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My Plan to End the Birth Dearth
I have been worrying, like everyone, about the Birth Dearth. How women just aren’t having children the way they did back in the bad old days of the Patriarchy.
But then I had a Brain Wave. Experts agree that used to happen to FDR’s Brain Trust back in the day. Pity it didn’t fix the Great Depression…
Back in the day it occurred to me, as a Sailer-approved Noticer, that a hundred years ago the rich were fat and the poor were thin. Today the opposite is true.
I once mentioned this little joke to a nice liberal lady, wife of the first communiity college president in Massachusetts, and she was not amused.
So it must be true.
I don’t know if you have Noticed that back in the day, poor women worked and rich women did not.
But today, poor women are on welfare and rich, educated women all have fabulous careers. Darling.
The poor women have all the babies they want, because welfare pays them all they need. But the rich educated women do not have many babies. They have more important things to do, like making universities “safe” and implementing DEI in corporations and reciting liberal anthems at mostly peaceful protests.
So My Plan is to end welfare as we know it and gently encourage poor women to get a job. This will prompt all the rich, educated women to decide that the better, evolved form of life is to bear children and raise them to perfection. Because working for wages and salaries is so déclassé, darling.
Do you think it would work?
All I can say is: nobody has come up with a Better Plan.
The thing is that women all go with the program. You could say, pejoratively, that they are slaves to Fashion. But I think it is deeper than that. Women go with the program — the “common knowledge” of the other women in the community — because that is the way, down the ages, to keep themselves alive and their children alive.
Right now the program for women in the educated class is careers. Don’t ask me how it got started, because I don’t know. But today all the women go to college and all the womenwant a career.
But high-status women could just as easily decide that careers are déclassé and start a movement back into the home. They might all get together and set up bespoke micro-schools for their children to attend. The whole point would be to differentiate their special micro-school from the ordinary middle-class-mom home-schooling culture. Needless to day, your kid would not be welcome at the custom micro-school.
I don’t know how to get this started because, even though I have studied women all my adult life I still don’t understand what makes them tick.
Whaddya think, Baldrick? Is this a Cunning Plan, or what?
| perm | 02/17/26 10:55 pm ET | comments |
The Modern Birth Dearth
Experts agree that the current low birth rates in the developed world are a problem. Almost all developed countries have a birth rate less than the population replacement level of 2.1 children per couple.
South Korea is the worst, with a current birth rate of about 0.75 children per couple. If you ask Grok it mumbles about:
High cost of housing and children
Work culture
Gender inequality and patriarchy
Job market pressures
Tiger moms directing kids’ eduction
But I suspect that the problem is the hegemonic dominance of politics and government in modern society. In other words, the educated class. But what do I know?
I’m reading The Origin of Politics by Nicholas Wade. It’s the fourth book in which Wade — for 30 years a New York Times writer and editor — has gone against the narrative.
The Origin of Politics is not so much about political origins as a discussion of the conflict between politics and culture, understanding culture as a combination of biological programming and social evolution.
However, there is a school of “social constructionism” in lefty social science circles that argues that “all human behaviors are cultural” and forget genetics.
Yes, and Wade got into a lot of trouble over A Troublesome Inheritance where he argued for evolution and genes and got pushback from the scientists.
Mind you, back in 1982 Wade wrote with William J. Broad the book Betrayers of the Truth in which they discuss historical and contemporary examples of scientific fraud.
But what struck me in The Origin of Politics was this statement about the left:
The idea of inherited human nature is also opposed by many on the left. A fixed set of behavior would stand in the way of their ideas for reforming society. Marx and Engels proposed to abolish the family as the basic unit of all human societies. Their followers have sought to eliminate the hated patriarchy of the father and to divert people’s allegience form the family to the state.
You can see the point of the dustup. The whole point of the left is that “we” are going to execute a “fundamental transformation” of society — in the memorable words of President Barack Obama. What is stopping us is injustice and inequality. And the family, and patriarchy, and capitalism, and billionaires, and racist-sexist-homophobes.
But if human society is basically formed as a net consequence of genes and social and cultural evolution then there is very little for lefty politicians and activists — and government funded scientists — to do. And that must be wrong!
Do you see how this explains our lefty friends? How it explains the whole gender thing? How it explains the lefty feminist movement?
If you have Plans for society you are not going to believe that society evolves, and that some adaptations will work, and some adaptations will not work. You fill the streets with devoted activists and demand Change.
Why does one adaptation work and another adaptation not work? Good question. What social change resulted in the South Korean birth-rate of 0.75? Obviously, in the long term it does not matter, because the way things are going there won’t be a South Korea in a century from now.
Is monogamy a good idea? The Romans started it and the Jews and Christians picked it up.
Is contraception a good idea? Abortion? Divorce on demand? Good question.
Is careers for women a good idea? Women in administrative hierarchies a good idea? Good question.
Is normalization of homosexuality and transgenderism a good idea? Good question.
Is capitalism a good idea? Good question.
Is government welfare a good idea? It seems to have destroyed work and marriage in the lower classes.
And on and on. In the present age we are taught that conscious direction of traffic from the educated elite and from scientists is a Good Thing. But is it?
The fact is that humans are born, live and die; families come and go, political entities come and go, empires come and go. Species come and go; genuses come and go. And nobody knows what comes next.
But we sure would like to know, and we sure like to think that we know how the world works. And the solar system, and the galaxy, and the universe.
And yes: is the universe all there is?
Meanwhile what are we going to do about births at less than replacement?
| perm | 02/17/26 1:19 am ET | comments |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Laffer: the more you redistribute, the greater will be the drop in total income.
When people start to feel the heat, that is when they start to cheat.
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: The Reality of Policing
