Baby socialism
WAR IS PEACE
SLAVERY IS FREEDOM
IGNORANCE IS KNOWLEDGE
DIVERSITY IS...
Inquisition, for the most part. The corporate PR racket sells that diversity is a strength because having different people in your organization gets you different points of view, and that results in better input for discussions and thus better decision-taking. Which is exactly how it doesn't work in practice. Racial diversity is welcome so long as everyone is strictly progressive, and USG has been busy promoting ideological uniformity across its whole empire. In recent years who basically can't get a job if you are caught dissenting with the most trivial progressive dogma. As Trotsky had it, in capitalism those who don't work shan't eat; under communism those who don't obey shan't eat.
The argument itself is true, though. Actual diversity does bring different points of view, which can often be interesting. But that requires actual ideological independence. The ideological landscape in the West is completely owned by USG, and one can hardly found any original ideas that differ even slightly from the progressive platform. But far away in East Asia, people can afford to think for themselves. And they do, for the most part, producing actually interesting ideas. If there's an argument for learning exotic languages, this is it. This blog is proof of that.
The talk of the street these weeks in Japan is a proposal for reforming pre-primary school, and making not only kindergarten (3 to 6 year olds) but even nurseries (0 to 3 year olds) part of mandatory schooling. This might sound similar to the recent "universal pre-K" idea in the US, but the argument here is not about the cognitive benefits of early schooling. The point is purely monetary: if woman are to join the workforce, as Japan's Abe government has publicly proclaimed they must, well somebody should take care of the babies then. Nurseries as of today are regulated by the Ministry of Welfare, which has a bunch of agencies skimming the budget, so that nurseries are underbuilt and baby nurses has laughably low salaries. Corruption is rampant, and the law isn't working, as there's a severe shortage of available nurseries. The idea is to change the law to make nurseries depend on the Ministry of Education, and be run as normal schools. There's no shortage of schools.
Interestingly enough, a similar debate has been going on in China for a while. While the countries are close by geographically, of course China is very different Japan in many ways. China is a communist one-party state, and it has no big issues with their workforce. What China and Japan do have in common is a dire demographic problem. Low fertility.
A while ago there was a post by some man called Ma Qianzu 馬前卒, writing about demographic policy. As many of you will know, China has had a One Child Policy for decades, which this year has been finally modified to allow 2 children per couple. The revision of the law of course caused a very big reaction in China, and people have been debating the issue for years. This Ma Qianzu guy is apparently an official intellectual, party member, who basically provides the smart version of government propaganda. He's a smart commie. And there aren't many of those, so people listen to this guy, even if they don't agree with them (public opinion in China, at least among the young, is rabidly anti-government).
While Japan can often produce interesting policy ideas, in the end Japan is still a USG vassal, with tens of thousands of American troops watching over the country. China on contrast is an actually independent country, so they have much more freedom to think about policy in their own way. This article by Ma Qianzu was a good proof of that. It's very first paragraph was such a good example of clear, frank thinking that one could never see in any Western publication. I couldn't believe my own eyes. It made so much sense I got tears in my eyes. It said:
只要阶级跌落的恐惧还在，放开的意义就不大。我周围的育龄人口反应冷淡，原因不是真养不起孩子，而是二胎可能会影响家庭生活水平，让他们所期望的中产阶级生活更渺茫。As long as the fear of downward mobility remains, opening up the One Child Policy won't change anything. My peers reacted to the new law with derision, not because they can't afford more children, but because a second child would impact their living standards, make the middle-class lifestyle they desire become unachievable.
The original wording is somewhat more dramatic. Downward mobility is stated as "falling from their class". And 'class' is a very charged word in Communist China. Class struggle is still a mainstream concept over there. The guy is an official intellectual of the Communist Party: class struggle is what he writes about. Demographic policy in China is a function of Class Struggle. In this case, the white-collar middle class is refusing to breed because they fear the cost will make them drop out into the proletariat. And they aren't having that.
The writer goes on describing why exactly having a second child would make people think that they would have to abandon middle-class living standards. He aptly says that the whole idea of "not being able to afford more children" makes no sense. Our parents, he says, were much poorer than we are (back in the Mao days), yet they all had plenty of children. Of course, children cost less back then; they played out in the street, went to free state schools, healthcare was unavailable so children would die every now and then, which if sad, was still accepted as something that happened. It was no big deal.
Today, though, people have much higher incomes. But that surplus income, and then some, has been taken over by skyrocketing school fees. "Malicious capitalists", as he aptly puts it, are taking advantage of the status anxiety of people, and charging exorbitant fees for children books, cram-schools, and other assorted services for middle-class children. Competition to get into top colleges in China is fierce, so people spend every single dime they have to make sure their children have a chance. And then they complain they can't afford more children.
Part of the issue, Mr. Ma says, is that schools close down too soon. Parents work late, until 8 PM on average, and children leave school at 5 PM. Kids have 3 hours without supervision, so the parents take them to cram schools if only to have them go to some place until they can leave work. Once you get them into cram school, though, the signaling spiral starts. Nobody wants to be that parent who takes his kid to the bad cram school. You want the good one, and the good one is worth money. So cram schools end up charging exorbitant tuition for lousy cram schools, and parents have their small precious discretionary income gone down the drain into education fees.
Well, the author rightly points out, as a Communist Country, we must not allow evil capitalists from taking advantage of the insecurity of our people and make rich from a signaling spiral. China should forbid private ownership of education facilities, cram schools included. Actually, cram schools should be forbidden, period. If children have to spend more time in school, then so be it. Have schools open until late, at least until their parents finish work. If kids are to study, let it be at good Communist schools, and not perfidious capitalist cram schools.
A problem with keeping kids at school until 10 PM is that... the schools don't want the kids around. Parents today are increasingly litigious, and when a kid gets hurt at school parents waste no time suing schools for damages. Under firm Communist principles, that doesn't do. Parents should be stripped of the right to sue schools for what happens to their children inside them. Children spent most of their waking time in schools, not at home. Schools have as much a right to custody over children than their parents do. Sure, people will complain that this goes against natural rights, the sacred property rights of parents over their children. But that, you'll notice, is bad feudal Confucianism. And we are now a Communist country. So no more of that absolute parental rights nonsense. Kids aren't their parents'. You didn't build that.
At this point I started to get uneasy. Hey, hey. There's a reason kids are regarded as being the property of their parents. Parents (generally) have an interest in their children's welfare. Schools don't. A school teacher can be an evil asshole and beat your kid for fun. Or ignore it while other kids bully him into suicide. Overly litigious parents are certainly a drag on the system, but to fix that you don't need to change the whole legal idea of custody.
I got even more uneasy, outright anxious, when the author mentioned how in recent years we see more out-of-wedlock births, with women having children without husbands, and that is a good thing because it shows how old feudal family values are disappearing and moral progress is obviously good. The path to Communism! I didn't see that coming. Don't be fooled by the guy's progressive nonsense; single-motherhood in China is, while certainly increasing, still extremely rare. And for good reason; there is no welfare. Chinese women don't want to have children with their husbands as it costs too much; why would they be willing to have children on their own? That some skank gets knocked up once in a while is obviously just a proof of lack of foresight, not the vanguard of future Communist birth ethics.
Now the whole idea of socializing children in China, or mandatory universal pre-K for 1 year olds in Japan has the common idea that child-rearing is a cost, in both labor and money, and that if the state took care of that cost, people would have more children. And yes, sure, up to a point, child rearing costs money, and it can be a hassle. Some people enjoy taking care of babies, but some people sure don't. I know of plenty of women in Japan who went to work because they found their cubicle jobs easier than their annoying babies. For these people, subsidized daycare would be a godsend.
But there's another side to that equation. If you reduce the costs, you make it easier to consume. But what's the incentive for having kids anyway? If your children are going to be closed up in some government facility for 12 hours a day since age 1 until they leave to college and never come back; what's the point of having children at all if you don't get to see them?
Let's face it, the demand for children in developed countries today is effectively indistinguishable from the demand of pets. People have children because they are adorable, small and cuddly, and many people enjoy having some small cutesy thing to care of.
In the old days, people didn't have pets. They had livestock, they had animals to use them. You had a dog to hunt, or watch the house, you kept a cat so he would eat mice and other vermin. You had cows to milk, pigs to eat, chicken to give you eggs. You didn't take care of animals, take pictures of them, find them cute, watch them or buy them clothes. You had them outside, treated them like shit, and efficiently exploit them as an economic resource. You had as much livestock as you could afford, as they were supposed to be a profitable resource.
Not today though. People don't have animals, because it's cheaper to buy animal products in the supermarket. People who have animals today have them as pets; as small cutesy things to make them company. You pet them, cuddle them, take pictures, watch their every reaction with amusement.
In the same way, in the old days people had children as a resource. Kids weren't found to be cute (the word itself didn't exist until the 19th century); they were annoying brats to be trained into farm hands or money earners for the family. People sent their children away as soon as 8 years old, and had no emotional hangups about it whatsoever. People had a lot of children because they were profitable, or at least there was a gambling chance of getting an awesome kid who raised the whole family out of poverty.
Today though, kids today are a cost, not a profitable resource. And so people have don't have large families the same way they don't have livestock anymore. They have kids like they have pets, as small cutesy things that give them company. Things to watch and enjoy. People actually use the same vocabulary to refer to both children and pets the same way. Some people actually call their pets "children"!
The children market, such as it is, is determined by the demand of pets. Having the government socialize the costs of childrearing might help a bit on the margin, but it won't shift the fundamentals of the market. The fundamental issue is that children aren't profitable, and there's no market incentive for having large families.
Social Matter had a characteristically childish post where they made a more or less accurate assessment about why present policies are wrong, but remained completely clueless about what could possibly fix the issue. "It's not about money". Indeed it's not about the money. Children don't make money and people have internalized that over the last 100 years. And that's why people don't have more than 1 or 2 children; the same way people don't generally have more than 1 or 2 cats. To create incentives for people to have large families there's only one way to do it.
Make it again about money. Change tax incentives so that childless people get their tax burden tripled, while large families are tax free. Make it profitable. Bureaucrats, East and West, are obsessed with socializing anything. But we have decades of experience with market incentives. People like money more than they like kids. At some point somebody is going to have to say it.
91 comments
[…] Baby socialism […]
The kind of people who like money more than kids should not be given money to have kids. In reality, for a long time now children have been unprofitable. This idea that 150 years ago, you'd have kids in order for them to take care of you when you got old is not super-plausible. By the time they got old enough to take care of you, you'd likely be dead. People have kids because they want kids, because kids are one of the great sources of joy and satisfaction in life. As for diversity-the function of diversity is that in every workplace, the Party should have plenty of people who owe their entire career and position to the Party alone, since without its promotion of their diverse asses they would be unable to stand on their own merits. These nobodies can then be relied upon to attack and denounce anyone whom they suspect of being against the Party and its platform. This is the way a weak Party handles things (since a strong one would have smart, talented people fighting to be its adherents, not diverse zeroes.) And even then you have glitches in the Matrix. For instance, Neal DeGrasse Tyson's whole career is that of a Black Astrophysicist. Well, when he turns around and bites the hand that feeds him, it turns out that there's a lot of people who Don't Fucking Love Science After All: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/708817118150537216 If you can't trust your model diversity, whom can you trust?
"People have kids because they want kids, because kids are one of the great sources of joy and satisfaction in life." I got this bridge to sell you. The joy and satisfaction one gets from children decreases quite dramatically after the third kid. Note Scalia's priest son mentioning how dad Scalia often forgot his children's names. For the sake of accuracy, people had large families because it was their culture. They didn't stop to think whether to have every single child. But that culture was formed on a time where large families were profitable more often than not. People today have more cellphones than children because that's their culture. But that culture has been (recently) formed on an age where children are financial ruin. We have to change the culture, or else be replaced by people with their own cultures, such as yours.
I will let you know when I go over 3 kids. Based on my close observation of my friends with 5, 6, 7 children, they get lots of joy out of the younger ones as well. YMMV, of course, like those Japanese girls running away from the one or two kids they managed to have into a makework job. "People do X because it is their culture" is not a very good explanation of X, since culture is basically the sum of the things people do. In general, it is natural for people who believe that life is inherently good, run by a G-d who is good, and that children are a good thing, to form into likeminded communities and have lots of children, and for people who do not believe these things to not have lots of children, regardless of the economic situation (barring extreme privation, of course). So you have, for instance, things like the US from the 1880s to the 1920s, where the WASP elite was constantly racking its brains over what to do with the damn Irish, Poles and Italians who were having 8 kids per family, voting according to their beliefs and interests, and would turn the place into a papist state if left to their own devices (the answer: compulsory mass education, blockbusting through use of black families, forcible assimilation). Obviously, those Irish, Poles and Catholics didn't have big families because they were planning on making a profit off their kids, nor because the economic incentives in working-class Catholic neighborhoods were different from the ones in upper-class Unitarian and Quaker ones. They had big families for the same exact reason that their Orthodox Jewish neighbors did (and still do.) The Quakers and Unitarians didn't have small families because they were worried about prep school costs. They had small families for the same exact reason that their assimilated Jewish neighbors did (and still do.) And by the way, the financial burden that children impose on the average Orthodox Jew is quite high-you have to educate them and marry them off (with a dowry for the girls, and an appropriate wedding, and it's expected that parents help children after they are married in the beginning if possible.) Most of these people are not doctors or lawyers, neither in America, nor here in Israel. But because they make kids a conscious priority, they manage. When you and everyone around you honestly believe that kids are a blessing from G-d and that He will provide you with the means to provider for the children He has given you, you have kids (at the time in your life when your perspectives for providing for them are least clear, typically.) When you all believe that it's your duty to help each other, you make it easier for your family members and neighbors to raise those kids. Reverse those beliefs, you get the reverse results. Throwing money at the problem or making kids their father's property is irrelevant. The former never works. The latter was tried by the Romans and didn't help. Finally, Alrenous is correct-people who don't like kids should be allowed to breed themselves off the planet.
If we did that, Europe would be replaced by Arabs in 2 generations. And I'm not sure Arabs like children all that much either. "Like" is a social construct, like everything.
Did what, not subsidize white losers to breed? I suspect that there would be a population collapse which would be followed by a Reconquista by the descendants of those Euros with a backbone.
I have more than three children and my joy increased with each one. I never felt they were a burden. I think that people that has no or few children are pessimists and fear the uncertainty of the future.
The moment that guy said, "This idea that 150 years ago, you’d have kids in order for them to take care of you when you got old is not super-plausible", I stopped reading. This guy is perfectly suited to be a Sunday school teacher or the Village simpleton. Either that or he is indulging in some sort of signaling trying to establish status points based on his superior holiness. Why do you bother answering people who are clearly wither a couple sandwiches short of a picnic basket or are status whores?
lalit, you are so wrong that I can't even start trying to explain it to you.
Bullshit. Look at old family trees. Plenty of dead kids, a few TB casualties, but most people who saw their 18th birthday also saw their 60th, and a fair few also 70. People had kids in their 20, and they were not very likely to die before age 40. As far back as I know, elderly in my family lived with their mature children. The first one to die (sort of) alone only happened recently, due to her being an overbearing parent and unpleasant, mother-in-law.
"The children market, such as it is, is determined by the demand of pets." Easy solution - mandatory pet licensing which costs at least $100k. Now we know the real backstory to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
Ha! I thought of this one too. Why should Fnargl allow people to have cute things which substitute for children? Pets are a pure gold-sink; children are (in the long run) gold producers. Perhaps Fnargl would allow pets for people with low breeding priority. But certainly not for those he wants to breed!
Forbid all women everywhere from employment. There, problem solved.
German and Japanese women are the least employed of all civilized countries. Their fertility is also on the floor. Making women bored won't make them want to have large families. Women didn't use to have babies because they were bored.
Well, the point is to operate on the margins. Making women bored will get some of them to have large families. Of course many of them will work on their eat/pray/love.
we see that women have more kids in societies where their status is low. So am I right in understanding that having more kids in such societies increases the woman's status?
That doesn't quite follow. But I believe that to be the case; a way of getting your husband to stop beating you is by having a strong son who will intercede for you. The endless battles in the Chinese imperial harem between women fighting to get their son in the throne come to mind.
Here is how it follows 1. Female status is low 2. People keep trying to raise their status. Women being no exception want to raise their status too. 3. If the primary role for women is as wives and mothers, guess what raises their status. Being a wife and being a mother. 4. The more the kids, the higher status the mother.
In logical terms "follow" means "necessarily follow". It could be that women are low status and having children did nothing to raise it. A mother of many daughters in old China would've gained little status from her motherhood.
She could sell them as concubines or wives of poor men.
Not for a lot, and only if they happened to be pretty or obedient. The economics must have been clear: a boy was the better asset. Else infanticide wouldn't have existed.
"childless people get their tax burden tripled" This was tried in ancient Rome and in fascist Italy. It *lowered* birthrates, because it prevented single people from accumulating enough wealth to start a family. I suggest abolishing Social Security and Medicare, making children absolute property of their fathers, and repealing all laws regarding child labor and school attendance. Men have a natural talent for increasing the quantity and quality of their property.
That's not a bad point. First point is easy solvable by putting an age restriction, though. As for the state giving away their child-brainwashing racket, good luck with that.
This only works in communities where the identity of the father is a known. Not so much with the useless single mom/ho crowd. You would have to add a tax on them as well. Maybe have it go away if they get sterilized.
Instead of this stupidity just add an extra tax on all childless people and the tax goes away after 2 or 3 kids. That's it. If you want to really make it effective make it a business employment tax as well. But what they are doing in Japan is the opposite of making more kids. It's discouraging having kids.
[…] Source: Bloody Shovel […]
Nope. "There are four main reasons, then, for 'demographic winter,' in order of importance: First, low rates of religious observance, which are associated with low birth rates and high incidence of abortion; second, social benefits so high as to displace gifts within the family, particularly the gift of life; third, legacies of totalitarianism; and finally, heavy reliance on so-called 'consumption' taxes, which penalize investment in 'human capital.'" http://www.refdag.nl/media/2009/20090811\_MUELLER.pdf And everybody: Do try skimming the piece first. After doing that, it's A-OK to summarily dismiss it; since after all, it's not your personal idea developed at the kitchen table after a full half an hour; and it is from the obeisant, degenerate, brain-shackled West; and obviously there's nobody locating himself within a Catholic, classical worldview who even in theory could think productively about things like this.
_Parents should be stripped of the right to sue schools for what happens to their children inside them._Classic second-best theorem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory\_of\_the\_second\_best And now, as I knew I eventually would, I have a good example of 'deregulation' actually means. It means allowing parents to send their kids to cram school again, without lifting the civil suit prohibition. For some reason, this leads to some real shitty cram schools. This, except more complicated, is what happened when California 'deregulated' the electricity industry.
Personally think it's okay for parents who hate children to breed themselves out of existence. The demographic decline trend can't be permanent. It's thoroughly impossible.
People who "hate" children most likely have been breeding themselves out of existence since the beginning, and yet there's still no lack of them. This suggests it's no one gene. So you can't get rid of those and replace them.
False. All human traits are heritable; almost all are highly heritable. It doesn't matter if it's one gene or many genes that program a trait; what matters is that natural selection cannot stop. We are programmed to fuck, not to have or want kids. This has been sufficient until the modern era. It is no longer sufficient. It will change. The question in the long run is merely what sort of child-desiring people will evolve in the future. Will it be high time preference smart people? Or low time preference dumb people? Currently, we are doing our best to make sure it's the latter. Civilizational catastrophe to follow. Let us pray for genetic engineering in time.
It's as you say, Leonard, but while we're waiting for a technological solution to societal decline, we should craft some social mores and public policy to reduce the bleeding.
Praying won't get us very far. Indeed we are programmed to produce kids by a very rundabout set of motivations. That suggests that perhaps "having kids because one likes kids" is not a very stable set of personality traits, and thus not very inheritable. Recall the definition of a gene. "Liking kids" might not be inheritable, in that it doesn't reliably get passed down as a concrete set of traits.
Fucking is one of those things that when you have an adequate supply of gets pretty routine quickly. In other words, hedonic treadmill. Kids, on the other hand, provide me with a very deep, enduring, increasing feeling of joy (different from hedonic pleasure.) YMMV, of course.
How many children do you have again?
One, with another on the way, G-d willing.
Congrats! Should've said something.
Thanks.
כן ירבו
Low future orientation kinds are having kids because they don't remember the pill exists. If they weren't being supported the kids would all starve and from a gene pool perspective everything would be fine.
It's not about money and you can't make it about money. It's about leftism and its totalitarian growth. Kids aren't profitable only because the state and 200 years of leftist/Enlightenment intellectual garbage have totally polluted the minds of Westerners (and clearly, to a large extent, the Chinese as well). Your "solution" is about as likely to work as trying to get the state to give up its child-brainwashing racket, and it's precisely the kind of narrowminded and sterile thinking I was arguing against in my piece. If bureaucrats are deciding how much money people get to reproduce, you've already lost and aren't likely to recover. A nation depending on bureaucrats for permission to survive is a nation that's good as dead. Kids aren't expensive because technology has changed, they are expensive because of leftism. If I had a profitable programming business I could teach my kids how to program and take it over when I die, and help me out while I'm alive. Possessing my genes, IQ and agency (and the youthful energy I lack) they would probably make my business more profitable and earn me more money rather than less. Family social dynamics don't change because the business is Silicon Valley programming or Manhattan real estate instead of Iowa corn farming. Donald Trump isn't a farmer but he employs his entire family. I know several other small businessmen who basically do the same thing. It's why "small family business" has a particular meaning that isn't "business run by related midgets." Oh but wait, do I get to train my kids to be programmers from the moment they can speak? Nope! The state takes them away from me and brainwashes them 8 hours a day for 20 years (the number keeps increasing), and then makes me pay for it. So instead of having a kid and teaching it to assist me and my business, I have a kid that the state steals from me and turns into a burden. People don't own their kids, the state owns their kids, which is why people don't have kids. The only reason people think it's normal and OK and not an evil, criminal travesty that they don't own their own kids is because of leftism, and because leftism is all they and their parents have ever known. Don't even get me started on the ways the state taxes productive people who might have productive kids with housing, education, income tax, inflation, welfare, pointless wars, etc. Put another way, paying for actual children whom you control is not expensive and is probably profitable. Paying for future pot-smoking Bernie commissars certainly is a burden, and it takes many years and lots of money to get them to that stage. If your definition of child is "someone who biologically shares 50% of my talents whom I have total control over from birth and may force to do anything I want," having a child ought to be pretty profitable. If your definition of child is "a cute pet until it's a few years old when the state gets total control over it but I have to pay," then yes, having a child is a huge burden. But if you paid for cars that other people drove, you wouldn't tell me having a car is a burden and we should expect never to drive cars unless we heckle the people driving your car to let you drive it perhaps 10-15 minutes a day (or 30 minutes if you're a hateul Nazi). Make women property, make children property. Men will accumulate property naturally.
Everything you claim to want is doable in today's America. Plenty of people homeschool their kids. I've met quite a few. With Odesk, you can hire your kid out to program under your own name. What's the problem?
Newsflash, not everybody is a business owner. Newsflash, most people don't use servants anymore. All nations on earth depend on bureaucrats for permission, and it has been so for centuries. Millennia in some places. Carlyle is dead. Hero worship is poetry, not history. Of course it's state regulation which enforces the present situation. But having the right to own children and women as property is no guarantee that men would be inclined to do so. It's a lot of work.
Newsflash, that's the problem, and its source is leftism. Why bother wondering about how to maneuever within the constraints of a broken, evil and decaying system? It has to be removed in totality, and it will be removed, either by us or someone else. We may as well figure out how to do it ourselves. Actually I won't bother arguing more because it seems you agree with AntiDem's comment below, which I agree with too. It's not about money, it's about leftism. This is stupid and meaningless though: "People don’t really naturally want to have children." Naturally? What naturally? Is Islam natural? Is the Cathedral natural? Is patriarchal nationalist Christianity natural? People need incentives, sure. Religion backed by some real private property is how the incentives are provided, this is no secret, and beginning with bureaucrats and incentives is a way to guarantee you'll fail at solving the problem. Bureaucrats maybe in China, not in the West where they're a symptom of decline.
Rofl. Make them. This sort of bitching and whining is just pointless, unless you happen to be building a secret society/militia with the long-term aim of achieving power. Statism is here to stay.
Slow clap.
"In the same way, in the old days people had children as a resource. Kids weren’t found to be cute (the word itself didn’t exist until the 19th century); they were annoying brats to be trained into farm hands or money earners for the family. People sent their children away as soon as 8 years old, and had no emotional hangups about it whatsoever. People had a lot of children because they were profitable, or at least there was a gambling chance of getting an awesome kid who raised the whole family out of poverty." Nothing about this stopped being true because of technology, it stopped being true because of leftism. Kids are a cost because the state artificially turns them into a cost.
One explanation as to why such a tax scheme has not been tried, is that - assuming they are cynic realists such as yourself, Span, is that they understand that they themselves and those of their class are not primarily motivated by, say, a tax break, to have kids (or not.) And that the exploitation of kids (to whichever degree we would express this - it obviously varied even as kid-count may not have) to benefit them monetarily would be regarded as a base motivation, and be low status. Thus the likely outcome, they would cynically suppose, would be a surge of -- not underclass exactly -- but poor. Now, the cynical reason to increase birth rates is to increase tax base, and tax credits are not free. So the assumption doesn't seem to pan out - as probably it wouldn't. In the end you'd likely have more takers (which may vote Democrat, but may also be of yucky non-colors and therefore Feared To Have Right Wing Fascist Sympathies here in the states) and more than that, you'd pay to expand the lower part of the pyramid and assuming the tax break is fixed (say, 5600 bucks per kid -- which by the way, such a break already exists for up to three kids in the USA.) And that probably won't pay for itself. I say this because in practice the way you'd penalize non-breeders would be to give tax breaks to breeders. (Frogs and boiling water and all that.) In the USA it doesn't seem to have caused the desired effect, probably because it only serves as a support to those already wishing to have more kids. The primary motivation to not have kids... is still leftism. Interestingly, I heard that the Georgian patriarch (Orthodox Church of Georgia) in the interest of increasing fecundity offered to be the godfather of any third or later child of a couple. That apparently... worked.
If you give hard cash to breeders, as some countries do, that does create relatively stronger incentives for unproductive people. Tax breaks affect more the higher your income, so they would be better incentives to higher income people. Of course the trap is that governments like tax, so if you tax single people, the government would eventually ever so subtly start producing or importing more of those. The Georgian fertility pick up is quite small.
I say this because I've rarely been motivated by lump sums that involve taking on a longer term cost. Even if they gave me 1000 bucks a kid, that would easily be spent, so it's not going to be anything to make me decide to have a kid unless I was already interested. I think there's some marketing know-how involved here - when you offer a 2 for 1 deal for say, soda pop, the gain in people who originally weren't going to buy soda who now buy soda is marginal (probably not significant.) The concept is you take people who already want soda and get them to buy it because it is cheap. Their wanting soda doesn't necessarily mean they will buy - sometimes I go to the store to buy an item and there's nothing cheap enough that I'm willing to purchase. The problem they are having seems to be twofold: people who can't have kids due to financial disincentive, and beneath that, lack of desire for kids to begin with. The dirty secret is that the biggest correlation between gain/loss of fertility is female education. If you want to get a gain in fertility, given that you've provided incentives that permit some benefit from childrearing, just ban females from education that grants them entry into male professions - or simply just ban them from formal education entirely. That would stop those Greedy Capitalists from exploiting half the population! Though I can only imagine the amusing and horrible unintended consequence that might bequeath to dear China--! PS - I would bet an analysis of the female education fertility correlation could net dividends in understanding the best incentives to improve fertility among desired groups.
Japan gives you 120 bucks per month and (actually usable) free healthcare and schooling until 15 years old. It doesn't make you want kids, but it does take away a lot of the anxiety.
While this is all perfectly true, the factor left unmentioned here is urbanization. Let's assume a world in which all else is equal (i.e. where the government is not actively subsidizing dysgenic breeding among the urban poor). Now, let's imagine living arrangements as existing along a range, with a remote farm at one extreme and the center of a megacity as the other extreme. In the middle, we find increasingly dense living arrangements, from more populated farmland, to small towns, to country cities of a few tens of thousands, to dense suburbs, and finally to megacities. On the remote farm, children are a net economic positive - they consume a modicum of extra resources, and soon grow to the point where the free labor they provide outweighs the resources they consume. The further you move along the range, however, the more of a net negative they become, until finally, in the core of the megacity, they become, economically speaking, a vanity item that makes about as much sense to acquire as a Ferrari or a Vertu phone. There's a reason why cities are notorious as population shredders - the only way you can afford to have one, or at most two, kids there is either if you're rich or the government is subsidizing you to have them.
Urbanization is irrelevant. Crown Heights and Williamsburg are typical Brooklyn neighborhoods, as urbanized as it gets. The Orthodox Jews there have 8-10 kids per family. The blacks have 2-4. The hipsters have 0-2. The Japanese, when living in pre-WW2 cities which were made out of bamboo and rice paper and allowed for zero privacy, had a ton of kids. The Japanese post-WW2, living in cities made out of concrete, don't have kids. In today's Israel, Ramat Gan and Bnei Brak are suburbs of Tel Aviv, right next to each other. Bnei Brak, which is very religious, has the highest population density in the country, 25k/km^2, with a population growth of 2.78%/year. Ramat Gan is mostly secular, has about 10k/km^2 people and grows at 1% per year. Cities were notorious as population sinks because of factors which are irrelevant today, including open sewers and chamberpots being emptied out the window, the plethora of syphilitic whores, taverns serving rotgut gin, etc. Even in these conditions, proper behavior largely insulated a population from most of the ill effects.
Right. Also worth mentioning is the fact that Tokyo has been a very dense urban area for a very long time. Its urban core population was something like 1.3 million back in 1890, with an additional 1.6 million in Tokyo prefecture --- there are very few cities in today's America that are larger than that --- and yet birthrates in Tokyo actually rose from 1890-1920, then declined slowly from 1920-1970, then fell off a cliff. Its population has increased only slightly since 1965, and this is almost entirely due to migration from small towns for economic reasons.
The only things that are irrelevant here are your examples. Brooklyn (or Bnei Brak) Orthodox Jews are both rich, and an outlier. Poor blacks are being heavily subsidized by the government to have more children, and thus do. Examples dating back to the late 19th century and early 20th century, when most people still lived on farms and mass urbanization was still just getting started, are so out of date and so inapplicable to present conditions that bringing them up just comes across as bizarre. The examples of open sewers and rotgut gin are puzzling too, because they have nothing to do with the factors that do make cities population shredders, including unaffordable family formation and lack of sufficient space to raise a large family.
Backwards. Obviously the problem isn't urbanization if there are urban communities producing 8 kids per mother. Oh, and coincidentally... "...the factors that do make cities population shredders, including unaffordable family formation and lack of sufficient space to raise a large family." ...by which you mean leftism? Remove NAMs, remove taxes, remove feminism, remove state atheism, remove gays and AIDS, remove Marxist architects, remove the cult of the dollar and replace it with the cross and I bet cities become much more affordable and liveable.
"remove the cult of the dollar and replace it with the cross and I bet cities become much more affordable and liveable." Dude. I got this other bridge to sell you too.
There's a reason I put that "all else being equal" qualifier in there. Of *course* if the government lavishly subsidizes poor urban blacks to have children, they're going to have more children than they otherwise would given any certain set of circumstances. Whatever you subsidize, you get more of - that's so obviously true as to barely be worth repeating. In fact, what's shocking is that even *with* these subsidies, there's still a 52% abortion rate for black pregnancies in this country. And yes, in the cities it's even higher - 61% in New York City, for example. So even *with* the government paying them to have children, blacks still abort more babies than they give birth to, which ought to tell you something about how much they naturally want to have babies. And yes, Orthodox Jews are producing a large number of children per mother. They're also a tiny outlier who live under unique social arrangements that will be virtually impossible to reproduce with any other urban population. Their combination of extreme insularity, high religiosity, high social pressure within the group, high level of wealth within the community, history of persecution which causes them to want to increase their numbers as a defensive measure, and yes, very small number means they can implement a survival strategy which you can't copy. Nor would you want to. I've had a lot of contact with the Hasidim in Brooklyn. Trust me - you don't want to live like they do. As for all the things you'd have to remove in order to make cities livable, you're still left with the fact that it's urbanization, and its attendant atomization, and the incentives that go along with urban living, that make those things possible at the scale we experience them in the first place. Yes, if you removed all the things that make cities suck, cities wouldn't suck. And if I had wheels, I'd be a wagon. Also, you're ignoring simple supply and demand. If X number of people want to move into Y geographical area, that's going to cause housing prices to be Z. The more X increases, the more Z increases. The only way to try to mitigate that is for the city to become an endless, ugly sprawl in which you can be guaranteed to spend at least 20 hours a week breathing in carbon monoxide while stuck in miles-long traffic jams trying to get to work. Even this will eventually hit some physical limit - either a barrier like an ocean or mountains, or a limit to the ability to pump resources into your megacity (For example, we in California have had our asses saved by an unusually wet winter, but a bit longer version of the California drought of last year would have raised some serious questions about the long-term sustainability of Los Angeles). Even *if* people naturally wanted to have a lot of children, high fertility rates are just not sustainable in big cities. Where are you going to put six kids? How much money would you have to make to be able to afford an apartment where you can raise them in conditions *not* resembling those of a Bowery tenement circa 1890? How many of the non-rich and non-subsidized can realistically pull that off?
>Their combination of extreme insularity, high religiosity, high social pressure within the group, high level of wealth within the community, history of persecution which causes them to want to increase their numbers as a defensive measure, and yes, very small number means they can implement a survival strategy which you can’t copy. Insularity has nothing to do with anything (although high internal trust and cohesion do). They are not wealthy (on average.) Persecution also has nothing to do with anything-nobody says, "hey, let me get married at age 20 and have kids to show that damn Hitler." Their numbers are quite sizeable if you compare to the population of Brooklyn, or Israel. As for the rest of it, it can be copied, and will have to be copied by any white population which wants to grow in today's world. >Nor would you want to. I’ve had a lot of contact with the Hasidim in Brooklyn. Trust me – you don’t want to live like they do. You mean, trading nights out at the bar for scholarship and family? You're right, it's terrible. > it’s urbanization, and its attendant atomization, and the incentives that go along with urban living, that make those things possible at the scale we experience them in the first place. Atomization and urbanization have nothing to do with each other. The US was, 80 years ago, full of urban communities which were quite dense, had a deep social structure, their own institutions and lots of kids per family. The brownstones and row houses of the New York, Philly, Chicago, etc. Irish, Italian, Polish and Jewish communities were anything but places of atomization. The atomization largely happened with the ethnic cleansing of those neighborhoods and their inhabitants' flight into suburban Levittowns, The religious Jewish communities proved more resistant to a large degree. >Even *if* people naturally wanted to have a lot of children, high fertility rates are just not sustainable in big cities. This would be news 80 or 130 years ago. >Where are you going to put six kids? In bunk beds in one or two rooms. A normal urban neighborhood is a place where kids can play in the streets and parks when they're not studying in school, and where they come home to study, eat and sleep. It's not that terrible an existence. In fact, it's a lot easier to raise a bunch of kids than a couple, because the older ones take care of the younger ones. >How much money would you have to make to be able to afford an apartment where you can raise them in conditions *not* resembling those of a Bowery tenement circa 1890? What is wrong with Bowery tenements, except for progressive propaganda? They, and similar neighborhoods, produced a huge amount of great Americans. Inevitably, when Whytes begin complaining about how it's simply impossible for them to have and raise children in today's conditions of injustice (which are materially much better than those faced by whites during the days of their greatest civilizational achievements,) it turns out that they mean that they require at least a separate bedroom for every child, close to their job so that they don't have to commute, and all this should not cost more than they can afford to pay without sacrificing their ability to buy the latest iShit, maintain late-model cars for themselves and the wife, and go out for dinner 2-3 times per week.
>Even *if* people naturally wanted to have a lot of children, high fertility rates are just not sustainable in big cities. Tokyo in 1960 wasn't significantly smaller than it is today. Its birthrate was double what it is today. Some of the world's largest cities -- from Lagos to Karachi to Jakarta -- all have high fertility rates at present, and these fertility rates have been sustained over the past few decades. If the statistics are to be believed, Lagos was at 4.1 children per woman as recently as 2013, and Lagos is far larger than any city in Europe or the USA... and infinitely more intense. ...Of course, cultural differences largely account for this. The "urbanization hypothesis", solely, cannot explain why fertility rates in the ultra-dense cities of Africa and South Asia are more than twice those of Poland and Vermont. There's more to it than that. I find B's arguments persuasive -- as were those you wrote below: It is about money, about convenience, about cultural decadence and nihilism, and so forth...
Most Orthodox Jews in the neighborhoods I mentioned are lower-middle class. Poorer in Israel (lots of 10-20 year old cars, for instance.)
If you look at communities where people manage to raise 8 kids in a 2-3 bedroom apartment and then other ones where people manage 1-3 in a 2000 square foot house, obviously the conclusion isn't "we need more affordable living space to breed." The move of white America to cul de sac Levittowns from brownstones and row houses was immediately followed by fertility collapse.
Orthodox Jews are the poorest group in Israel, many subsisting on handouts and charity. They are rich in spiritual gifts and a "plethora" of studious kids.
No, it is not about money. People want to have children. And will make big sacrifices to have children. Japan before emancipation was reasonably first world, but had high fertility. There are lots of third world countries, for example Nepal, where everyone is poor, but unemancipated groups have high fertility, and emancipated groups have western European fertility.
Sorry, but everyone here claiming that it's not about money and "people naturally want to have children" are believing what they want to be true instead of what actually is true. Cultural Marxism has liberated us from all the old traditions, religious strictures, and taboos - and in doing so, it has unmasked us; it has shown the world what we are like when we are free to follow our nature. What we see, if we are honest with ourselves, is not just disillusioning, but downright sickening. Over the past 250 years, we've seen one movement or political system after another fail because it based itself on a fundamentally inaccurate (and always overly optimistic) model of human nature. The heart of reaction - of a call for a return of the authority of the priests and kings from which the men of the Enlightenment sought to free themselves - is that, having seen clearly what happens when mankind's chains are broken, we reject romantic notions, and call for all the old chains to be repaired and placed right back where they were - even if we are as restrained by them as everyone else. (As the line from Elizabeth Bowden's "The Heat of the Day" goes: “Who could want to be free when they can be strong? Freedom, what a slaves’ yammer! We must have law ⎯ if necessary let it break us.") No more romantic illusions. Here's some hard reality: People don't really naturally want to have children, and certainly not more than one or two. People do what they think they are expected to (i.e. what the chains of tradition and taboo placed on them guide them toward). People respond to incentives, including (or perhaps especially) money. If we want people to have more children, we need to shift the balance of incentives and punishments back in favor of them doing so. We can't afford to wallow in happy wishy thinking.
This, exactly.
Not this. Not exactly. People do (on average) want to have children. Not as much as they want to take their next breath, but a lot more than they want to retire in Florida. In the middle, on the margins, of course incentives matter. Cultural trends in education, sluttery, late marriage, sluttery, divorce, and sluttery matter a lot more. Humans did not spend the last 100k years pretending to want children (and having them) because that was the socially acceptable opinion to have.
Look, if you really want to raise the fertility rate, the best way to do so is to get people married -- voluntarily or not -- as young as possible, and encourage them to have sex with their spouse as young as possible. No abortions, no contraception, no condoms, no tricks. But to get there, you need a) young male providers, that is, young males, 13 year old males, working who can raise a family, b) families or communities that can support young couples financially or otherwise, such as grow organically outside the cities or among the religious, c) absolutely no education for females, let them remain illiterate if need be. To get there, you have to abolish schools completely, or only allow the very smartest males to be in school and pay them for it. The rest of males work and provide, and all females learn housewifery and practice it. Need 13 year old laborers and 12 year old housewives. To get there, abolish the notion of childhood. It's a modern romantic notion. Know what children should do? Grow up. Kids only have one mission in life: to become adults. The culture of infantilization: movies, shows, toys, songs, activities, etc. "for children" must be ruthlessly expunged. Ban Spiderman. When the modern romantic notion of childhood is destroyed, then you can send teenagers to work if male or teach them housewifery if female, annihilate schools, and get people married -- voluntarily or not -- as young as possible, ideally at 12, but no later than 18. Raise them in religion, meaning, teach them that contraception is from the Devil, which it is btw. This is best achieved when you have an organic community. Organic communities can be fertile yet secular outside the city, where there's less exposure to strangers and no mass culture. Or, religious communities, strict ones, secluded ones in ghettos, inside cities. Of course, total Patriarchy is required, because otherwise the females will demand "equality", to be "free" like males, and all is ruined. In fact, freedom itself has to be destroyed. Allow me to explain: If you don't get to choose your occupation, your location, or even your spouse, if it is forbidden to "follow one's dreams", then you have no justification to avoid reproduction. People avoid reproduction because "muh liberty to do stuff". So we reach the conclusion that liberalism itself has to be killed and incinerated. Your father has a family business and you will, as his son, take over it eventually. Divorce has to be banned. Marriage is for life - Catholics had the right idea. Or at least, very very difficult to divorce. Restriction of exposure to the outside world has to be in place. Minimum travelling is called for. On the other hand, local socialization is beneficial. Stay in one place your whole life and see the same people always. Boring? That's how people always lived. Risk adventurism at your own peril. Community is supposed to be permanent. Overall you have to go "hardcore". My suggestion to burn schools to the ground, get people married at 12 or why not earlier, illegalize infantilism, illegalize freedom, send male teenagers to work preferably at a family business and teach female teenagers to serve in complete obedience their imminent husbands, bring back fundamentalist religion that teaches not abstinence but rather plenty of vaginal sex within Patriarchal monogamous early teens marriage, and may I suggest racial AND classist/caste segregation that will guarantee people grow up with those most behaviorally close to them so will be glad to socialize and share genes via reproduction, well it's all very extreme but if you do most or all of it, you bring back reproduction to optimal levels. "A little goes a long way", but it's really better to go all the way, to go rogue. So the enemies are secularism, Scale, romantic conception of childhood, schools, liberalism, female education and employment, male lack of employment during young age, and modernism. It is especially important that only men work, because then one salary will suffice for a whole family. And women need to learn from a young age servitude so when they are married at 12 or no later than 18, they can take care of their husband who puts the bread on the table. Note that as families and communities grow, it will be easier to take care of kids, help will always be found. Church also serves a function here. Not just kids, the whole communities, all the members, will have plenty of relatives and organic relationships to support them. Large communities maintain themselves. Also, governmental bureaucracy will be destroyed once female teachers, social workers, lawyers, and other assorted female parasites are banned forever from working anywhere, are sent home to take care of the children, theirs especially, the old, and the community. Women can contribute a lot to society, but the government and the capitalists need to lay their hands off of our women, who should be the property of husbands or at least fathers. The government and the capitalists both support Feminism because they want women to work for them rather than serve husbands and the needy in the community. Dismantle the big government, localize the economy, break the cities apart (or make cities as uniformal as possible: one race, one religion, one language, one culture, etc.), and you incentivize traditional sex roles and dare I say the preservation of the race. It's all very radical. But doable.
Excellent comment. Again, the problem being leftism. And no, technology doesn't magically alter human nature. All business used to be family business, including the most cosmopolitan one of all -- international banking (thanks Rothschilds). If we are powerless at technology's feet we might as well accept that families and pair bonds are forever obsolete because Tinder exists. On the other hand we can dispel with this fiction that Enlightenment philosophers don't know what they're doing, they know exactly what they're doing: undertaking a systematic effort to convince us we have no agency in the face of new technologies or ideologies. The Amish control their technology. In contrast, our technology controls us. Why is that? Put leftism back in the closet.
I should add to my above post that immigration has to be restricted, get the point across that your own people are all you have to work with, no influx of foreigners is forthcoming. Of course without Feminism and the modern lifestyle you have reproduction, so no need for foreigners. And without foreigners, when all members of society are authentically related - wait, let me "all caps bro": WHEN ALL MEMBERS OF SOCIETY ARE AUTHENTICALLY RELATED, then you naturally are inclined to seek friendships and genetic reproduction with them, you have high-trust with all the ensuing benefits, no deracination ergo Feminism is unappealing, women are tied to the needy in the community and give zero shits about some Africans somewhere. Immigration/globalism/multiracialism and Feminism are interrelated diseases, while strict particularism and Patriarchy are preliminary conditions for a cure. Naturally then, governments and big businesses support globalism and Feminism and oppose/subvert all conservative forces, while we who seek to increase reproduction, the reactionaries, understand that both globalism and Feminism are Satanic and have to go away. Destroy one and both are gone, allow one and both arrive. No reproduction leads to openness to globalism so instead of local laborers who all have grey hair you have young immigrants; immigration/Diversity and societal inflation bring deracination and hinder reproduction. It's a very simple equation, a vicious circle. To destroy a vicious circle, attack it from all directions at once. Immigration/globalism and Feminism both spring from the enlightenment principle of liberty. If you think women "have a right to their body" then you have already lost. In fact it's for the best if single unsupervised women be allowed to be "raped", so very soon all women are married and supervised. Similarly if you expell everyone who is dissimilar to your clan from your town, and restrict outsiders' liberty to enter your town, you'll feel much at home in your community. Crowded cities can only sustain ultra religious populations. If you're not a fundie then leave the city, go where the air is fresher and space is abundant, you'll be relieved and reproduction will look natural. People find it difficult to reproduce because society is too damn complex. So many things to care about! Living in a small community where things are predictable, simple, and there's no constant friction with the unfamiliar can really push one to desire reproduction, for it's a nice world to populate with one's children, the children and the community will be better off for it. Also love your race, be a racial supremacist, an ethnic bigot. Then you naturally desire to expand the ranks of your people - by reproduction of your own, with your racially pure wife. Bonus points for religious fundamentalism - reproduce to out-breed the heathens. Hating outgroups is healthy, tribalism is healthy. So many factors are at work, plenty of challenges, therefore the West is in decline, actually most developed societies are. But I think I have presented here a more or less complete program for reproductive restoration.
Sounds theoretically convincing until you realize it does not stand up to the numbers. Poland, 93% ethnic Polish, 1.33 fertility. And decently conservative and nationalist culture. France is still at 2, despite being a poster child of forced diversity. And of course all the highly tribal African countries with 4 . I don't blame you, this is the kind of thing I would usually believe, too, it just does not check out. In fact one of the greatest mysteries is the low fertility of countries like Poland or Russia. None of the things usually raised explain it, for example, feminism is low and gender roles are pretty traditional. My personal experience with them is that the main reason is being too poor, but this should not be taken literally, they were poorer in the past with higher fertility, many poorer countries have higher. Rather it should be seen as the wealth-as-status thing. They don't accept putting four kids into a hut. They want Western level of wealth in order to not feel ashamed, separate child room etc. combine this with their strong desire for stability so often feel they must own not rent but cannot afford that, I was often told the future is too insecure for kids and so on. But again the aggregate level of wealth would not be so bad if it was somehow more spent on safety or comfort, their core problem is status-seeking through wealth. For example Italy is full of Romanian and Hungarian prostitutes and mostly it is just that they want that Vutton bag. They don't want to be the poor rural girl anymore and by poor I mean exclusively status symbols, affording the designer clothes, the works. My primary impression with Eastern Europe and its low fertility is the lack of social classes. They would benefit from having nobility and peasantry, as they had that for a long time, the peasants would simply accept yes I have a hut, no shame in it, I am just a peasant, so let's make kids. The fact that everybody wants to look like a noble destroys these countries. They simply cannot deal with the lack of clear social classes. In short the root problem is status competition everywhere. Even in fairly conservative countries.
Yes, empirically it's better for the birth rate to have two rabidly hostile tribes locked in a vendetta cycle against each other, so that they have to pump out cannon fodder to keep on the pressure on the enemy.
People today aren't essentially different than people of old. Back in the day, couples found various ways to control reproduction. However, by and large most people desired to have large families. The "mystery" you refer to is not particularly mystifying: this age of materialism drives the masses to abandon reproduction. Materialism is the diseased heart pumping corrupted blood into the veins of modern society. The Soviet Union instilled materialism within its inhabitants for generations. Everywhere Communism advanced, there life lost its value, and only hedonic, instant gratification remained. Progressivism made an alliance with the capitalists -- hence it survived whereas the inferior Communism collapsed -- but it advocates the same old materialism. These two ideologies go back to the Enlightenment, whose basic tenet is that human conduct can, should, and will increase happiness on Earth, until everyone is happy. The goal is the same although the means -- dictatorship of the proletariat versus global democracy -- differ. Democratic liberal capitalism and revolutionary Communism are two sides of the same coin, different currents within the ideology of social engineering. Children are natural. If people en masse refrain from producing them, it's a sign that social engineering is at work. What is common to the Amish, the Mormons, the devout Muslims, the tribal Africans, and the Orthodox Jews? All these groups are immune to, or successfully cope with, attempts at social engineering by the proponents of Enlightenment ideologies. How? Herein lies the answer to your mystery: These groups all disavow the one thing which makes Progressivism so captivating, so magnetic, the thing which facilitates social engineering: material comfort. The issue is not mere status competition - that's an inadequate explanation because who determined that status is conferred by expensive clothing, for instance, and not by having dozens of grandchildren? And in fact, status in Western society is granted partly according to holiness, which is defined as adherence to enlightenment ideology, and partly according to material prosperity or symbols thereof. Those groups that refuse to play this game, or are incapable of playing it, are the ones which reproduce the most. These groups necessarily undermine the project of social engineering. They refuse to participate in it, to cooperate with it. They stick to their own way of life. That is why Communism was totalitarian, and why Progressivism is well on its path to become just as totalitarian: some people; scum! dissidents! ruin Our Utopia. Christian bakeries that don't condone the sodomic lifestyle, by virtue of their very (objectively harmless) existence, threaten the grand vision of universal happiness through material progress, because they proclaim that there exist transcendental values that can't be socially engineered: Such a slap in the face of social engineering is driving the leftists hysterical, for their ideology is based upon social engineering. Ever wondered why leftists instinctively defend vaccination against even mild scepticism? It's not because of their solid grip on the science behind it; it's because mass vaccination is social engineering, and social engineering must not be questioned, since that's the only way forward for the proponents of the Enlightenment. If social engineering results in catastrophe, that's only because we haven't done it right, bigot, so we'll have to try harder. Evidently, you can't will children into existence by thinking positive thoughts, by feelgood: beside just having sex, there are sacrifices of material welfare to be made. But Progressivism teaches that everyone can be happy all the time and never sacrifice anything, or at least anything beside their "privilege", so why should people adjust their lifestyle just to reproduce? To leftist ears, or rather to modern ears which are full of pozz, that's just plainly irresponsible, because of Muh Happiness. Mass education, which is classic social engineering, programs the students to seek happiness by obsessing over meaningless, fleeting "achievements" that stem from cooperating with The System. I see all those girls, young girls aged 10-16, how they are so anxious about "exams", "material", "homework", "classes", which they treat as the most or perhaps only important things in the world, and I'm sickened to the core. In a sane world they wouldn't ever worry about this inane waste of time, because they'd be busy raising a family, or at least taking care of their kin. As long as you insist on leaving the major components of modern social engineering intact, you can't really expect people to overcome this programming -- this infantilizing programming to be precise -- and choose reproduction over comfort. They have to be de-infantilized first. If you program your population with infantilization and flood their culture with strict materialism and so-called materialistic "values", and you don't ever attempt to de-infantilize them, to imbue them with real values which extol the sacrifice of one's various different comforts for greater, higher ideals (and the only ideals you allow to flourish are enlightenment egalitarian crap anyway; Social Justice demands material equality!), then how can you possibly expect them to take the mantle of reproduction? People over 25 used to be considered "old"; now they are still within the category of youngsters, and there's no wonder they feel immature and unready to start a family. This is not natural. It's the opposite of natural - it's artificial. Massive, overwhelming social engineering is required to get society to this point. "Conservatives" who made a pact with the Devil (the Feminists) to ensure people stay celibate, sterile until they are "ready" to start a family have shot their own foot: no one seems to ever be ready to start a family! Celibacy till the late 30s or early 40s, yay! It's unrealistic and unnatural and therefore people don't take "conservatives" seriously at all these days. "Woman's liberation" has to be discarded completely, not just partially. Once and for all, let's dispel with this fiction that lesbians or otherwise androgenized women don't know what they're doing. They know exactly what they're doing: applying the "salami strategy" to little-by-little undermine the last vestiges of Patriarchal monogamy. They present myriads of tiny little ostensibly-unrelated "innocent" demands; only after these begin to aggregate into a large black hole of misery and childlessness that people wake up to the danger of appeasing those dykes; but then it's already too late and society is in deep decline. One of these "innocent", definitely-not-sinister demands is handing power to schools, which are female-dominated, at the expense of paternal authority and supervision. The social engineers and the Feminists argue that not exposing children to school brainwashing is "child abuse". Need to protect children from their fathers and mothers, so goes the argument. Progressivism proves itself, time and age, as nothing but the more sophisticated version of Communism. Now I'm asking you: is there any Western country that utterly rejects this pernicious enlightenment ideology? If not, why not? The only groups which reproduce well above replacement level are the ones that are oblivious to, if not actively rebel against, the project of modernization. The Cathedral goes out of its way to inject the pozz into these recalcitrant communities, though so far with little success. It's not a coincidence, folks. The good people in Eastern Europe have their hearts in the right place, but only when they reject the century-long brainwashing of materialism (it's still ongoing) will they manage to overcome the predicament of childlessness and regain their virility as a race and a civilization. The System can't be reformed. It has to be burned to the ground. The cuteness of kids is not the issue. Again, reproduction is natural; it is lack of reproduction that points to something being deeply wrong. Where's pride in being a parent? Parenthood has been hollowed out by our democratic / communist social engineers. When parenthood is meaningful again, people will again reproduce: it won't be because of the cuteness of the kids, but rather because it's an honor and a divine blessing to pass on one's legacy. Do people still have legacies to pass on? Traditions? Materialism ensures they don't. The preliminary change is a fundamental, total rejection of materialism.
>Let’s face it, the demand for children in developed countries today is effectively indistinguishable from the demand of pets. People have children because they are adorable, small and cuddly, and many people enjoy having some small cutesy thing to care of. I think it is not true. I think it primarily comes from an existential problem, we enjoy life in the twenties then get tired of partying and suddenly find our life has no meaning or goal because we are too tired to go on with that and just working in order to afford vacations looking at pretty old buildings or having hobbies like playing golf just does not cut it. This meaninglessness is a generic problem of the modern world - see the whole existentialist stuff - but having children is a way to solve or postpone that problem. It is probably not entirely logical, but emotionally it works. A second aspect is pleasing your own parents who are bored without grandkids. I don't think the cute factor is big. Before kids get cute, there is that crucial two years of shitting and barfing and wailing and generally not being too cute. Actually the other way around, people who did not have kids in the time window they could treat their pets like kids with all parenting instincts.
Kids are at their cutest in that 2 year shitting-barfing-wailing stage. Yes, I know YMMV, but I have grandmas stop me at the street to admire my little kids all the time. People also have pets because they're bored with life and caring for some cutesy little thing keeps you busy and stops you from thinking about how fucking stupid your cubicle->home->vacation->cubicle cycle is. You could say some people get huge ugly dogs as pets, which aren't cute by any sane definition of the term, but still, generally speaking there's some wide intersection between "wanting to care of something because I'm bored" and having that object of care being cute and cuddly.
It never really stops I believe. Every time I see some friend of my mother's I get told what a good looking kid I am. (Which isn't even true, or maybe I'm good looking to middle-aged medical professionals. ). This has been the case as far back as I can remember. (and it's not that they're brown-nosing, mother has never been anything more than a specialist). Women.
I don't disagree with the religious and emotional aspect of having children, but the point about money and incentives is certainly a sound one. A rich couple today could conceivably (if law allows) pay money to other women to carry out their/his child. With enough money and willing "gestaters," 10 children would be a triviality. Think not of 10, in this case, but something like an order of 100. It is quite possible: think like Hongwu Emperor of Ming or ancient kings. One could note that these men had many wives. However, with modern reproductive tech, a 100 children can come from one couple, given that enough eggs could be harvested from a woman. And sperm is not in shortage. Given a people coming from a pro-natalist mindset, this is where economic incentives play a huge role -- and this is where a sane nation's Sovereign would certainly wish to encourage the better citizens to procreate more than the worse ones. The geneticist Ronald Fisher thought that this could be solved by government allowances proportional to father's income. In my opinion, it could be solved more simply by (the nation's Sovereign) creating the necessary kinds of jobs/industries (obviously, with competition among them), which would pay said income. Naturally, there would not be many dig-a-ditch type jobs, but more jobs in the realm of scientific and technical innovation: something that expands the carrying capacity of the land, the Malthusian limits of the society. Of course, the above still assumes that people want to have children. I think that even if Trump becomes King of The USA, nothing of the sort will happen in the next few generations. I say: let cultural evolution run its course, and let all anti-natalists/feminists and those who stand by them die out, as well as let people who hate children die out as well. What will remain are niggers and religious/good people. With sane capitalist regime and law enforcement, niggers will die out, too. (To digress, if one is to take away the power of procreation from people by centralizing it into the hands of a nation's Sovereign, many bad things will happen, as there is much more variables out there than income or IQ or whatever else. Besides, by aggregating the power of procreation into few hands, there is no guarantee that unforeseen-by-establishers consequences may ensue, due to personal interests and shortsightedness of bureaucracy/technocracy, no matter how enlightened. Maybe someday humans will learn more about genetics and how society should work, but this is not the day today.) There will be, of course, unlucky good few who will not survive. My heart cries out for them (as I might be among them), but I did not create this good world. Evolution in its many manifestations is one of God's laws of nature, and, for now, it seems to be of a more basic category than present laws and current capabilities of man, even if some of these were Divinely inspired (e.g. Halakha).
"What will remain are niggers and religious/good people. With sane capitalist regime and law enforcement, niggers will die out, too." Doesn't seem like the kind of demographic mix that produces sane capitalist regimes and law enforcement.
Well, good point: since niggers depend on civilization and its goods, they will be left to their own devices with regards to day-to-day conduct, with natural homicide rates eventually approaching hunter-gatherers' (some areas de facto are). But because society is liberal and very developed, production fairly automated, general niggerization/idiocratization will continue, until a snag hits the system (not unlike New Orleans). It won't take much, really. A natural catastrophe like a hurricane or earthquake, with insufficient personnel to fix the system and prevent critical systems from being incapacitated further. In general, will lead to further balkanization of society, until the country breaks up. Then sanity will start to prevail in some of these regions.
[…] thought sometimes appears in unexpected places and it is usually quite revealing when it does. The post in question the […]
[…] markets (the natalist angle). Poseidon on fire (1, 2, 3, 4). “Sex is far too important to be left to the decision of […]
[…] markets (the natalist angle). Poseidon on fire (1, 2, 3, 4). “Sex is far too important to be left to the decision of those […]
People love money more than children, but European experience shows that they don't love money enough to make more than one or two children. Financial incentives are proven too weak. Looking back at how European villages and tribes used to function, all of them was waging a permanent war against their neighbors. The other villages were always extend their lands and pressing your borders, the neighboring tribes were periodically raiding your cattle and stealing the crops. A villager saw very clearly that his personal security was a function of the number of young males in the village, and they were always trying to create the conditions (the culture) to have young maids marry and be fertile. In every tribal and village there were fertility cults, fertility gods and saints, they organized village fiestas or maydays where girls and boys were given opportunity to meet and fall in love. The promotion of fertility went to the extend of organizing sacred rituals where women who did not get pregnant by their legal husbands could do so without social penalties. For example, in Spain (read "Yerma") women ascended a mountain to the grotto of the fertility saint, and young males hidden in the bush ambushed them. The Greeks had their Dyonosius rituals with wine and drugs. In a mass society, say like China, the individual understands that his/her personal contribution is meaningless (say ten million babies born in 2016, or ten million and ONE). The only incentive that remains is the "pet" incentive, which exists. Look at the cat ladies.
Hey, good to have you here. I read you too. If tribal warfare is a prerequisite maybe the Muslim invasion of Europe will finally solve the problem. Soon enough the Germans are going to actually need young boys for more than to take cute pictures. Japan's old festivals were also famous for getting everyone drunk and letting girls get pregnant without social disapproval. The more we know about how traditional society actually worked, the harder it looks to pull it off today. That said, I think there's room for more financial incentives. But of course the communist daycare plan is better for rent seeking and is probably what will end up happening, results be damned.
I liked this comment in the original: 中国人都是中共圈养的猪！ The Chinese people are the Communist Party's fattened pigs. In my times, a sentence like that was unthinkable. China is certainly changing.
Note that the website is inaccessible within China. Emigres tend to be quite bitter, often excessively so. But yes, the ideological climate is pretty hostile these days.
I re-read this conversation three months later. Somehow escaped our attention the fact that in Israel (and some European countries) children ARE a resource. Here we have a subsidy of some 600 dollars per month per child, and the kindergarten are much subsidized. A family with 4 children can subsist without working or just studying full time in the yeshive (which in this country is a paid occupation). Yet the system is not working. Middle class couples love vacations in the Greek islands and children are not yielding enough to give up hedonistic lifestyle. On the other hand, it is working on the very religious people, who would have children with or without subsidy. And it is working on the Bedouin nomad ethnic minority, that changed its goat herding economy to baby-production and bring three or four wives from poor Bedouin tribes in the surrounding countries. One Bedouin has 56 children. They are a social and political problem for us. Israeli Arabs, on the other hand, have fought their way to middle class and their fertility has moderated accordingly. As the Singapore Government learns, no amount of dollars can convince its smarter population to give up their careers and lifestyle.
[…] obvious observation that minor tax incentives are not enough to raise the baby-making rate, while Spandrell has linked the the fertility crisis to kids costing lots and recommends making it profitable with major tax […]
[…] obvious observation that minor tax incentives are not enough to raise the baby-making rate, while Spandrell has linked the the fertility crisis to kids costing lots and recommends making […]
You may find this interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHXPAPTFPvc
Blake Stone-Banks @blakestonebanks Ha! Here's how friends are saying "shithole country" in Beijing: 垃圾国家 ("trash country"), 破点儿 ("broken place"), 鬼地方 ("haunted spot"), 穷山恶水 ("barren mountains and evil waters"), and the best: 粪坑国 ("manure kingdom").