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.

1

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.

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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.

I'm almost certainly somewhat of an outlier, but I am very excited about having 3+ children. My ideal number is 5 (or maybe more if I become reasonably wealthy). My girlfriend is also on board.

I just can't picture anything more joyous in a normal life (i.e. excluding upload enabled perma-jhana) than finding someone I deeply love and combining ourselves to make new people. It's a miracle that's even possible! If this wasn't a normal part of everyday life people would laugh at you for proposing such an absurd thing could ever be real.

EDIT: One more thing worth mentioning: If we ignore AGI for a second (not much point in talking about this otherwise), I think the long term solution to this problem is to create pro-natalist microcultures. Groups of friends living around each other raising their children in a shared environment. My dream is to live close to friends who also have a bunch of kids and raise them alongside people I love.

I know from reading reports of parents who have done or tried this that it's not trivial. One of the most difficult parts seems to be getting everyone to agree to a set of parenting standards and having the flexibility and acceptance to not require perfect adherence to every rule from every parent all the time. But we are still going to try to make this happen, probably somewhere close by the bay area.

Groups of friends living around each other raising their children in a shared environment.

To get a taste of that, you could go on a vacation with friends who have children of similar age as yours.

One of the most difficult parts seems to be getting everyone to agree to a set of parenting standards and having the flexibility and acceptance to not require perfect adherence to every rule from every parent all the time.

Yeah. We experimented having vacations with various friends who have children, and indeed this was a problem with some of them. Some parents were "nature-oriented" and were shocked that our children were allowed to use computers at pre-school age (also that we refused to use homeopathy to solve all kinds of problems). Some parents insisted that every conflict or misunderstanding between children needs to be solved by endless moralizing and psychologizing (as opposed to just sending kids to different rooms and letting them calm down). Some parents were shocked to hear me tell children that they are not supposed to interrupt adults when they are talking, and especially not by repeatedly yelling something that was supposed to be very funny but actually was not (in their opinion, it is only legitimate to tell children "no" when you are already on the verge of collapse, and mere constant yelling shouldn't get you there).

But that's what you solve by trying different people. Either you find someone with similar norms, or someone who knows how to interact with people who have different norms. For example, we are an atheist family, but my children are taught that it is polite to respect that other people are religious -- without necessarily agreeing with them. "They are wrong, but it is not your place to tell them, or to make fun of them." (The differences in belief are often not a problem in practice, but proselytizing is.)

I'm almost certainly somewhat of an outlier, but I am very excited about having 3+ children. My ideal number is 5 (or maybe more if I become reasonably wealthy). My girlfriend is also on board.

It's quite a different question whether you would really pull through with this or whether either of you would change their preference and stop at a much lower number.

We're pretty firmly committed to at least 3. I think whether we have more than that depends on how well we're doing financially and whether the world is still around at that point.

One solution is life extension. I would prefer to have one child every 20 years (have two with 14 years difference). So if life expectancy and fertility age will grow to 100 years old, many people will eventually have 2-3 children. 

If compute is linear in space, then in the obvious way of doing things, you have your Nth kid in your th year.

[-]dr_s128

I honestly think "find the elixir of immortality within a couple of generations" is not what I'd call a pragmatic plan to solve this. Personally I don't think having 2 or 3 children would necessarily be such a curse in a different kind of world. A few obvious changes that I think would help towards that:

  • short of immortality, any extension of youth helps. Part of the problem here is that by the time we feel like we've got our shit sorted out, we're almost too old to have children;

  • artificial wombs. Smooth out the risks of pregnancy and eliminate the biological divide between men and women in this deal;

  • houses, houses, houses. Children need space. People want to give their children space. "Shit sorted out" almost always includes buying a house. Build more fucking houses. Have priorities;

  • a less neurotic culture around children. We kept raising the bar about what it means to be a good parent and then we're surprised so many people see it as way too stressful and hard for them. Make more independence to children not only legal when it's not, but normal. That has the double benefit of being known to actually really help the psychological growth of those children and of leaving more free time to the parents. Are there risks? Yes, but all life comes with risks, they can be mitigated in other ways, and these risks I feel are likely perceived way more than statistics would justify;

  • get our priorities straight about work. Look, yes, productivity is important and all. But effectively our society tells people that if you want to work towards developing a new sports betting app, that's £80,000 per year; if you want to work towards making sure the city doesn't fall to dysentery by keeping it clean, that's £30,000 per year; and if you want to have and raise the next generation, a £100,000 lump sum for 18 years of work would be the wildest thing we can think of. Obviously this is not even on the same scale. Pay a straight up parental sabbatical for people at peak reproductive age (say, 25-35), see what happens. A time to do mostly parenting and nothing else, maybe some easy part time work on the side. Does that mean losing some peak productive years? Yes, of course. Would that productivity be best used for society making sure all the middle management is properly middle managed in the umpteenth marketing company?

The problem is honestly that this issue is so polarized. So doing anything about it is now associated with being with the religious right wing (or worse, the racist right wing specifically worried about white people being out-bred), which then means that the actually more liberal and rational parts of the centre-right, centre and left abhor touching it and have to pretend there's no problem. The Amish thing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think the way forward in this sense would be to spin it: not "you must have children for the sake of humanity's future!", but "our inability to allow people to have children is actually ruining their potential happiness". There's already some efforts in that direction but they feel quite half assed, and I think the left in particular focuses too much on the economic aspects only without seeing that there's a bit more at play.

People do not want more than one child. Some don’t even want one. Two children is viewed as a stretch goal. 

The first Google result I get for "ideal family size in america" is a 2023 Gallup poll according to which 44% of Americans who had an opinion think two children is the idea family size, and 45% that three or more children is.

My current impression is that most people would prefer to have more children than they actually end up having, but there are various societal forces in play making this hard, so it'll take some time to develop the necessary social technologies to better align people's family sizes with their preferences.

Revealed preference is my cheeky answer here. "If I had infinite time/money" and "what I am willing to do IRL" are two different types of "want", and I was talking more about the latter.

Your argument seemed to be that the fertility fall is not just a temporary thing where people's want is currently overwhelmed by other factors, but a stronger diswant that cannot be counterbalanced by shifting those factors. Revealed preference only shows what things are like with the current balance of factors.

I don't expect the factors to change, they are downstream of our social fabric. A different society won't have these factors, but ours does 

(sorry for the long delay)

Some people don't want to have children. It is not a problem as long as the people who want to have more children are allowed to do so. I know people who don't have children, but whose siblings have four or more.

It becomes a real problem when the people who want to have three or more children are not allowed to do so.

One problem is the society telling people that there is always enough time to have children later. Denying the fact that after some age, it becomes difficult to conceive a child. This problem is typically stronger for women, which is why if you mention it, you will be immediately accused of sexism. (The logic is: only a sexist would be motivated to talk about something that is mostly a women's problem.) So everyone is told to wait as long as possible. Then some people find out they no longer can have children. Yeah, modern medicine can do miracles. But they are expensive, they hurt, they take a lot of time, and you probably don't want to get three or more children that way. Even the people who have children at last moment sometimes have fewer than then originally wanted, because you typically don't want to have many children at the same time. I guess this is individual, but anecdotally, I know some people who had two kids, decided that it was too much work and therefore enough, but about ten years later changed their mind and had a third child. But if you have your first children at the last moment, you won't get the opportunity to change your mind ten years later.

We need to be able to give your people the same advice that the generations before us received: If you don't have your first child at the age of about 30, the biology will very likely prevent you from having as many children as you would want to have. (Yes, I said 30; not 40, and definitely not 50.)

Another problem is the social brainwashing telling us that the meaning of life is either to work hard to make your bosses rich, or to spend a lot of time partying and drink a lot of alcohol. I mean, there is a place and time for everything, but at some moment, even the partying gets boring. But you don't know what else to do, because everyone keeps telling you that having children is the worst fate that could befall a young human. (Typically done in a motte-and-bailey fashion, where you first tell an anecdote about someone getting pregnant at 16 and thereby ruining their life, because in this story their partner abandons them... and when the lesson is internalized, you suggest that getting pregnant at 25 or 30 is practically the same thing, only instead of education it ruins your career.)

And hey, people are different. For some, endless partying really is the meaning of their lives. Others genuinely want to make their bosses rich, hoping that some of that wealth will trickle down to them. And there is nothing wrong with that. But there are many of us who merely pretend that making our bosses rich makes our lives fulfilling, when instead, we would secretly prefer to spend the time with our friends and loved ones. (But obviously you can't say that out loud, if you want to pass the job interview; at least as a software developer there is the cultural expectation that coding is all you care about, which is why you are supposed to have a portfolio on GitHub to prove that you also spend your free time coding and learning the latest technologies.)

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).

The cost of having children also scales sublinearly. (Which you will never find out, if you stop at one.) One child will depend on you all the time, because there is no one else at home to interact with. Two children can play together. Older siblings can take care of younger siblings; they can teach them many things. (Those who were the only children of their parents probably don't realize that taking some responsibility for your younger siblings is a natural part of childhood for most of humanity. I suspect it might even prepare you for being a parent later.) Cooking for two children does not require more time than cooking for one (unless they have food allergies).

(Anecdotally, when I look at people around me, those with more children seem happier than those with one. But the causality probably goes in the other direction -- if your first child has serious health problems, or if your partner abandons you after your first child is born, you are less likely to have more children.)

If you have multiple children, they are not copies of each other. If you had two or more children, you will probably find the idea of humans being born as blank slates not just wrong, but laughably silly. (I suspect we get a lot of nature denial precisely because most people participating in the debate do not have children of their own, or stopped at one.) I was there when my two children were born, and they were dramatically different from the first moment. So, having more children is not just more of the same thing. It is a new experience.

There are also costs that scale linearly or worse, but those are often society's choices. Consider education, which is mostly glorified childcare. If you hired a babysitter for your child, you wouldn't need to hire 2 babysitters for 2 children, and 3 babysitters for 3 children. If you wanted your children to learn programming, it makes a lot of sense to simply teach the oldest one and let them teach the younger siblings, and only intervene if they get something wrong or can't explain something, in which case even the oldest one benefits from the clarification. But the school system disrupts this natural passing of knowledge to younger siblings, and insists that the costs of educating N children must be exactly N times the costs of educating one. (If homeschooling is legal in your country, you could send the oldest child to school and let them teach their younger siblings at home... but then the younger siblings wouldn't get the credentials, and those are often more important than the knowledge.) The rules for car seats make having more kids expensive and inconvenient beyond linear.

What is worse, the later people have children, the more intolerant the society becomes against children and those who have them. Some people get hysterical about breastfeeding in public. People get fired from their jobs for suggesting that the easiest way to have more women in STEM is providing more part-time jobs -- but that is exactly what needs to be done, if you want two people to keep their jobs while having a small child. (How many women with small children are working at Google? Do their children ever see their parents, except shortly before bedtime? What happens when the children get sick?) People sometimes talk about ageism... but I suspect that maybe half of that is ageism per se (discriminating against older people regardless of whether they have children or not) and the other half is about having children (which correlates with age, especially in cultures where young people delay having children). For example, if your company is advertised as "young and dynamic", I expect that the company culture includes a lot of unpaid overtime... which you won't get from someone who needs to pick up their kids from school. All that talk about how "we don't really want people who don't deeply care about the company and only work 9-5 and then leave" may sound inspiring to some naive young people, but my brain translates it as "we don't want people who have families (or hobbies)".

People who have one child probably make it more expensive for people who want to have more children, by increasing the social norms about how much money and time one should spend per child. For example, in certain bubbles is it considered cool when schools have various projects and after-school activities where the parents are expected to participate. Sound nice, but now imagine it multiplied by four.

Three is a major sacrifice that one takes on for the good of their community. 

Huh? I don't know anyone like that. I have a problem even imagining a person like that.

For anecdata: id be really jazzed about 3 or 4, 5 might be a little crazy but somewhat open to that or more.

Ladies

Not worth worrying about given context of imminent ASI.

But assuming a Butlerian jihad occurs to make it an issue of importance again then most topics surrounding it are gone into at depth by radical pro-natalists Simone and Malcom Gladwell, who have employed genetic screening of their embryos to attempt to have more high-achievers,  on their near-daily podcast https://www.youtube.com/user/simoneharuko .  While quite odd  in their outlook they delve into all sorts of sociopolitical issues from the pronatalist worldview.  Largely rationalist and very interesting and informative, though well outside of Overton window on a lot of subjects.

Collins not Gladwell lmao

Not worth worrying about given context of imminent ASI.

This is something that confuses me as well: why do a lot of people in these circles seem care about the fertility crisis while also believing that ASI is coming very soon?

In both optimistic and pessimistic scenarios about what a post-ASI world looks like, I'm struggling to see a future where the fact that people in the 2020s had relatively few babies matters.

I'm familiar, have interviewed them twice, and linked to them in the OP in the culture-ectomy section. :) I don't think their lives work as a model for the majority of people in our culture, and suspect their children either will revert to mean in TFR, or will be drastically different culturally and thus an example of what I'm pointing at with this post.

How do we know money wouldn’t work? Surely most of the reasons people don’t have more children could be solved with more resources (eg surrogacy, childcare, private school fees, a larger house).

I think it's more a matter of Not Enough Dakka plus making it illegal to do those things in what should be reasonable ways. I agree there are economic (and regulatory) interventions that could make an enormous difference, but for various reasons I don't think any government is currently willing and able to implement them at scale. A crisis needs to be a lot more acute to motivate that scale of change.

What are the illegal things that would be needed?

The specifics of what I'm thinking of vary a lot between jurisdictions, and some of them aren't necessarily strictly illegal so much as "Relevant authorities might cause you a lot of problems even if you haven't broken any laws." But roughly speaking, I'm thinking about the umbrella of everything that kids are no longer allowed to do that increase demands on parents compared to past generations, plus all the rules and policies that collectively make childcare very expensive, and make you need to live in an expensive town to have good public schools. Those are the first categories that come to mind for me.

[-]plex24

give up large chunks of the planet to an ASI to prevent that

I know this isn't your main point but.. That isn't a kind of trade that is plausible. Misaligned superintelligence disassembles the entire planet, sun, and everything it can reach. Biological life does not survive, outside of some weird edge cases like "samples to sell to alien superintelligences that like life". Nothing in the galaxy is safe.

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 don't know how you would prevent that. Absent an AI catastrophe, fertility will recover, in the sense that "we" (rationalists etc) will mostly be replaced with people of low IQ and impulse control, exactly those populations that have the highest fertility now. And "banishing aging and death" would not prevent them from having high fertility and dominating the future. Moloch is relentless. The problem is more serious than you think.

[-]TsviBT0-1

How many are excited and aiming for 3+ children?
 


Given modern technology and old style community, raising 5--7 would be a joy, IDK what you're talking about. (Not a parent, could be wrong.)

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?

There's just no political will to do it, since the solutions would be harsh or expensive enough that nobody could impose them upon society. A god-emperor, who really wished to increase fertility numbers and could set laws freely without the society revolting, could use some combination of these methods:

  • If you're childless, or perhaps just unmarried, you pay additional taxes. The amount can be adjusted to be as high as necessary. Alternatively, just raise the general tax rate and give reduction based on the number of children. If having children meant more money instead of less, that would help quite a bit.
  • Legally mandate having children. In some countries, men are forced into military service. You could require women to have children in similar way. Medical exceptions are already a thing for military service, they could apply here as well.
  • Remove VAT and other taxes from daycare services, and medical services for children.
  • Offer free medical services to children. And parents. (And everyone.)
  • Spend lots of money and research how to create children in artificial wombs. Do that.
  • The state could handle child-rearing, similar to how it works in Plato's Republic. I.e. scale up orphanage system massively and make that socially acceptable.
  • Fix the education system, while you're at it.
  • Forbid porn, contraception, and abortion. (I don't think that actually helps)
  • Deny women access to education beynd elementary school, and additionally forbid employment (likely helps, but at what cost)
  • Propaganda. Lots of it. Censorship as well.

Deny women access to education beynd elementary school, and additionally forbid employment (likely helps, but at what cost)

Probably even more controversial, allow different people to learn at different speeds. So that everyone would study e.g. until they are 20, but the most stupid ones would only learn to read and write, and the smartest ones would get the same university education they get now, only at an earlier age.

Make it mandatory for companies above certain size to offer part-time jobs for both women and men who have children.

I think the state handling child rearing is the long term solution. The need for new people is a society wide problem and not ultimately one of personal responsibility.  Of course people should still be free to do it on their own if they want. It'll be weird that not everyone will have traditional parents, but I think we can figure it out. Maybe a mandatory or highly incentivized big brother/ sister program would help make it more nurturing.

This is part of my point. Our culture will not survive such measures. A different culture will result.

[-]dr_s*23

I mean, the whole point was "how can we have fertility but also not be a dystopia". You just described a dystopia. It's also kind of telling that the only way to make people have children, something that is supposedly a joyous experience, you can think of is "have a tyrannical dictator make it very clear that they'll make sure the alternative is even worse". Someone thinking this way is part of the problem more than they are of the solution.

[+]AaronF-17-4