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;
This article obeys the first rule of author intent - the author pays attention to something which reinforces his perspective. However, it points to something interesting. The only places in the world with robust, even scary (from some perspectives), population growth rates are those places with little to no reliable vital statistics.
The simple fact is that we can't know much about the birth and death rates in large parts of Africa. People draw shocking conclusions and fit them to all sorts of ideologies. My expectation is that a world-wide trend doesn't skip places with bad statistics; and that local leaders tend to overestimate populations, hide deaths, etc for a variety of reasons, and that old data is also poor, but reflected assumptions about exponential, runaway human population - soaring through Malthusian limits - that motivated all sorts of interventions. In every other region, the annual ritual is that population projections are lowered repeatedly. If the surprise is always in the same direction, it should not be a surprise anymore. I expect rapidly falling fertility and soon falling population in Africa and rural India.
I'm not sure what the population composition will be world-wide or locally in the future, but I doubt that analysis of faked statistics will be a good guide.
Khan is not predicting a trend. The quote has nothing to do with a projected birth rate. He is using current population to estimate how many workers over 25 in 25 years. (Not sure why he didn't use 18 or some lesser number) While the statistics to make that estimate might be bad, they aren't bad enough to result in him being wrong about where the working age population will be in 25 years.
Technology shock — the pill, new abortion techniques, transition to a service economy — probably has been a major cause of marriage delay and birth-rate decline. Maybe future technology shocks will increase the birth-rate? "Designer babies" and artificial wombs come to mind.
Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. Arnold seems to count on selection effects and heritability of fertility genes. Robin Hanson seems to put hope in exponential growth of Amish and other insular high-fertility cultures.
Increased fertility treatment in general. If a woman can be just as fertile at 40 as at 30, at a cost a couple could afford (probably in the range of car?) then that changes the calculus. Right now there is a tremendous demand at older ages after career and financial stability catches up ... but at that point the biological feasibility gets fairly low. Address that problem, via cheap IvF or miracle vitamins or whatever and we can side-step the cultural rot problems. Probably better to address the root cause, but my money is always on the tech.
"Right now there is a tremendous demand at older ages after career and financial stability catches up."
What is tremendous demand?
Right now about 2% of births are the result of IVF. What increase would you expect? Double to 4%? Quadruple to 8%? Meanwhile we need to go from 1.66 to nearer 2.1 births per woman. That's more than a 25% increase.
The "fertility gap" is measured by surveys of how many children woman want vs how many they have. Both numbers have declined over the decades, but right now recent data shows us around 0.6 child/woman as the residual gap by age 44. Closing the gap would take us from 1.6 to 2.2, which solves the problem. Note this already accounts with lowered desired rates. Reasons for not having more children vary, but primarily are economic, biological, and not having the right partner. Policy can influence the first 2 pretty strongly, though cash transfer in the first case seems less effective than first anticipated. My guess is it just isn't enough.
The reason we give tax breaks is because just handing out $100,000 cash at birth would mean a lot of underclass people would have kids for the money.
The unsaid part of all this fertility stuff is that they are trying to raise the birthrate of the middle and upper middle class, not the underclass. That means that the payment has to be tied or scaled to some standard that indicates being a productive member of society.
Personally, I think they should just pay people a % of their FICA taxable amount per kid or some similar program. It would be a good mix of fairness and merit (due to the FICA cap and flat tax nature).
Morally, it would recognize that taking on the cost of raising children is just a different way of contributing to future SS/Medicare revenue.
Finally, it would reward marriage. A flat tax credit is the same married or unmarried. A credit based on FICA wages would increase in a two parent household.
"Morally, it would recognize that taking on the cost of raising children is just a different way of contributing to future SS/Medicare revenue.
Finally, it would reward marriage. A flat tax credit is the same married or unmarried. A credit based on FICA wages would increase in a two parent household."
I like the logic behind this but there is no doubt it would attract very loud complaints, not that there is any chance of this happening in the first place.
I know multiple women who were pressured by all the adults around them (including parents) to delay marriage and childbearing in favor of education and career. Then they discovered, to their dismay, that getting pregnant at age 35 is not so easy. And the clock is really ticking at that point, so now they're panicking and are forced to turn to IVF, which is very expensive and onerous. Many of these women, had they started having kids in their twenties, would have never needed IVF. And they would have had the option of having larger families.
There are many advantages to marrying and having children in your twenties rather than your thirties.
1. Both parents have a lot more physical energy. Little kids are physically draining in multiple ways.
2. The mother, who bears the physical burden of pregnancy, child birth, and breastfeeding, is younger and healthier. This sounds obvious, but I don't think young women fully appreciate this.
3. Grandparents are more likely to be alive and able to help out.
4. You might discover that you really like being a parent. And I mean REALLY like it. Especially for women. Some women who are on the fast track with education and career have a child and discover that all they want to do is be a mom. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. But if you discover it at age 35, there's a lot less you can do about it than if you discover it at age 25.
5. Having children early leaves you the option of having a large family (say 4 or more children). It is extremely difficult for a woman to have a large family if her first child isn't born until she is in her mid-30's.
6. Having children early means you get to spend more time with them. You are more likely to see them grow up and start families of their own. You get to spend more time getting to know your grandchildren. Maybe even great grandchildren. (Although I'm not a grandparent yet, reviews from older friends are unambiguously positive.)
I'm not saying all men and women SHOULD marry and have children in their twenties. I'm just saying that there are good, solid reasons to do so. And we should be presenting those to young people as well, rather than giving them a lopsided and misleading sense of the tradeoffs.
Socially, and especially culturally, we need more happy families in movies & sit-coms, not childless rom-coms. More Brady Bunch, less Pretty Woman, great as the latter was.
2 of our 4 kids are married, and we grandparents are deliberately, and joyously, trying to be as helpful as possible. Like making a big Thanksgiving feast for that holiday.
I am not convinced that we have any idea how to have cities not be other than demographic sinks. Yes, there are things that make a difference at the margin, but positive fertility requires a big family “tail” and cities squash such.
One question no one likes asking is that if you consider the vast subsidies to the elderly as something that suppresses fertility and encourages institutions to hammer themselves into shapes that support the elderly, you have an issue of rank order. We spend a lot of money on making the old comfortable and extending their lives through unnatural means. They also get the benefit of a lot of tax relief programs that they can only really benefit from in old age. So even if you spent 2% of GDP on some loopy subsidy program for the fecund, you would still be spending a lot more on the elderly, and the institutional incentives would still be towards making the country a giant nursing home. No tax scheme that you could come up with in the US would be more generous than what the retirement investment accounts and other similar mechanisms provide.
You can have only one #1 priority at one time, and what that priority is will have a irresistible influence. That #1 priority in the west is giving the elderly a great time with unlimited drugs, surgeries, medical slaves, and other entertainments.
This also points to one of the big problems with the concept of the welfare state that you can only get around by not having a welfare state.
Could be! Perhaps also a "hard UBI" combined with a strict flat tax could bring down the rock candy mountain of true welfare fairness. But political reality makes that unlikely.
Nigeria's population numbers are completely fake. There's never been an accurate census and local governments intentionally overstate their population to get more subsidies. This also means that the projections are completely fake, because they're based on historical changes in reported population. I point this out whenever the topic comes up, which is increasingly often. Of course, quite a lot of people do and will live there, just not nearly as many as that.
Even if the numbers are inflated to twice their actual size, Nigeria is extremely populous, extremely poor, and expanding at a rate much higher than any prosperous country.
I’m certain there are amounts, like 2 or 5 x median annual wage. But it’s really unlikely that govt giving $120,000 to get married & have kids is gonna be acceptable to most elderly voters. Maybe $12,000 is a political max that is too small an incentive to get TFR up to 2
US population growth needs a two prong solution: robust legal immigration and natural births. Population growth and productivity gains (mostly AI) are the keys to healthy 3-4% US GDP growth. It’s growth that makes nations thrive. Good leaders matter too, but without growth it’s all for naught.
Zvi is right incentives matter and cash upfront is the best approach - cash for immigrants and cash for babies. However, babies take longer to impact the economy so, let’s focus on getting 3M solid immigrants a year. To do this we need to massively staff up US embassies and process in the optimal mix. This is not hard for a major power like the US. Congress and the President must make this happen and all of us need to scream from the rafters until it’s done. Remember Trump has at most 15 months to get things done (the Republicans will lose the midterms) and immigration is item #1. We should only count on 3-4 things from Trump in those 15 months and let’s hope he act wisely.
I’d like to make the payments variable based on future earnings estimates for each child. We have strong enough predictive models that doing this and tweaking it over time would be easy. So, this will be Trump item #2.
Item #3&4 is the deficit and government spending (item #3). This is straightforward. Cut spending and once you think you have that right, add taxes (item #4).
All could be done in 15 months and we would have decades of prosperity. Scream from the rafters! Onward!
My quick search suggests 800,000 legal immigrants in 2023. I like what you suggest even if I might go for doubling or 2 mil rather than your 3 mil. Unfortunately I don't see any chance of it happening. I'm pretty sure Trump cut legal immigration last time and hasn't changed his stance so I don't see it happening in the next four years.
Something akin to your #2 seems the most possible under Trump, though I have little supporting evidence he might consider it other than his family leave act for federal employees, weak as that is.
I don't see Trump making progress on #3 and #4. Worse, my fear is I might be wrong and his "fixes" cause more problems than what is gained.
"I continue to hope that as the gender-fluid types take themselves out of the gene pool."
No doubt some labeled as gender fluid are intersex as the result of mutations. This is something less than 1%. Others have atypical chromosomes, hormones, or other issues which probably aren't hereditary and might not even contribute to gender fluidity. This group is probably similarly small. The atypical chromosome group is no bigger. Given this you think the group that remains is genetic heredity in origin and not social contagion? Is that what you are saying?
"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."
Gee, what might the unintended consequences be? Who might be most attracted to a big bonus up front?
- might someone get pregnant, take the money, and abandon the child? Maybe a drug addict? Homeless?
- ignoring the worst case, is the money going to be most attractive to educated, high income parents or people below median income?
Not just kids, kids whose parents are married. Big benefits, like a tax free, $10,000 govt loan, automatically reduced by $100 per month while married (paid off in 100 months). Loan so that if divorced, it must be repaid.
Upon having a baby, when married, both parents get $10,000 and a 1% reduction in SS rate.
This hugely helps poor kids of married parents, when the poor kids of unmarried parents are the worse off. The moral hazard problem is clear, rewarding having kids out of wed-lock results in more such kids. That is an increasing problem for society, and is the single biggest reason for Black community far lower performance economically & socially.
Not racism, Black men literally screwing Black women without commitment to the woman or their kids. There are even more such White women screwing around and having kids without marriage, but it’s a lower 30% instead of 70%.
We also need more slut shaming—the lifestyle choice to have uncommitted, tho often pleasurable & orgasmic, sex also means likely having kids. Neither Kling nor most Symbolic Capitalists are happy about shaming sluts, tho perhaps ok with shaming slut-jerk guys, “rakes”, but many men aspire to be successful womanizers like Clinton, Trump, Musk, Brad Pitt, and so many famous high status men. All interested in hot babes.
Feminist desire to equalize promiscuity was always false—not 50%, not 10%, but 0% of the unwanted pregnancies occur to men, it’s only women. With Pregnancy Power comes Pregnancy Responsibility, which responsibility men were and usually are happy to give to women. So he shame of a bad outcome has to go onto the one with the responsibility.
But like kids, both sexual partners wanting sex without kids want Freedom From Responsibility.
Shame is the cultural stick against bad behavior, and the elite have no problem trying to use it, so need to stop saying it’s wrong to use.
Arnold;
Allow me to introduce some expert knowledge which might change your perspective on the Khan statement:
Starting with a general-purpose article:
https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/how-worlds-deadliest-crises-go-unseen
This article obeys the first rule of author intent - the author pays attention to something which reinforces his perspective. However, it points to something interesting. The only places in the world with robust, even scary (from some perspectives), population growth rates are those places with little to no reliable vital statistics.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/padr.12608
https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol50/38/50-38.pdf
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-109X(24)00171-2/fulltext
https://www.demographic-research.org/articles/volume/49/31
The simple fact is that we can't know much about the birth and death rates in large parts of Africa. People draw shocking conclusions and fit them to all sorts of ideologies. My expectation is that a world-wide trend doesn't skip places with bad statistics; and that local leaders tend to overestimate populations, hide deaths, etc for a variety of reasons, and that old data is also poor, but reflected assumptions about exponential, runaway human population - soaring through Malthusian limits - that motivated all sorts of interventions. In every other region, the annual ritual is that population projections are lowered repeatedly. If the surprise is always in the same direction, it should not be a surprise anymore. I expect rapidly falling fertility and soon falling population in Africa and rural India.
I'm not sure what the population composition will be world-wide or locally in the future, but I doubt that analysis of faked statistics will be a good guide.
Khan is not predicting a trend. The quote has nothing to do with a projected birth rate. He is using current population to estimate how many workers over 25 in 25 years. (Not sure why he didn't use 18 or some lesser number) While the statistics to make that estimate might be bad, they aren't bad enough to result in him being wrong about where the working age population will be in 25 years.
Technology shock — the pill, new abortion techniques, transition to a service economy — probably has been a major cause of marriage delay and birth-rate decline. Maybe future technology shocks will increase the birth-rate? "Designer babies" and artificial wombs come to mind.
Or maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. Arnold seems to count on selection effects and heritability of fertility genes. Robin Hanson seems to put hope in exponential growth of Amish and other insular high-fertility cultures.
Right now, doing IVF is very onerous on the woman. If that were to change, it would really lower the cost of having a child.
No. It really lowers the cost for IVF conception. Maybe 10%? 5%? In US in 2023?
-2.5% in 2021 (1 in 42)
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-ivf-babies-are-born-in-the-us/
Natural birth is much cheaper, tho we need more.
IVF might be 1 in 42 but what would it be if way cheaper? Surely more. How much? Still, I generally agree with your point.
Increased fertility treatment in general. If a woman can be just as fertile at 40 as at 30, at a cost a couple could afford (probably in the range of car?) then that changes the calculus. Right now there is a tremendous demand at older ages after career and financial stability catches up ... but at that point the biological feasibility gets fairly low. Address that problem, via cheap IvF or miracle vitamins or whatever and we can side-step the cultural rot problems. Probably better to address the root cause, but my money is always on the tech.
"Right now there is a tremendous demand at older ages after career and financial stability catches up."
What is tremendous demand?
Right now about 2% of births are the result of IVF. What increase would you expect? Double to 4%? Quadruple to 8%? Meanwhile we need to go from 1.66 to nearer 2.1 births per woman. That's more than a 25% increase.
The "fertility gap" is measured by surveys of how many children woman want vs how many they have. Both numbers have declined over the decades, but right now recent data shows us around 0.6 child/woman as the residual gap by age 44. Closing the gap would take us from 1.6 to 2.2, which solves the problem. Note this already accounts with lowered desired rates. Reasons for not having more children vary, but primarily are economic, biological, and not having the right partner. Policy can influence the first 2 pretty strongly, though cash transfer in the first case seems less effective than first anticipated. My guess is it just isn't enough.
The reason we give tax breaks is because just handing out $100,000 cash at birth would mean a lot of underclass people would have kids for the money.
The unsaid part of all this fertility stuff is that they are trying to raise the birthrate of the middle and upper middle class, not the underclass. That means that the payment has to be tied or scaled to some standard that indicates being a productive member of society.
Personally, I think they should just pay people a % of their FICA taxable amount per kid or some similar program. It would be a good mix of fairness and merit (due to the FICA cap and flat tax nature).
Morally, it would recognize that taking on the cost of raising children is just a different way of contributing to future SS/Medicare revenue.
Finally, it would reward marriage. A flat tax credit is the same married or unmarried. A credit based on FICA wages would increase in a two parent household.
"Morally, it would recognize that taking on the cost of raising children is just a different way of contributing to future SS/Medicare revenue.
Finally, it would reward marriage. A flat tax credit is the same married or unmarried. A credit based on FICA wages would increase in a two parent household."
I like the logic behind this but there is no doubt it would attract very loud complaints, not that there is any chance of this happening in the first place.
Re: The biological reality of fertility
I know multiple women who were pressured by all the adults around them (including parents) to delay marriage and childbearing in favor of education and career. Then they discovered, to their dismay, that getting pregnant at age 35 is not so easy. And the clock is really ticking at that point, so now they're panicking and are forced to turn to IVF, which is very expensive and onerous. Many of these women, had they started having kids in their twenties, would have never needed IVF. And they would have had the option of having larger families.
There are many advantages to marrying and having children in your twenties rather than your thirties.
1. Both parents have a lot more physical energy. Little kids are physically draining in multiple ways.
2. The mother, who bears the physical burden of pregnancy, child birth, and breastfeeding, is younger and healthier. This sounds obvious, but I don't think young women fully appreciate this.
3. Grandparents are more likely to be alive and able to help out.
4. You might discover that you really like being a parent. And I mean REALLY like it. Especially for women. Some women who are on the fast track with education and career have a child and discover that all they want to do is be a mom. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. But if you discover it at age 35, there's a lot less you can do about it than if you discover it at age 25.
5. Having children early leaves you the option of having a large family (say 4 or more children). It is extremely difficult for a woman to have a large family if her first child isn't born until she is in her mid-30's.
6. Having children early means you get to spend more time with them. You are more likely to see them grow up and start families of their own. You get to spend more time getting to know your grandchildren. Maybe even great grandchildren. (Although I'm not a grandparent yet, reviews from older friends are unambiguously positive.)
I'm not saying all men and women SHOULD marry and have children in their twenties. I'm just saying that there are good, solid reasons to do so. And we should be presenting those to young people as well, rather than giving them a lopsided and misleading sense of the tradeoffs.
Socially, and especially culturally, we need more happy families in movies & sit-coms, not childless rom-coms. More Brady Bunch, less Pretty Woman, great as the latter was.
2 of our 4 kids are married, and we grandparents are deliberately, and joyously, trying to be as helpful as possible. Like making a big Thanksgiving feast for that holiday.
I am not convinced that we have any idea how to have cities not be other than demographic sinks. Yes, there are things that make a difference at the margin, but positive fertility requires a big family “tail” and cities squash such.
https://www.lorenzofromoz.net/p/collapsing-fertility-is-not-so-mysterious
One question no one likes asking is that if you consider the vast subsidies to the elderly as something that suppresses fertility and encourages institutions to hammer themselves into shapes that support the elderly, you have an issue of rank order. We spend a lot of money on making the old comfortable and extending their lives through unnatural means. They also get the benefit of a lot of tax relief programs that they can only really benefit from in old age. So even if you spent 2% of GDP on some loopy subsidy program for the fecund, you would still be spending a lot more on the elderly, and the institutional incentives would still be towards making the country a giant nursing home. No tax scheme that you could come up with in the US would be more generous than what the retirement investment accounts and other similar mechanisms provide.
You can have only one #1 priority at one time, and what that priority is will have a irresistible influence. That #1 priority in the west is giving the elderly a great time with unlimited drugs, surgeries, medical slaves, and other entertainments.
This also points to one of the big problems with the concept of the welfare state that you can only get around by not having a welfare state.
I fear these are hard truths.
Could be! Perhaps also a "hard UBI" combined with a strict flat tax could bring down the rock candy mountain of true welfare fairness. But political reality makes that unlikely.
We aren't getting rid of retirement benefits until the entire government goes bankrupt.
When that happens, lets have more kids around to clean up the mess.
Nigeria's population numbers are completely fake. There's never been an accurate census and local governments intentionally overstate their population to get more subsidies. This also means that the projections are completely fake, because they're based on historical changes in reported population. I point this out whenever the topic comes up, which is increasingly often. Of course, quite a lot of people do and will live there, just not nearly as many as that.
Even if the numbers are inflated to twice their actual size, Nigeria is extremely populous, extremely poor, and expanding at a rate much higher than any prosperous country.
all those people with all those schemes
maybe someone should tell them about the null hypothesis
up until the industrial revolution there was a basic economic incentive to marry and marry young
mens work (farming hunting etc) paid more than womens work (cooking cleaning weaving etc)
and both were time consuming
so there was a relative advantage to partnering up
a woman doing the house work got access to her mans bigger wages
while the man could concentrate all of his time fully on work and still have warm meals and clean clothes
all of that is gone
there are very few jobs that men are better at
house work is not the chore it used to be
and everyone has plenty of spare time to cook and clean and smoke a pipe in front of the fire
so 18 year old men no longer have a material reason to propose
and 16 year old women have no reason to accept
no amount of government money/propaganda is going to reverse that
I’m certain there are amounts, like 2 or 5 x median annual wage. But it’s really unlikely that govt giving $120,000 to get married & have kids is gonna be acceptable to most elderly voters. Maybe $12,000 is a political max that is too small an incentive to get TFR up to 2
US population growth needs a two prong solution: robust legal immigration and natural births. Population growth and productivity gains (mostly AI) are the keys to healthy 3-4% US GDP growth. It’s growth that makes nations thrive. Good leaders matter too, but without growth it’s all for naught.
Zvi is right incentives matter and cash upfront is the best approach - cash for immigrants and cash for babies. However, babies take longer to impact the economy so, let’s focus on getting 3M solid immigrants a year. To do this we need to massively staff up US embassies and process in the optimal mix. This is not hard for a major power like the US. Congress and the President must make this happen and all of us need to scream from the rafters until it’s done. Remember Trump has at most 15 months to get things done (the Republicans will lose the midterms) and immigration is item #1. We should only count on 3-4 things from Trump in those 15 months and let’s hope he act wisely.
I’d like to make the payments variable based on future earnings estimates for each child. We have strong enough predictive models that doing this and tweaking it over time would be easy. So, this will be Trump item #2.
Item #3&4 is the deficit and government spending (item #3). This is straightforward. Cut spending and once you think you have that right, add taxes (item #4).
All could be done in 15 months and we would have decades of prosperity. Scream from the rafters! Onward!
My quick search suggests 800,000 legal immigrants in 2023. I like what you suggest even if I might go for doubling or 2 mil rather than your 3 mil. Unfortunately I don't see any chance of it happening. I'm pretty sure Trump cut legal immigration last time and hasn't changed his stance so I don't see it happening in the next four years.
Something akin to your #2 seems the most possible under Trump, though I have little supporting evidence he might consider it other than his family leave act for federal employees, weak as that is.
I don't see Trump making progress on #3 and #4. Worse, my fear is I might be wrong and his "fixes" cause more problems than what is gained.
“Large families will make a comeback” - dream on.
"I continue to hope that as the gender-fluid types take themselves out of the gene pool."
No doubt some labeled as gender fluid are intersex as the result of mutations. This is something less than 1%. Others have atypical chromosomes, hormones, or other issues which probably aren't hereditary and might not even contribute to gender fluidity. This group is probably similarly small. The atypical chromosome group is no bigger. Given this you think the group that remains is genetic heredity in origin and not social contagion? Is that what you are saying?
"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."
Gee, what might the unintended consequences be? Who might be most attracted to a big bonus up front?
- might someone get pregnant, take the money, and abandon the child? Maybe a drug addict? Homeless?
- ignoring the worst case, is the money going to be most attractive to educated, high income parents or people below median income?
Not just kids, kids whose parents are married. Big benefits, like a tax free, $10,000 govt loan, automatically reduced by $100 per month while married (paid off in 100 months). Loan so that if divorced, it must be repaid.
Upon having a baby, when married, both parents get $10,000 and a 1% reduction in SS rate.
This hugely helps poor kids of married parents, when the poor kids of unmarried parents are the worse off. The moral hazard problem is clear, rewarding having kids out of wed-lock results in more such kids. That is an increasing problem for society, and is the single biggest reason for Black community far lower performance economically & socially.
Not racism, Black men literally screwing Black women without commitment to the woman or their kids. There are even more such White women screwing around and having kids without marriage, but it’s a lower 30% instead of 70%.
We also need more slut shaming—the lifestyle choice to have uncommitted, tho often pleasurable & orgasmic, sex also means likely having kids. Neither Kling nor most Symbolic Capitalists are happy about shaming sluts, tho perhaps ok with shaming slut-jerk guys, “rakes”, but many men aspire to be successful womanizers like Clinton, Trump, Musk, Brad Pitt, and so many famous high status men. All interested in hot babes.
Feminist desire to equalize promiscuity was always false—not 50%, not 10%, but 0% of the unwanted pregnancies occur to men, it’s only women. With Pregnancy Power comes Pregnancy Responsibility, which responsibility men were and usually are happy to give to women. So he shame of a bad outcome has to go onto the one with the responsibility.
But like kids, both sexual partners wanting sex without kids want Freedom From Responsibility.
Shame is the cultural stick against bad behavior, and the elite have no problem trying to use it, so need to stop saying it’s wrong to use.