Finding ways to combine RAT with core insights from sociology and anthropology is a worthy aim.
And among the contenders for a synthesis, you are on the same track as those who combine insights from the theory of games with asymmetric information (and consequent need for reputation-building, adopting pseudo-self-binding strategies, evolut…
Finding ways to combine RAT with core insights from sociology and anthropology is a worthy aim.
And among the contenders for a synthesis, you are on the same track as those who combine insights from the theory of games with asymmetric information (and consequent need for reputation-building, adopting pseudo-self-binding strategies, evolutionary arms races to detect cheaters & evolve more subtle ways to cheat etc.) with Goffman-style sociology (Interaction rituals, The presentation of self in everyday life, Strategic interaction and symbolic interactionism more generally) and acculturation theories (Konner's 700+ tome The Evolution of Childhood and others). The sentence “each person’s main underlying preference is really just to conform to their cultures norms, and rank high on their culture’s status markers.” is quite apt as a nutshell statement in this regard.
“Cultural drift” is also a useful concept to use as an umbrella turm for the various mechanisms that underlie cultural change.
BUT you move very fast (too fast) from such a “positive” synthetic theory to normative assessments of “maladaptive” cultures. Your single proxy indicator for maladaptiveness appears to be low fertility. That’s your Archimedian fulcrum on which you plant your moral lever, in your attempt to move the world. I must protest: Not so fast! For several reasons:
(1) Low fertility need not be maladaptive. Fewer children means that more can be invested in each. More investments = higher long-run survival probability. It’s a human version of the old evolutionary distinction between K-strategists and r-strategists.
(2) …more generally, be careful to assume you, or anyone else, can be smarter than evolution. Stronger: Never argue with evolution.
(3) Even if below 2.1. fertility should be considered maladaptive on the individual level, it can be adaptive for humanity as a whole. Thus it can be a case where what is individually not rational is collectively rational. Fewer humans = less risk of an ecological disaster. Plus fewer, but higher human capital, human beings = higher probability of new innovations & higher societal dynamism.
(4) It is in any case too early to tell if today's global low fertility trend is maladaptive or not. It is also too early to tell if the long-term trend will never break. There were similar concerns about declining fertility in Europe in the 1930, then came WW2 and fertility shot up again. (Actually, it is obvious that the trend will break at some point. Humans are not going to keep getting below 2.1. children per woman until we go extinct.)
(5) Even if it should turn out that below reproduction fertility is forever, it is unlikely to be driven by any particular “culture” alone. Since declining fertility is a global phenomenon, across all world cultures. Including Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Muslim and animistic cultures. It has nothing particularly to do with the brands of liberal & conservative Americanism that dominates ideologically in the US.
In short: We must collect data on fertility developments for at least a few hundred more years before we can move on to moral statements. As with the French Revolution, the impact of low fertility on the future of humanity is too early to tell.
We have other plausibly maladaptive cultural trends, but low fertility does seem the clearest evidence. No way below replacement fertility in good times can be adaptive, and it seems consistent enough for long enough to project it forward quite a ways. World elites today share a common culture to a large extent.
Fully agree that world elites today share a common culture to a large extent, more so than at any previous point in history.
Although there are perhaps two global elite cultures. The late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger distinguished between what he somewhat tongue-in-cheek labelled the Faculty Club Culture and the Davos Culture. The global Faculty Club Culture is Human Rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, and being pro UN generally. The global Davos culture is free trade & the WTO, Washington consensus & IMF, and pro-business generally.
None of them are particularly anti-natalist, however. Nor are they particularly pro-natalist for that matter. Pro/anti natalism has not been any core item in the ideological “package” of either of these two elite cultures….I believe the main reasons for the global reduced fertility trend must be sought closer to the material base of societies, in the “production conditions for reproduction” so to speak. But, sure, with complex links to how people try to live lives they deem meaningful, i.e. with complex links to culture.
It is no so much that culture is directly natalist as it is that it strongly supports elements that happen to have anti-natalist consequences. Like gender equality, long school prep, intensive parenting, etc.
Yes, these are some of the factors behind fertility decline. But are they driven by elite-culture changes, or by a host of socio-material changes with lots of feedback loops both to elite culture and to mass culture?
A way to get some kind of handle on all the multicausality going on, is to adopt the old distinction between distal, intermediate and proximate factors used in public health studies. I do some work on this myself, and here is a suggestion:
Distal factor (behind fertility decline):
Mortality decline (driven by a host of factors, but that's another can of worms)
Intermediate factors:
Stronger states, and effective legal guarantees against interpersonal violence
Increased predictability of individual life courses implies cognitive shift to a «planned» life course
Shift from agriculture to industry-and-services economy
Child labor made illegal and effectively enforced
Introduction of formal social security systems
Urbanization
Women gain access to wage labor
Social structure opens up to allow for skill-based upward mobility
Mandatory education & higher percentage of young people in higher education
Two-income families having advantages in housing markets
Less stable family formations create higher risk when siring many children
Female life course becomes more similar to male life course
Proximate factors (closer to the actual fertility decision):
Delayed birth of first child & delayed marriages
Effective contraception made available. Particularly important is contraception that can be administered by the woman alone, and independent of coitus
Low fertility is not the only indicator (he's also referenced swiftly declining patriotism & willingness to fight wars), it's just the most obvious. And it is indeed obvious when fertility is not merely low in a sacrifice for "quality" (as in r vs K selection theory), but BELOW REPLACEMENT. Even a strategy of producing the highest quality offspring will result in extinction if the number is below replacement. That cannot possibly be an ESS.
Humanity as a whole is not at risk of extinction from an ecological disaster. We've survived much worse. And innovation occurs with growing populations, it will decline as population does (particularly since the most innovative countries now have lower fertility than the least innovative ones).
> There were similar concerns about declining fertility in Europe in the 1930, then came WW2 and fertility shot up again
Finding ways to combine RAT with core insights from sociology and anthropology is a worthy aim.
And among the contenders for a synthesis, you are on the same track as those who combine insights from the theory of games with asymmetric information (and consequent need for reputation-building, adopting pseudo-self-binding strategies, evolutionary arms races to detect cheaters & evolve more subtle ways to cheat etc.) with Goffman-style sociology (Interaction rituals, The presentation of self in everyday life, Strategic interaction and symbolic interactionism more generally) and acculturation theories (Konner's 700+ tome The Evolution of Childhood and others). The sentence “each person’s main underlying preference is really just to conform to their cultures norms, and rank high on their culture’s status markers.” is quite apt as a nutshell statement in this regard.
“Cultural drift” is also a useful concept to use as an umbrella turm for the various mechanisms that underlie cultural change.
BUT you move very fast (too fast) from such a “positive” synthetic theory to normative assessments of “maladaptive” cultures. Your single proxy indicator for maladaptiveness appears to be low fertility. That’s your Archimedian fulcrum on which you plant your moral lever, in your attempt to move the world. I must protest: Not so fast! For several reasons:
(1) Low fertility need not be maladaptive. Fewer children means that more can be invested in each. More investments = higher long-run survival probability. It’s a human version of the old evolutionary distinction between K-strategists and r-strategists.
(2) …more generally, be careful to assume you, or anyone else, can be smarter than evolution. Stronger: Never argue with evolution.
(3) Even if below 2.1. fertility should be considered maladaptive on the individual level, it can be adaptive for humanity as a whole. Thus it can be a case where what is individually not rational is collectively rational. Fewer humans = less risk of an ecological disaster. Plus fewer, but higher human capital, human beings = higher probability of new innovations & higher societal dynamism.
(4) It is in any case too early to tell if today's global low fertility trend is maladaptive or not. It is also too early to tell if the long-term trend will never break. There were similar concerns about declining fertility in Europe in the 1930, then came WW2 and fertility shot up again. (Actually, it is obvious that the trend will break at some point. Humans are not going to keep getting below 2.1. children per woman until we go extinct.)
(5) Even if it should turn out that below reproduction fertility is forever, it is unlikely to be driven by any particular “culture” alone. Since declining fertility is a global phenomenon, across all world cultures. Including Buddhist, Hindu, Shinto, Muslim and animistic cultures. It has nothing particularly to do with the brands of liberal & conservative Americanism that dominates ideologically in the US.
In short: We must collect data on fertility developments for at least a few hundred more years before we can move on to moral statements. As with the French Revolution, the impact of low fertility on the future of humanity is too early to tell.
We have other plausibly maladaptive cultural trends, but low fertility does seem the clearest evidence. No way below replacement fertility in good times can be adaptive, and it seems consistent enough for long enough to project it forward quite a ways. World elites today share a common culture to a large extent.
Fully agree that world elites today share a common culture to a large extent, more so than at any previous point in history.
Although there are perhaps two global elite cultures. The late sociology-of-religion scholar Peter Berger distinguished between what he somewhat tongue-in-cheek labelled the Faculty Club Culture and the Davos Culture. The global Faculty Club Culture is Human Rights, the Sustainable Development Goals, and being pro UN generally. The global Davos culture is free trade & the WTO, Washington consensus & IMF, and pro-business generally.
None of them are particularly anti-natalist, however. Nor are they particularly pro-natalist for that matter. Pro/anti natalism has not been any core item in the ideological “package” of either of these two elite cultures….I believe the main reasons for the global reduced fertility trend must be sought closer to the material base of societies, in the “production conditions for reproduction” so to speak. But, sure, with complex links to how people try to live lives they deem meaningful, i.e. with complex links to culture.
It is no so much that culture is directly natalist as it is that it strongly supports elements that happen to have anti-natalist consequences. Like gender equality, long school prep, intensive parenting, etc.
Yes, these are some of the factors behind fertility decline. But are they driven by elite-culture changes, or by a host of socio-material changes with lots of feedback loops both to elite culture and to mass culture?
A way to get some kind of handle on all the multicausality going on, is to adopt the old distinction between distal, intermediate and proximate factors used in public health studies. I do some work on this myself, and here is a suggestion:
Distal factor (behind fertility decline):
Mortality decline (driven by a host of factors, but that's another can of worms)
Intermediate factors:
Stronger states, and effective legal guarantees against interpersonal violence
Increased predictability of individual life courses implies cognitive shift to a «planned» life course
Shift from agriculture to industry-and-services economy
Child labor made illegal and effectively enforced
Introduction of formal social security systems
Urbanization
Women gain access to wage labor
Social structure opens up to allow for skill-based upward mobility
Mandatory education & higher percentage of young people in higher education
Two-income families having advantages in housing markets
Less stable family formations create higher risk when siring many children
Female life course becomes more similar to male life course
Proximate factors (closer to the actual fertility decision):
Delayed birth of first child & delayed marriages
Effective contraception made available. Particularly important is contraception that can be administered by the woman alone, and independent of coitus
Widespread access to risk-free abortion
Low fertility is not the only indicator (he's also referenced swiftly declining patriotism & willingness to fight wars), it's just the most obvious. And it is indeed obvious when fertility is not merely low in a sacrifice for "quality" (as in r vs K selection theory), but BELOW REPLACEMENT. Even a strategy of producing the highest quality offspring will result in extinction if the number is below replacement. That cannot possibly be an ESS.
Humanity as a whole is not at risk of extinction from an ecological disaster. We've survived much worse. And innovation occurs with growing populations, it will decline as population does (particularly since the most innovative countries now have lower fertility than the least innovative ones).
> There were similar concerns about declining fertility in Europe in the 1930, then came WW2 and fertility shot up again
The baby boom began somewhat before, in the mid 1930s https://worksinprogress.co/issue/understanding-the-baby-boom/
> As with the French Revolution, the impact of low fertility on the future of humanity is too early to tell.
The actual quote was referring to the 1968 riots. Chas Freeman cleared that up some years ago.