The political left and right each have a big long term problem about which they cry most. For the left it is global warming; for the right fertility decline. (Sure, a few tech people cry about AI, but far fewer than re these others.)
I think we need to take into account naturally occurring negative reinforcement feedback loops. For instance, you write that “Amish-like insular fertile subcultures are known for living in small rural pacifist egalitarian fundamentalist-religious isolated communities”.
But insular rural subcultures don’t scale very well. You can’t support a population of 300 million amish in the US if they’re all living in small tech rural communities. So that means either fertility will decline due to carrying capacity limits (e.g. lack of affordable living space), or the Amish will have to adapt to urban living, which puts them into contact with mainstream culture, which inevitably introduces fertility stagnation...
So it seems like there are strong negative reinforcements which will prevent such subcultures from scaling up and dominating the world demographics. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this.
It isn't urban living that puts Amish at risk but urban living mixing with non-Amish. So as they become a larger % of population they can start to make their own smaller then bigger towns.
Similar, the reason they are pacifists is less that they object to war and more that they object to having their impressionable young men mixing up with others in war training. But when they are large % of population they can make their own units of soldiers who train together.
Judeo-messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only reinforced the old Jewish narrative. They are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond peoples, races, cultures) and which are the daily sustenance of our schools, in our media, in our popular culture, at our universities, and on our streets, have ended up reducing our biosymbolic identity and ethnic pride to their minimal expression.
Jewish bankers flooded Europe with Muslims and America with third-world garbage. Exile as punishment for those who preach sedition should be reinstated within the legal framework of the West . . . Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are death cults originating in the Middle East and totally alien to Europe and its peoples.
One sometimes wonders why the European left gets along so well with Muslims. Why does an often overtly anti-religious movement take the side of a fierce religiosity that seems to oppose almost everything the left has always claimed to stand for? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Islam and Marxism have a common ideological root: Judaism.
No country is leading its own course in this invasion because it is a UN-led political agenda driven by the Jews and their puppets (politicians). Most people just don't know or understand that this is a political agenda. However, some manage to understand that politicians are deliberately working to import Muslims and replace people, but that's it, they are like a computer that can't work because the program doesn't allow it.
Why do they have to foemrm war groups. I think itnis more that they don't want their young.ones to be contaminated by modern ways en modern living. Although they do give the young ones a chance to see for themselves what is out there
They do, but are remarkably unique in that. I think of things like the “Quiverfull” Christian movement, which has been trying the “out-breed everyone else to take over the world” strategy for a few decades. They DO have lots of children but have a lot of difficulty keeping the children in the faith.
The attrition rate among the ultra-Orthodox is ~30%, which means that around 1 in 3 of them stop being ultra-Orthodox. In Israel they generally become Modern Orthodox, not secular, and maintain a very high fertility rate.
“Oh how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.” — Martin Luther
“Oh how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.” — Martin Luther
Pardonne mon français . . . Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif . . . Ce sont les mêmes idéaux . . . Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Les banquiers juifs ont inondé l’Europe de musulmans et l’Amérique de déchets du tiers-monde . . . L'exil comme punition pour ceux qui prêchent la sédition devrait être rétabli dans le cadre juridique de l'Occident . . . Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune : le judaïsme.
Aucun pays ne mène sa propre course dans cette invasion parce qu’il s’agit d’un programme politique dirigé par l’ONU et piloté par les Juifs et leurs marionnettes (les politiciens). La plupart des gens ne savent tout simplement pas ou ne comprennent pas qu’il s’agit d’un programme politique. Cependant, certains parviennent à comprendre que les politiciens travaillent délibérément à importer des musulmans et à remplacer des gens, mais c'est tout, ils sont comme un ordinateur qui ne peut pas fonctionner parce que le programme ne le permet pas.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait : «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv . . . Nous socialistes nationaux est venu à libéré Paris, nous ne l'avons pas détruit.
Besides there are evidence that Amish or Haredim is not that insular. Economic crisis affect them and reduce fertility. Declining US economy would also push Amish to decline.
Mormonism is an excellent case study for this point. A few fundamentalist sects still exists and the average Mormon still has higher fertility than gentiles as a whole, but mainstream Mormons are people like Mitt Romney and not particular different than the average American vs in Brigham Young's day when he had dozens of descendents.
Estic obligat a escriure en diversos idiomes perquè: 1. A la majoria de la gent dels Estats Units se'ls ha rentat el cervell perquè cregui que els jueus són la seva salvació; i 2., el seu anglès és una merda i no poden romandre en silenci el temps suficient per escoltar o veure el que òbviament passa al seu voltant . . . El judeomessianisme fa gairebé dos mil anys que escampa entre nosaltres el seu missatge verinós. Els universalismes democràtics i comunistes són més recents, però només han reforçat la vella narrativa jueva. Són els mateixos ideals.
Els ideals transnacionals, transracials, transsexuals, transculturals que aquestes ideologies ens prediquen (més enllà dels pobles, races, cultures) i que són el sosteniment diari de les nostres escoles, als nostres mitjans de comunicació, a la nostra cultura popular, a les nostres universitats, i sobre al nostres els carrers han acabat reduint la nostra identitat biosimbòlica i el nostre orgull ètnic a la seva mínima expressió.
Els banquers jueus han inundat Europa amb musulmans i Amèrica amb escombraries del tercer món . . . L'exili com a càstig per als que predicen la sedició s'hauria de restablir dins el marc legal d'Occident . . . El judaisme, el cristianisme i l'islam són cultes a la mort originats a l'Orient Mitjà i totalment aliens a Europa i als seus pobles.
De vegades ens preguntem per què l'esquerra europea es porta tan bé amb els musulmans. Per què un moviment sovint obertament antireligiós es posa del costat d'una religiositat ferotge que sembla oposar-se a gairebé tot allò que l'esquerra sempre ha pretès defensar? Part de l'explicació rau en el fet que l'islam i el marxisme tenen una arrel ideològica comuna: el judaisme.
Don Rumsfeld tenia raó quan va dir: "Europa s'ha desplaçat en el seu eix", va ser el bàndol equivocat que va guanyar la Segona Guerra Mundial, i es fa més clar cada dia . . . Què ha fet l'OTAN per defensar Europa? Absolutament res . . . Els meus enemics no són a Moscou, Damasc, Teheran, Riad o algun eteri bogeyman teutónic, els meus enemics són a Washington, Brusselles i Tel Aviv. Els nacionalsocialistes van venir a alliberar París, nosaltres no el vam destruir.
I was going to comment about 2 but you beat me to it.
My own suggestion, if at least some countries were to think of this as enough of a problem to warrant action, would be for them to invest in R&D about human cloning, artificial wombs, and enough social and psychological research to be able to help tube-grown humans to be risen in what would amount to orphanage conditions but without developing the psychological issues than tend to develop when being orphanage-risen.
This way new people could be mass produced to achieve any level of balance thought appropriate.
That said, the real question is: what's worse?
a) Declining scientific and technological prowess due to a voluntary decline in human population and trying to somehow fix the economic issues roughly at the rate the population is declining;
b) Declining scientific and technological prowess due to a humanity that kept growing exponentially hitting top-everything and then sharply declining very quickly due to the ensuing famines, thirsts, and wars for resources, nuclear wars included?
Going for one accelerates the other. I fail to see a scenario in which we get no scientific and technological decline at all, be it a slow or a very fast decline.
Oh, and regarding nuclear power, if I remember right the stochastic prediction, combining exponential population growth and exponential energy consumption growth, is in 400 years it'd cook Earth due to all the heat pumped into the atmosphere, making life impossible. So it buys us time, but not a solution. Absent sci-fi technologies that may never materialize, with nuclear power a scenario like "b" still happens, just a little bit later.
I agree that an "artificial" population grown in synthetic wombs and raised as wards of the state until adulthood seems like an underappreciated possibility. Maybe first in Japan? Early childcare and education will be important to figure out, but this is where LLMs might really come into play as they could substitute for a lot of the purely social and linguistic interaction children need today from parents early in their development.
“Oh how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.” — Martin Luther
In 400 years we'll be spread across the Earth, Moon, L4 and L5, Mars, and, most importantly, the Earth-Mars asteroid belt; plenty to room to dissipate heat.
Nuclear power plant-driven mass launchers on equatorial mountains throwing us and our stuff into orbit - halfway to anywhere in the solar system, out of the gravity well, you know? How speculative is that? ;-)
This is similar to my point below about future social mores.
If we're all still biological by that point, we'd need perfectly self-sustainable space habitats, each of which might cost trillions in current dollars and not get significantly cheaper in future as we go about reaching peak-oil, peak-rare earths, peak-uranium, peak-this, peak-that, etc.
Atop that, there are questions about how well the human body can live in space, even with centrifugal gravity, meaning we may need to terraform floating chunks of rock in the correct mass range for long term survival, a process that takes much longer than a few centuries.
And then politics might end up opposed to using that much of the available energy for making rockets and rocket fuel, for whatever reasons, of which we can imagine several. E.g., "Why spend money in useless space habitats when there are still hungry people down here!?!?", to name but one.
I hope so, but I have serious doubts it'll be allowed. Consider the extensive social backlash we're witnessing about transgender people, which we might consider a very light form of transhumanism; imagine that backlash scaling up a thousandfold for full on transhumanism; and then a thousandfold over that for uploading.
It's perfectly possible global society will move in a direction that will make uploads impossible. That might include all forms of legal impediments that could range from considering uploading a form of suicide and uploaded minds as unpersons with no legal rights, all the way to extreme religious opposition demanding upload server farms be burned down as it's a sacrilege against the sanctity of the human form or whatever.
But even if that doesn't happen, there's no guarantee minds can be uploaded to begin with. The hypothetic arguments for the feasibility of uploading sound plausible, but then, lots of arguments do, and still prove false.
I don't think the right outside some very small corners of podcasting universe is concerned about fertility. Maybe it'll catch on as an issue, but it's not anywhere near where global warming is to the left. Since it hasn't been politicized it's unclear we can't actually solve it. There's no ozone hole, right?
Hard disagree. The nature of the problem is that it cascades. So marginal changes, if we're successful, can build into larger changes. This cascade is why fertility keeps dropping. Fertility is not something that stays stable, it's super affected by environment, and perception of the environment. IE making kids 10% more common starts a self propelling narrative and cultural changes, that builds until some countervailing force stops or reverses it. RIght now secular society has no countervailing forces, and the perception that the point of life is pleasure, and that kids don't bring pleasure. Make life harder for people without kids and more people will have them.
That's my read also. It seems like a niche issue among a certain libertarian set, but not a real issue for the general right. I've actually asked a few of my right wing friends and not one of them has heard of fertility as an issue. It's never listed as a top priority in polls.
That's not a position on whether it is or isn't a big issue, just an observation on what I see in the marketplace of ideas.
I wonder if there is a reliable way to create that kind of "safe space" for any specific community. I think it's very hard, generally. Amish seem to be quite unique in this regard.
Maybe, having a religion and long enough history helps them. Scientology also uses religion as a mean to be left alone by governments.
However, if we'll see more of that kind of cults expanding, being left alone by government will not be enough. More aggressive cults (e.g. Scientology) will consume peaceful cults.
Could gametogenesis and embryo selection derived from the former technique kind of attenuate the catastrophic scenario? We could have babies with way higher IQs, way more productive adults, more scientists, etc. Even with a smaller population because its quality would be substantially higher.
A world dominated by Amish or other tech-rejecting society is quite literally worse than "stagnating" big economy with shrinking population. They will never outcompete precisely due to their insularity and tech-rejection, it will be a 300/Cortez scenario - small but technologically advanced group will beat big but technologically retarded one 10 times out of 10. (Christians are not a good counterexample - they were coopted, and most of their original communist/commune-ist ideals literally destroyed from with in.)
I didn't mean retarded in the sense of their intelligence. But no, "evolving to extinction" is a thing, including via conscious choices. Druids didn't select to write down their rites when the existence of their rites depended on it, and now we only have scattered remarks about them. There is no reason to believe that at some point they will magically understand that tech helps.
This is pretty distasteful, but the big gain may literally be their young people. I could see a Eloi/Morlock relationship where low fertility, technologically advanced, warlike groups raid high fertility, pastoral, pacifist groups for their young people to fill their gap (most of the high fertility groups today are also pacifist)
Slave labor isn't that valuable in a post-industrial economy. On the other hand, Robin's theory is that economies will regress as their populations sink. Even so, if they mostly consist of senior citizens I don't think they'll be doing much raiding for unskilled labor.
I also wouldn’t think it would be slave labor, more like “forced re-education” ☹️. While currently the numbers of secular, less fertile cultures have swelled by converting religious people by mere contact, in future it may become more forceful.
This seems unnecessary, after all the extent to which these groups are abnormal will radically decrease thanks to the relative fertility issues. The Mormons aren't the Amish and I'd just expect groups like them to become larger *and* for the fertility inside those groups to increase as well thanks to selection for higher fertility subgroups.
Also, I think you underestimate the effects of genuine evolutionary selection. Until recently there was very little pressure to select for genes that favored having a large family as opposed to ones that merely selected for high sexual interest. This has only changed extremely recently and it places a really strong selective pressure on those genes.
As long as worldwide culture remains as it is - not hostile to but merely not encouraging of large families - I'd expect these two factors to be more than sufficient in the long term.
Interesting, but they are still doing double the rate of America on average and in the long term the subgroups with more fertility will come to dominate if this becomes a serious issue. It still shows that you can manage significant deviation without going all the way to Amish.
Right, but that is in a world where you don't have strong selection for fertility. In a world where this is actually a problem that means that the contribution to each generation from the parts that have low birth rates rapidly starts to dwindle meaning the parts of the population that have the social (or genetic) predispositions to higher fertility end up making up larger and larger proportions of both the subgroups and the population as a whole.
I have discussed this online and in person with Robin Hanson, who is one of the most brilliant and future-oriented people I will ever meet.
I think Hanson is right about a great deal of his analysis. Where we part ways is his view of the inevitability of decline and how late in the game we are.
I think it is far earlier in the game than he does. In short, we aren't even yet trying to solve this problem -- not in America anyway, which is the country that matters most for global culture. No political leader in the West ever even mentions it. Some Eastern European and East Asian leaders are worried, but their cultures are completely enveloped in American culture, so they can't develop a separate pro-natalist culture when America is not yet concerned at all.
I have a lot of related points to make:
(1) To compare this to global warming is to show how early in the game it really is. Political leaders in America have uttered the words 'global warming' probably tens of millions of times. I can count on zero hands the number of times political leaders in America have fretted about the low fertility crisis.
(2) Another way to gauge the level of official concern, think about the scope of the military budget as compared to the scope of funds to address low fertility. In America, the ratio is perhaps 1000 to 1 in favor of the military, even though national greatness surely depends much more on fertility in the long run.
(3) We **can** have a boost to fertility that is broad based, across all parts of society. That is what the Baby Boom was. It was a cultural shift worldwide that saw birth rates soar from below replacement across Europe and America to far above replacement all over the world. (In the 1930s, replacement fertility was above 2.1 due to higher child mortality).
Here is a great thread on the cultural shift that gave us the Baby Boom.
(4) Comparisons to the ancient world are somewhat inapt. Ancient Rome needed a TFR of 6 births per woman just to reach replacement fertility because infant mortality was so high. That is a lot to ask! We would only need to reach the low 2's, a much easier bar.
(5) The potential for having children is very high. Women who want to have a bunch of children and start in their twenties can have ten or more surviving into adulthood pretty straightforwardly. Almost nobody even thinks like that these days. Rose Kennedy and Queen Victoria each were upper-elites who had nine children at a time when having children was en vogue in their countries. It just isn't the fashion at this moment.
I am in full agreement with Robin Hanson on how dire this problem is. Most people don't realize we are facing near-certain economic declines a-la Japan due to demographic shortfalls already baked in. (There is a 25-year lag from birth to productive citizen so low fertility now is guaranteed to give us big problems down the pike.) It has the potential to well-and-truly collapse civilization. But where I part company with Dr. Hanson is in the inevitability of it. I think most people only even learned this was a problem within the last two or three years. If people just deeply internalize that they **should** have more kids, that mental shift alone might raise fertility rates enough to solve the problem. Of all the developed nations, only in Israel is the public broadly afraid of the consequences of not having enough children and they have responded rationally.
MoreBirths on Twitter/X is a great follow to learn about ways we can turn this around whenever we get serious about it. So far, we aren't remotely serious about it.
Here is good thread on possible solutions. A lot of it is straightforward, but almost nobody is comprehensively thinking about how to solve this yet.
I feel like this issue would benefit from a good mathematical model. Assume that there is some pressure towards having the same number of children as your friends do and that society is made up of a range of communities from the relatively insular to some mainstream pool (ie affecting what fraction of your friends you choose from within that group).
That model explains why the more insular a group is the easier it is to have a highly divergent birth rate. But I also suspect that model will also not allow much long term depression of birth rates except in the most homogeneous cultures because once you run into issues you quickly have a correcting force that actually pushes up the birth rates of both subgroups and the population at large.
It wouldn't be hard to code this up and have some knobs that adjust the rate at which people leave subcultures to see where it runs into long term fertility issues but I expect it will take quite a high degree of homogeneity to allow for more than a short term decrease or a very very large rate at which people leave the subgroup.
I'll make the point more explicitly. I don't think it's very helpful to just vaguely eyeball the problem and try to extrapolate. If you want to make a case here I think you need to use a model.
I doubt an appropriate model which took into account the way social pressure tends to work (ppl feel pressure to have similar family sizes to their friends) would support a long term concern outside of extremely homogeneous societies.
Most folks i know worry about price of food, energy, domestic insurance, and other vitals like taxes. Stuff right here in front of your nose. Shiny stuff like climate change or fertility are far away. They dont care. They care about today and next week. They worry about money. They worry about crap healthcare or education. Fertility, what about emptying my bins or getting post more than twice a week. Lala land versus cold hard reality of those living week to week.
Obesity rates kept heading up for years as food remained abundant, and the only reason that might start changing is newer medicines that reduce appetite rather than people not being able to afford food.
Suggest obesity is more down to poor lifeztyle choices and food ind producing uber processed salt laden sugar filled slop at cheap prices. Google Professor Tim Spector from KCLondon and look at work his team do. Id also add lack physical exercise too.
There’s a difference between being able to afford enough calories (the government could subsidize corn enough that you get sufficient calories from the high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks for near free and does in the USA) and being able to afford a healthy diet. Obesity is about as much a sign that food is too cheap as smog-filled air is that energy is too cheap.
My wife studied dietetics and public health and worked for WIC: I guarantee there basically no mom’s prefer for their children to eat junk food, it’s simply most affordable and the most convenient since they often work a lot of hours.
I do detect some forced tech aculteration (aculteration should be something that forms naturally, and not tech forced by the way) here, and also by example of the amish who never did no one any harm by being themselves, a almost relentlessness for their culture? To be cultural diverse is exactly what makes it beautiful and what makes us belong in a certain group (smaller than the plastic tech group for sure, but never the less) with most often (christian) religious undertones.
Respecting the autonomy and values of future overlords while finding ways to present information and technology that align with our goals is a delicate balance.
Fertility decline is what people on the right cry most about? That's not my impression unless you mean things like abortion and immigration can be lumped together as really being about fertility, but that seems like a stretch.
This post is so far removed from reality that it is difficult to know for sure that it isn't satire.
In 1355, the Ming emperor decided that cotton was a strategic good, and he instructed the people in a particular region to grow it. So they did.
In 1959, a different Chinese government decided that backyard steel furnaces were a strategic necessity, and he instructed the people to build them. So they did.
If a Chinese government five or twenty-five years from now decides that falling population poses a strategic threat, it will simply instruct the Chinese people to have more babies. And they will.
I think we need to take into account naturally occurring negative reinforcement feedback loops. For instance, you write that “Amish-like insular fertile subcultures are known for living in small rural pacifist egalitarian fundamentalist-religious isolated communities”.
But insular rural subcultures don’t scale very well. You can’t support a population of 300 million amish in the US if they’re all living in small tech rural communities. So that means either fertility will decline due to carrying capacity limits (e.g. lack of affordable living space), or the Amish will have to adapt to urban living, which puts them into contact with mainstream culture, which inevitably introduces fertility stagnation...
So it seems like there are strong negative reinforcements which will prevent such subcultures from scaling up and dominating the world demographics. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on this.
It isn't urban living that puts Amish at risk but urban living mixing with non-Amish. So as they become a larger % of population they can start to make their own smaller then bigger towns.
Similar, the reason they are pacifists is less that they object to war and more that they object to having their impressionable young men mixing up with others in war training. But when they are large % of population they can make their own units of soldiers who train together.
Judeo-messianism has been spreading its poisonous message among us for nearly two thousand years. Democratic and communist universalisms are more recent, but they have only reinforced the old Jewish narrative. They are the same ideals.
The transnational, transracial, transsexual, transcultural ideals that these ideologies preach to us (beyond peoples, races, cultures) and which are the daily sustenance of our schools, in our media, in our popular culture, at our universities, and on our streets, have ended up reducing our biosymbolic identity and ethnic pride to their minimal expression.
Jewish bankers flooded Europe with Muslims and America with third-world garbage. Exile as punishment for those who preach sedition should be reinstated within the legal framework of the West . . . Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are death cults originating in the Middle East and totally alien to Europe and its peoples.
One sometimes wonders why the European left gets along so well with Muslims. Why does an often overtly anti-religious movement take the side of a fierce religiosity that seems to oppose almost everything the left has always claimed to stand for? Part of the explanation lies in the fact that Islam and Marxism have a common ideological root: Judaism.
No country is leading its own course in this invasion because it is a UN-led political agenda driven by the Jews and their puppets (politicians). Most people just don't know or understand that this is a political agenda. However, some manage to understand that politicians are deliberately working to import Muslims and replace people, but that's it, they are like a computer that can't work because the program doesn't allow it.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire
Why do they have to foemrm war groups. I think itnis more that they don't want their young.ones to be contaminated by modern ways en modern living. Although they do give the young ones a chance to see for themselves what is out there
So religionless comparing to what then? Do you want the pagans back then, because that is what europe was in the dark ages.
Ultra-orthodox Jews are able to maintain high fertility in urban environments.
They do, but are remarkably unique in that. I think of things like the “Quiverfull” Christian movement, which has been trying the “out-breed everyone else to take over the world” strategy for a few decades. They DO have lots of children but have a lot of difficulty keeping the children in the faith.
The attrition rate among the ultra-Orthodox is ~30%, which means that around 1 in 3 of them stop being ultra-Orthodox. In Israel they generally become Modern Orthodox, not secular, and maintain a very high fertility rate.
“Oh how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.” — Martin Luther
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/oh-how-fond-they-are-of-the-book
__________________________________________________________________________________________
JESUS NEEDS MORE BABIES FOR HIS WAR MACHINE . . .
We Can't Afford Healthcare for American Children Because We Keep Bombing Everyone Else's for the Love of Jesus and Israel . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/we-cant-afford-healthcare-for-american
__________________________________________________________________________________________
“Oh how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.” — Martin Luther
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/oh-how-fond-they-are-of-the-book
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Pardonne mon français . . . Le judéo-messianisme répand parmi nous son message empoisonné depuis près de deux mille ans. Les universalismes démocratique et communiste sont plus récents, mais ils n’ont fait que renforcer le vieux récit juif . . . Ce sont les mêmes idéaux . . . Les idéaux transnationaux, transraciaux, transsexuels, transculturels que ces idéologies nous prêchent (au-delà des peuples, des races, des cultures) et qui sont le subsistance quotidienne de nos écoles, dans nos médias, dans notre culture populaire, à nos universités, et sur nos rues, ont fini par réduire notre identité biosymbolique et notre fierté ethnique à leur expression minimale.
Les banquiers juifs ont inondé l’Europe de musulmans et l’Amérique de déchets du tiers-monde . . . L'exil comme punition pour ceux qui prêchent la sédition devrait être rétabli dans le cadre juridique de l'Occident . . . Le judaïsme, le christianisme, et l’islam sont des cultes de mort originaires du Moyen-Orient et totalement étrangers à l’Europe et à ses peuples.
On se demande parfois pourquoi la gauche européenne s’entend si bien avec les musulmans. Pourquoi un mouvement souvent ouvertement antireligieux prend-il le parti d’une religiosité farouche qui semble s’opposer à presque tout ce que la gauche a toujours prétendu défendre ? Une partie de l’explication réside dans le fait que l’Islam et le marxisme ont une racine idéologique commune : le judaïsme.
Aucun pays ne mène sa propre course dans cette invasion parce qu’il s’agit d’un programme politique dirigé par l’ONU et piloté par les Juifs et leurs marionnettes (les politiciens). La plupart des gens ne savent tout simplement pas ou ne comprennent pas qu’il s’agit d’un programme politique. Cependant, certains parviennent à comprendre que les politiciens travaillent délibérément à importer des musulmans et à remplacer des gens, mais c'est tout, ils sont comme un ordinateur qui ne peut pas fonctionner parce que le programme ne le permet pas.
Don Rumsfeld avait raison lorsqu’il disait : «L’Europe s’est décalé sur son axe», c’est le mauvais côté qui a gagné la Seconde Guerre mondiale, et cela devient chaque jour plus clair . . . Qu’a fait l’OTAN pour défendre l’Europe? Absolument rien . . . Mes ennemis ne sont pas à Moscou, à Damas, à Téhéran, à Riyad ou dans quelque croque-mitaine teutonique éthéré, mes ennemis sont à Washington, Bruxelles et Tel Aviv . . . Nous socialistes nationaux est venu à libéré Paris, nous ne l'avons pas détruit.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire
Seconded.
Besides there are evidence that Amish or Haredim is not that insular. Economic crisis affect them and reduce fertility. Declining US economy would also push Amish to decline.
Mormonism is an excellent case study for this point. A few fundamentalist sects still exists and the average Mormon still has higher fertility than gentiles as a whole, but mainstream Mormons are people like Mitt Romney and not particular different than the average American vs in Brigham Young's day when he had dozens of descendents.
Estic obligat a escriure en diversos idiomes perquè: 1. A la majoria de la gent dels Estats Units se'ls ha rentat el cervell perquè cregui que els jueus són la seva salvació; i 2., el seu anglès és una merda i no poden romandre en silenci el temps suficient per escoltar o veure el que òbviament passa al seu voltant . . . El judeomessianisme fa gairebé dos mil anys que escampa entre nosaltres el seu missatge verinós. Els universalismes democràtics i comunistes són més recents, però només han reforçat la vella narrativa jueva. Són els mateixos ideals.
Els ideals transnacionals, transracials, transsexuals, transculturals que aquestes ideologies ens prediquen (més enllà dels pobles, races, cultures) i que són el sosteniment diari de les nostres escoles, als nostres mitjans de comunicació, a la nostra cultura popular, a les nostres universitats, i sobre al nostres els carrers han acabat reduint la nostra identitat biosimbòlica i el nostre orgull ètnic a la seva mínima expressió.
Els banquers jueus han inundat Europa amb musulmans i Amèrica amb escombraries del tercer món . . . L'exili com a càstig per als que predicen la sedició s'hauria de restablir dins el marc legal d'Occident . . . El judaisme, el cristianisme i l'islam són cultes a la mort originats a l'Orient Mitjà i totalment aliens a Europa i als seus pobles.
De vegades ens preguntem per què l'esquerra europea es porta tan bé amb els musulmans. Per què un moviment sovint obertament antireligiós es posa del costat d'una religiositat ferotge que sembla oposar-se a gairebé tot allò que l'esquerra sempre ha pretès defensar? Part de l'explicació rau en el fet que l'islam i el marxisme tenen una arrel ideològica comuna: el judaisme.
Don Rumsfeld tenia raó quan va dir: "Europa s'ha desplaçat en el seu eix", va ser el bàndol equivocat que va guanyar la Segona Guerra Mundial, i es fa més clar cada dia . . . Què ha fet l'OTAN per defensar Europa? Absolutament res . . . Els meus enemics no són a Moscou, Damasc, Teheran, Riad o algun eteri bogeyman teutónic, els meus enemics són a Washington, Brusselles i Tel Aviv. Els nacionalsocialistes van venir a alliberar París, nosaltres no el vam destruir.
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/pardonne-mon-francais-va-te-faire
1: Nuclear.
2: Create technology to reduce the cost of motherhood, e.g. uterine replicators, robonannies, LLM tutors...
I was going to comment about 2 but you beat me to it.
My own suggestion, if at least some countries were to think of this as enough of a problem to warrant action, would be for them to invest in R&D about human cloning, artificial wombs, and enough social and psychological research to be able to help tube-grown humans to be risen in what would amount to orphanage conditions but without developing the psychological issues than tend to develop when being orphanage-risen.
This way new people could be mass produced to achieve any level of balance thought appropriate.
That said, the real question is: what's worse?
a) Declining scientific and technological prowess due to a voluntary decline in human population and trying to somehow fix the economic issues roughly at the rate the population is declining;
b) Declining scientific and technological prowess due to a humanity that kept growing exponentially hitting top-everything and then sharply declining very quickly due to the ensuing famines, thirsts, and wars for resources, nuclear wars included?
Going for one accelerates the other. I fail to see a scenario in which we get no scientific and technological decline at all, be it a slow or a very fast decline.
Oh, and regarding nuclear power, if I remember right the stochastic prediction, combining exponential population growth and exponential energy consumption growth, is in 400 years it'd cook Earth due to all the heat pumped into the atmosphere, making life impossible. So it buys us time, but not a solution. Absent sci-fi technologies that may never materialize, with nuclear power a scenario like "b" still happens, just a little bit later.
I agree that an "artificial" population grown in synthetic wombs and raised as wards of the state until adulthood seems like an underappreciated possibility. Maybe first in Japan? Early childcare and education will be important to figure out, but this is where LLMs might really come into play as they could substitute for a lot of the purely social and linguistic interaction children need today from parents early in their development.
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JESUS NEEDS MORE BABIES FOR HIS WAR MACHINE . . .
We Can't Afford Healthcare for American Children Because We Keep Bombing Everyone Else's for the Love of Jesus and Israel . . .
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/we-cant-afford-healthcare-for-american
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“Oh how fond they are of the book of Esther, which is so beautifully attuned to their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous yearning and hope.” — Martin Luther
https://cwspangle.substack.com/p/oh-how-fond-they-are-of-the-book
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In 400 years we'll be spread across the Earth, Moon, L4 and L5, Mars, and, most importantly, the Earth-Mars asteroid belt; plenty to room to dissipate heat.
That's very speculative. What if it doesn't happen?
It's good to hope for the best, but it's also prudent to prepare for the worst.
Nuclear power plant-driven mass launchers on equatorial mountains throwing us and our stuff into orbit - halfway to anywhere in the solar system, out of the gravity well, you know? How speculative is that? ;-)
This is similar to my point below about future social mores.
If we're all still biological by that point, we'd need perfectly self-sustainable space habitats, each of which might cost trillions in current dollars and not get significantly cheaper in future as we go about reaching peak-oil, peak-rare earths, peak-uranium, peak-this, peak-that, etc.
Atop that, there are questions about how well the human body can live in space, even with centrifugal gravity, meaning we may need to terraform floating chunks of rock in the correct mass range for long term survival, a process that takes much longer than a few centuries.
And then politics might end up opposed to using that much of the available energy for making rockets and rocket fuel, for whatever reasons, of which we can imagine several. E.g., "Why spend money in useless space habitats when there are still hungry people down here!?!?", to name but one.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220629164900/http://winwenger.com/part59.htm
In 400 years we'll be mostly post-biological one way or another - e.g. upload or LLM. How's that for speculative? :D
I hope so, but I have serious doubts it'll be allowed. Consider the extensive social backlash we're witnessing about transgender people, which we might consider a very light form of transhumanism; imagine that backlash scaling up a thousandfold for full on transhumanism; and then a thousandfold over that for uploading.
It's perfectly possible global society will move in a direction that will make uploads impossible. That might include all forms of legal impediments that could range from considering uploading a form of suicide and uploaded minds as unpersons with no legal rights, all the way to extreme religious opposition demanding upload server farms be burned down as it's a sacrilege against the sanctity of the human form or whatever.
But even if that doesn't happen, there's no guarantee minds can be uploaded to begin with. The hypothetic arguments for the feasibility of uploading sound plausible, but then, lots of arguments do, and still prove false.
I recommend optimism. Caplan argues that trans is, ah, winning, for example: https://betonit.substack.com/p/lgbt-explosion
1. Not just nuclear, see the solar costs _and_ battery costs (the latter help with solar's intermittence, i.e. "what if it's cloudy") plummeting.
But generally, agree on both.
I don't think the right outside some very small corners of podcasting universe is concerned about fertility. Maybe it'll catch on as an issue, but it's not anywhere near where global warming is to the left. Since it hasn't been politicized it's unclear we can't actually solve it. There's no ozone hole, right?
The changes needed to raise fertility are VASTLY more than required to prevent ozone hole.
Hard disagree. The nature of the problem is that it cascades. So marginal changes, if we're successful, can build into larger changes. This cascade is why fertility keeps dropping. Fertility is not something that stays stable, it's super affected by environment, and perception of the environment. IE making kids 10% more common starts a self propelling narrative and cultural changes, that builds until some countervailing force stops or reverses it. RIght now secular society has no countervailing forces, and the perception that the point of life is pleasure, and that kids don't bring pleasure. Make life harder for people without kids and more people will have them.
That's my read also. It seems like a niche issue among a certain libertarian set, but not a real issue for the general right. I've actually asked a few of my right wing friends and not one of them has heard of fertility as an issue. It's never listed as a top priority in polls.
That's not a position on whether it is or isn't a big issue, just an observation on what I see in the marketplace of ideas.
Amish live under protection of US government. They won't survive without it if they don't change their culture.
I wonder if there is a reliable way to create that kind of "safe space" for any specific community. I think it's very hard, generally. Amish seem to be quite unique in this regard.
Maybe, having a religion and long enough history helps them. Scientology also uses religion as a mean to be left alone by governments.
However, if we'll see more of that kind of cults expanding, being left alone by government will not be enough. More aggressive cults (e.g. Scientology) will consume peaceful cults.
Could gametogenesis and embryo selection derived from the former technique kind of attenuate the catastrophic scenario? We could have babies with way higher IQs, way more productive adults, more scientists, etc. Even with a smaller population because its quality would be substantially higher.
Particularly in societies like Denmark or Israel, where there is a lot of IVF already, high wealth, and high/stable fertility?
A world dominated by Amish or other tech-rejecting society is quite literally worse than "stagnating" big economy with shrinking population. They will never outcompete precisely due to their insularity and tech-rejection, it will be a 300/Cortez scenario - small but technologically advanced group will beat big but technologically retarded one 10 times out of 10. (Christians are not a good counterexample - they were coopted, and most of their original communist/commune-ist ideals literally destroyed from with in.)
The Amish aren't retarded, just selective. They will select differently when their existence depends on it.
I didn't mean retarded in the sense of their intelligence. But no, "evolving to extinction" is a thing, including via conscious choices. Druids didn't select to write down their rites when the existence of their rites depended on it, and now we only have scattered remarks about them. There is no reason to believe that at some point they will magically understand that tech helps.
Who is going to be the conquistador conquering the pacifist Amish? What would be the big gain?
I mean, what's the big gain for China and Uighurs or Russia and Ukrainians? Anyone who's ideologically sufficiently pissed-off with them.
This is pretty distasteful, but the big gain may literally be their young people. I could see a Eloi/Morlock relationship where low fertility, technologically advanced, warlike groups raid high fertility, pastoral, pacifist groups for their young people to fill their gap (most of the high fertility groups today are also pacifist)
That's called "public schools."
Slave labor isn't that valuable in a post-industrial economy. On the other hand, Robin's theory is that economies will regress as their populations sink. Even so, if they mostly consist of senior citizens I don't think they'll be doing much raiding for unskilled labor.
I also wouldn’t think it would be slave labor, more like “forced re-education” ☹️. While currently the numbers of secular, less fertile cultures have swelled by converting religious people by mere contact, in future it may become more forceful.
This seems unnecessary, after all the extent to which these groups are abnormal will radically decrease thanks to the relative fertility issues. The Mormons aren't the Amish and I'd just expect groups like them to become larger *and* for the fertility inside those groups to increase as well thanks to selection for higher fertility subgroups.
Also, I think you underestimate the effects of genuine evolutionary selection. Until recently there was very little pressure to select for genes that favored having a large family as opposed to ones that merely selected for high sexual interest. This has only changed extremely recently and it places a really strong selective pressure on those genes.
As long as worldwide culture remains as it is - not hostile to but merely not encouraging of large families - I'd expect these two factors to be more than sufficient in the long term.
Mormon fertility has dropped to roughly the replacement rate.
Interesting, but they are still doing double the rate of America on average and in the long term the subgroups with more fertility will come to dominate if this becomes a serious issue. It still shows that you can manage significant deviation without going all the way to Amish.
If the trajectory for Mormons continues to head downward, they will go below replacement and someone else will dominate.
Maybe, I don't particularly care if it's the Mormons, my only point is that it need not be super insular farming communities like the Amish.
The problem is that only super-insular communities (whether rural Amish or urban ultra-Orthodox) seem to be able to keep their fertility up.
Right, but that is in a world where you don't have strong selection for fertility. In a world where this is actually a problem that means that the contribution to each generation from the parts that have low birth rates rapidly starts to dwindle meaning the parts of the population that have the social (or genetic) predispositions to higher fertility end up making up larger and larger proportions of both the subgroups and the population as a whole.
Wrote this on MR, cross-posting it here:
I have discussed this online and in person with Robin Hanson, who is one of the most brilliant and future-oriented people I will ever meet.
I think Hanson is right about a great deal of his analysis. Where we part ways is his view of the inevitability of decline and how late in the game we are.
I think it is far earlier in the game than he does. In short, we aren't even yet trying to solve this problem -- not in America anyway, which is the country that matters most for global culture. No political leader in the West ever even mentions it. Some Eastern European and East Asian leaders are worried, but their cultures are completely enveloped in American culture, so they can't develop a separate pro-natalist culture when America is not yet concerned at all.
I have a lot of related points to make:
(1) To compare this to global warming is to show how early in the game it really is. Political leaders in America have uttered the words 'global warming' probably tens of millions of times. I can count on zero hands the number of times political leaders in America have fretted about the low fertility crisis.
(2) Another way to gauge the level of official concern, think about the scope of the military budget as compared to the scope of funds to address low fertility. In America, the ratio is perhaps 1000 to 1 in favor of the military, even though national greatness surely depends much more on fertility in the long run.
(3) We **can** have a boost to fertility that is broad based, across all parts of society. That is what the Baby Boom was. It was a cultural shift worldwide that saw birth rates soar from below replacement across Europe and America to far above replacement all over the world. (In the 1930s, replacement fertility was above 2.1 due to higher child mortality).
Here is a great thread on the cultural shift that gave us the Baby Boom.
https://twitter.com/MoreBirths/status/1702079006089105592
(4) Comparisons to the ancient world are somewhat inapt. Ancient Rome needed a TFR of 6 births per woman just to reach replacement fertility because infant mortality was so high. That is a lot to ask! We would only need to reach the low 2's, a much easier bar.
(5) The potential for having children is very high. Women who want to have a bunch of children and start in their twenties can have ten or more surviving into adulthood pretty straightforwardly. Almost nobody even thinks like that these days. Rose Kennedy and Queen Victoria each were upper-elites who had nine children at a time when having children was en vogue in their countries. It just isn't the fashion at this moment.
I am in full agreement with Robin Hanson on how dire this problem is. Most people don't realize we are facing near-certain economic declines a-la Japan due to demographic shortfalls already baked in. (There is a 25-year lag from birth to productive citizen so low fertility now is guaranteed to give us big problems down the pike.) It has the potential to well-and-truly collapse civilization. But where I part company with Dr. Hanson is in the inevitability of it. I think most people only even learned this was a problem within the last two or three years. If people just deeply internalize that they **should** have more kids, that mental shift alone might raise fertility rates enough to solve the problem. Of all the developed nations, only in Israel is the public broadly afraid of the consequences of not having enough children and they have responded rationally.
MoreBirths on Twitter/X is a great follow to learn about ways we can turn this around whenever we get serious about it. So far, we aren't remotely serious about it.
Here is good thread on possible solutions. A lot of it is straightforward, but almost nobody is comprehensively thinking about how to solve this yet.
https://twitter.com/MoreBirths/status/1663202168516628481
Meh. Fertility decline is overstated. 8 billion is enough.
I feel like this issue would benefit from a good mathematical model. Assume that there is some pressure towards having the same number of children as your friends do and that society is made up of a range of communities from the relatively insular to some mainstream pool (ie affecting what fraction of your friends you choose from within that group).
That model explains why the more insular a group is the easier it is to have a highly divergent birth rate. But I also suspect that model will also not allow much long term depression of birth rates except in the most homogeneous cultures because once you run into issues you quickly have a correcting force that actually pushes up the birth rates of both subgroups and the population at large.
It wouldn't be hard to code this up and have some knobs that adjust the rate at which people leave subcultures to see where it runs into long term fertility issues but I expect it will take quite a high degree of homogeneity to allow for more than a short term decrease or a very very large rate at which people leave the subgroup.
There are already literatures on fertility and cultural evolution with many math models.
I'll make the point more explicitly. I don't think it's very helpful to just vaguely eyeball the problem and try to extrapolate. If you want to make a case here I think you need to use a model.
I doubt an appropriate model which took into account the way social pressure tends to work (ppl feel pressure to have similar family sizes to their friends) would support a long term concern outside of extremely homogeneous societies.
Most folks i know worry about price of food, energy, domestic insurance, and other vitals like taxes. Stuff right here in front of your nose. Shiny stuff like climate change or fertility are far away. They dont care. They care about today and next week. They worry about money. They worry about crap healthcare or education. Fertility, what about emptying my bins or getting post more than twice a week. Lala land versus cold hard reality of those living week to week.
Folks now can afford a lot more food than previous generations.
Not always no. Some can. Some cant afford food they coyld afford last year.
Obesity rates kept heading up for years as food remained abundant, and the only reason that might start changing is newer medicines that reduce appetite rather than people not being able to afford food.
Suggest obesity is more down to poor lifeztyle choices and food ind producing uber processed salt laden sugar filled slop at cheap prices. Google Professor Tim Spector from KCLondon and look at work his team do. Id also add lack physical exercise too.
There’s a difference between being able to afford enough calories (the government could subsidize corn enough that you get sufficient calories from the high fructose corn syrup in soft drinks for near free and does in the USA) and being able to afford a healthy diet. Obesity is about as much a sign that food is too cheap as smog-filled air is that energy is too cheap.
Healthy food isn't too expensive, people just prefer unhealthy food.
My wife studied dietetics and public health and worked for WIC: I guarantee there basically no mom’s prefer for their children to eat junk food, it’s simply most affordable and the most convenient since they often work a lot of hours.
A libertarian might suggest not subsidizing things that are bad for people e.g. corn, tobacco.
I do detect some forced tech aculteration (aculteration should be something that forms naturally, and not tech forced by the way) here, and also by example of the amish who never did no one any harm by being themselves, a almost relentlessness for their culture? To be cultural diverse is exactly what makes it beautiful and what makes us belong in a certain group (smaller than the plastic tech group for sure, but never the less) with most often (christian) religious undertones.
Respecting the autonomy and values of future overlords while finding ways to present information and technology that align with our goals is a delicate balance.
Spree killing seems like the thing the left and right both like to get worked up about and push opposing ineffectual prescriptions for.
Fertility decline is what people on the right cry most about? That's not my impression unless you mean things like abortion and immigration can be lumped together as really being about fertility, but that seems like a stretch.
This post is so far removed from reality that it is difficult to know for sure that it isn't satire.
In 1355, the Ming emperor decided that cotton was a strategic good, and he instructed the people in a particular region to grow it. So they did.
In 1959, a different Chinese government decided that backyard steel furnaces were a strategic necessity, and he instructed the people to build them. So they did.
If a Chinese government five or twenty-five years from now decides that falling population poses a strategic threat, it will simply instruct the Chinese people to have more babies. And they will.
Because China. End of story.