Something like TFR decline is certainly not monocausal, but I would submit these are the primary drivers:
* Status & culture for females, wherein getting married / having children young and raising them is low status. Feminism promotes this mindset, but also raising kids is more effort and more frustrating than an email job. I think this is an umbrella for what you're generally referring to.
* Technology enabling the former. I think this is one case where culture is downstream of technology. If the pill were never invented, it's hard to see the culture change occurring
* "Housing theory of everything" - College-educated elite moved to cities in a big way, and costs balloon for children exponentially compared to single/DINKs. I believe the primary driver is real estate. 4 children in NYC is not doable without a $1M+ year job that you can rely on to be there for 20 years. Only choice for most people who want to have 4 kids is uprooting your life and moving pretty far out to somewhere you may not know anyone. It's a big and disruptive change. Child care / private schools cost far more due to real estate costs, multiplying the pain ($70k is a typical per year per child cost starting in K). The cost of children overall in NYC is astronomical, so most well-paid folks top out at 2.
YIMBY is the default for Rs and ascendent for wonk Ds. All you need to address housing is respect the idea of private property and allow people to use land they purchase for what they want instead of central planning everything. Finding a way to remove the strings that prevent that seems more feasible, as prior growth-suppressing regulation is reviewed...
I think part of the story is cultural expectations about what you're supposed to provide for kids. I suspect the thought that you need a $1M+ year job to have 4 kids in NYC is in part based on background ideas about what you *must* provide for kids that are in fact pretty contingent, and aren't likely to be shared by religious people who prioritize having more kids.
I do have four kids, don't make anywhere near a million dollars a year, and live within a 1.5 hour drive of NYC (I myself am an only child who grew up in NYC), and I know lots of huge families in the area (e.g., > 6 kids) who earn less than us. While I'm not Catholic, my wife is, and lots of our friends are. The kids share bedrooms. They don't do lots of expensive and time-consuming traveling sports teams, they certainly don't go to expensive private schools. I think part of what religion gets you is not just prioritizing having children, but also making kids less expensive by getting you *not* to be caught up in a rat race about all the expensive things kids are supposed to get. I think the most wonderful gift I've given any of my children is their siblings.
Wow, I wish you also published in French. We are nowhere in conservative thought and would need a serious dose to avert the inevitable civilisational suicide under way.
It's funny because even Ezra Klein, when Tyler recently interviewed him, pretty much was in agreement in that one needs a philosophical shift to get to high fertility again. Tyler was probably closer to your view. Klein dismissed it as impossible. He argued that the fundamental philosophical shift required was _religious_, but, "you can't just tell people to start believing in God because it will be improve our TFR"
We have lost sight of the biblical admonition to "be fruitful and multiply"...I would be interested in statistics which graph the decline of organized religion beside population decline
Developed countries that score lower on individualism than the USA have even lower fertility rates. Even in a theocracy like Iran the fertility rate is dropping.
My theory of the “child decision” is that you are basically passing judgement on life as a whole. Any offspring you have will presumably have your life, so if life is one long trauma, then it would be morally fraught to perpetuate it with a new person. If even my “fortunate” life has been full of anxiety and depression, bearing on suicide, how could I justify giving that to someone else?
If this is true, then the answer is making people happier and more stable and they will make the kids. Healthy, well watered trees produce good fruit…although they don’t have to raise the fruit for 21 years….😮💨
I’m going to be a bit snarky, not because I dislike you but because I’m supportive of your general program and would like it to be done better. And since you didn’t really engage on the object level with the fertility problem neither will I.
Every essay follows the same arc: here’s a serious problem, laid out with clarity and insight. But rather than engaging with it on the object level or offering concrete solutions, you pivot — not to technocratic fixes, but to a deeper critique. You don’t just question policies or outcomes; you critique the very foundations of Western thought, morality, and governance.
And somehow, no matter the problem, the proposed answer is always the same: transfer power — not just political or economic power, but moral authority itself — to the smartest people. And lest I forget… oh Brian you were a math Olympiad prodigy right?
Do you see why this makes me trust you less, even when I find parts of your diagnosis compelling? There’s an obvious incentive problem here. When your solution to every societal ill just happens to place people like you at the top of a newly defined moral hierarchy, it starts to feel less like philosophy and more like self-serving ideology.
Very good article! This is the most confucian perspective I've ever read on the subject. It's true, but hard for most Americans to grok. Post WWII liberalism needs to be viewed as a secular religion or moral philosophy kind of like how confucianism is, except that modern liberalism is clearly terrible and destroys every society that it touches. For South Korea to recover it would need to make a hard rejection such as re-implementing arranged marriages, a move so unfathomable that it's on the order of mass religious conversion or Mao's one child policy. Of course it is, but to every other society in history so is the idea of sending your unmarried 18 year old daughter to live on her own like an unwanted second son.
But it's also about salience. Children, infants, are now almost nowhere to be seen in the daily lives of maiden, childless young women. As a result, they rarely think concretely about fitting children into their own lives.
Women operate on social proof. If they see women around them with young children, they will want their own, and make concrete plans for them. Which suggests mandating creches on every floor of every office building in the country, and paid time to look after your infant while at work, thereby making active, concrete motherhood both visible and high-status.
Men are lazy; or if you prefer, men seek the path with lowest energy expenditure for the greatest payoff, using 'energy' in its California sense, psychic energy as well as other resources.
So, if you want men to have children, you have to make having children the easy thing to do in life, the default life path; and as well, make fatherhood desirable to men. Make it hard to go through life without having children, and make raising children a thing that nearly all men would want to do anyway. (No single course of action immediately suggests itself to me; perhaps one will occur to you.)
The trouble with Hanson, Stone, Collins, and company is that they think in terms of green pieces of paper (subsidies, tax credits, blah blah), not in terms of what really matters to people: respectability, and relative status. Green pieces of paper don't change fundamental incentives, but that is precisely the task for pronatalists.
Perhaps you are right in your assessment of the most well known pronatalists, but your description doesn't match my experience attending the last Natal conference. What I saw is that pronatalism is very divided between people who take a technocratic approach and people of faith who take more of a virtue-based approach.
So it seems to me this is not so much an argument for why you are not a pronatalist as it is an argument in defense of a particular flavor of pronatalism.
Interesting article. I grew up in England in the 80s and unless one happened to be a "couldn't care less" low-status young woman, wanting to get married and have children instead of striving to be an independent, highly skilled professional, felt shameful and because of parental pressure and the modern financial burden of a joint home mortgage, actually impossible to achieve for many of us. I never thought I was living in the right era. Indeed, women born in the 1960s in England and Wales are twice as likely to be childless as those born immediately post-WW2 (Office of National Statistics, Census 2021).
1. Fertility does not have any correlation with war. The baby boom started after 1945. Unless we are counting Korea or the Cold War, it’s fairly obvious that the boom occurred after the war. The fertility rate plummeted after World War I but rose sharply after WW2. It’s difficult to parse any causal relationship here.
2. It’s difficult to claim the “West” destroys fertility when East Asia has worse fertility rates and more conservative values than the west. In the U.S., Asian-Americans have the lowest fertility rates around 1.3. Moreover, fertility rates are falling in every culture. The west is not that hegemonic.
Brian always challenges my inner leftist. I agree that if I had to choose between "institute various technocratic policies to marginally increase fertility" and "create a revolution in the moral zeitgeist that inspires society to reify higher virtues" I would choose the latter.
I suspect that the reason various autists do not spend time arguing for that option and instead focus on policy is because it is hard to radically alter the social and moral landscape; by comparison, it's much easier to spend money on childcare.
Fantastic work as always.
Something like TFR decline is certainly not monocausal, but I would submit these are the primary drivers:
* Status & culture for females, wherein getting married / having children young and raising them is low status. Feminism promotes this mindset, but also raising kids is more effort and more frustrating than an email job. I think this is an umbrella for what you're generally referring to.
* Technology enabling the former. I think this is one case where culture is downstream of technology. If the pill were never invented, it's hard to see the culture change occurring
* "Housing theory of everything" - College-educated elite moved to cities in a big way, and costs balloon for children exponentially compared to single/DINKs. I believe the primary driver is real estate. 4 children in NYC is not doable without a $1M+ year job that you can rely on to be there for 20 years. Only choice for most people who want to have 4 kids is uprooting your life and moving pretty far out to somewhere you may not know anyone. It's a big and disruptive change. Child care / private schools cost far more due to real estate costs, multiplying the pain ($70k is a typical per year per child cost starting in K). The cost of children overall in NYC is astronomical, so most well-paid folks top out at 2.
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
YIMBY is the default for Rs and ascendent for wonk Ds. All you need to address housing is respect the idea of private property and allow people to use land they purchase for what they want instead of central planning everything. Finding a way to remove the strings that prevent that seems more feasible, as prior growth-suppressing regulation is reviewed...
I think part of the story is cultural expectations about what you're supposed to provide for kids. I suspect the thought that you need a $1M+ year job to have 4 kids in NYC is in part based on background ideas about what you *must* provide for kids that are in fact pretty contingent, and aren't likely to be shared by religious people who prioritize having more kids.
I do have four kids, don't make anywhere near a million dollars a year, and live within a 1.5 hour drive of NYC (I myself am an only child who grew up in NYC), and I know lots of huge families in the area (e.g., > 6 kids) who earn less than us. While I'm not Catholic, my wife is, and lots of our friends are. The kids share bedrooms. They don't do lots of expensive and time-consuming traveling sports teams, they certainly don't go to expensive private schools. I think part of what religion gets you is not just prioritizing having children, but also making kids less expensive by getting you *not* to be caught up in a rat race about all the expensive things kids are supposed to get. I think the most wonderful gift I've given any of my children is their siblings.
Wow, I wish you also published in French. We are nowhere in conservative thought and would need a serious dose to avert the inevitable civilisational suicide under way.
I haven't written anything in french since high school but I can try :)
It's funny because even Ezra Klein, when Tyler recently interviewed him, pretty much was in agreement in that one needs a philosophical shift to get to high fertility again. Tyler was probably closer to your view. Klein dismissed it as impossible. He argued that the fundamental philosophical shift required was _religious_, but, "you can't just tell people to start believing in God because it will be improve our TFR"
We have lost sight of the biblical admonition to "be fruitful and multiply"...I would be interested in statistics which graph the decline of organized religion beside population decline
The bible also says a wife is FOUND. We sure aren't producing any wives now are we?
Does anyone have those stats?
This was an excellent essay and I have nothing to add.
Thank you!
Developed countries that score lower on individualism than the USA have even lower fertility rates. Even in a theocracy like Iran the fertility rate is dropping.
The advantage of individualism is that you end up with many different subcultures. Some of which figure out ways to address the problem.
My theory of the “child decision” is that you are basically passing judgement on life as a whole. Any offspring you have will presumably have your life, so if life is one long trauma, then it would be morally fraught to perpetuate it with a new person. If even my “fortunate” life has been full of anxiety and depression, bearing on suicide, how could I justify giving that to someone else?
If this is true, then the answer is making people happier and more stable and they will make the kids. Healthy, well watered trees produce good fruit…although they don’t have to raise the fruit for 21 years….😮💨
I’m going to be a bit snarky, not because I dislike you but because I’m supportive of your general program and would like it to be done better. And since you didn’t really engage on the object level with the fertility problem neither will I.
Every essay follows the same arc: here’s a serious problem, laid out with clarity and insight. But rather than engaging with it on the object level or offering concrete solutions, you pivot — not to technocratic fixes, but to a deeper critique. You don’t just question policies or outcomes; you critique the very foundations of Western thought, morality, and governance.
And somehow, no matter the problem, the proposed answer is always the same: transfer power — not just political or economic power, but moral authority itself — to the smartest people. And lest I forget… oh Brian you were a math Olympiad prodigy right?
Do you see why this makes me trust you less, even when I find parts of your diagnosis compelling? There’s an obvious incentive problem here. When your solution to every societal ill just happens to place people like you at the top of a newly defined moral hierarchy, it starts to feel less like philosophy and more like self-serving ideology.
Well it obviously doesn't place people like me at the top of a moral hierarchy, since I don't have any children yet.
All I'm saying is that there obviously should be a moral hierarchy. In fact such a hierarchy would pressure people like me to change.
But unless you’re invoking God, aren’t we just assigning the power to whoever defines the moral hierarchy?
Very good article! This is the most confucian perspective I've ever read on the subject. It's true, but hard for most Americans to grok. Post WWII liberalism needs to be viewed as a secular religion or moral philosophy kind of like how confucianism is, except that modern liberalism is clearly terrible and destroys every society that it touches. For South Korea to recover it would need to make a hard rejection such as re-implementing arranged marriages, a move so unfathomable that it's on the order of mass religious conversion or Mao's one child policy. Of course it is, but to every other society in history so is the idea of sending your unmarried 18 year old daughter to live on her own like an unwanted second son.
Rob F.'s first point is right: it's about status.
But it's also about salience. Children, infants, are now almost nowhere to be seen in the daily lives of maiden, childless young women. As a result, they rarely think concretely about fitting children into their own lives.
Women operate on social proof. If they see women around them with young children, they will want their own, and make concrete plans for them. Which suggests mandating creches on every floor of every office building in the country, and paid time to look after your infant while at work, thereby making active, concrete motherhood both visible and high-status.
Men are lazy; or if you prefer, men seek the path with lowest energy expenditure for the greatest payoff, using 'energy' in its California sense, psychic energy as well as other resources.
So, if you want men to have children, you have to make having children the easy thing to do in life, the default life path; and as well, make fatherhood desirable to men. Make it hard to go through life without having children, and make raising children a thing that nearly all men would want to do anyway. (No single course of action immediately suggests itself to me; perhaps one will occur to you.)
The trouble with Hanson, Stone, Collins, and company is that they think in terms of green pieces of paper (subsidies, tax credits, blah blah), not in terms of what really matters to people: respectability, and relative status. Green pieces of paper don't change fundamental incentives, but that is precisely the task for pronatalists.
Perhaps you are right in your assessment of the most well known pronatalists, but your description doesn't match my experience attending the last Natal conference. What I saw is that pronatalism is very divided between people who take a technocratic approach and people of faith who take more of a virtue-based approach.
So it seems to me this is not so much an argument for why you are not a pronatalist as it is an argument in defense of a particular flavor of pronatalism.
Interesting article. I grew up in England in the 80s and unless one happened to be a "couldn't care less" low-status young woman, wanting to get married and have children instead of striving to be an independent, highly skilled professional, felt shameful and because of parental pressure and the modern financial burden of a joint home mortgage, actually impossible to achieve for many of us. I never thought I was living in the right era. Indeed, women born in the 1960s in England and Wales are twice as likely to be childless as those born immediately post-WW2 (Office of National Statistics, Census 2021).
Universalism and democracy isn't at odds with becoming better people, is the fundamental belief that everyone can become better people.
Some quibbles:
1. Fertility does not have any correlation with war. The baby boom started after 1945. Unless we are counting Korea or the Cold War, it’s fairly obvious that the boom occurred after the war. The fertility rate plummeted after World War I but rose sharply after WW2. It’s difficult to parse any causal relationship here.
2. It’s difficult to claim the “West” destroys fertility when East Asia has worse fertility rates and more conservative values than the west. In the U.S., Asian-Americans have the lowest fertility rates around 1.3. Moreover, fertility rates are falling in every culture. The west is not that hegemonic.
The reason the technocrats focus on birth rate is that its the easiest to measure symptom of the collapse of virtue.
Brian always challenges my inner leftist. I agree that if I had to choose between "institute various technocratic policies to marginally increase fertility" and "create a revolution in the moral zeitgeist that inspires society to reify higher virtues" I would choose the latter.
I suspect that the reason various autists do not spend time arguing for that option and instead focus on policy is because it is hard to radically alter the social and moral landscape; by comparison, it's much easier to spend money on childcare.