Based Camp - Robin Hanson： Culture as it Relates to Fertility Decline

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. As you can see today, we are joined by the one, the only, the incredibly

00:00:04.780 prolific and brilliant Robin Hanson. He is the American economist author. He's also an associate

00:00:10.820 professor of economics at George Mason University. But he is known for some of the most catchy ideas

00:00:16.060 ranging from grabby aliens to one of the most popular fertility intervention proposals, which

00:00:20.340 has to do with sort of like a tax bonds on children's future tax generated income. But

00:00:25.860 most recently, on the pronatalist front, Robin Hanson's focus has been shifting to culture.

00:00:31.680 So we wanted to have him on Basecamp to talk about pronatalist culture. Welcome, Robin.

00:00:37.500 Hello, everyone. So as you know, culture, I mean, fertility looks like a pretty hard problem. 0.81

00:00:43.560 Like, right? Yeah. So you guys are working hard. I hope you have success. But you get that it's

00:00:47.960 an uphill battle, right? Yeah. Yeah. So at least I feel good about fertility that I can frame a

00:00:53.020 proposal and say it in words and say, if only you would do this, it'll probably fix the problem.

00:00:58.440 That doesn't mean you can get somebody to do it. But it's a nice thing to have is to be able to

00:01:01.740 have a concrete proposal. It's like, look, if you do this, that would fix it. Yes. And that's,

00:01:06.440 as a policymaker, I'm proud. Like, that's kind of our job. Like, okay, if you guys won't do anything,

00:01:11.580 you know, what the hell? Yeah, that's on you. Yeah. You could have. You could have had nice things.

00:01:15.480 We at least had an idea for what to do. Yeah. But so I thought about fertility for like eight

00:01:21.440 months. And then, like most people in fertility, I came to see culture underlying as a fundamental

00:01:28.660 cause of fertility decline. It doesn't mean that we have to fix it that way, right? We can fix things

00:01:33.500 with money that are caused by culture. If you can afford it, yeah. Right, right. If you can afford it.

00:01:39.620 But as money and culture interact and have for many centuries, like capitalism and culture have had a lot

00:01:44.520 of influences on each other. So just because something's caused by culture doesn't mean it

00:01:48.220 needs to be fixed by culture directly. That is, you could do a money thing that changes culture.

00:01:52.560 And I think the money thing we talked about in our last episode is such a thing that would change

00:01:55.980 culture. But you certainly notice that the proximate cause of the problem is culture.

00:02:00.820 And that induced me, more of a theorist, to say, okay, why? What's causing culture to change?

00:02:08.060 Is it just some random, you know, thing that just happens in the world? Or is there some more

00:02:12.360 systematic way to understand why culture? So it's not, it's like a half a dozen trends I can point

00:02:18.920 out that can, that seem to be causing fertility decline. You guys know them all probably.

00:02:24.360 Yeah, but go into them. Let's go.

00:02:26.500 Yeah, yeah. We made fertility. 0.99

00:02:27.620 Okay, well, let's just mention them for, you know, for completeness sake.

00:02:31.260 Yes.

00:02:31.600 So obviously like longer years of education and early career prep, right? A lot of young women want, 1.00

00:02:37.980 who are very powerful, you know, capable people want to prove that they can do well in their

00:02:43.300 careers. And our career ladders don't give very good pauses. Yeah. And they want to show that they

00:02:48.560 are capable and, you know, be successful. And so they want to wait to, as long as the career ladder

00:02:53.840 requires to then consider having kids. So that's, that's one.

00:02:56.620 Yeah. Hold on. As we go through each of these, I want to talk about how they can be addressed and

00:03:01.280 how other cultures, their state high fertility have addressed them. The two ways that this particular

00:03:06.340 problem I've seen addressed is one, have women not become educated or have men and women not

00:03:11.960 become educated works really well for fertility rates. But also places like Kazakhstan, you still

00:03:16.620 have men and women getting educated, but they're having kids in university. And this is my favorite

00:03:20.500 solution. I think that's the best time to have kids.

00:03:22.700 This is what Simone said is you have to change the expectation of timing. Get married, then you go to

00:03:29.600 university or you get married in your first couple of years of university and should have a couple of

00:03:34.720 kids by the time you graduate. This is a normal within a lot of cultures. But it's an easy thing

00:03:39.800 to frame. I think the quiverful movement had a really good framing of this. You know, the children

00:03:44.700 are like the arrows in the quiver of your youth, which, which points out is that children are supposed

00:03:50.180 to be something that you sort of stock up on while you're young and, and then, and then provide

00:03:55.400 benefit to you when you're older, which is a very different framing than children are the capstone

00:04:00.920 once you are stable.

00:04:04.900 That brings up a next trend, as you know, which is the switch from cornerstone to capstone marriage.

00:04:10.140 You know, when I was young, the norm was you just marry early when you're not fully formed or you don't

00:04:15.660 know what you're going to become. And the two of you form each other and become something together.

00:04:19.640 Yes. Okay. And now the norm is you should find yourself and know who you are and have a stable

00:04:24.800 position and then match with somebody who matches your stable position to what you become.

00:04:29.420 Exactly. And that takes a lot longer. And that also puts on a delay.

00:04:32.800 And I know with this particular trend is that it's not leading to better marriages. Like a marriage,

00:04:40.200 marriage is actually much better. I'd argue to have a cornerstone marriage than to have a capstone

00:04:45.760 marriage because you can one, grow together. Two, it fixes a lot of the problems with the existing

00:04:52.420 monetary difference. So, you know, one of the things I'm sure you're going to get to

00:04:56.280 is that women like men who earn more money than them, but they also don't like men on average 0.99

00:05:02.240 earning more money than them, which means that on average, they're not going to be able to find a

00:05:06.700 spouse once they've corrected and they've overcorrected. Now, if you look at young women, 0.92

00:05:10.300 they over earn men pretty significantly. But so if they're like, oh, I'll only date men who earn more 0.94

00:05:14.980 money than me. And on average, women earning more than men, you know, they're going to have a really

00:05:18.900 hard time fighting a partner. And they're going to be dating a bunch of people who are likely lying

00:05:22.440 to them about like their, their actual status. And that's why women think all men are bastards 1.00

00:05:26.980 because they are sorting into the bastards. But the point here being is that this is a problem that 1.00

00:05:33.640 occurs once you graduate from college. If you normalize marrying somebody going into college,

00:05:40.980 you marry somebody at an age where neither of you has an income yet. And this is why it's so

00:05:46.560 important to get married before you get a job, not after. Yeah. Good point. So I'm not sure of all

00:05:53.600 these trends, but I don't need to be sure that they're just things people talk a lot about. So

00:05:57.020 a third one is more intensive parenting. Yeah. So I think I see this. I see my son taking care of

00:06:03.680 their, you know, our grandchild compared that to my taking care of my son compared to how I was taking

00:06:09.820 care of. Yeah. And if I look, it's like, look at movies from the thirties and forties and kids in

00:06:15.160 the movies and see how much parent attention parents are paying to those kids. They're not

00:06:18.880 paying any attention to the kids. Yeah. What, what attention? Like watching them and taking them

00:06:23.180 around and instructing them. The kids are just running around and the parents are talking to each

00:06:26.240 other and they're just two separate worlds. That was okay back then. Yes. And this is incredibly

00:06:31.780 important to renormalize. And I think that you really cannot have any form of pronatalism work

00:06:36.560 without normalizing this specific thing. And it's one of the reasons why, when many people are like,

00:06:41.580 why do you as the heads of the pronatalist movement so often, you know, get seen by reporters as like

00:06:46.780 not really paying that much attention to your kids or, or, or, you know, being rough with your kids or

00:06:51.420 like mostly ignoring them. And it's like, because that's the only way you make this sustainable.

00:06:55.900 If, if you, if you like overly, and what's wild is, is that we even have AI now. Like I don't even

00:07:01.980 need to talk to my kid for my kid to have somebody to talk to, you know, AI is infinitely attentive

00:07:07.500 and patient with our kids. Like our kids talk with chat to PT and I love it because we'd be like,

00:07:12.660 okay, whatever. And chat to PT is like, wow, I love that too. This is so great. It's just like,

00:07:17.740 this is right. So another trend that certainly contributes via the school thing is just gender 0.99

00:07:22.880 equality. Oh, interesting. If, if women just hold, hold the different life paths and that wasn't 1.00

00:07:28.880 involving career aspirations, then there was, you know, the, the school thing would be much less

00:07:33.820 of an issue. And obviously that did happen in the past. Yeah. So we're not saying we're definitely

00:07:37.840 not saying we're going to reverse all these trends. Like, let's just be clear, but we do want to

00:07:41.920 acknowledge what are the trends that have been contributing to gender equality. So just keep 0.97

00:07:48.760 going, but I'm just going to get Indy cause she woke up. Hold on, hold on. There's actually some

00:07:53.160 interesting data on gender equality that we went over in a few recent episodes where

00:07:58.440 it appears that in some environments, gender inequality, and not some, I actually say most

00:08:06.400 environments today, like in developed countries leads to much lower fertility rates.

00:08:11.540 You're right. So, but it certainly contributed early. Like, so in South Korea, they have this

00:08:15.700 huge gender conflict. And part of it is that women want men to do more household chores and men, 0.92

00:08:20.740 you know, don't think they should, because that's not what they used to do.

00:08:23.440 Yeah. So specifically here, this comes from the, I don't know if you've seen this,

00:08:28.780 this tweet, but it's really good. It's like, what makes these countries different from these

00:08:32.660 countries? And it breaks down like Denmark, the USA, you know, I think like Israel, a few others

00:08:38.740 all in one category. And then another category is like Italy, Portugal, Korea, Japan, China. And the

00:08:45.580 argument presented was, is that the second group of countries modernized and became wealthy much

00:08:52.240 later. And as such, it didn't update its views around gender norms as much. And so you had the

00:08:58.640 economic expectation of women working without the updated gender norms within the household.

00:09:05.660 Although I think many of these cultures were actually just more misogynistic historically.

00:09:09.720 If you look at like Albion Seed or American nations, you can see many of the

00:09:13.360 founding cultural groups of America were highly gender egalitarian. Like the backwoods, 0.97

00:09:19.400 greater Appalachian culture was very gender egalitarian. The Puritans were very gender 0.97

00:09:22.960 egalitarian. And by egalitarian, men and women were still seen as very different, but they...

00:09:27.460 No, no, no, but they were gender egalitarian when contrasted with Japanese or Chinese culture.

00:09:32.160 For sure. Yeah, yeah.

00:09:33.280 Right. But it's about these changing roles. That is, we had the expectation women go to work, 1.00

00:09:37.860 but also that they keep doing the housework.

00:09:40.100 Yeah.

00:09:40.380 And then they're less willing to have kids, which makes sense. But, you know, it's uneven

00:09:44.320 development of gender norm changes.

00:09:46.540 Yes.

00:09:47.160 So an older one that I still think is important to notice is norms of children not living with

00:09:52.700 their parents when they have children.

00:09:54.520 Oh, yes. That's very good.

00:09:56.540 In the old days, people would live in a family estate with three generations.

00:10:01.640 Yeah.

00:10:01.880 And that was usual. So kids didn't have to have their own place or even their own income in order

00:10:06.260 to have their own kids.

00:10:08.120 Yeah. And you'd built in childcare and built in elder care. So big elements of our social

00:10:14.840 safety net.

00:10:15.340 It also meant that the grandparents had more control. They got to say more. But the old,

00:10:20.600 you know, clan-based societies, the patriarch or matriarch just had more say about how everybody 1.00

00:10:26.220 lived.

00:10:26.600 True. Yeah.

00:10:27.520 One of the things people enjoy about our world is more freedom from parental influence over

00:10:31.660 your lives. But a big cost of that is they're not helping so much with childcare, childcare

00:10:36.680 environment, housing, you know, everything else.

00:10:39.300 One hundred percent. Yeah. I think people don't think about the opportunity cost as much as they

00:10:44.280 maybe should.

00:10:44.820 Yeah. And I've seen this as a major fertility factor that is more addressable than many cultures

00:10:53.200 give it credit for. Specifically at NatalCon, one couple was telling me, well, we had kids

00:10:59.580 much earlier than we had planned on having them because we had moved to a community that

00:11:03.260 wasn't our birth community. And the pastor at this community said, oh, well, we'll be there

00:11:08.320 for you. Like, we'll help you with childcare. You let me know when you need it. And then they

00:11:13.540 were like, okay, then I had a kid. And then the pastor told them when the kid was crying

00:11:16.580 one day, he's like, you can let the kid cry. Like, we don't care. Like, and they were like,

00:11:20.300 and I felt really self-conscious. And then I didn't feel self-conscious. So we had a second

00:11:22.680 kid. And these things at a cultural level, like people can be like, culture, isn't something

00:11:27.300 you can change. And it like literally is. You can just go to your pastor and be like, hey,

00:11:31.320 can we like put together some system for like childcare sharing or something like that for

00:11:36.180 our parishioners? Can you like call out and praise people who have children? Like that like

00:11:42.220 increases fertility rates really dramatically. Right. Obviously you as a grandparent could

00:11:49.520 just tell your children about how you might be willing to help, but that's an awkward

00:11:53.520 conversation. I think that is also a lot of us can't like, I can't make my parents take

00:11:58.120 care of my kids. And in truth, I don't think they have the, like, you've got to trust a parent

00:12:03.960 to take care of a kid as well. Like you've got to trust like, oh, I'll leave a toddler around

00:12:07.360 this person. And I think we're a generation that may not have a level of trust in our parents

00:12:14.160 conscientiousness around little toddlers that would have been taken for granted in previous

00:12:19.440 generations. So maybe a lot of that too has to do with child count and, and child rearing

00:12:24.780 participation. So if for example, only one parent primarily raised only one child, like their

00:12:31.140 experience with childcare is probably just. Or, or worse if they, if they had nannies all

00:12:36.460 the time. Yeah. So our habit of moving away from home when we become adults is related

00:12:42.740 here. That is if we stayed in the same neighborhood where our parents lived, we probably could arrange

00:12:48.180 for more grandparent help in child rearing, but we have this habit of going to college

00:12:52.960 somewhere far away and then going to a job far away. And that does make it a lot harder

00:12:56.660 for grandparents to help. Yeah. Though I will say we know anecdotally, at least a lot of people

00:13:02.120 who after having kids have moved to be closer with their parents or have parents who have moved

00:13:07.580 to be closer to them. And it's encouraging to see that like people, I think do understand the value

00:13:13.160 is just making it happen is a lot harder than other, like then it, than it used to be because

00:13:18.420 in many cases, parents really prefer to live a life that doesn't involve providing free child.

00:13:24.560 You have to be willing to make sacrifices. And part of the sacrifice is moving. I was talking

00:13:28.380 with a reporter recently and this reporter was telling me, well, I only have one kid and I live

00:13:33.880 in Manhattan, so I can't easily have more kids because my husband and I have jobs in Manhattan.

00:13:38.320 And I was like, oh, that's really tough. You know, like maybe, and I was thinking, oh, maybe you get

00:13:42.320 jobs outside of Manhattan or something like that. The conversation goes on and I realized, I was like,

00:13:47.700 wait a second. You're a journalist and your husband runs a startup. You can move. You have jobs in

00:13:58.260 Manhattan because you have chosen to have jobs in Manhattan. Being a journalist, you don't need to go

00:14:02.900 to the office every week. And your husband chooses where his office is based. You have chosen to

00:14:08.280 sacrifice the lives of your future children. And I think that that cultural framing is also really

00:14:12.700 big. It's one that we talk about pretty frequently is for us, when we think about like, when does life

00:14:18.920 start, the way you view life can change how many kids you're going to end up having. For fertility, 0.97

00:14:24.060 it appears about the worst way to view life at the beginning of conception because Catholics have 1.00

00:14:27.120 really low fertility rates when you control for income. But I think the best way is the way that we 0.93

00:14:31.340 do, which is to say, every time you choose between two timelines, if you choose to erase a life

00:14:37.260 within one of those timelines, you are responsible for eradicating that person. And you should

00:14:42.100 think about the you in that timeline, how they would feel about your decision.

00:14:47.260 So when I was talking to the journalist and she's like, well, how do I have another kid?

00:14:51.260 Like, can you convince me? But I was like, well, you know, if you have that other kid,

00:14:56.020 five years from now, the you in that timeline is mortified that you ever had this conversation.

00:15:01.180 They're mortified that you ever thought even for one instance about not having that kid.

00:15:06.380 That timeline is just as valid as a timeline in which you don't have the kid.

00:15:10.260 So you should consider that iteration of yourself that is mortified at your selfishness for deciding

00:15:17.000 not to bring a life into the world. And I think that when I talked to reporters about Simone,

00:15:21.580 you know, getting, because she's the most C-sections anyone has ever had is 11. 0.99

00:15:25.520 And Simone's going to be at five with this kid, you know, so she's getting up there.

00:15:29.260 And so, you know, she is putting her life at risk and people are like, why would she put her life

00:15:32.320 at risk? And I'm like, the moral equation is obvious. Like if a robber had a gun to your,

00:15:37.500 your, your spouse's head and one of your kids head and was like, if you don't tell me to like 1.00

00:15:42.760 shoot the spouse, I'm going to shoot the kid. Everybody chooses shoot the spouse, right? 1.00

00:15:46.620 Like, but why isn't this the case when it's a baby?

00:15:50.680 So I've got three more trends left.

00:15:52.860 Go for it. Yes.

00:15:53.580 So one is urbanity. So we had the debate at the previous event, but I do think basically

00:15:58.980 there's this attraction of urbanity that the city centers are full of activities and full of status.

00:16:05.460 There's a place to meet and hang with people. Yeah. If you want to choose a high status life,

00:16:09.580 that's the place to go, but it does cost you in terms of opportunity to cost, including in space

00:16:14.740 and income. And so that does come at the expense, I think, of fertility. So you don't have to live

00:16:19.840 in city centers, but people, if you want to choose fertility, you can, but often the price of that is

00:16:24.660 to be less away from the center of activity. Yeah. What are your thoughts on the role that urbanity

00:16:29.600 plays, however, in matchmaking? Like I think it's a lot easier to find a partner when you're in a

00:16:34.680 highly dense area. And then it seems like, I mean, my general intuition is go to highly dense

00:16:40.160 population centers to find your person. And then when you find them, get out of there and start

00:16:44.340 your family. Right. But unfortunately, like we're pretty plastic culturally when we're young. So if

00:16:48.800 you go to the city when you're 20 and you spend the next few years looking for partners, you will

00:16:53.160 also assimilate the city values and the city practices. Yeah. It's so hard to get out of it.

00:16:57.660 And then you will be less eager to leave the city to go have kids somewhere else.

00:17:01.460 I think that's true though. When like the plot of all the Hallmark Christmas movies and romances

00:17:06.060 is girl with big power job from the city goes back home for Christmas, reluctantly, of course,

00:17:12.300 or like to some small podunk town meets hunky man and stays there forever. Like there seems to be

00:17:17.340 this. I, I, I think that if you approach stages, life stages, like a preset life stage model as a

00:17:24.080 culture, like I was raised totally your life happens in stages, do this at this stage, this at this

00:17:28.500 stage, it's, it's easier to switch between them. If you have that preset up, especially if you have

00:17:35.280 the stage in the city framed of as like a, a, a trial in bad, if you teach your kid to think of a

00:17:43.260 city as a place there, there's not really anything to do because everything costs a ton of money and

00:17:48.760 it's pointless. And that you, you really only get freedom, the freedom to have the privilege of living

00:17:55.280 in the countryside. Once you find a partner, I think that that could help them set up more,

00:17:59.480 but I, I, I think the more options feed into the capstone marriage concept to them. That is look,

00:18:05.780 if you just lived in a small town and those were all the people you would just pick somebody from

00:18:09.160 among them and make do and go on with it. Yeah. The city raises your standards. Here's all these

00:18:14.580 people. I need to pick like one of the best of all these people. I can't just pick the first person

00:18:18.420 I like overwhelmed by the expectation that they're all around for many years. What, you know, how do

00:18:23.660 you think you're going to leave so earlier than, than you assimilate the culture of expecting to

00:18:27.560 spend 10 years in the city looking for the very best person. Fair point. I actually really like

00:18:32.540 something you said there, but I, I, I change it a little for like realistic high achieving culture,

00:18:37.100 which is you want a pool that people are dating within that they feel they can exhaust. If they feel

00:18:43.980 that the meeting pool is inexhaustible, then they go on forever. But if you're like, no,

00:18:47.840 this is all of the best people in the world here, here they are. Um, like that's really what caused

00:18:52.840 me to marry you, Simone. As I went to Stanford business school, I was like, oh, this is supposed

00:18:56.200 to be like the highest competency women in the world. They're not as good as you. So I know I've, 0.53

00:19:00.500 I've searched the world. You need a bounded game of musical chairs and you need to know when the music's

00:19:05.200 about to stop. To do this with our kids is put together a discord like thing with parents who have kids

00:19:10.880 around our kids age who are like based and interesting and like the most successful people

00:19:14.540 in the world. And we're searching really hard to make this group as big as possible. And then we

00:19:18.840 tell the kids in this discord, you can date whatever. And if you find someone you like,

00:19:23.500 we'll send you to live with their family for a bit. So you can like get to know them, get to know the

00:19:27.260 kids and date in a controlled environment so that you get this feeling of, if I don't find the person

00:19:33.200 in this discord, I'm not going to find many people more interesting than this.

00:19:36.660 So think about careers. I did the thing where I kept changing careers many times

00:19:42.860 until I found a career I liked, but that was costly for me. Most people find a career that's

00:19:48.840 good enough and they stick with it. And it might be if we had that attitude toward marriage,

00:19:54.240 like I think I had more of the attitude toward marriage. I found my wife and I said,

00:19:58.180 good enough, let's take her. I wasn't thinking, well, is she really better than the best I could find?

00:20:02.180 But for careers, I had this higher standard of, okay, this is okay. I like it. But like

00:20:06.740 this other thing over there might be even better. So just think about the inconsistency versus career

00:20:12.460 choice versus marriage. People seem to choose their careers much earlier in life than they choose

00:20:16.360 their life partners. It's not clear that you actually should. I mean, you have to spend some

00:20:21.500 time searching for each and then pick and go. Yeah. Your, your life partner matters more and will

00:20:26.880 influence your career. Like the career that they want will influence the career that you want.

00:20:31.100 They can also help you get a career. More reason to pick them early.

00:20:34.820 Exactly. Yeah. And having a spouse can give you the security to have a career. We know so many

00:20:39.000 people who took turns getting graduate degrees or doing the risky job so that the other one had

00:20:43.280 the steady job and it's just, everything's better with a good spouse. Okay. My second to last trend

00:20:48.360 is less religion. Yeah. So clearly there's huge correlations with religion around the world and

00:20:54.360 fertility. Yeah. And the world has become less religious. And that just seems to be

00:21:00.280 a trend that's causing lower fertility. You don't have to understand necessarily why exactly,

00:21:05.440 but it does seem to be real. And what a lot of people miss about this is religion is dropping

00:21:10.500 in gen alpha at a much faster rate than it is in other generations. I'll try to put a graph on screen

00:21:14.700 here if I remember. And so people see that religion has stopped dropping in the United States this year.

00:21:19.780 And they're like, oh, this is a sign that this trend has stopped and maybe fertility rates still.

00:21:23.780 I don't think that that is a sign of that. I think that what we're seeing is reconversions

00:21:28.460 into religion of adults and not a drop in the rate to which young people are being torn out of

00:21:34.680 religions. And then, you know, like us or JD Vance or something like that. Like, and I don't think

00:21:39.600 that this is as positive a sign as people think it is. If I had to look for an explanation,

00:21:46.320 it seems to me that when people are really poor and in desperate circumstances, religion does comfort

00:21:51.680 them in a really substantial way. Absolutely. I don't think that's why I think the reason why

00:21:56.400 religion increases fertility rates is two reasons. One is that it provides an exogenous motivation to

00:22:01.180 have kids beyond hedonism. A lot of secularists, when they're having kids, they're like, will they

00:22:05.420 improve my quality of life? Will I enjoy having them? Will I, but in a religion, it's like, this is

00:22:09.680 the duty, you know? And so you don't even question how it's going to make you feel or anything like

00:22:13.960 that. So the exogenous motivation increases the number of kids. Two, I think religiosity is often

00:22:19.360 just a very high correlatory sort of indicator of a person's, how much they're in an ancestral

00:22:29.200 culture versus the urban monoculture. When somebody becomes more urban monocultured, more like

00:22:34.940 of this progressive cultural group that is all around cities today and it's sort of like a memetic

00:22:38.400 virus, they decrease in religiosity. And so if you look at atheists who are distant from the urban 0.97

00:22:46.300 monoculture, they're often pretty high fertility. So you can look at like Elon Musk, who's pretty

00:22:50.320 distinct from the urban monoculture, very high fertility, or some people would consider us a

00:22:53.860 form of secularists and we're pretty high fertility. So I think that there's two parts. There's what's

00:23:00.020 causing the religion decline and then does religion decline cause fertility decline? So, I mean, I think

00:23:05.900 in a modern rich world, we're comfortable and secure enough that we don't need religion so much,

00:23:13.220 but look, when you're just really poor and like your children are dying and you're in war and

00:23:18.360 whatever, religion just is an appeal much more directly. Like it gives you comfort and some

00:23:23.960 place in the world and meaning that you really want and need. And, but once you have that,

00:23:29.140 the structure that you tend to get with, it comes with structures that make you also want to be

00:23:32.720 fertile. That is the kind of meaning you get in religion is, you know, helps, is a compliment of the

00:23:37.700 kind of meaning you get in family. But there's this puzzle, why, why isn't there a modern

00:23:42.000 culture religious? And I think it's because they're just rich and comfortable and not really

00:23:46.820 very afraid of very much. Although, don't you think there's also this big correlation between

00:23:51.900 religions and the ability to delay gratification and think in terms of the longer term with the

00:23:57.280 contrast being that mainstream urban monoculture culture is about instant pleasure and you will

00:24:03.560 never have kids or at least a lot of kids if your life is about instant pleasure. Like kids are

00:24:08.880 definitely a delayed gratification thing. Strikingly, although a lot of, you know,

00:24:13.660 the urban monoculture people are willing to make sacrifices for careers. You know, they'll spend a

00:24:18.920 lot of time studying for classes. That is true. Yeah. That's a really good point. That's a really

00:24:23.320 good point. And careers suck. Yeah. They're not always the most fun. So wait, then what is, 0.99

00:24:29.740 what is the Robin Hanson solution to the Robin Hanson fertility stack of demographic collapse? Like

00:24:35.580 what would you, if you were one last trend and then let's, let's talk about the underlying problem.

00:24:40.480 Yes. So one last trend is just a more integrated world. A less integrated world would just have more

00:24:46.520 variety and all these different kinds of cultures around the world and what their attitudes were

00:24:50.440 related to fertility. So a more varied world would just have some places that happen to have high

00:24:56.200 fertility and other low. And at least, you know, we'd have more overall fertility, but our dominant 0.99

00:25:02.200 monoculture is low fertility and we have all this communication and travel and trade in the world

00:25:08.560 that just merges the world together into a shared culture. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the hot, so now the

00:25:16.440 question is, okay, we see all these trends. What's the cause now first notice in our world, the most

00:25:24.000 prestigious intellectuals are the people who comment on the sort of trends we've been talking about.

00:25:28.140 They point out what the social trends were and they want to like talk about what the trend should

00:25:33.500 be. Everybody loves this culture trend conversation. It's the most elite conversation you see in pundits

00:25:39.540 and you know, everybody else. It is, it is. But, but there's also a separate group of people who

00:25:45.420 analyze how culture happens over time. They are specialists in cultural evolution and they are not

00:25:50.320 very prestigious, even among academics. And they really crave being scientific. And so they try not to

00:25:57.260 enter into these conversations about cultural trends, because that would be non-scientific.

00:26:03.900 And those are the people I turn to, to understand what's happening with culture. How does it work

00:26:09.180 and how to understand these trends, but you have to turn away from the most prestigious culture talk

00:26:14.080 because the way people talk about culture is kind of the way you guys have been here, which is as a

00:26:20.140 participant, you say, what are the trends? What do I like? What I don't, which, what could I argue for?

00:26:24.220 What could I argue against? That's what prestigious culture talk is like, is analyzing, like recruiting

00:26:30.620 allies for your direction to push culture and recruiting like arguments and things like that.

00:26:36.300 And that's what you're doing in fertility. And I'm glad you are doing it. But the key thing to notice

00:26:40.700 is that makes you somewhat blind to what's this process by which cultures change? How does that work?

00:26:47.660 Tell us, because we've written a whole book on this subject.

00:26:51.580 Yeah, we're curious to get your take.

00:26:54.380 Well, so the basic idea is it's just randomness. That is, humanity's superpower is cultural evolution,

00:27:01.660 and it's just a different kind of biological evolution. And it's just variation and selection.

00:27:06.540 And in fact, it's simpler than DNA evolution, because DNA evolution had billions of years to collect all

00:27:11.820 sorts of like clever tricks and hooks and like fixes for things. But cultural evolution is just

00:27:18.780 new and simple. And so it's really just very basic variation and selection.

00:27:23.340 Yeah, the analogy that we use in the book, The Pragmatist Guide to Crafting Religion,

00:27:27.420 which is 100% on this topic, is we argue that culture is an evolving software that sits on top

00:27:33.020 of our biological hardware and can adapt to environmental constraints much faster than the hardware can.

00:27:38.780 Right. Now, the framing I want you to see, though, is an analogy to driving a car.

00:27:45.020 Like, so when you're driving a car, you have a control system. You look and see the road ahead

00:27:50.300 and you see where the road turns. And then you're supposed to see the road, think about where you

00:27:55.740 want to be, tell your hands to turn the wheel, the wheel turns the, you know, the wheel turns the tires

00:28:01.340 and then the tires moves the car. And each of these things has parameters in terms of the delay

00:28:07.180 and sort of the noise. And that should be compared to like how fast you're going down the road and how

00:28:12.140 fast the road's changing. So if your parameters of how fast you notice things and how noisy you

00:28:18.140 see things are too bad, you won't be able to stay on the road and you'll just go off the road.

00:28:23.340 If you drive slowly enough and see the road well enough, you can follow the road,

00:28:27.180 but otherwise you go off. And the same sort of parameter comparison should be there for cultural

00:28:31.660 evolution. Cultural evolution is this process where there's a distribution of cultures

00:28:37.100 and there's some sort of distribution of fitness landscape. And the fitness landscape is actually

00:28:42.220 going to be moving a bit. And these points on the landscape are also going to be fluctuating around

00:28:46.620 a bit. And the cloud of points will follow the fitness landscape as it moves if the parameters are

00:28:55.900 right. That is, if you have enough points, if the pressure to like, you know, when you have the

00:29:03.420 more adaptive region that the pressure, you know, those things grow faster, those things shrink,

00:29:08.300 then the drift rate is low enough. And the rate at which the landscape changes is low enough, then

00:29:13.580 selection can follow it as the cloud of points will follow the landscape as it moves if the parameters

00:29:19.900 are right for cultural evolution. And then the thing to notice is the parameters have changed.

00:29:26.060 So three centuries ago, the world had hundreds of thousands of peasant cultures, 0.85

00:29:32.780 each of which had a thousand or two thousand people in it that were really pretty independent.

00:29:37.180 They didn't trade that much with each other or do that much. They each little cousin culture mostly

00:29:41.260 was self-sufficient and they were poor at the edge of survival. So they suffered famines and pandemics

00:29:48.220 and wars all the time. And they were conservative. They didn't want to change very much. They tried to stay

00:29:53.500 near as they were. And the environment was changing slowly. So, you know, the world economy doubled roughly

00:29:57.980 every thousand years up until a few centuries ago. And so that's a stable situation for the cloud of

00:30:05.020 cultures to follow the adaptive landscape. Slow change, conservative change, lots of variety and

00:30:12.620 strong selection pressures. And now in the last few centuries, we've changed all four of these parameters.

00:30:17.740 So we first merged peasant cultures into national cultures. So there's a famous book, Peasants into

00:30:26.060 Frenchmen describing that in France, but that happened everywhere. And then afterwards, these

00:30:30.460 different national cultures have merged into a global monoculture, as you're all aware. So the variety

00:30:36.700 has gone way, way down. And then if you look at selection pressures, cultures just don't die very

00:30:43.260 much anymore from war or pandemic or famine because we're rich, we're healthy, we're at peace. And so,

00:30:50.220 you know, there's just very little selection. And now the environment is changing very fast.

00:30:54.540 That is what behaviors are adaptive is rapidly changing as the economy grows. And then added all

00:31:02.460 to that, we have this internal random change process. We have cultural activists who are

00:31:06.780 trying to change culture, like you guys are trying to do. And they have fights over which way culture

00:31:12.940 goes. And some of them win the fights and others lose. And the winners are our greatest heroes in our

00:31:17.420 world, cultural activists who fought for cultural change. But the fights and who wins them aren't very

00:31:23.340 aligned with adaptive pressures. So from the point of view of the system, it's kind of, it's a random

00:31:28.380 drift. It's a, it's a lot of random fluctuation. So fast changing environment, a lot of random drift,

00:31:34.700 not much selection, far less variety. That's a recipe for going off the road.

00:31:40.940 It's it. So the, the, the, the addition to your model that I would add, and we talk about this a lot

00:31:46.220 in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion is culture should be thought of as broadly being in two

00:31:51.100 categories. First, we use with a lot of data to argue historically that cultures should largely

00:31:57.580 be thought of as religious groups. Like that's the easiest historically, they're mostly religions

00:32:02.620 and that they mostly grew not through conversions, but by affecting fertility rates of populations.

00:32:08.460 They literally enhance the biological fitness of their hosts. And that in modern times,

00:32:14.380 we've had cultural parasites evolve that were not that common in evolutionary history,

00:32:21.100 essentially in the same way that you can get parrot, like super bugs in hospitals where you have a bunch

00:32:25.900 of immunocompromised people all next to each other. If you have a bunch of people outside of an

00:32:30.220 environment that is anything like the environment, their culture evolved in, in like city, you're going

00:32:35.100 to get the environment of aliens, which realize that they can grow faster by motivating a person to

00:32:43.900 almost like a virus infecting an ant, ignore your own reproduction, just replicate the meme,

00:32:49.660 just replicate the meme, just replicate the meme. And we argue that this is what the urban monoculture

00:32:55.420 is. So we've got sort of a double whammy here, which is what you pointed out, which is very astute,

00:33:02.060 which is called the environment that the culture needs to optimize fertility within is entirely

00:33:09.100 different than the environment it evolved within. But now you also have these parasitic attacking,

00:33:17.340 they're not even like, it's like you're surrounded by wolves. You're basically sending your child

00:33:21.180 into like a den of wolves every day and hoping they make it back out because the wolves can only survive

00:33:26.940 because of their low fertility rate by taking the children from other cultures. 1.00

00:33:30.940 And, and that this is as bad as the change in modernity.

00:33:39.420 So this, this field of cultural evolution, these experts do find the ways that cultural evolution

00:33:44.780 go wrong. And one of them, as you say, the more you inherit from people other than your DNA parents,

00:33:50.220 the more ways that things can be inherited that aren't promoting, you know, DNA reproduction. And that's one of

00:33:57.420 the ways that can go wrong. Another way it can, it's known to be able to go wrong is the key idea

00:34:02.700 is if you just copy random previous generation people, it doesn't help. You have to be selective

00:34:08.060 about copy who you copy to be better than average. And our main simple heuristic is to copy prestige,

00:34:14.220 copy status. But if the status markers we use are maladaptive, then the whole thing can go maladaptive.

00:34:21.340 So one story is that we got into this habit of using education as a status marker.

00:34:27.820 And so we copy the behavior of the well-educated, but they have lower fertility because it takes 0.86

00:34:33.180 longer to be well-educated. So that's a driver for lower fertility is to, because the status 0.99

00:34:38.300 marker is maladaptive. So status markers can just evolve and become maladaptive. And then it takes a

00:34:44.220 longer process for, you know, the whole society to be selected out to replace it.

00:34:49.180 Yeah. Well, I mean, I could argue that education isn't intrinsically maladaptive. Education is

00:34:53.420 maladaptive in our culture because it's one, how we relate to it. And two, because it's infected with

00:34:57.580 the urban monoculture at a much higher rate than any other cultural center. And the urban monoculture

00:35:03.020 focused on evolutionary pressures, just like everything else. It overly focused on the educational

00:35:08.620 centers because the iterations of it that did were better at spreading themselves. If you have access to

00:35:13.020 young minds, people generally convert from their birth culture between the ages of 13 and 22.

00:35:18.380 And so if you have access to them during those age ranges, like a lot of people have been with

00:35:23.180 the urban monoculture, like, Hey, trans people lay off kids. Like, why are you being so creepy about

00:35:27.020 this? I mean, it's because the iterations of the trans culture that weren't didn't spread and don't

00:35:32.620 exist anymore because you can really only get someone at that very young age range. In addition,

00:35:38.220 they started to focus on tactics that we see was in cults due to cultural evolution.

00:35:42.700 Like convincing people to hate their support network, like their parents to their family,

00:35:47.740 their, their ancestors, because it's much easier to, to, to convert them into a different religion.

00:35:52.380 If you, if you do this, but anyway, continue. I'm interested.

00:35:55.820 So I want to make a distinction here that like takes a little work, but it helps us to think about

00:36:00.140 these things. So think about species and biology. Okay. There's two levels of evolution that happens

00:36:06.860 in biology with species. There's evolution of features within a species, things that can change within a

00:36:11.660 species. And there's evolution of the features that define a species. Now, when you have large

00:36:17.420 habitats, like a big ocean region, you have fewer, bigger species, and they have faster evolution of

00:36:24.700 the features that can vary within a species because the species is bigger and innovations can appear

00:36:28.780 anywhere and spread to the whole rest. But you have less innovation of the features that define a

00:36:33.260 species because there aren't so many. In a fragmented habitat, like a river, a rainforest, or, or a coral

00:36:40.380 reef, you have lots of little habitats. And so you have lots of smaller species and that makes less

00:36:45.500 evolution within the species, but better evolution of the species of the features that define a species.

00:36:50.540 Now it turns out life on arts today, it came more from the fragmented places, which means that

00:36:57.580 evolution of the features that define a species actually matters more than the evolution of the features that

00:37:02.620 can vary within a species, surprisingly. Interesting. The same thing homes for corporate cultures.

00:37:08.220 So corporations, you know, some innovations can spread within a company, and then the bigger the

00:37:12.780 company is, the better you can evolve those iterations. And many kinds of things that can be

00:37:17.260 patented are of that form. So bigger companies have more patents. And so an industry that has fewer

00:37:23.340 bigger firms is better at patenting and producing the innovations that can vary within a firm. But industries

00:37:30.380 that are more fragmented, that have more smaller firms, are more innovative overall, because they can better

00:37:38.700 innovate in the corporate culture features that define the whole corporation, that you need a whole new

00:37:45.180 corporation to experiment with those. And so the same thing should happen with macro cultures. And you see, many

00:37:51.580 people are fooled by the fact that we have record economic growth today, say. But that's because when we merged the

00:37:58.380 entire world into one big monoculture, we have great evolution of the things that can vary within the monoculture,

00:38:04.940 like technology and business practices. So those are going gangbusters. We have record ever rates of

00:38:11.660 innovation and business practices and technology. But at the expense of much weaker or even regressive

00:38:19.260 evolution of the features that are shared across the culture, like the ones we were going through.

00:38:23.660 The major cultural features that are causing fertility decline are the kind that it's hard for a small

00:38:29.100 group to deviate from the world consensus on. If you say you don't want to value education, but the world

00:38:35.020 does, you just get less education. But now the world disrespects you and you suffer. You can't just make

00:38:40.940 a group of people who all say, we don't care about education. We're going to care about each other.

00:38:44.220 That's hard to me. That's interesting. Yes. So if you were going to craft a culture to combat this,

00:38:54.620 what features would it have? Well, I like the analogy of you're on a ship heading to an iceberg.

00:39:01.340 You've got two choices. You turn the whole ship or you get off on icebergs.

00:39:06.940 I'm not an iceberg. Off on icebergs. Sorry. Off on icebergs. It won't make any sense.

00:39:13.420 So if you are mixed in with our global culture, you need to help us change the whole global culture 0.89

00:39:21.740 in order for us to not fall off the cliff, hit the iceberg. Or you need to form a new subculture

00:39:28.780 that's insular enough to actually deviate from the dominant culture. And that's hard. So that's,

00:39:35.020 for example, what the Amish or Heretim have succeeded in doing, which is really amazing.

00:39:39.100 They've created not only insular, they've created subcultures that only have high fertility and 1.00

00:39:43.180 double every 20 years, they're insular enough to be able to resist the outside influence.

00:39:46.940 And that's in part by foregoing many kinds of technology and contact. And that's a really high

00:39:52.220 bar. So if you have a small, if you have a small group of people saying, we want to make a new

00:39:55.580 subculture here. The key question, as I've talked to you guys about before, is how insular do you think you

00:40:02.140 could actually be? Well, I think that it's possible, and this is a hypothesis, that it is

00:40:08.060 possible to craft a culture that can interact with technology and mainstream culture and not deconvert.

00:40:14.300 And if anyone can do this, that person owns the future. Because that person is going to have

00:40:20.140 automated drone swarms and everyone else is going to have AKs. So like the Amish do use technology, 1.00

00:40:27.180 they just resist the technology that would put them in cultural context. So they have like,

00:40:31.340 they switch to small businesses, they use machines in their small businesses, they use, you know,

00:40:35.500 tractors, they use trucks, they use, you know, all sorts of machines that don't threaten to give

00:40:41.500 them cultural influence. Some, some do, some do not, not all. But yeah, right. So interestingly,

00:40:48.700 like far, the Amish were farmers up into a generation ago. And then the last generation,

00:40:52.380 they made the switch to be mainly rural small business, which is quite a substantial change.

00:40:56.620 And it does risk their insularity and fertility, but they seem to be making a go of it.

00:41:02.220 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm concerned about that. I I've read that

00:41:06.220 from some people who've had more exposure to the communities than we have, that those who are

00:41:10.940 adopting more technology are also seeing a fall off in the stability of their communities,

00:41:16.620 their marriages, their, their birth rates. That's the risk to worry about. Yes.

00:41:19.820 Yeah. There's a great study on this, Simone, that looked at Pennsylvania and Dutch speakers in the,

00:41:24.060 in the U S and then whether or not they had cell phones. And if they had cell phones,

00:41:28.780 they had fairly low fertility rates. And if they didn't, they had fairly high fertility rates.

00:41:32.940 So like their community, isn't that resistant to, to cultural mimetic viruses.

00:41:40.460 So I watched some videos on like Hutterites. And one of the stories you see over and over is that

00:41:45.500 like, if you want a local doctor, then he has to be sent off to a medical school. And then when he

00:41:51.420 comes back, he's less likely to stay. And so I think that's really the main reason they are pacifist.

00:41:56.860 They just don't want their young men to go off and mix with other young men in the military. I

00:42:00.380 think when they're big enough to have their own military units, they'll be fine.

00:42:03.980 I mean, from a cultural evolution perspective, it would be the iterations of the Anabaptist traditions 0.98

00:42:10.060 that weren't pacifist had their men interact with other men in militaries and disappeared.

00:42:13.500 Right. I never thought why so many of them were, that makes sense.

00:42:19.420 So it's almost like the same as avoiding university, you're saying?

00:42:21.900 Yes. Right. Like avoiding being a medical student. So they actually have trouble getting their own

00:42:26.140 doctors. They were going to go to a non-Amish doctor or Hutterite doctor, because it's hard

00:42:30.140 to have their own doctors because to send their own boys off to medical school and get them to actually

00:42:34.300 come back and stay is a hard trick.

00:42:35.820 Okay. That makes sense. Wow. Okay. That's super interesting.

00:42:40.940 That's really clever. Yeah. Okay. But it shows you what you're up against here.

00:42:44.620 Yeah.

00:42:44.940 Trying to have a small subculture. Let's call it cult. The world actually could use more

00:42:48.860 cults and let's just call it cults. It really could. Yeah.

00:42:51.740 But it's hard to maintain a cult. Most small cults just die and don't last very long.

00:42:55.580 Yeah. And the hard part here, if you want to do the lifeboat strategy, as opposed to turn the ship,

00:42:59.820 you've got to find a way to keep the lifeboat intact and away from the ship. And that's quite

00:43:06.700 a challenge.

00:43:07.660 I might push back against the concept. A lot of people are like, oh, you know, you guys are starting

00:43:12.140 your own weird religion or whatever, like that, that most of those die. I'd actually argue if you

00:43:17.260 look historically, that's not really true. Most religions are, if you look at like cults, cults,

00:43:22.940 if they were founded for like personal gain or something like that, most of them die.

00:43:27.180 But the ones that were not founded for personal gain, actually fairly frequently are persistent.

00:43:34.380 There is not a, unless, now there's a few, unless it's here, unless they were celibate,

00:43:39.740 there's that. Yes, of course.

00:43:41.020 Or they were founded around a fad that was temporarily locked. So these are often tied to like

00:43:49.020 eating habits and stuff like that.

00:43:50.940 There's a literature that I recall on, looks at communes in the United States from the 1800s.

00:43:56.620 Yeah. And how they varied in the intensity of the religions that were organized around.

00:44:01.500 I saw those articles. Great one.

00:44:02.780 Right. High ask religions lasted longer than low ask religions.

00:44:06.540 There you go.

00:44:07.660 Yeah. And so basically, don't be afraid to do a strong ask

00:44:12.540 in terms of what the cult or culture is asking of its participants, because that's in fact,

00:44:17.580 high asks will make you people more stay with religion.

00:44:21.020 Yeah. In the privateist guide to crafting your religion, we compare them from like hard to soft

00:44:25.580 to super soft cultures with hard cultures, making the most asks, doing the most othering,

00:44:30.860 but also having the most cultural amenities that are really beneficial because often the hardness of

00:44:35.580 these cultures is accompanied by really helpful amenities like, okay, an ask might be a lot of

00:44:41.820 fasting days, but those fasting days help you develop inhibitory control. And there are other

00:44:45.900 health benefits as well. A big ask might be, well, you have to communicate, you have to contribute

00:44:49.900 all these things to community, but you may be contributing childcare to families that enables

00:44:53.180 them to have more kids, which is a huge amenity for them. And they wouldn't want to leave that

00:44:56.300 vaccinated childcare. So that there's that, that weird correlation that also that the more weird

00:45:02.940 you are in your culture, we really like this concept of othering is I think, you know, because

00:45:07.260 we like our weird names and weird dress and weird behavior because it stops you. It makes you see

00:45:12.940 yourself as distinct from mainstream culture and have some pride in that negative emotional

00:45:17.740 moments with mainstream culture. Like people are like, oh, you name your kids weird things.

00:45:21.180 Won't they be mocked in school? And I'm like, that's a good thing. You want them to dislike

00:45:26.140 the urban monoculture. Yeah. So I did some surveys a while ago and had some conversations with some

00:45:32.540 people who are into multicultural. And I think people agreed with the following description.

00:45:36.940 A lot of people in our world like the idea of multiculturalism when they think of it as different

00:45:41.340 foods and dress and holidays and myths. And, you know, in ways you build your houses,

00:45:47.020 they love that kind of multiculturalism and different TV shows, different, you know,

00:45:51.500 different song genres. Right. Yeah. When you talk about multiculturalism as having deep values of the

00:45:57.100 sort we talked about that are driving fertility change, like gender equality or war or democracy, 0.87

00:46:01.980 people hate the idea of that kind of multiculturalism. They don't want that kind. They're

00:46:07.020 particularly against it. So that's, you know, the kind of the obstacle here is the world is so

00:46:12.140 into shallow multiculturalism and really aggressively against deep multiculturalism.

00:46:17.980 So I think about COVID, there were one or two nations in the world that deviated from the world

00:46:22.380 consensus about how to do COVID. And everybody else in the world is like heretics, terrible, 0.99

00:46:26.380 like, you know, string them up. How do we allow, how do we dare allow Sweden to have a different 0.96

00:46:30.380 COVID policy than everybody else? Because, you know. Oh, that was such a thing.

00:46:34.540 No, I love this, but we have a theory on this. So if you look at the urban monoculture,

00:46:39.100 which is, I think is what's driving this view of multiculturalism, they will say above all else,

00:46:44.300 like multiculturalism is good. And then I'm like, okay, so like in Africa, are you okay?

00:46:49.980 Was there like marriage structure? They're like, no, their gender roles are all wrong. Are you okay? 0.97

00:46:53.900 Was there sexuality? No, no, that's all wrong. Are you okay? Was the way they view morality? No,

00:46:58.300 that's all wrong. Are you okay? Was the way they view religion? Oh, well, that's all wrong.

00:47:02.300 And what I realized after a while, and I always was like, why, why even does diversity have value

00:47:06.940 if everyone's secretly the same? Like it wouldn't. What they mean by valuing diversity is that they

00:47:13.420 value a diversity in victims. They value a diversity in people that they convert to their

00:47:20.220 imperialistic cultural practices and not in maintaining actual diversity. Because the odd

00:47:26.540 thing about the urban monoculture is it lets you superficially identify as like a Muslim or a 0.93

00:47:31.660 Christian, but you can't have Muslim or Christian views about like gay people. You can't have Muslim 1.00

00:47:36.780 or Christian views about like a wife's role in the family. So yeah.

00:47:41.420 So in the long run, we have the success that if we eventually spread across the stars,

00:47:47.420 the distances will ensure cultural diversity. Thank goodness.

00:47:50.780 The long delays will in fact mean that different places have different cultures and they just can't

00:47:54.940 stop that. But if that's several centuries away, the question is how can we manage between now and

00:48:00.060 then? Because in the next time, we will have, again, the high rates of communication, trade, talk,

00:48:07.660 trade, you know, travel are just seem like those costs are not going to go way up anymore. And so you

00:48:13.580 have to artificially limit them if you're going to. And most people really enjoy all the, you know,

00:48:19.980 connection with the world that we have. So even if I try to imagine asking a few friends to like,

00:48:25.820 can we, you and I just like isolate ourselves and live on an island and not talk to anybody else.

00:48:29.660 Yeah. That's going to, that's going to work. Yeah. Yeah. And we, we even have so many friends

00:48:34.460 who've been like, Hey, let's all just like move to this one place and build a community together.

00:48:39.100 And people have even started that they've purchased property and they can't get anyone to move out.

00:48:42.860 Or people are like, ah, you know, it's, oh, I don't really feel like it.

00:48:46.620 I'm sure you've seen this a hundred times. People trying to start coming in.

00:48:49.340 I actually joined a cult when I was a tween. So I have an emotional inside view of, of cults.

00:48:58.300 Did they live together? I was in San Diego and it was a local Pentecostal religious cult. And I sort

00:49:04.940 of attended their meetings and they had meetings at group houses and they had some compound in Iowa

00:49:09.420 that I never went to, but basically I could feel emotionally what it was like to be in a cult.

00:49:15.820 And I can see the appeal. So I think ever since then, I understand at a visceral level,

00:49:20.540 what is, what the appeal is. Well, what was it that drew you in? I mean, especially as a teen boy.

00:49:25.900 Tween, really. Tween boy. Yeah. Right. Well, the idea was just, they included you. They loved you.

00:49:33.740 They wanted the best for you and they were going to, you know, help you if they could. That sense of

00:49:39.020 belonging and mutual support was very attractive. And then of course they had a mission and they had a,

00:49:44.300 a reason they were special and that, that motivated them and gave, gave them meaning.

00:49:50.300 And that's all very attractive, even to like, you know, 12 year old me who grew up in our

00:49:55.500 shared culture, but we don't offer that so much to most people.

00:50:00.060 Yeah. And that was just appealing. But you know, after, I don't know, six months or a year,

00:50:03.980 my parents said, you can't go there anymore. We don't like them. And I just, okay, fine.

00:50:07.820 So I didn't fight my parents or rebel too much. I'm, I'm, but I, but basically I still remember

00:50:13.740 what it felt like. And it is a strong appeal, but you can see most people just, yeah.

00:50:20.700 The very idea of what I'm saying for most people goes, that sounds pretty icky. Yeah.

00:50:24.540 And that's part of the modern culture is that is to disapprove of that.

00:50:27.820 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I didn't just simultaneously love bomb you with their tactics. And if you joined

00:50:35.260 their process. Interesting history is that roughly a century or century and a half ago,

00:50:42.860 cultural elites in our societies realized consciously that they had drifted away from some

00:50:49.340 more stable culture that they had come from. And they then called themselves modernists.

00:50:54.540 And they said they were in a modern era. What they meant by that literally was

00:50:58.140 the one thing we're sure of is we don't want to go back to the culture of a century ago that our

00:51:03.260 grandparents had. That's clearly what we don't want. We want to go somewhere new. We don't know where

00:51:06.780 that is. And we're going to explore the space of possible writing styles and paintings and

00:51:11.180 architecture and songs and everything else. And they celebrated this search for something new,

00:51:16.460 but they were, they knew they were unanchored. And that was part of their description of,

00:51:20.060 we don't know what we really value here. And then in the middle of the 20th century,

00:51:24.780 World War one and two became a moral anchor for a lot of the world.

00:51:28.620 That's the one thing they decided they knew we are anti-Nazi. We don't know what else,

00:51:31.740 but we know we're anti-Nazi.

00:51:32.700 So we're more American. And then it became capitalism?

00:51:34.700 And then there was anti-sexism, anti-racism, and lots of things like there, but also anti-communism

00:51:40.860 or anti-socialist, right?

00:51:42.700 Yeah.

00:51:42.780 But still, a lot of our world is still modernist in the sense that we value this idea that we are

00:51:47.260 just moving in the space of possible cultures, and we're not saying still. And that's what gives a

00:51:52.060 lot of energy to cultural activism is this idea that our current culture couldn't possibly be the

00:51:57.900 right one. Surely we need to find a new one to move to because that's who we are. We're the

00:52:03.820 wanderers in the space of cultures.

00:52:05.420 I feel like that even might have started with deism. And then you sort of see this,

00:52:11.100 like with a lot of the founding fathers being deists, if I'm not completely misremembering

00:52:14.940 everything terribly. And we kind of had this vision and it kind of also dovetailed with the

00:52:19.420 development of American democracy, representative democracy, but it just never, the follow through

00:52:25.420 just fell apart and it was sort of allowed to degrade. And it was never really, it never really

00:52:30.540 turned into the thing it was roughly in some fever dream meant to be. I would argue that

00:52:37.820 what Malcolm is trying to create with techno puritanism is very much driven by that. It's

00:52:41.740 like this idea of the belief in an Abrahamic Christian Judeo God, but just technically scientifically

00:52:49.980 correct that like Malcolm's trying to pick up where the deists left off, even from a governance

00:52:54.140 perspective of like, let's also try to create the most optimal governance format. I just think that

00:52:59.180 it's really hard to do these things on a societal and especially collaborative level, because what

00:53:03.340 you saw with the founding fathers is like a couple of great minds came together. You know, you had a

00:53:07.340 lot of people sort of like, like these battling sub stacks with the federalist papers and all these

00:53:11.500 like thought leaders being like, Oh, I think this, and I think this, and they're all talking about it.

00:53:15.100 It's just that there wasn't this ability to take all these threads and knit them together.

00:53:19.900 And I still don't know how that is going to happen. But it could be that in the face of demographic

00:53:25.900 collapse and the civilizational collapse that we see as a result of a fumbled demographic collapse,

00:53:31.100 you know, like countries basically not being able to handle their crumbling infrastructure and social

00:53:37.180 systems that we will see city states that do have enough of a coherent narrative and grip of what

00:53:43.100 they want their deism or like religion or culture to be that they can actually pull it off and build

00:53:49.580 a city upon a hill that actually sticks. I don't know.

00:53:54.780 I think a lot will have to be some level of believing in things that's just not really

00:53:59.180 fashionable anymore.

00:54:00.060 Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know. I feel like we've, there was certainly this era for the past decade or

00:54:06.620 so where everyone had to be ironic because to be too earnest was seen as cringe. I feel like we've

00:54:13.100 come into a new era where earnestness gets a premium and people are getting social credit for

00:54:19.500 that even when it is very cringe. So maybe now is time for faith. Now, now is our comeback.

00:54:25.980 So I want to summarize what I've been arguing here because I hear a new argument. So I said

00:54:31.660 fertility is being caused by a number of cultural trends and that plausibly is caused by this larger

00:54:36.700 cultural process of drift away from what was used to be adaptive culture. And that's a really hard

00:54:42.060 problem to fix. We can understand in terms of these parameters, but it's really hard to change

00:54:47.020 these parameters. One would be add more cultural variety. And I guess that's the one you're pursuing.

00:54:52.140 Like, can you make just separate insular subcultures and produce more variety that way? And I definitely

00:54:57.820 hope you succeed, but it does seem like a difficult thing to do. The other solutions we can try to think

00:55:03.820 of to change these other parameters are also just big asks and difficult. So my overall conclusion is we

00:55:09.740 actually don't know how to solve this problem and plausible. If we don't solve this problem,

00:55:14.380 our civilization just does decline until if something else rises again. And that's happened

00:55:23.180 many times before. So we shouldn't think we're that special that it can't happen to us.

00:55:27.100 We should hope to try to prevent it and see what we can do instead. And I, you know, I wish you all the

00:55:33.180 luck in producing some insular subculture that can rise like the Amish and Haredim are doing and 1.00

00:55:39.020 replace the current culture. And look, in some sense, if some of these, if a proven successful

00:55:44.460 culture would be willing to take on, you know, converts, I might consider converting because I think

00:55:49.980 I don't want to fall down with the world culture and collapse. I want to be part of something that's

00:55:54.540 rising, even if I have to compromise for it, you know, tell me what the compromises I have to make,

00:55:58.940 but they're not really open to converts. That's part of the wise choice they have to say this is

00:56:05.100 I would argue that the last time this happened, when they had the collapse last time, there was

00:56:10.460 this successful new culture and it's what today we call Christians. And it was just like a cult. 1.00

00:56:15.580 Everyone thought of them as like a cult. Until they got too big to call them names.

00:56:19.820 And they, they had like crazy ideas. They, they would feed themselves to lions. Like,

00:56:24.700 come on. Like that's a cult by modern standards. And they, they took the babies. Other people left

00:56:29.180 for exposure to the animals and they took and raised them. Yeah. Like they were weird. These

00:56:34.220 crazy people. We, we often, one of the lines I love is tacticus. He complained that Jews wouldn't 0.79

00:56:42.380 expose babies. And I'm like, what a, what an inversion of blood libel there. Like these horrible Jews, 1.00

00:56:48.460 they don't expose babies. But you, you know, there was a cult that, that, that, that came out of 0.99

00:56:54.460 Judaism and they took over the world. And that I think when we look at what does the group that's 1.00

00:57:00.860 going to replace the urban monoculture look like, we should look at what were the ways that the early

00:57:05.980 Christians were different. And it wasn't like the Amish or something. You basically had a big 1.00

00:57:10.780 competition between the Christians and the, the military mystery cults. But I think that that's what 0.97

00:57:16.220 we're going to have within our time. The mystery cults are the people who are like, let's go back

00:57:19.420 to tradition. And the Christians are the people who are like, no, here's this new thing. Let's like 1.00

00:57:24.060 meet and innovate. I don't know how to predict what's, who's going to win, but I can look the

00:57:31.820 insular fertile subcultures have a number of interesting features in common. At least today, 1.00

00:57:35.820 they're all heavily religious. They're also very decentralized. I think that's an important thing

00:57:39.820 to notice. They each have governance of a scale of roughly a hundred people and there's no higher

00:57:43.500 governance that can control them. And I think that's, that protects them against some of them

00:57:47.340 making mistakes. Say the Mormons did not do that. They had more centralized governments.

00:57:52.060 And then when they centralized governments make a mistake, it takes them all down. So

00:57:55.580 they're also, you know, pacifist, which I think is keeping them insular. They're also relatively low

00:58:00.060 tech. They don't let their kids go off and learn very specialized tech. That means they have to go to

00:58:03.580 some separate schools to learn it. And they are very egalitarian, honestly. And you know, they,

00:58:10.220 they put that people, they don't wear extra fancy, the higher status people don't wear extra fancy

00:58:14.460 clothes or things like that. And I think that also is, you know, so just looking at the correlation,

00:58:19.740 it seems like don't deviate too far from what's working, make your own special formula, but like

00:58:26.540 take most of the stuff that seems to be working and try to just innovate in a few areas. That would be

00:58:31.740 my main, my main recommendation for all innovation is that there's a pile of innovators who have to

00:58:36.060 innovate on every dimension. And that's crazy. So I was, I was a part of a group called Xanadu

00:58:41.820 a long time ago. And there were all these very creative people who were inventing the worldwide

00:58:45.900 web. And then they had to be creative about everything. And that just took them down.

00:58:51.020 Yes. I remember that was the Silicon Valley group, right?

00:58:53.740 Silicon Valley, Xanadu.

00:58:55.420 Was it like a group house?

00:58:58.540 Well, at one point they might've, it was a company to make the worldwide web. It was before the

00:59:02.620 worldwide web. This was the late 1980s where my web showed up like in the 90, you know, 93,

00:59:09.340 and they were trying to create an alternative version of the worldwide web. And I went off to

00:59:12.620 Silicon Valley to hang out and be with them in 84. And, but they just had to be creative about

00:59:17.580 everything. And later on, I've gone back to Silicon Valley, see some other groups like that. They,

00:59:21.420 they just, they're so creative, have so many ideas that they want to just try new ideas on all the

00:59:26.140 different aspects of their organizations. And if you think about it, that's just not going to work.

00:59:30.060 Yeah. The follow through is, is very important.

00:59:32.460 You need to pick your few best ideas to for change and package that with conservative

00:59:37.740 choices on the other dimensions. Yeah. Commit then and follow through.

00:59:41.660 And then that gives you your best shot. You might, you know, it may still be a long shot,

00:59:45.180 but your best shot for any idea is to package it with conservative parameters on all the other,

00:59:50.300 on the other dimensions you have. So I said, that's what I suggest for you choose your key

00:59:55.500 radical things, but then go along with the way the Amish are right. Do it on the 0.99

00:59:59.900 other ones. Don't deviate too far. Like be pacifist, perhaps.

01:00:03.580 It makes sense. Well, we won't be pacifists. No, I think we need to, I mean, I think if you go

01:00:10.300 the pacifist route, when the Pax de Romana of the urban monoculture falls, you get wiped out.

01:00:14.780 Well, you have to be ready to switch when you're big enough.

01:00:18.700 Armed pacifists. Sovereign armed pacifists is the key, I guess. Don't send out your people. No, 0.99

01:00:25.820 no outsourcing, no integrating. That's an interesting concept is, is defensive pacifism.

01:00:30.780 I've never heard of it before, but I think it's, it's a, it's a clever one.

01:00:33.980 But I just never thought about what you pointed out, Robin, that was like

01:00:37.500 medical school or military. This is probably going to cause some problems. That is, that is

01:00:41.580 so fascinating. It has been wonderful to have you on.

01:00:44.300 Yes. Thank you so much. Every time you tackle something, it's so brilliant. And we were just

01:00:48.940 talking about this. Like, it's very, it's people like you who come across with these theories that

01:00:53.900 are not only like cross disciplinary and all over the place, but like memeable and understandable

01:00:59.900 are so rare. So it's, it's a privilege and please keep going. Keep, keep coming up with new stuff.

01:01:04.940 All right. Well, thank you. I'm honored. And until we talk again, I guess.

01:01:07.500 Great. Have a good one.

01:01:09.180 Looking forward to it. Yeah. Thank you so much. Okay.

Based Camp - April 10, 2025

Robin Hanson： Culture as it Relates to Fertility Decline

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