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
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!
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?
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.
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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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
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!
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?
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.
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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