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.
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a
court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to
optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.
The weekly Culture War threads host the most
controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are
appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy;
if in doubt, post!
Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts.
You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.
Why are you called The Motte?
A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently,
it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey",
originally identified by
philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial
but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens
this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for
the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired
propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."
On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.
New post guidelines
If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it.
A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts
such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a
submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).
Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or
significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link