> Blame myopia and education, not liberalism and prosperity
Have you done a regression of all four variables? I tend to roll my eyes when people on the left blame bigotry/discrimination for various outcomes without seeing if variations in the causal variable are associated with variation in said outcomes, so for the sake of consistency I make the same point here.
> It’s worth pointing out that at least in the U.S., the direct effect of income is apparently to raise fertility. It’s education — the classic correlate of income — that’s anti-natal.
As young men consider "getting serious" with a romantic partner, they have to consider whether they are willing to accept and agree to give her the option to subject them to two decades (more, in some states) of punitive fines and intrusive oversight as the designated "breadwinner" paying "child support" for one or more children.
Despite marketing to the contrary, young men generally have very strong desires for romantic and life partners.
And yet, put that bluntly, for many of them, "getting serious" turns out not to be an attractive option at all. They famously try to avoid being cast into bondage for decades - or life - while young women become less and less young, waiting for their boyfriends to "commit".
No-one takes this as a serious hindrance to the birth rate. Maybe it's not. Bet it is.
My impression is that most libertarian intellectual writers suffer from, perhaps not 'crimestop', but a similarly severe aversion to even thinking about the impact of and potential reversal of the major changes over the last three generations in the regulation of marriage and sexual relations. For most libertarians the ideas that a state could lawfully prevent an unmarried man and woman from cohabitating and fornicating, or could refuse to grant easy divorces or dissolve marriages except under the most extreme circumstances, are borderline unthinkable.
The problem is that when it is easy and cheap to both enter into and end relationships, then one has the option of starting over and the flexibility for getting a more preferable partner (or job, or city, etc.) and whether they will openly admit it or not, by revealed preference it is clear that people deem this option to be extremely valuable.
Having children creates hard to reverse lock-in, greatly reduced flexibility, and makes it profoundly more difficult to exercise this option at low cost, and the loss in option value is an enormous opportunity cost to having children, incentivizing even people who want to have kids to wait until the very last minute before doing so.
This is hardly anything knew, anyone in the ancient world would have been intimately familiar with all the same human desires and tendencies. The way traditional societies tended to deal with the problem of option-value preservation was to say one doesn't get the benefits of marriage without actually being married, but once married, you were stuck with each other. Getting rid of both of those norms created a huge new downside to having kids.
What's actually happening is that efforts to preserve those traditional values are crushing relationship formation. It turns out that more and more people are simply not bothering with the "benefits of marriage" if they have to pay the prodigious cost. The issue today is not unmarried or teen parents; it's that young people increasingly aren't having sex at all.
Listen to them: young women are saying that young men aren't marriageable (i.e., the financial benefit of being in a relationship is not worth the practical downsides) even as young men are saying that marriage isn't worth "half my stuff" (a naive phrase but it captures the idea).
I'm in the interesting position of living this dilemma. I'm mid-30s and married and have 1 kid (toddler age). On one hand, I think life is valuable and were we to have another kid, odds are very high they would have a great life. However, having/raising a child is EXHAUSTING. Both me and my wife work, and between the near constant illnesses my daughter brings home from daycare and the financial burden I'm finding it hard to justify having another.
It blows my mind that some people have 4, 5, 6+ kids. I can't even imagine. Even more so that that used to be somewhat the norm in earlier generations.
Adding a second reduces work in some ways. If they are close enough in age they will play together without supervision. If you can get a third in relatively quickly they can all play together.
About age 4+ they can mostly be counted on not to kill themselves if left alone. About 6+ they can be totally unsupervised without even breaking things.
If you get to 3+ consider Au Pairs. It turns the scalar cost of daycare into a fixed cost and you don't feel like your paying for nothing when they get sick.
I could see the relaxed parenting style working a bit better for older kids. But for toddlers, there's a limit on how relaxed you can be. Even in a childproofed home, they are constantly at risk of damaging something or themselves, so you need that constant vigilance. There's also cooking for them, cleaning after them, laundry, Dr appointments, and generally organizing their entire lives, as well as the aforementioned barrage of illnesses which is probably most draining of all.
I was in the same position, and ended up with 3 kids. I can tell you that the additional kids do not lead to 2x or 3x the child care burden of just one. On the other hand, having one or both parents able to work from home helps a lot, as does availability of family care. Especially once the kids are all in school the additional work for additional kids is pretty low. (Although I have three girls... young boys seem like more work, and it is at least convenient that the girls generally want to do the same things e.g. gymnastics or dance classes.)
"The population will dwindle. Perhaps one day, the species will go extinct due to lack of reproduction. In that case, it would have been better if we had remained illiberal."
I'm not sure I agree. Wouldn't a liberal society that went extinct due to individual choices still be preferable to Soviet-style, totalitarian dictatorship that doesn't lead to extinction (due to, say, forced eugenicist breeding programs)?
People in the actual Soviet Union usually didn't commit suicide, because life was still preferable. For one thing, there is at least the possibility of freedom in the future, which doesn't exist for the extinct.
"In prosperous nations, humans don’t just have better career options; they have better parenting options! ... Money lets you do more fun things without kids; money lets you do more fun things with your kids."
Here is the thing, Bryan :) Though capitalism increases options here and there, the growth in options itself is not the same in both categories.
You simply have to devote your time to raise children. It may be a fun time, but it leads to a different lifestyle than otherwise would have been. And no amount of additional parenting options changed that. Ask literaly any couple how their private time has changed since they had a child.
The pro-natalists notion that people are generally happy is questionable to me. Much of the recent push back to children seems to be rooted in people being unhappy and pessimistic about the future. The liberal program itself has destroyed our institutions and connections and left many people without meaning or purpose.
People who don't like living could kill themselves. But usually they don't. People near the end of their lives are more likely to do so, but that's just more evidence that we value life.
I don't think suicide is necessarily a great indicator of whether life is worth it. Most societies, including our own, have a pretty severe taboo associated with suicide, and most people aren't sociopaths, so they consider the effects of their suicide on others. It's possible for there to be many people who would honestly rather not have been born nonetheless choosing not to commit suicide for non-selfish reasons.
True enough, but is that an argument for having kids (if you think they are likely to be unhappy), that they could just kill themselves? In real life, I expect people put up with much misery before doing so for various reasons.
Well, one would need to balance the likelihood of your kids being miserable on average. Most kids seem pretty happy, and even those that are pretty miserable are miserable for fairly fixable reasons if one makes the effort. The why of misery is important to identify here, as if the parents are pretty miserable the answer might just be telling the kids "don't make the bad decisions we did"; of course that requires recognizing that one is miserable due to one's own choices.
You assume people are happy if nothing is wrong, as a default state, but this is not true in my experience/observation. People need meaning and purpose, which modern liberal society has dismantled. Then layer onto that the fact that things do often go wrong, even when you make good decisions, and the probability of being happy drops. I can only judge by myself and the people I personally interact with though.
Modern liberal society has made people less likely to believe they will be damned as a result of committing suicide, which does appear to have elevated the rate relative to the past... but it's still low enough that you should expect most people like being alive.
I am not assuming that at all. I am just saying that most people are on average alright with being alive at the least. Exceedingly few people even attempt suicide much less do it. The probability of being happy in any given second might be low, but there are plenty of ups and downs, and most people aren't merely indifferent to being alive on average. Even people with otherwise rather rough lives with lots of problems seem to find plenty of reasons to keep going. Remember that we are talking "happy enough that being alive is better than not" not "overwhelmingly ecstatic and fulfilled."
I don't really disagree. I'd only point out that there is a significant cost to someone committing suicide. One could be quite miserable before doing so due to fear of pain or failure, or not wanting to put one's family through the trauma.
Yours is a good interrogation of Huemer but I am puzzled as to why you call his piece "excellent". It may be excellent on natalism but the Conservative vs Liberal quotes on 'Sex' & 'Gender' that you (correctly) interrogate are obtuse stereotypical nonsense. Fortunately - on a more positive note - I am beginning to notice an emerging trend of dissident feminist journalism with a more nuanced understanding of Conservative vs Liberal perspectives on these subjects than is to be found in Huemer's essay....plus a welcome "acknowledgement that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life". https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
> It may be excellent on natalism but the Conservative vs Liberal quotes on 'Sex' & 'Gender' that you (correctly) interrogate are obtuse stereotypical nonsense.
What do you mean? They're fairly accurate descriptions of the two positions.
Well for example: "Non-reproductive sex might even be wrong. Premarital sex is bad or wrong. People, especially women, should be chaste.".....is an utterley absurd cariacature of what a typical 21st c. (or even 20th c.) conservative thinks abour sex.
You are a strange one I have to say. You have just 'liked' my https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining essay. Did you actually READ it? If so you could be left in NO doubt that I am about as far from being "centre left" as it's possible to be! And in fact over the months my email inbox has had maybe 50+ 'likes' from you on my various comments and essays...everyone of which would make abundantly clear that I as far from being any kind of Lefty as it's possible to be! Do you actually READ the stuff you press the 'like' button on Eugine? Wierd....seriously wierd behavior.
Doesn't remotely answer the point I've just made about your bizarre 'like' this; 'like' that, 'like' the other' behavior.... whilst seemingly having taken on board NOTHING about the observations you are 'liking'. This is another one you 'liked' a while back: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers.....Look "centre-left" NYT to you does it? And I said 'typical' conservatives not 'any' conservatives.
Huemer for some time has been very confident in the moral rightness of contemporary liberal values, current fertility trends (and what one might predict from them) seem to go in the face of his argument against evolutionary debunking arguments (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0588-9), as such it would be interesting to see his views evolve (if at all) given further empirical data relating to fertility decline and reversal etc.
You are trying to analyze the problem of falling natality in all developed nations from the perspective of someone immersed in the reality of the US. You need more research in other countries.
That said, my explanation is increasing economic precarity for the middle classes in the developing world, even for young people with advanced degrees.
Most young adults in developed nations experienced economic stability when growing up.
Their expectation therefore is that it is essential to have economic stability to raise a family.
To maintain a large family, to be able to give enough time to every child, one parent needs to stay at home. That means that a large family has to survive on a single salary, which is pretty hard, given the possibility of unemployment. The probability of encountering prolonged periods of unemployment, or under-employment has increased. Young people see it as precarity and instability. It is understandable why young people who have seen their parents get laid off and not find a job for a year, would have cold feet about having a large family.
It was not libertarian policies that led to large families in the 50's and 60's US. It was the employment stability for the fathers. This started to erode in the Reagan-Thatcher years. Now we reap the results. Unfortunately we cannot have our cake (economic flexibility) and eat it too (large families).
I have't seen you acknowledge that explanation before as a driver, but he makes the compelling argument that a falling birth rate is not pre-ordained, because technology / liberalism is not the driver of declining fertility as everyone thinks. He points to many times in the past in other cultures and countries where birth rates increased and decreased dramatically in ways that that deny that explanation as the driving factor. Instead he points to fertility as fashion, related to social status, and when it's high status to have children, birth rates rise and when it's not they fall. That is irrespective of freedom, access to contraception, gender equality, etc.
While such a complicated topic no doubt has many drivers, I have seen first hand how the desire to conform can make folks uncomfortable with large families in cities today, even regardless of the insane housing costs (which IMO is the other huge factor).
"Everyone will think we're on reality tv" - about having a 4th child.
> If having children were less costly, more people would do it. To that end, we need to develop artificial wombs, whereby babies could be gestated without having to occupy someone’s body for 9 months.
It strikes me that people proposing Artificial Wombs as a way to save liberalism, haven't thought through the implications of Artificial Wombs.
Artificial Wombs basically turn humanity into a eusocial species, think "Brave New World".
I suspect artificial wombs will have zero impact on fertility. Anyone I know of voluntarily not having a baby does so because of the work involved in raising them for the next 18 years, not because a nine months of morning sickness sucks.
I say this as someone who's 100% pro-choice any time for any reason till time of birth is called: ACB's "suck it up for 9 months" comments during Dobbs oral argument was seen as garish, presumably because women get abortions because they don't want 9 months of morning sickness.
I’m not buying it. When artificial wombs come around, I don’t anticipate any change in people’s attitudes about abortion.
The main people want abortions is that they don’t want to raise the kid. They also don’t want the psychological pain of knowing they abandoned them and they are out there somewhere. They want “the whole thing never to have happened.”
I wasn't talking about a normal family using an artificial womb to avoid morning sickness. I was talking about an organization using artificial wombs to mass produce loyal bugmen.
There was a couple in Russia that tried to do this with surrogates but he went to jail for drug possession. She has 21 kids from her eggs like 3-4 years old now.
I wonder how much of the slump in having children is due to the last 50 odd years of "population bomb" type rhetoric. Lots of young people were being taught that over population is a serious concern for quite a long time, such that it is pretty well engrained; people can still push crude Malthusian theories forecasting the end of the world without getting laughed out of the room. I think the perceived need to send kids to school for 20 or so years of "education" hurts reproduction as well, but if the deep seeded belief that we have too many people accounts for more than a little, things might swing very quickly if it becomes apparent that those claims are false.
Of course, that also requires changing the education system quite a bit to stop pushing those sorts of beliefs.
I know, right? It is as though humans have a deep seeded desire to believe that there will be too many of us, an instinct towards deep pessimism about resources relative to population. I suppose I can see how that would have been useful in the old days, but the last few centuries have really put the lie to it.
In general I'm quite opposed to population decline and all its ill effects. But it will be nice to see the inherent Ponzi-ishness of most retirement schemes be put on full display should population decline significantly. Hoppe made the argument that the medicare/social security type benefits often pushed for within democracies has the effect of breaking up families along generational lines and that in their absence there would be more pressure for extended families to stay intact. This both has the positive effect of making aging/dying less depressing while also giving free childcare to the parents and keeping up family traditions and values.
They will raise taxes and crush the young to keep the checks flowing. The young thus crushed will have fewer kids. It will be a vicious cycle, not something where those that are wrong repent and change.
Surprised to see Huemer not mention the meat eater argument against population expansion/development etc. There are some interesting responses to it, and I do vaguely remember Huemer saying that various non libertarian policies can be justified to stop factory farming.
The fertility crisis is a function of the welfare state.
If you don't have kids, you are still entitled to all of the state benefits that are to be paid for by children.
Why, for instance, should the childless receive Social Security and Medicare?
I'm open to a solution in which they pay more taxes than the childbearing during the prime years and then later receive the benefit. And I don't mind calling it a childbearing discount rather then a childless tax, even if its the same whatever the name.
The bottom line is that if a kid costs like $250,000 or whatever we need to give people $250,000 in incentives paid for by those who didn't have kids.
If we do this, I'm willing to consider the childless having "paid their fair share to create the next generation" and that they have a valid lifestyle choice that contributes fairly to society.
At the moment I think peoples choices simply reflect incentives, the childless can free ride on the childbearing.
The other issue is that what benefits parents do get is not provided to them in the form of cash. It's provided to them in the form of in-kind services they may or may not value (public education, etc).
Anyway, I think we could easily solve the fertility problem with incentives.
Unlike Bryan, I don't think this will solve itself. I think we will enter a doom loop where ever smaller youth cohorts are forced to pay huge portions of their incomes in taxes to fund welfare for olds, leaving them with not enough resources to have children themselves, which will only make the problem even worse.
The longer we go without solving the problem, the harder it gets, because the median voter gets older and less and less concerned with the future.
----
I'm aware culture is important in childbearing, but money shapes culture. If having children was more pleasant (because it was rewarded financially) more people would have kids and that would make them more conservative. Existing conservatives would feel confident enough to have even more kids.
Take a simple matter. After 2020, I really don't want to send my kids to public schools. That means every new kid represents a new tuition bill. It's a scalar expense. If the public schools weren't so leftist, or if the left would allow school vouchers so I could choose a non-leftist school, that would dramatically change the financial burden of each additional child by around $150-200K based on just K-12.
Let's take a variant of your question, "why should the childless receive Social Security and Medicare?" and ask, "why should family breadwinners, who did not raise children, receive Social Security and Medicare?" - because, after all, it was the homemakers who raised the children, not the breadwinners.
Well, of course, it's because the children, the homemakers, and society generally benefit from the productive work of the breadwinners.
And that's true of the childless, also. They're just breadwinners. Sure, they may not have raised a particular child or set of children, but their productive work contributed to taxes that did, and to the infrastructure and wealth that other people's children will inherit.
The breadwinner pays For the things the homemaker needs to survive and raise children.
If you want breadwinner status, you have to provide bread. A tax and transfer system from the childless to the childbearing would allow you to play your part as breadwinner.
Otherwise, your just asking other people’s kids to pay the taxes that fund your social security.
I think the OP's point is one I actually agree with more broadly - although not in that particular implementation.
If society, collectively, wants more children it needs to make it more attractive (or less unattractive) to have them, and make it less attractive (or more unattractive) not to have them - and the more children, the more.
Today, society wants children but imposes the vast majority of the cost on their parents, who receive emotional benefits (maybe) and perhaps (but not necessarily) some financial support. Yes, there are some tax benefits for single-income couples (but penalties for dual-income couples), and other tweaks here and there but they're not nearly enough. I've raised the issue of family law elsewhere: it actively and severely and often very excessively punishes breadwinners, mostly but not only men, for having formed families or having had children; but it's worth remembering that it does this because of a concern that, without it, women (specifically) would not want to form families or have children - and that points to the underlying issue, which is that having children simply costs more than it's worth for many people, men and women, IF THEY HAVE TO COVER THE BULK OF THE COSTS.
That approach is almost certainly going to need to change. And if society is going to make it more attractive to have kids, someone is going to have to pay for that. In practice, that means money (taxes and also spending) will have to shift and that will mean that taxes will fall more heavily, on average, and there will be reduced spending, on average, on people who don't have kids. Which is, I think, what the OP was getting at.
The way to do that isn't to cut people off from Social Security: they played by the rules they were given, and it's too late for them to have kids now. It also undermines the viability of Social Security: if you're going to renege over this, you may renege over other issues, and that will undermine support for the whole program pretty strongly. And it probably needs to be steered toward those who raise kids; not everyone has the biological ability to do that. But I digress.
It could very well - may have to - have implications for tax rates and benefits in the future, which can influence decisions to form families and raise children. Watch governments get serious about this, because the old approaches aren't going to work.
Dumb comparison because the breadwinners help the homemakers directly. And what is the ratio of government-owned infrastructure left to the next generation compared to debt the next generation will have to pay back?
I'm sorry you think that's a "dumb comparison". Helping many a little each, instead of helping a few a lot each, is a valid form of social contribution. Indeed, it's especially important because it carries far fewer emotional benefits to the helper.
Remember, too, that those childless people will leave everything they created and everything they have, to someone else's children. You don't take it with you.
"Helping many a little each, instead of helping a few a lot each, is a valid form of social contribution."
Do childless people send small amounts of charitable donations to people with children regularly? I don't believe so. Only thing you can say about them is that they pay somewhat higher taxes due to the child tax credit.
> Blame myopia and education, not liberalism and prosperity
Have you done a regression of all four variables? I tend to roll my eyes when people on the left blame bigotry/discrimination for various outcomes without seeing if variations in the causal variable are associated with variation in said outcomes, so for the sake of consistency I make the same point here.
> It’s worth pointing out that at least in the U.S., the direct effect of income is apparently to raise fertility. It’s education — the classic correlate of income — that’s anti-natal.
Per Lyman Stone, the evidence is that the education effect is actually a selection effect which diminishes as a larger portion of the population is educated. https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1744957394344349864
I was surprised you didn't mention Robin Hanson's proposals to use the tax code to encourage fertility:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/can-govt-debt-solve-fertility
Two words: family law.
As young men consider "getting serious" with a romantic partner, they have to consider whether they are willing to accept and agree to give her the option to subject them to two decades (more, in some states) of punitive fines and intrusive oversight as the designated "breadwinner" paying "child support" for one or more children.
Despite marketing to the contrary, young men generally have very strong desires for romantic and life partners.
And yet, put that bluntly, for many of them, "getting serious" turns out not to be an attractive option at all. They famously try to avoid being cast into bondage for decades - or life - while young women become less and less young, waiting for their boyfriends to "commit".
No-one takes this as a serious hindrance to the birth rate. Maybe it's not. Bet it is.
My impression is that most libertarian intellectual writers suffer from, perhaps not 'crimestop', but a similarly severe aversion to even thinking about the impact of and potential reversal of the major changes over the last three generations in the regulation of marriage and sexual relations. For most libertarians the ideas that a state could lawfully prevent an unmarried man and woman from cohabitating and fornicating, or could refuse to grant easy divorces or dissolve marriages except under the most extreme circumstances, are borderline unthinkable.
The problem is that when it is easy and cheap to both enter into and end relationships, then one has the option of starting over and the flexibility for getting a more preferable partner (or job, or city, etc.) and whether they will openly admit it or not, by revealed preference it is clear that people deem this option to be extremely valuable.
Having children creates hard to reverse lock-in, greatly reduced flexibility, and makes it profoundly more difficult to exercise this option at low cost, and the loss in option value is an enormous opportunity cost to having children, incentivizing even people who want to have kids to wait until the very last minute before doing so.
This is hardly anything knew, anyone in the ancient world would have been intimately familiar with all the same human desires and tendencies. The way traditional societies tended to deal with the problem of option-value preservation was to say one doesn't get the benefits of marriage without actually being married, but once married, you were stuck with each other. Getting rid of both of those norms created a huge new downside to having kids.
What's actually happening is that efforts to preserve those traditional values are crushing relationship formation. It turns out that more and more people are simply not bothering with the "benefits of marriage" if they have to pay the prodigious cost. The issue today is not unmarried or teen parents; it's that young people increasingly aren't having sex at all.
Listen to them: young women are saying that young men aren't marriageable (i.e., the financial benefit of being in a relationship is not worth the practical downsides) even as young men are saying that marriage isn't worth "half my stuff" (a naive phrase but it captures the idea).
I'm in the interesting position of living this dilemma. I'm mid-30s and married and have 1 kid (toddler age). On one hand, I think life is valuable and were we to have another kid, odds are very high they would have a great life. However, having/raising a child is EXHAUSTING. Both me and my wife work, and between the near constant illnesses my daughter brings home from daycare and the financial burden I'm finding it hard to justify having another.
It blows my mind that some people have 4, 5, 6+ kids. I can't even imagine. Even more so that that used to be somewhat the norm in earlier generations.
Adding a second reduces work in some ways. If they are close enough in age they will play together without supervision. If you can get a third in relatively quickly they can all play together.
About age 4+ they can mostly be counted on not to kill themselves if left alone. About 6+ they can be totally unsupervised without even breaking things.
If you get to 3+ consider Au Pairs. It turns the scalar cost of daycare into a fixed cost and you don't feel like your paying for nothing when they get sick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-G4LtTno8I
Is it exhausting even with the relaxed parenting style Bryan recommended in Reasons to have more Kids?
I could see the relaxed parenting style working a bit better for older kids. But for toddlers, there's a limit on how relaxed you can be. Even in a childproofed home, they are constantly at risk of damaging something or themselves, so you need that constant vigilance. There's also cooking for them, cleaning after them, laundry, Dr appointments, and generally organizing their entire lives, as well as the aforementioned barrage of illnesses which is probably most draining of all.
Most of those in the first world who have 4, 5, 6+ kids don't do so with both parents working full-time.
I was in the same position, and ended up with 3 kids. I can tell you that the additional kids do not lead to 2x or 3x the child care burden of just one. On the other hand, having one or both parents able to work from home helps a lot, as does availability of family care. Especially once the kids are all in school the additional work for additional kids is pretty low. (Although I have three girls... young boys seem like more work, and it is at least convenient that the girls generally want to do the same things e.g. gymnastics or dance classes.)
"The population will dwindle. Perhaps one day, the species will go extinct due to lack of reproduction. In that case, it would have been better if we had remained illiberal."
I'm not sure I agree. Wouldn't a liberal society that went extinct due to individual choices still be preferable to Soviet-style, totalitarian dictatorship that doesn't lead to extinction (due to, say, forced eugenicist breeding programs)?
People in the actual Soviet Union usually didn't commit suicide, because life was still preferable. For one thing, there is at least the possibility of freedom in the future, which doesn't exist for the extinct.
Abortion is probably “fine” according to 21st century progressivism but certainly not according to classical liberalism.
"In prosperous nations, humans don’t just have better career options; they have better parenting options! ... Money lets you do more fun things without kids; money lets you do more fun things with your kids."
Here is the thing, Bryan :) Though capitalism increases options here and there, the growth in options itself is not the same in both categories.
You simply have to devote your time to raise children. It may be a fun time, but it leads to a different lifestyle than otherwise would have been. And no amount of additional parenting options changed that. Ask literaly any couple how their private time has changed since they had a child.
The pro-natalists notion that people are generally happy is questionable to me. Much of the recent push back to children seems to be rooted in people being unhappy and pessimistic about the future. The liberal program itself has destroyed our institutions and connections and left many people without meaning or purpose.
People who don't like living could kill themselves. But usually they don't. People near the end of their lives are more likely to do so, but that's just more evidence that we value life.
I don't think suicide is necessarily a great indicator of whether life is worth it. Most societies, including our own, have a pretty severe taboo associated with suicide, and most people aren't sociopaths, so they consider the effects of their suicide on others. It's possible for there to be many people who would honestly rather not have been born nonetheless choosing not to commit suicide for non-selfish reasons.
True enough, but is that an argument for having kids (if you think they are likely to be unhappy), that they could just kill themselves? In real life, I expect people put up with much misery before doing so for various reasons.
I'm saying you should believe the probability is low because people generally don't commit suicide while expecting lots of remaining life.
Well, one would need to balance the likelihood of your kids being miserable on average. Most kids seem pretty happy, and even those that are pretty miserable are miserable for fairly fixable reasons if one makes the effort. The why of misery is important to identify here, as if the parents are pretty miserable the answer might just be telling the kids "don't make the bad decisions we did"; of course that requires recognizing that one is miserable due to one's own choices.
You assume people are happy if nothing is wrong, as a default state, but this is not true in my experience/observation. People need meaning and purpose, which modern liberal society has dismantled. Then layer onto that the fact that things do often go wrong, even when you make good decisions, and the probability of being happy drops. I can only judge by myself and the people I personally interact with though.
Modern liberal society has made people less likely to believe they will be damned as a result of committing suicide, which does appear to have elevated the rate relative to the past... but it's still low enough that you should expect most people like being alive.
I am not assuming that at all. I am just saying that most people are on average alright with being alive at the least. Exceedingly few people even attempt suicide much less do it. The probability of being happy in any given second might be low, but there are plenty of ups and downs, and most people aren't merely indifferent to being alive on average. Even people with otherwise rather rough lives with lots of problems seem to find plenty of reasons to keep going. Remember that we are talking "happy enough that being alive is better than not" not "overwhelmingly ecstatic and fulfilled."
I don't really disagree. I'd only point out that there is a significant cost to someone committing suicide. One could be quite miserable before doing so due to fear of pain or failure, or not wanting to put one's family through the trauma.
Yours is a good interrogation of Huemer but I am puzzled as to why you call his piece "excellent". It may be excellent on natalism but the Conservative vs Liberal quotes on 'Sex' & 'Gender' that you (correctly) interrogate are obtuse stereotypical nonsense. Fortunately - on a more positive note - I am beginning to notice an emerging trend of dissident feminist journalism with a more nuanced understanding of Conservative vs Liberal perspectives on these subjects than is to be found in Huemer's essay....plus a welcome "acknowledgement that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life". https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance
> It may be excellent on natalism but the Conservative vs Liberal quotes on 'Sex' & 'Gender' that you (correctly) interrogate are obtuse stereotypical nonsense.
What do you mean? They're fairly accurate descriptions of the two positions.
Well for example: "Non-reproductive sex might even be wrong. Premarital sex is bad or wrong. People, especially women, should be chaste.".....is an utterley absurd cariacature of what a typical 21st c. (or even 20th c.) conservative thinks abour sex.
Speak for yourself.
Let me guess your idea of a "21th century conservative" is the kind of center-leftist the NYT keeps on staff to pretend to be "balanced".
You are a strange one I have to say. You have just 'liked' my https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining essay. Did you actually READ it? If so you could be left in NO doubt that I am about as far from being "centre left" as it's possible to be! And in fact over the months my email inbox has had maybe 50+ 'likes' from you on my various comments and essays...everyone of which would make abundantly clear that I as far from being any kind of Lefty as it's possible to be! Do you actually READ the stuff you press the 'like' button on Eugine? Wierd....seriously wierd behavior.
And yet apparently you somehow don't know any conservatives who oppose premarital sex and think women should be chaste.
Doesn't remotely answer the point I've just made about your bizarre 'like' this; 'like' that, 'like' the other' behavior.... whilst seemingly having taken on board NOTHING about the observations you are 'liking'. This is another one you 'liked' a while back: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers.....Look "centre-left" NYT to you does it? And I said 'typical' conservatives not 'any' conservatives.
I'm done with this conversation.
Huemer for some time has been very confident in the moral rightness of contemporary liberal values, current fertility trends (and what one might predict from them) seem to go in the face of his argument against evolutionary debunking arguments (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0588-9), as such it would be interesting to see his views evolve (if at all) given further empirical data relating to fertility decline and reversal etc.
You are trying to analyze the problem of falling natality in all developed nations from the perspective of someone immersed in the reality of the US. You need more research in other countries.
That said, my explanation is increasing economic precarity for the middle classes in the developing world, even for young people with advanced degrees.
Most young adults in developed nations experienced economic stability when growing up.
Their expectation therefore is that it is essential to have economic stability to raise a family.
To maintain a large family, to be able to give enough time to every child, one parent needs to stay at home. That means that a large family has to survive on a single salary, which is pretty hard, given the possibility of unemployment. The probability of encountering prolonged periods of unemployment, or under-employment has increased. Young people see it as precarity and instability. It is understandable why young people who have seen their parents get laid off and not find a job for a year, would have cold feet about having a large family.
It was not libertarian policies that led to large families in the 50's and 60's US. It was the employment stability for the fathers. This started to erode in the Reagan-Thatcher years. Now we reap the results. Unfortunately we cannot have our cake (economic flexibility) and eat it too (large families).
Bryan, I would love to see you take on the "social status" explanation for fertility, described by Lyman Stone on this podcast:
https://www.fromthenew.world/p/lyman-stone-growing-the-population
I have't seen you acknowledge that explanation before as a driver, but he makes the compelling argument that a falling birth rate is not pre-ordained, because technology / liberalism is not the driver of declining fertility as everyone thinks. He points to many times in the past in other cultures and countries where birth rates increased and decreased dramatically in ways that that deny that explanation as the driving factor. Instead he points to fertility as fashion, related to social status, and when it's high status to have children, birth rates rise and when it's not they fall. That is irrespective of freedom, access to contraception, gender equality, etc.
While such a complicated topic no doubt has many drivers, I have seen first hand how the desire to conform can make folks uncomfortable with large families in cities today, even regardless of the insane housing costs (which IMO is the other huge factor).
"Everyone will think we're on reality tv" - about having a 4th child.
> Artificial Wombs
> If having children were less costly, more people would do it. To that end, we need to develop artificial wombs, whereby babies could be gestated without having to occupy someone’s body for 9 months.
It strikes me that people proposing Artificial Wombs as a way to save liberalism, haven't thought through the implications of Artificial Wombs.
Artificial Wombs basically turn humanity into a eusocial species, think "Brave New World".
I suspect artificial wombs will have zero impact on fertility. Anyone I know of voluntarily not having a baby does so because of the work involved in raising them for the next 18 years, not because a nine months of morning sickness sucks.
I say this as someone who's 100% pro-choice any time for any reason till time of birth is called: ACB's "suck it up for 9 months" comments during Dobbs oral argument was seen as garish, presumably because women get abortions because they don't want 9 months of morning sickness.
I’m not buying it. When artificial wombs come around, I don’t anticipate any change in people’s attitudes about abortion.
The main people want abortions is that they don’t want to raise the kid. They also don’t want the psychological pain of knowing they abandoned them and they are out there somewhere. They want “the whole thing never to have happened.”
Agreed: artificial nannies will have a much greater impact than artificial wombs.
Isn't that basically what public schools are?
Artificial wombs would only exist in a world that was much richer in general.
I wasn't talking about a normal family using an artificial womb to avoid morning sickness. I was talking about an organization using artificial wombs to mass produce loyal bugmen.
There was a couple in Russia that tried to do this with surrogates but he went to jail for drug possession. She has 21 kids from her eggs like 3-4 years old now.
I agree surrogacy is the lite version of what I was talking about. It is, however, limited by the supply of surrogates.
I wonder how much of the slump in having children is due to the last 50 odd years of "population bomb" type rhetoric. Lots of young people were being taught that over population is a serious concern for quite a long time, such that it is pretty well engrained; people can still push crude Malthusian theories forecasting the end of the world without getting laughed out of the room. I think the perceived need to send kids to school for 20 or so years of "education" hurts reproduction as well, but if the deep seeded belief that we have too many people accounts for more than a little, things might swing very quickly if it becomes apparent that those claims are false.
Of course, that also requires changing the education system quite a bit to stop pushing those sorts of beliefs.
Has anyone been so spectacularly wrong and still so celebrated and taken seriously as Ehrlich?
I know, right? It is as though humans have a deep seeded desire to believe that there will be too many of us, an instinct towards deep pessimism about resources relative to population. I suppose I can see how that would have been useful in the old days, but the last few centuries have really put the lie to it.
In general I'm quite opposed to population decline and all its ill effects. But it will be nice to see the inherent Ponzi-ishness of most retirement schemes be put on full display should population decline significantly. Hoppe made the argument that the medicare/social security type benefits often pushed for within democracies has the effect of breaking up families along generational lines and that in their absence there would be more pressure for extended families to stay intact. This both has the positive effect of making aging/dying less depressing while also giving free childcare to the parents and keeping up family traditions and values.
They will raise taxes and crush the young to keep the checks flowing. The young thus crushed will have fewer kids. It will be a vicious cycle, not something where those that are wrong repent and change.
Surprised to see Huemer not mention the meat eater argument against population expansion/development etc. There are some interesting responses to it, and I do vaguely remember Huemer saying that various non libertarian policies can be justified to stop factory farming.
The fertility crisis is a function of the welfare state.
If you don't have kids, you are still entitled to all of the state benefits that are to be paid for by children.
Why, for instance, should the childless receive Social Security and Medicare?
I'm open to a solution in which they pay more taxes than the childbearing during the prime years and then later receive the benefit. And I don't mind calling it a childbearing discount rather then a childless tax, even if its the same whatever the name.
The bottom line is that if a kid costs like $250,000 or whatever we need to give people $250,000 in incentives paid for by those who didn't have kids.
If we do this, I'm willing to consider the childless having "paid their fair share to create the next generation" and that they have a valid lifestyle choice that contributes fairly to society.
At the moment I think peoples choices simply reflect incentives, the childless can free ride on the childbearing.
The other issue is that what benefits parents do get is not provided to them in the form of cash. It's provided to them in the form of in-kind services they may or may not value (public education, etc).
Anyway, I think we could easily solve the fertility problem with incentives.
Unlike Bryan, I don't think this will solve itself. I think we will enter a doom loop where ever smaller youth cohorts are forced to pay huge portions of their incomes in taxes to fund welfare for olds, leaving them with not enough resources to have children themselves, which will only make the problem even worse.
The longer we go without solving the problem, the harder it gets, because the median voter gets older and less and less concerned with the future.
----
I'm aware culture is important in childbearing, but money shapes culture. If having children was more pleasant (because it was rewarded financially) more people would have kids and that would make them more conservative. Existing conservatives would feel confident enough to have even more kids.
Take a simple matter. After 2020, I really don't want to send my kids to public schools. That means every new kid represents a new tuition bill. It's a scalar expense. If the public schools weren't so leftist, or if the left would allow school vouchers so I could choose a non-leftist school, that would dramatically change the financial burden of each additional child by around $150-200K based on just K-12.
Let's take a variant of your question, "why should the childless receive Social Security and Medicare?" and ask, "why should family breadwinners, who did not raise children, receive Social Security and Medicare?" - because, after all, it was the homemakers who raised the children, not the breadwinners.
Well, of course, it's because the children, the homemakers, and society generally benefit from the productive work of the breadwinners.
And that's true of the childless, also. They're just breadwinners. Sure, they may not have raised a particular child or set of children, but their productive work contributed to taxes that did, and to the infrastructure and wealth that other people's children will inherit.
So, that's why.
The breadwinner pays For the things the homemaker needs to survive and raise children.
If you want breadwinner status, you have to provide bread. A tax and transfer system from the childless to the childbearing would allow you to play your part as breadwinner.
Otherwise, your just asking other people’s kids to pay the taxes that fund your social security.
I think the OP's point is one I actually agree with more broadly - although not in that particular implementation.
If society, collectively, wants more children it needs to make it more attractive (or less unattractive) to have them, and make it less attractive (or more unattractive) not to have them - and the more children, the more.
Today, society wants children but imposes the vast majority of the cost on their parents, who receive emotional benefits (maybe) and perhaps (but not necessarily) some financial support. Yes, there are some tax benefits for single-income couples (but penalties for dual-income couples), and other tweaks here and there but they're not nearly enough. I've raised the issue of family law elsewhere: it actively and severely and often very excessively punishes breadwinners, mostly but not only men, for having formed families or having had children; but it's worth remembering that it does this because of a concern that, without it, women (specifically) would not want to form families or have children - and that points to the underlying issue, which is that having children simply costs more than it's worth for many people, men and women, IF THEY HAVE TO COVER THE BULK OF THE COSTS.
That approach is almost certainly going to need to change. And if society is going to make it more attractive to have kids, someone is going to have to pay for that. In practice, that means money (taxes and also spending) will have to shift and that will mean that taxes will fall more heavily, on average, and there will be reduced spending, on average, on people who don't have kids. Which is, I think, what the OP was getting at.
The way to do that isn't to cut people off from Social Security: they played by the rules they were given, and it's too late for them to have kids now. It also undermines the viability of Social Security: if you're going to renege over this, you may renege over other issues, and that will undermine support for the whole program pretty strongly. And it probably needs to be steered toward those who raise kids; not everyone has the biological ability to do that. But I digress.
It could very well - may have to - have implications for tax rates and benefits in the future, which can influence decisions to form families and raise children. Watch governments get serious about this, because the old approaches aren't going to work.
*not everyone has the biological ability to produce children, I meant, in the second-last para.
Dumb comparison because the breadwinners help the homemakers directly. And what is the ratio of government-owned infrastructure left to the next generation compared to debt the next generation will have to pay back?
I'm sorry you think that's a "dumb comparison". Helping many a little each, instead of helping a few a lot each, is a valid form of social contribution. Indeed, it's especially important because it carries far fewer emotional benefits to the helper.
Remember, too, that those childless people will leave everything they created and everything they have, to someone else's children. You don't take it with you.
"Helping many a little each, instead of helping a few a lot each, is a valid form of social contribution."
Do childless people send small amounts of charitable donations to people with children regularly? I don't believe so. Only thing you can say about them is that they pay somewhat higher taxes due to the child tax credit.
Contributions do not only take the form of taxes. Arguably, taxes are the least constructive form of contribution. Admittedly, I'm no leftist.
Will they?
Won’t a bunch blow it on personal consumption before the end?
Your average old person dies broke in a nursing home with Medicaid taking care of them.
Maybe scammers will get it. Or they will donate it to some charity I don’t care about.
I know several childless old people and they seem to waste their money on bullshit and I don’t expect there to be much left.
Yes, they will and they do.