Fertility Will Never Recover
The world is in a spiraling fertility crisis which everyone has notice over the last year-ish.1 Sarah Haider proposes a GI Bill for young moms. Scott Alexander says a govt payment of $200,000 per child should work. Everyone wants to go back to thick-community-style living.
Amid ever-increasing talk of what to do to increase fertility, I think it’s important we acknowledge that nothing will increase fertility to the levels required for our society to continue. People do not want more than one child. Some don’t even want one. Two children is viewed as a stretch goal. Three is a major sacrifice that one takes on for the good of their community. You cannot incentivize people to make that sacrifice at anything close to the proper scale because people don’t want money that badly. How many hands would you amputate for $100,000?
A Life Worth Living
One child is all you need to get 90% of the joy, meaning, and interesting experiences out of having children. There are massive diminishing returns to having additional children (for the parents). Ask all your friends. How many are excited and aiming for 3+ children? Really excited and joyously motivated—not because it’s their duty for humanity and they’re on the EA burnout path. The life worth living is one with one child per couple among happy couples. Or 1.35 on average when you count the outliers.
Why yes, I’m fixated on 3+. One child is a death sentence. Two ““should”” be enough, but it’s not. “Two” doesn’t mean what it used to. Now four births lead to two reproducing children, on average. My parents have four children, but they have two grandchildren. Three of us are childless (hi!), one has two kids. If my parents are lucky that might increase to three grandchildren.
Just as premodern couples had to accept half their kids wouldn’t live to adulthood, we have to accept half our kids won’t reproduce. This means three children as a minimum goal is the only way to begin to attain replacement fertility. Parents should be hoping for more than three, but wanting three as their starting baseline.
Yes, agreed: lmao
Don’t Summon Eldritch Gods
So—we can’t fix this with money, people don’t want it badly enough. We can’t fix this by altering our culture, every other force in society is arrayed against it. A complete culture-ectomy could work, akin to passionately converting to a new religion and moving to their ethnostate-ish region. But no one wants that either. Fertility will not recover to replacement rates and we must all prepare for that.
Why care if evolution will fix this?
Because I don’t care about “humanity in general” nearly as much as I care about my society. Yes, sure, the descendants of the Amish and the Taliban will cover the earth. That’s not a future I strive for. I’d be willing to give up large chunks of the planet to an ASI to prevent that. I want the future to have a robust rationalist society of humans I relate to and care for. For the humanity I care about fertility will never recover. Don’t summon up eldritch gods to fix your problems, you’ll never be happy with the result.
Pull The Rope Sideways
Fortunately we’re at the dawn of the singularity and as Scott pointed out, though Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable. We won’t die out if we don’t die. The most feasible solution I see is honestly the banishment of aging and death. We don’t need to dedicate our collective lives to grinding out 3+ children before it’s too late and cursing our children to do the same. We can just not die and retain our culture that way. If we want to have another child every century or so, there will always be a happy rationalist society to welcome them and celebrate their growth and uplift.
Not Dying is the true frontier in preventing demographic collapse, and the loss of the society we care about. Short of that we’re doomed.
Yes, lots of people started ringing alarm bells about this well before that (it’s nice being in the rationalist community and always learning about what’s going to happen 20% sooner than the rest of the world), but it’s really taken off lately.
IMHO you get less than 50% (though much more than 33%) of the utility of 3 children (what I have) with just 1 (what my parents had), especially in the present day (when most kids have far less nearby extended family and neighbor children) and assuming you can have kids close enough together in age. With 3 kids, each of them nearly always has someone to play with (even if one of their two siblings is busy), as well as a non-authority-figure to talk with. Two of them have at least one easily relatable role model to look up to, and two of them have at least one junior looking up to them. Many of the costs of raising them (in both money and time) are flat fixed costs that don't double and triple with the second and third kid. The younger kids get the benefit of our having learned from (relatively minor, fortunately) mistakes raising the oldest. They work together on childhood projects in a way that makes helping 2 or 3 of them at a time *less* work than helping 1 alone would have been. And hopefully the benefits will continue to accrue to them; my wife and her older sister have been invaluable sources of support to each other for decades and I like to imagine my kids turning out the same way.
Also important is that they're individually surprisingly different people. They're both obvious mixes of my wife and I, but not in the way that blue and yellow make green, more like the way that HPMOR!Harry's shuffled "chromosome" papers make new discrete combinations. (there's got to be a less dorky reference to make here, but my kids all loved HPMOR too, so I'm sticking with that one) I know personality etc. are supposed to be very polygenetic, but our kids got a variety of different attributes, and seeing those contrasted against each other makes it easier to accept that they're just their own individual people, rather than assuming we're parenting "correctly" when a kid strongly shares a particular one of our strengths or avoids a certain flaw versus "incorrectly" when they don't. Even for utility that obviously has nothing to do with "correct" parenting, like the enjoyment of shared hobbies and interests, it's easier to "have it all", without pushing any of your kids into particular directions, when you can be confident that at least *one* of your kids is likely to enjoy whatever you expose them all to.
All that said, we've got people by the millions and billions now, and if that number goes down here or there we've got a *lot* of runway with which to fix the problem, or with which to wait for natural selection to get the problem to fix itself. IMHO the major short-term reason to worry about fertility drops is only that they may be symptomatic of deeper underlying social problems. E.g. If people don't want to have kids that's their business, but the typical gap between TFR and desired fertility was around 1 the last time I checked, and if people aren't even getting to have the kids they do want then it's worth looking into why not.
The other thing is that if we can extend healthy lifespan to, say, 250 years, each child will take a lower percentage of one’s life. I say healthy lifespan, because nobody wants to be 80 for 170 years. Anyhow, today if you have a kid, that’s 20 years of prime life taken. The opportunity costs are massive. But if 20 years becomes 1/10 of adult life, far fewer opportunity costs.