What Happens To A Society That Stops Reproducing? - Lyman Stone

what is the story of fertility rates in America over the last few years uh they're going down uh as in every country essentially um so yeah I mean in 2007 the average woman had 2.1 kids per woman uh today it's closer to 1.6 so half a child missing per woman though uh it's always a weird thing to say which half of the child is missing um no really Bally that means every other woman um is missing a child that she would have had if birth rates were stable at 2007 approximate levels what happens if we go much further back what was happening with fertility rates in America in like the 1800s and the early 1900s so pretty much everywhere um it used to be that women had lots more babies um I say pretty much everywhere because there are exception cases um they're sort of unusual ones to Kagawa ER Japan had pretty low fertility there was low fertility in some parts of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries um but pretty much everywhere I mean the US had I think six children per woman um in uh 1800 um with the exception of like Massachusetts in Connecticut that were lower maybe around four um but um that number's kind of an optical illusion we say oh they had six children per woman but the first thing you have to keep in mind is most women didn't survive to the end of their reproductive years right so if life expectancy is 30 and we calculate a total fertility rate up to age 50 well half of women never even make it to the end of their reproductive years oh so that was a projected right not an actual number right well it might be true for the women who actually survive but a lot of women don't survive um I I don't know why I'm laughing that's not funny that's horrible um but it's a statistical problem right that the actual the actual number of of children born um per woman uh is going to be much lower because many of them are not going to survive long enough to have six kids and then secondly a lot of those children didn't survive um so surviving fertility per woman um in the US was was quite High still um probably you know 2.7 to to 4ish in that range depending on the place and the time um uh but in many Societies in Europe it was much lower uh in some places below two um because uh death rates for children and for women were so high that the average woman hitting puberty really could only couldn't expect to have um that many kids it's wild to think that you could get between 2 and a half and four with all of the hurdles that that you need to get over uh risk of uh mother dying during child birth risk of child not making it to maturity risk of mother just dying outside of child birth and still you get close to two and a half or four yeah it's uh um I mean humans have overcome extraordinary adversity um just uh before you uh before I got on this podcast I was writing about um uh the massive population oscillations in like the Yucatan Peninsula over the last several Millennia um and I mean the result is I mean literally the stories are embedded in our genes right like you've got subpopulations that they have meaningfully different genes related to how they digest certain foods um or how they interact with certain viruses and bacteria um because of horrible things that have happened um in their past um and the survivors come out of it fundamentally changed um and so we as a species um uh have um a variety of adaptations that that help us uh continue to have children despite all these things um the most important one is that we have very low variation in our reproductive systems that is to say pretty much any human can be fertile with almost any other human um is that common in other animals we have a lot of genetic variation um that we are still fertile across that in some animals um uh would be more challenging what do you mean be be can you be more specific uh yes so I mean in some species um you've got groups that are isolated for thousands of years and when you bring them back to other other um branches of the species they basically can no longer produce um fertile offspring whereas human populations that were separated for tens of thousands of years um uh when they get back together still make babies um what's going on is we have very so to speak harmonized reproductive systems um we have very low variation in genetically what's going on with reproduction we we pretty much all do it the same way um there's there's variation in some of our hormones and um and a lot of uh there's some variation in human body size but even then humans have le less variation in body size than most animals I mean if you look at um other species that have wide distributions they just have more variation than we do um so uh the the upshot of all this uh is um you can survive a lot more things uh if you're working with a very standardized or rather your genes can survive a lot more things if you're all working with a very standardized toolkit and whoever the survivors are uh they can they can make babies looking at the 1900s the must be some interesting oscillations and lessons in terms of fertility rate in terms of Desire number of children versus actualized etc etc as you have people dying different economic situations fast crashes and then rebounds and and uh sex ratio imbalances and stuff like that what are some of the lessons to take from the 1900s so definitely one of the lessons we've learned is uh when people um when people are less likely to die they are in less of a hurry to start having kids um and so they start later and furthermore when people believe more of their children are going to survive they have fewer children um which is to say people are implicitly targeting surviving fertility and that explains most of the fertility decline up through like 1950 around the world and even today a lot of the fertility decline in developing countries is essentially explained by assuming if you just assume that women are targeting or families are targeting a stable surviving number of children that explains most fertility decline uh it is the case that um uh surviving fertility rates are actually rising in some African countries for example even as overall fertility rates are declining um but in general surviving fertility is a lot more stable um particularly in that period where you're coming off like early 1900s and things like that um or today for for some African countries um but that doesn't explain what's happened in like industrialized countries over the last 40 50 years because almost all children Sur survive to puberty it's like you know 99 something per um in in our societies so there's not really any leverage there and yet fertility keeps falling so that's not going to be about uh child survival um uh we also know it's not about Rising standards of living um I have some articles about this coming the they might be out before this podcast so then people can look them up but um but essentially we can see what happens when people suddenly become a lot wealthier but without cultural change and we can see what happens when whole countries suddenly become much wealthier but without dramatic cultural change so like for countries we're often looking at like natural resource discoveries right like they find oil and suddenly they're no longer in destitute poverty they're like wildly wealthy for individuals we look at things like lottery winnings um or money transfers and we can see that when you make people richer uh they have they don't have fewer babies and in fact typically they have more babies um so what happens uh is not that societies became richer we know now that um fertility began to fall in many countries long before they were industrialized and in many earli indust early industrializing countries like the UK fertility did not fall for a very very long time and it didn't fall until other conditions were met so basically one of the key takeaways that we learn from particularly the last century um uh is that that um fertility decline is not about just becoming a high income Society we know a lot um about fertility enough now to know that uh that fertility declines largely in response in the long run to cultural factors um not to uh just becoming a wealthy Society there was an interesting study I saw you tweet I actually looked at it off the back of your Twitter about fertility rates from lottery winners and uh Swedish people when they win the lottery yeah we have several studies uh that leverage lottery winnings um the findings are not all in Perfect Harmony um as studies never are um but in general um when men win the lottery uh they definitely have more kids that's true across many different contexts um when women win the lottery there's a little bit more variety um but even then it does generally seem like um there's a there's a sort of a Pro-Am effect um in the Swedish case the it was one of the bigger gaps that is there was definitely a positive effect for men um and I forget if it was a neutral or slightly negative effect for I think women women women get divorced a little bit more likely yeah there was there was definitely a divorce effect I forget what the fertility effect was for women um I will say in Africa for example we have a collection studies recently that showed that when African women have higher incomes they have more children and we also know that from from studies of American women um and American men um so there's definitely some cultural contextualization there um but just in general I mean think about any product like if you have more money will you consume more hamburgers very likely um if you have more money will you consume more airplane tickets very likely most goods are kind of you know consumption of them is going to be approximately related to income so kids are not different in that regard if you give people more money it does tend to be the case that that they have a bit more yeah I think it's a interesting or difficult Circle for me to square with modern living standards at the moment compared with how they would have been in 1900 or in 1800 or whatever um the fact that people a lot of the time feel or say anecdotally I can't for to have a kid even though they're living in the richest Society in the world so and they feel like it's true yeah right they feel like they do not have the money to be able to raise a child how could I raise a child I can barely pay for myself I can't get on the property ladder and uh cost of living's going up as ever before and the cost of fuel and the cost of housing and the cost of groceries inflations through the roof and unemployment and all the rest of it um so that is genuinely how they feel yeah even if that isn't perhaps um accurate quantitatively when you compare it with our ancestors so where's that either estimation of the cost of having children or estimation of the cost of how much uh life is is going to come in as an expense what's going on here so one thing to keep in mind is what I said about mortality that when you actually look at surviving fertility rates um modern people have more kids than people in the past I mean human populations in the past were largely stable for a very long time now there was a lot of oscillation for hundreds of years at time but like there were long periods where for centuries humans had below replacement rate fertility okay in the past not below 2.1 they were having six kids but five of them were dying um so um uh for certain periods so it's important to keep in mind that like the the ancestral primordial human environment that sort of structures the hard where we're working within our brain um was an environment where human population was not growing um it was not a growth environment for human population um so um the 20th century saw massive human population growth that's unusual in human history um not quite not totally unique but it's not the the dominant experience rapid population growth is not the most common human experience and what that should tell us is that like three or more surviving children is not the usual Human Experience through most of human history um so right off the bat we just have to get out of our head that people in poor societies were having tons of kids right they were having tons of babies but rather few of them became kids okay um so we just have to keep in mind that like humans are targeting the number of children they're going to raise and so on that sense yeah actually the number of children people were raising did rise over the course of the 20th century as um particularly the the early 20th century AS Global income started to rise right and that's child mortality improved so we just I really want to dig you get things like the baby boom right like the baby boom there's this massive increase in standards of living with rapid technological innovation in the mid century that led to dramatic increases in wealth particularly housing wealth and that's both size of hous and quality of housing people were living in way better houses I mean you look at the things people lived in I don't mean rich people I mean like normal people like in the late 1800s and like compare that to what they were living in in you know 1948 and it's just seismic Improvement and they had way more kids um so just to like I say I've never heard of this before but it makes it makes complete sense are you saying that there is somewhere sort of internally inside of either men and women or just women men and women alike you are tarting surviving fertility so for example we know in modern and ancient societies if a kid dies the odds of having another kid rise okay demographers sort of maab in a maab way call this replacement fertility not replacement rate um mortality replacement fertility um so basically the idea is that humans are shooting for surviving family size we don't think about it much in our society because almost all of our kids live um but this was very very very present in the past and you see this in the past in societies where people had six or seven kids you routinely there's a problem in genealogical data you find a kid their name is JN they die when they're a month old the next kid also gets named John when he dies at two the next kid is also named John um they just keep reusing names because they're just shooting for a John you know why they want a JN because Dad's name is Jon and there needs to be a JN after the JN okay um so like name repetition is like a really strong indicator psychologically of what's going on here oh wow that's such an interesting way you've got this census data or whatever type of dat data you get tax record data all kinds of things you've got genealogical data going back along way and you've got four kids all named the same there's no way that you would name four kids that survived into adulthood the same name it would be absolutely this is yeah and again the names that get repeated are likely to be family names particularly right because you really want inheritor for the name um so that's the first thing to keep in mind okay is that it really is the case that like modern people are actually raising bigger families often than people of the past it's not they're bearing more children but they're raising more of them often the second thing that's going on is we have to distinguish between um standard of living and standard of living okay there's the standard of living in the sense of what you earn and like we have a better standard of living we are more productive we earn more we are richer and then there's the standard of living that is the standard that if you don't meet it you feel bad about your position in life okay so if you raise that first one you can think of it as like income level fertility doesn't tend to fall and it often Rises but if you raise that other one that is your expectations about what you should have or what a child should have have fertility tends to fall what's happening in modern society is yet income has gone up but particularly over the last you know 60 I would say especially the last 40 years expectations have also dramatically risen particularly in terms of what you'll provide to Children um there's a bit of an arbitrary example of this but I love it um if you look up the frequency of the word parenting in English language texts over time it's like nonex it's it it really is quite rare before like 1975 and if you look up like other substitute terms like child rearing and things like that they're also uncommon but after 1980 the share of English language texts and this is true in English English American English English Fiction it's true across all textual categories legal it's true in in in um uh legal cases like corpuses of of legal texts um frequency of parenting vocab just explodes in the 80s 90s and 2000s um we became way more preoccupied with parenting this this idea of parenting this notion of like all the things you have to provide your kids um now I think this actually arguably may have begun a bit earlier than the linguistic shift um but it is the case that there has never been an era as preoccupied with parenting strategies and the things you have to do to raise your children as a current one um we are what's that an indication of I think it's an indication um I think it's two things one it's just kind of it's just a cultural meme you know there are some societies that did human sacrifice there are some societies that tattoo their whole bodies and there are some societies that are obsessed with parenting um so on some level just societies just do things for reasons that are hard to explain um on the other hand I I do think there's a sense in which as children became rare um or as childbearing became rare and as it became as we all developed the expectation that all children survive to maturity it kind of raised the question of like so what should parents do like what are we supposed to do um and I think like the baby boomer generation the answer was like nothing like I mean we'll put you in a school put you in front of a TV when you need to be distracted but like parents didn't have to do much and a nice little indicator of this you look at like the share of mothers who breastfed their children it reaches like Rock Bottom lows in like the 40s okay 40s and 50s and then it's been rising since then so in like the 40s and 50s I think it's something like 25% of American moms were breastfeeding their children and the vast majority of kids were formula fed um and it's not that that's bad like full disclosure I'm a bought and paid for consultant for the formula industry like I'm not saying formula is bad but I think this testifies to people's views of like of parenting as an Endeavor right that in the middle of the century it was very outsourced right outsourc the feeding outsourc the education just trust whatever the school is offering for your kid I'm sure it's fine um whatever's on TV I'm sure it's fine just put the kid in front of the TV um well you know whatever's a church I'm sure it's fine they'll do religion parent doesn't need to handle religion that's Church's job Outsource everything right so you get this very outsourced model of parenting in the mid 20th century um as people just sort of assumed that like if you keep the kid alive everything's fine because that's the goal because they could remember a time when kids didn't all live right um and they could see that they were entering a period where if you really try you could keep your kid alive so that that they entered a period where it was really possible to keep almost all the kids alive and they hadn't thought about all the new difficulties that might create and I think the generation the baby boomer generation that grew up that way and then also the kind of the genx Generation Um kind of experienced this very hands-off parenting and it didn't actually go very well for them that is they saw that culture started intergenerational cultural transmission was breaking down right that gaps between between generations and social values attitudes and behaviors got much bigger um this is empirically true um that this did happen so we see um a much faster pace of social change that caused a lot of people to be like whoa whoa maybe we don't want to do that um and also you get things like Rising discourse about fatherlessness um single parents um you know obviously you get things with drug abuse whatever um what was the what was the birth rate during uh baby boomer generation it's a bit over three per woman I believe in the US maybe even almost four at one point I wonder whether just adding in uh another element here I wonder whether because living standards were Rising so much intergenerational competition Theory they were just so much further ahead so that discussion we had before about expectations versus reality living standards versus living expectations the kids are doing great we don't need to do any parenting like look how much farther ahead they are than us we went on holiday twice this year I didn't even get to go on holiday at all when my parents growing up because they were growing up during World War II yeah exactly so I mean that's exactly what's going on um is that that generation actually the metrics that they were used to measuring against were met okay um and then you get in the 80s you get the kids who came out of this looking around being like okay um that didn't actually go great like we we broke pieces of society we didn't mean to and also just feeling like their childhood maybe wasn't actually quite what they wanted it to be um or that they didn't have a close attachment to their parents or like like or also as the outsourc things got more and more expensive like wow it costs a lot to put your kid in child care all the time um and also what happened as a result of this is because children became in some sense less similar to the parent generation on average it meant that there was more heterogeneity in society like basically more diversity and I don't just mean like racial ethnic I just mean like more diversity in how you think you should fold your laundry okay like just like it's just more likely that like children and their parents or their grandparents just didn't share a view on you know what kind of yard maintenance you you should do um just these little things like within a family are a little bit irksome um and as a result you get a generation coming up that's more aware wow the world is really diverse I can't just trust that whatever's on TV is good right it might not replicate my values I can't just trust that whatever is in the schools is correct it might not replicate my values right and so you get the rise of parenting right the idea that like actually we have to protect our children from becoming abusers you're talking about uh parenting is kind of stepping into the natural flow of children just finding it out on their own right exactly you're stepping in you're saying okay I can't Outsource everything I have to do it I can't just put my kid in school I have to make sure they get a good education now initially that means choosing more carefully about Outsourcing okay I'm not just going to put my kid in whatever school I'm gonna make sure they get a good school I'm G to make sure they get good child care I'm gonna make sure they get you know good formula for them or whatever you know it's this quality idea but I think what we're seeing now is even more that branded parenting things like free range parenting helicopter parenting gentle parenting all these like types of parenting that people do okay um uh it um I think what's going on is as people realize how diverse Society actually is and how they really do want to see certain of their values replicated in their children they are looking for um parenting strategies that they never learned as a child right because they just kind of were put in child care and that was it um uh they're looking for strategies to replicate their values in the Next Generation and the result is that they have a very costly vision of parenting right their vision of parenting involves doing all these things exactly right these strategies these disciplinary modes like whatever it is it's like a very long to-do list how to be a good parent okay so I think basically what's going on here is um yes Rising expectations of what your kid is going to have and then also as Society became more heterogenous in in various ways um more and more parents realize oh to make sure to get what I want out of raising a child that is Raising someone who's like me in certain valuable ways I have to do a lot of effort so cost as yes so that therefore means even if living standards are higher even if real world money is more available even if all of the things that economists look at and say why is it the people think that having children is so much more expensive they were poorer in the past and they had more children there is this degree of investment this sort of expectation investment expectation going back to um what you said before to do with this like pivoting in in uh living standards it was a fascinating study about Ubi that just came out recently what for the people that didn't get to see that can you just give a a 30,000 foot view yeah there's um there's a growing interest in Universal basic income basically just giving people a monthly check for nothing um and some of the big donors interested in it um put some money into a pilot project okay basically they got a bunch of people gave them bucks a month and survey and kind of did collected follow-up data on them and what they found is um for every dollar you gave them um their earnings declined I think it was like 25 cents so to speak um their spending Rose like 30 or 40 cents um 45 cents maybe and it Rose kind of across categories it wasn't like it all went to one thing it Rose it Rose in like necessaries like food and it also Rose in like luxury categories like vacations actually the biggest growth was in gifts people gave more gifts to other people um when they had a Ubi um and all the Ubi recipients by the way were poor they were all low income to begin with um so there was if you think about it for every dollar you give there was a reduction in income an increase in spending but not enough to count for that whole dollar so you would expect that net worth should have gone up like people should have had more savings then by you know 25 cents per dollar 20 cents per dollar in fact uh their net worth declined by about six cents per uh um uh you can think of this like by by six cents per dollar kind of net worth is a little more complicated because not it's a stock not a flow um so for every you know $1,000 of monthly income they they ended up with about 60 bucks less of net worth at the end um so there's two problems here one is just like that seems bad we got success we got people to work less spend more and also like not have any wealth building despite higher income so that's unfortunate but two it really raised a question about even The credibility of some of these results right because you add up you know 25 cents less of earnings 40 cents more of income a bit less of net worth and there's a huge resid there's like a 35 Cent residual of like where did that money go like did they just like did they just light it on fire like did they buy something they didn't want to report like something illegal um did they cut their work by more than they reported did they increase spending on some other category more um so it not only s uh and they also found like there there was not a big Improvement in housing conditions um there was not um there really were not improvements in in there were not big improvements in in almost any category uh that would that would be some like obviously if you give people one they'll spend more that's not an improvement that's just like a thing that happens um so um uh we didn't see improvements in we didn't see big improvements in like objective things that we might all agree are a good thing um and so that should really concern us about Ubi um that it that it's probably not going to um result in great Liberation for people um it might just result in like more gambling well a place that people might go to is they might say well you know you that's right perhaps they haven't got that much to show for it financially at the end of the day but what happened with regards to an alleviation of stress and they also looked at that as well the cash transfer resulted in large but short-lived improvements in stress and food security greater use of hospital and emergency department care and increased medical spending of about $20 per month in the treatment relative to the control group suggested that the use of other office-based care Dental Care blah blah blah however we found no effect of to transfer across several measures of physical health as captured by multiple well validated survey measures and biomarkers we drive from blood drawers can rule out even very small improvements in physical health and the effect that would be implied by cross-sectional correlation between income and health Li well outside of our confidence inter so people weren't happier they weren't less stressed they didn't have uh improvements again on any of these measures that are like things we would all universally want like if we found a Trans for that just made everyone happier and healthier it'd be like great cool like on these measures that are like clearly like good outcomes yeah they found nothing it did it didn't help people at all there's there was another study a different study that looked specifically at home that gave a Ubi specifically to homeless people and the goal was we will give them thousand bucks a month to find housing and they found in the long run there was no across I think it was threee followup after three years years there was no difference in the homelessness rate of people who got like 0 or $1,000 a month um simple reality was that giving homeless people money did absolutely nothing to get them in house and a lot of Mone a thousand bucks a month you can pay rent for that for one person is that not something to do with the culture or the lifestyle or the substance dependency that these people have kind of being a lingering overhead that doesn't allow them to get the exit velocity to get out of the bottom of homelessness yeah there's it would be easy to look at these Ubi studies and say what these tell us is that nothing helps the the poor are permanently poor that is in fact not what they show because we actually have a lot of interventions we do know work focused substance AB substance abuse interventions like getting people in rehab getting them support stuff like that um does cause people to be less poor uh high quality therapeutic interventions like based on cognitive behavior therapy um not lowquality random talk therapy things but like high quality therapeutic interventions can actually boost people's like long run income and health um certain religious interventions are actually known to boost longrun income and health um there are a lot of things that we can do that do lift people out of poverty I mean education obviously um handing them cash turns out not to be one just it just isn't um so yeah it is the case that like if you are a donor and you have like $20 million that you want to spend on helping poor people in the US let's say you would be way better off investing that in like focused substance abuse treatments okay um than a Ubi okay giving cash doesn't do a thing for longer outcomes it actually briefly it does right A change in income is a better predictor of happiness than absolute income like eventually everything normalizes until you dis dise equilibri it again yeah so but I mean the point is like if you actually want to alleviate poverty not just for the next six months but you know actually lift people out of poverty like Ubi is just not the way to do it it just isn't and at this point we have Decades of experiments and pilot studies and all these things looking at this we know that this doesn't work for long-term poverty alleviation now there are things that are somewhat similar to ubii that do work so conditional cash transfers um so for example uh child allowances sometimes um when people really want to argue against child allowances they will sometimes call them uis they are not ubis not everybody gets them you don't get them for forever you get them conditional on something that is having custody of a child and it's important to mention having custody okay like people who are the genetic parent of a child but not actually like in the same tax unit as them don't get a child allowance right um so when we give people a child allowance that rewards them for actually raising their child co- residentially that's good okay it generates slightly more children and it generates slightly less divorce and it generates um slightly more uh spousal or um uh co-residents of Partners um we know this we have Decades of studies showing this so Ubi where you give people money for nothing not a good policy conditional transfers where you give people money for something can be a decent policy depending on what outcome you're targeting and um and what trying to do um it's still expensive but um it's important to distinguish between Ubi which now I think we really should be able to put this to bed that it's not a good idea um and conditional cash transfers which um May in fact be very worthwhile so when we get back to the fertility rates and where we're at at the moment what are people saying modern people right now about the number of kids that they do or don't want and their reasons for wanting or not wanting children um in surveys like in the US for example uh people report that their ideal number of children is uh 2.3 If instead of Ideal you ask them to rate how happy they would be with different family outcomes like 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 whatever ever people's sort of weighted sort of weighted average happiness tends to be about uh 2.3 if you ask people what the ideal family size for a family is their average tends to be 2.3 um any way you ask that's getting it desires wants ideals for the US it's 2.3 um um if you ask about intentions how many kids you intend to have that's a very different question that's not asking what people want it's asking okay down to Brass tax thinking about your life as it really is how it's almost like asking people how many kids do you think you can afford to have okay all of us would recognize how many kids can you afford to have is not the same thing as how many kids do you want okay but how many kids do you intend to have depending on the population subgroup and the exact survey and all it ranges from like 1.85 to 2.1 in the US actual fertility in the US is 1.6 so people are way short they're about s kits short of what they want and they are about 02 to point4 kids2 to 0.5 kids short of even what they think they're really realistically going to have they are they are um they're not even meet meeting what they think of as like their realistic goals and just presumably the number of when you look at actual fertility rates that's people who've had kids so far when you ask people what they intend to that's future focused and given do it different ways yeah but given given that we're on a decline in terms of fertility we can assume that the number of actual children is going to continue to move away from that number of intended children so I I get that but that Pew research that came out recently like 10 percentage Point increase in the number of people under 50 saying that they didn't want to have kids 37% to 47% between 2018 and 2023 what what do you make of that that's nearly 50% of people under the age of 50 saying that they don't want to have kids unlikely to ever have kids so the actual prevalence of young people who say they don't want to have kids was 20 something percent um the 50-some was like the share of the share of childless young people who say the reason for being childless is because they just don't want kids so you say Okay among childless people what share just don't want kids the actual share who say they don't want kids is like maybe 20ish 20 25% um that sounds High um it's similar what I find in my surveys that say we do inhabit a society where the average person wants 2.3 kids and also where you know 15 to 25% of people say they want zero kids um we are inhabiting a society of increasingly polarized desires where there's people more and more clustering at zero and at you know three or four um not a lot of people saying like six um so um yeah it it is what it is um long run for fertility um you know you can have a society where everybody has two you can have a society where half the people have zero and half the people have four they both have a fertility rate of two on average um so what we're seeing is yeah there is some rise in intended childlessness um it's largely offset by Rising desires for big families um on average desires haven't changed a lot um and what we can see is that the fertility decline we've had over the last 15 years um it's bigger for un unintended births that is unintended births have fallen um like I think it's like 40% what's unintended births births people were not trying to have so like they were not planning to have a kid and they did um whereas intended births have fallen like I think a bit less than 20% um so yeah there's been a bigger decline in unintended births meaning that um uh meaning you can think of that as like uh you know people avoiding having kids that they didn't want to have that would be consistent with the idea that there's more people wanting to avoid have kids and successfully avoiding um but we've also seen a decline in intended births that is people who do intend to have kids but are having fewer of them um so I don't worry too much about like a growing share that say they want zero um because okay that's fine you can want zero other people want four other people want two on average it doesn't seem to be changing a whole lot you seem uh surprisingly uh positive or at least non- apocalyptic uh given most of the demographers and the people sort of in this world that I'm speaking to have this like cataclysmic uh perspective it doesn't seem to the alarm Bells don't seem to be going off quite as aggressively or maybe you're just holding it together well you know um falling fertility is a very serious problem it is uh it's a problem to me my view the biggest problem of falling fertility is I want people to have the lives they want to have I want to live in a free Society where people are free to achieve reasonable normal and acceptable life goals two kids that's a totally reasonable life goal people should be able to achieve that if they can't achieve it that's a serious problem in society in my view it also happens that low fertility has really bad economic effects in the long run has bad political effects um it has all sorts of bad effects in the long run those are less of a concern to me um because first of all I think it's kind of gross to use babies as like your instrumental solution to GDP like have a baby for the GDP is like not a great pitch or like have a baby so we can recruit them into the army like not a great pitch um um so to me the biggest issue is just people not getting what they want um so if people genuinely want zero like that's not my problem I don't want zero I want five so I want to be able to hit five I want Society to not put obstacles in front of that because we are below desires on average I'm very very strongly in support of pronatal policy I think we should be doing a lot more to help families hit their goals um and offset some of that standard of living issue but and this is what I think is really important you're right there are a lot of people who like me are PR natalists that is they want to see more kids born and they do adopt this really apocalyptic tone it's a fertility crisis demographic winter um Koreans are going extinct and I think that that that tone is just a massive mistake um the best predictor of people not wanting kids is depression and anxiety okay if you want to know if someone wants to have kids ask them to rate 1 to 10 how happy they are the number they give you is going to be wildly correlated with the number of kids they want to have the strongest predictors of low birth rates at the individual level are fertility preferences and measures of mental health people who are depressed anxious uncertain sad worried about the future they don't have kids why because the reason you have kids is to raise them and watch them become fruitful adults and if you think that the future is scary and bad and awful then you're not anticipating the joy of children you're anticipating watching your children suffer in a bad World okay so my view is that if you actually want people to have kids shut up about a crisis okay the only way to get more kids is to convince people that the future isn't awful that the the birth rate decline is Downstream from a mental health crisis it's definitely related to it so I mean yeah this is you know there's there's these like broad structural things about like the standard of living people expect the standard of care they expect for kids all these things but there is also very concretely yes A Mental Health crisis um I mean pick your condition I mean depression anxiety um autism schizophrenia I mean these are very different conditions um or just like survey reports of sadness survey reports of uncertainty um survey reports of beliefs about if the future is going to get better or worse um negative AFF effect across all of these indicators is associated with lower fertility preferences and lower fertility behaviors um so so like categorically my concern is that some very well-intentioned people talk a lot about the fertility crisis and they are sabotaging efforts to address the problem of low fertility and the problem of people's fertility not meeting what they want because by talking Crisis crisis Crisis crisis we're telling people look if if there aren't more babies the the future will be very bad okay but think about what that says somebody says okay so then I shouldn't have a baby you should bring your children into this world that's reliably think and also there's no way I can guarantee other people will have babies I can't change the social fertility rate I can only change my own fertility rate so if I see that other people aren't having babies I'm not GNA have babies because a world of low fertility is a world of bad outcomes and I don't want to bring my baby it's like it's this like vicious cycle where like because people are so convinced that like of dumer ism they don't have kids and then the pronatal people come out and tell even more doery stories when what we should say is like look if you individually have kids like desired children this isn't as true for like unintended children okay but people who want kids when they have kids is associated with very positive outcomes they have higher happiness in the short run they have higher happiness in the long run 10 years out they're happier than otherwise similar people who want to to kids and didn't have them people who want kids and don't have them have higher rates of prescription of anticho anti-anxiety anti-depressants um they are more likely to have adverse quite adverse mental health outcomes um people who want kids and have them um report just a whole range of better life outcomes and people who want kids and don't have them report considerably worse subjective well-being in the long run now for people who don't want kids it's thing okay not I'm not you know I'm not trying to bully anybody to having kids they don't want to have um but there are so many people that want kids and they're not having them because they're worried about this that and the other and we just need to say look first of all the we know in longitudinal surveys that when people have kids they increase the number of kids they think is ideal so think about what that says once you have the experience of having kids you decide you want more of them on average okay so like my my encouragement to people is like kids are going to be way more fun than you think like they're going to be way more interesting than you think they're going to be full of way more value than you think um and once you have them you're way more likely to be like I'd kind of like to have more of these than being like dang I would have preferred fewer that latter response it does happen people do say that in surveys there are people who say you know I love my kids but if I had it to do over you know I might have one less there are people who say that it's not it's not never I'm not going to say that never happens it does but on average people who say you know what I had these kids and wow yeah I'm totally raising my number now way more numerous have you had a look at retrospective regret of childless people what is there to learn from that how common is it so actually the the survey you mentioned has some surveys on has some stuff about this they didn't ask it exactly um but yeah I mean childless people um do report various difficulties arising arising from childlessness um crucially the Pew survey asked young people do you expect such and such a thing to be a a challenge with childlessness and then they asked older childless people was such and such thing a challenge and they found it across numerous categories the challenges were more common than the young people expected what what sort of challenges um you know feeling disconnected from the Next Generation feeling like you lost friends because you didn't keep up you didn't have kids um feeling like um you were lonely feeling like um uh I forget the list they had they had a bunch they had a bunch of these different things um and across the vast majority of them current people who don't want kids were underestimating just how big the difficulties challenges and regrets can be that doesn't mean that childless people all regretted it many of them didn't um but um but it is the case that young people are greatly overestimating the uh the benefits of childlessness so to speak um or the costs of having children um or maybe they're underestimating the benefits of having children however you want to put it um it is the case that when people get to retirement it's not that free solo life is just not going to be as good as they think it is what is the relationship that you see between marriage rates desire to get married mating crisis uh desire to get into a relationship and desire for children and and and stuff does does this piece together in a nice neat fashion does it make a cohesive narrative or is it individual things going on so fertility of married people has not declined nearly as much as the fertility of unmarried people um and crucially the main thing that's happening in fertility is just that people are not getting married as much okay they're getting married later or not at all but are people not getting married because they don't want kids before they get into a relationship um no cuz we know that desire for children is approximately stable right so we know that we know desire for children is approximately stable we also know desire for marriage is approximately stable about 90% of people say they want to get married um most of them in their mid to late 20s that's the typical age which is a bit younger than actual marriage ages right now um so um uh we know that that's what people want and yet marriage ages are rising and Rising and a growing share of people will never marry so we're actually seeing a shortfall in marriage versus desires okay people who get married their fertility rates are not declining that much um not declining as much and if everyone got married at the same rates they did in 2007 fertility would not have declined nearly as much most of the decline is just because of less marriage okay so yeah a mating problem is a huge part of the story um uh and there are so many reasons people are not marrying as much as they used to um I mean the one of the biggest ones is just an economic change um uh it is the case that if you look at like data from dating apps women swipe on men's incomes at the same rate that men swipe on women's conventional physical attractiveness um I'm not sure you can say that says something bad about us as a species if you like um it's facts um it hasn't changed in you know 2,000 years um actually let me take that back it hasn't changed in 600,000 years um so uh status will always men's status has always been fertility correlated it's just always has been it's always been the case there's virtually no exceptions um that high status men High in come men in money societies have more kids than low status men um that being the case you have to ask what not what has happened to men's income generally you have to ask what happened to men's income at the marriage ages that if you get married in those ages it's easy to have two or three kids so that's going to be marriages in your 20s if you're not married in your 20s odds of getting to two and especially three kids decline um so what has happened to the income of men in their 20s in the US at least it has actually declined um over the last 20 years 30 years um men in their 20s are actually getting poorer in inflation adjusted terms um this is not true for men generally this is not true for older men this is not true for the population generally people are getting richer incomes are going up but for men in their 20s and that's the group for for whom income is sort of setting the bar for marriage because I'm assuming that women in their 20s are like not getting less attractive or something okay um uh and again these are not the only things that that like guide marriage obviously what really guides individual marriages like love and like shared values and shared life orientation but funny enough uh people tend to fall in love with people who are within a certain socioeconomic band of their expectations and within a certain range of um of [Music] um it sounds so callous to say but like physical attractiveness um uh yes individually people marry for love collectively humans uh don't they marry for other things um so um uh it is the case that men's marriageability in the key marriage ages for supporting fertility has declined really really sharply um that is their incomes have fallen particularly compared to women um that being the case there's less marriage and in fact marriage rates and particularly fertility rates have declined at exactly the ages where men's incomes are declining so early and mid 20s and at the ages where men's income is rising in the 30s and 40s fertility rates have actually risen um there actually has been an increase in fertility at those ages not enough to offset the decline at earlier ages but a little bit um so basically what's going on with the marriage Market on a deep level is that um young men are poor um they cannot support a family um particularly a family whose consumption expectations are set by um by like the joint incomes of two single people with no kids um so if you spend your whole 20s setting your consumption expectations based on zero care responsibilities your parents are still young enough that you're not having to take care of them in old age you don't have kids you don't have a you know a spouse or something like that and then you come into marriage and that's how your consumption expectations have been set well it's really hard to have kids you mentioned before about this decline in unintended kids I know that you've looked recently and I've been doing quite a bit of research into this too about the attitudes toward contraception in the US I think if I was to put a couple of bets on a roulette table for upcoming Public Health fur rals uh things that people are going to be really really concerned about I think we're already sort of starting to see a lot of women talk about the psychological uh challenges that come from hormonal birth control phys physiological changes things that you can lock in for the rest of your life if you take it during uh puberty and and and periods where the brain is in development I also think microplastics in water I think toxic uh environments molds Etc is also going to be another one um but it it's surprising to me that it seems to be this it seems to be two things at the same time it seems to be both a very Pro contraception and a very anti-contraception culture I don't know whether that's just two different cohorts and I get to like hear the most vicious of one and the most vicious of the other but do you know what I mean there's this sort of super position I'm in yeah everything natural except reproduction right that's that's the vibe right all natural except reproduction um so uh I think that's a real thing um on the fertility front um you know you sometimes hear things about falling sperm counts or falling testosterone counts um this is basically fake um sperm counts are not falling in scientifically studied cohorts um and anyways the actual effect of the kinds of variation in sperm counts we observe the implication would just be you need to have sex for an extra two or three months to have a child not that you would become infertile um testosterone changes are a bit more complicated because there's just measurement of testosterone is extremely problematic um it problematic since like it's very difficult and it changes over the course of the day and it changes in different parts different types of tissue samples U or cell samples um but either either the way either way these kinds of things don't appear to be affecting fertility um microplastics there's some BPA there are some Plastics that could impact fundability um so far a couple Studies have gone looking and have not found anything um or at least not anything significant um but could be I mean these things last a long time so it could be that takes us a few generations for them to build up in sufficient levels to do damage um uh in general and then on contraception um the best evidence suggests that hormonal contraception can increase time to pregnancy after cessation um by a few months that is it can take a few months longer to become pregnant um and for some methods it can be a lot longer I think long acting reverse contraceptions like implants can increase time to conception by by quite a few months um uh there doesn't appear to be long-term identifiable damage to fundability the problem with all these studies is that people who choose to use more intense contraception are also people who want fewer children so even when they go off contraception they have fewer children because the reason they were using contraception is because they're people who want fewer children have you have you have you found any research looking at how uh women's desire for children desired number of children intended children changes when they're on or off birth control I haven't I know that there's some stuff that's I don't know the state of the research on this but I've seen headlines saying that like when women are on certain forms of hormonal birth control that like the type of like body type that they will swipe on on dating apps is different or something um I don't know how credible that is in general um I'm skeptical of most of these types of findings for a variety of reasons one um we have really good controlled studies that look at time to pregnancy um and we can see that for couples who are not using contraception of a given age and actively trying to conceive time to pregnancy hasn't changed in decades um as far back as we can study it just isn't the case the time to pregnancy has changed people's ability to conceive hasn't changed a bit um uh so um and time to life birth hasn't either that is implied miscarriage rate has not has not changed um so um that tells me that whatever is going on under the surface it's it's not dramatically altering fertility it could there could be things on mate selection I would totally believe that the rise in but honestly contraception wouldn't be the main thing I'd point to I would point to the rise of like ssris um and other um um you know anti-depressants anti anti- anti-anxiety antis psychotics um they more directly impact the brain the share of the population or I mean frankly also just drugs um like pot and opioids like there are so many other substances that would be like my go-to on like if something is messing with mate preferences what could it be maybe the really like quite powerful drugs that are designed to alter your neurochemistry um let's not say those things are bad like I don't know if anyone's ever studied what they do to make preference um they do alter libido obviously um but I don't know what they do to mate preference and things like that or views of commitment um uh and also like I I said earlier that like depression is itself um sort of anti-natal um so like you could find that like anti-depressants are anti-natal but they're less anti-natal than the depression oh my God that's so funny right so like you could get these kinds of really interesting challenges um yeah and so I just um in general my view is like we live in a chemical soup we just do we always have um in ancient times they weren't chemical soup it was just that humans were so hungry they were just I mean you look at old cookbooks and they were eating stuff that today you know 20% of the population is allergic to and it smells like death and like it's awful but they were eating it like twice a month or like uh I mean you look at the it's there's something called the Eastern agricultural complex which is um pre corn agriculture among um Native American tribes in the eastern US um and like you can look it up there's like all these crops that you're like what is this crop and I kept telling my wife like I really wish I really wish there was like a restaurant that would like like a hipster restaurant that would like use only pre-columbia crops and animals like have a whole menu on it I was like this would be a cool idea and then I looked up the crops and I was like okay so like this one has like an aroma that can be smelled down the street when it's cooked like this one has great proteins it's like better than kenoa also like everybody's allergic to it like so many people are allergic to it um like they're they're awful plants like like there's a reason that as soon as Native Americans got corn they were like yeah I want corn Corn's amazing um so like one of the things we don't talk about with like the great diversity of crops that people used to eat is that like so many of them were really bad and like bad for you and unpleasant or maybe they were good for you but they were unpleasant or they were pleasant but they're bad for you um that's not to say declining crop diversity isn't a bad thing it is like we should preserve rare varietals but that stink the street out though yeah yeah yeah exactly like I would be okay if dur do you know about duri are you familiar with durian yes yeah that stinky fruit yeah I'd be okay if it went extinct like I know like all of Asia cries out in horror at what I just said but like that one I wouldn't mourn um but uh but by and large um like humans have always been putting just weird stuff into their bodies um uh and so I think we are less fragile than we think we are and we talked at the beginning about how humans lived in environments where so many people were dying and yet they still carried on and I think less fragile than we think we are um and to be honest this is actually part of what I think is part of the cultural change we need to promote fertility is like kids are not as fragile as you think they are that standard you think they have to have they might not need that standard they might be tougher than you think they are they might can just be okay playing outside some um you might not need to intensively do every little thing um and beyond that you are less fragile Than You Think You Are children are not going to break you you're going to be okay some people won't be most people will be like you are gonna be okay um you are less fragile than you think you are you can do it you can raise kids you can parent you will pull it off does political polarization play a role here you know we recently came out of the DNC where they were offering free vasectomies and abortions outside I think uh but you know what about the role of yeah polarization in political uh beliefs parents wanting their kids to date somebody from within their own political class the increasing importance of politics in mate selection and in people's lives than perhaps it used to previously um yeah so politics plays a role in a couple ways one um political cultures are sets of ideas and values and memes and norms and behaviors and social ties um the fact that one side of politics in the US at least um has adopted particularly anti-natal social values um that is uh I mean if you you a great example of this is like the the average fertility rate of Republican elected officials at the federal level is something like 2.6 kids and the average fertility rate of democratic ones is like 1.4 um uh so like there's like microcosm right there right um uh interestingly that means that Democrats are closer to the societal average um so Republicans are the weirdos um but they're like the weirdos continuing Humanity um but um so I do think this is unfortunate that we kind of have this perpetuating political culture on one side that promotes Norms of of anxiety fear and uncertainty about children um and presents children as burdens primarily um that's not say Republicans are innocent there's a lot of ideas and values on the Republican side that I think are anti-natal in a little bit more of an oblique way um particularly Norms around work for Republicans everything is about jobs like if it makes jobs it's good but I'm like if you employed a mom earning minimum wage like in her alternative was staying home with kids or a dad it could be a dad as well though in practice statistically it's usually usually mom um like and she has two kids it's probably more socially valuable for her to like invest in her kids than flip Burgers so like I'm actually not interested in creating make workor jobs um just to pull people away from their families because I want to buff labor force participation like I that's just not what I value um in general just the super work Focus that Republicans tend to have um I think is a cultural mistake um work is rivalis with family um on some level um so um at the same time I do think it's worth remembering that political culture comes from somewhere right um we know that uh depression is not equally distributed across the parties um we know that um certain types of fears about the future are not equally distributed across parties um and as a result I don't know how much we can blame partisanship for what might actually be a difference in religiosity or um Family background or uh mental health or a million other variables right is partisanship causing this or is partisanship just reflecting that this is the kind of divided Society we live in wow yeah I mean increasingly fewer people are are disbelieving about the heritability of sort of psychological dispositions whether that be introversion or extroversion or conscientiousness or willpower or [ __ ] hunger or political ideology some things that are more complex which are an entire sort of Suite of dispositions that all come together but this is the every time that I see it every single time that I see an anti-natalist movement that intends on continuing it blows my mind it's like what you this is mating seppuku do you know how things work I just it dude the the thing outside of the DNC for the I'm just going to make this plan for the people that haven't seen the previous episodes your political affiliation is heritable that means that if you are a card carrying died in the wool Democrat it is more likely that your children will be Democrats as well because there is a particular Suite of traits personality types and dispositions that have led you toward that you can take personality tests for both Republicans and for Democrats left leaning right leaning labor conservative whatever it is and people will Veer in that kind of a direction given that your children are made up of the raw genetic material that you're about to give to them if you are someone who wants your particular political ideology to keep moving forward and you do not have children that is you basically seeding ground to decide that decides to have children and and it just every single time that I see this I'm like I is it do they not know that this is the case are they do they know and not care are they so short shortterm minded that they think yeah but we're going to you know buff kamala's votes by 0.1% in in a key Battleground state by doing the vasectomy outside of the DN SE truck I don't know I think there's a couple things going on one is they're they're betting on the power of conversion right um uh because most people um you think about the dynamic here because more socially conservative people have more children um a disproportionate share of children are raised in conservative environments and yet we end up with relatively even politics how because conversion favors Dem Democrats okay um so the Democratic party is disproportionately made up of converts so to speak people raised Republican and became Democrat um and as a result it's going to be people who selectively believe in the cultural power of conversion right um and I would say they're not actually entirely wrong so I've done a fair amount of writing about this recently that um heritability of fertility turns out to be very complicated um it's true if you have a norm that uh leads to zero fertility okay that weeds itself out relatively quickly um unless it has a reason for people to select it for Fitness in the time being right so if there's a norm that um you know gives you zero fertility but also it just hacks the part of your brain that handles dopamine you'll choose it every time and eventually the species will just go extinct like species can just go extinct like it's not inevitable that like fertility is 2.1 we could just stop having babies and go extinct um and there are pieces of your brain that can be hacked through you know drugs through medicine through um you know congenital defects through whatever like yes dopamine receptors can get fried um people can become addicted to things that kill them um people can it is possible uh that we could just stop breeding there's no reason that fertility has to return to two and I've actually run a lot of simulation models on this that like let's say you have like the Amish okay are the Amish ever going to become a majority of the population the answer is absolutely not they never will um if all you do is you take actual real world Amish fertility over the last 50 years and Trend it forward and use real world rates of conversion in and out of the Amish you find that the Amish are going to Peak at a maximum a maximum of like 7% of American population and they're never actually going to get there um the simple reality is conversion is really powerful and assimilation is really powerful there is not um for simple monogenetic traits that do that have certain types of Fitness profiles um genetic drift can be really powerful but most traits aren't like that particularly if they're polygenic for example politics I mean height is quite heritable okay like Height's very heritable like it's like 80% heritability um and some behavioral traits are quite heritable um there's debate about schizophrenia but it appears to be relatively heritable okay um and it has behavioral implications and stuff like that so social values as a family set which includes both politics and religion is like one of the least heritable trait sets that we know of um along with reproduction ironically um uh I mean religion is high is actually highly environmental environmentally sensitive right the reason kids born in Saudi Arabia become Muslim is not because they have a Muslim Gene right it's because they're in a context that encourages Islam okay um and we know this because kids get a adopted across countries and they're astronomically more likely to end up in their adoptive parents religion than their birth countries religion like Korean kids adopted in America don't become Buddhist by and large they become like you know Presbyterian although there's a lot of Korean Presbyterians too um so um in general social values they they do have a her I'm not g to say they don't have a heritable component they absolutely do depending on kind of how you define heredity because that's complicated and um and what social value talking about ranges from like 3% heritable to like 40% heritable that's kind of the range you're talking about there aren't a lot of social values that are over 40% heritable um or is there's a lot of physical traits that are considerably over 40% heritable and then you get like traits that are kind of like like a a medley of the two so you think about things like sexuality the super controversial one intelligence um there's huge debates about heritability of these sexuality is highly non-heritable for example there's some genes that do relate to it um but probably through Gene environment interactions not directly Gene um the upshot of all this I'm kind of Meandering the upshot of all of this is that like conservative fertility Advantage does Drive some electoral Advantage but way less than you would think way less than you would think from just like a naive sort of breeders equation type of population genetic model um it really is the case that um the heritability rates are sufficiently low and conversion rat sufficiently high that they're um that conservatives don't get nearly as much electoral bang as you would expect from their fertility buck and their fertility Buck is large it's a very large fertility gap between Republicans and Democrats and in a pure hereditarian environment like this would be the last generation of Democrats to have an electoral shot yeah but we all know that's not what's going to happen we all know that politics are going to remain highly competitive for and Democrats have the same thing where they're like look at how conservative young people are or look how liberal young people are this is the last time conservatives will have a shot and yet here we are they think that every generation and it's still the case that politics are competitive on the same issues that they always have been so um I would strongly caution against trusting to fertility to give your cultural group uh a long-term majority you really do need to persuade other people you meaning that you can't shag your way out of some ideological culdesac probably not you you actually need to make persuasive arguments so so you know I think you know vasectomized into the DNC whatever its net social benefits or costs uh probably doesn't have a huge effect on Long Run political equilibriums okay um what are your predictions for the the sort of future of Western fertility rates and stuff at the moment like down just it's going to continue I mean does it bottom out it has to presumably at some point it's going to be carried by certain small subgroups that would maintain a higher it could bottom out at zero um like I mean if you think like let's let's imagine okay let's just do like Doomsday scenario and it turns out that like microplastics totally sterilize people okay microplastics are also totally inescapable they're like literally in the air okay like unless you are wearing like a hazmat suit you are getting microplastics in considerable volumes um so if microplastics cause sterility then Western fertility will bottom out at zero okay um on the other hand um if low fertility is caused by if falling fertility is being caused primarily by um um I don't know pick your pick your pet Theory um if it's caused by like um uh particular parenting Norms parenting Norms are something that probably could weed out fairly quickly in just a few Generations okay they're going to be highly volatile they're not we know that they can be broken across Generations because that's what has happened recently um and we know that people with parenting specifically parenting Norms that encourage more children that seems of values that seems more likely to have high heritability like. three or something than low like 0.1 okay so like if parenting Norms are what's driving low fertility then maybe in 150 years we're like back up to two people's expectations about the amount of in yeah and people who are raised in like lower expectation environments will will will be will make up a larger share of the generation and I don't think there's a compelling reason to think that like super high expectations parenting is necessarily always can to be super persuasive as a conversion Prospect um so um uh on the other hand you can get things like if it's really just that like young men's incomes are crack that's not likely to go away because skills bias technical change in the economy is what it is you need skills it takes a while to get them it is what it is um so that might not necessarily go away but that also wouldn't cause us to Flatline at zero that might cause us to Flatline at one or 1. two or something um so you know I tend to think that stuff like skills bias technical change is a decent explanation for those types of kind of structural economic factors and also things like parenting or decent explanations for what's going on with fertility and I and I don't think the more apocalyptic explanations are reasonable um and so I think that we're likely to see continuing decline for quite a while I think we'll bottom out somewhere between 0.4 and 1.3 um and then maybe there will be social subgroups that find ways to achieve higher fertility whether that will be heritable will remain to be seen um fertility heredity requires stable transmission of the same traits across lots of generations to do the work there's only one gene that's known to have long run positive selection um across a long time span um so I'm I'm a little I'm just skeptical that we're gonna suddenly find a new Gene that like drives super strong positive selection maybe we will um right now we can see that positive selection for fertility across cultures is happening across 50 or so Gene Gene genetic loky but it's not the same ones in different cultures it's not like all Western and this is just among just among European societies among Western like European and American societies there's 50 or so genetic loai that are among active selection but there's only one genetic lokai that's under active selection among like all groups um and it's been under active selection for 30,000 years and it's still only 66% of the population so like give it another 500 years it's still going to be like 66% of the population so um other than that like there is genetic there is selection on fertility happening in different societies but like Dutch people are breeding for are like selecting on different genes than American people and different than Estonian people and different than Swedish people like it's just it's different um we're not gravitating towards like it's not like we're finding a gene that across populations it's like predicting higher fertility so I'm skeptical we're GNA find a new one what is a medium-term future with an upside down demographic table look like what what will it be like to exist over the next going from wherever we're at now 1.6 to somewhere between 0.4 and 1.3 yeah it's going to be a lot of disappointment and a whole lot of cope so disappointment there's going to be a lot of people not having the families they wanted to have um that will lead to various coping mechanisms um encourage trying to encourage the younger generation not to make the same mistakes um which might be an endogenous method of of fertility increase um or just being angry at the Next Generation because you feel no attach attachment to them which could be an endogenous mechanism for continued fertility decrease um uh disconnection between Generations sadness insisting that you're not actually sad you never really wanted those kids anyway um people have different coping strategies but it's going to be a sadder and more disappointed Society there will be reduced entrepreneurship reduced pace of technological innovation there will be reduced economic growth rates um I mean we've lived in societies with zero population growth before they were called feudalism so we will see more inequality greater concentration of wealth across Generations um because Estates will be divided among fewer people um quite I mean it's it it's unpleasant um this is why people talk about a fertility crisis as we've already discussed I I I really dislike that language and I think humans survive have survived unpleasant environments before life in a low fertility future will be worth living it will be so worth living as human life has been for hundreds of thousands of years um so and crucially the main obstacles to having kids are likely to be psychological that is if you can get over the burden of like being like married younger than your friends not going on quite as many International trips as your friends and you know adopting strategies conducive for mental well-being you'll probably have plenty of kids it's going to be an interesting period i the cope thing I think is going to occur on an individual level but it's also going to occur on a macro level as well you know it is so I don't know because I live in this weird like degenerate internet subculture niche as opposed to sort of Normy world uh but you know people still talk about an overpopulation problem they talk about population boom about limited resources about us running out of space about us running out of energy about all of this stuff and there are going to be all of these things that come along for the ride that you population decrease is going to result unless we have some unbelievable Automation in AI robotics stuff that comes in to save the economy you're going to have to have a a reduction in economic growth okay so what's that going to cause it's going to be a lot of people that are very unhappy and start pointing fingers all over the place and you go well the policies that you were putting in place only not so long ago are the these are the fruits of those exact suggestions and now it's something else something else is going on for you to complain about so yeah I uh I'm I'm concerned quietly concerned I'm not as equanimous as you are although I'm uh I'm actually feeling a little bit better after today's conversation what's next or when it comes to sort of studies where is your focus going to be over the next uh Eur so right now um I'm the director of the pronatalism initiative at The Institute for family studies and what we're focusing on right now is housing um housing is a major milestone for young people it's one of those um one of those things that people tend to think like you shouldn't have kids until your housing situation is kind of sorted out um and young people are getting less and less likely they're living in smaller and smaller houses and they're less L like less and less likely to own their houses um and so we are exploring um what can be done about that how can we make housing more affordable how can we make it a more useful um method of of of uh long-term planning for young people how can we make it more accessible to them um and what types of housing uh are most supportive of transition to family life um so we're doing a lot of original research there and hoping to release some of that over the next next few months dud that's cool that's cool I'm very I'm a big fan of the institute for family studies Brad's a a fascinating writer and so you where should people go they want to keep up to date with all of the work that you're doing uh so ifs is a great place to look for a lot of the uh um the population work um if you want all my truly unfiltered opinions on this stuff um uh you can follow me on Twitter at lionstone KY um and uh and you can you can get all my opinions there on on all the sorts of topics that uh that that sometimes I should actually shut up about but hell yeah Lyman I appreciate you thank you man good talking you if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give him a watch