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Tract 0: Cultural Experimentation is the Key to Saving Our Species
Our podcast, Based Camp, focuses on the topics of sex, politics, genetics, and religion. The first three are understandable obsessions for leaders of the pronatalist movement but the last often perplexes newcomers. Religion? This confusion is amplified when they ask why we haven’t written a book on pronatalism and realistic solutions to falling fertility rates and we point out that we have and it's titled The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion.
The great thing about being an American and exploring the problem of crashing fertility rates is that most of the developed world is further along the path to demographic collapse than we are, which allows us to see what has and hasn’t worked.
The “obvious” solutions to falling fertility rates simply don’t work. You can’t buy fertility: Hungary spent 5% of its GDP attempting to do this one year and only rose fertility rates by 1.6%, a laughable figure in a world where rates are falling annually by double digit percentages in dozens of countries. What’s more, if you line up all the studies looking at whether financial incentives boost fertility rates, you see a clear association between the proposed effect size and the margin of error.
Is there some amount we could pay people to get them to have kids? Of course. Is there an amount a government would be able to pay (i.e., something that would pass in Congress) that would make a significant difference? The answer is no. Anyone telling you otherwise is either not familiar with the data or is lying to you in an effort to promote some other agenda.
Shifting the culture is the obvious way to save our species from the self-induced extinguishing of our most productive members. Yet actually doing so is not entirely straightforward. One’s first intuition when observing that conservative religious populations have more children within countries is to assume that imposing their beliefs on the population level is the solution. But then one sees that the more conservative a country’s average citizen, the lower its fertility rate, as Aria Babu has shown. Imposing conservative values through governments fiat does not appear to work and may even be counter-productive.
The failure of universal conservative values to sustainably raise birth rates is likely driven by the same process that leads to native ethnic groups having higher fertility rates in ethnically and culturally diverse countries than in ethno-states or mono-cultures (when controlling for prosperity). That's right: an ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction. The reason for this, I suspect, is that high fertility requires not just a strong, religiously infused culture but one whose members feels like a threatened minority that is starkly different from its neighbours. This would explain the perplexingly high Jewish Israeli fertility rates.
I suspect there are two major forces at play. The first is just common sense. If you have daily reminders that people who look, act, and think like you might be “replaced”, that is a strong motivation to have kids. In a country like South Korea (where I used to live) almost everyone you see and interact with shares your culture and ethnicity, so there is no daily feeling of existential threat. Think of it like a fertility-cultural version of the bystander effect.
The second force at play is more subtle. When a government imposes a culture’s value system, the forces of intergenerational cultural evolution that made the culture strong in the first place begin to atrophy. If a person lived their life in a mech suit which moved their body for them, all th
Published on 1 year, 9 months ago