- To reverse the fertility decline, financial incentives aren’t enough. We need to shift our culture in a pro-natalist direction
- To do that, we need some kind of religion that can guide its members in that direction, while insulating them from the antinatalism of our current culture.
I also agree that Israel is an example to follow. In that country, even secular Jews are having above-replacement fertility. This has happened because the government has striven to make family formation not only affordable but also normal and expectable. Visitors often remark that “this is a country where hot chicks have kids!”
I disagree with some of your secondary points. Financial incentives can help shift cultural norms. Once we have enough people having children, other people will want to follow because humans tend to be imitative and conformist. This is a big reason for the current fertility collapse. Wherever childlessness is sufficiently widespread, it becomes the cultural norm, and people with children will begin to feel isolated and even freakish.
I also disagree with your argument that “an ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction.” Yes, if we look at Europe, we see that fertility rates are higher in northwest Europe, even among the indigenous inhabitants, and that is also where we find the largest immigrant communities. There is a link between the two demographic trends, but I think it’s less direct:
- Northwest Europeans have been more open to immigration partly because they have a long history of individualism, individual rights, and weak kinship ties.
- For the same reason, they are more accustomed to having children without assistance from kin (aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.)
- Modernity, and the social atomization that comes with it, thus has a less dramatic effect on their fertility rates than it does on the fertility rates of other societies, where kin are supposed to play a role in family formation.
Fertility rates will thus plummet in any kin-oriented society that adopts our cultural/economic model of individualism and high labor mobility.
While I agree that instilling the value of childbearing as a religious value in one's own children is a good pro-fertility move, I'm not sure that I really see the point of trying to make a "new religion" out of it. Plenty of regular, non-Amish Christians can and do teach their children that it is important that they, too, have children of their own. Attempting to frame this as a "new religion" seems like adding a lot of extra baggage for no extra value, and comes across as being motivated by simple anti-Christian animus.
With that said, my personal belief from everything I've read and observed, is that the only means of raising fertility rates (other than simply waiting out the current decline) would be to effectively ban women from large sectors of the economy, accomplished through both cultural and legal means. As you correctly point out, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between productivity and fertility. If we want more fertility, we must remove productivity as a viable path. Perhaps that is not actually possible. Perhaps people don't like that answer and won't go for it. But I do believe it's the only thing that would actually work--a world in which women mostly don't work, except perhaps in a select few areas, and a childless woman is seen as a low-status failure.
I can't really blame women for not having children in a world where we expect them to be the same as men when it comes to the economy, jobs, career, etc. The costs of children are real and very high, and disproportionately borne by the woman. Of course they don't feel prepared to pay that price if they already work some corporate job 40+ hours a week.
The other option, as I mentioned above, is to just wait it out. Fertility isn't going to somehow keep declining down to 0 such that humans actually go extinct. At some point, rates will level off or even reverse. But what that will look like is anyone's guess, and it very well might be after everyone reading this post are all dead.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.
I will be looking into your work....it sounds very interesting.
I myself participated in the California Cryobank program....I have around 30 genetic offspring in addition to the children I have with my wife. I would be curious to hear what role you think this technology may play in your "vision". It's not a space age religion or anything...but it was the best idea I could come up with.
The only meaningful way to increase fertility is to embrace the Hatchery. No amount of tax cuts or childcare subsidies will make a big difference. Face it, when people are free to choose, they choose to have fewer children. Embracing backward religiousness or ethnonationalism to boost fertility will lead to bad outcomes. If we rely on the religious and xenophobic to have children, then ignorance and dysgenic fertility will lead to a degraded humanity. Embryo selection, surrogacy (eventually ectopods), and state-run facilities to raise said children is the only way forward.
What utter nonsense. We should be imprisoning breeders, not rewarding them.
High birth rates always lead to higher crime, poverty, hunger and misery. Poverty is a key component of terrorism and the drug trade. Ending our addiction to growth is the only way to solve our problems.
I am very pronatalist and advise my young friends to "have more children and pay less attention to them. they'll be fine and they are wonderful as adults." But even I don't see the point of giving up your religion on the belief that your seed might have a better chance of surviving.
We keep the family genealogy, and when we moved we sorted through it and put it out on display for the children and grandchildren: a high school yearbook from1888, a seafarer's book from 1882, family reunion photos from the 1920s, church Christmas bulletins from the 30s... Our grandchildren didn't care. They were more fascinated by a photo of my wife at six in a dance recital costume. My children also care only as far as their own grandparents as well, even though we had many stories of their greats and great-greats. When we thought about it, neither did we care much beyond two generations.
In the other direction I care about my granddaughters - though less than I cared about my sons. If I am still alive, I doubt I will be much interested in their children. Our ancestors at a thousand years gave no thought to us and probably would not much approve or care about us. I feel the same way about my descendants in a thousand years. There is no evidence that I will even like the ones in a hundred years. Mere life extension into succeeding generations is only an abstraction. Who cares? Really? So my line does not survive, I'm supposed to care? These things are covered pretty thoroughly by Lewis and Tolkien.
We are built to care about the next 1.5 generations, and that's how the system works. Stretching beyond that is mostly imaginary.
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.
As a moderate Christian, I take offense to that. I want us to progress and get off of this rock, but that doesn't have to come by trashing religion.
I think our problem is more basic than that. We have removed morality from the school system and erased the Ten Commandments from our lexicon.
In their place, the Marxists have instituted their own moral code, and they will be more evil than any other in history. They have pushed abortions, transsexual deviancy, and polygamous relationships, and they will seek to control this through community kitchens. Their motto will be "If you don't work and do what we say, you'll starve."
They have their first generation of Marxist-educated people going into business in the healthcare, energy, and political systems. If they get total control, they will kill more people than any other communist government in history. If you don't do what they say, you won't eat, you won't get electricity, you won't get gas, you won't get government healthcare. You'll simply be left out in the cold to die.
Once the Marxists take control, we won't be going anywhere except to a bleak dystopian future.
But I want a bright future where people can do what they want, live like they want, and have as many children as they want.
Shocking idea here, but maybe we don't actually need more people. It's not a "fertility collapse", the last 250 years have just been a, hopefully temporary, fertility boom. The historic normal has been a steady population, because that's what this planet, and any planet for that matter, can support. More humans is not a goal in and of itself. You make no mention of making sure that the people who reproduce are actually good quality people, and that's the only metric that matters.
The most effective thing we could do to make sure our people don't get outbred by the hordes is just to stop feeding them, because you're never going to convince the majority of Whites and Japanese to get enough children to outbreed the Africans and Mestizos. It would also be much less of an infringement on people's personal lives, so it's much more palatable to Big Normie.
AFAICT the strongest case for not needing anything quite so drastic is that:
-- The US had at-replacement TFR (2-2.1) consistently from 1989-2008, per FRED data. During this period it was somewhat more religious than today, but not hugely so, and not under any particularly great existential threat, nor particularly socially conservative/traditionalist.
-- If I understand Lyman Stone's work correctly, the decline since then is not a decline in number of kids *desired*, but an increasing gap between desired and achieved fertility. If the culture had really turned so decisively against childbearing as a life goal in that relatively short time, you'd expect a bigger decline in desired fertility.
This suggests that fixing whatever led to the post-2008 desired-achieved gap could plausibly suffice to keep a basically modern, secular, WEIRD society around replacement rate. Again, the median American in 2008 was somewhat more religious than the 2024 median, but hardly Amish or integralist or whatever. Maybe you can't just throw money at the desired-achieved gap, but it's got to be some combination of socioeconomic issues (e.g. housing abundance) and cultural issues (marriage matching problems plausibly due to social media induced loneliness) that are solvable through incremental fixes, not (counter)revolution.
You could solve it with money, but you’re right we probably won’t. Parents can’t vote on behalf of their kids, so there will always be cheaper votes out there to buy.
The nice thing about solving it with money is that culture will take care of itself. People that want more kids will form communities now that they can afford to
Varg Vikernes has about 7 kids - and raising them within his interpretation of Asatru/traditional Nordic religion. Interesting to see how he will go about the next generation - some of them must be early teens? Would be nice to some real multiplying.
I agree with your two main points:
- To reverse the fertility decline, financial incentives aren’t enough. We need to shift our culture in a pro-natalist direction
- To do that, we need some kind of religion that can guide its members in that direction, while insulating them from the antinatalism of our current culture.
I also agree that Israel is an example to follow. In that country, even secular Jews are having above-replacement fertility. This has happened because the government has striven to make family formation not only affordable but also normal and expectable. Visitors often remark that “this is a country where hot chicks have kids!”
I disagree with some of your secondary points. Financial incentives can help shift cultural norms. Once we have enough people having children, other people will want to follow because humans tend to be imitative and conformist. This is a big reason for the current fertility collapse. Wherever childlessness is sufficiently widespread, it becomes the cultural norm, and people with children will begin to feel isolated and even freakish.
I also disagree with your argument that “an ethnic group that seeks to counteract low fertility by restricting immigration is actually speeding up its extinction.” Yes, if we look at Europe, we see that fertility rates are higher in northwest Europe, even among the indigenous inhabitants, and that is also where we find the largest immigrant communities. There is a link between the two demographic trends, but I think it’s less direct:
- Northwest Europeans have been more open to immigration partly because they have a long history of individualism, individual rights, and weak kinship ties.
- For the same reason, they are more accustomed to having children without assistance from kin (aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.)
- Modernity, and the social atomization that comes with it, thus has a less dramatic effect on their fertility rates than it does on the fertility rates of other societies, where kin are supposed to play a role in family formation.
Fertility rates will thus plummet in any kin-oriented society that adopts our cultural/economic model of individualism and high labor mobility.
While I agree that instilling the value of childbearing as a religious value in one's own children is a good pro-fertility move, I'm not sure that I really see the point of trying to make a "new religion" out of it. Plenty of regular, non-Amish Christians can and do teach their children that it is important that they, too, have children of their own. Attempting to frame this as a "new religion" seems like adding a lot of extra baggage for no extra value, and comes across as being motivated by simple anti-Christian animus.
With that said, my personal belief from everything I've read and observed, is that the only means of raising fertility rates (other than simply waiting out the current decline) would be to effectively ban women from large sectors of the economy, accomplished through both cultural and legal means. As you correctly point out, there is an unavoidable tradeoff between productivity and fertility. If we want more fertility, we must remove productivity as a viable path. Perhaps that is not actually possible. Perhaps people don't like that answer and won't go for it. But I do believe it's the only thing that would actually work--a world in which women mostly don't work, except perhaps in a select few areas, and a childless woman is seen as a low-status failure.
I can't really blame women for not having children in a world where we expect them to be the same as men when it comes to the economy, jobs, career, etc. The costs of children are real and very high, and disproportionately borne by the woman. Of course they don't feel prepared to pay that price if they already work some corporate job 40+ hours a week.
The other option, as I mentioned above, is to just wait it out. Fertility isn't going to somehow keep declining down to 0 such that humans actually go extinct. At some point, rates will level off or even reverse. But what that will look like is anyone's guess, and it very well might be after everyone reading this post are all dead.
It's nice to know I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.
I will be looking into your work....it sounds very interesting.
I myself participated in the California Cryobank program....I have around 30 genetic offspring in addition to the children I have with my wife. I would be curious to hear what role you think this technology may play in your "vision". It's not a space age religion or anything...but it was the best idea I could come up with.
Stop the religion.!
Enough of religion, it has done enough damage to us!!
The only meaningful way to increase fertility is to embrace the Hatchery. No amount of tax cuts or childcare subsidies will make a big difference. Face it, when people are free to choose, they choose to have fewer children. Embracing backward religiousness or ethnonationalism to boost fertility will lead to bad outcomes. If we rely on the religious and xenophobic to have children, then ignorance and dysgenic fertility will lead to a degraded humanity. Embryo selection, surrogacy (eventually ectopods), and state-run facilities to raise said children is the only way forward.
What utter nonsense. We should be imprisoning breeders, not rewarding them.
High birth rates always lead to higher crime, poverty, hunger and misery. Poverty is a key component of terrorism and the drug trade. Ending our addiction to growth is the only way to solve our problems.
This has already been solved: higher rates of higher education for women = lower fertility. Men "do" and women "create"
I am very pronatalist and advise my young friends to "have more children and pay less attention to them. they'll be fine and they are wonderful as adults." But even I don't see the point of giving up your religion on the belief that your seed might have a better chance of surviving.
We keep the family genealogy, and when we moved we sorted through it and put it out on display for the children and grandchildren: a high school yearbook from1888, a seafarer's book from 1882, family reunion photos from the 1920s, church Christmas bulletins from the 30s... Our grandchildren didn't care. They were more fascinated by a photo of my wife at six in a dance recital costume. My children also care only as far as their own grandparents as well, even though we had many stories of their greats and great-greats. When we thought about it, neither did we care much beyond two generations.
In the other direction I care about my granddaughters - though less than I cared about my sons. If I am still alive, I doubt I will be much interested in their children. Our ancestors at a thousand years gave no thought to us and probably would not much approve or care about us. I feel the same way about my descendants in a thousand years. There is no evidence that I will even like the ones in a hundred years. Mere life extension into succeeding generations is only an abstraction. Who cares? Really? So my line does not survive, I'm supposed to care? These things are covered pretty thoroughly by Lewis and Tolkien.
We are built to care about the next 1.5 generations, and that's how the system works. Stretching beyond that is mostly imaginary.
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.
As a moderate Christian, I take offense to that. I want us to progress and get off of this rock, but that doesn't have to come by trashing religion.
I think our problem is more basic than that. We have removed morality from the school system and erased the Ten Commandments from our lexicon.
In their place, the Marxists have instituted their own moral code, and they will be more evil than any other in history. They have pushed abortions, transsexual deviancy, and polygamous relationships, and they will seek to control this through community kitchens. Their motto will be "If you don't work and do what we say, you'll starve."
They have their first generation of Marxist-educated people going into business in the healthcare, energy, and political systems. If they get total control, they will kill more people than any other communist government in history. If you don't do what they say, you won't eat, you won't get electricity, you won't get gas, you won't get government healthcare. You'll simply be left out in the cold to die.
Once the Marxists take control, we won't be going anywhere except to a bleak dystopian future.
But I want a bright future where people can do what they want, live like they want, and have as many children as they want.
Why is any religion necessary to increase fertility? Just explain the consequences of low fertility to the populace.
Immigration of non-native ethnic or racial groups without strict restrictions is a recipe for disaster.
Scientism. I'm not even being mean about it, this is faith in science as the god that delivers a future galactic civilization. Rapture in a rocket.
I would be grateful if a source for the claim that multi-ethnic societies had higher TFR than mono-cultures would be provided.
Shocking idea here, but maybe we don't actually need more people. It's not a "fertility collapse", the last 250 years have just been a, hopefully temporary, fertility boom. The historic normal has been a steady population, because that's what this planet, and any planet for that matter, can support. More humans is not a goal in and of itself. You make no mention of making sure that the people who reproduce are actually good quality people, and that's the only metric that matters.
The most effective thing we could do to make sure our people don't get outbred by the hordes is just to stop feeding them, because you're never going to convince the majority of Whites and Japanese to get enough children to outbreed the Africans and Mestizos. It would also be much less of an infringement on people's personal lives, so it's much more palatable to Big Normie.
AFAICT the strongest case for not needing anything quite so drastic is that:
-- The US had at-replacement TFR (2-2.1) consistently from 1989-2008, per FRED data. During this period it was somewhat more religious than today, but not hugely so, and not under any particularly great existential threat, nor particularly socially conservative/traditionalist.
-- If I understand Lyman Stone's work correctly, the decline since then is not a decline in number of kids *desired*, but an increasing gap between desired and achieved fertility. If the culture had really turned so decisively against childbearing as a life goal in that relatively short time, you'd expect a bigger decline in desired fertility.
This suggests that fixing whatever led to the post-2008 desired-achieved gap could plausibly suffice to keep a basically modern, secular, WEIRD society around replacement rate. Again, the median American in 2008 was somewhat more religious than the 2024 median, but hardly Amish or integralist or whatever. Maybe you can't just throw money at the desired-achieved gap, but it's got to be some combination of socioeconomic issues (e.g. housing abundance) and cultural issues (marriage matching problems plausibly due to social media induced loneliness) that are solvable through incremental fixes, not (counter)revolution.
You could solve it with money, but you’re right we probably won’t. Parents can’t vote on behalf of their kids, so there will always be cheaper votes out there to buy.
The nice thing about solving it with money is that culture will take care of itself. People that want more kids will form communities now that they can afford to
Hail the placenta!
Varg Vikernes has about 7 kids - and raising them within his interpretation of Asatru/traditional Nordic religion. Interesting to see how he will go about the next generation - some of them must be early teens? Would be nice to some real multiplying.
https://x.com/BornLik23266/status/1767602470983815593?s=20
https://x.com/CachetMarie/status/1752317846565061090?s=20
Fan-page:
https://twitter.com/nocontextvarg?lang=en