Family Matters

The West has fallen. Billions must birth.

i almost went with one of those weird out of pocket diane arbus pictures but decided elvis and his child bride was more suitable

Man is diminished if he lives without the knowledge of his past; without hope of a future he becomes a beast. We see in every country in the world the loss of that hope, the end of science and invention, except for discoveries which may extend life or add to its comfort and pleasure, the end of our care for the physical world and our planet. What does it matter what turds we leave behind as legacies of our brief disruptive tenancy?

P.D. James, “Children of Men”

I saw a bunch of people talking, again, about the whole “falling birth rates” situation, as well as the “end of marriage”, and other such issues, and once again attributing it to the social or economic problem of their choice. Well, that leads one to wonder: are falling birth rates that bad? What’s with marriage rates? And what’s behind this?

Children of men

OGs will remmeber the time I wrote about the subject of declining birth rates for the last (and first) time. To start with a fact: the population of the world’s richest countries is growing more and more slowly, and has been for a while. In fact, some countries have aged so poorly that they will decrease in population altogether, such as Japan, Europe, and paradoxically enough, China (it’s Chinover). Is this actually, like, bad?

Well, the major drivers of economic growth are clearly population growth, investment, and improvements in how the two are combined, which is commonly known as Total Factor Productivity, or TFP. TFP isn’t really a measure of anything concrete¹, but it’s generally assumed that it’s connected in some way to “new ideas”, aka innovations and technology. If each person has a fixed number of ideas, more people means more ideas for obvious reasons. And because ideas are non-rivalrous, may have increasing returns (more ideas means new ideas are invented more quickly), and have spillovers , then more people come up with more and more ideas. This is known as a scale effect (find out more reading about German movies), even when it has “utter lack of evidence” issue. Scale effects look a bit less dicey if you consider longer timescales (like, eons and not the 50 years we actually have data for) or that knowledge spillover areas are not national borders - Europe is clearly one of them, despite being many tiny countries, and not all of China or India might be one.

So population growth speeds up idea creation, and idea creation speeds up economic growth. This makes slower population growth really scary: declining population growth could mean declining idea growth, and declining economic growth. This means that, over extremely long periods of time, you would end up having lower and lower growth rates. Of course, many developed countries (particularly the US) have seen higher than usual growth for pretty prolonged periods, as a byproduct of a combination of growing educational attainment, declining misallocation (aka less “wasted talent”), and highly productive research - meaning that it could be possible to sidestep this issue.

Another problem is that we’ve assuming that the “cost” of inventing/discovering things is constant, but that’s not necessarily true. It’s been observed that coming up with new ideas has been getting steadily harder over the last couple of decades, and scientific discoveries are getting smaller on average, in a variety of sectors. The causes why are pretty complicated (upcoming blog post on Oppenheimer will tackle this, I promise) but there’s also a number of possible diagnoses and solutions. One weird angle, however, is that people from different backgrounds have different sorts of ideas and research agendas, meaning that the “finding new Einsteins” angle could work - immigrants appear to be a genuinely powerful force for innovation.

The end of marriage?

Forty is the oldest a woman can be photographed in a wedding gown without the unintended Diane Arbus subtext

Enid (Carrie Bradshaw’s editor) in Sex and the City: The Movie

The second point here is, why are birth rates going down? The first, most obvious answer is that birth rates are declining everywhere on the planet, due to something called the “demographic transition”, which posits a decline of fertility as countries get less poor, but they’ve fallen quite behind the bare minimum of around 2 even. So it’s not that. If you look at the US specifically, birth rates fall across income, wage, and age groups - and it’s a weird combination of declining marriage rates AND married families having fewer children.

Why are fewer people getting married? A first point to broach has been recently made by the Washington Post: political polarization. Women are increasingly liberal, and men are either less liberal or more conservative, resulting in the fact that around 20% of Gen Z should have to marry someone outside their political persuasion. Other data points back this up: most young people meet their partners online, and they rate people on dating apps with similar politics more favorably. I think one possible explanation is, simply, that polarization also means people don’t know many people that different from them in beliefs: liberals are mostly urban and conservatives rural and exurban, while college and non college educated voters of all backgrounds are increaisngly divided by party. This is similar to the Chinese dating scene: the country has an extremely skewed gender ratio, and its women aere especially concentrated in cities, meaning thatrural men have a much worse dating market. A further possible explanation for the 20% difference is that around one in five “zoomers” (and one in four Gen Z women) is LGBT, meaning that there could simply be no mismatch².

But whatever. I’ve already been on the topic of the decline of marriage in a recent blog post and it appears to be not because of feminist mumbo jumbo, but simply because the available men do not meet expectations. Most people still want to get married and have families. Culturally speaking, the communities with the highest number of single mothers also have the highest disaproval of them.

At the same time, when women’s wages are higher, they expect more from their partners, not just in terms of money but also in terms of actual quality of a match. In an extreme example, if women are allowed to seek jobs, domestic violence rates decrease, since women could simply divorce rather than stay and endure a toxic, violent partnership. In fact, legalizing divorce resulted in a 20% reduction in female suicides, and another large reduction in femicides.

In the developed world, owing to improvements in education, women’s economic prospects are now better than they have ever been. For instance, back in the 1950s and 1960s, women showed much less interest in a career than they do presently - surveys, for instance, show that the main reason why women attended college was to find a (successful) husband, rather than a career of their own. But, at the same time, the returns to getting a husband through an education were higher than the results of getting a job through an education, which meant that when this differential shrank, women were incentivized to hunt for jobs.

So why aren’t women settling down? Well, because they aren’t settling, period. The dating scene is dismal for women, as social media will tell you. Men, even men who tell you they want an equal partnership, are remarkably sexist: when a man is outearned by a woman, he becomes less satisfied with the partnership (but the woman does not in the reverse), and the two are likelier to divorce³. Even if men aren’t sole breadwinners anymore, women are still tasked with most of the housework, and there is a strong, negative correlation between domestic work and wages. Even when no children are had, marriage negatively affects women’s wages and distorts their career choices - straight women have shorter commutes than gay women, because men expect different things from women than other women. Households, as a general rule, maximize not joint earnings, but the man’s earnings in particular regardless of who is the “breadwinner” - gay men earn less than straight men, but gay households earn the same, or why there’s a lesbian “wage premium”. Men’s regressive attitudes are linked towards both worse careeers for women and lower fertility, while at the same time when men are able to take over childcare, women’s wellbeing (measured as health outcomes) improves.

Put another way, the quality of the relationships women have is going up, but mainly due to having fewer of them - resulting in fewer marriages and fewer births. And money doesn’t actually help: when men make more money, marriage or fertility rates don’t seem to go up much.

Focus on the family

[I had] the kind of illness that affects only women and turns them into housewives.

Happening (2021) based on the novel of the same name by Annie Ernaux

Omitting the marriage stuff from the equation, the question of why fertility is down remains. The causes for the US in particular come down to a combination of the economy being really mediocre for most of the last twenty years, some demographic trends surrounding Latinos, and “shifting priorities”.

Before getting into the woke of it all, something to consider is that the “shifting priorities” explanation account for the steep decline among women 20-24 and 25-29, but that one of the biggest relative drops, and a leading factor in this decline, is the sharp drop in teen pregnancies, aka in the 15 to 19 group. The reasons for this are varied, but largely come down to a weird mix of sex ed, increased access to contraceptives and the morning after pill, and teenagers having less sex in general. And this is an unavowed good thing: in 70% of teen pregnancies (during the 1990s), the fathers were older than 20, and 15% were older than 25. And looking at mothers 12, 13, and 14 years old, the fathers were adults in 27% of cases, and had an average age of 23. So the issue is less “stupid girls stopped spreading their legs, which was also stupid” and more “fewer (male) nonces running around”.⁴

The shifting priorities part could be a big GOTCHA for the Woke Rabenmutter, so let’s look at it more closely. Firstly, the most conservative countries in Europe, Hungary and Poland, don’t have substantially higher birth rates than, say, France or Sweden - there barely is any association between support for traditional gender norms and fertility. The French Revolution and its emphasis on secularism was indeed followed by a “baby bust”, but it could also be attributed to inheritance reforms - people die at different dates to avoid higher taxes, actually. Speaking of France, cutting the child allowance in 2014 resulted in lower fertility, but only for couples with children - as in, people went from planning on two to staying at just one, rather than from one to zero.

Looking at the baby boom, there’s (roughly speaking) three main reasons for it: higher economic growth (disputed, though), more ease and safety in child-rearing, and lower housing costs. The first one is tenuous, but also the US economy was pretty bad until five years ago, so it makes sense - especially considering that single people are outearned by members of couples. Secondly, parenting is getting more and more demanding, and affluent parents do more and more, while poorer parents fall behind - all of which is falling on the shoulders of women (see above). As is the burden of an aging population, by the way. Maternal mortality has risen in the US in recent years, aka the opposite of what you’d want to see for more babies. And housing costs have soared, taking a toll on the entire US economy. So it’s no wonder women don’t want to be mothers, or see it as an anxiety inducing, (literally) dreadful ordeal.

Conclusion

Is the declining birth rate bad? Kind of. Whose fault is it? Men’s. But seriously, “too many uppity feminists” isn’t really something with much explanatory power.

1. Who would have guessed relying on an indicator called, basically, “Total Growth Causes” that’s just the residual of a regression wouldn’t be very meaningful. But at least Vollrath called Ted Cruz “a seditious grifter who should resign”. Dare I say based?

2. This is especially true because LGBT conservatives are, let’s be real, complete cretins.

3. In Finland, however, the earnings of the two converge, explaining the difference.

4. Now you’re getting why I used a picture of Elvis and Priscilla in the header.