 This is Just Asking Questions, a show for inquiring minds on reason. Today's guest is Tim Carney. He is a senior columnist at the Washington Examiner and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also the father of six children. Thank you so much for joining us, Tim. Hey, thanks for having me. So, you recently wrote a book called Family Unfriendly. I don't even know if it's been released yet. I'm pretty sure the publication date is a few months from now. So hopefully viewers will check it out once it is released. But, you know, you basically lay out a very interesting case for how American culture and businesses can really become a lot more approachable for families. Lay out the doomsday scenario for us if there's this fertility bust that continues for many decades to come. Yeah, so since 2008, at least, when the Great Recession happened, the birth rate in the United States just plummeted, which was expected. That's what happens for the short period in economic downturns. But it never recovered. It's been falling since then. And the millennials who are much more numerous than my generation, Gen X, when they came on the scene, people expected a massive baby boom. That hasn't happened. So this has been going on for 15 years. There are now fewer children in America today than there were at the last census. There are more people in their 60s in America than there are in their zeros. That is under 10. And so if this continues, what we're going to see is the workforce is naturally going to shrink. And we can talk about social security or that sort of thing. I think that's all secondary to the fact that there will be fewer people doing work. That's the economics of it. And then I do for a few chapters about sort of the social ramifications. I think that we're sadder. We're less optimistic when there are fewer children around. And then it spirals into the culture that you already referred to. When we have fewer children, we stop kind of building culture to support families, parents, and children. And thus we lead to even fewer and fewer children. South Korea is seeing exactly that and they've fallen down below one child per woman of childbearing age. We're down at about 1.6, 1.7. Europe is down at about 1.5. And the rest of the world is falling as well. So in the future, if we don't start having more kids, we'll have a shrinking population, an aging population, not enough people to do work. But more important, I think we'll have a sort of a sadder, less trusting, less loving society when people don't have kids around them. How bad will this actually be? Will this be something that is noticeable 10, 20 years from now? Or will it sort of be the US continuing on the trajectory set by Europe where you walk around Europe and it's not as if there's it's immediately apparent that it's a completely decaying society? How bad is it actually forecasted to be in the United States? Well, so again, South Korea is the example where they are down below one child. The replacement level is 2.1. And there, again, you do see a real increase of sadness, a real decrease of even the idea of getting married. There's fewer and the idea of having children and so it becomes self-reinforcing. So that's why I don't think it's a slow, steady decline. It's a kind of thing that spirals out of control. The fewer children, the more the more family unfriendly our culture gets. And just to look at the economics, the working age population, which the federal figures on this count starting at age 15, that's already flatlined. So then the question is, so then the fact is that in a few years that will start declining and will decline every year for the foreseeable future. That's happened in Japan. When we have fewer people doing work that's going to be a lot of problem. I don't care how big your retirement savings are. If there's not somebody you can hire to fix the leaky pipe in your apartment, it's no good to you. And that will start happening in our lifetime. For me, when I'm retired, for you guys when you're retired, that will be the reality that there will be fewer and fewer workers. And again, I don't think we can overstate the cultural impact of places where all the schools are going out of business, where all the playgrounds don't, where then in turn the rest of the culture stops even thinking about children. Let me pull up a little bit some data that you cited here just because it helps people to see I think sometimes what you're talking about. Here's the U.S. total fertility rate 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 we've got, you mentioned the percentage or the total number of children people under the age of 18 in the U.S. flatlining there and then this shows the total number of children as a percentage relative to the total number of seniors age 65 and over and you see those lines starting to converge and projected to flip in the not too distant future and then this is the world fertility rate at 2.4 according to the United Nations and projected to continue downwards. So I guess my question taking all that into account is 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 how much different would the world look whether we have 10 billion in the year 2100 or 6 billion is it a terrible change in quality of life for the average American or the average global citizen? One way to think about it is when you retire let's look over a 150 year span even though we probably don't have to go back that far when you retire 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 it'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 half there and they're taking care of you 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 then 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 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 you know United States or Northern Europe or 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 per woman of child-bearing 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 utopian 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 my kids to be taken care of me surely there's a middle ground for those techno utopian Catholics out there right yeah and I'm a father of three so yeah 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 your brood of sex but you know at the bottom the bottom line for me is 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 you know 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 or 2.5 the mean comes out to be 2.7 but on that 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 have 5% of African Americans at once point 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 we and I think they are over represented I think all of those 5% of the people who meant to answer the question that way I think they're all columnist at the Washington Post right now because you would think that there's a massive child free by choice or I just want to 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 so 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 sorry go on I just want to know how much can we infer from that 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 going to like dial back my expectations a little bit or my desires change once I started having kids you know how much do we know about that changing psychology the most of what I've seen the biggest thing that has changed is the optimism that 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 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 we often fall short of our ideals so then we have intentions that are less than our ideals on anything I have an ideal house, I'm house shopping I'm not going to get that what do I expect or intend that's always going to fall short of your ideals but then what people, millennials especially are attaining is far less than even what they intend or expect they're 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 well so how much can this be chalked up I mean this is a huge debate within the sort of pronatalist circles and I think libertarians tend to have a lot of pushback on this how much can this be chalked up to women choosing of their own volition based off of their own analysis of trade-offs and to have children later what do you make of that and how do you factor that into the equation because the thing that I definitely don't want to get into is a situation where a bunch of pundits are shaming women for choices that they made that may be good choices where they had full information or maybe kind of sad choices where they wish they'd done something different but regardless there's a little bit of this like well this is the cultural shift that we see as women enter the workforce and have more opportunities available to them well so certainly when people say that having kids is less affordable the fact is that's mostly false except for in two ways in the last four years or five years housing prices have gone crazy but the baby bus is 15 years old so the housing affordability question can't really explain what's been happening for the last 15 years the other way in which it's become the real way in which it's become less affordable every year for the last 30 years to have children is that the opportunity cost has gone up specifically because women are more educated they're more educated than men in America today and they have much more professional opportunity than they did in the past and so that is a real trade-off and life is full of trade-offs we can't get rid of trade-offs but my argument is that there are things that a culture can do some through policy some through other cultural forces and you mentioned employers and I would say communities and all sorts of thing religious communities local libraries etc. extended families our individual choices there are things we can do to make it easier to reduce the severity of the trade-offs to reduce the opportunity cost of having kids whether it's vis-a-vis a career or vis-a-vis just having a social life and that's the job of culture is to make it easier for people to attain their ideals and to lessen the costs of people pursuing real worthwhile, noble ideals you know there was this video that was circulating the internet a few weeks ago about the community the double income no kids there was a tiktok trend where people are describing what is life as a dink and why why am I choosing not to have kids why am I choosing this child free life I thought that we could play a role that clip of this one that went viral because it's a good jumping off point to talk a little bit more about these trade-offs and why people are making these choices and how much these choices are actually grounded in the economic reality so best could you run the dinks clip for us so we go to trader joes and workout classes on the weekends we're dinks we get into snobby hobbies like skiing and golfing we're dinks we can go to florida on a whim we're dinks we're already planning our european vacation next year dinks we get a full eight hours of sleep and sometimes more we're dinks we get desserts and appetizers at restaurants we're dinks we can play with other kids and give them back we're dinks we still do it three times a week dinks we spend our discretionary income on eight dollar latte we're dinks we max out our 401ks Roth IRAs and HSAs we're dinks we don't use our kids or dog as an excuse to leave a party we just leave so I mean my reaction to this initially was like first of all it is funny and like you know it's okay to be a dink and dink life it's fun but I felt like they were kind of overstating some of the material sacrifices but what are your thoughts on the dink video Tim? well first thing I would think is so I'm in a different stage of life than you guys my oldest is a high school junior my youngest is seven years old and my wife my our problem is that our social life is too crowded because through our kids friends and we have tons of parties and we're again we're renting now and so we don't throw parties as much and one of our kids I overheard somebody said oh do your parents entertain a lot and one of my kids said no my parents are entertained a lot because we're going to other people's houses for parties and so they're a they're comparing themselves to people with babies and very young children and not to people with grown children who occasionally are able to get up and leave and on the other hand the idea that maxing out your HSA is like really something to celebrate and talk about while on your vacation in Florida that struck me as sort of a very sad note right there and this is one of the things that I encountered as I went around and I talked to people I a big part of my job has always been what I call bar reporting or coffee shop reporting just talking to strangers and the great thing about writing a book on parenting is that everybody has something to say either they are parents or they want to be or they've chosen not to be and one of the things was the sadness the sort of banality of the explanations behind why I'm not going to become a parent a lot of times it was one woman just said I'd love to have kids I love spending time with kids I'd love to have my own but it would it would weaken my career a little bit and then if my husband divorced me I'd be in a disadvantageous place so basically it was like unemployment insurance it was this insurance policy basically why she was not making this choice and so just to see some of those things it's it's I mean we've all had bad reasons for doing things and some of those are are pretty sad eight dollar lattes is a pretty sad reason to not have kids yeah and to your earlier point you know some of the I feel like there's there are a lot of economic myths out there I mean housing is one thing that's a serious impediment I think to a lot of people having kids and we can talk about housing a little bit later but as you know in your book millennials have as much wealth as prior generations and as you go up the wealth ladder to a point you start having less kids so it's not so clear that it's just about economics and you know could it be that some of that mythology just needs to be punctured the idea that we're like more strapped than ever and kids are gonna bankrupt you no absolutely and Jeremy Horpdahl is the numbers guy who constantly does this he just does an inflation adjusted wealth and income comparing boomers to Gen X I'm always grateful that he remembers that we exist because most commentators don't but boomers to Gen X millennials at a given age and shows that the wealth is basically equal across those three and affordability of certain of goods that a family would buy how does that compare to you know hours of work but that is largely stable across the last few decades and so the affordability thing I keep coming back to culture I think part of it and Angela Rashidi who's my colleague at AEI and Melissa Carney who's at Brookings Institution and University of Maryland they keep pointing out that part of the reason that it feels so much more unaffordable to raise kids and to some extent is can be most affordable depending on your life is that fewer people have a culture that surrounds them that helps them raise their kids largely I'm talking about extended family when my kids were little my wife's little sisters babysat them now that my wife's little sisters have babies it's my oldest that same one who they were babysitting she's babysitting her cousins and that's a sort of culture that's very pro family that's very supportive it's just very explicit because people are expected to have kids people are expected to help other people take care of kids there's not a mindset about your kids were your choice like buying a boat so it's your problem and I'm not really I'm not talking about welfare state policies or that sort of thing let's talk about cultural expectations you should help people raise their kids you should have a community that's pro family that expects people to show up at whatever you're showing up with kids in tow and that if you live in a culture or subculture that's not family friendly you think I have to pay for everything and then life does start to become less affordable yeah I haven't think about these themes so much because I wrote a piece for Barry Weiss publication The Free Press about being a quote unquote young mom which is a little bit of an absurd thing because I had my child at 26 that's not particularly young by global standards that's not even particularly young American standards it's the median age at first child in the United States for women is 26.3 so rightfully very much the norm however in my milieu of journalists who live in New York City upper middle class women college educated went to a pretty good school that whole subset of American society this is something where having a kid at 25 or 26 is very unheard of is this cultural expectation that you'll push it off until later so the thing that's been so interesting for me is like I was in this park slope moms group and it was fascinating to me the things that the 40 year old moms because many of them were legitimately 15 years older than me the things that they think you need to have in place before having a child and even physical goods that they think you need it feels as though we almost have concocted a sort of absurd sense of how much having a kid actually costs and surely if you buy absolutely everything new and expect to be shelling out $200,000 for your kid to go to an excellent elite college and you're expecting to pay for day care for every single year so that you can maintain your job sure having a kid is awfully expensive but there are an awful lot of ways to minimize these things and to come up with more creative arrangements to get around all of that to me it seems like there's like if we look at things one way and if we assume that you know X Y and Z things must be in place before starting a family of course it seems unattainable to an entire generation of women but if we rethink what things are necessary precursors it really changes absolutely and so I ran focus groups and actually it was the men in my focus groups who are more likely to say look the reason I'm not ready and won't be ready anytime soon to have kids is because I don't want to give them the bare minimum I want to give them the best of everything I can promise you guys we do not give our kids the best of everything we found a used piano and it's still out of tune and they still love playing on it we send them once we made the mistake of travel baseball that's a whole discussion in the book but basically we send them to the local rec leagues and all of that they do the basic violin lessons at school none of them has gotten good violin trumpet trombone one son is good at guitar because he's interested in girls now but we haven't given them lessons or the best of everything and that idea that you do have to give the kids the best everything that's again not just a cause but a consequence of smaller families this idea that I cite in the book of well it's good that we're choosing quality parenting over quantity I argue it's not good because it makes people think you have to give your kids these really expensive enrichment etc the best of everything and then you have fewer kids and then because you have fewer kids you invest more in each that's not necessarily even good for the kids or the parents if everybody's constantly anxious that playing the piano goes from something fun to do around Christmas with Christmas carols to being basically a job that's going to get you your scholarship in a college nobody's happy or the high quote quality parenting isn't high quality it's just more expensive and more anxiety-inducing I love that part of the book because you're you touch on so many themes that it's basically just like parents can you chill out a little bit this is like very present in the work of Lenore Scanesi with free-range parenting or Brian Kaplan's you know selfish reasons to have more kids the themes that unite all three of these kind of schools of thought is like you don't need to be putting them all your kids on this pre-formed track to get to some magical destination you can let things play out a little more spontaneously a little bit the challenge then is like if we're in this culture that that does kind of incentivize getting on that track what do you think are the best ways to escape that is it just a kind of bottom up counter cultural movement yeah I'm being counter cultural and this is one of the things that I've done I've started multiple baseball teams I the book family and friendly starts with the t-ball program I discovered and then copied which was all based around being actually family friendly the point of my t-ball program was to bring all your kids and ignore them including the one playing t-ball while we serve burgers to your family the baseball teams I started I told the parents we're not going to practice we're just going to go out and play the game we didn't even have the take sign in other words we told their kids if you can hit the ball hit the ball because baseball is more fun that way and our job is not to improve your stats and win as many games but to have fun playing baseball and maybe you'll get better at it and try out for the varsity squad one day but but yeah being counter cultural and you find that people gravitate towards that they say oh I'm allowed to not care so much about it and so it was with my second half of my children that I started being very loud and explicit and not just trying to say you know what I want this but to just loudly say hey I'm starting a baseball team that's not going to practice we're just going to play in the games who wants in and boom people come so there's that demand for it but people feel bad because they nobody wants to choose lower quality parenting but being counter cultural really is absolutely necessary and new parents can be can be reluctant to do that yeah it does seem like that is a part of your case for you know having six kids is you cannot helicopter parents six of them the helicopter is not fast enough to get to all of them or you know you can't tiger mom them you know another part of your kind of bar bar stool or shoe leather reporting is you were talking to a lot of people who were referencing the movie idiocracy the Mike judge film which is very famous introduction and I've also pulled that clip which I want to roll and talk about a little bit best could you play the idiocracy clip evolution does not necessarily reward intelligence with no natural predators within the herd it began to simply reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species having kids is such an important decision we're just waiting for the right time it's not something you want to rush into no way oh shit I'm pregnant again shit I got too many damn kids thought you was on the pills and shit that's the thing Brittany there's no way we could have a child now not with the market the way it is no that just wouldn't make any sense well we finally decided to have children and I'm not pointing fingers but it's not going well and this is helping I'm just saying that before I have in beat trail maybe you should be willing to it's always me right well it's not my sperm count so implications are obvious having a lot of kids is for stupid people why do you think that's a little class endeavor right like that's the exactly why do you think that it has such cultural relevance was that say about attitudes towards kids and family and I love it because I first heard about that movie the first time anyone ever asked me have you watched idiocracy I was at a reason happy hour and said to one of my friends there that I was expecting my second in 2008 and she said oh have you seen idiocracy and I think she meant it in a friendly joking way but then when she explained the plot I wasn't sure how to take it and yeah and this is something I encountered in a playground in New Milford Connecticut which I highlight as a shrinking town the playground was outside of an elementary school that's closed down and was currently hosting senior yoga instead as sort of the future and I think again the idea that it's smart and both sides get mocked in this movie right like the the yuppie couple with the 140 IQs are not coming out as the prudent the people to look up to but really the idea that raising kids is this because it's become such a choice because it's not just kind of something you do now there are subcultures where finished school get a job get married have kids is just kind of what you're expected to do and well if you're going to deviate from that you're making a different choice that's fine but now it's not even that it's not expected it's like choosing what color sweater you're going to put on in the morning it's an explicit choice it's a lifestyle choice because of that a it leads to a culture that says it's your problem if you have kids but b it makes you feel and I quote Stephanie Murray who's a great parenting writer on this it once it becomes a choice then you have to do it all exactly right it's like you I would tell my kid don't go to college if you're not going to try to get good grades and that kind of thing and this is what people say if you're not going to absolutely do it right make sure you have everything in order make sure you have the house in the right school district and you have the savings to send them to college and you have lined up the piano teacher etc then don't do it and so that's again the way in which I think it's a self-reinforcing thing as people have fewer children their perception of the amount of inputs you need to do into child rearing goes up which then makes parenting seem more daunting which causes people to put it off and sometimes you put it off too long and it's no longer in the cards for you to me the opposite vision of this is the sound of music right like there's a little bit of horseshoe theory at play where it's like okay the poor and low class family and idiocracy okay they have a ton of kids but then there's also we see this actually in a lot of the data surrounding this sometimes it's the ultra wealthy families like you know Christopher Palmer's family and sound of music who end up having a whole bunch of kids and then they essentially live the libertarian dream right like they have a governess they do micro schooling like it's an awesome sort of like means of you know you can really scale up the family but so do we need cultural messages like that where we also show this being like a very high class thing or do we need cultural messages where it's just seen as like ultra attainable to you what's the universal manners we need Maria to come and raise all of the children for all of the families I don't think the image of perfectly behaved kids is the right one to give an example I try to get my kids to hold especially my sons to hold open doors for people because that's really easy to teach them and it's really easy to just say one word as you walk by them door and then they'll hold the door open and that makes other people happy and it's really my kids can't sing in unison again I have a son who can play the guitar and that's the extent of the music and I actually go where it's made out of curtains you don't have anybody making them out kids out of drapes or anything I criticize the mom fluencers in my book the you know the Instagram moms who everything is perfect and specifically the ones who they all live in farm houses it's a bizarre thing that I can't understand and the reason it's I cannot understand because it's supposed to look oh well we are going a simple route I mean that farm house they made with the first five million they made off of their influencer cash they often started with cash and the simple route like you notice a denim is all like made to point perfectly towards the hues of the ballerina mother's blue eyes right like it's none of it is simple it's all extremely curated none of that helps people have kids because that's what causes people say oh I have to have my life that much in order to raise kids to have kids who are basically happy who you know and they eat nuggets and french fries for dinner at least once a week that's the kind of attainable image of the parent I actually praise in family unfriendly I praise the lawn that's scattered with like footballs and tricycles and there's some dead grass from where the you know the home plate was left or the skateboard was left upside down to be a little bit messy and happy and that sort of thing and not not perfect kids not Ivy League kids so I you know have lower ambitions for your kids is one of the messages I have in the first two chapters for the book so maybe it's not the accuracy or sound of music maybe it's like cheaper by the dozen remember like that movie I guess there was the original one and then the Steve Martin remake right even cheaper by the dozen because he's like militaristic that did set for me a tone and I've been in the book I say when I'm a bad dad when I lose my temper it's because I want to think of myself as militaristic like if I whistle my dogs calm a certain whistle in cheaper by the dozen he has a certain whistle where his 12 kids come and again there's a couple things I'm good at which is my kids open the door and they behave well and mass but after that I try to be you know relatively laissez-faire with the kids don't always succeed at that but yeah that model that the things you think you need to do for your kids you don't they might look like a mess sometimes your house will look like a mess sometimes your kids won't get into hard but that those things are all fine that's the main message that I think needs to get conveyed to people now does that sound to you like I'm saying you should live you know be a dude having babies with all his neighbors in the trailer park well those sound the same to you I'm sorry I don't have much to say but I think you can see sort of a stable couple with a moderate income and just trying to raise happy kids that definitely is doable even in this world you do have to change your expectations so taking us to terrain where maybe Zach will start to to fight us Tim I did want to ask you you write in the book about how our meritocratic secular society has forgotten that we have innate value do you think that sense of innate value can ever truly exist in a secular society well I think that in I think that ultimately it is our secularization that makes us less believe in innate value that makes us think our kids have value if they accomplish something good and that you know I'm always reminded of Donald Trump's horrible explanation for how he went from being pro-choice to pro-life was he knew the single woman who was pregnant he thought she should have an abortion 18 years later he meets the kid and the kid was really successful in life so he changed his mind that to me is like the worst possible explanation for welcoming life is this kid might get into Harvard so don't abort him but I do think that that reflects our secular view of children that children are good if they are successful in these measurable ways and I do think that that materialism a secular society where we stop seeing people as I'm a Catholic I think we are made in the image of God I believe that every human being has basically infinite value but I don't think that's an exclusively religious argument I think it's inevitable that a secularizing society will hold on to that value less dearly but I also do think that a secular society can see okay wait a second if we do hold that human life really is valuable in itself that will ultimately all be happier in other words I do think you can make almost almost make a utilitarian argument for that idea that humans have value but the fact is that the more secular any society has gotten in recent history there's been sadness that's gone together with it and I think if we look around today I think with Gen Z especially you see a guilt and a dark foreboding fear of the future which is supposedly what the fire and brimstone preachers were driving home but now it's actually what the fire and brimstone op-eds about climate changer driving home so I think it's hard to really see human life as fundamentally good in our current secular society yeah I mean I don't really disagree with too much of that I think the foundation of liberalism is really the value of the individual you know everyone is treated equally under the law because everyone has an equal amount of dignity that needs to be respected and you know in the book it's interesting because you use Israel which you've mentioned a couple times and Utah as examples of unusually fertile cultures and obviously a lot of Jewish people in Israel a lot of Mormons in Utah religion plays a role but it seemed like something emanates out and it's not just the religious people living in those areas who are unusually fertile what lessons do you draw from places like Israel and Utah yeah so one of the things I always say and I said this in my previous book Alinated America is that the effect of religion on cultures doesn't come from the sermons as much as it comes from the culture doesn't come from the catechism as much as it comes from the culture that what happens is religious institutions and religious based institutions of civil society build a family friendly culture so I jokingly say pregnancy is contagious because a demographer in Utah told me that the Catholics in America that have the most babies are the Catholics who live in Utah in other words living near Mormons makes you get pregnant and so it's obviously not a virus that spreads in the air but it is a culture that gets built up by people who hold family very dear they then build up a culture that makes it easier you could if you want to put in purely economic terms makes it more affordable to have kids I put in ecological terms they create fit for raising families so the most important data point I got from Israel was secular Jews which in the census they're counted as their own categories these are people who identify as Jews but you know they'll eat bacon cheeseburgers and shrimp and you know they only they might celebrate Passover but they're not keeping the Sabbath secular Jews in Israel average 2.0 children that's far more fertile than any in Europe and then the United States so that is the religious Jews have a lot more than that but the culture that's built around the religion I make an image of a garden it's a garden that is creates an environment an ecosystem that's profamily and so I even ran into this guy who is complaining of Israel he's complaining oh yeah the religious over in Jerusalem they have too many kids yada yada and while he was complaining about this he was kicking a soccer ball with his 4 year old son and then at one point his wife came over and handed over his 2 year old daughter to him and so I was like the anti-kid people in Tel Aviv have 2 kids and they were going enough they might have 3 or 4 I would take that over here what exactly like break this down for us more you know I I don't want to be relegated to a fate of sitting in you know Utah Chuck E cheeses for the rest of my life but I assume it's more like you know Kubutsum like communal child rearing type stuff than you know higher prevalence of Chuck E cheeses like what is it exactly about these cultures that makes it like would Zach's family move to Utah and immediately be just thriving well so yeah in Israel one of the lines that somebody told me was the bus drivers in Israel have a real affection for little children so just imagine that where you send your 8 year old to the bus stop not worrying that the bus is going to pull away or that the guy is going to bark at your kid or anything like you just say the bus drivers going to stop and help the kid on and and you know make sure somebody gives him a seat there's another one of the dads who was he was Orthodox he has 2 young kids or maybe 3 he hopes to have a lot of kids and he said well a 6 year old can walk to school 6 year old knows he can't cross the street on his own and so any adult who walks up to a crosswalk knows there might be some strangers kid there who you're going to wait and then take him across the street the expectations a restaurant it's normal to have kids there if you need help with your children somebody will help you out all there is not the mindset your children are your own problem there was recently a red am I the asshole thread where this woman was like well my sister needed to take a shower and wanted me to watch the kids and I said I have no obligation that was your decision to have the kids I'm not even going to watch your kids A your kid probably can be left alone while you take a shower but B no you should help your sister Ron Johnson the Republican senator in opposing the child tax credit said I've never thought that it was anybody's it was society's responsibility to help people raise their kids and set aside the policy debate and say no actually I do think in these subcultures and these cultures like Israel and Utah there's just a ton of little supports and expectation people are going to have kids and we should all help them out and support that in their undertaking I wonder whether thinking about like the New York City restaurant scene whether there's also like incentives for places to be more family friendly you know I've gotten icier treatment while bringing my son to certain restaurants before but I'm thinking you have two places Baltazar in Manhattan which is always extremely you know I think they kind of let us jump in line a little bit in terms of waiting for a table versus other people there's a little bit of like accommodating families noticing the children are hungry and then a place called Bonnie's in Williamsburg and I've noticed that like there are certain restaurants you know high end that I'll go into in New York where I'm it stands out because they're so accommodating toward families and I do wonder like to what degree do they have a natural incentive to do this because it's something that at least like I notice this as a parent and it makes me frequent these restaurants far more than I would otherwise but it would be incredible higher culture of that where I never go into any New York City restaurant and feel a sense that my son is unwelcome as a parent of six I actually my wife and I do occasionally really relish a child free environment but that's again that's if we went on our 15th anniversary to like an adults only resort and by the end of it we're like four days is a maximum we miss miss our kids I don't think we miss our kids for the first three days so if you're gonna have a restaurant that's basically gonna be child free there's definitely a place for that in society but that your normal restaurant there was this great place called Hamburger Hamlet in Maryland that looks like a fancy restaurant but if you show up with kids again you use the word they accommodate you which is not strictly treating everybody equal they're actually giving a a special a preference for the families with kids because the families with kids need it because sitting at a table when you're a little kid at a restaurant is a hard thing to do because you don't naturally sit still so that's sort of idea that culture accommodates families is is important and the more that it happens the more that it happens again it doesn't preclude having a small set of child free places it does mean that the norm is you expect to kids to be brought to that place if you go to a conference and speak in a conference in the United States nobody has their kids there unless it's like a super Catholic or super Mormon conference and in Israel though the speaker who has a PhD will be up there and his kids will be running around in the front of the audience that I would love that to be more normal in Washington DC you can tell I'm a little too steeped in libertarian culture because I was I went to Bethany Mandel and Carol Markowitz's book party maybe like last year and I had my son was I think you know four months old or something five months old at the time and it was in Manhattan sort of like in this you know bar hotel bar and I was sort of deliberating oh should I bring my child with me or should I just you know leave him home with my husband and how silly of me to assume that Bethany who has a bunch of kids wasn't also bring a kid right like I show up to her own book party and her her baby is like in a sweet little sling and I'm like oh wait a second I'm with conservatives I'm pretty sure I could have just brought my kid and it would have been no big deal whatsoever but there is something so lovely about especially as a younger woman going into professional environments when you see other people who are more established in their careers and more established in you know building their families there is something that's very eye opening about like oh Bethany is doing that okay I'll just do that next time perfect and this is I say this specifically about the workplace that a lot of people and trying to become a lot of employers try to become more family friendly by providing better daycare more maternity leave and all that stuff is great but I say that one of the most important things that an employer do is tell you your family is more important than this job and one of the most important things someone like me you've read my titles earlier they're senior in both of them right I'm not that old but I have been at the examiner longer than anyone else I've been at AEI for over 10 years and when I get up and leave and I say okay I got to go home my kids need me and so then the trade offs that women have to make because women do a disproportionate amount of the child rearing the tradeoffs that women have to make the way to alleviate the negative impact on their career is not to say we're going to make it so you don't have to spend more time with your kids it's to say you know what dads you ought to go off and spend more time with your kids and that someone like me right now I'm not a boss but I am a senior guy and I make it clear my family is more important than my jobs and that that again is setting norms and expectations so this is something that I I think that this has it's a conservative argument as you're suggesting but it should have broad appeal to the libertarian audience I believe because what I'm saying is not all mostly about government policy it is mostly about norms and expectations and and what we do as individuals and employers freely choosing rather than mandating anything on anyone well so you talk in the book and this is I think the chapter that I am most skeptical of and so you're going to need to convince me on this one but you talk about incentives that employers can offer to attempt to ease the burden of having a lot of children doesn't this just create extraordinary levels of resentment between the childless and the child having like why should you know our colleagues without children be subsidizing the actions of breeders like me and Zach well because we humans are not a consumption good in other words if you said look I think the employer I think reason should pay for my tattoos and then Peter Studerman and Stephanie Slade who don't want or have tattoos to my knowledge said wait we're not going to get tattoos why should the tattooed be subsidized by us I would say well I think it's not as outlandish of an idea as you think it is Tim reason has paid one of Elizabeth's tattoos for a documentary well that's great I hope it wasn't like a a Mises or a ran tattoo or anything like oh no that would be despicable as long as it's artwork I can get behind it I suppose but so subsidizing everybody's tattoos it kind of leaves the people who know they're not going to choose tattoos feeling like well couldn't we just have paid everybody a little bit more and then you can choose to get a tattoo with your money that argument doesn't apply for people and this is again there you'll detect a religious underpinning in this argument but people are people people are that for which the sake for the sake of which we make government policy or company policy and I am explicit that the neutrality that we ought to have towards in government policy or employer policy do you have a Tesla or not do you drive or not do you have tattoos or not I don't think that neutrality fit for family and for children I think we actually ought to take the side of families because what are we doing we're taking the side of people which is the natural and good choice to make and the argument would be different if we had a birthrate of 3.0 or if everybody was achieving what their desired family size was but seeing so many people fall short of their desired family size for a generation now and something so important and to see that family and work are the two main competitors for our time I do think that it's fitting and appropriate for an employer to come out and say and again I'm not saying they should have to but I'm glad when pro family employers do come out and say actually we're going to support and we're going to accommodate family in a way that we're not going to necessarily accommodate everything else and to be clear when I was the opinion page editor here my accommodation of family included telling the 24 year old to go home and spend time with her sick dad while he was in the hospital it's not just parents who were accommodating family with but that is practically going to be the biggest source of family accommodation is accommodating parents so is that totally fair and equitable by some measures so I think it is ultimately fair and just to say your family is the most important thing one of the major developments that I've seen just anecdotally and also there does seem to be some evidence empirically for this that has increased family formation and people having well specifically people having more babies there's a little baby in the room let post covid and some of that may have been attributed to remote the rise of remote work and just more flexible working arrangements that seems to have given people a little more breathing room to take their kids to soccer practice or whatever needs to be done and maybe opened up more possibilities for considering more kids are there things that can be done in a more neutral way to just further enable that trend because to me that seems like one of the biggest changes in my working lifetime the fact that people have more flexible working arrangements seems more to having more kids so I do definitely think that flexibility in all dimensions is really important to this and in fact the Nobel Prize winning economist Claudia golden I she just won the Nobel Prize recently she has done all the research on gender and pay and work and all that and what she realizes that the gender gap the difference in pay between men and women in similar jobs with similar amount of education is entirely due to the fact that women demand more flexibility that in fact that mothers demand more flexibility so A one of my answers is hey men you should demand more flexibility to be is the more that you can make your place of work if you're the boss be more flexible the better it is for family and again this also benefits the guy who's a golf addict and he wants to be golfing all the time if he has flexibility so definitely absolutely and that not every job should have to be 40 plus hour full time or just 1099 so that's a place where government policy you know guys know that horrible law in California what is it SB 5 basically outlaw basically outlaws contract work that's absolutely an anti family law so the more that we can allow people to scale up and scale down to public policy and workplaces make it very explicit I think of journalism but I think of a woman I worked with who she got married she's like I basically want to have a baby right away and so we switched her to editing outside contributor pieces because that was perfectly made for working for home while the sort of day to day writing and interacting with other writers and bosses and making phone calls and checking sources that didn't lend itself to working from home with a baby and so we tried to cultivate jobs for half time stay at home that's really something that can be done neutral towards what you're splitting your time with it could be splitting your time with your parents splitting your time with hiking splitting your time because I've paid off my mortgage I'm 50 I don't really want to work full time but I do want to do some work that all of that there are some policies that need to be changed to make that more feasible and employers adopting that would be both family friendly as well as ultimately neutral towards what you're spending your other time it almost seems like the divide between the two I guess the progressive family pro family side and the conservative pro family side is like the progressive vision is kind of like we need to have all these like unlimited universal day care but also we're not going to allow this kind of flexible job arrangements so you're going to be working full time and your kids going to be totally covered in day care and your side of the equation is like well if you want people to make if you want people to have the optionality to have more kids let them have more flexible working arrangements and just give them straight up cash because they can use it how they want to raise their families is that kind of the the family you're fighting in the book I definitely say a tax credit that currently exists is basically almost an equalizer with so that I use the example of five guys who live in a I actually was thinking of five specific guys who lived in a bachelor pad in the suburbs right next to another family of five with the same aggregate income they should have the same aggregate taxes that's what the current child tax credit does I would expand it a tiny bit by indexing it for inflation and rolling in some other parents specific child tax credit for such as for daycare and just have it be straight cash and let people make the decision because a lot of people would decide to work a little less and spend a little bit more time with their kids and a lot of people decide to spend it on daycare and to work a little bit more and so in that regard I do call for more of a policy neutrality while there are a lot of people say no our GDP needs those women and work lets instead do a nudge to nudge every parents into working 40 hours a week full time outside of the home and at the same time subsidize the daycare industry I think that's a really bad policy to me the thing that's so sad about so much of the progressive push for universal you know pre-k universal daycare is that it acts as though people all have the same values and it acts as though all families want to farm their children out to entities you know picked or approved by the state and at least for me and my family that is not true I would much rather spend more time with my kid and I'm incredibly grateful to have a workplace that allows me to I start my day at 5am most people at reasons start their days you know at 9am or sometimes a little bit later than that but I feel lucky because I write the morning newsletter for reason and so at 5am before anybody else in my house is awake I get to actually have you know my little chunk of intense deep focus work time for the day and that type of thing I think you know there's something so frustrating about the universal approach the universal this universal that that's so frequently favored by status you know of all varieties and it's like well what would happen if instead we enabled families to use their time and money as they see fit in a way that is in accordance with their values versus values that are imposed top down to me it's very profoundly frustrating no I think that's exactly right and I get frustrated I would read the academic studies while working on family unfriendly and I would just see the absolute premise of half of these academics was simply how can we get more parents to be putting combined 80 hours a week outside the home and very rarely was it considered that well how can we give parents more flexibility to have the work life balance that they would optimally have though one thing that I do want to focus on before we move on from this topic because I know Zach wants to talk about housing policy in a little bit but don't the child lists already subsidize us all so much in that their property taxes pay for K-12 schools what do you make of that component of this where like isn't the better approach to try to make it so as you of us are subsidizing the choices of other people as possible and to attempt to unwind the terrible place that we've already gotten to or are you just saying we really need to scrap neutrality and we need to be as a society like all in favor of trying to promote people if you look at the subtitle of family unfriendly it's how our culture made raising children harder than it needs to be so most of the places in which I'm thinking we should have accommodation and preference for family over those are cultural changes rather than government policy and again my argument for a child tax credit that's slightly bigger than it currently is is a fairness and neutrality one but I do think there are people who say children are a public good like that way of talking because for a variety of reasons that I think you guys could all figure out but I do think that we should say well you know what actually children that public policy should be oriented not just towards the present but towards the future and it's hard to talk about this without getting sounding super cheesy but like children are the future I think I avoid saying that line in the book because it's too cheesy but that people raise children even with pretty secular values is a way of saying okay we're going to help people attain their desires or get closer to their desires and very important things and we're going to help guarantee that there is a future which is not guaranteed in a place like South Korea and so I don't support huge chunks of cash for parents for a variety of reasons one I think ultimately you do run into an unfairness argument I absolutely believe that choosing a childless life an unmarried life whatever is is a totally valid choice athletes have always believed that and not just for priests and nuns but also for other people I absolutely understand that a lot of people who want to have kids don't end up having kids and can feel like they're getting ripped off if they're constantly subsidizing families but I do think the culture should be set up there's this term that gets used a lot of times in progressive identity politics that something is too blank normative just normative heteronormative etc sometimes that's a problem but I think the right balance is often to be normative but tolerant and I think to be family normative and single or child free tolerant is the the right balance that we expect people most people are going to get married and have kids some people are going to choose not to some people are just not going to end up doing it and so the sort of hardcore pro-natalist approaches you see that they're trying in Hungary or that some conservatives and a smaller portion of progressives want I don't think that's the right way to go but I also don't think that the complete hewing to neutrality is the right way to go and if you're going to resent that we are being pro-family that's what I hope in the book to argue against and I spent a lot of pages arguing well actually even if you don't want to have kids you should want other people to be having the families that they desire and right now we're airing in the side of people are not getting the families that they say they desire what role does technology play in all this I mean to go back to the videography moment for a second where you've got the yuppie couple who just waits too long and then they biologically cannot have a kid anymore obviously we've got IVF to the extent that that improves if life spans continue to get longer and even thinking way out there you hear about artificial wombs and stuff like that will that play potentially play a role if part of the issue is people delaying to the point where they're not able to have the family size that they had dreamed of when they were younger well certainly right now a large portion of the shortfall of women getting fewer kids and they want happens because of a combination of a delay and then sort of bad luck and biological clocks in other words if you choose to start your family in your thirties you're increasing the risk that you won't be able to have as many you're not guaranteeing it's not even about 50% but you're increasing the risk that you won't get the two or three kids that you want but ultimately the reason I'm skeptical of some technological fixes to this is because I think that the planning mindset is a sort of fatal conceit the idea that oh with enough technology with enough planning we can build the life that we want free of these other problems I think that really is a hubris it's an over it's an overestimation of our own ability to plan what we want and to know what we want I kind of celebrate at the end of the book the unplannedness of children and life with children every child is unplanned is one of the quotes I have in there because even if you wanted to have a child you didn't get to choose this specific child I tell the story when my oldest daughter was born and we had picked her name we had done her nursery we were totally ready for her we we knew we wanted to get married and have a honeymoon baby this was we had basically I was hoping it was going to be a girl first we had basically planned this child she's born and I look at her think who is this I've never met this girl before how am I supposed to like make her my roommate for the next 18 years when she's a total stranger and sure enough like every child is unplanned and that serendipity that it introduces into life is good so that's one reason that I don't fall into sort of thinking tech and planning can solve all our problems because I think the human mind is such that when we try to plan too much we end up messing stuff up you know speaking of planning and fatal conceits I want to wrap this up with the little discussion about urban planning and housing and the role that this plays I mean we've seen again post pandemic there's been an acceleration accelerated migration from some of the big coastal areas to Sunbelt cities I was part of that and there's a real question about you know I mean one thing is like are people flocking to the Utah's of the world where is that how some of this gets resolved is kind of flocking to more family friendly areas you have a chapter in the book which is just one of the greatest chapter titles I've ever seen want fecundity in the sheets give us walkability in the streets maybe just start there what do you mean by that so one of the key needs of parents is the ability to ignore their children and not feel bad about it and so Gen X we used to what our parents told us was okay make sure when the street lights come on that's when you come home so ride your bike walk go wherever you want that's harder where I moved out of during the pandemic Montgomery County the streets were three four lanes in each direction it was not walk there weren't sidewalks in a lot of places and so if our kids needed to get somewhere small local high schools are replaced by regional massive high schools which get economies of scale but means nobody gets to walk to school the walking that children don't do is way down my brother lives in Connecticut he can almost hear the crowd cheer at his daughter's little league softball field because it's less than a mile away there is no way she could walk there because there's no sidewalks and the only street has people going 50 miles an hour each way so urban planning is a place where very explicitly this is where the government needs to be pro family and it has been family unfriendly to this date they don't build sidewalks I think the speed limits are too high and a lot of conservatives and some libertarians are kind of instinctively pro car in a lot of ways that I think is a big mistake it needs to be easy for kids to sort of run the neighborhood then you need less less planning of their activities doing less time in what I call car hell with the buckling and the unbuckling and the rebuckling that you guys both know very well and then obviously there's I don't have to deal with this to the degree that you guys do deliberate choice because I'm a car hater I am very sympathetic to the idea that Robert Moses is to blame for people feeling to have unproduced sex that is something that I am definitely interested in because for me at least the idea of attempting to get children and especially like your car size then limits the amount of car seat bound children you can have so it necessarily has all of these family planning implications car seat has that suggestion that was the study that I cited that because a car seat mandates rolled out at different times multiple studies have shown that people are much more likely to stop at two kids just to wrap it up as long as we're talking about policy though allowing it's really complicated because allowing more density does allow for sort of more playgrounds and makes housing more affordable and that sort of stuff but big apartment buildings do not turn out to be family friendly because they don't turn out to be community friendly this is one of the things that surprises a lot of people because in college you might have lived in some of that felt kind of like a big apartment building and everybody knew each other but in adult life the average American apartment building is not pro communal because you need community to raise kids those don't end up working as we were talking earlier you need a mix of lots of different things you need garden apartments that surround a courtyard with a playground you need single family homes but not with minimum lot sizes that drive up the price of houses and make it impossible for someone to start a family and so it would be a lot of sort of A, deregulation B, promotion of a mixture of different types of housing and then the stuff that the city that the government has to do which is pave the sidewalks and pave the bike trails and build the playgrounds that is really a huge part of this and again I don't support neutrality I support how do we build this so as to make this a place that young people will move and want to start families but I've got to just point out this sort of empirical reality of where people have been moving I'm going to pull up one of those pie charts that urbanists who talk about walkability kind of hate which is this is from the Urban Reform Institute showing that 50% of people live in low density suburban environment another 42% in a higher density suburban environment America just has been getting more suburban and the kind of revealed preference is for the cars the detached single family homes and so forth so how do you cope with or you know deal with that reality while also making neighbor trying to push for neighborhoods to become more family friendly there's what I call kid walkability versus hipster walkability one of my friends joked that so many urbanists what they're really saying is I need to be able to walk to a great cocktail bar which is fine I used to be able to walk to a great neighborhood pub and I loved it but kid walkability and bike ability might mean you're driving to work you're driving your kid to their boy scout meeting or their girl scout meeting or whatever but the playgrounds and the schools and the 7-11 where they're going to buy slurpees and taquitos that they get to those on themselves so a suburb where you can see sort of pro commuter pro single family home while also having kid walkability at the same time Tim I want to close us out but before I do I want you to give us your 30 second pitch for why libertarian skeptical of your argument should come over to the light side and beyond give us your 30 second pitch and a little bit of a fence sitter on this issue I feel very torn between my Catholic peers and my libertarian ones and then my actual personal experience of like I really really value spending time with my kid I really hope to have a large family at some point give us your 30 second sort of closing argument for why people should come over to your side with libertarians in mind so first of all a lot of what I'm arguing for is a kind of neutrality and fairness and it's about changing the culture rather than government policies to inflict this top down but I think a more childless society will make people more status and make people more depressed about the future and make people more fearful I think that when people have kids they're more hopeful for the future they're more trusting of their neighbors a more trusting communal society is a place where people rely on norms and neighborhoods and good will and they're less likely to think that the only source of their goods and their needs is going to be the state so more babies equals more freedom fair enough thank you so much for talking to Reason Tim Carney thank you thanks for listening to Just Asking Questions these conversations appear on Reason's YouTube channel and Facebook page every Thursday and the Just Asking Questions podcast feed every Friday before you get your podcast and please rate and review the show