In my opinion, reducing the number of years of formal education in society would not only reduce the fertility problem, but also reduce the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility.
A large part of people, both men and women, go to university, while for the absolute majority it is useless, the reason? The intense promotion of a university degree by society/leftists as something with high prestige and essential in life, while it is not.
I read your previous post and I think artificial intelligence will help us, with the intense automation of jobs and education , people will be much less interested in going to university.
This will mean a decrease in the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility and an increase in fertility rates.
It's sometimes hard to tell whether leftists promote university out of naivety, desire for power, or malice. It's probably different combinations for different leftists.
If you're an envirommentalist rather than a hereditarian, it's easy to think that all problems can be solved with increased education. We as a society show far too much deference to this belief, and ought to spend more time mocking it. (Why stop at free college? Make everyone stay in school till they're seventy!)
There were already too many people going to college by the 1980s, when we had ~20% of the population going, as opposed to the ~30% of today. College format is really only practical for those with an average IQ in at least the 110s, so unless colleges in the 1980s were filled exclusively with only the people smart enough to qualify for college, and let's face it we know they weren't, there's no way to get a significantly higher rate of college attendance without heavily lowering standards, which thus dilutes the sheepskin's value, and forces those who want it to still signal something to spend even more time and money on even more schooling.
It's time we put an end to this stupidly wasteful nonsense. No more than ten percent of the population of a white-majority country could possibly have any use for a college degree beyond signaling and networking, both of which we have many better, faster, and less expensive enablements of.
The "intense promotion of a university degree" is pursued governments of any stripe to hide unemployment stats.
Education and intelligence are not the same thing. More education doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent but it wastes time, especially for women.
There is too much school and too much emphasis on unnecessary post-graduate qualifications as higher ed is now run as an enterprise.
This is interesting and suggestive, but is it true? I would suggest that an apt comparison for the question: ‘would you like to have (more) children?’ is the question ‘would you like to exercise (more) / eat (healthier) foods?’ Also in the latter case you are likely to find a significant majority of people answering in the affirmative. However, public interventions to nudge people toward healthier lifestyle have a mixed record at best (not to mention the libertarian objections against interfering with people’s lifestyle, eg tax on sugars et similia).
Concerning the correlation between marriage s and having children, since you are very well/versed in statistics, what makes you think that there is a causation link? I am raising the questions because, like you, I think the problem is fundamental.
In theory one could use fixed effects / longitudinal models to study the effects of marraige/cohabitation on chance to have a child in a given year, and thus compare the same person over time controlling for stable unobserved factors. I looked but couldn't find such a study. It might exist as this kind of data is plentiful. However, my mental model is that being in a serious relationship drastically increases the chances of having a child a given year, and the main cause of fertility decline is that people are spending fewer of their reproductive years in such relationships.
If you want to advertising to show happily married same-race couples with children... there is a certain tribe, heavily overrepresented in the advertising industry, that might have a problem with that.
The over-representation of minorities (and mixed couples) in advertisement might also be a result of womens being liberals and having negative ingroup preferences. And women wanting to virtue signal.
The problem is more fundamental and confusing to the male mind: women choose what they don’t want. This is a shit test. The traditional solution was to tell them “no”, or aa Heartiste used to put it, “ignore and plow”.
Women do this because they want to know that the men in their lives love them enough to stop them from choosing what they don’t want. Women desire to be owned by strong men, and they test the boundaries to reassure themselves that their men are strong.
The problem is that, in advanced societies, their choices are as legally binding as a man’s. So they choose things they don’t want, no one can stop them, and then they feel bad.
You’ve diagnosed the problem but come up with an awful Ceaucescu-era state-run solution.
Women work now. The genie is out of the bottle.
A better approach would be to ensure that women their first child younger, which leads to more total children.
Undergraduate education should be intense, for bright people only, be and capped at three years. Workforce placement should be a big part of this. Being on a university campus after the age of 22 should only be for the very few.
Get men and women into career tracks in their early 20s and children will soon follow.
Women always worked, it's not like they sat around the last 100k years before feminism was a thing. The difference is they work away from home and delay family formation.
There were also a lot more practical limits on what a woman could contribute in the days when the majority of useful labor was physical, where even the most robust women are lucky to keep up with the least of men. Industrialization and capitalism greatly increased the value of cognitive labor, which average women can actually be competitive with men. A third of a standard deviation gap is much easier to surmount than a gap of two.
There was always important physical labor that didn’t depend on brute strength. The OP is correct - that labor just simply used to be done in the home, or *could* be done in the home even if it didn’t necessarily have to be.
It also depends on which society and time you’re talking about. We have a bad habit in the modern day of flattening history. Women - and men - have enjoyed different benefits, responsibilities, and privileges throughout different times, societies, and incarnations of those societies. It’s true that women didn’t enjoy all the privileges they have today (though many still insist they’re oppressed), but the idea that women enjoyed zero privileges at all is a myth.
It's not a matter of enjoying zero privileges. It's a matter of who enjoys the most, and it was the case in every premodern civilization ever surveyed that men always enjoyed more power and privilege than women. The only difference was the degree of severity of women's oppression. The notion that pre-civilizational hunter-gatherer humans were even kinda sexually egalitarian contradicts all known serious observation of such people, who overwhelmingly show themselves to be the most likely of all men to treat their women badly, such as by proscribing gangrape for the crime of a woman looking at a sacred flute:
It's also a serious disadvantage in a labor market when everyone on one side of it can do everything that the other side can do, but not vice versa. It severely limits the ability of those on the handicapped side to advance their station, as well as incentivizes cartelization by the able side. Because the way they see it, why should they have to listen to those who have so much less to contribute?
Nonsense. Apex fallacy, avoiding the worst effects of wars and living longer have been women's privileges for just about ever. And women do actually have so much less to contribute-LA firefighters being the perfect example
These aren't nearly as beneficial as a +2σ physical strength advantage, a +0.33σ cognitive ability advantage, the ability to fertilize others rather than to be the one getting fertilized, and the ability to maintain fertility until in many cases death from old age.* If it weren't for the widespread acceptance of victimhood culture and feminist propaganda in the Occident, nobody would even consider women to have the better deal.
What you're proposing is a good idea, but there's nothing wrong with strong state-mandated encouragement either.
You may be (and I certainly am) the type of person who likes living a "lone brave individual" type of life, but I think the bulk of people, men and women, prefer to feel like they're part of something bigger than merely their own ephemeral life.
We in the West never had this sense as much as some ethnic/racial groups do, but we did have it to some extent, enough to keep our civilization going, but in the past 70 years or so we have completely lost (or rather it has been bamboozled out of us, but that's another story) that sense of being a polity, being a nation with grand goals that go beyond our invidual lives, but it's not impossible that that should come back.
(But first we'd have to return to being ethnostates like we used to be and kick most of the foreigners out.)
You show all the usual signs of the libertarian who has no problem running head first into Idiocracy, as long as you get to have something approaching a free market along the way. If Ceacescu's crimes were limited to making sure Romanians were having more kids by giving married couples priority in housing, loans and hospital queues, he wouldn't have been toppled.
Also, could you in that case explain how you would make sure the free market doesn't get everyone into universities on $40.000 student loans without government intervention, since you don't want state run solutions?
The societal function of a pension is to rob money (= time, vitality) from the fertile and give it to the infertile. From an ecological perspective, pensions are not only useless, they are downright destructive.
The historical way to solve this issue was to have enough children that they could support you. Since the state took over this role, there was no incentive for parents to have enough children for them to take care of them. Someone else's children would indirectly do that through taxes. That is, until everybody has the same free rider approach.
Brazilians aged 20-25 who won a mortgage (let's simplify and just say: won a home) in a lottery were 32% more likely to have children and had 33% more children. Public housing with large apartments for young people might be the most cost-effective approach.
I think that the key variable is age of the bride at first marriage. That has shifted from 23 to almost 30. It is pretty simple for the vast majority of women to have 2-3 children if they get married at age 23, while it is very difficult if they get married at age 30.
I predict that the fertility rate will not go up significantly unless the age of first marriage for the bride goes down significantly.
The early brides was a brief historical period. The normal age of the bride at marriage was in the upper 20s in Scandinavia for seemingly 100s of years. The post-war period is abnormal, not normal.
“ Between 1800 and 1900, women generally married for the first time between the ages of 20 and 22 years old, making the median age 21 years old for average brides.”
Yes, age at first marriage dropped immediately after WW2, but since that led to the Baby Boom, this only strengthens my case.
I don’t think Scandinavia is relevant to this discussion.
Sorry. When I said that "I don’t think Scandinavia is relevant to this discussion," I did not realize that you were Danish.
No offense intended.
I should have figured it out based on your last name. I actually attended two years of university in Copenhagen and was fluent in Danish at the time.
As for the data that you present, it appears to contradict the data from other nations, so I do not know what to make of it. Perhaps because it is a different metric or perhaps because Denmark was unique at the time.
The data from the US is very clear and I have heard enough references to Western Europe before 1900 to believe that the USA was not unusual.
You’ll never fix this issue without ending no fault divorce, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. Feminism as an ideology hates children - of course they don’t typically outright state this (although sometimes they do), but it is their revealed preference. Feminism looks at children - and frankly marriage as well - the same way men used to joke about it - “the old ball and chain”. (As an aside here, this is yet another way feminism imitates a toxic aspect of contemporary maledom and holds it up as a virtue when expressed by a woman).
Obviously not every woman out there is a hardcore feminist, but every woman credits feminism, and rightly so, with their current social mobility. For most women, even if they disagree with the radical aspects of the movement, the movement itself must go unsullied - it gave them freedom.
You’ll never get the Starship Trooper-esque propaganda you want - our elites have clearly made their choice when it comes to fertility vs immigration, and women in general are loathe to in any way “depend on” men.
Tbh, while I do think the restructuring of tax benefits is itself a good idea, that won’t matter - because men increasingly distrust the institution of marriage as well. We know that 80% of marriages are ended by women, and that most of those are no fault. We know that in today’s competitive sexual marketplace, there’s another guy just around the corner. We know that there’s multiple surveys out there indicating that up to half of women in committed relationships - including marriage - have a “back up man”. We know there are studies out there showing that both men and women who have many sexual partners tend to report feeling less satisfied in their marriages later on in life - though this effect seems more pronounced in women.
Substack itself is rife with middle-aged to proto-elderly female writers who were married for 10, 15, 20 years and then just decided they weren’t happy anymore and their husbands were too comfortable and not ambitious enough, and then blindsided them with divorce. Seriously, I read an account not even a week ago by a late-40-something woman who divorced her husband after 15 years because at 50, he was no longer “ambitious” enough. The joke writes itself.
To loop back to my original thesis - men increasingly won’t trust the institution of marriage unless it’s concrete in a way that today’s civil society simply does not allow. Everything is made to be broken now. Changing this in regard to marriage would mean ending no fault divorce.
But that won’t happen - feminists will never let it happen. And women will never meaningfully go against feminists.
So rampant immigration and careerism - corpo-slutism if you’re not feeling particularly charitable - for women it is.
One long term trend accompanying declining birthrates is women's average earnings approaching men's (at least in the United States). I would guess male earnings are more variable than women's and there are a lot of men earning little or nothing, and others earning something but less than the women they might marry.
Women are more functional than men on average and less likely to wind up homeless or in prison if they stay single. Men want women sexually more than women want men. So there has to be some strong reason for women to marry, but those reasons are getting weaker.
I don't know the answer. Just pointing out that it's hopeless.
One problem here. Like many articles on birth rates, families, society etc., it omits a key part of the equation.
Men.
Nobody seems to care if they want more kids, why they do/don't want kids. Nobody ever asks what men want at all.
If we have women work less, they will want men to support them, either through direct support from their man directly or from Big Daddy Government. Are men going to be paid more? Don't think so.
I sometimes think "birth rates" is, like mass migration, just a niche 1% plea for an endless supply of slaves. Human slaves being more fun than robots.
That is frankly not how it has traditionally been in human societies. There are places today where that’s still not the case. This is a modernism masquerading as fundamental nature.
That you’ve been lockdowned for nothing? Johns Hopkins meta-analysis of 18000 studies proved that lockdowns didn’t work and worse, killed people by stopping those with cancer or heart conditions from getting testing and treatment
Could you please explain why no Health Agency researched the 30+ COVID effective cures, but instead censored and banned the doctors successfully applying them? Was it because a successful cure would void the Emergency Use Authorization of the lethal vaccines?
Should every single vaxxed on the planet be suing Pfizer and Moderna for deliberately hiding human DNA plasmids in their vaccines, and Pfizer, for injecting an undisclosed carcinogenic monkey virus (SV40) sequence in the clueless biohacked, as officially recognized by Health Canada?
Failed again? Show 10 secs in the middle of this video (who doesn’t have 10 seconds for you)
(caveat about the beginning: pot destroys your brain + “Raises Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke”)
9/11: two "planes", yet 8 towers down. WTC7 imploded, free falling on its footprint, in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach as well as the unblemished Deutsche Bank. All 7 World Trade Center towers and that bank needed to be rebuilt, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center...
The “owner” took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, months before, when no one was taking them … he didn’t show up for work on 9/11 … just as his 2 grown up siblings.
The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!
There's a plan to slow-murder 95% of the global population by 2050… written on the masonic Georgia guide-stones: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 … ”:
- J6: The false flag operation of the fake riot was planned, incited and guided by 200 infiltrated FBI mason agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
In 2022, the same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband millions of Brazilians against the stolen elections through the rigged voting machines owned by mason Soros:
- Since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population by adding hCG to infertilize women: lab-detected in 30 countries, and overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” (tampering) by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas). Check SoundChoice.org or videos.
- Excess deaths in the first 2 years: 40 million people killed by the lethal injections... so far. COVID was designed as a primer for even more lethal COVID haccines:
Yet, the most important impact of the COVID haccines, population-wise, is lifelong infertility.
Births keep dropping even more dramatically. The infertility bomb will fully explode in 10-20 years, when the haxxed babies and children grow up.
Even if unhaxxed children evade self-replicating transfecting haxxines (replicons) and marry haxxed ones? ... just as planned, the only choice deliberately left, will be DNA-designed infertile transhumanized babies, for an ever dependency on immoral IVF (for every IVF-born, 25 are lost or murdered).
2. There's proof of deliberate geoengineering to increase global temperatures and droughts, and decrease albedo by dissolving clouds with satellite and Weather Radars’ Electro-Magnetic Frequencies.
3. Life involves a carbon cycle. A war on carbon is a war on life, causing crop/food scarcity, increase in food prices and famines. Decarbonization is part of the plan to exterminate 95% of us.
- Apart from sin-empowered demons, what is their main source of power? NOT a coincidence that the USA left dollar convertibility to gold in 1971, precisely triggering the exponential government deficit coupled with the trade deficit and inflation.
Taking down central banking doesn't solve the problem. Their source of free endless money is counterfeiting, fractional reserve banking and financial instruments (e.g. derivatives, debt over debt, compound interest above real growth, etc.). Also, insider information, sabotage, infiltration, manufactured news and events to create profitable market-movements.
This is the Achilles’ heel of all nations: the SSS (Satanic Secret Societies such as masonry) create trillions out of thin air and launder them through their Banks, foundations, and foreign loans and “aid”, with which they buy puppeticians and seats in the boards of the Federal Reserve (the only private-run Central Bank in the world), judiciary, corporations, media, healthcare, universities, foundations, political parties, etc.
The masons’ worst nightmare is that the daydreaming majority wakes up, finds out their crimes, and seek justice. We are a million to one. Until they achieve the CBDC digi-tatorship, they are walking on a tight rope.
We've got a very small window of opportunity to fight or ... die (they want to murder 95% of us).
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
I think key is freedom of speech and freedom of market. In EU, for example, we live under green socialism where everything is decided by regulations and subventions distrubuted by bureaucrats. The windmills do not produce energy in sufficient quantity and at the right time. And cheap and available energy is basis of any civilization. We're getting poorer, in decline and many people are pessimistic about future and hopeless. Who would like to have children under such conditions?
The poorest people in the entire world today are by far our most fertile. Per-capita GDP is heavily inversely correlated with TFR. Afghans have almost five kids per mother, and they have lower a per-capita GDP than the United States has had since the 18th Century:
The idea that people aren't having kids today because of economic concerns is a socialist braingremlin that metastasized to the general public in large part because rightoids are resentful of their decades of political and cultural losses. Serious people should discard this hokum.
In my opinion, reducing the number of years of formal education in society would not only reduce the fertility problem, but also reduce the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility.
A large part of people, both men and women, go to university, while for the absolute majority it is useless, the reason? The intense promotion of a university degree by society/leftists as something with high prestige and essential in life, while it is not.
I read your previous post and I think artificial intelligence will help us, with the intense automation of jobs and education , people will be much less interested in going to university.
This will mean a decrease in the negative correlation between intelligence and fertility and an increase in fertility rates.
May the machine gods save us.
It's sometimes hard to tell whether leftists promote university out of naivety, desire for power, or malice. It's probably different combinations for different leftists.
If you're an envirommentalist rather than a hereditarian, it's easy to think that all problems can be solved with increased education. We as a society show far too much deference to this belief, and ought to spend more time mocking it. (Why stop at free college? Make everyone stay in school till they're seventy!)
My parents and their six siblings were born in the decade between 1952 and 1962.
Al but one went to university and none stayed older than age 22.
All of them were on a career track youngest at 17, latest by 23.
Two of them didn’t have as many kids as desired but this was due to fertility issues, not economic circumstances.
There were already too many people going to college by the 1980s, when we had ~20% of the population going, as opposed to the ~30% of today. College format is really only practical for those with an average IQ in at least the 110s, so unless colleges in the 1980s were filled exclusively with only the people smart enough to qualify for college, and let's face it we know they weren't, there's no way to get a significantly higher rate of college attendance without heavily lowering standards, which thus dilutes the sheepskin's value, and forces those who want it to still signal something to spend even more time and money on even more schooling.
It's time we put an end to this stupidly wasteful nonsense. No more than ten percent of the population of a white-majority country could possibly have any use for a college degree beyond signaling and networking, both of which we have many better, faster, and less expensive enablements of.
The "intense promotion of a university degree" is pursued governments of any stripe to hide unemployment stats.
Education and intelligence are not the same thing. More education doesn't necessarily make you more intelligent but it wastes time, especially for women.
There is too much school and too much emphasis on unnecessary post-graduate qualifications as higher ed is now run as an enterprise.
This is interesting and suggestive, but is it true? I would suggest that an apt comparison for the question: ‘would you like to have (more) children?’ is the question ‘would you like to exercise (more) / eat (healthier) foods?’ Also in the latter case you are likely to find a significant majority of people answering in the affirmative. However, public interventions to nudge people toward healthier lifestyle have a mixed record at best (not to mention the libertarian objections against interfering with people’s lifestyle, eg tax on sugars et similia).
Concerning the correlation between marriage s and having children, since you are very well/versed in statistics, what makes you think that there is a causation link? I am raising the questions because, like you, I think the problem is fundamental.
In theory one could use fixed effects / longitudinal models to study the effects of marraige/cohabitation on chance to have a child in a given year, and thus compare the same person over time controlling for stable unobserved factors. I looked but couldn't find such a study. It might exist as this kind of data is plentiful. However, my mental model is that being in a serious relationship drastically increases the chances of having a child a given year, and the main cause of fertility decline is that people are spending fewer of their reproductive years in such relationships.
These surveys were not done by me. If you would like to run some surveys of your own, please proceed.
If you want to advertising to show happily married same-race couples with children... there is a certain tribe, heavily overrepresented in the advertising industry, that might have a problem with that.
The over-representation of minorities (and mixed couples) in advertisement might also be a result of womens being liberals and having negative ingroup preferences. And women wanting to virtue signal.
Yes but before that, someone had to establish that mixed race couplings are virtuous (for the white partner).
The problem is more fundamental and confusing to the male mind: women choose what they don’t want. This is a shit test. The traditional solution was to tell them “no”, or aa Heartiste used to put it, “ignore and plow”.
Women do this because they want to know that the men in their lives love them enough to stop them from choosing what they don’t want. Women desire to be owned by strong men, and they test the boundaries to reassure themselves that their men are strong.
The problem is that, in advanced societies, their choices are as legally binding as a man’s. So they choose things they don’t want, no one can stop them, and then they feel bad.
It's not do much they make bad choices as much as they don't want to make a choice at all. They want biology or men to make the choice for them.
So true. This is why reader surveys in women’s magazines cannot even suggest the truth, irrespective of horrendous sampling bias.
You’ve diagnosed the problem but come up with an awful Ceaucescu-era state-run solution.
Women work now. The genie is out of the bottle.
A better approach would be to ensure that women their first child younger, which leads to more total children.
Undergraduate education should be intense, for bright people only, be and capped at three years. Workforce placement should be a big part of this. Being on a university campus after the age of 22 should only be for the very few.
Get men and women into career tracks in their early 20s and children will soon follow.
Women always worked, it's not like they sat around the last 100k years before feminism was a thing. The difference is they work away from home and delay family formation.
There were also a lot more practical limits on what a woman could contribute in the days when the majority of useful labor was physical, where even the most robust women are lucky to keep up with the least of men. Industrialization and capitalism greatly increased the value of cognitive labor, which average women can actually be competitive with men. A third of a standard deviation gap is much easier to surmount than a gap of two.
Ehhhhh…..
There was always important physical labor that didn’t depend on brute strength. The OP is correct - that labor just simply used to be done in the home, or *could* be done in the home even if it didn’t necessarily have to be.
It also depends on which society and time you’re talking about. We have a bad habit in the modern day of flattening history. Women - and men - have enjoyed different benefits, responsibilities, and privileges throughout different times, societies, and incarnations of those societies. It’s true that women didn’t enjoy all the privileges they have today (though many still insist they’re oppressed), but the idea that women enjoyed zero privileges at all is a myth.
It's not a matter of enjoying zero privileges. It's a matter of who enjoys the most, and it was the case in every premodern civilization ever surveyed that men always enjoyed more power and privilege than women. The only difference was the degree of severity of women's oppression. The notion that pre-civilizational hunter-gatherer humans were even kinda sexually egalitarian contradicts all known serious observation of such people, who overwhelmingly show themselves to be the most likely of all men to treat their women badly, such as by proscribing gangrape for the crime of a woman looking at a sacred flute:
https://nautil.us/the-point-of-mens-cults-237005/
It's also a serious disadvantage in a labor market when everyone on one side of it can do everything that the other side can do, but not vice versa. It severely limits the ability of those on the handicapped side to advance their station, as well as incentivizes cartelization by the able side. Because the way they see it, why should they have to listen to those who have so much less to contribute?
There's no question who had it better.
Nonsense. Apex fallacy, avoiding the worst effects of wars and living longer have been women's privileges for just about ever. And women do actually have so much less to contribute-LA firefighters being the perfect example
These aren't nearly as beneficial as a +2σ physical strength advantage, a +0.33σ cognitive ability advantage, the ability to fertilize others rather than to be the one getting fertilized, and the ability to maintain fertility until in many cases death from old age.* If it weren't for the widespread acceptance of victimhood culture and feminist propaganda in the Occident, nobody would even consider women to have the better deal.
* Especially with the advent of viagra.
What you're proposing is a good idea, but there's nothing wrong with strong state-mandated encouragement either.
You may be (and I certainly am) the type of person who likes living a "lone brave individual" type of life, but I think the bulk of people, men and women, prefer to feel like they're part of something bigger than merely their own ephemeral life.
We in the West never had this sense as much as some ethnic/racial groups do, but we did have it to some extent, enough to keep our civilization going, but in the past 70 years or so we have completely lost (or rather it has been bamboozled out of us, but that's another story) that sense of being a polity, being a nation with grand goals that go beyond our invidual lives, but it's not impossible that that should come back.
(But first we'd have to return to being ethnostates like we used to be and kick most of the foreigners out.)
You show all the usual signs of the libertarian who has no problem running head first into Idiocracy, as long as you get to have something approaching a free market along the way. If Ceacescu's crimes were limited to making sure Romanians were having more kids by giving married couples priority in housing, loans and hospital queues, he wouldn't have been toppled.
Also, could you in that case explain how you would make sure the free market doesn't get everyone into universities on $40.000 student loans without government intervention, since you don't want state run solutions?
One of the main overlooked causes of the birthrate decline is the existence of pensions.
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/pub/pdf/scpwps/ecbwp1734.pdf
The societal function of a pension is to rob money (= time, vitality) from the fertile and give it to the infertile. From an ecological perspective, pensions are not only useless, they are downright destructive.
The historical way to solve this issue was to have enough children that they could support you. Since the state took over this role, there was no incentive for parents to have enough children for them to take care of them. Someone else's children would indirectly do that through taxes. That is, until everybody has the same free rider approach.
I wish you mentioned this study: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5046571
Brazilians aged 20-25 who won a mortgage (let's simplify and just say: won a home) in a lottery were 32% more likely to have children and had 33% more children. Public housing with large apartments for young people might be the most cost-effective approach.
Great article.
I think that the key variable is age of the bride at first marriage. That has shifted from 23 to almost 30. It is pretty simple for the vast majority of women to have 2-3 children if they get married at age 23, while it is very difficult if they get married at age 30.
I predict that the fertility rate will not go up significantly unless the age of first marriage for the bride goes down significantly.
The early brides was a brief historical period. The normal age of the bride at marriage was in the upper 20s in Scandinavia for seemingly 100s of years. The post-war period is abnormal, not normal.
Are you claiming that the current age of brides at first marriage has not increased since 1900?
If so, I will need stats to be convinced.
Here is one data series showing the opposite:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizations/time-series/demo/families-and-households/ms-2.pdf
Here is another quote:
“ Between 1800 and 1900, women generally married for the first time between the ages of 20 and 22 years old, making the median age 21 years old for average brides.”
Yes, age at first marriage dropped immediately after WW2, but since that led to the Baby Boom, this only strengthens my case.
I don’t think Scandinavia is relevant to this discussion.
I don't know about US data, but age of marriage is a proxy for age of first child anyway. Here's the Danish data. https://www.ejog.org/article/S0301-2115(19)30407-5/abstract
In 1850, age of mothers at first birth was 28 years.
Sorry. When I said that "I don’t think Scandinavia is relevant to this discussion," I did not realize that you were Danish.
No offense intended.
I should have figured it out based on your last name. I actually attended two years of university in Copenhagen and was fluent in Danish at the time.
As for the data that you present, it appears to contradict the data from other nations, so I do not know what to make of it. Perhaps because it is a different metric or perhaps because Denmark was unique at the time.
The data from the US is very clear and I have heard enough references to Western Europe before 1900 to believe that the USA was not unusual.
You’ll never fix this issue without ending no fault divorce, and I don’t see that happening any time soon. Feminism as an ideology hates children - of course they don’t typically outright state this (although sometimes they do), but it is their revealed preference. Feminism looks at children - and frankly marriage as well - the same way men used to joke about it - “the old ball and chain”. (As an aside here, this is yet another way feminism imitates a toxic aspect of contemporary maledom and holds it up as a virtue when expressed by a woman).
Obviously not every woman out there is a hardcore feminist, but every woman credits feminism, and rightly so, with their current social mobility. For most women, even if they disagree with the radical aspects of the movement, the movement itself must go unsullied - it gave them freedom.
You’ll never get the Starship Trooper-esque propaganda you want - our elites have clearly made their choice when it comes to fertility vs immigration, and women in general are loathe to in any way “depend on” men.
Tbh, while I do think the restructuring of tax benefits is itself a good idea, that won’t matter - because men increasingly distrust the institution of marriage as well. We know that 80% of marriages are ended by women, and that most of those are no fault. We know that in today’s competitive sexual marketplace, there’s another guy just around the corner. We know that there’s multiple surveys out there indicating that up to half of women in committed relationships - including marriage - have a “back up man”. We know there are studies out there showing that both men and women who have many sexual partners tend to report feeling less satisfied in their marriages later on in life - though this effect seems more pronounced in women.
Substack itself is rife with middle-aged to proto-elderly female writers who were married for 10, 15, 20 years and then just decided they weren’t happy anymore and their husbands were too comfortable and not ambitious enough, and then blindsided them with divorce. Seriously, I read an account not even a week ago by a late-40-something woman who divorced her husband after 15 years because at 50, he was no longer “ambitious” enough. The joke writes itself.
To loop back to my original thesis - men increasingly won’t trust the institution of marriage unless it’s concrete in a way that today’s civil society simply does not allow. Everything is made to be broken now. Changing this in regard to marriage would mean ending no fault divorce.
But that won’t happen - feminists will never let it happen. And women will never meaningfully go against feminists.
So rampant immigration and careerism - corpo-slutism if you’re not feeling particularly charitable - for women it is.
Ever so true
One long term trend accompanying declining birthrates is women's average earnings approaching men's (at least in the United States). I would guess male earnings are more variable than women's and there are a lot of men earning little or nothing, and others earning something but less than the women they might marry.
Women are more functional than men on average and less likely to wind up homeless or in prison if they stay single. Men want women sexually more than women want men. So there has to be some strong reason for women to marry, but those reasons are getting weaker.
I don't know the answer. Just pointing out that it's hopeless.
Much better version of my post. https://open.substack.com/pub/someunpleasant/p/no-sex-and-the-city?r=2y2mz&utm_medium=ios
Teaching young girls how to care for babies increases their fertility...
https://www.minnpost.com/second-opinion/2016/08/infant-simulator-dolls-linked-more-not-fewer-teen-pregnancies/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Emil, are you doing your part?
Yes, we are.
One problem here. Like many articles on birth rates, families, society etc., it omits a key part of the equation.
Men.
Nobody seems to care if they want more kids, why they do/don't want kids. Nobody ever asks what men want at all.
If we have women work less, they will want men to support them, either through direct support from their man directly or from Big Daddy Government. Are men going to be paid more? Don't think so.
I sometimes think "birth rates" is, like mass migration, just a niche 1% plea for an endless supply of slaves. Human slaves being more fun than robots.
Women control the means of reproduction, men are always willing to provide.
Men are always willing to have sex. Marriage and children is another aspect entirely.
For humans, as with allost all other animals, women decide over with whom, when and how often to mate
That is frankly not how it has traditionally been in human societies. There are places today where that’s still not the case. This is a modernism masquerading as fundamental nature.
All answers are ignoring that falling fertility is the result of a deliberate plan to reduce the population!
What’s your best way to wake-up those who didn’t yet?
The more the awakened, the sooner this nightmare will be over!
What’s your experience about asking for an opinion on the following topics?
Why is food poisoning legal? (Rumsfeld forced the FDA approval of Aspartame/Nutrasweet)
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/why-is-food-poisoning-legal
Your phone attacking with ultrasonic booms?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/sound-of-silence-challenge
How could a father get 20 million dollars from the Government?
A 20 sec video of a baby with vax seizures?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/autism-day-shall-we-celebrate-the
Your opinion about Big Pharma scandals?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/system-failure-ai-exposes-zero-government
Ready for anti-COVIDiot pills?
Did you know that Fauci admitted that there was no scientific basis for social distancing?
https://thefederalist.com/2024/06/04/fauci-admits-there-was-no-scientific-evidence-for-six-foot-social-distancing-rule/
That the CDC admitted that masking was useless against COVID?
https://www.dailyveracity.com/2021/07/26/over-50-scientific-studies-conclude-masks-do-nothing-to-prevent-the-spread-of-illness-so-why-do-people-keep-claiming-they-work/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-08-28-cdc-admits-masks-totally-useless-against-covid.html
That you’ve been lockdowned for nothing? Johns Hopkins meta-analysis of 18000 studies proved that lockdowns didn’t work and worse, killed people by stopping those with cancer or heart conditions from getting testing and treatment
https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf
Could you please explain why no Health Agency researched the 30+ COVID effective cures, but instead censored and banned the doctors successfully applying them? Was it because a successful cure would void the Emergency Use Authorization of the lethal vaccines?
http://c19early.com
http://bit.ly/research2000
Should every single vaxxed on the planet be suing Pfizer and Moderna for deliberately hiding human DNA plasmids in their vaccines, and Pfizer, for injecting an undisclosed carcinogenic monkey virus (SV40) sequence in the clueless biohacked, as officially recognized by Health Canada?
Failed again? Show 10 secs in the middle of this video (who doesn’t have 10 seconds for you)
https://odysee.com/@ImpossiblyWackedOutWorld:f/WTC-7-Free-Falling:8
(caveat about the beginning: pot destroys your brain + “Raises Risk of Heart Attack and Stroke”)
9/11: two "planes", yet 8 towers down. WTC7 imploded, free falling on its footprint, in a controlled demolition. It was out of reach as well as the unblemished Deutsche Bank. All 7 World Trade Center towers and that bank needed to be rebuilt, not the closer towers not belonging to World Trade Center...
The “owner” took an insurance policy for the WTC against terrorism, months before, when no one was taking them … he didn’t show up for work on 9/11 … just as his 2 grown up siblings.
The inside information about the FUTURE 9/11 event helped masons make trillions by shorting the stock exchange: the records were deleted by the SEC so they wouldn't be prosecuted !!!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/911-2-planes-3-towers
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/107-911
There's a plan to slow-murder 95% of the global population by 2050… written on the masonic Georgia guide-stones: “Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 … ”:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/depopulation-or-extermination
- J6: The false flag operation of the fake riot was planned, incited and guided by 200 infiltrated FBI mason agents, who broke into the Capitol !!! All intel agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA) were founded by masons and are run by them for their own nefarious goals.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/j6-what-you-need-to-know
In 2022, the same mason-plot was copy-pasted to disband millions of Brazilians against the stolen elections through the rigged voting machines owned by mason Soros:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-2020-american-coup
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/dominion-over-us
Weaponization of migration to steal elections and destroy nations
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/weaponization-of-migration
Elections: bought or stolen? Both!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/2024-elections-bought-or-stolen
Free 100 redpill movies and documentaries:
(don't miss the 1st one, 10 min at 2x, amazing tool for a discussion):
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/wake-up-videos
- Since the 90s, vaccines are weaponized to reduce the population by adding hCG to infertilize women: lab-detected in 30 countries, and overpassing the FDA 10 ng limit to human DNA “contamination” (tampering) by 2000%, thus causing neuro-damage (autism, asperger, tics, dyslexia in 29% of kids, etc.) and childhood cancer epidemic (n.b. leukemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphomas). Check SoundChoice.org or videos.
- Excess deaths in the first 2 years: 40 million people killed by the lethal injections... so far. COVID was designed as a primer for even more lethal COVID haccines:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-real-covid-timeline
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/not-vaccine-not-gene-therapy-just
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/what-do-bioweapons-have-to-do-with
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/you-are-anti-haccine
Yet, the most important impact of the COVID haccines, population-wise, is lifelong infertility.
Births keep dropping even more dramatically. The infertility bomb will fully explode in 10-20 years, when the haxxed babies and children grow up.
Even if unhaxxed children evade self-replicating transfecting haxxines (replicons) and marry haxxed ones? ... just as planned, the only choice deliberately left, will be DNA-designed infertile transhumanized babies, for an ever dependency on immoral IVF (for every IVF-born, 25 are lost or murdered).
- You’ll go nowhere and you’ll be happy:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/2050-youll-go-nowhere-and-youll-be
- Elon's top secret: EVs cause cancer
Go green with gasoline!
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/electric-vehicles-cause-cancer
- You are the carbon they want to exterminate! Proven in 3:
1. No one denies that man affects the weather, but science disagrees with the official narrative.
Prehistoric data from ice cores proves that temperature rise precedes carbon release in the atmosphere, not the other way around.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/best-scientific-sources-to-debunk
2. There's proof of deliberate geoengineering to increase global temperatures and droughts, and decrease albedo by dissolving clouds with satellite and Weather Radars’ Electro-Magnetic Frequencies.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/satattack
3. Life involves a carbon cycle. A war on carbon is a war on life, causing crop/food scarcity, increase in food prices and famines. Decarbonization is part of the plan to exterminate 95% of us.
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/carbon-reparations
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/climate-deaths
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/killing-me-softly-with-green-songs
- Apart from sin-empowered demons, what is their main source of power? NOT a coincidence that the USA left dollar convertibility to gold in 1971, precisely triggering the exponential government deficit coupled with the trade deficit and inflation.
Taking down central banking doesn't solve the problem. Their source of free endless money is counterfeiting, fractional reserve banking and financial instruments (e.g. derivatives, debt over debt, compound interest above real growth, etc.). Also, insider information, sabotage, infiltration, manufactured news and events to create profitable market-movements.
This is the Achilles’ heel of all nations: the SSS (Satanic Secret Societies such as masonry) create trillions out of thin air and launder them through their Banks, foundations, and foreign loans and “aid”, with which they buy puppeticians and seats in the boards of the Federal Reserve (the only private-run Central Bank in the world), judiciary, corporations, media, healthcare, universities, foundations, political parties, etc.
The masons’ worst nightmare is that the daydreaming majority wakes up, finds out their crimes, and seek justice. We are a million to one. Until they achieve the CBDC digi-tatorship, they are walking on a tight rope.
We've got a very small window of opportunity to fight or ... die (they want to murder 95% of us).
President John Quincy Adams: “Masonry ought forever to be abolished. It is wrong - essentially wrong - a seed of evil, which can never produce any good.”
Who are The Powers That SHOULDN'T Be ?
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/criminal-intent
https://www.coreysdigs.com/global/who-is-they/
Weaponization of Justice
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/weaponization-of-justice
Illuminati David Rockefeller, finest quotes:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/david-rockefeller-illuminati
Confessions of ex illuminati Ronald Bernard:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/confessions-of-illuminati-ronald
Illuminati Attali, finest quotes:
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/attali-illuminati-finest-quotes
Chisholm, father of the WHO’s global pedophilia
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/brock-chisholm-father-of-the-whos
Ex mason Serge Abad-Gallardo:
https://www.ncregister.com/interview/confessions-of-a-former-freemason-officer-converted-to-catholicism
16 laws we need to exit Prison Planet
https://scientificprogress.substack.com/p/laws-to-exit-planet-prison
Please share, not the articles, but the information! I'm expendable. Saving the free world, is not!
Children are not “human capital.” That's a revolting attitude, Emil. I think you should read my essay An Indictment of Life.
Good thing I didn't say that then.
It's your sole concern here. Maintaining the intergenerational ponzi scheme.
I don't like welfare states, but voters do. Given economic realities, there is little choice here.
I don't think you understand where my objection is coming from. You are treating children as a means to an end.
I didn't know you're such a social engineer and etatist. "State subsidies for rent" - my ass!
It was a list of ideas. I'm not a strict libertarian anyway. What are your proposals?
I think key is freedom of speech and freedom of market. In EU, for example, we live under green socialism where everything is decided by regulations and subventions distrubuted by bureaucrats. The windmills do not produce energy in sufficient quantity and at the right time. And cheap and available energy is basis of any civilization. We're getting poorer, in decline and many people are pessimistic about future and hopeless. Who would like to have children under such conditions?
People are richer than ever, even with those conditions. I don't see any realistic ideas from you.
The poorest people in the entire world today are by far our most fertile. Per-capita GDP is heavily inversely correlated with TFR. Afghans have almost five kids per mother, and they have lower a per-capita GDP than the United States has had since the 18th Century:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/total-fertility-rate
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gdp-per-capita-by-country
The idea that people aren't having kids today because of economic concerns is a socialist braingremlin that metastasized to the general public in large part because rightoids are resentful of their decades of political and cultural losses. Serious people should discard this hokum.