Huemer on Natalism: Commentary

Blame myopia and education, not liberalism and prosperity

Mike Huemer recently wrote a characteristically excellent piece on natalism, one of my top topics (and lifestyle choices). I concur with most of his essay, but I’m still itching to issue line-by-line commentary. Mike’s in blockquotes; I’m not.

I am a proponent of liberalism (more specifically, of the most consistent form of liberalism, which is of course libertarianism. But let’s not worry about different versions of liberalism today)… It is largely to liberalism that we owe vast improvements in human beings’ standard of living, in our health, longevity, freedom, individual fulfilment, knowledge, access to great art, and just about everything that’s good in human life.

But this is no guarantee that this will continue. Nor is the basic rationality of liberalism any guarantee that it will have overall positive impacts on humanity. In the last few decades, a worrying trend has become apparent that could conceivably outweigh the advantages of liberalism. Furthermore, this trend might be attributed in large part to liberalism. Namely, liberalism might lead to the species ceasing to reproduce. The population will dwindle. Perhaps one day, the species will go extinct due to lack of reproduction. In that case, it would have been better if we had remained illiberal.

All true.

1. The Baby Shortage

First, just in case any readers don’t know this yet: The world does not have an overpopulation problem, as people used to think. Birth rates around the world are declining. They’re currently still high enough to have a net increase in world population each year, but the pattern makes it clear that the world is destined for declining overall population.

…Currently, about half of countries are above replacement rate, and about half below. The ones above replacement fertility are all or almost all very poor countries, especially countries in Africa. Basically, all the prosperous countries are below replacement.

So, as nations develop economically, fertility will decline around the world.

It’s worth pointing out that at least in the U.S., the direct effect of income is apparently to raise fertility. It’s education — the classic correlate of income — that’s anti-natal. Granted, that’s small comfort if you believe that education is essential for economic prosperity. If, however, you accept the heresies of educational signaling and credential inflation, the situation is more hopeful. We don’t have to give up prosperity to reverse falling birthrates; we just have to stop wasting taxpayers’ dollars and young people’s twenties to pretend to teach piles of irrelevant (and often toxic) book learning.

What’s bad about this? Three things:

• First, the decline in fertility means an aging population. That means more retired people, more people with Alzheimer’s disease, more people who need long-term care, with fewer young people to work and provide care.

Yep.

• Second, the foregone goods of life. Our ancestors struggled through millennia of suffering, oppression, and danger. Now that we’ve finally made it to the point where no one has to go hungry, where for the first time, almost everyone can live happy, healthy, free lives … people want to stop reproducing. If new people could have great lives, that is a reason to produce more people. But because of the decline in fertility, the next centuries will contain a lot less value than they could.

Absolutely. This is one of the greatest applications of Econ 1’s concept of opportunity cost. “Great stuff you could have had but didn’t” is, properly measured, a tragic loss.

• Third, eventually the species may go extinct if we keep reproducing below replacement rate. (Though that would probably take centuries, and a lot of stuff is going to radically change in the meantime. So we can’t really make predictions.)

Much too agnostic. Basic Darwinism, combined with the fact that fertility is heritable, should make us highly confident that low fertility won’t last more than a few centuries. The rebound is coming.

2. Why?

Prosperity

The fertility collapse is largely a function of prosperity, in a pretty direct way:

• In prosperous nations, people have better career options open to them, but children interfere with those options. Children compete with career; the better your career options, the harder it is for children to beat career development.

• In prosperous nations, people also have many fun things to do (say, taking vacations in Maui), which children interfere with. Again, the better your other options are, the harder it is for children to compete.

I’m asserting (but I’m not going to argue the point) that liberalism contributes to prosperity, so it thereby also contributes to low fertility.

Though this sounds entirely plausible, it’s only half the story. In prosperous nations, humans don’t just have better career options; they have better parenting options! Food preparation, laundry, and electronic babysitters all make raising kids far easier than it used to be. And in contrast to earlier eras, modern parents rarely have to witness their children suffer, much less die. Money lets you do more fun things without kids; money lets you do more fun things with your kids. I’m stunned when economists claim that economic theory predicts falling fertility. Flatly false, my colleagues.

But there are some more direct connections that also seem plausible. Liberal views about sexuality, gender roles, etc., might be contributing to low fertility.

Since the predictions of the pure wealth story are ambiguous, this is a much stronger explanation. After reviewing the main mechanisms, Huemer remarks:

All this poses something of a dilemma, because the liberal views on nearly all of the above points are clearly the correct, rational views. (Sorry, conservatives.) (Exception: abortion.) But that doesn’t stop them from having big negative effects on society. Widespread knowledge of the truth can be harmful.

I maintain that the correctness and rationality of the liberal views is much more mixed. Item by item:

Contrast the stereotypical conservative views with liberal views about these things:

Sex

Conservative view: The purpose of sex is reproduction. Non-reproductive sex might even be wrong. Premarital sex is bad or wrong. People, especially women, should be chaste.

Liberal view: The main purpose of sex is recreation. All kinds of sex between consenting adults are good, as long as everyone has a good time.

We should distinguish between “a good time in the short run” and “a good time in the long run.” Yes, lots of casual sex is fun in the short-run, especially for males. That said, human beings, including males, seem much happier in long-run relationships. Which introspectively makes a helluva lot of sense. (As I love to joke, “Treat me like the princess I am!”) You can acknowledge that lots of people — especially immature young adults — make poor life choices while respecting their right to do so.

Family

Conservative view: Family is the most important thing in life.

Liberal view: Family is fine, but career success and personal fulfilment are at least comparably important.

Again, you can reframe the conservative view as, “In the long run, family typically matters more for your happiness than either career success or what passes for ‘personal fulfillment.’” And a pile of happiness research backs this up. Indeed, the main thing most people like about their jobs is making friends and being part of a team, not the tasks themselves.

Gender roles

Conservative view: Men and women have distinct roles that they should stick to. Men should function as breadwinners; women should mostly stay home to raise children and take care of the home.

Liberal view: Traditional gender roles are oppressive and based on erroneous stereotypes. Men and women are pretty much the same, and there’s no reason why women should not be just as career-oriented as men.

“Men are women are pretty much the same” is the “correct, rational view”?! Sounds more like dogmatic blank-slatism to me. The correct, rational view is that there are medium-to-large differences between men and women on almost everything important. Gender stereotypes remain highly accurate. Furthermore, all self-reported gaps are probably understated, because both genders tend to gauge themselves against others of the same sex. While the traditional view underrates intra-sex variance, that’s a minor error compared to damning the sexual division of labor as “oppressive.”

Religion

Conservative view: Embraces traditional religion.

Liberal view: Either rejects religion or gives liberalized, more permissive, less literal interpretations of religion.

In practice, traditional religion is pro-natalist. Religious people do have more kids. In theory, however, traditional religion’s commitment to natalism is mixed at best: See the glorification of celibacy in many religions. Furthermore, when you crunch the numbers, much of the religious effect on fertility seems to be social rather than doctrinal. Look, for example, at the General Social Survey, which measures both church attendance (social) and Biblical literalism (doctrinal). If you race the two, they’re about equally efficacious.

Abortion

Conservative view: Abortion is wrong. Even contraception might be wrong (according to Catholics).

Liberal view: Abortion is fine. Contraception is extra obviously fine.

Besides the complexity of the moral arguments, there is good evidence that women overestimate the negative effects of unwanted pregnancies. Women who say, “A baby would ruin my life” are typically deeply mistaken.

LGBTQIA+ stuff

Conservative view: Homosexuality is bad. Transgenderism is bad.

Liberal view: Homosexuality and transgenderism are obviously fine.

Again, what if a lot of this is just social contagion of troubled youths? We can be accepting of the small share of the population that really is happier living a non-straight lifestyle while wondering if the recent rise of LGBT is “obviously fine.”

3. Liberal Solutions?

Is there a solution to the fertility problem that is compatible with liberalism?

Pro-natalism

One solution is to supplement liberal beliefs with another correct belief: pro-natalism, the view that having children is praiseworthy…

But here is the short argument for pro-natalism:

1. Most of you (readers), if you had children, would have children with happy lives.

2. A happy life is good.

3. It is good to produce good things.

4. Therefore, it would be good for you to have children.

How good is it? That depends on how good your children’s lives would be. But let’s just say: in all probability, creating a life would be extremely good, likely the best thing you ever did in your life by a wide margin (unless you go around saving people’s lives. Which you should do, but most people don’t.)

I agree, but there’s much more to be said. In my Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, I discuss other relevant, correct beliefs.

1. At least in the First World, the effect of parenting on adult outcomes is much lower than most people believe. A large share of unpleasant parental “investment” is therefore better seen as waste. Much of the pain of being a parent is therefore caused by false theories of child development rather than the children themselves. I freely admit that many parents are disgruntled, but that’s mostly because of their own bad parenting choices rather than the kids themselves.

2. Most parents select their family size based on myopic feelings of exhaustion with young kids. The rational approach, however, is to weigh costs and benefits over your entire lifetime. “Will two kids be enough when I’m 60?” should receive almost as much attention as “Are three kids too much to handle now?”

3. In economic jargon, Huemer is roughly making an “existence externality” argument. A fine neglected pro-population argument, but only one of many. Population also has large positive effects on innovation, choice, and retirement systems. And in economic terms, most of these are not merely benefits, but positive externalities that self-interest alone tends to undersupply.

Curing Aging

Another solution would be to develop more technology. For instance, when we cure aging, that will greatly diminish the rate of population decline (or increase the rate of growth).

Fingers crossed!

Artificial Wombs

If having children were less costly, more people would do it. To that end, we need to develop artificial wombs, whereby babies could be gestated without having to occupy someone’s body for 9 months.

Again, fingers crossed.

Incentives

Perhaps there could be a political solution. Maybe, e.g., we could give big(ger) tax breaks to people who have children, thus improving the benefit/cost ratio of reproduction. Producing children is a big positive externality, for which people are not adequately compensated.

(Problem: This would have relatively small effect on the most productive members of society, who might be the ones we most want to encourage to reproduce.)

In this piece, I argue that a good solution is to encourage fertility with tax credits rather than baby bonuses. The more taxes you normally pay, the bigger the gain. Indeed, I like the idea of giving parents a full tax holiday for a year or more for every kid they have.

Nor is government the only possible source of better incentives. My book argues that would-be grandparents should restructure their wills to reward their children for giving them grandchildren early and often. Also, try to be quietly helpful rather than packaging your assistance with odious interference. To caricature, be like the “cool grandfather” on The Simpsons, whose loves “two things: shutting up and giving away money.”

“I love two things: shutting up and giving away money.”

Q: What other solutions are there? We don’t have to go back to promoting false conservative ideas, do we?

To repeat, most of the relevant fertility-relevant ideas about the family and sexuality that Mike deems blatantly false possess more than a kernel of truth. Indeed, they’re “mostly true” rather than “irrational.” Based on past experience, I predict that Mike will acknowledge my large amendment fairly readily. We shouldn’t let our shared aversion to paternalism to get in the way of teaching people how to live better, especially when living better leads to the creation of more lives.