Falling Birthrate Pt II

I know, I know, it’s been a while; in my defence, I’ve been working hard on the Second Novel; it’s 1/3 of the way to final copy, and as for the First, well, my Agent just got back to me with some positive news.  Expect some updates over the next few months.

But as to the whole Birthrate issue; I need to get this out of my head before the ideas start to rot, and I wind up laying on the couch with an ear canal full of sodium bicarbonate.

Last time we discussed why immigration is a Non Starter.  Quite frankly, if we’re going to import an entire ethnically homogenous community, we might as well just cede our territory to country X.  This time we’re going to look at the whole incentives issue, the real nut of the problem, and see if we can’t come up with some solutions (which of course will never be implemented – but thought experiments are fun!).

On the radio program, they were asking the questions: “Is the Baby Bonus enough?  Do we need state supported daycare for single moms?  What kind of socialist money-transfer schemes could we implement to cause more baby-making?”

The reason these questions are useless is because they don’t address the root of the probelm – namely: Why The Hell Are We Having This Problem Anyway?  No society in History has ever had a problem making the next generation,* so what’s changed in our present world?

Two things; one that we can’t do anything about, and another that we most certainly can.

The first is birth control, and the pill in particular.  It’s hard to say how many of our grandparents were Oops Babies, but I know for a fact that I was, and it’s a good guess that many of them were, too.  Giving people to choice of when to bread has advantages and disadvantages; it’s hard to say whether or not this is a net positive.  But the point remains, Pandora’s Cunt has been opened, and trying to close it won’t clear the air of that fishy smell.

The second reason – the one we could control (but won’t) is the role we’ve ‘given’ to women in our Modern Progressive society.

Pundits love to talk about how people are having babies later in life, because they’re spending so much of their twenties pursuing an education.  University is Good, we are told, opportunity costs be damned.  Look at how -fucking- progressive we are, sending half our population to attain these worthless degrees!

So right off the bat, we have ghettoized immigrants creating three generations, in the time it takes a native-born to create two.

But that’s not where the story ends; if the only problem were that we were breeding later in life, that would be offset by the fact that we’re living longer.  As usual the pundits have it wrong; it’s not just that women are wasting time and money getting useless degrees in their early twenties – we need to look at what they’re doing after University (aside from visiting Europe, and volunteering with third world destroying charities).  Do they find a husband and get married?

No.  They enter the workforce.

You show me a stay-at-home mom, and I’ll show you a dad who got out before the dot-com bubble burst.

A question for all you women out there (forget for the moment that fifty years ago, all husbands beat their wives, and women were considered property, not people): throughout history women have always had the opportunity to pursue meaningful work (well, at least as much opportunity as men), but they were seldom forced to slave away at back-breaking, soul crushing jobs at the box factory.  They had the choice of getting married, and staying home to raise babies.

How many of you have such a Choice nowadays?

Some of you – aw, hell, all of you (since you’re literate enough to understand my Esoteric Nonsense) – probably work at one of those rare fulfilling jobs.  You are the exceptions.  Take a moment, and think back to the last time you were at Tim Hortons.  Do you really think that the 40 year old woman behind the counter prefers serving coffee to staying at home and making babies?

So in a sense, the Radio People were right; it is an issue of incentives.  Only problem is, they’re watching the front-end, when they shold be checking out the back.

We live in an era of female ‘prvilige’, by policy and by subsidy (privilege that ultimately harms women, but that’s not the point).  On the one hand, educational systems, legals systems, and workplace harassment policies are all designed to be anti-male – they throw an extra pound of straw on that camel’s back, giving women the handicap’s advantage.  Simultaneously, our governments institute transfer payments which drive women towards the workforce: scholarships, social services, broken divorce-law incentives.

All of it comes together to form a nice little stink flower, where men have more difficulty than ever before in affording (let alone attracting) a wife, and women are constantly pushed to go out into the world and find out just how crappy Working For A Living really is.  We’ve shattered the institution of Marriage, and convinced little girls that being a Stay At Home Mom is a moral failing.

Oh, gee – and this somehow translates into dropping birth rates?

If you want to fix the birthrate, it’s pretty easy: stop trying to recruit women specifically into the work force; stop wasting money advertising STEM degrees to them, stop funding councils and workshops about a woman’s ‘issues’ in the company.

Start treating women like Equals.

Do this, and most women will take the past of least resistance, the path most in tune with their innate nature: they will stay home while their husband goes to work at the Box Factory, and start popping out plenty of Babies.  As it was fifty years ago, as it was five-hundred years ago, some of them will still go out and work.  Equal treatment won’t hold back the Madame Curies of the world, but the sad fact of the matter is that most people just aren’t talented.

So there’s my modest proposal: start treating people all the same, stop messing around with egghead incentive schemes, and just let human nature take it’s course.  There’s your birthrate for ya’.

Yes, yes, I know – it’ll never work.

* Untrue, actually.  Both Greece and Rome in their latter years saw declining birthrates alongside the decline of democracy, immigrant power blocks, excessive transfer payments, and bronze-age feminism.  The more things change, the more they stay the same, eh?