Reversing the Fertility Collapse

You can't buy fertility, and imposing values through government fiat doesn't work. New and fortified religions are the only realistic solution.

Written by Malcolm Collins.

Our podcast, Based Camp, focuses on the topics of sex, politics, genetics, and religion. The first three are understandable obsessions for leaders of the pronatalist movement but the last often perplexes newcomers. Religion? This confusion is amplified when they ask why we haven’t written a book on pronatalism and realistic solutions to falling fertility rates and we point out that we have and it's titled The Pragmatist’s Guide to Crafting Religion. 

The great thing about being an American and exploring the problem of crashing fertility rates is that most of the developed world is further along the path to demographic collapse than we are, which allows us to see what has and hasn’t worked. 

The “obvious” solutions to falling fertility rates simply don’t work. You can’t buy fertility: Hungary spent 5% of its GDP attempting to do this one year and only rose fertility rates by 1.6%, a laughable figure in a world where rates are falling annually by double digit percentages in dozens of countries. What’s more, if you line up all the studies looking at whether financial incentives boost fertility rates, you see a clear association between the proposed effect size and the margin of error. 

Is there some amount we could pay people to get them to have kids? Of course. Is there an amount a government would be able to pay (i.e., something that would pass in Congress) that would make a significant difference? The answer is no. Anyone telling you otherwise is either not familiar with the data or is lying to you in an effort to promote some other agenda.

Shifting the culture is the obvious way to save our species from the self-induced extinguishing of our most productive members. Yet actually doing so is not entirely straightforward. One’s first intuition when observing that conservative religious populations have more children within countries is to assume that imposing their beliefs on the population level is the solution. But then one sees that the more conservative a country’s average citizen, the lower its fertility rate, as Aria Babu has shown. Imposing conservative values through governments fiat does not appear to work and may even be counter-productive. 

The failure of universal conservative values to sustainably raise birth rates is likely driven by the same process that leads to native ethnic groups having higher fertility rates in ethnically and culturally diverse countries than in ethno-states or mono-cultures (when controlling for prosperity). That's right: an ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction. The reason for this, I suspect, is that high fertility requires not just a strong, religiously infused culture but one whose members feels like a threatened minority that is starkly different from its neighbours. This would explain the perplexingly high Jewish Israeli fertility rates.

I suspect there are two major forces at play. The first is just common sense. If you have daily reminders that people who look, act, and think like you might be “replaced”, that is a strong motivation to have kids. In a country like South Korea (where I used to live) almost everyone you see and interact with shares your culture and ethnicity, so there is no daily feeling of existential threat. Think of it like a fertility-cultural version of the bystander effect.

The second force at play is more subtle. When a government imposes a culture’s value system, the forces of intergenerational cultural evolution that made the culture strong in the first place begin to atrophy. If a person lived their life in a mech suit which moved their body for them, all their muscles would eventually atrophy.

Cultures that maintained prohibitions on porn had more intramarital sex and thus more children. Yet they also taught self-control, which strengthens the inhibitory pathways in the prefrontal cortex. So when a country does something like ban porn outright (as South Korea has done) then consuming porn is no longer a personal choice where one affirms one’s cultural traditions; it is simply the law of the land. To see this effect in action just look at the correlation within the EU between how much a country restricts access to abortion to its fertility rate. Abortion restrictions are a good proxy for how much the government is enforcing value systems/perspectives that religions should be enforcing on their own. Removing the responsibility from a religion to motivate individuals to exercise self-control will destroy that religion over time.

If religion is the answer, why not just go back to one of the old ones? While religious communities have shown more resistance to fertility collapse than their secular counterparts, they too are dying. For example, Catholic majority countries in Europe have an average fertility rate of only 1.3—a rate that will see them almost halving in population every generation! Things are not much better in Catholic majority Latin America:

As recently as 2019, a benchmark study by the United Nations Population Division for 2020 to 2100 forecast that fertility in Latin American and Caribbean countries would stabilize at an average of around 1.75 children per woman in the latter half of this century. Stunningly, except for Mexico, all the countries listed in this graph have already dropped below this level. Uruguay, Costa Rica, Chile, Jamaica, and Cuba now have total fertility rates of around 1.3 children per woman—the so-called “ultra-low fertility” threshold that has only been seen in a handful of European and East Asian countries.

Catholics are not the only religious group in which fertility rates are plummeting. One can observe the same delayed fertility crash across almost all religious groups. Even historically high-fertility groups like Mormons fell below the replacement rate and will eventually disappear without a change.“ The Mormon fertility rate is harder to calculate than other populations’ fertility rates, but there is evidence of a substantial decline. Even Muslims are not immune to this trend, with their fertility rates sometimes falling below other groups’ when they are in monocultural communities. (Iran’s fertility crisis is an obvious example.)”

One might point out that there are often high-fertility sub-populations within religious communities. The problem is that they tend to be less economically and intellectually productive. These low-productivity, high-fertility groups are much more damaging to religious communities than they are to secular society, as there is much more interbreeding between their members and those of the low-fertility, high-productivity groups. (There is one study arguing that this is not the case in some Mormon communities, but the correlation shown is very weak.) 

With all this being the case, sending our kids into an extant religious community seems like tossing them into a genetic death spiral. It would be unwise in the extreme if I want my genetic line to be among those humans who colonize the stars.

It should come as no surprise that throwing out all one's ancestral traditions—traditions with which one’s ancestors evolved—will have voluminous deleterious effects on the individual. It should also come as no surprise that clinging dogmatically to cultural traditions that evolved within and were optimized for not just a pre-internet world but a pre-industrial world will have disastrous consequences for the group. The only way to ensure ancestral traditions work as intended without updating them for the age of technology is to include within them a mandate for a pre-industrial lifestyle. 

This is why the only groups that seem to show durable resistance to fertility collapse are those that either ban their members from engaging with technology or have social practices that lower the economic potential of their adherents. What is concerning about these groups is that they are often wildly xenophobic, believing that eventually everyone on earth must believe what they believe. In fact, not a single religious group in the world within a developed country has been able to stay durably above the replacement rate while being economically productive and engaging with technology (except, arguably, for Israeli Jews).

Some adherents of traditional religions assume that they can use their technophobic members to generate a large population that can subsequently be converted to technophilia. This strategy does not work for two reasons. The first and obvious one is the enormous dysgenic effects it will have on their population (culturally sterilizing the economically productive members of a group is not a winning formula). The second is that sub-groups within these communities that disengage with technology more extremely will outcompete those that do not. This can be seen clearly in Amish populations where the rate of cell phone use correlates with their fertility rate. Through cultural evolution the technophobic factions will eventually dominate the others (except for iterations that totally culturally and genetically isolate themselves).

Malcolm and Simone Collins.

This is the crux of why we are raising our kids in a new religious system. It is also why we encourage others to attempt to edit their pre-industrial systems with practices that will make them competitive in an age of AI and the internet. All religious traditions evolve—the drastic social and technological changes that pose new threats simply require that such evolution happen faster.

The genetic game we are playing is different from the one our ancestors played. Historically, if a group had cultural practices that lead them to select for higher economic and technological productivity in breeding partners, males from that group would regularly outbreed with females from neighbouring groups. This had the affect of reducing genetic differentiation between geographically adjacent groups. The advent of near universally enforced child support naturally leads to the genetic isolation of high-earning technophilic groups with the capacity for self-control (outbreeding is heavily punished by the state).

As a result of this, any genetic IQ advantage will be amplified much faster than would have historically been the case. This is doubly true for groups that practice polygenic selection and have arranged marriage protocols in place. Oh, that seems harsh, does it? In the words of one of my favourite movies, “You disapprove? Well, too bad. We're in this for the species, boys and girls. It's simple numbers. They have more.” 

The old ways have failed us. Many bemoan the urban monoculture, whose adherents are known for their censorious “woke” behaviour. As threatening as the urban monoculture may be, when it breaks we will be facing an infinitely more threatening flood of xenophobic, technophobic, religious extremists who will drag our species back to the stone age if given the chance. This flood will come from groups as varied Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists – some of whose adherents maintain a high fertility rate by using culturally induced poverty to simulate pre-industrial environments among their members while maintaining cultural isolation through intense cultural xenophobia.

The pronatalist movement is a beacon for those few humans left who are willing to do what makes us human: innovate, improve, and band together so we can mount a real defense. God willing, once the wave passes, this movement will be the seed that grows into a vast interstellar human empire. 

Finally, you may be asking, “but why religion, why not just a few cultural tweaks?” Even if it's entirely secular, a suite of intergenerationally durable cultural perspectives and practices that differ strikingly from those of the society around it will be called a religion by the dominant cultural group. If my descendants think and perceive the world in a manner that differs from thought processes and worldviews of the dominant cultural group, calling them something other than a religious minority is merely a semantic quibble. And our descendants do need to think differently if we want them to survive. 

The religion we have built for my family must be one of many experimental cultures designed to combat fertility collapse. Our unique religion is meant to be one hypothesis among many—because that is all what we are doing: testing a hypothesis. You can riff on ours or riff on the traditions of your ancestors, but raising your children in the urban monoculture with unmodified ancestral traditions is like asking them to charge a gatling gun with spears. Our goal is not to create a new religion but rather a coalition of them that can share cultural resources rendered useless in the wider society (like marriage markets). If you want to join this network, please reach out, (we are building both a school system and will be doing yearly summer camps when our kids are old enough to socialize with likeminded peers).

And if you are interested in the specific religion of our family, we lay it out in a Substack piece titled Tract 1: Building an Abrahamic Faith Optimized for Interstellar Empires. In short, we teach our kids that whatever man becomes in a million or so years will be conceptually closer to what humans today would think of as a God than to a human. This entity is so advanced that it exists outside of time as we understand it and thus, form the perspective of the entity, it is guiding us to reunite with it.

God is the ultimate manifestation of human potentiality, and the good is defined by actions that expand human potentiality. We believe that this is the entity the Abrahamic Traditions¹ were revelations of, and that new revelations are given to man when he has the capacity to understand them. Hence we have a religious mandate to expand that capacity (through both genetic and synthetic means). Ours can be thought of as almost an Abrahamic E/Acc religious system.

Malcom Collins is the founder of Pronatalist.org and the Pronalist Foundation. He has written five best selling books with one topping the WSJ Best Seller list. His professional background is in venture capital and private equity. He runs the podcast Based Camp.

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1. When we say this is an Abrahamic tradition, we mean that God has always done his best to attempt to convey truth to man but man of the past was not yet sophisticated enough to fully understand that truth. The story of Jesus’s life was sent to teach us that God’s Son, as man, must be martyred to sanctify mankind. Only through generational martyrdom can God’s Son (representing all of us) but also God (because we will eventually become God) remove man-kinds flaws that prevent us from joining with God. Of course, this is a concept that people during the life of Christ would have been incapable of grasping so when explained to them it came out as a convoluted plan for God to turn himself into a man, which man would then need to unjustly kill in order for God to forgive man. God told us that he was not the type of entity to demand a father sacrifice his son to appease Him in the story of Abrahm, but in that story he also told us that we, His followers, would believe he was that kind of entity but follow His word regardless until it could be revealed He was not.