Modern Wisdom
#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates
Sat, 23 Nov 2024
Mads Larsen is a researcher who focuses on the history of human mating ideologies. The truth can be a tough pill to swallow, but when it comes to saving humanity, even the hardest truth is better than the softest lie. So why is Mads facing outrage for speaking a truth that could save a country? Expect to learn why Mads was canceled for talking about Norway's declining birth rates, the key reasons why people aren’t having more kids, the underlying psychology behind modern mating, the potential interventions to fix this and much more… Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get a 25% discount on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get a Free Gift, 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from AG1 at https://drinkag1.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get up to 80% off everything sitewide at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) Extra Stuff: Check out Mad's book: https://bit.ly/4fIfT8S Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: https://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: https://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: https://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - Get In Touch: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact - Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is Norway facing a fertility crisis?
How did all of this start?
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.
They felt that talking about involuntary single women was misogynistic and they didn't want to connect that to declining fertility.
What's the line between talking about involuntarily single women and misogyny?
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.
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.
Okay. And how's that misogynistic?
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.
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.
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Chapter 2: What are the misconceptions about involuntary single women?
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.
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.
It seems strange to me that somebody doing research into the literal future of the human species, forget the kind of projected future of the environment that the potential human progeny will inhabit, climate. This is the number of people that are going to be around in future. It seems odd to me that
When you're able to throw soup over a Van Gogh or glue yourself to the M25 in protest of big oil or whatever, and even the more sort of down-to-earth data science-y people, Hannah Ritchie from Our World in Data, who...
specializes in climate science being on the show you know she's she doesn't pull any punches when she's talking about the climate you know she's really and she's as sciencey and evidencey as it's possible to be seems odd to me that these researchers would think that they wouldn't be taken seriously if they gave what are to be honest much more easily verifiable pieces of data that will occur in a much shorter time about something that's a pretty big threat to human civilization
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 3: How does modern dating affect birth rates?
that bringing back a patriarchal or enforced monogamy style, socially enforced monogamy, not handmade sale, socially enforced monogamy style society is better, that equality and women's financial and socioeconomic independence is anathema to having a flourishing society. Therefore, all of the things that we have done should be rolled back.
And the more that we roll them back, the more that we then get the birth rate to be able to flourish again.
So, I mean, we've spoken about this, I've spoken about this hundreds of times, but it's a difficult circle to square to say that something which was good and that everybody is in support of, women getting their socioeconomic independence, women having equal access to the things that they should, women not being under the boot of their father or their brother or stuff like that, like these things are good in a developed society.
And yet they can also have this externality, which is, well, it's misaligned with mating psychology. And downstream from that, what you end up with is this really difficult situation. And to the women that are listening too, especially the ones that are struggling to find a guy that they think is good enough,
you know there's no I and this is where we get into interventions a little bit later on but I think it's very difficult to say hey girls lower your standards like what does that mean what does that mean in in the same way as telling guys that you need to do better like what does that mean especially at a group level you know the individual level what you're asking is
kind of like a tragedy of the commons type thing, a God's eye view coordination. You, individual man, you should work harder so that you can help the birth rate. Or you, individual woman, you should lower your standards so that you can help the birth rate. Like not for you, you take a personal cost, you pay a personal cost in order to supply a public benefit.
and uh yeah it's it's it's fascinating so okay we've got what a couple of other things here When women say men do better and they've got a list of things, what are the main areas? Because presumably one of the places that we should be looking at for intervention is how do we make men more attractive to women in this new environment? That has to be one of the routes that you lay out.
It would be stupid to not give that information out to guys because there will be a subset of men that go, hey, just give me the cheek. What is it they're looking for again? And if you just give me that and I'll just like tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and I'll be sweet. So what are the areas that women say men are lacking in?
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.
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