In my new column in Taki’s Magazine, I review a new academic paper hypothesizing that the steady fall in the birthrate might be due in part to the steady rise in racial diversity:
I don't think I want to see that chart split between native and foreign born women.
What are the areas they examined--zip codes, city, county? Presumably, big city centers (which used to attract young singles) are more diverse than the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas many moved to after they married, so this isn't terribly surprising, or did they control for that?
I wonder what new public housing does to the the birthrate in the surrounding area, since spreading them around became fashionable 30 years ago.
They attempted to control for everything, but they may have controlled for too much.
As usual, I would have appreciated Top 25 and Bottom 25 lists of cities ranked by fertility, unadjusted and adjusted. For example, with Raj Chetty's studies of different locales, by putting his findings in rank order I can usually tell what's driving them better than he can.
The one exception was a puzzling study Chetty did a couple of years of places where people have the most Facebook "friends" across income lines. The top and bottom towns appeared to be pretty random, other than that summer resort communities like Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard ranked high in Facebook egalitarianism.
That's a little creepy that the Island locals keep track of their wealthy customers & clients via Facebook, but it must pay off. The summer people need to believe the locals will be conscientious, so the schmoozing is probably mutual.
The female body is a highly advanced organism. When external pressures deem the environment unsafe, then it is no surprise women don't feel as though they do not wish to reproduce. It is a collective understanding that something if off. The spike in diversity due to, primarily the effects of globalization, among other various policies, would undoubtedly put undue pressure on the female psyche, even if she tries to convince herself that she is accepting of it (as women often do).
I agree with your comment but don't think you go far enough. There does seem to be something bigger going on, something ideological. This "something ideological" overrides instinct, in many cases. It's hard even to define. We lack useful terms for to describe the phenomenon. We are left like that proverbial group of the blind clutching various parts of an elephant.
What about the additional dimension of Gender Diversity? Seems like it has added an element of complexity and cost to baby-making that wasn’t there during my youth. We only needed to find a willing girl and the backseat of a 1963 Plymouth. No IVF or Surrogacy required.
Sounds plausible but I don't really buy it. Fertility is falling almost everywhere on the planet (with the possible exception of Black Africa), and the proposed pathway - of diversity making it harder to find a spouse through chance encounters - should have been offset in recent years by the rise of Tinder and other dating apps.
My guess is that it's a spurious correlation: diversity steadily goes up year by year while fertility goes down; and the most and fastest-rising diversity is generally in expensive progressive cities where fertility is generally falling the fastest, the white people who move there are the most politically left-wing, family formation is least affordable, etc.
It is a mistake to assume "the rise of dating apps" would lead to a higher likelihood of stable, healthy, monogamous, family-formation-oriented relationships.
Another point is that people find ways of being around their own kind even (or perhaps especially) in “diverse” settings. Within any larger Zone of Diversity people are not in fact randomly distributed across neighborhoods, schools, or workplaces.
E.g. Whites in LA may not trust the city government, but do they really have trouble finding enough other whites to constitute a dating pool?
I went to Manhattan twice this spring, and Manhattanites are so good at networking that they've recently even developed a social scene (in the sense of attractive young single men and women flirting) out of events like a Steve Sailer book reading or an Encounter Books party. That's less true in other high end places I went to like downtown L.A. and Austin where the audiences tended to be young men and some of them brought their good-looking girlfriends.
My guess is that New York tends to have such an abundance of smart, good-looking young women that they are more enterprising than anywhere else about figuring out where the smart young men are going to be and going there.
That may sound cynical, but I am enormously in favor of young people using their intelligence to figure out how to meet and marry.
I find it interesting that contrary to the other cohorts, the fertility of Asian women went up with more white guys around. Doesn't this support your chapter in "Noticing"? With the sex ratio of Asians in America skewed by the historical importation of Asian men for their labor and discouragement of Asian women immigrating before 100 years ago, the sheer numbers of Asian women are low enough to make them particularly prized. Add to that the perception of Asian women as being more feminine than other races make them more desirable as well as scarce. "Yellow fever" seems easy to explain.
“The taste. Both drinks are sugar free and calorie free. Coca‑Cola Zero Sugar looks and tastes more like Coca‑Cola original taste, while Diet Coke has a different blend of flavours which gives it a lighter taste.”
Ah ok. I really wanted to read what else this professor had to say because he sounded very frank.
Re: Male fragility
Reminds me of the wonderful advertiser and behavioral scientist Rory Sutherland’s anecdote of working with a cocktail bar. Because men were unsure if certain cocktails would come in fruity looking glasses they refrained from buying them. So they standardized the glasses regardless of drink and men felt safe ordering the cocktails.
On a related note; I do often wonder how you engage with the respectable set, as you hint at from time to time. Do they simply not care about your reputation? I would feel awfully self-conscious talking with certain people if I had a slanderous Wikipedia people can look up. But maybe this is all overblown?
Whites need not worry. When the hoards arrive their leaders will only want to mate with white women. Soon enough the Country will be ruled by whites again.
The "full-White fertility-rate" (both parents White) in the USA has fallen to 1.4 in the early 2020s.
See: "A study on America’s demographic-national crisis: Early-2020s birth-data by race; and developments in the White birth-share in the USA, 1920s to 2020s"
The USA's White population-crisis is a strange one. Sub-replacement for almost fifty years, now down to the 1.4 range. Full-White births have actually been below 50% for twenty years now. And with net-migration by non-Western youths, the ratio sinks even further when the rubber hits the road and these people age into active life.
Bizarrely, almost nobody ever talks about this crisis. If it were almost any other country, they would. In the USA, it would seem there is just no space to talk about it, I mean given the increasingly shrill political-climate. That which is called "politics" today, and much "news" too, is obsessed with making all public-policy into a strange and pointless prolefeed spectacle: everything devolving into grand pro-wrestling-style or daytime-tv-drama-style affair of fluff and misdirection, spiced up by a few characters who are agitators of anti-White-Male hatred but have free-reign of the discourse (whereas the White equivalents never do, possibly excluding, briefly, the Alt-RIght movement at its height in 2016-17). In other words, political discussion in the USA is stupid and unserious. Prolefeed politics.
In other societies that have medium- and long-term core-population fertility crises, social and political discourse does actually talk about this kind of thing, often and non-histrionically. But it's seldom talked about it in the USA.
It is of course occasionally indirectly talked about. But whenever it is, and I mean always, what you get is people engaging in strange forms of thinly veiled ethnomasochism, and immigrant-triumphalism, in tones that remind one of religious-prophecy and even racial-supremacism-- prophecy failing the chosenness and quasi-racial-cultural superiority of non-western Migrants, of course, and not core-population Americans.
In the entire first quarter of the 21st century, you only ever see deviation from this view people who are not megaphone-holders. But maybe they megaphone-adjacent would find it in their power to get very worked up about the Ukrainian TFR; we need emergency measures to boost the fertility-rate of Holy Ukraine, and we need it now! White-America? Meh. Who cares?
---
On the above, see also: "The USA’s guiding maxim on immigration" and "On ‘Immigrationism’ ideology, its future, and elite-dissent: Economists Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane on the impact of foreigners upon the U.S. elite"
Steve Sailer writes: "If your chance of going out and meeting that special someone [is relatively low] in a diverse setting, are you going to go out as much? Sitting on the couch with the remote control starts sounding like a good use of your time."
By the 2010s and especially the 2020s, this reference to TV-watching -- as a thing demoralized people to do kill time instead of getting stuff done (such as making huge sums of money, finding a wife, and starting a family) -- it's becoming outdated as a reference.
Time-wasting activities engaged in by young males today include video games, social media of all sorts, many forms of endless eye-glazing "content" shoved at them. The average engagement-times per month for such things as Youtube and TikTok, for some demographics, are astonishing.
Women, too, are negatively affected by the rise of the Internet in this way. There has been a weaponization of female narcissism to a degree that hurts everyone involved.
But as to the endless debate on whether young White-males or young White-females are more to blame for the "family-formation failure phenomenon": the arguing match there seems quite popular to engage in. Of course it's a mistake to blame one side or the other. It's enough to say: People respond to incentives (and disincentives).
----
See: "Who is responsible for the decline in family-formation in the U.S. and the rest of the West?"
I think it’s female reproductive suppression. No conspiracy needed.
Women are by far the biggest influence on other women’s actions. They have been playing intrasexual status games forever, but having children no longer boosts a woman’s status, so they don’t.
increasingly common "Diversity Is Our strength" L
I don't think I want to see that chart split between native and foreign born women.
What are the areas they examined--zip codes, city, county? Presumably, big city centers (which used to attract young singles) are more diverse than the suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas many moved to after they married, so this isn't terribly surprising, or did they control for that?
I wonder what new public housing does to the the birthrate in the surrounding area, since spreading them around became fashionable 30 years ago.
They attempted to control for everything, but they may have controlled for too much.
As usual, I would have appreciated Top 25 and Bottom 25 lists of cities ranked by fertility, unadjusted and adjusted. For example, with Raj Chetty's studies of different locales, by putting his findings in rank order I can usually tell what's driving them better than he can.
The one exception was a puzzling study Chetty did a couple of years of places where people have the most Facebook "friends" across income lines. The top and bottom towns appeared to be pretty random, other than that summer resort communities like Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard ranked high in Facebook egalitarianism.
That's a little creepy that the Island locals keep track of their wealthy customers & clients via Facebook, but it must pay off. The summer people need to believe the locals will be conscientious, so the schmoozing is probably mutual.
The female body is a highly advanced organism. When external pressures deem the environment unsafe, then it is no surprise women don't feel as though they do not wish to reproduce. It is a collective understanding that something if off. The spike in diversity due to, primarily the effects of globalization, among other various policies, would undoubtedly put undue pressure on the female psyche, even if she tries to convince herself that she is accepting of it (as women often do).
I agree with your comment but don't think you go far enough. There does seem to be something bigger going on, something ideological. This "something ideological" overrides instinct, in many cases. It's hard even to define. We lack useful terms for to describe the phenomenon. We are left like that proverbial group of the blind clutching various parts of an elephant.
It does seem like it is designed rather than happening organically.
What about the additional dimension of Gender Diversity? Seems like it has added an element of complexity and cost to baby-making that wasn’t there during my youth. We only needed to find a willing girl and the backseat of a 1963 Plymouth. No IVF or Surrogacy required.
89%? I mean, come on.
What is a stylized fact?
So... what about Korea and Japan and Finland etc?
Rapes, and sales of ice cream, are closely correlated. Therefore, there must be a causal connection.
(My point is that your post beat me to it, it is exactly the point I had been going to make as well, those countries being so very diverse.)
Sounds plausible but I don't really buy it. Fertility is falling almost everywhere on the planet (with the possible exception of Black Africa), and the proposed pathway - of diversity making it harder to find a spouse through chance encounters - should have been offset in recent years by the rise of Tinder and other dating apps.
My guess is that it's a spurious correlation: diversity steadily goes up year by year while fertility goes down; and the most and fastest-rising diversity is generally in expensive progressive cities where fertility is generally falling the fastest, the white people who move there are the most politically left-wing, family formation is least affordable, etc.
It is a mistake to assume "the rise of dating apps" would lead to a higher likelihood of stable, healthy, monogamous, family-formation-oriented relationships.
Another point is that people find ways of being around their own kind even (or perhaps especially) in “diverse” settings. Within any larger Zone of Diversity people are not in fact randomly distributed across neighborhoods, schools, or workplaces.
E.g. Whites in LA may not trust the city government, but do they really have trouble finding enough other whites to constitute a dating pool?
If Diversity was truly to unite, it has not been successful.
Larger dating pool should have produced more.
I went to Manhattan twice this spring, and Manhattanites are so good at networking that they've recently even developed a social scene (in the sense of attractive young single men and women flirting) out of events like a Steve Sailer book reading or an Encounter Books party. That's less true in other high end places I went to like downtown L.A. and Austin where the audiences tended to be young men and some of them brought their good-looking girlfriends.
My guess is that New York tends to have such an abundance of smart, good-looking young women that they are more enterprising than anywhere else about figuring out where the smart young men are going to be and going there.
That may sound cynical, but I am enormously in favor of young people using their intelligence to figure out how to meet and marry.
I find it interesting that contrary to the other cohorts, the fertility of Asian women went up with more white guys around. Doesn't this support your chapter in "Noticing"? With the sex ratio of Asians in America skewed by the historical importation of Asian men for their labor and discouragement of Asian women immigrating before 100 years ago, the sheer numbers of Asian women are low enough to make them particularly prized. Add to that the perception of Asian women as being more feminine than other races make them more desirable as well as scarce. "Yellow fever" seems easy to explain.
"Doesn't this support your chapter in "Noticing"?
Why, yes, yes it does.
A lot of factors to consider.
The ever-growing cost of living and the cost to raise a child to age 18.
The impacts of feminism, delayed marriage, emphasis on putting career ahead of family, and the belief that children are a burden/punishment.
Climate change alarmists brainwashing folks into believing that it is an imminent existential threat.
Abortion.
What's the source on the professor's coke zero quote or is it a joke? Because nothing showed up when I searched for it.
I searched for the difference between the two:
“The taste. Both drinks are sugar free and calorie free. Coca‑Cola Zero Sugar looks and tastes more like Coca‑Cola original taste, while Diet Coke has a different blend of flavours which gives it a lighter taste.”
https://www.coca-cola.com/gb/en/about-us/faq/what-s-the-difference-between-cocacola-zero-sugar-and-diet-coke
I have often wondered about that.
Thx
Somebody recently told me this memorable anecdote.
Unlikely as it may seem, I actually do talk to people in real life so not everything I know is Googleable.
Ah ok. I really wanted to read what else this professor had to say because he sounded very frank.
Re: Male fragility
Reminds me of the wonderful advertiser and behavioral scientist Rory Sutherland’s anecdote of working with a cocktail bar. Because men were unsure if certain cocktails would come in fruity looking glasses they refrained from buying them. So they standardized the glasses regardless of drink and men felt safe ordering the cocktails.
On a related note; I do often wonder how you engage with the respectable set, as you hint at from time to time. Do they simply not care about your reputation? I would feel awfully self-conscious talking with certain people if I had a slanderous Wikipedia people can look up. But maybe this is all overblown?
John Wayne threw the celery sticks in his cocktail off the balcony in "In Harm's Way." Patricia Neal was so impressed, she did it, too.
Whites need not worry. When the hoards arrive their leaders will only want to mate with white women. Soon enough the Country will be ruled by whites again.
Islam has long had this problem.
If I understand what you're getting at, your definition of "White" is much different from any traditional understanding in North America or Europe.
White as in Sweden for an example.
But its interesting you focus on my definition of white. Instead of my overall point.
The "full-White fertility-rate" (both parents White) in the USA has fallen to 1.4 in the early 2020s.
See: "A study on America’s demographic-national crisis: Early-2020s birth-data by race; and developments in the White birth-share in the USA, 1920s to 2020s"
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2023/07/11/americas-demographic-crisis-on-developments-in-births-in-the-usa-in-the-early-2020s-and-1920s-to-2022/
The USA's White population-crisis is a strange one. Sub-replacement for almost fifty years, now down to the 1.4 range. Full-White births have actually been below 50% for twenty years now. And with net-migration by non-Western youths, the ratio sinks even further when the rubber hits the road and these people age into active life.
Bizarrely, almost nobody ever talks about this crisis. If it were almost any other country, they would. In the USA, it would seem there is just no space to talk about it, I mean given the increasingly shrill political-climate. That which is called "politics" today, and much "news" too, is obsessed with making all public-policy into a strange and pointless prolefeed spectacle: everything devolving into grand pro-wrestling-style or daytime-tv-drama-style affair of fluff and misdirection, spiced up by a few characters who are agitators of anti-White-Male hatred but have free-reign of the discourse (whereas the White equivalents never do, possibly excluding, briefly, the Alt-RIght movement at its height in 2016-17). In other words, political discussion in the USA is stupid and unserious. Prolefeed politics.
In other societies that have medium- and long-term core-population fertility crises, social and political discourse does actually talk about this kind of thing, often and non-histrionically. But it's seldom talked about it in the USA.
It is of course occasionally indirectly talked about. But whenever it is, and I mean always, what you get is people engaging in strange forms of thinly veiled ethnomasochism, and immigrant-triumphalism, in tones that remind one of religious-prophecy and even racial-supremacism-- prophecy failing the chosenness and quasi-racial-cultural superiority of non-western Migrants, of course, and not core-population Americans.
In the entire first quarter of the 21st century, you only ever see deviation from this view people who are not megaphone-holders. But maybe they megaphone-adjacent would find it in their power to get very worked up about the Ukrainian TFR; we need emergency measures to boost the fertility-rate of Holy Ukraine, and we need it now! White-America? Meh. Who cares?
---
On the above, see also: "The USA’s guiding maxim on immigration" and "On ‘Immigrationism’ ideology, its future, and elite-dissent: Economists Tyler Cowen and John Cochrane on the impact of foreigners upon the U.S. elite"
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2023/04/17/the-usas-guiding-maxim-on-immigration-analysis-and-commentary-of-a-discussion-between-nicolas-eberstadt-john-cochrane-h-r-mcmaster-and-niall-ferguson/
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2023/05/01/tyler-cowen-and-john-cochrane-elite-economists-on-the-impact-of-foreigners-on-the-u-s-elite-and-on-immigrationism-ideology/
Steve Sailer writes: "If your chance of going out and meeting that special someone [is relatively low] in a diverse setting, are you going to go out as much? Sitting on the couch with the remote control starts sounding like a good use of your time."
By the 2010s and especially the 2020s, this reference to TV-watching -- as a thing demoralized people to do kill time instead of getting stuff done (such as making huge sums of money, finding a wife, and starting a family) -- it's becoming outdated as a reference.
Time-wasting activities engaged in by young males today include video games, social media of all sorts, many forms of endless eye-glazing "content" shoved at them. The average engagement-times per month for such things as Youtube and TikTok, for some demographics, are astonishing.
Women, too, are negatively affected by the rise of the Internet in this way. There has been a weaponization of female narcissism to a degree that hurts everyone involved.
But as to the endless debate on whether young White-males or young White-females are more to blame for the "family-formation failure phenomenon": the arguing match there seems quite popular to engage in. Of course it's a mistake to blame one side or the other. It's enough to say: People respond to incentives (and disincentives).
----
See: "Who is responsible for the decline in family-formation in the U.S. and the rest of the West?"
https://hailtoyou.wordpress.com/2023/12/18/who-is-responsible-for-the-decline-family-formation-in-the-u-s-and-rest-of-the-west/
I think it’s female reproductive suppression. No conspiracy needed.
Women are by far the biggest influence on other women’s actions. They have been playing intrasexual status games forever, but having children no longer boosts a woman’s status, so they don’t.