Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?
You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?
You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).
Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.
To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!
It makes sense, but it's probably pretty far down on the list of "what could we put money towards in order to increase birthrate". Could probably get a lot more result for the money by funding efforts to pair people together, make them want to have kids, make them more financially equipped to have kids, etc.
Or, why not lean in to falling birthrates and try to build a society that doesn't rely on the population needing to increase infinitely? Everyone just acts as though replacement birthrate is simply something we must meet or exceed, because of dumb "line must always go up" economics. Can't we envision a functional world where the global population is halving every 40 years rather than doubling every 40 years?
Barring not-yet-invented advances in automation, shrinking population means fewer and fewer people providing goods and services compared to the number of people that need them, which means worse and worse poverty for larger and larger fraction of people.
I don't know why this topic would be surprising for people. The elephant in the room is that right leaning people tend to be more religious (or have experienced a religious uprising).
Religion puts an incredible amount of social pressure on children, marriage and families. This is why most conservatives advocate for traditional gender roles, rally against abortion, etc.
My own personal experience of growing in a conservative Islamic country, then converting to Christianity after moving to the West is a testament of how social pressure has an impact on this.
My wife (from South America) was similarly raised in a conservative family. We have delayed having children but it has reached a boiling point where we have to absolutely discuss having kids now.
Yes, there are other factors like affordability that prevents left leaning people from having kids, but to me those are secondary reasons. This social dynamic is simply not there in Liberal circles.
It's fairly obvious that to raise the birthrate, all you have to do is get rid of proper sex education and promote abstinence-only education to teenagers (because it doesn't work), and get rid of social media for them. Prohibit them from buying alcohol but give them plenty of ways to acquire it. Use teenage rebellious nature to socially engineer them getting drunk together. Teenage pregnancy is how to get them.
Of course this is absolutely abhorrent to the left, but the article is discussing the left's lowered birth rates, and giving teenagers, especially women, sex education that works can't be ignored. It's some Handmaiden's Tale shit to dupe teenage women into having kids so they're beholden to a man and their family, so they don't get an opportunity to have their own lives, and are instead merely baby making factories, but this is the future of the human race we're talking about here!
No one would ever admit to this being the plan out loud, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it from a societal standpoint, on the level of Dune or the Foundation series of sci-fi writing. Or Idiocracy.
> Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.
I think the confusion is that “fertility” means different things in medicine vs demography
In medicine, fertility is about your ability to have biological offspring, not about whether you personally choose to make use of that ability
In demography, fertility is about how many children people actually have. The completed TFR (total fertility rate) of a population is the lifetime average number of children per a woman.
From a demographic perspective, the vast majority of differences in fertility are due to socioeconomic and cultural factors, medical infertility and the availability of treatments for it makes only a very small difference to overall birth rates
Fertility treatment isn't a guarantee. My brother and his wife ended up adopting after treatment failed.
The government paying for it also doesn't make it cheaper, it just moves the costs around.
A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such. That would benefit a lot more people.
Nah just bump every tax bracket of people over 25 with no children 10% and use the money to care for the vat grown replacement children they didnt have. Cut the taxes back when they hit their 2 kid quota and cut them further for additiinal kids
Changing the birth rate begins with changing the culture that discourages families of a certain size.
Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society.
Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizing it would not meaningfully affect the birthrate of the country.
Unless, of course, you believe that being on the left politically makes people less fertile...
For example, Israel has universal fertility benefiots and this is predicted to contribute ~0.03 TFR. The US and would need a an effect 2,000% (20x) larger to reach replacment. Many EU countries would need an effect 30X stronger.
The bigger challenge is the people wanting to have children in the first place.
This is driven by social values, preceived preconditions, and when in life those conditions are met.
I was just hanging out with some friends for the 4th of July. Their immigrant parents chose to have a child while in college working on their Phds and residing in the US on student visas.
I dont know any of my peers that would intentionally make that choice due to the percarious and unstable position.
Yes, and it's not working, birthrates are still declining. The one factor that more than anything triggers declining birthrates are the level of education among women.
We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.
Because it encourages society to delay childbirth further. If two groups have kids at 20 and another society has them at 30, over those two generations the first would be twice as large as the second.
We know how to raise the birth rates: give money to men, discourage parental co-habitation.
Sure, that's why Smokey the Bear is such a bad idea. Ignore the fact that pushing propaganda starts young, (the population in general, but especially) children are impressionable, and (echoing sibling) that we should probably consider the impacts of media on children.
Lots of cartoons are wholesome, and it can be a powerful tool for setting social norms. More to the point, it's going to happen anyways - so let's do what we can to make sure it's a message we agree with
I mean, I probably saw this when I was 4 or so, and I don't have any children now. I can't really blame my four year old self for being impressionable. I'd say this is probably more of an example of why people should be cautious of the kind of content they put in front of their kids.
Is it not an issue if your group becomes less powerful than other groups? You are then putting yourself at their mercy, and we cannot assume that everyone has the same values (they don't).
Sure of course, I was too vague. I’m not referring to our descendants having different values from us or myself. We do have some control over that, but not complete control, and exerting whatever control is available in the modern day risks future blowback. We are in agreement here.
I’m referring to the value of not persecuting based on ethnic or cultural background.
Not everyone in the world holds this value, and relocating to different land is not what makes a person hold one value or another.
So if groups who don’t hold this value grow numerically to the point where the lack of this value becomes dominant, we are putting our own group at risk of being subjected to it in the future, which seems rather unwise.
You shouldn't be OK with them having any random values, either.
If you have a civilization, you have a vision about life, and what's good and what's bad, and you want to see it to continue.
That some of them will inevitable change over time is not the same as you preactively having no preference and guidance for your offspring whatsoever, and thinking "no problem, anything goes".
A group having more power has little to do with numbers. If that was the case the rich would be more numerous than the poor, and India would be the most powerful country in the world.
The "power" of a country, however you define it, lags the population growth. China was the biggest country for decades, its power only really started exploding some 10 or 15 years ago.
That's an incredibly short sighted way of looking at countries. The US was never the country with highest population growth, and right now is also heading into a demographic collapse.
Likewise in the 90s the idea of fearing unintentional pregnancy was intentionally infused into teen oriented TV shows and PSA. It created the idea that pregnancy is something to avoid unless you are super ready which is understood to have moved the needle.
There's something beyond idiotic about a society that frames it's own reproduction as a negative.
It seems the paper conflates "fertility" and "reproductive rate". Which is akin to conflating "soil fertility" and gross yields. It also seems many comments here have not picked up on that.
The left reproduces indirectly, so this isn't as much of a problem as they might think. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite of the surface conclusion.
If the left reproduces via external means (e.g., media), then they've effectively outsourced biological reproduction and all its costs to the right. The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left. The right expends the resources bootstrapping civilization into their biological offspring, Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject, which ends up being the vector for the brood parasitism of their own socio-cultural opponents. So, if you're the right, you're the host of this parasitism, and should be looking for some kind of antiparasitic social solution in the form of impenetrable cultural barriers.
An insane thesis of the terminally online. If you go out into the real world the lines between “left” and “right” are far more blurry than you seem to think.
Yeah I think that there's some serious over-indexing on university political indoctrination. I can buy that kids adopt far-left viewpoints in college after being exposed to them for the first time just due to novelty.
But college is not the be-all and end-all of someone's political evolution. Buying a home and having a family also influences someone's political opinions, broadly in the more conservative direction.
What I think sounds plausible is that the rise of women pursuing post-graduate degrees brings down birth rates. If a woman isn't done with her academic pursuits until she's 30, she'll unquestionably be less likely to have kids as a matter of biology.
Moreover, if it's extremely difficult to buy a house and start a family until you're in your mid-30s, that's going to keep people more liberal for longer.
So I don't think the basic dynamics have changed, but the timelines have. When people have a house and family, they have things to lose and act more self-interested. When they don't, they don't, they're much happier to entertain proposals for vast societal change.
I think this makes a lot of sense. The parents of my generation (I am in my 40s) saw no danger in sending their kids to a university where every professor and student peer was super-left.
A lot of their kids (my peers) ended up unmarried and childless as per this article. So in a way those parents got punished by evolutionary forces for not being careful enough about their kids. I can guarantee you that those of my generation who "made it" through that filter are vigilant to ensure it doesn't happen to our kids.
Fair point. What I'm talking about specifically is being intentional with the values and orientation we raise our kids, versus leaving it to chance which I think was the default earlier.
Some families avoided being hippies just like they avoided being free facto castrated as per this article. People are much more intentional now. You see this in the rise of homeschooling and religious attendance among young families (while the childless scoff at both)
How do these conversion numbers compare to changing demographics via immigration? The problem with this view in my eyes is that you can get minority/interest groups to vote left in a host country by advocating for them, while these same people vote for ethnonationalists in their home country. See: Erdogan polling very well with Turks abroad, Isreal, to name 2.
> The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left.
I think the right has been evolving higher memetic immunity, which is causing this strategy to become less effective over time.
Increases in homeschooling and private religious schools – school vouchers in the US really help with that. Reduced rates of cross-political friendship, dating and marriage. Increased geographic sorting based on ideology. Social media echo chambers. The "right-wing media ecosystem" (see e.g. Libs of Tiktok) is a lot more engaging than it was 40 years ago. Internet filtering (some religious groups pressure even adults to install it.) Increasing political pressure on universities to moderate their politics reduces their effectiveness at transmitting left-wing politics to students, meanwhile right-leaning alternative tertiary institutions are growing.
Also, odds of political defection is partially determined by personality traits, which are partially genetic. This creates selective pressure to reduce the frequency of defection-promoting alleles in right-leaning populations across generations, which is a genetic rather than memetic factor predicting that conservative retention rates will rise over decades to come. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3125629/ which discusses this with respect to genes for religiosity, which is heavily overlapping with (albeit not quite the same as) political conservatism.
That's a really funny way of looking at "Some right wingers end up repelling their children through sheer bigotry or just being terrible parents, and as a result, these poor children will find solace and friendship in an ideology opposite from their parents' one."
I don't completely buy it. The Right makes plenty of noise online and in media, but limited more to their circles. Also, the Right is famous for spreading disinformation which disseminates far and wide.
It remains to be seen if the indirect strategy of converting people originating from different backgrounds holds or fails in the 21st century. All that we can say is that it used to work against some traditional Christian churches and more liberal Jewish groups.
That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to left-wing or even just generic secular persuasion: there are very few ex-Amish or ex-Haredi leftists, and some, but not very many, ex-Muslim and ex-Mormon leftists.
I think the way the left's exterior reproduction's been successful is by leveraging the market more effectively. By that, I mean that global capital has already done a great job of mapping and stratifying our desires. If you like, say, passive media consumption combined with power fantasies (e.g., the superhero movie), the market will figure that out pretty quick. The left then only has figure out how to inject their social reproduction program into this pre-existing channel, then reap the rewards.
Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.
Your notion of “the left” as some sort of… swirl of evil linguistic specters that prey on the good and civilized flesh-and-bone right is better suited to post-OT III Scientology than Lacan. If you want a philosophy that your ideological detractors are literal evil ghosts they have recruiting offices in most major cities.
No ethical position on the message itself is taken here. Brood parasitism is an ecological niche. The right could do this as well, if they can capture the levers to do so, and as another reply pointed out, perhaps they're getting better at exactly that.
In fact, that's a very real threat if you're the left, since if this mechanism reverses, now you've got a real reproduction problem.
seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
I feel like the obvious answer this topic is circling is that the left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet), while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)
I think this is bait because it's the sort of thinking that 'feels right' without thinking too hard about it.
> while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)
Not true. Right idea of family valuea is not about empathy and does not have much elements of empathy. It is more about establishing hierarchy and punishing you if you step put of it.
It is not even like they would be more emphatic toward disabled close ones. They dont extend empathy toward abused or sexually harassed female familly member or kid. Or to gay familly member.
Inward focus of the right is toward the members of they political and social group.
> left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet)
Left do cares more about planet, but also toward close ones that need help. A lot of leftist activism is motivated by personal experiences and experiences of close ones.
Agreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?
> it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals
It's possible this has changed but I would name Catholics and Mormons as topping the large family demographics in the US (although in 2015, Pew disagreed¹ with my assertions about Catholics).
Does this challenge your overall point about conservatives? I'm not sure.
It is my experience that a rise in Evangelicals' political power is eventually followed by returns to their historical disregard/animosity for Catholics² and Mormons³. Being on the receiving end of serial demonization can shove folks away from the ideologies that generate it.
One thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here.
And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
Pshaw! There are plenty of non-heterosexual people who end up with children! A (drunken) poke here, a (drugged) poke, a wild moment, etc there really adds up.
My take on this as someone who swings left is that desire for children isn’t meaningfully lower among the left, but would-be parents want to provide quality of life that is as good or preferably significantly better than that of their own childhoods. This rolls in several other assumptions, such as reasonable assurance of financial stability, low housing and relationship drama, capacity to take unexpected disaster in stride, all while having enough headroom for occasional travel and vacation.
If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is.
The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children.
I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.
I'm Russian, my generation was raised in the ruins of socialism when wages often went unpaid for months (if not years) and people had to grow their own veggies. We're now doing better than our parents in every way, yet children still get delayed.
It's a complex, multi-pronged issue, of which finances are just a single aspect. A wide variety of circumstances can lead people to feel that they'd be unable to give their children a good childhood.
I hang out on fertility related sites and on twitter.
It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.
No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.
Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.
> No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions.
I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t believe that; the long-term solution is their demographic replacement by people who do.
Any population decline is likely to be temporary; by the 23rd century, I think people will be back to worrying about overpopulation
I didn't read the full paper only the abstract, but bc the political spectrum is correlated with education level or urban vs rural or multiple other factors that deeply impact what it is like to have kids.
Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives? Or does the opportunity cost on careers plus the high cost of childcare plus the cost of living space impact conservatives and progressives alike? And among rural people without a college degree, do progressives still have fewer kids than their conservative neighbors?
When a bunch of demographic factors are all not just correlated but are linked to challenges in raising kids, it seems like elevating a single one of those factors is selective framing
> Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives?
Look at Amy Coney Barrett - Supreme Court justice, before that a constitutional law professor then federal appeals court judge, five biological children plus two adopted, and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic.
I think you’ll find the “women with successful professional careers and >=5 kids” demographic has a strong conservative skew.
Isn't this simply because the political realignment in US resulted in an arrangement where higher incomes generally correlate with left-wing political views? And it's not exactly a new thing that higher incomes also correlate with fewer children.
Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.
Just like there's a natural selection to those with religious beliefs (and active killing of those without) there's probably active selection to those with conservative beliefs like raiding a family, a desire to teach their values to their children, producing as many children as possible - values that correlate with conservatives.
I think the atheist experiment of the last century or so is starting to yield clear evidence of what is and isn't "fit" in the Darwinian sense. Exactly as you are saying.
I’ve also noticed fertility is high among certain immigrant demographic groups. Near me, it’s refugee groups (asylum applicants) where families very typically have 4 or more kids. In a couple decades I can see the demographics being very different in America, but especially Europe. It’ll probably look more brown, more Islamic relative to today.
What’s interesting to me is that these groups are very effective at making use of programs we have to help families and subsidize costs. But I feel like Americans generally are less aware of these programs or decide they can’t afford children without considering this help.
Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online.
As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.
It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
After putting it off for many years, many millenials are finally settling down and starting the families that perhaps more traditionally we began 15 years earlier - but outside ones with fertility issues, we are getting on with it. Im in the same boat as you, left leaning with left leaning friends, mostly late 30s and we're all getting on with having or raising young kids at this point - so n=2 from real life observations
Just a thought, based on my own experience. If you have children, or is about to have a baby, you start being around more parents or "parents to be". Either as part of parenting groups, in conjunction with daycare, schools or parents of your children's friends. Because this centers around your child, the children around you tends to be roughly the same age, plus or minus a few months.
I agree with you, but this is not the case. It is very much a trend with people in their mid 30s right now. The overlap is there yes, we have friends who have children, but for instance my wife announced her pregnancy and had 4 friends announce shortly there after. We certainly did not conspire with them on conception :)
It is an odd time for everyone to be really into kids but perhaps that is a species trigger for all we know
This still runs contrary to national statistics, which would include these births unless there is a wave of children/births unregisted with the state. There is good public data on this, for example here:
That said, I think there is a perspective issue at play. It may seem like lots of people are having kids. A lot of our friends are too. However, I dint live through the 70s or 40's to have a comparison for what that seemed like when the fertility rate was higher.
This report is from 2.5 years ago. I am talking about within the past year to 2 years. So this might actual lend credit to my theory of a stealth baby boom happening. Perhaps I should have clarified "happening right now"
I know plenty of women who have delayed starting a family and they were well aware of the increased risks.. as they struggled to meet the right person, establish themselves professionally etc. They were certainly not brainwashed.
I know someone who knew such a women that benefited from this suggestion, so for what it's worth: women who feel strongly about having kids but are struggling to find a suitable partner should consider instead finding a suitable sperm donor through the appropriate legal channels, and raising the kid alone.
It is the height of arrogance to read the fact and still deny it, even in the face of experiencing it. Realization and reckoning come too late.
They thought the risks won't apply to them, that they'll get lucky. Wanting to meet the "right person" is exactly the problem. The more established one becomes, the more picky one gets, and the target is always just out of reach. Well, when one is ready, pregnancy then is a coin toss with a diminishing probability. The brainwashing is exactly what you are denying, that one can always achieve it later.
Leaning into one's evolutionary tendencies, meeting a partner in one's teen years, and getting it done by age 20 is best because one is the least picky then among all of one's fertile years. The cultural brainwashing is that is way too early an age for it.
Obviously it has nothing to do with some kind of mass non-awareness that fertility falls with age. (Caused by being "not sensible"? Not sure what that means here.)
Please avoid double negatives and potential sarcasm when trying to intelligently communicate a point. People don't have extra mental tokens to waste on it. It's best to communicate plainly and clearly.
What would've been sensible would be to go with the flow in one's teen years of finding a partner, then having one or more children with them by or before the age of 20. I'll leave it at that, as there are ten ways of approaching the goal insensibly, and only one of doing it sensibly. Instead, they've been brainwashed into being told that it's way too young an age to have a child. If you want to win, don't resist evolutionary mate-seeking preferences.
Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"?
You want to raise the fertility rate, yes?
You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure).
Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fertility treatment, they're already decently well off, too.
To me it seems like a very obvious, targeted solution!
It makes sense, but it's probably pretty far down on the list of "what could we put money towards in order to increase birthrate". Could probably get a lot more result for the money by funding efforts to pair people together, make them want to have kids, make them more financially equipped to have kids, etc.
Or, why not lean in to falling birthrates and try to build a society that doesn't rely on the population needing to increase infinitely? Everyone just acts as though replacement birthrate is simply something we must meet or exceed, because of dumb "line must always go up" economics. Can't we envision a functional world where the global population is halving every 40 years rather than doubling every 40 years?
Barring not-yet-invented advances in automation, shrinking population means fewer and fewer people providing goods and services compared to the number of people that need them, which means worse and worse poverty for larger and larger fraction of people.
I don't know why this topic would be surprising for people. The elephant in the room is that right leaning people tend to be more religious (or have experienced a religious uprising).
Religion puts an incredible amount of social pressure on children, marriage and families. This is why most conservatives advocate for traditional gender roles, rally against abortion, etc.
My own personal experience of growing in a conservative Islamic country, then converting to Christianity after moving to the West is a testament of how social pressure has an impact on this.
My wife (from South America) was similarly raised in a conservative family. We have delayed having children but it has reached a boiling point where we have to absolutely discuss having kids now.
Yes, there are other factors like affordability that prevents left leaning people from having kids, but to me those are secondary reasons. This social dynamic is simply not there in Liberal circles.
It's fairly obvious that to raise the birthrate, all you have to do is get rid of proper sex education and promote abstinence-only education to teenagers (because it doesn't work), and get rid of social media for them. Prohibit them from buying alcohol but give them plenty of ways to acquire it. Use teenage rebellious nature to socially engineer them getting drunk together. Teenage pregnancy is how to get them.
Of course this is absolutely abhorrent to the left, but the article is discussing the left's lowered birth rates, and giving teenagers, especially women, sex education that works can't be ignored. It's some Handmaiden's Tale shit to dupe teenage women into having kids so they're beholden to a man and their family, so they don't get an opportunity to have their own lives, and are instead merely baby making factories, but this is the future of the human race we're talking about here!
No one would ever admit to this being the plan out loud, but it's pretty obvious if you look at it from a societal standpoint, on the level of Dune or the Foundation series of sci-fi writing. Or Idiocracy.
Actually, they do admit it: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/republicans-mad-teen-pre...
Much of the party seems to be obsessed with children's genitals and fertility. Why can't they leave all this on their little island?
Is it so weird to think about the future of humanity? I want my children, and my children's childrens to have a good life as well.
thats the problem, it should be at the top of the list (all the way at the top) and nothing else should be close 100th
Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.
> Maybe I'm wrong, but it looks like the paper just has a misleading title, and this is about having children, not fertility.
I think the confusion is that “fertility” means different things in medicine vs demography
In medicine, fertility is about your ability to have biological offspring, not about whether you personally choose to make use of that ability
In demography, fertility is about how many children people actually have. The completed TFR (total fertility rate) of a population is the lifetime average number of children per a woman.
From a demographic perspective, the vast majority of differences in fertility are due to socioeconomic and cultural factors, medical infertility and the availability of treatments for it makes only a very small difference to overall birth rates
Fertility treatment isn't a guarantee. My brother and his wife ended up adopting after treatment failed.
The government paying for it also doesn't make it cheaper, it just moves the costs around.
A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such. That would benefit a lot more people.
Nah just bump every tax bracket of people over 25 with no children 10% and use the money to care for the vat grown replacement children they didnt have. Cut the taxes back when they hit their 2 kid quota and cut them further for additiinal kids
no one (I mean this, not one person on Earth) will be swayed to have a baby given your offer.
Changing the birth rate begins with changing the culture that discourages families of a certain size.
Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society.
Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizing it would not meaningfully affect the birthrate of the country.
Unless, of course, you believe that being on the left politically makes people less fertile...
Fertility treatments have a small impact.
For example, Israel has universal fertility benefiots and this is predicted to contribute ~0.03 TFR. The US and would need a an effect 2,000% (20x) larger to reach replacment. Many EU countries would need an effect 30X stronger.
The bigger challenge is the people wanting to have children in the first place. This is driven by social values, preceived preconditions, and when in life those conditions are met.
I was just hanging out with some friends for the 4th of July. Their immigrant parents chose to have a child while in college working on their Phds and residing in the US on student visas.
I dont know any of my peers that would intentionally make that choice due to the percarious and unstable position.
don’t non-US countries already do this?
Yes, and it's not working, birthrates are still declining. The one factor that more than anything triggers declining birthrates are the level of education among women.
We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.
Because it encourages society to delay childbirth further. If two groups have kids at 20 and another society has them at 30, over those two generations the first would be twice as large as the second.
We know how to raise the birth rates: give money to men, discourage parental co-habitation.
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Sure, why not.
And, there were 1,126,000 abortions were provided by US clinicians in 2025.
Ban abortions.
* citation needed
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Captain Planet literally told children who cared about environmentalism to "keep families small" to save our planet.
https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY
It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.
That's why people shouldn't take life advice from cartoons and celebrities
Sure, that's why Smokey the Bear is such a bad idea. Ignore the fact that pushing propaganda starts young, (the population in general, but especially) children are impressionable, and (echoing sibling) that we should probably consider the impacts of media on children.
Lots of cartoons are wholesome, and it can be a powerful tool for setting social norms. More to the point, it's going to happen anyways - so let's do what we can to make sure it's a message we agree with
I mean, I probably saw this when I was 4 or so, and I don't have any children now. I can't really blame my four year old self for being impressionable. I'd say this is probably more of an example of why people should be cautious of the kind of content they put in front of their kids.
Okay but if other groups aren’t doing it, the planet is still doomed and now your group is worse off. Congratulations, you have accomplished nothing!
The environment is doomed either way without action. Is the issue that some demographics will become more dominant?
Is it not an issue if your group becomes less powerful than other groups? You are then putting yourself at their mercy, and we cannot assume that everyone has the same values (they don't).
We can't also assume that your offspring will have the same values as you.
Sure of course, I was too vague. I’m not referring to our descendants having different values from us or myself. We do have some control over that, but not complete control, and exerting whatever control is available in the modern day risks future blowback. We are in agreement here.
I’m referring to the value of not persecuting based on ethnic or cultural background.
Not everyone in the world holds this value, and relocating to different land is not what makes a person hold one value or another.
So if groups who don’t hold this value grow numerically to the point where the lack of this value becomes dominant, we are putting our own group at risk of being subjected to it in the future, which seems rather unwise.
You shouldn't be OK with them having any random values, either.
If you have a civilization, you have a vision about life, and what's good and what's bad, and you want to see it to continue.
That some of them will inevitable change over time is not the same as you preactively having no preference and guidance for your offspring whatsoever, and thinking "no problem, anything goes".
A group having more power has little to do with numbers. If that was the case the rich would be more numerous than the poor, and India would be the most powerful country in the world.
The "power" of a country, however you define it, lags the population growth. China was the biggest country for decades, its power only really started exploding some 10 or 15 years ago.
And now its power is declining rapidly.
Peter Zeihan "Don't be Surprised by China's Collapse":
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844...
That's an incredibly short sighted way of looking at countries. The US was never the country with highest population growth, and right now is also heading into a demographic collapse.
Likewise in the 90s the idea of fearing unintentional pregnancy was intentionally infused into teen oriented TV shows and PSA. It created the idea that pregnancy is something to avoid unless you are super ready which is understood to have moved the needle.
There's something beyond idiotic about a society that frames it's own reproduction as a negative.
It seems the paper conflates "fertility" and "reproductive rate". Which is akin to conflating "soil fertility" and gross yields. It also seems many comments here have not picked up on that.
Yes, but that is the common terminology.
The left reproduces indirectly, so this isn't as much of a problem as they might think. In fact, I'd say it's the opposite of the surface conclusion.
If the left reproduces via external means (e.g., media), then they've effectively outsourced biological reproduction and all its costs to the right. The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left. The right expends the resources bootstrapping civilization into their biological offspring, Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject, which ends up being the vector for the brood parasitism of their own socio-cultural opponents. So, if you're the right, you're the host of this parasitism, and should be looking for some kind of antiparasitic social solution in the form of impenetrable cultural barriers.
An insane thesis of the terminally online. If you go out into the real world the lines between “left” and “right” are far more blurry than you seem to think.
Yeah I think that there's some serious over-indexing on university political indoctrination. I can buy that kids adopt far-left viewpoints in college after being exposed to them for the first time just due to novelty.
But college is not the be-all and end-all of someone's political evolution. Buying a home and having a family also influences someone's political opinions, broadly in the more conservative direction.
What I think sounds plausible is that the rise of women pursuing post-graduate degrees brings down birth rates. If a woman isn't done with her academic pursuits until she's 30, she'll unquestionably be less likely to have kids as a matter of biology.
Moreover, if it's extremely difficult to buy a house and start a family until you're in your mid-30s, that's going to keep people more liberal for longer.
So I don't think the basic dynamics have changed, but the timelines have. When people have a house and family, they have things to lose and act more self-interested. When they don't, they don't, they're much happier to entertain proposals for vast societal change.
I think this makes a lot of sense. The parents of my generation (I am in my 40s) saw no danger in sending their kids to a university where every professor and student peer was super-left.
A lot of their kids (my peers) ended up unmarried and childless as per this article. So in a way those parents got punished by evolutionary forces for not being careful enough about their kids. I can guarantee you that those of my generation who "made it" through that filter are vigilant to ensure it doesn't happen to our kids.
It’s weird how every conservative family ends up sending their kids to Wesleyan.
Ensure?? Oh man, you're gonna blow a gasket with your ultrawoke kids. How do you think we ended up with hippies from such a conservative generation?
Fair point. What I'm talking about specifically is being intentional with the values and orientation we raise our kids, versus leaving it to chance which I think was the default earlier.
Some families avoided being hippies just like they avoided being free facto castrated as per this article. People are much more intentional now. You see this in the rise of homeschooling and religious attendance among young families (while the childless scoff at both)
Are you suggesting that no parents of your generation went to liberal schools?
I'm not suggesting that. I am suggesting its a risk factor - one that has emerged as more obvious.
How do these conversion numbers compare to changing demographics via immigration? The problem with this view in my eyes is that you can get minority/interest groups to vote left in a host country by advocating for them, while these same people vote for ethnonationalists in their home country. See: Erdogan polling very well with Turks abroad, Isreal, to name 2.
> The right will successfully reproduce their political alignment sometimes, of course, but they also effectively act as the breeder population for the left.
I think the right has been evolving higher memetic immunity, which is causing this strategy to become less effective over time.
Increases in homeschooling and private religious schools – school vouchers in the US really help with that. Reduced rates of cross-political friendship, dating and marriage. Increased geographic sorting based on ideology. Social media echo chambers. The "right-wing media ecosystem" (see e.g. Libs of Tiktok) is a lot more engaging than it was 40 years ago. Internet filtering (some religious groups pressure even adults to install it.) Increasing political pressure on universities to moderate their politics reduces their effectiveness at transmitting left-wing politics to students, meanwhile right-leaning alternative tertiary institutions are growing.
Also, odds of political defection is partially determined by personality traits, which are partially genetic. This creates selective pressure to reduce the frequency of defection-promoting alleles in right-leaning populations across generations, which is a genetic rather than memetic factor predicting that conservative retention rates will rise over decades to come. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3125629/ which discusses this with respect to genes for religiosity, which is heavily overlapping with (albeit not quite the same as) political conservatism.
> If the left reproduces via external means (e.g., media), then they've effectively outsourced biological reproduction and all its costs
Ahh. Brood parasitism. Very tricky.
That's a really funny way of looking at "Some right wingers end up repelling their children through sheer bigotry or just being terrible parents, and as a result, these poor children will find solace and friendship in an ideology opposite from their parents' one."
I don't completely buy it. The Right makes plenty of noise online and in media, but limited more to their circles. Also, the Right is famous for spreading disinformation which disseminates far and wide.
It remains to be seen if the indirect strategy of converting people originating from different backgrounds holds or fails in the 21st century. All that we can say is that it used to work against some traditional Christian churches and more liberal Jewish groups.
That does not mean that it will work against all of them. Some high-fertility groups of today don't seem to be particularly prone to losing their members to left-wing or even just generic secular persuasion: there are very few ex-Amish or ex-Haredi leftists, and some, but not very many, ex-Muslim and ex-Mormon leftists.
I think the way the left's exterior reproduction's been successful is by leveraging the market more effectively. By that, I mean that global capital has already done a great job of mapping and stratifying our desires. If you like, say, passive media consumption combined with power fantasies (e.g., the superhero movie), the market will figure that out pretty quick. The left then only has figure out how to inject their social reproduction program into this pre-existing channel, then reap the rewards.
Your counterexamples are indeed the succesful defenders, the ones the right could learn from. The Amish (the only successful resisters of brood parasitism I'm directly familiar with), don't have to worry about capital mapping their offspring's desire because they have created an effective cultural barrier from it. No doubt many young Amish would find superhero media alluring, but movies, TV, and phones need electricity, which they have forbidden from their personal lives. More generally, the hierarchy of God, family, work, then finally self is fundamental and encoded into the child's being. To electrify your bedroom is to no longer be Amish, which has a lot more friction than drifting from your parents' mainstream conservatism.
>Oedipalizing them into the world as linguistic subject
I don’t think this means what you think it means
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Very sophomoric reading of Lacan.
I kind of meant more broadly.
Your notion of “the left” as some sort of… swirl of evil linguistic specters that prey on the good and civilized flesh-and-bone right is better suited to post-OT III Scientology than Lacan. If you want a philosophy that your ideological detractors are literal evil ghosts they have recruiting offices in most major cities.
No ethical position on the message itself is taken here. Brood parasitism is an ecological niche. The right could do this as well, if they can capture the levers to do so, and as another reply pointed out, perhaps they're getting better at exactly that.
In fact, that's a very real threat if you're the left, since if this mechanism reverses, now you've got a real reproduction problem.
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seems like an odd choice to so emphatically phrase this as a quality of "the left" when there are so clearly many plausible confounding factors (education, wealth, employment status, do you live in a small city apartment, etc.)
I feel like the obvious answer this topic is circling is that the left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet), while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)
I think this is bait because it's the sort of thinking that 'feels right' without thinking too hard about it.
> while the right focuses their empathy inwardly (family values.)
Not true. Right idea of family valuea is not about empathy and does not have much elements of empathy. It is more about establishing hierarchy and punishing you if you step put of it.
It is not even like they would be more emphatic toward disabled close ones. They dont extend empathy toward abused or sexually harassed female familly member or kid. Or to gay familly member.
Inward focus of the right is toward the members of they political and social group.
> left expresses more empathy to those outside their immediate circles (caring for the planet)
Left do cares more about planet, but also toward close ones that need help. A lot of leftist activism is motivated by personal experiences and experiences of close ones.
Agreed, although one thing I'll grant is that these days it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals, who obviously skew conservative, and there's not really a counterpart to that on the left. So even if families are getting smaller in general across the political spectrum, could it be that the outliers are imbalanced?
> it seems like extremely large families in the US are almost always evangelicals
It's possible this has changed but I would name Catholics and Mormons as topping the large family demographics in the US (although in 2015, Pew disagreed¹ with my assertions about Catholics).
Does this challenge your overall point about conservatives? I'm not sure.
It is my experience that a rise in Evangelicals' political power is eventually followed by returns to their historical disregard/animosity for Catholics² and Mormons³. Being on the receiving end of serial demonization can shove folks away from the ideologies that generate it.
¹ https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-cha...
² https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/peter-thiel-antichrist-remarks-pop...
³ https://www.sltrib.com/religion/2026/07/02/how-pete-hegseths...
One thing that appears to be missing is any mention of non-heterosexual couples, some of which are biologically incapable of having their own children and it's unclear how adoption or surrogacy gets counted in here.
And I think it's fair to say that in the US non-heterosexual people are overwhelmingly on the left, for fairly obvious reasons.
Pshaw! There are plenty of non-heterosexual people who end up with children! A (drunken) poke here, a (drugged) poke, a wild moment, etc there really adds up.
Many gay people I know have children.
My take on this as someone who swings left is that desire for children isn’t meaningfully lower among the left, but would-be parents want to provide quality of life that is as good or preferably significantly better than that of their own childhoods. This rolls in several other assumptions, such as reasonable assurance of financial stability, low housing and relationship drama, capacity to take unexpected disaster in stride, all while having enough headroom for occasional travel and vacation.
If clearing that bar isn’t feasible, starting a family is delayed until it is.
The problem is that many will never achieve that before aging out of the opportunity, due to it becoming increasingly difficult to climb that ladder. Many millennials for example only got to a point where they felt like they could stand on their own two feet in their 30s, which is the starting line for providing the desired quality of life for children.
I don’t think this is a bad thing to desire. People like this tend to be good, thoughtful parents if they manage to endure the marathon and reach the finish line in time. It’s just out of reach for many, and nobody cares to even try to fix that.
I'm Russian, my generation was raised in the ruins of socialism when wages often went unpaid for months (if not years) and people had to grow their own veggies. We're now doing better than our parents in every way, yet children still get delayed.
It's a complex, multi-pronged issue, of which finances are just a single aspect. A wide variety of circumstances can lead people to feel that they'd be unable to give their children a good childhood.
What other aspects do you have in mind, then?
I hang out on fertility related sites and on twitter.
It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally.
No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure, some new study like this one, will come along and add in a new wrinkle. But it really seems, to me at least, that the fertility issue is a multi-faceted one with no clear causes nor clear solutions.
Now, once we discover whatever the recipe for fertility decline is, then all those partisans and religious nutters will scatter and then go right back to hating each other. But for now, they play nice. There's a lesson in there, but I'm not sure what it is.
Again, it's a weird little sub domain.
> No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions.
I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t believe that; the long-term solution is their demographic replacement by people who do.
Any population decline is likely to be temporary; by the 23rd century, I think people will be back to worrying about overpopulation
By the 23rd century, sexual reproduction will be vastly transformed by technology. The discussions we're having now will be unrecognizable.
I didn't read the full paper only the abstract, but bc the political spectrum is correlated with education level or urban vs rural or multiple other factors that deeply impact what it is like to have kids. Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives? Or does the opportunity cost on careers plus the high cost of childcare plus the cost of living space impact conservatives and progressives alike? And among rural people without a college degree, do progressives still have fewer kids than their conservative neighbors?
When a bunch of demographic factors are all not just correlated but are linked to challenges in raising kids, it seems like elevating a single one of those factors is selective framing
> Of urban college educated professionals, do the conservatives still have more kids than the progressives?
Look at Amy Coney Barrett - Supreme Court justice, before that a constitutional law professor then federal appeals court judge, five biological children plus two adopted, and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic.
I think you’ll find the “women with successful professional careers and >=5 kids” demographic has a strong conservative skew.
Isn't this simply because the political realignment in US resulted in an arrangement where higher incomes generally correlate with left-wing political views? And it's not exactly a new thing that higher incomes also correlate with fewer children.
Indeed, they also point out that the finding only holds true for US whites but not for blacks. Which is also consistent with this being just a reflection of economic status.
Oh great, Idiocracy as a scientific paper.
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Just like there's a natural selection to those with religious beliefs (and active killing of those without) there's probably active selection to those with conservative beliefs like raiding a family, a desire to teach their values to their children, producing as many children as possible - values that correlate with conservatives.
I think the atheist experiment of the last century or so is starting to yield clear evidence of what is and isn't "fit" in the Darwinian sense. Exactly as you are saying.
I’ve also noticed fertility is high among certain immigrant demographic groups. Near me, it’s refugee groups (asylum applicants) where families very typically have 4 or more kids. In a couple decades I can see the demographics being very different in America, but especially Europe. It’ll probably look more brown, more Islamic relative to today.
What’s interesting to me is that these groups are very effective at making use of programs we have to help families and subsidize costs. But I feel like Americans generally are less aware of these programs or decide they can’t afford children without considering this help.
Everything about this thread is weird and woefully online.
As an n of 1, we are surrounded by so many births that we just trade baby gear since we are either a handful of months ahead or behind many other parents. Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom. Truly everyone we know has a minimum of one very young child with a high number of parents with between 2 and 4.
It certainly runs counter to many online discussions but reality often does.
After putting it off for many years, many millenials are finally settling down and starting the families that perhaps more traditionally we began 15 years earlier - but outside ones with fertility issues, we are getting on with it. Im in the same boat as you, left leaning with left leaning friends, mostly late 30s and we're all getting on with having or raising young kids at this point - so n=2 from real life observations
You might be interested in the link I provided in a sibling post.
A larger percentage of births are to older women, but total number of births are still dropping accross all ages.
Just a thought, based on my own experience. If you have children, or is about to have a baby, you start being around more parents or "parents to be". Either as part of parenting groups, in conjunction with daycare, schools or parents of your children's friends. Because this centers around your child, the children around you tends to be roughly the same age, plus or minus a few months.
I agree with you, but this is not the case. It is very much a trend with people in their mid 30s right now. The overlap is there yes, we have friends who have children, but for instance my wife announced her pregnancy and had 4 friends announce shortly there after. We certainly did not conspire with them on conception :)
It is an odd time for everyone to be really into kids but perhaps that is a species trigger for all we know
> Our assumption was that we were in a stealth baby boom.
That somehow evaded fertility statistics?
Where are you and what percentage of your neighbors go to church and similar.
Ha none. We are not "conservative" in the least bit, or even politically performative.
Where are you?
This still runs contrary to national statistics, which would include these births unless there is a wave of children/births unregisted with the state. There is good public data on this, for example here:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr74/nvsr74-3.pdf
That said, I think there is a perspective issue at play. It may seem like lots of people are having kids. A lot of our friends are too. However, I dint live through the 70s or 40's to have a comparison for what that seemed like when the fertility rate was higher.
This report is from 2.5 years ago. I am talking about within the past year to 2 years. So this might actual lend credit to my theory of a stealth baby boom happening. Perhaps I should have clarified "happening right now"
It would have to be very stealth because the US CDC says numbers have only gone down since (including 2026).
Left-wing women wait till they're 40, and then it's too late. They're not as sensible they pretend to be.
The left has culturally brainwashed itself into believing that having children later is okay, but it's not. Muslims are the only exception.
I know plenty of women who have delayed starting a family and they were well aware of the increased risks.. as they struggled to meet the right person, establish themselves professionally etc. They were certainly not brainwashed.
I know someone who knew such a women that benefited from this suggestion, so for what it's worth: women who feel strongly about having kids but are struggling to find a suitable partner should consider instead finding a suitable sperm donor through the appropriate legal channels, and raising the kid alone.
It is the height of arrogance to read the fact and still deny it, even in the face of experiencing it. Realization and reckoning come too late.
They thought the risks won't apply to them, that they'll get lucky. Wanting to meet the "right person" is exactly the problem. The more established one becomes, the more picky one gets, and the target is always just out of reach. Well, when one is ready, pregnancy then is a coin toss with a diminishing probability. The brainwashing is exactly what you are denying, that one can always achieve it later.
Leaning into one's evolutionary tendencies, meeting a partner in one's teen years, and getting it done by age 20 is best because one is the least picky then among all of one's fertile years. The cultural brainwashing is that is way too early an age for it.
Obviously it has nothing to do with some kind of mass non-awareness that fertility falls with age. (Caused by being "not sensible"? Not sure what that means here.)
Please avoid double negatives and potential sarcasm when trying to intelligently communicate a point. People don't have extra mental tokens to waste on it. It's best to communicate plainly and clearly.
What would've been sensible would be to go with the flow in one's teen years of finding a partner, then having one or more children with them by or before the age of 20. I'll leave it at that, as there are ten ways of approaching the goal insensibly, and only one of doing it sensibly. Instead, they've been brainwashed into being told that it's way too young an age to have a child. If you want to win, don't resist evolutionary mate-seeking preferences.
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