The Domestic Product. Ben Hoffman explains low fertility: we are poor where it counts

To be frank, this looks like a long exercise in motivated reasoning. There's a big dubious claim in the introduction:

> But at least in the USA - and probably in other high per-capita GDP countries participating in the same economic system - fertility is suppressed in large part by the macroeconomic policies with which the state constructs and regulates stores of financial value.

...followed by thousands of words of history and commentary that, from a glance, seem to assume this claim rather than justify it.

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Any discussion of fertility has to address two core facts:
- Fertility decline is NEW. With the exception of France (whose fertility started declining around 1800), rich and poor countries alike had high birthrates until the 20th century.
- Fertility decline is GLOBAL. It is not a Western phenomenon; the most severe cases are in East Asia. It is not a rich-world phenomenon; almost every country outside of subsaharan Africa has seen large drops to below replacement-level, including many that are neither rich, industrialized, nor urbanized. It is not a woke-vs-trad phenomenon; Russia and China have seen some of the steepest declines. Even Saudi Arabia went from over 5 children per woman in 1990 to 2.3 in 2024.

Therefore, any explanation has to address why it changed recently and everywhere. Talking about "fiat currency" doesn't meet that bar.

> - Fertility decline is NEW. With the exception of France (whose fertility started declining around 1800), rich and poor countries alike had high birthrates until the 20th century.

Looks like that was one of the earliest movements towards women's rights: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminism_in_France#The_French_Revolution

>- Fertility decline is GLOBAL. It is not a Western phenomenon;
https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/data-stories/flfp-data-story

It has always seemed obvious that fertility is tied to feminism, and the power women hold in society at large. It has also seemed very clear that this falls firmly in the realm of "unacceptable beliefs to hold in polite society."

In my opinion there is no policy possible as the only answer is to reduce the relevance of women in society, which is not going to happen. I'm not saying this because I hate women, I just believe this to be the most likely cause. You can't really try to communicate this idea to people though as people have psychological barriers to holding these beliefs.

>>2884
>It has always seemed obvious that fertility is tied to feminism, and the power women hold in society at large.

Yeah, I agree it probably has to do with the status differential between men and women. A point in favor of this that people always seem to miss is that while modern fertility decline is new, and novel in geographic scope, fertility decline in general has absolutely happened before. Rome had its sexual revolution, women’s status increased, and all the noble families went voluntarily extinct just as our elite is now. Augustus even tried to reverse this and it didn’t work! “Modernity” on its own is not the decisive factor.

>>2884

This is a simple explanation that's far more plausible than the OP's "macroeconomic policies" argument.

However, it still leaves more to unpack.
- What makes Israel and France overperform? Even the moderate, secular groups in those countries (non-Orthodox Jews, European-descent French) have decent birthrates despite feminism.
- Why do Iran and Saudi Arabia show steep declines? Clearly, cultural patriarchy by itself doesn't cut it.

I buy that it relates tightly to status. It sits squarely in a blind spot where academic ethnographers can't ask honest questions (because the relevant threads to pull are too taboo) while the online right can't well-grounded answers (this is a difficult research/journalism challenge that requires talking to lots of people; unlike other taboo areas such as human evolution, it's not something you can ground-truth with just a DNA sequencer or some other mechanical method).

I find it difficult to appreciate any theory explaining the causes of fertility decline when the simplest answer so neatly explains it already: female education increases the value of female labor and therefore increases the opportunity cost of childrearing. All other theories seem to be attempts to explain around this fact or overcomplicate it.

>>2889
Did the entire Roman population's fertility decline, or just the fertility of the elites? Key difference

>>2898

Then how do you explain the fertility decline in for example Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan ?
All three countries show a decline in fertility rate starting in the 1980, 1990 and 2000's, respectively. However the total percentage of woman in the workforce is roughly 20% nowadays and even lower beforehand with woman being 50% of the population (exception Saudi Arabia where its 40%).
Maybe they are still just studying like crazy for nor economic reason or those woman were crazy breeding machines but your suggestion does not explain this data to me.

Fertility rate: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=SA-IR-AF
Labor force, female: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.TOTL.FE.ZS?locations=SA-IR-AF
Total Pop., female:https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL.FE.ZS?end=2023&locations=SA-IR-AF&start=1960

>>2898
That sounds plausible to an economist, but "opportunity cost" is about what you value and how you narrativize the alternatives. It's not quite as simple as "people would rather have money than children", it's rather a whole lifestyle and worldview they've been trained into where you end up having few children. Someone is profiting from maintaining this lifestyle, but it doesn't even have to be the people actually in question. For my case, i could make a *lot* more money doing all kinds of things other than what I do, including being married with children. So could my wife. But who cares? Children are higher on the value hierarchy than money. They are simply not fungible the way an economist thinks. Anyone who thinks otherwise has got it the wrong way around, IMO. In fact, I would bet it becomes psychologically impossible to have children once you even enter the worldview where children are subject to opportunity costs at all. People who have children don't think like that.

The stuff about women's education, feminism, status, lifestyle, etc is clearly where the action is in this topic. The exact details hard to see like >>2897 says, but education of women reliably causes fertility collapse more than any other factor, it's not close, and it's probably not from any downstream effect of education like opportunity but rather something direct about the social worldview training.

As for Israel and to a lesser extent France, I think something in the area of ethno-nationalism is a serious fertility boost, or at least that kind of national-indentity self-confidence. Most high fertility people I know are some variety of nazi and/or extreme christian. It would be interesting to try to measure more precisely what that factor is.

>>2884
>this falls firmly in the realm of "unacceptable beliefs to hold in polite society."
>You can't really try to communicate this idea to people though as people have psychological barriers to holding these beliefs.
fortunately this is an anonymous imageboard where we are not beholden to the rules of polite society. If the right answer is to reduce women to the status of breeding stock, then let's talk about it. I don't think the right answer is quite as crude as "status" though. Something more like "priorities". The child-oriented women I know (my wife included) are some of the most dignified and confident women I know. But they are utterly sure of their particular place in the family and the world, and utterly unconcerned with all the crap that fills the head of the modern woman.

That said, from the perspective of the insane modern girlboss korean-style feminist, it's about status. Specifically, she thinks she deserves better than mortal men can give her, and won't settle for less than some kind of bizarre female-led relationship with gigachad (and she'll wait until 36 to even think about settling for that). This delusional female status complex is indeed the problem. I just think the solution should be positively articulated, and in the case of the good women I know, it's about priorities and role rather than "status".

>>2883
>thousands of words of history and commentary that, from a glance, seem to assume this claim rather than justify it.
To address what I thought notable and interesting about the OP article, it's not as simple as "muh fiat currency". Mr Hoffman establishes a view where the social and economic system of accounting for wealth has us convinced by cheap trinkets and large valuations that we are "rich", but measured in actual ability to buy leisure time, space, and childcare help, we are actually poor. This is actually closely related to the whole "feminism" account of the problem: the problem is distortion of value signals and intuitive value accounting that set people's life plans and priorities. What Hoffman does which is novel and interesting is give a materialist financial-historical account of those distortions.

Relatedly, I saw a video recently of someone who I believe is an acquaintance of mr Hoffman (Michael Vassar) giving an account of the great depression focused on how actual material abundance *rose* during this time such that people were no longer starving and had longer life expectancy, but our accounting systems based in leveraged holdings in certain kinds of scarcity-predicated assets interpreted that as a disaster (which it was for the small capital owning class). Is it true? I don't know. But I like the concreteness and apparent power of these materialist explanations. They are fresh and need more discussion.

>>2904
Thank you for the breath of fresh air. I wholly agree that status is not the most important factor. The economic arguments seem completely unconvincing as it doesn't explain how in terms of "leisure time, space, and childcare help" the average person was more wealthy for most times in history and why in critical times (Classical Greek city states, Rome) this "soft-economic power" was the driving force.

If I had to put forward a hypothesis on the driving force behind low fertility the argument would proceed as follows:

1. Women slowly gain more influence in a society.
2. This influence leads to social status indicators that were unavailable previously.
3. Women are innately more influenced by social status indicators which creates a feedback cycle where more and more of a given woman's peers are competing in status games outside of procreative family life.
4. This paired with influence they have over society causes men to compete in these same status games.
5. This negative feedback cycle continues until society is violently recreated, and given man's superiority in the realm of effective violence, they end up back with the most influence.

I use the words influence, as it doesn't necessarily indicate economic power though it can!

The potentially more radical argument is that in a society with minimal female influence, I would bet the average woman is happier.