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Sweden's Pronatalism Fails: Just Like We Predicted
We analyze the recent collapse in Swedish birth rates, despite its generous pro-family policies. As Sweden embraced feminism, state-supplied daycare, and progressive values, we predicted their fertility incentives would prove fruitless. Sure enough, financial subsidies cannot overcome the cultural antagonism modernity holds towards childbearing. We reiterate that culture- not money- drives birth rates. Until having children is celebrated and prioritized, the developed world will continue on the path to slow suicide.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Even men have become feminists.
The state supplies universal daycare and flexible employment for mothers, fathers take up their share of domestic labor, and both parents are awarded generous leave from their jobs to raise the next generation
across these countries that had been implementing these policies, they have begun to see their fertility crash. And we told you, but I want to hear you pontificate on this first.
Simone Collins: I, yeah, I, this was very much. And I told you so kind of thing, because we're like, it's not the money.
It's not the money. It's not the money. It's a culture. And here it is. There's, there's no exogenous celebration of people being parents. I think one of the big problems is, is there's this dream that you can have a pronatalist culture and everyone can work and everyone can participate in the modern economy and identify as career people.
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Simone Collins: Remember when we took that trip to Sweden and you paid like 30 for a hot dog and then we decided to stop eating
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it's funny so [00:01:00] we we did this trip to Sweden and I love the the trip that we did there actually because This was what Simone gifts me when she's giving me a trip. Like we don't go on normal trips I should say before we went to Sweden Simone had me for me, she emailed every one of the VCs in, in the city we were visiting and every one of the private equity company owners and all of the famous startup people.
And so when we went there, just cold email, but, you know, I have a Stanford MBA and she was a Cambridge student at the time. So a lot of them responded. I mean, we would go to their offices and we would see what they were working on and everything like that. Because And they know where all the
Simone Collins: good restaurants are.
Malcolm Collins: Well, it's important to never allow yourself to come to indolence. To do a trip just for idle curiosity, I think, is sinful. And so, while we can see the world, we need to make sure that we learn how to improve ourselves on these trips. And At this point, I was also trying to learn, because I was working as a VC in South Korea how some small economies were doing well with their venture capital investing, and others were not, because this was very interesting to me, [00:02:00] like why you would get some economies creating these giant companies.
And just for
Simone Collins: TLDR of your theory, which I think is very astute, is that basically for countries, Startup economy to work well, if they're relatively small and they eventually have to leave, they can't be, they can't have a sufficiently compelling market like South Korea does, because then basically you go big in your own home market, but never really make yourself ready for an international market.
If you have a very, very, very small market like that in Sweden, you immediately have to be international from day
Malcolm Collins: one. You need to be so small that the first market you are attempting is an international market. So this means that this is why areas like Germany and France have such bad startup marketplaces.
Whereas domestic markets are too big, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, stuff like that,
Published on 1 year, 9 months ago