sections of society see a marriage and baby boom from that process- white collar professions seeing declining income as compared to the median wage just seems baked in at this point and the (heavily female)fat is going to get trimmed more and more the longer interest rates stay high, regardless.
The theory that feminism and fertility are strongly inversely correlated (at least within the relevant range as of the mid-20th century - as of the early 21st we are on the flat part of the feminism-fertility curve), and that the baby boom was caused by feminist gains being rolled back in the 1950's, is the kind of theory that is frighteningly plausible but can't be discussed in most spaces because neither side of the culture war likes the implications.
The Jim-tier version of this take is worth reading. I think he is serious. I am too - I think that the sexism was a load-bearing part of the 1950's social model (in a way that the racism wasn't), that 2nd wave feminism destroyed the good bits of the model as well as the bad bits, and that this is a big part of the answer to "WTF happened in 1971"
Hey, reading this thread is my first real exposure to this community. I'm curious, who is Jim, what is his reputation here, and why do you think that blog is worth reading? I'm trying to understand the ethos of this place. I get that you guys try to be open-minded and understand people who disagree with you, but surely essays that say women can't be raped because they don't control their bodies and blames victims of pedophilia for the crimes of their abusers are beyond the pale.
Jim is a far-right (I think at one point he self-identified as neoreactionary) blogger who was close to Scott on the blogosphere social graph back when the blogosphere was a thing. He is interesting because there are not that many smart people with far-right political views, and most of the ones that do exist are hiding either their intellectual or political power level. So he is making the secular case for standard American (i.e. Christian and Trumpy) far-right politics in a more intelligent way than I can find elsewhere. If you are interested in non-mainstream political thought, this is interesting.
By "worth reading" in context I was meaning any or all of the following:
This is a well-argued contrarian take that is a useful contribution to the debate, even if I don't fully endorse it.
As above, with the understanding that it is not entirely serious and should be read in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal
This is well-written and intellectually coherent, and therefore the sort of thing that this site's target audience would find interesting even if the argument is ultimately unconvincing.
This is a cringeworthily bad take by a well-known figure in this part of the internet and thus worth sharing for purposes of ridicule.
This is a post about kinky sex that will be titillating to people who share Jim's (not particularly unusual) kink.
I won't name names, but there are Motte regulars from all five of those perspectives who would not regret clicking the link.
In a hypothetical scenario where "Jim" posted this essay here, in all likelihood we could consider it so flagrantly in violation of our guidelines that demand that inflammatory claims require supporting evidence in proportion, that he would probably be banned immediately.
But the person you are replying to is not doing that, though this is closer to the use end of the use/mention distinction.
@MadMonzer is free to correct me, but I do not interpret his comment as endorsing precisely the same things as Jim, he seems to be claiming that feminism inversely correlates to fertility, and seems to consider Jim's essay to be an exceedingly bad way of presenting an idea outside the Overton Window that he thinks has a kernel of truth in it.
I agree that MadMonzer didn't seem to be endorsing Jim's views, and I didn't mean to give that impression. It just seems a little odd (okay, more than a little) to me to lay out the reasonable version of a view, then direct readers to someone who advocates for committing violent crimes against women and girls. I find it genuinely difficult to see what's valuable about the essay, aside from the trivia about depiction of corporal punishments in film, although I am frankly skeptical that Jim is a trustworthy film historian.
Hello, welcome, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I assumed Jim was “the Dreaded Jim,” an edgy neoreactionary with some very aggressive positions. If so, his reputation probably ranges from disgust to unironic admiration, because users here have some pretty diverse values. And they’re allowed to argue for those values, so long as they follow the rules and maintain something resembling civility.
As for why? In short, because engaging with something is not the same as endorsing it, and engaging with people of very different opinions has value. For examples of what this community can create, I recommend reading some of the old Quality Contribution Reports, which usually collect a month’s worth of the most lucid or surprising writeups.
It is probably worth noting that this community got here, via several levels of indirection, from the comments section of Scott Alexander's blog www.slatestarcodex.com. Jim Donald was quite close to Scott on the blogger social graph for obscure early-2010's blogosphere politics reasons, and got quite a long leash in the comments before eventually being banned for being persistently obnoxious. (In those days Scott didn't ban for far-right politics). So I was assuming a certain level of familiarity with the sort of thing Jim was likely to post.
IIRC laestadians and Dutch Calvinists have had consistently high enough to grow despite apostasy rates TFR since those countries went through the fertility transition.
It's a bit difficult to get a "true" rate of Laestadian "membership" since they're not formally a separate church but a movement inside the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church (and presumably other Lutheran churches in at least other Nordic countries).
Is there no separation at all? I’d have thought conventional Finnish Lutheran parishes with a Sunday attendance of 3 octagenarian widows and the pastor and laestadian parishes were pretty well separated.
Geographically, sure. However - and since I'm not a Lutheran and not from the Laestadian areas, my knowledge is pretty limited - my understanding is that most actual "Laestadian" activity does not happen in the formal church structures but in their own conventicles (I hadn't heard of this English term before, or perhaps I had but hadn't looked it up), which they have in common with the other Evangelical movements inside the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Also, there are surprising cases on "cultural" Laestadianism that sometimes turn up. For instance, there's an older female reporter whose name has become byword for almost ridiculous levels of liberal pro-European cosmopolitanism and particularly Francophilia (rare in Finland, Finns tend to be Anglophiles and/or Germanophiles). However, recently, the same reporter wrote an article recommending voting for the presidential candidate of the Centre Party, a centrist pro-rural party. This befuddled me a bit until it was pointed out to me that the said reporter comes from a Laestadian background, and Laestadians have always been Centre supporters - apparently something might remain even after you leave the conventicle life.
By the by, this guy is rapidly approaching mid-10s Scott-tier for me. Scratches almost the same itch. Almost every time he releases a podcast essay, I end up re-listening a few times, and it lingers in my mind for weeks. (The interview podcasts are less interesting.) I recommend "The Frontier Was Always Closed (To you)", "How the Taliban Won", and his review of Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
erwgv3g34 3mo ago
I read the first one and it's really just the usual paranoid, millenarian boo-outgroup screed I've seen from rightists about a million times now. A far cry from early Scott.
the enemy has transmogrified from self-dealing hustlers & zealots into a cabal of literal blood-drinking pedophile satanists in command of the entire Western order
As the divide becomes more dangerous, They will be more insistent to know which side you’re on, & institutions with the power to reveal that knowledge will lose the pretense of impartiality.
You know what is coming for this culture. It’s going to be destroyed - & long before it is destroyed, it’s going to become an unbearable hell. Maybe you were hoping to time your exit, make a little more money, watch a little more Netflix, eat a little more plastic meat - but maybe your plan would have come too late. If God calls you out of Babylon ahead of schedule, you don’t ask questions & you don’t look back.
Scott has committed to not doing boo-outgroup against his ingroup no matter their epistemic evils and to writing subpar propagandistic slop, and eventually was rewarded with an incredible mainstream reputation and traditional marriage and children. With his children growing up, he will drop cringey Fristonian analogies and «rediscover» traditional religion too. Truly, the dream life of any trad. Makes his paranoid freakout about the NYT that much more embarrassing.
It is not very interesting that people outside his ingroup experience life differently.
This thread is about early Scott who wrote a lot of criticism of the in-group that's pretty far from propagandistic slop or boo outgroup, so I basically don't know what relation your comment has to what I said.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
No_one 3mo ago·Edited 3mo ago
Even that one veers into fantasies about confiscatory taxes, conspiracy, and collapse.
Tax debates in our lifetime have mostly been about the moral rectitude of redistribution — what’s “fair” or what people “deserve” — but for our grandchildren, it will be a question of who lives and who dies. The young will not be able to support their own families alongside dozens of unrelated dependents, even as far as the basics of food and shelter.
Paradoxically, this will unfold in a world with abundant land and capital lying unused, because there will be so few competent, able bodies to operate it. Survival will be a straightforward matter of saying “no” to all of these demands — building for your own people, and protecting what you build.
Unsourced tweet from dprk enjoyer about Amish cell phones
for the powers we wrestle against, sterility is the point.
Once you understand the 'Social contract' in shrinking societies, 'Day of the Pillow' or more likely 'Just letting state pensioners slide into utter poverty' starts looking downright appealing.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
No_one 3mo ago
There's some truth to the meme, but unlike in Europe, in the US the social security age is raised on a regular basis without everyone flipping out and burning busses. Finances are also not the reason that people aren't having kids, it's entirely cultural and the fact that people simply prefer the DINK lifestyle. Per capita income tax is recently high but until covid has been flat for 20 years. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-money-does-the-government-collect-per-person/
And certainly nobody is going or will go hungry or homeless due to taxes, what a ridiculous exaggeration.
I think the first paragraph you cite makes a lot more sense together with the second:
But you still call them names & waggle your dick at them online, out of habit. You definitely don’t treat them like they’re possessed of infinite supernatural malice, & have the power to publicize everything you’ve ever watched & said & done on the internet.
The other two paragraphs are definitely overly paranoid, especially the last, but surely some level of paranoia is warranted at this point.
I do find the other two essays much higher quality than that one.
sarker
Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?
Tenaz 3mo ago
Adding that paragraph just makes it more paranoid and boo outgroup, especially since he takes the "infinite supernatural malice" ball and runs with it.
I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn the Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters, and to care intensely what happens to them, and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex. I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realise that all that was completely okay and not a big deal it didn't make them unloveable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person.
Well, societies like Japan or South Korea show us what may be the best case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates. Basically an orderly managed retreat from the planet. And hopefully at the end, there's a robot nurse to turn off the lights.
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. [...]
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
To maybe point out the obvious, a TFR below 2 doesn't hit uniformly across a population. If Lebanon, Israel, or the US for that matter are magically reconfigured into ethnostates and their borders sealed tomorrow, those countries will not have the same genotype in a hundred years with half the population. The type of person who succeeds and breeds in the modern environment is of an unusual temperament, and their characteristics will sweep the board and change the character of the country.
Your premise rests on the assumption that AI and robotics are a magic money cheat that will allow a nation of retirees to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You might be right, and I certainly hope you are. Infinite wealth for humanity sounds great. But on the (perhaps more than) slim chance that technology doesn't go foom and solve all our economic problems, it's probably worth worrying about birth rates.
The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
In America, even without mass immigration, you have the high fertility of the ultra Orthodox Jews. So unless you want a future without music or art or equality or indigenous Europeans it’s a good idea to incentivize births. Eg 200k in New York, doubling every 20 years means hundreds of millions within 200 years. And they already wield an absurd amount of political power in New York
The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
People underestimate the ease with which large manufacturers like e.g. e-car makers could turn out million-strong robot armies once there's a good design.
Let's not get into what absolute craziness it'd be if you had bomb-chucking autonomous drones that'd fly to a supply truck, take a small bomb, swap battery, fly back & toss bomb accurately at a target and repeat.
Once you take out air defense cannons, which by necessity are >500kg and more and need engines, the enemy is extremely dead.
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
In addition to No_one's fleets of bomb-droppers, spotters and kamikaze drones, I'll add self-propelled artillery pieces, minelaying artillery like Russia used to great effect, traditional high-altitude airpower, ballistic missiles, SAMs and some low-altitude drones carrying longer-range missiles like Hellfires (do we really need a whole Apache gunship anymore?) Maybe some tracked vehicles with LMGs to escort the vulnerable heavier vehicles against anything that slips through. These all seem fairly open to mechanization, at least more than legged infantry. There would be great dividends in fire control, coordinates of enemy targets would go from drone spotter to robotic artillery at machine speeds.
Jamming would be one countermeasure, yet jammers put out a great big 'here I am' signal. That's begging for an anti-radiation missile or artillery fire, just like how radar-guided SAMs need to watch out. Jamming would be a useful tool but not necessarily a hard counter. In Ukraine, drones can drop bombs from above the effective range of ECM mounted on vehicles, or fly in on a ballistic trajectory after control is lost.
Such robotic forces would probably flounder in urban warfare, where line of sight is low and there's plenty of cover available. Nothing stops them laying siege though. Relying on a central computing/data processing post is also a risk, I'm envisioning a huge truck or armoured train full of expensive compute. I suppose you could put a lot of air defence and guards nearby though.
Perhaps the biggest risk is cyberwarfare, losing command and control over one's robots.
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
You are describing an artillery shell.
So long as artillery shells can't by themselves hold positions and police an area infantry will remain the sole reason any other military implement exists.
There is this myth that has captured the imagination of American aligned armies after the cold war, that air superiority or any other kind of area denial of that sort means anything by itself.
The lesson of all of the recent American defeats is that if you don't have grunts patrolling some territory unmolested, you don't hold shit. You're just having an extended operation behind enemy lines.
Maybe robots will one day have the flexibility to act as grunts, but so long as they're still, in any mass producible form, glorified fire support, you still need infantrymen.
Neither do modern kamikaze drones that are built in significant scale like we're talking about here. The thermals alone would be more expensive than the whole thing.
Besides, reconnaissance is not a primary goal of warfare, and has long escaped the sole magisteria of grunts.
Satellites are rare, planes won't spot sneaky units and can be shot down anyway.
Drones with good thermals at say, company level are a complete change of the meta.
Infantry absolutely are needed right now, for urban warfare, for reconnaissance, for fighting in forests. I've made posts about how the US needs infantry and recruits in the combat arms generally.
Where the US went wrong in its desert wars was that it went in without a clear plan of what to do after ejecting Saddam/Taliban from power. The political skills just weren't there to follow up victory on the ground. It's not that there was a shortage of infantry but that infantry weren't committed in a well-considered campaign with the right goals. They pumped a grossly corrupt and incompetent Afghan govt full of money, allied with the child rapist elements of the country - yet the goal was to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. In Iraq they were catching and releasing terrorists (or torturing them in ways that made Arabs very angry). That doesn't fit with the war goal! The US is just really bad at a certain kind of martial imperialism, the British or Romans were much better at this kind of thing.
What I'm talking about is future conventional war, between serious countries that know what they're doing. A war with proper, realistic, military goals can be fought with firepower alone. In Desert Storm (a masterpiece in how wars should be fought), the firepower intensive elements of the Coalition won the victory, infantry were barely needed. There were some special forces that did useful work, some infantry engaged with their anti-tank weapons but it was mostly won by airpower, artillery and armour. There was a clear plan - thrash the Iraqi army on the battlefield till they leave Kuwait.
Holding positions - what does this mean? Sitting in a trench or hiding in a forest with rifles and ATGMs, ready to pop out and attack hostiles as they approach. Robots can do that in the future. Put an LMG on a little tracked vehicle or a bulked up Boston Dynamics bot, add some optics and that can hold positions fine, with the right software. Landmines can hold a position. You could leave some kamikaze drones in a forest on standby mode, they could potentially hold a position. Urban warfare makes things harder of course.
Policing is a different problem to these battlefield issues and the very name implies it's something for civilian police or military police, not infantry.
Policing is a different problem to these battlefield issues and the very name implies it's something for civilian police or military police, not infantry.
I understand it's categorically different when we're talking about combat, but to this particular issue it's significant because it draws the boundary of things that robots can't do.
The reason robots are not going to replace the infantryman at the margins is because they, in their current incarnations, are incapable of improvisation or dealing with general problems. They are indeed just a more sophisticated version of a mine.
And no, a mine can't hold a position. It can slow the enemy, it can increase attrition, it can funnel the enemy where you want him or free up your forces to be used elsewhere. It can do a lot of useful things, but it can't hold a position.
Loitering munitions can probably even make what used to be static defense a lot more mobile, but mobile or not it's still a castle/trap. You need men behind those supposedly automated defenses or the enemy is going to exploit it because robots can't adapt on the fly and can be jammed or sidestepped. Even drones can do so a lot less than actual boots on the ground.
Look at Hamas' low tech tour de force which was all against state of the art automated defenses. It's emblematic of what you do to deal with that kind of thing: you find some exploit, sit on it for a while, and nullify the defenses all at once when the enemy expects they're solid.
Put an LMG on a little tracked vehicle or a bulked up Boston Dynamics bot, add some optics and that can hold positions fine, with the right software
I'm well aware of what can be done, friend of mine actually writes that exact kind of software. And it's not magic, it's just a much more annoying claymore at the end of the day. Bots don't dig foxholes or deal with complex terrain very well. Their best use is in in freeing up hands to do other things.
I'm skeptical you could effectively use automated turrets on the battlefield in a way that wouldn't eventually be nullified because I think the environment is too chaotic.
What do you mean by holding a position? Entrenched infantry slows down the enemy, inflicts losses, funnels them where you want them. The primary difference is that infantry is mobile, yet drones can also be mobile. Engineering vehicles can dig earthworks suitable for tanks. A mini-tank could presumably go hull-down, though it seems most threats come from above these days.
What good are entrenched infantry going to be when a swarm of kamikaze drones fly down into their trenches at 3 in the morning?
Assuming we've got them all linked up to an AGI performing the role of brigade command, robotic forces could adapt and execute plans, counter exploits. Wearing weird camouflage patterns probably wouldn't work on a decent AGI - if all else fails they could use thermal imaging. Palantir has already made a test LLM for quickly organizing strike missions, I see no reason why machines couldn't execute tactics. The speed and coordination of an unmanned force would be extremely impressive. Commanders are deluged in information from all the sensors in modern warfare, machines are best at managing a tsunami of data and providing quick answers. The gains in cost-efficiency and speed will probably outweigh the loss in human flexibility for most environments. I'll admit that infantry will be better in urban environments for a long time to come. But everyone seems to agree that urban environments are hellish to fight in, it might be easier to encircle and siege them out.
Jamming isn't a foolproof answer. The transmitter will be lit up for artillery or missile fire. Some weapons could be designed to go into an autonomous mode if they lose connection to command and control.
Look at Hamas' low tech tour de force which was all against state of the art automated defenses
Au contraire, the problem was that the human guards were understrength and unprepared due to the holiday. Arrogance and complacency was their core problem. They had a bunch of sensors but relied on a response force of human soldiers that simply wasn't there. There weren't any landmines beneath the fence (or certainly not enough to impede Hamas planting explosives there). There wasn't a response force ready to go, they planned assuming a 24-hour warning time to deploy.
For at least three months prior to October 7, the soldiers recalled reporting information on Hamas operatives conducting training sessions multiple times a day, digging holes and placing explosives along the border.
However, when presenting the evidence to their senior officers, they were ignored, and the information was not passed further up the chain of command.
While there were three infantry battalions and one tank battalion positioned along Gaza’s border, stated the report, a senior military officer estimated that perhaps half of the 1,500 soldiers were away.
Now maybe an AI-based combat system would also have failed here, yet the humans certainly didn't cover themselves in glory. Sensors are useless if the humans don't listen to them and aren't prepared to act. They missed the warnings, they fielded understrength forces, they waited too long to deploy and were uncoordinated in their initial attacks (since divisional HQ was directly attacked). Hamas also made good use of drones to defeat turrets and armour, which doesn't necessarily counter my argument.
In America, even without mass immigration, you have the high fertility of the ultra Orthodox Jews. So unless you want a future without music or art or equality or indigenous Europeans it’s a good idea to incentivize births. Eg 200k in New York, doubling every 20 years means hundreds of millions within 200 years. And they already wield an absurd amount of political power in New York
The number of Ultra Orthodox and the number of Amish in the US is actually pretty similar (~400k). Good tfr estimates for both are fraught (both populations are actually experiencing falling birthrates) but many estimates are similar. Of course, neither the Amish or the Ultra-Orthodox in their current forms will ever be the majority in the US because their cultures will undergo huge changes as they become large shares of the population (as they already are in Israel).
A much larger Amish population will necessarily experience urbanization and the cultural and economic change that will follow, and a much larger ultra orthodox population will become more splintered and atomized, and as more men labor (or spend any time) beyond the kollel the whole institutional structure of that society will begin to crumble in places. In both cases, birthrates will fall (as they already are).
Every estimate I have even seen shows an Hasidic doubling every 20-22 years. From 2006 to today. In Israel the Haredi double every 16 years. I have never seen anything even vaguely hinting at the population not doubling that quickly. Do you have a source for why it’s fraught or were you just saying that? It’s actually surprisingly easy to do a head count on how much the ultra orthodox are increasing.
their cultures will undergo huge changes
We have much evidence that this will not be the case. Both Amish and Hasidim have high retainment rates of 85-95% which have not slowed due to any technological advance, and I recall reading that the Amish have a higher retainment now than in the 60s. The ultra-orthodox in America are centered in literally the most culturally diverse and dense part of the country, NYC and neighboring towns, and this has not stopped their increase.
Youre right that the Amish threat can be ignored — at most they will be a large peasant class with little political or financial power, and their way of life conflicts with urban living. But this is not so for the ultra orthodox. The way the community works is that the wealthy landlords and financiers etc disperse their funds to the poorer members who spend their time studying Talmud etc. There’s no shortage of wealthy ultra orthodox doing this. And they are also expanding their influence in shipping, I recall reading that 15% of all Amazon fulfillment in the US is done by ultra orthodox. So there’s no conceivable economic hindrance to their growth minus perhaps an anti-Hasidic boycott movement which I suppose is not out of the question in the future.
I recall reading that 15% of all Amazon fulfillment in the US is done by ultra orthodox
Isn’t Amazon fulfillment mostly contracted out to gig work? Seems a natural economic niche for people with incredibly specific and annoying religious rules governing their every action.
Sorry I think I got it wrong, they aren’t the drivers (haha) but the third party sellers / middle men. Apparently they have pretty insular marketing conferences and organizations to help other ultra orthodox enter this niche. But yeah this makes sense for them if they have to pray a number of times a day and can’t work around women. I was primarily mentioning this as an example of the sustainability of the ultra orthodox economy in light of their growth.
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection, which unlike AI-powered robots has the perk of existing and already being cheap enough to be accessible for middle class people if they so choose. Even in the current form it'd be trivial for western government to subsidize usage for poor people (though I think there is enough slack to make it much, much cheaper to begin with through scaling).
Agree on the Ukraine war & on the problem of extremely fertile ultra-conservative populations, though.
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
I don't think it's necessary to use for every birth, just consistent usage for people who struggle with pregnancy in the first place & people with certain known problems (I'm deliberately vague here because I think there is a wide range of reasonable policies that should be subject to debate by both the public and experts to collectively find out what we find or find not adequate to select against) is likely to be sufficient to make effective dysgenics per generation almost zero or even turn it around. Many dysfunctions and abnormalities impact fertility, so even just better embryo selection for those that already use IVF is imo likely to impact dysgenics more than you'd naively expect. From the initial data I've seen, simple general-health PGS is likely to even substantially improve the chances for a successful pregnancy beyond what the existing standard tests do, so it's win-win for absolutely everyone.
My first rough idea is something like this:
Make sequencing (again, deliberately vague because while I think deep WGS should be the goal, WES, larger SNP arrays, etc. would be a big step up compared to current practice) for would-be (in the sense of planning, not already pregnant obviously) parents completely free. Even if we assume every second parent takes you up on this, and even assuming one of the most costly option, 100x WGS at ca. 1k (see Nebula for example), this is more in the ballpark of low single digit billions. Probably we will go for a cheaper option, and probably less parents will use it initially, so in practice I'd expect less than a billion.
Only if the parents fulfill the aforementioned "certain known problems" they will also have access to free IVF + embryo selection. Likewise, people that get regular IVF due to struggling to get pregnant also get free genetics-based embryo selection by default on top. Here there is a wide range of costs; I'd probably be initially in favor of a policy that subsidizes only the worst 1% or so. So this would again be in the low single digit billions or less than a billion depending on the take-up.
We can also save a lot by only subsidizing it for people who can't afford it otherwise, but I'm personally against such policies since they have bad incentives imo. But it's an option on the table that would slash the cost down substantially.
I think such a program would be very cost-effective initially as mainly people who already have family histories take it up + those struggling to get pregnant. Over time, success and normalisation would increase the take-up and hence costs, but - and here you can call me out I guess - I think the scaling will more than make up for it. Remember, dysgenics is a pretty slow long-term problem, it's fine if it takes some time, as long as we get the process started and don't just completely ignore it.
In my ideal future, it's completely normal and free for everyone to have access to their own genome through ultra-deep WGS, access to several different risk scores for various diseases, abnormalities and dysfunctions for themselves, there is simple, accessible software that can estimate the joint risk for the same things for the offspring of any two people, and there are clear, commonly agreed guidelines when embryo-selection is subsidized or free for you (ideally with a linear or a multi step function instead of a simple free vs full price).
All in addition to full-price IVF/embryo selection for those who don't agree with guidelines and want to select for the things they personally care about. And in think this ideal future is actually possible even just with the current technology level.
Thanks for the reply, and sorry for being slow to get back to you. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just understand what you're really proposing.
For the record, I briefly looked into embryo screening when I was trying to have children but it seemed like we're not quite there yet. And IVF is such a pain in the ass that the only people who really go through with it really want a child.
I don't think it's necessary to use for every birth, just consistent usage for people who struggle with pregnancy in the first place & people with certain known problems (I'm deliberately vague here because I think there is a wide range of reasonable policies that should be subject to debate by both the public and experts to collectively find out what we find or find not adequate to select against) is likely to be sufficient to make effective dysgenics per generation almost zero or even turn it around.
I'm seeing only around 2% of people use IVF; why would you think they're the main potential drivers of (hypothetical) dysgenics? Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics. Note also that prenatal screening can have a pretty drastic effect, although I suppose many of the disorders you catch would be individuals who wouldn't go on to reproduce regardless so you may discount them.
From the initial data I've seen, simple general-health PGS is likely to even substantially improve the chances for a successful pregnancy beyond what the existing standard tests do, so it's win-win for absolutely everyone.
I can believe it.
Make sequencing (again, deliberately vague because while I think deep WGS should be the goal, WES, larger SNP arrays, etc. would be a big step up compared to current practice)
I've mostly focused on Mendelian disorders, but would you still be able to generate a PGS with whole exome? Or are you just looking for Mendelian diseases? Most of the well-validated genes are already tested for, whereas the disorders with a couple dozen known patients are more likely to just return VUS (variants of unknown significance) which aren't really actionable.
Over time, success and normalisation would increase the take-up and hence costs, but - and here you can call me out I guess - I think the scaling will more than make up for it.
I'm sure scale-up will factor in somehow, I just have no idea what order of magnitude to expect. The sequencing costs would probably scale. Analyzing the data and other bullshit probably wouldn't, unless we can get AI integrated into the healthcare system in some form or another. Hiring thousands of bioinformaticians, clinicians, nurses, lab techs, etc. would be a nightmare.
I'm not against what you're saying in broad strokes; I think something like this is coming sooner or later. I think it'll look a bit different than you outline, but maybe that's just splitting hairs. We'll almost certainly have the technology in place long before the public is anywhere close to accepting genetically engineered babies. It doesn't help that the godmother of CRISPR is profoundly decelerationist.
No problem, as you see I can be even slower, especially over the weekend when I'm barely touching my computer.
For the record, I briefly looked into embryo screening when I was trying to have children but it seemed like we're not quite there yet. And IVF is such a pain in the ass that the only people who really go through with it really want a child.
On my side, I also looked into embryo screening for our first child, and I briefly worked for an embryo screening company in the past. Similar to my proposal, I'd advise people to get themselves sequenced if they can afford it, and that they only should do embryo screening if there are specific reasons, such as that they already do IVF anyway or that they have higher risks for a serious disease based on their preliminary screening, score low on a general health PGS, etc. Btw, I'm also not opposed to germ cell selection since this came up somewhere else, but I'm not aware of this being an actual possibility at the moment.
I'm seeing only around 2% of people use IVF; why would you think they're the main potential drivers of (hypothetical) dysgenics? Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics. Note also that prenatal screening can have a pretty drastic effect, although I suppose many of the disorders you catch would be individuals who wouldn't go on to reproduce regardless so you may discount them.
As I wrote, I'd also advice people with a bad general health PGS/high risk for specific diseases etc. to get embryo screening, on a similar magnitude to the number of people who get IVF. So I don't think the IVF population is THE only main driver. But I do think the IVF population is very disproportionally an issue because they consistently have a much higher risks for almost every genetic/biological abnormality and this is often the reason for the pregnancy to fail in the first place. Sometimes because the parents are already unknowing carriers of something, sometimes the parents are even noticeably disabled themselves, and sometimes because the mother simply waited far too long (40+ the disability risk for children goes through the roof that mostly are down to genetics).
On the other point, despite the cliche that someone like me who believes in HBD and advocates embryo screening necessarily thinks that everything is genetics, I'd actually still attribute ~50% of most things to environmental effects. "Welfare queens", by the usual definition, are actually capable of work, they merely refuse to. And they very disproportionally are part of a culture that tolerates or even encourages this behaviour. I consider dysgenics, which actually makes you less capable of working, a related but not entirely identical issue.
I've mostly focused on Mendelian disorders, but would you still be able to generate a PGS with whole exome? Or are you just looking for Mendelian diseases? Most of the well-validated genes are already tested for, whereas the disorders with a couple dozen known patients are more likely to just return VUS (variants of unknown significance) which aren't really actionable.
The most comprehensive currently available risk scores I'm aware of, such as genomic prediction's embryo health score or the UKBB PGS release, are just based on genotyped SNPs or WES at best. WGS (ideally including SVs) would be optimal of course, but isn't really sufficiently available. You don't need to only look at monogenic/mendelian disorders. It works fine in practice for most reasonably common polygenic attributes/diseases, because even if you have an attribute that is associated with, say, 10.000 variants, then not a single of those needs to be significant for the score as a whole to be significant. But it's true that very rare diseases are still a problem. But also by definition they're not actually the most pressing issue, so it's fine if we can't act on them for the time being.
Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics.
And that’s interesting because as far as I can tell, the high TFR for very low incomes is driven by illegals picking fruit and Hasidic Jews not wanting day jobs, Shaniqua in the ghetto having 5 children was a 90’s stereotype and not one with a huge amount of basis in present-day fertility rates.
Instead the bigger driver of dysgenics looks to be the divergence between the TFR’s of college and high school educated women(I think the above replacement TFR for women with less than a high school diploma is mostly confounders and that it’s a small enough population for that to be the case).
The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection
The obesity pandemic is also trivial to solve with people eating less. Mass migration would be easily solved if a wall would be build at the Mexican border.
Even if an easy solution is known, even if the solution is proven to work, it can be very very hard, often impossible, to implement it.
In the blink of an eye, the price dropped from ridiculous to well worth it, in India of all places. Fucking give the people killing themselves with food the pills to stop them wanting to.
Even if the price stays high, it doesn't have to get much cheaper for the cost-benefit to be grossly positive from the reduced healthcare costs for the fat and sick.
This is not impossible, or even very hard to implement. Negotiate costs. Make insurance cover it, if they don't make a rational decision to do so. Buy it from countries where it's cheaper.
Fucking give the people killing themselves with food the pills to stop them wanting to.
Not pills, it's an injection. You try finding different places on your stomach to stab yourself weekly 😁
Plus, there are side-effects. Some people react so badly that they can't stay on the medications. If you're lucky, you'll just end up constipated because of the mechanism of action, which is to slow down the passage of food through the digestive system. If you're extra lucky, you get the "not wanting to eat so much" side-effect, but not everybody does get that.
Not pills, it's an injection. You try finding different places on your stomach to stab yourself weekly
No, it's not necessarily injections, you can quite literally get Semaglutide in oral form. I was looking up formulations for my mom yesterday.
Plus, there are side-effects. Some people react so badly that they can't stay on the medications. If you're lucky, you'll just end up constipated because of the mechanism of action, which is to slow down the passage of food through the digestive system. If you're extra lucky, you get the "not wanting to eat so much" side-effect, but not everybody does get that.
Sigh. Everything has side effects. For semaglutide, they're not particularly noteworthy, regardless of your personal bad luck with it.
I didn't know about the oral formulations, the only ones I've encountered for both Ozempic and Trulicity have been the injectables, (ouch ouch ouch), and even then supply was intermittent because demand outstripped it (particularly for those looking for quickie weight loss).
India makes half the pharmaceuticals you consume in the West, be they cheap or expensive. So it's not surprise I can get it for next to nothing, especially in bulk. So could anyone really, depending on their appetite for Chinese grey markets.
Oral formulations of semaglutide are less effective than a jab, but they're also cheaper, and you can just take more of them.
The long and short (and thin) of it is that it works for most people, and for those it didn't work on/couldn't tolerate it, there are both similar drugs that are likely better at the weight loss deal, and tens of billions of dollars being spent finding more.
Mass migration wouldn’t be solved with a wall because a large number of illegal immigrants (obviously more if the illegal land crossing route was closed) come legally and then overstay tourist or student or other visas. And, of course, a wall wouldn’t affect legal immigration.
The obesity pandemic is being solved as we speak with the new generation of appetite suppressant drugs. It will take time, but ultimately the market is generating the solution.
As soon as embryo selection for positive traits is possible, everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it because parents have a biological drive to advantage their children in any way they can.
As soon as embryo selection for positive traits is possible, everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it because parents have a biological drive to advantage their children in any way they can.
Designer babies seem like they’ll suppress the birthrate further among the sorts who do it for the same reason ultraselective preschools and the like to, leading to a natural selection effect towards tabooing it.
This is not true in practise. Parents who go for antenatal screens don't abort on a whim because the kid isn't just right, even in IVF, those who want kids almost always accept the first viable pregnancy with no obvious abnormalities.
They don't get into a tizzy about finding the absolute best, just the best of what's at hand.
In practice, the "my child must be perfect" mentality seems to lead to people hating the idea of parenting and not wanting to have kids- that's the reason for east Asia's anomalously low birthrates. It's hyper-k selection and human beings really hate hyper-k selection. Embryo selection feeds into that mentality for obvious reasons and I find it dimly hilarious that the modern west is selecting for religious fundamentalism so strongly. In 2260 or whenever star trek was supposed to be set the stereotype of whites will be dogmatic, socially conservative, and highly natal.
That isn't what would suppress the birthrate, but rather changing the burden of action from having to end a pregnancy, toward having to take (non-fun, non-instinctual) action to begin a pregnancy.
Likewise, I would expect implants to suppress the birth rate vs oral contraception, because the implant has to be intentionally removed by a doctor, while the pill might just run out or be forgotten (or "forgotten" with some subconscious drive toward having children).
See, I think it's all moot because human labor will shortly cease to matter. But ignoring that:
The people who are opting for pregnancy in a considered manner, especially those who want to go through IVF and potentially embryo selection, want a baby more than is the norm, or they wouldn't bother. People who adopt instead of accepting being childless probably want kids more than average after all.
Likewise, I would expect implants to suppress the birth rate vs oral contraception, because the implant has to be intentionally removed by a doctor, while the pill might just run out or be forgotten (or "forgotten" with some subconscious drive toward having children).
My exam in about a dozen hours leaves me well prepared to field that point. You know why implants are offered in the first place? It's precisely because they reduce unwanted births.
Some poor 18 year old girl is scared of being knocked up? We give her an IUD. A 26 yo woman, we ask her if is planning a family. No? Or a 36 yo who says she's got 3 kids and not one more? Then an IUD, or perhaps an implant, which can be trivially removed for any reason, let alone if they desire kids.
Leaving aside total birth rates, where I expect changes to be minor, this is also helping mitigate dysgenics. A lower class girl with low time preferences has far lower odds of being knocked up again by her deadbeat boyfriend, and then has every opportunity to remove it when she legitimately feels ready.
Every additional thing we feel like we need to do before feeling ready for children is a roadblock to having children at all. So fertility goes down when women are expected to go to college and get a decent job before having children. And again if they're doing self actualization stuff, traveling, training for marathons, doing advocacy, or whatever else and getting social approval for it. And again if they need an unusually excellent partner, a house with a yard, to pay for private school. It would almost certainly go down again if they needed to go to a clinic multiple times to also choose the most excellent possible combination of their genetic potential.
DuplexFields
Ask me how the FairTax proposal works. All four Political Compass quadrants should love it.
2rafa 3mo ago
Why not germ cell selection for positive traits? I’m one of those “religious extremists” who believes creating new people just to throw most of them in the trash is evil incarnate made more evil by its banality, and I’d have no problem picking the right sperm and egg to combine and grow.
Mass immigration is only one angle of change with late stage demographic transition. You can apply the same logic you apply to immigrants to demographic collapse. Some things:
Dysgenic effect of this demographic collapse. The population that is more likely to have children in modern context is population that is more likely to be prone to risky behavior. We are talking about teen mothers, people who also are more prone to addictive substances and so forth. It also makes huge difference when it comes to regional birth rate difference as well as various subcultures: for instance orthodox vs secular Askhenazi Jews in Israel.
The structure of post-collapse population is impacted in very important way. If you will have 15 million South Koreans in 2100 their median age can be close to 60 years. I is far worse than just having small population, it means that small number of working age people will have to take care of so many unproductive ones. Even if everything that you say is true and we will have some sort of robot revolution, this whole affair will impact the underlying political structure. I do not think that democracy as we know it can thrive in a situation where over 50% of the population is literally living on government dole or its equivalent.
Nevertheless I think you and Kevin Dolan are agreeing here. Birth rates are "not a problem" as long as some societies somehow will find a way to organize economic and political life so that people don't need to work and everybody will get what they need and want - as if this "don't work and get rich" is somehow a novel idea. I think in that case you just solved the people bottleneck by making people obsolete, as easy as that.
If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant
Go back and look at that part about "every family". Only one out of the four of us, my siblings and me, have children and they're going to carry on their father's line (such as it is). So my parents heritage is pretty much at a dead stop. It's only as you get older you realise "this is why we have rituals, this is why we have customs" in order to carry forward memory (I think this is why Sam Bankman-Fried's parents did him such a disservice with, if I believe Lewis' book, no celebrations of Jewish festivals or secular festivals or even his damn birthday).
It's easy to say "It doesn't matter if my family has no descendants, look at the millions of other people living in this country" but as you get older and the older generations die off, it becomes very clear how fragile the chain of knowledge is. Things changed in my father's lifetime, and he told me of those changes; things have also changed in my lifetime. But there's no-one for me to hand that knowledge on to, and in future if any one is researching such-and-such a place and the changes there, they won't know the information I could have told them.
It's very easy to lose knowledge, to have things forgotten, lost, not handed on. If you're pinning your hopes on automation and robots to replace humanity, you may not care. But look at history and archaeology and other sciences which would love to have that exact information to fill in the gaps of the past, but the chain of transmission was broken.
Falling birthrates matter when it comes to individual families, because the last person ever to remember an event/speak a language/practice an art dies, and that information is lost, and no amount of AI will ever get it back.
My great grandparents and my wife’s great grandparents were born in the same decade. My great grandparents had one son, who had two children, two grandchildren, and only one great grandchild (working on fixing that!) Her great grandparents had five children, all of whom had huge numbers of kids, the lowest was 5 and the highest was 11.
Same ethnic group and religion too although her side actually practiced. Couples of the same era but one side has almost no living descendants and one has hundreds. Crazy. How do people ensure they’re on the side that actually reproduces if you can’t afford or don’t want to have 5+ kids?
I don’t actually disagree with you at all. I think having children is important, spiritually and in general. But - sans mass immigration - it is not the critical, existential issue in the short term that some on the right suggest. When people say they are concerned about birthrates, often what they’re actually concerned about is immigration.
It's easy to say "It doesn't matter if my family has no descendants, look at the millions of other people living in this country" but as you get older and the older generations die off, it becomes very clear how fragile the chain of knowledge is. Things changed in my father's lifetime, and he told me of those changes; things have also changed in my lifetime. But there's no-one for me to hand that knowledge on to, and in future if any one is researching such-and-such a place and the changes there, they won't know the information I could have told them.
This makes me think about the historical tradition of adult adoption.
Even in Rome the adult adoption ran in family. For instance Augustus was grandson of Ceasar's elder sister Julia Minor and Hadrian was Trajan's cousin. It is not a bad way of running the family - but we are talking about extended patriarchal clan-like family type that is typical in Sicilian mafia movies or in Middle East as opposed to egalitarian nuclear family of English/US type.
Which might be a worthwhile adaptation to falling birthrates. If fewer Americans are having kids, the kids that exist should naturally be spread more evenly.
Except they won’t be- IIRC parity is actually rising for women with children, but fewer women are having kids. So the decline in the birthrate is mostly about the increase in family size being unable to cancel out the decline in numbers, and that means kids are spread less evenly.
Dunno, I really hate relying on technology that doesn't actually yet exist. I agree that it seems likely enough, but fusion or hydrogen or ... also seemed likely to revolutionize society at different time points. Computers and the internet, for example, were one of the revolutions that DID pan out, but I'm still undecided whether that revolution was really so net-positive. Any gain in efficiency seems to have been more than swallowed by cheaper and more accessible distracting entertainment. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if for one reason or another AI-guided robots in particular just stubbornly refuse to become economically efficient for many tasks. I'd also not be surprised if LLMs turn out to be extremely good at entertainment-related activities - it arguably already is - while its helpfulness for practical purposes is good enough to be widely used, but never reaches a point where it can outright take over critical productive jobs.
Even worse, assuming it should eventually pan out, we still need to get through the intermediate time. Germany doesn't have asian levels of terrible birth rates and also has a decent level of "good" immigration from eastern europe and other places that can paper over some difficulties, but the crunch as the boomers are retiring is quite noticeable. Though admittedly I think some of this is self-inflicted - the lack of teachers, for example, would be almost trivial to solve by better conditions for "Quereinsteiger".
Agree with Gaashk. I'd love instead a long post about who these people are, what they're doing, how this kind of organizing ties together more mainstream and far-right spaces, positive or critical commentary on the likelihood of whatever 'movement' this is succeeding, etc.
Title is highly exaggerated too, not the kind of thing you'd want in a post here. Also, "yeah but AGI so whatever lol"
I wish that this were a transcript, not a Youtube clip. Personally, I do not like starting a separate thread as a way to get around writing a submission statement. Why were you interested in this? What do you want to talk about? It looks like pretty standard stuff about people not having as many children as they would have wanted, and this being bad for society, and also for those who never become grandparents. That seems true enough.
Before checking the comments I've transcripted it with whisper and added paragraphs with an LLM:
Good afternoon, welcome to the Natal Conference. I'm Kevin Dolan. We're here to solve a problem that will define the next century. In our lifetime, in our children's lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on earth will pass through a bottleneck, bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question, will your children have children of their own?
It doesn't matter if you already have kids, if you don't have kids, if you hate kids. If you have a 401k or a mortgage or a social security card or a checking account, this question is going to impact your life in a very direct way. The entire global financial system, the value of your money and almost every asset you might buy with money, is defined by leverage, which means its value is dependent on growth.
Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a scale that makes that growth impossible to maintain, which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles. Not just a temporary overheating of home construction, but a permanent oversupply, like the kind you find in cities like Detroit. Not just tech stocks, but the entire equities market. Not just a handful of cities gutted of their tax base and going bankrupt, but thousands of them, and then sovereign bankruptcies. It's an everything bubble.
Even so, you may say, well, it's a bubble. So be it. If it pops, then there's a correction and we move on. But in the aftermath of a collapse like this, the shrinking number of productive workers have to support a growing number of older, sicker people, which in turn accelerates the economic pressures that make it difficult to start families. This problem isn't self-correcting, at least not within your lifetime. It gets worse as it gets worse.
So what does that look like? Well, societies like Japan or South Korea show us what may be the best case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates. Basically an orderly managed retreat from the planet. And hopefully at the end, there's a robot nurse to turn off the lights.
To be clear, that will take luck and meticulous planning on their part. Maybe they pull it off. But I think Japan and Korea are beautiful places with beautiful people who should go on existing. That would be an orderly tragedy. And again, that's best case.
Places like China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, and Mexico got old before they got rich. In coming decades, these countries will be totally unable to sustain their elderly populations, even if they could stop the flight of their most productive young people, even if they work them and tax them to death. Unless something truly dramatic happens, these countries will face humanitarian and political crises on par with the worst of the 20th century.
The United States will probably be somewhere in the middle. So far, immigration makes US fertility rates look better on paper, but not enough to prevent a degrowth economic collapse and not enough to take care of an aging population. It's not obvious in any case why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment while their own grandmothers back home are starving. America's wealth and productive capacity give us a few more attractive options in the short run, a few ways to avoid catastrophe if we act now, but our political system and our culture is just so damaged that making that happen would be a heroic undertaking.
So those are the global stakes of this issue. And we've brought experts in demography, genetics, endocrinology, economics, and public policy to tell you about all that. I'm not an expert. The reason I'm here is that I have two girls and four boys. And like a lot of millennials raising kids, when I look around at how few of us managed to start families and how much worse it is for Gen Z, I feel like I caught the last train out.
A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids, but it looks like only about 60% of millennials will get there, and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable. You give people the freedom to choose, and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice. But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys, only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases, it's what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness. You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line, the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off, and raising kids is just broken down.
So I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn't say, wow, I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health, or they're spoiled, they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors. And we certainly wouldn't say, good, there's too many Bengal tigers, Bengal tigers are ruining everything. Instead, we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative. And it is a basic imperative. If you're built to do anything at all, you're built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there's no more punishing verdict, there's no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable than when they take a chance on that.
You can tell a kid who's afraid of rejection that it's not life and death, but it is life and death. When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you're asking them, do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk, do you want that to go on into the future, or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.
For men, it's usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to, yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on.
I don't think there's anything to gain from asking who has it worse or who's to blame. And in fact, one of my goals for the conference is to create a space totally free from that brand of Twitter blood sport. But I get why so many people are angry. We're just not built to be hurt like that over and over again with no end in sight. And a system where that's the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.
Bottom line for me is I don't want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue, and I'm excited to think through them with you, but I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters and to care intensely about what happens to them and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.
I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realize that all that was completely okay and not a big deal and it didn't make them unlovable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person. You're supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father's eyes, your mother's eyes, maybe through God's eyes. You're supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did, and you're either supposed to understand that and forgive it or you're supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right, maybe both. And these are psychological loops that don't close in any other way.
Of course, life isn't fair. Things don't always work out, but it should be normal. It should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty and just as transformative. I want that for my kids and I want it for your kids because I like your thing and I think it should go on.
To the extent that I care about the median home price or the social security trust fund, that's why I care about those things. My personal line of attack on this issue is economic. I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married, and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life. So I found that exit as a network and a fraternity to build something new on the outside, a place for like-minded talent and capital to build businesses, schools, marketplaces, and communities that can make raising a normal family normal again.
That's not for everyone. It's not a total solution. There are so many more things that could be done and that's why we launched this conference. We want to see what you're seeing to know what you know and to build things we haven't thought of yet. We've done a little homework on you, not a lot, but some, and I can tell you for certain that we don't share a common culture or political program. We even disagree in pretty stark terms about this issue, what it means and what ought to be done about it. But we're here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on. I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in making this conference happen, especially my co-founders, Drew Gorham and David Moore, our producer Barbara Williams, our sponsors, our volunteers, and all of our speakers who made the effort to get out here, prepared remarks, connected us with their friends. And of course, thanks to all of you for spending the time and travel and money to make this possible. Thank you.
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Notes -
This topic fills me with some kind of unexplainable Lovecraftian dread. The problem feels a lot more viscerally real than say Global warming. Maybe because it's kind of close to home for me.
I see all these attempts to turn the tide around as the last stand of a dying society. This is not going to work.
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I think about the conditions that most seem to work toward producing children and I have three that seem to be in common: optimism about the future, cheap to live, and at least one parent that can be an at home caregiver. Religion tends to solve for the first one — if you believe, then God runs the universe and things will ultimately work out, and God will provide for your needs. It also, in traditional forms tends to prioritize the creation of the third by promoting women acting as caregivers. The second seems to be an economic problem— make it cheap enough that a family can have and maintain multiple children on a single income. In the country land is generally cheaper and thus getting enough space for a large family is less of a problem, and if good jobs are available that allow a single earner to provide so that the other can stay home and raise the kids, this seems ideal.
This list is fairly good, but it's missing something important: men and women getting married in the first place. Maybe you bundled this into your third point but I'd say it deserves explicit mention. The marriage rate has been collapsing due to a variety of factors, and this poses a huge issue to solving the problem. We could have the most optimistic future, cheap living standards, and people who are so rich that they could afford to stay at home, but none of that matters if men and women hate each other and refuse to form long term commitments with each other. I guess some women could become single moms by going to sperm banks, but that hardly seems like a society-wide solution.
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I saw the trailer for this conference. This was held last year in Austin. I am a father, and before I was a father I could not have afforded a trip to attend this. I expect their target audience are HENRYs & PMCs, not tradesman.
I've wanted to be a father for a very long time. I could imagine my kids, but for a very long time I couldn't picture the woman who would want to have mine. After I bought a house, I couldn't find a local woman who wanted my children.
I don't care how beautiful the rhetoric is. They're not talking to me. I already kinda buy in, but I'm not who they want to sign on.
It sucks to be looked past. And I recognize Sean Hannity in the series of audio quotes. "Beyond politics", my ass.
Respectfully, does this matter? They're not trying to tell people to have more children. They're trying to tell the movers and shakers to make life easier for those who want to have more children. A "have more kids" conference would be all about the wonders of parenthood, financial preparation, resources, etc. which is obviously not what this is.
Seems like you've correctly identified their target audience but ascribed it to malice or selfishness rather than pragmatism.
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How did you eventually resolve this?
I was in the backyard of my grieving stepbrother. He was a widower due to a vehicle accident and not even 40 yet. I hadn't seen him face-to-face in about 15 years. But we reconnected over video chat during the pandemic.
Because I knew I was only going to know our parents there, I made it my mission to talk to everyone & be curious about them. I had enough surface-level knowledge to engage with anyone. That caught the eye of the most bookish of the bunch, a coworker of the deceased.
Less than 2 years later we became parents, and she packed up her belongings and moved 1000 miles away to live with me. It's an imperfect arrangement, a local maxima, but it works for now.
Congrats.
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Fuck yah brother.
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Crazy off-the-cuff idea: Since apparently none of this birthrate-encouragement is going to work, just have the government make kids itself and cut out parents entirely. Legalize trade in surrogacy and egg/sperm cells, make as many kids as required then house them in "orphanages" until they're adults.
How would one find that many women to be surrogates? Africa, probably; it won't take too much money until a paid 40-week vacation in e.g. the Korean countryside will seem an attractive option to many. (The median wage in Nigeria is about $9000/year, and just paying that on conclusion isn't much all things considered.)
Aren't orphanages really terrible places where the children will suffer? Probably not, the poor outcomes of current abandoned children is much more the fact that statistically they've inherited terrible traits from their deadbeat/intellectually disabled/addict parents. If you pick the top-10% of parents by some sane scoring method instead and make kids from that, I'd bet their upbringing – with peers of the same sort – would get much more pleasant.
Orphanages and foster care are, by any objective look, terrible places where neglect is standard and severe child abuse is common place.
I’m not throwing shade at foster parents or orphanage workers here; everything we know about these places is that they jack up the kids even when run by people more competent than the government. And paying Nigerian teenagers $20k to have Korean designer babies won’t change that, either, because it’s an inherent feature of orphanages that they’re dramatically worse than nuclear families.
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They are. It's like being stuck in school or in shitty summer camp with no activities 24/7 for eighteen years.
Better than never having existed at all, surely! There's also similar things like British boarding schools that we already accept, so it doesn't seem too beyond the pale?
I reject the very first step in the mere addition paradox, so no.
These British kids are heirs to something, orphans won't get anything from their parents by definition.
But in this hypothetical at least they could from the government. If the state is so desperate for new citizens it is paying for babies, I don't think we can rule out the system in which they are raised might also be much better funded and run. They will be valuable if nothing else.
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One thing I genuinely wonder about re: current and future birthrates is if the selection pressures stay relatively consistent. People always talk about the current bottleneck selecting for people who still choose to reproduce under modernity but do those selection pressures change too quickly to effectively select for anything? Things have changed so radically culturally and technologically just in my short lifetime. Are current births selecting for the same type of personalities as in the 2000s? What about now vs the 2030s and 40s? Maybe the type of personality that become DINKs in the 2020s would’ve had four kids in 1990 or will in 2040. For example right now (in the US at least) actually practicing a religion makes one much more likely to reproduce but could that reverse?
I genuinely don’t know. It makes it even harder to make any serious predictions
Why? All established religions stress family life and promote having children. At least the Abrahamic ones, I've no idea about buddhism as actually practiced.
Notoriously, the ones that didn't- Quakers who made marriage difficult and saw sex as sinful, Shakers who abstained from sex and procreation etc are all gone.
Quakers still exist. But you are directionally correct. There are like 100k Quakers left in the entire US. Even fewer depending on how important you judge continuity of method to be.
But yes. Quakers used to be something like 2/3rds of Pennsylvania and now they are a drop in the bucket and mostly old and dying.
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It’s true, and I don’t see any good reason why this would change but the future is always uncertain. I couldn’t have predicted 2024 ten or fifteen years ago
That said I think the role of religion in fertility might even be underestimated. I know I know anecdotal evidence but I see so many families with 4+ kids at church and knowing what birth rates are like these days thats very unusual in the general population. According to this women who attend religious services weekly or more are right at replacement with 2.1 kids per woman, while women who never attend are 1.3. Women who sometimes attend are in the middle. And this pattern has persisted for at least 40 years in the US so it’s a reasonably good bet that it’ll continue.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/americas-growing-religious-secular-fertility-divide
The US tradcaths tried to estimate their own TFR with an internal survey and came up with 3.6(barely higher than the US as a whole in 1950). https://liturgyguy.com/2019/02/24/national-survey-results-what-we-learned-about-latin-mass-attendees/
It's obviously not high quality data and it's easy to think about how it could be biased downwards and not easy to think about how it could be biased upwards. But, communities living in the modern world(as opposed to Amish, Hasidim, etc) are probably not beating the tradcaths on fertility, so we can treat it as a reasonable upper bound.
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Lyman Stone seems to think that non-Abrahamic religions don’t bring any fertility premium.
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I think this is an important (and under-discussed) aspect of the birthrate discourse. Say you wound the clock back to 1923 and projected 2023 demographics on the basis of 1923 brith rates. How accurate would you have been? My impression is not very accurate. More generally, for how many century-long periods were birth rates at the beginning of the century predictive of demographics at the end of the century? My impression is not very many. And yet we're expected to believe birth rates in the present day are predictive of demographic composition in a century. Seems unlikely!
This is essentially my take as well.
I feel like most of the discussion surrounding this topic is predicated on two assumptions. That "Demographics are Destiny" (IE that you can predict 2023 based on 1923 birthrates) and that social sciences is especially hard and rigorous field that increases our understanding of the world and promotes capital-T Truths.
I'm not convinced that either of these assumptions are true.
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I'd also be quite interested. From my own impression at least, "old" birthrates are predictive of "new" birthrates, but directionally not absolutely. My parents were 4 siblings and 7 siblings, respectively, my grandparents afaik also had 6+ siblings for the most part, and my cousins usually were around 3 siblings. These cousins now also seem to mostly have 2-3 kids, with very few childless. So while there is a clear downward-pointing arrow, at any time point we're consistently above the average. At the same time, my childless acquaintances seem to primarily come from academic families that rarely had more than 2 children even in the past. All with considerable variance of course, so I'm open to the possibility that this predictivness is quite weak.
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But it's actually very accurate (outside of certain kinds of immigration), given that 1923 birthrates are nearly identical to modern birthrates (though the shift to urbanization kind of throws this off; 1923 had 50% rural whereas 2023 only has 20% rural, and rural areas tend to have more kids for farm labor reasons and because there's nothing else to do) and far lower than one or two generations before that.
I assert that the financial conditions and constraints on the average potential kid-haver is probably the same, because the same thing is happening- rural centers hollowing out for centralized urban industry- and aside from cheap land, cheap transportation, and an abundance of well-paying low-credential labor becoming available in the 50s and lasting until about 1973 or so that drove this trend backwards (and led to the significant outwards expansion of cities into suburbs) we've regressed to the mean for Western nations.
Yeah I think people have the impression that birth rates were high in the early 20th century and then dropped steadily until today. In fact we already had low birth rates in the 1920s and the only thing that saved us was the baby boom, which was totally unexpected and still I've never seen a really satisfying explanation for what caused it or how we could make something similar happen today.
Is it not obvious what caused it?
No, because there was a baby boom in neutral Sweden and Switzerland, too.
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I was under the impression the baby boom was actually pretty well explained by a very high and early marriage rate driven by a drastic increase in young male wages that wasn’t available to women?
This is the most plausible explanation I’ve seen. It was perhaps really a marriage boom driven by upward mobility from men and increasing divergence between male and female wages in favor of men. Sadly it’s also probably the bleakest explanation in terms of future demographics given that people are getting married less and less and women are pulling away from men in college enrollment
Actually it’s not implausible that high interest rates and finicky, unreliable automation drive another baby boom- the making and fixing things part of robotics and AI is gendered pretty male and quite well paid, and the operation and routine maintenance is also gendered male and usually better paid than the labor replaced, and sustained high interest rates will probably be absolutely brutal to female-gendered work.
It was project managers and HR the tech companies laid off, after all.
I'd say that's not impossible, but certainly implausible. The most plausible result from that circumstance seems to me that we'll seen continued increase in de facto quota for women in those technical roles such that the people who were laid off get funneled into those development, operation, and maintenance roles.
I mean you’re not wrong in that large portions of society will do everything in their power to prevent that from happening, and large numbers of zillennial men would rather drive for Uber than take a job with schedules and drug tests, but it’s more plausible that at least some sections of society see a marriage and baby boom from that process- white collar professions seeing declining income as compared to the median wage just seems baked in at this point and the (heavily female)fat is going to get trimmed more and more the longer interest rates stay high, regardless.
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The theory that feminism and fertility are strongly inversely correlated (at least within the relevant range as of the mid-20th century - as of the early 21st we are on the flat part of the feminism-fertility curve), and that the baby boom was caused by feminist gains being rolled back in the 1950's, is the kind of theory that is frighteningly plausible but can't be discussed in most spaces because neither side of the culture war likes the implications.
The Jim-tier version of this take is worth reading. I think he is serious. I am too - I think that the sexism was a load-bearing part of the 1950's social model (in a way that the racism wasn't), that 2nd wave feminism destroyed the good bits of the model as well as the bad bits, and that this is a big part of the answer to "WTF happened in 1971"
Hey, reading this thread is my first real exposure to this community. I'm curious, who is Jim, what is his reputation here, and why do you think that blog is worth reading? I'm trying to understand the ethos of this place. I get that you guys try to be open-minded and understand people who disagree with you, but surely essays that say women can't be raped because they don't control their bodies and blames victims of pedophilia for the crimes of their abusers are beyond the pale.
Jim is a far-right (I think at one point he self-identified as neoreactionary) blogger who was close to Scott on the blogosphere social graph back when the blogosphere was a thing. He is interesting because there are not that many smart people with far-right political views, and most of the ones that do exist are hiding either their intellectual or political power level. So he is making the secular case for standard American (i.e. Christian and Trumpy) far-right politics in a more intelligent way than I can find elsewhere. If you are interested in non-mainstream political thought, this is interesting.
By "worth reading" in context I was meaning any or all of the following:
I won't name names, but there are Motte regulars from all five of those perspectives who would not regret clicking the link.
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In a hypothetical scenario where "Jim" posted this essay here, in all likelihood we could consider it so flagrantly in violation of our guidelines that demand that inflammatory claims require supporting evidence in proportion, that he would probably be banned immediately.
But the person you are replying to is not doing that, though this is closer to the use end of the use/mention distinction.
@MadMonzer is free to correct me, but I do not interpret his comment as endorsing precisely the same things as Jim, he seems to be claiming that feminism inversely correlates to fertility, and seems to consider Jim's essay to be an exceedingly bad way of presenting an idea outside the Overton Window that he thinks has a kernel of truth in it.
And that is within the rules.
I agree that MadMonzer didn't seem to be endorsing Jim's views, and I didn't mean to give that impression. It just seems a little odd (okay, more than a little) to me to lay out the reasonable version of a view, then direct readers to someone who advocates for committing violent crimes against women and girls. I find it genuinely difficult to see what's valuable about the essay, aside from the trivia about depiction of corporal punishments in film, although I am frankly skeptical that Jim is a trustworthy film historian.
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Hello, welcome, and may God have mercy on your soul.
I assumed Jim was “the Dreaded Jim,” an edgy neoreactionary with some very aggressive positions. If so, his reputation probably ranges from disgust to unironic admiration, because users here have some pretty diverse values. And they’re allowed to argue for those values, so long as they follow the rules and maintain something resembling civility.
As for why? In short, because engaging with something is not the same as endorsing it, and engaging with people of very different opinions has value. For examples of what this community can create, I recommend reading some of the old Quality Contribution Reports, which usually collect a month’s worth of the most lucid or surprising writeups.
It is probably worth noting that this community got here, via several levels of indirection, from the comments section of Scott Alexander's blog www.slatestarcodex.com. Jim Donald was quite close to Scott on the blogger social graph for obscure early-2010's blogosphere politics reasons, and got quite a long leash in the comments before eventually being banned for being persistently obnoxious. (In those days Scott didn't ban for far-right politics). So I was assuming a certain level of familiarity with the sort of thing Jim was likely to post.
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That is one I hadn't heard before, it sounds plausible.
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IIRC laestadians and Dutch Calvinists have had consistently high enough to grow despite apostasy rates TFR since those countries went through the fertility transition.
It's a bit difficult to get a "true" rate of Laestadian "membership" since they're not formally a separate church but a movement inside the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church (and presumably other Lutheran churches in at least other Nordic countries).
Is there no separation at all? I’d have thought conventional Finnish Lutheran parishes with a Sunday attendance of 3 octagenarian widows and the pastor and laestadian parishes were pretty well separated.
Geographically, sure. However - and since I'm not a Lutheran and not from the Laestadian areas, my knowledge is pretty limited - my understanding is that most actual "Laestadian" activity does not happen in the formal church structures but in their own conventicles (I hadn't heard of this English term before, or perhaps I had but hadn't looked it up), which they have in common with the other Evangelical movements inside the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church.
Also, there are surprising cases on "cultural" Laestadianism that sometimes turn up. For instance, there's an older female reporter whose name has become byword for almost ridiculous levels of liberal pro-European cosmopolitanism and particularly Francophilia (rare in Finland, Finns tend to be Anglophiles and/or Germanophiles). However, recently, the same reporter wrote an article recommending voting for the presidential candidate of the Centre Party, a centrist pro-rural party. This befuddled me a bit until it was pointed out to me that the said reporter comes from a Laestadian background, and Laestadians have always been Centre supporters - apparently something might remain even after you leave the conventicle life.
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By the by, this guy is rapidly approaching mid-10s Scott-tier for me. Scratches almost the same itch. Almost every time he releases a podcast essay, I end up re-listening a few times, and it lingers in my mind for weeks. (The interview podcasts are less interesting.) I recommend "The Frontier Was Always Closed (To you)", "How the Taliban Won", and his review of Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.
It's a shame he's not anywhere near as prolific.
Does he have written things?
He has a blog called Bennett's Phylactery. I really liked "You’re Going to Be Doxxed", "Evils & Designs", and "Breeding Our Way Out".
I read the first one and it's really just the usual paranoid, millenarian boo-outgroup screed I've seen from rightists about a million times now. A far cry from early Scott.
Maybe the others are better.
Scott has committed to not doing boo-outgroup against his ingroup no matter their epistemic evils and to writing subpar propagandistic slop, and eventually was rewarded with an incredible mainstream reputation and traditional marriage and children. With his children growing up, he will drop cringey Fristonian analogies and «rediscover» traditional religion too. Truly, the dream life of any trad. Makes his paranoid freakout about the NYT that much more embarrassing.
It is not very interesting that people outside his ingroup experience life differently.
This thread is about early Scott who wrote a lot of criticism of the in-group that's pretty far from propagandistic slop or boo outgroup, so I basically don't know what relation your comment has to what I said.
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I only read the last one. I'd not rate him anywhere near Scott, but he's reasonably smart and the third essay is very much worth reading.
Even that one veers into fantasies about confiscatory taxes, conspiracy, and collapse.
Like I said, downright millenarian.
Once you understand the 'Social contract' in shrinking societies, 'Day of the Pillow' or more likely 'Just letting state pensioners slide into utter poverty' starts looking downright appealing.
/images/17057029934202542.webp
There's some truth to the meme, but unlike in Europe, in the US the social security age is raised on a regular basis without everyone flipping out and burning busses. Finances are also not the reason that people aren't having kids, it's entirely cultural and the fact that people simply prefer the DINK lifestyle. Per capita income tax is recently high but until covid has been flat for 20 years. https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-money-does-the-government-collect-per-person/
And certainly nobody is going or will go hungry or homeless due to taxes, what a ridiculous exaggeration.
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I think the first paragraph you cite makes a lot more sense together with the second:
The other two paragraphs are definitely overly paranoid, especially the last, but surely some level of paranoia is warranted at this point.
I do find the other two essays much higher quality than that one.
Adding that paragraph just makes it more paranoid and boo outgroup, especially since he takes the "infinite supernatural malice" ball and runs with it.
I don't know what to say except that it doesn't read that way to me.
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Holy crap, thanks for linking this guy. Do you know anything about the exit group he seems to have started?
It's on his twitter profile.
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I need the same speech but spoken by a hotter guy so I can send it to my girlfriend.
(On second thought I'm going to speak these words to her myself instead of outsourcing my masculinity)
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The end of the speech is particularly beautiful:
I particularly liked this part:
Profound.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but I got hung up on that line too. I watched the recording and the way it was spoken was
"Not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family."
i.e. that it's not just out of reach, but that it's getting even further out of reach
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Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
To maybe point out the obvious, a TFR below 2 doesn't hit uniformly across a population. If Lebanon, Israel, or the US for that matter are magically reconfigured into ethnostates and their borders sealed tomorrow, those countries will not have the same genotype in a hundred years with half the population. The type of person who succeeds and breeds in the modern environment is of an unusual temperament, and their characteristics will sweep the board and change the character of the country.
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Your premise rests on the assumption that AI and robotics are a magic money cheat that will allow a nation of retirees to be kept in the manner to which they have become accustomed. You might be right, and I certainly hope you are. Infinite wealth for humanity sounds great. But on the (perhaps more than) slim chance that technology doesn't go foom and solve all our economic problems, it's probably worth worrying about birth rates.
If only so that politicians don't have an excuse to import millions of low-IQ workers to maintain the dependency ratio.
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The war in Ukraine is strong evidence that manpower will continue to matter in war.
There is a longterm dysgenic effect with 2 kids per household, because the way human fertility is designed to work is that ~8 births occur and perhaps 1 or 2 of the healthiest go on to have 8-12 births themselves. A norm of 2 births is a norm of decreasing health over generations until the problems become apocalyptic.
People underestimate the ease with which large manufacturers like e.g. e-car makers could turn out million-strong robot armies once there's a good design.
Let's not get into what absolute craziness it'd be if you had bomb-chucking autonomous drones that'd fly to a supply truck, take a small bomb, swap battery, fly back & toss bomb accurately at a target and repeat.
Once you take out air defense cannons, which by necessity are >500kg and more and need engines, the enemy is extremely dead.
this is a quite significant thing to assume to exist soon
Modern kamikaze drones are pretty devastating, routinely blowing up tanks and other primary weapons platforms in Ukraine. The infantrymen need to be lucky every time, the drone only needs to get through once. They're very cost-efficient.
In addition to No_one's fleets of bomb-droppers, spotters and kamikaze drones, I'll add self-propelled artillery pieces, minelaying artillery like Russia used to great effect, traditional high-altitude airpower, ballistic missiles, SAMs and some low-altitude drones carrying longer-range missiles like Hellfires (do we really need a whole Apache gunship anymore?) Maybe some tracked vehicles with LMGs to escort the vulnerable heavier vehicles against anything that slips through. These all seem fairly open to mechanization, at least more than legged infantry. There would be great dividends in fire control, coordinates of enemy targets would go from drone spotter to robotic artillery at machine speeds.
Jamming would be one countermeasure, yet jammers put out a great big 'here I am' signal. That's begging for an anti-radiation missile or artillery fire, just like how radar-guided SAMs need to watch out. Jamming would be a useful tool but not necessarily a hard counter. In Ukraine, drones can drop bombs from above the effective range of ECM mounted on vehicles, or fly in on a ballistic trajectory after control is lost.
Such robotic forces would probably flounder in urban warfare, where line of sight is low and there's plenty of cover available. Nothing stops them laying siege though. Relying on a central computing/data processing post is also a risk, I'm envisioning a huge truck or armoured train full of expensive compute. I suppose you could put a lot of air defence and guards nearby though.
Perhaps the biggest risk is cyberwarfare, losing command and control over one's robots.
You are describing an artillery shell.
So long as artillery shells can't by themselves hold positions and police an area infantry will remain the sole reason any other military implement exists.
There is this myth that has captured the imagination of American aligned armies after the cold war, that air superiority or any other kind of area denial of that sort means anything by itself.
The lesson of all of the recent American defeats is that if you don't have grunts patrolling some territory unmolested, you don't hold shit. You're just having an extended operation behind enemy lines.
Maybe robots will one day have the flexibility to act as grunts, but so long as they're still, in any mass producible form, glorified fire support, you still need infantrymen.
Artillery shells don't have thermals and can't report what's going on under them.
Neither do modern kamikaze drones that are built in significant scale like we're talking about here. The thermals alone would be more expensive than the whole thing.
Besides, reconnaissance is not a primary goal of warfare, and has long escaped the sole magisteria of grunts.
They're already in use.
The recon drone has good thermals, costs less than smart artillery shells, the fpvs have shitty. (looks like 320x240) or less.
Lancet UAV has a thermals variant.
Satellites are rare, planes won't spot sneaky units and can be shot down anyway. Drones with good thermals at say, company level are a complete change of the meta.
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Infantry absolutely are needed right now, for urban warfare, for reconnaissance, for fighting in forests. I've made posts about how the US needs infantry and recruits in the combat arms generally.
Where the US went wrong in its desert wars was that it went in without a clear plan of what to do after ejecting Saddam/Taliban from power. The political skills just weren't there to follow up victory on the ground. It's not that there was a shortage of infantry but that infantry weren't committed in a well-considered campaign with the right goals. They pumped a grossly corrupt and incompetent Afghan govt full of money, allied with the child rapist elements of the country - yet the goal was to turn Afghanistan into a liberal democracy. In Iraq they were catching and releasing terrorists (or torturing them in ways that made Arabs very angry). That doesn't fit with the war goal! The US is just really bad at a certain kind of martial imperialism, the British or Romans were much better at this kind of thing.
What I'm talking about is future conventional war, between serious countries that know what they're doing. A war with proper, realistic, military goals can be fought with firepower alone. In Desert Storm (a masterpiece in how wars should be fought), the firepower intensive elements of the Coalition won the victory, infantry were barely needed. There were some special forces that did useful work, some infantry engaged with their anti-tank weapons but it was mostly won by airpower, artillery and armour. There was a clear plan - thrash the Iraqi army on the battlefield till they leave Kuwait.
Holding positions - what does this mean? Sitting in a trench or hiding in a forest with rifles and ATGMs, ready to pop out and attack hostiles as they approach. Robots can do that in the future. Put an LMG on a little tracked vehicle or a bulked up Boston Dynamics bot, add some optics and that can hold positions fine, with the right software. Landmines can hold a position. You could leave some kamikaze drones in a forest on standby mode, they could potentially hold a position. Urban warfare makes things harder of course.
Policing is a different problem to these battlefield issues and the very name implies it's something for civilian police or military police, not infantry.
I understand it's categorically different when we're talking about combat, but to this particular issue it's significant because it draws the boundary of things that robots can't do.
The reason robots are not going to replace the infantryman at the margins is because they, in their current incarnations, are incapable of improvisation or dealing with general problems. They are indeed just a more sophisticated version of a mine.
And no, a mine can't hold a position. It can slow the enemy, it can increase attrition, it can funnel the enemy where you want him or free up your forces to be used elsewhere. It can do a lot of useful things, but it can't hold a position.
Loitering munitions can probably even make what used to be static defense a lot more mobile, but mobile or not it's still a castle/trap. You need men behind those supposedly automated defenses or the enemy is going to exploit it because robots can't adapt on the fly and can be jammed or sidestepped. Even drones can do so a lot less than actual boots on the ground.
Look at Hamas' low tech tour de force which was all against state of the art automated defenses. It's emblematic of what you do to deal with that kind of thing: you find some exploit, sit on it for a while, and nullify the defenses all at once when the enemy expects they're solid.
I'm well aware of what can be done, friend of mine actually writes that exact kind of software. And it's not magic, it's just a much more annoying claymore at the end of the day. Bots don't dig foxholes or deal with complex terrain very well. Their best use is in in freeing up hands to do other things. I'm skeptical you could effectively use automated turrets on the battlefield in a way that wouldn't eventually be nullified because I think the environment is too chaotic.
What do you mean by holding a position? Entrenched infantry slows down the enemy, inflicts losses, funnels them where you want them. The primary difference is that infantry is mobile, yet drones can also be mobile. Engineering vehicles can dig earthworks suitable for tanks. A mini-tank could presumably go hull-down, though it seems most threats come from above these days.
What good are entrenched infantry going to be when a swarm of kamikaze drones fly down into their trenches at 3 in the morning?
Assuming we've got them all linked up to an AGI performing the role of brigade command, robotic forces could adapt and execute plans, counter exploits. Wearing weird camouflage patterns probably wouldn't work on a decent AGI - if all else fails they could use thermal imaging. Palantir has already made a test LLM for quickly organizing strike missions, I see no reason why machines couldn't execute tactics. The speed and coordination of an unmanned force would be extremely impressive. Commanders are deluged in information from all the sensors in modern warfare, machines are best at managing a tsunami of data and providing quick answers. The gains in cost-efficiency and speed will probably outweigh the loss in human flexibility for most environments. I'll admit that infantry will be better in urban environments for a long time to come. But everyone seems to agree that urban environments are hellish to fight in, it might be easier to encircle and siege them out.
Jamming isn't a foolproof answer. The transmitter will be lit up for artillery or missile fire. Some weapons could be designed to go into an autonomous mode if they lose connection to command and control.
Au contraire, the problem was that the human guards were understrength and unprepared due to the holiday. Arrogance and complacency was their core problem. They had a bunch of sensors but relied on a response force of human soldiers that simply wasn't there. There weren't any landmines beneath the fence (or certainly not enough to impede Hamas planting explosives there). There wasn't a response force ready to go, they planned assuming a 24-hour warning time to deploy.
SIGINT apparently wasn't working on holidays: https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-israeli-intel-unit-wasnt-operational-on-october-7-due-to-personnel-decision/
Now maybe an AI-based combat system would also have failed here, yet the humans certainly didn't cover themselves in glory. Sensors are useless if the humans don't listen to them and aren't prepared to act. They missed the warnings, they fielded understrength forces, they waited too long to deploy and were uncoordinated in their initial attacks (since divisional HQ was directly attacked). Hamas also made good use of drones to defeat turrets and armour, which doesn't necessarily counter my argument.
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The number of Ultra Orthodox and the number of Amish in the US is actually pretty similar (~400k). Good tfr estimates for both are fraught (both populations are actually experiencing falling birthrates) but many estimates are similar. Of course, neither the Amish or the Ultra-Orthodox in their current forms will ever be the majority in the US because their cultures will undergo huge changes as they become large shares of the population (as they already are in Israel).
A much larger Amish population will necessarily experience urbanization and the cultural and economic change that will follow, and a much larger ultra orthodox population will become more splintered and atomized, and as more men labor (or spend any time) beyond the kollel the whole institutional structure of that society will begin to crumble in places. In both cases, birthrates will fall (as they already are).
Ultra Orthodox was actually ~700000 in 2020, per wikipedia.
They seem to be about one generation ahead of the Amish, both doubling a bit quicker than every 20 years.
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Every estimate I have even seen shows an Hasidic doubling every 20-22 years. From 2006 to today. In Israel the Haredi double every 16 years. I have never seen anything even vaguely hinting at the population not doubling that quickly. Do you have a source for why it’s fraught or were you just saying that? It’s actually surprisingly easy to do a head count on how much the ultra orthodox are increasing.
We have much evidence that this will not be the case. Both Amish and Hasidim have high retainment rates of 85-95% which have not slowed due to any technological advance, and I recall reading that the Amish have a higher retainment now than in the 60s. The ultra-orthodox in America are centered in literally the most culturally diverse and dense part of the country, NYC and neighboring towns, and this has not stopped their increase.
Youre right that the Amish threat can be ignored — at most they will be a large peasant class with little political or financial power, and their way of life conflicts with urban living. But this is not so for the ultra orthodox. The way the community works is that the wealthy landlords and financiers etc disperse their funds to the poorer members who spend their time studying Talmud etc. There’s no shortage of wealthy ultra orthodox doing this. And they are also expanding their influence in shipping, I recall reading that 15% of all Amazon fulfillment in the US is done by ultra orthodox. So there’s no conceivable economic hindrance to their growth minus perhaps an anti-Hasidic boycott movement which I suppose is not out of the question in the future.
Isn’t Amazon fulfillment mostly contracted out to gig work? Seems a natural economic niche for people with incredibly specific and annoying religious rules governing their every action.
Sorry I think I got it wrong, they aren’t the drivers (haha) but the third party sellers / middle men. Apparently they have pretty insular marketing conferences and organizations to help other ultra orthodox enter this niche. But yeah this makes sense for them if they have to pray a number of times a day and can’t work around women. I was primarily mentioning this as an example of the sustainability of the ultra orthodox economy in light of their growth.
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The dysgenics is trivial to solve with embryo selection, which unlike AI-powered robots has the perk of existing and already being cheap enough to be accessible for middle class people if they so choose. Even in the current form it'd be trivial for western government to subsidize usage for poor people (though I think there is enough slack to make it much, much cheaper to begin with through scaling).
Agree on the Ukraine war & on the problem of extremely fertile ultra-conservative populations, though.
IVF costs 10-30k per cycle, with a success rate of around 20-30%. There are around 3.5 million births per year in the US. Even discounting sequencing costs (you want whole genome? Just a SNP chip?), assuming I'm understanding you correctly, won't your program have a roughly hundred billion/year budget? Not to mention that many women don't want to do ivf.
I don't think it's necessary to use for every birth, just consistent usage for people who struggle with pregnancy in the first place & people with certain known problems (I'm deliberately vague here because I think there is a wide range of reasonable policies that should be subject to debate by both the public and experts to collectively find out what we find or find not adequate to select against) is likely to be sufficient to make effective dysgenics per generation almost zero or even turn it around. Many dysfunctions and abnormalities impact fertility, so even just better embryo selection for those that already use IVF is imo likely to impact dysgenics more than you'd naively expect. From the initial data I've seen, simple general-health PGS is likely to even substantially improve the chances for a successful pregnancy beyond what the existing standard tests do, so it's win-win for absolutely everyone.
My first rough idea is something like this:
I think such a program would be very cost-effective initially as mainly people who already have family histories take it up + those struggling to get pregnant. Over time, success and normalisation would increase the take-up and hence costs, but - and here you can call me out I guess - I think the scaling will more than make up for it. Remember, dysgenics is a pretty slow long-term problem, it's fine if it takes some time, as long as we get the process started and don't just completely ignore it.
In my ideal future, it's completely normal and free for everyone to have access to their own genome through ultra-deep WGS, access to several different risk scores for various diseases, abnormalities and dysfunctions for themselves, there is simple, accessible software that can estimate the joint risk for the same things for the offspring of any two people, and there are clear, commonly agreed guidelines when embryo-selection is subsidized or free for you (ideally with a linear or a multi step function instead of a simple free vs full price). All in addition to full-price IVF/embryo selection for those who don't agree with guidelines and want to select for the things they personally care about. And in think this ideal future is actually possible even just with the current technology level.
Thanks for the reply, and sorry for being slow to get back to you. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, just understand what you're really proposing.
For the record, I briefly looked into embryo screening when I was trying to have children but it seemed like we're not quite there yet. And IVF is such a pain in the ass that the only people who really go through with it really want a child.
I'm seeing only around 2% of people use IVF; why would you think they're the main potential drivers of (hypothetical) dysgenics? Most people around here seem to have 'welfare queens' in mind when discussing dysgenics. Note also that prenatal screening can have a pretty drastic effect, although I suppose many of the disorders you catch would be individuals who wouldn't go on to reproduce regardless so you may discount them.
I can believe it.
I've mostly focused on Mendelian disorders, but would you still be able to generate a PGS with whole exome? Or are you just looking for Mendelian diseases? Most of the well-validated genes are already tested for, whereas the disorders with a couple dozen known patients are more likely to just return VUS (variants of unknown significance) which aren't really actionable.
I'm sure scale-up will factor in somehow, I just have no idea what order of magnitude to expect. The sequencing costs would probably scale. Analyzing the data and other bullshit probably wouldn't, unless we can get AI integrated into the healthcare system in some form or another. Hiring thousands of bioinformaticians, clinicians, nurses, lab techs, etc. would be a nightmare.
I'm not against what you're saying in broad strokes; I think something like this is coming sooner or later. I think it'll look a bit different than you outline, but maybe that's just splitting hairs. We'll almost certainly have the technology in place long before the public is anywhere close to accepting genetically engineered babies. It doesn't help that the godmother of CRISPR is profoundly decelerationist.
No problem, as you see I can be even slower, especially over the weekend when I'm barely touching my computer.
On my side, I also looked into embryo screening for our first child, and I briefly worked for an embryo screening company in the past. Similar to my proposal, I'd advise people to get themselves sequenced if they can afford it, and that they only should do embryo screening if there are specific reasons, such as that they already do IVF anyway or that they have higher risks for a serious disease based on their preliminary screening, score low on a general health PGS, etc. Btw, I'm also not opposed to germ cell selection since this came up somewhere else, but I'm not aware of this being an actual possibility at the moment.
As I wrote, I'd also advice people with a bad general health PGS/high risk for specific diseases etc. to get embryo screening, on a similar magnitude to the number of people who get IVF. So I don't think the IVF population is THE only main driver. But I do think the IVF population is very disproportionally an issue because they consistently have a much higher risks for almost every genetic/biological abnormality and this is often the reason for the pregnancy to fail in the first place. Sometimes because the parents are already unknowing carriers of something, sometimes the parents are even noticeably disabled themselves, and sometimes because the mother simply waited far too long (40+ the disability risk for children goes through the roof that mostly are down to genetics). On the other point, despite the cliche that someone like me who believes in HBD and advocates embryo screening necessarily thinks that everything is genetics, I'd actually still attribute ~50% of most things to environmental effects. "Welfare queens", by the usual definition, are actually capable of work, they merely refuse to. And they very disproportionally are part of a culture that tolerates or even encourages this behaviour. I consider dysgenics, which actually makes you less capable of working, a related but not entirely identical issue.
The most comprehensive currently available risk scores I'm aware of, such as genomic prediction's embryo health score or the UKBB PGS release, are just based on genotyped SNPs or WES at best. WGS (ideally including SVs) would be optimal of course, but isn't really sufficiently available. You don't need to only look at monogenic/mendelian disorders. It works fine in practice for most reasonably common polygenic attributes/diseases, because even if you have an attribute that is associated with, say, 10.000 variants, then not a single of those needs to be significant for the score as a whole to be significant. But it's true that very rare diseases are still a problem. But also by definition they're not actually the most pressing issue, so it's fine if we can't act on them for the time being.
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And that’s interesting because as far as I can tell, the high TFR for very low incomes is driven by illegals picking fruit and Hasidic Jews not wanting day jobs, Shaniqua in the ghetto having 5 children was a 90’s stereotype and not one with a huge amount of basis in present-day fertility rates.
Instead the bigger driver of dysgenics looks to be the divergence between the TFR’s of college and high school educated women(I think the above replacement TFR for women with less than a high school diploma is mostly confounders and that it’s a small enough population for that to be the case).
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The government spends $120bn a year on food stamps, which is much less net positive than this program.
I also wouldn't describe that program as 'trivial.'
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The obesity pandemic is also trivial to solve with people eating less. Mass migration would be easily solved if a wall would be build at the Mexican border.
Even if an easy solution is known, even if the solution is proven to work, it can be very very hard, often impossible, to implement it.
The Obesity epidemic is, in fact, easy to solve.
Start handing out Ozempic.
In the blink of an eye, the price dropped from ridiculous to well worth it, in India of all places. Fucking give the people killing themselves with food the pills to stop them wanting to.
Even if the price stays high, it doesn't have to get much cheaper for the cost-benefit to be grossly positive from the reduced healthcare costs for the fat and sick.
This is not impossible, or even very hard to implement. Negotiate costs. Make insurance cover it, if they don't make a rational decision to do so. Buy it from countries where it's cheaper.
Not pills, it's an injection. You try finding different places on your stomach to stab yourself weekly 😁
Plus, there are side-effects. Some people react so badly that they can't stay on the medications. If you're lucky, you'll just end up constipated because of the mechanism of action, which is to slow down the passage of food through the digestive system. If you're extra lucky, you get the "not wanting to eat so much" side-effect, but not everybody does get that.
No, it's not necessarily injections, you can quite literally get Semaglutide in oral form. I was looking up formulations for my mom yesterday.
Sigh. Everything has side effects. For semaglutide, they're not particularly noteworthy, regardless of your personal bad luck with it.
I didn't know about the oral formulations, the only ones I've encountered for both Ozempic and Trulicity have been the injectables, (ouch ouch ouch), and even then supply was intermittent because demand outstripped it (particularly for those looking for quickie weight loss).
India makes half the pharmaceuticals you consume in the West, be they cheap or expensive. So it's not surprise I can get it for next to nothing, especially in bulk. So could anyone really, depending on their appetite for Chinese grey markets.
Oral formulations of semaglutide are less effective than a jab, but they're also cheaper, and you can just take more of them.
The long and short (and thin) of it is that it works for most people, and for those it didn't work on/couldn't tolerate it, there are both similar drugs that are likely better at the weight loss deal, and tens of billions of dollars being spent finding more.
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Mass migration wouldn’t be solved with a wall because a large number of illegal immigrants (obviously more if the illegal land crossing route was closed) come legally and then overstay tourist or student or other visas. And, of course, a wall wouldn’t affect legal immigration.
The obesity pandemic is being solved as we speak with the new generation of appetite suppressant drugs. It will take time, but ultimately the market is generating the solution.
As soon as embryo selection for positive traits is possible, everyone except some religious extremists and the dirt poor (who should and in many nations will get it for free) will do it because parents have a biological drive to advantage their children in any way they can.
Designer babies seem like they’ll suppress the birthrate further among the sorts who do it for the same reason ultraselective preschools and the like to, leading to a natural selection effect towards tabooing it.
This is not true in practise. Parents who go for antenatal screens don't abort on a whim because the kid isn't just right, even in IVF, those who want kids almost always accept the first viable pregnancy with no obvious abnormalities.
They don't get into a tizzy about finding the absolute best, just the best of what's at hand.
In practice, the "my child must be perfect" mentality seems to lead to people hating the idea of parenting and not wanting to have kids- that's the reason for east Asia's anomalously low birthrates. It's hyper-k selection and human beings really hate hyper-k selection. Embryo selection feeds into that mentality for obvious reasons and I find it dimly hilarious that the modern west is selecting for religious fundamentalism so strongly. In 2260 or whenever star trek was supposed to be set the stereotype of whites will be dogmatic, socially conservative, and highly natal.
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That isn't what would suppress the birthrate, but rather changing the burden of action from having to end a pregnancy, toward having to take (non-fun, non-instinctual) action to begin a pregnancy.
Likewise, I would expect implants to suppress the birth rate vs oral contraception, because the implant has to be intentionally removed by a doctor, while the pill might just run out or be forgotten (or "forgotten" with some subconscious drive toward having children).
See, I think it's all moot because human labor will shortly cease to matter. But ignoring that:
The people who are opting for pregnancy in a considered manner, especially those who want to go through IVF and potentially embryo selection, want a baby more than is the norm, or they wouldn't bother. People who adopt instead of accepting being childless probably want kids more than average after all.
My exam in about a dozen hours leaves me well prepared to field that point. You know why implants are offered in the first place? It's precisely because they reduce unwanted births.
Some poor 18 year old girl is scared of being knocked up? We give her an IUD. A 26 yo woman, we ask her if is planning a family. No? Or a 36 yo who says she's got 3 kids and not one more? Then an IUD, or perhaps an implant, which can be trivially removed for any reason, let alone if they desire kids.
Leaving aside total birth rates, where I expect changes to be minor, this is also helping mitigate dysgenics. A lower class girl with low time preferences has far lower odds of being knocked up again by her deadbeat boyfriend, and then has every opportunity to remove it when she legitimately feels ready.
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That would be my expectation as well.
Every additional thing we feel like we need to do before feeling ready for children is a roadblock to having children at all. So fertility goes down when women are expected to go to college and get a decent job before having children. And again if they're doing self actualization stuff, traveling, training for marathons, doing advocacy, or whatever else and getting social approval for it. And again if they need an unusually excellent partner, a house with a yard, to pay for private school. It would almost certainly go down again if they needed to go to a clinic multiple times to also choose the most excellent possible combination of their genetic potential.
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Why not germ cell selection for positive traits? I’m one of those “religious extremists” who believes creating new people just to throw most of them in the trash is evil incarnate made more evil by its banality, and I’d have no problem picking the right sperm and egg to combine and grow.
Sure, I should probably have said ‘designer babies’ or whatever to include that whole category of possibilities.
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Mass immigration is only one angle of change with late stage demographic transition. You can apply the same logic you apply to immigrants to demographic collapse. Some things:
Dysgenic effect of this demographic collapse. The population that is more likely to have children in modern context is population that is more likely to be prone to risky behavior. We are talking about teen mothers, people who also are more prone to addictive substances and so forth. It also makes huge difference when it comes to regional birth rate difference as well as various subcultures: for instance orthodox vs secular Askhenazi Jews in Israel.
The structure of post-collapse population is impacted in very important way. If you will have 15 million South Koreans in 2100 their median age can be close to 60 years. I is far worse than just having small population, it means that small number of working age people will have to take care of so many unproductive ones. Even if everything that you say is true and we will have some sort of robot revolution, this whole affair will impact the underlying political structure. I do not think that democracy as we know it can thrive in a situation where over 50% of the population is literally living on government dole or its equivalent.
Nevertheless I think you and Kevin Dolan are agreeing here. Birth rates are "not a problem" as long as some societies somehow will find a way to organize economic and political life so that people don't need to work and everybody will get what they need and want - as if this "don't work and get rich" is somehow a novel idea. I think in that case you just solved the people bottleneck by making people obsolete, as easy as that.
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Go back and look at that part about "every family". Only one out of the four of us, my siblings and me, have children and they're going to carry on their father's line (such as it is). So my parents heritage is pretty much at a dead stop. It's only as you get older you realise "this is why we have rituals, this is why we have customs" in order to carry forward memory (I think this is why Sam Bankman-Fried's parents did him such a disservice with, if I believe Lewis' book, no celebrations of Jewish festivals or secular festivals or even his damn birthday).
It's easy to say "It doesn't matter if my family has no descendants, look at the millions of other people living in this country" but as you get older and the older generations die off, it becomes very clear how fragile the chain of knowledge is. Things changed in my father's lifetime, and he told me of those changes; things have also changed in my lifetime. But there's no-one for me to hand that knowledge on to, and in future if any one is researching such-and-such a place and the changes there, they won't know the information I could have told them.
It's very easy to lose knowledge, to have things forgotten, lost, not handed on. If you're pinning your hopes on automation and robots to replace humanity, you may not care. But look at history and archaeology and other sciences which would love to have that exact information to fill in the gaps of the past, but the chain of transmission was broken.
Falling birthrates matter when it comes to individual families, because the last person ever to remember an event/speak a language/practice an art dies, and that information is lost, and no amount of AI will ever get it back.
I was just wondering this morning if anyone even knows when the last native speaker of Hittite (or Etruscan, or Pelasgian) died.
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My great grandparents and my wife’s great grandparents were born in the same decade. My great grandparents had one son, who had two children, two grandchildren, and only one great grandchild (working on fixing that!) Her great grandparents had five children, all of whom had huge numbers of kids, the lowest was 5 and the highest was 11.
Same ethnic group and religion too although her side actually practiced. Couples of the same era but one side has almost no living descendants and one has hundreds. Crazy. How do people ensure they’re on the side that actually reproduces if you can’t afford or don’t want to have 5+ kids?
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I don’t actually disagree with you at all. I think having children is important, spiritually and in general. But - sans mass immigration - it is not the critical, existential issue in the short term that some on the right suggest. When people say they are concerned about birthrates, often what they’re actually concerned about is immigration.
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This makes me think about the historical tradition of adult adoption.
Even in Rome the adult adoption ran in family. For instance Augustus was grandson of Ceasar's elder sister Julia Minor and Hadrian was Trajan's cousin. It is not a bad way of running the family - but we are talking about extended patriarchal clan-like family type that is typical in Sicilian mafia movies or in Middle East as opposed to egalitarian nuclear family of English/US type.
Which might be a worthwhile adaptation to falling birthrates. If fewer Americans are having kids, the kids that exist should naturally be spread more evenly.
Except they won’t be- IIRC parity is actually rising for women with children, but fewer women are having kids. So the decline in the birthrate is mostly about the increase in family size being unable to cancel out the decline in numbers, and that means kids are spread less evenly.
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That's a lot of "ifs". In the meantime, I'd also sacrifice a few goats to the gods just to be sure all your bases are covered.
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Dunno, I really hate relying on technology that doesn't actually yet exist. I agree that it seems likely enough, but fusion or hydrogen or ... also seemed likely to revolutionize society at different time points. Computers and the internet, for example, were one of the revolutions that DID pan out, but I'm still undecided whether that revolution was really so net-positive. Any gain in efficiency seems to have been more than swallowed by cheaper and more accessible distracting entertainment. I wouldn't be particularly surprised if for one reason or another AI-guided robots in particular just stubbornly refuse to become economically efficient for many tasks. I'd also not be surprised if LLMs turn out to be extremely good at entertainment-related activities - it arguably already is - while its helpfulness for practical purposes is good enough to be widely used, but never reaches a point where it can outright take over critical productive jobs.
Even worse, assuming it should eventually pan out, we still need to get through the intermediate time. Germany doesn't have asian levels of terrible birth rates and also has a decent level of "good" immigration from eastern europe and other places that can paper over some difficulties, but the crunch as the boomers are retiring is quite noticeable. Though admittedly I think some of this is self-inflicted - the lack of teachers, for example, would be almost trivial to solve by better conditions for "Quereinsteiger".
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Agree with Gaashk. I'd love instead a long post about who these people are, what they're doing, how this kind of organizing ties together more mainstream and far-right spaces, positive or critical commentary on the likelihood of whatever 'movement' this is succeeding, etc.
Title is highly exaggerated too, not the kind of thing you'd want in a post here. Also, "yeah but AGI so whatever lol"
Why is the title highly exaggerated?
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I wish that this were a transcript, not a Youtube clip. Personally, I do not like starting a separate thread as a way to get around writing a submission statement. Why were you interested in this? What do you want to talk about? It looks like pretty standard stuff about people not having as many children as they would have wanted, and this being bad for society, and also for those who never become grandparents. That seems true enough.
Before checking the comments I've transcripted it with whisper and added paragraphs with an LLM:
Good afternoon, welcome to the Natal Conference. I'm Kevin Dolan. We're here to solve a problem that will define the next century. In our lifetime, in our children's lifetime, every government, every culture, every belief system, and every family on earth will pass through a bottleneck, bottleneck tighter than the Black Death, predicated on one question, will your children have children of their own?
It doesn't matter if you already have kids, if you don't have kids, if you hate kids. If you have a 401k or a mortgage or a social security card or a checking account, this question is going to impact your life in a very direct way. The entire global financial system, the value of your money and almost every asset you might buy with money, is defined by leverage, which means its value is dependent on growth.
Every country in the developed world and most countries in the developing world face long-term population decline at a scale that makes that growth impossible to maintain, which means we are sitting on the bubble of all bubbles. Not just a temporary overheating of home construction, but a permanent oversupply, like the kind you find in cities like Detroit. Not just tech stocks, but the entire equities market. Not just a handful of cities gutted of their tax base and going bankrupt, but thousands of them, and then sovereign bankruptcies. It's an everything bubble.
Even so, you may say, well, it's a bubble. So be it. If it pops, then there's a correction and we move on. But in the aftermath of a collapse like this, the shrinking number of productive workers have to support a growing number of older, sicker people, which in turn accelerates the economic pressures that make it difficult to start families. This problem isn't self-correcting, at least not within your lifetime. It gets worse as it gets worse.
So what does that look like? Well, societies like Japan or South Korea show us what may be the best case scenario, what it might look like if you could let the air out of the balloon slowly. What that looks like is young people chained to the desk, working ever longer hours for ever lower wages, not only unable to start a family, but increasingly unable to start a family. The countryside and smaller cities abandoned as the tax base evaporates. Basically an orderly managed retreat from the planet. And hopefully at the end, there's a robot nurse to turn off the lights.
To be clear, that will take luck and meticulous planning on their part. Maybe they pull it off. But I think Japan and Korea are beautiful places with beautiful people who should go on existing. That would be an orderly tragedy. And again, that's best case.
Places like China, Brazil, Russia, Thailand, and Mexico got old before they got rich. In coming decades, these countries will be totally unable to sustain their elderly populations, even if they could stop the flight of their most productive young people, even if they work them and tax them to death. Unless something truly dramatic happens, these countries will face humanitarian and political crises on par with the worst of the 20th century.
The United States will probably be somewhere in the middle. So far, immigration makes US fertility rates look better on paper, but not enough to prevent a degrowth economic collapse and not enough to take care of an aging population. It's not obvious in any case why young immigrant families from poor countries would sign up to support a population of elderly dependents to whom they have no attachment while their own grandmothers back home are starving. America's wealth and productive capacity give us a few more attractive options in the short run, a few ways to avoid catastrophe if we act now, but our political system and our culture is just so damaged that making that happen would be a heroic undertaking.
So those are the global stakes of this issue. And we've brought experts in demography, genetics, endocrinology, economics, and public policy to tell you about all that. I'm not an expert. The reason I'm here is that I have two girls and four boys. And like a lot of millennials raising kids, when I look around at how few of us managed to start families and how much worse it is for Gen Z, I feel like I caught the last train out.
A consistent 95% of Americans say they want kids, but it looks like only about 60% of millennials will get there, and it's much worse for the Zoomers. Fertility decline often gets characterized as inevitable. You give people the freedom to choose, and it turns out parenting just isn't a desirable choice. But that's not the story that you hear from childless people. In surveys, only about 10% of childless people say it was a conscious decision. Another 10% deal with some form of medical infertility. But in 80% of cases, it's what demographer Stephen Shaw calls unplanned childlessness. You'll hear more about exactly what that means, but bottom line, the infrastructure that gets ordinary people educated, employed, paired off, and raising kids is just broken down.
So I view this as fundamentally a conservation project. If the Bengal tiger suddenly and dramatically stopped breeding, we wouldn't say, wow, I'm so glad the tigers are prioritizing their mental health, or they're spoiled, they're just not made of the same stuff as their tiger ancestors. And we certainly wouldn't say, good, there's too many Bengal tigers, Bengal tigers are ruining everything. Instead, we'd look at their environment and try to figure out what changed, what's disrupting their ability to fulfill this most basic imperative. And it is a basic imperative. If you're built to do anything at all, you're built to fall in love and have children and raise them. And there's no more punishing verdict, there's no situation in which a person is more psychologically vulnerable than when they take a chance on that.
You can tell a kid who's afraid of rejection that it's not life and death, but it is life and death. When you ask someone to love you, to marry you, to have a child with you, you're asking them, do you want my eyes, my nose, my hairline, the way I think, the way I walk and talk, do you want that to go on into the future, or should it go away forever? And for hundreds of millions of men and women, it feels like the whole world is telling them, nope, not you.
For men, it's usually near the top of the funnel, just getting swiped left 10,000 times at a glance. For women, it often comes later in the form of situationships that can last for months or years and never quite come around to, yes, I want you in particular. I want my kids to be like you. I think your thing should go on.
I don't think there's anything to gain from asking who has it worse or who's to blame. And in fact, one of my goals for the conference is to create a space totally free from that brand of Twitter blood sport. But I get why so many people are angry. We're just not built to be hurt like that over and over again with no end in sight. And a system where that's the fate of an ordinary person is a broken system.
Bottom line for me is I don't want any of that for my kids. I have to think of something better. Yes, there are political and economic dimensions to this issue, and I'm excited to think through them with you, but I'm not trying to have grandkids so they can fund Medicare. I want my kids to have kids so they can learn that Christmas morning is actually better as a parent than it was as a kid. I want my daughters to have sons and my sons to have daughters and to care intensely about what happens to them and watch as that transforms their whole perspective on the opposite sex.
I want them to see all the little imperfections and embarrassing things that they were insecure about as kids in this other person who's just the best and realize that all that was completely okay and not a big deal and it didn't make them unlovable. You're supposed to observe your life again in third person. You're supposed to see yourself as a little child through your father's eyes, your mother's eyes, maybe through God's eyes. You're supposed to see yourself saying and doing things your parents said and did, and you're either supposed to understand that and forgive it or you're supposed to recognize that it was wrong and make it right, maybe both. And these are psychological loops that don't close in any other way.
Of course, life isn't fair. Things don't always work out, but it should be normal. It should be typical to have these experiences. Parenting is as fundamental to the human life cycle as puberty and just as transformative. I want that for my kids and I want it for your kids because I like your thing and I think it should go on.
To the extent that I care about the median home price or the social security trust fund, that's why I care about those things. My personal line of attack on this issue is economic. I believe that the mainstream institutions that used to get people educated, employed, married, and supporting a family are in terminal decline and have become hostile to life. So I found that exit as a network and a fraternity to build something new on the outside, a place for like-minded talent and capital to build businesses, schools, marketplaces, and communities that can make raising a normal family normal again.
That's not for everyone. It's not a total solution. There are so many more things that could be done and that's why we launched this conference. We want to see what you're seeing to know what you know and to build things we haven't thought of yet. We've done a little homework on you, not a lot, but some, and I can tell you for certain that we don't share a common culture or political program. We even disagree in pretty stark terms about this issue, what it means and what ought to be done about it. But we're here because we agree that people are beautiful, that life is beautiful, and that it should go on. I'd like to thank everyone who's participated in making this conference happen, especially my co-founders, Drew Gorham and David Moore, our producer Barbara Williams, our sponsors, our volunteers, and all of our speakers who made the effort to get out here, prepared remarks, connected us with their friends. And of course, thanks to all of you for spending the time and travel and money to make this possible. Thank you.
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There's a pseudo-transcript available. I forgot to post it.
That’s a lot easier to read than the auto generated one, thanks.
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https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Pb8fX30QuR0
I hadn’t seen that before, thanks. Its looking promising but imperfect so far, like Youtube auto captions.
I think it might use youtube's built-in transcript, but I'm not sure.
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