Fertility Links, 1/29/2025

Yascha Mounk interviews Anastasia Berg; Arctotherium on the marriage game; Tove K on the fear of an African population boom; Lyman Stone on non-monogamous societies

In an interview with Yascha Mounk, Anastasia Berg says,

as birth rates decline and as we see fewer and fewer children, I think we're going to see even more uncertainty and ambivalence really take hold, as the people having children are, each and every one of them, going to be making a completely independent choice—you hear this in every friend group from the person who's having children first. They'll name that as one of the challenges: “I was the first to have kids. I didn't have other friends who were parents, and I found that hard to navigate personally and socially.” That's something that I think about a lot, when I think about what that world with declining birth rates is going to look like.

I want to elaborate on this sentence from Berg:

It used to be that having children was part and parcel for most people what it meant to be a human being. People understood themselves intergenerationally.

If you are ambivalent or negative toward having children, I suggest you talk to a grandparent. In my experience, grandparents have the greatest joy and life satisfaction of anyone. None of the other things that people strive for, including consumer goods, career success, and sexual fulfillment, are as reliably rewarding as becoming a grandparent. I do not know one grandparent who is less than thrilled about their grandchildren.

Her book is What Are Children For? I have not read it. Apparently it is not sufficiently anti-natalist to satisfy some people on the left, but my guess is that it is not sufficiently pro-natalist for me. I find it interesting that Mounk, who is center-left, sounds pro-natalist, since that is a right-coded stance.

I also recommend an interview by Serena Sigillito with Berg and her co-author, Rachel Wiseman.

Arctotherium writes,

Both father and mother can choose to fully commit or pursue other options. In this context, marriage provides a framework for encouraging, legitimizing, and stabilizing commitment.

He describes marital behavior in terms of cooperate/defect. The man is cooperating if he devotes his resources to his wife. He defects if he gives resources to another woman. The woman is cooperating if she ensures that the child her husband helps to support is his. She is defecting if she tries to get him to support a child who is not his.

He then looks at societies where norms promote both cooperating, both defecting, men cooperating/women defecting, and men defecting/women cooperating.

Not surprisingly you get better outcomes in a society where the incentives are for both to cooperate, and you get really terrible outcomes in a society where the incentives are for both to defect. About the latter, the he writes,

Without paternal certainty, men have no investment in the future and spend their time fighting, dancing or resting rather than working. Economically, these societies are desperately poor and largely incapable of collective action.

In his view, the Western norms and rules that were in place before the 1960s were conducive to marriages where both spouses cooperate. But now looser divorce laws, especially “no-fault divorce,” make it easier to defect. And the welfare state makes it easier for women to defect, because they can fall back on government support. These developments, plus others, lead to this result:

The shift from a cooperate/cooperate marriage system, where both men and women made sacrifices to gain the security required for childbearing, to a cooperate/defect one, where men are expected to uphold their end of the bargain in exchange for nothing…

Men are dropping out of work or burning things down, and both marriage and children are increasingly relics of the past. We are thereby moving towards a defect/defect system of the kind I described at the start. Men increasingly disdain the daily grind (bewildering public intellectuals, who fail to understand why men won’t respond to market signals). Birth rates continue to decline. And things slowly fall apart.

I link because you may find it interesting, not because I am convinced. As you know, I think that the proximate cause of fewer babies is fewer people getting married in their twenties, and the ultimate causes of that are many.

Tove K writes,

Africa today holds about 20 percent of the global population. In 80 years the UN forecasts that it will constitute almost 40 percent. And the other 60 percent will be much older than today. And that is based on the UN’s forecast, which predicts that, for some reason, fertility will converge toward 2 all over the world in 2100 (numbers from Wikipedia's page on World population projections). It is easy to imagine other scenarios. For example, fertility might remain between 0.7 and 1.5 in Europe and East Asia and remain around 4 in Africa. If that remains the case, our world will rapidly become African.

She makes the point that it does not matter whether or not backwardness in Africa is driven by low average IQ. Backwardness has persisted for so long that it is reasonable to expect problems there to continue, and for Africans to seek to escape.

Lyman Stone writes,

The most plausible story, therefore, is not that settled agriculture led to hoarded surplus wealth creating highly reproductive elites. While that dynamic absolutely did happen in many sedentary societies, the actual forces driving truly epochal imbalances in male reproductive inequality were the superior mobility of pastoralist peoples which gave them greater power to strike at agriculturalists and limited agriculturalists’ ability to strike back.

He argues against the view that economic inequality is what leads to males having multiple wives. He argues instead that multiple wives emerge among groups that are high in predatory violence.

substacks referenced above: @

We need to think about Africa

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Human Reproduction as Prisoner's Dilemma

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What Are Children For?