An Open Letter to a Smart Young Man About Dating Women

0.

Dear [redacted],

It’s been a while since we spoke. You’re finishing high school and starting college soon, no? Very good. One of your parents (I won’t say which) asked me to talk to you about dating issues. It’s not that they couldn’t tell you some of this stuff themselves. It’s just that teenagers often don’t want to listen to things coming from their parents.

From your point of view, this is basically unsolicited advice. The first rule of interpreting unsolicited advice is that it is nearly always actually about the person dispensing the advice, and only somewhat about the person to whom advice is being given. Solicited advice is fundamentally different in this regard. Usually, the most heartfelt, passionate advice that people give is addressed to a younger version of themselves, no matter who the nominal audience is. It is usually about the mistakes they made that they now understand better, but also sometimes about great triumphs they had which their younger self wouldn’t have envisaged. These two possibilities complicate matters. It's somewhat like Freud. He was wrong on the specific point that everyone secretly wanted to have sex with their parents, but right on the broader point that if you want to understand someone's personality, you need to start with the relationship they have with their parents. So it is here. It doesn't mean that unsolicited advice is wrong, it just means you should consider the extent to which you actually fit the same case as the younger version of them, and adjust accordingly. I’ve tried to tailor this as much as possible to a) the parts I think you might actually listen to, and b) the things you might not figure out on your own. It as much about you as possible, subject to the caveats above.

1. 

This is not primarily advice about how women work, or how to find one to date. For that, read the Chateau Heartiste archives, especially the early stuff. You can learn a lot from Heartiste, but you need to be careful. He is at his best talking about applied evolutionary psychology. Follow what Heartiste says, and you will get laid. For a man of your age, this is almost certainly your main concern. But make sure you keep an eye on the positive - how the world works - versus the normative - how ought you act in your life with this knowledge? This is distinct. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you ought to. And we're back at the point above – Heartiste’s advice, like everyone’s, is probably going to be slanted towards being somewhat self-serving. There's a normative suggestion that endless philandering is something that you should do, that it's a life well lived. Well, that's the rub, isn't it? Do you want to end up like Heartiste, at least as much as you can estimate what his life is like?

But you're busy. You don't want to spend weeks reading old blog posts (though you should, they're very entertaining too). Okay, fine. Let me give you the condensed Cliff notes version, as much as I understand it.

Lesson #1.

On average, women will be attracted to behaviors and traits that would have been associated with the alpha male chimp in pre-historic society.

Being big and strong, obviously. But more importantly, how you carry yourself. Are you confident? This is nearly universally stated by women as being attractive. Being confident in a chimp society, if you weren't the top chimp, was a fast way to get yourself killed. Now it isn't, of course, but our brains are still wired the same way. Similar things apply for status and social proof. Acting like you have options with women, and could take it or leave it with any particular girl, is paradoxically more likely to succeed than acting very eager and desperate. Girls can smell desperation at a thousand miles. If you are desperate, it’s all the more important to act like you’re not.

You're a smart young man, and like most smart young men, your social status will probably go up as you leave high school, not down. The dumb jocks peak at age 14. But in the interim, you'd be amazed just how far "fake it" can take you as advice. If you pretend to be confident, it works almost the same as the real thing. Easier said than done, of course, but that's life.

Lesson #2.

In any battle between women's stated preference and their revealed preference, bet on their revealed preference.

Applying this takes some skill, because you have to pay attention to what women's revealed preference actually is, and society tends to give you bad advice on this front. Moreover, you will be tempted to make the worst common mistake that many young men make - if in doubt, they substitute the question "what would I want in this situation", which is generally a very poor strategy. The traits and behaviors that you would want in a woman are generally not the same traits and behaviors that a woman wants in you.

For instance, suppose a woman says that she wants a sweet, funny guy who buys her roses and cuddles her at night. She's not lying, she does want this. But what it's important to realize is that when she says this, she's imagining Brad Pitt doing these things. When a man is high in status, displays of commitment are desired, because the primary worry is that he's going to leave. You, however, have the preliminary problem - how to I become more of a facsimile of Brad Pitt? Not a movie star necessarily, but how do I carry myself like Tyler Durden in Fight Club? This is the problem you need to solve, but women won't tell you this. If you start out being Bob from Accounting and act like their stated preference claims, you'll get fired. If they say they want sweet guys and instead keep going out with the @**hole bass player from the band, you'd do far better learning how to play bass and give less of a damn when dealing with women.

A crude but effective approximation of “bet on revealed preference” is just “act as much as possible like the guys who are successful with women”.

Lesson #3.

Don't be pathetic.

The reason I like this version is that it condenses many things down into one idea, because we all kind of know what "pathetic" looks like. Like many things in life, game advice eventually hits diminishing returns. And the biggest benefits actually come early on, from cutting out the left tail of pathetic, cringeworthy behavior. If you do nothing else, read Heartiste's hilarious "Beta of the Month" series. This will give you a range of examples of terrible behavior to avoid. If you just avoid this kind of thing, you'll be way ahead of the curve.

As they used to say when people still wrote blogs, go read the whole thing. There are only a few blogs I've gone back and read from start to finish. Heartiste is one, and Moldbug is the other.

2. 

At some point, I decided that I was only going to write blog posts about things that I hadn't actually read elsewhere. So think of this letter as an addendum to the kinds of things I've seen written in game blogs, and a way of avoiding the pitfalls that might come from taking 2010-2018 manosphere advice too literally.

Chief among these is the following. One of the most consistently unpopular messages in human society is the reality of the budget constraint. Telling people that life has hard, unpleasant binding tradeoffs, and that something inevitably has to be sacrificed, is a truth that it is human nature to resist as far as possible.

It is extraordinarily unlikely that you will get everything you want. If you are lucky, you will get some or most of what you want, depending on how expansive are your wants. The right choice, in a big picture sense, will very likely involve giving up something else you want, with all the attendant regret that entails.

The fact that people generally don’t want to hear this message goes doubly so for those who write about self-improvement. They’re right to do so for the purpose they have. For game in particular, imbuing a sense of irrational self-confidence is very important when approaching women, especially among self-doubting beginners. It’s not for nothing that I began by saying “read Heartiste first”.

Being irrationally overconfident when it comes to women is great tactics, but not great strategy. In other words, when approaching any one woman at a bar, you absolutely want to be irrationally overconfident. But it doesn’t follow that you also want to be irrationally overconfident about your long-term budget constraint, and what tradeoffs it implies.

The rest of this post is primarily about what some of those budget constraints are, as I see them, and what you should do about them.

3.

Game authors are very good at skewering women's self-deceits and delusions. The largest among these is that they can just date around, prioritise their job and travel, and start thinking about trying to find a husband in their late twenties or early thirties. This is, of course, a disastrous strategy, on average, and comes with a high probability of ending up as a cat lady, or ending up with no children/fewer children than you’d like, if you do find a husband.

But still, there's an equivalent male delusion, and it goes like this.

“Men just keep getting better and better over time.”

It is indeed true that men don't have nearly as steep a decline in sexual market value over time. This is complicated by the fact that wealth and status take on different trajectories, and women's preferences aren't as strictly driven by looks and youth as men's are.

But the basic idea that men just keep getting better seems ludicrous to me, particularly because it violates revealed preference arguments. Limiting oneself to women above the age of consent (here assumed 18), at what age are women the most physically attractive? Probably ages 18-22. Men mostly, but not entirely, have preferences based on age and physical attractiveness, both of which are correlated on average. Great. So who are the 18 year old women actually dating?

The answer is, largely men ages 18-25. The 22 year olds are generally dating men ages 22-28. At least in my observational experience.

Now, part of this is just the mechanics of dating. Who are you actually interacting with? If you're at college, probably other people at college. In a different world, say southern Europe 300 years ago, it may have been much more normal for a 15 year old to marry a 40 year old. But we ain’t in that world. The Smashing Pumpkins put it quite memorably: Love – it’s who you know. At a bare minimum, people the same age have a much higher chance in our largely age-stratified society to meet and interact with hot young women in an environment where dating is on the cards.

But even so, let's consider the hypothesis that 18 year olds are actually more attracted to 35 or 40 year old men. In such a case, we have to posit a fairly significant market failure as to why they aren't dating them. Does Tinder not exist for such women? Could they not just go online and select their desired age range as 35-45? Of course they could. Doesn't revealed preference seem more believable? In this view, your ability to attract 18 year olds probably maxes out at about 22, at least if you’re still in college then. Your ability to date 22 year olds probably maxes out at 26-27. If you're getting better on other dimensions (richer, higher status job), you can compensate partially, but probably only partially.

If you want to date 27 year olds, you'll have a good many years ahead in which you can do this easily. If you want to date college freshmen, you won't. You can still do it, it just involves getting luckier, or drawing from more idiosyncratic bits of the distribution (i.e. paying a cost on some other dimension).

Positing that George Clooney has gotten more attractive to women as he aged is every bit as absurd as saying that Christie Brinkley still looked hot at 50. Neither is remotely representative of the average person's experience. If you want to find out how easy it is for a 40 year old to date 18 year olds, ask a 40 year old. They'll tell you. Or if you don’t believe me, just set up a tinder account yourself with some pictures of decently attractive 40 year old men, set your age as 40, start swiping, and see how many matches with 18 year olds you get.

There is one offsetting aspect to this, however, which is especially apt to confuse some people. Many of the people writing game advice are generally smarter than average. And in my anecdotal experience, smart men who think explicitly about game do so because a) it’s not something that came naturally to them as a teenager, and b) it’s something they only got better at with age. So for these people, the age decline tends to be muted by the fact that their experience with how to interact with women was getting better, at least for some time.

This can indeed offset a good amount of the decline, and as a point estimate will probably actually improve your chances.

But this is best understood as you moving up the cross-sectional distribution over time. It doesn’t change what the age-related decline is for the distribution as a whole.

4.

Why does this matter? Well, in the short term, it tells you that the regret avoidance strategy when you’re just casually dating is to date as young as you can, for as long as you can. There’ll be a good number more years where you can date 25 year olds, but the 18 year olds are going away faster than you think.

But this is a relatively shallow lesson. There’s a more important one.

Suppose you believe, as survey evidence tends to indicate, that marital unhappiness and a woman’s divorce risk increases with her lifetime number of sexual partners. Or, suppose you’re one of the mass of normal men that feels somewhere between uncomfortable, grossed out, or angrily jealous when they think about the idea of one’s dearly beloved having boned other men, especially lots of other men.

Partner counts are a ratchet. They go up, but they never come down.

For any given sex drive that a woman has, her partner count is lower when she is younger.

Add this to the point above, and you have the following.

Your ability to wind up with a wife where you got to enjoy all of her best years and experiences peaks relatively early.

The price you pay is likely giving her most of your best years.

If you choose to spend those years just casually hooking up with random women who you aren’t going to marry, you will get the fun of banging lots of women. But it will probably come at the cost that your wife, when you meet her, will be older, and will have banged more guys already. To make things worse, the longer it takes you to realise this, the more you’ll keep chasing after the dwindling chances of getting the kind of wife you could have gotten if you’d met her at age 22. The longer you wait, the larger the gap between what you ideally want, and what you’re likely to get. At a certain point, you might not end up with anything at all that meets your estimates of minimum acceptable partner.

This is not fun to contemplate, but I think it’s true nonetheless.

I don’t mean this rhetorically to imply one course of action or the other. A budget constraint is not advice. The guys that met their wife when they were both freshmen in college nearly always have regrets about the fact that they didn’t get to have as many years in college and in their 20s being free and single. This message is true, and it tends to get emphasized fairly loudly in the modern world. Which is why I bring up the flip side. The guys that did get to enjoy lots of years of partying in college and their 20s don’t generally get to marry women they met when such women were 18 year old virgins, and go into a relationship with their eventual wife when neither one has very much baggage from past relationships. This doesn’t get talked about at all, because it cuts against much of the grain of modernity to acknowledge that lots of men prefer women to have lower partner counts. It sounds to modern ears like “slut shaming” (a hilarious concept that tries to paper over the reality that the harshest critics of women who sleep around a lot tend to be… other women).

See point zero. The extent to which this applies to you depends to a considerable extent on your preferences.

If you aren’t jealous by nature, great! You can sleep around more in your early 20s and it won’t trouble you that your wife wasn’t a virgin when you met. I think jealousy is an understandable and common human trait, but the more common character flaw comes from having too much of it, rather than too little. If you don’t feel it, I certainly wouldn’t try to talk you into it. You’ve got a preference set that will pose you fewer hard tradeoffs in life. Happy days!

If you aren’t particularly into younger women, also great! You’ve got a much longer horizon in which to meet late 20s and early 30s women. Doubly so if you don’t want to have children. The budget constraint is thus considerably relaxed.

But if you do feel the above things, you might want to ponder such a tradeoff in advance. You’re probably going to have to give up something, unless you get lucky and meet a hot 18 year old when you’re 29 who’s super into you.

On average, by definition, people do not get lucky.

5. 

Gary Becker modeled the marriage market as being a matching problem. Men and women assortatively match on some set of traits, whether income, race, intelligence, attractiveness, or what have you. Gary Becker was a God damn genius, so I don’t mean to cast aspersions on this view. But I think there’s another aspect worth understanding that’s better described as an optimal stopping time problem.

If I had to sketch out the model, it would look as follows. Women come along according to some Poisson process. They are drawn from a distribution of quality and interest in you / compatibility. You can date each woman for some time period, during which you stop receiving a flow of new women. Your utility function is increasing in the number of women you hook up with, and with the average quality multiplied by the duration of the women you’re hooking up with. Finally, the average quality rate of the women you meet decreases with time, as per the point above. Your choices are a) which women to date versus reject, b) if you’re going to date them, for how long, and  c) when to pick a single woman to stick with for the remainder of your time period.

Solve for the optimal strategy.

One lesson from this is that the required quality threshold for marriage should be higher when you’re younger to settle on a person as a wife. This holds even if you know the true quality distribution, and would get worse if you were trying to learn about, e.g. how much is that I really love this girl, and how much is this just what nice long term dating feels like?

Another is that anything that increases the rate of meeting women (e.g. online dating) will have large increases in welfare. A lack of new arrivals is the biggest cause of failure to find a wife. If your life station is preventing this from happening, think very hard as to whether it’s worth it.

Yet another is that you should be particularly careful whom you “casually” date for extended periods of time, because this is going to reduce the rate at which you meet someone you might actually settle on. You will feel like you’re still single-ish, but if you’re not actively looking, you’re less likely to find someone.

Still another is that the greater your risk aversion, the more you’re going to settle on a medium quality partner early on.

But for our purposes here, the biggest philosophical difference is that the “optimal” part of optimal stopping time only holds in an ex ante sense. Once you stop, you’ll never really know what else would have come along. Unlike in a matching model where one sees the whole distribution, here you never do. Whoever you pick will always end up containing what ifs and uncertainties.

This setup also highlights the problem of having standards that are too high. I think this is another area where one can get mislead by with manosphere writings. It’s easy to enumerate a list of stuff that’s important in a woman, or stuff that’s a deal-breaker. Women do the same thing all the time, with their endless point checklists.

Rather, what’s hard is know the actual distribution of potential traits that you want, and which combination you might be able to plausibly get.

The “combination” part is especially hard. If you’re someone with options, you can probably score very highly on any one trait that you like in a woman. But the danger is in wanting too many traits at once, each of which is individually attainable. Even if the probabilities are independent, you start multiplying them out, and you realize you’ve got a pretty small chance of meeting them all.

The stereotype of bad women’s checklists is that they all want a 6’4 male model billionaire with rippling abs. But this understates the universality of the problem. The giveaway is “billionaire”, which is shorthand for “unattainable all on its own.”

Rather, the more pertinent problem is if you want a blond, 18 year old, hot, slim, smart Christian virgin with a sweet personality and a sense of humor (and I want to have banged a hundred girls before I met her).

This is the equivalent. But there’s not one single trait that gives it away. You probably could get at least any one trait if you really tried, or perhaps several. It’s unlikely you’ll get all of them.

This problem gets even worse if you fail to account for the likelihood that at least some of the traits you want are probably negatively correlated. For instance, one tradeoff I’ve noticed – being smart, and being easy going (broadly defined) are negatively correlated in women. Not hugely negatively correlated, but negatively correlated. Being smart tends to go with career ambition, and higher than average chances of teeth and claws ball cutting lawyer-like behavior. This is just one example. Being hot and smart might be another. Being hot and a nice person might be another still. When the world is willing to put up with all your b.s. because you’re very attractive, it’s hard to not turn into a bit of a b****. Having a high sex drive and low partner count is a definite one.

This is hard enough to forecast when you know the correlations, let alone if you’re not thinking about them.

Very few people in the manosphere write about which negative traits you should just lump it and put up with in order to compromise, because your wife is going to inevitably have things about her that you don’t like, just like there’ll be things about you that she doesn’t like. It doesn’t fit the “get irrationally overconfident!” vibe.

But I assure you that being irrationally overconfident that you’ll marry a blond, 18 year old, hot, slim, smart Christian virgin with a sweet personality and a sense of humor is not a recipe for winding up happy, if it causes you to reject all sorts of very eligible women who don’t meet that standard, and you only realise your mistake once your pool of options has shrunk.

Compromise is easier to stomach when you’ve got both tradeoffs in front of you, and you can see exactly what you get in return – in other words, when you’re choosing between two direct options. It’s much harder in an optimal stopping time world. Because you’ll have the lingering uncertainty that perhaps if you’d just waited longer and gotten a higher draw, the compromise might not have been necessary in the first place. This is the problem of the optimal stopping time psychology.

But if you set your standards high enough, you only end up with a wife if you effectively win the lottery. Or, even worse, if you win the lottery at the right time in your life, when your optimal quality threshold is sufficiently low that you’d actually take it.

6. 

The above is just one example of the point that the budget constraint problem is made much worse when the person doesn't realize that what they want is either impossible, mutually contradictory, or so negatively correlated as to be astonishingly unlikely.

To a psychologist, unlike an economist, the idea that people want impossible and contradictory things is not unusual. Rather, it's par for the course.

So what, in the generality, do men want?

I think they want three things.

First, they want to have a beautiful wife/long term girlfriend figure, who is sweet and caring, loyal and faithful only to them, that they can fall asleep next to at night and wake up next to in the morning.

Second, they want to be able to bang a wide range of hot young women on the side in a casual, no-strings-attached way, in a manner that makes them feel powerful and attractive (which, as I've noted before, rules out prostitution, which is begging for sex via the medium of money).

Third, they want to not feel like a hypocritical @**hole who goes around hurting those near and dear to them.

If you are lucky, you get to pick two out of three. Unless you are a sociopath, and they tend to have other problems. If you are unlucky, maybe you get one or none.

This is a fairly hard tradeoff. The number of women that are genuinely happy with a one-way open relationship is very few. The number of men who are genuinely happy with a two-way open relationship is similarly few.

This has an important lesson.

The hallmark of a good life decision is that it will probably feel vaguely unsatisfying, and there will always be a "grass is always greener" aspect. Beyond a certain point, the married man will vaguely envy the single man's variety of women. The single man will envy the married man's companionship and life certainty. The faithful will vaguely envy the freedom of the man with the selfish courage to have an affair or sleep with a prostitute. The cheater will envy the faithful man's ability to sleep peacefully at night and not have to hide his phone and lie about his whereabouts.

It is unlikely that the right decision will leave you with no regrets whatsoever, unless your preferences score very low on one of the three points above. Way down the line, one should not take the fact of vague regrets as indicating that you’ve made some mistake. The same problem exists on a smaller scale in any long term relationship.

7.

You’re thinking, “Come on Holmes, I’ve barely started in college. I’ve got better things to do than worry about either finding a wife now, or some weird scenario where I’m having difficulty finding a wife at age 40.”

Fine.

I can only end with the prompting to think further ahead, with a kind of empathy of what things might feel like at the time, and what you might do today as a consequence. This is not most people's default way of thinking.

This sounds very downbeat, but it’s not. Quite the contrary. Get it right, and you've got a lifetime of happiness ahead of you. More importantly, only in the fullness of time will you realise just how many options you had in front of you right at this moment, and how much possibility lay ahead of you. It’s an exciting time, and many is the old man who wishes he could be back in your shoes.

Good luck.

Your friend,

Shylock.

A Lower Bound on Viable and Efficient Parenting Reductions

It's been a running theme of mine for a while that prospective parents should invest less in each child, and have more children instead. This is what the twin studies tell you. This is what most of the education random controlled trials tell you. Parental investment just doesn't matter that much. But having more children does matter.

Investment is a loaded word though. The immediate connotation is expensive monetary investments, like college and private school. It's true that you should cut back on these. But in some sense, these can only be the binding constraint if you're very forward looking. By the time you're in a position to actually decide whether to pay for your child's first year of college or just let them have some student debt, it's highly likely that you're long past the point of deciding whether to have more children.

No, the insidious aspects of investment are those in the very early years of a child's life - waking up every two hours to feed them, dealing with crying and tantrums and poopy diapers. And the reason they bite the most is that by the time you're thinking about having another child, many of the worst bits have just passed. The child is now two or three, and you have just started to get the feeling of having gotten over the top of the hill. If you simply stop now, you never have to deal with that phase ever again.

Look, I sympathise with this feeling. I think everyone does, including parents who had lots of children. 

But the mystery is still the time series. Your great grandmother had 7 children, and managed to rub along just fine. Not only that, she did so while washing every dish by hand, washing every shirt by hand, cooking every meal that the household ate, and on a budget a fraction as large in real terms as you have.

Hence the mystery - how did it all apparently get so much harder? What is it your great grandmother knew, but you don't know?

I suspect that one largely unremarked upon aspect is that your great grandmother started much earlier, in her early 20s. All that energy you put into partying into the wee hours and running on a treadmill? She put it into getting up in the night to feed children, and chasing after them by day. 

My guess for the biggest factor is social support structures. Both sets of grandparents living nearby, for instance. Trying to make up for that with hourly babysitters is like running a one man lesson in Ronald Coase's theory of the firm, where you find out that a lot of things are considerably harder to contract on than you thought. Friends and neighbours with lots of children, whom you could turn to when things were tight. Now nobody knows their neighbours. 

So, to the extent you can do this stuff, it's totally worthwhile. Fly in your parents for a while, if they don't live nearby. Try and do like the Mormons do, and make good enough friends with people nearby that you can do shared babysitting things.

These things are hard, though. If your parents live on the other side of the country, or the planet for that matter, rearranging your life or theirs to remedy this distance is probably not practical advice.

But there's another aspect to it. Culturally, a hundred years ago everyone was just far more comfortable with radically increased autonomy for children, and far less moment-to-moment supervision of what they were doing. I remember the Daily Mail depicting this visually in a quite arresting manner, showing how far different generations of Brits were allowed to walk.

Rotherham, Rotherham... where have I heard that name before? Hmm, maybe it's not just cultural norms.

But at a very young age, when children require full time care, was it always this hard? Is it possible to just...do less? Let the kid cry? Let the kid walk around on their own more, at a younger age, without being supervised, even if they sometimes cut themselves or bump their head? Let the kid figure out how to put themselves back to sleep? Let the kid play with the toys on their own, rather than expecting to have one or other parents joining them all times?

Parenting plans, like Mike Tyson's quip about boxing plans, last until you metaphorically get punched in the mouth. It's easy to say in the abstract that you'll just be a little bit more distant when the kid starts demanding attention, but another thing altogether when the kid is screaming their head off. And for someone like me, who has zero kids, there's an inevitable aspect of cheap talk to all this. If someone else has a troublesome child, maybe it's just genetics, or nutrition, or something else hard to fix in the short term. Maybe if you had their child, you'd act the same way.

Still, there is one metric that I think shows that reductions are possible. Namely, the inevitable decline in attention that occurs in nearly all parents between their first child, and their subsequent children. 

For the first child, you're worried about everything going wrong. You're taking endless baby photos, and reading to them all the time. You're doing all sorts of stuff. By child number 4, you just don't have time for that any more. The child is crying? Is this a problem? Depends. Are they fed recently? Is their diaper clean? Are they sick? If the answers are "Yes, Yes and No" respectively, then no, it isn't fundamentally a problem. It's unfortunate, but it's okay to just close the door and let them figure it out. They'll work out just fine.

Hence the minimum viable Holmes advice for new parents:

Aim to bring a fourth child attitude to your first child.

Ask older parents - do they think their fourth child turned out much worse because of the lesser attention paid? Or do the younger children mostly tend to appreciate the more laid back attitude that parents took, and which older siblings are often jealous of?

Not only is it doable, for many aspects of parental involvement it's not even clear what the sign is for the effect of the extra effort.

Of course, there's one caveat here. There is non-trivial evidence of birth order effects, whereby first-born children tend to outperform in life (I trust Scott Alexander probably as much or more than the social science literature on this stuff).  At least some of this effect is probably the extra efforts their parents are putting in.

That said, there's two responses. First all all, this just says that there's something on the revenues side of the ledger. This doesn't mean that the whole project of the extra effort for the first child is actually NPV positive for anyone involved. Indeed, given the extent of the extra effort, finding zero birth order effects would be evidence of a massive failure in rational parental investment.

Secondly, it's not clear how much of the effect of birth order is due to extra parental investment, versus just having more confidence by virtue of being bigger and stronger than one's siblings. It's probably both, of course. But any part of it that's coming from just sibling size doesn't require any investment, and is unbudgeable by your efforts in any case. I think the jury is still out on this one.

More importantly, suppose you believe that there might be an investment and/or confidence channel. If you're worried about this, just load up on the related investment/confidence effect - birth month. It's also true that the oldest children in a kindergarten class tend to outperform in life, for a similar mix of reasons. They're bigger and more confident than their peers, and they get greater investment because teachers and coaches perceive them as more talented when they're young, when they're simply more mature. 

So if you're a big believer in birth order effects signalling something important, just aim to have all your kids be born at the start of the school year. It costs you nothing other than delaying slightly when you start trying to conceive. It'll probably also go a decent way towards offsetting any effects of reduced parenting for the first child (and will be a likely benefit to later children, for no obvious cost). 

And remember, the second you're tempted to feel guilty about this advice and plan, just bear in mind - you're thinking of the wrong counterfactual. The whole point of doing all these reductions in wasteful effort is so that you can easily and cheerfully bring one more child into the world, with a full complement of life's joys, sorrows and experiences. That is something to be proud of, not embarrassed. 

Fourth children turn out just fine.

Project Jacob

In the financial world, it is a reliable rule of thumb that the largest and most lucrative forms of arbitrage will be those that don't strike the average investor as being an arbitrage. If they did, they'd have been traded away already. So how would they be seen by the average person? Probably as just weird. The kind of thing that nobody thinks about very much, because it's too obscure. If they do turn their mind to it, they assume there must be some big reason that nobody else is doing this, even if they can't quite articulate what it might be.

So it is, I suspect, with society more broadly.

So with this in mind, before I get to the punch line, I want to start with a few assumptions, and see where we end up. If these sound like things you already know and agree with, please bear with me and keep reading – this is exactly the point. My aim is to show what possibilities flow from things we mostly agree on, because the conclusion might strike you as rather surprising if I started with it.

1. Genes matter a lot for individual traits, and individual traits define the society to a large degree

The first of Turkheimer's laws of behavioral genetics is that nearly everything is heritable to a significant degree. Overall political ideology has a significant genetic component – approaching 60%, by some estimates. The impact of WEIRDO political culture and the Hajnal line are just some of the many indications to this effect. A society is determined to a considerable degree by the distribution of who is living there. If reactionaries have more children, on average the future looks more reactionary.

2. Parenting, like all shared environment terms, matters much less than people think.

This is kind of a mish-mash of Turkheimer's second and third laws. Related to #1, people tend to significantly overestimate the effect of environment on outcomes, because they fail to control for genetics. I suspect that most readers of this august periodical are conversant in the findings of HBD, and one set of the most important is the twin studies. The general finding of most of them is that genetics matter a lot, and idiosyncratic environment matters a lot, but shared environment doesn’t matter very much for adult behavior. Once children can select their own environment upon reaching adulthood, the impact of shared environment drops a lot, often to almost zero. The environment that does matter is mostly idiosyncratic, which, frankly, we don’t really know what it is. Some combination of school peers, parasites, measurement error, etc. But most of what’s included in parenting is shared environment (school district, general attitude of parents), or gene-environment interactions. What matters most is who your parents are. How they parent seems to matter less than nearly everybody thinks. In most contexts, reactionaries are willing to embrace this idea.

3. Having more children is valuable, but very difficult to scale within the context of marriage

The injunction we are often told on the right is to marry and have children, as a means of propagating ourselves and our values. This is a very worthy enterprise, but one that is almost impossible to scale at an individual level. Unless your wife is young, there is a hard limit on how many children you can have. Unless you’re young yourself, finding a wife young enough to have many children is likely to be hard. Finding one willing and eager to do so is harder still. All of this is magnified if one lives in cities, where the cost of having many children is much higher. Bottom line – having more children yourself is important, but the impact that each of us can have in this respect is likely to be a drop in the ocean. The problem is simply one of scale. You and I could try to convince everyone in the west to have more kids, and that’s definitely worthwhile. But if we could convince everyone of whatever we wanted, we’d already be able to solve lots of problems. The issue is that convincing the populace of anything when one lacks power is very hard.

4. Even outside the context of marriage, having lots of children with lots of women is financially impossible for anyone with means, and generally promotes degeneracy.

The Bronze Age Pervert mindset, frequently joked about, is to take a group of elite Chads and send them out to impregnate thousands of hot teens. The problem, of course, is that if you do this, you end up with endless single mums and degeneracy, because you can’t marry more than one of the women you are impregnating. To make matters worse, the modern court system with ruinous child support makes this strategy catastrophically costly to anyone with any financial prospects whatsoever. The only people who can afford this strategy are those who are, as the lawyers say, “judgment proof” – they live on welfare and crime, so can’t be held to account for any child support payments, which makes them much more willing to impregnate lots of women. Because everything is heritable (see point 1), we end up with a significant expansion of the worst traits of criminality, low impulse control, and violent tendencies. This is dysgenics exemplified.

5. Subverting valuable but unguarded institutions is an important aim.

One of the genius moves of the left during the 20th century was to find resources that were important, but relatively unguarded, and take them over. Academia or the media, for instance. These were always decent jobs, but weren’t perceived as being quite as influential in the past as they later became. Fighting over things which everyone knows are important (e.g. Supreme Court nominations) is extraordinarily difficult. Subverting and taking over institutions which are important, but not yet realized to be important, is a much more promising strategy.

So far, so good.

So based on the above, the question is: as reactionaries, if we want to increase the number of children we have so as to propagate reactionary ideals, is there any way to do it that doesn’t involve getting crushed by the court system or increasing the amount of degeneracy in society? Is there an institution that we can subvert that will help us achieve this aim?

The answer is yes.

And the answer is shockingly simple.

Go to a sperm bank, and donate.

In evolutionary sperms, the unpopularity of sperm donation is simply mind-boggling. It is a colossal unguarded resource – the wombs of thousands of women, openly seeking to bear your children while you are legally shielded from any costs whatsoever of raising them. If humans were fitness maximizers, men should all be beating down the doors of these places to fight each other off. But we aren’t. We’re adaption executors instead, spending all our resources and energy into banging women (which evolutionarily would have produced lots of children) while simultaneously trying not to actually get those same women pregnant. Meanwhile sperm banks are just considered weird. The main people who go are idiot college students not really thinking about the consequences and just treating it like it’s an easy source of beer money. If reactionaries started going there en masse, we’d probably be a large component of the potential pool.

And it goes without saying that this project is enormously scalable. As the marketing goes, you can make a difference in the life of a family! What they don’t say, because it weirds people out, is that you’ll probably make a difference in the lives of dozens, if not hundreds of families. This becomes an enormous force multiplier to any group with small numbers.

Not only that, but this project is compatible even with a world view that thinks single motherhood is undesirable. The effect is not to increase the number of single mums in the world. Anyone going to the sperm bank has already made up their mind to have a child, whether it's a good idea or not. Unless the sperm banks get shut down, the change is entirely one in composition, not in number. The only question is whose children these women will be having, and what traits will these children have. Since everything is heritable (see law 1!), it's better if the children have reactionary fathers, than soy-boy loser fathers.

Moreover, this can be done alongside a traditional lifestyle oneself. Donate while young and single, or if your wife/girlfriend is okay with it. Doing it while single is probably easier – future wives may be uncomfortable with the idea, but if it is presented as a fait accompli, they’ll probably find a way to make peace with it, especially because it likely doesn’t impact very much in one’s day-to-day life. Then after that, get married and have your own children with your wife and raise them yourself, just as you were planning to before. Most young men masturbate for free. Instead, they could get paid to impregnate hundreds of women with almost no negative consequences to themselves. And yet almost nobody does. Go figure.

There are, however, at least two caveats worth mentioning (and probably more – these are the ones that came to my mind). First, in the age of genetic testing, it is increasingly unlikely that you will be able to maintain true anonymity to your donor children or their parents forever. Some places actually put any recipient adult in touch (anonymously) if they want to. Truthfully, this is probably better, as it’s preferable to have people email you than turn up at your office. There’s too many ways to track people down, from genetic tests to compiling scraps of information into endless google searches. If you go down this path, it’s worth trying to preserve anonymity with sensible steps (turn your 23andme to private, obviously). But you should assume that you may get some contact from the recipient mothers or their children, at least to some extent. Probably not a lot, and probably not most of them. But it’s worth assuming the worst. If this prospect is too uncomfortable to you, then it may not be a good idea. To me, the idea doesn’t seem that troubling, once I actually thought about it. Still, your mileage may vary.

Second, I imagine that some of you (maybe most of you, maybe all of you) will have ethical issues with the idea of having children that one doesn’t have contact with. This is a totally fair viewpoint. If one feels this way, particularly from a religious basis, then definitely don’t do it. But if one is less troubled by this aspect, then perhaps it’s not an insurmountable objection. There is certainly a strong qualified defense of the idea in the pragmatic angle – even if sperm banks should be shut down altogether as an abomination, in the world we live in, they’re not going to be. The main change we make is at the margin of what kind of children result. You might be tempted to wonder if your children will turn out badly because they won't have you there to raise them. But remember point 2! Parenting doesn't matter that much. Genetics do. Still, if one feels strongly that there is an ethical objection to the whole enterprise, then one might feel that this would be lending some kind of implicit support to it. Again, I don’t tend to feel as strongly on this point, but I imagine some of you probably will.

If you're thinking that this whole idea sounds really weird, it struck me as weird too when I first considered it, but it grew on me more and more as I thought about it. And the more it went on, it began to seem like it actually meets a large number of reactionary goals. The fact that it seems weird is exactly why it’s unguarded. Paul Graham once wrote a great essay about this in the context of startups. He said that the best startup ideas were the ones that sound bad, but were actually good. You don’t want the ones that sound good and are good – everyone is trying to do those ones, so you’ll have stacks of competition. But the ones that sound weird at first (turn your car into a gypsy cab! Let strangers stay in your house when you’re not there) but are actually really good are the absolute best prospects of all. I think this has the potential to be one of those. In the scheme of the trichotomy, this is much more techno-futurism than traditionalism – in family terms, it’s more neocameralism and less throne and altar. So be it. I think the ability to recognize these possibilities is one of the big advantages of neoreactionaries over paleoreactionaries.

More importantly, this might be the golden age in which to undertake this project. In another 5 or 10 years, we might get to the point where recipients get to select traits based on the full genome of the donor. To the extent that single women seeking donor sperm likely skew progressive, if they understood HBD, they might screen us out themselves. Right now, they can’t.

Even turning up for the initial tests is valuable – if it turns out your sperm count or motility is low and you can’t donate, this is almost certainly knowledge that you’d like to have so you can start trying to have children sooner.

I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong on this. But so far, it makes a disturbing amount of sense to me.

The other counterfactual to wasteful childhood spending

In the modern world, much parental investment in their children is wasted. Parents would almost certainly be better off investing less per child.

They overinvest relative to what the twin studies reliably tell us we should do. Genetic influence is large for most things we care about (e.g. 62% for core educational achievement in the UK. Or if you want a wider sample of traits, look at Table 1 here and see how many are in the category of "high heritability"). Not only that, but most parenting is in the category of common environment, in the language of twin studies - non-genetic factors that are common to both twins in a family. And shared environment generally doesn't do very much, particularly for outcomes measured in adulthood. Which means that all the things you do in common for your children, whether it's the choice of school district, or commonly instilled values, or not having a TV in the house, or whatever... none of them do that much. The components of that which cost you money are probably money spent in vain. The environment terms that do seem to matter are mostly idiosyncratic environment: the non-genetic factors that differ between two twins in a family. Unfortunately, we don't really know what these are. People like to talk about peers at school, but it's also parasites, and head trauma, and infectious diseases, and measurement error, and lots of other weird things.

To sum all this up - parenting doesn't matter very much. It certainly doesn't matter nearly as much as people these days think it does. The main reason nobody notices this is that parenting is nearly always correlated with genetic variation. What matters is if you have the kind of genes that would make you want to read a book to your children each night. Whether you actually read the book or not is far less important. Outside of twin studies, adoption studies, and a few other places, these things are very difficult to tease apart.

But I suspect a lot of people will instinctively resist this conclusion. Am I really saying parents should spend less on their children? People being what they are, they will resist the scientific validity of the above claims because they sound like they're implying parents should be more stingy towards their children. How could I be so heartless and selfish!

First off, if you're ever tempted to deny basic facts just because you don't like the conclusions that flow from them, you're so many levels deep in shonky motivated reasoning that I don't know how to help you.

But more importantly, you're assuming a particular counterfactual, one which I never stated.

I said that parents should spend less per child. And that's true.

When I say that, you're assuming that the relevant tradeoff is "take the money you were going to spend on maths tutoring, and spend it on a fancy new car for yourself". In other words, you make the choice between altruism and selfishness, and then declare yourself righteous by advocating on the side of altruism.

But spending-per-child has both a numerator and a denominator.

People only seem to think of the numerator, to spend less in total. Of course, there's another way to reduce spending per child. Namely, hold total spending constant, and have more children.

And it's bizarre that this is almost never the tradeoff that people think of, even though they should. The real tradeoff should be "skip the maths tutoring and have one more child".

When phrased this way, the choice is much harder to feel righteous about, because now altruism is stacked on both sides of the ledger. And the altruism is actually quite jarring when considered explicitly.

"I'm saving for my child to have a debt-free college experience at the best university possible! What could be more noble than that?", asks John Q. GenXer. Well, let's phrase it differently. Suppose that you have two children, and you want to pay for both of their college. You're setting aside, what, $400K or so? In practical terms, that would go an awfully long way towards funding the entire existence of child #3. Suppose you had to confront the actual child #3, in some hypothetical universe. You have to tell him, "Sorry, son, I chose for you not to exist so that your older brother wouldn't have to have college debt."

Put that way, it doesn't sound nearly so noble, does it? In fact, it sounds downright disturbing and shallow.

And yet that's the actual alternative being faced. It doesn't feel that way, because the children you don't have aren't salient, or even fully real. But if they were, they'd be much harder to treat so callously.

The "aborted daughter" meme made this point very powerfully:

The late, great Gary Becker made a similar point, in the language of economics. People don't love their children, as much as they learn to love them. Because exactly as above, at some point people typically make a choice to stop having more. And yet if the children came along by accident, they'd love them anyway, very intensely, and would risk their lives to save them. But ex ante, they go to considerable lengths to make sure the children don't exist in the first place.

People aren't perfectly altruistic, of course. Surviving on zero sleep for 10 years, instead of 4 years, is a non-trivial difference to one's quality of life over the period. If a couple decides they simply can't do any more, so be it. Let he who has donated all his wealth to charity cast the first stone.

But there is a group of people for whom the alternative counterfactual is crucially important. These are the couples who feel that they might like to have one more kid, but they just can't afford it. Those are the people who are making the wrong choice. The piano lessons and the maths tutoring don't matter. If endless driving the kids to weekend soccer is too hard, just don't put them on the soccer team. They'll survive. If you don't have a huge house, then maybe they'll have to share a bedroom. People have turned out just fine, starting with much worse.

Have one more child, and spend less on each one.

The spending doesn't matter. The child does.

For the world, firstly. And for the child themselves.

Feminism and Birthrates

As I’ve written about in the past, by my reckoning the direst problem of our time is that the west is not having enough children to replace itself. It is literally dying out. To make matters worse, the distribution of birthrates seems significantly dysgenic. It is the rich and educated who are having the least children. We are not just shrinking, we are getting dumber to boot. If you doubt me, I’ll gladly stake a wager on whether you should expect to see more articles about “The Flynn Effect” or “The Reverse Flynn Effect” over the next 20 years. One does not have to be a HBD fanatic to observe that, if current trends continue, it is hard to see a scenario where this ends well.

And, as far as I can tell, we don’t really know why all this is happening, though of course there are theories. Some parts, as I’ve noted, are purely technological. We have much better birth control technology, which means that those people who are inclined to not have children have a much easier time of arranging this. We’ve short-circuited evolution’s link between having sex and having children, so we do the former, but not the latter.

But there’s another part that missing in the previous analysis. Even among the couples that do want to have kids, there’s an increasing sense that they can’t afford to have as many as they’d want. The cost of raising them has gotten too high, both in terms of money and time. For today, let’s just focus on the money aspect (with the acknowledgement that this almost certainly doesn't explain the whole thing).

While it’s worth taking this complaint seriously, it sounds very odd at a first glance. Society is immensely richer than it was a hundred years ago. We have a lot more labor-saving technology, and ipads and televisions to entertain children. How is it that the cost has not only gone up, but gone up so much that it overwhelms the increase in income, resulting in the budget set allowing for fewer children under current preferences?

Part of this is just a raised set of standards. When people lived in primitive societies, often everyone in a family slept in the same room and the same bed. A hundred years ago, it was entirely normal for children to share bedrooms for years at a time. Now, it’s considered vaguely odd for middle class children to not have their own bedrooms for their whole life. So people acting as if it’s better for the child not to exist in the first place than to have to share a bedroom. Hey, I didn’t say it made sense, but that’s the implication.

If children are expensive, what are the costs that make it that way? By my reckoning, the two biggest costs are schooling and housing. The two are correlated. Part of the cost of schooling is being able to afford a house in a good school district, which makes it harder for people to just buy a bigger house in a cheap area. The alternative is to spring for private school, which is even worse for birthrates, since this adds a fixed per-child cost.

The sheer mendacity of the social discourse about “good schools” makes it hard for people to even explain what it is they’re after. Part of the demand comes from delusion about the idea that schools with good educational outcomes get results solely from good teachers and more resources, as if the quality of the student body had nothing to do with it. Partly it comes from a realistic appreciation about what the student body’s qualities have to do with the chances your kid ends up being friends with drug dealers and gang bangers, or just gets beaten up at school.

But whatever the reason, it’s deemed very important to be in a good school district, so there’s lots of demand for houses in these areas.

And a similar geographic aspect is present in the demand for housing itself we described. If it’s hard to afford a big house with a bedroom for every child, is this because the cost of construction has gone up? Not really – building technologies keep getting cheaper.

No, houses are expensive because of land. You might be able to afford a big house. You just can’t afford one in any place you’d like to live. Schooling is expensive because it is assigned by school district, which is also based on land. If there were more selective, entrance-exam public schools, a lot of this pressure might be alleviated. But disparate impact related hysteria being what it is, land is the currency of our time for schooling.

Land is interesting, because it’s almost the classic example of a positional good. There is a certain amount of beachfront real estate in Los Angeles, Miami and the Hamptons. The ability to make more of it is approximately zero. The best land will end up being held by whoever the richest people in the area are at the time. Whether the society is rich or poor, someone will get to look at the ocean view, and the ocean isn’t much different than it was in 1950. As more money comes in, this will simply drive up the price, because the supply is highly inelastic. In one sense, you can build skyscrapers so lots of people live there. This solves the problem of getting to look at the ocean, but not the school district problem whereby the new entrants will be poorer than those who would live there if it’s only single family dwellings. So for the school district problem, it’s even more of a positional good problem.

And this is where feminism comes in.

Because the patriarchy, even in its relatively mild 1950s form, acted like a fairly strong co-ordinating mechanism whereby we all agreed that only 50% of us were going to work. For positional goods, if we all co-ordinate to do exactly 50% as much work, we end up holding exactly the same land as before – the ordering of who is rich and poor doesn’t change, and neither does the mapping between the richest and the best land.

In theory, you could get a similar effect with a rule that said that only one partner in a marriage was allowed to work (regardless of who it was), and everyone had to be married. In practice, even putting aside the desirability of this in terms of men vs women doing the child raising, and the relative complexity of trying to co-ordinate on this alternative, I don’t know how much difference this would make. Gary Becker famously noted that assortative matching between high income potential women and high income potential men (for any number of reasons, from preferences on down) means that the number of cases where the women would be the optimal choice to be a sole worker would likely be a lot lower than 50%, provided that men enjoy some income advantage. In other words, the “one worker per married couple”, if enforced, would mostly end up as only having the man working.

Either way, the norm that, in general, women don’t work, was a reasonably strong Schelling point around which to co-ordinate. As long as everyone stuck to the deal, you could afford exactly the same house and school district as before, but now there was someone at home to make dinner, keep the house clean, look after the kids when they came home from school.

As the Schelling point collapsed, we got the school district arms race. The first couple to have dual incomes can move up a long way in the school district / land rat race, but it wasn’t stable. Other people joined in, and before you know it, everyone has to have two incomes just to afford the same house that they would have had before under a single income model.

It’s actually worse than that – as well as having to pay more for the same house, the couple now has to pay to contract out all the services that previously would have been done by the woman who stayed at home, from childcare to cooking to cleaning. Feminists, like progressives, are always apt to insist that the problem is simply a lack of more feminism! We just need to have more family-friendly work policies, free childcare etc. It’s true that this will help somewhat – there is probably a J-shape of feminism and birth rates, where a moderately large amount of feminism without any maternity leave or childcare subsidies (a la the American model) is probably about the worst possible scenario. But look at the Scandinavian countries. Even with all the childcare in the world, the total fertility rate for Denmark, Sweden and Norway are 1.69, 1.88 and 1.75 children per woman respectively (without even inquiring how many of those are ethnic Scandinavians as opposed to third world immigrants).

It seems apparent that more feminism is entirely unable to solve the school district problem, because they don’t even understand it, and they don’t think about the extent to which this is driving the birth rate choice. It’s not a surprise then that even going the full retard of feminism doesn’t get you even replacement rates.

And in the cross-section, which people are going to feel this school district / birthrate pinch the most?

Those who are most likely to think that education and school districts are highly valuable. Which is to say, those who are highly educated themselves, since they likely attribute their success to their education. Being unable to bear the possibility of their kids going to “bad schools”, they instead get a small house in a good area and have fewer children. So we end up with not only reduced birth rates, but dysgenic birth rates to boot. Which, as I noted last time, is the biggest puzzle to be explained in the cost story.

And like Scott Alexander’s Moloch, we now don’t know how to stop the process. Some co-ordination mechanisms are easier to break than they are to get started again, even if there were the will to do so.

Of course, the problem will resolve itself one way or another. It’s just that the some of the resolutions sound like “the disappearance of people who care about school districts, and the societies able to sustain such infrastructure”.

As far as I can tell, the only groups of westerners with significantly above-replacement birthrates are Orthodox Jews, Mormons and the Amish. It is no surprise that all of them are considerably more patriarchal than the secular west. On current trends, there will be a lot more of them in the future, and that’s currently the best case scenario.

If you don’t like that, you’d better start figuring out some alternative, because the future is coming one way or another.

On the Pathology of Low Birthrates

One of the important axioms of organisational development is that if you want an organisation to be successful and sustainable, you should make sure it's profitable.

For organizations like businesses, whose whole raison d'être is profit, this doesn't need much explanation. But what about for causes where the organisers don't care much about profit - a renaissance fair, a church, a literary magazine?

There was a great Social Matter article talking about this a month or so ago in the context of the Gulenist movement in Turkey - why would a religious cult also operate a test prep centre?

The reason is that a profitable organization is self-sustaining. Every organisation needs resources, and profit ensures you won't run out of them. Even if the resources you really need aren't money, profit ensures that a) you don't fail for lack of money, and b) you've got a good shot of acquiring the non-monetary resources you need anyway. Suppose you want supporters - well, would better marketing help? Would free food? Would a great place to hold meetings?

When you forget this lesson, you end up like jwz (whose writing I enjoy, even if I don't agree with all of it) with DNA Lounge (a nightclub I've been to, and very much like) - he made a ton of money in tech, wanted to run a cool nightclub, and didn't care about the money. Then $5 million later, he ran out of money. It sounds both mean and trite at this stage, but if he really cared about the mission of having creative musical venues available, he should have worked damn hard to make it profitable as soon as humanly possible.

But even people who think about this when it comes to profit and organisations often don't think about the equivalent for ideas and cultural practices.

To wit: if you want a culture or idea to survive, the people who practice it must have high birth rates.

Because while organisations propagate themselves by resources, ideas and cultures are carried by people. It doesn't matter how much you love your particular idea - feminism, classical music, the constitution, whatever. If the people who support that idea have below replacement birth rates, and the people who are opposed to that idea have above replacement birth rates, then the prevalence of that idea is being whittled away, slowly but surely. Ideas don't breed directly, but they can still be bred out.

Because ideas, like most things in this world, are heritable. Both genetics and culture mean that parents in general pass their values on to their children. Take away the children, and you take away the people likely to hold the idea tomorrow.

Of course, people are apt to forget this, because it's a slow-moving effect. The faster way ideas spread is through communication across a given population.

Which is all well and good. The more you spread the idea, the more people who hold it right now, and, ceteris paribus, the more people will hold it next generation.

Where things get complicated, however, is if the idea itself reduces birthrates directly. This is especially true for ideas like feminism or progressivism in general. In this sense, they are parasitic and pathological. I mean this as a metaphor, but only in the barest biological sense. They reduce the reproductive fitness of their host, simply by reducing the number of offspring it has that survive to adulthood to themselves reproduce. As a consequence, these ideas are like a deadly virus that can only survive by spreading and infecting other hosts. Is reducing the reproductive fitness of your host not the very essence of parasitism?

Ideas that increase procreation are symbiotic in that sense - the idea spreads by increasing the fitness of its host. But as in nature, parasites and diseases can spread and survive, although there is a tradeoff between the mortality rate and the transmission rate. The faster you kill off the host, the faster the disease must also spread, or it kills off itself with the host. In this sense, the fact that progressivism has spread throughout the west with increasing speed, and the fact that it is catastrophic for birth rates, are not a coincidence. The former is a requirement for the latter.

It is an unassailable fact that the ideas, beliefs and circumstances of the modern west are extraordinarily pathological in terms of birth rates. The exact cause of this is hard to pin down, but in some sense it doesn't specifically matter - not only the directly pathological ideas, but those that tend to co-locate with it, are similarly being selected out. So a taste for classical music rose with the growth of Europe and was able to last for a long time, but now is associated only with low birth rate groups. If you disagree with my assessment that progressivism is considerably to blame for low birth rates, that's fine, because they're all going down together. If you think the answer is just 'wealth' as the cause of low birth rates, then we are ineluctably being selected for poverty.

(The problem with wealth as an explanation, incidentally, is that while it could explain the time series and the current cross-section, it fails entirely with the historical cross-section. Which is to say, for most of history, the rich had more children. For them at least, wealth didn't seem to produce the same pathologically low birth rates that it does for us).

But no matter where exactly it is coming from, the west simply cannot survive long term in its present form. And this is a purely mathematical prediction, not a sociological one. Any set of values that creates below replacement birth rates is pathological, and is actively being bred out.

Of course, the other complicating factor is that the west keeps taking in new immigrants. When they arrive, they have high birth rates, before they too end up declining. In the mean time, they acquire at best only a fraction (if any) of the traits that made the west what it was.

Which, if you like the west as it is, or as it was, is a big problem.

But if you're the blind idiot god of social evolution, this is the pathology solving itself. The modern west is pathological, and the dismantling of the circumstances that created it is evolution's revenge.

The ultimate irony of social Darwinism is that while it was pilloried for its racism in predicting the decline of third world populations, on current birthrates it was ultimately the west itself, the very progenitor of the idea, that was the unfit one. Evolution does not work the way most people seem to think, just making stuff awesome according to your particular preference for what that involves.

The biggest question isn't whether the current situation can go on forever. It's only what will replace it. The replacement will be made up of individuals holding ideas that are resistant to whatever set of pressures create low birth rates. In this sense, we are like a population in the midst of a great plague, knowing that eventually society will only be made up of people with an immune system able to defend against it.

If you want to know who that might be, just look at who is currently having children. The sincerely religious, such as Mormons and Muslims, for one. And those with a very high time preference and few outside options.

There are many forms of non-pathological social structures and ideas that could replace the current one.

One is Victorian England.

Another is Africa 40,000 years ago.

You may care which of these we end up in, but evolution doesn't.

Most likely, it will be neither, but some new combination of traits and ideas. When the dinosaurs get wiped out, the new species don't evolve back into the same old dinosaurs.

The good news, however, is that ideas are not DNA - people can change their ideas much faster than their genes. And whatever pathology is producing our current predicament must be relatively recent in origin, suggesting that fixing it does not necessarily involve going back to the dark ages. I have suggested the birth control basilisk as one possible cause, but the problem is a hard one to pin down.

The bad news is that we seem to be making almost no progress in actually fixing the problem, or even identifying it.

But the big picture lesson stands - there are, and can be, no healthy low-birthrate societies. It is a contradiction in terms.

The Birth Control Basilisk

An ongoing question I've talked about a few times before is that at least some of our toughest social problems are really technology problems. That is, not problems of a lack of technology, but of a surfeit of neutral or even beneficial technology which is having unexpected negative side effects. Mass illegal immigration is mostly a problem of cheap transport, for instance.

I mostly think about the declining birthrates in much the same way as I think about the increase in obesity (which deserves its own post for sure). Specifically, that technology has produced an environment so unlike that to which we’re evolutionarily adapted that people’s instincts no longer produce reliably good outcomes.

In other words, reliable contraception and abortion has been like a basilisk. It short circuits what had previously been a very successful evolutionary adaption which used to have high reproductive fitness. It leaves humans like the moth circling the light bulb, thinking it is the moon and flying in circles until it drops of exhaustion.

What are the instincts that people have with respect to children and reproduction?

1. People have a very strong, uncomplicated and concrete desire to have sex, ideally right now. They don't need marketing campaigns to make them want to do this. Oddities like Japan aside, people seem to have no problem getting laid.

2. People have a somewhat strong, but quite complicated, abstract and malleable, desire to have children, at some point in time.

3. People have a very strong, uncomplicated desire to love and care for the children they have.

#2 and #3 are deliberately split into two parts. As the great Gary Becker put it, you don't love your children as much as you learn to love your children once they arrive. There was usually the option to have one more child, which you chose not to do, often as part of a quite sensible cost/benefit tradeoff. Of course, if people had an unplanned pregnancy and had another child anyway, they'd still love and care for the child. But the fact that each child gets loved intensely once it arrives doesn't cause people to want as many children as possible. The love only kicks in after they arrive, and the prospect of loving another child in the abstract does not exert nearly the same overwhelming pull.

In other words, traditional reproduction worked primarily through #1 and #3. A strong desire to have sex ensures children are produced with fairly high regularity, because birth control is either non-existent or unreliable. A strong desire to care for children once they arrive ensures they live to adulthood if resources allow. #2 served mostly as a general background reinforcement. This is the environment we all lived in from 10 million BC until the 1950's or so.

The whole idea of it being a contentious question whether you chose to have kids or not is, as far as I can tell, a shockingly recent question. If the only way you could so choose would be to either a) not get laid, or b) rely on methods that require practice, discipline in the heat of coital moment, forward planning and/or health risks, the discussion would be largely moot.

With birth control, childbirth has been largely disconnected from being a necessary consequence of getting laid. It seems that most unplanned pregnancies are teenagers who are still learning the ropes of birth control, the very poor who simply can't afford it, or people with very low forward planning skills. But regardless of how you cut it, in the modern era it is very easy to take precautions that mean you can have sex for an extended period and not get pregnant.

As a result, we’re now expecting the second, weaker desire to do the job where previously the heavy lifting was done by the first. You have to choose to have children. Is it a wonder that this doesn’t wholly succeed?

This doesn't mean that the problem is impossible - social pressure can be a powerful force, if the right motivations and incentives are set up. But make no mistake, we're expecting new social engineering to reproduce a result that was previously done just by our evolutionary adaptions.

I suspect that we are only recently finding out that the majority of human survival and reproduction was actually driven by unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. We now suffer from a want of unwanted pregnancies, and we don't know how to make up the difference.

Making the human race better

Let me ask you, dear reader, a fairly straightforward question.

Suppose that you and your wife or husband are about to have a child. All else equal, would you like your child to be smarter, or dumber? You will love your child either way, of course, so that's not the issue. But if you could take a vitamin supplement during pregnancy that would give them an extra 10 IQ points, would you do it? Let's assume it's a wholly natural supplement. There's a risk of childhood malnutrition without it, which will permanently harm their intelligence.

Taking the supplement would certainly make their life somewhat easier, and increase the chances that they could come up with important business and scientific advances that could benefit society. Lord knows parents spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on education after the fact to try to achieve exactly the same goal.

So to ask a slightly weaker question - does the prospect of such a vitamin supplement shock, horrify and disgust you? Is it repugnant, equivalent to the Holocaust, for parents to love their children so much that they wish them to be slightly smarter? Is it wrong to wish for these benefits for your neighbour's children, or your friends' children? If you're not an IQ booster, substitute in adjectives like 'taller', 'more attractive' or 'healthier' - the logic is exactly the same.

I am pretty sure the answer to this is 'of course not'.

So now, question number two.

Would society as a whole be better off if all prospective mothers took this pill? If you could make all the children in society smarter, healthier and more attractive, would that be a net benefit to society, or not? Would that be a project that we should undertake?

As it turns out, that project already has a name.

That name is eugenics.

Eugenics is, of course, in the popular discussion on the subject, literally Hitler.

And I personally find this the most unfathomably braindead attitude I can imagine.

In the case of eugenics, the objections to it are especially vague, and seem to descend into Godwin's Law territory even faster than most political issues, because eugenics is often explicitly presented as a motivation for the Holocaust. This is of course yet one more example in a long list that support the claim that "Hitler makes everybody stupid". Hitler butchered 6 million Jews in a horribly cruel manner. Therefore, we should be entirely unconcerned with whether the human race is on net getting smarter or dumber, or whether the prevalence of genetic health disorders is becoming more common or less common. Not quite so compelling when you spell it out now, is it? That's The Magic of Hitler™, that you never bothered to notice this before now.

To begin with a quibble - it's pretty bizarre to claim that the Holocaust discredits eugenics, because the Holocaust seems about the least eugenic policy I can imagine. Ashkenzi Jews have a mean IQ of 113-116 for crying out loud! I can scarcely imagine a more disgenic policy than killing them off wholesale. If Hitler was a eugenicist, he was the worst one in history, save perhaps Pol Pot, who deliberately killed anyone who seemed even vaguely smart. I don't think his monstrous actions teach us anything about eugenics.

Part of the reason for all this nonsense is that the term eugenics came to conflate two quite different concepts. The first is the general aim of improving the genetic stock of the human race. The second was a specific set of policies that got applied to do this.

If you can't change the genes of a population directly, you can still change their frequency. In terms of the existing population, we can't instantly clone adults, but we can kill them. In terms of children, we can either have policies designed to encourage more children from the people we want, or policies designed to discourage having children by the people we don't want.

Now, to give opponents their (very limited) due, a number of the policies implemented to achieve eugenic aims were in fact quite horrible. Killing entire populations is of course repugnant. Forced sterilisations of the disabled, the retarded or the mentally ill are something that we find very troubling and immoral.

Because this is a touchy subject, let me emphasise that I share the above concerns.

So for the purposes of argument, let us specify in advance, to allay any possible fears, that we shall rule out any policy whatsoever designed to specifically discourage anyone from having children, let alone killing anyone.

But what about the last category? What about just encouraging high-functioning, good people to have more children?

What in God's name is wrong with that? Why shouldn't that be something to be celebrated? Trying to bring more happy, healthy capable children into the world is about as far from the Holocaust as I can possibly imagine. So why on earth does it still get tarred with the same brush? Is it really so repugnant to increase tax breaks for rich parents? Is it appalling to run ad campaigns in low-crime-rate areas encouraging people to have more children?

Marketing and associations being what they are, I think we need a new term to describe the specific set of policies that encourage higher birth rates by well-adjusted people. I humbly submit 'progenetic policy' (a play on both genetics and progeny). But any new term would be helpful to sever people's inane association with things like forced sterilisations.

By this point in time, we have an overwhelming body of evidence from behavioral genetics that large amounts of personality traits and behaviors are significantly heritable, and have sizable genetic components. As a result, if you have more children being born with good genes, you will get more good outcomes. Isn't this something you'd want? This would seem obvious to me, but apparently it's not to a lot of people.

And the thing that is most perplexing to me about the current antipathy towards thinking about these questions is that not thinking about these issues doesn't make them go away.

Because the broader side of eugenics goes on whether you think about it or not.

There is no opt-out here. There is only eugenics, disgenics, or stasis.

Either the genetic traits associated with pro-social behavior, or IQ, or anything else, are becoming more prevalent in the population, less prevalent in the population, or they are staying at the same rate. So which is it? Which would you like it to be? When you design a new policy, it will either cause those frequencies to go up, or go down. This seems like something worth thinking about in advance.

You may not be interested in progenetics.

Progenetics, unlike Trotsky's quip about war, is not interested in you either.

But it is very interested in your children.