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This post is meant to serve as a prod to certain of my smart liberal friends to start having children. It will come as no big surprise to my long time readers.
The 2012 General Social Survey (GSS) results have been released. I decided to take a quick look to see if certain trends were continuing. One of those pronounced trends that was fleshed out on my blog is that in America, the fertility rate among Whites is dictated by political orientation, increasing as you go from liberal to conservative. The most conservative White Americans are having the most children, by far. As political orientation is primarily inherited, this means that liberals are slowly but surely breeding themselves out.
We have seen this illustrated on my blog many times before. But, I wanted to see what’s going on with it today. Now, these data cannot pick up fine year-to-year trends in birth rates, but it certainly can tell us where we stand right now. Here are what the results look like from the 2010-2012 GSS data:
These are U.S. non-Hispanic Whites, age 25-34. These are the cohorts who are currently in the main phase of their reproductive careers. I left off the error bars because sample sizes are generally small (but typically are 50-100 respondents in each category). As we can see, the pattern evident in previous years continues quite strong.
What about those coming right out of the gate? This is 18-24 year olds:
The pattern doesn’t appear detectable in the youngest individuals. This confirms that in the States, as with the rest of the West, people generally hold off having children until their mid to late 20s, with moderates getting the early lead, which is not too surprising since it’s been established that political moderates are the least intelligent group overall.
This compliments the trend seen with those who have mostly completed their reproductive careers, the 35-45 year olds:
It’s amazing how clear and unidirectional the effect is. In short, the more conservative, the more children. The more liberal, the fewer. There is a pronounced selection for conservatism in today’s world and all that goes with it. Conservatives are the only group that reproduce at or beyond the replacement level.
Political orientation (as with all things) is largely under genetic influence, with overall political orientation being at least 60% heritable:
This means that the White population will become increasingly conservative (at least genotypically) over time. Liberals, do not count on prevailing trends to offset this change to the gene pool (that is, evolution). There can only be so much social trends can do before the force of heredity comes to bear. In short, if you do not want a future dominated by conservative nuttiness and all that entails, you must start having children, soon, and often.
Don’t think you have plenty of time. You don’t. Check this out:
As I’ve previously noted, many liberals desire children and expect to eventually have them – indeed many. But for the intelligent ones, especially those who pursue higher education, (which often consumes most of their prime childbearing years) they find themselves falling far short of the number of children they wished to have. It’s a simple fact that the longer you wait to start having children, the fewer of them you will end up having, typically. This cascades down the line: this means the fewer grandchildren you’re likely to have, and so on (this also means the fewer grandchildren your parents will end up having – think about that).
For those of you worried about “overpopulation”, don’t. Almost certainly, if you’re worried about overpopulation, you’re not the one contributing to it:
The people who are contributing to overpopulation, who generally aren’t even in the developed world, will continue right on reproducing. It is their descendants who will populate the world of the future, descendants who will carry the sensibilities of their antecedents, that is, not your sensibilities. In America, and likely most of the Western world, those are mostly religious, close-minded conservatives. Besides, worrying about your own personal contribution to overpopulation is inherently silly. What difference does it make to you what happens to the planet if your children aren’t on it? What stake do you have in what happens in the future?
Also, do not think that someone else is going to “pick up your slack” and have kids if you don’t. The only people picking up your slack are religious conservatives.
Of course, this is aimed at intelligent liberals. Intelligent people are the stewards of the Earth, and make this modern civilization – which supports all these people with all this fantastic technology – possible. These intelligent people are the doctors, the scientists, the architects, the engineers, the mathematicians, etc… that make the world go around. With the way reproductive patterns are currently going, we’ll end up with what’s perfectly symbolized here:
Granted, this process is slow, and takes time to work. But it’s not that slow, and we’re not going to get there if we don’t start now. Even moving away from the fate of the world as a whole to the fate of your own chromosomes, would you not want your line – a line which, if you’re a person in the target audience of this post, is one that gave rise to someone who can make positive contributions to the world – to continue?
Like I said, this post is nothing regular readers don’t already know. I probably won’t make another “reminder” post for a while, but there’s my statement. I can only hope it impresses on some of its intended readers, but one can only hope for so much.
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It’s not going to work. Liberals are inherently selfish and status conscious. Children don’t add anything to their inwardly focused status races, and to the extent they do this can be provided by a single or at most two children.
As HS points out, Bobo’s highest goal in life is “self-actualization”, normally through career. “Self” is right in the title. Do you really think children can compete against fine dining, cocktail parties, work awards, and casual sex when it comes to the average liberal?
Only God can defeat the condom.
“Only God can defeat the condom.”
This made me lol.
But I think the rest of his point is basically correct, it sure looks like social status is more important to many on the left than babies are.
I agree this isn’t likely to work. Religious people just seem to inherently place more value on the family than secular people. They are much more likely to see their identity as being part of a group extending both into the past and the future. Liberals on the other hand tend to see themselves as autonomous individuals. Children are nice, but only as one of many lifestyle options.
The other thing is that if feminists were to convince young women to stay home and have children earlier in life (so as to preserve feminism, of course) that basically defeats the purpose of feminism. Not gonna happen.
Jeezz!!!
Man, liberal white people aren’t very smart people you’re imagining. For them i only can say
adiós, sayonara, addio!!!
https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/political-orientations-intelligence-and-education.pdf
Here in Brazil it seems that people with political affiliation among the center-right and center-left party are more smart.
The “natality” orientation among liberals is indeed lower. A certain amount of this is inevitable, but this could be ameliorated with the right public policy. But getting that in place…
I plan on reading that study as it speaks to a lot of the stuff in which I’m interested.
This won’t work, because it’s not rational. If you are an atheist, why should you worry about what happens after you die? Why should you slave yourself trying to raise more kids only for you great-grandchildren not to be in a more religious world? Life is short and you won’t even know your great-grandchildren.
What that your great-grand children share your DNA? Big deal. Only 12.5%. Give some few generations more and “your line” will barely genetically related to you. And why should you sacrifice your entire life for a guy you won’t even know and has, say, 3% of your DNA. There are many people right now who share this percentage of DNA with you. There are called “distant relatives”. And let’s be honest: you don’t give a damn about them.
Furthermore, what if predictions are not fulfilled? I am old enough to remember lots of catastrophic predictions that never came true. Nuclear harmageddon, ozone layer disappearing (it has regenerated since then), Japan becoming the first economy in the world and so on and so forth. A prediction is based on a extrapolation, that is to say, it assumes that current trends remain well into the future. But the future is full of surprises. When I was young, I never expected the Soviet Union to disappear in some few months. I never expected that Muslim countries, such as Algeria or Iran, could have below-replacement fertility.
So why should you waste your short life in order to prevent a future danger that you won’t live and that maybe never happens? This is NOT rational at all and most liberals won’t buy it and rightly so.
If you have an atheist worldview, your only rational strategy is to enjoy the day, make the most of your life. You pride yourself in being a scientist so I assume you get that being rational is the way to go. But, from a rational point of view, your post does not make any sense. No mean to offend, mind you.
Only to make myself clear, “enjoying the day” does not mean “not having children” but “living the life you want to live and makes you happy, without worrying about what happens after you die”. Which is what most liberals do.
First, despite the fact that this post seemed to gain attention from certain liberals, it was meant as a prod to certain liberals I know personally into having children – though it is applicable to all liberals.
Quite right. And quite likely the trend won’t hold forever in the future. It’s hard to know. That said, I don’t expect it to change any time soon. The “liberal mindest”, much as you describe, is being selected out.
This is actually misleading. Individually, any one great-grandchild probably shares on average about 12.5% of your DNA (with respect to others in your group, anyway), but collectively, they share closer to 50% with you, on average. Besides, time’s arrow goes in one direction. Parent-offspring conflict, is, evolutionarily, the conflict between child and additional children the parent could be having. People value their own selfish pursuits over their children because those pursuits, in the past, would have led to more and better children (of course, that’s no longer the case in today’s world). So it doesn’t quite work as you’re portraying.
That said, the drive to have children for their own sake is likely weaker in liberals. Hence, the results we see.
Who said humans are rational (aside from economists)? Humans aren’t coldly rational, except from an evolutionary standpoint. People follow their drives and proclivities. While this IS a rational argument, the criticism that you could have correctly levied is that trying to convince someone that they need to reproduce with a rational argument when their personal drives (to seek status and sex, for example) is saying something else is bound to fail in the majority of cases. And on that point I agree.
This is a strange “straw vulcan” perspective on rationality.
Rationality is not a synonym for selfishness – An irrational belief is at odds with the evidence. An irrational action is at odds with producing likely outcomes that you value. An irrational value is… not a coherent concept. In other words you can believe something irrationally, you can do something irrationally, but you can’t *want* something irrationally, provided it is at least coherent. I want the future world to be a good one, even if I don’t get to see it, and that isn’t irrational.
Do you genuinely model religious people as thinking “Oh I’ll do this good thing, even though the outcome will happen after I die, because I’ll be able to watch the outcome from heaven and feel happy about it then”? That the only reason for it is your own personal enjoyment decades from now in the afterlife? I don’t think religious people think that way at all, I think they think “I’ll do this because it’s a good thing, even though I won’t see the outcome, because I know it’s a good thing to do and that makes me happy now”. And I think atheists think in the exact same way.
I suspect ‘liberal’ isn’t the core issue, but that feminism is. Obviously the quest for gender equality leads to a situation in which the man is supposed to not pursuit his career a 100% but to take time of to take care of kids and the household. The open minded men probably agree with this in principle….but…when they think a little longer they realize that they really don’t like to do it…because it goes against their instincts, they’re men. So they make up all kinds of reasons why it is not the time to have kids yet. They just don’t want to face the fact that the only ‘solution’ to their aversion to being tortured by having to take care of little children is to have a traditional marriage because that would get into trouble with their spouse.