Why Are Muslim Fertility Rates So Fragile？
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Summary
In this episode, we talk fertility rates around the Islamic world, and what the Islamic diaspora is doing to try to slow them down, and why it s not working. We also talk about the decline in fertility rates in the Middle East, and some of the things Islamic leaders are trying to do to slow it down.
Transcript
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Hello, Malcolm. I'm so excited to be speaking with you today, especially because we're talking
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about a big misnomer in the demographic collapse world, which is that Muslims are going to take
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over the world because they're going to have perpetually high fertility, which is just not
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true, as Camille recently pointed out on X. And what's most interesting is when you go into what
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various Islamic countries and Muslim majority countries are trying to do to keep their birth
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rates up, it's basically a buffet, an overloaded buffet of all of the disparate policies of the
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different camps of the prenatalist movements want. There's the culture stuff, which, you know,
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we're always like, it's the culture, it's the culture, it's the culture. Well, they did that
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stuff. And then there's the, although, you know, it's the, it's the payout people. Well, it's all
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about them giving money and cash payouts and cash payouts, but they're doing that. And then there's
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also the people who are like, no, it's traditionalism and, you know, early marriage, it's the marriage,
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it's the marriage. Well, they're doing that too. And guess what? They're also doing the whole thing
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of scaling back family planning, like taking away access to birth control and abortions. And that's
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not working either. And so I think it's really important to look at, at the Middle East and
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Islamic countries as a case study and say, all right, so there is this world in which everyone
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got their way. All the prenatalist leaders with all their disparate little pet projects
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got their way. Why is it not working? And I point out here, then people are like, well,
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don't some Muslim populations have a high fertility rate. Muslims are not high fertility. They're poor.
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Okay. It's a mistake that people make. Muslims are actually have a lower fertility than Protestant
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groups when you control for income. And their fertility rate is so low that despite the relative
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poverty of the Middle East, only Iran, you were saying, what was it? Iraq?
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Beats Israel. Because I think Israel's a really great, like here's where we are with developed
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non-Islamic Middle Eastern nations. I think it's a really good base. And of course it's the
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ultra-Orthodox Jews that are really propping this up. You know, they're killing it. They're doing
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great, but they've figured it out. So in this episode, what we are going to be covering is
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crashing fertility rates around the Islamic world, crashing fertility rates within the Islamic diaspora,
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what the Islamic communities are attempting to do to decrease this.
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And there are some really, there are some policies in here that like are so insane in terms of
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over the top. You will not believe it, Malcolm. I'm like, what? So there's some good stuff in here.
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And then, and then try to figure out what do we learn from this? Cause they're not working.
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So there's a Cremio. This, this was all inspired by him because he's so fricking amazing. We love him.
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He posted on X basically like a clarification to people because especially in X, there's a whole like,
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he writes, there's a myth that the Islamic world has figured out fertility, but it has not.
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They show the same declining fertility rates that other places have barring Iraq, the Middle East has
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lower fertility rates in Israel. And hopefully you can put this graph that he shared up on the screen
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showing this just overall declining fertility graph and infertility rates births per women in the Middle
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East, basically with Iraq at the top, then Israel, then Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Oman,
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Libya, and so on with the UAE at the bottom. But I love the UAE because you're going to see,
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they have my very favorite pernatalist policy. I can't wait to get to it. And this graph that we're
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seeing really tracks global fertility rates in general. And that's an argument that Cremio makes
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in the comments of this thread where people are like, what about this? What about that? And he's just
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pointing out, no, everywhere this is happening. And that I think is a really important theme of all this.
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So he continues in his thread, exceptions, maybe Yemen and maybe Palestine, both of which have
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terrible data. So their comparative situation is unclear. But two things on that. Firstly,
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Jewish fertility is the head of Arab fertility in Israel. And he shows a graph of fertility rates in
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Israel of basically the average number of births per woman for Jews and others in Israel, and then
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Arabs in Israel. And what's really interesting with this graph, if you're just listening, Arabs in 1990
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were at eight, eight kids per woman. And Jews were hovering a little bit below four, they were
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at 3.49. And now in 2018, or at least as of 2018, they were basically at exactly the same spot,
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3.05 for Jews and 3.04 for Arabs. And so Arabs just are freaking plummeting. And there's something,
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this is why we're always so interested in Jews and Jewish culture and like what's going on in Israel,
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because they are holding strong in the face of modernity. So anyway, Cremu continues. Secondly,
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Israeli fertility might be just ahead or slightly behind Palestinian fertility, depending on the
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source. Israeli growth is definitely ahead of Palestinian growth due to immigration, Palestinian
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emigration, and Palestinian mortality. So he shows another graph, fertility rates, births per women
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in Palestine and Israel. Again, Palestine, Arab, Islamic, Muslim going down, Israel holding steady.
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So he continues. So no, I don't believe in Islamic excellence and fertility. Even their famously
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fecund culture is not immune to the global baby bust, not in Denmark. And then he shows basically
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after Muslim immigrants spend some time in Denmark, their fertility plummets. They normalize to normal
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Denmark fertility levels. He continues, nor in France. And even if we look at second generation
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immigrants, not shown in the graph he, he had, but linked below and we can link to his same sources.
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And then he shares his sources. And basically he shows that the diaspora that's Middle Eastern also
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doesn't have great fertility. So once they leave, because a lot of people were like, okay, yeah,
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fine. In these, in these countries, they're bad, but then, you know, they go to other countries and
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that's where they're spreading so much, but no, sweeties, no. So like one, the source is drying up
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and two, once the diaspora goes out there, they, they drop infertility even faster. So I think what's
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really important is that the stereotype exists for a reason, right? That, you know, Muslims are high
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fertility because this is a culture and a religion that supports that, you know, like traditionally,
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this is, you think of traditional Muslim families and it's, it's young marriage. It's a lot of
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children. It's very traditional gender roles, right? So you think like these guys are going to,
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they're going to like, they're going to be the fine ones. No, one's going to have trouble with
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them. We don't have to worry about them. And indeed these countries have really, at least after
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they've gotten over freaking out over too much population, they've really put in a lot of effort.
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When they started a lot earlier. So for example, Iran, as an example, started its massive fertility
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efforts about 10 years ago. So what's interesting about the data we have from these countries is they give
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us a lot of data on long-term and quite dictatorial implementation of often the most aggressive
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forms of pronatalist policy that people can imagine. Yeah. Yeah. Because from the 1980s to the 2000s,
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fertility in Iran dropped from 6.5 to 1.7 children for women. So like Iran is especially boned and
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they're also kind of the leader in, in like fertility obsession. I mean, I kind of see them as like the
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Hungary of the middle East, you know, like they're kind of the ones who were like, yeah, rah, rah, rah.
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So in terms of their policies, they've totally reversed their family planning programs. They
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scaled back their birth control programs. And even in 2014, they proposed bans on vasectomies to
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restrict sterilizations and encourage higher birth rates, very similar to what's going on in China.
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So stuff that, you know, China's like just getting used to, this is like old conversations in Iran.
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So they also have cash payments for additional child. Oh, all the socialists love this, you know,
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Lyman Stone, super happy, right? You know, he loves this stuff. Right. And then, then for, on our part,
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they're there, they have a big cultural push for pronatalist policy. Supreme leader Ayatollah al-Khamenei
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has publicly condemned contraception as a Western influence, promoting larger families as a national
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and Islamic duty. So this is clearly, you know, at least on a national level, they're really trying to
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push pronatalism as this is, this is good. This is for your country. And then they all, of course,
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have various bills proposed that are supposed to penalize the promotion of contraception,
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which is very similar to stuff that's been proposed in project 2025. So there's a lot of,
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there's a lot of parallels, but they've already been there, which is important.
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Yeah. And we can see from this that Iran actually has had its fertility rate up, go up a little bit
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recently. So it's not that the policies are having no effect. Yeah. If anything, and I think
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Camus would argue this, the cash payments are probably the biggest thing. Yeah. He's, and we can
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have a separate podcast about this. He's kind of changed my mind a little bit about direct cash
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transfers. Oh yeah. We could have, I mean, this is, I think it's important for us to, when we
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moderate our views. But let's talk more about the other policies. Let's go to Turkey, which I fell down
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the other, the other, like, I think a year ago, Turkish hospitals where women are giving birth.
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It's like a whole thing. They, these are like luxury hospitals. You get all the flowers, you get
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all these, like they're literally, there's a small economy built just around huge decorations and
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celebrations and meals and parties, like literally held for you in the hospital. And they're like
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celebrity doctors delivering kids. Like I can already tell even before reading about Turkey's
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prenatalist policies, that this is a country that's really making it cool.
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And what I think is important there is when I see it on Instagram, like when people are flexing it on
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Instagram, it's not like a cringe thing that like, you know, how the CCP is kind of trying to pressure
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people into have kids. They don't think it's cool, but no, in Turkey, like they're actually
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flexing it on Instagram. They're actually excited about it. And I think that's really important to
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note, but you know, in general, what I think is really funny is that Erdogan has repeatedly urged
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families to have at least three children. And he, he frames family planning and contraception as
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treason, which is amazing. It's true. I love it.
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Against Turkish nationalism, treasonous people. So I mean, not, I think they take a step beyond
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the Iranian thing of just like, this is for your country. It's your duty. It's national. It's like,
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no, you're fricking treason for not having kids. Treasonous. I love that. But also back to stuff
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that, you know, a lot of people really advocate for, including Cremieux, including all the people
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who are like, yes, Marxism. They have, they have housing support. They have maternity benefits.
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They have tax breaks. I think tax breaks are great for families. They have subsidies for newlyweds,
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which is big and also campaigns to reinforce traditional family structures. So, you know,
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sort of the heritage camp, the religious traditionalists would love that, right?
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Early marriages support the family. And then they also have extended maternity and parental
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leave policies. Really with these, the funny thing about maternity leave and parental leave is I only
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really hear non-pronatalists advocating for it because basically-
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When they hear a pronatalist advocating for something, they get really mad and they're like,
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why aren't you advocating for this? And that's because it's really like the, the funny thing is
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there's not, not actually any expert in the, in the, in the pernatalist world. That's like,
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yeah, extended parental leave really helps. Cause it really doesn't like, there are,
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there are definitely people who are like cash payments are very important and we really should
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be investing in these. And here is actual robust evidence. And then, you know, cultural things really
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do help. There's robust evidence. No one's really standing extended parentally, but they're still
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trying and you know, every little thing. It's not that it doesn't help any families, but I think
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it's something that should be relegated by industry and not holistically. Yeah. Like for some work from
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home is just such a better policy, but you know, if you work in food service or in hospitals and
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things like that, and you have to show up and it's great. And then per industry, I think it should be
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the childcare center should be the responsibility of the company. 100%. Yeah.
00:12:00.380
Yeah. Yeah. If they're going to demand that somebody comes to work, which I'm totally okay with.
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Yeah. So let's fly over to Saudi Arabia, whose TFR has declined from over seven in the 1970s,
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woof, to 2.4 in recent years. So the government has been a little bit less aggressive in this case
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with friend Adel's policies, I think, cause they're like, Oh, 2.4 is fine. Like we're doing great,
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but they are focusing more on economic diversification. And I think that's actually really smart
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because, you know, another element that really predicts good fertility is good economic prospects.
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And I think Saudi Arabia very reasonably is like, we can't depend on this one industry forever.
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So I think they're doing the right thing, but they're also doing the cultural reinforcement thing.
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The state backed clerics are really pushing, you know, for having a family. There aren't really
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that many explicit government campaigns, but I think we're going to argue later that that
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actually kind of backfires. And they do have subsidies for housing, subsidies for education,
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subsidy for healthcare. And while these things aren't directly branded as pronatalist, they are
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like, they definitely can help. And then also they have extended maternity leave, which again,
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I don't know. So Qatar or Qatar, I guess how some people say it, they have a like two to three
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fertility rate. And they also have housing grants, child allowances, state-sponsored programs promoting
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traditional family. Again, the heritage camp loves that. They have free or subsidized maternal
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healthcare and child healthcare, which again, helps, you know, like in terms of, you know,
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more births, whole thing about this is a fertility stack. It's a bunch of factors. Most of these
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countries have multi-pronged strategies here. We've got the payouts, we've got the extended leave,
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we've got the cultural leadership and it's still not working, but let's go to the UAE because this is
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my very favorite. Okay. One, they have one of the lowest fertility rates in the region. They're
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like 1.5 to 1.7. So like at the U.S. level or maybe a little lower and the U.S., the Emirati
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government, it's like uniquely concerned, I think about kind of like cultural genocide, which they
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should be. We cite them as like one of the classic examples of people who are going to disappear like
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South Koreans, like Emiratis, Native Americans, Janes, like they're on that go-to list we give.
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Obviously they have childcare incentives and childbirth incentives. They give subsidies and benefits for
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Emirati families, like education support, healthcare support, and they have national
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identity campaigns that sort of are like, yeah, like be proud to be Emirati. But here's my favorite
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thing. Can you guess? Like, I hope you haven't read my outline, but like, can you guess?
00:14:31.640
Okay. Would you get married, Malcolm? This reminds me of that comedy skit you shared with me on like,
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Literally, I feel like they're doing that in the UAE. They're like, hey, okay, what if we gave you
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$20,000 for a wedding? Like, literally, this is beyond like having a kid. They will give you money
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for your wedding. So they have this thing called the marriage fund, and it provides financial grants
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to Emirati men to cover wedding costs in hopes that they will encourage early marriage and family
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formation. Like in most cases, you can't qualify. Obviously you can't qualify if you're not Emirati,
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but also you won't qualify in most cases if you've been married before. So they're like really trying
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to target like first time young marriages. And so I'm like, this is, this is insane. Like this can't
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actually exist, but no, it definitely does exist. According to one source, getting married is also
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an extremely expensive affair in the UAE. Emirati women can officially demand a maximum dowry of up
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to, what is this currency called? Of up to 20,000 dirhams, though families often set much higher
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amounts. So there are dowries. And then the average cost of a UAE wedding has been reported to be in
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excess of 300,000 dirhams. So that's approximately $81,677, which is $81,000 you get? No, no, no.
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That's how much like a wedding can cost. Like a typical wedding in the UAE can cost. So
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government pays for it. But like, because this is a problem, like the government's like,
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oh, culturally, this is kind of an issue, but also like, we don't want to get rid of our culture.
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So what do we do? Well, I guess we'll pay people for weddings up to 20,000 US dollars. So then that
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like cuts it down 20,000. What does the traditional UAE wedding look like?
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I mean, they gotta, it's gotta be great, man. But yeah, there's, there's been, there's some,
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like one of the reasons why this grant program began is there's some speculation that Emirati
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men are choosing to marry foreign women in order to save money. So this brings us back to the passport
00:16:36.080
bro. I get that UAE wedding and it's a bunch of Emiratis marrying foreign women.
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That's the only way to make it sustainable. My sister was proposed to by an Emirati royal.
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What? Yeah. I won't say her name on air, but yeah, my sister had a marriage proposal
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from one of the, if I remember correctly, one of the Emirati royal families. One of the big ones
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too, actually not like one of the side ones. That is insane. That is insane. Well, but I,
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okay, this fund though, I'm obsessed with this fund. Like literally here's your wedding money.
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The fund is led by a committee, which is selected by the UAE government to enable nationals who are
00:17:14.080
battling to raise the funds to cover their wedding expenses. So they give away approximately 3,000
00:17:20.140
grants on an annual basis where couples can expect around 70,000 dirhams. And that's, that's about
00:17:26.360
$19,000 and they get 30,000 upon the announcement of the marriage. And then the rest is handed to them
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once they've begun their wedding plan. So you have to kind of like show that like the wedding's
00:17:35.940
actually going to happen, but you get like 30,000 upfront. And in addition to providing
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the financial assistance of this grant, they also provide guidance for couples before their wedding
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ceremony on like lectures and like how to handle sexual relations. And then also 300 UAE nationals
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are married in group weddings hosted by Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahian, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
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So also like literally if you are okay with a group wedding, and I guess a lot of women are
00:18:08.300
probably like, no, not for me. You need to do all the things, but like, it's also hosted by the
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Sheikh. Like, I don't know. I feel like that could be decent. I've been to these sort of group events
00:18:17.680
in the UAE before that are hosted by like, and they can be pretty decent. Yeah. I mean,
00:18:22.000
like you're in a palace, right? I mean, I mean, often what you're outlaying a lot of cash for is to
00:18:27.840
get married in a palace with a lot of food. The only problem is that it's just not, it's not,
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you're a special day, Malcolm. And I don't get, you know, you get the whole thing for women. It's,
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it's supposed to be all about the woman. What about her? But anyway, you can't have a group wedding,
00:18:41.080
but I just, that is, that is a pronatalist policy that is so out there. And I get the cultural reasons
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and everything, but I'm just like, man, like we're just trying to scrape together for like
00:18:53.380
$5,000 per kid had in the United States. And like, here's the UAE. And they're like,
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here, here's $20,000 for your wedding. Oh my God. I love it. Yeah. I just think it's so great.
00:19:06.020
You know, Egypt, Egypt, if we're moving on, it has a relatively high TFR at three,
00:19:11.160
but the government has, it's, it's, it's also focused on reducing fertility. So there's still
00:19:15.180
kind of like transitioning from the, oh my God, we have too many people still, they provide subsidies
00:19:19.820
for food education and health care. They have a pretty high fertility rate, right?
00:19:23.880
Three. Yeah. Yeah. There are three. And they are massively overcrowded. Egypt is a great example
00:19:29.440
against the argument that it is about. Oh, having space, having leverage.
00:19:34.800
And you keep in mind, if you just look at like the, the landmass of Egypt to the fertility rate
00:19:38.760
of Egypt or the population of Egypt, you're like, what? No, they have a very low density of
00:19:42.300
population. And then you look at like a light map of Egypt or a population map of Egypt. And you're
00:19:48.140
like, oh yeah, I forgot. You can only live in like 2% of the Egyptian landmass.
00:19:55.180
Horrifying desert. It's a fricking sand. And, and if you go to Egypt, you know, I've driven around
00:20:01.580
there. It is super, super crowded, super, super people stacked on top of people. And yet the
00:20:08.500
fertility rate is really hot. Yeah. That actually might be an interesting question to explore is
00:20:14.160
why is the Egyptian fertility rate as high as it is? Yeah. Yeah. And also like, even in the face
00:20:19.320
of them, really the only interventions they've placed so far to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow
00:20:23.740
down. Like, can we not? So, you know, cause Iran did that and it worked really well. So I don't
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know if it's poverty. I'm guessing that that's it. That's that, I mean, I was like 90, 90% confident
00:20:37.460
that that's just the case, but I just want to like, you know, bring it together. This is a who
00:20:43.320
is who of everyone's pet policies. We've got the cultural and religious messaging. We've got the
00:20:47.620
economic incentives, including like direct subsidies, tax breaks, grants for housing and
00:20:52.600
education, wedding payments. We have early marriage promotion. Heritage is happy with that. All the
00:20:58.220
marriage people are happy with that. The religious conservatives are happy with that. And then scaling
00:21:02.500
back family planning, you know, all the people who are like abortion is murder and contraception is
00:21:06.900
killing you and making you infertile. Like again, these are all the things. Nothing
00:21:12.040
is missing. Interesting. By the way, I was just looking at the differential average yearly
00:21:15.620
incomes. So Iran's is $5,300. I, I, Iraq's is $4,137 and Egypt's is $3,636. Well, there
00:21:30.460
you go. So it is significantly poorer. That's yeah. More money for you kids. Okay. I mean,
00:21:36.760
unless you make a ton more and then suddenly you have more kids, but I think so. The, the,
00:21:41.620
the thing here though, is that it's not working the, the, the, the payouts, everything else. I
00:21:49.860
mean, Cremieux, if he were here might argue, well, you don't know what the counterfactual
00:21:53.440
is. You don't know how much lower their fertility would be if they didn't provide these subsidies
00:21:57.460
and this cultural support and everything else. I think it's more in the execution. Honestly,
00:22:02.260
I think that as, as Aria Babu pointed out, when you look at countries that are on the
00:22:07.920
whole culturally conservative, where it's like this oppressive miasma that you have to
00:22:14.360
walk through everywhere, you're not like endogenously excited to have kids. You feel
00:22:21.300
like it's forced on you and then it becomes this burden. And then you're really concerned
00:22:24.560
about having kids. I even think about the case of Turkey where I fell down this, this
00:22:31.520
Instagram loop of these insane hospitals and celebrity doctors and in beautiful delivery
00:22:38.800
rooms and parties and balloons and flowers. These women were not having a lot of kids.
00:22:44.520
This was like a first or second kid. And I think they were like, where this backfired is
00:22:50.560
they're like, oh yes, our culture idolizes the mother and like, blah, blah, blah. But
00:22:54.120
then the way that women are doing it is like, well, okay, well then I'm going to front, I'm
00:22:58.480
going to show how much, you know, how many designer clothes I have my kids in and how fancy my kids
00:23:04.100
daycare is. And then they can't afford to have a big family.
00:23:10.680
Like these giant parties for their kids. Like we don't do birthdays for our kids. I don't
00:23:16.260
Well, they don't like them. I mean, we were, we're doing what Malcolm calls kid maxing where
00:23:20.100
we actually just do what the kids really like, instead of what we feel like we're supposed
00:23:25.240
to do as good parents. So for their birthdays, we do whatever it is, their favorite activity
00:23:29.800
is. Malcolm takes them to a store and they get to choose whatever they want, which costs
00:23:35.640
a tiny fraction of an entire birthday party. We go to a store and we buy whatever their favorite
00:23:41.140
food is like for Torsten, it's just tons of fresh berries. And then, you know, for him,
00:23:46.000
he doesn't want a cake. He wants a candle and a dinosaur nugget. And so we do it.
00:23:50.000
Whereas other, other parents would be like, no, you have to have a cake and you have to
00:23:53.160
eat, you know, and like, then they cry and they're overstimulated and there's like kids
00:23:56.200
would just Google if the kid wanted a cake or something like that. How do I make a good
00:23:59.300
cake? You know, of the type they want, like you just make it right. Like, yeah. Which
00:24:03.240
is what we do for our kids who like cakes. We've never, we've never bought a cake as a
00:24:08.140
Even see this in the United States where, you know, in our episode, we were talking about
00:24:11.220
how progressive social media significantly mentally hurts people and conservative social media
00:24:16.420
doesn't. Somebody was like, well, yeah, that's because you're talking about the modern U S
00:24:19.840
definition of conservative. You know, if we were talking about the conservative culture
00:24:24.120
of the past, social conformity and shaming and like, instead of vitalism and excitement
00:24:31.800
about your ancestry and who you are, you know, modern conservative is much more based around
00:24:37.000
vitalistic, positive nationalism. Whereas historic conservatism is based around, you know, having
00:24:43.180
the nun watching you and making sure you're not breaking any of the rules.
00:24:46.200
Yeah. And then again, this is all about intrinsic versus extrinsic when it is extrinsic, when
00:24:51.740
it's forced on you, or even when you're have an extrinsic, intrinsic force, the individual
00:24:57.520
who goes online and is so proud of their conservative tradition and is shaming other individuals for
00:25:03.800
doing things like, let's say like masturbating or being gay or something like that, right? Like
00:25:08.420
this individual is the type of conservative that's dying out. And I think that they don't realize
00:25:16.500
that they're not really part of the governing apparatus that's going to exist within the
00:25:22.560
conservative movement going forwards, because it's become a fundamentally vitalistic movement
00:25:26.540
instead of a nanny state movement. And I think that this is where a lot of these nanny state types
00:25:31.660
have begun. They're like those progressives who haven't woken up of like, oh, we're the party of the
00:25:38.120
imperialistic authority. Like these people haven't woken up and be like, we're not the party of the
00:25:42.560
imperialistic authority. And when they have that wake up, they're like, oh, I'm actually a
00:25:46.500
progressive. I just didn't realize that the parties had flipped yet. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. But I mean,
00:25:53.180
so like I, when I, when I'm trying to think through like, okay, what would I do differently if I were
00:25:58.000
these countries? And also when, for example, the United States does actually decide to invest
00:26:05.100
maybe a lot of money, but also at least more policy effort into prenatalist policies.
00:26:10.540
How can we go about all these things? How can we go about the fertility stack of more births
00:26:15.200
in a way that's actually effective because they're doing the fertility stack and it ain't working.
00:26:18.920
And so the question is, you know, how do we do that? Right. Like if it's the UAE,
00:26:24.460
it's clearly a problem that like weddings can cost over $80,000, but like maybe instead of
00:26:32.940
shoving out money to people on a limited basis, cause that's only 3000 couples per year,
00:26:39.020
you could just be like, well, you know, anyone who wants to book my palace is a venue.
00:26:44.320
The palace booking is free. You can use my staff and the food is at cost. You know, like how can you
00:26:50.520
use existing government resources to just make this more doable and, or change the standards? I mean,
00:26:57.380
I know that they want to keep Emirati culture, but I also don't think that Emirati weddings always cost
00:27:03.620
that much. Cause I just don't think Emirati families always had that much money. Like, I don't think
00:27:08.680
traditional Emirati culture is like Nouveau Riche, if you know what I mean. Like it is now buddy.
00:27:14.260
It is now. They don't want to look like, no, our culture is Nouveau Riche. I'm a real house
00:27:19.840
for the sake of garishness. I mean, power to the people, but like, if you want to do garishness
00:27:27.200
for the sake of garishness, then like, how can the government do that in a more scalable and
00:27:30.500
efficient way? Because while with this grant program, they're expanding it now to make it
00:27:34.840
more available to people at all income levels. They only at first made it available to people
00:27:38.620
at lower income levels. And then like, ah, you're, you're sort of limiting the program that you're
00:27:42.720
still dissuading people. And then like all the rich people are just marrying Russians and Americans
00:27:48.000
and Italians and it's just not working, but also like, how do you make, how do you support this
00:27:53.820
endogenous self-motivated culture? And I think that that's, you know, like having these government
00:27:59.760
messages like turkeys, it's treason to not have more children. It's treason to use birth control.
00:28:08.220
Gets a little, a little creepy, like just a little, like, I don't know. It goes, it goes too far.
00:28:14.000
So I feel like, I don't know, how would you, aside from cultural sovereignty, which I think
00:28:18.140
is the key thing is like homeschooling, let the weird cultures be weird, let people do their own
00:28:23.880
cultural thing and encourage weird religious subcultures and cults and all that stuff.
00:28:35.800
I mean, I think, you know, in the past, the United States has funded and put pressure on
00:28:44.100
Hollywood to make movies that are nationalistic, that celebrate things like our military or
00:28:52.040
Our school system had entire holidays created around this sort of celebration, like 4th of July.
00:28:59.400
And today, you know, it's like 4th of July, but with qualifications and I remove the whiz
00:29:06.260
qualifications, you don't have a day every year where you unironically as a country celebrate how
00:29:12.680
awesome you are, which America has so many reasons to do. Like if you are not just wildly brainwashed
00:29:17.760
and uneducated, you'd be like, wow, America is like a really awesome country. And like the grand
00:29:22.620
scale of countries, you were like, well, what about sleep is like, it contrasted was like the great
00:29:28.240
things American has done that like bad things we've done are just not particularly detracting
00:29:35.040
from the greatness of the country. We won a world war and then focused on rebuilding the economies
00:29:43.560
of the people we defeated while keeping them as autonomous countries and not their land or money
00:29:51.960
or like that hadn't been done before. The idea of let's help the people we just defeated.
00:29:59.580
That was a look at like the end of World War One. It was all reparations and punishment and dividing
00:30:05.760
Oh yeah. And clearly it went wrong and we saw that and we learned from it. So it's, I mean,
00:30:12.240
No, it's not that it was, it was. So they, when at the end of World War Two, there was this moment
00:30:16.700
where the Americans were bringing everyone to the table and they're like, okay, we're setting
00:30:21.260
the agenda for this. And everyone expected that what the Americans were going to do was
00:30:26.780
going to be a carve up their countries and take their land or gives them like really horrible
00:30:30.680
terms. And America was like, no, we're going to like help rebuild. We're going to like make
00:30:34.920
everything. And apparently like everyone was shocked. They were like, wait, what you're going
00:30:39.280
to do what you're going to give us money. You're going to send us engineers to rebuild the
00:30:46.220
things you destroyed. You're going to, what are you talking about? Like, sorry, America, we need
00:30:52.600
to take you aside. This is not what you do when you defeat somebody. America has been, you know,
00:30:58.860
we denigrate the concept of the melting pot today. And yet it is where all of American culture comes
00:31:05.760
from. You know, if you today look at American cinema, you know, this is downstream of Jewish
00:31:13.100
refugees often. If you look at American technology, these are our Nazi scientists. If you look at
00:31:21.440
America music, pretty much all forms of American music that have been globally influential came
00:31:27.380
from black people. By this, what I mean is if you look at modern, for example, rock music,
00:31:34.540
modern rock music came from blues music, which was a predominantly black form of music. If you look
00:31:39.940
at modern, I'm sorry, did I say rock or country music? You said rock. Okay, sorry. Country came
00:31:45.280
from blues. Rock and roll came from jazz and blues. And if you look at hip hop, obviously a black form
00:31:53.640
of music. If you look at modern American pop music, it often came from like rock and country, which again,
00:32:00.400
come from black forms of music. All of American music is, whether you're talking about the
00:32:06.080
countryest of country song is ultimately heavily, heavily, heavily influenced by predominantly black
00:32:12.500
music. And that's okay. Like that's, that's something that all Americans have pride in. Like I have pride
00:32:18.560
in country music. I listened to lots of country music. Yes. So yeah. So yeah, I guess more investment
00:32:24.000
in media that supports it, which actually a big theme in the comments on the Kremu thread when, where he
00:32:29.400
pointed to these falling fertility rates was this is Western culture diffusing into Middle Eastern
00:32:35.740
culture and Western values polluting it. And I'm, I'm sure that's a factor, you know, and I mean,
00:32:42.240
also this rampant consumerism and the fact that Nuvo Rich has become the aesthetic of the UAE
00:32:46.780
100% is not helping with birth rates. Like it is not helping. It can only hurt. So I think you're
00:32:54.720
right there. And in terms of the, the, the, the economic incentives, I think the tax breaks are great.
00:33:01.160
I think income tax breaks from a demographic collapse perspective is very good at incentivizing
00:33:06.960
the creation of more high taxpayers, because people who pay high taxes and would be excited to pay
00:33:11.820
less of those taxes are also likely to produce through their children, future high taxpayers.
00:33:17.780
So it's like, you're getting greater bang for your buck. I feel like that grants for housing sound
00:33:21.660
good, but in terms of things like childcare housing, like I'm not, I'm not as sure about those. I just
00:33:30.020
feel like maybe they need to be more evidence-based in the whole like extended parental leave thing.
00:33:34.320
If they just took the money that they spent on that and shifted it to just more direct payments
00:33:40.040
and subsidies, but I think more direct payments in general, they'd probably see better results.
00:33:44.540
So maybe more of, it's just about smarter versions of the policies they already have early marriage
00:33:50.560
promotion. I'm just surprised. Like I'm, maybe this is one of those issues of like early marriage
00:33:55.300
promotion really does help and they're doing a great job with this. And if they didn't do it,
00:34:00.860
things would be a lot worse. But it is interesting to me that despite there being so much traditionalism
00:34:06.440
preached, I mean, I, I do want to kind of highlight this to people who are in the pro natalist
00:34:11.580
movement when they're like, no, this is all, it's all about early marriage. It's 100% early marriage
00:34:15.400
because you get that in, in, in these countries. Yeah. Like you couldn't do it more than it's done
00:34:21.020
here. Like it's so explicit. You could never get close to the level of early marriage promotion in
00:34:26.840
the middle East that you, like in the United States, like that would just never happen.
00:34:30.300
So it reminds me a little bit of what happened with COVID where like only when we grounded all
00:34:35.040
flights, functionally speaking, and almost everyone stopped commuting and everyone was inside their
00:34:38.980
house. Did we reach the level of emissions that like the Paris climate. The incremental reduction
00:34:44.140
that we needed year over year, every year by the Paris. And it still wasn't enough. And so I feel
00:34:48.880
like that's kind of, this is analogous with the whole marriage thing. Like, you know, even that,
00:34:54.700
even if we went to that level with early marriage promotion in the United States, which would be
00:34:59.160
insane pandemic mirror world dystopia level promotion by our standards, by American standards,
00:35:07.140
it would still not be enough. And, and so I do question, I mean, I I'm all for marriage formation.
00:35:12.900
It's so much easier to raise kids when you have someone to help you. Like it, that's just a
00:35:17.260
logistical truth. This is not, it has to be a man and a woman thing. Like, I don't care if it's a
00:35:22.740
cat girl and a cat girl. Okay. But like the logistics are easier. And then the scaling back family
00:35:29.840
planning thing. Like, I feel like that's just, that's just so dumb. Like this has been shown again
00:35:34.300
and again to not, to not be helpful. I don't even know if we can count that. Maybe we just have to
00:35:38.880
throw it out. Like, unless you get, I feel like China is going to be the first country
00:35:43.260
to do this in a way where maybe it works because unlike with Romania, I think instead of just dumping
00:35:50.900
kids in orphanages where they, they languish and are not taken care of, I could see China just being
00:35:57.620
like, yeah, we'll take them. Now they're CCP babies and we're going to raise them to be in our CCP army.
00:36:03.740
And it's going to be like the clone wars and they're just all going to, it's going to be the
00:36:07.080
clone wars. No, I think we'll do that. Yeah. But I think that's the one way where removing
00:36:13.020
reproductive choice and going hyper dystopian is going to work is if you're like, I'm going to
00:36:18.780
force you to have babies, but also I'm going to raise them because you can't force a person to have
00:36:26.220
a baby and expect them to do a good job raising them and like not abandon or abuse them. You know,
00:36:31.020
you're not going to create high tax paying citizens or high productivity citizens. If you
00:36:35.780
have this resentful or traumatized or whatever, like coerced slave perspective of the state,
00:36:42.860
childcare has always been free and that needs to change. That's a really great way. That's a
00:36:48.040
wonderful way of putting it. Yeah. From the perspective of the state, childcare has always
00:36:54.020
been free. Free, freeloading state. Freeloading state? They expected these taxpayers. Come on,
00:37:01.100
man. Oh my God. Now I'm like, I'm genuinely insulted. The state is using you, Simone.
00:37:08.940
That is. It takes that you care about the future. How dare they? Anyway, love you to death.
00:37:14.880
I love you too. Great topic. Great job researching it, Simone.
00:37:18.400
All thanks to Cremieux for inspiring this, but I found the UAE marriage wedding thing and that's so
00:37:25.400
insane. That is crazy. It is crazy. It is crazy. Okay. I already sent you the link for the other
00:37:32.840
one I'm ending recording. The story I'm working on is so engaging. What kind of husband walks up to
00:37:40.960
their wife on a random day and is like, I accidentally wrote a novel today. Yes. Well,
00:37:46.900
I finally found a very good AI integrated storyteller for like exploring worlds. Okay. And so I put an
00:37:54.020
isake together, which is like a Harry Potter of method rationality, but good. I'll link to it in
00:37:58.880
the comments here so people can read it, but it takes place in like an isake world. It's got an overly
00:38:04.460
arrogant protagonist who is just had it with this isake nonsense and decides to take over the world
00:38:12.740
immediately to, to make things better. And I did it all with the AI, like allowing the AI to,
00:38:20.400
if it presented a challenge to me or like, if I didn't know how like a magical system worked,
00:38:24.900
I would always have the AI sort of lay out the rules of the thought experiment that I was going
00:38:29.840
to have to try to get through. So it was written, you could say to an extent adversarially where
00:38:35.400
there wasn't a lot of like, Oh, I want this to happen, or I want things to go in this way,
00:38:40.500
which I think makes it roll pretty fun. You know, it's very much like I'm going in and I'm like,
00:38:45.860
okay, we're going to do things in this new way. We're going to have this new technology. It's
00:38:48.960
really fun. It's really fun. Very methods of rationality. Yeah. And if people like it and they're
00:38:53.560
like, Hey, write more of this, I can continue in this world and try to make like a bigger world and even
00:38:58.540
create with our video game, like a thing. So you can explore worlds like this or do this yourself
00:39:02.720
better. Well, that's the point of the platform that you and Bruno are building is that while
00:39:07.080
you're starting off with this post-apocalyptic or like post-demographic collapse AI world game,
00:39:13.520
anyone's lore or fan universe can be plugged in and be explored with this really rich format,
00:39:20.720
right? That's what I'm so excited about. Yeah. That's what I'm really excited about too,
00:39:24.340
is it creates a system where you can create these really big, persistent and interesting worlds
00:39:30.140
that you can explore. And that's what we're working on with the Reality Fabricator project
00:39:34.580
to basically create this, but more adversarial and better. But with this one system, I was just really
00:39:40.460
impressed with it. And I ended up because I finally had a little bit of time to myself, like,
00:39:45.580
okay, let's actually play through one of these because I haven't in a long time.
00:39:50.220
Yeah. Enjoy it while it lasts. You're not going to have a private moment for a long time
00:39:55.300
and a bit. You're going for the cruise together. It's going to be great.