Arctic Dementor

July 3, 2020

Compared with previous generations, Millennials – those ages 22 to 37 in 2018 – are delaying or foregoing marriage and have been somewhat slower in forming their own households. They are also more likely to be living at home with their parents, and for longer stretches.
- pew
honestly, botching household formation seems to have been a major right-wing fuckup this time around.

Indeed; this is one of the key points — “affordable family formation” — Steve Sailer’s been pushing for over a decade now.

But, I’m not sure what, really, we could have done about it, looking at some of the contributing factors:

1. Urbanization

Cities have always been population sinks, maintained by influx from more fertile hinterlands, including ‘delayed or forgone’ marriage. And for the first time in history, the majority of humans now live in urban environments. This is a global phenomenon, and the economic forces driving it don’t look to be changing anytime soon.

Alaska is pretty much all rural — AIUI, even Anchorage fails to meet the definition of “urban” used in Federal statistics — and we’ve been shedding jobs since the middle of last decade at least. And with that has come net out-migration. And it seems to me that much (most?) of rural America is in similar straits.

I’ve seen a bunch of city dwellers lately opining online about contemplating moving to “cheaper” rural lands to get away from COVID19 and/or inevitable police-abolishment-driven-crime-increases. I expect these dreams to crash firmly on the rocks of reality, and little such outmigration to happen, when they discover any decrease in “cost of living” is overwhelmed by a greater decrease in income. Sure, we’ve recently found that some people — high-end computer programmers and the like — can do their job from anywhere there’s an internet connection. But those are at best a tiny fraction of the population. So, as pretty much every other non-governmental employment disappears from everywhere but big cities, you’ll find the only people living outside these large urban hives will be those internet workers (again, a tiny fraction, and probably not young due to time to develop the requisite skills), those able to live off savings (mostly retirees, all too old for the sort of “family formation” we’re talking about), and those who’ve found their way onto one or another government teat.

2. Education

There’s a whole batch of studies, from various places around the world, showing that (Western-style) schooling correlates with later marriage and fewer children. I often see referenced this study from Nigeria showing a reduction of an average 0.26 children per woman per each year of primary (elementary) school. This one from Indonesia shows an increase of 0.38 years in age of marriage for each year of primary school. I recall seeing a study from Nepal showing similar effects for Western-style schools, but not Islamic schools. Then add on top of this post-secondary education that can often take up the years at which physical fertility peaks.

But what could the right really do to push back against education? I mean, pushing against ever-expanding college attendance is a good idea for multiple reasons — but employers are going to keep on asking for college degrees when hiring, due to various systemic incentives, which will continue to push these trends. Add in that increasing specialization and complexity means that more and more jobs do indeed require more and more learning, and as the rate at which we can pump learning into a human brain isn’t changing, that means more time spent in education — “adolescence” wasn’t always a thing, but came about from the amount of learning needed to function as an “adult” in society exceeding biological childhood. (And unless we figure out how to “I know kung fu” download skills into our brains or else massively reengineer our lifespans and time of peak fertility — both of which I find unlikely to happen anytime soon, if ever — then this mismatch between the demands of technological society and our biology are only going to get worse.)

And on the primary and secondary education fronts above, AIUI, there isn’t much difference between public and private schools on this, so “vouchers” isn’t going to affect that. I mean, some on the right are (correctly, IMO) pushing for more homeschooling, but I expect if that ever becomes too vocal or starts showing significant success, we’ll see a German-style ban on homeschooling (I figure we’ll likely see it even without much success in expanding homeschooling).

3. Religion

Variations in birth rates generally correlate more strongly with cultural than economic factors. And one of the more notable cultural factors is religion — at least, certain kinds of religion. The highest fertility groups, by far, are the Amish and the Hasidim.

But you can’t simply propose “become (traditionally) religious” as a broad political solution. America is often cited as an exception to the “secularization thesis” describing trends in Europe. I’ve read a paper (I thought I had it bookmarked) which presented data to argue that America is not really an exception, except in time; that we’re undergoing the same trend as Europe, just several decades delayed. Add in that all the “religious revival” energy in America these days is going into the Great Awokening instead.

Plus, the Amish and Hasidim have a number of unique legal exemptions and exceptions, generally grandfathered in, which aren’t readily available to any new group trying to emulate their example. And even those are potentially at risk — I’ve read more than one legal scholar argue that Wisconsin v. Yoder is, under current jurisprudence on education and parental authority, ripe to be overturned.

Also recall the “quiverfull” movement, which tried to pursue this strategy. And while it worked for one generation, it failed in the long term from lack of retention — unlike the Amish and Hasidim, with their high retention rates (over >90% for the Amish), the quiverfull children pretty much all left the movement.

4. Culture

Again, even outside religion, culture is a big factor. If you read articles asking why the birth rates in Niger are so high — over 6 children per woman — despite the efforts of Western NGOs to provide birth control and education on its use, you’ll find that the answer is that the Nigeriens want large numbers of children; polling shows the average number of children women say they want is 10. For understandable historical reasons, marrying early and having a large number of children are high-status.

Meanwhile, in the West, even in many right-wing spaces, the quiverfull folks were looked down upon, large families being looked upon as the domains of Shaniqua the Welfare Queen or Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. And when it comes to determining what’s “cool” or high-status in the West, the right hasn’t had much influence on that since well before I was born.

When the Amish or Hasidim are held up as examples to emulate, people also point out that part of their success at “insulating” their cultures and retaining their youth comes from literally speaking a different language, both having German dialects as their first language. And while it would certainly be possible for a determined group to change, over a generation or two, their primary language (see the unique example of Israel “reviving” the formerly “dead” liturgical language of Hebrew to a “live” language), it’s not the most practical large-scale political project.

And further, another part of Amish and Hasidic success is that they’re not starting “from scratch,” but as long-established distinct cultures with mechanisms for insulating themselves from the outside culture around them; they’re not having to reverse “modernity,” more they didn’t let it in in the first place. It’s much harder and costlier to undo and reverse damage than to prevent damage.

5. Economics

I mentioned before economic forces driving urbanization and increasing educational requirements. But there are other factors as well (again, see Sailer’s work) like Warren’s “two-income trap,” outsourcing, and competition with immigrants (and you know how hard it is to argue the immigration issue). And while economic factors have less influence than cultural ones, they are more amenable to government policy.

However, this sort of policy intervention into the economic sphere on the part of the right would mean breaking with the pro-business, pro-free-market “fiscal conservatives” who are over-represented among the GOP establishment. And now, particularly with the rise of “woke capitalism,” it is finally happening to some degree (and was likely inevitable — the tripartite alliance between religious traditionalists, free-marketeers, and pro-military foreign interventionists was only ever held together, despite its deep internal conflicts, by the common enemy of Godless Soviet Communism), there’s a reason it’s not easy (and not proceeding easily).

Consider the “fiscal” and “social” axes of “conservative” versus “liberal.” The two “matching” quadrants are both represented in the establishment. I’ve seen many people ask online about why we see plenty of rhetoric about “fiscally conservative and socially liberal,” despite this being the least-populated quadrant by far, and yet we don’t see any political figures of note trying to tap the much larger, more underserved voting pool in the opposite quadrant.

And every time, pretty much everyone, left and right, gives the same reply. On the social axis, just whose social traditions are the “social conservatives” seeking to conserve? Particularly in the global context, and in contrast to cosmopolitan multiculturalism? So you have what might be loosely labeled as “nationalism” (and, in the views of many, at least implicitly of the historical ethnoreligious majority). And on the fiscal axis, you have a pro-government anti-market redistributionist (but, in this context, non-global in redistribution) that is often loosely labeled “socialism.” So, you’re asking why you don’t see a politician openly campaigning on combining “nationalism” with “socialism,” hmm? Why do you think? (I recall seeing this once laid out by an individual on the Left as to why Occupy Wall Street had to fail in the manner it did.)

The right is already painted as a bunch of anti-intellectuals and would-be theocrats and fascists. Look at how people react to “civic nationalist” Steve Sailer’s policy proposals. What could the establishment right reasonably done to promote “affordable family formation” without marginalizing and weakening themselves further, and opening themselves further to attack on the above lines?

And how can one fight the powerful social and economic trends I point to — urbanization, secularization, increasing knowledge requirements, et cetera — without either some sort of (unlikely) technological deus ex machina of the singularitarian bent, a major “unwinding” — likely disastrous — of technological society as we know it, or a spontaneous expansion of religious and cultural traditionalism (my preferred strategy, which you yourself have argued is a non-starter)?

11:06am | URL: https://tmblr.co/Z5F2sbYa5jGq4i01

(Notes: 9)