My wife and I feed wet food to our two cats Ben and Jerry at the same time every day. Ben spends the whole prior hour crying for that food. He seems to be expect that, if not for his lobbying, we’d never feed him. Jerry instead spends a similar time spread out across the prior 24 hours lobbying for our immediate attention. He seems to expect that we wouldn’t feed or house him if he could not induce us to pay enough regular attention to him.
I like this kind of analysis where you examine the interplay of signalling issues with attempts to incentivize certain behaviors. I love the idea of designing clever new mechanisms to more efficiently incentive certain behavior but I think the kind of analysis like you do at the top here of checking to see if it is appropriately signal compatible is critical.
It is interesting that in the fifties, during the baby boom, a man could support a large family on a single salary, and his job security was much higher than anyone’s today. It was not uncommon to start and finish one’s career at the same company. I think the expectation of job insecurity, or experience of a layoff early in one’s career would also drive down fertility, since financial stability is usually a prerequisite for starting a family.
My daughter is a young adult who happens to know Japanese and has visited the country a few times. She was telling me that the phenomenon of the salary-man is mostly a thing of the past, and that most young people can only find temp jobs. Japan has another problem as well: mismatched status expectations to actual jobs. Too many young people get educated, get university degrees and there are fewer jobs for these degree holders than there are lower status jobs. The surplus degree holders do not flock to jobs like construction work, but stay at their parents’, ashamed of their underemployment, not daring to even date, let alone start families. So here you have a paradox of elite overproduction fueling lower fertility.
That elite over production sounds exactly like the US case for the past 40 odd years, having become more similar as time goes on. So not so much a question of job security but a question of not measuring up to expected status making many relegate themselves to failure.
This is exactly why we can't bring back the past for us to progress into the future. Regarding gender roles and traditional values especially as it relates to men, I've found works by Richard V Reeves very helpful.
A reality of modern life may not match with our biological inclinations, but the church managed to enforce monogamy for men and sanction cuckoldry for women. Older men/society in general can help younger men socialise differently to mitigate the lowering in status of traditional gender roles.
We need more studies on men. We need to know more about male social behavior, psychology and biology beyond being the sole provider. Men, among themselves, may have to redefine what it means to be a man which I don't see many people talk about.
We could expand this insecurity theme well beyond job security. Many aspects of our culture feel particularly unsettled now: Politics, climate change, advanced technologies like AI, a growing divide between wealthy and not, gender roles and norms of behavior. Much of this is probably perception (driven by a media with an ever-worsening bad news bias), but it's enough to make some people hesitate to bring children into the world.
The most interesting part to me was the idea that women wait to marry out of fear of admitting personal failure. They see marriage as solidifying their self worth.
I am curious if you have a reason WHY this is particularly bad recently?
I would think that feminism would have the opisit effect-- the more detached ones self worth is from marriage, the lower their standards.
“The book Promises I Can Keep (recommended to me by Caplan) describes how lower class US women now wait longer to marry because of their increased reverence for marriage. They have sex and children with men they do not see as good enough to marry. This is because they see marriage as a declaration of life success, and so wait to marry until they have collected a good enough career, partner, home, etc. To marry without these is to publicly admit to life failure. Such signaling habits plausibly reduce their marriage rates. And as marriage tends to increase fertility, this plausibly cuts fertility. “
Is it gatecrashing this conversation to note that human fertility is currently doing fine (or alarmingly not at all fine for those old people who have seen the world's population triple in just the course of one boomer lifetime)? What seems to be the case globally is that more advanced societies will lose out fertility-wise to those of what used to be called ''the third world '. Anyone got a plan for how to make that a happy prospect?
The ultimate back up plan is that it's pretty much impossible to breed a breeding out of a species.
In two or three generations, the vast majority of people will be the descendants of those who were fertile under current conditions. It will likely be a major shift toward those with a tendency to high religiosity, poor impulse control, or upper, upper middle class success. Those being the three categories of people that are still having large numbers of children.
I like open borders, geolibertarianism, radical markets... the world is not going to go according to my plan, honest. Broadly speaking, regulation is expensive and discourages whatever is being regulated. The cost/benefit tradeoff of regulation probably looks different to regulators and their, ah, victims.
Hmm? Yes but meanwhile the ethnicity-mix of the world's population will have changed out of all recognition. Are you perhaps not rather missing my point here? Without getting too deep into Charles Murray/Steve Sailer territory here, it should not, surely, be outside of the Overton window to note that anywhere that might reasonably be called an advanced modern civilisation has been created by either S.E. Asian or Indo-European majority ethnicities?
I think it's strange how many people in rationalist spheres, who say they are concerned with underpopulation, and wary of signalling and status games etc. Have yet to start a high fertility subculture, it seems sort of trivial for such a group to prevent population collapse and genetic deterioration etc. at minimal cost.
Many rationalist types and such, seem well-suited to resist outside influence. It seems mostly like a failure to coordinate, at least with respects to initially starting such a subculture, the main problem is ensuring its maintenance for many generations. Hard, but I'm surprised no one has seemed to even give it a shot.
The Zvi has kids and is pro-natal, Jakob Falkovich is a proud father of a girl https://putanumonit.com/2022/02/23/artificial-wordcels/ writing about "my kids" in the plural only - and Scott Alexander is trying. Aella is offering her eggs for sale. Not sure about Eliezer Yudkowsky. But the leading disciples/caliphs of rationalism seem pro-kids not just in theory.
Don't know how many kids Zvi and Jacob have but my guess is that its way less than was common even a hundred years ago or so, Aella doesn't plan on having any kids her self, and the eggs she's selling plausibly will only have a marginal effect if any at all, Yudkowsky from what I gather from his recentish podcast appearances is very strongly against having kids or at least if you do have them you should be prepared for them to die in the next couple decades or so, Alexander is probably not going to have lots of kids, and the whole micromarriages thing doesn't seem conducive to high fertility. These caliphs also seem disinterested in promoting their followers to be really pro natalist, at best someone like Scott might write a post on why climate change is a bad excuse to avoid having kids etc.
More broadly I think the mistake rationalists tend to make when talking about low fertility is not realising how puzzling it is, that is for evolutionary reasons you would expect humans to very quickly end up at a equilibrium at the malthusian limit where the number of kids is 8 or so (do to high mortality and nursing times etc.), given how rich we are now, the puzzle isn't why we have 1.4 instead of 2.1 or 3 kids, it's why we don't have easily have well in excess of 8 kids on average. And this is ignoring more high tech solutions such as artificial wombs or inflating the number of twins etc. or skewing the sex ratio.
:) Opportunity costs, mainly. Having any kid will set back a smart woman's life-earnings by 500k easily - the 2nd comes cheaper. As we all know. I am just a modest Catholic with 5 kids (3 mother's). A colleague has 9 - with one wife, but he is Mennonite. His community approves, obviously. As does his wife. (Which is all it ever took for me. - A bag of charcoal+water or a new human - similar at the level of atoms, but I know my preference. ) - For smarter takes, I turn to The Zvi: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-rate-roundup-1 - I appreciate your reading of ACX; Scott also tries to explain why he wants kids - and is honest to admit there is not much moral/rational reason or clear obligation to have any. Let alone test Malthusian limits. I have been there, when we were just 4 billion, now we are 8,059,348,179 or so. I do not feel humanity's value doubled. But you are welcome, sure.
I'm not making any normative claims, only pointing out that the usual framing neglects the fact that evolution for obvious reasons is ultimately trying to select for humans reaching the Malthusian limit, and that when people talk about reasons for underpopulation they shouldn't be treating a fertility rate of 2.1 as the norm, so to speak.
I prefer Hanson's posts on fertility to anything I have seen from Zvi. You have still yet to provide any meaningful evidence in favor of your original claim that "But the leading disciples/caliphs of rationalism seem pro-kids not just in theory." nor address my claims to the contrary, say in the case of Yudkowsky, I think its great that you and the people you know have lots of kids but the claim about rationalist caliphs and such is obviously false, and the claim relevant to my original post that they are trying to start a broader high fertility subculture is even more obviously false.
I think for reasons discussed by Hanson for many years now, the usual Gary Becker/Jacob Mincer opportunity cost story is mostly false, that in reality something along the lines of status drunkenness is a better account. That is consider what in actuality people do with the additional savings (signalling), then consider what set of heuristics evolution would have generated that is responsible for such behavior and would have been adaptive in the context of our EEA.
Seems different to me. EA sounds as religious as can be. AI-doom, too. Not saying they are wrong. Just speaking as a theologian. ;) Eating pork seems anathema (Scott argues beef better than chicken + versus worms). And he wrote on SSC that the community are really people who dig Eliezers writing and get along with each other fine - a least much better than with those hopeless normies: "The rallying flag was the Less Wrong Sequences. Eliezer Yudkowsky started a blog (actually, borrowed Robin Hanson’s) about cognitive biases and how to think through them. Whether or not you agreed with him or found him enlightening loaded heavily on those pre-existing differences, so the people who showed up in the comment section got along and started meeting up with each other. “Do you like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog?” became a useful proxy for all sorts of things, eventually somebody coined the word “rationalist” to refer to people who did, and then you had a group with nice clear boundaries." https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
The incentivizes for diagnosing a problem are very different from those taking action to solve it. Why should they sacrifice any more than anyone else?
I think some non trivial amount of rationalist types wouldn't see allocating resources away from signalling and consumption, and instead towards recruitment as a sacrifice.
There is reason to believe that most parents today pay more attention to their kids than in the past, at least if daycare is counted as farmed-out attention. Either way, I think it is a mistake to lump all types of added attention as over-parenting.
I agree that suggesting too many play dates and not enough unstructured time with other kids has negative impacts is a reasonable claim.
Spending lots of time interacting with an infant or even 18 months old probably isn't over parenting. I'd argue it's hard for a parent to spend too much time interacting (as opposed to hovering) with any age kid.
I'd bet the cases for unstructured kid play instead of play dates (your assertion) and for increase parent interaction (my assertion) are both rather weakly supported by data, science, studies,, etc .
The long term solution is evolution. Those who have inheritable traits that makes them enjoy having even more than 2 kids will have more. Evolution seems slow, but depending on the factors, it can be quite fast: As DINKs, GINKs and DINKWADs get eliminated from the gene-pool by definition, expect much less of them in three generations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DINK
I agree with much of this. I had recommended that high-status (pro natalist) folks talk more about little kids publicly and "pay" moms with attention. Not promoting the abstract idea of mothers who do all the work while the other adults are out building satellites, but specifically helping a current mom. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/08/20/ambitious-parenting/ Specifically, I suggested that Elon Musk tweet out Emily Oster's newsletter every week.
The post was a rant by an exhausted mom of littles. I'm tempted to edit it, but I'll keep it honest by leaving it alone.
I gave specific examples of existing talk that made me happy, and I gave specific suggestions for what I'd like to see next, in the blog post.
Good speech: Elon saying he enjoys being a father, and Freakonomics Guide to Parenting
What would make me happy: Elon tweets out Emily Oster's newsletter, What if Elon (or some other ambitious person with a large platform) retweeted a trick for getting children to try carrots. “Wow, genius technique. Follow this Mom for more…”
How much more specific could I have been about what "talk would make you happy"?
I'm a mom and am just coming out of this stage, so I understand where you are coming from but fervently disagree with you. I recently finished going through my social media and unfollowing all the accounts that discuss baby sleep, potty training, and other young parent issues and replacing them with people who are obsessed with phonics, sight words, and early arithmetic. For three years I rapaciously read all baby and toddler related content I could get my hands on, but wild horses wouldn't make me look at that stuff ever again.
That's interesting. So you would argue that people should learn it when they need it but otherwise free up their minds for other things? Since we have limited cognitive capacity, I can see a point there. I guess the big question would be what gets crowded out by toddler posts. I believe that everyone in society, whether or not they are a parent, could lend some attention to the people doing the hard work of toddler years. It's a form of compensation. One big problem is that family life is largely private, and that could be one reason we see more posts about rockets and less posts about kids breaking lamps.
What helped me was going to church, where they have free childcare and a community that really welcomes children and sees them as real members of the community, not nuisances. We also have a wonderful toddler play area has happy hour two nights a week, where the moms gather and chat over a glass of wine while the kids play.
I'm a bit confused about what your primary complaint is here. Is it?
1) That pro-natalists don't encourage people enough to share their investment as parents with colleagues or at work because we shouldn't be scaring people about how much their parenting will harm a career?
2) That natalists shouldn't be advising parents not to share pictures of kids at work etc bc we should be upfront about the fact that parenting will tradeoff against career goals and not hide from that?
3) Is it the genderification of talk about moms rather than parents somehow pressures women specifically into that role?
Tho given the fact of unequal sharing wouldn't this undermine the intent of raising the relative status as primary caregiver bc men get to have both the work status and get praised as a parent? (We can't usually know about a colleagues parental duty sharing equality at home)
(as a househusband, tho anti-natalist, I'd love more recognition of men who adopt the traditionally female roles but factually it just seems rare).
As a househusband who likes blogs, wouldn't it be neat if Elon Musk was talking about precisely what he did about vegetables when his kids were 5? If Elon Musk was engaging you publicly on the challenges you face? There are lots of ways to help and support and reward parents. My point is a narrow one - give them a piece of the attention economy.
If someone says "So glad other people are doing the parenting so I don't have to think or talk about it!" then that might be intended as an accolade to the parents (statistically, often mothers). But does it inspire a curious young person to remove themselves from the Conversation to go do it for years? It really does take a lot of work. Just avoiding malnutrition and Reactive Attachment Disorder is a huge investment of time. So it isn't all that important whether a parent should take kid to sports practice when they are 8. There is such a thing as too little parenting investment.
Ok, give parents more attention. I get that part, but isn't this piece by Hanson an instance of giving parents more attention? Or do you have something more specific in mind. I'm really not objecting, just a little confused.
As far as giving details about a parent's day, I too often tend to see that devolve into a disagreement about the 'right' way to raise kids. I think it would be good to increase the status of being a parent, but we need to do thst without demanding that parents jump through more hoops about the right activities at the right ages and that's a very tough line to walk in the modern day.
Parenting is very demanding and rewarding but not particularly skill based so I don't think we want to encourage primary caregivers to follow in the model of the momfluncer and largely define their identity and success in terms of what they do for their kids. That just makes potential parents feel that they are failures because they don't plan every minute of a child's day.
"I agree with much of this." I didn't comment to to contradict Hanson. I was providing additional support and examples.
Good point. You wouldn't want people to feel like they were being told what to do. But I think there is a way to do it well.
I don't know if "skill" is what I'd want to emphasize. But there are "techniques". If someone is a full time mom, she has largely forfeited her ability to be successful in the business world, so why deny her the opportunity to be successful as a mom? I think you are raising important points that I hadn't thought of, but I also feel like someone who innovates on parenting should be allowed to get the reward of attention. Plus, if the great techniques get widely shared, then everyone will be more equipped to be good parents when their turn comes. "Oh yeah, I saw how Jenny74894 handled the issue of peas. I'll try it her way first."
To the counter-argument that there are no techniques because it doesn't matter and you can just leave your kid alone in the backyard with a bag of chips for 8 hours... no. Nope. It's a lot of work even to provide a minimal level of care for young children.
I'm 55. When I was a young kid - elementary school - I walked and biked to school and the park - complete with deathtrap steel-and-asphalt playground - and friends' houses, climbed trees, ate peanut butter, drank from hoses... I know, survivorship bias. Current standards - or even higher - might be optimal, but they're certainly higher than past standards.
At what age do you think it's appropriate to allow a child to wander like that? Let's say it's 7th birthday and a mom has two kids three years apart. She has 10 years in which that scenario is not possible and everyone is getting ahead of her in the status race while she watches a toddler.
I think the situation is less dire than it'd be if all those tendencies were independent. I don't think they are.
I think they are (or most are) downstream from population being excessive, and the demand for human labour having cratered since the turn of the XX century.
The implied solution trend is simpler and clearer, but harder to stomach
For the parental investment one, some ideas that might help:
Promote free-range parenting and encourage parents to compete on how independent their children are instead of how much attention they give them.
Reverse changes to laws and guidance so kids can be left alone at earlier ages, play unsupervised earlier etc. (Difficult with current safetyism, but necessary for the above.)
Publicise research that shows parenting has little effect on IQ, personality etc; stop claiming the early years are critical to academic achievement and well-adjustedness.
Reduce competitiveness of the education system. Helping children through the educational gauntlets is one reason for intensive parental investment, so reducing or eliminating these would give a double benefit.
Seems like the best solution is teen pregnancy among the high IQ.
A subculture that encouraged and rewards High IQ people who choose to pair bond and reproduce (2-3 children) at 16-19 who are then left to be raised by the married grandparents (4 of them) while the 20+ yr old parents go on to 4-6 yrs of school and then reproduce again at 30-35 (2-3 children) would go a long way providing society with more children (4-6 per couple) and healthier pregnancies.
Each sanctioned pregnancy of a 140+ IQ 16-19 yr old couple would earn a refundable tax credit of $50k per child/yr up to age 25
When you compare the tax credit cost to healthcare costs for fertility treatments and >38 yr old pregnancies, having kids early look like a bargain
The analysis is solid - but it assumes that things continue as they are. But they won’t. I can’t say how they will change - but they will change; and if the fertility bust continues long enough there will be incentives to reverse it.
I think this post could use some headings. "So far I have listed many ways in which lower fertility allows for better looking signals" This paragraph is a transition to a new section and should be marked as such. Another heading for when that list begins.
Children require sacrifices. People are not used to sacrificing anything, and so they don't have children. In the past, children were at least of possible economic utility, but now they are only a drain.
So combine no sacrificing with no benefit, and you get less kids.
I like this kind of analysis where you examine the interplay of signalling issues with attempts to incentivize certain behaviors. I love the idea of designing clever new mechanisms to more efficiently incentive certain behavior but I think the kind of analysis like you do at the top here of checking to see if it is appropriately signal compatible is critical.
It is interesting that in the fifties, during the baby boom, a man could support a large family on a single salary, and his job security was much higher than anyone’s today. It was not uncommon to start and finish one’s career at the same company. I think the expectation of job insecurity, or experience of a layoff early in one’s career would also drive down fertility, since financial stability is usually a prerequisite for starting a family.
I added the point about job security near where I mention work hours.
What about Japan ?
They seem to me quite big on job security
My daughter is a young adult who happens to know Japanese and has visited the country a few times. She was telling me that the phenomenon of the salary-man is mostly a thing of the past, and that most young people can only find temp jobs. Japan has another problem as well: mismatched status expectations to actual jobs. Too many young people get educated, get university degrees and there are fewer jobs for these degree holders than there are lower status jobs. The surplus degree holders do not flock to jobs like construction work, but stay at their parents’, ashamed of their underemployment, not daring to even date, let alone start families. So here you have a paradox of elite overproduction fueling lower fertility.
That elite over production sounds exactly like the US case for the past 40 odd years, having become more similar as time goes on. So not so much a question of job security but a question of not measuring up to expected status making many relegate themselves to failure.
This is exactly why we can't bring back the past for us to progress into the future. Regarding gender roles and traditional values especially as it relates to men, I've found works by Richard V Reeves very helpful.
A reality of modern life may not match with our biological inclinations, but the church managed to enforce monogamy for men and sanction cuckoldry for women. Older men/society in general can help younger men socialise differently to mitigate the lowering in status of traditional gender roles.
We need more studies on men. We need to know more about male social behavior, psychology and biology beyond being the sole provider. Men, among themselves, may have to redefine what it means to be a man which I don't see many people talk about.
We could expand this insecurity theme well beyond job security. Many aspects of our culture feel particularly unsettled now: Politics, climate change, advanced technologies like AI, a growing divide between wealthy and not, gender roles and norms of behavior. Much of this is probably perception (driven by a media with an ever-worsening bad news bias), but it's enough to make some people hesitate to bring children into the world.
The most interesting part to me was the idea that women wait to marry out of fear of admitting personal failure. They see marriage as solidifying their self worth.
I am curious if you have a reason WHY this is particularly bad recently?
I would think that feminism would have the opisit effect-- the more detached ones self worth is from marriage, the lower their standards.
“The book Promises I Can Keep (recommended to me by Caplan) describes how lower class US women now wait longer to marry because of their increased reverence for marriage. They have sex and children with men they do not see as good enough to marry. This is because they see marriage as a declaration of life success, and so wait to marry until they have collected a good enough career, partner, home, etc. To marry without these is to publicly admit to life failure. Such signaling habits plausibly reduce their marriage rates. And as marriage tends to increase fertility, this plausibly cuts fertility. “
Is it gatecrashing this conversation to note that human fertility is currently doing fine (or alarmingly not at all fine for those old people who have seen the world's population triple in just the course of one boomer lifetime)? What seems to be the case globally is that more advanced societies will lose out fertility-wise to those of what used to be called ''the third world '. Anyone got a plan for how to make that a happy prospect?
The third world is on the same trajectory, just with a time delay. They should also fall below replacement fertility within a half century.
We - at least some of us - might be post-biological in half a century; long-term predictions seem fraught these days.
Might. But shouldn't we have a backup plan?
The ultimate back up plan is that it's pretty much impossible to breed a breeding out of a species.
In two or three generations, the vast majority of people will be the descendants of those who were fertile under current conditions. It will likely be a major shift toward those with a tendency to high religiosity, poor impulse control, or upper, upper middle class success. Those being the three categories of people that are still having large numbers of children.
I like open borders, geolibertarianism, radical markets... the world is not going to go according to my plan, honest. Broadly speaking, regulation is expensive and discourages whatever is being regulated. The cost/benefit tradeoff of regulation probably looks different to regulators and their, ah, victims.
Hmm? Yes but meanwhile the ethnicity-mix of the world's population will have changed out of all recognition. Are you perhaps not rather missing my point here? Without getting too deep into Charles Murray/Steve Sailer territory here, it should not, surely, be outside of the Overton window to note that anywhere that might reasonably be called an advanced modern civilisation has been created by either S.E. Asian or Indo-European majority ethnicities?
I think it's strange how many people in rationalist spheres, who say they are concerned with underpopulation, and wary of signalling and status games etc. Have yet to start a high fertility subculture, it seems sort of trivial for such a group to prevent population collapse and genetic deterioration etc. at minimal cost.
Starting a subculture is hard, especially if it is to resist outside cultural influence.
Many rationalist types and such, seem well-suited to resist outside influence. It seems mostly like a failure to coordinate, at least with respects to initially starting such a subculture, the main problem is ensuring its maintenance for many generations. Hard, but I'm surprised no one has seemed to even give it a shot.
The Zvi has kids and is pro-natal, Jakob Falkovich is a proud father of a girl https://putanumonit.com/2022/02/23/artificial-wordcels/ writing about "my kids" in the plural only - and Scott Alexander is trying. Aella is offering her eggs for sale. Not sure about Eliezer Yudkowsky. But the leading disciples/caliphs of rationalism seem pro-kids not just in theory.
Don't know how many kids Zvi and Jacob have but my guess is that its way less than was common even a hundred years ago or so, Aella doesn't plan on having any kids her self, and the eggs she's selling plausibly will only have a marginal effect if any at all, Yudkowsky from what I gather from his recentish podcast appearances is very strongly against having kids or at least if you do have them you should be prepared for them to die in the next couple decades or so, Alexander is probably not going to have lots of kids, and the whole micromarriages thing doesn't seem conducive to high fertility. These caliphs also seem disinterested in promoting their followers to be really pro natalist, at best someone like Scott might write a post on why climate change is a bad excuse to avoid having kids etc.
More broadly I think the mistake rationalists tend to make when talking about low fertility is not realising how puzzling it is, that is for evolutionary reasons you would expect humans to very quickly end up at a equilibrium at the malthusian limit where the number of kids is 8 or so (do to high mortality and nursing times etc.), given how rich we are now, the puzzle isn't why we have 1.4 instead of 2.1 or 3 kids, it's why we don't have easily have well in excess of 8 kids on average. And this is ignoring more high tech solutions such as artificial wombs or inflating the number of twins etc. or skewing the sex ratio.
:) Opportunity costs, mainly. Having any kid will set back a smart woman's life-earnings by 500k easily - the 2nd comes cheaper. As we all know. I am just a modest Catholic with 5 kids (3 mother's). A colleague has 9 - with one wife, but he is Mennonite. His community approves, obviously. As does his wife. (Which is all it ever took for me. - A bag of charcoal+water or a new human - similar at the level of atoms, but I know my preference. ) - For smarter takes, I turn to The Zvi: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/fertility-rate-roundup-1 - I appreciate your reading of ACX; Scott also tries to explain why he wants kids - and is honest to admit there is not much moral/rational reason or clear obligation to have any. Let alone test Malthusian limits. I have been there, when we were just 4 billion, now we are 8,059,348,179 or so. I do not feel humanity's value doubled. But you are welcome, sure.
I'm not making any normative claims, only pointing out that the usual framing neglects the fact that evolution for obvious reasons is ultimately trying to select for humans reaching the Malthusian limit, and that when people talk about reasons for underpopulation they shouldn't be treating a fertility rate of 2.1 as the norm, so to speak.
I prefer Hanson's posts on fertility to anything I have seen from Zvi. You have still yet to provide any meaningful evidence in favor of your original claim that "But the leading disciples/caliphs of rationalism seem pro-kids not just in theory." nor address my claims to the contrary, say in the case of Yudkowsky, I think its great that you and the people you know have lots of kids but the claim about rationalist caliphs and such is obviously false, and the claim relevant to my original post that they are trying to start a broader high fertility subculture is even more obviously false.
I think for reasons discussed by Hanson for many years now, the usual Gary Becker/Jacob Mincer opportunity cost story is mostly false, that in reality something along the lines of status drunkenness is a better account. That is consider what in actuality people do with the additional savings (signalling), then consider what set of heuristics evolution would have generated that is responsible for such behavior and would have been adaptive in the context of our EEA.
Rationalist agree with eachother on few things . They also seem to lack conception of sacred
Seems different to me. EA sounds as religious as can be. AI-doom, too. Not saying they are wrong. Just speaking as a theologian. ;) Eating pork seems anathema (Scott argues beef better than chicken + versus worms). And he wrote on SSC that the community are really people who dig Eliezers writing and get along with each other fine - a least much better than with those hopeless normies: "The rallying flag was the Less Wrong Sequences. Eliezer Yudkowsky started a blog (actually, borrowed Robin Hanson’s) about cognitive biases and how to think through them. Whether or not you agreed with him or found him enlightening loaded heavily on those pre-existing differences, so the people who showed up in the comment section got along and started meeting up with each other. “Do you like Eliezer Yudkowsky’s blog?” became a useful proxy for all sorts of things, eventually somebody coined the word “rationalist” to refer to people who did, and then you had a group with nice clear boundaries." https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/04/the-ideology-is-not-the-movement/
The incentivizes for diagnosing a problem are very different from those taking action to solve it. Why should they sacrifice any more than anyone else?
I think some non trivial amount of rationalist types wouldn't see allocating resources away from signalling and consumption, and instead towards recruitment as a sacrifice.
They are mostly signalling smarts. Parenting responsibilities is real work , which from their actions is clear they refuse to do
There is reason to believe that most parents today pay more attention to their kids than in the past, at least if daycare is counted as farmed-out attention. Either way, I think it is a mistake to lump all types of added attention as over-parenting.
I agree that suggesting too many play dates and not enough unstructured time with other kids has negative impacts is a reasonable claim.
Spending lots of time interacting with an infant or even 18 months old probably isn't over parenting. I'd argue it's hard for a parent to spend too much time interacting (as opposed to hovering) with any age kid.
I'd bet the cases for unstructured kid play instead of play dates (your assertion) and for increase parent interaction (my assertion) are both rather weakly supported by data, science, studies,, etc .
This is all true. Mostly urbanisation (high rents, so much income to make and things to do): cities are fertility traps - and always have been, though some disagree: https://www.allianz.com/content/dam/onemarketing/azcom/Allianz_com/migration/media/press/document/PROJECTM_Big_cities-more_babies.pdf .
The long term solution is evolution. Those who have inheritable traits that makes them enjoy having even more than 2 kids will have more. Evolution seems slow, but depending on the factors, it can be quite fast: As DINKs, GINKs and DINKWADs get eliminated from the gene-pool by definition, expect much less of them in three generations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DINK
I agree with much of this. I had recommended that high-status (pro natalist) folks talk more about little kids publicly and "pay" moms with attention. Not promoting the abstract idea of mothers who do all the work while the other adults are out building satellites, but specifically helping a current mom. https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2022/08/20/ambitious-parenting/ Specifically, I suggested that Elon Musk tweet out Emily Oster's newsletter every week.
The post was a rant by an exhausted mom of littles. I'm tempted to edit it, but I'll keep it honest by leaving it alone.
I see that you are unhappy with the way that some have talked about fertility, but it still isn't clear to me what sort of talk would make you happy.
I gave specific examples of existing talk that made me happy, and I gave specific suggestions for what I'd like to see next, in the blog post.
Good speech: Elon saying he enjoys being a father, and Freakonomics Guide to Parenting
What would make me happy: Elon tweets out Emily Oster's newsletter, What if Elon (or some other ambitious person with a large platform) retweeted a trick for getting children to try carrots. “Wow, genius technique. Follow this Mom for more…”
How much more specific could I have been about what "talk would make you happy"?
I'm a mom and am just coming out of this stage, so I understand where you are coming from but fervently disagree with you. I recently finished going through my social media and unfollowing all the accounts that discuss baby sleep, potty training, and other young parent issues and replacing them with people who are obsessed with phonics, sight words, and early arithmetic. For three years I rapaciously read all baby and toddler related content I could get my hands on, but wild horses wouldn't make me look at that stuff ever again.
That's interesting. So you would argue that people should learn it when they need it but otherwise free up their minds for other things? Since we have limited cognitive capacity, I can see a point there. I guess the big question would be what gets crowded out by toddler posts. I believe that everyone in society, whether or not they are a parent, could lend some attention to the people doing the hard work of toddler years. It's a form of compensation. One big problem is that family life is largely private, and that could be one reason we see more posts about rockets and less posts about kids breaking lamps.
What helped me was going to church, where they have free childcare and a community that really welcomes children and sees them as real members of the community, not nuisances. We also have a wonderful toddler play area has happy hour two nights a week, where the moms gather and chat over a glass of wine while the kids play.
I'm a bit confused about what your primary complaint is here. Is it?
1) That pro-natalists don't encourage people enough to share their investment as parents with colleagues or at work because we shouldn't be scaring people about how much their parenting will harm a career?
2) That natalists shouldn't be advising parents not to share pictures of kids at work etc bc we should be upfront about the fact that parenting will tradeoff against career goals and not hide from that?
3) Is it the genderification of talk about moms rather than parents somehow pressures women specifically into that role?
Tho given the fact of unequal sharing wouldn't this undermine the intent of raising the relative status as primary caregiver bc men get to have both the work status and get praised as a parent? (We can't usually know about a colleagues parental duty sharing equality at home)
(as a househusband, tho anti-natalist, I'd love more recognition of men who adopt the traditionally female roles but factually it just seems rare).
As a househusband who likes blogs, wouldn't it be neat if Elon Musk was talking about precisely what he did about vegetables when his kids were 5? If Elon Musk was engaging you publicly on the challenges you face? There are lots of ways to help and support and reward parents. My point is a narrow one - give them a piece of the attention economy.
If someone says "So glad other people are doing the parenting so I don't have to think or talk about it!" then that might be intended as an accolade to the parents (statistically, often mothers). But does it inspire a curious young person to remove themselves from the Conversation to go do it for years? It really does take a lot of work. Just avoiding malnutrition and Reactive Attachment Disorder is a huge investment of time. So it isn't all that important whether a parent should take kid to sports practice when they are 8. There is such a thing as too little parenting investment.
Ok, give parents more attention. I get that part, but isn't this piece by Hanson an instance of giving parents more attention? Or do you have something more specific in mind. I'm really not objecting, just a little confused.
As far as giving details about a parent's day, I too often tend to see that devolve into a disagreement about the 'right' way to raise kids. I think it would be good to increase the status of being a parent, but we need to do thst without demanding that parents jump through more hoops about the right activities at the right ages and that's a very tough line to walk in the modern day.
Parenting is very demanding and rewarding but not particularly skill based so I don't think we want to encourage primary caregivers to follow in the model of the momfluncer and largely define their identity and success in terms of what they do for their kids. That just makes potential parents feel that they are failures because they don't plan every minute of a child's day.
"I agree with much of this." I didn't comment to to contradict Hanson. I was providing additional support and examples.
Good point. You wouldn't want people to feel like they were being told what to do. But I think there is a way to do it well.
I don't know if "skill" is what I'd want to emphasize. But there are "techniques". If someone is a full time mom, she has largely forfeited her ability to be successful in the business world, so why deny her the opportunity to be successful as a mom? I think you are raising important points that I hadn't thought of, but I also feel like someone who innovates on parenting should be allowed to get the reward of attention. Plus, if the great techniques get widely shared, then everyone will be more equipped to be good parents when their turn comes. "Oh yeah, I saw how Jenny74894 handled the issue of peas. I'll try it her way first."
To the counter-argument that there are no techniques because it doesn't matter and you can just leave your kid alone in the backyard with a bag of chips for 8 hours... no. Nope. It's a lot of work even to provide a minimal level of care for young children.
I'm 55. When I was a young kid - elementary school - I walked and biked to school and the park - complete with deathtrap steel-and-asphalt playground - and friends' houses, climbed trees, ate peanut butter, drank from hoses... I know, survivorship bias. Current standards - or even higher - might be optimal, but they're certainly higher than past standards.
At what age do you think it's appropriate to allow a child to wander like that? Let's say it's 7th birthday and a mom has two kids three years apart. She has 10 years in which that scenario is not possible and everyone is getting ahead of her in the status race while she watches a toddler.
Brilliant!
I think the situation is less dire than it'd be if all those tendencies were independent. I don't think they are.
I think they are (or most are) downstream from population being excessive, and the demand for human labour having cratered since the turn of the XX century.
The implied solution trend is simpler and clearer, but harder to stomach
For the parental investment one, some ideas that might help:
Promote free-range parenting and encourage parents to compete on how independent their children are instead of how much attention they give them.
Reverse changes to laws and guidance so kids can be left alone at earlier ages, play unsupervised earlier etc. (Difficult with current safetyism, but necessary for the above.)
Publicise research that shows parenting has little effect on IQ, personality etc; stop claiming the early years are critical to academic achievement and well-adjustedness.
Reduce competitiveness of the education system. Helping children through the educational gauntlets is one reason for intensive parental investment, so reducing or eliminating these would give a double benefit.
Seems like the best solution is teen pregnancy among the high IQ.
A subculture that encouraged and rewards High IQ people who choose to pair bond and reproduce (2-3 children) at 16-19 who are then left to be raised by the married grandparents (4 of them) while the 20+ yr old parents go on to 4-6 yrs of school and then reproduce again at 30-35 (2-3 children) would go a long way providing society with more children (4-6 per couple) and healthier pregnancies.
Each sanctioned pregnancy of a 140+ IQ 16-19 yr old couple would earn a refundable tax credit of $50k per child/yr up to age 25
When you compare the tax credit cost to healthcare costs for fertility treatments and >38 yr old pregnancies, having kids early look like a bargain
education signalling also makes the cost of kids much higher
The analysis is solid - but it assumes that things continue as they are. But they won’t. I can’t say how they will change - but they will change; and if the fertility bust continues long enough there will be incentives to reverse it.
I think this post could use some headings. "So far I have listed many ways in which lower fertility allows for better looking signals" This paragraph is a transition to a new section and should be marked as such. Another heading for when that list begins.
Children require sacrifices. People are not used to sacrificing anything, and so they don't have children. In the past, children were at least of possible economic utility, but now they are only a drain.
So combine no sacrificing with no benefit, and you get less kids.
It is quite implausible that people had kids in the past mainly for economic utility. Which you'd know if you'd had kids.
I didn't say mainly, you're misreading my comment.
As for me having kids, thank G-d , I do!