Fertility Links, 12/8/2024

Razib Khan on 2050's working-age population; Zvi Mowshowitz on fertility policy; Matt Goodwin on the British demographic situation; Magdalene J. Taylor on gender division;

Razib Khan presents a world map of births in 2021.

By the mid-21st century, raw population sizes will drive South Asian and African concerns to the fore, while by 2050, the working-age population of Nigeria alone will rival that of the entire EU.

The number of births today tells us what the working-age population will look like in 25 years. It will be overwhelmingly African and Indian.

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

everything we know says you want to prioritize getting parents cash money quickly. That impacts behavior far more than long term subsidies. Giving people tax breaks after several children is exactly the kind of move that is not going to get much impact on fertility per dollar spent.

He is bullish on giving people money to have children. But he argues that it has to be a lot of money, and it has to be paid up front as a bonus when children are born, not doled out gradually to support children over time.

He also points out that encouraging marriage would be a good idea, and that the American system of taxes and transfers does the opposite.

As someone who had to decide whether to get married, I can verify this absolutely makes a huge difference. The incentives here can be very, very large. If we had gotten married earlier, it would have plausibly cost six figures in lost financial aid.

Also, it seems quite obvious to me that if you boost the marriage rate, you also boost the birth rate. As in, yes, being counterfactually married should quite obviously lead to decisions to have more children. So should giving married people better financial conditions relative to the unmarried, over and above changing people’s marriage decisions, although the size of that mechanism is reasonably disputed. How could these things fail to be true?

Matt Goodwin writes,

Britain has one of the meanest tax treatments of married people with kids, particularly if one partner wishes to stay at home and look after them. Turning this around will involve re-orienting our tax and benefits system towards families — towards things like baby bonuses, paid family leave and subsidised childcare, among other tax changes, to actively promote families.

…we will need to invest massively in pro-natal communications, from explaining the reality of the fertility crisis to children and young people in schools and universities, making it central to the education system, to explaining to British girls (who go on to have children too late in life) the biological reality. We also need to root out green anti-natalism in the classroom, such as the ridiculous idea that people should avoid having children to ‘save the planet’.

While doing this, we need to change the social status system in our society, using government and the levers of the state to redistribute the allocation of social status, celebrating and bestowing status on parents, especially those with many children.

Magdalene J. Taylor writes,

Most men are not Nick Fuentes celebrating the fearmongering belief that men will now own women’s bodies. Most women are not hardline SCUM Manifesto-reading radical feminists calling for universal male castration. Each of these represent small niches of the population, ones that barely move the political needle. But if you spent much time on various circles of X or TikTok, you might be led to believe otherwise — and some of these ways of thinking are indeed creeping further into the mainstream.

When I was young, movies and television often celebrated gender differences, romance, and family life. Today, it is fashionable to condemn all of these. That cannot help the birth rate.

I continue to hope that as the gender-fluid types take themselves out of the gene pool, within another twenty or thirty years the fashions will revert to favoring what was considered normal when I was a kid. Large families will make a comeback.

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The Gender War Wants to Divide You

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Fertility Roundup #4

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Graphic Content & Cyber Monday: the year’s deepest discount