Natalism and Liberalism: My Reply to Huemer's Reply to My Reply

Here’s my response to Huemer’s response to my response to his fine essay on natalism. My latest words are in normal text, Huemer’s in blockquotes, and my earlier words are in bold-face. Enjoy.

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(1)

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. Granted, that’s small comfort if you believe that education is essential for economic prosperity. If, however, you accept the heresies of educational signaling and credential inflation, the situation is more hopeful. We don’t have to give up prosperity to reverse falling birthrates; we just have to stop wasting taxpayers’ dollars and young people’s twenties to pretend to teach piles of irrelevant (and often toxic) book learning.

I understood that the thesis of The Case Against Education was only that signaling accounted for some significant fraction of the value of a degree, not that the learning was entirely useless.

Of course. I’m using “waste” in the economist’s sense of “spending with costs>benefits” rather than in the stronger sense of “stronger with zero benefits.”

I haven’t looked into this, but why would education reduce fertility, apart from increasing career opportunities? Because professors are teaching students that having kids is bad? I’m sure that has some negative effect, but my impression was that the effect applies to all kinds of schooling, not just schooling at recent left-wing colleges where this might be taught.

The simplest story is simply that prolonging education delays adulthood, which delays family formation. Another mechanism is that even if they never explicitly tell students, “Having kids is stupid,” schools send this message indirectly by constantly talking about the wonder of college and careers, and saying next to nothing good about having kids.

Btw, the competition between career and family is not only about income. It could also be about interestingness of one’s career. E.g., people might put off having kids to go to grad school, because they want a more interesting (but not necessarily well-paid) career.

Again, if I’m right about credential inflation, then education subsidies make people spend extra years in school to get a more interesting job even though they don’t actually need that schooling to learn how to do those jobs.

(2)

Much too agnostic. Basic Darwinism, combined with the fact that fertility is heritable, should make us highly confident that low fertility won’t last more than a few centuries. The rebound is coming.

Yes, we can hope that selection pressure will result in future generations who like kids more and therefore have more of them. I’m just not sure that will happen. I’m not sure there are enough genes for “really wanting to have lots of kids” in the gene pool. Heritability only means that what variation there is in fertility is to some degree explained by genetic variation; that doesn’t tell us whether there is enough variation to get a desired result.

If there’s a lot of variation, then we should be highly confident there’s enough variation! Remember, natural selection for height doesn’t just let tall specimens take over the population. It ultimately shifts the whole height distribution up. Dog breeding have given us an incredible range of phenotypes, many of which are far outside the range of the original breeding stock.

This is all true despite regression to the mean. If two six-foot parents have kids, their average height will be below six feet. But if they have ten kids, at least one of them will probably be much more than six feet tall. If there is strong selection pressure for height, this will eventually yield a population where almost everyone is well above six feet tall.

Does the same work for fertility? Yes, except that unlike height, there is always strong selection pressure for fertility. By definition!

Anyway, complete human extinction is an unlikely outcome. But there are some societies that are in serious trouble, in the pretty near future. South Korea has 0.9 fertility. Singapore has 1.0. I wouldn’t like to see either of these societies evaporate, even if the rest of humanity continues.

Agreed.

A cool guy and positive person

(3)

Though this sounds entirely plausible, it’s only half the story. In prosperous nations, humans don’t just have better career options; they have better parenting options! Food preparation, laundry, and electronic babysitters all make raising kids far easier than it used to be.

True, but then people raise their standards for what counts as good parenting. My armchair impression is that raising kids in poor countries isn’t a big burden because the parents don’t do all that much, and the kids actually help them with work. In rich countries, we can’t put our kids to work, and we (falsely, as you note) think we have to do lots more for the kids to count as good parents. So my guess is that overall, kids impose a greater burden in richer countries.

Great, but then you’re shifting away from your original story that low fertility is a natural outgrowth of liberalism to my story that low fertility heavily hinges on misconceptions about nature versus nurture.

(4)

And in contrast to earlier eras, modern parents rarely have to witness their children suffer, much less die. …

True; however, it seems that the risk of having some of your kids die increases fertility. At least, that’s the message I got from Amartya Sen; people have extra kids to compensate for the child mortality.

Maybe, but you’re again shifting away from your original story. You start with, “Having kids is relatively worse in rich, liberal societies” and end with, “OK, having kids is in many ways better in rich, liberal societies, but fertility is still falling for other reasons.”

(5)

We should distinguish between “a good time in the short run” and “a good time in the long run.” Yes, lots of casual sex is fun in the short-run, especially for males. That said, human beings, including males, seem  much happier in long-run relationships.

Agreed. I wrote here about the importance of marriage:

My point was that the spread of liberal values causes people to marry later and/or be less likely to marry at all. Maybe that’s partly because young people have false beliefs or imprudent tendencies. But anyway, given those beliefs and tendencies, liberalism reduces/delays marriage, which in turn reduces fertility.

Remember, you started off saying that liberalism is, despite its unfortunate anti-natal effects, factually correct. Now you’re appealing to “false beliefs” and “imprudent tendencies.” Which is it? Semantically speaking, we can either say:

(a) These “false beliefs” and “imprudent tendencies” are part of liberalism. If so, then liberalism is much less factually correct than you initially said.

or

(b) These “false beliefs” and “imprudent tendencies” are not part of liberalism. If so, then the real cause of falling fertility is not “liberalism” but these false beliefs and imprudent tendencies.

(6)

You can acknowledge that lots of people — especially immature young adults — make poor life choices while respecting their right to do so.

Agreed. However, I think it’s part of modern liberalism that one doesn’t judge those people too harshly either. You don’t get on their case, call them “immoral”, etc.

“Modern liberalism” has little trouble condemning people for doing anything that modern liberalism considers bad. So problem seems to just be that liberalism mistakenly denies that immature young adults are making poor life choices.

(7)

Again, you can reframe the conservative view as, “In the long run, family typically matters more for your happiness than either career success or what passes for ‘personal fulfillment.’” And a pile of happiness research backs this up. Indeed, the main thing most people like about their jobs is making friends and being part of a team, not the tasks themselves.

Sure. That’s compatible with the idea that your career is of comparable importance to family life; that’s just a comment on what about your work life is valuable.

I’m not sure the conservative view is what you say. I think the conservatives might say that it isn’t about your happiness at all. That’s a selfish concern. They might say that having a family is just intrinsically good, that it’s part of your role, that God wants you to do it, etc.

Granted. That’s why I used my exact phrasing. Conservative defenses of traditional values are all over the place. My point, though, is that your original essay explicitly states, “The liberal views on nearly all of the above points are clearly the correct, rational views. (Sorry, conservatives.),” singling out abortion as the sole outlier. Your considered view, however, seems to be that conservative conclusions on most of these issues are closer to the truth the the liberal views.

Agreed that family life is very important to most people’s happiness, and is probably undervalued by young people.

(8)

The correct, rational view is that there are medium-to-large differences between men and women on almost everything important. Gender stereotypes remain highly accurate.

Of course. I certainly never meant to deny biological sex differences. I discussed some of them here and here.

Great, which is why I was so baffled that you seemed to include “Traditional gender roles are oppressive and based on erroneous stereotypes. Men and women are pretty much the same, and there’s no reason why women should not be just as career-oriented as men” on your list of “clearly correct, rational views”!

I just meant that women don’t have to remain barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. It’s totally cool for women to want a career. It’s also cool if they don’t. Individuals should decide what’s best for themselves. Conservatives of previous generations didn’t agree with that.

A much more modest position, especially if you pair it with: “Traditional gender roles are functional and based on statistically accurate stereotypes. Men and women are very different, and there are good reasons why women should not, on average, be just as career-oriented as men.” How many liberals of the current generation would publicly say such a thing?

(9)

In practice, traditional religion is pro-natalist. Religious people do have more kids. In theory, however, traditional religion’s commitment to natalism is mixed at best: See the glorification of celibacy in many religions.

Fair. St. Paul says that complete celibacy is the best option, followed by marriage; premarital sex is of course sinful. But given that most human beings are not remotely prepared to accept celibacy, that message winds up being a pro-marriage message.

I was raised Catholic. Even in liberal California, they preached the evils of sex far more than the glories of marriage. I don’t think my experience is so odd.

(10)

Besides the complexity of the moral arguments, there is good evidence that women overestimate the negative effects of unwanted pregnancies. Women who say, “A baby would ruin my life” are typically deeply mistaken.

Completely plausible. Even more importantly, they probably don’t realize how much they’re going to love the baby and the emotional rewards that will result.

Yes.

(11)

Again, what if a lot of this is just social contagion of troubled youths? We can be accepting of the small share of the population that really is happier living a non-straight lifestyle while wondering if the recent rise of LGBT is “obviously fine.”

Of course. I’m saying it’s fine to be (genuinely) gay or trans. I’m not saying that it’s fine to try to convince other people that they’re gay or trans when they’re not. Abigail Shrier’s recent book has evidence about the social contagion effect. I am highly skeptical of the ability of social pressure to make people actually gay or trans, but Shrier shows evidence that it can make people say and even believe that they are trans.

So again, you wind up endorsing conclusions that are, at least in the contemporary public political landscape, highly conservative.

(12)

At least in the First World, the effect of parenting on adult outcomes is much lower than most people believe. A large share of unpleasant parental “investment” is therefore better seen as waste. …

Most parents select their family size based on myopic feelings of exhaustion with young kids. The rational approach, however, is to weigh costs and benefits over your entire lifetime. …

Population also has large positive effects on innovation, choice, and retirement systems. And in economic terms, most of these are not merely benefits, but positive externalities that self-interest alone tends to undersupply.

All sounds right.

Appreciated!

In this piece, I argue that a good solution is to encourage fertility with tax credits rather than baby bonuses. The more taxes you normally pay, the bigger the gain. Indeed, I like the idea of giving parents a full tax holiday for a year or more for every kid they have.

…Maybe, rather than a fixed dollar amount, you should get to deduct a fixed percentage of your income per dependent child that you have, on the theory that the cost of raising kids goes up with your income. I would do this every year, rather than a big credit at the beginning (so people don’t, e.g., father kids then abandon them). I wouldn’t give a full tax holiday, though; that sounds like too much.

If the fertility problem is anywhere near as severe as you paint, why think that a one-year tax holiday is anywhere near enough? Why not two years? Or five?

I maintain the problem of child abandonment that you worry about is trivial, because almost all of the tax benefit would go to higher-income parents who have high family stability. My proposal is designed to counter anti-natal myopia — overrating short-run costs of kids — with pro-natal myopia — giving big cash windfalls every time a baby arrives.

Final query: My previous comment maintains that, “Most of the relevant fertility-relevant ideas about the family and sexuality that Mike deems blatantly false possess more than a kernel of truth. Indeed, they’re ‘mostly true’ rather than ‘irrational.’ Based on past experience, I predict that Mike will acknowledge my large amendment fairly readily.”

So, Mike, are you ready to acknowledge my large amendment?