A cultural transmission belt

From JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney by Jane Psmith and John Psmith.

The correct way to view all the changes that Carney lists is as a sort of transmission belt that has slowly and inexorably propagated and magnified the effects of the one, very simple technological change that occurred. The story goes something like this: birth control is introduced, but large families are still normative and supported by generations of cultural accretion. So people still have an above-replacement number of kids, because they remember their mothers and grandmothers having 10 or 12 kids, and because society is still basically set up for families. But time passes, and culture gradually shifts to accommodate material reality. Law and economics follow culture. The next generation remembers their parents having 3 or 4, and maybe manages 1 or 2 themselves. The fewer people are having lots of kids, the less of a constituency there is for having lots of kids, and the harder society makes it, further turning the screws on marginal parents.

There is a separate implication here.  There is a tendency to view culture as a set of folkways and values.  Things people value and believe in.  And I believe that is true up to a point.  But those folkways and values produce outcomes.

As long as technology is unchanging or slowly changing, over time, culture will refine towards the mean of its outcomes.  Culture becomes outcomes.

But when technological change is a reality (last five hundred years) and accelerating (last fifty years), the cultural transmission belt slips.

There are now outcomes arising not from culture and values but from technological munificence.  Dysfunctional value and behaviors can now survive despite their negative outcomes.  What the Psmiths are pointing out is that cultural transmission is part explicit (values learned in church or school or explicitly articulated in family) and part implicit (values picked up by emulating the examples set by others).  

Abundance arising from technological productivity is eroding the explicit transmission of culture.  But that happens it undermines the implicit transmission via the environment of examples.