Why aren’t More People have Kids? Why do not more people have kids? What do we need to know about fertility and population decline around the world?
Why do not more people have kids? What has made the sexes not like each other? Would you marry and have children if your government paid you? Alice Evans might have some answers to these questions. Alice Evans, welcome to Interesting Times. Indeed. Thank you so much. Is it correct that you are a sociologist at King’s College London? Yes. I believe you are working on a book about the decline of fertility around the world and the social forces that contribute to it. And those include, in particular, the failure of men and women to relate to one another and pair off. I am particularly interested in talking to you because of those issues. I want to try and quantify the problem before we talk about why population decline is happening, and I hope that some of our audience will be aware that I haven’t been focused on this issue for a long time. What do we mean by declining fertility and population decline? fertility is collapsing all at once Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa have all seen their rates go down, even though they are still very high. And economically, this has catastrophic implications for middle income countries, because as you have an aging population, then older people typically have lower rates of labor force participation. They’re less economically productive. Young people who are productive and innovative are the ones who start new companies. As the economy ages, it becomes more sluggish. The younger people who need to pay for elderly health care or pension costs are either through savings or taxes. A massive fiscal squeeze is created by that when governments or individuals have to spend more money due to the rising dependency rates. And if we’re concerned with things like climate change mitigation, the governments just won’t have enough money to spend on extra costs if you’re spending more on old people. And on top of this, if younger people are saving more as they are in China, then they’re going to be spending less. So that has a knock-on effect on the entire economy. When did you become interested in the fertility crisis? The focus of your first project was on gender equality in developing countries. How did this issue- which I should say- it has long been the province to be kind to ourselves, right-wing- cranks. How did this issue become a big part of your focus? So I think fertility and women’s choices and men’s choices about how many children they want, that’s always come up in my interviews because I’m always interested in: What do you want to do for your life? So I’ve got so much data on this going back for the past 15 years. I was encouraged to have another child by the women while I was in Zambia. You need to have a baby. You must have a baby.” It was so important for them. This is what I tell my colleagues too. It isn’t just Zambia. So I was constantly pestered and then I think in East Asia, in South Korea, where I was looking at the data so intensely and I was having so many of my interviews, and I just realized it was so omnipresent. And then I looked at the data more broadly. So I think going to South Korea is really what fertility killed me, so to speak. And a country like South Korea has a fertility rate of 0.7, right? It’s assumed that the population will go from 50 million to 20 million over the course of two generations. Let’s say between 15 and 20 million. Is that correct? I’m just trying to give people a sense that when we talk about in these with the numbers we have now, when we talk about the reason you use a term like population collapse is we aren’t talking about a kind of gentle slide from to above replacement fertility to slightly below replacement fertility, where you need to adjust the retirement age so that people stay in the workforce five years longer. Cities are empty, buildings are standing empty, economies are grinding to a halt and just seeing a country that has gone furthest down. Yes, absolutely. And you see it, you see it in Italy, too, for example, when you get off the train in Rome, you see the pet store rather than the kids store. We took our family to Rome, and we are trying to find a store for children. And it turned out that there was an important children’s chain that had closed a bunch of its places. But also, when I traveled around Italy the hill towns are empty, right. The rural areas are aging and emptying the big cities. There were people there. And so they stay densely populated even if they’re having fewer kids. And so this can actually end up being kind of invisible in an interesting way. Because if you’re in the big city, there are more people there than ever. And so you think to yourself, well, how can there be how can there be a population crisis. One more thing would be what I would say. I teach on international development as a part of my job as a social scientist. I’m interested in how economic outcomes can help with the idea of abundance. I study culture as well. So it’s the interconnection between all these economic consequences of our cultural choices. So O.K, why is this happening. And just before you tell us, I think it’s safe to say, everyone has a particular pet theory. So if you talk to people on the political left for a long time, they would insist that it’s just a problem of the provision of public services. And they would say, the developed world just needs to become more like Scandinavia in terms of paid leave and parental support. People on the right conservatives were more likely to talk about the decline of religion and a sense of moral obligation to the future. You have people who focus right now, especially in developed countries, on climate change and say, oh, the young people don’t want to have kids because they’re afraid of the human future. And you’ll have people who say, look, this is just about women’s choices, right. This is just. Women are less likely to choose to have kids once the society has become more equal. And this is where we end up. And all of these arguments have problems. It is hard to fit them all to the general trend. And especially since places have been heading towards the cliff in recent years. All of the generous benefits. What do you think is the master theory of this? Let me add that point to it. Left wing progressives say that Sweden is family friendly. Universal childcare is available. It’s easier to be a workingmother.com. But actually the US has higher fertility. So that signals to us that theory isn’t working. In Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey and Tamil Nadu, the fertility rates are crashing because of a theory that it is all about women’s choices and liberalism. Something is happening in the past 15 years, everywhere at once, across different economies, governance and welfare systems, and across vastly different levels of liberalism. Those theories seem to be a poor fit for comparative analysis and the recent global plummet. A huge rise in singles has happened in Sweden over the last few years. Hugely there are more and more and more people living in single occupier households, and this reflects a global trend. So this rise in singles, you frame it as a kind of crisis of coupling. Can you explain how that crisis came about and why? In your view, the leading explanation for the larger trends we’ve been talking about. If we look at data for a number of countries, we see that there is increasing number of people staying with one another. That is, they are neither married nor cohabiting. So in the US. There are half of the people between the ages of 18 and 34 who are neither married nor cohabiting. They are single. It is the case in a lot of Latin America, East Asia, Korea, and China. Those rates of I chat to all my Chinese students. Many are single. No plans, no expectations, no desire to be married. That is a huge global amount of drag. So if people are staying single, that is closely correlated. If we look at the data, the decline in people being married or couples is almost one to one. The correlation between the decline in children and the US and China is more closely correlated than anywhere else in the world. And across many countries. The data is so strong. Thecoupling crisis seems to be linked to technology. I think that is what it is. Certainly so I think we can say, there could be locally specific factors that go on in each place. I don’t want to ignore the cultural quirks that each place has. Absolutely. The large improvement in personal online entertainment is a big shock. Everyone in the US is a podcaster. That’s right. So people are spending more. I think that is the thing. I do blame charismatic people like you. If people want to socialize, to listen. This is a new podcast. It’s played no role at all yet. O.K. you protest. You’re distracting and distracting the young people of America. O.K, O.K. You’re totally innocent. There is an increase in online entertainment, whether it’s watching shows onNetflix or sports bets. Online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America. More broadly. You can. What Go on. Pornhub online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram and play Call of Duty world of Warcraft. We are all becoming one of things, not being single. We are all taking a break into the digital world. And I think that’s partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home. You can work from home. It is so engaging in many of the apps that you get distracted by the constant dopamine hits as each app, and technology companies are competing against each other to keep their users hooked. The tech is taking away from personal interactions. That’s my fear. And that holds, then, as a global explanation, because even though there’s tons of variation in internet access, and so on, smartphone penetration is a global phenomenon. You go you go to India and Africa and you find people with smartphones. And there’s the big difference that sub-Saharan Africa has much, much lower rates of smartphone penetration. So as the iPhone moves across sub-Saharan Africa, you would expect fertility rates to fall. But so how much of this. You just mentioned distraction, right? Entertainment right that it’s easier to it’s easier to play video game than go to a bar. It would be easier to do sports gambling at home than it would be to meet a nice lady at the racetrack. How much of it is distraction, and how much it might say digital segregation of women and men, where they aren’t just going online but they’re not interacting with each other. That’s true. In person, I think male female friendships are crucial in driving gender equality because as you come to care about someone, as a friend, as you hear about how the day was, or the kind of things they don’t remember, it’s important for you to know that they are And the women were saying that they didn’t like it when guys were rowdy or aggressive, or when one of his female friends was approached by a guy He called her a puta after she said no to him. He called her, a whore or something. She was telling her friend that it was distressing. She didn’t like it. He understands that because he cared for her friend. And he moderated his own behavior. And I think that building trust, rapport, understanding of what offends or not even just offense, but having a sense of what matters to the other person. So I absolutely agree that retreating into these digital spaces of solitude harms our understanding and also our solidarity more broadly. We care about other people. Right No, well, no. One of the features of modern politics around the developed world is the fact that the sexes are not always on the same wavelength. Where And it was, I think, less extreme in the end, in the most recent US election than some people had anticipated. But I wonder too, if there’s a feedback loop here, where the sexes don’t interact and therefore are more likely to marriage and relationships are themselves a moderating influence in an interesting way. I think that is true. And so people don’t have that influence and then they go online. You will see a lot of liberal women and a lot of conservative men on social media performing their politics. Those are not your politics. You don’t have a relationship with those people. It just seems a lot easier to create a kind of hostile generalization about right wing men or left wing feminists. If you’re having face to face interaction. I agree with everything you said, and I think that it is important to have intimate partnerships in order to build mutual understanding and common ground. That said, I don’t think this is just about men not understanding women. Many men are from Mars and many women are from Venus. For example, if you look at modern trends like the discourse of secular monks, which says a guy will spend a young American man, will I eat some of these specific macros? I’ll have 200 grams of protein. I’ll spend two hours on the bike. That’s a guy with no friends. A guy is taking care of his body. He is not building friends and he is notStrengthening. He’s not building rapport. He’s not becoming a funny, charismatic guy. So this isn’t just the gender issue. It’s a solitude issue of people losing their capacity, losing the social skills to charm and make friends. And if you don’t have a network that is socially active, then even if you wanted to go out, no one is. And so it’s all reinforcing, right. What about the economy, besides the phone? Young men falling behind young women in education is a world that has entered into digital life. Men with lower levels of education are having I think, a particularly hard time finding a mate or pairing off. College educated women’s marriage rate is down a bit, according to trends in the US. Women without a college degree, the marriage rate is way down. Absolutely. And so one way to look at this is that men are losing a certain kind of status. They care about status. When they lose status, they become more sexist, hostile to women, and less attractive to women. Is that the only way to look at it? I think we can think about it in two different ways. So certainly as women increasingly enter the labor force and get higher skills, then they can be more economically independent and they can choose to be alone. So they would only marry if a guy is charming if they find love. The phones may be hurting that. If the guy gives a package of good that is attractive, entertaining or money. You money is impressive for many of us. So I think that the most disadvantaged guys certainly may struggle to offer an appealing package. The marriage rates are falling chiefly for men who have less money and who are less likely to stay home with their parents, because they cannot offer an attractive package of goods. I should just say that it’s not entirely that young men are getting less educated, rather that the most disadvantaged men are struggling in education. I think the aspect is related to economics. And what do you think a man is supposed to do in this kind of situation. There is a male reaction to the economic landscape which is toxic, anti-female, misogynist, and lashing out at the same time as there is a cultural script that states it is good for women to be. You don’t need a man. And women still like male status. Men are not the only ones who want status. The women like it. There is a lot of data on women. It is possible for a man to potentially earn more than them. A person can be a source of income. Maybe not all the time. But if you’re going to have kids, it’s nice to have a man, a man around, right. For a period of time, who can be the primary earner? It’s not that women want to marry men who have less education than them, or men who make less money than them. So those men are in a trap that isn’t just created by their own sense of masculine identity. It was created by women who preferred 100 percent of the economic structure. The open ended question is: What can bring the sexes back together? So I think that if it’s the case that technology is the major friction, then we need to look at the political economy, because each tech company to be successful, they want to distract us and Hoover up our attention for as long as possible for as much as possible. The market mechanism is against something. And my concern is that tech companies are just becoming so much more engaging, more affable, more charismatic more shocking. Endure Mr beast. Oh, what is he going to do, that is so engaging right? If tech surpasses our social connections, then the rise in solitude seems to be happening, too. And so I honestly don’t know the answers, but here are a couple of things we should do. We should ponder about how we regulate technology. So Jonathan Haidt has really done fantastic work in encouraging phones, free schools, for example. And that would be important in enabling young people to actually talk to each other to play in the parks, to chat, to make jokes, to learn how to make jokes so it become less anxious. I think that’s really important, but it’s clearly not a sufficient solution because US as adults are also vulnerable to just getting sucked into all these things. It is relatively easy in a liberal individualist society to say “we need to make a certain set of social changes that impose”, and that is what strikes me about his ideas. Kids are the great, which makes the exception not fit within liberal social. They’re not really part of the social contract and so on. And he’s gotten a lot of traction, I think there will be. There is already. But there will increasingly be an attempt to master the lure of the virtual as it applies, especially to younger kids. I can not see how you can get your kids to join an adult life online once you get them further into adolescence. It is really hard for me to see how a political restriction could be accepted by people of all ages. Maybe some people in the US will think that we have done a bit of a mistake in this sports betting experiment. Maybe it wasn’t the right idea to promote sports gambling. In on every TV network that airs a baseball game or something. It does seem harder to discern how adult distraction can cause social restrictions. What do you think? It is very difficult and politically difficult. I believe there are two tensions. One is both the demand and the supply that as humans become more hooked and dependent on these personal online entertainment, then we want to protect those freedoms. All the various companies are going to lobby in order to prevent any kind of restrictions and regulations. Even if a church building program or a program to champion the church was being dreamed up, the church is not going to let it go to waste. Or even if you’re doing something secular a community fair or community festival, some people may well say, as they so often do, hey, I’ll rather just stay home in my pajamas and enjoy whatever on TV. And you can choose exactly what you want on TV. There is culture apart from politics. While culture is determined to some degree by tech, the way the phone makes culture is its own thing. The issue of declining birthrates is not something that a lot of elite Western culture takes seriously. It’s not something that’s entered into the mainstream cultural mind, the way that, say, the threat of climate change has done. If this became a more important part of the cultural imaginary, you could imagine a kind of self conscious attempt to treat it as an important issue. So let’s say, right now, people in Hollywood would feel bad. If it was said that they weren’t doing anything to fight climate change or making romantic comedies, that wouldn’t be true anymore. There’s still a few. But like, are there cultural scripts that could be written, whether in movies or TV or elsewhere, that you think could actually make a difference. I think so. I think it would be great if Hollywood supported that. And in fact, as a joker, last year, I even wrote a comedy script about how Hollywood could support fertility and things like that. But let me add, so even though I’m totally on board with that, and I think that’s very important, there are several frictions because one, it’s very difficult to do cultural engineering today because if you’re not, we have infinite options of entertainment at our fingertips on Netflix and everything. Maybe you are interested in a romantic comedy, if you are not. It is very difficult to do cultural engineering on top ofdivorce in China, since a lot of the most popular films are about divorce. People who use their phones too much might not have the social skills to do it. I think that a mechanism that could be used is to give enormous tax incentives to people who have children because it is a positive externality. That is where most people have gone for a long time. With models in Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary of the conservative government trying to boost the birthrate or increase the marriagerate through incentives, you have people on the left and the right. Do those work. That is a good question. The present evidence suggests that pro-natal incentives have not reversed the downward trend. So far. Even when the governments give them, that doesn’t seem to work. It’s possible, however, that were financial incentives sufficiently large that could change. Hungary suggests to women with two kids that they don’t have to pay taxes again. Now, that’s a pretty big giveaway. The marriage crisis also needs to be solved. I believe that is a thing to explore. The Fed can look into the taxation system. I think my impression is, as you say. In part, it’s these policies can work, but you have to spend incredibly large sums to do it, which gets harder when your country is experiencing economic decline caused by falling birthrates. Yeah. And then also your gains are like they get swamped by larger effects. I think Hungary pushed the birthrate up from 1.3 to 1.6. Making your investment is reaping marginal gains, which I think is worth it. It could mean hundreds of thousands of lives potentially, but it’s not actually a fix. What about religion. Overall, it’s the case that religious people tend to have more kids than secular people. Do those differential birthrates mean that the secular western world will eventually become more religious since only religious people will be having kids? What is the role religion plays? Definitely. I think it is difficult to deny that. So for example, in Britain Muslims have much higher fertility. So Britain will see a big increase in a larger Muslim, more politically active population. So that will have huge political consequences. And so if liberal secular people don’t have kids, they will have less political influence. We see it in Israel, too, that the Hasidic Jews, the ultra conservative, I think they typically have six kids each. So again, that is changing the political bent of Israel’s foreign policy. These demographic implications are huge in every single country. Is it necessary for a certain type of Separatism to have big effects? There is a separate religious community of the ultra-orthodox in Israel. And my reading of the literature for Muslims in the UK and in Europe is the more those communities integrate, the more their birthrates rates converge with the European norm. And the same goes in the US. I don’t know. I do not believe in prophecies of a massive religious revival. The religious advantage seems more important if birthrates are falling fast. And then maybe at maybe the opposite end of the spectrum of possibilities from traditional religion. You have reproductive technology offered as a kind of response. So if you go so there is a big pro-natalism conference that was held recently in the US that attracted a lot of media attention because of course, it was filled with a lot of very curious characters, some of whom are my friends, some of whom are not. Everyone that was there said it was a mixture of serious religious people and Silicon Valley people who thought that there would be a technological solution. And maybe the solution is artificial wombs, maybe it’s a cure for menopause that extends female reproductive life deeper into deeper into middle age or something. What effect is reproductive technology had so far. Do you think that the trend is mitigated by the use of fertility drugs? That is a good question. I think in the vast majority of cases worldwide, a very small share of births are IVF. That said, were the technology to have greater success rates and to be more accessible and more affordable, we might see greater uptake because it addresses a fundamental issue of expanding women’s reproductive freedom if people want to spend their seconds finding themselves or focusing on greedy jobs, becoming ultra, ultra demanding climbing the career ladder. And in their seconds, they’re still struggling to find someone. But maybe in their late seconds, they do. So lots of data suggests that people do tend to couple up a bit later because they’re coupling up a bit later, so I can’t predict that people are going to eventually couple up. Of the society who were single in their seconds but ended up with the one they were looking for at 40, a fraction are still alive. But then that’s the real trouble that at age 40. TikTok and women’s wombs are no longer at 100 percent And so that’s where for that particular subgroup, that IVF could be really, really helpful in enhancing women’s reproductive freedoms and enabling the couplings, the couples that form later to have more choices, to have more freedoms and expand. Right now, it is difficult and costly to get a fertility treatment, and the chances of success are very low. Unreliable, right. And isn’t there a danger. And I think you see this in some professional class circles, where it’s seen as a reason why it’s safe to postpone marriage and fertility. You have the companies offering egg freezing services, that are unreliable guarantors of fertility. So when I look at that landscape right now, I wonder if for every benefit to fertility you get from assisted reproduction, if there isn’t a cultural sense that O.K, I can put this off, that then ends in disappointment when it turns out that the tech is not all that people expect it to be. I understand that. So let’s call it a moral hazard that if you pipe up a fertility solution, then people might put off children. That is theoretically possible. I don’t want to dismiss it. But if we look at the Pew data, for Americans under 35, you’ve got half of them saying they’re single. And of those singles, the vast majority say they feel no pressure to couple up, no pressure to be in a relationship and perfectly happy with the status quo. And I don’t think those secular monks we were talking about say I will find a woman in about 20 years and we’ll use in-vivo fertilization. I don’t think that is a thing for IVF, partly because of what you say, but more so because of my interviews. Many people don’t like it that IVF is unreliable and expensive. So if IVF was currently cheap and everyone thought it was great, but we were all deluded and the scientists were deluding us and we were all overestimating its potential, then I think that explanation would have some credence. I think the hazard is possible, but I don’t think it’s a big I don’t think it’s going on right now. But then do you think I mean, it seems like. If you apply the logic, we can say that you could reliably extend female fertility by 10 years. That doesn’t actually solve the coupling crisis, right. It may end up meaning you have more. You have some women who don’t pair off, don’t partner up but end up having a child. It is more difficult to raise your own children than it is here. So even people who want children outside of a coupled situation are going, even if they have a kid, they’ll probably have fewer kids. And yeah, it just seems like you’re still stuck in the same general trap. You can add a little to the reproductive life cycle. So let me say that I think, given our recent discussion, each of these possible interventions has limited efficacy. Evidently there is no magic bullet. And given the enormity of the fertility crisis, what I as a researcher would really like to see or be so many different initiatives and pilot initiatives, how can we build community groups. Let’s go back to religion. I think that building a sense of community is a good thing for religions. So I spent a lot of time in small town Alabama, and I went to local Bible study, and I went to churches and I chatted to the community and that’s really, really important. In singing hymns together and praying together, that builds a sense of cohesion. Secular organizations can also do those collective rituals. So we can organize, we can try 100 different things, let 100 flowers bloom. Try to see how we can regulate technology at some points in time, in some ventures, and see all these little community events. And let’s see how we can increase women’s reproductive freedoms, and let’s see what we can do with the tax system and fiscal incentives. So I don’t think any one of these things will fix it unilaterally. But I would like to see everyone right and left focus on this issue, understand the real driving forces and try to target those. We aren’t doing that at the moment. Right But the whole but to the extent that you can tie all of that together. So you wrote a fascinating paper recently about the Islamic religious revival. This is the so this is the broad trend across the Muslim world towards increasing piety and religious practice that helped define the late 20th century. It was not expected. One of the arguments you make in the paper, is that there is an element of prestige here. It’s really important to note that a lot of Islamic schools did a great job of making Islam seem prestigious, and revivalists did a great job as well. And so, in a way, aren’t we talking we’re talking about a similar problem here, right. In the end, you’re trying to make both coupling and kids. I think those things together prestigious in a way that they aren’t right now. I agree, I agree. Can you do that in a world where everyone is able to create their own echo chamber on their phone?Cultural engineering is difficult in a world where everyone can create their own echo chamber. My ambitions have been limited in the 21st century. Do you Do you have a certain type of ambition? That was a joke by British people. Sorry, no. I mean, no. This is what I mean. Well, but this is the. I guess it’s another interesting question. Is that we’re talking about this in the context of primarily of liberal democracies. But all of the trends that you describe apply to places like the People’s Republic of China. Yes China’s birthrate is headed towards South Korean levels. China is totalitarian, but you can argue about it. A society with a state and a leadership class that think naturally in terms of five year plans and social engineering, is certainly an authoritarian society. And they are I mean, they take the fertility crisis seriously. Do you think that China will be able to survive through social engineering? Not at all. Not at all. I don’t think they seem to understand it at all. And actually, even though I totally agree that China has masterminded masterminded massive success with electric vehicles, for example, or innovation, they can’t seem to encourage people to couple up and have babies. Two examples of limits of cultural engineering are given to you. So on little red book, when I chat to my students, if you type in fertility in Little Red book, which is their version of Instagram. So if you type in fertility and I’d encourage you to do this, download the app and do it. You will get all this antenatal propaganda. This is really shocking and I have previously written about it. It’ll be all these horrifying images about how your vagina gets destroyed and your body is destroyed, and it’s the most painful experience of your life. It is frightening and gory. All these girls are appalled by this. I never want to do it. So despite all the censorship and the great firewall of China, all that exists on top of that, young women will upload video blogs celebrating their independent life. So check out my apartment. I plan on cutting this piece of food. And I’m living as an independent person glorifying and in many ways rewriting the script, challenging expectations of marriage, et cetera. It is consistent with my interviews with Chinese women and it is being passed by the censors. I want to stay on that idea of the pain of pregnancy and childbirth because this is more speculative. But we’ve been talking about virtual life as a distraction from reality. From physical reality, a distraction from going out to a bar and meeting someone, or just hanging out with friends and getting introduced to someone. But isn’t there also a way in which I mean, it is true that sex is dangerous. It is high risk. There is a high risk of fatal consequences to pregnant women. It is more dangerous for women to have children than it is for men. It’s obvious. For obvious reasons. Do you think virtual life makes it seem like physical and painful human life is riskier than it is just by virtue of your phone? You’re not connected with your body in a more direct way than usual. I just wonder if this kind of propaganda about what reproduction does and how dangerous it is fastens more easily in minds that are already a little bit detached from their own embodiment. Let me say, I think that’s an interesting hypothesis, but I think you see young people still doing things that are painful. So whether it’s young women, trying to get an Instagram face and having fillers and Botox and painful things, or men spending painful times at the gym, being secular makes people do painful stuff. I think the more direct causal link is people spending time on their phones and then feeling anxious about chatting to people at the bar. But maybe not pain. But maybe there it’s more a kind of idealized fantasy of youth, because Yes, people are willing to go through painful processes of calisthenic activity and facial surgery. And so on. Both of those things for men and women are attempts to retain a kind of eternal youth. I’m just trying to get us to think about the philosophy a bit. But the act, I mean, I had hair right before I started having kids. The entering, entering into Parenthood is inherently a confrontation with your own mortality. I think it’s possible that people seem to be wanting to extend the freedom and the lack of responsibility that they already possess, as well as some people saying that they don’t necessarily want marriage and kids because it comes with that. And I think this could be even more salient than the pain of pregnancy. Like, imagine if you’re a guy in a pretty crappy labor market with lots of informal labor, lots of insecurity, lots of massive financial shocks and crises and inflationary pressures. Do you think I should commit to a woman and say that we are going to raise two kids together and feel all that strain and responsibility? Do I just want to chill out and play Call of Duty? So that, I think, is that’s a really salient I mean, I think that progressives have generally underestimated how much women benefit from, as you were saying earlier, making that commitment of monogamous, permanent devotion and support. Feminism has championed freedoms and shared care work, but the people that actually listen to those messages are men with strong emotional connections and like to spend time with their wives. And now many men are saying, maybe I don’t want those things. Maybe that is not what I need. And that’s a hugely important, an under-told aspect of this global story. We have been talking about solutions and responses but overall we are describing a problem where there is not a single solution. There might be a large number of small bore responses that make some kind of difference, but basically the low fertility future, the population crash is going to happen right in most places. Yes, almost certainly there is not going to be a worldwide pro fertility mobilization that suddenly reverses birthrates and takes these trends off the table. So I just want to I just want to speculate at the end. What does what does that future look like. What if the trends continue and the world looks similar in 2080? So I am reluctant to make predictions. These aren’t predictions. I want to be clear. These are imaginative speculations. If fertility continues to decline and we are either ineffective or inactive, then certainly. And simultaneously, we do not have a large rise in immigration, which is super productive and super economically active. And simultaneously, we do not see a massive boom in AI productivity. If none of those countervailing forces happen, then we are all going to become poorer. It is possible that it is politically. Also, we might see some shifts with a rising support for more conservative groups. Say, just say a little more about the politics. What is it that means when you speak of being more conservative? Oh, so for example, in the US. Who have more kids is Republicans. Republicans will win more elections because of fertility in Europe. We will just all become much poorer. Our public services will continue to deteriorate, and we will have less spending power. Europe is in economic doom and the US could be better because they will get the most productive migrants, most entrepreneurial migrants. But they should also become, if we’re right, more conservative and more Republican. So it’s just so it’s just replacement like. Conservatives have more kids. Liberals have more. Conservatives are in control of the future. I think there are political adaptations, too. Like you can see in Europe already with some of the populist parties. Yes this sense of we’re trying to protect the aging society. We want to keep immigrants out because they threaten a culture that is disappearing, while we ourselves haven’t had enough kids. I don’t People worry about the authoritarianism of that type of politics. I think there is a pull towardsauthoritarianism. But it seems like, in a weird way, the opposite of an aggressive, 20th century fascism that wants to make Hungary or Germany or Austria great. It’s more this kind of cocooned authoritarianism. It seems like you will get novel forms of politics in this environment. Well, I think certainly that if people grow up with a certain standard of living and a certain quality of public services, and then those deteriorate as a result of population aging and lower rates of economic dynamism, then people should get Fed up and frustrated simultaneously as people spend more time on their phones, hooked on these echo chambers, polarizing differently, not just by gender but polarizing, then the less time that we spend socializing with different other people, the less we develop understanding right across genders, right across political groups. And as we become more illiberal, I would predict that would fuel political authoritarianism, because those guys are the bad guys and will do anything to stop them from winning, and will support our strongman to stop those crazy people winning. It is a bad future so I would just expect lots of economic frustration and support for illiberalism. It seems like a very dark future. The problem of a low fertility trap is what I am talking about. Is that once a society gets old enough and its democracy, the older voters are just going to keep voting for benefits for older people. That’s right, exactly. And it’s going to keep and it’s still going to be difficult. It will be hard to get the government to spend money on the young people even if you need them. So absolutely, Yes. So you’ll have this political lobby group of old people who are directly concerned with pensions and health care rather than economic dynamism and frictions. If we want to be a young person that can have it, we should go back to the disadvantage men. It’s harder to move upwards as a disadvantaged man and harder to get a wife if the entire voting system is rigged by these old people who don’t care so much about you. Just to keep being speculative, the world in this future will have more empty spaces. China has spent 20 years building all of these huge cities. And if China’s population falls by half, those cities will be empty. Big, big regions, big rural regions of Latin America will be empty and so on. Yes right. So sometimes when I’m trying to be optimistic and I don’t want to end on a super optimistic note, because the point of this show is that people should be alarmed and concerned by this. But Yes, there are ways in which a young person could look at that world and say, O.K the mega cities of Western Europe and North America are actually bad places to be young, but there’s a kind of reopened frontier in Uruguay or Eastern Europe or the hinterlands of China or something. I don’t think that’s true because, I mean, in China, when you talk about those cities, those tower blocks, those big blocks, that’s a China is currently dealing with massive local government debt because so much of the local governments, their assets are in buildings that no one is buying. So that’s not a win. Those empty cities are no sense of win. There’s no can’t don’t. Nobody is moving to those cities because they don’t have any jobs or demand. I think I want to be like a pirate. Like imagine imagine that you were like a 19th century, would be desperado. I think of groups with high intentionality. This new world will reward people who are intentional about things like getting married and having children, but also maybe about building a community and trying to find space in one of the spaces created by the retreat of the human race. So let me say I think that previously. It is possible that it would be amazing. And I’d love to see it if some community group forged a space in the US and O.K, how can we arrange this community space. Maybe it’s 100 households, how can we arrange it in a pro coupling pro fertility way. That would be fascinating to explore, but just because there’s a plot of vacant land, I wouldn’t expect anything to follow. You have kids of your own. I don’t. O.K, so I have kids, and my kids are maybe tired of hearing their father mention to them, just occasionally that global population is going to collapse over the course of their lifetime. So normal children of New York Times’ employees are worried about climate change. My children are worried about what demographic will be. I know. I keep trying to prod you towards optimism, but what would you what would you say to the children of this future. When I talk to my kids about it, I try to frame it as an opportunity. It was stated that the world is going to grow old but you will have agency and you will have opportunities to shape a world with fewer young people to compete with. And maybe your horizons will widen. What do you think about the future of young people? They should probably have some kids as well. There are two things on that. So I think first of all, it’s really important that the young people understand the economic implications. They do the same as we do. Climate breakdown. First and foremost. And that’s what I do in my lectures. I think that’s the reason so many young Americans are unhappy, because there’s a lot of this driven by the rise of singles. A lot of young people in one of the richest countries are lonely and unhappy. And one of the most unique and wonderful things that we have as humans is to find people to love and care for and build emotional connections and devotion and support each other and understand each other. So going back to the writing, the Hollywood script, I would go back for those Rom coms and celebrate the romantic love, because when people shift their focus from celebrating the freedoms or secular monks of the seconds to thinking more about O.K, how can I build friendships and romantic love. When you get people finding love earlier you should encourage a higher rate of grappling. So I think the romantic love would be my optimistic, positive focus that I think would restore both socializing friendships, mutual understanding, empathy, happiness and down the line fertility. O.K, so we’re ending on an agreement of a massive government program to subsidize a new revival of Jane Austen adaptations for the 21st century. On that note, Alice Evans, thank you so much for joining me. I would like to thank you.
What Have Parents Done Recently About Parenthood? A Journey Through Time with Thoughts and Thought in the Words of Philip Larkin
How many times had I read a version of these lines or heard them recited? The opening stanza of Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” is a favorite of fictional shrinks and wise folk. I can say the words by heart. I had just begun to feel better after a year with a new life, and I read the poem again and found myself thinking of what had happened in the first two paragraphs:
There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend. People aren’t having kids because it’s too expensive. They’re not having kids because they can’t find the right partner. Climate change and the idea of bringing a child onto a broken planet are why they aren’t having kids. They’re swearing off parenthood because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they’re perennially commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem so daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. It’s possible that women are having fewer children because they can.
I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past several decades, Americans have redefined what constitutes abuse, neglect, and trauma, in order to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children appear increasingly more likely to cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood, and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.
The new standard for parenting has been contributed to by this cultural shift. We, our children, expect parents to give us shelter, food, safety and love and to keep an eye on us as we progress into adulthood, but they also need to get us off to a good start in our careers.