I am one of the people who doesn’t want children and may not be able to have them anyway. The stretching of adolescence into one’s twenties means many of us made bad mating choices without long term considerations of what we want. I blame feminism for telling women we don’t have a fertility expiration period; even if I wanted to right now, I’d have difficulty conceiving and that’s probably in no small part due to my age. Separately, feminism taught me that men shouldn’t care about our fertility or even consider it, leading many of us to think our chances are the same in our 30s as in our 20s to attract a high quality man. But, I think not taking a stance is an easy thing to do. I’d challenge you to take one.
Realistically though, how would you prove it’s truly a choice? What about people who tried to have kids and couldn’t? How hard do you have to try? Is someone who couldn’t conceive naturally but doesn’t want to do IVF because of the expense and health effects now ineligible for social security? What if someone can’t find a partner to procreate with?
“Separately, feminism taught me that men shouldn’t care about our fertility or even consider it…”
And women are not supposed to care about men’s fertility or even consider it. Unless they have exceptional good genes or lifestyle, most men in their late 30s and over are going have increased sperm mutation and infertility that would either increased miscarriage or genetic defect to their offsprings.
It is not that feminist don’t think fertility is important. They just don’t want men to be hypocrites and chase young women who are not interested in them.
Tell that to Chris Evans. Young women aren’t interested in _ordinary_ older men. In a warrior culture, survival into one’s 40s indicated good genes, so such men would have seemed more attractive.
Mate selection for women is a trade off between genes and provisioning. It can be argued that provisioning ability indicates good genes, but these days a base level is assumed, and so discounted.
You’re making a false equivalence. Plenty of women consider men’s fertility. The tide hasn’t turned on the other side, and feminism is, regardless of this, about flipping the power dynamic, not evening it.
I was well aware of the fertility window and had two kids in my 20s accordingly. I regret having them. Having kids sucks. I should have enjoyed my 20s more instead.
I’ll bite. I’d start immediately with 1 & 2, then up it to 3, then escalate to 7 & 8 if they don’t get to the breedin’. Eugenics, polygamy and reducing men can all fuck off though. Big gay no win.
Brother I love your content but you have the same misguided principles when it comes to fertility issues.
I will need to write a whole post later on but the basics is: fertility is not linked to feminism, material wealth, attraction to women, women being hard to please bitches or anything.
You have hit it by mistake but fertility is a complete mimetic phenomenon, meaning it is only based on the culture of the group and those who are around you.
Even if you live in a war torn area, with an abusive husband (or a bitch of a wife), if what gives you status in the community is number of children: you will make 8 children by Allah’s will.
Fertility ever since 10% of the population was liberated from working in the fields, became a phenomenon linked to status (and thus a sort of immaterial capital) in your community.
If being a mom was glamourized and supported by all society, and given a special status position, America or the West would be over 2.1 fertility but full of broken homes and a ton of other issues (and thus full of the God of trade-offs)
But it is also the fertile terrain of the cultures of tomorrow who will come to conquer.
And by the way, Islam and the immigration wave to Europe is also exhausting itself. All islamic countries fertility rate is collapsing and Morocco/Algeria have already crossed the threshold of 2.1 down.
What I mean by conquerors imo is the intellectual/spiritual frameworks that will guide the future and are in the making now.
What examples do you have of these intellectual and spiritual frameworks? Are we thinking only about the extreme hyper-reproducers like Mormons and Amish, or the solid reproducers like Traditional Catholics and general Islamic world?
Idk, I think some Integrist Catholic, subsects of Mormonism and some radical Islamic movements will keep high natality as a consequence but they will pay a heavy price and every time they will try to be less strict (to reap the benefits of a more open society) they will falter in fertility or if they go too strict they will basically end up imploding and getting conquered by better societies with better frameworks.
If I had to push a model I would start with the Chestertonian Conservative pov. Women have rights and they enjoy them, if any solution means oppressing them then we will end up like Korea. A first step will fall onto men to become better beings, developping a traditional masculinity but not like the redpills, a non-hypocrite one, meaning that you cannot ask of women what women cant ask of men.
For example: an enticing solution might be to promote motherhood alongside career as a way of life to happiness instead of pushing propaganda on either one. Another way is to make motherhood non impactful on other spheres of life thus giving women a real freedom to choose how to lead their lives.
Propaganda, making motherhood cool and trendy, creating enticing social privileges for women with children (for example social norma that benefit them compared to childless women).
I focused a lot on women because currently, they are the bottleneck not through being bitches or bad people but because rationally, they have choices to make and those choices should hit their emotional side making them feel good or better than the alternative.
I fail to see why the groups you described are/ would suffer and thus reduce their birth rates? Hardcore American Catholics for example still benefit and grow alongside the wealth and technology of America, there’s no reason for their religion to deviate.
Secondly, your suggestions are mostly null and void I’m afraid, as you’ve failed to consider the differences between men and women in both biology (desires, strengths, weaknesses) and what they are attracted to - obvious example; women are not attracted to egalitarian fathers who behave like stay at home mothers, and men are not attracted to girl bosses who prioritise career over family, chase status in their career, and otherwise aim towards masculine status signals instead of the feminine ones deeply-seated into their genetic design -> motherhood, maternal instincts (not a myth).
We can maintain rights while leaning into biological realism (complementarianism), accepting the beautiful and ugly truths about both sexes without judgment, and aligning ourselves accordingly… rather than continuing on this utterly failed path of egalitarian Utopianism, and hoping financial incentives can delete biological realism and evolutionary psychology.
Basically the reasoning goes that oppressive groups (I will take Islamic groups as I am most familiar with them) are extremely oppressive and small minded when it comes to endeavours. And they only work as a subgroup of a more successful culture.
This small mindedness limits women’s freedoms yes, but also imposes a culture of not risking anything, lest you lose face in your community. Meaning no industry, no real competitive edge in the modern world and basically ending up as the Taliban (a stone age society that will never develop endemic industry) which is null compared to another Islamic country like Turkey or Iran (Iran’s society is more open than its state, and even its state is very open compared to pure Wahhabis)
My suggestion actually take into account what you say. I am not bling and I believe women are most attracted to masculine competent men and men attracted to dutiful feminine women. What I mean is that those dutiful feminine women want fairness, and they sometimes also have passions like researching biology, teaching or other endeavours in society which are recompensated and take time away from family.
Something you may not take into account is women today are liberated of many ardous tasks (baking bread, sewing clothes, cleaning etc) which gives them a lot of free time (look into the american 50s housewives) and cant always be taking care of kids because after some point they are at school. So they get bored and will scroll on tiktok or whatever.
I am not a blind tabula rassa believer and I believe in inherent differences and complementarism too, I just believe in the west (and global south) many men sin of asking too much of their wives while not taking into account their burdens.
I also believe another solution I didnt give you: but differed education that adapta to women’s cycle. Women mature faster, and thus would benefit from finishing school earlier or having more compact schooling because they are on average better students and would give them a fair deal of starting a career, having kids and then retaking it when the kids grow up without too much of a hit.
And what I meant about men being fair, doesnt mean being equal. If you ask your woman to be a stay at home mom, then you take the rest of responsability but if she wants to work and you agree, then you should also pull your weight in the household chores (many uncles in my family never did so even when their wives took work)
So men should be masculine but men can't expect anything from women that they themselves don't have/are? You're just perpetuating socially disfunctional feminism
If you are masculine then you can ask for a feminine woman, and you usually get it. What I meant is many men are hypocrites and what to have their cake and eat it too (redpillers are a good example).
I meant fairness as in, dont ask what you are not ready to give equivalence in. If you want a pretty hot attractive woman then your work as a man, is to acquire the status and maintain yourself physically attractive too. If you want a dutiful wife, you need to be a dutiful husband. So on and so on.
“To be very clear: I neither endorse any of the following solutions, nor attempt to produce an exhaustive list.”
Your belief is mistaken, but I understand why it might look so. I still shared this comment as I think half of the solution go from the usual materialist postulate
How am I mistaken when you just quoted from the author that he does NOT endorse a solution?
Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time on the Internet for me where someone has tried to claim I was wrong by quoting evidence proving the very point I was making.
If you mean I mistaken about your mixup, you outright said at the start "you have the same misguided principles..." when he never stated or outlined his principles in the article save a link to his old article on trade-offs.
I understand he doesnt endorse or believe those propositions he gave. But the underlying fact behind them is that there are some presuppositions, a big one of them being that demography and by consequence fertility, is a problem of money (or material) and that by giving men, women or both enough material they will make kids again (points 1 to 4 mainly).
He doesnt endorse the solutions, but the solutions to the problems he states, all have the same vibe. Thus I made a simple pattern matching of a very common POV I see that relates material wealth to fertility.
While I understand I might have miscommunicated my point, you cannot not look at his solutions and see a common thread behind them.
Motherhood has definitely lost status _with other women_. Many men still esteem it. I led a round of applause at a company meeting when the product manager announced her maternity leave.
Beware any so-called solutions involving de facto or formal polygyny. Civilization harnessed men’s energies by tying marriage to work. Most of men’s efforts can be thought of as mating display. We break that link at our peril.
I think the fact it still has status amongst men is because they still have less skin in the game than women do. Across many western nations women still note that a big part of the household tasks fall on their laps while now also working full time. And in the global south it is worse as women are both expected to keep their traditional role in the household but also work and contribute financially.
I honestly think you are right about the link but it is tenous and indirect at best. What motivates men is always tied to a form of status (glory, money, recognizition, women, Nobel prize or the impulse of exploration) which indirectly gets you a woman.
And I agree on the polygyny, polyamory or polygamy are alwaya degenerate (untethered from reality) endeavours that end up in tragedy.
Women take for granted their ultimate skin in the game, perhaps because they control access to it. There is only one way that the vast majority of us will leave even a ripple in the stream of time. Children.
The vast majority of us, both men and women, do not have careers, even in retrospect. We have a succession of jobs. We leave no lasting mark, anywhere.
Women tell each other that motherhood is a burden. It’s even true. It’s also the ultimate power of life and death for our species in general, the men they accept or reject, and the women themselves.
Women, collectively and individually, control whether they, and the men around them, plant a stake in the future, or vanish without leaving a trace.
Well said, couldn’t agree more. Women also take for granted that men’s entire productive lives are focused around convincing a woman to have their children. It is men who have to lead the difficult life, and succeed, while most women will stand at the finish line and pick the winner. As soon as the woman’s job in that deal gets going; motherhood - feminism instinctually throws a lack of appreciation or gratitude for the husband and all that he’s done and will do for you. It comes across in most messages from women these days, always referencing “abuse”, or “house chores”… even though all of these are stories from a previous generation, or a criminal minority.
Where do you think the term “toxic masculinity”, and meme “kill all men”, and “I’d rather be in a forest with a bear than man” came from? How about the fact you can’t possibly call out misandry or criticise a woman, but a man is completely free game?
Totally wrong. You’re putting the cart before the horse. Having lots of babies can’t just be “high status” because over time in a godless world hedonism always wins out over sacrificing for “status.” The only way it doesn’t is if your society isn’t godless and recognizes that children are good
Ok lets do away with the God thing. China, India and Africa had very high natality rates while not beleving in a god or higher power like Abrahamic peoples do (Christians, Jews, Muslims), so if there is a reason for natality God might have never been part of it.
A society that doesnt recognize children is doomed to disappear and thus be replaced by one that does recognize children and believe in children over material things. The question is which one is it gonna be, and why not ours (whatever nation you are from).
Status as I personally see it doesnt get in the way of having kids and foments women and men to have kids. Be it men actually respecting the bar and being fair (if she works, then you also contribute to the household tasks).
It should foment children taking into account women’s pov meaning giving them the chance to both have careers, contribute to society at large and also have 2-3 kids.
China, India, and Africa might have some tribes that had high birth rates for a time, but not a sustainable period of thousands of years. Why? Because in a society without transcendence people stop sacrificing for inconvenience because they realize their polity is based in a lie and instead only seek their own pleasure, which destroys the polity. Once that polity is weak it will be conquered by another polity which will also eventually stop sacrificing for the polity and only seek pleasure. This was traditionally called “the state of nature” in the Catholic tradition and the “cycle of regimes” by pagans like Plato in the Republic and Polybius
Yeah, but funnily the polity was usually a subgroup of the cultural group taking control and enforcing a sort of transcendence.
I agree with your point, but I dont see the point because heathen/irreligious societies also reproduced and had high fertility for longer than some religions have existed. This is what I meant by making your point moot
These countries had their own strong gods. China has had Confucianism, best defined as an atheistic religion, just as conservative and complimentarian as an Abrahamic faith. Africa is not secular in the slightest, has very large pockets dominated by Islam, and has some of the most devout Christians on earth, with some places having their laws designed around Christian principles.
Confucianism is seen at best as a humanist philosophy, no God in it. An equally secular philosphy could lead to similar outcomes, if Confucianism is to follow. They worshipped gods but under Taoism, Buddhism or Ancestor Veneration.
Africa had high natality even before the Christians and Muslims came, many Muslim recounting of the Islamization of the Sahel recount how like in pre-Islamic arabia the number of kids confered status and thus chieftains had many wives to bear many kids.
Christianization started in the 16th century with the Portuguese and late 18th with the English and French. Islamization started around the same time as the end of the Reconquista so 11th to 14th century.
The Confucianism point is semantics, you completely missed what I meant by “strong gods”. Same goes for adding additional faiths that dont* dominate East* Asian culture like Confucianism does.
The rest of what you said is true but not helpful. For Africa you can throw in widespread polygamy, kids to help as hands for agriculture, etc etc. You’re missing the relevant points of application to modern society, and the reason for kids is not due to economics, it’s due to culture and religiosity.
And yes it’s religiosity, not philosophy. The Latin definition of religion, “religio”, is “to Bind”. Philosophies don’t tightly bind entire cultures and countries into a single worldview, religions do, which is why Confucianism, with all of its ancestral worship, Christian-like covenental patriarchal households, and extreme obedience to authority and the state, is best described as an atheistic religion, because yes, not all religions are theistic.
No I actually got what you meant and my point was really not semantics. Religions as we see them (Abrahamic ones) are a complete worldview, closed to any other. Meaning that if you are a devout Christian, Muslim or Jew you cant and wont accept any other worldview other than the one it is revealed through the holy corpus.
The key in Abrahamic religions is its self enformcement. You follow the religion because it is God’s will, and if you dont you have X or Y abstract aethereal punishment under the form of eternal damnation. Confucianism has none of this, it is a state/humanist doctrine that is enforced by the state and culture which is why I meant it is a philosophical construct. You follow the confucian way because it is the moral way, but other than doing good for good you have external enforcement that varied by dynasties and thus is a very flexible philosophy to apply society wide.
In some times it was even forbidden and replaced by legalism or other philosophies. This is why I treat them as such, Confucianism can be seen as an Enlightment philosophy people agree on but that lacks teeth like a religion does to enforce itself. It may look like a duck, and act like it but at the end it is not one.
Also, men and women have been doing equal shares of the household work (combined totals of economic work and domestic work) for decades now. This feminist propaganda needs to die already.
I know in Nordic countries, France, Germany and the US it is the case. Not the same in the rest of the OECD and not even remotely in the emerging countries.
Yeah but in a way that actually talks to most women and doesnt diminish their concerns. A lot of my cohort (Gen Z) have grown up with basically anti-natalist propaganda from our families and the idea that you must live your life before you settle. One ought to convince them earnestly that those material pleasures, travels and all of those things that give status on social media are fake and after 30 years there will remain nothing of your travels to Bali or your weekends spent in a club (if that is all you do of your life).
Also funnily, the Soviet union tried but like everything there no one took it seriously, starting by the state itself.
Not going to work. The reason the anti-natalist propaganda was there in the first place is because society was structured around pleasure rather than duty. Going to Bali is way more fun than having and raising kids but pleasure is not the only thing that matters
I'm surprised that you haven't mentioned contraceptives. Before 60s you didn't have them nor porn so sooner or later you would have sex(especially men). That caused cultures to force early marriage so there wouldn't be whole society of single mothers. Now sex is usually purely hedonistic pleasure and people can choose to just not have kids
This is also a popular misconception, contraception has existed under different forms much earlier than the pill. For example, condoms come from french because they were produced in the french city of Condom.
There is written contraceptive use of different methods (Catholic rythm methods, condoms out of animal insides, herbs and combinations…) that had different levels of efficacy back in the 1700s.
For sexual revolution contraceptives have to be almost always effective. Lowering chance by half isn't enough. Also I suspect that those methods weren't available for everyone
You are assuming that if women were prevented from having abortions they would have those children, plus whatever children they went on to have later in life. I don't think that assumption is warranted. If a woman is forced to have more children earlier in life, she will probably compensate by having fewer later in life.
He is assuming correctly, restricting contraception and abortion is one historically proven way to increase fertility rates. Romania did it and fertility went from 1.9 in 1966 to 3.66 in 1967, and the rates remained consistently above 2.1 until communism fell in 1990 and restrictions were removed.
He specifically mentioned abortion. The only research on it that I've seen is a paper by Donahue, Grogger, and Levitt (2009) that basically finds that abortion reduces total lifetime fertility by, at most, a tenth of a child per woman. This is because most women denied abortions compensate later in life by having fewer children. Abortion mostly serves to change the time when a woman bears children, not how many she actually bears.
The initial surge in fertility in Romania was short-lived, people adapted to it fast. At most it delayed Romania's fertility decline by a decade. If you look at graphs, it looks like Romania's fertility is falling, there is a spike when the ban occurs, and then fertility begins falling again at nearly the same rate after the spike. I imagine it would be even easier to adapt today. The modern world is far less boring than communist Romania, people can just stay at home and scroll social media instead of having sex.
Romania's policy also led to those orphanages full of kids with serious mental health issues. That seems really bad, remember that the goal of increasing fertility is to increase the amount of happy and productive people in the world.
First of Romania banned contraception in totality, not just abortion. If you look at Romanian fertility people adapted, but it was still above replacement rates, so clearly they didn't adapt to pre-abortion ban when it was 1.9. Te fall below 2 only happened once communism fell and contraception was made legal once again. This is the only historic policy that worked.
> Romania's policy also led to those orphanages full of kids with serious mental health issues. That seems really bad, remember that the goal of increasing fertility is to increase the amount of happy and productive people in the world.
People do not have to be happy to be productive. Without constant growth civilisation will inevitably collapse as there won't be enough bodies to keep it running. Already you are seeing systems collapse in western countries, due to lack of manpower to keep them running.
The mental health issues that the orphans suffered didn't just make them unhappy. It also made them unproductive by making them mentally ill and prone to criminality. It's true that people don't need to be happy to be productive, but there isn't much of a point to preserving civilization if the majority of people inhabiting it aren't happy.
I looked at a chart of Romanian fertility, and it was a steady decline, followed by a spike when the policy was adopted, followed by a resumption of the steady decline once the spike was over. That indicates that the spike was temporary and fertility would have continued declining even if the regime hadn't fallen.
I’m skeptical that the “fertility crisis” even exists.
We know the media and academia and the powers that be basically make shit up the vast majority of the time and the “fertility crisis” has been the main justification for flooding America and Europe with orcs and pajeets. That should be reason enough to make one highly skeptical.
Even if it wasn’t fake, people act like it isn’t the easiest problem in the world to solve. Stop taking pills, fuck without a rubber and don’t murder the babies. Nobody’s too poor; most of your ancestors were raised on a dirt floor and the orcs and pajeets flooding into the west manage to raise 12 kids a piece back home under a roof that blows away every three weeks.
One Google search to find that literally every single first world country on earth is well below replacement rate, will reveal to you how real and extremely serious this problem is. This is why the article is bothering to mention extremely heavy handed options, as those are what is left to try.
Oh, you’re one of the deranged conspiracy theorists that believes every statistic on earth is produced by a shadowy cabal of elite illuminati type figures? That control every single country’s output of information simultaneously? And you don’t have the ability to identify and review sources? Sorry I bothered responding to you
Solutions 8A and 8B are, in fact, being implemented as we speak.
The other issue is that increasing birth rates *right now* would also make the dependance ratio worse *right now*. Think about it. Who are the dependents? Essentially, the young (children) and the old (retirees). I know, I know, the disabled, the rentier class, etc. etc. But in terms of sheer numbers, it's basically children and retirees. So, children and retirees compete for the same resources. A child is born, and suddenly, the mother becomes a less productive employee (for starters, by staying home for a while to take care of her baby), contributing less to the tax pool, which translates into fewer resources for the old. Moreover, the state provides all sorts of resources for the child (for example, schooling). These resources could otherwise be spent on the old. So, it is only natural that old people will support de facto anti-natalist policies, since this reduces competition that old people face. Oh, sure, they might want grandchildren of their own, but who needs 4.41?! (2.1^2 = 4.41) One or two grandchildren will do just fine. And who needs *other* people's grandchildren? So, vote for policies that reduce birth rates. By the time today's infants are old enough to contribute economically, today's retirees will be dead anyway.
Yeah, this has always been used as an argument to do nothing. Too bad, then some luxury projects will need to be cut down, and retirees will get less social security money.
Eventually, what you're suggesting is guaranteed to happen. Having a typical person live 80+ years and dying of/with dementia is something that only very wealthy societies can afford. So, expect entitlements for the old to shrink and life expectancy to go down. But this is likely to happen at a slower rate than the overall societal impoverishment, meaning that birth rates will keep tanking for a while yet.
Orrrrr people will just work longer. In first world countries outside the US, both lifespans and healthspans are increasing. Per capita wealth is mostly increasing throughout most of the world as well, and AI may accelerate that.
The future will be extremely wild and different and we don't quite know what it will look like.
From the perspective of individual utility, having a child is a heavy net cost to both the mother and father, but especially the mother. If individual utility is the highest value then children are The Enemy of Progress.
In previous ages the economic conditions for raising a child were much worse than they are now, even for the very rich. And yet people did it anyway. Our lack of fertility is perhaps a result of the peculiar degree to which our society valorises self actualisation and individual expression.
For people to have kids, they need to believe in *something* other than themselves and their own wellbeing; they must believe willing to sacrifice something for the benefit of others.
Essentially, people are trying too hard to make themselves happy, failing because their notion of happiness is bogus; and producing results that make life more miserable for everyone else in the process
Society has been turned into a government brokered Ponzi scheme rather than a collection of self-sustaining units
Once upon a time, children were your retirement plan and the family was a core unit of economic investment. People lived, worked & died in the context of the family
Now, people are individuals who “invest” their money in the government (tax) with the expectation that government will broker all their services. Especially retirement.
Loved this. Not because I endorse the ideas, but how thoroughly you thought through the many options, a couple of which I had never considered. Very well done. 👍🏻🏆😎
I think we could actually do a couple of them together. Pay young couples to have children and raise the retirement age are a start.
Fixing the economy such that more men would make a good income could help quite a bit as well. Such as eliminating the income tax so that we all got to keep the full paycheck. If fewer people would need government programs if they got to keep their full paycheck.
It's probably impossible to pay the middle classes enough to incentivize them to produce more children. After all, the tax money has to come from somewhere. Where is it going to come from? Incentivizing the welfare class to have children is easier, but few people want to do that, for obvious reasons. If you want to incentivize the middle classes to have more children, you probably need more indirect subsidies such as cheaper housing and/or education. This is bad for the rentier class, which will obviously fight it. The other problem is that it's probably impossible for monetary incentives to increase fast enough to keep up with increasing social atomization. The more socially atomized you are (for example, no grandparents to babysit), the more money you need to compensate for that. Advanced social atomization makes children very, very expensive, and even if you have the funds, the children still turn out less well. It's like using a ton of fertilizer to grow crops on poor soil, only to have those crops turn out less well than if you simply had quality topsoil. I am not sure there's much that policy makers can do to fight social atomization, and even if they could, the effects would be very slow.
Note that immigration was supposed to be a solution for this problem. Someone else, somewhere else, produces and raises the children, and then you get a ready-made adult, free of charge. Except that "someone else, somewhere else" isn't producing too many children, either (not anymore), plus the imported adults disproportionately turned out not to have been made to the host countries' cultural specifications, leading to a backlash. Well, producing a well adjusted adult to Western countries' cultural specifications is difficult and expensive, which is why it's increasingly not being done.
Germany has had negative population growth well ahead of many other countries that are getting there. Their system was to pay a couple hundred Deutsch Marks per child, increasing the amount for each additional child. It wasn’t a huge amount of money but a monthly stipend for a number of years anyway. 🤷♂️
Cutting other wasteful spending and growing the economy could easily generate room for modest incentives.
A nation should at least replace itself without having to import from other cultures. And as politically incorrect as the statement may be, we should import from compatible cultures far more, and eliminate incompatible cultures from being brought here. At least in great numbers. Preserving culture is pretty important it turns out. Europe is discovering that now.
Wow, I think Americans have a larger number of people willing to have big families than Europeans. I think the incentive would work better here in America. Even if the incentive had to be matched on the backend by having increasing tax deductions for additional children to double up the incentive.
I don’t think we are suffering from industrial rot, but rather cultural rot. Particularly coming from feminism which told women that serving their families was “unpaid labor“… Breaking your back for a corporate master who doesn’t give a damn about you is somehow empowering to women.
If we can find a way, we need to turn back the cultural clock and the economy by getting back to one income households. Even if that means we freeze immigration and allow a worker shortage to develop the wages can increase. If men became high earners again, women would respect them more, and I think plenty of women would be happy to become homemaker again And not work so hard. Not sure we can put that genie back in the bottle, but I think it’s worth an attempt.
Nah, you're not going to see the 1950s again. If the housing market crashes, it's possible that you'll see a mini baby boom, but not if that's accompanied by an economic depression.
Europe is more densely populated than the United States, and apartments are much smaller (few people live in houses). Try having 5 kids in a 70 sq m (that's 753 sq ft) apartment. And actually, 70 sq m is quite difficult to afford for a young couple, unless they inherited it. Now try the same exercise with a 40 sq m apartment, which is a bit easier to afford (two incomes definitely help).
America is different than Europe on housing… but I meant a return to the 80’s not the 50’s. Not a “return” really but a reinvention of American prosperity resembling it.
Frankly, as AI starts deleting jobs, the workplace will get very sparse. That might be exactly the impetus to get back to one income households and homemakers who work for their family instead of a corporate cubicle.
As I said: "It's probably impossible to pay the middle classes enough to incentivize them to produce more children." What you say about Germany suggests that I was right. Doesn't it? If it were a couple thousand rather than a couple hundred, that might have done the trick. And where are the couple thousand going to come from?
The broader point is that the industrial civilization is simply unsustainable. People have been talking about this since before I was born, and I am not young. They've been focusing on the non-renewable material resources, but it appears that the industrial civilization is unsustainable in additional (social/biological) ways as well. To wit: to get a highly productive workforce, you need atomization, but once your population is atomized, it can no longer produce enough children to reproduce itself.
Half of those aren't solutions in sense that they would be impossible to implement, and even if implemented, would not solve the problem. Also, the problem isn't just with large number of unproductive old men, but the fact that declining population means lesser and lesser amount of people to upkeep and hold infrastructure which makes our life at all possible in modern technological civilization - and we absolutely need to keep lights running, because we don't have an option to go rural again without civilizational collapse.
Civilizational collapse may be in the cards eventually, but not immediately. The way it works is that you simply stop providing certain services to certain areas. What exactly the "services" are will depend on how far along the collapse curve you find yourself, but it can be anything from "no GPs anywhere within 50 miles" to "no electricity and running water in your area, sorry." So, your total population shrinks, while the population of major cities grows. Major cities are very expensive, with relatively little in the way of informal family and friend networks to help with child raising, and so few children are born there. However, all opportunities are in the major cities, and so young people who were born elsewhere migrate to the cities. The overall population declines, while the population of major cities grows. Lots of ghost towns, but no civilizational collapse, or at least not for a while.
I believe that the technical term is "kicking the can down the road." No, you cannot do this (grow a few cities as the rest of the country depopulates) permanently, but you can do it for quite a while. The same applies to all sorts of other things as well.
The classical economic model includes 'primate cities' and 'hinterlands.' Depopulating the hinterland will impoverish and destabilize the urban cores (hint: not much food grown in cities). 'Hollowing out' is the popular term these days.
Cities are expensive because they are socially fractured, inefficient, and have the perception of dirt, disease and danger. In other words, cities are poorly planned, haphazardly populated and burdened with amateurish, corrupt administration.
Re-urbanization based on solid planning and design can solve many problems.
It may also require massive demolition and reconstruction, as well as political will, cooperation, and-- underpinning all-- the desire for humanity to see and participate in the future of the universe. This last point is questionable, based on many comments seen on this platform.
China engaged in re-urbanization-- the result was often good, but also tainted by corruption bourn of the single-party system. For example, destruction of ancient villages and farmland without recourse, and infrastructure projects that were sometimes repeated two or three times like a successful Hollywood movie formula.
China played with anti-natalism and is suffering demographic buyer's remorse. Irony: with tariffs cutting off access to the teat of Walmart, and the West's exclusionary tech policies, China is now racing forward with internally powered energy and AI industries, and developing cutting edge orbital operations technology. China seems to have a great interest in the future, and has ceased the muttering of Malthusian mantras.
Would that China give up its Elitist Confucian hangover, popularize governance, and open it's economy entirely. Perhaps the world would finally learn the shape of things to come.
Good article sometimes it helps to just objectively look at the extremes and work your way up to something resembling a solution I don’t think this is offensive or that you’re advocating any of this lol. The problem with fertility though as you’ve presented it is simply the financial burden and entitlements due to a large aging population. Take away the entitlements to the elderly gradually and eliminate some of those issues. Historically it seems the elderly were a net benefit when they moved into the home with the younger family and helped out. Now we have a mentality where boomers want to revert to a state of permanent vacation goers for the remainder of their lives and hold on to their property forever. Booomers have also infected their offspring with the mindset of every family going forth and shedding family ties in order to chase the highest paying jobs and reinventing the wheel of home ownership. Families should take care of their own and not the state and when families pool resources they become powerful. Everyone thinks having kids is a burden because we have the mindset that we have to launch every child into college and a deep space mission to find a home and a job and never fathom that if we stick together and work together we can increase our wealth and security. This reminds me of all the trash articles where wives bicker about household labor division with the husband then casually mention that have a 10 year old and a 13 year old child!! The kids do the fucking chores for god sake problem solved!!! How do you think Murdaughs in South Carolina basically became god kings in their area with just a few shit kicker law degrees over the generations?! It’s because they pooled their resources and stuck together over time in the same area. When people understand the benefits of having a clan and sticking together in one area then you’ll have all the incentive you need to breed more and of course this only applies if your family actually works and doesn’t just take handouts and live in public housing for generations.
What’s doable right now is encouraging “beautiful smart people to have more kids because they are better” thus normalizing this attitude in the culture. Appealing to the best instincts of the best people.
There is very little worth living for - why would I force one or more new humans to have to confront this same bullshit for the next 20-40 years, especially when it will inevitably get a lot worse before it gets better? If it ever gets better?? Why would I do what my parents generation did and say, essentially "What worked for us will never happen for you without a total reset on society, and we've pulled up the ladder and will keep voting against your generation controlling anything ever. The paid-to-lie morons on cable news tell us everything is going great, except for you selfish younger people wanting rights and freedoms and healthcare and whatever, so fuck you. Good luck pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
In fairness, they had it easy, and their parents thought this was a benefit instead of a cost. Their parents definitely did not have it easy, but they persevered. Many of their generation did not.
There are too many humans on Earth, which is why our environment is fucked. We need fewer humans, not more humans. Maybe if the 10 people who owned 90% of everything didn't have a stranglehold on actual progress we could find a more egalitarian way forward, but instead we've got what we've got. See you down in Arizona Bay.
I am one of the people who doesn’t want children and may not be able to have them anyway. The stretching of adolescence into one’s twenties means many of us made bad mating choices without long term considerations of what we want. I blame feminism for telling women we don’t have a fertility expiration period; even if I wanted to right now, I’d have difficulty conceiving and that’s probably in no small part due to my age. Separately, feminism taught me that men shouldn’t care about our fertility or even consider it, leading many of us to think our chances are the same in our 30s as in our 20s to attract a high quality man. But, I think not taking a stance is an easy thing to do. I’d challenge you to take one.
If you chose no kids you should not be entitled to social security, I think that’s a great solution to address lazy hedonists 👍
Realistically though, how would you prove it’s truly a choice? What about people who tried to have kids and couldn’t? How hard do you have to try? Is someone who couldn’t conceive naturally but doesn’t want to do IVF because of the expense and health effects now ineligible for social security? What if someone can’t find a partner to procreate with?
This is all just hypothetical so yeah, those questions are all valid and would need to be addressed.
yup.
“Separately, feminism taught me that men shouldn’t care about our fertility or even consider it…”
And women are not supposed to care about men’s fertility or even consider it. Unless they have exceptional good genes or lifestyle, most men in their late 30s and over are going have increased sperm mutation and infertility that would either increased miscarriage or genetic defect to their offsprings.
It is not that feminist don’t think fertility is important. They just don’t want men to be hypocrites and chase young women who are not interested in them.
Men aren’t being hypocrites by pursuing younger women.
Men’s fertility does have an expiration date, but it’s later than women’s.
In a world where most men make it past age 35, an older man isn’t necessarily a superior specimen. Men are still wired to feel that way, though.
Also, a man in his 40s looking to marry is also looking to start a family. A woman his age is unlikely to help him with that.
Young women aren’t interested in 40 year old men.
Tell that to Chris Evans. Young women aren’t interested in _ordinary_ older men. In a warrior culture, survival into one’s 40s indicated good genes, so such men would have seemed more attractive.
Mate selection for women is a trade off between genes and provisioning. It can be argued that provisioning ability indicates good genes, but these days a base level is assumed, and so discounted.
If they're not interested then they can simply reject them
Except the ones that are.
And how many of these kids of your are on welfare?
You’re making a false equivalence. Plenty of women consider men’s fertility. The tide hasn’t turned on the other side, and feminism is, regardless of this, about flipping the power dynamic, not evening it.
I need evidence for your latter point. Feminism are not flipping anything.
First, address the false equivalence and then I’ll consider wasting more time on responding. But otherwise, good luck to you.
Ok, don’t need to be mean? What’s the “false equivalence”? I’m assuming you mean male and female fertility are not the same? Can you clarified?
I was well aware of the fertility window and had two kids in my 20s accordingly. I regret having them. Having kids sucks. I should have enjoyed my 20s more instead.
I’ll bite. I’d start immediately with 1 & 2, then up it to 3, then escalate to 7 & 8 if they don’t get to the breedin’. Eugenics, polygamy and reducing men can all fuck off though. Big gay no win.
These are some Aella-level controversial thought experiments, good work 😉
Many people are saying this
you have a good mind. you're a little different than "most people."
(smile)
Brother I love your content but you have the same misguided principles when it comes to fertility issues.
I will need to write a whole post later on but the basics is: fertility is not linked to feminism, material wealth, attraction to women, women being hard to please bitches or anything.
You have hit it by mistake but fertility is a complete mimetic phenomenon, meaning it is only based on the culture of the group and those who are around you.
Even if you live in a war torn area, with an abusive husband (or a bitch of a wife), if what gives you status in the community is number of children: you will make 8 children by Allah’s will.
Fertility ever since 10% of the population was liberated from working in the fields, became a phenomenon linked to status (and thus a sort of immaterial capital) in your community.
If being a mom was glamourized and supported by all society, and given a special status position, America or the West would be over 2.1 fertility but full of broken homes and a ton of other issues (and thus full of the God of trade-offs)
Low fertility is, first and foremost, the last gasp of a culture that has exhausted itself.
But it is also the fertile terrain of the cultures of tomorrow who will come to conquer.
And by the way, Islam and the immigration wave to Europe is also exhausting itself. All islamic countries fertility rate is collapsing and Morocco/Algeria have already crossed the threshold of 2.1 down.
What I mean by conquerors imo is the intellectual/spiritual frameworks that will guide the future and are in the making now.
What examples do you have of these intellectual and spiritual frameworks? Are we thinking only about the extreme hyper-reproducers like Mormons and Amish, or the solid reproducers like Traditional Catholics and general Islamic world?
Idk, I think some Integrist Catholic, subsects of Mormonism and some radical Islamic movements will keep high natality as a consequence but they will pay a heavy price and every time they will try to be less strict (to reap the benefits of a more open society) they will falter in fertility or if they go too strict they will basically end up imploding and getting conquered by better societies with better frameworks.
If I had to push a model I would start with the Chestertonian Conservative pov. Women have rights and they enjoy them, if any solution means oppressing them then we will end up like Korea. A first step will fall onto men to become better beings, developping a traditional masculinity but not like the redpills, a non-hypocrite one, meaning that you cannot ask of women what women cant ask of men.
For example: an enticing solution might be to promote motherhood alongside career as a way of life to happiness instead of pushing propaganda on either one. Another way is to make motherhood non impactful on other spheres of life thus giving women a real freedom to choose how to lead their lives.
Propaganda, making motherhood cool and trendy, creating enticing social privileges for women with children (for example social norma that benefit them compared to childless women).
I focused a lot on women because currently, they are the bottleneck not through being bitches or bad people but because rationally, they have choices to make and those choices should hit their emotional side making them feel good or better than the alternative.
I fail to see why the groups you described are/ would suffer and thus reduce their birth rates? Hardcore American Catholics for example still benefit and grow alongside the wealth and technology of America, there’s no reason for their religion to deviate.
Secondly, your suggestions are mostly null and void I’m afraid, as you’ve failed to consider the differences between men and women in both biology (desires, strengths, weaknesses) and what they are attracted to - obvious example; women are not attracted to egalitarian fathers who behave like stay at home mothers, and men are not attracted to girl bosses who prioritise career over family, chase status in their career, and otherwise aim towards masculine status signals instead of the feminine ones deeply-seated into their genetic design -> motherhood, maternal instincts (not a myth).
We can maintain rights while leaning into biological realism (complementarianism), accepting the beautiful and ugly truths about both sexes without judgment, and aligning ourselves accordingly… rather than continuing on this utterly failed path of egalitarian Utopianism, and hoping financial incentives can delete biological realism and evolutionary psychology.
Basically the reasoning goes that oppressive groups (I will take Islamic groups as I am most familiar with them) are extremely oppressive and small minded when it comes to endeavours. And they only work as a subgroup of a more successful culture.
This small mindedness limits women’s freedoms yes, but also imposes a culture of not risking anything, lest you lose face in your community. Meaning no industry, no real competitive edge in the modern world and basically ending up as the Taliban (a stone age society that will never develop endemic industry) which is null compared to another Islamic country like Turkey or Iran (Iran’s society is more open than its state, and even its state is very open compared to pure Wahhabis)
My suggestion actually take into account what you say. I am not bling and I believe women are most attracted to masculine competent men and men attracted to dutiful feminine women. What I mean is that those dutiful feminine women want fairness, and they sometimes also have passions like researching biology, teaching or other endeavours in society which are recompensated and take time away from family.
Something you may not take into account is women today are liberated of many ardous tasks (baking bread, sewing clothes, cleaning etc) which gives them a lot of free time (look into the american 50s housewives) and cant always be taking care of kids because after some point they are at school. So they get bored and will scroll on tiktok or whatever.
I am not a blind tabula rassa believer and I believe in inherent differences and complementarism too, I just believe in the west (and global south) many men sin of asking too much of their wives while not taking into account their burdens.
I also believe another solution I didnt give you: but differed education that adapta to women’s cycle. Women mature faster, and thus would benefit from finishing school earlier or having more compact schooling because they are on average better students and would give them a fair deal of starting a career, having kids and then retaking it when the kids grow up without too much of a hit.
And what I meant about men being fair, doesnt mean being equal. If you ask your woman to be a stay at home mom, then you take the rest of responsability but if she wants to work and you agree, then you should also pull your weight in the household chores (many uncles in my family never did so even when their wives took work)
So men should be masculine but men can't expect anything from women that they themselves don't have/are? You're just perpetuating socially disfunctional feminism
If you are masculine then you can ask for a feminine woman, and you usually get it. What I meant is many men are hypocrites and what to have their cake and eat it too (redpillers are a good example).
I meant fairness as in, dont ask what you are not ready to give equivalence in. If you want a pretty hot attractive woman then your work as a man, is to acquire the status and maintain yourself physically attractive too. If you want a dutiful wife, you need to be a dutiful husband. So on and so on.
Genug, the culture that exhausted us all is largely academic, who unfortunately became for some decades became an ersatz ruling class.
Now they fall justly into the abyss of obscurity, soon to be forgotten.
No memory to Damn, the “culture” never happened.
I believe you have mistaken the author describing proposed solutions as endorsement of any of them.
“To be very clear: I neither endorse any of the following solutions, nor attempt to produce an exhaustive list.”
Your belief is mistaken, but I understand why it might look so. I still shared this comment as I think half of the solution go from the usual materialist postulate
How am I mistaken when you just quoted from the author that he does NOT endorse a solution?
Believe it or not, this isn’t the first time on the Internet for me where someone has tried to claim I was wrong by quoting evidence proving the very point I was making.
If you mean I mistaken about your mixup, you outright said at the start "you have the same misguided principles..." when he never stated or outlined his principles in the article save a link to his old article on trade-offs.
I understand he doesnt endorse or believe those propositions he gave. But the underlying fact behind them is that there are some presuppositions, a big one of them being that demography and by consequence fertility, is a problem of money (or material) and that by giving men, women or both enough material they will make kids again (points 1 to 4 mainly).
He doesnt endorse the solutions, but the solutions to the problems he states, all have the same vibe. Thus I made a simple pattern matching of a very common POV I see that relates material wealth to fertility.
While I understand I might have miscommunicated my point, you cannot not look at his solutions and see a common thread behind them.
BOT
Motherhood has definitely lost status _with other women_. Many men still esteem it. I led a round of applause at a company meeting when the product manager announced her maternity leave.
Beware any so-called solutions involving de facto or formal polygyny. Civilization harnessed men’s energies by tying marriage to work. Most of men’s efforts can be thought of as mating display. We break that link at our peril.
I think the fact it still has status amongst men is because they still have less skin in the game than women do. Across many western nations women still note that a big part of the household tasks fall on their laps while now also working full time. And in the global south it is worse as women are both expected to keep their traditional role in the household but also work and contribute financially.
I honestly think you are right about the link but it is tenous and indirect at best. What motivates men is always tied to a form of status (glory, money, recognizition, women, Nobel prize or the impulse of exploration) which indirectly gets you a woman.
And I agree on the polygyny, polyamory or polygamy are alwaya degenerate (untethered from reality) endeavours that end up in tragedy.
Women take for granted their ultimate skin in the game, perhaps because they control access to it. There is only one way that the vast majority of us will leave even a ripple in the stream of time. Children.
The vast majority of us, both men and women, do not have careers, even in retrospect. We have a succession of jobs. We leave no lasting mark, anywhere.
Women tell each other that motherhood is a burden. It’s even true. It’s also the ultimate power of life and death for our species in general, the men they accept or reject, and the women themselves.
Women, collectively and individually, control whether they, and the men around them, plant a stake in the future, or vanish without leaving a trace.
Well said, couldn’t agree more. Women also take for granted that men’s entire productive lives are focused around convincing a woman to have their children. It is men who have to lead the difficult life, and succeed, while most women will stand at the finish line and pick the winner. As soon as the woman’s job in that deal gets going; motherhood - feminism instinctually throws a lack of appreciation or gratitude for the husband and all that he’s done and will do for you. It comes across in most messages from women these days, always referencing “abuse”, or “house chores”… even though all of these are stories from a previous generation, or a criminal minority.
I think that feminism is aimed primarily at other women. Any effect on men is collateral damage.
Feminists denigrate motherhood, encourage women and men to delay starting families, and encourage women _and men_ to distrust each other.
Where do you think the term “toxic masculinity”, and meme “kill all men”, and “I’d rather be in a forest with a bear than man” came from? How about the fact you can’t possibly call out misandry or criticise a woman, but a man is completely free game?
Totally wrong. You’re putting the cart before the horse. Having lots of babies can’t just be “high status” because over time in a godless world hedonism always wins out over sacrificing for “status.” The only way it doesn’t is if your society isn’t godless and recognizes that children are good
Ok lets do away with the God thing. China, India and Africa had very high natality rates while not beleving in a god or higher power like Abrahamic peoples do (Christians, Jews, Muslims), so if there is a reason for natality God might have never been part of it.
A society that doesnt recognize children is doomed to disappear and thus be replaced by one that does recognize children and believe in children over material things. The question is which one is it gonna be, and why not ours (whatever nation you are from).
Status as I personally see it doesnt get in the way of having kids and foments women and men to have kids. Be it men actually respecting the bar and being fair (if she works, then you also contribute to the household tasks).
It should foment children taking into account women’s pov meaning giving them the chance to both have careers, contribute to society at large and also have 2-3 kids.
China, India, and Africa might have some tribes that had high birth rates for a time, but not a sustainable period of thousands of years. Why? Because in a society without transcendence people stop sacrificing for inconvenience because they realize their polity is based in a lie and instead only seek their own pleasure, which destroys the polity. Once that polity is weak it will be conquered by another polity which will also eventually stop sacrificing for the polity and only seek pleasure. This was traditionally called “the state of nature” in the Catholic tradition and the “cycle of regimes” by pagans like Plato in the Republic and Polybius
Yeah, but funnily the polity was usually a subgroup of the cultural group taking control and enforcing a sort of transcendence.
I agree with your point, but I dont see the point because heathen/irreligious societies also reproduced and had high fertility for longer than some religions have existed. This is what I meant by making your point moot
These countries had their own strong gods. China has had Confucianism, best defined as an atheistic religion, just as conservative and complimentarian as an Abrahamic faith. Africa is not secular in the slightest, has very large pockets dominated by Islam, and has some of the most devout Christians on earth, with some places having their laws designed around Christian principles.
Confucianism is seen at best as a humanist philosophy, no God in it. An equally secular philosphy could lead to similar outcomes, if Confucianism is to follow. They worshipped gods but under Taoism, Buddhism or Ancestor Veneration.
Africa had high natality even before the Christians and Muslims came, many Muslim recounting of the Islamization of the Sahel recount how like in pre-Islamic arabia the number of kids confered status and thus chieftains had many wives to bear many kids.
Christianization started in the 16th century with the Portuguese and late 18th with the English and French. Islamization started around the same time as the end of the Reconquista so 11th to 14th century.
The Confucianism point is semantics, you completely missed what I meant by “strong gods”. Same goes for adding additional faiths that dont* dominate East* Asian culture like Confucianism does.
The rest of what you said is true but not helpful. For Africa you can throw in widespread polygamy, kids to help as hands for agriculture, etc etc. You’re missing the relevant points of application to modern society, and the reason for kids is not due to economics, it’s due to culture and religiosity.
And yes it’s religiosity, not philosophy. The Latin definition of religion, “religio”, is “to Bind”. Philosophies don’t tightly bind entire cultures and countries into a single worldview, religions do, which is why Confucianism, with all of its ancestral worship, Christian-like covenental patriarchal households, and extreme obedience to authority and the state, is best described as an atheistic religion, because yes, not all religions are theistic.
No I actually got what you meant and my point was really not semantics. Religions as we see them (Abrahamic ones) are a complete worldview, closed to any other. Meaning that if you are a devout Christian, Muslim or Jew you cant and wont accept any other worldview other than the one it is revealed through the holy corpus.
The key in Abrahamic religions is its self enformcement. You follow the religion because it is God’s will, and if you dont you have X or Y abstract aethereal punishment under the form of eternal damnation. Confucianism has none of this, it is a state/humanist doctrine that is enforced by the state and culture which is why I meant it is a philosophical construct. You follow the confucian way because it is the moral way, but other than doing good for good you have external enforcement that varied by dynasties and thus is a very flexible philosophy to apply society wide.
In some times it was even forbidden and replaced by legalism or other philosophies. This is why I treat them as such, Confucianism can be seen as an Enlightment philosophy people agree on but that lacks teeth like a religion does to enforce itself. It may look like a duck, and act like it but at the end it is not one.
Also, men and women have been doing equal shares of the household work (combined totals of economic work and domestic work) for decades now. This feminist propaganda needs to die already.
I know in Nordic countries, France, Germany and the US it is the case. Not the same in the rest of the OECD and not even remotely in the emerging countries.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Heroine
So bring this back and make it a status symbol?
Yeah but in a way that actually talks to most women and doesnt diminish their concerns. A lot of my cohort (Gen Z) have grown up with basically anti-natalist propaganda from our families and the idea that you must live your life before you settle. One ought to convince them earnestly that those material pleasures, travels and all of those things that give status on social media are fake and after 30 years there will remain nothing of your travels to Bali or your weekends spent in a club (if that is all you do of your life).
Also funnily, the Soviet union tried but like everything there no one took it seriously, starting by the state itself.
Not going to work. The reason the anti-natalist propaganda was there in the first place is because society was structured around pleasure rather than duty. Going to Bali is way more fun than having and raising kids but pleasure is not the only thing that matters
yes yes yes!
I'm surprised that you haven't mentioned contraceptives. Before 60s you didn't have them nor porn so sooner or later you would have sex(especially men). That caused cultures to force early marriage so there wouldn't be whole society of single mothers. Now sex is usually purely hedonistic pleasure and people can choose to just not have kids
This is also a popular misconception, contraception has existed under different forms much earlier than the pill. For example, condoms come from french because they were produced in the french city of Condom.
There is written contraceptive use of different methods (Catholic rythm methods, condoms out of animal insides, herbs and combinations…) that had different levels of efficacy back in the 1700s.
For sexual revolution contraceptives have to be almost always effective. Lowering chance by half isn't enough. Also I suspect that those methods weren't available for everyone
According to the W.H.O., approximately 73 million abortions are performed worldwide each year…
Seems strange to overlook such a large number of babies that get “un-personed” for convenience… 🤔
You willing to adopt those millions? Sure, fewer abortions means more children . . with parents who didn't want them. Is that better?
There is no such thing as an unwanted baby. Just babies unwanted by their gamete donors.
The are 36 couples trying to adopt a baby for every baby put up for adoption.
Hey, I'm all for making adoption easier as well.
You are assuming that if women were prevented from having abortions they would have those children, plus whatever children they went on to have later in life. I don't think that assumption is warranted. If a woman is forced to have more children earlier in life, she will probably compensate by having fewer later in life.
He is assuming correctly, restricting contraception and abortion is one historically proven way to increase fertility rates. Romania did it and fertility went from 1.9 in 1966 to 3.66 in 1967, and the rates remained consistently above 2.1 until communism fell in 1990 and restrictions were removed.
He specifically mentioned abortion. The only research on it that I've seen is a paper by Donahue, Grogger, and Levitt (2009) that basically finds that abortion reduces total lifetime fertility by, at most, a tenth of a child per woman. This is because most women denied abortions compensate later in life by having fewer children. Abortion mostly serves to change the time when a woman bears children, not how many she actually bears.
The initial surge in fertility in Romania was short-lived, people adapted to it fast. At most it delayed Romania's fertility decline by a decade. If you look at graphs, it looks like Romania's fertility is falling, there is a spike when the ban occurs, and then fertility begins falling again at nearly the same rate after the spike. I imagine it would be even easier to adapt today. The modern world is far less boring than communist Romania, people can just stay at home and scroll social media instead of having sex.
Romania's policy also led to those orphanages full of kids with serious mental health issues. That seems really bad, remember that the goal of increasing fertility is to increase the amount of happy and productive people in the world.
First of Romania banned contraception in totality, not just abortion. If you look at Romanian fertility people adapted, but it was still above replacement rates, so clearly they didn't adapt to pre-abortion ban when it was 1.9. Te fall below 2 only happened once communism fell and contraception was made legal once again. This is the only historic policy that worked.
> Romania's policy also led to those orphanages full of kids with serious mental health issues. That seems really bad, remember that the goal of increasing fertility is to increase the amount of happy and productive people in the world.
People do not have to be happy to be productive. Without constant growth civilisation will inevitably collapse as there won't be enough bodies to keep it running. Already you are seeing systems collapse in western countries, due to lack of manpower to keep them running.
The mental health issues that the orphans suffered didn't just make them unhappy. It also made them unproductive by making them mentally ill and prone to criminality. It's true that people don't need to be happy to be productive, but there isn't much of a point to preserving civilization if the majority of people inhabiting it aren't happy.
I looked at a chart of Romanian fertility, and it was a steady decline, followed by a spike when the policy was adopted, followed by a resumption of the steady decline once the spike was over. That indicates that the spike was temporary and fertility would have continued declining even if the regime hadn't fallen.
If you looked at the chart you'd see that the fertility kept above 2 right until communism fell and contraception was legalised.
Don’t make me post the meme
Post whatever you want. I said what I said.
I’m skeptical that the “fertility crisis” even exists.
We know the media and academia and the powers that be basically make shit up the vast majority of the time and the “fertility crisis” has been the main justification for flooding America and Europe with orcs and pajeets. That should be reason enough to make one highly skeptical.
Even if it wasn’t fake, people act like it isn’t the easiest problem in the world to solve. Stop taking pills, fuck without a rubber and don’t murder the babies. Nobody’s too poor; most of your ancestors were raised on a dirt floor and the orcs and pajeets flooding into the west manage to raise 12 kids a piece back home under a roof that blows away every three weeks.
Yes, the elites lie about everything so thats possible.
https://futuredad.substack.com/p/futuredad-38-why-do-the-elite-lie?r=59rk8t
It clearly isn't the easiest problem to solve since no-one has solved it, despite the cause being very clear: -
https://futuredad.substack.com/p/futuredad-32-the-fertility-rate-crash?r=59rk8t
One Google search to find that literally every single first world country on earth is well below replacement rate, will reveal to you how real and extremely serious this problem is. This is why the article is bothering to mention extremely heavy handed options, as those are what is left to try.
You are a special kind of fucking retard.
What part of, "We know the media and academia and the powers that be basically make shit up the vast majority of the time" do you not understand?
Do you need to Google that, too?
Oh, you’re one of the deranged conspiracy theorists that believes every statistic on earth is produced by a shadowy cabal of elite illuminati type figures? That control every single country’s output of information simultaneously? And you don’t have the ability to identify and review sources? Sorry I bothered responding to you
Solutions 8A and 8B are, in fact, being implemented as we speak.
The other issue is that increasing birth rates *right now* would also make the dependance ratio worse *right now*. Think about it. Who are the dependents? Essentially, the young (children) and the old (retirees). I know, I know, the disabled, the rentier class, etc. etc. But in terms of sheer numbers, it's basically children and retirees. So, children and retirees compete for the same resources. A child is born, and suddenly, the mother becomes a less productive employee (for starters, by staying home for a while to take care of her baby), contributing less to the tax pool, which translates into fewer resources for the old. Moreover, the state provides all sorts of resources for the child (for example, schooling). These resources could otherwise be spent on the old. So, it is only natural that old people will support de facto anti-natalist policies, since this reduces competition that old people face. Oh, sure, they might want grandchildren of their own, but who needs 4.41?! (2.1^2 = 4.41) One or two grandchildren will do just fine. And who needs *other* people's grandchildren? So, vote for policies that reduce birth rates. By the time today's infants are old enough to contribute economically, today's retirees will be dead anyway.
Yeah, this has always been used as an argument to do nothing. Too bad, then some luxury projects will need to be cut down, and retirees will get less social security money.
Eventually, what you're suggesting is guaranteed to happen. Having a typical person live 80+ years and dying of/with dementia is something that only very wealthy societies can afford. So, expect entitlements for the old to shrink and life expectancy to go down. But this is likely to happen at a slower rate than the overall societal impoverishment, meaning that birth rates will keep tanking for a while yet.
Orrrrr people will just work longer. In first world countries outside the US, both lifespans and healthspans are increasing. Per capita wealth is mostly increasing throughout most of the world as well, and AI may accelerate that.
The future will be extremely wild and different and we don't quite know what it will look like.
From the perspective of individual utility, having a child is a heavy net cost to both the mother and father, but especially the mother. If individual utility is the highest value then children are The Enemy of Progress.
In previous ages the economic conditions for raising a child were much worse than they are now, even for the very rich. And yet people did it anyway. Our lack of fertility is perhaps a result of the peculiar degree to which our society valorises self actualisation and individual expression.
For people to have kids, they need to believe in *something* other than themselves and their own wellbeing; they must believe willing to sacrifice something for the benefit of others.
Essentially, people are trying too hard to make themselves happy, failing because their notion of happiness is bogus; and producing results that make life more miserable for everyone else in the process
Society has been turned into a government brokered Ponzi scheme rather than a collection of self-sustaining units
Once upon a time, children were your retirement plan and the family was a core unit of economic investment. People lived, worked & died in the context of the family
Now, people are individuals who “invest” their money in the government (tax) with the expectation that government will broker all their services. Especially retirement.
Loved this. Not because I endorse the ideas, but how thoroughly you thought through the many options, a couple of which I had never considered. Very well done. 👍🏻🏆😎
I think we could actually do a couple of them together. Pay young couples to have children and raise the retirement age are a start.
Fixing the economy such that more men would make a good income could help quite a bit as well. Such as eliminating the income tax so that we all got to keep the full paycheck. If fewer people would need government programs if they got to keep their full paycheck.
It's probably impossible to pay the middle classes enough to incentivize them to produce more children. After all, the tax money has to come from somewhere. Where is it going to come from? Incentivizing the welfare class to have children is easier, but few people want to do that, for obvious reasons. If you want to incentivize the middle classes to have more children, you probably need more indirect subsidies such as cheaper housing and/or education. This is bad for the rentier class, which will obviously fight it. The other problem is that it's probably impossible for monetary incentives to increase fast enough to keep up with increasing social atomization. The more socially atomized you are (for example, no grandparents to babysit), the more money you need to compensate for that. Advanced social atomization makes children very, very expensive, and even if you have the funds, the children still turn out less well. It's like using a ton of fertilizer to grow crops on poor soil, only to have those crops turn out less well than if you simply had quality topsoil. I am not sure there's much that policy makers can do to fight social atomization, and even if they could, the effects would be very slow.
Note that immigration was supposed to be a solution for this problem. Someone else, somewhere else, produces and raises the children, and then you get a ready-made adult, free of charge. Except that "someone else, somewhere else" isn't producing too many children, either (not anymore), plus the imported adults disproportionately turned out not to have been made to the host countries' cultural specifications, leading to a backlash. Well, producing a well adjusted adult to Western countries' cultural specifications is difficult and expensive, which is why it's increasingly not being done.
Germany has had negative population growth well ahead of many other countries that are getting there. Their system was to pay a couple hundred Deutsch Marks per child, increasing the amount for each additional child. It wasn’t a huge amount of money but a monthly stipend for a number of years anyway. 🤷♂️
Cutting other wasteful spending and growing the economy could easily generate room for modest incentives.
A nation should at least replace itself without having to import from other cultures. And as politically incorrect as the statement may be, we should import from compatible cultures far more, and eliminate incompatible cultures from being brought here. At least in great numbers. Preserving culture is pretty important it turns out. Europe is discovering that now.
Wow, I think Americans have a larger number of people willing to have big families than Europeans. I think the incentive would work better here in America. Even if the incentive had to be matched on the backend by having increasing tax deductions for additional children to double up the incentive.
I don’t think we are suffering from industrial rot, but rather cultural rot. Particularly coming from feminism which told women that serving their families was “unpaid labor“… Breaking your back for a corporate master who doesn’t give a damn about you is somehow empowering to women.
If we can find a way, we need to turn back the cultural clock and the economy by getting back to one income households. Even if that means we freeze immigration and allow a worker shortage to develop the wages can increase. If men became high earners again, women would respect them more, and I think plenty of women would be happy to become homemaker again And not work so hard. Not sure we can put that genie back in the bottle, but I think it’s worth an attempt.
Nah, you're not going to see the 1950s again. If the housing market crashes, it's possible that you'll see a mini baby boom, but not if that's accompanied by an economic depression.
Europe is more densely populated than the United States, and apartments are much smaller (few people live in houses). Try having 5 kids in a 70 sq m (that's 753 sq ft) apartment. And actually, 70 sq m is quite difficult to afford for a young couple, unless they inherited it. Now try the same exercise with a 40 sq m apartment, which is a bit easier to afford (two incomes definitely help).
America is different than Europe on housing… but I meant a return to the 80’s not the 50’s. Not a “return” really but a reinvention of American prosperity resembling it.
Frankly, as AI starts deleting jobs, the workplace will get very sparse. That might be exactly the impetus to get back to one income households and homemakers who work for their family instead of a corporate cubicle.
If AI generates mass unemployment (we'll see if it does), then you can expect an economic depression, in which case, birth rates will tank.
As I said: "It's probably impossible to pay the middle classes enough to incentivize them to produce more children." What you say about Germany suggests that I was right. Doesn't it? If it were a couple thousand rather than a couple hundred, that might have done the trick. And where are the couple thousand going to come from?
The broader point is that the industrial civilization is simply unsustainable. People have been talking about this since before I was born, and I am not young. They've been focusing on the non-renewable material resources, but it appears that the industrial civilization is unsustainable in additional (social/biological) ways as well. To wit: to get a highly productive workforce, you need atomization, but once your population is atomized, it can no longer produce enough children to reproduce itself.
Half of those aren't solutions in sense that they would be impossible to implement, and even if implemented, would not solve the problem. Also, the problem isn't just with large number of unproductive old men, but the fact that declining population means lesser and lesser amount of people to upkeep and hold infrastructure which makes our life at all possible in modern technological civilization - and we absolutely need to keep lights running, because we don't have an option to go rural again without civilizational collapse.
Civilizational collapse may be in the cards eventually, but not immediately. The way it works is that you simply stop providing certain services to certain areas. What exactly the "services" are will depend on how far along the collapse curve you find yourself, but it can be anything from "no GPs anywhere within 50 miles" to "no electricity and running water in your area, sorry." So, your total population shrinks, while the population of major cities grows. Major cities are very expensive, with relatively little in the way of informal family and friend networks to help with child raising, and so few children are born there. However, all opportunities are in the major cities, and so young people who were born elsewhere migrate to the cities. The overall population declines, while the population of major cities grows. Lots of ghost towns, but no civilizational collapse, or at least not for a while.
I am not sure this can be done at any extended period of time, but I have no way of proving this or reverse, so I think it’s a good comment.
I believe that the technical term is "kicking the can down the road." No, you cannot do this (grow a few cities as the rest of the country depopulates) permanently, but you can do it for quite a while. The same applies to all sorts of other things as well.
Sounds like The Hunger Games.
The classical economic model includes 'primate cities' and 'hinterlands.' Depopulating the hinterland will impoverish and destabilize the urban cores (hint: not much food grown in cities). 'Hollowing out' is the popular term these days.
Cities are expensive because they are socially fractured, inefficient, and have the perception of dirt, disease and danger. In other words, cities are poorly planned, haphazardly populated and burdened with amateurish, corrupt administration.
Re-urbanization based on solid planning and design can solve many problems.
It may also require massive demolition and reconstruction, as well as political will, cooperation, and-- underpinning all-- the desire for humanity to see and participate in the future of the universe. This last point is questionable, based on many comments seen on this platform.
China engaged in re-urbanization-- the result was often good, but also tainted by corruption bourn of the single-party system. For example, destruction of ancient villages and farmland without recourse, and infrastructure projects that were sometimes repeated two or three times like a successful Hollywood movie formula.
China played with anti-natalism and is suffering demographic buyer's remorse. Irony: with tariffs cutting off access to the teat of Walmart, and the West's exclusionary tech policies, China is now racing forward with internally powered energy and AI industries, and developing cutting edge orbital operations technology. China seems to have a great interest in the future, and has ceased the muttering of Malthusian mantras.
Would that China give up its Elitist Confucian hangover, popularize governance, and open it's economy entirely. Perhaps the world would finally learn the shape of things to come.
Good article sometimes it helps to just objectively look at the extremes and work your way up to something resembling a solution I don’t think this is offensive or that you’re advocating any of this lol. The problem with fertility though as you’ve presented it is simply the financial burden and entitlements due to a large aging population. Take away the entitlements to the elderly gradually and eliminate some of those issues. Historically it seems the elderly were a net benefit when they moved into the home with the younger family and helped out. Now we have a mentality where boomers want to revert to a state of permanent vacation goers for the remainder of their lives and hold on to their property forever. Booomers have also infected their offspring with the mindset of every family going forth and shedding family ties in order to chase the highest paying jobs and reinventing the wheel of home ownership. Families should take care of their own and not the state and when families pool resources they become powerful. Everyone thinks having kids is a burden because we have the mindset that we have to launch every child into college and a deep space mission to find a home and a job and never fathom that if we stick together and work together we can increase our wealth and security. This reminds me of all the trash articles where wives bicker about household labor division with the husband then casually mention that have a 10 year old and a 13 year old child!! The kids do the fucking chores for god sake problem solved!!! How do you think Murdaughs in South Carolina basically became god kings in their area with just a few shit kicker law degrees over the generations?! It’s because they pooled their resources and stuck together over time in the same area. When people understand the benefits of having a clan and sticking together in one area then you’ll have all the incentive you need to breed more and of course this only applies if your family actually works and doesn’t just take handouts and live in public housing for generations.
People keep saying 'fertility' when they mean 'fecundity,' good to see the term used properly.
But more paragraphs, please. Thanks.
There is another solution, which will come eventualy: artificial wombs.
On 1 I am not sure that this will be restricting rights or not. It seems to me that most women want to have kids, but they cant rigth now.
So we are now in the Reverse of the Handsmaid Tale, and It is so restrictive as the previous tale.
Women might say they want kids but unless they have a spiritual principle inculcated in them by their father or husband hedonism will always win
Nope. The shiny tech toys are all Fake and Gay. No artificial wombs. No RoboWaifus. You get to SUFFAH. Nothing else.
Just Fucking SUFFAH.
Most of these solutions are likely to result in civil war and unrest leading to an accelerated collapse instead of preventing it.
We should've let Covid rip through the old population, and I'm only half joking.
If you read https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/sudden-and-unexpected-thursday-july then you may be aware that there seems to be a recent uptick in "died of suddenly" again affecting the elderly. So that might be happening anyway, just not in 2020
What’s doable right now is encouraging “beautiful smart people to have more kids because they are better” thus normalizing this attitude in the culture. Appealing to the best instincts of the best people.
There is very little worth living for - why would I force one or more new humans to have to confront this same bullshit for the next 20-40 years, especially when it will inevitably get a lot worse before it gets better? If it ever gets better?? Why would I do what my parents generation did and say, essentially "What worked for us will never happen for you without a total reset on society, and we've pulled up the ladder and will keep voting against your generation controlling anything ever. The paid-to-lie morons on cable news tell us everything is going great, except for you selfish younger people wanting rights and freedoms and healthcare and whatever, so fuck you. Good luck pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
In fairness, they had it easy, and their parents thought this was a benefit instead of a cost. Their parents definitely did not have it easy, but they persevered. Many of their generation did not.
There are too many humans on Earth, which is why our environment is fucked. We need fewer humans, not more humans. Maybe if the 10 people who owned 90% of everything didn't have a stranglehold on actual progress we could find a more egalitarian way forward, but instead we've got what we've got. See you down in Arizona Bay.
I’ll go with retarded. Have a nice day.
It sounds like Maynard.
Given your reference to Arizona Bay, I’m surprised you didn’t recognize the other lyrics.
Are you retarded? Or is English not your first language?
Have you learned to swim? Really? Doesn't sound like it.
Not if you just blame everyone else and cry, cry, cry...
If you were unlucky enough to be born in SoCal in the last 20 years, then you do have my sympathy.
What does the knowledge of swimming sound like, bright boy?
Wipe up your drool and bother someone else.