Natalcon 2025
Natalcon was a wonderful time. The best was the people. Everyone bright, friendly, motivated, and if you spent enough time with them, with a story to tell.
Our main problem was not being able to meet with half the people we wanted to.
There is a real momentum.
Also pretty great was the sponsor who cheekily offered a discount per child. Here is the real natalist subsidy we’ve been looking for!
Also pretty great was bringing our teenage daughter for the final reception and dinner. The people made a great impression on her.
Also pretty great was selling a number of copies of the first ever pro-natalism kids’ book (way more rollicking than it has any right to be).
Notes
These are from the talks and the conversations and the unconference breakouts.
My impression that it wasn’t only Rome that had a birth collapse, but Greece before it, was confirmed by a classicist. This creates a real dilemma for those of us who think that some form of biological or cultural selection will eventually get us out of the current birth crisis (the Eric Kaufmann thesis). If birth collapse occurs nearly every time a civilization goes into decline, which I believe it does, why hasn’t this evolutionary selection process happened before?
“The key is the stories.”
Every Home Needs a Story
We are driving hard on a natalist project that could change the world. We give it a 1-in-5 chance that you could hear about it on the news, and soon.
Marriage decline = birth decline. “How can you commit to an unknown person (a child) if you can’t commit to someone you already know?”
“Family formation is more important than capital formation.”
We need a serious “root-causes” commission.
Someone suggested a pro-natal month and flag. We jokingly suggested that a la the LBGTQ flag we could start with the basic natalism flag then add stuff for grandparents, step-parents, IVF, etc. The humor was not well received.
Several recommendations for Math Academy (the conversations were pretty wide-ranging). Also for Onki flash cards.
“You want the best of everything for your kids, especially existence.”
L0m3z hit hard that natalism should be wu-wei. All true, but effortlessness requires enormous amounts of effort.
Another L0m3z point: natalism as a cause is political, and politics is about power and is sterile. All true, but power plus love is fatherhood, brotherhood. True natalism is power made possible through love.
"If birth collapse occurs nearly every time a civilization goes into decline, which I believe it does, why hasn’t this evolutionary selection process happened before?"
Malaria resistance has been a major evolutionary driver in areas with Malaria, but not so much elsewhere. I recall a story about a spot in England with malaria. Men living there who survived it would often marry several wives in sequence from the surrounding areas. But no resistance was being evolved because importing fresh blood trumped any selection effects that might have been going on.
In the case of Rome and Greece's baby bust, large migrations occurred, swamping any selection effect.
It's hard to say how the modern open-ended experiment on this will go - there is a lot different about the situation than in those classical cases.