#834 - Lyman Stone - Why Is Everyone Having Fewer Children?

27:39Yeah, there's a growing interest in universal basic income, basically just giving people monthly check for nothing. And some of the big donors interested in it put some money into a pilot project, okay? Basically they got a bunch of people, gave them a thousand bucks a month and collected collected follow -up data on them. And what they found is for every dollar you gave them, their earnings declined, I think it was like 25 cents, so to speak. Their spending rose like 30 or 40 cents, 45 cents maybe. And it rose kind of a cross categories. It wasn't like it all went to one thing. It rose in like necessaries like food.

28:33And it also rose in like luxury categories like vacations. Actually the biggest growth was in gifts. People gave more gifts to other people when they had a UBI. And all the UBI recipients, by the way, were poor. They were all low incomes to begin with. So if you think about it, for every dollar you give, there was a reduction in income, an increase in spending. but not enough to count for that whole dollar. So you would expect that net worth should have gone up, like people should have had more savings then, by, you know, $0 .25 per dollar or $0 .20 per dollar. In fact, their net worth declined by about six cents per,

29:22you can think of it as like by six cents per dollar, or kind of network is a little more complicated, it's a stock, not a flow. So for every $1 ,000 of monthly income, they ended up with about $60 less of net worth at the end. So there's two problems here. One is just like, that seems bad. We got success. We got people to work less, spend more and also like not have any wealth building despite higher income. So that's unfortunate. But two, it really raised a question about even the credibility of some of these results, right? Because you add up, you know, 25 cents less of earnings, 40 cents more of income, a bit less of net worth.

30:17And there's a huge, there's like a 35 cent residual of like, Where did that money go? Like, did they just light it on fire? Like did they buy something they didn't want to report? Like something illegal? Did they cut their work by more than they reported? Did they increase spending on some other category more? So it not only, and they also found like there was not a big improvement in housing conditions.

30:49There were not improvements in almost any category that would be something like obviously if you get people wanting to spend more, that's not an improvement. That's just like a thing that happens.

31:06So we didn't see improvements in, we didn't see big improvements in like objective things that we might all agree are a good thing. And so that should really concern us about UBI, that it's probably not going to result in great liberation for people. It might just result in more gambling. Well, I placed that people might go to as they might say, well, that's right, perhaps they haven't got that much to show for it financially at the end of the day, but what happened with regards to an alleviation of stress? And they also looked at that as well. The cash transfer resulted in large, but short -lived improvements in stress and food security, greater use of hospital and emergency department care and increased medical spending of about $20 per month in the treatment relative to the control group, suggested that the use of other office -based care, deep dental care, blah, blah, blah.

31:59However, we found no effect of the transfer across several measures of physical health as captured by multiple well -validated survey measures and biomarkers we drive from blood draws, can rule out even very small improvements in physical health and the effect it will be implied by cross -sectional correlation between income and health while outside of our confidence interval. So people weren't happier, they weren't less stressed, they didn't have improvements. Again, on any of these measures that are like things we would all universally want, like if we found a transfer that just made everyone happier and healthier, it'd be like, great, cool.

32:32Like on these measures that are like clearly, like good outcomes, yeah, they found nothing. It didn't help people at all. There was another study, a different study that looked specifically at home that gave a UBI specifically to homeless people. And the goal was we will give them thousand bucks a month to find housing. And they found in the long run, there was no, across I think it was three year follow up. After three years, there was no difference in the homelessness rate of people who got like zero dollars or a thousand dollars a month. Um, simple reality was that giving homeless people money did absolutely nothing to get them in -house.

33:12And a lot of money, a thousand bucks a month. You can pay rent for that for one person. Is that not something to do with the culture or the lifestyle or the substance dependency that these people have kind of being a lingering overhead that doesn't allow them to get the exit velocity to get out of the bottom of homelessness? Yeah, there's, it would be easy to look at these UBI studies and say what these tell us is that nothing helps the poor are permanently poor. That is in fact not what they show because we actually have a lot of interventions we do know work focused substance abuse, substance abuse interventions like getting people in rehab, getting them support stuff like that does cause people to be less poor.

33:53high quality therapeutic interventions, like based on cognitive behavioral therapy, not low quality random talk therapy things, but like high quality therapeutic interventions can actually boost people's like long run income and health. Certain religious interventions are actually known to boost long run income and health. There are a lot of things that we can do that do lift people out of poverty, I mean education obviously. Handing them cash turns out not to be one. It just isn't. So yeah, it is the case that if you are a donor and you have like $20 million that you want to spend on helping poor people in the US, let's say, you would be way better off investing that in like focused substance abuse treatments.

34:44Okay. Okay. Um, then a UBF. Okay. Giving cash doesn't do a thing for long right now. But it does it actually does briefly, briefly it does, right? A change in income is a better predictor of happiness than absolute income. Like, eventually everything normalizes until you disequilibriate it again. Yeah. So, but I mean, the point is like, if you actually want to alleviate poverty, not just for the next six months, but actually lift people out of poverty. Like, UBI is just not the way to do it. It just isn't. And at this point, we have decades of experiments and pilot studies and all these things looking at this, we know that this doesn't work for long -term poverty alleviation.

35:33Now there are things that are somewhat similar to UBI's that do work. So conditional cash transfers. So for example, child allowances, sometimes when people really want to argue against child allowances, they will sometimes call them UBI's. They are not UBI's. Not everybody gets them. You don't get them for forever. You get them conditional on something that is having custody of a child. And it's important to mention having custody. Okay, like people who are the genetic parent of a child, but not actually like in the same tax unit as them don't get a child allowance, right? So when we give people a child allowance that rewards them for actually raising their child co -residentially, that's good.

36:28Okay, it generates slightly more children, it generates slightly less divorce, and it rates, slightly more spousal or co -residents of partners. We know this. We have decades of studies showing this. So UBI, where you give people money for nothing, not a good policy. Conditional transfers where you give people money for something can be a decent policy, depending on what outcome you're targeting and what you're trying to do. It's still expensive, but it's important to distinguish between UBI, which now I think we really should be able to put this to bed. It's not a good idea. And conditional cash transfers, which may in fact be very worthwhile.

37:16So when we get back to the fertility rates and where we're at at the moment, what are people saying modern people right now about the number of kids that they do don't want and their reasons for wanting or not wanting children?

37:35In surveys, like in the US for example, people report that their ideal number of children is 2 .3. If instead of ideal you ask them to rate how happy they would be with different family outcomes like 0123456, whatever. People's sort of weighted average happiness tends to be about 2 .3. If you ask people what the ideal family size for a family is, their average tends to be 2 .3. Any way you ask that it's getting at desires, wants, ideals for the US, it's 2 .3.

38:29If you ask about intentions, how many kids you intend to have? That's a very different question. That's not asking what people want. It's asking, okay, down to brass tax, thinking about your life as it really is. It's almost like asking people how many kids do you think you can afford to have? Okay? All of us would recognize how many kids can you afford to have is not the same thing as how many kids do you want? Okay? How many kids do you intend to have depending on the population subgroup and the exact survey and all? It ranges from like 1 .85 to 2 .1 in the US. Actual fertility in the US is 1 .6.

39:13So people are way short. They're about 0 .7 kids short of what they want. And they are about 0 .2 to 0 .4 kids, 0 .2 to 0 .5 kids, short of even what they think they're really realistically going to have. They are, they are, they're not even meeting what they think of as like their realistic goals. And presumably the number of, when you look at actual fertility rates, that's people who've had kids so far, when you ask people what they intend to, that's future focused, and giving you a different way. But given that we're on a decline in terms of fertility, we can assume that the number of actual children is going to continue to move away from that number of intended children.

40:00So I get that, but that Pew research that came out recently, like 10 percentage point increase in the number of people under 50 saying that they didn't want to have kids, 37 % to 47 % between 2018 and 2023. What do you make of that? That's nearly 50 % of people under the age of 50 saying that they don't want to have kids unlikely to ever have kids. So the actual prevalence of young people who say they don't want to have kids was 20 something percent. The 50 something was like the share of the share of childless young people who say the reason for being childless is because they just don't want kids.

40:48So you say, okay, among childless people, what share just don't want kids. The actual shares say they don't want kids is like maybe 20 20 to 25 percent. That sounds high. It's similar what I find in my surveys. Let's say we do inhabit a society where the average person wants 2 .3 kids and also where 15 to 25 percent of people say they want zero kids. We are inhabiting a society of increasingly polarized desires where there's people more and more clustering at zero and at you know three or four. Not a lot of people saying like six. So yeah it is what it is. Long run for fertility. You know you can have a society where everybody has two.

41:49You can have a society where half the people have zero and half the people will have four, they both have a fertility rate of two on average. So what we're seeing is, yeah, there is some rise in intended childlessness, it's largely offset by rising desires for big families. On average, desires haven't changed a lot. And what we can see is that the fertility decline we've had over the last 15 years, It's bigger for unintended births that is unintended births of fallen. I think it's like 40%. What's unintended births? Births people were not trying to have. So they were not planning to have a kid and they did.

42:41Whereas intended births have fallen, I think a bit less than 20%. So yeah, there's been a bigger decline in unintended births, meaning that meaning you can think of that as like uh you know people avoiding having kids that they didn't want to have that would be consistent with the idea that there's more people wanting to avoid have kids and successfully avoiding um but we've also seen a decline in intended births that is people who do intends to have kids But are having fewer of them. So I don't worry too much about like a growing share that say they want zero. Because, okay, that's fine. You can want zero.

43:22Other people want four. Other people want two. On average, it doesn't seem to be changing a whole lot. You seem surprisingly positive or at least non -apocalyptic given most of the demographers and the people sort of in this world that I'm speaking to have this like cataclysmic perspective. But it doesn't seem to the alarm bells don't seem to be going off quite as aggressively or maybe you're just holding it together well You know

43:55Falling fertility is a very serious problem It is it's a problem To me my view the biggest problem of falling fertility is I want people to have the lives they want to have I want to live in a free society where people are free to achieve reasonable, normal, and acceptable life goals. Two kids, that's a totally reasonable life goal. People should be able to achieve that. If they can't achieve it, that's a serious problem in society, in my view. It also happens that low fertility has really bad economic effects in the long run, has bad political effects. It has all sorts of bad effects in the long run.

44:40Those are use babies as like your instrumental solution to GDP. Like have a baby for the GDP is like not a great pitch or like have a baby so we can recruit them into the army. Like not a great pitch. So to me, the biggest issue is just people not getting what they want. So if people genuinely want zero, like that's not my problem. I don't want zero. I want five. So I want to be able to hit five. I want society to not put obstacles in front of that. Because we are below desires on average, I'm very, very strongly in support of pro -natal policy. I think we should be doing a lot more to help families hit their goals and offset some of that standard of living issue.

45:24But, and this is what I think is really important, you're right, there are a lot of people who like me or pro -natalists, that is they wanna see more kids born. And they do adopt this really apocalyptic tone. It's a fertility crisis, demographic winter. Koreans are going extinct. And I think that that tone is just a massive mistake. The best predictor of people not wanting kids is depression and anxiety. Okay, if you want to know if someone wants to have kids, ask them to rate one to 10 how happy they are. The number they give you is going to be wildly correlated with the number of kids they want to have.

46:14These strongest predictors of low birth rates at the individual level are fertility preferences and measures of mental health. people who are depressed, anxious, uncertain, sad, worried about the future, they don't have kids. Why? Because the reason you have kids is to raise them and watch them become fruitful adults. And if you think that the future is scary and bad and awful, then you're not anticipating the joy of children. You're anticipating watching your children suffer in a bad world. Okay? So my view is that if you actually want people to have kids shut up about a crisis. Okay? The only way to get more kids is to convince people that the future isn't awful.

47:09The birth rate decline is downstream from a mental health crisis. It's definitely related to it. So, I mean, yeah, this is, you know, there's these like broad structural things about like the standard of living people expect, the standard of care they expect for kids, all these things, but there is also very concretely, yes, a mental health crisis. I mean, pick your condition. I mean, depression, anxiety, autism, schizophrenia, I mean, there's very different conditions. Or just like survey reports of sadness, survey reports of uncertainty, survey reports of beliefs about if the future is going to get better or worse.

47:48Negative affect across all of these indicators associated with lower fertility preferences and lower fertility behaviors.

47:58So categorically my concern is that some very well -intentioned people talk a lot about the fertility crisis and they are sabotaging efforts to address the problem of low fertility and the problem of people's fertility not meeting what they want. Because by talking crisis, crisis, crisis, crisis, we're telling people, look, if there aren't more babies, the future will be very bad, okay? But think about what that says. Somebody says, okay. So then I shouldn't have a baby. You should bring children into this world that's really happy about that. Yeah. Because think about it. Also, there's no way I can guarantee other people will have babies.

48:36Don't have a good life. I can change the social fertility rate. I can only change my own fertility rate. So if I see that other people aren't having babies, I'm not going to have babies. Because a world of low fertility is a world of bad outcomes. And I don't want to bring my baby. So it's this like vicious cycle where like because people are so convinced that like of doom or is them, they don't have kids. And then the pronatal people come out and tell even more do -mory stories. When what we should say is like, look, if you individually have kids, like desired children, this isn't as true for like unintended children, okay?

49:13But people who want kids, when they have kids, it's associated with very positive outcomes. They have higher happiness in the short run. They have higher happiness in the long run, 10 years out they're happier than otherwise similar people who want to kids and didn't have them. People who want kids and don't have them have higher rates of prescription of antipsychotics, antinexiety, antidepressants. They are more likely to have adverse, quite adverse mental health outcomes. People who want kids and have them report just a whole range of better life outcomes and people who want kids and don't have them report considerably worse subjective wellbeing in the long run.

49:54Now for people who don't want kids, it's a different thing. Okay, I'm not, you know, I'm not trying to bully anybody to have in kids that they don't want to have. But there are so many people that want kids and they're not having them because they're worried about this, that and the other. And we just need to say, look, first of all, the, we know in longitudinal surveys that when people have kids, they increase the number of kids they think is ideal. So think about what that says. Once you have the experience of having kids, you decide you want more of them on average. Okay? So like my encouragement to people is like, kids are going to be way more fun than you think.

50:36Like they're going to be way more interesting than you think. They're going to be full of way more value than you think. And once you have them, you're way more likely to be like, I kind of like to have more of these than being like, dang, I would have preferred fewer. That latter response, it does happen. People do say that in surveys. There are people who say, you know, I love my kids. But if I had it to do over, you know, I might have one less. There are people who say that. It's not, it's not never. I'm not going to say that never happens. It does. But on average, people who say, you know what?

51:09I had these kids and wow, yeah, I'm totally raising my number now. Way more numerous. have you had a look at retrospective regret of childless people? What is that to learn from that? How common is it? So actually the Pew Survey you mentioned has some surveys on has some stuff about this. They didn't ask it exactly, but yeah, I mean, childless people do report various difficulties raising arising from childlessness. Crucially, the Pew Survey asked young people, do you expect such and such a thing to be a challenge with childlessness? And then they asked older childless people, was such and such a thing a challenge?

51:52And they found that across numerous categories, the challenges were more common than the young people expected. What sort of challenges? You know, feeling disconnected from the next generation, feeling like you lost friends because you didn't keep up, you didn't have kids. Feeling like you were lonely, feeling like I forget the list they had, they had a bunch, they had a bunch of these different things. And across the vast majority of them, current people who don't want kids were underestimating just how big the difficulties challenges and regrets can be. That doesn't mean that childless people all regretted it.

52:34Many of them didn't. But it is the case that young people are greatly overestimating the benefits of childlessness, so to speak, or the costs of having children. Or maybe they're underestimating the benefits of having children. However you want to put it, It is the case that when people get to retirement, it's not that free solo life is just not going to be as good as they think it is. What is the relationship that you see between marriage rates, desire to get married, mating crisis, desire to get into a relationship and desire for children and stuff? Does this piece together in a nice neat fashion?

53:25Does it make a cohesive narrative? Or is it individual things going on? So fertility of married people has not declined nearly as much as the fertility of unmarried people. And crucially, the main thing that's happening in fertility is just that people are not getting married as much. Okay? They're getting married later or not at all. But are people not getting married because they don't want kids before they get into a relationship?

53:58No, because we know that desire for children is approximately stable, right? So we know that we know desire for children is approximately stable We also know desire for marriages approximately stable about 90 % of people say they want to get married Most of them in their mid to late 20s That's the typical age which is a bit younger than actual marriage ages right now

54:22So, we know that that's what people want. And yet, marriage ages are rising and rising, and a growing share of people will never marry. So, we're actually seeing a shortfall in marriage versus desires, okay? People who get married, their fertility rates are not declining that much, not declining as much. And if everyone got married at the same rates they did in 2007, fertility would not have declined nearly as much. Most of the decline is just because of less marriage. Okay? So, yeah, a mating problem is a huge part of the story. And there are so many reasons people are not marrying as much as they used to.

55:04I mean, one of the biggest ones is just an economic change. It is the case that if you look at data from dating apps, Women's swipe on men's incomes at the same rate that men's swipe on women's conventional physical attractiveness. I'm not sure. You can say that says something bad about us as a species if you like. It's facts. It hasn't changed in 2000 years. Actually, let me take that back. It hasn't changed in 600 ,000 years.

55:47So, men's status has always been fertility correlated. It's just always has been. It's always been the case. There's virtually no exceptions that high status men, high income men in money societies have more kids than low status men. That being the case, you have to ask what, not what has happened to men's income generally. You have to ask what happened to men's income at the marriage ages that if you get married in those ages, it's easy to have two or three kids. So that's gonna be marriages in your 20s. If you're not married in your 20s, odds of getting to two and especially three kids decline.

56:26So what has happened to the income of men in their 20s? In the US at least, it is actually declined over the last 20 years, 30 years. men in their 20s are actually getting poorer in inflation -adjusted terms. This is not true for men generally. This is not true for older men. This is not true for the population generally. People are getting richer and incomes are growing up. But for men in their 20s, and that's the group for whom income is sort of setting the bar for marriage. Because I'm assuming that women in their 20s are like not getting less attractive or something Okay. And again, these are not the only things that like guide marriage.

57:10Obviously what really guides individual marriages like love and like shared values and shared life orientation. But funny enough, people tend to fall in love with people who are within a certain socioeconomic band of their expectations and within a certain range of

57:31of it sounds so callous to say, but like physical attractiveness. Yes, individually people marry for love. Collectively, humans don't. They marry for other things.

57:49So, it is the case that men's marriageability in the key marriage ages for supporting fertility has declined really, really sharply. That is their incomes have fallen, particularly compared to women. That being the case, there's less marriage. And in fact, marriage rates and particularly fertility rates have declined at exactly the ages where men's incomes are declining. So early in mid -20s, and at the ages where men's income is rising in the 30s and 40s, fertility rates have actually risen. There actually has been an increase in fertility those ages. Not enough to offset the decline in the earlier ages, but a little bit.

58:33So basically what's going on with the marriage market on a deep level is that young men are poor. They cannot support a family, particularly a family whose consumption expectations are set by the joint incomes of two single people with no kids. So if you spend your whole 20s setting your consumption expectations based on zero care responsibilities, your parents are still young enough that you're not having to take care of them in old age. You don't have kids. You don't have a spouse or something like that. And then you come into marriage and that's how your consumption expectations have been set.

59:16Well, it's really hard to have kids. You mentioned before about this decline in unintended kids. I know that you've looked recently and I've been doing quite a bit of research into this too about the attitudes toward contraception in the US. I think if I was to put a couple of bets on a roulette table for upcoming public health, few rules, things that people are going to be really, really concerned about. I think we're already sort of starting to see a lot of women talk about the psychological challenges that come from hormonal birth control, physiological changes, things that you can lock in for the rest of your life if you take it during puberty and periods where the brain is in development.

1:00:04I also think microplastics in water, I think toxic environments, molds, etc., is also going to be another one. But it's surprising to me that it seems to be two things at the same time. I mean, it seems to be both a very pro contraception and a very anti contraception culture. I don't know if that's just two different cohorts and I get to like hear the most the cipherus of one and the most the cipherus of the other. But do you know what I mean? Does this sort of call it a superposition? Yeah, everything natural except reproduction. Right, that's the vibe, right? All natural except reproduction.

1:00:43So I think that's a real thing. on the fertility front. You know, you sometimes hear things about falling sperm counts or falling testosterone counts. This is basically fake. Spurm counts are not falling in scientifically studied cohorts. And anyways, the actual effect of the kinds of variation in sperm counts we observe, the implication would just be you need to have sex for an extra two or three months to have a child not that you would become infertile. Tostosterone changes are a bit more complicated because there's just measurement of testosterone as extremely problematic. Problematic instance, like it's very difficult, and it changes over the course of the day and it changes in different types of tissue samples and cell samples.

1:01:33But either the way, either way, these kinds of things don't appear to be affecting fertility.

1:01:41Microplastics, there's some plastic that could impact fecundability. So far, a couple studies have gone looking and have not found anything, or at least not anything significant, but it could be, I mean, these things last a long time, so it could be that takes us a few generations from a new build -up and sufficient levels to do damage.

1:02:06In general, and in contraception, the best evidence suggests that hormonal contraception can increase time to pregnancy after cessation by a few months. That is, it can take a few months longer to become pregnant. For some methods, it can be a lot longer. I think long -acting reversible contraceptions, like implants, can increase time to conception by quite a few months. There doesn't appear to be long -term identifiable damage to fecundability. The problem with all these studies is that people who choose to use more intense contraception or also people who want fewer children. So even when they go off contraception, they have fewer children because the reason they were using contraception is because they're people who want fewer children.

1:02:51Have you found any research looking at how women's desire for children, desired number of children, intended children, changes when they're on or off birth control? I know that there's some stuff that's, I don't know the state of the research on this, but I've seen headlines saying that like when women are on certain forms of hormonal birth control, that like the type of like body type that they will swipe on on dating apps is different or something. I don't know how credible that is. In general, I'm skeptical of most of these types of findings for a variety of reasons. One, we have really good controlled studies that look at time to pregnancy.

1:03:38And we can see that for couples who are not using contraception of a given age and actively trying to conceive, time to pregnancy hasn't changed in decades as far back as we can study. It just isn't the case the time to pregnancy has changed. People's ability to conceive hasn't changed a bit.

1:03:58So in time to life birth hasn't either. That is implied miscarriage rate has not changed. changed. So that tells me that whatever is going on under the surface, it's not dramatically altering fertility. It could be things on mate selection. I would totally believe that the rise in, but honestly, contraception wouldn't be the main thing I'd point to. I would point to the rise of like SSRIs and other, you know, antidepressants, anti -anxiety, anti -psychotics because they share the more directly impact the brain. Right. The share of the population, or I mean, frankly, also just drugs like pot and opioids.

1:04:38And like, there are so many other substances that would be like my go to on like, if something is messing with mate preferences, what could it be? Maybe the really like quite powerful drugs that are designed to alter your neurochemistry? Like, let's not say those things are bad. I don't know if anyone's ever studied what they do to make preference. They do alter libido, obviously, but I don't know what they do to make preference and things like that or views of commitment. And also, like I said earlier, depression is itself sort of anti -natal. So you could find that anti -depressants are anti -natal, but they're less anti -natal than the depression that they get.

1:05:22Depression is so funny. Right. So like you could get these kinds of really interesting challenges. Um, yeah. And so I just, in general, my view is like, we live in a chemical soup. We just do, we always have, um, in ancient times, they weren't chemical soup. It was just that humans were so hungry. They were just, I mean, you look at old cookbooks and they were eating stuff that today, you know, 20 % of the population is allergic to and it smells like death and like it's awful. But they were eating it like twice a month. Well, like, I mean, you look at the, it's, there's some called the Eastern Agricultural Complex, which is pre -corn agriculture among Native American tribes in the Eastern US.

1:06:12And like, you can look it out. There's like all these crops that you're like, what is this crop? And I kept telling my wife, like, I really wish, I really wish there was like a restaurant that would like like a hipster restaurant that would like use only pre -columbian crops and animals and like have a whole menu on it It was like this would be a cool idea and then I looked up the crops now is like okay, so like this one has like an aroma that can be smelled down the street when it's cooked Like this one has great proteins. It's like better than quinoa Also like everybody's allergic to it like so many people are allergic to it Um like they're they're awful plants Like, like there's a reason that as soon as Native Americans got corn, they were like, yeah, I want corn.

1:06:55Corn's amazing. So like, one of the things we don't talk about with like the great diversity of crops that people used to eat is that like so many of them were really bad and like bad for you and unpleasant or maybe they're good for you, but they're unpleasant or they're pleasant but they're bad for you. That's not to say declining crop diversity isn't a bad thing. It is like we should preserve rare varietals. not the ones that stink the street out there. Yeah, exactly. Like I would be okay if dirt, do you know about dairy, dairy from the Mediterranean? Yes, yeah, that's stinky fruit. Yeah, I'd be okay if it went extinct.

1:07:29Like I know like all of Asia cries out in horror when I just said, but like that one I wouldn't mourn. But by and large, like humans have always been putting just weird stuff into their bodies. And so I think we are less fragile than we think we are. And we talked at the beginning about how humans lived in environments where so many people were dying and yet they still carried on and I think we're less fragile than we think we are. And to be honest, this is actually part of what I think is part of the cultural change we need to promote fertility is kids are not as fragile as you think they are.

1:08:07That standard you think they have to have. They might not need that standard. They might be tougher than you think they are. They might can just be okay playing outside some. You might not need to intensively do every little thing. And beyond that, you are less fragile than you think you are. Children are not going to break you. You're going to be okay. Some people won't be. Most people will be. Like you are going to be okay. You are less fragile than you think you are. You can do it. You can raise kids. You can parent. You will pull it off. Does political polarization play a role here? We recently came out of the DNC where they were offering free vasectomies and abortions outside, I think.

1:08:56But what about the role of, yeah, polarization in political beliefs, parents wanting their kids to date somebody from within their own political class, the increasing importance of politics in mate selection and in people's lives than perhaps it used to previously? Yeah, so politics plays a role in a couple of ways. One, political cultures are sets of ideas and values and memes and norms and behaviors and social ties. The fact that one side of politics in the US at least has adopted particularly anti -natal social values. That is, I mean, a great example of this is like the average fertility rate of Republican elected officials at the federal level is something like 2 .6 kids.

1:09:57The average fertility rate of democratic ones is like 1 .4. So like there's like microcosm right there, right? Interestingly, that means that Democrats are closer to the societal average. So Republicans are the weirdos, but they're like the weirdos continuing humanity. But so I do think this is unfortunate that we kind of have this perpetuating political culture on one side that promotes norms of anxiety fear and uncertainty about children. and presents children as burdens, primarily. That's not say Republicans are innocent. There's a lot of ideas and values on the Republican side that I think are anti -natal in a little bit more of an oblique way.

1:10:47Like, particularly norms around work for Republicans, everything is about jobs. Like if it makes jobs, it's good. But I'm like, if you employed a mom earning minimum wage, Like, in her alternative was staying home with kids or a dad, it could be a dad as well, though in practice statistically, it's usually mom. Like, and she has two kids. It's probably more socially valuable for her to like invest in her kids than flip burgers. So like I'm actually not interested in creating make work jobs, just to pull people away from their families because I want a buff labor force participation. Like, that's just not what I value.

1:11:31In general, just the super work focus that Republicans tend to have, I think, is a cultural mistake. Work is rival risk with family on some level.

1:11:45So at the same time, I do think it's worth remembering that political culture comes from somewhere, right? We know that depression is not equally distributed across the parties. We know that certain types of fears about the future are not equally distributed across parties. And as a result, I don't know how much we can blame partisanship for what might actually be a difference in religiosity or family background or mental health or a million other variables, right? Is partisanship causing this or is partisanship just reflecting that this is the kind of divide the society we live in? Wow. Yeah, I mean, increasingly fewer people are disbelieving about the the heritability of sort of psychological dispositions, whether that be introversion or extroversion or conscientiousness or willpower or fucking hunger or political ideology, some things that are more complex, which are an entire sort of suite of dispositions that all come together.

1:12:58But this is the, every time that I see it, every single time that I see an anti -natalist movement that intends on continuing, it blows my mind. It's like what you this is mating sepuku. Do you know how things work? I just do the thing outside of the DNC for the I'm just gonna make Discipline for the people that have you seen the previous episodes Your political affiliation is heritable. That means that if you are a card carrying died in the wall Democrat it is more likely that your children will be Democrats as well because there is a particular suite of traits its personality types and dispositions that have led you toward that.

1:13:40You can take personality tests for both Republicans and for Democrats, left -leaning, right -leaning labor, conservative, whatever it is. And people will veer in that kind of a direction. Given that your children are made up of the raw genetic material that you're about to give to them, if you are someone who wants your particular political ideology to keep moving forward and you do not have children, that is you basically seeding ground to decide that decides to have children. And it just every single time that I see this, I'm like, is it, do they not know that this is the case? Are they, do they know and not care?

1:14:14Are they so short, short term minded that they think, yeah, but we're going to, you know, buff Kamala's votes by 0 .1 % in a key battleground state by doing the vasectomy outside of the DNC truck. I don't know. I think there's a couple of things going on. One is they're betting on the power of conversion, right? Because most people, you have to think about the dynamic here, because more socially conservative people have more children, a disproportionate share of children are raised in conservative environments, and yet we end up with relatively even politics. How? Because conversion favors Democrats.

1:14:56Okay? So the Democratic Party is disproportionately made up of converts, so to speak. People raised Republican and became Democrat. And as a result, it's going to be people who selectively believe in the cultural power of conversion, right? And I would say they're not actually entirely wrong. So I've done a fair amount of writing about this recently that Heritability of fertility turns out to be very complicated. It's true if you have a norm that leads to zero fertility, okay, that weeds itself out relatively quickly. Unless it has a reason for people to select it for fitness in the time being, right?

1:15:42So if there's a norm that gives you zero fertility, But also it just hacks the part of your brain that handles dopamine. You'll choose it every time. And eventually the species will just go extinct. Like species can just go extinct. Like it's not inevitable that like fertility is 2 .1. We could just stop having babies and go extinct. And there are pieces of your brain that can be hacked through drugs, through medicine, through, you know, congenital defects through whatever, like, yes, dopamine receptors can get fried. People can become addicted to things that kill them. People can, it is possible that we could just stop breeding.

1:16:31There's no reason that fertility has to return to two. And I've actually run a lot of simulation models on this that like, let's say you have like the Amish, okay? Are the Amish ever going to become a majority of the population? The answer is Absolutely not, they never will. If all you do is you take actual real world Amish fertility over the last 50 years, and trend it forward and use real world rates of conversion in and out of the Amish, you find that the Amish are gonna peak at a maximum, a maximum of like 7 % of American population and they're never actually gonna get there. The simple reality is conversion is really powerful and assimilation is really powerful.

1:17:17There is not for simple monogenetic traits that do that have certain types of fitness profiles, genetic drift can be really powerful. But most traits aren't like that, particularly if they're polygenic. For example, politics, I mean, height is quite heritable. Like, height's very heritable. Like, it's like 80 % heritability. And some behavioral traits are quite heritable. There's debate about schizophrenia, but it appears to be relatively heritable. And it has behavioral implications and stuff like that. Social values as a family set, which includes both politics and religion, is like one of the least heritable trait sets that we know of, along with reproduction, ironically.

1:18:04I mean, religion is actually highly environmental sensitive, right? The reason kids born in Saudi Arabia become Muslim is not because they have a Muslim gene, right? It's because they're in a context that encourages Islam, okay? And we know this because kids get adopted across countries and they're astronomically more likely to end up in their adoptive parents' religion than their birth countries' religion. Korean kids adopted in America don't become Buddhist by a large. They become like, you know, Presbyterian. Although there's a lot of Korean Presbyterians too. So in general, social values, they do have a hair, I have a knock I say they don't have a heritable component.

1:18:46They absolutely do. Depending on kind of how you define heredity, because that's complicated. And what social value you're talking about it ranges from like 3 % heritable to like 40 % heritable. Well, that's kind of a range of talking about. There aren't a lot of social values that are over 40 % heritable. Or is there's a lot of physical traits that are considerably over 40 % heritable? And then you get like traits that are kind of like like a medley of the two. So you think about things like sexuality, the super controversial one, intelligence. And there's huge debates about heritability of these sexuality is highly nonheritable, for example.

1:19:28There's some genes that do relate to it, but probably through gene environment interactions, not directly gene. The upshot of all of this, I'm kind of meandering. The upshot of all of this is that like conservative fertility advantage does drive some electoral advantage, but way less than you would think. Way less than you would think, from just like a naive sort of breeder's equation type of population genetic model. It really is the case that the hairate ability rates are sufficiently low and conversion rates sufficiently high that conservatives don't get nearly as much electoral being as you would expect from their fertility buck.

1:20:15And their fertility buck is large. It's a very large fertility gap between Republicans and Democrats. Democrats. And in a pure hereditary environment like this would be the last generation of Democrats to have an electoral shot. Yeah. But we all know that's not what's going to happen. We all know that politics are going to remain highly competitive for in Democrats of the same thing where they're like, look at how conservative young people are or look how liberal young people are. This is the last time conservatives will have a shot. And yet here we are. They It's still the case that politics are competitive on the same issues that they always have been.

1:20:54So I would strongly caution against trusting to fertility, to give your cultural group a long -term majority. You really do need to persuade other people. You mean that you can't shag your way out of some ideological cul -de -sac? Probably not. You add a shame to make persuasive arguments. It's goddamn it. So, I think, you know, for sectorizing everybody who walks into the DNC, whatever its net social benefits or costs, it probably doesn't have a huge effect on long run political equilibrium. Okay. What are your predictions for the sort of future of Western fertility rates and stuff at the moment?

1:21:39Down. So just can it's going to continue. I mean, does it bottom out? It has to presumably at some point. It's going to be carried by certain small subgroups that would maintain a higher. It could bottom out at zero. I mean, if you think about like, let's imagine, okay, let's just do like Doomsday scenario. And it turns out that like microplastics totally sterilize people, okay? Microplastics are also totally inescapable. They're like literally in the air, okay? like unless you are wearing like a hazmat suit, you are getting microplastics, inconsiderable volumes. So if microplastics cause sterility, then Western fertility will bottom out at zero.

1:22:23Okay. On the other hand, if low fertility is caused by, if falling fertility is being caused primarily by, um, um, I don't know, pick your, pick your pet theory. Um, if it's caused by like, um, uh, particular parenting norms, parenting norms are something that probably could weed out fairly quickly in just a few generations, okay? They're going to be highly volatile. They're not, we know that they can be broken across generations because that's what has happened recently. We know that people with parenting, specifically parenting norms that encourage more children, that seems of values, that seems more likely to have high heritability, like point three or something, then low, like point one.

1:23:14So if parenting norms are what's driving low fertility, then maybe in 150 years we're like back up to two. Okay. People's expectations about the amount of investment that's required in a mild risk. Yeah, and people who are raised in like lower expectation environments will, will, will, will make up a larger share of the generation. And I don't think there's a compelling reason to think that like super high expectations parenting is necessarily always can be super persuasive as a conversion prospect. So, um, uh, on the other hand, you can get things like if it's really just that like young men's incomes are crap.

1:23:56That's not likely to go away because skills bias technical change in the economy is what it is. You need skills. It takes a while to get them. It is what it is. So that might not necessarily go away, but that also wouldn't cause us to flatline at zero. That might cause us to flatline at one or 1 .2 or something. So, you know, I tend to think that stuff like skills bias technical change is a decent explanation for those types of kind of structural economic factors and also things like parenting or decent explanations for what's going on with fertility and I don't think the more apocalyptic explanations are reasonable.

1:24:40And so I think that we're likely to see continuing decline for quite a while. I think we'll bottom out somewhere between 0 .4 and 1 .3. And then maybe there will be social subgroups that find ways to achieve higher fertility. Whether that will be heritable will remain to be seen. fertility, heredity requires stable transmission of the same traits across lots of generations to do the work. There's only one gene that's known to have long run positive selection across a long time span. So I'm a little skeptical that we're going to suddenly find a new Eugene that drives super strong positive selection.

1:25:41Maybe we will. Right now, we can see that positive selection for fertility across cultures is happening across 50 or so gene genetic locai, but it's not the same ones in different cultures. It's not like all Western, and this is just among European societies. Among Western, European and American societies, There's 50 or so genetic low guy that are among active selection. There's only one genetic low guy that's under active selection among like all groups. And it's been under active selection for 30 ,000 years. And it's still only 66 % of the population. So like, give it another 500 years. It's still going to be like 66 % of the population.

1:26:30So other than that, like there is genetic, there is selection. on fertility happening in different societies, but like Dutch people are breeding for, are like selecting on different genes than American people and different than Estonian people and different than Swedish people. And like, it's just, it's different. Um, we're not gravitating towards like, when it's not like we're finding a gene that across populations is like predicting higher fertility. So I'm skeptical we're going to find a new one. What is a medium term future with an upside down demographic table look like? What will it be like to exist over the next going from wherever at now 1 .6 to somewhere between 0 .4 and 1 .3?

1:27:14Yeah, it's going to be a lot of disappointment and a whole lot of cope. So disappointment, there's going to be a lot of people not having the families they wanted to have. That will lead to various coping mechanisms, trying to encourage the younger generation not to make the same mistakes, which might be an endogenous method of fertility increase. Or just being angry at the next generation because you feel no attachment to them, which could be an endogenous mechanism for continued fertility decrease. Disconnection between generations, sadness, insisting that you're not actually sad, you never really wanted those kids anyway.

1:27:58People have different coping strategies, but it's going to be a sadder and more disappointed society. There will be reduced entrepreneurship, reduced pace of technological innovation. There will be reduced economic growth rates. I mean, we've lived in societies with zero population growth before. They were called feudalism. So we will see more inequality, greater concentration of wealth across generations, because estates will be divided among fewer people. Quite, I mean, it's unpleasant. This is why people talk about a fertility crisis. As we've already discussed, I really dislike that language.

1:28:46And I think humans have survived unpleasant environments before. Life in a low fertility future will be worth living. It will be so worth living as human life has been for hundreds of thousands of years. So, and crucially, the main obstacles to having kids are likely to be psychological. That is, if you can get over the burden of like being like married younger than your friends, not going on quite as many international trips as your friends, and you know adopting strategies conducive for mental well -being, you'll probably have plenty of kids.

1:29:29It's going to be an interesting period. The cop thing I think is going to occur on an individual level, but it's also going to occur on a macro level as well. I don't know because I live in this weird degenerate internet subculture niche, well, it's supposed to sort of normy world. But people still talk about an overpopulation problem. They talk about population boom, about limited resources, about running out of space, about running out of energy, about all of this stuff. And there are going to be all of these things that come along for the right. That you population decrease is going to result.

1:30:06Unless we have some unbelievable automation and AI robotic stuff that comes in to save the economy, you're going to have to have a reduction in economic growth. Okay, so what's that going to cause? It's going to be a lot of people that are very unhappy and start pointing fingers all over the place. and you go, well, the policies that you were putting in place only not so long ago are the, these are the fruits of those exact suggestions. And now it's something else, it's something else is going on for you to complain about. So yeah, I'm concerned, quietly concerned. I'm not as, uh, a quantumist as you are, although I'm, uh, I'm actually feeling a little bit better after today's conversation.

1:30:46What's next? Oh, when it comes to sort of studies, where is your focus going to be over the next year or two? So right now, I'm the Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. And what we're focusing on right now is housing. Housing is a major milestone for young people. It's one of those things that people tend to think like you shouldn't have kids until your housing situation is kind of sorted out. And young people are getting less and less likely. they're living in smaller and smaller houses and they're less and less likely to own their houses. And so we are exploring what can be done about that.

1:31:28How can we make housing more affordable? How can we make it a more useful method of long -term planning for young people? How can we make it more accessible to them? And what types of housing are most supportive of transition to family life? So we're doing a lot of versional research there and hoping to release some of that over the next few months. That's cool. That's cool. I'm a big fan of the Institute of Family Studies. Brad's a fascinating writer. So where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the work that you're doing. So IFS is a great place to look for a lot of the population work.

1:32:07If you want all my truly unfiltered opinions on this stuff, you can follow me on Twitter at LymanStoneKY. And you can get all my opinions there on all the sorts of topics that sometimes I should actually shut up about. Hell yeah, Lyman, I appreciate you. Thank you, man. Good talking to you.