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'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.
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Notes -
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!
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.
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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