Bryan, what do you think of the limits of rationality?
I’m of the view that rationality is limited. There are facts, but facts are always subordinate to story. Certain stories align with facts better than others, but no story ever emerges from facts alone, no matter how large the collection of facts. In my view, the social movement known as Rationalism often devolves into something resembling a religion once it bumps up against this limit I describe.
“Murder is wrong” seems more like a moral proposition than a story. Rationalists probably agree that murder is wrong, and I don’t know what sort of rationalist would say stories emerge from facts alone. That sounds more like an empiricist. I am still missing something.
Good point. That seems much more understandable than the topic of this comment. Kant would disagree, but I don’t want to try to channel him. I will just say, that depends on what rational means to you, and is independent of OP’s mysterious claim about facts and stories.
Facts always serve a story, not the other way around.
You just gave an example—all the competing factions of Rationalism. They’re in competition because they can’t agree on a story, despite having the same set of facts to work with.
I really don’t understand. What does “facts serve a story” mean? Can you give an obvious example?
What are you criticizing, if all of those thinkers are examples of “rationalism?” Leibniz was all about a priori reasoning (other two not), Yud likes rationality, Popper used logic to criticize the basis for science and epistemology. Are they all guilty of the same flaw? I am not able to guess what that is.
Facts do not create a story on their own. The creation of a story requires an act of human consciousness which imposes relationships upon the facts.
That’s why people can literally look at the exact same facts and reach opposite conclusions (stories). So facts only serve stories, which are a separate thing imposed upon sets of facts by human beings.
I think the best example is the contra-example. Make a story from facts alone. See if you can do it. I’ll bet you can’t.
Dave, you seem pretty offended by my claim that facts are subordinate to story and that the Rationalist community can seem religious at times.
You’re arguing pretty aggressively against my point, under the pretext of not understanding it, when the question wasn’t even directed at you. (So why would I care if you understand my point? It’s Bryan who needs to understand it.)
I think you might have an irrational bias towards Rationalism.
Are any of the rationalists denying that “”,Facts do not create a story on their own. The creation of a story requires an act of human consciousness which imposes relationships upon the facts. ,” whatever it means? It sounds vaguely in opposition to empiricism.
>That’s why people can literally look at the exact same facts and reach opposite conclusions (stories).
If a rationalist said that they come to the inference with different background assumptions, would they be saying the same thing or something different?
>So facts only serve stories, which are a separate thing imposed upon sets of facts by human beings.
Popper would put this in terms of theories, I think. Was he wrong?
>I think the best example is the contra-example. Make a story from facts alone. See if you can do it. I’ll bet you can’t.
You win that bet, but for a wrong reason. I have no idea what you mean, so I can’t give an example or counterexample or anything other than a shoulder shrug. You are trying to tell me something. I am saying I don’t understand what you’re saying. Asking me for a counterexample of what you are saying is not really appropriate. Please try to give me a hint about a concrete phenomenon that exemplifies the concept you have in mind.
I think where you, Huemer and probably most of the readers (including me) agree is that we probably shouldn't be prescribing how people live their personal lives, in *any* direction. There are, essentially, two sorts of social conservatism and two sorts of social liberalism.
Conservatism has:
- a prescriptive branch, that tries to force people into old social norms, and in its most extreme form is a kind of "back to the 1950s"
- a live-and-let-live branch, which tries to absorb diversity into the old structures (eg by promoting gay marriage as opposed to queer polycules)
Liberalism has:
- a live-and-let-live branch (which isn't really that different from the conservative version above, maybe there are more differences on things like immigration)
- a prescriptive branch, that wants to push everyone into nonconformism (which, of course, is nothing of the sort, it's just conformism to a different set of norms).
We're all live-and-let-live folk here, right? As stated above, it's difficult to slot us into the culture-war binary, we could be parsed as either conservative or liberal. Maybe we should just get away from thinking rigidly along this axis? (Ooh look, we discovered a spectrum rather than sticking to a rigid binary, the woke brigade will be all over that!)
A truly live and let live world would consist of a significant percentage of the country shitting themselves on the streets on fentanyl or squirreled away at home playing video games and watching porn all day.
I think this is a selection effect. The sort of people who don't believe in sex before marriage also don't believe in divorce. Divorce rates in such circumstances are not a great proxy for marital satisfaction.
Fair, but a lot of what we deem as good choices are to inculcate the habit of making further positive choices (pre-moderns used to call this developing virtue). And I've also seen data that those in arranged marriages are the happiest couples. Fact check me if you'd like. I feel like so much contra this perspective hinges on the existence of unhappy marriages--we both agree those are unfortunate and suboptimal, but marriage in general is still a greater moral social system than not.
I suppose this comes down to whether you consider marriage in and of itself to be virtuous, in which case it doesn't really matter to whom you commit, as long as you commit to someone; or whether it's fundamentally romantic love that is the virtue, in which case suddenly your choice of spouse matters a great deal more, and then some - how to put this - "market research" may be advisable.
To go from the abstract to the anecdotal, as a married man, marriage and commitment have (so far) heightened my awareness of deeper truths and virtues, which have, in turn, deepened the romantic love within. So, while acknowledging my luck and gratitude, it is a choice and a leap of heuristic faith (hence the term faithful to one's spouse). Is there space in the rationalist discourse for this? And very true--I have heard it said that a person's (man's, especially) choice of spouse if marrying is perhaps the single greatest and most crucial decision.
I think there is space in the rationalist discourse for just about anything (excepting lizardmen-style conspiracy theories).
Love is a tricky topic for rationalism, because it has this mystical, ineffable quality to it. The rationalist's toolkit is just not very good at analysing the subject (https://xkcd.com/55/). And at the same time, the rationalist space is full of men (come on, it's mostly men) driving themselves nuts trying to demystify the issue, to turn it into an exact science in a fashion that is not merely misguided but often self-defeating. Ultimately, I think there is some merit to "when you know, you know" instinct-trusting.
Oh, of course it's mostly men! It's an extremely male (though perhaps not strictly 'masculine') form of analysis. A good inverted obvious parallel example is to consider why the speech therapist field is ~95% female! At any rate, I was once well-versed in the rationalist/EA world. Perhaps I was primed to sign up for objectively pursuing the truth and inoculated against moral relativism via my Catholic upbringing. As a lapsed atheist/Sam Harris-style Buddhist and a struggling revert to a Christian lifestyle and ideals, I believe I'm on a new track of synthesizing intuition and reason. Thanks for sharing the XKCD comic, it's a good one. Be well!
Bryan has noted in the past that the single largest number of sexual partners (the mode) is one. Amongst those likely to to have stable marriages and bear above replacement children, people that have low single digit number of sexual partners predominate (excluding the elite).
So I would say "premarital sex is wrong" is basically correct. Even when its not 100% correct, its mostly correct as far as "marginally correct social signaling" goes.
You appear to assume facts not in evidence: that "decrease likelihood of divorce" is a good thing; and that this correlation is causation.
The fetishization of marriage has led to severe harms to human rights. Indeed, lawmakers seem to be incapable of structuring marriage without trampling on human rights. It's high time the institution was taken off its pedestal. Stable human relationships are more often constructive than destructive, it's true - but they're not infrequently highly destructive. And when society and the state step in to preserve those harmful relationships, they all too often do so to the detriment of the person already being hurt.
I do, generally. Marrying smartly, well, and happily is hierarchically underneath the general social good of marriage. (Of course there are bad marriages, investment bias, etc. etc.)
Humer is a brilliant intellectual and I highly respect him, but on his blog it seems he goes out of his way to be incendiary and provocative. The best recent example is the recent post claiming that raising kids religiously is a "rights violation."
To steelman his approach, perhaps he's saying things that are wrong to make his audience think about why they are wrong. I certainly think that when he disagrees with you or David Friedman, all your readers get a real treat!
Oof, did not see that post of Huemer's until now, and it is a doozy.
It is one thing to claim that children have a right to an education that promotes critical thinking. But it's rather more extreme to claim that one is able to judge what constitutes critical thinking, with enough confidence to ban parents from pursuing a particular education on that grounds that "dogma" (religious dogma in particular) can never be rational.
There must always be axioms to form a foundation upon which reason can do it's work. Everyone takes something dogmatically, or else they could never reach any conclusions at all.
It looks to me you both might have been thinking of a strawman version of the opposite perspective (“liberal” / “conservative”) instead of the real, rational thing 🙂
"I referred to claims that premarital sex is wrong"
Bryan has noted in the past that the single largest number of sexual partners (the mode) is one. Amongst those likely to to have stable marriages and bear above replacement children, people that have low single digit number of sexual partners predominate (excluding the elite).
So I would say "premarital sex is wrong" is basically correct. Even when its not 100% correct, its mostly correct as far as "marginally correct social signaling" goes.
Within Europe, social conservatism by country is mildly negatively correlated with fertility: the statement of traditional roles and birth rates simply does not hold when looking at comparable national peers.
A possible explanation - the more socially liberal countries take in more immigrants from socially conservative countries, and it is those immigrants (with their larger families) who are raising their adopted countries' overall birth rates.
It's not material; the biggest impact is in France, where the impact of immigrant birth rates is about 0.1 increase overall, still putting France at or near the top of the pack.
True. But also worth adding that the opposite holds within the US... this European pattern could be confounded by a whole bunch of relevant variables, and given that it completely conflicts with what we see across US states, where we should expect less confounding, I don't take it very seriously.
The differences in US states and fertility, at least at a glance, are differences in religiosity, no? I think that's a distinct factor from traditionalist social attitudes, albeit often coming together. East Asian societies have very low religiosity and traditional views on gender roles, and cratering fertility rates.
It’s based on the same variable used to find the European negative correlation, the question was something like “women should ideally stay home with young children”. It’s likely correlated with religiosity but that is also not controlled for in Europe - negative correlation pattern also doesn’t hold for OECD ex Europe.
Hmm, I'm interested in doing a wider analysis across countries trying to control for religiosity; the pattern thus far, at high income points, seems to be that religiosity is strongly correlated with fertility and traditional gender views weakly anti-correlates, such that religiosity+trad combinations are overwhelmed by the religiosity element, but lacking that trad views are counter-fertility; this is very explicitly the case among many women in Korea and China, for instance.
Give me a week, I'll see if the data exists in a reasonable form.
Similarly, more or less immigration doesn't materially move the dial on TFR decline, Nordics take in a larger amount proportional to population and are seeing similar declines (albeit from a higher base).
In Denmark and Iceland, native born women have *higher* TFRs than immigrants, despite those native born women being more or less universally less socially conservative than the immigrants.
Of course, it is worth adding that the East Asian countries are generally more socially conservative than Western ones, and have very low Total Fertility Rates .
"[I]t is precisely because wisdom has to be accumulated in incremental steps that it cannot be centrally planned by any single political or religious authority, contrary to the aspirations of conservatives and collectivists alike. While the collectivists are indeed guilty of trying to rationalistically reconstruct society in defiance of tradition (a valid criticism of left-anarchists), conservatives on the other hand are guilty of trying to freeze old traditions in place. Conservatives have forgotten that the process of wisdom accumulation is an on-going one, and instead have opted for the notion that some existing body of traditions (usually Judeo-Christian) already represent social perfection."
The case for taking traditional values seriously is that they are a product of a long cultural evolution and that in some instances facilitate productive social interactions with others who are embedded within the same common culture. Abstract reasoning might occasionally give one clues on how to improve on values that are a product of the process of cultural selection that occurs in a free society, but you can't really know that such rational insights actually represent "progress" until you have personally experienced the consequences of deviating from the tradition in question. It is all too common for know-it-alls who experiment with social deviancy in their youth on the basis of plausible-sounding rationalizations to drift back to more traditional values as they gain experience and learn for themselves why the tradition took hold in the first place.
Likewise, some people may find that adhering to traditional values is a source of profound personal dissatisfaction, so of course they will be attracted to an anti-traditional counter-culture instead. They become permanent defectors from prevailing social norms. However, it is an error to infer from a personal experience of such dissatisfaction that other people will feel equally repressed by the observance of traditions. A custom that seems unduly repressive to you may in fact be essential to someone else's pursuit of happiness, and forcibly overthrowing that custom doesn't represent "progress" for most people in spite of your own experience.
The curious thing about traditions is that they are often justified on wildly irrational grounds. It seems that fears about an afterlife or about angering a powerful supernatural entity are more efficient at motivating the transmission of useful values to the next generation than any honest account of what previous generation felt about the various life choices they made in an attempt to instruct the young about the psychological nuances of human nature. Feelings are frequently demeaned as "sinful" by tradition-bound conservatives and as "irrational" by rationalizing progressives, but in fact they are the primary source of evidence that reason must operate on to generate new wisdom.
The compatibilist view of emotions and reason (in contrast to the popular Spock/McCoy dichotomy, to use a _Star Trek_ metaphor) is that they have to work together to generate values and attitudes that optimize one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that human beings share a common innate psychological nature, there will be certain universal virtues that are instrumental to one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that there are innately different personality types, there will also be a need for tolerance of deviant counter-cultures within the framework of more universally-acknowledged values. When a culture spontaneously evolves in a society that defends the personal moral autonomy of all adults, there emerges a presumption in favor of the resulting traditions, but those traditions aren't commandments that are carved in stone for all time. As I noted above, the process of wisdom accumulation is a gradual, incremental one.
Yes; I love having kids, but as is in my society (UK) it's mainly fun if you make six figures, an relatively egalitarian and stable marriage, your family is healthy, and you have supportive family and/or paid help. I don't expect others to have as much fun as I'm having.
The most success sequence people in the world, Koreans, and going extinct.
"studies show that people with kids are less happy on average than those without kids"
This could easily be solved by increasing child tax breaks until there is no consumption difference between child bearing an childless (stop the childless from free riding).
The childless have their retirement paid for by those that have children. Medicare and Social Security swamp K-12. The contribution of a childless person to Medicare and Social Security is effectively $0, since they are pay as you go benefits. Only future taxpayers contribute to their retirement, and they didn't make any.
Moreover, ultimately all these programs do is pay young people to provide services to old people. No young people, no services.
I could maybe credit the childless with having done their fair share if they paid enough to taxes to help other people have children for them, but they didn't. The main reason for childlessness is to free ride on the system and enjoy extra consumption.
"Schools basically only work if most taxpayers are childless and subsidizing the parents"
About 80% of people have kids at some point, so I'd say about 80% of property tax revenue comes from parents. Moreover, parents tend to have more expensive real estate near schools then non-parents.
Finally, the childless oppose school vouchers and school choice (they are overwhelmingly leftists) and thus K-12 funding isn't given to the parents but the school system. This means it is of limited benefit to the parents themselves, unlike SS which is cash. Non-parents also get to vote in school board elections which is bizarre IMO, and again they are hard left.
Bryan, what do you think of the limits of rationality?
I’m of the view that rationality is limited. There are facts, but facts are always subordinate to story. Certain stories align with facts better than others, but no story ever emerges from facts alone, no matter how large the collection of facts. In my view, the social movement known as Rationalism often devolves into something resembling a religion once it bumps up against this limit I describe.
What say you?
This is unclear. Facts are subordinate in what way?
Story never emerges from facts alone. Okay. Can you give an example of rationalism bumping against this limit? I can’t fill one in on my own.
When you say rationalism, do you mean Leibniz, or Yudkowsky, or Popper, or someone/something else?
Facts can never tell you that murder is wrong. You have to have pre-rational ideas about what is good before determining that.
If stories the source of the knowledge that murder is wrong, I am taking “story” too literally.
“Murder is wrong” seems more like a moral proposition than a story. Rationalists probably agree that murder is wrong, and I don’t know what sort of rationalist would say stories emerge from facts alone. That sounds more like an empiricist. I am still missing something.
But there is no purely rational argument for why murder is wrong. That's my point.
Good point. That seems much more understandable than the topic of this comment. Kant would disagree, but I don’t want to try to channel him. I will just say, that depends on what rational means to you, and is independent of OP’s mysterious claim about facts and stories.
Facts always serve a story, not the other way around.
You just gave an example—all the competing factions of Rationalism. They’re in competition because they can’t agree on a story, despite having the same set of facts to work with.
I really don’t understand. What does “facts serve a story” mean? Can you give an obvious example?
What are you criticizing, if all of those thinkers are examples of “rationalism?” Leibniz was all about a priori reasoning (other two not), Yud likes rationality, Popper used logic to criticize the basis for science and epistemology. Are they all guilty of the same flaw? I am not able to guess what that is.
Facts do not create a story on their own. The creation of a story requires an act of human consciousness which imposes relationships upon the facts.
That’s why people can literally look at the exact same facts and reach opposite conclusions (stories). So facts only serve stories, which are a separate thing imposed upon sets of facts by human beings.
I think the best example is the contra-example. Make a story from facts alone. See if you can do it. I’ll bet you can’t.
Is the just, people disagree about abortion, the flat earth, and the war in Gaza, therefore rationalism is wrong?
Dave, you seem pretty offended by my claim that facts are subordinate to story and that the Rationalist community can seem religious at times.
You’re arguing pretty aggressively against my point, under the pretext of not understanding it, when the question wasn’t even directed at you. (So why would I care if you understand my point? It’s Bryan who needs to understand it.)
I think you might have an irrational bias towards Rationalism.
Are any of the rationalists denying that “”,Facts do not create a story on their own. The creation of a story requires an act of human consciousness which imposes relationships upon the facts. ,” whatever it means? It sounds vaguely in opposition to empiricism.
>That’s why people can literally look at the exact same facts and reach opposite conclusions (stories).
If a rationalist said that they come to the inference with different background assumptions, would they be saying the same thing or something different?
>So facts only serve stories, which are a separate thing imposed upon sets of facts by human beings.
Popper would put this in terms of theories, I think. Was he wrong?
>I think the best example is the contra-example. Make a story from facts alone. See if you can do it. I’ll bet you can’t.
You win that bet, but for a wrong reason. I have no idea what you mean, so I can’t give an example or counterexample or anything other than a shoulder shrug. You are trying to tell me something. I am saying I don’t understand what you’re saying. Asking me for a counterexample of what you are saying is not really appropriate. Please try to give me a hint about a concrete phenomenon that exemplifies the concept you have in mind.
I think where you, Huemer and probably most of the readers (including me) agree is that we probably shouldn't be prescribing how people live their personal lives, in *any* direction. There are, essentially, two sorts of social conservatism and two sorts of social liberalism.
Conservatism has:
- a prescriptive branch, that tries to force people into old social norms, and in its most extreme form is a kind of "back to the 1950s"
- a live-and-let-live branch, which tries to absorb diversity into the old structures (eg by promoting gay marriage as opposed to queer polycules)
Liberalism has:
- a live-and-let-live branch (which isn't really that different from the conservative version above, maybe there are more differences on things like immigration)
- a prescriptive branch, that wants to push everyone into nonconformism (which, of course, is nothing of the sort, it's just conformism to a different set of norms).
We're all live-and-let-live folk here, right? As stated above, it's difficult to slot us into the culture-war binary, we could be parsed as either conservative or liberal. Maybe we should just get away from thinking rigidly along this axis? (Ooh look, we discovered a spectrum rather than sticking to a rigid binary, the woke brigade will be all over that!)
A truly live and let live world would consist of a significant percentage of the country shitting themselves on the streets on fentanyl or squirreled away at home playing video games and watching porn all day.
Citation needed, no? Many people could do this but don't.
Marijuana use has gone up a ton since it was legalized. What do you think would happen if we legalized all opiates?
I want to raise my kids to not suffer those vices but is it odd that I’m not scared of people who waste their lives in such ways?
"Claims that premarital sex is wrong, that sex should only be for reproduction, and things like that -- which are obviously silly."
And yet some studies show that very low numbers of sexual partners before marriage decrease likelihood of divorce.
I think this is a selection effect. The sort of people who don't believe in sex before marriage also don't believe in divorce. Divorce rates in such circumstances are not a great proxy for marital satisfaction.
Not true. They've also looked at marital satisfaction rates, and found the same thing.
Fair, but a lot of what we deem as good choices are to inculcate the habit of making further positive choices (pre-moderns used to call this developing virtue). And I've also seen data that those in arranged marriages are the happiest couples. Fact check me if you'd like. I feel like so much contra this perspective hinges on the existence of unhappy marriages--we both agree those are unfortunate and suboptimal, but marriage in general is still a greater moral social system than not.
I suppose this comes down to whether you consider marriage in and of itself to be virtuous, in which case it doesn't really matter to whom you commit, as long as you commit to someone; or whether it's fundamentally romantic love that is the virtue, in which case suddenly your choice of spouse matters a great deal more, and then some - how to put this - "market research" may be advisable.
To go from the abstract to the anecdotal, as a married man, marriage and commitment have (so far) heightened my awareness of deeper truths and virtues, which have, in turn, deepened the romantic love within. So, while acknowledging my luck and gratitude, it is a choice and a leap of heuristic faith (hence the term faithful to one's spouse). Is there space in the rationalist discourse for this? And very true--I have heard it said that a person's (man's, especially) choice of spouse if marrying is perhaps the single greatest and most crucial decision.
I think there is space in the rationalist discourse for just about anything (excepting lizardmen-style conspiracy theories).
Love is a tricky topic for rationalism, because it has this mystical, ineffable quality to it. The rationalist's toolkit is just not very good at analysing the subject (https://xkcd.com/55/). And at the same time, the rationalist space is full of men (come on, it's mostly men) driving themselves nuts trying to demystify the issue, to turn it into an exact science in a fashion that is not merely misguided but often self-defeating. Ultimately, I think there is some merit to "when you know, you know" instinct-trusting.
Oh, of course it's mostly men! It's an extremely male (though perhaps not strictly 'masculine') form of analysis. A good inverted obvious parallel example is to consider why the speech therapist field is ~95% female! At any rate, I was once well-versed in the rationalist/EA world. Perhaps I was primed to sign up for objectively pursuing the truth and inoculated against moral relativism via my Catholic upbringing. As a lapsed atheist/Sam Harris-style Buddhist and a struggling revert to a Christian lifestyle and ideals, I believe I'm on a new track of synthesizing intuition and reason. Thanks for sharing the XKCD comic, it's a good one. Be well!
Bryan has noted in the past that the single largest number of sexual partners (the mode) is one. Amongst those likely to to have stable marriages and bear above replacement children, people that have low single digit number of sexual partners predominate (excluding the elite).
So I would say "premarital sex is wrong" is basically correct. Even when its not 100% correct, its mostly correct as far as "marginally correct social signaling" goes.
Which means basically correct more than not, as far as human social heuristics go! Btw great username.
You appear to assume facts not in evidence: that "decrease likelihood of divorce" is a good thing; and that this correlation is causation.
The fetishization of marriage has led to severe harms to human rights. Indeed, lawmakers seem to be incapable of structuring marriage without trampling on human rights. It's high time the institution was taken off its pedestal. Stable human relationships are more often constructive than destructive, it's true - but they're not infrequently highly destructive. And when society and the state step in to preserve those harmful relationships, they all too often do so to the detriment of the person already being hurt.
Do we count low probability of divorce as a good in itself, or an instrumental good?
Is it due to making better choices, reluctance to admit making a bad choice, or some other cause?
It is a good in itself for people who have children.
I do, generally. Marrying smartly, well, and happily is hierarchically underneath the general social good of marriage. (Of course there are bad marriages, investment bias, etc. etc.)
Humer is a brilliant intellectual and I highly respect him, but on his blog it seems he goes out of his way to be incendiary and provocative. The best recent example is the recent post claiming that raising kids religiously is a "rights violation."
To steelman his approach, perhaps he's saying things that are wrong to make his audience think about why they are wrong. I certainly think that when he disagrees with you or David Friedman, all your readers get a real treat!
Oof, did not see that post of Huemer's until now, and it is a doozy.
It is one thing to claim that children have a right to an education that promotes critical thinking. But it's rather more extreme to claim that one is able to judge what constitutes critical thinking, with enough confidence to ban parents from pursuing a particular education on that grounds that "dogma" (religious dogma in particular) can never be rational.
There must always be axioms to form a foundation upon which reason can do it's work. Everyone takes something dogmatically, or else they could never reach any conclusions at all.
It looks to me you both might have been thinking of a strawman version of the opposite perspective (“liberal” / “conservative”) instead of the real, rational thing 🙂
wellll.....we are waiting
"I referred to claims that premarital sex is wrong"
Bryan has noted in the past that the single largest number of sexual partners (the mode) is one. Amongst those likely to to have stable marriages and bear above replacement children, people that have low single digit number of sexual partners predominate (excluding the elite).
So I would say "premarital sex is wrong" is basically correct. Even when its not 100% correct, its mostly correct as far as "marginally correct social signaling" goes.
Are all mostly true things rational to believe?
Within Europe, social conservatism by country is mildly negatively correlated with fertility: the statement of traditional roles and birth rates simply does not hold when looking at comparable national peers.
https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/the-value-of-family
A possible explanation - the more socially liberal countries take in more immigrants from socially conservative countries, and it is those immigrants (with their larger families) who are raising their adopted countries' overall birth rates.
It's not material; the biggest impact is in France, where the impact of immigrant birth rates is about 0.1 increase overall, still putting France at or near the top of the pack.
Could be convinced the pattern is there, but the articles I’ve seen claiming this are not nearly strong enough to support this unintuitive result
True. But also worth adding that the opposite holds within the US... this European pattern could be confounded by a whole bunch of relevant variables, and given that it completely conflicts with what we see across US states, where we should expect less confounding, I don't take it very seriously.
https://www.allcatsarefemale.com/p/can-women-really-have-it-all
The differences in US states and fertility, at least at a glance, are differences in religiosity, no? I think that's a distinct factor from traditionalist social attitudes, albeit often coming together. East Asian societies have very low religiosity and traditional views on gender roles, and cratering fertility rates.
It’s based on the same variable used to find the European negative correlation, the question was something like “women should ideally stay home with young children”. It’s likely correlated with religiosity but that is also not controlled for in Europe - negative correlation pattern also doesn’t hold for OECD ex Europe.
Hmm, I'm interested in doing a wider analysis across countries trying to control for religiosity; the pattern thus far, at high income points, seems to be that religiosity is strongly correlated with fertility and traditional gender views weakly anti-correlates, such that religiosity+trad combinations are overwhelmed by the religiosity element, but lacking that trad views are counter-fertility; this is very explicitly the case among many women in Korea and China, for instance.
Give me a week, I'll see if the data exists in a reasonable form.
https://www.ined.fr/fichier/s_rubrique/29430/population.and.societies.568.2019.fertility.france.immigrants.en.pdf
Source for France data above.
Similarly, more or less immigration doesn't materially move the dial on TFR decline, Nordics take in a larger amount proportional to population and are seeing similar declines (albeit from a higher base).
https://unric.org/en/family-day-nordic-fertility-rates-in-steady-decline/
In Denmark and Iceland, native born women have *higher* TFRs than immigrants, despite those native born women being more or less universally less socially conservative than the immigrants.
Of course, it is worth adding that the East Asian countries are generally more socially conservative than Western ones, and have very low Total Fertility Rates .
Something I wrote a few decades ago which Bryan quoted in his anarchism FAQ (https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm) is relevant here:
"[I]t is precisely because wisdom has to be accumulated in incremental steps that it cannot be centrally planned by any single political or religious authority, contrary to the aspirations of conservatives and collectivists alike. While the collectivists are indeed guilty of trying to rationalistically reconstruct society in defiance of tradition (a valid criticism of left-anarchists), conservatives on the other hand are guilty of trying to freeze old traditions in place. Conservatives have forgotten that the process of wisdom accumulation is an on-going one, and instead have opted for the notion that some existing body of traditions (usually Judeo-Christian) already represent social perfection."
The case for taking traditional values seriously is that they are a product of a long cultural evolution and that in some instances facilitate productive social interactions with others who are embedded within the same common culture. Abstract reasoning might occasionally give one clues on how to improve on values that are a product of the process of cultural selection that occurs in a free society, but you can't really know that such rational insights actually represent "progress" until you have personally experienced the consequences of deviating from the tradition in question. It is all too common for know-it-alls who experiment with social deviancy in their youth on the basis of plausible-sounding rationalizations to drift back to more traditional values as they gain experience and learn for themselves why the tradition took hold in the first place.
Likewise, some people may find that adhering to traditional values is a source of profound personal dissatisfaction, so of course they will be attracted to an anti-traditional counter-culture instead. They become permanent defectors from prevailing social norms. However, it is an error to infer from a personal experience of such dissatisfaction that other people will feel equally repressed by the observance of traditions. A custom that seems unduly repressive to you may in fact be essential to someone else's pursuit of happiness, and forcibly overthrowing that custom doesn't represent "progress" for most people in spite of your own experience.
The curious thing about traditions is that they are often justified on wildly irrational grounds. It seems that fears about an afterlife or about angering a powerful supernatural entity are more efficient at motivating the transmission of useful values to the next generation than any honest account of what previous generation felt about the various life choices they made in an attempt to instruct the young about the psychological nuances of human nature. Feelings are frequently demeaned as "sinful" by tradition-bound conservatives and as "irrational" by rationalizing progressives, but in fact they are the primary source of evidence that reason must operate on to generate new wisdom.
The compatibilist view of emotions and reason (in contrast to the popular Spock/McCoy dichotomy, to use a _Star Trek_ metaphor) is that they have to work together to generate values and attitudes that optimize one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that human beings share a common innate psychological nature, there will be certain universal virtues that are instrumental to one's pursuit of happiness. To the extent that there are innately different personality types, there will also be a need for tolerance of deviant counter-cultures within the framework of more universally-acknowledged values. When a culture spontaneously evolves in a society that defends the personal moral autonomy of all adults, there emerges a presumption in favor of the resulting traditions, but those traditions aren't commandments that are carved in stone for all time. As I noted above, the process of wisdom accumulation is a gradual, incremental one.
Looking forward to Huemer's new book.
Yes; I love having kids, but as is in my society (UK) it's mainly fun if you make six figures, an relatively egalitarian and stable marriage, your family is healthy, and you have supportive family and/or paid help. I don't expect others to have as much fun as I'm having.
The most success sequence people in the world, Koreans, and going extinct.
"studies show that people with kids are less happy on average than those without kids"
This could easily be solved by increasing child tax breaks until there is no consumption difference between child bearing an childless (stop the childless from free riding).
The childless have their retirement paid for by those that have children. Medicare and Social Security swamp K-12. The contribution of a childless person to Medicare and Social Security is effectively $0, since they are pay as you go benefits. Only future taxpayers contribute to their retirement, and they didn't make any.
Moreover, ultimately all these programs do is pay young people to provide services to old people. No young people, no services.
I could maybe credit the childless with having done their fair share if they paid enough to taxes to help other people have children for them, but they didn't. The main reason for childlessness is to free ride on the system and enjoy extra consumption.
"Schools basically only work if most taxpayers are childless and subsidizing the parents"
About 80% of people have kids at some point, so I'd say about 80% of property tax revenue comes from parents. Moreover, parents tend to have more expensive real estate near schools then non-parents.
Finally, the childless oppose school vouchers and school choice (they are overwhelmingly leftists) and thus K-12 funding isn't given to the parents but the school system. This means it is of limited benefit to the parents themselves, unlike SS which is cash. Non-parents also get to vote in school board elections which is bizarre IMO, and again they are hard left.