Posted on 12/19/2023 12:07:00 PM PST by River Hawk
American conservatives fell in love with Poland and Hungary. The two countries stand as models for what all right-wing governments should be. Not only do they keep migrants out, they also promote pro-family policies designed to boost birth rates. Many of their fans want America to adopt these same policies to fix our fertility woes.
But the two countries are not quite the paragon of fecundity some may believe. Hungary did boost its fertility from the lowest in Europe after implementing pro-natalist policies, but its total fertility rate (TFR) still remains low. Poland’s TFR continues to rapidly decline in spite of the government’s support for larger families. Poland is on pace to drop below a TFR of 1 in the very near future.
Our governments should still encourage people to have children. Conservatives just need to understand the limits of what it can do. The Great Replacement is the gravest threat to the West. Allowing millions of non-westerners into our countries is not a solution to our demographic woes. It creates an even worse problem.
The real solution is to build societies that don’t need as many people as we do today. Greater automation could ensure we don’t need as many people as before. Automation has helped Japan maintain strict immigration policies in the wake of demographic decline. The same can be done for us.
We just need to accept an America with less population growth. We can still have a great America and a West to be proud of. It just calls for a few changes to deal with this new paradigm.
(Excerpt) Read more at highlyrespected.substack.com ...
No amount of financial incentives is going to get the birth rate up significantly, the 3 factors that determine birth rate are: the age at which people marry, the divorce rate, and female labor participation rate.
Unless those factor change, nothing else matters. If women wait until their 30s to get married, they won’t be having many children, even if they want to, and if women focus on their “careers” and have that settled before they get married, they won’t be getting married until their 30s.
You want to fix the problem....
Phase out Social Security. It’s going away on it’s own anyhow.
If you don’t have lots of successful kids, you starve in your old age.
It’s pretty simple.
THE WALL
is inevitable.
By lowering government spending we lower a main factor in inflation. Thus it'd cost less to raise kids. And by lowering entitlements, the main people who'd be taken care of in their old age are the people who'd either financially prepare for it, or the people who raise kids with the kind of family values to take care of their elder parents.
+1000
I don't know why there isn't more discussion of this. There seem to be 3 approaches:
1) Import tons of Third World people to replace Americans who are not being born.
2) Magically transform the US into a perfect land where all the happy Americans are able to settle down with their true love and pump out lots and lots of babies.
3) Figure out some way that the country can accept reality and live with the fact that we will have a lot of old people and not that many young people. Yeah, that's not ideal. But it's real. Learn to deal with it.
Jump back 200 years or more -- No one had a magic wand. No one had a magic government. Reality was what it was. People just dealt with the hand that they got. And it was OK. We can do that again. Or we can try to build some sort of communist utopia full of Third Worlders, and we can see how that works.
Well said.
It took decades of propaganda from the culture of death to lower birth rates in the west
I assume it will take decades to fix the problem (if it’s possible at all)
The fertility problem is solved by religion.
If you believe in religion, you exercise more self control due to pressure derived from some afterlife outcome. Sexual methods are more directed towards beneficial goals for society/said religion.
If you don’t, you’re more likely to worship yourself, which childbearing interferes with. Your sexual methods are more directed towards pleasure.
We need to figure out a way to reintroduce women to womanhood.
The left has convinced a large portion of Western women that being a woman was an artificial social construct imposed on them and that womanhood and the feminine don’t actually exist and were a temporary cultural enslavement that has to be fought and overcome and prevented from ever happening again.
Ya, go back to God’s original instruction manual......
My parents, from The Greatest Generation, had three children. They were able to do so because my father’s income was sufficient to feed, clothe and house them with enough left over they gave us each one million dollars when they died. My mother stayed home and raised us. Various policies have kept labor rates low since their time and prices much higher. Gone are the days when filling the gas tank was something you did without thinking of the cost. Same with the electric bill, insurance and dozens of things that nickel and dime people into poverty. Let’s not even mention the cost of a college education. If people don’t feel financially secure, if they both work, they won’t have many children.
The communists aren't popping out enough kids either (good news).
The Muslims are (bad news).
It is doubtful anyone will convince to Muslims to stop as their goal is to kill us all and have a Muslim "utopia".
Every study has shown that income negatively correlates with fertility, them more money people have, the less children they have. This is true regardless of culture.
So no, we don’t have less children now not because we’re poorer, we’re having less children now because we’re wealthier.
“So no, we don’t have less children now not because we’re poorer, we’re having less children now because we’re wealthier.”
The reason that’s true in some cultures is because they are agricultural. If you live on a farm, children are free labor, you have a lot of them. When people take jobs in the city, they have less room and less time. Children are expenses. When I was a child in the suburbs most of my friends were one of two, three or four children families. But at that time a blue-collar worker made enough money to live comfortably. Of course, our lives were simpler and there was less to spend money on. A single-family home where I live now starts in the low three-hundreds. That’s way too expensive for the average family where the income is $76000. In my day everything associated with, say, getting a driver’s license was free. Now the required “drug course” costs the applicant $150. That’s a high bar.
Import widows with 3 kids. Start with Ukraine.
People lived “comfortably” because they are mostly driven by envy.
We aren’t poorer now, we just spend more on stuff because we see other people having things and we have to have them too.
The average size of a single family home in 1949 was 909 sq ft, it was 2480 in 2021. This despite the fact the average size oof the family is smaller now. In 1950 there was 1 car for every 3.5 people, by 2013 it has tripled for 1 car for every 1.2 people.
But nobody would consider themselves “living comfortably” if they had a family of 5 living in a 900 sq ft house with 1 car today as they did in 1950. Because they would look at other people living in 2500 sq ft houses with 2-3 cars and be miserable at how they compare. But the house that is 3 times bigger and the extra cars all cost money. Not to mention all the other appliances that we didn’t have to buy in 1950. The TVs, the smartphones, etc, etc.
No, the reason why we have fewer children is not that we don’t have enough money, it’s because we spent money on other things, and then realize we have to work more to earn the money, and working more means we don’t have time for children.
You know that old saying about how the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money?
One can say the same thing about industrialization, eventually you run out other people’s people.
Everything you say is true. I’m stunned by the amount of “stuff” my low end renters have. Still in 1979 my power bill was fifty bucks and I ran the air in an uninsulated apartment. Now in a superbly insulated place it runs well over two hundred.
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