Why Is Everyone Having Fewer Children? - Lyman Stone
嘉宾：Lyman Stone
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There's agreement among badly informed midwits on all sides of the political spectrum that that you simply cannot have a society where women are free and population is and fertility is at the rates that people say that they want. So that that that's one problem is people see it as a stalking horse for rolling back women's rights. Birth rates are collapsing and in many places they're well below replacement
But it's not because people have stopped wanting children. Studies consistently show that people are having fewer kids than they actually want. And if this continues, the consequences won't be abstract. They'll reshape our cultures, economies, and politics within our lifetimes. So what's going on? How come in some of the richest societies that have ever existed, people are struggling to build the families they say they want? Is
there something structurally wrong with the way we've built our economies, politics, and lives? In this conversation, I speak with Lyman Stone, a leading expert on fertility and demographic change to understand why this is happening and whether anything can be done to reverse it. This is the Escape Artist podcast. >> If you value these conversations, please subscribe. It costs you nothing and keeps the podcast alive.
And now, here's Lyman Stone. I hope you enjoy. Escape Artist podcast.
Lyman Stone, welcome on the podcast. It's great to be with you. So to start with, I want listeners to really conceptualize the scale of the demographic changes that are happening across the world today and particularly in the West. All right, so usually when people think of the West, so northern and western Europe and North America, they think of these as being major population centers. But if we look at the the of births that
are occurring, you know, the fraction of of worldwide wide births that are happening in the West today. What does that look like and how does it compare with say 50 years ago? So, I mean, births are fertility rates are declining pretty well everywhere. Um around the world we're seeing a rapid pace of fertility decline in high-income countries. So, obviously, I think this is pretty well known. Um in
low-income countries, also I think this is pretty well known that fertility is falling from the historic levels of, you know, five, six, seven children per woman. Um I think less well known is that actually there's a rapid decline even in middle-income countries. So, if you look at somewhere like Thailand. Thailand's not a rich country. It's also not a poor country, right? It's kind of middle income. And yet the
fertility rate in Thailand is is only just a bit above one child per woman. Actually, it might be below that now. Um So, it's it's a story that cuts across income. So, it's not closely related to income. It's not like, "Oh, countries got rich and now they don't want babies anymore." Cuz we see um uh fertility is falling um far below uh for I guess I would say for any for a country at any given level of income
they probably have a lower fertility than a country of the same income had 20 years ago or even 10 years ago. Um So, uh it's broad-based fertility decline cutting across income levels.
and and um it it's it's uh it's something that the demographic profession has struggled to keep up with. Um we've had a lot of historic models about how fertility change would Um and they all kind of suggested that eventually fertility would fall to a certain level and then kind of oscillate somewhere near something like stability and that seems not to be the case. >> But but it was the case, right? So, if
if we look at uh fertility rates before 2008, it seemed like thing it seems like things were improving and then the economic crash seemed to also crash fertility rates, right? So, should it was the expectation wrong? So, it depends on kind of the the model used. If you look at like period specific total fertility yeah, you see some stabilization. If you look at completed fertility rates, right? The actual number of children
women had at the end of their reproductive years, the decline is much smaller, but it doesn't show the same quite the same pattern of leveling out. In some countries it does a bit. Actually, the US and Australia show some leveling out, but but it really seems as we get more data that the actual story is just persistent There are variations in the pace and the depth of that decline based on temporal and local factors,
but the broad model a period of decline followed by natural stability around, you know, 2.2 children per woman or per woman or something. This this model was just wrong. >> There's no there's no reason that people intrinsically have to have or will have two kids. But but how long has it been how long have we been sub replacement then across the world? If you focus say on the west and then also in East Asia where where things are
particularly bad. Yeah, um so Western countries started dropping below Well, it depends on how we count replacement. If you use true replacement rate, that is you know, are they below the level of birth they would need to have for long run stability given prevailing mortality rates. Some countries in the west dropped below replacement in the late But but usually we think of replacement as a fixed number 2.1 or something like
which isn't really replacement, but it's kind of a shorthand for a low mortality society. And so we started seeing countries drop below replacement in the early 20th century like the 1910s and but really the the big drops below replacement were in [clears throat] like the 60s and 70s. That that's when it seems to really become widespread that lots and lots of industrialized countries are dropping below
replacement. Um many of them dropped a bit below then kind of came a little closer or maybe a bit above um and there was kind of a period of oscillation um partly as migration was really rising into industrialized countries. Um uh but since since 2000 um and particularly as you said since like 2008 somewhere between 2007 and 2014 depending on the country um we've seen the end of that stability. Um we've seen fertility rates dropping
below what like a simple model of sort of modernization would suggest. When you mentioned that for some countries uh replacement in in some measures drop below you know stability in the 1700s are you implying there that there were high deaths due to wars? I see. Well and child mortality, right? The big thing is child mortality. Adult mortality is not the biggest factor here. It's about It's about child mortality. So you do have a
lot of countries where and of course data I should be clear data from the 1700s is of limited quality. So we're we're doing some guesswork here but based on the the the limited data we do have it does seem that there were societies um where uh the the effective replacement rate that is the number of children they would need to have to maintain stability um was like um maybe four um and uh and there were
and some of those societies the best data we have on their fertility rate suggests that their fertility rate was perhaps 3.5, you know, a bit below true replacement rate. Um it's not most societies, but yeah, I mean it is the case that um uh population growth in pre-modern societies was not usually uh and persistently high. And the reason for that is that fertility was often not high enough to uh mortality-driven replacement.
Mhm. I see. And so here most people survive into adulthood and and so we're we're really looking at something like 2.1 children per woman for replacement. So what what are the rates at across say Western Europe uh and the US right now Uh the US is about 1.6. Um I think the European the like the EU average is like maybe 1.4. Um Southern Europe seems quite low, just a bit above one maybe. Uh Northern Europe is higher, um maybe
around 1.6, you know, anywhere from 1.4 to 1.8. Um Eastern Europe is um uh has a wide range of experiences. Uh I think Bulgaria is actually one of the highest in the EU right now or highest in Europe right now. Um I think they're like 1.7 maybe. Uh but then you have other Eastern European countries that are very very low. Um and the Eastern European countries are also challenging because their fertility
situations change very very fast. Ukraine obviously is like 0.7 or something. Um and [clears throat] also their the quality of their censuses has not always been up to snuff. Um and so sometimes it's just very challenging to figure out what their fertility rate is. Um like if you want to talk about like what's the fertility trend in Moldova, it's like well what would you like it to be?
>> I see. And and but so then what does it mean at a human level, right? So so let's take say the average 1.4 children per woman. Let's take a cohort of say 100 people alive today. You know, how many grandchildren will they have? Oh man, there's there's some math. So you you think that each generation at 1.4, let's make it simple, let's call it 1.5. Um let's assume a very low mortality society, okay? So at 1.5 um
your cohort size is going to shrink by um with each uh with each generation. So uh if you have if you have 100 people and 50 of them are women and each woman has 1.5 kids, your next generation is 75. And then those 75, half of them women, that's 37.5, 1.5 kids each, uh gosh, what is that? Uh 50, high 50s, low 60s, something like that. So in two generations, you'll be looking at almost a halving of the
population size. If you drop it down to one child per woman, it's even faster. you you have uh quite rapid um uh yeah, it it can be it can be quite And why isn't it visible? You know, so you have you have this uh sort of halving of the population across two generations, but when I look out the window, there are people everywhere, you know, for for my entire life we've been worrying about overpopulation, right? So so why
is this not um why does it why does it not seem as dramatic as the numbers would suggest? I think there's a lot of reasons. One is that um because mortality rates are falling, um even when for when fertility is when mortality when we say replacement rate, that's assuming stable mortality If mortality conditions are not stable, say if deaths are coming later and later and later in life, then the true replacement rate
might only be 1.7. Mhm. Right? [clears throat] Um that is the the actual number to maintain a stable population. Um and that's what's been happening in recent decades is we've been living longer. Um and so there's more old people, and they contribute to the line at Kroger and the the traffic, and and all these things. Um and so uh perceived population, you know, population continues to rise, and so
population uh so like perceived population crowding, so to speak, can continue to rise for a long time. Second reason is it's very slow. Um you know, if we say, "Well, across a generation, the next generation will be 25% That's true. uh but a generation is, you know, 30 years wide. So, that's less than 1% decline a year. Um that's that's not the type of thing that you're going to notice immediately.
That said, th- as population growth is slowing around the country, and it is, and around many countries, it is noticeable. Right? You go around rural Japan, rural Bulgaria, um rural uh Germany, um you'll find a lot of towns that are just empty. They just don't have people anymore. Um you can buy entire towns in interior Um now, then you have to pay for their upkeep, so you're the real loser here. Um but uh
in areas of falling population, when when fertility slows down, you do find a lot of falling population, but it is spatially concentrated. And this is what There's actually a really weird dynamic that people don't always grasp. You can have a society of rapidly falling population where the actual population density that everyone experiences is rising. And the reason you can have that is because as population falls
some towns will go belly up. And they'll shut down. They'll close their post office. They'll close their police department. They'll close their school. And you just got to move, right? So, a few people will linger, but most people will move to a city, to a bigger city. And when your town goes belly up, you don't usually move to the neighboring town because the neighboring town is probably about to go belly up,
too. So, what do you do? You move to a big city that's going to be there So, I refer to this as the population triaging effect. So, in a declining population country, you'll usually find a rapidly growing big city. Bulgaria, Sofia. Japan, Tokyo. Um, population clusters in the places that people think are going to hold out, so to speak. So, you can actually have a situation where as a country is emptying
people perceive that it's getting more crowded. Right? So, think of like Seoul in Korea, okay? The rural The countryside of Korea is emptying out, but Seoul is like just slam packed. Or think of like rural China that's increasingly just emptying versus Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Chengdu, these places. so there's no contradiction between dramatic population decline at a national level and a person feeling that
their society is overcrowded. Um, it's actually very easy to have both and very And uh cities good places to have children, you know, did you do you have a compounding uh effect there where people get driven into cities and you have to live in a little apartment, you can't afford to have children. Is there some dynamic there that you're able to follow? Generally speaking, big cities have lower fertility rates.
The two most compelling reasons why this is so um are first that in big cities just house size tends to be smaller. Um you just tend to have fewer bedrooms, and that's the key limiting factors is it's bedroom count. Um so uh um in in big cities people tend to have fewer spare bedrooms, and so if that tends to constrain fertility. The second factor is possibly just crowding. Um in big cities people tend to perceive
that the world is very crowded, and they start to say, "Why would you need to add more people? I want some of these people to move away." Um so the social perception of crowding probably matters as well. people can have big families in apartments, there's lots of places where they do, but wherever you find big families in apartments, it is because the apartments have lots of bedrooms. So when you get cities that are adding
lots of population by having very small um that is not conducive to family formation. And so you can have a situation where as people move out of sometimes bigger units in rural areas. And I say sometimes cuz like in post-Soviet countries you often have a situation where like it's a rural area but you're still living in like an apartment block with like a one-bedroom unit, right? So it's like this weird
kind of Soviet housing design thing. Um but presumably it's often easier to get a bigger house in a more rural or less dense area. Um and so you can have a situation where the the areas that have larger houses are emptying out, and people cluster in areas that have smaller houses, and so more people are exposed to this sort of house-size binding constraint. And additionally, people's perception of crowding grows.
Um and so, yeah, that could become a vi- it can become a vicious cycle. So, there there's there's an argument a declining country to try and push against the emergence of superdominant primate cities. Right? So, you want a diverse urban ecology where there are functional suburbs um and functional second-tier cities. Um putting all your eggs in your capital city basket is probably demographic It's It's funny you mention that,
because if you look across Europe, there are countries like France, which demographically uh it's it's not great, but they're not doing as bad as some of the rest of Europe. Whereas Germany i- is not doing so well. And Germany's very uh it's distributed, where whereas France is Paris and a few other uh major cities. So, it sort of goes against uh what you're saying there. I suppose it's just it's a multifaceted problem,
>> Yeah, it it is. And I think the important thing in both of those is um is that both of them still have growing population. Um and so, this kind of demographic decline triaging effect is not yet binding on either of them. But in France, the unique case, of course, is is a century-long campaign of pronatal policy to create massive subsidies to have babies. Um so, uh and that's that's a huge part of the
story with France. So, just like why, you know, why is France an exception? Well, they pay for it. >> And and so then what happens so I know this is politically fraught, but what happens with the native population? So, if if you we have a birth rate of 1.4, 1.5 children per woman and in two generations, you know, that population will halve in size, let's say. If you're maintaining the population at
a stable level, I suppose you just have a smaller and smaller fraction of you know, the native population and that's just the way things go. Yeah, so that is the challenge for countries like like somewhere like Germany or France where their fertility rates have been below replacement off and on for a while and yet their population isn't rapidly declining and the reason is one life expectancy increased so that's yay, good
love not dying so much. But also they've welcomed a lot of and that is starting to have some political challenges. Because you do see a declining share of the native population. one of the challenges is that a lot of policy makers have this notion that you if birth rates are falling you can substitute with migrants and there is that's true for some things. You can in employment you can somewhat substitute
migrants for natives. Okay, that's like the math kind of pencils out there. but the reality is that most there's a political constraint in which births of natives and migrant and arrival of migrants are not substitutes but When the native-born population is having a lot of babies when they feel that their position is secure, they are more likely to comfortably welcome immigrants. Right? As the share of population growth which
is derived from migration rises you will see more nativist pushback. it's just it's it's practically an an Um because uh, in virtually every country, there are, uh, at least some people who are very politically motivated, um, to, uh, protect what they see as their their native culture. And I'm trying to be very neutral on that. Um, you know, I think there's there'll be some people who will uh, read what I'm saying as being like
crazy, and like I should be condemning this, and other people will say, "What do you mean, what they see as their native culture? Of course it's their native culture." Like, I'm not making a value judgment either way. I'm just describing the mechanism but beyond that, I do think there's a real sense in which policymakers have so zeroed in on, um, kind of the like the dependency ratio problem. Like, "Oh, where are we
going to get workers to support When that's really not the biggest problem, um, because in practice, if productivity growth is high enough, which with AI maybe it will be, um, you can you can offset workers. You can offset that. Um, I mean, don't get me wrong. Like, I I'm skeptical that we will fully offset it, but like it's possible. Like, it it's in theory there's ways to make the math pencil out
that nobody's worse off, okay? With an optimal policymaker and efficient redistribution, all things are If only we could elect an optimal policymaker. But, the real problem is that, um, in most countries, we we have good surveys that ask people how many kids they want to have. And people like have a very easy time answering this question. Like, it's not rocket science. They're not like, "I've never thought about how many kids
I want to have before. That's a that boy, that's really stumping me." Like, people know. They answer the question quickly. They give clear answers. Um, their answers are predictive of subsequent behavior. Their answers are not highly sensitive to priming from other questions in the survey. There are some people who are more uncertain, so they they might change their answers between survey waves, but a lot of
people are highly consistent across survey waves. And when their answers do change, it's often for rational reasons, like something changed in their life circumstances in a big way. and so there's a subset that's highly volatile and unstable, but most people have a pretty clear idea of what they want. And in most countries, the numbers that people want, in most industrialized actually in every industrialized
country, as it turns out, the number of people want is a lot higher than the number they're actually Um they say, "Oh, I'd like to have, you know, two." And they're actually going to have 1.4. Um so that being the case, immigrants can't replace that, right? No amount of very nice immigrants moving in next door replaces the fact that like, you know, I hoped to have children, and then it took me forever to find a
partner. By the time we got married, it was late. We had fertility trouble, blah blah blah, you know, go on and go on and go on. Migrants don't replace that. It's And And I'm not That's not to say migrants are good or bad. It's just it's not responsive to the issue. It's like It's like, "Gee, I'm I'm sorry you didn't have the family life you wanted. We've brought in some families to replace you." >> Um I hope you're happy.
And I I think that policymakers often just have not grasped the the the fundamental sort of subjective experience and psychological dynamic of declining fertility. Yeah. And so they they don't understand the kind of pathos that it has for for voters. I suppose at the end of the day we're animals, right? And it's it's not going to feel great if if wanted to have children, if if you were driven to have children, you end up with
uh you know, alone at the end of your life, let's say, or not finding that partner, or ending up in a situation So in Berlin, for instance, you'll go places in the city where you don't hear You hear either English or Arabic or And it must be confronting not only for people who ended up not having children, but to not hear their native language when they're 90 years old. I suppose that's that's that's also an
aspect that's not really caught in the Um Yeah, I mean, I lived when I I lived in Quebec for a number of years. And the neighborhood that my church was in was essentially Little India. And so, you would walk around the neighborhood and you wouldn't hear French, which is official, you know, language for Quebec. You also wouldn't really hear English, which is like the dominant language in the rest of Canada.
You'd hear Hindi, Those were the languages. And then, the neighborhood I lived in when we played at the park, you'd hear Yiddish. Now, that's a whole different kind of uh whole different thing cuz those people cuz Yiddish speakers have been in Canada for a long time. >> Um but So, I think that the these are real real for governments to to try and wrestle And I think they're also they they do come back around to bite in a weird
financial way. So, one of the things you know if if you have any people in your life that you care about who are who are aging is that no matter how rich you are when you retire, and no matter how much money you have, and no matter how generous the pension system is, or how good the health care system is, the reality is a lot of the burden of caring for an old person falls on their descendants. In every country in the world, one way
or another, you end up taking care of your parents. And they need it. Now, there there's varieties of the intensity of that care. In some places, you pretty much have to do it alone, there's no help. In other places, there are public systems, and that's that's great. But, at the end of the day, it's really expensive to care for every single need of an 85- or 90-year-old. Um, that's just really costly.
If society can offload some of that cost onto people who love that 85- or if if they'll just do it for love, that saves so much public money. >> But, in a world where we've got all these 85-year-olds who have no one who loves them, no one to take care of them, and it all falls on their savings, or once their savings run out, as they will because elder care is crazy expensive, once it falls on the taxpayer,
that's incredibly expensive. And I should say, like in the US, our like Social Security and Medicaid assumptions going forward, when they forecast costs, they assume that the share of care provided by descendants will be stable in the Okay? But, this is clearly wrong. >> Because in the future, people there will be the share of people who have no will be higher. >> Um, and they they just they don't even
model this. They they don't even consider the possibility that the share of people who have who are entirely dependent on market- or public-provided care, who have zero non-market care provided for them, might be twice as high. Um, and that is an extremely costly segment um of of the of the of the elder care economy. And so, even if even and that's something that again, migrants don't replace that, right? Because
taking care of your parents is just a different thing.
So, we've created a a society or we've created an economic and and social has the effect or it suppresses the number of births below what people would optimally like to have. It's It's not that It's not that it's c'est la vie. We We We're happy with having our 1.4 children per woman. It's [clears throat] that we're really not having the fertility rates that we want optimally as a society. >> And we we can actually By the way, we
can see this in like subjective well-being data. Um because uh um uh we can we can follow a cohort of people over time where we survey them about their fertility desires early in life, and we can see if they end up with more or fewer than they said. And we can see that um uh people who people who end up with fewer children than they said they wanted um are less happy at the end of their life. Okay, so that there are regrets later on
in life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean uh overshooting your desired family size is um well, it kind of depends on the data set you use, but over a lot of the data we have suggests that having more kids than you wanted is probably the the worst outcome. Um but it's very uncommon. Like in in in industrialized societies, like less than 10% of people end up with extra kids. Um whereas um undershooting
undershooting is probably not as disruptive to your happiness as overshooting is, but it's so much more common. It's like anywhere from 30 to 60% of people will have fewer kids than they said they wanted. Um so uh and and it's it's so even though it's individually less uh less disruptive, um it's so much more common that the total sort of societal welfare losses of undershooting are much larger. But if you think about like the
decision parameter facing an individual, if you know that ending your life with the regret that you had too many would have more individual negative effect on you than ending your life with the regret that you had too few, then you might bias downwards. Um now, that's why, you know, a lot of old people say, "Well, but I never heard anybody get to their old age and say I wish I had fewer children." But you know what? I survey people all
the time. There are people who say they wish they had fewer children, and they they have reasons for it, you know? They they had negative experiences along the way related to the obligations that additional children created or the outcomes those kids had. Um and so while while there's kind of like a oh, nobody ever regrets this, I think you know, there is a small share of the population that that that does have
genuine regrets. Um doesn't mean they don't love the kids they had. It just means they've they've seen that there were other paths that they that they might have preferred. But again, that's that's it's a it's a quite a small share of people. Okay, so so that's sort of what's going on demographically across the world in the West. Why? So that that's what I want to get next. And I imagine as you said, it's
multifaceted. So I I want to break this down into economic, status, you know, if you different structural and so on. So let's let's start with economic. Um has the economic logic for individuals flipped? So So by that I mean, you know, if you go back 100 years, 200 years, I imagine a situation where children would have provided labor and looked after you when you were in your old age. But now, with
sort of socialized old age care to a certain extent, um and and the logic economically is just completely flipped and and it's it doesn't make economic sense. Is is that the case? So, there's definitely some of that. Um, there's a really nice study that shows that like um, when child labor laws were implemented in the US that like fertility rates in those states like did start declining more. Um, so there I
think there's good evidence for what we call the intergenerational wealth transfer hypothesis. This is the the model demographers like. Um, this suggests that basically when children um, when children are basically a kind of a capital investment for the parents that they have greater incentives to have That dynamic is definitely operating in some countries. Um, the biggest factor though, if we think of like like sort of I don't know
if this economic, but it's material. The biggest factor globally is just child mortality. It used to be that a lot of kids died. Um, humans have probably always targeted something like three surviving children. That's probably always across societies been a basically what we were targeting, trying to hit. Three kids who make it to maturity. and uh um, uh and there's there's a lot of reasons to to think that that was kind of the
intrinsic target, but in the past, you know, 40% of your kids died. So, you you know, if you're shooting for three, you got to have five or six. so that that's that's a really big factor. It's just just child mortality declined and boom, there you go. That's that's like a huge share of it, but that's obviously not what's happening in like the last 20 years. Okay, like it's not like child mortality crashed in Korea in the last 20 years.
Um, like it was already basically zero. Um, so um, uh there are other economic factors. Um, a big part of it is that uh peak income has come later in life. Partly, I mean people living longer so they have longer to build up, but um it it just is the case that um if you compare a man's income in uh 19 if you compare compare a 25-year-old man's income in 1955 um you know, a 45-year-old man's income in 1955
um they're actually pretty close. Um but if you compare them now they're quite different. uh so um >> uh that is a key >> poorer when we're younger, is that is that the point? It's not that we're absolutely poorer. We are relatively poorer. That is our peak income comes And peak income matters uh because in some sense um you really want to be paying for the expenses of children when you're at peak. When you have kids, it often
disrupts career progression, especially for women. Um but uh for men it's not there's a it's not there's a penalty for having kids, but um but it can complicate um >> it can complicate um uh career progression. So for example, when men get divorced, their income often rises um because they they often um don't have other obligations to negotiate in the same way. Um uh that's not an endorsement of divorce,
by the way.
Um often when men get divorced, they also need their income to rise because they are paying child support. Um but um uh so um uh but peak income comes later and as a result um the meeting and matching problem gets harder. Um right? Because uh people do match on uh earning potential and socioeconomic status and inferring particularly a man's earning potential is much harder than it used to be um because the the
market signals are a lot weaker earlier on. Um we can also talk about housing dynamics. Um around much of the world, housing is is getting more expensive with respect to income or if it's not getting more expensive with respect to income, it's getting smaller. Um and these these are both both problematic dynamics. I suppose there's also dual income families now. That that's sort of the So if both parents are out out of the
house in employment and they need to be so, then I guess there's not much time for child raising. Yeah, there's there's a lot of debate on the role of um dual income households and female labor force participation. Um it probably has has some effect. Like the most precisely uh controlled studies do suggest that um when women have higher earning potential outside of the um that it has a small negative effect
on fertility. Um however, when men have more earning potential outside of the home, it has a positive effect on fertility. Um and when households have exogenous just more money when they're just richer, that has a positive effect on fertility. So the net effect of these things is a bit tricky to untangle, but overall the effects are pretty pretty small. Um so using like the best estimates we have of kind of the income
and substitution effects of men's and women's um earning potential um it looks like we might be able to explain uh maybe 5 or 10% of the fertility decline since uh since like um in the US for example uh by change it through changes in um outside of the home earning potential. It's a very small effect. Um it's it's just not I mean you know, would I like fertility to be 5 or 10% higher? Yeah, sure. uh do I think there's a plausible
pathway to do that by like taxing women more? Not really. Um and we actually have three countries that did cut taxes dramatically just for women. Um well, not just for women, but 90% for Um in Sweden in 1970-something, I forget the exact date. I I wrote about this somewhere else, but I forget the exact date. In Canada in like 1991 in the UK in 1989 or actually I might have Canada and the UK flipped there,
but there's three cases where countries that had joint tax systems, that is couples were taxed as a unit, Mhm. switched to individual or at least partly individual tax systems. Okay, they reformed their tax codes to go to an individual system. The result of this is that lower earning spouses, so spouses whose earnings were lower than their other partner, saw huge tax cuts. Massive tax cuts for lower earning
Um lower earning spouses in like Sweden in the 1970s is like 90% Okay. And in Canada and the UK around 1990, there's like 80% wives, right? Um so overwhelmingly there's there's a huge tax cuts for wives. We know that these tax cuts did increase women's labor force participation. Okay, there's a lot of studies on that. Nobody had previously studied their fertility So I did. Um and we can look at what happened to
society-wide fertility in all three cases using like synthetic control models. So I looked at both uh both um period-specific total fertility rates and completed fertility rates. So, I looked at like exposure to these policies versus completed fertility rates. Um and across the two indicators for each country in the three cases, I made, you know, pretty well-matched synthetic controls. Um which is just a
method where basically we pull a bunch of countries to try and get a comparable counterfactual. It's not perfect, but it's a reasonable guess. Um and across the six outcome variables, so two variables for three countries, that's six. Um two of them showed like no effect. Um and three of them showed that fertility rose. Or sorry, four of them showed that fertility rose after women were taxed less. Um which is not what you would expect if
taxing wives if encouraging women to work reduces fertility. Now, why? This is the big question. >> Maybe reduces stress. It uh There's a There's a way simpler explanation. And it's it's the ur-factor everything. Okay. Everybody wants to talk about the economic side. And economics matter because economics one particular human behavior. and that's marriage. Mhm. Joint tax systems sometimes create marriage penalties.
They often do actually. Particularly if two people have similar incomes, under a joint tax system, they often face a penalty for getting married. Because now they're taxed as, you know, combine their incomes and you're now you're rich. Um so, joint tax systems have often created marriage penalties. Not all They don't have to. They can create big marriage bonuses depending on how you structure them. Some people get bonuses,
some people get penalties. But in uh as more and more women enter the workforce and have higher incomes, joint systems increasingly are creating more and more marriage penalties. They discourage marriage for more and more That doesn't have to be the case. There are ways to structure joint systems that they don't create that penalty. But for a lot of people in a lot of systems, they do create these marriage
This being the case, we um what happened in these countries, I think, is that when they repealed their joint tax systems, they may have removed marriage And so I have not checked if marriage rates rose, but I cuz I just haven't had time to get around to it, but I suspect that in these countries, marriage rates may have risen. Mhm. Um exposure to marriage may have risen relative to counterfactuals. so uh that's my my working theory is
that basically removing joint taxation um may have motivated people to marry more. Um uh rather than rather than stay single. Because we know that marriage is sensitive to financial incentives. For example, in South Korea, uh in 2024, they rolled out a new incentive for marriage. It's just a a cash grant for first marriages. You get married, we give you a lump of cash. It's not tons, but it's it's not
nothing. Um marriage rates rose in South Korea in 2004 for the first time in decades. Um and they stayed high in 2005. Or 2025. I said 2004 and 2005. 2024 and You if you know anything about South Korean fertility, you know it's super but you also know, perhaps, that 2024 and 2025 were the were were the first time that South Korean fertility rose in a long time. Um that's not random. Yep. Fertility is mostly about marriage.
And declining fertility rates around the world are mostly about declining marriage rates. Do people misunderstand how much that time they have then? You know, you know, in other words, today we have dating apps. We have Tinder, we have OKCupid. I'm a little bit old now, so I don't remember all of I don't know which apps are sort of in play at the moment. But I imagine these you you have this feeling that I can
play this game forever. There's always someone else. So, I go on a date, that person isn't perfect for me, I'll find someone else. I imagine this also has a massive impact on when people get married or whether they're getting married in in the first place, right? so what impact then do does our dating and relationship culture have on fertility? Is there much of a link there that you've followed? So, the dating and
relationship culture definitely matters. The research on dating apps specifically is mixed. Um unfortunately, the data quality on on dating apps is not is not great. So, we don't exactly know what effect dating apps apps had on marriage. That remains speculative, though I think we all have probably the same speculation. Uh that is that um that it's it it creates a perception of options that might induce people to delay longer
than is efficient. Um right? Like it's an optimal matching There's there's there's basically formulas on optimal matching. Like how many candidates for a job should you sort through before you stop? Um there's math to govern this based on the relative distribution of quality in the candidates that you observe, what you think the distribution is out there, um and the odds that you think they say yes to you. Okay. Um
and I think what's going on is dating apps might be creating um irrational beliefs about the quality of what's out there. Partly cuz people present the best version of themselves in the apps. uh and also because um they just they just make you think there's so many fish in the sea when there's there's really so uh but [clears throat] it's not just that, right? It's not just dating apps. I mean you talk to people today and a lot of a
lot of people will say, "Yeah, okay. I go on the apps and yeah, I have to swipe a gazillion times, but like okay, eventually get a date. We go on a date, um but like I just don't like her. Like her I don't like him. Um like she's, you know, she has eight different mental illnesses um and he is, you know, practically an angry incel. Um like the things that the sexes say about each other highly critical. Um
>> um it doesn't seem like like men and women young men and women in many countries like each other very much. Um so I don't think the problem is just that you can't get matches. I think the problem is even once you match like we don't like each other. that being the case, I think there is a deeper cultural issue beyond just the apps, right? About why are young men and women increasingly wanting different
things from relationships, having different ideas about what makes for a polite and reasonable uh men and women increasingly just have different ways of interacting with the world, seeing the world. Um >> uh I love there is this there is one of these studies that showed like the top 20 words that like men know and women don't and that women know and men don't. And I'm like, I want to see that, but like do it in 1960. Cuz I suspect like
the gender variety in vocabulary has Um would be my guess. Um uh Um so uh I think um that we've seen increasing polarization of the sexes across lots of different and I think that that's just making coupling and matching very very hard. Um then there's also the the the the time problem. I mentioned it like peak income is coming later. Most people tend to match to someone of similar socioeconomic status.
uh men and women don't always have the same income, but men tend to marry women who have dads who have extremely similar income as themselves. That is to say men tend to marry women whose fathers are similar socioeconomic status as they themselves are or will be. but women tend to look for men who are currently similar socioeconomic status essentially their dads. Um I'm not saying this is like a daddy
issue thing. This is just how assortative mating works. Um people form their expectations of socioeconomic status based on their family environments, and then they go looking for someone who will be a partner in that socioeconomic status. Men can often infer that about women fairly efficiently because you might look at her family. though increasingly >> her father. You can you meet her father, her her parents, and then you'll know.
But I will say though this this norm is eroding, right? Increasingly meeting family is later and later. And so I think young women today, I mean not I think I know, for young women today like getting a degree and getting a good job is a good marriage strategy. Um women who get a degree and get a job have higher marriage rates than women who do not do those things, and the gap is growing over time. Um so the whole
like oh men just want a hot girl who's submissive and she doesn't need to have a degree and a job." Like, bull crap. Um, men want women who are socioeconomic and competence peers. And because meeting her family is less and less a thing, increasingly a woman has to signal that on her own devices. Um, uh, with education and work. Um, though if that's the only thing she signals, then she's signaling that the
type of spouse she will be is is very career-focused. And if if that's what she wants, fine. That's the great thing to signal if that's the type of spouse you want to be, but a lot of women uh, would like A lot of women would like to have, more more involvement at home than their That doesn't necessarily mean only a stay-at-home parent. They might want, you know, hybrid work or part-time work or something like that, but
statistically women are more likely to to have a larger domestic role than than their husbands. And so a challenge for women is figuring out how to signal socioeconomic parity while also signaling, um, uh, while still optimally signaling your own domestic interest. Um, you don't want to signal boss babe if you don't want to spend your whole life as boss babe. Do people actually conceptualize things this way or, you know, in my
experience in the dating market it was a little bit more messy. Like, I I didn't really think about, you know, my income as compared to say her father's. It was, I think she's You know, I maybe I'm a basic a very simple person. Um, So, people don't people People do consciously consider these things as they approach more serious stages of relationships. Um, it definitely I mean, yeah. When people are thinking about moving in
together or getting married, they absolutely start thinking about these Um and they often have conversations about them with their partner or with with their friends or with trusty confidants. Um but even beyond that, yes, people think about these things even on a first date. Um if your date shows up and signals low socioeconomic status um or lower than you, you know, uh depending on how callous you are,
maybe you uh maybe you stick around for a few dates um even though you don't intend a long-term partnership. But yeah, cross-class marriage is is less common and it's not getting more common over Um and I think uh ultimately people marry for love, but who they allow themselves to love is stratified by social class. And pretending like that is not the case is just absurd. and again, I don't even think it's
I don't think that this is like a shallow or bad behavior. If you know that your life is going to involve a kind of social engagement that the partner you're looking at is not going to be a functional partner in, is your is that a good marriage? if if you and your partner have just fundamentally different ways of engaging with the world or different expectations about how to live together in a house or
different views of how to spend money, these are going to be real conflicts. So, I don't think that we I don't think we need to romanticize marriage and mating. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It it often works for lots of people. Um but assortative mating happens because the reality is people are often um there are often real challenges in marriages where people have very different expectations finances, socialization, education of
children, these kinds of things. So, if we look back So, So, you meant we started off talking about tax >> Then into dating apps and so on. But, if we jump back into the tax incentives, you know, that that bears a cost to the Right? So, if if if the government decides, "Okay, we would like to push up native births or births of citizens, then there's going to be a cost there. I need to reduce taxes on women, say, or whatever the the
policy is they need to implement. Is it worth it for the state? In the sense that are immigrants just cheaper than than you know, putting in place policies that lift fertility rates?
may be cheaper in the short run, but we're running out of them. What I mean by that is fertility's falling all around the world. At some point, someone has to figure out the fertility thing because you can't Every country can't be receiving immigrants at the same time. They have to come from somewhere. And I think there's a serious ethical concern with the rich countries who had the first fertility decline saying, "We're going
to take all the most talented and capable people from poor countries and move them here to take care of our old Cuz then who's going to take care of the old people in the other countries? They'll just die alone and far from their kids. Um so, I I really think that this is just not a solution long run. I'm not saying we shouldn't have immigration, but I'm just saying at some point, we have to figure out the
fertility stuff. Financial incentives are expensive, uh but they do work. Um I'm actually working on a big meta-analysis right now of hundreds of estimates of different policies and how they've impacted fertility. Um we find that um when you increase financial benefits for kids, you do get more kids. You just do. That does happen. But it is expensive and for many countries it's so it's truly prohibitively expensive to try and
get to a replacement just through financial incentives. Um so governments do need to think about other options as well. I think they should do cash incentives. I think if you don't do cash incentives, your population will not take you seriously about anything else you try to do. Um but we should be thinking about other stuff as well. thinking about marriage is important. We should be asking, do we have any
marriage penalties in our tax code, in our means-tested benefit programs? In most countries, the answer is yes, there are marriage penalties. So we want to fix that. Um we we want to we want to eliminate marriage penalties. We shouldn't be discouraging marriage. And I think we can think about marriage bonuses. Um and these can all be done in a revenue-neutral ways. Um that is you can you can eliminate marriage penalties by
by raising taxes on single people if you want. Um marriage penalties are important. Also housing. A lot of times a barrier in many countries is unaffordable or unsuitable housing and that's often because of regulations and laws that govern housing supply. Um Make it easier to build where people want and what they want and marriage and fertility will rise. They they they will in the long run. Um Beyond that,
uh you know, cultural interventions I think are an interesting area to be thinking about in the future. We don't know exactly what those would look like and they probably look different in different countries. This is a really active area of research right now for for my program at the Institute for Family Studies. And just a few weeks we're going to be fielding a huge multinational survey looking at all kinds of different social
and cultural factors shaping fertility to try and identify are there places where governments could make little um to help people just you know, understand their own timelines better or or or figure out um uh you know, are there social influences that are very significant that we could that we could nudge a bit. Um so trying to figure out if there are places where there are social or cultural factors
that we could we could work with um is I think a an important area of future research. Unfortunately, it's not one we know a lot about yet. We know that social and cultural factors matter. We have tons of surveys showing that like when we have no no sorry sorry not surveys studies. We have tons of studies quasi-experimental causal variation showing that when your co-workers or your friends have babies, you're more
likely to have babies. It's contagious. Um but how to jump-start or engineer that effect um remains unclear. One thing that I've always found a little bit curious is online. So Facebook is sort of old these days, but back in the day people would avoid putting their pictures of their children online on Facebook, on Instagram, let's say. Uh or they'd blur their faces. And so people who had kids would there'd
be an absence of their kids on social media. Right? So that that was for protective reasons. Um whereas at the same time um you know, celebrities uh who are doing very well in their lives might not have children, right? We the the forward-facing people we see the the social elites uh maybe signaling that um you know, having children is bad for the environment or for whatever reason that they decide to forego having
children in in favor of a career, let's How important uh social elites then in terms of um the status drive uh towards children. Um you know, in in in today's society, it's not really a status symbol to have children. Whereas back in the day it might have been a status symbol to have six, seven, eight, nine, 10 kids. I think actually having kids is a status symbol. Um and what I mean by that is it used to be the case that fertility was
highest for the poorest people. That's no longer the case. Um in many countries around the world, uh fertility is higher for richer people Um and we know that odds of getting married are shaped by income and socioeconomic Um I think increasingly family is a status symbol. And that's part of the problem. Um that is that people see family life like a distant goal to be obtained rather than something you can just go
and do. In the past, it is not the case that someone with six kids was high status. Someone with six kids was normal.
today, someone with six kids might be high status. Families with six kids tend to be high Um at least at least in the US.
what's changed is that the idea that you would just go and have two or three kids is no longer like a universal norm. Okay? That's what's changed. Having kids is not déclassé. Um it's a flex. I mean, people are like, "Oh, it's so expensive. How can you afford it?" And you're like, "Well, I make good money as a demographer." No, um, so I I really don't believe that it's low status. Now, it is true that,
um, online there is a particular status vector that is, um, family exclusive. Uh, Instagram, travel photos, all this. Um, this is a particular route to specific status that is family exclusive. And I think it might have some negative effect on fertility. Um, I've done some work some survey work on like people's views of travel and fertility. Um, and it does seem like, um, a lot of people really care a lot about
travel. And the effect that having kids would have on their ability to travel is like a really big thing for them. It's a really big concern. Um, and so, um, uh, that that particular vector of status is significant. Um, and I I agree there is this weird thing where people with kids hide their kids from social media and social media companies prefer not to boost posts that have kids in them. Um, and it is kind of perverse, right? It's
like we hide kids from society so that no one will ever know how happy the parents are. Um, uh, it it is bizarre. Um, like I and I think I think we do society a disservice by hiding our kids. Um, uh, so I I don't blur my kids' faces. Um, so, you know, I guess that creates some kind of insecurity for my kids. I'm not sure exactly what it is I'm supposed to be afraid of if my kids' faces are online. Like, "Oh, they might get kidnapped."
yes, they they they could be, but like stranger kidnapping is extremely rare. This This is like a black swan event. The odds of this happening are are crazy low. Um like oh, they might get murdered. Yeah, well, most kids who are like murdered at school or something, cuz I mean if it's my house, you don't need to know them they're my kids. You walk in, they're in my house, it's they're clearly my kids.
So, if they're like killed at school, yeah, school shootings happen, but like I've actually never heard of a school shooting where someone like like targeted like a celebrity's kids at that school. Like maybe it's happened, but that's not how most school shootings work. It's usually just like a deranged person walks in >> that people, at least from what I've heard, is just the consent to put your face out there. You know, once it's put
out into the you know, it's a choice, right? Yeah, I don't really know what privacy rights to begin with. Like look, up until the 1930s in the US, census forms were posted in the town square. You could go and look up your neighbor's income. Um and I think you should still be able Um I just think that uh the right to privacy was a mistake. Um in the in the broad sense. I mean, in the US, the right to privacy was
um to protect contraception and Um and uh and I'm I'm I'm I support abortion or I support contraceptive legalization. I'm I'm not opposed to that, but the the idea that legal contraception needs to be protected under a right to is ridiculous. Like no, that that's not the right legal basis for protection of contraception. Um Can Can Can Can I pause you there? I'm not familiar with this story. Can Can you flesh out what
you mean here? On the right to privacy? >> So, the link between the right to privacy and uh contraception it it this is not a story >> the the the right to privacy in the US So, so let me be clear about privacy rights. There are privacy rights that predate uh the 1960s. So, obviously, you're you have a right to be free from un- from like unreasonable search and seizure, for example, okay? So, when we
say privacy rights, we're not talking about like unreasonable search. People do have a right to not be unfairly searched by authorities in the United States. That And that's been true since uh the dawn of constitution, basically. Um but encompassing privacy right then unless the government has a compelling reason to collect or to enforce something that they can't. That is um that the the pri- the basic
assumption should be non-disclosure rather than disclosure. So, in the US, this comes from a case called Griswold v. Connecticut, where if I remember the details correctly, Connecticut wanted to regulate The plaintiff wanted to say that the um that the state had no right to inspect their private medical records on whether they were getting contraception or not. And the Supreme Court ruled that yes, in
fact, people have a generalized right to privacy. The state cannot just cannot just interfere in private matters like medical records. which is a strange uh or I'm probably getting some of the legal details wrong, but it is true that the expansive right to privacy in the US comes from Griswold v. Connecticut. Um and then also it comes up a lot in a lot of the abortion cases as well and is refined there. Um
And uh again, this isn't even to say anything about abortion and contraception. But, I just think that this culture of privacy um like look, I can go and buy your cell phone metadata, okay? like companies sell it online. Um you don't have privacy unless you want to do like off-the-grid stuff. Um privacy is basically a lie, but it's a fiction that we preserve for our own sort of ego defense. I think we should be honest and just
accept that privacy doesn't exist. Um that um private data purchasers can get whatever they want. Um the government can already pretty much get whatever it wants. Um and we should just be honest about this and confront as a society. And I also think that privacy rights lead to quite bad I think that um if all of our spouses knew what we did online, we would probably be better Um I think that uh if everybody was on
their real name on Twitter, Twitter would be better. Um Now, you can say, "Well, what about authoritarian regimes?" Okay, sure. But, let's constrain to liberal societies here. You want to make like a dictatorial regime exception, fine. uh whatever. I I agree. But, we're talking about societies that are basically have basically liberal norms. and if what you're saying is that you have opinions that would get you
canceled by all your friends and family and co-workers, that might be a you problem. Like like >> I think I think the main [laughter] one of the main counterarguments is that you never know how information is going to be used tomorrow. Sure. >> Today, we live in a liberal society. But, I I I think this is getting a little bit uh off topic cuz I I want >> topic, but No, no. >> No, but but it it But, it
>> is on topic in this particular sense that these intense rights to privacy um do affect parenting in important ways, right? This intense like, "Oh, I need to keep my kids safe in this particular way, and they need to do exactly this, and I want to parent in exactly this way." It makes parenting really hard, right? Because you have this idea that you have to do all these things with your kid and protect them
from all these things. And all this elaborate work and I just ran a big survey of parents and we found that yeah, parents who feel that parenting is more difficult um have fewer children. >> have fewer kids. Yeah, yeah, they're less likely to intend more kids. Um and they have fewer kids. Um and so uh um when we when we adopt these social norms that make the the experience of parenting more isolated
more um more anxious when we expand the list of things that parents are supposed to be freaked out uh we do contribute to the extinction of our species. So then what does work? So so there are some countries that have really like you mentioned France. There there are some countries that have been playing this game for a long time trying to uh stabilize or push up their fertility rates. So what have we learned? What policies do
actually work? Yeah. So um I said, you know, giving cash works. It does. France gives a ton of cash mostly through their quotient system that is if you have a lot of kids in France, you basically just don't pay taxes cuz the tax brackets like multiply with each kid and stuff. It's um you basically just don't pay taxes while you have kids. Um which is crazy cuz France has really high tax rates. >> So it's like high taxes plus huge tax
breaks for kids is like a heck of a one-two punch. Um but France has another thing going for it. France builds a lot of housing. In uh up until recently the share of like twenty-somethings who live apart from their parents in their own house is higher than most other places in Europe. So there's a one-two punch here. Big tax breaks help. But in a lot of countries, if you give families big tax breaks because you're
not building enough houses, it just inflates housing costs. >> I see. So you have to give big financial benefits and build enough houses that that money doesn't just go to housing costs. Right? So, um it's a one-two punch of um of uh financial incentives and make sure that this is or not just flowing into, you know, cost-eating categories. So, it can't just all go to housing costs and it can't just all go to child care. Um
and the child care side is tricky, so you have to um you have to make sure that child child care is lightly um widely available, um and that people can and that whatever child care subsidies you give are available across lots of different modes of child care. So, you can't just be like, "Oh, we have free public day care centers." No, if people want grandma to watch kids, you need to subsidize Okay? Um so, whatever benefit you're
giving for child care needs to be very flexible, so that you're not just plowing it into, you know, a narrow cost center of the child care economy, and so that people have a lot of options to shop around for the best option for themselves. So, like child care is >> grandma? How do you subsidize grandma? You give a child care voucher um to a family and you tell them whoever does child care for you, you can pay them and
claim the expense, and then grandma bills you per hour that she watches your And but is this This is not very efficient, right? If I have a child care center, then I have a few grown people looking after lots of Cost per kid in child care centers is often a lot higher than cost per kid in home-based care. Um it's often way higher. Um home-based >> wants to be there. Grandma wants to be there. Grandma's flexible. Grandma will
do it at whatever random hour you need it. Um grandma doesn't have to pay rent on a secondary facility. Grandma um you know, home-based care avoids a lot of the of the building costs. Um and then also center-based care tends to create a quality ratchet where people start to say, "Oh, we need to make sure it's high quality, high quality, high quality." And so they buy all this extra equipment. They insist on having workers
with all these degrees and certifications and yada yada yada. And I'm like, "Dude, like a 70-year-old Hispanic grandma who's raised six of her own kids is a better child care worker than your 23-year-old with nine Mhm. Like I don't care if she speaks Does she know how to play with the kid? Like um uh so um uh um it just is the case that that center-based care um creates cost ratchets, has a lot of built-in fixed costs. And so the best
thing we can do is just give a voucher to families and say, "You know, you can claim x amount of child care expenses and we will reimburse you." Now, you do need to keep, you know, a little bit of aboveboard. A child care worker The child care worker needs to be There should be a system where they get a background check. Um and they should report the income you pay them for tax purposes. uh and um uh you know, you you need to have some
you know, basic regulatory, like, you things. Um so background check, reporting for taxes, um you know, you could do a site check, you know, if it's an offsite location, it needs to have a minimum minimum safety standard. Though even there, I'm like, "Do we really need a minimum safety standard or can we just let parents be the judge?" Um but uh you know, and you probably want to have a limit on like how many kids can be
watched at once at some level. Um but again, like if you're letting grandma claim it, grandma's not going to be watching nine kids. Um so um vouchers to families are the best way to do this, rather than um rather than concentrated centers. I see. And And but Fran- France doesn't have this system, do they? Because >> France has a range of child care that they've expanded over the years. I don't know the exact system for it, but
they do have a lot of different child care benefits, yeah. But they also don't They haven't succeeded in pushing above replacement levels, right? Uh no, they're falling recently, but in the last decade or so France has slashed a lot of their benefit programs. They reduced the generosity of the quotient system. They cut their child allowances. They cut the They used to do a cool thing where if you took time off work to watch a child
in your home, your kid, like, you know, you you're mom, you take time off work to stay home with your kid, you got retirement pension credits. So, basically, they said, "We're going to act like you're still working for the sake of pension calculations for a few years." But they they got rid of that recently. Um so, France has been cutting their benefit programs for kids, and surprise, surprise, they're like,
"Oh ho, WHY IS OUR FERTILITY FALLING?" Um it's like, "Well, because you abandoned being French." Um like, France was like this super pro-family pro-natal culture, and then in like the 2010s they were like, "What if we became Germans?" >> Um and it's not working. W- Why is it that so, France obviously put a lot of effort in, but then other governments seem to be very blasé about this. Why is this politically invisible
because it the timelines are so long, or what Why does >> Yeah, but there are there are a couple of factors. One is long timeline, slow-moving stuff, it's easy to ignore. Or it's easy to kick the can down the um two other big reasons loom large. One is a lot of policy makers worry that um that fertility the talking about fertility will be a stalking horse for rolling back women's rights. Um, and I will say a lot of pro-natal
people, people who who want there to be more babies, um, they have not done much to dissuade that perception. like it it blows my mind when these guys are out there on Twitter and it's it's guys usually. Um, out there on Twitter being like, "It's clear that the problem is just like the 19th Amendment. We let women vote and that ruined fertility." And I'm like, "First of all, >> And second of all, like
you clearly are not reading the room." Wait a second, didn't fertility rates rise until like the '70s or the the '60s or something? >> I mean yes, there's like complications on how you count it. Yeah, there's there's the baby boom and all these different dynamics, but you know, there there there's a popular narrative that basically um uh that basically um uh you know, women entering the workforce, women having rights, feminism
is the problem. Um, and I don't really I mean I it is the case that changes in gender norms contributed to the decline in fertility. And I mentioned before that yeah, there are studies showing that women's outside the home earning opportunities influence fertility. But as I said, the effect size is very small. Other factors matter a lot more. And at some point um, you know, you start to say, "Well, you know,
well, it wasn't feminism, it's declining marriage." And they say, "Well, marriage is declining because of feminism." You say, "Well, it's not declining because of feminism, it's declining because of you know, later in you know, skills biased technical change and housing." And also because of these polarization of the sexes. And they say, "Well, polarization of the sexes is because of feminism. You say, well,
it's not so much because of feminism, it's bec- it's because, you know, we invented these new technologies that allow gender-specific online socialization without any kind of sane guardrails or multi-generational community and these things. They say, well, no, but it's because on these online communica- communities, they get exposed to feminism. And like feminism is always the answer for certain guys.
and like they don't understand that like just because feminism might on some level be part of the story, doesn't mean that like first of all, it doesn't mean you'd ever be able to get rid of feminism. And second of all, it doesn't mean that if you got rid of feminism, that the problem would be solved. Because people would still have memories. They would still remember that feminism existed once upon a time. And they might resent
that you took it away from them. Um and three, it just is the case that like nowadays women who act like feminists, that is, go to college, get a good job, demonstrate their, you know, their socioeconomic status within their own workforce history, they marry more. They have more kids. >> Um now, what happens after marriage can can vary. Um but uh >> Can I Can I stop you and ask Yeah. Do progressives also believe uh this story?
In other words, is is there is there a belief >> Progressives often believe that that that feminism is the reason for falling fertility. Yes. >> And so they might have ideological commitments that uh >> There's a worry that if fertility rises, it will be a threat to women's social position. Right? If women are all having three kids, how are they going to be able to succeed in the work- workforce? So, yes, there's there's there's
agreement among um badly informed midwits on all sides of the political spectrum that um that you simply cannot have a society where women are free and population is and fertility is at the rates that say that they want. Um so that that that's one problem. Is people see it as a stalking horse for rolling back women's Um and that's unfortunate. Um because I would say women having fewer kids The data doesn't support that is what
you're saying. No, it doesn't. No. Um look, on some extreme level like look, if you go like if you go like Taliban level of intense, yes, you can raise fertility. But like like the differences in gender politics that we observe in in industrialized liberal societies explain virtually no differences in fertility. Um so uh um uh so that's that's one set of concerns. The next set of concerns is is environmental. Um so there is a concern
that um if fertility's high, it'll be bad for the environment, it'll destroy the the world, blah blah blah. This is of course false as well. Um it's infuriatingly so. If you look at countries that cracked down hard on fertility 40, 50 years ago um places like China or India um uh their emissions growth their carbon emissions growth is not slower. Um fertility rates don't predict uh once you account for governance
quality that is like does this country have a functioning state? Um fertility rates, you know, don't even predict deforestation. They don't predict resource intensity. Um higher fertility just isn't a climate threat. The threat to climate is bad governance. Um slow technology adoption of new technologies, lack of substitution of fossil fuels, poor protection of of natural environments. Um and those are all population
independent. In fact, innovation and fuel substitution is arguably faster with faster population growth. That is to say, when population growth is faster, the economics of replacing a power plant pencil out more easily. Whereas when population growth is declining, um uh the the economics of new investments are less favorable, right? Because the future the future market for that base load power is smaller. You might as well
just keep the plant running for another decade. Um so uh population growth just isn't a serious environmental threat. The problem is the laws, not the people. Um but there are a lot of people who just have a hard time swallowing that. On this point, you know, in the West, we have socialized systems, socialized care systems for the elderly, which means, you know, if you expect to get a pension when you're older,
that only holds if the population is stable or increasing, right? And to some extent, which means, you know, if you're not having children, then people still need to come into the system to support it when you're older. And often the system is taking people low carbon, you know, places where they they don't have large environmental impacts, and you're dragging them into the West where our carbon budget is is
higher. So, you know, even at the individual level, I don't really buy the environmental story uh so so much. Um but uh Yeah, the same people who will tell you that um having babies is bad for the environment will then tell you that you should relocate a person from a country with a carbon footprint of, you know, um uh of 10% of an industrialized country, and then move them to an industrialized country where their carbon footprint
grows tenfold. Um right? That's what immigration does. It increases people's carbon footprint. Um and they'll say, "Well, we shouldn't have babies, we should have migration." You're like, "You're aware migration increases carbon footprints, right?" Yeah, and and then the same people also they spend their money somewhere, right? So that they then they go they they go and Yes. have multiple houses, they
travel. Yep. I know we have to get to the end of the conversation. We don't have many we don't have long. Yeah, we have we have to end the conversation soon. So let let me just ask what would an ideal set of policies look like? So if you were in charge of the government and your your single issue leader, you're just interested in fertility. What what what do you implement? What what are the policies that that really
work and which governments should implement? So I would set a child allowance that is calculated as a percentage of median income. I would set it that the annual child allowance per kid um should probably be about uh anywhere from 10 to 20% of the median income of a worker um in the society. I would go through the entire tax and benefit code and make sure that there are no marriage penalties and in fact
marriage tends to create bonuses for people that is that they're financially better off by getting married than staying single single. Um on housing I would eliminate minimum lot sizes. I would eliminate eliminate setback rules. Um and I would universally set a plus one story rule. That is that it is in every case legal to build one story higher than any of your neighbors. Um so no more no less. You can build one
story higher or you can build less, but it's always legal to build one story higher than your neighbors. So if your neighbor builds up one then you can build up one above him. Um >> So you ratchet. Yeah, so but it creates gentle density, right? It means like nobody's putting a skyscraper in a single-family neighborhood, but you know, you can do a little more. Universal I would allow universal ADUs. I would remove all
limits on lot sub- sub- subdivision. But wait a second, wouldn't that lead to smaller and smaller houses, which is sort of counter No, so what it mostly does is it leads to smaller lot sizes. Okay? So, you you shrink the yard for a similar house. I see. Okay? Um cuz people in in rich countries people want big houses. They're not People keep building like small houses and then people keep not buying them. They're
like, "Look at this tiny home." And I'm like, "How many units did you sell?" Um cuz people want bigger houses. We're We live in rich countries. People want bigger houses. Um Uh So, I mean there's a few people buying small houses, but house house people want bigger houses. Um and so if you allow them to build bigger houses by removing floor area ratio requirements and stuff like that, um you can you can
get a lot more houses. Um Uh I would also do things like um require sidewalks in every neighborhood. Um which really encourages developers to pack houses closer together because sidewalk maintenance is is is costly. Um I would also encourage shade rules, that is I would I would encourage narrower streets in residential areas and set um where climatologically possible, I would set um uh um Uh I would instead of green space rules,
I would set tree cover rules. Um where climatologically possible, though that's not possible in all of the US. Um Beyond that, um I would also look at pension systems. At a minimum, we could do care credits like I mentioned France used to do and like like a dozen countries do, where basically parents get credit for uh for time they were out of work caring for their own child. Um Alternatively, instead of doing care credits, you could
do explicit child rating of benefits. That is, you could say, "Look, half of your benefit is a base benefit the way we would normally calculate it based on your wages or whatever, and the other half will be calculated based on how much money your bio your, you know, legal children earned last year." So, if you have a lot of kids earning a little bit of money each, you would get a big benefit. If you have one kid
earning a lot of money, you'd get a benefit. If you have no kids, sorry. Now, this would be unfair in various ways because some people, you know, can't have kids through no fault of their own. So, you know, you could you could try and make some kind of offset for that, but ultimately, I think that uh rewarding parents in retirement for the work that they did raising kids, contributing to the long-term balance of pension plans, is
Um, uh you know, I I I could go on all day about various you know, I think one of the things we should be thinking about is a kids are always welcome policy. That is, if a business or an organization is going to say no kids allowed, um, they need to have that should be subject to strict scrutiny. That is, they should have a specific, compelling, safety-based reason for not allowing a child on their premises or at an
activity. Um, I think that this should even extend to recreational venues. Um, so, if you are a venue that gets rented for weddings, um, I think it's reasonable for a regulator to say, in the same way that it would be a violation of discrimination law for you to say a no blacks allowed wedding, um, you you you can't host a no children allowed wedding. uh so, I just think we need to consider children to be a class of people who
require discrimination protections. Um at the level of political systems, we should consider the fact that um that children go unrepresented um in our political process. So, I think lowering the voting age to zero is reasonable. And um so, once children are old enough to cast their own vote, they can. But beyond that, I think we should give children the same accommodations we give to disabled blind retirees. Children
should be able to vote by mail. They should be able to have an assistant help them vote. Um and if they are not cognitively uh able to express their vote, um a relative should be able to express their preference for them. We already allow this to be done for retirees. A lot of people are uncomfortable with it, but if we're going to allow these things for retirees, if you're going to allow someone to go into a retirement home,
get their 93-year-old parent, and you help them cast a mail-in vote, then I should be allowed to do it for my Um my 5-month-old >> is pretty young. Why not? Uh so, you so you but you what you're saying in this case My 5-month-old >> essentially you're making the vote. So, what what it's saying is you want parents to have a have more voting power. >> be able to vote. And I think age-based discrimination is
And I think that providing equal accommodation to everyone is reasonable. So, as long as voting is going to allow retirees to act like they still have a long-standing stake in society, I think my children who do have a long-standing stake in society should have their voice heard. Once they're able to make their own voice heard, they can make their own voice heard. But while they're not able I should be able to express their voice
for them. So, currently when we the we have sub-replacement uh fertility levels, you you you drive towards a population which is extremely old and they they are a voting block that's extraordinarily I would say that your proposal might make sense from the point of view of strengthening the votes of of uh >> It does. say parents. >> It does. That's exactly what I said. >> but let's be let's be honest though uh
a 5-month-old is is not making the vote, right? It it really will be the parent. You know, who can say? A 93-year-old with with dementia, are they making the vote or is their proxy making the vote? Who can say? All I'm saying is legal equality. Let me uh let me wrap up the conversation cuz I know you need to run. Um but I I I want to know so the policies that you want to implement, is this a is this a wave a magic wand and the
state has enough money to implement them or or you know, are these also practical solutions uh where where you're able to balance the budget and >> I mean, the pension thing has a zero-dollar cost, right? Giving care ultimately all the pension systems are going to run out of money anyway, which means we're really just going to be shuffling money around who gets it, right? So, all I'm really saying there
is just reallocate who gets the money, not increase the money. Um on uh marriage penalties, you can make that budget neutral. On letting on letting kids vote, that's budget neutral. On uh liberalizing housing, that's budget positive actually because allowing more housing to be built is actually good for property tax revenues. Um uh the only one that really has a big budgetary cost is like child allowances.
Um but uh I think it's worth doing and you could pay for it by raising taxes on old people, which is a totally reasonable thing to do. Well, I'm in stone. It's been a It's great talking to you.