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Decoding Fertility Rates: Income, Culture, and Ideological Influences In this episode, Simone and Malcolm dive deep into fertility statistics, examining the correlation between income levels and fertility rates across different demographics. They unpack several studies, including ones from Lyman Stone, and discuss the intricate relationship between wealth and the number of children people have. The discussion also covers cultural influences, historical trends, and specific cases in various parts of the world such as pre-industrial societies, modern Africa, and the United States. Key insights are shared on how educational attainment, societal norms, and economic factors impact fertility rates. Tune in to explore the nuances and complexities of demographic changes and fertility patterns.

[00:00:00] Simone! Today we are going to do an episode that focuses on Fertility stats, and it's gonna be a stat heavy episode. It's gonna be a study heavy episode, and it's gonna be on demographic collapse, which our audience love.

Ooh, the trifecta. The trifecta. So in today's episode, we are going to focus on the nuances of when fertility decline does not follow the model. The more wealth an individual has, the fewer kids they have. Where are the kinks in this particular incredibly robust statistical trends armor? Would you like to know more?

I, I like that we're looking at this because I think The exceptions to the general trend probably yield really useful insights So we're gonna be focused on a few articles here But one of the ones that I'm going to draw a lot from it's actually from Lyman Stone Who runs the Institute of Family Studies and it's [00:01:00] called more money more babies.

What's the relationship between income and fertility now? Something we should note here, and it's one of the reasons I'm looking at this, is I believe in always really digging deep. when somebody says something that sounds, you know, utterly preposterous or is obviously ideologically motivated because there's often elements of truth in what they're saying that I may not be seeing on the other side of the ideological fence.

Right. So those who are not familiar, haven't read a lot of limestone stuff. He really likes to manipulate statistics to try to argue his perspective. And his perspective is always. That we should be doing more cash handouts and that this can be solved with Christianity. Those are generally the two arguments that he's always going to use.

And so he'll often twist things to sort of this, you know, Christian socialist perspective. But this means that he has to argue and he has argued explicitly. There isn't that much of a correlation between [00:02:00] fertility and income, which is just a preposterous thing on its face. There was a piece that he wrote that was attacking us.

And this was one of the claims he made when we were pointing out that you don't seem to be able to solve this with cash handouts. However he has invested a lot of energy and a lot of his own personal credibility in debating this matter. And as such he has found a number of interesting points that I may not have caught myself which don't reverse either of the two larger truisms.

The first being that you do not appear to, with any reasonable amount of money, be able to pay people or with social services, increase fertility rates. And the second being that generally speaking, the more income a country has or the more income an individual has, the lower their fertility rate is going to be.

But there are modifications in this trend. Hmm. Okay. Over where we see those in turn. So the first is that if you look in pre industrial societies, [00:03:00] the more income an individual has, particularly a man, the higher their fertility rate is. in pre industrial societies. Yes. And this is only with male fertility, not female fertility.

No, it's also female fertility, but it is more tied with male fertility. So this is from an article titled men's status and reproductive success in 33 non industrial societies affects a subsistence marriage system and reproductive strategy. And this showed a meta analysis of 288 results of 33 non industrial populations.

And it showed that. Status is significantly associated with men's reproductive success consistent with the evolved basis for status pursuit. Status hierarchies have changed dramatically though in recent eras. , if anybody doesn't immediately see the implication of this, it does show that dysgenic fertility selection, sorry, I should explain what dysgenic means. Dysgenic means certain environments can cause things to [00:04:00] be selected for in a population that do not actually make the population more fit but just increase the number of surviving offspring that population has.

A great example of this is rabbits in the UK. If you've ever seen rabbits in the UK, they're all deformed and weird looking and witness. Yes they, I don't remember the full story. But , the point being is that they don't have natural predators and because they don't have natural predators, it's literally just the ones that can have the most kids that survive. And so there is no real fitness preservation technique , or pressure for the population.

And so they end up being . cancerous witless balls , of tumors. They're really quite gross. If you ever see a rabbit in the UK, it's, it's, it's kind of scary. But where this is relevant to humans is we've been under similar pressures for a while, as we mentioned in our can society become an idiocracy episode which by the way, was ad restricted.

I don't [00:05:00] even think we went that spicy in that one. Just saw that today. Maybe we sound like it. And I'm like, come on, man. Yes. Humans have genes and they're correlated with intelligence and they're being selected against. This is like really clear in the data, but okay. I guess we'll pretend we live in your little fantasy world where everyone's born exactly the same.

But anyway, the point being here that dysgenic selection started in humans with the rise of the industrial revolution, it appears. Or with modern industrial society. And that before this, the more status someone was able to accrue, whether that was through, you know, wealth or charisma or attractiveness or et cetera, the more kids they were going to have now, generally the two things most correlated with a high fertility rate are low IQ and obesity which are, you know, witless rabbits, right?

I think it's low educational attainment. Not necessarily though. Okay. Low educational attainment. Yeah. But yeah, not, not ideal, not [00:06:00] ideal. Obviously this doesn't really help his larger point.

What fertility rates were like in pre industrial societies isn't exactly relevant in the modern world. But it is, you know, an interesting and novel point nonetheless. But to him saying something like, well, you can't just assume that less income means more kids because in pre industrial societies, that wasn't true, it's like, yeah, but that's not relevant to the current, to a post industrial society.

problem that we're facing that's like throwing sand in my eyes with statistics. This is what I mean when I say he, he likes doing the, the pocket sand thing. Statistics and hope you don't notice.

Pocket sand.

Okay. So for the next point. He says here, the author argues that historic fertility declines were overwhelmingly caused by novel cultural norms, which are often correlated, but distinct from income.

So here I was looking at the study that he was looking at. It's called a culture and the historic fertility transition.

This paper presents a novel argument for the historic fertility [00:07:00] transition, emphasizing the role of cultural forces alongside economic factors. The authors highlight a significant and abrupt decline in fertility rates among British households in 1877, which was observed not only in Britain, but also among culturally British populations living in Canada, the United States, and South Africa.

The authors propose that the famous Braggadoll Bestent Trial of 1877 served as a possible catalyst for this widespread change in fertility behavior. Now this would be very interesting if it was true, okay? If it was true that only British People like people in Britain and British immigrants experienced a sudden and sharp fertility decline all at around the same year, starting at around the same year, due to some massive cultural change.

I would be like, Oh, that's really interesting. I mean, yes, we know that culture affects fertility, but this would be a more acute effect than we had seen historically. So, [00:08:00] do you happen to know what , the Braggadon Dissent Trial of 1877 was about? No, I've never heard of it. It was a book about Called The Fruits of Philosophy That Discussed Contraceptives.

And the court trial was about trying to ban it. After the trial, book sales rose from around a thousand copies to a hundred and twenty five thousand copies. So this was a Streisand effect thing? It was a Streisand effect thing, but It also completely undermines the claim here. This was not a book that popularized contraceptives.

It was a book that taught a population that didn't know how to use contraceptives broadly to how to use contraceptives broadly for the first time. Of course, it was going to have an effect on fertility rates. This is not. particularly interesting as a data point. Contraceptives have the capacity to lower fertility rates in a population that has never been exposed to them.

Duh. But what [00:09:00] is interesting here and the reason this is pocket sand

Pocket sand.

is that when you ban contraceptives in populations that already have them, that actually decreases fertility rates. As we saw with the Romania situation where you get a sharp increase for a couple of years and then a sharp decrease, right?

And the reason is, is because then having lots of kids becomes associated with low wealth and low status, and nobody wants to do it. So the people with self control stop having kids. It's a really bad way to increase fertility rate. But also just more broadly, I remember at the perinatalist conference, somebody was like, Well, what do you think about banning condoms?

And I was like, do, like, do I really want More people accidentally having kids. Like, is that the, is that what I'm trying to do? Yeah, that's the solution to our problems. More unwanted children. Yeah, more unwanted children. That will solve the problem. I was like, that's the, that's the comical, no, no, no, not just for the children's sake, but from the genetic effects of something like that.

[00:10:00] That's just not healthy. Right. So no, I had no but again, pocket sand there. This one, this one may not be pocket sand in France, fertility fell 100 years before industrialization. While in England, the first country to industrialize, fertility did not decline for a century after industrialization.

Wasn't that in France though, more A product of famine and hardship. Yeah, there was famine and hardship during that period. There have been various studies that analyze this, the mainstream perception. Is that it was probably due to decline in religiosity. This is the interview when I've heard most.

But remember, what I said, all of Lyman's arguments, whenever you read him, he's like one of those far lefties who literally can only argue for far lefty positions and you just know, like, okay, they're going to twist everything. And you get really interested when they're arguing something against their Or like Leather Apron Club, like if Leather Apron Club ever argued a left leaning position, I'd be like, this [00:11:00] is something I need to take ultra seriously because he would never do that.

But you know, if, if, if Limestone is arguing Christianity good or socialism good, you know, pretty much, I don't know, it's, it's, it's not that much you can take from it, but I will note that this does appear to be true. So, the decline in marital fertility in France began around 1800, about 70 years before other European countries, before other European countries.

Some sources indicate the decline may have started even earlier in the 1760s. By 1840, France's Marital fertility rate had fallen to two thirds of its 1800 level. Oh yeah, you had the French Revolution, tons of secularization. That, that, okay. Yeah, and remember the hope problem. If you don't have home, you don't have kids.

Yeah, a lot of instability, a huge amount of change, and probably people just didn't know what to expect from their government and infrastructure and everything [00:12:00] going forward. But let's go over the various theories that have been put forward for this. Okay. I will note that in the 1800s, the average English woman was still having six children during this decline in France's fertility rate.

And so here are the various things here. Secularization a decline in the influence of the Catholic Church may have led to a wider use of contraceptive and changing attitudes about family size. Cultural changes. The French Revolution may have played a major role in the change of social norms around family size.

Economic pressures. Some people argue that pre industrial France Had limited economic opportunities, creating pressure to limit family size. Think about the economic famines and pressure that would have been created by the French revolution. Obviously, even if you're in a status where income translates to kids, you're going to have lower number of kids there.

Right. And land inheritance laws, post revolution laws requiring equal division of property among heirs may have incentivized smaller families. That is definitely going to incentivize smaller families. So people who do not know this, this [00:13:00] law was generally something historically that you would impose on a community that you had conquered.

So famously the English imposed this change in inheritance laws on the Irish after conquering them. Because why will it quickly breaks up any large family was a lot of power if they have to split their land every generation among all of their descendants instead of, yeah, it distributes rather than consolidates their power, increasingly consolidates.

Yeah. So, they ended up. Yeah, not a, not a great situation. So they ended up incentivizing lower fertility rates, but let's talk about more about France's secularization because this is worth talking about. And I found pretty interesting. France experienced a process of secularization and de Christianization beginning in the 18th century, well before the French revolution of 1789.

This decline in religious influence occurred much earlier than in England. Secular wills increased from 10 percent in 1710 to 80 percent by 1780. So before the turn of the [00:14:00] 1800s, okay, long before the turn of the 1800s, 80 percent of wills were secular. There were only 10 percent less than a century before.

There was a significant decrease in the number of clergymen by capita by the end of the 18th century. Yeah, that makes sense. A rose is an attempt to reform Catholicism by bringing some Calvinistic doctrines, such as the depravity of man, predestination, irresistible grace, and limited atonement entered.

And this was a movement called the Janus enists, Janus enists? But Janus enists were not Protestant. They were a reforming group of Catholics who some, Blame for this lower fertility rate because they made the, but this doesn't really make sense because Calvinist groups in this time period had really high fertility rates.

So I think this might be more just any sort of moderating secularizing political forces going to have these problems. And we also need to ask why, you know, we always mentioned that Catholics are uniquely susceptible to fertility collapse. Why the [00:15:00] first of the European fertility collapse that happened in a Catholic country.

And my guess is there's probably a big, a big cross correlating reason there. But do you have any thoughts before we move forwards? If I had to guess, I would say it was mostly due to a period of cultural and religious and political turmoil where to your point, more simply, there's just not really a lot of hope or certainty around the future, and I think when people don't have hope or certainty, they stop having kids, especially when they don't have, you know, amazing, abundant resources and or.

I guess a lot of social support. I don't think social support was that strong at this time either. Yeah, the, the church offered some, but you know, it was limited compared to modern social support. Yeah. All right. So, now we are going to talk about Africa. So he has here today, fertility in Africa is a lower than it was for Europe or Asian countries when they had similar income levels [00:16:00] because modern Africa, though poor is nonetheless highly exposed.

To globalize cultural norms at the individual level. When African women get richer, they actually tend to have more children.. this came from an article called how developmental programs impact fertility rates in Africa. And a quote from it is, however, another strand of the literature suggests , that fertility can increase with greater wealth. If the household desires more children than it can now afford.

And it mentions here, Lindo 2010, Black et al 2013, Loverman and Mumford 2013. Previous work has also shown that women may have more children to ensure economic security in old age from both a theoretical and empirical perspective. And here it lists. Five papers that I'm sure you don't care about.

The last channel is particularly important in a context like sub Saharan Africa for three main reasons. First pension systems are either weak or non existent. Second, men typically marry women who are [00:17:00] significantly younger, meaning that most women anticipate ending up as widows. Customary laws and norms often exclude women from property ownership and inheritance.

So this, this almost reminds me of the way that people. handle retirement programs with money, like you will, if you have more income, when you're young, you will save more money. Typically for your retirement, you'll put more into a 401k. You'll set stuff aside in Roth IRAs in the United States. So you will have, you'll be saving more for your retirement.

And perhaps in Africa, the equivalent of that in, in some areas is Well, if I have more income now, that means I can do more to prepare for my old age, which is have more children because then I have a more diversified portfolio of caregivers. Why do you think everyone should be viewing children this way right now?

Really? From a caregiver perspective? I don't know if I like that. From an income perspective, I will explain. Okay. [00:18:00] Do you think that you or I are going to get Social Security? No. Okay. Do you think that there's going to be a robust Medicare system in the United States when you and I are older? No, but I wouldn't want my children to pay for it.

Hold on, we're gonna talk about a few other things here. I'm just pointing out to people, okay? If you think anything other than your kids, they can say, well, I could save money, right? I could save money and that could support me in my old age. Here's the problem with saving money. In this global economy as it exists right now.

Fertility decline has the effect that I expected to have an AI is not a literal deus ex machina getting us out of this situation. We could enter a state of persistent economic decline instead of the average aggregate economic growth, our ancestors faced. And that is what made compound interest is what made.

Saving money, a smart thing to do on average. Okay. A growing global economy is what made saving money [00:19:00] a good idea. If we don't have that saving money is next to setting it on fire worse. It would be, you know, like saving money in Argentina or something. Worse, you have the problem of the United States becoming more and more.

Argentina like we talked about this in another episode in terms of like how costly it is to build infrastructure, how much the bureaucracy costs, how much cronyism there is on the democratic side of the aisle. I mean, there's cronyism on the Republican side too. Thank you very much. No, not at all in the establishment.

No, no, not in regards to the way it works. In Argentina, there's like mild cronyism, but there is not peronism type cronyism, which is what leads to like hyperinflation and stuff like that. It's a completely different scenario. There, there's a difference between you know, like low level nepotism and stuff like that, and literally paying for your votes through massive, massive, massive bureaucratic programs.

But. There is the, the secondary [00:20:00] issue that we have here, okay which is wage inflation. So for people who don't know what wage inflation means, it means that, now this is great for our kids. Okay. It means that if you have a world where the number of workers is dropping really, really quickly, the amount you have to pay every individual worker goes up dramatically.

And we've actually seen this. If you look at the recent inflation that we've experienced at the country, it's really been concentrated in wage inflation especially with lower end, lower skilled workers, wages going up some specialty skilled worker wages going up. And that means that your kids are a really safe way to make money, so long as AI just doesn't strictly replace them.

So you need them to be at some base level of competence. But other than that it is not as smart to think that you are gonna be able to afford the types of services or anything comparable to your existing life in your old [00:21:00] age. But do you think it's, it's right. To put that on children. If it motivates more kids, I don't think kids should support a useless older person who's not providing them any services.

Yeah. But I guess, yeah, if we go back to like older people being housekeepers, childcare providers, yeah, then it, then it makes sense if you're literally exchanging housing and food with. full time childcare and probably elite education, then I guess I, yeah, I could see that for sure. Okay. You can see it now for sure.

Maybe. Yeah. Hey, I don't want our kids to get a bad deal, even when that involves me. I appreciate your diligence and, and, and dedication to fairness. One thing that I think is going to become quite the trend, and this is something we should probably do another episode on people's retirement plans being a bullet.

I've noticed this a lot for people in our group. [00:22:00] Oh, just euthanasia. Yeah. Yeah where Wait, more people are saying this? That's great. Oh yeah, it's pretty common online these days. It might actually be interesting to do a survey on this. Oh, like people are posting, like, pictures of a gun and being like, Look, it's my retirement.

No, they just are like, Oh, I don't really save for retirement because I plan to end my life. Yeah, I mean, everyone says that and then they chicken out, except for our family, apparently. Except for our family, everyone else pusses out. We follow through. It's terrible, but true. It's, it's, it's realistically the only thing that a lot, that a lot of people are going to have.

available to them, especially the ones that didn't have kids. Yeah. But also for families in many respects, like you can see how it plays out when family members who can't take care of themselves really ruin the lives of what you would call the sandwich generation. And our government also in the United States, in many states, at least does not.

Even support [00:23:00] them, for example and Pennsylvania one of the constituents in our district who's giving me advice on policy, who is an accountant has pointed out that if you are caring for a dependent family member, who is an older adult. There, you can't count them on your state tax return as a dependent, meaning that you're not, you're, yeah, what?

Yeah. So yeah, a lot of, there are a lot of people who are caring for parents and older family members and they're not getting support from the state. They're not getting any help. It's, it's bad. So yeah. Well, you could draft something to reverse that. That would be Oh, it's on my list, but you know, my odds of getting elected are 7 percent per my calculation, just given the makeup of our district, despite all my efforts.

So we'll see. Oh, we'll see. We'll see. So, now how does Limestone argue? So something to note here is that African fertility rates are falling way slower. Everyone thinks they're following way slower [00:24:00] than they should be. Okay. Based on their income level. Like they are not falling at the same rate as other countries did when they hit their same income level.

But in some areas they're falling faster than people expect. Blah, blah, blah. Now Lyman stone made the claim. This is not true. And then he put up a bunch of graphs. However, it's a bit of a pocket sand situation. Again, as I mentioned, he said, this is not true. And then all of the graphs he puts up are comparing.

Child mortality rates with fertility rates instead of income level with fertility rates because it's a good proxy for income level. And I'm like, no, it's not. Like, basically he found one graph where things lined up and he didn't want to think about it anymore because it doesn't fit any of his agendas.

Yeah. And so he then just made this claim and hoped people wouldn't notice that he was pretending that child mortality rates were societal development indexes or income levels when they [00:25:00] aren't. But I will put two of these graphs on screen here because they are nonetheless interesting. Here you have one that just shows, you know, a broad alignment between child mortality rates and fertility rates.

And then here you see one that is titled, Africa's Fertility Rate is About Normal for its Developmental Stage. And then if you look at the axes, it's Total Fertility Rate and Child Mortality. Like if people wonder what I mean when I'm like, he's really intentionally manipulative with data. This is what I'm talking about.

Or just in terms of the sometimes lazy or manipulative tendency to just throw in stats or a study or a graph and know that most people aren't going to look closely at it and just be like, Oh yeah, he backed it up and just read the headline. Limestone, as much as we respect his work, abuses that tactic egregiously.

Pocket sand.

I [00:26:00] don't respect his work at all. I'm sorry. Somebody can do it. Like he, obviously he puts a diligence in and I appreciate that, but overall he is the net negative to the movement and we'd be better if he wasn't in it. Well, the internet loves a flame war. So yeah. Well, I mean, look, he hates us. He hates us.

So there's that because we have integrity and that doesn't help him. I mean, look, this is a problem, right? If you're gonna consistently put out claims that are just patently false, right? And you have a big platform and you're part of a movement. It makes everyone else in the movement look bad or uninformed or manipulative.

And so it reflects very poorly on work we are trying to do. Fortunately, Almost nobody reads his work except for pronatalists, right? The problem is, is just making sure pronatalists know to, it's not that his work has no utility. You'll get lots of interesting stats. He's put together some, [00:27:00] some graphs that have really changed my perspective on things.

But the, the one that changed my perspective most, he used to argue for the exact opposite direction. It changed my mind when I actually read it. This is a famous fertility rate. Correlation to cash handouts. When you account for the margin of error was the margin of error getting smaller, the lower the rate it said was.

And I don't, I just don't think he noticed this when he was putting together the graph, maybe because the graph he uses to argue that cash handouts do work when it's literally the single best argument I've ever seen that cash handouts don't work. But anyway and I'd be happy to have him, like he could, he could do a good job.

If he could, I don't know, work towards a position of personal integrity. I have to ask, why does he feel the need to do this all the time? And the only answer I can come to is his moral system is so far based within his. Theocratic mindset that a, [00:28:00] everything is about promoting his particular theocratic agenda which is about socialist redistribution and spreading his particular brand of theology's message.

And so, there is no moral qualms for him either in setting back the pronatalist movement by manipulating the way data is presented, you know, pocket sanding or you know, just causing people to focus on potential solutions to fertility collapse that like we should know won't work like cash handouts because they don't like go see our episodes on on this.

We talk about it all the time. It just doesn't seem to work. And everyone else agrees. It doesn't work. That was one of my favorite parts. We were sitting down with the Heritage Foundation and all the, the fertility experts, and they were like, okay, so I read in this one place that this one guy thinks this works, but like, everyone else says they don't work.

Like, they don't work, right? And we were like, yeah, they don't work, and everyone else at the table was like, yeah, it's not working. That's the livenstone thing. So anyway, again, another graph here. This graph is titled Africa's [00:29:00] fertility is normal for its mortality level. This one is titled honestly. I like that.

And here it is with the mortality of children under five. Unfortunately, I mean, it would be nice if he said the child mortality level, but you know, okay, it works here. But this I actually found pretty interesting, and I'm gonna put this on screen here. This isn't a graph, it's a heat map of Africa that looks at where fertility rates are unexpectedly low or unexpectedly high based on these child mortality metrics.

And the place where they are unexpectedly low is South Africa and places like Morocco and Northwestern Africa. And this makes a lot of sense to me. You know, these are regions that are right now undergoing a significant collapse. They were some of the more industrialized parts of Africa. And they were really industrialized during that period where I think people still had the, The fantasy of industrializing Africa in the same way other countries were industrialized, which, you know, most people have given up on at this [00:30:00] point.

Do you have thoughts on that? That's good. Yeah. Then you found something nice to say. That's good. That's good. Well, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's tied to his thing. It still hasn't really shown this, this trend that he's claiming. Now we're going to look in the United States at TFR by income level breaking down groups by ethnicity.

Okay. Okay. So, there is some interesting stuff in this graph, generally in this graph. So I'll, I'll read what he says in the United States correlations between fertility and income differ , wildly by race among whites into a lesser extent Asians. It tends to rise was income except for the high fertility and very poor.

And by contrast, well, see black and Hispanic women have rather low birth rates while foreign born women exhibit little connection between income and fertility. So I mean, this is what he says. The graph says. Which is [00:31:00] something he does all the time. But I'll go over what the graph actually shows for anybody who's watching on a podcast.

Okay. Listening. Yeah. Listening. So, native born, non Hispanic whites the less money you have when you are below the it looks around 15 percent bottom income demographics, so household income decimal, if you're below the bottom 15% it goes way up sort of in direct correlation with the amount of poverty your family's in.

And this makes a lot of sense in the United States. And I just want to highlight, which I've said in other podcasts, how in the United States, especially if you are at or near the poverty line, basically A huge portion of your expenses as a parent are covered by state governments. Your child's daycare, medical care, food, medic, it's all covered.

Here's what's interesting. Yeah. Why does it go up as you get poorer? If that explained high [00:32:00] fertility rates among low income groups, what you would expect is basically everyone below the would just be high bottom 10 percent would just be high. It wouldn't be a direct and linear line going up.

Yeah, I don't necessarily have an answer for that. I think when you get closer. Like higher in income, you're going to have more variation between having those services and not having those services. Like you may be going in and out of it. Less wealth you have. You can almost think of it as like income security, but the income security is around these government incentive programs and these government payment programs.

This income security drives up your fertility rate. Now, what is interesting is Sort of a flat white fertility rate here until you get to 20%. If you're looking at between 20 percent and around 65 percent in terms of the, the household income percentile. Okay. [00:33:00] So I'm going to say this again, between 20 percent and 65 percent in the white population, you have a steadily increasing fertility rate.

Yeah. But to your point, basically the poorer you are in the United States, the more secure your income is for support in child care, food for your kid and medical care for your kid. But what I just said is a steadily increasing as you go from 20 percent to 65 percent of closer to poverty. You're saying, yeah, as you get poorer, but as you know, Increasing, i.

e. as you get wealthier, you have more kids. Oh, so as you get closer to not having support for. So basically what this seems to indicate, and the way I read this is that below the sort of 10 percent range these are individuals who are living off the state. And then, you know, below the 20 percent range, they are marginally living off the state in some capacity.

And then after that. The money is able to go to [00:34:00] kids, you know, like they basically break from the state and that's why they're at the very bottom of the fertility metric when they're at like the 20 percent low income level and they rise until they get to the 60th or the 65 percent level. Okay. So, do you want me to send this graph to you?

Yeah, I want to see it.

Okay, this is so helpful. Okay, and so now you can see that after that, so basically for middle income white Americans, the more money you have, the more kids you're going to have. But then you hit something, which I'm going to call the replacement rate ceiling where as soon as it gets hits too, it bounces off it and starts going down again.

As you get more money than that. And here, I think that this is an urban monoculture thing. If you're above the 65 income percentile, you're likely in some way involved in an urban monoculture industry. And that's why you see the fertility rate going down again until you get to above 90 percent and 90 percent to a hundred percent.

Again, you have a linear increase. Yeah. That's still even when you get to 100 percent is [00:35:00] barely above two. So at no point does this really go, go above repopulation rate. And this is for the, the white households. It's interesting. These graphs have these sort of heart, almost a heartbeat, like fluctuations.

It makes me think they correspond with tax brackets in some way. I'm not really sure though. Yeah, they might. But anyway, so the next group, well, let's talk about blacks because that's an interesting group, non Hispanic blacks non Hispanic blacks. This is pretty strictly the less money you have, the more kids you have.

Yeah. It's wild. Populations respond to fertility rate. However, the correlation is strongest between around 10%. So people in the bottom 10 percent up to people at around 25 percent to 30%. And in that range, you just have a really quick increase. The poorer you are from 30 percent to 10%, the more kids you're going to have of your Black.

But there's two really interesting things about this. Once you get above 30%, [00:36:00] it continues to go down a bit, but it's mostly even. Like, if you are above 30 percent as a Black American, you're basically going to be near bottom Black fertility rates in the United States. But, and here's the really interesting part, It's below 10 percent in the black American population below 10%.

Remember when the white population fertility shot up for that, that demographic population, fertility shoots down in that demographic. No, I should note that while it's shooting down, it's still way above the white fertility rate. Yes. So low income black fertility rate is just like Way above low white fertility rate.

And what this shows with the black population, and this is something I've argued in other episodes, and it's just something for like black community members to take super seriously, is income is far more dysgenic for the black community in the United States than [00:37:00] any other American demographic. Yeah.

What is going on? Sorry. When I say it's way more discogenic, what I mean is you are specifically genetically selecting for whatever correlate is tied to low income within the black community, much more so than you are in other communities where you just don't have a very strong correlation. Other communities that don't have a strong correlation would be the, the, the white community, the correlation's a bit all over the place.

But probably not enough to have, like, a massive genetic effect. Other, it's, it's pretty all over the place. And foreign born women, pretty all over the place. The other group that has a very strong dysgenic selective pressure, but not as strong as the Black American community, is the native born Hispanic population.

Yeah, it's not as dramatic, but the, the Directionality is the same. Well, it basically like, like the black population well, so unlike the black population, it doesn't have that weird drop between 0% and [00:38:00] 10% percentiles. Yeah. But what it does have is if you go from 0% to around 30%, it's just like a constant drop.

And then after that it levels off. And it stays a bit higher than high income black fertility does. In fact, this is a really interesting thing. Once you get above the 30 percent income demographic, black fertility rate is pretty much the lowest fertility rate in the United States by a pretty dramatic margin.

Keep in mind you can sort of ignore the purple line here because the purple line is native born non hispanic other asian multi Which is like fine, but it doesn't really mean anything about any specific demographic that I can target or say anything about So if you ignore the purple line, blacks have a very low fertility rate when they get any amount of income Which is really fascinating Yeah, that is really interesting.

And I've seen this in our friend groups [00:39:00] actually. You know, cause we know a lot of wealthy black people. I don't know any wealthy black people with kids. One I can think of.

I can think of two friends, but yeah, not many, not many. And it's, it's, no. Okay. Cause I, yeah, I know the adoptee one and that's, I wasn't counting them, but I guess I should. But yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's tough. And it's definitely something I noticed like within our, our friend group. Yeah. That's fascinating.

Yeah. Well, gosh, now I feel more confused than anything. I don't know what to make of it. You feel more confused? Yeah. I thought I'd get some, some takeaways from these exceptions.

I mean, I think that the core thing is that social services should never be gated for just support. That's the way I feel about basically any data I've looked at. I am okay with social [00:40:00] services, but if you're offering a social service to anyone, you should be offering it to everyone. Yeah. Otherwise it leads to really negative economic and effects like this.

Okay. So, next point here among the Amish and ultra Orthodox Jews in the U S fertility is negatively correlated with income, poor income brackets have six to eight children while the richer ones have three to five. Overall, the higher fertility of these two groups compared to other Americans is overwhelmingly driven by cultural factors.

That's really interesting that among ultra Orthodox Jews and Amish, fertility is negatively correlated with income. But that, that makes sense to me because in those instances, I view more income as being correlated with more integration. With mainstream society and therefore the urban monoculture. So the less income you have, probably the more you are pure, purely within your [00:41:00] community and not making money from the outside world.

And that's the bigger theme of demographic collapse, that industrialization, leaving the house, integrating with a larger economy, working for larger businesses that are not owned for your family. All of those things drive fertility collapses. Then he does another little pocket sand here. I'm going to see if you can catch where the pocket sand is in this.

Among the Arab countries, which range from poor to oil rich, there is no national correlation between wealth and lower fertility. Which, I mean, first of all, I mean, the graph shows the exact opposite. Okay. The graph shows yeah, I'll send you the graph because this is one of those things where I just am astounded that he will do this all the time.

This graph shows this, and then I read the graph and I'm like, it literally shows the exact opposite of what you just said. It shows..

This is the graph that he's claiming that shows that [00:42:00] more income a Arab country has, that doesn't correlate with it having a lower fertility rate. It's, it's, it's literally an up and to the left graph. Hmm. What you could claim with this graph, maybe, is that the Gulf states aren't subject to this trend, but other MENA countries are. Maybe that's what he's trying to even sort of true among the Gulf States, look. Yeah. If we were to, if we were to draw like an average line, what it, what is that linear regression? God, it's been too long since I've taken a math class. But if we were to, yeah, do like a normalized line, it would be down into the, like a downward sloping line.

So. Yeah, pocket sand.

Pocket sand.

All right, [00:43:00] fine. But also it wouldn't even matter to me if this was true. Because it's like, why isn't there this great fertility collapse once you're talking about the Gulf States? Because the Gulf States do not distribute income in any sort of meaningful, equal way. This is looking at GDP per capita, not median GDP per capita.

Gulf states are fricking wacky when it comes to how wealth is distributed within them. And then I'd want to, you know, make sure that we are Talking specifically about their native populations, fertility rate, which it can be very hard to break out in these countries, or is it naturally broken out in a lot of the statistics on the countries?

Because they have huge, huge, huge immigrant populations, which have much higher fertility rates than the native fertility rate. And then the native fertility rate within these countries has all sorts of other weird things going on with it because they often treat maintaining the native population, which is a vast minority population is some sort of like.

Spartan duty, right? To maintain the masterclass so the slaves don't revolt. [00:44:00] Like, no, I mean, you see this, right? Like, they see themselves as very different than the, the other people in their countries. And they do see it as a crisis that their populations are crashing and they are often crashing.

Oh, actually I can just look at this and immediately tell you that this is not looking at native populations. Cause I know the native population fertility rates for some of these countries like Emirati and Dubai, and they're way below too. So this is including immigrants, which basically means this is a pointless graph.

Okay, fantastic. That doesn't even show what he wants it to show. So what was the study that you found Simone? Right. I was reading the other day. An essay by Emil Kierkegaard looking at Norwegian cognitive inequality. There was research in 2024 published about the correlation between educational attainment and developing dementia, but it just happened to have other interesting longitudinal data.

There should be the caveat that this was looking longitudinally at men [00:45:00] specifically who were born in the fifties. So this is not. You know, we're not looking at people right now, but it did find that for lower groups in terms of educational attainment or IQ did have lower male fertility. And they, this also is seen in another study from Norway and other research in Sweden.

He writes male fertility for the mean 70 IQ group is markedly lower. This is the same as seen as in a prior study from Norway and Sweden. Based on overlapping data, so that's good. This does not mean Norway has eugenic fertility, because this data set only concerns men and only those who took the test.

Those who were not disqualified prior for some reason. And then he shares the Swedish and other Norwegian study information which show a marked male dip in fertility for those with [00:46:00] quite low IQ which does produce a slight eugenic fertility pattern for men in these Nordic regions. Most of the stuff that you've pointed to in this conversation has been.

Overall fertility, both men and women. And I do think based on the pressures that men and women are subject to, and also just looking at the history of whose genes get passed on, that it would make sense to me that most dysgenics have to do with women. And not with men because it's just harder as a man to gain access to a woman and get her pregnant if you are sick or less, less fit in some way or less intelligent, like significantly, right?

If you're uniquely dumb and you have uniquely terrible social skills and you're uniquely ugly and you're like, malformed or whatever, right? It's just going to be harder. To get a woman [00:47:00] ask all the black pill community, you know? So when I first told you this, you're like, no, that's just not true.

Everything refutes this. But one, this one 24, 20, 2024 study. Is not alone in finding this correlation. There is another Swedish study and another Norwegian study that finds it. And two, it just makes logical sense to me that Sweden and Norway keep in mind are very different culturally from other places, but are very culturally similar to each other.

Sure. Okay. So you're just saying, well, and he did point out that some of it was overlapping data, but I don't know, intuitively it would make sense to me. That on the dysgenic front, men are subject to more evolutionary pressures, even in a post industrial society. Then women are, and often when you look at the people who are having a lot of kids, it's much more common to see men who have had multiple female partners, [00:48:00] maybe not concurrently, but over a series of relationships or marriages, consider how many wives your dad has had.

And my dad has had three partners like long term monogamous and not all at the same time. And your dad saying not all at the same time, but still, and. There are lots of men who in turn go with no partners at all. And yes, I'm just, I just want to point out that I do think that wealth probably correlates with higher fertility in men on average, if we were to have really good data to look at that, because men with more money probably also have other.

Elements of fitness. This is bringing up an interesting relationship dynamic in which you're having sort of a functional type of harem, but you are basically staying with one woman until she's infertile. Then you're exchanging her for another. Well, then that's, that's, I mean, that's modern polygamy that exists [00:49:00] functionally and is extremely normalized in our culture and yet not really seen as polygamy.

It's almost, it's worse though, because like a normal polygamist, like Joseph Smith. And Brigham young, you can see pictures of their wives. A lot of them were super old and many of them were widows.

And he said, both of them claimed to take on, you know, many of their wives is just like, just to take care of them because they were widows.

And some of them have like also like 14 year old wives too. Let's not worry about that. But that, that seems to me in many ways, a little bit kinder. Then dumping a wife, like a post menopausal wife, and then marrying a much younger woman. So here's my question for you. When you're infertile, am I allowed to take on a younger wife?

I won't dump you, but we've got to keep the babies coming, right? I'm not into raising someone else's kids. Wait, hold on. What if they were from your embryos? Do I have to live with them? I'm, I'm just, I don't like being around people. That's the problem. [00:50:00] You know, no. Okay. I understand everyone has a price I think is, is the answer to this.

And in, in many sister wives situations, it actually works really well. And the families work out quite well. And I'm sure that there are people where I'd be like, Oh my gosh, yes, let's do this. But. You know, you got to find the right, I've got, I've got to find the right person. That's my duty here.

Okay. Well, I didn't want to marry anyone. Let's keep that in mind. You know, like let alone multiple people. By the way, I'm not seriously suggesting this. I'm just getting, getting a feel, you know, when I need to think about what, what's going to happen when you become infertile. Like, I don't, I don't know.

Like, I don't know. How I'm going to feel if I live in a house without young kids in it anymore, like that's a, I have no plans. It ages out of the house and you know, you're never going to spend those, those moments again, you [00:51:00] know, I haven't, I haven't, I love it when people are like, when is your wife like going to stop having kids?

You know, you must be almost done at this point. And I'm like, I haven't even normalized to the idea that I may, at some point in my life, be living in a house without toddlers in it. Well, no, I mean, our plan is, by the time I can no longer have babies and we no longer have toddlers, we have grandkids. So there will always be pitter pattering little feet.

Pressure them into I mean, they're already down with it. They're ready. Yeah. Anyway, I love you to death, Simone. I love you too, Malcolm Collins. Alright, have a good one. Bye.

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124 - Stuff

Stoic Coffee Break

The Cycle of Stuff and the Importance of Minimalism

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