Fizz n Dizz

Oh, no! The peasants aren't having enough babies! How will we keep the cost of labor down? We couldn't possibly examine the conditions leading up to the fertility crisis. That might force us to have uncomfortable conversations, confront unpopular truths, and perhaps even acknowledge that we, personally might have played some role in causing it. Wait! I have an idea! People are all just interchangeable units of economic productivity, right? Let's just import some like we're buying a sack of potatoes! Yay! That will solve everything! Best of all, they work for cheap, because they're used to third world conditions, and part of their compensation is they get to come to the US. And they can't quit, because if they do, they have to go back! But we need to call it something other than "indentured servitude"... hhhmmmm... how about "skilled immigration"? Yeah, that's it! Listen, sunshine, and listen carefully, because I'm going to explain exactly where the "demographic cliff" you so uncritically accept actually came from. Yes, I am now going to explain the entire fertility crisis. You know, that thing everyone condemns, but no one wants to examine too closely. It came from the insatiable capitalist appetite for cheap labor. Does this make no sense to you? Are you sure you just read what you thought you read? Did Devon Eriksen actually just say something critical of capitalism? Are you checking outside the window for soaring pigs on the wing? Well, have a seat in your favorite beanbag chair, get your blankie and a cup of hot chocolate, because it's story time. --------------------------------------------------------- Once upon a time, people lived in tribes, and hunted wild animals, and gathered wild plants. This wasn't very nice, because it was hard to feed themselves this way, and there wasn't any high-speed internet service. Then people discovered you could tame animals. You could tame an animal called a cow, and raise them for milk and meat. And you could tame an animal called a cat, and then you could grow lots of plants and store them without mice eating all your hard work. You couldn't eat all the cows, of course, or there would be no next generation of cows. And you couldn't eat all the grain, or you wouldn't have seeds to plant and grow more grain. But people quickly figured this out. Then things were nicer and people could own stuff. In fact, they owned so much stuff that somebody invented something called "war", which was where you got a bunch of your friends together and went and took someone else's stuff instead of having to make it yourself. Well, people didn't like losing wars and having their stuff taken, and they noticed that guys who had more friends, and guys whose friends worked together better, were the guys who won all the wars. So they invented kings. Kings were special guys who everybody had to obey or his friends would beat them up. This helped your tribe win wars, which was nice, but the king could do whatever he wanted, like not share the stuff he took in wars, or take stuff from his own tribe instead. So somebody else realized that everybody had been living in big tribes called "nations", and cooperating with each other for a while, and maybe they really didn't need kings anymore, because they'd still be able to work together and fight wars. So they came up with two different systems. One was socialism, where they had a big bunch of bureaucrats who took all the stuff, and capitalism, where everybody kept whatever stuff they made. Well, socialism didn't work at all, and it was worse than kings, but capitalism worked great. And they built so much stuff and traded with each other and everybody got rich. Now, some people got richer than others, which was fine because everybody was better off overall, and the really rich people paid other men to work for them and help build more stuff. This was great, too. Then one of the rich people had an idea. A really bad idea. A really horrible terrible no good very bad idea. An idea which was so awful that it threatened to undo all the other good ideas that people had, all the way back to the bit with the cows and the cats. You see, the rich men, and to a lesser extent everybody else, had gotten so rich, and there were so many nice things that people could have, that the only thing holding us all back from having even more nice things was not enough people to do work. So somebody said "What if we hired people's wives, too?" At first, the wives weren't interested. Work wasn't fun, it couldn't be fun, because work was something you pay other people for, and people do fun things for free. And wives didn't need money, because their husbands just gave it to them. So a club of rich guys, let's call them "Wall Street", went looking for a solution. They found one, buried in the back corners of dusty universities. There were a small bunch of women who didn't like men very much. Some of them didn't like men very much because they weren't very pretty, so men didn't pay attention to them. Others didn't like men very much because bad men had raped them. And others didn't like men very much because they liked women very very much indeed, in very intimate ways. But whatever their reasons, these women didn't like men, and they didn't like babies, either. And they didn't see the point in women having men, or babies. So the Wall Street guys said "Ah-hah! If we can make other women think like this, they will come work for us, instead of making babies!" So they gave the women who didn't like men a bunch of money, and put the articles they wrote in magazines, and put them on TV, where they talked about how strong and empowered and cool they were, and about how only dumb scared uncool women had babies, instead of traveling to exotic places and having sex with mysterious exciting men and wearing pretty clothes. But the Wall Street men didn't think about babies grow up, and there aren't any babies, there's no one to grow up and do work later. They forgot the lesson about not eating all the cows and all the grain. And so they tried to hire all the people. ----------------------------------------------------- All right, are we finished here? Do you understand now? Radical feminists, and hardcore traditionalists, have both noticed that when you educate women, they stop having babies. But neither of them asked what those women are being educated for. They're being educated to train them for careers. You can educate women all you like, about matters animal, vegetable, and mineral. You can make them into the very model of a modern major general. You can teach them many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse. But if they have to work 8 hours a day wrangling spreadsheets in a cubicle, then can't, and won't, have babies. Women aren't having babies because you're paying them to do other stuff instead. And this is why immigration isn't a solution for jack shit. If your imported population assimilates, they'll have the exact same fertility crisis. And if they don't assimilate, they can't be a substitute workforce for a industrialized and technological society. You're not solving any problem, with your immigration. You're just an addict digging through the couch cushions, hoping to find a crumb of unsmoked meth. You're trying to keep the cheap-labor bonanza going, with increased supply and lowered real wages, despite the fact that it's strangling Western Civilization, and could strangle the whole race. You forgot the lesson about eating the seed corn. Because the lesson is harder to learn this time. After all, seed corn belongs to the farmer. He can just learn not to eat it, because that's in his own best interest. But women don't belong to anyone, unless you're living in an Islamic society (which, by an odd coincidence, never seem to have a fertility crisis). So it's the tragedy of the commons. If you don't hire the women, someone else will, and we're back to no women having babies. Besides, our braindead parents and grandparents literally made it illegal to not hire women. This is we need governance for this one. Either of the legal, government variety or through social mores and shaming. We stop people from hunting female deer. We stop people from overfishing. We protect endangered species. We understand what population replenishment requires. When it's another species and we don't get all emotional and irrational about it. We need some way of restricting female employment when birth rates fall. And yes, this means driving the price of labor up. Those unemployed women have to be supported, and not only supported... they have to feel secure about their futures. They have to know they will continue to be supported without needing to have careers. That means husbands with jobs that are not only well-paid enough for them to afford to support wives, but secure enough that they won't get laid off every time the demand for acme widgets dips by three percent. But Devon, women having babies instead of jobs is demeaning! Nothing is demeaning if the rest of the human race thinks it is honorable. You only think babies are demeaning because somebody paid a lot of money to program you to think that. Your belief doesn't even make any sense. If there is a single thing which humans can do that is honorable, how can it be dishonorable to make humans who do that thing? But Devon, women are perfect capable of doing those tough, technical jobs, and it's sexist and misogynist of you to say they aren't! I didn't say they aren't. You are just programmed to think I did because you are a non-player character. I said that there is another tough, critically important job that only they can do. It is a waste of smart women's time to make rockets. Because any sufficient number of smart people can make rockets, but only smart women can make a sufficient number of smart people. The fertility crisis does not come from ideology or culture. It is a trap that lies across the development path of every high-tech human civilization. That is why every such culture has it. Feminism is an aspect of it in the West, but feminism is not the driving force behind it. The driving force behind the fertility crisis is financial incentives. Capitalism is great. It produces wealth and technology like nothing else in the world. It optimizes better than any deliberate centralized planning ever could. But it is unable to consider certain variables that come from core human biology, and we have hit a situation where we have over-optimized to the detriment of human thriving. So, whether it be by laws or by culture, we must fence off certain areas of human existence, away from the hyper-optimization engine. I suggest we start by making it a status symbol for a woman to have a wealthy husband instead of a job. Quality women don't have loser husbands who make them work. Quality women don't put their kids in public school to be raised by strangers. But that's not enough. If the term "loser" is be a badge of shame, it cannot apply to the average man. You will never sell housewifery as a status symbol if men who can support it are unavailable. Which means that you cannot have Western Civilization flooded with indentured servants from the third world. A man who completes with a slave earns the wages of a slave. And free markets contain no slaves. The Mario Nawfals of the world don't really pick up on that too easily. When you're a "Lebanese-Australian" businessman, who lists his location as "Dubai", and whose account is geolocated at "Europe", it's hard to be smart enough to connect the dots and understand why you shouldn't destroy societies you have no loyalty to. But this is not about any particular society. All high-tech societies have the fertility crisis. The fertility crisis may very well be the Fermian Great Filter. So if you don't fix it somewhere, it doesn't matter if you are a "citizen of the world". Because the whole world is back to cavorting druids, and death by stoning. It doesn't matter if you have two and half million followers on Twitter, because there is no Twitter. It doesn't matter if you are wealthy, because the modern finance has collapsed, and the tech stack — which makes all the nice things you can buy with that wealth — has collapsed along with it. You may not feel any loyalty to the boat, Mario. But you cannot drill a hole in the bottom of every boat, because there's only so long you can tread water. Not to mention that, as @romanhelmetguy pointed out, your hothouse-flower meritocracy of Excel spreadsheets is only protected from the real meritocracy of extreme violence by lots of Western men with guns.