Expectations and peer effects. If everyone around you is having kids, it's weird not to have kids (and it's orders of magnitude to have kids when there are other families with kids around). The inverse is also true. Having-kids and not-having-kids are both reinforcing.
"All she does is eat and poop." No—babies are fascinating, they have personality! But if you have one, and you think, "All she does is eat and poop,” then, yes, you probably shouldn’t have another.
My understanding is that C is not innate, but we are doing things as a society that tend to reduce people's C. In particular, we place 'lack of trustworthiness' and 'actual betrayal of trust' on the list of 'minor transgressions' rather than 'major sins'. Rob Henderson is correct that we can use rewards and punishments to modify C -- but mostly what we need to do is to reform institutions so that those who aren't trustworthy are removed, and face real consequences when they betray those of us who trusted them.
We would agree totally except for "including religious tradition." as being a factor. Our circle of friends, including Jewish friends, do not believe in magical thinking. In our circle, we do have a token couple of Christian believers we have known for over half a century, but they know it is irrelevant to us. Funny how we are all married to the same people and most have grandchildren including us. The variance in economic outcomes was large, but that made no difference.
To us, this is the good life.
A lot of it is the result of longer term thinking in all spheres of life. We planned enough to have saved enough for retirement, my patients planned enough for educational saving accounts for our two children and their other grandchild, we are saving for our grandchildren education when the twins were born, etc. From when we married in 1971 we started saving 20% of our gross income and that provided the capital for my own business 19 years latter.
We always assumed that "s**t happens" is a universal truth and tried to minimize the damage. That really payed off when our business had major problems at a time when both children when to UC Berkeley and they had the funds to supplement their earnings and scholarships all the way through Ph.D.s in STEM areas.
However, we were lucky with an older friend who helped us over emotional hard patches of life.
"I suspect that in another generation or two the values in popular culture will have shifted. The people who devalue marriage and children will not have much impact on the generations to come."
No doubt popular culture will shift but I have almost no idea in what direction and I doubt you have a significantly better guess. I'm still amazed how quickly opinion on gay marriage changed after the SCOTUS ruling. We don't know what and how things will shift culture. I'm curious why you think the people who devalue marriage and children will lose impact. Reverting to a norm? Maybe we'll also reduce the federal deficit?
I explained AK's view. Which is not that mad. People who have kids only come from people who had kids. ;) While the high TFR values are from times where nearly all had a bunch of kids. - People born NOW in Japan/Korea et al. come mostly from people with a stronger than average wish to have kids. Might (partly) be inheritable - at least they have a chance to install in their kids a sense of "having kids is fine".
You explained your guess of his view. It is not mad even if I find it unlikely. Unless he's said this somewhere I've not seen, I'd guess the likelihood is no better than 50% he shares that hypothesis. I suspect the heredity part is at least small enough that people not having kids won't die out. Whatever the cultural norm was, is or will be, there always was and will be a substantial percentage who chose not to have kids.
I think it is worth noting that while Scandinavians increasingly don't marry, as parents they are every bit as likely to stay together as married parents elsewhere. In other words, they haven't seen the same increase in single parenting.
"If the pressure is to aim toward marriage and children, good. If it is to aim toward sexual deviancy or substance abuse, not good."
True statements but putting them together implies a relationship that doesn't necessarily exist. In college I knew many people heavily into recreational sex (including a bit of porn, prostitution, and more) and substance abuse beyond just drinking and weed but it was entirely recreational and they were also very much aimed toward eventual marriage and children. While the former can surely interfere with the latter, it's not a given. I'm not sure I see sexual deviancy and substance abuse reducing the likelihood of children and the main cause of sexual deviancy and substance abuse in combination with no marriage may be something else entirely, like C or maybe failing the marshmallow test. Said less roundabout, if the sexual deviants and substance abusers had avoided those pitfalls, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would have gotten married.
This makes me think of Myron Magnet's "The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass". One of it's themes was that people with fairly good executive function, fairly low present-orientation (I am in awe of Dallas E Weaver above), friends and/or family who could "bail them out", and some source of money could do things that poorer, less supported people couldn't. If you "didn't have far to fall", stupid sex or drug experimentation could push you into a real crappy life, while those more favorably situated could weather the problems.
I think it works as you say far more often than not. Maybe one could argue you missed additional important differences but your list is close enough for the point being made.
The key word there is correlation. If people who eat lots of salad are healthy, will I be healthy if I start eating lots of salad? Probably not if salad eaters do lots of other good things I don't do. Maybe the things you list are causation some or most of the time but I would bet there is something else which causes promiscuous behavior, commitment, personality, independence, narcissism issues, etc. AND unsuccessful or no marriage.
Between explicit costs and opportunity costs I think the answer is no. I just turned 30 and the vast majority of my friends and classmates I grew up with (I can't believe graduation was 12 years ago!) are unmarried and w/ out children. The incentive structure of modern America streamlines lots of women into college, ensures the majority of them have good jobs, makes divorce very expensive, and subsidizes single parenthood. Legal contraceptives and abortion make casual sex much less risky in addition to it being much less stigmatized. I see few strong reasons to get married, especially for women. They can take care of themselves. Historically, the strongest incentive to get married for women was to find a provider because their opportunity to make an income that would allow independence was very limited. Even with all their socioeconomic gains most women would still prefer a man with at least as much education and income as well as one who will participate a lot in the household chores.
"The people who do reproduce will be people who are less self-centered, more conscientious, and more appreciative of tradition."
Or it may be people who are more self-centered, more impulsive, more present-oriented, and with less executive function.
Or it may be both, and society will continue to bifurcate into the equivalents of Belmont and Fishtown. What will be lost will be the middle of people who are together enough to control their fertility and whose utility function prefers all the things they can do today and tomorrow and next year if they don't have kids (the opportunity cost theory of fertility crash, e.g., https://quillette.com/2023/12/14/misunderstanding-the-fertility-crisis/).
"the opportunity cost theory" amounts to saying that people have decided there are things they would rather do. It says that people have the desired amount of children, when in fact surveys consistently show people wanting more children than they end up having. And I don't think it deals well with my observation that there is deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers. You can make a tautology out of "people choose X over Y because they want to," but it is less persuasive when they seem to want Y at age 20 and again at age 50 but choose X at age 30 and are stuck with it.
"Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" can join "Time Inconsistent Preferences" and "Bounded Rationality" and - what I would add - "Bounded Conscientiousness". All are really pseudo-technical euphemisms for the more common, blunt, and ancient terms used to describe the human condition.
It's possible to think it's best to respect the right of people to make certain decisions, while recognizing that lots of them will end up making what they will come to believe were bad decisions.
I'll explain, but first, let me step back to a bigger picture.
The bigger picture is a story of war between two factions (Sowell's Conflict of Visions), and then, "Player 3 has entered the game". "Science" (real or fake) is not actually one of the players, more of a weapon each side tries to use to fight the war, because of the shared social presumption of claims having objective basis and transcending (thus trumping) differences in opinion.
The war is about "deutungshoheit" / "discursive dominance" for the elite consensus position on or intellectual framing / modeling on the nature of human psychology. Heh, maybe Arnold should do a sequel to "The Three Languages of Politics" with "The Three Languages of the Humanitas-ology". (Ok, not catchy, needs work.)
The traditional view is that humans are born to be really different in ways that really matter, and that human beings have all kinds of inherent limits and weaknesses and faults that cause them to make a lot of bad decisions. Crooked timbers and all that. The language would be similar to the traditional religious terms involving talents as rare gifts, sins, lusts, temptations, virtues, and so on, though it's certainly possible to take out the theology and use secular equivalents. To a traditionalist, "bad decisions" are an obvious, common, and frequent fact of human existence and it would be absurd for anyone to try and rationalize them as "actually good" on the one hand or define them away on the other. People make bad decisions all the time - often even by their own standards and intentions - because people are wicked, impulsive, hypocritical, only rarely all that bright, and constantly deluding themselves about their true motives. Even if a traditionalist is willing to respect the right of an adult to make certain choices, he will do this while thinking that most people - being people - are going to use that liberty to make bad choices, and they are going to suffer bad consequences as a result.
If they learn at all, most of the time they're going to learn the hard way, and it's probably going to take a few times at that. If Socrates has to tell us to "first, know thyself", it's because few humans ever get even close to really knowing themselves, and are often clueless about how much they will change in the future as they age and/or find themselves in very different circumstances, to do things they never though they'd do, to believe and want things they never thought they would ever believe or want. Humans are fools, and any human who thinks humans can make good decisions about their futures without a tremendous amount of observable examples, help, support, guidance, and hard nudges by people with influence over them who care about their welfare, is a fool's fool.
Comes now player 2 - Utopian / Social-Constructivists / "Blank Slate" / Progressive Anthropology (similar ideas can be found in the thought of Rousseau, Plato, etc.) If humans are bad it's because society corrupts them, but we can make a new non-corrupting society, a new way of life, and "new men" will result to live in it. These efforts go back centuries, started religious, became secular-religion ideologies, usually some flavor of socialism, and then when the status of Science rose to the top of the hierarchy of epistemic discourse, tried to reformulate and justify themselves in terms of "Science", which, unlike actual science, always proves flexible enough to assert the truth of what the powers that be want people to think is true.
100 years ago Trotsky wrote about the "man of the future" on the road to superman, and the USSR produced lots of output on the "New Soviet Man" and "New Soviet Woman". Of course that's problematic and we know better now and would have corrected them with, "Ahem, you mean, New Soviet Person, right?"
This completely different way of modelling how and why people decide and behave as they do is able to reject the traditionalist's view of the value of traditional norms and institutions and to claim that we are sitting on a goldmine of locked-up potential welfare and flourishing which we could unlock if only ...
Player 3 is "Economics Imperialism" (sometimes getting a boost from evolutionary psychology), going well beyond matters of specialization and trade and taking over from the progressivism-ruined fields of Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology and explaining choices in a values-neutral manner using the metaphysical construct of "utility" combined with subjective preferences and framing matters as people acting, deciding, trading, etc. in ways they calculate on some level to be the choices most likely to maximize this utility, somehow balancing their present interests with their anticipated future interests.
This model works pretty good for sophisticated businesses seeking profits by trading in markets. For actual human beings though, especially on matters touching the more primal impulses of core evolutionary matters like mating and reproduction, it is Ptolemaic Geocentrism that needs quite a few more epicycles.
And, guess what, I'll let you in on a secret, which is that the epicycles turn out to be the same weaknesses and faults and limits that the traditionalists, but they use more modern, technical-ish, intellectual-ish, science-ish terminology - effectively just euphemisms - to avoid having to admit the inherent similarity to low-status, knuckle-dragging, traditionalist thinking to the public or to themselves. These euphemism epicycles are the tribute economics imperialism pays to traditionalism when the traditionalists were right about human reality.
So "bounded rationality" in reality just means that people are not actually smart, rational, patient, and persistent enough to make the best chess moves in live even when they have all the information.
"Well, if you can't make the perfect chess move, you can still make the 'best' (satisficer) move from the much smaller number of possibilities when one can only see one move ahead. But wait, how do you know it's the best if you can only see one move ahead? Well, not if best means, "best for winning the game", but maybe we can redefine best so that it's best according to some simpler heuristic which a person who can only think one move ahead could develop by ... um ... uh .... "
Yeah, the whole point is they can't do that on their own. The best heuristic is, "What would someone better than me do if they were in my position?" and one discovers the answer by means of relying on observable examples, cultural institutions, and social influences, while hoping you don't live in Clown World full of smart-set inside-jokes you don't get where following high-status messages about what one should do is only liable to get one in deep, irreversible trouble.
Likewise, "Time Inconsistent Preferences" just means that people have a hard time with deferred gratification (e.g., marshmallow tests) and while some are ants plenty are grasshoppers who would starve in the winter if left to their own devices. The related, "Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" means that as badly as people are ignorant of their true selves now, they are far worse off in knowing how they are going to be in the future, what they are going to want, and how to provide for those wants by trading off certain choices today.
When I say "Bounded Conscientiousness", I am kind of poking fun at these euphemisms, and it's just my way of saying that some people are obviously just born bad apples with a higher disposition to violence, crime, and other bad acts, and have a very hard time resisting impulse and temptation, and repressing personally counterproductive and externally anti-social behaviors out of some internal sense of scruples to follow typical norms. Without going full "Lord of the Flies" levels of "civilizational order is fragile", the traditionalist believes that some people are more likely to become criminals, and if you stop keeping their heads down and start going soft of crime, so that they start to think "crime pays", then crime is what they'll do. Crazy, I know.
Now, there is a bit of a wrinkle to all this. You might think the traditionalists - especially what you might call "Neo-Traditionalists" informed by insights from genetics, evolutionary psychology, psychometrics, comparative biology, and game-theoretic social analysis - would want to call some of this word-game-playing out. And they did and do. But to the extent anyone even listens to people like us (which is approximately zero) there is also a bit of pressure to bite one's tongue. That's because there's a catch.
The catch is that while traditionalists do not sacralize liberty and choice and consent uber alles, and have qualms about "the market" regarding the need for paternalistic prohibitions or regulations, they recognize that the Progressives are ON TOP and IN CHARGE, and that just like a dog returns to its vomit and the progressive will go soft of crime, the sow after washing also returns to wallowing in the mire, and the progressives will also try to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in their suffocation of the market that is the indispensable engine of all our progress and prosperity.
And in the last century it seems that only the science-ish, technical-ish language of Economics Imperialism has had any track record of actual success in successfully arguing down the progressives by providing this framework capable of explaining the virtues of free markets and liberalized consumer choices and thwarting their constant efforts to convince people and prove that they can do better by means of mega-regulation, socialist redistribution, and central planning.
Is there more desire for additional children beyond the ones you have than there has been in the past? Or is it that there has always been a certain number of people who had fewer kids than they want? Perhaps the difference is that in the present day there is less overall demand for kids, and still some amount of unmet demand for kids--but no more unmet demand than there used to be.
It seems like you are referring to a subset of people. Maybe it's just college educated with good jobs, maybe it's even a majority including many with blue collars who have relatively stable lives but surely it's not people who have unplanned children or people who are miserable and think a child whom they will struggle to support is going to somehow make their life better. And I doubt it includes grandparents trying to raise grandkids they can't afford after their children abandoned those grandkids for one reason or another.
No, it doesn't say they have the desired amount of children. It is in some ways a tragic theory. It says that day to day and month to month, people decide they don't want kids NOW. They want to have kids "when they're ready". This is some times referred to as the "capstone" strategy for kids as opposed to the "foundation". Kids are a capstone AFTER you have finished your schooling, established yourself at your job, and hopefully have a house with a yard. For some people, this will be an easy change, but for lots of people it will be difficult to break habits that have been years in the making. Even those who then have a kid may well decide to stop after one. It's a bigger change than they realized. "When am I ever going to get enough sleep." "All she does is eat and poop." Also, fertility declines so having more kids (or that first one) may be difficult--or impossible to do naturally.
There may well be a "deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers" but, as Tom Schelling has observed, 55 year old me is a different person than 25 year old me.
It is a common observation that people over-discount the future. Throughout most of history, kids were not so much a conscious choice as something that happened after sex. Now that kids are for many people a conscious choice, that over-discounting comes into play. So people end up with fewer kids than they say they actually want.
Nowadays, wanting kids is like wanting to lost weight. "I want to lose weight but I get so hungry on a diet and I'd rather watch tv than exercise and ..." "I want to have kids but I don't want to give up vacations or eating out or all the other things the two of us enjoy. I have to get a promotion and we have to save enough to buy a house (but I don't want to give up those vacations and eating out and all those other things in order to build up a big nest egg).
Some of us knew when we were children that we weren't interested in having kids at all. But marriage was an assumed goal. So I was found by a not-interested-in-kids man & we've been together for pushing 50 years. High C + high openness personalities with dark triad tendencies. Perhaps just as well we are not reproducing.
I don't think you're acknowledging the plurality of human value here Arnold. You're assuming other people are like you and share your preferences and your strong and weak points.
For some people the best thing in life is to write great novels or play the best chess they can. For some it's to wake up every day in a cabin in the mountains with peace all around them and no one else within ten miles.
The real problem is that many people lack meaning, and kids and grandkids are indeed a way that many people can get that (not everyone can play great chess and not everyone enjoys it). Also the world must be peopled.
But on the flip side kids can be little shits, for real. Bad people in miniature form, and born that way. Not every kid, or even every grandkid, counts as winning at life. The kid in my life is kind and wonderful, but some of my friends I genuinely feel sorry for.
Unless there were unsuccessful pregnancies I wouldn't know about, my maternal grandparents were conscientious and exercised restraint, using the contraceptives of the time (this was the Depression) and had but two children, ten years apart. (Between them, these two grandparents had had, coming off of farms as everyone did, more than a dozen siblings, more of those on the more successful, prosperous side, fewer on the sharecropper side.)
A difference in these two strands, my mother and her older brother. From my mother and her three kids: a total of four grandchildren. From my late uncle, her brother, and his three kids: a total of 8 grandchildren.
Among all of these 12 - no great-grandchildren have yet issued - indeed, the *first marriage* is only just upcoming.
The difference between eight and four might not seem to matter much, but it does in that - besides being generally sunnier, uncursed people, for other reasons - the branch of the family with the eight total grandkids, has made family the focus of their lives, and the source of their joy, and it is just much more possible to do that with the the greater number of connections to be made, across 3 nuclear families of eight cousins clustered together in age, versus four grandkids, from my parents' line, more staggered.
They will eventually see some great-grandchildren. Will it be more than eight?
My (side of the) family do not discuss this. We are not Catholic. There is nothing in our catechism that has taught us how to flourish other than materially, or located that flourishing in family. It is only the old grandma who sentimentally and openly wishes for marriages - hell, wishes for girlfriends or boyfriends - she doesn't even yet moot the idea of great-grandchildren.
How dull it is to talk to young people and pretend to be interested in their boring jobs and their constant travel ...
People see themselves as the main character in the story of their life. Notice that there are zero popular stories that focus on the joys of being a happy grandma as an ultimate victory stage of a woman's life-script. It's not that it's not true, it's just not one of the story arcs humans are hard-wired to resonate with. A young person can really believe that the payoff for all the work and stress and sacrifice that goes into child-rearing really is worth all the effort in the long-run, but imagining oneself happy *as an old person who can no longer participate in or enjoy many young-person activities* is not appealing or compelling enough of a vision to motivate giving up large option value and paying big opportunity costs in the present.
There's wisdom in what you say, for sure. But it depends on which "young person things" we're talking about. To return to my example, if you are in such bad shape in old age that you can't play chess you won't be enjoying the grandkids much either. I do worry about people who stake their happiness on more taxing activities like international travel.
It just seems to me that the happy grandma where that's the primary joy in her life is a thing of the past that almost no one can have anymore. It's a relic of when people lived in the same town all their life. Lots of people fall out with their adult children, and lots of people's adult children move to the Bay Area or something. Then you get to see your grandkids for a couple dozen days a year perhaps, unless you have two million dollars for a house near there to retire in.
If you base your happiness around intellectually fulfilling pursuits and pastimes, you will have meaningful happiness until you die or get dementia. Of course this isn't mutually exclusive, but it is to some extent. If you raise five kids, you're probably not going to be writing that many novels.
Arnold - Thank you for this simple and important reminder about tradition. I write with similar sentiments about Rob’s book—virtue, religion and tradition, but especially gratitude.
Kind of. Things are really different in Afghanistan and Africa and very religious insular communities, and they are the only ones having lots of kids. For most middle-to-fully developed countries, however, there is indeed a lot more convergence in big-picture matters of social organization, time allocation, lifestyles, and incentives in societies that only the narcissism of small differences makes us imagine are more different than they really are.
I think the broader point is Newt Gingrich's quip which I'll paraphrase, "If you want real change, it's going to take real change." Anyone who imagines that a government of a low-fertility country is going to have a substantial effect on these rates by fine-tuning tinkering of policies within their society's Overton window is just nuts.
It's not that there is nothing they can do, it's that what has to be done is so far out of the range of current conception for all these societies that people like to fool themselves that there might be some easier way that's actually palatable to modern public sentiments to avoid extinction.
There isn't, they are all unpalatable.
The only "solution" is going to be when a majority of people left are those who find those changes palatable, and those people won't think much like the average modern person in lots of ways.
Maybe so, but a generous per child transfer to parents (just as public education is an in-kind transfer to parents) and reducing the lifetime income penalty for women who spend a few years out of paid employment with young children would not hurt.
Shooting a squirt gun at a forest fire doesn't hurt either. Not enough bang for the buck. There are already tons of subsidies directed at kids, but they don't accomplish much.
Shooting a squirt gun at a forest fire definitely hurts, because the squirter is wasting his time instead of helping put out the fire - by digging ditches, felling trees for firebreak, piloting helicopters etc. It's the opportunity cost argument. And if on top of this the squirter is high status, others will get the idea that shooting squirt guns is the best way to fight forest fires and will imitate him, or just go home to grill in their backyards because if it a forest fire only takes squirting water out of a toy gun at it to put out, how bad can it be?
I don't know how much effect it would have on TFR, either, but "child insurance" makes as much sense as health insurance or pensions. Transfer income to people when they have a particular need.
I'm not following you here. Which unpalatable changes do you think will avoid extinction?
Why are any changes needed at all? Why not allow those who see no point to reproduction to pass into extinction, while those who value children and continuity thrive?
I hesitate to put words in Handle's mouth but I think he would mean something like:
1) There are serious penalties for childlessness. E.g., no one can go to college who has not gotten married, had a child, and raised it to the age of two.
2) Women are legally treated differently than men. There is "affirmative action" for men when it comes to paying jobs and legal advantages to women when they bear and care for children.
Consider the enormous effort and distortions that go into affirmative action.
Now, stop doing that for all the current beneficiaries, and start doing at least as much for parents, by points awarded by some combination of number of children dependents and number of years married.
The representation rate for parents with 4+ kids among senior executives must be 80% if you ever want to do business with the government. No student loans for anyone not married with children. That kind of thing.
Discriminatory? You bet. Outside the Overton Window? Oh yeah - as far as the planet Neptune is outside my office window. Fertility rate tripled overnight? At least.
There is just no way for me to answer your whys unless there is some common ground on fundamental questions of value. What do you think we should be trying to maximize?
Individuals will pursue happiness in whatever form they wish. Many modern-minded people seem to think this does not involve children. Or at least they think this way during most of the years when they could most plausibly have children.
So, if you define the "problem" as "society is collectively producing too few children and is heading for self-imposed extinction", I see three approaches to finding a "solution".
The first would be trying to find some combination of policies that will change people's collective thinking on the subject, inducing them to have more children. I doubt there is any such combination of policies that could work.
The second would be trying to address the thinking directly - extolling the virtues of marriage and parenthood, praising the joys of doing the job of parenthood well, highlighting the joys that grandparents feel in seeing their children also perform this job well. Think of the Temperance movement, or the urban Settlement movement that tried to adjust people's moral sensibilities, possibly with some success. I don't think a government could organize such an effort, but committed individuals self-organizing a movement might.
The third would be noting that there are significant numbers of people who already see the joys and (nonpecuniary) rewards of parenthood, and are having plenty of children. If they also teach and demonstrate these values to their children, they will also have plenty of grandchildren. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will eventually dominate the population, and the problem will no longer exist.
My intuition is that the next round of technology shock in human reproduction — gene-editing, designer babies, and the like — will have major impacts on marriage and fertility.
Largely agree but I think peer pressuring my girlfriend into marriage at the ripe old age of 23 is what caused the end of our relationship :( looking forward to the next one though
He brings a lot of information to bear on the question and debunks common narratives. He makes the case that status / conformity is the primary driver of TFR and if popular culture celebrated fertility instead of denigrating it, things would change in a hurry. I haven't seen any responses to his argument from Caplan et al and would be interested in your take, Arnold.
On Policy interventions - While I agree that small interventions seem unlikely to move the needle, I think you are underselling the effect of cost on decisions around family size. These 3 things are major considerations for a young family deciding on whether to have a marginal child in an urban environment (New York City in my case)
1. Housing costs - Many young professionals like the urban environment and offerings. Having space for 4 kids requires a very high income to be affordable. If you could reduce housing costs to half, that would make it possible to avoid a choice between moving to the suburbs and having > 2 kids for many more people.
2. Schools - Private schools cost $70k / year per kid. I believe they are priced to what the market will bear, and this advantages families with 1 or 2 children over those with 3 or 4 greatly. They may have aid, but it's not for professionals who make 6 figures yet still could not afford $280k/year for 4 kids.
Public schools seem to be luck of the draw. From the outside, I have two main concerns - they do not seem to handle disruptive students very well and one disruptive student in class can have major ill effects on your child, and they seem all-in on DEI.[1]
3. Help is expensive. We pay $30/hr for a just-graduated student to pick up our children from school and take them to activities. $25 barely gets you someone who speaks English.
Each of these could help a lot:
* If it was affordable to get 4 bedrooms for more people
* If public schools effectively dealt with disruptive students and focused just on straightforward teaching of Reading/Writing/Math or parochial schools costing more like $20k/student were more common
* If help was cheap
I think people would much more often to decide to have the marginal child.
[1] Although, so are the private schools. One of our primary school tours involved the new headmaster sharing his background in "challenging racial inequities", as if that somehow made him appropriate to run an education facility for children.
If you "haven't seen any responses to his argument from Caplan" you may not follow his substack "betonit" - As Caplan writes repeatedly, he considers a lot just conformism: ppl have kids if others do , and zero-one-max2 if others do likewise. Though he also pushes for much more housing (if one lives with mom+pop, one does not raise a family) and open borders (cheaper nannies: more kids).
I agree that moving to the suburbs is an option. That is what most do unless they have few kids or make a lot of money. I would be fine doing that but many folks do not want to give up urban life and have to choose between a child and the city.
Those folks who can't decide whether it's more important to live in the city or have children are actually the problem. My children are in their child bearing years, and they're not having children. They would rather travel, eat out four nights a week, and own expensive things then deal with the intrusion and cost of children. Everyone who makes these kinds of decisions is going to be very sad indeed when they are old. The population of developed countries is collapsing, but the 20 and 30 something's taking selfies in front of the Trevi Fountain couldn't care less.
I think the steelman is more like: their work, friends, and hobbies are in NYC, where they worked for 10 years and came to call home. Either (a) moving an hour outside the city where they don't know anyone in order to have a house for many kids or (b) accommodating many kids in a small space is a fairly large and clear cost.
I have friends that did a triple bunk with 3 young kids in a 2 bedroom, so I agree it can be done, but I'm thinking about the marginal family. I have 4 young children -- everyone sleeps a lot better when they are in separate rooms, and everyone is less stressed when there are separate play areas so that it's not one big mosh pit in the living room.
I think society would be better off if even people who fail the marshmellow test are encouraged and able to get married and have children.
Life if full of (kind of) hard choices. NYC isn't about to change anytime soon.
It's certainly possible that we could reform things so that housing were a little cheaper or that people got a school voucher for their kids. For normal suburban middle class that want to send their kids to an ordinary functional school that could work. But we can't make prime Manhattan real estate or $70k private school tuition affordable to all.
If it's just "being urban" that you want I can suggest several cities in the South (I enjoy Tampa when I visit), but I suspect its not "urban" so much as "NYC tier city" that your after.
You can certainly pay people to have kids; but you can't pay them to be attentive parents. There's way too much opportunity to take the money and slack. Without attention, you end up, at best, with the issues that plagued the late British aristocracy. Tons of tutors and governesses don't make for good parenting.
That "the people who do reproduce" will %-wise likely tip the global population against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asia.......is a worry.
Please clarify what you mean by “the people who do reproduce will %-wise likely be biased against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]”
Still does not clarify why he believes that parts of the world with higher birth rates will “%-wise likely be biased against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]” — you are just telling me things I already know about birth rates around the world.
I dunno his thoughts. As the US, Europe and most of Asia has shrinking ("native") populations and (nearly) only African and Muslim countries grow (and many of those grow fast) - he may think that those will not like "us" a lot. (It seems to me he was saying sth. not very smart that sounded"racist", and you pretended not to understand it, to make Graham say sth even more openly racist.) Anyways, good luck with your new partner! This may help: https://putanumonit.com/2022/01/02/selfless-dating/
I have but I’m asking you to clarify why you believe that parts of the world with higher birth rates will “%-wise likely be biased against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]”
Furthermore what are the “ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]?” Last I checked those are all religions not civilizations — and Confucianism is from China not Southeast Asia
Well, my assumptions are based on my knowledge of the distribution of Confucianism and Judeo-Christian religion, national and subnational demographics, changes in the forecasting and demographic predictions, and issues in global statistics. It seems that any combination of realistic assumptions I make do not suggest that SEA Confucianism and Judeo-Christian religion are disfavored in relative reproduction rates. For example, the places that are suspected to continue having high reproduction rates are largely in Africa and India; with the reported rates in South America plummeting. Africa is also having a major swing towards Christianity, of all things, as has the highlands of South-East Asia, where the birth rates are remaining high, as opposed to the cities where Islam and Buddhism are dominant. Now, I'm not necessarily convinced that the rates are as high as reported in Africa; for some good reasons I think mortality is underreported and birth rates overreported. But the parts most likely to continue having high birth rates are the ones that are also becoming Evangelical, for whatever reasons. This really leaves India as a place with high rates of Hinduism and Islam and possibly high birth rates; but those appear to be falling rapidly in the cities. So the question might hang on the future of rural India, if I were to be wrong.
Well this is a complex tapestry of a reply....with which I have no quibbles. But my comment was (as I would have thought obvious) a simple one -sentence rhetorical one....implicitly "will the global ethnic mix of the futue world population change? And will that change tilt away from the ancient civilisations of Europe (inc its Anglosphere and Hispanic projections) and SE Asia? OK you've picked me up on the Indian subcontinent but apart from that I fail to see what was so "dubious".
Confirmation bias and survivorship bias
Expectations and peer effects. If everyone around you is having kids, it's weird not to have kids (and it's orders of magnitude to have kids when there are other families with kids around). The inverse is also true. Having-kids and not-having-kids are both reinforcing.
"All she does is eat and poop." No—babies are fascinating, they have personality! But if you have one, and you think, "All she does is eat and poop,” then, yes, you probably shouldn’t have another.
You don't really think that. But that's how you feel at times. And if you never seem to have enough time or sleep, you may feel it more than a little.
My understanding is that C is not innate, but we are doing things as a society that tend to reduce people's C. In particular, we place 'lack of trustworthiness' and 'actual betrayal of trust' on the list of 'minor transgressions' rather than 'major sins'. Rob Henderson is correct that we can use rewards and punishments to modify C -- but mostly what we need to do is to reform institutions so that those who aren't trustworthy are removed, and face real consequences when they betray those of us who trusted them.
We would agree totally except for "including religious tradition." as being a factor. Our circle of friends, including Jewish friends, do not believe in magical thinking. In our circle, we do have a token couple of Christian believers we have known for over half a century, but they know it is irrelevant to us. Funny how we are all married to the same people and most have grandchildren including us. The variance in economic outcomes was large, but that made no difference.
To us, this is the good life.
A lot of it is the result of longer term thinking in all spheres of life. We planned enough to have saved enough for retirement, my patients planned enough for educational saving accounts for our two children and their other grandchild, we are saving for our grandchildren education when the twins were born, etc. From when we married in 1971 we started saving 20% of our gross income and that provided the capital for my own business 19 years latter.
We always assumed that "s**t happens" is a universal truth and tried to minimize the damage. That really payed off when our business had major problems at a time when both children when to UC Berkeley and they had the funds to supplement their earnings and scholarships all the way through Ph.D.s in STEM areas.
However, we were lucky with an older friend who helped us over emotional hard patches of life.
"I suspect that in another generation or two the values in popular culture will have shifted. The people who devalue marriage and children will not have much impact on the generations to come."
No doubt popular culture will shift but I have almost no idea in what direction and I doubt you have a significantly better guess. I'm still amazed how quickly opinion on gay marriage changed after the SCOTUS ruling. We don't know what and how things will shift culture. I'm curious why you think the people who devalue marriage and children will lose impact. Reverting to a norm? Maybe we'll also reduce the federal deficit?
why AK thinks the people who devalue marriage and children will lose impact? Cuz they will die out, childless. At least those who devalue kids. More and more are born out-of-wedlock: Mexiko 70%, USofA: 40%, Spain 50%, Norway and Portugal: near 60% https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/out-of-wedlock-births-by-country
"Cuz they will die out, childless."
Really. So people who don't have kids only come from parents who don't have kids. Are you sure about that?
I explained AK's view. Which is not that mad. People who have kids only come from people who had kids. ;) While the high TFR values are from times where nearly all had a bunch of kids. - People born NOW in Japan/Korea et al. come mostly from people with a stronger than average wish to have kids. Might (partly) be inheritable - at least they have a chance to install in their kids a sense of "having kids is fine".
You explained your guess of his view. It is not mad even if I find it unlikely. Unless he's said this somewhere I've not seen, I'd guess the likelihood is no better than 50% he shares that hypothesis. I suspect the heredity part is at least small enough that people not having kids won't die out. Whatever the cultural norm was, is or will be, there always was and will be a substantial percentage who chose not to have kids.
I think it is worth noting that while Scandinavians increasingly don't marry, as parents they are every bit as likely to stay together as married parents elsewhere. In other words, they haven't seen the same increase in single parenting.
"If the pressure is to aim toward marriage and children, good. If it is to aim toward sexual deviancy or substance abuse, not good."
True statements but putting them together implies a relationship that doesn't necessarily exist. In college I knew many people heavily into recreational sex (including a bit of porn, prostitution, and more) and substance abuse beyond just drinking and weed but it was entirely recreational and they were also very much aimed toward eventual marriage and children. While the former can surely interfere with the latter, it's not a given. I'm not sure I see sexual deviancy and substance abuse reducing the likelihood of children and the main cause of sexual deviancy and substance abuse in combination with no marriage may be something else entirely, like C or maybe failing the marshmallow test. Said less roundabout, if the sexual deviants and substance abusers had avoided those pitfalls, it doesn't necessarily follow that they would have gotten married.
This makes me think of Myron Magnet's "The Dream and the Nightmare: The Sixties Legacy to the Underclass". One of it's themes was that people with fairly good executive function, fairly low present-orientation (I am in awe of Dallas E Weaver above), friends and/or family who could "bail them out", and some source of money could do things that poorer, less supported people couldn't. If you "didn't have far to fall", stupid sex or drug experimentation could push you into a real crappy life, while those more favorably situated could weather the problems.
I think it works as you say far more often than not. Maybe one could argue you missed additional important differences but your list is close enough for the point being made.
The key word there is correlation. If people who eat lots of salad are healthy, will I be healthy if I start eating lots of salad? Probably not if salad eaters do lots of other good things I don't do. Maybe the things you list are causation some or most of the time but I would bet there is something else which causes promiscuous behavior, commitment, personality, independence, narcissism issues, etc. AND unsuccessful or no marriage.
Between explicit costs and opportunity costs I think the answer is no. I just turned 30 and the vast majority of my friends and classmates I grew up with (I can't believe graduation was 12 years ago!) are unmarried and w/ out children. The incentive structure of modern America streamlines lots of women into college, ensures the majority of them have good jobs, makes divorce very expensive, and subsidizes single parenthood. Legal contraceptives and abortion make casual sex much less risky in addition to it being much less stigmatized. I see few strong reasons to get married, especially for women. They can take care of themselves. Historically, the strongest incentive to get married for women was to find a provider because their opportunity to make an income that would allow independence was very limited. Even with all their socioeconomic gains most women would still prefer a man with at least as much education and income as well as one who will participate a lot in the household chores.
"The people who do reproduce will be people who are less self-centered, more conscientious, and more appreciative of tradition."
Or it may be people who are more self-centered, more impulsive, more present-oriented, and with less executive function.
Or it may be both, and society will continue to bifurcate into the equivalents of Belmont and Fishtown. What will be lost will be the middle of people who are together enough to control their fertility and whose utility function prefers all the things they can do today and tomorrow and next year if they don't have kids (the opportunity cost theory of fertility crash, e.g., https://quillette.com/2023/12/14/misunderstanding-the-fertility-crisis/).
"the opportunity cost theory" amounts to saying that people have decided there are things they would rather do. It says that people have the desired amount of children, when in fact surveys consistently show people wanting more children than they end up having. And I don't think it deals well with my observation that there is deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers. You can make a tautology out of "people choose X over Y because they want to," but it is less persuasive when they seem to want Y at age 20 and again at age 50 but choose X at age 30 and are stuck with it.
"Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" can join "Time Inconsistent Preferences" and "Bounded Rationality" and - what I would add - "Bounded Conscientiousness". All are really pseudo-technical euphemisms for the more common, blunt, and ancient terms used to describe the human condition.
It's possible to think it's best to respect the right of people to make certain decisions, while recognizing that lots of them will end up making what they will come to believe were bad decisions.
I wish you could expand on this. Sounds like a great blog post.
Happy to oblige, in due time.
"Bounded Conscientiousness"? What do you mean by that?
I'll explain, but first, let me step back to a bigger picture.
The bigger picture is a story of war between two factions (Sowell's Conflict of Visions), and then, "Player 3 has entered the game". "Science" (real or fake) is not actually one of the players, more of a weapon each side tries to use to fight the war, because of the shared social presumption of claims having objective basis and transcending (thus trumping) differences in opinion.
The war is about "deutungshoheit" / "discursive dominance" for the elite consensus position on or intellectual framing / modeling on the nature of human psychology. Heh, maybe Arnold should do a sequel to "The Three Languages of Politics" with "The Three Languages of the Humanitas-ology". (Ok, not catchy, needs work.)
The traditional view is that humans are born to be really different in ways that really matter, and that human beings have all kinds of inherent limits and weaknesses and faults that cause them to make a lot of bad decisions. Crooked timbers and all that. The language would be similar to the traditional religious terms involving talents as rare gifts, sins, lusts, temptations, virtues, and so on, though it's certainly possible to take out the theology and use secular equivalents. To a traditionalist, "bad decisions" are an obvious, common, and frequent fact of human existence and it would be absurd for anyone to try and rationalize them as "actually good" on the one hand or define them away on the other. People make bad decisions all the time - often even by their own standards and intentions - because people are wicked, impulsive, hypocritical, only rarely all that bright, and constantly deluding themselves about their true motives. Even if a traditionalist is willing to respect the right of an adult to make certain choices, he will do this while thinking that most people - being people - are going to use that liberty to make bad choices, and they are going to suffer bad consequences as a result.
If they learn at all, most of the time they're going to learn the hard way, and it's probably going to take a few times at that. If Socrates has to tell us to "first, know thyself", it's because few humans ever get even close to really knowing themselves, and are often clueless about how much they will change in the future as they age and/or find themselves in very different circumstances, to do things they never though they'd do, to believe and want things they never thought they would ever believe or want. Humans are fools, and any human who thinks humans can make good decisions about their futures without a tremendous amount of observable examples, help, support, guidance, and hard nudges by people with influence over them who care about their welfare, is a fool's fool.
Comes now player 2 - Utopian / Social-Constructivists / "Blank Slate" / Progressive Anthropology (similar ideas can be found in the thought of Rousseau, Plato, etc.) If humans are bad it's because society corrupts them, but we can make a new non-corrupting society, a new way of life, and "new men" will result to live in it. These efforts go back centuries, started religious, became secular-religion ideologies, usually some flavor of socialism, and then when the status of Science rose to the top of the hierarchy of epistemic discourse, tried to reformulate and justify themselves in terms of "Science", which, unlike actual science, always proves flexible enough to assert the truth of what the powers that be want people to think is true.
100 years ago Trotsky wrote about the "man of the future" on the road to superman, and the USSR produced lots of output on the "New Soviet Man" and "New Soviet Woman". Of course that's problematic and we know better now and would have corrected them with, "Ahem, you mean, New Soviet Person, right?"
This completely different way of modelling how and why people decide and behave as they do is able to reject the traditionalist's view of the value of traditional norms and institutions and to claim that we are sitting on a goldmine of locked-up potential welfare and flourishing which we could unlock if only ...
Player 3 is "Economics Imperialism" (sometimes getting a boost from evolutionary psychology), going well beyond matters of specialization and trade and taking over from the progressivism-ruined fields of Psychology, Anthropology, and Sociology and explaining choices in a values-neutral manner using the metaphysical construct of "utility" combined with subjective preferences and framing matters as people acting, deciding, trading, etc. in ways they calculate on some level to be the choices most likely to maximize this utility, somehow balancing their present interests with their anticipated future interests.
This model works pretty good for sophisticated businesses seeking profits by trading in markets. For actual human beings though, especially on matters touching the more primal impulses of core evolutionary matters like mating and reproduction, it is Ptolemaic Geocentrism that needs quite a few more epicycles.
And, guess what, I'll let you in on a secret, which is that the epicycles turn out to be the same weaknesses and faults and limits that the traditionalists, but they use more modern, technical-ish, intellectual-ish, science-ish terminology - effectively just euphemisms - to avoid having to admit the inherent similarity to low-status, knuckle-dragging, traditionalist thinking to the public or to themselves. These euphemism epicycles are the tribute economics imperialism pays to traditionalism when the traditionalists were right about human reality.
So "bounded rationality" in reality just means that people are not actually smart, rational, patient, and persistent enough to make the best chess moves in live even when they have all the information.
"Well, if you can't make the perfect chess move, you can still make the 'best' (satisficer) move from the much smaller number of possibilities when one can only see one move ahead. But wait, how do you know it's the best if you can only see one move ahead? Well, not if best means, "best for winning the game", but maybe we can redefine best so that it's best according to some simpler heuristic which a person who can only think one move ahead could develop by ... um ... uh .... "
Yeah, the whole point is they can't do that on their own. The best heuristic is, "What would someone better than me do if they were in my position?" and one discovers the answer by means of relying on observable examples, cultural institutions, and social influences, while hoping you don't live in Clown World full of smart-set inside-jokes you don't get where following high-status messages about what one should do is only liable to get one in deep, irreversible trouble.
Likewise, "Time Inconsistent Preferences" just means that people have a hard time with deferred gratification (e.g., marshmallow tests) and while some are ants plenty are grasshoppers who would starve in the winter if left to their own devices. The related, "Time Inconsistent Opportunity Cost Estimation" means that as badly as people are ignorant of their true selves now, they are far worse off in knowing how they are going to be in the future, what they are going to want, and how to provide for those wants by trading off certain choices today.
When I say "Bounded Conscientiousness", I am kind of poking fun at these euphemisms, and it's just my way of saying that some people are obviously just born bad apples with a higher disposition to violence, crime, and other bad acts, and have a very hard time resisting impulse and temptation, and repressing personally counterproductive and externally anti-social behaviors out of some internal sense of scruples to follow typical norms. Without going full "Lord of the Flies" levels of "civilizational order is fragile", the traditionalist believes that some people are more likely to become criminals, and if you stop keeping their heads down and start going soft of crime, so that they start to think "crime pays", then crime is what they'll do. Crazy, I know.
Now, there is a bit of a wrinkle to all this. You might think the traditionalists - especially what you might call "Neo-Traditionalists" informed by insights from genetics, evolutionary psychology, psychometrics, comparative biology, and game-theoretic social analysis - would want to call some of this word-game-playing out. And they did and do. But to the extent anyone even listens to people like us (which is approximately zero) there is also a bit of pressure to bite one's tongue. That's because there's a catch.
The catch is that while traditionalists do not sacralize liberty and choice and consent uber alles, and have qualms about "the market" regarding the need for paternalistic prohibitions or regulations, they recognize that the Progressives are ON TOP and IN CHARGE, and that just like a dog returns to its vomit and the progressive will go soft of crime, the sow after washing also returns to wallowing in the mire, and the progressives will also try to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs in their suffocation of the market that is the indispensable engine of all our progress and prosperity.
And in the last century it seems that only the science-ish, technical-ish language of Economics Imperialism has had any track record of actual success in successfully arguing down the progressives by providing this framework capable of explaining the virtues of free markets and liberalized consumer choices and thwarting their constant efforts to convince people and prove that they can do better by means of mega-regulation, socialist redistribution, and central planning.
Is there more desire for additional children beyond the ones you have than there has been in the past? Or is it that there has always been a certain number of people who had fewer kids than they want? Perhaps the difference is that in the present day there is less overall demand for kids, and still some amount of unmet demand for kids--but no more unmet demand than there used to be.
It seems like you are referring to a subset of people. Maybe it's just college educated with good jobs, maybe it's even a majority including many with blue collars who have relatively stable lives but surely it's not people who have unplanned children or people who are miserable and think a child whom they will struggle to support is going to somehow make their life better. And I doubt it includes grandparents trying to raise grandkids they can't afford after their children abandoned those grandkids for one reason or another.
No, it doesn't say they have the desired amount of children. It is in some ways a tragic theory. It says that day to day and month to month, people decide they don't want kids NOW. They want to have kids "when they're ready". This is some times referred to as the "capstone" strategy for kids as opposed to the "foundation". Kids are a capstone AFTER you have finished your schooling, established yourself at your job, and hopefully have a house with a yard. For some people, this will be an easy change, but for lots of people it will be difficult to break habits that have been years in the making. Even those who then have a kid may well decide to stop after one. It's a bigger change than they realized. "When am I ever going to get enough sleep." "All she does is eat and poop." Also, fertility declines so having more kids (or that first one) may be difficult--or impossible to do naturally.
There may well be a "deep satisfaction among grandparents that you do not find among their lonely peers" but, as Tom Schelling has observed, 55 year old me is a different person than 25 year old me.
It is a common observation that people over-discount the future. Throughout most of history, kids were not so much a conscious choice as something that happened after sex. Now that kids are for many people a conscious choice, that over-discounting comes into play. So people end up with fewer kids than they say they actually want.
Nowadays, wanting kids is like wanting to lost weight. "I want to lose weight but I get so hungry on a diet and I'd rather watch tv than exercise and ..." "I want to have kids but I don't want to give up vacations or eating out or all the other things the two of us enjoy. I have to get a promotion and we have to save enough to buy a house (but I don't want to give up those vacations and eating out and all those other things in order to build up a big nest egg).
Some of us knew when we were children that we weren't interested in having kids at all. But marriage was an assumed goal. So I was found by a not-interested-in-kids man & we've been together for pushing 50 years. High C + high openness personalities with dark triad tendencies. Perhaps just as well we are not reproducing.
The bottom line is we have no reason to think it will self correct.
If people want kids but find it to troublesome, imagine how troublesome it will seem when the dependency ratio is even worse.
Yes, exactly. The burdens and sorrows seem if not less, at least ameliorated when they are experienced communally.
I don't think you're acknowledging the plurality of human value here Arnold. You're assuming other people are like you and share your preferences and your strong and weak points.
For some people the best thing in life is to write great novels or play the best chess they can. For some it's to wake up every day in a cabin in the mountains with peace all around them and no one else within ten miles.
The real problem is that many people lack meaning, and kids and grandkids are indeed a way that many people can get that (not everyone can play great chess and not everyone enjoys it). Also the world must be peopled.
But on the flip side kids can be little shits, for real. Bad people in miniature form, and born that way. Not every kid, or even every grandkid, counts as winning at life. The kid in my life is kind and wonderful, but some of my friends I genuinely feel sorry for.
Unless there were unsuccessful pregnancies I wouldn't know about, my maternal grandparents were conscientious and exercised restraint, using the contraceptives of the time (this was the Depression) and had but two children, ten years apart. (Between them, these two grandparents had had, coming off of farms as everyone did, more than a dozen siblings, more of those on the more successful, prosperous side, fewer on the sharecropper side.)
A difference in these two strands, my mother and her older brother. From my mother and her three kids: a total of four grandchildren. From my late uncle, her brother, and his three kids: a total of 8 grandchildren.
Among all of these 12 - no great-grandchildren have yet issued - indeed, the *first marriage* is only just upcoming.
The difference between eight and four might not seem to matter much, but it does in that - besides being generally sunnier, uncursed people, for other reasons - the branch of the family with the eight total grandkids, has made family the focus of their lives, and the source of their joy, and it is just much more possible to do that with the the greater number of connections to be made, across 3 nuclear families of eight cousins clustered together in age, versus four grandkids, from my parents' line, more staggered.
They will eventually see some great-grandchildren. Will it be more than eight?
My (side of the) family do not discuss this. We are not Catholic. There is nothing in our catechism that has taught us how to flourish other than materially, or located that flourishing in family. It is only the old grandma who sentimentally and openly wishes for marriages - hell, wishes for girlfriends or boyfriends - she doesn't even yet moot the idea of great-grandchildren.
How dull it is to talk to young people and pretend to be interested in their boring jobs and their constant travel ...
People see themselves as the main character in the story of their life. Notice that there are zero popular stories that focus on the joys of being a happy grandma as an ultimate victory stage of a woman's life-script. It's not that it's not true, it's just not one of the story arcs humans are hard-wired to resonate with. A young person can really believe that the payoff for all the work and stress and sacrifice that goes into child-rearing really is worth all the effort in the long-run, but imagining oneself happy *as an old person who can no longer participate in or enjoy many young-person activities* is not appealing or compelling enough of a vision to motivate giving up large option value and paying big opportunity costs in the present.
There's wisdom in what you say, for sure. But it depends on which "young person things" we're talking about. To return to my example, if you are in such bad shape in old age that you can't play chess you won't be enjoying the grandkids much either. I do worry about people who stake their happiness on more taxing activities like international travel.
It just seems to me that the happy grandma where that's the primary joy in her life is a thing of the past that almost no one can have anymore. It's a relic of when people lived in the same town all their life. Lots of people fall out with their adult children, and lots of people's adult children move to the Bay Area or something. Then you get to see your grandkids for a couple dozen days a year perhaps, unless you have two million dollars for a house near there to retire in.
If you base your happiness around intellectually fulfilling pursuits and pastimes, you will have meaningful happiness until you die or get dementia. Of course this isn't mutually exclusive, but it is to some extent. If you raise five kids, you're probably not going to be writing that many novels.
Arnold - Thank you for this simple and important reminder about tradition. I write with similar sentiments about Rob’s book—virtue, religion and tradition, but especially gratitude.
https://scottgibb.substack.com/p/rob-hendersons-good-fortune?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2&triedRedirect=true
"We are seeing the same phenomena occurring across many different political and economic regimes."
Are we? I kind of feel like the political and economic regimes around the world are all pretty similar.
Kind of. Things are really different in Afghanistan and Africa and very religious insular communities, and they are the only ones having lots of kids. For most middle-to-fully developed countries, however, there is indeed a lot more convergence in big-picture matters of social organization, time allocation, lifestyles, and incentives in societies that only the narcissism of small differences makes us imagine are more different than they really are.
I think the broader point is Newt Gingrich's quip which I'll paraphrase, "If you want real change, it's going to take real change." Anyone who imagines that a government of a low-fertility country is going to have a substantial effect on these rates by fine-tuning tinkering of policies within their society's Overton window is just nuts.
It's not that there is nothing they can do, it's that what has to be done is so far out of the range of current conception for all these societies that people like to fool themselves that there might be some easier way that's actually palatable to modern public sentiments to avoid extinction.
There isn't, they are all unpalatable.
The only "solution" is going to be when a majority of people left are those who find those changes palatable, and those people won't think much like the average modern person in lots of ways.
Maybe so, but a generous per child transfer to parents (just as public education is an in-kind transfer to parents) and reducing the lifetime income penalty for women who spend a few years out of paid employment with young children would not hurt.
Shooting a squirt gun at a forest fire doesn't hurt either. Not enough bang for the buck. There are already tons of subsidies directed at kids, but they don't accomplish much.
Shooting a squirt gun at a forest fire definitely hurts, because the squirter is wasting his time instead of helping put out the fire - by digging ditches, felling trees for firebreak, piloting helicopters etc. It's the opportunity cost argument. And if on top of this the squirter is high status, others will get the idea that shooting squirt guns is the best way to fight forest fires and will imitate him, or just go home to grill in their backyards because if it a forest fire only takes squirting water out of a toy gun at it to put out, how bad can it be?
I don't know how much effect it would have on TFR, either, but "child insurance" makes as much sense as health insurance or pensions. Transfer income to people when they have a particular need.
I'm not following you here. Which unpalatable changes do you think will avoid extinction?
Why are any changes needed at all? Why not allow those who see no point to reproduction to pass into extinction, while those who value children and continuity thrive?
I hesitate to put words in Handle's mouth but I think he would mean something like:
1) There are serious penalties for childlessness. E.g., no one can go to college who has not gotten married, had a child, and raised it to the age of two.
2) Women are legally treated differently than men. There is "affirmative action" for men when it comes to paying jobs and legal advantages to women when they bear and care for children.
even I am against that!
Consider the enormous effort and distortions that go into affirmative action.
Now, stop doing that for all the current beneficiaries, and start doing at least as much for parents, by points awarded by some combination of number of children dependents and number of years married.
The representation rate for parents with 4+ kids among senior executives must be 80% if you ever want to do business with the government. No student loans for anyone not married with children. That kind of thing.
Discriminatory? You bet. Outside the Overton Window? Oh yeah - as far as the planet Neptune is outside my office window. Fertility rate tripled overnight? At least.
"Conan! What is best in life?"
There is just no way for me to answer your whys unless there is some common ground on fundamental questions of value. What do you think we should be trying to maximize?
I'm not sure who you mean by "we".
Individuals will pursue happiness in whatever form they wish. Many modern-minded people seem to think this does not involve children. Or at least they think this way during most of the years when they could most plausibly have children.
So, if you define the "problem" as "society is collectively producing too few children and is heading for self-imposed extinction", I see three approaches to finding a "solution".
The first would be trying to find some combination of policies that will change people's collective thinking on the subject, inducing them to have more children. I doubt there is any such combination of policies that could work.
The second would be trying to address the thinking directly - extolling the virtues of marriage and parenthood, praising the joys of doing the job of parenthood well, highlighting the joys that grandparents feel in seeing their children also perform this job well. Think of the Temperance movement, or the urban Settlement movement that tried to adjust people's moral sensibilities, possibly with some success. I don't think a government could organize such an effort, but committed individuals self-organizing a movement might.
The third would be noting that there are significant numbers of people who already see the joys and (nonpecuniary) rewards of parenthood, and are having plenty of children. If they also teach and demonstrate these values to their children, they will also have plenty of grandchildren. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will eventually dominate the population, and the problem will no longer exist.
Given what's since come down the pike, old Newt Gingrich seems smarter now.
My intuition is that the next round of technology shock in human reproduction — gene-editing, designer babies, and the like — will have major impacts on marriage and fertility.
Largely agree but I think peer pressuring my girlfriend into marriage at the ripe old age of 23 is what caused the end of our relationship :( looking forward to the next one though
I highly recommend this podcast with Lyman Stone
https://www.fromthenew.world/p/lyman-stone-growing-the-population
He brings a lot of information to bear on the question and debunks common narratives. He makes the case that status / conformity is the primary driver of TFR and if popular culture celebrated fertility instead of denigrating it, things would change in a hurry. I haven't seen any responses to his argument from Caplan et al and would be interested in your take, Arnold.
On Policy interventions - While I agree that small interventions seem unlikely to move the needle, I think you are underselling the effect of cost on decisions around family size. These 3 things are major considerations for a young family deciding on whether to have a marginal child in an urban environment (New York City in my case)
1. Housing costs - Many young professionals like the urban environment and offerings. Having space for 4 kids requires a very high income to be affordable. If you could reduce housing costs to half, that would make it possible to avoid a choice between moving to the suburbs and having > 2 kids for many more people.
2. Schools - Private schools cost $70k / year per kid. I believe they are priced to what the market will bear, and this advantages families with 1 or 2 children over those with 3 or 4 greatly. They may have aid, but it's not for professionals who make 6 figures yet still could not afford $280k/year for 4 kids.
Public schools seem to be luck of the draw. From the outside, I have two main concerns - they do not seem to handle disruptive students very well and one disruptive student in class can have major ill effects on your child, and they seem all-in on DEI.[1]
3. Help is expensive. We pay $30/hr for a just-graduated student to pick up our children from school and take them to activities. $25 barely gets you someone who speaks English.
Each of these could help a lot:
* If it was affordable to get 4 bedrooms for more people
* If public schools effectively dealt with disruptive students and focused just on straightforward teaching of Reading/Writing/Math or parochial schools costing more like $20k/student were more common
* If help was cheap
I think people would much more often to decide to have the marginal child.
[1] Although, so are the private schools. One of our primary school tours involved the new headmaster sharing his background in "challenging racial inequities", as if that somehow made him appropriate to run an education facility for children.
If you "haven't seen any responses to his argument from Caplan" you may not follow his substack "betonit" - As Caplan writes repeatedly, he considers a lot just conformism: ppl have kids if others do , and zero-one-max2 if others do likewise. Though he also pushes for much more housing (if one lives with mom+pop, one does not raise a family) and open borders (cheaper nannies: more kids).
And reducing land use and building code restrictions and improving public schools are good in themselves whatever the effect on the TFR.
When I think about whether I have out of control expenses, I wander onto something like this.
The average religious school, even on the coasts, is $10-$20k a year (towards the lower end of that K-8).
Have you looked up housing and private education costs in West Chester?
I agree that moving to the suburbs is an option. That is what most do unless they have few kids or make a lot of money. I would be fine doing that but many folks do not want to give up urban life and have to choose between a child and the city.
Those folks who can't decide whether it's more important to live in the city or have children are actually the problem. My children are in their child bearing years, and they're not having children. They would rather travel, eat out four nights a week, and own expensive things then deal with the intrusion and cost of children. Everyone who makes these kinds of decisions is going to be very sad indeed when they are old. The population of developed countries is collapsing, but the 20 and 30 something's taking selfies in front of the Trevi Fountain couldn't care less.
I think the steelman is more like: their work, friends, and hobbies are in NYC, where they worked for 10 years and came to call home. Either (a) moving an hour outside the city where they don't know anyone in order to have a house for many kids or (b) accommodating many kids in a small space is a fairly large and clear cost.
I have friends that did a triple bunk with 3 young kids in a 2 bedroom, so I agree it can be done, but I'm thinking about the marginal family. I have 4 young children -- everyone sleeps a lot better when they are in separate rooms, and everyone is less stressed when there are separate play areas so that it's not one big mosh pit in the living room.
I think society would be better off if even people who fail the marshmellow test are encouraged and able to get married and have children.
Life if full of (kind of) hard choices. NYC isn't about to change anytime soon.
It's certainly possible that we could reform things so that housing were a little cheaper or that people got a school voucher for their kids. For normal suburban middle class that want to send their kids to an ordinary functional school that could work. But we can't make prime Manhattan real estate or $70k private school tuition affordable to all.
If it's just "being urban" that you want I can suggest several cities in the South (I enjoy Tampa when I visit), but I suspect its not "urban" so much as "NYC tier city" that your after.
You can certainly pay people to have kids; but you can't pay them to be attentive parents. There's way too much opportunity to take the money and slack. Without attention, you end up, at best, with the issues that plagued the late British aristocracy. Tons of tutors and governesses don't make for good parenting.
That "the people who do reproduce" will %-wise likely tip the global population against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asia.......is a worry.
Please clarify what you mean by “the people who do reproduce will %-wise likely be biased against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]”
Of the Top 40 TFR countries (all above 3.6 births per woman) only one - Afghanistan (4.4) - is not in Africa. The only developed country not below replacement level is: Israel. The "ancient civilisation of Juda" seems ok. - While Latin America: https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/latin-americas-fertility-decline-is-accelerating-no-ones-sure-why/
Still does not clarify why he believes that parts of the world with higher birth rates will “%-wise likely be biased against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]” — you are just telling me things I already know about birth rates around the world.
I dunno his thoughts. As the US, Europe and most of Asia has shrinking ("native") populations and (nearly) only African and Muslim countries grow (and many of those grow fast) - he may think that those will not like "us" a lot. (It seems to me he was saying sth. not very smart that sounded"racist", and you pretended not to understand it, to make Graham say sth even more openly racist.) Anyways, good luck with your new partner! This may help: https://putanumonit.com/2022/01/02/selfless-dating/
Have you somehow managed to not know about sub-par replacement-rate statistics....Europe (esp Italy), Japan S Korea etc etc etc?
I have but I’m asking you to clarify why you believe that parts of the world with higher birth rates will “%-wise likely be biased against people from the ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]”
Furthermore what are the “ancient civilisations of Judeo-Christianity and SE Asian Confucionism [sic]?” Last I checked those are all religions not civilizations — and Confucianism is from China not Southeast Asia
Rather dubious assumptions underlie this...
Rather dubious assumptions underlie your reply I suspect. But have a nice day.
Well, my assumptions are based on my knowledge of the distribution of Confucianism and Judeo-Christian religion, national and subnational demographics, changes in the forecasting and demographic predictions, and issues in global statistics. It seems that any combination of realistic assumptions I make do not suggest that SEA Confucianism and Judeo-Christian religion are disfavored in relative reproduction rates. For example, the places that are suspected to continue having high reproduction rates are largely in Africa and India; with the reported rates in South America plummeting. Africa is also having a major swing towards Christianity, of all things, as has the highlands of South-East Asia, where the birth rates are remaining high, as opposed to the cities where Islam and Buddhism are dominant. Now, I'm not necessarily convinced that the rates are as high as reported in Africa; for some good reasons I think mortality is underreported and birth rates overreported. But the parts most likely to continue having high birth rates are the ones that are also becoming Evangelical, for whatever reasons. This really leaves India as a place with high rates of Hinduism and Islam and possibly high birth rates; but those appear to be falling rapidly in the cities. So the question might hang on the future of rural India, if I were to be wrong.
Well this is a complex tapestry of a reply....with which I have no quibbles. But my comment was (as I would have thought obvious) a simple one -sentence rhetorical one....implicitly "will the global ethnic mix of the futue world population change? And will that change tilt away from the ancient civilisations of Europe (inc its Anglosphere and Hispanic projections) and SE Asia? OK you've picked me up on the Indian subcontinent but apart from that I fail to see what was so "dubious".