Is it Over for Breedcels?

What does "prioritize family and marriage" even mean?

if you like this they have a terrific kathe kollwitz exhibit at MoMA

In what seems like a weekly occurrence at this point, there’s been extremely noxious gender discourse on Twitter - and this time it's not the usual suspects (sociopathic right wing freaks and wholly unpersuassive woker-than-thou types), but rather generally reasonable people - for example:

honestly i didn’t include a link because embeds don’t work anymore

I was supposed to be writing about Challengers instead, but here we are. It’s also Father’s Day on Sunday so at least it’s vaguely topical, I guess.

Wife, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

Well, what do we mean here? What does “prioritize marriage and family” mean? It’s not really clear. The phrase was inserted into the discourse by a Pew Poll and discourse on it by the usual suspects (Melissa Kearney and Brad Wilcox, plus an unhinged contribution by Bryan Caplan) on a whole host of hot-topic issues (guns, immigration, etc) including gender where the question is whether “society is better off if people make marriage and having children a priority”, as opposed to “society is just as well off if people have priorities other than family and children”.

The results for the “overall sample” were generally similar, with 40% of people agreeing with prioritizing family, and the breakdown was about what you’d expect: Biden voters agreed with the “career” statement, Trump voters agreed with the “family” statement, and there was a 10 point gender gap (34% of women versus 44% of men), with slight racial differences within each voting block (Black people who support Biden, namely, were around 30% in favor of the statement, compared to 20%ish of all other Bidenist demographics).

What even is the problem? The concerns are, mainly, about the decline of marriage rates and consequently birth rates, as well as the effects of the birth rate on the overall economy. The idea being pushed is that people don’t want to get married or have kids because of “differences in values” (read: progressivism), and that the government needs to “promote pro-family values” (read: extreme social conservatism) to counteract this noxious trend.

Of course, there is virtually zero evidence for this claim. Most people still want to get married and have families, and . Culturally speaking, the communities with the highest number of single mothers also have the highest disaproval of them. There is also zero association between how conservative European countries are and their birth rates - Hungary has fewer kids per woman than France. Additionally, one of the leading factors in the decline of US birth rates has been a steep drop in the number of teen births, which is (I think) an unqualifiedly good thing: back in the 1990s (aka when there were a substantial number of teen births), a solid 70% of fathers to children born to the 15-19 age range were over 20, and 15% were over 25 years old. Similarly, for girls aged 12-15 years old, the fathers were adults in 27% of cases, and on average were 9 years older than the mother.

Exactly why teen pregnancies declined so drastically is a thorny question: the reasons for this are varied, but are largely attributable to teenagers having less sex in general, and when they do, higher contraceptives and morning after pill use (courtesy of sex ed classes). Contrary to the “cultural values” explanation, government campaigns have been ineffective or midly effective at best, and the study about the TV show “16 and Pregnant” reducing pregnancy rates was later questioned quite strongly

This gets to an important point: we are talking about period fertility rates, which are the fertility rates for a given point in time - for example, the period life expectancy is the death rates across the population in a given year. In contrary, cohort life expectancy (or fertility rates) are the expected average lifespan for someone born in a given year. The period measure says “a good proxy for how many years a baby will live to in X years is the death rate X years from now”. But it doesn’t actually tell you how much someone being born today can expect to live, because it assumes that mortality rates stay flat across time - which isn’t true, they have substantially declined. Cohort life expectancy can more accurately measure how much someone born on year X can expect to live, because it measures the average death age of someone born in year X (with, of course, a significant lag). Likewise, a few years back there was a lot of discourse about the US life expectancy falling, because it had dropped - but the interpretation looking forward was wrong. A large share of the decline can probably be attributed to COVID (this was 2020 and 2021), and while it makes sense that the average age of death has fallen (since a lot of people who could have lived longer died of a preventable disease), it does not carry much weight in considerations about the future health of a baby born in 2020. I think you can see what I’m getting at here: the decline in period fertility rates appears to be driven by a sharp decline in the birth rates of young women (15 to 19 and 20 to 29). But those young women are young now, and the question is whether they’ll have more children later - which definitionally does not have an answer yet. Total fertility will fall below replacement if these women keep having so few children in their late 20s and 30s as they are in their teens and 20s.

I’ve already written about lower fertility rates at length. The causes of declining fertility among adults seem to be, mainly, “lower marriage rates”, “higher opportunity costs of doing childcare instead of working”, and “extremely high cost burdens of housing”. Similarly, there’s also concern about an “anti marriage turn in culture” that is never substantiated by anything besides “fewer people are getting married”. The problem with marriage is not that women as a whole don’t want to get married (I’m watching Sex and the City and I would find that hard to believe), but rather, that men are not very marriageable as a group.

Before the feminist 1960s and 1970s, surveys found that the main reason why women attended college was to find a (successful) husband, rather than a career of their own, and thus the returns to getting a husband through an education were higher than the results of getting a job. However, women’s higher earning potential on their own (the girlboss turn?) resulted in the advantage of being “just a wife” rapidly declining versus working. So there goes benefit number one: women could win their own bread.

But even moreso, another problem is that per woke party bro Brad Wilcox, men as partners are less likely to be “fully committed”. As a general rule, women having more options on their own means women also have higher standards for their partners, and these expectations aren’t just about money anymore - when men earn more money, marriage or fertility rates in the area don’t increase much. What women want is a better match in terms of lifestyles, values, and relationship parity: Men, even men who tell you they want an equal partnership, are remarkably sexist: heterosexual couples where the woman outearns the man have lower likelihood of marrying, higher divorce rates, and lower satisfaction ratings. The quality of the relationships women have is going up, but mainly due to having fewer of them - aka, via more selectivity on the partner. Women do not want to end up placing their ambitions on the back burner for their husbands, but know men won’t “put out” unless they pretend to: female MBA students answered a questionnarie more conservatively if they thought their (male) classmates would see their answer, an effect concentrated among single women partnered with single men.

This expectation that marriage would be financially harmful for women is not unreasonable: it appears that household maximize not total earnings, or the breadwinner’s earnings, but the man’s earnings in particular. In this sense, you can look at same-sex relationships in general: gay men earn less than straight men, but gay households earn the same, or why there’s a lesbian “wage premium”. Likewise, men’s regressive attitudes are linked towards both worse careeers for the women they are partnered to, and with lower fertility, while at the same time when men are able to take over childcare, women’s wellbeing (measured as health outcomes) improves.

Stature

Overall, the problem is quite simple: women want to gain status, as all people do. In the past, a woman could only do so via marriage. Now, women can make their own money, and thus many choose to have a successful or satisfactory career. This is not necessarily incompatible with family, but it is fundamentally incompatible with the extremely lopsided model of family we currently have: women are still tasked with most of the housework (which is negatively correlated with wages), and there is even a marriage penalty for straight women due to men’s demands.

Of course, the status game is a double-edged sword: in South Korea, home to the world’s lowest fertility rates, excessive preoccupation with offspring’s educational outcomes are linked to low fertility. In South Korea, fertility increases non-monotonously with income, because poor and lower middle class families have fewer children, but middle class families have even fewer, and upper middle and upper class families have more. Empirically, poorer families spend a higher share of income on education, which leads to them having few children - the more status can be improved by “overschooling”, the more it is invested in, and the fewer kids a family has. Across East Asia as a whole, fertility has collapsed, resulting from meritocratic civil service exams that put enormous weight into education and thus incentivized overschooling, and from declines in the traditional emphasis placed on “kin”, “lineage”, and serving the family (which is economically good - entrepreneurs who don’t face “taxes” from helping extended family invest more productively).

It is no coincidence that the pro-family contingent are, largely, interested in reducing the aspirations of women outside the domestic sphere, that is, in reducing women’s status independent of men. Women are increasingly growing in economic status and educational attainment, and men are falling behind: there is a large gap in educational and behavioral outcomes in children.

In this sense, it’s worth pointing out a series of issues: men are doing consistently worse at school than women, at all levels of education. This is particularly true for college education, since men enroll in and graduate from higher education at much lower rates than women. Men also have higher suicide rates, though the difference seems to be mostly about mental healthcare, health insurance, and the technicalities of suicide These issues are especially bad for men from the poorest families, even if men still dominate the top spots of society. Some of these issues, for instance involving welfare, are due to weird statistical issues, but men are usually behind women in educational aspects.

Overall, this responds to fields where men drew large advantages over women becoming less prominent in the economy - labor market outcomes are increasingly better for “soft” skills (social interaction) than for “hard” skills (math). Likewise, communities exposed to automation have substantial declines in marriage, upticks in divorce, and lower intra-marriage fertility - pointing to economic, not cultural, explanations. As mentioned in a trillion other posts before this, the problem with single parents is that they’re poor, not single.

Trust fund, 6’5, blue eyes

The decline in relative status of men relative to women has reverberated across society: for instance, men and women somewhat politically diverge in the present. This has some main components, in my opinion: increased status for women, economic resentment, social segregation, and cultural entrepreneurship.

The first one we’ve already been through. The second one is fairly straightforward: there is a strong association between male job insecurity and sexist beliefs, and in beliefs that women’s economic advancement came at men’s expense. Social segregation is also straightforward: people are increasingly isolated from those different to them - men from women, but also, say, the rich from the poor. Cultural entrepreneurship, lastly, is extremely interesting: online figures such as Andrew Tate, much like the coordinated efforts by Saudi Arabia, have been pushing reactionary ideologies on today’s (male) youth. This is also where the tradwife movement comes in - online figures pushing for a “return” to completely imaginary ideals.

Another, similar, and extremely aggrieved set of the online population are incels: men who cannot get laid against their will (incel is short for “involuntarily celibate”). While the term was coined in the 1990s by a lesbian, it is currently associated with straight men, who have a rather curious worldview (which is largely pathological and also connected to other forms of bigotry).

The core of incel beliefs is simple: there is a natural hierarchy in society, which is ranked by desirability - determined by both attractiveness and wealth. This puts tall, attractive men (over 6 feet) at the top (these are called “Chads”), and short, ugly, broke guys (the incels) at the bottom. Women, of course, go after the most desirable men only - this is known as hypergamy and is an iron law of dating. The incel is the lowest of the low, and definitionally has no woman who wants him - largely because of a shift in cultural values that permits women too much promiscuity and choice, leading them to inherently value better matches more. Of course, this is hot nonsense, and a big indicator thereof is that the most famous incel ever (mass shooter Elliot Rodger) was actually quite conventionally handsome, whereas uber-Chad Mr Big from Sex and the City is actually reviled by the fan community.

Of course, the incel mindset is hot nonsense - contrary to their beliefs, women value physicall attractiveness and wealth less than they expect, and value intelligence, kindness, and humor more than they think. Hypergamy is actually not just uncommon presently, but actually historically - in fact, the current norm is hypogamy, that is, women marrying below their social station, simply because of how far behind men fell. And while there is a premium on attractiveness (for instance, attractive lawyers are more successful), this isn’t absolute - it has a very complicated relationship to elite professions and status.

So, ultimately, extremely rigid and gendered beliefs about the relative status of men and women aren’t just wrong, they’re also profoundly dangerous, as the multiple incel-related mass violence events can prove.

Conclusion

So, surprising nobody, there isn’t a new anti feminist consensus anywhere except on the op-ed pages: conservatives hold conservative beliefs, and liberals don’t, and most people aren’t conservatives. Since I’m a liberal and the cornerstone of liberalism is thinking that people can do whatever they want with their own lives, my position here is rather clear and obvious: it’s okay if people who don’t want children don’t have them. Around 60% of Americans agree with my position here (just do whatever you want), so the US discourse on the topic is 100% an elite concern. So the elites, who are still extremely influential, turning rapidly against the idea that women having professional ambition is morally neutral is profoundly disquieting.

Now, I am not saying that the people espousing the “marriage good, career bad” are all incels; however, I am saying that it does not escape my notice how they have the exact same demands - namely, that women give up their status in the public sphere in order for men to regain status in the private sphere, which is somehow empowering. It’s also the very same drug that the tradwives are pushing - and it’s just hot nonsense.