It's (mostly) free! The tech bros just have to get over their status and control issues about forcing workers back into the office. Can they? Remains to be seen.
This article frames the behavior of Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and others as being hypocritical or misguided, that their aims are not aligned with their actions. Either the author is completely missing the point, or they're crafting a particular narrative to provide plausible deniability for these billionaires acting fully in accordance with their philosophies as they've many times publicly espoused. Far from being "pronatalist", Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, and others are only interested in rising birthrates among a particular portion of the population. Like many SV elites, they have a cozy relationship with the HBD movement within the rationalist movement, including Thiel's close association with Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug). It's /very/ obvious to anyone who has spent any time comprehending things that these billionaires are very invested in increasing birth rates among other people they consider worthy of having children, particularly elite whites, and decreasing birth rates among those they don't consider worthy of having children, particularly anyone who is not white.
To not put too fine a point on it: Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen do NOT care if their policies prevent their workers from having children. They don't want their workers having children, they only want children from the families of elite whites. They cannot be too loud in their statements, but these people are eugenicists.
Pronatalists didn't kill WFH - offshoring did.
I've mentioned my experiences in board meetings about this topic as well [0].
WFH proved to the leadership of a number of previously hesitant companies that async and distributed work doesn't impact delivery.
But wait, why should I even keep paying a Silicon Valley salary for someone living in Tulsa, when I can have my existing Eastern European or Indian employees move back to the old country and open a GCC hub for me?
It's just vanilla (pardon the pun) white supremacy combined with the myth of meritocracy and prosperity gospel. By this I mean there is the belief that one's genes are superior because they're a billionaire. It then throw in some Nazi-era conspiracy theories like "Great Replacement" [3][4].
It's worth adding that pronatalists, as a general rule, don't believe in higher birth rates for everyone. It's inherently racist, just like banning abortion [5].
The irony is that the curent end result of this movement is that the absolutely dumbest and most incompetent people have ended up in charge because of it.
Just think about the sequence of events here. We had to WFH so companies could survive. Billionaires saw massive increases in wealth in Covid and, briefly, there was real wage growth. RTO mandates are part of a wider movement to suppress wages, combined with the permanent layoffs culture we're in now. It was never about productivity or culture.
And now because of the biggest self-own in American history (ie by starting an unwinnable war with Iran for literally no reason) we're going to see massive gas and diesel price hikes, higher food prices (because of fertilizer shortages) and higher prices for everything because of the fuel price hikes (just like 2021-2022). And now it's OK to WFH again?
It's hard to calculate how much harm and misery the wealthiest 10,000 people in the world inflict on almost 8 billion other people, so much so that the world would be demonstrably and immediately better were the billionaires actually garbage collected.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhumanism
[2]: https://www.seenandunseen.com/transhumanism-eugenics-digital...
[3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-is-great-replacem...
[5]: https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/the-racist-history-...
How did we get to this place where a small number of strange white men have soured an industry that used to give us marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better?
If you can name a historical figure, they were probably some flavour of non-standard mental processing and beliefs.
Even just coming up with "marvels that expanded our freedom and made our lives better" is inherently a non-standard position relative to how most people live and think.
The silicon valley pronatalist stance is because they want to be patriarchs in full control of their family. They want absolute control over women and absolute control over their kids. Or they want to exert control over particular minority groups.
> ...
> The loudest “pronatalists” (Musk, Andreessen) spent two years killing workplace flexibility while funding nearly a billion in elite fertility tech.
So the message here is SV pronatalists aren't actually pronatalists, because pronatalism is way down on their list of priorities, especially bar below the priority of "be an imperious boss."
Capitalism seems to like to choke everything that's not maximum capitalism, reproduction in this case. It has no future unless humanity can be replaced by capitalist machines, but fortunately we've got top men working on that.
Imagine this for a sci-fi story: a dead world, its dominant technological species extinct, but it's mindless LLM-powered machines live on, mining raw materials and trading on a stock market.
Or it's genuine, but almost completely trumped by other concerns, which I think is the more psychologically plausible explanation than conscious deception. They only pursue pronatalism without contradicting their other priorities, which makes their actions ineffective.
Or their belief is twisted: they're pronatalists, but not pro your natalism (e.g. they're really only interested in a master-race of SV founders reproducing).
Like the saying goes: lemons -> lemonade
Thank goodness you didn't assume what they mean as well, then.
If someone calls themselves a free speech maximalist followed by banning people who criticize him, then he cannot by definition be a free speech maximalist.
Also, according to the article, Musk "called children and called declining birth rates a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming," which is not so much pro-natalism as it is dismissive of global warming, because Musk no longer cares about electric cars and has pivoted to ventures that are much less friendly to the environment such as AI and mass rocket launches.
And cited his opposition to apartheid as the central reason that he left the country as soon as he could, at age 17, because he didn't want to be a part of that system.
There are so many legitimate reasons to criticize Musk, but this isn't one.
There are tons of (valid) reasons for and against boosting birthrates, but you have to break it down to the actual reasons that people are "natalists" or not.
Throwing all (anti-)"natalists" into the same pot makes as much sense as labelling communists, fascists and anarchists "anti-capitalists" instead; yes your label technically applies, but the group it describes is so heterogenous that you can't meaningfully talk about it anyway.
Edit for failing to address your actual question: No and no (people are not anti-nativists by default and shouldn't be).
If "anti-nativist" means someone that wants to keep birthrates below 2/womanlife long-term, than this is basically advocating for suicide at a species-level, and "unhealthy" from an evolutionary point of view.
But is that actually what your "anti-natalist" believe? If people just live lifes that lead to <2 children/woman, but don't really care or consider the whole question, does that make them anti-natalists, too (I don't think so)?
I am not sure what % of pro-natalists that applies to, exactly, but keep in mind most people in Silicon Valley voted for Clinton/Biden/Harris in 2016, 2020, and 2024 and most are not weird traditionalist cultural conservatives. There are many progressive left-liberal pro-natalists who just 1) don't want humanity to go extinct and 2) know that population decline in a country can lead to various issues, including economic problems. Immigration can help with some of that, but reproduction rate is declining or low in basically every single country and so immigration will eventually also not be a sustainable solution.
I think the majority of vocal pro-natalists are probably right-wing/racist/misogynistic, but the core pro-natalist stance in itself (as opposed to a stance of "whites are being out-reproduced", or something) is, in general, still a completely reasonable and I'd argue moral position.
Even coming up with the scientific method took millennia, and actually trying to take that seriously is still really unusual in the human species.
It may happen to be a clique of strange mostly white men in the USA, but it would be wrong in both directions to label this under "modern America": the founding fathers of the USA were, by both modern and contemporary standards, more than a bit odd. And that was true at almost every point in US (and indeed world, not just USA) history. And it's not just a uniquely American thing, as anyone who points to, say, the Chinese Great Leap Forward's famine will point out. (And that was just the first example that came to my head, basically everywhere and every-when has something weird to pick up on).
Science is hard. Thinking critically and logically is hard. As Feynman said:
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool.You didn't mention how "opposition to apartheid" also meant avoiding mandatory military service. Interesting coincidence, I would say. Serious question: if one cared about ending Apartheid, wouldn't it be much more effective to do that from within South Africa than from across the ocean?
See also: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
Finding good among the bad is such a commonplace occurrence that my native tongue, English, has many metaphors for it. I already mentioned making lemons into lemonade; there is also "every cloud has a silver lining," "every dog has his day," "light at the end of the tunnel," and "April showers bring May flowers"
I suspect you would respond, "but Mayflowers brought genocidal white settlers!!!!"
That's your problem, not mine.
No, and I think that's a slander. If you look at the numbers, birth rates are falling everywhere. There's no fecund area pumping out babies at a rate to use immigration to solve the labor component of the birthrate problem. And even the most fecund area may drop to sub-replacement rate in a generation or two, if the follow the patterns of everywhere else. It really is a global problem.
And the progressive immigration solution is kind of imperialist: exporting problems from rich countries to poorer ones, who are even less equipped to deal with them (e.g. "let's export our trash to Africa and plunder its youth").
I'm well aware that birth rates are falling in the rich world. It's a universal problem across all wealthy countries regardless of immigration or social policy.
I'm also not certain that this is some kind of urgent issue we need to do anything about. It seems like a natural cycle. And maybe we're better off letting the global population taper off.
I think you're also off base on immigration policy but that's a separate topic.
It's not just the "rich world". China is deeply below replacement rate (for unique reasons), and even India has dropped below replacement rate (https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/rural-indias-total...). Those aren't wealthy countries.
> I'm also not certain that this is some kind of urgent issue we need to do anything about. It seems like a natural cycle. And maybe we're better off letting the global population taper off.
Denial is certainty a response people can have to difficult or ideologically inconvenient problems.
> I think you're also off base on immigration policy but that's a separate topic.
How so? Liberals/progressives can be parochial and ignore of misunderstand the world outside their borders, falling back to their own little dogmas. Today, the math just doesn't work out for immigration being the solution for declining birthrates globally. And it'll just get worse as sub-Saharan Africa follows the trends of other regions.
And while I'm sure most everybody can have misapprehensions about the world beyond their observation, I'd reckon that liberals are far less misguided than conservatives and also ask why the hell is that relevant? We're talking about people who are coming here. I don't really need to know what's happening Haiti beyond knowing there are people who desperately prefer to live in the US and are seemingly adjusting very well and definitely not eating anyone's cats.
My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money, and that benefit from maximum productivity of their employees, still generally have a hybrid work culture.
“True work only happens in person with human collaboration! Everyone must come back”
2 years pass
“Oh wow we can replace everyone with a chatbot this is amazing”
narrator: It was the interest rates all along. Many of these tech businesses are fundamentally bad, the ROI is smoke and mirrors, energy shocks and bad macro-economics are coming, and investors are starting to ask hard questions.
I'd be fine with earning less (we're pretty frugal) to work in that kind of environment with good people.
Trading firm managers are like sales managers, you've got one number, nothing else matters, the truth will set you free.
Big Tech is a bunch of people competing for influence over the big shared number coming in from ads or whatever, it's important to have good UX etc so you get more ad money, but how do you tell who's meaningfully contributing, or who's just really good at playing internal politics? This will bias towards different sorts of decisions.
I'm guessing the opposite: that these firms wanted to push back-to-the-office policies, and so either invented, or publicized, engineers doing "over employment", and that it wasn't a real problem that any of them actually faced.
Realistically I think very little employees were doing this. And, of the ones that were, is it even a problem?
I mean, the idea is that they're such amazing developers that they can be 2 developers at once. So you still end up with 1 developer. So, break even, right? No harm no foul?
Additionally, I wonder how many CxOs have corporate real estate in their investment portfolio which might influence decisions.
Look at the last 3 years of the job market: No company has any issue with doing actual lay offs. The layoffs have been about reducing capital spend, and one wants to get rid of dead wood and redundant hires, not let fate decide who stays or goes.
> My "evidence" is that trading firms that kept raking in the money
If you're talking about "trading" as in financial, then this makes sense from a culture perspective. Its a group of people who, are about the job and not about any ones feelings.
It's harder for teams to be this way without the social lubricant of bonding over lunch and coffee and small "how are you" or "the boss sucks" social interactions. Things that are easy in person but more difficult when all your communication channels are owned by the company or result in "documentation" that can be used against you. It's much easier to be "professional brusk" (I need this asap) with someone you just ate lunch and talked about life with than it is for someone you DONT have those interactions with.
I have been a consultant (read: mercenary) for over a decade now. I have seen just about every team layout there is, and there are lots of distributed teams whos effectiveness is much lower than it could be. Its going to depend more on your product and ALL your teams willingness to be candid and blunt than anything else.
Open plan offices continue to be designed more for seeing the work happen than for doing the work. I spend a lot of mental energy on ignoring the distractions around me. No job has ever offered me a private office with a door that closes in exchange for being in the office 5 days a week.
Historically though, the data suggests that mass layoffs have a huge impact (negatively) on productivity after a short term "boost" by the survivors.
Maybe there's some 19D "soft layoff" motivation, but I suspect a large part is just about control and appearance. You spent all that money on offices so workers better be there. And what's the point of having your own nice big office if you can't look out on the peons toiling for you? And more fundamentally, some people just have this deep belief that work = something you do in an office and can't compute working at home as "real" work, no matter what the results show.
Then the executives come up with justifications, one of which is surely the ability to trim some hires in a tight financial environment.
Every single frontpage thread on WFH / RTO for years now on HN has dozens to hundreds of comments bitching about the obvious stupidity and narcissism of upper management to force RTO, which is obviously inferior in every way, at least according to HN.
You don’t spend many billions on the offices for nothing.
I imagine there was some pressure from cities as well since many downtown businesses rely on foot traffic.
Are the tech firms the ones spending billions on office buildings? It's certainly not the VPs.
What pressure are cities applying to companies to get them to move back into the offices, exactly?
And culture does not care about logic.
If they had a shred of evidence that RTO was the eminently more productive, they would smugly rub our collective noses in it.
They don't have evidence. They have vibes and a profound hatred for the labor class. It irks them that suddenly common people had access to a benefit exclusive to them.
I think it was mostly about lack of trust and desire to regain a feeling of control over employees. The soft layoffs were just a bonus.
When my company WFH during covid the first thing they did was force-install invasive tracking software. You could practically taste the executive paranoia.
I for one am renting a desk at an office. I have all the usual office amenities and an environment in which I can focus properly, but I don't have to involve myself geographically with the company I work for.
The "RTO is more productive" thesis tends to come from industry sectors where quantitative measures like billable hours aren't so readily available. At best, it seems vibes-based - but, like you, I suspect that it's actually disingenuous posturing.
After all, not a single CEO cited published metrics for the productivity reasons for ending WFH, and almost all went about other power grab type moves later to show the working class the power they were able to wield during COVID was over and we were returning back to the old ways.
Or both.
But housing, transportation, daycare costs make that impractical. If they really want me in the office, companies need to engage on these issues in the metros they live in. They need to clear NIMBY barriers to urban housing, support transit, and good parental leave.
We saw how much less pollution there was during the pandemic
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/04/8110190...
I worked from home but a few times I needed to go to my parents house during what used to be rush hour. Less than 5% of normal traffic and fuel demand dropped so much that prices were lower.
My job went hybrid in 2022 and then return to office full time last year. Everyone hates it. It's a waste of time and resources.
Less pollution, less traffic means we don't need to use tax revenue to expand roads and less wear and tear means less repairs.
Take it one step further and give tax breaks to businesses that let employees work from home and close physical offices. Then this means less new office construction which can be used for housing to help the housing crisis. It's a win win for everyone except control freak managers.
At this point I'd rather use the stick than the carrot. Make employers 100% shoulder their employees' commute costs. Don't like it? Allow WFH or pay them enough to afford to live close to the office.
* Less time wasted in commute/traffic, which adds up to a significant portion of your lifetime
* Lower vehicle expenses (car-centric people often forget just how much the total cost of ownership for vehicles really is)
That is an interesting point, and not obvious why it would be so. In fact, it kind of calls into question whether the whole relationship is causal. The people who were able to WFH longer were more often in high-income jobs (service workers never got to do it in the first place, it was almost entirely an office worker thing). They were thus more likely to be in an economic position where they felt comfortable having another child.
This would also explain why it impacted the intensive margin (children per mother) but not the extensive margin (percent women who are mothers).
I don't have a problem with WFH where it makes sense, and I do think many societies need to look at how to help young adults become parents, but I am a bit skeptical of this particular relation. If you've ever been a parent with a young child at home, your estimate of how much work you could do would be possible is a lot more modest.
But the article framing as if the pronatalists somehow knew of the birth rate benefit and maliciously used it to counter their stated goals is too heavy-handed.
How about framing this as the new information that it is and getting the information out there in a positive way so that it can be used in both government and corporate policy?
It's good to have exact numbers of course, but I can't see how anyone would think RTO wouldn't impact fertility or households in some fashion.
By the end of the pandemic, it was more of a social battle between those who wanted to maintain the new normal and those who absolutely loathed it, and again nobody* really cared about childcare.
Closest anyone got to caring about childcare at any point was home-schooling and the value of air filters in classrooms.
* I am of course being excessively absolutist with this language, very little is all-or-none.
I think the article is on the right track, but it misses also mentioning the conservative politics angle. The right-wing version of pronatalism also includes a pretty obvious implicit, if not entirely explicit, goal to return to the 1960s model of family life where the husband worked while the wife stayed home with the kids. Offering women workplace flexibility and giving them the option to both work and have a family runs counter to that societal vision.
I once did a six-month project where I'd go the office to sit on zoom with my team in 3 other cities. One of those cities was our offshore dev team that we hired because they cost less and could do the job remotely. How the hell did CEOs get away with telling us that offshore dev teams would be fine because in-person collaboration wasn't necessary while simultaneously saying we all had to be in the office?
Because of workers who let them get away with it (apparently, including yourself). Workers who do not collectively act in their own best interests get taken advantage of, that is what CEOs exist to do.
Hopefully those particular CEOs are now in line for being replaced with an AI.
Interest rate hikes, increased unemployment, austerity (...sorry fiscal prudence), are all tools that can be deployed to reduce the bargaining power of labour. So is return to office, layoffs, AI.
This is a supply shock - one with no alternatives. For people who aren't aware of just how much we depend on petrochemicals, see this video on the perils of peak-oil.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOMWzjrRiBg
Peak-oil may have proved "false" (not quite - only that Hubbert didn't expect a bimodal distribution), but this is a good time to come out of our illusions, not only about the "unlimited"-ness of oil, but also about creating societies that are so toxically dependent on oil.
The best employees get more fertility days as a reward, to encourage more such good employees into being born!
Most of the CEE along with Western European countries like Netherlands and Ireland have ass-in-seat requirements for American companies to unlock FDI subsidizes when opening a GCC. Additionally, management culture in London as well as Paris is very hybrid work oriented.
There is a decent proliferation of WFH roles in Europe, but those are the same roles in the US anyhow - we're posting those in Europe it's us offshoring.
Germans need to stop using "Europe" as a stand-in for Germany.
I live in Spain, and received WFH job offers from Spanish, French, Dutch, Swedish and German companies. For all intents and purposes, WFH doesn't seem "dead" in Europe at all, as far as I can tell.
> like Netherlands has ass-in-seat requirements for American companies
That might be true, but doesn't really tell us about Dutch companies, just what American companies want/does in Europe, doesn't really reflect what European companies are up to.
It got better with COVID, but you still have to dig, to find something 100% remote.
Musk is for sure. Doesn't he have like 100 kids because he's constantly trying to get women to become pregnant by his sperm?
My counter-argument: the full expression of human achievement is not genetic; it depends on the resources given to the human; If we accept that someone cannot reach their entire potential if living in poverty, and we accept that a lot of the advantages of rich children are due to the environment and opportunities that wealth provides, then it naturally concludes that we could get all of the advantages that pro-natalists look for by creating a higher standard living for all existing children.
Only when we can provide the sustainable resources for all people on the planet can we accept the idea that we have room for more.
Your "human achievement" viewpoint is highly reductive. The culture of a place is maintained by it's local population. When you have a low birth rate situation to the point that you need to supplement the workforce with immigrants, that signifies that the local culture is slowly dying. While some mixing of cultures is beneficial, we should also try to perserve our local cultures. We should not turn every city in the developed world into a little NYC.
Thats not to say there aren't other impediments. Maybe your job is legally protected onshore (military)
Nor is this a value judgement, or a prescription of a solution. Maybe lowered tech wages are the best solution for this problem. I work in a lab, I'd love for these coders to make less money and not have to compete with them economically.
But WFH is a demonstration of ability to off-shore. That's indisputable.
This is a pretty terrible distributional effect, all things considered.
So that you can still go to work, and procreate- Win-win for the masters.
Additionally I would not take Musk as the voice of reason, as he has demonstrated borderline behavior if not complete irrationality on this kind of issues in the past (and why should he have a word in this anyway?).
I would say that the healthy response is to promote human autonomy alongside policies that show that a society cares about its most vulnerable, but what do I know.
Also everyone on HN: "there is absolutely no good argument for working in an office and anyone who suggests it is evil."
That’s different.
It looks like "pronatalist" policy is "say you support increased birth rates while simultaneously being against any economic policy that would support families."
Which looks like the conservative playbook for decades. "Yes, more people in need, with limited education, so we can scare them into supporting more of the same."
Do I have that right? Or did I miss some nuance?
I wonder if they can fit they people in available desks by now (After the layoffs).
-- W. B. Yeats
Yes, work from home is beneficial for employees, but what's best for their employees is not what they're interested in.
It's rent, the answer is almost always rent. Its my rent, its my child-care workers rent, it my kids school-teachers rent. It's always rent.
I live ~20 minutes away from my job and you eventually get tired of that, too. Car maintenance, bad weather, bad drivers, etc. grind you down little by little everyday.
But what if they can't? The options aren't great:
1. One of them takes a hit on their career for the benefit of the other.
2. Both move to an area with OK-ish jobs for both, sharing the sacrifice.
3. Both take optimal jobs wherever they are and move into a long distance relationship.
With kids in the mix, it becomes even harder, you might want to be around family to have a support network etc.
RTO mandates generally seem pretty tone deaf about this aspect.
I enjoy sitting on the tram/bus, reading a book and getting into the "work time now" mindset. Having half an hour to relax, look at the scenery, the people, and so on, is always nice.
Commute "distance" is definitely measured in minutes and not kilometers.
But then again I balance that by claiming some rebates for using my home office, now and again.
This is a really good point. At one point in my career I lived close enough to the office that I could ride my bike to work. It was actually pretty nice to work that close to home and I didn't really mind going into the office.
Hiring by catchment area does seem very appealing for anyone - neither the companies nor the candidates.
In this new, for me, city, Boston, it's quite hard to build housing for reasons that seem to only favor those in existing houses.
And that was a few years ago now, that option no longer exists; I might be able to get an apartment if I pay 2x as much as what I did for my house.
In fact, I've never actually commuted into the city for a job, it's always been suburb to suburb commutes - part of the problem there has been it's not worth moving for a job that lasts on average 3-5 years.
But in my line of work I'm often put next to people from all over the country, and / or on assignments where most the employees already do live close.
I did get a job close to home once, but one, the job was a bit bleh, and two, the pandemic started three months in so we were all asked to work from home for the next 2+ years.
Furthermore, there's a vicious cycle that keeps cities at a disadvantage, to a large part driven by the parasitic nature of suburbs themselves. Suburbs are financially completely unsustainable. Tax revenue doesn't come close to paying for the maintenance of suburban roads, infrastructure, and utilities. They survive by draining state and federal money, which itself is disproportionately drawn from urban centers where economic activity is highest. This takes money away from cities that should be reinvested back into cities.
One thing we should do is tax municipal bonds. There are other ways in which suburbs are actively and artificially propped up, of course. The point is that the suburbs has always been a Frankenstein on life support that's been bleeding cities.
So I think one way to address the suburb is to attack the parasitic dimension. By forcing suburbs to pay their own way, no one can be accused of robbing suburbs; it would incriminate the suburbs and call out their hypocrisy. It would also strike at the heart of the "adulthood" and "manhood" artificially bound up with owning a house in the suburbs. How adult and how masculine is it to mooch off of others to maintain the suburban lifestyle?
This would then fortify the urbs and also push back on the stupidity of the housing market in cities, the poor land use in many of them, as well as bad public transportation.
Sorry, no, I'm not going to raise my family of six plus a dog in a high rise. Encouraging happy, productive families by subsidizing suburbs is good.
I have a commute that varies between 30 minutes and 2 hours (one way). I am in office 5 days each week, eight hours of work, and hour for lunch. That's 11 hours gone each day (sometimes more, occasionally less). Add in getting ready to go in, doing stuff around the house when I get home, and the only time that I am really available to my spouse is dinner and Saturday/Sunday. Due to the time lost, I end up doing household work at least one day each weekend. My spouse and I now have 1 full day together each week. Where in that is there really time for romance?
I can fully understand where even two days with more time and less stress would create opportunity for romance that otherwise may not exist.
Ask me how I know it...
Just a reminder that if you pull up a chart of countries with the highest birth rates, they all have poor economic conditions. If the theory that a better economy correlates with more babies then countries like South Korea would have the world's highest birth rate.
TLDR Fertility declines as countries urbanize, income rises, and women are educated and empowered to make more affirmed fertility choices, but also slightly increases when prospective parents feel economically secure enough to have a child, or more children (within some intent or desire band).
Higher incomes are increasingly associated with higher fertility: Evidence from the Netherlands, 2008–2022 - https://www.demographic-research.org/articles/volume/51/26 | https://doi.org/10.4054/DemRes.2024.51.26 - October 8th, 2024
More Babies For the Rich? The Relationship Between Status and Children Is Changing - https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-babies-for-the-rich-the-rela... - March 18th, 2024
> Yet the trend at the aggregate level of the whole country disguises trends that are emerging among individuals in these countries. In my new book, coauthored with Martin Fieder and Susanne Huber, Not So Weird After All: The Changing Relationship between Status and Fertility, we document that while in much of the twentieth century it was poor people in countries such as the United States who had more children than richer people, there is a new emerging trend where better-off men and women are more likely to have children than less well-off men and women.
When the kid is sick and not in school daycare, that one person can do supervision. A sick kid usually does not need super involved care whole day, but they cant be left alone whole day either.
If my kid is sick I stay home and look after him, sure half the time they'll be sleeping/reading, but the other half the time its just constant interruptions and caring for him.
At least I'm lucky that I'm allowed about ten paid "care of sick child" days a year.
This also explains the results specifically impacting the number of children per mother. Having to take time off to deal with kid related things is much more manageable with fewer children, while even modest WFH flexibility might relieve that logistical burden even for much larger numbers of children. Just one or two days a week of WFH hybrid flexibility could take the place of 10-20 weeks of time off, which is far more than any employee is likely to have or need to deal with even the largest of families.
To preemptively address an obvious complaint about my comment, I'm not saying WFH replaces the need for taking PTO when it comes to childcare. Some childcare situations realistically would not allow the parent at home to work. But a lot of scenarios just require a physical presence or the ability to duck in and out with short notice. In those situations, having the WFH option is dramatically better than having to take the entire day off and removes one more burden of trying to work and parent at the same time.
Believe Switzerland allows professionals to choose the percentage of work time they want to sign up for. For instance, if 100% is 8h, 5d/week, 80% would be 4d/week. The parent can then both take 80% each & have 2 work days free for childcare.
two working people, trapped in the same house together during working hours.
if there are kids, they might be at school.
Let's wind back to March-April 2020. If you remember, there was a brief period where because of shutdowns oil prices went negative. Commodities are generally traded at spot prices and with what are called futures contracts. A future contract allows you to schedule the purchase or sale of a commodity at a price that's agreed upon today. Producers and consumers use this to de-risk prices.
Oil futures contracts are standardized with fixed delivery dates and sizes (usually 1000 barrels per contract). So in April there was a glut and nowhere to store it becasue people stopped buying on the spot market and had trouble accepting deliveries anyway. So for a brief moment, producers had to start paying people to take oil because they had nowhere to put it. Technically, this is an example of an extreme contango market.
So the world produces and uses roughly 100M barrels per day ("bpd") of oil. OPEC+ produces 40-50% of that and they like stability in the oil market. Too low and they don't make enough money. Too high and it create political instability and economic distress. The current guidance is a floor of $70 and a ceiling of $80 is considered "ideal".
So how does OPEC+ do this? They meet every 3 months and look at projected demand and adjust supply accordingly.
In May (give or take), Trump went to MBS (Mohammed bin Salman, Crown Pricne of Saudi Arabia) and asked--begged really--him to cut production because the administration believed there would be a prolonged demand slump. Now this was largely unnecessary because OPEC would do this anyway with their 3 monthly rolling cycle.
For reasons I won't get into, this was an opportunity for MBS to get back at Donald Trump for screwing over OPEC in 2018 when Trump intentionally crashed the oil market.
Starting in June 2020 and lasting 2 years, OPEC would cut production, initially by 9.7Mbpd (going down in stages to 6.3Mbpd). That's 10% of world supply. Don't believe me? It's documented [1]. And nobody talks about it.
This was, as we now know, a disaster. Demand exploded in 2021. The now-Biden administration quietly went to MBS and asked him to reverse the cuts. He refused. It was payback. The Biden administration could've absolutely talked abou this but didn't. No Democrat did. Because no establishment Democrat wants to actually upset the oil and gas industry and interfere with American foreign policy, no matter how much huffing and puffing they do about caring about such things.
So when people ask "what happens if the Strait of Hormuz closes?" we don't need to speculate. We know exactly what happens because it's already happened. Except this time it's worse. And all of these consequences were completely foreseeable and known but were ignored. And the war with Iran is 100% unwinnable.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
Yes, I am a pro-natalist - https://www.governance.fyi/p/yes-i-am-a-pro-natalist
Like many <label>'s, the group isn't seen as homogenous from within regardless of how smooth and unfeatured they appear from outside.
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2024/1218/elon-musk-cu...
I think there is considerable overlap, in the form of people who believe in the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. Essentially "we need to make sure there are enough white babies so that white people can outbreed <insert preferred minority scapegoat>." That thought is inherently eugenicist because it implicitly holds that white people are "better" in some way. "Christian" is also often implicit in "white babies," especially in contrast to Muslim or Jewish people being a common choices of scapegoat.
TFA? It certainly is.
The term pronatalist? Maybe it shouldn't be, but TFA is a political commentary on the term.
I'm just trying to understand how this word is being used. And all the answers thus far indicate that it does indeed encompass political beliefs.
It's just that those people tend to be about 2 standard deviations out on whatever normal distribution you're dealing with.
Here in the US, you get a lot of these incel-y types with women control and breeding kinks.
But in China, it's more the very hardcore commies worried about the future of the party in 30 years and maybe have one chubby grandchild.
In Korea and Japan, you get a lot of Moonie types and that sort of folk.
In the Middle East (huge, I know), these are the hardcore Muslim folks but with a family bent (think strange uncles without children themselves).
South Americans here will be the turbo Catholic variety typically with a lot of kids already
Generally, the person that is in the pro-natalist camp is generally a person that is conservative in their social ideas. They want yesterday to be like to day, and today to be like tomorrow.
But, their individual ideologies and day-to-day-life are about as opposed to each other as can be and they may outright hate each other.
Marx would have a field day with these people.
"...they went on to become the faces of the pronatalist movement, and so far they’ve been given several long profiles for mainstream media outlets to share their pronatalist ideals. This week, it was the Telegraph. In January, it was the New York Post. Last year, it was Business Insider. As Business Insider put it, pronatalism—espoused by Elon Musk, for example—is about breeding supposedly “genetically superior” people. The Collinses have expressed in multiple profiles that certain traits like empathy and even political beliefs are genetically inherited, and so breeding among people who hold those beliefs will carry them forward. In an email to Motherboard, the Collinses disputed this characterization and described pronatalism as “a movement that urges individuals from low fertility cultures to have kids to preserve as much genetic and cultural diversity as possible.”
Vogue did a decent overview of this[1] and history is littered with all kinds of examples if you go looking.
1. https://www.vogue.com/article/dark-history-of-the-far-rights...
I haven't had an in person meeting in, god, years at this point.
The only difference between my house and the office is the physical location. That's literally it. Oh, and I'm a lot less happy now.
... hard to feel that the "lot less happy" part isn't the motivation.
(And this might be why the CEOs all seem to have coordinated changing back to RTO at the same time).
Rich people sitting on multiple boards and running multiple companies is A-OK
Poor people having to work 3 jobs to keep food on the table is A-OK
But, middle class office workers working at multiple jobs is fraud and abuse and must be stopped.
GCC = global capability center
Even part timers get reimbursed.
[0]: https://japan-dev.com/blog/employee-benefits-in-japan
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/y1nurn/places_outsid...
> getting into the "work time now" mindset
This is actually the reason I never liked WFH. I don't want to be in the work mindset at home, it degrades my ability to relax at home.
Sometimes I just want to be at home to do deep thinking without anyone bothering me.
Sometimes the weather makes it so I don't leave the house.
Just let me decide where I work from.
I think the thing people miss about RTO is that management are more likely to be extroverted. They’re the kind of people who thrive on being surrounded by people. I don’t think RTO is as nefarious as people here make out - it’s just extroverts wanting to mold the workplace to for them.
That makes them bad managers, but not necessarily bad people.
An urban city can be or have an industrial hub. By industrial I don't necessarily mean manufacture.
> Urban cities tend to have more than one employer too
They can also have those employers at a couple hours commute (not walking) from each other. That helps my point, not hinders it.
> there were maybe a dozen or so companies that were hiring devs where I lived
Assuming those were all within 15 minutes walking distance, then it would qualify as the kind of industrial hub I mentioned - although a dozen or so may not be good enough for an employee to shop around and get good deals.
> now after moving there are around 800 companies that hire devs
Again, within 15 min walk of each other? I find that hard to believe, but assuming so, that is an industrial hub.
Mass Transit will never, ever, ever work in rural areas where houses are 2-5 miles apart from each other. It would barely work in suburbs, and only certain kinds like bus transit. You're never going to get a subway to work in the suburbs. Mass Transit is great for cities though, we should be building more of it.
The chaos and noise (especially the car noise) are just an explicit choice American cities have made.
I really hope you get the irony of being a suburbanite complaining about there being too many cars in cities when most of those cars are suburbanites who’ve given up on improving the public transit in their cities.
And the people working in those places provided the customer base for local and regional financial services, along with the rest of the commercial base that made small towns and provincial cities good places to live and raise a family throughout the 20th century.
And of course, a household only needed one person employed, so there was less pressure to move to a bigger city that could provide opportunities for two different careers.
If you have a situation where suddenly your life improves noticeably, birthrates will rise - even if the first group is always better off than the second. It's relative.
So WFH may have contributed to a birth rate rise simply because people felt more secure and more in control (or better) than they did before.
It may be an ideology but I don’t think this is a red/blue topic and certainly not a legislative one imo. It is more of a geographical issue and a byproduct of industrialism that isn’t really reversible, you just hope the ride down is more of a slope and not a cliff.
I have less insight into the culture of natalists in countries like Japan or South Korea where their population pyramids are heavily inverted. I don't know what they're doing to address their age demographic issues, nor do I have any ideas for what they should do.
This holds whether their butt is in a seat in some office or at home.
> Homo Economicus
GOOD ONE
Companies should stop penalizing people for being work efficient, and increase their salary if the workload increases.
... everyone else follows because, "Amazon's doing it.."
You're not thinking systematically. Increased demand isn't the only variable. Consider also how gov't and the market respond to increased demand and need, especially if the paradigm of normative human settlement changes. Social pressure forces changes. Diffusing pressure allows gov'ts to kick the can down the road, which is what led to the suburban debacle.
> I'm not going to raise my family of six plus a dog in a high rise.
Where did I say you must live in a high rise? Urban development isn't limited to high rises. Small towns and cities exist, yes? It's a question of density and particular patterns of urban planning that enable a healthy social environment. Traditional urban planning did a far better job of that than the suburb.
And btw, what's the problem having a large family in a high rise? Living in a high rise actually reduces the maintenance costs (both in terms of time and money). Owning a suburban house comes with more overhead. In well-designed cities, there is ample green space. In a landscape dotted with cities, you are also within reach of more expansive natural landscapes that haven't been spoiled, scarred, and deformed by sprawling suburbs.
> Encouraging happy, productive families by subsidizing suburbs is good.
I assure you: the suburb is neither good for families nor productive. They are extraordinarily wasteful. Children are shackled and isolated at home, because getting anywhere requires driving. Parents are then burdened with the task of driving their children everywhere or making arrangements. You can't do or buy anything without driving. People waste countless hours commuting. And as I already wrote, it is very expensive to maintain suburban utilities. It takes a lot more energy to keep the suburban machine running. Suburbs are basically on gov't welfare funded by city tax payers.
This naturally comes off as entitled: entitled not to live in a high rise (which, as I said, is not necessarily entailed by the word "city", so rather moot) and entitled to subsidies that drain resources from cities. Why don't suburbs pay for the luxury of their own existence? Funding them is not a matter of the common good, nor is it charity. It's exploitation of others to satisfy a private fetish and fantasy, one that incidentally harms the common good.
I encourage you to visit Strong Towns[0]. There's plenty of material there that targets a popular audience that covers this subject. You might find these ideas less threatening than the urban boogeyman of your mind.
The government already isn't effectively responding to increased demand and need, so I really disagree that making the problem worse will overall help anything. That is basically accelerationism.
The rest of your post I disagree with from value-based first principles, e.g. "children are shackled and isolated" and "you can't do...anything without driving", as though the only things for children to do in the world are shop and consume in an urban center, so there is no point discussing it.
Most tech employment in Europe is via American FDI.
And for a large number of "European" companies it's the same management, board members, and investors as in the US. Heck, I'm on the board of a European company as well.
Coming from the person who said "Germans need to stop using "Europe" as a stand-in for Germany"... I don't think whatever you personally experienced applies to all of Europe, it's not a tiny place with heterogeneous employment situations across the continent exactly.
Visible elements of pronatalism are largely focused on assigning a particular family role to women and trying to increase the supply of a particular kind of desirable baby (often white, but sometimes focused on IQ selection and other eugenic elements).
The eugenics part doesn't match my experience at all. I've never seen any evidence that people who are having large families are motivated by that.
Every younger sibling from a large family that I know was in large part raised by their older siblings.
Then don't because it's just wrong. Very few, if any, of the "more babies, bigger families" types have any interest in or concern for the children after they're born. In fact they're usually the ones fighting tooth and nail to prevent any kinds of programs or services that might help the resulting children and families.
For them it's just a pure numbers game/bizarre sexual fetish disguised as a philosophy.
We tried to have them at home while WFH a few months during covid when everything was shut down. That didn't work. lol.
I don't think any companies move into cities with agreements they will meaningfully increase foot traffic in large urban centers, certainly not with any sort of true repercussions if they don't. That just simply does not happen.
Source: https://blog.google/company-news/outreach-and-initiatives/di...
I mean, your own link up there has a sub-heading of "Everyone has their own definition".
Especially when you're replying to "he seems to clear favor white Christian people and himself especially" rather than "is a Christian". Queen Victoria wasn't a feminist, neither.
The point is that given Musk is clearly not an actual Christian he cannot favour Christians "himself included".
Now compare it again.
you don't need much experience. the tools make you insanely faster with much much less physical strain and maintenance time. they're simple, predictable, reliable, and obscenely powerful.
an experimented carpenter would take a few minutes to be decent at using then.
- stable and "slow" is best - don't ever let the blade get pinched (by wood) - be mindful of the cords - keep the flesh out of the way - goggles up and don't breathe the dust
you got 95% of it there
Actual affordability of children has zero direct effect on fertility, the only thing that really matters here is "perceived affordability" (=> and by implication, effect on lifestyle)!
So if you can "trick" people into having more sex, then expecting higher fertility is quite reasonable, while decreasing the monetary cost of raising kids might not really help much at all.
Me and the wife only decided to have a child after finances were in order. If finances were not in order we wouldn't have had a child.
Affordability was definitely a factor.
Have you known many couples who had trouble trying to conceive? There's a reason fertility monitoring strips, apps, etc. are such a huge market, and it's not because people are trying to avoid pregnancy.
> [...] for some magic moments that may not be particularly planned or even romantic, rather more characterized by a delightful and clumsy urgency.
I guarantee that if you interviewed couples who had been unsuccessfully trying to conceive for a long time a large number of them would strongly disagree with using "delightful" to describe the urgency of sex during the fertility window.
Man available to the woman effectively around the clock every day, setting majority of the time is private and comfortable enough that sex can just happen, in compressed and sometimes exciting timeframe, i.e. even if busy with WFH and childcare.
I am aware of couples who struggled or are struggling with fertility, and using the various tools and techniques to increase the odds. I am not discounting their experiences and hardships. I am saying that, on average, if more couples of child bearing age are sexually accessible to one another effectively 24/7, then there are natural instincts that can and do play a role in them coming together sexually at the critical time for conceiving a child, and so more children would be conceived.
this is patently wrong. getting pregnant isn't just something that magically happens once you decide you have enough money
Regressive attitudes tend to not come alone.
(That being said, this isn't an excuse to be an absentee, deadbeat dad. Traditionally, most people lived in villages, living agrarian lives. Family life was much more involved. That meant both parents were generally present throughout the day. And with age, the fatherly role becomes increasingly important for development. The strict division of mom-in-suburban-home/dad-away-at-urban-office is hardly traditional or representative of historical realities.)
I don’t think it’s the be-all end-all explanation, but the shoe fits.
You know what else is socially conservative?
RTO makes relationships outside of the traditional nuclear family more difficult. It discourages career building which, because of the patriarchy and our history, is going to primarily affect women.
Sexism and misogyny is actually very complicated. It's built-in to just about every system that exists in America. It's not the sort of simple "woman bad" some people think. It's the choices we make when we design structures. It's part of our DNA, it's not a symptom.
Not on all dimensions, of course. People with kids e.g. will have to find a solution for who gets to work how much, it's a similar conflict WFH addresses partly at best.
Doctors can find a clinic to work at nearly anywhere. If their partner needs to move they can go with.
If both can WFH, they can even choose the place they want to live in regardless of where their optimal employment options are based.
Those meme-level DITL and older hustle culture stuff are two completely different things, targeting different audiences, and using different methods, so it makes sense that people would have two different reactions to them, even if you think both of them are stupid?
Are there any reports of someone moving their company from WFH to full RTO in order to get women writ large to leave their company? I think it's much more likely that capital owners just want their building full so they don't lose their investments, business owners and executives don't like WFH for various reasons including the extremely overblown risk of overemployment, managers on average want to micromanage and find it easier in-office, and there's no public health backstop to justify WFH like there was 5 years ago.
Separately but related, I don't think there's anything wrong with a factory worker getting paid $18/hr watching someone spread 2 hours of work over 7 hours in the office with two catered meals plus snacks and making jokes about "email jobs" not being real. I probably watched all the DITL things that went truly viral and the comments were never any more sexist than any other viral video on the internet.