 Despite Americans' reputation for being cock-eyed optimists, we've always been suckers for declension narratives, or stories about how the golden age ended sometime in the past, and we have the rotten luck to live in a world that is no longer what it once was. Donald Trump built a successful presidential campaign on making America great again, and his successor Joe Biden's Build Back Better slogan similarly harkens back to a more wholesome and idyllic past. We often hear of falling fertility rates, rising income inequality, and declining economic mobility. But these stories are either misleading or flat out wrong. It's a one-year cut that reduces your taxes by $3,000 a year for each child you have under the age of 18. Both Democrats and Republicans are pushing for new subsidies for parents, attributing our historically low fertility rates to the cost of raising kids. Joe Biden's American Rescue Plan gives parents of toddlers as much as $3,600 annually for each child, and Josh Hawley wants to up that to 12 grand, though only for married couples. But the reason we're having fewer kids isn't because they cost too much. It's because we don't want as many as we used to. To look at the trend in fertility, which is dramatically down across the industrialized world, and to understand it, is it a problem because people actually would like to have more kids but can't afford to? Scott Winship is a sociologist and the director of poverty studies at the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI. He argues that if it's a lack of money that's swaying Americans to procreate less, then we'll find that a growing number of women will have had to scale back the number of kids they planned on having in their early 20s. And that's not the case. Winship points to a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, which found that 44% of millennial women ended up having fewer children than they had expected as young adults. 29% had more and 27% hit their targets exactly. But the same survey conducted on baby boomers born a generation earlier found that today's women are actually slightly more likely to reach or exceed their parental dreams, indicating that declining birth rates mostly reflect a cultural shift. As a society, we've chosen more stuff and fewer kids. Turns out women have been better able to achieve their fertility targets even though a lot of them haven't even started having kids yet. Winship says that simple morality tells about a massive and growing gap between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans missed more important truths. Inequality has increased over the past half century, but low-income Americans have made massive gains, especially when you take into account their after-tax income and transfers. The Gini coefficient, a measure of income inequality, has basically been the same since 1989, and overall poverty, child poverty and poverty among the kids of single mothers are at all-time lows. As important, he notes, middle-class Americans have seen their income rise dramatically. When you're talking about the median household, you're looking at an income of around $70,000. That's up something like $25,000 since 1979, for instance. That's taking into account the fact that prices have gone up for all the things we buy, not working harder than we used to. We just have $25,000 more at the middle than our counterparts did. But what about the ability to move up the income ladder from where do you start it? Which for many people defines the American dream. It's common to read headlines announcing that millennials are the first generation will be poorer than their parents, and they comprise a new lost generation. These claims are flatly wrong, says Winship. I've sort of looked at the data and found that's probably closer to 70% of kind of 30-year-olds today are better off than their parents were. Winship believes that part of the problem is that people spreading these narratives of generational decline come from a narrow slice of contemporary society. I have a theory about, in addition to just kind of this declensionism that sort of runs through all this stuff. I think that you hear more about this because a lot of people in media are upper middle-class, but they were also raised pretty upper middle-class themselves. So there is downward mobility and that is a thing. There are people who do worse than their parents. It's more likely if your parents were rich that you're going to do worse than them. Winship stresses that anything we do that slows down risk-taking in innovation is not only likely to hurt our long-term economic growth, but also increased demand for government policies that will save us, leaving us with the worst of two possible outcomes, a smaller economy and a bigger government.