A blog post by Nom de Plume Yrjoperskeles about Finns becoming minority in Finland got me thinking about the low birth rates of the First and Second World countries, also receding in the Third World.
Aside from the discussion about immigration and emigration, there is a question why don’t people have babies. The capitalist explanation is poverty – poor people cannot afford babies, so they do not have them. I don’t think this is a whole explanation, since most people throughout human history have been poor and the struggle to feed children was no doubt an issue to prehistoric people, even to other human species. Even today birthrates are high in poor countries, to the moral condemnation of Western experts who blame the natives not planning properly. I think they are planning quite appropriately, local realities considering.
Many flowers, Berkeley, CA, 2026, March 29th.
Therefore, I think there is something inherently antinatalist in modern Western socioeconomic models, which have been spread by the power of gun and international banking to all inhabited lands of the Earth. Except North Sentinel Island and possibly many of the uncontacted tribes in Amazon rain forest. Below is my partial list of possible reducers of birth rates, with the caveat that not all of them may act in the same context and some may be wrong.
1) Long education
Many modern jobs require complex education, which is given as an excuse for long education, but in reality most relevant skills for an average modern job can be taught in much shorter time.
Worse, modern education is not. The rot of education is especially prevalent in USA, where high school graduates may require remedial reading and math classes in universities where they were accepted despite educational deficit, but also Finns are moaning about the collapse of vocational education. Schools have become warehouses for children and youth, who are led to believe that if they do not complete and comply they will not receive jobs. Which, thanks to persistent and structural under/unemployment do not exist in any case, unless the young one has connections and/or money.
The longer the young person spends in the education system, the later comes the family formation or extramarital offspring. By warehousing young people, while telling them that without this process they will not have future or prospects, governments around the world are killing birth rates.
Slow maturation with few offspring with higher per offspring parental investment with intent to increase the offspring’s future reproductive success is known as K-strategy. Spawning many offspring with minimal parental investment in hopes that numbers beat the low odds of individual survival is known as r-strategy. r-strategy is optimized for unstable conditions where individual survival is uncertain, whereas K-strategy is for stable conditions where an edge in intraspecies competition is required.
Long education mimics K-selection, but since the education system does not deliver, it actually has become a tool for sabotaging the masses in competition for resources – elites can afford actual schools or home tutors, such as necessary, after all, their income is not dependent on good grades or compliance with The System. I recently heard a brief blurb about California having 7x the expected loss of school enrolled children this year, both public and private schools and even home schooling registrations had gone down. The news put this on current immigration policies which had driven the undocumented migrants to pull their children out of schools or packing their family and leaving the country. Methinks there are additionally quite a few Californians with children who moved out of the state. But I also suspect that some of the missing children have been pulled out because their parents do not believe the current school system to be good for their children despite not being able to afford anything better. And then there are the consequences of years of declining birth rates, i.e., fewer potential students.
2) Female employment
Warehousing of young people is especially poison to female reproduction, which is further curtailed by economic realities. To survive in modern society, most young women need to enter workforce. Many do it voluntarily, because they have been taught that women’s work is not proper work but they should aspire to be like men. Do men’s work, have a career. This suits well to many women, but others do it because of grim necessity. Speaking from experience, studying hard and working harder are too exhausting to consider dating. Without dating, there won’t be children. And so women’s fertility rates in rat race societies are collapsing. Even those women who find their soul mates often need to defer pregnancies, because the minimum wages or less the couple brings home are barely enough for roof, heating and eating. And the employment for either sex in these days is increasingly ephemeral.
Again, 40% of the jobs in the private sector (in public sector probably more) are bullsh!t jobs, that I suspect exist because The System needs to warehouse consumers. Private companies usually don’t hire people just for the sake of employing people, there tends to be financial logic behind private sector bullsh!t jobs – often it is the government regulatory apparatus rewarding those who do and punishing those who don’t hire to fill bullsh!t positions dictated by government edicts or bribes, or an activist wealth fund providing cheap loans based on ESG score, or something analogous. Governments, of course, are incentivized both to reduce unemployment numbers, e.g., by legislating a need to compost and then hiring compost inspectors to ensure that people compost according to regulations, or to hire friends and relatives of the politically connected or party comrades for well-paid low impact or no-show jobs. Lots of those pointlessly employed on public and private sectors alike are women, both because women need the money, and because there is an ideological push to get as many women into workforce as possible. Again, governments like the idea, because it nearly doubles the current tax take. That the tax take 20 years down the line might be endangered as the working women today do not have time for children is a secondary issue. And in any case, workers are interchangeable, they can be imported from other continents as needed, right?
Off topic, it has been interesting to see how IT and related industries have been shedding thousands and tens of thousands jobs past year, blaming it on AI and post-covid overstaffing. Obviously the layoffs have nothing to do with rumored roll-back of government (and private sector) pressure to meet the ESG metrics? Or maybe it just is a sign of The System meeting the limits imposed by economic realities – the reality being that the economy never properly recovered the 2007 crash, and then COVID lockdowns combined with The Green New Leap had shaved so much of the economic output that the system is teetering at the edge of collapse. Facing weakening consumer spending and rising input costs, corporations now must trim extraneous spending or face bankruptcy proceedings. Maybe, if the government removed its finger from workforce manipulation, an organic balance better suited to the needs and wants of the people (regardless of their gender) would emerge.
3) Urbanization and resource allocation
My mother used to say (roughly translated): “What is poverty in countryside, is destitution in city.” She meant that even with subminimal income, rural people had access to more resources like garden plots for vegetables, nearby lakes for fishing and forests for firewood, berries and meat. Small crofters might keep a cow or two and a pig for a summer and a flock of chicken. None of this is possible in a fourth floor concrete cube of a commieblock planted between inner ringroads between factories and office buildings. Thus, an income that would be survivable in countryside would be death by starvation in a concrete jungle. Unless social services intervened, or the urban pauper was healthy enough to participate in black economy. In other words, raising children in rural parts is more affordable than in city. Unless social services can be harnessed to help with the costs.
Additionally, rural living is more spacious allowing room for children – a room in a shared apartment (analogous to Soviet Union kommunalkas) or a studio apartment in a social housing project will not be nearly as nice place to raise a baby as even one room croft.
Cities tend to have lower birth rates than countryside. Cities have also had higher morbidities (before modern living standards and hospital systems) being polluted plague pits where food was both suspicious and expensive. Why did people then flock into cities? They were driven off their lands. In British Isles, the industrialization coincided with enclosure of the commons, the bigwigs privatized the lands, and the peasants had to migrate to big cities or overseas. In modern Africa, wars are a big driver for urbanization when villagers flee armed factions into slums where they will not be killed for being wrong tribe, religion or having something the looters need. In modern Western countries, rural youth do not need to worry about marauding warlords, but The System itself is making rural survival increasingly precarious by regulating or outlawing nearly any economic or survival activity into de facto extinction. And this is in purpose, the elites want masses as resource-constrained as possible, all in the name of protecting the planet. The reduction of birth rates, over which they then shed crocodile tears, is just an extra bonus – every mouth not born is one fewer ‘useless eater’.
4) Pension system
The majority of the people in Western countries labor according to the rules that dictate they need a job (self-employment is a possibility, but increasingly difficult to achieve, not the least because of modern equivalent of enclosure, namely of intellectual property, and of myriad regulations to commercial activities strangling young businesses before their birth) to pay taxes to contribute to public welfare, healthcare, law enforcement, defense, education, roads, and pension system. In exchange, The System allows the people to keep part of the fruits of their labor (which is taxed heavier than passive income) and provides law enforcement to protect it from other people. Based on the state of our roads, education system, defense and healthcare, and thriving people vs people crime, I have suspicion that the pension system is also a scam. It is definitely structured like a Ponzi scheme, where the later investors pay the expenses of the earlier investors and which presupposes ever expanding economy with more and more payers in each generation. Then there is the persistent inflation eating the value of the savings and periodic market corrections to loot the 401Ks.
Which will be tragic for Gen X and Millenials (I doubt Zoomers or Alphas will even dream about pension.) One of the reasons for children in older days was that there was no public pension system, you had to raise your old age support yourself and hope that your offspring survived, succeeded and was grateful or dutiful enough to take care of you in your dotage. Gen X and Millenials did not have this added incentive, after all The System would provide a pension, so children were optional fun, not an essential. Besides, the modern economic realities have made children a luxury item for the middle and working classes (actually the lower middle classes, or professional belong to working classes because both work for living.) Upper classes are not constrained by opportunity costs of raising children instead of working and for non-working classes having children may increase the family net income. Except The System is now broke, and childless Gen X’ers and Millenials better hope that there will at least a robot nurse allocated for their dotage.
5) Rules based society
How are the above absurdities possible? None of the above would work, if people were not trained to believe in The System. In the school civics lessons we were told that we live in the best available system and that if we obey the rules and work hard The System will reward us. This is a Load Bearing Lie of our current capitalist system. It was the Load Bearing Lie of the communist system. As soon as people stop believing The System rewarding them for good behaviour, or worse, being able to survive despite obedience to the rules, people begin to ignore the rules instead of merely twisting them for their own advantage.
The much reviled welfare queens who realized babies could be used for extracting resources from social services were an early version of this phenomenon. Social services providing for welfare of the babies and their mothers was originally meant as an insurance for catastrophal failure in family circumstances, but in modern times replacing work income with social subsidies is a valid career strategy, as exemplified by one 2024 calculation where in Finland nine babies to a single mother provide as much after tax income as 11 392 EUR per month job. Combined with “Learing Center”-scams with other neighborhood baby mamas, it is possible to earn quite a comfortable income by not having a career or an alimony. Ironically, the very existence of welfare queens proves that women in workforce are being scammed by the idea of rules based society.
Rules based society also allows making rules that deprive masses of their survival resources and herds them into big cities with even fewer resources. The rules are enforced not only by the state violence machinery (police, commissars, gendarmerie, judges, bailiffs, tax inspectors, etc.) but by financial punishments and rewards, such as social services, business permits or fines and tax incentives.
The media constantly repeats that young people move into cities because that’s where the opportunities are. What is conveniently left out of this statement are the aggregate decisions depriving the rural opportunities by increasingly centralized governments. And the opportunities do exist in the cities, even though the price may literally be your firstborn child (and all the other children that might follow.) Many people succeed in having both urban career and children, despite everything stacked against them, through luck or skill or combination of both, but The System is designed to reduce the resources of the masses to prevent uprisings against the elites and their digital dictatorship, so also the fraction of people with luxury items like children decreases.
There is an ideology that believes that rational governance requires central control, the bigger the better. We saw what happened to Soviet Union. We are seeing what is happening to EU and USA as the grips of Brussels and Washington DC tighten. The centralization of control is only possible within rules based systems. The more the people obey, the tighter rules, and the larger The System can grow. Except for the complexity collapse. As the number of rules increases, internal contradictions and wasted resources multiply creating a drag in performance. Which is what killed people’s faith in Soviet System.
Unfortunately, wasted resources in terms of The System mean people with lives and their hopes. Also the opportunity cost for societal improvement – nothing improves under sclerotic bureaucracy that, despite failing, labors mightily to prevent people from having alternatives. Locked into ever-shrinking space within this cage of rules, obedient people are the ones suffering the most. They are hence the least likely to have children, leaving reproduction to those who either ignore the rules or only use them when it is advantageous to them.
Ironically, this is a deathblow to a high trust society: whether the antiorganizational trait relies on genetic or memetic inheritance, the result will be future generations growing less obedient to rules and consequent erosion of rules based society regardless of its performance otherwise. In other words, thanks to the reduced ability to make children within a current rules based society, the conformists have a very strong selective disadvantage – future generations will be born to the more feral parents, and growing up feral themselves will not maintain the rules based society.
6) Antinatalist fanaticism
Today’s left is decidedly antinatalists. In certain circles, children are not wanted because they pollute and consume resources. They are an economic drag and hinder hedonism. Today’s right is more likely to want children both because of religious reasons and because moving in conservative circles they encounter children more often and baby fever is socially contagious. Thus, there is a birth rate gap between the progressives and the traditionalists.
7) Evolutionary consequences
In the end, future belongs to those who arrive there, Western (or Asian) rules based societies are an evolutionary dead end. Whether the tendency for obedience that is the basis of Rules-Based Society is memetic or genetic is irrelevant, thanks to Freeloaders Paradox. The linked paper only models genetic freeloading, but shows that freeloaders and their groups exist in oscillating equilibrium – when freeloaders are few, the group as a whole is efficient and benefit per freeloader is high, when freeloaders are many, the group becomes so inefficient that there is no benefit to freeloading. I think communism shows that memetic crash of altruistic tendencies under state mandated freeloader burden collapses a group faster than genetics (which is good for humans suffering under it), but the oscillations will guarantee a bumpy ride, or interesting times, as the Chinese put it.
Meanwhile, in long term, societies and systems can grow only as much as the “natural” freeloading tendencies of the people within the system allows. Mass-migration provides an interesting social experiment, wherein Western countries imported en masse freeloaders from other countries. There are also millions of productive people migrating around the world, but the productive people tend to emigrate into those countries where their efforts benefit themselves the most, whereas freeloaders tend to migrate into those countries where they most benefit from the efforts of the others. Conspiratorially minded might come to conclusion that the Western elites know this and are purposefully collapsing the Western welfare society, but many Western countries are losing their wealthiest (i.e., the most resource-rich) as well as the young educated professionals to countries where these individuals can maximize their personaI welfare (another type of freeloader, according to the socialists – which by the way would be a valid POV if humans were eusocial like termites or certain Hymenopterans). Therefore, I think the collapse of social security, pensions and healthcare systems are just an aspect of the total societal collapse, after which the more competitive societies with less freeloader acceptance (outgroup or ingroup) will take the lead of global cultural evolution. TLDR; groups with high freeloader burden are in competitive disadvantage to groups with low freeloader burden, and the latter will outcompete the former, leading to lower systemic freeloader burden overall.
P.S. Apologies for not putting many links towards the end of the posting, many of the interesting or informative links are unfortunately behind a copyright enclosure, and searching for suitable links takes more time than writing.
More flowers. We are many, but only because the conditions allow it.
PlanktonPunkt 