Are Asians Not Having Babies Due to Genetics? The Equation that Cracked Low Asian TFR

Join Malcolm and Simone Collins as they challenge popular misconceptions about race, IQ, and success. This thought-provoking discussion dives deep into the complex relationship between genetics, culture, and achievement, offering surprising insights that challenge both progressive and conservative narratives. Key topics include:

* The truth about Asian-American academic success

* Debunking the myth of significant racial IQ differences

* The impact of immigration and cultural factors on group success

* How class, rather than race, influences genetic advantages

* The role of Confucianism in creativity and innovation

* Why some immigrant groups outperform others

* The fallacy of attributing success solely to individual effort

Whether you're interested in genetics, sociology, or the complex factors behind group achievement, this video offers a nuanced and data-driven perspective that will challenge your assumptions and broaden your understanding of human potential.

[00:00:00] Hello, Simone! Today we are going to be doing a stats heavy episode. Ooh. It's an intensive episode. Yes! It's one of those really fun episodes where I read something that a racist person wrote or somebody who seemed to have a racial agenda.

Okay. And While I think that the person, you know, has some bias in their thoughts, I was like, this is why it's important that we don't ban people like this from talking. Okay. Because they will sometimes see things that somebody who is presenting and looking at the world from a non reasoning point of view will never ever ever see.

And that is really important.

Simone Collins: This is Well, but if you say this to a mainstream progressive, you have already basically just said, don't you think we should genocide all the Palestinians? I mean, you have just said something incredibly offensive because there's this perception that even being, even sharing oxygen with a racist is somehow an unforgivable act.

So this is excuse me, [00:01:00] but I don't know that

this person, they just, they're Seem to not love east asian immigrants and they didn't like that the beltway conservatives liked east asian immigrants And I like east asian immigrants. I really have genuinely no problem with east asian immigration into the united states and I I don't even understand even if you were biased about east asian immigrants Like you must anyway, we'll get to this later in the in the piece Okay but they noticed something that I have never seen anyone notice before and I was like, oh my gosh Like this is true.

This is in the data You

Simone Collins: Okay. Wow.

Comes to the subject of low East Asian fertility rates might be either persistently cultural post immigration or genetic. And in this episode, we're going to talk about the genetics of low fertility rates and why East Asians might have at a genetic level, a lower like biological desire to breed with somebody.

[00:02:00] Whoa. And there is actually a good explanation for why they might.

Simone Collins: In

historical data.

Simone Collins: That, that, so this whole like Kiki Gomori thing, this is people in Japan who just don't leave their houses and the vegetarian men of Japan, the men who sort of just never choose to date or have partners. This could just be partially genetically driven, that these are, these aren't just tropes that happened out of nowhere.

There was a.

Yes. And due to a specific and intergenerational practice that was done in all of the East Asian countries for hundreds of years.

Simone Collins: Infanticide? What?

Well, arranged marriages. Very strict arranged marriages. We'll get to it. But it makes sense when you think about it for five seconds.

You're like, oh yeah, they didn't have to have a biological urge to find a partner. They were matched with a partner. Well,

Simone Collins: or the biological urges to have partners. didn't correlate as highly with fertility or with with having kids and passing on your genes as they do in other societies.

And what's very interesting is if you look at East [00:03:00] Asian populations, And then you look at the East Asian populations that are Abrahamic in their faith.

They have really good fertility rates. Would you like to know more?

. So if you look at studies of fertility rates the heredity of fertility rates appears to be around 20 to 40 percent.

This is if you look at identical twin studies where identical twins are raised in separate families So we already know that there is some biological drive to have kids which ends up affecting fertility rates And you can also look at studies that look at age of a first child Which is really well studied in identical twin studies and again 20 to 40 percent.

So it is Fairly genetic. Okay. It's not as genetic as something like IQ or height, but it is fairly genetic.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Meaningful.

Now first let's talk about the culture of East Asian countries. Okay. So here I am going to put on screen graphs that are looking at two questions. Sorry. I should point out to the audience because the audience may not know this going into this.

I just assume that everyone knows this [00:04:00] East Asian countries. If you control for wealth, generally the wealthier country gets the lower fertility rate gets when you control for wealth. They have the worst fertility rates of anywhere in the world by astronomical amounts. Like they are. off a cliff, they would, if they were an animal, like if you, if you considered them an animal groups, like Koreans, for example, would be considered a critically endangered species.

Well, and wouldn't you

Simone Collins: say that in terms of the, the countries on our watch list for experiencing fundamental structural concerns in the near future due to demographic collapse include China and South Korea before anyone else.

Yeah. Yeah. So, so like it matters. You need to pay attention to these falling fertility rates.

This is a part of the core key of the question of falling fertility rates. Now culturally speaking, we're going to look at first here. This, this is a percent study within a cultural group. And then it was ranking countries, many point to family and children [00:05:00] as sources of meaning in life.

So it ranked countries here. If you look at the top of this wrist, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, U. S. I. These are countries that are actually pretty high in terms of their fertility rate. When contrasted was what you would expect to give in their wealth. Okay. So children are a source of meaning in my life.

Those countries. You want to see who's at the very bottom of this list? Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. They just don't see children as sources of meaning in life at higher, as higher rate as other countries. So, okay, culturally, that's why you would see that.

Simone Collins: Alright,

let's look at another graph here.

Relatively few mention their romantic partners as a source of meaning in life, okay? So who considers their romantic partners, their source of meaning in life? Those countries at the top of the list, like the USA and Netherlands, two countries that have unusually high fertility rates given their wealth.

At the bottom of the list, the four bottom countries. Again, in order, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. So culturally speaking, they just do not see children or their [00:06:00] significant others as key parts of their meaning in life. I'd actually ask you, Simone, if you were like rankings, like your meanings in life, How high would you say like I and the kids are?

Simone Collins: Oh, you guys are number one at this point. You weren't when I was a kid, you know, before I met you. But for me,

you are so obviously number one, like the kids, then you, then my mission, like

Simone Collins: that happens to people after they have those things.

Yeah, it could be downstream of this. So we'll see.

Simone Collins: Kids were like number thousand, like the thousandth thing on my list before I met you.

You know what I mean? I really didn't want kids. Before I met you. So,

 Actually started thinking about this more as could this be the explanation of why some cultures seem more resistant to the impact increasing wealth has on fertility rates. , and. It really checks out. When I think about it, for example, Jewish groups are uniquely resistant to. [00:07:00] Prosperity induce fertility clots. And Jewish communities also put a really high in FISAs. On their children and their spouses in terms of meaning in their lives. In addition to that, I was also thinking about music.

Cause you know, I lived in Korea. I consume a lot of Korean music. I really like K-pop. I can think of only one Korean song. That is about a person's children. , or about a relationship between a child and their parents. , and that is actually a funny, Uh, Lee enough, Okay, bye. Sigh, the guy who did gung them style. And it's. I got it from my daddy. , which is interesting because the song is actually done in English. Psych grew up in the U S and his form of K-pop is more popular in the United States than it is in Korea. Yes. I know people might be surprised about this, but getting them saw it was not the hit in Korea, that it was in the United States. , it's not considered like classic [00:08:00] K-pop. , also interesting here. If I think about like my own cultural group, the greater Appalachian cultural group and the type of art that we produced, you know, often classic country music. Country music has tons and tons and tons of songs about how great a persons. Wife is or how great their children are.

, and how important kids are. In the last episode, we played a clip from. The episode about like what matters in life? It's a song called by dirt. Find the one you can't live without Get a ring, let your knee hit the ground And add a few limbs to your family tree

And in it, you know, they're saying one of the key things that matters in life. Uh, if not the key thing that matters in life is one is who you marry. And your children, that's like the key point of the song or another one that I really like, , lady, which I'll play a clip from here.

I hope you love your mama . you'll see close to perfect patience.

If you watch every, look at her, [00:09:00] baby girl, in your How to be a lady.

Okay. Well, this piece was written by a futurist, right? The sub stack. And it was titled East Asian extinction level. Fertility is genetic and beltway. Conservatives are traitors. His fighting words there. I actually really liked this guy's writing when I was going through this.

I was just like, this is really creative stuff. The analysis was well done. He didn't lie with data. I really hate when people do that to fit an agenda. And yeah. Just, just cool stuff. I just disagree with him on like America is worse off for having a large population of East Asian immigrants.

I don't believe that at all. Like there are some areas where I'd be like, yeah, maybe we should think again about immigrants from these areas. But like, I'd literally take all of Hong Kong when like China went in to take them. I'm like, let's screw Hong, let's screw China over, take everyone in Hong Kong was over X amount of money as an immigrant.

I do not mind high skill immigrants at all. All right, so let's check in on the [00:10:00] fertility of U. S. born East Asians, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, weighted for respective populations within the U. S. and compare them to the figure of that same weighted population back home. Then let's compare it to U. S. born white fertility.

So the U. S. born East Asian fertility is 1. 38, and here he's only counting East Asian as China, Japanese, and Korean. But that's generally what people mean when they say East Asia. So 1. 38 versus 1. 197 if they had stayed at home. So we often say this is a great thing, like I've always been like, I assumed that it was like American culture was affecting them, and it was increasing their fertility rate, okay?

Yeah, exactly.

Simone Collins: We would cite stats that South Korean fertility rates went up when South Koreans moved to the United States, which is notable because most immigrant groups fertility drops after they immigrate to the United States.

Yeah, well, they're from a higher fertility culture. Yeah. Yes. In Koreans, for a period at least, it jumped about 50 percent up.

But that may have been an illusion, and I'll [00:11:00] explain where the illusion came from. Yeah, interesting. And it's also gone down from that 50 percent up number in more recent samples. Wow, okay. Interesting. So, so right here, he's not talking about modern fertility rates. By the way, these are, these numbers are all higher than modern fertility rates, but this is just a sample set he had.

Okay. So the U S born white fertility is 1. 89. All right. So here you're contrasting. And this is, that's why I don't understand. Why does he care about an immigrant group with such a lower fertility rate than our own? Like they're just going to disappear anyway. Like,

Simone Collins: yeah,

I don't, I don't

Simone Collins: mean about it.

Yeah. You don't need to be mean about it, bro. Okay. So he goes, ouch. East Asians are clearly passing on more of their anti natalist culture than we thought. 1. 38 versus a 1. 9 7. We've done some good work in defeating it, but there's clearly more work to be done. Like, this is what you would think, right? Like, okay, well, we've helped defeat a little bit of their antinatalist culture when they moved here, but not totally.

Well, here comes some [00:12:00] uncomfortable stats I had forgotten about.

Simone Collins: Oh no.

I'm going to put on screen here that famous OkCupid chart that I am so glad someone at OkCupid ran with their giant, giant data size from back when we for whatever reason, somebody thought it was okay to post, like, ethnic breakdowns of message and reply rates.

And I Times were different. As a human race, we are so, so, so lucky to have this data, okay? East Asian women prefer white men to Asian men in terms of reply rates in messages. On okcupid. This isn't like rating or anything like this is the actual yeah, just looking at who's getting back.

Simone Collins: Yep

And this is I think the only place in the entire chart where a group preferred another ethnic group over their own which is actually kind of wild.

Um, What's up with that? By the way, East Asian females, they also preferred Middle Eastern men and Native [00:13:00] American men to Asian men. Huh. So, oh, wait, no, hold on. They also preferred other and only less Pacific Islanders. So, I actually suspect this might be due to the incredibly strict gender roles was in Asian culture.

And Asian women just not wanting to live that lifestyle.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

And they may have you know, prejudices because you see this in Korea. Like, I know, like, I know. personally, Korean women who have moved out of Korea just to marry people from white people, to be honest. And it wasn't because they had like white fever or something.

They're just like, well, you know, on average, I'll have a more gender equal relationship if I do this. And you see this in statistics on, for example, Korean culture that women handle like Way more of the housework, way more of the house maintenance, even though they're still expected to provide the predominant amount of childcare and work a job.

Like it's just a raw deal they're getting. And this is, I mean, [00:14:00] unfortunately a cultural thing. When you have other cultural options in this way, you can almost sort of see white culture as victimizing East Asian culture. Because I mean, there are a cultural hypothesis about how they can make society work, but it's a cultural hypothesis that stops working in an open dating market.

Right. Ouch. And also keep in mind that then there's a secondary thing here. So suppose an East Asian woman does want to take on all of these roles, right? Like um, they want to be subservient. They want to do the majority of the housework and they want to do the majority of the child work.

Simone Collins: Okay.

In a mixed ethnic group if you're thinking about arbitrage opportunities, these women would actually be better off going after white men.

Gosh, you know what? You're right.

Simone Collins: Because the white

men will value all of these sacrifices from the white man's perspective that they're making, that the East Asian men wouldn't sacrifice. To an East [00:15:00] Asian man, they might be just like, yeah, you're doing your job to the, the white man. Oh my God, a woman who's doing housework.

So, so they can, and I've actually seen this in San Francisco where there is the common practice. of the upper mid east Asian woman getting the extremely wealthy white tech bro. I'd actually say that that's the like most common Silicon Valley marriage structure. Because the, the tech bro is just like endlessly thankful that there is any gender dynamic, like dimorphic behavior at all.

Because they're so not used to it in the culture that they're used to this, like far lefty urban monoculture mindset. But what, do you have thoughts here or

Simone Collins: No, I, I have seen what you are talking about, and I'm sure most people watching can think of examples.

And I also want to, just looking at this chart, we'll do this in another episode, but like, we need to talk about like, because the left has [00:16:00] stolen the Black American identity to use for all of its like identity politics nonsense, it makes up ways they're discriminated against.

Which then hide the ways that they actually are discriminated against and that would easily pierce a public mindset if you just showed them the data that like we're not supposed to show them. If you look at Black female or Black males in this graph, it makes your heart break. No one is replying to them.

If you look at Yeah, that's what I

Simone Collins: also remember from those particular OkCupid surveys. Was, they're not surveys, but studies. I just like, but especially how screwed you are if you're a black woman.

So sadness of this, like if you look at this chart, like women of like all other ethnic groups are like, I never replied to anyone.

And then black women, like a green across the board, you messaged me. Somebody messaged me! They, they are like as green as male reply rates. Actually, I think [00:17:00] more green than male reply rates is how screwed they get. Which is well, also you, this is another group. I misspoke here. It appears black females also they literally respond to black male messages less than any other group.

They are more willing to respond to male messages from any group more than black males. Ooh, that is not good. Oh goodness gracious. Does not say a lot about gender relations within that community. And then black male response rates across the board are just like, oof, anyway but we can also look at out out marriage rates.

So Pew research did a research of this and 54 percent of Asian immigrants marry someone of another ethnic groups. So, here, I'm just gonna read a quote here. Among Asian newlyweds, these gender differences exist for both immigrants, 15 percent men, 31 percent women, and US born 38 percent men, 54 percent women. So it's, it's more likely that an East Asian woman marries out much more likely, like more than double more likely [00:18:00] in, in, in one case.

than a man who marries somebody of a different ethnicity. And while the gender gap among Asian immigrants has remained relatively stable, the gap among the U. S. born has widened substantially since 1980, when the intermarriage rate stood at 46%. , And now it's around 49 percent among East Asian women.

So, you can see again, losing their culture here, which, which is sad. I mean, they're creating a new culture, right? I don't think that like the culture has disappeared, but it's going to be a hybrid white East Asian culture, which may be more resistant. It may be that they needed this, this cultural infusion to survive due to fertility rates.

I don't know, but I mean, that's what we're seeing here. No, by the way, speaking of American Asian marriages, J. D. Vance Oh yeah. That's not East Asian. That's South Asian. Yeah. South Asian.

Simone Collins: But still, I, I was more thinking Priscilla Chan. Mm.

Good [00:19:00] example there. All right. So here's the thing that absolutely floored me.

So okay, now you've got to consider that a lot of these people are going to be influenced by who they married, right? So you can't just look at them as if having like normal Asian fertility rates, right? You need to say, okay, let's look at this, right? So I'm going to read the, the, the line here and this shocked me.

, so what the guy did is he said, okay, so we know that. 54 percent are marrying people of a different cultural group, predominantly white people. So then let's take that 54 percent and assume that their expected fertility rate is going to be exactly in between the East Asian fertility rate and the white fertility rate.

Okay. And then you run the math here and I'll put the math on the screen. And I will remind you that the average you know, U. S. born East Asian fertility rate is 1. 38. [00:20:00] So if you average the average East Asian fertility rate 1. 197 and then take 54 percent of that and assume that that portion of that 1.

97 would be midway between 1. 97 and 1. 89, do you know what number you get? 1.

38. The exact number of the fertility rate they have in the United States.

Simone Collins: Wow. Okay.

You don't need any cultural change to explain the rise in fertility rate. It is simply marrying non Asians. That's

Simone Collins: okay. Yeah. All right. Well,

it's bleak if you think Asian culture is a good thing. And I do, I do think Asian culture is a good thing.

I'm

Simone Collins: sad. I just, I think that could, they're not, I mean, there are, there are ways to culturally build and aren't there some very high fertility [00:21:00] subcultures like outside Seoul in South Korea that are just primed to inherit all of the country? I've heard of like

one religious cult in Korea and one in Japan.

Their fertility rates aren't great. They're not like, Look, Korea has always been great at exporting cults, like the moonies and some more recent ones, and they're great at building cults. So maybe they'll create something that saves them.

Simone Collins: Maybe,

but like their fertility rates just don't touch on like the white religious nut job groups, like us.

We need more religious nut jobs and turning women into baby factories.

Simone Collins: I mean, Gosh, yeah, I, it is concerning. It's very concerning. I don't want Asian cultures to disappear. But do

you mind? Simone was born in Japan and has lived with Japanese people for a long time. Her middle name is Haruko because she was born in Japan.

She has strong cultural connections. She grew up in the Bay area, which is very Asian. Pretty much your entire friend group growing up with East Asian, [00:22:00] right?

Simone Collins: Pretty much. Yeah.

And I lived and worked in Korea. Like I have a very strong personal connection to these cultural groups. It makes me sad that they may not survive.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And I guess when I think of all my high school friends, one of them, yeah, not, not many of them have kids, certainly not more than one kid right now. Which is

And you're at four, lady. Yeah.

Simone Collins: When you compare, it's not looking fantastic. So,

yeah. So I really wanted to tackle this, this hypothesis he had that this was due to a ranged marriage.

Because I was under the, the perspective that range marriage was at least occasionally practiced in Europe. Right. Yeah. And what I came to is actually, no, it's being practiced in Europe was pretty rare in a historic level. Yeah. More

Simone Collins: among just a very rare. Super high class group, right?

Yeah. So, yeah, basically only like the super wealthy did it.

So, and even they did it differently than [00:23:00] East Asians did it. So we'll talk about the East Asian cause it gets kind of horrifying when you hear about how East Asians did it.

Simone Collins: Oh,

yeah.

Simone Collins: Honestly, it was news to me from you that there was even an arranged marriage thing in East Asia. You will be,

you will be.

Surprised by the number of women who had their legs broken.

Simone Collins: They

couldn't leave their house until they were ready to marry. I'll just say that. Now let's go to the European sample before we get to that. Okay. So, McFlane's Marriage and Love in England 1300 1840 describes the laws to this effect.

 Well, it's primary focus is the timeline described in the title. It cites the laws of Colterre for 560 A. D. and I don't want to get picked up on a filter. C U N T, I'm not going to say that word out loud because I don't know how to say it. That is an unfortunate last name.

Early, well, it's the name of it Cunott, I think it's pronounced. Okay.

Simone Collins: Anyway,

Early 1000s AD, in describing the historic Germanic tradition of [00:24:00] opposition to forced marriage, it lays out clear evidence for the existence of an ancient Germanic custom of permitted marriage against the wishes of parents, which remained uninhibited in Britain.

Even as the reintroduction of Roman civil law elsewhere opposed it. The other country where this norm remained unabridged was Sweden. So keep in mind, this is you know, specifically Northern Europe. In Rome, arranged marriage was more common but also, you know, you see less. You know, you see outcomes that look more in between Northern European outcomes and East Asian outcomes when you look at Southern European outcomes.

But keep in mind, even the Catholic church here. So, and when the Catholic church confronted the latter question, whether marriage could be valid without the consent of parents, it was unambiguous in its support, citing creatively the Bible verse that quote, What therefore God has joined together. Let no man put asunder in quote Matthew 1916.

The church consistently upheld even secret marriages made without the consent or knowledge of anyone, but the participants see Charles Dorn Jr's paper on [00:25:00] Canon Law and Marriage in the Journal of Family History. Furthermore, the, there, there was a very high median age of first marriage in Northern Europe in the 1600s, which was 42 plus, which is very rare. If you look at it, if you're talking about like the 1600s in East Asia, yeah, that's late.

I'm gonna guess it was around 16. 22 plus is wildly late which, which was because they gave people a lot of independence. And this source here argues that that was the case. A, a, in addition to all of this, you had a church and civil ban on cousin marriage, which forced women to, and men to look outwards to marry.

So you can keep in mind if you look at a lot of Muslim cultures they do a lot of like cousin marriages and stuff like that. And that's common in East Asia as well. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of family because it consolidates power within the family. It's what you would want if your goal was amassing power as a family.

It's what you wouldn't want if you're. An extra family bureaucracy made up of eunuchs um, that was trying to claim more power for [00:26:00] itself, which the Catholic Church functionally is so they ban that, but that creates a very interesting sort of like biological impulse here. If you, as a European historically, We're like, not driven by your sexuality to go out and screw people.

You might not end up having descendants that just wasn't as true for other populations on earth. And this actually reminds me of a very interesting conversation I had with a very dear friend of mine who was a JN. Boy at the time, man. I don't know, young, we were teens at the time. And we were both in college and he's like, I was talking to him about dating.

I was like, I, who are you interested in? Right. And this was during that time of my life where I was probably sleeping with like three or four different people a week. And he's like, Oh, well, you know, I don't want to date until I have a job. I was like, you, you don't want to date until you have a job.

And he was like, yeah, you know, my parents say I shouldn't really focus on it. So culturally my people we don't really focus on it. You know, I just, well, we'll focus on the next shift to college. [00:27:00] Like. High school, college you know, that's for focusing on work. And in another episode we did here, we pointed out how East Asians, at least, and I'm sure South Asians are the same way, spend way more time on schoolwork than white kids.

So I decided to look this up, to see if this hunch was right. And yes, there have been studies confirming this. , east Asian. Individuals have way, way, way lower sex drives than Europeans.

And this is explains a huge part of why they outcompete white people, not IQ differences. And I think Part of it is, I was busy screwing my way through high school in college, and here this kid is, and he's just like, nah, I don't want it. But I don't know if, like, biologically I could have, realistically, like, even when I think about my kids, I'm like, I know the number one thing I can't do is say Don't engage with your sexuality because I know how loud that was.

I may be able to like use naltrexone to try to break any sort of like opioid pathway they have in their brains related to this. Right. But I would need to [00:28:00] is through some sort of pharmacological intervention. Like actively

Simone Collins: treat it like an addiction or disease. Want to be

trapped by this or not because naltrexone is actually good at breaking arousal compulsions.

But it's, it's tough. It is tough. Like it's not necessarily awesome sauce. But this is interesting to me. Now I'm going to go to what he says about these other countries. Okay. So he says in China and Korea, nearly all marriages were arranged in Japan. Most were, and unlike the kinds of more modern arranged marriages that are unfairly stigmatized today, these arrangements, at least outside of Japan involved a no role for fertile female choice or male choice in the matter, i.

e. no interactions between the soon to be married occurred before the marriage was fully contracted. Total female seclusion from non kin males Transcribed Both pre and post marriage ensured success of this arrangement of this arrangement to remarry even after the death of one's husband was stigmatized.

And even when you see this in South Asia in India, the, the common practice of Oh, what was it called again? [00:29:00] where they would burn the widows. Oh,

Simone Collins: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

yeah. And people pretend like this wasn't a common practice, and it was common in some regions. But I don't want to get to South Asian populations.

The Han Chinese famously left nothing to chance in ensuring seclusion, Was nearly all upper middle class and many other class households, up to 50 percent of the population breaking the feet of their girls to ensure their limited mobility and subservience to the East Asian marital process.

50 percent of young women had their feet broken.

 Would note here that this number seemed unbelievably high to me. So I went to an AI perplexities specifically to ask the same question. , and it said in response , in the 19th century, an estimated 40 to 50% of Chinese women had their feet bound among the upper economic classes in the 19th century, the prevalence was almost a hundred percent. A study by William Rousseau, estimated that as many as 2 billion Chinese women may have had their feet bound research by hill gates found that virtually 100% of women born in 1850 to [00:30:00] 1854 had bound feet. With the percentage slowly decreasing in subsequent decades. , so a hundred percent of women and during some periods had their feet bound during other periods, it was 50%. , so. Just an absolute time. , and it was practiced well into the 20th century, especially in rural and coastal regions.

I said this article was not cherry picking to make a point. If anything, they may have understated the number. Like this was like not messing around. Like you are not going to find a partner on your own. We handle who you're marrying. Don't worry about it.

Simone Collins: Was this a by product of the foot binding process? Like their feet were just broken because they were binding them or was this All right.

Here's the hammer. Video

on screen. Close your eyes for five seconds. One, two, three. It's going to be on screen. One, two, three, end. Okay, good. It's off screen now, but for people who don't know what the golden lotuses look like they would put the feet of little girls [00:31:00] in really tight shoes. They never fully developed.

They couldn't walk. And this was, you know, you can sit and talk about it as a beauty ritual or whatever you want to talk about it as, but it was a ritual that really ensured that these women didn't play a role in who they were mating with. And this of course is going to have a genetic impact on arousal pathways, use it or lose it.

I'm sorry. It doesn't use it or lose it. The saying in genetics if you don't need an arousal pathway to motivate having children, you're going to lose the impulsive arousal pathway that causes teams to make the types of impulsive decisions that lead to babies and then lead to marriage. And. That could explain this difference.

Simone Collins: That's a very interesting prospect. If you're saying that this is mostly upper and middle class people though, I don't know if they're the biggest genetic contributors to any society. I don't know. He said upper middle

class in many others. So around 50 percent of the [00:32:00] population. Okay.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I guess 50 percent of the population is probably enough for it to have a meaningful effect too.

Yes. Also upper and middle class on a historic basis had more kids than the lower classes.

Simone Collins: Oh yeah. Cause they had resources and food and whatnot. Okay.

Yeah. And then the kids who, you know, weren't able to compete within these environments would become and probably lower

Simone Collins: infant mortality. Yeah. Okay.

Okay.

Okay. So, so keep all that in line. Now I want to move quickly to an email we got from one of our fans talking about Chinese culture because he's been living there for a while. And I think it also helps us understand the difference between the Chinese population and our own, right? I'm a Brit who lived in China for five years.

You and ConsenSys missed a few significant details regarding why they're so effed. I basically polled people on this while I was there. Having few kids in China has become fashion driven by women. One, women's sexual status in China is about luxury. Maximum [00:33:00] consumption, minimum effort. And I've actually seen this in like Chinese videos, where they'll have like women who act like b****y or like, Oh, they got a car for their birthday or for their marriage and they complain about it or something to try to show their status to other women.

It's like, men give me stuff and I make fun of them for it.

Simone Collins: And I

am unappreciative. That is a sign of like, It does seem

Simone Collins: to be a fetish though. Like there are those people who. Make money from men just for yelling at them and whatnot. So it's a thing.

These men do not look happy about this. They usually look like their souls have been taken and stomped on.

And then we can talk about how bad women have it in East Asia. But I think in many ways, men also have it absolutely terrible. And like gender dynamics in these countries just need to be like,

Simone Collins: yeah, the, the sign that it seems that both East Asian men and East Asian women aren't choosing their, I want to keep, I want to keep going here.

I want to keep going.

Two, they want the status label of quote unquote mother without the work, meaning one kid [00:34:00] max. So mother is a status, but you don't get that much additional status or it appears any additional status from additional kids. Okay. In the U S that definitely isn't the case. Actually, you don't really get any status was one kid.

I wouldn't even say you get that much status with two kids, but there is a community in the U S where when you get to three up kids, you get additional status with every kid. Like with four kids, I feel like walking through the mall these days. I said, I feel a bit like Prince Ali Prince Ali, fabulous he, Ali Ababwa with the, the kids and matching outfits trailing behind us and everybody like, Ooh, they must be fancy.

Three. They accuse men who want more children as treating them as quote unquote cattle. They love this comparison. The oversupply of men, plus a surprisingly strong and rather toxic feminist slash anti pickup movement, gives them leverage. And keep in mind, there's, there's very few women compared to men in China because during the one child policy people preferred male children.

So women have the advantage in the sexual [00:35:00] marketplace and they are able to demand these types of concessions,

Simone Collins: right? In China, at

least. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Then next intersectional status signaling and competition. The culture explicitly demands women to select men based on wealth Households slash car meme and this is actually a common mean i've seen in my asia watching stuff in china that house car meme Children are expensive.

So reduce her other luxury consumption once they have again it true and they can be uniquely expensive in East Asia. If you look at something like South Korea, Children are way more expensive than they are in the U. S. You end up spending. I think it was something like a third of a family's household budget ends up going for one child to go to cram school.

This is the additional school they attend in addition to public school.

Simone Collins: Mhm.

Social media embraces the narcissism and wealth expectations. For example, there are very popular TikTok channels of couples where a woman acts bored and useless where her boyfriend showers her with gifts and services.

 I've seen these before. The fact that what are you saying? It [00:36:00] just sounds awful. The fact that a man loves a horrible and useless woman implies that she is beautiful enough to counterbalance her awfulness, implying she's really beautiful.

Laziness is an honest signal of beauty. Women aspire to be useless and rich. I'm not joking. This person says, and again, I see this

oh, well, the way he writes this, I don't know if I'd word it this way, but he says, , Chinese women cannot reconcile their preferences for prostitution with the notion of love. They ask, how can you really love a poor man? In quote here. And I have heard this but I haven't, you know, seen it myself.

And then here he says Chinese people appeal to political correctness on a daily basis. It is very deeply ingrained. They are genuinely patriotic when asked to give an opinion on something potentially quote unquote sensitive, read political. There is a short delay where they recall the Chinese stance before they state the collective national view.

He would argue that this happened for such a long time that Chinese people convinced themselves that having few kids was not only moral, but good in other ways. Two, cognitive dissonance, [00:37:00] confirmation bias, and intersexual status signaling drove them to post rationalize having few children as being something that was fashionable.

Three, this would have been compounded by by overly effective propaganda promoting all the positives for having few kids and downplaying the negatives, which are repeated verbatim by women who don't want kids because you know why the women also don't want this. And for those arguments have now been fully adopted and leveraged perhaps in a subconscious collective quote unquote F you to the government for controlling reproductive rights for the past for in the first place.

And then he said, and he asked a few women whether they would prefer one child worth 1 million or two kids worth 500k and they unanimously chose one child worth 1 million. China is effed. They need to convince these women that having kids is preferable, but they spent the last few decades doing the exact opposite.

Chinese women are Ironically, very individualistic. And I've actually seen this individualism in Chinese women that we're friends with. But another thing I note here is for people who like, don't [00:38:00] believe how set in their ways China is, even despite their desperate demographic situation, which is going to lead to the collapse of their country, pretty much inevitably at this point, the government is still only on a three child policy.

They need to be on a. 10 child policy. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Right. Yeah.

And I think it's this cognitive dissonance that he's talking about here is why they haven't. Gone to new way of viewing things.

So, I hear I'm going to talk about another one of the subsects that this feature is right, a podcast did on Asians. Which I found really interesting and I'm gonna quote something here because he's he's talking about real studies here Like I don't love all of the ideas that he draws from it, but I found it really interesting so one thing to note is if you look at infants like six months old people who are like There are not gender differences in infants.

You see massive differences and like Very, very young infants. In terms of behavioral patterns, it is very clear that we are pre coded to be different as genders. But you also see ethnic differences, which I wasn't as aware [00:39:00] of. The face of a 48 year old Chinese baby with a cloth. It may clear its mouth for a way to breathe, but it will otherwise stay passive.

The white baby will go to war. It's arms will flail with all the force it can muster against the unidentified creature that's intruded its rights. That's the way he, he words this. And the paper that was looking at this had a p value of 0. 001. Oh! So this is a really strong, and you can say, was there bias in the study?

In a 2005 book, and I'm quoting him now, the U. Chicago professor who carried out this study and its follow up in the 1970s describes his inspiration for it as talking to his Chinese American wife about different cultural upbringings. Babies have no culture. A conformist baby becomes a conformist adult.

This is him quoting here, of course, we be free and creative people, not drones. So this is the way he sees it. I don't see it this way. Okay, but I did find this very interesting and they actually have video of these [00:40:00] old studies of the babies. Yeah, you can see how the different babies react to this on earth, but there's going to be, if you look at Confucius culture, which we, you know, talked about in the last video on lower East Asian fertility rates are like really, really preferring hierarchy and conformity that is going to genetically reward people who have these preferences.

I

Simone Collins: guess trusting of authority figures,

trusting of authority figures in the system. And you see this in the U S even, even though the Democrats, like the, the East Asian population in the U S it's the most effed population by DEI. and yet they keep voting for Democrats. It is absolutely wild. No one should be further to the right.

Like they should be like far to the right of white people. In terms of their, the amount that they contribute to social services, if they, but they culturally speaking and perhaps even genetically speaking, seem to trust authority [00:41:00] and hierarchies more. But again, I don't think this is a bad thing.

I said this in the last episode. Progressives pretend they value diversity, but then they pretend that everyone's the same. How could diversity have value if everyone's the same? Diversity can only be a strength if we admit that whether it's from a cultural or genetic standpoint, there are not better or worse people, but people on average are bringing different perspectives and proficiencies to the table and through working with people who are genuinely different from you.

In the same way that I was able to read this study by a guy who holds many perspectives that I personally find distasteful, right? I was able to learn things that I never would have seen because of my perspective.

Simone Collins: Yeah, that's, that's a really strong point. Yeah. Well, and that's why, especially why looking into the work of people from a broad variety of viewpoints is important because if you just [00:42:00] stick with the heterodox people, like within a certain realm, you're just going to see the weird stuff that they see.

You also have to look at the sources and arguments made by people who say things that are very offensive to you, or that are really. Yeah, so out of my field for you. So,

so I would argue that the, the Chinese problem when I read this guy's email and I consider it in context as potential, you know, cultural differences and perhaps even genetic differences in terms of, you know, proficiencies and how they choose to relate to the world.

It actually seems that the core problem of East Asian fertility is downstream of a sexist culture. If you have a conformist culture that views males and females as two essentially different classes or castes you get this culture where it's easy for a woman or a man to identify more with other men or women, especially if you consider the first polls that we were looking at, that is my husband or wife is not the core focus of my life.

[00:43:00] Whereas if you look at the culture that we come from, which is one of the most resistant cultures to fertility collapse or other resistant cultures to fertility collapse, like Jewish culture they're much more clan based. So like our culture, and I really see this now that I have kids and I consider my family conceptually in my head, I see us more as a clan than a family.

Looking at them, I'm like, Oh yeah, I got to raise the next generation of the clan. I got to play with, you know, when I'm playing with my other family members, this is our clan's value set. This is what we stand for. The clan comes first. And this is something that was always told to me when I was a kid, you know, blood thicker than water, your family always comes first, you know, see yourself.

Well, I should note that my culture has a pretty unique understanding of family comes first. It's competent family comes first. Incompetent family are worse than trash which is a very interesting way of relating to it. Yeah. I was thinking about

Simone Collins: you versus like the tiger mom trope. And it's really interesting because it's, it's a lot more sink or swim.

It's not so [00:44:00] much, I'm going to focus on you no matter what, even if you're a loser, I'm going to keep hammering at you. It's more like. If you're a loser, you're dead to me. Leave the house. We're not going to talk anymore. If you're a winner. And a

lot of people were surprised. They were like, I haven't, cause I mentioned like my parents talking about disowning me when I was a kid.

Right. If I did X or I did Y or I didn't achieve Z. And I think a lot of people, they were like, I didn't hear this type of language growing up. This type of language is very common in my culture. Okay. It's very common because. If you are going to have, like people can see it as unethical, but I actually see it as a highly ethical way of dealing with things.

If you are going to have a clan based mentality, i. e. family first, this has a huge risk of nepotism. I. e. you, you end up defending clan members who either did something that was obviously immoral, which can lead to things like blood feuds with neighboring clans. Or Or you end up putting a family in a position that they haven't earned the right to secure.

And so it's more a clan based system, but a [00:45:00] clan based system that only maintains ownership of an individual if they have proven that they are worthy of being slurred, slotted into, like, roles within the clan or, or clan based, like, business structure. Based on their own competence. And, and it was made very clear to me, if you do not show that you are excellent, like if you go to less than an Ivy League school, you're out.

If you go to, like, they were really clear on all of this stuff. And I think this is why, like, all of my cousins went to an Ivy League school or Oxford or Cambridge. Like, it's, it's and I have a lot of cousins. All but one. But yeah, it's. Interesting. Anyway, did you have any, uh, final thoughts here before we move to the next one?

Simone Collins: I, I'm just really excited to see where the research goes over time. And when we It won't go anywhere. That's why all these studies

are from like the freaking

Simone Collins: 40s. No, but just specifically on unpolygenic risk scores related to fertility, because I think more people are going to start looking at those.

[00:46:00] But we'll see.

Yeah. I mean, and a lot of people are like, why are you looking at this old research? You think you could conduct any of these studies today?

Simone Collins: Yeah. It ain't happening anymore. Any type of ethnic

differences. Like we're, we're different and that's why we benefit working together. And as I said in the last episode, you know, you want to go on and on about how, you know, we don't need their conformist hierarchy based culture.

Nothing good is going to come from this. Well then where are our semiconductor fabs buddy? Okay. We got a few, but not many. A little island out there has most of the world's semiconductor fabs, and when they tried to build ones in the United States, they said people couldn't follow orders well enough for the plants to operate.

Yeah, so well then

Simone Collins: I really hope that East Asian populations figure out how to develop some high fertility subcultures that are also really high performing. Because, yeah, to lose their unique competitive advantages, their unique perspectives, would be a genuine tragedy, so. Yikes, but, oh well. We'll see what happens.

[00:47:00] Love you to death, Simone. I love you too, Malcolm. Okay.

So here's a question, Octavian. Do you want to marry someone when you grow up? Like, like have a mommy who you marry and then be mommy and daddy to kids? Yes. Okay. Do you want to find that person yourself or do you want daddy to find them for you? Um, I want to find it by myself. Okay. Why do you want to find them by yourself?

Because. Because why? Why? Because. Because you like doing things on your own? You like walking home on your own, right? You get really mad when daddy tries to help you. Yes. Why do you like to walk home on your own? Because I wait to, what about you, Titan? Do you wanna be a mama one day? Do you? Yes. You think she wants to be?

Aw,

you guys are adorable. [00:48:00] Yes. Daddy, what do you want, Torson? If you don't wanna like and describe, push our button at the YouTube.

Get full access to Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm at basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe