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Comment by orasis | Hacker News Reader

Note that these cultural norms evolved prior to modern birth control, STI testing/treatment, and peak population.

Birth control is a radical invention and it is shocking that it hasn’t led to even more rapid cultural change than it has.

One also needs to separate generalized cultural knowledge from individual knowledge. As people mature, they should tend to individuate and discover “what works for them” vs “what works for society”.

That individual knowledge can be bootstrapped on cultural knowledge, but ultimately we may each need to reject aspects of our culture in order to discover our unique path.

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> That individual knowledge can be bootstrapped on cultural knowledge, but ultimately we may each need to reject aspects of our culture in order to discover our unique path.

But we’re not unique individuals. We’re 8 billion copies of two sexes of human animal, and pretty much everyone falls into a handful of archetypes and social roles.

Seeking to collapse the unique contexts and interplay between 8 billion individuals is incredibly dangerous, leading to things like command-and-control economies, socialism, and genecide.

The information surface area and processing power of 8 billion people far exceeds the few bits representing your “handful of archetypes and social roles”.

Anyone who believes that Western civilization has been largely functional should soundly reject these ideas and agree that individuation is a fundamentally Good Thing.

Western civilization is literally in the middle of wiping itself out. People have become so individualistic and self-absorbed that they cannot even perpetuate their own civilization and need to import people from the Middle East and Africa to avoid disappearing. The phrase “jump the shark” comes to mind.

All highly developed societies have birth rates below replacement. Nothing special about western nations there.

I think that’s more of a confounding correlation. America had birth rates above 3 when it landed a man in the moon. And Europe was “highly developed” before birth rates started collapsing in the 1970s. Several highly successful American subgroups, such as Muslims and Mormons, still have birth rates above replacement.

And Asia has its own distinct issue, which is that development coincided with population control evangelism from the west.

You’ve mentioned Mormonism twice now as an example of successful monogamous societies but it should be noted that the growth rate of the church has become negative. I’d be amazed if the LDS church is still around in any meaningful way 30 years from now. It’s hardly meaningful now.

As far as I can tell, it's one of the more robust sociological correlations that has been established worldwide. Fertility rates are dropping on every continent, and the drops are strongly correlated with economic development. See links below, they seem pretty damning.

And yes, it begun in the second half of the 20th century, but I don't think that makes it spurious.

I wouldn't be surprised if western cultural influence played a meaningful role, but I can't imagine that explaining the entire phenomenon.

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* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility (see the graph at the top)

* https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#total-fertility-ra...

* https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034075/fertility-rate-w...

Is it a bad thing ?

As you might know, Malthus was quite concerned about the issues of overpopulation. His solution was to educate women. This seems to be working surprisingly well !

>His solution was to educate women.

Really? I never knew this! Can you expand on his rhetoric at all?

Well, that too short comment of mine might be slightly disingenuous, considering what you might have thought I meant by this, but here's an overview :

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aehr.12250

I seem to remember that he practiced what he preached (not only as the first ever professor of economics, but also as a pastor), and has founded at least one school for women, but annoyingly I can't seem to find the source any more ??

Of note also : by the end of the 19th century the (neo-)Malthusian feminists had already embraced ideas that he disagreed with like contraception and for some even abortion.

The elephant in the room is that “highly developed” is a euphemism for “women are treated equally and have rights”.

Only if you define “rights” and equal treatment in rather libertarian way. Americans’ ideal family size is the highest in decades. Almost half of women (46%) ideally want three or more kids: https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-lar.... But the American ideal of “equality” is giving women the choice to be treated like childless men in the workforce. And America’s idea of “rights” is allowing women to abort pregnancies, rather than the “right” to social and economic support for having children.

Ideal != even close to going to happen. As you note, the reality on the ground is so unconducive to that actually happening, it’s a joke.

Is it individualization that's done that, or rentier capitalism?

Individuals in the western capitalist society spend most of their time making capitalists of all sorts exceedingly wealthy, rather than spending most of their time on themselves.

Give us 4 - 6 months off a year like our ancestors had, and we'll have plenty of children

While I agree with the central point, just wait until you see the data in China, Japan, and South Korea. It makes the US look damn healthy by comparison.

Asia has a distinct problem. For the last 50 years, western countries pushed the idea that population control was the only way for these countries to advance economically. My dad was involved in these efforts, supporting USAID projects in places like Bangladesh. And they were successful in bringing down birth rates. But you’ve now got two generations of people who were raised with the almost religious idea that having kids will hinder economic development.

I was having lunch with some of my dad’s USAID friends, and someone joked whether my wife and I were thinking of having a fourth. Then someone reflexively said “well nobody needs four kids.”

That and a serious demographic issue with too many old folks needing care and not producing ‘economically’ and not enough young folks who are.

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