Nobody is being honest about the fertility crisis

There is a goddess of fertility, and her name is Trade-off

You've probably been bombarded by dozens of articles about the supposed “fertility crisis”

It's a topic that basically every pundit has given their opinion on, considering how many different areas of society it potentially impacts.

Some people blame feminism. Others, the cost of living. Others, declining moral values. Urbanization, cultural drift, elitist attitudes, genetic issues — and just about everything in between has been cited as the main culprit for the reason that nobody's having kids anymore.

And yet, for all of the article out there, very few people of them are being intellectually honest about the subject.

Calling it a fertility crisis is misleading. While there is some preliminary data suggesting a declining sperm counts, as well as problems in conceiving for older women, this is not the heart of the issue.

The real crisis is this:

There will be too many unproductive old people

These people will retire, and no longer contribute to an economy which is built on the idea of continual growth. They will put a strain on institutions such as healthcare and the pension system.

This, in turn, is going to have negative effects on GenX and younger, as a greater portion of their wealth will go to funding old people, while they themselves are destined to live a stagnating quality of life.

There's a reason why nobody is being honest about this crisis. There is a god, and his name is trade-off, and the vast majority of people and institutions are incapable of acknowledging them. The truth of the matter is:

In order to solve this crisis, significant portions of the population will need to make sacrifices.

The delusion is not restricted to any particular side of the political spectrum. Many in the PMC don't even believe this is a problem. Or if they do, they see it as something they can “innovate” their way out of. Innovation is the magic word — a nice way to say “somebody else will figure it out, so I don't have to worry about it.”

A significant portion of the “trad” movement also fail to comprehend the scope of the issue — the 1950’s economy is dead. In previous generations, low IQ boomers could reasonably find consistent long-term employment. Now that’s no longer the case.

This post will attempt to outline a number of conceivable solutions.

To be very clear: I neither endorse any of the following solutions, nor attempt to produce an exhaustive list.

Rather, this post is primarily written in response to the many fertility crisis think pieces that heavily imply a solution, without actually having the fortitude to say it for fear of backlash.

The majority of think pieces around this topic either complain about the issue without trying to come up with feasible solutions, or otherwise discuss solutions in an abstract manner so as to avoid talking about who makes the sacrifice.

This post is nothing more than an aggregation of all the cultural punditry that has taken place so far, but stated in a blunt manner so that it's perfectly clear who is going to be making the sacrifice in order to fix this problem.

Solution 1A: Restrict the freedoms of women

This has generally worked in the past. It is clear that, while a man's income raises his ability to access mates, the same is not true for women to the same degree.

South Korea is the prototypical example of this. In this region, women are forced to play the status games of both men and women — the majority of them unsuccessfully. As a result, they have all but abandoned the idea of having kids, and thus have the lowest fertility rate of any of the major countries.

The heavy-handed solution would be to turn higher educational institutions into an all male environment once more. A softer approach would be to give explicit preference to men in various productive fields, especially STEM fields, and other professions where income tends to be higher. The status discrepancy would once more restore the requisite balance in the gender dynamics in order for women to find men attractive.

And of course, there are many other ways to restrict the freedoms of women; one needs only to open up a history textbook to find many sources of inspiration.

Solution 1B: Make women attractive again

The fuck rate is about to implode.

Just as men are treated harsher for their ability to earn and produce resources, women are treated harsher based on their looks. One of the primary factors determining the attractiveness of a woman is her weight. And right now, the average woman is now 5'4 170lb, with somewhere between 28 and 40 percent body fat.

For the far left, it has become taboo to admit there are biological realities to beauty standards – and so they have become willfully blind to the idea that many have eaten themselves out of the mating pool.

Men have been impacted by obesity as well – although they have the luxury of not being penalized by it to the same degree. A man can mask the fat gain by gaining additional muscle, or adopt a sort of powerlifter/”Teddy Bear” physique, or otherwise developing a personality.

Solution 2: Restrict the freedoms of men

On the flip side of the fuck rate implosion is the fact that it has become exponentially easier to see a beautiful naked woman online. Since the majority of women in real life have gotten fatter, and porn has become ubiquitous, men simply do not have the same incentives to find a mate as they once did.

By leveraging heavy-handed punishments for porn, OnlyFans, and AI companions, men will eventually be forced to leave the house in order to find a viable mate. These punishments can come in the form of banning porn websites, forcing identity verification, or criminal punishment.

Solution 3: Pay People to Have Kids

South Korea, Hungary, and Japan have already implemented some variation of this, and largely this has not worked — but of course, this could just be a question of magnitude.

We can imagine a scenario where we pay families absurdly high prices for having children. Let's take this article by Krypto Gal; according to her estimates, a typical man would demand to be paid no less than $1 million dollars to give birth.

Let us indulge this baseline for a minute.

At such a high price, this would almost guarantee that women would be incentivized to have more kids. But of course, there would be two inherent problems. If the price is too high, most families would have exactly one kid, which might actually worsen the problem. But then we might alter the terms of the deal, where we give marginal sums for the first kid, and increasingly large amounts for the next.

Ultimately, this would have the same problem as any sort of social program: the money would have to come from somewhere. Historically, this funding comes from either taking out additional debt, or through taxation of the most productive citizens of a given nation. This would likely induce a cycle of increasing inflation, or otherwise a brain drain to those countries where men and women would be able to keep the fruits of their labor.

Solution 4: Normalize Bad Parenting

When most people say they are not ready to have kids, they are usually referring to the fact that they are not mentally equipped to be a good parent. This is because the baseline standards that constitute “good” parenting have progressively increased throughout the generations.

People in their late 30s and 40s can easily contrast their own childhoods with those of the younger generations; their daily lives were minimally structured by their parents. Now it appears as though the lives of the majority of children are overly structured, with very little freedom to make their own decisions.

One of the solutions is to change the culture so that we simply have a much higher tolerance for subpar parents. This means increasing the probability of children being born to alcoholics, gambling addicts, drug users, or domestic abusers. When one lowers the standards, more people are allowed through, and no cultural gate is going to be perfect.

Related to this is the acceptance of deadbeat dads. One of the issues men face is the potential ramifications of the court system. First, they are not allowed to commit financial abortions in the event that a woman wants to keep the child while a man does not; second, in the case of divorces, many courts are highly favorable towards the woman. Overhauling these laws would make marriage more appealing to men.

Solution 5: Eugenics

This can take many potential forms. As a hypothetical, society may incentivize the elite in society to donate their respective sperm and eggs, and pay low-income women to have these children. In fact, as future technology advances, women may not be needed for this process, as artificial wombs can become increasingly viable.

In parallel, as AI agents improve alongside gene sequencing technology, scientists will increasingly have a window into the correlations between genetics and life outcomes.

It is not inconceivable that we might begin to “pre-plan” the sorts of people who will be born based on their genetics, optimizing for certain characteristics. As a result, society need not necessarily fear the shrinking population, as every incremental child born will have a clear purpose — a function to which he or she is optimized for.

Solution 6: Eradicate most men

One of the reasons why the replacement rate needs to be 2.1 births per women in order to sustain the population is the fact that women have to replace not only the existing pool of women, but also the men. We may solve this problem by systematically moving towards a population where there are, say, four women for every man.

As a result, only a small percentage of women need to have more than one child in order to replace the population between generations. Combine this with artificial sperm banks, and it becomes a lot easier to sustain a population with these ratios, and a lot less burdensome for pregnancy for any particular woman.

Solution 7: Strip people of their property rights

The biggest problem in creating more people around urban centers is the fact that there is a critically low supply of housing. This is due to several variables, not the least of which being that existing homeowners have a disproportional amount of veto power of a given neighborhood relative to those who have not yet moved in.

For example, a small number of home owners / condo owners might be able to halt construction of new developments or renovations. In the case of someone who refuses to move out of their condo so that it might be rebuilt and replaced, most municipalities/states do not have the authority to forcibly kick them out.

By stripping people of their property rights, it becomes easier to demolish, rebuild, and reallocate housing.

Solution 8A: Euthanasia

Places such as Canada and the UK are increasingly expanding their assisted suicide programs. At present, the expansion of these programs have been implemented on the grounds of ending suffering, and otherwise giving people dignity for their terminal diagnoses.

It is conceivable to expand these programs for the sake of practicality. Which is to say, as people live longer, their quality of life goes down — and once it simply falls below the requisite threshold, they might choose to end their life.

A preemptive implementation of assisted suicide would have the benefit of preserving government spending programs, as those who die early would not be withdrawing as much from the overall fund. It would additionally save a lot on healthcare costs, saving family members a lot of money and time.

As with the case of breeding programs, however, the ethical dilemma comes with determining whose life is worth terminating and whose life is worth continuing. As with most of these issues, the dividing line will very likely come down to income and social class.

Solution 8B: Revoke pensions and Raise retirement ages

One of the big problems with an inverted population curve is the fact that entitlements will balloon, and pension systems will run out, meaning that fewer young people will have to support more old people. In places like Italy, the old age dependency ratio has already deteriorated to the extent that the country has experienced net emigration over the last decade.

One of the ways to avoid this is to revoke pensions and entitlements for the elderly. Those who have accumulated lots of wealth might simply forgo their pension. Additionally, we might exclude men and women who have made it to retirement without having kids, as it might be viewed as reneging on the social contract.

Similar to revoking pensions, countries can raise the retirement age in order to delay having to pay out from the social security pool, hoping that more people on average die before that happens.

Solution 9: Polygamy

Eggs are valuable, sperm is cheap.

In previous societies, those men of higher status generally were able to afford multiple wives/concubines, and have multiple children by those wives. Seeing as how large quantities of capital are increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few, it would not be inconceivable to return to this system.

Of course, this would leave the problem of the surplus men in the interim – normally, this was solved through disease and war.

Once more, this post does not endorse any of the solutions outlined above.

Rather, it's simply an acknowledgement that many of the discussions around the subject of fertility heavily imply one or many of the solutions listed above, without having the fortitude to actually say it.

In outlining the potential solutions above, this post lays the cards out on the table, without resorting to the typical pearl clutching that accompanies this sort of discourse. The fertility goddess is also named trade off — if people actually want to solve this problem, then they are going to have to start acknowledging them.

So the next time you read a fertility crisis piece, ask yourself, which one of these solutions are they actually advocating for?