Why Did Only Some Countries Have A Baby Boom？
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Summary
In this episode, Simone and I talk about the post-World War II baby boom and why it may not have been caused by decreased child mortality. We also talk about why the baby boom didn't happen in every country, and why there may have been no boom in some countries.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone! I'm excited to be here with you today. Today, we are going to be talking about
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the post-World War II baby boom. We have done an episode of this in the past, and the thesis that
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we came to in that episode was that the post-World War II baby boom was predominantly about
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decreased child mortality. And this is true. A lot of it can be just pinned on the head of,
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if you think about that period, if you go to the beginning of it, it was something like half of
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babies died. Then at the end of it, it was something like 2% of babies died. It was pretty big.
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A very big jump. It was like, you're doubling the number of babies out of nowhere. But that can't
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really explain everything because it didn't happen the same amount in every country. And if it had
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just been medical technology, then it would have been based on how developed a particular country
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was at the time. And that's what would have led to the baby boom. And you get a little bit of that,
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And the baby boom is incredibly important to study because if you look at this graph here,
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when we're talking about fertility collapse, it really started in the U.S. around 1835.
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And the only persistent reversal you get of it from that time period is the baby boom. And it is a
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It appears to, when we go through, and we're going to go through now, the country that happened in the
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country that didn't happen in, when you go through that list, you can begin to try to build a thesis
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on what caused this. All right. So in Italy, you had no boom or a very small boom. Okay.
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Okay. In Greece, you had no boom. In Portugal, you had no boom. In Spain, you had no boom. All right.
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In Poland, you had no boom. In Bulgaria, you had no boom. Throughout most of the Soviet Union, you had
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no boom. Estonia, no boom. Lithuania, no boom. Brazil and Latin America, no boom. Argentina, no boom.
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Uruguay, no boom. India, no boom. So is this a lack of economic thriving in these countries? That's
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my first intuition. Most people commenting are going to be like, well, that's because they were
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struggling economically. So what's the difference? Yeah, but all of Europe was struggling economically
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post-World War II. A lot of places were struggling economically post-World War II without having the
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boom. Okay. So now let's go. Okay. Where do we get a boom? All right. You get a boom in the United
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States. All right. You get a boom in Canada. You get a boom in the United Kingdom. Okay.
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You get a boom in France. You get a very large boom in Australia. You actually get an even larger
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boom. The largest of the big booms happened in New Zealand. You get a very big boom in Norway.
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You get a moderate boom in Sweden, but it began before the war started. In Denmark, you have a weak
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boom. In Finland, you had a significant boom. In Iceland, you had a very significant boom.
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In the Netherlands, you had a weak boom. In Belgium, you had a weak boom. In Switzerland,
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you had a weak boom. In Austria, you had the strongest in Europe.
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In West Germany, you had a boom, but in East Germany, you didn't have a boom.
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And in Ireland, you didn't have a boom. You also didn't have booms in... Oh, interesting. You had a
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very short one in Japan, but then it disappeared. So you had a non-Western boom in Morocco.
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So again, keep in mind, like economic developments and stuff like this. And you had a boom in Mongolia.
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You had a boom in Turkey. Not a big one, these non-Western ones, but you had them.
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All right. So trying to build a pattern here. Initial part of the pattern, really easy to see.
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Anyone who's under Soviet communist rule did not have a boom. However, I didn't mention this one.
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You did get a big boom in China, but Chinese communist rule, you get a big boom. Okay.
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So first note here. Second, if you were part of the allies, you get a very big boom.
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Right. Well, I mean, some people like technically won by not having the war ravaged their countries,
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but we're not part of the allies. So an example of this would be Ireland. Ireland didn't have a boom
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and refused to join the allies. Irish bastard. What's that? McCarran. That's an Irish name.
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Save the Blarney for the Killeens, Patty. What? Archer, what are you? He's the target. What?
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Yeah. I just remembered from the dossier. You know what, Patty? Hang on.
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Lana, shut up. God. So where did you get access power?
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Are you sure? They were neutral. Oh, that's right.
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Oh yeah. Whereas France got pommeled. It was not pretty, but.
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Right. And it's not just the countries that were personally like, like hit by the effects of the
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war because the North America and Canada and New Zealand and Australia, where you saw booms many
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times bigger than the European booms, they were not actually like, they didn't see all the devastation.
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So we've talked about, if you have a tsunami in an area, you'll have a higher fertility rate after
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the tsunami than in surrounding areas. So like mass death can cause fertility growth. Maybe it triggered
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something in these men's heads that they were at war and they saw all this. Maybe, maybe. So we'll
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get to that. But then you've got other countries that maybe make less sense. Okay. Um, I also think
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that things like, if I remember like Morocco, can you check this on AI was weekly allied with the
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allies in World War II. So that could explain their boom, but not all allies have a boom. India doesn't
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have a boom. Okay. So, so we've got to look, okay, what, what does India have in common with
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the Soviet Union? And yeah. So Morocco was under French colonial rule and part of the French
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Yes. That could explain a weak boom. Then you, you have a weak boom in Switzerland as well. So,
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so in Europe didn't participate. Right. But you could say, well, what about the access powers?
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You had a big boom in a few of them. You had a very big boom in Austria, which was an access power.
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And you had a very big boom in Western Germany, but not Eastern Germany.
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So check something for me. Austria was not under communist rule, right? Also was Turkey under
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communist rule? Can you ask any of this? Because I don't remember these ones, but like, why is Turkey
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seeing a boom? Also ask, was Turkey an access or allied power? I don't remember that one.
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In World War I, Turkey was access because they were under the Ottomans.
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We're asking about post-World War II though, weren't we?
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Yeah. So, so ask in World War II, which side was Turkey on? And did Austria see direct
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fighting in its territory? Because I don't remember much.
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Yeah. I thought Austria was just sort of taken by Germany.
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It willingly joined if I remember. Turkey remained officially neutral for most of World War II,
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and it had diplomatic and economic relations with both access and allied partners. But in February
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1945, Turkey declared war on Germany and Japan as a symbolic gesture to secure a seat in the United
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Nations, but it did not engage in any significant military action. So it was, it was looking out for
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number one. No, I remember Austria being quite enthusiastic about joining Germany.
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Yeah. And I said, and you earlier, you said Austria did not experience significant
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fighting on its soil during World War II. After the Anschluss in 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi
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Germany and became part of the Third Reich. Can you ask how enthusiastic, because Hitler was Austrian,
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right? So I don't know if I would be that upset being Austrian and joining the, the,
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like, I wouldn't have seen it as a wound to national pride.
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Yeah. Maybe I've watched The Sound of Music too many times. So I'm, I'm, I'm too affiliated with
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just like one family's approach to it. A notable portion of Austria welcomed the Anschluss. Many saw
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it as fulfillment of a pan-German nationalism, uniting German speaking people. Yeah.
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So it was mixed, but an enthusiasm appears to have been a little varied. So there, there was some
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coercion, there was some pragmatism, but there were some people who were stoked about it. It seems.
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And so if we, if we go through these countries and we're trying to, to fill this out, I can,
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I can draw another, I'm actually going to see, do you note the other big thing that seems to cause
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fertility booms or that seems to be the differentiator between the countries that had it
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in the countries that didn't. It's, I'll just give it to you. Yeah. A distinct sense of national
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identity. So, and not just national identity, but with us versus them propaganda. So if you look at
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West Germany. A little bit of xenophobia, are you saying like even that far?
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Yes. If you look at West Germany versus East Germany, very famously, the United States was
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constantly dropping propaganda flyers into West Germany. But keep in mind, West Germany wasn't
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like under the United States or something like that. And the way East Germany was under Russia,
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the communist empire. It, it felt like those propaganda posters are saying, isn't it so great
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to be West German and have this West German identity and be free as a West German. If you look at the
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allied countries like throughout this entire area, all of them were subject to lots and lots of
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propaganda about how great it was to be a member of their national identity. If you were an American
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at this time period, you would have constantly be told, not only is being America the best and the
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American way of life, the best and the greatest, and that everybody wants to be American because
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America is the greatest, but you're getting this in New Zealand as well. You might check out,
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you're getting New Zealand best and the greatest, right? Interesting. Okay.
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But in, in what, which of the allies, like which part of the allies wouldn't have gotten this?
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India, because India is under British rule at this time and, and wanting to escape a British rule at
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this time. So Britain is not going to attempt to foster pan Indian nationalism while they are under
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British rule. So this basically explains it. And this is, I think is a huge, it also explains why
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Austria had such a fertility boom, because when they were under the Nazis, they saw a pan German
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identity, which they were a part of. And after the Nazis, you would have continued to check again,
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Austria, was Austria taken by the communists? No, no. Haha, Simone was wrong here.
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Austria was divided just like Germany was divided. And just like in Germany, further strengthening our
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point, the side under communist rule did not have as much of a baby boom as the side under
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capitalist rule. Okay. So after the war, you then had, of course, given how close they were to the
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communists, we would have been showering them with propaganda about how great it is to be Austrian and
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not be a part of the communists. Now, many people note that the baby boom started before the war,
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and it did start before the war, in large part because of medical technology. We've already
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talked about this. But the big boom that happened after the war, I'm going to argue is directly
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downstream of nationalism. But didn't nationalism peak before and during the war as they're trying
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to win it, not after when they were like, okay, let's get back to normal life. No, because after the
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war, we immediately went into the Cold War. I'm here arguing that the early stages of the Cold War,
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before it became, you know, like long Vietnam drawn out national pride, the youth is rebelling,
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blah, blah, blah. Everyone was fairly on board with the idea, right? Like, where are the good
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guys? They are the bad guys. And better than that, for most people, they had just had it validated in
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their minds. It's like, look, there really are bad guys. We really can go out and oppose them.
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Like, let's work to do that. And what doesn't work is globalism for fertility rates.
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You can see communism in Russia, and it was practiced in Russia versus how it was practiced
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in China, as proto-globalism. Be proud to be a human. Don't be proud to be an Estonian. You know,
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don't be proud to be, you know. So I think that in a big way, what's causing our current fertility
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collapse could be downstream of what caused their fertility collapse during, or I mean,
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caused the communist fertility to not go up in the way that the other countries did.
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Because they didn't have this degree of national identity to pair, because they were getting just
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as much propaganda as everyone else. I know, but I'm just thinking about communist propaganda,
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and it's all about being so proud to be contributing to your country. You don't think
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that that counts? I mean, I get this sense as an outsider looking in that there was this really
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strong sense of here's who we are, and you will pay the price if you don't identify that way,
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by the way. Well, it's be proud to be a member of our collection of countries, which again, the point
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that I'm making here is for this sort of nationalist propaganda to work. It needs to be a little more
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granular. There has to be like, there's no Borg. You can't be the Borg. You have to be like
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a Kardashian. You have to be a Klingon. Yeah, you have to be one in a Kardashian. Did you mean
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Kardashian? Sorry, Kardashian. Listen, why did, why? But yes, I mean, Kardashians also have high fertility
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and a lot of pride. So yeah, I guess either way works. But pride in a distinct identity. And so I
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think you could see this, like have lots of kids to serve the collective better doesn't work. And
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it's what the EU is still trying to push, right? Like, yeah, I started trying to push in terms of
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how they're handling this. And I think it's only going to make the problem worse for everyone involved.
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So I think, and this is why I promote with a lot of the ideas. At the end of this,
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we talk about the speech that we're putting together. And in it, one of the things that I
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talk about and why I want to work to do this is put together some sort of like Japanese perinatalist
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event so that we can do it as like a joint, like we are doing this for self-defense, but what's the
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word like national defense reasons, right? National security.
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And the reason I really want to do that is to freak out the media. Because if you
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host a US-Japan national security conference, you could invite some other countries, New Zealand,
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Australia, which you're really doing is why are those countries getting together to talk about
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fertility rates? Well, the core national security threat to all of them is China. And China is going
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to immediately realize this. But what it's also going to immediately frame is how strong all of our
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countries are vis-a-vis China. For people who don't know, China's fertility rates are like around
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one now. New Zealand's is like 1.5 to 1.8. Australia is at like 1.5. The United States is
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like 1.6. Japan's at like 1.3, one of the strongest for an economically developed country in
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the region. So China's going to freak out. A bunch of media is going to freak out because they're
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going to be like, hey, why are you doing this country? And I'm going to be like, well, you know,
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we've got to figure out what we're going to do with China when there's no Chinese people left.
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What we're going to do with Korea when they're all gone. You know, just things that'll really
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freak people out and get them angry. And then the media does the whole thing on this.
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And we can use that to get in front of people, one, a very vitalistic message, like us versus
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them. But then two, frame it in a non-racialized context because, you know, this is, we're looking
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here at the Pacific theater, right? And then three, I can combine a lot of the art and promotional
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material with the event with anime and have that be very germane to the setting that we're in,
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right? And so the media will pick up this over the top, very anime inspired, very sort of like
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man's world inspired art style as the sort of pro natalist art style. And people will see that and
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see the vitalism that is inside of it and want to replicate that. It's a very easy way. Like if you
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want people to like, I'm not, I don't think I'm going to get the government to put pro natalist
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posters in every classroom in the United States. No, that's not happening.
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But what can I do? Oh, actually we should add to the speech. The thing about the baby toys.
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You're half, you have that in there. It's in there.
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Oh, it is. The people who had the baby toy. I mean, I can put in the actual stats,
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but I'm going to put that just in the report and we can just talk.
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No, no, no. I'm talking about when people were given babies by the government.
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Yeah. And I'm saying I can put the actual stats in the PDF report, like the extent to which they
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affected fertility and the treatment versus control groups.
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Yeah. Because when people were given those little babies to take care of,
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they ended up having more kids. And so maybe that's something.
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Malcolm's referring to a baby simulation program that was tried in Australia in which adolescents were
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given actual baby dolls. This was done to dissuade them from teen pregnancy, but it actually
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increased incidence of teen pregnancy and having kids quite young. So.
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But I think all of this is upstream of a very simple framing, right? The way you actually achieve
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pronatalist outcomes, the way you actually get people to choose to have children is to have a
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cultural identity, like believe they are a something and want more of that something to exist in the
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future because they think the future is going to be bright.
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Yeah. The way you put it really well is convincing people to have kids isn't about convincing people
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that kids are great. It's about convincing people that they themselves are great, which is
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Yeah. And if you, what a lot of groups attempted you to do this is to say, and we're great because we
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were great in the past, which super backfires. We're always noting like very low Catholic fertility rates.
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And I think that one of the reasons why Catholic and Catholic countries have such low fertility is
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because their intuition immediately around fertility. Like whenever I talk with a conservative Catholic,
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at least is restrictions. We need to restrict lewd images. We need to restrict gay marriages. We need to
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restrict masturbation. We need to restrict like just restriction, restriction, restriction,
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restrict abortion, restrict this. And they're basically chaining like a person's humanity and
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expecting that person to flourish, I think. And I think what we're seeing is, is attempting to increase
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fertility rate by adding restrictions does the exact opposite of the intent. One of the jokes I always
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make when I went to AI to double check that this is true. And it was true up until 2023, where, you
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know, somebody is like, well, you know, we can get fertility rates up if we basically banned immigration
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and we banned gay marriage and we banned abortion and we made pornography illegal. And I was like, great.
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All of those things were true in South Korea up until 2023. And the only one that I think is now not
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true. It's abortion. 2021 I think was when abortion was somewhat legalized in South Korea. That doesn't
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change the fact that it's still quite difficult to get an abortion in South Korea. Just FYI.
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Yeah. And the point here being is that the countries with these incredibly strict restrictions have
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incredibly big problems with fertility rates. I mean, the countries with incredibly loose restrictions,
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and even the cultural groups with loose restrictions have much higher fertility rates,
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or at least when the restrictions are expected to be self-imposed. So consider something like the Jews.
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Jews, Orthodox Jews have tons of restrictions. They're just like restrictomania in terms of all their
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rules. But the Israeli state, being a soft theocracy, literally enforces none of them.
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Yeah, the rules have to be endogenous, not exogenous.
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And I think that this is something that like, people just actually, I should mention that as a
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contrast with Korea, because I think that's really good. Oh, Israel versus Korea. Yeah,
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that's a good way of putting it. But yeah, I think that that's what we need to get back to. And that's
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what every family should be promoting with their kids. And at the national level, get back to and I
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think it's a conservative party, like we're already in a place where we're really close to being able
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to do this. Because if you went to the conservatives of the 90s, they wouldn't be able to do this. They
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had no vitalism to the party, right? Like they were restrictomania as well back then. They were like,
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let's just go back to the past, create a bunch of restrictions, etc.
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Well, and the idea also among the conservative party was to impose morality on people because
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they couldn't be trusted or be seen as capable of imposing it on themselves.
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Right. And we've talked about this before. The core reason why the conservative party stopped
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doing that was because they used to be the party of the dominant cultural group,
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which was sort of this Judeo-Christian alliance. And so they could attempt to impose their morality
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on the population. But now because they're in the minority and the urban monoculturism majority
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within this country, the urban monoculture attempts to use the progressives to project
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moral authority through restrictions on individuals or on threats to companies and a broad alliance,
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including like gamer bros and tech bros and conservative Christians are all like, no,
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stop restricting my ability to have a culture that's different from your culture. But what that means
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is that a big part of the cultural framing has become ultra vitalistic.
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Mm hmm. And you see this in a lot of the art. If you look at our episode on like the aesthetics
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of the new right, you see this with, you know, mixing in, you know, anime themes. One of the things
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I think is incredibly vitalistic that we see in conservative art that you don't see in as much
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progressive art is the competent and lauded use of AI is both in terms of video creation to create like
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shorts and in terms of art or like thumbnails or like, whereas in progressives, you get your head
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spit on off for using that much AI art. I mean, like our videos just use constant AI art in terms
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of like the videos. We do AI songs in a lot of videos. We, you know, very, very lean into AI.
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And this is because we don't allow, like they, they, they using their position of cultural dominance
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want to restrict what we are allowed to think looks good. What we are allowed to, and you, you actually
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know this of the anti AI community because there's that famous study done that when people didn't know
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that art was AI art, even if they said they didn't like AI art, they preferred AI art.
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So it means that the, the stated preference of, I don't like AI art is downstream of knowing that
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it's created with AI, meaning that these people actually do have a preference for this art.
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They're just forcing themselves to engage with it through disgust. And, and as such,
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there is a level of beauty that is like vulgar to them that we can celebrate, right?
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What you're looking for. And I think that this, this is how you really capture vitalism the most
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is you look for things that are considered vulgar within the elite society of our age, but not for
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actual vulgarity, i.e. not because they actually like damage an individual, but because there is some
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other interest at play like status signaling or something like that. A great example here is anime.
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I mean, this is why you see anime and anime related stuff so much in sort of new right art
00:24:29.320
and memes and everything like that is because there's this hard lean into. So that's why you
00:24:33.160
see a lot of means in, in mainstream new right art, you know, very, very low culture considered
00:24:38.760
vulgar by mainstream society. The government literally created a department named after a doge, right?
00:24:44.440
Like, but what's the post-World War II nationalism driven element of the baby boom also driven by
00:24:54.920
generally vulgar cultural amenities? Because I didn't, okay, how so?
00:25:00.200
So it was driven by the, the nationalism of the 1950s and post 1950s when you have this boom period,
00:25:08.040
right? Was absolutely driven by was what was at the time considered low culture and disgusting,
00:25:15.320
i.e. what dominated pop media at the time, comic culture, penny mag culture, the early science
00:25:22.680
fiction retrofuturism culture. I mean, today we call it retrofuturism. All of this stuff to your,
00:25:29.240
you know, opera goers at the time to your people.
00:25:31.960
Well, yeah, that's fair. Yeah. Sci-fi books and comic books. Yeah.
00:25:35.640
What we're seeing is very low culture, right? Yeah.
00:25:40.120
And people were taught to, you know, admire their ancestors through what the Western,
00:25:45.320
right? Like the Western, which was popular during these time periods and said, you know, America,
00:25:50.520
great. Awesome. We, we, we, we certainly didn't do anything wrong. I mean, there were Indians here.
00:25:55.560
We had the us versus them, cowboy versus Indian. You as a kid, you'd run around and play this game,
00:25:59.800
you know, but you, you, you, you can't do that anymore. Like you couldn't, you know,
00:26:03.560
take pride in the Cowboys today. Like what? Everybody would, would freak out. Right.
00:26:08.280
Sean, why is there a giant hole in my front yard? The hole was my grave. Gus made me dig my own grave,
00:26:18.200
then shot me and stole my boots. Oh, so you, uh, you were playing Cowboys and Indians, huh?
00:26:25.720
Just Cowboys. Playing Indians is offensive. And then the buzzers ate your entrails. That's awful.
00:26:31.640
Yeah. It was a tragic end to our adventure, but it's the realism that makes it fun.
00:26:36.280
But you couldn't. I guess the last big cowboy film we, no, we've had a,
00:26:39.960
actually there's, there's been a decent number of films romanticizing Cowboys.
00:26:46.840
Which one? Not, not versus Indians though. Yeah. Not versus Indians.
00:26:50.840
But the point here being is that in the 1950s, the culture that was lauded, think back to,
00:26:57.960
to the 1950s cultural boom. And what do you think of if you are imagining like what people are doing
00:27:06.360
or where they're gathered, right? It's at a diner, a very low culture restaurant or at a soda shop.
00:27:16.920
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're not imagining, you know, big glamorous restaurants or anything like that.
00:27:22.360
Right. Um, which is if I go back and I try to imagine, you know, other periods,
00:27:26.360
like say the 1920s, I am imagining that. I am. Yeah. Well, and today what is considered
00:27:31.320
aspirational are these jet set lifestyles such that people are literally buying, renting time on a
00:27:38.760
private jet set just to fake it to people that they're on a private jet. Yeah. That they're that
00:27:45.960
what is now aspirational is unsustainable. Whereas during these times of nationalism,
00:27:49.400
you're right. Low culture is framed as more celebrated.
00:27:54.520
I know what she's talking about here. What she means, because this is actually crazy to me that
00:27:57.640
this is a thing is you can rent private jets. You don't take off. You don't fly anywhere in them.
00:28:03.480
They're set up so that you can take lots of selfies in them.
00:28:05.960
It's I don't, I don't even know if it's a real private jet. There's this one in LA that you can
00:28:09.720
spot as soon as you see what it looks like on like the rental site. And then as soon as you see it,
00:28:15.080
you can tell which social media people are renting like an hour on it.
00:28:22.440
So people, I don't know if other, other evidence of this, just in case you find this amusing,
00:28:26.680
people literally buy things like Hermes bags on eBay. So they can look like they've purchased
00:28:33.240
a bunch of things from designer shops. And there's also this really huge issue of
00:28:40.200
What do you mean? Do they like go to the designer store and take pictures like walking out with it?
00:28:44.120
No, they typically just show the pictures in their apartment, but it makes it seem like they went
00:28:48.120
shopping and they're like, Oh, this is, you know, just so busy. And then people also buy and return
00:28:54.120
clothes so much so that retail stores are suffering and they're needing to change their policies because
00:28:59.960
so many people are just buying and immediately returning outfits to make it seem like they
00:29:04.920
are having these huge clothing hauls that they ultimately can't afford.
00:29:10.520
No, no, people value thrift. And it, yeah, what was aspirational was more that you had the perfect
00:29:19.400
wife and the perfect family and the perfect kids and that you entertained. Well,
00:29:23.720
you had your barbecue. You could make a good burger. You could make a good jello dessert,
00:29:30.920
but you had your car in the garage, but it wasn't that you went on fabulous vacations or bought a ton
00:29:36.680
of stuff. I mean, it, there were consumerism was big, but it was consumerism on a slightly more
00:29:41.560
sustainable level. And it was like, do you have the top of the line kitchen?
00:29:45.400
No, it wasn't that there wasn't a wealthy elite culture of the time period. It was, it was that
00:29:50.520
there was outside of that, a mainstream cultural perception of an ideal to strive for that was not
00:29:57.960
that culture. And, and if anything, the highest form of culture you could ascribe to was the not
00:30:05.240
elite culture version. And if you look at, I mean, we try to do this within the way we, we, we promote
00:30:10.680
things like people notice I wear Amazon essentials in every episode. Simone got her dress on Etsy,
00:30:16.520
you know, like we're, we're not coming at this, like trying to show, oh, this, this glamorous life.
00:30:22.920
We talk about being a Kikomori all the time. Like we never leave our house. We don't bother
00:30:27.080
entertaining people. We don't do, you know, birthdays for our kids. We don't do, you know,
00:30:32.040
big Christmases or anything. And, and we, we brag about this because it sets a norm,
00:30:39.960
which is the norm that you need, which is a patriotism in whatever you are and how that's
00:30:45.400
different from other people, which obviously we have a lot of pride in and in sort of wholesomeness,
00:30:50.360
I think as well, like the, the, the culture that was sold was wholesome. But then as I also mentioned,
00:30:55.480
very important, there was, it was a forwards looking culture. It was not a culture trying to recapture
00:31:02.920
a past. So what's really ironic is the people who, you know, do the cargo cult of the 1950s and,
00:31:09.320
and do the child wife dress up and everything like that. They're missing the spirit of it,
00:31:13.320
right? The spirit of the 1950s, which was retro futuristic, which was, which is progress,
00:31:18.280
which is look at how great it's going to be in just a few years. Yeah. Like we split the atom.
00:31:22.360
We're in the atomic age now. It was so, you know, retro futuristic that everything was called like
00:31:28.920
atomic at the era. Like, like the, the, the entire art style that you associate with like 1950s ads
00:31:33.960
is called the atomic art style. Like that might actually be really cool to make that like slang
00:31:38.920
in our family, like atomic, but to mean like, cool, but yeah, like every, everything was about
00:31:45.880
the atom, you know, and when you'd go buy toys, they'd be like, what do we, what do we call our
00:31:51.320
wagon? Well, what's like cutting edge radios and flying. Okay. The radio flyer.
00:31:57.640
That was sort of a bit earlier era, but it was still an era that looked ahead. And now so much of
00:32:01.960
conservative culture are parts of it really. I'd say the, probably the, the, the backseat
00:32:06.920
part of it, like the part of it that's sort of, I think right now filtering out of the party
00:32:11.320
after sort of the MAGA coup wants to pearl clutch and go back to an earlier way rather than embrace
00:32:17.240
vitalism and look to the future. And it's, well, it's not working. It's, it's not working for them.
00:32:23.400
In fact, most of the influencers I know of this persuasion don't have a family and kids.
00:32:28.360
I mean, I think it's because it's just not fun to tie your life to somebody like that,
00:32:31.320
right? Like that, that could be a big part of it. Like what, why, why, why does nobody,
00:32:36.280
you know, want to marry Nick Fuentes, right? Like if you have this, let's go back to this
00:32:41.480
earlier era and then maintain it in, in stagnancy forever, who wants to, who wants to sign on for
00:32:47.640
that? Right. But if you're like, look at this bright future, look at the future, look at the
00:32:52.840
talking, the future of talking machines that we have now, right? Like this is amazing.
00:32:56.760
Right. And yet so much of society, interestingly, not as much the conservatives, much more the
00:33:02.520
progressives have a shoot it. They're like, ew, I hate AI. It's so gross. It's so icky. It's so
00:33:09.720
terrible. I only can see how it's, it's bad. And then you have the, the much more common on the
00:33:15.160
conservative side, which I think surprised a lot of people that the conservatives became the party
00:33:18.200
pushing for like regulation against regulating AI. And the progressives were pushing for the regulation
00:33:24.200
of AI, but it's because they, they, they maintain norms through this pearl clutching. And so everybody
00:33:30.680
who wanted to pearl clutch about AIs naturally found allies among the progressives.
00:33:36.920
Yeah. It didn't occur to me until you mentioned it, just how pessimistic about the future
00:33:44.040
the progressive party is. And also the urban monoculture in general, that, that enthusiasm
00:33:49.000
and excitement for the future is totally gone. And it does seem to be playing a major role in
00:33:55.160
the depression and lack of vitalism in younger generations. They're like, why should I bother?
00:33:59.320
I'll never have the same level of wealth as my parents. I'll never have this or that. It's really
00:34:03.160
frustrating. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I, and my kids talk like that. I'll be like, bro,
00:34:11.640
you're growing up with talking machines. Like, do you understand how cool what you can do is you
00:34:19.960
can go to one of these AIs and just type in a question and it will give you an answer that you
00:34:24.840
can chat and have interactive worlds with them. Like we're building with our fab.ai to make better
00:34:29.400
that you can like just the future to me looks so infinitesimally bright compared to previous
00:34:36.280
generations. If, if we do this right. But that was also true in the 1950s. I mean, this was the
00:34:42.360
era where it was very much a, the future might be bright if you put everything in to make it awesome,
00:34:47.080
but also, Hey, stick your head in the locker in case the atomic bomb explodes and kills everyone.
00:34:51.640
You know? Well, yeah, it was, yeah, I guess. So what you're saying is the right
00:34:57.560
mood for a baby boom is one in which you are very proud of your group and you think the future is
00:35:05.080
bright, but there is an existential threat and victory is not guaranteed. Yes.
00:35:13.080
Yeah. I think, yeah. I think feeling like you've already won or that's what Israel has right now.
00:35:17.960
All of those things you just mentioned. That's a really good point. Yeah. Okay.
00:35:23.240
I actually think that this is part of why Muslims have struggled so much with their fertility rate
00:35:28.200
is they force other Muslims into a pan Muslim identity over pride in their own group. Whereas Jews,
00:35:34.760
Jews have much more pride in their own sect of Judaism often than they have over
00:35:40.440
Jewish identity. Yeah. This is something else I hadn't really thought about. Cause I was just
00:35:45.080
assuming for example, that Soviet Russia or the USSR more specifically would just have this,
00:35:53.160
that there would be no difference between pride in the USSR versus pride in like your specific
00:36:00.760
Orthodox Jewish sect. But what you're saying is you really do need much more localized communities
00:36:07.400
to feel excited about their own identity and they can be loosely allied. So it doesn't have to be
00:36:13.720
that you are as an autonomous country, a small thing that's proud of your small group. You can be part of a
00:36:20.280
big country, but you do need to also be part of a small group and really proud of it. Meaning that the
00:36:25.720
diversity or variety of the United States is helpful and important insofar as we're allowed to celebrate
00:36:31.880
it and let it be distinct. Right. And we'd probably be worse off without it. Cause it was something that
00:36:38.200
happens a lot in the comments as people are like, no diversity is terrible. And it doesn't seem intuitively
00:36:44.520
right to me. Help you see your own group as more different. Like there's a ton of diversity within
00:36:51.000
Israel, for example, right? Huge Muslim population, huge Christian population. As Curtis Yervin suggested
00:36:57.240
we, we use instead of diversity is variety, which I think is, is a pretty good way to put it because
00:37:02.280
diversity has been somewhat ruined as a term. Yeah. Anyway, that's, that's my new take on what we need
00:37:10.040
to be leaning into more. I like it. I like it. Variety, pride, a feeling of existential threat,
00:37:19.160
but a feeling like beyond that existential threat is a future so bright and exciting that you are
00:37:31.400
All right. I love you, Simone. Alexander is actually religious. He identifies as Jewish. And then I
00:37:36.920
remember when I went to their house, one of the times that they were doing a Jewish celebration,
00:37:42.840
one of those meals. I want to say, I don't remember which one it was. Was it a Shabbat dinner? Yeah,
00:37:48.120
you might've been a Shabbat. Yeah. But I didn't contextualize it as religious in my head because
00:37:52.200
there were so many, obviously non-Jewish people there, but of course, how is someone obviously not
00:37:56.920
Jewish? Because their affiliation was clearly rationalist above all else or, or not rationalist,
00:38:04.440
but you know, the wider like EA community. So I thought of it as like an EA meetup in my head
00:38:08.680
more than a Shabbat dinner. But I was like, oh, of course. Yeah. So they are raising their kids.
00:38:14.040
Religious. So, yes. Any comments on today's episode were very mean when I checked them.
00:38:22.040
I didn't check them. I was so busy trying to get the slide deck and started and...
00:38:28.760
I don't know if we're able to say that. Oh, we're not? Yeah. Well, don't screw it up. Just
00:38:34.360
don't mention anything about it until... Until it's done.
00:38:38.360
Well, or yeah, or maybe we won't like that. We could be invited back if we keep our mouths shut.
00:38:50.920
Oh, let me get my ethernet cord one second. This is one of these things where I want you to keep
00:38:55.080
your mouth shut until we know it's okay. Don't make them regret inviting us when we could...
00:39:00.280
I mean, you're trying to pitch a conference. You're trying to pitch all these other things.
00:39:03.160
You're not going to get them. You read the new... You read the new write-up?
00:39:10.360
I did. Yeah. I'm... You're not making this easy to set up. You're not like...
00:39:17.880
Like, I'm just going to write a book and that's going to be easy. And I'll just memorize the book.
00:39:22.520
And like, no, no, you should have just made a simple outline, but you are incapable of doing that. And so
00:39:28.440
somehow on top of everything else that I have to do this week, I need to... So it's just going to take
00:39:34.600
longer because you decided to make this impossibly difficult. And of course not ordered. And I get
00:39:40.040
that you're like ordering it from a like narratively rich standpoint, but you like keep jumping around
00:39:46.520
from like causes to significance to solutions in a way that doesn't work well with slide decks or
00:39:53.320
outlines unless you're doing like a Ted talk. And I get that you're trying to keep it narratively
00:39:57.880
engaging. So like, I'm trying to accommodate that while also like giving materials that are
00:40:01.800
professional and usable after we leave. The burden I place on you... That's my job.
00:40:08.920
In case you can't tell, because it does have a structure to it, is to start with why is this
00:40:15.800
important? Then to transition to all of the things... What are the causes? What are not the causes?
00:40:21.800
And what are solutions? I know, I get it. And that's good. You just jump around.
00:40:27.880
I do not. And you're not exactly like thorough. And you just jump to like the solutions that
00:40:33.720
are the most self-promotional and like not evidence-based, but fun.
00:40:40.920
That's the real solution, as we'll learn in today's episode. The real solution to fertility
00:40:46.360
collapse is promotional sort of nationalism, futuristic nationalism, I guess I'd call it.
00:40:51.960
And you, you know, a lot of people, when they come to this, they want to do it from the perspective of,
00:40:57.560
you know, cash handouts or regulation or, and all of that stuff seems to make things worse.
00:41:03.880
In the, in the slide deck I put together, if you look, for example, at Europe and you look at
00:41:09.240
the, the amount of contraception laws that are in a country, and you look at the fertility rates,
00:41:15.000
a strong correlation to more contraception laws leading to lower fertility rates.
00:41:19.320
And so like, I, I get, I, I, I don't know. I just, I, I don't, the self-promotional ones are the
00:41:28.040
ones that work. You need to create promotion. You need to create pizzazz. You need the public
00:41:32.360
talking about it. That's the one thing that nobody has really tried yet.
00:41:36.360
Oh, wouldn't you say Hungary and Turkey have tried it pretty?
00:41:42.280
No, no, they, they, so if you, if you look at what they did, they made like a number of
00:41:47.720
politicians went around and talked it up and everything like that, but they didn't create
00:41:51.640
like a branded movement. They didn't create like a, oh, and you can identify as one of these things
00:41:57.640
and dedicate your life to this. And this can be like an active choice that you make.
00:42:01.640
They didn't do that. It was just like, go back to sort of an older Hungarian identity,
00:42:07.800
which is what you see a lot of traditionalist conservatives innately wanting to do when the
00:42:12.440
point that I'm trying to make here is don't do that. It makes things worse. So if your intuition
00:42:19.320
is we should look to the past to make this like, like be more like we were in the 1950s or something
00:42:26.840
like that instead of become this new, amazing what it is to be American thing, because in the 1950s,
00:42:32.600
how did they contextualize themselves? Well, you know, because you can just read like the,
00:42:36.680
the comic books of that time period, it was retrofuturism, right? It was all like, we're
00:42:41.000
going to go to space and we're going to conquer the universe. And we're going to, which is ironic
00:42:45.720
that people would be like, go back to the 1950s when in the 1950s, everything was futurism
00:42:50.840
or, or like over the top, bigger than thou sort of like superheroism and stuff like that. Not,
00:43:00.360
you know, broody superheroes like we have today, but like the, we're great kind. So I'm, I'm promoting
00:43:07.080
this stuff because I think genuinely it is the stuff that works. Not that it doesn't also help us, but
00:43:14.840
you think it's too self-promotional? I'm going to
00:43:24.360
like adjust things a little bit just to add professional polish. But I, I think it's,