Links - 2nd October 2026 (2 - More Births/Fertility)

Rapid Fertility Decline Is an Existential Crisis - "Few countries remain above replacement—except for those in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. Furthermore, fertility rates are declining more significantly and, importantly, at a faster pace than anyone anticipated a few years ago. This trend is evident in both wealthy and poor nations, in religious and secular states, in countries with right-wing governments, as well as those with left-wing governments, and in nations with free abortion access and those with restrictive abortion laws. Pick any country at random from a world map, and the chances are high that its fertility rate is falling rapidly.  In the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, only Haiti, Honduras, Bolivia, Paraguay, and a handful of small Caribbean nations are on pace to exceed replacement levels in 2025—and only slightly. The region’s demographic giants—the US, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Canada—are already significantly below replacement. Notably, as of early 2025, the US has a higher fertility rate than Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Canada...   Between 1991 and 2019, Japan’s GDP grew at an annual rate of 0.83%, significantly lower than the US rate of 2.53%. The main driver of their weak economic performance? Japan’s dramatic demographic collapse...   The consequences of significantly slower output growth will be severe for the US economy. While we consider output growth per capita when assessing welfare (and output per capita growth will not decline as sharply as total output growth), total output growth is crucial for addressing the funding of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, servicing our public debt, and financing our armed forces in the face of increasing international competition. Once we begin to contemplate the fiscal implications of a declining population, it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.   When I reach this point in seminars, lectures, or media interviews, I invariably receive three questions: climate change, immigration, and artificial intelligence... A stable or slowly declining population can help ease pressure on the environment and facilitate the transition to net-zero CO2 emissions. However, a collapsing population, like the ones we are likely to encounter given current fertility rates, will generate so many fiscal problems that there will be no room left in government budgets for environmental concerns...   The US has a welfare state. This means that those individuals who are below 60th percentile or so of the income distribution are net receivers of funds from the government during their lifetime (i.e., the net present value of what they contribute less than what they receive later in life, like Social Security and Medicare), those between the 60th and 90th percentile are approximately net zero contributors, and only at the top 10th percentiles are net contributors. In other words, all immigrants that come to the US are below the 90th percentile and won’t help solve the fiscal woes created by low fertility. European countries that have the detailed databases required to compute these numbers carefully have found that not even the second-generation (i.e., the sons of immigrants born in the country) is a net contributor to the welfare state.   We need to assess immigration policy based on various factors in addition to its fiscal implications. My argument is more modest: “If you think that raising the number of low- and middle-skill immigrants will solve the long-term fiscal issues facing the US, you are mistaken.”...   This is Moravec’s Paradox: programming computers to perform tasks that most humans consider very difficult (e.g., advanced math) is much easier than programming them to carry out tasks that most humans find trivial (e.g., making a bed). Unfortunately, the problems we will face due to the falling population, such as the need for old-age care, require skills like making a bed and not doing advanced math.  So, what can the US do to address the fertility crisis?  This is the one-quadrillion-dollar question (yes, tackling fertility has an impact measured in discounted terms of quadrillions of dollars, not just small change like a miserly trillion dollars here or there)...   Returning to the topic of climate change, many young people are deeply concerned that we face extinction due to this issue. While I share the concern about climate change, it’s not at the level of urgency of our fertility crisis: we have already developed the technologies needed to transition to net zero emissions. The current challenge lies mainly in political implementation. This will require effort and may lead to more damage to the planet than what an ideal policy would have caused, but I believe we will achieve this goal. The true economic challenge of our time, for humanity overall and the US specifically, is the fertility crisis. Let’s get to work on it—as soon as possible."

Thread by @MoreBirths on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "A recent study found that giving men a pay raise led them to have more children, while giving women a pay raise led them to have fewer children. 🧵.
For women, the effect of a pay raise was significantly reduced future fertility. A pay increase at 25 was associated with a large decrease in fertility at age 30, regardless of the skill level.  For men, a pay increase was associated with persistently higher fertility. Why? The authors argue that "the substitution effect between children and labor supply is dominating for women while the income effect is dominating for men."  Since childcare falls more on women, the competition between work and family is greater for women than for men. Policies which set out to combat pay disparities between men and women may therefore be inadvertently pushing fertility downward."
Nate Schlomann on X - "Civilization literally lives when you give men more money and dies when you give women more money. Literally. That's the Natural Law. And it is screaming at us."
Another disadvantage of equal pay

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Wow!  Across basically all of Europe, people at higher income levels are now *more likely* to become parents!  This is a stunning shift! Among men, this relationship goes a while back now, and in several places, the income gradient has gotten more extreme. Among women, there are some recent crossover events, where the low-income used to be more likely parents than the rich, but now it's different. The authors' preferred explanation for this is that the cost to start childbearing has increased.  That's unfortunate, but knowing that means it is at least addressable!"

'We Can’t Even Afford to Have Sex': China’s New Condom Tax Draws Ire | TIME - "The Chinese government is testing out a new solution to falling birth rates: making sex more expensive.   Consumers will pay a 13% value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and products, including condoms, beginning Jan. 1, as part of China’s newly revised Value-Added Tax Law. Those products have been exempted from tax since 1993 as part of China’s one-child policy, which heavily penalized families for having more than one child from 1980 to 2015. As the country’s birth rate has fallen in recent years, the government has turned to seeking to boost birth rates with a range of incentives and subsidies... China remains one of the most expensive countries in the world to raise children relative to household income. A 2024 report from the YuWa Population Research Institute in Beijing found that the cost of raising a child until the age of 18 is more than 538,000 yuan ($76,000)... China has also introduced measures to curb the number of abortions not deemed “medically necessary,” as part of guidelines announced in 2021"

Meme - Way of the World @wayotworld: "While the West is dying out, its huge aid programmes are fuelling massive population growth in a continent that cannot even feed itself."
Civixplorer @civixplorer: "Nigeria currently has more births per year than all blue countries combined.
6.3 million births per year *Europe including Asian Russia*
7.5 million births per year *Nigeria*"

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "About a decade ago, a theory emerged:  If men do more of the housework and child care, fertility rates will rise!  Men have been doing increasingly large shares of the housework and child care.  Fertility is lower than ever. In fact, they're doing more in each generation, but fertility has continued to fall.  The original claim, that men's household work would buoy fertility, was based on cross-sectional data that was inappropriately given a causal interpretation.  The updated cross-sectional data is as useful, and it affords no assurances about the original idea.  We should move on. Source:"

James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ on X - "Since 2006, South Korea's government has spent $270bn, or just over 1% of GDP a year, on babymaking incentives. Here's the dismal result:"
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 on X - "Lee Kuan Yew on why Government Policies aimed at increasing the birth rate which pay people money to have children will fail  “If I were in charge of Singapore today, I would introduce a baby bonus equal to two years' worth of the average Singaporean's salary.  The sum would be enough to see the child through to the start of primary school at least. Would I expect the number of babies to increase substantially? No.  I am convinced that even super-size monetary inducements would only have a marginal effect on fertility rates. But I would still go ahead and offer the bonus, for at least a year, just to prove beyond any doubt that our low birth rates have nothing to do with economic or financial factors, such as high cost of living or lack of government help for parents.  They are instead the result of changed lifestyles and mindsets.  …  Once women are educated and have equal job opportunities, they no longer see their primary role as bearing children or taking care of the household. They want to be able to pursue their careers fully just as men have always been able to.  They have very different expectations about whether or whom they should marry because they are financially independent.  There is no turning back the clock, unless we want to stop educating women.”"
Clearly, they just didn't spend enough money

More Births on X - "An extraordinary relationship: The lower the share of households in a metro area that live in an apartment, the higher the birthrate will tend to be!"
Why left wingers want to force everyone to live in an apartment with a land tax

Thread by @lefineder on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - ""In 2007, Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church made a decision: facing a country with a declining population...the church leader announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to any third-or-high Orthodox child born to a married couple in Georgia"  This shifted the Country of Georgia to above-replacement fertility. The effect is concentrated on third or higher births."

Carl on X - "My big problem with this argument (that people don't have kids because kids are too expensive) is: On average, poor people have MORE kids than rich people! Explain that Mustache Man!"

More Births on X - "A stunning visual by demographer Philip Cohen. Nearly all countries that fell below replacement fertility are still stuck below 2.1 today. The only exceptions are Mongolia and Kazakhstan. What is it about 🇲🇳 and 🇰🇿? Both are purposefully pronatal and honor mothers of many kids."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "This is an obvious but rarely made point. It's not cost alone, or primarily, that is causing the fertility crisis: people had far more kids when incomes were much lower.  The proximate cause is the use of "onanist alternatives" to having procreative sex - birth control, Plan B, for that matter pornography. But, a big reason for THAT is that motherhood is often considered low-status in developed countries: in an odd twist, both feminists and aggressive male executives CONSTANTLY attack housewives and good moms as "do nothings."   Changing this, with an ~10 year campaign to emphasize the social value of motherhood, the fact that home management is a 40-50 hour a week job, the idea of the guys being involved fathers (!!!), etc would raise birth rates. This isn't theoretical - one of probably a dozen national examples appears below."

Meme - Paul Vanitas @Dr_Vanitas_: "Germans stopped having kids and are getting cats and dogs instead. Dogs now outnumber children < 10 years of age in Germany. I'm not judging; everyone should be free to choose the lifestyle they want for themselves, But my personal opinion is that this outcome is sad."
"Dogs now outnumber children < 10 years in Germany"

Freedomain - with Stefan Molyneux, MA on X - "Your ancestors lived in mud huts, and still had children."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "This is the basic problem with "kids are too relatively expensive." The claim doesn't even make sense. People aren't having kids because they get married at 33, and gibberish theories like "gentle parenting" make it an annoying pain in the ass."
Plus, poor people have more kids. But of course, expanding the state in terms of regulations and spending pushes the left wing agenda, so

'No-kids' holiday venue? Think again, says France - "While Paris is considered one of the most child-friendly cities in the world, more and more venues in France have been shunning children in an effort to shield customers from kids' unpredictable behaviour and noise.  The government on Tuesday held a roundtable meeting with key industry players to discuss a trend that France's high commissioner for childhood, Sarah El Hairy, has said should end.  Socialist senator Laurence Rossignol has introduced a bill that would make it illegal to ban children from venues in France. "Children are not a nuisance," said Rossignol, adding that the bill is aimed at promoting "a society that is open to children"... El Hairy said excluding children was infringing on their rights, putting pressure on their parents and dividing society.  "There is a growing intolerance, and we must not allow it to take hold," El Hairy told broadcaster RTL. "We are pushing children and families out, and in a way, this is real violence," she added... In France, adult-only services are currently limited.  According to estimates from a travel industry union, they represented around three percent of the market in 2024... the government's High Council for Family, Children and Age (HCFEA) warned about the lack of spaces for children, pointing to the "harmful consequences for their physical and mental health"."

John B. Holbein on X - "Do people who belong to right-wing political parties have more babies? This paper takes a look at this important question in Western Europe. In some places--like Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Spain, right-leaning people do have more babies than left-leaning. But in many other places, this pattern isn't present! Right and left-leaning people have similar number of babies.    Fascinating!"

Felix Helberg on X - ""More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children.""

‘One and done’: How Britain became a single-child nation - "having just one child is increasingly seen as an enviable choice rather than a consolation prize – and perhaps the best chance women today have of achieving that old adage of “having it all.” In a study of 35,000 Danes, parents of only children were found to be happier than anyone else, while European data showed that only 17 per cent of women moved to part-time work after one child, compared with more than 30 per cent of those with two.  Indeed, many millennials are looking for a way to have children while retaining their social lives and careers – along with the time, money and freedom to travel, go to concerts, the theatre and out to dinner. Of course, this often also means staying in hugely expensive cities like London, where upgrading to a bigger home is all but impossible... A lack of grandparents living nearby also contributed to their decision. Millennials, more than any previous generation, are likely to live in a different part of the country from their parents. This not only means a lack of childcare support but can also make those first few destabilising months with a newborn feel incredibly isolating. Without the support networks older generations took for granted, the thought of a second child can feel impossible... For Stuart Gietel-Basten, a professor of social science at Hong Kong University who studies family size, this shift is also happening because couples are doing something relatively novel – asking themselves exactly why they are having children. “If the answer is about passing on genes or loving someone deeply, then these evolutionary or anthropological needs can easily be met by one child,” he says. “And nowadays, it is very rare for that child to die, so you can be confident you will have them for the rest of your life.”... “Most people I spoke to said they have the first baby for themselves and the subsequent baby for their existing child,” says Sandler. “But that premise is flawed, as there is no evidence that a child with siblings is better off.”"

The chart that shows Europe is doomed - "Clearly the rise of the smartphone and the transformation of social norms are part of the answer, but what is also apparent is that desired fertility in most European democracies is higher than the current fertility rate.  In the UK, for example, surveys indicate the existence of a strong “birth gap” with women wanting on average 2.35 children rather than the 1.41 fertility rate reported in 2024.  This massive gap, found in most European countries, should be at the heart of European politics. The countless debates this continent has had on Brexit, immigration or even the war in Ukraine will be deemed to be largely secondary by future historians relative to the demographic question we have been avoiding. And yet few politicians in Western Europe had taken this existential issue seriously.  For decades talking about fertility was once deemed to be slightly paternalistic in polite society, or irrelevant when not outrightly compared with fascist regimes of the past.  The tone has shifted somewhat in the last five years. In 2024, French president Emmanuel Macron stated that “demographic rearmament” was a national priority. Prime minister Giorgia Meloni created a minister in charge of birth rates and said in 2023: “we want to give Italians back a nation in which being a father is not out of fashion and being a mother is not a private choice but a socially recognised value.”... For all the economic and political implications, it is important to remember that a childless continent will not just be smaller, poorer, and older; it will also be lonelier and sadder."

hyper(bolic) disco(unting) girl on X - "this is going to sound terminally authority-brained but at some level i find it amazing that you can just get pregnant and create a new human being without any government regulation of the process"

ZUBY: on X - "I have never seen or heard a publicly proposed solution to this that would actually work. Not once.  The truth is, you can't have widespread feminism AND high birth rates. And people have chosen implicitly that feminism is more important. Very few modern men or women have the appetite or will to cut back on these 'gains'. Including conservatives.  There are other contributing factors, but this is the uncomfortable crux of the issue.  You cannot have mass feminism (both in policy and culture) and high birth rates. They are opposing forces."
Andy Ujku-Dardania | Facebook - "And quite ironically, the biggest feminists out there and their so called “male allies” are the biggest proponents of both unfettered access to abortion and a wide encompassing welfare state.  They just can’t or won’t put two and two together. You can’t have a generous welfare state by killing off or not reproducing the next generation that is needed to pay for it.  These people are simply nihilistic hedonists who don’t care about the long term.  They got the worst traits of their boomer or early Gen X parents. They want instant gratification and not have to worry about how it is paid for or any consequences thereafter.  The post 1945 liberal democratic order is a house built on sand.  It’s a highly unsustainable system propped up by massive debt/money printing… And the blessings of a high tech version of bread and circuses.  Eventually it’ll run out of road.  And the reckoning that will come with it will make life literally unbearable for a significant number of people.  Stay strapped and batten down the hatches friends."

Meme - Andrew Torba @BasedTorba: "They always use the White people stock photos for antinatalist articles"
"Having children DOESN'T make you happy: Becoming a parent provides no boost to wellbeing, study claims - but it does ruin your relationship"

James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ on X - "'Being around babies makes people want babies. ... As fertility declines and infant exposure falls, the conditions that sustain the desire for children weaken, and the decline can become self-reinforcing.' @nberpubs"

To Improve U.S. Birth Rate, Give Parents Money and Time - The Atlantic
Amazingly, this doesn't even mention that poor people have more children, or that the US has higher fertility rate than other developed countries despite not giving parents time. Curious how the "solution" is pushing the left wing agenda

Liam Out Loud on X - "The Gender Gap No One Is Talking About:
- Young men and women are 30 points apart ideologically. 5x wider than 2000.
- Only 31% of young adults are dating. Less than a third.
- 0.6 liberal men for every liberal woman. 0.5 conservative women for every conservative man. Neither side can find what it's looking for.
- 60% of liberal women rank political alignment above a stable job in a partner.
- 63% of Americans say they'd struggle to date someone who voted differently.
- US fertility: 1.7. UK: 1.4. Italy: 1.1. Every Western nation below replacement.
- 62% of countries tried baby bonuses and tax incentives. Minimal effect.
They don't disagree about tax rates. They disagree about what this is all for."

With a record-low 1.25 children per Canadian woman, stop dismissing falling fertility rates as a choice - "A 2023 Cardus study found that Canadian women without kids wanted an average of 2.2 children, and expected to have 1.9. The reality is that they’re having far fewer than that, with Canada’s fertility rate hitting a record low of 1.25 as of 2024, putting it into the “ultra-low” category, a category that includes countries like South Korea and Japan. One reason researchers have found for the decrease in fertility rates is the rising prerequisite of parenthood, specifically, what would-be parents feel they need to be ready to have kids. That bar has risen drastically over the past few decades, and it correlates with all the costs we’ve been burdening young people with: high costs of education, expensive housing costs, and a shortage of family-sized rentals.  Credential inflation is also to blame, stretching education well into the mid-20s. You’re much less likely to feel established enough in your career to have a child if you’re only just starting that career at 25.  A 2025 Brookings study put data behind what a lot of parents already feel: that child-rearing has become an arms race of educational investment. Social media plays a huge role here, offering constant glimpses into the successes of your peers’ kids and the lives of parenting influencers, who all seem to have perfect Montessori-inspired nurseries, screen-free playrooms, and organic meals made from scratch every night. The message viewers take away is that anything less is falling short. The result is a feeling that having children is a project that requires perfect conditions to begin, and we know that the later people begin having kids, the harder it is to have them.  That delay has been getting steadily worse for decades. The average age of a first-time mother has risen from 23.5 years in 1965 to 29.4 years in 2019, and even higher in B.C. and Ontario, home to Canada’s most expensive housing markets. Saskatchewan, with comparatively lower housing costs, still had the youngest first-time mothers in the country, at 27.3 years. The geography of delayed parenthood tracks almost perfectly with the geography of unaffordability.   And since those numbers are now seven years old, with the cost of living only rising since, the delay has likely grown further.  Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that society now treats having kids in your 20s as young, even though biologically, it isn’t. Part of what’s driving the shift is how dramatically the expectations of parenting have changed. A generation ago, eight-year-olds walked home to empty houses and made their own peanut butter sandwiches. Today, children are expected to be constantly supervised and enrolled in structured activities. That’s a significant increase in both the time and financial cost of raising kids, and it starts before they’re even born.  One of the most meaningful policy-driven changes to the cost of parenting has been the introduction of universal childcare. It’s too early to measure its full impact on fertility rates, but we can get a sense of how it might play out from Quebec’s experience.  In 1997, Quebec introduced $5-a-day subsidized childcare. A 2024 study looked at the results and found that for younger women aged 20 to 24, the reform increased the likelihood of having a first or second child by 7 percentage points. However, for women in their 30s, subsidized childcare actually decreased the probability of having more, by 5 to 7 percentage points.   The theory is that affordable childcare made returning to work easier, and once women were back in the workforce, the opportunity cost of another pregnancy rose substantially. Policies can simultaneously decrease the cost of having children for some, while raising it for others. There’s a parallel here to the impact of home prices on fertility rates, where increased home values simultaneously made homeowners feel wealthy enough to have more children, while pricing out younger would-be parents who felt anything but secure...   The 2026 World Happiness Report ranked Canadians 58th in the world for the freedom to make life choices, a dramatic drop from just a decade ago when the country was in 12th place. That’s an area worth taking seriously and fighting for improvement"

More Births on X - ""I don't know why people say the policies in Hungary didn't work. The trends are relatively healthy." -R.H. Efforts to raise birth rates (both in culture and in policy) do work! But there is no magic bullet, and you have work hard at it because many forces push fertility down."

Thread by @MoreBirths on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Elevating the Status of Motherhood Solves Low Birthrates: The Extraordinary Case of Mongolia For 68 years, Mongolian leaders have given the Order of Maternal Glory to mothers. This raised the status of motherhood and helped forge a remarkably pronatal culture. 🧵, please share!
Mongolia's pro-motherhood culture stands out on a fertility map. Fertility in Mongolia has consistently been 2-3 times(!) higher than neighboring areas in recent years and it has been increasing over the past 20 years, even as its neighbors have seen birthrates plunge!Mongolia's incomes are comparable its neighbors. It is urbanized. This is also not a case of religiously driven fertility: 🇲🇳 is primarily Buddhist and non-religious.  This is about the status of motherhood. In 🇲🇳, the president himself gives an award to every mother of four! Mongolian mothers of six are presented with the Order of Glorious Motherhood, First Class. Second Class if you have four.  Here celebrated mothers descend the steps of the State Palace in Ulaanbaatar on a red and gold carpet, the statue of Genghis Khan directly behind them.The Mongolian president holds separate ceremonies by district, in order to be able to give more personal attention to recipients. There is a cash award too, but it is just $60 for a mother of six. Clearly, this a story motherhood and status in Mongolian society.So important is this award that Mongolia's consulates are even tasked with conferring the award to Mongolian mothers abroad. Here, Mongolia's ambassador to the United Nations presents the award to a mother in Geneva.
Status around motherhood is a crucial and under-appreciated driver of birthrates.  We have seen this elsewhere! By honoring parents, Patriarch Ilia of Georgia created a baby boom, something generous financial incentives elsewhere could not achieve.Status is incredibly important for most people, and we strive for status perhaps more than anything else.  Status helps explain the paradox that as societies become richer, fertility usually drops. Even though absolute well-being has risen, living in a wealthy society offers no increase in relative status. In fact, the status competitions of modern life, like education and career, directly compete with family life.  This also tracks with how in cultures where parenthood is elevated to high status, such as among religious subgroups like the Amish, Haredi Jews and traditionalist Catholics, fertility can be much, much higher.  As well, this helps explain the remarkable fertility of England and Wales during Victorian Times. Queen Victoria, the personification of the era, both inherited and carried forward a culture that conferred high-status on motherhood in raising nine children.
In Korea meanwhile, the highest status people are childless, and culture is filled with every status competition but one around parenthood.  The message is that we have to find a way to honor motherhood like our civilization depends on it.  Mongolia helps show the way!"

The truth about population decline - "In general, the more prosperous the place or the people, the fewer the births. This is not just true across countries. Within India, the state of Tamil Nadu has the eighth highest GDP per head and a fertility rate of 1.8, while Bihar, with the 34th highest GDP per head, has a fertility rate of 3. Again, graduate women tend to have fewer children than non-graduates. Prosperity is the most powerful contraceptive of all. The explanation I addressed last week was the transformation in the role of women. But even that is part of a broader set of changes. Two others — urbanisation and mass education — also matter. The former moves people to places where land is relatively expensive. The latter transforms children from productive assets in the quite short term into costly long-term investments. Grown children may also now move far away from their parents. Modernity also creates capital markets, pensions and welfare states, all of which are a substitute for children’s financial support. Finally, it creates new pleasures, which compete with those of having children. We can see the effects of all these changes in the fertility data... should we be worried about the possibility of population falls in many places, perhaps ultimately for humanity as a whole? No, argues the British economist Lord Adair Turner. A favourite argument why the declining fertility rates are potentially catastrophic is that “dependency ratios” will soar. Measured in the normal way, as ratios of people over 65 to those aged 15-64, this is true. But this ignores the fall in the proportion of the young, many of whom are now dependent until their twenties. Overall dependency ratios will rise far less, except in the more extreme cases of low fertility. It also ignores the potential for people to work longer. In South Korea, 38 per cent of people over 65 were working in 2024, against a ludicrous 4 per cent in France. Furthermore, adds Turner, rising productivity, possibly accelerated by artificial intelligence, offers a way out. Note that people work far fewer hours than they did two centuries ago, because they are so vastly more productive than they used to be in, say, 1800. Thus, notes Turner, the share of available hours spent working after the age of 15 in high-income countries has fallen by at least 60 per cent since then. But real output per head has increased 15-fold. If this continues, as is likely, a modest increase in the dependency ratio would be extremely manageable. Some also argue that there will be “too few innovators”. Nonsense! The global population is not even set to fall before 2100. Moreover, we now have a far better educated labour force, the inclusion of women and the gains from AI. Moreover, radical innovation has always been driven by the few. Not least, today’s population is a multiple of what it was a century or two ago, when innovation was doing just fine. What matters far more is providing the environment for innovation, not least support for science. Again, there has been much chatter about the “demographic dividends” that supposedly come from youthful populations. In fact, notes Turner, “there is no evidence that economies with sustained high fertility rates grow faster. On the contrary, persistently high fertility often leads to a demographic disaster of sluggish income growth and widespread unemployment.” India is a sobering example... India’s swelling population has, alas, created a sea of chronic underemployment around an island of prosperity. In much of Africa, this situation is worse. Finally, growing populations impose costs — not just the global environmental ones, but local ones as well. These include the soaring prices of urban land and so of housing in many countries (themselves an explanation for low birth rates). Indeed, the competition for intrinsically scarce “positional goods” is exacerbated by rising populations and so would be ameliorated by the reverse."
This assumes that people are all identical and that it doesn't matter which populations have kids

The unspoken truth about the baby bust - "All theories for the baby bust, other than choice, get undeserved shrift. One is that practical barriers — such as lack of childcare — stops people having the kids they tell surveys they want. So, Chad has a 6.1 birth rate because of subsidised crèches, does it? Shared child-rearing duties and free IVF explain Afghanistan’s 4.8? Finland (1.3) should send a research delegation to Mali (5.6)? The United Nations, an activist group with a sideline in diplomacy, published a report last month that blamed a “toxic” mix of economic and gender rigidities for low birth rates. All we learn from this is that the use of the T-word outside a strictly chemical context has become an excellent warning of impending bullshit. And this isn’t even the silliest explanation for demographic decline that does the rounds. What is? That people can’t in good conscience “bring a child into this world of ours”. Well, the birth rate was high during the cold war. Parents were knowingly bringing kids into an open-ended nuclear stand-off. Today, the most fertile countries are those most stalked by climate change and violence. Meanwhile, the havens that are Switzerland and New Zealand are well below the replacement rate. If dystopian dread was the issue here, the numbers would be the other way round. Why kid ourselves like this? Why go through contortions to avoid the obvious?Some of it is just academic confusion. To clear up one thing: asking people whether they want more children is close to pointless. The question is whether they want them above other things. Stated desires are not useful information unless ranked. I want to be more successful, but not as much as I want to sleep until 10am. People want larger families, but not as much as they want leisure and surplus cash. The rest is politics. The notion of voluntarily small families is too awkward for either left or right to accept. For the left, there is no social problem whose answer isn’t government action. If that problem exists out of choice, that leaves them with nowhere to go. For conservatives, the family stands between the individual (liberalism) and the state (socialism). If people are choosing to minimise or avoid the domestic realm, that cuts to the quick of an entire worldview. And so we have a winner, as it were. Liberalism has had a bad electoral decade. In the “discourse”, too, it is on the back foot. But in the one way that counts — how life is lived — its triumph is total. From Ireland to South Korea, the evidence suggests that once people are rich and free enough to choose, they choose individualism. Many do so with a pang, of course. They really do want more kids. But not as much as they want to live in the city of their choice or hold out for a relationship that is fun and not just stable. Consumption, selfhood, the pursuit of happiness: all the things that are said to be not enough, seem to be enough. How telling that even the most widely heard argument for pronatalism — that we need more workers to support the old — is itself materialist."

Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents?

We know that social connections make people happy and stops them from falling into cults. So consciously or not, this pushes the left wing agenda. 

Are Therapists to Blame for the Rise of Adults Cutting Off Their Parents? - WSJ
Many moms and dads believe that their adult children are getting bad advice—and a growing number of researchers agree. ‘Everything becomes trauma.’

Shoshana Rubli was shocked by her therapist’s advice, given in her second session. But the counselor was recommended by someone she knew and had impressive credentials, so she did as she was told. 

She cut off all ties with her mother.

“It was an argument made from authority, so I followed it,” says the 42-year-old freelance marketer.

Is it really good therapy to break your mother’s heart?

After decades of urging families to communicate better and work on their issues together, some therapists are now taking an opposite tack: They’re encouraging estrangement as a means of self-care. 

Proponents of the trend hold that advising patients to consider a cutoff from a close relative or spouse they deem toxic or unsupportive can protect their mental health and allow for emotional growth. Meanwhile, critics—many of whom are researchers who have studied relationships for decades—say that it encourages self-centeredness and self-delusion and ruins families.

Most therapists agree that sometimes people are justified in breaking ties with their parents or a close relative, especially if they were physically or emotionally abusive. 

What’s changing now is the bar for what is deemed abusive enough for a cutoff. “We are in a culture where we emphasize fragility, everything becomes trauma, and the solution increasingly is to split and leave,” says William Doherty, a therapist and professor emeritus of family social science at the University of Minnesota who has researched the ways that therapy may be harmful. “But it should be the tragic exception that you cut off a parent or loved one, not business as usual in therapy.”

About 25% of the U.S. population is estranged from, or has cut ties with, a close relative at any given time—and 10% is estranged from a parent or child—according to research by Karl Pillemer, a family sociologist and professor of human development at Cornell. He believes that more rifts are likely, as tensions over politics and social issues continue to rise.

Among some 7,000 estranged parents surveyed in April a third believed their adult child’s therapist had influenced or recommended the decision to end the relationship. “A lot of therapists are taught to believe whatever the client is saying at face value,” says Peter Anderson, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Beverly, Mass., who helps families with estrangements and conducted the surveys. “They’re forming conclusions based on one person’s account.”

Social media has played an outsize role in both the growing awareness of estrangement—or going “no contact,” in internet lingo—and the role of therapists in it. In recent years, the number of users sharing personal stories of how cutoffs have improved their mental health has skyrocketed. Meanwhile, therapists and “estrangement coaches” have been producing a growing slew of offerings, from quizzes (“The Emotionally Immature Parent Assessment”) to courses (“Navigating a Family Cut-Off”) to books (“No Contact, No Guilt.”)

“People are coming into a therapist’s office and parroting what they hear on social media,” Anderson says. “They’re looking for affirmation for a decision they’ve already made.”

Whitney Goodman, a licensed marriage and family therapist in Tampa, Fla., takes the patient’s lead when considering estrangement. Trauma and abuse, she says, is in the eye of the beholder. “Why are we giving all this deference only to parents?” Goodman said. “Why aren’t we believing the kids? They are adults.”

Goodman often speaks to her more than 660,000 followers on Instagram and TikTok about estrangement and “emotionally immature” parents. “I reject the argument that we should ignore the impact of abuse because it wasn’t considered abuse 75 years ago,” she wrote in a recent post. 

In her work, Goodman sees people who want to go no-contact with a parent for everything from drunken driving with grandchildren to dictating future spouses. “You have an adult population now who says: ‘I am going to stand up for myself. I am not going to do what was always done.’”

Critics, however, say that therapists should be questioning their clients’ estrangement beliefs, not affirming them. They warn that patients aren’t always reliable narrators, especially if they have mental-health issues. And the therapist is hearing only one side of the story.

This can lead to two major problems, according to Jay Lebow, senior scholar and senior therapist at the Family Institute at Northwestern University, who says he often sees people in his practice who have been encouraged by previous therapists to sever ties with a loved one. “You are not solving the right problem, which is the mental-health crisis,” he says. “And—this is the most tragic part—you may be encouraging them to cut off their best source of support.”

Critics also argue that there is no scientific evidence that separating from a close relative is inherently beneficial. And the long-term damage—including broken relationships with siblings, grandchildren and parents as they age—is often unanticipated. “You can have somebody die during the estrangement,” says Christine Droney, a licensed clinical social worker in Lititz, Pa., who often sees clients who are grieving the impact of estrangements they initiated. “There are lifelong consequences.”

Indeed, research from Cornell’s Pillemer and colleagues shows that while people who start a cutoff often feel a temporary sense of relief, they also experience significantly higher rates of chronic unhappiness and depression over time. He calls this the “exiter cost.” 

Shoshana Rubli was a young woman living abroad when her therapist surprised her by recommending she cut off her mom. Her childhood had been chaotic after her parents divorced when she was a toddler, she says, but she didn’t view it as so extreme.

“I went in expecting to focus on boundaries,” says Rubli, who lives near Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “I thought that meant better self-discipline and better communication.”

Rubli tried to push back, but her therapist framed her concerns as blind spots that impeded healing, she says. So she took the advice and stopped talking to her mom. “I thought it wasn’t permanent, that it was just fewer phone calls when I was in my therapy process,” she says.

The estrangement lasted 10 years, despite her mom repeatedly trying to reach her. During that time, Rubli fell in love, got married and lost two grandparents. She also experienced other family members cutting her off in anger over her estrangement with her mom. “It was really hard,” she said. “There were all these unintended consequences.”

Then Rubli had children of her own and realized all parents have flaws. So one day she called her mother, and the two began talking again. “I was thrilled to hear from her,” says her mom, Ann Tendler, 69, of Cedar Key, Fla. “It was a real trial, but I always figured that someday she would realize she had made a mistake.”

Rubli deeply regrets taking the therapist’s advice, but says she blames herself. 

“At the end of the day, you can’t hold them accountable,” she says. “Because you told them what you told them, and you listened to what they said.”

 

Related:

Katie Miller on X

"Therapy has become incredibly dangerous for societal bonds.

In a new study, 1/3 of parents believe their child won’t speak to them because of a therapist’s influence.

This is how countries weaken and fall apart.

Rome didn’t fall primarily because of barbarians at the gates. It fell because loyalty, duty, bonds, and the birth rate collapsed. When the Romans lost the traditional family, its societal structure that fostered mutual support fell.

Therapists are creating a mental health crisis by actively encouraging patients to cut off their families.

When communities are no longer connected, they become unrecognizable to their people."

Black Fathers Weren’t Removed from the Home; They Left.

Black Fathers Weren’t Removed from the Home; They Left.

"We can no longer blame systemic shadows for the internal work Black men are unwilling to do...

I’d always blamed the United States government for the fatherless experience of so many Black children, people like my cousin and his four siblings. I was raised hearing that it was the crack epidemic of the ’80s that ripped so many Black men from their families, that mass incarceration separated innocent men from their children, and that the unavoidable allure of a life of poverty anchored with the welfare system was too good to be true to some Black women. My childhood was full of fables about the Black welfare queen, a woman who willingly excommunicated the devoted Black man in her life in exchange for government cheese and a subsidized studio in a project dwelling. 

Somehow, my uncle hit the victim lottery all three times, even doubled back a few times to be sure. He was another Black man denied the freedom to father, victimized by his own Black woman working in conjunction with an unjust system. 

I was an adult before I learned the length of these lies. In reality, parental absence was never as taboo as I was taught, particularly of the paternal variety. From 1880 through 1960, the rate of paternal absence averaged around 30% for black children ages 0 to 14, in comparison to 10% for white children over the same years. Now, we can attribute a great deal of this to the migration patterns of Black people post-slavery, where millions left the South, lured by the prospect of financial prosperity, mainly the Northern migration (1840–1890), Western migration (1840–1970), and Great Migration (1916–1930). Additionally, parental mortality was common in the nineteenth century, the assumed life expectancy of Black adults was just shy of 35. 

However, with geographical and medical stability came further familial destabilization. Paternal absence among black children rose from 32% in 1960 to 53% in 1980. On the heels of the 1965 Moynihan report, “The Negro Family: A Case for National Support”, which critics felt fingered the single mother as both the victim and the villain in the growing absence of black fathers, social commentators were hesitant to hand the blame over to black men. Instead, sociologists sought culprits outside the community, i.e., white supremacy, which was an easier evil to explain. It was obvious that this system was squeezing the life out of black fathers; where were the jobs; what about police brutality; not to mention child support, another name for the war on Black men. However, timelines fail to support the assertion that the phenomenon was a recent one...

Before Reagan ever took office and took up the task of doubling prison populations, before the first reports of crack emerged in cities like Los Angeles in 1981, half of all black children lived in single-parent homes, the gross majority of those homes headed by women. This number continued to climb, in 1990 reaching 63%, and even increased throughout the early 2000s despite record low unemployment rates for Black men and prison admission rates declining upwards of 24%. At the same time, the myth of the welfare queen was being taken to task by decades of research debunking the rumored welfare-loving single mother mockup. Not only did single black mothers experience shorter stints of government dependence than recipients of other races, but their children were no more likely than anyone else’s to enter the welfare system themselves, challenging the depiction of the single-family government-funded home complete with three generations of Black women and children. For years, we faced Washington while Black men packed their bags behind our backs...

It became clear to me that this was a matter of shitty men and the circles that surrounded them, not some secret system holding Black men’s arms behind his back...

The same data that speaks to high mass incarceration rates speaks to the fact that most Black incarcerated individuals had absent fathers. The same data that speaks to the prevalence of inner-city violence indicates that most perpetrators and their victims share the experience of fatherlessness. The same research that speaks to mass illiteracy, high school dropout rates, and underperforming Black students in the classroom indicates that most children with academic and behavioral struggles are raised in fatherless homes with limited parental input, involvement, and supervision. 

Our focus is so much on defending the imaginary morality and poor decisions of men, we can’t be bothered to see how the children are suffering. Our response to this growing phenomenon has been just as troubling as our accountability avoidance; complete with an odd argument suggesting that absent black fathers, unlike those of other races, were somehow absent yet extremely active. So active, in fact, that we could contend their absence wasn’t really all that relevant to begin with, just another ploy by the white man to tarnish Black men’s reputations. However, the 2013 CDC report cited in this argument doesn’t say anything remotely suggestive of that...

Black non-coresidential fathers, i.e. those who lived apart from their children, were less likely to see or speak to their children regularly, host their children in their homes, eat meals with them, ask them about their day, take them to activities, or help with homework. The report ended with a poll asking these absent Black fathers to rate their own parenting, the majority answered with “very good job”. The cognitive dissonance is deafening...

Black men weren’t removed from the homes, they got up and left. They made the same choice in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and 2000’s that they continue to make today...

There is no Black anti-father task force picking the world’s best Black dads up from soccer practice, never to be seen again. The real conspiracy is they simply don’t desire to be there."

That's not autism: It's simply a brainy, introverted boy

Yet more harms of wokeness and tabula rasa dogma. Female behavior is seen as the default, and male behavior is a disorder: 

That's not autism: It's simply a brainy, introverted boy

"In its milder form, especially among preschool- and kindergarten-age boys, it is tough to distinguish between early signs of autism spectrum disorder and indications that we have on our hands a young boy who is a budding intellectual, is more interested in studying objects than hanging out with friends, overvalues logic, is socially awkward unless interacting with others who share identical interests or is in a leadership role, learns best when obsessed with a topic, and is overly businesslike and serious in how he socializes. The picture gets even more complicated during the toddler years, when normal, crude assertions of willfulness, tantrums, and lapses in verbal mastery when highly emotional are in full swing...

True autism is a potentially very disabling neurological condition. Roy Richard Grinker, in his acclaimed book “Unstrange Minds,” masterfully documents the challenges he faced raising Isabel, his autistic daughter. At age two, she only made passing eye contact, rarely initiated interactions, and had trouble responding to her name in a consistent fashion. Her play often took the form of rote activities such as drawing the same picture repeatedly or rewinding a DVD to watch the same film clip over and over. Unless awakened each morning with the same utterance, “Get up! Get up!” Isabel became quite agitated. She tended to be very literal and concrete in her language comprehension. Expressions like “I’m so tired I could die” left her apprehensive about actual death. By age five, Isabel remained almost completely nonverbal.

When the signs of autism spectrum disorder are clear, as in Isabel’s case, early detection and intervention are essential to bolster verbal communication and social skills. The brain is simply more malleable when children are young...

However, the earlier an evaluation is conducted, the greater the risk of a false diagnosis. Many toddlers can be autistic-like in their behavior when they are stressed. Sometimes the procedures used by experts to evaluate toddlers generate the sort of stress that leads a struggling, but otherwise normally developing, toddler to behavior that is autistic-like.

Nobody has made this point more clearly than the late Dr. Stanley Greenspan, the internationally recognized child psychiatrist who developed the popular Floortime approach to treating autism spectrum disordered kids. In his web-based radio show several years before his death in April 2010, he cited an alarming statistic. Of the two hundred autism assessment programs his team surveyed across the country, many of which were located in prestigious medical centers, only 10 percent emphasized the need to observe a child along with a parent or guardian for more than ten minutes as they spontaneously interacted together. He tended to observe children playing with a parent for forty-five minutes or more, waiting for choice points to engage a child to determine if he or she was capable of more sustained eye contact, elaborate verbalizations, or shared emotional reactions. Dr. Greenspan believed that these conditions of safety and sensitive interaction were essential in order to obtain an accurate reading of a child’s true verbal and social skills.

For a sizable percentage of toddlers who don’t transition well to new surroundings, freeze up with strangers, or temporarily dread being apart from a parent, the formal nature of a structured autism assessment can lead to their becoming mute, hiding under a table, avoiding eye contact, hand flapping, or exhibiting any number of other self-soothing behaviors that get misinterpreted as autistic-like. Trained professionals are supposed to conduct autism assessments in a standardized way. This is clinical jargon for being fairly neutral in one’s approach to the child. This might involve an examiner assuming a seating position that requires a child to turn his or her head ninety degrees to directly look at the examiner when his or her name is called. If the child fails to look up and make direct eye contact with the examiner after his or her name is called aloud several times, the child is considered to be exhibiting autism red-zone behavior. Yet many distressed or slow-to-warm toddlers will only respond to their name if an unfamiliar adult strives to be warm, engaging, and nonthreatening—not just neutral. 

It is these autistic-like situational reactions of struggling toddlers during formal testing conditions that make a false diagnosis a real possibility. A 2007 University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill study found that over 30 percent of children diagnosed as autistic at age two no longer fit the diagnosis at age four. Several years ago, data supplied by parents of over seventy-eight thousand three- to seventeen-year-olds, as part of a National Survey of Children’s Health, discovered that nearly 40 percent had a previous, but not a current, diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder.

There are other reasons why a sizable percentage of toddlers get erroneously diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Up to one in five two-year-olds are late talkers. They fall below the fifty-word expressive-vocabulary threshold and appear incapable of stringing together two- and three-word phrases. This sort of irregular language development is one of the hallmarks of early autism. Yet it is notoriously difficult to distinguish between toddlers with autism spectrum disorder and those who are afflicted with delayed language development. The situation is further complicated by the fact that toddlers with delayed language development tend to share other features in common with autism spectrum children. Scientific findings at the famed Yale Child Study Center have shown that toddlers with delayed language development are almost identical to their autism spectrum disordered counterparts in their use of eye contact to gauge social interactions, the range of sounds and words they produce, and the emotional give-and-take they are capable of. Consequently, many toddlers who simply don’t meet standard benchmarks for how quickly language should be acquired and social interactions mastered are in the autism red zone.

Expanding autistic phenomena to include picky eating and tantrums only amounts to more confusion when applied to toddlers. The percentage of young children in the United States with poor appetites and picky eating habits is so high that experts writing in the journal Pediatrics in 2007 commented, “It could reasonably be said that eating-behavior problems are a normal feature of toddler life.” Tantrums also are surprisingly frequent and intense during the toddler years. Dr. Gina Mireault, a behavioral sciences professor at Johnson State College in Vermont, studied children from three separate local preschools. She discerned that toddlers had tantrums, on average, once every few days. Almost a third of the parents surveyed considered their child’s tantrum behavior to be distressing or disturbing.

With the push to screen for and detect autism spectrum disorder at progressively younger ages, the risk is greater that late-talking, picky-eating, tantrum-throwing, transition-resistant toddlers will be misperceived as potentially autistic—especially if an evaluation is conducted in which the child is not sensitively engaged and put at ease. The risk is more acute, as I will soon illustrate, if this toddler is likely to develop into an introverted, cognitively gifted boy who tends to be single-minded and willful in his approach to life learning. Even more basic than that, if we don’t have a firm grasp of gender differences in how young children communicate and socialize, we can mistake traditional masculine behavior for high-functioning autism.

A book I return to every so often is Eleanor Maccoby’s “The Two Sexes.” Her descriptions of boys’ and girls’ different speech styles jive with what I see daily in my office. She maintains, and I agree, that boys’ speech, on average, tends to be more egoistic than girls’. Boys are more apt to brag, interrupt, and talk over others, and ignore commands or suggestions. They are more inclined to grandstand and “hold court,” trying to impress listeners with all that they know. They seem to be less socially attuned than girls. They are less likely to scan the faces and body language of others for cues on whether they should stop talking and start listening—for basic social sensitivity reasons.

Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge University professor who popularized the extreme-male-brain theory of autism, would say that boys’ speech is more egoistic because, overall, boys tend to be less empathic than girls. He backs this up with abundant scientific evidence. Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes to figure out what they might be feeling comes more naturally to girls. Girls are simply more inclined to read a person’s facial expressions in order to make sure that they are coming across sensitively. Faces tend to be sources of social feedback for girls in ways that they are not for boys. Dr. Baron-Cohen’s research team has discovered that even at birth, female infants will look longer at faces than male infants and prolong mutual eye gazing.

Many boys just get perplexed when you try to empathize with them...

for many boys, grasping the literal content of their verbalizations matters more than “feeling understood.” Appearing attentive, asking probing questions, and reflecting back what someone is saying may be the empathic glue that cements a friendship for the average female. However, for the average male, following along with and responding to the literal content of what they are saying is what’s deemed valuable. A friend is someone who shares your interests and with whom you can have detailed discussions about these interests. 

Watch boys at a sleepover and you’ll quickly realize that they need a joint activity to buttress social interaction and verbal dialogue. If that joint activity is a videogame like Red Dead Redemption, the discussion will be peppered with pragmatic exchanges of information about how best to tame horses, free someone who has been kidnapped, or locate animal pelts. Without a joint activity that taps into their preexisting knowledge about that activity, boys are often at a loss for discussion. There are long silences. Eye contact is avoided. Bodies become more wiggly.

Watch girls at a sleepover and any shared activity they engage in is often secondary to the pleasure they seem to derive from just hanging out and talking.

The stereotype of boys as logical, inflexible, and businesslike in their communication habits is more than just a stereotype. A recent massive study out of the University of Florida involving fifty-four hundred children in the United States ages eight to sixteen indicates that twice as many boys as girls fit this thinking-type temperament. Conversely, twice as many girls as boys fit the feeling-type temperament— tactful, friendly, compassionate, and preferring emotion over logic.

Many boys feel compelled to be logical and exact in their use of language. They withdraw and shut down around people who use language more loosely. A glaring example of this was shown to me recently by a fourteen-year-old client named Jordan. His parents brought him in for therapy because he was racking up school detentions for being rude to teachers. Jordan secretly confessed to me that his English teacher must be dumb because she referred to certain assignments as “homework” when she allowed them to be completed in class. She should have renamed them “schoolwork,” he said, because they were being completed at school. In twenty-five years of therapy practice, I’ve never known a girl to make such a comment.

As educated people, we don’t want to believe in overarching differences in communication styles between the sexes. When I was in college in the 1980s and ’90s, “essentialism” was a dirty word. To believe that males and females might be different in essential ways was akin to admitting that you were unenlightened. There’s still a pervasive sense in our culture that to be educated is to be gender-blind, and there is something of a taboo against voicing aloud explanations for a child’s behavior in terms of his or her gender...

It’s this public discomfort with discussing children’s gendered behavior that gets many traditionally masculine boys inappropriately labeled as high-functioning autistic. Poor eye contact, long-winded monologues about one’s new favorite topic, being overly serious and businesslike, appearing uninterested in other’s facial expressions, and restricting friendships to those who share one’s interests, may all be signs of Asperger’s syndrome or high-functioning autism. However, these same traits typify boys who are traditionally masculine in their behavior. Parents somehow have to ask the uncomfortable question in the doctor’s office: Is he high-functioning autistic or really a more masculine-identified boy? If it’s the latter, what a boy may need is some combination of acceptance and personal and professional help to finesse his social skills over time—not an incorrect diagnosis and unnecessary medical treatment...

When highly restricted interests are shared with relatively little spontaneity and enthusiasm, in ways that fail to entice children to come hither to listen and play—this is when we should suspect autism spectrum disorder. The same is true when a kid talks without interruption about a very technical topic, such as dinosaur names or bus schedules, seemingly indifferent to whether the listener congratulates him for his encyclopedic knowledge or is peeved by the lecture...

Autism spectrum disordered children tend to hold steadfast to their odd topics of interest over time and not readily substitute one for another. 

One of the drawbacks to early screening and detection of high-functioning autism is that small children’s cognitive development isn’t sufficiently mature enough to judge what their sense of humor is like. Often it is a sense of humor that separates true cases of mild autism from mental giftedness. Mildly autistic kids often don’t really comprehend irony, sarcasm, and absurdity. Mentally gifted kids, on the other hand, often thrive on irony, sarcasm, and absurdity...

Highly intelligent boys who happen to be introverted by temperament are probably the subpopulation of kids who are most likely to be erroneously labeled autistic. In her provocatively titled Psychology Today article “Revenge of the Introvert,” Laurie Helgoe, a self-described card-carrying introvert, captures a key personality characteristic of introverts: “[They] like to think before responding—many prefer to think out what they want to say in advance—and seek facts before expressing opinions.” Introverted, highly intelligent boys may appear vacant and nonresponsive when asked a question like “What is your favorite animal?” Yet in their minds, they may be deeply and actively processing copious amounts of information on types and defining features of animals and zeroing in on precise words to use to articulate their complex thoughts. Thirty seconds, a minute, or even more time may pass before an answer is supplied. In the meantime, the listener might wonder if the boy is deaf or completely self-absorbed.

According to Laurie Helgoe: “Introverts seek time alone because they want time alone.” Brainy, introverted boys may cherish and look forward to alone time, which allows them the opportunity to indulge their intellectual appetites full throttle, amassing knowledge through reading or Internet searches. Solitude creates the time and space they need to totally immerse themselves in their preferred interests. They may get more turned on by studying ideas, pursuing science projects, or by solving math problems than by conversing with people.

In our extroverted culture, where being a “team player” and a “people person” are seen as linchpins of normalcy, the notion that a brainy, introverted boy might legitimately prefer the world of ideas over the world of people is hard for most people to accept. Parents of such boys may feel terribly uneasy about their tendency to want to be alone and try to push their sons to be sociable and to make more friends. But if you get to know such boys, they would much rather be alone reading, writing, or pursuing projects that stimulate their intellect than be socializing with peers who are not their intellectual equals. However, once they come into contact with a kindred spirit, someone who is a true intellectual equal with whom they can share the fullness of their ideas, that person just might become a lifelong friend. Around such kindred spirits, brainy, introverted boys can perk up and appear more extroverted and outgoing, wanting to talk as well as to listen. With people who share their interests, especially people who possess equal or greater knowledge in these areas, brainy, introverted boys can display quite normal social skills.

I’d like to engage the reader in a thought-provoking exercise. I’m going to list a collection of behaviors. As you peruse them, ask yourself if these behaviors are indicative of typical willful male toddlers or of possible autism at this age. Remember, the toddler years are from approximately age one to three.

Doesn’t look when you call their name, even if they seem to hear other sounds
Doesn’t look you in the eye much or at all
Doesn’t notice when you enter or leave a room
Seems to be in their own world
Doesn’t look where you do or follow your finger when you point to something

Leads you by the hand to tell you what they want
Can’t do simple things you ask them to do
Has a lot of tantrums
Prefers to play alone
Wants to always hold a certain object, such as a flashlight Doesn’t play with toys in the usual way

It may surprise the reader to learn that I obtained this list of behaviors from a Consumer Reports health-related article titled “What Are the Symptoms of Autism?” If this exercise left you thinking that these behaviors might be characteristic of both willful male toddlers and autistic children, that’s commendable. This means that you have more than a passing familiarity with early childhood development. It also means that you are keenly aware of how toddler issues can get misconstrued as autistic tendencies.

The glee on the faces of toddlers upon discovering that they can propel themselves away from caregivers and into the world beyond— with the power of their own limbs—says it all. During the first year of life, they were relatively helpless. They were at the complete mercy of caregivers to gauge what they needed. Now their fast-evolving fine-and gross-motor abilities are being put to full use in exploring their surroundings. There is fire in their bellies. They insist on having personal control over what they get to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste and for how long. This is what developmental psychologists call the “need for autonomy” that kicks in during toddlerhood. The word parents tend to use is “willfulness.” There is a world of sensory delight out there for toddlers to discover and sample, and they want nothing to get in their way.

Male toddlers advance at a faster rate than the opposite sex in their gross-motor development and visual-spatial skills. The science is there. Generally speaking, boys are more physically capable of exploring their environments than girls. When they do, objects are likely to be the object of their exploration. Little boys, especially those with strong visual-spatial intelligence, can appear as though they’ve entered a trance when they stare at, squeeze, lick, toss and fetch, arrange, stack, and knock down blocks—only to do it all over again. We forget how immersion in an activity, and repetition of it, can lead to an experience of mastery. Lining up trains in identical order, making the same sounds, and pulling them with the same force can rekindle the same feeling of mastery that was felt the first time this activity went well. Not all repetitiveness and needs for sameness speak to autistic tendencies. When a toddler appears driven to use his body effectively in the accomplishment of a task and to further an experience of mastery, it’s unlikely that he’s on the spectrum no matter how repetitive the task becomes—particularly if that toddler shows self-pride and wants others to share in the excitement of it all, even in quiet and subdued ways.

Boys’ level of engrossment in discovering and manipulating objects can lead them to be oblivious to their surroundings. They may not look up when their name is called. They may appear unconcerned whether you’re in the room or not. Self-absorption while studying objects is expectable behavior for male toddlers, especially for those on the upper end of the bell curve on visual-spatial intelligence.

Parents and educators shouldn’t assume the worst when male toddlers play alone. Research shows that boys are far more likely to engage in solitary play than girls at this age. Many little boys are satisfied playing alone or quietly alongside someone else, lining up toy trains, stacking blocks, or engaging in a range of sensorimotor play activities. It is not until about age four or five that boys are involved in associative play to the same extent as girls. That’s the kind of play where there’s verbal interaction and give-and-take exchanges of toys and ideas.

The difference between a relatively typical male toddler immersed in solitary object play and one who shows early signs of autistic behavior can be subtle. Typically developing male toddlers are more apt to experience periodic separation anxiety. They suddenly wonder where Mommy is. Needing Mommy in these moments takes precedence over the activity in which they were absorbed. Sometimes visually checking in and receiving a reassuring glance back from Mommy is enough. Sometimes more is needed, like approaching her for a hug or a pat on the back. This inspires confidence that Mom will be available if and when needed. The toddler can then go across the room and pick up where he left off playing. This “emotional pit stop” behavior is less apparent with toddlers on the spectrum.

Mentally gifted boys are often perfectionists. Their projects need to be done just right, and they will continue to work on a project until it is exactly what they want...

Tantrums during the toddler years are, of course, commonplace. Under normal family circumstances, when a toddler’s maturation is right on schedule, parents can expect a tantrum from their three-to five-year-old once every few days. That was the conclusion of Dr. Gina Mireault’s study, cited earlier. Her research also revealed that the reason top ranked by parents as triggering a toddler’s tantrum is this: “Denial of a request/not getting his or her way.” Most tantrums are triggered by parents directly confronting kids’ assertions of autonomy or by kids’ need to have personal control over what they get to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, and for how long. Tantrums can be exacerbated by fatigue and hunger. Toddlers have different temperaments, and this influences the frequency, intensity, and duration of tantrums. But in general, tantrums occur because a toddler is denied ice cream before dinner, for example, or is prevented from grabbing Grandma’s expensive Moorcroft pottery dish or insists on watching one more show when it’s bedtime—or any such expectable parental challenge to their need to prolong a pleasurable activity or independently exercise sensorimotor mastery.

The tantrums of autism spectrum kids are less likely to be of the autonomy-assertion or mastery-seeking variety. Their tantrums more often than not reflect sensory overload. They may scream and writhe around on the floor because they are in physical pain due to their nervous system being bombarded by an intolerable level of stimulation. The sights and sounds at the mall when their family is shopping for holiday gifts may put them over the top. The buzz from and brightness of overhead lights might be a trigger. Rituals and routines are relied on to keep sensory stimulation at manageable levels. Tantrums may signal a need to keep a ritual or routine exactly the way it was to protect the kid from sensory overload.

Sometimes what appears to be an autistic-like tantrum is really what Dr. Stanley Greenspan, the world-renowned child psychiatrist, calls “sensory craving.” This applies to toddlers whose ability to self-regulate their feelings while they’re in the act of exploring their environments is underdeveloped...

A child wants more sensory input, but doesn’t know how to do it in an organized social way. 

These are toddlers who Dr. Greenspan thinks need abundant “sensory meaningful” interactions with parents and care providers to help them become more self-composed over time. This could amount to matching the child’s energy and activity level in a fun airplane-ride game. Scooping him up, asking him to point his fist in the direction in which he wants to be flown, with a thumbs-up for faster and a thumbs-down for slower, would be an example of a sensory-meaningful interaction that still honors his need for autonomy.

Temper outbursts and quirky behavior around food preferences are widespread among autism spectrum children. But the same can be said of toddlers in general. It’s important to have a sense of perspective regarding the pervasiveness of toddlers’ habit of latching onto preferred foods and rejecting new offerings. A survey of more than three thousand households with infants and toddlers conducted by nutrition experts at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville indicates that a whopping 50 percent of two-year-olds are considered picky eaters by their caregivers. These nutritionists believe the numbers are so high because mothers are not persistent enough in introducing new foods in ways that ensure they’ll eventually be eaten: “When offering a new food, mothers need to provide many more repeated exposures (e.g., eight to 15 times) to enhance acceptance of that food than they currently do.”

Let’s call this the “eight-to-fifteen-times rule.” If a toddler reacts with revulsion, aggressively throwing dishes on the floor or refusing to eat each time a new food item is introduced after eight to fifteen separate attempts, chances are that he or she is a picky eater. This is particularly true if, in the process, the parent stayed calm and conveyed confidence that the new food item was good to eat—not being too insistent on the one hand, or tentative, on the other.

But certainly not all picky eaters are that way because they are on the spectrum. Autism spectrum children who are picky eaters often have odd food preferences, such as only eating foods that are yellow-colored. Their reactions after repeated exposure to new foods frequently remain acute or become even more blustery. It’s not about power struggles and control. A new food item may literally assault their senses. The smell, look, and texture of that food may induce a type of sensory revulsion and disgust. They can’t be around it. Either it goes or the kid does—perhaps agitatedly running off.

The younger in age a kid is when professionals screen for milder forms of autism, the greater the risk a struggling kid will be misperceived as a disordered one. A vast number of toddlers present in the doctor’s office with a hodgepodge of social and emotional difficulties, such as poor eye contact, overactivity and underactivity, tantrums, picky eating, quirky interests, or social awkwardness. These phenomena need not be seen as telltale signs of autism spectrum disorder. Sometimes they are merely evidence of a perfect storm of off-beat events in social and emotional development mixed with difficult personality traits—with the upshot that the kid, for the time being, is very out of sorts.

When we mistake a brainy, introverted boy for an autism spectrum disordered one, we devalue his mental gifts. We view his ability to become wholeheartedly engrossed in a topic as a symptom that needs to be stamped out, rather than a form of intellectualism that needs to be cultivated."

Low Fertility as a Consequence of Status Hierarchies

Thread by @JohannKurtz on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App

S. Korea spent $200b trying to increase its birthrate. Hungary spends 5% of GDP.

Both are failing.

Yet the small country of Georgia spiked its birthrate massively without spending a dollar. How?

They understood that fertility isn't about money. It's about status. 

Before explaining the importance of status, let's quickly note that the common explanations of why fertility is collapsing cannot be the whole story.

As the above countries and the Nordics show, giving people economic benefits to have children doesn't move the needle. 

Religiosity alone does not have the answer.

Even if you isolate the most religious population (weekly church attenders) within the most religious of the major Western countries (the USA), you find barely breakeven fertility rates.

We'll look at the Amish and the Jews shortly. 

The last decade has seen a substantial increase in the share of millennials who own homes (by 2022, more than 50% of US millennials were homeowners), but childlessness in the same cohort has continued apace.

The collapse in fertility rates in the Western world, which started over a century ago, long precedes the advent of oral contraceptive pills, as well as endocrine disruptors and other relevant chemical agents which might be interfering with fertility health. 

 

We are thus presented with an apparent paradox: a stable trend which continues to unfold across the West, in country after country, generation after generation, without an obvious causal logic. How is this to be explained? 

 

I propose that there is, in fact, an under-appreciated fundamental cause of these trends, which manifests in the form of different proximate causes (real and imagined) across different geographies and times.

This fundamental cause is status. 

 

Social 'status' denotes a universal set of human instincts and behaviors. Status describes the perceived standing of the individual within the group.

It denotes their social value and their place within the formal and informal hierarchies which comprise a society. 

 

It finds expression in the behaviors of deference, access, inclusion, approval, acclaim, respect, and honor (and indeed in their opposites - rejection, ostracization, humiliation, and so forth).

 

Status is gained and maintained through approved behaviors (achievement, etiquette, defending the group) and through the possession of recognized ‘status symbols’ (titles, wealth, important physical assets). 

 

My belief: our post-enlightenment values result in the net status outcome of having a child being lower than the status outcomes of various competing undertakings - and that this is incredibly important.

I'll break this down in more detail shortly. 

 

As an explanatory factor, status has the advantage of being a relative - as opposed to absolute - attribute.

This is important because absolute material conditions have radically improved, even while birthrates have fallen. Many children used to die young.

 

Status is also of existential importance to individuals. This is necessary for our inquiry: we are seeking a behavioral determinant which is powerful enough to influence fundamental human decisions like whether or not to reproduce.

People kill themselves over loss of status. 

 

Where's the evidence for my theory?

Let us turn to the first of the small number of European and Asian countries which defy wider fertility trends. This is the country of Georgia, which sits at the intersection of the two continents, with a population of about four million. 

 

In the mid 2000s, Georgia spiked its birth rate, which went from ~50,000 to ~64,000 over the course of two years - a 28% increase, which it sustained for many years. How?

 

The evidence points to an unusual factor: a prominent Patriarch of the popular Georgian Orthodox Church, Ilia II, announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to all third children onwards. 

 

Births of third children boomed (so much so, in fact, that it eclipsed continuing declines in first and second children).

This has widely been understood as a religious phenomenon, but I propose that it is better understood as a status phenomenon. 

 

What about the inverse? Can status suppress birthrates?

It can. Let's turn to the canonical example of low fertility: South Korea.

 

Thanks to the Korean formalized systems of etiquette, language, and titles, social hierarchies are clear, explicit, and prominent.

Individuals are incentivized to take whatever measures are necessary to ensure that their rank within the system is maximized. 

 

This process finds particular expression within the structure of the Korean economy, in which the only high-status employers are the small number of industrial mega-conglomerates like Samsung (the so-called ‘chaebols’).

A quote from Malcolm @SimoneHCollins, who worked there: 

 

"To understand how much the chaebol system matters in Korea: you are not a person of equal status to other people if you don't work at one of the chaebols." 

 

"The chaebols are extremely important to your social status within Korea… your life is spent to try to get that perfect test score so you can get into the perfect chaebol." 

 

Competition is fierce, and hinges on each individual’s performance in the national exam which determines university places.

This exam is so important that they ground all planes and clear traffic on the one day each year it occurs.

 

Each child must receive exceptional training to perform at this exam.

This means parents must pay for extended, expensive tutoring, and this in turn precludes almost all couples from having large families. 

 

I provide more examples of status being the clear determinant factor in the most notable fertility trends on my blog.

This thread is already too long, so go there if you want more evidence.

For now, let's understand the specific mechanism at play. 

 

A useful model we can take from the literature is to classify the sources of status into three types: dominance, virtue, and success. 

 

Will Storr describes:

 

"In dominance games, status is coerced by force or fear. In virtue games, status is awarded to players who are conspicuously dutiful, obedient and moralistic." 

 

"In success games, status is awarded for the achievement of closely specified outcomes, beyond simply winning, that require skill, talent or knowledge." 

 

In the pre-Enlightenment period, a woman’s status was defined by her birth (class), maintained by her virtue (virginity, piety, motherhood), and modified substantially by her husband’s status. 

 

The primary sources of her status were therefore upheld by the Church (which held a role of social dominance incomparable to today) and her family (embedded within a formalized class structure).

 

In other words, the pre-Enlightenment woman derived her status from virtue and dominance games.

 

These virtue strategies did not tradeoff with fertility, and likely supported it, with the Church teaching ‘conjugal duty’ and families demanding heirs. 

 

The Enlightenment brought with it not just intellectual, economic, and scientific revolutions - it drove a status revolution. It challenged the dominance of the Church and aristocracy through the elevation of the ideals of equality, freethinking, and meritocracy. 

 

In turn, this emphasis on the moral primacy of meritocracy changed the primary status game from dominance and virtue to success, with those who demonstrated exceptional knowledge or professional skill held in newly high esteem. 

 

Importantly, meritocracy is an individualist model of status. The status accrued by a prominent scientist does not necessarily extend to his wife or children. 

 

The successful accrual of status through virtue mechanisms requires one to be embedded in a largely static community with shared norms, who appreciate and reward sacrifices made for the group. 

 

Conversely, status markers associated with success (wealth, knowledge, skill) attach primarily to the individual and are fungible across groups and geographies, thereby retaining value in less dense networks.

This becomes important in an era of mass transportation.

 

Thus the Enlightenment initially opened up new status opportunities for men (success) whilst undermining those that supported women (virtue). 

 

We all have a psychological need for status, and so it was only a matter of time before women demanded access to and participation within success games (education, commerce, politics, even sport).

 

Unfortunately, accruing status through success games is time intensive, and unlike virtue games, trades off directly with fertility.

 

Over time, this set of status mechanics spread, intensified, and deepened, particularly during the process of urbanization during the Industrial Revolution.

Ultimately this culminates in today, when the standard introductory question has become:

‘What do you do?’.

 

This is because the most effective way to gauge the status of one’s interlocutor is to understand their level of success within our meritocracy.

 

Unfortunately, ‘I’m a mother’ is not a good answer to this question, because this conveys little status within a success framework, which is usually the operative one.

So is there any hope for future generations?

Yes.

 

The Amish and the Orthodox Jews have very high birthrates despite living in Western countries.

 

I propose that the fundamental driver of their birthrate is not merely their religiousness, it is their isolation and in-group preference which has allowed for the preservation of virtue games.

 

Through the cultivation of intense social density and homogeneity, they have built what I call ‘mimetic infrastructure’, which enforces people’s full participation in their religious duties if they are to maintain standing in the group.

 

Western governments should pursue policies which give greater space for the rise of other stable groupings of people with sub-identities, within which alternative status ecosystems can flourish.

 

As a first step, governments must do everything they can to foster the creation of further mimetic infrastructure which supports virtue games.

 

These cultural colonies must be uninterrupted, to the greatest degree possible, by the state imposition of universal Enlightenment success games.