How donors can actually solve the fertility crisis

Instead of giving more money to useless mouths

Tyler Cowan recently admitted that he has absolutely no clue how to fund ‘art’, saying that he would ‘probably not have recognised Shakespeare’ despite giving huge amounts of money to an experimental art fund.

I am of the view that nearly of Cowan’s philanthropic spending has achieved little to nothing, given how much of it has been funnelled towards Effective Altruists - not just because I dislike EAs - but because that the sort of person he has given money to seems to be of little functional use.

We have already been rude about Speak, which was billed by Effective Altruists as being a more ‘social media savvy’ organisation than the Free Speech Union or other ‘crank’ organisations. Speak was created from a $60k grant by Scott Alexander in October of 2025 of this year (many thanks to Andrew Orlowski for finding this out). Since then the page has mostly tweeted infrequently, including many screenshots of Telegraph headlines or other people’s work with two sentence captions. This does not seem like very good output to me, for three people, but I am not a very clever ‘tech’ person so what do I know?

It reminds me much of Dr Lawrence Newport’s YouTube channel (preceding ‘Looking For Growth’) for which he was given a $95,000 ‘regrant’ to fund the first year of a YouTube channel featuring video essays on his top topics by Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX future fund in March 2022. Below:

The first video that is still available on YoutTube under Newport’s own name came out in October of that year. Here is a screenshot of the eight videos that you can see on the page now.

Eight videos were released between the grant being awarded (March 2022) and the last video (June 2023), which equates roughly to one video every two months. All for a total of 31,038 views. That means that Fried paid $3.06 for every single view that Newport was able to yield from the platform.

My advice to rich people who are looking to influence society, discourse or politics is that they should not give any money at all to anybody who is promising to merely ‘create content’ for them, whether that be videos, tweets etc. You will get as much value out of them as you will get out of hiring a ‘social media manager’ for a department store which sells beds.

Talented influencers do not need money to thrive on social media. You either have ‘it’ or you do not, and those who are actively searching out investors never do. Give up, also, on the idea that you need to use these people as a way of reaching ‘young people’, or making your desired outcome ‘cool’. Nobody who is interested in this issue, including me, is normal or fashionable. It is a total non-starter.

Why do I point this all out? There is a point to this all that goes beyond spite. My prediction for the next five years is that the fertility crisis will become a top three issue - I recognise this is not a particularly novel observation – and that as a result there will be a huge amount of money pumped by billionaires into both ‘influencers’ and political parties to try and solve this problem.

Neither of these solutions will actually work, for the reason that the ‘influencers’ or politicians they pick are not actually interested in taking the difficult steps necessary to solve the problem. Most ‘faceposting’ fertility people are scared of being seen as White nationalists, so they either try to refract their calls for reform through either the lens of intergenerational unfairness (we can’t afford to get on the housing ladder and then have kids) or gender inequality - to give an example the lack of free IVF or free childcare.

Anybody who knows this issue well will know that more provision of IVF will not make even the slightest dent in the fertility crisis. In fact, as is the case with freezing eggs, it may lead women to delay having children even more. If you actually seriously wanted to increase the TFR to the replacement rate for everybody you actually have to reconstitute society.

On political solutions, to keep this short – Nigel Farage is never going to propose a policy which excludes the immigrant/second generation minority groups which many of these billionaires believe should not be having more children. Fertility is a crisis because if talented white people stop reproducing Western civilisation ceases to exist. Giving out bennies for ‘people’ in the abstract to have kids does not actually solve this problem. When Labour took away the two child cap it ends up benefiting Somalians and Pakistanis who already claim welfare. Non-discriminatory policies like this are the best you are going to get out of ‘Conservatives’ or ‘Reformers’ in Britain, so it’s all a non-starter.

All of the policy level solutions to this are very difficult, reminiscent of handmaids tale, certainly we will need far less women in the workplace and likely at University. You may need to ban homosexuality (which grows year on year in the West as it is socially tolerated, and means less babies). If you want to maintain gender relations which vaguely resemble the liberalism of the late 20^thcentury, you need extremely radical solutions, artificial wombs as another example. The point is that you aren’t going to get there with a series of palatable centre-right policy fixes. If that was possible, Hungary/Japan/Poland would have made at least some progress on the issue.

None of it works. So what? What can a billionare actually do with their money if they want to increase the fertility rate? Years ago, I wrote an article imploring wealthy people who wanted a higher fertility rate to buy me a house so I could start having children right away. I proposed that a wealthy person buy me a £22.5 million pound house and pay for the private school tuition fees of however many children I would have. Two years down the line, with a much larger audience, I want to put forward a legible programme that would allow extremely wealthy people to efficiently convert their money into high-iq individuals as a charity donation.

Here is my proposition, a working model.

GROK HIVES

Let’s say you are Elon Musk and you are reading this Substack post.

You have decided that you are going to set aside £100 billion pounds to increase the European fertility rate in London. Why not? You are supposed to become a Trillionaire after all. Ok, it might mean selling stock, but you are a smart man, I’m sure you’ll find a way if you are able to bring other investors in with you.

You give this £100 billion to me, to set up a new Trust located in London.

The Trust then does two things. It buys up around 90,000 five-bedroom houses in relatively pleasant parts of London, at a cost of around one million per house, meaning an investment of £90 billion.^[1]

At the same time, it conducts an extensive series of publicly available examinations, and tests including fertility/genetic compatibility to identify suitable couples under the age of 25. IQ tests could be used, but interviews would probably serve the purpose just as well, I know quality when I meet it.

Once these couples are selected, they are not simply offered the house. Instead, the trust offers them a rolling rental contract at a peppercorn rate (say £1 a month). Under the renters rights legislation (taking force in April) this will begin a rolling contract with a two month notice clause.

If the couple fails to produce at least one child every three years the Trust will use whatever chicanery it must to force an eviction (‘selling the property’ would be one option). This would continue until 18 years have passed, with six children produced.

The rental contract would remain in place until the last child born has turned 18 and left the house. At this point, all of the tenants, the mother and father, they will all be evicted. So long as the parents have been putting away a small amount of money each month, they should be able to buy themselves, at minimum, two bedroom flat to live their non-fertile days out in.

Or they could use their savings to travel the world in their mid 40s, with their genetic legacy already secure.

The remaining £10 billion held by the trust will be used as a sinking fund to maintain the 95000 properties over the 20-30 year period, including some administrative costs. The intention is that the trust is financially self-sustaining, and will continually re-let out homes to new couples as families are processed through. If the sinking fund is exhausted, the Trust can simply sell houses once they became vacant to keep sustaining itself, or draw upon more external donors for capital.

With housing costs paid for (roughly on average 40% of a Londoner’s income), a couple could very easily sustain themselves on a single income without the need for expensive external care. Since these couples will generally be reasonably high earners, the majority of them will probably be able to stretch to day private schools in London (thus avoiding the worst inner-city comprehensives that Birbalsingh’s hammer has not yet fallen onto).

By my estimation, if all goes to plan, 90000 houses producing 6 children each guarantees a minimum of 540,000 children within thirty years, the majority of whom will have exceptional genetics, a good education and will have been cultivated in a Tier One global city. 540,000 people is roughly the population of Manchester. For comparison, there are 594,000 births every year in Britain.

This generation would have a transformative impact on the trajectory of the West, of that I have no doubt. They would dominate the globe. The very fact that they are ‘Grok kids’ would immediately mark them out with an assumption of high human capital. They would form a natural network. London is the best place in the world to do this. It is anglophone with top class schools and Universities, and unlike in America, there is no reason for exceptional; people to live anywhere else in the country. No debate between LA, DC and NY. Everything is one place, all of the key institutions and good private schools, which means that every British person of high value will be willing to live there.

It is the best possible use of £100 billion when you think about it. Your asset would not disappear, as it normally would in a philanthropic donation. In fact, because of the impact you will have on the area, re gentrification, it is likely that the homes will increase in value as a positive impact of ‘the Hive’. And Musk would not need to convince a government to allow him to do this. Get back to the old ways, of moving fast and breaking things without having to interact with politicians.

Now, I have been told that I must talk in the most scalable terms when speaking directly to Silicon Valley type people, which is why I have painted a scenario which involves the richest man in the world giving me 10 percent of his hypothetical future wealth. But you could easily see how a smaller billionaires could get something out of this.

We have spoken about Musk’s incentive re saving humanity from extinction. But there are other incentives to philanthropic endeavours which could be transplanted to the billionaire Hives. I am sure that many of my readers will not in fact be billionaires but will be, like me, caught on the wrong end of the London property market.

Would you give your first son the middle name of Evgeny-Lebedev? If that guaranteed you a decent sized family home near a Tube Station? Quite possibly. The only thing currently preventing me from producing five children is financial. I would happily crack on with it, but the state is thieving from me to pay benefits to rape gangs. If you want me to reproduce, instead of them, you will have to reach your hand into your pocket. But crucially it will be an investment in your own power, in the long run.

I could go on but let me stop for a moment, because I want you to twist this around in your own imaginations. Give it some real thought over the week.

I have had it put to me that this idea is in some way ‘socialism’ and that young professionals in London should move to America where they can make lots of money. Apart from this not being a solution as scale – the truth is that the state in Britain and America already provides this service to millions of non-whites in cities like London and New York through social housing and section 8, so your provision is simply a way of counteracting a prevailing force.

What’s more, ‘capitalism’ is not functioning properly if a 140 IQ person is not able to pursue academia without being rendered infertile by the financial system. If you believe in meritocracy, you do not want the only people who are able to advance in fields which are not lucrative to be those with inherited wealth. That dynamic, which I have personally seen (only dumb rich kids can stick it out once it comes time to settle down) is as much responsible for our failure to move forward culturally as DEI is.

Impotent whingeing about fertility is getting nobody anywhere, and that the issue of everybody under the age of thirty being unable to buy homes large enough for families is an issue which can be resolved by philanthropy if the government is not willing to step in. If you are rich, your choices are direct action, or wasting more money on ‘influooencers’ or 50-60 year old politicians who have no interest in solving this problem.

If you think this is all pie in the sky and bonkers, remember that almost half a trillion pounds was spent on Lockdown by the British government alone. All of that money has disappeared. It was not ‘invested’, it just disappeared, vapourised to keep elderly people alive for a couple more years of Gogglebox.

£100 billion invested my way will pay itself back four-thousand times over.

Think about it.

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^[1] Before some idiot tells me that you can’t buy a five bedroom house in Kensington for one million pounds - yes, I am well aware of that. But think about it. If you can buy 90,000 homes and populate them with well educated natives, you can terraform entire boroughs of London into being much more pleasant demographically than even the loveliest avenues in Primrose Hill. You can bring the bloody banana with you.