 All right This is The reason live stream. I'm Nick Gillespie and today I am talking with Elizabeth Nolan branch who's a recent senior editor and I'm talking with Scott Winship of the American Enterprise Institute where he's a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility Scott Liz thanks for talking to reason Hey, thanks for having me. All right. So today what we are talking about is one of you know There's the AI panic But there's a deeper longer lived kind of rolling panic Which probably has something to do with AI as well But that's fears that we are not producing enough children particularly in the US But this is something that comes and goes and waves all over the globe particularly in Western Europe Excuse me, you know, 50 years ago or thereabouts the Obviously the fear was that we were having too many children Particularly in bad parts of the world by which I mean third world countries China India and that we were going to be overrun by poor Starving people who would be pissed off. Now the problem is that even in those countries We're seeing declining fertility rates and this has given rise to a new Conversation about how do we how do we increase? Fertility rates are the number of children that women have Liz Nolan Brown and the most recent issue of reason Has a great story called storks. Don't take order It's from the state at first. I thought this was a blast You know the long-awaited plastic pickle special issue that we have been talking about But it's not that but let's start with Liz give a basic summary of what what is your story about? What it's about falling fertility rates in the US and around the world pretty much You know more than half the countries in the world have below replacement level fertility, which is 2.1 kids per woman Some of them quite a bit below the United States is at 1.66 which puts us kind of kind of on par with with a whole lot of European countries and above above a lot of Very low countries So it sort of looks at why fertility rates have been falling a little bit of the good reasons for that But also the negative things associated with that it looks at a lot of the theories as to why fertility rates are falling and then sort of Tears them all apart because when you look at the global data It doesn't really lend itself to any of the sort of popular Explanations that come from either the right or the left of the United States Yeah, what are the you know and again? This is when we know we're in a full-blown panic because people on the right and the left sometimes for the same reasons But us often for you know different reasons are like oh my god. This is now officially an issue Typically if it's just the right or it's just the left you're like, okay, we're you know, we're in the gestation period I'm sorry to use pregnancy related metaphors throughout this conversation, but you know, it's like okay This is just for cheap political opportunity, but this now has you know It's entered the bloodstream right because both the right and the left are like oh my god. We're not having enough babies What is the You know, what was your main finding of because this is a global phenomenon? And it's something that is actually I mean if you take a longer view, it's like basically for hundreds of years In general, there's been a very broadly observed correlation that as countries become richer And more industrialized they have fewer kids, but what what is driving the decline in birth rates, Liz? I think that the main findings were two things neither of which Answers your question of what is driving the decline because that's that's sort of a mystery unless we just say individual choice in general but the main findings I think were that you know pronateless policies government policies intended to boost birth rates don't work whether that's you know bribing people to have more kids with you know various tax incentives or direct cash payments or all sorts of subsidies or Just sort of a patriotic campaigns like Russia gave people like several days off work to like make babies None none of that works and then the other main finding is that yeah Like I said just you know a lot of these explanations you have you know on the right things like we're not valuing motherhood enough or too many women are working or You know we just have it We you know there's all these selfish single millennial women who don't want to have kids and are being childless and on the left You have all these you know more economic explanations. We need more government subsidies for childcare. We need it's just too expensive Yeah, it's right and yeah, and when you look at other countries These these things just don't not none of these explanations really pan out right because in some countries You know women are given a lot of money to have kids and others They're not and they're just doesn't seem to be a strong correlation Between that and one of the things in your story that is available online at reason calm Points out is you know, there was a kind of plausible Notion that you know with the baby boom after World War two women kind of left left the workforce from a Certain peak during the war years because everybody was working, you know either fighting or working in factories When they pulled out of the labor force a little bit They had more kids and people were like, oh, this is the thing but then As women entered the work, you know at various points women entering the workforce They had fewer kids or they enter the workforce even more and they have more kids So it's just the data really You know the the only thing we know for sure is that women are having fewer kids Yeah, basically yeah and scott your work And and I really want to recommend everything that you do at the direct at the center on opportunity and social mobility I'm a big fan of it of your work particularly because and we've talked at various times over the years about it You stand a thwart decline narratives or declension narratives where people are saying things are just going to hell in a hand basket You say, you know, no not really one of your findings is that You know one of the reasons why we're having fewer children is because women want fewer children What goes into that? Yeah, I think that's right. I think if you if you look at the grand sweep of history Was was his piece mentions this, you know, there's there's been this I don't know over a hundred year decline in fertility with the exception of the baby boom that we can sort of come back to Which I think is a more interesting story than a lot of people realize But but yeah, essentially apart from the baby boom and then, you know, a small recovery more recently before the great recession It's just been down and and and fertility dropped the most during the 1970s Which not coincidentally at all was the big decade for women's labor force participation Rising um, that was you know, the generation of of boomer Women who had opportunities that opened up that weren't there before Coincides with increasing educational attainment on the part of women later marriage More divorce And and as Liz's piece notes, you know, these are sort of trends that are common to rich countries around the world It's it's kind of modernity Uh, and at the same time that we've seen these declines in fertility You know, there is empirical evidence suggesting that women want fewer kids than they that they did in the past So I wrote a piece Boy, I guess a couple years ago at this point, which is crazy. Um Where it actually asked people when they it asked women when they were uh in their late teens How many kids do you expect to have? And in one of the surveys, how many kids do you want to have? And that's gone down over time. It's basically gone down, you know, in line with how much actual fertility has gone down Um, this this was sort of comparing The youngest or the the youngest boomers to the oldest millennials So essentially what we're looking at is I think, um a change in preferences And uh, it it will have consequences. I think that uh that Liz talks about, um, but but we tend to forget, you know, if If the decline is the result of preferences for fewer kids That's a very different story and it implies benefits that have to be weighed against these costs Then if the story is well People want the same number of kids. It's just they can't afford to have them anymore Yeah, and this was yeah, go ahead. I was like people will always point to these surveys that, you know, we'll show Still millennial and gen X women saying, you know, the ideal number of children is two But I think, you know, as I talk about in there, too Um, you know, a lot of those surveys get are asked when people are fairly young And you know people change like surveys do show that when people are younger They tend to say they want more kids and then that changes when they get older because you know Have a kid or two and then it's yeah, and then it's difficult or expensive or they just get other priorities in their life Or you know, something doesn't work out in their marriage just a billion different reasons why people might, you know When their 20s say they want four kids and then by the time they're 30 Realize they don't and that doesn't mean that they failed in their fertility goals. It just means they change their mind Yeah, it is these yeah kind these questions, you know get posed to 18 year olds Without any kind of like trade-offs, right? They're not like, all right What would you give up to have the two kids that you that you would like to have are you willing to You know live in a less glamorous suburb with a smaller house So that you can save up more to afford these kids and give up Are you willing to spend 20 years watching nickel odion and whatever succeeded disney you channel for kids You know for 20 years Same episode of finneas and firm over And I want to point out for skeptics all of us here have done our share to keep the planet populated Which you know and I'm older than I'm older than you guys and I'm old enough to remember when humanity was the problem when over population Was the problem and so I feel bad. I have two children and uh, you know god, I I I haven't helped the environment by You know shutting down the uh my evolutionary uh stream Let's before we go to the question of whether or not there are Government policies that can actually increase Fertility rates and you know, Liz you mentioned, you know, like You know, it's it's a mixed sword right or a mixed uh message when you you say something like Even Stalin couldn't get russian women to have more kids because it's like obviously the soviet union and communism doesn't work It doesn't work that you know create kids or anything But it's kind of fascinating when a totalitarian leader Is incapable of getting women to put out more basically, right? This is you know in in the crudest terms possible But we'll talk about whether or not the state can do that whether it should but first Can we focus a little bit on the question of whether or not it's a you know, how do you measure the costs and benefits of A falling fertility rate and there you know, there are one, um, you know There's the images which are older now because in places like china and india the most populist countries in the world Birth rates are declining And populations are aging but you know, you have that as the bad sign But then you have uh, you know in a place like japan, which i believe is the only country only industrialized country That has fewer people now than in 2000. It has a famously Aging population etc and the economy You know, it's not clear that how tightly correlated any of this is japan has been in what's been called the lost decade for really the past 30 years almost 40 years But what are the negative consequences of a decline in Birth rates or or in in population of a country scott. Do you want to go first on that? What are what are are there issues with that? Yeah, so there are a lot of claims that are made and i'm not an expert in this in this literature You know the big ones that you hear are results in slower economic growth over time weirdly that's often Framed in terms of gdp rather than gdp per person like if we have fewer people Or the growth in people is lower like it's okay to have a lower growth in gdp as long as we don't have a lower growth in gdp per person um, you know, there's evidence that it uh reduces dynamism and innovation Entrepreneurship things like that I think there's so there there's big impacts on for instance senior entitlements To the extent that you've got a lot of retirees that are receiving social security medicare And you don't have a lot of people who are paying taxes into the system that creates some fiscal stress for sure So I I think there's in some ways some of it is is just math Uh, I think the entitlement problem, you know is very real others, you know our empirical questions I don't think there's fantastic research for a lot of the claims Uh, I think it's clear that that regions states that um that have lower fertility Experienced less dynamism than places that don't um, but I don't that doesn't necessarily translate I think into the future But those are the those are the ones you hear I think lizz touches on all these Yeah, lizz you are calling in from the Southwestern ohio region Cincinnati where I I lived in oxford for a number of years and that part of ohio in general But that part of ohio Is an interesting example of a place where You know, they're they're losing population relative to other parts of the country and whatnot They don't have a lot of immigration to that, you know to like the Cincinnati metro area um What what do you see as you know, you're in a part of the country? Which is kind of suffering from you know, uh, you know on a micro level Some of the issues where there are fewer people and the population is aging are there concerns with that? That that we should be thinking about and taking seriously I mean in terms of just what I see around me. I I can't really It's hard to speak to it because Cincinnati in this whole area that I'm in is so much more dynamic now than it was 20 or 30 years ago So it's it's kind of strange even though the population but the lines have the sketchers Stores in the mall are just out I mean they have to combine a lot of the catholic schools because it's a big catholic school area There's tons of catholic grade schools like the one I went to and like five others of all combined because there's much fewer But I don't know if that's that could just also be fewer people in catholic school than previously Catholicism has not had a great 20 years It has it has not Yeah, uh, but but I like I talked to this uh this guy from uh califa university in the united arab immigrants stewart guess They tell boston I'm probably butchering his name who who works on these issues a lot And I thought his perspective on this was really interesting because he talks about how you know It could be an opportunity like lower population People focus on the doom aspects of it, but it could be an opportunity and in any rate it We shouldn't just be folk like the reason people want to raise birth rates and they're obsessed with it is because Well population decline like instead of focusing on make more babies make more babies We should be looking at the actual problems We're trying to solve whether that's dynamism or like having to shift where people are in the labor You know force or whether that's you know pension systems and old age entitlements like and fix those problems Instead of trying to fix this proxy problem of the birth rates because even if we raise birth rates right now We're still facing this massive aging population in the u.s And still the other countries and more babies right now. You've been already going to change that Yeah, it's uh, you know jonathan last who was at the weekly standard and is now at The dispatch or the bulwark. I apologize for confusing Uh bulwark. Thank you About 10 or 15 years ago. He wrote a very good book about this general problem called what to expect when nobody's expecting and you know kind of uh anticipating your What both of you have said in different ways It's that declining fertility rates or declining population is the is an artifact of modernity of people having more money more options Particularly more women and I know he tied declines in fertility to Essentially they correlate with the more years of education that women have available to them Which is a proxy for opportunity on autonomy and so it does seem and scott. I think you even mentioned this it's you know like The war on declining fertility. I mean if it's going to become a war on modernity Um, that's kind of disturbing, but it also seems like a lot of critics particularly on the right seem to be like Yes, yes, that is exactly the problem Um, how how does one reach? You know a person who is invested in the idea that You know and and they can be male or female You know, but saying no women need to be making more babies for the good of something Yeah, I mean go ahead Liz. Oh, no, I'll just I'll just start to just you know I think some surprising things that I learned doing this is that a lot of the assumptions in Baked into those sort of ideas are wrong Like a lot of people just assume that you know low fertility rates are being driven by a rise in childlessness of Women or couples just deciding that they that they don't want to have kids and you know, there's a stereotype on the right And it's just they're all you know too selfish and too busy with either their careers or having fun or whatever Um, but actually, you know, we're we're kind of on par with historic levels of of childlessness Actually, the decline is much more driven by people just having smaller families There's way fewer people having four plus kids and way more having one or two So we've actually got more people having Children than then in that then either than 30 40 years ago even But they're just having smaller families than they did once upon a time Which I think puts things at a different perspective. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. For sure. Yeah. No, I I mean what I've been trying to do Really as a result of the child tax credit expansion Debate from a couple of years ago is to try to force people to just confront the facts and and I think You know, I have a lot of friends who are social conservatives A lot of them really would like to believe that the decline in fertility is in large measure because People still want the same number of kids. They just can't have them for some reason if that student loan dead If it's like housing has gotten too expensive You name it. There's some kind of economic Factor behind it and I just don't think the evidence is consistent with that the paper that I wrote for the dispatch a couple years ago showed that The the older millennials are no less likely to hit the fertility targets that they said they were shooting for at 18 then Then the youngest boomers were And actually you found that they were a little bit closer to yeah, that's right You know boomers Or at least boomer women wanted more kids than they achieved. Yep Millennials were doing pretty good Yeah, that's exactly right. And so I think I think social conservatives I would hope are sort of Forced to confront this evidence that a lot that they would they would like to believe That the culture hasn't changed the preferences haven't changed and therefore there's an economic explanation that policy Such as bumping up the child tax credit by a couple thousand dollars increasing paid leave By this or that Can can move the lever on some of this stuff Because if it's just culture and it's its preferences and modernity, you know, good luck With the policy changing that I think ultimately social conservatives This is a marketing campaign in the end for them Like if they it's perfectly fine to want more kids and to think Americans should be having more kids But that's a value position and you need to convince the rest of the country To think that way, too It is Oh, just it's funny that you say that this is the position of social conservatives too because it's it's It's again the convergence of the left and the right on these things because both of them have Sort of settled on this idea that like if only we could make you know Give people more money in order to raise their kids that yeah And I want to get to that in a second, but you know just to dilate first again. I'm I apologize They're out of control there The the weirdness of the baby boom and particularly the 1950s as a decade that you know, I think if you trace the kind of intellectual etiology of Of why do we look back in the to the 1950s as a decade of you know, all positive stuff It's really bill Bennett and William Bennett and a bunch of social conservatives people who are then called neo conservatives often Painted a picture of the night. They they needed to demonize the 1960s as the decade when everything went insane And so they leapfrog back over that and this was starting in the late 70s and in the 80s and they went You know, they talked specifically about the 1950s as this wonderful decade It was a return to normalcy and there was broad prosperity And they they painted a picture in a series of works of you know Just a wonderful time when women left the workforce and Rosie the riveter Turned out not to be a crypto lesbian, but she really wanted to go home and have like eight kids And you know bill Bennett would talk about how you know teachers only complain that kids in school were chewing gum or talking In the halls they're in classes And and you know divorce rates went down for the first time and you know like in the past 150 or almost 200 years Divorce rates have been climbing You know except for in the 1950s And They painted this erroneous picture of a decade focusing on like kind of pro family values Moments and then of course, you know allotted the fact that rock music came out then the beats were everywhere You know people started doing drugs the civil rights movement There was so much anxiety about you know, johnny couldn't read and sputnik was eating our lunch and we all got fat um It casts a long shadow because you have people looking back at it an incredibly atypical decade that they are already mischaracterizing And then saying why can't we do that? I look at You know various accounts on twitter and you know god forbid that we mistake twitter for reality, but there's a nostalgia for A kind of neo 50s ism of like where no we can really go back to having four kids in a family and living in cul-de-sacs Etc as if anybody really wants that and I think Until social conservatives kind of get over the idea that a that was never what it was But it's not coming back. They'll be lost and then the left You know is getting on this bandwagon of like well, we need to You know, we need to subsidize children More so that we get more of them mostly so that they will Fund social security and medicare which should not just be for old people but for everybody and I guess You know On on the heels of that Let's talk about some of the attempts by various governments Both now and in the past to actually increase fertility Liz, what did you find when you surveyed? You know past and present attempts by specific societies to say, okay You know what we're going to crank up the baby making machine Um, I mean, yeah, I found that the in short just that it doesn't work Um, that you know that some of the countries that have tried the hardest are South Korea Which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. I think it's it's one Oh 0.81 in 2021. So it's below one now And um, also Singapore and japan very very low. Singapore's is around 1.1 or 1.2 Singapore has tried so much. They you know, they give people Housing because you know a lot of the state the housing is decided by the state So they give people preferential housing if they have more kids They gave people direct cash bonuses eight thousand ten thousand dollars for a first kid more after that They you know subsidized child care They give subsidies to grandparents to move next to their kids they've just tried basically every everything that you can try and um It has not managed to to raise their fertility rate has continued to fall over the past several decades And that's the same story that you see in japan That's the same story that you see basically everywhere that has really You know gone all in on these sort of pronatalist policies and and then to the same effect some of them You know aren't specifically portrayed as pronatal policies But say like the nordic countries where there is like subsidized leave a lot of you know Guarantee guaranteed parental leave subsidized child care when we can stay home for a year or more after the kid And and they also have seen you know birth rates just continue to fall over the past several decades Scott do you have you found any places where these policies either seem to work or Or they kind of pay for themselves or or something? Uh, so I thought liz's uh article did a great job summarizing the evidence. Um, I've I've tended to sort of Look to some of the more pronatalist folks out there who Um, you know would would love to find policies that would move the needle and to sort of see what they say So, uh, I think now's now's the time and the Uh, the conversation that we ring the bell and invoke limon stone Um, you know lineman explain who he is and uh, yeah, so limon stone Is a demographer. I think he's in grad school right now. Um Getting an econ degree Has written for well, he was at AEI for a little while. He has an affiliation with the institute for family studies Has written a lot about fertility trends. Um, and Is I think safe to say he's a pronatalist. Um, think he'd call himself that He had a long twitter response, which is kind of his modus operandi To liz's original piece when it came out and what was interesting about it was To me was that he claimed first of all that that 99 percent of Uh, the first that liz ignored the programs that work was the first one second that 99 percent of what's tried Uh, is too meager to have any impact Um, so I guess he's saying liz missed the one percent The of studies and then third that um, you know as an example of something That to be clear he didn't endorse. Um, uh, but something that could move the needle was in romania You know where they outlawed birth control and abortion for uh, uh, yeah, this was under chuchescu So it's yeah at the peak of chuchescu's, uh, glorious powers Yeah, so, you know from more than a decade outlawing, uh, birth control and abortion for for most of the population Um, and as far as I could tell the the claim was that uh, maybe in the long run they increased the total fertility rate by half a child Um, so, you know, if that's uh, if that's sort of uh, the best a totalitarian government can do Um, you know paid family leave is just not going to move the needle Uh, you know, I think liz quotes somebody is saying like the the amounts we're talking about versus how much it cost to raise a kid You know the idea that a three thousand dollar Uh child tax credit instead of a two thousand dollar child tax credit Uh is going to suddenly, uh reverse the trends. Um, just doesn't make any sense to me Yeah, and I guess there's that issue of like even if it was thirty thousand dollars. I mean what um You know, and I I don't mean to put you guys individually on the spot But you know, what would it take to put you in the position of having more kids? And liz you're actually you you have one child and you're pregnant with your second You know, what would it take for you to uh, you know to have triplets or something like that? I mean, I don't think there's any amount of money that would make me have more kids than I Otherwise wanted to and I think that's that's the big problem with a lot of these most people These aren't decisions that you can buy, you know These are deeply based on deeply held beliefs and and values And they're not the kind of thing that you can easily sway with a little more money They have shown, you know to just to be fair they have shown that like some of these policies can change the timing of kids They can make people have kids sooner, but not necessarily have more Um, and you know, they can there are some people that some policies might make convinced You know, it's not like literally they don't work on anybody like I'm sure that you know There are families that might have an extricate if they got fruit childcare But it's just not ever enough to make to make any sort of difference Except for on the margins, you know, like it's not it's not making any wide-scale difference I know uh, I I believe this was my birth announcement. I was born in 1963 So it was the end of the baby boom, uh, but um, it it the birth announcement It had a picture of the baby with a diaper and a stamp on the diaper saying another tax deduction Which is kind of you know, uh kind of early natalist kind of policy, right? Um, and but it I don't think my parents took seriously, you know, the cost of children or how much money they might get out of it And I know in my own experience and again, you know, we you know, we can't mistake this for kind of data or or Random controlled studies or anything like that But the idea that you would be able to pay people to have more kids it's It seems kind of um, you know, it's it's just not going to work and and liz in your piece You do point to a number of places where it shows the timing of children Uh, you know changed uh in some of these studies, but it really did not increase the overall amount Scott what um, you know, is there yeah talk a little bit about the earned income tax credit and some of the other tax policies That have been tried that are you know considered Child friendly or family friendly and do they have the the effects the the intended effects or is it Mostly kind of rewarding people for decisions that they were going to do anyway Yeah, I don't I don't know good research. Um that that shows That they have moved the needle You know in terms of people that would have people that wanted to have another child Being you know Incentivizing them to have more kids. I think you know, the child tax credit is Uh, something that goes pretty high up the income scale. So you can be a married couple making $400,000 A year and still get the maximum child tax credit for child Um, I think there probably are some families, you know that switched from being two worker families to being One worker families and having having one of the parents stay at home That's a that's a sort of explicit goal that a lot of social conservatives have for the program. I think But I I've I've not seen any evidence to suggest that it's affected fertility The EITC the earned income tax credit that you mentioned is more of an anti poverty program than the child tax credit is It phases out a lot sooner It's targeted much more towards the working poor And I don't know of good evidence there that that has also increased fertility, but it does sort of raise I think what ought to be A real concern for a lot of the pro natalists Who generally think that these incentives Are going to increase The number of kids being raised by married parents. Maybe it's going to increase the number of kids and married parent families with one parent at home But to the extent that they target folks lower down on the income ladder They could also increase fertility In ways that maybe they haven't thought about non marital fertility unintended fertility teen fertility It really raises the question of of is all fertility something that we want to encourage the policy wants to encourage And it's really relevant. There's good research showing that the decline in fertility Since the great recession is overwhelmingly a decline in non marital fertility So it's it's not that married couples are having fewer kids. It's that single single mothers are having fewer kids Um Over half of it is a decline in unintended fertility. Um, so, you know, do we wish that we had had more? Uh unintended births, um since since 2007. That's a big open question That's a uh fascinating kind of question too of like, you know, one of the ways, you know, if if you uh, you know To paraphrase willy, uh, Sutton who, you know, rob banks because that's where the money is Do you want to go back to a world in which? Teenagers are having more kids Because you know that is way down. That's a that's a huge part of this too. Is it's Yeah, it's such a triumph. I mean, I think until about 1970 that it was typical that, you know A first live birth was to a woman who was 20 or younger Um that has aged up and it also seems particularly with social conservatives who are often obsessed with, you know Issues of grooming and things like that. We have effectively desexualized adolescents and young adulthood Or or late teen years, um, which would seem to be a win But then it's like, okay. Well, you know why aren't kids having more sex or more births? It it gets confusing, um very quickly What is the uh, you know, what is the way to speak to people on the left to kind of Not worry so much If we're not having as many kids as we need in order to make Medicare for all, you know a glorious reality well, I think you know, I think the The easiest message to them, um, you know, which conservatives would immediately react to I think is uh, you know, you ought to be advocating for just stronger immigration, you know, if that's our higher higher levels immigration if that's your if that's your concern um beyond that I think You know the the the sort of To the extent that fertility is something that the left worries about I think it's just one facet of a bigger Sense of doomerism. Um, you know, it's just another example of like why the economy is failing everybody and why we need bbi uh, so in some ways, I think Progressives come at it from a little bit of a different perspective where I think the main thing they're concerned about is just how terrible late capitalism is and this is just another example of that whereas at the conservatives come at it from like this is a problem of of itself It's more important than economics And it's kind of fascinating that libertarians lives are like, yeah, you know I mean when you say like no amount of money is going to move you to do something like what what kind of libertarian are you? You can't put a price back You know on that third child Uh, it's funny too though because like a lot of times I've been asked like several times after readiness, you know Well, so what if it doesn't raise fertility like isn't it a good thing in and of itself to you know Make lives easier for parents of all of lot. I'm like, you know This I'm this can't answer that question like that depends on your political values Like the left is going to say yes, you know, we should give people paid You know leave and subsidize childcare and all this stuff anyways, just because we should You know libertarians are going to say no because the government's going to muck it all I think more expensive So I think you know, yeah, like the question of fertility alone doesn't settle whether or not that is good policy Which is which is like a weird thing people want it to settle Yeah, um, and it does seem I mean kind of uh Thinking about some of the stuff that scott was talking about, you know, it I don't think it's late capitalism I you know since I was in grad school in the late 80s. I've been hearing about late capitalism which After the collapse of communism became advanced capitalism and now it's back to late capitalism So maybe this time it it actually is the beginning of the end But it's certainly the end of the entitlement state as we know it I mean these you know, so security medicare seem unsustainable in any in in the current form they're in and then the question is How much do you kind of built the younger generation to pay for the older generation? How much do you means test people out of these programs and things like that? But it seems to be a kind of fundamentally different question than just having more kids So that you have future taxpayers Which was scott. I don't were you technically were you part of the reforma con? movement or whatnot, but that Seemed to be a popular position on the right to say, you know, what's good about kids Is that they are future taxpayers and it was kind of this grim human calculus Of you know, we we need to be having more kids because we're going to need more taxpayers by the time i'm ready to go on So security Yeah, that was definitely I mean the so the first yes, I am a living specimen of a reforma con who will even own up to it So I think among the reforma cons are kind of like the sith lords or something Star Wars right except not quite as successful or or ultimately deadly. So that's good. Yeah, I think we're associated fairly or not with jeb bush and the famous report after the 2012 election about how republicans needed to go after more diverse constituents and ignore the populists and Had a had a very happy ending as we all know So but the child tax credit I think was the main thing that the reforma cons were pushing and they were pushing it I think with this argument that the people who had kids were sort of doubly taxed. They were They were taxed themselves to support entitlements and then because they were burned with having the kids and raising the kids who would support Entitlements down the road. That was a second tax. I I never loved that argument But but it certainly was quite popular and I think as we saw after Trump was elected and the reforma con Group I think sort of splintered a little bit into the the more pronatalist social conservative side and others Was that that there really was this desire to increase fertility because kids are good I think because we needed to offer something to the middle class And it was in real tension with kind of more libertarian points around, you know Well, if people can afford the costs of their decisions, they should favor them Yeah, I because in the reforma con argument, too It was kind of like I don't know these kids just showed up like you know the people who had kids There was no sense of agency that well, you know what I Chose to have children who are a cost on society as well. You know and yeah down the road maybe they'll pay in taxes and whatnot, but I was kind of interesting obfuscation of like well, where did all these kids come from that? I now need more money in order to you know live a life worth living Um, can I ask Scott for you? You know for you and I'll go to you Liz after that like you know on the on the kind of more broad moral or ethical question Should the state be in the business of saying you should have more kids or you should have fewer kids You know, there's and Liz touches on this inner story because of our population in china You know, they had the one child policy in place for decades Which is a disturbing? You know, I mean beyond disturbing You know apparition and it's similar to various kinds of eugenics programs like you know But that's a negative thing But is it kind of morally the same thing to say the state should be geared towards people having more kids Or fewer kids and is is the problem that the state should not be putting its thumb on the scale You know not not that it can actually change behavior, but even the gesture is is questionable Yeah, I think that's certainly the case I I think you know a very quick way to upset A social conservative is to sort of make an argument along the lines of like there are two families and each Make a hundred thousand dollars one of them You know buys a boat one of them like the size of have a kit like You know, we should not it's not the role of government or policy to Favor or disfavor one of those. Um, and I do believe that I'm you know, I'm a little bit More paternalists probably than you guys in some ways so I think that I think all the policy debate about fertility is just misguided. I think I wish there were more of a debate around marriage incentives And in part I can justify that because currently government policy Disincentivizes marriage in a variety of ways, especially for for poor americans Can you know, yeah, what are those and then? Yeah, what are some of the ways that it does that so much of our Our safety net programs are the eligibility is based on Family income and so this is true if you take a job And your income goes up your benefits go down But if you if you marry your boyfriend or your or your girlfriend her benefits Stand to go down if she's getting food stamps or housing benefits and those are are real Those are very clear financial disincentives that you you can talk to people getting these benefits And they will tell you like I can't do that because I'll lose my my housing subsidy So there are things we could do with the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit to Um try to counter Some of those disincentives that I would favor and that I've actually proposed You know sort of expanding their income tax credit for married couples for instance Why is why is marriage a good thing in and of itself? Why is that something that the state should encourage rather than be neutral on? Yeah, no, I'm glad you asked that I you know, I we were talking I was talking about single-parented earlier Like I've been a single parent myself I So I'm not somebody to sort of finger wag But there's just a ton of research showing the kids who grew up with two parents do better on or you know Dozens of outcomes than kids who grew up with a single parent on average I think People whose own parents, you know had split up or who uh or whose kids have been raised separately Are probably you know that that seems more obvious to them than it does to I think a lot of people who are sort of like who are we to Say, you know, what what family structure ought to be? So so to my mind I think just for kids opportunity for upward mobility out of poverty for kids happiness levels You know encouraging more Happily married two parent families Would would be a good It would also actually if Probably indirectly help fertility as well because one of the I think biggest reasons Although maybe Liz would disagree with this based on her research Um, one of the biggest reasons fertility is declined is that people marry later And so they lose they lose some years, you know, where maybe some of them would would be having kids And they might marry sooner if it didn't disadvantage them In tax tax policy or transfer payments Yeah, that that that would sort of be the argument Uh, Liz, what do you think should the state, uh, you know, will you take a bold stand right now, Liz and say I'm rejecting You know the the child tax credit for my second kid You're gonna be a prisoner of conscience No But should do I mean, how do you approach that the idea, you know, and you know And this goes to a kind of question of libertarian paternalism I suppose where people like Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler said, you know what there's going to be incentives built into every kind of policy Um, why not tip them in ways that make more sense or you know, you know, that are that are kind of better for society Recognizing that's always hard to determine that but should should this state be encouraging or discouraging any kind of family formation any kind of You know kind of personal livings that the situation I mean, no, I don't I don't think so. I don't think that's fair to prioritize. Yeah, any particular lifestyle over another Because you know, those are matters of people's people's values and choices or sometimes they're not, you know Sometimes it just matters of circumstances and we shouldn't be Penalizing people one way or the other because of the way that they're This is they made or the way that their life turned out in that in that Capacity, um, I do think this is just you know, kind of get at one of the things Scott mentioned about, you know This is uh, this should be a a marketing campaign for conservatives You know this should this is this because this is a matter of values and and the things you were talking about with the 1950s too, you know, like, um I read recently that the the divorce rate is actually lower now than it has been in I think like five decades And you know, I was saying that to someone a social conservative recently and they were like Well, yeah, but that's because you or people are getting married in general. So like, you know, we're still in less manner. I'm like, yeah But but again, like this is how are we looking at it? Like do we want people just to be getting married just because or do we want people to be getting married that are more Wanting to get married and able to be in happy marriages the same thing with fertility and I think we can argue that, you know because we have more Choice in these matters because we've loosened these cultural constraints around the idea that everyone has to get married Everyone else have kids the people who are doing it are a lot more stable are a lot happier are going to produce happier You know individuals and happier families and better well adjusted children I think that it's it's fascinating to think about on the right. There is a broad You know, and there's a broad discontentment with the choices that people are making because yeah No, they want I want people to get married and have kids and and be younger or whatever On the left that takes the form of I just read a great essay Called ugg capitalism where it was a critique of left-wingers who just everything that they dislike about the current moment They just say, oh, that's like capitalism. That's and it ultimately You know, we have these broad ideological camps that are just Mad at the fact that a lot of people make life choices or have preferences that they don't agree with and instead of You know for me, I mean the only way out of that for sanity was to kind of be libertarian and be like You know, you know, we live in an incredibly varied society and world and that's kind of great And we're bringing in more types of people And sanctioning people to live and to think and express whatever they believe and that's all great And it means like you're gonna You know, you're gonna encounter a lot of stuff that you wouldn't necessarily Prefer but it you know for the same reason that they can You know dye their hair whatever color they want or live in a thrupple or or you know, not get married It means you you have a little bit more space to live the way that you want and overall that's that's pretty good Yeah, this makes me think so of the the catholic integralists. Um, you know that that want the state to enforce um their their version of the good life, uh, sort of it somehow the thought never enters their heads like you guys are a tiny minority Of the population, which you how would you like to see the? the the the rest of the country impose Sort of have the state impose Its values on you, uh, which they probably would argue it does to some extent, but but I think your point About libertarianism is absolutely well taken here Yeah, that's sort of the the bottom line in in all of this fertility stuff is just that you know when what we've seen in countries with Like hugely diverse cultures political systems, you know all around the world and just all these any difference You can imagine what we've seen is that when you give people the the choice to have You know the technical ability to have less kids and the choice to have less kids A large percentage of them are going to take it people are still wanting to get married people are so Wouldn't have kids but people are wanting to have smaller families and that's It's also true that like you you know You're giving people the technological or the technical ability to have kids who wouldn't be able to otherwise So it's not just okay. You know we're we're not having kids It's you know people who wouldn't have been able to have kids are having them and that You know that doesn't really get discussed very often, which is is a shame That's one of the things yeah that I mentioned briefly at the end of this article two is like just in in in a way You know possible bright spots in this fertility argument one or a population plan. I meant one immigration But two Yeah, it's just technology I mean we've seen so many people be able to have kids that wouldn't have been able to a few decades ago because of Things like IVF and other assisted reproduction technologies and as you know, those things get even better and less expensive and You know egg freezing just all sorts of things like as those things get less expensive and more widely available I think we will see more people who are maybe struggling to conceive now be able to actually have children I worry about you know in the same there's a parallel argument about how you there's so much data We put so much data out into the cloud and it's going to be weaponized against us And I always think I had a Fitbit in like 2011. I have no idea what happened to the data It's somewhere in the internet of things. It's floating out there But Liz that's like, you know, these eggs when they You know when people die or you know, they're still around like somebody is maybe in a thousand years We'll stumble across them and create a whole new race of uh, superhumans An army. Yeah, you know, it'll be um I Scott uh as we wrap up could you talk a little more broadly about you know The debate over fertility is one of these great declension narratives that you talk about and these are things that exist You know apps. I mean from in in human history I mean, certainly, you know the garden of Eden is kind, you know adam and eve are kind of it's the first declension narrative in a in a in a very particular way within a kind of christian worldview But in the colonies the american colonies, uh, you know, certainly in the 20th century and the 21st century We are rife with the clenching narratives Everybody knows only one thing which is that things today are worse than they were 10 years ago 20 years ago 100 years ago Yeah, and certainly, you know the decline in fertility is always framed in that way What is there an underlying dynamic to like when you go through phases where it seems like people are more You know declineist than they used to be Yeah, that's a great question. Uh I don't know that I have a good answer to that. I I I think your point that it's sort of is always There Is right. Um, I sort of You know, my my limit maybe this reflects my uh, my age. I was born in 1973 But so I I sort of think of in the 1980s, you know, there were all these arguments that Uh, japan was going to eat our shorts You know in the 1990s the recession was described as this white collar recession You know that was hitting even the middle class an upper middle class Yeah, the worst one since the great depression. Yeah, which turned out to be you know about as right as you know, the shi session from 2020 was You know, and then there was like The wto and the rise of china and the china shock and there's there's some it's certainly true that that the the China being a bigger economic power has had some costs and it's had a lot of benefits as well Um But but it's it's sort of just this this constant thing that shifts Occupy wall street And around the the financial crisis and the great recession Um, millennial and the tea party if we're if we're being honest the tea party was a form of declension narrative as well Yeah, that's absolutely right. So it it has it has been around for a long time I think social media has made it worse I think you know, maybe the millennials have Maybe an undeserved reputation as being especially whiny because like social media was around for them to whine on Whereas when generation x When when douglas copeland's book came out, you know, there it was just a book that a few people read So I I don't know what it is psychologically You know, we are inclined to think that the good old days were always good I think there's an element in our media of if it bleeds it leads and and so there's a bias there towards Pointing out all the things that are going wrong And there's there's a lot of bad statistics out there And a lot of people who think their job either as social scientists or journalists Or policy makers is to find, you know, the problems that need to be addressed And if you go looking for the problems You will you'll find them one way or another I know some of the stuff that you've done at a eye at the center on opportunity and social mobility is to debunk the idea That younger people don't have any upward mobility or any options and part of it you you mentioned a version of this You know, when you look at gdp per capita Rather than just gdp. I mean with millennials, for instance, actually are doing pretty well when you look at Millennial income per capita and pegged against where their parents were at the same age so that You know the I I'm becoming more and more obsessed with what urban gothman the sociologist Called frame analysis that you know, we we are just applying The wrong frame to so many Issues, but then it becomes that question and I think about this My parents who were born in the 20s to immigrant Parents grew up poor in the depression world war two They would talk a lot about you know the difference between 1945 when world war two ended But they just assumed That their lives were going to be kind of miserable because they had been all along and you know Then there would probably be another world war in 15 or 20 years But by 1950 That seemed to have changed and even when you look at Like, uh, you know the black civil rights movement people it was bad But people felt they were on an upward trajectory You know the moral arc of history was bending towards freedom and fairness And you know and even in my uh, I guess young adulthood the difference between 1979 or 1980 and 84 was Amazing, you know, it's not that people weren't complaining and there weren't a lot of bad things going on But the the general mood had shifted to one of optimism I think this happened in the 90s as well despite, you know, bill clinton somehow got elected by saying The you know the mild recession of the early 90s was the worst thing since the great depression But by 1996 he you know, everybody was doing extremely well So I'm curious what goes into those kinds of big flips in a kind of social or national mood Yeah, I I don't have a good sense of that. I do think the great recession You know was pretty formative for a lot of millennials and in some ways like You know the the view of late capitalism or ever like the the the switch was never dialed back as as the expansion Under obama and then under trump now under biden has has sort of barreled forward I think um, you know, it's funny because we do a lot of like debunking of these narratives too At reason and whenever we do, you know, you think people would be Would be happy to learn that things aren't as bad as they seem in this horrible view And instead people get really mad and really defensive about it And it's always very interesting to me that everyone sort of clings to this, you know Things are worse than they are view My totally like unscientific speculation here is it seems like, you know For for some older people like Their lives are not as good as they would like them to be or not where they wish they'd be So it you know is beneficial for them to believe that that is because society has gotten worse And for a lot of younger people or young ish because millennials are not young anymore You know, there's this sort of yearning to live in interesting times and this feeling that like, you know, like Our parents and people before us all had these much more Dramatic, you know fights to fight and and you know, just you know And we don't have that so people want to have that and so they're sort of Obsessed with this idea that actually we are in these worst times and it is, you know Existential and we are fighting fascism and all this stuff because it makes them feel Better about their sort of place in history or their own, you know, self-importance Even though I don't think anyone would describe it like that consciously But it seems like there's some of that going on. Yeah Liz you you are a millennial, correct? Yes. Yeah. Yeah What could you and I realize it's terrible to put you on the spot this way, but What how does the issue of climate change or not climate change but climate catastrophe How does that fit into your world view and obviously you're Sui generous to begin with and you work at reason and whatnot, but It seems to me that the climate apocalypse Which is something that you know has been An ongoing kind of narrative that's been pushed and you know, and I'm not saying it's it's completely wrong or whatever It's just that was a background story Which seems to be fading a little bit But is that part of the the general Kind of milieu in which you grow up where it's almost like no matter what you do It doesn't really matter because by the time you're 50 the planet is going to be a burnt cinder That feels to me like a very like extremely online person or very highly educated sort of certain type of neurotic Progressive idea because like no that is that has not only never been like my sense, but also like, you know, I'm around Not just libertarians. Not just um, you know Just I'm around a vast different variety of of sort of socioeconomic classes You are living in the yeah, I live in real America. Yeah, and I just don't part of it all I mean yeah, people don't seem to really Feel like that's a I mean it's not saying that people aren't necessarily worried But like there's not this like doom about it that but but I am always surprised then to see certain people arguing online Or in in the media that like well, obviously millennials aren't having kids or obviously we're not going to do this Because how could we bring a kid into the world with climate change and and you know Yeah, there are people who fervently believe that which is always a little bit Wow, that that exists I remember an episode of all in the family. I must have been in the early 70s where mike Civic and gloria, you know meathead rob reiner And you know, they're telling archie like how could they possibly bring a kid into the world? because of you know starvation in china and the cold war and this and that and it's like You know, like there's always more arguments for not bringing kids into the world, right? And it's never the right time to have a kid, right? So but nobody ever says nobody ever says boy I wish I hadn't brought been brought into this terrible world Yeah, well catch me. It's wednesday by by friday. You talk to me about that. I don't know. I'll have a different opinion, but um, you know, I guess uh, uh, you know scott A final question for you and then one for liz but in terms of the debate over natalist policy or Or more broadly, I guess kind of social engineering through Government policy and tax code. Do you is that? Is that becoming worrying to you? I think you are old enough I certainly am to remember when that was the argument that Conservatives and and people at places like the american enterprise institute would make against democrats And liberals and they would say, you know, they are trying to do social engineering through the tax code Or through public policy and that's wrong Has that changed on the the broadly construed right and does that worry you? Uh, I I think it I think there's been a rift that's opened up Since 2015 2016 where I think you have you've sort of seen Uh, you'll call them the national conservatives or the national populists They have adopted a lot of the same critiques That progressives have had for years now in terms of the economy contributing to Whatever whatever they don't like About today. It's sort of because of features of the economy trade immigration The financialization of the economy That that need to be fixed In service of of these values they have that they believe, you know or Maybe more widely shared than than they are I think a lot of that message has been attractive to a lot of social conservatives And so you've just seen the base of The republican party for sure, which you can argue whether they're republic whether whether they're conservatives or not, but But but clearly that base is very much populist very much wants the government's hands off their medicare and You know adopts a lot of these other progressive friendly positions. I do think there is I hope it's not a remnant You know as Jonah Goldberg But it's sometimes of of sort of more principal traditional conservatives who are Holding fast to the positions That were more common in the 1980s, but it's it's certainly kind of the central split I think on the right these days Thank you. Liz in terms of kind of natalist policy and feminism Can you briefly touch on do you do you feel with the libertarian movement? You know, and I know you're one of the co-founders and heads of feminists for liberty Which is trying to you know, kind of grow the understanding of individualist feminism and whatnot. Do you um, do you find that? Do you find that that message is growing or is there also? I mean, I guess maybe a mirror is a split on the conservative right of people who seem people who call themselves a libertarian or are libertarian and seem uh increasingly hostile to feminism or to Kind of you know increased autonomy for women and the choices that they make Yeah, I don't know if it's if it's growing Or if it's just getting more vocal but like, you know, as sort of as you said mirroring the the split with the conservatism It's been the big split within libertarianism about whether or not, you know Libertarians in in their forward-facing capacity should be Tolerant of various lifestyles and you know sort of say like yes The beauty of libertarianism is that it allows people to live all these different ways Which is which is what I think you know as much as you know, uh, I you know think that Women's autonomy and everything is great. Um, you know, I'm not going to tell people like oh, you you need to you know Live your life. You need to have your relationships in this model You need to have your family being raised in this model Like I think that that's you know an important thing that everyone needs to figure out for themselves But there definitely is this strain of of libertarianism that's that's getting louder that um At least on the internet not not that I really encounter in real life That that very much believes like no actually like we should take explicitly socially conservative positions You know, we're not necessarily saying the state should you know mandate these but we should definitely Pick a side in the culture war and argue that really strenuously, which I think Is you know that obviously libertarians are going to have lots of different positions at the culture war And I'm not saying we should be quiet about them by any means But I do think that it's it's a bad idea for libertarianism as a whole to sort of Make that central to our project to to pick a side in the culture war, you know And I think that's one of the things you'll find with just some of this for liberty is that while we are stressing You know certain certain positions. We are very much still holding the libertarian line of you know, it takes all You know, we want we want women to be able to make their own choices We want people of all dinners be able to make their own choices. We don't want to force these decisions on anybody Yo, thank you. Um, we're gonna leave it there. Uh, we've been talker. I've been talking with Liz Nolan brown of reason a senior editor whose cover story is storks. Don't take orders from the state Thanks so much for joining us. Liz and I've also been talking with Scott winship who's a senior fellow in the director of the center on opportunity and social mobility at the american enterprise institute Scott, thanks so much Very pregnant points you made I think many of them were still born quite honest, but So, uh, you know, I hope this was a fertile conversation for future Discussions, we're gonna leave it there. Please come back next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time when it's usually Zach Weismiller and I talking and uh, thanks for coming out