Opinion about why Millennials don’t like having babies

Why Population Decline Isn’t Having Kids, or What Makes the Sexes Not Like Each Other? Alice Evans, Welcome to Interesting Times

People aren’t having kids. What made the sexes not like each other? Would you have children if your government paid you to get married? Alice Evans may have the answers to these questions. Alice Evans, welcome to Interesting Times. Indeed. Thank you so much. Is it true that you are a sociologist at King’s College London? Yes. And you write a lot about, and I think you’re working on a book, about the key social forces shaping the decline in fertility around the world. And those include, in particular, the failure of men and women to relate to one another and pair off. And those issues are part of why I’m especially interested in talking to you. But before we dive into why population decline is happening, I’d like to try and quantify the issue a little bit, and maybe help sound the alarm for some of our listeners who, unlike myself, haven’t been obsessed with this issue for years or decades and may still assume that we’re living in a world where the biggest problem is likely to be overpopulation. So let’s start out when we talk about declining fertility and population decline, what do we mean? Well, fertility is collapsing everywhere at once. Perhaps with the exception of sub-Saharan Africa, where rates are still very high, but across Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa, and all those trends are going sharply downwards. Middle income countries are at a disadvantage because older people are less likely to participate in the labor force. They are less productive. It’s the young people who are innovative, productive, starting up new companies. But as the entire economy ages, then it becomes more sluggish. And those younger people, either through savings or taxes, need to pay for elderly health care or pension costs or provisions. And that then creates a massive fiscal squeeze, because governments or individuals need to spend a higher amount of their money given those rising dependency rates. And if we’re concerned with things like climate change mitigation, the governments just won’t have enough money to spend on extra costs if you’re spending more on old people. And on top of this, if younger people are saving more as they are in China, then they’re going to be spending less. So that has a knock-on effect on the entire economy. And when did you become interested in the fertility crisis? You started out working on gender equality, the socioeconomic status of women in developing countries. It has been the province to be kind to ourselves and right-wing cranks, for a long time. How did the issue get placed at the forefront of your attention? I am always interested in women’s choice of fertility and how many children they want from men, and that’s why it’s always come up in my interviews. I have had data on this for the past 15 years. When I was in Zambia, women would always encourage me to have another baby. “Oh, you must have a baby. You must have a baby.” That was very important to them. This is what I say to my colleagues, too. It is not just the African nation of Zambia. I was constantly pestered, but then I went to South Korea, and I was having so many interviews, that I just realized that it was so pervasive. I looked at the rest of the data more broadly. South Korea is where fertility died me, so to speak. South Korea’s fertility rate is 0.7, right? That means that over the course of two generations, the population goes from 50 million to what 20 odd million. Let’s say 15 to 20 million. Does that sound right? I’m just trying to give people a sense that when we talk about in these with the numbers we have now, when we talk about the reason you use a term like population collapse is we aren’t talking about a kind of gentle slide from to above replacement fertility to slightly below replacement fertility, where you need to adjust the retirement age so that people stay in the workforce five years longer. Cities being empty, buildings standing empty, economy grinding to a halt and just seeing a country that has gone furthest down is what you are talking about. Yes, absolutely. And you see it, you see it in Italy, too, for example, when you get off the train in Rome, you see the pet store rather than the kids store. No, we took our family to Rome, and we’re trying to find a children’s store. And it turned out that there was an important children’s chain that had closed a bunch of its places. But also, when I traveled around Italy the hill towns are empty, right. The rural areas are aging and emptying the big cities. There were people there. And so they stay densely populated even if they’re having fewer kids. And so this can actually end up being kind of invisible in an interesting way. If you are located in the big city, you will encounter more people than ever. And so you think to yourself, well, how can there be how can there be a population crisis. I would say one more thing. I teach on international development, one part of my job as a social scientist. I am interested in economic outcomes and the idea of abundance. But I also study culture. The economic consequences of our cultural choices are related. So O.K, why is this happening. I think it is safe to say that everyone has a pet theory. The people on the left will insist that it is just a problem of providing public services, if they talk for a long time. They say, that the developed world needs to pay more attention to paid leave and parental support. People on the right conservatives were more likely to talk about the decline of religion and a sense of moral obligation to the future. You have people who focus right now, especially in developed countries, on climate change and say, oh, the young people don’t want to have kids because they’re afraid of the human future. And you’ll have people who say, look, this is just about women’s choices, right. This isn’t really a huge deal. And once you have a more egalitarian society, women understandably, are less likely to choose to have kids. And this is where we end up. There are problems with all of these arguments. And as it’s hard to fit them all to the general trend. In the past few years, even places like Scandinavia have headed towards the cliff. There are generous benefits. So what is your master theory of all of this. So let me add on the Scandinavia point. Left wing progressives may say oh, Scandinavia is so family friendly. There’s universal childcare. It is easier to be a working mother. But actually the US has higher fertility. That means that the theory is not working. And as for the theory that it’s all about women’s choices and liberalism, how can that explain why fertility is crashing in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Turkey and in Tamil Nadu, which remain very conservative. So something is happening very recently, maybe in the past 15 years, everywhere all at once, across vastly different economies, across vastly different governance and welfare systems, and across vastly different levels of liberalism versus religiosity. Those theories that you mentioned seem to do a poor job of the comparative analysis and the very recent global plummet. A huge rise in singles has been seen in Sweden in the last few years. The global trend is that more and more people are living in single occupier households. The rise in single people is being seen as a crisis ofcoupling. So can you define that crisis for me and why. We have been talking about the bigger trends and you think they are the leading explanation? Absolutely So if we look empirically at the data for a range of countries, we find that increasing number of people are staying single. They are not married or cohabiting. In the US. Over half of the people between 18 and 34 are neither cohabiting nor married. They are single. And that’s the same case in much of Latin America, East Asia, Korea, in China, in South Korea. I chat with my Chinese students at those rates. Many are not married. No expectations, no plans, no desires to be married to be married. That is a huge, huge global problem. So if people are staying single, that is closely correlated. If we look at the data, the decline in people being married or couples is almost one to one. With the decline in children, it matches so closely in both the US and China everywhere this is the strongest correlation is more closely correlated than anywhere else. Across a wide range of countries. The data is strong. So thecoupling crisis seems to be connected to technology, right? Yes, that’s what I think. Certainly so I think we can say, there could be locally specific factors that go on in each place. I don’t want to overlook the cultural quirks of each place. Yes, absolutely. The biggest shock at the time was that we have seen huge improvements in personal online entertainment. Everyone in the US is just a podcaster. That is correct. So people are spending more. No, but I think that’s the thing. Yes, no offense, Ross, but I do blame charismatic people like you. If people want to socialize, to listen. It’s a new show. It’s played no role at all yet. Oh, you protest. You distract the young people of America. You are completely innocent. But we do have this big increase in personal online entertainment, whether it’s watching shows on Netflix or sports bets. Online gambling has become absolutely massive across Brazil and Latin America. More broadly. You can. What do I have to do? Pornhub online connectivity enables people to stroll on Instagram and play Call of Duty world of Warcraft. So we’re all becoming it’s not just being single. We are all retreating into digital solitude. And I think that’s partly because technology makes it nicer and easier to stay at home. You can work from home. Some of the apps are so engaging that you feel like you are spending a lot of time with each one, as each technology company tries to keep it’s users hooked. And effectively, the tech is outcompeting personal interactions. That’s my fear. And that holds, then, as a global explanation, because even though there’s tons of variation in internet access, and so on, smartphone penetration is a global phenomenon. You go you go to India and Africa and you find people with smartphones. And there’s the big difference that sub-Saharan Africa has much, much lower rates of smartphone penetration. You would expect fertility rates to fall as the iPhone moves across Africa. But so how much of this. So you’ve just been talking about distraction, right. It is easier to play a video game than to go to a bar. It’s easier to do sports gambling at home than meet a nice lady in a broad brimmed hat at the racetrack, as one does. How much of it is distraction and if it says digital segregation of men and women, where they are not interacting with each other on the internet. That’s true. But I totally agree that in person, you get when I think that male female friendships are really important driver of gender equality because as you come to care about someone, as a friend, as you listen to their stories, as you hear about how their day was or the kind of things they don’t like, and you and they say, hey, I was interviewing this guy in Catalonia, in Spain, and he was telling me that they went to watch the football game at the bar. When a female friend of a guy was approached by a guy the women didn’t like it, and when a guy was rowdy or aggressive they didn’t like it. He called her a puta after she said no to him. He called her a whore. She said to her friend that it was distressing. She didn’t like that. He empathised with that since he cared about her friend. He moderated his own behavior. Building relationship, understanding of offends and having a sense of what matters to the other person– that’s what I think. I agree that retreating to these digital places of solitude harm our understanding and solidarity more broadly. Whether we care about other people. Right. Well, no. The current politics of the developed world have some kind of polarisation of the sexes. Where And it was, I think, less extreme in the end, in the most recent US election than some people had anticipated. If there is a feedback loop where the genders don’t interact and so are less likely to marriage and relationships, then that’s an interesting way to look at it. I definitely believe that. People don’t have that influence so they go online. In social media, people are always doing their politics and you can see a lot of conservative and liberal men doing their politics. It’s And those aren’t your politics. You do not have a relationship with those people. It just seems a lot easier to create a kind of hostile generalization about right wing men or left wing feminists. than if you’re having any kind of interpersonal face to face interaction. I think that’s all true, and I absolutely agree that intimate partnerships are a major important factor for building mutual understanding and common ground, et cetera. I think this is not just about men not knowing women. A lot of men are from Mars, Women are from Venus story. Because if you look at some modern trends, say, for example, the discourse of secular monks, whereby a guy will spend a young American man will I’m going to eat these specific macros. I will have 200 grams of it. I’ll spend two hours on the bike. That’s a guy with no friends. That’s a guy who’s prioritizing optimizing his physique. He’s not building friends and he’s not strengthening. He is not building a relationship. He’s not becoming a funny, charismatic guy. This is not just the gender issue. People are losing their capacity, social skills and ability to make friends because of a lack of solitude. And if you don’t have a network that is socially active, then even if you wanted to go out, no one is. And so it’s all reinforcing, right. Economic forces other than the phone. So digital life has entered into a world where young men are falling behind young women in education. Men with lower levels of education are having I think, a particularly hard time finding a mate or pairing off. If you look at trends, at least in the US for marriage rates, college educated women, marriage rate is down a bit. Women without a college degree, the marriage rate is way down. Yes, totally. One way to look at this is that men are losing their status. They care about what’s going on. When they lose their status, they become less attractive to women due to being hostile. Is that that’s one way to look at it, right. Certainly I think we can think about this in two ways. So certainly as women increasingly enter the labor force and get higher skills, then they can be more economically independent and they can choose to be alone. So they would only marry if a guy is charming if they find love. The phone may be hurting that. Or if the guy offers a desirable package of goods, whether that’s attractiveness, entertaining or money. You money is impressive for many of us. The most disadvantaged guys may struggle to offer an appealing package. The marriage rates are falling among men who are most disadvantaged, those who can’t offer an attractive package of goods and men who stay at home with their parents. It is not entirely that young men are getting less educated, rather the most disadvantaged males are struggling in school. I believe that aspect is related to economics. What should a man do in this situation? On the one hand there is a male reaction to this economic landscape that is toxic, misogynist and lashing out at the same time, there is a cultural script that states that it is good for women to be. You don’t need a man. And women still like male status. It’s not just men who want status. Women like it. Like there’s a lot of data on women. It was suggested that a man could potentially earn more than the other person. Who can be a breadwinner. It’s possible that not all the time. It is good to have a man around, if you are going to have kids. For a while, who can be the primary earner? Women don’t want to marry men with less education than they are or men who earn less than they do. Men are in a trap not just because of their own sense of masculine identity, but because of something else. It was also created by the broader economic structure and by women’s preferences 100 percent. Open ended question what can bring the sexes back together. I think we need to consider the political economy if it is the case that technology is the major issue, because each tech company wants to distract us and Hoover up our attention for as long as possible. So the market mechanism is really against coupling. And my concern is that tech companies are just becoming so much more engaging, more affable, more charismatic more shocking. Endure Mr beast. Oh, what’s he going to do now that’s so engaging, right. My concern is that if tech outcompetes our social connections and we are left alone, then there will be a rise in solitude. And so I honestly don’t know the answers, but here are a couple of things we should do. We need to think about how we regulate technology. Jonathan Haidt has done terrific work with encouraging phones and free schools. It would be great if we could allow young people to talk to each other in the park, to make jokes, and to learn how to make jokes so that they are less anxious. It is important that it be done but it is not sufficient because US as adults are also vulnerable to getting sucked into all these things. This is what strikes me about his ideas, is that it’s very easy in I shouldn’t say it’s very easy, but it’s relatively easy in a liberal individualist society to say, O.K, we need to make a certain set of social changes that impose restrictions on kids, right. Because kids are the great, the great exception that doesn’t quite fit within liberal social. They are not part of the social contract. I think there will be, and he has gotten a lot of traction. There already is. It will be an attempt to master the virtual as it applies to younger kids. It’s harder for me to see that once you get further into adolescence, where so much of the adult life you’re trying to get kids to join is online. It is hard for me to see how a political restriction could be accepted by people who are just adults. Now Maybe there will be cases where people say in the US, this sports betting experiment, that we’ve done a bit of a mistake. It may not be the right idea to put ads for sports gambling. In on every TV network that airs a baseball game or something. Maybe that gets walked back, but it does seem harder to see how you get any kind of social restrictions on adult distraction. What do you think. Absolutely and politically it’s very difficult. I think there are two tensions. One is both the demand and the supply that as humans become more hooked and dependent on these personal online entertainment, then we want to protect those freedoms. All the various companies will lobby different political parties to not have any restrictions or regulations. Even if one tried to have a program to build a church, the church was fighting against all those competing distractors. Or even if you’re doing something secular a community fair or community festival, some people may well say, as they so often do, hey, I’ll rather just stay home in my pajamas and enjoy whatever on TV. And you can choose exactly what you want on TV. Then what about culture apart from politics. The phone creates culture in its own way, even though the culture is determined by tech. It’s also the case is that, the issue of declining birthrates is not one that much of elite Western culture has taken seriously. The way in which the threat of climate change has changed the way in which it is entered into the mainstream cultural mind is different. If it became more important to the cultural imagination, there would be an attempt to treat it as an important issue. So let’s say, right now, people in Hollywood would feel bad. It doesn’t seem like they’re doing something to fight climate change if they’re perceived to be not doing anything at all. There’s still a few. Is there a cultural script that could be written, whether in movies or TV, that would make a difference? Yes, I think so. It would be great for Hollywood to promote and support that. And in fact, as a joker, last year, I even wrote a comedy script about how Hollywood could support fertility and things like that. So even though I am totally in favor of that, and I think that is very important, it’s hard to do culture engineering today because we have infinite options of entertainment at our disposal. Maybe you are interested in a romantic comedy, if you aren’t. It’s difficult to do cultural engineering on top of divorce in China as a lot of the most popular films are about it. People who are obsessed with their phones may not have the social skills to do it. I think the tax system could be used to give huge tax incentives to people who have children because it is a positive externality. Well, let’s talk about that for a minute because that’s where people have naturally gone for a long time. People on the left, as I mentioned earlier, but also some people on the right, you have models in Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary of conservative or traditionalist governments trying to boost the birthrate or boost the marriage rate through incentives. Do those work. That is a good question. The present evidence suggests that pro-natal incentives have not reversed the downward trend. So far. That doesn’t seem to work when governments give these bags. It’s possible, however, that were financial incentives sufficiently large that could change. So, for example, Hungary has recently suggested to women who have two children will not have to pay taxes again. That is a very big prize. But we also need to solve the coupling crisis. That is one thing to explore. The Fed can explore the taxation system. I think that my impression is right. It’s these policies that can work, but you have to spend unbelievably large sums to do it, which makes it hard when your country is experiencing economic decline due to falling birthrates. Yeah. Your gains get swamped by larger effects. So Hungary seemed to have some success pushing its birthrate, I think from 1.3 to 1.6. So you’re making your investment is reaping marginal gains, which I think are worth it. It could mean hundreds of thousands of lives potentially, but it’s not actually a fix. What about religion. Secular people tend to have fewer kids than religious people. I mean, do you think that the secular Western world will become more religious as a result of the differential birthrates? How does religion play a role? Definitely definitely. I think that I mean, I think it’s difficult empirically, descriptively to deny that. In Britain Muslims have much higher fertility. So Britain will see a big increase in a larger Muslim, more politically active population. Huge political consequences will be caused by that. And so if liberal secular people don’t have kids, they will have less political influence. In Israel too, we see that the Hasidic Jews have six children each. So again, that is changing the political bent of Israel’s foreign policy. Every country’s demographic implications are huge. But don’t you need a certain kind of separatism to have big effects. The ultra-orthodox in Israel are different from the rest of the religion. In the literature I read for Muslims in the UK and Europe it’s stated that as the communities integrate, their birthrates converge with the European norm. The same thing happens here in the US. I don’t know. I don’t think there are any prophecies of massive religious revival. Although I will say that if birthrates are falling this fast, then suddenly the religious advantage looks more important. At the very opposite end of the spectrum of possibilities from traditional religion. A kind of response is offered by reproductive technology. There was a pro-natalism conference that was held in the US recently that attracted a lot of media attention because it was filled with very curious characters and some of them were not my friends. But what everyone who was there said is that it’s this really weird mixture of serious conservative religious people and Silicon Valley people who are convinced that there’s going to be a technological solution. And maybe the solution is artificial wombs, maybe it’s a cure for menopause that extends female reproductive life deeper into deeper into middle age or something. The effects of reproductive technology have yet to be seen. Has IVF mitigated the trend do you think. So that’s a good question. I think that in the majority of cases there is no need for IVF. It addresses a fundamental issue of expanding women’s reproductive freedom if people want to find themselves or become extremely demanding climbing jobs, because it is more accessible and affordable. They are still trying to find someone. But maybe in their late seconds, they do. So lots of data suggests that people do tend to couple up a bit later because they’re coupling up a bit later, so I can’t predict that people are going to eventually couple up. But let’s talk about that fraction of society who was single in their seconds but finds the one at age 40. That is the real problem at 40. In the subgroup that is TikTok and women’s wombs are not at 100 percent, it’s helpful to have inimplanted fertility drugs to enhance women’s reproductive liberty and allow the couples that form later to have more choices. Yeah I mean, IVF right now is very costly, difficult, and obviously does not deliver guarantees of success. Unreliable, right. Isn’t there a danger? It is seen as a reason why it is safe to delay marriage and fertility in professional class circles. Egg freezing services are unreliable because they are unreliable guarantors of fertility. So when I look at that landscape right now, I wonder if for every benefit to fertility you get from assisted reproduction, if there isn’t a cultural sense that O.K, I can put this off, that then ends in disappointment when it turns out that the tech is not all that people expect it to be. I can understand that. So let’s call it a moral hazard that if you pipe up a fertility solution, then people might put off children. So that’s theoretically possible. I would rather not dismiss it. But if we look at the Pew data, for Americans under 35, you’ve got half of them saying they’re single. And of those singles, the vast majority say they feel no pressure to couple up, no pressure to be in a relationship and perfectly happy with the status quo. And I don’t think those secular monks we were talking about say I will find a woman in 20 years and we will do in-house fertilization. I think those calculations are not entering into by IVF, partly because of what you say, at least from my interviews. Many people see IVF as unreliable, costly, expensive. The scientists were deluding us and we were all overestimating its potential when we thought it was cheap, so I think that explanation would have some credence. I don’t think it’s a big problem and I think the hazard is possible. But then do you think I mean, it seems like. But then by that logic, let’s say you could extend you could reliably extend female fertility by 10 years. That doesn’t solve the problem. It could mean that you have more. You have at least some women who don’t pair off and end up with one child, that’s right. But I mean, that’s part of the reality here, is that it’s harder to raise children on your own. Even if people want kids outside of a coupled situation, they will probably have more children than they need. And yeah, it just seems like you’re still stuck in the same general trap. Even if you can add a little bit to the reproductive life cycle. I think that each of these possible interventions has limited efficacy after our recent discussion. Evidently there is no magic bullet. As a researcher, I would like to see more pilot initiatives and different initiatives so that we can build community groups for the fertility crisis. We need to go back to our religion. I believe that religions have done well in the past by building a sense of community. So I spent a lot of time in small town Alabama, and I went to local Bible study, and I went to churches and I chatted to the community and that’s really, really important. In singing hymns together and praying together, that builds a sense of cohesion. Those collective rituals which also secular organizations could do. So we can organize, we can try 100 different things, let 100 flowers bloom. Try all the little community events to see if we can regulate technology at certain times in the future. Let’s see how we can increase reproductive freedom and how we can better utilize the tax system and fiscal incentives. I don’t think any of these things can fix it on their own. But I would like to see everyone right and left focus on this issue, understand the real driving forces and try to target those. But at present, we’re not doing any of that. Right But the whole but to the extent that you can tie all of that together. So you wrote a fascinating paper recently about the Islamic religious revival. The late 20th century was dominated by the growing piety and religious practice of the Muslim world. And was not entirely expected. One of the arguments you make in the paper is that there is an element of prestige here. It was something that you wanted to be part of and a lot of Islamic schools, preachers and revivalists did an excellent job of making Islam seem prestigious. We are talking about a similar problem here, right. You’re attempting to make both kids and couples. I think those things together prestigious in a way that they aren’t right now. I agree, I agree. It’s very hard to do cultural engineering in a world where everyone has a phone and can make their own decisions. So my totally totalitarian aspirations are limited in the 21st century. Do you Do you have a plan to destroy the world? That was a British joke. Sorry no, no. I don’t mean that. This is what I mean. Well, but this is the. I guess this is one more interesting question. We are talking about it in the context of liberal democracies. The trends you describe apply to places like the People’s Republic of China. Yes China’s birthrate is headed towards South Korean levels. China is a place that you can argue about. There is an authoritarian society with a state and a leadership class that thinks naturally, thinking in terms of five year plans and social engineering. They are serious about the fertility crisis. Do you think that China will be able to pull out of this by using social engineering? Not at all. Not at all. I don’t think they understand what is going on. Even though I agree that China has masterminded massive success with electric vehicles, for example, or innovation, it can’t seem to encourage people to marry and have babies. I’m going to give you two examples of the limits of cultural engineering. So on little red book, when I chat to my students, if you type in fertility in Little Red book, which is their version of Instagram. If you download the app, I would encourage you to type in fertility. You will get all this antenatal propaganda. And I’ve previously blogged on this and it’s really shocking. It will be all these frightening images about how your vagina gets destroyed and your body is destroyed, and it is the most painful experience of your life. It is frightening and gory. All the girls are saying, Oh my God, this is horrible. I do not want to do it. So despite all the censorship and the great firewall of China, all that exists on top of that, young women will upload video blogs celebrating their independent life. Look at the place that I live in. I’m going to cut this bit of food. And I’m living as an independent person glorifying and in many ways rewriting the script, challenging expectations of marriage, et cetera. I don’t know why it is passing the censors, but it is consistent with the interviews I have done with Chinese women. I want to stay on that idea of the pain of pregnancy and childbirth because this is more speculative. But we’ve been talking about virtual life as a distraction from reality. From physical reality, a distraction from going out to a bar and meeting someone, or just hanging out with friends and getting introduced to someone. It is true that sex is dangerous, but isn’t there also a way to do it? It is high risk. There’s a danger to pregnant women. Having kids is obviously more dangerous for women than for men. For obvious. For obvious reasons. Do you think there’s a way in which virtual life makes like physical, carnal, painful human life seem more dangerous than it would have just by virtue of you’re living in a phone. You’re detached from you’re abstracted from your own body in a more profound way than usual. I’m not sure if this kind of propaganda about what reproduction does and how scary it is will get in the minds of people already detached from their own embodiment. I think that is an interesting hypothesis but you can see young people still doing things that are painful. So whether it’s young women, trying to get an Instagram face and having fillers and Botox and painful things, or men spending painful times at the gym, being secular makes people do painful stuff. I think the more direct causal link is people spending time on their phones and then feeling anxious about chatting to people at the bar. Maybe not pain. People are willing to go through painful processes of facial surgery and calisthenic activity in order to get a youth-like fantasy. And so on. Both of those things are attempts to retain a kind of eternal youth. And in that sense, sorry, I’m just trying to push us a tiny bit, tiny bit into the philosophical. I had hair before I had kids. The entry into Parenthood is always a confrontation with mortality. I suspect that people are wanting to have more freedom and less responsibility in their life, and I think that Latin American men probably don’t want a family because of that. And I think this could be even more salient than the pain of pregnancy. Imagine if you could, you would be a guy in a crappy labor market with lots of informal labor, huge financial shocks, crises, and inflationary pressures. And you’re like, do I want to commit to a woman and say that we’re going to raise two kids together and feel all that strain and responsibility. I just want to chill out and play Call of Duty. So that, I think, is that’s a really salient I mean, I think that progressives have generally underestimated how much women benefit from, as you were saying earlier, making that commitment of monogamous, permanent devotion and support. Feminism has historically championed freedoms and shared care work, of course, crucial for gender equality, but I believe that men who love their wives are more likely to listen to those messages. Many men are saying that they do not want those things. Maybe that is not what I need. And that’s a hugely important, an under-told aspect of this global story. We’re describing a problem to which there is not a single solution, but we’ve been talking about solutions and responses. There are a lot of small bore answers, but they don’t change things, the low fertility future is going to happen in most places. Yes, almost certainly there will be no worldwide pro fertility movement that reverses birthrates within a day or two. So I just want to I just want to speculate at the end. What will that future look like? Like what do you think the world looks like in 2080 with these if these trends continue. So I am reluctant to make predictions. But these are not predictions. I want to be clear. These are speculative speculations. If fertility continues to decline and we are either ineffective or inactive, then certainly. We do not have a large rise in immigration, which is very productive and economically active. And simultaneously, we do not see a massive boom in AI productivity. We are all going to become poorer if no countervailing forces occur. And maybe politically. A rising support for more conservative groups is one of the reasons we might see some shifts. Say, just say a little more about the politics. What does it mean to say that you are more conservative? Oh, for example, in the US. It’s Republicans, as who have more kids, right. I think we can predict that the Republicans are going to win more elections because of fertility in Europe. We will just all become much poorer. We will have less spending power because our public services are in bad shape. So Europe is just in an economic doom loop, and the US may be better because they’ll get all the world’s migrants, they’ll get the most productive migrants, they’ll get the most entrepreneurial migrants. But they should also become, if we’re right, more conservative and more Republican. It is just replacement like. Conservatives have more kids. There are fewer liberals. Conservatives are in control of the future. I guess I’m wondering, though surely there are also kind of political adaptations. There are some populist parties in Europe. Yes this sense of we’re trying to protect the aging society. We want to keep out immigrants because they threaten a culture that is disappearing, but we also don’t have enough kids. I don’t. People worry about the authoritarianism of that type of politics. And I think there is a pull towards authoritarianism. But it seems like, in a weird way, the opposite of an aggressive, 20th century fascism that wants to make Hungary or Germany or Austria great. This kind ofauthoritarianism is more like a way of life. I don’t it just seems like you will get novel forms of politics in this environment. Well, I think certainly that if people grow up with a certain standard of living and a certain quality of public services, and then those deteriorate as a result of population aging and lower rates of economic dynamism, then people should get Fed up and frustrated simultaneously as people spend more time on their phones, hooked on these echo chambers, polarizing differently, not just by gender but polarizing, then the less time that we spend socializing with different other people, the less we develop understanding right across genders, right across political groups. And as we become more illiberal, I would predict that would fuel political authoritarianism, because those guys are the bad guys and will do anything to stop them from winning, and will support our strongman to stop those crazy people winning. I would anticipate a lot of economic problems, lots of support for illiberalism, and so on like it was a bad future. It seems like it is a very dark future. I mean and this is the problem of a low fertility trap, right. Is that once a society gets old enough and its democracy, the older voters are just going to keep voting for benefits for older people. And Yes, exactly. And it is going to stay. It is still going to be difficult. It’s going to be increasingly difficult to get the government to spend money on the young people, even if you need the young people. Yes, so absolutely. So you’ll have this political lobby group of old people who are directly concerned with pensions and health care rather than economic dynamism and frictions. So then it becomes harder to be a young person that could have so we go back to the disadvantage men. It’s harder to move upwards as a disadvantaged man and harder to get a wife if the entire voting system is rigged by these old people who don’t care so much about you. But then finally, just to keep being speculative, the world in this future will have a lot more empty spaces though, too. China has spent 20 years building all of these huge cities. And if China’s population falls by half, those cities will be empty. Big, big regions, big rural regions of Latin America will be empty and so on. Yes right. Sometimes, when I am optimistic, I want to end on a positive note, because the point of this show is that people should be worried about this. But Yes, there are ways in which a young person could look at that world and say, O.K the mega cities of Western Europe and North America are actually bad places to be young, but there’s a kind of reopened frontier in Uruguay or Eastern Europe or the hinterlands of China or something. In China, where many of the local government assets are in buildings, that is not true and that has led to massive local government debt. So that’s not a win. There isn’t a sense of win in those empty cities. There’s no can’t don’t. No one is moving to those cities because there’s no jobs, no demand, nothing there. So I guess I’m thinking more like imagine that you wanted to be like a pirate. Imagine that you were in the 19th century and it was desperado. I am imagining a world of like-minded people. This new world will reward those who are intentional about getting married and having kids, as well as those who are trying to establish themselves in one of the spaces created by the retreat of the human race. So let me say I think that previously. It would be amazing. And I’d love to see it if some community group forged a space in the US and O.K, how can we arrange this community space. Maybe it’s 100 households, how can we arrange it in a pro coupling pro fertility way. That would be fascinating to explore, but just because there’s a plot of vacant land, I wouldn’t expect anything to follow. You have kids. No, no I don’t. O.K, so I have kids, and my kids are maybe tired of hearing their father mention to them, just occasionally that global population is going to collapse over the course of their lifetime. So normal children of New York Times’ employees are worried about climate change. My children are concerned about the demographic. I’m aware. I’m not sure what you would say to the kids of this future, but I want you to be optimistic. When I talk to my kids about it, I try to frame it as an opportunity. It’s like, Yes, the world is going to grow old, but you will be young and you will have agency and you will have opportunities to shape a world in which there are fewer young people to compete with. Maybe you will find more things to do. Do you think young people should think about the future? Apart from apart from they should probably have some kids, right. So two things on that. I think it’s important that young people understand the consequences of their decisions. They take it as seriously as we do. Climate breakdown. First and foremost. I do that in my lectures. So many young Americans are unhappy due to the rise of single people, and I would say that is a big reason for this. One of the richest countries in the world, a lot of young people are deeply lonely and unhappy. One of the most unique and wonderful things that we can do as humans is find people who love and care for each other and also build emotional connections and support each other so that they understand each other. So going back to the writing, the Hollywood script, I would go back for those Rom coms and celebrate the romantic love, because when people shift their focus from celebrating the freedoms or secular monks of the seconds to thinking more about O.K, how can I build friendships and romantic love. Then people find love earlier and that should encourage a higher rate of grappling. I think that the romantic love is my positive focus and it would help to reestablish both friendship andmutual understanding as well as fertility down the line. O.K, so we’re ending on an agreement of a massive government program to subsidize a new revival of Jane Austen adaptations for the 21st century. Thank you so much Alice, for joining me. I would like to thank you.

Why aren’t parents having kids? A logical response to the stories of Philip Larkin and other philosophers and physicists

How many times had I read a version of these lines or heard them recited? The opening stanza of Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” is a favorite of fictional shrinks and wise folk. By heart, I can say the words that are spoken. But it was only last year, my stomach already stretching with new life, that I reread the poem and found myself focusing on the third stanza, which offers the logical conclusion of the earlier two:

There are many plausible explanations for the trend. It is too expensive for people to have kids. They’re not having kids because they can’t find the right partner. The idea of having a child on a broken planet is too depressing for them to have kids because they want to prioritize their careers. They’re swearing off parenthood because of the overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they’re perennially commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem so daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of masochism to even consider it. Maybe women, in particular, are having fewer children simply because they can.

There are a lot of explanations, and I think some of them are true. But I think there’s another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,” expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, parental toxicity or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.

This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for parenting. We expect our parents, not only to provide shelter, food, safety and love, but also to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness as we grow up, because we know how important that is.