Fertility Links, 3/12/2026
Tyler Cowen's hypothesis; Brad Wilcox on early marriage; Tim Carney on fertility as a social phenomenon; Nicholas Eberstadt on Chinese fertility
Fertility rates have declined around the world because birth control technologies became much better and easier to use. And people — women in particular — just do not want that many kids.
…Part of this model is that many women just love having a child. They love “children” so much that a single child fills up their needs and desires.
My mother would have liked more children, but that was not possible, for medical reasons. So I was an only child.
I came to believe that children from large families were happier. In college, I stayed a couple of days with a friend at her house. She had five younger siblings, and I decided that this was the ideal family.
Recently, I listened to a podcast of two high school classmates. Peter was one of six children, and his aunts and uncles also had large families. You picture family gatherings with piles of cousins. That sounds really fun to me, and I don’t think people today appreciate it enough.
An analysis of retrospective demographic data by Grant Bailey at IFS found that women who are middle-aged today and reached thirty without starting a family did indeed have only a 52 percent chance of having children.
If you ask me how to bring back fertility, I would recommend getting rid of social pressure to accumulate credentials in your twenties. And create “junior living” communities (analogous to senior living communities, but instead catering to families with young children).
What people consider possible is shaped by what they see. If 20-somethings don’t see bosses or older colleagues with families, then they won’t have an image of family and career working together. If young couples don’t see anyone with more than two children, then they won’t have an image in their minds of larger families, and they will have trouble imagining that for themselves.
…ust a few more people having just a few more babies could repopulate a playground or save a local elementary school. That could make it more possible or appealing for the next couple to have kids, and more than one or two.
By 2050, China’s median age is on track to hit 52 years. No country in history has ever been that gray—yet. That same year, nearly one in three in China will be 65 or older. One in ten will be over 80 by then, as well.
My parents came from the same small town. My father had 5 siblings. 1 had Downs syndrome, but the other 4 all had families of 2 or 3 kids. We had 3. My mother came from a mixed family and had 3 biological sisters and 4 step-siblings. All the families were of 2 or 3 kids. All of my holidays as a child were spent immersed in a thick atmosphere of family. It was exactly as much fun as you imagined.
Currently we have 4 kids and my 2 sisters each have 3, while my wife has 1 sister with 2 kids. My parents have passed away, but I bought our childhood home from my dad before he died and my sisters and I still regularly gather at our house for holidays. My wife's parents and sister live in a smaller town a couple hours away. The atmosphere at the gatherings that have 10 kids vs the ones that have 6 is noticeably different. It makes me grateful that my sister-in-law has multiple kids and doubly grateful that both of my sisters do as well.
As a parent, I can appreciate the challenge of larger families. As a kid, I never saw a downside. As a parent, giving my kids an experience of life overflowing with upside outweighs all the challenges.
Cowen's answer is one of those times you know he's being Straussian - because a subject is too hot to touch directly - by sending a classic signal of strange drop in the usual amount of insight, coherence, and rigor.
For starters - and as Hanson has pointed out many times in ways in which Cowen is surely familiar - it's not birth control. Birth control might explain a drop from an average of, say, 7 or more kids. It doesn't explain a drop from 3 to 1, especially when the 3 was when there was already chemical birth control, and indeed often accomplished with chemical birth control. Also, Cowen's Second Law is "There is a literature on everything" and that includes historical birth rate changes vs the introduction of chemical birth control. In particular, we have plenty of historical examples of average birth rates dropping a lot in particular classes or in whole societies prior to the availability of modern methods, or on the flip side, not changing for a while after such methods became available.
Also, that women "want fewer kids" is not an explanation of the thing people are wondering about, it *is* the thing people are wondering about, for which they are looking for an explanation. "Why are people eating less beef?" - "People - meat eaters in particular - just do not want that much beef." Thanks, genius. Ok, one could interpret this by saying the demand for beef would have fallen even if the price had stayed the same, which yes is a different situation from the demand curve staying the same but quantity demanded falling in response to a higher price. But for the whole fertility question discourse it is mostly just kicking the can to the more interesting question of *why* the current generation of women now want fewer kids than previous generations of women.