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zeke5123a
4m ago
I read him to mean older mothers are likely to have less intelligent kids because egg and sperm quality degrades as humans age. Not sure if it is true though it seems plausible. I’m not sure I would really trust the science here since the result is clearly politically salient.
pigeonburger
5m ago
I don't think the trust problem is a response to the selfishness problem, because just saying "people are being selfish" has no explanatory power. Are people more selfish because of genetics? Have all the selfless people selected out of the gene pool?
On the other hand, if you present selfishness as a rational response to a society that they don't trust will repay pro-social behavior, you get a lot further with explanations that match observations. Trust is downstream of shared identity, experience and culture (see: Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone). If I think of my fellow citizens as being somewhat similar to me, I can easily imagine them coming to the same pro-social conclusions as me. Shared identity, experience and culture are impacted negatively by multiculturalism and by emphasing diversity. Hence why high trust societies are typically homogenous societies.
Explain your math I’m not following. Also would be reducing taxes by a lot.
If half of women had one child you would have a tfr of .5.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
10m ago
I think people concerned about TFR often advocate it as a mode of social organization and I had received some other replies downthread suggesting it was the way we ought to be going to boost TFR. So, mostly people here I think.
sliders1234
11m ago
Hungary spends 5% of gdp on boosting fertility. So yes they cross that threshold. Without verifying that number it’s going to be very hard for governments to go any higher than 5% of gdp. Countries need to do a lot more things than subsidize fertility.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-populist-right-want-you-make-more-babies-viktor-orban/
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
23m ago
Countries have tried economic incentives and mostly failed or slowed the decline
Have they tried economic incentives that are at least a 2 digit percentage of the opportunity cost of having additional children?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
26m ago
I agree that the opportunity costs are much lower if women work while also raising kids but I've been operating on the assumption people want women to become full time homemakers, which I think is much more disruptive. I do not have any kids of my own but your experience makes sense to me. I'm under the impression there are a lot of up-front cost for kid 1 that can probably be re-used for subsequent kids (toys, clothes, etc).
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
26m ago
Stressed working women raise less healthy, less intelligent children who are more likely to have behavioral problems
I presume by this you mean "mothers being stressed causes their children to be less healthy and less intelligent" rather than "those women who are likely to have less intelligent, less healthy children are also more likely to be stressed". Do you have a source and an estimate of the effect size? Based on the sorts of things I've seen (example), the effects exist but are usually quite small. For example, the highest effect size I found in that study was r=0.16 for maternal exposure to a natural disaster, which explains about 2.5% of the variance in outcomes -- and most of that effect size came from a single n=20 study about an ice storm, so I expect the effect size in practice is even smaller than that.
Intelligent working women give up on producing more offspring who are also intelligent
I expect this is almost the entire effect in practice.
It would be far more economically valuable in toto and longterm if women focused on their biological role of mothers, wives, and homemakers.
From a purely economic viewpoint I doubt that. I think the opportunity cost of being a homemaker is genuinely higher now than it used to be. Also the benefits are both distributed across society, and the benefits of choosing the homemaker route are not as legible as they could be to the women making that decision.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
29m ago
The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity.
I'm not sure I agree. I don't read any intent requirement in the text of 14-12.7. It seems like what's banned is "being in public wearing anything that could conceal your identity." Your intent about concealing your identity doesn't enter into it.
As to your examples I think it would be fair to say "they're banning standing around in front of the mall in a funny hat" or "they're banning beer in the park" but the firearm one is trickier.
Tenaz
31m ago
Well you do still have to wear it "to conceal the identity of the wearer." Most facemasks don't do that. This law is broad enough that a power-hungry official could use it to criminalize covid masks, but most laws are similarly broad, and the left-leaning ones don't receive such scrutiny.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
35m ago
The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity. People may do Y, but they can't do Y in furtherance of X. To concretize other possible examples:
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There is a law against loitering in front of the mall, unless you're wearing a funny hat. The exemption for funny hats is set to be removed. Are funny hats banned?
-
You may not drink alcoholic beverages at the park, with the exception of beer. The beer exception is removed. Is beer banned?
-
Carrying a firearm to intimidate others is illegal, but firearms in holsters are exempted. The exemption is removed. Are firearms or holsters banned?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
36m ago
Maybe $2 million for some people, true. Most would be much less. According to FRED the median US personal income in 2022 was $40,480. According to the US census there are about 74M women between the ages of 15 and 50 (the age categories used for calculating TFR). Let's say we get half of them to have a child (that would boost US TFR to ~2.3). If we gave each of them the median income that comes out to about $1.5T per year. That would be about 15% of the US federal budget, 10% more than we spend on Social Security. This is much less than I expected it to be!
Ioper
38m ago
In the context of Sweden, which has very generous parental leave benefits, an extra child per woman would amount to ~0.75 lost work years per person over their lifetime.
Personally, going from 1->2->3 kids werent big changes and I feel like I share the parenting equally with my wife. The big change was going from 0->1.
wlxd
39m ago
I can second that, and I've heard exactly the same sentiment from my wife (who is very successful in her well-paid career). This was instilled in her by her mother, who worked a fake government job helping applicants fill paperwork for farm subsidies. She was paid peanuts compared to her husband, but she prided herself at being independent (even though everything was actually paid for by her husband).
Women just don't want to be dependent on their husbands, because they heard a lot of horror stories of abusive husbands, and so they want to maintain a put option ready to exercise. Usually, however, they suck at pricing this option, especially the theta.
07mk
41m ago
"every movement bends the truth, it doesn't make social justice bad just because we lie, too" or "so what if the woke encourages nosy busybodies and wokescolds? The conservatives do it, too". I've never known how to argue back other than just insisting that they should be better than stooping to low techniques then making excuses.
This looks similar to arguments I've had with myself as someone who used to be "woke" before the term was popularized ("social justice warrior" was the common term back then), and hashing out the argument was one of the many factors that got me to abandon the ideology.
On lies, it took very little thinking to recognize that lying is a habit that one can get into that's very difficult to turn on and off at will, especially since it's often difficult even to recognize when one is lying. This goes even more for lies that one tells oneself, which is by far the most common kind of lie and the most difficult lie to avoid telling even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions. It's also difficult to recognize which ideology is better than others if your beliefs are based on lies; as such, if I want what's best for the world rather than merely my team winning, then that means choosing the best ideology on the basis of an honest assessment of the facts and truth. But if I make it a habit to lie to others for the sake of convenience, then it'd be easy for me to unintentionally lie to myself for the sake of convenience, e.g. I could lie to myself that this ideology that happens to be popular among my peers and happens to give me social status for overtly supporting also happens to be the best or most correct ideology - what a convenient universe for me this is, that these characteristics happen to coincide in this one ideology! It also raises questions about how I was won over to the ideology, and whether those were based on lies that other follower of the ideology decided was convenient to tell to me for the sake of recruiting another follower - questions that can only be answered by taking a brutally honest look at the actual underlying reality, and that brutal honesty only comes about by making honesty a habit, which obviously includes doing so towards one's ideological opponents.
Unfortunately, I don't see this as being possible when a third party is involved, because the ideology is so hardened against external (and internal as well) scrutiny that only scrutiny that comes from an internal desire to get things right can survive long enough to actually have any effect. I think there are right wing parallels, such as some Christians dismissing some arguments as literally satanic, or Islam allowing for dishonesty towards non-Muslims as a way to win them over, but these are explicitly faith-based religions where the followers openly acknowledge that the reason they chose their team is faith. This is contrast to modern progressive idpol, whose followers claim to genuinely believe that they figured out the correct (or, at least more correct than the others) ideology through non-faith-based means. Genuinely believing this while also intentionally corrupting one's ability to discern lies from truth - and more generally abiding by the intentional corrupting of this ability in the followers of this ideology - seems like cognitive dissonance. Which, again, just doesn't seem possible to penetrate as a third party. Without the genuine will to actually figure out what the best ideology is for the world, most people will be happy enough to lie to themselves that the ideology they like also happens to be the one that is the best one for the world. Again, not lying to oneself that way is hard enough even under the best circumstances and with the purest of intentions.
Ioper
46m ago
Ireland is moving to recognize Palestinian statehood, making them the first nation in western Europe to do so, as far as I know. The historical relationship between the Irish and Palestinian nationalist movements means this was perhaps to be expected
Sweden and Iceland have already done this.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
46m ago
I mean, it's not that big of a change, like, numerically. I bet it would be a pretty big change in the lives of the women having the children. It's true the state could punish people but, being a liberal, I am pretty averse to that as a strategy.
pigeonburger
49m ago
The system being implemented is a spoils system, and the question to answer is whether it is a result of or a cause of a drop in civic virtue.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
51m ago
Even if none of that is true, you’re also dealing with the added costs associated with outsourcing child-rearing. Daycare generally costs enough that the second income doesn’t go as far as it would on paper.
So like $2 million a kid? For the people you want breeding the most. IQ >110. That’s a yearly income of probably $150k give or take which capitalizes to $2 million plus or minus.
Having someone carry your biological kid for you thru pregnancy runs 50-150k and that’s recruiter lower class. Doesn’t include the 18 years of motherhood. I don’t think we have anywhere close to enough money to boost tfr at the rates you imply by paying people. You need people to desire motherhood as it’s own reward.
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
54m ago
I think you’re correct that it’s a selfishness problem more so than a trust problem (the trust problem is developing as a response to the selfishness problem. And I think the cause or at least a major cause of selfishness has little to do with government, but more to do with atomization.
Communities, civic pride, and rootedness in a place have all declined rather rapidly over the course of the last 50 or so years. People don’t stick around the same places, the don’t keep the same jobs, they don’t form deep lasting relationships with people around them. And without a sense of tribe, a lot of pro-social behaviors don’t make sense. Why return a lost wallet when it belongs to someone you don’t know, and you’re not going to get social credit for doing the right thing anyway? Why not cheat Red Lobster? Do you know the owner? Do you worry that friends and neighbors will notice you cheating the system? Even if they do, what social control is there that they could leverage to shame you? Or on the negative end, who in your area knows or cares if you never contribute to society? If you decide to do nothing but game and eat? Who’s going to shame you for being a burden on your family or the government?
The thing that jumps out at me about the so-called high trust societies is the degree of social conformity and shaming that happens in them. There’s a shame to not working hard in those societies, but it’s not the theoretical “grind-core” thing like we have, it’s people you work with (and might work with for decades) noticing that you leave early all the time. Or noticing that you’re not producing as much as they are. In social relationships, they’re close enough that you’ll be shamed if you do something that the society sees as wrong. And the informal social credit system works pretty well most of the time, producing the kinds of pro-social behaviors we actually want. If you want divorces to go down, having a lot of negativity around getting a divorce AND having a network of people willing to gossip and shame you for getting a divorce keeps most people together.
I think shame works for the most part, and the loss of it makes trust-breaking a much more rational decision than it would be in a shaming culture.
Ioper
57m ago
I mean, were talking like 0.5-1 more kids per woman, it isn't that big a change. We've lived in that world and with the same FLPR.
Also, the state doesn't necessarily have to compensate people, it could punish them instead. Currently we only have (tiny) carrots but perhaps we should introduce some sticks as well and possibly increase the carrots for those that actually contribute until we reach something sustainable.
Or try any number of other ideas a Instead of throwing up our hands and declaring that we've tried nothing and are all out of ideas.
I think the argument is that it increases overall utility; not money. So whilst kaldor hicks efficient it may be hard to compensate the losers with a tax on the winners if there is less pecuniary wealth.
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