Robin Hanson: Culture as it Relates to Fertility Decline

In this episode, we are joined by the renowned economist and author Robin Hansen, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. The discussion centers around the challenging issue of fertility decline and its cultural underpinnings. Hansen outlines various trends contributing to lower fertility rates, such as prolonged education, intensive parenting, gender equality, urban living, and less religious adherence. He also explores the interaction of culture and economy, the potential for policy interventions, and the role of subcultures in addressing demographic challenges. Additionally, they touch on historical patterns, the evolution of cultures, and the strategies for fostering sustainable, high-fertility communities. The conversation offers a rich and insightful analysis of one of today's pressing societal issues.

[00:00:00]

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. As you can see today, we are joined by the one, the only, the incredibly prolific and brilliant Robin Hansen. He is the American economist author. He's also an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. But he is known for some of the most catchy ideas, ranging from grabby aliens to one of the most popular fertility intervention proposals, which has to do with sort of like a tax bonds on children's future tax generated income.

But most recently on the prenatal list front Robin Hansen's focus has been shifting to culture. So we wanted to have him on base camp to talk about prenatal list culture. Welcome, Robin.

Robin Hanson: Hello everyone. So, as you know, culture, I mean, fertility looks like a pretty hard problem, like, right? Yeah. So you guys are working hard.

I hope you have success, but you, you get that it's an uphill battle, right? Yeah, yeah. But so at least I feel good about fertility that I can. Frame a proposal and say it in words and say, if only you would do this, it'll probably fix the problem. That doesn't mean you can get somebody to do it, but [00:01:00] it's a nice thing to have is to be able to, yes.

Have a concrete proposal and say, look, if you do this, that would fix it.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Robin Hanson: And that's as a policymaker, I'm proud. Like that's kind of our job. Like, okay, if you guys won't do anything, you know what the hell Yeah. That's on

Simone Collins: you. Yeah. You could have it's, you could have had nice

Robin Hanson: things. We could, we at least had an idea for what to do.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Robin Hanson: But so I thought about for. Fertility for like eight months. And then like most people in fertility, I came to see culture underlying as a fundamental cause of fertility decline. It's, it doesn't mean that we have to fix it that way. Right? We can fix things with money that are caused by culture.

That's a, if you can

Simone Collins: afford it. Yeah. Right. If

Robin Hanson: you can afford it. Money and culture interact and have for many centuries, yes. Like capitalism and culture have had a lot of influences on each other. So just because something's caused by culture doesn't mean it needs to be fixed by culture directly. That is, you could do a a money thing that changes culture and I think the money thing we talked about in our last episode is such a thing that would change culture.

But you certainly notice that the proximate cause of the problem is [00:02:00] culture. And that induced me more of a theorist to say, okay, why? Hmm. What's causing culture to change? What is it just some random, you know, thing that just happens in the world? Or is there some more systematic way to understand why culture?

So it's not, it's like a half a dozen trends. I can point out that cons that seem to be causing fertility decline. You, you guys know them all Probably.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I go into 'em. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. We may particularly

Robin Hanson: very differently. Okay. Let's just mention them for, you know, for, for completeness sake. Yes.

So obviously like. Longer years of education and early career prep. Right. A lot of young women want, who are s very powerful. You know, capable people want to prove that they can do well in their careers and our career ladders don't give very good pauses. Yeah. And they want to show that they are capable and.

You know, be successful. And so they want to wait to as long as the career ladder requires to then consider having kids. So that's, that's one. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. As, as we go through each of these, I wanna talk about [00:03:00] how they can be addressed and how other cultures, their state high fertility have addressed them.

The two ways that this particular problem I've seen addressed is one have women not become educated or have men and women not become

Robin Hanson: educated. It works really well for fertility rates, but also

Simone Collins: in places like Kazakhstan. You still have men and women getting educated, but they're having kids in university.

And this is my favorite solution. I think that's the best time to have kids.

Malcolm Collins: It's what Simone said is you have to change the expectation of timing.

Robin Hanson: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Malcolm Collins: You get married, then you go to university or you get married. In your first couple years of university and should have a couple kids by the time you graduate.

Mm-hmm. This is normal within a lot of cultures. Then it's an easy thing to frame. I think the quiver full movement had a really good framing of this. You know, the the, the children are like the eras in the quiver of your youth, which, which points out is that children are supposed to be something that you sort of stock up on while you're young.

And, and, and then, and then provide benefit to you when you're older which is a very different framing than children [00:04:00] are. The capstone. Once you are stable.

Robin Hanson: That brings up a next trend, as you know, which is the switch from cornerstone to capstone marriage. You know, when I was young the norm was you just marry early when you're not fully formed, where you don't know what you're gonna become.

And the two of you form each other and become something together. Yes. Okay. And now the norm is you should find yourself and know who you are and we have a stable position. And then. Then match with somebody who matches your stable position in what you become.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly.

Robin Hanson: And that takes a lot longer, and that also puts on a delay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I, and I know with this particular trend is that it's not leading to better marriages like, right. No. A marriage, a marriage is actually much better, I'd argue to have a cornerstone marriage than to have a capstone marriage because you can one, grow together. Two, it fixes a lot of the problems with the existing monetary difference.

So, you know, one of the things I'm sure you're gonna get to is that women like men who earn more money than [00:05:00] them, but they also don't like men on average earning more money than them, which means that on average they're not gonna be able to find a spouse once they've corrected and they've overcorrected.

Now if you look at young women, they over-ear men pretty significantly. But so if they're like, oh, I'll only date men who earn more money than me, and on average women are earning more than men, you know, they're gonna have a really hard time fighting a partner, right? So they're gonna be dating a bunch of people who are likely lying to them about like their, their actual status.

And that's why women think all men are b******s because they are sorting into the b******s, right? But the point here being is that this is a problem that occurs once you graduate from college if you normalize, I. Marrying somebody going into college. You marry somebody at an age where neither of you has an income yet.

Right. And this is why it's so important to get married before you get a job, not

Robin Hanson: after.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

Robin Hanson: Good point. So I'm not sure of all these trends, but I don't need to be sure that they're just things people talk a lot about. So a third one is more intensive parenting. [00:06:00] Yes. So I think I see this, I see my son taking care of their, you know, our grandchild.

Compare that to my taking care of my son, compared that to how I was taking care of, yeah. If I look, it's like look at movies from the thirties and forties and kids in the movies and see how much parent attention parents are paying to those kids. They're not barely paying any attention to the kids. Yeah.

What? What attention. They're not like watching them and taking them around and instructing them. The kids are just running around and the parents are talking to each other and they're just two separate worlds. That, because that was okay back then.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And this is incredibly important to Renormalize and I think that you really cannot have any form of Tism work without normalizing this specific thing.

And it's one of the reasons why when many people are like, why? Do you, as the heads of the prenatal lesson movement so often you know, get seen by reporters as like not really paying that much attention to your kids or, or, or, you know, being rough with your kids or like, mostly ignoring them and it's like, because that's the only way you make this sustainable if, if you, if you like overly And what's wild is, is [00:07:00] that we even have AI now.

Like I don't even need to talk to my kid, for my kid to have somebody to talk to. Yeah. You know, I just feel AI is

Simone Collins: infinitely attentive and patient with our kids. Like our kids talk with chat GBT and I love it because we'd just be like, okay, whatever. And chat G t's like, wow, I love that too. This is so great.

This just like, this is

Robin Hanson: perfect. Right. So another trend that certainly contributes via the school thing is just gender equality.

Simone Collins: Oh, interesting.

Robin Hanson: If, if women just hold, hold different life paths and that wasn't involving career aspirations, then they would, you know. The school thing would just be much less of an issue.

Obviously that did happen in the past. Yeah. Yeah. So we're not saying we're, we're definitely not saying we're gonna reverse all these trends. Like yeah, let's just be clear. But we do wanna acknowledge what are the trends that have been contributing the election. Gender equality. Gender equality.

Simone Collins: So, hold, just keep going, but I'm just gonna get Indy 'cause she woke up.

Malcolm Collins: Well, hold on, hold on, hold on there. There's actually some interesting data on gender equality that we went over in a few recent episodes where. It [00:08:00] appears that in some environments, gender inequality and not some, I'd actually say most environments today, like in developed countries leads to much lower fertility

Robin Hanson: rates.

You're right. So, but it certainly contributed early, like so in South Korea they have this huge gender conflict and part of it is that women want men to do more household chores and men. Don't think they should because that's not what they used to do.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. So, you know, so clearly. So yeah, specifically here, this comes from the, I dunno if you've seen this, this tweet, but it's really good, this like what makes these countries different from these countries and it breaks down like Denmark, the USA you know, I think like Israel a few others all in one category.

And then another category is like Italy's. Portugal, Korea, Japan, China. And the argument presented was, is that the second group of countries modernized and became wealthy much later. And as such, it didn't update its views around gender norms as much. And so you had the economic [00:09:00] expectation of women working without the updated gender norms within the household.

Although I think many of these cultures were actually just more misogynistic historically, if you look at like Albion Seed or American Nations, you could see many of the founding cultural groups of America were highly gender egalitarian. Like the backwoods greater Appalachian culture was very gender egalitarian.

The Puritans were very gender egalitarian. Well, and

Simone Collins: by egalitarian men and women were still seen as very different, but they no, no, no. But they

Malcolm Collins: were gender egalitarian when contrasted with Japanese or Chinese culture, for example. For sure. Yeah.

Robin Hanson: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right.

Robin Hanson: It's about these changing roles that is, we, we had the expectation women go to work, but also that they keep doing the housework.

Yeah. And then they're less willing to have kids, which, which makes sense, but you know, it's uneven development of gender norm changes.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Robin Hanson: So an older one, but I still think it's important to notice is norms of children not living with their parents when they have children.

Simone Collins: Oh yes. That's very good.

Grandparent's. Very good. In the old days,

Robin Hanson: people would live in a family estate [00:10:00] with three generations. Yeah. And that was usual. And so kids didn't have to have their own place or even their own income in order to have their own kids.

Simone Collins: And you'd built in childcare and built in elder care. So big elements of our

Robin Hanson: social safety.

Right. But it also meant that the grandparents had more control. That's true. They got to say more. But true. The old, you know, clan based societies, the, the patriarch or matriarch just had more say about how everybody lived. True,

Simone Collins: yeah. And

Robin Hanson: one of the things people enjoy about our world is more freedom from parental influence over your lives.

But a big cost of that is they're not helping so much with childcare, childcare, environment housing, you know, everything else.

Simone Collins: 100%. Yeah. I think people don't think about the opportunity cost as much as they maybe should.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, and I've seen this as a major fertility factor that is more addressable than many cultures give it credit for.

Mm-hmm. Eh, specifically at Nacon, one couple was telling me, well, we had kids much [00:11:00] earlier than we had planned on having them because we had moved to a, a community that wasn't our birth community. And the pastor at this community said, oh, well, we'll be there for you. Like, we'll help you with, with childcare.

You let me know when you need it. And then they were like, okay. Then I had a kid, and then the pastor told them when the kid was crying one day, he's like, you can let the kid cry. Like, we don't care. Like, and they were like, and I felt really self conscious and then I didn't feel self conscious.

So we had a second kid. And. These things at a cultural level, like people can be like, culture isn't something you can change and it like literally is you can just go to your pastor and be like, Hey, can we like put together some system for like childcare sharing or something like that for, for our parishioners.

Can you like call out and praise people who have children like that? Like increases fertility rates really dramatically.

Robin Hanson: Right. Obviously you as a grandparent could just tell your children about how you might be willing to help, but that's an awkward conversation. I think that is right.

Malcolm Collins: Well, I also, a lot of us can't, like, I can't make my parents take care of my kids, and in truth, I [00:12:00] don't think they have the, like, you've gotta trust a parent to take care of every kid as well.

Like, you've gotta trust, like, oh, I'll leave a toddler around this person. And I think we're of a generation that may not have a level of trust in our parents conscientiousness around little toddlers that would've been taken for granted in previous generations. So. Well, and maybe a lot

Simone Collins: of that too has to do with child count and, and child rearing participation.

So if, for example, only one parent, primarily raised only one child, like their experience with childcare is probably just, or, or worse

Malcolm Collins: if they, if they had nannies all the time.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Robin Hanson: So our habit of moving away from home when we become adults is related here. That is, if we stayed in the same neighborhood where our parents lived, we probably could arrange for more grandparent help in child rearing.

Yeah. But we have this habit of going to college somewhere far away and then going to a job far away. And that does make it a lot harder for grandparents to help.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Though I, I will say we [00:13:00] know anecdotally, at least a lot of people who, after having kids have moved to be closer with their parents or have parents who have moved to be closer to them.

And it's encouraging to see that, like people I think do understand the value. It's just making it happen. Is a lot harder than other like, than it, than it used to be because in many cases, parents really prefer to live a life that doesn't involve providing free child labor, be

Malcolm Collins: willing to make sacrifices, and part of the sacrifice is moving.

I was talking with a reporter recently and this reporter was telling me well, I only have one kid and I live in Manhattan, so I can't easily have more kids because my husband and I have jobs in Manhattan. And I was like, oh, that's really tough. You know, like maybe. And I was thinking, oh, maybe you get jobs outside of Manhattan or something like that.

The conversation goes on and I realize, I was like, wait a second, you're a journalist and you are husband. Runs a startup, you can move you. You, you have jobs in Manhattan 'cause you have chosen to have [00:14:00] jobs in Manhattan. Being a journalist, you don't need to go to the office every week. And your husband chooses where his office is based.

You have chosen to sacrifice the lives of your future children. And I think that that cultural framing is also really big. It's one that we talk about pretty frequently is for us, when we think about like, when does life start the way you view life can change how many kids you're gonna end up having.

For fertility, it appears about the worst way to view life at the beginning of conception. 'cause castles have really low fertility rates when you control for income. But I think the best way is the way that we do, which is to say, every time you choose between two timelines, if you choose to erase a life, was in one of those timelines, you are responsible for eradicating that person.

And you should think about the you in that timeline, how they would feel about your decision. So when I was talking to the journalist and she's like, well, how, how do I have another kid? Like, can you convince me? And I was like, well, you know, if you have that other kid, five years from now that you in that timeline is mortified that you ever [00:15:00] had this conversation, they're mortified that you ever thought, even for one instance about not having that kid, that timeline is just as valid as a timeline in which you don't have the kid.

So you should consider that iteration of yourself that is mortified, your selfishness for deciding not to bring a life into the world. And I think that when you, when I talk to reporters about Simone, you know, getting, because she's. The most c-sections anyone has ever had is 11, and Simone's gonna be at five with this kid, you know, so she's getting up there.

And so, you know, she is putting her life at risk and people are like, why would she put her life at risk? And I'm like, the moral equation is obvious. Like if a robber had a gun to your, your, your spouse's head and one of your kids' head and was like, if you don't tell me to like shoot the spouse, I'm gonna shoot the kid.

Everybody chooses shoot the spouse, right? Like, but why isn't this the case when it's a baby?

Robin Hanson: So I've got three more trends left. Go for it. Yes. So one, is there vanity? So we had the debate at the previous event, but I, I do think basically. [00:16:00] There's this attraction of urbanity that this, the city centers are full of activities and they're full of status.

There's a place to meet and hang with people. Yeah. And if you wanna choose a high status life, that's a place to go. But it does cost you in terms of opportunity to cost, including in space and income. And so that does come at the expense, I think, of fertility. Mm-hmm. So, you don't have to live in city centers, but people, if you want to choose fertility, you can, but often the price of that is to be less away from the center of activity.

Right. Yeah. What,

Simone Collins: what are your thoughts on the role that urbanity plays? However, in matchmaking like you, I think it's a lot easier to find a partner when you're in a highly dense area. And that it seems like, I mean, my, my general intuition is. Go to highly dense population centers to find your person and then when you find them, get out of there and start your family.

Right. But unfortunately,

Robin Hanson: like we're pretty plastic culturally when we're young. Yeah. So if you go to the city when you're 20 and you spend the next few years looking for partners, you will also assimilate the city values and the city practices. Yeah. It's so

Simone Collins: hard to get out there and then

Robin Hanson: you will. Be less eager to leave [00:17:00] the city to go have kids somewhere else you might wanna contribute.

Do you think that's true

Simone Collins: though? When like the plot of all the Hallmark Christmas movies and romances is girl with big power job from the city goes back home for Christmas reluctantly Of course. Or like to some small Podunk town meets hunky man and stays there forever. Forever. Like there seems to be this

Malcolm Collins: I, I.

I think that if you approach stages, life stages, like a preset life stage model, as a culture, like I was raised, totally, your life happens in stages. Do this at this stage, this at this stage, this at this stage. It's, it's easier to switch between them if you have that preset up, especially if you have the stage in the city framed of as like a, a, a trial and bad.

If you teach your kid to think of a city as a place there, there's not really anything to do because everything costs a ton of money and is it's pointless. And that you, you really only get freedom, the freedom to have the privilege of living in the countryside once you find a partner. I think that that could help them set up more.

But I, I, [00:18:00]

Robin Hanson: I, I think the more options feed into the capstone marriage concept too, though. Mm. That is, look, if you just lived in a small town and those are all the people, you would just pick somebody from among them and like, make, do and go on with it. Yeah. The city raises your standards. Here's all these people.

I need to pick like one of the best of all these people. I can't just pick the first person I like. Overwhelmed by how and then the expectation that they're all around for many years. What? You know, how do you think you're gonna leave so earlier than, than you assimilate the culture of expecting to spend 10 years in the city?

I. Looking for the very best person.

Malcolm Collins: Fair point. I actually really like something you said there, but I I, I change it a little for like realistic high achieving culture, which is you want a pool that people are dating within that they feel they can exhaust. If they feel that the dating pool is inexhaustible then they go on forever.

But if you're like, no, this is all of the best people in the world here. Here they are. Yeah. Like that's really what caused me to marry you, Simone, is I went to Stanford Business School. I was like, oh, this is supposed to be like the highest competency women in the world. They're not as good as you. So [00:19:00] I know I've, I've searched the world.

So you need a balanced

Simone Collins: game of musical chairs and you need to know when the music's about to stop.

Malcolm Collins: To do this with our kids is put together a discord like thing with parents who have kids around our kids' age who are like based and interesting and like the most successful people in the world. And we are searching really hard to make this group as big as possible.

And then we tell the kids in this discord, you can date whatever. And if you find someone you like, we'll send you to live with their family for a bit. So you can like get to know them, get to know the kids and date in a controlled environment so that you get this feeling of, if I don't find the person in this discord, I'm not gonna find many people more interesting than this.

Robin Hanson: So think about careers. I did the thing where I kept changing careers many times. Yes, until I found a career I liked, but that was costly for me. Most people find a career that's good enough and they stick with it. Yeah. And it might be, if we had that attitude toward marriage, like I think I had more of the attitude toward marriage.

I found my wife and I said, good enough. Let's take her. I [00:20:00] wasn't thinking, well, is she really better than the best I could find Uhhuh, but for careers, I had this higher standard of, okay, this is okay. I like it, but like this other thing over there might be even better.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Robin Hanson: So just think about the inconsistency versus career choice versus marriage.

People seem to choose their careers much earlier in life than they choose their life partners. It's not clear that you actually should, I mean, you have to spend some time searching for each and then pick and go.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Your, your life partner matters more and will influence your career. Like the career that they want will influence the career that you want.

Like you, they can also help

Simone Collins: you get a career. We got more reason

Malcolm Collins: to pick them early. Exactly.

Simone Collins: Yeah. And having a spouse can give you the security to have a career. We know so many people who took turns getting graduate degrees or doing the risky jobs so that the other one had the steady job and it's just, everything's better with a good spouse.

Robin Hanson: Okay. My second to last trend is less religion.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Robin Hanson: So clearly there's huge correlations with religion around the world and fertility.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Robin Hanson: And the world has become less religious and that just seems to [00:21:00] be a trend that's causing lower fertility. You know, have to understand necessarily why exactly, but it, it does seem to be real.

Malcolm Collins: And what a lot of people miss about this is religion is dropping a gin alpha at a much faster rate than it is in other generations. Mm-hmm. I'll try to put a graph on screen here, if I remember. And so people see that religion has stopped dropping in the United States this year and they're like, oh, this is a sign that just trying to stopped and maybe fertility rates.

So I don't think that that is a sign of that. I think that what we're seeing is reconversion into religion of adults and not a drop in, in, in the rate to which young people are being torn out of religions and, you know, like us or JD Vance or something like that. Like, and I don't think that this is as as positive a sign

Robin Hanson: as people think it is.

If, if I had to look for an explanation, it seems to me that. When people are really poor and in desperate circumstances, religion does comfort them in a really substantial way.

Malcolm Collins: Absolutely. Oh, I, I don't think that's why, I think the reason why religion increases fertility rates is two reasons. One is that it provides an [00:22:00] exogenous motivation to have kids beyond hedonism a lot of secularists when they're having kids.

Sure. They're like, will they improve my quality of life? Will I enjoy having them? Will I, but in a religion, it's like, this is the duty, you know? And so you don't even question how it's gonna make you feel or anything like that. So the exogenous motivation increases the number of kids. Two, I think religiosity is often just a, a, a very high correlary sort of indicator of a person's how much they're in a, an ancestral culture versus the urban monoculture.

When somebody becomes more, more urban monoculture, more like, of this progressive cultural group that is all around cities today and is sort of like a mimetic virus they, they decrease in religiosity. And so, if you look at. Atheists who are distant from the urban monoculture, they're often pretty high fertility.

So you can look at like Elon Musk, who's pretty distinct from the urban monoculture, very high fertility or some people would consider us a form of secularists and we're pretty high fertility. So I think that the,

Robin Hanson: there's two, there's two parts. There's, there's what's [00:23:00] causing the, the religion decline and then does religion decline?

Cause fertility decline? So, mm, I mean, I think in the mo in a modern, rich world, we're comfortable and secure enough that we don't need religion so much. But look, when you're just really poor and like your children are dying and you're in war and whatever, religion just is an appeal much more directly.

Like it gives you comfort and some place in the world and meaning that you really want and need. And, but once you have that, the structure that you tend to get with it comes with structures that make you also wanna be fertile. That is the kind of meaning you get in religion is. Like, you know, helps is a compliment of the kind of meaning you get in family.

But there's this puzzle. Why? Why isn't there Vermont culture religious? And I think it's because they're just rich and comfortable and not really very afraid of very much. Although, and don't you think

Simone Collins: there's also this big correlation between religions and the ability to delay gratification and think in terms of the longer term with the contrast being that mainstream urban [00:24:00] monoculture culture is about instant pleasure and you will never have kids, or at least a lot of kids, if your life is about instant pleasure.

Like kids are definitely a delayed gratification thing.

Robin Hanson: It's strikingly though a lot of, you know, the urban monoculture people are willing to make sacrifices for careers. You know, they'll spend a lot of time studying for classes, sorts of

Simone Collins: things. That's, yeah, that's a really good point. That's a really good point.

Yeah, they're, they're not always the most fun. So, wait, then, what is, what is the Robin Hansen solution to the Robin Hansen fertility stack of demographic collapse? Like what would you,

Robin Hanson: if you were just one last trend, and then let's talk about the underlying problem.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Robin Hanson: So one last trend is just a more integrated world, a less integrated world will just have more variety in all these different kinds of cultures around the world and what their attitudes were related to fertility.

So a more varied world would just have some places that happen to have high fertility and other low, and at least, you know, we'd have more [00:25:00] overall fertility. But our dominant monoculture is low fertility, and we have all this communication and travel and trade in the world that just merges the world together into a shared culture.

Simone Collins: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Robin Hanson: So the high, so now the question is, okay, we see all these trends. What's the cause now first notice. In our world, the most prestigious intellectuals are the people who comment on the sort of trends we've been talking about. They point out what the social trends were and they wanna like talk about what the trend should be.

Everybody loves this culture trend conversation. It's the, the most elite conversation you see in pundits and you know everybody else. It is, it is, but, but there's also a separate group of people who analyze how culture happens over time. They are specialists in cultural evolution and they are not very prestigious, even among academics.

And they really crave being scientific. And so they try not to enter into these conversations about cultural [00:26:00] trends because that would be non-scientific. And those are the people I turn to, to understand what's happening with culture, how does it work and how to understand these trends. But you have to turn away from the most prestigious culture talk because I.

The way people talk about culture is kind of the way you guys have been here, which is, as a participant, you say, what are the trends? What do I like? What I don't? Which, what could I argue for? What could I argue against? Mm-hmm. That's what prestigious culture talk is like, is analyzing, like recruiting allies for your direction to push culture and recruiting like arguments and, and things like that.

And that's what you're doing in fertility. And, and I'm, I'm glad you are doing it, but the key thing to notice is that makes you somewhat blind to what's this process by which cultures change? How does that work and how do we tell us? 'cause we've written the whole

Malcolm Collins: book on this subject. Yeah. We're curious to get your take.

Robin Hanson: Well, so, so the basic idea is it's just randomness that is. [00:27:00] Humanity superpower is cultural evolution, and it's just a different kind of biological evolution. Yeah. And it's just variation in selection. And in fact, it's simpler than DNA evolution because DNA evolution had had billions of viewers to collect all sorts of like clever tricks and hooks and like fixes for things.

But cultural evolution is just new and simple. And so it's really just very basic variation in selection.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. The, the analogy that we use in the book, the pragmatist guided crafting religion, which is a hundred percent on this topic, is we argue that culture is an evolving software that sits on top of our biological hardware and can adapt to environmental constraints much faster than the hardware can.

Robin Hanson: Hmm. Right now the framing I want want you to see though, is an analogy to driving a car. Like, so when you're driving a car, you have a control system. You look and see the road ahead. And you see where the road turns and then you're supposed to see the road. Think about where you wanna be. Tell your hands to turn the wheel.

The wheel turns the, you know, the, [00:28:00] the wheel turns the tires and then the tires moves the car. And each of these things has parameters in terms of the delay and sort of the noise. And that should be compared to like how fast you're going down the road and how fast the road's changing. So if your parameters of how fast you notice things and how noisy you see things are too bad, you won't be able to stay on the road and you'll just go off the road.

If you drive slowly enough and see the road well enough, you can follow the road, but otherwise you go off. And the same sort of parameter comparison should be there for cultural evolution. Cultural evolution is this process where there's a distribution of cultures and there's a, some sort of distribution of fitness landscape.

And the fitness landscape's actually gonna be moving a bit. And these points on the landscape are also gonna be fluctuating around a bit. And you, the cloud of points will follow the fitness landscape as it moves if the parameters are right, that is if you have enough points. Mm-hmm. If [00:29:00] the pressure to, like, you know, when you have the more adaptive region, the the pressure, you know, those things grow faster, other things shrink, then the drift rate is low enough and the rate at which the landscape changes is low enough, then.

Selection can follow it. That is the cloud of points will follow the landscape as it moves if the parameters are right for cultural evolution. And then the thing to notice is the parameters have changed. So three centuries ago, the world had hundreds of thousands of peasant cultures. Yes. Each of which had a thousand or 2000 people in it that were really pretty independent.

They didn't trade that much with each other or do that much. They, each little peasant culture mostly was self-sufficient. And they were poor at the edge of survival. So they suffered famines and, and pandemics and wars all the time. And they were conservative. They didn't wanna change very much. They tried to stay near where they were and the environment was changing slowly.

So, you know, the world economy doubled roughly every thousand years up until a few centuries [00:30:00] ago. And so that's a stable situation for. The cloud of cultures to follow the adaptive landscape. Slow change, conservative change, lots of variety and strong selection pressures. Mm-hmm. And now in the last few centuries, we've changed all four of these parameters.

So we first merged peasant cultures into the nation national cultures. So there's a famous book, peasants in the French Men describing that in France, but it happened everywhere. Mm. And then afterwards, these different national cultures have merged into a global monoculture, as you're all aware. So the variety has gone way, way down.

And then if you look at selection pressures, cultures just don't die very much anymore from war or pandemic or famine because we're rich, we're healthy, we're at peace. And so, you know, there's just very little selection. Now the environment is changing very fast. That is what behaviors are adaptive is, is rapidly changing as the [00:31:00] economy grows.

And then added all to that, we have this internal random change process. We have cultural activists who are trying to change culture like you guys are trying to do. Yeah. And they are, they have fights over which way culture goes. And some of them win the fights in southers lose. And the winners are our, our greatest heroes in our world.

Cultural activists who fought for cultural change, but the fights and who wins them aren't very aligned with adaptive pressures. So from the point of view of the system, it's kind of, it's a random drift. It's a, it's a lot random fluctuation. So fast changing environment, a lot of random drift. Not much selection, far less variety.

That's a recipe for going off the road.

Malcolm Collins: It's, it. So the, the, the, the addition to your model that I would add, and we talk about this a lot in the pragmatist guide to crafting religion, is culture should be thought of as broadly being in two categories. First we use with a lot of data to argue historically that culture should largely be thought of as religious groups.

Like that's a, [00:32:00] the easiest. Historically, they're mostly religions and that they mostly grew not through conversions, but by affecting fertility rates of populations. They literally enhanced the biological fitness of their host. And that in modern times we've had cultural. Parasites evolved that were not that common in evolutionary history.

Essentially in the same way that you can get para like super bugs in hospitals where you have a bunch of immunocompromised people all next to each other. If you have a bunch of people outside of an environment that is anything like the environment, their culture evolved in, in like city, you're gonna get the environment of mees, which realize that they can grow faster by motivating a person to almost like a.

Virus infecting an ant. Ignore your own reproduction. Just replicate the meme. Just replicate the meme. Just replicate the meme. And we argue that this is what the urban monoculture is. So we've got sort of a double whammy here, which is what you pointed [00:33:00] out what was very astute which is that the, the cult, the environment that the culture needs to optimize fertility within is entirely different than the environment it evolved within.

But now you also have these. Parasitic attacking. They, they're not even like, it's like you're surrounded by wolves. You're basically sending your child into like a den of wolves every day and hoping they make it back out because the wolves can only survive because of their low fertility rate by taking the children from other cultures.

And, and that this is as bad as the change in modernity.

Robin Hanson: So this, this field of cultural evolution, these experts do find the ways that cultural evolution go wrong. And one of them, as you say, the more you inherit from people other than your DNA parents, the more ways that, you know, things can be inherited, that aren't promoting you know, DNA reproduction.

And that's one of the ways that can go wrong. Another [00:34:00] way it can, it's known to be able to go wrong, is the key idea is if you just copy random previous generation people, it doesn't help. You have to be selective about copy, who you copy to be better than average. Right. And our main simple heuristic is to copy prestige copy status.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Robin Hanson: Mm-hmm. But if the status markers we use are maladaptive, then the whole thing could go maladaptive. So one story is that we got into this habit of using education as a status marker. And so we copy the behavior of the well-educated. But they have lower fertility because it takes longer to be well educated.

So right. That's a driver for lower fertility is to, because the status marker is maladaptive, so status markers can just evolve and become maladaptive, and then it takes a longer process for, you know, the whole society to be selected out to replace it.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, well, I mean, I could argue that education isn't intrinsically maladaptive.

Education is maladaptive in our culture because of one, how we relate to it, and two, because it's infected with the urban monoculture at a much higher rate than any [00:35:00] other cultural center. And the urban monoculture focused on evolutionary pressures just like everything else. It overly focused on the educational centers because the iterations of it that did were better at spreading themselves.

If you have access to young minds, people generally convert from their birth culture between the ages of 13 and 22. And so, if you con have access to them during those age ages, like a lot of people have been with the urban monoculture, like, Hey, trans people lay off kids. Like, why are you being so creepy about this?

I mean, it is because the iterations of the trans culture that weren't, didn't spread and don't exist anymore because you can really only get someone at that very young age range. In addition, they started to focus on tactics that we see as in cults due to cultural evolution. Like convincing people to hate their support network, like their parents, their family their, their ancestors, because it's much easier to do to, to convert them into a different religion if you, if you do this.

But anyway, continue. I'm, I'm interested,

Robin Hanson: so I wanna make a distinction here that like, takes a little work, but it helps us to [00:36:00] think about these things. So think about species in biology, okay? Yeah. There's two levels of evolution that happens in biology with species. There's evolution of features within a species, things that can change within a species, and there's evolution of the features that define a species.

Now, when you have large habitats, like a big ocean region, you have fewer bigger species and they have faster evolution of. Features that can vary within a species, 'cause the species is bigger and innovations can appear anywhere and spread to the whole rest. Yeah. But you have less innovation of the features that define a species.

'cause there aren't so many and a fragmented habitat like a river, a rainforest or, or a coral reef. You have lots of little habitats and so you have lots of small species and that makes less evolution within the species, but better evolution of the species of the features that define a species. Now it turns out life on earth today, it ha came more from the fragmented places, which means that evolution of the features that define a species [00:37:00] actually matters more than the evolution of the features that can vary within a species.

Surprisingly interesting. The same, the same thing. Homes for corporate cultures. So corporations, you know, some innovations can spread within a company and then the bigger the company is, the better you can evolve those iterations and many kinds of things that can be patented are of that form. So bigger companies have more patents.

And so an industry that has a fewer, bigger firms is better at patenting and producing the innovations that can vary within a firm. But industries that are more fragmented, that have more smaller firms, are more innovative overall. Ah, because they can better innovate in the corporate culture features that are, that define the whole corporation, that you need a whole new corporation to experiment with those.

And so the same thing should happen with macro cultures. And you see many people are fooled by the fact that we have record economic growth today, say, but that's because when we merged the entire world into one big [00:38:00] monoculture, we have great evolution of the things that can vary within the monoculture mm-hmm.

Like technology and business practices. So we, those are going gangbusters. We have record ever rates of innovation in business practices and, and technology. But at the expense of. Much weaker or even regressive evolution of the features that are shared across the culture, like the ones we were going through.

Hmm. The major cultural features that are causing fertility Kline are the kind that it's hard for a small group to deviate from the world consensus on, if

Simone Collins: that's really, they say you don't

Robin Hanson: wanna value education, but the world does. You just get less education. But now the world disrespects you and you suffer.

You can't just make a group of people who all say, we don't care about education, we're just gonna care about each other. That, that's hard to make.

Malcolm Collins: That's interesting. Yes. So if you were going to craft a culture to combat this, what features would it

Robin Hanson: have? Well, I like the analogy of you're [00:39:00] on a ship heading to an iceberg, you've got two choices.

You turn the whole ship or you get off on icebergs. That's not a iceberg off on light. Sorry, the iceberg sense it. So that's this. So. If you are mixed in with our global culture, you need to help us change the whole global culture in order for us to not fall off the cliff, hit the iceberg, or you need to form a new subculture that's insular enough to actually deviate from the dominant culture.

And that's hard. So that's, for example, what the Amur Retta have succeeded in doing, which is really amazing. They've created not only insular, they've created subcultures not only have high fertility in double every 20 years, they're insular enough to be able to resist the outside influence. And that's in part by foregoing many kinds of technology and contact.

And that's a really high bar. So if you have a small, if you have a small group of people say, we wanna make a new subculture here. The, the key question as, as I've [00:40:00] talked to you guys about before is how insular do you think you can actually be?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I, I think that it is possible, and this is, this is a hypothesis that it is possible to craft a culture that can interact with technology and mainstream culture and not deconvert.

And if anyone can do this that person owns the future because that person is gonna have automated drone sworn and everyone else is gonna have AKs.

Robin Hanson: So like the Amish do use technology, they just resist the technology that would put 'em in cultural context. So they have like, yeah, they switch to small businesses.

They use machines in their small businesses. They use, you know, tractors, they use trucks, they use, you know, all sorts of machines that don't threaten to give them cultural influence.

Simone Collins: Some, some do, some do not. Not all. But yeah.

Robin Hanson: Right. So interestingly, like farm, the Amish were farmers up until a generation ago, and then the last generation they made the switch to be mainly rural small business, which is quite a substantial change.

And it does risk their in ancillary infertility, [00:41:00] but they seem to be making a go of it. Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm concerned about them. I, I've read that from some people who've had more exposure to the communities than we have, that those who are adopting more technology are also seeing a fall off in the stability of their communities, their marriages, their, their birth rates, actually.

Well, that's the risk

Malcolm Collins: to worry about. Yes. There was a great study on this Simone that looked at Pennsylvania Dutch speakers, the Uhhuh in the US Uhhuh, and then whether or not they had cell phones. And if they had cell phones, they had fairly low fertility rates. And if they didn't, they had fairly high fertility rates.

Mm-hmm. So, like their community isn't that resistant to, to cultural mimetic viruses.

Robin Hanson: So I watched some videos on like Hutter writes and yeah. One of the stories you see over and over is that like if you want a local doctor, then he has to be sent off to a medical school and then when he comes back he's less likely to stay.

Simone Collins: Ah. And

Robin Hanson: so I, I think that's really the main reason they are pacifist. They just don't want their young men to go off and mix with other young men in the [00:42:00] military. I think when they're big enough to have their own military units, they'll be fine

Malcolm Collins: point. I mean, even from a cultural evolution perspective, it would be the iterations of the Anaba traditions that weren't pacifist had their men interact with other men in militaries and disappeared.

Right. I had never thought why so many of them were. That makes,

Simone Collins: so it's almost like the same as avoiding university, you're saying? Yes. Right. Like

Robin Hanson: avoiding being a medical student. So they actually have trouble getting their own doctors. They were gonna go to a non Amish doctor, or how to write doctor, because it's hard to have their own doctors 'cause to send their own boys off to medical school and get them to actually come back and stay is a hard trick.

Simone Collins: Okay, that makes sense. Wow. Okay. That's super interesting. That's really

Robin Hanson: clever. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But it shows you what you're up against here. Yeah. Trying to have a small subculture, let's call it cults. The world actually could use more cults and let's just call it cults. It

Simone Collins: really could. Yeah.

Robin Hanson: But it's hard to maintain a cult.

Most small colts just die and don't last very long. Yeah. And the hard part here, if you wanna do the lifeboat strategy as opposed to turn the ship, [00:43:00] you've gotta find a way to, you know, keep the boat, the lifeboat intact and away from the ship. Mm-hmm. And that's, that's quite a challenge.

Malcolm Collins: I might push back against the concept.

A lot of people are like, oh, you know, you guys are starting your own weird religion or whatever like that. The most of those die I'd actually argue, if you look historically, that's not really true. Most religions are, if you look at like, cults, cults, if they were founded for like personal gain or something like that, most of them die.

But the ones that were not founded by per for personal gain. Right. Actually fairly frequently or persistent. There is not a, unless now there's a few, unless it's here, unless they were celibate. There's that, yes, of course. Or they were founded around a. A, a fad that was temporarily locked. So these are often tied to like eating habits and stuff like that.

Robin Hanson: There's a literature that I recall on looks at communes in the United States from the 18 hundreds. Yeah. And how they varied in the. Intensity of the [00:44:00] religions that were organized around them. Articles,

Simone Collins: great

Robin Hanson: one, right? High Ask Religions lasted longer than low Ask religions.

Simone Collins: There you go.

Robin Hanson: Yeah. And so basically don't be afraid to do a strong ask in terms of what the culture, culture is asking of its participants, because that's, in fact, high asks, will make you people more stay with religion if

Simone Collins: Yeah.

In, in the private guide to crafting religion, we compare them from like hard to soft to super soft cultures with hard cul cultures, making the most asks, doing the most othering, but also having the most cultural amenities that are really beneficial because often the, the hardness of these cultures is accompanied by really helpful amenities.

Like okay, an ask might be a lot of fasting days, but those fasting days help you develop inhibitory control. And there are other health benefits as well. A big ask might be, well you have to communi, you have to contribute all these things to community, but you may be contributing childcare to families that enables 'em to have more kids, which is a huge amenity for them.

And they wouldn't wanna leave that 'cause they need the childcare. So. That there's that, that weird [00:45:00] correlation that also the, the, the more weird you are in your culture. We really like this concept of othering as, as I think, you know, because we like our weird names and weird dress and weird behavior because it stops you, it makes you see yourself as distinct from mainstream culture and have some pride in that.

It also creates

Malcolm Collins: negative emotional moments with mainstream culture. Like people are like, oh, you name your kids weird things. Won't they be mocked in school? And I'm like, that's a good thing. You want them to dislike the urban monoculture. Yeah.

Robin Hanson: So I did some surveys a while ago and, and had some conversations with some people who are in a multicultural and, and I think.

People agreed with the following description. A lot of people in our world like the idea of multiculturalism when they think of it as different foods and dress and holidays and mist and you know, in ways you build your houses. They love that kind of multiculturalism and different TV shows different, you know?

Yeah. Different song genres, right? Yeah. When you talk about multiculturalism as having deep values of the sort we talked about that are driving fertility change like gender [00:46:00] equality or war or democracy, people hate the idea of that kind of multiculturalism. Yeah. They don't want that kind. They're particularly against it.

So that's, you know, the kind of the obstacle here the world is so. Into shallow multiculturalism and really aggressively against deep multiculturalism. So like, think about covid. There were one or two nations in the world that deviated from the world consensus about how to do covid. And everybody else in the world was like, heretics terrible.

Like, you know, string 'em up. How do we allow, how do we dare allow Sweden to have a different covid policy? Everybody else. Because, you know, oh, that

Malcolm Collins: was such a, a thing. Yeah, I, I know I love this, but we, we have a, a theory on this. So if you look at the urban monoculture, which is I think is what's driving this view of multiculturalism they will say above all else, like, multiculturalism is good.

And then I'm like, okay, so like in Africa, Africa are, are you okay with their like marriage structure? Is it like, no, their gender roles are all wrong. Are you okay with their sexuality? No. No, that's all wrong. Are you okay with the way they view morality? No, that's all wrong. Are you okay with [00:47:00] the way they view religion?

Oh, well, that's all wrong. And what I realized after a while, and I always was like, why, why even does diversity have value if everyone's secretly the same? Like it, it wouldn't, what they mean by valuing diversity is that they value a diversity in victims. They value a diversity in people that they convert to their imperialistic cultural practices.

And not in maintaining actual diversity, because the odd thing about the ever monoculture is it lets you superficially identify as like a Muslim or a Christian, but you can't have Muslim or Christian views about like gay people. You can't have Muslim or Christian views about like a wife's role in the family.

So yeah, so in

Robin Hanson: the long run we have. The success that if we eventually spread across the stars, the distances will ensure cultural diversity. That is, thank goodness mm-hmm. That the long delays will in fact mean that different places have different cultures and they just can't stop that. But if that's several centuries away, the question is how can we manage between [00:48:00] now and then, because in the next time we will have, again, the high rates of communication, trade, talk trade, you know, travel are just, seem like those costs are not gonna go way up anymore.

And so you have to artificially limit them if you're going to. Mm-hmm. And most people really enjoy all the, you know, connection with the world that we have. So even if I try to imagine asking a few friends to like, can we, you and I just like, isolate ourselves and live on an island and not talk to anybody else.

Yeah. That's gonna, that's gonna work.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. Now we, we even have so many friends who've been like, Hey, let's all just like move to this one place and build a community together. And people have even started that. They've purchased property and they can't get anyone to move out. Or people are like, ah, you know, let's, ah, I don't really feel like it.

Malcolm Collins: I'm sure you've seen this a hundred times. People try to start communions.

Robin Hanson: I, I actually joined a cult when I was a tween, so I have a best emotional inside view of, of cults. Did they live together? So it [00:49:00] was a religion. I was in San Diego and it was a local Pentecostal religious cult. And I sort of attended their meetings and they had meetings at group houses, and they had a, some compound in Iowa they never went to, but basically Oh,

Simone Collins: wow.

Robin Hanson: Basically, I, I could feel emotionally what it was like to be in a cult, and I can see the appeal. So I think ever since then, I, I understand at a visceral level what it, what the appeal is.

Simone Collins: Well, what was it that drew you in? I mean, especially as a, a teen boy tween. Really Tween boy. Yeah.

Robin Hanson: Right. Well, the idea was just they included you.

They loved you, they wanted the best for you, and they were gonna, you know, help you if they could. That sense of belonging and mutual support was very attractive. And then of course, they had a mission and they had a, a, a reason they were special and that, that motivated them and gave, gave them. Meaning, and that's all very attractive even to like, you know, a 12-year-old me who grew up in our shared culture, but we don't offer that so much to most people.[00:50:00]

Simone Collins: Yeah, fair enough. And that was just

Robin Hanson: appealing. But you know, after I, I don't know, six months or a year, my parents said, you can't go there anymore. We don't like them. And I just, okay, fine. So I didn't fight my parents or rebel too much. I'm, I'm, but I, but basically I still remember what it felt like. And that's wild.

It is a strong appeal, but you can see most people just y the very idea of what I'm saying for most people goes That sounds pretty icky. Yeah. And that's part of the modern culture is that, is to disapprove of that.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. You talk about the well and just simultaneously love bomb you with their tactics and if you join their pro process.

Robin Hanson: So interestingly, history is that roughly a century, a century and a half ago, cultural elites in our societies. Realized consciously that they had drifted away from some more stable culture that they had come from, and they then called themselves modernists and they said they were in a modern era. What they meant by that literally was.

The one thing we're sure of is we don't want to go [00:51:00] back to the culture of a century ago that our grandparents had. That's clearly what we don't want. We wanna go somewhere new, we don't know where that is, and we're gonna explore the space of possible writing styles and paintings and architecture and songs and everything else.

And they celebrated this search for something new, but they were, they knew they were uncured. And that was part of their description of, we don't know what we really value here. And then in the middle of the 20th century, world War I, Andi became a moral anchor for a lot of the world. That was the one thing they decided, they knew we are anti-Nazi.

We don't know what else, but we know we're we're American.

Simone Collins: And then it became capitalism. And then, well, it

Robin Hanson: was antis, sexism, anti-racism, and you know, lots of things like there, but also anti-communism or anti-socialist. Right? Yeah. But still, a lot of our world is still modernist in the sense that we value this idea that we are just moving in the space of possible cultures.

And we're not say