In this transmission we highlight three different intellectual contributions to the problem of natalism. All of them identity national or even global issues.
The good news is that natalism is the one system-wide problem that it is in your grasp to solve, and each of these essays offer some insight for you. One sign that natalism is a real problem is that it is a problem that at every level with solutions that can be adapted at every level.
The Demographic Roots of American Power
A thoughtful essay on American power being based on both a large and a high quality population, and how American thinkers from Benjamin Franklin on have recognized that strength begins in the cradle. Franklin’s attack on slavery as a way of masking and exacerbating problems with American natalism is fascinating.
Let’s make this less abstract. The Demographic Roots of MyBusinessCo Power. An enterprise founder is often better off having more high quality people quite apart from what tasks there are to do—they make their own productivity. “Reducing headcount” is not a healthy goal. Same for the bureaucratic empire builder who obsessively increases headcount. Both are cancerous metastases of actual leadership. If your extended family is not a financial, social, and network asset you have untapped potential for growth!
The Demographic Roots of the Me Family Power. A family founder absolutely has opportunities to build power and strength by creating a network of high quality people who trust each other, share deep cultural roots, and are highly linked. Even in the immediate family when the children are still young the additional children can be a strength. The current model where children are an expensive luxury is broken. Reconceptualize additional children as additional cultural power for the values you are trying to teach each child (your family project becomes much more persuasive when a bunch of brothers and sisters share it too). Find modes of home production that are of value to you for economic, aesthetic, or health reasons that the children can work in—experience your children as productive members of your household. Look for family enterprises that children can help in. Within reason, leverage their cuteness and the fundamental appeal of what you are doing.
The Human Monkey Cares About Status
Valuable thinkers More Births and Becoming Noble have both focused in lately on the role that status plays in having children. When motherhood is high status, women become mothers. (Ditto, we would argue, fatherhood and fathers). When it isn’t, they don’t.
Two notable examples of status effects on birth rates are in Mongolia, where the President personally decorates mothers of big families with medals and the famous Georgian birth rate bump when the Patriarch of Georgia offered to personally baptize each child in large families.
Read More Birth’s thread and Becoming Noble’s thread for all the particulars.
One caution: there is an emerging consensus that financial incentives for families don’t work, based on the failure of programs that offered laughably small incentives. All the smart people now say this. The reality is that real financial incentives have literally never been tried.
Natalism Boom
We are in a natalism boom. The lack of kids is starting to shock. This transmission covers the boom, from how many kids to fit in one bedroom to South Korea’s proposal to pay $70,000 per birth. It ends with some suggestions on what the boom should mean for you.
Our view is that the natalist crisis is serious enough that no serious nation can or should try to cheap out on solving it. We also believe that wealth and status are closely allied, and ultimately any attempt to increase status long term that leaves people in financial difficulties is likely to fail. We believe in George Washington’s motto that Honor and Self-Interest Must Combine.
We also caution that long-term status changes can be just as wrenching and just as opposed by established status configurations as long term economic adjustments are. There is no easy end run around opposition.
Despite these cautions, we are enthusiastic about the insights and possibilities for birth rates that come from considering status. What are the personal implications? The first is that you should live in such a way that your commitment and love of family is high status by association with you. Are you fit, handsome, pretty, kind, intelligent, and so on? Become so, and become more so, to the extent you can. The second is that you should pay attention to how you family’s identity concepts can make your family experience feel high status to its participants. Do things that the culture doesn’t do but values. Third, parents are automatically high status in a family setting, what you both preach and practice will naturally seem high status to your children.
