The Fertility Crisis: Part 2

Economic Distortion

Last week, I introduced this series with a brief essay describing the the party which is concerned with population decline and their reason for being concerned. Read it here if you have not yet:

I argued that even though the interests of the ruling class and the Western citizenry are opposed, the multicausal and multivariate nature of the ongoing demographic collapse means there is overlap in our concerns, and we should develop a specific vision of which aspects of this multi-crisis will be most important to solve, and, potentially, which aspects it could be advantageous for us to embrace so as to protect our cultures and sovereignty.

In this week’s entry, I’m going to discuss in more depth how our current economic and political status quo is contributing to demographic collapse.

The Economic Angle

One dimension of why population collapse is disastrous for the plutocratic political and economic order is because consent for the present labor culture is almost completely dependent on certain capitalist concessions to socialism, concessions which were made when it seemed that a normal population pyramid would make those socialistic policies sustainable. The primary such policy is the expectation of paid retirement, the promise of which inspired pre-Zoomer generations to tolerate decades of financial and emotional stagnation.

Whether that retirement takes the form of public pensions or just investment plans (which are also more or less subsidized and kept afloat by money printing), it is now impossible to ignore that the financial burden of the older generations being larger than the younger ones is not just an unfortunate side effect of population collapse, it may actually be one of its primary drivers.

Young Westerners live in the unprecedented situation of having to compete with their own elders, their own families, as voting blocs with completely opposed economic interests. And most humiliatingly, the boomers not only have decades of experience organizing politically, they also outnumber us in raw voting power. Boomers maintain the incumbent advantage both politically and economically, sitting on homes, stock portfolios, and lucrative jobs that retained value while both money and labor prices were debased for decades.

Again, just like the ponzi market in general, this is fine as long as the bottom keeps getting bigger. Everyone in the middle and bottom of the pyramid understands they just have to wait their turn. The problem with the pyramid, though, is that it has to maintain a delicate balance between two separate metrics: The population must grow at a certain rate, yes, but the absolute value of the economy must also grow at a rate that matches or exceeds population growth.

Because labor is one of the basic physical inputs that creates value, the tendency of the pyramid is actually to balance towards equilibrium. A small labor pool drives labor prices up, well-paid laborers have larger families, the next generation sees labor get a little cheaper, so the economy in absolute terms expands, but the less compensated laborers have smaller families. There are many experts who claim this model is deboonked, but they usually fail to consider that for most of history the primary economy is not monetary but based on food and goods, and it’s just obvious fact that when food is scarce populations shrink and when it’s abundant they expand.

So why has that equilibrium broken in the West? Food is clearly more abundant than ever and technology seems to keep the absolute size of the economy expanding as fast or faster than the population. While monetary wealth has been inflated away, wealth in terms of gadgets, experiences, and food has increased.

Or maybe the question of what broke it isn’t actually the question that matters: perhaps the real issue isn’t that the disturbance happened but that something is artificially preventing the scale from naturally correcting itself. In the narrow sphere of economics, it is clear that the finger on the scale is immigration policy. Importing laborers has completely disrupted the natural incentive of a smaller generation to birth a larger next generation. This should have been obvious as soon as the data was known that even new arrivals see a reduction in fertility within a generation.

Now, if you are a plutocrat who only cares that Line Go Up and does not care whether your underlings are white or brown or christian or muslim, you feel like you have just found a cheat code. You can maintain the complex economies of Europe and North America indefinitely so long as you leave India and Africa as dirt cheap breeding plantations. This lets you forego the economic expenses of children who consume food and pricy education services.

The incentive structure created by mass immigration has been pushing us towards a world which is segregated and specialized not by nationality but by age: The young would be born and reared in poor nations with extremely cheap costs of living and then would graduate into the H1B-mill for the next 50 years, after which they would be rewarded with a few years of retirement culminating in state sponsored euthanasia.

Of course this was never going to actually work, but there are a certain set of idealist dogmas that made it seem plausible, and the political transformation the West has just begun is based on reevaluating those dogmas.

The Political Angle

The few decades where we could skim off the top 1% of the world’s talent seemed to prove that this plan would be foolproof. Indian, Asian, and Middle Eastern professionals — doctors, lawyers, architects, and often sympathetic members of persecuted Christian minorities — became the posterchildren of “legal immigration.” They seemed to confirm our belief that anyone could assimilate into a melting pot culture and contribute to economic growth without destabilizing the basic orderliness which complex economies require as a foundation.

Because so much was riding on that belief being true, policymakers went all-in before enough time had actually passed to know anything useful about the second order effects of such migration. The successful immigrants of the late 20th century told us nothing useful about how things might change if the share of immigrant population rose above five or ten percent, whether the second generation of immigrants would be more or less problematic, and, especially, what happens if the average immigrant is not from their homeland’s elite stratum but is closer to the mean in terms of intelligence, impulse control, etc.

While all those factors are finally getting some airtime after years of even mild inquiry being censored, it’s also important to remember that the unprecedented wave of immigration into the west also dumped these people into a society that was already intensely destabilized by the other political revolutions of the late 20th century. The reduction in fertility for second generation immigrants strongly suggests that one of these other changes or trends is likely to be more directly responsible for the political dimension of birthrate decline, although it’s also true that these changes reinforce each others’ effects.

For one thing, new immigrants arrived into a post-Civil Rights Movement America. A combination of postwar economic migration and attempts at forced integration between Whites and Blacks resulted in a limited but undeniable ethnic cleansing of White Americans from many urban centers, especially in northern states with less historical experience or precedent for how to handle diverse populations. This began what I call the suburban-urban lifecycle, where Whites hold on to some of the economic and social opportunities of cities by inhabiting them for a few years when they are young, childless, and thus their risk tolerance is highest.

One result of this is that down to the current moment, Whites are politically fragmented in a way that reflects our geographic fragmentation. After widespread white flight, rural populations who were not effected skew conservative but are ultimately too isolated and uninformed to fully understand our situation, resulting in a GOP that is in love with things like putting the Ten Commandments on display in public schools that are filled with Guatemalans. Urban Whites on the other hand skew blue because they tend to either be idealistic young people or, if they are older, they are either insulated by wealth or are lifetime blue idealogues.

Only in the purple suburbs is there still any competition between the two camps of White politics, yet these crucial battlegrounds are dysfunctional in many of the same ways that led to the original White flight. Every day a new suburb turns minority-majority as residents are some combination of habitually politically inactive, in denial about their situation, or, familiarly, insulated by personal wealth and a homogenous social bubble.

The Suburban-Urban Lifecycle & Dating Dynamics

The state of the suburbs is especially important to take into account because the last half-century has basically established that the suburbs are supposed to be our national spawning pools. The life path of a respectable successful normie is to grow up in a “good school district,” then experience college and their early career in an urban center with lots of bars and singles, and then swim back upstream to repeat the cycle — again we see this pattern of an attempt at an age-segregated world.

This life cycle though has become increasingly precarious. For many young people the initial move to a city has become too expensive, and many young people in cities are failing to pair off into actual marriages. Here we run into a potential circularity — Perhaps demand for suburbs is declining because the birth rate is declining which is in turn forcing suburbs to sustain their real estate markets by pivoting into the retirement industry, importing hospice nurses that exacerbate the population spiral.

If the suburbs become unstable, even mildly unsafe, and, especially, expensive, they lose the appeal of their intended purpose. They turn from spawning grounds to open air nursing homes. This has already begun, and the emotion that young people associate most strongly with the suburbs is the feeling of being smothered by NIMBY Olds who have no patience for the healthy rowdiness of anyone between the ages 6 and 30.

This smothering sensation drives the part of the life cycle where youths go to the cities to find a partner, but it gets worse and worse as the average suburban adult goes from 30 year old parents of 8 year old kids to 60 year old parents of 20 year old kids who have either just flown the coup or failed to launch. Those children are now likely to have acquired an anti-natalist sentiment from how suffocated they felt when young and from how stressed they witnessed their parents being. It becomes harder and harder for each new generation to find a marriage partner whose desire for children will overcome their emotional association of children with burden and suffocation.

So the inversion of the population pyramid is not only especially pronounced in suburbs, it is also especially destructive to potential future birth rates. But we can’t definitively say that the suburban model of life and the suburban-urban life cycle are primarily responsible for birthrate decline. At most we can claim that this lifestyle becoming more precarious or unfulfilling contributes to the widespread opinion that children are too expensive and reduce one’s quality of life by forcing one to make the sacrifice of living in a boring and socially suffocating environment.

One good place we can look for a more basal cause is in that second part of the life cycle, where young people are supposed to leave town and pair off in their 20s. If something is wrong here then it would certainly reduce the amount of births.

Well, universal anecdote if not hard data certainly suggests serious problems with this first stage of family formation. For one thing, the rate of adult children remaining in parents’ homes has approximately doubled since 2000, and estimates of that number vary between one third to one half of under-35s. This trend is driven mostly by increasing rent and real estate prices, increases which the powers that be demand must continue perpetually so as to buffer their collateral in the ponzi market.

There will be much more to say about this phenomenon in the next section, but for now we must move on to the more outwardly political dimension of dating dynamics: The sexual revolution and birth control technology underpinning it. Leagues and fathoms of ink have been spilled on this topic by more devoted students of it than I, so rather than going for depth I will try to go for succinctness.

Traditional Western gender norms and sexual morality was essentially an adaptation to a specific set of historical conditions:

• Firstly, that the only reliable birth control method is abstinence.

• Secondly, that monogamy is necessary for social stability because it maximizes the proportion of men that have a solid stake in the nation or tribe and its safety, wealth, etc.

• Finally, that due to monogamy, patrilineal inheritance, and male social dominance which results from their monopoly on violence, certainty of paternity is absolutely necessary and is protected by social expectations placed upon both female and male behavior.

Social and technological changes of the 20th century changed every single one of these conditions, and our sexual morality is still scrambling to find a solid new form. Birth control, condoms, and paternity testing made it possible for women to have many partners before choosing one to have children with. Higher partner counts for women of course also translated to higher partner counts for men who indulged in the new abundance. Much has been said about modern female hypergamy, but as true as it is that women are willing to sacrifice lots of their fertile window waiting for the perfect match, men are equally reluctant to give up on infinite optionality. Female drive towards quality and male drive towards quantity are opposite forces that any sexual ethic must bring into some kind of equilibrium, and the fact is we are currently very far from having any such ethic.

Besides for sexual supply and demand becoming much more liquid (and thus less stable), the anomalously safe and orderly 20th century West functionally erased the historic power disparity between men and women through legislation, messaging, and the monopolization of violence by state actors who, with female suffrage, would be directed for the first time in history as much by female decision-making as by male decision-making.

We entered into this new state of affairs under the influence of an ideological, wishful ignorance of the fact that female decision making is structurally different from male decision making due to fundamental differences in our physiology, neurology, and endocrinology. The mere suggestion that these differences exist was declared anathema, completely preventing us from actually building accurate and benevolent models of what these differences are and how they may be integrated instead of locked in opposition.

The story of how the Suburban life cycle has changed over its ~50 year run is in large part the story of how the sexual revolution has affected family formation trends in each successive generation. The great cloud hanging over this topic is how we will square the easily observable fact that these changes result in smaller families and fewer births with the much harder to answer question of whether people are more or less happy and fulfilled with this state of affairs, a question which is impenetrable in large part because of strong partisan interests in how it should be answered; It is hard to interrogate the nuclear families of the early 1960s without someone loudly asserting that they were composed of closet homosexuals and pill zombie waifs, and it’s equally hard to take a look at the life of a modern economically independent 27 year old woman without someone else claiming she must be an eggless, toxoplasma-ridden wino. But exactly this investigation is what will be the topic of next week’s installment.