Based Camp - When Does More Money Not Mean Fewer Kids？ (A Data Deep Dive)

00:00:00.000 Hello, Simone! Today we are going to do an episode that focuses on fertility stats. 0.99

00:00:06.440 And it's going to be a stat-heavy episode, it's going to be a study-heavy episode,

00:00:09.540 and it's going to be on demographic collapse, which our audience love.

00:00:13.240 The trifecta.

00:00:14.660 The trifecta.

00:00:16.360 So in today's episode, we are going to focus on the nuances of when fertility decline

00:00:24.980 does not follow the model, the more wealth an individual has, the fewer kids they have.

00:00:32.500 Where are the kinks in this particular incredibly robust statistical trends armor? 0.98

00:00:40.460 Would you like to know more?

00:00:41.960 I like that we're looking at this because I think the exceptions to the general trend

00:00:48.780 probably yield really useful insights.

00:00:51.580 So we're going to be focused on a few articles here,

00:00:53.400 but one of the ones that I'm going to draw a lot from is actually from Lyman Stone,

00:00:57.860 who runs the Institute of Family Studies, and it's called More Money, More Babies.

00:01:01.340 What's the relationship between income and fertility? 0.78

00:01:04.380 Now, something we should note here, and it's one of the reasons I'm looking at this,

00:01:08.540 is I believe in always really digging deep when somebody says something that sounds,

00:01:14.600 you know, utterly preposterous or is obviously ideologically motivated,

00:01:17.880 because there's often elements of truth in what they're saying that I may not be seeing on the

00:01:24.060 other side of the ideological fence.

00:01:25.940 Right.

00:01:26.380 So, those who are not familiar or haven't read a lot of Lyman Stone stuff,

00:01:30.540 he really likes to manipulate statistics to try to argue his perspective,

00:01:35.240 and his perspective is always that we should be doing more cash handouts

00:01:39.880 and that this can be solved with Christianity.

00:01:41.980 Those are generally the two arguments that he's always going to use.

00:01:44.260 And so, he'll often twist things to sort of this, you know, Christian socialist perspective.

00:01:50.340 But this means that he has to argue, and he has argued explicitly,

00:01:56.520 that there isn't that much of a correlation between fertility and income,

00:02:02.100 which is just a preposterous thing on its face.

00:02:04.300 There was a piece that he wrote that was attacking us,

00:02:06.240 and this is one of the claims he made when we were pointing out

00:02:08.560 that you don't seem to be able to solve this with cash handouts.

00:02:10.700 However, he has invested a lot of energy and a lot of his own personal credibility

00:02:16.840 in debating this.

00:02:18.520 And as such, he has found a number of interesting points

00:02:22.300 that I may not have caught myself,

00:02:25.240 which don't reverse either of the two larger truisms.

00:02:29.220 The first being that you do not appear to, with any reasonable amount of money,

00:02:33.100 be able to pay people, or with social services, increase fertility rates.

00:02:37.040 And the second being that, generally speaking,

00:02:40.320 the more income a country has, or the more income an individual has,

00:02:42.780 the lower their fertility rate is going to be. 0.97

00:02:44.640 But there are modifications in this trend.

00:02:48.200 Hmm. Okay.

00:02:49.540 Over where we see those in turn.

00:02:53.380 So the first is that if you look in pre-industrial societies,

00:03:00.160 the more income an individual has, particularly a man, 0.91

00:03:04.920 the higher their fertility rate is.

00:03:07.540 In pre-industrial societies?

00:03:09.620 Yes.

00:03:10.020 And this is only with male fertility, not female fertility.

00:03:13.660 No, it's also female fertility, but it is more tied with male fertility. 1.00

00:03:17.320 So this is from an article titled,

00:03:19.380 Men's Status and Reproductive Success in 33 Non-Industrial Societies

00:03:23.420 Effects of Substance, Marriage System, and Reproductive Strategy. 0.67

00:03:27.380 And this showed a meta-analysis of 288 results of 33 non-industrial populations.

00:03:34.080 And it showed that status is significantly associated with men's reproductive success,

00:03:39.320 consistent with the evolved basis for status pursuit.

00:03:42.340 Status hierarchies have changed dramatically, though, in recent eras.

00:03:45.860 If anybody doesn't immediately see the implication of this, it does show that dysgenic fertility

00:03:52.480 selection, sorry, I should explain what dysgenic means.

00:03:55.740 Dysgenic means certain environments can cause things to be selected for in a population that

00:04:03.360 do not actually make the population more fit, but just increase the number of surviving

00:04:09.160 offspring that population has.

00:04:10.820 A great example of this is rabbits in the UK.

00:04:14.740 Have you ever seen rabbits in the UK? 0.75

00:04:16.240 They're all deformed and weird looking and witless.

00:04:18.620 Wait, what? 0.99

00:04:19.140 Really?

00:04:19.660 Yes.

00:04:20.320 They, I don't remember the full story, but the point being is that they don't have natural

00:04:24.680 predators.

00:04:25.380 And because they don't have natural predators, it's literally just the ones that can have

00:04:29.680 the most kids that survive.

00:04:31.520 And so there is no real fitness preservation technique or pressure for the population. 0.90

00:04:37.420 And so they end up being cancerous, witless balls of tumors. 0.85

00:04:42.340 They're really quite gross. 0.79

00:04:43.760 If you've ever seen a rabbit in the UK, it's, it's, it's kind of scary, but where this is

00:04:48.700 relevant to humans is we've been under similar pressures for a while.

00:04:52.080 As we mentioned in our can society become an idiocracy episode, which by the way, was

00:04:58.520 ad restricted.

00:04:59.800 I don't even think we went that spicy in that one.

00:05:01.840 Just saw that today.

00:05:03.700 Maybe it sounds like it.

00:05:04.940 And I'm like, come on, man.

00:05:07.260 Yes.

00:05:07.520 Humans have genes and they're correlated with intelligence and they're being selected against.

00:05:11.440 This is like really clear in the data, but okay.

00:05:14.120 I guess we'll pretend we live in your little fantasy world where everyone's born exactly

00:05:18.140 the same.

00:05:18.860 But anyway, the point being here that dysgenic selection started in humans with the rise of

00:05:27.200 the industrial revolution, it appears, or with modern industrial society.

00:05:31.620 And that before this, the more status someone was able to accrue, whether that was through,

00:05:36.260 you know, wealth or charisma or attractiveness or et cetera, the more kids they were going

00:05:41.600 to have.

00:05:42.240 Now, generally the two things most correlated with a high fertility rate are low IQ and 0.71

00:05:47.220 obesity, which are, you know, witless rabbits, right?

00:05:51.480 I think it's low educational attainment, not necessarily low IQ.

00:05:54.800 Low educational attainment.

00:05:56.160 Yeah.

00:05:57.000 But yeah, not, not ideal, not ideal.

00:06:00.160 Obviously this doesn't really help his larger point.

00:06:02.640 What fertility rates were like in pre-industrial societies isn't exactly relevant in the modern

00:06:07.620 world, but it is, you know, an interesting and novel point nonetheless.

00:06:11.700 But to him saying something like, well, you can't just assume that less income means more

00:06:16.760 kids because in pre-industrial societies, that wasn't true.

00:06:19.360 It's like, yeah, but that's not relevant to the current.

00:06:21.260 To a post-industrial society problem that we're facing.

00:06:24.800 That's like throwing sand in my eyes with statistics.

00:06:27.200 This is what I mean when I say he likes doing the, the pocket sand thing.

00:06:30.980 Um, statistics and hope you don't notice.

00:06:37.460 Okay.

00:06:38.060 So for the next point, he says here, the author argues that historic fertility declines

00:06:43.060 were overwhelmingly caused by novel cultural norms, which are often correlated, but distinct

00:06:48.180 from income.

00:06:49.100 So here I was looking at the study that he was looking at.

00:06:52.860 It's called a culture and the historic fertility transition.

00:06:55.740 This paper presents a novel argument for the historic fertility transition, emphasizing the

00:07:00.740 role of cultural forces alongside economic factors.

00:07:03.380 The authors highlight a significant and abrupt decline in fertility rates among British households

00:07:08.500 in 1877, which was observed not only in Britain, but also among culturally British populations

00:07:16.320 living in Canada, the United States and South Africa.

00:07:20.000 The authors propose that the famous Braggadol-Bestant trial of 1877 served as a possible catalyst

00:07:28.320 for this widespread change in fertility behavior.

00:07:31.420 Now, this would be very interesting if it was true.

00:07:35.560 Okay.

00:07:35.740 If it was true that only British people, like people in Britain and British immigrants experienced

00:07:41.200 a sudden and sharp fertility decline all at around the same year, starting at around the

00:07:46.800 same year due to some massive cultural change, I would be like, oh, that's really interesting.

00:07:51.940 I mean, yes, we know that culture affects fertility, but this would be a more acute effect than we

00:07:56.520 had seen historically.

00:07:57.420 So do you happen to know what the Braggadol-Bestant trial of 1877 was about?

00:08:06.480 No, I've never heard of it.

00:08:09.820 It was a book called The Fruits of Philosophy that discussed contraceptives, and the court trial

00:08:16.840 was about trying to ban it. 0.64

00:08:18.680 After the trial, book sales rose from around 1,000 copies to 125,000 copies.

00:08:25.100 So this was a Streisand effect thing?

00:08:27.320 It was a Streisand effect thing, but it also completely undermines the claim here.

00:08:32.740 This was not a book that popularized contraceptives.

00:08:36.740 It was a book that taught a population that didn't know how to use contraceptives broadly

00:08:41.600 to how to use contraceptives broadly for the first time.

00:08:45.240 Of course, it was going to have an effect on fertility rates.

00:08:48.020 This is not particularly interesting as a data point.

00:08:51.060 Contraceptives have the capacity to lower fertility rates in a population that has never been

00:08:57.020 exposed to them.

00:08:58.720 Duh.

00:08:59.420 But what is interesting here, and the reason this is pocket sand,

00:09:02.860 Pocket sand.

00:09:04.160 Yeah!

00:09:05.680 Is that when you ban contraceptives in populations that already have them, that actually decreases

00:09:11.560 fertility rates.

00:09:12.740 As we saw with the Romania situation, where you get a sharp increase for a couple years and

00:09:17.820 then a sharp decrease.

00:09:18.660 And the reason is because then having lots of kids becomes associated with low wealth

00:09:23.560 and low status, and nobody wants to do it.

00:09:26.200 So the people with self-control stop having kids.

00:09:29.020 It's a really bad way to increase fertility rates. 0.92

00:09:32.000 And also, just more broadly, I remember at the Perinatalist Conference, somebody was like,

00:09:34.780 well, what do you think about banning condoms?

00:09:36.760 And I was like, do I really want more people accidentally having kids?

00:09:43.000 Like, is that what I'm trying to do?

00:09:44.960 Yeah, that's the solution to our problems.

00:09:47.360 More unwanted children.

00:09:49.420 Yeah, more unwanted children.

00:09:50.740 That will solve the problem.

00:09:52.160 I was like, that's a comical, no, no, no.

00:09:55.880 Not just for the children's sake, but from the genetic effects of something like that.

00:09:59.860 That's just not healthy, right?

00:10:02.020 So, no, I had no.

00:10:03.360 But again, pocket sand there.

00:10:04.740 This one may not be pocket sand.

00:10:07.340 In France, fertility fell 100 years before industrialization, while in England, the first

00:10:13.400 country to industrialize, fertility did not decline for a century after industrialization.

00:10:19.180 Wasn't that, in France, though, more a product of famine and hardship?

00:10:27.360 Yeah, there was famine and hardship during that period.

00:10:30.020 There have been various studies that analyze this.

00:10:32.300 Because the mainstream perception is that it was probably due to decline in religiosity.

00:10:39.840 Oh, interesting.

00:10:41.060 This is the thing I've heard most.

00:10:42.380 But remember, what I said, all of Lyman's arguments, whenever you read him, he's like

00:10:45.920 one of those far lefties who literally can only argue for far lefty positions, and you

00:10:49.580 just know, like, okay, they're going to twist everything.

00:10:51.900 And you get really interested when they're arguing something against her.

00:10:54.600 Or like Leather Apron Club. 0.99

00:10:56.100 Like, if Leather Apron Club ever argued a left-leaning position, I'd be like, this is something

00:11:00.420 I need to take ultra-seriously, because he would never do that.

00:11:04.240 But, you know, if Lyman Stone is arguing Christianity good or socialism good, you know, pretty much,

00:11:11.100 I don't know, there's not that much you can take from it.

00:11:14.140 But I will note that this does appear to be true.

00:11:17.820 So, the decline in marital fertility in France began around 1800, about 70 years before other

00:11:25.140 European countries.

00:11:26.120 And this is before other European countries.

00:11:28.140 Some sources indicate the decline may have started even earlier in the 1760s.

00:11:33.220 By 1840, France's marital fertility rate had fallen to two-thirds of its 1800 level.

00:11:41.080 Oh, yeah.

00:11:41.660 So, you had the French Revolution, tons of secularization.

00:11:45.800 Okay.

00:11:46.320 Yeah, and remember, the hope problem.

00:11:49.240 If you don't have a home, you don't have kids.

00:11:52.000 Yeah, a lot of instability, a huge amount of change, and probably people just didn't

00:11:55.720 know what to expect from their government and infrastructure and everything going forward.

00:12:00.700 But let's go over the various theories that have been put forward for this.

00:12:03.620 Okay.

00:12:04.240 I will note that in the 1800s, the average English woman was still having six children during

00:12:08.340 this decline in France's fertility rate.

00:12:10.560 Yeah.

00:12:10.740 And so, here are the various things here.

00:12:14.140 Secularization, a decline in the influence of the Catholic Church may have led to a wider

00:12:17.860 use of contraceptive and changing attitudes about family size.

00:12:20.740 Cultural changes, the French Revolution may have played a major role in the change of social

00:12:24.960 norms around family size.

00:12:26.620 Economic pressures.

00:12:27.840 Some people argue that pre-industrial France had limited economic opportunities, creating

00:12:31.800 pressure to limit family size.

00:12:33.320 Think about the economic famines and pressure that would have been created by the French 1.00

00:12:37.680 Revolution.

00:12:38.600 Yeah, no kidding.

00:12:40.320 Obviously, even if you're in a status where income translates to kids, you're going to

00:12:44.580 have lower number of kids there.

00:12:46.200 Right.

00:12:46.900 And land inheritance laws, post-revolution laws requiring equal division of property among

00:12:52.140 heirs may have incentivized smaller families.

00:12:54.460 That is definitely going to incentivize smaller families. 0.95

00:12:56.660 So, people who do not know this, this law was generally something historically that you would

00:13:02.600 impose on a community that you had conquered.

00:13:05.320 So, famously, the English imposed this change in inheritance laws on the Irish after conquering

00:13:11.680 them.

00:13:12.320 Because why?

00:13:13.380 Well, it quickly breaks up any large family with a lot of power if they have to split their

00:13:18.220 land every generation among all of their descendants instead of...

00:13:21.600 Yeah.

00:13:22.040 It distributes rather than consolidates their power.

00:13:24.400 Increasingly consolidates.

00:13:25.540 Yeah.

00:13:25.680 So, they ended up...

00:13:27.920 Yeah.

00:13:28.360 Not a great situation.

00:13:30.020 So, they ended up incentivizing lower fertility rates. 0.93

00:13:33.300 But let's talk more about France's secularization because this is worth talking about and I found

00:13:37.840 pretty interesting.

00:13:39.040 France experienced a process of secularization and de-Christianization beginning in the 18th

00:13:43.980 century, well before the French Revolution of 1789.

00:13:47.800 This decline in religious influence occurred much earlier than in England.

00:13:51.200 Secular wills increased from 10% in 1710 to 80% by 1780.

00:13:57.900 So, before the turn of the 1800s, okay?

00:14:01.800 Long before the turn of the 1800s, 80% of wills were secular.

00:14:05.240 Wow.

00:14:05.480 From only 10% less than a century before.

00:14:07.440 There was a significant decrease in the number of clergymen by capita by the end of the 18th

00:14:12.720 century.

00:14:13.280 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:14:14.120 A rose is an attempt to reform Catholicism by bringing some Calvinistic doctrines, such as the depravity

00:14:20.540 of man, predestination, irresistible grace, and limited atonement entered.

00:14:25.400 And this was a movement called the Genesonists, but the Genesonists were not Protestant.

00:14:33.400 They were a reforming group of Catholics who some blame for this lower fertility rate because they

00:14:39.040 made the...

00:14:39.860 But this doesn't really make sense because Calvinist groups in this time period had really

00:14:43.740 high fertility rates.

00:14:45.420 So, I think this might be more just any sort of moderating, secularizing political force

00:14:51.760 is going to have these problems.

00:14:52.900 And we also need to ask why, you know, we always mention that Catholics are uniquely

00:14:57.220 susceptible to fertility collapse, why the first of the European fertility collapse that

00:15:01.640 happened in a Catholic country.

00:15:03.380 And my guess is there's probably a big cross-correlating reason there.

00:15:08.320 But do you have any thoughts before we move forwards?

00:15:10.920 If I had to guess, I would say it was mostly due to a period of cultural and religious and

00:15:19.620 political turmoil where, to your point, more simply, there's just not really a lot of hope

00:15:24.120 or certainty around the future.

00:15:26.160 And I think when people don't have hope or certainty, they stop having kids, especially

00:15:29.680 when they don't have, you know, amazing, abundant resources and or, I guess, a lot of social

00:15:34.700 support.

00:15:35.280 I don't think social support was that strong at this time either.

00:15:38.360 Yeah.

00:15:38.900 The church offered some, but, you know, it was limited compared to modern social support.

00:15:43.760 Yeah.

00:15:44.020 All right.

00:15:45.740 So now we are going to talk about Africa.

00:15:49.900 So another quote he has here.

00:15:52.500 Today, fertility in Africa is lower than it was for Europe or Asian countries when they

00:15:58.340 had similar income levels because modern Africa, though poor, is nonetheless highly exposed to

00:16:04.180 globalized cultural norms.

00:16:05.860 At the individual level, when African women get richer, they actually tend to have more children. 0.99

00:16:12.020 This came from an article called How Developmental Programs Impact Fertility Rates in Africa.

00:16:17.120 And a quote from it is, however, another strand of the literature suggests that fertility can

00:16:22.340 increase with greater wealth if the household desires more children than it can now afford.

00:16:27.900 And it mentions here Lindo 2010, Black Itaul 2013, Loverman and Mumford 2013.

00:16:35.200 Previous work has also shown that women may have more children to ensure economic security

00:16:40.500 and old age from both a theoretical and empirical perspective.

00:16:45.280 And here it lists five papers that I'm sure you don't care about.

00:16:48.320 The last channel is particularly important in a context like Subs of Hara in Africa 0.74

00:16:52.140 for three main reasons.

00:16:54.200 First, pension systems are either weak or non-existent.

00:16:57.280 Second, men typically marry women who are significantly younger,

00:17:00.660 meaning that most women anticipate ending up as widows. 0.97

00:17:03.320 Third, customary laws and norms often exclude women from property ownership and inheritance. 1.00

00:17:10.500 So this almost reminds me of the way that people handle retirement programs with money.

00:17:18.380 Like you will, if you have more income when you're young, you will save more money typically

00:17:24.840 for your retirement.

00:17:26.400 You'll put more into a 401k.

00:17:27.740 You'll set stuff aside in Roth IRAs in the United States.

00:17:30.920 So you will have, you'll be saving more for your retirement.

00:17:34.340 And perhaps in Africa, the equivalent of that in some areas is, well, if I have more income

00:17:40.500 now, that means I can do more to prepare for my old age, which is have more children because

00:17:45.700 then I have a more diversified portfolio of caregivers.

00:17:49.020 That's interesting.

00:17:49.380 Why do you think everyone should be viewing children this way right now?

00:17:52.600 Um, really from a caregiver perspective, I don't know if I like that perspective.

00:17:58.000 I will explain.

00:17:59.140 Okay.

00:18:00.320 Do you think that you or I are going to get social security?

00:18:04.600 No.

00:18:05.880 Okay.

00:18:06.740 Do you think that there's going to be a robust Medicare system in the United States when you

00:18:10.720 and I are older?

00:18:11.620 No, but I wouldn't want my children to pay for it.

00:18:14.540 Hold on.

00:18:15.200 We're going to talk about a few other things here.

00:18:16.720 I'm just pointing out to people.

00:18:17.980 Okay.

00:18:18.780 If you think anything other than your kids, they can say, well, I could save money, right?

00:18:24.460 I could save money and that could support me in my old age.

00:18:27.300 Here's the problem with saving money in this global economy as it exists right now.

00:18:34.540 Fertility decline has the effect that I expected to have.

00:18:37.580 And AI is not a literal deus ex machina getting us out of this situation.

00:18:41.800 We could enter a state of persistent economic decline instead of the average aggregate economic

00:18:47.440 growth our ancestors faced.

00:18:49.720 And that is what made compound interest is what made saving money a smart thing to do

00:18:55.760 on average.

00:18:56.820 Okay.

00:18:57.060 A growing global economy is what made saving money a good idea.

00:19:01.600 If we don't have that, saving money is next to setting it on fire.

00:19:06.660 Worse, it would be, you know, like saving money in Argentina or something.

00:19:10.440 Worse, you have the problem of the United States becoming more and more Argentina-like. 0.99

00:19:15.580 We talked about this in another episode in terms of, like, how costly it is to build

00:19:18.760 infrastructure, how much the bureaucracy costs, how much cronyism there is on the Democratic

00:19:22.720 side of the aisle.

00:19:24.540 I mean, there's cronyism on the Republican side, too.

00:19:27.060 Thank you very much.

00:19:28.260 No, not at all.

00:19:29.400 In the establishment?

00:19:30.860 No, no.

00:19:31.320 Not in regards to the way it works in Argentina.

00:19:34.920 There's, like, a lot of cronyism, but there is not Peronism-type cronyism, which is what

00:19:39.580 leads to, like, hyperinflation and stuff like that.

00:19:41.900 It's a completely different scenario.

00:19:44.500 There's a difference between, you know, like, low-level nepotism and stuff like that and

00:19:50.320 literally paying for your votes through massive, massive, massive bureaucratic programs.

00:19:55.860 But there is the secondary issue that we have here, okay, which is wage inflation.

00:20:04.240 So, for people who don't know what wage inflation means, it means that, now, this is great for

00:20:10.420 our kids, okay?

00:20:13.060 It means that if you have a world where the number of workers is dropping really, really

00:20:17.800 quickly, the amount you have to pay every individual worker goes up dramatically.

00:20:23.560 And we've actually seen this.

00:20:25.560 If you look at the recent inflation that we've experienced at the country, it's really been

00:20:30.060 concentrated in wage inflation, especially with lower-end, lower-skilled workers' wages

00:20:35.040 going up, some specialty-skilled worker wages going up.

00:20:39.960 And that means that your kids are a really safe way to make money so long as AI just doesn't

00:20:45.820 strictly replace them.

00:20:47.100 So you need them to be at some base level of competence.

00:20:50.100 But other than that, it's not as smart to think that you are going to be able to afford the

00:20:56.480 types of services or anything comparable to your existing life in your old age.

00:21:00.460 But do you think it's right to put that on children?

00:21:05.380 Mm-hmm.

00:21:06.740 If it motivates more kids. 0.85

00:21:08.900 I don't think kids should support a useless older person who's not providing them any services.

00:21:13.160 Yeah, but I guess, yeah, if we go back to, like, older people being housekeepers, 0.92

00:21:19.520 child care providers, yeah, then it makes sense.

00:21:23.520 If you're literally exchanging housing and food with full-time child care and probably

00:21:30.100 elite education, then I guess I, yeah, I could see that for sure.

00:21:34.620 Okay.

00:21:35.180 You can see it now for sure.

00:21:36.700 Maybe.

00:21:37.600 Yeah.

00:21:38.420 Hey, I don't want our kids to get a bad deal, even when that involves me.

00:21:43.720 I appreciate your diligence and dedication to fairness.

00:21:48.500 One thing that I think is going to become quite the trend, and this is something we should

00:21:51.400 probably do another episode on, is people's retirement plans being a bullet.

00:21:57.820 I've noticed this a lot for people in our lives.

00:21:59.920 Oh, just euthanasia.

00:22:01.600 Yeah.

00:22:02.520 Yeah.

00:22:03.080 Where-

00:22:03.380 Wait, more people are saying this?

00:22:05.000 That's great.

00:22:05.620 Oh, yeah.

00:22:05.920 It's pretty common online these days.

00:22:07.340 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.

00:22:13.800 No.

00:22:13.880 They just are like, oh, I don't really save for retirement because I plan to end my life.

00:22:18.760 Yeah.

00:22:19.220 I mean, everyone says that, and then they chicken out, except for our family, apparently.

00:22:25.020 Except for our family.

00:22:25.960 Everyone else pusses out.

00:22:27.160 We follow through.

00:22:29.380 That's terrible.

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

00:22:51.540 the sandwich generation.

00:22:53.620 And our government also in the United States, in many states at least, does not even support

00:22:59.780 them.

00:23:00.100 For example, in Pennsylvania, one of the constituents in our district who's giving me advice on policy,

00:23:06.560 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

00:23:18.980 that you're not.

00:23:21.280 Yeah.

00:23:21.900 What?

00:23:22.440 Yeah.

00:23:23.480 So, yeah, a lot of there are a lot of people who are caring for parents and older family

00:23:27.680 members, and they're not getting support from the state.

00:23:31.000 They're not getting any help.

00:23:32.540 It's bad.

00:23:33.320 So, yeah.

00:23:36.560 Well, you could draft something to reverse that.

00:23:38.640 That would be a popular bill.

00:23:39.040 Oh, it's on my list.

00:23:40.140 But, you know, my odds of getting elected are 7% per my calculation, just given the makeup

00:23:45.500 of our district, despite all my efforts.

00:23:47.320 So, we'll see.

00:23:48.460 We'll see.

00:23:49.160 We'll see.

00:23:50.240 So, now, how does Lyman Stone argue?

00:23:53.520 So, something to note here is that African fertility rates are falling way slower.

00:23:58.060 Everyone thinks they're following way slower than they should be.

00:24:00.320 Based on their income level.

00:24:04.220 Like, they are not falling at the same rate as other countries did when they hit their

00:24:07.020 same income level.

00:24:08.160 But, in some areas, they're falling faster than people expect, blah, blah, blah.

00:24:11.680 Now, Lyman Stone made the claim, this is not true.

00:24:16.400 And then he put up a bunch of graphs.

00:24:18.540 However, it's a bit of a pocket sand situation again, as I've mentioned.

00:24:22.300 He said, this is not true.

00:24:24.560 And then all of the graphs he puts up are comparing child mortality rates with fertility

00:24:30.240 rates instead of income level with fertility rates.

00:24:33.580 Because he claims it's a good proxy for income level.

00:24:37.100 And I'm like, no, it's not.

00:24:39.300 Like, basically, he found one graph where things lined up and he didn't want to think about

00:24:44.060 it anymore because it doesn't fit any of his agendas.

00:24:46.480 And so, he then just made this claim and hoped people wouldn't notice that he was pretending

00:24:52.920 that child mortality rates were societal development indexes or income levels when they aren't.

00:25:00.240 But I will put two of these graphs on screen here because they are nonetheless interesting.

00:25:04.740 Here, you have one that just shows, you know, a broad alignment between child mortality rates

00:25:10.280 and fertility 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.

00:25:30.680 This is what I'm talking about.

00:25:31.860 Or just in terms of the sometimes lazy or manipulative tendency to just throw in stats or a study

00:25:42.560 or a graph and know that most people aren't going to look closely at it and just be like,

00:25:46.480 oh, yeah, he backed it up and just read the headline.

00:25:49.660 Limestone, as much as we respect his work, abuses that tactic egregiously.

00:25:55.860 I don't respect his work at all.

00:26:01.340 I'm sorry.

00:26:02.500 Somebody can do it.

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.

00:26:11.460 Well, the internet loves a flame war.

00:26:13.320 So, yeah.

00:26:14.000 Right?

00:26:14.400 Well, I mean, look.

00:26:15.700 He hates us.

00:26:16.400 He hates us.

00:26:17.080 So, there's that.

00:26:17.580 Of course, he hates us because we have integrity, and that doesn't help him.

00:26:22.000 I mean, look, this is a problem, right?

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.

00:26:46.060 Fortunately, almost nobody reads his work except for pronatalists, right? 1.00

00:26:50.880 The problem is just making sure pronatalists know to – it's not that his work has no utility.

00:26:56.960 You'll get lots of interesting stats.

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

00:27:08.340 it changed my mind when I actually read it.

00:27:10.860 Yeah.

00:27:11.260 The famous fertility rate correlation to cash handouts when you account for the –

00:27:19.000 It was the margin of error.

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

00:27:28.000 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.

00:27:36.240 But anyway, and I'd be happy to have him.

00:27:38.300 Like, he could do a good job if he could, I don't know,

00:27:43.780 work towards a position of personal integrity.

00:27:45.780 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 –

00:28:30.300 Like, go see our episodes on this.

00:28:32.700 We talk about it all the time.

00:28:33.680 It just doesn't seem to work, and everyone else agrees it doesn't work.

00:28:36.120 That was one of my favorite parts.

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,

00:28:45.980 but, like, everyone else says they don't work.

00:28:49.200 Like, they don't work, right?

00:28:51.020 And we were like, yeah, they don't work.

00:28:52.420 And everyone else at the table was like, yeah, that's the limestone thing.

00:28:56.280 So anyway, again, another graph here.

00:28:57.920 This graph is titled Africa's Fertility is Normal for its Mortality Level. 0.90

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.

00:29:18.620 This isn't a graph.

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.

00:29:40.220 And this makes a lot of sense to me.

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.

00:30:00.100 Do you have thoughts on that?

00:30:03.220 That's good.

00:30:04.000 Yeah.

00:30:05.420 Then you found something nice to say.

00:30:08.340 That's good.

00:30:09.420 That's good.

00:30:10.280 Well, yeah, I mean, it's tied to his thing.

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.

00:30:24.000 Okay.

00:30:24.480 Okay.

00:30:25.840 So there is some interesting stuff in this graph.

00:30:29.880 Generally in this graph.

00:30:31.760 So I'll read what he says.

00:30:33.840 Okay.

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.

00:31:00.420 He does this all the time.

00:31:02.080 But I'll go over what the graph actually shows for anybody who's watching on a podcast.

00:31:05.640 Okay.

00:31:06.580 Listening.

00:31:07.320 Yeah.

00:31:08.000 Listening.

00:31:08.480 So native-born, non-Hispanic whites. 0.98

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.

00:31:53.480 But here's what's interesting.

00:31:54.760 Yeah.

00:31:55.040 Why does it go up as you get poorer?

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.

00:32:28.780 Like you may be going in and out of it.

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. 0.89

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%.

00:33:25.920 Of closer to poverty.

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.

00:33:35.020 Oh.

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. 0.99

00:34:08.360 And they rise until they get to the 60th or the 65% level.

00:34:13.720 Okay.

00:34:14.520 So do you want me to send this graph to you?

00:34:17.200 Yeah, I want to see it.

00:34:18.280 Okay, this is so helpful.

00:34:19.960 Okay.

00:34:20.300 And so now you can see that after that.

00:34:23.400 So basically, for middle income white Americans, the more money you have, the more kids you're going to have. 0.56

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.

00:35:04.760 And this is for the white households. 0.62

00:35:07.080 It's interesting.

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.

00:35:16.940 I'm not really sure, though.

00:35:17.860 Yeah, they might.

00:35:19.040 But anyway, so the next group, well, let's talk about Blacks, because that's an interesting group.

00:35:24.020 Non-Hispanic Blacks. 0.93

00:35:25.220 Non-Hispanic Blacks, this is pretty strictly the less money you have, the more kids you have. 1.00

00:35:30.540 Yeah, it's wild.

00:35:31.920 Tribulations respond to fertility rate.

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. 0.94

00:35:52.300 The poorer you are from 30% to 10%, the more kids you're going to have if you're Black. 1.00

00:35:56.180 But there's two really interesting things about this. 0.90

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%.

00:36:16.600 In the Black American population, 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. 0.95

00:36:36.400 Yes.

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.

00:37:02.300 Yeah.

00:37:03.000 What is going on?

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.

00:37:32.320 Other, it's pretty all over the place.

00:37:34.800 And foreign-born women, pretty all over the place. 1.00

00:37:38.160 The other group that has a very strong dysgenic selective pressure, but not as strong as the Black American community,

00:37:44.060 is the Native-born Hispanic population.

00:37:46.620 Yeah.

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 1.00

00:37:58.000 between 0% and 10% percentiles.

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. 0.58

00:38:17.800 In fact, this is a really interesting thing.

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.

00:38:30.500 By a pretty dramatic margin.

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. 0.99

00:38:52.860 Which is really fascinating.

00:38:56.900 Yeah, that is really interesting.

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.

00:39:05.560 One, I can think of.

00:39:06.820 I can think of two friends.

00:39:13.520 But, yeah, not many.

00:39:16.700 And it's, it's.

00:39:19.260 No.

00:39:20.440 Okay.

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.

00:39:31.260 Yeah, that's fascinating.

00:39:35.440 Yeah, well, gosh, now I feel more confused than anything.

00:39:39.360 I don't know what to make of it.

00:39:40.340 You feel more confused?

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.

00:39:58.160 Yeah, for sure.

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.

00:40:04.140 Yeah.

00:40:04.900 Period.

00:40:05.760 Otherwise, it leads to really negative economic and effects like this.

00:40:10.980 Okay, so, next point here.

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.

00:40:30.420 That's really interesting.

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.

00:41:14.080 All of those things drive fertility collapses. 0.99

00:41:17.340 Then he does another little pocket sand here.

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.

00:41:38.520 Okay?

00:41:39.320 The graph shows...

00:41:41.120 I'll send you the graph.

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.

00:41:48.880 I'll be like, this graph shows this.

00:41:51.600 And then I read the graph.

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.

00:42:06.720 It's literally an up-and-to-the-left graph.

00:42:11.440 Hmm.

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.

00:42:26.780 Maybe that's what he's trying to say.

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.

00:42:52.780 So, yeah.

00:42:54.780 Pocket sand.

00:42:55.540 Pocket sand.

00:42:56.580 Yeah!

00:42:58.280 All right.

00:42:59.080 Fine.

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? 0.84

00:43:07.960 Because the Gulf states do not distribute income in any sort of meaningful, equal way.

00:43:12.980 This is looking at GDP per capita.

00:43:14.840 Not meeting in GDP per capita.

00:43:17.000 All right.

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. 0.65

00:43:59.640 Like, no, I mean, you see this, right?

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.

00:44:10.320 And they are often 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.

00:44:26.640 Okay, fantastic.

00:44:27.960 That doesn't even show what he wants it to show.

00:44:30.000 So what was the study that you found, Simone?

00:44:32.900 Right.

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.

00:45:37.740 So that's good.

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? 0.98

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? 1.00

00:46:57.360 It's just going to be harder to get a woman, ask all the black pill community, you know? 1.00

00:47:03.040 So when I first told you this, you're like, no, that's just not true.

00:47:07.100 Everything refutes this.

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.

00:47:33.380 Sure.

00:47:34.020 Okay.

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. 0.79

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.

00:48:23.400 True.

00:48:23.540 Yeah.

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. 0.83

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. 0.97

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.

00:49:24.280 Let's don't worry about that.

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.

00:49:36.960 So here's my question for you.

00:49:38.700 When you're infertile, am I allowed to take on a younger wife? 0.94

00:49:43.060 I won't dump you, but we've got to keep the babies coming, right?

00:49:47.980 I'm not into raising someone else's kids.

00:49:50.600 Wait, hold on.

00:49:51.280 What if they were from your embryos?

00:49:52.520 Do I have to live with them?

00:49:56.720 I'm, I'm just, I don't like being around people.

00:49:58.580 That's the problem.

00:49:59.280 Like, you know.

00:50:02.540 No.

00:50:03.020 Okay.

00:50:03.260 I understand.

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.

00:50:13.540 And the families work out quite 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.

00:50:18.200 But, you know, you've got to find the right.

00:50:24.080 I've got to find the right person.

00:50:26.340 That's my duty here.

00:50:27.840 Okay.

00:50:28.080 Well, I didn't want to marry anyone.

00:50:29.600 Let's keep that in mind.

00:50:30.900 You know, like, let alone multiple people.

00:50:34.740 By the way, I'm not seriously suggesting this.

00:50:36.720 I'm just getting, getting a feel, you know, when I need to think about what, what's going

00:50:41.460 to happen when you become infertile.

00:50:43.160 Like, I don't, I don't know.

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

00:50:48.480 anymore.

00:50:49.040 Like, that's a tragedy.

00:50:51.360 I have no plans.

00:50:52.760 It ages out of the house and you know, you're never going to spend those, those moments

00:50:57.700 again.

00:50:58.620 Hmm.

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

00:51:04.880 wife like going to stop having kids? 1.00

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

00:51:13.720 be living in a house without toddlers in it. 0.85

00:51:15.980 Well, no, I mean, our plan is by the time I can no longer have babies and we no longer

00:51:21.840 have toddlers, we have grandkids.

00:51:23.860 So there will always be putter-pattering little kids.

00:51:26.880 Pressure them into.

00:51:27.860 I mean, they're already down with it.

00:51:29.880 They're ready.

00:51:31.560 So.

00:51:32.540 Anyway, I love you to death, Simone.

00:51:34.440 I love you too, Malcolm Collins.

00:51:36.520 All right.

00:51:36.880 Have a good one.

00:51:37.520 Bye.

Based Camp - September 18, 2024

When Does More Money Not Mean Fewer Kids？ (A Data Deep Dive)

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