Krugman is generally great, but he has a habit of mixing his cogent analysis based on deep knowledge with expressions of bile, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.
Is this really a "habit" of his? Honest question. I'm a big Krugman fan like a lot of people, but I agree with Matt that the Krugman take in question is quite a bad one. The only other one I can think of was his prediction on election night in 2016 that the economy would soon tank. (He almost immediately backtracked on that one, to his credit, IIRC).
I'm just not remembering any other bad ones off the top of my head, although it could be the case that some Krugman takes that folks on this thread find bad I found unobjectionable.
I think his entire Trump coverage really suffered from a Trump-is-bad starting point (as you pointed out with his post-election chicken-little take) and then working backwards. I felt his coverage of the 2018 tax cut was disingenuous - he never engaged on the stimulus spending side of it where Matt has felt more comfortable praising it as a step towards full-employment.
If you concede a conservative framing as legitimate then you concede the legitimacy of the conservative actors. When you're a partisan hack, conceding the legitimacy of your opponents is just devaluing your own currency.
Matt (our local, proud partisan hack) doesn't concede the legitimacy of conservatism, but he does it without calling it racist these days, by just saying "they're obviously wrong." Of course, when non-partisans see "they're obviously wrong" they think "you're admitting you have no good reason to disagree" -- which is conceding the opponent's legitimacy. It's perhaps viable with a paid audience, but legacy columnists can't risk losing the crowd the way Matt does.
I mean, as commenters we have the luxury of spending 1,000 words to avoid phrases like “they’re obviously wrong”.
Matt does not have the same freedom to re-litigate exactly how disastrous the post-Reagan financialization of the economy was for the average household, so uses “obviously wrong” as shorthand for “go look at the ratio between wages and cost of living, or productivity growth and wage growth on your own damned time.”
That he doesn’t make the argument in front of you each and every time doesn’t mean the argument can’t be made.
> as commenters we have the luxury of spending 1,000 words to avoid phrases like “they’re obviously wrong”.
Have you seen how long Matt's blog posts are?
> Matt does not have the same freedom to re-litigate exactly how disastrous the post-Reagan financialization of the economy was for the average household
Literally never seen Matt argue that we should unwind the securitization that's enabled loose monetary policy to fuel a 40+ year bull market. That would mean opposing the Clinton and Obama administrations. Only ever seen him take potshots at Republicans doing the financialization wrong by not using a greater supply of treasury bonds in the collateral mix.
Matt's pretty consistent schtick, alongside the "MOAR MURIKANS" bit for which he's well-known, has been that we're underinvesting in public goods and industrial policy, and that our investments are not well-structured when they do occur.
That underinvestment and an aversion to interfering in "market outcomes" (which are themselves the outcome of policy) are both features of the over-financialized economy that came into reality under and following Reagan. They're made worse by obscenely low marginal tax rates on the earned and (especially) unearned income of the top 10% of so, which creates an environment awash in "paper capital" for which there are few genuinely productive outlets.
Honestly, I don't think he's ever used "they're obviously wrong" as short-hand for what I just did, but it does seem to underpin much of his thinking.
Anyway, if you actually want to go dig up an example of him using it in a way that seems dismissive to "conservatives", so we can have it out here instead, go for it.
I'd add that as their voting population gets younger, Democrat's stranglehold on minority voters will decrease. Older blacks still remember the civil rights movement, or the immediate events following it and are captured voters for the Democratic party. That won't last much longer, and that's going to cause big problems in later elections.
Reading the responses here is a good reminder that, even within the hallowed halls of Slow Boring, the opinions of Very Online people do not represent the Normal American.
I honestly appreciate people outing themselves by over-intellectualizing the merits of human reproduction.
Sincere advice: if your politics requires humanity *as a whole* to betray the reproductive function shared by all living things, those politics is a waste of time. Stick to totalizing enterprises that have at least some basis in history, like communism.
I haven’t found a partner and that is why I don’t have kids. Part of my anti natal desire is just plain jealousy. I see some guy happily married with 2 kids and and don’t want that guy to get a tax break at my expense. He already has a great life why does he need more. I know it is childish
But that’s the emotional reaction.
On a policy level pro natal politics is the best way to make conservatives care about polices I agree with. On the environment level most of the global warming stuff is so our kids will have a better life the planet will be fine.
This comment is going to stick with me for a long time. It's one of the most selfless things I've read online. It doesn't even come off in that "oh, I'm such a martyr" kind of way.
LOL "happily married with two kids." There's a whole lot of people who are just tolerating their marriages for the sake of the kids, and in any case there is a marriage *penalty* on your income taxes.
I know you can find someone with a wonderful wife and wonderful kids who is miserable person but you can find sad billionaires too. The tax system favors having kids if you compare worker to workers getting rid of the minor marriage penalty is the least pro natal thing we can do.
If you don't have children though you receive the benefit of large tax transfers from other people's children in your old age which surely cancels out the modest annual tax benefit for parents of young children.
Yea if your sufficiently pro immigration you can ignore that argument. Having, said that I know that when I am opposed to pro natal polices I am really just being a jealous punk. Also, on the old age stuff that assumes I will make it to that point and retire at that point. People die before 65 and people work into their 80s look at congress.
You must be incredibly fun to have around at parties.
Your arguments are ill-supported dreck, you bounce between ten of them in the span of an hour like a kangaroo on crack, and then you engage in drive-by sniping at anyone and everyone who doesn't accept them, along with a bunch of people who haven't spoken with you at all.
What the hell is your deal, that you feel the need to exude misery like this?
No, you don't. You just like to talk endlessly about how your whining and complaining means you care.
No one who feels compelled to come into a policy blog comment section under an anonymous username and post endlessly about how horrible ordinary people are and how great they themselves are for having some weird ideological leaning cares one iota about other people.
One of the things that always strikes me about this debate is the survey research that points to women having fewer children than they say that they want, by quite a bit. While revealed preference is often a better indicator than survey preference, it seems that our society is stacked against people building the actual lives they want. Education is too front loaded, and too expensive, changing careers is too hard.
And then for obvious political reasons we don't support or invest in kids as much as the elderly, which economically is nuts. (Krugman should take on the economic and racial case for social security and Medicare!)
I think that the traditional economic case for investing in kids is pretty strong. But there's also something of a human flourishing argument about giving people more opportunities to create the life they want.
There is a disconnect between the reality that women having less kids than they want against the discourse that focuses primarily on women being forced to have kids and society being to child centric.
The disconnect is that it is two different groups of women. Most feminists working professional class jobs have kids and want them. But feminists working professional class jobs are much more likely than the average woman to not want kids, prioritize their career and feel unwanted family pressure. Since they have a larger voice you hear more about the later than the former.
Both groups deserve respect. And addressing the massive fertility gap doesn't require and shouldn't result in any pressure on the women who don't want kids.
It is impossible to assure the human life you’ve created will be good and decent, and not miserable. It’s certainly important to try! But the idea that you are an artist creating another human to your personal specifications is kind of grandiose.
Who are you to decide people "are not actually putting meaningful effort in ensuring the lives of children are good and decent"?
And what is your evidence? Climate change will hit poorer countries much harder than rich ones. Uncontrolled climate change will make farming harder, but I have yet to see arguments that we can't science our way out of crop failures, and climate change is not entirely uncontrolled. Climate change can make the equatorial regions literally unlivable due to heat stress, but we're probably going to see a refugee crisis anyways.
Two native-born American parents reproducing in Kansas does not affect whether a Bangladeshi child drowns in climate-change induced flooding. Preventing them from having children _might_ make them adopt that Bangladeshi child, or induce policymakers to increase immigration, but those second-order effects are small. Whether the US acts as global hegemon in those poorer countries' interests is orthogonal to natalism.
This is only relevant if you think the marginal incremental person is so miserable that they’re better off not existing. If that were the case, we’d see a lot more “revealed preference” in the form of suicide. If anything, we see the opposite: suicide elevated in the precisely the places that *aren’t* growing!
> If you want effective altruism there is essentially no value to natalism.
This doesn't sound right to me, except insofar as effective altruism says that nothing you do in the rich world matters because it's so much more expensive than in poor nations.
That is because taken to the extreme affective altruism is BS. Don’t spend $5 taking the the bus to a BLM protest instead donate that money to buy bed nets. Or better yet drive for Uber and buy even more bed nets.
But this depends on a lot of assumptions about well-being. How do you measure the difference in well-being between existing vs. not-existing? This is in fact the basis of Parfit's arguments about the "Repugnant Conclusion": https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
Moreover there's the question of agency. As I noted above, I have far less control over the downstream impact from deworming as opposed to from my own parenting. It is in fact not terribly far-fetched to suggest that I can have more impact in terms of well-being by raising my children well as opposed to spending all that money on deworming - again, this comes down to the enormous black box of how to quantify+value well-being that you're taking for granted (or worse, defining in such a way that you're reaching a very particular cynical conclusion.)
Effective altruism as an ideology doesn't need to make the case you're making because it's comparing *different kinds of altruism* - it's relatively trivial to argue that between helping ten people improve their well-being from a 1st world baseline, vs. helping 1000 people improve their well-being from a 3rd world baseline, helping the 1000 is more impactful. But that kind of comparison goes out the window when you stop treating the population and its distribution as fixed.
"People don't do that because they just don't give the much of a fuck" you should speak for yourself, I've thought about this quite a bit actually. I just reached different conclusions than you (apparently) did. If you want to claim that I'm just engaged in motivated reasoning and/or wrong, you'll need substantially better arguments than this.
I think “poor Americans shouldn’t have children because they’ll be sad” is (a) empirically false and (b) much closer to a reductio against particularly anti-humanist, non-Millian versions of utilitarianism than an argument that will ever compel a psychologically normal human being
I guess that’s one way to dress up Benetarianism in effective altruist lingo but you’re still a Benetarian, which is still empirically false. People are generally happy.
The fact that a huge proportion of people forgo having additional children before reaching the number they truly want is ample evidence that this view is overblown. Obviously, in practice, the overwhelming majority of people put the needs of their children first.
So this sort of moralizing is not a real worry that should impact policy.
Not debatable. The evidence says that the overwhelming majority of children in developed world households are well cared for, even to the exclusion of other parental priorities. There is virtually nothing to indicate the opposite.
Humans are evolutionarily constrained to have our sense of self-worth wrapped up in reproduction. It is not possible to disentangle the two.
That said, we have a proxy question that we can use to understand whether people are primarily motivated by self actualization, or by altruism, once they’ve actually had children. That question is, “do people continue to have children that they want even if it will negatively impact their existing children’s standard of living?”
As already discussed in this thread, the answer is no. This clearly indicates that once children actually exist parents care for them primarily out of love/altruism. Most parents, anyway.
Krugman’s comment that Vance’s proposal was racist is a stark example of how accusations of racism can be used by the left to attack policies that are the exact opposite of racist.
Vance is himself contributing to the browning of America, with two mixed kids with his Indian wife. The idea that he’s got a hidden agenda of turning back white replacement is an offensive smear. I’m south Asian and have three kids with my Irish wife, for I suspect the same reason as Vance and his wife—our cultures both value children.
Look at other key proponents of pro-natal policies: Corey Booker and Kanye West. Say what you want about West’s mental health, his proposal to reduce abortion by giving women money to have kids is solidly rooted in Black Protestant views about family.
The reality is that it’s mostly Black and brown people in this country, along with “ethnic whites” like Irish and Italians, who highly value kids. It’s upper class white Protestant culture that’s fascinated with small families. (And people who have assimilated into it, like some Asians.)
You see a similar inversion with respect to school choice. Blacks and Latinos strongly support it, along with Republicans. So how do liberal whites (the only opponents) frame it? As a racist and segregationist policy.
I don’t think there’s a shred of evidence that ethnic Italian and Irish Americans are having appreciably larger families than the US (or even white) average these days. 1950s? Perhaps.
I’m making an inference: white ethnics (as opposed to WASPs) are more likely to vote Republican, and Republicans have higher fertility rates than Democrats.
Seems doubtful. The vast swath of US territory home to the most fervently Republican voters (WV, KY, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansans, etc) are also home to large numbers of White Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin.
I agree broadly with the notion that framing many policies as "racist" is not useful and in most instances harmful.
That said, I don't think there's a large cultural component to this. Almost all of the differences we see both globally and at home are that wealth decides all.
Amusingly, at home and within other wealthy countries we see that birthrates, when plotted against income, look like a bowl, not a steady downward trend. Those who are wealthy enough not to have to make sacrifices to have more kids, unsurprisingly, do just that.
In the US, TFR bottoms out between 100 and 200k, then rises again after, as resource constraints fade.
There is a major cultural component. Republicans have much higher fertility rates than Democrats: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advantage. That’s true even though most Black and Latino people are Democrats, who have much higher fertility rates than white Democrats.
Asians are the odd one here. On one hand, Asians who immigrate to the US tend to be high assimilated into local cultures with a lot of white Democrats. (Most Asians live in California and New York.) They also tend to be elites in their home countries, and have absorbed the west’s population control message over the last 50 years.
But South Asian culture, where Vance’s wife comes from, is strongly pro-natal. It’s not the biblical command to have as many kids as possible, but rather the strong expectations to fulfill your social role of becoming a mother or father. My extended family (who mostly immigrated to the west) all had exactly 2 kids, but a cousin saying they planned to have no kids would set the aunties aflutter.
When I read that analysis, I draw damned near the opposite conclusion regarding causation: material factors that tend to make people "conservative" in American terms also tend to make them have more children.
The biggest of those factors are income vs. local cost of living, and the affordability of housing, IMO.
But anyway, we're really grasping at straws here; there's no data for either of our theories at the micro-scale needed, and I'm not even sure, practically speaking, that they produce very different outcomes.
Krugman calling pro-natalist policies racist isn't intended to convince any moderates or conservatives, it's intended to signal allegiance to the blue tribe by attacking the red tribe
I agree, but it’s problematic. When white people call something racist, they’re drawing on the (limited) political capital of people of color. Insofar as that’s weaponized to attack policies that are good for people of color (or at least ones that people of color want), that’s appropriative and wrong.
I agree. I think it applies especially to accusations of "vague racism," or "something that *feels* racist even though its connection to bigotry or oppression can't be readily articulated."
I think the WASP tendency to have small families is contingent; early puritan settlers had tons of children. Perhaps it's the case that WASPs are more susceptible to fashions in these things than "white ethnics" and non-whites.
It's a fair point and TBF I took Ray's original assertion on faith because it sounded about right. I doubt an accurate statistic will be possible to obtain. It's very difficult to say who counts as a "WASP".
In fairness to his point, we know that non-whites have higher fertility than whites at every level of the income distribution in the US.
But we have no breakdown for WASP vs. "ethnic" white and no breakdown for recent immigrant vs other non-white.
My guess, and I acknowledge it as a guess based on the lack of data, is that the majority of the gap between white and non-white comes down to recent (1st and 2nd generation) immigrants from poorer countries.
I don't know that the same thing exists within the white population, and it's impossible to know.
The non-Hispanic white fertility rate differs quite sharply between states. It’s just 1.5 in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire. Under 1.4 in Rhode Island. These are low cost fairly rural states. Similarly rural states with large Scots Irish populations like Kentucky are at 1.9. States like Iowa with large German populations are around 1.8.
I am a mother of two, having those children in my 20s, and the wife of an immigrant. I also have one more on the way, and my husband and I would like to have a fourth before I'm 35. We live in a rural area, so day care can be difficult to find, but babysitters/nanny's are cheap, relatively. We are both professionals so we can afford it. The schools don't provide the best academics, but the teachers and staff are genuine. Also, my school-age daughter has a great friendship network. I can afford a tutor if I want my kids to grow further.
All that being said, I think the reason my family can grow this way is 1) we are professionals earning good money in a relative LCOL area (HCOL state though), 2) we had our first kid unplanned and just rolled with it (I was on WIC until I couldn't be - wonderful program), 3) while our family could not physically support us, they were able to send us money when things got hairy. (However, many families do take advantage of grandparents/relatives as cheap/free daycare)
This is just my view of the system as a mother and a worker, but as people have discussed, it wasn't necessarily the government programs that allow us to have the kids we want. It helped a lot, no question. But it was that our jobs provided the money to support it, and our family and friend networks supported us too.
I'm not alone up here in my rural area. I know many conservative and liberal families that all have 3 or more kids, but one or both parents have a great job (white collar and tradesman families).
All that being said, I think having more pro-natalism stance in our society is an excellent thing. Let's have more "mom" parking spots at groceries or more family/child programs (like how the YMCA used to be), but not necessarily free day-care for the whole country. When it comes to true pro-natalism, it's raising the wages of our current workers and providing job opportunities that give *living wages* that will actually increase native-born fertility rates.
Because why should mom go to work when it barely pays for the day care? However if less than half the check goes to day care for a few years, then when the kid is in school, they get the whole check, the family will be more likely think they can afford the amount of children they want.
The right has a point that we should just support mothers, not just working mothers. Half of women with kids under 18 would prefer a homemaker role: https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer-working-homemaking.aspx. Women without a college degree are 50% more likely to have that preference. (Given that skew, it may well be that the majority of moms of kids under 18 who lack a college degree would prefer to stay at home instead of working.)
There is a big focus on professional women, who tend to be the ones participating in these discussions. But we’re a wealthy society and we should also accommodate those non-professional women, many of whom think their efforts would be better spent at home.
People are often surprised by Krugman writing silly stuff given his career, but the most banal thing is for a hyper-accomplished academic to later decide to use his reputation to just say whatever nonsense he wants, as opposed to actually retiring and finding some other hobby. Krugman just happens to have a NYT column.
Based on this latest rant (and others) I feel like Krugman is still trapped on the cultural debates of the time he was most relevant, when the left was more unanimously obsessed with population control. It's also pretty weird to implicitly associate religiosity with whiteness.
"It's also pretty weird to implicitly associate religiosity with whiteness."
The only way I can explain how a large part of the American left talks about religion is that they appear to believe that non-whites have "culture" rather than "religion," i.e., religion as practiced in non-white communities is something like ethnic cuisine or clothing, something you do out of tradition not because you sincerely believe in it, whereas religion as practiced by whites is something done consciously and with malice aforethought, and thus is less worthy of respect.
You might be on to something. That's an old tension in many corners of the left: seeing themselves with the mainstream lens of the Enlightenment, the "others", minorities or foreign societies, with the lens of Rousseau's noble savage. An unconscious form of ethnocentrism.
Having read all the comments on this post, I suddenly had the crazy idea that it might be interesting to read what actual women have to say about the subject of having more babies.
There are at least a few women who have written in these comments! If other people here know of good places to read what women are saying about the subject of having more babies, maybe it would be good for them to post links here?
E.g., have them answer the question, here are things government policy might do:
--Child allowance à la Biden’s proposal.
--Paid parental leave.
--Publicly funded summer camp and afterschool programming.
--Preschool for four-year-olds
How many more kids would you want with those in place? What are the biggest impediments to having more kids and how big do they loom compared to the lack of these policies ? (My uninformed guess is that these four policies rank well behind having more supportive businesses as well as more supportive partners and having these policies would be great but of marginal impact on the decision of number of kids to have.)
There isn't just encouraging people to have more kids, another option is to encourage people to have kids earlier. All else being equal you get more population growth if families are having children in their 20's instead of their 30's or 40's. That's another factor of slowing population growth besides the number of kids.
And having kids earlier means the opportunity for more kids. Every large family I know of with 4+ kids had their first kid in their 20's or late teens.
But the various economic and social realities of our society mean there is a very strong incentive for most people to delay having children. And that delay is getting longer, not shorter, as the current younger generation struggles with many issues from finding a partner to achieving a sufficient level of economic independence. For example, I have a handful of family members who really want a family and kids but, for whatever reason, can't find a partner. Their ages are 60, 45 and 35. The 60-year old finally partnered with a woman who has kids from an earlier marriage. The other two have pretty much given up.
I'm seeing more and more people who are single into their 40's and beyond. But I don't think government policy can really change that.
More generally, I'm skeptical that the family-friendly policies that Matt supports will provide enough incentive to actually increase the number of kids people have. Again, at least in my circle, no one I know proactively decides to have a kid or not based on government child policies and benefits. Where I think these policies would have the most effect is reducing the number of abortions from unplanned pregnancies, which is another potential sell point to skeptical right-wingers.
One question I have on this is: Are people having kids later because of economics, or are people having kids later because they are, for non-economic reasons, deciding to form committed relationships later than they used to? The answer is obviously "both" but I do think the latter factor is a really big deal. And I would go so far as to say that isn't really a great social trend, i.e. a lot of people would be happier if they committed earlier. But I don't really see how government can influence people to do that (and even if it succeeded, it would probably end up playing out in the stupidest way possible).
Yeah, I also think that's a big issue. I'm Gen-X (52) and didn't get married or have kids until my 30's. That was primarily because I didn't find a partner. I was an introvert without a good social network and internet dating wasn't yet a thing. Flesh-and-blood social networks are even less prevalent today, but internet dating as a tool for finding a life partner doesn't seem to be that great of an option. So it appears to me that finding a partner is even harder for younger generations, especially women, who still are much less likely to "marry down" than men are.
And I agree that government policy isn't very good at changing any of this except maybe at the margins.
Interesting point about women being better/pickier and this making it harder to settle down earlier (women are finishing college now more than men, not on opioids as much, etc).
Aren’t there books on how men are currently doing poorly in terms of life outcomes?
1) one way to do this is to reduce the economic cost of staying in one place. Right now the standard model is: go to your local high school, then go somewhere completely different geographically for college, then go get a job in a major (or minor) city wherever you can for about 5 years (or go to graduate school in yet another completely different geographic location). By definition this means that you're either fumbling through a long-distance relationship for a decade+, or you're first capable of dating with the intent of marrying when you're 22. The opportunity cost of limiting yourself to a single geography is just astronomical. Remote work might wind up making a big difference here; remote higher education would make an ever bigger one (though I don't expect that to happen any time soon.)
2) These factors are themselves interrelated - I've heard (and felt) discomfort with the prospect of getting married until my career was on solid footing. It's not crazy either!
I think dating-to-marry in college can work out fine too, it's in part just a cultural thing. BYU and Notre Dame seem to produce tons of happy young marriages, but you and your partner have to both be up for early commitment, moving if necessary for the other's education, etc.
The graduate school population is tiny and won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but sure, making graduate school more family-friendly is overall a good thing. I do agree to an extent when it comes to early careers, but the median age of marriage continues to rise - most people are single in their early careers.
I don't think anyone needs to proactively decide based on government policies to have an effect here. All you need is 5% of families who are hemming and hawing about another kid but struggling with daycare costs to not be struggling with daycare costs and go ahead and do it, to increase fertility from 1.81 to 1.86 or whatever.
I'm skeptical there will be an increase in fertility. Japan has a year of paid parental leave for fathers and mothers. Most of Europe as well has generous family policies, yet those policies don't seem to be substantially increasing birth rates there and current birth rates are lower than in the US.
Japan has an INCREDIBLY fucked up work culture where you're basically an indentured servant for life if you're white collar. I believe that that's changing but in that environment, sure, handing people cash is not going to make the difference. The US, thankfully, is not like that.
There's a bunch of research that's been done on the subject and while pro-natalist policies like these don't always work, they often do.
Sure, Japan is exceptional in that regard, but Europe is not. Europeans generally have a lot more government support for families than the US, yet still have lower birth rates. In the developed world, birth rates plummeted in the 1970's and have been relatively flat since then despite various changes in government policy.
That's not to say that we shouldn't have pro-natalist or pro-family policies. But I think we ought to be skeptical that those policies will result in a meaningful increase in birth rates.
Like the evidence is yes you will get an increase in fertility but not much. You need 2.2 to break even of people. Going full France raises the birth rate from 1.4 to 1.45.
Conservatives say “omg you raised the quality of life of poor people and only got a .05 increase!!”
Liberals say we helped families and got a .05 birth rate uptick as bonus!
Just to clarify, I'm not against the family-friendly policies that MY listed in his post, I generally support them. I'm just skeptical they will do much to increase birth rates and have yet to see compelling evidence to the contrary.
Assuming the different view points are going to be somewhat hereditary. Pro-natalist people will have bigger families, and those against will have smaller or none, I think its pretty easy to see who will win the argument in a few generations.
Personally, I just assume that in the greater scheme of History and civilization, the only way to win is to have as many descendants as possible in a few thousand years. Many of us are destined to be genetic dead-ends. All we can do is increase our odds that bits of our DNA code exist when we finally settle across the galaxy.
The main economic motivation to have lots of kids is as a retirement strategy. I have 5 kids. I'm hoping at least one of them strikes it rich and funds my retirement.
Personally, I'd like to see Matt troll the anti-natalists by having a few more kids. I hear that making them is fun.
Yes, I know I have added nothing constructive in this comment section. What can I say, my kids wore me out.
The historical record is clearly towards smaller families since the Industrial Revolution, which seems to be directly contrary to your assertion. I think the size of families is affected much more strongly by other factors than ideological pro-natalism as transferred across generations.
Yes but even a small difference at the margins, will eventually overwhelm all other factors. Also, raising kids will be so much easier when we have robotic servants to assist us. That is if artificial intelligence doesn’t go self-aware and just wipe out humans, in which case the conversation is mute.
I'm not sure about that. It's possible that as people have fewer kids the assistance expectation from parents will increase. That's obviously happened since the 70s.
Going forward will ability to pay for and provide transportation to activities, homework supervision and assistance, college expenses, down payment assistance, and on and on. Have a outsized impact on where one ends up in life.
In the past, richer people had more (surviving) children, as they had greater ability to support them.
But in the modern era, it's a bit more complicated.
The scope of the state and the general wealth of society means you'd need to be an *extremely* bad parent for your kids to actually starve.
As I understand it, fertility is now somewhat U-shaped, with the poor and the wealthy having more kids.
But there's nothing actually stopping a regular middle-class couple from having tons of kids and just deciding not to provide them the same lifestyle that their peers would think necessary.
"But there's nothing actually stopping a regular middle-class couple from having tons of kids and just deciding not to provide them the same lifestyle that their peers would think necessary."
Other than human nature. To use Adam Smith's example:
"A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. "
If what is considered the linen shirt level of parenting increases then to go without the linen shirt is a really big deal. And a huge actual impediment.
"But there's nothing actually stopping a regular middle-class couple from having tons of kids and just deciding not to provide them the same lifestyle that their peers would think necessary."
Only for the types of parents that have few kids. Those of us with big families don't do crap for our kids, teaches resilience and independence.
My 15-year old just got accepted to the South Carolina School for Science and Math (11th and 12th public boarding school - top school in State). She applied as a Freshman and got in anyway. Her mother and I literally did nothing... not a damn thing to help her. She wrote the essays, solicited recommendation letters, set up the zoom interviews. We have never taken her to a museum. Don't help her with her homework. Definitely mediocre parents at best. Whereas I invested a lot of time with my oldest son and he works as a dishwasher in Scotland. (Though he did just enroll in University to study computer science).
As far as funding costs, I say we make peoples social security contributions inversely proportional to their contribution to future tax payers. People with zero kids would have to contribute 20% of income. Phase it out at 4 kids. Seems fair to me considering its kids of today that will have to wipe their asses of the future.
I don't know. I'm more likely to hear people say... kids have it way easier than ours. But peoples stated preferences and revealed preferences are two different things.
This isn't so much an issue when its 1952 and everyone has 4 or 5 kids. You're peers are all in the same boat. But when everyone else is an only or has only one sibling...
"I'm hoping at least one of them strikes it rich and funds my retirement."
Have you run the numbers on how much you'd retire with if you didn't have kids and instead invested that money in a nice index fund? I think that's an important part of the issue. If most people were relying on a pension then having 0 or 1 kid and having 5 kids wouldn't matter nearly so much. When you're self funding your retirement that's a much bigger issue.
That calculation would make sense, if I wasn’t naturally terrible with money. So my choice was between spending it on kids, or on hobbies. Spinach a non-kids, sucked up all my time so I didn’t miss not having hobbies. It was a win.
Everytime I hear this issue discussed, someone brings up that Scandinavian countries have great family leave policies and robust welfare states, but these haven't had much of an effect on fertility. I'm all for these policies on humanitarian and economic grounds, but what does the evidence say about how much they boost fertility?
So the short answer is robust family polices only slightly increases birth rates. Conservative pro natal people complain that you spend all this money and go from 1.4 to 1.45 so what is the point of providing a better quality of life to families.
Liberals say let’s improve families quality of life and get an extra.05 birth rate as a bonus.
It looks like fertility rates are in line with other developed countries, including the US. Although there's a noteworthy gap between the US/Nordic countries (clocking ~1.8-1.9) and Japan and some southern European countries (~1.4 or so)
I agree with this take. It is true that robust family leave policies and robust welfare states, if constructed carefully, do seem to raise the birth rate (e.g., Scandinavia, Netherlands, etc.). It's also a modest effect, say 0.2 children or the equivalent. What does seem to raise the birth rate is politics, national solidarity, and the perception of threat. So France has much higher birth rates than you would expect, and part of it is the extensive pro-natalism policies it has. The reason it has these is because France historically had a well-developed economy and lots of fecund arable land and so had higher population densities than its neighbors. This changed in the 19th century, when France went through the demographic transition, and France lost relative power and could no longer boss around western and central Europe, annexing land from its neighbors. Germany grew more quickly in population, and many of the pro-natalist policies are justified to resist the German threat, and at some level are still thought of that way. Another country with anomalously high fertility rates relative to its level of economic development is Israel, which also has strong pro-natalist policies, for the same reason. It is outnumbered by its enemies and views population growth as essential for national security.
In 2017 French fertility rates were 1.77 native born and 2.60 immigrant, with the latter comprising 20% of births. 1.77 is still higher than the 1.5 EU average, but has been monotonically declining for some time (https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPSOC_568_0001--french-fertility-is-the-highest-in.htm). The Nordic countries, with very generous child support policies, are barely above the rest of the EU in terms of TFR.
I'm all for making it easier to raise and support children, but this is pretty weak tea for actually increasing the population or even significantly slowly a demographic decline.
I know polls show that people (or maybe just women) would like to have more children than they currently do and you can believe that or not, but I think it's hard to conclude that governmental policy would make a significant difference one way or the other.
Immigrant births don't count? Immigrants almost always have more kids than the native-born. I agree with you that pro-natalism policies don't have a strong effect on the birth rate, except when they combine with strongly held cultural/social trends. France (and Israel) have been working hard for a very long time to raise birth rates, and seem relatively successful relative to other countries. I don't think it is just the pro-natal policies, I also think it is the viewed security threat.
Sure they count. I highlighted it as a compositional effect that helps keep French TFRs higher than other EU countries with smaller immigrant populations.
Yes, and part of the reason France has higher immigration is that they push pro-natalism and "la mission civilasatrice'. I don't think you can straight decouple these.
I believe this is also true of Japan. Douthat wrote a book on the broader issues of what he calls “decadence” recently. Birth rates of the west a major aspect of it. I think we’re still left scratching our heads as to why birth rates are so low.
However, I did recently read something about how this might reverse itself because western birth rates are so heavily focused among people who either want to have children, or can’t control themselves from having children. This might lead to a “generation of breeders.” Not sure I fully agree but was at least an interesting thought.
That thread by Krugman is really muddled... I wasn't sure what he was arguing until I read his column today (and he still doesn't engage with pro-natalism on substance).
While I agree that pro-natalism isn't inherently racist, the fact is that "white people are being outbred" has been a talking point in right-wing circles since at least the 80s, with Tucker Carlson and JD Vance espousing this recently. I'm not sure that weakens the argument for those policies, but it's not a fringe idea (unless you consider the entire Republican party to be fringe, which...).
I agree with you that it’s been a thing. But is it a relevant thing? Especially given that these policies actually help more non-white people. If your opponent is in the middle of making an unforced error, why interrupt them?
Well, the flip side of this argument has been to marshal forces against immigration in the name of protecting White Christendom. ONE BILLION AMERICANS is both pro-natalist and pro-immigration.
Yeah so fight them on the immigration stuff and don’t on the breeding stuff. You can even propose it as a trade! Oh man mr. Vance it really kills me to support your efforts to help white people have kids and maintain their political support in this country, but I’ll take it for immigration liberalization. I wish I wasn’t up against such a clever negotiator like you!
The range countries with under-replacement fertility is really wide and interesting. Look it up on wikipedia if you're interested. It includes not just all the developed European and Asian countries that you'd expect to see, but also many less- developed countries: Brazil, Iran, Bangladesh (by some estimates), Myanmar and Thailand. Maybe half of Latina and America and the Caribbean. Cuba and Puerto Rico are especially low. Especially PR.
In Bangladesh, at least, it was a direct result of major western family planning efforts. (My dad spent much of his career on this.)
In many ways it’s a good thing. Obviously educating and empowering women reduces birth rates. It improves outcomes for everyone. In the long run I’m a little concerned the west exported an anti-natal ideology—let’s face it, from a paternalistic WASP point of view—that will cause these societies to peak and then decline.
It’s really become part of the culture. Even after we immigrated to the US, and my brother and I are now solidly in the top 1%, my parents were kind of horrified when my wife and I we decided to have three kids.
Bangladesh is the most densely populated non-microstate on the planet, by a pretty overwhelming margin over the next large state on the list.
Getting concerned that its TFR is going to plunge off a cliff when it has 160 million people, is still growing rapidly, and has a TFR right around replacement... is very much putting the cart before the horse, IMO.
Just taking women out of near-bondage seems to be enough to take TFR from 7 to around 2.5, so seeing it at 2 in a rapidly developing country with decent rights for women is not terribly surprising.
The possibility that it suffers population decline in the future is simply not a concern at the moment. It's half again as dense as Taiwan, in an area of the world uniquely vulnerable to climate change, with a still relatively poor populace.
It has bigger problems than the biggest "first-world problem" out there, and certainly shouldn't be accounting for that in policy-making for quite a while.
In any case, Bangladesh's fertility is almost certain to go off a cliff at some point. Why? For the same reason that this happened in Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore; extremely dense populations make it hard for the bulk of "normal folk" to afford living space sufficient to raise large families.
That the US is managing to replicate the same failing with none of the geographic constraints is the result of profound stupidity. We need to build more freaking houses.
But the reality is that we have no idea what demographics will look like in 50 years. I wouldn't be too wedded to any one set of beliefs on the matter because it's impossible to know whether changes in fertility will be a problem, a positive development, or just a neutral backdrop.
Sure there's a policy lever to make people more religious: dismantle the social safety net. Krugman has it backwards; Republicans oppose support for families because a mother who can stand on her own two feet, thanks to government programs available to her as an individual unmediated by traditional institutions, is a free actor, liberated from dependence on a (possibly abusive) husband, a (possibly abusive) birth family, or a (possibly abusive, or just incongruous with her own convictions) church community. Conservatives do not think it is feasible or desirable for people to construe themselves as free individuals outside of a web of social ties, and many do not think it is healthy for women to aspire to the same freedom to set one's own course in the world as men. Hence the relative absence of religious conservatives proposing policies to make parenting easier: they would rather make independence harder, to keep people beholden to family and faith.
This is at least part of why every level of religious disaffiliation in the US is progressively more male, with atheists the most disproportionate. People literally turn to their churches for financial support, and women have less money on average and still shoulder more of the burden of child and elder care. The social safety net also seems to me to be the strongest reason why Western Europe is less religious than the US. (Being a superpower engaged in an existential geopolitical rivalry against a formally atheist opponent probably also contributed.)
And what do you know, which European country has notably high fertility levels for a rich country, a generous social safety net for new parents, a notably small gender gap in religiosity for a majority-Christian country (per Pew https://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/22/women-more-likely-than-men-to-affiliate-with-a-religion/), and a long tradition of leftist anticlericalism? Yes: France, the most underrated (by Americans) European country.
This is a view of religious institutions that could only be held by someone with extremely limited experience with them. Religious people are not motivated by material concerns, you don’t need to be religious to access church-funded social services, and on a variety of metrics regular churchgoers are better-off than non-attendees.
The prevalence of the prosperity gospel is vastly overstated in popular discourse, it's really fringe even among Evangelicals outside of old times televangelists. I've heard it's reasonably big in Brazilian Evangelical churches though.
> a mother who can stand on her own two feet, thanks to government programs available to her as an individual unmediated by traditional institutions, is a free actor, liberated from dependence on a (possibly abusive) husband, a (possibly abusive) birth family, or a (possibly abusive, or just incongruous with her own convictions) church community.
The idea that the welfare state causes the disintegration of family and community has long been a conservative talking point. I've never seen anyone in the wild actually argue that this is a _good_ thing and a point in the welfare state's favor.
There's a large strand of liberal thought about the virtues of people developing independence from potentially oppressive social ties. Every gay person who grew up in a small town and moved to the big city and felt the anonymity as a breath of freedom and fresh air thinks something like this is a good thing.
It seems like the foreign policy reasons to have more kids are also really strong. If we double our population we don't need to also double our military budget. So our per capita military spending can be lower. And if we have a huge population then other countries like China will be less likely to try to compete with us militarily so maybe we can mutually lower our military expenditures.
So Krugman says that the population balance won't be that problematic based on the Social Security projection which indicates Social Security as a percentage of GDP will go from about 5% to about 6% between now and 2075 (most of that increase occurs between now and 2035 and then it stays roughly flat after).
But this assumes a Total Fertility Rate of roughly 1.9 births/woman during that time. Why would we assume that is the worst case scenario given many other countries have much lower TFRs? Perhaps significant pro-natalist intervention is required to maintain this. Surely Krugman would concede a South Korea-like TFR of .98 would create significant problems for the economy over the next 50 years.
I'm as left as they come, but the thing left of center people do where they call any conservative frame of an issue racist is annoying as shit
This is a character flaw. Krugman should be embarrassed.
Krugman is generally great, but he has a habit of mixing his cogent analysis based on deep knowledge with expressions of bile, and sometimes it's hard to tell which is which.
Keep the former, drop the latter, Paul.
Is this really a "habit" of his? Honest question. I'm a big Krugman fan like a lot of people, but I agree with Matt that the Krugman take in question is quite a bad one. The only other one I can think of was his prediction on election night in 2016 that the economy would soon tank. (He almost immediately backtracked on that one, to his credit, IIRC).
I'm just not remembering any other bad ones off the top of my head, although it could be the case that some Krugman takes that folks on this thread find bad I found unobjectionable.
I think his entire Trump coverage really suffered from a Trump-is-bad starting point (as you pointed out with his post-election chicken-little take) and then working backwards. I felt his coverage of the 2018 tax cut was disingenuous - he never engaged on the stimulus spending side of it where Matt has felt more comfortable praising it as a step towards full-employment.
I agree except for the last part, i.e. I don't think it's that hard to tell which is which.
> Krugman should be embarrassed.
Sadly, nobody who becomes a partisan pundit is capable of embarrassment.
I blocked Krugman years ago.
It’s so profoundly dumb.
If you concede a conservative framing as legitimate then you concede the legitimacy of the conservative actors. When you're a partisan hack, conceding the legitimacy of your opponents is just devaluing your own currency.
Matt (our local, proud partisan hack) doesn't concede the legitimacy of conservatism, but he does it without calling it racist these days, by just saying "they're obviously wrong." Of course, when non-partisans see "they're obviously wrong" they think "you're admitting you have no good reason to disagree" -- which is conceding the opponent's legitimacy. It's perhaps viable with a paid audience, but legacy columnists can't risk losing the crowd the way Matt does.
I mean, as commenters we have the luxury of spending 1,000 words to avoid phrases like “they’re obviously wrong”.
Matt does not have the same freedom to re-litigate exactly how disastrous the post-Reagan financialization of the economy was for the average household, so uses “obviously wrong” as shorthand for “go look at the ratio between wages and cost of living, or productivity growth and wage growth on your own damned time.”
That he doesn’t make the argument in front of you each and every time doesn’t mean the argument can’t be made.
> as commenters we have the luxury of spending 1,000 words to avoid phrases like “they’re obviously wrong”.
Have you seen how long Matt's blog posts are?
> Matt does not have the same freedom to re-litigate exactly how disastrous the post-Reagan financialization of the economy was for the average household
Literally never seen Matt argue that we should unwind the securitization that's enabled loose monetary policy to fuel a 40+ year bull market. That would mean opposing the Clinton and Obama administrations. Only ever seen him take potshots at Republicans doing the financialization wrong by not using a greater supply of treasury bonds in the collateral mix.
I love how long they are and with no Adds I am totally getting my money’s worth!!
Matt's pretty consistent schtick, alongside the "MOAR MURIKANS" bit for which he's well-known, has been that we're underinvesting in public goods and industrial policy, and that our investments are not well-structured when they do occur.
That underinvestment and an aversion to interfering in "market outcomes" (which are themselves the outcome of policy) are both features of the over-financialized economy that came into reality under and following Reagan. They're made worse by obscenely low marginal tax rates on the earned and (especially) unearned income of the top 10% of so, which creates an environment awash in "paper capital" for which there are few genuinely productive outlets.
Honestly, I don't think he's ever used "they're obviously wrong" as short-hand for what I just did, but it does seem to underpin much of his thinking.
Anyway, if you actually want to go dig up an example of him using it in a way that seems dismissive to "conservatives", so we can have it out here instead, go for it.
It’s also racist insofar as Black and brown people are also often conservative on cultural issues.
I'd add that as their voting population gets younger, Democrat's stranglehold on minority voters will decrease. Older blacks still remember the civil rights movement, or the immediate events following it and are captured voters for the Democratic party. That won't last much longer, and that's going to cause big problems in later elections.
Yup
Reading the responses here is a good reminder that, even within the hallowed halls of Slow Boring, the opinions of Very Online people do not represent the Normal American.
Kids are great, y'all.
I have raised 9. 5 natural. 4 step. I'd only trade in 3 of them.
I thought you said 9.5 natural. Iwas wondering about the .5 😄
Artificial insemination? or the mailman.
Artificial insemination? or the mailman.
I was hoping for cyborg
God your name cracks me up every time I see it lol.
That's what my wife calls her... nevermind.
I was wondering - half a child, or half natural?
I honestly appreciate people outing themselves by over-intellectualizing the merits of human reproduction.
Sincere advice: if your politics requires humanity *as a whole* to betray the reproductive function shared by all living things, those politics is a waste of time. Stick to totalizing enterprises that have at least some basis in history, like communism.
You’re in a very sad place indeed when “But they didn’t do communism *right*!” is actually a step up from what you’re peddling.
Tbh, I took his communism comment as sarcastic.
As did I. I was using "you" in the general case to express agreement with him, just as he used "your" in his post.
Yeah totalizing enterprise in governance, aka totalitarianism, is Bad, Actually is my brave hot take
I haven’t found a partner and that is why I don’t have kids. Part of my anti natal desire is just plain jealousy. I see some guy happily married with 2 kids and and don’t want that guy to get a tax break at my expense. He already has a great life why does he need more. I know it is childish
But that’s the emotional reaction.
On a policy level pro natal politics is the best way to make conservatives care about polices I agree with. On the environment level most of the global warming stuff is so our kids will have a better life the planet will be fine.
That is surprisingly and refreshingly honest.
Also, the only good thing about having kids, as they provide you with grandkids.
My advice is to just skip kids, and go straight to the grandkids.
This comment is going to stick with me for a long time. It's one of the most selfless things I've read online. It doesn't even come off in that "oh, I'm such a martyr" kind of way.
LOL "happily married with two kids." There's a whole lot of people who are just tolerating their marriages for the sake of the kids, and in any case there is a marriage *penalty* on your income taxes.
I know you can find someone with a wonderful wife and wonderful kids who is miserable person but you can find sad billionaires too. The tax system favors having kids if you compare worker to workers getting rid of the minor marriage penalty is the least pro natal thing we can do.
If you don't have children though you receive the benefit of large tax transfers from other people's children in your old age which surely cancels out the modest annual tax benefit for parents of young children.
Yea if your sufficiently pro immigration you can ignore that argument. Having, said that I know that when I am opposed to pro natal polices I am really just being a jealous punk. Also, on the old age stuff that assumes I will make it to that point and retire at that point. People die before 65 and people work into their 80s look at congress.
Online People don't have kids?
Like digital ones.
You must be incredibly fun to have around at parties.
Your arguments are ill-supported dreck, you bounce between ten of them in the span of an hour like a kangaroo on crack, and then you engage in drive-by sniping at anyone and everyone who doesn't accept them, along with a bunch of people who haven't spoken with you at all.
What the hell is your deal, that you feel the need to exude misery like this?
No, you don't. You just like to talk endlessly about how your whining and complaining means you care.
No one who feels compelled to come into a policy blog comment section under an anonymous username and post endlessly about how horrible ordinary people are and how great they themselves are for having some weird ideological leaning cares one iota about other people.
One of the things that always strikes me about this debate is the survey research that points to women having fewer children than they say that they want, by quite a bit. While revealed preference is often a better indicator than survey preference, it seems that our society is stacked against people building the actual lives they want. Education is too front loaded, and too expensive, changing careers is too hard.
And then for obvious political reasons we don't support or invest in kids as much as the elderly, which economically is nuts. (Krugman should take on the economic and racial case for social security and Medicare!)
I think that the traditional economic case for investing in kids is pretty strong. But there's also something of a human flourishing argument about giving people more opportunities to create the life they want.
There is a disconnect between the reality that women having less kids than they want against the discourse that focuses primarily on women being forced to have kids and society being to child centric.
The disconnect is that it is two different groups of women. Most feminists working professional class jobs have kids and want them. But feminists working professional class jobs are much more likely than the average woman to not want kids, prioritize their career and feel unwanted family pressure. Since they have a larger voice you hear more about the later than the former.
Both groups deserve respect. And addressing the massive fertility gap doesn't require and shouldn't result in any pressure on the women who don't want kids.
It is impossible to assure the human life you’ve created will be good and decent, and not miserable. It’s certainly important to try! But the idea that you are an artist creating another human to your personal specifications is kind of grandiose.
Kind of grandiose and guaranteed to produce disappointment all around.
Single best argument I saw in favor of having a second kid is to humble yourself about the extent of your impact to shape them in the long run.
Fascinating! Really, self-fulfillment is ultimately the only true motivation to do anything, even advocating for socialism or climate action 🤷🏻♀️
Who are you to decide people "are not actually putting meaningful effort in ensuring the lives of children are good and decent"?
And what is your evidence? Climate change will hit poorer countries much harder than rich ones. Uncontrolled climate change will make farming harder, but I have yet to see arguments that we can't science our way out of crop failures, and climate change is not entirely uncontrolled. Climate change can make the equatorial regions literally unlivable due to heat stress, but we're probably going to see a refugee crisis anyways.
Two native-born American parents reproducing in Kansas does not affect whether a Bangladeshi child drowns in climate-change induced flooding. Preventing them from having children _might_ make them adopt that Bangladeshi child, or induce policymakers to increase immigration, but those second-order effects are small. Whether the US acts as global hegemon in those poorer countries' interests is orthogonal to natalism.
This is only relevant if you think the marginal incremental person is so miserable that they’re better off not existing. If that were the case, we’d see a lot more “revealed preference” in the form of suicide. If anything, we see the opposite: suicide elevated in the precisely the places that *aren’t* growing!
> If you want effective altruism there is essentially no value to natalism.
This doesn't sound right to me, except insofar as effective altruism says that nothing you do in the rich world matters because it's so much more expensive than in poor nations.
That is because taken to the extreme affective altruism is BS. Don’t spend $5 taking the the bus to a BLM protest instead donate that money to buy bed nets. Or better yet drive for Uber and buy even more bed nets.
But this depends on a lot of assumptions about well-being. How do you measure the difference in well-being between existing vs. not-existing? This is in fact the basis of Parfit's arguments about the "Repugnant Conclusion": https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/
Moreover there's the question of agency. As I noted above, I have far less control over the downstream impact from deworming as opposed to from my own parenting. It is in fact not terribly far-fetched to suggest that I can have more impact in terms of well-being by raising my children well as opposed to spending all that money on deworming - again, this comes down to the enormous black box of how to quantify+value well-being that you're taking for granted (or worse, defining in such a way that you're reaching a very particular cynical conclusion.)
Effective altruism as an ideology doesn't need to make the case you're making because it's comparing *different kinds of altruism* - it's relatively trivial to argue that between helping ten people improve their well-being from a 1st world baseline, vs. helping 1000 people improve their well-being from a 3rd world baseline, helping the 1000 is more impactful. But that kind of comparison goes out the window when you stop treating the population and its distribution as fixed.
"People don't do that because they just don't give the much of a fuck" you should speak for yourself, I've thought about this quite a bit actually. I just reached different conclusions than you (apparently) did. If you want to claim that I'm just engaged in motivated reasoning and/or wrong, you'll need substantially better arguments than this.
Relevant to the discussion? To decision making around whether to encourage fertility?
I don’t see how this point about altruistic thinking follows from what you claimed earlier.
Your arguments are all over the place and it’s hard to follow what you think you’re arguing for
Who claimed most people are primarily motivated by altruism when having children? That’s obviously wrong and you’re just hitting irrelevant straw men
I think “poor Americans shouldn’t have children because they’ll be sad” is (a) empirically false and (b) much closer to a reductio against particularly anti-humanist, non-Millian versions of utilitarianism than an argument that will ever compel a psychologically normal human being
I guess that’s one way to dress up Benetarianism in effective altruist lingo but you’re still a Benetarian, which is still empirically false. People are generally happy.
Yes, a little bit. But given how few people die before adulthood these days, that bias is very tiny compared to the size of the effect.
The fact that a huge proportion of people forgo having additional children before reaching the number they truly want is ample evidence that this view is overblown. Obviously, in practice, the overwhelming majority of people put the needs of their children first.
So this sort of moralizing is not a real worry that should impact policy.
Reading between the lines of the responses you’re getting, it seems most of us believe that the effective altruism movement is a load of horseshit.
This is a place for the discussion of serious policy, not ivory-tower moralizing, divorced from all constraints imposed by reality.
Thank you for very effectively making my argument for me.
Not debatable. The evidence says that the overwhelming majority of children in developed world households are well cared for, even to the exclusion of other parental priorities. There is virtually nothing to indicate the opposite.
To add to that:
Humans are evolutionarily constrained to have our sense of self-worth wrapped up in reproduction. It is not possible to disentangle the two.
That said, we have a proxy question that we can use to understand whether people are primarily motivated by self actualization, or by altruism, once they’ve actually had children. That question is, “do people continue to have children that they want even if it will negatively impact their existing children’s standard of living?”
As already discussed in this thread, the answer is no. This clearly indicates that once children actually exist parents care for them primarily out of love/altruism. Most parents, anyway.
In other words: “I’m going to engage in rampant speculation regarding the motives of others and call it evidence.”
Krugman’s comment that Vance’s proposal was racist is a stark example of how accusations of racism can be used by the left to attack policies that are the exact opposite of racist.
Vance is himself contributing to the browning of America, with two mixed kids with his Indian wife. The idea that he’s got a hidden agenda of turning back white replacement is an offensive smear. I’m south Asian and have three kids with my Irish wife, for I suspect the same reason as Vance and his wife—our cultures both value children.
Look at other key proponents of pro-natal policies: Corey Booker and Kanye West. Say what you want about West’s mental health, his proposal to reduce abortion by giving women money to have kids is solidly rooted in Black Protestant views about family.
The reality is that it’s mostly Black and brown people in this country, along with “ethnic whites” like Irish and Italians, who highly value kids. It’s upper class white Protestant culture that’s fascinated with small families. (And people who have assimilated into it, like some Asians.)
You see a similar inversion with respect to school choice. Blacks and Latinos strongly support it, along with Republicans. So how do liberal whites (the only opponents) frame it? As a racist and segregationist policy.
I don’t think there’s a shred of evidence that ethnic Italian and Irish Americans are having appreciably larger families than the US (or even white) average these days. 1950s? Perhaps.
I’m making an inference: white ethnics (as opposed to WASPs) are more likely to vote Republican, and Republicans have higher fertility rates than Democrats.
Seems doubtful. The vast swath of US territory home to the most fervently Republican voters (WV, KY, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansans, etc) are also home to large numbers of White Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin.
I don't think these are the "White Protestants of Anglo-Saxon origin" that people mean when they use term "WASP".
Yes. The WASPs looked down on those people (mostly Scots-Irish, who are Anglo Saxon but not WASP) and white ethnics for having too many kids.
I agree broadly with the notion that framing many policies as "racist" is not useful and in most instances harmful.
That said, I don't think there's a large cultural component to this. Almost all of the differences we see both globally and at home are that wealth decides all.
Amusingly, at home and within other wealthy countries we see that birthrates, when plotted against income, look like a bowl, not a steady downward trend. Those who are wealthy enough not to have to make sacrifices to have more kids, unsurprisingly, do just that.
In the US, TFR bottoms out between 100 and 200k, then rises again after, as resource constraints fade.
There is a major cultural component. Republicans have much higher fertility rates than Democrats: https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advantage. That’s true even though most Black and Latino people are Democrats, who have much higher fertility rates than white Democrats.
Asians are the odd one here. On one hand, Asians who immigrate to the US tend to be high assimilated into local cultures with a lot of white Democrats. (Most Asians live in California and New York.) They also tend to be elites in their home countries, and have absorbed the west’s population control message over the last 50 years.
But South Asian culture, where Vance’s wife comes from, is strongly pro-natal. It’s not the biblical command to have as many kids as possible, but rather the strong expectations to fulfill your social role of becoming a mother or father. My extended family (who mostly immigrated to the west) all had exactly 2 kids, but a cousin saying they planned to have no kids would set the aunties aflutter.
When I read that analysis, I draw damned near the opposite conclusion regarding causation: material factors that tend to make people "conservative" in American terms also tend to make them have more children.
The biggest of those factors are income vs. local cost of living, and the affordability of housing, IMO.
But anyway, we're really grasping at straws here; there's no data for either of our theories at the micro-scale needed, and I'm not even sure, practically speaking, that they produce very different outcomes.
Krugman calling pro-natalist policies racist isn't intended to convince any moderates or conservatives, it's intended to signal allegiance to the blue tribe by attacking the red tribe
I agree, but it’s problematic. When white people call something racist, they’re drawing on the (limited) political capital of people of color. Insofar as that’s weaponized to attack policies that are good for people of color (or at least ones that people of color want), that’s appropriative and wrong.
I agree. I think it applies especially to accusations of "vague racism," or "something that *feels* racist even though its connection to bigotry or oppression can't be readily articulated."
I think the WASP tendency to have small families is contingent; early puritan settlers had tons of children. Perhaps it's the case that WASPs are more susceptible to fashions in these things than "white ethnics" and non-whites.
I'm still waiting on a source to accept the assertion that WASPs have a lower TFR than other Americans at the same level of wealth.
It's a fair point and TBF I took Ray's original assertion on faith because it sounded about right. I doubt an accurate statistic will be possible to obtain. It's very difficult to say who counts as a "WASP".
In fairness to his point, we know that non-whites have higher fertility than whites at every level of the income distribution in the US.
But we have no breakdown for WASP vs. "ethnic" white and no breakdown for recent immigrant vs other non-white.
My guess, and I acknowledge it as a guess based on the lack of data, is that the majority of the gap between white and non-white comes down to recent (1st and 2nd generation) immigrants from poorer countries.
I don't know that the same thing exists within the white population, and it's impossible to know.
The non-Hispanic white fertility rate differs quite sharply between states. It’s just 1.5 in Vermont, Maine, and New Hampshire. Under 1.4 in Rhode Island. These are low cost fairly rural states. Similarly rural states with large Scots Irish populations like Kentucky are at 1.9. States like Iowa with large German populations are around 1.8.
I am a mother of two, having those children in my 20s, and the wife of an immigrant. I also have one more on the way, and my husband and I would like to have a fourth before I'm 35. We live in a rural area, so day care can be difficult to find, but babysitters/nanny's are cheap, relatively. We are both professionals so we can afford it. The schools don't provide the best academics, but the teachers and staff are genuine. Also, my school-age daughter has a great friendship network. I can afford a tutor if I want my kids to grow further.
All that being said, I think the reason my family can grow this way is 1) we are professionals earning good money in a relative LCOL area (HCOL state though), 2) we had our first kid unplanned and just rolled with it (I was on WIC until I couldn't be - wonderful program), 3) while our family could not physically support us, they were able to send us money when things got hairy. (However, many families do take advantage of grandparents/relatives as cheap/free daycare)
This is just my view of the system as a mother and a worker, but as people have discussed, it wasn't necessarily the government programs that allow us to have the kids we want. It helped a lot, no question. But it was that our jobs provided the money to support it, and our family and friend networks supported us too.
I'm not alone up here in my rural area. I know many conservative and liberal families that all have 3 or more kids, but one or both parents have a great job (white collar and tradesman families).
All that being said, I think having more pro-natalism stance in our society is an excellent thing. Let's have more "mom" parking spots at groceries or more family/child programs (like how the YMCA used to be), but not necessarily free day-care for the whole country. When it comes to true pro-natalism, it's raising the wages of our current workers and providing job opportunities that give *living wages* that will actually increase native-born fertility rates.
Because why should mom go to work when it barely pays for the day care? However if less than half the check goes to day care for a few years, then when the kid is in school, they get the whole check, the family will be more likely think they can afford the amount of children they want.
The right has a point that we should just support mothers, not just working mothers. Half of women with kids under 18 would prefer a homemaker role: https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer-working-homemaking.aspx. Women without a college degree are 50% more likely to have that preference. (Given that skew, it may well be that the majority of moms of kids under 18 who lack a college degree would prefer to stay at home instead of working.)
There is a big focus on professional women, who tend to be the ones participating in these discussions. But we’re a wealthy society and we should also accommodate those non-professional women, many of whom think their efforts would be better spent at home.
People are often surprised by Krugman writing silly stuff given his career, but the most banal thing is for a hyper-accomplished academic to later decide to use his reputation to just say whatever nonsense he wants, as opposed to actually retiring and finding some other hobby. Krugman just happens to have a NYT column.
Based on this latest rant (and others) I feel like Krugman is still trapped on the cultural debates of the time he was most relevant, when the left was more unanimously obsessed with population control. It's also pretty weird to implicitly associate religiosity with whiteness.
"It's also pretty weird to implicitly associate religiosity with whiteness."
The only way I can explain how a large part of the American left talks about religion is that they appear to believe that non-whites have "culture" rather than "religion," i.e., religion as practiced in non-white communities is something like ethnic cuisine or clothing, something you do out of tradition not because you sincerely believe in it, whereas religion as practiced by whites is something done consciously and with malice aforethought, and thus is less worthy of respect.
You might be on to something. That's an old tension in many corners of the left: seeing themselves with the mainstream lens of the Enlightenment, the "others", minorities or foreign societies, with the lens of Rousseau's noble savage. An unconscious form of ethnocentrism.
Having read all the comments on this post, I suddenly had the crazy idea that it might be interesting to read what actual women have to say about the subject of having more babies.
There are at least a few women who have written in these comments! If other people here know of good places to read what women are saying about the subject of having more babies, maybe it would be good for them to post links here?
They consistently say they want more than they have? Honestly not sure where you're going with this.
E.g., have them answer the question, here are things government policy might do:
--Child allowance à la Biden’s proposal.
--Paid parental leave.
--Publicly funded summer camp and afterschool programming.
--Preschool for four-year-olds
How many more kids would you want with those in place? What are the biggest impediments to having more kids and how big do they loom compared to the lack of these policies ? (My uninformed guess is that these four policies rank well behind having more supportive businesses as well as more supportive partners and having these policies would be great but of marginal impact on the decision of number of kids to have.)
There isn't just encouraging people to have more kids, another option is to encourage people to have kids earlier. All else being equal you get more population growth if families are having children in their 20's instead of their 30's or 40's. That's another factor of slowing population growth besides the number of kids.
And having kids earlier means the opportunity for more kids. Every large family I know of with 4+ kids had their first kid in their 20's or late teens.
But the various economic and social realities of our society mean there is a very strong incentive for most people to delay having children. And that delay is getting longer, not shorter, as the current younger generation struggles with many issues from finding a partner to achieving a sufficient level of economic independence. For example, I have a handful of family members who really want a family and kids but, for whatever reason, can't find a partner. Their ages are 60, 45 and 35. The 60-year old finally partnered with a woman who has kids from an earlier marriage. The other two have pretty much given up.
I'm seeing more and more people who are single into their 40's and beyond. But I don't think government policy can really change that.
More generally, I'm skeptical that the family-friendly policies that Matt supports will provide enough incentive to actually increase the number of kids people have. Again, at least in my circle, no one I know proactively decides to have a kid or not based on government child policies and benefits. Where I think these policies would have the most effect is reducing the number of abortions from unplanned pregnancies, which is another potential sell point to skeptical right-wingers.
Figuring out how to make graduate school and early careers more child-friendly also seems like a good thing for the first point you mention.
One question I have on this is: Are people having kids later because of economics, or are people having kids later because they are, for non-economic reasons, deciding to form committed relationships later than they used to? The answer is obviously "both" but I do think the latter factor is a really big deal. And I would go so far as to say that isn't really a great social trend, i.e. a lot of people would be happier if they committed earlier. But I don't really see how government can influence people to do that (and even if it succeeded, it would probably end up playing out in the stupidest way possible).
Yeah, I also think that's a big issue. I'm Gen-X (52) and didn't get married or have kids until my 30's. That was primarily because I didn't find a partner. I was an introvert without a good social network and internet dating wasn't yet a thing. Flesh-and-blood social networks are even less prevalent today, but internet dating as a tool for finding a life partner doesn't seem to be that great of an option. So it appears to me that finding a partner is even harder for younger generations, especially women, who still are much less likely to "marry down" than men are.
And I agree that government policy isn't very good at changing any of this except maybe at the margins.
Internet dating is fantastic, IMO. I'd almost certainly still be single but for internet dating.
Internet dating is a circle of hell.
Interesting point about women being better/pickier and this making it harder to settle down earlier (women are finishing college now more than men, not on opioids as much, etc).
Aren’t there books on how men are currently doing poorly in terms of life outcomes?
1) one way to do this is to reduce the economic cost of staying in one place. Right now the standard model is: go to your local high school, then go somewhere completely different geographically for college, then go get a job in a major (or minor) city wherever you can for about 5 years (or go to graduate school in yet another completely different geographic location). By definition this means that you're either fumbling through a long-distance relationship for a decade+, or you're first capable of dating with the intent of marrying when you're 22. The opportunity cost of limiting yourself to a single geography is just astronomical. Remote work might wind up making a big difference here; remote higher education would make an ever bigger one (though I don't expect that to happen any time soon.)
2) These factors are themselves interrelated - I've heard (and felt) discomfort with the prospect of getting married until my career was on solid footing. It's not crazy either!
I think dating-to-marry in college can work out fine too, it's in part just a cultural thing. BYU and Notre Dame seem to produce tons of happy young marriages, but you and your partner have to both be up for early commitment, moving if necessary for the other's education, etc.
Can? Sure. Is it easier if you're going to the local state school and plan on staying local-ish when you graduate? Hell yeah.
The graduate school population is tiny and won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things, but sure, making graduate school more family-friendly is overall a good thing. I do agree to an extent when it comes to early careers, but the median age of marriage continues to rise - most people are single in their early careers.
I don't think anyone needs to proactively decide based on government policies to have an effect here. All you need is 5% of families who are hemming and hawing about another kid but struggling with daycare costs to not be struggling with daycare costs and go ahead and do it, to increase fertility from 1.81 to 1.86 or whatever.
I'm skeptical there will be an increase in fertility. Japan has a year of paid parental leave for fathers and mothers. Most of Europe as well has generous family policies, yet those policies don't seem to be substantially increasing birth rates there and current birth rates are lower than in the US.
Japan has an INCREDIBLY fucked up work culture where you're basically an indentured servant for life if you're white collar. I believe that that's changing but in that environment, sure, handing people cash is not going to make the difference. The US, thankfully, is not like that.
There's a bunch of research that's been done on the subject and while pro-natalist policies like these don't always work, they often do.
Sure, Japan is exceptional in that regard, but Europe is not. Europeans generally have a lot more government support for families than the US, yet still have lower birth rates. In the developed world, birth rates plummeted in the 1970's and have been relatively flat since then despite various changes in government policy.
That's not to say that we shouldn't have pro-natalist or pro-family policies. But I think we ought to be skeptical that those policies will result in a meaningful increase in birth rates.
I wouldn't be surprised if US TFR fell below Europe's TBH.
Like the evidence is yes you will get an increase in fertility but not much. You need 2.2 to break even of people. Going full France raises the birth rate from 1.4 to 1.45.
Conservatives say “omg you raised the quality of life of poor people and only got a .05 increase!!”
Liberals say we helped families and got a .05 birth rate uptick as bonus!
Just to clarify, I'm not against the family-friendly policies that MY listed in his post, I generally support them. I'm just skeptical they will do much to increase birth rates and have yet to see compelling evidence to the contrary.
TFR in France is much higher - 1.88
“It’s a big country full of kooks” will be my new mantra to chill myself out when I see nutpicking.
Assuming the different view points are going to be somewhat hereditary. Pro-natalist people will have bigger families, and those against will have smaller or none, I think its pretty easy to see who will win the argument in a few generations.
Personally, I just assume that in the greater scheme of History and civilization, the only way to win is to have as many descendants as possible in a few thousand years. Many of us are destined to be genetic dead-ends. All we can do is increase our odds that bits of our DNA code exist when we finally settle across the galaxy.
The main economic motivation to have lots of kids is as a retirement strategy. I have 5 kids. I'm hoping at least one of them strikes it rich and funds my retirement.
Personally, I'd like to see Matt troll the anti-natalists by having a few more kids. I hear that making them is fun.
Yes, I know I have added nothing constructive in this comment section. What can I say, my kids wore me out.
Also... child tax credit is good!
The historical record is clearly towards smaller families since the Industrial Revolution, which seems to be directly contrary to your assertion. I think the size of families is affected much more strongly by other factors than ideological pro-natalism as transferred across generations.
Yes but even a small difference at the margins, will eventually overwhelm all other factors. Also, raising kids will be so much easier when we have robotic servants to assist us. That is if artificial intelligence doesn’t go self-aware and just wipe out humans, in which case the conversation is mute.
I'm not sure about that. It's possible that as people have fewer kids the assistance expectation from parents will increase. That's obviously happened since the 70s.
Going forward will ability to pay for and provide transportation to activities, homework supervision and assistance, college expenses, down payment assistance, and on and on. Have a outsized impact on where one ends up in life.
In the past, richer people had more (surviving) children, as they had greater ability to support them.
But in the modern era, it's a bit more complicated.
The scope of the state and the general wealth of society means you'd need to be an *extremely* bad parent for your kids to actually starve.
As I understand it, fertility is now somewhat U-shaped, with the poor and the wealthy having more kids.
But there's nothing actually stopping a regular middle-class couple from having tons of kids and just deciding not to provide them the same lifestyle that their peers would think necessary.
"But there's nothing actually stopping a regular middle-class couple from having tons of kids and just deciding not to provide them the same lifestyle that their peers would think necessary."
Other than human nature. To use Adam Smith's example:
"A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct. "
If what is considered the linen shirt level of parenting increases then to go without the linen shirt is a really big deal. And a huge actual impediment.
"But there's nothing actually stopping a regular middle-class couple from having tons of kids and just deciding not to provide them the same lifestyle that their peers would think necessary."
Is this the comment version of subtweeting me?
Call me by name next time.
Lol yes I had seen your comment before responding to BZC and I guess I was kind of responding to that too.
Only for the types of parents that have few kids. Those of us with big families don't do crap for our kids, teaches resilience and independence.
My 15-year old just got accepted to the South Carolina School for Science and Math (11th and 12th public boarding school - top school in State). She applied as a Freshman and got in anyway. Her mother and I literally did nothing... not a damn thing to help her. She wrote the essays, solicited recommendation letters, set up the zoom interviews. We have never taken her to a museum. Don't help her with her homework. Definitely mediocre parents at best. Whereas I invested a lot of time with my oldest son and he works as a dishwasher in Scotland. (Though he did just enroll in University to study computer science).
As far as funding costs, I say we make peoples social security contributions inversely proportional to their contribution to future tax payers. People with zero kids would have to contribute 20% of income. Phase it out at 4 kids. Seems fair to me considering its kids of today that will have to wipe their asses of the future.
"Those of us with big families don't do crap for our kids, teaches resilience and independence."
And in many cases the next generation sees how much harder things have been and says we don't want that for our kids.
I don't know. I'm more likely to hear people say... kids have it way easier than ours. But peoples stated preferences and revealed preferences are two different things.
This isn't so much an issue when its 1952 and everyone has 4 or 5 kids. You're peers are all in the same boat. But when everyone else is an only or has only one sibling...
> Personally, I'd like to see Matt troll the anti-natalists by having a few more kids. I hear that making them is fun.
This is how I’ve decided to troll the white supremacists complaining about replacement, as well as the anti-natal left.
I'm confused... by having kids or not having kids?
By having kids. Am brown.
I'm confused... by having kids or not having kids?
"I'm hoping at least one of them strikes it rich and funds my retirement."
Have you run the numbers on how much you'd retire with if you didn't have kids and instead invested that money in a nice index fund? I think that's an important part of the issue. If most people were relying on a pension then having 0 or 1 kid and having 5 kids wouldn't matter nearly so much. When you're self funding your retirement that's a much bigger issue.
That calculation would make sense, if I wasn’t naturally terrible with money. So my choice was between spending it on kids, or on hobbies. Spinach a non-kids, sucked up all my time so I didn’t miss not having hobbies. It was a win.
*spending all my time on kids…
Everytime I hear this issue discussed, someone brings up that Scandinavian countries have great family leave policies and robust welfare states, but these haven't had much of an effect on fertility. I'm all for these policies on humanitarian and economic grounds, but what does the evidence say about how much they boost fertility?
So the short answer is robust family polices only slightly increases birth rates. Conservative pro natal people complain that you spend all this money and go from 1.4 to 1.45 so what is the point of providing a better quality of life to families.
Liberals say let’s improve families quality of life and get an extra.05 birth rate as a bonus.
Sure, but when you’re gunning for 1 billion Americans, every little bit helps.
It looks like fertility rates are in line with other developed countries, including the US. Although there's a noteworthy gap between the US/Nordic countries (clocking ~1.8-1.9) and Japan and some southern European countries (~1.4 or so)
https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/total-fertility-rate/country-comparison
Overall *population growth* is strong, however:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_countries#Demographics
US birth rates have dropped significantly recently to 1.6 or so.
In 2010 it was 1.85
South Korea is below 1 now.
I agree with this take. It is true that robust family leave policies and robust welfare states, if constructed carefully, do seem to raise the birth rate (e.g., Scandinavia, Netherlands, etc.). It's also a modest effect, say 0.2 children or the equivalent. What does seem to raise the birth rate is politics, national solidarity, and the perception of threat. So France has much higher birth rates than you would expect, and part of it is the extensive pro-natalism policies it has. The reason it has these is because France historically had a well-developed economy and lots of fecund arable land and so had higher population densities than its neighbors. This changed in the 19th century, when France went through the demographic transition, and France lost relative power and could no longer boss around western and central Europe, annexing land from its neighbors. Germany grew more quickly in population, and many of the pro-natalist policies are justified to resist the German threat, and at some level are still thought of that way. Another country with anomalously high fertility rates relative to its level of economic development is Israel, which also has strong pro-natalist policies, for the same reason. It is outnumbered by its enemies and views population growth as essential for national security.
In 2017 French fertility rates were 1.77 native born and 2.60 immigrant, with the latter comprising 20% of births. 1.77 is still higher than the 1.5 EU average, but has been monotonically declining for some time (https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_POPSOC_568_0001--french-fertility-is-the-highest-in.htm). The Nordic countries, with very generous child support policies, are barely above the rest of the EU in terms of TFR.
I'm all for making it easier to raise and support children, but this is pretty weak tea for actually increasing the population or even significantly slowly a demographic decline.
I know polls show that people (or maybe just women) would like to have more children than they currently do and you can believe that or not, but I think it's hard to conclude that governmental policy would make a significant difference one way or the other.
Immigrant births don't count? Immigrants almost always have more kids than the native-born. I agree with you that pro-natalism policies don't have a strong effect on the birth rate, except when they combine with strongly held cultural/social trends. France (and Israel) have been working hard for a very long time to raise birth rates, and seem relatively successful relative to other countries. I don't think it is just the pro-natal policies, I also think it is the viewed security threat.
Sure they count. I highlighted it as a compositional effect that helps keep French TFRs higher than other EU countries with smaller immigrant populations.
Yes, and part of the reason France has higher immigration is that they push pro-natalism and "la mission civilasatrice'. I don't think you can straight decouple these.
I believe this is also true of Japan. Douthat wrote a book on the broader issues of what he calls “decadence” recently. Birth rates of the west a major aspect of it. I think we’re still left scratching our heads as to why birth rates are so low.
However, I did recently read something about how this might reverse itself because western birth rates are so heavily focused among people who either want to have children, or can’t control themselves from having children. This might lead to a “generation of breeders.” Not sure I fully agree but was at least an interesting thought.
That thread by Krugman is really muddled... I wasn't sure what he was arguing until I read his column today (and he still doesn't engage with pro-natalism on substance).
While I agree that pro-natalism isn't inherently racist, the fact is that "white people are being outbred" has been a talking point in right-wing circles since at least the 80s, with Tucker Carlson and JD Vance espousing this recently. I'm not sure that weakens the argument for those policies, but it's not a fringe idea (unless you consider the entire Republican party to be fringe, which...).
I agree with you that it’s been a thing. But is it a relevant thing? Especially given that these policies actually help more non-white people. If your opponent is in the middle of making an unforced error, why interrupt them?
Yeah, I'm not feeling terrible motivated to try to argue someone out of supporting my policy preferences.
Well, the flip side of this argument has been to marshal forces against immigration in the name of protecting White Christendom. ONE BILLION AMERICANS is both pro-natalist and pro-immigration.
Yeah so fight them on the immigration stuff and don’t on the breeding stuff. You can even propose it as a trade! Oh man mr. Vance it really kills me to support your efforts to help white people have kids and maintain their political support in this country, but I’ll take it for immigration liberalization. I wish I wasn’t up against such a clever negotiator like you!
It's been a talking point by racists since the 19th Century really; that's part of where things like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 comes from.
The range countries with under-replacement fertility is really wide and interesting. Look it up on wikipedia if you're interested. It includes not just all the developed European and Asian countries that you'd expect to see, but also many less- developed countries: Brazil, Iran, Bangladesh (by some estimates), Myanmar and Thailand. Maybe half of Latina and America and the Caribbean. Cuba and Puerto Rico are especially low. Especially PR.
In Bangladesh, at least, it was a direct result of major western family planning efforts. (My dad spent much of his career on this.)
In many ways it’s a good thing. Obviously educating and empowering women reduces birth rates. It improves outcomes for everyone. In the long run I’m a little concerned the west exported an anti-natal ideology—let’s face it, from a paternalistic WASP point of view—that will cause these societies to peak and then decline.
It’s really become part of the culture. Even after we immigrated to the US, and my brother and I are now solidly in the top 1%, my parents were kind of horrified when my wife and I we decided to have three kids.
Bangladesh is the most densely populated non-microstate on the planet, by a pretty overwhelming margin over the next large state on the list.
Getting concerned that its TFR is going to plunge off a cliff when it has 160 million people, is still growing rapidly, and has a TFR right around replacement... is very much putting the cart before the horse, IMO.
Just taking women out of near-bondage seems to be enough to take TFR from 7 to around 2.5, so seeing it at 2 in a rapidly developing country with decent rights for women is not terribly surprising.
Maybe but you could have said the same thing for Taiwan or Singapore or etc.
The possibility that it suffers population decline in the future is simply not a concern at the moment. It's half again as dense as Taiwan, in an area of the world uniquely vulnerable to climate change, with a still relatively poor populace.
It has bigger problems than the biggest "first-world problem" out there, and certainly shouldn't be accounting for that in policy-making for quite a while.
In any case, Bangladesh's fertility is almost certain to go off a cliff at some point. Why? For the same reason that this happened in Japan, Taiwan, and Singapore; extremely dense populations make it hard for the bulk of "normal folk" to afford living space sufficient to raise large families.
That the US is managing to replicate the same failing with none of the geographic constraints is the result of profound stupidity. We need to build more freaking houses.
But the reality is that we have no idea what demographics will look like in 50 years. I wouldn't be too wedded to any one set of beliefs on the matter because it's impossible to know whether changes in fertility will be a problem, a positive development, or just a neutral backdrop.
Sure there's a policy lever to make people more religious: dismantle the social safety net. Krugman has it backwards; Republicans oppose support for families because a mother who can stand on her own two feet, thanks to government programs available to her as an individual unmediated by traditional institutions, is a free actor, liberated from dependence on a (possibly abusive) husband, a (possibly abusive) birth family, or a (possibly abusive, or just incongruous with her own convictions) church community. Conservatives do not think it is feasible or desirable for people to construe themselves as free individuals outside of a web of social ties, and many do not think it is healthy for women to aspire to the same freedom to set one's own course in the world as men. Hence the relative absence of religious conservatives proposing policies to make parenting easier: they would rather make independence harder, to keep people beholden to family and faith.
This is at least part of why every level of religious disaffiliation in the US is progressively more male, with atheists the most disproportionate. People literally turn to their churches for financial support, and women have less money on average and still shoulder more of the burden of child and elder care. The social safety net also seems to me to be the strongest reason why Western Europe is less religious than the US. (Being a superpower engaged in an existential geopolitical rivalry against a formally atheist opponent probably also contributed.)
And what do you know, which European country has notably high fertility levels for a rich country, a generous social safety net for new parents, a notably small gender gap in religiosity for a majority-Christian country (per Pew https://www.pewforum.org/2016/03/22/women-more-likely-than-men-to-affiliate-with-a-religion/), and a long tradition of leftist anticlericalism? Yes: France, the most underrated (by Americans) European country.
This is a view of religious institutions that could only be held by someone with extremely limited experience with them. Religious people are not motivated by material concerns, you don’t need to be religious to access church-funded social services, and on a variety of metrics regular churchgoers are better-off than non-attendees.
"Religious people are not motivated by material concerns"
That's quite a generalization, Haven't you heard of the prosperity gospel?
The prevalence of the prosperity gospel is vastly overstated in popular discourse, it's really fringe even among Evangelicals outside of old times televangelists. I've heard it's reasonably big in Brazilian Evangelical churches though.
> a mother who can stand on her own two feet, thanks to government programs available to her as an individual unmediated by traditional institutions, is a free actor, liberated from dependence on a (possibly abusive) husband, a (possibly abusive) birth family, or a (possibly abusive, or just incongruous with her own convictions) church community.
The idea that the welfare state causes the disintegration of family and community has long been a conservative talking point. I've never seen anyone in the wild actually argue that this is a _good_ thing and a point in the welfare state's favor.
There's a large strand of liberal thought about the virtues of people developing independence from potentially oppressive social ties. Every gay person who grew up in a small town and moved to the big city and felt the anonymity as a breath of freedom and fresh air thinks something like this is a good thing.
It seems like the foreign policy reasons to have more kids are also really strong. If we double our population we don't need to also double our military budget. So our per capita military spending can be lower. And if we have a huge population then other countries like China will be less likely to try to compete with us militarily so maybe we can mutually lower our military expenditures.
So Krugman says that the population balance won't be that problematic based on the Social Security projection which indicates Social Security as a percentage of GDP will go from about 5% to about 6% between now and 2075 (most of that increase occurs between now and 2035 and then it stays roughly flat after).
But this assumes a Total Fertility Rate of roughly 1.9 births/woman during that time. Why would we assume that is the worst case scenario given many other countries have much lower TFRs? Perhaps significant pro-natalist intervention is required to maintain this. Surely Krugman would concede a South Korea-like TFR of .98 would create significant problems for the economy over the next 50 years.