This week, Natal Conference cofounder Drew Gorham and I discuss what has changed on the issue of demographic decline since last year’s conference, and what we have planned for NatalCon 2025.

I introduce some ideas about what is driving demographic decline — it clearly isn’t just wealth, or housing, or feminism, or birth control, or microplastics, or the declining value of child farm labor.

My theory, as I’ve discussed here previously, is that human fertility declines in captivity in much the same way that animal fertility does.

The “breakdown of the family” as “the fundamental unit of society” became a cliche in conservative circles in the 1990s, but the relative political power and independence of the family in pre-modern societies allowed family members to invest in one another, and in the family itself.

It wasn’t that pre-modern people raised kids at an economic loss for 12 years so they could get six years of productive farm work out of them: the family was a little state unto itself, which belonged to you, and to which you belonged, throughout your lifetime.

This is the kind of sovereignty that we talk about at EXIT.

The family was a genuine “us”, independent within its sphere — and having more of “us” made each member more productive, more secure, more influential, etc. Families partook in a common project that was, in many ways, transcendent and selfless; but self-interested enough to incentivize day-to-day cooperation and sacrifice.

I believe that this is basically the way humans are built and meant to live — and as our social structures abstract further and further away from that, raising families makes less and less intuitive sense to ordinary people.

The cultures that survive the demographic bottleneck will be those that find a way to restore this natural mode of human civilization, and make families sovereign again.

Since recording, I also got to listen to Lyman Stone’s turn on Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson (Lyman will be with us at NatalCon 2025.)

It was an excellent review of the research on demographic decline, and raised some interesting questions. Topics I’d like to explore with Lyman at the conference:

* Is alarmism about fertility decline discouraging fertility? I think doomer anxiety is so prevalent that “one more existential problem” probably doesn’t do much — though catastrophism probably doesn’t encourage people to start families. People aren’t going to have kids to save Social Security or boomers’ home values. Discussing the seriousness of the problem is more about drawing the attention and resources of people who wouldn’t care otherwise — but maybe that, too, is of limited utility.

* Do high-intensity parenting norms actually lead to better outcomes for kids? This was a topic of some debate at last year’s NatalCon, with Diana Fleischman taking the hardest line on genetic determinism. I think that if parenting doesn’t matter, it’s pretty weird that all human cultures and the human endocrine system reward it so intensely. The problem with modern parenting is not that it’s high-intensity, but that it’s solitary — each family having to come up with boutique solutions, almost building a little idiosyncratic civilization from the ground up for their children.

* What can be done about the fact that so many conservative families end up raising sterile secular liberals? This is one of the central questions around which EXIT is organized. Exit is a matter of survival because we’re dependent on cultural and economic institutions that are sterilizing our kids. (Usually figuratively.) We’re building businesses and organizing parallel social structures — but we’re always looking for new ways to make our families more resistant to the acid bath of modernity.

If you want to join us for the conference, early-bird tickets are still on sale at natalism.org. Use offer code NATALISM for 10% off.

EXIT News

* On last Tuesday’s full group call (12/10) we had our 2024 Year in Review. (More on this next week.)

* On tonight’s full-group call (12/17), we will hear from a former lead technical recruiter at a Fortune 500 company on how to get a tech job. We’ll discuss how to defeat or bypass algorithmic gatekeeping, and how AI is changing the tech job market.

* Real estate call is this Thursday (12/19).

* EXIT will have a sponsor table at the Coronation Ball, January 19th at the Watergate in Washington, DC. We have two seats left; if you are a member and would like to join us, please DM right away.

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Who will make it through the bottleneck?

EXIT Podcast (private feed for joe.substack@hootman.org)