Silicon Valley's "Pronatalists" Killed WFH. The Strait of Hormuz Brought It Back

toomuchtodo

> WFH delivers more fertility impact than the entire U.S. early childhood spending apparatus, at zero taxpayer cost. 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.

fzeroracer

Unfortunately this is an argument from the wrong angle, because it assumes what the pronatalists 'mean' by their belief. It's the same way that arguing with Musk about being a free speech maximalist is fundamentally a failed argument, because he doesn't actually believe in free speech. 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.

nemomarx

it'll be interesting to see how wfh and 4 day week policies play out in SEA, and that's more interesting than the domestic us conversation here really. If the us could follow suit we could probably do some great work on families but it seems very unlikely.

DFHippie

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. -- W. B. Yeats

cdrnsf

"Pronatalists" and this administration that they support is anything but. They've made employment more precarious, driven up costs, attacked public education, destroyed public health policy and on and on. Any claim on their part to be pro-family is either delusional or an outright lie. Yes, work from home is beneficial for employees, but what's best for their employees is not what they're interested in.

jagged-chisel

The one thing I can't find a quick is a definition for "pronatalist." The obvious definition without the scare quotes is "those in favor of families having children." But we have scare quotes and references to men who definitely desire extreme levels of control over others. 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?

palmotea

> Return-to-office is functionally anti-natalist policy beloved by “pronatalists”. > ... > 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.

alephnerd

Huh?!? 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? [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40730052

Tepix

WFH may be dead in the US, but it sure is alive and well in Europe.

largbae

I love this new information about birth rates and WFH, and totally support following it to higher birth rates. 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?

phlakaton

Please do not use the occasion of the death of thousands of Iranians in a war we launched against them as some sort of illustrative point about return to office and birth rates in the West.

riskable

Conservatives have always been hypocrites at heart. They want cheaper gas but they want to halt electric car sales. They want more babies but oppose maternity/paternity leave and work from home. They want fewer unwed teen pregnancies but oppose comprehensive sex education. They want religion to be more popular but continually protect and associate with priests and pastors that are sexual predators. They want more people to own guns but freak TF out when their darlings get assassinated (by gunfire). They want less fraud in government programs but spend vastly more than ever gets lost to fraud trying to catch it. They want a better economy but oppose nearly every measure that would improve it such as a higher minimum wage, affordable housing programs, socialized medicine, etc.

rossdavidh

"One or two hybrid days per week capture nearly all the fertility upside." 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.

softwaredoug

If I could afford to live 15 minutes from the office I 100% would go to an office. 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.

cosmic_quanta

I will die on this hill: tech firms that mandated 5 days in the office was about soft layoffs, rather than a principled stance on individual performance under WFH. 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.

tristor

> And the loudest pronatalists in American life, the ones who claim declining birth rates are civilization’s gravest threat, are the same people who just spent two years dismantling it: Elon Musk, who has fathered at least fourteen children and called declining birth rates “a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” told tech workers on CNBC to “get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bulls**.” Marc Andreessen, whose Techno-Optimist Manifesto declares “our planet is dramatically underpopulated,”testified before his local town council that he was “immensely against multifamily housing development.” The network around them (Thiel, Altman, Armstrong, Buterin) has poured some $800 million into fertility technology while the companies in their orbit dismantle the workplace flexibility that actually raises fertility. 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.

kirykl

Drive to the office and sit on a video call you can hardly hear because the coworkers next to you are on their own video calls

tho2i34u2347697

This is way more serious than Covid - there it was a demand-shock. 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.

jmyeet

This conversation is incomplete without bringing up transhumanism [1], which is basically just Silicon Valley themed eugenics [2]. It is the belief by SV billionaires that their genes are superior and their goal is to "gift" those genes to future humanity. It's why the likes of Elon Musk is the absent or no-contact father to so many children. 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... [4]: https://archive.ph/Sp4WH [5]: https://www.aclu.org/news/racial-justice/the-racist-history-...

throwaway21856

One WFH scenario I've never seen brought up is trying to hold a career while needing to care for elderly family members. That's not something people can just choose not to do, if family cultural norms require it.