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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25939 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024

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Italy’s birth rate is decreasing further to 1,2:

Financial Times: Italy’s births drop to historic low
Just 379,000 babies were born in 2023, despite PM Giorgia Meloni’s efforts to reverse demographic decline

https://archive.is/T6thJ

Meloni has continued a child allowance scheme introduced by the previous government in 2021 and slightly increased the monthly sums families receive for small children, but her rightwing government has also experimented with other incentives.

After coming to power in late 2022, the coalition government halved VAT on infant products such as baby formula and nappies, but it has since scrapped those tax cuts. This year, Italy has allocated €1bn in other measures aimed at supporting mothers, including temporarily making pension contributions on behalf of working women who have at least two young children.

But Maria Rita Testa, a demographer at Rome’s Luiss university, said policymakers needed to address other factors, including parents’ economic stability and access to affordable childcare, now in acutely short supply. “They should try to tackle the problem of reconciliation of family and work tasks,” Testa said.

Italy had planned to use some of the €200bn in EU recovery funds it receives to build new childcare facilities for 260,000 infants and pre-school aged children, but Rome has now cut that target to 160,000.

The article notes that Meloni is herself a single child, but fails to mention that she also only has a single daughter. Still the low birth rate is a core issue for her and her right-wing coalition, but as in leftwing governments elsewhere they can’t find policies to reverse course.

The carrots are not working, so there should be sticks implemented. Not sure how, but we should make childlessness painful.

I am not opposed to a mixed carrot and stick approach but there are plenty of carrots that haven't been tried and things that aren't carrots but changing the current arrangement. I oppose maximizing the sticks as unnecessarily cruel and less likely to work than some more politically incorect changes that are also less about sticks. The compulsion policies should not just be directed at single people but also business, unviersities, and all sorts of powerful institutions.

Lets mention one issue that we could see positive change:

Our current model is that careerism and education is pushed as a model for the youth in their family formation years. Add to that female overepresentation in universities and desire to date up.

This is a result of plenty of subsidies and encouragement. Stopping this and strongly encouraging by various policies instead family formation as a priority, especially for women in that window would make much more sense. And we don't even have to exclude careerism and education as goals, just put them as less a priority. Especially for women.

But women always worked, and in the past it was a more village setting and also with less machines and globalized system of productions. So it doesn't make sense to go back to that, but our current model also doesn't make sense. We need greater prioritisation of family formation.

Beyond that, people can live long life. We should deal with overcredentialism and wasting time on those issues, but what is wrong with spending more time being educated in your thirties, delaying your career focus too in 20s and 30s, but having a family. From a perspective of the greater good, it is a better arrangement. Men becoming in such a situation higher economic status and more attractive for women will also increase the marriage rate.

And directly teach people in schools, and through television programs promoting large families, the value of larger families. Especially promote "propaganda" in the good sense especially towards women and girls which in fact is in line with their insticts, and also better inform them about the fertility window. For example bring along married mothers with their husband with multiple children in school for "family planning" school lessons and strongly encourage the model of a married family with multiple children through both the media and such experiences.

Also, it is obviously the case that pets have taken some of the role of the need for children for various people including some who do have children and might have had more without pets. I dunno what the correct policy response would be to that, but it is a factor.

Another thing that is politically incorrect is that to do this and other changes, you simply need to suppress the feminist and liberal establishment and anti natalist liberals in general which are not going to stand for this. They can go as far as support canceling pro natalist conferences. Many liberals do not want to solve this issue but want to downplay it and point to the inevitability of solving it. Because they oppose the more conservative, or anti-feminist changes, or also are hostile to stopping what facilitates the replacement of western populations, and are also hostile to those nativists who oppose the destruction of their nations through mass migration and low ferility rates. They are also motivated by the fact that liberalism will be blamed for the drop of fertility rates.

Imagine you are in a sinking ship which has a hole in it. And you got a part of the crew and passengers claiming that there is nothing to be done and they are discouraging those trying to cover it. You either sink, or you stop them and keep them out of influence and strip the demoralizing pro inaction crew from their position.

So if we want a stick, lets also talk about suppressing factions who oppose this, and promoting the pro-natalists. Because you are not going to get into the position of implementing serious carrots and serious sticks, without having natalists to capture power and suppress anti-natalists which are made especially by plenty of liberals. We could call this faction liberal fundamentalists/dogmatists, while maybe ideally we could get some people who sympathized or identified with liberalism, to break from it.

By directly promoting natalism and suppressing anti natalism you could get it through. It's how liberalism and its version called wokeness, and the Israel lobby and even Covid measures were promoted. Fundamentally, you can as a society through both authoritarian means and through education and having people capturing institutions that push certain agendas, get plenty but not all people to change their attitudes. Most importantly you can get policy changes in this way. So a change for natalism is possible. Although the point isn't just to change things from a bad direction, but to change things towards a wise direction. Which I believe would require a more multi-faceted approach than maximizing sticks in single areas. So you can't be maximally authoritarian without considering what you are promoting and being willing to adjust where you overreached. Although that is far from the current problem, and really being wise requires not being too impotent to act as well.

I think over-education is a problem for society in general and especially when it comes to family formation. When stable adulthood in both genders is pushed back farther (assuming 5 years post graduation to stable job and housing) to 26-27 years old, it’s simply too late for this couple to have more than 2 or 3 kids at reasonable spacing of 1-2 years. First kid at 27, second at 30, third at 33. And that’s pretty much the fertility window for most people. This assumes no difficulties in the schooling and job-seeking process, and marriage pretty much right after college. Go for a masters (additional two years) or have difficulty finding the first good job or housing and we’re talking 30 before we’re seeing the first baby.

The problem is the lengthening of childhood and preparation for adulthood phase of life into nearly middle age. Which shortens working and family life, and increases costs in ways that don’t necessarily produce better outcomes either economically or socially (in fact I think the opposite is true, extended childhood is creating a culture of narcissistic behavior).

Birthrates are dropping in Iran and Saudi Arabia - basically the only places where they aren't is some poor African countries and the Ultra Orthodox in Israel.

Even the vast majority of married conservative women with children in the US don't want Iranian or Saudi Arabian rules for women, so how are you guys going to pull this off?

It's worth noting that Iran's birthrates dropping was likely affected by deliberate action to that effect by the Iranian government.

The carrots are not working

The carrots are a big part of the problem.

I feel like we had an AAQC not too long ago about this, but I can't remember the details now. The gist was something like "the opportunity costs of childbearing and childraising are just insanely high and keep getting higher because there are so many other things to do that generate more immediate rewards." In particular, allowing women into the workforce came up, possibly alongside Elizabeth Warren's Two-Income Trap book.

The value of raising children has become the inverse of the "privatize gains, publicize losses" business strategy. People who raise children bear the actual costs of perpetuating civilization, while everyone reaps the reward. We don't valorize motherhood, but perhaps more importantly, we don't punish childlessness.

so there should be sticks implemented

The comment I'm thinking of referenced someone's argument that "I would never do this of course but likely the most effective way, and maybe the only truly effective way, to increase birthrates is to just ban women from the workforce."

EDIT: Oh, hahah, it was my post actually. Here's the quote from the article I linked:

He asked what I’d do to increase fertility if that were the only outcome I cared about. After clarifying that I don’t support this policy, I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

I said that I’d massively increase marginal tax rates on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity cost of having children.

Seems pretty counterproductive to me: marriage rates would plummet, reducing birth rates.

The trouble is that ban women working outside the home nowadays, and you'll restrict motherhood to the latest arm candy of Elon Musk's or whomever - women in arrangements (be that marriage or cohabitation) where the man earns a ton of money and can support a family on one wage.

I'm referencing another discussion elsewhere here where someone said that the middle-class assembly line worker who could afford the lifestyle on one wage are the jobs being hollowed out, and that's the truth of it. If you want women to have four kids as a family, which wasn't a crazy notion even thirty years ago, then you have to make it livable. The family where they have four kids and are in squalor are not going to be the solution, because they will be lost in petty crime and all the other problems we have today, even if they start off with middle-middle class parents/grandparents. If they're living six people to three rooms and can't afford dentist or doctor visits, then they're sliding down the class ladder and are not the replacement fertility children you want. The very rich may have status marker big families, but they're never going to be producing numbers enough to stem the decline. You need the vast bulk of the middle to be having more kids, and if they can't afford them already, then cutting down on family income isn't going to fix the problem.

Arguably if women left the workforce en masse it would lead to an increase in men's wages due to lower job competition. You'd have to put in some protectionist regulations to keep companies from just outsourcing for cheaper labor, but part (and definitely only part) of the reason it's so difficult to raise a family on a single income is precisely because women entered into the workforce en masse to begin with.

Women's rights are not a suicide pact, but feminism and leftism generally seem deadset on making them such.

But would it lead to a corresponding increase in cost for everything?

It'd be complicated, since women not having disposable income independent of their husbands would lower demand on the consumer side.

Sure, but the answer there is that if there is a labour squeeze because no women in the workforce, then you will get the push for bringing in migrants for cheaper labour, plus increasing automation, plus demands for productivity increases - if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job. That won't necessarily mean higher wages, either, unless you're in the kind of job where there's the expectation of good pay and conditions baked in.

And now because John is working longer hours and over the weekend, Jane is doing all the child-raising, and now there is dissatisfaction and unhappiness at home about "you don't do your fair share, the kids never see you" "well it's not my fault, I have to be the breadwinner, don't you think I'd love to be around more but it's not possible".

We're reaping what we sowed. The panic in the past was over "too many people! the earth can't support them all!" and that encouraged the decline in fertility, backed up by Malthusian fears. Now we're finding out that in fact, you need babies to replenish your population of working age adults, and Malthus was a false prophet to follow.

On the one hand, I'm laughing here because Paul VI has been vindicated. But I can't laugh too much, as the Zeitgeist has also corrupted Catholics who go along with the "sex is for fun and pleasure, you don't need to be married, don't get tied down with babies, use contraception to plan your family for when it is convenient for you" social messaging.

if there are two jobs and John is doing one, now John has to ramp up his productivity to cover the second, vacant job.

That's a very simplified view of thing. For that to work, you have to assume that all jobs are fungible and their income perfectly matches their net production to the economy. The reality is uh... more complex.

Roko had a funny tweet about this on twitter: the net change from most women to GDP is negative

Look at the jobs most women get. Very, very few of them are doing something like hard labor or the skilled trades. Rosie the Riveter was a switchboard operator who the artist painted much larger than she really was, and with a fake rivet gun.

More often they work in very human-focused jobs, like teachers, waitresses, nurses, haircutters, and secretaries. A lot of that is just getting paid to do the same shit they would have done anyway as a homemaker, except now they're doing it for strangers instead of their living family. (prostitution comes to mind as a similar model...) You can teach your kids, make meals for them, cut their hair, and take care of them when they're sick, it's not rocket science. But of course it looks good for the economy to have it be paid instead of free, so more money moves around.

More perniciously, they also work in office jobs where they directly compete with men. And then the entire office has to adapt and change culture to accommodate them. No more dirty jokes with the lads. Not too much overtime. Someone will have to cover for her when she's sick or just too stressed out to deal. Everyone must reach "consensus" so not too much angry arguing. Power structures based on hidden cliques rather than clear, explicit rules and hierarchies. And we must promote women at equal rates to men, so we can't use any evaluation metrics that would make them look bad, and we must hire women into HR roles specifically focused on hiring other women.

I increasingly just see the world as a power struggle betweeen men and women. In the past men had more power, because of their earnings. And they used that power to get what they wanted, which was sex, which incidentally led to babies. No women have more power, and they use it to get baubles and attention without having to put out.

Banning women from the workforce makes such wages possible, because it more than doubles the labor bargaining power of men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs.

yeah, I thought this too back when I was fifteen. But why did companies go along with it, then? Because labour is the greatest cost for any business, and you want to keep your costs down as much as possible. If there's a shortage of workers, you may have to pay higher wages to attract them - if you can't wait them out, or replace them with cheaper labour, or automate the job away.

Look at the breaking of the power of the unions, when they got too cushy about jobs and pay and conditions. Governments backed this up. If it becomes too expensive to pay the men in middle-class and white-collar lower class jobs, then there will be a solution found to the problem.

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?

I'm not sure, but now that I've found the article I was thinking of, Nowrasteh definitely has a lot more to say about the aforementioned "carrots." Economic opportunities are a part of that picture, but so are things like Netflix and video games and international travel. His argument, ultimately, was that deregulation is the answer, which seems a bit optimistic to me. But also moot, because there's basically no political will for deregulation at this point, at least not in America. Which is in turn partly because it's easier to fight a culture war if you're authoritarian about it, so American politics has become increasingly authoritarian as it has become increasingly factional.

This is probably related to what you're talking about here.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

Yeah, I think a huge part is insufficient pair bonding. I wonder if perhaps the problem is social media and porn -- unrealistic expectations abound there.

That is certainly true. But porn, at least, is also directly related to the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s and 1970s, which was in turn substantially a product of feminism. In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America. Feminism and race relations and homosexuality and other left-of-center issues really became politically salient around that time, without significant historical precedent. America itself wasn't even particularly "multicultural" circa 1960, when the population was 85% white and 11% black.

I don't know where it ends, or how. I don't know how to resolve the problems we've inherited. If I look at history for guidance, problems don't appear to generally get solved so much as subsumed into whatever problems come next. Usually that seems to mean war, within or without. These days I suppose something approaching a technological singularity could also suffice. It's not clear to me that I want to still be alive when whatever happens next finally gets around to happening, except for the part where I'm curious to see how it plays out.

In many ways I think we are still stuck playing out the consequences of the cultural upheaval of post-WWII America.

That is undeniably true. Hell, it's such a cliche I think we all kind of accept it without even really thinking about how strange this situation is.

The more I read and think about history, the more I see is as being on the far right side of an exponential growth chart. Almost none of the stuff that dominates our lives has ever existed before. That's trivially true for recent inventions like social media and video games, but you can go back further and say that about anything. Like you said, the sexual revolution and civil rights era wasn't that long ago, it's within living memory, I've talked to my parents about it. Cars, TV, and telephones also only became common at that time.

Or go back further. The human population didn't used to grow so fast, until like 1850 when the developed nations solved child mortality and suddenly tripled in size in the span of a few generations. Then that spread to every other country on earth, until we all suddenly stopped having kids for some reason.

Or ocean travel. That didn't used to be a thing! Sailors would stay close to shore so they wouldn't get lost at sea. It was only a few centuries ago that humans learned to sail across the ocean, leading to the "age of discovery" when they could finally explore the world. Even then, it was normal for ships to crash and sink. Magellan and most of his sailors died on his expedition.

Before that, you have the bronze age and the metal age, when humans finally learned how to make metal. And it was a huge ordeal, requiring tons of skilled labor and maybe some slaves dying in the mines. That was still just a few thousand years ago, practically a blip in the human timescale, compared to the first humans from 2.8 million years ago. So for most of our history I guess we just used rocks and sticks, living in small tribes, leading a very violent dangerous life, and that's what we've evolved for. It's going to take some time to figure out how to live in in this modern world of technological miracles.

Oh, I don't know either. My girlfriend and I had a chat the other day where we were lamenting that people weren't involved in their communities, voluntary associations are dying out, people are lonely, everyone seems to hate each other. And then we just sat there in shocked silence as we pondered how we had no idea how to fix this. I think we both consider ourselves lucky to at least have each other.

Sometimes I feel like a sane man in an insane world (and other times an insane man in a differently-insane world, I guess that's how it goes). But there's something massively wrong with everything, and the internet seems to be making it meaningfully worse, filled with negativity (even deserved negativity!) and brutal comparisions. I'm certainly part of the problem. I've been on a death-spiral as of late that's consisted of hate-reading people's discussions on modern dating, and the only thing I've gained is unnecessary insecurity about what is really a very happy relationship with someone I love. Maybe that's what's going on -- there are real problems, things could be better, but everything people are engaging with is so harshly negative that it colors their perception of the world in ways that make the real problems seem worse, and even actually positive things that exist seem unstable. And since the problems are deeply connected to social trust and confidence, this acts as a self-fulfilling prophesy that makes the problems actually worse and the positive things that exist actually unstable. Nobody seems to be living in the real world, I'm no exception. I wish I could live in the real world. But how do I go about doing that? Am I so far gone, so deep into the rabbit hole that there isn't any way out? What is the real world? What is real? How do you define real? What is "online"? Do our minds make it real? A Roman official once said to a man he was about to execute, two thousand years ago yesterday: "What is truth?"

Marry your girlfriend and have children. Join a church and raise your children according to its teachings.

Are you and your girlfriend involved in a community? Do you have a community you know you could join, but haven't gotten around to it?

I have a basically functional community I could join, but due to some discontinuity, am having trouble joining again with very young children.

Time to unplug for a bit. Sounds like it is really getting to you. Go to real places and talk to real people. Most get along just fine.

Russia's birth rate has roughly followed US birth rate trends, except for the major dip during the 1990s, which happened for obvious reasons. What is noteworthy is that this is despite major efforts by the Putin government to incentivize people to have kids.

It's not clear to me that the state can really do much to incentivize people to have kids. To me, birth rates seem to be mainly driven by how much the economy incentivizes people to have kids and by the availability of contraception. A 19th century farming economy by nature highly incentivizes people to have more kids than a 20th century tech economy. Also, when the economy is doing well and people in general are making more money, birth rates tend to go up. But not by enough to make up for huge technology-driven changes such as the change from a farming economy to an information economy.

Birth rates are also driven by cultural attitudes, see the classic example of Orthodox vs non-Orthodox Jews.

Any other than a completely totalitarian state has very limited means to change any of these things. The ship has sailed on contraception. You will almost certainly never be able to effectively remove access to birth control in any modern Western country. Cultural attitudes have shifted too much in the last 70 years and there is no reason to think that they will shift in the other direction by any significant amount.

In any case, if you tried to make childnessness painful for me I would try to make the effort painful for you. So you also have to account for the large number of people who are very much passionately opposed to your program. And our lower birth rates are not going to change things fast enough to give you enough political power to freely enact your proposals, since a large fraction of your kids are always going to be coming over to our political side of these policy ideas and relatively fewer of ours will go over to your side, for similar reasons as to why people from Istanbul, Moscow, and San Francisco are generally speaking not moving to small rural towns en masse.

Any other than a completely totalitarian state has very limited means to change any of these things.

Robin Hanson has suggested making a financial asset out of future tax revenue, and giving some of that to parents.

That could reach the necessary scale, I think.

Source for anyone interested in the details

See also:

  • The Unincorporated Man, in which every person is "incorporated" at birth into tradable shares, of which the parents get 20 percent held jointly, the government gets 5 percent, and the person cannot sell the last 25 percent (which is enough for him to support himself in this high-productivity future setting; the percentage might have to be higher in the present day)

  • Income-share agreements

I see Hanson has two kids. Why didn't he have more? When someone is suggesting bigger family sizes, I think it's a legitimate question to ask.

Robin Hanson has suggested making a financial asset out of future tax revenue, and giving some of that to parents.

That used to be the case that the elderly parents would move in with or remain in the family home with the eldest son or other married family member who would then look after and support them, on the model of "they took care of you when you were unable to do so, now it's your turn to support them". But then socially we decided that we didn't want that, and if you take the model of "move to where the money and jobs are" (again, another debate on here recently), then families by default were broken up - parents in one state, children scattered all over, having their own families and own lives elsewhere.

We've done away with the expectations of supporting the parents and any suggestion of "I have to give a percentage of my wages directly to them, just because they decided they wanted to live on Easy Street and have kids to take care of them" is going to be resented. Besides, this is what we're doing currently with social security - you pay in, then in old age you get the benefits, but they come from the payments made by the younger workers. We don't have enough younger workers and there's already a lot of resentment about "Boomer voters going to vote in elections so they get a bigger slice of the pie".

Maybe I hate my parents, don't want to pay them back, so I deliberately fail at life in order that the "future tax revenue" is as small as possible. What are they gonna do, have a late-late-late term abortion?

I don't expect people are going to stop caring about their own life.

Also, he suggests that the asset can be sold and transferred, have financial derivatives made, etc.

That's why I think it's foolish. You're packaging up someone's life as a bundle of "we can make PROFIT off this" and that's not how it works. Who wants to be an indentured servant, even to their parents? And the experience we've had with packaging up and selling on and that bundle gets sold on etc. should make us wary. "I owe my soul to the company store, 21st century version" - the vulture fund that bought my future tax earnings is sending me to the salt mines.

I've never found Hanson a compelling thinker, and the more of his batshit 'let's just imagine for a second that you gently rape a sleeping woman' thought experiments I hear about, the less impressed I am.

But you literally already have to pay the money, just to the government.

Limit dispensing of oral contraceptives to married couples with verified children. Ban abortion.

Yes, it will be tough. Lots of terrible situations will pop up. The question to be asked is, “is this worse than literally running out of people?”

My main issue with this line of thought is that we aren't running out of people, and reducing the population by 75% or more seems positively wonderful. The US was plenty capable of a very rich and successful society with far fewer people than today.

Why would we want more? Do you want 1.2 billion people in the US, with the accompanying congestion, resource usage, and garbage? Why is 330 million the magic number? Surely 75 million is sufficient?

Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?

Why not have one billion Americans (I haven't read it yet myself)? We are nowhere near constraints on space right now; the United States is on the low end for population density. There's so much space to grow.

Sure actively lowering the population would make me question your motives, but if people just prefer cruise ships and video games to reproducing, why do you want to stop them? Why not just have kids of your own who get to inherit a cleaner, more open world with beaches that aren't packed with strangers?

The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse. Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people. If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen. Especially because developed countries are the ones where birthrates are falling the most, we could see us unable to maintain modern standards of living, and much less innovation. Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe. And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.

People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.

But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?

We are nowhere near constraints on space right now

No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people. Kowloon Walled City is the constraint on space. I don't want that.

The world will not be more idyllic following a population collapse.

Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.

If this hits worldwide, then we could well have an economic decline everywhere, as division of labor and economies of scale worsen.

The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement. This is part of why labor value has declined so precipitously. A farmer today can produce many multiples of the amount of food of one 80 years ago, with fewer people working to make that happen. Most of our economy is either providing service tasks (the demand of which obviously falls proportionally to the population) or performing largely pointless clerical tasks. You could achieve the same real output with far fewer people, and likely much higher on a production-per-capita ratio (which is the measure that actually matters).

Even more of the economy than now will be spent on supporting old people

I expect this is likely true for some comparatively small amount of time. Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare. Sucks for those that didn't have kids, sure. They made bad choices and can pay for them.

Which might lead to more use of dirtier power and so not the "cleaner, more open world" you describe.

80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.

And more garbage, as things designed for more people fall into disuse.

The disuse of things currently in existence would have an infinitesimally small impact on the amounts of garbage compared to that produced by an extra ~650 million Americans.

People do not think Detroit is better because its population has fallen.

No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.

But further, even supposing you're right and those are the options, do you really think that cruise ships and video games are a better life than raising a family?

Absolutely not. I will continue to tell people I care about that they should raise a family, I just don't know why I would want to increase the birthrate among the population at large in the meantime. The ideal scenario as far as I'm concerned is "literally no one but me and my family and friends has kids," but that's obviously not realistic.

No, but we are well beyond the point where you can add any more people without it having a negative effect on other people.

Do you have evidence you can point to for this?

Immediately? Perhaps not. In the long term, the average-quality-of-life ceiling is higher with fewer people.

I don't know that I'm convinced of this. The earth is not currently running up against Malthusian limits, so having the increased labor force allows for more work, more innovation (and so more technological progress), more division of labor, and so on. Of course, some parts of that depend on having decent institutions.

Anyway, average (arithmetic mean, I assume?) quality of life is not my sole concern, but I get that it's yours, so I'll assume it for the sake of the argument.

The economic gains of the last 80 years have not been driven by increasing economies of scale or division of labor, but by technological advancement.

Yes, and the current fertility rates are dysgenic with respect to IQ, at least in the US, though I don't remember to what extent. We need a smart enough populace for upkeep, at the very least.

Roughly the same can be said of the remainder of your paragraph.

Once a sufficiently large economic contraction happens, however, I do not think the entirety of the working-and-fighting-age population will consent to toil to pay for 80-year-old welfare.

But this doesn't depend on public spending. With fewer people, and an inverted population pyramid, more of the total wealth will be devoted to supporting retirees.

80 million Americans doing nothing but burning coal results in a cleaner world than 1 billion Americans consuming at current standards with all the electricity coming from non-nuclear renewables.

Fair enough.

No, they think it's worse because it has too many net-negative people. I am not suggesting we remove the most productive people from the group (which is roughly what occurs to a city like Detroit when it's primary import-replacement industry collapses,) but merely that we have fewer people in total.

But demographic trends are currently removing the most productive people from the group, or at least moving in that direction.

I think decline in population also can lead to insufficiently maintained infrastructure and buildings.

I think I would take post-depopulation Detroit over ~late 70s/early 80s ditto, and the rural parts of Japan and Spain, for instance, seem quite nice.

The problem is that there can't be cruise ships and video games if there aren't enough people working good enough jobs to pay the tax revenues to support that life. Economic collapse due to lack of labour also means that the cruise ships don't get built and if built, can't be staffed, etc.

The problem isn't that there are fewer people. That's the good part.

The problem is that there are fewer Europeans.

I think a large fraction of the people who are in favor of reorganizing society for the sake of more fertility are not really concerned with how large the population will be in the future, they are just consciously or unconsciously trying to sneak in social conservatism (what they really want) by using the argument that "society will collapse if the fertility is low". It is similar to how some people who claim to want to fight anthropogenic climate change are really just trying to sneak in far left social and economic policies by appealing to people's fear of climate change.

There are also some who are mainly worried about their own ethnic group being outbred by other ethnic groups. That at least is a pragmatic and tangible argument, rather than being fundamentally an emotion-driven preference like I think the majority of social conservatives' social conservatism is.

Yeah i don't get it. I want fewer people. Not more!

Malta - a country that used to have a total ban on abortion until 2023, after which it relaxed it to allow abortion to save the life of the mother - has EU's lowest TFR.

Abortion bans are mostly worthless without contraception bans, as least as far as impact-on-tfr goes

Abortion bans are worthless when you’re a €60, two hour budget airline flight from somewhere with legal abortion.

We won't run out of people. Subpopulations with higher fertility rates will outcompete. In the short run, though, countries may shrink, and the burden of caring for the elderly fall on a smaller and smaller working population, which in turn makes it harder and harder for that population to also take care of kids of their own.

It's all a result of socialist policies allowing people to offset the cost of their choice to not have children onto others. We still sort of "punish" childrearing in the sense that governments are strongly concerned with the material welfare of the elderly, but not so concerned with the financial capacity of those providing for the elderly to have children of their own.

"The Italian government currently contributes around 30% of its overall annual public spending (net of interest expenses) to pensions."

"Government spending in Italy was last recorded at 56.1 percent of GDP in 2022"

Putting these figures together, working-class people are shouldered by the elderly with a tax burden equivalent to nearly 40 percent of their earnings. If they did not have to pay for these pensions (not to mention other large expenses such as medical care) their salaries would be 40 percent higher.

I don't have the time to make an effortpost about this right now but this is obviously the issue. These married couples already have the equivalent of many children to look after, through no fault of their own. A frugal, average-earning couple could probably get away with raising 3-4 children on less than 40% of their income. Before banning contraceptives etc. let's fix the broken system that forces poor couples at childrearing age to pay for the luxurious retirements of unrelated elderly people.

The higher fertility rate subpopulation thing does provide a chance of running out of productive workers, though. One of the killer hacks of avoiding the fertility decline associated with being a productive member of industrial civilization is to just call the bluff of the other members when it comes to willingness to let you starve.

In the US that would be basically just the haredim. Ghettos really don’t have that high a TFR anymore and other very high TFR subcultures are at least workers even if they’re not doing particularly skilled work.

It's all a result of socialist policies allowing people to offset the cost of their choice to not have children onto others.

I think it's not so simple. While it is true that the average social security recipient takes out more than he or she put in, this is to some extent balanced by the fact that people who have fewer children have more time and energy to be economically productive and are thus also in a way economically subsidizing people who have more children. One would need to analyze relative economic productivity between people with various numbers of children in order to get a clear view of what is happening.

Well, putting aside the selfish aspect of having kids (there are benefits that go along with the costs after all), I think generally raising kids is harder than putting more time into your job. On average those who have more kids will be working harder overall than those who don't and happen to make more money because they're more career-oriented.

Further, I very much doubt that in countries with such a large tax burden, those without kids are making nearly as much of a financial contribution as the kids themselves will. Three kids each making $100,000 per year will generate much more wealth for the state than the childfree couple making an extra $200,000 per year due to their decision, not to mention the exponential effects of those kids going on to have kids of their own.

So, yes, there are other factors to consider, but I'm confident that if we looked at the actual numbers we'd find this factor in particular pretty negligible.

This is the most dysgenic possible approach.

I think that honor goes to what the US has long done, taxing people who work to pay for the non-working non-elderly, and paying the latter extra if they have more kids.

If you want to use money to incentivize something requiring at least as much effort as full-time employment, you should expect to have to compensate people on a similar scale. As far as I know, no policy has come anywhere close to this yet. Before writing off carrots, try paying families 30-50% of the median personal income for each kid, every year, for the kid's entire period of minority. See what happens.

(I know, nobody wants to model parenting this way, because we like to believe it's some sacred endeavor set apart from crass commerce. But the reality is that it's in competition with the market for labor-hours, and it's in competition with everything supplied by the market as a source of utility. It benefits little from automation, so it's subject to cost disease, and becomes a little less attractive relative to alternatives that aren't every year.)

It is a combination of feminism and globalism. The first makes it hard for any particular mother to be a SAHM. Even if you solve the economic issues, there isn’t frequently a cohort of other women in the neighborhood to (1) help each other out and (2) socialize.

The second frequently involves kids moving away from where they grew up for economic opportunity. Extended family therefore are not heavily involved in family life which makes it harder for parents and less rewarding.

Maybe you could solve the first one (eg large tax breaks for mothers who drop out of the work force when they have kids) but the second is challenging. Remote work in theory could help but remote work itself has short comings.

New France fined men whose daughters remained unmarried after 16. Early 20th century Argentina fined bachelors.

Both societies(French Canadians and argentines) maintained high tfr long after declines had started everywhere else. This is because in most societies, the tfr issue is not due to DINK’s. It’s due to a high percentage of unmarried people. Even Japan and South Korea have stable married TFRs.

I’m not sure that fining unmarried people is the solution, but I am sure that fixing the lack of partnering is the solution- fines may not be the best answer, here. This is a deeper issue and I have an effortpost bouncing around in my head about gender polarization, but it’s likely to be a next month thing if I get around to it- as it has been for the last several months.

Please write it. I've had an effortpost about gender polarization and unrealistic expectations for relationships bouncing around in my head also. I think it may be in the top three biggest world issues right now, it seems to be happening everywhere.

Ok, I’ll try to get around to it.

If I compare the US' and Argentina's fertility rate trends over the course of the 20th century, I see that Argentina overall had a higher rate for most or all of that time, but the general trends are basically the same. Actually, in Argentina the rate halved between 1900 and 1950, whereas in the US it decreased by a similar but somewhat smaller amount (the US baby boom makes it hard to figure out where to put the "right" side (chart-wise) of the comparison in a way that is meaningful.

I have a few questions

1-Who is "we"?

2-What punishments are you thinking about dolling out to the childless?

3-What good are a ton of people going to do when AI and robotics do all the jobs?

Ah yes, so now if you're single you not only have to deal with the pain of nobody wanting to be with you, but you get punished by the government for not having children. Seems very reasonable and not at all cruel. Not to mention that punishing people for the state of their family is something a tyrant would do, not a reasonable government.

It's by design, 2rafa likes incels to suffer more.

  1. Don't put words in others' mouths.

  2. Especially when they aren't even involved. Did you reply in the wrong subthread?

sorry

On the positive side, it makes single people much more likely to find someone!

On the other hand, I think we need to make some tough decisions that will make life worse for childless people. A society that privileges its leafs at the expense of its roots will soon have neither.

On the positive side, it makes single people much more likely to find someone!

I've always wondered if it would make a funny reality TV show to take some incels and femcels and make them date and cohabitate. I think witnessing the children to come out of such relationships would be even funnier!

I don't personally think that the fertility rate is a problem, so I don't think a solution is needed. But if one is going to try to solve it, punishing childless people is just about the worst way I can think of. Like I said, a lot of people who have no children are that way not by their own choice (infertile or nobody wants to marry them). Punishing those people (who already are unhappy with their situation) is just plain cruel.

One of the biggest sticks is a pension divisor when under 4 grand children and I'd probably qualify that with taxpaying grandchildren.

That seems like poor policy. Even a pretty aggressive procreator is going to struggle to reach 4 21+ GC at 65, and it would in turn strongly penalise the family if the 21 year old grand daughters are forced into work and taxpaying instead of procreating.

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