An ad has been playing on television imploring for donations to educate girls in third world countries. The ad asserts that if girls don't get educated, they will marry young and start churning out babies, which the ad writers evidently regard as a fate worse than death. I don't know if they have any direct evidence for this claim, but it is plausible - plausible that they will get married young and start churning out babies, not plausible that this is a fate worse than death. Here is a conjecture - that the default female expectation is that their job, on growing up, is housekeeping, sex, and baby making, "oh, boobs, time to make some babies and place them on the boobs" School teaches them something different. No school: What to do now? Sex and babies! School: What to do now? coursework!

Amish had one hell of a fight with progressives over education. They absolutely did not want universal education beyond eight grade, which is to say, beyond age fourteen, beyond female puberty.

Well, there's ONE first world country with universal literacy and high female employment where birthrates are not plummeting, and families with five or more children are quite common. Why do you think that is? As for why Western birthrates are plummeting, there are two reasons I can think of. First, people measure their enjoyment of life not on an absolute scale, but from peak to trough. For most people in the Western world, the lows just aren't that low, and the highs mostly involve a good jerk session to the internet. I mean, they live in a sort of aquarium where there is no privation. Shades of Calhoun's Rat Heaven ensue, because our minds are calibrated by evolution to functioning with extremes, feast or famine, violent death or starvation or disease never too far out of sight, and we are not adapted to the aquarium existence. The second is that once you've explained to everyone that god is dead, there is no real reason to seek suffering or glory. In fact, this life is now just a pointless jail term. Perhaps hanging yourself to make it end faster is a bit scary, and there are lots of temporarily exciting pastimes to occupy yourself while waiting for the end, but there is certainly no reason to make a bunch of children with all that implies.

Its very hard to find an h^2 under 0.5, and I think the selection strength is like 5-10x that seen with lactase persistence (itself a hell of a selective sweep). So I think the breedophiles take over in more like 175 years. Which still leaves time for a demographic meltdown in Euros and NEAs. I wouldn't be surprised if a heavy-handed state intervenes though at some point. What else are N-Eurasians going to do? dwindle and age until they submit to 90-IQ Southern empires with hardly more than AK-47s? Dumber things have happened, but I think the odds tilt against that one. Most of these new people will be very pious, so I would like to see more reverence directed toward the experienced world rather than towards hypothetical experiences after death, also more 'always be first & best' and less 'lame shall enter first'. If Christianity is to be a net positive it needs to refocus towards those healthier impulses. Barring cold fusion I think the economic world we know may be over by then (2214). Known uranium reserves are not that much greater than fossil carbon ones. There is quite a lot of thorium, but that is somewhat experimental, and synth-ing liquid fuels from its energy, en masse, might be extremely inefficient -- I know that using energy to free H from H2O is an ugly business -- so it may yield chiefly electricity. Which would be quite the adjustment to make. I still hope we can use it to reach the stars but I don't know. If we are stuck here, the world could still, at least potentially, be better than ever before with eugenesis. Strong AI is not in my story because I'm a strong skeptic, largely by intuition I admit.

The short-term solution for Japan would be to just replace democracy with a powerful aristo-statism that can set BIG incentives for breeding. But we all know there are some pretty heavy prerequisites for that kind of thing ever happening.

Jonathan Last's recent book, 'What to Expect When No One's Expecting," discusses the fertility issue in detail. He mostly agrees with what you're saying, but is more moderate on the female education issue. You may be interested to know that the fertility projections you're quoting are actually pegged to an overly-optimistic projection by the UN, per Last, and that the demographic die-off in Japan and Germany is likely to be far more severe. I reviewed the book here: http://henrydampier.wordpress.com/2013/12/31/book-review-what-to-expect-when-no-ones-expecting-by-jonathan-last/ Your observation about your wife is apt: for a few generations now, the state has optimized for extracting resources from female labor in the present at the expense of their aptitude as mothers and home-makers. There are also of course many industries, like that of Divorce Inc., that makes money by encouraging women to loot their families, damaging the future value of their children in an economic sense, and further mutating society towards a short time orientation.

The Japanese situation is merely a variant on the same theme in the West and in wealthy countries: Young men can't afford to form a family and society disintegrates starting with the bedrock of society in all sexual species.

It simply is not plausible that an increase in the cost of real estate, as certainly occurred post-1973, would have virtually no impact on the total fertility rate -- all else being equal. The "McMansion" argument, while appealing, really isn't adequate. People have been paying huge sums of money, in real terms, for houses no more luxurious than the Levittown "boxes made of ticky tacky", relative to the prices for those homes in the 1950s. An alternate explanation, more in line with "feminism", as well as being in line with the data presented, is what might be called "household patriarchy" which takes on two basic types: Environmentally imposed patriarchy and socially (culturally) imposed patriarchy. Basically, if the social status of the male in the household is high, the female will tend to become pregnant by him. This has the benefit of not only explaining the data, but also of plausibility: Starting in the 1960's the social status of males started declining substantially -- even more so for white males in the West. Certainly television had a role to play here -- perhaps THE major role. And, certainly, a rise in a woman's TV commercial-driven expectations of her husband's earning power would tend to lower his status in the household. But there were other forces lowering masculine household status and some of those forces were also coming over the TV from indifferent and hostile elites located thousands of miles from the affected household. The data most interesting here are the by-State fertility rates in the US topped by Utah and Alaska. Utah's Mormonism imposes patriarchy in the household socially by declaring as a matter of religious principle, the husband to be the moral equivalent of Christ in the home. Alaska's harsh environment imposes patriarchy in the household. Of course both of these states are increasingly subject to the fertility suppressing influences, but relatively speaking they've tended to best.

The mechanism involves the destruction of socially imposed monogamy/polygyny suppression. With agriculture and civilization, there is a caloric surplus introduced that changes the environment which previously had an ecologically imposed monogamy/polygyny suppression. A hunter-gatherer lifestyle in an environment with winters has an ecologically imposed monogamy/polygyny suppression as males can't afford polygynous or heavily polygynous lifestyles. The caloric surplus of agriculture changes this, and a socially imposed monogamy/polygyny becomes necessary as a cultural adaptation to replicate the older environment. This cultural adaption involves patriarchy, whereby the primordial group—the family—is rendered stable by the civil authorities deliberately portraying, through any means necessary, the male of the heterosexual pair bond as worthy of reproduction in the female’s eyes and the male is provided sufficient paternal certainty and resources to honor his role as sovereign to his family. Family formation and reproduction when this adaptation is attacked or destroyed.

Monogamy, or more accurately, the suppression of of polygyny, is an artifact of technology which allowed us to expand into other climates (i.e. harsh climates with low carrying capacity) where female dependence on male technology for reproduction was a fact of life. So if the individual male is no longer the primary provider, then it's Africanization time. The pressure toward de jure polygyny is actually from the females although they would never admit it. Many women simply cannot maintain a fertile relationship with a man who they perceive as genetically a dead end—which, in the current vicious environment, is any so-called “nice guy”. But neither can they admit to themselves what, exactly, is bugging them. So many end up with no children at all. Moreover, many women who end up being kicked out of their positions as concubines to the managerial state—usually right around the age they are starting to run a risk of "difficult" pregnancies—would be far better off if they were in a real harem with relationships with fellow concubines and their children that are not going to be terminated just because they are no longer fertile.

Education reduces fertility in several ways: By indoctrinating women with anti family, anti home maker, and anti fertility views - progressivism being a religion inherently hostile to fertility. By giving women entertaining interests other than sex, status building activities other than motherhood, and work less stressful than babies. By raising the status of women relative to their husbands - a woman is reluctant to get pregnant to a relatively low status male. What evidence do we have to disentangle these factors?

High status and freedom for women leads to low birth rates. A bit of background on it: http://www.the-spearhead.com/2009/12/21/patriarchy-works-ii/ The basic mechanism is female desire is either a man is higher status than her, or the man is violent and savage. When the normal order has been reversed and women are equal or higher status than most men there are very few men suitable to be her mate. Leading to a state where women have few if any children because they can’t find a high enough status man or they have children with the most savage men they can find. Japan can solve their problem the same way Sparta did. Reduce women’s status, revoke their rights, and return to patriarchal families and the population would start increasing immediately. Romania under the communists discovered similar problems with women rights and did a flip flop on the issue when the birth rate dropped like a stone. Education is the tool used to implant feminism (women’s rights and freedoms) into young girls minds. Which is why cultures that want to continue to existence fight so hard against female education. Please delete my dupe post.

No more Joo talk please. To the extent that the Orthodox Jews have a functioning high fertility society which works in a modern society, i.e. no Amish medieval farming, I'm all ears.

Islam certainly has not collapsed.

Some variants of Islam have suffered collapse of birthrates, others have not

Meanwhile, Christian populations in non-Western countries continue to have high birthrates.

Phillippines, which has old style divorce laws and high fertility- the Phillippines being good evidence for the centrality of divorce law to the collapse of fertility. Israel and the Phillippines have comparable divorce laws, and comparable fertility. People may be reluctant to invest in children too much if they cannot trust that their partner will stick around.

Uganda? South Korea? Paraguay?

Black Christianity is subhuman, South Korea is not really Christian, and to the extent that they are, their Christianity is progressivism, and Latin American Christianity is two fifths Marxism and one third paganism. However, Filipino Christianity is doing OK.

[…] has a post wondering where all the babies went, and whenever I propose one of the usual suspects, for example no fault divorce, denormalization of […]

I think you're on to something with the last paragraphs of this post. The effect of cultural imprinting is sometimes neglected when we focus on the genetic essentialism in the HBD worldview. While women do have a strong innate nurturing instinct, it is also clearly affected by the cultural environment they grow up in. In a culture that does not actively boost motherhood and childrearing, that nurturing instinct will atrophy or manifest itself in destructive ways. If a large, healthy and steady family is the definitive measuring stick for a woman, she'll be more inclined to gravitate towards that. If the measuring stick is altruist universalism and emotional fulfillment, she'll be more inclined to direct her misfiring nurturing instinct towards teaching the alphabet to some Korean Negroes in the middle of Amazonas. Foseti once loosely quoted his wife remarking that no one ever - or at least during the impressionable college age years - told her that there's a chance she'll really enjoy having and taking care of her children. It was always framed as a burden, something that shackles you down, the standard feminist view, really. I've seen this with my GF as well. Until her 20s, she wanted no part with children at all, until she actually spent a significant amount of time with a relative of hers who had two toddler daughters at the time. That planted a seed that fully burst recently when one of her closest friends had a baby and my GF spent one afternoon pushing the stroller around town with her friend. Now it's a foregone conclusion that if I wife her up, we'll have kids. You've probably noticed that pregnancies are contagious within a social circle (as are divorces, unfortunately). Women are malleable that way. But yes, there's a shitload of other factors as well. I believe there's something to the flipped man-woman status angle, especially in the sense that the inflated status of women makes them more unwilling to get married when they're at the top of their game in their early 20s, and unless they're impulsive and careless, they won't get pregnant at that time either. I'm probably around your age, spandrell, and while I could also have had 5 kids by now, this is the first time in my life that I'm dating someone I see as a reasonable bet to start a family with. The option has been on the table previously with previous girls but I've always bailed out, which was the correct decision to make in hindsight. Getting hitched to a knife-edge alcoholic is a losing proposition, and if that's what you can attract from the opposite sex, the right play is to fold and try again later. Life's tough for a late bloomer but that's how it is. As for why the couples that do get married have the 1-2 kids instead of 3 , here are some ideas off the top of my head: * The severed link between children and future support. When welfare is outsourced to the state, other peoples' children fit the bill just as well. That's what a lot of welfare programs amount to, right? Kicking the can to the next generation. * General anomie, ennui, lack of pride, whathaveyou about the larger society people live in. If god is dead, our nations just lines on a map, and our history a litany of oppression, what's the point of anything outside aimless hedonism? For me, wanting to have children is obvious because I'm proud of my lineage and what I am. I also both want to, and feel a duty towards continuing that legacy to the next generation. But that's an iconoclastic view these days. * The lack of tradition towards childrearing. This is a bit of a rehash of my earlier paragraphs but it affects both men and women. When we are 'liberated' from the obvious life script of growing up, getting work and having kids, it turns out not so many actually want to do that after all. Not that their choices are necessarily any better. This can be tied down to one of your main insights: that most of what we 'decide' to do is mostly determined by what's going on outside our rational and conscious thought processes. I'm fine thinking that the vast majority of us are heavily influenced by what we pick up to be prudent through social osmosis. * Overpopulation. Doesn't seem to have much effect in the r-dominant tropics, honestly, so probably not much of an universal factor. Maybe susceptibility to overpopulation would be restricted to more K-selected temperaments, and maybe even then only in eras of internal cohesion. If inter-tribal conflict returns and the commons start to get tragedized, you want your tribe to pick the largest piece of whatever is left, consequences be damned.

Regarding Orthodox Judaism, it's not a sustainable general model for everybody because it's a parasitic culture that depends on feeding on other populations, both in Israel and in diaspora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiryas\_Joel Everyone and every group can't behave parasitically, otherwise there won't be any hosts.

[…] “Any reasonable calculation to get Japanese (or any industrialized country in a few years) population growing again would need the average married couple to have 4 children. It’s not going to happen. Not even Mormons do that. And yes I know the optimistic evolutionary theory that people who like babies will inherit the earth. I’m sure they will given a 500 year timeframe, and that’s assuming the heritability of “liking babies” is very high. But mid term we’re going to hell before we solve this.” […]

[…] population decline in Japan. And in […]

[…] on my last post on fertility there was a discussion on muslim birth rates, and the example of Iran came up. Iran is famous for […]