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Ep 6 - Lyman Stone, Institute for Family Studies - The Fertility Crisis And What We Can Do About It
108 Plays2 months ago
On this week's episode of the Sphere Podcast, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Publisher of Sphere Media, interviews Lyman Stone, demographer and senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. We talk all things fertility and birth rates: what the fertility collapse is, why it's bad, why policy can have a role to play, and if so how.
And, of course, his favorite book outside his area of expertise.
This is our longest podcast to date because, once Lyman gets started, he can't stop--and this is a very good thing because everything he says is fascinating.
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Institute for Family Studies Pronatalism Initiative: https://ifstudies.org/pronatalism-initiative
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Transcript
Introduction and Setting
00:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Good morning everyone and welcome to the Low Productions Values a Sphere podcast, which is a shot from my ah terrorist hideout in Syria, ah where I have just been named Minister of Information.
00:00:17
Lyman
I was going to say, now you're the legitimate government hideout in Syria. so
00:00:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, exactly. this is This is the new Ministry of Religious Liberty.
Meet the Expert: Lyman
00:00:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um Well, all joking aside, I'm very happy to have ah Lyman here with me, and this could possibly be the easiest interview in the history of this podcast, the very long history of this podcast.
00:00:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Because I told this story in the and the newsletter, you and I had been following each other on Twitter for a long time. And then we were at a conference together and I watched you speak and then we met and we got along. But watching you speak, I think I described it as like ah hearing an AI talk, just spitting out facts about your area of research, which is a relatively niche or considered relatively niche, but it's actually extremely important area, which is, uh, demographics and specifically fertility birth rates, natalism, or you may, you may describe it better, but, um, and so I really wanted to have you on because it was great to hear your talk and it's an important topic that's not covered enough.
00:01:22
Lyman
No, that's right.
00:01:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So.
Global Fertility Decline
00:01:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah I guess I'm going to start by asking, you know many people know this by now because of Musk and because of how bad the numbers are, but the first question is how bad is it? Explain why fertility numbers have been plummeted and how it's all around the world and how it's really dramatic.
00:01:57
Lyman
So um these days you do hear a lot more about low fertility, pronatalism, stuff like that. um And sometimes I get asked like, why? Why are we hearing about this now? And the answer is what you said, because um the news is following events, right? So fertility has fallen sharply all over the place.
00:02:17
Lyman
um I don't think it's surprising to people when you say, oh, fertility is falling really, really rapidly in Ethiopia. They're like, well, that's just because of some modernization process. Okay. But then people are more surprised to say, you know, it's fallen by half a child in Korea in 15 years. um When you say, oh, it's fallen by half a child in Finland.
00:02:38
Lyman
um in 15 years, you know, these these kinds of things. um We do see a big decline across across lots and lots and lots of countries. The exact pace of decline varies a bit. Some of the biggest declines are in Latin America, East Asia, um and actually some of the Scandinavian countries. um And it matters quite a bit ah for a lot of reasons. One of them is the obvious, right? The next generation. You know, civilization is always one generation away from ending.
00:03:08
Lyman
And that sounds like apocalyptic, but it's actually just a very straightforward factual statement. We just, we depend on the next generation. So that's true for something like social security. It's also true for something like, you know, just you know having kids to take care of you as you get older.
00:03:23
Lyman
um It's also gonna be true um just for the economy at large, right? You depend on younger workers, younger consumers to to drive the economic returns for your 401k or whatever. um So that's kind of one obvious reason that low fertility is bad. It's just, it has like bad economic consequences. um But are another reason, which to me, i'll I'll be honest, this is to me actually the most important reason that falling fertility is quite bad.
Desire for More Children
00:03:52
Lyman
um You can imagine a scenario where, you know, fertility has fallen to one child per woman, but that's because people just don't want kids anymore, right? Where everybody's like, I only want one kid. I'm only having one. And like people are just like making up like a rational decision to have cultural decline. Like you can imagine that that scenario and like, that's not my values, but if some society had those values, like,
00:04:19
Lyman
I guess like they they have a right to that, I guess.
00:04:25
Lyman
But that's not what's happening globally. Like in Korea, the average fertility rate is like 0.7, 0.6 to 0.8 children per woman. But the average Korean woman says she wants 2.2.
00:04:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh my God. Oh wow.
00:04:36
Lyman
Okay, so like, so this is not, yeah, even in Korea, like this is not a product ah product of like, people don't want kids anymore.
00:04:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Even in Korea.
00:04:43
Lyman
The average American woman wants like 2.4 kids, 2.5 kids, depends on exactly how you ask the question, and is going to have like 1.6. The average, um ah there are some countries that genuinely have low preferences like China, ah Hong Kong, Taiwan, or probably around like 1.4 to 1.8 desired.
00:05:02
Lyman
but they are all at or below one actual. um Malta and Austria have pretty low fertility desires, um but most countries are actually above two, which tells you, and I should say there are countries where people have more kids than they desire. So there are some countries in like Africa, some in Asia, some of the the lower income countries where people are still having a lot more kids than they want. um ah But what ah what I'm saying here is It's not that people are just sort of like choosing decline and like embracing civilizational D growth. Okay. People want kids and they're failing to have them. They're experiencing roadblocks, obstacles, hiccups in their life. And we actually know these have bad
Fertility and Mental Health
00:05:47
Lyman
consequences. Like we can look at it for a bunch of different studies. I won't.
00:05:51
Lyman
If you want more weeds on it, I can get into it later, but basically we know that having missing children leads to much worse levels of like happiness and subjective wellbeing later in life.
00:06:02
Lyman
So when you want kids and don't have them.
00:06:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i I actually want you to get into the weeds on this because I think this will be, no, but like, okay, so how do we know this and and and how does that manifest itself concretely?
00:06:07
Lyman
Okay.
00:06:11
Lyman
Okay. Yeah.
00:06:15
Lyman
Yeah. So the best, like really good causal instrument for this, um, is a very niche case, but because it's niche, it makes it really clear what's happening, um, is with IVF. So you, everybody who goes in to get IVF wants kids. Nobody's like, I don't want kids. Here's $40,000 to try and put children in me.
00:06:37
Lyman
Um, so everybody going for IVF wants kids. Okay. And some countries have super crappy privacy laws that basically just let researchers have all of your personal information.
00:06:48
Lyman
So like Denmark, Sweden, these countries, um, which is like a blessing for the world and really awkward.
00:06:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yes Give me your private information.
00:06:54
Lyman
If you're.
00:06:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's okay. It's for science.
00:06:58
Lyman
Yeah, so if you're like Swedish tax ID number 3,825, there's like 50 papers all about your personal life, right? um Okay, so the point is we can merge the complete list of every medicine someone's ever been prescribed.
00:07:14
Lyman
um to other kinds of records, okay? So for example, we can say, oh, they were prescribed all these like IVF procedures, and we can see were they prescribed antidepressants or not, okay?
00:07:27
Lyman
So we can say, oh, and then we can also match that to birth records.
00:07:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Umm...
00:07:30
Lyman
We can say, oh, these people then showed up as a mother a year later, nine months later, 18 months later. And what we can do is we can say, let's compare women of the same age, the same income, all these different background traits,
00:07:43
Lyman
who all went in for IVF around the same time. And some of them by chance had a success. They got pregnant immediately. Others got pregnant, but it was two or three years later after several rounds and others never got pregnant.
00:07:58
Lyman
So some of these women by chance had an IVF success and others by chance had a failure. And then let's say, how many antidepressants, antipsychotics, anti-anxiety medications were they prescribed over the next five to 10 years? And the answer is, if you have IVF failure, you have way higher rates of having antidepressants and anti-anxiety medications prescribed to you, okay?
00:08:23
Lyman
um So that's evidence one is just like failure to conceive very obviously leads to ah higher rates of what looks like clinically recognizable ah mood and behavioral disorders.
00:08:40
Lyman
So that is like like pretty rock solid and evidence um and that shows
00:08:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. It's a natural experiment.
00:08:48
Lyman
Yeah.
Happiness and Family Size
00:08:49
Lyman
Now, another way we can look at this is we can, in longitudinal data, we can say, okay, there's all these studies saying like, what happens to happiness when you have a kid? And the general finding is there's like a short term positive bump and then like, not a lot of like long run change. But the problem is these studies fuse wanted and unwanted children.
00:09:08
Lyman
Okay, so like in the US, like 40% of ah births are unintended. Now that's not the same as unwanted, I wanna acknowledge, but um but there is like some, and this is similar, like in France it's gonna be like 25 or 30% or something.
00:09:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh wow.
00:09:22
Lyman
um ah So there's a lot of unintended, unwanted, whatever conceptions in births.
00:09:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. So unintended. ah So what's the i mean i can the difference between unintended and unwanted? So, you know, you're a married couple and it's like, oops, pregnant.
00:09:40
Lyman
Yeah.
00:09:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's unintended, but that's not unwanted.
00:09:41
Lyman
But then you don't say, Oh, I didn't want that kid.
00:09:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Like you're happy. Right.
00:09:44
Lyman
Yeah.
00:09:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
You didn't intend to get pregnant, but once you find out you're pregnant, you're happy.
00:09:45
Lyman
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so um in general, unintended pregnancies are way more likely to also be unwanted, um but not always the case. um And intended pregnancies are way more likely to be wanted. But regardless, the data we often have is actually on intentions, not wantedness. um But we can say, okay, in longitudinal data sets like the British Household Panel Survey or the survey of
00:10:16
Lyman
There's a German one abbreviated S-O-E-P, I forget though what it stands for. probably It's probably like four German words that are actually a whole paragraph. um So, and what we can say is, okay, in these surveys,
00:10:29
Lyman
You know, when you have a kid, there's like a short term bounce in happiness and then it sort of levels out. Um, but if you segregate that by intended births and unintended for intended births, you see a big increase in happiness in the short run. And then it does decrease a bit, but it remains a significant increase like forever. Okay. For unintended births, you see a big decline in happiness.
00:10:52
Lyman
And then um a gradual, basically an increase in statistical noise over time. Some people kind of make their peace with their unintended birth and ultimately become rather happy, other people don't. So what this tells us is having intended children creates happiness, okay? um And having unintended children creates sadness. And what does that tell us? Having things consistent with your desires tends to make, like if somebody says I want a banana and you tell them no bananas for you, like it doesn't matter if bananas are objectively associated with happiness. People who want bananas are probably gonna be happier when they get bananas and unhappy when you tell them no bananas, okay? um The final way we can do this um is we can look at, again, a longitudinal survey um in the US, a national longitudinal survey of youth.
00:11:46
Lyman
um where we have data on people's overall number of desired children, actual fertility, happiness, and well-being across decades of their life course. So I can say when you told me at age 16 how many kids you wanted,
00:12:01
Lyman
At age 40 or whatever, did you end up above or below that? And then if I compare where you are in the distribution of happiness when you were young to where you are in the distribution of happiness when you're old, what we see is the happiest people in the NLSY are the people who had more children than they desired.
00:12:19
Lyman
And we'll come to why that is in a second.
00:12:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, interesting.
00:12:21
Lyman
And the most unhappy are those who had fewer than they desired. Now, this is not me saying, go have unwanted kids.
00:12:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Could they be childless cat ladies by any chance?
00:12:30
Lyman
What happened is people who had more children than they desired in their teenage years tended to be people. Their life went better than and they anticipated. They fell in love earlier.
00:12:40
Lyman
They got married earlier.
00:12:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
a
00:12:42
Lyman
They shifted their desires upwards over the course of their life. Whereas people who ended up with fewer children than they intended tended to be cheap people that their life went badly. Maybe they had an episode of incarceration.
00:12:54
Lyman
Maybe they have an episode where they fall out of the survey for a few waves because we couldn't find them because they were strung out on drugs somewhere. Maybe they had employment interruptions or they never got married, you know, these types of things.
00:13:04
Lyman
So, um, you can say, well, the real cause was those bad things that happened in life. And like, I agree, but I think it tells you something when, when life goes well, people have more people raise their desires.
00:13:17
Lyman
And when life goes badly, people undershoot their desires. Um, so all this is evidence that basically societies of, yeah,
00:13:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and Hang on, can you can you repeat that? ah when When life goes badly, people undershoot their desires and when life goes well, people overshoot their desires.
00:13:31
Lyman
yeah
00:13:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What does that mean?
00:13:33
Lyman
when When life goes well, people raise their desires.
00:13:37
Lyman
They don't overshoot them per se. So they overshoot, sorry, this it's complicated it's a bit complicated math. They overshoot their desires at time one, but then at time two, they raise their desires.
00:13:49
Lyman
They say, well, life is going well, now I don't want two, I want three, okay? But when life is going badly, people actually don't tend to cut their desires as much.
00:13:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I see.
00:13:59
Lyman
They do do it some, There's a little bit of kind of rationalization downwards, but not as much. Rather, when life goes badly, people still say, I would have loved to have, you know, two or three or whatever, but they just don't achieve it.
00:14:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:14:13
Lyman
Okay. So that's basically what we observe in reality.
00:14:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Got it, got it, got it, got it, got it. I got it.
00:14:17
Lyman
So all this to me says.
00:14:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I thought you were making a deep philosophical point about how, but no, it's just like relative to how many children people want.
00:14:24
Lyman
Well, I will say one of the best predictors, one of the best predictors of increasing the number of children you desire over the course of your life is having children.
00:14:35
Lyman
So as people experience having children, they tend to want more of them.
00:14:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah That's fascinating. So right. ah The more you have kids, the more you want kids.
00:14:41
Lyman
Yeah, because guess what?
00:14:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:14:42
Lyman
Kids, I mean, literally right now I can hear my 14 year old screaming as she goes down goes down for nap through the wall.
00:14:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's definitely true for me.
00:14:50
Lyman
And yet I would still tell you, kids are great and they're they're more fun than you expect. Like the narrative you hear in society is like, oh, there's so much work, like you never sleep.
00:14:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:15:00
Lyman
And yes, it's true. You realize that five hours of sleep is fine. um At the same time, they're like so much more fun and satisfying.
00:15:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Also, it doesn't last it doesn't last that long, that period.
00:15:10
Lyman
No, eventually you reach a period where they're all teenagers and they sleep for like 18 hours a day. So.
00:15:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Yes, that's also true. And but before that, you reach a period where you can just say, go to your room. um That was the line in my in my house.
00:15:25
Lyman
Yes, stop bothering me.
00:15:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, exactly. It's like the the the line in my house was, ah go to sleep doesn't mean sleep. It means go into your room, close the door and don't make a noise.
00:15:38
Lyman
Yes.
00:15:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What goes on in there is none of my business, but stay in there and don't make a noise.
00:15:43
Lyman
Yes, exactly. it's it's It's the don't ask, don't tell of parenting.
00:15:46
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Exactly. um All right, so we got sidetracked, but this is this is fascinating about like how people get unhappy when they don't have the amount of kids they want and how people get happier when they do.
00:16:01
Lyman
Yeah.
00:16:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:16:02
Lyman
So the upshot of this is a society of falling fertility, is a society of greater personal misery.
00:16:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:16:09
Lyman
um This is a society of more people who are just really disappointed with their life and probably kind of angry at how things went for them. um And the upshot is it's also a society less invested in the next generation, right?
00:16:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:16:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:16:25
Lyman
That like, you've got all these old people looking at the next generation and being like, None of those are my people. um So this is just a recipe for a lot of social dysfunction, frankly.
00:16:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:16:38
Lyman
um it's a lot of It's a recipe for a lot of misery and social dysfunction.
00:16:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Indeed.
00:16:42
Lyman
It's going to be an unpleasant outcome as we get to to that period. But I want to emphasize the kind of dysfunction. The economic stuff is a collective action problem. If you're like, oh,
00:16:54
Lyman
You know, if people don't have babies, the economy will be bad. So I should have babies. You can't control your neighbor. Maybe you'll have babies and nobody else will. And now your children's just going to experience a worse economic environment.
00:17:06
Lyman
Okay. Like you can't fix that, but the disappointment side you can fix. Like it's, it's up to you.
00:17:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:17:14
Lyman
Only you can prevent fertility disappointment. Okay. Like, like this is a thing that like, it doesn't depend on your neighbor to also get on board with pronatalism to fix the problem of like disappointment.
00:17:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
To some extent, anyway. Right.
00:17:28
Lyman
All it depends on is basically like somebody who also wants to like mix their genes with you. Like that's pretty much the criteria.
00:17:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, so ah another point about the how bad it is is that I want you to just touch on is compounding because this
Societal Impacts of Low Fertility
00:17:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
is something that people don't really realize is that this stuff compounds.
00:17:49
Lyman
yes Yes.
00:17:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And so they imagine, oh, people have fewer babies. Okay, maybe it causes some fiscal problems. Maybe some people are less happy than they would otherwise be because they don't have their desired fertility.
00:18:03
Lyman
But we'll get through the hump and it'll be okay.
00:18:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Exactly. Exactly. So why isn't it, why isn't there a hump? Why is there a cliff instead?
00:18:12
Lyman
So ah imagine, so let's let's simplify and say that the replacement rate is two. It's technically anywhere from two to four, depending on local mortality rates, but we so we so conventionalize as 2.1, but for simple for simple math, let's say it's two. um Imagine a society where everybody has two children. Over time, that society, and let's assume that there's no migration on net, but let's assume that life expectancy is rising, basically like our real world, where we're getting better at like curing diseases. Over time, population will grow,
00:18:42
Lyman
even though fertility is just two, because yes, each couple of two people is having two kids, but because life expectancy is rising and people are living longer, each generation stays in the population pyramid for longer. Okay, great. That's like a fine scenario. um Imagine the same scenario, um but everybody has like 1.9 kids, okay?
00:19:04
Lyman
You know, it's plausible that population will still be stable or grow in the long run because life expectancy is rising. Okay. So like, yes, each generation is a bit smaller, but each generation lives a bit longer.
00:19:16
Lyman
So they stay in the population pyramid longer. So populations can be stable. Like demand for houses will be roughly stable. Demand for hot dogs will be roughly, sorry, your, your fringe. I should use like some fringe now, but demand for baguettes will be relatively stable.
00:19:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Dement for croissant.
00:19:29
Lyman
Yeah. Um, uh, and, um,
00:19:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Dement for delicious espresso.
00:19:33
Lyman
but you'll get like this older society. There you go. You'll get an age. This is an aging so society society scenario. Okay. So you'll get challenges with like dependency ratios, but like fundamentally you don't get like a collapse of social scale. And so this is a problem that demographers have been writing about for decades, and decades, and decades. It was always assumed to be the basic problem that like fertility will even out close to replacement, but we'll have aging. So like there's all this writing about like what to do about an aging society, but now imagine a different scenario.
00:20:03
Lyman
where fertility is 1.5 per generation. Well, in this case, each generation is 25% smaller than the one before. And yeah, they might live a little bit longer, and so they like stay in the cohort longer, but they're not living 25% longer, okay? At this point in society, you should not expect that each generation will live 25% longer.
00:20:23
Lyman
Okay, um, so that means in the long run the actual scale of society declines now in that first generation It's 25% smaller. Okay, and the second generation is 25% smaller than that But that means that that or sorry the third generation, but that means that that third generation is actually 0.75 squared the size of The first generation. Okay, so what's 0.75 squared? It's something like 0.75 uh, six, uh, what, 0.68, 0.67 or something.
00:20:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:20:56
Lyman
So it's like a third, it's like a bit more than a third, um, smaller.
00:20:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and
00:21:00
Lyman
And then each generation is subsequently smaller. And the result is that you actually get an escalating pace of decline that at first it's a slow dribble. You're kind of, Oh, you stabilize and then you go down and the pace at which your society descales, it's faster and faster.
00:21:15
Lyman
Um, this is obviously a problem because once that decline starts, you get constant economic headwinds and those economic headwinds create bad life outcomes for people.
00:21:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, thank you.
00:21:26
Lyman
And what did we already say happens with bad life outcomes? People fall further below their desired fertility. Okay. So you get kind of a vicious cycle where it's, it's, it becomes very difficult to stop the train.
00:21:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, and it just slides off because it pulls down the rest.
00:21:40
Lyman
I mean, think I'm actually a train going off a cliff is kind of a great metaphor, right? When the first car goes off the cliff of the train, you can like get a big enough train to pull it back the other way. But like at some point enough cars have gone off the end that like there's no train big enough to do it.
00:21:55
Lyman
Right, it just pulls itself down. um Now, so that's, so that was, you know, 1.5, now vision a vision of society where each generation only has one kid. Okay, half of each generation, each generation is 50% smaller.
00:22:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:22:10
Lyman
Okay, remember Korea is at like 0.7 right now. So is like, I think Hong Kong is like 0.7, 0.8, Taiwan's at like 0.8, 0.9, I think Macau is at like 0.6.
00:22:22
Lyman
China generally is, probably around one. um Japan's like, I think like 1.1 or 1.2. Italy and Spain are like 1.1, 1.2 or something like that. um A lot of the Eastern Europeans are close to that. We are looking at a lot of societies where their population, each each generation will be 50% smaller than the one before. And by the way, this doesn't just impact those countries. Let's say that you are one of the wealthier countries of Western Europe, okay? And like France or Germany or the UK, do we count the UK as a wealthier country of Western Europe? Okay. So um you're Norway, let's say you're Norway, okay. um You've been riding on immigration for a while.
00:23:09
Lyman
right Like you've been saying, okay, we don't have that many kids, but um ah immigrants will fill the gap. But the countries the immigrants are coming from are having smaller and smaller generations.
00:23:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:23:21
Lyman
So if you've been having Polish workers fill your labor supply gap, there's not that many generations of Polish workers left. okay Their fertility is 1.3 or something.
00:23:30
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. This is, this is, yeah, I wanted to get into this point because like, when you talk about declining fertility, people will say, oh, immigration, but fertility is declining everywhere.
00:23:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So that, that's not an option either.
00:23:43
Lyman
The example I love to give, so I do a lot of research.
00:23:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Even putting aside questions about like cultural blah, blah, blah, or whatever the downsides of immigration you believe exist or don't believe exist, the math simply doesn't work anymore.
00:23:49
Lyman
Yeah. Yeah. So.
00:23:54
Lyman
Yeah. Well, and the example I love to give, um and this isn't just just Francophone pandering, um is ah that Nepal and France have the same fertility rate. And I give this example because I've done a lot of work on France, and then I do, just two weeks ago I was doing fieldwork in Nepal for a research project, I do a lot of work in Nepal, and these are very different countries.
00:24:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:24:18
Lyman
um
00:24:19
Lyman
France has like 25 times the GDP per capita of Nepal or something. Even at like PPP per capita, it's like 10 times or something. um ah um But they have the same fertility rate.
00:24:31
Lyman
Um, so, and Nepal is famous as a country that like sends tons of laborers abroad.
00:24:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, wow.
00:24:37
Lyman
Like Nepalese people likes, I forget if it's like, like 20% or something of Nepalese men will like spend at least a year abroad in the Gulf countries or East Asia or India working and sending remittances home.
00:24:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Wow. Oh, I see. Yeah.
00:24:51
Lyman
Like this is a country that is like a huge manpower source for the world. Um. And now their fertility is below replacement. like How much longer is that going to be there? Not much longer.
00:25:02
Lyman
um So this is not just like a rich country thing. Go to Bangladesh. It's even lower. um You can go to urban Africa. like um Maputo, I believe, which is ah the biggest city in Mozambique, had a recent demographic and health survey that showed a fertility rate of 1.9.
00:25:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, interesting.
00:25:22
Lyman
The GDP per capita in Maputo is $900.
00:25:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right.
00:25:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Oh, interesting. So urban Africa is also... um
00:25:34
Lyman
Falling. Yeah. Yeah.
00:25:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Uh, yeah, I, I, cause I, I also wanted you to touch on Africa briefly, which is the, the, the, the point you made at that conference, I remember.
00:25:35
Lyman
I mean, all of Africa is falling.
00:25:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So one of the things I, cause like, when you talk about this, people say, Oh, Africa. And it's like, yes. One of the things that I didn't know is that it keeps trending down. But one of the things you pointed out is that it's already very low relative to their GDP compared to historical data.
00:25:57
Lyman
Yes. Yeah. If you compare African fertility to African GDP, and then you compare it to like Western Europe's history, like what was Western European fertility when we had the GDP per capita of Africa?
00:26:11
Lyman
Okay. We had way higher fertility when we had their GDP per capita.
00:26:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:26:17
Lyman
Okay. Um, the countries that had similar GDP per capita and like Latin America also had much higher fertility when they were at similar GDP per capita. Um, The countries that were similar when they were at a similar GDP per capita are like Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, these places, Bangladesh, India.
00:26:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:26:37
Lyman
um So um my view, or like Thailand or something, um my view is that Africa is, um it's taking its time because um they they keep having, you know,
00:26:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's the case.
00:26:54
Lyman
Disasters and wars and bad governance and all this stuff um And we can talk about why that would relate to fertility.
00:26:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:27:00
Lyman
We can get into that um but suffice to say African high fertility is not because like Africans have like special baby juju or something like it's basically just that um The cultural narratives that drive low fertility are most persuasive in environments where economic development Seems like a personal aspirational possibility and in much of Africa that is not yet true um And so Sure, yeah, exactly.
00:27:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right.
00:27:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. And if they had maybe juju, we could, you know, steal it like we stole everything else.
00:27:35
Lyman
Well, and that's basically what we do right like the Western country.
00:27:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Sorry, I'm being French for a second.
00:27:38
Lyman
What's that?
00:27:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I said I was just being French talking about stealing natural resources from Africa, which isn't true, by the way.
00:27:43
Lyman
Yes, but this is this is kind of what this is kind of what happens anyway though, right? Is that like the Western countries don't have enough babies to sustain themselves. And they say, well, let's let's bring in like a bunch of Africans um to prop up our society.
00:27:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:27:57
Lyman
And nobody says like, well, when African fertility falls, who will prop them up?
00:28:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
00:28:04
Lyman
Like, and the answer is no one, no one will.
00:28:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep. Yep.
00:28:08
Lyman
Um, and it's going to be really, really bad. I mean, if you're Thailand right now and your GDP per capita is very low and your fertility is, I don't know, 1.1 or something, like you're very much thinking like, what is the future here?
00:28:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:28:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:28:23
Lyman
Like, like, yes.
00:28:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So right. So even Africa is not going to save us. They're on the same track as us just on a time delay.
00:28:30
Lyman
And the, the really terrifying question is who will save Africa?
00:28:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Yeah.
00:28:35
Lyman
Or more pressingly, who will save India?
00:28:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No one.
00:28:38
Lyman
Because they're below replacement right now.
00:28:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. ah Okay, so we sort of covered how bad. My next, I take extensive notes on this and so I first first wrote how bad and then I wrote why bad. So we covered some of the why bad. ah We covered the sort of economic aspect of it, which I think is, you know, the most obvious because the math, especially if you've got aging population is just ah brutal. We covered the happiness aspect. There's another aspect um Which is harder to sort of explain, but that I think is deeply important um is a sort of cultural aspect to what a country where the majority or if not the majority of the critical mass of people are old people.
00:29:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's not a dynamic country. It's a country where the majority of the market spending is old people. It's not a country where you're going to have a lot of luck with some you know innovative, weird new product in the market that might actually succeed in a country full of 22-year-olds who can take a chance in some new unproven gizmo.
00:29:39
Lyman
Yeah.
00:29:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah It's going to be a country where the politics are risk-averse and so on and so forth. um Do you have studies that measure this?
00:30:01
Lyman
yeah ah We
Youth and Economic Vitality
00:30:03
Lyman
do. um A number of years ago, I wrote a paper on this summarizing a lot of them. They basically, um younger societies produce more entrepreneurs. They produce more patents. They produce higher value patents. They produce more businesses that grow to become employers.
00:30:19
Lyman
um They adopt new products more quickly. They scale new products more quickly.
00:30:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
00:30:25
Lyman
um To a considerable extent, the pace of innovation in a country is a simple equation of basically like, raw number of 25 year olds times nutrition quality when they were five years old times like tax rate on capital investment. Like this is just basically innovation. Okay. So in the reason for this is like, I'm not like a world-class intelligence person. Like I'm just not, like I sometimes have met these people that just have these like blistering intellects and it's just like,
00:31:04
Lyman
immediately outclassed okay so like I might do a little bit of innovation in my life where I like write a fairly interesting paper that eight other sociologists are like oh cool we'll cite this a few times okay like that's my innovation but then you get like the Elon Musk's of the world who are like well my rocket engineer isn't quite working on my pace I'm just gonna step in and do it myself and like invent new rockets that reduced across to okay like those people occur as an approximately stable ratio of like share of births.
00:31:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:31:36
Lyman
Once in a generation, talents are more common when the generation is twice as big.
00:31:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:31:43
Lyman
Assuming that those people like basically ah don't experience nutritional stunting in childhood, so like their brain can develop normally, And assuming they live in a society that is like not punitive on like entrepreneurship, risk-taking, stuff like that, which, you know, whatever, call it capital tax rate or call it, you know, whatever your legal environment for entrepreneurship, basically.
00:32:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. yeah
00:32:04
Lyman
um they will just like kind of as a just like law of nature they like they will produce some patents okay they will produce things and a lot of them will suck but like one of them will revolutionize society okay um so this is just there's actually a great study of World War One mortality in France that shows um that like municipalities of France that had more casualties in World War I had like a proportional decrease, particularly like officer casualties, had a proportional dis decrease in patenting after the war. um But then the places that had like the most lopsided ratio of like enlisted man casualties versus officer then had a shift in innovation composition towards labor replacing things.
00:32:52
Lyman
because suddenly like labor was way more expensive because there's just like weren't that many workers and they're like crap we have to automate away labor um and so then there's it's a funny paper it's this interesting kind of shift in entrepreneurship but whatever the case um uh um It is the case that when you have more minds in societies that can feed them, educate them, and create a market for them, you get more innovation. um and so the pro People are like, what caused the Industrial Revolution? Potatoes. like Potatoes. like This is very obvious. okay like The level of science that Europe was at in 1492, other societies had gotten there.
00:33:38
Lyman
Okay. Um, like that, the big takeoff in like the huge, like pathbreaking takeoff in like European welfare and wellbeing and population growth and everything is in like the 1600s.
00:33:51
Lyman
Okay. And then into the 1700s, the big takeoff and innovation is in the early 1700s and like.
00:33:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:33:57
Lyman
Like it was potatoes. It was that potatoes and other new world crops enabled population to rise to reach a scale where like more ideas could percolate and be tested.
00:34:09
Lyman
Feudal institutions couldn't keep up with controlling people. The return to capital rises. Like there's all this stuff, but it's basically potatoes.
00:34:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right what One thing people aren't aware of or don't have as part of their mental furniture is just how big Europe's population was in the 19th century relative to the rest of the world.
00:34:28
Lyman
Yeah, it's just I'm not even nice like by like the late 1700s, you're seeing this just like like Europe is just way out of its historic proportion.
00:34:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It was just bigger.
00:34:40
Lyman
Particularly France um is just this like behemoth in Western Europe.
00:34:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
the I mean, this has been ah a hot take of mine for a very long time, which is, you know, the industrial revolution was caused by the population boom. So I'm glad i'm i'm glad to i'm glad somebody agrees with me.
00:34:52
Lyman
Yes. Well, and the interesting thing is, is the two different paths, right? So like France gets all this population growth and it kind of like sits in France and it doesn't generate an industrial revolution, but it does generate other kinds of revolutions.
00:35:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like
00:35:06
Lyman
Um, in particular, it generates a revolution in secularization in the advent of modern fertility decline in the early to mid 1700s.
00:35:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right.
00:35:14
Lyman
Um, Britain has the same.
00:35:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
can Can you please explain that because I know the study you're referencing, but the...
00:35:19
Lyman
I will, let me let me get like the British counterfactual first.
00:35:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah Okay, okay.
00:35:22
Lyman
Britain and Spain and Portugal have a different solution, which is basically they just kick everyone across the ocean. um And they get a very different outcome. And arguably, it's a more efficient outcome, actually.
00:35:32
Lyman
And so you know you can argue about like why did industrialization kick kick off in Britain.
00:35:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, but the problem is the French people didn't want to live because France is so nice. Like no, like ah in in the 17th and 18th century, like you know France was already a technocracy, so you had all these incentives programs trying to pay people to move to America and they wouldn't do it.
00:35:41
Lyman
Exactly.
00:35:48
Lyman
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. And they wouldn't do it. Yeah. Also the French colonies like kind of sucked more.
00:35:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Whereas you know if you if you live in England, yes, you're you're going to want to leave.
00:35:55
Lyman
And like I say, that is I lit, but also like, I mean, I lived in Quebec for four years. So I can say this, like if your option is moving to Pennsylvania or Quebec, like everyone will choose Pennsylvania, like literally a hundred percent of people.
00:36:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Fair enough.
00:36:10
Lyman
Um, so, okay. Yeah. So the question of French fertility. So. This is actually hugely important to understand France versus England on this. People have a mental model that is wrong and it's this, like rising incomes, industrialization, urbanization caused falling fertility because once you have money, why would you have babies?
00:36:30
Lyman
Okay, like people have this model. It's it's a folk version of what's called in the literature, the modernization hypothesis.
00:36:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
00:36:39
Lyman
Among demographers, the modern the modernization,
00:36:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. I was taught this in school, by the way.
00:36:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I was taught this in middle school.
00:36:43
Lyman
Yes, yes.
00:36:45
Lyman
So if you go on the AP geography test in the US, s there will be a question about the modernizationization modernization hypothesis. They will say it's true. And the reason they will say it's true is because a group called Population Connection has basically captured the AP review board for all of the demography related topics.
00:37:03
Lyman
And they have an over, like you can look on their website, they brag about like, We run the AP grading stuff for demography things. We run the, like we train 10,000 teachers a year and their whole thing is to try and convince children to not want to have kids.
00:37:18
Lyman
Okay. Like that's their mission statement.
00:37:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Wonderful.
00:37:20
Lyman
You can go look it up. Population connection. It's out there. The, um, the Twitter account more births has a nice little short essay on this where he puts together the numbers. um I don't know, I actually don't think that this group has been very successful at persuading kids not to have babies.
00:37:35
Lyman
We we could talk about why, but they're trying. But if you actually talk to working demographers, like people in the field publishing, no one believes this theory, okay? It's wrong.
00:37:46
Lyman
Like it's it's widely understood to have been very strongly falsified like decades ago and continuing so today.
00:37:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Interesting. Oh, interesting.
00:37:54
Lyman
So the prediction of the modern ah modernization hypothesis is, Once incomes begin to rise, mortality will begin to fall.
Modernization Fallacy and Fertility
00:38:06
Lyman
And after mortality begins to fall, particularly child mortality, fertility will begin to fall as people no longer like need to have as many kids to hit their goals. Okay, this is the theory. Here's what we actually know.
00:38:19
Lyman
Fertility decline has happened many times in human history. You can see it in Edo period Japan, you can see it in classical Rome, you can see it in ah Puritan Massachusetts, um you can see it most famously in 18th century France. And I say famously also because it's been very well studied by an economist named Guillaume Blanc. um And he finds that basically ah the map of french that French fertility starts to fall in like the 1720s, 1730s.
00:38:49
Lyman
um And it doesn't fall evenly. It falls in places that were early that had early exposure to what we call secularizing influences. He points to a number of these. One is the Jansenist controversy. um There was kind of this movement that could be criticized by people host to it hostile to it as crypto-Protestant. Persons favorable to it would say it was a reformist movement within Catholicism.
00:39:20
Lyman
um But regardless of the case, it threatened the general authority of the traditional clerical class. um Around the same time, we start to see priests specifically condemning pulling out as a method of control.
00:39:35
Lyman
um
00:39:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah there There was a joke about this ah in France in the 19th century. The joke was that the French were the smartest people in the world because they invented pulling out.
00:39:46
Lyman
Yeah, um so you get this stuff and then also you can look at like during the French Revolution, the share of priests who like said, I'll screw it, I'll take the like secular vow to the nation or whatever, is like a strong proxy for the places that already had had fertility decline.
00:39:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:40:01
Lyman
um
00:40:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:40:03
Lyman
Blanc has a new paper that isn't published yet, but I've seen ah like a presentation version of it where they modulate these results a bit and they show that like it's kind of actually a little bit of an interaction between like exposure to secularization and certain local economic factors. um There's also an argument that like different inheritance rules played ah played a part, but the err factor under all of it is basically secularization.
00:40:26
Lyman
OK, there's other modulating factors, inheritance, ah subsistence limits.
00:40:26
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:40:30
Lyman
OK, which parts of France are good for potatoes and which aren't? OK, but fun that's that's not a joke, actually, like different like crop regions of France.
00:40:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, I bet.
00:40:40
Lyman
okay um But fundamentally, it's secularization.
00:40:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Um, okay. i Yeah.
00:40:44
Lyman
And then this explains fertility falling. um And then other parts of Europe begin to have fertility transition in the early 1800s.
00:40:54
Lyman
to the extent that they are exposed to the French language. Now this matters because, yes, the poison of the French language.
00:40:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:41:04
Lyman
This matters because basically some languages are more similar to French.
00:41:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
French is such a beautiful language that you will, you know, you'll stop eating, you'll lose interest in sex, you will just spend all your days reading French poetry.
00:41:10
Lyman
Exactly, I was gonna say some languages, yeah. so So some languages are more beautiful than others. And that is to say they are more similar to French than others.
00:41:21
Lyman
um And the more similar your local language was to French, the the earlier your fertility began to decline.
00:41:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh my God.
00:41:28
Lyman
um Now, interestingly, a language that was fairly similar to French where fertility decline didn't happen. um Well, you could debate similar to French, but like phylogeny, like in terms of like the family tree of languages is like technically similar to French, is English.
00:41:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
00:41:45
Lyman
um ah and the
00:41:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, English is just bad French.
00:41:51
Lyman
I would say French is just English without the blessing of the egalitarian Nordic tradition.
00:41:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:41:58
Lyman
so um But whatever the case, um English is a holdout language. okay They're like, screw it, we're not declining, babies rock, make the babies. um And so there's no decline in Great Britain in the early 1800s.
00:42:13
Lyman
There's no fertility decline. And this is interesting because if your theory is the modernization hypothesis,
00:42:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:42:18
Lyman
Britain is the place where you get big income increases and France is not.
00:42:20
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:42:24
Lyman
um So the map of early fertility transition is the map of basically cultural exposure to Paris, okay? The map of and and not industrialization.
00:42:36
Lyman
So like the Netherlands is not is also like an early industrializer and is not like the early fertility decline.
00:42:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh my God, I apologize to the world. I apologize.
00:42:44
Lyman
Yeah, you all you all you all literally have the decline of humanity
00:42:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
If you compound, it's like how many billions of lives have we prevented?
00:42:49
Lyman
yeah Yeah.
00:42:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, I...
00:42:51
Lyman
So, but but it's not just you. i'm I'm getting to, I'm getting as an American.
00:42:54
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So basically the solution is to go back in time and kill baby Russo.
00:42:59
Lyman
So as, no, it's before Rousseau, it's before Rousseau.
00:43:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Who is a Protestant, by the way?
00:43:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It is, it is, it is, it is, it is.
00:43:04
Lyman
Like the decline starts, so, um but we we have to get to England, you know, as an American, I have to crap on all Europeans, so we're coming to England. um So the Brits are a holdout for a while and they actually have censorship laws.
00:43:16
Lyman
Like it is illegal to publish manuals that teach women how to do birth control, okay? And what's interesting is it was also illegal in America, but in the 1830s, a Massachusetts doctor wrote one anyway, and he
Cultural Attitudes and Fertility Decline
00:43:31
Lyman
published this thing.
00:43:31
Lyman
He gets arrested for it, put in jail. The book is suppressed.
00:43:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Of course, it was Massachusetts.
00:43:36
Lyman
Yeah, which their fertility transition was also in the 1700s and also because of secularization, but a different kind of secularization. Okay. So like in the same way that Paris is like the patient zero or fertility transition in Europe.
00:43:50
Lyman
Um, Boston is patient zero in the United States. So like the more exposure you have to Boston, like if Boston newspapers come to you, like you are.
00:43:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
but but It's like the two hell mouths on the planet where all of the bad ideas come out.
00:44:02
Lyman
Yeah. Yes. Yes. The great, the great. Yeah. Yeah.
00:44:08
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and sort of
00:44:08
Lyman
Yeah. Like the Cthulhu consuming human fertility. They are, they are just gaping maws in
00:44:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah and but both Both very pretty cities architecturally.
00:44:18
Lyman
Wonderful places.
00:44:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um
00:44:19
Lyman
Yeah. So whatever the case, um in Britain, they have all these laws banning the spread of these ideas, but this Massachusetts mate book is printed by two secularists in Britain who want to, they're fishing for a court challenge.
00:44:34
Lyman
They think they can beat the censorship laws.
00:44:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Ah.
00:44:36
Lyman
And so they published the book, they they immediately get arrested. There's a censorship case, but here's two really important facts. First, The book was full of crap. Okay. None of the advice it gave was actually correct.
00:44:48
Lyman
It was like, you could use this chemical after you have sex. The chemical doesn't work. Okay.
00:44:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:44:52
Lyman
Like, so it had no actual scientifically correct information about how to do birth control. Okay. Secondly, um, the, the, the court case was covered.
00:45:07
Lyman
in tons of newspapers all over the world, but only English-speaking newspapers and not all newspapers, okay? So there's authors of the study studying this called the Bradlaugh-Bissant case in 1876 to 77, and they show that around the world, wherever the local newspapers cover the case, fertility declines starting in 1878 or 1877, okay?
00:45:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:45:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So it's like the MTV ah reality TV thing, but yeah.
00:45:34
Lyman
Yeah, it's like the 16 and pregnant thing. But the interesting thing is again, it's not shaped by whether they cover the news, the, the, by like which side the newspaper takes in the case. And again, there's no actual scientific knowledge spreading here.
00:45:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:45:48
Lyman
Okay.
00:45:49
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:45:49
Lyman
All that's going on is the breaking of a taboo. Now you can talk about family limitation.
00:45:52
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right.
00:45:56
Lyman
And that's what they were calling it then, family limitation. So starting in 1877, the entire Anglophone world just off a cliff.
00:45:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:46:04
Lyman
And then that does spread everywhere because um English is in fact the global language and it has been for quite a long time.
00:46:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Incredible.
00:46:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:46:13
Lyman
And so things the French effect is kind of slow moving. It takes a little while to percolate, but the the ang the ang when the Anglophone world pivots, Very quickly, the whole world is pivoting.
00:46:25
Lyman
By 1900, the entire Western world and really the entire industrializing world, so including Japan, is starting to to pivot at this point.
00:46:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Fascinating. Okay.
00:46:35
Lyman
um Yeah.
00:46:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah i I'm going to cut you off here because we've got three, five minutes and ah there's a really important topic that I want to discuss afterwards.
00:46:40
Lyman
Yep, you need to cut me off, yeah.
00:46:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So when you talk to people about this stuff, you talk about have this really bad, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they sort of nod along, but then they say very confidently, well, there's nothing you can do about it. Everything that's been tried to boost birth rates everywhere has failed.
00:47:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They say this very confidently as if it's an established fact. um
00:47:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Do you agree?
00:47:09
Lyman
No, that's full of crap. So um fertility has fallen many times in human history and it keeps bouncing back.
00:47:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, go on.
00:47:19
Lyman
So the Roman decline was largely driven by infanticide. Christians promoted anti-infanticidal norms, fertility rose. The Japanese decline was largely driven by infanticide.
00:47:34
Lyman
The Meiji government promoted anti-infanticidal norms, fertility rose. um Modern declines are not driven by infanticide. um They are related to abortion, but as the US has discovered, even when you ban abortion, fertility doesn't really rise much. um ah They are driven by these other norms. Norms that I'm not going to belabor what they actually are too much, but basically I'm going to call them developmental idealism. Basically they are the idea that um Suppressing fertility is a path to prosperity and happiness. This is not true, but it is a wide belief around the world. Um, so these norms spread and fertility fell. Now a lot of countries have attempted to push back on this and they are almost always successful. And what I mean by that is when a country gives a $2,000 baby bonus,
00:48:30
Lyman
Okay. That is say when a company, when a country goes to parents and gives them a few crumbs. Okay. Uh, those parents produce slightly more mouths to eat the crumbs. Okay. Um, so when you do trivially small programs to support families, like, you know, giving families $5,000, you do in fact get trivially small increases in fertility. Okay.
00:48:56
Lyman
um When you do big programs to boost fertility, like a lot of Soviet countries did when they put in draconian childlessness taxes, um like Israel does with a whole range of programs, um you do get bigger fertility increases. No country has used fiscal policy to increase fertility by more than 0.3 children per woman, but some have used cultural interventions. So for example, the country of Georgia ah has a state church The state church, I'm not gonna belabor this too much, but basically they did a reform that altered the status of having a third child.
00:49:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, this is a famous one.
00:49:34
Lyman
um And fertility rose from 1.6 to 2.2 in about 12 months, 18 months, and it remained above replacement for about, 10 or 12 years basically until COVID and it remains much higher than other countries nearby.
00:49:49
Lyman
um Armenia recently, Armenia now has higher fertility than Azerbaijan, which in the long run is going to cause some interesting, it's been a bad few years of strategy for the Armenians, but in 20 years, things may tip the other way because the Azeris are not having very many kids and the Armenians have thrown a lot of money, like a whole lot of money at having kids and their fertility has risen.
00:49:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:50:13
Lyman
um I could go on and on, but yeah.
00:50:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so devil's advocate, why, you know, why are places like Hungary still having their fertility crash, even though they spend like 4% of GDP, which is a huge amount actually.
00:50:21
Lyman
So, yeah.
00:50:26
Lyman
So it's really not that much. um You know, Hungary's not the biggest spender.
00:50:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, realistically, it's a big amount on pro-family policy.
00:50:34
Lyman
So they're not the biggest spender in the OECD, I'll say. um In fact, I don't know if they're top five.
00:50:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I mean, they they say they are.
00:50:42
Lyman
on on on no on fertility and child supports. No, they're not. um ah There's also a question on their numbers. I'll just say the last time the OECD did an apples to apples comparison, Hungary was at 2%. I'm not 100% sure how they get to 4% or 5%. They may be doing a little creative accounting with their debt programs. A lot of their programs are basically debt forgiveness.
00:51:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
00:51:10
Lyman
It's possible that they may be counting future loan forgivenesses that they are anticipating doing as part of their spending.
00:51:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah Okay, so.
00:51:18
Lyman
I'm not 100% sure. But whatever the case, Hungarian fertility has risen quite dramatically.
00:51:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:51:23
Lyman
They've had the most positive change in fertility of any country in Europe. Actually, sorry, the second most. Czechia is beating them because Czechia is one of the only countries that has spent even more, over that that is has increased their funding even more over the last 15 years.
00:51:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so let's let's get down to brass stacks, policy.
00:51:36
Lyman
um Yeah.
00:51:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What works? What doesn't?
00:51:43
Lyman
Yeah.
00:51:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Which countries? When? How do we know that it's a causal impact?
00:51:48
Lyman
Yeah.
00:51:48
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
like
00:51:48
Lyman
So we have dozens of studies that look at programs where some families were eligible for them and others weren't due to, you know, various quirks of policy design, random chance, whatever.
00:52:00
Lyman
And they reliably show that when you subsidize fertility, you get more kids. But here's the problem. So what I've said so far is it actually works.
00:52:11
Lyman
It is in fact the case when you spend money on families, you get more babies. Now let's get to the con case. That's the pro case. And again, I can point you to dozen, literally dozens of studies showing this literally dozens of real world cases of countries.
Successful Fertility Policies
00:52:25
Lyman
We can talk more about France. I assume you'll want to talk some about that in a bit. Um, but, um,
00:52:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i I know France is like one of the leaders in this, but we don't have to talk specifically about France.
00:52:34
Lyman
Yeah, yeah, yeah. France has some of the most generous policies in in the world, and it's no surprise that France has the highest fertility ah in Europe, and that it's entirely driven by native-born French women.
00:52:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:52:47
Lyman
um Not high, I mean, yes, there's also immigrants that have high fertility, but native-born French women have like 0.3 or 0.4 more kids and than most other European countries. um And this is due to policy.
00:52:58
Lyman
There's actually, you can just look at towns along the border in France, and like on the French side of the border, they have like 0.2, 0.3 more kids. um so um So whatever the case, that's the pro case, the policy works.
00:53:10
Lyman
But then you say, then why is it that when you do these, why does nobody gotten back to 2.1?
00:53:16
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
00:53:16
Lyman
So first of all, I would say some countries have, okay Georgia did, and they did it with a mixture of financial benefits and cultural interventions. A lot of Soviet countries, post-Soviet countries, particularly in Central Asia actually did.
00:53:29
Lyman
um But the reason is, kids are insanely expensive. And I don't just mean in money. There's a recent paper that showed that um if you add up all the taxes and benefits parents get and compare them to all the transfers they make to society, such as by the time they spent they spend raising their kids, parents are reimbursed for something like 15% of the gifts they give to society, okay?
00:53:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah
00:53:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, that's that that that's that's fascinating. Can you detail that? So basically, yeah, so the amount of tax that a married couple with kids pays over their lifetime.
00:54:03
Lyman
Yeah. So, so basically and all the benefits they give the free education for their kids in the public system, all this stuff, then you have to say, well, what's the cost of parenting?
00:54:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Okay.
00:54:19
Lyman
Well, one, when you have a kid, your income often falls because often one spouse takes time off work. Okay. So that's one cost to you buy things for the kid. Yeah. Three.
00:54:31
Lyman
You spend, and this is the biggest cost, you spend a lot of time on your kids. And time is money, okay? If you were to pay pay parents a 10th of the minimum wage, okay, for the time they spend rearing their kids, like immediately, the wage, you'd be talking about like 20% of the economy or something, like 15% of the economy, okay? tim it's it's I forget the exact share, it depends on each country, but it's a big share of the economy, okay?
00:55:00
Lyman
So then you have to ask, well, but why should you do that? Why would you do this? Well, because think about the benefits of of parenting. Who gets the benefits? Mostly not the parent.
00:55:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:55:11
Lyman
mostly the child and society at large. Don't get me wrong, parenting's fun. I like my kids. I love my kids. I do derive a lot of satisfaction for them. But the reality is most of the good things I create for anyone in the world by raising my kid are good things that my child is the main beneficiary of, or maybe that their future spouse is the beneficiary of, or the their coworkers, the people that benefit from the products they make. Regardless, it's mostly what's called an externality. It's basically a gift that I'm giving to society.
00:55:42
Lyman
for which I am not compensated. When you realize that, you say, okay, so that gift basically is the cost. That's actually basically the cost of parenting. um If I let my kid live with me until they're 28, their share of the house is part of the cost of parenting, okay? um The time I spend doing their laundry because they are immature and they refuse to do their own laundry is part of the cost of parenting. So then you look at a society like Korea,
00:56:11
Lyman
where kids live with their parents until they're 32. And then parents buy them a house, okay?
00:56:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
my
00:56:17
Lyman
And you realize the cost of parenting is insanely high, okay? um And demographers have been arguing for decades. This is actually called what's called the wealth transfer hypothesis associated with demographer Caldwell, um that basically,
00:56:36
Lyman
The thing driving low fertility on some level is a shift in the dynamics of wealth transfer.
00:56:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh my.
00:56:41
Lyman
Once upon a time, children were an earning proposition for parents. Now they're not. And in fact, they keep be becoming a bigger and bigger losing proposition for parents, okay?
00:56:52
Lyman
Because norms of intensive parenting mean you have to do all this stuff.
00:56:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:56:58
Lyman
you know, increasing, like, yeah, and also children remain children longer, right?
00:56:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's a big problem.
00:57:04
Lyman
Basically, if you live with your parents and or you are still in school, sociologically speaking, you are a child, okay?
00:57:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
00:57:11
Lyman
Whatever the law says, if you are in the social position of the learner or the social position social position of like the economic dependent, you're a child, okay? So, um the cost of raising,
00:57:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
That's okay. I haven't been a child since I was 38. So, you know.
00:57:26
Lyman
Okay. Um, yeah, exactly. I say this as someone who has not finished his PhD. Okay. Um, so, but the point is, um, you know, I can expect that my kids are going to be dependent on me much longer than age 18. Okay. To some extent. Um, and so basically the cost of raising children is monumentally vast in modern societies and the benefits are not enormous. So when countries give these benefits,
00:57:55
Lyman
Yeah, it helps. And it offsets 0.25% of the cost of having kids. And so that increases fertility, 0.25%.
00:58:01
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
okay
00:58:04
Lyman
But what you need, and and to be clear, I'm totally in favor of these policies, but what you need is also interventions that reduce the cost of having kids.
00:58:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
00:58:13
Lyman
So you need to make housing cheaper so that the young people get the crap out of the basement. You need to have things that help people get jobs earlier in life. So that means deal with occupational licensing, deal with credentialization, deal with seniority-based hiring, all these perverse and discriminatory norms that basically attack family formation, okay?
00:58:34
Lyman
um We need to do things to reduce the cost of parenting, and that means accelerating adulthood. okay Child labor laws are ruining this civilization.
00:58:45
Lyman
No, I'm kidding. That's a joke. um But like on some level, like it's not that I want children slaving away on the factory line.
00:58:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, here's here's another policy, which is military service. Because it's a right, no, it's a right of passage into adulthood.
00:59:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
and um All right.
00:59:07
Lyman
Yeah, I will put the kibosh on that though. Korea, just like, counterexample, Korea.
00:59:11
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. Korea is not korea iss not great in that in that regard.
00:59:14
Lyman
Yeah, so, yeah, I wish, I wish, I wish we could say, look, we can just create these things, but in practice, um it just becomes another milestone people have to hit.
00:59:14
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. Got it.
00:59:24
Lyman
It just becomes another, another, another roadblock.
00:59:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
okay Okay, so let's let's try – this is a policy podcast.
00:59:29
Lyman
um
00:59:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Let's let's say you know I'm ah an American politician. I take your point about deregulation and lowering all that, agreed to that, but that's just sort of generic deregulation stuff.
Financial Incentives and Family Planning
00:59:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Let's say I want a pro-natalist agenda that's somewhat realistic. in the American context, how do I get the most bang for my buck?
00:59:56
Lyman
Yeah.
01:00:00
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
What works best?
01:00:00
Lyman
Yeah.
01:00:02
Lyman
So I'll give a couple of these in different arenas. um We'll start with basically statutory things that would require Congress to act in a fiscally meaningful way.
01:00:12
Lyman
So first, marriage penalties. For people who get married, the biggest hiccup in life is marriage. For people who get married at a given age, there has been no fertility decline in the United States and in most other countries in the last 15 years.
01:00:26
Lyman
Okay, so like the failure of sexy times in romance. is like threatening civilization. We need people to fall in love faster, better, stronger, okay, and get married.
01:00:38
Lyman
um So we have to say, why is marriage falling? And research suggests a big part of it is marriage penalties. So for example, the earned income tax credit, if two working class people, maybe maybe they one of them has a kid, if two working class people get married, they can face enormous marriage penalties.
01:00:54
Lyman
They can lose thousands of dollars of benefits.
01:00:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right.
01:00:56
Lyman
We have to correct that. Every means-tested program has big marriage penalties. We have to correct that. It does cost money. It does require Congress to actually sit down in the weeds and do some like implicit marginal tax rate you know trapezoids and things like that.
01:01:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, yeah.
01:01:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right.
01:01:11
Lyman
But um this is one of the things we're doing at the Pronatalism Initiative, this ah think tank I had, um where we are trying to support this kind of work, provide the expertise to be able to tackle marriage penalties.
01:01:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, and it's great work, by the way, and I i read it all and I cite it whenever I can.
01:01:23
Lyman
Yeah. Thank you.
01:01:26
Lyman
Thank you, um I appreciate that. So that's one, um another is deal with policies that are facially discriminatory towards ah marriage. So like the child and dependent care tax credit is a tax credit that is not the child tax credit, the child and dependent care tax credit is a tax credit that I won't...
01:01:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right.
01:01:44
Lyman
belabor the exact details, but it's literally written. It explicitly excludes ah families that have a stay-at-home parent, and it's written to exclude families that are low-income. So like you could understand subsidizing childcare for low-income people because you say, okay, maybe it's good to get a job.
01:02:01
Lyman
It's a pathway out of poverty. Maybe childcare is the hiccup. We're going to subsidize your childcare. But no, this one just excludes low income people. It's like a subsidy. Only people over $100,000 in income receive like half of the total benefit of all spending on this program.
01:02:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Holy cow.
01:02:15
Lyman
So it should just be abolished. We should just get rid of it and plow the money into a bigger child tax credit. Okay. So we should expand the child tax credit. Um,
01:02:26
Lyman
I'm also open to changing the things it's refundable against, make it refundable against social security taxes um or some something like that. There's hesitancy on making it a full child allowance, like full ref full refundability. I understand the hesitancy. There are other interests here besides just family policy. We don't want to discourage work, but but we could at least expand refundability to other work-related things. um Another thing I think is really important and valuable um is ah thinking about our retirement programs.
01:02:57
Lyman
Families subsidize all of society. There is no Social Security trust fund that actually pays for retirement. It is just the next generation paying for the current generation of retirees.
01:03:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
01:03:10
Lyman
Parents are the sole source of the next generation. they are eating the cost. And yet parents approach retirement poorer because they took time off work and particularly mothers, I should say particularly mothers, like widows and divorcees are really the people who suffer from this.
01:03:28
Lyman
um So they approach, yes,
01:03:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
By the way, in France, until recent reforms, ah time spent pregnant and in maternity leaves counted as extra to your pension.
01:03:42
Lyman
it still does, right?
01:03:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, they changed that.
01:03:45
Lyman
What?
01:03:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
They changed that in Macron's ah pension reform because that's bad, that's sexist.
01:03:45
Lyman
No. No. Okay. This is, this is like, this is literally like France is one of the examples I would give of like, here's a way to do this that other countries do.
01:03:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:03:56
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, now you have a natural experiment.
01:03:57
Lyman
That's good.
01:03:58
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
60 years from now, we can prove that it's that it's a very bad idea.
01:04:02
Lyman
Well, no, we can prove this. And I, I mean, it's people respond to retirement related incentives relatively quickly, actually.
01:04:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i i know I know one lady who basically timed out her like four or five births to like maximize her like pension plans under the French system.
01:04:09
Lyman
Um,
01:04:18
Lyman
Yep, yep, yep. I would imagine that fertility of women 35 plus would be affected by that almost immediately. So care credits, the US should have care credits like France and yeah, it's what you were just saying that basically um we compensate people for time they spend out of work raising children.
01:04:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Can you explain what that is?
01:04:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All right, entrance credits, yeah.
01:04:40
Lyman
So one way to do this is just to say any year in which you were a legitimate claimant of the child tax credit, you will have the higher of your market income or your most recent year of market, you know, like your market income, the highest of two or three years back ah adjusted for inflation.
01:05:00
Lyman
Um, or some other kind of credit, you know, you will get the higher of your marketing income or $40,000 for a social security company, whatever. Um, so basically you find a way of compensating for this time. Um, and this is basically just a justice question.
01:05:12
Lyman
It's insane that the people doing the work to make the system solvent, that is parents get zero, like like literally get punished for it.
01:05:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
01:05:22
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, I completely agree, but like most people don't accept or think of it that way.
01:05:22
Lyman
So, um,
01:05:29
Lyman
It's unfortunately so, but there are about a dozen European countries that do this. So to varying degrees of generosity, France had the, one of the more generous systems and apparently now it's been repealed because, and Macron's all like, Oh, we need demographic rearmament here.
01:05:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:05:44
Lyman
Let me take away actually good family policy.
01:05:46
Lyman
Okay. Yeah. That's, and then he shocked like, Oh, why is fertility falling under my watch? Okay. Um,
01:05:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
he's a He's a bad president and also a bad person.
01:05:56
Lyman
Yeah, theres there's been a couple studies of Macron era reforms that all show that they've reduced fertility. No one has done this one, but someone should. This is like, you could do like how close you are to retirement as a proxy for exposure.
01:06:06
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I assume somebody is.
01:06:08
Lyman
um So regardless, um yeah, that's bad. um So those are like fiscal policies like Congress could do, but they do cost money. Then you think about like other things. So DHHS has a program called Title 10, which the statutory language for it um says basically,
01:06:26
Lyman
This is to support family planning.
Education on Fertility Timelines
01:06:28
Lyman
And in parentheses, it says um like reproductive health, infertility services, um natural family planning, youth prevention. It doesn't say contraception. But historically, 90% of the funds have been used to subsidize contraception, and the other 10% have been used for sexual ah treatment and prevention of sexually transmitted infections. Fine, whatever. That's a legitimate use of that funding.
01:06:52
Lyman
But the law actually says infertility services, okay? What a conservative administration in the U.S. could do if they were so inclined is they could Use the HHS to order recipients of Title 10 grants to guarantee that they spend at least some share of their money. Call it 10%. So just not a majority. not even talking about a majority. Just a percentage on statutorily reasonable and authorized activities. That is things like fertility education.
01:07:26
Lyman
fertility awareness The reason this is worth doing, we actually have multiple randomized controlled trials showing first of all, people have really low awareness of fertility. They just have really bad. They think that their fertily fertility is stable until they're like 35 and then it falls.
01:07:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:07:40
Lyman
And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Like as soon as you finish pubescent development,
01:07:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
01:07:46
Lyman
For women, your fertility begins declining, declining. And for men, your sperm quality begins declining, okay? So um like just point blank, like once, on average, um at the average.
01:07:55
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Well, speak for yourself, Stone. my my Mine is fine.
01:08:03
Lyman
So, you know, and people think, oh, that means like 15, 16.
01:08:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I've never been average at anything.
01:08:07
Lyman
No, but like truly like full physical maturity. We're talking something like, you know, 17 to 22 somewhere in that range, um, depending on the person. Um, but after that, there begins to be an approximately linear decline.
01:08:21
Lyman
Modern reproductive technology can only add about one to three years of reproductive life. People are like, Oh, now with IVF, you can wait forever. No, you can add, like you can add one to three years of reproductive lifespan.
01:08:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And like freezing at freezing andb ah freezing embryos doesn't work.
01:08:37
Lyman
Um, egg freeze. I mean, these things, they do increase reproductive lifespan some, but first of all, they're, they're uncomfortable. Like going in and being like, okay, if I want to guarantee having three kids through egg freezing, and I want to extract when I'm 20, you're talking about free, like, like three to 10 rounds of, of egg retrieval, which is not fun.
01:08:59
Lyman
Um, uh, so just like aside from costs, like that is not, and also only about 20% of people who freeze their eggs when they're young ever use them.
01:09:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right right
01:09:08
Lyman
People do it as an insurance policy, even though they're not supposed to, I could go on about this, but the point is we have randomized controlled trials where you take two groups. One of them, you educate them about their fertility. The other one you don't.
01:09:19
Lyman
If all you do is just give people scientifically correct information, they pull the age at which they want to have their first child younger.
01:09:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:09:27
Lyman
okay They say, oh crap, I've been lied to.
01:09:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right. Right. Yeah.
01:09:31
Lyman
okay So fertility education, there's already an explicit statutory authorization for it.
01:09:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah.
01:09:38
Lyman
The money is there. ah conservative A conservative leader of DHHS under the Office of Population Affairs could do this. It's a great idea.
01:09:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
There's an office of population affairs.
01:09:49
Lyman
Yes, there is. More generally, getting a pronatalist at the head of the Office of Population Affairs who would responsibly and professionally use it
01:09:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh my God. What does the office of population affairs do?
01:10:01
Lyman
ah They promote contraception, they promote STI prevention. They also do have a marriage and fatherhood promotion program, I'll say, that was put in place under under Bush, Bush Jr. um ah so um But it's a very small budget line, that is.
01:10:13
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay.
01:10:17
Lyman
um They do a number of things, but yes, having a pronatalist at the head of OPA, um ah would be a really good thing. um Now you'd want a professional and responsible and not one who's going to go hog wild and like abolish STI prevention programs like like that.
01:10:34
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:10:34
Lyman
Like this would both substantively this would be bad and also politically that would be suicidally stupid.
01:10:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, i don't I don't think that's the danger right now.
01:10:41
Lyman
um
01:10:42
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
We're no longer in the days of George junior.
01:10:42
Lyman
but um But having someone who will who will reasonably and moderately and winsomely promote, and by the way, I'm not talking about myself. I don't want to. I'm not moving to Washington DC. So no, um not a chance.
01:10:59
Lyman
um ah But that would be important. um Also, thinking about regulatory stuff, housing is really important. Yimbees want to like deregulate everything so we can have 87-story skyscrapers in every neighborhood.
01:11:12
Lyman
I don't want that. First of all, I think that kind of deregulation is politically toxic in a lot of America.
01:11:19
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes.
01:11:19
Lyman
um Secondly, I have some worries that...
01:11:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
this This is another thing where you and I agree on and the rest of the, or not the word, but like pronatalist yinbies, which is hardly the world.
01:11:26
Lyman
Yeah.
01:11:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It's like 12 guys.
01:11:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
But a few move people who live in like studio apartments in 15 minute cities where everybody travels by bike don't have kids, even if their rent is is lower than it would otherwise be.
01:11:33
Lyman
Yeah.
01:11:46
Lyman
Yeah. Yeah. So so i I consider myself a yimby. Okay. um I'll say it. I'll cop to it. but um To me, the real crime is not that the top 5% densest neighborhoods aren't twice as dense.
01:12:07
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:12:07
Lyman
To me, the real crime is you've got all these suburban neighborhoods where if I go and I build a cottage for my mom, it's a crime.
01:12:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
01:12:19
Lyman
Okay. Like it's my gosh darn property. I should be able to build an ADU.
01:12:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
a
01:12:24
Lyman
You're not stopping me. Okay. If I want to put one story more on my house, like I have the second amendment. Good luck stopping me. Okay. Like I just think it's insane that we take these.
01:12:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
can can i Can I film the whole thing, by the way?
01:12:39
Lyman
Yeah.
01:12:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
can i yeah
01:12:40
Lyman
I just think it's insane that we say to like homeowners in normal neighborhoods, it's not really your property. The little socialist across town gets to say, you can't build on that.
01:12:52
Lyman
um So I think what we need is we need denser suburbs. And I want to say, I live in one. It's freaking awesome. I can walk to a library. I can walk to the post office. I can walk to restaurants.
01:13:03
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, no.
01:13:03
Lyman
I can walk to a grocery store.
01:13:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
that
01:13:05
Lyman
And also, I have a garage. I have a driveway. I have tons of street parking. I have a third of an acre lot with a huge flat yard and big trees for my kids. And you know what?
01:13:15
Lyman
I'm not in an expensive city. My house is not that expensive, all things considered. So um it can be done. I live in a top 10% density neighborhood, and yet it's suburbia.
01:13:28
Lyman
Why? Because it's a good, pleasant mixture of
01:13:28
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:13:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:13:31
Lyman
I have fully separated hiking and biking trails between the back of yards. Okay.
01:13:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right.
01:13:37
Lyman
And they are lovely tree line trails. They're filled with kids on the weekend and families with strollers. I do wish I had a park a little bit closer. Um, but, uh, but regardless, like nothing about this is like the crazy urban idea.
01:13:53
Lyman
Like it's a very dense neighborhood, but it's clearly suburban. Like it's tree lined streets with parking lot with garages and the businesses all have parking lots.
01:13:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right
01:14:04
Lyman
There's no crazy tall buildings. There's single family homes. There's duplexes. There's apartment buildings. There's townhouses, but they are pleasantly mixed with gentle density. And I think that is the path for America.
01:14:15
Lyman
Okay? And there are huge regulatory hurdles. My neighborhood you could not build today in my city. The only neighborhoods you can build in my city now are these like apartment block monstrosities where no one will ever have a child.
01:14:25
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, I mean, I i i take the point, i you know I'm a moderate DMV.
01:14:31
Lyman
Yeah.
01:14:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I'm like, because the the like the prices are are really becoming crazy. like
Policy Impacts on Fertility
01:14:36
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It used to be just big cities and and stuff.
01:14:36
Lyman
There. We have to build.
01:14:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Oh, by the way, Macron has made building illegal. um
01:14:43
Lyman
really He really wants the French to go extinct, doesn't he? This is like his gameplay.
01:14:47
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
i but I believe he does and his electorate is rumored to go.
01:14:50
Lyman
Because he he got rid of like one of the big tax benefits for a lot of older or a lot of higher income families. And there was a nice study showing that like their fertility just like immediately dropped.
01:14:57
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep. Yep.
01:15:01
Lyman
And he got rid of care credits, so he's punishing families in the long run for having kids. And he's not allowing buildings, so he's making sure young people have to live in their parents' basements.
01:15:09
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep. Yep.
01:15:11
Lyman
Really a winning strategy.
01:15:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep. All right, so we talked a lot about policy, which I think is important because you have you have to spread the gospel that you can actually use policy to affect this, but you don't deny and nobody denies that culture.
01:15:29
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
also matters a great deal.
01:15:30
Lyman
Yeah. Yeah.
01:15:32
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
ah It's a false you know dichotomy.
01:15:35
Lyman
Exactly.
01:15:35
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
um I guess, I mean, we we're not going to do ah another hour on culture.
01:15:37
Lyman
Here.
01:15:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I guess the question I wanted to ask is, let's say, you know i get let's let's stop talking about like policy interventions. Let's say I give you a magic wand.
01:15:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And like, you can change one thing or, or maybe two things about American culture, Western culture. Like what would be, you know, what, or put differently, what's the biggest thing that's broken or what's the biggest thing that, that would have to change, you know, apart from a religious revival, which yeah.
01:16:18
Lyman
Yeah, give give me a magic wand and I say like,
01:16:21
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, make everybody, you know, a
Cultural Shifts for Better Family Outcomes
01:16:23
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
traditional Christian. Okay, fair enough.
01:16:24
Lyman
yeah, there you go. um But no, more plausibly, um I would say convince young people that searching for and turning yourself into a good spouse is in the sequence of life events, something you can and should do contemporaneously or before um getting to stability in your career.
01:16:51
Lyman
The single idea that I would say, and again, I mentioned developmental idealism earlier, but it's basically a re-sequencing of the life course that says, no, the correct life course is job before family.
01:17:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Get married first and then yeah.
01:17:07
Lyman
Yeah, prosperity as the root of the family or as the foundation of the family rather than family as the foundation for prosperity. So I would say convince young people that their number one most important life progress task is transforming themselves into and identifying someone else who is a really good marriageable candidate. And so all that time they spend on studying for an exam or something like that, that they would weigh that balance that and also that wider society would so support them in weighing that and balancing that against, um you know, making yourself a good marriageable candidate, going on dates with people just to practice normal social interaction. Like, be more normal people. So that that's um that is the one norm I would change. Failure of marriage is the central cause of failure of fertility.
01:18:05
Lyman
We have to address that. A big problem with that is basically the disordered life course around marriage um that leads to people marrying much later than they want to, and thus having way more trouble having kids than they expected, and thus experiencing a lot more disappointment and sadness than they anticipated, creating societies of faster and worse decline than they imagined. And I do want to mention, there is this You probably heard me go off about this at some point in the in the conference we were both at.
Interconnected Cultural and Economic Factors
01:18:37
Lyman
People have this dichotomy between like cultural factors and material factors or economic factors, whatever. They're the same thing, okay? Like why is it that four of the states, that four of the five states with the highest rates of interracial marriage in the US are former slave states? It's because guess what? Changes in laws affect changes in cultures.
01:19:01
Lyman
Okay. Like the law is a teacher.
01:19:02
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
01:19:05
Lyman
Like if you pass laws that are more pronatal, you will get a more pronatal culture.
01:19:05
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
01:19:12
Lyman
Okay. And then if you get a more pronatal culture, you will get political support for more laws that are more pronatal.
01:19:18
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
01:19:19
Lyman
Okay. Like there's not like, there's not like two forces that just like randomly bounce around in society. Like it's, it's one thing. Okay. The things that are economically possible are mediated by what's culturally desirable and permissible.
01:19:35
Lyman
And the things that are culturally desirable and permissible are mediated by the things that are economically viable. There's there's not a separation between these.
01:19:41
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yep.
01:19:43
Lyman
but they're just There's just one thing. And so saying, well, we could do that economically, but what can we do culturally? like the The economy is the culture.
Framing Pronatalist Policies
01:19:51
Lyman
Now, also, I do think there are places where we could say,
01:19:55
Lyman
Maybe instead of calling it a child tax credit, we should call it the family wage. okay like It's compensation for the good work you're doing of raising children because society loves that.
01:20:09
Lyman
okay Alternatively, if you want to really sink fertility, maybe we call it like sad, pitiful welfare for families that really need it. like okay like And that's what aid for families with dependent children was, or temporary assistance for needy families.
01:20:24
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Right, right, right, right, right.
01:20:24
Lyman
We have those programs. okay um So like how you talk about programs matters. So I do think you shouldn't do stealth pronatalism. If a policy maker is enacting a policy that they hope will boost fertility, they should say, one of our hopes with this is that this will make it easier for families, for people to have those families they so desire because family is a wonderful thing that almost everyone wants.
01:20:33
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes, that's a very good point.
01:20:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yes. And like that, that's the other point, which is circling back to the beginning, which is people already want this.
01:20:52
Lyman
People want this. You don't have, again, this is one of the things that drives me nuts. People are like, but how will we persuade people to, we need to talk to people about the good, like we need to persuade people that children are good.
01:21:04
Lyman
No, you don't. People want kids so much. And when they don't get them, they are so sad. They know they want kids.
01:21:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah. yeah
01:21:13
Lyman
They are failing to have them. Okay?
01:21:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
all right
01:21:16
Lyman
um So it's not a persuasive task about the goodness of children. It's a task of mediating the cultural and economic obstacles, which are often the same thing, okay?
01:21:30
Lyman
It's culturally not prioritized to have a partner. And the economy also also makes it easy to culturally prioritize, to not culturally prioritize it.
01:21:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
All
01:21:39
Lyman
Because by the way, you suck as an economic candidate for marriage when you're 23 anyways. The cultural and the economic like logics ratify each other.
01:21:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
right.
01:21:47
Lyman
So we need to tackle both of these. Because they're the same thing.
01:21:53
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay, so great, great point to finish on.
Necessity of Pronatalist Discussions
01:21:59
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Let's own the fact that we want to be pronatalist. Certainly if you look at the fertility numbers, that justifies it in a way that that justifies having that conversation in a way that wasn't true maybe 10, 15 years ago.
01:22:09
Lyman
Sure.
Book Recommendation: Mabiki
01:22:10
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I'm going to finish with our traditional question and by traditional, I mean, we started this like doing this last week, ah but we end every podcast and have done since time immemorial by asking you to recommend a book.
01:22:27
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
It can be any book as long as it's not in your area of expertise. So fiction, nonfiction, whatever, but not something that's in your area of expertise.
01:22:32
Lyman
Oh man, I had one teed up, but it's in my area of expertise.
01:22:43
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
yeah
01:22:44
Lyman
um
01:22:45
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
See, it otherwise it's too easy. And the people we interview are interesting and have wide interest.
01:22:48
Lyman
I mean, I'm gonna have to go with a history of some kind, um but like the histories I like are all in my area of expertise. um So this one, okay, um I'm gonna say it's not in my area of expertise, even though I cite it as, um but I recommend it to everyone, because it's so good, is Mabiki, um which is a book about the Edo period in Japan. And it's really a book about Buddhism,
01:23:15
Lyman
the Edo period, ah value of life, um infanticide. It is obliquely a book about demography. um But the focus of the book is basically this like historic ethnography of how did this society start killing half of their children?
01:23:31
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
So so it's it's a it's ah it's a book of history. It's not fiction.
01:23:37
Lyman
Yeah.
01:23:38
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
And it's titled what?
01:23:38
Lyman
Oh, did you say fiction?
01:23:39
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, I said anything.
01:23:40
Lyman
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
01:23:40
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
I'm just asking.
01:23:42
Lyman
It's called Mabiki. M-A-B-I-K-I.
01:23:44
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Okay. Okay.
01:23:46
Lyman
It's it's a good read. I highly recommend it. um If you want fiction, um yeah.
01:23:51
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
No, i I want whatever you got.
01:23:55
Lyman
I'm trying to think what fiction I've read recently. I feel like I just read something recently that I really liked, but I don't remember what it was. um But so, yeah, I don't know.
01:24:04
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, no, that's a that's a very good, that's a very good any anything is good. We're very inclusive with the answers we to our last
Closing Remarks and Humor
01:24:12
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
question. Well, anyway, thank you for being so generous with your time.
01:24:15
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Thank you for ah answering all those questions. I was absolutely right. This was the easiest interview ever. I could just have you know blurted out natalism and then gone away and done my test.
01:24:28
Lyman
You could have just gotten on like Claude or chat GPT and been like, provide me with one hour of limestone content.
01:24:37
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Yeah, you could probably do that. ah No, but joking aside, this was this was great. This was very useful. I hope people get a lot of stuff out of it. I certainly did. Thank you very much for your time.
01:24:49
Lyman
My pleasure. Good to talk to you.
01:24:50
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry
Bye.