
Suicide by Culture - rumcajz
http://250bpm.com/blog:113
======
ansible
I was so interested to read about a somewhat similar situation with the Shaker
Church in the USA:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers)

The members took a vow of celibacy, and the church depended on new members
joining. As of today, there are just two offical Shakers left, both quite old.

~~~
Retric
Without immigration US is in the same boat as Japan with a falling population.
Long term I suspect cultures with positive population growth to beat the
competition, but that may take a long time.

~~~
RyanZAG
Not American and my culture is all about massive childbirth, but this
sentiment seems strange to me. How does that solve the problem?

If your panda bears are failing to breed, surely the solution is not to just
import grizzly bears and pretend the panda bears never existed there? I guess
it's a type of solution to the problem of "lack of bears", but is it really a
good thing?

~~~
Tehnix
I think people are missing the point being made by RyanZAG, in that you are
not really fixing the problem of -->childbirth<\-- by having mass immigration.
Imagine if these new immigrants then a few generations down start also not
having a high birthrate, and the problem continuous... It's not about the damn
bears...

~~~
RyanZAG
No, they certainly get the point. They just don't like it for political
reasons. The downvotes are political, not because they don't understand the
issues.

~~~
sanderjd
So, given the chance of a graceful way to walk back your implication that
people from different places are analogous to different species of animal, you
are choosing to double down on that? It is not a political perspective that
people are not like different species of bear: we can talk with each other,
understand each other, love each other, marry each other, start families with
each other. Not only _can_ we do these things, we _constantly do_. If you're
making a different point and just chose a particularly ... inelegant analogy,
then please do clarify.

------
erasemus
Wow that's well below replacement fertility. Also dysgenic since intelligent
and responsible people are _more_ likely to follow the moral fad. For me it
demonstrates the importance of obeying my conscience and not caring what
neighbours and other people might say. It's easier for me to do that nowadays
since I'm not dependent on a local network of reciprocal favours in order to
survive. But still I wonder how many neighbouring families both secretly
wanted another child but were each afraid what the other might think.

~~~
ImSkeptical
It's not a moral fad at all. Women, including highly educated women, typically
prefer having more children than they have [1]. 60% of women in the EU say
they have less than the ideal number children. Women all over the world want
more children than the replacement rate (makes sense) and in the developed
world they have fewer children than this.

The reason women have fewer children nowadays is because of women's liberation
- specifically in terms of education and professions. Working and studying
requires time and dedication, and that conflicts with having and raising a
child.

I don't really know how to solve this problem other than force women to choose
between careers and children as they currently do. The best thing I can think
of is subsidizing child care, trying to get more jobs that can support a
family (so one parent can work and one can child raise), better maternity and
paternity leave, and maybe making it more common to take a year or two off
around 18 to 20.

1 - [http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/11/birth-
rates-...](http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/04/11/birth-rates-lag-in-
europe-and-the-u-s-but-the-desire-for-kids-does-not/)

~~~
slv77
>The best thing I can think of is subsidizing child care...

Since most childcare providers are women and programs with high adult to child
ratios are preferred doesn’t this lead to the strange situation where a large
parts of the workforce are taking care of other people’s young children?

This story reminds me of two similar stories. One was a fad in England where
middle class wet nurses were employed by the wealthy. The middle class then
passed their children down to the lower class and the lower class to the
lowest class. The result was the lowest class mothers wet nursing a half dozen
children.

The second story was that in communist Russia the early leadership was
obsessed with economic efficiency. The thought of mother’s raising their
children was considered a waste of resources and so the idea was that the
state would take over raising and caring for children. Professionals would be
better equipped and trained and, more importantly, more efficient! The result
was a nearly feral generation of children that almost collapsed the country.

Raising young children is just very labor and resource intensive. Forgoing
having children frees up a tremendous amount of economic resources and can
temporarily boost consumption. In economics this is known as the one time
“generational dividend” that if squandered leaves society poorer and not
richer.

~~~
ImSkeptical
Yeah, I agree that's a problem too. The problem seems to come from when women
entered the work force, society neglected to take a roughly equal amount of
men from the work force. This resulted in a surplus of labor and therefore
diminished costs of labor, and therefore families needed to have two people
working, and now they don't have the time and resources for children.

I'm a believer in the idea that we should be using productivity to ease the
obligations of labor. Ideally we could get back to one person per household
working, or even better, both parents doing part time work (though I believe
this plan requires socialized medicine). This would give plenty of time for
child raising and wage earning, and distribute the burdens evenly among
parents.

In recent years women have faced a declining happiness according to self
reported results. We also have dwindling populations in the developed world
and exploding populations in the under developed world where ideally that
would be reversed and we could send the developing world doctors, engineers,
teachers, etc. I see these problems as connected by the fact that women are
structurally limited by society from pursuing their biological drive towards
children whereas men, who don't face declining happiness, live in a society
that encourages their biological drive (sex).

~~~
watwut
One person per household working did not really worked for lower class. That
is origin of kindergaden - four years old alone whole day because both parents
work 12 hours a day (in Germany). Meanwhile rich had kids with nannies whole
day, because women needed to "represent familly" (read look good and spend
time at parties) else husbands career could suffer for social reasons.

Women are not really struturaly limited to have more children. Most families
could afford one more child if they wanted to. Not being at home is preferable
then to be at home for women. There is a reason fight for female right to have
career happened when large part of population was able to have one person at
home - that situation largely sux for too many personality types and on top of
it, you are fully aware of your lesser status.

It would be the same with man at home. He would become restless and unhappy
too.

And sex has nothing to do with anything. Contraception made it so.

~~~
slv77
> Most families could afford one more child if they wanted to.

The counter argument was made in Elizabeth Warrens book The Two Income Trap
where her research showed that the single income family of the 1970’s had more
disposable income than the two income family of the 90’s after adjusting for
housing, healthcare, transportation and childcare and showed that the majority
of those expenses were primarily driven by children.

A household with children has less ability to make trade offs in the big four
than a household without children. For example affordable schools and
childcare may dictate more expensive or more distant housing.

The result is that children have a disproportionate impact to discretionary
income beyond immediate needs for food, shelter and clothing. If you consider
children as just another discretionary way of spending income people in many
cases will make the rational choice to _spend less_ on children if the cost is
vastly increased.

In other words if the choice is between a minivan and instant coffee and a
Mercedes and Starbucks many women may rationally choose the later.

If children were like any other discretionary purchase this wouldn’t be a
problem but children are also a societal asset (or liability). Current public
policy in many countries has shifted to privatizes more of the costs while
socializing the benefits.

For example Social Security benefits is a pay—as-you-go program but there are
no adjustments to benefits based on the economic value of the children that a
household contributed to the current generation that is paying it. If the
costs of raising those children were fully socialized it wouldn’t be an issue
but otherwise it is a transfer of income from those who raised children to
those who did not.

~~~
watwut
That does not explain stats for European countries with good free public
schools.

I did not meant money so much through. More like, overall lifestyle and your
ability to do things that are not children related. With one child, mom can
have work she takes seriously and is important for her. She can be competitive
there, if you will. With four, nope. Whether you value yourself as
entrepreneur, passionate programmer, artist, reader of books, gamer, whatever,
you are more or less ok with one-two childs. With four/three, you have to
forget about that other identity of yours. Forever.

Have you ever derived confidence or was praised for being good at something or
achieving something? One more child may mean good bye to all that.

Moreover, 1970 had poor people too. There was less gap between poor and rich,
but it existed. Poor people still exist. Taking about past families as of
1960-1970 usa affluent upper middle class were historical norm is weird. I
have noticed tendency to take richest parts of society as the norm, ignoring
majority of population for most historical periods.

Imo, a lot of effort and money into childrasing is consequence of widening gap
between classes of people. If the difference between bad school and good
school did not meant so much for future life, the good school districts would
not be so expensive. That is zero sum competition and it does not matter how
many incomes you have. You simply need more then competitors.

~~~
slv77
>That does not explain stats for European countries with good free public
schools.

It may still hold if public policy transfers income from families with
children. This could range from mercantilistic suppression of exchange rates
that favors exporters to the detriment of households to public spending for
the retired. France has worked to develop policy that is targeted at raising
the fertility rate with some success.

[https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/france-boosts-birth-
rate-w...](https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/france-boosts-birth-rate-with-
incentives-for-parents)

------
sgt101
The differences to the current situation seem more interesting than the
similarities.

Now :

\- widespread easy access to contraception \- low early life mortality \-
massive agricultural automation and machinery \- pervasive educational
opportunities

~~~
ghostcluster
You're missing the economic burden of extra children in modern urbanized
settings, along with the rise of women in the workplace which further lowers
fertility.

As far as I can tell, this trend is global in every modern urban setting, some
are just further along.

~~~
fvdessen
The Muslims in my city seem to have no problem raising large families in a
urban environment despite having less financial resources than the other
cultural groups, so the explanation cannot be entirely economic. Culture and
religion seem to play a very important part

~~~
thriftwy
The thing is, in our culture it's no loger cool to dedicate your life to
selling doner kebabs. Pur definition of success includes high skills and
specialization. That produced the society that attracts immigrants and that
can't be reproduced back where they came from.

But it also puts high price tag on children.

------
freeflight
It feels like there's an angle missing to that story. One has to assume there
was a reason for that much agriculture being there in the first place and a
reason why it suddenly wasn't in such a high demand anymore, it can't just all
be "lack of labor" because then people would probably have starved due to the
lack of agricultural products being available.

~~~
mabbo
It's not just lack of labor, but lack of profit. Farm efficiency has increased
incredibly in the last 200 years. People tend to forget that in 1850, a huge
proportion of the population were farmers. Today it's down around 1%.

Consider the implications though: each farm may become more efficient, but
that increases the food supply, lowering the food price. Then you add in a
shrinking population, lowering demand, lowering the price further.

Sure, for the right price you could hire labor for your farm, but then you'd
lose money on every sale. It's not lack of labor so much as lack of labor at
prices you can afford.

And this is happening today. A friend of mine is from a large farm family in
southern Kentucky. Grain prices are getting so low because of high yields that
even with the best technology on hand they can barely make a profit. This is
great for consumers (cheap food) but short term fluctuations put smaller
farming operations at serious risk.

So to answer your initial question of why there was so much agriculture to
begin with: it was required to feed the population.

~~~
evgen
It is also the case that marginal farmland can support a small subsistence
farmer but be uneconomical for incorporation into large-scale agriculture.
Such land will usually end up as woodland/scrub or grazing land over time.

------
panic
It's a neat story, but IMO the article doesn't do a good job linking this
small subculture to modern society. Just because you see the same effect (low
childbirth) doesn't mean the cause is the same, and it doesn't mean the
outcome will be the same.

~~~
alexasmyths
Well, we are seeing a hollowing out of many rural communities in the US,
there's an analogy there.

~~~
brudgers
Tractors. When my wife's grandfather was born in the early 20th century a
family farm in north central Iowa was limited to about 160 acres or a 1/4
section. So each section could have four family farms and a Township with ~50%
agricultural utilization might have 300 farm families in the township and some
people living in town. That's about a 1000 people.

Today a family farm there is about 1200 acres. That's 1/7 the rural density.
The economic catchment for the town no longer has enough customers to support
the businesses it once did...and that all happened before Amazon and UPS and
Walmart thirty miles away and Costco up in Minneapolis and cars got faster and
safer and roads got better.

------
purplezooey
Some questionable assertions here.

"Sexual abstinence brought in the familiar zoo of weird behaviors, ranging
from coitus interruptus to having sex with animals."

Uh yeah.

------
choonway
Their situation sounds very familiar here in Singapore, the country with the
lowest fertility rate in the world.

~~~
cheschire
Which is interesting, as I've heard Singapore held up as an example of
successful universal healthcare. I wonder what correlations there are between
the two larger trends.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthcare_in_Singapore)

------
virgilp
I wonder how the same "only one child" rule will work out for China, in the
end. It might be the same, but given the wildly different scale (plus
different times: more and more automation coming our way) - it might actually
turn out very well for them.

~~~
rumcajz
I recall I've read somewhere that the problem of finding a partner exists in
China as well.

~~~
gaius
China is said to have 60M men who will never be able to marry. I wonder how
that will play out.

~~~
danieltillett
They won’t get married.

A interesting historical parallel is early Australia. Due to more men than
women being shipped as convicts to Australia (something like 50:1), many women
in Australia were rather reluctant to get married. Why get married and be
under the power of your husband when you could live “in sin” and move on if
your defacto husband was not up to scratch.

~~~
virgilp
Interesting. What were the long-term effects of this? Did women get more
rights/sooner, compared to other parts of the world? Or was it just "a phase"
with little long-term impact?

~~~
chillydawg
In the opposite case in modern day USA, black men are much less likely to
marry than their peers. The sad cause of this is that such a high proportion
of marriage age black men are in prison, that the ones that are not have their
pick of all the women left. It turns into this:
[http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/02/rev...](http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/02/revisiting-
the-marriage-supermarket.html)

~~~
danieltillett
Yes marriage doesn’t work whenever the gender demographics gets extreme. My
favourite example is the Paraguayan War [1] when almost all the men of
Paraguay were killed.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paraguayan_War)

~~~
sparrish
Even though the gender imbalance is long gone from that war, there's still an
attitude among Paraguayan women that there aren't enough men around and
they'll have to share. Wife and a mistress or two is pretty common still.
(Lived there for several years)

------
stefs
i wonder if it would have been possible for single families to exploit the
"one child" culture later on by having a lot of children, thus providing much
needed brides and grooms and profiting from the wealth gained by marriage.
sure, this would have been a long-term investment and might have lowered you
social standing in the beginning, but there'd also be pressure for the others
to marry your kid to other protestants (even if those are less wealthy) than
to outside catholics.

------
microtherion
I'm not convinced of either the facts or the narrative here.

As to the facts, it does not look to me like Slovakia had particularly low
fertility.

See e.g.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Slovakia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Slovakia)

"Half of all women born before 1930 had three or more children compared to
one-third of Czech women of the same birth cohorts": [https://www.demographic-
research.org/volumes/vol19/25/19-25....](https://www.demographic-
research.org/volumes/vol19/25/19-25.pdf)

As to the narrative, I've never heard of a society breeding itself into
prosperity. In 2005, the 10 countries with the highest fertility in the world
were: Niger, Mali, Somalia, Chad, Burundi, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of the
Congo, Uganda, East Timor, and Angola.

Bottom 10 on that list were: Hungary, Slovakia, Serbia, Malta, Portugal, South
Korea, Singapore, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Hong Kong, and Macau. A somewhat mixed
record of success, to be sure, but would any of them want to trade places with
any country in the top 10?

[http://www.nationmaster.com/country-
info/stats/Health/Births...](http://www.nationmaster.com/country-
info/stats/Health/Births-and-maternity/Total-fertility-rate)

~~~
coldtea
> _As to the facts, it does not look to me like Slovakia had particularly low
> fertility._

He speaks of ONE part of Slovakia, and ONE community/religious group in that.
And even that, in the past, not now. Those demographic numbers are, as such,
irrelevant.

> _As to the narrative, I 've never heard of a society breeding itself into
> prosperity._

You'd be surprised. The reason the list doesn't look impressive is that
fertility is one factor, and those countries lack the others (and have few
hopes of getting it). Instead look at China, India, and the like for better
examples.

Plus, it's reversing cause and effect, as countries with major growth tend to
decrease in fertility rates.

~~~
microtherion
> Instead look at China, India, and the like for better examples.

That would be China, which for most of its phase of economic hyper growth had
a rather brutally enforced low fertility policy?

~~~
coldtea
There's a delay between adding such a law, and it having measurable
demographic impact. That the law coincided with the growth is not the reason
for growth: the prior population boom was the reason -or part of the reason-
behind both the growth and the need for such a law.

They didn't have an economic boost while suffering from the effects of sub-
replacement/low fertility rates. Instead they've developed a huge population
that was enough to fuel a huge growth, so much so that they had to slow it
down.

------
danieltillett
In the long run all that matters is demographics.

~~~
thriftwy
Nope. In the long run all that matters is culture.

Small community may thrive. Community that was absorbed by different culture,
no matter how large, is no longer yours.

~~~
Red_Tarsius
> _In the long run all that matters is culture._

Genetics seems to play a key role in the development of culture and social
structure. If you move 1M Mexicans in Tokyo, their offspring will not act like
Japanese people do, regardless of the environment. They would exhibit
different behavioral and voting patterns.

~~~
panic
That's not because of their genetics; it's because of a tendency for groups of
people to reproduce their culture. If a family in Mexico City adopted a baby
from Tokyo, the kid would become a part of Mexican culture, to the extent that
the Mexican culture accepts people who don't look Mexican. They would not be a
part of Japanese culture.

~~~
Banthum
It's both.

Large groups of people carry characteristic sets of genes which drive
behavioral patterns, as well as culture which also drives behavioral patterns.
On a large scale, the differences between Japanese and Mexicans are driven by
cultural and genetic differences.

The degree, balance, and nature of those differences is complex and up for
debate, of course. But to state that Japanese and Mexicans have no
distinguishing behavior-driving genes _at all even in the slightest degree_ is
basically the left-wing version of young-Earth creationism.

~~~
jholman
Do we have any evidence at all that any of the behaviour differences between
populations are genetic? I'm not well-educated in this area, but I'm aware of
no such evidence. Educate me?

As far as I can tell (again, in my relative ignorance), the assertion that
"genetics seems to play a key role in the development of culture and social
structure" is just as foolish and unsupported as the claim that you dismissed.

~~~
MichaelGG
I'm honestly curious in why you think it's likely there are no genetic
differences. Everyone accepts physical attributes, most people accept the
brain is responsible for consciousness and personality and is a physical
object.

Would it not be completey bizarre if there were zero differences in the one
most complex organ we do not understand?

Would you argue that no group of people are taller? Or could run faster? Or
perhaps have varying levels of visual acuity? What would cause such
differences to suddenly just completely stop because it's related to the
brain?

[http://m.pnas.org/content/106/7/2118.abstract](http://m.pnas.org/content/106/7/2118.abstract)

~~~
geofft
One reason to believe there are no _meaningful_ genetic differences is that
we've seen large-scale migration leading to different cultures among
genetically similar people, and similar cultures among genetically diverse
people. There are a lot of people with the same Anglo-Saxon stock in "red
state" America, in "blue-state" America, and in the UK with rather different
cultures, political preferences, social norms, etc. There are a lot of ethnic
Russian diaspora communities who did not lean towards communism during the
20th century. (Yes, this is a pointed example, but I think we need to be clear
about what our examples are, or everyone is going to argue about their own
unstated personal stereotypes and we won't be discussing anything productive.)
There are plenty of second-generation immigrants in America, like myself, who
have basically assimilated into the dominant culture and carry little of their
ancestors' culture beyond what was impressed on us in childhood via nurture.

Meanwhile, there are lots of different genetic groups making up America, even
within a race - the American definition of "white" is extremely genetically
diverse and contains lots of backgrounds that have formed separate identities
in Europe, and you don't see a lot of cultural separation on those lines. You
see cultural separation on _visible_ lines like actual skin color, language,
recency of immigration, etc. But all of that is more easily explained by
humans making conscious choices to associate with certain people we think are
like ourselves, not genetics.

Tendency towards aggression, as your paper shows, is an individual
characteristic, and something that can be overridden in either direction by
social norms. (Even within a fairly homogenous genetic group, there's a huge
amount of individual variation in aggressiveness.) I'm certainly happy to
concede that genetics matters a lot at the individual level, but it's a large
leap to find that it matters at the cultural level. If you introduce one
million people without (or with) this gene _slowly_ into a culture of people
with (or without) this gene, letting them assimilate, letting them have
children and raise them within the existing culture and intermarry, would we
expect a chance in cultural norms for people with this genetic background?
Possibly, but I certainly wouldn't expect one.

------
mellowdream
[https://jacobitemag.com/2017/06/20/modernitys-fertility-
prob...](https://jacobitemag.com/2017/06/20/modernitys-fertility-problem/)

Nick Land's ideas at least marginally relevant to the OP as far as I can tell.

~~~
golemotron
This too: [http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-return-of-
patriarchy...](http://foreignpolicy.com/2009/10/20/the-return-of-patriarchy/)

------
aidos
Fascinating. How widespread was this?

~~~
rumcajz
Looking at the map, the region is around 20x50 km.

------
jhiska
They could have hired, and married, immigrants.

~~~
thriftwy
Immigrants usually have zero desire to go to remote, poor areas. Maybe at some
point they did, but today they target large urban areas. That makes sense - if
locals can't make use of a piece of land, recent immigrants will struggle even
more.

