The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates - Mads Larsen
Chris Williamson (host), Mads Larsen (guest)
In this episode of Modern Wisdom, featuring Chris Williamson and Mads Larsen, The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates - Mads Larsen explores evolution, Dating Markets, And The Civilizational Cost Of Collapsing Births Mads Larsen discusses the global fertility collapse, arguing that modern dating markets, women’s increased independence, and contemporary ideologies of love have unintentionally created conditions where people can’t or won’t have the children they actually want.
Evolution, Dating Markets, And The Civilizational Cost Of Collapsing Births
Mads Larsen discusses the global fertility collapse, arguing that modern dating markets, women’s increased independence, and contemporary ideologies of love have unintentionally created conditions where people can’t or won’t have the children they actually want.
He explains, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, how female mate preferences in a freely chosen, promiscuity-enabled mating market lead to a concentration of mating opportunities among a minority of high-status men and widespread involuntary singlehood among others.
Larsen contends that replacement-level fertility is not simply an economic or lifestyle issue but an existential risk comparable in scale to other X‑risks, with societies on track to lose the majority of their population within a few generations.
He criticizes current researchers and policymakers for downplaying the problem, calling instead for cultural experimentation, better understanding of mating and reproductive psychology, and new dating norms that preserve women’s freedoms while making family formation more feasible.
Key Takeaways
Low fertility at current levels leads to rapid population collapse within a few generations.
A fertility rate of 1. ...
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Modern mating markets systematically exclude many men while over‑rewarding a minority.
With individual partner choice and dating apps, women’s more selective promiscuous attraction system funnels attention toward high‑value men, leaving a growing share of men with few or no mating or relationship opportunities, which depresses family formation.
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Women’s economic independence changes what counts as an attractive or acceptable partner.
Because many women no longer need men for material survival, the evolved pull to pair‑bond with an average man in harsh conditions is weakened; in an abundant, choice‑rich environment, standards rise and more men fall below the threshold for partnership and parenthood.
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Policy tools focused on cash incentives to parents have limited impact on birth rates.
Evidence from multiple countries suggests that direct financial transfers can only move fertility marginally and at extremely high cost per additional child, because the deeper drivers are psychological, cultural, and structural—not just economic.
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Contemporary ideology of ‘confluent love’ undermines long‑term, child‑centered relationships.
The current norm of serial monogamy and individual self‑realization—staying together only while it “works for me”—reduces social pressure and cultural scripts that once steered couples into stable pair‑bonds and parenthood.
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Stigma around discussing male disadvantage and ‘incels’ blocks honest problem‑solving.
Men who cannot find partners are often caricatured or pathologized; this makes it socially unsafe for them to speak publicly and prevents societies from acknowledging and addressing the structural and psychological factors behind involuntary singlehood.
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Addressing fertility collapse requires cultural experimentation that preserves women’s freedoms.
Larsen argues societies must commit to maintaining women’s rights at 2024 levels while testing new dating norms, institutions, and educational approaches that make pair‑bonding and child‑rearing more achievable, rather than reverting to patriarchal coercion or simply ‘accepting’ demographic decline.
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Notable Quotes
“With a fertility rate of 1.4, you lose one third of your generational size per generation.”
— Mads Larsen
“Demography is destiny… we know how many one‑year‑olds were born last year.”
— Chris Williamson
“We have created a society where men actually aren’t good enough to entice women’s attraction systems so that women want to have sex with them and pair‑bond with them and have children with them.”
— Mads Larsen
“This is an existential threat, perhaps the greatest challenge of our era, and people have not so far wanted to take it seriously.”
— Mads Larsen
“When we’re now self‑eradicating… our cultural intuitions, our cultural legacies—we have almost nothing to build on.”
— Mads Larsen
Questions Answered in This Episode
If financial incentives are weak levers, what specific cultural or institutional experiments might realistically help more people form stable partnerships and have the children they want?
Mads Larsen discusses the global fertility collapse, arguing that modern dating markets, women’s increased independence, and contemporary ideologies of love have unintentionally created conditions where people can’t or won’t have the children they actually want.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can societies raise struggling men’s attractiveness and life prospects without framing it as blame or sliding into regressive gender politics?
He explains, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, how female mate preferences in a freely chosen, promiscuity-enabled mating market lead to a concentration of mating opportunities among a minority of high-status men and widespread involuntary singlehood among others.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
What would a new, pro‑family ideology of love look like that balances individual autonomy with social needs for reproduction?
Larsen contends that replacement-level fertility is not simply an economic or lifestyle issue but an existential risk comparable in scale to other X‑risks, with societies on track to lose the majority of their population within a few generations.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
How can researchers study reproductive psychology and involuntary singlehood rigorously when public discourse is so quick to label such work as misogynistic or extremist?
He criticizes current researchers and policymakers for downplaying the problem, calling instead for cultural experimentation, better understanding of mating and reproductive psychology, and new dating norms that preserve women’s freedoms while making family formation more feasible.
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
At what point, if any, should concerns about overpopulation or climate mitigation give way to concerns about demographic collapse, and how should policymakers navigate that trade‑off in public messaging?
Get the full analysis with uListen AI
Transcript Preview
You managed to get yourself in trouble.
Well, I, um, I tried to get my country of Norway to start taking the fertility crisis seriously, and as we've seen in many nations, people are unwilling to do that, and, uh, yeah, that motivated some, uh, some attacks along- alo- along that way.
How did all of this start?
Well, it started with, with an article that, uh, me and Leif Guinier, a professor in evolutionary psychology, wrote earlier this year where we, uh, conceptualized and theorized the concept of involuntary single women, INSYNS. Um, and then, uh, we, I did some interviews about that and, uh, peop- people weren't happy. Um, they felt that talking about involuntary single women was, was, uh, misogynistic and, uh, they didn't want to connect that to, uh, declining fertility.
What's the line between talking about involuntarily single women and misogyny?
Well, one of the main drivers of low fertility is that people are just having too hard of a time to find partners. So women either do not find a partner with whom they can have children or they find one too late so that the reproductive window is shortened. So this means that, uh, women aren't having the children they would like to have. In Norway, women would like to have 2.4 children and they're having 1.4. So, um, a dysfunctional dating market is an important contributor, uh, to this, uh, fertility crisis.
Okay, and how is that misogynistic?
Um, that is a bit of a puzzle that I think I have eventually, uh, managed to solve through going through this process. Um, many felt that, uh, if you, uh, bring the attention to how the dating market works for women, you are some- somehow blaming women for low fertility. And as, as an evolutionary scholar, um, I would never think of assigning blame to any groups. We are born into this environment with a certain nature and that plays out differently in different environments, and now we've created an environment where it has become very difficult for women to find partners.
What are the specifics of the mating psychology that are going on that are contributing to making this environment difficult for women in that regard?
Well, we are the first, um, first societies in, in human history that have, um, that have individual partner choice. No other society have done that before. It's always been different extents of various degrees of arranged marriage. Um, so when we opened this up in the 1960s, we talked about this last year how the six million year buildup to the, today's mating regime, and when we opened these, uh, mating markets up, what has happened is actually quite predictable as a consequence of the difference between women's promiscuous attraction system and pair-bonding attraction systems. And, uh, the regular fertility researchers do not understand these mechanisms. Um, for everyone, it's just a big puzzle why we're no longer partnering up and, and creating children. But from an evolutionary perspective, it's, it's quite predictable.
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