People would rather have prestige than babies

it’s not Netflix, it's positional status strategy

Regardless of whether and to what extent you think it’s an issue, global fertility rates are declining, especially in developed nations. There has been a great deal of public discourse recently as to why.

We can logically segment the causal factors into two groups:

1. Those related to human rights and access (e.g. legality and availability of birth control, abortion)

2. Those related to unfettered personal choice

Frankly, I wish the first could be taken for granted; I resent forced birth even being up for debate. It’s the second I want to talk about today. The think pieces and conversations like this between Ross Douthat and Alice Evans that circle around my own hypothesis without ever quite landing on it—the iPhones! the Netflix! even status—the shifting incentives to invest more in fewer children; the dearth of prestigious men.

There are three foundational concepts that can lead us to a more precise understanding of what’s going on:

1. René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire; that our wants are modeled by and copied from others rather than spontaneous

2. What I call egoic bifurcation; “the sense of having distinct digital and physical selves, both of which are still ‘you’”

3. Positional status strategy; that we care more about our relative position in social hierarchies than absolute goods and services

Personal online entertainment as catalyst vs. escape

Douthat: The coupling crisis writ large seems to be linked somehow to technology, right?

Evans: Yes, that’s what I think. Certainly. [. . .] we do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it’s watching shows on Netflix, sports bets—online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America more broadly. You can go on Pornhub. Online connectivity enables people to scroll on Instagram, play Call of Duty, World of Warcraft.

So we are all becoming—it’s not just being single—we’re all retreating into this digital solitude. I think that’s partly because the technology makes it nicer and easier to stay home—you can work from home—and some of these apps are so hyper-engaging that you get distracted by the constant stream of dopamine hits as each app, as each technology company competes against others to keep its users hooked.

And effectively, the tech is outcompeting personal interactions. That’s my fear.

I think this is backwards, at least in terms of one-way escapist entertainment. Under the umbrella of hyper-engaging apps, Evans is conflating two distinct (plat)forms of technology:

1. One-way escapist platforms like Netflix that are new distribution methods for older pastimes

2. Two-way performative platforms like Instagram that have fundamentally changed the mechanics of Veblenite status signaling:

   Instagram’s rapidly growing user base and features like the “Explore” tab in 2012 progressively expanded the pool of models for invidious comparison and pecuniary emulation. Alongside the normalization and entrenchment of quantitative, gamified measures of social approval—follows, likes—this created a heightened sense of social competition that both augmented individual pressure to differentiate and planted the seeds of what I’ll call egoic bifurcation—the sense of having distinct digital and physical selves, both of which are still “you.”

It’s the two-way performative platforms (social media) that I see as a causal factor to coupling and fertility decline. Not because they are so pleasurable as to outcompete personal interactions, but because they so painfully expose positional status disappointments.

Between egoic bifurcation and internally mediated mimetic desire, social media platforms inflate our standards even as they highlight our own failures to meet them. It is when such a mismatch occurs—when, say, a woman’s umpteenth first date fails to live up not only to his own photos online, but to the boyfriends and husbands of the women she considers her peers (and whose images pack her feed)—that she, perhaps, says to herself “not worth it” when the next guy asks. Won’t it be less immiserating to just stay home?

This is the void into which Netflix steps, that one-way escapist platforms more broadly fill. Then their seamless distribution and addictive interfaces truly sink their claws.

The prioritization of performative appearance over embodied experience

Recall how mimetic desire works, that our wants are modeled by others; that we tend to take our cues from those just above us in the positional status hierarchy.

As I recently discussed at length with Jim O'Shaughnessy, after “influencers began to cross egoic bifurcation’s critical inflection point: the abject subjugation of the physical to the digital self,” others followed, and still others followed them. People are increasingly optimizing for online status—performative appearance—even if it comes at the expense of embodied experience:

Egoic bifurcation changed what social differentiation entailed, offering a digital path to high status via its own currency (follows, likes) that was increasingly disconnected from offline pecuniary repute. The timeline here aligns precisely with Jonathan Haidt and Co.’s quantifiable data on the teen mental illness epidemic—and also just makes intuitive sense, as the separation of digital projection from source material also underpinned the rise of the selfie. Egoic association with our discrete, frozen, inorganic “selves” is why selfies seem, as I’ve argued before, to solve two of humanity’s deepest issues: lack of control, and the problem of immortality.

How did we previously solve for these exact two issues offline? By having babies! More at times of greater precarity, fewer as we collectively gained control (e.g., via antibiotics, wealth). “Success is succession,” as Erica Robles Anderson says. But success is also preservation.

The preservative path to immortality formerly manifested mainly through art, a conspicuously useless, high-cost enterprise. Social media has changed this, lowering the barriers to image-based preservation way below those of biological succession at the same time as they’ve increasingly incentivized us to prioritize status optimization in the digital sphere.

Think about our disappointed woman who’s retreated into Netflix. She doesn’t have a multi-generational childcare support system; her sense of “community,” insofar as you can call it that, exists predominantly online. Her friends there won’t envy pictures of her baby with an undesirable guy nearly as much as a Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc thirst trap. Better—safer—to preserve optionality. Maybe a more attractive guy will see me. When we’d rather be fuckable than actually fuck, is it any wonder we’re having fewer kids?

Motherhood’s positional risks and aspirations

For those who find an acceptable spouse, parenthood—especially motherhood—still carries increased multi-dimensional status risks. High-paying jobs, hot bods, white sofas, &c. are all inclined to suffer.

Again I want to emphasize that status is positional; there is only “high status” insofar as others sit below, and we human beings demonstrably care more about the pecking order than our absolute assets. This is why, per Evans to Douthat:

The present evidence suggests that pro-natal incentives have not reversed the downward trend. So even when governments do these goody bags, that doesn’t seem to work.

It’s possible, however, that if financial incentives were sufficiently large, that could change.

Specifically, because government handouts apply equally and thus do not affect positional status among those who qualify, the “goody bags” would have to more than offset the categorical status risks of parenthood overall. They’d need to be compelling to the point that, all else being equal, having kids becomes a positional advantage over not having them.

The fact that the Scandinavian social democracies have declining birth rates too goes to show not that such policies are materially ineffective (they are wonderful), but the vast categorical status penalty parenthood (and again especially motherhood) presents in developed countries with widespread egoic bifurcation.

What about the aspirational mothers of social media? The Ballerina Farms and Nara Smiths of the digisphere? Don’t they model desire for big families through the same mimetic mechanics? Sara Petersen has written extensively and compellingly about the complex dynamics of their influence.

As I understand it, the conservative Christian audiences these momfluencers appeal to most tend to have more kids anyway; tend to live in communities that are less online, in which motherhood carries higher relative status, in which there are often impediments to choice.

At the same time, the ultra-luxe professional level of sourdough-starter at which these women operate has also sent the More Work For Mother arms race off to the races, making motherhood seem more unattainable than ever—like a desire that only the most secure in their status can safely entertain. And even then there are at least temporary costs: in the workforce, to the body. Even in its most deluxe manifestations, competitive motherhood can feel like the bronze-medal match.

“In the Medieval galleries, all of the baby Jesuses, with their lurid halos and warped adult features, seemed to be harshly judging her.” -The Portrait of a Mirror / Madonna and Child with Two Angels and a Donor, Giovanni di Paolo (1445)

All of this fits with oft-touted exceptions in fertility data

It fits with the Scandinavian social democracies, the conservative Christians—with religious conservatives more generally. With higher birthrates at the tippy top, among the most secure.

It also fits with higher birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa—not because of low smartphone penetration and personal online entertainment writ large, but the correlated reduction in social media and egoic bifurcation.

It fits with Japan, with their ultra-low “flourishing index.”

It fits! So why don’t we hear more about mimetic desire and egoic bifurcation and positional status specifically?

Positional status is antimemetic (sic)

This is admittedly confusing; bear with me.

Separate and apart from mimesis with an “i”—imitation—memesis with an “e” refers to idea spreadability (as in “meme”). Antimemetics, in Nadia Asparouhova’s parlance, correspondingly explores ideas that resist spreading.

I think all three of the key concepts I’ve outlined here—mimetic desire, egoic bifurcation, and especially positional status—are antimemetic in general, and perhaps even more so with regard to a sensitive topic like fertility.

Mimetic desire impinges on our sense of free will. It’s Girard’s “romantic lie” of spontaneous desire that is rather memetic, fanning our illusions of control.

Egoic bifurcation likewise uncomfortably recalls our screen time and how easily we can be manipulated by the apparatus of surveillance capitalism.

And to the extent that we can admit to our human preoccupation with status at all, positional status is at its antimemetic apex, underlying our brain’s self-deceptive tendencies:

where Frank’s focus [in Success and Luck] is on how we humans fail to account for positional status in designing our incentives and institutions, [in The Elephant in the Brain] Simler and Hanson also tell us why. Our big racks are our brains—“This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other”—and protecting ourselves from the awareness of our own machinations is part of the package.

Jane Austen gets the last word as usual!

“OK, so we’re ending on an agreement of a massive government program to subsidize a new revival of Jane Austen adaptations for the 21st century,” Douthat patly wraps the podcast with Evans.

I couldn’t help but chuckle. It’s a good line, and too truly the perfect strategy if this is keeping you up at night—just not due to Austen’s “optimistic, positive focus” on “romantic love.” Nuh no. Jane Austen had a world-historically shrewd understanding of positional status strategy.

In invoking Austen’s skewed popular perception, Douthat again grasps a phantom memetic thread in place of the real antimemetic one. Good luck tugging on them, I say—but I’m also curious what others think.