This one from Aporia really set me on my heels. The Baby Boom was not anything else you have heard. It actually started, albeit slowly, before WWII, for example. It was a marriage boom, caused by reduced female participation in the labor market and higher wages for men (those two related, and I have seen the connection to the status that increasingly accrued to those whose wives did not have to work), and not only in America, but in developed countries as a whole. He also shows that the decline in fertility started decades before the recent bust, with a sharp decline in England, and then elsewhere, after the Bradlaugh-Besant trial for publishing birth control information. In 1875.
He dismantles a number of common explanations quite quickly, showing that the actual rises and declines occurred well before or well after the change mentioned.
Quite something. Did I know nothing, or only wrong things? Read and see if you think the numbers tell the same story that he claims.
Over the course of a decade back then we embarked on at least three radical social experiments: no fault divorce in '69, Roe in in '73, and also in '73, trying to normalize homosexual behavior. The principles behind the experiments were similar, of course, and "second wave feminism" was part of it, so I wonder how you disentangle the effects of each. The Overton window doesn't move instantly.
ReplyDeleteVery interesting. As you noted, this makes sense to me based on a lot of bits and pieces of things I've absorbed over the years. It aligns with PUA observations of human mating behavior, and anecdotal references to studies that show married people have more sex, and it makes sense that when someone (generally women) can stay home with the kids the birth rate goes up. Urbanization as a driver of birth rate decline makes more sense if you look at it as expanding the opportunities for women to work outside the home. This would be especially true of the light industrial and service jobs that have become common across the world because of globalization after WWII.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that he brings up France because Peter Zeihan has often noted that France has 'better demographics' i.e. a birth rate closer to replacement, than other countries in Western Europe. PZ also notes that the U.S. had a 'boomlet' (the Millennial generation, 1980s-2000) since the general decline started. Using foreign auto manufacturers building plants in the U.S. as a proxy this boomlet does align with economic environment that would tend to favor men, who would be more likely to employed in construction and heavy industry. Googling around it does look like men's labor force participation leveled off in the 1980s and 1990s even though the overall trend as been negative since 1960.
If both Peter Zeihan's predictions of an industrial build out (re-shoring) over the next decade and this explanation of the Baby Boom are accurate, I'd bet we see an uptick in marriage and birth rates in the U.S as young men's earning potential increases due to an expansion of blue-collar construction and manufacturing jobs.
james = I don't know how good the data is but he at least mentions Japan as an example of the disentangling birth control from feminism effects via when the Pill was legalized there.
Part of it, I think, was due to the societal self-confidence stemming from having won a major war. And every man who had served in the military probably enjoyed some perception of indirect alpha-ness, regardless of what his actual contributions had been.
ReplyDeleteAs a reaction to war and depression, there was also a hunger for Normality...and what could be more normal than a family with kids and dog?
Very interesting, thanks for sharing a nice find.
ReplyDeleteDavid, the part I found fascinating was the idea that the Baby Boom was not really a post-WWII phenomenon, nor is the gradual reduction in number of children in developed countries, but both, though in temporarily contradiction to each other, are both part of longer secular trends. Not what I expected at all.
ReplyDeleteWhat we think are our decisions are sometimes just stories we tell ourselves later because we like stories, I suppose.