Modern WisdomBirth Rate Debate: Why Is No One Having Kids?
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,040 words- 0:00 – 5:20
Why We Should Be Worried About Birth Rate Decline
- CWChris Williamson
Why should anyone listen to anything that you guys have to say?
- LSLyman Stone
I mean, you, you've brought in an interesting group, right? I mean, whenever people, like, don't wanna read something and they just wanna, like, watch something to understand falling fertility, inevitably I'm like, "Well, there's, there's this movie you can watch online, um, about how fertility is falling. Why? What's going on?" And I reference your work, and I pass them basically to you. Um, I mean, I'm, I'm a demographer. I'm, uh... At some point today, I will, during this conversation, I will probably try to draw a graph in the air with my hands. Um, you can, you can, you, you can, like, lunge and slap my hand down when I do it. Um, but, uh, so I mean, for me, I'm, there's that. And then of course, the Collinses are, are, like, practically the people who've, like, made this an issue for a lot of people. So I don't-
- SCSimone Collins
We're the punchable face of pronatalism.
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- LSLyman Stone
So I guess I'm kind of introing, like, multiple people here. [laughs] And then you're like, you know-
- CWChris Williamson
It's so true.
- SCSimone Collins
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
It's so true. I don't wanna punch you, but-
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
... it's, uh, yeah. Yeah, Simone, have you got, uh, uh, this just a passing interest, a passion for you? What is this?
- SCSimone Collins
We are... We're hard effective altruists. We care about the long-term future of humanity, and you can actually see this among many people who are famous pronatalists, like Elon Musk, right? Like, his interests track with what appear to be existential threats to humanity. He's concerned about the environment. He, he works on Tesla, right? He sees these things, now he's trying to get humans to space. Um, so people who are very interested in long-term human flourishing are naturally likely to care about demographic collapse because it is one of those things that is a civilizational level threat. I mean, when, when Stephen mentioned, for example, that this does affect everyone, yeah, boomers who are like, "Eh," like, "not my problem," they're still in just a few years going to be receiving only, like, under 80% of their expected Social Security payments, which are being paid for by Gen Z, who's not expecting anything. So everyone is affected by this. And yeah, this is something where basically even if you don't care about the long-term future, you're affected. But because we do care about it, we care about humanity in 100, in 1,000 years, we're, we're at the precipice of a tipping point that could either take things in a very cool direction or a very bad direction. So we care about it from that perspective.
- CWChris Williamson
And you've been working on this for two decades, flying around the world.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Um, it's just over one decade. It feels like two.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
You know, I come from a very different perspective. I came out of the commercial world, uh, where I ran a data science company doing advanced data modeling for 20 years. And I, I could've and maybe should've continued in that line, but once I saw in January 2016 that the birth rate issue wasn't just limited, as I thought at that time, to Japan and Italy, that effectively it was spreading globally and had been spreading for 50 years, and I didn't know about it, and for sure I was bringing up my kids at that time, as teenagers as they were, for a world where birth rate decline was not going to be a factor for their, the entirety of their future, I got scared that w- why do we not know about this? And then going to research to find out, well, what's the common factor? Because we can't have independent factors alone explaining why this happened in Italy and Japan and Germany and Spain and Austria, et cetera, at effectively the same time. Uh, and I found that no one was looking at it from that way, so I, you know, I really have devoted, uh, 10 years into what I would call, you know, reproductive dynamics. What are the patterns? So rather than looking at demography from the point of view of how do we explain changes or rather what levers can change things, is it linked to salaries? Is it linked to housing or prices? I come at it from a different point of view as, what's the same? What are the underlying structures across societies and over time that are really locked in or mostly locked in? And so I, it, it's an interesting... I would describe it really as, yeah, reproductive dynamics or structural demography.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- LSLyman Stone
One thing that I think is worth, uh, noted, noting is that for all three of us, uh, your backstory, I know your all's backstory, none of us, like, grew up as kids and were like, "I hope someday that I study low fertility."
- SCSimone Collins
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- LSLyman Stone
Um, like-
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- LSLyman Stone
And, and also, like, none of us are actually coming out of the tradition of academic demography, okay? I started writing on low fertility and then went and got a PhD 'cause it was, like, a, like, a, a neces- a necessity of the job, right? The reality is, on the question of low fertility, by and large, academic demography has to a considerable extent been missing in action.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- LSLyman Stone
Um-
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yes
- LSLyman Stone
... that you kind of noticed this was a thing and then got into it from a very different background. You all, you all were, like, living in Korea, right? And kind of freaked out by no one having kids. Um, for me, I was working on totally different, like, regional economic development stuff, and then I kept bumping into fertility and being like, "This is this weird, super powerful, slow-moving force in the background of everything I'm writing about."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- LSLyman Stone
"Maybe I should just write about that." Um, and I think that that's the story for a lot of people who are concerned about falling fertility, is that none of us just woke up and said, "I'm deeply concerned about falling fertility." There were other things we loved in the world, and we gradually woke up to the fact that if no one's having kids, the other things we love don't last.
- 5:20 – 8:12
The Shocking Reality of Falling Fertility
- CWChris Williamson
Global fertility is projected to keep falling, reaching around 1.8 by 2050 and 1.6 by 2100. By 2100, only six countries are expected to still be at or above replacement level. The US recorded its lowest ever fertility rate of 1.6 births per woman in 2024. Around 710,000 fewer children were born in the US last year compared to the nation's peak in 2007. Since 2007, the general fertility rate has declined by 23%, and in the UK, being childless at age 30 is now the norm, rising from 48% to 58%.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah, and I, I think those numbers really don't even do a justice to the reality of what that means for a society. Um, you know, people often still think-Many still do, that there are too many people on the planet and having fewer people is a good thing. But when you look at the dynamics of this, I like to talk in the periods of time in which births will half-
- LSLyman Stone
Mm
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... and then half again, and half again, and half again. A curious one I was, uh, looking at the other day is if you have a fertility rate of 1.0, that's very low, but it's above what we're seeing right now in Korea and Taiwan-
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... Hong Kong, et cetera. If you take 1.0, a- and if that doesn't change, the total births in a given generation is equal to the total future births of all future generations, because you keep halving-
- LSLyman Stone
Yep
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... and halving, and halving, and halving. And you add up all those halves of halves of halves, and you get no more than the total of the current generation.
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Now, that's 1.0.
- LSLyman Stone
That's a fun homework math problem.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Right, right.
- LSLyman Stone
For like intro to demography students. [laughs]
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Well, let me give you another one, can I? I've only two of these, and I haven't shared these before. But if you take a fertility rate of 2.0, almost replacement level, and 1.0, and I were to ask you what's the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0, well, there's actually two answers to this question. If you're talking about, well, today's generation, you know, the number of average children people have, of course it's 1.5. But if you're l- looking at f- the future, the halfway point between 2.0 and 1.0 is 1.92.
- LSLyman Stone
Yep.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
'Cause at 2.0, births are gonna half every 800 years. You get down to about 1.92, and they're gonna half every 400 years. You've halved the length of time for births to half already. When you get down to that 1.5 point, 1.6 point, like the US and Europe and yeah, well, and you know, frankly, um, I think we're all on the path to South Korea. May- maybe we'll get to that at some point in the conversation. But where we are right now, births are halving in the industrialized world every 50 to 60
- 8:12 – 17:40
What Happens If the Population Shrinks?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
years.
- LSLyman Stone
What happens if the population declines? I think a lot of the time people ask the question, why should I care? They maybe got some defenses. We're worried about climate change or overpopulation or this or that or the other, trying to get women out, and we'll get into that. But like what happens to the world? Forget individuals, forget happiness and connection and stuff like that. Like what just happens to... What, what's the impact of having fewer people next generation than now?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Well, I, I think there's so many answers to that. I mean, you, economics and the social side. I mean, I spent seven years in Detroit, Michigan, uh, around the time of its bankruptcy in 2013, and there was a city built for two million people with only 700,000 living in it.
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Very different reasons. But you have the same issue of a, a society, a city in this case, built for a certain number of people. And you look over a period of decades what it's like for a city, a community to be hollowed out. I remember I was filming for the documentary, uh, driving around, and you see some clips of this, but there was one moment driving down this street of what would've been very fancy houses in then a very scary area not far from the center of Detroit. And there's just decay everywhere, except towards the end of this one-way street, there was a family having a picnic on the garden outside with young kids running around. And for me, that was just the image of this is the future. [laughs]
- LSLyman Stone
So that's a book chapter opening, right? Yeah, yeah.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Right. You know, you've got this joyous moment for a young family surrounded by decay. And do you know what? I bet you now that family isn't living there. I bet you that... Well, Detroit has kind of re- re-energized itself. It's come back.
- LSLyman Stone
So-
- SSStephen J. Shaw
But that's, that's not gonna happen while fertility is low
- LSLyman Stone
... so I say, I, I hope we come back to the question of what will happen in terms of people's individual experiences of happiness, 'cause personally, that's what I care about most. But there is one area of this that I think is dramatically underappreciated in terms of the effects of falling fertility. Fertility doesn't fall evenly everywhere, and as we just heard, um, it is the case that small differences in fertility... Once you're below replacement, small differences in fertility, quote-unquote small differences, can create radically compounding differences in military age recruitable populations. The result is in the 20th century, we worried about how large groups of young men would impact internal stability of countries. Too many young men, they start a civil war. You get communist revolutions. And the US built a whole foreign policy apparatus around managing communist revolutions and civil wars in other countries. The 21st century we already know is not like that. Civil wars are not the problem. Interstate conflict is, okay? We're seeing an explosion in conflicts between states. Why? Well, one very plausible reason is that when fertility decline becomes very rapid and becomes very differential, you get a lot of countries that realize, one, this is their last chance to make a go at it before they don't have a fieldable army anymore, and two, that the guy beside them declined way before them, that they're a generation farther down the path. And so a lot of countries in the next few decades are gonna be at a place where they realize that they will literally never, ever have a better time to strike ever again. That being the case, the 21st century fertility decline... I mean, you can think about this, North and South Korea. North Korea's fertility rate is something like two times that of South Korea. China has low fertility, but still has this, this big, uh, age bump that Taiwan does not have, and Taiwan's already smaller. Now, you can say, well, you know, automated weapons will fill the gap and all these things and, and that is happening in Ukraine. I mean, Ukraine's trying, but Ukraine's also showing how hard it is. Um, the, even with the full support of lots of industrialized technological societies helping them innovate and develop, it's still taking a brutal, ghastly cost for their entire society just to barely cling to their turf. So I would say that one of the real... realities of low fertility will be the resumption of zero-sum interstate conflict. And we know that because stable population societies, or even declining population societies, have existed many times in the past. Most of human history was a situation where there was no long-run population growth, and it wasn't peaceful. [laughs] The idea that as countries decline they'll get so freaked out about war that they stop fighting is nonsense. Instead, they will realize, "Now's our moment."
- SCSimone Collins
But it's even more local than that because, I mean, basically we, our government and most developed countries' governments are set up like a Ponzi scheme. And you-
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah
- SCSimone Collins
... you're not... You're bought into it. Like-
- LSLyman Stone
Mm
- SCSimone Collins
... this is a problem 'cause you're bought into a Ponzi scheme. And even if you're trying not to, like let's assume that you're like, "Well, I know I'm not gonna get my Social Security. Well, I know I'm not gonna get Medicare or Medicaid if anything's hard for me," it still matters because hospitals are gonna start shutting down when the government stops-
- LSLyman Stone
Your 401 [k]
- SCSimone Collins
... reimbursing them. Your 401 [k] , yes. You're bought into the stock market-
- LSLyman Stone
You do
- SCSimone Collins
... if you have a 401 [k] , if you have a state-based pension fund. Also, keep in mind that as cities start to spend more and more of their budgets just paying for pension funds, where is the money to pay for their existing police forces, for their fire departments? Who's gonna come to your house when it's burning down? A, a lot of these things that we've come to depend upon that we're like, "Well, obviously I'm gonna get this"-
- LSLyman Stone
Mm
- SCSimone Collins
... th- these are relatively new inventions. United States is a socialist utopia, and people don't even realize it. You know, we're like, "Oh, well, you know, China is soc-" No, they're not. We're way more socialist than China.
- LSLyman Stone
How so?
- SCSimone Collins
People don't... Well, you have to pay for school in China. All the, all the health-
- LSLyman Stone
Public pensions
- SCSimone Collins
... coverage that you get in China, yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- SCSimone Collins
It, it's, it, it's, it's not... You don't get, like, if you're poor in the United States, if you're at or near the poverty line, especially if you're a parent, you typically have childcare paid for. You typically have healthcare totally paid for for your kid. You have food assistance for your kid. That doesn't exist in China. That exists here, and it's not going to exist much longer if demographic collapse keeps playing out without serious intervention.
- LSLyman Stone
Why? What... We already see this in a lot of towns. I mean, uh, I'm from Kentucky. Uh, Eastern Kentucky has massive population decline over the last few decades, and whole communities, municipalities that just disband-
- SCSimone Collins
Mm-hmm
- LSLyman Stone
... and they say, "Okay, we're just done as a municipality. There's not enough taxpayers." What it really does is you get to a point, uh, they'll abandon the school, they'll abandon the roads. The town disbands when there's not enough taxpayers to pay for the salaries of the bureaucrats.
- 17:40 – 25:39
Is Low Fertility a Threat to the Economy?
- LSLyman Stone
city.
- SCSimone Collins
Why is it the case that declining fertility impacts the economy negatively? Uh, what, what's the reason for that? 'Cause you said 401 [k] s, we don't have the money to be able to put into the system. Like, people might not naturally just understand why that's the case.I mean, when, when you have growing fertility, you have growing population, growing demand, you have more people paying into a system. Also, we didn't set up things like our social services in a way where, you know, you, you, you actually pay money to Social Security and it stays there. No, we, we, we first created Social Security, and we paid people out immediately, and we're like, "We'll just keep funding it as we go along. It ... What could possibly go wrong?" Um, so when you stop that, again, because it's a Ponzi scheme, just like the basic design, is you have to pay people in, and then you pay someone out. And then whoever's last holding the bill is gonna have the problem.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
So you need to feed more young people in the bottom-
- SCSimone Collins
You have to feed more, yeah
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... in order to be able to pay for the old people at the top.
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
But because we've got an aging population, this inversion means-
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... that there are fewer and fewer young people with more and more old people-
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... and that is gonna be the problem. So the, the point here, you-
- LSLyman Stone
So, but, so I mean, that's 100% true. But when I think about the real economic crime of low fertility, you know, I benefit so much from the existence of Albert Einstein, okay? He invented things that everyone in the world benefits from, ideas, concepts, or, um, uh, or we could say Elon Musk, okay? Or any of these high productivity geniuses who have done things that have revolutionized the world. Innovation is non-rivalrous. Everybody benefits. The odds you get a genius are just a function of population times education times, you know, some latent genetic difference, but times capital density, okay? So if a super genius is born in a country with no education and no capital density, they don't live up to their potential.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Hmm.
- LSLyman Stone
So basically, as fertility is falling, particularly in industrialized societies that have deep capital markets, education, where a genius could rise to their potential, everyone loses. A bigger population, particularly in those countries, yields innovators for the entire world. The fundamental engine of economic growth is not population structure, it's just ideas. It's productivity. It's, it's division of labor, it's innovation, and that stuff slows down. Even on the consumption side, when a new ... What are we drinking here?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Neutonic.
- LSLyman Stone
Neutonic, a productivity drink. Um, and this is a relatively new product. It's only been around for-
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Couple years
- LSLyman Stone
... couple years. Okay. Um, I would bet if you did a marketing survey on your consumers, most of them aren't 65. They're probably relatively young, partly 'cause your market is young, but also because the market for every new product skews young. Demand for innovation skews young. Older people are fine with what they have. So it is not just that a higher fertility population makes more innovators. It's that a higher fertility population wants more innovation, demands more innovation, can absorb more innovation. As fertility falls, we will simply not have as much innovation. I know Robin Hanson, uh, an economist, uh, who writes on this, argues that we're basically facing the end of innovation, that we're gonna see essentially the end of human progress, or at least a dramatic foreshortening in pace. Maybe AI revolutionizes that, but when I think about the economic costs, yeah, there's, there's the wasted consumption of reallocating young people's savings towards old people's, uh, consumption. That, that's, that's a, a real burden on the economy. But you just, you need those innovators, and you need people who buy their products.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
I, I think there's several ways to try and, to me, crystallize this. Um, national debts, we've all got them. National debts are there to be paid off somehow, or their interest to be paid off. If you, if you have fewer people in the future, those debts don't just disappear. You're going to have your national debts, as they stand now, paid off by fewer and fewer and fewer people. So it's not just pensions. A, a lot of this skews to the problems that we're going to have when people get older.
- LSLyman Stone
Hmm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
But the tax system is there to support the entirety of how societies operate. And national debts are a very real, tangible thing, I think, that everybody should be focused on. Now, you're right, we're going to lose human capital, talent. I'm less concerned about that because I think the problems are, you know ... If you're a young person today thinking of setting up a business, any business, whether it be a cafe or a spaceship company, and you're looking at a business plan, and you're looking for investors, and if you're a cafe or your drinks company is dependent on a certain number of people and growth, and you're actually looking at, let's take a cafe in a town with falling birth rates, the investor's gonna be much less likely to say, "I want to invest in that. I'll keep my money in my pocket." I think you're going to have a, a massive, uh, move away from entrepreneurialism-
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... the investment in time and, and funding to create innovation. And then we haven't even touched on capital markets. The whole entire bond market-
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... which most people are unaware of. We don't go around thinking about what the bond market's going to do today. But the bond markets are what drive economies. And when governments issue bonds, they issue bonds for new projects to support their national debts, et cetera. There's a cost to that. And those bonds can be, today, 20 years out, even 50 years out. And those bonds get traded. So you can go today, and you can buy probably a 20-year bond that's got 15 years remaining on the city of wherever in Kentucky or the country of Japan. The cost of those bonds, the interest of those bonds, is effectively going to be negatively impacted massively in the decades ahead. And what does that mean? It's gonna be harder and harder and harder for governments to raise more money, which means, again, less investment. And this goes back to my passion for this project. We haven't even s- even if you were to think-
- CWChris Williamson
There's too many people on the planet, and if you were to think you don't want kids, this is going to impact you. It's gonna impact societies in ways that we aren't yet talking about. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement. You feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body, which is why I partnered with Function. Function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, metabolic markers, inflammation, thyroid, nutrients, liver and kidney function. It even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer. To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test about 20 markers, and Function runs over 160. And this isn't just numbers dumped into your inbox. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Abnormal markers get flagged, and you get clear explanations and a personalized protocol with actionable next steps so you can actually do something about what you learned. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives in a simple dashboard. You can just track trends over time, make sure that you're moving in the right direction. Normally, this level of testing would cost thousands through private clinics. With Function, it is $365 a year. That's $1 a day to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional $25 by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout.
- 25:39 – 38:46
Why Are Birth Rate Debates So Controversial?
- CWChris Williamson
This sounds like quite a left-leaning idea that we're worried about the welfare of people. We're worried about especially helping people who are more disadvantaged, that it's really important to ensure that there is enough in the pot to be able to support the people who really need it, including the old and the poor and the people that are injured, et cetera, et cetera. If you ever want a nationalized health service, you're going to need to have money to be able to fund that, as opposed to just relying on the wages that people can put in so that they can pay their insurance so that everybody else can get it redistributed like that. Why is it the case that having this conversation is so unpopular on the internet and immediately gets thrown the right-wing conservative misogyny, the fascism? Why do those arguments get thrown around so quickly?
- LSLyman Stone
I think people understand correctly that there can be... There certainly can be, and often in effect there is, a tension between sustainable fertility rates and the gender egalitarianism that I think most of us cherish, right? That like I'm, I'm not like a radical left feminist, but like I do want my wife to be able to vote and own property and have the right to like the police hear her out if I'm beating her or something. Like I'm, you know, like little E egalitarian in that sense. Um, and a lot of people fear very sincerely. They say, "Well, I would... I do worry about low fertility, but I would never say so publicly because, you know, I stand with women, and the pronatalists want to force women to stay barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen." Um, and, and I, I mean, I'm sympathetic to that and, and unfortunately some varieties of pronatalism have tended to play into that. Um, the reality... And, and there's, and there's genuine tension. I mean, it is true that a lot of the most sexist countries in the world have the highest birth rates. It is true that within society, people with more traditional gender attitudes have higher birth rates. Um, these are all true things. There's real tension between certain gender models and high fertility. Now, does it have to be intrinsic tension? Can we find a way through it to the other side? I hope so, and I think that's what, what you all have talked about as well, is that you want your progressives to be having kids so that their values can survive in the future too. Um, and so I think there's a lot of people who feel, rightly or wrongly, feel trapped between two things they want, okay? They, they don't love the idea of a low fertility future, but they also feel like they don't have an option other than to like, well, if a low fertility future is the only way to protect the fact that like I'm a woman and I basically want to have rights [chuckles] , then like screw fertility.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- LSLyman Stone
Who cares?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- LSLyman Stone
Um, or, you know, trust that it'll get solved somehow and just don't think about it. So... And, and I think on some level, pronatalists have not always done a great job, and, and I probably, I would count myself in this to some extent, of, uh, of trying to communicate that, um, yes, right now feminism broadly construed is pretty strongly negatively correlated with fertility. It is on almost any metric. But we don't know that it has to be. We don't know that there's not a future version of feminism that's pronatal. We don't know that such an idol- ideology couldn't be invented. The problem is most of the people who self-iden- identify as feminists won't even try. So they won't even try to come up with a version of the ideology that's pronatal. So, uh... And there are people who are. Like, uh, uh, Leah Sergeant has a great book on this, um, where she's trying. Um, but, uh, um... So I, I would say I, I agree with a lot of what you're saying, but I'm a little, I'm a little more sympathetic to people who feel between a rock and a hard place on this.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, I think the other, the other point here is that it's obvious what you need to give up now, and it's not obvious what the costs will be in future.
- LSLyman Stone
Sure.
- CWChris Williamson
And, and for the most part, you're not gonna pay them, right? And if you're not intending on having kids or if fewer people around you are intending on having kids, then you're not even attached to people who might be having to pay them. So it's having to give up something that you want in order for something that you're being told that-... future people need
- LSLyman Stone
Well, it-
- CWChris Williamson
But we're not good at, in a society, at doing that at the moment, at the, the old staving off of-
- LSLyman Stone
And imagine-
- CWChris Williamson
... delayed gratification
- LSLyman Stone
... you really value gender egalitarianism, and then you have daughters, and then you learn that the future is going to be one where, like, all the crazy far-right people had all the babies and they're gonna outvote you, and now your daughters live out Handmaid's Tale. Okay, like, this, as silly as that sounds to, like, my rational brain, I personally know people who really think that's what's going to happen.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- LSLyman Stone
That any kid they have is just going to be, like, governed by zealots. And so they're like, "Well, I don't want that for my kid. I'm not going to have them."
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah, but if feminists stop having kids-
- LSLyman Stone
I know
- SCSimone Collins
... there will be no feminists left.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
This is why I'm like, y- f- be the change you wish.
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, this is-
- LSLyman Stone
Only you can prevent forest fires
- CWChris Williamson
... this is the gap, the mean change, uh, the mean children by ideology. Conservatives at 1.67, which has actually gone up since the 1980s.
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And liberals from 1.29, which was nearly the same, 1.44 to 1.29, 1980, conservative to liberal, to now 1.67 to .87. So yeah.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
It seems to be the case from well put-together surveys that, let's say, 90%-ish of people at some point in life either have or want kids.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
That's not all right-wingers. 90% is pretty much everybody.
- 38:46 – 51:45
Is Having Kids Too Expensive Now?
- CWChris Williamson
So I asked Grok to scrub the most common reasons given on X to explain why birth rates are declining. Economic pressures and affordability was by far the most cited. People repeatedly argue that raising children has become financially impractical due to high costs of housing, childcare, inflation, stagnant wages, and the need for dual incomes. A single salary no longer supports a family, making kids a luxury many can't afford. Variants include asset price inflation favoring the wealthy, gutted job prospects for young people, and wealth inequality like billionaires driving up the costs. Around 25% to 30% of people in the UK cite money as a reason for not having children, and lower income individuals are twice as likely to intend to remain childless. So economic pressures and affordability. Is it the cost of housing? Is it the cost of living that's stopping people from having kids?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
For every one of those examples, true as it may appear wherever you're living at, you can find counter examples around the world. I mean, housing, for one, for sure, I understand housing is a major challenge. It's a challenge for, for, for my growing kids now. You look at Tokyo with birth rates as low or lower than most places in the world. You've had mortgage rates of less than 1% for over 30 years. You have a society that doesn't necessarily crave more space. I have never met any Japanese per- I've been to Japan nine years now. I've never met any young Japanese person who said that the barrier to them having kids is housing or income. They cite, no, it's gender imbalance.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
It's life-work imbalance. So I th- I think it's easy for societies to become programmed and assume that, oh, yes, life is expensive here, or there's some other imbalance, or there's too much youth unemployment in, say, Italy, that that must be the reason, that that's my reason. But what I've noted in these surveys often is that you ask those same people, the 20 whatever percent who blame finances, do they have a partner? And the answer is, well, no. So would the answer to the question be different if they did have a partner? And really, how much more expensive is it for two people living independently to live together and have a small infant?
- CWChris Williamson
Well, why is it the case then that so many people on the internet and so many people when we talk about this problem, it's obvious. It's obvious it's impossible to afford a child and raise a child in this economy.
- LSLyman Stone
So I-
- CWChris Williamson
Why is that response given if you're saying that it's not the case?
- LSLyman Stone
Costs do matter. So, and I think there's, there's two ways to help think about this. The first is, let's say you have bad eyesight, okay? And the reason you have bad eyesight, you know, ophthalmological traits are overwhelmingly genetic, right? The reason you have bad eyesight is because your parents have bad eyesight. We could... We-- What we would say is you have bad eyesight because of your genes. There's a lot of people who would say, "Okay, so if genes are causing bad eyesight, you have to fix it by changing your genes." But I would say, no, you could get LASIK or wear glasses, okay? Costs are not the, the, the root underlying cause of low fertility. It's not like, it's not like in societies where costs are a bit better that, like, they just have no fertility decline, 'cause fertility decline is happening all over for cultural reasons and technological reasons, all kinds of things. But they are locally a cost. They are locally a factor everywhere, and we see that. There's ludicrous amounts of evidence that costs matter. Um, a lot of times people say, "Well, if costs are such a factor, why do higher income people have lower fertility?" They don't. That's an error. That's a statistical error caused by looking at women's income instead of householder, husband's income. Um, fertility is positively correlated with income and has been forever. Um, even in non-human primates and non-primate mammals, like social status predicts higher fertility everywhere. Um, soCosts do matter. The eyesight analogy is a h- nice way of understanding causes and responses, causes and how you fix a problem are just not always the same thing. Second way to understand cost is what I call the blueberry problem, okay? When I was growing up, if I said, "Hey Mom, I want some fruit," she would go into the cabinet and she would pull out these plastic cylinders that inside them had some kind of chunks of, I don't know, maybe it was peach or pear or some kind of fruit in, in, like, a liquid, like a sugary liquid. I don't even really know what this stuff was. It was probably plastic rolling off a, a thing. But it was, like, 15 cents for a little cup of fruit. You can still buy them at the store. They're still there. I see them. I don't buy them for my kids. My kids get fresh blueberries. They'll knock back, like, $10 of blueberries in, like, five minutes.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- LSLyman Stone
Why do I do that? Because social norms changed, okay? Because the social norm now is if you're the parent at the park and you're not giving your kids real berries, I mean, meh, what are you? And also, it's not just social pressure. I like the idea of my kids eating fresh blueberries or fresh blackberries, whatever. I like that.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a curse of knowledge in that way.
- LSLyman Stone
The ... Yeah, okay. But when you think about it, is that cost or culture? Well, they're the same damn thing. There's no difference between cost and culture. The demand curve is shaped by culture, and also, uh, culture itself shapes the demand curve. If you ask, what's the price of a prostitute? It's going to matter what people-
- CWChris Williamson
Jared knows.
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs] It's going to-
- CWChris Williamson
Put a comment.
- LSLyman Stone
It's gonna matter what people think the appropriateness of using a prostitute is, okay? Any price contains in it both material supply and demand factors and culturally normative judgments. And so when we think about the cost of, of kids, people say, "Well, it's not that having kids got more expensive. It's that your social norm of raising kids changed." But look, if all people want is to have kids, you can donate to a sperm bank. Your genes will get out there.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- LSLyman Stone
But people don't want to have kids. People want to have a family, a partner who loves them, children that they get to share their life projects with, a house of a certain type. They want to have a package of goods that go together, and that package is defined by prevailing cultural norms. And it is the case that the prevailing cultural norm of what a middle class family wants to have is really freaking expensive, and you see it on Twitter.
- CWChris Williamson
Comparatively.
- LSLyman Stone
Com- yeah, and you see it on Twitter. Like, just yesterday there was this thing about people showed this, like, farmhouse with, like, a kid running in a field and they're like, "This used to be affordable." And I'm like, that farmhouse was definitely, like, a planter aristocrat's house, like 200 ... This was not affordable. The other factor going on here is because fertility has always been status correlated for men, every generation of kids is basically the children of the top 80% of men, which means everybody's expectations intrinsically ratchet upwards because the bottom 10 or 20% of men filter out of every generation.
- CWChris Williamson
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- SCSimone Collins
But you've touched on the core wicked problem of falling fertility. I mean, this began not in the '70s like a lot of people tend to think if they're looking at this as outsiders, but in, like, with the Industrial Revolution. And that is when we fundamentally changed the way that we lived. We shifted from living in family units with cottage industry businesses, to working in cities, to working in factories, and suddenly everything about the family that used to come from within the family, you know, your food, your clothing, everything was made mo- more or less within your family or community, to suddenly being bought piecemeal. Everything was atomized. And that is a fundamentally unsustainable lifestyle, and it makes kids very difficult to have. And now kids are being raised like they're aristocratic millionaires. I mean, even the children of noble families in the past would be raised in a way that would have CPS called on those families today, 'cause the kids are off running in, like, the garden. They're, like, down in the kitchen, like, almost getting burned in the fire or something, right? Like, the parents were like, "Go away. Leave me alone, and, like, come present it to me dressed up by your sometimes present governess at the end of the day." And that, God forbid. No, we have to chauffeur them everywhere. We have to buy them fresh blueberries. You know, like, this ... And, and to a certain extent too, this has, this has been legalized. You know? You, you, you can't even legally raise your children sustainably anymore.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- SCSimone Collins
So it, it makes sense. Basically, there is no affordable way to have children, especially a lot of children, and opt into mainstream society. You have to be a weirdo Mennonite Amish person. You have to be off in some cul- you have to live off the grid in some way. You have to be in some high fertility Catholic community where everyone kind of takes care of each other's kids and keeps quiet with CPS and stuff. Like, uh, that, that is a really tough thing, is you can't now really opt into, to a high fertility lifestyle-
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, you're talking about-
- SCSimone Collins
... and opt into modernity
- SSStephen J. Shaw
non-typical volume of kids there
- LSLyman Stone
consumption selection
- SCSimone Collins
Well, yeah, but I mean, like, you know, keep in mind, most people aren't having any kids at all.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Mm-hmm.
- 51:45 – 58:41
Why People Are Delaying Parenthood
- SSStephen J. Shaw
So all of these things are going through young people's minds is in the context of misinformation that it's easy to start a family at age 35. 40, no problem. I've got time. And if, if you're in that context where you believe you have time, you can easily see where you're going to think, "Well, if I just get that little bit farther in my career."
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Or, "Maybe I'll meet a more attractive girl next week, next month, next year. I got time." Or a more stable, more successful man. And this to me is... And I, I, you know, I've started a nonprofit, I, I hope you don't mind me saying, called XY Worldwide, and we're sending volunteers around the world to simply go and talk to younger people about the reality of the timing-
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm
- SSStephen J. Shaw
... of when people realistically can start families. And the stat, uh, put it with people-
- LSLyman Stone
Can you explain what this graph is, please?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
[laughs] Sure. So, um-
- LSLyman Stone
Oh, yeah, that's one of ours. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Well, yeah, and I, I have my own way of deriving them, but I saw that. It's the same, it's the same thing.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, same thing.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
So, you know, the way I like to state it is for each individual country, at what moment in time does a woman have a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother? And that means you, you look at the people who've already become a mother, and in the US, this is around age 27. So if you look at American women who've become mothers at 27, and then look at all other women currently childless at 27, how many would be expected to become mothers at current prevailing fertility rates? And in the US, that's 50/50 at age 27. Um, that shocks a lot of people, and back to your point, that I, I, I do sense, you know, a shift you were saying, uh, about the idea of things are starting to change and maybe prioritize, and peop- maybe we will see people deciding to prioritize becoming a, a mom again over purely career. But one of the things I think is so important that will help this is people understanding, not just women, that the window is actually much, much shorter, and the likelihood of childlessness at age 35 is-
- LSLyman Stone
And it's a linear decline. It's not like you're good all through your 20s, and then it falls. It's just whoop.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah. Well, to, to be honest with you, um, you know, I, I think this plays into an explanation of the political differences that we've seen. I don't know, but I imagine that conservatives, Republicans in the US, are having kids at a younger age.
- LSLyman Stone
They are, yes.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
And if that's true, it makes sense that more are gonna become parents, and that theLiberals, the left, given again that the vast majority of people do want kids, I think what's happening there is that more and more are leaving it to a point in time where they still think there's time to have children.
- CWChris Williamson
What are some of the other realities around the timing stuff?
- LSLyman Stone
So, you know, this, I'm-- this will really shock you, Chris, to hear this. I, I know you're not very familiar with this topic, but there are some problems in dating right now between men and women. [laughs] Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Why'd you say... Why'd you look at me and say, "Problems in dating"?
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs] I just-- I know that you, you haven't really written about any, or talked about masculinity or anything like that ever.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.
- LSLyman Stone
I know that's unfamiliar terrain to you. Um, but, uh, so yeah, I mean, people are marrying late. Uh, they are... And not just marrying late, they're coupling late. The rate of people who are, you know, have no partner of any kind, not having any sex or anything like that is, is declining, or the rate that are not is rising. Um, and I think there, there's a lot of different ways of thinking about this. Um, one is, okay, people think they have all the time in the world. Fertility knowledge is really low. Um, there's a lot of great work on surveying fertility knowledge, figuring out what people really think. It turns out people's knowledge about fertility is not much better than storks. Um, and, uh, and so people postpone because they think they have all the time in the world, or they think IVF means there's no clock at all, at all anymore. People postpone because they think they need to have a ton of money saved up. I'll admit, I actually had my first kid before I learned that people save up money before having kids. I was like, after I had my first kid, somebody was like, "Oh, y'all must have been saving a lot." And I was like, "I mean, we paid down our student debt, but wait, what?" And they're like, "Yeah, I mean, you know, you need, like, USDA says it'll be like $250,000 of spending over the course of a kid's life. So you probably wanna have, like, a big chunk of that saved." I was like, "Oh, no. We, we didn't do that. We, we, we just-"
- CWChris Williamson
Hold the pen and fuckin'-
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, we just had a baby
- CWChris Williamson
... fertilize this thing.
- LSLyman Stone
Um, but then the other, the f- the, the dynamic under all of this is it used to be, when I say used to, I mean as recently as the 1950s, but certainly back in the 1700s or something, that a guy in his, a guy who was 20, 22, 25 was at his peak income, his peak earnings ability. He basically, that guy, you know exactly what his social status is gonna be for the rest of his life.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- LSLyman Stone
Partly because also-
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah, but he also started working at, like, age 11.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So he's way into his career.
- CWChris Williamson
Been a fucking chimney sweep for two decades.
- 58:41 – 1:01:45
Would Marrying Younger Fix the Problem?
- LSLyman Stone
kick the can.
- CWChris Williamson
What are some of the realities of trying to do it later?
- LSLyman Stone
I mean, you have less time to hit your desired family size. In fact, one of the best predictors, um, of having fewer kids than you said you wanted... We had these longitudinal surveys where we asked people, "How many kids do you wanna have?" when they're, like, 18 and 22 and 25, and we'd follow up for decades. And so then we can see who hit their goals, who didn't. Um, and one of the best predictors of hitting your goal is the age at which you marry. And if you marry before age 27, on average, you have basically no gap between your desired family size early in life and your final family size. Marry before 27, you're, before 26 maybe, and you're pretty much gonna have your desired family size. Marry later than that, and your odds fall and fall and fall and fall and fall. Because the reality is, now, if your desired family size is one, you might do it, but if it's three, it's gonna be harder, 'cause the reality is you, you're trading off time. But it's not just number of kids. Get married at 35, maybe you have the number of kids you want, but by the time they want to play soccer, your knees hurt. [laughs] By the time their grandkid comes along, your ability to remember your grandchild's name is not as good as you might have hoped. Walking your grand... You know, being there for your grandchild's wedding, not gonna happen. Later doesn't just mean you have fewer kids. It means you spend less of your quality years with your kids, with your grandkids. That is just... I said earlier, I hope we get to the, the happiness problem. Yeah, all these, like, social effects of falling fertility are bad, but to me, the reason I care about this, the reason ultimately I've chosen to devote my life to this at the Prenatalism Initiative, is because there's just a lot of people who are gonna die miserable because they don't have the families they want. And as a Christian, I'm called to love my neighbor. I don't have an option in it, and I think that this is one of the most severe problems in our society, that so many people are foregoing one of the great intrinsic goods in life, one of the most meaningful parts of their life, the tr- the great project that they will buildas much or more than any company is going to be the company of their family
- CWChris Williamson
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- 1:01:45 – 1:12:14
Do Kids Actually Make You Happier?
- CWChris Williamson
What is the truth around happiness, marriage, and kids?
- LSLyman Stone
Parents are happier. You get happier when... You get happier-
- SCSimone Collins
Nah, not true
- LSLyman Stone
... they are-
- SCSimone Collins
Especially women
- LSLyman Stone
... 100% true
- SCSimone Collins
take a happiness hit when they have kids in diapers
- LSLyman Stone
They do not. They do not.
- SCSimone Collins
Yes, they do
- LSLyman Stone
Their happiness... No. Intentional fertility causes a rise in happiness. The problem is we mix unintentional and intentional fertility in the data. It's very difficult to separate-
- SCSimone Collins
Mm
- LSLyman Stone
... 'cause you don't have preferences. I guarantee you, in longitudinal data, happiness rises short-term. In the long run, it's a little more ambiguous because happiness scales reset over time. Happiness rises with engagement. That is, it rises before marriage basically, but then marriage locks it in. If you don't get married, the happiness of a cohabiting union rapidly returns to baseline. The happiness of a married union, uh, tends to remain above baseline as long as you remain married, which people don't always. Um, but widowage and divorce tend to return you to your pre-marital happiness level. There's three different longitudinal surveys I can demonstrate all this in. Having kids that you want to have, which is a big stipulation. Unwanted kids, unintended kids is a different dynamic, but having kids you want to have increases happiness, um, in the most robust models we know of. Unintended fertility is a different beast. Um, and it is true that in every, in almost every survey, um, unless you add like a million controls where you're basically controlling away the effect of having kids, people with kids are happier, and one reason is 'cause happier people have more kids.
- SCSimone Collins
Mm, especially when there's, like, abundant childcare in that, in that country.
- LSLyman Stone
Yes. Yeah.
- SCSimone Collins
But women do-
- LSLyman Stone
More social support increases the happiness of kids. Yeah
- SCSimone Collins
... in, in places where there's less social support, which is, like, the modern developed country, like in the United States, where you're not really getting a lot of help, especially if you're a middle class or above woman. Women especially do take a short-term hit per the research that I've seen, and then it goes up over the long run. But I think this focus on hedonistic happiness is, is overwrought, and again, it's cultural. You have to look for meaning beyond that. Um, and I mean, we also have to look at really pragmatic solutions here.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, I agree with that from what I've searched. I would say meaningfulness is more important than happiness.
- SCSimone Collins
We can talk about broken dating markets, but, like, what are we... We can't, we can't fix it. I mean, what... My, my husband and I literally have an index of other parents with kids close to our age, and we're gonna intermarry our children. My new way of skeezing on people is like, "I want our children to intermarry." Like, we're, we... Parents used to be very involved in matchmaking their children. And w- so we have to talk about what are we actually gonna do? 'Cause we can't fix the swipe-based dating model. That's gone. It's done. Uh, what we're trying to do now is just manually matchmake again. Maybe bring back the Linden C that we used to talk about.
- LSLyman Stone
Oh, matchmaking is coming back.
- SCSimone Collins
It is totally coming back.
- LSLyman Stone
It's totally making a comeback.
- SCSimone Collins
Arranged marriages. People are like, I mean, Zoomers are like, "Sign me... Where do I sign up for the arranged marriage group you guys have?" Like, it, it is, it is a real and big thing.
- LSLyman Stone
Mine was called church, so. [laughs]
- SCSimone Collins
Well, church is a good thing. Honestly, like, Catholic colleges, religious colleges are, like, the new hottest place to find a spouse. I mean, we need to look at what practically to do. 'Cause we can talk about this big problem, but the whole thing is like, so what? I guess I'm gonna, like, die alone and, and without any sort of support or I'm never gonna marry. There are many things that people can do now, and that's what's important too is this is a wicked problem. It's very scary. But, like, with every endemic and existential problem, there are manageable things that you can do. Like, if you're worried about, you know, changing sea levels, like, maybe we should look at, like, managing, um, a mass migration and getting people off coastlines and shifting the home insurance market and shifting regulation, expecting it to happen. We need to look at how we on a micro and macro level are going to manage falling and declining fertility rates and our own personal lives based on the expectation of that. And I think too much of the discussion around demographic collapse is like, "Is this a real problem? Like, how bad is it? Let's all, like, ruminate on that," when really it's like, "Okay, well, what are we gonna do?"
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- SCSimone Collins
And some of the solutions are very radical. Like, literally arranged marriages sounds kinda crazy, but this is what we've come to. And I think very similar to COVID, people are like, "Oh, this will, like, blow over in a couple months," and, like, the world shuts down. This is another COVID. Y- you think this can't possibly get super bad. It's not gonna b- be so crazy. It's going to be profoundly more crazy than COVID. This is cities crumbling. This is pension funds falling apart. This is people dying en masse. Millions and millions of people. Uh, we need to realize that, but then also just actually plan for that. No more performative pronatalism. Actual pronatalism. Um-
- LSLyman Stone
Can we comment on the dying en masse? I just wanna mention, 'cause I don't know if, if all listeners will, will get this. In industrialized countries, our social support systems are probably good enough, probably-
- SCSimone Collins
Mm
- LSLyman Stone
... that for the most part-
- 1:12:14 – 1:18:34
Does Age Predict Fertility Levels?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
So let me put my f- vitality curve on the table. So, um, I heard you with, uh, Richard Reeves giving a really good talk.
- LSLyman Stone
I managed to molest your great idea and get it a little bit right.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah, you did.
- LSLyman Stone
Okay.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Um, so if you look at the age of motherhood, and almost certainly fatherhood if we had the data, if you look at the age of motherhood, it falls into a bell curve shape. And what does that mean? It means that if you take a society, and most societies today have a peak age of motherhood of around 30.
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
South Korea 33, US a little younger. There's a curve.And that curve is almost perfectly smooth. If you want to throw R squareds at it, and then we're not getting too scientific here, but it's like n- ninety-eight percent R squared matched to a perfect bell curve.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Now, that curve has stretched over the decades. It used to be the peak was really high when everybody was having kids around the same time, early 20s. And as the timeline has stretched out, the curve has got flatter and flatter, and it's fallen by a faster rate than it's stretched. So you can look at this coldly, 'cause I'm not talking to people to ask them do they want to have five kids even though they don't have a partner. Um, I'm just looking at data saying, do you know what? You can actually predict what the fertility rate in any country is going to be, any cohesive society, by simply knowing the average age and the width of that curve with very high accuracy.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
It means that in effect there, there is a constraint. There's a limit here into the number of people in a society who can ever become parents. And that's quite a chilling thing, even for me when I first saw this data. I don't need to know the name of the country, the year. I d- I don't need to know what the h- house prices are, the level of unemployment, et cetera. You can simply predict what the rates of motherhood are going to be in any society from age alone.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, the vitality curve is essentially everybody's at a dance party and the music is playing.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And people who want to leave the dance party used to want to all leave at the same time, which means that if you want to leave and I want to leave, we can leave together.
- LSLyman Stone
They called, they called last call, and they walked out.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
However, this new vitality curve, which is flatter, so there's more variety, the likelihood of you being ready and the person that you meet being ready at the same time is less, and also right shifted, so it's later, means it is harder for you to find someone compared to where it would've been in the past. So I, I don't think it's fair to say that, um, they don't want it hard enough, given that right now I'm gonna guess the vitality curve is also kind of a measure of difficulty. It's kind of like a measure of family formation difficulty-
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... mating difficulty-
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yes, it is
- CWChris Williamson
... mating crisis issues, changing dynamics between men and women, men's mate value. Men might want, want to have a family. Now, I'm being outstripped by some changing demographic socioeconomically here. Uh, like, yes, they could David Goggins it and get up at four thirty AM and, like, triple their net worth and try and do that thing. But-
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
... like, it doesn't deny the fact that the difficulty of doing that has become significantly greater, and, like, that just causes casualties as you go along. So again, I, I worry about saying they don't want it badly enough because it... all it results in is sort of people being left behind.
- LSLyman Stone
I think we can also just look at the honesty of people's, uh, suffering in another way, and that is, again, I've mentioned longitudinal surveys before. We can just look people who hit their desired family size. That is the number they said when they were young, and then they get older. Are they happier or... And, yeah, okay, happiness, blah. Yeah, it's not a great measure, but unfortunately, in this case, I'm actually not talking about happiness. It's the CES-D scale. It's a s- it's a scale for depression, basically. So how depressed are they? Um, are people who hit their, uh, desired family size from earlier in life, are they more depressed, less depressed? In general... There's some exceptions, but in general, the people who are the least depressed are the people who hit the number they said when they were a late teenager or young adult. If you overshoot or undershoot, you're just more likely to be clinically depressed. And moreover, in IVF, we can see that when people go in... Everybody who goes in for IVF wants kids. Almost nobody's like, "Oh, crap, I fell into an IVF clinic and, and now I'm preg- preg-"
- CWChris Williamson
"I was bored and I just had to get a haircut and freeze my eggs."
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. So, like, that's not what happens. If you're in, if you're getting IVF, you want kids. Um, but some people succeed and some people don't, and it's not totally random, but it's kind of random, and some people succeed faster. And we can see what happens to people who succeed versus people who don't, and what we know is, and this is from, like, Nordic data where there's no privacy, so all... so researchers can see all your medical data, which is super fun. Um, uh, we know that if, if your IVF fails or if it takes just longer than expected, uh, you're, like, almost twice as likely to be prescribed antipsychotics or antidepressants.
- CWChris Williamson
No way.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah. So I think we can just say that, um, a significant source of suffering, of misery, of depressive symptoms, uh, in midlife, in late midlife, in this case particularly for women because that's who we have data for, but I suspect it's true for men as well-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- 1:18:34 – 1:27:52
The Hidden Risks of Selection Pressure
- LSLyman Stone
state.
- CWChris Williamson
Simone, what do you, what do you think? I'm aware you've got your, like, long-termism EA hat on in a big regard. Uh, does that, does any of that land with you?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Look, when we're all getting on spaceships and heading out somewhere else, like to Mars-
- SCSimone Collins
I don't know if I wanna be sharing a spaceship with the person who couldn't get their act together and plan early, right? Like, we used to lose a lot of humans to infant mortality. That was tragic.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- SCSimone Collins
I think it's a lot less sad that maybe, you know, someone couldn't get their act together, maybe they just didn't have what it takes. You know, they're not humanity's best and brightest or whatever. They, they were, they were s- they were too much of a victim-
- CWChris Williamson
What about this, like-
- SCSimone Collins
... to culture, and then they're just not gonna inherit the future result. Like, I, I, I'm okay with only the most big go-getters, most ambitious people who are gonna push through no matter what being the ones to inherit the future. It is unfair, right? They... It's deeply unfair. But the world is relatively less unfair today than it ever was before.
- CWChris Williamson
That, that selection-
- LSLyman Stone
Like how I learned to love fertility decline. [laughs]
- SCSimone Collins
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
That, uh, that selection pressure's incredibly novel, and I don't know if it's actually what you want everybody to be selected for in the future in any case. Do we want everyone to be, like, hyper-autist agency maxes?
- SCSimone Collins
I don't know.
- CWChris Williamson
I don't... Yeah, I'm, I'm sure. But I don't think that that is necessarily what you want an entire civilization to be filled with.
- SCSimone Collins
Well, we're not gonna have that.
- CWChris Williamson
We've got novel selection pressures.
- LSLyman Stone
So to be clear, ASD, uh, spectrum, symptomaticity, and genes related for are associated with much lower fertility now.
- CWChris Williamson
All r- I, I'm, I'm... I'm using the colloquial-
- SCSimone Collins
For now
- CWChris Williamson
... f-
- LSLyman Stone
For now. For now, yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... I'm using the colloquial version of autism-
- LSLyman Stone
But, but, no, but-
- CWChris Williamson
... not the real version
- LSLyman Stone
... no, but like, like, even-
- CWChris Williamson
It's like the autism I have, not the autism that, like, fucking-
- SCSimone Collins
Not the autism I have. [laughs]
- LSLyman Stone
But like, like, even... Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs] Look, I'm just... M- m- my point here is that the, the novel selection pressures thing, like, people aren't hard-charging and driving enough. Like, executive function was essentially only required fucking 100 years ago.
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah.
- 1:27:52 – 1:35:05
How Does Education Impact Birth Rates?
- LSLyman Stone
I'm ready.
- CWChris Williamson
Is there a relationship between female education and fertility rates, a causal relationship?
- LSLyman Stone
Not causal, no. It's correlated. It's messy.
- CWChris Williamson
Because what I've d- what I've done with the... I've tried to do, although it took an hour. The first big reason that people give, it's too expensive, typically comes from the left. This reason, which is women are getting educated, bro.
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Slow life strategy come careerism, workism, et cetera. Although this one's specifically around female education. Like, that's usually what comes from the right.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, but when Iran started curtailing female access to higher education, their birth rate continued to plummet. Like-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. So I'm, I'm asking-
- LSLyman Stone
... it doesn't fix it
- CWChris Williamson
... what, what's the, what's the relationship?
- LSLyman Stone
There, there are a couple of studies that try, that use qua- credibly causal variation. So they're looking at like places where mandatory school enrollment was raised by a year or two. Um, primary school education does have a causal effect. When you go from like, oh, you had six years of education to eight, that does reduce fertility.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- LSLyman Stone
Um, tertiary education, college education doesn't appear to reduce.
- CWChris Williamson
Which is usually what people are pointing the finger at now.
- LSLyman Stone
Yes. Usually we aren't like, "Those women should have stopped at fifth grade."
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
Like that... But that does matter. Like, just getting people basically literate and agential in the world-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm
- LSLyman Stone
... does matter. Um, but-
- CWChris Williamson
If anything it helps now because it's how women are finding their partners.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, yeah. But tertiary education doesn't seem to have... To my knowledge, there's not a credible study showing that expansion of tertiary education reduces fertility.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay. So the m- f- most used reason for people left of center is wrong.
- LSLyman Stone
Is... There's a grain of truth, but it's more complicated.
- CWChris Williamson
And the most used reason for people right of center, as long as you believe that kids up to the age of 16 should be educated, is also-
- LSLyman Stone
Is basically wrong
- CWChris Williamson
... largely wrong.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. This entire conversation-
- LSLyman Stone
I mean, we've touched on this
- CWChris Williamson
... is fucked, isn't it?
- 1:35:05 – 1:38:59
Do Men Want Families More Than Women Now?
- SCSimone Collins
I don't want that."
- CWChris Williamson
Why do you think that? Why do you think that's the case? Why do you think that we've got this sex difference now in desire for marriage and desire for kids?
- LSLyman Stone
I mean, I would say personally, uh, not being a Zoomer woman, um, that, uh, it seems a lot of it is related to emergent norms of what we could call low, like small F feminism. And what I mean by that specifically is the convergence of things like Me Too giving a lot of women the impression that men are fundamentally unsafe. Just yesterday I saw someone saying men do 95% of, you know, intimate partner violence. That's not true. Men do about 57 to 60% of intimate partner violence. Um, maybe not even that much if you trust the raw CDC data. Um, you also ... So you get this idea that men are, like, a deep danger to women. Um, you ... And I mean, m- yes, men do most of the crime in the world, but specifically on intimate partner violence, it's actually way more equal than, than you would think. Um, uh, or you get things like women being told that, like, when you get married, you know, it's like your individuality is done. I mean, on some level, yes, that's true.
- SCSimone Collins
It is. No, the ... it's, it's our modern culture that basically has shifted our values in favor of individualism and hedonism. And-
- LSLyman Stone
But men get told the same thing about the ending of individuality.
- SCSimone Collins
It's true. It's true.
- LSLyman Stone
Well, I would argue-
- SCSimone Collins
But I think women have a lot more to lose. So, uh, it-
- LSLyman Stone
To-
- SCSimone Collins
It sort of men feel like they become complete when they have their wife and their kids, whereas women, what you're being sold is you're gonna lose yourself once you have kids and your husband. You no longer exist as an identity.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- SCSimone Collins
And in a world where everything is about you, you, you, that's terrifying. Also, women are, are raised to want to always be 20, to always try to look 20. When you see, you know, older female actresses now, they still look or they're trying to look like they're 20. Um, like, there's no, there's no model for, like, a, a, a m- matronly middle-aged woman who has a lot of kids who's kind of cool. Like, maybe Meryl-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, it can't be flexed. That, that sort of thing can't be flexed on Instagram. So I think the way that-
- LSLyman Stone
I mean, it can be
- CWChris Williamson
Right, but it's not, it's, but
- SCSimone Collins
It can be. Is it?
- CWChris Williamson
But the current market dynamics aren't exactly rewarding that, right? People aren't showing the diaper changes at 3:00 in the morning other than to say, "Look at how horrible this is." And I think that this is, it's, it's an important thing to kind of give compassion to women about, which is the, uh, things that you are rewarded for and that are most visible have changed rapidly over the last-
- SCSimone Collins
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... 30 years.
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And what is now being valued more than ever is youth, fertility, freedom-
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... status, the opportunity to do what you want, independence. And that is not just something that you have always kind of wanted a bit of in the right doses, but it's the sort of thing that your entire world is going to feed back to you. And if most of your communication and most of your integration is mediated through the internet, mediated through social media, which is where most of this is, because you're in an atomized, non-religious, non-gener- pan-generational house, this is the only way that you can get some sense of semblance of belonging-
- LSLyman Stone
So-
- CWChris Williamson
... and, and recognition from the people around you. So you're obviously gonna play into that game. And it's tough because you go, what you have been psyoped and gaslit into believing, and that's not to say that every woman wants to have kids, et cetera, et cetera, fucking caveats and throat-clearing out of the way. Like, for the women who do, there is this market that they're existing within which doesn't allow you... Okay, put the glasses on.
- SCSimone Collins
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
I can tell this is gonna get good. Um, there is a market they're existing within which penalizes lots of the things that come along as a byproduct of becoming a mother.
- SCSimone Collins
Well, and there's no market for hag maxing. No one's gonna make money by selling hag maxing.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- SCSimone Collins
Um, you know, you, you can't sell-
- 1:38:59 – 1:45:06
Are We Choosing Travel Over Children?
- SCSimone Collins
scenes.
- LSLyman Stone
So this year, so, like, last year for the Pronatalism Initiative, most of our work was focused on housing. We thought housing was super important, and we think it is, and we still have some more on that. This year, most of our work is gonna be on non-material drivers of fertility culture. So looking at, like, cult- because we all know culture matters, but what is it about culture specifically? And there's one norm that comes up a lot in surveys I do, and I didn't take it seriously for a long time, but I'm gradually coming around to... You didn't have tinfoil for me to put a tinfoil hat on, so I'm going with the, the funny glasses. And it is that we've underrated the extent to which travel has fundamentally rewired particularly young women's sense of identity.
- SCSimone Collins
That's a great point.
- LSLyman Stone
And what I mean by that is globalization, cheaper airline tickets, Instagram, all this stuff has actually changed the world. Like, vacation is different. Leisure is different specifically, and there's also, we can, like, point to a technology shock. Basically deregulation of airlines, improved, uh, airline technology for, like, better fuel usage. We can say, like, isn't it weird that the share of Americans with a passport has, like, tripled in a generation and a half? Isn't it weird that everybody vo- vacations in all these countries, like the end of the Cold War de- uh, deregulation, all this stuff? And in surveys, one of the things that shows up repeatedly over and over is when you ask people, you know, "Okay, you say you want to have kids, but you're, like, not. What is it?" And one of the most commonly volunteered responses when we don't give it as an option is, "I want to keep traveling, and once you have kids, you can't travel." And I'm like-
- SCSimone Collins
Oh, that's underrated
- LSLyman Stone
... "Here's a picture of me with my kids at, like, a mountaintop in Georgia. Here's me and my kids in Vietnam." And yes, granted, I'm a high-earning man with a flexible job who can give my children an elite aristocratic upbringing.
- CWChris Williamson
And it's a bit more of a nightmare than doing it on your own.
- SCSimone Collins
It is.
- LSLyman Stone
Honestly, I love it. And I, I, I tried to bring my kid here. We were just talking about this before. I was gonna bring my kid here, but she wanted to stay at home and go to the racetrack with mama and put on fancy dresses and watch the thoroughbreds work out. Um, so I love traveling with my kids. I had a speaking gig in Hong Kong a few months ago. I brought two of my kids with me. We had so much fun. It is more logistical challenges, and it's way more expensive. It's so much more expensive. And it changes the type of trip, but I genuinely love it. And I see so many people who really believe, and again, cost stuff stipulated, it's expensive, but I see so many people who really believe that, like, once you have kids, travel's not fun anymore, when it's super fun. You see the world through a kid's eyes. You go to a place and there's a green taxi, and you're like, "Eh, it's a green taxi," and they're like, "It's a green taxi." And again, like, I see this time and time again that travel, particularly there's a sex difference on it, women increasingly see this as how you find who you are. You go and sample all these cultures, and this tells you who you really are. What I think people are like-
- CWChris Williamson
Fucking Eat, Pray, Love generation too. That book
- LSLyman Stone
... yeah, and you, and you, and you build this, like, cosmopolitan, multicultural identity, whereas men are like, "Is there a cliff I can jump off? Can I, like, shoot a rocket launcher in this lightly regulated African country?" Like, get like, what, like-
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- LSLyman Stone
And they do things that are fun, but it, it's a whole different thing what men are looking for in travel to the extent they do it at all, and young men controlling of income travel way less than young women.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- LSLyman Stone
Um, and in particular, as women age, travel becomes more and more associated with childlessness. Like, middle-aged childless women travel a lot, and so travel culture starts to cater to them. You get this whole thing where, again, I have these on because I will admit the empirical basis for this argument is not fully fleshed out. 2026 is the year where I have a research budget to flesh it out a bit more. Um, but I really think as we think about culture, a specific cultural norm we should be thinking about-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- LSLyman Stone
... is the extent to which for young women-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- LSLyman Stone
... international travel has become a fountainhead of identity that they see as hostile to them.
- CWChris Williamson
And this is-
- SCSimone Collins
It's anti-natalist though. We've literally had close family members say-
- LSLyman Stone
It is expensive
- SCSimone Collins
... "Well, but if you have more children, how will you be able to travel?" And we're like, "Okay, so which of our future children are you gonna just say that to?" Like, we're, we're literally gonna have another kid and be like, "Hey, why don't you tell them that you thought they shouldn't have existed?"
- LSLyman Stone
Vacation was better than you.
- SCSimone Collins
"Because we could have gone on a cruise. We could have gone to Thailand." Like, it, it's, it is, it is so anti-natalist, and I, I get that there are great experiences. Our kids lose their minds when they just see an airport shuttle with polka dots on it. Like, "Oh my God," like, "Valhalla." Um, butIt's not actually that rewarding. If you go on a trip now, you see a lot of people who look hot and tired and dehydrated going and taking the picture and going to the hotel and paying their tab for a meal.
- LSLyman Stone
I was hot and tired and dehydrated in Vietnam on this trip.
- SCSimone Collins
I mean, like, it's not-
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- SCSimone Collins
It's really not as rewarding a- as, as you, as you think it is, and people are literally making trade-offs between bringing a whole new life with the entire range of their experiences and a whole new generation-
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm
- 1:45:06 – 2:07:20
Do You Lose Yourself When You Have Kids?
- CWChris Williamson
One, one thing that was interesting on the sort of loss of identity point that we were talking about, there was this New Statesman article that came out last week, and one of the quotes in it said, "It's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers." This is a group of girls that they're interviewing. "It's a much bigger deal for us to become mothers. We have to get rid of our career. I'm not fully against kids. I just really don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I want to still be me, and I will probably lose that." That final sentence, "I'm not fully against kids. I just don't want to lose the other things and become just a mother. I still want to be me, and I will probably lose that." I think that that, like, yeah, travel and Instagram and all the rest of it, this hits really close to the center of what it is that women viscerally feel. Now-
- SCSimone Collins
It's real.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
That, like, holy fuck, I- I've spent a long time getting myself into education and employment and really, really pushing the limit and, like, the world recognizes me, and maybe I've got followers on Instagram and my Instagram's going up, and maybe I've got my own business to a degree or whatever it is that I'm doing. I don't want to become just a mother. I want to still be me, and I will probably lose that. Why is that a new or novel identity shift challenge that women are facing?
- SCSimone Collins
I'll tell you what, like the one thing that convinced me to have kids, uh, second date with my, my future husband, he's like, "I wanna have a lot of kids." And I'm like, "I'm never gonna have kids and I'm never gonna get married." And he's like, "Well, what would have to change, you know, to, to change your mind?" I'm like, "I don't wanna give him my career and identity." Exactly that issue. And he's like, "Well, what if you didn't? What if by default in our relationship, if anyone had to step back, it would be me, and you would never have to do anything you don't want to." And I'm like, "Well, I'd have infinite kids then." And I think a lot of women are the same way, and they're not presented with that opportunity. I think another issue here is that now women are-
- LSLyman Stone
Can I just say I really hate the crap you all get in the media when Malcolm is like paradigmatically the thing that a lot of like feminists would say they want is like a man who will be like, "I would like to have kids. I'm willing to take the hit for it." Like-
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah
- LSLyman Stone
... that's something I have always admired about him and about your alternative choices.
- CWChris Williamson
So Malcolm, Malcolm's a stay-at-home dad.
- SCSimone Collins
He- well, he's right now with like all the kids, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Stay, stay-at-home army fucking platoon commander.
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Um, while-
- LSLyman Stone
Sorry, I interrupted you, but I just wanted to do some Malcolm pitching.
- CWChris Williamson
No, no, but the fact, the fact that he does that but you guys get kind of castigated as the conservative trad con despite the fact that-
- SCSimone Collins
Well, 'cause we like to troll. Uh-
- LSLyman Stone
[laughs]
- SCSimone Collins
No one's gonna pay attention to us if we-
- CWChris Williamson
I noticed, yeah
- SCSimone Collins
... if we give the nuanced perspective because no one likes nuance in the end. You, you gotta catch them with the candy. But-
- CWChris Williamson
So identity, don't wanna become just a mother. I still want to be me
- SCSimone Collins
... well, but women in the past used to complete their identity to fully become themselves by being a mother. You know, you, you people would, you know, all the arts like the Virgin Mary with... You know, that's like pronatalist propaganda. Like, all the most beautiful women always have a baby in their arms, right? Like, this, this was so endemic in sort of the culture that women grew up around, that they were willing to die in childbirth, 'cause that happened a lot. You know, they, they would know someone who died in childbirth, who lost babies. You know, this was clearly something that was very dangerous. Women were willing to endure that anyway. And it just happens to be now that we live in a culture where all that we're presented with is loss, and we've grown up with mothers who've done that. I mean, the reason why I, I really felt this way is I saw how it hurt my mother to basically sort of fall back and become this caretaker. And then, um, I, I think she kind of gave up on getting cancer treatment because she didn't really have an identity left anymore.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- SCSimone Collins
She just decided to stop treatment because there was no one for her to care for anymore. She was done caring for me. She was done caring for her parents who died. Like, what, what left was there? Because she lost her identity in that wash.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm.
- SCSimone Collins
And I didn't want that for myself, and I think a lot of women feel the same way. We need to fix that in society. And I do think that-
- CWChris Williamson
Does that mean therefore that somebody needs to leave, lose their identity now in the modern world?
- SCSimone Collins
We need to shift to a new way of living, but we will. We're about to enter such a period of massive disruption with demographic collapse, with AI, with all these other things that are gonna happen. I feel like it's gonna shake out for the best, but people need to be aware of the dynamics at play. I mean, I'm glad you're having this conversation with people.
- LSLyman Stone
Can I just... Sorry, we've talked a lot. You, and you, you're, you're, you're getting in-
- 2:07:20 – 2:10:20
Should Mothers Get Free Education?
- LSLyman Stone
kids." [laughs] And I was like-
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Well, what about, what, what about free college tuition for mothers?
- LSLyman Stone
Okay, so this is an interesting one because you could say when people have kids, they tend to drop out of college. We want toEncourage women's educational attainment by providing free tuition for moms. So it's interesting 'cause you're saying we want to encourage education when obliquely what you're actually doing is you're encouraging fertility for students, and I think it's a fantastic idea.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
School is a great time to have a kid.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yes.
- LSLyman Stone
Your schedule is easy. I mean, I had three kids during my PhD.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Smart.
- LSLyman Stone
Okay? Uh, four... Sorry. I had, arguably I had four kids during my PhD. My first was while I was applying. Um, it's a great time. First of all, you have a lot of young peers who can watch your kids. Um, second of all, most universities have on-site childcare that you might be able to get into and is often discounted for students. Third, you're pretty young. Fourth, your schedule's, like, flexible in different ways. If you are married during graduate school, that is your time. Crank 'em out.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But that also means that free college tuition for mothers would allow somebody who's 35 to go and get an education.
- LSLyman Stone
Yes. Oh, so you mean going back. You could, yeah, you could have like a V- a VA or like a GI Bill for moms.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, yeah. I think it's not a terrible idea.
- CWChris Williamson
GI Bill.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
I like it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, GI Bill, yeah.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
I, I, I, um, interviewed a young German woman, um, medical student, about fertility, or ma- making birth gap, and, uh, I, I didn't realize, but she already was a mother at age 21. So I was interviewing her as a medical student, thinking I was going to be asking her about her future fertility plans, and no, she's already a mom. And by the way, she was traveling and, um, so, so that was never a problem to her. But her data point for starting a family young was she looked at all the other doctors, and so many were childless.
- LSLyman Stone
Mm. Yep.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
And she talked to some of them and said, "Well, there's just never been a moment in time. Life just sped up and sped up and sped up." So she decided, well, let's, let's do... And she ended up cohabiting with an, a, a group of other young people who all had kids. And, you know, so there is something for it. It's not for everybody, clearly. But, you know, these pathways to make education, training, careers, career development, um, parenting something that are entirely compatible is... And I'll, I'll go further. Well, I don't think nations are going to survive this- No. No
- CWChris Williamson
The point that you mentioned there, which I think is really important, is the sort of felt sense that women have, especially now, of that loss of identity, and the fear and the uncertainty. Cost of living is higher for a lot of people, especially at the lifestyle that they think that they're supposed to have.
- LSLyman Stone
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Which is what it is.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Mm-hmm.
- CWChris Williamson
Right? Regardless of whether or not you would adjust inflation fucking-
- LSLyman Stone
Social norms are imposed.
- CWChris Williamson
Correct.
- 2:10:20 – 2:20:51
Are Women Being Blamed for Declining Birth Rates?
- CWChris Williamson
re- one of the things I've been thinking about, I got in a lot of trouble at the start of this year, uh, for talking about birth rate decline. It's interesting when it kind of breaks out into the real internet, right? Not the people that are maybe a bit more familiar with this.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And I hadn't done the appropriate land acknowledgment throat clearing that I do usually, and that means that if you don't and it hits kind of like the normie net-
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... you get in a lot of trouble. It made me reflect on things. So I'm like, okay, if I'm, if I'm interested in this topic and I don't want to have to take a ton of slings and arrows when I do it, how do I do it without having to do this sort of unnecessary landing in Australia thing each time before I, I start talking about it? I think one of the problems that I encountered was the cost of having kids to a woman is so high, like physically incredibly high. They're the ones that risk it. They're the ones that-
- LSLyman Stone
Absolutely
- CWChris Williamson
... their mate value changes way more than the father. Give a dad a kid and get him to walk around a park, like his mate value's probably gone up.
- LSLyman Stone
So high.
- SSStephen J. Shaw
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yes. As opposed to a woman who your beauty, your sense of self-worth, all of this stuff that society is imposing on you and is now trying to extract and monetize from you, that's being-
- LSLyman Stone
To say nothing of health complications
- CWChris Williamson
... And, and the physical, the cost, the pain, the uncertainty, the fear, all of these things. And I think what happens is if you're a guy who is talking about that in anything that approximates flippancy or dismissiveness, you come across as being very callous.
- LSLyman Stone
Yep.
- CWChris Williamson
If you talk about this topic without the appropriate level of sensitivity, and it's all well and good, me steaming in and going, "Well, look, we know that da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da." It's like, hey, hey, I don't think that you're fully appreciating the gravity, the felt gravity of the situation.
- LSLyman Stone
Absolutely.
- CWChris Williamson
When we're talking about lost identity for women in their careers, which are now a more important part, it's the thing that's imposed self, uh, uh, reinforced from all of the people on the internet. This is your primary source of self-worth, your work, your career, your education, your independence, your freedom, and then there's real legitimate reasons to worry about it too. You say, "Well, what, what if I get left? What if we get divorced? I don't want to be a financial prisoner to my husband and be in a relationship that I can't leave." How many marriages stayed together 75 years ago because the woman had literally nowhere else to go? Like, all of these things together have created a situation where this conversation's really fucking hard, and the conversation's always about women.
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
The conversation always lays this at the feet of women and goes-
- LSLyman Stone
Yep
- CWChris Williamson
... because, as I asked you this question over WhatsApp, I was like, why do we... Why is it, like, total children per mother? Why is it the moth- why is it mother, mother, mo- mum, woman, woman, wo-
- LSLyman Stone
Because men lie about their fertility. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Never.
- LSLyman Stone
They, they don't know how many kids they have. And Sweden actually tracks this data pretty aggressively, and, uh, the, the total number of children born, uh, by administrative data matching to fathers is about 8% less, uh, than to mothers.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh.
- LSLyman Stone
Or sorry, it's about 6% in Sweden. In the US, it's about 11%. Um, about 11%. Actually, I think in the newest data, it's 10%, but about one in 10 kids have no medically acknowledged paternity.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, also, like the ONSjust collect data about mothers
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah. Yeah, all of-
- CWChris Williamson
They just, there is no data about fathers, so
- LSLyman Stone
Yeah, no, no, the ONS has, has father data, but it's missing for, I wanna say, 7% of births? But it, it is there
- SSStephen J. Shaw
But, but in terms of the regular fertility data-
- 2:20:51 – 2:29:51
Why Is Everyone So Offended?
- SSStephen J. Shaw
risks. I would love to come back to something you just said, because you did take a lot of stick in February. In fact, you blew the internet up because I did searches for-
- LSLyman Stone
How did I miss this?
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah, I missed it too. And how did-
- LSLyman Stone
Which, which interview got you in trouble?
- SCSimone Collins
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
So I did, uh, I was on Steven Bartlett's podcast.
- LSLyman Stone
Oh, okay.
- CWChris Williamson
So it was number eight in the world with number two in the world. Steven's got a very female audience, and we did two and a half hours on how to do a good New Year's resolution.
- SCSimone Collins
Oh.
- CWChris Williamson
And I did 10 minutes on mating dynamics and maybe three minutes or so on birth rates. And, um-
- LSLyman Stone
So you for four... So for two hours you hectored women about having babies is what I hear. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Is essentially what happened. I got in, I... Look, I, I, I got in an awful lot of trouble and, uh, I mean, it, it's, it's one of those times where Scott Galloway rang me and he, he spoke to me on the phone the same way that someone consoling a person that's recently bereaved would. He's like-
Episode duration: 3:43:57
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