I think you're missing a pretty big factor in the English Industrial Revolution that has nothing to do with genetics and IQ: Coal. Coal, oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels served as "energy slaves" that allowed us to escape the Malthusian trap in the first place: you didn't need to raise more kids to work the fields or the forges if you could run those things with coal or oil. The yield of these fuel source has declined precipitously since the 1970s, which explains many of the phenomena you highlight in this essay.
Thanks for reading and for your feedback. I think it is certainly important to consider all of the factors at play, and that is going to take a much longer essay. I think it is a case of both/and, and I am generally unsatisfied with the two sides of the nation development debate. Jared Diamond (Guns Germs and Steel) types only really highlight the accident of environmental placement and the natural resources available, whereas Richard Lynn (IQ and the Wealth of Nations) types try to pin it all on IQ. I do not think it can be simplified into just one factor or the other (which I certainly am not accusing you of doing!). So, while I placed a particular emphasis on genetics in this essay, I do not mean to say that other factors do not play a role. Rather, I focused on genetics because I think that, at present, population dynamics are leading to a reverse Flynn effect.
Thanks for the reply! I do agree with you that it’s both! The English culture of engineer/technique allowed them the first to harness coal vs other European or Asian countries with large amounts of that resource. And that’s a culture that’s dependent on IQ for sure.
Part of the reason that we’re in such a difficult situation right now is indeed because we are dealing with both a declining resource base and a population that is ever more unfit to tackle the issues facing us because of the reverse Flynn Effect (but also deskilling). I don’t mean to imply that you’re doing this, but the focus on the later often leads to an overly optimistic prognosis. If we can just have more kids/limit immigration/recapture the institutions, society will get better! I think there is definitely a path forward, but I don’t think it comes from doubling down on the conservative ideology of the 19th century.
This is really good Mason, well done. I think it also neatly explains Spengler and cyclical theory in a more technical manner. I would recommend to you the work of Ed Dutton, who has rather large bibliography on this exact topic. Also would recommend Academic Agent who has recently released a book on cyclical theory and Spengler among others.
Good essay, even if I have some points of disagreement. Hadn't heard of Weiss before and I'll likely do some more reading on my own. Also, I'm fine with long essays if the material is good, but I'll suggest that breaking an essay like this into smaller chunks will probably drive more engagement in the Substack format, for what it's worth to you.
If I can address a few points:
>Modeling Spengler is difficult because Spengler approaches history and human development from the perspective that cultures act as autonomous organisms.
I wonder if you've engaged with Robin Hanson's idea of cultural drift as the driver of fertility collapse. I don't know Spengler that well so I'm not sure if the concept of cultural drift can be harmonized with his ideas or not.
In essence, cultures experience selection much as organisms do. For most of human history, individual tribes, villages, human groupings each had their own micro-culture, and selection pressures were intense, keeping any society from straying that far from survival-oriented values. Life was short and brutal, infant mortality was high, and enemies were all around. In the past, it's quite possible that from time to time, one tribe or another might have developed some cultural idea that led to a TFR of 1.0, but if that happened, the tribe would be wiped out so quickly that there would be no memory left of it. A TFR of 1.0 means that you have perhaps 0.5 surviving children, or 0.25 boys, which means that your supply of fighting men decreases by 75% in a single generation, which means annihilation by one cause or another. Now another tribe with more survival-oriented values moves into your lands and populates them to their carrying capacity.
Nowadays, these pressures are greatly relaxed, allowing us to get much further away from survival-oriented values than was ever possible in the past, and we're still drifting. People live a long time, genocides are rare, and nearly all infants survive. Also, we effectively have a single high-status cosmopolitan global culture, which spread across the world by capturing hearts and minds through mass media rather than through population explosion and conquest. Thus there is much less competition among various micro-cultures. But what this means is that when the shock comes, it will be global.
>In addition, policies aimed at increasing the birth rate generally seem to be failing across the board. There is nothing industrial nations can do about it.
Ultimately, my view is the fertility crash will persist until we have adapted to the conditions of industrialization, through some combination of genetics and culture. There is nothing governments/institutions can do to drive this adaptation, the exact shape of which is impossible to predict, though maybe they can help steer it on the margin (in this sense, ending mass immigration is one way to steer the shape the adaptation takes in the West). But either the adaptation will emerge naturally and inevitably, or industrialization itself will collapse and be undone.
All that said, there's good evidence governments CAN drive a TFR improvement on the order of 0.3 or so. See the work of Lyman Stone. This can soften the blow, which will be a pleasant thing for those living through a population collapse.
>Feminism doubtlessly bears a lot of responsibility for this state of affairs. If traditional gender roles were still intact, the smartest among us could be having many children and raising them, but instead, the most intelligent women are girl-bossing through life at the expense of humanity’s future.
Feminism is itself an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution. It is a human universal, observable even in hunter-gatherer societies, that women tend to be more "liberated" in times and places where they have more ability to procure calories for themselves and their progeny. Patriarchy is preserved effortlessly in times and places where available technology and environment render it impossible for them to procure enough calories.
The market price of women's wage labor has increased as a result of technologies that have elevated the value of women's conscientiousness and social skills while depressing the value of men's upper-body strength, spatial intelligence, etc. Some on the right seem to think that women's wage labor is worthless, but I strongly disagree. Although some specific policies in the West are artificially inflating women's relative earnings power, the primary changes have been technological.
Thank you for your feedback Thomas, I appreciate it and I appreciate you giving this much thought to my piece. Splitting it up may have been the move, yes. I will make sure to check out Hanson and Stone.
I'm fascinated by the topic of the fertility crash -- the macrohistorical story of our time -- and I've heard most of the talking points around it, so I'm eager for unique perspectives like yours. At some point I'd like to put more of my own thoughts down in essays.
I've tried to read Spengler in the past but without much success penetrating the text thus far. But I am interested in approaching history with the same sort of vision, the grand arc of civilizations which great men can perhaps help steer, but not reverse.
It is a fascinating topic and I was left unsatisfied with most of the answers surrounding it, which spurred my research for this essay.
Spengler is a great read and I think you’d enjoy him. If you’re having trouble getting started with Decline (it is indeed huge) perhaps try one of his shorter works. Man and Technics is quite good. I also have many essays on Spengler on my page. Others on Substack are writing about his ideas too, they’re all on my recommendations tab. Neema Parvini’s ‘Prophets of Doom’ also has a good chapter on Spengler
This brings to mind how europeans bred the ability to handle alcohol into themselves over generations. Whereas the native Americans ruined themselves via the addiction to liquor. The same may be true for the consequences of industrialization.
Another thing it brings to mind is the killing and exiling of criminals by european countries over time, removing those traits from the gene pool via targeted state violence.
I think we’ve already entered the mouse paradise trap, though, and so down we spiral. The behavioral traits already internalized by our demoralized populations aren’t going to suddenly reverse themselves before a collapse occurs
I think the "mouse paradise" can also be analogized to the trees in the Biosphere experiment that collapsed due to the absence of wind, which we only then learned is apparently essential for trees to develop a sufficiently strong root structure to remain standing.
The behavioral sink experiments showed that mice and rats apparently need more than unlimited food, water, and oxygen to function mentally, let alone reproduce. The same is true of humans, though we are more adaptable than mice, in the sense that we have culture and a much greater ability to influence our environment. There are human life strategies that are capable of exponential growth under conditions of modernity, but they are not the norm. One day they will be, or modernity will be undone.
But then, the humans that are able to densely populate the planet under conditions of modernity will in turn influence their environment and it will become something different yet again. Will they still be adapted to it?
There probably is no true equilibrium until the Eschaton. This is the nature of a fallen world: it is always out of balance.
I'm curious to know how you reconcile your moral rejection of contraception on Catholic grounds with your opposition to policies that make it easy for the poor to have many children?
Without artificial contraception, how are the poor supposed to reduce their fertility? Especially given that NFP requires unusually-high levels of both physical health and conscientiousness to reliably use.
Even more fundamentally, how do you reconcile your rejection of aid to the poor as dysgenic with the strong endorsement of charity toward the poor that has always been a basic part of Catholic moral teaching?
The path forwards is going to be very politically incorrect. Whether this is a wholesale collapse or a violent reorganization of our very societies with the above in mind. Politically violent societies that would make the communists blush.
If the latter wins out, I can for-see the subjugation of man to the state permanently (until and unless we take to the stars), as the state desperately attempts to survive and decides to tinker with its own people. State approved genetics, minimum and maximum allowable iqs as well as other arbitrary traits to ensure compliance of its populations. Voluntary sterilization for the genetically defunct in exchange for cash payments. Euthanasia becoming common place to avoid end of life payouts. Our genetic legacy and future becoming a toxic waste dump overseen by Puritans.
I am even more pessimistic than you in general, this is probably our species’ only shot, due to the resources our civilizations have already expended. If we fail here, and civilization backslides too far, then our species dies on this rock.
I think you're missing a pretty big factor in the English Industrial Revolution that has nothing to do with genetics and IQ: Coal. Coal, oil, natural gas and other fossil fuels served as "energy slaves" that allowed us to escape the Malthusian trap in the first place: you didn't need to raise more kids to work the fields or the forges if you could run those things with coal or oil. The yield of these fuel source has declined precipitously since the 1970s, which explains many of the phenomena you highlight in this essay.
Thanks for reading and for your feedback. I think it is certainly important to consider all of the factors at play, and that is going to take a much longer essay. I think it is a case of both/and, and I am generally unsatisfied with the two sides of the nation development debate. Jared Diamond (Guns Germs and Steel) types only really highlight the accident of environmental placement and the natural resources available, whereas Richard Lynn (IQ and the Wealth of Nations) types try to pin it all on IQ. I do not think it can be simplified into just one factor or the other (which I certainly am not accusing you of doing!). So, while I placed a particular emphasis on genetics in this essay, I do not mean to say that other factors do not play a role. Rather, I focused on genetics because I think that, at present, population dynamics are leading to a reverse Flynn effect.
Thanks for the reply! I do agree with you that it’s both! The English culture of engineer/technique allowed them the first to harness coal vs other European or Asian countries with large amounts of that resource. And that’s a culture that’s dependent on IQ for sure.
Part of the reason that we’re in such a difficult situation right now is indeed because we are dealing with both a declining resource base and a population that is ever more unfit to tackle the issues facing us because of the reverse Flynn Effect (but also deskilling). I don’t mean to imply that you’re doing this, but the focus on the later often leads to an overly optimistic prognosis. If we can just have more kids/limit immigration/recapture the institutions, society will get better! I think there is definitely a path forward, but I don’t think it comes from doubling down on the conservative ideology of the 19th century.
This is really good Mason, well done. I think it also neatly explains Spengler and cyclical theory in a more technical manner. I would recommend to you the work of Ed Dutton, who has rather large bibliography on this exact topic. Also would recommend Academic Agent who has recently released a book on cyclical theory and Spengler among others.
Thank you for the recommendations, I’m familiar with both! I even pre ordered prophets of doom
Ahh well, should have guessed; my apologies.
No man no need to apologize, I appreciate you recommending them!
Good essay, even if I have some points of disagreement. Hadn't heard of Weiss before and I'll likely do some more reading on my own. Also, I'm fine with long essays if the material is good, but I'll suggest that breaking an essay like this into smaller chunks will probably drive more engagement in the Substack format, for what it's worth to you.
If I can address a few points:
>Modeling Spengler is difficult because Spengler approaches history and human development from the perspective that cultures act as autonomous organisms.
I wonder if you've engaged with Robin Hanson's idea of cultural drift as the driver of fertility collapse. I don't know Spengler that well so I'm not sure if the concept of cultural drift can be harmonized with his ideas or not.
In essence, cultures experience selection much as organisms do. For most of human history, individual tribes, villages, human groupings each had their own micro-culture, and selection pressures were intense, keeping any society from straying that far from survival-oriented values. Life was short and brutal, infant mortality was high, and enemies were all around. In the past, it's quite possible that from time to time, one tribe or another might have developed some cultural idea that led to a TFR of 1.0, but if that happened, the tribe would be wiped out so quickly that there would be no memory left of it. A TFR of 1.0 means that you have perhaps 0.5 surviving children, or 0.25 boys, which means that your supply of fighting men decreases by 75% in a single generation, which means annihilation by one cause or another. Now another tribe with more survival-oriented values moves into your lands and populates them to their carrying capacity.
Nowadays, these pressures are greatly relaxed, allowing us to get much further away from survival-oriented values than was ever possible in the past, and we're still drifting. People live a long time, genocides are rare, and nearly all infants survive. Also, we effectively have a single high-status cosmopolitan global culture, which spread across the world by capturing hearts and minds through mass media rather than through population explosion and conquest. Thus there is much less competition among various micro-cultures. But what this means is that when the shock comes, it will be global.
>In addition, policies aimed at increasing the birth rate generally seem to be failing across the board. There is nothing industrial nations can do about it.
Ultimately, my view is the fertility crash will persist until we have adapted to the conditions of industrialization, through some combination of genetics and culture. There is nothing governments/institutions can do to drive this adaptation, the exact shape of which is impossible to predict, though maybe they can help steer it on the margin (in this sense, ending mass immigration is one way to steer the shape the adaptation takes in the West). But either the adaptation will emerge naturally and inevitably, or industrialization itself will collapse and be undone.
All that said, there's good evidence governments CAN drive a TFR improvement on the order of 0.3 or so. See the work of Lyman Stone. This can soften the blow, which will be a pleasant thing for those living through a population collapse.
>Feminism doubtlessly bears a lot of responsibility for this state of affairs. If traditional gender roles were still intact, the smartest among us could be having many children and raising them, but instead, the most intelligent women are girl-bossing through life at the expense of humanity’s future.
Feminism is itself an inevitable product of the Industrial Revolution. It is a human universal, observable even in hunter-gatherer societies, that women tend to be more "liberated" in times and places where they have more ability to procure calories for themselves and their progeny. Patriarchy is preserved effortlessly in times and places where available technology and environment render it impossible for them to procure enough calories.
The market price of women's wage labor has increased as a result of technologies that have elevated the value of women's conscientiousness and social skills while depressing the value of men's upper-body strength, spatial intelligence, etc. Some on the right seem to think that women's wage labor is worthless, but I strongly disagree. Although some specific policies in the West are artificially inflating women's relative earnings power, the primary changes have been technological.
Thank you for your feedback Thomas, I appreciate it and I appreciate you giving this much thought to my piece. Splitting it up may have been the move, yes. I will make sure to check out Hanson and Stone.
Absolutely.
I'm fascinated by the topic of the fertility crash -- the macrohistorical story of our time -- and I've heard most of the talking points around it, so I'm eager for unique perspectives like yours. At some point I'd like to put more of my own thoughts down in essays.
I've tried to read Spengler in the past but without much success penetrating the text thus far. But I am interested in approaching history with the same sort of vision, the grand arc of civilizations which great men can perhaps help steer, but not reverse.
It is a fascinating topic and I was left unsatisfied with most of the answers surrounding it, which spurred my research for this essay.
Spengler is a great read and I think you’d enjoy him. If you’re having trouble getting started with Decline (it is indeed huge) perhaps try one of his shorter works. Man and Technics is quite good. I also have many essays on Spengler on my page. Others on Substack are writing about his ideas too, they’re all on my recommendations tab. Neema Parvini’s ‘Prophets of Doom’ also has a good chapter on Spengler
This brings to mind how europeans bred the ability to handle alcohol into themselves over generations. Whereas the native Americans ruined themselves via the addiction to liquor. The same may be true for the consequences of industrialization.
Another thing it brings to mind is the killing and exiling of criminals by european countries over time, removing those traits from the gene pool via targeted state violence.
I think we’ve already entered the mouse paradise trap, though, and so down we spiral. The behavioral traits already internalized by our demoralized populations aren’t going to suddenly reverse themselves before a collapse occurs
Yes.
I think the "mouse paradise" can also be analogized to the trees in the Biosphere experiment that collapsed due to the absence of wind, which we only then learned is apparently essential for trees to develop a sufficiently strong root structure to remain standing.
The behavioral sink experiments showed that mice and rats apparently need more than unlimited food, water, and oxygen to function mentally, let alone reproduce. The same is true of humans, though we are more adaptable than mice, in the sense that we have culture and a much greater ability to influence our environment. There are human life strategies that are capable of exponential growth under conditions of modernity, but they are not the norm. One day they will be, or modernity will be undone.
But then, the humans that are able to densely populate the planet under conditions of modernity will in turn influence their environment and it will become something different yet again. Will they still be adapted to it?
There probably is no true equilibrium until the Eschaton. This is the nature of a fallen world: it is always out of balance.
I'm curious to know how you reconcile your moral rejection of contraception on Catholic grounds with your opposition to policies that make it easy for the poor to have many children?
Without artificial contraception, how are the poor supposed to reduce their fertility? Especially given that NFP requires unusually-high levels of both physical health and conscientiousness to reliably use.
Even more fundamentally, how do you reconcile your rejection of aid to the poor as dysgenic with the strong endorsement of charity toward the poor that has always been a basic part of Catholic moral teaching?
The path forwards is going to be very politically incorrect. Whether this is a wholesale collapse or a violent reorganization of our very societies with the above in mind. Politically violent societies that would make the communists blush.
If the latter wins out, I can for-see the subjugation of man to the state permanently (until and unless we take to the stars), as the state desperately attempts to survive and decides to tinker with its own people. State approved genetics, minimum and maximum allowable iqs as well as other arbitrary traits to ensure compliance of its populations. Voluntary sterilization for the genetically defunct in exchange for cash payments. Euthanasia becoming common place to avoid end of life payouts. Our genetic legacy and future becoming a toxic waste dump overseen by Puritans.
I am even more pessimistic than you in general, this is probably our species’ only shot, due to the resources our civilizations have already expended. If we fail here, and civilization backslides too far, then our species dies on this rock.