Transcript for episode 46
Grant:
My guest today is Lyman Stone. Lyman wears many hats. He's the Chief Information Officer at Demographic Intelligence, which is a collection of the world's leading demographers who develop forecasting models related to changing demographic economic and cultural conditions around the world.
He's also adjunct fellow at AEI, a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and a former international economist at the US Department of Agriculture, where he forecasted cotton market conditions. His writing has appeared widely in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, South China Morning Post, and elsewhere.
Today, Lyman and I will primarily be discussing issues related to fertility. So Lyman, welcome to the Beatrice Institute podcast.
Lyman:
It's good to be with you. I'm glad to get the chance to talk with you.
Grant:
I often ask interviewees to give a quick background of how you got to where you are right now, particularly as a leading commentator on fertility rates. How did you get here?
Lyman:
Entirely by accident. I did my undergraduate, my master's work in international trade and trade policy. Then I worked in tax policy for a little while. When I was doing that, I was unwillingly assigned to write about taxes and migration—how did tax rates influence migration, or not?
I found that actually, I enjoyed it. So I took some classes in migration studies, migration theory, and all that. Then I went and got a job in trade policy. On the side I started blogging about this stuff, writing about it, and then from migration got to place and economic development. From there I got to, why do places decline, and what can be done about that? And then from there got into demography. And then with demography came babies, fertility. You talk to anybody who's not a demographer, but demography adjacent, and it's just like, “Oh yeah, demographers; all they do is babies.” We do death and migration, too.
Grant:
Death and babies.
Lyman:
Exactly.
So I got into demography and started writing about it, kind of auto-didactically just on a blog. But over time I started getting requests to write on really specific topics, topics that were unusually niche for a random internet commenter. I started to realize what was happening was that corporate research departments were leaving comments to say, could you research this? So now I do it for profit, for folks. I'm also getting my PhD at McGill University in Montreal, where I'm recording this from.
Grant:
And that's what brought you to Montreal. I really appreciate that bit of history. It's really interesting that in many ways I've sort of randomly landed in my field as well. So it's good to hear that other people aren't so focused in the way they get to where they are. Sometimes you just end up there.
Can you describe for the listeners general trends in fertility rates in the US over the last a hundred years? At a very high level, so we get some sense of where we are now.
Lyman:
The first thing to understand is there's fertility, and then there's fertility. What I mean is, there's how many babies people have, and then there's how many babies people have that live. And these are very different stories.
So if you go back to the 1600s, the British colonies of North America, people are having seven kids per woman, but four of those kids are going to die before age 15. As far back as we can really see, it seems like the US has averaged, in our pre-revolutionary period, three to four children per woman who survived to her reproductive years. That's the number of children that would survive, themselves, to age 15 or so. Sometimes people are like, "Oh, people used to have 57 kids, now they only have two," and that this is not true. Deep in the wells of history, family size still only averaged around three or four kids per married woman, because that's how many actually made it to a higher age.
Then in the mid 18th century, things began to change. We begin to get to what’s called the fertility transition. It hits America before anywhere else in the world. It hits France second. But as far as we can tell, the first fertility transition to modernity is in the middle and later part of the 18th century in Massachusetts, where you get new ideas about family. About whether it's okay to not try to have as many kids; about how you might go about avoiding kids. The first birth control manual is published--it's called The Fruits of Philosophy--it's published in, I think, 1832 in Massachusetts. And it's a collection of remedies that were already in use.
Massachusetts also has some of the first anti-abortion laws, because it becomes an issue late in the 18th century. So you get this transition, and it begins in Massachusetts in the mid 18th century and it spreads. And so the entire 19th century is a story of gradually declining fertility.
Now in the beginning, it's declining fertility in terms of the number of babies, but actually the number of surviving kids is about flat. That is, they're having fewer children, but the ones that are born are living at higher rates. So you actually have stable family size, but fewer traumatic losses of children.
Then over the end of the 19th century, birth rates began to fall, and by World War I, they are down at about two surviving children per family. So they dropped pretty dramatically in the latter 19th century and the early 20th century.
They dropped below two during the Great Depression—real bad times. And then towards the end of the Great Depression—so about 1937 or 1938—birth rates begin to rise again. People think that the baby boom was GIs coming back from the war. That did contribute; nine months after the GIs are home—boom. And it is precisely nine months after the troop ships are landing. But actually, birth rates were already rising, in 1937, '38, '39. So there was already this sort of pent up demand. We know that around that time, there was a Gallup survey in 1936 that asked people their family size preferences, and the average was 3.5. People wanted 3.5 kids, which is again, in substance, you could say it's almost the biological norm of a pre-modern human society. For society to remain stable, given mortality rates and reproductive rates and all that, you need about three or four children to survive to age 15. You need probably 2.8 to 3 for it to be stable, given adult mortality.
Grant:
What do you mean by stable in this context?
Lyman:
We think of the replacement rate as 2.1, that people need to have 2.1 kids in order for the population to be stable. That's actually not true. That's only true at current mortality rates. If you have much higher mortality rates, you actually need to have far more babies.
Grant:
So you're saying in 1930—1937, what would have been considered replacement rate would have been higher than 2.1, closer to 3.
Lyman:
In the 1700s, it would have been around three or four, but those norms of a three or four child family persist much longer than the death rates that made it necessary. So you see this three or four child norm up until the fifties in surveys; then the baby boom peaks in the late fifties, early sixties. It crashes hard in the late sixties and into the seventies.
And that's the result of several things. One is that family size preferences collapse. They drop really rapidly from three or four, to two or three. So they dropped by about one child on average per woman. Then concurrent with that, we get technological advances in birth control. So you get the Pill. After World War II, especially, you've got much more widespread access to condoms. Then of course, starting in 1970, and then nationally in '73, you get legalized abortion, which reduces birth rates as well.
Since then, people thought, "Oh gosh, birth rates are going to keep going down." We were at 1.7 or so around the time of Roe v Wade. But that's not what happened. Birth rates recovered; they bounced back up. There's a lot of reasons for that, but one big reason is immigration. We opened up immigration; we got more immigrants from high fertility countries, and they came here. They had fewer children than the people in the countries they came from, often, but they still had more children than natives in the US were having.
So then we were above two for a long time, and people always said, "Oh, America is a uniquely high fertility country." And there were all these explanations, like Americans are very religious. These might've been somewhat true, but the main story was just immigrants. We just had a lot of immigrants from poor countries. And over the last 20 years, as immigration has slowed down and as those immigrants have assimilated, and as more countries sending immigrants themselves have low fertility, we now have very low fertility. We have the lowest fertility in our history, of about 1.6 children per woman. That's what we project will happen at current birth rates. So that's where we are now.
Grant:
I noticed you got yourself a little bit embroiled in a controversy in the literature regarding how much we should pay attention to total fertility rates. Basically, the reduction in fertility rates we're seeing is an artifact of women having later children, but eventually these women will catch up. They'll have kids in their mid-forties and all will be fine. How important is this tempo effect?
Lyman:
That's a great question. This is a huge issue in demography. When we look at birth rates, we're looking at how many babies were born to mothers of a certain age, and then how many women are there in that age group, and that's the age-specific fertility. This is the basic building block of the total fertility rate, which is this indicator of children born per woman.
But you can imagine the social norm of when you begin having kids changes. So let's say everybody wants to have two kids, but in generation one, they want to have two kids, and they want to have their first kid around age 15. And then, they want to have their second kid at age 20, and then they're done.
But in generation two, they want to have their first kid at age 30 and their second kid at age 35. This is a 15 year difference. During the transition from generation one to generation two, those young birth rates will collapse—they’ll fall to nearly zero. Then you still have generation one that's in the older age group, and they're not having more kids--of course they're not, they already had the two that they wanted. So it will make fertility rates really, really low. And you'll say, "Oh gosh, women who are being born today are only going to have 0.2 kids, because if we look at current older birth rates, they're not having very many, and they're not having many now, so they're not going to have many kids." What's really going on is they're going to have the same number of kids, but they're going to have them later in life. So this is what’s called the tempo effect.
This comes up in popular narratives when somebody says, "People are still going to have the same number of kids; there's just delay." We have all kinds of mathematical tools for measuring tempo. I actually have a paper that's going to be submitted for publication this fall, but it's expanding on a prior paper that showed a very similar thing: for all the demographers love to talk about this tempo effect, it turns out accounting for the tempo effect does not actually improve forecast accuracy. Demographers go to all this work to say: here's tempo, here's quantum, here's all these things. It turns out if you look at women when they're 15 and you try to project their fertility based on fertility rates, versus tempo-adjusted for delivery rates, the tempo-adjusted fertility rates don't do any better.
I mean, yes, there is delay. There is, it is real, but births delayed are usually not fully made up.
Grant:
Interesting.
Lyman:
Now I should say that at age 15, none of our indicators are super, highly predictive; there’s just a lot going on over there. It is true that there is this tempo effect, but as people delay, they don't tend to fully make up for those “lost” babies. For that reason, while it is important in an academic sense to think about the tempo effect, my argument is that when we think about the world we inhabit, the world we want to live in we, we don't need to make it a big thing, because not accounting for the tempo effect is still going to give us a decent forecast. And moreover, having kids later in life is still important in the sense that you're going to have fewer healthy years with that kid, or with grandkids, or things like that.
Grant:
This leads in pretty well to my next set of questions about why you think plumbing fertility rates are problematic. Matthew Yglesias in his book, One Billion Americans raised concerns about the economic impact of low fertility rates, and also he points to impacts on policy-related issues such as social services for the elderly. We don't have enough children or young adults to support the aging and elderly. Some are militaristic: we need more kids to have an army—that one's a little tough to swallow. And Ross Douthat is very concerned with issues of dynamism: the fewer people we have in America, the less likely we are to invent amazing things and to be a dynamic culture.
Your concerns seem to be a little bit different and much more about personal desires, and the relationship between desired fertility and actual fertility. Why do you think these fertility rates are so problematic, in a way that's independent of these economic/militaristic/cultural dynamism issues?
Lyman:
We're going to introduce a word here. Pro-natalism: those of us who want more babies. There's three kinds that we can point to.
One I think we can sort of toss out right at the beginning, which is essentially ethno-nationalist pro-natalism: we need babies because it is fundamentally good for our genetic stock to be more numerous in the competition of species. That's one kind of pronatalism. You definitely see this as a policy motivation in some places, for example, Germany, 1933-1945. You also see it today in China. This is basically the policy of the People's Republic of China at this point; it has not always been, but it is now. So this is a real thing; it's out there. As a Christian, I find it abominable.
A second kind is what we would call collective liberal pro-natalism. That's what you are going through: all these arguments that if we don't have babies, there'll be all these social consequences that are bad for all of us. Lower dynamism, lower economic growth, strategic insecurity in a future war. The story these ones tell is that if we don't have these babies, the future will be not good, or less good. So the argument that this pronatalism is making is that parents need to have children for the instrumental purpose of creating a better future. If you don't, you're going to be beaten with the stick of the future. You should be so scared of the future that you have more children. That's the argument in a nutshell. I think it’s a bad argument.
Grant:
It gets a little problematic, particularly the economic argument, that children become simply inputs into economic growth. Right. They become an input in the same way that we need more oil.
Lyman:
There’s a philosophical problem here on how we think about people. What if it turned out in the future that having less people was good for economic growth? Are we going to turn around and have a cull? No. Not in this country; in some countries maybe.
I understand this argument, and it is important from a public policy perspective. These arguments have the benefit of being fairly neutral. They appeal to pretty widely shared values. They are preference independent, also; it doesn't matter if you want kids or not, for these arguments, you suffer the consequences.
But the argument I make, which is sort of an individualist liberal argument, is that we should want higher birth rates because people want higher birth rates. That is, we have surveys. We have literally, in the United States, hundreds of surveys that have been conducted for almost a century. I mentioned a Gallup one in 1936. Just before I got on this call, I was processing the data for a survey I fielded last month, asking all kinds of questions about fertility preferences and family formation. We’re just asking, how many kids do you want to have? What would be the ideal number of kids for you to have? If you could do your life over, how many kids would you have wanted to have? On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy would you be if you ended up with this number of kids, or this number, or this number? We ask these questions a million different ways.
People always think, “You only got the response to people want 2.5 kids because you asked this questions that aren’t real questions about what they really want.” The truth: it doesn't matter how you word the question. If you ask American women—or men, but we mostly survey women. First of all, men lie about their fertility history a lot. They don't know their fertility history in some cases. Also, they are not the ones carrying babies, so it's kind of like, “Cool, it's great that you want nine kids. Good for you.” So we mostly survey women, because they tend to have more credible preferences for a variety of reasons.
Ask American women how many kids they want—phrase it any way you want, as long as you're querying a preference—they will tell you a number between 2.2 and 2.8 on average. Some people will say zero, some people will say five, a lot of people will say two. But on average, you get 2.2 to 2.8, around there.
I should also say, if you ask women this question when they are 16, and then you follow up with them when they're 40, and you say, “Okay, how many kids did you have?” You're not going to get the same number, because life happens and values change and all that. But there is no single variable that you could have had when they were aged 16, that is more predictive than their fertility preference. You can look at their number of siblings. You can look at their religiosity, you look at their parents' marital status, their socioeconomic standing, whatever. Their fertility preference is the most powerful predictor. This has been demonstrated in numerous longitudinal data sets in numerous contexts.
These preferences are weighty. They are thick preferences. They are resilient to rephrasing the question, to priming people in different ways. They do not just vanish in a puff of rhetorical air. They're also empirically highly predictive of actual behavior. If I know your stated intention to become pregnant, I know you're much more likely to become pregnant. If you tell me in a survey, I am trying to become pregnant, or I want more kids, this is predictive of what's actually going to happen in your life. Not perfectly; it's statistics. There's a lot of noise. But it's pretty good. And with a few more controls in there, it gets very good.
So I would say these preferences are real. People care about them. They want more kids, and there's some evidence that when people have reproductive outcomes they don't want—they have fewer kids than they want, or especially if they have more kids than they want—that there are happiness costs. People who have undesired reproductive outcomes, end up less happy in life.
This is why I think the reason we should have more babies is that people want them. There's nothing wrong with babies. It's not like if people said I want to sacrifice 10,000 goats on my neighbor's doorstep. No, you can’t. More babies is fine; it's a reasonable desire. It's not like everybody's saying “I want my own personal yacht”; saying “I'd like to have two or three kids” is reasonable in a decent society. This is something that should be attainable.
And finally, it is a credible preference. And we know that policy measures that make it easier to have children, like financial supports and stuff, do in fact yield higher birth rates. Which is all my argument for: why have more babies? Because people want them.
Grant:
As I was reading your papers, the one thing I thought about was, well you can solve this problem in two ways. You either increase the number of children that people have, or you reduce their expectations and you convince them that they want fewer children than they actually want. And we're seeing this, right? I deal with college students every single day, both undergraduates and graduates, and I'm often taken aback by how few of my female students want children. So haven't we solved this problem by convincing people—or people convince themselves—they want fewer children?
Lyman:
I'd say a couple things. First of all, we also survey fertility intentions, and fertility expectations. These are not preferences: how many kids you intend to have is not how many you want to have. You might intend to have children you don't want, because your spouse really wants them and you're conceding to their desires. Or you might want children that you do not intend, because gosh, you'd love to have it, but have you seen the price of childcare? So we have seen a pretty sharp decline in fertility intentions or expectations over the last few years. Over the last decade or so, we have not seen a corresponding decline in fertility desires.
What I'm saying is that expectation-setting is happening, and it's not convincing women to reset their desires. They're saying, I know this might not be realistic, but this is what I want. I get it when people are like, “Maybe we could change these desires.” But these desires are pretty robust. In Taiwan or Korea, where women only average one child, each surveyed preferences are still around two. In Taiwan they're just below two, in Korea they’re a little above. There’s only a few places where surveyed preferences are below two. Malta is one, which is weird; and then mainland China is one, and that's partly because, up until recently, saying you wanted three kids would have been a crime.
There are not many places where these preferences fall. You can say we'll convince people they don't want them. But from a liberal perspective, why? Why would you want to do that? First of all, it's not clear you can do that. Governments have tried to do this, yet the fertility preferences are still there. China had a legal one child policy, and yet the average preference was still 1.7. So unless you're proposing something more draconian than China's one child policy, you will not succeed in getting these preferences that far down.
Grant:
Is it possible to make an argument that there's actually something natural to the human person that desires these procreative habits? I know that in this particular moment, when we think about sex and gender, this is such a problematic argument to make; but it seems to me that you are making that argument. There's something natural to a woman who wants 2.5 children.
Lyman:
I would actually emphatically not say a woman; I would say a person.
I do think that there are, from two perspectives. We can start with the evolutionary psychology perspective, which is that if we didn't have a reproductive impulse drive, our species would not be here. Point blank, it has to be there. There has to be something innate in us telling us, “Have babies, take care of it.” Otherwise we wouldn't be here. We are, therefore it exists.
As a Christian, I would give an account of that drive that is not simply brute psychological selection. I would argue that it is, in fact, a fundamentally creative impulse that exists in us, because it is in some sense the indelible imprint of a law given to us before corruption: go forth and multiply. This is not an aberration to our nature. This is fundamental to it.
Now, you can make prudential arguments about the extent of multiplication, what exactly is meant by that. I'm not arguing for a Quiverfull situation here. In fact, there's some very interesting readings on the curse in Genesis about that. But suffice it to say, throughout Scripture, as a Christian, it's clear that the procreative impulse is not only a fleshly thing that's part of our body, but it is in fact something of the spirit, something given to us by God, something that is a part of the story of humanity's redemption. Language of marriage, our children and child-rearing frames so much of the relationship between God and the Church. I'm getting off track here, but I would say both from an evo psych side of things, and from a religious perspective, it seems clear to me that while it is not immutable—anything can be changed— some degree of desire for reproduction is fundamental to humanity.
Grant:
John Paul II tied so closely even our understanding of God, and God being procreative: the love of the Father and the Son pouring forth as the Spirit. And having children's so closely tied to our deepest theological virtues of charity—that the pouring forth of the love between the husband and the wife is the child. Having children is inherently an act of charity. At the same time, it's an act of hope: that you believe that there's something in the future that's worth giving to someone other than yourself.
So, what do you think are the three leading causes of this discrepancy between desired fertility and total fertility? What do you think are the three big things? I Cultural, political, economic—what do you think the three big ones are?
Lyman:
When we see this desired fertility, the first thing driving the shortfall is timing. It's timing factors. It's the women who got started later than they planned. And we do in fact, know that women on average start having kids later than they planned. There's also survey questions where we ask, what would be the ideal time to have a baby, when would you like to start having kids? And they tend to start later than they planned. That is often because it took longer to find a suitable spouse, settle down, and be stable. Is that because ideas of stability and suitable spouse changed, or because the actual quantity of suitable spouses has changed, and the actual availability of economic stability changed? The answer is some of both.
But timing is a big part of this. So more years in school—and of course as long as you're in school, you're a child. I know that sounds strange, but I'm a child right now, even though I have children, because the position of a child in society is the learner. As long as you are the learner rather than the teacher, as long as you are the one receiving the knowledge of society, you're a child. That's what childhood is: it's the learning time. You can call your age an adult, but the stage of childhood is the stage of learning. People don't usually want to feel like a child when they have kids. Now I left school for a while and had a kid, and now I'm back, but whatever. I'm weird.
We have this strong social thing about extended years of education, and then it takes longer to get a good job. And then, with both partners employed in more and more cases—you get the two body problem, right? Where you have to find jobs for both of you. And as marriage happens later, you've got more people happy with their life, set in their way and not willing to change things. You're not gonna move an hour away to be close to that person like you might have when you were 23. So that's one thing is timing.
The second is just cost. Even if you began at the time you intended, you have that first one and then you go, “Wow, things are expensive. Maybe I'm going to have three, not four. Childcare's expensive. Have you seen college costs? Wow.” You suddenly start to say, okay, this is expensive. We're gonna think about this a little more. Even if the timing all works out, there's the cost issue. Just a budget constraint—you can think of it that way.
There's a real component to that: the prices of things kids consume really have risen. And then there's also norms component to that: you could just not put your kid in any lessons, but that's not the social norm anymore. You need toddler music classes. My kid goes to toddler music classes. She loves it. She dances around, my wife sends me these adorable videos of it. It's wonderful. But that does add to the cost, and it isn't strictly necessary. So the budget component is hard budget issues and also norms.
The third thing is opportunity costs. Let's say that desire for children is stable over time and there's been no decline. People want exactly the number of kids, exactly as intensely as they always wanted them. Let's say all of their preferences have been stable over time, that there's been no change in what humans want over time. But airplane tickets to Italy have fallen in price… which means, even if you have all the same preferences, you're going to take more Italian vacations, and maybe not spend the money on a kid. If all your preferences have been the same, but a technology has been invented that enables you, or I should say that subjects you, to images of other people's lives all the time; and particularly to a curated version of it; and particularly to compelling visual images of their consumption habits.
If such a technology were invented ...
Grant:
I hope a technology like that is not invented.
Lyman:
I know, I hope it's never invented. But it could have the effect, if you have all the same preferences, of making you feel worse about missing out on certain things.
Now one could combat this by flooding such a technology with pictures of cute children. I suggest this as a resistance strategy. If ever such a technology is invented, we should resist it's "keeping up with the Jones" effects by baby spamming it, so that people understand that they're missing out on babies.
Grant:
Right, but you have to curate it perfectly and get the right baby pictures. The especially cute ones when they're not screaming.
Lyman:
Yeah. And then you have one unposed, like what it was really like, so that people know you're genuine.
Grant:
Right.
Lyman:
So this is another thing, there's opportunity costs. There's these hedonic opportunity costs about what's happening in other people's lives; there's opportunity costs around price changes of consumption goods; then there's also an opportunity cost around income. That is, as more families are two-earner income, or as more women are working in formal employment, the opportunity cost—the lost income of having children—grows. These are all what I call opportunity cost effects.
So you basically have timing, budget constraints, and opportunity cost effects.
Grant:
Do you think your brand of pro-natalism is feminist, or anti-feminist?
Lyman:
It's going to depend on how you define those words, right? There's some people who [say] feminist just means equality, in which case, great; My brand of pro-natalism is feminist. Because I'm just arguing: listen to people's preferences and try to fulfill them in a neutral and equal way.
For other people, feminist means maximizing women's power in dyadic relationships, and power is construed as ability to marshal resources which are valuable outside of the relationship. So essentially leverage. In that sense, my perspective is not particularly feminist, because it is a universal truth that having children is going to limit women's power in that sense. They are going to lose some earning potential, at least for the period of the recovery postpartum. And it tends to have effects much longer than that, even in highly gender egalitarian couples.
In substance, arguing that people want more babies is always going to be anti-feminist in some definition of feminism. But I would argue that that definition of feminism is simply willfully ignoring what women repeatedly say that they want, in survey after survey after survey. If what you mean by feminism is trying to recognize women's equal personhood, equal stake in society, and view their desires and preferences as on par with men's—then I would argue that pro-natalism is almost a necessity.
I would also note that a lot of the policies that achieve pronatalism—things like parental leave from work with pay—some of these are things that feminists really like. Others, things like a child allowance, are kind of neither here nor there; but on net, a lot of feminists don't love them, because they recognize that giving cash to families for kids is going to lead to some women saying, "Maybe I don't need to work and I'll just stay home." And that's viewed as bad. I would say, that's their free choice. You just gave them cash and they chose to stay home. That’s not bad. I'm not going to say it's necessarily good, but it's not bad. But there are some strands of feminism that will see that choice as, ipso facto, a manifestation of unequal power relationships.
Grant:
It seems to me that in the political realm, there are some countries that are really seeing fallen fertility rates as an existential threat to survival. We think of Poland and Hungary. Now there is some question about whether or not those are nationalistic, like you mentioned, or if they're liberal. Comment on that.
But it seems as though, if I'm to be honest, you have Matthew Yglesias, you have Ross Douthat, you have you, you have some other folks; but I don't see the same level of concern in the United States about fertility rates as I do in Europe and in Asia. Is that because our fertility rates simply haven't cratered yet? Or what's explaining this?
Lyman:
Fear about fertility does not come from low fertility rates. Fear about fertility comes from shrinking population, or from at least a relative shrinking of population. When a community begins to shrink, they begin to worry about fertility rates.
And I should say, this is true even if fertility rates are not the problem. In fact, I'm working on a piece right now where I specifically look at the Syro-Malabar Church in Kerala, India. I show that they've got this huge fertility rate freakout going on right now, and they're doing all this stuff to try and counter it, but their birth rates are higher than the non-Christians in their same region. The reason they have declining population share in their region is because their kids are very well-educated, and they emigrate away from India. But they're not doing anything. It's not like they're going to stop educating their kids or provide incentives to stay. Once population or relative population begins to decline, people worry about fertility, even if fertility is not the problem.
That clarifies what's happening in Poland and Hungary. Yes, they have very low fertility, and low fertility is a big part of the problem there; but also after they opened up to the EU, they had a huge migration away. And this is why we've also seen even bigger turns toward pro-natalism in Czechia, in Slovakia, in Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania. These countries are arguably doing even more than Poland and Hungary are. They just do it a little more low key and without as many fireworks, and they're smaller, so they don't attract as much attention.
Other examples of this are Japan, Taiwan, China. All these places, when the population began to decline, people freaked out. In the US, population is not declining. Why? Our fertility rates were high for a long time because of immigrants, and also we get a lot of immigration, so we can kind of coast along, we can kick the can down the road for a while. We don't have the motivation.
Now you do see some pro-natalists. You see some offering kind of a liberal pro-natalism on the left. You see some folks like Marco Rubio or Josh Hawley who have made various kinds of pro-natal arguments on the right. The other problem in the US is that there are a lot of people on the right who do believe in a version of pro-natalism, but it's that first version: it’s the race pronatalism. And in US policy, you can't do that. You can't be like, it's a child allowance for white people. So in practice, race pro-natalism ends up mobilizing political resources against pro-natal policy, because they're worried it will disproportionately encourage what they call dysgenic fertility: it’s going to cause more fertility among the "bad" sorts of people.
Grant:
It's a kinder, gentler eugenics.
Lyman:
I would just call it eugenics.
Grant:
Fair enough.
Lyman:
The place doing this most right now is China, where they're actively suppressing fertility of ethnic minorities now, and then they're encouraging it among the Han Chinese. In particular, they've started also talking about improving investments in the quality of pregnancy and birth. And what they mean is improving R&D in genetic selection and stuff like that.
On the question of what's happening in Poland and Hungary, things are always complicated. What happened in Hungary is that in about 2015, they woke up to the problem in a serious way, but also they wanted to cut their welfare state because they felt like it was holding back employment and economic growth. So they did cut their welfare state, and then they implemented new programs with that money. They actually didn't increase spending on pro-natal policy; they just changed how it was being spent. They gave it a very flashy rebranding as super ethno-conservative, true Hungarian identity, whatever. As part of that, the pro-natal policies have gotten billed as an alternative to immigration as a source of growth. So they have been characterized as basically being this kind of race/ethnic nationalism.
I think there is some of that; I think that's a fair critique. I also don't think it's the only thing that's happening. I think Hungary correctly saw that their unemployment rate had skyrocketed, for no reason, relative to their peers. They wanted to do something about it. They correctly felt that work incentives were part of the story. They tried to deal with those work incentives, but they still wanted to keep some family supports, so they rebranded it in a way that was politically palatable at the time. Since then they've continued to experiment; they're always getting further and further away from their initial gamification type model. Recently they've rolled out a huge cash grant for having kids. It's the first one of their policies that actually seems to be working. And you know why—because it's just a big cash grant. When you just give people money, that works; when you try and get fancy with all these weird things, it doesn't work as well. So this policy may actually be working.
Poland is a bit of a different story, where they wanted to do pro-natalism to deal with falling population. They are opposed to immigration, but actually Poland has quietly been welcoming in a lot of immigrants from farther east in Europe, from Ukraine especially. But they want to deal with population. They had a conservative government, so they wanted to roll out a policy that they thought would be immune from liberal critique. So they rolled out a child allowance—who doesn't like a child allowance? They billed it as a child poverty program, even though they definitely want it to influence the birth rate. And this program worked. It created a large, if temporary, boom in fertility, much larger than we saw in Hungary.
I would say that Poland's model—for whatever the political constraints—the actual policy approach was clearly aimed at doing a liberal pro-natalism.
It's anti-poverty, it's not like anti-feminist, and it's gonna make the bureaucrats happy. Now, joke on Poland: they immediately got excoriated for this, because it's discouraging women's work. It didn't discourage women's work, but it did give them cash that they could use to choose not to work. That's that particular strain of feminism we were talking about. So this was a case where they tried the liberal pro-natalism thing, and they got treated like they were keeping women barefoot in the kitchen.
I think this speaks to the problem of pro-natalism, that any policy offends one side's family sensibilities, because there's a culture war wrapped in.
Grant:
What can we learn about the United States? You've sort of alluded to this a little bit, that there's different ways that we can construct pro-natal incentives. You seem to suggest that maybe grants for the minivan don't work, but cash transfers—straight cash transfers, and maybe linked to children—is effective. How do we parse this out and do this?
Lyman:
In the US, we have a couple of salient features of our society. We're very diverse, and we're pretty committed to pluralism, to basically "You don't mess with me, I won't mess with you." The American way is, “I do what I want to do on my land. You do what you want to do on your land. We don't have to like each other, but we won't mess with each other.” This is us; this is how we are as a people.
So we're going to have to build policies like that, which means one of the things we should be doing is block-granting states pro-natal blocks that they can use however they want. You can either use it on daycare, or a child allowance, or a baby bonus, a minivan loan subsidy—whatever you want to do. Letting states experiment would be a great idea. Maybe one state is going to want universal daycare, maybe one state’s going to want a child allowance. That's not my problem. Now you'd have to have some rules on that: it has to go for pro-natalism. But you can work with that. So that's one option.
Another option is, when you think about policy, you're going to have to think about it as choice-consistent. Americans are going to make a lot of different choices. They're not going to agree on what choice is best; you can't make them agree on it. You're going to need to provide a policy that enables people to make all their different choices. A universal childcare program for the US does not fit that bill, because a family that's not employed isn't going to benefit from it. A family that wants one partner to stay home to watch the kids doesn't benefit from that. A family that wants both partners to work, but wants grandma to watch the kids so they can keep it in the family, doesn't benefit from that program. So the best thing in the US is going to be cash. Give people cash.
A child allowance is a good way to do it. You can do it as a monthly check; you can do it as an annual rebate; you can do a baby bonus at birth. But a child allowance, cash, is going to be your most choice-consistent tool for the US. And because we are diverse as a country, I think we should not try to go down the interventionist, welfare-state model of Quebec, which is not so diverse, and is committed to Franco-nationalism; or Sweden or Norway or Denmark or Iceland. Weird how these are all 95% white countries—we're not them. There are different family norms within the US. We have a lot of diversity, so accommodate that diversity, lean into it and give people the resources to have the family they want.
The clever interlocutor recognizes what I'm doing: I'm saying give people their choice, knowing that "give people their choice" tends to favor the choices of more conservative households. The norm of service provision of "give everyone daycare" tends explicitly favors the family and work balance norm of less conservative households. By saying, "give everyone a choice," I'm saying, yeah, you can use the money to pay for daycare. But I am consciously carving out space for those who aren't going to adopt a modern, liberal family norm. The Amish can get their child allowance as far as I'm concerned.
Grant:
That argument is inherently liberal, to the extent that we believe liberalism is creating a space in which we can make choices.
Lyman:
I would say it’s liberal. It might not be progressive, in that I'm arguing that people who aren't interested in progress should still have equal treatment under the law, equal access to support for their parenting. So it is liberal, I think. It might not be progressive.
Grant:
It appears once a country hits a particularly critical point, there is no turning back. We think of Singapore, that for many, many years had very aggressive abortion/euthanasia/eugenics regime. They're now at 1.2, or astoundingly low; I think Korea might be a little bit lower. The government tried to do all these things to promote fertility, but it had just become a norm to have very few children. Is there a point at which there's just no turning back, and do you see the US getting to that point?
Lyman:
In China, they might be getting to that point. We have surveys on preferences, and Chinese women don't want two kids. They just don't. So what are you going to do?
Singapore is a bit different. Singaporean women still want about 2.5 kids. They don't have a norm of the one child family. What they have is high housing prices, or if you're in the subsidized housing, a fixed housing allotment essentially. And do you really want to have kids in this size house? The housing situation is really dicey.
And then also there's that opportunity cost. There's a fascinating thing going on in Singapore: you're a really rich country, but you know what you're surrounded by? The world's cheapest and most beautiful vacation places. You talk to people in Singapore and they're like, "Oh yeah, we're always out enjoying the weekend, on the beaches in the Perhentian Islands, or we’re up in Thailand." I live in Hong Kong, and I see the same thing: the opportunity-cost of forgoing consumption in these places is massive, because you can get so much good stuff for so cheap. You're very high-income, surrounded by these cheap places.
I actually think this is a huge opportunity cost story in these places, that the yawning, geographic inequality around them means, why would you pour all your money into this kid, when look at all this other cool stuff you can do? This speaks to the importance of a degree of economic equality for fertility: when you have really high inequality, low-income people don't have the money to have kids, and high-income people have the money to have kids; but also there's a lot of cheap labor that they can hire to pay for their experiences, and they can get them for cheaper than they would if they had to pay a fair wage to those people. Singapore and Hong Kong also both have these massive domestic labor workforces that they don't count in their fertility statistics. But if you did, they'd have even lower fertility. So I would say this is in many ways an opportunity cost story.
But I didn’t answer your question. When fertility preferences drop low enough, what are you going to do? If people only want 1.5 kids, good luck throwing money at them to get to. Very few places are at that point.
It is possible that at that point we'll find something else. And at that point, the real question you have to ask is, is there some subculture in this society that is going to have more children and want more children? And is their rate of retention in their cultures high enough to sustain themselves? And if so, then that group presumably will repopulate the earth. This is Eric Kaufmann's argument in Shall the Righteous, Inherit the Earth. Right now there's not evidence of it, because the highly fecund populations—like the Amish or Hasidic Jews—are mostly small shares of their surrounding populations. And their birth rates are already appearing to converge to social norms, albeit slowly, but they are. And they show signs of being materially sensitive and economically cyclical and all those things. Beyond that, with a lot of these groups, their retention rates fall as their population size grows.
Grant:
There's this interesting political/cultural issue, where we do have two Americas in many ways, and it goes beyond fertility. We have early marriages, higher fertility rates, in the fly over states, Trump country; and extremely late marriages and low fertility rates in what we think of as Clinton areas. What kind of political and cultural implications do you think these birth rate patterns have for the future of American democracy? You mentioned that Jonathan Last makes this argument in his book, from maybe 10 years ago. He even says the faithful will inherit the earth.
There actually are these communities across the United States—and maybe they're on the margins, but [they] have relatively early marriages, lots of kids. And what we consider to be the centers of cultural power tend to not have children.
Lyman:
I'm skeptical of the "faithful will inherit the earth" story, because there are fertility differentials—and they're growing, actually, they're getting bigger—but we're still seeing the fertility rates decline among the religious. They're just declining faster among the less religious. Same thing with conservative/less conservative. They’re still declining. Which means, yeah, maybe we'll maintain some population share over time. But you're not going to see us swamp the other side, because we're not exactly reproducing super quickly either.
Look at something like the Amish. The Amish run out of land; what are they going to do when they bought up all the land? You might say, oh, we're not close to that. But actually, the amount of land it takes to support an Amish family is not small. Especially given the fact that the Amish are highly dependent on federal milk subsidies. The dairy program is basically an Amish support program. The Amish support themselves by selling furniture to the wider economy that is much more productive.
A lot of these high fertility communities are not sustainable on their own. They depend on the existence of the modern, consumer-capitalist, liberal society around them. They have a symbiotic relationship. I would argue that more religious communities should think about that as a model: not becoming Amish per se, but understanding that they should free ride on the largesse of consumer-capitalist society as a way to subsidize higher fertility. They're going to need it, because retention rates are not as high in diverse, modern societies as they are in more monolithic religious societies.
For example, the average Christian community in the US needs to have something like 2.8 children per woman to compensate for low retention rates. That is not how many children they actually end up having.
Grant:
I think we'd be remiss if we didn't discuss global warming. I mentioned earlier in the conversation that when I talked to my students, I'm surprised at how few have decided to have children. There's all sorts of different reasons—I want to have a job and I want a career—but a big one is this global warming issue. The more children we have, the worse global warming gets, and we're at this imminent, apocalyptic extinction. So is it irresponsible to have kids given global warming?
Lyman:
That's a great question. I have an hour and a half long talk I gave on this at a university in California a couple of years ago that I can provide a link to. The short version is yes, it's perfectly responsible to have children in the face of global warming.
This is a whole conversation in its own right. Global warming is real: climate change generally, resource exhaustion, habitat loss. These are all very serious problems, and they're anthropogenic. They're caused by humans. I accept that. It's a huge problem. I want a carbon tax. I keep telling my wife, as soon as there's a viable,road-tested, electric Tesla minivan, that's what I want. That's going to be my dad-mobile. We need to be doing much more on this front.
Here's the problem: we are actually in an ecological crisis. We need a very rapid turn around in carbon emissions, but also we need to be preserving tons more wildlands around the world—rainforest loss, habitat degradation. We have a lot of natural resources where even if we can extract a lot more of them, doing so will be very expensive or destructive. So we need to be managing those resources better.
These are all problems right now, that we should deal with right now. If I decide not to have a child right now, I still have the same amount of money in my checking account. In fact, I might have more, because if you have a child, you might take some time off work and have less money in your checking account. If you have the same amount of money in your checking account, or even more by choosing not to have a child, what are you going to do with it? You're going to spend it. And if you spend it, what are you gonna spend it on? I don't know, maybe a bottle of wine. Guess what? Wine has massive carbon emissions per dollar spent.
You know what object has the highest carbon emissions per dollar you spend on it? It's your phone. The electricity that you use on your devices is so cheap per carbon emission. Diapers are lower carbon emission than an airplane ticket. Daycare is lower carbon emission per dollar spent than a nice dinner out.
So I would say that if you care about reducing emissions now, have a kid, just don't fly to Italy, please. Now I say that as someone who loves travel—I'm chief of sinners here. To the extent that your personal behaviors matter at all—which, spoiler, your personal behaviors, don't matter at all; all we need to do is change all the power plants and the cars, then we're done. Your personal behaviors don't really matter. But to the extent that they do, what you can do is go vegetarian, and don't travel so much. And that's it, that's what you can do. Maybe swap out your light bulbs or something, but you just need to change all the power plants; and to change all the power plants, you need it to be economically viable to change all the power plants; and for it to be economically viable to change all the power plants, you need it to be economically viable to make big long-term investments that are going to be profitable; and to make big long term investments that are going to be profitable, you need growing demand for electricity; and for that, you need a growing population.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does not include any population management strategies. They don't even regard this as a viable strategy, let alone politically. They just say this doesn't do anything. It doesn't work, not least because the places most likely to reduce their fertility are low carbon countries. Poor countries.
Finally what I would say about climate and the environment is, why do we care about taking care of the environment? What's the point? For most of us, we have two reasons. One is intrinsic value—that for some reason we think the environment's intrinsically good. Maybe as a Christian, you think it's God's creation; or maybe as some other religion, you have some other belief.
But second is an instrumental good. We want the environment to do well, because it will be bad for future humans if it's bad. Well, those future humans need to exist for that instrumental argument to matter.
Frankly, I don't believe there's almost anyone on this earth who only believes the intrinsic argument. We all believe the instrumental argument somewhat. If you want to reduce the number of people that exist in the future, you are reducing the number of people who will benefit from an improved environment, which means you're actually reducing the benefit side of the cost-benefit for any climate change policy. You want to impose a carbon tax, you need a lot of people in the future who you can stack up in your benefitting from the clean environment side of the ledger.
So overall, I would say the argument connecting climate to the environment is bunk. Also, I have a survey where I ask all these fertility questions and I also ask, "Are you worried about climate change?" Or "Are you worried about overpopulation?" Women who are worried about climate change do not have different fertility preferences than other women. For a lot of women, the reason they are worried about the climate is that they want to have kids.
Grant:
That argument is a really interesting one that I've been trying to make. There’s this deep irony here, where there's this intense fear that having too many children will lead to this catastrophic ecological collapse and eventually to human extinction. But ironically, to prevent this cataclysmic reality, we're not having children, inadvertently leading to extinction. So there's this funny kind of irony. I try to pose that to folks that make this argument, with varying levels of success.
Lyman, thank you so much for joining me today. This was very, very interesting, and keep up the good work. I'm grateful that we have you working on this issue. You do all sorts of different demographic research, so maybe we can bring you back to talk about something else in the future.
Lyman:
Happy to.
Grant:
Awesome. Thanks so much.