f0xr

@michaeljknowles They do. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

Talk about playing the long game…

@RokoMijic Yup open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

It's a complete mystery why a society without feminism has a fertility rate of 6.1 and is set to take over the world

@JohnIVSobieski If you're curious why that is... open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

Fun Fact: The Amish population doubles every ~20 years. In 1920 there were only 5000 of them. Today they number around 400,000.

@martianwyrdlord I'm almost certain the majority of them no longer make their income from agriculture... open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

The Amish can afford to be pacifists because their life-way is to use the proceeds of their agricultural industry to buy land for their children. Extremely high fertility will ultimately make that untenable. Every strip of arable land will be occupied by Amish farmers in 23rd century America. There will only be one way to get land. I have a vision of a great Anabaptist Khan at the head of a horde of horse-drawn war wagons thundering across the Midwest, bringing the judgment of God upon the infidel English...

@ryanburge Here's why. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

Some absolutely INSANE numbers about the Amish. Average woman gives birth to 6 children in their lifetime. ~4% of first births are to unwed mothers. But here's crazier numbers: They convert virtually NO ONE. 154 total in 100 years. Retention: 85%

@emlwaters Because changing anything that would make a difference is way outside the Overton window, even if anyone knew what those things are, which they don't. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

The birthrate declined to 1.57 births--and it has been decades of technological, economic, cultural, and policy changes in the making. And yet, demographic decline and the forfeiture of the absolute joy of children is too grave to accept with a shrug. wng.org/opinions/the-b…

@ryanburge If you're curious about why open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

@BasedTorba They have the high fertility rate partially because they're Christian. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

@IterIntellectus Quite a few things, actually. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

the Amish are obviously doing something right and everyone else is doing it wrong

@RedemTheTimes Here's why. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

If all fertility rates remain constant, and assuming no net migration, the USA will be majority Amish in ~150 years.

@ComteWasRight It's good to see some up to date data. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

New Amish study was released. It uses data from over 50,000 households, which covers 89.9% of all Amish in North America. It found the average TFR for all Amish women was 6.1 in the 2002–11 period.

@the_erlis @ComteWasRight Exactly open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

@ComteWasRight To any idiot who argues affordability is why fertility is down, this is the perfect natural experiment to refute that point. It’s not cost of living, it’s culture, it’s whatever wave of feminism we are on now.

@BasedTorba There's a reason for that. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

@Geiger_Capital There's a reason for that. open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

New study on the Amish in America… ~10,000 women Only 4% are childless. Only 9% have less than 3 children. The average number of children is 7.2

@WestsideLAGuy Yup open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

The reason behind the low fertility rate is simple but uncomfortable for people to talk about. No society in history has had both male-female educational & financial parity AND increasing fertility rates. Simply not possible to have both.

@AlextheYounga Yes open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

This is the problem, stated very well by Keith. This is why the Amish and the poorest countries are the only outliers. I think there is a scalability problem in human nature, something that is not easily correctable. I will try to unpack it. In all sexual species, women are always more valuable. This is a natural asymmetry; you only need one very lucky man to continue the species, but you need as many women as possible. Humans have uniquely balanced gender roles, which is likely a reason we are so successful. But we have broken this balance. Women are physically weak, men are multiples stronger. And men are hypnotized by women, for lack of a better word. Men are programmed to provide, fight, and die in the protection of women and children. Women are programmed to provide, fight, and die for their children. Add to this, our babies are some of the weakest in the animal kingdom, incentivizing pair-bonding, and you have all the conditions needed for mutual cooperation, family, and love. But there's still an asymmetry here. There are two natural human behaviors that lead to problems at scale: 1. Men desire women. Women desire safety. 2. Neither sex actually yearns for children. Children are always a liability for an individual's survival. Every sexual species has some unique way of encouraging this sacrifice, but births are always a coincidence, an afterthought. For men, fatherhood is primarily the product of chemically-induced hypnosis through infatuation. Men have 20x more testosterone than women, the primary sex motivator. Look to gay couples for a good observation of this difference. If an STD mutated so that it killed you at climax, most gay men would be dead, and lesbians would sew themselves up. There is even a term for this: "lesbian bed death". We are bombarded with government-sponsored AIDS pill commercials because men-on-men is a nuclear reaction of sexual impulses. For women, motherhood is primarily the product of the burning desire for "safety," physical and emotional, which can never be satisfied. Women are not hypnotized by men to anywhere near the same degree, and for good reason, but not without consequence. There are plenty of species where the males sacrifice their lives for the females, or literally let themselves be eaten by females, but basically never the opposite, because that would actually be unworkable. That would be a bottleneck. A man helps stabilize a woman's identity, helps them feel chosen and seen, and historically provides resources. The emotional stability is not alien to men at all, but it is usually not the primary motivator, to much frustration of women. We can even stabilize our identity using inanimate objects and abstractions - in "the work" to a degree that women often struggle to, or are annoyed by. A man desires a woman, plain and simple. Her body first, her mind second. A woman desires safety, for her body, mind and her children. This was not a problem when men were the primary means of safety. This is a problem when safety is largely a solved problem and when we have post-scarcity for food. Both sexes try to artificially replace the other, but the man's attempt at this will always be futile because he is actually more replaceable. The best he can do is watch porn and jerk off. For women, the desire for emotional safety can apparently be satisfied by other means, and we can see this clearly in the modern behavior of women in their reluctance to enter relationships. And after the invention of sperm banks and advancements in genetic engineering, women could literally kill all men right now. We wouldn't even be the first species where this happened (look up asexual lizards). Of course, none of this is actually sustainable, and this is why you will watch billions of people disappear from the Earth within this century from our sub-replacement birthrates. By next century, we will see humanity dwindle to a quarter. This is a scalability problem in human nature. There is a natural human ceiling.

@JumboDST @IterIntellectus Exactly open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

@IterIntellectus Strong correlation between socialized retirement and TFR. Makes children expensive pets instead of a personal existential necessity.

US fertility reached 1.57 last year, the lowest ever recorded, and the WSJ explanation is "uncertainty about finances, relationship stability, and the political climate" my great grandma had eleven children during the second world war, in a country being bombed, in a house with no running water, on rations. poor people have always had kids. the poorest people on earth right now still have kids and the financial excuse is a story we tell ourselves because it makes us feel good and the real one is unbearable the real mechanism is that we got rich enough to redefine children as an expense instead of the point. somewhere in the last fifty years the cultural goal inverted and a child stopped being what life is for and became a line item competing with the lifestyle. once you frame it that way the math never works, because the math isnt supposed to work. that's the point we are living in the richest moment in human history and we decided to use the surplus to buy ourselves out of the future. the most prosperous civilization that has ever existed is committing demographic suicide at the altar of personal optimization and comfort, and the official line is that we cant afford it the birthrate is a lagging indicator of a civilization that forgot why it was alive

@HispanicPundit @IterIntellectus Exactly open.substack.com/pub/f0xr/p/the…

@IterIntellectus I think a better explanation is the rise in womens equality to men in income and status. This makes women feel no real gain from marriage which reduces marriages which reduces babies. Thoughts?

@Pat_Stedman f0xr.com/p/the-amish-fe…

As I have said numerous times, the birthrate issue is fundamentally a spiritual one. In order to have kids you need to believe in a future and more broadly that your time and role here is connected to something bigger than yourself. Religious people and natalists (who possess a functionally similar idealism) are going to be the only ones having large families. You cannot make a strong sell to the rest of society on the proposition. Kids are enormous joy but they are also sacrifice, and if you are not living for anything beyond yourself that sacrifice will seem a poor ROI

@berrysweetlady @classicspilled Even with those losses, the Amish population is doubling roughly every 20 years. That's orders of magnitude faster growth than the overall population. And retention rates are 70-95%, higher than almost any other religious group.

@thef0xr @classicspilled The Amish lose young people constantly who choose the “English world.” It’s such a problem that remaining communities have resorted to inbreeding.

This topic has already been addressed by Catherine Pakaluk in Hannah's Children. She interviewed 55 college educated women with 5+ children. The twelve that made it into the book were all very religious. Religion was an important reason for fertility. She tried finding nonreligious/atheist samples, but there were basically none. Fertility cults aren't the solution.