Based Camp - September 18, 2024When Does More Money Not Mean Fewer Kids？ (A Data Deep Dive)
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Summary
In today's episode, we focus on the nuances of when fertility decline does not follow the model that says the more wealth an individual has, the fewer kids they have. Where are the kinks in this particular statistical trend? And what are the exceptions to the general trend?
Transcript
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Hello, Simone! Today we are going to do an episode that focuses on fertility stats.
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And it's going to be a stat-heavy episode, it's going to be a study-heavy episode,
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and it's going to be on demographic collapse, which our audience love.
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So in today's episode, we are going to focus on the nuances of when fertility decline
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does not follow the model, the more wealth an individual has, the fewer kids they have.
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Where are the kinks in this particular incredibly robust statistical trends armor?
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I like that we're looking at this because I think the exceptions to the general trend
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So we're going to be focused on a few articles here,
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but one of the ones that I'm going to draw a lot from is actually from Lyman Stone,
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who runs the Institute of Family Studies, and it's called More Money, More Babies.
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What's the relationship between income and fertility?
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Now, something we should note here, and it's one of the reasons I'm looking at this,
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is I believe in always really digging deep when somebody says something that sounds,
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you know, utterly preposterous or is obviously ideologically motivated,
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because there's often elements of truth in what they're saying that I may not be seeing on the
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So, those who are not familiar or haven't read a lot of Lyman Stone stuff,
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he really likes to manipulate statistics to try to argue his perspective,
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and his perspective is always that we should be doing more cash handouts
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Those are generally the two arguments that he's always going to use.
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And so, he'll often twist things to sort of this, you know, Christian socialist perspective.
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But this means that he has to argue, and he has argued explicitly,
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that there isn't that much of a correlation between fertility and income,
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which is just a preposterous thing on its face.
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There was a piece that he wrote that was attacking us,
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and this is one of the claims he made when we were pointing out
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that you don't seem to be able to solve this with cash handouts.
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However, he has invested a lot of energy and a lot of his own personal credibility
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And as such, he has found a number of interesting points
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which don't reverse either of the two larger truisms.
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The first being that you do not appear to, with any reasonable amount of money,
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be able to pay people, or with social services, increase fertility rates.
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the more income a country has, or the more income an individual has,
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So the first is that if you look in pre-industrial societies,
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the more income an individual has, particularly a man,
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And this is only with male fertility, not female fertility.
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No, it's also female fertility, but it is more tied with male fertility.
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Men's Status and Reproductive Success in 33 Non-Industrial Societies
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Effects of Substance, Marriage System, and Reproductive Strategy.
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And this showed a meta-analysis of 288 results of 33 non-industrial populations.
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And it showed that status is significantly associated with men's reproductive success,
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consistent with the evolved basis for status pursuit.
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Status hierarchies have changed dramatically, though, in recent eras.
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If anybody doesn't immediately see the implication of this, it does show that dysgenic fertility
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selection, sorry, I should explain what dysgenic means.
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Dysgenic means certain environments can cause things to be selected for in a population that
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do not actually make the population more fit, but just increase the number of surviving
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They're all deformed and weird looking and witless.
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They, I don't remember the full story, but the point being is that they don't have natural
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And because they don't have natural predators, it's literally just the ones that can have
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And so there is no real fitness preservation technique or pressure for the population.
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And so they end up being cancerous, witless balls of tumors.
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If you've ever seen a rabbit in the UK, it's, it's, it's kind of scary, but where this is
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relevant to humans is we've been under similar pressures for a while.
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As we mentioned in our can society become an idiocracy episode, which by the way, was
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I don't even think we went that spicy in that one.
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Humans have genes and they're correlated with intelligence and they're being selected against.
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This is like really clear in the data, but okay.
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I guess we'll pretend we live in your little fantasy world where everyone's born exactly
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But anyway, the point being here that dysgenic selection started in humans with the rise of
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the industrial revolution, it appears, or with modern industrial society.
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And that before this, the more status someone was able to accrue, whether that was through,
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you know, wealth or charisma or attractiveness or et cetera, the more kids they were going
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Now, generally the two things most correlated with a high fertility rate are low IQ and
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obesity, which are, you know, witless rabbits, right?
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I think it's low educational attainment, not necessarily low IQ.
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Obviously this doesn't really help his larger point.
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What fertility rates were like in pre-industrial societies isn't exactly relevant in the modern
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world, but it is, you know, an interesting and novel point nonetheless.
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But to him saying something like, well, you can't just assume that less income means more
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kids because in pre-industrial societies, that wasn't true.
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It's like, yeah, but that's not relevant to the current.
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To a post-industrial society problem that we're facing.
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That's like throwing sand in my eyes with statistics.
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This is what I mean when I say he likes doing the, the pocket sand thing.
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So for the next point, he says here, the author argues that historic fertility declines
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were overwhelmingly caused by novel cultural norms, which are often correlated, but distinct
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So here I was looking at the study that he was looking at.
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It's called a culture and the historic fertility transition.
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This paper presents a novel argument for the historic fertility transition, emphasizing the
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role of cultural forces alongside economic factors.
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The authors highlight a significant and abrupt decline in fertility rates among British households
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in 1877, which was observed not only in Britain, but also among culturally British populations
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living in Canada, the United States and South Africa.
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The authors propose that the famous Braggadol-Bestant trial of 1877 served as a possible catalyst
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for this widespread change in fertility behavior.
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Now, this would be very interesting if it was true.
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If it was true that only British people, like people in Britain and British immigrants experienced
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a sudden and sharp fertility decline all at around the same year, starting at around the
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same year due to some massive cultural change, I would be like, oh, that's really interesting.
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I mean, yes, we know that culture affects fertility, but this would be a more acute effect than we
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So do you happen to know what the Braggadol-Bestant trial of 1877 was about?
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It was a book called The Fruits of Philosophy that discussed contraceptives, and the court trial
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After the trial, book sales rose from around 1,000 copies to 125,000 copies.
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It was a Streisand effect thing, but it also completely undermines the claim here.
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This was not a book that popularized contraceptives.
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It was a book that taught a population that didn't know how to use contraceptives broadly
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to how to use contraceptives broadly for the first time.
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Of course, it was going to have an effect on fertility rates.
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This is not particularly interesting as a data point.
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Contraceptives have the capacity to lower fertility rates in a population that has never been
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But what is interesting here, and the reason this is pocket sand,
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Is that when you ban contraceptives in populations that already have them, that actually decreases
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As we saw with the Romania situation, where you get a sharp increase for a couple years and
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And the reason is because then having lots of kids becomes associated with low wealth
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So the people with self-control stop having kids.
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It's a really bad way to increase fertility rates.
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And also, just more broadly, I remember at the Perinatalist Conference, somebody was like,
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And I was like, do I really want more people accidentally having kids?
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Not just for the children's sake, but from the genetic effects of something like that.
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In France, fertility fell 100 years before industrialization, while in England, the first
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country to industrialize, fertility did not decline for a century after industrialization.
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Wasn't that, in France, though, more a product of famine and hardship?
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Yeah, there was famine and hardship during that period.
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There have been various studies that analyze this.
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Because the mainstream perception is that it was probably due to decline in religiosity.
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But remember, what I said, all of Lyman's arguments, whenever you read him, he's like
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one of those far lefties who literally can only argue for far lefty positions, and you
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just know, like, okay, they're going to twist everything.
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And you get really interested when they're arguing something against her.
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Like, if Leather Apron Club ever argued a left-leaning position, I'd be like, this is something
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I need to take ultra-seriously, because he would never do that.
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But, you know, if Lyman Stone is arguing Christianity good or socialism good, you know, pretty much,
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I don't know, there's not that much you can take from it.
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But I will note that this does appear to be true.
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So, the decline in marital fertility in France began around 1800, about 70 years before other
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Some sources indicate the decline may have started even earlier in the 1760s.
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By 1840, France's marital fertility rate had fallen to two-thirds of its 1800 level.
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So, you had the French Revolution, tons of secularization.
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Yeah, a lot of instability, a huge amount of change, and probably people just didn't
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know what to expect from their government and infrastructure and everything going forward.
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But let's go over the various theories that have been put forward for this.
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I will note that in the 1800s, the average English woman was still having six children during
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Secularization, a decline in the influence of the Catholic Church may have led to a wider
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use of contraceptive and changing attitudes about family size.
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Cultural changes, the French Revolution may have played a major role in the change of social
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Some people argue that pre-industrial France had limited economic opportunities, creating
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Think about the economic famines and pressure that would have been created by the French
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Obviously, even if you're in a status where income translates to kids, you're going to
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And land inheritance laws, post-revolution laws requiring equal division of property among
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That is definitely going to incentivize smaller families.
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So, people who do not know this, this law was generally something historically that you would
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So, famously, the English imposed this change in inheritance laws on the Irish after conquering
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Well, it quickly breaks up any large family with a lot of power if they have to split their
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land every generation among all of their descendants instead of...
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It distributes rather than consolidates their power.
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So, they ended up incentivizing lower fertility rates.
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But let's talk more about France's secularization because this is worth talking about and I found
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France experienced a process of secularization and de-Christianization beginning in the 18th
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century, well before the French Revolution of 1789.
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This decline in religious influence occurred much earlier than in England.
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Secular wills increased from 10% in 1710 to 80% by 1780.
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Long before the turn of the 1800s, 80% of wills were secular.
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There was a significant decrease in the number of clergymen by capita by the end of the 18th
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A rose is an attempt to reform Catholicism by bringing some Calvinistic doctrines, such as the depravity
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of man, predestination, irresistible grace, and limited atonement entered.
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And this was a movement called the Genesonists, but the Genesonists were not Protestant.
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They were a reforming group of Catholics who some blame for this lower fertility rate because they
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But this doesn't really make sense because Calvinist groups in this time period had really
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So, I think this might be more just any sort of moderating, secularizing political force
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And we also need to ask why, you know, we always mention that Catholics are uniquely
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susceptible to fertility collapse, why the first of the European fertility collapse that
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And my guess is there's probably a big cross-correlating reason there.
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But do you have any thoughts before we move forwards?
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If I had to guess, I would say it was mostly due to a period of cultural and religious and
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political turmoil where, to your point, more simply, there's just not really a lot of hope
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And I think when people don't have hope or certainty, they stop having kids, especially
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when they don't have, you know, amazing, abundant resources and or, I guess, a lot of social
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I don't think social support was that strong at this time either.
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The church offered some, but, you know, it was limited compared to modern social support.
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Today, fertility in Africa is lower than it was for Europe or Asian countries when they
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had similar income levels because modern Africa, though poor, is nonetheless highly exposed to
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At the individual level, when African women get richer, they actually tend to have more children.
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This came from an article called How Developmental Programs Impact Fertility Rates in Africa.
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And a quote from it is, however, another strand of the literature suggests that fertility can
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increase with greater wealth if the household desires more children than it can now afford.
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And it mentions here Lindo 2010, Black Itaul 2013, Loverman and Mumford 2013.
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Previous work has also shown that women may have more children to ensure economic security
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and old age from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.
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And here it lists five papers that I'm sure you don't care about.
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The last channel is particularly important in a context like Subs of Hara in Africa
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First, pension systems are either weak or non-existent.
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Second, men typically marry women who are significantly younger,
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meaning that most women anticipate ending up as widows.
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Third, customary laws and norms often exclude women from property ownership and inheritance.
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So this almost reminds me of the way that people handle retirement programs with money.
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Like you will, if you have more income when you're young, you will save more money typically
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You'll set stuff aside in Roth IRAs in the United States.
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So you will have, you'll be saving more for your retirement.
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And perhaps in Africa, the equivalent of that in some areas is, well, if I have more income
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now, that means I can do more to prepare for my old age, which is have more children because
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then I have a more diversified portfolio of caregivers.
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Why do you think everyone should be viewing children this way right now?
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Um, really from a caregiver perspective, I don't know if I like that perspective.
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Do you think that you or I are going to get social security?
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Do you think that there's going to be a robust Medicare system in the United States when you
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No, but I wouldn't want my children to pay for it.
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We're going to talk about a few other things here.
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If you think anything other than your kids, they can say, well, I could save money, right?
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I could save money and that could support me in my old age.
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Here's the problem with saving money in this global economy as it exists right now.
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Fertility decline has the effect that I expected to have.
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And AI is not a literal deus ex machina getting us out of this situation.
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We could enter a state of persistent economic decline instead of the average aggregate economic
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And that is what made compound interest is what made saving money a smart thing to do
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A growing global economy is what made saving money a good idea.
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If we don't have that, saving money is next to setting it on fire.
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Worse, it would be, you know, like saving money in Argentina or something.
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Worse, you have the problem of the United States becoming more and more Argentina-like.
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We talked about this in another episode in terms of, like, how costly it is to build
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infrastructure, how much the bureaucracy costs, how much cronyism there is on the Democratic
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I mean, there's cronyism on the Republican side, too.
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Not in regards to the way it works in Argentina.
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There's, like, a lot of cronyism, but there is not Peronism-type cronyism, which is what
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leads to, like, hyperinflation and stuff like that.
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There's a difference between, you know, like, low-level nepotism and stuff like that and
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literally paying for your votes through massive, massive, massive bureaucratic programs.
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But there is the secondary issue that we have here, okay, which is wage inflation.
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So, for people who don't know what wage inflation means, it means that, now, this is great for
00:20:13.060
It means that if you have a world where the number of workers is dropping really, really
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quickly, the amount you have to pay every individual worker goes up dramatically.
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If you look at the recent inflation that we've experienced at the country, it's really been
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concentrated in wage inflation, especially with lower-end, lower-skilled workers' wages
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going up, some specialty-skilled worker wages going up.
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And that means that your kids are a really safe way to make money so long as AI just doesn't
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So you need them to be at some base level of competence.
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But other than that, it's not as smart to think that you are going to be able to afford the
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types of services or anything comparable to your existing life in your old age.
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But do you think it's right to put that on children?
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I don't think kids should support a useless older person who's not providing them any services.
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Yeah, but I guess, yeah, if we go back to, like, older people being housekeepers,
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child care providers, yeah, then it makes sense.
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If you're literally exchanging housing and food with full-time child care and probably
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elite education, then I guess I, yeah, I could see that for sure.
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Hey, I don't want our kids to get a bad deal, even when that involves me.
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I appreciate your diligence and dedication to fairness.
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One thing that I think is going to become quite the trend, and this is something we should
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probably do another episode on, is people's retirement plans being a bullet.
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I've noticed this a lot for people in our lives.
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It might actually be interesting to do a survey on this.
00:22:10.280
Oh, like, people are posting, like, pictures of a gun and being like, look, it's my retirement.
00:22:13.880
They just are like, oh, I don't really save for retirement because I plan to end my life.
00:22:19.220
I mean, everyone says that, and then they chicken out, except for our family, apparently.
00:22:30.240
Well, I mean, it's realistically the only thing that a lot of people are going to have
00:22:36.480
available to them, especially the ones that didn't have kids.
00:22:39.120
Yeah, but also for families, in many respects, like, you can see how it plays out when family
00:22:46.640
members who can't take care of themselves really ruin the lives of what you would call
00:22:53.620
And our government also in the United States, in many states at least, does not even support
00:23:00.100
For example, in Pennsylvania, one of the constituents in our district who's giving me advice on policy,
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who's an accountant, has pointed out that if you are caring for a dependent family member
00:23:12.700
who's an older adult, you can't count them on your state tax return as a dependent, meaning
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So, yeah, a lot of there are a lot of people who are caring for parents and older family
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members, and they're not getting support from the state.
00:23:36.560
Well, you could draft something to reverse that.
00:23:40.140
But, you know, my odds of getting elected are 7% per my calculation, just given the makeup
00:23:53.520
So, something to note here is that African fertility rates are falling way slower.
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Everyone thinks they're following way slower than they should be.
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Like, they are not falling at the same rate as other countries did when they hit their
00:24:08.160
But, in some areas, they're falling faster than people expect, blah, blah, blah.
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Now, Lyman Stone made the claim, this is not true.
00:24:18.540
However, it's a bit of a pocket sand situation again, as I've mentioned.
00:24:24.560
And then all of the graphs he puts up are comparing child mortality rates with fertility
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rates instead of income level with fertility rates.
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Because he claims it's a good proxy for income level.
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Like, basically, he found one graph where things lined up and he didn't want to think about
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it anymore because it doesn't fit any of his agendas.
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And so, he then just made this claim and hoped people wouldn't notice that he was pretending
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that child mortality rates were societal development indexes or income levels when they aren't.
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But I will put two of these graphs on screen here because they are nonetheless interesting.
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Here, you have one that just shows, you know, a broad alignment between child mortality rates
00:25:12.240
And then here, you see one that is titled, Africa's fertility rate is about normal for its developmental stage.
00:25:20.740
And then if you look at the axes, it's total fertility rate and child mortality.
00:25:25.680
Like, if people wonder what I mean, like, he's really intentionally manipulative with data.
00:25:31.860
Or just in terms of the sometimes lazy or manipulative tendency to just throw in stats or a study
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or a graph and know that most people aren't going to look closely at it and just be like,
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oh, yeah, he backed it up and just read the headline.
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Limestone, as much as we respect his work, abuses that tactic egregiously.
00:26:03.600
Like, obviously, he puts diligence in, and I appreciate that.
00:26:06.940
But overall, he is the net negative to the movement, and we'd be better if he wasn't in it.
00:26:17.580
Of course, he hates us because we have integrity, and that doesn't help him.
00:26:24.560
If you're going to consistently put out claims that are just patently false, right,
00:26:31.480
and you have a big platform and you're part of a movement,
00:26:34.580
it makes everyone else in the movement look bad or uninformed or manipulative.
00:26:41.080
And so, it reflects very poorly on work we are trying to do.
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Fortunately, almost nobody reads his work except for pronatalists, right?
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The problem is just making sure pronatalists know to – it's not that his work has no utility.
00:26:58.740
He's put together some graphs that have really changed my perspective on things.
00:27:02.800
But the one that changed my perspective most, he used to argue for the exact opposite direction
00:27:11.260
The famous fertility rate correlation to cash handouts when you account for the –
00:27:19.640
It was the margin of error getting smaller the lower the rate it said was.
00:27:24.980
And I just don't think he noticed this when he was putting together the graph maybe
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because the graph he uses to argue that cash handouts do work
00:27:31.540
when it's literally the single best argument I've ever seen that cash handouts don't work.
00:27:38.300
Like, he could do a good job if he could, I don't know,
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I have to ask why does he feel the need to do this all the time?
00:27:49.980
And the only answer I can come to is his moral system is so far based within his theocratic mindset
00:27:58.140
that everything is about promoting his particular theocratic agenda,
00:28:03.700
which is about socialist redistribution and spreading his particular brand of theology's message.
00:28:09.100
And so there is no moral qualms for him either in setting back the pronatalist movement
00:28:16.500
by manipulating the way data is presented, you know, pocket sanding,
00:28:19.440
or, you know, just causing people to focus on potential solutions to fertility collapse
00:28:25.240
that, like, we should know won't work like cash handouts because they don't –
00:28:33.680
It just doesn't seem to work, and everyone else agrees it doesn't work.
00:28:37.440
We were sitting down with the Heritage Foundation and all the fertility experts,
00:28:41.460
and they were like, okay, so I read in this one place that this one guy thinks this works,
00:28:52.420
And everyone else at the table was like, yeah, that's the limestone thing.
00:28:57.920
This graph is titled Africa's Fertility is Normal for its Mortality Level.
00:29:02.360
Ooh, this one is titled – honestly, I like that.
00:29:04.860
And here it is with the mortality of children under five.
00:29:10.220
Unfortunately, I mean, it would be nice if he said the child mortality level, but, you know, okay, it works here.
00:29:15.260
But this I actually found pretty interesting, and I'm going to put this on screen here.
00:29:19.900
It's a heat map of Africa that looks at where fertility rates are unexpectedly low or unexpectedly high based on these child mortality metrics.
00:29:31.000
And the place where they are unexpectedly low is South Africa and places like Morocco and Northwestern Africa.
00:29:42.180
You know, these are regions that are right now undergoing a significant collapse.
00:29:46.040
They were some of the more industrialized parts of Africa, and they were really industrialized during that period where I think people still had the fantasy of industrializing Africa in the same way other countries were industrialized, which, you know, most people have given up on at this point.
00:30:12.680
It still hasn't really shown this trend that he's claiming.
00:30:15.260
Now we're going to look in the United States at TFR by income level, breaking down groups by ethnicity.
00:30:25.840
So there is some interesting stuff in this graph.
00:30:34.040
In the United States, correlations between fertility and income differ wildly by race.
00:30:38.700
Among whites and to a lesser extent Asians, it tends to rise with income, except for the high fertility and very poor.
00:30:47.260
And by contrast, wealthy, black, and Hispanic women have rather low birth rates, while foreign-born women exhibit little connection between income and fertility.
00:30:55.660
So, I mean, this is what he says the graph says, which is something he does.
00:31:02.080
But I'll go over what the graph actually shows for anybody who's watching on a podcast.
00:31:12.180
The less money you have when you are below the, looks around 15% bottom income demographic.
00:31:19.760
So household income decimal, if you're below the bottom 15%, it goes way up sort of in direct correlation with the amount of poverty your family's in.
00:31:27.720
This makes a lot of sense in the United States, and I just want to highlight, which I've said in other podcasts, how in the United States especially, if you are at or near the poverty line, basically a huge portion of your expenses as a parent are covered by state governments.
00:31:46.900
Your child's daycare, medical care, food, it's all covered.
00:31:58.620
If that explained high fertility rates among low-income groups, what you would expect is basically everyone below the bottom 10% would just be high.
00:32:09.720
It wouldn't be a direct and linear line going up.
00:32:16.500
Yeah, I don't necessarily have an answer for that.
00:32:19.160
I think when you get closer, like higher in income, you're going to have more variation between having those services and not having those services.
00:32:30.300
The less wealth you have, you can almost think of it as like income security.
00:32:34.240
But the income security is around these government incentive programs and these government payment programs.
00:32:40.140
So this income security drives up your fertility rate.
00:32:44.000
Now, what is interesting is sort of a flat white fertility rate here until you get to 20%.
00:32:50.900
If you're looking at between 20% and around 65% in terms of the household income percentile.
00:32:59.480
Okay, so I'm going to say this again, between 20% and 65% in the white population, you have a steadily increasing fertility rate.
00:33:08.400
Yeah, but to your point, basically the poorer you are in the United States, the more secure your income is for support in child care, food for your kid, and medical care for your kid.
00:33:20.000
Yeah, but what I just said is a steadily increasing as you go from 20% to 65%.
00:33:27.800
You're saying, yeah, as you get poorer, but as you get poorer.
00:33:29.920
No, I'm saying increasing, i.e. as you get wealthier, you have more kids.
00:33:35.840
So as you get closer to not having support for.
00:33:38.980
So basically, what this seems to indicate, and the way I read this, is that below the sort of 10% range, these are individuals who are living off the state.
00:33:51.080
And then, you know, below the 20% range, they are marginally living off the state in some capacity.
00:33:56.020
And then after that, the money is able to go to kids.
00:33:59.980
You know, like, they basically break from the state.
00:34:02.700
And that's why they're at the very bottom of the fertility metric when they're at, like, the 20% low income level.
00:34:08.360
And they rise until they get to the 60th or the 65% level.
00:34:23.400
So basically, for middle income white Americans, the more money you have, the more kids you're going to have.
00:34:28.160
But then you hit something, which I'm going to call the replacement rate ceiling, where as soon as it hits two, it bounces off it and starts going down again as you get more money than that.
00:34:39.640
And here, I think that this is an urban monoculture thing.
00:34:42.080
If you're above the 65 income percentile, you're likely in some way involved in an urban monoculture industry.
00:34:47.740
And that's why you see the fertility rate going down again until you get to above 90%.
00:34:53.840
And 90% to 100%, again, you have a linear increase that still, even when you get to 100%, is barely above two.
00:35:01.840
But no point does this really go above repopulation rate.
00:35:07.900
These graphs have these sort of almost heartbeat-like fluctuations.
00:35:13.940
It makes me think they correspond with tax brackets in some way.
00:35:19.040
But anyway, so the next group, well, let's talk about Blacks, because that's an interesting group.
00:35:25.220
Non-Hispanic Blacks, this is pretty strictly the less money you have, the more kids you have.
00:35:33.560
However, the correlation is strongest between around 10%, so people in the bottom 10%, up to people at around 25% to 30%.
00:35:48.440
And in that range, you just have a really quick increase.
00:35:52.300
The poorer you are from 30% to 10%, the more kids you're going to have if you're Black.
00:35:56.180
But there's two really interesting things about this.
00:35:58.160
Once you get above 30%, it continues to go down a bit, but it's mostly even.
00:36:04.420
Like, if you are above 30% as a Black American, you're basically going to be near-bottom Black fertility rates in the United States.
00:36:12.280
But, and here's the really interesting part, it's below 10%.
00:36:20.160
Remember how in the white population, fertility shot up for that demographic?
00:36:23.980
In the Black population, fertility shoots down in that demographic.
00:36:28.160
Now, I should note that while it's shooting down, it's still way above the impoverished white fertility rates.
00:36:37.760
So, low-income Black fertility rate is just, like, way above low-income white fertility rate.
00:36:43.840
And what this shows with the back population, and this is something I've argued in other episodes,
00:36:48.640
and it's just something for, like, Black community members to take super seriously,
00:36:53.220
is income is far more dysgenic for the Black community in the United States than any other American demographic.
00:37:04.980
Sorry, when I say it's way more dysgenic, what I mean is you are specifically genetically selecting for whatever correlate
00:37:12.380
is tied to low-income within the Black community, much more so than you are in other communities
00:37:20.560
where you just don't have a very strong correlation.
00:37:22.740
Other communities that don't have a strong correlation would be the, the white community,
00:37:27.300
the correlation's a bit all over the place, but probably not enough to have, like, a massive genetic effect.
00:37:34.800
And foreign-born women, pretty all over the place.
00:37:38.160
The other group that has a very strong dysgenic selective pressure, but not as strong as the Black American community,
00:37:47.080
It's not as dramatic, but the directionality is the same.
00:37:52.140
Well, it basically, like the Black population, so unlike the Black population, it doesn't have that weird drop
00:38:01.020
But what it does have is if you go from 0% to around 30%, it's just like a constant drop.
00:38:11.000
And then after that, it levels off, and it stays a bit higher than high-income Black fertility does.
00:38:20.040
Once you get above the 30% income demographic, Black fertility rate is pretty much the lowest fertility rate in the United States.
00:38:33.180
Keep in mind, you can sort of ignore the purple line here, because the purple line is Native-born, non-Hispanic, other Asian, multi.
00:38:40.820
Which is, like, fine, but it doesn't really mean anything about any specific demographic that I can target or say anything about.
00:38:46.980
So if you ignore the purple line, Blacks have a very low fertility rate when they get any amount of income.
00:38:58.400
And I've seen this in our friend groups, actually.
00:39:00.160
You know, because we know a lot of wealthy Black people.
00:39:02.240
I don't know any wealthy Black people with kids.
00:39:22.380
Because I, yeah, I know the adoptee one, and I wasn't counting them, but I guess I should.
00:39:26.500
But, yeah, it's tough, and it's definitely something I notice, like, within our friend group.
00:39:35.440
Yeah, well, gosh, now I feel more confused than anything.
00:39:42.240
Yeah, I thought I'd get some, some takeaways from these exceptions, but.
00:39:49.340
Well, I mean, I think that the core thing is that social services should never be gated for just support.
00:39:54.600
That's the way I feel about basically any data I've looked at.
00:39:58.860
It's okay with social services, but if you're offering a social service to anyone, you should be offering it to everyone.
00:40:05.760
Otherwise, it leads to really negative economic and effects like this.
00:40:12.800
Among the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews in the U.S., fertility is negatively correlated with income.
00:40:17.740
Poorer income brackets have six to eight children, while the richer ones have three to five.
00:40:22.760
Overall, the higher fertility of these two groups compared to other Americans is overwhelmingly driven by cultural factors.
00:40:32.080
That among ultra-Orthodox Jews and Amish, fertility is negatively correlated with income.
00:40:38.380
But that makes sense to me because in those instances, I view more income as being correlated with more integration with mainstream society and therefore the urban monoculture.
00:40:52.820
So, the less income you have, probably the more you are purely within your community and not making money from the outside world.
00:41:03.300
And that's the bigger theme of demographic collapse, that industrialization, leaving the house, integrating with a larger economy, working for larger businesses that are not owned for your family.
00:41:20.260
I'm going to see if you can catch where the pocket sand is in this.
00:41:22.940
Among the Arab countries, which range from poor to oil rich, there is no national correlation between wealth and lower fertility.
00:41:32.200
Which, I mean, first of all, I mean, the graph shows the exact opposite.
00:41:42.200
Because this is one of those things where I just am astounded that he will do this all the freaking time.
00:41:52.940
And I'm like, it literally shows the exact opposite of what you just said it showed.
00:41:56.780
This is the graph that he's claiming that shows that more income a Arab country has that doesn't correlate with it having a lower fertility rate.
00:42:12.200
What you could claim with this graph, maybe, is that the...
00:42:19.200
The Gulf states aren't subject to this trend, but other MENA countries are.
00:42:28.100
But even though it's even sort of true among the Gulf states, look.
00:42:31.140
Yeah, if we were to draw, like, an average line, what is that linear regression?
00:42:38.660
God, it's been too long since I've taken a math class.
00:42:42.120
But if we were to, yeah, do, like, a normalized line, it would be down into the, like, a downward sloping line.
00:42:59.780
But also, it wouldn't even matter to me if this was true.
00:43:02.960
Because it's like, why isn't there this great fertility collapse once you're talking about the Gulf states?
00:43:07.960
Because the Gulf states do not distribute income in any sort of meaningful, equal way.
00:43:17.780
Gulf states are freaking wacky when it comes to how wealth is distributed within them.
00:43:22.180
And then I'd want to, you know, make sure that we are talking specifically about their native population's fertility rate, which can be very hard to break out in these countries.
00:43:32.580
Or is it naturally broken out in a lot of the statistics on the countries?
00:43:36.200
Because they have huge, huge, huge immigrant populations, which have much higher fertility rates than the native fertility rate.
00:43:41.800
And then the native fertility rate within these countries has all sorts of other weird things going on with it.
00:43:47.240
Because they often treat maintaining the native population, which is a vast minority population, as some sort of, like, Spartan duty, right?
00:43:56.440
To maintain the master class so the slaves don't revolt.
00:44:01.660
Like, they see themselves as very different than the other people in their countries.
00:44:06.400
And they do see it as a crisis that their populations are crashing.
00:44:12.400
Oh, actually, I can just look at this and immediately tell you that this is not looking at native populations.
00:44:16.540
Because I know the native population fertility rates for some of these countries, like Emirati and Dubai, and they're way below two.
00:44:22.700
So this is including immigrants, which basically means this is a pointless graph.
00:44:27.960
That doesn't even show what he wants it to show.
00:44:33.300
I was reading the other day an essay by Emile Kierkegaard looking at Norwegian cognitive inequality.
00:44:40.460
There was research in 2024 published about the correlation between educational attainment and developing dementia.
00:44:49.940
But it just happened to have other interesting longitudinal data.
00:44:53.500
There should be the caveat that this was looking longitudinally at men specifically who were born in the 50s.
00:45:02.100
So this is not, you know, we're not looking at people right now.
00:45:06.620
But it did find that for lower groups in terms of educational attainment or IQ, did have lower male fertility.
00:45:18.580
And this also is seen in another study from Norway and other research in Sweden.
00:45:26.340
He writes, male fertility for the mean 70 IQ group is markedly lower.
00:45:32.080
This is the same as seen as in a prior study from Norway and Sweden based on overlapping data.
00:45:38.840
This does not mean Norway has eugenic fertility because this data set only concerns men and only those who took the test, those who are not disqualified prior for some reason.
00:45:49.480
And then he shares the Swedish and other Norwegian study information, which show a marked male dip in fertility for those with quite low IQ, which does produce a slight eugenic fertility pattern for men in these Nordic regions.
00:46:07.860
Most of the stuff that you've pointed to in this conversation has been overall fertility, both men and women.
00:46:15.540
And I do think based on the pressures that men and women are subject to, and also just looking at the history of whose genes get passed on, that it would make sense to me that most disgenics have to do with women and not with men.
00:46:35.020
Because it's just harder as a man to gain access to a woman and get her pregnant if you are sick or less fit in some way or less intelligent, like significantly, right?
00:46:50.520
If you're uniquely dumb and you have uniquely terrible social skills and you're uniquely ugly and you're like malformed or whatever, right?
00:46:57.360
It's just going to be harder to get a woman, ask all the black pill community, you know?
00:47:03.040
So when I first told you this, you're like, no, that's just not true.
00:47:08.320
But one, this one 2024 study is not alone in finding this correlation.
00:47:18.800
There is another Swedish study and another Norwegian study that finds it.
00:47:21.880
And two, it just makes logical sense to me that Sweden in Norway, keep in mind, are very different culturally from other places, but are very culturally similar to each other.
00:47:34.280
So you're just saying, well, and he did point out that some of it was overlapping data, but I don't know.
00:47:39.520
So intuitively, it would make sense to me that on the dysgenic front, men are subject to more evolutionary pressures, even in a post-industrial society than women are.
00:47:52.180
And often when you look at the people who are having a lot of kids, it's much more common to see men who have had multiple female partners, maybe not concurrently, but over a series of relationships or marriages, consider how many wives your dad has had.
00:48:07.040
And my dad has had three partners, like long-term monogamous and not all at the same time.
00:48:14.000
And your dad, same, not all at the same time, but still.
00:48:17.460
And there are lots of men who in turn go with no partners at all.
00:48:24.280
So I just want to point out that I do think that wealth probably correlates with higher fertility in men on average, if we were to have really good data to look at that, because men with more money probably also have other elements of fitness.
00:48:41.820
Well, this is bringing up an interesting relationship dynamic in which you're having sort of a functional type of harem, but you are basically staying with one woman until she's infertile, then you're exchanging her for another.
00:48:55.720
Well, then that's, I mean, that's modern polygamy that exists functionally and is extremely normalized in our culture and yet not really seen as polygamy.
00:49:04.780
It's almost, it's worse though, because like a normal polygamist, like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, you can see pictures of their wives.
00:49:12.680
A lot of them were super old and many of them were widows.
00:49:14.840
And he said, both of them claimed to take on, you know, many of their wives is just like, just to take care of them because they were widows.
00:49:21.180
And some of them have like, also like 14 year old wives too.
00:49:26.040
But that, that seems to me in many ways, a little bit kinder than dumping a wife, like a post-menopausal wife, and then marrying a much younger woman later.
00:49:38.700
When you're infertile, am I allowed to take on a younger wife?
00:49:43.060
I won't dump you, but we've got to keep the babies coming, right?
00:49:56.720
I'm, I'm just, I don't like being around people.
00:50:03.940
Everyone has a price, I think is, is the answer to this.
00:50:07.320
And in, in many sister wives situations, it actually works really well.
00:50:15.220
And I'm sure that there are people where I'd be like, oh my gosh, yes, let's do this.
00:50:36.720
I'm just getting, getting a feel, you know, when I need to think about what, what's going
00:50:44.680
Like, I don't know how I'm going to feel if I live in a house without young kids in it
00:50:52.760
It ages out of the house and you know, you're never going to spend those, those moments
00:50:59.800
You know, I haven't, I haven't, I haven't, I love it when people are like, when is your
00:51:06.640
You know, you must be almost done at this point.
00:51:08.200
And I'm like, I haven't even normalized to the idea that I may at some point in my life
00:51:15.980
Well, no, I mean, our plan is by the time I can no longer have babies and we no longer
00:51:23.860
So there will always be putter-pattering little kids.