My Fertility Posts
These are my blog posts on fertility, in reverse chronological order:
Aug 18: How Far Might We Fall? Once innovation rates greatly fall, we may lose our innovating promoting cultures, and take a long time to find them again.
May 24: Robust Efficient Fertility Govt borrowing to pay parents to have kids, & then taxing those kids later to pay back the loans, gets us close to free market solution
May 22: How Long Will Population Fall? Many are confident that world population fall based on fertility trends won’t last long, because: selection.
Apr 14: Hail Richerson & Boyd In their book they suggest fertility fall due to prestigious folks now doing more early career prep, leaving less time for kids after.
Jan 25: Brink Lindsey’s Doubts Brief responses to Linsey’s comments after our convo.
Jan 21: Are We A Tower of Babel? Amish-like who repopulate Earth my see our civ as like a Tower of Babel. This helps us see what they might retain from us.
Jan 17: Five Fertility Fails: 5 attitudes that keep us from solving fertility fall.
Jan 11: Stasis is Illiberal: As innovation halts, the world will likely become less liberal.
Jan 6: Crediting Conservatives: Historians could study how much to credit conservatives for resisting the cultural changes.
Jan 1: How Much More Innovation Before Pause?: We will see ~60-90 years worth of innovation at prior rates before innovation grinds to a halt.
Dec 10, 2023: We Can BUY New Culture Some say money can’t help, as fertility is cultural. But money can induce a big fast search in space of possible culture changes.
Dec 2: Recalibrating Respect: As winners deserve respect, let’s recalibrate to respect the Amish-like cultures on track to replace our civ.
Nov 25: After Eating It, Software Will Bite The World: Declining economy will end new hardware, and find it hard to support so many software systems.
Nov 17: Honing Fertility Fall Theories: I adjust my theories of why fertility fell in response to Hanania critiques.
Nov 15: Bow To Our Future Overlords: To influence the future, accept the Amish-like as likely new winners, and try to figure out what they will honestly value.
Nov 10: Fertility Fall From Selection Neglect: A habit of copying what high status folks do reinforces a selection effect: having fewer kids can make them higher status.
Nov 6: Ancient Fertility Quotes: The ancient world consistently had problems with low fertility, problems it never solved.
Oct 31: What If Culture Is Unstable?: What if cultures just do random walks, with most places bad compared to where they start? Might that explain fertility change?
Oct 13: Turn the Ship, or Abandon It: Our choice is to try to turn the huge slow ship that is world culture, or throw in with a deviant small insular fertile subculture.
Oct 2: A Fertility Reckoning: We should face the hard fact that treasured aspects of world culture conflict with fertility, threatening our longterm existence.
Oct 1: Four Uses For Personal Tax Assets: Transferable rights to individual tax payments have many uses, including paying parents to make productive kids.
Sep 22: Can Govt Debt Solve Fertility?: Governments could borrow money to pay parents large amounts per kid, much as one can borrow to pay for home additions.
Sep 15: The Return of "Commune-ism": The Amish-like who will inherit the Earth live in small-scale autonomous communes.
Sep 10: Will Nations Fund Fertility?: Nations seem unlikely to fund fertility rises.
Sep 4: Escalating Signals Cut Fertility: I review the many strong and treasured social trends that promote fertility decline.
Aug 23: 16 Fertility Scenarios: I outline 16 scenarios by which fertility fall may reverse, and show poll results re which are more desirable or likely.
Aug 21: Shrinking Economies Don’t Innovate: In a declining economy due to falling population, innovation grinds to a halt.
That is when my recent burst of posts on fertility started. Some earlier posts:
May 3: Fertile Factions (See also AIs Will Be Our Mind Children): Evolution should make us wary of co-existing rivals, but indulgent of descendants, like AI.
Dec. 2021: On Evolved Values: Eventually our descendants will be selected for consciously and abstractly know their main value: reproduction.
Sep. 2021: The Insular Fertile Future. Insular fertile subcultures like the Amish will plausibly win the future over our falling-fertility world culture.
Jun. 2021: We Moderns Are Status-Mad. Overestimating our status makes us all pick strategies today that once only made sense for high status folks.
Nov. 2010: Fertility: The Big Problem. It was my guess for the world’s biggest problem.
August 2010: Bill & My Excellent Hypothesis. Maybe we see high personal chance of royalty when high absolute personal wealth, as ave. wealth varied little until recently.
Also earlier: Are Gardens Fertile?, Fertility Fall Myths, French Fertility Fall, Fertility Looks Bad, Elite Fertility Falls, Priceless Fertility, Forbidden Fertility, Future Fertility,
The book "Random Family" by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is partly about overpopulation. Coco and Jessica have so many babies, by so many fathers, and their children have so many half-siblings, that at times it’s impossible to keep the names straight. By the time the two women are in their early thirties, they have given birth to Mercedes, Nikki, Nautica, Pearl, LaMonte, Serena, Brittany, Stephany, Michael, and Matthew, by Cesar, Torres, Puma (or maybe Victor), Willy (or maybe Puma), Kodak, Wishman, and Frankie. This is a book awash with sperm (Jessica even manages to conceive twins while in prison, after an affair with a guard), and at one stage I was wondering whether it was medically possible for a man to become pregnant through reading it. I think I’m probably too old.
There are many, many things, a zillion things, that make my experiences different from those of Coco and Jessica. But it was remembering my first pregnancy scare that helped me to fully understand the stupidity and purposelessness of the usual conservative rants about responsibility and fecklessness and blah blah blah. It was the summer before I went to college, and my girlfriend’s period was late, and I spent two utterly miserable weeks convinced that my life was over. I’d have to get, like, an office job, and I’d miss out on three years pissing around at university, and my brilliant career as a… as a something or other would be over before it had even begun. We’d used birth control, of course, because failing to do so would cost us every-thing, including a very great deal of money, but we were still terrified: I would just as soon have gone to prison as started a family. What 'Random Family' explains, movingly and convincingly and at necessary length, is that the future as Coco and Jessica and the fathers of their children see it really isn’t worth the price of a condom, and they’re right. I eventually became a father for the first time around the same age that Jessica became a grandmother. - (Nick Hornby ‚Stuff I’ve Been Reading‘ Sept. 2003)
So, R. Hanson's recipe: "PAY for babies, substantially" will indeed raise TFR among the Cocos and Jessicas of the USofA. Or in Somalia. Substantially. At a much, much lower pay-level than needed to move the needle on TFR among college-students (prospective/present/former). The question I never see addressed in overcomingbias is: Do we want that? I am doubtful. "Just Emil Kirkegaard Things" would scream: NO!
Maybe 10k at birth and 200k when the kids passes SAT in the top 20%, 500k in the top 5%, 1 million in the top 1%? Find the equilibrium.
Seems very little analysis on the impact of religious views on fertility.