Mads Larsen
Appearances
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, no, I mean, we will get there. South Korea, the government there is pretty clear. They said not too long ago that this is the point of no return. If we don't get the fertility rate up now, we're going to disappear. We're not there yet. This is a process. Finland is a little bit ahead of Norway. A colleague of mine, she's been running the debate there for three years.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And three years ago, they had the same anger and the... attacks on people who said that this was a really serious problem. But after a process of a few years, the population and politicians have gotten to where they're now taking this seriously, and they're going to start experimenting to see what they can do. And also here in Norway, the politicians are beginning to take this seriously.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Strangely, they're taking it more seriously than the researchers that have the data and work on this. So we just established a national birth rate committee. that will study this and see what kind of solutions they may suggest. I don't have too high hopes to anything substantial coming from there.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
They're probably going to try to throw a little money on the problem when we know from other countries that that doesn't work. Giving money to parents to have children, it doesn't have an effect that... In those instances, there are certain ways you can boost the numbers a little bit, but then suddenly you're paying a million dollars or $2 million per extra child. So it's just not feasible.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But the researchers that are doing this And those that are working on it in the government, they have what I think at least are misplaced fairs. I was in a debate last week with someone from the birthright committee and someone from the Ministry of Finance. And the woman from the Ministry of Finance started by showing the audience a kind of frivolous,
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
She was showing that having more children would be negative for the national economy because in Norway we are a very generous welfare state and we have oil money. every group in the population is a net negative. So she was making that kind of jokingly saying, well, at least children aren't profitable for us.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And then later in the debate, because I was so curious, and I've been curious for so long, why they're not portraying this with the seriousness that it requires. They all have this attitude that, okay, let's talk about it, but not negatively. And then when I pushed her on it and I asked her questions,
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We are born into this environment with a certain nature and that plays out differently in different environments. And now we've created an environment where it has become very difficult for women to find partners.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Just to amuse me, could you say, could you confirm to the audience that 1.4 means that we lose a third of the generation? And she did that. She finally did that. Yes, that is true. But you can't portray this so negatively because then you will empower the political forces on the right.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So there's this belief that if we talk about low fertility, there are going to be these people on the right that will deprive women of their reproductive rights and we will be taken back to the dark ages. And at least in Norway, the risk of that is infinitesimally small. Even our right-wing party are, from an international perspective, feminist social democrats. So I don't think...
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I don't think us having this discussion and taking things seriously is going to turn us into the handmaid's tale. But this is a common assumption. Also, some of them, they're afraid that they will be perceived as racist, that if we are concerned about Western countries having low fertility, that would be inappropriate because there are so many people in Africa.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So they have all these strange fears.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I wouldn't take the content that seriously. This is the beginning of a debate that is very confusing. And at that phase of the debate, personal attacks, anger, those kind of accusations tend to be quite common. So over the last months, I've been called a misogynist, a fascist, because
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
because I bring up this problem, people assume I want the government to force women to have sex with and have children with incels. Those accusations of racism or wanting to empower the far right, it's just the confusing beginning face of a really important debate, and that will only last for so long.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Once people work their way through that and throw out those accusations, I don't know if they're that serious when they accuse people of being racist.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, we are the first societies in human history that have individual partner choice. No other society have done that before. It's always been different extents of various degrees of arranged marriage. So when we opened this up in the 1960s, we talked about this last year, how the six million year build up to the today's mating regime.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, people are people and in the cultural moment that we live now, those kind of accusations are the weapons available. So when I presented my research for the Norwegian Fertility Institute a few weeks ago, They had been so amazed at how I, this summer, had been able to elevate this debate about low fertility to the national level and trigger a really fiery debate on it.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
They had tried to do that for years, but they weren't successful. The reason why they weren't successful is because they didn't portray this as the problem that is as serious as it is. while I said that this was an existential threat and that we need to look at how mating markets work, why is modern dating so dysfunctional?
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And then I described using the evolutionary sciences, what it is about female and male mating psychology that in our current environment creates a stratification that contributes to single them that then results in low fertility. So the way I see this, there's There's several bottlenecks in the pipeline between being single and having a child.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And then I describe the different hindrances along that pipeline. And of course, especially in a culture like the Norwegian one, a very social democratic culture, the evolutionary sciences are not broadly embraced, to say it mildly.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, and when we published the Insing article in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, one of the newspaper commentators referred to this as the online publication, the Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences. So yeah, it's been strange, and also the attacks of, I would say, over the last few weeks, people in...
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Newspaper commentators, experts, even the leader of the birth rate committee have disproven my positions, about 10 or 20 of them. But the weird part is when they write these articles to disprove my positions, not a single time have they argued against the position I actually have. It's been exclusively strawman. which is a little bit predictable too, and it's okay.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And when we open these mating markets up, what has happened is actually quite predictable as a consequence of the difference between women's promiscuous attraction system and pair bonding attraction systems. And the regular fertility researchers do not understand these mechanisms. For everyone, it's just a big puzzle while we're no longer partnering up and creating children.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I just want this debate to get started, and now it has started. And if that means that I have to just endure all those weird attacks and personal attacks and being discredited, well, hopefully I'll be able to be in this for the long haul, and I hope to contribute more productively with time. But right now the debate is going, and for that I'm thankful.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah. So let's line this up along these bottlenecks that I talked about. So I like to view this as something that happens in three steps. First, you have to be able to find a partner. You have to date, you have to find someone, you have to agree that you're a couple. And that has become increasingly challenging. The next step is that you have to decide to have children.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And there, there are different hindrances. And then you have to be able to make one. Now, the latter one, it's not, It seems not to be that big of a deal. As you're aware, sperm quality has decreased 40% among men. But according to the experts, it's still more than good enough for making children. So it's not that we're not able to.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Now, then there are some problems for women because they postpone having children, but women, their fecundity has not decreased in all likelihood at the earlier ages. So the latter bottleneck seems not to be a real issue.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But from an evolutionary perspective, it's quite predictable.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, absolutely. But the issue is that there hasn't been changes in fecundity. Fecundity seems to be the same or better than before. So it's not that we're not able to have children, but yeah, when women start very late, then it becomes more problematic. But that is not more problematic than it used to be. It's just that women are starting later.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So then we have to look at the world. So we're in the world where birth rates, where people are still reproducing and growing, are in countries where female equality is not a very high value. And this is an important factor. This is a result of the empowerment and liberation and equality afforded to women in the process that has been ongoing in the West Sin for like 800 years.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And here it's very important for me to state that I am an enormous supporter of equality for women. I am such a big supporter of that, that I would like also women in the future to have the same rights and opportunities that women have today. If we continue down the path we are now and just self-eradicate, those populations that are left are not champions of women's freedoms.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, as we talked about the last time, six million years ago with our last common ancestor with chimpanzees, we made it promiscuously, which is what most animals do. So there, women or females are incentivized to be very choosy.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So when we go into this and we talk about what has happened with women over the past, say, particularly 150 years, that explains... much of the first bottleneck. But describing these mechanisms and this process doesn't mean that I'm against it. I'm just describing these are the mechanisms that are at play. This is how human nature plays out in certain environments.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And I wish it wasn't that way, but it really seems to be that way. So this is what I will be describing. So what we talked about last year is that Our lineage over the, yeah, it's interesting to look at the last 6 million years. We became a pair bonding species around 4 million years ago.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And women only evolved an attraction to men that motivated sufficient pair bonding and reproduction in really impoverished environments. So men, as we talked about, because their promiscuous attraction system is so generous, they're a lot more willing to have sex with women and engage with women than what, or a lot, many different kinds of women than what women are. So if
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
A man activates her pair bonding attraction system. That can be a man with similar mate value as she has. They fall in love, they have sex, they have a child. But if you have an environment like you have now that appeals predominantly to, or to a great extent to the promiscuous attraction system, which is what Tinder does, et cetera, then women will be a lot more selective.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So we have a few things that have happened here. Women have been empowered to have their own jobs, make their own money, be free, and importantly, to choose their own partners for the first time in human history. The result of that has been that the better women are doing, the more they exclude the lowest value men from their potential pool of partners.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, I tried to get my country of Norway to start taking the fertility crisis seriously. And as we've seen in many nations, people are unwilling to do that. And yeah, that motivated some attacks along that way.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And with prosperity and with a promiscuous mating regime like we have now, or that is a lot more promiscuous than before, Female mating psychology seems... to channel the attention to higher value men to avoid the deception of similar value men. That's something that happens when there's high promiscuity.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
While lower value men in an environment like we have today, even though they are receiving less mating attraction and having less opportunities and we see their number of sex partners going down, they will have increased expectations of promiscuity. So you get more and more dysfunction the further away from this third sexual revolution of the 1960s we get. This is only getting worse.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
They're supposed to give mating opportunities predominantly to the most successful males because that is the most effective way of distributing beneficial genes to the population. So... And then because of the development of our speeches around four million years ago, we evolved a different attraction system, pair bonding attraction system.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So the problem with creating relationships now, and this has been something that's been in the debate in Norway to an enormous extent, what very many women have said in this debate, I don't know how representative it is, but their main talking point is that men aren't good enough. And if men do not become better, women simply don't want to partner with them and certainly not have children.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
It's quite predictable. Women, of course, because of our evolutionary past, they have a lower desire for partner variety, while men, because... by having permissive sex, they would leave a larger genetic legacy. They have a higher desire for partner. So one study showed that Norwegian women want five lifetime sex partners and Norwegian men want 25. So this is a question of how markets work.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
When you have a high demand of female sexuality and a low supply, women will have the power on the short-term mating market. So as we know, if you as a woman go on Tinder now, you will get access to thousands and tens of thousands of men, and you will have men that have much higher mate value give you a lot of attention and try really hard to get a date with you and then get you to bed.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So when you have that kind of enormous choice, that kind of power, it's very natural that you increase your standards. Now, if women understood better, and I do understand it, many understand it very well, and some understand it to some extent, but this isn't a cultural script that we're raised with. We're not offered this information when we grow up.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
It's just not a part of our culture because this mating regime is so new, but it's a big difference between a short and long-term mating market. So if many women confuse the power they have on the short-term mating market, with the long-term mating market where men and women are more equal.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So their experiences on the short-term mating market motivates women to increase their partner demands, which they can do on the short-term mating market. There's no limits to how many attractive men they can have there. But if they want a boyfriend, then they have to go on dates with men that have similar mating value with them because in a monogamous regime, our species mates sortatively.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
People with similar value find each other. And this makes it harder and harder for women to find partners. And the funny thing in the debate that's been in Norway is that so many said that, oh my God, those men need to stop telling women to lower their standards. The problem isn't that we have high demands and then they go and list 10 things that men have to do to get better.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So this environment that we live in now, it just motivates women to, number one, they don't need men anymore. They used to need men. And those emotions, that attraction women have for men evolved in a much more impoverished environment where having a man could be of existential importance. And now they don't need them. Women can have wonderful lives without men. For many women,
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And that's more, say, egalitarian, because then you want paternal investment from the male, and then a woman will typically then pair bond with a male of similar partner value. So you have in a promiscuous system mating opportunities going mostly to the most attractive males. And in a pair bonding attraction system, it spreads more evenly. But we didn't become a pure pair bonding species.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
The type of men that they would have access to simply isn't good enough to justify not longer being single. And on an individual level, that is perfectly fine and I support it 100%. So what women are doing on the short and long-term mating market, I have no issue on that. As individuals, I lay no blame. But our society will disappear if we don't do anything about this.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And the thing is, this is a brand new system that no human community has succeeded with. We've been doing this for 50 years. And these processes, these changing between different mating regimes, typically can take centuries. Some of them, the older ones, took much longer even. So that we, after 50 years, haven't found a way to reconcile individual and social needs, it's no wonder.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But now that we see the effect that our inability to find partners It leads to self-eradication. We need to talk about it. We need to agree that this is a problem and that it's an existential problem.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And we have to start experimenting, not by forcing women to marry incels, but to try to find if we can create new dating arenas, if we can increase the knowledge around this, if we can change people's approach to dating and mating. then I am naively positive. I mean, I've studied human or hominin mating over 6 million years.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, it started with an article that me and Lev Kinnear, a professor in evolutionary psychology, wrote earlier this year where we conceptualized and theorized the concept of involuntary single women in things. And then I did some interviews about that and people weren't happy.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We face tremendous challenges and our ancestors solved every single one of them. And the 21st century's reproductive crisis, it's not the biggest one. I think we can make changes. And these fertility researchers that I've talked with, they don't have much of an historical perspective. They look at today and they see this is a problem. They don't understand why it's happening.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And then they give up. And a lot of them say, we just need to embrace low fertility. We've solved problems like this so many times. Yeah, go ahead.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Because it's relative. I mean, men are men and women are women. Going out and saying to men, you have to get better. I mean, who would go out and say Somalis need to get better or people with Down syndrome have to get better? We don't talk like that to groups. We don't say they're not good enough and tell them to better themselves. One, because it's inhumane, and two, it doesn't work.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
You can't tell groups to pull themselves together. So yeah, maybe men have gotten worse and worse. Maybe women have gotten better and better. But I think it's more, it's... It's a change in that women, we had patriarchal societies where women were subservient and dependent on men. If they didn't find a partner, they would be sanctioned socially hard. They would live in poverty many times.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So now that we've created these wonderful new societies, that innate biological attraction that women had to men that motivated sufficient reproduction in the past, it's no longer strong enough. Life is too good. And given that, we have to look for new solutions.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We have a mixed system. We both have a promiscuous attraction system and a pair bonding attraction system. And for every human community that has existed, a fundamental challenge has been how to reconcile women's different preferences according to those attraction systems in a way that allows functional mating. Now, men are different. Their promiscuous attraction system is very inclusive.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, these lists that Dev has spread, they're not terribly insightful or helpful, I think, but it reflects the experiences that women have had with men. Don't be so interested in hunting and fishing and cars. Don't talk about yourself. Give me the right emotional support. Don't brag about things. It's this minutia that they say that men in general suffer from. And it's not men in general.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
There's a normal distribution among men. You have a few men at the top that are phenomenal and a few men at the bottom that are terrible. And then you have just a bunch of normal guys. And women are right. In today's environment, men aren't good enough for women. But then we have to ask, what are we going to do about that?
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And I don't know a single person, I don't even know if I've met a single person who wants to go back to the dark ages and put women under the boot of the patriarchy. But if we really love female freedoms as highly as many proclaim, and I certainly do,
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
then we owe ourselves to start experimenting and trying new things to see if we can have societies that exist in the future where women also are free. I mean, the stakes couldn't be higher. So this misplaced fear that if we talk about low fertility, women will suddenly live in oppressive patriarchies the day after tomorrow or 10 years down the line or 50 years down the line.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Most men would sleep with most women, while most women would sleep only with a small proportion of men. So What happened when we tried to introduce this system for the first time with the second sex revolution in the 18th century, things went very poorly because we didn't have contraceptives and we were so poor that breaking up was very hard and women weren't independent.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I mean, I understand the fear because nobody wants to go back. Women don't want to be unfree again. But what I've done in my research and in other projects also, I've studied the cultural changes over the last thousand years to see what is it that made modernity emerge. And we never go backwards.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We have these really deep cultural changes intermittently, and they're terrible, and we're living through one now. And in those cases, we have to start entertaining new thoughts, new norms and new values. And different communities should try different solutions based on what is salient to them, based on their cultural legacy. And I think Norway is in a unique position here.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We've been spearheading new gender relations for 150 years. We've been in the forefront of female equality. And in Scandinavia, we have really good culture for this. We have cohesive populations. We have a lively national debate. We're willing to find and experiment with new things and find solutions. And I think we can do it here also.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And I think all nations should do that, build on their cultural legacies and try new things. I mean, in Norway, it would be so anathema. I think the risk of us going back to the dark ages is very small, but I'd be willing to suggest a suicide pact on this. I mean, we're stirring towards self-eradication. Let's just agree, and I understand women's fear of this, so let's agree.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Female freedoms at the level of 2024 can never be threatened. Let's have that as our starting point. Let's experiment with new ways of dating and mating, but never ever anything that would involve jeopardizing women's freedoms. And if those means that we come up with aren't able to help us increase fertility, Then we'll die together. We'll disappear. We'll just dwindle until there's no one left.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And that will be the Norwegian way. And then I'm sure some other countries in the world will experiment with more handmaid's tale-like means for raising fertility, but that won't be us. And that is the key to success. We have all these different communities, all these different cultural legacies that make different means salient to us. We need to start experimenting.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We need to do something because we're all disappearing in this part of the world.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
They were dependent on men. So you had a very high rise in illegitimacy because women competed for the most attractive males. And when they became pregnant, a lot of the time the man just moved on, which wasn't allowed a century earlier. So then we had a pullback with romanticism and we went back to, we connected copulation to pair bonding again.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But then in the 1960s with birth control and post-World War II prosperity, we were able to implement this system. And then because of this gap between women's promiscuous and pair bonding attraction systems,
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, we don't tell. It's certainly not in Scandinavia. That's not what we tell poor people. Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps. That's more of an American strategy. But what you said about the insult term is very interesting. Unfortunately, that coin was termed, or at least it spread into the mainstream with these terrorist attacks of the 2010s.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And what this has caused, it's very unfortunate. I mean, incels, it's arguably the most or one of the most marginalized groups in society. On some level, it is the most marginalized group. These are men that are being deprived of life opportunities. You're just suffering in solitaire.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And I wrote one op-ed in Norway where I said, there's a reason why you don't know the name of a single Norwegian incel. I speak up about these matters and I'm in a position to endure the hatred and the attacks that come and they have become increasingly grave. Could you imagine what happened if a regular guy, an incel, spoke up and said, I have never had any mating opportunities.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
we've seen an increasing stratification among men, where some men at the top get an increasing amount of mating opportunities, and then while men at the bottom are being excluded from mating, both long-term and short-term. That means relationships and uncommitted sex, respectively.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Let me tell you how this destroys my life. First, he wouldn't be met with compassion. He'd be villainized. He'd be seen as a misogynist and a potential terrorist. So we've created the culture where these men that are the most marginalized, and you could say oppressed, aren't even allowed to speak up about how terrible their lives have become.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So we don't hear anyone bear witness to this marginalization. Women spoke up loudly and proudly about what the patriarchy were doing to them, and they succeeded with liberating themselves from that. It's very difficult to see in the short to mid-range how these men can be a part of the public conversation because the costs that we impose on them are so enormous.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And to that other thing you said about how can we raise up men, well, that's what you could call one of the Scandinavian paradoxes. In raising up women, as I again, I think that I mentioned to you last year, the Norwegian welfare state, men pay more into it in taxes than they receive from it. Women receive more than $1.2 million from the welfare state over their lifetime than they pay in taxes.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And $1.2 million, that's still pretty good money. And I think that is one of the linchpins of our society. The reason why Norway, according to the UN, almost every year is the best society living in the world is precisely because we transfer these resources from men to women. And there's a variety of reasons why that creates a better society.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But then a negative aspect of that is that men lose these resources and women gain them, which is good for society, good for the women and the children they bear. But it makes men relatively less attractive because, number one, women, to a much lesser extent, need the resources of a partner. And men have lost these resources that in previous times would make them more attractive to women.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And that's a very bad externality. So we created perhaps the greatest society in human history. And because of the way we did that, we're now striving towards self-eradication because we created a society where men actually aren't good enough to entice women's attraction systems so that women want to have sex with them and pair bond with them and have children with them. And that is unfortunate.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And like you said, that is a spaghetti.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And if people can't find somebody to partner with, if they can't pair bomb, it's just much less likely that they will reproduce. So as the single rate has skyrocketed over the past four or five decades, you also see an increase in low fertility.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, so that has to do about culture and ideology. This is what we covered the last time over an hour. And I recently published a book called Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder, where I take the reader through a 800-year journey of Western ideologies of love to show how we ended up where we are today and how that explains our dating dysfunction and the demographic collapse.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So we now live in a world with the mating ideology that's called confluent love. Confluence means to come together. So we're supposed to come together and as long as that's beneficial, we're supposed to stay together. When it's not, move on. So we have serial pair bonding interspersed with opportunistic short-term relationships.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So we sleep around when we're single and preferably not when we're hitched up and then relationships last for as long as they last. And the values of this mating regime is, convenience, reward, and individualistic self-realization. So we're supposed to do whatever works for us as individuals. And to modern ideology, that makes a lot of sense.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And we wanted to do that for a good while, but we weren't prosperous enough. But now we are, and now we've implemented this regime symbolically from 1968.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Before that, to give an example of another ideology of love, from the early 1800s until 1986, we had the ideology of romantic love, where cultures imposed on people, they indoctrinated them, acculturated them, socialized them, however you want to put it. into thinking that a man and a woman, as individuals, they're only half a person.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So you're supposed to find that other soul that matches yours, and then you're supposed to merge in a pair bond, underpinned by very strong, true love. And this love lasts a lifetime. And then you self-realize as a couple through the breadwinner-housewife model.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So from our perspective, that sounds a little bit silly, but imposing those beliefs on people pushed them together and made them have children to a sufficient extent. Well, you could say maybe to a too high extent because the population growth during that period was enormous. So
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
In that second bottle, when it comes to having children, in earlier times, in all earlier times, I'm sure there were exceptions here and there, but maybe those weren't too functional. Societies imposed on people that they had to pair bond and have children. If not, you would be sanctioned, ostracized, or maybe you'd be a monk or go to war or work the fields. And we don't do that anymore.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And we only... Here's an important part, contraception. We didn't evolve to have this incredible desire to be parents. We have a desire for it, but as we see now, it's not strong enough for our current environment. Evolution works in a way that it implants proxies for you're sexually attracted to someone. You do these things, and then in some, it leads to sufficient reproduction.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But now that we've detached copulation from reproduction through effective contraceptives, those adaptations that we evolved from the previous mating regimes don't work as well. And we also have this ideology where having children has become quite voluntary. I mean, there's still some pressure, but you'll do fine without. In some milieus, it's even seen as heroic not to have children.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
You have environmentalists that think having children is wrong. You have all kinds of different antinatalist beliefs. And this reduces the pressure that in previous times pushed people toward reproduction. So that's when people do manage to pair bond and they have to decide where their children are.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
You have those ideological differences from earlier times and then you have other environmental pressures such as the costliness of having children, the difficulties, the time pressure, etc. So you have all these factors that play in there and what politicians and fertility researchers are drawn to are those more mundane environmental factors. So Norway probably has the best
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
social regime in the world for having children. We give incredible benefits to parents and children. There's probably never existed an environment in the history of humanity where it's more beneficial to have children than in Norway, and still we're not doing it. So what this birth rate committee is probably going to do is suggest we throw another $100 there, another $1,000 there.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But we know from research that that's not going to work. So if we're going to work on this second bottleneck, It's about cultural change and evolving towards a new ideology of love. And that sounds very inappropriate for modern minds. We're supposed to leave individuals alone. A lot of people have said in the debate in Norway that it's inappropriate for politicians to engage.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But I mean, if we're staring towards self-eradication, nothing is more important than the question of existence versus non-existence. So we really should be open to experimenting and trying to question even our most sacred values.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, so in Norway, the fertility rate is 1.4. And experts haven't wanted to portray this negatively. They've said that, well, it's low, but the population is going to continue to increase. And people have an impression that centuries ahead, this will have drastic consequences. But the fact is that with a fertility rate of 1.4, you lose one third of your generational size per generation.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, we don't know. That is the thing about this. Experts actually do not know what the precise factors are that have created the situation. They don't understand why people aren't... They know that urbanization is a factor, individualization, but how they play in, how much they affect things, it's still a puzzle. And especially, what of these factors could be amenable to policy?
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
What is it we have to do? What kind of society do we have to move towards to make people again having children? It's been very under-researched. That is among other things. I'm part of a group of researchers that are applying for funds now, and we want to actually find this out. We want to study female and male mating reproductive psychology.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
and see what are the actual factors, not what people say are the factors, but through longitudinal studies to uncover what the actual elements are that motivate or demotivate reproduction. And especially within evolutionary psychology, this has been so under-researched over the last few decades.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
There's been so many valuable contributions on dating and relationships and parental investment, partner preferences, sex, Everything within mating except its ultimate function, which is to reproduce. That's been enormously under-researched, which is puzzling. And now it's become existentially important to understand these mechanisms.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So in only three generations, we will have lost 70% of the children. And that is if we in Norway are able to keep a fertility rate of 1.4. The leading experts in this field predict that the rates will just continue to decline as they have for a long time now. Not so long in Norway, but in other nations.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, that's why the leading researchers believe that this unfortunately is a self-reinforcing process. Like I mentioned, Norwegian women want to have 2.4 children, but they have 1.4. Now, Now that it's fell to 1.4, the next generation will probably want to have quite a bit fewer than 2.4. And we've seen this through the generations. So we're not able to fulfill our fertility ideals.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And this puts us in a spiral that just entails us as society circling the drain until there's no one left, unless we're able to turn this around.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, no, that's why I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation how unfortunate it is that the main Norwegian researchers on this, they're just waiting for women around 40 to have an unprecedented number of baby because... I mean, the leading international experts are pretty uniform. They don't all agree, but they're pretty uniform. This isn't turning around.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
They say that it's more likely that it continues to decline than that it tapers off or goes up again. So if we don't turn this around, likely it will only get worse. And this circling of the drain is just going to go faster and faster until our societies collapse.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, that was the commentator in Norway's biggest newspaper. She thought 1.4 was just... A number that captured the moment. And she also, so she talked to these experts and they said, yeah, I know Norwegian women will start having babies soon in their 40s. So this is going to go up again.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
They felt that talking about involuntary single women was misogynistic and they didn't want to connect that to declining fertility.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So yeah, she actually wrote that the best thing we can do to increase the fertility rate is to resign and relax. And if we do that, we disappear.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, and I'm grateful that they chime in. I haven't responded to almost any of them. I'm just glad that people are participating in this debate. And if they want to smear men or want to attack my credentials or my intentions or call me a fascist, that's just how these debates work. And hopefully, this is the first phase of the debate.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
It seems to be a self-reinforcing process where as people get used to there being fewer children, even though they want more, for each generation, people want less children.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And then if we're able to get past it, we can agree that this is an existential challenge. And after that, we can start talking about experiments and then executing them. And maybe we can have more research on this and And we can have a national movement to try to turn this around. Like I said, I think specialists getting Navy nations are... best situated nations for doing something about this.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We should spearhead this. We should be in the forefront. We're so rich and wealthy and we have such good national conversations and we're so far ahead in general. We've been doing this for so long. Why can't we cease? This is the biggest problem we've faced, at least in a very long time. Let's try to solve it. Let's not resign and give up.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, there too, I am very understanding. I was working at a center of environmentalists and they need to have their profile. And I respect that. And when they found out that I was going to research declining populations from a negative perspective, they didn't want to have anything to do with it. But I found a different university that I'm applying for research funds from. So I'm okay.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But well, it's... People don't understand that 1.4 means that our societies will disappear. They don't see the problems with it, and they don't see how this can work against solving the climate crisis. Collapsing societies aren't going to develop new technology. They're not going to be cooperative. They're probably not going to recycle too much either.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So if our fertility rate keeps falling, for instance, down to South Korea's level of 0.7, then in three generations, 100 people in generational sizes reduced to just four, and in the next generation, one, which means countries will be empty. And that is a very real existential threat. that experts and populations have not so far wanted to take seriously.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I mean, we want functioning societies, stable functioning societies for the next generation so we can fix the climate crisis. And this is a new situation. Before this summer, there had been maybe one or two op-eds a year in leading newspapers where people said that we'll be fine, 1.4 isn't a big of a deal.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And one op-ed wrote that this for sure won't be as bad as the Black Death, so we'll be okay, which is a pretty little bar. So yeah, I... I understand. And yeah, especially for environmentalists, it's hard to wrap your head around how a declining population could be a negative thing. So I try to be understanding, but yeah, it wasn't too cool, but I'll be okay.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
That's what I tried earlier this year by spurring this debate in Norway. People weren't ready for it, but it is moving along and people are contributing. With time, I think people will accept that this is an existential threat, perhaps the greatest challenge of our era. Then we perhaps can start experimenting with ways to find a way to motivate people to reproduce again.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah. No, you asked her earlier if I saw myself as some kind of firebrand. I... I wish I wasn't an imposition. I want to jump over these next two phases and jump to the one where we start researching this and conducting experiments and try to turn things around.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I don't enjoy being the object of hatred and derision and having... Well, if at least they attacked something that was actually my position, but so far it's been exclusively straw man. And of course it's tiresome. It sucks my... My department lied to a newspaper that I was no longer connected to them. I have a contract out the air and they just didn't want to be associated with me.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
The reason why I'm sitting here is because my university would no longer let me use the podcast studio, which are just bizarre. I'm like, just what is this? It's so odd. That's how these things work. Yeah, I was at a dinner a couple of weeks ago with a member of the birthright committee, a very reasonable person. And he said they haven't been able to create debate about this.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And this summer I was able to do that. And that noise will help them. So now we're working through that phase where people are just arguing and bickering and saying this isn't a problem. And hopefully... We can get to the point where we can have a recent discussion about this, and that's when the birthright committee will put forward their findings, however useful or unuseful they are.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I don't know. We'll have to see. But then after that, something else will come. I mean, this isn't a one-year conversation. We're going to be talking about this for generations unless we're able to turn this around, let's recircle the drain.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I mean, it's going to become more and more apparent how devastating, how disastrous the consequences will be of losing a third of your generation or two thirds of your generational size per generations. This discussion is not over. It has just started. And thank you for pushing this and not just inviting me, but so many others to talk about this.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
You're one of those who really are spearheading this in the international marketplace of ideas, and that's really valuable.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah. No, I mean, send an enemy at us. Yes. We're immediately going to know exactly what to do. Our neighbor comes, go to war against us. We're going to band together. We're going to forget all the bickering and we're going to unite and we're going to do our best to survive and beat them and murder them and win. That's in our nature. When we're now self-eradicating... We're just, what?
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We've had low fertility before, but we never had this kind of increasingly global phenomenon that just isn't stopping. It's just a continuing decline. So our cultural intuitions, our cultural legacies, we have almost nothing to build on. We have to think anew. We have to analyze and understand something that is really complex. And then we have to come up with completely novel solutions, probably.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And that is a hell of a challenge. We have very little to go on here. This is a brand new environment.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, maybe under the YouTube video, you can put a link to Stories of Love from Vacants to Tinder. It's open access, so it's free to download. If you want to see what I've published, you can go to my Google Scholar. Yeah, thank you. You can go to my Google Scholar page and just type in my name and you'll see my publications there. Also, ResearchGate is good. There are different ways to find it.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
It was a pleasure talking to you again.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, absolutely. A few weeks ago in Norway, we had this big controversy because up north, they had to shut down a school and people were very unhappy. If every generation, you lose a third of your generational size, there's going to be a lot of schools shut down. And then when they grow up, there won't be enough people to step into the jobs that exist.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Well, one of the main drivers of low fertility is that people are having too hard of a time to find partners. So women either do not find a partner with whom they can have children or they find one too late so that the reproductive window is shortened. So this means that women aren't having the children they would like to have.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And this, across time, will age the population drastically. You can imagine, look at a situation like South Korea's, where in three generations, you'll go from 100 to four people. Who's going to keep society running? You're just going to have a bunch of really, really old people. And this will also change cultural psychology. We've been very fortunate since World War II with a growing economy.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
When we start to have to fight, when we have negative growth or stall growth, we're going to be fighting over a shrinking pie. And our species tends to get quite unpleasant in those situations. Also, you would think this has some interesting connections on several levels with the climate crisis.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
One thing is that people assume that this will be a slow decrease and that having fewer people will be good for the climate. In a way... That is true. That is one factor. But if we're going to solve the climate crisis, we're going to have to make a lot of progress between now and say 2050 when we're supposed to reach net zero. And it's possible to do that.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
But if we have to channel more and more of our resources toward taking care of the elderly and we see societies start solely disintegrating and becoming, we'll have more and more ghost towns and the cultural psychology turns uncooperative, I don't think we're going to be able to make those technological steps to allocate those resources that we need in order to get there.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So I think solving the climate crisis and other challenges that we have in the decade ahead is just going to be a lot harder if we have collapsing population numbers. And also, because of the climate crisis, people are less willing to engage low fertility because they assume that it will be beneficial.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So some people are so used to the challenge of overpopulation, which we've talked about for generations, so that switching your mind and thinking about a brand new problem that goes against the previous concern, it's just really difficult. But if we don't have these discussions now, Things do not look good.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
In Norway, women would like to have 2.4 children and they're having 1.4. So a dysfunctional dating market is an important contributor to this fertility crisis.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
We're going to have to start experimenting and see what we can do soon because I'm pretty sure very few people would want to live in societies where there are less and less young people and where we eventually disappear. And that is where we're headed now. This isn't some temporary thing. This is a really large trend and experts think it will only get worse.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
So at some point, we have to take this seriously and see what we might be able to do about it.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Yeah, those are terrifying numbers and that we're not sounding the alarm and refusing to talk about it. It makes you feel like you're in that movie, Don't Look Up. I mean, the asteroid is heading straight for us, but out of misplaced concerns, political concerns, confusion, we're not willing to accept the facts the way they are. And I've experienced that in Norway over the past months.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
I've talked to quite a few of the leading experts and the people that research fertility, people that work on this in the government, and they all have this unified approach to this, that we can't portray this as a negative thing. This is what they research. This is all they do.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
And they are concerned, but they're afraid that if they tell people how serious this is, somehow the politicians won't take them seriously. They will think they're alarmist. This could affect their career and their funds. And they're hoping, like the current strategy among commentators in the media and among researchers,
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
is that somehow those children that weren't born when women were in their early 20s and late 20s and early 30s will now over the next 10 years be born when women are in their late 30s and early 40s. So there's no data that supports that this will happen, but the researchers are assuming that if we just wait
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
That is a bit of a puzzle that I think I have eventually managed to solve through going through this process. Many felt that if you bring the attention to how the dating market works for women, you are somehow blaming women for low fertility. And as an evolutionary scholar, I would never think of assigning blame to any groups.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
10 years, perhaps the fertility rate in best case scenario will go up to 1.7 because women around 40 will start having so many children that it really boosts the fertility rate. And that could happen.
Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
It's not impossible, but it's a really puzzling strategy after we waited now for 15 years while this has plummeted that we should wait 10 more years before we portray this negatively because the rate could go up over the next 10 years.