Re: "male college graduates are not ready to launch, either emotionally or financially. Ahead of them are internships, post-graduate degrees, possibly even Ph.D programs and postdocs."
Here is a causal chain that reduces fertility:
1. Increase in educational attainment by women.
2. Increase in assortative mating by (a) educational attainment and (b) by income.
3. Increase in *noise* of college degree "signal" for career success (grade inflation, country club, wokeness).
4. Women delay marriage in order to discern solid career and earnings potential of a potential spouse -- i.e., to clarify the noisy degree signal.
Muhammed Tuncay writes:
"Individuals face a large degree of uncertainty about their permanent incomes early in their careers. If they marry early, as most individuals around 1970 did, this uncertainty leads to weak marital sorting along permanent income levels. But when marriage is delayed, as around 1990, the sorting becomes stronger as individuals are more able to predict their likely future incomes. After providing reduced-form evidence on the impact of marriage age, I build and estimate a marriage model with income uncertainty, and show that the increase in marriage age can explain almost 75 percent of the increase in the assortative mating."
Note: A substantial subset of women who delay marriage in order to optimize the match (aiming at a mix of degree prestige and expected permanent income), then withdraw from career and focus on childbearing, childrearing, philanthropy, and community leadership. Highly educated women have a relatively low labor-force participation rate after age 30.
On the "Note" part: this bait and switch has been perpetrated on a couple of generations of young men, now. These young men grew up hearing that they had no right to require a woman to stay at home with the children, that women had a right to a career. They also grew up seeing what happened to older, breadwinner men in divorces. They bought into the idea that women should have careers, they bought into the idea that they should share child-raising, and they went looking for women who would be truly equal partners rather than adult dependents. They married people who presented themselves are career women, as partners. And two generations of those "career women" dropped out and - accepting that they spent some time raising children for a few years - as Janice Ian puts it, "married young and then retired."
Young men are, by now, aware of the incentive structure, and the hopeless legal situation a breadwinner is placed in. If you look at dating websites and count women who are looking for husbands, and compare it to the number of men who are looking for wives, you begin to understand: the shortage of children isn't because women are balking. It's because men are.
If we want babies, they will need fathers. Enslaving men to support women who have basically dropped out, is not a good way to recruit fathers. It needs to stop.
And the injustice of blaming men for the unjust ways many women treat men is a huge part of the culture problem.
We also need more men, possibly early retired but still healthy men, to be teachers K-6, or at least 3-6. Possibly the biggest sex imbalance is elementary school teachers. The men need to be there as role models, especially for the boys being raised by single mothers.
Arnold is "not ready to push the panic button" on the baby bust; he thinks "we can tolerate some shrinkage until we see the emergence of social conditions and societal norms a few generations hence." He is too insouciant.
With the fertility rate falling far below maintenance (about 2.2 children per mother) down to around one or even below, it means that in 20 - 30 years there will be very few women of child bearing age. This sets off an accelerating downward spiral into population collapse that to be reversed would require a huge increase in natality up to 4 - 6 children per mother. It is hard to imagine the social conditions and societal norms that might bring about this change. It appears to have happened in Israel, but that is a very special case.
More to the point, waiting two or three generations, as Arnold would have us do, assumes that we have the time to wait. *We will be replaced demographically by more anti-freedom cultures* before that can happen. Especially those that practice plural marriage.
The obesity ‘epidemic’ (tut) is like the CoVid pandemic - who provides the data, who benefits, is anyone allowed to challenge/test the data? Obesity has a specific meaning and does not just mean fat. How is obesity measured? The BMI a simple test to measure thickness of the flesh of the upper arm of children in poor Countries to determine level of nutrition, not ‘obesity’. A test for one thing, applied to another is not valid, like the PCR test developed as a laboratory tool selectively to enlarge tiny viral fragments to provide enough material for laboratory examination, was applied as a diagnostic test to produce a clinical diagnosis of disease in individuals infected with viral fragments, most of whom had no disease, and thereby support the claim of pandemic. Epidemic applies only to infectious micro-organisms - obesity is not infectious. Pandemic applies to wide scale presence of disease in the population over a large geographical area, not the mere presence of a transmissible pathogen spreading, which is epidemic. Words and their definitions matter. Currently the fashion is to co-opt words to support whatever the political/ideological claim is. There is nothing more absurd than ‘stopping’’ climate change...’ which makes as much sense as stopping the Moon. Talking of climate change as if there were a default condition, ‘climate stasis’ is the blather of the madhouse.
The fall in fertility in the West is not solvable in my opinion. The best that could be hoped for is that we import a lot of highly competent and educated Indians and east Asians who don't bring with them their own cultures suddenly falling fertility rates. The far more likely outcome, though, is that as the cultures that built European and North American culture die off, the newly open lands are resettled by the cultures that are still growing in sheer numbers today. You can see this process today as the West has lost the will to defend its own borders.
"The Japanese government almost quadrupled spending on families between 1990 and 2015"
From what to what? What is the per child per year subsidy in Japan?
"And then there's Singapore, which offers $8,000 for a first or second baby and $10,000 for every child thereafter"
And they offer this...one time at birth. $10,000 / 18 years = $555 / year. PATHETIC!
They will subsidize a minority of daycare expense but only if the mother works. So if you agree not to see your child grow up you get a small discount on having someone else raise them.
We spend $15k/kid in K-12 schools that we don't allow parents to direct. In the higher cost of living areas it's closer to $20k+.
I'm not even including all the subsidies for daycare that parents can't direct or lose access to if they don't work/aren't poor.
We spend $45k/year per retiree, not counting Medicaid and other assistance.
Defense spending clocks in at close to $14k per citizen under 18. Cut that in half and that's $7k.
The money is there bro. You just don't want to spend it. You like ed administrators, old folks dribbling on themselves in nursing homes, and cruise missiles.
>>From the perspective of younger men, American feminism, by making American women quick to play the victim or to blame men for their woes, makes them less lovable
A lot of men learn that placing the locus of control in the self leads to success (that's a basic component of stoic philosophy). A lot of women are being taught the opposite, with poor results.
Yenor: "No one warns of the biological clock?" What sort of bubble does this guy live in? As for parental surveys of what they wish for, aren't these implicitly about what the parent can do to help, not about things outside their influence?
My anecdotal observation is that this is more of a marriable man quality problem. Too many of the gung-ho, reach for the stars type are "too" focused on careers to be a good match for an ambitious woman seeking an equitable partnership while too many others are uninspiring.
"men who lack ambition or strength—two qualities that feminism arguably censures in men" ???
I wonder how many women think that feminism censures "ambition and strength."
Total agreement about the panic button. Let's just fund Medicare and SS, a (more generous) unemployment insurance, and CTC with a VAT and chill. Attracting lots more young high skilled immigrants will be good for VAT collections, too.
We should be more worried about toxic feminine attitudes. We've given women the vote for a century now, and the main result has been massive nanny-statism, from Prohibition onward. That's why I would take it back.
No. Toxic masculinity is interrupting when a woman is speaking, preferring an inferior man for a position over a superior woman, "just grab 'em by the ..."
Re: "male college graduates are not ready to launch, either emotionally or financially. Ahead of them are internships, post-graduate degrees, possibly even Ph.D programs and postdocs."
Here is a causal chain that reduces fertility:
1. Increase in educational attainment by women.
2. Increase in assortative mating by (a) educational attainment and (b) by income.
3. Increase in *noise* of college degree "signal" for career success (grade inflation, country club, wokeness).
4. Women delay marriage in order to discern solid career and earnings potential of a potential spouse -- i.e., to clarify the noisy degree signal.
Muhammed Tuncay writes:
"Individuals face a large degree of uncertainty about their permanent incomes early in their careers. If they marry early, as most individuals around 1970 did, this uncertainty leads to weak marital sorting along permanent income levels. But when marriage is delayed, as around 1990, the sorting becomes stronger as individuals are more able to predict their likely future incomes. After providing reduced-form evidence on the impact of marriage age, I build and estimate a marriage model with income uncertainty, and show that the increase in marriage age can explain almost 75 percent of the increase in the assortative mating."
Source:
https://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1881?ln=en
Note: A substantial subset of women who delay marriage in order to optimize the match (aiming at a mix of degree prestige and expected permanent income), then withdraw from career and focus on childbearing, childrearing, philanthropy, and community leadership. Highly educated women have a relatively low labor-force participation rate after age 30.
On the "Note" part: this bait and switch has been perpetrated on a couple of generations of young men, now. These young men grew up hearing that they had no right to require a woman to stay at home with the children, that women had a right to a career. They also grew up seeing what happened to older, breadwinner men in divorces. They bought into the idea that women should have careers, they bought into the idea that they should share child-raising, and they went looking for women who would be truly equal partners rather than adult dependents. They married people who presented themselves are career women, as partners. And two generations of those "career women" dropped out and - accepting that they spent some time raising children for a few years - as Janice Ian puts it, "married young and then retired."
Young men are, by now, aware of the incentive structure, and the hopeless legal situation a breadwinner is placed in. If you look at dating websites and count women who are looking for husbands, and compare it to the number of men who are looking for wives, you begin to understand: the shortage of children isn't because women are balking. It's because men are.
If we want babies, they will need fathers. Enslaving men to support women who have basically dropped out, is not a good way to recruit fathers. It needs to stop.
And the injustice of blaming men for the unjust ways many women treat men is a huge part of the culture problem.
We also need more men, possibly early retired but still healthy men, to be teachers K-6, or at least 3-6. Possibly the biggest sex imbalance is elementary school teachers. The men need to be there as role models, especially for the boys being raised by single mothers.
Arnold is "not ready to push the panic button" on the baby bust; he thinks "we can tolerate some shrinkage until we see the emergence of social conditions and societal norms a few generations hence." He is too insouciant.
With the fertility rate falling far below maintenance (about 2.2 children per mother) down to around one or even below, it means that in 20 - 30 years there will be very few women of child bearing age. This sets off an accelerating downward spiral into population collapse that to be reversed would require a huge increase in natality up to 4 - 6 children per mother. It is hard to imagine the social conditions and societal norms that might bring about this change. It appears to have happened in Israel, but that is a very special case.
More to the point, waiting two or three generations, as Arnold would have us do, assumes that we have the time to wait. *We will be replaced demographically by more anti-freedom cultures* before that can happen. Especially those that practice plural marriage.
The obesity ‘epidemic’ (tut) is like the CoVid pandemic - who provides the data, who benefits, is anyone allowed to challenge/test the data? Obesity has a specific meaning and does not just mean fat. How is obesity measured? The BMI a simple test to measure thickness of the flesh of the upper arm of children in poor Countries to determine level of nutrition, not ‘obesity’. A test for one thing, applied to another is not valid, like the PCR test developed as a laboratory tool selectively to enlarge tiny viral fragments to provide enough material for laboratory examination, was applied as a diagnostic test to produce a clinical diagnosis of disease in individuals infected with viral fragments, most of whom had no disease, and thereby support the claim of pandemic. Epidemic applies only to infectious micro-organisms - obesity is not infectious. Pandemic applies to wide scale presence of disease in the population over a large geographical area, not the mere presence of a transmissible pathogen spreading, which is epidemic. Words and their definitions matter. Currently the fashion is to co-opt words to support whatever the political/ideological claim is. There is nothing more absurd than ‘stopping’’ climate change...’ which makes as much sense as stopping the Moon. Talking of climate change as if there were a default condition, ‘climate stasis’ is the blather of the madhouse.
The fall in fertility in the West is not solvable in my opinion. The best that could be hoped for is that we import a lot of highly competent and educated Indians and east Asians who don't bring with them their own cultures suddenly falling fertility rates. The far more likely outcome, though, is that as the cultures that built European and North American culture die off, the newly open lands are resettled by the cultures that are still growing in sheer numbers today. You can see this process today as the West has lost the will to defend its own borders.
$200 B / 16 years = $12.5 B a year.
Let's say Korea had 10 million under 18 during that time. Quibble if you want.
That's $1,250 per kid.
Pathetic. My child tax credit in the USA is $2k.
Social Security pays an average of $30k per year to retirees. Medicare cost per beneficiary is another $15k/year.
So we pay olds 20 times what we pay kids.
Paying people REAL MONEY to have kids simply has never been tried and we don't know if it would work.
"The Japanese government almost quadrupled spending on families between 1990 and 2015"
From what to what? What is the per child per year subsidy in Japan?
"And then there's Singapore, which offers $8,000 for a first or second baby and $10,000 for every child thereafter"
And they offer this...one time at birth. $10,000 / 18 years = $555 / year. PATHETIC!
They will subsidize a minority of daycare expense but only if the mother works. So if you agree not to see your child grow up you get a small discount on having someone else raise them.
We spend $15k/kid in K-12 schools that we don't allow parents to direct. In the higher cost of living areas it's closer to $20k+.
I'm not even including all the subsidies for daycare that parents can't direct or lose access to if they don't work/aren't poor.
We spend $45k/year per retiree, not counting Medicaid and other assistance.
Defense spending clocks in at close to $14k per citizen under 18. Cut that in half and that's $7k.
The money is there bro. You just don't want to spend it. You like ed administrators, old folks dribbling on themselves in nursing homes, and cruise missiles.
Take your flame war somewhere else, guys.
>>From the perspective of younger men, American feminism, by making American women quick to play the victim or to blame men for their woes, makes them less lovable
True of me, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/women-dont-think-that-women-can-make-adult-decisions-and-be-held-accountable-for-those-decisions.
A lot of men learn that placing the locus of control in the self leads to success (that's a basic component of stoic philosophy). A lot of women are being taught the opposite, with poor results.
The times; they are a changing
Yenor: "No one warns of the biological clock?" What sort of bubble does this guy live in? As for parental surveys of what they wish for, aren't these implicitly about what the parent can do to help, not about things outside their influence?
My anecdotal observation is that this is more of a marriable man quality problem. Too many of the gung-ho, reach for the stars type are "too" focused on careers to be a good match for an ambitious woman seeking an equitable partnership while too many others are uninspiring.
"men who lack ambition or strength—two qualities that feminism arguably censures in men" ???
I wonder how many women think that feminism censures "ambition and strength."
Total agreement about the panic button. Let's just fund Medicare and SS, a (more generous) unemployment insurance, and CTC with a VAT and chill. Attracting lots more young high skilled immigrants will be good for VAT collections, too.
Just spitballing here, but aren't ambition and strength closely related to "toxic masculinity"?
We should be more worried about toxic feminine attitudes. We've given women the vote for a century now, and the main result has been massive nanny-statism, from Prohibition onward. That's why I would take it back.
I think this comment might help Mike understand the difference between ambition and "toxic masculinity."
No. Toxic masculinity is interrupting when a woman is speaking, preferring an inferior man for a position over a superior woman, "just grab 'em by the ..."