Can governments increase birthrates? Should they?

all right this is uh the reason live stream I'm Nick Gillespie and today I am talking with Elizabeth Nolan Branch who's a recent senior editor and I'm talking with Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute where he's a senior fellow and the director of the center on opportunity and social Mobility uh Scott Liz thanks for talking to reason hi thanks for having me all right so today what we are talking about is one of you know there's the AI Panic uh but there's a deeper longer lived kind of uh rolling Panic which probably has something to do with AI as well but that's fears that we are not producing enough children particularly in the U.S but this is something uh that comes and goes and waves all over the globe uh particularly in Western Europe um excuse me um you know uh 50 years ago uh or thereabouts the uh obviously the fear was that we were having too many children uh particularly in bad parts of the world by which I mean third world countries China India and that we were going to be overrun by poor starving people uh who would be pissed off now the problem is that even in those countries we're seeing declining fertility rates and this has given rise to a new uh conversation about how do we uh how do we increase uh fertility rates or the number of children that women have Liz uh Nolan Brown in the most recent issue of Reason uh has a great story called storks don't take order it's from the state at first I thought this was of last you know the long-awaited flastic pickle special issue that we've been talking about um but it's not that um but let's start with uh Liz give a basic summary of what what is your story about what did you say it's about falling fertility rates in the in the U.S and around the world pretty much um you know more than half of the countries in the world have below replacement level fertility which is 2.1 uh kids per woman um some of them quite a bit below the United States is at 1.66 which puts us kind of kind of on par with uh with a whole lot of uh European countries and um above above a lot of um of the very low countries um so it sort of looks at why fertility rates have been falling a little bit of the good reasons for that but also the negative things associated with that um it looks at a lot of the theories as to why fertility rates are falling and then sort of tears them all apart because when you look at the global data it doesn't really lend itself to any of this sort of popular explanations that come from either the right or the left of the United States what um yeah what are the you know and again this is when we know we're in a full-blown panic because people on the right and the left sometimes for the same reasons but us often for you know different reasons are like oh my God this is now officially an issue um typically if it's just the writer it's just the left you're like okay we're you know we're in the gestation period I'm sorry to use pregnancy related metaphors throughout this conversation but uh you know it's like okay this is just for cheap political opportunity but this now has you know it's entered the bloodstream right because both the right and the left are like oh my God we're not having enough babies what is the um you know what was your main finding of because this is a global phenomenon um and it's something that is actually I mean if you take a longer view it's like basically for hundreds of years uh in general there's been a very broadly observed correlation that as countries become richer and more industrialized they have fewer kids but what what is driving the decline in birth rights I think the the main findings were two things um neither of which answers your question what is driving the decline because that's that's sort of a mystery unless we just say individual choice in general um but the main findings I think were that you know pronatalist policies government policies intended to boost birth rates don't work whether that's you know bribing people to have more kids with you know various uh tax incentives or direct cash payments or all sorts of subsidies or just sort of uh patriotic campaigns like Russia gave people like several days off work to like make babies um none of that works and then the other main finding is that uh yeah like I said just you know a lot of these explanations you have you know on the right things like we're not valuing motherhood enough or too many women are working or um you know we just haven't we you know there's all these selfish single Millennial women who don't want to have kids and are being childless and on the left you have all these you know more economic explanations we need more government subsidies for child care we need it's just true yeah and when you look at other countries these these things just don't not none of these explanations really pan out right because in some countries you know women are given a lot of money to have kids and others they're not and there just doesn't seem to be a strong correlation correct between that and one of the things in your story that is available online at reason.com uh points out is you know there was a kind of plausible uh notion that you know with the baby boom after World War II women kind of let left the workforce from a a certain Peak during the War years because everybody was working you know either fighting or working in factories when they pulled out of the labor force a little bit they had more kids and and people were like oh this is the thing but then uh as women entered the work you know at various points women entering the workforce they had fewer kids or they enter the workforce even more and they have more kids so it's just the day to really you know the the only thing we know for sure is that women are having fewer kids yeah basically yeah and Scott your work uh and and I really want to recommend everything that you do at the direct uh at the center on opportunity and social Mobility I'm a big fan of it of your work particularly because then we've talked at various times over the years about it you stand a thwart decline narratives or declension narratives where people are saying things are just going to hell in a handbasket you say you know no not really one of your findings is that you know one of the reasons why we're having fewer children is because women want fewer children what goes into that yeah I think that's right I think if you if you look at the Grand sweep of History um was Liz's uh piece mentions this you know there's there's been this I don't know over a hundred year decline in fertility with the exception of the baby boom that we can sort of come back to uh which I think is a more interesting story than a lot of people realize um but but yeah essentially apart from the baby boom and then you know small recovery more recently before the Great Recession uh it's just been down and and fertility dropped the most during the 1970s which not coincidentally at all was the big decade for women's labor force participation Rising um that was you know the generation of of Boomer uh women who had opportunities that opened up uh that weren't there before um coincides with increasing educational attainment on the part of women later marriage more divorce um and and as Liz's piece notes you know these are sort of trends that are common to rich countries around the world uh it's it's kind of modernity um uh and at the same time that we've seen these declines in fertility you know there is empirical evidence suggesting that women want fewer kids than they that they did the past uh so I wrote a piece um boy I guess a couple years ago at this point which is crazy um uh where it actually asked people when they had asked women when they were in their late teens uh how many kids do you expect to have um in in one of the surveys how many kids do you want to have and that's gone down over time it's basically gone down you know in line with how much actual fertility has gone down um this this was sort of comparing the youngest or the the youngest boom Farmers to the oldest Millennials um so essentially what we're looking at is I I think um a change in preferences and uh it will have consequences I think that uh that Liz talks about um but but we tend to forget you know if if the decline is the result of preferences for fewer kids that's a very different story and it implies benefits that have to be weighed against these costs than if the story is well people want the same number of kids it's just they can't afford to have them anymore yeah and this was yeah go ahead people will always point to these surveys that you know will show still Millennial and genetics women saying you know the ideal number of children is two but I think you know as I talk about in there too um you know a lot of those surveys get are asked when people are fairly young and you know people change like surveys do show that when people are younger they tend to say they want more kids and then that changes when they get older because you know and then it's yeah and then it's difficult or expensive or they just get other priorities in their life or you know something doesn't work out in their marriage just a billion different reasons why people might you know when their 20s say they want four kids and then by the time they're third you realize they don't and that doesn't mean that they failed in their fertility goals it just means change their mind yeah it is please yeah these questions you know get posed to 18 year olds um without any kind of like trade-offs right they're not like all right what would you give up to have the two kids that you that you would like to have are you willing to um you know live in a less glamorous uh suburb uh with a smaller house uh so that you can save up more uh to afford these kids and give up are you willing to spend 20 years watching Nickelodeon and whatever succeeded Disney Channel for kids uh you know for 20 years same episode of Phineas and Ferb over and over and over uh and I I want to point out for Skeptics all of us here have done our share to keep the planet populated which you know and I'm older I'm older than you guys and I'm old enough to remember when Humanity was the problem when overpopulation was the problem and so I feel bad I have two children and uh you know God I I I haven't helped the environment by uh you know shutting down the uh my evolutionary uh stream uh let's before we go to the question of whether or not there are government policies that can actually increase fertility rates and you know as you mentioned you know like you know it's it's a mixed sword right or a mixed uh message when you you say something like even Stalin couldn't get Russian women to have more kids because it's like obviously the Soviet Union and communism doesn't work it doesn't work that you know create kids or anything but it's kind of fascinating when a totalitarian leader is incapable of getting women to put out more basically right this is you know in in the crudest terms possible but we'll talk about whether or not the state can do that and whether it should but first can we focus a little bit on the question of whether or not it's a it you know how do you measure the costs and benefits of a falling fertility rate and they're you know they're one um you know there's the images which are older now because in places like China and India the most populous countries in the world uh birth rates are declining um and populations are aging but you know you have that as the bad sign but then you have uh you know in a place like Japan which I believe is the only country only industrialized country that has fewer people now than in 2000 it has a famously aging population Etc and the economy I you know it's not clear how tightly correlated any of this is Japan has been in what's been called The Lost decade for really the past 30 years almost 40 years um but what are the negative consequences of a decline in birth rates or or in in population of a country Scott do you want to go first on that what are what are are there issues with that yeah so there there are a lot of claims that are made and I'm not an expert in this in this literature um you know the big ones that you hear are results in slower um economic growth over time weirdly that's often uh framed in terms of GDP rather than GDP per person like if we have fewer people uh or or the growth in people is lower like it's okay to have a lower growth in GDP as long as we don't have lower growth in GDP per person um you know there's evidence that it uh reduces dynamism and Innovation um entrepreneurship things like that I think there's so there there there's big impacts on for instance um senior entitlements uh to the extent that you've got a lot of retirees that are receiving Social Security Medicare um and you don't have a lot of people who are paying taxes into the system that creates some fiscal stress for sure uh so I I think there's in some ways some of it is is just math I think the entitlement problem you know is very real others you know are empirical questions I don't think there's fantastic research for a lot of the claims um uh yeah I think it's clear that that regions states that um that have lower fertility experience less dynamism than places that don't um but I don't that doesn't necessarily translate I think into the future um but those are the those are the ones you hear I think Liz touches on all these uh their opinions Liz you are uh calling in from uh the uh Southwestern Ohio region Cincinnati uh where I I lived in Oxford for a number of years and that part of Ohio in general but that part of Ohio is an interesting example of a place where you know they're they're losing population relative to other parts of the country and whatnot they don't have a lot of immigration to that you know to like the Cincinnati Metro Area um what what do you see as you know you're in a part of the country which is kind of suffering from you know uh you know on a micro level some of the issues where there are fewer people and the population as a aging are there concerns with that um that that we should be thinking about and taking seriously I mean in terms of just what I see around me I I can't really it's hard to speak to it because Cincinnati and this whole area that I'm in is so much more Dynamic now than it was 20 or 30 years ago um so it's it's kind of strange even though the population but the lines have the Skechers uh stores in the mall are just out there I mean they have to convert a lot of the Catholics the one I went to and like five others have all combined because there's much fewer but I don't know if that's that could just also be fewer people in Catholic School than previously Catholicism has not had a great 20 years it has it is not yeah uh but but I like I talked to this uh this guy from uh Khalifa university in the United immigrants Stuart guess Geico Boston I'm probably butcher in his name who works on these issues a lot and I thought his perspective on this was really interesting because he talks about how you know it could be an opportunity like lower population people focus on the Doom aspects of it but it could be an opportunity and at any rate it we shouldn't just be vote like the reason people want to raise birth rates and they're obsessed with it is because while population decline like instead of focusing on make more babies make more babies we should be looking at the actual problems we're trying to solve whether that's dynamism or like having to shift where people are in the labor you know force or whether that's you know pension systems and old age entitlements like and fix those problems instead of trying to fix this proxy problem of the birth rates because even if we raise birth rates right now we're still facing this massive aging population in the US and still be other countries and more babies right now even aren't even gonna aren't going to change that yeah it's uh you know Jonathan last who was at the Weekly Standard and is now at um uh the dispatch or the bulwark I apologize for confusing uh bulwark thank you uh about 10 or 15 years ago he wrote a very good book about this General problem called what to expect when nobody's expecting and uh you know kind of uh anticipating your uh what both of you have said in different ways it's that declining fertility rights or declining population is the is an artifact of modernity of people having more money more options particularly more women and I know he tied declines in fertility to essentially they correlate with the more years of education that women have available to them which is a proxy for opportunity on autonomy and so it does seem and Scott I think you even mentioned this it's you know like the war on declining fertility I mean if it's going to become a war on modernity um that's kind of disturbing but it also seems like a lot of critics particularly on the right seem to be like yes yes that is exactly the problem um how how does one reach uh you know a person who is invested in the idea that you know and and they they can be male or female uh you know but saying no women need to be making more babies for the good of something yeah I mean go ahead Liz oh no I'll just I'll just some surprising things assumptions in baked into those sort of uh ideas are wrong like a lot of people just uh assume that you know low fertility rates are being driven by a rise in childlessness of women or couples just deciding that they that they don't want to have kids and you know there's a stereotype on the right and it's just they're all you know too selfish and too busy with either their careers or having fun or whatever um but actually you know we're kind of on par with historic levels of of childlessness actually the decline is much more driven by people just having smaller families there's way fewer people having four plus kids and way more having one or two so we've actually got more people having um children than than either than 30 40 years ago even uh but they're just having smaller families than they did Once Upon a Time which I think puts things at a different perspective absolutely yeah absolutely for sure yeah no I I mean what I've been trying to do um really as a result of the child tax credit expansion uh debate from a couple of years ago is to try to force people to just confront the facts and and I think um you know I have a lot of friends who are social conservatives um a lot of them really would like to believe that the decline in fertility is in large measure because uh people still want the same number of kids they just can't have them for some reason if that's student loan debt if it's like housing has gotten too expensive uh you name it um there's some kind of economic Factor behind it and I just don't think the evidence is consistent with that the paper that I wrote for the dispatch a couple years ago showed that um the the older Millennials are no less likely to hit the fertility targets that they said they were shooting for at 18 then and then the youngest Boomers were um and actually you've found that they were a little bit closer to yeah that's right that's right you know Boomers or at least Boomer women wanted more kids than they achieved um yeah Millennials were doing pretty good yeah that's exactly right and so I think um I think social conservatives I would hope are sort of forced to confront this evidence that a lot that they would they would like to believe that the culture hasn't changed the preferences haven't changed and therefore there's an economic explanation that policy such as bumping up the child tax credit by a couple thousand dollars increasing paid leave uh by this or that can can move the lever on some of this stuff because if it's just culture and it's it's preferences and modernity you know good luck uh with the policy changing that I think ultimately social conservatives you know this this is a marketing campaign in the end for them like if they it's perfectly fine to want more kids and to think Americans should be having more kids uh but that's a value position and you need to convince uh the rest of the country uh to think that way too it is fast yeah go ahead oh just it's funny that you say that this is the position of social conservatives too because it's it's it's again the convergence of the left and the right on these things because both of them have said it sort of settled on this idea that like if only we could make you know give people more money in order to raise their kids than yeah and I want to get to that in a second but you know just to dilate first again I apologize the weirdness of the baby boom and particularly the 1950s as a decade uh that you know I think if if you trace the kind of um intellectual etiology of of why do we look back in the not to the 1950s as a decade of you know all positive stuff um it's really Bill Bennett and William Bennett and a bunch of social conservatives people who are then called neoconservatives often painted a picture of the night they they needed to demonize the 1960s as the decade when everything went insane and so they LeapFrog back over that and this was starting in the late 70s and in the 80s and they went you know they talked specifically about the 1950s as this wonderful decade it was a return to normalcy and there was broad prosperity and they they painted a picture in in a series of works of of you know just a wonderful time when women left the workforce you know Rosie the Riveter turned out not to be a crypto lesbian but she really wanted to go home and have like eight kids um and you know Bill Bennett would talk about how you know teachers only complain that kids in school were chewing gum or talking in the Halls during classes um and it and you know divorce rates went down for the first time and you know like in the past 150 or almost 200 years divorce rates have been climbing uh you know except for in the 1950s um and if they painted this erroneous picture of a decade focusing on like kind of pro Family Values moments and then of course you know a light of the fact that rock music came out then the Beats were everywhere you know people started doing drugs the Civil Rights Movement there was so much anxiety about you know Johnny couldn't read and Sputnik was eating our lunch and we all got fat um it it Castle long Shadow because you have people looking back at it an incredibly atypical decade that they are already mischaracterizing and then saying why can't we do that I look at you know various accounts on Twitter and you know God forbid that we mistake Twitter for reality but there's a Nostalgia for a kind of Neo 50s ISM of like where no we can really go back to having four kids and a family and living in cul-de-sacs ETC as if anybody really wants that and I think until social conservatives kind of get over the idea that a that was never what it was but it's not coming back they'll be lost and then the left you know is getting on this bandwagon of like well we need to you know we need to subsidize children more so that we have more of them mostly so that they will fund Social Security and Medicare which should not just be for old people but for everybody and I guess you know uh on on the heels of that let's talk about some of the attempts by various governments both now and in the past to actually increase fertility Liz what did you find when you surveyed you know past some present attempts by specific societies to say okay you know what we're going to crank up the baby making machine um I mean yeah I found that in short just that it doesn't work um that you know that some of the countries that have tried the hardest are South Korea which has one of the lowest fertility rates um in the world I think it's it's one uh 0.81 in 2021 so it's below one now and um also Singapore and Japan very very low Singapore's is around 1.1 or 1.2 Singapore has tried so much they you know they give people preferential housing because you know a lot of the state the housing is decided by the state so they give you preferential housing if they have more kids they gave people Direct Cash bonuses eight thousand ten thousand dollars for a first kid more after that they you know subsidize child care they give subsidies to grandparents to move nuts and their kids they've just tried basically every everything that you can try and um it has not managed to to raise their fertility rate has continued to fall over the past several decades and that's the same story that you see in Japan it's the same story that you see basically everywhere that is really you know gone all in on these sort of pronatalist policies and and then to the same effect some of them you know aren't specifically portrayed as product as policies but say like the Nordic countries where there is like subsidized leave a lot of you know guarantee guaranteed parental leave subsidized Child Care women can stay home for a year or more after the kit and and they also have seen you know birth rates just continue to fall over the past several decades Scott do you have you found any places where these policies either seem to work or or they kind of pay for themselves or or something uh so I thought Liz's uh article did a great job summarizing the evidence um I've I've tended to sort of look to some of the more pronatalist folks out there who um you know would love to find policies that would move the Needle and to sort of see what they say so I think now as the time and the uh the conversation that that we ring the bell and invoke lymanstone um you know can you explain who he is and uh yeah so Lyman Stone um is a demographer I think he's in grad school right now um uh getting an econ degree uh has written for well he was at AEI for a little while he has some affiliation with the institute for family studies um has written a lot about fertility Trends um and is is I think it's safe to say he's a pronatalist I think he'd call himself that uh he had a long Twitter response which is kind of his modus operandi uh to Liz's original piece when it came out and what was interesting about it was uh to me was that he claimed first of all that that 99 percent of uh the well first that Liz ignored the programs that work uh was the first one second but 99 of what's tried uh is to meager uh to have any impact um so I guess he's saying Liz missed the one percent uh uh of studies and then third that um you know as an example of something that to be clear he didn't endorse um uh but something that could move the needle was in Romania uh you know where they outlawed birth control and abortion for yeah this was under chichasco so it's yeah at the peak of chuchisco's uh glorious Powers Yeah so you know for more than a decade outlawing uh birth control and abortion for for most of the population um and as far as I could tell the the claim was that uh maybe in the long run they increased the total fertility rate by half a child um so you know if that's uh if that's sort of uh the best a totalitarian government can do um you know Paid Family Leave is just not going to move the needle uh you know I think Liz quotes somebody is saying like the amounts we're talking about versus how much it costs to raise a kid you know the idea that a three thousand dollar uh child tax credit instead of a two thousand dollar child tax credit uh is gonna suddenly uh reverse the trends um just doesn't make any sense to me yeah and I I guess there's that issue of like even if it was thirty thousand dollars I mean what um you know and I I don't mean to put you guys individually on the spot but you know what would it take to put you in the position of having more kids and Liz you're actually you you have one child and you're pregnant with your second um you know what would it take for you to uh you know to have triplets or something like that and I mean I don't think there's any amount of money that would make me have four kids that I than I otherwise wanted to and I think that's that's the big problem with a lot of these most people these aren't decisions that you can buy you know these are deeply based on deeply held beliefs and and values and they're not the kind of thing that you can easily Sway With a little more money they have shown you know to be fair they have shown that like some of these policies can change the timing of kids they can make people have kids sooner but not necessarily have more um and you know they get there are some people that some policies might make convinced you know it's not like literally they don't work on anybody like I'm sure that you know there are families that might have an extricate if they got free child care but it's just not ever enough to make to make any sort of difference except for on the margins you know like it's not it's not making any wide scale difference I know uh I I believe this was my birth announcement I was born in 1963 so it was the end of the baby boom uh but um it it the birth announcement it had a picture of the baby with a diaper and a stamp on the diaper saying another tax deduction which is kind of you know a kind of early natalist kind of policy right um and but it I don't think my parents took seriously you know the cost of children or how much money they might get out of it and I know in my own experience and again you know we you know we can't mistake this for kind of data or or random controlled studies or anything like that but the idea that you would be able to pay people to have more kids it's it seems kind of um you know it's it's just not going to work and and Liz in your piece you do point to a number of places where it shows the timing of children uh you know changed uh in some of these studies but it really did not increase the overall amount Scott what um you know is there yeah talk a little bit about the earned income tax credit and some of the other tax policies that have been tried that are you know considered uh child friendly or family friendly and do they have the the effects the the intended effects or is it mostly kind of rewarding people for decisions that they were going to do anyway know good research um that that shows uh that they have moved the needle you know in terms of people that would have people that wanted to have another child um being incentivizing them to have more kids I think you know the child tax credit is uh something that goes pretty high up the income scale so you can be a married couple making four hundred thousand dollars a year and still get the maximum child tax credit uh for per child um I I think there probably are some families you know that switched from being two worker families to being uh one worker families and having a having one of the parents stay at home um that's a that's a sort of explicit goal that a lot of social conservatives have for the program I think um but I I've not seen any evidence to suggest that it's affected fertility um the eitc the earned income tax credit that you mentioned is more of an anti-poverty program than the child tax credit is um it phases out a lot sooner it's targeted much more towards the Working Poor um and I don't know of competitive evidence there that that has also increased fertility but it does sort of raise I think what ought to be a real concern for a lot of the pronatalists um who generally think that these incentives are going to increase uh the number of kids being raised by Mary Perry since maybe it's going to increase the number of kids and married parent families with one uh parent at home but to the extent that they target folks lower down on the income ladder they could also increase fertility uh in ways that maybe they haven't thought about non-marital fertility unintended fertility teen fertility it really raises the question of of is all fertility something that we want to encourage the pulse he wants to encourage and it's really relevant there's good research showing that the decline in fertility since the Great Recession is overwhelmingly a decline in non-marital fertility so it's it's not that married couples are having fewer kids it's that single single mothers are having fewer kids um over half of it is a decline in unintended fertility um so do we wish that we had had more uh unintended births um since since 2007 that's a big open question that's a fascinating kind of question too of like you know one of the ways you know if you uh you know to paraphrase Willie uh Sutton who you know rob banks because that's where the money is do you want to go back to a world in which uh teenagers are having more kids because way down yeah it's such a Triumph I mean I think until about 1970 that it was typical that you know a first live birth was to a woman who was 20 or younger um that has aged up and it also seems particular with social conservatives who are often obsessed with you know issues of grooming and things like that we have effectively desexualized adolescence and young adulthood or or late teen years um which would seem to be a win but then it's like okay well you know why aren't kids having more sex or more births it it gets confusing um very quickly what is the uh you know what is the way to speak to people on the left to kind of not worry so much if we're not having as many kids as we need in order to make Medicare for all you know a glorious reality well I think you know I think the the the easiest message to them um you know which conservatives would immediately react to I think is uh you know you ought to be advocating for just uh Stronger immigration you know if that's or higher higher levels of immigration if that's your if that's your concern um beyond that I think you know the the sort of to the extent that fertility is something that the left worries about I think it's just one facet of a bigger sense of doomerism um you know it's just another example of like why the economy is failing everybody and why we need Ubi uh so in some ways I think progressives come at it from a little bit of a different perspective where I think the main thing they're concerned about is just how terrible late capitalism is and this is just another example of that whereas that the conservatives come at it from like this is a problem of of itself it's more important than economics and it's kind of fascinating that Libertarians Liz are like yeah you know I mean when you said like no amount of money is going to move you to do something like what kind of libertarian are you you can't put a price point I don't know I know you know I'm that third child uh it's funny too though because like a lot of times I've been asked like several times after reading this you know like well so what if it doesn't raise fertility like isn't it a good thing in and of itself to you know make lives easier for parents of blah blah like you know this I'm this can't answer that question like that depends on your political values like the left is gonna say yes you know we should give people paid you know leave and subsidize child care and all this stuff anyways just because we should um you know Libertarians are gonna say no because the government's gonna muck it all up and make it more expensive so I think you know yeah like the question of fertility alone doesn't settle whether or not that is good policy which is which is like a weird thing people want it to settle yeah um and it does seem I mean kind of uh uh thinking about some of the stuff that Scott was talking about you know it's I don't think it's late capitalism I you know since I was in grad school in the late 80s I've been hearing about like capitalism which after the collapse of Communism became Advanced capitalism announced back to late capitalism so maybe this time it it actually is the beginning of the end but it's certainly the end of the entitlement State as we know it I mean these you know Social Security Medicare seem unsustainable in any in in the current form they're in and then the question is how much do you kind of built the younger generation to pay for the older generation how much do you means test people out of these programs and things like that but it seems to be a kind of fundamentally different question than just having more kids um so that you have future taxpayers um which was Scott I don't were you technically were you part of the reformacon movement or whatnot but that seemed to be a popular position on the right to say you know what's good about kids is that there are future taxpayers and it was kind of this Grim uh human calculus uh of you know we we need to be having more kids because we're going to need more taxpayers by the time I'm ready to go on Social Security yeah that was definitely I mean the so so first yes I am a a living specimen of a reformacon who will even own up to it um so I think among them yeah the reformacons are kind of like the Sith Lords or something in Star Wars right except not quite as uh successful or ultimately deadly so that's good yeah I think we're Associated fairly or not with uh Jeb Bush and uh the the the famous uh report after the uh 2012 election uh about how Republicans needed to um go after more diverse constituents and ignore the populists and um had a had a very happy ending uh as we all know um so but the child tax credit I think was the main thing that uh the reformer cons were pushing and they were pushing it I think with this argument that uh the people who had kids were sort of doubly taxed they were um they were taxed themselves um to support entitlements and then because they were burned with having the kids and raising the kids who would support uh uh entitlements down the road that was a second tax I I never loved that argument um but but it certainly was quite popular and I think as we saw after Trump was elected in the reformacon group I think sort of splintered a little bit into the the more pronatalist social conservative side and others um was that that there really was um this desire to increase fertility because uh kids are good um uh I think because we needed to offer something to the middle class um and it was in real tension with kind of more libertarian points around you know well if people can afford the cost of their decisions they should favor them um I I because then the reformacon argument too it was kind of like I don't know what these kids just showed up like you know the people who had kids there was no sense of agency that well you know what I chose to have children who are a costs on society as well you know and yeah down the road maybe they'll pay in taxes and whatnot but obviously kind of interesting obfuscation of like well where did all these kids come from that I now need more money in order to you know live a life worth living um yeah can I ask Scott for uh you know for you and I'll go to you Liz after that like you know on the on the kind of more broad moral or ethical question should the state be in the business of saying you should have more kids or you should have fewer kids you know there's uh and Liz touches on this in her story because of her population in China you know they had the one child policy in place for decades um which is a disturbing you know I mean Beyond disturbing you know Apparition uh and it's similar to various kinds of eugenics programs like you know but that's a negative thing um but is it kind of morally the same thing to say the state should be geared towards people having more kids or fewer kids and is is the problem that the state should not be putting its thumb on the scale you know not not that it can actually change Behavior but even the gesture is is questionable yeah I think that's certainly the case um I I think you know what a very quick way to upset um a social conservatives to sort of make an argument along lines of like there are two families of each make a hundred thousand dollars one of them you know buys a boat one of them like decides to have a kit uh like you know we we should not it's not the role of government or policy to favor or disfavor one of those um and I do believe that I'm you know I'm a little bit uh more paternalist probably than you guys uh in some ways um so I think the I think all the policy debate about fertility is just misguided I think I wish they were more of a debate around marriage incentives um and in part I can justify that because currently government policy uh disincentivizes marriage in a variety of ways especially for for poor Americans can you what are those and then uh yeah what are some of the ways that it does that so much of our um our safety net programs are the eligibility is based on um family income and so this is true if you take a job um and your income goes up your benefits go down um but if you if you marry your boyfriend or your or your girlfriend um her benefits uh stand to go down if she's getting food stamps or housing benefits and those are are real those are very clear Financial disincentives you you can talk to people getting these benefits and they will tell you like I can't do that because I'll lose my my housing subsidy um so there are things we could do with the Earned Income Tax Credit child tax credit to try to counter some of those disincentives that I would favor and that I've actually proposed you know sort of expanding their income tax credit for married couples for instance why is why is marriage a good thing in and of itself why is that something that the state should encourage rather than be neutral on yep no I'm glad you asked that I you know I I we were talking I was talking about single parented earlier like I've been a single parent uh myself um uh so I'm not somebody to sort of finger wag um but there's just a ton of research showing the kids who grew up with two parents do better on a you know dozens of outcomes than kids who grew up with a single parent on average um I think uh people whose own parents you know had split up or who uh or whose kids have been raised uh separately are probably you know that that seems more obvious to them um than it does to I think a lot of people who are sort of like who are we to say you know what what family structure ought to be um so so to my mind I think just for kids opportunity for Upward Mobility out of poverty for kids happiness levels um you know encouraging more happily married two-parent families um would would be a good it would also actually if uh probably indirectly help fertility as well um because one of the I think biggest reasons although maybe Liz would disagree with this based on her research um one of the biggest reasons fertility's declined is that people marry later um and so they lose they lose some years you know where maybe some of them would would be having kids and they might marry sooner if it didn't disadvantage them in tax tax policy or transfer payments yeah that that would sort of be the argument yeah uh Liz what do you think should the state uh you know will you take a bold stand right now Liz and say I'm rejecting uh you know the the child tax credit for my second kid you're going to be a prisoner of conscience [Music] no should you I mean how do you approach that the idea you know and you know and this goes to a kind of question of libertarian paternalism I suppose where people like cast Sunset and Richard thaler said you know what there's going to be incentives built into every kind of policy um why not tip them in ways that make more sense or you know you know that are that are kind of better for society recognizing it's always hard to determine that but should should this state be encouraging or discouraging any kind of family formation any kind of uh you know kind of personal living situation I mean no I don't I don't think so I don't think that's fair to prioritize yeah any particular um lifestyle over another because you know those are matters of people's people's values and choices or sometimes they're not you know sometimes they're just matters of circumstances and we shouldn't be penalizing people one way or the other because of the way that they're either this is the date or the way that their life turned out in that um I do think this machine just you know kind of get at one of the things Scott mentioned about you know this is a this should be a marketing campaign for conservatives you know this should this is this because this is a matter of values and and the things you were talking about with the 1950s too you know like um I read recently that the divorce rate is actually lower now than it has been and I think like five decades and you know I was saying that to someone a social conservative recently and they were like well yeah but that's because fewer people are getting married in general so like you know we're still investment and I'm like yeah but but again like this is how are we looking at it like do we want people just to be getting married just because or do we want people to be getting married that are more wanting to get married and able to be in happy marriages the same thing with fertility and I think we can argue that you know because we have more choice in these matters because we've loosened these cultural constraints around the idea that everyone has to get married everyone else have kids the people who are doing it are a lot more stable are a lot happier are going to produce happier you know individuals and happier families and and better well-adjusted children I think that it's it's fascinating to think about on the right there is a broad you know there's a broad discontentment with the choices that people are making because yeah no they want I want people to get married and have kids and and be younger or whatever on the left that takes the form of I just read a great essay called Ugg capitalism where it was a critique of left Wingers who just everything that they dislike about the current moment they just say oh that's like capitalism that's and It ultimately um you know we have these broad ideological camps that are just mad at the fact that a lot of people make Life Choices or have preferences that they don't agree with and instead of you know for me I mean the only way out of that for sanity was to kind of be libertarian and be like you know you know we live in an incredibly varied society and world and that's kind of great and we're bringing in more types of people and sanctioning people to live and to think and express whatever they believe and that's all great and it means like you're gonna you know you're gonna encounter a lot of stuff that you wouldn't necessarily prefer but it you know for the same reason that they can you know dye their hair whatever color they want or live in a throuple or or you know not get married it means you you have a little bit more space to live the way that you want and overall that's that's pretty good yeah this makes me think so of the um the Catholic integralists um you know that want the state to enforce um their their version of uh the good life uh sort of it's somehow the thought never enters their heads like you guys are a tiny minority uh of the population would you how would you like to see the uh the the rest of the country uh impose and sort of have the state impose um its values on you uh which they probably would argue it does to some extent but but I think your point uh about libertarianism is absolutely well taken here yeah sort of the bottom line in in all of this fertility stuff is just that you know when what we've seen in countries with like he hugely diverse cultures political systems you know all around the world and just all these any difference you can imagine what we've seen is that when you give people the the choice to have you know the technical ability to have less kids and the choice to have less kids a large percentage of them are going to take it people are still wanting to get married people are still wanting to have kids but people are wanting to have smaller families and that's right and it's yeah it's also true that like you you know you're giving people the technological or the technical ability to have kids who wouldn't be able to otherwise so it's not just okay you know we're we're not having kids it's you know people who wouldn't have been able to have kids are having them and that you know that doesn't really get discussed very often which is is a shame that's one of the things yeah that I mentioned briefly at the end of this article too is like just in in a way you know possible bright spots in this fertility argument one or a population decline everyone immigration but two yeah just technology I mean we've seen so many people be able to have kids that wouldn't have been able to a few decades ago because of things like IVF and other assistive reproduction Technologies and as you know those things get even better and less expensive and you know egg freezing just all sorts of things like as those things get less expensive and more widely available I think we will see more people who are maybe struggling to conceive now be able to actually have children I worry about you know in this because there's a parallel argument about how you know there's so much data we put so much data out into the cloud and it's going to be weaponized against us and I always think I had a Fitbit in like 2011 I have no idea what happened to the data it's somewhere in the internet of things it's floating out there but Liz that's like you know these eggs when they you know when people die or you know they're still around like somebody is maybe in a thousand years will stumble across them and create a whole new race of uh super humans yeah you know it'll be um Scott uh as we wrap up could you talk a little more broadly about you know the the debate over fertility is one of these great declension narratives that you talk about and these are things that exist you know apps I mean from in in human history I mean certainly you know the Garden of Eden is kind of you know Adam and Eve are kind of it's the first declension narrative in in a very particular way within a kind of Christian world view uh but in the colonies the American colonies uh you know certainly in the 20th century and the 21st century we're Rife with declension narratives everybody knows only one thing which is that things today are worse than they were 10 years ago 20 years ago 100 years ago um and certainly you know the decline in fertility is always framed in that way what is there an underlying Dynamic to like when you go through phases where it seems like people are more you know declinists than they used to be yeah that's a great question uh I don't know that I have a good answer to that I I think your point that it sort of is always there um is right um I sort of you know my my limit maybe this reflects my uh my age I was born in 1973 um but so I I sort of think of in the 1980s you know there were all these arguments that uh Japan was going to eat our shorts um you know in the 1990s the recession was described as this white collar recession you know that was hitting even the middle class and upper middle class yeah the worst one since the Great Depression yeah which turned out to be you know about as right as you know the she session um uh from 2020 was um you know and then there was like uh the WTO and the rise of China and the China shock and there's there's some it's certainly true that that the the China being a bigger economic power has had some costs and it's had a lot of benefits as well um uh but but it's it's sort of just this this constant thing that shifts um Occupy Wall Street uh and around the the financial crisis and the Great Recession um Millennials and the Tea Party if we're if we're based yes the tea party was a form of declension narrative as well yeah absolutely right so it it has it has been around for a long time I think social media has made it worse I think you know maybe the Millennials have uh maybe an undeserved reputation as being especially whiny uh because like social media was around for them to whine on uh whereas when Generation X uh when when Douglas Copeland's book came out you know there uh it was just a book that a few people read um so I I I don't know what it is psychologically um you know we are inclined to think that the good old days uh were always good um I think there's an element in our media if it bleeds it leads um and and so there's a bias there towards uh pointing out all the things that are going wrong uh and there's there's a lot of bad statistics out there uh and a lot of people who think their job either as social scientists or journalists or policy makers is to find you know the problems that need to be addressed and if you go looking for the problems you will you'll find them one way or another I know some of the stuff that you've done at AI at the center on opportunity and social Mobility is to debunk the idea that younger people don't have any upward Mobility or any options and part of it you you mentioned a version of this uh you know when you look at GDP per capita rather than just GDP I mean with Millennials for instance actually are doing pretty well when you look at Millennial income per capita and pegged against where their parents were at the same age so that you know the I I'm becoming more and more obsessed with what Irvin Goffman the sociologist called the frame analysis that you know we we are just applying the wrong frame to so many issues um but then it becomes that question and I think about this uh my parents who were born in the 20s to Immigrant parents grew up poor in in the depression World War II they would talk a lot about you know the difference between 1945 when World War II ended but they just assumed that their lives were going to be kind of miserable because they had been all along and you know then there would probably be another world war in 15 or 20 years but by 1950 that seemed to have changed and even when you look at uh like uh you know the black civil rights movement people it was bad but people felt they were on an upward trajectory you know the moral Arc of History was bending towards freedom and fairness uh and you know and even in in my uh I guess young adulthood the difference between 1979 or 1980 and 84 was amazing you know it's not that people weren't complaining and there weren't a lot of bad things going on but the the general mood had shifted to one of optimism I think this happened in the 90s as well despite you know Bill Clinton somehow got elected by saying the you know the mild recession of the early 90s was the worst thing since the Great Depression but by 1996 he you know everybody was doing extremely well so I'm curious what goes into those kinds of big flips in a kind of social or national mood yeah I don't have a good sense of that I do think the Great Recession um you know was pretty formative for a lot of Millennials and in some ways like you know the the view of uh late capitalism or whatever like the the switch was never uh dialed back uh as as the expansion um under Obama and then under Trump uh now under Biden uh has has sort of barreled forward I think um you know it's funny because we do a lot of like debunking of these narratives too at reason and whenever we do you know you'd think people would be would be happy to learn that things aren't as bad as they seem in this horrible View and instead people get really mad and really defensive about it and it's always very interesting to me that everyone sort of clings to this you know things are worse than they are view uh by totally like unscientific speculation here is it seems like you know for for some older people like their lives are not as good as they would like them to be or not where they wish they'd be so so it you know is beneficial for them to believe that that is because Society has gotten worse and for a lot of younger people or youngish because Millennials are not young anymore um you know there's this sort of Yearning to live in interesting times and this feeling that like you know like our parents and people before us all had these much more dramatic you know fights to fight and and you know just you know just and we don't have that so people want to have that and so they're sort of obsessed with this idea that actually we are in these worse times and it is you know existential and we are fighting Fascism and all this stuff because it makes them feel better about their sort of place in history or their own you know self-importance even though I don't think anyone would describe it like that consciously but it seems like there's some of that going on yeah um Liz you're you are a millennial correct yes yeah yeah um what could you and I realize as terrible to put you on the spot this way but what how does the issue of climate change or and not climate change but climate catastrophe say how does that fit into your world view and obviously you're Suey generous to begin with and you work at reason and whatnot but it seems to me that the climate apocalypse uh which is something that you know has been an ongoing kind of narrative that's been pushed and you know and I'm not saying it's it's completely wrong or whatever it's just that was a background story which seems to be fading a little bit but is that part of the the general kind of milieu in which you grew up where it's almost like no matter what you do it doesn't really matter because by the time you're 50 the planet is going to be a burnt Cinder online person or very highly educated sort of certain type of neurotic Progressive idea because like no that is that has not only never been like my sense but also like you know I'm around not just Libertarians not just um you know just I've been out of a vast different variety of sort of socioeconomic classes yeah I live in real America yeah and I just don't part of it all I mean yeah people don't seem to really feel like that's uh I mean it's not saying that people aren't necessarily worried but like there's not this like Doom about it that but but I am always surprised then to see certain people arguing online or in in the media that like well obviously Millennials aren't having kids or obviously we're not going to do this because how could we bring a kid into the world with climate change and you know yeah it there are people who fervently believe that which is always like I'm like wow that that exists I remember an episode of All in the Family it must have been in the early 70s where Mike uh Civic and Gloria you know Meathead Rob Reiner and you know they're telling Archie like how could they pass bring a kid into the world because of you know starvation in China and the Cold War and this and that and it's like you know like there's always more Arguments for not bringing kids into the world right and it's never the right time to have a kid right so but nobody ever says nobody ever says boy I wish I hadn't brought been brought into this terrible world yeah catch me it's Wednesday by Friday talk to me about that at all I'll have a different opinion but um you know I guess uh uh you know Scott of uh final question uh for you and then one for Liz but in terms of the debate over natalist policy or or more broadly I guess kind of social engineering through uh government policy and tax code is that is that becoming worrying to you I think you are old enough uh I certainly am to remember when that was the argument that conservatives and and people at places like the American Enterprise Institute would make against Democrats and liberals and they would say you know they are trying to do social engineering through the tax code or through public policy and that's wrong has that changed on the the broadly construed right and does that worry you uh I I think it I think there's been a a rift that's opened up um since 2015 2016 where I think you have you've sort of seen uh you call them the national conservatives or the national populists um they have adopted a lot of the same critiques uh that progressives have had for years now in terms of the economy contributing to whatever whatever they don't like um uh about today it's sort of because of features of the economy trade immigration uh the financialization of the economy uh that that need to be fixed in service of of these values they have that they believe you know are are maybe more widely shared than than they are I think a lot of that message has been attractive to a lot of social conservatives um and so you've just seen the base of the Republican party for sure which you can argue whether they're Republican whether they're conservatives or not but um but but clearly that base is very much populist uh it very much wants the government's hands off their Medicare and um you know adopts a lot of these other Progressive friendly positions I do think there is I hope it's not a Remnant uh you know is Jonah Goldberg uh puts it sometimes um of sort of more principal traditional conservatives who are holding fast to the positions uh that were more common in the 1980s uh but it's it's certainly kind of the central split I think uh on the right these days thank you uh Liz in terms of kind of natalist policy and feminism can you briefly touch on do you do you feel with the libertarian movement uh you know and I know uh you're one of the co-founders and heads of feminists for Liberty um which is trying to you know kind of grow the understanding of individualist feminism and whatnot do you um do you find that um do you find that that message is growing or is there also I mean I guess maybe it mirrors a split on the conservative right of people who seem people who call themselves a Libertarian or are libertarian and seem uh increasingly hostile to feminism or to uh kind of you know increased autonomy for women uh and the choices that they make yeah I I don't know if it's if it's growing or if it's just getting more vocal but like you know as sort of as you said mirroring the display with the conservatism it's been the big split within libertarianism about whether or not you know Libertarians in their forward-facing capacity should be tolerant of various Lifestyles and you know sort of say like yes the beauty of libertarianism is that it allows people to live all these different ways which is which is what I think you know as much as you know a I you know think that women's autonomy and everything is great um you know I'm not going to tell people like oh you you need to you know live your life you need to have your relationships in this model you need to have your family being raised in this model like I think that that's you know an important thing that everyone needs to figure out for themselves but there definitely is this strain of of libertarianism that's that's getting louder that um at least on the internet not not that I really encounter in real life uh that that very much believes like no actually like we should take explicitly socially conservative positions um you know we're not necessarily saying the state should you know mandate these but we should definitely pick a side in the culture war and argue that really strenuously which I think is you know that obviously Libertarians are going to have lots of different positions in the culture war and I'm not saying we should be quiet about them by any means but I do think that it's it's a bad idea for libertarianism as a whole to sort of make that Central to our project to pick a side of the culture War you know and I think that's one of the things you'll find with just the feminist for Liberty is that while we are stressing you know certain certain positions we are very much still holding the libertarian line of you know it takes all you know we want we want women to be able to make their own choices we want people of all dinners to be able to make their own choices we don't want to force these decisions on anybody yeah thank you um we're gonna leave it there uh we've been taught her I've been talking with uh Liz Nolan Brown of Reason a senior editor whose cover story is storks don't take orders from the state thanks so much for joining us Liz and I've also been talking with Scott Winship who's a senior fellow and the director of the center on opportunity and social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute Scott thanks so much I think many of them were still born uh so uh you know I hope this was a fertile conversation for uh future uh discussions we're going to leave it there please come back next Thursday at 1 pm eastern time when it's usually Zack wise Miller and I talking and uh thanks for uh coming out

Channel: ReasonTV

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Length: 67min 57sec (4077 seconds)

Published: Fri May 19 2023