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Silicon Valley “Pronatalists” Oppose Remote Work Despite Boosted Fertility Rates
- hgsgm 3y ago[flagged]
- kramerger 3y ago[flagged]
- morelisp 3y agoOn the other hand our post used to be timely and cheap, our milk fresh and healthy, and our water cleaner. Maybe those housewives were onto something.
- rpastuszak 3y agoYou can substitute “fertility” for “control” in this comment.
- concordDance 3y agoA lot of people seem to have trouble understanding how very different people think and assume the worst. In actuality, people can often care about all sorts of things you might find bizarre, there are model train enthusiasts and balloon fetishism and people who worry climate change will make humanity extinct. There are also people who genuinely think there's the possibility of a slow decline in human population.
- oytis 3y agoIt's not a policy, it's a pipe dream. You can mandate men to work from the office, but there is no way you're going to force women to stay home and bear children. Conversely, enabling men to spend more time with the family has been shown to increase birthrates.
- backendanon 3y agoI tend to be conservative. I don't hold those views at all. I know for a fact that I'm not an outlier. Your opinion seems to be misinformed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- epistasis 3y agoI am somewhat disturbed by these weirdos proclaiming weird politics and somehow being considered representative of Silicon Valley. This sort of behavior, by both the PayPal mafia and the media, maligns the sector unfairly. If you want to find weird SV behavior that's more reflective fo the field, then dive into the weirdness of the Singularity religion.
- hgsgm 3y agoWhat percent of silicon valley wealth / employment does PayPal Mafia control?
- morelisp 3y agoIt would be hard to find a trio that better exemplifies SV 2008-2020 than Musk, Thiel, and Andreessen. You could toss in Brin I guess, I'm not sure if he's "pronatalist" or just loves to fuck his employees. How about Neumann or the Soylent dude? If they're not pronatalist I bet they're even weirder.
- concordDance 3y ago> Singularity religion. Either not a religion or not common depending on exactly what you mean. Unless you think that intelligence that is copypasteable and can be restored from backups wouldn't be a worldchanging event?
- Someone1234 3y agoSV has always been an odd place full of strange people and unhealthy work/life balances though. If anything it is more "professional" (corporate) now than it has ever been.
- morelisp 3y agoWow now that this guy has pointed out their inconsistency, I'm sure all these billionaires will shift their viewpoints away from whatever their self-interest is focused on at the moment.
- pessimizer 3y agoThose people who rule by power have been defeated with logic! Now smoke comes out of them and they shut down, like evil computers on Star Trek. Also, if we're talking about logic, to "stoppopulationdecline" when population almost never declines anywhere doesn't make sense. preventpopulationdecline?
- rpastuszak 3y agoEven if this means a single person thinking a bit more about the issues, it’s still a net positive. No need to be cynical.
- lifechoseme123 3y agoTLDR: 3 tech gurus who like RTO bad. remote work good. Pretty silly, short, overly hyperbolically-opinionated article. It infers that anyone who agrees with RTO to some degree as hypocrites. I agree this part of Thiel's quote here, it makes sense to me: "misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren't together full-time, in the same place, every day"
- jackmott42 3y ago[flagged]
- brookst 3y agoSure. Remote work isn’t without downsides. But neither is RTO. If the standard is that any policy must have zero negative impacts on performance, I’m not sure what to do other than just closing the company.
- nocoiner 3y agoThat quote is incredibly dystopian and just seemingly obviously wrong on its face. Misalignment can creep in anywhere, at any time, and I would probably rather have, you know, a life, than spend all my time, every single day, in the same physical location as my coworkers. (Sorry, spouse! Sorry, kids! Gotta keep the org aligned!)
- whynotmaybe 3y agoThis quote is a parody of itself because you could also argue that they have to be together all the time and no one should ever think about work when they're not at work with the team. That email that a manager sent at 10pm regarding some stuff todo for the tomorrow 8am meeting with the client ? "Sorry boss, can only work with the whole team." "Colleague on vacation?" "the whole team on vacation!" Misalignment will always occur. Always, and it's the manager job to ensure that there aren't any. Bringing everyone in the same room is the simplest way for a manager to manage, without understanding the need of the member of the team. Yes, I sometimes need face to face discussion with colleagues to nicely understand the specifications, and it's way better than any video call. But when I'm trying to debug that script in the CI/CD that doesn't work as intended, I don't need to be sitting next to the project manager who's always on the phone.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoThat’s because pronatalism is just an excuse that people like Musk hide behind in order to justify their misogynistic lifestyles. Seriously, how many children with how many partners does he have now?
- concordDance 3y agoIt's really not, it's a genuine concern many people have. I know some.
- LapsangGuzzler 3y agoRight, but this article points out very clearly how Musk’s actions are actually making it harder for people to have children. The control that his class demands on capital and labor is actively harming reproduction. Fundamentally, billionaires don’t want to recognize that they are the problem, they’re happy just talking about the problem and making their own dozen “personal” contributions to progeny to help out those that are bound to the full time job. What heroes they are.
- morelisp 3y agoThere is no actual problem! They invent the "problem" so they can propose plans to "solve" it which drive society towards outcomes more favorable to them.
- joe__f 3y agoI think they've learnt by to ignore feedback that they're pushing people too hard. Then over a period of years they learn by experience that they can get what they want out of people if they continue to push. So they have first hand evidence that bullying the people you're leading works.
- TheAceOfHearts 3y agoIt's an interesting point that despite claiming to be a pronatalist Elon Musk demands hardcore work hours from his employees, which one would expect leaves very little time for developing relationships and eventually having children. I wish there were more candid interviews with people where these topics and other difficult questions were discussed openly. I'd love to hear how Elon would respond.
- 29athrowaway 3y agoI think the population decline we should worry about is in terms of quality not quantity. Humans are not an endangered species in terms of population size. We need less people who are empty on the inside and try to fill their void through compulsive overconsumption and traveling and stuff like that. If you are not good enough without the traveling and overconsumption in whatever frame of reference you establish, you are not enough with those things either. BTW, did I just repurpose a quote from Cool Runnings? Yes, I did.
- meindnoch 3y agoNot really surprised. But does any self-respecting person listen to these three bozos anymore? I'd be surprised.
- js8 3y agoMusk, Thiel and Andreessen are not liberal or libertarian, they are all conservative. They are not proponents of freedom, they all value authority above everything. Look at how they run their companies - on top-down authority. Somebody who is truly (classical) liberal would have no employees and contracted everything, because that way you also maximize other people's freedom.
- morelisp 3y agoThey're the same picture.
- jfengel 3y agoThey're not supposed to be. But it's certainly true that the "libertarians" one hears most from are very concerned about their own liberty and actively oppose that of others. It's almost a perfect representation of the aphorism about those the law protects but does not bind, versus those the law binds but does not protect.
- backendanon 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism I searched that page for "oppos" and could not find anywhere it suggested or stated that libertarians "actively oppose [liberty] of others". Your assertion seems to be very antithetical to the very views that libertarians hold dearly.
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoIt's all in the outcomes. You want to own a road, charge for travel over it? Who's liberties are being supported there? Libertarians want to gate-keep and rent-take everything for profit. That's their entire thesis.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- lafar6503 3y agoOk I understand that someone has proven that remote work doesn't affect productivity. Not in my case, but maybe I'm the outlier. But remote work combined with having small children - I'm pretty sure it not only affects productivity, but the productivity goes out of the window. And if productivity doesn't suffer when taking care of children then it means there was never any productivity to begin with, or the company was seriously overstaffed. And in my case remote work allowed me to take better care of kids because of extra flexibility, but at the same time made my work days more chaotic and fragmented. Very hard to find undistracted chunks of time necessary for any advanced tasks. Plus the family gets used to me being available all the time and more needs creep in... All in all, an occasion to spend a full day in the office, alone, feels like a productivity boost :)
- internet101010 3y agoWorking from home doesn't mean you don't have to send the kids off to daycare each day. Yes, it is expensive. But taking care of young kids is a full-time job.
- 46Bit 3y agoIndeed. Working from an office without daycare would be similarly unproductive.
- lafar6503 3y agoI just mean don't take the remote work idea too far. Raising children is affecting the ability to do any professional work and because of that people deciding to have children should receive various forms of support and protection by social institutions and employment laws. Pretending that you can take care of children while working from home is very harmful idea imho.
- ddorian43 3y ago> Pretending that you can take care of children while working from home is very harmful idea imho. Nobody ever did that actually works.
- bhouston 3y agoYeah, I noticed this too. I just had another child and WFH has been awesome for my wife and I leading up to and during this time. Like many, Elon Musk's recruiters have come for me in the past. I looked it up and 12+ hours a day is apparently normal (overtime is mandatory it appears?) and it is on site as well? Count me out. There are better jobs out there that lead to better work-life balance. When I was fresh out of school I worked in a VFX firm for a few years, it was intense, I gave up a ton, I learned a lot and then my name was left out of the credits of most films I worked on. So I noped out of there and then made more while also building a family. That doesn't seem that different than Elon Musk's companies.
- frob 3y agoI think it's really telling that every "pronatalist" in this piece is a man. It is quite easy to go around saying we need more babies when your contribution to the process is having sex, not actually growing the child and birthing it. Or, in Musk's case, leaving a string of them throughout the world whom you don't raise.
- SomethingNew2 3y agoMen also help raise the child over their lifetime.
- Someone1234 3y agoIn general, yes. Specifically the people we're discussion here: No.
- llm_thr 3y ago[flagged]
- bhouston 3y agoIt is way worse that than for Musk. One of his kids came out as transgender and then Musk went full on anti-transgender and has made being anti-trans much more socially acceptable as a result. That can give your kid trauma for real. That your dad, in response to you coming out, goes around actively hurting the transgender community in real ways.
- IG_Semmelweiss 3y agoOne could argue that , for Musk case at least, he does a great job fostering babies. What matters is not one's own babies. But "more babies". The more wealth created, the more babies can be supported with the wealth. Musk in particular has created many high paying jibs that are undoubtedly anchoring solid families with strong economic foundation. For Musk, its a prohibitive opportunity cost for him to have babies of his own vs enabling hundres of others doing the same. Musk will not be the face of a fertility campaign. Musk is not the paragon of virtue. But he's helping support tons of families have their babies
- Barrin92 3y agothe billionaire angle aside, where does this population panic comic from? Today there's eight billion people in the world. One hundred years ago there were 2 billion people in the world. Was anyone in 1920 panicked that the world is too empty? The global fertility rate is 2.3 right now I believe, but even if it was say, 1.5 it would take until 2200 to be back where we were a century ago. How is this a pressing issue? I get there's of course economic/political consequences to changing demographics but this isn't going to be an existential problem for literal centuries
- convolvatron 3y agoI think the subtext here is that the 'right kinds' of people aren't breeding as much as everyone else
- strikelaserclaw 3y agoBecause the capitalistic machine needs man power (for now) to run, how can we colonize planets and star systems without enough people? Again, they will change their tune when there are other ways to produce that don't involve having lots of people.
- falcolas 3y agoRoughly, if the population doesn’t keep going up, neither does the economy.
- jfengel 3y agoNotice that these are all white men in the US. Where "replacement theory" used to be reserved for kooks writing mimeographed newsletters, and everyone else got to pretend it didn't exist. They got tired of being dog whistled to, and are now saying the quiet part out loud. None of them really think the earth is running out of humans. Just humans who look like them.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoBecause it won't take until 2200 for us to feel the very real effects of an aging population. An aging population means many more people past retirement age, no longer economically productive, and requiring more medical care, skilled nursing, pension or social security income, etc. It means fewer young workers entering the workforce at the same time, and therefore reduced tax revenue, fewer people paying into insurance plans, fewer people donating to charities, etc. So there's this distinct one-two punch of having more folks to support, and fewer who are able to support them, regardless of any family structure; this will be a global problem.
- Robotbeat 3y agoSo? I support women’s education and freedom, which often tends to reduce fertility, but I’m pro-natalist. This isn’t contradictory, it’s just the idea of having multiple goals.
- SomethingNew2 3y agoAnyone who has had several kids and worked at home knows you can’t do both unless you leave the house or have a nanny / partner / grandparent watch the children while you work. Young children are on a cycle of eat, poop, sleep, activity every few hours or even over a matter of minutes sometimes. It may be easier to have children while at home, but working and raising kids under the same roof would be challenging. This article pulls together a lot of evidence, but it does not consider evidence for the contrary. Productivity went up with remote work. Fertility rates went up. How was productivity for people with little kids at home who never sleep? Is there any evidence that sleep deprived people aren’t as productive? Also what is productive? Pumping out the most units of work? Sitting at home with no in office social obligations will give more time for work output. But does that create the most value for the economy? What about innovation, serendipity, brainstorming, building relationships, sharing ideas etc. They will provide long term productivity, vs short term output based productivity metrics.
- coldtea 3y ago>Anyone who has had several kids and worked at home knows you can’t do both unless you leave the house or have a nanny / partner / grandparent watch the children while you work. Anyone who has had several kids and worked at home knows that it's much easier than when commuting to work. Even if you can't have one partner (or parters alternating) to cater to them constantly, and need a nanny, it's still much better, you can help much more, doing little errands, tending to them, be there for whatever small emergency and so on, than when stuck in some office 10-50 miles away. You also have the extra hours you'd be commuting to be with them. And that's when they're babies and need constant care. When they grow enough for school? It's not just much easier than commuting, but unbelievably better too. Except if one goes for the "out of sight, out of mind" angle. Then sure, tending to your career in some office while the nanny or your partner takes care of the kids is better.
- SomethingNew2 3y agoAgree. It is easier to be present for children and their needs when you are physically present. One could say the same applies in reverse. Being physically present at a business allows for someone to more easily reach them, discuss issues, get to know coworkers etc. I believe remote work works well enough with all the digital tools. But it’s not as engaging as being physically there surrounded by teammates.
- chmod600 3y agoHow weird to make this a fight against hypocrisy. If X causes Y, and you like Y, then it might boost your support for X. But if not, that doesn't make you a hypocrite. I mean, what if X is a bad thing for other reasons? Why not just say "remote work increases fertility" and let people judge for themselves?
- Bostonian 3y agoThe U.S. fertility rate is 1.64, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, and in Asia and much of the Western world, it is even lower. It is not crazy to be concerned about that and be "pronatalist".