The world is slowly waking up to the fertility crisis. There is more acknowledgement of the problem, and there is more talk of potential practical solutions. I do not believe the topic is a realistic target for Balsa Policy Institute, but I will continue to keep an eye on the ball and issue periodic roundups like this one.
For what it's worth, now that my wife and I are in our 50s, I wish we had 1 or 2 more kids. Not a soul rending regret, but more of an "I wish I knew" thing.
At the time, I was worried about the responsibility, and felt worried that if my job fell through or something I wouldn't be able to support a 3-4 kid family, which in hindsight seems a little silly.
Now, even if I were to remarry a younger woman, I'd feel on the older side to have more kids.
I wonder is the reason why libertarians tend towards these fertility worries that they have a blind spot about how easily affordable it is to solve them with transfer payments because they're ideologically opposed to redistribution? I had an interesting conversation with Nolan Brown about that article where I pointed out she had gotten the cost of increasing fertility too high by an order of magnitude, to which reason responded by fixing the statistic but keeping the claim that it was unaffordable. If you're pro-welfare state on the other hand all these pro-natalist policies are just things you naturally support to improve people's lives regardless of the fertility impact.
1) China - If there really is a social credit system in China, giving people more credit for having more kids can be really effective. If social status is a number and a central commitee controls that number and the institutional response to it then policies can be very effective. Yes this is a bit evil, but making implicit things explicit usually reduces evil. Like we already have social credit it's just obtuse to earn and hard to measure, but no less oppressive. How many hours did you spend on extra curciluars to increase your social credit score as measured by the Havard central committee. Same fucking thing.
2) You are right about Simon and Malcom, too much leakage won't work.
3) I think we are close enough to replacement rate that we don't yet need extreme policies. Lots we can do on the margin. I'd focus, on 1) making housing affordable (that doesn't work in Japan, but might here), 2)Targeted policies to reducing the age of first child in married couples. 3) repealing stupid policies like car seats, day care provider certifications that make having kids expensive. 4) and the big one, making life less competitive for parents,
How do we make life feel less competitive. I have a number of ideas
1) ban college admission that is not based on test scores, a kid joining a club or doing sports, or anything that involves a parents time is a policy failure. Kids should work and contribute.
2) Colleges can't control their own admission, there is a test with a wide bar, schools are divided by wide bar, so 1500 or higher can go to these 10 schools, choosen by lottery, 1499-1400 or these 25 schools, again by lottery, so on and so forth. Unless you are on the border between those wide bars studying doesn't make sense.
3) We need schools run by conservative values. That means disapline, tracking, competition. Even bad schools can have 1 or 2 good classes. Disruptive kids need to be vanquished, moved to a warehouse, given the ability to move out of the warehouse, but it's much more important every school is well run, than people have choice. Choice is time, it's another lag on parents. Disruption also happens on the margin, lots of kids will not be disruptive if there are real consequences and no disruptive role models. That means the Bukele option for bad schools, a onetime iliberal policy leads to a more liberal world.
Finally on the womb stuff, one thing that really interests me about that is we'll eliminate congenital low fertility by avoiding having gay children being born. Just like we avoid down syndrome babies today. Since we know the amount of hormones in the womb affects sexuality, we can use this tech to eliminate the chance a child is gay. That's going to be an interesting trade off for social conservatives who think this tech is bad.
I just want to footstomp the fact that it's essentially impossible to realize how much the average 30-something in my circles is constantly worried. COVID, climate change, AI killing us all, sure. But even more than that, it's job loss, housing costs, rising gun crime in DC.
We raised a generation on precarity, and we're shocked about the result, apparently.
Babies and children are a pain in the ass (I'll grant they get better as they grow older). If we had robo-nannies and cheap food, I'd consider it. But as it stands, I'm fine letting some else win the pointless Darwinian competition and have to change shitty diapers.
Inclusive fitness is sufficient for me. Not to mention not having the guilt of bringing another soul into this thresher.
The whole structure of building a family in China is so alien to me. You gotta pay the bride price, plus you need to make sure one of the pair has a good hukou, plus you need to start saving to pay for a house for them since newlyweds can't afford their own, plus you have to navigate the politics of receiving a house from your parents/in-laws, plus only half of all kids get to go to high school and then only half of high school grads get to go to college, so you need to make sure they get a good education, but you can't be too brazen about it because private tutoring is against the law, and on and on and on.
The Chinese Doomscroll substack has so many parenting posts that just make it obvious why their fertility dropped so hard. This FAQ from the author is probably the one that was the most consistently unbelievable to me: https://weibo.substack.com/p/040923-faq-answered
> As commentors note, in the past we had very long work weeks and very high birth rates. My guess is that it is the combination of hours worked with huge expected time investments in childcare, and modern isolation of the nuclear family, and that this is indeed making this dynamic important, although one factor among many.
the increased availability of birth control (a very positive thing!) is likely a pretty big factor in declined fertility rates that I'm surprised to not see mentioned here. I think the interesting discussion to have is that, due to the increased availability of birth control, we've reduced the chances that children will be born to unprepared parents and consequently face benign neglect or worse. I think that's something that's missing in a lot of rationalist discussions around increasing fertility. Increasing fertility is really important, but the decline here also means that, proportionally, more children that grow up are healthy and loved and well educated and well prepared to become productive members in a society that they feel affinity towards. That's also a very important part of the puzzle of "sustaining a society across generations", and I worry that people who want to brute force increase TFR aren't thinking enough about these later steps.
(My own take as an ex-latchkey kid is that benign neglect is great, but I'm also aware of how many more worse dynamics there are if your parents weren't prepared for you or didn't want you.)
> Matt Palmer: We must do everything in our power to ensure that our friends have a relatively easy time having babies Bring babies to parties, normalize free range children, give a bunch of parents a night off at once by organizing group babysitting events Many unimplemented wins here.
This is a good take. There's actually been a lot of traction/discussion around stuff like this in women-dominated blogging circles, which are very removed from rationalist blogging circles so I'm not surprised that there's been no cross pollination, but, here are some examples:
I'm gonna grab the third rail of Internet discourse with both hands, and ask: Are artificial wombs the solution to the abortion debate? If artificial wombs can be used to transplant a, say, 8-12 week old fetus, would laws absolutely prohibiting abortion but permitting completely free transfers (paid for by the state) to artificial wombs be palatable to both sides? In theory, it addresses both sides of the "women's bodily autonomy" vs "life of the child" debate. What am I missing?
I think the Cato part largely hits everything I would suggest, although it does not seem to mention the sheer amount of education time (time spent, not actual education) investment in kids along with the competition to spend that time at specific institutions. There is a lot of unnecessary time spent running kids to X, Y or Z activity in part because we can't just let them play, and in part because if they don't play an instrument, make varsity in at least one sport, and volunteer since the age of 5 they will never make it into a top tier school. (Or something.) I think for many people that have actual hobbies and interests outside of their 8-5 job the prospect of becoming an unpaid Uber driver for their kids is a bit unappealing. That also plays into the fact that all that time in school keeps kids from becoming adults; I've had classes of college sophomores where the majority never had a job that wasn't an internship, and they weren't going to have one until after graduation at 22-24 years old. If we could get the butt in seat part of schooling done in ~75% of that time it would be a big deal, and that improvement seems pretty trivial to achieve considering how little high school and college grads actually retain.
With regards to banning children from public places (or private businesses) I am actually a little sympathetic in some cases, despite having three kids myself. I have seen some really awful behavior of children in stores, making a mess and wrecking the place even when their parent is right there to correct the behavior. Likewise unattended children steal or otherwise create a nuisance. Without social control, either through the parents not being too worthless to teach their children to behave or shoplifting kids getting in trouble with the law, banning kids seems like the next best solution. Now, I don't know what is going on in South Korea, but given the unwillingness to enforce behavioral standards (or laws) in the US, I would not be surprised or even particularly offended if a private store decided to ban children. Public libraries though, that's just dumb.
a) Maternal mortality: In most of Europe it is below 10 in 100k births, thus the US was an outlier always, the spike is Corona-only hopefully. Newest numbers in EU are mostly still 2020, showing no rise yet and I do not expect much (except Italy, maybe). - The US numbers seem easily explained by access to docs/hospitals: If 5% of pregnant women in the US face hurdles to regular check-ups et al - maybe simply by living much further from the next hospital than anyone in West-Europe does, maybe *undocumented immigrant" or sth. their risk may rise from 5 in 100,000 up to a staggering 1% - i.e. 1000 in 100k. And thus "spoiling" the average. - This study shows some other factors that increase mortality risk: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj-2022-070621
Tldr: Being under 20 or over 30 doubles the risk, being over 40 quadruples it. Being an immigrant raises it by about 50 % (except in rich Norway, where all get very fine support). "Cardiovascular diseases and suicides were leading causes of maternal deaths in each country". Obesity does not help, sure.
a) The Turkish husband and his wife (an ex-stripper from Georgia; seemingly now a millionaire, too) spent more than €168,000 on 22 surrogates between March 2020 and July 2021, and spends more than €90,000 a year on 16 live-in nannies. - So, around 8k for a surrogate mom and 7k a year for each live-in-nanny. They sure know how to get a sweet deal! He should swap his money laundering+bus company to an agency getting others such incredible deals ... . - Who needs artificial wombs then?! - Oh, "the couple set out to have 105 surrogate babies together. " - Singapore pay attention and the bills for your high achievers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipl9tqyoS8o
I mean I'd love to think about owning a home but I'm mostly tempted to not even start thinking with the level of loans I have hanging on.
Wife and I are comfortably at "are fine without kids, would roll with it if one happened but aren't going to try". I'm vaguely interested in the -idea- of having a family but it's definitely financial incentives pushing the balance away from it.
What we really need is exponential rewards for having more children:
- $1k for the first kid
- $2k for the second
...
- $512k for the tenth child
Obviously you'd need some sort of a verification system to ensure people can't game the payouts too easily but overall the problem is that we don't provide huge payouts to people who make the sacrifices in order to have a large family.
The best part is that issuing debt for the purposes of funding this program would be a no brainer as you'd be generating millions of additional future taxpayers, so the program should be sustainable in nations that aren't suffering too much of a brain drain. Definitely doable in the US, Japan or Germany.
Anecdatum: a couple, good friends of mine, live in Seattle with 2 tech incomes and 2 young kids. They have extended family in the area and the pandemic was a happy time for them. Recently they had to find a new house due to a combination of return-to-office policy impacting commutes and childcare (you can probably guess which company), wanting a good elementary school, and a nanny demanding they get a 4th bedroom to make kid supervision easier (no, I don't understand that part either). This had a major impact on their finances because of the difficulty satisfying the required parameters (size and location, and they eventually compromised on school quality).
Work from home is potentially a big deal for fertility if it keeps enough traction going forward. Aside from cultural/social desirability there's practically no reason for families with kids to prefer a big city over a small town, if work lets them move. And moving makes a big dent in both the financial (housing prices) and time commitment (WFH plus a backyard and friendly neighbors reducing active time requirements) costs of parenting at a single stroke.
It’s amazing to me how wide a gulf instantly opened between us and our peer group when we chose to have a child. I literally don’t know what those guys are doing with their lives anymore other than being mad at us we can’t go to their New Years Eve kegger in a different city and “just bring her” if we don’t have a sitter.
They’re constantly miserable, constantly angry at everyone around them, and constantly lonely. We make a special (though unsuccessful) effort to avoid talking too much about Obviously The Most Perfect Baby Ever To Live, but every time she comes up you can feel the annoyance and (I hesitate to say) jealousy. One friend immediately shows us picture of “his” baby each time: an adorable rescue cat who I always want to see pictures of but it’s still weird?
Obviously the bigger issues are economic - doing this with a two-income family seems insane, especially given the cost of childcare. Despite a good job and a good income we’re still thousands of dollars in debt from the delivery alone. And debt from student loans plus actually spending four years in college can obviously delay the decision to have kids.
But part of it’s got to be that our culture teaches selfishness as the epitome of virtue and then gets confused why people are lonely.
For what it's worth, now that my wife and I are in our 50s, I wish we had 1 or 2 more kids. Not a soul rending regret, but more of an "I wish I knew" thing.
At the time, I was worried about the responsibility, and felt worried that if my job fell through or something I wouldn't be able to support a 3-4 kid family, which in hindsight seems a little silly.
Now, even if I were to remarry a younger woman, I'd feel on the older side to have more kids.
I wonder is the reason why libertarians tend towards these fertility worries that they have a blind spot about how easily affordable it is to solve them with transfer payments because they're ideologically opposed to redistribution? I had an interesting conversation with Nolan Brown about that article where I pointed out she had gotten the cost of increasing fertility too high by an order of magnitude, to which reason responded by fixing the statistic but keeping the claim that it was unaffordable. If you're pro-welfare state on the other hand all these pro-natalist policies are just things you naturally support to improve people's lives regardless of the fertility impact.
A few things
1) China - If there really is a social credit system in China, giving people more credit for having more kids can be really effective. If social status is a number and a central commitee controls that number and the institutional response to it then policies can be very effective. Yes this is a bit evil, but making implicit things explicit usually reduces evil. Like we already have social credit it's just obtuse to earn and hard to measure, but no less oppressive. How many hours did you spend on extra curciluars to increase your social credit score as measured by the Havard central committee. Same fucking thing.
2) You are right about Simon and Malcom, too much leakage won't work.
3) I think we are close enough to replacement rate that we don't yet need extreme policies. Lots we can do on the margin. I'd focus, on 1) making housing affordable (that doesn't work in Japan, but might here), 2)Targeted policies to reducing the age of first child in married couples. 3) repealing stupid policies like car seats, day care provider certifications that make having kids expensive. 4) and the big one, making life less competitive for parents,
How do we make life feel less competitive. I have a number of ideas
1) ban college admission that is not based on test scores, a kid joining a club or doing sports, or anything that involves a parents time is a policy failure. Kids should work and contribute.
2) Colleges can't control their own admission, there is a test with a wide bar, schools are divided by wide bar, so 1500 or higher can go to these 10 schools, choosen by lottery, 1499-1400 or these 25 schools, again by lottery, so on and so forth. Unless you are on the border between those wide bars studying doesn't make sense.
3) We need schools run by conservative values. That means disapline, tracking, competition. Even bad schools can have 1 or 2 good classes. Disruptive kids need to be vanquished, moved to a warehouse, given the ability to move out of the warehouse, but it's much more important every school is well run, than people have choice. Choice is time, it's another lag on parents. Disruption also happens on the margin, lots of kids will not be disruptive if there are real consequences and no disruptive role models. That means the Bukele option for bad schools, a onetime iliberal policy leads to a more liberal world.
Finally on the womb stuff, one thing that really interests me about that is we'll eliminate congenital low fertility by avoiding having gay children being born. Just like we avoid down syndrome babies today. Since we know the amount of hormones in the womb affects sexuality, we can use this tech to eliminate the chance a child is gay. That's going to be an interesting trade off for social conservatives who think this tech is bad.
It's genuinely reassuring to know that someone's keeping their eye on the ball here. Thanks, Zvi.
I just want to footstomp the fact that it's essentially impossible to realize how much the average 30-something in my circles is constantly worried. COVID, climate change, AI killing us all, sure. But even more than that, it's job loss, housing costs, rising gun crime in DC.
We raised a generation on precarity, and we're shocked about the result, apparently.
Babies and children are a pain in the ass (I'll grant they get better as they grow older). If we had robo-nannies and cheap food, I'd consider it. But as it stands, I'm fine letting some else win the pointless Darwinian competition and have to change shitty diapers.
Inclusive fitness is sufficient for me. Not to mention not having the guilt of bringing another soul into this thresher.
The whole structure of building a family in China is so alien to me. You gotta pay the bride price, plus you need to make sure one of the pair has a good hukou, plus you need to start saving to pay for a house for them since newlyweds can't afford their own, plus you have to navigate the politics of receiving a house from your parents/in-laws, plus only half of all kids get to go to high school and then only half of high school grads get to go to college, so you need to make sure they get a good education, but you can't be too brazen about it because private tutoring is against the law, and on and on and on.
The Chinese Doomscroll substack has so many parenting posts that just make it obvious why their fertility dropped so hard. This FAQ from the author is probably the one that was the most consistently unbelievable to me: https://weibo.substack.com/p/040923-faq-answered
> As commentors note, in the past we had very long work weeks and very high birth rates. My guess is that it is the combination of hours worked with huge expected time investments in childcare, and modern isolation of the nuclear family, and that this is indeed making this dynamic important, although one factor among many.
the increased availability of birth control (a very positive thing!) is likely a pretty big factor in declined fertility rates that I'm surprised to not see mentioned here. I think the interesting discussion to have is that, due to the increased availability of birth control, we've reduced the chances that children will be born to unprepared parents and consequently face benign neglect or worse. I think that's something that's missing in a lot of rationalist discussions around increasing fertility. Increasing fertility is really important, but the decline here also means that, proportionally, more children that grow up are healthy and loved and well educated and well prepared to become productive members in a society that they feel affinity towards. That's also a very important part of the puzzle of "sustaining a society across generations", and I worry that people who want to brute force increase TFR aren't thinking enough about these later steps.
(My own take as an ex-latchkey kid is that benign neglect is great, but I'm also aware of how many more worse dynamics there are if your parents weren't prepared for you or didn't want you.)
> Matt Palmer: We must do everything in our power to ensure that our friends have a relatively easy time having babies Bring babies to parties, normalize free range children, give a bunch of parents a night off at once by organizing group babysitting events Many unimplemented wins here.
This is a good take. There's actually been a lot of traction/discussion around stuff like this in women-dominated blogging circles, which are very removed from rationalist blogging circles so I'm not surprised that there's been no cross pollination, but, here are some examples:
https://annehelen.substack.com/p/how-to-show-up-for-your-friends-without
https://www.thecut.com/article/adult-friendships-vs-kids.html
https://www.thecut.com/2023/05/is-camel-mode-inevitable-for-parents.html
I'm gonna grab the third rail of Internet discourse with both hands, and ask: Are artificial wombs the solution to the abortion debate? If artificial wombs can be used to transplant a, say, 8-12 week old fetus, would laws absolutely prohibiting abortion but permitting completely free transfers (paid for by the state) to artificial wombs be palatable to both sides? In theory, it addresses both sides of the "women's bodily autonomy" vs "life of the child" debate. What am I missing?
How many children do you have, Zvi?
Curious to hear from other commenters as well.
I have four (so far).
I think the Cato part largely hits everything I would suggest, although it does not seem to mention the sheer amount of education time (time spent, not actual education) investment in kids along with the competition to spend that time at specific institutions. There is a lot of unnecessary time spent running kids to X, Y or Z activity in part because we can't just let them play, and in part because if they don't play an instrument, make varsity in at least one sport, and volunteer since the age of 5 they will never make it into a top tier school. (Or something.) I think for many people that have actual hobbies and interests outside of their 8-5 job the prospect of becoming an unpaid Uber driver for their kids is a bit unappealing. That also plays into the fact that all that time in school keeps kids from becoming adults; I've had classes of college sophomores where the majority never had a job that wasn't an internship, and they weren't going to have one until after graduation at 22-24 years old. If we could get the butt in seat part of schooling done in ~75% of that time it would be a big deal, and that improvement seems pretty trivial to achieve considering how little high school and college grads actually retain.
With regards to banning children from public places (or private businesses) I am actually a little sympathetic in some cases, despite having three kids myself. I have seen some really awful behavior of children in stores, making a mess and wrecking the place even when their parent is right there to correct the behavior. Likewise unattended children steal or otherwise create a nuisance. Without social control, either through the parents not being too worthless to teach their children to behave or shoplifting kids getting in trouble with the law, banning kids seems like the next best solution. Now, I don't know what is going on in South Korea, but given the unwillingness to enforce behavioral standards (or laws) in the US, I would not be surprised or even particularly offended if a private store decided to ban children. Public libraries though, that's just dumb.
So many things to comment on: a) US maternity death rate - very shocking, not very relevant
b) I want an old-fashioned house with ten old-fashioned nannies and an old-fashioned millionaire + update: her husband arrested for money laundering https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10934703/Russian-woman-21-babies-Turkish-millionaire-devastated-arrest.html
a) Maternal mortality: In most of Europe it is below 10 in 100k births, thus the US was an outlier always, the spike is Corona-only hopefully. Newest numbers in EU are mostly still 2020, showing no rise yet and I do not expect much (except Italy, maybe). - The US numbers seem easily explained by access to docs/hospitals: If 5% of pregnant women in the US face hurdles to regular check-ups et al - maybe simply by living much further from the next hospital than anyone in West-Europe does, maybe *undocumented immigrant" or sth. their risk may rise from 5 in 100,000 up to a staggering 1% - i.e. 1000 in 100k. And thus "spoiling" the average. - This study shows some other factors that increase mortality risk: https://www.bmj.com/content/379/bmj-2022-070621
Tldr: Being under 20 or over 30 doubles the risk, being over 40 quadruples it. Being an immigrant raises it by about 50 % (except in rich Norway, where all get very fine support). "Cardiovascular diseases and suicides were leading causes of maternal deaths in each country". Obesity does not help, sure.
a) The Turkish husband and his wife (an ex-stripper from Georgia; seemingly now a millionaire, too) spent more than €168,000 on 22 surrogates between March 2020 and July 2021, and spends more than €90,000 a year on 16 live-in nannies. - So, around 8k for a surrogate mom and 7k a year for each live-in-nanny. They sure know how to get a sweet deal! He should swap his money laundering+bus company to an agency getting others such incredible deals ... . - Who needs artificial wombs then?! - Oh, "the couple set out to have 105 surrogate babies together. " - Singapore pay attention and the bills for your high achievers! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipl9tqyoS8o
Ctrl+F student loans 0/0
I mean I'd love to think about owning a home but I'm mostly tempted to not even start thinking with the level of loans I have hanging on.
Wife and I are comfortably at "are fine without kids, would roll with it if one happened but aren't going to try". I'm vaguely interested in the -idea- of having a family but it's definitely financial incentives pushing the balance away from it.
What we really need is exponential rewards for having more children:
- $1k for the first kid
- $2k for the second
...
- $512k for the tenth child
Obviously you'd need some sort of a verification system to ensure people can't game the payouts too easily but overall the problem is that we don't provide huge payouts to people who make the sacrifices in order to have a large family.
The best part is that issuing debt for the purposes of funding this program would be a no brainer as you'd be generating millions of additional future taxpayers, so the program should be sustainable in nations that aren't suffering too much of a brain drain. Definitely doable in the US, Japan or Germany.
Anecdatum: a couple, good friends of mine, live in Seattle with 2 tech incomes and 2 young kids. They have extended family in the area and the pandemic was a happy time for them. Recently they had to find a new house due to a combination of return-to-office policy impacting commutes and childcare (you can probably guess which company), wanting a good elementary school, and a nanny demanding they get a 4th bedroom to make kid supervision easier (no, I don't understand that part either). This had a major impact on their finances because of the difficulty satisfying the required parameters (size and location, and they eventually compromised on school quality).
Work from home is potentially a big deal for fertility if it keeps enough traction going forward. Aside from cultural/social desirability there's practically no reason for families with kids to prefer a big city over a small town, if work lets them move. And moving makes a big dent in both the financial (housing prices) and time commitment (WFH plus a backyard and friendly neighbors reducing active time requirements) costs of parenting at a single stroke.
It’s amazing to me how wide a gulf instantly opened between us and our peer group when we chose to have a child. I literally don’t know what those guys are doing with their lives anymore other than being mad at us we can’t go to their New Years Eve kegger in a different city and “just bring her” if we don’t have a sitter.
They’re constantly miserable, constantly angry at everyone around them, and constantly lonely. We make a special (though unsuccessful) effort to avoid talking too much about Obviously The Most Perfect Baby Ever To Live, but every time she comes up you can feel the annoyance and (I hesitate to say) jealousy. One friend immediately shows us picture of “his” baby each time: an adorable rescue cat who I always want to see pictures of but it’s still weird?
Obviously the bigger issues are economic - doing this with a two-income family seems insane, especially given the cost of childcare. Despite a good job and a good income we’re still thousands of dollars in debt from the delivery alone. And debt from student loans plus actually spending four years in college can obviously delay the decision to have kids.
But part of it’s got to be that our culture teaches selfishness as the epitome of virtue and then gets confused why people are lonely.