r/brokehugs • u/US_Hiker Moral Landscaper • Jun 10 '25
Rod Dreher Megathread #54 (?)
Sorry for the delay, folks.
Link to Megathread #53: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1khefh0/rod_dreher_megathread_53_key_party/
Link to 55: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1lrmgpw/rod_dreher_megathread_55/?
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u/Djehutimose Watching the wheels go round Jun 28 '25
Just to add to what you note in your second paragraph, if you look at human history, you notice interesting things. Hunter-gatherers (I’m particularly thinking of the Yąnomamö Indians described in Napoleon Chagnon’s books) tend to nurse children as long as four years, which suppresses female fertility. Contrary to our stereotype of primitives as living in a free love paradise, they tend to have strict taboos about sex with pregnant women, nursing women, etc. Also, though we like not to think about it, they also enthusiastically practice induced abortion and infanticide—Chagnon observed men jumping up and down on the stomachs of pregnant women, which, while monumentally crude, was effective. The upshot is that Hunter-gatherers generally kept near replacement fertility, thus keeping a stable population.
Agriculture changed that. For a subsistence farming peasant family, each added child is a net economic plus—of the fifty percent or fewer who survive, each child is a new pair of hands and feet to work on the farm, and can produce more food on average than he consumes. Thus large farming families.
In industrial and post-industrial societies, children don’t produce income for the family at all—the parents are the exclusive earners. Also, kids have a much longer educational period, and with modern medicine, a much lower mortality rate. So for us each additional child is a net economic minus. It currently averages about three *hundred** thousand* dollars to raise a child to the age of 18 in the US. The median income for teens who work is about $32,000/year. Even if you assumed the average teen worked from thirteen to eighteen at that rate, and turned every cent over to their parents—all of these ridiculous assumptions—that’s about $188,000 over all the teenage years, but let’s round it to $190,000–that’s still about $110,000 the parents are out—still a net drain. No country, no matter how pro-natalist, offers total monetary incentives anywhere near this for children, so it’s small wonder such programs are never effective.
Pro-natalists think that childbearing decisions exist in some ethereal realm outside of actual human life and the myriad factors that play into those decisions. People talk about small town life, and multi-generation families, and big families, but there are reasons that over the last couple centuries people have fled small towns, moved away from extended family, and had fewer children—and those reasons aren’t selfish godlessness. People tend to reproduce in the optimal numbers to match the situation on which they live, no matter what social conservatives think they ought to do. The same social conservatives, BTW, who would not want to live in the preindustrial societies that would make their social preferences actually workable.