This Years Demographic Data Was Worse than Anyone Expected (Yes, Even Us)

Simone and Malcolm Collins debate the causes of declining birth rates and potential solutions after reading a provocative proposal from writer "Arctotherium." They analyze his argument that improving men's status relative to women could incentivize marriage and higher fertility.

Topics discussed:

* Statistics showing drastic fertility declines across multiple countries

* The role of female empowerment movements and decreased male status

* Policies like defunding education and affirmative action to aid men

* Reversing cultural changes from the sexual revolution

* Flaws in the "baby boom" theory and viability of copying it

* Biological drives behind having children after tragedy

* Standards for modern dating contributing to dismal marriage rates

Simone Collins: [00:00:00] And again, this is like men are losing their status. They're checking out. They're not getting educated. They're not getting jobs or they're getting depressed. And it's showing up differently. Like, you know, I think generally women are much more likely to publicly complain about things. identify as depressed and say all these things.

Whereas men don't, they're very quiet and they silently suffer and they just back out of society.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: So we're going to go over these numbers. This is year over year fertility decline in these countries. So you already know one number in Korea year over year for Q3. It was what, 14%? I thought it

Simone Collins: was

Malcolm Collins: 11%. It was just incredibly hot, like double digits decrease in a country that's already doing that bad. And Seoul's already at 0.

53 fertility. A rat row. So here we go. Romania, 19%. 4 percent decrease year over year, Latvia, 19 percent decrease year over year, [00:01:00] Lithuania, 17. 8 percent decrease year over year, Estonia, 16. 3 percent decrease year over year, Mongolia, 16. 1%, uh, I don't know what this is, Federation BIH 10. 10%. Serbia.

Simone Collins: Oh, no, it's not Hungary.

Malcolm Collins: is 9. 1%, Netherlands is 9%, Belgium is 8. 5%, Russia is 8. 4%, Croatia is 8. 2%, Hungary is 6. 6%, Armenia is 6. 1%, Thailand is 5. 9%, Kosovo is 4. 8%, Uh, well, 4.1% and Uzbekistan is only 3% or 2.8%, so not that bad. Oh, good for you. 17.6% and Japan is 11.9%.

Simone Collins: [00:02:00] So roughly the same as what we saw for South Korea. If memory serves, yeah, if, if,

Malcolm Collins: if, if you are somebody who works in the field of statistics, a double digit year over year, decrease.

Is catastrophic. Catastrophic. This is not like a small thing. This is not an irrelevant thing.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And, and we're talking to people about this day in, day out. Yesterday we had like a 90 minute conversation with someone writing a book about this. And, and this is where sort of like I, I read something this morning that now like.

Because, you know, our solutions to prenatalism, they're like very gender egalitarian. They're like, how do we make this work in a society where we keep high levels of education, high levels of, of prosperity, high levels of, of, of gender equality and choice, and also the choice to not get married and not have kids if you don't want to.

And I'm like, okay, okay, okay. But then I'm reading this sub stack and I'll tell you more about [00:03:00] it. And I'm just like, oh man. So I'd never heard of this author on sub stack before. Arctotherium is, is his name. And he, he writes in this, this analysis of the baby boom. Assuming he's a he for reasons that will become apparent later in my rant about all this that basically nations that have.

undergone a first demographic transition, sort of, you know, when a nation becomes prosperous and more gender egalitarian and blah, blah, blah with more education, they start to see a decline in fertility. And he argues that baby booms prove that this decline can be Reversible. Okay, great. You know, that's hopeful.

And I'm like, this is going to be great. I want to read this. I want to hear his analysis as to what it is that drives a baby boom, you know, and so that maybe we can like come to new ideas and I can read someone else's ideas on what might aid. pronatalism in an era of demographic collapse. And it seems, you know, like I'm, I'm reading this and it seems [00:04:00] like we're very much on the same page with values.

He writes, quote, many theories of fertility decline claim that it is the inevitable result of various good things, technological advancement, wealth, education, science through weakening religion, urbanization, individualism, and declines in childhood mortality. Since almost no one really wants. to go back to being high mortality, low tech, extremely poor, rural, and ignorant.

The story goes, we simply need to live with it. There is good empirical evidence for all these things mattering. But what the baby boom shows is that it is possible to have it all unquote. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally agrees. Like we're on the same page. Yeah. Okay. Like he's, he's got me. Yeah. Right.

And then, and he he, he then connects baby booms, this magical reversal that we're all trying to make happen to marriage booms. And I'm like, okay, this totally makes sense. We agree. This is, you know, a crisis of relationships. Absolutely. What he does quite compellingly with tons of graphs and a lot of stats is [00:05:00] show that really marriage is, is a big driving factor here more than I had thought.

thought when it came to specifically baby booms you know, he points out that for example, most fertility and the highest fertility is with monogamous married couples that couples that stay married have the most kids. And, and we've seen this from other people too. There's a shocking

Malcolm Collins: statistic here that you would tell me like of people who stay married for X amount of years, something percent of them have a kid.

Simone Collins: Like they have a lot of kids, like their like average fertility is quite high, but I can't remember exactly what it is. But like several, several people from very different philosophical, philosophical camps within the pronatalist movement all have this thing of like, you know, monogamous marriage is a very key driver of fertility.

So I'm like, okay, like

Malcolm Collins: I'm trying to remember this. It's something like on average, a couple that stays married for 30 years has an average number of like 4. 5

Simone Collins: kids. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a really high number of kids and yeah, I, I have to look up that stuff. It sounds unbelievable. We'll find it. Yeah, it did seem [00:06:00] unbelievable, but it's, you know, I think it's easy for anyone to agree that yes, you know, like stably married couples and he, he has a lot of graphs in the south and we'll of course link to the sub stack post that, that sort of show like the fertility.

for married couples living together, married couples with a partner that's absent, separated couples and like various levels of divorce and singlehood and obviously like highest fertility is, as a thing, clearly, I mean, even among our friends who are super pronatalist, the ones that have the most kids have a partner who's there to help them with the kids.

Obviously it's, this is not rocket science. So then this, This author proceeds to say, okay, so what caused this marriage boom? He says the answer appears to be a rise in young men's status compared to young women's. Now that was interesting to me. I haven't heard anyone talk about this before. So I'm like, okay, I'm intrigued.

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