The Usual Suspects love to talk about “sustainability” – but they ignore the most basic aspect of actual societal sustainability: unless each woman has 2.1 children, any society will blow away.
What brought this to mind was watching the beginning of a Korean crime drama, in which almost every position of authority was filled by a woman – except for one hapless male detective who got stuck with riding the Seoul underground late at night to catch pickpockets.
He entered a carriage which was empty except for a fashionably-dressed drunk woman sprawled out on a seat, unconscious. A pickpocket entered the carriage at the next station and proceeded to rob the unconscious woman of her expensive jewelry. The detective intervened.
At that point the “drunk” woman came to life, revealing that she too was a police officer. She misread the situation, beat down the larger stronger detective, handcuffed him to a stanchion, and then (wearing high heels, of course) jumped off the train to chase the pickpocket – without first freeing the male detective to help her. I can’t say what happened after that, because I switched off the TV in disgust at this feminist idiocy.
South Korea has the lowest birth rate in the developed world. Fertility has dropped there such that now the average woman has only 0.7 children. South Korea is not sustainable; the country is dying. Perhaps part of the reason for this failure is that South Korean women are being fed a bunch of feminist cobblers by their media?
Hence a modest proposal – female citizens do not get the vote, or the opportunity to run for elective office, until they have delivered two children.
Of course this is unfair to women … but is it any more unfair than forcing young men to go involuntarily to their deaths in the proxy war in the Ukraine? If we want our society to survive, we all have to play our designated parts … even women.
Not a bad idea…although even ONE kid might better be the threshold, I personally don’t wanna be disenfranchised!
I think mebbe any individual who doesn’t have issue, male or female, should be disenfranchised after …what, age 70? 80? Why should they get to shape a future they have no stake in? Unless maybe they own land! Now THAT would be a throwback!
But that isn’t the point you’re making; you feel women who do not do their civic duty to keep the population viable via the birth rate should not get the civil right to vote.
Do keep in mind that many women are not childless by choice.
Should men who’ve never impregnated anyone be disenfranchised? After all, we can’t do it alone!
We need to keep it simple and easily tracked. Motherhood is really definite – fatherhood, not so much. And we certainly don’t want to give the vote (and the right to run for elective office) to men who wander around randomly impregnating females.
Maybe the reasonable course would be to limit male voting to married men with children. I would also support the idea that no man (or woman) can run for elective office without first having served in the military or a police force – and not as a lawyer! I like your idea of a maximum voting age, so that people have to live with the consequences of their votes.
But arithmetic rules! Without those 2.1 children per woman, everything else is simply waiting for the curtain to come down.
Aldous Huxley’s naturalist heritage offered an obvious path forward in Brave New World’s recapitulation of the hive. This is obviously something Musk’s TFR advocacy is broaching with IVF and surrogacy.
On the other hand, who needs organic agents when you can manufacture robots? Sterile workers are, after all, merely “exosomatic extensions of their mother” in the words of E. O. Wilson.
That China hasn’t already started manufacturing females with artificial wombs may, perhaps, be chalked up to the foresight of the CCP’s leadership in recognizing the power of manufacturing specialized machine-cells in the womb war called “technological civilization”.
The weird thing – the thing that is continually there “like a splinter in your mind” – is why Elon Musk’s pro-humanity stance, evident in his concern about TFR, doesn’t force him to recognize that he could not only be 4 times wealthier under a wealth tax, but that it would manufacture many more entrepreneurs like Elon Musk who would be doing all the things he can’t get around to doing in the short time technological civilization has to remove to space.
This is one of the steps toward instituting Militia.Money – which would correct the fundamental conflict between civil society and masculinity evident in Gavin’s question – and thereby preserve human sexuality as well as provide humans for the space diaspora.
There are two aspects to maintaining a society. The first is the demographic numbers game – the need to produce a sufficient number of babies, which is where South Korea and the rest of the developed world are falling short. The second aspect is inculcating culture & civilization into those babies – a decades-long process where the input of the mother is very important. (The input of the father of course also matters). That is where the concept of an artificial womb falls short. Who is going to devote the essential one-on-one attention to the growing child if it has no biological mother?
As to the first aspect, it is fascinating that even in Roman times, because of high mortality rates among the young, a couple had to produce about 10 children in order for at least two of them to survive and breed in their turn. Given the later sexual maturity and earlier deaths of those times, that meant most women had to spend most of their lives pregnant. Now that heavy burden has been lifted from women, but those in the developed world are frequently unwilling to deliver even the 2.1 children essential for sustainability.
First, is to dispense with the illusion of “a sea of troubles”…
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles…
… and apply intelligence to objectively measure the quality of macrosocial models.
That would be fair in view of the fact that men are required to die in war. However, I think most women would sooner accept the responsibility of the draft than that of motherhood. This is not a new phenomenon:
“…formerly the blessing of children was woman’s pride; now she boasts with Ennius that she ‘would rather face battle three times than bear one child.’”
– Marcus Terentius Varro, 1st century B.C. (as quoted in Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization)
It would be difficult to sell the idea of taking away anyone’s right to vote, but we could achieve a similar result by expanding the franchise to include children, and letting parents vote on their children’s behalf until they reach the age of majority. @johnwalker mentioned this idea in an earlier post:
Under this system, a childless woman could still vote, but a woman with four children could vote five times (once for herself, and again for each of her children), or three times if the children’s votes are divided between the mother and father. I don’t think this would stimulate births among people who have already decided not to have children because the returns to voting for any individual are virtually zero (one has a greater chance of being struck by lightning than casting the tie-breaking vote), but it would probably lead to governance with a longer time-horizon.
We are not the first civilization to encounter the problem of declining birth rates. Our ancestors have tried and failed to stimulate fertility among their people. Perhaps there is a solution, but I am beginning to think that everything goes in cycles. The Spartans enacted pro-natalist policies more radical than could be hoped for from any modern state:
“…for they have a law releasing the man who has been father of three sons from military service, and exempting the father of four from all taxes.”
– Aristotle, Politics, 2.1270b
But their society eventually died out due to an unfavorable distribution of wealth in which young men were left with too little property to make viable husbands. @jabowery’s militia.money might have offered a solution. Again from Politics:
“For next to the things just spoken of one might censure the Spartan institutions with respect to the unequal distribution of wealth. It has come about that some of the Spartans own too much property and some extremely little; owing to which the land has fallen into few hands, and this has also been badly regulated by the laws; [20] for the lawgiver made it dishonorable to sell a family’s existing estate, and did so rightly, but he granted liberty to alienate land at will by gift or bequest; yet the result that has happened was bound to follow in the one case as well as in the other. And also nearly two-fifths of the whole area of the country is owned by women, because of the number of women who inherit estates and the practice of giving large dowries; yet it would have been better if dowries had been prohibited by law or limited to a small or moderate amount . . .1 But as it is he is allowed to give an heiress in marriage to whomever he likes; and if he dies without having made directions as to this by will, whoever he leaves as his executor bestows her upon whom he chooses. As a result of this2 although the country is capable of supporting fifteen hundred cavalry and thirty thousand heavy-armed troopers, they numbered not even a thousand. And the defective nature of their system of land-tenure has been proved by the actual facts of history: the state did not succeed in enduring a single blow,3but perished owing to the smallness of its population.”
2.1270a
It merely points to a proximate cause – a cause which is, because merely proximate, in any event, is not actionable.
Indeed, in my view a major (but still not ultimate) contributor to that proximate cause is perhaps encouraged by that documentary:
“The men are no good.”
This is a view held by what I call “the upper 10%” of men (eg Chambers of Commerce) who are suffering from Africanization just as are the vast majority of women:
“The solution is to unleash our inner African Big Man with polygyny!!!”
Not only would polygyny, to these 10%ers, be a great revolution in societal norms because it would get their dicks wet, but it would be EUGENIC!! You see, the only reasonable artificial selection regime – the only “fair” evolution is MONEY.
Without something like Militia.Money, this deadly embrace between female hypergamy and “civil society” coddling rent seekers will result in Islamization ending in the destruction of the biosphere with full-on Africanization of technological civilization rather than launching technological civilization into space. Can’t get you guys to understand why, after discovering the roadblock to commercial launch services wasn’t just in public sector rent seeking, I proposed replacing the 16th Amendment with a single tax on liquidation of net assets and replacing government delivery of social goods with a citizen’s dividend – not even though it would make entrepreneurs like Musk wealthier (and make Bezos less wealthy since his wealth is more dependent on network effect monopolization – take THAT Mr “Zero To One”).
So, OK, ya’ll are junkies addicted to your economic rent streams that insulate you from the need to be entrepreneurs. You can’t be reasoned with directly but perhaps I could convince you to take reform of sociology seriously enough to trick you into discovering that you, like Musk, would be better off if you kicked.
But, hey, I get it… just sour grapes from a “loser” right? Envy… Anger… need to “get help”…
That is really interesting, Magus. I had imbibed the conventional view that Sparta died out because the males adopted homosexuality and lost interest in females – rather as something similar is claimed to have happened with upper class Romans during the declining Empire.
But there has to be more to the story. After all, if a society ended up with lots of idle rich women surrounded by needy toy boys, one could anticipate a fair number of pregnancies.
Stepping back, there are two obvious ways to reduce the number of babies produced by the average woman. One way would be simple abstinence; there have been some reports that this is the situation in Japan, where a substantial proportion to women choose to go to their graves as virgins. The other way is unlimited access to contraception and abortion, which – to judge from the statements of Far Left politicians – is the preference of American women.
Either way, it is clearly women who bear the responsibility for choosing not to have the babies required for a sustainable society. That may be a reasonable decision for each individual woman, but it has societal consequences. This is just another of those important (even existential) topics which “democracies” seem unable even to discuss.
While arranged marriages may work for cultures of group integrity, they are less effective in cultures of individual integrity for the obvious reason that women will inherit a tendency toward individual agency even if not to as great a degree as men. This conflicts with the fertility of arranged marriages in populations descended from cultures of individual integrity. Sparta, like the Yamnaya, was likely in transition due to their geographic proximity to cultures of group integrity hence perpetual war as the mother of “ur” specialization hence group integrity. That transition either extinguishes individual integrity or the culture comes up with some cultural protection of individual male agency such as Militia.Money or formal single combat at least among the aristocrats…
“Transgressive”… heh… just wait until they permit me to start making “transgressive” jokes about Jewish comedians in Sparta.
If I may be allowed to amend & extend my remarks – the above is essentially the Lefties’ beloved “Tragedy of the Commons” in a nutshell. Each individual acts in her own best interests … and instead of society being enriched by the Invisible Hand, society gets flattened by the Invisible Punch in the Mouth.
But we have to accept that demographics is even lower on the list of acceptable political topics in the DC Swamp than balancing the budget. “Democracy”!
Interesting topic you put up here, Gavin. Much of this same stuff was covered in a book called How Civilizations Die - (And Why Islam Is Dying Too by David Goldman. He observes the same issues you bring up - decreasing birth rates in various societies. Japan is on the way to extinction as they are not replacing their dead with babies. So are so many other places.
?Why. Well, he proposes ONE reason is that government largess has gotten to the state where people no longer need children to subsist, nor to care for them in their old age. So all our wlefare systems contribute to a lack of desire to have children. ?Why have kids, who cost money to raise, when you could just spend that money on yourself and let the state take care of you when you need it.
Perhaps another interesting observation he makes is that as any society becomes better educated, the women fail to reproduce at the necessary rate, being otherwise “occupied”. OTOH families with hope - and here it is primarily families that have faith - have multiple children simply because they want to. They have no fear of bringing into this world a child, unlike those without faith who generally are unwilling to bring a child into this world.
I believe Hypatia’s idea of disenfranchising those over 70 or some arbitrary age is counter productive. It is no happenstance that those societies that have lasted the longest revere the elderly. Primarily because the elderly have accumulated experience in life.
Several decades ago a couple friends and I discussed this self same issue. We concluded voting with a weighted scale would be the best idea. So, if none of your children had served time in jail, you got a point. Having a job or retirement was worth a point. Families would get a point (so hudband and wife would each get 1/2 added vote). Completing some educational level - nothing exceptional, vocational school would do - gave you a point. OWNING your home gave you a point, and renting your abode subtracted 5 points. Having served or being currently in the military was worth points. Like that. One could debate just how many points this or that factor was worth, but the clear message was that those who worked to improve society deserved lifting their “influence”.
I’m late getting back to the 19th Amendment’s funeral, but dear @Gavin, given your concern about the birth rate, , why WOULDN’T you want to give the vote only to “men who wander around randomly impregnating females”? They seem like the most civic-minded members of the ideal electorate,
And don’t worry about “tracking”, proof of whether the MEN can prove they did the deed and planted the seed! Just check the local county child support dockets. In order to register to vote, the gents could be required to produce either birth certificates evidencing paternity of 2.1 infants, or two+ child support orders ( wage garnishments accepted.).
See? Easy -peasy, to condition BOTH genders’ civil rights on successful copulation!
I understand we are just having fun here … but for the avoidance of doubt: What a sustainable society needs is citizens; babies are just the first step towards creating productive citizens, and fathers are a key (if currently ignored) element in transforming baby into citizen.
Since we don’t want random male impregnators controlling politics, any more than we want casual baby-mommas calling the shots, it makes sense to limit the vote to married couples with two or more children. Thank you for helping me see the light!
If so, then the criterion for receipt of Militia.Money (ie: the criterion for sharing in the positive network externalities of civilization aka economic rents) should be married couples with two or more children.
But PLEASE, if you want to sustain technological civilization, subject ALL political systems to market competition within property-backed fiat money.
You want something involving “votes”?
Fine… yeah… great… go ahead within the bylaws of a corporation owned by those you consider custodians of the foundation of civilization.
Oooh dear @Devereaux , no can Like! your “point” system is parlously parallel to the Chinks’ “social credit”” system. Admittedly, as you couch it, it’s rightly-guided, but when you set up a system like that, you never know when you’ll find yourself on the WRONG side of the electric fence.
But I’m sure your proposal about that was in the same spirit as my comment about disenfranchising the elderly, Yuh, I don’t wanna be disenfranchised at this point either. I have SO much wisdom to share!! (don’t laugh…). “Why should not old men be mad?” mused Yeats, and I agree, they OUGHTA be mad if they get disenfranchised.
But OTOH, pace Gavin, if all that matters is the birth rate, the old probably won’t be reproducing any more, and unkess they’ve already done so, they)ve lost their chance to plant a flag in the as-yet-unexplored future.
I can’t resist: I could recommend that you polymaths look up Yeats’ great poem, but you probably wouldn’t, so voici:
“Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
Who had a fine fly-fisher’s wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist.
A girl who knew all Dante once
Live to bear children to a dunce.
A Helen of social welfare dream
Climb on a wagonette to scream.
Some call it a matter of course that chance
Should starve good men and bad advance:
That if their neighbors figured plain
As though upon a lighted screen,
No single story would they find
Of an unbroken, happy mind,
A finish worthy of the start.
Young men know nothing of this sort.
Observant old men know it well.
And, when they know what old books tell,
And that no better can be had,
Know why an old man should be mad.”
Aside from being occupied during their most fertile years with the process of education, the opportunity cost of having children is greater for educated women since they command higher market wages.
The Amish and Mormons have among the highest birth rates in the United States, and they didn’t achieve it because of democracy. Perhaps we are wrong to look for a government solution to a religious problem.
Since religious families have the highest birth rates, shouldn’t we expect Darwin to make society more religious in the future? This runs counter to our present cultural bias toward secularism and the idea that secularism is associated with progress.
That is the potential silver lining in the dark demographic cloud – the pussy hat-wearing childless cat ladies are exiting stage left.
I confess to being in a quandry about this. In the long run, it may be a great thing that people who don’t want children leave the gene pool. But the long run is multiple generations – say, a century. A hundred years is a long time in which those people with no stake in the future can do a lot of perhaps irreversible damage to a society.
If I remember correctly, Nevil Shute incorporated an idea like that into one of his novels. I am surprised the Usual Suspects have not already adopted it, because it is an invitation to electoral fraud. Since people can cast variable numbers of votes, it would be impossible for simple checks of the kind that show more than 100% of the electorate voting in certain cities. On the other hand, we have seen that >100% turnout in certain precincts in today’s elections – and no politician dares to make an issue of it.
A conversation I had with the most recent OpenAI release that purports some semblance of reasoning with me more or less playing the role of Socrates. The topic? The impact on TFR and societal wealth of replacing income tax with wealth tax and citizen’s dividend replacing government transfer programs.
