Strong piece, and the Julian Simon framing is exactly right. I'd add one diagnostic refinement: the stated vs. revealed preference gap you identify isn't just about tradeoffs—it's about identity strategy.
When Gen Z Harris voters rank "having children" 12th of 13 priorities (6% essential) while Gen Z Trump voters rank it 1st (34% essential), we're not seeing different calculations about the same goal. We're seeing fundamentally different conceptions of what constitutes a fulfilling life. The economic barriers are real but not binding—they're post-hoc rationalizations for choices already made at the identity level.
This is why Nordic subsidies fail despite eliminating economic barriers entirely, while Utah County achieves 2.1+ fertility without them. Sweden solved the wrong problem. Utah County built identity infrastructure—community networks, family-oriented culture, migration mechanisms that concentrate family-formation people—and got the outcome subsidies couldn't purchase.
Your point about needing status to exceed opportunity cost is the key insight most policy wonks miss. You can't subsidize your way to status. You have to build environments where family formation identity is normative rather than exceptional.
I explore this at length in my forthcoming book on why America's "problems" are actually structural advantages—federalism lets Utah County exist while progressive metros run different experiments, mobility lets families sort toward what works, and free speech lets us have exactly this conversation. The repair mechanism is already operating.
Sure, will do. I am sharing the current draft with some thought leaders to get their feedback. Recently, I had Forbes review it and provide feedback, which I have since incorporated. If you are interested in reviewing the current version and providing feedback, let me know. I would be happy to share an electronic version with you. Chris
What was not addressed here is the question of opportunity cost. If we want more Americans, and we are willing to spend billions (or even trillions) to increase the population, the best way to do this would be to pay more immigrants to come to our country. Now, if we get all 8 billion people to come to America and empty out the rest of the world, and the birth rate is still a problem, then we can start thinking about welfare for natalism. But the gains from immigration are so massive compared to natalism that it doesn't seem like a good utilitarian calculation, if we had to choose one over the other. As you mentioned, my problem with empowering natalists is that they do generally seem to be nativists and nationalists.
Seems like a motivated take. Why focus on the US in particular? Absent AGI, global fertility is (obviously) much more important to the long-term growth of the global economy, on which the US economy is dependent, than immigration. Not utilitarian to prioritize short-term, (somewhat) localized gains for US citizens over widespread human flourishing.
On the whole I would consider myself a utilitarian, but I think the assumption that "more people is good" is wrong. Good for whom? The assertion that a world with 10 billion people is better than one with 5 billion people has never made sense to me. The idea that you can do arithmetic with total happiness levels is nonsense. Things can only matter to individual minds that already exist. A mind that doesn't exist doesn't suffer from not existing. Nobody is harmed by not being born. There is no one to harm. And on the contrary, everyone suffers from being born. Even the most charmed life has loads of suffering in it. Adding more people to the world doesn't increase overall happiness levels. That's such a simplistic view of what a mind is. "Happy lives" is an incoherent concept. Someone's only a "happy person" until they're not. Our lives are all a mix of highs and lows, banality and crises. You might be the happiest person in the world one day and then you have bone cancer or an excruciating mental health crisis the next. Happy lives are happy compared to bad lives, but not compared to never having been.
I've never seen anyone successfully rebut David Benatar's asymmetry argument. People seems to just dismiss it out of hand but it seems rock solid to me. Probably doesn't help that the dude seems to be a reclusive weirdo.
I agree that I'm not sure that having 10 billion people in the world or even today's 8 billion is preferable to say 1 or 2 billion. Not to sound like a total environmentalist hippie or anything, but having 8 billion people today is filling the world with endless amounts of garbage and pollution. I'm cool with 10 billion people if we can in the long term find a way to live in balance with nature (I'm not degrowth for the sake of degrowth), but I'm skeptical that this can/will be done with 10 billion people or more, but then technology could always prove me wrong - I hope it does!
But all that being said, I absolutely love children and babies. I have 4 of my own. And while I don't think everyone should have kids, I do think anyone who wants to should (excepting some classes of wierdo).
But I think the trend of modern economic reality is that human growth rates slow once economies modernize - so this is happening no matter what we do or no matter how much people stomp their feet about birth rates.
Consider these two realities:
1. Most US conservatives have a kind of ideological block that does not let them seriously consider the idea of pronatalist benefits. They might say "maybe" sometimes, or come up wtih gimmicks like Trump Accounts, but they are never going to voluntarily pay extra taxes for these things, which is what is necessary.
2. US Left-Liberals have a similar block because for them, degrowth is the point - the correct amount of babies to be had is always zero.
So that leaves only normie centrists/liberals and the occasional Mitt Romeny-type on board with pronatalist policies, which does not look promising in today's political environment.
Your argument boils down to "life sucks". If the average life is more positive than negative, then that's better than non-life. So your contention is that life is more negative than positive, therefore we should all kill ourselves to end our unhappiness.
Again, better for whom? If it contains more positive than negative then that's great. I would argue that it's impossible to quantify that, and I think people are quite bad at objectively assessing the quality of their own lives. But even granting the premise, if that person with a positive life had never been born there would have been no them to miss out on anything. So how can it have been better for them to exist? Presumably you're unbothered by not having been alive in the year 1526, right?
This is merely an argument against procreation, it's not pro suicide. Once you exist, you have an interest in continuing to exist and also your life impacts the lives of of the people you know and love.
A big problem with this is our culture has no healthy way of thinking about women.
Incels and groypers think that women are stupid, manipulative, should not be able to vote, belong in the kitchen raising kids, and hate women because of these factors.
The left thinks women are basically akin to men, the differences are purely socialized, and that marriages should be purely egalitarian. They like women because they think women are liberating themselves from false socialized standards.
The 'chivalrous' right also thinks that women are stupid, belong in the kitchen, and should not be working, but they cloak this in old fashioned 'my wife is so much better than me' rhetoric.
To women, the incel mentality seems hateful and scary, and the 'chivalrous right' perspective seems patronizing and condescending. Therefore, they default to the left perspective, and try to act like men. This is going to lead to falling birthrates. We need some modern way of partitioning gender roles in a way that does not completely ignore biology but is also not hostile, hateful, or anachronistic.
Thankfully in the real world there's plenty of people who are neither Trad\Incels nor radical feminists who think men and women are basically identical.
Go to the average Hispanic or Orthodox Jewish family and you'll find a far more reasonable and accurate attitude to sexual differences.
I think one of Hanania's better ideas is that we underrate the importance of the internet, that most culture flows downstream from the internet, and so if the 'healthy attitudes' you describe exist in pockets of real life, but they are nowhere to be found on the internet, they are likely doing to decline and decay over time.
You're thinking of ultra orthodox. Just normal religious jews are pretty modern besides for things like modest clothing and specific religious rituals. Like think of Ben Shapiro's wife being a doctor. That's the norm.
We could mix an economic explanation into this. It used to be the case that one salary was enough to raise a middle class family. Nowadays, two incomes are needed. But having children is much less fun if both parents have to work full time. It means much less time to spend with the kids. We even invented awful words like "quality time" in the attempt to cope with this.
First, as some argue, we have been having diminishing (or even negative) returns on innovation for a while. Second, for the future of humanity, shouldn't we prioritize maintenance (including the preservation of natural ecosystems) over innovation? Third, if we really wanted more innovation, why don't we educate our children better?
Not sure how you came up with this: "What is the ideal fertility rate for a society? I don’t know, but would guess somewhere between 4 and 8 per woman."
Umm. I am not sure that would even be safe given that that average age a woman starts her family is now >30 and 1 in 3 births is a c-section.
I have to admit, even as a man, 4-8 seems like a lot. You start running into all those Malthusian concerns people used to have. And that's not even getting into the strain on the woman's body of having that many kids.
I had my third child in less than three years just a few days ago. I am very sleep deprived, am struggling to keep my growing business moving, and feel very run down physically. And just imagine how my wife feels!
But we are both also very happy. This is possible I think because little babies are adorable and make you happy, because we have a ton of family support, and because my wife and I were raised in a religious environment where having children is an unquestioned and obvious good. The very saddest and most unfortunate in our community are those who are unable to achieve marriage, and for those who marry and then struggle with fertility.
The financials do matter, and I stress about them every day, but because of my community structure which includes vast and deep charitable organizations to cover almost every area of life, and NYC's over the top generous welfare state, I have zero fear about even a worst case scenario financially. We will not be thrown out on the street, we will not starve, we will be able to get good medical care, and I will even be able to send my kids to religious private school, even if I completely fail at my job of supporting my family.
When I think about how to extrapolate from my experience to the American and global fertility crisis, I think the problems to solve are social status, community, and safety net. We need pedal-to-the-metal pro-natal propaganda inserted into all media at every level, we need to make community formation possible (this is mostly housing related I think), and we need to redirect our social welfare spending from the old, disabled, and criminal, towards growing families. I think a combo of those three, seriously pursued and applied, would get us above replacement in a decade or less
You know it doesn't work like that. You could pay me a million dollars and I can't stop Richard from doing it. Though I do roll my eyes when they start with the pronatalism without getting any women involved. What are you guys going to do, jack off into an artificial womb?
I did argue in a brief comment that talking about having babies is really stupid without more buy-in from women. I mean, that's biology 101.
They just talk about it so completely detached, like it's no big deal to have babies. Like women not having babies is just a bug in the female programming, not a sign of something much more important. The cavalier attitude is irritating especially from the group of people who will never have to give birth and deal with the physical aftermath.
I actually don't think the problem's solvable without going more right wing than most techies want to. Most wealthy nations with stronger welfare states and better women's rights have lower fertility rates than we do. (Although the *lowest* are in East Asia, which are even more patriarchal generally.) The exception is Israel, which has a strong cultural drive to avoid extinction. What's probably going to happen is you're going to see the urban liberal fraction of American society further decline and evangelical Christians and other conservative groups multiplying in numbers by having more kids, and gradually driving this country further and further right.
I just find it silly the techies rarely recognize there's a second person involved in this.
But that's regression and it doesn't really add up when you account for the amount of women leaving the church as a whole. The birth rate decline is everywhere, even in highly patriarchal countries. What is probably going to happen is a complete dissolution of religion as women continue to exit, with the entire entire establishment collapsing in on itself without women there to do the work. Evangelical christians are a dying breed. If we want this problem to be solved, then it needs to revolve around the needs of women, not markets, not countries, not statesmen.
I guess the question is whether old-school religions can breed faster than they lose converts, and it's an open question. I genuinely do not know the answer.
I've seen the whole 'society centered around people's needs' thing come up before and the last attempt to do that was socialism, and you remember how that turned out. If you mean women specifically...actual matriarchies are pretty thin on the ground historically, you wind up looking at tiny groups like the Mosuo. That doesn't mean something new couldn't come up, of course.
The essay & comments have lots of 3rd person perspectives- and assumptions - about women. For example Richard writes, "I’m guessing that when you ask women this question, they’re thinking about an ideal scenario without tradeoffs."
Are we taking for granted here that any tradeoff of parenting is for women to calculate alone? Or, does it gloss over the fact that parenthood impacts mothers a lot more than fathers--despite everything? Ask a woman about the mental burden of parenting with a partner who hasn't yet understood that zoning out is not a prerogative for both. So in our very "enlightened" age, gender roles still matter in growing a family.
Secondly, it would be helpful if you are a weathy couple and can afford trophy children. For the middle or low class to see they cannot give to thier child the advantages of elite birth, money, power and prestige is painful--doesn't matter if the child is bright and deserving.
Lets talk about location. To be able to give the child not just competitive advantage, but even a decent eduction and opprtunities for growth, one needs to be in the right place! In fact, most places on earth will ensure that a newborn will grow up to be under-privileged. Do parents want this?
Or consider this: parents might exert themselves and provide for the first born, but will exhaust financial and emotions resources by the time the 2nd, 3rd or the 4th child comes along. Not to mention, the grandparents-if a couple is lucky--who also grow older and can no longer help?
A little but a hard fact of growing a family also will be impacted by whether you are bringing a white, a black brown or a native child into the world. Anyone thinks that racial privileges are not part of the equation?
Having said all this, If we want women's perspective, how about we ask a woman with adult daughters whether she would recommend motherhood? In all likelyhood she would say they would be as loved as the daughters, but beware of the motherhood penalty.
Motherhood penalty a real thing and it assumes the right to personal & financial growth, personal-health priorities and emotional well-being is slightly less for women.
"A little but a hard fact of growing a family also will be impacted by whether you are bringing a white, a black brown or a native child into the world. Anyone thinks that racial privileges are not part of the equation?"
I agree; any white woman has to contend with the fact that any bright son she has will be discriminated against by colleges and employers.
I too am always very happy to hear that someone is "expecting." But I do not feel correct in making someone who has not had children or does not intend to have children feel bad about that decision. I can't know the circumstances that went into their decision.
I have three adult children and three grandchildren and have been married happily for 40 years. But a lot of good fortune and luck led to our having an extended family that provides us a great deal of purpose and joy. It doesn't always work out that way.
The economic case for having children today is not very convincing when AGI seems so close. You could still make the utilitarian argument that more people equals more happiness and so we should make more people, but I don't see why that should motivate anyone if they prioritize their own self-interest.
The appeal of utilitarianism is that it's a system that self-interested actors can coordinate around to maximize their own expected value. But in a world where AGI has eliminated the need for humans, adding more people only serves to reduce the expected value of the people already alive (by soaking up resources), thereby decoupling self-interest from utilitarianism. So then why should anyone be motivated by the utilitarian argument for having lots of children?
I get that this question is ultimately just asking "why be a utilitarian rather than an egoist," and that's beyond the scope of the essay, but I think it's still something pro-natalists should have an answer for given that AGI seems imminent and a large portion of people are fundamentally operating on egoist morality, even if they won't say so.
This reminds me of the climate change arguments against natalism. It feels like the underlying logic is to commit to an anti-natalist position and then rationalize it based on the millenarian topic du jour. “AGI” is not lurking around the corner to take all of our jobs, it’s not a legitimate reason to avoid having children.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis says that available information should be reflected in share prices. There are lots of publicly listed companies that would be affected by AGI. We don't see an indication of that. OpenAI said they would never have ads in their product... they are shifting to that now, whereas if their product was valuable enough they shouldn't need to resort to a revenue model they had rejected.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis doesn't carry much weight when we're talking about AGI. The problem is that it's never happened before so people have no reference by which they can figure out how much they should update towards AGI. Thus any information strongly signaling AGI is drowned out by priors.
As for OpenAI moving to an ad-based revenue model, that only says that they're short on money right now. This could be because investors lost faith in AGI itself and it isn't near after all. Or it could be because they're putting more of their faith in other AI companies and amidst all that competition, OpenAI is struggling to raise the exorbitant amount of money needed for their operations. I don't think the other AI companies are struggling to raise money and forced to resort to ads, so my guess is that it's the latter.
The EMH can still apply with new things, because things that have never happened before also happen all the time as time goes on. The EMH can handle Moore's Law, even though those increases are all things that previously weren't possible. People aren't just going on "priors", they are continually updating on new information, even if at any point in time one's current beliefs can be summarized as "priors", even after/if AGI arrives.
Do competing AI companies currently have higher market caps than OpenAI?
Wait, are you saying that to maximize utilitarian happiness, we wont need humans in the future because AGI can be happy for us? Wouldnt that be an argument against utilitarianism?
No, I'm saying even if you accept that humans are the only morally valuable beings, the utilitarian arguments for having kids lose their force because there's no longer any sort of selfish interest for the humans already alive.
I think the reason a lot of people are motivated by utilitarianism is because it's a coordination mechanism that can achieve good selfish outcomes for everyone. I might just be projecting my own egoist philosophy on other people but I'd be surprised if I were highly atypical in this regard. The reason the utilitarian argument loses its force when it comes to having kids is because AGI decouples self-interest and total utility. Unless you value having kids in itself, but then you probably don't have to be told about the utilitarian argument.
The issue here is that your premise is nonsensical. AGI is not only not close, but outright impossible. There is no jumping from mathematical models to sentience unless you've watched too much sci-fi.
I would like to try another critique. Children are beautiful, children bring joy to our lives, children teach us that learning is so much more important than knowing. But the children's perspective is entirely missing from this article. Children are only considered from an instrumental pov. This article promotes children as a tool for political ends. Is that an ethical position to take? And does this position not, indirectly, reveal the deeper reason why so many think that our society is fundamentally hostile to children?
Having children creates an enormous positive externality for the child- life. The positive externality for society is comparatively smaller. The parents should be compensated for this, and the receiver of the positive externality should pay the compensation. Children should not have to pay this at a young age, as this will diminish their ability to form their own families. They should have to pay their children when they are older. This payment can replace social security, killing two birds with one stone. It should be a percentage of their income, which will also incentivize parents to educate their children. Percentage based compensation will also ensure a greater incentive for parents likely to have high earning children.
Yep. There are tweaks necessary though. For example, if the kids when they grow up are not gainfully employed, they don't need to contribute to their parents. On the other hand, one would like parents bringing up kids in such a way that they are gainfully employed.
Moreover, female kids might be interested in raising their own families with kids. So in such a case, contribution from married female kids might be replaced by society mirroring the tax and other dues paid by the working male member of that new family.
Since the money is assigned to the mothers of the children, then female children who in turn have children will in turn be given such money... although a percentage tax on a percentage of tax revenue will shrink with compounding. Assigning 100% of all income of offspring to parents would fully internalize income effects all the way down, but zero tax revenue for the government and zero income remaining to the kids (as long as their ancestral maternal line is still alive) is the opposite of Laffer-maximizing.
There is no reason to assign money to the mothers of the children exclusively. If one were to do that, the fathers of the children would have no financial motive in supporting children's mothers. Besides, there is the danger that if one gives money to say a 40 year-old, he or she would stop working. Just like one knows with UBI.
The fundamental difference between the biological sexes across species is that sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive. Humans amplify this via internal gestation, and having children born helpless for a long time requiring care. Since they are already so invested, this falls more on the mother, and thus they require more incentivizing. If women could all go to sperm banks and raise children by themselves, that would be sufficient as far as the government is concerned which just the needs those kids to grow into taxpayers.
One of the main problems in HUMAN fertility in post-industrial countries is that good to above average men do not get rewarded. So it is very common to see partnerships where the man threatens to leave if the woman becomes pregnant. So she continues in a fruitless partnership with a socially above average man until she's no longer easily fertile. If he were sufficiently rewarded, this wouldn't happen.
Once again, a person loads up a mountain of facts and does not grasp the simple truth: in order for more babies to be born, we have to give the majority of people enough money to have them. There are reasons why we do not: the basic reason is that people who are born sooner want their wealth to have priority over that of other people, born later, to have their wealth protected.
This is a mathematical problem: a great deal of the wealth is not really there. But you can pass rules to give yourself the money anyway. This is true of Elon Musk's wealth, running into hundreds of billions of dollars, and the zoning ordinances on most buildings, because building more buildings would decrease the value of current housing. This is a problem in the developed world - it is not exclusive to the US.
The problem will go away when the faux-rich are pried loose from their grip on power. This is a ripple effect of the post war war two baby boom: there are a lot of people who are old and want their faux income to be monetized. You can't happen unless you restrict all the ways that money passes from older to younger and expands with new projects being built. Again, this is the grit on the wheels and while conservatives are leading, the charge liberal groups to less, but more than enough, to keep faux wealth to go to the old.
Again, this is a mathematical problem that needs to be taken on by an entire society. But individually, people want to continue to harvest the faux-wealth even though collectively they deny the problem because other people are not willing to give up their faux-wealth. "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree." Everyone wants someone else to give up their wealth.
This is the point where the problems of faux-wealth have reached a breaking point because fossil fuels are a large portion of the faux-wealth. And the people who want to continue to extract more than their portion of that faux wealth are a plurality of the world's developed population. However, this is the acute version of a chronic problem: the rich (and we are all the rich, though each of us thinks we are poor because there is another layer of rich, which is even richer than we are) want to get their share of faux-wealth without treating the chronic problem.
To summarize: we need to electrify the economy. This means getting fossil fuel cars off the streets. No one wants to do this because the initial part is extremely expensive. It means making public transportation better as they do in some areas of Europe and Japan. It means junking a great deal of faux-wealth that is invested in fossil fuels: including buildings and other infrastructure. It means building units of housing, which will almost certainly depreciate existing housing.
Of course, the problem will get solved, but the way to do that is to have a huge war, which will burn a great deal of the faux-wealth, and open up redevelopment on a tremendously huge scale. It is coming; the rumblings of it are being heard in Greenland and Venezuela. It will get much larger. This war will come, even though the vast majority of people want to stick their craniums in the sand and hope it will all go away. For many of them, it will: they are old enough that they will not see the destruction that an overheated atmosphere will deliver. Others will not be so lucky.
The problem with your article is that it misses the point. You have to give more to the young, but in a way so they don't spend it on gambling or other forms of zero-sum wealth accumulation. Preaching that the young should give up more freedom so that the old can cruise happily on faux-wealth is not going to cut it. People are dumb, but they're not quite so dumb as to give up freedoms so that other people can cruise to retirement.
People were much poorer in the past, but had more kids. The Amish & ultra-Orthodox aren't wealthier than average Americans, but they culturally value kids more, so they have them.
And are lower than average in almost every measure of success. If the Amish are your poster child, then you have real problems. Now I am a person who believes in having more children, but I trace the problems to a wealthier generation of people hoarding all of the gains of society rather than passing it down to these people who are most able to have children.
That is, I believe that the problem is a top-down one in our politics, and not just the US politics, but the global developed world politics, including China, Japan, Europe, Canada, and most of South America. Claiming that the people who have very little choice is a suboptimal strategy.
> And are lower than average in almost every measure of success.
Not the measure of Darwinian fitness. I'm pretty sure they have lower homicide rates too.
> Now I am a person who believes in having more children, but I trace the problems to a wealthier generation of people hoarding all of the gains of society rather than passing it down to these people who are most able to have children.
You tracing it that way doesn't make sense. The explanation is CLEARLY cultural rather than economic. Hence the high fertility populations I mentioned, and the higher fertility of the poorer past (and found in some poorer countries today).
> That is, I believe that the problem is a top-down one in our politics, and not just the US politics, but the global developed world politics, including China, Japan, Europe, Canada, and most of South America.
There isn't really a top-down political structure over all those countries, and they vary a lot in their politics. But they are all plugged into global culture, while the Amish & ultra-Orthodox and many sub-Saharan Africans are less so.
> Claiming that the people who have very little choice is a suboptimal strategy.
That your pile of bullshit means something. It doesn't, but it shows that we are on the decline because people rally around false promises rather than real solutions.
So why do the poorest people on Earth in places like Sub-Saharan Africa have the most children in the world, at between double and triple the replacement rate, while people in developed carbon-neutral welfare states have the fewest? Have Chad and the Congo embraced the abundance agenda and invested heavily in natalist wealth redistribution, public transportation, and green energy? You are just arguing for your ideology and working backwards to apply it to a completely unrelated issue.
Until there is a transition to a post-industrial society and economy, there is a heavy pressure on women and men to have more children, as having more children means having a larger workforce at a younger age. This continues into the postindustrial. Because people are programmed to have babies, there is a 50 to 75-year wave where the agricultural and industrial propagation is maintained, even though the economics become postindustrial during that time.
When the second generation of post-industrial economics comes in, they see that there is very little benefit to having children and a great deal of minuses. They also come to realize that Fertility is a choice that they can delay or prevent, even to the point of having abortions as they do in Japan, and therefore, on the margins, they have fewer children.
So yes, if you want to go back to supporting the population by agriculture and are willing to give up a host of the amenities of the 20th century, you can do that. However, there are other forces which want you to industrialize so that you can become a successful and commercially viable market for the products of industrialization.
Again, the obvious economic argument is that raising families is not profitable, and if we want more of the product, we have to give more to the people who raise families. Again, I will point out this is not just a US problem but a global problem with different subgroups of the "wealthy" claiming a larger share of the profits than they are rightfully entitled to, that is, in an economic sense.
Again, you should not lead with this argument because it is easy to rip up into small pieces and get thrown back in your face. Which is what I am now doing.
You are moving away from your original claim. That difference in the role of children between agrarian and post-industrial societies is reasonable, and I have heard others, like Peter Zeihan, articulate it similarly. However, you are viewing the issue purely in economistic terms when the fertility crisis is primarily a cultural issue.
The cost-benefit differential for children in the developing versus developed world explains the discrepancy between societies with 5.5 and 2.5 births per woman. However, I think that is a different issue from a developed country that manages to stay above the replacement rate at 2.5, ensuring long-term stability, versus one at 1.5 that faces a demographic bomb.
Bryan Caplan explains this issue well in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. He argues that people overestimate the costs of having children because our society is heavily invested in the pseudoscientific nurture assumption, which makes parenting seem much more daunting than it needs to be. If people had a more relaxed, long-term perspective on the benefits of having children, as people in the developing world do, they would not view it in such pessimistic, economically reductive terms.
No, I praise it in economic terms because economics is a probable discipline rather than on cultural themes, which are inherently unprovable. It doesn't mean I don't have cultural reasons, but they are rather much more intrinsically personal than economic ones.
I agree with much of this, although I admit I struggle to reconcile the desire to make childless adults lower-status with the desire to keep abortion legal. Is it your desire that abortion remains legal, but subject to greater social shaming than it currently is?
I agree, this is contradictory. I actually cringe at the idea of shaming childless adults.
Once had a bad female boss who was a real twit. She said she never wanted kids and had her tubes cut. I was like "Thank God!" I have no desire to see women like her forced into motherhood. Let her genes end with her, please!
I agree with Richard that, to reverse current trends in fertility, some amount of social shaming is necessary, and you have to consider what trade-offs to make. Sure, on the margin more social shaming of childless people might induce some people who really oughtn't to be parents to have children. But in our culture currently, lots of people who really OUGHT to be parents choose not to have children, which has dysgenic effects and negative externalities for society as a whole.
I guess I'm not really a "natalist" then. I am certainly pro-having babies, as my own life attests, I just am "pro-women/couples who want babies having as many or little as they want" - as opposed to "all women must have babies."
I understand you are taking a philosophical stand here, but there is a pragmatic aspect of this you are not considering, and, as you correctly note, making this argument puts you in strange company.
Saying you think women should have 6.5 babies or whatever, notwithstanding the validity or otherwise of your arguments about maximising utility, virtue etc., immediately puts you in la-la land for most normies. There is just no way that in our current society women are going to (freely) go back to having 6-8 children or whatever it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
And that is a problem, because the collapsing birth rate is one of the world’s biggest issues, and you are making it more likely that people won’t take it seriously. But people really need to take it seriously! The average birth rate for the developed world is currently around 1.5. The result of this is a quickly aging population. Unless we get the birth rate back up to around 2 there will be very negative consequences for society. Whole countries will be brought to their knees, economically. South Korea and probably Japan are finished. And apart from the pure economic impact, there are lots of other ways an aging population will have a profound impact on society.*
I am not saying you shouldn't argue your point of view, but to enact change you need to temper it with some realism.
*There is a good book, No One Left, by British demographer Paul Morland, which goes into the details and consequences. I highly recommend it.
Strong piece, and the Julian Simon framing is exactly right. I'd add one diagnostic refinement: the stated vs. revealed preference gap you identify isn't just about tradeoffs—it's about identity strategy.
When Gen Z Harris voters rank "having children" 12th of 13 priorities (6% essential) while Gen Z Trump voters rank it 1st (34% essential), we're not seeing different calculations about the same goal. We're seeing fundamentally different conceptions of what constitutes a fulfilling life. The economic barriers are real but not binding—they're post-hoc rationalizations for choices already made at the identity level.
This is why Nordic subsidies fail despite eliminating economic barriers entirely, while Utah County achieves 2.1+ fertility without them. Sweden solved the wrong problem. Utah County built identity infrastructure—community networks, family-oriented culture, migration mechanisms that concentrate family-formation people—and got the outcome subsidies couldn't purchase.
Your point about needing status to exceed opportunity cost is the key insight most policy wonks miss. You can't subsidize your way to status. You have to build environments where family formation identity is normative rather than exceptional.
I explore this at length in my forthcoming book on why America's "problems" are actually structural advantages—federalism lets Utah County exist while progressive metros run different experiments, mobility lets families sort toward what works, and free speech lets us have exactly this conversation. The repair mechanism is already operating.
—Chris Wasden
Please send me your book when it comes out!
Sure, will do. I am sharing the current draft with some thought leaders to get their feedback. Recently, I had Forbes review it and provide feedback, which I have since incorporated. If you are interested in reviewing the current version and providing feedback, let me know. I would be happy to share an electronic version with you. Chris
What was not addressed here is the question of opportunity cost. If we want more Americans, and we are willing to spend billions (or even trillions) to increase the population, the best way to do this would be to pay more immigrants to come to our country. Now, if we get all 8 billion people to come to America and empty out the rest of the world, and the birth rate is still a problem, then we can start thinking about welfare for natalism. But the gains from immigration are so massive compared to natalism that it doesn't seem like a good utilitarian calculation, if we had to choose one over the other. As you mentioned, my problem with empowering natalists is that they do generally seem to be nativists and nationalists.
Seems like a motivated take. Why focus on the US in particular? Absent AGI, global fertility is (obviously) much more important to the long-term growth of the global economy, on which the US economy is dependent, than immigration. Not utilitarian to prioritize short-term, (somewhat) localized gains for US citizens over widespread human flourishing.
I'm saying if you had to choose between the two, one is better than the other
On the whole I would consider myself a utilitarian, but I think the assumption that "more people is good" is wrong. Good for whom? The assertion that a world with 10 billion people is better than one with 5 billion people has never made sense to me. The idea that you can do arithmetic with total happiness levels is nonsense. Things can only matter to individual minds that already exist. A mind that doesn't exist doesn't suffer from not existing. Nobody is harmed by not being born. There is no one to harm. And on the contrary, everyone suffers from being born. Even the most charmed life has loads of suffering in it. Adding more people to the world doesn't increase overall happiness levels. That's such a simplistic view of what a mind is. "Happy lives" is an incoherent concept. Someone's only a "happy person" until they're not. Our lives are all a mix of highs and lows, banality and crises. You might be the happiest person in the world one day and then you have bone cancer or an excruciating mental health crisis the next. Happy lives are happy compared to bad lives, but not compared to never having been.
I've never seen anyone successfully rebut David Benatar's asymmetry argument. People seems to just dismiss it out of hand but it seems rock solid to me. Probably doesn't help that the dude seems to be a reclusive weirdo.
I agree that I'm not sure that having 10 billion people in the world or even today's 8 billion is preferable to say 1 or 2 billion. Not to sound like a total environmentalist hippie or anything, but having 8 billion people today is filling the world with endless amounts of garbage and pollution. I'm cool with 10 billion people if we can in the long term find a way to live in balance with nature (I'm not degrowth for the sake of degrowth), but I'm skeptical that this can/will be done with 10 billion people or more, but then technology could always prove me wrong - I hope it does!
But all that being said, I absolutely love children and babies. I have 4 of my own. And while I don't think everyone should have kids, I do think anyone who wants to should (excepting some classes of wierdo).
But I think the trend of modern economic reality is that human growth rates slow once economies modernize - so this is happening no matter what we do or no matter how much people stomp their feet about birth rates.
Consider these two realities:
1. Most US conservatives have a kind of ideological block that does not let them seriously consider the idea of pronatalist benefits. They might say "maybe" sometimes, or come up wtih gimmicks like Trump Accounts, but they are never going to voluntarily pay extra taxes for these things, which is what is necessary.
2. US Left-Liberals have a similar block because for them, degrowth is the point - the correct amount of babies to be had is always zero.
So that leaves only normie centrists/liberals and the occasional Mitt Romeny-type on board with pronatalist policies, which does not look promising in today's political environment.
Your argument boils down to "life sucks". If the average life is more positive than negative, then that's better than non-life. So your contention is that life is more negative than positive, therefore we should all kill ourselves to end our unhappiness.
Again, better for whom? If it contains more positive than negative then that's great. I would argue that it's impossible to quantify that, and I think people are quite bad at objectively assessing the quality of their own lives. But even granting the premise, if that person with a positive life had never been born there would have been no them to miss out on anything. So how can it have been better for them to exist? Presumably you're unbothered by not having been alive in the year 1526, right?
This is merely an argument against procreation, it's not pro suicide. Once you exist, you have an interest in continuing to exist and also your life impacts the lives of of the people you know and love.
A big problem with this is our culture has no healthy way of thinking about women.
Incels and groypers think that women are stupid, manipulative, should not be able to vote, belong in the kitchen raising kids, and hate women because of these factors.
The left thinks women are basically akin to men, the differences are purely socialized, and that marriages should be purely egalitarian. They like women because they think women are liberating themselves from false socialized standards.
The 'chivalrous' right also thinks that women are stupid, belong in the kitchen, and should not be working, but they cloak this in old fashioned 'my wife is so much better than me' rhetoric.
To women, the incel mentality seems hateful and scary, and the 'chivalrous right' perspective seems patronizing and condescending. Therefore, they default to the left perspective, and try to act like men. This is going to lead to falling birthrates. We need some modern way of partitioning gender roles in a way that does not completely ignore biology but is also not hostile, hateful, or anachronistic.
Thankfully in the real world there's plenty of people who are neither Trad\Incels nor radical feminists who think men and women are basically identical.
Go to the average Hispanic or Orthodox Jewish family and you'll find a far more reasonable and accurate attitude to sexual differences.
The normies outnumber the online weirdos
I think one of Hanania's better ideas is that we underrate the importance of the internet, that most culture flows downstream from the internet, and so if the 'healthy attitudes' you describe exist in pockets of real life, but they are nowhere to be found on the internet, they are likely doing to decline and decay over time.
I don't believe the Amish get their attitudes from the internet. The Amish have not been declining & decaying over time, but rather growing.
Fair
Orthodox Jews are more genuinely traditional than self-proclaimed trads.
You're thinking of ultra orthodox. Just normal religious jews are pretty modern besides for things like modest clothing and specific religious rituals. Like think of Ben Shapiro's wife being a doctor. That's the norm.
We could mix an economic explanation into this. It used to be the case that one salary was enough to raise a middle class family. Nowadays, two incomes are needed. But having children is much less fun if both parents have to work full time. It means much less time to spend with the kids. We even invented awful words like "quality time" in the attempt to cope with this.
First, as some argue, we have been having diminishing (or even negative) returns on innovation for a while. Second, for the future of humanity, shouldn't we prioritize maintenance (including the preservation of natural ecosystems) over innovation? Third, if we really wanted more innovation, why don't we educate our children better?
Not sure how you came up with this: "What is the ideal fertility rate for a society? I don’t know, but would guess somewhere between 4 and 8 per woman."
Umm. I am not sure that would even be safe given that that average age a woman starts her family is now >30 and 1 in 3 births is a c-section.
I have to admit, even as a man, 4-8 seems like a lot. You start running into all those Malthusian concerns people used to have. And that's not even getting into the strain on the woman's body of having that many kids.
Wrote about it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/annledbetter/p/c-section-overuse-is-suppressing?r=8c5pl&utm_medium=ios&shareImageVariant=overlay
I had my third child in less than three years just a few days ago. I am very sleep deprived, am struggling to keep my growing business moving, and feel very run down physically. And just imagine how my wife feels!
But we are both also very happy. This is possible I think because little babies are adorable and make you happy, because we have a ton of family support, and because my wife and I were raised in a religious environment where having children is an unquestioned and obvious good. The very saddest and most unfortunate in our community are those who are unable to achieve marriage, and for those who marry and then struggle with fertility.
The financials do matter, and I stress about them every day, but because of my community structure which includes vast and deep charitable organizations to cover almost every area of life, and NYC's over the top generous welfare state, I have zero fear about even a worst case scenario financially. We will not be thrown out on the street, we will not starve, we will be able to get good medical care, and I will even be able to send my kids to religious private school, even if I completely fail at my job of supporting my family.
When I think about how to extrapolate from my experience to the American and global fertility crisis, I think the problems to solve are social status, community, and safety net. We need pedal-to-the-metal pro-natal propaganda inserted into all media at every level, we need to make community formation possible (this is mostly housing related I think), and we need to redirect our social welfare spending from the old, disabled, and criminal, towards growing families. I think a combo of those three, seriously pursued and applied, would get us above replacement in a decade or less
How much money would women have to pay men, as a collective, to get you all to stop talking about this?
You know it doesn't work like that. You could pay me a million dollars and I can't stop Richard from doing it. Though I do roll my eyes when they start with the pronatalism without getting any women involved. What are you guys going to do, jack off into an artificial womb?
I did argue in a brief comment that talking about having babies is really stupid without more buy-in from women. I mean, that's biology 101.
They just talk about it so completely detached, like it's no big deal to have babies. Like women not having babies is just a bug in the female programming, not a sign of something much more important. The cavalier attitude is irritating especially from the group of people who will never have to give birth and deal with the physical aftermath.
I actually don't think the problem's solvable without going more right wing than most techies want to. Most wealthy nations with stronger welfare states and better women's rights have lower fertility rates than we do. (Although the *lowest* are in East Asia, which are even more patriarchal generally.) The exception is Israel, which has a strong cultural drive to avoid extinction. What's probably going to happen is you're going to see the urban liberal fraction of American society further decline and evangelical Christians and other conservative groups multiplying in numbers by having more kids, and gradually driving this country further and further right.
I just find it silly the techies rarely recognize there's a second person involved in this.
But that's regression and it doesn't really add up when you account for the amount of women leaving the church as a whole. The birth rate decline is everywhere, even in highly patriarchal countries. What is probably going to happen is a complete dissolution of religion as women continue to exit, with the entire entire establishment collapsing in on itself without women there to do the work. Evangelical christians are a dying breed. If we want this problem to be solved, then it needs to revolve around the needs of women, not markets, not countries, not statesmen.
I guess the question is whether old-school religions can breed faster than they lose converts, and it's an open question. I genuinely do not know the answer.
I've seen the whole 'society centered around people's needs' thing come up before and the last attempt to do that was socialism, and you remember how that turned out. If you mean women specifically...actual matriarchies are pretty thin on the ground historically, you wind up looking at tiny groups like the Mosuo. That doesn't mean something new couldn't come up, of course.
Same.
That's fair. I think there is a secret third option here that we will have to figure out eventually if we want the species to continue.
The essay & comments have lots of 3rd person perspectives- and assumptions - about women. For example Richard writes, "I’m guessing that when you ask women this question, they’re thinking about an ideal scenario without tradeoffs."
Are we taking for granted here that any tradeoff of parenting is for women to calculate alone? Or, does it gloss over the fact that parenthood impacts mothers a lot more than fathers--despite everything? Ask a woman about the mental burden of parenting with a partner who hasn't yet understood that zoning out is not a prerogative for both. So in our very "enlightened" age, gender roles still matter in growing a family.
Secondly, it would be helpful if you are a weathy couple and can afford trophy children. For the middle or low class to see they cannot give to thier child the advantages of elite birth, money, power and prestige is painful--doesn't matter if the child is bright and deserving.
Lets talk about location. To be able to give the child not just competitive advantage, but even a decent eduction and opprtunities for growth, one needs to be in the right place! In fact, most places on earth will ensure that a newborn will grow up to be under-privileged. Do parents want this?
Or consider this: parents might exert themselves and provide for the first born, but will exhaust financial and emotions resources by the time the 2nd, 3rd or the 4th child comes along. Not to mention, the grandparents-if a couple is lucky--who also grow older and can no longer help?
A little but a hard fact of growing a family also will be impacted by whether you are bringing a white, a black brown or a native child into the world. Anyone thinks that racial privileges are not part of the equation?
Having said all this, If we want women's perspective, how about we ask a woman with adult daughters whether she would recommend motherhood? In all likelyhood she would say they would be as loved as the daughters, but beware of the motherhood penalty.
Motherhood penalty a real thing and it assumes the right to personal & financial growth, personal-health priorities and emotional well-being is slightly less for women.
"A little but a hard fact of growing a family also will be impacted by whether you are bringing a white, a black brown or a native child into the world. Anyone thinks that racial privileges are not part of the equation?"
I agree; any white woman has to contend with the fact that any bright son she has will be discriminated against by colleges and employers.
I too am always very happy to hear that someone is "expecting." But I do not feel correct in making someone who has not had children or does not intend to have children feel bad about that decision. I can't know the circumstances that went into their decision.
I have three adult children and three grandchildren and have been married happily for 40 years. But a lot of good fortune and luck led to our having an extended family that provides us a great deal of purpose and joy. It doesn't always work out that way.
The economic case for having children today is not very convincing when AGI seems so close. You could still make the utilitarian argument that more people equals more happiness and so we should make more people, but I don't see why that should motivate anyone if they prioritize their own self-interest.
The appeal of utilitarianism is that it's a system that self-interested actors can coordinate around to maximize their own expected value. But in a world where AGI has eliminated the need for humans, adding more people only serves to reduce the expected value of the people already alive (by soaking up resources), thereby decoupling self-interest from utilitarianism. So then why should anyone be motivated by the utilitarian argument for having lots of children?
I get that this question is ultimately just asking "why be a utilitarian rather than an egoist," and that's beyond the scope of the essay, but I think it's still something pro-natalists should have an answer for given that AGI seems imminent and a large portion of people are fundamentally operating on egoist morality, even if they won't say so.
This reminds me of the climate change arguments against natalism. It feels like the underlying logic is to commit to an anti-natalist position and then rationalize it based on the millenarian topic du jour. “AGI” is not lurking around the corner to take all of our jobs, it’s not a legitimate reason to avoid having children.
The argument isn't "don't have kids because AGI will take our jobs." The argument is, when AGI is imminent:
1. The economic arguments for having children are no longer valid
2. The utilitarian arguments for having children are no longer moving
Well, what exactly do you believe is imminent? What’s your definition of AGI?
AI that can do everything humans can do better and cheaper.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis says that available information should be reflected in share prices. There are lots of publicly listed companies that would be affected by AGI. We don't see an indication of that. OpenAI said they would never have ads in their product... they are shifting to that now, whereas if their product was valuable enough they shouldn't need to resort to a revenue model they had rejected.
The Efficient Markets Hypothesis doesn't carry much weight when we're talking about AGI. The problem is that it's never happened before so people have no reference by which they can figure out how much they should update towards AGI. Thus any information strongly signaling AGI is drowned out by priors.
As for OpenAI moving to an ad-based revenue model, that only says that they're short on money right now. This could be because investors lost faith in AGI itself and it isn't near after all. Or it could be because they're putting more of their faith in other AI companies and amidst all that competition, OpenAI is struggling to raise the exorbitant amount of money needed for their operations. I don't think the other AI companies are struggling to raise money and forced to resort to ads, so my guess is that it's the latter.
The EMH can still apply with new things, because things that have never happened before also happen all the time as time goes on. The EMH can handle Moore's Law, even though those increases are all things that previously weren't possible. People aren't just going on "priors", they are continually updating on new information, even if at any point in time one's current beliefs can be summarized as "priors", even after/if AGI arrives.
Do competing AI companies currently have higher market caps than OpenAI?
Wait, are you saying that to maximize utilitarian happiness, we wont need humans in the future because AGI can be happy for us? Wouldnt that be an argument against utilitarianism?
No, I'm saying even if you accept that humans are the only morally valuable beings, the utilitarian arguments for having kids lose their force because there's no longer any sort of selfish interest for the humans already alive.
Wouldnt it be enough that the future kids will have selfish interest? And why do dyou say that there is no longer any selfish interest?
I think the reason a lot of people are motivated by utilitarianism is because it's a coordination mechanism that can achieve good selfish outcomes for everyone. I might just be projecting my own egoist philosophy on other people but I'd be surprised if I were highly atypical in this regard. The reason the utilitarian argument loses its force when it comes to having kids is because AGI decouples self-interest and total utility. Unless you value having kids in itself, but then you probably don't have to be told about the utilitarian argument.
The issue here is that your premise is nonsensical. AGI is not only not close, but outright impossible. There is no jumping from mathematical models to sentience unless you've watched too much sci-fi.
How do we jump from chemical soup to sentience?
What makes you say AGI is impossible?
I would like to try another critique. Children are beautiful, children bring joy to our lives, children teach us that learning is so much more important than knowing. But the children's perspective is entirely missing from this article. Children are only considered from an instrumental pov. This article promotes children as a tool for political ends. Is that an ethical position to take? And does this position not, indirectly, reveal the deeper reason why so many think that our society is fundamentally hostile to children?
Having children creates an enormous positive externality for the child- life. The positive externality for society is comparatively smaller. The parents should be compensated for this, and the receiver of the positive externality should pay the compensation. Children should not have to pay this at a young age, as this will diminish their ability to form their own families. They should have to pay their children when they are older. This payment can replace social security, killing two birds with one stone. It should be a percentage of their income, which will also incentivize parents to educate their children. Percentage based compensation will also ensure a greater incentive for parents likely to have high earning children.
Robin Hanson has a proposal for children paying for their own existence https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/win-win-babies-as-infrastructurehtml
Yep. There are tweaks necessary though. For example, if the kids when they grow up are not gainfully employed, they don't need to contribute to their parents. On the other hand, one would like parents bringing up kids in such a way that they are gainfully employed.
Moreover, female kids might be interested in raising their own families with kids. So in such a case, contribution from married female kids might be replaced by society mirroring the tax and other dues paid by the working male member of that new family.
Since the money is assigned to the mothers of the children, then female children who in turn have children will in turn be given such money... although a percentage tax on a percentage of tax revenue will shrink with compounding. Assigning 100% of all income of offspring to parents would fully internalize income effects all the way down, but zero tax revenue for the government and zero income remaining to the kids (as long as their ancestral maternal line is still alive) is the opposite of Laffer-maximizing.
There is no reason to assign money to the mothers of the children exclusively. If one were to do that, the fathers of the children would have no financial motive in supporting children's mothers. Besides, there is the danger that if one gives money to say a 40 year-old, he or she would stop working. Just like one knows with UBI.
The fundamental difference between the biological sexes across species is that sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive. Humans amplify this via internal gestation, and having children born helpless for a long time requiring care. Since they are already so invested, this falls more on the mother, and thus they require more incentivizing. If women could all go to sperm banks and raise children by themselves, that would be sufficient as far as the government is concerned which just the needs those kids to grow into taxpayers.
One of the main problems in HUMAN fertility in post-industrial countries is that good to above average men do not get rewarded. So it is very common to see partnerships where the man threatens to leave if the woman becomes pregnant. So she continues in a fruitless partnership with a socially above average man until she's no longer easily fertile. If he were sufficiently rewarded, this wouldn't happen.
Once again, a person loads up a mountain of facts and does not grasp the simple truth: in order for more babies to be born, we have to give the majority of people enough money to have them. There are reasons why we do not: the basic reason is that people who are born sooner want their wealth to have priority over that of other people, born later, to have their wealth protected.
This is a mathematical problem: a great deal of the wealth is not really there. But you can pass rules to give yourself the money anyway. This is true of Elon Musk's wealth, running into hundreds of billions of dollars, and the zoning ordinances on most buildings, because building more buildings would decrease the value of current housing. This is a problem in the developed world - it is not exclusive to the US.
The problem will go away when the faux-rich are pried loose from their grip on power. This is a ripple effect of the post war war two baby boom: there are a lot of people who are old and want their faux income to be monetized. You can't happen unless you restrict all the ways that money passes from older to younger and expands with new projects being built. Again, this is the grit on the wheels and while conservatives are leading, the charge liberal groups to less, but more than enough, to keep faux wealth to go to the old.
Again, this is a mathematical problem that needs to be taken on by an entire society. But individually, people want to continue to harvest the faux-wealth even though collectively they deny the problem because other people are not willing to give up their faux-wealth. "Don't tax you, don't tax me, tax that fellow behind the tree." Everyone wants someone else to give up their wealth.
This is the point where the problems of faux-wealth have reached a breaking point because fossil fuels are a large portion of the faux-wealth. And the people who want to continue to extract more than their portion of that faux wealth are a plurality of the world's developed population. However, this is the acute version of a chronic problem: the rich (and we are all the rich, though each of us thinks we are poor because there is another layer of rich, which is even richer than we are) want to get their share of faux-wealth without treating the chronic problem.
To summarize: we need to electrify the economy. This means getting fossil fuel cars off the streets. No one wants to do this because the initial part is extremely expensive. It means making public transportation better as they do in some areas of Europe and Japan. It means junking a great deal of faux-wealth that is invested in fossil fuels: including buildings and other infrastructure. It means building units of housing, which will almost certainly depreciate existing housing.
Of course, the problem will get solved, but the way to do that is to have a huge war, which will burn a great deal of the faux-wealth, and open up redevelopment on a tremendously huge scale. It is coming; the rumblings of it are being heard in Greenland and Venezuela. It will get much larger. This war will come, even though the vast majority of people want to stick their craniums in the sand and hope it will all go away. For many of them, it will: they are old enough that they will not see the destruction that an overheated atmosphere will deliver. Others will not be so lucky.
The problem with your article is that it misses the point. You have to give more to the young, but in a way so they don't spend it on gambling or other forms of zero-sum wealth accumulation. Preaching that the young should give up more freedom so that the old can cruise happily on faux-wealth is not going to cut it. People are dumb, but they're not quite so dumb as to give up freedoms so that other people can cruise to retirement.
People were much poorer in the past, but had more kids. The Amish & ultra-Orthodox aren't wealthier than average Americans, but they culturally value kids more, so they have them.
And are lower than average in almost every measure of success. If the Amish are your poster child, then you have real problems. Now I am a person who believes in having more children, but I trace the problems to a wealthier generation of people hoarding all of the gains of society rather than passing it down to these people who are most able to have children.
That is, I believe that the problem is a top-down one in our politics, and not just the US politics, but the global developed world politics, including China, Japan, Europe, Canada, and most of South America. Claiming that the people who have very little choice is a suboptimal strategy.
> And are lower than average in almost every measure of success.
Not the measure of Darwinian fitness. I'm pretty sure they have lower homicide rates too.
> Now I am a person who believes in having more children, but I trace the problems to a wealthier generation of people hoarding all of the gains of society rather than passing it down to these people who are most able to have children.
You tracing it that way doesn't make sense. The explanation is CLEARLY cultural rather than economic. Hence the high fertility populations I mentioned, and the higher fertility of the poorer past (and found in some poorer countries today).
> That is, I believe that the problem is a top-down one in our politics, and not just the US politics, but the global developed world politics, including China, Japan, Europe, Canada, and most of South America.
There isn't really a top-down political structure over all those countries, and they vary a lot in their politics. But they are all plugged into global culture, while the Amish & ultra-Orthodox and many sub-Saharan Africans are less so.
> Claiming that the people who have very little choice is a suboptimal strategy.
Claiming what?
That your pile of bullshit means something. It doesn't, but it shows that we are on the decline because people rally around false promises rather than real solutions.
You didn't even attempt to rebut a single point I made. Who is the bullshitter then?
So why do the poorest people on Earth in places like Sub-Saharan Africa have the most children in the world, at between double and triple the replacement rate, while people in developed carbon-neutral welfare states have the fewest? Have Chad and the Congo embraced the abundance agenda and invested heavily in natalist wealth redistribution, public transportation, and green energy? You are just arguing for your ideology and working backwards to apply it to a completely unrelated issue.
Until there is a transition to a post-industrial society and economy, there is a heavy pressure on women and men to have more children, as having more children means having a larger workforce at a younger age. This continues into the postindustrial. Because people are programmed to have babies, there is a 50 to 75-year wave where the agricultural and industrial propagation is maintained, even though the economics become postindustrial during that time.
When the second generation of post-industrial economics comes in, they see that there is very little benefit to having children and a great deal of minuses. They also come to realize that Fertility is a choice that they can delay or prevent, even to the point of having abortions as they do in Japan, and therefore, on the margins, they have fewer children.
So yes, if you want to go back to supporting the population by agriculture and are willing to give up a host of the amenities of the 20th century, you can do that. However, there are other forces which want you to industrialize so that you can become a successful and commercially viable market for the products of industrialization.
Again, the obvious economic argument is that raising families is not profitable, and if we want more of the product, we have to give more to the people who raise families. Again, I will point out this is not just a US problem but a global problem with different subgroups of the "wealthy" claiming a larger share of the profits than they are rightfully entitled to, that is, in an economic sense.
Again, you should not lead with this argument because it is easy to rip up into small pieces and get thrown back in your face. Which is what I am now doing.
You are moving away from your original claim. That difference in the role of children between agrarian and post-industrial societies is reasonable, and I have heard others, like Peter Zeihan, articulate it similarly. However, you are viewing the issue purely in economistic terms when the fertility crisis is primarily a cultural issue.
The cost-benefit differential for children in the developing versus developed world explains the discrepancy between societies with 5.5 and 2.5 births per woman. However, I think that is a different issue from a developed country that manages to stay above the replacement rate at 2.5, ensuring long-term stability, versus one at 1.5 that faces a demographic bomb.
Bryan Caplan explains this issue well in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. He argues that people overestimate the costs of having children because our society is heavily invested in the pseudoscientific nurture assumption, which makes parenting seem much more daunting than it needs to be. If people had a more relaxed, long-term perspective on the benefits of having children, as people in the developing world do, they would not view it in such pessimistic, economically reductive terms.
No, I praise it in economic terms because economics is a probable discipline rather than on cultural themes, which are inherently unprovable. It doesn't mean I don't have cultural reasons, but they are rather much more intrinsically personal than economic ones.
I agree with much of this, although I admit I struggle to reconcile the desire to make childless adults lower-status with the desire to keep abortion legal. Is it your desire that abortion remains legal, but subject to greater social shaming than it currently is?
I agree, this is contradictory. I actually cringe at the idea of shaming childless adults.
Once had a bad female boss who was a real twit. She said she never wanted kids and had her tubes cut. I was like "Thank God!" I have no desire to see women like her forced into motherhood. Let her genes end with her, please!
I agree with Richard that, to reverse current trends in fertility, some amount of social shaming is necessary, and you have to consider what trade-offs to make. Sure, on the margin more social shaming of childless people might induce some people who really oughtn't to be parents to have children. But in our culture currently, lots of people who really OUGHT to be parents choose not to have children, which has dysgenic effects and negative externalities for society as a whole.
I guess I'm not really a "natalist" then. I am certainly pro-having babies, as my own life attests, I just am "pro-women/couples who want babies having as many or little as they want" - as opposed to "all women must have babies."
I understand you are taking a philosophical stand here, but there is a pragmatic aspect of this you are not considering, and, as you correctly note, making this argument puts you in strange company.
Saying you think women should have 6.5 babies or whatever, notwithstanding the validity or otherwise of your arguments about maximising utility, virtue etc., immediately puts you in la-la land for most normies. There is just no way that in our current society women are going to (freely) go back to having 6-8 children or whatever it was at the beginning of the 20th century.
And that is a problem, because the collapsing birth rate is one of the world’s biggest issues, and you are making it more likely that people won’t take it seriously. But people really need to take it seriously! The average birth rate for the developed world is currently around 1.5. The result of this is a quickly aging population. Unless we get the birth rate back up to around 2 there will be very negative consequences for society. Whole countries will be brought to their knees, economically. South Korea and probably Japan are finished. And apart from the pure economic impact, there are lots of other ways an aging population will have a profound impact on society.*
I am not saying you shouldn't argue your point of view, but to enact change you need to temper it with some realism.
*There is a good book, No One Left, by British demographer Paul Morland, which goes into the details and consequences. I highly recommend it.