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Guest Post by The Zman

If science suddenly noticed that birds were laying fewer eggs, they would ring the alarm and warn of a coming bird-pocalypse. The assumption would be that humans were doing something to make the birds unable to reproduce. The same would be true of any species that saw its fertility decline. The starting assumption of biology is that all living things are built primarily to reproduce. That is the biological imperative. With one exception, a drop in an animal’s fertility must be due to some exogenous factor. That exception is humans.

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In the West, human fertility rates have steadily fallen for over a half century. This is celebrated by our betters as the hallmark of human progress. Anytime the subject of fertility rates is raised, the knee-jerk response is to start hooting about women being more educated and having more options. The underlying assumption is that stupid people have lots of kids while smart people have few children. The implication of this is that the people who built Western Civilization were stupid, because they had high fertility rates.

The whole “women are more educated” argument is not really an effort to understand why fertility rates, especially white fertility rates, have fallen. Rather, it is an effort to not understand it. It is a deliberate distraction, a way of shifting the focus from a problem that cannot be addressed by the Left, whether it is the materialist Left of Europe or the spiritual Left on America. To even acknowledge that the purpose of women is to have children gnaws at the extreme egalitarianism that animates the Western Left.

To some degree, efforts to level off fertility in Europe make sense. There are lots of people on the Continent who don’t always get along with one another. Generations of warfare pounded home the message that stable societies, respectful of national borders, is the way to keep the peace. Keeping fertility rates at something just above replacement was an understandable goal. In America though, that’s not an issue. The country is mostly empty space with lots of room to expand. Americans should be breeding like Africans.

It really is an odd thing that has happened in America over the last fifty years. Starting in the 1960’s, motherhood became something close to a badge of shame with our cognitive elites. This rather quickly oozed into the the upper classes and then the middle class. As a result, public policy has been altered to discourage childbearing. Just look at the hysterics from Progressive women anytime they don’t get their way. They immediately start howling about how they will not get easy access to abortions and free prophylactics.

This came to mind when I saw a tweet by the left-wing political science professor George Hawley, commenting on the GOP tax bill. He linked to an essay he posted about public policy and fertility rates. For those familiar with this territory, the points he makes and the errors he commits are all familiar. France may have a TFR of 2.08, but the French people do not have that TFR. The invader population has rocket high fertility rates, but the French, well, not so much. Steve Sailer touched on one aspect of this in a Taki post.

A similar pattern, though less pronounced, is seen in the US. White fertility rates are below replacement, while black fertility is still above replacement. Although the homicide rates among blacks probably requires a different definition of “replacement.” Hispanics have the highest fertility rates. In other words, simply looking at TFR for a country that is slowly being overrun by a third world population will lead to errors. In majority white countries, the salient issue is not TFR, but white fertility rates, relative to the whole.

Putting that aside, we return to the original question. Two questions, actually. Is it simply that whites are choosing to die out or have whites simply wandered down a cul-de-sac, in terms of public policy, that is having adverse effects on white fertility? One way to tease this out is something that Steve Sailer did after the 2012 election. He looked at how white women voted, relative to their marriage habits. In places where white women can and do marry, stay married and raise children, whites vote Republican.

Another way of putting this is that where affordable family formation is highest, you get more families. Despite being run by a cult, Utah is a wonderful place to raise a family. It is like the set of Leave It To Beaver, but the size of a European country. At the other end, a state like Massachusetts is wildly expensive and hostile to family formation. Those who do choose to marry and start families, often move to other states. The decades long migration, north to south and east to west, has largely been driven by cost of living.

None of this answers the basic question. Is it crackpot public policy driving down white fertility or is some weird desire for extinction? The latter is impossible to know, so the prudent course is to assume the former is the correct answer. That’s basic logic. This means any movement that is explicitly for preserving the nation’s racial character should promote public policies that are explicitly and overtly pro-family. That is the part of Hawley’s post that is correct. The GOP should be fanatically pro-family, not pro-business.

This especially holds for the dissident right. The alt-right is all over the map on public policy, because they get bogged down squabbling over aesthetics. Oddly, the best thing they could do, in terms of “optics”, is cast themselves as the extreme end of the pro-family spectrum. Redefining pro-women to mean pro-mother would go a long way toward rallying white Americans to their cause. After all, being for something always trumps being against something, even when the thing you oppose is awful. Positive always beats negative.

 

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19 Comments
Iska Waran
Iska Waran
December 6, 2017 9:26 am
Anonymous
Anonymous
December 6, 2017 9:50 am

The evolutionists tell us that those most fit to survive dominate the population while those least fit become a minor part of it and eventually die out with their genetics being lost.

This is how a species advances and slowly evolves into a new and superior species.

Iska Waran
Iska Waran
  Anonymous
December 6, 2017 9:55 am

Apparently we’re evolving toward a superior vertical jump and superior adeptness with leaf blowers.

Dave
Dave
  Anonymous
December 6, 2017 10:41 am

You can’t randomly abort fetuses and have evolution based on natural selection.

Persnickety
Persnickety
  Dave
December 6, 2017 11:39 am

Except abortion in the US isn’t random or even close. The abortion rate among black women is vastly higher than among other groups. Without abortion blacks would be a significantly higher percentage of the population than they are today.

Capn Mike
Capn Mike
  Persnickety
December 6, 2017 1:05 pm

Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood:

https://spectator.org/61552_reflections-roe-when-margaret-sanger-spoke-kkk/

Chubby Bubbles
Chubby Bubbles
  Anonymous
December 6, 2017 5:59 pm

It’s very important, however, to define what you mean by “superior”. This can become a trap. Specifically, with humans, one might be inclined to think that civilization, higher intelligence, greater manipulation of tools and materials, is to be regarded as “superior” to living in mud huts .

What if living in mud huts and having 11 kids is actually a better survival strategy going forward?

When I look at “Western Civilization” (of which I think everyone here is generally a fan), I am keenly aware that this superstructure is both beneficial and COSTLY. The Irish elk went extinct because his antlers were just Too Damn Big. Western Civilization is a superstructure which has become Too Damn Big given current and future energy and materials shortages. What can’t be maintained, won’t be.

I look at the porous borders of nation-states and think about the energy it takes to maintain the integrity of a biological cell wall. If you don’t have a regular, infinite, supply of energy to maintain it, the cell wall will fail, with every dis-ease that entails.

i forget
i forget
  Chubby Bubbles
December 6, 2017 7:16 pm

Earth is the cell. The maplines colored upon it are cells of another kind. As for civillaination, I gotta’ agree with the pirates revisioned: colonialism is bonobos gone wilder, under color ‘o stuporstructure law.

hardscrabble farmer
hardscrabble farmer
December 6, 2017 10:10 am

When I was younger there was a lot of press surrounding the term ZPG. It was the right thing to do, to lower the birthrate to improve life for everyone, but it only applied to one group of people.

Now every single proponent of the ZPG movement of the 70’s claims that the Western World cannot survive without importing greater and greater numbers of third worlders because Western women do not reproduce at sufficient levels.

These policies and positions are not built on logic or reason, they don’t improve lives or help the environment or economy, the facilitate a genocide.

TreeFarmer
TreeFarmer
December 6, 2017 10:30 am

Tell your open border liberal friends that since each US citizen consumes more limited global resources than each citizen does in any country in the world, the US should immediately ban all immigration in the interest of stopping global warming and saving the planet. Then watch their heads explode.

Dave
Dave
December 6, 2017 10:49 am

Here’s the real evolution. Whites developed superior intellects. This led to creativity and a desire for a better life and larger families ensued. This expansion of family led to a demand problem. Which in turn led to an increased cost in that better life, which led to a need for a married couple to both work to meet their needs to maintain a better life, which led to a realization that a large family was too costly to support. So…a choice. A smaller family or devolution to a third world lifestyle. Except for the Mormons. Since they get outside family support from the group.

Diogenes
Diogenes
  Dave
December 6, 2017 11:27 am

Bingo !!!!! Having and raising children is expensive!

Capn Mike
Capn Mike
  Dave
December 6, 2017 1:07 pm

Maybe if they didn’t have to send >50% of their earnings to a counter-productive government, one of them could stay home.

Oilman2
Oilman2
December 6, 2017 11:56 am

It’s a combination of things; women’s liberation movement, extreme feminism, remaining ZPG influence, economic slowdown reducing resources for larger families, housing costs, two jobs required to maintain semblance of middle class, massive divorce rates, etc. Many essays written in the last 40 years regarding the irresponsibility of having large families.

The single thing nobody is talking about is the issue of reduced male fertility in recent generations, which has been reasonably correlated with using plastic to contain EVERYTHING, and letting it loose into the environment. This affects all species, and is verboten for public discussion.

If immigration had been controlled, then the environment would be different. Uncontrolled, and actually encouraged with massive benefits and programs to support immigrants – immigrants actually have a safety net which natives do not. It’s less risk for them and their expectations are lower in terms of living standards.

Thinking you can have a large (more than 4) family without sacrifice is a notion that is easily disabused, yet it is also an expectation that developed during the economic expansion of the 1950’s. My kids don’t want large families because the resources are not there to support them in the face of housing costs, food costs, forced taxation and hidden inflation. They want to have a suburban lifestyle, and that is difficult to maintain today.

When they finally let go of worrying about that, they will likely have more children. I am watching that process happen.

Organisms expand within an environment until they reach the limits it can support – IF they are left alone. By opening the immigration gates, supporting immigrants better than the native population and withdrawing support from the native populace our government has fostered this situation. The reaction of having fewer children is a rational one in the face of the facts.

The final nail is the expectation for the future, and that is irrevocably tied to one’s history. Immigrants see coming here as a new start and opportunity while natives see everything getting worse all around. The former is conducive to positive thinking, the latter to negative. One makes babies a positive event, the other makes them a source of worry and concern.

It’s not one thing, but many that have produced what we see around us.

Iconoclast421
Iconoclast421
December 6, 2017 12:41 pm

The global ecosphere cannot support 7 billion americans living like americans. But it can support 7 billion africans living like africans, as long as there are a few smart people incrementally improving crop yields and such. It is this basic truth that drives down fertility rates in developed countries. One could argue that this narrative has been helped along by certain nefarious groups.

It all comes back to the simple fact that while the west has spent the last 50 years collectively worrying about population growth and all that this entails, literally billions of people have been born into this world who dont spend even one second of their lives thinking about population growth.

james the deplorable wanderer
james the deplorable wanderer
  Iconoclast421
December 6, 2017 3:46 pm

I am sure there are notable African scientists and researchers. I am sure they have found and done great things.
Why are so few of them represented in the Nobel ranks (ethnocentrism? lack of publicity?) ? Why are so few of their inventions and innovations well known? Is it because every so often a Mugabe or Mobutu or similar leader kills tens of thousands of compatriots, disrupting research efforts and killing the researchers who don’t “welcome” the new government?
Would it be possible to keep alive the “few smart people incrementally improving crop yields and such” when the whole damn continent seems to go mad for a decade or two every century? Who is going to fund and protect these “few smart people” long enough for them to discover something worthwhile and present / patent it?
Does the patent system exist in Africa, and is it used / respected?
I’m not sure Africa can support the kind of abstract thinking / delayed gratification / reward of innovation necessary to support itself. Otherwise, you get 9/10 done before you are killed and the next guy has to start over from the ashes of your notebooks and laboratory.

DRUD
DRUD
December 6, 2017 2:43 pm

“Is it crackpot public policy driving down white fertility or is some weird desire for extinction?”

It is neither. It is driven mostly by technology and our techno-culture. In the old days, people tried to have lots of kids for a couple of reasons. First, for cheap labor, more hands to work the land that you didn’t have to pay. Second, because the survival rates for children were MUCH lower…it was simple math, have a bunch so a few would make it into adulthood. Now, machines do all the plowing, swathing, bailing, building, plus all kinds of new shit we do that never was necessary or even occurred as something to be done to our ancestors, so kids are no an economic drain instead of an economic boost. Also, children are so well monitored and nourished and protected that survival rates are incredibly high.
Furthermore, young adults are used to lives of ease–easy food, easy money, easy entertainment, easy, easy, easy–and guess what? Raising kids is HARD, so it is left undone.
Now, where public policy certainly does come into play is welfare…where the poorest are encouraged to have more and more kids to get more and more easy shit from the State. This culture is found mostly in minorities. White kids ease is funded mostly by their rich boomer parents.
And while a desire for extinction may be a thought in the head of some (and perhaps many) individuals…nobody consciously plans for something that will take many generations to play out–which won’t happen anyway, because we will, sooner or later, be forced to deal with reality and after all the wars and plagues and ugly collapses of our beloved institutions of ease we will once again have to play that most desperate game of having lots of children so some will certainly survive.

i forget
i forget
December 6, 2017 4:58 pm

“The implication of this is that the people who built Western Civilization were stupid, because they had high fertility rates.”

Mensch Menken (“In Defense of Women”):

“Here we have a sufficient explanation of the general superiority of bachelors, so often noted by students of mankind—a superiority so marked that it is difficult, in all history, to find six first-rate philosophers who were married men. The bachelor’s very capacity to avoid marriage is no more than a proof of his relative freedom from the ordinary sentimentalism of his sex—in other words, of his greater approximation to the clear headedness of the enemy sex. He is able to defeat the enterprise of women because he brings to the business an equipment almost comparable to their own.

It is, of course, not well for the world that the highest sort of men are thus selected out, as the biologists say, and that their superiority dies with them, whereas the ignoble tricks and sentimentalities of lesser men are infinitely propagated. Despite a popular delusion that the sons of great men are always dolts, the fact is that intellectual superiority is inheritable, quite as easily as bodily strength; and that fact has been established beyond cavil by the laborious inquiries of Galton, Pearson and the other anthropometricians of the English school. If such men as Spinoza, Kant, Schopenhauer, Spencer, and Nietzsche had married and begotten sons, those sons, it is probable, would have contributed as much to philosophy as the sons and grandsons of Veit Bach contributed to music, or those of Erasmus Darwin to biology, or those of Henry Adams to politics, or those of Hamilcar Barcato the art of war.

Monogamy, in brief, kills passion—and passion is the most dangerous of all the surviving enemies to what we call civilization, which is based upon order, decorum, restraint, formality, industry, regimentation. The civilized man—the ideal civilized man—is simply one who never sacrifices the common security to his private passions.

All animal breeders know how difficult it is to maintain a fine strain. The universe seems to be in a conspiracy to encourage the endless reproduction of peasants and Socialists, but a subtle and mysterious opposition stands eternally against the reproduction of philosophers.

The marriage of a first-rate man, when it takes place at all, commonly takes place relatively late. He may succumb in the end, but he is almost always able to postpone the disaster a good deal longer than the average poor clodpate, or normal man. If he actually marries early, it is nearly always proof that some intolerable external pressure has been applied to him, as in Shakespeare’s case, or that his mental sensitiveness approaches downright insanity, as in Shelley’s.

Another reason for the relatively late marriages of superior men is found, perhaps, in the fact that, as a man grows older, the disabilities he suffers by marriage tend to diminish and the advantages to increase. At thirty a man is terrified by the inhibitions of monogamy and has little taste for the so-called comforts of a home; at sixty he is beyond amorous adventure and is in need of creature ease and security. What he is oftenest conscious of, in these later years, is his physical decay; he sees himself as in imminent danger of falling into neglect and helplessness. He is thus confronted by a choice between getting a wife or hiring a nurse, and he commonly chooses the wife as the less expensive and exacting. The nurse, indeed, would probably try to marry him anyhow.

This brings us to a fact frequently noted by students of the subject: that first-rate men, when they marry at all, tend to marry noticeably inferior wives. The causes of the phenomenon, so often discussed and so seldom illuminated, should be plain by now. The first-rate man, by postponing marriage as long as possible, often approaches it in the end with his faculties crippled by senility, and is thus open to the advances of women whose attractions are wholly meretricious, e.g., empty flappers, scheming widows, and trained nurses with a highly developed professional technic of sympathy. If he marries at all, indeed, he must commonly marry badly, for women of genuine merit are no longer interested in him.

A husband begins by kissing a pretty girl, his wife; it is pleasant to have her so handy and so willing. He ends by making machiavellian efforts to avoid kissing the every day sharer of his meals, books, bath towels, pocketbook, relatives, ambitions, secrets, malaises and business: a proceeding about as romantic as having his boots blacked. The thing is too horribly dismal for words. Not all the native sentimentalism of man can overcome the distaste and boredom that get into it.”

“To even acknowledge that the purpose of women is to have children gnaws at the extreme egalitarianism that animates the Western Left.”

Free to choose, goose & gander – else slander. A possible purpose is no “the” purpose. American-you•ewe can breed like Africans•heep, if you want. Telling others what they should be doing is more like an African dictator, tho. Hey Idi, Amin the mood otherwise, must I cum out tonight?

Voters, of whatever skin tone, are yellow. Optics, sophists.

“After all, being for something always trumps being against something, even when the thing you oppose is awful.”

Gimme that ol’ time logical positivity. Don’t care what it is, positive is more logical than negative. Charging to 450 volts, doc Milgram. That’ll be positively shocking, to “the learner,” & to the learned doing what authoritorro-torro redcapes me to do.

All that said, the world is awash in xenoestrogens, other adverse chemicals. Fertility rates of humans, other animals, are trajectory south. Congenital defects are trajectory north. This has been trumpeted for a long time. (& sounds a lot like chicken little AGW, & big chicken discounts of the opposite.) To no avail. Rent-seeking continues to prevail. The typical human animal, particularly amongst the males\trom movers & shakers, is none too bright, in either quotient (intellect or integrity).

c1ue
c1ue
December 7, 2017 12:19 pm

Idiotic.
The answer is very simple: look at Millenial incomes, house purchase rates, and debt levels.