Restarting the engine of civilization (at minimum viable scale)

COVID caused baby boom in red states, baby bust in blue states

Scientific American says “the findings suggest that the degree to which states or regions took the virus ‘seriously’ affected whether they were likely to see a drop or bump in fertility rate”.

In the big picture, fertility is declining rapidly in all of these states and none are above replacement in the aggregate, so this isn’t cause for red-state triumphalism — but it does support the thesis that Western infertility is mostly memetic, and therefore not inevitable.

Our people tend to think of the demographic crisis as depicted in the movie Idiocracy: smart people descending inexorably into neurotic barrenness, while the stupid breed like rabbits.

But whatever proxy for IQ you choose, the story falls apart upon inspection. Every group that comes to the US or Europe and imbibes the local culture is effectively sterilized within two generations.

Education, socioeconomic status, IQ, etc. are relevant because the sterilizing memes hit rich, educated, high-IQ populations first, but it’s not obvious that it hits them any harder.

The middle class aren’t having kids, but neither are the poor — except at the very bottom of the distribution, where they are (barely) at replacement, with 100% subsidies of housing, food and healthcare.

(Anyone who recommends handing people money to have kids should explain why it will work better than this.)

Meanwhile, the fertility rates at the upper end of the income distribution — among a very small but culturally influential population — demonstrates that “rich/smart/high-status = barren” is an oversimplification.

And all of these statistics give the misleading impression that these populations are all slowly declining together — but what is actually happening is a world-historic selection event:

According to this figure, one-third of the population will be excluded from the next generation, and the 20% of families with three or more children will produce 50% of the next generation. (That’s a minimum estimate, using the lowball assumption that the average size of 5+ families is 5.)

If you really wanted to stretch, you could argue that our economic situation is so awful that only families making $1,000,000 a year can afford to have 2.1 kids, but having spent many years deep in the trough of the middle-class income distribution, I can tell you that it’s silly.

Middle and upper-middle class people can certainly afford kids — but they are unable or unwilling to have them for cultural reasons.

First, men and women are struggling to pair off, because (as noted by Brit Benjamin at NatalCon 2023) marriage has become an unenforceable contract, so the financial and personal risk involved is unsustainable.

This means that people take a long time — too long — to choose and vet romantic partners. Many age out of childbearing having never met The One.

Among those who find a viable partner, the median age of first-time American moms is 30, at which point a lot of things have to go right (professional, marital, medical) for the couple to make it to three children.

Second, dual income families cannot support replacement fertility in the aggregate.

Median personal income in the US is about $55K, and childcare costs about $10K per year per child. Even with the massive de facto childcare subsidy provided by public schools, most families can’t afford to spend $30,000 on childcare for the first five years.

And the public school “subsidy” is mostly illusory anyway, since sending your kids to a school where they’ll actually be safe and educated requires you to buy a massively overvalued house “for the schools”. (Liz Warren wrote a book about this back when libs were allowed to notice things.)

One of the funniest examples of this phenomenon is Medina, Washington, where Bill Gates dumped millions of dollars into the local school district (so he could give his kids an elite experience but still claim that they “went to public school”), and now Seattle strivers rent empty apartments on Mercer Island so they can send their kids to Gates’ personal public school district. (Now that the Gates kids are grown, of course, the spigot has run dry and the district is struggling to keep up appearances.)

The decision to be a middle-class working mom of three is a decision to earn less than burger-flipper wages for five years, and then either sign on to the most burdensome mortgage and commute you can afford, or send your kids to a gladiator school. Unsurprising that few take that deal.

The two problems are linked, of course: if marriage establishes no real social or contractual obligations, it is difficult to justify the risk of creating an integrated (and mutually dependent) family. So most people build separate, air-gapped economic lives where they don’t actually need each other — their “marriage” is largely a gesture of sentiment and a tax vehicle.

The doomers have a point: you can’t fully escape these problems just by being individually smart and competent. The collapse of single-earner families has introduced social and financial costs that affect everyone.

You have to earn a salary for one, while paying a mortgage priced for two, in a neighborhood where most kids are being raised by the state.

If you bug out to the country, your kids will be surrounded by the same dysfunction you find everywhere else.

If you can afford to live in a fancy neighborhood on a single income, and your wife brings your kids down to the clean, well-funded public park during the day, instead of meeting other moms she will mostly encounter foreign nannies.

There’s nowhere to run.

The systems that got your grandfather educated, employed, married, and raising a family no longer exist.

These are the systems by which a culture replicates itself. If it cannot accomplish these basic tasks, it will collapse — no matter what else it does.

The infrastructure of Western society has now organized around a new default life-path for men and women that is incompatible with family life, so it cannot reproduce itself. It only survives by consuming the families of healthier cultures — and it is rapidly running out of other people’s kids.

So we have to build new systems:

• developing marketable skills outside public school and academia

• networking to build businesses and find work for our guys

• connecting people who want kids and grandkids

• building communities that support raising a family

These are roughly in order of complexity. EXIT is intended to address #1 and #2 directly, and lay the groundwork for #3 and #4. Natal Conference is our first attack on #3, and what we are building in Texas will serve as a blueprint for #4.

It’s a huge task: restarting the engine of civilization at minimum viable scale. We can’t stop the flood, but if we work together maybe we can build a boat.

EXIT News:

• Last week on our full-group call, we discussed “How to Live Near Your Friends” — and, more broadly, how/whether we can adapt rich atomized techbro digital-nomad networking paradigms to our purposes.

• In the Hot Seat, we pull together the resources and connections of the group to help one member with his EXIT plan. Tonight, we’ll be running a Hot Seat for a young man who is preparing to leave his FAANG job, go into business for himself, and start a family.

• Seattle meetup was a success. Topics at the unconference:

  • The role of genetic testing in cancer diagnosis and treatment from a bioinformatics researcher

  • The case for commodities over the next 5 years, from an investment manager

  • The physiology of stress, from a fitness trainer

  • Project Kuiper (Amazon’s Starlink competitor) from an Amazon engineer

  • The case for getting the hell out of Seattle, by me

Cocktail hour meetup links for Austin (4/26), Boston (5/24), and New York City (6/21) below the fold; as always, members-only meetup invites will be sent via email.