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This Years Demographic Data Was Worse than Anyone Expected (Yes, Even Us)
Simone and Malcolm Collins debate the causes of declining birth rates and potential solutions after reading a provocative proposal from writer "Arctotherium." They analyze his argument that improving men's status relative to women could incentivize marriage and higher fertility.
Topics discussed:
* Statistics showing drastic fertility declines across multiple countries
* The role of female empowerment movements and decreased male status
* Policies like defunding education and affirmative action to aid men
* Reversing cultural changes from the sexual revolution
* Flaws in the "baby boom" theory and viability of copying it
* Biological drives behind having children after tragedy
* Standards for modern dating contributing to dismal marriage rates
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] And again, this is like men are losing their status. They're checking out. They're not getting educated. They're not getting jobs or they're getting depressed. And it's showing up differently. Like, you know, I think generally women are much more likely to publicly complain about things. identify as depressed and say all these things.
Whereas men don't, they're very quiet and they silently suffer and they just back out of society.
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: So we're going to go over these numbers. This is year over year fertility decline in these countries. So you already know one number in Korea year over year for Q3. It was what, 14%? I thought it
Simone Collins: was
Malcolm Collins: 11%. It was just incredibly hot, like double digits decrease in a country that's already doing that bad. And Seoul's already at 0.
53 fertility. A rat row. So here we go. Romania, 19%. 4 percent decrease year over year, Latvia, 19 percent decrease year over year, [00:01:00] Lithuania, 17. 8 percent decrease year over year, Estonia, 16. 3 percent decrease year over year, Mongolia, 16. 1%, uh, I don't know what this is, Federation BIH 10. 10%. Serbia.
Simone Collins: Oh, no, it's not Hungary.
Malcolm Collins: is 9. 1%, Netherlands is 9%, Belgium is 8. 5%, Russia is 8. 4%, Croatia is 8. 2%, Hungary is 6. 6%, Armenia is 6. 1%, Thailand is 5. 9%, Kosovo is 4. 8%, Uh, well, 4.1% and Uzbekistan is only 3% or 2.8%, so not that bad. Oh, good for you. 17.6% and Japan is 11.9%.
Simone Collins: [00:02:00] So roughly the same as what we saw for South Korea. If memory serves, yeah, if, if,
Malcolm Collins: if, if you are somebody who works in the field of statistics, a double digit year over year, decrease.
Is catastrophic. Catastrophic. This is not like a small thing. This is not an irrelevant thing.
Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and we're talking to people about this day in, day out. Yesterday we had like a 90 minute conversation with someone writing a book about this. And, and this is where sort of like I, I read something this morning that now like.
Because, you know, our solutions to prenatalism, they're like very gender egalitarian. They're like, how do we make this work in a society where we keep high levels of education, high levels of, of prosperity, high levels of, of, of gender equality and choice, and also the choice to not get married and not have kids if you don't want to.
And I'm like, okay, okay, okay. But then I'm reading this sub stack and I'll tell you more about [00:03:00] it. And I'm just like, oh man. So I'd never heard of this author on sub stack before. Arctotherium is, is his name. And he, he writes in this, this analysis of the baby boom. Assuming he's a he for reasons that will become apparent later in my rant about all this that basically nations that have.
undergone a first demographic transition, sort of, you know, when a nation becomes pro
Published on 2 years ago