"Communist governments saw their people as tools of the state, not individuals and citizens valuable in-and-of themselves" – unlike Capitalist governments that see their people as tools of rich individuals, not people and citizens valuable in themselves?
No income taxes paid for any married family with two or more kids by age 30, until all their kids are over the age of 5. No income limits.
This incentivizes marriage, penalizes divorce, encourages starting childbirth early and provides continuing rewards for even larger families. It doesn’t penalize working men, and probably incentivizes full time housewives as well.
I might even add some benefits for free college for the kids, paid in higher tuition by all the other families (those not having at least 2 kids by age 30). Details TBD.
The point of this would be to make it so that nobody can afford NOT to get married and have kids.
How do you propose getting any of that implemented in a democracy where every single one of those policies would be destroyed at the ballot box and when the countries narrative have been to liberate from all constraints for the last 60 years?
> "I am amazed at the number of people who cite low Iranian fertility as evidence that feminism, secularism, or education are irrelevant, apparently not knowing about this very successful population control campaign, or that the Iranian population is very secular, Iranian women outnumber men in higher education (more than 60% of the total, rising to 70% in engineering), and Iran has one of the highest education-to-workforce ratios in the world."
Doesn't Iran still have a pretty high male-to-female income ratio, though? Is that purely a function of older age groups and not present in under-30s, or something?
> "And depending on the course of technology, it may never matter. The singularity renders fertility concerns, along with everything else, irrelevant. My gut feeling is that it will probably (>50%) render the question moot, but since I can neither predict nor control this, I’d rather write about the base case where neither happens."
I won't say it's impossible, but I think it's likely we'll get some kind of AI bubble crash in the short-to-medium term. There's also a huge chunk of the creative class and left-wingers that really hate AI, so maybe the post-crash political reset will finally wake up conservatives about this.
Great article overall, though. I'm kind of stunned that Hungarian fathers don't get tax breaks for their kids when the mother does- that seems like a really glaring oversight.
"Doesn't Iran still have a pretty high male-to-female income ratio, though? "
Wikipedia states that it's actually quite low:
"Gender based pay gaps exist in Iran, with males earning 11–12% more than females. For example, male physicists earn approximately 1,235,999,900 IRR, while females earn 1,113,601,700 IRR—an 11% gap. Male administrative law judges earn, on average, 1,619,999,400 IRR, compared to 1,452,001,600 IRR for females—showing a 12% gap. Male economists earn 934,798,400 IRR, while women earn 842,398,300 IRR, reflecting an 11% difference. Male office clerks earn around 248,398,700 IRR, while their female counterparts earn 224,398,200 IRR, showing a similar 11% gap.[1]"
The below paper reports a 35% gender wage gap in Iran’s industrial sectors, which is still far lower than the 400% figure cited in your source:
That's after controlling for occupation (albeit not for seniority or part-time work.) If women are employed in different jobs (or less likely to work outside the home at all), you could still see quite large income gaps.
That is basically the whole point of gender pay gap: comparing pay at equal job/occupation is the definition (and it doesn’t even take into account effort/value added which is another can of worms).
Of course if women have other occupations they will earn less, that such a dumb remark you must be ideologically compromised.
My point here was not to argue that Iranian women are especially ill-treated (that might or might not be true), but to point out that if the aggregate economic bargaining power of Iranian men is so much greater you might expect this to positively impact fertility.
If "raise male employment/salaries" is the silver bullet that fixes TFR, fantastic, but this seems like a large potential confounder in the data, and I want actual answers to this problem.
Ok I understand. I don’t know about the collective bargaining power of men vs women in Iran but if what I’ve read is true it’s seems like it favors women actually ? Considering they are statistically more represented in the high value job that requires a degree. Is there any reliable data on that ?
The problem with authoritarian regimes is that it is very difficult to get data and even harder to trust it. If you look at the history of USSR, the gist of it was that the propaganda and « data » that was fed to the world was complete bullshit (crowned by the attempt at covering the utter incompetence of Chernobyl disaster).
Something you might want to consider is that it’s not just the collective economic power of men vs women that matters alone. It is quite important what type of men actually get this economic power and this is precisely the issue with interventionist policies: they tend to draw and benefits the type of people that are the least likely to make good use of it.
And this is where the evil lies in the feminist and equalitarianism propaganda, they attempt to « correct » outcomes that derive from natural differences with no self correction mechanism.
As we say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> "I don’t know about the collective bargaining power of men vs women in Iran but if what I’ve read is true it’s seems like it favors women actually ? Considering they are statistically more represented in the high value job that requires a degree. Is there any reliable data on that?"
I don't know. I was hoping Arcto might have a better idea.
> Most modern pro-natalist efforts and proposals, like JD Vance’s $5,000 Child Tax Credit, consist of some form of monetary or in-kind transfers (such as state-subsidized child care) to mothers.
To be fair, Vance's original proposal was a tax penalty for childlessness.
Yes, this is mathematically equivalent to your description but the framing difference is important. A penalty on childlessness signals that being childless is low status. A tax-credit or subsidy reads like charity for those with many children and being on the receiving end of charity is low status.
Of course, for precisely this reason Vance's original proposal was immediately attacked by the childless feminists, causing all its defenders to re-frame it as a tax-credit, thus destroying most of its value.
Why wasn't this corrected when this version of the article was published?
Edit: For the record, I still don't think Hanson's proposal is a good idea, but I don't think it's right to attribute ideas to him that he doesn't endorse.
Thanks Noah, I knew that you would fix this. I'm more disappointed with Arctotherium on this, since he still hasn't corrected the essay version on his substack.
To me, this clearly shows that birth rates are NOT going to rise again. Modernity and female emancipation sealed the deal. Societal pressure and state incentives have not and will not work.
Instead of pearl clutching about low TFR, we need to devote our resources to reconfiguring society to function with fewer people. That's the real challenge. It can be done, with AI, robotics, automation, etc.
We have time to figure it out -- global population is still increasing after all, and won't start actually declining until ~2080.
Regarding the first sentence, you'd be surprised. I've encountered at least a dozen people in the past few years who told me that my population control proposal will never work (https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#overpop-solution) because it's "too authoritarian", but they're just ignorant about history.
There are lots of people who would consider the norms regarding marriage and sexuality that governed pre-modern societies to also be "too authoritarian", even if they're laid down by the church instead of the state.
Not that I disagree about this being a long-term imperative, but the prospect of eternal paradise/damnation is conceivably more motivating than the honours and penalties bestowed by temporal government.
While I understand this is conservative publication, I grew up in communist Yugoslavia. Many things were worse with that system, but promoting full inclusion of women in workforce and high education was great civilizational achievement. Like good kindergartens, female reproductive healh, etc.... This did not exclude biological differences between sexes (men still fought more for high value positions), but it did rule out shameful things like offering female law graduates secretary job (memoirs of O'Connor, US Supreme Justice).
Yeah, sure, I mean... most of us don't particularly want women to be housebound domestic servants squeezing out ten kids for the rest of their lives, but the current status quo for gender relations is clearly insane and if men's behaviour needs to improve then women are also going to have to make some concessions here.
Yugoslavian republics are separate countries now; not all of them are poor. Also most ex East Bloc countries in general are currently narrowing gap with the West.
As for subject we are talking about (emancipation of women) I don't see any great conservative "rollback" (with partial exception of Poland which made abortion much harder). Unemployment is low in these countries. If they started "pushing" women to purely domestic roles, there would be immense problems with getting enough workforce. By and large, I think issue of female empowerment is not so politicized n ex Eastern Bloc.People are used to female judges, doctors...
I don’t think women having to work is female empowerment but just a basic necessity when men cannot manage to generate enough wealth to care for the whole family. It was basically the default state before western civilization became rich enough to give a choice.
Women had always been working, the distinction came after the Industrial Revolution because suddenly men’s work was given wage when women’s work was still largely invisible.
Women being part of the workforce is not a problem in itself, it’s the feminist propaganda asking for women’s work to be over-valued and be given preference to men’s work.
If women compete equally there is hardly any problem (I suspect this is what’s going on).
I don’t think anybody want to push women into purely domestic work; this invisible work still has to be done and women still do most of it on top of wage work usually. If you think about it, this is a strictly inferior situation. Women gain pretend « freedom » because they trade dependency on a man for dependency on a wage or the ultimate patriarch: the state.
I won’t expand much but I suspect that it works because as long as you are poor enough there is no question of destroying institutions like mariage, it would make everyone worse off regardless of labor market participation status.
Once those countries get rich enough, they may have to deal with the women promoting feminism to gain power/money with less effort (because the reality is that women cannot really be competitive, as a statistical group, I’m not talking about exceptions that will always exists).
Yes, I also draw the line with "positive discrimination/preference" measures. We do have some of those- they work mostly on political, not legal level, and I find them unjustified.
A policy that selectively increases fertility of productive, tax-paying people is to make university free for people who have two or more children of their own living with them. This also moves child-bearing back into the mother's early-mid twenties, where it is healthier and safer for her and the babies.
A second policy shifts the burden mostly onto the private sector, which is often better at efficiently meeting demands. Require all offices to have creches within five minutes' walk from any room, and require employers to allow mothers ample time to nurse their infants during the working day. Social proof, childless young women seeing other women with their infants during their daily lives, will do the rest.
But of course these are far outside the Overton window at present. We shall see how desperate governments become over the next couple of decades.
Quote: "The only really effective high-fertility groups in economically advanced countries are patriarchal and pro-natalist religious groups, which are often separated from mainstream society by technological choices or language barriers. Some examples are the Haredim³, practicing non-ultra Orthodox Jews⁴, the Amish, orthodox Dutch Calvinists (strict enough to oppose women’s suffrage), and Finnish Laestadians. As a rule, the more culturally separated from mainstream society, the higher the fertility and the lower the attrition out of the group."
I'm not saying this is quite the same thing (not patriarchal for instance) but in certain instantiations might be close: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Thus, for instance, in the Epilogue (from A to Z) listing 26 ways this book might be read, I say that the ideal critic will see in it a picture not only of what the final and highest stage of capitalist development is going to look like (which turns out to be a form of socialism in all but name other; see chapter two, note v) but of what can justly be described as the apotheosis of the entire Judeo-Christian project out of which capitalism emerged, the overarching theme of which is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom.
I go on to say that religiously motivated Americans will see in it "a chance to build new Jerusalems all over this land." To enact a new form of Zionism in other words.
Whats more, the new three-generation form of the family being proposed (under two roofs, not one, at opposite ends of the garden) is inherently child friendly no matter one's religious orientation (or lack thereof).
Much like almost all men who are pro-life demonstrate misogynistic tendencies, men discussing total fertility rates also demonstrate misogynistic tendencies. It seems that too many conservative men want to punish women for making choices of which those conservative men disagree.
Nice. But the taxes on childless (wo)men were just mentioned, but not analyzed for their effects in the past or potential in the present. (People are loss-averse; an extra-tax may raise fertility more than the same amount of hand-outs!) P.s.: the Murray graphic seems not to be corresponding to the text, mix up?
"Communist governments saw their people as tools of the state, not individuals and citizens valuable in-and-of themselves" – unlike Capitalist governments that see their people as tools of rich individuals, not people and citizens valuable in themselves?
Thanks for the interesting article.
The stupidest thing a country can do to increase its population is to allow the immigration of diverse people.
No income taxes paid for any married family with two or more kids by age 30, until all their kids are over the age of 5. No income limits.
This incentivizes marriage, penalizes divorce, encourages starting childbirth early and provides continuing rewards for even larger families. It doesn’t penalize working men, and probably incentivizes full time housewives as well.
I might even add some benefits for free college for the kids, paid in higher tuition by all the other families (those not having at least 2 kids by age 30). Details TBD.
The point of this would be to make it so that nobody can afford NOT to get married and have kids.
How do you propose getting any of that implemented in a democracy where every single one of those policies would be destroyed at the ballot box and when the countries narrative have been to liberate from all constraints for the last 60 years?
Of course it won’t work.
The only real « solution » is to abuse the system best as you can until it falls.
If you have a confortable situation you can make other choices but that pretty much true in any system so whatever…
Doesn’t make analyzing and talking about it less interesting.
In fact maybe over time they’ll be enough people pissed that it might actually work at the ballot (unlikely but one can hope).
Agreed. Purely theoretical.
> "I am amazed at the number of people who cite low Iranian fertility as evidence that feminism, secularism, or education are irrelevant, apparently not knowing about this very successful population control campaign, or that the Iranian population is very secular, Iranian women outnumber men in higher education (more than 60% of the total, rising to 70% in engineering), and Iran has one of the highest education-to-workforce ratios in the world."
Doesn't Iran still have a pretty high male-to-female income ratio, though? Is that purely a function of older age groups and not present in under-30s, or something?
https://www.peace-mark.org/en/articles/135-9-en/
> "And depending on the course of technology, it may never matter. The singularity renders fertility concerns, along with everything else, irrelevant. My gut feeling is that it will probably (>50%) render the question moot, but since I can neither predict nor control this, I’d rather write about the base case where neither happens."
I won't say it's impossible, but I think it's likely we'll get some kind of AI bubble crash in the short-to-medium term. There's also a huge chunk of the creative class and left-wingers that really hate AI, so maybe the post-crash political reset will finally wake up conservatives about this.
Great article overall, though. I'm kind of stunned that Hungarian fathers don't get tax breaks for their kids when the mother does- that seems like a really glaring oversight.
"Doesn't Iran still have a pretty high male-to-female income ratio, though? "
Wikipedia states that it's actually quite low:
"Gender based pay gaps exist in Iran, with males earning 11–12% more than females. For example, male physicists earn approximately 1,235,999,900 IRR, while females earn 1,113,601,700 IRR—an 11% gap. Male administrative law judges earn, on average, 1,619,999,400 IRR, compared to 1,452,001,600 IRR for females—showing a 12% gap. Male economists earn 934,798,400 IRR, while women earn 842,398,300 IRR, reflecting an 11% difference. Male office clerks earn around 248,398,700 IRR, while their female counterparts earn 224,398,200 IRR, showing a similar 11% gap.[1]"
The below paper reports a 35% gender wage gap in Iran’s industrial sectors, which is still far lower than the 400% figure cited in your source:
https://kspublisher.com/media/articles/MERJEM_52_23-28_Free.pdf
That's after controlling for occupation (albeit not for seniority or part-time work.) If women are employed in different jobs (or less likely to work outside the home at all), you could still see quite large income gaps.
That is basically the whole point of gender pay gap: comparing pay at equal job/occupation is the definition (and it doesn’t even take into account effort/value added which is another can of worms).
Of course if women have other occupations they will earn less, that such a dumb remark you must be ideologically compromised.
My point here was not to argue that Iranian women are especially ill-treated (that might or might not be true), but to point out that if the aggregate economic bargaining power of Iranian men is so much greater you might expect this to positively impact fertility.
If "raise male employment/salaries" is the silver bullet that fixes TFR, fantastic, but this seems like a large potential confounder in the data, and I want actual answers to this problem.
Ok I understand. I don’t know about the collective bargaining power of men vs women in Iran but if what I’ve read is true it’s seems like it favors women actually ? Considering they are statistically more represented in the high value job that requires a degree. Is there any reliable data on that ?
The problem with authoritarian regimes is that it is very difficult to get data and even harder to trust it. If you look at the history of USSR, the gist of it was that the propaganda and « data » that was fed to the world was complete bullshit (crowned by the attempt at covering the utter incompetence of Chernobyl disaster).
Something you might want to consider is that it’s not just the collective economic power of men vs women that matters alone. It is quite important what type of men actually get this economic power and this is precisely the issue with interventionist policies: they tend to draw and benefits the type of people that are the least likely to make good use of it.
And this is where the evil lies in the feminist and equalitarianism propaganda, they attempt to « correct » outcomes that derive from natural differences with no self correction mechanism.
As we say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> "I don’t know about the collective bargaining power of men vs women in Iran but if what I’ve read is true it’s seems like it favors women actually ? Considering they are statistically more represented in the high value job that requires a degree. Is there any reliable data on that?"
I don't know. I was hoping Arcto might have a better idea.
> Most modern pro-natalist efforts and proposals, like JD Vance’s $5,000 Child Tax Credit, consist of some form of monetary or in-kind transfers (such as state-subsidized child care) to mothers.
To be fair, Vance's original proposal was a tax penalty for childlessness.
Yes, this is mathematically equivalent to your description but the framing difference is important. A penalty on childlessness signals that being childless is low status. A tax-credit or subsidy reads like charity for those with many children and being on the receiving end of charity is low status.
Of course, for precisely this reason Vance's original proposal was immediately attacked by the childless feminists, causing all its defenders to re-frame it as a tax-credit, thus destroying most of its value.
Status matters so much it hurts
Robin Hanson has said that Arcotherium mischaracterized his fertility proposal: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/communist-pronatalism/comment/143056512.
Why wasn't this corrected when this version of the article was published?
Edit: For the record, I still don't think Hanson's proposal is a good idea, but I don't think it's right to attribute ideas to him that he doesn't endorse.
Thanks — I wasn't aware of that. Have removed Hanson's name from the article.
—NC
Thanks Noah, I knew that you would fix this. I'm more disappointed with Arctotherium on this, since he still hasn't corrected the essay version on his substack.
A tour-de-force essay, thanks.
To me, this clearly shows that birth rates are NOT going to rise again. Modernity and female emancipation sealed the deal. Societal pressure and state incentives have not and will not work.
Instead of pearl clutching about low TFR, we need to devote our resources to reconfiguring society to function with fewer people. That's the real challenge. It can be done, with AI, robotics, automation, etc.
We have time to figure it out -- global population is still increasing after all, and won't start actually declining until ~2080.
Low TFR is never forever low TFR. It is a selection event.
Regarding the first sentence, you'd be surprised. I've encountered at least a dozen people in the past few years who told me that my population control proposal will never work (https://zerocontradictions.net/faqs/overpopulation#overpop-solution) because it's "too authoritarian", but they're just ignorant about history.
There are lots of people who would consider the norms regarding marriage and sexuality that governed pre-modern societies to also be "too authoritarian", even if they're laid down by the church instead of the state.
Not that I disagree about this being a long-term imperative, but the prospect of eternal paradise/damnation is conceivably more motivating than the honours and penalties bestowed by temporal government.
While I understand this is conservative publication, I grew up in communist Yugoslavia. Many things were worse with that system, but promoting full inclusion of women in workforce and high education was great civilizational achievement. Like good kindergartens, female reproductive healh, etc.... This did not exclude biological differences between sexes (men still fought more for high value positions), but it did rule out shameful things like offering female law graduates secretary job (memoirs of O'Connor, US Supreme Justice).
No it wasn’t it was a terrible achievement that lead to millions of murdered babies and habitual mortal sin
Yeah, sure, I mean... most of us don't particularly want women to be housebound domestic servants squeezing out ten kids for the rest of their lives, but the current status quo for gender relations is clearly insane and if men's behaviour needs to improve then women are also going to have to make some concessions here.
Yet Yugoslavia is still a quite poor country and now countries adopting the same ideological idealism are becoming poorer themselves.
What an achievement indeed !
Yugoslavian republics are separate countries now; not all of them are poor. Also most ex East Bloc countries in general are currently narrowing gap with the West.
Yes it may be so. But isn’t this happening precisely because they let go of the destructive communist and feminist ideologies ?
I don’t know the current culture in those countries but to me it seems like a basic requirement from experience.
As for subject we are talking about (emancipation of women) I don't see any great conservative "rollback" (with partial exception of Poland which made abortion much harder). Unemployment is low in these countries. If they started "pushing" women to purely domestic roles, there would be immense problems with getting enough workforce. By and large, I think issue of female empowerment is not so politicized n ex Eastern Bloc.People are used to female judges, doctors...
I don’t think women having to work is female empowerment but just a basic necessity when men cannot manage to generate enough wealth to care for the whole family. It was basically the default state before western civilization became rich enough to give a choice.
Women had always been working, the distinction came after the Industrial Revolution because suddenly men’s work was given wage when women’s work was still largely invisible.
Women being part of the workforce is not a problem in itself, it’s the feminist propaganda asking for women’s work to be over-valued and be given preference to men’s work.
If women compete equally there is hardly any problem (I suspect this is what’s going on).
I don’t think anybody want to push women into purely domestic work; this invisible work still has to be done and women still do most of it on top of wage work usually. If you think about it, this is a strictly inferior situation. Women gain pretend « freedom » because they trade dependency on a man for dependency on a wage or the ultimate patriarch: the state.
I won’t expand much but I suspect that it works because as long as you are poor enough there is no question of destroying institutions like mariage, it would make everyone worse off regardless of labor market participation status.
Once those countries get rich enough, they may have to deal with the women promoting feminism to gain power/money with less effort (because the reality is that women cannot really be competitive, as a statistical group, I’m not talking about exceptions that will always exists).
Yes, I also draw the line with "positive discrimination/preference" measures. We do have some of those- they work mostly on political, not legal level, and I find them unjustified.
A policy that selectively increases fertility of productive, tax-paying people is to make university free for people who have two or more children of their own living with them. This also moves child-bearing back into the mother's early-mid twenties, where it is healthier and safer for her and the babies.
A second policy shifts the burden mostly onto the private sector, which is often better at efficiently meeting demands. Require all offices to have creches within five minutes' walk from any room, and require employers to allow mothers ample time to nurse their infants during the working day. Social proof, childless young women seeing other women with their infants during their daily lives, will do the rest.
But of course these are far outside the Overton window at present. We shall see how desperate governments become over the next couple of decades.
I can't comment on the latest post, but I just wanted to say that the link for https://www.noahsnewsletter.com/p/expert-surveys-on-biological-group doesn't work anymore. Instead, it redirects to a different site.
Thanks — fixed.
—NC
Quote: "The only really effective high-fertility groups in economically advanced countries are patriarchal and pro-natalist religious groups, which are often separated from mainstream society by technological choices or language barriers. Some examples are the Haredim³, practicing non-ultra Orthodox Jews⁴, the Amish, orthodox Dutch Calvinists (strict enough to oppose women’s suffrage), and Finnish Laestadians. As a rule, the more culturally separated from mainstream society, the higher the fertility and the lower the attrition out of the group."
I'm not saying this is quite the same thing (not patriarchal for instance) but in certain instantiations might be close: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00U0C9HKW
Thus, for instance, in the Epilogue (from A to Z) listing 26 ways this book might be read, I say that the ideal critic will see in it a picture not only of what the final and highest stage of capitalist development is going to look like (which turns out to be a form of socialism in all but name other; see chapter two, note v) but of what can justly be described as the apotheosis of the entire Judeo-Christian project out of which capitalism emerged, the overarching theme of which is the long human struggle from servitude to freedom.
I go on to say that religiously motivated Americans will see in it "a chance to build new Jerusalems all over this land." To enact a new form of Zionism in other words.
Whats more, the new three-generation form of the family being proposed (under two roofs, not one, at opposite ends of the garden) is inherently child friendly no matter one's religious orientation (or lack thereof).
Why would you want to make feminism work? It’s an evil and false ideology
Much like almost all men who are pro-life demonstrate misogynistic tendencies, men discussing total fertility rates also demonstrate misogynistic tendencies. It seems that too many conservative men want to punish women for making choices of which those conservative men disagree.
Nice. But the taxes on childless (wo)men were just mentioned, but not analyzed for their effects in the past or potential in the present. (People are loss-averse; an extra-tax may raise fertility more than the same amount of hand-outs!) P.s.: the Murray graphic seems not to be corresponding to the text, mix up?