Based Camp - July 25, 2024


The Baby Boom Mystery： Europe Was Below Repopulation Rate in the 1920s？!


Episode Stats


Length

50 minutes

Words per minute

65.603905

Word count

3,343

Sentence count

304

Harmful content

Misogyny

7

sentences flagged

Toxicity

1

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, we re looking at a piece written by Phoebe Arsolognik-Wakefield about the decline in fertility rates across the 19th and 20th centuries, and the theories about what caused it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone! We are back to pro-natalist coverage.
00:00:03.940 And today we're going to be talking about a very interesting phenomenon that not many people know about.
00:00:09.840 Not many people are aware that half of Europe was below repopulation rate before the baby boom in TFR numbers.
00:00:16.720 That means that they weren't having enough kids to replace themselves.
00:00:19.940 The entire world was in a bit of a fertility collapse during that period.
00:00:23.960 And we somehow got out of it with the baby boom, and then that's at a new sort of set point that we've been declining from ever since then. 0.97
00:00:32.480 But I want to talk about two things.
00:00:34.840 One, this initial slump.
00:00:36.460 And two, theories for what caused the baby boom to potentially recreate a phenomenon like this.
00:00:44.120 There's a phenomenon that we can recreate every hundred years or so, and then just have this cycle.
00:00:48.940 That would be great, right?
00:00:49.920 Would you like to know more?
00:00:51.000 This was written by Phoebe Arsolognik-Wakefield.
00:00:55.000 Phoebe came to our dinner in London, remember?
00:00:57.460 We met her?
00:00:58.500 Yeah, we know Phoebe.
00:01:00.240 Oh, oh, oh, her, yes! 1.00
00:01:02.300 Yes, Phoebe. The Indian food in London?
00:01:05.800 Yes, yes, yes. I do think you begin to see her blinders near the end of the piece.
00:01:09.900 That is mostly due to the areas of policy in which she has worked.
00:01:13.460 But outside of that, I actually think the piece is fantastic.
00:01:16.280 Because it brought a lot of information to me that I didn't know.
00:01:19.000 And I'd also say another thing I really liked about this piece and her writing is usually when I take a piece, I just read like a few paragraphs from it to get like the core of the message.
00:01:28.260 I'll be reading over 50% of this piece.
00:01:30.420 Because she presented so much consistent new information that I really have to read most of it to get the point across.
00:01:36.460 Right. I think we should be clear that Phoebe is one of the most prominent pronatalists in the UK.
00:01:41.920 She's very respected, she's very smart, and she's a wonderful person.
00:01:45.380 And you may be bad with names, but yes, we do know her.
00:01:48.280 And she was always presented to us as a who's who of one of the top pronatalist policy wonks and thinkers in the United Kingdom.
00:01:58.200 So if you want to read this or other work of hers, you can check out Works in Progress.
00:02:03.640 In 1800s, the average British woman had 4.97 children over the course of her life.
00:02:09.200 About the same amount as the average woman living in Burkina Faso today.
00:02:13.640 A century later, Britain's fertility rate had slipped to 3.9 children per woman.
00:02:18.040 And 30 years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1.79, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, the number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady.
00:02:30.340 So in 1935, the TFR of the UK was only 1.79.
00:02:35.020 That's kind of shocking.
00:02:36.260 Yeah, those are modern numbers.
00:02:38.860 Yeah.
00:02:39.220 So much for, oh, it was women entering the workplace. 1.00
00:02:42.280 It was the pill.
00:02:45.020 Yeah, no, this is actually very important.
00:02:46.780 Very clearly, this debunks the women in the workplace and the pill arguments.
00:02:51.740 And even women getting educated. 0.62
00:02:53.580 At that time, women also didn't have such high levels of higher educational attainment either. 0.70
00:02:59.380 Yeah.
00:03:00.260 This trend occurred across Europe.
00:03:02.780 By the 1920s, over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
00:03:10.300 The US and Canada also saw steady declines in family sizes throughout the 19th century.
00:03:14.560 By 1800, the average American woman had over seven children.
00:03:18.860 By 1900, she had fewer than four.
00:03:21.520 And by 1930, fewer than three.
00:03:24.180 So talk about how quick that's happening.
00:03:26.500 It goes from four to three in just 30 years there.
00:03:29.320 And that's, sorry, that's from, what, you said 1850 to 1900?
00:03:32.340 So, 1800, seven.
00:03:35.800 1900, four.
00:03:37.180 Okay, over the course of 100 years.
00:03:39.300 No, no, 1933.
00:03:41.800 Oh.
00:03:42.740 Okay.
00:03:43.200 And I'm going to put a graph on screen so everyone can see and they can more easily visualize than you can.
00:03:47.600 If you look from 1800 to 1880, in most countries except for the US, you had a steady fertility rate.
00:03:55.740 In the US, you had a slightly declining fertility rate.
00:03:58.500 And then 1880 to 1920, pretty much across the board, you have steadily declining fertility rates.
00:04:02.780 And it seems to accelerate in the US a little bit during that period.
00:04:05.480 So, France's fertility rate had begun slipping even earlier to great alarm in 1896, an organization called the Alliance Nationale pour le Crossement des Populations.
00:04:18.940 The way you butcher French. 1.00
00:04:21.700 Can you, it's like when Gomez speaks to Morticia in Italian.
00:04:26.240 Son, il le perce comme un poignard. 0.95
00:04:30.080 Oh, Tish, that's French.
00:04:33.980 Oui.
00:04:35.480 God, I'm here.
00:04:39.580 No, I speak French.
00:04:41.000 What's better, what gets me harder for you, is when you butcher French for me. 0.99
00:04:45.480 Like, oh, Malcolm, butcher some more French for me. 1.00
00:04:48.920 I love it.
00:04:50.340 Yeah, but you love how patriotic I am.
00:04:52.940 And you keep doing it.
00:04:54.640 Keep reading it now.
00:04:55.600 Read it.
00:04:56.160 Sorry, read that off again.
00:04:57.420 Honestly.
00:04:58.740 Created expressly.
00:04:59.980 No, read it again.
00:05:01.080 Do it for me.
00:05:01.800 Oh my gosh, okay.
00:05:02.580 Alliance Nationale pour le Crossement.
00:05:04.880 De la Population Francais was born.
00:05:10.400 Buongiorno.
00:05:12.200 Signore, è un piacere.
00:05:13.940 Li amici della vedeta amirata da tutti noi, questa gemma propria della nostra cultura saranno naturalmente accolti sotto la mia protezione per la durata del loro soggiorno.
00:05:26.460 Grazie.
00:05:28.600 Corllomi?
00:05:29.120 Lo pronuncio correttamente?
00:05:32.520 Si, correcto.
00:05:34.040 Created expressly to combat de natalite, essentially depopulation.
00:05:40.040 It had attracted some 40,000 members by the 1920s with novelist Emily Zola, an early recruit.
00:05:46.920 The Alliance Nationale was merely one of many organizations, local and national, established to resist France's apparent progress towards what demographer and statistician Dr. Jacarese Berletilione disparagingly called the imminent disappearance of our country.
00:06:04.860 French pronatalists frequently and vividly campaigned on the issue as a serious matter of national security.
00:06:11.180 In 1914, the Alliance Nationale published over a million posters showing two Frenchmen being bayoneted by five Germans.
00:06:19.620 The poster bore a caption explaining that for every five German soldiers born, only two French soldiers were.
00:06:26.920 That is a great pronatalist propaganda there.
00:06:30.240 We need to get some of that on board, right?
00:06:32.600 So hold on.
00:06:33.180 I won't give the context of this.
00:06:34.880 This was actually sent to us by a fan, and it was a Dieter Roosevelt speech from this period about...
00:06:39.180 I love it that we can have Theodore Roosevelt tell us his thoughts on demographic collapse and how we should fix it and what it means for a country.
00:06:47.780 Yeah, so this friend of the base camp pod said to us,
00:06:52.500 one of Theodore Roosevelt's most famous speeches given in Paris in 1910 is known as the man in the arena speech.
00:06:59.440 For the first time in my life, our base camper says, I just read the entire speech and found this very powerful paragraph.
00:07:06.120 So now I'm going to read the paragraph from Teddy Roosevelt's speech as sent by our base camper.
00:07:12.180 Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need,
00:07:18.720 is to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land.
00:07:26.500 It was the crown of blessings in biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now.
00:07:31.300 The greatest of all curses is in the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility.
00:07:41.680 The first essential in any civilization is that men and the women shall be father and mother of healthy children,
00:07:49.280 so that the race shall increase and not decrease.
00:07:51.940 If this is not so, if through the fault of society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune.
00:08:01.000 If the failure is due to deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune.
00:08:06.000 It is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk,
00:08:12.800 which in the long run, nature punishes more heavily than any other.
00:08:17.180 If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error,
00:08:26.060 bring down upon our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, 1.00
00:08:31.180 then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.
00:08:37.500 No refinement in life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches,
00:08:45.100 no sensuous development of art and literature can in any way compensate for the loss of great fundamental virtues.
00:08:54.200 And of these great fundamental virtues, the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race.
00:09:01.660 That's some prose right there, right?
00:09:04.140 Yeah, no, he talks about the willfully barren and how disgusting they are, morally speaking.
00:09:10.280 And, you know, that's maybe what we think of.
00:09:12.660 Well, but also, like, you know, what is the point of all of our progress?
00:09:16.100 What is the point of all of our luxury if it is not used as a flywheel,
00:09:20.980 if it is not used as momentum to create more human flourishing?
00:09:26.160 Yeah.
00:09:26.640 Like, what was all of this for if we're just like a match going to light it and then flame out?
00:09:32.940 What the hell?
00:09:34.320 A match is for lighting kindling. 0.87
00:09:36.560 A match is for creating a bonfire.
00:09:38.660 And these people just want to snuff. 1.00
00:09:40.520 Like, I can't believe.
00:09:41.740 It's so horrible.
00:09:42.500 They want to consume as much fuel as possible because they just are morally quite selfish.
00:09:48.540 They are the darkness.
00:09:49.540 Let's keep going here because this is, and if you're like,
00:09:52.960 oh, no, anti-needalism makes sense because I have childlike understanding of morality.
00:09:58.140 You should check out our video on these people want us all dead and are weirdly reasonable about it.
00:10:01.880 And we go over to all of the anti-needalist arguments and they are not strong.
00:10:05.680 But anyway, I'm going to keep going with the piece here.
00:10:08.160 The French were not the only nation to chafe against a new reality of smaller family sizes
00:10:13.340 and quieter maternity wards.
00:10:15.300 The British government established the National Birth Rate Commission in 1912.
00:10:19.780 In fascist Italy, the battle for births was named one of Mussolini's four key economic campaigns of 1922.
00:10:26.860 Wow.
00:10:28.220 Isn't that crazy?
00:10:29.320 And he apparently had like posters up everywhere about it and everything like that.
00:10:32.680 Yeah, just the understanding, the prior, I guess, that I grew up with was that always there was this Malthusian concern for growing populations
00:10:40.940 and that there was never any deviance from that ever since Malthus wrote his seminal piece, right?
00:10:46.540 Like that's sort of where things left off.
00:10:49.240 And I was wrong.
00:10:50.460 This is so cool.
00:10:51.520 By the way, was he after this or before this?
00:10:52.800 Thomas Malthus was before this.
00:10:54.200 Fascinating.
00:10:57.300 Okay.
00:10:58.620 Contemporary demographers looked to shifts in values to explain the decline, like rising individualism, new family structures,
00:11:05.600 and ways of living that were less compatible with parenthood.
00:11:09.020 In need, Charles, a British statistician and feminist, argued that increasing female empowerment was one cause 1.00
00:11:14.460 because motherhood made it difficult for women to compete with men economically. 1.00
00:11:17.360 So they were even arguing that back in the 1920s.
00:11:19.380 Charles, a mother of four, called children a handicap to vocational advancement in adult life.
00:11:26.640 Despite the organized resistance of groups like Alliance Nationale, at least some Eastern European demographers doubted whether falling birth rates were truly reversible or even arrestable.
00:11:37.380 In 1936, Dr. Carr Sanders, an English biologist, eugenicist, and later director of LSE, wrote, and this is in 1936,
00:11:46.700 once the small voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain, in time to become so small that the reproductive rate will fall below replacement rate.
00:11:58.280 And that, when this happened, the restoration of the replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem.
00:12:06.280 But even as Carr Sanders wrote those words, he was being proven wrong.
00:12:09.940 Something was happening.
00:12:11.040 Europe and further afield, something we are still trying to understand, the baby boom.
00:12:15.960 And here I am putting a graph on the screen that shows the giant jump in fertility rates that basically happened out of nowhere in tons of different countries.
00:12:24.340 The baby boom was an unexpected change in the direction from half a century of falling fertility rates that had taken place in Europe and North America.
00:12:34.180 Contrary to the popular belief that it was triggered by soldiers returning home from World War II, the boom, in fact, began in the mid-1930s.
00:12:41.200 It was not simply an American or British phenomenon either.
00:12:44.120 Demographic wave swept over Iceland, Poland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and the Czech Republic, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland,
00:12:52.240 thousands of miles across the sea.
00:12:54.800 It even happened in Australia and New Zealand.
00:12:57.300 And yet, Saunders' doubt had been extremely well justified.
00:13:01.100 For whenever and wherever we have had data, and since the Industrial Revolution, with the crucial exception of the baby boom,
00:13:08.320 it has been a nearly iron law of fertility that higher incomes are associated with lower birth rates.
00:13:13.280 Which, by the way, is something that the Institute of Family Studies guy, what's his name?
00:13:17.880 Lime and Stone.
00:13:18.960 Lime and Stone.
00:13:19.600 He says this isn't true.
00:13:20.700 He's just completely delusional.
00:13:22.580 You really should not be citing his work or, as like an authoritative source, he seems completely to have gone off the deep end in some recent pieces.
00:13:30.240 Well, I mean, he wants to use the data to argue for socialism, and it doesn't work.
00:13:35.680 You know, so he lies about the data or lies about what the data is saying.
00:13:39.640 Yeah, he doesn't even necessarily, like, hide the data.
00:13:43.240 He will even point out that there is a very, very, very high cost to, quote-unquote, paying people through services or bonuses for pronatalism.
00:13:53.660 He just wants countries to do it anyway, which I think is really interesting.
00:13:57.240 Like, he doesn't deny the fact that it's prohibitively expensive.
00:14:00.880 He just, I don't know, somehow wants money to come from I don't know where.
00:14:04.940 Yeah, well, he wants the government to, like, create a Christian family department sort of thing that forces people to give birth, is sort of my read.
00:14:14.920 This is where I'm going to begin to start summarizing what's in the piece.
00:14:17.880 We're going to see on the screen here a graph that does show higher incomes associated with lower fertility rates, where we will see this in different time periods in the U.S.
00:14:28.760 The most widely known piece of information about the baby boom is its most pervasive myth, that it was caused by the end of World War II.
00:14:36.440 The baby boom was not the result of people making up for lost time during the war.
00:14:40.680 It saw lifetime fertility rates rise, meaning that people did not simply shift when they had their children, but had more of them overall.
00:14:48.400 And in many countries, including the U.S., U.K., Sweden, and France, the rise in birth rates began years before the war had even started.
00:14:56.060 Well, neutral Ireland and Switzerland experienced booms that began during the war in 1940.
00:15:01.680 Now we're going to talk about one of the explanations for this called the Easterlin hypothesis.
00:15:06.260 Okay.
00:15:06.680 Is there anything that you want to say to this so far?
00:15:09.060 Like, has this changed your understanding of anything or?
00:15:12.000 No.
00:15:12.320 My initial hypothesis around the baby boom is something we've discussed in other episodes, where I think that the hardship that people endured, even in neutral areas that weren't necessarily actively engaged in war, you know, caused by limited supplies, caused by, you know, trade issues that forced austerity on people's lives at the very least, if not genuine trauma, drove people to a level of vitalism that encouraged them, inspired them to have families.
00:15:41.020 And that without some level of austerity or hardship, which could be culturally imposed through strong, hard culture or religion, or could be imposed through the vicissitudes of geopolitical conflict, as you saw with World War II, I think that's what drives higher birth rates.
00:15:58.740 And I'm curious to see what this hypothesis is.
00:16:00.680 And I'm enjoying this.
00:16:01.680 So this is fun.
00:16:02.320 Thanks for sharing this.
00:16:03.080 Okay.
00:16:33.060 Thank you.
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00:44:02.540 I love you.
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00:48:21.540 Okay.
00:48:22.540 Thank you.
00:48:23.540 Thank you.
00:48:24.540 Thank you.
00:48:25.540 And the post says, if you're 25 to 30 and your main circle isn't frequently discussing nihilism, human consciousness, morality, generational trauma, and the intractable pain of human existence, and is instead discussing cribs, diapers, and prenatal vitamins, then it's time to elevate your circle.
00:48:49.060 It's a Facebook post that has over 600 upvotes.
00:48:52.280 And, you know, you're reading this thing, and everyone's like, oh, I feel so seen in this.
00:48:56.300 And I'm looking at this, and I'm like, wait, you want people to be less satisfied with their lives?
00:49:03.860 Like, you think that's an upgrade?
00:49:05.380 Like, what tipsy-topsing world do you live in?
00:49:09.580 Yeah, when I first read that, I thought it was the other way.
00:49:15.200 My reading comprehension near the end of the day just plummets because I get so tired.
00:49:18.700 And I read, like, oh, well, if you're talking about, you know, nihilism and intellectual stuff and not baby stuff, you should be elevating your circle.
00:49:30.620 That's what I thought.
00:49:31.120 That's a broken – but what I also find interesting is the guy who this is attributed to here, I went to his page, the wealth dad, because they had reshared this, and then it went viral.
00:49:41.220 I think he might have been making fun of it because he has two kids and a third on the way, and he was talking about how great his wife was for deciding to not redecorate their house in one of his posts.
00:49:52.460 When I was trying to find where he had said this, what he said is, I'm glad my wife is not saving money and not redecorating the house so we can put more money for our third kid.
00:50:00.040 And I'm like, okay, he pretty obviously doesn't think like this.
00:50:03.000 So I think he posted this as a joke, and the antinatalist took it seriously.
00:50:08.260 Whoops.
00:50:08.580 You know, I think that's actually a genre now, which is that jokes or parody created by one political side become appropriated by the other side, and it's sort of unironic.
00:50:25.260 Like, sometimes it's ironic, sometimes it's unironic, and it's just like, yeah, and it happens – it goes in both directions.
00:50:32.980 You know, like when – I think, like, 4chan tried to make it so that peace signs or okay signs or something were, like, supposed to be a sign of white pride, and then, like, actual white pride groups were like, this is perfect.
00:50:46.020 Why did I think of this?
00:50:47.620 Oh, my God.
00:50:48.120 They just adopted it.
00:50:49.340 And I think that is happening in both directions, and it's wonderful.
00:50:53.440 It's wonderful that it happens.
00:50:55.300 All right.
00:50:55.840 So I will get started here.