A point that many articles of this kind either neglect or miss entirely is touched on a few times here - once in the education graph, in particular, which shows the "U-curve" of fertility, though not in its entirety. The trough is Bachelors Degree, at around 1.3, recovering substantially as you look towards Masters degree holders, and then Doctorate holders. This peak is only 1.545, but this is simply because 'PhD' is too wide a category, and fails to isolate the truly elite.
This graph (https://i.snipboard.io/hmQcOo.jpg) shows the full curve, dividing it by annual income. The birthrate of the extremely poor is just slightly above replacement, at ~2.15, whereas the birthrate of the elite, the people with true power, start to see an exponentially growing birthrate, concluding at around 2.35k where the graph cuts out. The trough is, as you say, DINKs pulling between $150k and $199k, living for a simulacra of elite-hood rather than the real thing.
Something worth discussing - or at least thinking about - is the fact that we are not the only high-agency, high-fecundity faction looking towards future power. Our current ruling class has a birthrate that is substantially higher than that of almost any other demographic, even as they recommend that their most faithful clients behave otherwise.
Your writing, whether here or on Twitter, is consistently some of the best found anywhere on what could be considered "our team" broadly.
I'm not Mormon, and never have been--grew up in the evangelical world and nowadays I'm fairly secular, but it has seemed to me for a pretty long time now that the Mormon church has enormous potential to carry on much of the future in the event of considerable broader decline or collapse. I hope it succeeds in maintaining its institutional resilience.
Your point about sub-optimality especially resonates. There is no way that I can create a family culture that can compete calorie for calorie, dopamine for dopamine, dollar for dollar with globohomo. My kids and grandkids will have to stare it all in the face and still choose the right. Something about not being able to survive without a spiritual witness...
Be eccentric, be erudite, and with it all, be faithful.
When my teenage daughter tells me both that I'm the best dad ever, and also tells her friends that I'm a wizard, then I think I'm doing something right.
Very well articulated. I often think modern culture's sleight of hand is framing decision problems as discovery problems. The journey to adulthood is one that goes through delayed gratification - one has to decide who one wants to wills to become. But you don't have to ever do that if selfhood is something that can be discovered through consumption or by keeping up with the Jonases.
A culture where there is no transcendent frame of value of any kind defines everything referentially...getting sucked into the vortex of discovering who they are instead of deciding who they want to be.
Excellent article. Bookmarked. It's worth noting, however, that the memes causing this collapse evolve too, and they evolve much faster then people do. There is already and will continue to be strong selection on *them* to infect the children of those resistant to previous iterations. The set of traits that leads to resistance today may not lead to it tomorrow. And since fervent believers in them are in charge, there are a lot of levers available to increase their virulence. See here: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/memetic-evolution-and-progressivism
The way I see it, there are two ways to avoid them long-term without either total societal collapse or some form of singularity. These are completely firewalling your group off, Amish or Haredim style (highly vulnerable to regime attention), or completely changing the memetic environment (difficult, to say the least). The latter would probably mean regime change, since the current memeplex has strongly adapted to and is very much symbiotic with our current state. If Progressivism is a memetic virus, these are the equivalent of quarantine and something like water purification.
What would you think of making the following bargain with your children: An explicit promise of a financial bail-out, not for themselves, but for any grandchildren they may produce.
Much of this problem is obviously economic. Parents want to teach their children to be responsible, financially independent, etc. This occasionally works *too* well. A 20-something who believes they have to "be responsible" and "do it themselves" and cannot rely on family or community support is more likely to play it safe, not get married, not have kids, etc.
Why not tell them "I won't bail YOU out of your bad decisions, but if you have a kid, and if you ever need it, count on us to provide whatever basic support is needed."
I suspect there's a sort of implicit sense of this in LDS communities. That so long as you are acting generally in good faith, the overall community will support you with the basics, at least. But it is *very* much lacking in the secular community.
I don't believe there is any durable economic solution to increasing the fertility. Essentially, to convince someone to have a child economically, you have to calculate the net present value of the future economic value of raising that child, including foregon money and pay them that amount.
If the value doesn't accrue directly to you and you can't capture the full value it won't be economically rational to pay them the full amount.
I studied people with great grandchildren, every single one of them was religious. I tried to see if there was a secular solution. There was none.
Like the song goes: In God the solid rock we stand, all other ground is sinking sand.
Wonderful article. I've often wondered what a thorough comparative sociological analysis of fertility and continuity amongst Mormons, Amish, and "Ultra" Orthodox Jews would reveal
I've also found this very interesting to study. Another good book recommendation is Shall the Religious Inherit the earth which addresses some of these points.
Been thinking about this post for weeks. It is by far the best summation of the “problem.” The jewel beetle, false optimal choice. In my peer group (Midwest, middle to UMC suburbanites), nearly all select the perceived optimal choice. Most max out their home purchases, they are always upgrading a kitchen, a bathroom, etc. They all go on big vacations, sometimes two a year. Not to mention “girls trips” or whatever. They all wear North Face or Patagonia or whatever’s trendy. My favorite example: Over the past decade, everyone had every Yeti cooler, tumbler, mug, etc. I am in a relatively high-income profession, but I choose to live in a fairly blue collar neighborhood. But I see this lifestyle everywhere. My more affluent peers are just a level up. But the bottom line is these lifestyles are “optimal,” but they require two incomes. So everyone is maxed out. It’s just not possible to sustain this “optimal” lifestyle and have many children, let alone a stay at home mother. So 1-2 kids max. (And if there’s three, it’s mostly because the first two were the same sex, and the couple is rolling the dice to get the boy/girl set. Which is a sad commentary on the consumer approach to having children.)
Sadly, these trends are self-reinforcing. Being a stay at home mom is a low-status gig. If you’re UMC, you look down at them for not having a sophisticated or independent career. If you’re middle class, you resent the ability to be home. If anything, it’s seen as an eccentric luxury. And having 4+ kids is seen as lunacy.
I really appreciate your post because it gets to the heart of the issue. It’s sad that in religious circles, you usually only see controlled consumption as a part of some Dave Ramsey program. DR can provide some helpful tips, but it’s mostly fetishizing frugality for its own sake. Or a future retirement or whatever. It’s not about shifting resources to better serve a family.
(Sorry for the long reply. I know these things have been covered elsewhere ad nauseam. But I really appreciated your post.)
Great comment but I think generalizing teh controlled consumption as Dave Ramsey program is too reductive. For example, Amish and Orthodox Jews wear a uniform which is one of the simplest and most effective forms of controlled consumption that also affects the entire lifestyle and psychology of an individual, family, and community.
If I could have one minor criticism, your argument against the idea that universities are ruining people has some straw. You ask us to imagine a womens studies graduate student, and sure, that person probably would not have been a happily married mom if she hadn't made it through state U.
But I would ask you instead to imagine a girl who goes to college because it is just what middle class kids are supposed to do, and majors in psychology or economics or math or whatever, because someone in her family did, or because her guidance counselor told her to choose the subject she was best at in high school. Then it turns out that in her math classes there are guest lectures about how women have been excluded from mathematics because of "the patriarchy" and "white male privilege." She is encouraged to join the 'womyn and gender nonconforming in STEM' club. Her psychology class focuses on the "intergenerational trauma" of redlining. And her required gen ed in "diverse cultures" - well I don't even need to explain what happens there. All of this could very well have the affect of taking a naive and generally trusting young person who might have had eventual goals of marriage and motherhood, even if vague, and turn her into a blue hair or a corporate girlboss.
There is a purposeful conspiracy to create, and maintain an ecosystem where emergent conspiracies form naturally. Any popular alternative to this sterile ecosystem is crushed swiftly, and mercilessly.
Great article; a small nit-pick, though: assuming there is no wokipedian agenda to falsify Mongol imperial history, Kublai was the *second* of four (legitimate) children of Tolui - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolui
Also, now I get what that initially incongruous-seeming History in Music podcast appearance was leading up to :-)
A point that many articles of this kind either neglect or miss entirely is touched on a few times here - once in the education graph, in particular, which shows the "U-curve" of fertility, though not in its entirety. The trough is Bachelors Degree, at around 1.3, recovering substantially as you look towards Masters degree holders, and then Doctorate holders. This peak is only 1.545, but this is simply because 'PhD' is too wide a category, and fails to isolate the truly elite.
This graph (https://i.snipboard.io/hmQcOo.jpg) shows the full curve, dividing it by annual income. The birthrate of the extremely poor is just slightly above replacement, at ~2.15, whereas the birthrate of the elite, the people with true power, start to see an exponentially growing birthrate, concluding at around 2.35k where the graph cuts out. The trough is, as you say, DINKs pulling between $150k and $199k, living for a simulacra of elite-hood rather than the real thing.
Something worth discussing - or at least thinking about - is the fact that we are not the only high-agency, high-fecundity faction looking towards future power. Our current ruling class has a birthrate that is substantially higher than that of almost any other demographic, even as they recommend that their most faithful clients behave otherwise.
Your writing, whether here or on Twitter, is consistently some of the best found anywhere on what could be considered "our team" broadly.
I'm not Mormon, and never have been--grew up in the evangelical world and nowadays I'm fairly secular, but it has seemed to me for a pretty long time now that the Mormon church has enormous potential to carry on much of the future in the event of considerable broader decline or collapse. I hope it succeeds in maintaining its institutional resilience.
I am a Protestant Christian, and I agree! Bennett consistently writes brilliant insights.
I hope so too.
Your point about sub-optimality especially resonates. There is no way that I can create a family culture that can compete calorie for calorie, dopamine for dopamine, dollar for dollar with globohomo. My kids and grandkids will have to stare it all in the face and still choose the right. Something about not being able to survive without a spiritual witness...
the kingdom or nothing
The Sword or perish.
Chinghis approved.
Be eccentric, be erudite, and with it all, be faithful.
When my teenage daughter tells me both that I'm the best dad ever, and also tells her friends that I'm a wizard, then I think I'm doing something right.
Very well articulated. I often think modern culture's sleight of hand is framing decision problems as discovery problems. The journey to adulthood is one that goes through delayed gratification - one has to decide who one wants to wills to become. But you don't have to ever do that if selfhood is something that can be discovered through consumption or by keeping up with the Jonases.
A culture where there is no transcendent frame of value of any kind defines everything referentially...getting sucked into the vortex of discovering who they are instead of deciding who they want to be.
That is so well said Arth: "discovering who they are instead of deciding who they want to be".
Excellent article. Bookmarked. It's worth noting, however, that the memes causing this collapse evolve too, and they evolve much faster then people do. There is already and will continue to be strong selection on *them* to infect the children of those resistant to previous iterations. The set of traits that leads to resistance today may not lead to it tomorrow. And since fervent believers in them are in charge, there are a lot of levers available to increase their virulence. See here: https://arctotherium.substack.com/p/memetic-evolution-and-progressivism
The way I see it, there are two ways to avoid them long-term without either total societal collapse or some form of singularity. These are completely firewalling your group off, Amish or Haredim style (highly vulnerable to regime attention), or completely changing the memetic environment (difficult, to say the least). The latter would probably mean regime change, since the current memeplex has strongly adapted to and is very much symbiotic with our current state. If Progressivism is a memetic virus, these are the equivalent of quarantine and something like water purification.
Dr. Bennett,
Great post! Perhaps your best yet!
What would you think of making the following bargain with your children: An explicit promise of a financial bail-out, not for themselves, but for any grandchildren they may produce.
Much of this problem is obviously economic. Parents want to teach their children to be responsible, financially independent, etc. This occasionally works *too* well. A 20-something who believes they have to "be responsible" and "do it themselves" and cannot rely on family or community support is more likely to play it safe, not get married, not have kids, etc.
Why not tell them "I won't bail YOU out of your bad decisions, but if you have a kid, and if you ever need it, count on us to provide whatever basic support is needed."
I suspect there's a sort of implicit sense of this in LDS communities. That so long as you are acting generally in good faith, the overall community will support you with the basics, at least. But it is *very* much lacking in the secular community.
I don't believe there is any durable economic solution to increasing the fertility. Essentially, to convince someone to have a child economically, you have to calculate the net present value of the future economic value of raising that child, including foregon money and pay them that amount.
If the value doesn't accrue directly to you and you can't capture the full value it won't be economically rational to pay them the full amount.
I studied people with great grandchildren, every single one of them was religious. I tried to see if there was a secular solution. There was none.
Like the song goes: In God the solid rock we stand, all other ground is sinking sand.
Wonderful article. I've often wondered what a thorough comparative sociological analysis of fertility and continuity amongst Mormons, Amish, and "Ultra" Orthodox Jews would reveal
I've also found this very interesting to study. Another good book recommendation is Shall the Religious Inherit the earth which addresses some of these points.
Been thinking about this post for weeks. It is by far the best summation of the “problem.” The jewel beetle, false optimal choice. In my peer group (Midwest, middle to UMC suburbanites), nearly all select the perceived optimal choice. Most max out their home purchases, they are always upgrading a kitchen, a bathroom, etc. They all go on big vacations, sometimes two a year. Not to mention “girls trips” or whatever. They all wear North Face or Patagonia or whatever’s trendy. My favorite example: Over the past decade, everyone had every Yeti cooler, tumbler, mug, etc. I am in a relatively high-income profession, but I choose to live in a fairly blue collar neighborhood. But I see this lifestyle everywhere. My more affluent peers are just a level up. But the bottom line is these lifestyles are “optimal,” but they require two incomes. So everyone is maxed out. It’s just not possible to sustain this “optimal” lifestyle and have many children, let alone a stay at home mother. So 1-2 kids max. (And if there’s three, it’s mostly because the first two were the same sex, and the couple is rolling the dice to get the boy/girl set. Which is a sad commentary on the consumer approach to having children.)
Sadly, these trends are self-reinforcing. Being a stay at home mom is a low-status gig. If you’re UMC, you look down at them for not having a sophisticated or independent career. If you’re middle class, you resent the ability to be home. If anything, it’s seen as an eccentric luxury. And having 4+ kids is seen as lunacy.
I really appreciate your post because it gets to the heart of the issue. It’s sad that in religious circles, you usually only see controlled consumption as a part of some Dave Ramsey program. DR can provide some helpful tips, but it’s mostly fetishizing frugality for its own sake. Or a future retirement or whatever. It’s not about shifting resources to better serve a family.
(Sorry for the long reply. I know these things have been covered elsewhere ad nauseam. But I really appreciated your post.)
I have been coming back to this Essay throughout the year. Every time, I get the sense of a great truth being revealed.
Great comment but I think generalizing teh controlled consumption as Dave Ramsey program is too reductive. For example, Amish and Orthodox Jews wear a uniform which is one of the simplest and most effective forms of controlled consumption that also affects the entire lifestyle and psychology of an individual, family, and community.
Absolutely amazing article - thanks!
If I could have one minor criticism, your argument against the idea that universities are ruining people has some straw. You ask us to imagine a womens studies graduate student, and sure, that person probably would not have been a happily married mom if she hadn't made it through state U.
But I would ask you instead to imagine a girl who goes to college because it is just what middle class kids are supposed to do, and majors in psychology or economics or math or whatever, because someone in her family did, or because her guidance counselor told her to choose the subject she was best at in high school. Then it turns out that in her math classes there are guest lectures about how women have been excluded from mathematics because of "the patriarchy" and "white male privilege." She is encouraged to join the 'womyn and gender nonconforming in STEM' club. Her psychology class focuses on the "intergenerational trauma" of redlining. And her required gen ed in "diverse cultures" - well I don't even need to explain what happens there. All of this could very well have the affect of taking a naive and generally trusting young person who might have had eventual goals of marriage and motherhood, even if vague, and turn her into a blue hair or a corporate girlboss.
Damn
There is a purposeful conspiracy to create, and maintain an ecosystem where emergent conspiracies form naturally. Any popular alternative to this sterile ecosystem is crushed swiftly, and mercilessly.
Excellent, very good writing, Bennet.
Great article; a small nit-pick, though: assuming there is no wokipedian agenda to falsify Mongol imperial history, Kublai was the *second* of four (legitimate) children of Tolui - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolui
Also, now I get what that initially incongruous-seeming History in Music podcast appearance was leading up to :-)
Well done
Excellent piece
An excellent article. Thank you.