The Real Reason Birth Rates Are Falling - Lyman Stone

1. 0:00 – 4:39

   The Twitter Post That Caused Insane Tension

   1. CWChris Williamson0:00

      How did you get into neighborhood design beef on Twitter?

   2. LSLyman Stone0:05

      Uh. (laughs) Uh, so, I mean, somebody shared a photo of- it was, like, an aerial photo of some neighborhood in Phoenix, and they were like, "How would a-" I forget what exactly it was, but they were like, "How would any human ever want to live here?" I was like, "I mean, it looks like kind of a nice neighborhood." Like, people have pools in their backyard. Um, it doesn't have, like, a big highway cutting through it or anything. Um, I Street View'd the neighborhood. There's a bunch of parks in the neighborhood. Like, there's- y- you- in Street View, you can see kids playing in the parks. Like, clearly, people enjoy this neighborhood. I also looked up, like, the Zillow on it, like houses in this, in this neighborhood are... Like, people clearly want to live here from the prices they're paying. So I said, like, "You know, I don't know. It, it looks like a nice neighborhood." Like, it looks, it looks pretty nice to me. And the thing that really set people off is I said it looked relatively walkable. And what I mean by that is it's like, you can look up the census tract. It's a density of, like, 9,000 people per square mile, which is considerally- considerably above the US average, right? And if you look at the, the street grid, like, it's- it's quite compact lots. These are not, like, half-acre lots or something. They're, like, quite compact lots. You can very easily walk around. I could envision my kids going to play at any of the many parks in the neighborhood. There's a school on the edge of the neighborhood. Kids could walk to school. Um, but people really were mad that I called this neighborhood walkable. They were like, "Nothing in Phoenix is walkable! It's 110 degrees in the summer." And I'm like, "Okay, man." When I lived in Montreal, it was like negative 10 degrees 11 months out of the year. I didn't think that was very walkable either, but whatever. Um, so yeah. People didn't like the take.

   3. CWChris Williamson1:49

      What... W- where do you think that's coming from? What's the underlying impetus of that, the motivation for them being so upset at you?

   4. LSLyman Stone2:00

      So, a lot of people said, "Okay, but walkable to what? There's no bars. There's no restaurant in the neighborhood. What are you walking to?" And I was like, "I mean, 90% of the time when we walk somewhere, whether in my current neighborhood or when I lived in Montreal or l- when I lived in Hong Kong, most of the walking we did was not walking to what. It was walking to who." Right? We're like, "Oh, we're gonna go to a neighbor's house, and the kids are gonna play at the neighbor's house. We're gonna go and visit someone." And it looked like a neighborhood where, like, you know, a lot of my friends could get houses. My family could get houses. Like, we could all live close together, and we could walk to each other without having to cross, like, a major highway or some crap like that.

   5. CWChris Williamson2:41

      Hmm.

   6. LSLyman Stone2:41

      Um, so when I looked at it, I looked at houses clustered close together, houses that look like they have families in them, lots of parks, and I said, "Oh, there's clearly a neighborhood where there's a lot of whos that you might walk to. My kids are gonna have friends in this neighborhood." But basically, a lot of, you know, people who are gonna remain childless until the day they die looked at it and were like, "Oh, but where, where's my, like, boutique concert venue?"

   7. CWChris Williamson3:07

      (laughs)

   8. LSLyman Stone3:08

      (laughs) Sorry, that was like a really hostile way of putting that.

   9. CWChris Williamson3:12

      No, I, I, look, I-

   10. LSLyman Stone3:13

       But... (laughs)

   11. CWChris Williamson3:14

       I, I, Well, look. I mean, p- people, people who don't have kids and people who do have kids, or even people that are, are married and people who aren't married have very different-

   12. LSLyman Stone3:21

       We look at the world in different ways. (laughs)

   13. CWChris Williamson3:24

       That's correct. Is it not Nassim Taleb that says the world is split into two groups of people, those who have kids and those who don't?

   14. LSLyman Stone3:30

       Yep.

   15. CWChris Williamson3:30

       And, like, the, uh-

   16. LSLyman Stone3:31

       I mean, l-

   17. CWChris Williamson3:31

       ... second group will never understand the first?

   18. LSLyman Stone3:33

       Little things, like, like Montreal- like the neighborhood I lived in in Montreal had, like, a crazy high walkab- it's rated, like, one of the most walkable, cyclable neighborhoods in North America. And it was lovely. I enjoyed it. But I didn't think it was very walkable. And the reason is, yes, there's a lot of stuff around, but Montreal's public works program is basically controlled by the mafia, um, and they do a terrible job maintaining the roads and the sidewalks. And as a result, you really can't push a stroller on half of the sidewalks.

   19. CWChris Williamson4:03

       Yeah.

   20. LSLyman Stone4:03

       They're too potholed. Right? So, like, if I can't push a stroller there, it's not walkable, 'cause when I'm walking, I'm pushing a stroller. Um, but people are like, "Oh, it's so walkable." And I'm like, "No, your public works are crap." Whereas Phoenix, it never rains. There's no potholes. Boom.

   21. CWChris Williamson4:19

       Ah.

   22. LSLyman Stone4:20

       Walkable.

   23. CWChris Williamson4:21

       Yeah. So you're gonna be, you're gonna be hot but smooth.

   24. LSLyman Stone4:24

       (laughs) Well, but you're only hot, like, four months of the year, right? Like, the Southwest in the spring and fall is, like, the most glorious climate there. I mean, you're in Austin, right? Like, you know this. Like, outside of the hot season, it rocks.

   25. CWChris Williamson4:36

       Yep. Yep.

   26. LSLyman Stone4:36

       So... (laughs)

   27. CWChris Williamson4:37

       We're just, we're just getting into the thick of it now.

2. 4:39 – 14:14

   The Relationship Between Population Density & Fertility

   1. CWChris Williamson4:39

   2. LSLyman Stone4:39

      Yep, yep.

   3. CWChris Williamson4:39

      Uh, what about, what, what, talk to me about the relationship between population density and fertility. This seems to be, uh, an area of research that I didn't even know existed. Um, and in retrospect, kind of does make sense, but, uh, was certainly new to me.

   4. LSLyman Stone4:55

      Yeah. So it's super intuitive. We look at the world, um, we look at, look at any map of any country, and population density predicts everything, right? Like, the more dense counties in any country are, like, the more liberal voting counties. The more dense counties are, like, the more economically active counties. Like, all, like, population density proxies for, like, everything in the world. And one of the things it proxies for is fertility. So in most countries, to be honest, in, like, almost every country, or in almost every industrialized country, I should say, um, if you look at a map of fertility and a map of density, the really dense places are also the really low fertility places. And this has caused people to very reasonably infer that there's, like, a linkage here, right? That (laughs) this can't be a coincidence when the correlation is, like, off the cart- off the charts strong.

   5. CWChris Williamson5:47

      Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   6. LSLyman Stone5:47

      Um, so, but it turns out that it's actually kind of tricky when you start looking below the correlational level, when you try and look at mechanisms. Like, okay, but why?...the simple story of density and fertility starts to break down really fast. So there's some things that are quite clear, okay? Like neighborhoods where there is a very high ratio of adults to bedrooms have lower fertility, and it's kind of plausible what's going on there. Okay, so like crowded houses are bad for fertility. That's really clear. But that's actually not always high density areas. There's a lot of places where adults are very crowded together, but it's actually not super high population density. Right? So you see this less in the US, but you see this a lot in, like, Eastern Europe or Spain or East Asia where you'll have like a rural area, but it's got, like, a single apartment building in it. (laughs) And they're just like, "Well, we needed some more housing, so we put a 40-story apartment building in a farm." Um, and this is a case where like this is not a high density area. Okay? It's basically rural, but it just has a tower. But it's a place where the amount of living space per adult is quite low. Okay? So, um, it seems like the, the actual thing doing the work here is, um, uh, is like crowded living space, like small houses compared to people who have to occupy them, less like people per square mile. Um, these are obviously related, like places really, with really high people per square mile often also have like really crowded housing. Like the classic example is like Kowloon Walled City, th- the old place in Hong Kong. It's gone now. Now it's a lovely park. Um, I've been there several times 'cause we used to live in Hong Kong. Um, but, uh, you know, it was very dense and it was very crowded. But these are actually not the same thing.

   7. CWChris Williamson7:46

      So what's a better way to design it? We need space. We need to put people into houses. They need to be not super expensive. Not super expensive means spaceship, space efficient for the real estate company that's going to make them. You want, you know, uh, 10,000 square feet of floor space, like ground net floor space in Manhattan. Go fuck yourself.

   8. LSLyman Stone8:07

      (laughs)

   9. CWChris Williamson8:07

      But you, you put that across two stories in an apartment and it's, you know, accessible to maybe the top 1% of earners. Uh, what, what's a better solution?

   10. LSLyman Stone8:17

       So, um, you can... There's a great infographic that circulates sometimes on Twitter, and it shows like three different neighborhoods. And the neighborhoods all have the identical population density per square mile, but in one of the neighborhoods it's like a big t- a couple of big towers with like parkland between them. In the other one, it's like mid-rise apartment buildings, kind of like, like you'd see in, um, um, some of Spain, uh, like eastern Spain in, um, like Valencia or something. Um, uh, it's like these mid-rise apartment blocks with kind of courtyards in them. And then the third one is like townhouses. And the point is they're all identical density. Where they vary is some of them have more height and then more empty space on the ground, and others sacrifice some empty space on the ground to have less height. Okay? And what I would argue is if you want people to have kids, you should go for the less height and the less empty space on the ground. That is townhouses with tree-lined sidewalks are what everyone wants anyways. Those are the most bid up neighborhoods, so that's what we should build. Those are the ones that have the lowest vacancy rates, so that's what we should build. Um, and they also have relatively high fertility rates. That is when you actually look at these like dense neighborhoods that are actually, they're like dense single family. So actually I live in one of these neighborhoods, almost entirely single family housing, but it's also almost 10,000 people per square mile. Um, and like throw a rock in my neighborhood and you hit like a homeschooling family with five kids. Um, (laughs) it's just, I mean that's also just Kentucky, but um, uh, but that's the type of neighborhood families tend to want 'cause it tends to be something that like your kid can walk to the park very easily, um, we could walk to the YMCA and the gym and the pool really easily. Um, and it can be high density, but it also gives you actually a lot of the kinds of houses people want to raise kids in, kinds of houses that are convenient for families. That is they have a garage, they have parking, they have somewhere to put the stroller, stuff like that. Um, and also that are still, um, in places where it's regulatorily legal to build them, it's relatively, uh, cost-effective for a developer.

   11. CWChris Williamson10:34

       Is it a case that you are creating the sort of housing, or two things maybe, one that you're creating the kind of housing in high-rise apartments that single people or couples without kids are like, "Oh, this is cool. Look at the floor-to-ceiling windows and I've got a great view and this park is so spectacular." Or I guess that parks and large open green spaces are kind of like a very sexy billboard of look at how well-natured our local environment is, not in the same way that my small back garden is, but the, the day-to-day existence of most people is not spent in the park, it's spent in the house. So the sort of positivity and the, um, ceiling that you feel like you have from a lifestyle perspective is higher. Is that part of the mechanism that's going on?

   12. LSLyman Stone11:22

       Yeah. So, um, part of it is, uh, the first one you s- you said, which is basically that like... A- and by the way, I'm not speculating on this. At IFS we just finished a survey, we surveyed 9,000 Americans on their housing preferences and particularly their housing preferences as it relates to family. So when I say something like, when people visualize their family life, liberals and conservatives alike, like across the political or ideological spectrum, they visualize a single family house. Okay? 80% of them do. Um, uh, that's not speculation when I say that. That's fact. We, we just collected the data on that. Um, now I have another survey in the field right now where we're gonna look at can you make apartments that are slightly more family-friendly, that'll like help people have their first or maybe their second kid in the apartment because...... because apartments are kind of all that's being built in the US right now. Um, so we're... Our first report on housing at IFS was like, "Here's the ideal housing policy." The next one we're gonna do, it's gonna come out this summer, is like, "Ha, ha, ha, you didn't listen to our ideal housing policy. Here's how to do a needle exchange for housing policy, like harm reduction."

   13. CWChris Williamson12:28

       Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   14. LSLyman Stone12:29

       Like, "Can we make slightly less bad apartments?" Um, the other thing is parks. Parks are great. I love taking my kid to the park. Um, big parks are great, nature-y parks are great, if you keep them swarming with police. Okay?

   15. CWChris Williamson12:48

       Okay.

   16. LSLyman Stone12:48

       Like, if you don't police your parks really well, they become places families really don't want to go to, and they become disamenities, right? They become places for basically drugs and crime. Um, the, the number one thing the families want in any neighborhood is safety, order and cleanliness, beyond anything else. Beyond schools, although schools matter too. Beyond a specific house, you want safety, order and cleanliness. Um, if the neighborhood doesn't... If you don't get a sense that it's safe, clean and, and, and reasonable for your kid to walk around in the neighborhood, nobody wants to raise a family there. Um, they might do it because they don't have other options, but it's not what people want. And the problem with parks is that, especially we live in a time where, like, public disorder is really rising. We're just... I mean, people just don't really have respect for public spaces in the same way. Um, and as a result, public spaces increasingly are actually disamenities for families because they are not well policed. That- It doesn't have to be this way.

   17. CWChris Williamson13:55

       Mm-hmm.

   18. LSLyman Stone13:55

       So like gated communities and like master plan communities can still provide these, like, public space amenities because they police access really aggressively. Um, but if you don't police access, um, and police usage, um, then, uh, these public spaces become disamenities for families with small,

3. 14:14 – 20:17

   Why Young Adults Aren’t Leaving The Nest

   1. LSLyman Stone14:14

      with small children.

   2. CWChris Williamson14:15

      One of the most common reasons I think that people give for not having kids or not being able to have kids or not wanting kids is it's too expensive to get on the housing ladder.

   3. LSLyman Stone14:23

      Yeah.

   4. CWChris Williamson14:24

      Um, w- how... What are the nuances to what people are saying around that? And also, how does that relate to this population density style and type of home? I imagine that this is very carefully Gordian knot into itself.

   5. LSLyman Stone14:42

      Yeah, it is. (laughs) So people are not lying when they say that housing is a barrier to their fertility. Um, when people say childcare is a barrier to their fertility, they're not lying, but they're more often telling themselves a story about a series of other economic factors that are at work. But housing is a case where the price of h- the price of one square foot of housing compared to the income of a young adult considering a first child, that, that age range, has skyrocketed. It's just way more expensive to get housing than it used to be in the past, um, particularly housing in, in a neighborhood that is clean, orderly and safe. Um, uh, so that's very real. And in our study that we, that we did earlier this year, we showed that, um, in, um, in MSAs with like the top third most expensive housing compared to young adult income, um, young adults are more likely to live with their parents, they, uh, they have lower marriage rates and they have lower fertility rates. Um, so yeah, expensive housing, it keeps people stuck with their parents, stuck in their parents' basement, um, and it, it prevents marriage and fertility because people of all stripes... If you ask a 20-year-old, "Close your eyes. Visualize the Christmas card you're gonna send to all your friends 20 years from now." You know, you wanna, you wanna give an update to all your friends in 20 years, send your, like your winter greeting card, visualize the picture on the front of it of your family. Now, what is the house behind your family?

   6. CWChris Williamson16:21

      (laughs)

   7. LSLyman Stone16:22

      Okay? I've done this experiment-

   8. CWChris Williamson16:24

      (laughs)

   9. LSLyman Stone16:24

      ... in classrooms of sociology undergrads, okay? Like, super, like not conservative kids, okay? Like, sociology undergrads, super far left. 90% of them, when they open their eyes, they say, "Oh, it was a single family house. It was a two-story single family house with a yard."

   10. CWChris Williamson16:40

       Hmm.

   11. LSLyman Stone16:41

       Like-

   12. CWChris Williamson16:42

       You mean it wasn't-

   13. LSLyman Stone16:43

       ... it is all-

   14. CWChris Williamson16:43

       ... a super cool modern design floor to ceiling-

   15. LSLyman Stone16:46

       No. No.

   16. CWChris Williamson16:46

       ... window, overlooking-

   17. LSLyman Stone16:46

       Everybody, everybody... If you just ask people, like, "Was it made out of brick?" They're like-

   18. CWChris Williamson16:51

       (laughs)

   19. LSLyman Stone16:52

       ... "Of course, of course it was made out of brick." Like, I can guess the color palette of the brick to within like a small range.

   20. CWChris Williamson16:58

       (laughs)

   21. LSLyman Stone16:59

       Like, everyone is imagining this. This is... Now, when pe- when push comes to shove, yes, people opt for other things, people make other choices. But at like a brute, like cognitive schematic level-

   22. CWChris Williamson17:09

       Mm-hmm.

   23. LSLyman Stone17:10

       ... when people think about their family, and people don't just wanna arbitrarily have kids, okay? Nobody's like, "Well, I donated some sperm, therefore I have the kids I wanted to have." Like, that's not how that works. People don't wanna have kids. They wanna have a family, and a family is a package. It's, it's, it's a spouse, it's kids. It might be cousins, it might be aunts, it might be uncles, but crucially, it's an arrangement of residents as well as people. That being the case, um, it's not enough to say, "Well, we built a bunch of apartments and apartments are cheap now," 'cause guess what? That's not what people mean when they say a family. And how do I know that? Because I just surveyed 9,000 of them on this topic. Um, uh, so we have to build the kinds of houses that people want. And I wanna say, this doesn't mean we have to build expensive houses. Okay? I love Daybreak, Utah. I don't know if you've ever been there or heard of it. It's a gigantic master plan community. It's got like 60,000 people now, which is huge for a master plan community. It's super dense. Now, it does have apartments, it does have an apartment section. It has, it has a range of housing types. But I was just visiting a friend who lives there, um...... and like, he lives in a single family house that's like, I don't know, 2,500 square feet or something, decent sized house. Um, you could easily raise kids there, um, though he doesn't, he has two dogs. Um, (laughs) um, but, uh, but the neighborhood, like, they're these small yards, very compact, but every, every one of these small yards that I pass has, like, a tricycle in front of it or... Right? It's Utah, everybody's having kids. Um, you can build dense s- you can build dense single family, and that's what most Americans want. You can do it affordably if zoning will allow it. Um, it's, it's the type of housing that's most missing in America, is dense single family.

   24. CWChris Williamson18:58

       Hmm.

   25. LSLyman Stone18:58

       And it can be- even be like townhouses. Like, it doesn't have to be detached, even. It can be attached single family. People are happy to live in that, they're happy to raise a family in that, but nobody wants to raise a family in a small apartment. Heck, most people don't even wanna raise a family in a big apartment. Hauling a stroller up the, the elevator isn't-

   26. CWChris Williamson19:15

       Hmm.

   27. LSLyman Stone19:15

       ... isn't fun. Now, I think you can, like, imagine a world where this isn't true, okay? You can imagine a world where people kind of schematically lose their attachment to single family homes, so I think the Soviets kind of created that world in Eastern Europe, um, right? Like, Soviet families-

   28. CWChris Williamson19:36

       Oh, hooray. What a, what a, what a fantastic role model for... (laughs)

   29. LSLyman Stone19:38

       Right. Ri- so I, I say without endorsement. (laughs)

   30. CWChris Williamson19:41

       Yeah.
4. 20:17 – 30:37

   Why Parenthood Is Not For Everyone

   1. LSLyman Stone20:17

   2. CWChris Williamson20:17

      Right. Okay, so outside of housing, this always gets thrown around. New study, survey comes out, the biggest reasons that people give for not having kids, not necessarily the reason for them not having kids, but what are the, what are the touted reasons that people give when they're asked, "Why are you not having kids?" Or, "Not yet have had kids," or, "Don't want k-" Like, get into the math of that.

   3. LSLyman Stone20:45

      The bigger reasons, I mean, people say costs. That's common. But actually, like, some of the most common reasons that people give, um, are, uh, they don't wanna lose their personal leisure time and hobbies. Um, that's like actually one of the biggest reasons, is basically sometimes it gets surveyed as, like, leisure time, sometimes it gets surveyed as personal freedom, sometimes it gets surveyed as, like, hobbies and activities, but it's kind of this nexus of, like, disruption to my life. That's one of the biggest reasons, and it's a reason that really does predict not having kids. So, to the extent you're a person who really values, like, um, kind of your individual hobbies, probably you're gonna die alone. Um, (laughs) I just got i- in trouble. I tweeted about this on Twitter yesterday, and it's been, I've been, I've been catching some heat about it today. Um, but like, yeah, I mean, the extent to which your sense of what's valuable and meaningful in your life is like your little projects, like yeah, that, kids mess that up. Family messes that up. Um, uh, so, uh, that's one of the single biggest reasons people give, and they're not lying about it. They- they're not just making crap up. Like, w- people who say this really do have fewer kids later in life.

   4. CWChris Williamson22:02

      Yeah.

   5. LSLyman Stone22:02

      Um, you also see things about childcare availability, that, that, um, that can be a very real issue. Um, and the... But one of the most common ones is people just say, "Well, I just haven't met the right person yet." Um, or, "I met the right person, but it was too late for us." Um, that's one of the most common reasons, and that one also really does predict not having as many kids as you might have wanted to have. Um, so partnership and personal freedom are definitely really important, but in both of those, I will say there's, I think there's an underlying reason that people, they almost don't have the words to articulate it.

   6. CWChris Williamson22:41

      Mm-hmm.

   7. LSLyman Stone22:41

      Um, and to be honest, we don't survey it because it's weird to ask people about, and it's something like, um, you know, "The reason I don't have kids yet is because it just seems like it's kind of a weird thing for a person at my stage of life to do, and I think that it's supposed to come later." Okay? Like it's, it's just nebulously... It seems like the only people doing that at my age are people who, like, failed out of a career or something, right? Like, it's, it's a sense that it's low status, but not just low status, but that it's like, it's not normal to do that at this time in life.

   8. CWChris Williamson23:17

      Hmm.

   9. LSLyman Stone23:17

      Or maybe it's normal, but only to have one at this point. You wouldn't have had three kids by now. Um, and I think figuring out how to tackle that intuition is a really interesting question, a really interesting problem for people who care about this issue, like

   10. CWChris Williamson23:33

       Where do you think that's come from?

   11. LSLyman Stone23:36

       Um, there's a whole, uh, school, like sort of longstanding literature around a concept called developmental idealism, um, reaching back s- and I... Uh, people argue this kind of set of ideas emerged about 500 years ago and then really took over around 150 years ago. Um, uh, but it's basically, it's a reconceptualization of life and civilizational timelines that basically says, no, life is not a c- is not cyclical, okay? So like traditionally, most people's view life as cyclical, right? You have an infancy, then an adulthood, then a second infancy in some sense as a elder when you need care, and life is just sort of cyclical and everything comes back in its time, and there's nothing new under the sun. Civilizations rise to periods of greatness, then they have decadence and they fall, and then they rise again, and there's no long term trend. Okay? But developmental idealism introduces the idea that there actually is a long run trend.... that your life progresses linearly, not cyclically, that civilizations progress linearly or even exponentially, and they go through developmental stages. Like a child, you're, you're young and then you get mature and blah, blah, blah. Um, so you get this ethic of development. Um, and that stage tends, and that approach tends to say, um, because there's this developmental thing, you really need to make big investments early in life and postpone things that impede investment-making, most notably family. Um, there's other elements of developmental idealism that, that impinge on family formation, but this simple conceptual framework that, like, life isn't really cyclical, um, is a really important, like, psychological break between most modern people and more traditional societies. Um, and I mean, you can even see it in things like most traditional people are dealing with cyclical seasons as part of their subsistence. We are not, right? We don't have as much seasonality in our life. Um, so that's, that's a big part of it, but then beyond that, I think more contemporarily, I think just in the last 20 years, you see, like, a supercharged version of this with social media and the internet in the way that we can all observe each other's consumption in new ways, that it feels like you're missing out on more now to have kids.

   12. CWChris Williamson25:59

       Mm.

   13. LSLyman Stone26:00

       Even if you're not. Like, you're actually not missing out on a lot more (laughs) than you were in the past, but it feels like you are because so many of us spend so much of our life just scrolling through other peoples' conspicuous consumption.

   14. CWChris Williamson26:13

       How much of it is... Oh, well, talk to me about the relationship between the diffusion of mobile phones and fertility preferences. I- i- is this a, a correlation?

   15. LSLyman Stone26:25

       So, I have a paper in review right now on exactly this, and the correlation is actually surprisingly weird. Um, the strongest relationship is when people get more access to mobile phones and to the internet, they're more likely to adopt concrete discrete preferences. Not necessarily lower ones, just more concrete ones. That is, they have less fuzziness around the numbers they report. They're less likely to say, "I'll just have any, as many kids as God gives me," and they're more likely to, like, say a number. And if they're gonna say a number, they're more likely to say one number rather than, like, eh, five or six, f- four or five, three. Like, they're like, "No, I want two. I want three." Um, cellphones drive this sort of concretization of preferences, um, and they eliminate some of the flexibility that people naturally have around their family life, right? Um, historically, people had limited control over their family life. There was a lot of early death, um, limited ability to control conception, and so humans adapted by having a kind of flexible conception towards family life. Um, as people get more exposed to, like, Western media, um, they tend to lose that flexibility and adopt really inflexible family norms. I want exactly this. If I don't get exactly this, it's a big problem. And what's interesting i- th- this actually sets people up for a lot of misery, okay? So, in non-Western contexts, when people undershoot their fertility desires, it seems like they don't suffer as much loss of, like, happiness as Western people who undershoot their fertility desires. Like, when Western people say they want two kids, if they only have one, their odds of being depressed in their 40s and 50s are a lot higher, okay?

   16. CWChris Williamson28:12

       Mm.

   17. LSLyman Stone28:12

       Um, but if you look at, like, an African woman who says she wants five and she ended up with three, the effects on her subjective wellbeing actually don't seem to be quite as large, though I will readily admit we don't has- have as good of data for that context as well. And it seems like what's going on is Western people just adopt these really inflexible family norms, not just lower. Um, and when people get cellphones, the inflexibility translates more rapidly than the actual lower numbers do, at least is what we're finding in early research. Um, so, but what does happen with social media, um, aside from family desires, is we see people become less likely to intend big families even if they desire them. So, this is actually a weird dynamic. When people get cellphones, we see that more of them, they still want the same number of kids as their non-cellphone having neighbors, okay? So, like, if you're in a village where people have cellphone service and the neighboring village doesn't, you all, you both want the same number of kids, but if you have the cellphone, you're less likely to actually intend to have that number of kids.

   18. CWChris Williamson29:20

       Why?

   19. LSLyman Stone29:23

       Beats me. (laughs)

   20. CWChris Williamson29:24

       (laughs) I just report the data, man.

   21. LSLyman Stone29:27

       Yeah. No. So, like, th- but this i- this is like, this is in our, like, questions for further research section-

   22. CWChris Williamson29:33

       Mm-hmm.

   23. LSLyman Stone29:33

       ... is like, why? And we, we kind of think what's going on is, um, we do see this concretization, this spread of, like, more concrete fertility desires, and what's going on is people say, "Well, it would be..." Instead of saying, "Well, it would be nice to have four and maybe I'll have them, so I'm, I'm open to that, I'll try for it, maybe I don't get it, maybe I will," once people are more exposed to Western media, they start to say, "Well, it'd be nice to have four, but I'm not sure if I can hit it, so it's better to just content myself with the two I have." Right? So, you get this sense of, like, rationalizing the difficulties of your life. Um, at the same time, there's a whole different possibility that this is basically about exposure to different status hierarchies.

   24. CWChris Williamson30:24

       What, that flexing brunch with the boys and the girls on a Saturday is far more Instagram-worthy than a night of changing dirty nappies?

   25. LSLyman Stone30:34

       Yeah. Yeah, basically. So, um...I

5. 30:37 – 37:19

   One Minister’s Plan to Increase Births

   1. LSLyman Stone30:38

      think one of the... So, I published a study on this a couple of months ago, um, where we looked at... I- it's very hard to find cases of status interventions, like how often does a government or something like implement a policy where they announce like, "Three kids is high status now."

   2. CWChris Williamson30:55

      Yeah.

   3. LSLyman Stone30:55

      And even if they do, like, do people really, like, believe it?

   4. CWChris Williamson30:59

      What does that even mean? Yeah.

   5. LSLyman Stone31:00

      Right? So, but we have one case where this did happen successfully. So, the country of Georgia, um, their state church, the leader of their state church is, he's a rockstar. He's like the most popular public figure in the country. He has crazy high approval ratings, he's like a hero of national independence and revival, whatever. So, he got ticked off that... And like 80% of Georgia is Georgian Orthodox, so like it's most of the people in the country are part of this church. And he got annoyed that they just built this gigantic new cathedral and no babies were being baptized in it, okay? And he was like, "Crap, my congre- my, my fold is dying." Like, "They're not breeding," and also they're having a lot of abortions, which is like a big no-no in conservative Christianity. Um, and he said, "Okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I will personally baptize any third-born or higher child born to married Georgian Orthodox couples, and I will become their godparent." Okay? So, this is interesting because for traditional Christian movements, um, godparents matter a lot, like they are kin, they are family. So much so that it's actually incest to marry a god-sibling in most traditional Christian traditions. You can't marry god-siblings in Eastern Orthodox canon law because it's incest. You are siblings. You can't marry siblings. Um, uh, so anyways, this guy, he did this thing, he announced this, and in 18 months the fertility of Georgia rose from 1.6 to 2.2, and it remained, it's still above 1.6 to this day. It's like 1.85 today or something. Um, so, uh, this worked. I have a paper published where we use a bunch of different quasi-causal methods to show that it worked. Georgian Orthodox fertility rose more than minority fertility. It specifically rose among married, third or higher births, all these different things. The point is it worked. But the question is why? Like, why did it work that, like, this old religious leader was like, "Ah, I'll baptize your kids."

   6. CWChris Williamson33:02

      (laughs)

   7. LSLyman Stone33:02

      Why did that make everybody be like, "Eh, we're having a third kid."

   8. CWChris Williamson33:08

      (laughs)

   9. LSLyman Stone33:08

      Like, (laughs) w- so, what we can say is the number of children Georgian women said they wanted to have didn't change. They wanted three before the intervention and they wanted three after the intervention. But the number they intended to have rose. Okay?

   10. CWChris Williamson33:25

       What's the difference?

   11. LSLyman Stone33:26

       Wanting is if I just ask, like, "Eh, ideally, how many kids would you like to have?" Intending is, "How many do you actually plan on having?" Okay, so that's very different. You can imagine saying, "Well, I'd love to have four, but it's not gonna work out for me. I'm only gonna have two." We also know that people, that, uh, the abortion rate fell, the marriage rate rose, um, women's education did not decline, women's workforce participation did not decline. So, it's not like women adopted more traditional roles. Um, people just, like, spontaneously had more kids. We think what happened is that, in this case, this religious leader, he was popular enough, and the offer of godfamily was compelling enough, um, and also being part of a big mass baptism in the cool new church that they leveled a mountain to build is kind of, actually kind of an Instagram-worthy experience, um, that this, like, hacked enough different psychological constructs that it made a lot of people be like, "Well, you know, we used to think having a third child was, like, kind of backwards, like cool people don't do that, but now good Georgians have a third baby and we wanna be good Georgians, so we're gonna have a third baby." So, it, like, unlocked, unlocked kind of like a, a religious nationalist impulse that was latent, which means you couldn't just do this anywhere, but it does point to the fact that when you're able to alter status hierarchies, fertility does respond, um, and without disrupting, like, women's ability to be economic citizens.

   12. CWChris Williamson35:05

       Mm.

   13. LSLyman Stone35:06

       Um, it- it's actually not a re-traditionalization, it's like a new traditionalization, right?

   14. CWChris Williamson35:12

       Mm.

   15. LSLyman Stone35:12

       That you get big families, but also women working, which is something that a lot of sort of conservative pro-natalists often assume ha- is impossible, right, that, that the only pathway to big families-

   16. CWChris Williamson35:23

       It's a trade-off.

   17. LSLyman Stone35:23

       ... is to roll back this. And, and in Georgia we see that's not the case. Religious revival generated more babies, but didn't re-traditionalize women's roles.

   18. CWChris Williamson35:33

       How many kids do most Western women say that they want? British, American?

   19. LSLyman Stone35:37

       Two. Like, 2 to 2.5.

   20. CWChris Williamson35:39

       One? And how many-

   21. LSLyman Stone35:39

       There's a few countries that are, like, 1.9, like Malta is, like, 1.8 or 1.9. Austria, I think is 1.9 maybe. Um, but generally, most people say, like, between 2 and 2.5. Well, they don't say 2.5, but the national average is, like, 2 to 2.5, and in the US it's, like, 2.2 or 2.3.

   22. CWChris Williamson35:59

       And how many do they intend?

   23. LSLyman Stone36:02

       Uh, anywhere from 1.2 to 1.7 or 1.8.

   24. CWChris Williamson36:06

       Right.

   25. LSLyman Stone36:06

       I think in the US it's 1.9.

   26. CWChris Williamson36:08

       Right. Uh, so, yeah, I guess they're not actually that far off. Like, the birth rates and the intention rate are not actually all that far apart.

   27. LSLyman Stone36:17

       They're not. They're n- Births versus intentions are not radically far off. People, people are reasonably good predictors of what they themselves intend to do. (laughs)

   28. CWChris Williamson36:26

       Mm.

   29. LSLyman Stone36:27

       Um, it's just that what they intend to do is a lot less than what they would like to do, uh, if their circumstances were different. And so, like, the biggest things that predict intentions being lower than desires-... for young women are things like, um, uh, like mental illness is a big one, so like people with more severe diagnosed mental illness have a bigger gap between intentions and desires. Um, people with less relationship history, so people who have, like, never had a relationship by the time they're 28, um, have bigger gaps between intentions and desires. Um, people with worse work histories as well, or people with histories of incarceration. Um, so, uh, bad life outcomes predict a shortfall between intentions and desires, people who are basically failing to hit key milestones.

6. 37:19 – 47:17

   Where Do Fertility Preferences Come From?

   1. CWChris Williamson37:20

      Where do fertility preferences come from? Like, what w- w- w- what is that?

   2. LSLyman Stone37:27

      (inhales deeply) Um, that is a great question. Um, not genes. Um-

   3. CWChris Williamson37:34

      Right, this is the one area of psychology that-

   4. LSLyman Stone37:37

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson37:38

      ... apparently genetics isn't gonna step into.

   6. LSLyman Stone37:41

      Yeah, it's not genes. We, we actually know this one. Um, (laughs) uh, there are very few genes that are relevant for f- for fertility and, um, they, uh, they don't appear to be highly implicated in fertility preferences. Um, so it comes from some kind of socializing environment. Um, people are socialized into having bigger ferti- higher fertility preferences. Um, some of that is from your parents, right? You tend to absorb. There is some heritability of fertility and fertility preferences, though heritability of these things is pretty low. Fertility is much less heritable than most traits that we study heritability of. Um, so it tends to come from, um, idiosyncratic personal positive experiences of family life. So, you happen to attend a church that has happy families, and so you go, "Yeah, okay."

   7. CWChris Williamson38:40

      Mm-hmm.

   8. LSLyman Stone38:40

      So, like, religious people have much higher fertility preferences, but not all religious people, right? Um, and it's not necessarily the religious people whose parents had high fertility preferences. Um, so it tends to be what we call horizontal culture rather than vertical culture. That is, it's culture you absorb horizontally from other people in your society, not vertically from your parents primarily. There is some parental influence. And what is that horizontal culture? Well, it's gonna depend on the society you live in. Sometimes it's religion-

   9. CWChris Williamson39:11

      Hm.

   10. LSLyman Stone39:11

       ... sometimes it's, um, uh, sometimes it's, uh, peers. Uh, some of it is the c-

   11. CWChris Williamson39:17

       If you're friends with people with big families?

   12. LSLyman Stone39:19

       What's that?

   13. CWChris Williamson39:20

       If you're friends with-

   14. LSLyman Stone39:20

       Yeah, exactly, yeah. Yeah, actually there's, there's a, there's great studies on this that show that, um... There's a study using a huge database of Dutch people. There's actually a lot of studies involving large databases of Dutch people, because I guess Dutch people like large databases. But, um, uh, that shows that, like, the more of your personal social network, that is people with bigger families, the more kids you want to have. And, like, causality here is a little tricky. Like, maybe the reason you have those friends is 'cause you wanted to have big families. But the authors try to control for that, and they, they argue that it's actually causal, that, like, social exposure to people with big families makes you want big families. And they also show on the other side that, like, the m- the more childless friends you have, the more likely you are to not want to have kids. Um, so this suggests that there's a real contagion of fertility preferences. And this also points to, like, the Georgian Orthodox case I give. Like, what really happened here is that, like, a public figure, like, started, uh, a fertility epidemic, right? Like, he stood up and said, like, "You should all do this. This is a good idea." And then for whatever reason, some influential social actors were like, "Yeah, okay." And then it just, like, infected everyone. Um, so, uh, th- my favorite case of this actually, there, there's (laughs) , there's a study that sh- that looks at, um, that looks at coworkers, and particularly, like, coworkers who sit close to you at work. And they showed... And the, the first study to do this showed that, like, when a coworker who sits close to you at work has a baby, you become more likely to have a baby over the next few years, right? That there's, like, contagion via proximate coworkers. But then somebody said, they were like, "Wait, maybe that's not really causal, because, like, maybe your seating chart is not random." They said, "But what is random is the sibling behavior of coworkers." So they said, "What happens to your fertility when your coworker has a sibling who has a baby?" And they showed that, like a ripple effect, like when a coworker's sibling has a baby, it makes the coworker more likely to have a baby, and then that eventually makes you more likely to have a baby. There's, like, a ripple effect of babies. Um, so, like, it's all a little goofy. I'm like, "I'm not sure how much I believe the exact effect estimate there," but I think the model it lays out is plausible, that, like, fertility behaviors are highly contagious, and they operate via social learning, right? That, like, a lot of us, a lot of people th- People think parenting is harder than it is. Um, it, it's really genuinely not as hard as people think. And the way we know this is that the number one thing that makes people most likely to increase their fertility preferences, like if you re-survey people longitudinally across a lot of waves, like, what causes people to increase their fertility preferences? The number one thing is they had, is they had kids. When people have kids, they tend to want more kids. They raise their fertility preferences.

   15. CWChris Williamson42:16

       Mm-hmm.

   16. LSLyman Stone42:17

       And so what that tells us is as you acquire experience of children, you realize, "This is better than I expected." (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson42:25

       Mm, could, w-

   18. LSLyman Stone42:25

       If that... Yeah.

   19. CWChris Williamson42:26

       Sh- could that not be contributed to by the fact that there's an overhead that you need to pay in order to have one child? You need to childproof the house, you need to get a bigger car, you need to do all of these things. So kind of like a man who built a factory to make one pair of shoes. You go, "Well, you know, I mean, the shoes are nice, but God, I, I'm kind of in for a penny, in for a pound. I might as well have a..."... make a ton more shoes. Y- is it, is it possible to sort of bifurcate that?

   20. LSLyman Stone42:52

       Yes. It is, actually. So in the US ... Actually, not just the US. Like, every industrialized country that has these big fertility declines recently, the fertility declines are almost entirely among first births. Conditional on having baby one, your odds of having baby two have only declined a little bit in most countries. And conditional on having baby two, your odds of having baby three have not declined at all in most countries. And your odds of having baby four, conditional on having baby three, have actually risen in a lot of countries. So, it is actually the case that, yes, what we see is in for a penny, in for a pound. People who have any kids at all are still having them like they always did. We're just seeing that some people are not having kids at all, and as a result they never learned that this is actually a pretty good thing. But then if you imagine the social contagion effect, if none of your friends are having that first baby, you're not learning that actually when people have a baby they tend to want more kids. You're not seeing that. And as a result you get this contagion where people are just ... They're not observing something that people used to observe in human life which is, once you have one you realize, "Yeah, I could totally have another one." And then you think, "Yeah, I could have another one after that." And then you think, "Maybe I could have another one." Um, but a lot of people feel this way. Not everyone. Obviously there's some people who get two and they're like, "Oh, I'm done." Um, or they get one and they think that. That's always been the case. I, I'm not ... I don't wanna say that doesn't happen but, um, but on average having more kids causes upwards revision in fertility preferences.

   21. CWChris Williamson44:26

       So it's mimetic in both ways. It's mimetic on the way up and mimetic on the way down, but it's a little bit of an unfair war when the social contagion is moving in the downward traject- trajectory, because it's very easy to flex the kind of lifestyle that seems aspirational online without kids-

   22. LSLyman Stone44:47

       Yep.

   23. CWChris Williamson44:47

       ... and also all of the costs of having kids are very obvious, and all of the benefits of having kids are very hidden.

   24. LSLyman Stone44:53

       Yes. The benefits of having kids are literally behind closed doors. Like, there are the days where, like, on this podcast right now my kids are with my wife out at playgroup. You don't see them. But the benefit of kids is times where I'm working on something at home and my 18-month-old just comes and sits in ... I've got a little kid chair beside my chair, you can't see it, but, um, and she just comes and stands there and plays with her LEGOs on my desk. And it's just sweet, and it makes that 30 minutes of my day just more pleasant and happier. Okay? But no one sees that, because when it's time to record, I like shoo away, like, I'm like, "Go away kids, I don't want you on the recording." (laughs) Um, uh, we literally hide the joy of children. Right? Um, so, uh, before we were recording on this, we were, me and you were talking about how we were both tired. Uh, I don't know what your reasons for sleep loss were, but mine of course were jet lag, 'cause I was just in Asia for two and a half weeks, um, with my kids, and with another family with small kids. We had five kids, five and under, um, in Hoi An, Vietnam and in Hong Kong, um, and it was awesome. Like, it was so much fun. Um, and yes, I am going to do a massive flex post here in a few weeks where I do a blog post on how great it was and I show pictures of my kids, um, but like, that is not ... That's not typical. (laughs) Like usually the, the travel flex is people being like, "Oh, here's, like, gorgeous me with, like, no children in sight," um, uh, but it's so fun to travel with kids. Like, it's exhausting. Like, it's exhausting in very different ways, but like watching your kids freak out about some piece of cultural difference that you barely noticed is so much fun. Um, or like when you're like explaining something to your kids-

   25. CWChris Williamson46:54

       Mm-hmm.

   26. LSLyman Stone46:54

       ... when you're traveling and they, and it like clicks with them, it's so cool.

   27. CWChris Williamson46:59

       Yup.

   28. LSLyman Stone46:59

       Um, that's a bit of a digression, but yes, it's just easier to flex a childless lifestyle. Um, also it's the inertial position. Right? Like people are born childless-

   29. CWChris Williamson47:08

       Mm-hmm.

   30. LSLyman Stone47:09

       ... and so it doesn't take any effort to stay that way. So-
7. 47:17 – 57:46

   Where Do Women’s Income Standards Come From?

   1. CWChris Williamson47:17

      the set, the set point here. All right, what about, uh, male socioeconomic status? How much is that contributing to this?

   2. LSLyman Stone47:25

      Uh, it definitely matters. Um, so male earnings, uh, young men's earnings, uh, have seen essentially no economic growth in the last 20, 25 years. Uh, other groups have. Young women have to some extent. Um, but particularly older people have. Now, there's a popular notion that, um, that when men have more income than women or like when women are more dependent on men for their sustenance that there will be more marriage and more babies. This actually turns out not to be true in industrialized societies, that like US states that have a bigger gap between men and women, like if you put together like a, a, like a panel model with fixed effects of states with like gender gap for young men and women versus marriage rate, a bigger gender gap in incomes does not actually predict like a higher rate of entrance into marriage. Um, what does predict it (laughs) is when young men have a higher income relative to older men. Now this might sound weird. Why is it that young, that older men having really high incomes would be bad for young men's marriage rate? Immediately there will be some people saying, "Well, it's because older men are poaching all the young women." No, it's actually not that either. Even if we restrict to only the incomes of already married older men, why is this? And the reason is...Through all of time, all of human history, since we came down from the trees, there is one thing that women have desired above all else and it is insurance. They have desired to be insured against income volatility, particularly the income volatility that arises from family. To be clear, insurance is very different from economic provision. In most human societies, women produce about half of the economic benefits of their family. They farm, they gather. In hunter-gatherer societies, women gather, they produce a lot of the calories of a society. Um, in agricultural societies, women work on the farm, so do children. Um, in industrial, in early industrial societies, women worked in factories. Um, women have always been able to do economic provision. The problem is their incomes tend to take a hit when they have a baby. Um, so they need someone who provides insurance. Well, what kind of insurance are they looking for? Well, most women's sense of what they want to be provided for their children is gonna be shaped by one thing, and that is what they observe from fathers when they are growing up. Okay? So the comparison young men are facing is not young men's income versus young women's income. The comparison young men are facing is their income versus the income of the women, the incomes of the women's they want to marry's fathers.

   3. CWChris Williamson50:25

      Yes. Yeah.

   4. LSLyman Stone50:25

      Okay? So if you wanna marry a woman, she's comparing you to her dad. Okay? And why do we know this? Because across centuries of data on mating behaviors, we see that there's almost no hypergamy. That is, women do not marry up if you compare their husbands to their fathers. Okay? They marry up if you compare their incomes to their husbands', but they don't marry up if you compare their husband's income to their father's income. Women match to husbands that share their father's socioeconomic status. Okay? Which means when older men become much wealthier compared to younger men, sucks to be a young man, because all the women are like, "You clearly can't provide the things that my dad provided for my family."

   5. CWChris Williamson51:12

      Mm. It's so cr- it's like so incestuously weird to think that your potentially eligible male suitor is not competing with the other men around y- it's, uh, like, you as a guy don't need to be worried about that. You're competing with her dad in a-

   6. LSLyman Stone51:32

      Yup.

   7. CWChris Williamson51:32

      ... really weird way.

   8. LSLyman Stone51:34

      So and I should say, it's actually, you're not strictly competing. You are competing with her dad, but you're competing with her dad and the other dads of women she saw as peers when she was growing up.

   9. CWChris Williamson51:44

      Right.

   10. LSLyman Stone51:44

       Okay? So, like-

   11. CWChris Williamson51:44

       Yeah. Uh, there's a, uh, something I saw here, "Across the last 300 years of British data, men and women-"

   12. LSLyman Stone51:49

       Yes.

   13. CWChris Williamson51:49

       "... very reliably match on male status correlated to women's father status."

   14. LSLyman Stone51:53

       Exactly.

   15. CWChris Williamson51:53

       "i.e. a lot of women without college degrees may themselves be poor, but often their families are not."

   16. LSLyman Stone51:59

       Exactly. Exactly. So that's Greg Clark's study. That's a wonderful instantiation of this. Um, so yeah. You're, men, you're not competing with other guys. (laughs) You're competing with me. (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson52:12

       (laughs)

   18. LSLyman Stone52:12

       You're competing with a-

   19. CWChris Williamson52:15

       Dads.

   20. LSLyman Stone52:15

       ... a confederation of fathers. (laughs) Um, and what that means is as dads, one of things we can do for future men is not spoil our kids. (laughs)

   21. CWChris Williamson52:27

       Okay.

   22. LSLyman Stone52:27

       Like, and I know that sounds weird, but, like, really it's like if you have a lot of income, like, hide it from your kids. (laughs)

   23. CWChris Williamson52:34

       (laughs)

   24. LSLyman Stone52:34

       Um-

   25. CWChris Williamson52:35

       Okay.

   26. LSLyman Stone52:35

       ... like, wait until they're 35 to reveal to them how much money you actually have.

   27. CWChris Williamson52:39

       Millions, there was millions waiting there. And you, meanwhile, you had to have bread and cheese again for dinner, little Timmy.

   28. LSLyman Stone52:45

       (laughs) Um, no, like, but I mean, really, like, I think, I think there's, like, a genuine argument here for, like, like, princess spoiling your daughters really wrecks their future marriage prospects.

   29. CWChris Williamson52:58

       (laughs)

   30. LSLyman Stone52:59

       Um, especially, like, I, and, and I have a lot of sympathy for this, like, uh, whenever I see someone, like, a peer or a near peer who's, like, living a really opulent life, it's always, like, the game of, like, real money or debt? Like, which one is paying for this? Like, do you have that much income? Or are you just, like, up to your eyebrows in credit card debt? And it's- it's often the latter. And then I think, but the kids don't know. The kids don't know. Like, I have a dear friend, uh, someone I- I cared about very much who was always, um, always giving so many gifts to his kids. And- and not just to his kids, to everyone around him. He was, like, infamously generous, um, until he committed suicide because it turned out he had massive gambling debts.
8. 57:46 – 1:06:39

   Are Men Supposed To Be Providers For Their Family?

   1. CWChris Williamson57:46

      dig into the men as providers versus men as insurers thing a little bit more?

   2. LSLyman Stone57:50

      Yeah.

   3. CWChris Williamson57:50

      I- I've never heard of this, this-

   4. LSLyman Stone57:52

      Yeah.

   5. CWChris Williamson57:52

      ... in the past.

   6. LSLyman Stone57:53

      So... Okay. Um, we have a norm that really emerged in the 20th century that women don't contribute to household subsistence. Okay? This didn't happen in the past because it would never have worked, right? Like, for humans to survive, everybody needed to be working on the farm. Okay? Now, you did have separation of tasks. Okay? Men maybe did the plowing, women raised the chickens, um, women raised the, the cow or did the dairying. Okay, there's a division of labor. But I mean, look, go read Little House on the Prairie, okay? Ma is working all the time. Okay? She's not just keeping house. Ma is out there making things of economic value that then Pa goes into town and sells. Okay? Um, and while those books are, you know, fictionalized, they are accurate in representing that particular facet of subsistence, which is that women provided a very large share of the labor that gave households their subsistence and income throughout all historic human societies. It's only in the 20th century, to some extent the 19th, but especially the 20th century, that society's routinely became productive and wealthy enough that women could actually not contribute to subsistence and income, that men's productivity got so high that it became possible to say, "Actually, women can stay home and have book club."

   7. CWChris Williamson59:30

      Well, they could, they could stay home previously, but home was not a place-

   8. LSLyman Stone59:34

      I mean-

   9. CWChris Williamson59:34

      ... bereft of doing serious work.

   10. LSLyman Stone59:36

       ... in an agricultural society, everyone stays home.

   11. CWChris Williamson59:40

       (laughs)

   12. LSLyman Stone59:40

       Like, like, the d- the dad is staying home because home is just the field in front of your house that feeds you or you die.

   13. CWChris Williamson59:48

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   14. LSLyman Stone59:49

       So, like, the whole staying home distinction is invented in, like, 1750.

   15. CWChris Williamson59:53

       Right.

   16. LSLyman Stone59:53

       Okay? Um, so you get, like, this fear of D- of domesticity is invented around then, basically. Um, I mean, look, you can go in the Bible, in the book of Proverbs, the Proverb 31 woman, she grows crops, she weaves fabric, she sells goods in the marketplace, she does all of the economic production of the house. The man sits in the gate, which is code for politics and war.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:00:16

       Mm-hmm.

   18. LSLyman Stone1:00:17

       Okay? Um-

   19. CWChris Williamson1:00:17

       Can I ju- I need, I need to just interject. I've got an idea that I'm gonna be terrified I'm gonna lose. Providers, insurers, we're gonna go from th- the woman from the Bible. Is it, is it right for me to say then that what we're talking about is a novel new position for women in society when we take a broader perspective than simply the last 300 years, is not one of them working, not one of them, uh, providing and contributing in this way, but one that is done in a much more statusful way?It seems to me that the difference we have in the modern female work to the, uh, I guess, historical and then ancestral female work is that this is done in a much more male style-

   20. LSLyman Stone1:01:06

       Yes.

   21. CWChris Williamson1:01:06

       ... which, which is-

   22. LSLyman Stone1:01:08

       Exactly.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:01:08

       ... uh, power, status, um, individuality-

   24. LSLyman Stone1:01:12

       Yes.

   25. CWChris Williamson1:01:12

       ... uh, autonomy. Um, is, is that the k- uh, a key distinction, or am I bl-

   26. LSLyman Stone1:01:18

       Absolutely.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:01:18

       ... talking shit here?

   28. LSLyman Stone1:01:19

       No, you're absolutely right. So, so, eh, eh, actually, Proverbs 31 is actually a great case to exemplify this. So, the woman does all the subsistence. The man sits in the gate, which is a cultural reference for politics and war, okay? So, what is politics and war in a Bronze Age society, or an Iron Age society? Well, it's not your daily provision, like a warrior does not provide you your daily food. What is he? He's insurance against the other warriors, okay? He's... If you say, "What is the big risk in my society?" Well, it's that the Midianites come and kidnap me and my children and sell us into slavery. That's the big risk, so I wanna insure against that, okay? I need a man for that. Look, I can weave my own fabric and grow my own, um, uh, barley, and make my own barley beer. But I, mother of children, cannot march off on campaign against the Philistines, okay? So, a man insures against that. Or if you think about agricultural, uh, like a, a state-based agricultural society, where, like, imminent raiding and pillaging is, is not an immediate threat, um, still, uh, women do a lot of the subsistence work. Um, but they do different kinds than the men. They do things that are more compatible with, uh, having children around.

   29. CWChris Williamson1:02:39

       Mm.

   30. LSLyman Stone1:02:40

       Um, s- uh, actually, often they do more valuable. That is, often they're doing work that's actually more cash-based, that is more saleable, um, whereas often the men are doing the, like, the, the, the staple crops that are basically muscle power intensive.
9. 1:06:39 – 1:11:56

   How Women Size Up Potential Partners

   1. CWChris Williamson1:06:39

      is it."

   2. LSLyman Stone1:06:39

      That's...

   3. CWChris Williamson1:06:39

      Is that... Do w- so two questions on that. Um, is that both true for, uh, w- why is that true, and is that true for both men and for women? Is there this sense in women where they go, "These male suitors aren't doing as well as my dad," which makes for a poo- a pool of ineligible partners?

   4. LSLyman Stone1:07:00

      I think so, yeah. I mean, you could see lots... You can... It is easy to find women complaining about the lack of eligible partners online. Um, and if you... So I've done some structured interviews on this, um, as part of a project, and when you, when you lean on this argument a little bit, you end up finding that what these women are s- tend to be saying is... A lot of it is about socialization. That is, they'll say, "I mean, look, there's guys out there, but they're, they're weird." (laughs) So like that's a big part of it, and that's not really about income. That's-

   5. CWChris Williamson1:07:30

      Mm-hmm. Socialization.

   6. LSLyman Stone1:07:31

      We can talk about all that. That's, that, that's... Yeah, that's a separate dynamic. Okay. But when the income stuff comes up, usually what they'll say is, "Look, you know, he doesn't have to earn more than me. He just has to have a stable job that, like, he's proud of." Um, and then you say, "Okay. Really?" And then they're like, "Well..." Like, so I did a couple of these structured interviews and, like, multiple women unpromptedly were like, "Well look, my dad wasn't rich, but he did this job," and I'm like, boom! We're at the daddy comparison.

   7. CWChris Williamson1:08:04

      (laughs)

   8. LSLyman Stone1:08:05

      Like, we got that. Um, like, intuitively, if you just push people on this, like, and you don't even have to feed them a line.

   9. CWChris Williamson1:08:10

      They start to compare to fathers.

   10. LSLyman Stone1:08:11

       Yeah, and I think that's super normal.

   11. CWChris Williamson1:08:14

       Yeah.

   12. LSLyman Stone1:08:14

       Like, that's not weird.

   13. CWChris Williamson1:08:15

       Well, who is the most, who is the most formative-

   14. LSLyman Stone1:08:17

       Yeah.

   15. CWChris Williamson1:08:17

       ... male partner-

   16. LSLyman Stone1:08:19

       Yeah.

   17. CWChris Williamson1:08:19

       ... role model that you have?

   18. LSLyman Stone1:08:20

       The next most common people will appeal to is, like, a friend's husband, okay? Is like a friend who got married and has a husband. Um, uh, they'll say, "Well, like, my friend's husband, like, he... You know, she earns more than him, but like he has a good job," and then you're like, "Is his income similar to what her father's income was?"

   19. CWChris Williamson1:08:41

       (laughs)

   20. LSLyman Stone1:08:41

       And you're like, "Uh, I guess? Yeah, it is kinda similar."

   21. CWChris Williamson1:08:46

       Mm-hmm.

   22. LSLyman Stone1:08:46

       Um, so for my wife and I, I'll just do full disclosure. Um, her mom is a nurse, and her dad is a pastor. And my dad is a pastor, (laughs) and her mom is a nurse. (laughs) Um, I earn way more money than my... Well, my wife earns zero money now. Um, but, uh, but my earning potential was, was clearly higher than hers early on. Um, and so if you just looked at our individual stuff, it'd look like hypergamy. She married up.

   23. CWChris Williamson1:09:15

       Hmm.

   24. LSLyman Stone1:09:16

       But if you look at our parents' occupations, it's like this was literally a perfect 100% within-class marriage. (laughs)

   25. CWChris Williamson1:09:23

       Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Yeah, the regression to the mean keeps on regressing.

   26. LSLyman Stone1:09:26

       Yep.

   27. CWChris Williamson1:09:26

       Dig into, um, dig into that social ineptitude among young men. That's the most polite way that I can put it.

   28. LSLyman Stone1:09:37

       Yeah, so for what it's worth, I don't think it's just young men. I think there's a lot of socially incompetent young women as well. Um, but they code very differently. Socially incompetent young men code as, like, creepy, weird, and autistic. Socially incompetent young women code as, like, angry, depressed, and anxious, (laughs) okay? Um, so there are different kinds of things, but basically what I think is going on, um... And I think actually, uh, a scholar named Alice Evans has written a lot on this, and very, very capably and lucidly. Um, and not from, like, a, like, a, you know, frothing-at-the-mouth right-wing perspective. She's, she's, I think, quite, quite liberal personally. Um, but she nonetheless will, will... Sees the same thing, which is where young men and women are just inhabiting totally different social spheres. They don't live in the same world, um, online or in person. Um, they learn different ways of interacting, different cues about what's normal. My favorite example of this is there was a survey in Korea where, like, something like 70% of young women reported that they'd been, like, sexually assaulted. And then they asked them, like, "What, what is a sexual assault?" And like, like 5% of men reported they'd been sexually assaulted. And, like, only, like, 8% of men admitted to ever having sexually assaulted anyone. Um, so they're like, "How do these numbers stack up?" And then they asked everyone, like, what counts as a sexual assault. And, like, women's list of what counted as a sexual assault was just, like, pages of things, and men were like, "Well, he didn't ejaculate in her, so was it really sexual assault?" Like-

   29. CWChris Williamson1:11:17

       Jesus Christ.

   30. LSLyman Stone1:11:18

       They just had, like, totally different definitions.
10. 1:11:56 – 1:25:05

    Low Fertility Rates In South Korea & The “K-Popification” Of Asian Youth

    1. LSLyman Stone1:11:56

       of this everywhere.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:11:57

       Can you explain what, like, what the fuck happened in Korea culturally?

    3. LSLyman Stone1:12:02

       (laughs) Uh... (sighs) I don't have a complete answer to that. (laughs) But I can do some educated speculation. So, um, Korea is not alone. We see similar dynamics in Taiwan, Hong, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Japan, um... These countries have some things in common culturally, um, and so there's a temptation to say it's something about like the historic legacy of Sinitic cultural norms or something. I don't think it's that. Um, I think it's the specific development model that they adopted in the mid-20th century. So all of these countries, um, adopted versions of export-led growth and basically the idea that they would massively suppress consumption, labor activism, um-... everything to maximize savings, investment, exports, and growth. Okay?

    4. CWChris Williamson1:13:11

       Mm-hmm.

    5. LSLyman Stone1:13:12

       So the result is, um, you have these societies that just had incredibly low fertility rates, um, early on. I mean, Japan's fertility rate gets low quite early. Um, there are societies that really aggressively told people, "You should not have a family. You should work harder. You should grind harder instead of having kids." Um, uh, which is civilizationally suicidal advice.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:13:42

       They want what you wish for.

    7. LSLyman Stone1:13:44

       Yeah, yeah. Um, uh, so they gave this advice, and they implemented this advice successfully, and they grew really fast. These are also societies that their strategy for growth was not just grind harder in the factory, it was grind harder at school. And grind harder at school is an interesting dynamic, because women, women do really well in school. Um, school is a, a female-favorable environment for a variety of reasons, um, and it has become more so over time. And yet these are societies that women had curtailed work opportunities. So they did great in school, and then they didn't get a great job-

    8. CWChris Williamson1:14:25

       Hmm.

    9. LSLyman Stone1:14:25

       ... because sexist boys club or because it was hard to com- make, make work compatible with family, or any number of things. Women did great at school and then didn't, didn't get great jobs. So, um, this creates a situation where a lot of women feel aggrieved about their circumstances, legitimately in many cases-

    10. CWChris Williamson1:14:47

        Hmm.

    11. LSLyman Stone1:14:47

        ... um, which creates a uniquely extreme culture among young women. And I do wanna emphasize, I said before there's something going on on both sides, but, um, but if you compare, like, Korean young men's social values on, like, the world value surveys to other countries with similar incomes, their young men are not unusual. Like, young Korean men are n-

    12. CWChris Williamson1:15:13

        They're not having some weird, toxic, horrendous...

    13. LSLyman Stone1:15:15

        Yeah. Th- they're not super, like, their views of, like, gender and sex and marriage are, like, not that atypical for other societies with their income levels. Um, but Korean women, young Korean women have extremely atypical gender attitudes for a country of their income level.

    14. CWChris Williamson1:15:36

        What, like-

    15. LSLyman Stone1:15:37

        Th- they're extremely progressive, basically, um, uh, on a number of, like, batter- standard survey battery questions about, like, women in the workforce, mothers staying home with children, um, uh, marriage, the es- the place of marriage and children in a happy life, questions like this. Young Korean, and to a lesser, lesser extent Taiwanese, Japanese young people are just, the, the young women are just unusually progressive for societies with their other characteristics. Um, the young men are kind of normal. Um, so to me that says that something did happen among women particularly. And I think it's a combination of women succeeding in school then being locked out of the workplace by Asian work norms. I think also, um, uh, K-pop. Um, K-pop was a state-sponsored initiative, um, by the Korean government in the 1990s to create a services export to match their goods exports. They were very successful. They created a whole new cultural world. Um, and the distinctives of K-pop are, and now of C-pop or J-pop or any of the Asian pop cultures now, are single-sex bands that are young, heavily plastic surgereed, and contractually celibate. That is, literally they sign, like, when they, when they apply to the record programs, they agree to, like, live in dorms, not have relationships, not have children for the duration of their contract. And then once they wanna have a family, they have to stop performing. So they systematically created a culture of childless celebrities and role models.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:17:36

        Wow.

    17. LSLyman Stone1:17:37

        Right? So I really recommend, there's a documentary about the band BLACKPINK. Um, it's an interesting documentary to watch if you're interested in the social phenomenon of K-pop.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:17:47

        I am. Where, where can people watch it? Is it on YouTube?

    19. LSLyman Stone1:17:49

        It's on Netflix I think, or at least it used to be on Netflix. Um, the last scene, you're gonna watch the whole thing and you'll be like, "Why is Lyman recommending this? This is weird." Unless you're just, like, really into teen girl culture. Um, the last scene will clarify for you why I recommended it. Um, but, uh, but beyond that, I mean, okay, so I was in Vietnam two weeks ago, and we went to a place called the Ba Na Hills, okay? It is, uh, it's a hill, it's a big mountain above Hoi An, above Da Nang, Vietnam. And I've done a couple of these, like, cable car, top of the mountain hill stations in Southeast Asia before. And the other ones I've been to, you go to the top and it's a scenic view. You know, you see the clouds and the mountains and the hills, and it's beautiful. Maybe there's a Buddhist temple. Okay. I did not realize what Ba Na Hills was. They have built a fake French, German, Bavarian village on top. There's a fake castle. It's crazy, okay? There's nothing to do. You just take Instagram pictures. And it's filled with cute, it's filled with cute. Like, like, the little cats and the little dogs and the, the too cute stuff that's, like, so Asian. And I think the whole cute culture is, like, part of what's going on in Asia, is, like-... their childhood was so ruined by their educational culture that they have to stay children until they're 40. Um, uh, I'm just now like saying things-

    20. CWChris Williamson1:19:25

        Oh, no, no, no. I, I-

    21. LSLyman Stone1:19:26

        ... that are gonna get me in trouble.

    22. CWChris Williamson1:19:26

        Yeah, but, um, we're already in trouble.

    23. LSLyman Stone1:19:28

        (laughs) But like talk, talk to young Asian people about how much, how their school culture was when they were growing up. It's not fun.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:19:37

        That's fascinating. And so the, the only thing that I still don't fully, I mean, I don't understand a lot of it, but I, the thing that I mostly don't understand is where this, uh, intense liberalization of women in Korea came from. Is that simply a reaction to this imbalance between performance in school and opportunity in the workforce or is there something else going on?

    25. LSLyman Stone1:20:02

        Yeah, so I think the genesis of it is basically, um, Asian women leapt ahead in school, um, and then ran into a brick wall in the workplace, um, which created a, a culture of frus- of legitimate frustration.

    26. CWChris Williamson1:20:17

        But dude, think about how fucking resentful you'd be. I would be-

    27. LSLyman Stone1:20:20

        Yeah.

    28. CWChris Williamson1:20:20

        ... jo- holy fuck. So you're telling me for all of this time I've been in this weird, you know, insular in some places, honor culture thing, there's this sort of, it's- it's- it's very patriarchal, it's sort of steeped in history, it's got a long heritage. Fuck me, if you're in Japan, it's like, you know, the country was completely isolated for the, like f- four centuries or something, and you're telling me that now, "Oh, hooray, I finally got access. I can go and perform in education in the way that I want," and I reach adulthood-

    29. LSLyman Stone1:20:48

        Nope.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:20:48

        ... and nothing's changed.
11. 1:25:05 – 1:38:29

    Satisfaction Comparisons of Men & Women In The Workforce

    1. LSLyman Stone1:25:05

    2. CWChris Williamson1:25:05

       Mm-hmm. Going back to the West for a second, what is the truth in the, the double shift for women but not for men?

    3. LSLyman Stone1:25:15

       Women do not have a double shift on average. Um, statistically speaking, men and women report virtu- uh, married moms and dads-... that's the group we're talking about here. Um, married moms and dads report virtually identical combined hours of, of household and non-household work. Um, women report slightly more daily hours or daily minutes of leisure and sleep, um, but it's like, I think it's like seven minutes more or something. It- it's like trivial margin of error stuff. Um, married moms and dads have virtually identical overall workloads. There's, there's not a difference in leisure of any note-

Episode duration: 1:44:38