So the fertility debate is back. There’s been big pieces in the New York Times, the Financial Times, from Derek Thompson, who’s been writing a lot about this as well. And it feels like we’re sort of contending with a very unusual moment where birth rates are crashing, not just in the US and Europe, but in the developing world as well. And one of the stats that really struck me recently was the fact that Mexico, Tunisia, and Iran now have lower fertility rates than the US. So this is not a rich country/poor country kind of thing. It’s something that is broadly universal. We want to get a better sense of what’s going on. There’s a lot of explanations for why this might be the case, and there isn’t really an agreement. But we will try in this episode to come to some kind of understanding. We’re joined by Lyman Stone, who is really one of the leading demographers who explores these questions around fertility rates. He’s a senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He’s also the director of research at the consulting firm Demographic Intelligence. Lyman, welcome.
Lyman Stone: It’s great to be with you.
Shadi Hamid: So maybe just to get started, what are you making of this recent uptick in debate and argument around this issue? Why is it kind of catching more steam now?
Maybe give us a summary of just how bad is it? Because I think that’s something that’s hard for a lot of people to get their heads around. Is this really something people should be freaking out about?
Lyman Stone: One thing that I think we should freak out about is the example of Thailand. Just to kind of give people some background, Thailand’s fertility rate is 0.8. That means that the average woman has 0.8 children. The replacement rate — which we can talk about — is 2.1, which is what you need to keep population stable over time without immigration. So if Thailand continues having a 0.8 fertility rate, one estimate is that it would have only 2 million people in 200 years. And that was going around on Twitter and people were commenting on that, which was really a remarkable thing for me to see, because I just would never have seen it as that stark. Thailand’s not a rich country.
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, exactly. So anyway, take it away and tell us what’s going on.
Lyman Stone: So there has been, in the last several years, just really rapidly growing interest in the topic of falling fertility. I mean, definitely some of that is because you could call it the Elon effect — Elon cares about it, and so he gets people talking about it. But that’s not all that’s going on. The main thing happening is just fertility keeps falling in lots of countries around the world. And as it goes down, more people notice. And a lot of these explanations for why you wouldn’t have to worry about it start to sound less persuasive. When we say, well, you know, you don’t need to worry about a short-term decline in fertility because it might come back up in a few years and it’s just a tempo effect — but when you’re looking at a decline that’s been going on continuously for 20 years, you start to think, wait, it’s not coming back up, is it? So part of what’s just going on is just that people are catching up to the reality of events, and that fertility is not coming back up. It doesn’t seem like this is just a passing thing. That’s not to say it’s never going to come back up, but just, this is clearly something that’s going to be with us for a little while.
And in terms of, well, why would people care about that? I think people intuit a lot of reasons to care about falling fertility. People might intuitively understand that if there’s just fewer young people in society, it’s harder to support old people. So you can think about something like Social Security, pension plans, things like that. But there are plenty of other reasons people might intuit that falling fertility is a problem too. They might see it as just fundamentally sad to not have babies around and kids. They might worry about the economic effects of fewer young people to grow the economy and contribute to innovation, since young people account for a disproportionate share of innovation and entrepreneurship and patenting. There’s any number of reasons people could worry about this. If you’re South Korea or Taiwan or Ukraine, you might worry about it because it might threaten your ability to field an army to defend your country. If you are Estonia or Latvia or Hungary or Liechtenstein or Malta, you might worry about it — because saying, oh, in 200 years there will only be 2 million Thai people, well, 2 million is still a lot and 200 years is a long time. But what if you’re a country that only has a million people right now? In 50 years, you’re like, well, there’s still going to be 100,000 of us. But what you’re saying is your language is going to go extinct and your whole culture is going to die. So that sounds very scary.
So people have all kinds of reasons that they worry about this. For me personally, I’m not insensible to those kinds of macroeconomic worries or things like that. But my main worry is actually a different one. When people get into their 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, if they go into those years without children or with fewer children than they wanted to have, it’s associated with a lot of worse outcomes, particularly for mental health. Ending your reproductive years with a different number of children than you want to have is associated with much worse mental health, less happiness, less meaning in life. Ageing without family is associated with much greater costs of ageing, with worse health outcomes. The reality is the people who will take best care of old people are their children. And so if they don’t have children, or if they have too few children to take care of them, the result is just a lot of misery in the world. A lot of people who will spend decades of their life realizing that they missed the boat on having any connection to what comes after them. And so regardless of the macroeconomic effects, just the human cost on that — I see that as a pressing problem.
Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah, so Lyman, I imagine you have a lot of armchair public policy experts who like to weigh in on this fertility crisis.
Lyman Stone: I do.
Matthew Kaemingk: And I wonder if you could sort of outline for us some of the big myths that you are constantly coming up against — what this fertility crisis means, what causes it, and what are the quick solutions, the quick fixes. What do you come across? What are the armchair takes on this?
Lyman Stone: That’s a great question. So the most common one is, well, isn’t fertility declining just because people are rich nowadays? And as soon as someone says that — they say this because it’s received wisdom — oh, we’re a rich society, so we don’t have kids anymore. But then you just ask why. Like, if I had infinite money, personally, like, would that make me not have kids? No, it wouldn’t. So what is it about being rich? Well, it turns out actually a country getting richer doesn’t necessarily reduce fertility. Individuals getting richer doesn’t necessarily reduce fertility. In fact, fertility tends to go up with male income in particular. With women, it’s much more complicated because there’s also kind of a management challenge there. So what is it that actually leads to this association between wealth and fertility that causes people to just deeply believe that fertility decline is like an inevitable element of modernity? I could get into that a bit, but suffice to say for that first myth — the simple reality is, when income goes up, babies don’t go down. It’s just not true. There’s other elements of economic, structural, and cultural modernity that cause low fertility. It’s not actually the prosperity side of it that does that.
Now, one of the things that does do it is child mortality. As more kids survive, people have fewer kids, because humans are family-size targeters. We’re not live-birth targeters. We’re family-size targeters. And those are different things. People want to raise a certain number of children, which is why when children die, fertility tends to go up. That is, if you’re reproductive age and your child dies, your odds of having another child go up, not down. You’d think it might go down because of the trauma of losing a kid — but the reality is humans, as a species and as a general rule, are family-size targeters. We replace mortality. So first big myth: more money, less babies. It’s not true. The best studies suggest more money, more babies — and there’s just other things happening in modernity.
Another one is about the sexual revolution and contraception. A lot of people believe the reason fertility is declining is because of the sexual revolution and contraception. Obviously, we can’t fully untangle broadly shared social trends like sex being separated from marriage — that’s going to be hard to fully untangle. But by and large, this is not the main source of falling fertility. Fertility was below replacement in many contexts before modern contraception was available. Then it rose during the baby boom, and then it fell again after the pill. The best explanation is actually that fertility during the baby boom was so much higher than what people actually wanted — basically because they were having early marriage but high child survival, so they were raising a lot of kids that they weren’t prepared to raise — that there was so much demand for contraception that in some sense demand summoned the pill into existence, you could say. Which is kind of a strange way of thinking about innovation, but endogenous innovation is actually a very plausible theory of why and what innovation happens. So it’s not contraception. It’s not income.
Another one people often get at is basically women’s rights. Okay, fertility is low because we let women vote and have rights and speak and preach or whatever. So maybe it’s these uppity women ruining the fertility rate. And it actually turns out not to be that either. While there is a correlation between various measures of women’s social position and fertility rates, the reality is that nowadays, countries where women earn a larger share of income actually have much higher fertility rates than similar-income countries where women earn less. Families that have highly egalitarian norms do not necessarily have the lowest fertility rates in society. It tends to be that the highest fertility rates are your very conservative families, and then your lowest fertility rates tend to be your gender-moderate families. You kind of have to pick a family model. You can’t just kind of do one half-heartedly — you have to pick one. And if you try to just kind of muddle through, your divorce rates are really high and your number of children ever born are really low. So you either have to egalitarian-max or trad-max. You have options, but you have to pick one. The reality is humans benefit from scripts, from clear roles. Most of our choices are not deeply considered individual choices — they are following scripts.
So I’d say those are three big myths: that this is basically about contraception, this is basically about income, this is basically about women’s rights. And it’s really not about any of those. We see places where women don’t have access to contraception, where women don’t have many legal rights, and where they are not very rich — and we still see fertility falling.
Shadi Hamid: What about women just entering the workforce in larger numbers? That’s a little bit different than women’s rights, and that gets at — if women are getting more education, they’re delaying marriage for longer periods of time. They’re prioritizing sometimes their own career over building a family. And that seems to be a shift that is somewhat universal, even in relatively religious countries in the Middle East. The Middle East fertility rates are crashing too, as I alluded to with the examples of Iran and Tunisia, but also Egypt for that matter.
Tell us a little bit more about the workplace environment and the economic — the fact that women don’t need men. They don’t need — they can choose to be married now, where in a previous era, it was the default. No one really questioned whether or not you would get married — you had to, unless you were a very weird person. But now women have more options. And as men fall behind and become more disappointing on a number of measures, whether it’s employment or college graduation, women are not finding partners who are equivalent to them in terms of educational attainment.
Lyman Stone: Yeah. So women entering the workforce — as women entered the workforce, there was some negative effect on fertility, particularly because at that time employers really would refuse to keep moms in the workforce. I mean, it wasn’t just the women’s choice. It was that employers often just said, well, you’re having a baby, you’re gone. So you see these huge motherhood penalties in like the ’40s, ’50s, ’60s, where when women would have a kid, their odds of being able to remain employed would just plummet. Today, it’s way smaller. Motherhood penalties are way smaller. Women have a kid, their employer doesn’t fire them for it. In fact, that’s illegal in most developed countries. And many women choose to compatibilize these things. And so today, fertility of working women is still maybe a bit smaller than stay-at-home moms, but the gap has shrunk. And at the country level, countries where women have higher labour force participation rates — at least among OECD countries — don’t necessarily have lower fertility rates. So it doesn’t seem like that’s some inevitable effect.
Now, more interestingly, you brought up the question of the essentiality of marriage, and that does matter. You can kind of decompose fertility into, I guess, three parts. One is entrance into a stable union — usually a marriage, but legal marriage doesn’t always map onto a union that’s expected to be stable; there are different cross-cultural norms around legal marriage — but a stable union. And then you can think of sexual and reproductive behaviour within unions and outside of unions. So: three components — sexual and reproductive behaviour in unions, outside of unions, and then just odds of being in a stable partnership of some kind. It turns out that most fertility decline over the last 20 years, and over the last 100 years — including most fertility increases during the baby boom — can be explained by changes in union formation, not reproductive behaviour within union status. Now, there are exceptions to that rule. That’s not the whole story. The exact country and period you look at is going to change things. Does union status explain 40% of fertility change? Does it explain 60%? Does it explain 90%? There’s variety by time and place. But a huge share of change in fertility is just the fact that people aren’t marrying as much as they used to — and that they’re marrying later.
Shadi Hamid: Marrying later. Yeah.
Lyman Stone: They’re spending fewer reproductive years in a stable union. They are — to put my nerdy demographer hat on for a second — they have fewer fecundity-weighted years of exposure to a reproductive union.
Shadi Hamid: All right. No more sexy talk.
Lyman Stone: Talk demographer to me. So what we’re saying here is — if we just imagined that being 23 and married just exposes you to a hazard of having a baby — which it does, fact check true — what if we just imagined that people just kind of didn’t manage their fertility? They just had the married-person rate if they were married, or the unmarried-person rate if they weren’t. And we just manipulated the odds of being married. We’re saying that your odds of being married are basically the real thing shaping your odds of having kids. And that really is the case in most countries in most periods. And that being the case, a lot of the fertility discussion really just has to be a question of why are people marrying?
And part of this is, like you said, women’s expectations of men have definitely changed. Most women still tend to have a preference for men who are at least socioeconomic peers, and ideally have strong earning potential and educational background — although earnings are more important than education, empirically. Women are more tolerant of a man who’s less educated but earns well than they are of a man who’s educated but doesn’t earn well. But that being said, men’s preferences have changed as well. And you can actually see this — men increasingly prefer women who have earning potential. Women earning money was a strong predictor of not getting married 100 years ago. It’s not anymore. In fact, if you’re a young woman who wants to get married quickly, going to college and getting a good job is probably a really good choice. Not going to college is probably not a great choice if you want to get married and have kids, because nowadays your odds of getting married are much higher if you go to college, if you’re a woman. So I don’t think we want to see this as just women’s preferences changing, because clearly what men value in a partner has changed as well — they value a peer, someone who can keep up. If you’re a man and you think of your family project as kind of building your empire — which, for better or worse, is how a lot of map-game-brained men kind of think about their family life, it’s like this project they’re building — then you don’t want to bring on your senior VP or co-president of the family company who can’t keep up.
Matthew Kaemingk: So I’m going to make a little shift here. I grew up in Seattle — beautiful place, full of lovely people. But children are thin on the ground in Seattle. And my wife and I had three boys there. We were a bit of an oddity. We were, I think, 35 years old and had three kids. And it was not just that we were odd, but life was actually kind of difficult in Seattle with three children. It just sort of felt culturally like it wasn’t a place that was very accommodating to a larger family. And I would imagine families of four and five would have even more difficulty. Cities are tricky for my family, it gets me thinking — to your earlier point that birth rates don’t just bounce up — what happens to a culture and a city when it’s not used to lots of children for an extended period of time? Does it become less hospitable to children? And does that play a role in why, once birth rates go down, it’s so hard to turn it around?
I recently had a speaking engagement in Hong Kong where my first child was born. And so I thought, okay, I’m not paying for the airfare or the hotel room, so I’m going to bring my two older kids — my six-year-old and my four-year-old — with me. And we had a great time. We saw a bunch of old friends, friends who are basically family — actually, some godparents. And we did some sightseeing. My kids enjoyed staying in this swanky conference hotel — they thought it was the greatest thing ever. And people were so happy to have my kids around, because Hong Kong has very low fertility. They’re like, oh, it’s so wonderful you brought kids! Of course the family-speaker guy brought his kids! People were so hospitable and welcoming, and they loved having our kids there. Every single interaction my kids had with anybody was so, so positive, because kids are so rare in Hong Kong — they just really want to accommodate and welcome.
And that’s the problem. When my kids needed anything — is your kid thirsty? Let us go get them a water bottle. Do you need a snack? Let us go get them a snack. To walk two kids from the conference room back to the hotel room, we’re going to send two staffers to accompany your kids on the walk. And I’m like, my kid is six — she can push an elevator button. There begins to become not so much a culture of non-welcome, but a culture of fragility and of ignorance. For example, the hotel we stayed in — fantastic hotel, loved it — I had me and my two kids and then my nephew came to help me with my girls. So four of us in a hotel room. I just didn’t think that would be an issue. That’s not weird. But when I reached out to the hotel a week before the conference — hey, I’m looking for stuff for my kids to do during the day, I know you have some activities in the hotel, can you walk me through what they are? — he said, oh, how many kids do you have? And I’m like, I’m going to have two small kids and my teenage nephew with me. He said, oh, you know, we’re three people per room maximum. And I just thought, wait — so you actually have a legal limit on that? That’s basically a one-child policy for hotels. What’s the plan here? Oh, book a second room. Well, let’s just say this was not a hotel where I could afford to book a second room.
But it was this amazing moment, because the hotel did have activities for my kids — a scavenger hunt, a mocktail class where they went up to like the penthouse bar and the bartender taught them to make juice mocktails, shake up their drinks, all this. They had so much fun. But it was a hotel designed for one-child families.
Lyman Stone: I mean, that seems like more of a cultural issue than a political issue. It is cultural. But it’s cultural in a way that the society was not hostile to kids — they were so welcoming and accommodating to kids. It was a society that just could not even see its blind spots. They thought they were family-friendly. This hotel advertises itself as a premier family hotel in Asia. But I think we still haven’t found the smoking gun. We’ve touched on a few different factors that play some contributing role. And then there are obvious ones like housing affordability, and there’s a lot of data that seems to suggest that plays at least some role, although it’s not an overwhelming role. It seems that a lot of different factors play different roles and it’s very hard to isolate the variables.
That said, recently I think there’s been some commentators who have really been harping on the smartphone explanation — that we see a drop in fertility rates across the globe when those countries had mass adoption of smartphones, for example. And in one of your pieces, you make, I think, a related argument that a culture of selfishness is to blame.
Shadi Hamid: So how about this — can you just tell us what the predominant factor is, if you had to choose one?
Lyman Stone: I love that you used the smoking gun metaphor, because the real story of who killed fertility is that it wasn’t one bullet. It was a firing squad. There are a lot of factors. So it’s not going to be fully reduced. The biggest one is just declining marriage. It just is. But why did marriage decline? And there are many stories at different periods: a shift in educational timing, adulthood got pushed later. As long as you’re in the student social position, you’re a child. Just is the case. I will walk across the stage next week or two weeks from now and get my PhD. So technically I’ll stop being a child in two weeks. So don’t worry, I dunked on myself there, not just on other people.
There’s all kinds of factors. Declining marriage is a big one. But in the last 20 years or so, we have seen an unusual decline in fertility. What I mean by unusual is a decline that’s hard to explain through a lot of the other factors we would usually use. It wasn’t a big change in contraceptive usage. It wasn’t just a change in marriage — although there was a change in marriage, the decline in marriage accelerated. We see this big decline in fertility across lots of countries all over the world. And at the same time, we see a digital revolution: smartphones, Netflix, streaming devices, tablets, everybody having a computer, a globally interconnected community of communication. And a lot of people theorize that these might be related.
And what I have argued — and I will say there’s evidence for this, but it’s not done being proven, there’s still a debate to be had — is that the reason the digital revolution is reducing fertility is twofold. One is social incapacitation. Basically, solo leisure — leisure by yourself — is getting really good, really entertaining. You can do more by yourself than you used to be able to do. Video games, pornography, you can stream endless stuff online, social media. You can even pretend like you have friends. You can even get on a podcast and talk to people.
What you can do alone has greatly expanded, whereas the stuff you can do together kind of hasn’t. We didn’t invent a great new sport in the last few years. We didn’t invent a new way to hang out. We’ve basically hit peak performance on hanging out. As a result, it’s become easier and easier to be alone and more and more pleasant to be alone. So it’s not just fertility that’s falling. It’s not just marriage. It’s sex. It’s dating. It’s just hanging out. People just spend less time together with friends, with peers, with acquaintances. We’re seeing a decline in a lot of indicators — criminality, young people don’t get driver’s licences as much, they don’t go to parties, they don’t drink as much. As a Lutheran, that one’s really a threat to my faith. There’s all kinds of changes in social life.
Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah. So let me interrupt you there, because I want to play out this half-baked thought I’ve been having recently, and maybe you can help me out with it. So I grew up in 1990s evangelical subculture, where it seems like in the ’80s and the ’90s, the big concern for evangelical parents was: my kid’s going to go out, he’s going to date, he’s going to have premarital sex, somebody’s going to get pregnant. Are they going to do drugs or alcohol? They’re going to go out with their friends and they’re going to cause trouble. And so the church amassed a set of ways to guard against that — a whole degree of technologies to keep kids from having sex or getting drunk or getting arrested or whatever. And I wonder — is there now — I want to pivot towards religion here. And Shadi, I imagine from your own Muslim community there were some similar concerns about dating and sex and whatnot. But I find myself as a parent of a teenager right now, actually encouraging him to go out and talk to girls. I’m wanting him to go hang out with his friends. And he’s wanting to stay home and play video games. He’ll talk to his friends while he plays video games, but it’s a disembodied connection. And I’m actually — my Christian-ness is saying, no, girls are good. You shouldn’t be scared of girls. You should go talk to them. You should engage, and learn, and make mistakes, and be out there. As a Christian father and just as a theologian, I’m actually pushing him towards these things that my parents would have been warning against. So it seems like there’s almost this reversal that needs to happen within Christian families — actually developing a positive theology of the body, of sex, of all of this stuff.
Lyman Stone: In religious communities, we used to have a technology for dealing with teens going out and sleeping with each other. And it was called a shotgun. And they just got married. And then we stopped doing that. I think there were some good reasons for abandoning that particular strategy. But then it was — yeah, we need to prevent teen pregnancy, so we’re not going to make the kids get married anymore, because we think marriage should come later in life. And I think it’s worth noting the extent to which religious communities in North America really did come to develop an unstated theology of marriage — that marriage comes later in life. A lot of Christians are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of someone marrying at 18. They feel in their gut that that’s wrong, that it’s not God’s design, it’s not the best stewardship of your life. And you run into this when you actually start pushing on this issue, as I often end up doing in churches — people just really deeply feel that this is wrong. And they have a hard time articulating theologically why.
But stipulating that we’re not going back to that, we then said, okay, we just really have to prevent — okay. Because if we’re not going to give them the virtuous option of marriage — we basically told all the young people in our communities, you’re no longer allowed to have the virtue of marriage, it’s off limits until you’re 25 or 22 — so you can’t have that virtue. So instead we have to really double down on the virtue of chastity. We have to really purity-max. Because that’s not what historic Christians did. They didn’t purity-max. They just got married. It was like, oh, she’s cute, we went in the barn, that was a mistake, solution: we’re married.
Matthew Kaemingk: Well, I mean, don’t go in for romance novels, buddy. That was a terrible story.
So Shadi, as you listen to these two Christians go back and forth, I wonder — from your own Muslim community, in terms of dating and getting married — how are you seeing this play out in your own story and in the Muslim community?
Shadi Hamid: I think there’s now a general expectation that you don’t get married too early. So I think that even with religious people, there is a secularization effect. They’re affected by the broader cultural milieu. And if they watch TV shows, hear prominent people, listen to podcasts where people are saying it’s normal to wait and it’s better to get your life in order and to focus on your education and your career first — I think that has become the norm not just in American society, but more broadly. And that leads me to a question: maybe we’ve found one of the culprits here — that secularization, or something about modernization more broadly, leads all of these societies across the globe to move in a particular direction. There’s a particular logic of modernity that makes people have kids less, or focus on having kids less. And so even in religiously conservative countries, they’re still affected by this globalization of Western norms. They’re still listening to Western music, watching Western TV. They’re following Western people on social media. And smartphones probably accelerate that kind of distribution of norms throughout the world.
So I’m curious to turn this into a question: how much does secularization matter, and how much does being religious — or turning back to religion — act as a counter to dropping fertility rates?
Lyman Stone: Yeah, secularization is definitely a big part of the story, particularly in countries coming from the Abrahamic traditions. More religious segments of society have much higher fertility. That’s less true in Hinduism and Buddhism and in some of the other Eastern religions, but in the Abrahamic traditions it’s certainly the case that religiosity is quite pronatal. And as religiosity has declined, that certainly weakens a set of norms that made it easier for people to find suitable partners, that gave them motivations to marry and stay married, and gave them a sort of script and story about why kids are good.
Now, broadly speaking, though, secularization is a real change in norms that probably has fertility effects. We can also think about a process we call developmental idealism, which is kind of what you’re saying about Western ideas spreading around the world. Developmental idealism is the norm of self-development — the idea that I need to develop as a person. And when all the people in a country are doing a better job developing as people, getting more human capital, whatever — that’s how nations develop. And the main barrier to that development at the individual level or nationally is basically kids: child marriage, young marriage, having kids. And so the way we boost ourselves as a country is to not have so many kids. And so this idea has spread around the world. It’s very widely believed. Empirically, it’s wrong — it just isn’t the case that suppressing fertility at the national level accelerates economic growth. But it is something that’s widely believed.
But the vehicle here — so this is where I think smartphones kind of tie in. I talked before about the social incapacitation function of digital technology. It makes being alone great. That’s a pretty recent thing — that’s like in the last 25, 30 years. TV kind of did that, but modern digital technology just supercharges it. But what TV and radio and before that widespread newsprint and before that the printing press itself, or the telegraph — what they all did do is change the kinds of communities people can interact with. And we have so many studies showing that when you extend TV broadcast into a village, fertility falls. Some villages have better radio signals because of hills and forests and different things that block it, and the villages with better radio signals have faster fertility decline. And it is because of specific norms. We can see this because sometimes there are specific TV shows that promote specific things that we can track in data as a unique way of pursuing life. So we can see that it’s not just generic — it’s not like radio waves fry your babies or something. It’s literally just specific norms. And there are norms that we would probably associate with developmental idealism.
But the point is, whether secularization or developmental idealism, what these norms all actually are is they are long-run cultural evolutionary free-riding. Cultures persist because people add babies to them. Most of us want our culture to persist at least as long as we live. If we don’t add babies to them, we are free-riding on other people’s babies. No culture survives that in the long run. It’s not survivable. But you can survive it for several generations through conversions, migration, extending life expectancy, extending healthy life expectancy. You can survive it for several generations if selection pressures are weak — that is, if you’re not dealing with massive pressure on your society to compete on population terms. So what we’re really living through is this unique period where selection pressure on societies has been rather weak, and what we call these broadly self-preferencing norms.
Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah. I find this argument for developmental norms pretty compelling because one of my favourite authors on capitalism and modernity, Bob Goudzwaard, argues that capitalism has this sort of vision of progress, and that the purpose of progress in human development is increasing speed, increasing efficiency, increasing power. And so what happens in modernity is you’re trying to develop more speed, more power, more growth, and everything is judged upon those metrics. Babies are terribly inefficient. They are horribly slow. They don’t help you develop your career or whatever else. And I think I hear that in the back of a lot of discussions about children. But I also hear — I think what you were saying earlier — this sense of: I need to develop myself first. I have to finish myself first and get myself to this position of total stability. And then I will be in a position to develop others. Rather than understanding that, no — I will actually become a man or a woman in and through serving others, not by completing myself and then completing some other project.
Lyman Stone: Yeah. The whole developmentalist mindset. There’s a great book called Reading History Sideways that kind of is like a manifesto of what developmental idealism is and where it came from. And I do have to push back on the capitalism point because it definitely originated in a pre-capitalist context. Developmental idealism is most clearly articulated early on by mercantilist societies in their first contact with Native Americans and with sub-Saharan Africans in maritime trade. They encountered societies that were just so obviously poorer than Europe and they had to come up with an explanation for why. And they came away saying that these societies are basically like children — they’re just not developed, eventually maybe they’ll develop — but they’re like children, a less developed kind of human. And this gives rise to all kinds of racism and all kinds of bad stuff. But it actually is a pre-capitalist ideology. And then of course communism is fully bought in on developmental idealism as well — we basically — so I think broadly what you said was true, but I do want to emphasize —
Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah, yeah — it might be better said to be modernity.
Lyman Stone: Yeah. But then it is interesting that it does connect to the individual. Once you believe this whole developmentalist framework — the historic framework that most Westerners, and non-Western, I mean actually most societies, believe is a cyclical framework of history. There’s good times, there’s bad times. Nations rise, nations fall. You have periods of renaissance and decline. That’s the heuristic that most humans have for history for most periods. You read, oh, an empire rose, it fell, the next one rose, it fell. In the 1600s and 1700s, we started to get the idea of development. What if history could just be linear? What if we didn’t have to decline again? This is a great thing. I love that we were like, what if we just beat child mortality? That’s fantastic.
Matthew Kaemingk: I want to pivot us here and sort of say — hey, we’ve got three dudes talking about having babies and no women here at the moment. And what I’d love to hear from you is your sense of feminist voices out there who are doing a great job on this, or have interesting cultural insights on these kinds of issues, that you’d like to point our listeners to — or just some good work being done by feminists on these questions.
Lyman Stone: Yeah. So from kind of a Christian feminist perspective, Leah Libresco Sargeant has a great book out called The Dignity of Dependence. And she’s very much a pronatalist — she wants people to have babies and is writing about this, I think, in a really interesting way. A journalist/researcher who’s really interested in this is Stephanie Murray. She has a Substack called, I think, Family Matters, and she does a lot of interesting writing on this — it’s just a great resource. She comes to it from, I think, an interesting kind of moderate perspective. And then for kind of an avowedly feminist, liberal, pronatal perspective, Darby Saxby is a really interesting person to read. I argue with her a lot — I think she’s wrong about a lot of things — but she’s always interestingly wrong. And I think a lot of people will probably read her and think she’s right and I’m wrong, and that’s fine. So I would say those three are all really interesting people to listen to.
We do have a problem on this issue that a lot of the women who feel most strongly that people should have babies don’t have time to run a Substack, because they’re raising kids. And so we joke about this at Institute for Family Studies — another organization I work at — that we have a heavily male-biased staff. We would really like to be hiring female voices and empowering female voices in this area. And it’s like, yeah, but also we’re all here because our wives insist that we do these jobs because they think it’s super important. This is the job they want us to be doing. I could go do a different job. But this is the job my wife wants me to be doing because she cares about the outcome of this one.
Matthew Kaemingk: These women — in terms of what kind of cultural, structural support are they pointing out as needed or demanded? What sorts of things have you learned from these women on this issue?
Lyman Stone: I mean, obviously there are a range of social and structural supports that are often absent. The first basic one is just alloparenting — that just means other parents, other people to help. We increasingly live in an atomized society where people don’t have help. And men often don’t really notice that. But women often do, because often the burden of it lands on them. And often — just for various reasons — the meme online is, why does a woman have to plan her husband’s social calendar? And the answer is because he doesn’t have a social calendar.
I planned my own hangout with a friend yesterday, and I was very proud of myself. But just in general, cross-culturally, women socialize more than men, and that’s fine. And so women tend to feel that absence more acutely. Beyond that, there are structural supports that are needed to make that happen. You need to have sufficient leave. If you’re going to have public support for childcare, it needs to be flexible enough that it doesn’t just nudge every woman to put her children in daycare and thus not build any network of actual personal support. A real problem in daycare societies is that it really isolates parents from each other. Instead of actually having collaborative care, you end up with professional care.
Also, dads nowadays are more involved than human dads have ever been in any prior human society. No father has ever been as involved in childcare as modern Western dads are. So, like, pat on the back, dudes. We rock. Father’s Day is coming up — we deserve incredible stuff. I’m not even joking here. It just is true. There have never been fathers as involved as modern Western dads. No man has ever changed more diapers than modern Western dads or had more time with kids.
Shadi Hamid: Okay. But when you’re starting so low —
Lyman Stone: There you go.
Shadi Hamid: When you’re starting so low. Yes.
Lyman Stone: But again, no group of humans has ever seen as great a decline in leisure time as men from 1950 to today. Now, you can say, well, 1950s, okay. But again, I think it’s important to understand what’s going on in fertility — to understand that we’re having our lowest fertility moment ever at the time when men are the most helpful they’ve ever been. Which tells us that the problem is not intra-household dynamics. The problem is not that families are not finding a way to support each other. The problem is the wider culture around them.
Shadi Hamid: But isn’t it the case that in countries like the Nordic countries, that have much more parental leave and family support — where the government really tries to help people have a conducive environment for having kids — those countries also have quite low fertility rates?
Lyman Stone: Yeah, and this is why I distinguish between a daycare society and a cooperative care society. So in a daycare society — like many of the Nordic countries, although they do have higher fertility than Southern Europe does, so they’re getting something for their effort — you don’t get some of the benefit of cooperative care from daycare, because you drop off your kid. But one of the benefits of alloparental care is you get to spend time with your friends.
Like just last night, we had a friend over — he and I had gone shooting in the afternoon, and then he’s a dad of another kid in the same homeschool co-op that we’re in. So then we went and harvested just a ton of mulberries for a lesson that the kids are going to have tomorrow afternoon, and then came over and did dinner together. We all play with each other’s kids, we hang out with each other. And so childcare — our mutual care of our kids — is also one of the things that we do together as middle-aged dad friends. And so the problem with state-provided benefits is that sometimes they actually displace some of the benefits of parenting. One of the benefits of parenting is having good times with your kids, is being with other parents who are your friends.
Parental leave can be very important for that. Childcare can be a problem for that. Cash benefits for kids don’t really affect it one way or another. We do need to be thinking about how, culturally and structurally, we can be creating opportunities to make parenting fun and pleasant. And I think that that’s been a real challenge.
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, so that’s interesting. I wonder then — when we come to state-provided support, and some of the things you mentioned that are more cultural, I think they’re unlikely to make a big difference at the aggregate level. They might help things around the margins. But when people propose policies and throwing money at the problem — the East Asian countries have put a lot of money into encouraging people to have kids in different ways, but it doesn’t seem to have that much of an effect. So we get to this problem of there isn’t really an obvious solution. We can maybe boost fertility rates a little bit higher through the measures you just mentioned, but it probably won’t have that significant an effect unless perhaps state-provided support is more generous. And so far we haven’t really tested that out at scale.
I was reading something about how there was a Korean company that actually did a very good job of encouraging people to have kids. What did they do? They gave them $68,000. That’s going to be hard to scale up at the level of a nation — although maybe it’s possible in some countries. But it just shows that it’s really an uphill battle; the kind of money you have to put into these efforts is really tremendous. So is that a reason for losing hope? What is the path forward from your standpoint?
Lyman Stone: It was not too many generations ago that life expectancy was 30 years. And we could have said, well, look, if you cure cholera, that’s not going to increase life expectancy that much because you’re still going to die of tuberculosis. So why bother curing cholera? It doesn’t move the needle that much, and it’s going to be really expensive. But you know what? It turns out, you put enough money into it, you can cure a whole lot of diseases. One at a time, bit by bit, you climb that hill. And now we live three times as long as we used to.
In the same way — is there one policy that’s going to solve low fertility? No. Because as I said, what killed fertility? It wasn’t a single smoking gun. It was a firing squad. And you are going to have to unload every single one of those guns one by one. It’s going to involve hundreds of laws being changed across decades. There will never be a pronatal platform that just increases fertility overnight.
Except — I am obligated to say — there is a country that did do it. Georgia. They had a religious intervention. The patriarch of the Georgian Orthodox Church announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to any third-born or higher child born to a married Georgian Orthodox couple. And the baptism would occur in the brand-spanking-new cathedral that they levelled a mountaintop to build in the capital city, Tbilisi. So this is a very high-status thing. The man was personally a hero, a great figure of national pride for many reasons. And when he announced this, the birth rate rose from 1.6 children per woman to 2.2 in 18 months.
Matthew Kaemingk: That’s incredible.
Lyman Stone: Yeah. And it happened almost exclusively via births to married Georgian Orthodox women. Some of them were first births and second births, because they had to have the first two to get to the special third one. He just recently died. He baptized something like 55,000 kids under this program. So many that they had to alter canon law, because under Orthodox canon law it’s still incest to marry a godsibling. And they were like, oh no, these kids have so many godsiblings —
Matthew Kaemingk: Wow.
Lyman Stone: So they had this special dispensation — they’re like, okay, that rule doesn’t count for his godkids. So that one worked. Now, fertility in Georgia then went up and has gradually declined again. It’s still higher than it would have been on the prior trajectory, and it was a big cohort effect, but it wasn’t a permanent effect on the TFR. So even that one — it was crazily successful, but even there, this is a long-run problem.
Matthew Kaemingk: So as the resident theologian, I want to take us out of public policy for a little bit. So while I’m a Reformed theologian, Stanley Hauerwas is still one of my favourites to read.
Lyman Stone: I appreciate that. Thank you, man.
Matthew Kaemingk: Hauerwas — actually, before I get to the Hauerwas quote, I want to just name one other argument I have heard, which is the argument from despair. Essentially: the world is a terrible place. We have climate change, we have war, we have hate, we have all of these things. Why would I bring a child into this world? And so there’s just this sense of despair, this deep sense of despair. And that’s an argument that I hear, but it’s also, I think, just an unspoken argument in societies in general — just a kind of lack of hope.
And it touches on what Stanley Hauerwas had to say about having babies. He says:
The crucial question for us as Christians is what kind of people we need to be to be capable of welcoming children into this world, some of whom may be born disabled and even die. In a world of such terrible misery, having children is an extraordinary act of faith and hope.
Having children is an act of hope. And in other parts, he says, people who have children believe that they have a story worth telling, that should be continued — that the story we’ve been telling ourselves is a story we want other generations to tell. And of course he’s talking about the Gospel story, but you could talk about a national story that you believe in, that you just think — you know, France is so great, you want that story of France to be told in future generations, and you believe in the story of France. And so that’s moving to you. But for those of us who are religious, we have a story that we want to share with others. I would just love to hear you speak about the role of cultural despair and cultural hope. And I don’t know if there are statistics on these sorts of things.
Lyman Stone: Yeah, there are. We’re definitely seeing a rise in anxiety and depression in many countries around the world that seems to be associated with digital technologies, the digital revolution, smartphones, and all that. And we know that one of the better predictor variables we have for fertility is happiness and depression. People who are pessimistic about the future, people who are sad, people who have any kind of negative affect that we can measure are far less likely to have children. An early diagnosis with a serious mental illness has almost as negative an effect on fertility as a serious congenital birth defect has. It just is the case that fertility decline happens in the mind first.
I think one of the reasons that fertility is probably still high in Israel is because people in Israel kind of have a sense of what their story is. I think in Georgia, people were kind of given a story about what the nation was. Now, I think over time, Georgia has failed to live up to the promise that a lot of Georgians hoped for in 2006, 2007, et cetera.
But when you can give people a story of where their life and their family fits into a transcendent community — there’s a great book called Birth Control in American Modernity by Trent McNamara, where he talks about affiliation in the transcendent community as being a central part of how people make fertility decisions and how their fertility behaviours are shaped. And I think that’s very credible. I think it’s a reasonable explanation for the fertility behaviour of Abrahamic believers, because what we all share — we don’t all share rules around marriage, sex, contraception, we often have different rules on these things, abortion — but what we do share across all of us is a strong sense that the faith is creating a people. A people, a society, a culture. We are a people now because of the faith, whether it’s Islam or Judaism or — or the most correct version — confessional Lutheranism.
The sense of peoplehood is pervasive in the Abrahamic faiths in a way that is not the case in Hinduism or Buddhism. In Hinduism, a deep commitment to the faith is in fact segmenting of the people, because there are types of people, and the more seriously you take the religion, the more seriously you take the fact that the other types of people are very different from you — that you might not mix with them. And Buddhism just has a whole different conception of the individual and their position in relation to the cosmos. And so I think that the sense of peoplehood is ultimately a sense of transcendent community — a sense that I am spiritually connected to my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents and to my great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren.
And I think that the individualization of modern American religion that you see across many denominations and sects is a serious challenge in that regard. There’s the question — non-denominational evangelicals do not have exceptionally high fertility rates, I mean, granted, neither do Lutherans right now, unfortunately. But we are losing the sense of peoplehood as we become a kind of individualistic culture that even permeates into what should be the communitarianizing elements of our culture and religion. But increasingly, our religious communities are not bought into that idea.
Shadi Hamid: So is part of the answer then bringing religion back — that we should hope for some kind of religious, moral awakening that actually reshapes America, reshapes other countries at a mass level?
You know, on the role of faith, it does seem to me that the whole fertility rates discussion is within a technocratic society that is very used to — okay, we’ve got this social problem, what is a government program that will fix it? Or what is a tax change that will fix it? And fertility is interesting in that it comes up against the limits of a government bureaucracy to fix this particular social issue.
A recent article just came out in the New York Times a week or two ago — you probably saw it — by Anna Sussman, that I found to be a pretty interesting one. But near the end, she comes almost to a sense of hopelessness about what could be done about the fertility crisis. And she points to faith communities that — you know, beyond the reach of technocracy, beyond the ability of technocracy — these faith communities are having children and welcoming children who are able-bodied and who are not. And so — just piggybacking off of that — is that the missing piece here? Is this sense of supernatural hope what drives human beings to continue the race?
Lyman Stone: The forms of religiosity that are declining least in the US are not generally the most pronatal ones. So like non-denominational evangelicalism is still kind of eking out growth, and yet is not really associated with higher birth rates. So I think when we say a religious revival — not just any religion. It would have to be a religion that actually stays in the Abrahamic tradition. That is, that is about peoplehood. It has to be a hearth religion, if you will.
Shadi Hamid: What’s a hearth religion?
Lyman Stone: Transmission occurring primarily at home, not at church. If you need a church to pass your religion on, your faith is a dead end.
Matthew Kaemingk: That’s a strong statement.
Lyman Stone: I mean, it’s just true. Successful religious transmission cannot be achieved professionally. It is only achievable in the long run when it is passed on non-professionally by parents in immediate social communities. When parents in immediate social communities are not passing it on, it doesn’t get passed on and they just go and do something else. And for parents in immediate social communities to pass it on, it’s almost certainly going to have to be an endogamous religion that has strict norms about not marrying out. And so I think the reality is that American Christianity is not prepared for the version of itself it will have to be. And so I think the most likely religious revival is one that will not succeed in raising fertility. And so we will likely not actually see a successful change in this from religion in the near future.
Matthew Kaemingk: What about the turn to Catholicism? How would you sort of judge the kind of growing number of young Catholics, a slight uptick?
Lyman Stone: Yeah, you do see some of these places. You’ve got kind of neo-traditionalist movements in lots of denominations. Within Presbyterianism, there’s a strong neo-traditionalist movement, sometimes a very extreme one. Within my own church, I’m definitely part of a neo-traditionalist reaction of sorts, though there are some extreme ends of it I don’t love. You certainly see this in Catholicism as well, in Orthodoxy. But fundamentally, if you’re counting on religion to bail you out, you need to realize it’s probably not going to be a very nice religion. It’s going to be a religion that is not very interested in exogamy —
Matthew Kaemingk: Just say what that is for listeners.
Lyman Stone: Marrying out of the faith. It’s going to be a religion that places a really high priority on the family and kin ties. That doesn’t mean not a conversionist religion — the Abrahamic faiths are all open to conversion in various degrees. But American evangelicalism has systematically deprogrammed itself on virtually every kind of familism.
Matthew Kaemingk: I think ashes make excellent fertilizer sometimes. There’s a darker side to some of the things you just mentioned.
Lyman Stone: Yes, there is.
Matthew Kaemingk: Yeah, it’s a question of whether we want to accept that trade-off. It sounds like the kinds of Christians who will actually have more babies are maybe the kinds that are going to be very strict, very conservative, very intense, not very welcoming of outsiders, not flexible in terms of how to interpret the faith. And that might not be great for American democracy in political terms. So how do we kind of square the circle there? What should we want?
Lyman Stone: I think there are a couple of ways to think about this. One is: you try and get some life rafts going for everybody else. The sooner the government wakes up and starts trying to raise fertility for the general population, the less you have to worry about a world where Amish church discipline is actually law. Frankly, the policy that we talked about on the front end is part of how you avoid that outcome.
Right now, a lot of these neo-traditionalist movements in various groups are quite extreme. Some of that is they’re extreme because they’re not yet successful — they can kind of afford to be extreme because they don’t actually have to accomplish anything yet. But in the long run, the great moderator is actually having to build institutions. So I think that in the long run, there are versions of neo-traditionalism that are probably compatible with broadly modern lives as we think of them. The Amish version is not. The ultra-Orthodox Jewish version is not. The Salafi version — some of the Gulf states are giving it the best shot they can, but it’s touch and go. Figuring out what this will look like in the future is tricky, particularly if you get into a world where virtually all of the children are being raised by people who are two standard deviations to the right of your constitution. But I think it’s also worth recognizing we’re kind of there already.
There are several studies that have just asked — conservatives have had bigger families for a couple of generations now. How much has it shifted our politics rightward based on what we know of fertility rates and conversion rates across political ideologies? And the answer is anywhere from about one to five percentage points of popular vote. That’s what we’ve accomplished so far in terms of fertility differentials influencing politics. And that was with a fertility differential of about 0.1 to 0.3 kids per woman between liberals and conservatives. We’re now at a fertility differential of about 0.5. So you can expect conservatives in the future to have anywhere from a 3% to a 12% electoral advantage over their current position.
Matthew Kaemingk: Wow.
Lyman Stone: So I do think that’s actually a huge — it’s kind of like you see the train coming from a long way away and you’re trying to point it out to people, and they just insist the train is very far away and they’re not worried about it. But that train is coming for liberal democracy.
Shadi Hamid: So that’s a strong argument for liberals to prioritize pronatalism and to think seriously about how they can encourage a culture of having more kids if they want to win elections.
Lyman Stone: Or to never have children. And as strange as this sounds — if you think fairly extreme conservatives are going to govern the future, if you think the Handmaid’s Tale is the future, don’t have daughters.
Shadi Hamid: Yeah. And I think that is a real concern. I hear this from liberals often. They’re like, well, I would like to have kids, but I’m afraid the future is going to be like right-wing reaction. And I’m like, well, it will be if that’s your attitude.
Matthew Kaemingk: I mean, the third option — which you two didn’t open up on — is the other way for those on the left to have a place in the future: to play a stronger role with public education. So sort of shaping these young conservative kids towards more left-wing, liberal ends. But that strategy is kind of maxed out right now. I mean, if anything, it seems like more and more people are moving away from public education. So I’m not sure there’s much more juice to get out of that pineapple.
Well, gosh, Lyman, it’s been absolutely wonderful to have you here. I’d like to give you the final word and bring us back to this Hauerwas quote — just because I’m going to use my host privileges here. And his question is: what kind of people do we need to be to be capable of welcoming children into this world? So I wonder, for our listeners, if you could give them a call to action. What kind of people do we need to be? To be hospitable to children and families, to be the kinds of people who support mothers who don’t leave them on an island on their own. What is your word for us in terms of the kind of people that we need to be?
Lyman Stone: All too often, we characterize the parable of the Good Samaritan as a parable about poverty, about crossing racial or ethnic lines. And it can be about those things. But ultimately, what it’s about is noticing the need that God put in your path. And increasingly, we live in a society where we do not do that. I can notice a need anywhere in the world as long as it’s on Instagram, but my 80-year-old neighbour who hasn’t left her house in three weeks — I would never notice her.
We have to become people who are not socially incapacitated by the digital, by the disembodying revolution, if you will. We have to make that choice. We have to notice those in the ditch. And that might mean the poor. It might mean children. It might mean children who aren’t born yet.
And so I think the kind of people we have to be are people who actually look around at your actual neighbours within 800 metres of your house and make friends with them. And if you’re not doing that, if you’re not looking for people in your actual church or your actual T-ball league or your actual book club — or if you don’t have any of those actuals — then you’re going the wrong way.
Matthew Kaemingk: Amen. That’s a cautionary tale, a word of warning. And thank you so much, Lyman. This was fascinating. We could have gone for another hour. This is such a rich topic and there’s so much to discuss. We really appreciate you coming on and joining us.
Lyman Stone: My pleasure.
Shadi Hamid: Yeah, and we look forward to calling you Dr. Stone here — indeed, imminently. Congratulations.
Lyman Stone: Thanks a lot.
Matthew Kaemingk: Bye-bye.
