Talking Kids With the Collinses
Malcolm and Simone Collins are on a one-family crusade to raise human fertility. They run pro-natalist.org, they host the Based Camp podcast, and they’ve written the Pragmatist’s Guide series (including The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion: A Playbook for Sculpting Cultures That Overcome Demographic Collapse & Facilitate Long-Term Human Flourishing). I recently talked with the Collinses about how to raise fertility rates. Enjoy!
P.S. Happy Halloween! Trick-or-treating is one of the great joys of parenting.
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They are both on the autism spectrum and one of their kids is already diagnosed with it at a young age. I don't think filling up the world with even more autistic kids is a good thing. It's already an epidemic. Aside from costing the state a ton of money, typically with no return as very few autistic people end up in employment, rates of depression and anxiety in autistic kids is really, really high. It raises the average level of misery a lot.
One of two my kids is autistic, and we won't be having any more.
One shouldn't have to sacrifice most of one's individual property rights to enter into a life partnership with someone for purposes of raising children, but that is the default in most states with their heavyweight version of marriage. There'd be more marriages and more fertility if they offered a lightweight version with more sensible individualistic defaults as regards property -- everything remains separate property by default, instead of everything is community property by default. Including income earned during the marriage.
This is a special case of "we want people to have X, so we force bundling of X with Y, and the effect of that is just to make Y rarer and more difficult to get" which is a common failure mode of government. Other examples of this include the minimum wage, occupational licensing, etc.