A friend who is visiting from LA last night noted that they had stopped and two and his wife got her tubes tied. That he didn't know a single person with more then two children, and lots of people with none. He feels that the generation younger than his is on track for much lower TFR than his generation, and that seems born out in the …
A friend who is visiting from LA last night noted that they had stopped and two and his wife got her tubes tied. That he didn't know a single person with more then two children, and lots of people with none. He feels that the generation younger than his is on track for much lower TFR than his generation, and that seems born out in the data. TFR has collapsed rapidly and even fairly recent data is growing obsolete.
My friend is pretty well off, runs his own large business, and his wife is an accomplished Harvard grad. As Elon Musk notes, every conversation like this sounds like the opening scene of Idiocracy. They clearly could have more kids comfortably from an economics/housing perspective, but it would crimp their lifestyle, it's not in keeping with their peer groups social practices, and they have no cultural/religious/philosophical reason to have more kids.
I suppose that lower housing cost, which is harder than people think to achieve, might help on the margin. But it doesn't seem to be driving why people like this aren't having kids.
By contrast, I know a lot of people who have 3+ kids. They have worse financials then my friend, and some have had to deal with children with disabilities (friends we saw on Saturday their oldest had a stroke at birth and some disability on one side of the body, they went on to have two more). A lot more announced pregnancies at the end of last week, perhaps buoyed by Roe v Wade to shout it to the world.
But they are religious, and they belong to a religious peer group that values children.
On the margin I guess lower housing cost might help, but I doubt there is a silver bullet that can really change housing costs that much. My friends would never raise their kids in a bad neighborhood or send them to bad schools, and to a degree housing not being affordable is what keeps out the bad people.
Public policy wise what would help the most, by far, is no strings school vouchers. A lot of these people don't like what they see in public school, but nobody can afford to send 3+ kids to private school. Schooling is a linear expense, and linear expenses kill fertility.
It would also help to clean up the streets and make public life less obviously hostile to their values.
Really though I don't think there is a solution to the fertility crisis beyond a cultural change towards family values. You can try to throw a child tax credit at it but when push comes to shove people need to feel like getting up all night for a screaming infant is what they want to do with their lives.
Fun story: after our second was born, I was open to a third. My wife was adamant that if we had a third, we must also have a fourth. That way we'd be a family of six, packages of things tend to come in dozens, and you can evenly divide a dozen by six. Three kids == arguments about who gets the extra doughnuts.
Neither of us was up for managing four kids so two it was.
Excellent comment. As an aside, that last sentence gets at one of my pet peeves. A child tax credit would be enough if people would stop blindly mimicking exhausting and counterproductive infant sleeping arrangements. Sleep is so, so much easier for the baby, and more plentiful for the parents, if you nurse and if you use a raised co-sleeper. Not only are parents waiting too long because they think they need to decorate a cute room for the baby, they’re making parenting harder by using that room.
I’m sure some could reply with why my suggestion didn’t work for them, and I always like to hear the stories of individual parents, but I can’t help but notice the aggregate self-infliction of exhaustion.
It probably mattered more than it seemed at the time. Energy mismanagement during the day is another peeve, but I think I’ve annoyed my fellow parents enough for one day.
"I suppose that lower housing cost, which is harder than people think to achieve, might help on the margin. But it doesn't seem to be driving why people like this aren't having kids."
Housing costs and housing situations *do* matter a great deal!
The TFR in Seoul, Bangkok, Beijing, Singapore, and Shanghai is all in the range of 0.7 to 1.0 births per woman -- what is called ultra-low fertility. (The data are in the @BirthGauge twitter feed.) And in each of these cities the housing on offer consists essentially of expensive apartments in high rises. Terrible for families.
Suburbs and rural areas everywhere have much higher fertility rates than cities. Living space has been an important factor for being able to have a family throughout human history and it is certainly a factor now.
And most importantly, housing is a factor that is amenable to policy influence, compared to other factors. For example, religiosity strongly affects fertility rate but it is hard to imagine passing public policy in America that encourages religiosity.
I think the fact that you're referencing East Asia is the most critical aspect holding those together. Being East Asian does appear to be very bad for TFR.
That said, it's true that cities destroy fertility. But it's not clear to me that housing cost is the reason. There are lots of more affordable urban metros then NYC or SF and they too have low fertility. Perhaps density itself depresses TFR? Self sorting of people by preference? Other factors?
Lower urban TFR has been true for essentially all of civilized history. But since most people didn't live in cities, it didn't matter.
You might know this is called the urban graveyard effect -- cities are always and everywhere a demographic sink.
I think it might be true that moving people from 800 sq. foot apartments to 2500 sq. foot houses on 1/4 acre lots would increase fertility noticeably. I bought my first house as a single man, and I noticed almost immediately that I started feeling an urge to fill my house with a family, which I hadn't felt as an apartment-dweller.
But there's no serious public policy proposal to get to that drastic of a change, and any realistic gains in affordable housing will have a negligible effect on fertility. People will either move to a slightly larger home, which won't be enough to trigger a psychological change, they'll keep living in the same small apartment and spend more money on other consumption.
I largely agree with this, and it matches my experience. I too know lots of religious Millennials with large and growing families. But I don't think I know a single secular Millennial with more than two, and I'm aware of a few secular childless-by-choice married couples near the end of their fertile years.
While culture and values are more important, I do think economics can have a marginal effect, but stable attachment to employment is more important than housing costs, and the effect is not really landing on all those who willfully call a hard stop at 0-2 children. I just believe it's an exceptionally rare decision for a family to say "If we had a bigger house, we'd have an extra kid, but we don't so we don't."
Instead, if you want to find an economic effect on fertility, I'd look to people who fail to ever get married due to a lack of marriageable prospects or not being marriageable themselves (or who divorce rapidly due to marrying someone unmarriageable), or people who start a family later than they would have hoped and then find that biology has constrained their family size. Or to things like dad losing his job and struggling to find new stable employment, with a temporary decision to hold off on more kids eventually turning into a permanent one. I think people are much more motivated here by economic uncertainty than about the certain and predictable prospect of being a little bit more cramped within an existing home.
1) To the extent a society experiences dysgenic and overall aging, it will eventually become stagnant. There will be overwhelming pressure not to rock the boat and pay the pensions, and consume everything necessary to make that happen. The more resources necessary for the aged, the less available for the young, leading to even fewer children in an endless cycle.
2) A lot of low fertility groups turn to low IQ immigration in order to bolster their political clout. So ways of life that should be going extinct are kept alive by a kind of high/low mercenary alliance between the childless and aging and the welfare dependent global young.
3) Even if the above weren't true, it's just a tragedy. Kids are great, it's sad to see people miss out. There is a whole fear based mindset that accompanies low fertility mindsets. I never meet people who avoid having kids out of fear that aren't afraid of all sorts of other things. And I've never met someone with 3+ kids that doesn't have a spark of joy and adventure.
I am not sure that "cramping lifestyle" is a reason people don't have more than two kids. Once you have a child or two, adding another one doesn't really change how late you can stay out, whether you can work eighty hours a week, what parties you can go to, and whether you have to get up in the middle of the night.
Rather, I think that without a moral framework (e.g. religion) telling them to have a lot of kids, a modern's main reasons to have children are biological drive, emptiness/loneliness, and perhaps desire to have family and a legacy in old age and after death. People feel these are all satisfied nearly as well by one or two children as by five or six. So, since children cost time and money, people have no real reason to continue past one or two.
Personally, I think that's a mistake. I suspect most 60 year olds looking back on life would rather have had four or five children and spent more time at home than have had one or two and spent more time working or going to bars or on vacations. It's just difficult for young people to think that way, and so it doesn't factor into their decisions about number of kids.
I think your first paragraph is a bit overdone, but whatever. There was a phrase I heard once that I think gets more to the heart of the matter.
"You are as happy as your least happy child."
I think that is double plus mega true for many people the more successful they get. The idea of any of their children being downwardly mobile (a certainty if they are already high status) is terrifying. And of course we know that progressives are more depressed and mentally ill. This explains to me a big part of why TFR splits dramatically as IQ increases. High IQ conservatives care less about this, and high IQ liberals care a lot.
One kid gives you "immortality". Two kids gives the first a playmate and you a spare.
More kids doesn't give as much. At least it doesn't give as much to the progressive mindset. You've really got to have a totally different outlook to get more out of 3+ kids.
Typical parents here spend tons of time on their kids, take them to extracurricular activities, have family vacations and trips every year, do play dates and kid social events every weekend. Raising kids is an enormous amount of work, and two kid versus four is an enormous difference. Having only two elementary school kids versus also having two babies is a big deal and absolutely does inhibit adult lifestyles.
Even Caplan himself only has four kids. That is more than his career-centric peers, but for being such a vocal champion of having kids, that isn't that many. Why not five? Because it's a lot of work and money. I'm curious how much child rearing help Caplan gets from his wife and family. All of the high quality parents I know have 2-3 children and say they don't want to start over with babies, it's too much work, and they are right that it really is a ton of work to add another baby.
I also agree that most older adults would probably be happier if they had had more children in the past.
So true. For those of us who have modest taste and don't need a giant house, it really is necessary to buy into a good neighborhood anyway if you want to stay away from crime and other issues.
A friend who is visiting from LA last night noted that they had stopped and two and his wife got her tubes tied. That he didn't know a single person with more then two children, and lots of people with none. He feels that the generation younger than his is on track for much lower TFR than his generation, and that seems born out in the data. TFR has collapsed rapidly and even fairly recent data is growing obsolete.
My friend is pretty well off, runs his own large business, and his wife is an accomplished Harvard grad. As Elon Musk notes, every conversation like this sounds like the opening scene of Idiocracy. They clearly could have more kids comfortably from an economics/housing perspective, but it would crimp their lifestyle, it's not in keeping with their peer groups social practices, and they have no cultural/religious/philosophical reason to have more kids.
I suppose that lower housing cost, which is harder than people think to achieve, might help on the margin. But it doesn't seem to be driving why people like this aren't having kids.
By contrast, I know a lot of people who have 3+ kids. They have worse financials then my friend, and some have had to deal with children with disabilities (friends we saw on Saturday their oldest had a stroke at birth and some disability on one side of the body, they went on to have two more). A lot more announced pregnancies at the end of last week, perhaps buoyed by Roe v Wade to shout it to the world.
But they are religious, and they belong to a religious peer group that values children.
On the margin I guess lower housing cost might help, but I doubt there is a silver bullet that can really change housing costs that much. My friends would never raise their kids in a bad neighborhood or send them to bad schools, and to a degree housing not being affordable is what keeps out the bad people.
Public policy wise what would help the most, by far, is no strings school vouchers. A lot of these people don't like what they see in public school, but nobody can afford to send 3+ kids to private school. Schooling is a linear expense, and linear expenses kill fertility.
It would also help to clean up the streets and make public life less obviously hostile to their values.
Really though I don't think there is a solution to the fertility crisis beyond a cultural change towards family values. You can try to throw a child tax credit at it but when push comes to shove people need to feel like getting up all night for a screaming infant is what they want to do with their lives.
Fun story: after our second was born, I was open to a third. My wife was adamant that if we had a third, we must also have a fourth. That way we'd be a family of six, packages of things tend to come in dozens, and you can evenly divide a dozen by six. Three kids == arguments about who gets the extra doughnuts.
Neither of us was up for managing four kids so two it was.
Excellent comment. As an aside, that last sentence gets at one of my pet peeves. A child tax credit would be enough if people would stop blindly mimicking exhausting and counterproductive infant sleeping arrangements. Sleep is so, so much easier for the baby, and more plentiful for the parents, if you nurse and if you use a raised co-sleeper. Not only are parents waiting too long because they think they need to decorate a cute room for the baby, they’re making parenting harder by using that room.
I’m sure some could reply with why my suggestion didn’t work for them, and I always like to hear the stories of individual parents, but I can’t help but notice the aggregate self-infliction of exhaustion.
The problem wasn't getting enough sleep (although that was a challenge). It was that two kids just wore us down completely during the day.
And in case it matter, yes we did co-sleep with the second one. Didn't matter.
It probably mattered more than it seemed at the time. Energy mismanagement during the day is another peeve, but I think I’ve annoyed my fellow parents enough for one day.
"I suppose that lower housing cost, which is harder than people think to achieve, might help on the margin. But it doesn't seem to be driving why people like this aren't having kids."
Housing costs and housing situations *do* matter a great deal!
The TFR in Seoul, Bangkok, Beijing, Singapore, and Shanghai is all in the range of 0.7 to 1.0 births per woman -- what is called ultra-low fertility. (The data are in the @BirthGauge twitter feed.) And in each of these cities the housing on offer consists essentially of expensive apartments in high rises. Terrible for families.
Suburbs and rural areas everywhere have much higher fertility rates than cities. Living space has been an important factor for being able to have a family throughout human history and it is certainly a factor now.
And most importantly, housing is a factor that is amenable to policy influence, compared to other factors. For example, religiosity strongly affects fertility rate but it is hard to imagine passing public policy in America that encourages religiosity.
I think the fact that you're referencing East Asia is the most critical aspect holding those together. Being East Asian does appear to be very bad for TFR.
That said, it's true that cities destroy fertility. But it's not clear to me that housing cost is the reason. There are lots of more affordable urban metros then NYC or SF and they too have low fertility. Perhaps density itself depresses TFR? Self sorting of people by preference? Other factors?
Lower urban TFR has been true for essentially all of civilized history. But since most people didn't live in cities, it didn't matter.
Yes, more good thoughts.
You might know this is called the urban graveyard effect -- cities are always and everywhere a demographic sink.
I think it might be true that moving people from 800 sq. foot apartments to 2500 sq. foot houses on 1/4 acre lots would increase fertility noticeably. I bought my first house as a single man, and I noticed almost immediately that I started feeling an urge to fill my house with a family, which I hadn't felt as an apartment-dweller.
But there's no serious public policy proposal to get to that drastic of a change, and any realistic gains in affordable housing will have a negligible effect on fertility. People will either move to a slightly larger home, which won't be enough to trigger a psychological change, they'll keep living in the same small apartment and spend more money on other consumption.
I largely agree with this, and it matches my experience. I too know lots of religious Millennials with large and growing families. But I don't think I know a single secular Millennial with more than two, and I'm aware of a few secular childless-by-choice married couples near the end of their fertile years.
While culture and values are more important, I do think economics can have a marginal effect, but stable attachment to employment is more important than housing costs, and the effect is not really landing on all those who willfully call a hard stop at 0-2 children. I just believe it's an exceptionally rare decision for a family to say "If we had a bigger house, we'd have an extra kid, but we don't so we don't."
Instead, if you want to find an economic effect on fertility, I'd look to people who fail to ever get married due to a lack of marriageable prospects or not being marriageable themselves (or who divorce rapidly due to marrying someone unmarriageable), or people who start a family later than they would have hoped and then find that biology has constrained their family size. Or to things like dad losing his job and struggling to find new stable employment, with a temporary decision to hold off on more kids eventually turning into a permanent one. I think people are much more motivated here by economic uncertainty than about the certain and predictable prospect of being a little bit more cramped within an existing home.
Sounds self correcting in the long term though. It just depends how long "long term" is.
Sort of.
1) To the extent a society experiences dysgenic and overall aging, it will eventually become stagnant. There will be overwhelming pressure not to rock the boat and pay the pensions, and consume everything necessary to make that happen. The more resources necessary for the aged, the less available for the young, leading to even fewer children in an endless cycle.
2) A lot of low fertility groups turn to low IQ immigration in order to bolster their political clout. So ways of life that should be going extinct are kept alive by a kind of high/low mercenary alliance between the childless and aging and the welfare dependent global young.
3) Even if the above weren't true, it's just a tragedy. Kids are great, it's sad to see people miss out. There is a whole fear based mindset that accompanies low fertility mindsets. I never meet people who avoid having kids out of fear that aren't afraid of all sorts of other things. And I've never met someone with 3+ kids that doesn't have a spark of joy and adventure.
To pick a nit, "low skill" or "low education" is kinder and probably more accurate than "low IQ".
"solution to the fertility crisis"
What crisis? ... At 8,000 millions we are way to many!
I am not sure that "cramping lifestyle" is a reason people don't have more than two kids. Once you have a child or two, adding another one doesn't really change how late you can stay out, whether you can work eighty hours a week, what parties you can go to, and whether you have to get up in the middle of the night.
Rather, I think that without a moral framework (e.g. religion) telling them to have a lot of kids, a modern's main reasons to have children are biological drive, emptiness/loneliness, and perhaps desire to have family and a legacy in old age and after death. People feel these are all satisfied nearly as well by one or two children as by five or six. So, since children cost time and money, people have no real reason to continue past one or two.
Personally, I think that's a mistake. I suspect most 60 year olds looking back on life would rather have had four or five children and spent more time at home than have had one or two and spent more time working or going to bars or on vacations. It's just difficult for young people to think that way, and so it doesn't factor into their decisions about number of kids.
I think your first paragraph is a bit overdone, but whatever. There was a phrase I heard once that I think gets more to the heart of the matter.
"You are as happy as your least happy child."
I think that is double plus mega true for many people the more successful they get. The idea of any of their children being downwardly mobile (a certainty if they are already high status) is terrifying. And of course we know that progressives are more depressed and mentally ill. This explains to me a big part of why TFR splits dramatically as IQ increases. High IQ conservatives care less about this, and high IQ liberals care a lot.
One kid gives you "immortality". Two kids gives the first a playmate and you a spare.
More kids doesn't give as much. At least it doesn't give as much to the progressive mindset. You've really got to have a totally different outlook to get more out of 3+ kids.
Typical parents here spend tons of time on their kids, take them to extracurricular activities, have family vacations and trips every year, do play dates and kid social events every weekend. Raising kids is an enormous amount of work, and two kid versus four is an enormous difference. Having only two elementary school kids versus also having two babies is a big deal and absolutely does inhibit adult lifestyles.
Even Caplan himself only has four kids. That is more than his career-centric peers, but for being such a vocal champion of having kids, that isn't that many. Why not five? Because it's a lot of work and money. I'm curious how much child rearing help Caplan gets from his wife and family. All of the high quality parents I know have 2-3 children and say they don't want to start over with babies, it's too much work, and they are right that it really is a ton of work to add another baby.
I also agree that most older adults would probably be happier if they had had more children in the past.
So true. For those of us who have modest taste and don't need a giant house, it really is necessary to buy into a good neighborhood anyway if you want to stay away from crime and other issues.