# Fertility Will Never Recover

The world is in a spiraling fertility crisis which everyone has notice over the last year-ish.[^1^](https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/fertility-will-never-recover#footnote-1-155707857) Sarah Haider [proposes a GI Bill for young moms](https://x.com/SarahTheHaider/status/1882895164739588494). Scott Alexander says a govt payment of $200,000 per child should work. Everyone wants to go back to thick-community-style living.

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F93c4ce0a-43de-4353-8a81-9590f159f16c_1080x1077.jpeg)

Amid ever-increasing talk of what to do to increase fertility, I think it’s important we acknowledge that nothing will increase fertility to the levels required for our society to continue. People do not want more than one child. Some don’t even want one. Two children is viewed as a stretch goal. Three is a major sacrifice that one takes on for the good of their community. You cannot incentivize people to make that sacrifice at anything close to the proper scale because people don’t want money that badly. How many hands would you amputate for $100,000?

### **A Life Worth Living**

One child is all you need to get 90% of the joy, meaning, and interesting experiences out of having children. There are *massive* diminishing returns to having additional children (for the parents). Ask all your friends. How many are excited and aiming for 3+ children? Really excited and joyously motivated—not because it’s their duty for humanity and they’re on the EA burnout path. The life worth living is one with one child per couple *among happy couples*. Or 1.35 on average when you count the outliers.

Why yes, I’m fixated on 3+. One child is a death sentence. Two ““should”” be enough, but it’s not. “Two” doesn’t mean what it used to. Now four births lead to two reproducing children, on average. My parents have four children, but they have two grandchildren. Three of us are childless (hi!), one has two kids. If my parents are lucky that *might* increase to three grandchildren.

Just as premodern couples had to accept half their kids wouldn’t live to adulthood, we have to accept half our kids won’t reproduce. This means three children as a minimum goal is the only way to begin to attain replacement fertility. Parents should be hoping for *more* than three, but wanting three as their starting baseline.

Yes, agreed: lmao

### **Don’t Summon Eldritch Gods**

So—we can’t fix this with money, people don’t want it badly enough. We can’t fix this by altering our culture, every other force in society is arrayed against it. A complete culture-ectomy could work, akin to passionately converting to a new religion and moving to their ethnostate-ish region. But [no one](https://thebayesianconspiracy.substack.com/p/210-demographic-collapse-and-religion) wants that either. Fertility will not recover to replacement rates and we must all prepare for that.

Why care if [evolution will fix this](https://x.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1878245222284734946)?

![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3d5aeb42-e096-4d62-9fee-8b6a56e110aa_737x231.png)

Because I don’t care about “humanity in general” nearly as much as I care about my society. Yes, sure, the descendants of the Amish and the Taliban will cover the earth. That’s not a future I strive for. I’d be willing to give up large chunks of the planet to an ASI to prevent that. I want the future to have a robust rationalist society of humans I relate to and care for. For *the humanity I care about* fertility will never recover. Don’t summon up eldritch gods to fix your problems, you’ll never be happy with the result.

### **Pull The Rope Sideways**

Fortunately we’re at the dawn of the singularity and as Scott pointed out, though [Society Is Fixed, Biology Is Mutable](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/10/society-is-fixed-biology-is-mutable/). We won’t die out if we don’t die. The most feasible solution I see is honestly the banishment of aging and death. We don’t need to dedicate our collective lives to grinding out 3+ children before it’s too late and cursing our children to do the same. We can just not die and retain our culture that way. If we want to have another child every century or so, there will always be a happy rationalist society to welcome them and celebrate their growth and uplift.

Not Dying is the true frontier in preventing demographic collapse, and the loss of the society we care about. Short of that we’re doomed.

[1](https://deathisbad.substack.com/p/fertility-will-never-recover#footnote-anchor-1-155707857)

Yes, lots of people started ringing alarm bells about this well before that (it’s nice being in the rationalist community and always learning about what’s going to happen 20% sooner than the rest of the world), but it’s really taken off lately.