The Truth About Falling Fertility Rates and Misleading Statistics
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 8 minutes
Words per Minute
177.14581
Summary
Simone and Zvi discuss the shocking statistics on fertility rates across the world, and how the urban monoculture is perpetuating a false narrative about women not being able to have children. They discuss the role of social media in perpetuating this false narrative, and why it s a symptom of a larger, systemic problem.
Transcript
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hello simone today we are going to do a very very very statistics heavy episode on fertility rates
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and it's going to be a collection of statistics to focus on just how bad the situation has gotten
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with a lot from zvi's fertility roundup number four i love his fertility roundups yes
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fantastic stuff and a lot coming from random graphs and stuff like that they didn't find a
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fit into another episode what we're going to find as we go through this is two overarching
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theses one is the people who thought that this was going to level off this year or we were going to
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begin to see signs of it slowing this year we're wrong there is very little evidence that that is
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happening uh but this is what the un and the urban monoculture claims every year here i'll put a graph
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on a screen of the un's yearly predicted fertility rates in which you'll see as it's like going off
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a cliff in every country and every year the un's like this is the year it's just going to stabilize
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out of nowhere so i think that we're seeing that narrative is being broken and then the other big
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thing that we're seeing is a reinforcement of what we have said from the beginning is that culture is
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the only realistic way to fix this and every solution that you attempt that is not cultural
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whether it is making houses cheaper or making people earn more or even forcing one partner to
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live at home is not going to resolve this issue it's just going to make things worse
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right which seen in the statistics but what we'll see as you hear is we'll continue to see this in the
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statistics so the first errant tweet here that i wanted to go over that i thought was really
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interesting as he was commenting the culture is all too eager to tell us that children or even
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marriage will make us miserable when it is not even true if you discount the long term the latest
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example of this where there was a widely distributed claim in a new book that said married women are
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miserable because they report being unhappy when their spouse isn't around but what the study actually
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meant by quote-unquote spouse absent was no longer living with them not stepped out of the room
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which is the way he implied it he's like when a spouse isn't looking over their shoulders they say
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that they're less happy but what it really meant when the spouse is dead they're less happy
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yeah missing presumed dead yeah i'm probably less happy goodness gracious wow but i love that a lot
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of people like i actually remember when that stat was going around and i was like that's pretty wild
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that seems really out of line with what i've seen in my i don't know but i think what made it actually
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work and what made so many people misunderstand it is this implication that when the husband's back
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is turned when he's out of earshot suddenly people say other you know wives say different things
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it's exactly the trope that was pulled in that ballerina farms article that they that that they
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later categorized as a hit piece implying that when hannah's husband left the room wait sorry is her name
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hannah when when the husband left the room that she then talked about getting an epidural and then
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talked about how it was kind of awesome and it was just great and then that there's this understanding
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that spouses will say very different things about their partners when their partners are not present
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so yeah i don't know i i can understand how people definitely believed that and were very very
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credulous but it's so man it's a case study and how this stuff can be used to mislead people i hate it
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yeah so you are happy you're married by the way you know these these people are lying to you but
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they need to have you believe so much of this movement is just cope around when i say this
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movement i mean the parts of the urban monoculture which glorify a single lifestyle cope around failing
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to secure a partner just as much as a lot of the incel movement is when they act like women are evil or
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like these demonic creatures destroying society when if you look at voting patterns that just isn't true
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of married women it might be single women are evil and destroying society but married women are on
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team civilization okay so but actually do you have any thoughts on that point simone on sorry on which
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which point that this view that sort of the incel migtau parts of it movement have of women that they are
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the force of evil that has created the urban monoculture and all these forces destroying society
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and i just if you look at statistics around married women that's just not true it's it's really this
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single woman urban monoculture mind minded person i just see these things as more systemic issues
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and you know there there are many elements of society that feel more feminized now but that's not
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inherently the problem it's just a symptom of a larger systemic problem that can't really be characterized
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by tropes yeah all right so here is an interesting one this is a tweet by melissa carney she says
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the social security's actuaries are still bullish on the idea that u.s women are going to start having
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more babies than they're have than they've been having quote birth rates are assumed to increase from
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recent very low levels to an ultimate level of 1.9 children per woman for 2040 and thereafter
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why she says the trustee continue to assume that recent low birth rates of period fertility are in
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part indicative of a gradual shift towards older ages of childbearing for younger birth cohorts quote
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marco jurek when we say our core societal institutions are fragile and dysfunctional because they no longer
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suit the circumstances to which they were designed but cannot change this is what we mean and so here what
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she's talking about is other people have pointed out that like institutions like the social
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securities actuaries were created during a time of stable fertility rates and they just can't make the
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math work if they actually show what's really happening so they keep saying oh women are just choosing to have
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kids later which we know from the data isn't true and i'm going to put some graphs on screen here that show
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both what they're the what we're seeing right and so you can see the the birth rates going down per
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generation but here if you look at the age of birth by the various age groups which now i'm putting on stage
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here what you're seeing is it is not moving later yeah no and this is such a simple thing to think through
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someone sitting there looking at a massive spreadsheet or whatever and trying to model out
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things and needing to make the numbers work because if you can't make the numbers work people are going to get
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really mad and make a big fuss and it's going to ruin your entire week because you just don't want to think
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about it that much so you find a way to make the numbers work and then you find a narrative to
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justify that many anyone basically anyone who's been involved in any kind of modeling has probably
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gone through that at some point which makes me very dubious of almost all modeling because just
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i think it gives people this really false sense of security like oh in the models it all works out
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can't you see this is the predicted trajectory of of this company's performance or social security
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and oh my gosh it's so people don't realize what thin ice we're on right yeah and i think that say
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it's not just about modeling it's about who has was in the urban cultural ecosystem permission to like
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blow the whistle on this right so like you work at the so you're a social security actuary right
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and you're doing your report for the year and you could project what any rational person would
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project and then basically just submit a report that says you know we're fucked right like this
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isn't going to stay solvent do you culturally have permission to do something like that like
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as a social security actuary do you have the permission to be the one to sort of wake up society and be
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like but you know we're really screwed and i don't feel like they feel like they actually have permission
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to be that person that's something that needs to sort of be said from a position higher or within
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an administration that is going to be more favorable to that like if i was a social security
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actuary in the trump administration i'd be much more likely to be like okay fertility rates are actually
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a massive issue without worrying about my job if you wrote that i mean they'd be fired right yeah i don't
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in the government though i can't imagine people getting fired for things like this
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it's just you're not is is what would it happen okay so imagine you do the actual social securities
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math and a u.s branch of the government a fairly boring one puts out a report that basically says
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we're fucked due to falling fertility rates that then becomes a media storm yeah because all the
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right-wing media is going to jump on it and how is the left-wing media going to reflexively react to that
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they're going to reflexively say it's not true or they did the math wrong they're they never yeah
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i guess they're going to maybe scapegoat that person to say this person intentionally was negligent
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and don't they realize of course then someone's going to retroactively figure out how to fudge the
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numbers to make them work and retroactively build a narrative as to why that's obviously true
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there's going to be a rebound this person didn't count for that in cnn there's going to be all of
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these phds who come in and the phd is going to go up and say well this is how they did it wrong and
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then they'll have a panel of phds all arguing they all agree that that one actually is of course yeah
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but but like maybe this is an issue we should at least have on the discussion board which is so
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interesting to me that now that the issue is becoming more public one of the things i always hear
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is well malcolm and simone were right about the whole fertility rate thing but they're wrong in
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the way they've been presenting it you know they've been going out there saying that only people like
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them should have kids only tech elite should have kids you know what we really need is a more like
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communitarian form of prenatalism that like it involves everybody who's willing to participate in
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it and it's like that's what we've been doing from the beginning you just don't want to admit that
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we were right from the very beginning about not just the message but the way it was presented
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yeah and to keep going i thought this was an interesting point that was made
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your periodic reminder that we tax marriage which also means we tax fertility we do it less than we
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used to but we still very much do it when you tax something you get less of it niskanen center
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the u.s tax code disproportionately discourages marriage among middle and low income we need to
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fix this they offer a variety of proposals at the core of this is a basic set of arithmetic problems
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it is not difficult to adjust the numbers such that it almost always is beneficial or at least
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neutral to be married especially when there are children involved so right now it is not for middle
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and lower class individuals indeed if we cannot do better there is a very obvious solution raised
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based rates as needed to compensate and then allow married couples to file as if they were unmarried
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if they calculate that it is cheaper end of penalty and i i really like that like that's an easy quick
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fix married couples should be able to file as if they are unmarried there is no logical reason in america
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why we should be taxing married couples more especially low income married couples more well
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no this this specifically disproportionately affects middle income so low income you get a benefit from
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marrying and then a high high income you get a benefit from marrying but middle you get the penalty but
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again that it doesn't matter you should get no penalty for marrying because marrying in general seems to
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benefit society well in middle income is where we have the big fertility crash in america especially
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among the american white population yeah yeah there's the very inverted curve when it comes to
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income and fertility and i i cannot imagine like if you want to talk about like the rot of the urban
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monoculture that anyone isn't just like this isn't a bipartisan issue to just get this off the books
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i think shows often i hear progressives and they're like well our party isn't actually doing the evil stuff
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like that's just like what a few extremists are saying online and i'm like your party has literally
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made it so that married middle income people are taxed more than single ones they really are
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pushing the urban monoculture in a way that's destructive to the individual and that no logical
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argument other than distribution of the urban monoculture could yeah also funny here you could
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argue that this is a line you know we pointed out in our why the racist left trump video that
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a lot of the traditionalist right who had like racialist or anti-gay marriage or anti-women
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messages like oh you shouldn't you know women are the cause of all evil you shouldn't get married
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anything like that a lot of them turned against trump right before he the election and were like
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everybody needs to not vote for him or vote against him and that they have mostly been pushed out of
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the right coalition and that they should be leftist now because the left is structuring it in a way
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where no logical person would want to get married so being so anti-marriage seeing marriage as a trap
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that women have laid for men should they not be supporting the democrats at this point
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i mean with the four b's you even have the celibate women and everything now it's a it's a perfect
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match i can't hear you by the way sorry and he was making noises i totally okay here i'm going to be
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reading an abstract from a paper which i thought was pretty interesting children require care the
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market for child care has received much attention in recent years as many countries considering subsidizing
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or supplying child care as a response to dropping birth rates however the relationship between
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child care markets and the fertility gap the difference between the desired and achieved
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fertility is yet to be explored we build upon previous work by investigating the regulation
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of child care and fertility gaps across the u.s states our results consistently show fewer child
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care regulations are associated with smaller fertility gaps this suggests that women are better able to
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achieve their fertility goals in policy environments that allow for more flexibility in child
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care options and lower costs your child care regulations must be really harmful if parents are
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responding by having noticeably fewer children this is as clear a message as you can get listen the
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potential changes are big and this isn't the abstract this is v extrapolating from the data in the
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abstract they estimate that if you shifted from the highest level of regulation connecticut to the lowest
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of the lowest level of regulation in the lowest level of regulation in the lowest level of regulation
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the total fertility rate tfr would rise from 1.51 to 1.7 or 13 percent if every state moved to
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Louisiana's level we would see a roughly 38 percent improvement or a 5 percent increase in fertility well and
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probably the economy would be better off people would be happier and better off to regulatory bloat this isn't it
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amazing how regulatory bloat suppresses not just economic growth and and building and infrastructure
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development and fixing things but also literally human life that it is it is suppressing
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like the uk right like i i do love what you're saying here right like this idea that regulatory bloat
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and bureaucracy is smothering of human potentiality not just in our inventiveness but in the very birth of
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more humans so sad oh gosh it's it's it's sad and damning but i do think it is the inverse of
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vitalism the vitalism that we need and that's why it's so important the job of institutions like doge
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and stuff like that yeah oh i'd note how bad things probably are in the uk in regards to this they have
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some of the worst child care regulation in the world with you essentially needing like a call
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multiple people it was like college type degrees overseeing children in daycare centers
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because well you can't even have for example your neighbor watch your kids in the uk because of
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regulation you have to have some kind of certified professional watch your kids which that imagine how
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unsustainable child care is now and this is i think a relatively new rule since the 90s because there was
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some tragic and genuinely sad incident of a child being watched by a neighbor or something or children
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being watched by a neighbor and one of them died but think of just the number of children now who will
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never exist because it is so unsustainably difficult to raise kids in the uk now and this
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brings me to something that uh we've said before but i really need to pound home and make sure this isn't
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our policy doc by the way simone is that any policy that is meant to protect children's lives
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need to weigh how many children don't exist because it was implemented so a policy doc that says
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something like you know child seat certification like x many children's lives will be saved by this
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also needs to calculate the number of children who are functionally going to be killed because
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that kid but why they are replacements of people who had their existence consumed
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by denizens of the crimson world it's the same with uh regulation around caring for children it's the same
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with any of that can you actually make a note to add that to our policy doc yeah because that's really
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powerful and under one of our videos the if you have under three kids you are definitionally a cuck
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because you're below replacement rate video the top comment for a while i don't know if it still is
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but i found it really powerful and it argued that we should see having two kids as having zero kids
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because that's slightly below replacement rate like having two kids in our society should be considered
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having slightly fewer than zero kids having one kid is having negative one kid and having
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zero kids is having negative two kids it's burdening society with your existence and that you really
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only get to you know one kid or two kids once you are above the two kid mark you know so when you have
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three kids you have slightly less than one kid when you have two kids you have slightly less sorry when
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you have four kids you have slightly less than two kids um and i think that that conceptual framing
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difference is the way we will raise our children to think about kids
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all right now i'm going to read a tweet by more births you can see it pulling from a huge diversity
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of sources here today in this tweet he says did you think fertility couldn't get any lower than south
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korea's seemingly impossible 0.72 births per woman in 2023 macau is trending towards
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0.49 births per woman in 2024 lesson number one don't build like macau if you want your country to
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have a future by the way more birth thing really like the guy we were actually had him over at our
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place just last weekend him and and robin hansen and the woman who wrote hannah's children we had them
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together and we we chatted a lot about fertility rates catherine and they his core bugaboo in the
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same way that ours is culture is property prices and the way that you build he really thinks that
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like tall buildings are suppressive of fertility i just do not agree at all like it clearly has an
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impact but as for example israel became more dense their fertility rate also increased like
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where you see high fertility cultures they are just completely immune to this so like why are we
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pretending that this is an issue i don't know that's my take on this well it's the bigger thing
00:20:04.800
we've discussed as well is solving housing policy is one of those things of like yeah and you know
00:20:11.700
while we're at it let's you know make nuclear energy pervasive but it's not you know this isn't an
00:20:18.140
easy to solve problem whereas producing regulatory bloat is within our reach it's a stretch goal but
00:20:24.020
it's feasible well same with cultural change like cultural change at the family level at the
00:20:29.240
individual level at the level of our listeners our people that's possible and yeah and then i'd also
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he at birth gauge had tweeted and this was in a retweet new update i guess we can forget any recovery
00:20:43.920
this year for now and it was a fertility rates by country and you just see red across the board i'll put
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it on screen here but basically just across the board
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all right now we're going to look at some things from lyman stone that zvi uh brought up which i
00:21:01.500
thought were pretty interesting so he says i looked at the nl sy 1979 cohort the housing data
00:21:09.400
that's readily coded kind of sucks it's basically metro versus non-metro to homeowner versus not live
00:21:16.680
with parents live on own or gqb but gq but we can untangle some major indigeneity because nlsy gives
00:21:28.800
us one fertility preferences surveyed before exit from parental household or adulthood two sibling
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numbers three childhood religious environment all potentially huge confounds driving endogenous
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selection so if we start with just housing related variables this is what we get turns out more
00:21:49.840
years in metro areas maybe boost fertility and more years as a homeowner reduces fertility this is bizarre
00:21:58.180
for me but look at the effect of living with parents note this graph is for men not women but they look
00:22:04.880
similar so really bizarrely here what this shows is living in metros when you control for other things
00:22:13.860
actually increases not decreases fertility for a period of your life and you and i lived in a metro
00:22:21.160
for a period and then left and i assume that that's what we're seeing here as to why it would increase
00:22:25.960
fertility a lot of people can be like how could that possibly make sense in the day i have a really
00:22:29.900
instant intuition what's yours it's very hard to find a partner outside of a city exactly yeah you
00:22:36.260
find your partner in the city and then you get out as soon as you're ready to have kids so it may turn
00:22:41.460
out money find a partner the cities are actually critical to getting fertility rates back up because
00:22:49.120
they're the only environment where there are lots of single young people around and if you try to date in
00:22:54.860
a rural area you're just not going to find a partner well even keep in mind like we talk about
00:22:59.100
bringing back the london season it was the london season it existed because it was a time when parliament
00:23:04.960
was in session the house of lords was in session and all these families happened to be in london at the
00:23:10.320
same time even though they typically lived in really dispersed rural manor houses and estates so
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even in the past cities really mattered when it came to matchmaking and a transient time in a city
00:23:24.340
was important for matchmaking so that is really enlightening and helpful well yeah and if a
00:23:30.080
young person came to me and they're like i have decided to avoid cities because you know urban
00:23:36.480
monoculture hellholes how do i find a partner i'd say well you're not going to you need to go to a city
00:23:41.680
like that would be my advice not even partner at university or college you have to find them
00:23:46.960
at a city yeah i'd say basically if you're not if you haven't found the person you plan to marry by the
00:23:52.720
age of 25 you should be in oh shit territory and you should be grinding for it at that point
00:23:57.860
like that's like the point of a video game when you get stomped by a boss and you need to go in the
00:24:02.360
woods and start grinding to get your level up you are under leveled for life if you do not have the
00:24:08.540
person who you are going to marry in front of you around the age of 25 and i think that our society
00:24:13.420
right now the the heuristic that i would use for most young people is if you don't know who you're
00:24:18.360
going to marry by the time you graduate college you should be panicked yep wait by the time you
00:24:24.780
by the time you graduate from college graduate from college like if you leave a college environment
00:24:30.160
where you had tons of single people around your age similar socioeconomic income similar education
00:24:36.640
level uh and you were unable to secure a partner you immediately need to be panicking at that point
00:24:43.300
you you need to say because it's going to get infinitely harder in the real world and so if
00:24:48.460
you weren't able to find one in that environment it means that there was something systemically wrong
00:24:52.940
with you or how you were trying to secure a partner yeah and people can be like but it's just so hard
00:24:59.680
these days it's like it doesn't matter that it's hard these days right like it's like somebody comes
00:25:05.120
to me and they're like i'm a discriminated minority in my country and they really are a discriminated
00:25:09.700
minority in their country and so i'm like okay well then you have to work twice as hard you have to work
00:25:12.880
three times as hard you have to work four times as hard for the same it takes a while we had a friend
00:25:16.840
who maybe one or two years maybe even two years back moved to austin and was looking really really
00:25:23.660
hard for a partner and now we just got word of the engagement and that's great and it's perfect
00:25:29.700
she was grinding for it though yes and that's an attractive popular semi-famous woman who has been
00:25:36.940
grinding for a potential husband for years at this point and i think that the young men who are like
00:25:44.480
oh the women just aren't considering me they're being delusional that they are being absolutely
00:25:50.400
delusional actually brett cooper did a thing on this recently where she's like yeah i know a lot of young
00:25:55.680
women who are like i want a male who's good to marry and i can't think of a single young male that i
00:26:02.320
would introduce them to and brett cooper's a fairly based person right like you know she's not like
00:26:08.320
simping here for males and it's the same with us we know more females looking for husbands that we
00:26:16.640
struggle to match than we know young men looking for wives that we struggle to match um i don't know
00:26:23.640
you see it about equal or i think it's equal yeah and i think that for the most part
00:26:28.840
the biggest problem is a mixture of not trying hard enough and having unrealistic expectations
00:26:35.840
which is the worst combination you could possibly imagine to both have incredibly high standards and
00:26:40.820
not really be doing a high throughput i mean it's one thing if they're like yeah i'm dating at least
00:26:45.760
one person one new person every single night of every single day of the year doubling up on weekends
00:26:51.240
but i also have very high standards i'd be i would say that they have a long battle to fight but
00:26:57.260
they can probably get something because they're being so prolific in their attempts what i'm hearing
00:27:02.560
from people now though is oh i have incredibly high expectations and oh maybe three dates a month
00:27:09.540
a month i mean you're not even going to find a two at that rate true and i also go on to say here
00:27:16.100
i would say of the young males we know at least so of the males of this young generation right now
00:27:23.280
um i don't know any that have made it to 30 and we're seriously looking for someone to marry who
00:27:29.500
haven't secured a partner typically what i i am finding is that young men that are serious about
00:27:34.460
working to improve themselves have a life plan have their shit together they're typically finding
00:27:40.320
marriage partners that are really solid i won't say that's true for every young woman i know but i
00:27:44.240
will say that's true for most young men i know who have their shit together the ones who who don't
00:27:49.040
i'm often embarrassed to tell them like you really don't have your shit together you just are
00:27:53.220
pretending like you have your shit together aren't we all though not really anyway so then he goes on
00:28:01.060
to say i have told you people repeatedly this is the problem and it remains today in fact the problem
00:28:07.420
the young people must have their own houses so he's really against because if you correct for things
00:28:14.180
here people living at home right like it what's interesting though is if you correct for religion
00:28:21.300
and siblings and everything like that uh living with your parents is not that big an effect
00:28:26.060
isn't that interesting yeah but i i think that this is not about getting young people houses
00:28:34.020
i think this is about changing cultural norms about having uh finding a partner when you're living with
00:28:39.600
your parents like for our daughters i would not hugely well i don't know what i say like a guy
00:28:46.120
basically doesn't have his shit together if he's still living with his parents depends on how rich
00:28:50.000
the parents are depends on what he's doing with life yeah i i guess i'm kind of okay with the people
00:28:57.600
still living with their parents being removed from the gene pool even if it causes a major fertility crash
00:29:01.580
it depends on the circumstances in my opinion but yeah i think if if one is if someone is living with
00:29:10.620
their parents but could immediately move out and live on their own then it's a very different thing
00:29:18.480
some people live with their parents just to really quickly pay off student debt for example or save up a
00:29:25.220
lot of money to get a down payment on a house because it just makes more sense and that makes sense for
00:29:30.000
example if you have a job in the bay area and your parents live there i could see and i didn't do this
00:29:36.740
right i got my own apartment in the bay area regardless but i could see a lot of value in continuing to
00:29:42.720
live with your parents so that you don't have to pay rent for an apartment in the bay area to bide your
00:29:47.400
time to either get something really good maybe buy property or just get a different job and leave
00:29:53.120
california entirely right so there there are there are reasons why i would be okay with it but i would
00:29:59.600
want to know that that person was capable of moving out immediately if they wanted to and they were only
00:30:04.960
living at home with their parents because it was financially responsible for some reason does that
00:30:08.880
make sense so to continue okay but these are kind of dumb controls to be really savvy we don't just
00:30:16.620
want a control variable we want an interaction say does the effect of home ownership vary based on
00:30:23.620
preferences yes it does this is for women with all other controls entered for women who desire zero or
00:30:31.220
one child so women with quite low preferences one extra year of home ownership is associated with a
00:30:37.060
considerable decline in fertility but as desires rise so does the effect this kind of looks like home
00:30:44.160
ownership is associated with a modest improvement in correspondence between desires and outcomes at
00:30:50.140
least for people at the extremes i can tell you the same effect appears if i use metro status more
00:30:56.460
years spent in metro equals lower fertility for women with zero to one desires higher fertility to women
00:31:02.020
with three plus desires on the whole the results are a lot more favorable to density than i expected
00:31:07.820
them to be cc more bursts that said the measure here really are oblique quote
00:31:13.940
do you own a home in quote quote are you in a metro area in quote in quote do you live with your
00:31:19.280
parents in quote none of these are quote unquote high density so what you can see here is that owning
00:31:26.540
your own home and the number of years you own your own home actually increasingly suppresses fertility
00:31:32.740
for low fertility preference individuals likely because it's increasing stability um but increases
00:31:39.000
fertility for high fertility individuals and it's the same with living in a metro area
00:31:43.740
living in a metro area it decreases fertility of your low fertility preference but increases fertility
00:31:49.400
of your high fertility preference which again would ally with what we're saying like people who have
00:31:53.840
shit together it's just a higher standard of having your shit together is expected for this generation
00:31:59.640
than previous generations i think that's really what's going on here yeah well and i think i'm living in
00:32:05.260
a city with intention is like using psychedelics with intention right like a lot of people can
00:32:13.100
take psychedelics and have a weird trip and nothing really changes with their lives and then other
00:32:18.260
people can go into psychedelics with severe ptsd or other serious problems and come in with a really
00:32:23.760
good plan and then really good therapy afterward and like come at a way completely changed better person
00:32:28.580
with a more functional life and i think cities are like that you can just be in a city and kind of
00:32:33.200
sit in rotten one and it's a it's an experience it's the urban experience or you can go in with a
00:32:37.860
plan and follow up and follow through and change and then then you get out and you're good you're
00:32:44.620
changed forever you have your partner you have your life together you have your family but you have
00:32:48.460
to go into an urban area with intention and not just hedonism and a broad interest in maximizing
00:32:55.900
your financial gain which seems to be the default reason for entering a city i agree with that yeah
00:33:02.360
so to continue here other times it's easier to identify alex curtis i just met a 72 year old
00:33:10.920
woman who's been telling me about her life best quote she said you can either have a house and kids or
00:33:17.480
you can fly first class i want to fly first class i find her inspiring oh well you want to fly first
00:33:26.820
class the moon but we never do you take that as that's what we do for kids well what i what i i
00:33:33.340
understand that reasoning and i completely understand that mindset but then when i think about it and i
00:33:38.840
think about the number the percentage of my life that i spend on a plane every year versus the percentage
00:33:44.620
of my life that i spend living every day day to day the typical routine
00:33:49.380
the percentage of time i spend on flights is not worth an entire like forgoing
00:33:55.760
the most powerful thing yeah i mean i think this is a really great framework because of what could be
00:34:02.700
more indolent millennial urban monoculture than wasting money on first class it's such a transient
00:34:09.380
pointless selfish thing very similar to claiming everest right we have our video on that that that it is
00:34:16.380
i think indicative of to say i cannot make indulgent pointless expenditures if other people are relying
00:34:25.160
on me so i will choose here's my thing i really okay my argument for business class it's a little
00:34:32.680
different from everest some people do just fly business class to flex but i see it as akin to getting
00:34:40.200
anesthesia during a medical procedure or maybe maybe more similarly getting nitrous oxide during
00:34:49.240
like a dental procedure right you you can you can get through it fine uncomfortably but fine without
00:34:57.880
nitrous oxide but with it man like it would you don't even remember it it was it's just fine i mean it's
00:35:05.000
it's what you're saying is i would pay anything i would deny anyone in life to have the right to
00:35:09.960
their life to avoid discomfort yeah and which of course isn't justified but i'm just saying it's
00:35:15.620
different from everest you're saying it was no it's not it's not an everest thing it's a it's a
00:35:19.960
it's it's a hedonistic avoidance of discomfort and pain issue for many people which i respect but
00:35:26.720
also if you're a little bit less myopic about your pain which is difficult i think when you're in the
00:35:34.080
urban monoculture because it's all about avoiding pain you'll realize that the upside potential
00:35:40.480
of the the joy that family and children give to you and the meaning that your life gets and the
00:35:45.760
the extent to which actually on aggregate your pain and suffering and anxiety especially with a larger
00:35:53.120
family just becomes such a small percentage of your mindscape because it's so full of everything else
00:36:00.040
with your family that there's no room for the anxiety there's no room for the discomfort
00:36:03.720
that it's it's a silly trade-off to even think about making of course it's better to have a
00:36:08.640
family well it's something that you've talked about which i i find really interesting here is
00:36:12.500
also you would just not want to travel anymore because you've entered a state of your life where
00:36:17.520
our home and our life is so high quality that you view leaving it even for vacation and i feel the same
00:36:25.220
way is nothing but work and a burden but i think that that shows how our life is different from the
00:36:31.600
life of the person who opts into the urban monoculture belief system they find pleasure in taking a break
00:36:39.100
from their lives from getting in a plane going somewhere else and doing something other than what
00:36:44.660
they built for themselves whereas we would always take more pleasure from our day-to-day lives than we
00:36:52.020
would from leaving them hmm yeah anyway back to the stats here i'm going to put a graph on screen
00:36:59.720
and this is lyman stone here talking owd heads this section by saying quote fertility first falls
00:37:07.640
within development and then rises with development building on this uva student maxwell trabrock
00:37:14.120
argues that quote maximum progress can prevent declining fertility if society advances enough
00:37:21.880
fertility will rise again i mentioned maxwell because i did a twitter thread recently rebutting this
00:37:27.080
piece i did so because i was asked to do so by others but ultimately maxwell did an impressively good
00:37:33.140
job of putting together the u-shaped argument in one specific place since writing the thread i've had
00:37:39.940
requests to formalize the argument a bit more this that's what this is lyman stone my basic thesis is this
00:37:48.200
the view that more growth will boost fertility again is wrong it is based on seriously outdated
00:37:54.680
underlying research doesn't fit the actual empirical facts of the case well and it leads to theoretical
00:38:00.680
confusion which inhibits clear understanding of how fertility actually works and i agree with that
00:38:07.160
you just don't see this you cannot develop your way out of this issue unless you have ais creating and
00:38:14.920
raising kids any sane person would know that like if you look at your ultra developed ultra urban
00:38:20.900
monoculture friends these groups fertility rates is like 0.2 like it's so astonishingly low having even
00:38:27.740
two kids is considered quite a lot by some of these groups um so then he goes on to say so do we have
00:38:36.180
evidence on lifetime disposable income yes we do from sweden fertility rises with men's income and has
00:38:43.720
basically forever meanwhile women's incomes are pretty much totally unrelated to fertility whoopsie
00:38:49.700
and women's earnings are negatively related to fertility and i'll put some graphs on screen here
00:38:53.360
by the way this is lyman stone so just so people know and we've pointed this out before lyman stone
00:38:58.180
heavily biases anything he's looking at to try to argue that it's a really weird thing it's like being a
00:39:04.960
flat earther of the pro natalist movement that low income doesn't lead to higher fertility and that high
00:39:10.280
income generally doesn't lead to lower fertility and if you look here he had to find like one
00:39:15.260
obscure country where this is the case sweden to make this point but he's about to pull out some
00:39:20.380
data which makes our point which is that culture is everything which i'll get to in a second
00:39:23.500
so every kind of income is pro natal except for women's wages women's interest income business income
00:39:31.380
and rental income welfare income support from husband or family all probably pro natal earnings
00:39:38.320
no that's really interesting so women getting income from nothing or from not working he argues
00:39:46.520
is increasing fertility rate i think that's because he likes the idea of women living at home he really
00:39:51.760
likes this oh for sure yeah and that's what he's trying to argue even though he doesn't have any data
00:39:56.320
that supports this actually the data supports the opposite when women win the lottery their fertility
00:40:00.360
went down and this would be uh equivalent to you know like rental income business income welfare
00:40:05.880
income like it's a random cash deposit we also know from the big study on cash handouts that was done
00:40:12.940
on universal basic income didn't increase female fertility so he's just making something up here i guess
00:40:18.420
uh earnings no on the other hand you might look at the nearly universal rule of species that status
00:40:25.760
predicts reproductive success you might look at the stable male earnings fertility gradient
00:40:30.480
and suppose that high income will usually predict high fertility this is my view high income will
00:40:36.140
usually predict high fertility uh except it like doesn't in most countries in like that he had to
00:40:42.220
choose sweden to make this work is really i i think sort of the exception that proves the rule
00:40:46.520
so just so people understand how insane the statement you might look at stable male earning fertility
00:40:52.420
gradient and suppose that high income would usually support high fertility this is my view high
00:40:57.100
income will usually predict high fertility is just look at these charts here right this is between
00:41:03.560
country fertility rates this is with in-country fertility rates almost no matter how you slice it
00:41:08.500
lower income and this is between and within countries is predictive of higher fertility rate but then he goes
00:41:14.760
on to say which i think is interesting here is the relation between income and fertility is culturally
00:41:20.540
determined income has a relation with fertility but it's not income to fertility either up or down it's
00:41:28.960
income times culture to fertility okay i do agree with this the problem is is that the dominant
00:41:35.120
culture on earth the urban monoculture has a negative number attached to that culture times income to
00:41:43.180
fertility outcome which means that the only way to fight it is with cultures other than the dominant
00:41:49.260
culture which means it's culture silly any thoughts before i move forward there no the answer here is
00:41:59.520
it's the culture stupid it's the culture stupid yeah and so here we're back to zvi again
00:42:05.740
perhaps one could say that income relative to expectations or societal positions predict
00:42:10.600
individual fertility that seems like an actual mechanism as you get higher income perhaps excluding female
00:42:16.820
labor income because of the substitution problem relative to the perceived financial cost of children you get more
00:42:22.840
children the problem is that if rising income also raises perceived costs more you go backwards as it does in the
00:42:29.940
urban monoculture this is really interesting because the urban monoculture is at its core like a consumerist culture
00:42:34.260
as you get more income it's always going to say that the first thing that you should be spending it on is signaling
00:42:41.120
class status instead of anything like genuinely meaningful and so it's going to lower the fertility
00:42:47.760
rate because you're going to be more interested in signaling class status her core argument is that
00:42:54.240
what we actually have here is simpson's paradox that what's going on is the compositional changes in
00:43:02.000
income cohorts are creating a u-shaped curve that isn't a good way of understanding the situation and here i am
00:43:08.560
putting some graphs on screen here where i think what we can really see the answer from this final
00:43:15.840
graph which is like a graph i always wish it existed and i'm glad we have it here what this graph shows
00:43:20.800
is the u-shaped curve of fertility rates where you see them going up again at high levels of income
00:43:26.320
but it shows the population size of each one of these incomes as well and you see that basically no one exists
00:43:34.160
within the level of wealth you need for that to increase fertility rate and that is above half a
00:43:40.160
million to a million a year in household income now here's something that's really interesting if
00:43:45.680
we're talking about korea that i didn't know korea is very low fertility and we often talk about saving
00:43:51.840
korean culture and everything like that it's that korean culture for whatever reason makes large businesses
00:43:58.640
more productive than they should be and small businesses less productive than they should be
00:44:03.520
they are a chibol culture chibols are these giant mega corpse that are in korea where like you'll live
00:44:08.720
in like a samson apartment with a samson fridge and a samson computer and a samson internet connection
00:44:13.040
that makes samson boats it's it's weird and dystopian if you've ever lived there from the oh it's kind of
00:44:18.400
cool but yeah sure it is kind of cool i feel very much like i'm in like akira or something whenever i'm
00:44:24.240
there i'm like oh so i have to put my samson card to open the door for my samson building and yeah
00:44:30.400
they're tracking me all the time so great but anyway so so here it says while small to medium
00:44:36.400
sized businesses are rarely as productive as large ones it's striking how unproductive south korea's
00:44:42.240
small businesses are compared to those in western nations the oecd for example found small
00:44:48.160
service sector firms in korea are 30 as productive as larger firms with over 250 workers in the
00:44:56.480
netherlands and germany it is 84 to 90 respectively similarly the asian development bank found that in
00:45:04.640
2010 small korean firms with 5 to 49 workers were 22 as productive as firms with over 200 workers so in
00:45:14.160
most countries it's like a 20 or 10 hit in productivity in korea it's like an 80 or 90
00:45:20.480
hit to to productivity and i think this culturally shows how much korea is optimized for both collectivism
00:45:27.360
and to work in these giant giant giant firms which is interesting to me and i i think that there's
00:45:34.480
probably something to that that we'll probably dig deeper in the next time we look at korean fertility
00:45:38.480
statistics yeah that's interesting okay so next here we are looking at a list of wealthy people's
00:45:47.280
names and this person matthew iglesias is saying small sample but at the top end but larry ellison
00:45:54.400
and larry page each have two kids zuckerberg gates buffett volmer and brin each have three bezos has four
00:46:00.960
arnold has five and musk has seven when they're talking about the wealthiest people in the world right
00:46:05.360
in the us i suppose i would see this is really bad you should not live in a society where a number of
00:46:11.760
the wealthiest people only have two children that basically means they're aiming for what's normative
00:46:17.840
i would go so far as to say that if you are at the level of hundreds of billions of dollars
00:46:22.880
wealth that you should probably have multiple wives well one that's not legal in the united states
00:46:30.720
i think it would be very functionally does he does and there are other people in society who are
00:46:39.200
proudly advertising the fact that they have multiple wife not wives women who are pregnant
00:46:46.640
with their children just sent us that tweet from what was this tweet some rapper who is very proud
00:46:54.880
about the fact that he has like six women concurrently pregnant i i wouldn't imagine the the effect of
00:47:00.880
that are going to be entirely genetically positive it's just not sustainable in the same way like i i get
00:47:07.920
it i historically yes very resourced men have typically had a lot of children either very publicly or
00:47:17.920
privately you know kings of england and france had all these bastard children for example who were
00:47:23.040
recognized with varying degrees but they weren't they they were not they had no genetic advantage
00:47:29.200
over there like they may have from some sort of historical reason but it's not like they competed
00:47:33.680
in a meritocracy and ended up on top yeah i just yeah i is gonna happen okay i suspect that the moment we
00:47:44.880
get artificial wombs working really well we will have some billionaires begin to just mass produce
00:47:52.640
children yeah mass educate them mass give them nurturing so you'll have some that's producing
00:47:58.880
like 20 kids per year or something like that this is something where if somebody did that and they
00:48:03.440
were looking for somebody to run this facility that is my dream job so let me know i will make sure
00:48:10.640
very few of these kids end up totally messed up oh my god
00:48:14.160
i i i don't know i think that there are some people who just from an ideological perspective
00:48:23.840
want to spam children but that most of the billionaires who have larger families and i even
00:48:30.800
like anyone people of any level of wealth do it because they love their children and they
00:48:36.880
want to give their children a good life and they like spending time with their kids and when you change
00:48:41.200
it to this horrible reason to have kids oh horror you you don't kids aren't pets you don't have them
00:48:48.320
because of how they yeah they're not pets they're they're humans they're people you're bringing full
00:48:52.960
people into the world i may deserve you shouldn't have kids because of the emotional states they generate
00:48:58.560
in yourself no but you should be because you're willing to commit to raising and bringing a new person
00:49:04.000
into the world and yes very very well resourced people can do that by bringing in a ton of staff and
00:49:09.920
stuff it's just that after a while it becomes so abstracted from you personally that i kind of
00:49:15.600
feel like you're missing the point i think that there's a sweet spot so consider my childhood right
00:49:20.560
i spent very little time with my parents i spent a lot of time being raised by maids and stuff like
00:49:25.360
that you still spent a lot of very formative experiences with them and if you had 50 siblings
00:49:31.440
you would not have had that no you have been very shaped by formative experiences you have been gaslit
00:49:37.840
by my parents a little bit here who have not presented an entirely i've seen your home videos
00:49:42.160
i mean you've had enough to have formative experience this is exactly what i'm talking
00:49:45.520
about gaslighting simone home videos can be chosen for the maybe a few hours a year i would have spent
00:49:52.800
around my parents i have read about the amount of time that elon spends with his kids i absolutely guarantee
00:49:59.120
guarantee you that on average elon is spending twice as much time with any of his kids as my
00:50:05.280
parents spent with me and my child and my point is that he has about the right number of kids i think
00:50:08.880
he's 11 kids right and i think that's about the right number i think that no the point i'm making
00:50:13.840
which i don't think you're okay if if he spends twice the amount of time with his kids as my parents
00:50:18.240
spent with me right and i grew up very much seeing my parents as my parents my parents is the culture that
00:50:26.000
that i'm taking myself my life from i don't even remember the names of some of the maids who spent
00:50:32.080
years you're saying what you're missing is that the kids brains are biologically coded to know who
00:50:40.240
their parents are among the caregivers and culturally code to them
00:50:47.360
yeah i agree with you so you're indicating that a number between 10 and 30 is is optimal no i mean you're
00:50:55.760
you're really no i'm not arguing you think it's like 100 you think it's 200 that just doesn't
00:51:00.240
easily get to 100 or 500 in the age of ai there are various reasons why i don't like that i don't
00:51:06.720
like the lack of genetic diversity in that i i think that we're better off in society if if if one
00:51:15.200
billionaire had literally 10 000 kids it would do nothing to earth genetic diversity literally zero he
00:51:24.880
wouldn't even be 0.0000001 percent of earth's population right but we're not talking about
00:51:32.720
that we're talking about ultimately if if artificial booms became widely available there would be
00:51:40.240
you know 250 billionaires who are doing that and then suddenly there's this non-trivial percentage of
00:51:46.240
the future population that no it is a trivial do the math this is something that people don't do when
00:51:51.360
they make this genetics argument is they literally like they're like hypothetically that means 50
00:51:57.360
of the next population could all be a handful of people's kids and i'm like no even if every
00:52:03.280
billionaire on earth was doing this it would still be under 0.01 of earth's future population
00:52:10.400
like you're not running the actual numbers in your head here simone it would be completely trivial
00:52:17.280
and keep in mind that by the time it became an issue we would have genetic engineering to fix any
00:52:25.040
potential issues that this was causing even if it became an issue which it very is unlikely to become
00:52:31.520
an issue and in addition to that we this next generation like when this is happening this is when
00:52:38.160
they'll be able to train ais on uh books like if somebody wanted to train an ai on you and me for
00:52:44.320
example given the amount of content we put out there that ai would probably be within like 10 to
00:52:49.760
5 percent of uh being able to replicate our answers our parenting style in terms of how it interacted
00:52:57.440
with a kid just due to the sheer volume of information on us the idea that you cannot clone a parent
00:53:03.920
anymore is just factually wrong please can't you just leave the child with huggy stop calling him the
00:53:11.840
child richard his name is rocket and i'm not leaving him with your crappy robot sally why that's almost
00:53:19.280
churlish you can't replace family with a robot richard we need real human affection that's why huggy's
00:53:26.960
programmed to simulate its sweetness oh yes yes perhaps the fresh air will uh calm the female
00:53:37.200
uh hmm real human affection perhaps a pill or a burst of gamma radiation yeah i mean maybe this is just
00:53:47.280
you know intuitively not what feels right for me and i respect that sometimes logic is just
00:53:58.960
not in concordance with someone's intuition and feelings and i feel like if one of our kids ended
00:54:06.560
up doing this and one of our kids ended up i would talk with them about it i would you would try to
00:54:16.080
dissuade them from having more kids the same way my mom did with me no no because your mom was all about
00:54:24.160
putting in resources that i don't think really matter i mean i really this this is so against
00:54:29.680
everything that i stand for aesthetically so i think you can understand that i'm not fronting here
00:54:35.120
but i really think that children deserve a lot of very warm love and care and unique mental space of a
00:54:44.160
parent and when you have 50 plus children the fraction of them like you're gonna start having trouble
00:54:51.760
keeping track of who's who and what their names are and what their favorite colors are and i just feel
00:54:57.280
like if you're gonna bring someone into the world they are entitled to a certain proportion not just of
00:55:04.160
your wealth not just of your resources but also of your mindscape and maybe this is the difference
00:55:10.240
between men and women i mean obviously you evolutionarily as a male have been programmed on a
00:55:16.320
very deep level to spam and to just not give a like you can like you are just designed to have
00:55:24.240
as many kids as possible and genuinely not care whereas i have been you know evolved to be very
00:55:31.040
careful about the the quality and resources that each kid can can be given because typically it's the
00:55:40.080
women who are left with the kids and it's the men who walk away so i understand why you have the
00:55:43.520
mindset that you do and why none of this is what you're saying i might have a genetic predilection
00:55:48.320
to this mindset but i think that you're being overly sentimental and mythologizing the role of the
00:55:55.040
parent when a lot of this parental love can be simulated you can't replace family with a robot richard
00:56:02.640
we need real human affection that's why huggies program to simulate it sweetness this one is from
00:56:10.640
laura left finir well i have to ask you like would you be willing to i don't know like look one of
00:56:18.560
our kids are our living kids now in the face and say like hey i'm now going to send you to a facility
00:56:24.800
and you're largely going to be raised by other people and you know we're not going to live our
00:56:28.960
life together anymore and you know you're gonna have do you have any idea what my childhood was like
00:56:35.840
i was taken away from my parents at around the age of 12 stopped living with them after that i
00:56:42.080
never lived with them again i first lived in a prison system complex saying yes i lived at a
00:56:48.240
pre-preparatory boarding school for middle school and you're saying that was ideal yes it was better than
00:56:54.480
i know i literally i know all the other kids of rich people in my neighborhood all of them are drug
00:57:01.840
addicts they're od'd they're waste yeah as are many of the kids that you went to all these facilities
00:57:07.680
and schools with so fewer of them really yes how many of your classmates are thriving right now
00:57:17.920
well not many people are like me simone what i will say is my genetics does well in hardship environments
00:57:25.920
and i'd point out here that this childhood that she is terrified of one of our kids potentially
00:57:30.480
facing is the childhood that created me the person who presumably like i love who i am and she seems
00:57:38.480
to like who i am i would be really happy if my kids ended up like me and even if all of the hardship
00:57:46.400
was a negative even if i maybe could have been a better person without it i still would choose
00:57:54.640
existence plus hardship over non-existence and if through sending kids to a facility i was able to
00:58:00.880
bring more humans into existence of course are you willing to look at those additional kids in the
00:58:06.400
face and say sorry i wasn't willing to bring you into existence because your brother's at a facility
00:58:12.960
functionally those kids are up in heaven waiting on us to have them and you're just leaving them hanging
00:58:19.520
no this isn't cosmologically how i think things work but functionally it's how things work because
00:58:24.560
you're denying a human a right to exist what kind of dance should i do first for mom and dad
00:58:35.600
from what i've heard it's gonna take a while to even learn how to walk so maybe just a twist then
00:58:40.960
and i would be very and keep in mind when i was told this to the kid i wasn't told this like a bad
00:58:51.360
thing it's like oh you get to go to an environment where things are harder and you have more self
00:58:55.600
determination a kid especially one of our kids would love that if you don't frame it as some like
00:59:02.560
negative oh you were going to be away from mommy's hugs and you're like all right buddy now you're turning
00:59:08.240
eight the game gets harder like kids are like oh yeah let's do it like i i you're gonna have to
00:59:16.800
fend for yourself oh when i'm fending for myself i'm gonna do 10 times as good as when mommy and daddy
00:59:22.240
are fending for me you know that is the mindset i went into all this with and i look at our kids and
00:59:28.400
i know our kids like if you're saying our actual kids they'd effing love this in fact i remember like
00:59:36.240
just the other day our kids were playing and octavian took me aside and he goes daddy i need
00:59:41.200
you to go in the other room and look at the computer i was like what and he goes the little
00:59:46.960
ones are playing i need you to go look at a computer um because he knows what's up he he they were having
00:59:57.040
fun and me being around was was was lowering their ability to play so i disagree you make valid
01:00:06.000
arguments i just maybe it's just inbuilt to my biological right so you're like hyper on this side
01:00:18.320
i was an only child yeah and i loved being an only child and i loved having a close relationship with
01:00:22.960
my parents and i i love my parents and i also just have this deep inbuilt intuition and maybe this this
01:00:31.200
happened after i had kids we're just i really think kids deserve and i i am not someone to say
01:00:39.600
that anyone is entitled to anything right but i still think that if you're going to bring a person
01:00:44.080
into the world they are entitled to like a minimal percentage of your overall octavian think about
01:00:50.400
octavian our oldest kid our most cognitive kid if you asked him simone would you prefer more brothers
01:00:57.360
and sisters or more time with mommy and daddy what is he going to answer we can ask him tonight
01:01:06.720
i know i know it's more brothers and sisters you know it's more brothers and sisters you don't even
01:01:11.840
have to ask but we will we will all right so i'm gonna keep going so laura left fender says french
01:01:18.240
fertility rates top ratings in europe not for much for reasons of immigration but rather because
01:01:25.200
fertility among native born women is high and so here you can look at native born versus all women
01:01:30.800
in the country in what you see and what we've always said is that diversity in a country and
01:01:35.680
there's this one study that argues against this but it's like obviously not true if you look at the
01:01:39.600
data like it's so weird to me that people can't tell when people are lying to them with data i'm like
01:01:44.080
okay what countries have the highest fertility rates you're looking at like france and the united
01:01:47.840
states and israel fairly diverse countries which countries have the lowest fertility rates countries like
01:01:51.520
korea and china it's like okay well it's it's clearly diversity especially competitive diversity
01:01:57.840
is good for fertility rates which again we're finding in the data here now i thought this was
01:02:03.200
interesting to understand the cult of the host so this is talking about japan and host clubs
01:02:08.720
this was tweeted by jordan schneider we have to start with two statistics i'm sorry if you don't know what
01:02:13.920
a host club is it's a place where women in japan go to pretend to sort of date guys
01:02:20.000
like they buy pretty host clubs are basically bars or nightclubs in japan staffed by attractive
01:02:27.040
male boyfriend experience type people you select one when you get there and then one or two it's
01:02:33.200
you know like maybe one to a person and then sit there and drink with them and they make money from
01:02:37.840
the drinks that you purchase and then after that they may even like continue texting you and you know
01:02:42.320
asking you to come back and that's kind of how they make money and that they're a really interesting
01:02:47.760
phenomenon and you should definitely watch some youtube videos summarizing this this economy
01:02:52.000
because it's crazy some women even end up going into sex work because they are trying to support
01:02:58.320
the the addiction to their fake boyfriend yeah they'll quit their job and they'll go into sex
01:03:03.840
work to support their addiction to their fake boyfriend who works at basically also in sex work
01:03:08.560
which is basically the female equivalent of it which is more of a relationship style experience it's crazy
01:03:14.160
it is crazy and it is culturally normalized i think is really negative as well yes we can provide a
01:03:21.520
way to masturbate sort of the boyfriend desire that many japanese women have although i imagine
01:03:26.000
their host clubs are going to take a major hit as chat ais get more popular i could see that yes i
01:03:31.200
could also see the government banning them they probably should to be honest they should a lot of
01:03:36.720
women are going to be angry but they probably should yeah well i don't know i mean so this is something
01:03:40.880
would be like why would you not say that porn should be banned then because there's like no
01:03:44.240
statistics that shows that porn lowers birth rates actually anything if you look at the statistics in
01:03:48.640
the countries where porn is banned porn seems to a woman is very unlikely to be going through the
01:03:54.240
grind of dating and finding a husband if she's going to host clubs and this is not true of men in
01:03:59.520
porn and despite it's not true women in porn women can read romance novels and still actively be dating
01:04:05.120
but if you are investing in a host club relationship you do not have money or time to date you can only
01:04:10.400
spend your evenings and money on on supporting this this host club relationship which is just so
01:04:16.160
it's so toxic so i you know i typically am not for banning anything but i just i don't really see
01:04:21.040
anyone benefiting from this yeah even even though the the men who work in host clubs are paying huge
01:04:27.520
commissions to the club owner for you know all the all the alcohol purchase they're not being paid
01:04:32.880
directly they're being essentially paid a commission on drinks purchased at the bar it's it's stupid
01:04:38.320
yeah more than 60 percent of the japanese women in their late 20s are unmarried double the rate in
01:04:46.320
the mid-1980s a recent study found that more than a third of unmarried japanese adults 20 to 24 have
01:04:53.600
never dated oh yikes ouch that is wild so so when you consider that 60 are unmarried of of women at that age
01:05:03.760
range and a third of them more than a third of them have never even dated this makes a lot of
01:05:09.120
sense there's just not a cultural system that is pressuring them to go out and interact with guys
01:05:14.160
and they don't feel the need to do this they do not think guys have anything to offer right and i think
01:05:19.680
that this is something that a lot of guys in the west haven't gotten yet they if you increase this
01:05:26.080
narrative of women evil it can get to a point where women just decide in mass i'm not even going to try
01:05:32.160
anymore yeah because that's what happened in korea and japan yes well japan's doing relatively quite
01:05:39.280
well in east asia it's i don't think it's as bad in japan but in korea certainly it is and and this
01:05:48.000
people talk about the four bees move in and and misogyny being really stuff that is only very
01:05:54.640
serious among extremists but i do think that there is a trickle down effect that it sort of rubs off
01:06:00.240
and gives people general bad taste of the other sex because of these very high profile
01:06:08.320
battles taking place amongst extremists on each side so just because you yourself are not part of
01:06:14.000
the four bees movement if you're a woman in korea you might still be like like women and men hate each
01:06:18.800
other here right you know this isn't really a place for me to get married i shouldn't really be investing
01:06:23.520
in dating because it's not really great for women right it's not a good overall scheme
01:06:30.160
one note malcolm that in four minutes i have to jump on that call yeah i was actually thinking about
01:06:34.560
splitting this into two episodes so i am totally okay with that okay yes so people are commenting
01:06:40.720
on how like the conservatives now that they've won are beginning to split and fight amongst themselves
01:06:44.880
a bit more and one of the big areas which i think we've even seen is really the losers of the
01:06:49.840
conservative movement the traditionalists like that you know the the ones who really want to go back to
01:06:55.760
the old ways of doing things they've gotten quite mad about this stacy wojack meme who just acts like
01:07:01.920
a normal wife like you know demands things of her husband sometimes makes mistakes stuff like that
01:07:07.120
okay oh this is super relatable and they're like oh you guys are owning yourselves and women should
01:07:12.400
like always serve their husband and like not make any mistakes as a wife and like you're just looking
01:07:16.400
really cucked right here and all the normal like actually married men are like this is the way most
01:07:20.880
married women are like what are you doing um and it sort of devolved into this it was one faction
01:07:27.360
apparently sort of being led by nick fuentes which makes a lot of sense i mean you can talk a lot about
01:07:32.400
how a woman should act as a wife if you're not dating anyone you know because then you can say well
01:07:38.000
this is the ideal wife and i should only continue civilization if i can find this idealized wife
01:07:42.720
and it's created a huge problem for people i i think we should do an episode on it but it's a little
01:07:48.640
too similar to our don't trust influencers without parents episode which hasn't gone yeah or not
01:07:54.400
which hasn't gone live yet too too similar you can maybe add some annotation to it though about this