 Here's the US total fertility rates derived from World Bank data. You see a steep decline from 1960 to 1980, and then a slower decline from 1980 to present. And then this is the world fertility rates at 2.4, according to the United Nations and projected to continue downwards. So I guess my question, taking all that into account is like, how is a shrinking population necessarily a terrible thing? I mean, if we have life spans increasing, perhaps more importantly, health spans increasing, and then technology continuing to create more goods and services, presumably bringing things down and filling some of those gaps where the, if the workforce is shrinking, can automation come in and play a role? And like, how much different, I guess, would the world look, whether we have 10 billion in the year 2100 or 6 billion, is that a terrible change in quality of life for the average American or the average global citizen? One way to think about it is this, when you retire, and so let's look over 150 year span, even though we probably don't have to go back that far, when you're retired, when you're not able to really make a lot of money later on, or when you're just tired and you want to kind of rest, because you're 70, 75 years old, will you have your own children taking care of you, which is a very traditional model that's kind of on its way out, maybe with six kids, I'll be able to have that, who knows? Will you have sort of a assisted living facility where there's staff there and they're taking care of you and they're cooking dinner and there's nurses to check on you if you're sick, or will you have a little robot with AI zooming up to take care of you? Now, maybe that robot will have fewer medical mistakes and less malpractice than human doctors and nurses. I don't buy into that techno utopia future, and I don't think most people do. I think that when we have fewer people who are young enough to do the work, it will necessarily have negative cultural effects. It will decrease trust. A lot of the studies I point out in the book show how just being around children makes people more generous with their time. This is non-parents even. Being around children makes people more generous with their time. Dealing face-to-face with humans who we know does more to build social trust, does more to improve people's moods than dealing with faceless bureaucracies, with automated processes and that kind of thing. So if you really just prefer dealing with artificial intelligence and robots and computers to dealing with people, then maybe the baby bus is good news. But no, in general, I think for most people, it will absolutely be bad news. And again, when you look at the cultures where this is happening, nobody would tell you that Japan and South Korea, which are far ahead on the baby bus, represent happier places than say, the countries, United States or Northern Europe were at least closer to replacement level. Or Israel, which I talk a lot about in the book, which has a birth rate over three babies for a woman of childbearing age. The shrinking society and an aging society, I think inevitably is a sadder society. And I lay out lots of arguments for that in the book as well. As a techno utopia and Catholic, I just want to make it very clear that I want to have as many children as possible. And then in my old age, I want them to be AI enhanced to be able to help with medical diagnoses. But I do still want like my kids to be taken care of me, right? Like surely there's a middle ground for those techno utopian Catholics out there, right? Yeah, and I'm a father of three. So I love being around kids. Liz has a baby and I'm hopefully more on the way in that not too distant future. We're both amateurs in relation to your brood of sex. But the bottom line for me is I am as a libertarian, I don't really care how many children any individual chooses to have. What I do care about is, are people unable to have the number of children that they want to have. And so one of the stats that you cite regularly in your book that was concerning to me was this gap between the number of children that people say they want to have and the number they end up having. This is just one example of the polling on this question. Gallup polling over the years showing 48% of people want two children. This is Americans, 25% say three, 13% say four or more. So a large majority want at least two kids. I think you put the number somewhere between two and three is the average like 2.4, 2.5, something like that. The mean comes out to be 2.7, but on that chart, one of the most important things is it's 5% that say they want one or none. That's below what I'll call the brown cow line of polling. Some of you guys might remember a poll that came out about 10 years ago that for some reason asked people where does chocolate milk come from? And one of the answers was it comes from cows like regular milk, but those are brown cows and that's why it's chocolate. That was 7%. 7% is a negligible number in any poll. You had 5% of African-Americans at once points say that the Emancipation Proclamation was a mistake. So these are people who like misheard the question or trolling the pollster. And that's the level of people who say they want zero or one and I think they are overrepresented. I think all of those 5% of the people who meant to answer the question that way, I think they're all columnists at the Washington Post right now because you would assume that there's a massive child-free by choice or I just wanna have one kid by reading the main media, but that's the most shocking thing about that. Yet people are ending up increasingly with zero or one children. And I think it's sad that the number of people who say they want less than four is falling, but again, we can bracket that question. What people want, what people choose. As commentators, we try to nudge people one way or another, but from a perspective of cultural or policy failures, if people want two and three kids, yet they're getting between one and two and a record number are getting zero, then that shows us that something is wrong. Now I'm based in Washington and still, sorry, go on. No, I just wanna know like how much can we infer from that or what can we infer from that in terms of changing expectations? Like once you have one kid or two kids and you start to realize, okay, maybe this was more time consuming than I expected and I'm gonna dial back my expectations a little better or my desires change once I started having kids. How much do we know about that changing psychology? The most of what I've seen, that the biggest thing that has changed is the optimism and the desire to have multiple kids and keep working full-time in your current job outside of the home. That's where after baby number one, the expectations get dialed down and some people will say, okay, you know what, I can only have one kid because I can't afford two daycares or something, but in fact, a larger portion say, you know what, I just don't value work as much as I did before I had the first kid. So there's definitely a recalibration of expectations, but it's mostly how much can you straddle a full-time job and being a parent. And another thing to, so again, for me this reflects that there's something wrong if people want this thing and then decide that it's out of reach. So the way I phrase it is, what is the ideal family size? Well, we often fall short of our ideals. So then we have intentions that are less than our ideals on anything, right? I have an ideal house, I'm house shopping, I'm not gonna get that. What do I expect or intend? That's always gonna fall short of your ideals, but then what people, millennials, especially are attaining is far less than even what they intend or expect. So their intentions are a lot lower than their ideals and what they get is a lot less than their intentions or expectations. To me, that reflects a real cultural problem. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our new show, Just Asking Questions. 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