Why didn’t you mention the #1 reason for the drop in fertility: lower childhood mortality? People definitely had to have more babies when only half made it to age 15. It kind of poisons the well to leave that out, and makes the problem look twice as bad as it is.
Also, something that gets left off lists of the reasons for the drop in fertility because of Social Desirability Bias is the taboo against infanticide. When people could just kill a baby if they couldn’t support it, they likely would have been able to have more children closer to their limit of supportable offspring. Not advocating a return of infanticide, but worth noting that this was a common practice in many cultures that isn’t talked about.
I wasn't trying to list all possible causes. I was instead trying to list our cherished values that are now in conflict with fertility. Because that is where the reckoning must lie.
It just feels many times these lists of modern values that “lower fertility rate” are simply lists of complaints Conservatives Christian have about modernity. To wit, I’m unconvinced that egalitarian gender roles lower fertility rate since Japan and Korea have some of the most conservative cultures in gender roles in household work in rich countries and have the lowest birth rates.
I’m not saying that you doing this intentionally, I just think that most thought and research on increasing fertility rates has a conservative agenda. I’d like to see at least one item on the list that makes a Conservative Christian as uncomfortable as the other items make an egalitarian agnostic. Maybe like some of the taboos against fertility technologies like cloning and human genetic engineering.
You are welcome to suggest more items for the list of values that conflict with fertility, but I'm not going to add things just to make Christians feel bad. For example, I just can't see wariness of cloning as an important obstacle to fertility at the moment.
That’s fair, I’m just telling you how it reads as is. It’s like if someone shows me a list of voting reforms (like voter ID and more validity checks on mail in voting) and I’m like “these all favor republican outcomes, surely there much be some good reforms that favor democrats” and they say “I’m not going to come up with something to placate democrats feelings.” They may all be fine reforms but if they all line up with one side of a divide, you’re going to have a hard time building a consensus.
> I’m just telling you how it reads as is. It’s like if someone shows me a list of voting reforms (like voter ID and more validity checks on mail in voting) and I’m like “these all favor republican outcomes, surely there much be some good reforms that favor democrats”
There's nothing inherently Republican about any of those reforms, they're all common sense anti-fraud reforms. That anti-fraud reforms all favor Republican outcomes should be telling you something.
There are also great reforms that favor democrats, and reduce voter suppression like early voting, universal mail-in, and automatic voter registration, but I would be equally suspicious if someone only proposed those, without some of the common-sense anti-fraud ones.
OMG, you’re right! I’ve looked into it and every voting reform that the people on the right want is practical, doesn’t suppress legitimate votes, and prevents fraud and every reform people on the left want is so that they can do fraud and steal elections! How convenient! There’s no tribal or self-serving parts to the platforms at all, expect on the left, how dumb I’ve been.
I do hope I didn’t come off as too antagonistic, I’m basically on the same page as you, especially on how lower population hurts innovation, but I want to put forward a vision that everyone can see isn’t biased.
A good example of something left-leaning that promotes fertility is banning adoption agencies from discriminating against gay people. This discriminatory practice artificially drives down the demand for children.
??? You think people are having fewer children because they are worried homosexuals won't be able to adopt them? That seems implausible to me.
Also, unless things have changed, it's pretty difficult to adopt a healthy baby without special needs. I know people that have managed it in months; I know people that have been trying for several years. I'm not sure if the different results are because of being better able to navigate the complexities, having more resources, or just blind luck.
> You think people are having fewer children because they are worried homosexuals won't be able to adopt them? That seems implausible to me.
He's just desperate to avoid having to admit the *gasp* Christian Conservatives were more-or-less right about this, and is currently in the bargaining stage.
> but I want to put forward a vision that everyone can see isn’t biased.
The problem is that reality is in fact "biased" in this case.
> A good example of something left-leaning that promotes fertility is banning adoption agencies from discriminating against gay people. This discriminatory practice artificially drives down the demand for children.
> I’d like to see at least one item on the list that makes a Conservative Christian as uncomfortable as the other items make an egalitarian agnostic.
Well conservative Christians have a higher fertility rate than egalitarian agnostics. That suggests that they're a lot more comfortable with the cultural traits that enable high fertility.
You're just going to have to swallow your pride and admit the Christian Conservatives were mostly right here.
In a fully traditional society (think Afghanistan) women have no economic options and fertility is very high. The Asian countries are in a halfway zone that seems to be a fertility minimum: Women have the ability to support themselves economically, but burdensome cultural expectations lead them to opt out of married/family life.
Within Japan and Korea those that are religious are higher fertility then those that aren't, but so secularism is so overwhelming that fertility is low.
Japan and Korea engaged in a lot of technocratic anti-fertility policy in the second half the the 20th century, they got the results they were going for.
It is bizarre to see secularists complain about Christians wrt fertility. Just look at the data. The collapse in fertility is most of all a problem among secularists.
The TFR among secularists is around 1 child per woman, essentially a total collapse to far below replacement. The religious are the ones holding their own. Do secularists offer any competing pronatalist vision? The only one who does this is Elon Musk, with an optimistic futurist vision where humanity expands into the stars.
Is Kevin V willing endorse Elon Musk's ideas? Is he willing to offer any secular answer to the fertility crisis? The world needs secularists to help solve this, and yet most secularists offer almost nothing to the greatest crisis the world faces.
I don’t feel like Elon has any actual proposals of value in this area. He’s pretty much all pie-in-the-sky technological dreaming like artificial wombs and child rearing robots and trying to have as many kids as possible personally.
Hmmm i'm not so sure. A lot of liberal people seem to subscribe to such inhumanely elevated standards of ideal parenting and buy into the vision of having children as overwhelming on the one hand, and identity defining on the other task of self expression of some sort, rather than just a thing people do. So no wonder they don't have kids.
That could explain some of the drop, but not to below replacement levels. You'd expect it to just offset net population growth.
Wealth seems a more likely explanation than mortality though. Child mortality could get to 0, but as wealth kept increasing fertility could still fall.
The natural equilibrium is to have the population at Malthusian limits. The constraint on lifetime fertility was the shortage of food for keeping all children alive.
True. But 'replacement fertility' used to be a lot higher than it is now. What happened was: we mastered infant mortality, and other early deaths, and created a world where almost every child born can expect to live into adulthood and old age. Two things happened then: the population exploded and innovation exploded.
But the population explosion happened because our cultural mores were built for a reality where 5+ pregnancies are needed for 'replacement level'. The cultural momentum of those mores caused the population explosion after that reality changed, which in turn caused the innovation explosion.
Now the cultural momentum has run out, and our mores are shifting to a 2 pregnancies for replacement reality, coupled with a 'we're so rich and invulnerable we don't need to replace ourselves' illusory reality (which has only rarely existed in human history - Robin's reference to the Romans in the OP is not a coincidence - and is always an illusion, see for example: the Romans).
I pretty much agree with everything you just said, I just think that the end to the high growth period was always inevitable. Maybe it came one generation earlier than we might have hoped for, but it not practical to compare to historical fertility rates and how for that.
I also think that having a slow, steady growth mindset is going to be important for humans into the distant future: If we have a Mars colony that can support 20k children max and the people there make 18k they will be okay and can make up the difference later, if they have 22k, there will be violence over whose children have to go with lower rations and whose grandparents have to be euthanized to support them.
I agree it's inevitable that 'our' mores will shift to the 2 pregnancies for replacement reality, but I don't think it has to shift to the illusory less than replacement level.
And, as is the point of the OP 'our' mores are not the only ones in play. There are small, insular groups who cling to much higher fertility mores, and a real possible outcome is that they will replace us.
It’s obviously multi-causal, pretending it’s not obscures solutions. Like, if we ignore it and adopt solutions that will don’t work that well like living in techno-phobic cultures that will drive up fertility rates in the short term but ultimately increase childhood mortality in the long term because they don’t vaccinate and can’t develop new antibiotics.
"People are sometimes confused by the fact that complex conditions have a long list of necessary factors. However, the odds against more than one necessary factor pushing the phenomenon across the line into epidemic at the exact same time are astronomical."
If it’s astronomically unlikely that more than one factor was the reason this became a crisis why did Robin list 8: “These include valuing city life, schooling, intensive parenting, “finding ourselves” before marriage, preferring careers and friends to family, and also disliking religion, arranged marriages and traditional gender roles”.
That reason is that while there one is indeed the cause that pushed fertility rates over the edge into a problem, changing a combination of the issues listed has the potential to get fertility rate above replacement regardless.
Those things aren't independent but instead have a common cause: the shift from farming to industry made society richer and thereby weakened the social institutions we'd evolved under farming to adapt our hunter-gatherer era genes for different conditions.
That makes no sense. Infanticide would lower the population. That’s one of the reasons Christianity won, they didn’t practice infanticide and adopted abandoned children. Even back in the old Roman days they would abandon them and not kill them out-right. Why kill a child when there are long wait-lists of families desperate to adopt? But at least you’re saying the quiet part out loud, most pro-abortion arguments have also worked for infanticide. But you do you, my descendants will survive and yours may ... not. I don’t care.
Dude, I literally said I wasn’t advocating for it. I was saying two things:
1. I was giving an example of a value that probably lowered fertility rate, but would be abhorrent. Let’s remember fertility rate is just the number of children born per woman, so focusing on that number alone could lead to terrible things.
2. I was pointing out that many times these lists of modern values that “lower fertility rate” are simply lists of complaints Conservatives Christian have about modernity. To wit, I’m unconvinced that egalitarian gender roles lower fertility rate since Japan and Korea have some of the most conservative cultures in gender roles in household work in rich countries and have the lowest birth rates.
Yes, Christianity has took over Europe and has it as a taboo, but there is a world outside Europe where it wasn’t, look up the history in Asia.
Again, since I guess people don’t read infanticide is repugnant, but I find some of the values that we might have to give up to drive up birth rates in this list also quite disgusting.
I’m having a hard time understanding you, I think. Are you saying that infanticide is bad but normalizing it might increase birth rate as an example of how we shouldn’t look exclusively at birth rate?
Japan and Korea allow women to get educated and work. It’s only if a woman has children that their conservative values kick in. This obviously results in low fertility because women don’t want to give up their careers to stay at home and raise children. I don’t speak Japanese or Korea but I would assume that mainstream culture considers being a stay at home mom to be undesirable work. A culture that would actually work is if women aren’t given high education and aren’t encouraged to have a career and are encouraged to be mothers. That’s basically the whole thing, does the culture say that being a mom to a bunch of kids is a desirable job or not and obviously there needs to be a practical component of men wanting to be husbands and fathers who are able and willing to support their wives and children. It’s not that complicated. What values would we have to give up?
Just because infanticide was practiced in Asia before birth control and back when starvation was common has nothing to do with our current society of birth control and zero starvation. And Muslims are overtaking Hindu Indians because of the baby girl infanticide issue.
1. We shouldn’t look exclusively at fertility rates, but a more downstream metric, because if we adopted a policy that resulted in 40% higher fertility rates but 50% of children dying before their first birthday than would not actually address the problem.
2. Saying that we can just somehow give up values to raise fertility rate, only makes sense if you don’t hold those values to begin with. It doesn’t really matter if making infanticide acceptable drives up birth rates: there’s no way we’d change our values to accept it even if doing so increased fertility rates 50% (I think it’s pretty marginal but possibly slightly positive). If you’re willing to change one of your values, then you didn’t really have that value.
1. Ok, while technically true I don’t find this point very useful. If we had a bunch of children dying that would be a huge problem. But if they aren’t even being born at all that’s also a problem.
2. People can change their values. And if we are talking about what values society has, we can talk about what we think the values of society should be. I’m still wondering what values you think we need to change? I still don’t get why you think infanticide would increase fertility rate, but whatever.
A more libertarian approach might be to consider how government hinders fertility e.g. grain subsidies, laws against free-range kids - https://reason.com/tag/free-range-kids/ - et cetera, and stop doing those things.
Scott didn't say that other suggestions were anti-libertarian, but there are plenty of anti-family government policies that to libertarians are obvious. In the old days, family was the primary source of security and resources at all stages of life. The most oft-cited example is children being one's insurance, pension, and caregivers (though with Social Security diminishing that deal may yet return). It applies in other subtler ways. If parents (and perhaps extended family) were paying for a child's education, they could expect the child to feel some gratitude (I certainly do); state-financed education produces no gratitude in anyone. State-financed education tends to stretch on longer (incredibly so, here in Germany), which burns tax money and delays and reduces the periods for both productive employment and having a family. Perhaps with good intentions (e.g., "The Swedish Theory of Love"), we created policies to free people from the vagaries of family support, and, not surprisingly, we got a society where people value family less.
Having said all that, I should note that around the world the fertility gap is about 1, so people do say they want more children than they are having.
None of those things really make a big difference. Outside of COVID, I've never seen anyone do anything in the link, feels more like an urban legend.
I would assume that any reform libertarians have been pushing for about 50 years with no success probably aren't going to happen tomorrow and thus they shouldn't distract from the issue Robin brings up.
FWIW, I'm 61 and have one biological child (raised two). I very much regret not having had many more.
I've emphasized that to both the kids I raised and encouraged them to have lots of kids.
I don't remember anyone talking that way when I was their age. We're at an extreme point historically, maybe as more people end up like me we'll encourage the next generation to change their values.
I can tell you what mine is. When I was deciding how many kids I wanted to father, I considered a lot of things that I wish I didn't, mostly having to do with lifestyle and expenses. I thought two was a good number that I could afford and still maintain my standard of living. That was unbelievably shortsighted and stupid and my biggest regret is considering those expenses at all in the first place. None of it mattered. Today my two kids are the source of 90% of my joy, 90% of my fun, 90% of my laughs, 90% of my satisfaction with life. So maybe I have more money today than I would have. How much good is that money bringing me just sitting there in an account waiting to be used or spent or left behind? Each child brings more good to my life than a billion dollars could. When I think of what could have been, the massive wealth I could have had just by having had more children, I kick myself for being practical about it. Nobody ever told me what being a father was like. My own dad died young and I never really knew the upsides, only the potential downsides.
Israel is the ONLY 1st world/industrialized/high gdp per capita/whatever country with above replacement tfr. in fact not only is it above, it's well above and stable if not growing, around 2.9-3.0ish, sustainable and compatible with a healthy productive high tech and growing economy.
you'd think more people would be interested in this. you'd think. Digging down into why, is it just orthodox (no, seculars also above 2.1), is it a historical quirk, what's replicable/exportable, what can we learn, what doesn't work (muh nordic daycare), etc.
In Israel, the demonstrations in the last year is very much rooted in the demographic changes of the country. It's true that secular Jews have a fertility around 2.1, but that pales completely in comparison to the Hamish Jews, whose fertility rate has been above 6-7 for decades. The religious Jews have other wishes and ideas for the state of Israel, and as they are becoming the majority in these years, the laws of the land in Israel is almost destined to change in ways that secular Jews will dislike.
Some stuff, like free IVF, could be copied without much resistance.
Other stuff, like being a militant ethno-state, would go against the reigning ideology. Israel has always had a kind of "unprincipled exception" on this.
I know a few Israelis (all of them secular). They're definitely fecund compared to Americans.
My sense is it's a sense of duty/political - Israel has been outnumbered by surrounding enemies for its entire existence. And maybe also a sense of competition with Israeli Orthodox - secular Israelis really don't have much use for them, and fear they'll take over the country.
I'm one of those people happy to mostly kick this can down the road a few decades. Various countries are trying different things, and over the next few decades they'll try some more things, likely more strenuously. That seems sufficient for the time being.
I mean, they're "trying things", but to my knowledge nobody is trying to remove the messed up incentives that come from most modern countries promising that future taxpayers will pay for retirement benefits. If people that sacrificed to have kids got better social security or other retirement benefits in recognition that they are the ones that essentially invested enough to cover the costs of retirement benefits, people might not see kids as such a financial sacrifice.
Is that not more or less what everyone working on AI and robotics is doing? The very rich, for instance, have above replacement fertility even in which countries like the United States the most likely reason is that they have the ability to easily hire people to do most of the the tasks which make having children very costly. Their marginal cost are very very low. The people working in AI and robotics are essentially trying to do that for everyone.
Sure, you could frame that as them trying to overcome terrible incentives put in place by governments and that's great, but it'd be relatively low hanging fruit to just make sure the incentives from taxes don't point people in the wrong direction. Still going to need the AI and robotics advancement for countries that are too far gone demographically for a baby boom to help (which is most developed countries?), but just stopping incentivizing making the problem work would still be a good thing to do.
Can you explain this a bit more? Genuinely curious about what you mean. But agree that upper class is onto something. Accumulate wealth, outsource tasks and value having many well educated kids. If we can lower associated costs of educating and caring for many kids, there will be many more such kids.
Oh I just mean that the most likely reason the rich have above replacement fertility is that they can readily outsource many tasks to others (nannies, maids, chauffeurs, etc.) which frees them up from much of the drudgery of children and reduces opportunity costs.
Once we can have cheap robots that can do housework, babysit, self driving cars so travel time is productive (or at least less monotonous) etc., then most everyone would have similar material conditions as the rich today, and thus likely have above replacement fertility as well.
Certainly more resources is a big part of that and I'd guess a bigger part of it, but I think you may be underestimating how much high birth rate and high wealth/income are driven by the same factors. Children are in some ways the ultimate long term investment. The same people that are going to be willing to sacrifice early on to accumulate wealth on average are likely to also be the ones that keep a long term enough view that they are willing to deal with the sacrifices involved in raising children in order to enjoy the benefits.
The government paying people to have children is a terrible idea. We don’t want a nation of foster children, born to be a paycheck to their parents. And the government can’t afford it anyway. The mainstream culture will fall and that’s a good thing.
You’re assuming that the payment will be a static amount, which of course would be worth more to ghetto mamas.
But while I think tax credits would be a good thing, I would focus a lot on proportional tax cuts. For instance income, SS, and Medicare taxes are all % progressive taxes. Lowering the them based on the number of children you have would benefit the middle and upper middle classes more than the poor.
It’s not hard to come up with a system that provided income relevant incentives and had a eugenic tilt. A simple step would be to allow people who are married and filing jointly to take an additional standard deduction for each kid.
There is even a built in rationale, people who had kids have in a sense already funded SS more then those that didn’t.
Lastly, just using the money we spend differently would help. We spend a lot on k-12 education that many of our biggest breeders don’t even value enough to use. Simply allowing more parental choice with that money would increase fertility. Similar issue with subsidized daycare, penalizes SAHM and is fundamentally scalar marginal cost.
Payroll taxes aren’t progressive. They actually have a cap and are a flat rate from the first dollar earned. Why not just get rid of them completely? The Amish are exempt from having to pay payroll taxes and they have high fertility rates. And I don’t think there is the political will to start pro-eugenic tax exemptions anyway.
And hard core homeschoolers like me are very sensitive about the idea of the government giving us anything. We don’t want the government paying us what they would be spending on the public school system, because it always comes with strings. Just leave us alone and stop taxing us, that would be nice. I didn’t have kids to pay for social security.
Payroll taxes are progressive up to the cap, which is higher than most people earn. They will probably get rid of the cap at some point when the trust fund runs out anyway. Medicare and income taxes don’t have a cap.
Obviously you would t call it “pro eugenic tax credits”. You would call it “tax breaks for those that are creating the next generation of taxpayers”. The reality of the law as written would do its work.
Whether or not you get left alone will be sue to politics and not whether you receive government money or not. Paranoid homeschooler resistance to school vouchers is a huge own goal.
My husband makes the cap. And it’s not progressive up to the cap, it’s a flat rate. You don’t know what progressive means or you don’t know how payroll taxes work. And it doesn’t matter if most people don’t make the cap, that’s the point actually, the fact that only the high earners get that break makes it a regressive tax. We weren’t talking about what it might be in the future. And we weren’t talking about income tax, which are progressive. Income tax and payroll taxes are different things. Maybe take a moment and look things up before you fire off a response.
You don’t think leftists would call it eugenic? They are very good at their word games, they obviously would. It would be The Handmaid’s Tale come to life! And no one wants to have children to be future taxpayers. Barf.
I see people get mad about how many kids The Duggars have because of the child tax credit. You think cash payments to homeschoolers won’t lead to more regulation of homeschoolers? A much more elegant solution is to just shut down the government and never open it again. Problem solved.
I’m aware that they will tax us as much as they want so you pretending that you can make the system for functional is a funny delusion. They will increase taxes and spending until the system collapses under it’s own weight. You aren’t going to save it by paying people to have more children that they don’t want to have.
Anything that is % based is “progressive”. If I earn $50,000 and pay 10% I pay $5,000 in taxes. If I earn $100,000 and pay 10% I pay $10,000 in taxes. $10k > $5k. I don’t get double the government for double the taxes.
I understand that many progressives spin it as “only higher percentages on higher marginal income” is “progressive”, but that’s just them being better at the propaganda war. You have internalized the idea that paying way more in taxes than most others can still be “regressive”.
I saw how the “if we leave the government alone they will leave us alone” thing went down during covid. Poorly. When push comes to shove government does what it wants.
If you don’t want the government to do bad things to you then you have to win political power. If the median voter is a lot like you government is going to be nicer to people like you. If the median voter is a childless retiree that hates your values I guarantee they are goin got boss you around the squeeze every penny.
There is nothing “elegant” about having no realistic way of getting the outcomes you want. Throwing your hands in the air while others exercise power means you will be little more then an exploitable resource to that power.
Most people say they want to have 2.5 kids, but they fall short of that desire. I think that’s because there is a lot of zero sum competition for scarce resources in which those that have less children free ride on those that do and it results in a suboptimal equilibrium.
You don’t know what a progressive tax means. I suggest you look it up. It’s quite embarrassing to have access to all the information of humanity at your fingertips and not even bothering to fact check yourself. It’s not a propaganda campaign, the words regressive, flat and progressive taxes have meanings that are long-standing.
I never said that if we leave the government alone they will leave us alone. Try actually reading what I wrote instead of hallucinating.
I don’t want the government to be nicer to people like me. I want government to respect the rights of everyone regardless of who they are or what they believe.
If you think that coercive government is a realistic way to get the outcomes you want than you are delusional. I’m not against exercising power, you are debating a figment of your imagination.
In order to get rid of the free rider problem we should...get rid of coercive government. It is an elegant solution.
Yeah, I don’t buy into that definition set for the reasons I discussed.
Words are weapons and defining them is part of the war. It’s why people say “pro-choice” and “pro-life” rather then “anti-choice” and “anti-life”. Or why we argue endlessly over words like justice or racism or fairness.
I think “coercive government” is what the median voter wants. How are you going to stop that? What’s your plan?
My plan is to change who the median voter is by having a meaningful impact on demographics via a mechanism I think could pass and work.
What we would want is a payment scheme that encourages more births of children that grow up to be "good citizens" (however we end up defining that) and doesn't encourage more births of children that wouldn't. One such scheme would be to give bigger payments to parents of children that do better in school; if we pay a "ghetto mom" to be a full-time parent instead of getting a job herself, and she has a bunch of kids that all get straight As, go to college, and become well-paid engineers, I'd consider that a successful policy. (I do suspect that people would do their best to cheat the hell out of almost any conditional payment system, but this is thought-experiment-land anyway.)
But you’re coming from the assumption that we should raise children for the state. I’m against that. Let different social groups compete evolutionarily.
That's fine too. I was indeed making an assumption something along those lines for the sake of discussion, but "no, we don't actually want the state to act to increase birth rates in the first place" is also a reasonable position.
Fundamental problem with any conditional payment scheme is that eventually some fallible mortal bureaucrat has to evaluate compliance with the conditions. Which do you think would result in more human thriving: a system that gives you $900 per month, conditional on periodically filling out a survey to show that you're self-actualizing and reaching toward your full potential, but yanks the cash away and beats you with a stick if you get too many questions wrong?
Or $1000 per month with no strings, counting on people to know their own happiness when they find it? Latter program can afford to be more generous on the same budget because it avoids the overhead costs of surveys and beatings.
Or Georgist UBI, not conditional on anything but citizenship. That way the kind of person who'd spawn a kid just to get a government paycheck, and then hide in a hole, can have their subsistence taken care of and get out of everyone else's way without first being incentivized to bring an unwanted child into the world, while the kind of person wishing to pour cash and full-time effort into raising kids properly can immediately spend their best years doing so, instead of needing to compete for a career or inherit real estate first.
Nobody has really tried though. Someone will bring up some country that provided some token amount that offsets maybe 5% of the costs of raising a child and then claim that it had no affect.
When we spend as much on kids as we do on retirees I will believe the issue is being taken seriously.
More government debt when we already have 20% inflation per year on food? That’s not smart. And besides, why do we want to have children to continue being tax cattle for the ruling elite? Why keep this system going? Why not just let it fall?
Tax real estate at a rate which captures 80% of the expected rental revenue of the undeveloped lot. No tax on the value of any structures - or at most, some comparatively trivial fee to cover emergency services and the like. Abolish as many as possible of the existing broad taxes on capital gains, sales, income, any and all other desirable sorts of economic activity.
From what I've heard, result should be a fairly prompt 25% increase in GDP, and a far more stable tax base, with basically no surprise paperwork or enforcement hassles. Only downside is short-term pain on the part of the least-skilled land speculators... who are, sadly, numerous enough to be a major political obstacle.
Wait, so we live in an authoritarian state where our opinions don’t matter, or we live in a democracy where we were talking out what the best policy is. Pick one, you can’t vacillate from one to the other because you’re losing the debate.
Democracies can be authoritarian. If the median voter wants authoritarianism, you’re going to get it.
You are probably thinking of a constitutional democracy with strong limitations on government power, we haven’t been that for some time. No modern country is really. There are a lot of reasons for this, making the median voter older and more childless ain’t going to reverse the clock on that.
If the median voter is a childless retiree I guarantee they will vote to strip you bear to pay for their benefits.
You aren’t following the logic of the conversation. I said we should shut down the government and never open it again. You said they would throw me in prison for not paying taxes. I said you were going from pretending we live in a democracy where our opinions matter to an authoritarian state where our opinions don’t matter because you are losing the debate. So you start arguing about constitutional governments? You aren’t engaging with what I’m saying.
I wasn’t making a case for whether or not we have limited government, I was saying it makes no sense for you to be arguing about what policies the government should have and then say my opinion doesn’t matter and I will be thrown in prison when you can’t respond to my counter-argument.
You seem to be pointing out the flaws of democracy while trying to argue against shutting down the government. Weird.
1) democracy gives the median voter what they want
2) the median voter doesn’t want to shut down the government
3) you’ve got literally no plan to win the median voter over to your view
I think it’s worth trying to:
1) convince the median voter to support child tax breaks (this seems way more possible then shutting down the government)
2) having more children will impact who the median voter is
3) the demographic background of the median voter, including their age and how many kids they have, has a big impact on their public policy preferences
In my not-inconsiderable experience Orthodox Jews love innovation. Interesting to note that Werner Sombart wanted to claim that Jewish values were a major driver of dynamic free-market capitalism. Sombart's claim is exaggerated but there is no justification for going to the opposite extreme.
Hayek, Rodney Stark, and others also attribute the rise of Capitalism in part to Christianity. I’m with Robin on the need for increased fertility, but I don’t understand his odd assumption that a more Jewish or more Christian world would be a dark future without innovation.
There is nothing magic about a global population of 8 billion. Declining fertility may simply be a deep free market signal that the world is above its equilibrium population. The assumption that the population will decline indefinitely is as ill supported as the assumption the exponential population growth would continue indefinitely. And the assumption that "Innovation will then halt." simply because population is falling is likewise ill supported. Maybe the optimal global population is 100 million or 1 billion and when the world gets to that level it will asymptotically level out. The bias to be overcome, I think, is the bias the assumes that infinite population growth is necessary.
I subscribe to the line of thinking that female education and outside work are the primary drivers of falling fertility. Secular jews in Israel are an exception, are there lessons to learn from that exception? Maybe, but I suspect it would run completely contrary to current year morality.
Because I'm also interested in fertility, I was interested in the recent podcast with Agnes. Agnes was vapid. Robin kept presenting interesting aspects about fertility, and Agnes had basically nothing to offer (besides the usual subtle questioning of Robin's motives).
It might be time for Robin to move on from Agnes, she had nothing to contribute to that conversation (and so, so many others like it!). Robin should find someone else to be the podcast co-host!
Yeah, I don’t know what the heck was going on there. Agnes derailed so often for like super confusing reasons. It would have been fine if she disagreed with him about what was happening or what to do about it, but she didn’t really care to engage with the content. It was like going to a lecture on black holes and someone keeps raising their hand and asking about Steven Hawking’s favorite Agatha Cristy novel.
What are talking about! Humanity won’t go extinct if the Global population stabilizes or shrinks slightly. In fact overpopulation poses a greater threat to Humanity than declining fertility. To think innovation somehow correlates with population growth shows brainwashing by the myths of late capitalism. As I said declining fertility in developing countries correlates with increasing education and employment opportunities for women.
Aren't all the likely causes naturally self-limiting if median income declines sufficiently? Then the question is how far it needs to decline before the trend reverses. You seem to worry that median income could decline very far before fertility reversal, but your main argument seems to be that some people have been trying hard to increase fertility without success for a century or two. But the thing is that median income has been growing that whole time, so it doesn't give us any reason to think that median income fall won't be sufficient.
Indeed, the only way I can see median income continuing to rise despite large (say 90%) drops in total population is with some sort of AI revolution, of exactly the kind you think is too unlikely to rely on.
I've presented my simple argument: all the reasonable causes of low fertility I can think of are, to a good 1st order approximation, tied to consumption levels, and so fertility will reverse once consumption falls. As far as I can tell, your evo story about us mistaking consumption cues for being tribal kings and queens falls in this category.
In this post, in contrast, you seem to be gesturing at some sort of long-term cultural lock-in explanation, that even after consumption falls below levels historically associated with above-replacement fertility we will continue to have below-replacement fertility. But you haven't explained it, and I can't for the life of me fill in the gaps in a sensible way.
I see substantial delay effects in the relation between income and fertility. So the fertility we see at each time is best associated with a prior income level.
Do you have an explicit model anywhere? It will take much more than a couple generations for the total population of small insular religious groups to overtake the general population.
The young will be enslaved to pay for the retirement of the old. They will themselves not have children because then they will have to provide for both the old and their children.
This is already happening. Healthcare and retirement programs for people over 65 are eating the federal budget. According to that budget, the sacred value that has to yield in order to encourage fertility is care and funding of the elderly. It's the only sacred value that unites republicans and democrats.
I think a better (and more sufficient) value to sacrifice would be the landlord's sacred right to extract value and concentrate wealth without giving much of anything back.
Well, in some sense they have enslaved themselves, or were enslaved by their own parents, because one of those generations failed to breed sufficient numbers to spread the burden out and lighten the load on each individual. People pay the bulk of their taxes -- for care of the elderly, among other things -- during their peak earning years, which is about ages 35-60. By those years, you either have or have not reproduced, pretty much. If you're approaching 45, let us say, and are pissed that retirement taxes are going through the roof, but you yourself only have 1 child who still isn't paying taxes because he's in graduate school, or finding himself on a trip to Nepal -- well, you, or more precisely your generation, kind of did that to yourself. It's not like the economics of old age and the demographics in front of you were inscrutable to you, or indeed have varied a particle since when the Acropolis of Athens was brand new.
Population falls exponentially, and tech improvements falls exponentially leading to tech level stagnation, but consumption approaches a constant?! So much of our modern economy depends economies of scale. If tech levels is flat but population falls by a factor of 10, consumption falls a lot!
Much more likely to me: population starts falling in nearly all developed countries, leading to stagnating tech and slow falling consumption (due to reduced economies of scale) until reaching levels of consumption characteristic of the US between 1970 and 2000, by which time fertility rebounds to above replacement level (as it was in the US during that time period). This happens way before the Amish can double enough times to make a difference.
US native-born fertility rate during that time period was above replacement levels. So, by my reading, your previous explanations for fertility fall should predict fertility rise.
The reckoning will never be over fertility. It will be over WHO is fertile. There are always religious groups who are happy to breed at high rates and the whole world is far more diverse than Japan. The danger isn't that we stop breeding but that what's happening in Israel with the higher birth rate of religious Jews starts to happen to the world.
Your supposed rationalizations for addiction start off pretty ludicrous.
Then, you assume that attitudes toward individual survival scale up to humanity as a whole. While it’s easy to think of a bunch of collective social problems as something one ‘has’ to care about given how saturated the media is with things you can do next to nothing about, in reality those concerns are something opted into rather than essential.
It’s really no concern of mine if humanity persists or perishes.
Why didn’t you mention the #1 reason for the drop in fertility: lower childhood mortality? People definitely had to have more babies when only half made it to age 15. It kind of poisons the well to leave that out, and makes the problem look twice as bad as it is.
Also, something that gets left off lists of the reasons for the drop in fertility because of Social Desirability Bias is the taboo against infanticide. When people could just kill a baby if they couldn’t support it, they likely would have been able to have more children closer to their limit of supportable offspring. Not advocating a return of infanticide, but worth noting that this was a common practice in many cultures that isn’t talked about.
I wasn't trying to list all possible causes. I was instead trying to list our cherished values that are now in conflict with fertility. Because that is where the reckoning must lie.
It just feels many times these lists of modern values that “lower fertility rate” are simply lists of complaints Conservatives Christian have about modernity. To wit, I’m unconvinced that egalitarian gender roles lower fertility rate since Japan and Korea have some of the most conservative cultures in gender roles in household work in rich countries and have the lowest birth rates.
I’m not saying that you doing this intentionally, I just think that most thought and research on increasing fertility rates has a conservative agenda. I’d like to see at least one item on the list that makes a Conservative Christian as uncomfortable as the other items make an egalitarian agnostic. Maybe like some of the taboos against fertility technologies like cloning and human genetic engineering.
You are welcome to suggest more items for the list of values that conflict with fertility, but I'm not going to add things just to make Christians feel bad. For example, I just can't see wariness of cloning as an important obstacle to fertility at the moment.
Even in states that have six week abortion bans, nobody has done a thing to interfere with IVF.
That’s fair, I’m just telling you how it reads as is. It’s like if someone shows me a list of voting reforms (like voter ID and more validity checks on mail in voting) and I’m like “these all favor republican outcomes, surely there much be some good reforms that favor democrats” and they say “I’m not going to come up with something to placate democrats feelings.” They may all be fine reforms but if they all line up with one side of a divide, you’re going to have a hard time building a consensus.
> I’m just telling you how it reads as is. It’s like if someone shows me a list of voting reforms (like voter ID and more validity checks on mail in voting) and I’m like “these all favor republican outcomes, surely there much be some good reforms that favor democrats”
There's nothing inherently Republican about any of those reforms, they're all common sense anti-fraud reforms. That anti-fraud reforms all favor Republican outcomes should be telling you something.
There are also great reforms that favor democrats, and reduce voter suppression like early voting, universal mail-in, and automatic voter registration, but I would be equally suspicious if someone only proposed those, without some of the common-sense anti-fraud ones.
> universal mail-in, and automatic voter registration
Those make fraud significantly easier. You may want to learn about why voter registration was introduced in the first place.
OMG, you’re right! I’ve looked into it and every voting reform that the people on the right want is practical, doesn’t suppress legitimate votes, and prevents fraud and every reform people on the left want is so that they can do fraud and steal elections! How convenient! There’s no tribal or self-serving parts to the platforms at all, expect on the left, how dumb I’ve been.
If you weren't being sarcastic, this would be an actually improvement in your understanding.
I do hope I didn’t come off as too antagonistic, I’m basically on the same page as you, especially on how lower population hurts innovation, but I want to put forward a vision that everyone can see isn’t biased.
A good example of something left-leaning that promotes fertility is banning adoption agencies from discriminating against gay people. This discriminatory practice artificially drives down the demand for children.
??? You think people are having fewer children because they are worried homosexuals won't be able to adopt them? That seems implausible to me.
Also, unless things have changed, it's pretty difficult to adopt a healthy baby without special needs. I know people that have managed it in months; I know people that have been trying for several years. I'm not sure if the different results are because of being better able to navigate the complexities, having more resources, or just blind luck.
> You think people are having fewer children because they are worried homosexuals won't be able to adopt them? That seems implausible to me.
He's just desperate to avoid having to admit the *gasp* Christian Conservatives were more-or-less right about this, and is currently in the bargaining stage.
Giving the world to the Amish to own the Christian Conservatives.
> but I want to put forward a vision that everyone can see isn’t biased.
The problem is that reality is in fact "biased" in this case.
> A good example of something left-leaning that promotes fertility is banning adoption agencies from discriminating against gay people. This discriminatory practice artificially drives down the demand for children.
That effect is negligible.
> I’d like to see at least one item on the list that makes a Conservative Christian as uncomfortable as the other items make an egalitarian agnostic.
Well conservative Christians have a higher fertility rate than egalitarian agnostics. That suggests that they're a lot more comfortable with the cultural traits that enable high fertility.
You're just going to have to swallow your pride and admit the Christian Conservatives were mostly right here.
In a fully traditional society (think Afghanistan) women have no economic options and fertility is very high. The Asian countries are in a halfway zone that seems to be a fertility minimum: Women have the ability to support themselves economically, but burdensome cultural expectations lead them to opt out of married/family life.
Within Japan and Korea those that are religious are higher fertility then those that aren't, but so secularism is so overwhelming that fertility is low.
Japan and Korea engaged in a lot of technocratic anti-fertility policy in the second half the the 20th century, they got the results they were going for.
It is bizarre to see secularists complain about Christians wrt fertility. Just look at the data. The collapse in fertility is most of all a problem among secularists.
The TFR among secularists is around 1 child per woman, essentially a total collapse to far below replacement. The religious are the ones holding their own. Do secularists offer any competing pronatalist vision? The only one who does this is Elon Musk, with an optimistic futurist vision where humanity expands into the stars.
Is Kevin V willing endorse Elon Musk's ideas? Is he willing to offer any secular answer to the fertility crisis? The world needs secularists to help solve this, and yet most secularists offer almost nothing to the greatest crisis the world faces.
I don’t feel like Elon has any actual proposals of value in this area. He’s pretty much all pie-in-the-sky technological dreaming like artificial wombs and child rearing robots and trying to have as many kids as possible personally.
Robin Hanson has some ideas like the PTAs: https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/four-uses-for-personal-tax-assets, which is secular.
I line up political with Matt Yglesias frequently and he also has some secular ideas: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-economic-case-for-pro-natalism
People who strongly support and get abortions have much lower fertility then people who oppose abortion.
If anything pro-choice is so closely associated with holding children and parenthood in low regard that its one of the drags on fertility.
Which is why I vote for whoever has more kids.
Hmmm i'm not so sure. A lot of liberal people seem to subscribe to such inhumanely elevated standards of ideal parenting and buy into the vision of having children as overwhelming on the one hand, and identity defining on the other task of self expression of some sort, rather than just a thing people do. So no wonder they don't have kids.
Art would be the best way here.
There is a scene in The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis that I think describes how such behavior isn’t real love. I’d rather you read it then I describe.
That could explain some of the drop, but not to below replacement levels. You'd expect it to just offset net population growth.
Wealth seems a more likely explanation than mortality though. Child mortality could get to 0, but as wealth kept increasing fertility could still fall.
Humanity has spent 99% of its of its history at around replacement fertility, the last couple hundred years have been a huge aberration.
The natural equilibrium is to have the population at Malthusian limits. The constraint on lifetime fertility was the shortage of food for keeping all children alive.
True. But 'replacement fertility' used to be a lot higher than it is now. What happened was: we mastered infant mortality, and other early deaths, and created a world where almost every child born can expect to live into adulthood and old age. Two things happened then: the population exploded and innovation exploded.
But the population explosion happened because our cultural mores were built for a reality where 5+ pregnancies are needed for 'replacement level'. The cultural momentum of those mores caused the population explosion after that reality changed, which in turn caused the innovation explosion.
Now the cultural momentum has run out, and our mores are shifting to a 2 pregnancies for replacement reality, coupled with a 'we're so rich and invulnerable we don't need to replace ourselves' illusory reality (which has only rarely existed in human history - Robin's reference to the Romans in the OP is not a coincidence - and is always an illusion, see for example: the Romans).
I pretty much agree with everything you just said, I just think that the end to the high growth period was always inevitable. Maybe it came one generation earlier than we might have hoped for, but it not practical to compare to historical fertility rates and how for that.
I also think that having a slow, steady growth mindset is going to be important for humans into the distant future: If we have a Mars colony that can support 20k children max and the people there make 18k they will be okay and can make up the difference later, if they have 22k, there will be violence over whose children have to go with lower rations and whose grandparents have to be euthanized to support them.
I agree it's inevitable that 'our' mores will shift to the 2 pregnancies for replacement reality, but I don't think it has to shift to the illusory less than replacement level.
And, as is the point of the OP 'our' mores are not the only ones in play. There are small, insular groups who cling to much higher fertility mores, and a real possible outcome is that they will replace us.
It’s obviously multi-causal, pretending it’s not obscures solutions. Like, if we ignore it and adopt solutions that will don’t work that well like living in techno-phobic cultures that will drive up fertility rates in the short term but ultimately increase childhood mortality in the long term because they don’t vaccinate and can’t develop new antibiotics.
"People are sometimes confused by the fact that complex conditions have a long list of necessary factors. However, the odds against more than one necessary factor pushing the phenomenon across the line into epidemic at the exact same time are astronomical."
https://modeledbehavior.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/on-lead/
If it’s astronomically unlikely that more than one factor was the reason this became a crisis why did Robin list 8: “These include valuing city life, schooling, intensive parenting, “finding ourselves” before marriage, preferring careers and friends to family, and also disliking religion, arranged marriages and traditional gender roles”.
That reason is that while there one is indeed the cause that pushed fertility rates over the edge into a problem, changing a combination of the issues listed has the potential to get fertility rate above replacement regardless.
Those things aren't independent but instead have a common cause: the shift from farming to industry made society richer and thereby weakened the social institutions we'd evolved under farming to adapt our hunter-gatherer era genes for different conditions.
That makes no sense. Infanticide would lower the population. That’s one of the reasons Christianity won, they didn’t practice infanticide and adopted abandoned children. Even back in the old Roman days they would abandon them and not kill them out-right. Why kill a child when there are long wait-lists of families desperate to adopt? But at least you’re saying the quiet part out loud, most pro-abortion arguments have also worked for infanticide. But you do you, my descendants will survive and yours may ... not. I don’t care.
Dude, I literally said I wasn’t advocating for it. I was saying two things:
1. I was giving an example of a value that probably lowered fertility rate, but would be abhorrent. Let’s remember fertility rate is just the number of children born per woman, so focusing on that number alone could lead to terrible things.
2. I was pointing out that many times these lists of modern values that “lower fertility rate” are simply lists of complaints Conservatives Christian have about modernity. To wit, I’m unconvinced that egalitarian gender roles lower fertility rate since Japan and Korea have some of the most conservative cultures in gender roles in household work in rich countries and have the lowest birth rates.
Yes, Christianity has took over Europe and has it as a taboo, but there is a world outside Europe where it wasn’t, look up the history in Asia.
Again, since I guess people don’t read infanticide is repugnant, but I find some of the values that we might have to give up to drive up birth rates in this list also quite disgusting.
I’m having a hard time understanding you, I think. Are you saying that infanticide is bad but normalizing it might increase birth rate as an example of how we shouldn’t look exclusively at birth rate?
Japan and Korea allow women to get educated and work. It’s only if a woman has children that their conservative values kick in. This obviously results in low fertility because women don’t want to give up their careers to stay at home and raise children. I don’t speak Japanese or Korea but I would assume that mainstream culture considers being a stay at home mom to be undesirable work. A culture that would actually work is if women aren’t given high education and aren’t encouraged to have a career and are encouraged to be mothers. That’s basically the whole thing, does the culture say that being a mom to a bunch of kids is a desirable job or not and obviously there needs to be a practical component of men wanting to be husbands and fathers who are able and willing to support their wives and children. It’s not that complicated. What values would we have to give up?
Just because infanticide was practiced in Asia before birth control and back when starvation was common has nothing to do with our current society of birth control and zero starvation. And Muslims are overtaking Hindu Indians because of the baby girl infanticide issue.
I’m essentially making two points:
1. We shouldn’t look exclusively at fertility rates, but a more downstream metric, because if we adopted a policy that resulted in 40% higher fertility rates but 50% of children dying before their first birthday than would not actually address the problem.
2. Saying that we can just somehow give up values to raise fertility rate, only makes sense if you don’t hold those values to begin with. It doesn’t really matter if making infanticide acceptable drives up birth rates: there’s no way we’d change our values to accept it even if doing so increased fertility rates 50% (I think it’s pretty marginal but possibly slightly positive). If you’re willing to change one of your values, then you didn’t really have that value.
1. Ok, while technically true I don’t find this point very useful. If we had a bunch of children dying that would be a huge problem. But if they aren’t even being born at all that’s also a problem.
2. People can change their values. And if we are talking about what values society has, we can talk about what we think the values of society should be. I’m still wondering what values you think we need to change? I still don’t get why you think infanticide would increase fertility rate, but whatever.
I mean, birth control seems like a pretty strong candidate. That and fertility technology (weaken the overall gene pool fertility)
yes, please draw up a risk matrix of options and trade-offs of each complete scenario and not just the clickbait subset
A more libertarian approach might be to consider how government hinders fertility e.g. grain subsidies, laws against free-range kids - https://reason.com/tag/free-range-kids/ - et cetera, and stop doing those things.
Reckoning with value conflicts isn't at all anti-libertarian.
Scott didn't say that other suggestions were anti-libertarian, but there are plenty of anti-family government policies that to libertarians are obvious. In the old days, family was the primary source of security and resources at all stages of life. The most oft-cited example is children being one's insurance, pension, and caregivers (though with Social Security diminishing that deal may yet return). It applies in other subtler ways. If parents (and perhaps extended family) were paying for a child's education, they could expect the child to feel some gratitude (I certainly do); state-financed education produces no gratitude in anyone. State-financed education tends to stretch on longer (incredibly so, here in Germany), which burns tax money and delays and reduces the periods for both productive employment and having a family. Perhaps with good intentions (e.g., "The Swedish Theory of Love"), we created policies to free people from the vagaries of family support, and, not surprisingly, we got a society where people value family less.
Having said all that, I should note that around the world the fertility gap is about 1, so people do say they want more children than they are having.
Depends on who does the reckoning, I reckon: more freedom or less.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/04/210407135801.htm
https://hbr.org/2022/02/when-subtraction-adds-value
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03380-y
None of those things really make a big difference. Outside of COVID, I've never seen anyone do anything in the link, feels more like an urban legend.
I would assume that any reform libertarians have been pushing for about 50 years with no success probably aren't going to happen tomorrow and thus they shouldn't distract from the issue Robin brings up.
FWIW, I'm 61 and have one biological child (raised two). I very much regret not having had many more.
I've emphasized that to both the kids I raised and encouraged them to have lots of kids.
I don't remember anyone talking that way when I was their age. We're at an extreme point historically, maybe as more people end up like me we'll encourage the next generation to change their values.
What is the cause of your regret primarily?
I like children. I'd like grandchildren. So far, zero, my boys are 33 and 19.
I can tell you what mine is. When I was deciding how many kids I wanted to father, I considered a lot of things that I wish I didn't, mostly having to do with lifestyle and expenses. I thought two was a good number that I could afford and still maintain my standard of living. That was unbelievably shortsighted and stupid and my biggest regret is considering those expenses at all in the first place. None of it mattered. Today my two kids are the source of 90% of my joy, 90% of my fun, 90% of my laughs, 90% of my satisfaction with life. So maybe I have more money today than I would have. How much good is that money bringing me just sitting there in an account waiting to be used or spent or left behind? Each child brings more good to my life than a billion dollars could. When I think of what could have been, the massive wealth I could have had just by having had more children, I kick myself for being practical about it. Nobody ever told me what being a father was like. My own dad died young and I never really knew the upsides, only the potential downsides.
Israel is the ONLY 1st world/industrialized/high gdp per capita/whatever country with above replacement tfr. in fact not only is it above, it's well above and stable if not growing, around 2.9-3.0ish, sustainable and compatible with a healthy productive high tech and growing economy.
you'd think more people would be interested in this. you'd think. Digging down into why, is it just orthodox (no, seculars also above 2.1), is it a historical quirk, what's replicable/exportable, what can we learn, what doesn't work (muh nordic daycare), etc.
But no one cares.
In Israel, the demonstrations in the last year is very much rooted in the demographic changes of the country. It's true that secular Jews have a fertility around 2.1, but that pales completely in comparison to the Hamish Jews, whose fertility rate has been above 6-7 for decades. The religious Jews have other wishes and ideas for the state of Israel, and as they are becoming the majority in these years, the laws of the land in Israel is almost destined to change in ways that secular Jews will dislike.
Sounds great to me!
Hamish=Haredi
Some stuff, like free IVF, could be copied without much resistance.
Other stuff, like being a militant ethno-state, would go against the reigning ideology. Israel has always had a kind of "unprincipled exception" on this.
I know a few Israelis (all of them secular). They're definitely fecund compared to Americans.
My sense is it's a sense of duty/political - Israel has been outnumbered by surrounding enemies for its entire existence. And maybe also a sense of competition with Israeli Orthodox - secular Israelis really don't have much use for them, and fear they'll take over the country.
Muslims in Israel have almost identical fertility rates.
Isn't it just that Israelis are terrified the Muslim birthrates will outstrip their own and they will be bred out of power?
I'm one of those people happy to mostly kick this can down the road a few decades. Various countries are trying different things, and over the next few decades they'll try some more things, likely more strenuously. That seems sufficient for the time being.
We've been trying things for a very long time now. https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1704971027862974606
Oh, I didn’t realize that your focus was on the wrong groups having higher birth rates rather than population growth in general.
Maybe try to not make things up.
Buddy specifically stated that he's worried about Orthodox Jews having a higher birth rate than other groups. What is being made up here?
clutch them pearls bro
I mean, they're "trying things", but to my knowledge nobody is trying to remove the messed up incentives that come from most modern countries promising that future taxpayers will pay for retirement benefits. If people that sacrificed to have kids got better social security or other retirement benefits in recognition that they are the ones that essentially invested enough to cover the costs of retirement benefits, people might not see kids as such a financial sacrifice.
Is that not more or less what everyone working on AI and robotics is doing? The very rich, for instance, have above replacement fertility even in which countries like the United States the most likely reason is that they have the ability to easily hire people to do most of the the tasks which make having children very costly. Their marginal cost are very very low. The people working in AI and robotics are essentially trying to do that for everyone.
Sure, you could frame that as them trying to overcome terrible incentives put in place by governments and that's great, but it'd be relatively low hanging fruit to just make sure the incentives from taxes don't point people in the wrong direction. Still going to need the AI and robotics advancement for countries that are too far gone demographically for a baby boom to help (which is most developed countries?), but just stopping incentivizing making the problem work would still be a good thing to do.
Can you explain this a bit more? Genuinely curious about what you mean. But agree that upper class is onto something. Accumulate wealth, outsource tasks and value having many well educated kids. If we can lower associated costs of educating and caring for many kids, there will be many more such kids.
Oh I just mean that the most likely reason the rich have above replacement fertility is that they can readily outsource many tasks to others (nannies, maids, chauffeurs, etc.) which frees them up from much of the drudgery of children and reduces opportunity costs.
Once we can have cheap robots that can do housework, babysit, self driving cars so travel time is productive (or at least less monotonous) etc., then most everyone would have similar material conditions as the rich today, and thus likely have above replacement fertility as well.
Certainly more resources is a big part of that and I'd guess a bigger part of it, but I think you may be underestimating how much high birth rate and high wealth/income are driven by the same factors. Children are in some ways the ultimate long term investment. The same people that are going to be willing to sacrifice early on to accumulate wealth on average are likely to also be the ones that keep a long term enough view that they are willing to deal with the sacrifices involved in raising children in order to enjoy the benefits.
The government paying people to have children is a terrible idea. We don’t want a nation of foster children, born to be a paycheck to their parents. And the government can’t afford it anyway. The mainstream culture will fall and that’s a good thing.
You could just make the payment conditioned on marriage. Or scale with taxes paid. Or cap out at four kids.
Not hard to devise something that would limit it being a revenue source for ghetto mamas.
If the payments are low enough that ghetto moms aren’t incentivized to do it, it won’t incentivize anyone to do it.
You’re assuming that the payment will be a static amount, which of course would be worth more to ghetto mamas.
But while I think tax credits would be a good thing, I would focus a lot on proportional tax cuts. For instance income, SS, and Medicare taxes are all % progressive taxes. Lowering the them based on the number of children you have would benefit the middle and upper middle classes more than the poor.
It’s not hard to come up with a system that provided income relevant incentives and had a eugenic tilt. A simple step would be to allow people who are married and filing jointly to take an additional standard deduction for each kid.
There is even a built in rationale, people who had kids have in a sense already funded SS more then those that didn’t.
Lastly, just using the money we spend differently would help. We spend a lot on k-12 education that many of our biggest breeders don’t even value enough to use. Simply allowing more parental choice with that money would increase fertility. Similar issue with subsidized daycare, penalizes SAHM and is fundamentally scalar marginal cost.
Payroll taxes aren’t progressive. They actually have a cap and are a flat rate from the first dollar earned. Why not just get rid of them completely? The Amish are exempt from having to pay payroll taxes and they have high fertility rates. And I don’t think there is the political will to start pro-eugenic tax exemptions anyway.
And hard core homeschoolers like me are very sensitive about the idea of the government giving us anything. We don’t want the government paying us what they would be spending on the public school system, because it always comes with strings. Just leave us alone and stop taxing us, that would be nice. I didn’t have kids to pay for social security.
Payroll taxes are progressive up to the cap, which is higher than most people earn. They will probably get rid of the cap at some point when the trust fund runs out anyway. Medicare and income taxes don’t have a cap.
Obviously you would t call it “pro eugenic tax credits”. You would call it “tax breaks for those that are creating the next generation of taxpayers”. The reality of the law as written would do its work.
Whether or not you get left alone will be sue to politics and not whether you receive government money or not. Paranoid homeschooler resistance to school vouchers is a huge own goal.
They will tax you as much as they want.
My husband makes the cap. And it’s not progressive up to the cap, it’s a flat rate. You don’t know what progressive means or you don’t know how payroll taxes work. And it doesn’t matter if most people don’t make the cap, that’s the point actually, the fact that only the high earners get that break makes it a regressive tax. We weren’t talking about what it might be in the future. And we weren’t talking about income tax, which are progressive. Income tax and payroll taxes are different things. Maybe take a moment and look things up before you fire off a response.
You don’t think leftists would call it eugenic? They are very good at their word games, they obviously would. It would be The Handmaid’s Tale come to life! And no one wants to have children to be future taxpayers. Barf.
I see people get mad about how many kids The Duggars have because of the child tax credit. You think cash payments to homeschoolers won’t lead to more regulation of homeschoolers? A much more elegant solution is to just shut down the government and never open it again. Problem solved.
I’m aware that they will tax us as much as they want so you pretending that you can make the system for functional is a funny delusion. They will increase taxes and spending until the system collapses under it’s own weight. You aren’t going to save it by paying people to have more children that they don’t want to have.
Anything that is % based is “progressive”. If I earn $50,000 and pay 10% I pay $5,000 in taxes. If I earn $100,000 and pay 10% I pay $10,000 in taxes. $10k > $5k. I don’t get double the government for double the taxes.
I understand that many progressives spin it as “only higher percentages on higher marginal income” is “progressive”, but that’s just them being better at the propaganda war. You have internalized the idea that paying way more in taxes than most others can still be “regressive”.
I saw how the “if we leave the government alone they will leave us alone” thing went down during covid. Poorly. When push comes to shove government does what it wants.
If you don’t want the government to do bad things to you then you have to win political power. If the median voter is a lot like you government is going to be nicer to people like you. If the median voter is a childless retiree that hates your values I guarantee they are goin got boss you around the squeeze every penny.
There is nothing “elegant” about having no realistic way of getting the outcomes you want. Throwing your hands in the air while others exercise power means you will be little more then an exploitable resource to that power.
Most people say they want to have 2.5 kids, but they fall short of that desire. I think that’s because there is a lot of zero sum competition for scarce resources in which those that have less children free ride on those that do and it results in a suboptimal equilibrium.
You don’t know what a progressive tax means. I suggest you look it up. It’s quite embarrassing to have access to all the information of humanity at your fingertips and not even bothering to fact check yourself. It’s not a propaganda campaign, the words regressive, flat and progressive taxes have meanings that are long-standing.
I never said that if we leave the government alone they will leave us alone. Try actually reading what I wrote instead of hallucinating.
I don’t want the government to be nicer to people like me. I want government to respect the rights of everyone regardless of who they are or what they believe.
If you think that coercive government is a realistic way to get the outcomes you want than you are delusional. I’m not against exercising power, you are debating a figment of your imagination.
In order to get rid of the free rider problem we should...get rid of coercive government. It is an elegant solution.
Yeah, I don’t buy into that definition set for the reasons I discussed.
Words are weapons and defining them is part of the war. It’s why people say “pro-choice” and “pro-life” rather then “anti-choice” and “anti-life”. Or why we argue endlessly over words like justice or racism or fairness.
I think “coercive government” is what the median voter wants. How are you going to stop that? What’s your plan?
My plan is to change who the median voter is by having a meaningful impact on demographics via a mechanism I think could pass and work.
You just use words in your own unique way? And you expect to be understood?
I don’t think people really want coercive government, they just haven’t heard of moral government yet. My plan is to persuade people, duh.
Do you have any children?
What we would want is a payment scheme that encourages more births of children that grow up to be "good citizens" (however we end up defining that) and doesn't encourage more births of children that wouldn't. One such scheme would be to give bigger payments to parents of children that do better in school; if we pay a "ghetto mom" to be a full-time parent instead of getting a job herself, and she has a bunch of kids that all get straight As, go to college, and become well-paid engineers, I'd consider that a successful policy. (I do suspect that people would do their best to cheat the hell out of almost any conditional payment system, but this is thought-experiment-land anyway.)
But you’re coming from the assumption that we should raise children for the state. I’m against that. Let different social groups compete evolutionarily.
That's fine too. I was indeed making an assumption something along those lines for the sake of discussion, but "no, we don't actually want the state to act to increase birth rates in the first place" is also a reasonable position.
Fundamental problem with any conditional payment scheme is that eventually some fallible mortal bureaucrat has to evaluate compliance with the conditions. Which do you think would result in more human thriving: a system that gives you $900 per month, conditional on periodically filling out a survey to show that you're self-actualizing and reaching toward your full potential, but yanks the cash away and beats you with a stick if you get too many questions wrong?
Or $1000 per month with no strings, counting on people to know their own happiness when they find it? Latter program can afford to be more generous on the same budget because it avoids the overhead costs of surveys and beatings.
Or Georgist UBI, not conditional on anything but citizenship. That way the kind of person who'd spawn a kid just to get a government paycheck, and then hide in a hole, can have their subsistence taken care of and get out of everyone else's way without first being incentivized to bring an unwanted child into the world, while the kind of person wishing to pour cash and full-time effort into raising kids properly can immediately spend their best years doing so, instead of needing to compete for a career or inherit real estate first.
Also, as shown by the examples of the countries that tried it, paying people to have children has a marginal effect at best.
Nobody has really tried though. Someone will bring up some country that provided some token amount that offsets maybe 5% of the costs of raising a child and then claim that it had no affect.
When we spend as much on kids as we do on retirees I will believe the issue is being taken seriously.
How are we going to afford that? We already can’t afford the retirees.
We can pay for kids via more govt debt, which investors should back as they see it is a good investment.
More government debt when we already have 20% inflation per year on food? That’s not smart. And besides, why do we want to have children to continue being tax cattle for the ruling elite? Why keep this system going? Why not just let it fall?
Tax real estate at a rate which captures 80% of the expected rental revenue of the undeveloped lot. No tax on the value of any structures - or at most, some comparatively trivial fee to cover emergency services and the like. Abolish as many as possible of the existing broad taxes on capital gains, sales, income, any and all other desirable sorts of economic activity.
From what I've heard, result should be a fairly prompt 25% increase in GDP, and a far more stable tax base, with basically no surprise paperwork or enforcement hassles. Only downside is short-term pain on the part of the least-skilled land speculators... who are, sadly, numerous enough to be a major political obstacle.
I’ve posted in the past about how it’s affordable even not mentioning robins debt plan. It’s just not a political priority.
That being said, we can’t afford NOT to do it. Nothing about our budget is remotely sustainable with sub replacement fertility.
Good. Shut it down. I didn’t have kids to prop up your coercive state.
Good luck useful idiot. They will take whatever they want from you and will will comply because you’ll go to jail if you do t pay your taxes
Wait, so we live in an authoritarian state where our opinions don’t matter, or we live in a democracy where we were talking out what the best policy is. Pick one, you can’t vacillate from one to the other because you’re losing the debate.
We live in a democracy.
Democracies can be authoritarian. If the median voter wants authoritarianism, you’re going to get it.
You are probably thinking of a constitutional democracy with strong limitations on government power, we haven’t been that for some time. No modern country is really. There are a lot of reasons for this, making the median voter older and more childless ain’t going to reverse the clock on that.
If the median voter is a childless retiree I guarantee they will vote to strip you bear to pay for their benefits.
You aren’t following the logic of the conversation. I said we should shut down the government and never open it again. You said they would throw me in prison for not paying taxes. I said you were going from pretending we live in a democracy where our opinions matter to an authoritarian state where our opinions don’t matter because you are losing the debate. So you start arguing about constitutional governments? You aren’t engaging with what I’m saying.
I wasn’t making a case for whether or not we have limited government, I was saying it makes no sense for you to be arguing about what policies the government should have and then say my opinion doesn’t matter and I will be thrown in prison when you can’t respond to my counter-argument.
You seem to be pointing out the flaws of democracy while trying to argue against shutting down the government. Weird.
1) democracy gives the median voter what they want
2) the median voter doesn’t want to shut down the government
3) you’ve got literally no plan to win the median voter over to your view
I think it’s worth trying to:
1) convince the median voter to support child tax breaks (this seems way more possible then shutting down the government)
2) having more children will impact who the median voter is
3) the demographic background of the median voter, including their age and how many kids they have, has a big impact on their public policy preferences
In my not-inconsiderable experience Orthodox Jews love innovation. Interesting to note that Werner Sombart wanted to claim that Jewish values were a major driver of dynamic free-market capitalism. Sombart's claim is exaggerated but there is no justification for going to the opposite extreme.
Hayek, Rodney Stark, and others also attribute the rise of Capitalism in part to Christianity. I’m with Robin on the need for increased fertility, but I don’t understand his odd assumption that a more Jewish or more Christian world would be a dark future without innovation.
There is nothing magic about a global population of 8 billion. Declining fertility may simply be a deep free market signal that the world is above its equilibrium population. The assumption that the population will decline indefinitely is as ill supported as the assumption the exponential population growth would continue indefinitely. And the assumption that "Innovation will then halt." simply because population is falling is likewise ill supported. Maybe the optimal global population is 100 million or 1 billion and when the world gets to that level it will asymptotically level out. The bias to be overcome, I think, is the bias the assumes that infinite population growth is necessary.
That reads like a disguised appeal to group selection.
I subscribe to the line of thinking that female education and outside work are the primary drivers of falling fertility. Secular jews in Israel are an exception, are there lessons to learn from that exception? Maybe, but I suspect it would run completely contrary to current year morality.
Because I'm also interested in fertility, I was interested in the recent podcast with Agnes. Agnes was vapid. Robin kept presenting interesting aspects about fertility, and Agnes had basically nothing to offer (besides the usual subtle questioning of Robin's motives).
It might be time for Robin to move on from Agnes, she had nothing to contribute to that conversation (and so, so many others like it!). Robin should find someone else to be the podcast co-host!
Yeah, I don’t know what the heck was going on there. Agnes derailed so often for like super confusing reasons. It would have been fine if she disagreed with him about what was happening or what to do about it, but she didn’t really care to engage with the content. It was like going to a lecture on black holes and someone keeps raising their hand and asking about Steven Hawking’s favorite Agatha Cristy novel.
What are talking about! Humanity won’t go extinct if the Global population stabilizes or shrinks slightly. In fact overpopulation poses a greater threat to Humanity than declining fertility. To think innovation somehow correlates with population growth shows brainwashing by the myths of late capitalism. As I said declining fertility in developing countries correlates with increasing education and employment opportunities for women.
The "Population Bomb" style rhetoric you're using has an extremely ugly history.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/galton-ehrlich-buck
Aren't all the likely causes naturally self-limiting if median income declines sufficiently? Then the question is how far it needs to decline before the trend reverses. You seem to worry that median income could decline very far before fertility reversal, but your main argument seems to be that some people have been trying hard to increase fertility without success for a century or two. But the thing is that median income has been growing that whole time, so it doesn't give us any reason to think that median income fall won't be sufficient.
Indeed, the only way I can see median income continuing to rise despite large (say 90%) drops in total population is with some sort of AI revolution, of exactly the kind you think is too unlikely to rely on.
Median income would likely fall while population, but not obviously enough to by itself raise fertility enough before we reach extinction.
I've presented my simple argument: all the reasonable causes of low fertility I can think of are, to a good 1st order approximation, tied to consumption levels, and so fertility will reverse once consumption falls. As far as I can tell, your evo story about us mistaking consumption cues for being tribal kings and queens falls in this category.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-return-of-communism
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/our-big-wealth-status-mistakehtml
In this post, in contrast, you seem to be gesturing at some sort of long-term cultural lock-in explanation, that even after consumption falls below levels historically associated with above-replacement fertility we will continue to have below-replacement fertility. But you haven't explained it, and I can't for the life of me fill in the gaps in a sensible way.
I see substantial delay effects in the relation between income and fertility. So the fertility we see at each time is best associated with a prior income level.
This is interesting. Would love to see an article diving into this claim and the data that supports it.
More than a couple generations? What makes you think this? This is such a crucial and non-obvious feature.
A couple of generations is enough.
Do you have an explicit model anywhere? It will take much more than a couple generations for the total population of small insular religious groups to overtake the general population.
The young will be enslaved to pay for the retirement of the old. They will themselves not have children because then they will have to provide for both the old and their children.
This is already happening. Healthcare and retirement programs for people over 65 are eating the federal budget. According to that budget, the sacred value that has to yield in order to encourage fertility is care and funding of the elderly. It's the only sacred value that unites republicans and democrats.
The median voter is between 55-60 years old and this will rise over the next few decades.
I think a better (and more sufficient) value to sacrifice would be the landlord's sacred right to extract value and concentrate wealth without giving much of anything back.
Well, in some sense they have enslaved themselves, or were enslaved by their own parents, because one of those generations failed to breed sufficient numbers to spread the burden out and lighten the load on each individual. People pay the bulk of their taxes -- for care of the elderly, among other things -- during their peak earning years, which is about ages 35-60. By those years, you either have or have not reproduced, pretty much. If you're approaching 45, let us say, and are pissed that retirement taxes are going through the roof, but you yourself only have 1 child who still isn't paying taxes because he's in graduate school, or finding himself on a trip to Nepal -- well, you, or more precisely your generation, kind of did that to yourself. It's not like the economics of old age and the demographics in front of you were inscrutable to you, or indeed have varied a particle since when the Acropolis of Athens was brand new.
Like, the Chad Jones model you consider here seems very unrealistic:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/shrinking-economies-dont-innovate
Population falls exponentially, and tech improvements falls exponentially leading to tech level stagnation, but consumption approaches a constant?! So much of our modern economy depends economies of scale. If tech levels is flat but population falls by a factor of 10, consumption falls a lot!
Much more likely to me: population starts falling in nearly all developed countries, leading to stagnating tech and slow falling consumption (due to reduced economies of scale) until reaching levels of consumption characteristic of the US between 1970 and 2000, by which time fertility rebounds to above replacement level (as it was in the US during that time period). This happens way before the Amish can double enough times to make a difference.
Consumption levels in US 1970-2000 don't seem to me sufficient to raise fertility above replacement.
US native-born fertility rate during that time period was above replacement levels. So, by my reading, your previous explanations for fertility fall should predict fertility rise.
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/the-return-of-communism
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/our-big-wealth-status-mistakehtml
Seems easier to just redesign our economic system so that it doesn't rely on an ever-expanding population.
Did you even read Hanson's argument?
The reckoning will never be over fertility. It will be over WHO is fertile. There are always religious groups who are happy to breed at high rates and the whole world is far more diverse than Japan. The danger isn't that we stop breeding but that what's happening in Israel with the higher birth rate of religious Jews starts to happen to the world.
Your supposed rationalizations for addiction start off pretty ludicrous.
Then, you assume that attitudes toward individual survival scale up to humanity as a whole. While it’s easy to think of a bunch of collective social problems as something one ‘has’ to care about given how saturated the media is with things you can do next to nothing about, in reality those concerns are something opted into rather than essential.
It’s really no concern of mine if humanity persists or perishes.
Relatedly, this may be of interest to some of you: On Antinatalism as applied nihilism, https://open.substack.com/pub/thewaxingcrescent/p/on-asabiyyah?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web