Danny Kruger, a recent defector from the Tories, who would rescind no-fault divorce, with a return to household taxation, as though that would cement families and raise the birthrate. “We are suffering from having a totally unregulated sexual economy,” he says.
If consenting adult is to mean anything that’s probably what we would say it should mean, right? That it’s regulated by the consent of the adults involved?
Social Market Foundation’s report, Baby Bust and Baby Boom: the liberal case for pronatalism shows most women in England and Wales want more children than they have, enough to keep the birthrate at a stable 2.1, but instead they only have 1.4.
That’s an error. For that same research – the line of, not this piece of – shows that women have, for generations, wanted one more baby than they did have. But, obvs, not actually want enough to have that other. This was true when the fertility rate was 6, when it was 4 and so on. It’s just one of those things, that desire for another baby in the house.
Governments everywhere are struggling to raise birthrates – not even communist China or the mullahs of Iran can stop them plummeting.
And that’s the actual problem. No one, anywhere, through any means, has managed to get that birthrate up again. No, not even the Nordic free everything for all, always.
Me? I say the cause is being rich and the economic freedom of women. Opportunity costs – with more to do in life any one thing inevitably gets done less. Thus the only solution is to reverse either of those – riches or freedom. And, you know, we probabl;y aren;t willing to pay that cost – or those costs – so therefore it’s not a viable solution.
“with a return to household taxation, as though that would cement families and raise the birthrate.”
The thing is, this would probably help as you don’t get into the problems with a single earner hitting 40% tax.
“Me? I say the cause is being rich and the economic freedom of women. Opportunity costs – with more to do in life any one thing inevitably gets done less. Thus the only solution is to reverse either of those – riches or freedom. And, you know, we probabl;y aren;t willing to pay that cost – or those costs – so therefore it’s not a viable solution.”
That’s a large part of it. Although I have this theory about female socialisation, that women really like to be around other women. Back in the old days, the socialisation thing meant they wanted to be housewives as the other women were also at home. And as we gradually shifted to more women going to work, the rest joined them. Women in offices care far more about the charity bake sale than improving their Excel. They spend far more on clothes than men. They also don’t care about leaving for better paid work. They also do jobs where childcare and a second car wipe out most of their salary. What’s the rational explanation for this? There isn’t one. Men would stay home and play Call of Duty. But if you throw socialisation into the mix, it becomes important. Work replaces the coffee morning.
And then, what that’s done is created the pressure for government to be bigger because all the women in these useless government jobs vote for more useless government jobs. Even though it just taxes their husbands more. What’s the net economic value of an English lecturer at some poly? Not GDP, which just keeps adding the salary, childcare, car, wardrobe and probably student loans. After all the costs, what is that women doing to boost the economy? My guess, cooking a good dinner for a husband and raising a baby would be more valuable. They’d probably prefer to do it, based on how much interest women show in Bake Off. But we have thumbs on the scale, and we have this socialisation problem.
See, it’s my theory that all this spending massively boosted GDP for little net gain. Japan’s GDP is much lower, but do they seem poorer than us?
What if remote work changes it? Women realise other women are at home, working. Woman with baby can pop round and have coffee with working woman.
What if remote work changes it?
Forget it. WFH pretty well defines tasks can be done by AI.
Not really. But it would be interesting if AI wiped out a lot of women’s jobs.
Which it is doing. The feminazis just haven’t woken up to the potential profit to be made from it.
Not counting outwork for the rag trade & envelope stuffing for marketing, WFH is distributed data processing. Data processing is what AI does.
Yes, but AI doesn’t fully automate the job. It’s useful technology, it can raise productivity but remember Gell-Mann.
What’s going on with AI right now is lots of companies hyping investments, and this needs people to believe they have trillion dollar magic in the pipeline. There are also lots of journalists looking for something sexy to write about.
Like this story yesterday: https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/jack-dorsey-block-layoffs-ai-b2928612.html
“Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has fired nearly half the staff at his financial technology company, Block, as he goes fully in on artificial intelligence.”
Is anyone doubling productivity with AI? No. Any automation with machine learning over 15% was done years ago. But there’s more detail from Business Insider:
https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorseys-mea-culpa-on-block-layoffs-we-overhired-2026-2
The reality is that Block trebled staff during Covid. The overhiring binge that happened at lots of technology companies. Amazon, Facebook, Salesforce.
AI is being used (largely as an excuse) to eliminate all the bullshit jobs, which never needed doing in the first place
Define bullshit. Basically, anything you can’t eat, wear or sleep beneath is some level of bullshit. Go without any of the above & you’ll soon get the drift.
So no services of any kind? No transport? Welcome to the 13th century. Jim Graeber defined bullshit jobs as:
I don’t claim the above to be exhaustive.
“1 Flunkies, who serve to make their superiors feel important, e.g., receptionists, administrative assistants, door attendants, store greeters;”
Receptionists? So someone comes to your company to talk to you and you’re currently in a meeting, you’re just going to let them through, even though they don’t know where they are going? A dentist is going to stop drilling to greet patients, deal with their payment, next appointment etc?
Door attendants? You’re in a swanky New York building full of rich people and any hooligan can walk in? The point of door attendants is security.
“2 Goons, who act to harm or deceive others on behalf of their employer, or to prevent other goons from doing so, e.g., lobbyists, corporate lawyers, telemarketers, public relations specialists;”
You want to run a company and draw up million dollar contracts without lawyers?
“3 Duct tapers, who temporarily fix problems that could be fixed permanently, e.g., programmers repairing shoddy code, airline desk staff who calm passengers with lost luggage;
Yeah, but the economics of writing perfect code are terrible.
“4 Box tickers, who create the appearance that something useful is being done when it is not, e.g., survey administrators, in-house magazine journalists, corporate compliance officers, academic administration;”
And yet, he was the sort of socialist that wrote for the Guardian and wanted all sorts of employment laws, at which point, you’re going to get compliance officers. I hate all that bollocks but a company is going to have people doing it if laws exist.
“5 Taskmasters, who create extra work for those who do not need it, e.g., middle management, leadership professionals.”
Try managing a large company without at least some management layers.
Graeber was a twat. Anyone who was serious would have gone and found employers and asked them why they hired these people. People generally don’t hire people for the fun of it. They’d rather have money to spend on drugs and whores.
But there’s an audience for this. People who think anything above pig farming is pointless.
The irony is that being a professor of anthropology is about as close to a bullshit job as it gets. The main job you can get with a degree in anthropology is… professor of anthropology. It’s like The Human Centipede in job form.
This is just another part of our inevitable replacement, some of which appears to be intentional (600 young blokes welcomed yesterday alone – in February, mark you) and other bits of which (eg women deciding not to have kids) is on us.
Not to mention, if you were a young couple living in Gorton and Denton, would you want to have children and send them to the local school?
The milk has been spilled, the horse has bolted – now all that’s to be done is to sit back and enjoy the show.
Maybe it is time to realise that reducing population might be an opportunity not a threat. You do not need to import poor people from the third world who won’t assimilate. People may be fungible to some extent but populations are not. You only need to overcome the post-war bulge problem, which will cause expense until it solves itself. Then you can have the right crowd and no crowding. The UK was a lot more successful when it had 50 million white folks than it is now. Every advanced country has this problem nad nobody seems able to fix the reduction in births. Let’s try something else.
Agreed. Perhaps Tim or some other crack economist on here can explain why we should care if population declines from lower birth rate.
The actual reason? The politicians have already spent all the money from a rising population. Already gone, or promised pensions etc to the currently getting older. The only way those welfare state sums add up is if the population contnues to grow – or at least doesn’t shrink.
I’m sure there are calculators over in the US where you can play with SS and Medicare budgets. Try putting in population of 250 million in 2080 and see what results you get…..
Yep. Tough innit? But gonna get tougher.
The solution: make it a capital offense to refuse to employ older people. A delining population requires more people to work more, but the only thing stopping people working more is the employers refusing to employ people.
I went to a Job Fair today. I was chatting at the combined forces stand.
“I’ve probably got the skills you need, hardware and software development, IT maintainance and administration, cartography, map-making, map-reading, navigation”
How old are you?
“57”
Fuck off.
The problem is that we’re running something rather like a Ponzi scheme. We’re not importing lots of film directors who are going to more than pay for themselves and get things back into balance. We’re importing care workers, and the stats are that they’re a net loss over their lifetime.
…the cause [of falling birth rates] is being rich and the economic freedom of women.
Partly. But I’d say the social cancer of feminism is partly responsible too – in the West at least. Feminist ideology has persuaded millions of women that their ‘oppression’ by men is the result of the female reproductive role. So feminist-influenced women tend to abjure motherhood and deny what evolutionary biology strongly indicates are the primary sources of female fulfilment.
And those who decide to have children tend to whinge that their economic freedom conflicts with motherhood and so they demand workplace concessions – eg long maternity leave, flexi-time, menstrual leave, child sickness leave, WFH, etc – while apparently limiting their fertility.
Feminism has generally sold women ideas about “having it all”. Travel, work being important (even though most women are not that committed to it outside of care jobs).
Then as you say, it’s influenced policy. More yooni (for no good reason), more pointless jobs, more laws about employing women. The latter being why the public sector is so stuffed with women, and why the private sector outsource a lot of tasks to India to avoid them (employment tribunals are overwhelmingly complaints by women).
There are some real career women, like there always were. Often women who didn’t care about having children. Or happy to have a house husband. Most aren’t. They’re plodders. They have this dream of being a power bitch, but they don’t improve much. Because work isn’t that important to them.
I think educational inflation doesn’t help. The telegraph reported about a female judge (Valerie Pearlman) who had 2 children – didn’t go to uni though. Nowdays impossible would she still have had 2 children if she had gone to Uni?
The obvious way to increase the birth rate is to stop killing foetuses.
Just sayin’………
As good old Uncle Joe said, ‘You cannot say that. It tells the truth all too plainly.’
One report has it that, effectively, one third of Gen Z was aborted.
Last year the majority of abortions were carried out on married women. It’s a lifestyle thing.
philip, oof, I didn’t know that.
Apparently, killing 0.9% of a population is now genocide. So, when is the NHS going to be up before the international court for genociding 20% of the UK population since 1968?
Last year we have full figures for – 29.7% of conceptions ended in abortion. So yeah, 1/3 is pretty close for Gen Z.
Poor ol’ Tommy at the start of the Battle of the Somme had a better chance of surviving than a baby has of being born in GB. (ballpark 35% casualties, 8-11% fatalities)
The topic of abortion has come up a few times with friends, and only 1 person has had any idea of the actual law on it, never mind the scale.
That was after the Carla Foster conviction – and even my far-left friend agreed the conviction was just in that case.
Governments everywhere are struggling to raise birthrates
And Western Governments everywhere, in the same breath, tell us we must be Globalists yet the Global population is billions more than is sustainable.
Wish they’d pick a line.
There’s a one to one correlation with the introduction of the contraceptive pill.
No one here appears to have mentioned that the fact that as a war has been rained down on men and boys in the west for the last 50 years it is no wonder that blokes don’t want to tie the knot and have kids.
If I was a young bloke now I certainly would not get hitched or have kids……….And I’d emigrate, as others have mentioned……
“No one”…..bar the Israelis.
Just a thought. If we stopped importing half a million goat fuckers every year and abolished stamp duty house prices would fall and families could afford the extra bedroom for the additional sprog, and upsize or downsize according to the stage of life.
AI and getting rid of HR, DEI etc would decimate female employment so there’d be more people barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.
If you abolished stamp duty, prices would go up.
You could afford £180,000 plus £20,000 stamp duty, so clearly you can afford £200,000 plus zero.
True dat. Also to note that prices are not too high, people can afford them, that is why prices are so high.