You should probably also mention ever-increasing standards for child rearing, particularly in countries like the US, making merely "adequate" provision for one's children increasingly expensive in both time and money.
Part of the puzzle is that whatever is happening seems tp be happening almost everywhere. That fits improved contraception or rising incomes but I am not sure what else.
I'm not sure that rising incomes are present everywhere. In the presence of changes to inequality, you can't approximate changes in income by looking at changes in average income. The average doesn't have children.
But I wouldn't have a clue how to find out whether e.g. the bottom 70% were poorer even while the top 30%, and the average, was richer - particularly if I wanted the same answer for every nation, or better yet even smaller units.
Also, while I'm not sure whether child rearing standards are going up anywhere but in the US, I'm also not sure that they are not going up just about everywhere. (This is a potentially answerable question, but not easy to answer.)
One crude measure is calories per capita, which I believe has been increasing almost everywhere. Global rates of extreme poverty have gone down a lot. That doesn't imply everywhere but it is a measure of how badly the bottom is doing that pretty much ignores rich countries.
The puzzle of fertility is that rising male incomes increase it and rising female incomes reduce it.
Measures or household income to fertility are also flawed because fertility reduces income. Specifically, female income. Women face a tradeoff between having more kids and raising more kids, there is only so much time and energy in a day. When we notice that higher household income doesn't result in more kids, that is mostly because women with fewer kids have more income.
If we isolate only on male income, its a positive correlation. In other words, the more money a man makes the easier a tradeoff the wife faces between income and more children.
If we could disentangle assortive mating from this (high earning men marrying women capable of high earnings) I think it would be even stronger. Female income isn't bad in and of itself, it probably even allows for more options if it can outpace cost of childcare. Only if it causes one to choose income over child rearing is it problematic.
The solution is pretty clear. We need big payroll tax breaks for parents (by definition, taxes will have to rise on non-parents). This should scale with kids and income, Box 3 on your W2 * X% per kid. If married filing jointly both parents should get the tax break. We simply acknowledge that the costs of raising children are a form of "payroll tax" being born by parents and we shouldn't "double tax" parents.
Low fertility people will have to pay more payroll taxes to support those that are having the kids that will support them in old age. It's only fair. End the free riding.
At the correct scale this will work. Nobody in the world is really trying anything at any kind of scale that matters, and many of the child subsidies have terrible incentive structures (hungary's is pretty bad for instance).
Fertility increasing with male income and decreasing with female would make sense even if you had a measure of female earning power that wasn't affected by fertility, as long as the time cost of bearing children was born mostly by the mother.
1) Atomization of the extended family and post-industrial familial diaspora makes it more difficult to have proximate child rearing assistance that is truly loving, so having children has become more intimidating and therefore less desirable.
2) Childhood mortality has plummeted. The trend chart of childhood mortality looks almost exactly like the trend chart of fertility. In ye olden days, to be sure that enough of your children would survive that they would have enough children to survive, etc, you had to have a LOT of children. At least a few of the children you brought into the world needed to bring children of their own into the world for you to be confident that your genes would live on. For you to have three children become parents, you needed to have at least four or five be born, and even if you had that many, there was a decent chance you'd lose most of them, so you really needed to have seven or more to be reasonably confident that three might someday have children of their own. Nowadays, literally 99% of children born survive to adulthood, so if you have just one child, the pressure to have more has meaningfully evaporated.
3) School pushes back age of marriage for everyone, including women, and a woman's age at marriage is an exceptionally good predictor of how many children she'll have. I am an example: I am the youngest of four, my mother got married at 21, had her first child at 23, and her last at 33.
P.S. "Artificial wombs" 🤮
P.P.S. Your point about evolution/the Amish is a good one. The future belongs to those who show up. Antihumanists are least likely to have children. Pronatalists are most likely to have them.
To me, the Afghan example would seem to strongly indicate that the main cause is technological progress with regards to birth control rather than any social change taking place mainly in Western countries. This is also the explanation with the most straight-forward causality, and it is also the least useful explanation for people with a political axe to grind (except Luddites, I suppose).
As for the cure, as far as I can tell, social engineering tends to turn out worse than the disease, so I'd prefer laissez faire. But I do see a potential problem there of liberal societies being outbred by illiberal ones – e.g. what happens if South Korea ends up with a population of 10M and North Korea with one of 100M?
New angle on falling birthrates: growing fundamental cultural dividision between young people evident from huge diversion between young women and young men's political viewpoints. See German post-election surveys.
The default assumption here seems to be that having fewer children is a choice, made primarily by women. I wonder how much this is true now, as opposed to in the 1960s when reliable hormonal birth control came into use.
To what extent is the birth dearth a result of a conscious choice to have few or no children, and how much is the physical inability to have them? A couple marrying in their 30s may want 4 children but be unable to have them, or have any.
There is choice involved, to delay marriage, to use birth control while young, to have a job. Many of my co-workers are women in their 30s, who seem to be popping out babies as fast as they can. Others are women in their 20s, who mostly are not.
The choice by women seems to be delaying making a commitment to a stable married life until the late 20s and 30s, in spite of a desire to have children. Not having children is downstream and a not necessarily desired outcome.
There is evidence that hormonal birth control alters emotions and thinking of women.
The Ponzi scheme element of Medicare/Medicaid in the US is self-limiting, like all Ponzi schemes. I observe it in the UK with our NHS. The waiting room, both physical and virtual, in our GP surgeries and hospitals grows ever larger. Rationing by queuing is the well known effect. And many older folk will simply die while queuing. Less improvement in life expectancy or actual falls is the visible result.
As it happens I have a chapter on the general form of that problem: "What Does Optimum Population Mean?" Research in Population Economics, Vol. III (1981), Eds. Simon and Lindert. It's linked to my academic page: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Academic.html
> If people who are in favor of children have them and people against having children don’t, an increasing fraction of the population will be descended from the first group.
I have a feeling just being in favor does not help. You actually need to find a mate to be able to agree to it. I wonder if it is harder for such people to find a mate compared to someone who wants just 1 child.
If fertility decline is a bad thing, as you suggest it is a market failure, and if AI and medical advancements do not adequately compensate for this market failure, then wouldn't this imply that we should be more receptive to immigration? In the past the US economy was strengthened by the influx of immigrants to the workforce. Has something changed so that it should now be a priority to discourage immigration?
I have some calculations on philoprogenitive groups at https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/explaining-falling-birth-rates. Assuming population growth rates don't change, in a century there will be about 10 million Amish, 20 million Haredi. Mormons are growing much more slowly but from a much larger base; if their growth continues that will outnumber Amish+Haredi.
Very interesting, thanks for the link! Seems likely some kind of big shuffle like this will happen in the next few centuries, at least until genetic engineering or societal change can correct the bug.
You say: “A decline in the working population would produce an increase in the price of labor, a decrease in the return on capital, making the old worse off.”
Yes, if capital per capita (k) increases, the price of labor (w) increases, and the return on capital (r) falls. But (with a classical production function) the income from capital (rk) increases and the old ones are not worse.
1) The pill. Women have individual control of reproduction.
2) On the unmechanized farm, children were an asset. Currently they are expensive critters of negative financial value to parents.
3) Decrease in childhood mortality makes having a “spare” child less important.
4) Women are able to work in the monetized sector but motherhood is remains in unmonetized.
If you want more kids, consider an application of the 100% land “tax” proposed by Henry George - abolish private land ownership, replace it with rent paid by the highest bidder, and pay the rent to mothers in proportion to the number of their children.
Your 2 raises a question I didn't go into in the post. Mechanization makes physical strength less important. Why didn't that increase job opportunities for children as well as for women?
Subsidizing the production of children was one of the options I listed.
Henry George's proposal was only for the site value of land.
Older women having children have an increasing chance of abnormal babies, that grow into hugely draining (of resources), ever-dependent, adults. It's not so neat extending child-birthing years, maybe even a net negative.
Thank you for joining with those of us who recognize that the (old age) welfare state is a major explanatory factor in fertility declines, imo second only to contraception (with lucrative female labor force participation ease obviously very high up there as well, though I’d argue this is a steeper phenomenon for the upper 30% than for the entire population).
It is not a coincidence that “childless cat ladies” (i.e. unmarried women) are by far the biggest supporters of the party of the welfare state.
One possible partial solution to the interrelated problems of funding our Ponzi SS/Medicare system and TFR would be to introduce more appropriate incentives into our old-age welfare programs.
Have SS benefits (and Medicare premiums owed) be partly a function of how many children you produce (split appropriately across birthed and raised to adulthood).
Bringing two future taxpaying children into the world/country would be the baseline; the amount of your benefits are increased with more than 2, decreased for only one, and decreased further for zero.
It's confusing to me how the corners of the discourse most anxious about fertility rates are also the ones most aware of UBI debates, elite overproduction theory, woke excesses in the PMC, etc.
If we anticipate soon having more poor people than we have any use for, and we already have way more middle-class people than we have any use for (as shown by rising numbers of reviled HR busybodies, grifting NGO priesthoods and Starbucks baristas with psychology degrees, replication crises in the sciences and administrative bloat in the state), then what is the mechanism by which we think we can just pour large quantities of generic children into the future and have value come out the other end?
You seem to be assuming that the people we have no use for are a result of a shortage of things to be done rather than of a badly functioning incentive system controlling what people end up doing.
Well, ok, *maybe* there are lots of valuable, remunerative tasks out there and existing labor is just misallocated. I mean, I can't easily imagine what remaining high-value tasks we'd need our HR workshop people and ex-coal-miners to do. And I feel like the labor market is still free enough that if those jobs existed, people would find a way to fill them. But ok.
However, even supposing that your point about incentives is true, does it really change the bad calculus of destroying present utility to ensure a higher-fertility future? If you look around and see corn rotting unharvested in the fields, I don't think it matters whether the problem is that the corn is inedible or that it's fine and they just don't have a good way to harvest it. Either way, I think you need to figure out what's up with the existing corn before you can reasonably expect a lot of value from additional planting.
An additional cause I have observed among young people is their general pessimism about the future and an associated desire to not have children.
Consequences
If AI advances to replace humans in many jobs, then the negative consequence you cited of reduced intellectual property creation and slower technological progress (are they really negative?), may not occur. AI could take over much of the work in these areas, potentially overwhelmingly offsetting the effects of a declining population.
Cures
The cures you have cited primarily focus on governmental action, and it seems we are moving to implement, at least to some degree, each of them.
"Ban contraception" -- assuming you include restricting access (in addition to outright banning) to contraception and to abortion? With Roe having been struck down and the push to limit access, this is well on its way to being implemented.
"Sharply restrict women’s participation in the labor force" -- If this means reducing workforce opportunities for women, then the movement to eliminate DEI programs should contribute to that outcome.
"Abolish government funding of the old" -- If this refers to reducing government funding for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, then the current administration’s discussions about entitlement program funding suggest this is going to happen.
One "cure" that is conspicuously absent is using propaganda to promote families and having children. Humans, as a group, are highly susceptible to social influence and messaging (i.e., we are gullible and manipulatable). It did not even require a concerted media campaign to convince over 100 million people to believe, and who still believe, the 2020 election was stolen, so it may not be difficult to shape public perception around the idea that having children should be a primary life goal for women. A well-designed messaging campaign could emphasize that having children provides deep fulfillment and societal value and will provide women with a high level of personal utility.
A number of countries have been trying to use propaganda, most notably China, without much success.
I doubt that eliminating DEI will have a significant effect on women's job opportunities but making abortion illegal in some states might result in a few extra kids. I was imagining much larger changes, which I don't think are at all likely.
"If this refers to reducing government funding for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, then the current administration’s discussions about entitlement program funding suggest this is going to happen." How so? Trump continues to insist that he will not make any cuts in Social Security.
Trump says a whole lot of things, and deciphering which things to believe is not an easy task. Howard Lutnick, his Secretary of Commerce was recently quoted saying:
“You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicare and Medicaid is wrong, so he's going to cut one trillion,” Lutnick added. “Get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against Americans and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars in revenue, and our objective, under Donald Trump, is to balance this budget.”
I think Musk was also quoted as saying that more than 10 million dead people are still receiving social security benefits.
Given these soundbites from Trump's advisors, it sounds like a setup for cuts to at least one of Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.
Musk is saying, correctly, that large numbers of people who would be dead if the birth dates recorded for them were correct are in the Social Security database. The SSA knows that, has chosen not to do anything about it. That doesn't mean that more than ten million dead people are receiving benefits, only that the database has a lot of incorrect information.
Here are three articles on the issue by someone I am told is reliable:
Musk is attempting to mislead people by posting a table with misleading or irrelevant age data and claiming, "this might be the biggest fraud in history." He knows, you know, and I know that the data is bad, and that this is NOT the biggest fraud in history. Why do you supposed he made this statement?
If you want a clear cut example of waste, if you consider under-taxation waste, just look at your property taxes. Your assessed value is set to your purchase price when you purchased your home and it is limited to a two percent increase every year. I don't know about other areas, but if you happen to live in Santa Clara County, then your assessed valuation should be very close to (original assessment)*(1.02)^^(number of years since you purchased your home). The reality is that your assessed valuation is lower than this and, therefore, you are paying less in property taxes than you should if your assessed valuation were properly adjusted. Do you consider this massive fraud by the Santa Clara County Assessor?
People in politics routinely attempt to mislead people. In this case, Musk is doing it with a factually correct statement and misleading implications. But the accurate implication is that the SSA is doing a very sloppy job of maintaining a database that both they and other parts of government rely on, which is a reason to expect them to do other parts of their job badly.
I don't see why "properly adjusted" must mean "set to current market value." The assessed value of my home in Santa Clara County is, so far as I know, calculated in the way California law requires.
Your interpretation of Musk’s statement (that the SSA is doing a sloppy job maintaining a database) is fundamentally different from Musk’s explicit claim (that this might be the biggest fraud in history).
The SSA’s database may contain outdated or inaccurate birthdates, but that does not mean these errors result in fraudulent payments. Many of these records come from an era before digital age verification, meaning they were never designed for the type of report Musk is citing.
To illustrate how misleading his framing is: imagine the SSA had an old database where missing income (2-byte) fields defaulted to a placeholder hex value of "FFFFFFFF" which is approximately of 18 quintillion. Someone could then post a shocking headline saying, “Millions of quintillionaires appear to have received Social Security!”—technically true, but completely misleading.
As a former database programmer, I know that leaving old, rarely used records untouched is not necessarily sloppy—especially if they do not affect payments or decisions. Updating millions of old records unnecessarily would cost taxpayer money for no meaningful benefit (cue another misleading headline: “SSA wastes $9 million updating birthdates of dead people!”).
Regarding the Santa Clara County Assessor, I am not claiming laws are being broken—only that assessments are rising by less than the legal 2% cap, reducing property tax revenue. If the county is choosing not to raise assessments to the full allowable limit under Prop 13, that is a policy decision that benefits longtime homeowners at the expense of new buyers and public services. Just as the federal government can raise money by cutting spending, Santa Clara County is effectively cutting legal tax revenue by failing to assess at the full 2% cap.
I don't think this is just about Trump. Please note that I did not say that the average person is going to view Trump less favorably. We all interpret facts differently and can come to different conclusions. Musk posted a chart showing that the social security roles had more than 20 million people over 100 years old and then stated, "This might be the biggest fraud in history."
I believe Musk is a brilliant person and knows that there are not 20 million people 100 years old or older receiving social security. Lutnick knows there is not a trillion dollars of fraud every year. So what is the purpose of promoting a false narrative. I believe it is a setup to prepare people for cuts, or at least attempted cuts, to at least one of these three programs under the guise of saving us from massive fraud. Why do you think Musk implied a massive fraud citing data that he knows does not prove anything? Andy, you are bright, but not average, and I believe the average American has a difficult time grasping truth after wading through the morass of right and left narratives.
I think there are many valid arguments to be made for cutbacks to various government programs, but those may be too academic for the average person and may not resonate well with them. Anger about fraud is a comfortable jacket that fits most anyone.
Why do you think that Trump, who has for at least 10 years now demagogued just like Democrats about not cutting people’s entitlement benefits, is now going to propose cutting people’s entitlement benefits?
Based on what we are both saying, the average American would indeed view Trump less favorably if he of all people proposed cuts to people’s retirement entitlement benefits
We are not talking about what might be sensible long term public policy. We are not talking about what you might do or I might do (FYI as a start, *I* would change the formula and cut the rate of growth of SS retirement benefits to be based on CPI, rather than average wage growth. That alone would cover almost 80% of the SS shortfall.) We are talking about what Trump will do.
Now to be VERY clear I am referring to Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid is something different. I am not suggesting that Trump will try to cut Medicaid. But that is at least plausible, where Trump proposing cuts to people’s SS or Medicare benefits is not.
If you feel differently, then as Bryan Caplan says, would you like to Bet on It? Because I am happy to.
While I think that cuts or proposed cuts to at least one of social security, Medicaid, or Medicare will happen over the course of the next four years, I am not saying this will come directly from Trump. It might originate from Congress. And, when I refer to cuts, I am referring to the reduction of the benefit regime currently in place. This would include reducing the growth rate of benefits, increasing the age at which full benefits or maximal benefits accrue, and reducing benefits because of personal assets or income. Raising taxes to pay for the current benefit schema would not qualify, and disqualifying recipients because of actual fraud would also not qualify as cuts or proposed cuts.
Since you are discarding Medicaid, part of my original assertion, and you believe that cuts to social security and Medicare are not even plausible, then give me 2 to1 odds, and I will agree to wager $100 to $1,000 on this with you, based on the above terms, if I can know who you are in the real world.
There's a conflation going on between "Dollars spent on <thing> overall," with "Dollars paid per individual on <thing."
Ignoring the absolute dollars of fraud, call it $A, if we reduce what we're spending by $A, there's no reason to reduce the <thing> paid to any individual, yet the overall cost should go down, Also ignoring the ingenuity of bureaucrats to consume money pointlessly.
Unable to read minds, I have no idea why politicians would conflate those two values, any more than I know why politicians routinely ignore Econ 101 or Fleming v Nestor, but they all appear to have gotten that memo.
Trump is imo unfairly and wrongly maligned by people of intelligence for all sorts of things, often outright falsehoods, but the fact that he demagogues entitlements in the identical fashion that Democrats have done for decades is the single political area where he *most* deserves criticism.
You should probably also mention ever-increasing standards for child rearing, particularly in countries like the US, making merely "adequate" provision for one's children increasingly expensive in both time and money.
Why do you think that is happening? In how wide a variety of countries?
I have no idea why, or how widespread this is, or even whether it takes different forms in different countries.
Part of the puzzle is that whatever is happening seems tp be happening almost everywhere. That fits improved contraception or rising incomes but I am not sure what else.
I'm not sure that rising incomes are present everywhere. In the presence of changes to inequality, you can't approximate changes in income by looking at changes in average income. The average doesn't have children.
But I wouldn't have a clue how to find out whether e.g. the bottom 70% were poorer even while the top 30%, and the average, was richer - particularly if I wanted the same answer for every nation, or better yet even smaller units.
Also, while I'm not sure whether child rearing standards are going up anywhere but in the US, I'm also not sure that they are not going up just about everywhere. (This is a potentially answerable question, but not easy to answer.)
One crude measure is calories per capita, which I believe has been increasing almost everywhere. Global rates of extreme poverty have gone down a lot. That doesn't imply everywhere but it is a measure of how badly the bottom is doing that pretty much ignores rich countries.
Infertility increased as vaccines increased..
The puzzle of fertility is that rising male incomes increase it and rising female incomes reduce it.
Measures or household income to fertility are also flawed because fertility reduces income. Specifically, female income. Women face a tradeoff between having more kids and raising more kids, there is only so much time and energy in a day. When we notice that higher household income doesn't result in more kids, that is mostly because women with fewer kids have more income.
If we isolate only on male income, its a positive correlation. In other words, the more money a man makes the easier a tradeoff the wife faces between income and more children.
If we could disentangle assortive mating from this (high earning men marrying women capable of high earnings) I think it would be even stronger. Female income isn't bad in and of itself, it probably even allows for more options if it can outpace cost of childcare. Only if it causes one to choose income over child rearing is it problematic.
The solution is pretty clear. We need big payroll tax breaks for parents (by definition, taxes will have to rise on non-parents). This should scale with kids and income, Box 3 on your W2 * X% per kid. If married filing jointly both parents should get the tax break. We simply acknowledge that the costs of raising children are a form of "payroll tax" being born by parents and we shouldn't "double tax" parents.
Low fertility people will have to pay more payroll taxes to support those that are having the kids that will support them in old age. It's only fair. End the free riding.
At the correct scale this will work. Nobody in the world is really trying anything at any kind of scale that matters, and many of the child subsidies have terrible incentive structures (hungary's is pretty bad for instance).
Fertility increasing with male income and decreasing with female would make sense even if you had a measure of female earning power that wasn't affected by fertility, as long as the time cost of bearing children was born mostly by the mother.
Some additional/related explanations/thoughts:
1) Atomization of the extended family and post-industrial familial diaspora makes it more difficult to have proximate child rearing assistance that is truly loving, so having children has become more intimidating and therefore less desirable.
2) Childhood mortality has plummeted. The trend chart of childhood mortality looks almost exactly like the trend chart of fertility. In ye olden days, to be sure that enough of your children would survive that they would have enough children to survive, etc, you had to have a LOT of children. At least a few of the children you brought into the world needed to bring children of their own into the world for you to be confident that your genes would live on. For you to have three children become parents, you needed to have at least four or five be born, and even if you had that many, there was a decent chance you'd lose most of them, so you really needed to have seven or more to be reasonably confident that three might someday have children of their own. Nowadays, literally 99% of children born survive to adulthood, so if you have just one child, the pressure to have more has meaningfully evaporated.
3) School pushes back age of marriage for everyone, including women, and a woman's age at marriage is an exceptionally good predictor of how many children she'll have. I am an example: I am the youngest of four, my mother got married at 21, had her first child at 23, and her last at 33.
P.S. "Artificial wombs" 🤮
P.P.S. Your point about evolution/the Amish is a good one. The future belongs to those who show up. Antihumanists are least likely to have children. Pronatalists are most likely to have them.
> P.S. "Artificial wombs" 🤮
Agreed. I'm always amazed by how many people don't realize that artificial wombs would turn humans Eusocial.
To me, the Afghan example would seem to strongly indicate that the main cause is technological progress with regards to birth control rather than any social change taking place mainly in Western countries. This is also the explanation with the most straight-forward causality, and it is also the least useful explanation for people with a political axe to grind (except Luddites, I suppose).
As for the cure, as far as I can tell, social engineering tends to turn out worse than the disease, so I'd prefer laissez faire. But I do see a potential problem there of liberal societies being outbred by illiberal ones – e.g. what happens if South Korea ends up with a population of 10M and North Korea with one of 100M?
New angle on falling birthrates: growing fundamental cultural dividision between young people evident from huge diversion between young women and young men's political viewpoints. See German post-election surveys.
The default assumption here seems to be that having fewer children is a choice, made primarily by women. I wonder how much this is true now, as opposed to in the 1960s when reliable hormonal birth control came into use.
To what extent is the birth dearth a result of a conscious choice to have few or no children, and how much is the physical inability to have them? A couple marrying in their 30s may want 4 children but be unable to have them, or have any.
There is choice involved, to delay marriage, to use birth control while young, to have a job. Many of my co-workers are women in their 30s, who seem to be popping out babies as fast as they can. Others are women in their 20s, who mostly are not.
The choice by women seems to be delaying making a commitment to a stable married life until the late 20s and 30s, in spite of a desire to have children. Not having children is downstream and a not necessarily desired outcome.
There is evidence that hormonal birth control alters emotions and thinking of women.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6838021/
I speculate that constant exposure to female hormones also alters male emotions and thinking.
The Ponzi scheme element of Medicare/Medicaid in the US is self-limiting, like all Ponzi schemes. I observe it in the UK with our NHS. The waiting room, both physical and virtual, in our GP surgeries and hospitals grows ever larger. Rationing by queuing is the well known effect. And many older folk will simply die while queuing. Less improvement in life expectancy or actual falls is the visible result.
The main problem of having fewer people is that there will be fewer lives lived. Lives are good!
That is a reason for utilitarians who are maximizing total utility. I think people are more likely to be moved by perceived threats to themselves.
How do you make the tradeoff between marginally more people living marginally worse lives?
As it happens I have a chapter on the general form of that problem: "What Does Optimum Population Mean?" Research in Population Economics, Vol. III (1981), Eds. Simon and Lindert. It's linked to my academic page: http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Academic/Academic.html
> If people who are in favor of children have them and people against having children don’t, an increasing fraction of the population will be descended from the first group.
I have a feeling just being in favor does not help. You actually need to find a mate to be able to agree to it. I wonder if it is harder for such people to find a mate compared to someone who wants just 1 child.
If fertility decline is a bad thing, as you suggest it is a market failure, and if AI and medical advancements do not adequately compensate for this market failure, then wouldn't this imply that we should be more receptive to immigration? In the past the US economy was strengthened by the influx of immigrants to the workforce. Has something changed so that it should now be a priority to discourage immigration?
The amish will inherit the earth. They're the ones showing up
I have some calculations on philoprogenitive groups at https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/explaining-falling-birth-rates. Assuming population growth rates don't change, in a century there will be about 10 million Amish, 20 million Haredi. Mormons are growing much more slowly but from a much larger base; if their growth continues that will outnumber Amish+Haredi.
The problem with these kinds of analyses is they turn into a game of "which derivative does one keep constant".
Very interesting, thanks for the link! Seems likely some kind of big shuffle like this will happen in the next few centuries, at least until genetic engineering or societal change can correct the bug.
You say: “A decline in the working population would produce an increase in the price of labor, a decrease in the return on capital, making the old worse off.”
Yes, if capital per capita (k) increases, the price of labor (w) increases, and the return on capital (r) falls. But (with a classical production function) the income from capital (rk) increases and the old ones are not worse.
Uh…
You might well be correct that old people with capital are not worse off.
But old people expecting younger people to pay for their Ponzi-scheme old-age benefits definitively are worse off.
In a pay-as-you-go pension system, yes, but not necessarily in capitalization.
Why? Quick thoughts.
1) The pill. Women have individual control of reproduction.
2) On the unmechanized farm, children were an asset. Currently they are expensive critters of negative financial value to parents.
3) Decrease in childhood mortality makes having a “spare” child less important.
4) Women are able to work in the monetized sector but motherhood is remains in unmonetized.
If you want more kids, consider an application of the 100% land “tax” proposed by Henry George - abolish private land ownership, replace it with rent paid by the highest bidder, and pay the rent to mothers in proportion to the number of their children.
Your 2 raises a question I didn't go into in the post. Mechanization makes physical strength less important. Why didn't that increase job opportunities for children as well as for women?
Subsidizing the production of children was one of the options I listed.
Henry George's proposal was only for the site value of land.
Older women having children have an increasing chance of abnormal babies, that grow into hugely draining (of resources), ever-dependent, adults. It's not so neat extending child-birthing years, maybe even a net negative.
If you extend them by slowing aging that may slow the effects that produce that outcome.
Thank you for joining with those of us who recognize that the (old age) welfare state is a major explanatory factor in fertility declines, imo second only to contraception (with lucrative female labor force participation ease obviously very high up there as well, though I’d argue this is a steeper phenomenon for the upper 30% than for the entire population).
It is not a coincidence that “childless cat ladies” (i.e. unmarried women) are by far the biggest supporters of the party of the welfare state.
One possible partial solution to the interrelated problems of funding our Ponzi SS/Medicare system and TFR would be to introduce more appropriate incentives into our old-age welfare programs.
Have SS benefits (and Medicare premiums owed) be partly a function of how many children you produce (split appropriately across birthed and raised to adulthood).
Bringing two future taxpaying children into the world/country would be the baseline; the amount of your benefits are increased with more than 2, decreased for only one, and decreased further for zero.
It's confusing to me how the corners of the discourse most anxious about fertility rates are also the ones most aware of UBI debates, elite overproduction theory, woke excesses in the PMC, etc.
If we anticipate soon having more poor people than we have any use for, and we already have way more middle-class people than we have any use for (as shown by rising numbers of reviled HR busybodies, grifting NGO priesthoods and Starbucks baristas with psychology degrees, replication crises in the sciences and administrative bloat in the state), then what is the mechanism by which we think we can just pour large quantities of generic children into the future and have value come out the other end?
You seem to be assuming that the people we have no use for are a result of a shortage of things to be done rather than of a badly functioning incentive system controlling what people end up doing.
Well, ok, *maybe* there are lots of valuable, remunerative tasks out there and existing labor is just misallocated. I mean, I can't easily imagine what remaining high-value tasks we'd need our HR workshop people and ex-coal-miners to do. And I feel like the labor market is still free enough that if those jobs existed, people would find a way to fill them. But ok.
However, even supposing that your point about incentives is true, does it really change the bad calculus of destroying present utility to ensure a higher-fertility future? If you look around and see corn rotting unharvested in the fields, I don't think it matters whether the problem is that the corn is inedible or that it's fine and they just don't have a good way to harvest it. Either way, I think you need to figure out what's up with the existing corn before you can reasonably expect a lot of value from additional planting.
Causes
An additional cause I have observed among young people is their general pessimism about the future and an associated desire to not have children.
Consequences
If AI advances to replace humans in many jobs, then the negative consequence you cited of reduced intellectual property creation and slower technological progress (are they really negative?), may not occur. AI could take over much of the work in these areas, potentially overwhelmingly offsetting the effects of a declining population.
Cures
The cures you have cited primarily focus on governmental action, and it seems we are moving to implement, at least to some degree, each of them.
"Ban contraception" -- assuming you include restricting access (in addition to outright banning) to contraception and to abortion? With Roe having been struck down and the push to limit access, this is well on its way to being implemented.
"Sharply restrict women’s participation in the labor force" -- If this means reducing workforce opportunities for women, then the movement to eliminate DEI programs should contribute to that outcome.
"Abolish government funding of the old" -- If this refers to reducing government funding for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, then the current administration’s discussions about entitlement program funding suggest this is going to happen.
One "cure" that is conspicuously absent is using propaganda to promote families and having children. Humans, as a group, are highly susceptible to social influence and messaging (i.e., we are gullible and manipulatable). It did not even require a concerted media campaign to convince over 100 million people to believe, and who still believe, the 2020 election was stolen, so it may not be difficult to shape public perception around the idea that having children should be a primary life goal for women. A well-designed messaging campaign could emphasize that having children provides deep fulfillment and societal value and will provide women with a high level of personal utility.
I have an old post on the pessimism issue. https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/pessimism
A number of countries have been trying to use propaganda, most notably China, without much success.
I doubt that eliminating DEI will have a significant effect on women's job opportunities but making abortion illegal in some states might result in a few extra kids. I was imagining much larger changes, which I don't think are at all likely.
"If this refers to reducing government funding for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, then the current administration’s discussions about entitlement program funding suggest this is going to happen." How so? Trump continues to insist that he will not make any cuts in Social Security.
Trump says a whole lot of things, and deciphering which things to believe is not an easy task. Howard Lutnick, his Secretary of Commerce was recently quoted saying:
“You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicare and Medicaid is wrong, so he's going to cut one trillion,” Lutnick added. “Get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against Americans and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars in revenue, and our objective, under Donald Trump, is to balance this budget.”
I think Musk was also quoted as saying that more than 10 million dead people are still receiving social security benefits.
Given these soundbites from Trump's advisors, it sounds like a setup for cuts to at least one of Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.
Musk is saying, correctly, that large numbers of people who would be dead if the birth dates recorded for them were correct are in the Social Security database. The SSA knows that, has chosen not to do anything about it. That doesn't mean that more than ten million dead people are receiving benefits, only that the database has a lot of incorrect information.
Here are three articles on the issue by someone I am told is reliable:
https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/on-social-security-old-age-benefits
https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/visualization-of-social-security
https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/a-potential-large-source-of-junk
Musk is attempting to mislead people by posting a table with misleading or irrelevant age data and claiming, "this might be the biggest fraud in history." He knows, you know, and I know that the data is bad, and that this is NOT the biggest fraud in history. Why do you supposed he made this statement?
If you want a clear cut example of waste, if you consider under-taxation waste, just look at your property taxes. Your assessed value is set to your purchase price when you purchased your home and it is limited to a two percent increase every year. I don't know about other areas, but if you happen to live in Santa Clara County, then your assessed valuation should be very close to (original assessment)*(1.02)^^(number of years since you purchased your home). The reality is that your assessed valuation is lower than this and, therefore, you are paying less in property taxes than you should if your assessed valuation were properly adjusted. Do you consider this massive fraud by the Santa Clara County Assessor?
People in politics routinely attempt to mislead people. In this case, Musk is doing it with a factually correct statement and misleading implications. But the accurate implication is that the SSA is doing a very sloppy job of maintaining a database that both they and other parts of government rely on, which is a reason to expect them to do other parts of their job badly.
I don't see why "properly adjusted" must mean "set to current market value." The assessed value of my home in Santa Clara County is, so far as I know, calculated in the way California law requires.
Your interpretation of Musk’s statement (that the SSA is doing a sloppy job maintaining a database) is fundamentally different from Musk’s explicit claim (that this might be the biggest fraud in history).
The SSA’s database may contain outdated or inaccurate birthdates, but that does not mean these errors result in fraudulent payments. Many of these records come from an era before digital age verification, meaning they were never designed for the type of report Musk is citing.
To illustrate how misleading his framing is: imagine the SSA had an old database where missing income (2-byte) fields defaulted to a placeholder hex value of "FFFFFFFF" which is approximately of 18 quintillion. Someone could then post a shocking headline saying, “Millions of quintillionaires appear to have received Social Security!”—technically true, but completely misleading.
As a former database programmer, I know that leaving old, rarely used records untouched is not necessarily sloppy—especially if they do not affect payments or decisions. Updating millions of old records unnecessarily would cost taxpayer money for no meaningful benefit (cue another misleading headline: “SSA wastes $9 million updating birthdates of dead people!”).
Regarding the Santa Clara County Assessor, I am not claiming laws are being broken—only that assessments are rising by less than the legal 2% cap, reducing property tax revenue. If the county is choosing not to raise assessments to the full allowable limit under Prop 13, that is a policy decision that benefits longtime homeowners at the expense of new buyers and public services. Just as the federal government can raise money by cutting spending, Santa Clara County is effectively cutting legal tax revenue by failing to assess at the full 2% cap.
Musk saying there are 10M dead people collecting SS benefits means that Trump is saying he’s going to cut people’s SS benefits?
Litnick saying they’re gonna eliminate fraudulent scams means that Trump is gonna cut people’s benefits?
You think if they actually succeeded in cutting out anywhere close to that much fraud that the average person is going to view Trump less favorably?
🙄🙄🙄
I don't think this is just about Trump. Please note that I did not say that the average person is going to view Trump less favorably. We all interpret facts differently and can come to different conclusions. Musk posted a chart showing that the social security roles had more than 20 million people over 100 years old and then stated, "This might be the biggest fraud in history."
I believe Musk is a brilliant person and knows that there are not 20 million people 100 years old or older receiving social security. Lutnick knows there is not a trillion dollars of fraud every year. So what is the purpose of promoting a false narrative. I believe it is a setup to prepare people for cuts, or at least attempted cuts, to at least one of these three programs under the guise of saving us from massive fraud. Why do you think Musk implied a massive fraud citing data that he knows does not prove anything? Andy, you are bright, but not average, and I believe the average American has a difficult time grasping truth after wading through the morass of right and left narratives.
I think there are many valid arguments to be made for cutbacks to various government programs, but those may be too academic for the average person and may not resonate well with them. Anger about fraud is a comfortable jacket that fits most anyone.
You are likely bright, not average.
Why do you think that Trump, who has for at least 10 years now demagogued just like Democrats about not cutting people’s entitlement benefits, is now going to propose cutting people’s entitlement benefits?
Based on what we are both saying, the average American would indeed view Trump less favorably if he of all people proposed cuts to people’s retirement entitlement benefits
We are not talking about what might be sensible long term public policy. We are not talking about what you might do or I might do (FYI as a start, *I* would change the formula and cut the rate of growth of SS retirement benefits to be based on CPI, rather than average wage growth. That alone would cover almost 80% of the SS shortfall.) We are talking about what Trump will do.
Now to be VERY clear I am referring to Social Security and Medicare. Medicaid is something different. I am not suggesting that Trump will try to cut Medicaid. But that is at least plausible, where Trump proposing cuts to people’s SS or Medicare benefits is not.
If you feel differently, then as Bryan Caplan says, would you like to Bet on It? Because I am happy to.
While I think that cuts or proposed cuts to at least one of social security, Medicaid, or Medicare will happen over the course of the next four years, I am not saying this will come directly from Trump. It might originate from Congress. And, when I refer to cuts, I am referring to the reduction of the benefit regime currently in place. This would include reducing the growth rate of benefits, increasing the age at which full benefits or maximal benefits accrue, and reducing benefits because of personal assets or income. Raising taxes to pay for the current benefit schema would not qualify, and disqualifying recipients because of actual fraud would also not qualify as cuts or proposed cuts.
Since you are discarding Medicaid, part of my original assertion, and you believe that cuts to social security and Medicare are not even plausible, then give me 2 to1 odds, and I will agree to wager $100 to $1,000 on this with you, based on the above terms, if I can know who you are in the real world.
There's a conflation going on between "Dollars spent on <thing> overall," with "Dollars paid per individual on <thing."
Ignoring the absolute dollars of fraud, call it $A, if we reduce what we're spending by $A, there's no reason to reduce the <thing> paid to any individual, yet the overall cost should go down, Also ignoring the ingenuity of bureaucrats to consume money pointlessly.
Unable to read minds, I have no idea why politicians would conflate those two values, any more than I know why politicians routinely ignore Econ 101 or Fleming v Nestor, but they all appear to have gotten that memo.
Agreed.
Trump is imo unfairly and wrongly maligned by people of intelligence for all sorts of things, often outright falsehoods, but the fact that he demagogues entitlements in the identical fashion that Democrats have done for decades is the single political area where he *most* deserves criticism.