Apparently households with a yearly income of one million dollar and above are the only ones exhibiting above-replacement level fertility. The most immediate explanation, namely, the availability of hired help to facilitate parenting, is partial at best: hired help is available also to affluent households well below the one million threshold, who however exhibit a markedly lower fertility. A plausible explanation is that only the truly rich feel secure enough about their status to afford the handicap in the ‘meritocratic’ competition for status implied by having and raising children. In fact, at the top end of the income distribution the currently prevailing low status associated to raising children may invert, in line with the concept of ‘counter-signaling .’
The new reproductive technologies allowing a reduction of the downside risk of having children are likely to become available first to the rich. This should further raise their fertility: the rich would have smarter kids and more of them.
When you get to the level of truly rich, the wife doesn't have to work. And if she does work, it can be a fun make-work job that doesn't really need to make money. True status is that your wife has a "business" losing $10k a month or some dumb NGO thing or she's a high end "tradwife".
The real fertility crunch is two people in highly demanding real careers. If that's what it takes to afford real estate/childcare, you aren't going to be having many kids.
The truly rich are too small a demographic group to supply eugenics on their own. You need to get the UMC fertility rate up.
Note that the real problem here is that sending the wife in an UMC couple to work for money is a zero sum game. You do it and the other couples do it and then you all try to bid up the same real estate, same degrees, compete for the same careers, etc. It's a Red Queen Race.
You gotta find a way to make the goods involved less rivalrous, and you've got to normalize the disposable income between breeders and non breeders (basically, tax non breeders more and breeders less) so that having children isn't seen as a way to get one up on others in the Red Queen Race.
Who is the "you" in this? Are you answering the question "if you were dictator how would you raise fertility?" That isn't the question I am asking in the post, as I say at the beginning.
From the Baby Boom to the current Baby Bust, GDP/capita increased by something like thousands of %. Women went from spending nearly their entire lives in domestic service to almost none. We got the washing machine, jet travel, and Amazon delivering whatever I want from the whole world in two days.
And fertility fell.
What are the odds that Zoom, Chat GPT, and artificial wombs are going to change that?
All of the productivity those nerds, engineers, and business people came up with got redirected straight into Red Queen Races. We didn't get Keynes's 15 hour work week prediction. Star Trek didn't happen. You can blame the government for much of that if you like (I sure would), but that still means that *somebody needs to change the government*.
"You" is "us". And yes, we need to find a way to change the incentive structure because as mere individuals no matter how much we increase material prosperity we just end up in a no holds bared knife fight for positional goods so brutal we rob our own wombs to pay for it.
From 1950 to the present real GNP per capita has increased about five fold. That's a lot, but not thousands of percent. Real per capita income has gone up about as much.
In the grand scheme of things, where people on the Malthusian edge had eight kids and rapidly repopulated after every demographic disaster, does this insight matter?
Currently, people support regulations that curtail the supply of housing. I like to think it's not too far-fetched that public opinion will shift the other way some day. Both participants in the VP debate at least paid lip-service to the idea that more housing would be a good thing. Then again, if they are to be believed then half of all new homes will be given to illegal immigrants by the Deep State, and the other half will be bought up by speculators and left vacant 🤷♂️.
This is already happening, except that the "sustainable communities" crowd who are pushing it won't leave the properties empty. Blackrock (the main investor group involved) will bulldoze the houses and rebuild super-dense apartments which they will own forever, while continuing to use the urban-planning agencies to keep out competition. This is part of the WEF "Great Reset" to make us all serfs.
Have you read about Canada? Due very heavy legal immigration there’s now a massive housing crisis. A real estate agent told me the only young people buying were getting extensive parental help. I just sold a modest one bedroom condo in Victoria, BC. A well to do man paid all cash ($400K) to buy it for his son.
Young people can no longer even afford rent and are living with parents. A friend has two married kids with her. She’s not expecting grandkids.
I had two children back in the 70s. They’re both married with children themselves now. But they bought before Trudeau insanity took over. If I was a dictator I’d put him on an ice floe in the Arctic. He’s wrecked the country.
Some people foresee that remote work will lead to deurbanization. Personally I have been considering moving to a less urban/expensive area now that I am mostly working from home and thus no longer have much of a need for living within walking distance to the office.
It's clearly possible to have a large family under current circumstances — some people do, not all of them rich. The question is what changes might make it more likely. Martin is suggesting one change that would. My guess is that the effect would be small but I could be wrong.
In an earlier post, on homelessness, I calculated that from 1965 to 2023 the cost of housing per square foot, inflation adjusted, stayed about the same — houses got more expensive but also bigger. Over that same period real income increased substantially, so housing became more affordable while birth rates fell. Of course, it is possible that making it even more affordable would push them up, but the idea that more expensive housing is the main explanation for low birth rates does not fit the evidence.
"Housing" is a hard good to measure. Housing is cheap where the jobs aren't, and expensive where they are. Also, the fact that there is "cheap housing" in the "bad part of town" may influence *metrics*, but isn't useful when the kind of middle to upper middle class people you want to have more kids are doing their budget. My nephew in CA shows me his budget and its pretty obvious housing is a big reason he's not starting a family, it doesn't matter if there are cheap options in West Virginia or the Ghetto.
The real problem we have is that having outlawed discrimination base on not price, people have used price as the way to keep out the underclass and other dysfunctionals. Real estate is expensive because that's how you make sure your neighborhood and schools only have the right kind people in them that don't cause problems.
We get more building in Red States in part because they do a better job ameliorating the externalities of dysfunctionals. When you don't have to worry so much who your neighbors are you don't have the same incentives to be a NIMBY. This is why I don't have much hope for the blue states, they think they can end zoning by making a substack post and convincing a state legislator rather then addressing the root causes.
“Main” explanations for low birth rates, and what to do about it are two very different questions.
While there are no doubt many other additional explanations, the 3 biggest ones are clearly a) vastly increased wealth/income, b) birth control (both contraception and abortion) and c) generous state welfare (in the U.S. both Social Security *and* Medicare) for the old.
No serious person would suggest going backwards on a) or b), and even if there are a few “true believer” libertarians who would advocate eliminating or radically reducing c), imo the chances of that occurring in a rich country are essentially 0%.
So we are left with the far harder question of how to create the proper incentives in the cultural, in government, in our leaders, etc.
No single suggestion is likely to be even 30% of a solution. But imo one thing government could do would be to provide both a large child tax a credit AND a large tax deduction for each child raised.
A second small improvement would be the Vance suggestion to give parents the vote for their children. This would lead to more pro-family, pro-growth policies than we have now, but the left would never go for this, since “childless cat ladies” vote 2-1 for Democrats, while married people (and unmarried men) majority vote for Republicans.
Whatever else happens, the world of the future will belong to those who are there. The 'children' of the childless won't be there.
If instead of shoving everyone into 15-minute mega-cities, most people (using work-from-home, drone delivery, etc) move to less crowded spaces those who desire and have children may have at least one more than they would have. Maybe those who woud have had one or none if a 15-mnute city will be in exurbia and have 2 or more.
In addition, having more people with children outside of cities (this is happening now, really), with AI and connectivity and work from home, some sort of home schooling with diferent parents guiding different classes may well make having children less burdensome and more fun.
Confession: I NEVER found my children to be a burden. Rather they have always been a blessing.
I get the housing prices are a real problem and most families feel the need to have two incomes, but there are alternatives!
Even making much lower incomes, if you live in a rural or semi-rural area you can afford a lot more with less. The median home listing in my county is $160k right now. Even if that's a small house with a small yard (signs of a poor housing for people in my area) that's probably bigger than most housing in cities and infinitely more yard. Some Googling says that a 30 year mortgage on that kind of home is about $1k/month, or less than a third of the median rent in NYC. The median home size in my area is 1,700 sq. ft., compared to around 600 in NYC.
NYC's median household income is a little under $80k, while where I live household income is just under $60k. The difference in standard of living totally makes that worthwhile - you feel richer while making less.
I think that was kind of the underying theme of my post. If you want more children, there are going to be places where they will be 'cheaper' and your life will be richer.
Work at home is not going away. My wife has been doing pretty much the same job since late 2020 for the same company. Since Covid she has worked from home. So have most of her co-workers, and her company is thriving. It has a building that was designed to hod about 500 workers in a nice, upscale suburb. But now they're getting more work done by workers at home and ony having some 50 workers in the buiding. So they're renting very good office space to several other small companies that have a lot of off-site empoyees. The company has a new revenue stream.
Meanwhile, my wife is more productive, AND she can schedule her time to do other things she wants to do. So we moved to be closer to her famiy 2 years ago.
I think that, will lead more people to move to places where they can get more of what they want. I also thin a lot of these people will be professionals who want better education for their children, and wil find than among them all theyhave the knowledge to use "pods" to homeschool from K-12. And they will do so, and it will attract others. And homeschool pods mean interaction among parents, so . . .
Maybe not next year, but check in 10 years from now.
In keeping with the quoting of ideas from SF stories... Clifford Simak's "City" starts out with a similar concept. All manufacturing was automated and comms were at modern levels (1952) story. Everyone had moved out to the country side.
However, in his story, instead of adopting the characteristics of folks who currently live away from cities, they became agoraphobic because they never left their homes and never visited anyone in person.
Agree about children. My Son is the best thing there's ever been in my life.
Talk about changing social values is mostly wishful thinking, because major changes in the form of a horde of migrants who won't assimilate is replacing us as we speak. Many of the groups involved are either Catholic or Muslim, both of which encourage large families. Thus the problem is solving itself, whether we like the answer or not.
The only succesful example of 1st world country with high tfr is Israel, where religious identity plays a big role. The only succcessful examples of sub-groups in the 1st world with high tfr are religious groups (trad caths, orthodox jews, some evangelical sects).
Seems clear the only real solution to boost fertility will have to involve cultural or genetic selection for religion, though it's necessary but not sufficient condition (many religious groups DONT have high tfr). so likely religion PLUS focus on family/kids.
Yes. Specifically libertarian eugenics, letting each couple choose, from the children it could have, which children it does have. Why do you think that is a bad thing?
Do you also think it is bad for a woman, in deciding who to marry, to consider, among other things, whether she wants children somewhat like him? That too is eugenics.
Presumably some mix of firms that hope to profit by the technology, government money, and charitable money. Who funded the development of the technologies for keeping premature infants alive that saved my grandson?
Women will do whatever it takes to get and keep their status high with other women. Motherhood no longer increases that status. Change that, and I bet the birth rate will increase.
Take resources from non-mothers and give it to mothers.
People say money hasn't worked, but they've only ever tried like 10% the cost of raising a child and usually provided as in-kind services rather then cash.
The real problem is that parents can't vote for their children, and the childless have no shame voting for retirements they never had the kids to pay for.
A number of governments have tried financial incentives, to negligible effect. Hungary comes to mind.
Also, subsidies for mothers effectively cuckold unmarried men. Married couples would probably object to subsides for single mothers. Unmarried men would check out even more than many do now.
As I said, nobody has actually tried to compensate people an amount remotely close to the actual cost of child rearing. When I see a scale and method in line with the problem fail I’ll update my priors, but nobody has remotely tried for real.
Certainly I would favor the payouts to reward proper behavior and good breeding.
We don’t have unlimited resources. This is an important problem, but that doesn’t mean we should _waste_ money on it. There’s also the fact that, futile or not, government spending is easier to start than to end.
I have no idea. I think female intrasexual status competition has gotten completely out of hand. Male attempts to intervene are the only thing that unites them.
Even TERFs focus on men in women’s spaces instead of the effects that “treatments” for Sudden Onset Gender Dysphoria have on girls’ fertility.
The incels just need to become passport bros. There are billions of good women in SEA and LATAM that would highly value a partner who is undesirable by Western standards.
I know you mean children being born. But can we use adoption (across the national borders) as a proxy for fertility ?
What if Americans could very easily adopt children from other countries? If the legal process was simplified with multiple governments co-operating, may be India, Somalia, Nigeria, Afganistan etc. could send millions of new born babies to USA. Yeah it is not fertility rate increase but the end result is the same. More young babies in USA.
The pro-lifers can offer very simple incentives like $1000 to no go for an abortion and instead hand over the baby to an American adoption agency and they can help save a lot of lives in India while making lives of Indian women better.
The price of genetic engineering one’s children in utero and the cost of physically bearing children falls (artificially wombs?). This would remove the uncertainty/risk in 1) pregnancy and 2) the outcomes of the child. On the 2nd point, much less of a chance of having a child you’ll be disappointed with, so more likely to have more.
On the flip side, the reduction in uncertainty in child outcomes may also reduce fertility because parents would be assured that their one child would be great or exactly what they wanted.
Wages increase to the point where the labor supply curve bends backward (workers can afford more leisure). The opportunity cost of having children then falls, so fertility rises.
And re the cities point mentioned above, YIMBY could lower the cost of housing in the locations where jobs are and people want to work/live; this would be a real income increase greater than most others.
IIRC, US fertility rate was declining even before the Great Depression and WWII pushed it down, and the baby boom was the outlier.
One hypothesis to add to causes is that moving away from farming meant that children's work no longer brought value to the family. I'm sure ugly factories and antipathy to child labor contributed.
As work and technology changes, could we find a place for 8 year olds to add to the family income?
I would include governmental solutions that there is some reason to think likely to happen. What I don't want are answers to the question "If you were dictator, what might you do to raise fertility," which in my experience, here and on DSL where I first raised the question, are most of what I get.
Then I think the school choice (vouchers) solution is a good one that fits your constraints.
A decent portion of the TFR problem is that many people believe the “global warming is destroying the planet” and other Malthusian, western consumption is inherently bad crap they are taught in schools, and so don’t want to have kids, and certainly not very many if they do.
School choice - “forced” in a similar way that the feds got all states to a 21 year old drinking age, by threat of withholding federal money - would be a pretty big incremental step towards eliminating that ideology being widespread among the young, and so would likely have a positive impact on fertility rates. It would of course have multiple other desirable effects as well.
I expect school choice to continue to become more common through action at the state level, don't think it likely that the federal government will pressure the states to enact it.
I'm not sure why pessimism about the future is so common. It isn't only climate catastrophism — distopian fiction is also very popular.
“I'm not sure why pessimism about the future is so common. It isn't only climate catastrophism — distopian fiction is also very popular.”
IMO these are closely correlated - leftist ideology today is that western capitalism is evil and the primary/exclusive cause of what is wrong in the world. “Doomism” combined with “victim” status for the first time ever being higher than the status of the successful are mantras of the left (and it’s hard to deny that preaching - and teaching - such pessimism has helped them win elections).
Given that youths are taught that either the deck is stacked against them, or that they are the oppressors themselves, it is hardly surprising why pessimism about the future is so common. Young people believe they have it harder than any previous generation, despite the reality that by all objective measures they have it better.
Separately, while I see why you think it likely that school choice will develop at the state level in red states and some purple ones, I don’t understand your optimism about why it might develop in blue states. And it is blue states and blue cities disproportionately where the pessimism exists.
I think that it is pretty clear that low fertility is not an incentive problem (all surveys I could dig up in various parts of the world indicate that people WANT to have more children than they end up having) and it is mostly not a heritable behavioral pattern (that is mathematically impossible). It must be some environmental change in the broad sense. Also, high-fertility communities also experience a fertility decline, it is just a bit delayed compared to the rest of humanity; I don't think that the increase of their relative weight will significantly offset fertility. They may well hit the same walls long before their cultural patterns become dominant, which, in turn, might not even happen precisely because of that.
To me, it seems like the immediate reason for declining fertility is the increasing age at which people have their first child. Both male and female fertility fall with age, though in case of women it is more dramatic. The reason for this is the depletion of ovarian reserve. The technical solution is to freeze eggs during the most fertile years (in the late teens and early twenties) and have them fertilized in vitro. The availability of this technology is increasing rapidly and it may well become very widespread, once it will become better known. Having frozen eggs might even become a signal making women more attractive as mates in their thirties and forties.
Okay, let me clarify. Of course, most human behavior is driven by incentives. Including the behavior that results in having fewer children. My claim, which I am willing to back up by studies, if necessary, is that these incentives are not directly against having children and to a large extent people are unaware that what they are doing will result in them having fewer children than they would want. Thus, additional incentives rewarding having more children will not change anything. This has been unsuccessfully tried too many times to ignore. People start having children late and at some point they realize that they have fewer children than they wanted. The extent of fertility decline with age is not common knowledge at all. It is much more dramatic than most people (very much including a younger me) think.
Ok, now we *mostly* agree, but I still disagree with you in part.
We agree that all the other factors besides additional financial incentives matter MUCH more than even the biggest imaginable financial incentives.
We agree that small financial incentives - similar to the ones that you say have been “unsuccessfully tried too many times to ignore” would make virtually no difference.
Where we disagree is that a sufficiently large financial incentive would make *some* difference.
Whether we as a society a) could afford it and/or b) it would be a wise thing to do are different questions. In the short term, certainly for the U.S., I might well agree with you that it would not. For other countries, or in the longer term, it might well be a worthwhile/“necessary” (though again by itself not likely sufficient) thing to do.
P.S. putting in such a large financial incentive might also have valuable signaling benefit, and help to change the culture to where people decide they want to have more children because it is a good status symbol.
For one IVF is an uncomfortable process no matter what your age, so very few people want to do it unless its to conceive a child in the near future with a known partner.
For another having some eggs frozen somewhere doesn't get rid of the wrinkles or give you the energy to chase a toddler around.
Mostly, I think it gives people false hope. They ought to be focused on their biological clock, not trying to deny it. If it's an excuse not to be out there trying to find a partner, its unlikely to lead to more kids.
I love IVF for the eugenic possibilities and recommend it as opposed to natural birth, but its not clear it will safe society.
"For one IVF is an uncomfortable process no matter what your age, so very few people want to do it unless its to conceive a child in the near future with a known partner."
You mean egg extraction, not IVF, right? It is uncomfortable, but so are many other things that women do in order to be more attractive and more fertile.
"For another having some eggs frozen somewhere doesn't get rid of the wrinkles or give you the energy to chase a toddler around."
Yes, these are different, largely orthogonal problems, and they have different solutions. But let me tell you, that the ability to afford being a full-time dad in your forties gives you much more energy to chase a toddler around than arriving home in the afternoon exhausted from work in your twenties, taking over from a mother, also exhausted from having to do all this alone in the absence of a husband and not being able to afford a nanny.
"Mostly, I think it gives people false hope. They ought to be focused on their biological clock, not trying to deny it. If it's an excuse not to be out there trying to find a partner, its unlikely to lead to more kids."
No, it demonstrably gives them more healthy children. This is a factual question and there is more than enough data to answer it.
"I love IVF for the eugenic possibilities and recommend it as opposed to natural birth, but its not clear it will safe society."
Unfortunately, not too many jurisdictions currently allow to use IVF for eugenic purposes. Gender selection is illegal almost everywhere, and even screening for genetic diseases is only allowed in a limited number of places where it is possible to do at all. I was really shocked to learn that even screening for Down syndrome is illegal in many places. However, it is already quite visible that jurisdictions that allow genetic screening are becoming hubs for fertility treatments, earning a lot of money from medical tourism.
This is especially important, since many, if not most, genetic diseases are the result of the combination of some traits that are separately much less harmful, harmless or even advantageous. For example, people with some mild form of ASD are well-functioning and even tend to perform better at some important tasks, but by the time they learn how to overcome their handicap in mating and become sufficiently self-aware, they are naturally drawn to similar partners, not least because "they understand". Such couples are running a non-negligible risk of having children with full-blown autism, which is not what they typically want.
"No, it demonstrably gives them more healthy children. This is a factual question and there is more than enough data to answer it."
I'd like to see this data. What if the TFR of people who freeze their eggs for the purpose of having a child in the far future with a partner they haven't met yet? I'm betting it's not high, probably pretty close to the TFR of smart liberal women in general (which is like 0.6).
It's ironic considering I'm going to have my daughters freeze eggs at 18, but the messaging is different. I'm having them do it for eugenics, not as a way to avoid getting married for as long as possible.
"Unfortunately, not too many jurisdictions currently allow to use IVF for eugenic purposes."
I'm in America and don't know of any states that restrict this, at least any I've lived in. Polygenic scoring is advertised at clinics all over the country.
For instance, the Texas Fertility Center advertises PGT-P and other screening despite having a six week abortion ban.
Apparently households with a yearly income of one million dollar and above are the only ones exhibiting above-replacement level fertility. The most immediate explanation, namely, the availability of hired help to facilitate parenting, is partial at best: hired help is available also to affluent households well below the one million threshold, who however exhibit a markedly lower fertility. A plausible explanation is that only the truly rich feel secure enough about their status to afford the handicap in the ‘meritocratic’ competition for status implied by having and raising children. In fact, at the top end of the income distribution the currently prevailing low status associated to raising children may invert, in line with the concept of ‘counter-signaling .’
The new reproductive technologies allowing a reduction of the downside risk of having children are likely to become available first to the rich. This should further raise their fertility: the rich would have smarter kids and more of them.
When you get to the level of truly rich, the wife doesn't have to work. And if she does work, it can be a fun make-work job that doesn't really need to make money. True status is that your wife has a "business" losing $10k a month or some dumb NGO thing or she's a high end "tradwife".
The real fertility crunch is two people in highly demanding real careers. If that's what it takes to afford real estate/childcare, you aren't going to be having many kids.
The truly rich are too small a demographic group to supply eugenics on their own. You need to get the UMC fertility rate up.
Note that the real problem here is that sending the wife in an UMC couple to work for money is a zero sum game. You do it and the other couples do it and then you all try to bid up the same real estate, same degrees, compete for the same careers, etc. It's a Red Queen Race.
You gotta find a way to make the goods involved less rivalrous, and you've got to normalize the disposable income between breeders and non breeders (basically, tax non breeders more and breeders less) so that having children isn't seen as a way to get one up on others in the Red Queen Race.
Who is the "you" in this? Are you answering the question "if you were dictator how would you raise fertility?" That isn't the question I am asking in the post, as I say at the beginning.
From the Baby Boom to the current Baby Bust, GDP/capita increased by something like thousands of %. Women went from spending nearly their entire lives in domestic service to almost none. We got the washing machine, jet travel, and Amazon delivering whatever I want from the whole world in two days.
And fertility fell.
What are the odds that Zoom, Chat GPT, and artificial wombs are going to change that?
All of the productivity those nerds, engineers, and business people came up with got redirected straight into Red Queen Races. We didn't get Keynes's 15 hour work week prediction. Star Trek didn't happen. You can blame the government for much of that if you like (I sure would), but that still means that *somebody needs to change the government*.
"You" is "us". And yes, we need to find a way to change the incentive structure because as mere individuals no matter how much we increase material prosperity we just end up in a no holds bared knife fight for positional goods so brutal we rob our own wombs to pay for it.
From 1950 to the present real GNP per capita has increased about five fold. That's a lot, but not thousands of percent. Real per capita income has gone up about as much.
I guess I grabbed nominal rather then real, oops.
In the grand scheme of things, where people on the Malthusian edge had eight kids and rapidly repopulated after every demographic disaster, does this insight matter?
This is actually very eugenic
What about housing? I'm guessing there are people who would be more inclined to have kids if they lived in a place with more bedrooms.
What future changes would result in housing being less expensive?
Currently, people support regulations that curtail the supply of housing. I like to think it's not too far-fetched that public opinion will shift the other way some day. Both participants in the VP debate at least paid lip-service to the idea that more housing would be a good thing. Then again, if they are to be believed then half of all new homes will be given to illegal immigrants by the Deep State, and the other half will be bought up by speculators and left vacant 🤷♂️.
This is already happening, except that the "sustainable communities" crowd who are pushing it won't leave the properties empty. Blackrock (the main investor group involved) will bulldoze the houses and rebuild super-dense apartments which they will own forever, while continuing to use the urban-planning agencies to keep out competition. This is part of the WEF "Great Reset" to make us all serfs.
Have you read about Canada? Due very heavy legal immigration there’s now a massive housing crisis. A real estate agent told me the only young people buying were getting extensive parental help. I just sold a modest one bedroom condo in Victoria, BC. A well to do man paid all cash ($400K) to buy it for his son.
Young people can no longer even afford rent and are living with parents. A friend has two married kids with her. She’s not expecting grandkids.
I had two children back in the 70s. They’re both married with children themselves now. But they bought before Trudeau insanity took over. If I was a dictator I’d put him on an ice floe in the Arctic. He’s wrecked the country.
Some people foresee that remote work will lead to deurbanization. Personally I have been considering moving to a less urban/expensive area now that I am mostly working from home and thus no longer have much of a need for living within walking distance to the office.
Once upon a time kids -- all eight of them -- slept with their parents! There was a bed, but no bedrooms.
It's clearly possible to have a large family under current circumstances — some people do, not all of them rich. The question is what changes might make it more likely. Martin is suggesting one change that would. My guess is that the effect would be small but I could be wrong.
In an earlier post, on homelessness, I calculated that from 1965 to 2023 the cost of housing per square foot, inflation adjusted, stayed about the same — houses got more expensive but also bigger. Over that same period real income increased substantially, so housing became more affordable while birth rates fell. Of course, it is possible that making it even more affordable would push them up, but the idea that more expensive housing is the main explanation for low birth rates does not fit the evidence.
"Housing" is a hard good to measure. Housing is cheap where the jobs aren't, and expensive where they are. Also, the fact that there is "cheap housing" in the "bad part of town" may influence *metrics*, but isn't useful when the kind of middle to upper middle class people you want to have more kids are doing their budget. My nephew in CA shows me his budget and its pretty obvious housing is a big reason he's not starting a family, it doesn't matter if there are cheap options in West Virginia or the Ghetto.
The real problem we have is that having outlawed discrimination base on not price, people have used price as the way to keep out the underclass and other dysfunctionals. Real estate is expensive because that's how you make sure your neighborhood and schools only have the right kind people in them that don't cause problems.
We get more building in Red States in part because they do a better job ameliorating the externalities of dysfunctionals. When you don't have to worry so much who your neighbors are you don't have the same incentives to be a NIMBY. This is why I don't have much hope for the blue states, they think they can end zoning by making a substack post and convincing a state legislator rather then addressing the root causes.
Interesting point.
“Main” explanations for low birth rates, and what to do about it are two very different questions.
While there are no doubt many other additional explanations, the 3 biggest ones are clearly a) vastly increased wealth/income, b) birth control (both contraception and abortion) and c) generous state welfare (in the U.S. both Social Security *and* Medicare) for the old.
No serious person would suggest going backwards on a) or b), and even if there are a few “true believer” libertarians who would advocate eliminating or radically reducing c), imo the chances of that occurring in a rich country are essentially 0%.
So we are left with the far harder question of how to create the proper incentives in the cultural, in government, in our leaders, etc.
No single suggestion is likely to be even 30% of a solution. But imo one thing government could do would be to provide both a large child tax a credit AND a large tax deduction for each child raised.
A second small improvement would be the Vance suggestion to give parents the vote for their children. This would lead to more pro-family, pro-growth policies than we have now, but the left would never go for this, since “childless cat ladies” vote 2-1 for Democrats, while married people (and unmarried men) majority vote for Republicans.
Whatever else happens, the world of the future will belong to those who are there. The 'children' of the childless won't be there.
If instead of shoving everyone into 15-minute mega-cities, most people (using work-from-home, drone delivery, etc) move to less crowded spaces those who desire and have children may have at least one more than they would have. Maybe those who woud have had one or none if a 15-mnute city will be in exurbia and have 2 or more.
In addition, having more people with children outside of cities (this is happening now, really), with AI and connectivity and work from home, some sort of home schooling with diferent parents guiding different classes may well make having children less burdensome and more fun.
Confession: I NEVER found my children to be a burden. Rather they have always been a blessing.
I get the housing prices are a real problem and most families feel the need to have two incomes, but there are alternatives!
Even making much lower incomes, if you live in a rural or semi-rural area you can afford a lot more with less. The median home listing in my county is $160k right now. Even if that's a small house with a small yard (signs of a poor housing for people in my area) that's probably bigger than most housing in cities and infinitely more yard. Some Googling says that a 30 year mortgage on that kind of home is about $1k/month, or less than a third of the median rent in NYC. The median home size in my area is 1,700 sq. ft., compared to around 600 in NYC.
NYC's median household income is a little under $80k, while where I live household income is just under $60k. The difference in standard of living totally makes that worthwhile - you feel richer while making less.
I think that was kind of the underying theme of my post. If you want more children, there are going to be places where they will be 'cheaper' and your life will be richer.
Work at home is not going away. My wife has been doing pretty much the same job since late 2020 for the same company. Since Covid she has worked from home. So have most of her co-workers, and her company is thriving. It has a building that was designed to hod about 500 workers in a nice, upscale suburb. But now they're getting more work done by workers at home and ony having some 50 workers in the buiding. So they're renting very good office space to several other small companies that have a lot of off-site empoyees. The company has a new revenue stream.
Meanwhile, my wife is more productive, AND she can schedule her time to do other things she wants to do. So we moved to be closer to her famiy 2 years ago.
I think that, will lead more people to move to places where they can get more of what they want. I also thin a lot of these people will be professionals who want better education for their children, and wil find than among them all theyhave the knowledge to use "pods" to homeschool from K-12. And they will do so, and it will attract others. And homeschool pods mean interaction among parents, so . . .
Maybe not next year, but check in 10 years from now.
In keeping with the quoting of ideas from SF stories... Clifford Simak's "City" starts out with a similar concept. All manufacturing was automated and comms were at modern levels (1952) story. Everyone had moved out to the country side.
However, in his story, instead of adopting the characteristics of folks who currently live away from cities, they became agoraphobic because they never left their homes and never visited anyone in person.
Agree about children. My Son is the best thing there's ever been in my life.
Talk about changing social values is mostly wishful thinking, because major changes in the form of a horde of migrants who won't assimilate is replacing us as we speak. Many of the groups involved are either Catholic or Muslim, both of which encourage large families. Thus the problem is solving itself, whether we like the answer or not.
Will atheism decrease? Is it partly hereditary?
The only succesful example of 1st world country with high tfr is Israel, where religious identity plays a big role. The only succcessful examples of sub-groups in the 1st world with high tfr are religious groups (trad caths, orthodox jews, some evangelical sects).
Seems clear the only real solution to boost fertility will have to involve cultural or genetic selection for religion, though it's necessary but not sufficient condition (many religious groups DONT have high tfr). so likely religion PLUS focus on family/kids.
Why would that happen? Is that saying anything more than cultural or genetic selection for high birth rates, which I discussed in the previous post?
John Kurtz presents an interesting argument blaming childlessness on liberalism; https://becomingnoble.substack.com/p/liberal-societies-dont-have-children
I don't entirely agree with it, but it's great food for thought.
That was my take on his essay too.
I would say you are veering dangerously close to eugenics in your suggestion for selecting 'desirable ' characteristics
Yes. Specifically libertarian eugenics, letting each couple choose, from the children it could have, which children it does have. Why do you think that is a bad thing?
Do you also think it is bad for a woman, in deciding who to marry, to consider, among other things, whether she wants children somewhat like him? That too is eugenics.
You need IVF to do eugenics and it’s way too expensive. I’m dubious about artificial wombs. Who’s going to fund the development of those?
Presumably some mix of firms that hope to profit by the technology, government money, and charitable money. Who funded the development of the technologies for keeping premature infants alive that saved my grandson?
Just because IVF is expensive now doesn’t mean that it or something similar will always be in the future.
Historical technology development has led to massive cost reductions in many things just in the last 125 years.
Women will do whatever it takes to get and keep their status high with other women. Motherhood no longer increases that status. Change that, and I bet the birth rate will increase.
What future changes would increase the status of motherhood?
Take resources from non-mothers and give it to mothers.
People say money hasn't worked, but they've only ever tried like 10% the cost of raising a child and usually provided as in-kind services rather then cash.
The real problem is that parents can't vote for their children, and the childless have no shame voting for retirements they never had the kids to pay for.
A number of governments have tried financial incentives, to negligible effect. Hungary comes to mind.
Also, subsidies for mothers effectively cuckold unmarried men. Married couples would probably object to subsides for single mothers. Unmarried men would check out even more than many do now.
As I said, nobody has actually tried to compensate people an amount remotely close to the actual cost of child rearing. When I see a scale and method in line with the problem fail I’ll update my priors, but nobody has remotely tried for real.
Certainly I would favor the payouts to reward proper behavior and good breeding.
We don’t have unlimited resources. This is an important problem, but that doesn’t mean we should _waste_ money on it. There’s also the fact that, futile or not, government spending is easier to start than to end.
I’ll admit we have limited resources when we spend as much on people under 18 as we spend on people over 65.
We already do that. The tax rate for married couples is half that for single people. It’s the big reason gays pushed for gay marriage.
What are you talking about?
The tax brackets are all the same. Married filing jointly is just two single incomes put together.
"It’s the big reason gays pushed for gay marriage."
Lol, no.
Check the tables again.
12% $11,601 to $47,150 $23,201 to $94,300
22% $47,151 to $100,525 $94,301 to $201,050
24% $100,526 to $191,950 $201,051 to $383,900
32% $191,951 to $243,725 $383,901 to $487,450
I have no idea. I think female intrasexual status competition has gotten completely out of hand. Male attempts to intervene are the only thing that unites them.
Even TERFs focus on men in women’s spaces instead of the effects that “treatments” for Sudden Onset Gender Dysphoria have on girls’ fertility.
The incels just need to become passport bros. There are billions of good women in SEA and LATAM that would highly value a partner who is undesirable by Western standards.
I know you mean children being born. But can we use adoption (across the national borders) as a proxy for fertility ?
What if Americans could very easily adopt children from other countries? If the legal process was simplified with multiple governments co-operating, may be India, Somalia, Nigeria, Afganistan etc. could send millions of new born babies to USA. Yeah it is not fertility rate increase but the end result is the same. More young babies in USA.
The pro-lifers can offer very simple incentives like $1000 to no go for an abortion and instead hand over the baby to an American adoption agency and they can help save a lot of lives in India while making lives of Indian women better.
The price of genetic engineering one’s children in utero and the cost of physically bearing children falls (artificially wombs?). This would remove the uncertainty/risk in 1) pregnancy and 2) the outcomes of the child. On the 2nd point, much less of a chance of having a child you’ll be disappointed with, so more likely to have more.
On the flip side, the reduction in uncertainty in child outcomes may also reduce fertility because parents would be assured that their one child would be great or exactly what they wanted.
If parents had more energy(not in physical sense), eg energy drinks or cheaper weight loše treatments.
Wages increase to the point where the labor supply curve bends backward (workers can afford more leisure). The opportunity cost of having children then falls, so fertility rises.
Good one.
And re the cities point mentioned above, YIMBY could lower the cost of housing in the locations where jobs are and people want to work/live; this would be a real income increase greater than most others.
IIRC, US fertility rate was declining even before the Great Depression and WWII pushed it down, and the baby boom was the outlier.
One hypothesis to add to causes is that moving away from farming meant that children's work no longer brought value to the family. I'm sure ugly factories and antipathy to child labor contributed.
As work and technology changes, could we find a place for 8 year olds to add to the family income?
Provide something like $10k per kid in cash benefit. Scale it with income for eugenic reasons.
Provide full school choice (ESAs), another $10k per kid and doesn't even cost anything extra.
This can easily be paid for, the problem is political.
I started the post by explaining that my question was not what could be done to raise fertility but what might happen that raised it.
?
This seems like a distinction without a difference.
Or is just your wording for “any and all non-governmental solutions”?
I would include governmental solutions that there is some reason to think likely to happen. What I don't want are answers to the question "If you were dictator, what might you do to raise fertility," which in my experience, here and on DSL where I first raised the question, are most of what I get.
Then I think the school choice (vouchers) solution is a good one that fits your constraints.
A decent portion of the TFR problem is that many people believe the “global warming is destroying the planet” and other Malthusian, western consumption is inherently bad crap they are taught in schools, and so don’t want to have kids, and certainly not very many if they do.
School choice - “forced” in a similar way that the feds got all states to a 21 year old drinking age, by threat of withholding federal money - would be a pretty big incremental step towards eliminating that ideology being widespread among the young, and so would likely have a positive impact on fertility rates. It would of course have multiple other desirable effects as well.
I expect school choice to continue to become more common through action at the state level, don't think it likely that the federal government will pressure the states to enact it.
I'm not sure why pessimism about the future is so common. It isn't only climate catastrophism — distopian fiction is also very popular.
“I'm not sure why pessimism about the future is so common. It isn't only climate catastrophism — distopian fiction is also very popular.”
IMO these are closely correlated - leftist ideology today is that western capitalism is evil and the primary/exclusive cause of what is wrong in the world. “Doomism” combined with “victim” status for the first time ever being higher than the status of the successful are mantras of the left (and it’s hard to deny that preaching - and teaching - such pessimism has helped them win elections).
Given that youths are taught that either the deck is stacked against them, or that they are the oppressors themselves, it is hardly surprising why pessimism about the future is so common. Young people believe they have it harder than any previous generation, despite the reality that by all objective measures they have it better.
Separately, while I see why you think it likely that school choice will develop at the state level in red states and some purple ones, I don’t understand your optimism about why it might develop in blue states. And it is blue states and blue cities disproportionately where the pessimism exists.
I think that it is pretty clear that low fertility is not an incentive problem (all surveys I could dig up in various parts of the world indicate that people WANT to have more children than they end up having) and it is mostly not a heritable behavioral pattern (that is mathematically impossible). It must be some environmental change in the broad sense. Also, high-fertility communities also experience a fertility decline, it is just a bit delayed compared to the rest of humanity; I don't think that the increase of their relative weight will significantly offset fertility. They may well hit the same walls long before their cultural patterns become dominant, which, in turn, might not even happen precisely because of that.
To me, it seems like the immediate reason for declining fertility is the increasing age at which people have their first child. Both male and female fertility fall with age, though in case of women it is more dramatic. The reason for this is the depletion of ovarian reserve. The technical solution is to freeze eggs during the most fertile years (in the late teens and early twenties) and have them fertilized in vitro. The availability of this technology is increasing rapidly and it may well become very widespread, once it will become better known. Having frozen eggs might even become a signal making women more attractive as mates in their thirties and forties.
“I think that it is pretty clear that low fertility is not an incentive problem”
That’s not clear at all.
And you contradict your own point when you say there is “desire to have more children” and yet the opposite has occurred.
It is clearly at minimum *enormously* correlated with incentives. And I’d argue, fully explained by incentives.
Perhaps you are trying to suggest that not all the relevant incentives are financial? Because on *that* point I *would* agree with you.
Okay, let me clarify. Of course, most human behavior is driven by incentives. Including the behavior that results in having fewer children. My claim, which I am willing to back up by studies, if necessary, is that these incentives are not directly against having children and to a large extent people are unaware that what they are doing will result in them having fewer children than they would want. Thus, additional incentives rewarding having more children will not change anything. This has been unsuccessfully tried too many times to ignore. People start having children late and at some point they realize that they have fewer children than they wanted. The extent of fertility decline with age is not common knowledge at all. It is much more dramatic than most people (very much including a younger me) think.
Ok, now we *mostly* agree, but I still disagree with you in part.
We agree that all the other factors besides additional financial incentives matter MUCH more than even the biggest imaginable financial incentives.
We agree that small financial incentives - similar to the ones that you say have been “unsuccessfully tried too many times to ignore” would make virtually no difference.
Where we disagree is that a sufficiently large financial incentive would make *some* difference.
Whether we as a society a) could afford it and/or b) it would be a wise thing to do are different questions. In the short term, certainly for the U.S., I might well agree with you that it would not. For other countries, or in the longer term, it might well be a worthwhile/“necessary” (though again by itself not likely sufficient) thing to do.
P.S. putting in such a large financial incentive might also have valuable signaling benefit, and help to change the culture to where people decide they want to have more children because it is a good status symbol.
This isn't a solution.
For one IVF is an uncomfortable process no matter what your age, so very few people want to do it unless its to conceive a child in the near future with a known partner.
For another having some eggs frozen somewhere doesn't get rid of the wrinkles or give you the energy to chase a toddler around.
Mostly, I think it gives people false hope. They ought to be focused on their biological clock, not trying to deny it. If it's an excuse not to be out there trying to find a partner, its unlikely to lead to more kids.
I love IVF for the eugenic possibilities and recommend it as opposed to natural birth, but its not clear it will safe society.
"For one IVF is an uncomfortable process no matter what your age, so very few people want to do it unless its to conceive a child in the near future with a known partner."
You mean egg extraction, not IVF, right? It is uncomfortable, but so are many other things that women do in order to be more attractive and more fertile.
"For another having some eggs frozen somewhere doesn't get rid of the wrinkles or give you the energy to chase a toddler around."
Yes, these are different, largely orthogonal problems, and they have different solutions. But let me tell you, that the ability to afford being a full-time dad in your forties gives you much more energy to chase a toddler around than arriving home in the afternoon exhausted from work in your twenties, taking over from a mother, also exhausted from having to do all this alone in the absence of a husband and not being able to afford a nanny.
"Mostly, I think it gives people false hope. They ought to be focused on their biological clock, not trying to deny it. If it's an excuse not to be out there trying to find a partner, its unlikely to lead to more kids."
No, it demonstrably gives them more healthy children. This is a factual question and there is more than enough data to answer it.
"I love IVF for the eugenic possibilities and recommend it as opposed to natural birth, but its not clear it will safe society."
Unfortunately, not too many jurisdictions currently allow to use IVF for eugenic purposes. Gender selection is illegal almost everywhere, and even screening for genetic diseases is only allowed in a limited number of places where it is possible to do at all. I was really shocked to learn that even screening for Down syndrome is illegal in many places. However, it is already quite visible that jurisdictions that allow genetic screening are becoming hubs for fertility treatments, earning a lot of money from medical tourism.
This is especially important, since many, if not most, genetic diseases are the result of the combination of some traits that are separately much less harmful, harmless or even advantageous. For example, people with some mild form of ASD are well-functioning and even tend to perform better at some important tasks, but by the time they learn how to overcome their handicap in mating and become sufficiently self-aware, they are naturally drawn to similar partners, not least because "they understand". Such couples are running a non-negligible risk of having children with full-blown autism, which is not what they typically want.
"No, it demonstrably gives them more healthy children. This is a factual question and there is more than enough data to answer it."
I'd like to see this data. What if the TFR of people who freeze their eggs for the purpose of having a child in the far future with a partner they haven't met yet? I'm betting it's not high, probably pretty close to the TFR of smart liberal women in general (which is like 0.6).
It's ironic considering I'm going to have my daughters freeze eggs at 18, but the messaging is different. I'm having them do it for eugenics, not as a way to avoid getting married for as long as possible.
"Unfortunately, not too many jurisdictions currently allow to use IVF for eugenic purposes."
I'm in America and don't know of any states that restrict this, at least any I've lived in. Polygenic scoring is advertised at clinics all over the country.
For instance, the Texas Fertility Center advertises PGT-P and other screening despite having a six week abortion ban.