Re: "I say let’s discourage the slow lifestyle. No government subsidies for going to college, except for gifted children from poor families. Stop gearing K-12 toward the college track. Let’s try to get back to 20-year-olds being adults."
+1
I would add — perhaps in the spirit of Julie Luckey's decision to homeschool her children — that, upon adolescence, youths should spend much less time with one another in what amounts to protracted day care, and much more time immersed in work settings with adults.
I’m not as pessimistic as Arnold on this one. I think the realization that we have overinvested in college has only come recently. Maybe the last 3-5 years? It seems like there should be an alliance of progressive and conservatives to support more vocational training and to lower college requirements for jobs. Tim Walz did it in MN.
I’m not a fan of virtual reality headsets, Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg. The Palmer Luckey article is interesting, but except for his defense work, has Luckey made the world a better place? I would rather kids be outside in the real world, playing pickup games, getting scrapes and bruises, and interacting with people in their neighborhood.
It is interesting to know that 22% of American women over 40 have never been married. It would be even more interesting to know how many have never been in what they thought was a "long-term committed relationship".
I've occasionally palled around with "The Young Republicans" (YRs) in my state. They're pretty generous in how they define "young" all the way up to 39 instead of something more like 29 or 35 where I would probably cut it off but thats what they've chosen. Like the churches I frequent, curiously absent, in those places, are single young women. I'm still somewhat surprised that the few women at the YRs I go to are usually unmarried, childless, or both. Across the board almost all American women have grown up with parents and in a culture that has told them to prioritize careerism and professionalism over family and church.
Regarding church, most of the women there are over 40. There are very few under 40 who are single. Places that are either explicitly or implicitly "conservative" or traditional have a serious issue with female turnover! Amongst young women who are still traditional, they do have higher TFR than their progressive counterparts. I'm curious to see how this plays out long term. The only younger (under35) women I know with 4+ or even 3+ kids are through church.
There have been a lot of outrage pieces over JDVance by BOTS. You can find them on substack.
First, they all focus on perceived status considerations. Vance is lowering their status.
Most don't mention family policy/benefits/taxes, though if they do they will vaguely accuse the GOP of all sorts of things that are bad for families and the DEM of all sorts of things that are good for families. "Why doesn't the GOP lower housing costs?" is one I see a lot. If you point out that housing construction is a lot higher and prices are a lot lower in red states it's a lot of blank stares.
I will often ask "retirement benefits are pay as you go, so they can only be paid by future taxpayers. shouldn't those that haven't raised future taxpayers do more to help those that have taken on the expense of doing so out of fairness?"
People will say "I pay school taxes for kids I don't have!" When you show the math that SS/Medicare/Medicaid, etc way outstrip their K-12 contribution they just drop the subject. They also firmly oppose school choice.
I then suggest that an extra $10,000 in taxes a year by childless single people would probably balance the books. I even grant that well targeted, even half that could probably make a big difference, and that it could probably be paid for by ending a few tax breaks for well off childless. Is it really so much to ask for such a contribution for a bigger CTC?
Deny Deny Deny. It's not really about the money. Its about misogyny or something.
I took that "Life of Julia" line commenting on one. I linked to a study from the New Zealand government showing that men have a large fiscal contribution over their lifetime and women have a large fiscal deficit (mostly owing to old age pensions). I showed how every group except single women vote GOP, and that the implied reason in the Julia campaign is that single women were selling their votes to the DEMs for welfare.
I was told that there was plenty of money to pay for everything if we would just tax billionaires more.
Women really fucking LOVE having lots of sexual power in their 20s. I don't think they are going to give it up. The ones that fail to make the transition before the clock runs out are really bitter and want to marry Uncle Sam and have a margarita. They don't care about fairness or math or logic or what happens to the next generation. They basically are what JDVance says they are.
Rather than trying to win over this demographic I think you just need to go really bold appealing to families. Cut the crap and offer a CTC 5x Kamala paid for by the childless DEM professional class. Make it about their greed.
I haven't seen any evidence the GOP is thinking that way though. And its not like I have any way of communicating it to them.
"Women really fucking LOVE having lots of sexual power in their 20s. I don't think they are going to give it up. The ones that fail to make the transition before the clock runs out are really bitter and want to marry Uncle Sam and have a margarita."
Cruel but perhaps true. The first sentence certainly is.
The rise of single adult women is very much a feature and even seen as desirable by some, especially feminists. I think you could substitute the "single" in single women with "independent" in the sense they don't have to rely on a traditional human partner or family. Their goal is to make these women as independent as possible through state support. The UnHerd article mentions the grants, loans, subsidies, women's job training programs, affirmative action, and welfare but there is even more than that. About 60% of public sector workers in the USA are women. Do they want a smaller government?
If there is a growing gap in how the two sexes see the world (Gen Z women being the most progressive ever recorded but the males being slightly more right wing than you'd expect or just apathetic), this may be part of it. A multitude of policies regarding Civil Rights, education, employment, and sex have further enabled it. Absent those things a lot of single women would either be much poorer or have to depend on their parents or a male provider which is what feminists don't want, regardless of the direct and indirect costs. They just really seem H*ll bent on making sure women don't ever have to interact with their parents, siblings, extended family, or a man unless they give "enthusiastic" consent.
On the cultural and social level this is impacting families and relationships and probably making women more hostile to them. It's why women can just walk away from their parents and never talk to them as part of our modern culture's "I don't owe you anything and you're not entitled to my respect or affection" attitude (but the state owes everyone, especially women, enough cash to be financially independent). It's why they can declare "men are trash". Because they don't really need to do or say anything to be agreeable around men because they basically don't need them in any direct way. Luckily, most people I know don't behave like this, but these attitudes are here now and the army of single adult women isn't going anywhere.
The problem is that everyone is socialist-inclined until they have kids. In my peer group, I've seen extremely liberal women move to the right after their first child.
Seems more like the root problem is the social pressure to defer family formation for so many years.
"Francis Turner argues that renewable energy should be converted to synthetic hydrocarbons rather than stored in batteries."
Check out Terraform Industries who have a plan to turn increasingly cheap solar energy into natural gas, including pulling CO2 from the air so it's carbon neutral. They have a roadmap to make this cost competitive with extracted gas...
"No government subsidies for going to college"
Better still, a Baby Bill - free college once your first two kids are in elementary school.
The TF "roadmap" is just wishful thinking that certain exogenous trends in relative-prices will not just continue but get much better, not an actual plan of research and development to innovate to overcome major natural constraints and bottlenecks to continue pushing those relative prices into hoped-for economical territory where they can be competitive without subsidies. Making hydrocarbons from atmospheric (or captured) CO2 and solar panels could be done as a high school science project decades ago with enough equipment at the student's disposal. It just can't compete even at mega industrial scale unless the ratio of solar power to natural gas decreases by at least an order of magnitude, which by any reasonable guess is nowhere near on the horizon.
Decreased by 90% in the past 10 years alone, with an especially large decrease between 2023 and 2024.
> by any reasonable guess is nowhere near on the horizon.
I think it's reasonable to think that this trend will continue for a little while longer at least. I agree that they appear to be early to market in the absence of govt incentives though. But if the trend holds up for another 5 years, does that address your criticism?
Jinx, I also posted about Terraform Industries without seeing yours.
Having had the good fortune to go to a top 1 engineering school where I took heavy course loads and worked around the clock, I marveled at how much more I learned of value in my first year in industry. Not that it was useless, but maybe 5% was of practical use. I think college education is of practical value only for academics who intend to do research (e.g. a vanishingly small number of people).
In conjunction, consider the ages of the USA founders at the time of the Declaration signing -- all 19-24 or so.
Abolish college
Well not exactly -- treat it as the trade school for academics that it is, leading to reductions of 95% in enrollment, and beat back the pampering & infantilization of young adults
In hindsight I think I would have been a much better parent if it had happened at 30 year instead of 25. I think something similar is true for the vast majority who have kids before 25.
I became a parent much younger than Stu. I was the baby of my family and so beyond some babysitting (when my customers had usually put the smallest one to bed before I arrived) had little experience with caring for little kids or even with cooking and so forth. (This may have been a function of an American childhood in the latter 20th century; I assume the large families of the past produced girls mostly prepared for motherhood, at ages still younger than myself. I was sufficiently young that once, at a cafeteria, the Spanish-speaking girls who worked there (Luby's: later got in trouble with the feds for hiring illegal immigrants) came over to the table to shyly ask how old I was, which sounds bizarre but goes to show how rare a very young Anglo mom was in the city in those days, since of course it was no marvel for Hispanic girls to then routinely have children at 15 or sixteen. At children's birthday parties I was sometimes assumed to be the nanny. A mom friend of mine, some 20 years older, said she got the opposite treatment: service workers assumed she was the grandmother.)
In essentials I still belonged at the kids' table myself. I was by turns fanatically devoted to my child and also still moody and selfish of my own time. I had very poor judgment. I was a terrible wife and my husband was a terrible husband. Only the bourgeois norms with which we had both grown up, and on his part a conservative outlook, kept us ... keeping on. On the other hand, both of us parents liked to "play". We were perhaps more fun than older parents. The enthusiasms of our own childhoods were fresh in our minds and we enjoyed sharing them with our child. My husband had to work full-time of course (very suddenly!) and simultaneously went on to grad school but apart from little "gig economy" things (before the letter) I had nothing else whatever on my mind. When around our elders, which I wish we had been more - we functioned more like big brother/sister. I actually wish I hadn't even sought that stupid part-time work. It was a waste of time and made me tired. But I had imbibed the idea that money was very important - you were nothing if you weren't earning money (however inconsequential).
The indisputably best thing about having had a child when you're little more than a child - is that the child got to know well not only his grandparents (surrogate parents) but also his great-grandparents and grand-uncles, etc.
The worst is that you are still learning school-of-life lessons that it would have been better to have known already. Your innocent child becomes a party to your mistakes.
I think if there is truly some movement to return to younger parenting - people are going to have to lose the ideal of perfect parenthood that has developed.
I just did the math and realized my mother was the same age I was when she had her first child. She was presumably the same silly creature I was, yet just by virtue of the different time was more mature.
I am not sure my young relatives who have spent their twenties in constant traveling and fun and making in some cases, really good money, are necessarily more equipped for the moment of self-sacrifice that is giving birth.
Consumer goods related to baby, I've noticed, become much more important nowadays, to the older career mom. I was at a shower recently and didn't even grasp what many of the gifts were for the most part.
You don't really need much of anything. But I guess the economy would wither and die if that was understood.
I know this sounds stupid but I don't see how any of those four directly lead to being a worse parent.
Luciaphile above made an interesting observation, "I am not sure my young relatives who have spent their twenties in constant traveling and fun and making in some cases, really good money, are necessarily more equipped for the moment of self-sacrifice that is giving birth." I would add "and that is having an immature constantly changing dependent little person in your life". In some ways you are less equipped because you are used to, and in some ways dependent on, a very different reality.
Doesn't sound stupid and sounds even further from that after reading Luciaphile.
I left out one part I couldn't think of the the right way to say it - less ready to self-sacrifice. On that note I've known a few very old dads and they were extremely self-sacrificing. And she reminded me of something else - I was thinking of men and the optimal ages might be younger for women. Women certainly mature younger. And I didn't think of the advantages of likely enjoying play more.
I still stick to my age preferences but that's just me.
Willingness for self-sacrifice, more importantly many compromises, is likely a requirement for men to be happy in marriage with kids. More important than finance (over some minimum), ed, experience all are less important. Maturity is interestingly close to but different.
Surely the Birth Dearth is one of the West's top 3 actual problems, along with Education and Debt, since the climate "crisis" will pale as the formerly rich West shrinks. First, a lot of people are apparently unfulfilled. Second, the Ponzi scheme that is the welfare-warfare state will terminate much sooner. I believe the Gallup poll that the goal of 2-3+ kids is widely held, so it's a matter of how.
Apparently, bribing people to have children has limited effect, and it just adds to the debt. It may be more constructive to: 1) Educate young people that child 1 should happen before 30 years of age (I'd naively assumed it was 40); 2) Switch to professional degrees as undergraduates, like most countries, instead of a luxury good liberal arts degree then a professional degree, and the loans and delays in family starts that come with them; 3) Holding job offers open or promising to ease workforce (re)entry for mothers; 4) Stop selling fear of the future (e.g., climate apocalypse propaganda); 5) ???
More distally, reducing government's taxes and false promises. may open up space for community again. Deregulation and rapid growth will restore hope for the future, make men more economically successful and more attractive husbands and fathers than Uncle Sam. Actual root cause analysis is required as social engineering is not going to work; somehow removing barriers to nature's call is more likely to succeed. In the meantime, stop inflation, stop transferring resources from young to old, start shrinking government, drill, baby, drill, and build, baby, build!
I agree with you about the discouragement, as long as it’s not done by the government. And no subsidies for anybody! Let the for-profits do the talent hunting.
"By far the best way to store energy is to create some kind of hydrocarbon fuel with the energy."
I realize your aren't an engineer but I still can't believe you fell for such BS. Off the top of my head here are three faults:
1 Given we don't yet have a commercial method of creating a synthetic hydrocarbon which we know a price point, that is a ludicrous statement.
2 Pump storage hydro is far better even if places to do it are limited. Storing in all available batteries is certainly better than a synthetic hydrocarbon conversion.
3 "The best" is almost always situation dependent. The statement is akin to saying all cars should be EVs because they are best. Again, BS.
The math may work for synthetic hydrocarbon production if:
- it is solar, wind or nuclear
- the current electricity grid price is zero (all the solar and wind production is more than demand)
- the batteries are full, as is the pumped storage
In that scenario, instead of throwing the electricity away it becomes better to use it to produce synthetic hydrocarbon. At least you could sell the synthetic hydrocarbon for something rather than getting zero for your surplus electricity.
Many products started their useful life as waste from a different process.
To be charitable... I think the statement can be made reasonable by adding an introductory clause, "If they all cost about the same, 'By far the best way to store energy is to create some kind of hydrocarbon fuel with the energy.'" There are lots of advantages to hydrocarbons.
Of course, they do not cost remotely the same today, with synthetic hydrocarbons stratospherically expensive. Cheap synthetic hydrocarbons may be even further away than controlled fusion. (Though some of the cost disadvantage disappears when you realize that hydrocarbons don't require new infrastructure, that there is a large "installed base".)
I suppose that could have some truth to it but, as you say, we are pretty far from that. Hard to argue "best" with that caveat. Also, it's my understanding that miles/$ of energy is much less for EVs than ICE vehicles.
I (and my wife) are outraged by J.D. Vance's slur against women who choose not to bear children. Moreover I think that conservative intellectuals or economists who justify Vance risk leading us into electoral quicksand. Better to leave Mr. Samuels "unheard", in my opinion.
The whole conversation smacks of social engineering, not a good side hobby for economists. Don't talk to me about child tax credits or other Easter eggs for the next unread thousand page omnibus. Just simplify the tax code, and reduce central government planning of our individual lives and choices.
Let's wipe the "Brides of the State" (BOTS) accusation out of our vocabulary. It is a condescending insult to large classes of women struggling to attain the basics of life: loving relationships and good, clean jobs. Those who find satisfaction from careers benefit all, even as their taxes pay for the educations of children not their own. Those who have been unlucky in romance or sex deserve all the options they need in terms of reproductive choice, and politicians who oppose such choices deserve to fall. Clean up the family planning mess on the conservative aisle before you call out the Democrats with a taunt akin to "Who's Your Daddy?"
So long as our country remains an international magnet thanks to free market capitalism, we will not want for future generations of workers. Hopefully their interests, aptitudes, and work permits will be a match for the society's needs. What kind of society that will be -- one with individual freedom, or one subject to a social planning "elite" -- is up to us.
The current of thought has been so anti-motherhood and certainly anti-wifehood for so long, I would have thought Vance's little remark about women being lonely with pets rather than children might have cheered you, rather than the reverse, with the reflection that it was seen as so very singular, and was quickly debarred as beyond the pale of discourse by the media and by actress Jennifer Aniston. He was a little out of date with the cats though. Dogs have clearly trounced cats. Anyway, his musing seems highly unlikely to cause a retreat from dogs and toward babies.
What may be harder to deal with are the aging women with children who wonder where their missing grandbabies are. Not everyone is quite so happy with their line coming to an end. Perhaps that's just human nature. It would be a little strange if the subject drew no notice whatsoever. It's always going to be hard to get all the balls bouncing in exact unison.
Children are a deal of trouble and it is a shame that that's what's required for there to be people in your life. And yet, and yet ... I am surely not entirely alone in occasionally thinking, of my little one - if I could give you a magic pill, that would keep you by me, just as you are, little and sweet and needing me, forever.
They grow up - and this is what they don't tell you: it's as though those little ones had died. This is not for the faint of heart, or the overly sensitive. Fortunately I suppose most of the world busily procreates without giving it any thought, and they can come here and be people.
Now if the men ever decide they want the air-conditioned jobs, then we may be in trouble.
The secret perhaps is to keep importing men from hot places ...
Getting others to do your work for you - when did that ever cause any problems in American history? ;-)
> Francis Turner argues that renewable energy should be converted to synthetic hydrocarbons rather than stored in batteries.
This makes an enormous amount of sense to me, considering the worldwide storage & distribution networks, and the fact that so many heavy machines, chemical and industrial processes require hydrocarbons. Assuming it can be done with reasonable efficiency, storing energy as hydrocarbons seems far better than batteries for a huge number of power-intensive use cases.
I first got turned onto this from Terraform Industries.
> The Terraformer is designed to integrate directly with a standard 1 MW solar array. No grid connection, no interconnection queue. The Terraformer gets solar energy to market as energy dense, clean, cheap, carbon neutral synthetic natural gas.
Really interesting discussion of the topic on their blog
YES to encourage more folk with earlier marriages. Yeah, Libbers want to end govt support programs, but in almost all areas, not just edu, that “policy is not going to happen.”
My non-libber alternative is to provide Big govt support for younger marriages, like when the sum of the ages is 600 months (50 years, 27+23 or any combo). Their birth dates & marriage date determines the %, with a 1% reduction per month for each additional later month, up to 690 months, and the 10% marriage benefit available to all first time married folks.
The max amount should be 1/2 of prior years median income tax filed, about $30,000 only available once per person, so both first time married would get $60,000.
The game of promising goodies to voters will only end when Dems start opposing it, which will only happen when Reps start spending govt cash on helping those most likely to vote Rep. Like married people rather than the childless rat racers.
The rat race has never been fun, and only a tiny proportion of workaholic types become Fortune 500 CEOs.
“The game of promising goodies to voters will only end when Dems start opposing it, which will only happen when Reps start spending govt cash on helping those most likely to vote Rep. Like married people rather than the childless rat racers.”
That game will never stop, now that it’s started, unless we abolish the income tax. Of course, even without the income tax, the game will go on, but with less money to distribute.
This should be easy to test: have Reps in power shower govt cash, or tax cuts, mostly on those who vote Rep. (Most tax cuts have helped rich Dems far more tha average Rep workers.)
If Dems don’t object, I’d agree the game won’t stop.
If Dems do object, would you agree that the game could stop?
There are a lot of efforts out there now to discourage the college track in favor of different sorts of training programs either corporate or state financed. The difficulty is just that no one can compete with the largesse of the federal government through the lending programs and Pell Grants. Unless Congress acts (play the laugh track), what it more likely to happen is that the universities become even more vocational. So the new university will have even less in common with the old university as it becomes a sort of community college with nicer buildings. We will live to see college students studying logistics management programs and graduating with a commercial driver's license because incentives are powerful.
It's also not clear that the college path is really the main cause of low female fertility in the US. The 2022 Census even puts graduate-educated fertility as slightly higher than BA-only fertility (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertility/2022/am-women-fertility/t3c.xlsx). HS dropouts have the worst fertility rates. The percentage childless rates in every educational demographic were astoundingly high in 2022 (56.8% for 15-44 year old females who dropped out of college) and are higher now.
The problem that all the think tanks seem to be scrambling over is that the whole post-baby boom way of life is a dead man walking. By the time the investigators determine the proximate cause, religious maniacs will be contending with one another for the remnants of an advanced ex-liberal civilization. We do not know which item in the post-war bundle is causing the problem (plastics? feminism? television? smartphones? TikTok? novels? the automobile?), but we do know that rejecting most of the bundle fixes the problem while creating many other problems, such as how you finance the world's largest military when a large portion of your population has their schedule completely booked up attending barn-raisings.
Re: "I say let’s discourage the slow lifestyle. No government subsidies for going to college, except for gifted children from poor families. Stop gearing K-12 toward the college track. Let’s try to get back to 20-year-olds being adults."
+1
I would add — perhaps in the spirit of Julie Luckey's decision to homeschool her children — that, upon adolescence, youths should spend much less time with one another in what amounts to protracted day care, and much more time immersed in work settings with adults.
I’m not as pessimistic as Arnold on this one. I think the realization that we have overinvested in college has only come recently. Maybe the last 3-5 years? It seems like there should be an alliance of progressive and conservatives to support more vocational training and to lower college requirements for jobs. Tim Walz did it in MN.
I’m not a fan of virtual reality headsets, Facebook, or Mark Zuckerberg. The Palmer Luckey article is interesting, but except for his defense work, has Luckey made the world a better place? I would rather kids be outside in the real world, playing pickup games, getting scrapes and bruises, and interacting with people in their neighborhood.
It is interesting to know that 22% of American women over 40 have never been married. It would be even more interesting to know how many have never been in what they thought was a "long-term committed relationship".
I've occasionally palled around with "The Young Republicans" (YRs) in my state. They're pretty generous in how they define "young" all the way up to 39 instead of something more like 29 or 35 where I would probably cut it off but thats what they've chosen. Like the churches I frequent, curiously absent, in those places, are single young women. I'm still somewhat surprised that the few women at the YRs I go to are usually unmarried, childless, or both. Across the board almost all American women have grown up with parents and in a culture that has told them to prioritize careerism and professionalism over family and church.
Regarding church, most of the women there are over 40. There are very few under 40 who are single. Places that are either explicitly or implicitly "conservative" or traditional have a serious issue with female turnover! Amongst young women who are still traditional, they do have higher TFR than their progressive counterparts. I'm curious to see how this plays out long term. The only younger (under35) women I know with 4+ or even 3+ kids are through church.
There have been a lot of outrage pieces over JDVance by BOTS. You can find them on substack.
First, they all focus on perceived status considerations. Vance is lowering their status.
Most don't mention family policy/benefits/taxes, though if they do they will vaguely accuse the GOP of all sorts of things that are bad for families and the DEM of all sorts of things that are good for families. "Why doesn't the GOP lower housing costs?" is one I see a lot. If you point out that housing construction is a lot higher and prices are a lot lower in red states it's a lot of blank stares.
I will often ask "retirement benefits are pay as you go, so they can only be paid by future taxpayers. shouldn't those that haven't raised future taxpayers do more to help those that have taken on the expense of doing so out of fairness?"
People will say "I pay school taxes for kids I don't have!" When you show the math that SS/Medicare/Medicaid, etc way outstrip their K-12 contribution they just drop the subject. They also firmly oppose school choice.
I then suggest that an extra $10,000 in taxes a year by childless single people would probably balance the books. I even grant that well targeted, even half that could probably make a big difference, and that it could probably be paid for by ending a few tax breaks for well off childless. Is it really so much to ask for such a contribution for a bigger CTC?
Deny Deny Deny. It's not really about the money. Its about misogyny or something.
I took that "Life of Julia" line commenting on one. I linked to a study from the New Zealand government showing that men have a large fiscal contribution over their lifetime and women have a large fiscal deficit (mostly owing to old age pensions). I showed how every group except single women vote GOP, and that the implied reason in the Julia campaign is that single women were selling their votes to the DEMs for welfare.
I was told that there was plenty of money to pay for everything if we would just tax billionaires more.
Women really fucking LOVE having lots of sexual power in their 20s. I don't think they are going to give it up. The ones that fail to make the transition before the clock runs out are really bitter and want to marry Uncle Sam and have a margarita. They don't care about fairness or math or logic or what happens to the next generation. They basically are what JDVance says they are.
Rather than trying to win over this demographic I think you just need to go really bold appealing to families. Cut the crap and offer a CTC 5x Kamala paid for by the childless DEM professional class. Make it about their greed.
I haven't seen any evidence the GOP is thinking that way though. And its not like I have any way of communicating it to them.
"Women really fucking LOVE having lots of sexual power in their 20s. I don't think they are going to give it up. The ones that fail to make the transition before the clock runs out are really bitter and want to marry Uncle Sam and have a margarita."
Cruel but perhaps true. The first sentence certainly is.
The rise of single adult women is very much a feature and even seen as desirable by some, especially feminists. I think you could substitute the "single" in single women with "independent" in the sense they don't have to rely on a traditional human partner or family. Their goal is to make these women as independent as possible through state support. The UnHerd article mentions the grants, loans, subsidies, women's job training programs, affirmative action, and welfare but there is even more than that. About 60% of public sector workers in the USA are women. Do they want a smaller government?
If there is a growing gap in how the two sexes see the world (Gen Z women being the most progressive ever recorded but the males being slightly more right wing than you'd expect or just apathetic), this may be part of it. A multitude of policies regarding Civil Rights, education, employment, and sex have further enabled it. Absent those things a lot of single women would either be much poorer or have to depend on their parents or a male provider which is what feminists don't want, regardless of the direct and indirect costs. They just really seem H*ll bent on making sure women don't ever have to interact with their parents, siblings, extended family, or a man unless they give "enthusiastic" consent.
On the cultural and social level this is impacting families and relationships and probably making women more hostile to them. It's why women can just walk away from their parents and never talk to them as part of our modern culture's "I don't owe you anything and you're not entitled to my respect or affection" attitude (but the state owes everyone, especially women, enough cash to be financially independent). It's why they can declare "men are trash". Because they don't really need to do or say anything to be agreeable around men because they basically don't need them in any direct way. Luckily, most people I know don't behave like this, but these attitudes are here now and the army of single adult women isn't going anywhere.
Yes to more people having children in their early twenties. Fine by me if socialist-inclined women go unmarried and never have children.
The problem is that everyone is socialist-inclined until they have kids. In my peer group, I've seen extremely liberal women move to the right after their first child.
Seems more like the root problem is the social pressure to defer family formation for so many years.
"Francis Turner argues that renewable energy should be converted to synthetic hydrocarbons rather than stored in batteries."
Check out Terraform Industries who have a plan to turn increasingly cheap solar energy into natural gas, including pulling CO2 from the air so it's carbon neutral. They have a roadmap to make this cost competitive with extracted gas...
"No government subsidies for going to college"
Better still, a Baby Bill - free college once your first two kids are in elementary school.
The TF "roadmap" is just wishful thinking that certain exogenous trends in relative-prices will not just continue but get much better, not an actual plan of research and development to innovate to overcome major natural constraints and bottlenecks to continue pushing those relative prices into hoped-for economical territory where they can be competitive without subsidies. Making hydrocarbons from atmospheric (or captured) CO2 and solar panels could be done as a high school science project decades ago with enough equipment at the student's disposal. It just can't compete even at mega industrial scale unless the ratio of solar power to natural gas decreases by at least an order of magnitude, which by any reasonable guess is nowhere near on the horizon.
It's definitely a unique market offering that depends on continued decreases in the price of solar panels.
The graph of actual solar panel prices against deployment looks like a decent one to bet on, though:
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/
Decreased by 90% in the past 10 years alone, with an especially large decrease between 2023 and 2024.
> by any reasonable guess is nowhere near on the horizon.
I think it's reasonable to think that this trend will continue for a little while longer at least. I agree that they appear to be early to market in the absence of govt incentives though. But if the trend holds up for another 5 years, does that address your criticism?
Jinx, I also posted about Terraform Industries without seeing yours.
Having had the good fortune to go to a top 1 engineering school where I took heavy course loads and worked around the clock, I marveled at how much more I learned of value in my first year in industry. Not that it was useless, but maybe 5% was of practical use. I think college education is of practical value only for academics who intend to do research (e.g. a vanishingly small number of people).
In conjunction, consider the ages of the USA founders at the time of the Declaration signing -- all 19-24 or so.
Abolish college
Well not exactly -- treat it as the trade school for academics that it is, leading to reductions of 95% in enrollment, and beat back the pampering & infantilization of young adults
In hindsight I think I would have been a much better parent if it had happened at 30 year instead of 25. I think something similar is true for the vast majority who have kids before 25.
Really? What would have been worse at 25? Ask I, who became a parent at 32.
I became a parent much younger than Stu. I was the baby of my family and so beyond some babysitting (when my customers had usually put the smallest one to bed before I arrived) had little experience with caring for little kids or even with cooking and so forth. (This may have been a function of an American childhood in the latter 20th century; I assume the large families of the past produced girls mostly prepared for motherhood, at ages still younger than myself. I was sufficiently young that once, at a cafeteria, the Spanish-speaking girls who worked there (Luby's: later got in trouble with the feds for hiring illegal immigrants) came over to the table to shyly ask how old I was, which sounds bizarre but goes to show how rare a very young Anglo mom was in the city in those days, since of course it was no marvel for Hispanic girls to then routinely have children at 15 or sixteen. At children's birthday parties I was sometimes assumed to be the nanny. A mom friend of mine, some 20 years older, said she got the opposite treatment: service workers assumed she was the grandmother.)
In essentials I still belonged at the kids' table myself. I was by turns fanatically devoted to my child and also still moody and selfish of my own time. I had very poor judgment. I was a terrible wife and my husband was a terrible husband. Only the bourgeois norms with which we had both grown up, and on his part a conservative outlook, kept us ... keeping on. On the other hand, both of us parents liked to "play". We were perhaps more fun than older parents. The enthusiasms of our own childhoods were fresh in our minds and we enjoyed sharing them with our child. My husband had to work full-time of course (very suddenly!) and simultaneously went on to grad school but apart from little "gig economy" things (before the letter) I had nothing else whatever on my mind. When around our elders, which I wish we had been more - we functioned more like big brother/sister. I actually wish I hadn't even sought that stupid part-time work. It was a waste of time and made me tired. But I had imbibed the idea that money was very important - you were nothing if you weren't earning money (however inconsequential).
The indisputably best thing about having had a child when you're little more than a child - is that the child got to know well not only his grandparents (surrogate parents) but also his great-grandparents and grand-uncles, etc.
The worst is that you are still learning school-of-life lessons that it would have been better to have known already. Your innocent child becomes a party to your mistakes.
I think if there is truly some movement to return to younger parenting - people are going to have to lose the ideal of perfect parenthood that has developed.
I just did the math and realized my mother was the same age I was when she had her first child. She was presumably the same silly creature I was, yet just by virtue of the different time was more mature.
I am not sure my young relatives who have spent their twenties in constant traveling and fun and making in some cases, really good money, are necessarily more equipped for the moment of self-sacrifice that is giving birth.
Consumer goods related to baby, I've noticed, become much more important nowadays, to the older career mom. I was at a shower recently and didn't even grasp what many of the gifts were for the most part.
You don't really need much of anything. But I guess the economy would wither and die if that was understood.
Less mature, less financially stable, less likely finished education, less experienced, etc.
I know this sounds stupid but I don't see how any of those four directly lead to being a worse parent.
Luciaphile above made an interesting observation, "I am not sure my young relatives who have spent their twenties in constant traveling and fun and making in some cases, really good money, are necessarily more equipped for the moment of self-sacrifice that is giving birth." I would add "and that is having an immature constantly changing dependent little person in your life". In some ways you are less equipped because you are used to, and in some ways dependent on, a very different reality.
Doesn't sound stupid and sounds even further from that after reading Luciaphile.
I left out one part I couldn't think of the the right way to say it - less ready to self-sacrifice. On that note I've known a few very old dads and they were extremely self-sacrificing. And she reminded me of something else - I was thinking of men and the optimal ages might be younger for women. Women certainly mature younger. And I didn't think of the advantages of likely enjoying play more.
I still stick to my age preferences but that's just me.
Willingness for self-sacrifice, more importantly many compromises, is likely a requirement for men to be happy in marriage with kids. More important than finance (over some minimum), ed, experience all are less important. Maturity is interestingly close to but different.
In my opinion self-sacrifice is one of the many parts that makes up maturity.
Surely the Birth Dearth is one of the West's top 3 actual problems, along with Education and Debt, since the climate "crisis" will pale as the formerly rich West shrinks. First, a lot of people are apparently unfulfilled. Second, the Ponzi scheme that is the welfare-warfare state will terminate much sooner. I believe the Gallup poll that the goal of 2-3+ kids is widely held, so it's a matter of how.
Apparently, bribing people to have children has limited effect, and it just adds to the debt. It may be more constructive to: 1) Educate young people that child 1 should happen before 30 years of age (I'd naively assumed it was 40); 2) Switch to professional degrees as undergraduates, like most countries, instead of a luxury good liberal arts degree then a professional degree, and the loans and delays in family starts that come with them; 3) Holding job offers open or promising to ease workforce (re)entry for mothers; 4) Stop selling fear of the future (e.g., climate apocalypse propaganda); 5) ???
More distally, reducing government's taxes and false promises. may open up space for community again. Deregulation and rapid growth will restore hope for the future, make men more economically successful and more attractive husbands and fathers than Uncle Sam. Actual root cause analysis is required as social engineering is not going to work; somehow removing barriers to nature's call is more likely to succeed. In the meantime, stop inflation, stop transferring resources from young to old, start shrinking government, drill, baby, drill, and build, baby, build!
I agree with you about the discouragement, as long as it’s not done by the government. And no subsidies for anybody! Let the for-profits do the talent hunting.
Then Francis Turner should be in favor of a carbon tax.
"By far the best way to store energy is to create some kind of hydrocarbon fuel with the energy."
I realize your aren't an engineer but I still can't believe you fell for such BS. Off the top of my head here are three faults:
1 Given we don't yet have a commercial method of creating a synthetic hydrocarbon which we know a price point, that is a ludicrous statement.
2 Pump storage hydro is far better even if places to do it are limited. Storing in all available batteries is certainly better than a synthetic hydrocarbon conversion.
3 "The best" is almost always situation dependent. The statement is akin to saying all cars should be EVs because they are best. Again, BS.
The math may work for synthetic hydrocarbon production if:
- it is solar, wind or nuclear
- the current electricity grid price is zero (all the solar and wind production is more than demand)
- the batteries are full, as is the pumped storage
In that scenario, instead of throwing the electricity away it becomes better to use it to produce synthetic hydrocarbon. At least you could sell the synthetic hydrocarbon for something rather than getting zero for your surplus electricity.
Many products started their useful life as waste from a different process.
Depends on what it takes to build the production plant and how much it is used in the ways you mention but yes.
Note: sometimes electric prices are negative.
To be charitable... I think the statement can be made reasonable by adding an introductory clause, "If they all cost about the same, 'By far the best way to store energy is to create some kind of hydrocarbon fuel with the energy.'" There are lots of advantages to hydrocarbons.
Of course, they do not cost remotely the same today, with synthetic hydrocarbons stratospherically expensive. Cheap synthetic hydrocarbons may be even further away than controlled fusion. (Though some of the cost disadvantage disappears when you realize that hydrocarbons don't require new infrastructure, that there is a large "installed base".)
I suppose that could have some truth to it but, as you say, we are pretty far from that. Hard to argue "best" with that caveat. Also, it's my understanding that miles/$ of energy is much less for EVs than ICE vehicles.
I (and my wife) are outraged by J.D. Vance's slur against women who choose not to bear children. Moreover I think that conservative intellectuals or economists who justify Vance risk leading us into electoral quicksand. Better to leave Mr. Samuels "unheard", in my opinion.
The whole conversation smacks of social engineering, not a good side hobby for economists. Don't talk to me about child tax credits or other Easter eggs for the next unread thousand page omnibus. Just simplify the tax code, and reduce central government planning of our individual lives and choices.
Let's wipe the "Brides of the State" (BOTS) accusation out of our vocabulary. It is a condescending insult to large classes of women struggling to attain the basics of life: loving relationships and good, clean jobs. Those who find satisfaction from careers benefit all, even as their taxes pay for the educations of children not their own. Those who have been unlucky in romance or sex deserve all the options they need in terms of reproductive choice, and politicians who oppose such choices deserve to fall. Clean up the family planning mess on the conservative aisle before you call out the Democrats with a taunt akin to "Who's Your Daddy?"
So long as our country remains an international magnet thanks to free market capitalism, we will not want for future generations of workers. Hopefully their interests, aptitudes, and work permits will be a match for the society's needs. What kind of society that will be -- one with individual freedom, or one subject to a social planning "elite" -- is up to us.
The current of thought has been so anti-motherhood and certainly anti-wifehood for so long, I would have thought Vance's little remark about women being lonely with pets rather than children might have cheered you, rather than the reverse, with the reflection that it was seen as so very singular, and was quickly debarred as beyond the pale of discourse by the media and by actress Jennifer Aniston. He was a little out of date with the cats though. Dogs have clearly trounced cats. Anyway, his musing seems highly unlikely to cause a retreat from dogs and toward babies.
What may be harder to deal with are the aging women with children who wonder where their missing grandbabies are. Not everyone is quite so happy with their line coming to an end. Perhaps that's just human nature. It would be a little strange if the subject drew no notice whatsoever. It's always going to be hard to get all the balls bouncing in exact unison.
Children are a deal of trouble and it is a shame that that's what's required for there to be people in your life. And yet, and yet ... I am surely not entirely alone in occasionally thinking, of my little one - if I could give you a magic pill, that would keep you by me, just as you are, little and sweet and needing me, forever.
They grow up - and this is what they don't tell you: it's as though those little ones had died. This is not for the faint of heart, or the overly sensitive. Fortunately I suppose most of the world busily procreates without giving it any thought, and they can come here and be people.
Now if the men ever decide they want the air-conditioned jobs, then we may be in trouble.
The secret perhaps is to keep importing men from hot places ...
Getting others to do your work for you - when did that ever cause any problems in American history? ;-)
> Francis Turner argues that renewable energy should be converted to synthetic hydrocarbons rather than stored in batteries.
This makes an enormous amount of sense to me, considering the worldwide storage & distribution networks, and the fact that so many heavy machines, chemical and industrial processes require hydrocarbons. Assuming it can be done with reasonable efficiency, storing energy as hydrocarbons seems far better than batteries for a huge number of power-intensive use cases.
I first got turned onto this from Terraform Industries.
> The Terraformer is designed to integrate directly with a standard 1 MW solar array. No grid connection, no interconnection queue. The Terraformer gets solar energy to market as energy dense, clean, cheap, carbon neutral synthetic natural gas.
Really interesting discussion of the topic on their blog
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/home/
Relatedly, though they are not as far along, Valar Atomics is using Nuclear power for heat to produce natural gas.
https://www.valaratomics.com/
YES to encourage more folk with earlier marriages. Yeah, Libbers want to end govt support programs, but in almost all areas, not just edu, that “policy is not going to happen.”
My non-libber alternative is to provide Big govt support for younger marriages, like when the sum of the ages is 600 months (50 years, 27+23 or any combo). Their birth dates & marriage date determines the %, with a 1% reduction per month for each additional later month, up to 690 months, and the 10% marriage benefit available to all first time married folks.
The max amount should be 1/2 of prior years median income tax filed, about $30,000 only available once per person, so both first time married would get $60,000.
The game of promising goodies to voters will only end when Dems start opposing it, which will only happen when Reps start spending govt cash on helping those most likely to vote Rep. Like married people rather than the childless rat racers.
The rat race has never been fun, and only a tiny proportion of workaholic types become Fortune 500 CEOs.
“The game of promising goodies to voters will only end when Dems start opposing it, which will only happen when Reps start spending govt cash on helping those most likely to vote Rep. Like married people rather than the childless rat racers.”
That game will never stop, now that it’s started, unless we abolish the income tax. Of course, even without the income tax, the game will go on, but with less money to distribute.
This should be easy to test: have Reps in power shower govt cash, or tax cuts, mostly on those who vote Rep. (Most tax cuts have helped rich Dems far more tha average Rep workers.)
If Dems don’t object, I’d agree the game won’t stop.
If Dems do object, would you agree that the game could stop?
No - that’s just a disagreement about who gets to win the game.
There are a lot of efforts out there now to discourage the college track in favor of different sorts of training programs either corporate or state financed. The difficulty is just that no one can compete with the largesse of the federal government through the lending programs and Pell Grants. Unless Congress acts (play the laugh track), what it more likely to happen is that the universities become even more vocational. So the new university will have even less in common with the old university as it becomes a sort of community college with nicer buildings. We will live to see college students studying logistics management programs and graduating with a commercial driver's license because incentives are powerful.
It's also not clear that the college path is really the main cause of low female fertility in the US. The 2022 Census even puts graduate-educated fertility as slightly higher than BA-only fertility (https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/demo/tables/fertility/2022/am-women-fertility/t3c.xlsx). HS dropouts have the worst fertility rates. The percentage childless rates in every educational demographic were astoundingly high in 2022 (56.8% for 15-44 year old females who dropped out of college) and are higher now.
The problem that all the think tanks seem to be scrambling over is that the whole post-baby boom way of life is a dead man walking. By the time the investigators determine the proximate cause, religious maniacs will be contending with one another for the remnants of an advanced ex-liberal civilization. We do not know which item in the post-war bundle is causing the problem (plastics? feminism? television? smartphones? TikTok? novels? the automobile?), but we do know that rejecting most of the bundle fixes the problem while creating many other problems, such as how you finance the world's largest military when a large portion of your population has their schedule completely booked up attending barn-raisings.