This essay is part of a series of policy essays exploring ways to raise birthrates.

Married people tend to be a lot happier than unmarried people. The wealth gap between married and unmarried people is enormous. Those who are married are healthier by most measures and live longer. And these benefits accrue to both men and women. There is a lot of evidence that marriage causes all these good things.

Meanwhile, society depends utterly on marriage, because the vast majority of children born via marriage, and the vast majority of people prefer to have children within marriage.

Marriage isn’t for everyone, and tons of wonderful families exist without it. But marriage is still the dominant way that people have kids, and evidence suggests that marriage matters more, not less, than before.

Yet we hardly sell it, and so fewer and fewer people choose it. And birthrates follow marriage right down, all over the world, imperiling our future.

Married people are happier, healthier and richer

Lots of marriages don’t work out, and divorces can be a mess. Plenty of marriages are miserable. Yet despite what the red pill right and the feminist left will tell you, the benefits of marriage -- on average -- are astoundingly high for both sexes.

Happiness

Surveys almost invariably show that married people are happier than unmarried people. Skeptics claim that’s just because happy, well-adjusted people are the ones getting married. But we can see what happens to the happiness of people as they transition into and out of marriage.

It turns out that getting married actually makes people a lot happier. Getting divorced makes people very unhappy, but that is a pretty strong clue that they liked being married.

But that just for men, right? No! The marital happiness advantage is just as large for women as for men, and it has been increasing over time!

Researcher Tomas Pueyo summarized, “Both men and women are way happier when married than single, and that appears to be true in every paper I could lay my hands on.”

Health and long life

Married people are far likelier to be in good health than singles at the same age. But does marriage cause better health? It sure looks like it. Married and single people start with similar health, but the longer they are married, the larger the health gap becomes. Why? For one thing, married people tend to engage in much more preventative care, often because of the prodding of their partner.

As a result, the mortality gap between married and unmarried people is enormous.

Wealth

There is a large wealth gap between married and single people. Married people of all ages have many multiples of the wealth of singles.

Is some of this due to selection? Sure. People who have money are more likely to get married in the first place.

But also, one household is cheaper than two, and a lifetime of having another person to help with childcare and home maintenance instead of hiring out adds up. You also save a lot on leisure when you can just spend time with a significant other for free.

Marriage matters more for fertility than before

Nowadays people have children in a wide variety of family forms, so why even talk about marriage? Not only don’t you need to be married to have children, with IVF and surrogacy you don’t even need to have a partner.

But in the last decade or two a funny thing has happened as birthrates have fallen to record lows. Fertility outside of marriage has been falling while fertility inside of marriage has stayed high. Why?

A lot of births outside of marriage were unintended, and with improved birth control people are getting better at avoiding them. That means society now relies even more on marriage to have children.

Whatever people may say about marriage, they are voting through their behavior. Since 2008, married women in the US went from having 1.7 times the birth rate of unmarried women to 2.2 times.

All over the world, marriage is still the commonest path for people to have kids

For all of the lifestyle options now on offer, the ancient institution of marriage still accounts for the vast majority of births in all but a handful of countries.

To be fair, the unmarried share is an important contributor to fertility as well, especially in the US and Europe. I have argued that to solve the birthrate crisis, we need big tent pronatalism, and conservatives often make the mistake of having a too-narrow concept of family.

But if you want a society with a healthy birthrate, it’s hard to do so without marriage.

No country gets to replacement without a decent marriage rate

Using data from The Economist and National Reporting Agencies, I plotted the marriage rate and the fertility rate for about 90 countries with available data. Countries with high marriage rates had about double the fertility of countries with low marriage rates.

Remarkably, no country with a low marriage rate (below 5 marriages per 1000 per year) manages to reach replacement fertility.

Until recently, France and the Scandinavian countries seemed to hint that you don’t need a marriage culture to have a healthy birthrate. But France’s TFR now sits at 1.58 and Nordic Europe is lower still.

Most of the Declining Fertility is Due to Declining Marriage

The Institute for Family Studies asked, how much of the recent decline in US fertility is because of falling marriage rates? The answer? 75% of it!

If people married at the same rate that they did in 2007, fertility would be very close to replacement.

Earlier marriage is the key

But marriage doesn’t lead to higher birthrates if folks are marrying too late. Works In Progress had a great piece in September 2023 exploring the causes of the postwar Baby Boom and the best explanation they found is higher rates of young (under 25) marriage.

At the height of the baby boom, more than 70% of American women age 20-24 and nearly 60% of British women of these ages were married. A generation before, it was just around 50% of American women and only 25% of British women.

How much of a difference does earlier marriage make?

In 2023 a team from the University of Texas at Austin (funded by vocal pronatalist Elon Musk) studied human fecundability (the odds of becoming pregnant when you are trying) using a global dataset of three million women. It turns out that women are incredibly fecund in their early 20s, and then the ability to get pregnant declines throughout the 20s and 30s.

When you see it, it is so obvious. Not only do women who marry earlier have more time to have a bigger family, but their marriages have much better overlap with the most fecund ages.

Look at that curve again and consider that in Mediterranean Europe the average age that women marry is now 35. Is it any wonder that they have among the lowest birthrates in the world?

Cornerstone versus Capstone

University of Virginia professor and family policy expert Brad Wilcox talks of two different models for marriage.

Cornerstone, or foundational, marriage is the type of marriage that was most common historically. Couples marry early in adulthood (for example, during college or within a few years of graduation) and then build their lives together.

Capstone marriage, on the other hand is much more the norm today. Couples marry later, typically in their 30s or beyond, after putting a lot of things first. As one pundit explained, “modern young adults tend to view marriage as a capstone - you get your education, have a bunch of sex, establish a career, cohabit, maybe even buy a house ... and only then get married. And all of that takes time.”

Late capstone marriages wreak havoc on fertility. Remember that fecundability chart. Cornerstone marriages leave a lot more runway for having kids, and you need to start early to have the best odds, especially if you want more than one or two.

Fear of Divorce Hurts Birthrates

If marriage is good for birthrates, then divorce must be bad for birthrates, right? Yes, and there are studies that show it.

A 2014 paper by Bellido et al. found that “the introduction of more liberal divorce laws permanently reduces the value of marriage relative to divorce. Results suggest that divorce liberalization has a negative and permanent effect on fertility.”

A state-by-state study in the United States (Alesina et al. 2007) found the same thing, that rising divorce drives fertility down, both because marriages don’t last as long and because some people are afraid to get married at all.

But fears of divorce are overblown

Many men avoid marriage out of fear of divorce and a lot of influencers feed these fears. But the odds of divorce have gotten lower and lower with every generation since the 1970s. Those married in the 2010s get divorced at only half the rate of their boomer parents. In fact, the divorce rate for new marriages is barely higher than it was for people married in the 1950s!

But even marriages that end in divorce are usually still worthwhile. I count among my friends a number of people who got divorced, and none would wish away the kids that came out of their marriages. Most have much richer lives than those who stayed forever single.

Polyamory is associated with especially low fertility

Internet personality @Aella_Girl did a huge survey of 23,000 people in 2023, asking people how many children they have with their partner and whether they are polygamous. She found that the fertility of poly respondents is very low even though they married at similar rates.

It seems that those who have a traditional view of sex and marriage tend to have a lot more children.

Israel, East Asia and Matchmaking

Traveling around the world to document the low birthrate crisis, filmmaker Stephen J. Shaw found that the vast majority of the childless actually do want kids. The number one reason they don’t have them? They haven’t yet found the right partner. The most common way people meet these days is through dating apps, but most dating apps make things worse, not better, for finding long term relationships.

But in Israel, nearly 90% of women marry by age 40 according to the Taub Center, and this one reason why Israeli fertility is so high. What does Israel do differently?

For one thing, there is a robust culture of matchmaking, especially among the Orthodox. So much so that there is both a hit Netflix show and a blockbuster (in Israel at least) movie about it.

These shows put a modern spin on a very old tradition. All over the world, and in Asia especially, arranged marriage was the main way that families formed until very recently.

Young people are now adrift in many countries. Bringing back matchmaking might be essential for reviving fertility in East Asia and a lot of other places. We probably don’t want to see a return of the most oppressive forms of arranged marriage, but judging by these hit shows, matchmaking is something young people may want a lot more of.

What can policymakers do?

It is hard to deny that marriage drives fertility, as much today as it did in the past. But what can be done by policymakers? Isn’t marriage a private decision? Here are some ideas:

• Talk up marriage. One of the most powerful tools of leaders is the public stage.

  Conservative influencers already use their voice to promote marriage all the time. Liberal influencers and politicians almost never do. That helps explain why marriage and birth rates are now nearly twice as high for conservatives as for liberals

  .

• Favorable tax treatment for marriage. It would be bad politics to try to tax singleness. On the other hand, giving married people tax benefits is common in many countries and shifts culture toward marriage and more children.

• Religious freedom. The cultural norms around marriage are mainly taught by faith groups. If such groups are permitted to thrive, more marriage and higher fertility will be the natural result.

• Favor the young in policy. The United States is a gerontocracy that advantages the old in many ways, while burdening the young with taxes and inflation. Shifting the balance toward the young will boost marriage and family formation.

• Reduce marriage penalties. Marriage penalties are where some couples end up paying more tax if they get married. These penalties should be reduced where possible.

• Could you teach the benefits of marriage in school? Why not, since kids already get sex-ed!

This essay is part of a series of policy essays exploring ways to raise birthrates.

Everyone is talking about housing these days. On the right and left, people recognize that young people are having hard time getting homes. Birthrates are far below replacement, and we agree that housing bears a lot of the blame.

But this isn’t the first time we’ve been in this situation. Starting in 1925, long before modern birth control and the sexual revolution, fertility fell below replacement in more than a dozen developed countries and stayed below replacement for more than 15 years. Then as now, housing was a big cause of birthrate decline.

But the 1925-1940 fertility crisis had a happy ending as birthrates would go well above replacement for a whole generation starting in the 1940s. As we will see, housing and housing policy were central to the earlier recovery and could be part of a fertility recovery again today.

The first birth dearth

The chart below is from the paper “Subreplacement Fertility in the West before the Baby Boom” by Jan Van Bevel. It uses Net Reproduction Rate (NRR) which is the number of surviving daughters born per woman, so a figure less than 1 is below replacement.

Fertility in the 1930s was below replacement across virtually the whole of Europe. In fact, in Austria, fertility went down to just 65% of replacement. The United States went below replacement in 1935.

Then, as now, the low birthrate crisis was most acute in cities, which were seen as inhospitable to children. In fact, in the crowded European capital of Vienna, fertility fell to one quarter of replacement, even lower than in Seoul in 2025!

But a turnaround was coming.

The most successful pronatal program in history

Economists Lisa Dettling and Melissa Kearney published a wonderful paper in in February 2025: “Did the Modern Mortgage Set the Stage for the U.S. Baby Boom?”

In it they present a series of extraordinary charts. In the first, they show how the Baby Boom’s start lines up perfectly with new programs that helped young people borrow more to buy houses.

Contrary to what most people think, the Baby Boom did not begin when soldiers came back from the war but started a decade earlier with the introduction of the FHA loan program. Then when the WWII vets returned and were able to use VA loans to buy homes, the Baby Boom kicked into high gear. The first great fertility crisis was over, for at least a generation.

We can see the massive change in homeownership by age. Before the modern mortgage, most people in their childbearing years were not homeowners. Just 20% of 30-year-olds owned a home. After the modern mortgage, 55% of 30-year-olds were homeowners. Marriage and childbearing soared.

This makes perfect sense. When people were able to get a home sooner, they could marry sooner, boosting fertility. And the paper presents evidence that more FHA and VA mortgage originations per capita were associated with earlier marriages.

Dettling and Kearney’s paper also looks internationally and finds that other countries which adopted similar mortgage programs saw fertility soar as well.

But that isn’t the whole story of housing and the Baby Boom. What was being built and what were people buying?

The Suburbs and the Invention of Family Friendly Housing

In 1946, an entrepreneur named William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons created a whole town from scratch and revolutionized housing forever. The first Levittown, created as a suburb of New York, followed a new template. Levitt purchased a 7-square-mile tract of potato and onion farms near the city and subdivided it into modest parcels. Houses were mass produced, each with its own yard and the basic amenities a family would need.

This kicked off the greatest housing revolution in history, hitting the United States from coast to coast, Canada, Australia and a number of other countries. For the first time, ordinary people could at once be part of an urban economy and have also have a house well-suited for a family.

Until the invention of the suburb, most people had an unappealing set of choices. Either be isolated on a farm or in a small town, with plenty of room to raise a family but little economic opportunity, or else move to the city, where economic opportunity was high, but you would be stuck in a crowded building that was bad for raising kids.

This had been the story of humanity since time immemorial. Cities were “fertility shredders” -- bastions of opportunity but wreakers of birthrates. Although cities were economic engines, they were not self-sustaining. They had to continually draw new people from the countryside, where birthrates were higher.

Suddenly with Levitt’s great innovation, plus the automobile, everything changed. Regular people could both be integrated into the productive urban economy and have a house that was suitable for raising children, with a yard to play in and a little air gap so the noise wouldn’t upset the neighbors. And with those new mortgage programs, people could buy that house early in life, while they were still young enough to have children.

Levitt’s houses, modest though they were by today’s standards, were hugely popular. Built in assembly-line fashion, they were completed at a rate of one every 16 minutes, and 1400 houses were sold in the first three hours. By the time the first Levittown was finished in 1951, 17,500 houses had been built, accommodating nearly 100,000 people.

All across America, thousands of suburbs were built with variations on the Levittown model. As Green and Wachter wrote in 2005: “With the strong expansion of the U.S. economy in the post–World War II period driving up incomes, together with the new institution of the long-term (and therefore affordable), fixed-rate, self-amortizing mortgage, homeownership expanded rapidly. America was transformed from a nation of urban renters to suburban homeowners.”

The Baby Boom was Greatest in Countries Where Suburbs Exploded

How crucial were the suburbs in driving the Baby Boom? Consider:

When we look at countries that the most powerful baby booms, the top five winners were the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand along with the Netherlands.

What do the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands have in common? All five embraced the new decentralized suburban model with gusto.

It is pretty well-known that Canada, Australia and New Zealand followed America in the great suburban explosion, being culturally similar to the United States. But the Netherlands? It turns out that the Netherlands too embraced US-style suburban building after the war as a 2016 paper explains.

For Fertility, Follow Data, Not Fashion

Suburbs aren’t fashionable. Instead, the building ideal among fashionable thinkers and pundits looks like this:

The cover of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new bestseller Abundance shows the modern vision of what development should be. Urban sprawl is nowhere to be seen, as we transition seamlessly from beautiful futuristic urban towers to farmland and pristine nature.

There are some problems with this ideal. First of all, it’s not what people want. The Institute for Family Studies surveyed almost 9000 Americans to find out what sort of housing Americans prefer. Some 79 percent said that their ideal residence is a single-family home while just 8 percent said they prefer an apartment.

But second problem is even more acute.

Within greater London, the central district known as the City of London comes the closest to those gleaming glass towers of Klein and Thompson’s cover. If you are a certain kind of urbanist, this looks glorious and your heart soars.

Do you wonder what the TFR in the picturesque cityscape?

There are a few places where it is possible to get fertility data on a very granular level. London is one such place. Here is the fertility rate of London, neighborhood by neighborhood.

Do you see that area in white at the top of the bend in the Thames? That is the area of those towers pictured above, and its fertility is just 0.55 births per woman. If you are a pronatalist like me, you may get heartburn.

To be fair, only around 10,000 people actually live in the City of London; most only work there. But what about the neighborhoods of smaller apartment towers all around the downtown? Those are all residential and they have a fertility of only around 1.0 to 1.1. Keep in mind that many of those are heavily immigrant neighborhoods, where one expects fertility to be higher.

But then you get out to the leafy neighborhoods of houses with gardens and fertility is 1.6 to 2.0, nearly at replacement. What a difference!

(Some argue there is selection bias in fertility maps like this. Maybe people who want kids ‘select out’ of inner London. But if that’s true, it supports the thesis that certain housing types are better for families!)

But don’t we need those apartment towers to bring people closer together for greater economic cooperation? Don’t we need more density to have progress? Hardly!

Consider: At the density of the London suburbs, England alone, not counting Scotland or Wales, could still house 500 million people! Not only is extreme crowding bad for fertility. It is also completely unnecessary!

It’s rare to have such granular fertility data that we can look neighborhood by neighborhood across a city, and we don’t have that level of detail for the US. But like the UK, Australia has that data. And the fertility divide by housing type is stunning.

In Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Perth, the fertility rate ranges from 1.6 to 2.1 in the suburbs of single-family homes and just 0.9 to 1.1 in the apartment block-based urban core. That is up to a 100% fertility difference based on housing type and neighborhood alone. In demography, that is an absolutely enormous effect. If some pronatal policy increased TFR by just 0.1, many would consider it a win.

What Pronatal Housing Policy Would Look Like Today

If we want to “fix housing” in a way that supports long term thriving, we can’t simply follow fashion. The fashion these days is to upzone cities, get rid of single-family zoning, and build upward. But that has been tried, in Minneapolis, Auckland and Chicago. And in all of these cases, birthrates went down compared to nearby cities, because the type of housing being built wasn’t friendly for families.

To solve the fertility crisis, we should repeat the formula that gave us the Baby Boom: get family-friendly houses into the hands of young people early, while the fertility window is open.

Here are some ways to do that:

• Get rid of urban growth boundaries and build more suburbs. The housing crisis is really about a lack of the kinds of homes that are suitable for families.

• Give preference to young people in mortgage programs. The social value of mortgages lies in helping the young buy houses years earlier than they otherwise would.

• Open government land to build houses. Somehow Federal land is seen as sacred and untouchable. But consider the case of Canada. Some 89% of Canada is government-controlled “crown land”, off-limits to building. Amid this artificial land shortage, Canada has been building large blocks of small apartments and fertility has fallen to just 1.25 births per woman. That is not a model to follow.

• Don’t exempt people from property taxes.

  Many studies show property taxes encourage older people to downsize and move out of high-demand areas, letting younger people move in and form families.

This essay is part of a series of policy essays exploring ways to raise birthrates.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the global birthrate crisis is how it seems to be happening almost everywhere. Low fertility is acutely afflicting every part of Europe, East Asia and almost all of North and South America. Over and over, we hear that “nobody knows” how to reverse falling birthrates.

But that isn’t really true. Right in our midst are groups that are forging a path, trying and succeeding at creating subcultures that manage to have healthy birthrates within modern societies.

Why does the United States, the richest big country in the world, have higher fertility than France, Sweden, Hungary, Japan? All of those countries have a big basket of pronatal policies while the US has hardly any.

A big part of the answer is that America has a lot of high fertility subgroups within it. The groups with higher birthrates include of course well-known groups like the Amish and Orthodox Jews but also traditionalist Catholics, and numerous protestant denominations and other religious groups. That is only possible because of America’s deep tolerance of different beliefs.

On the flip side, why do East Asian countries like China, Japan and Korea have among the lowest birthrates in the world? One reason is that there aren’t any high-fertility subcultures left to show the way. And to an extent that is a self-imposed problem. East Asian countries value conformity and have a hard time tolerating big cultural differences.

How Freedom of Belief Drove the Greatest Population Growth in History

What country achieved the fastest sustained population growth in world history? That title surely belongs to the United States in its first centuries. The American colonies grew from just 2000 people in 1620 to 250,000 in 1700, 2.5 million at the time of Independence in 1776 and 76 million by 1900. That means America grew by 38 thousand times in just 280 years.

While immigration contributed to this growth, the vast majority of it was because of very high birthrates, above 7 births per woman until 1800 and dropping gradually to 3.5 births per woman by 1900.

No other country in history has seen growth like this:

How did America achieve such robust fertility, generation after generation? Europe by contrast had much lower fertility and grew from 78 million to 400 million in that 280-year span, a gain of just fivefold.

Much of the answer lay in America’s religiosity. Founded partly as a refuge from religious persecution, the colonies were intensely religious and very fertile.

Most of America’s founding denominations have faded. The Puritan, Dutch Reformed, Congregationalist and Anglican churches are now each less than 1% of the population. Less than one in a thousand Americans is a Quaker today.

But other faith groups grew as the original ones waned. No less than three Great Awakenings kept America in a state of revival and helped keep the young nation growing.

As old denominations lost their luster, new ones rose up in their place. And it was religious freedom that made this possible.

The US Bill of Rights starts with religious freedom before any others: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof...”

Not only did America’s founders view faith as a good thing; they barred the government from being able to intervene in people’s choices about it.

Amid a backdrop of strong freedom of belief, this process of decline and renewal is still happening today. Mainline protestant churches (the large denominations that dominated 20th century America) are losing membership. Catholic churches, which surged in the 20th century, have also seen waning attendance. But something new is picking up, nondenominational churches.

What are these nondenominational churches? A lot of them are startups. They are entrepreneurial and independent and sometimes with a charismatic leader they can be hugely successful.

Most developed countries do not allow this level of religious and cultural experimentation and so they stagnate.

But religious freedom isn’t just for new faiths, and it isn’t just for Christians. In a letter to the Touro Synagogue in 1790, new president George Washington wrote that the government “gives to bigotry no sanction” and “to persecution no assistance.” Touro was based in the colony of Rhode Island, which was the first government in the world to guarantee religious freedom in its founding document in 1636.

When you look at fertility by language spoken at home in America, the two languages that top the list are Yiddish and Pennsylvania German, representing Haredi Jews and the Amish respectively. Both of these groups fled persecution in Europe to thrive in America.

The case of Yiddish speakers is especially poignant. Some 85% of those who perished in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers, and now with the American guarantee of freedom of conscience, they are growing again.

Are Fertile Subcultures the Answer?

What explains the near-universal nature of fertility decline? Some of the most astute thinkers on the topic have explained that there is a global convergence of cultures today as the same norms (such as long educations, delayed marriage, and widespread Internet and social media) spread worldwide. The renowned futurist Robin Hanson (here is one of my conversations with him) talks of “modernity’s monoculture mistake.”

His essay Beware Cultural Drift explains it best.

When there were many small subcultures in the world, there was competition and selection. Subcultures had to maintain healthy fertility, or they would disappear and be replaced. But now a global monoculture is taking root, and this process of cultural evolution isn’t working anymore. We are adrift.

How can we answer this? Hanson notes that we can attempt to force cultural change from above which is difficult and lacks a consensus. Or we can allow deep multiculturalism.

I would argue that what Hanson calls deep multiculturalism, a tolerance for fundamentally different beliefs, is at the very core of American tradition and has been central to America’s cultural evolution and demographic success over the centuries.

Israel, the only advanced country that avoids fertility collapse

There is only one developed country in 2025 that combines modern life (urbanization, high education and high technology) with high fertility and that is Israel.

Among Jews in Israel, fertility has remained remarkably stable over the last 40 years, an incredible accomplishment in a world that has faced steep fertility collapse in that span.

But within this group there is enormous diversity of belief, and this produces vastly different fertility rates. The ultra-orthodox, who are about 13% of the population, lead the way with nearly 7 births per woman. For them having children is seen as a mission from God. Secular Jews, who are 50% of the population, pull up the rear with 2 births per woman.

That two births per woman among secular Jews may not seem so important, but actually it is a very big deal. For a secular, urbanized and modern population to have two births per woman is unheard of in today’s world. Elsewhere in the world, the fertility of similar groups is only around half of that.

What is going on? Why is Israeli fertility so high even among non-religious groups? An Israeli pundit with the handle NonZionism explains this as trickle down natalism.

He writes, “fertility in a post-contraceptive world is basically mimetic, which is a ponce way of saying that people decide to have x number of kids based on looking around at how many kids the people around them have, who in turn have that many because they looked around at how many kids the people around them were having. However, if fertility rates are recursive in this way, how can they change?”

He goes on to explain that the fertility norms of high fertility subgroups, such as the Haredi, are spreading out across the rest of society. Is this plausible? I think so, especially since a large share of secular Israelis come from more religious households and learn their fertility norms there.

And this shows the value of religious pluralism for society. The family norms of natalist subcultures can bleed out into broader society and make it more pronatal. Not only that but these subcultures are a valuable population source as many of their numbers join wider society.

Finland and the Outstanding Laestadians

Finland, in spite of pronatal benefits that are among the world’s most generous, had a fertility of just 1.25 in 2024, the lowest ever recorded. It is cases like Finland that lead people to throw up their arms and declare the fertility crisis to be hopeless.

And yet even in Finland, there is a subculture that defies the trend. Larsmo is a town of 5,700 people on the west coast of Finland that is notable for its high share of Laestadian Lutherans.

While fertility has collapsed across Finland in the last eighty years it has remained high in Larsmo and other Laestadian towns.

Many high fertility groups are isolated from broader society. Not the Laestadians.

In fact, the small Laestadian movement has been an integral part of Finnish society, contributing some 60 MPs and three prime ministers

The Baby Belt of the Netherlands

The Netherlands is mostly a secular country and has a fertility rate of just 1.43 births per woman, far below replacement. But there is a “Dutch Bible Belt” with a higher percentage of conservative Protestants. We can see it in the data because the Calvinist SGP party gets a significant share of the vote in these places.

Lo and behold, these municipalities have fertility that is consistently at replacement of around 2.0, far above the Dutch average.

East Asia and the Problem of Conformity

The lowest fertility region in the world is East Asia. Fertility will be just 0.81 in Korea, 1.13 in Japan and 1.02 in China in 2025. One of the first things a demographer notices about East Asia is that there aren’t really many higher fertility subgroups to move norms higher.

In China, weekly church attendance is just 1%. Japanese church attendance is even lower. This is no accident. Neither country has a tradition of religious or cultural freedom. The CCP’s attitude toward faith groups is well-known, but few know the lengths that Japan went to, to eradicate Christianity when it began to take root.

If the only groups that can manage bring about healthy birthrates in the modern world are religious, then East Asia has a big problem.

South Korea had been doing better in that regard. Not lately. In 2025, with the ascendance the left-wing President Lee Jae Myung, a series of church raids has thrown the country into political turmoil and called into question its commitment to religious liberty. The leader of the Unification Church, known for its mass weddings (something you would think Korea could use a lot more of right now), has been jailed as have been several other faith leaders in what is widely viewed as a politically motivated crackdown on political opposition.

In terms of religious tolerance, another question arises. What to do about faith groups that are intolerant of others? Perhaps the Religious Settlement of Elizabethan England offers a clue. More tolerance was granted to groups that showed greater tolerance themselves. Rough as it was, the settlement held.

Can there be healthy birthrates without faith?

If you’re like me, you’d love to see some non-religious groups manage to achieve high birthrates too. But so far there don’t seem to be any.

That means countries struggling with low birthrates would do well to adopt strong religious freedom and give fertile subcultures room to thrive. America is a pretty good model.

This essay is part of a series of policy essays exploring ways to raise birthrates.

One of the cruelest aspects of modern life is that while the life cycle has slowed dramatically (we finish education later, we move out of the parental home later, we start making real money later and we marry later), the fertility window hasn’t budged at all.

Modern birth control has allowed us to take control of our fertility and delay having children much longer than ever before, and there are plenty of things to do with the extra years of youth, from more education to career building, travel and much more. But this delay is taking a terrible toll. Fertility rates have plunged far below replacement in nearly every developed country, and in most countries, people are falling far short of their desired fertility.

Yet teaching people about fertility early, when there is still time, could go a long way to solving this problem, both for individuals and society as a whole.

The Great Mismatch

We are used to the idea that fertility drops off in the mid 30s or after 40. But in 2023 a team from the University of Texas at Austin studied human fecundability (the odds of becoming pregnant when you are trying) using a large global dataset of three million women. They found that fecundability peaks at age 20 and then declines throughout the 20s and 30s.

This means fertility peaks and then declines far earlier than any of us knew. By age 33, a woman is only about 1/3 as likely to get pregnant in a month of trying as she would have been at age 20, and by age 40, she is only about 10% as fecund as she was at her peak.

But how many women in developed countries are even thinking about getting pregnant before age 30? The age at first marriage has been shooting upward all over the world and is well into the 30s in many developed countries.

If you noticed that this map of the average age of marriage looks a lot like a global fertility map, that is no coincidence. Countries where marriage comes late as in Europe, Canada, East Asia and much of South America, almost invariably have very low birthrates.

Another important paper, presented in 2024, considered ‘fertility realizability’ which is ‘the ratio of total fertility to average desired fertility.’ Fertility realizability measures how well people are able to realize their fertility goals.

As countries get richer, as the human development index increased, as years of schooling rose and as marriage age rose, people were much less likely to realize their fertility goals.

The fertility crisis is not simply about women not wanting kids anymore. They do want them! But long educations and late marriages mean most people miss their most fertile years and many miss the window entirely.

Delays Cannot be Made Up

An amazing birth chart was produced last year by Yale economics professor Paul Goldsmith Pinkham. It is a plot of childbearing by age in the US, for the years 2001 to 2022. During that time, the total fertility rate went from 2.03 to 1.62, a huge decline even though desired fertility didn’t go down at all. The total fertility is proportional to the area under the curve for that year.

What happened? Since 2001, there has been a massive shift toward later childbearing. In 2000, childbearing was high throughout the 20s, dropped off sharply throughout the 30s and was very low by the 40s.

By 2022, the left part of the curve had moved far to the right. Childbearing was much lower throughout the 20s, only catching up by the early 30s. But then childbearing fell off sharply in the 30s, following the same pattern as before.

In other words, delayed fertility could not be made up. Even though women’s plans have changed a lot, physical fertility limits have hardly changed at all. (American women in 2022 had an ideal fertility that is almost a whole child more than actual fertility, 2.5 vs. 1.6). Think about what this means! Birthrates, now much too low, would likely be quite a lot higher if women weren’t running out of time.

Long Educations Consume the Fertile Years

One of the most robust findings in demography, both in the United States and around the world, is that more education means lower fertility. Among women who had finished having children in 2016, the difference in the number of children between the most and least educated women was 1.2.

Most people think that’s because people go to college and get indoctrinated into not having children. Maybe that happens sometimes, but that’s not the main reason why more educated women have fewer children.

The main reason is much simpler. People don’t usually have kids while they are enrolled in school and almost everyone waits until they have graduated before trying.

If school consumes most of the 20s, there will be a lot less time to have children and fecundability will be a lot lower by then. If a woman takes until age 33 to complete her PhD, she probably won’t try for kids until after that’s all done, and maybe not even then if marriage and career are still being figured out. Will she still be fertile after all that?

And by the way, age limits the fertility of men almost as much as women. The overwhelming majority of men are partnered with women similar in age to themselves, so the odds fatherhood drop off almost as steeply as the odds of motherhood.

Late Marriage Explains Most of the Fertility Decline in Rich Countries

Fertility plummets as countries advance, and that is a mystery to most people. We hear things like “Humans can’t breed in captivity” or “People won’t have kids unless they are poor.”

But actually, delays can explain most of the rich-country fertility collapse. There is not a single country with an average age at first marriage age above 30 that is above replacement, but most countries with an average age at marriage of 25 or lower are above replacement.

Remember that fecundability chart from Spears et al. If you want to have healthy fertility, it matters a lot if the peak of that curve matches with when people get married.

Earlier Marriage Gave Us the Baby Boom

A lot of people have tried to explain the mid-century Baby Boom via rising prosperity in that era. But then why didn’t birthrates go up in all the other eras when people got richer? Actually, one aspect of rising postwar prosperity did lift birthrates, and that was the explosion of suburbs and single-family homes.

But the biggest cause of the great Baby Boom is that people got married a lot younger in that era than ever before. When marriage overlapped with high youthful fecundity, more children came easily.

IVF Doesn’t Fix Delayed Fertility

A lot of people are under the impression that in-vitro fertilization (IVF) will fix the problem of age-related fertility decline. IVF is a remarkable technology, and it can do wonders for women under 35.

But the success of IVF drops off with age exactly like women’s fertility generally and a woman aged 44 has less than a 5% change of live birth after three simulated cycles.

The age of a woman’s eggs is the limiting factor here. Geneticist Ruxandra Teslo explains on her blog, “Cohesin [in the eggs] acts like a glue, holding chromosomes together so that they separate correctly later on. This “glue” is set in place when a female is still in the womb and has to last her entire reproductive life. With age, this “glue” or cohesin seems to weaken, leading to errors in chromosome separation and thus affecting the egg’s health and potential to lead to a successful pregnancy.”

Because of this, IVF can’t do the thing people expect it to do, give older women their fertility back.

Education About Age and Fertility is the Easiest Pronatal Policy

In every developed country, people are having fewer children than they would like, and the biggest reason that they are starting too late.

But most people don’t even know how age and fertility work. Demographer Lyman Stone surveyed women about their fertility knowledge and found that ignorance was the norm.

Although fertility drops throughout the 20s, just ten percent of women were aware of that. Nearly half of women thought that fertility decline only becomes noticeable after age 40, but by then fertility is almost gone.

The complete age-fecundability curve, computed by the U.T. Austin team from a sample of 2.8 million women, is shocking and should overturn everything we know about childbearing. Yet hardly anybody knows about it! How differently would young people behave in their 20s if they knew their ability to have children was already rapidly slipping away?

Even most doctors, who are among the best informed about the fertility window, have no idea. Here is the old chart, which suggests, incorrectly, that you lose nothing waiting until your 30s.

No wonder birthrates are too low.

These facts are sad and promising at the same time. Sad because almost all of us are close to people who wanted to have children but started too late, if that isn’t your own story. Promising because things can go so much better for young people when they learn how the fertility window really works.

Nearly all of ‘sex ed’ in high school is focused on teaching young people how to avoid pregnancy. Yet the biggest risk these days is not unintentional pregnancy but unintentional childlessness.

Demographer Anna Rotkirch shared this chart showing when women should try to have high odds of achieving a desired family size. The short answer is, far earlier than almost any of us thinks.

Knowledge, early on, would change everything. Grad school and career development can wait. Getting married and having children cannot.

Every high schooler and college student around the world should be taught these charts. Every ObGyn should be teaching their patients this information. The best way to get birth rates back to where they need to be may well be simple knowledge about age and fertility. Women and men need to know the landscape when they are young, while there is still time to organize their life around the one thing that cannot (so far) be adjusted much, the surprisingly short fertility window.

With birthrates having fallen to incredibly low levels in country after country, many pundits have declared that “nobody knows why fertility is falling” and “nothing can be done” to turn around the declines.

This grim perspective is understandable. If you’ve seen a global fertility map and really gotten what it means, it is the stuff of nightmares.

Lots of countries face catastrophic decline, the global economy will be devastated, and brilliant futurists like Robin Hanson believe that innovation will grind to a halt, because the groups with the lowest fertility are the ones with the most innovation.

Given the magnitude of the birthrate crisis, it seems like everyone should be focused on this, with the greatest minds working to solve it. But outside of @ElonMusk and a few oddball pronatalists, most people are tuned out.

Fundamentally, hearts and minds haven’t been won over yet.

Survey after Survey Shows People Put Low Priority on Having Children

A shock poll just went viral showing how little having children matters for most peoples’ idea of ‘success.’ Conservative women ranked “having children” sixth in importance behind such things as homeownership, having a fulling job and “having money to do things you want.” For liberal women, “having children” ranked dead last in a long list of priorities.

But this wasn’t the first time such sentiments were expressed. In fact, they mirror the results of a 2023 Pew Research Center poll that found that 71% ranked having an enjoyable job or career as very important for a fulfilling life compared to just 26% who ranked having children as very important. The same poll found that 42% said having children is unimportant.

If these priorities seem off, consider what parents of young adults are saying. A 2022 poll also by Pew found that 88% of parents said it is at least somewhat important that their children find a job or career they enjoy while only 20% of parents said it is at least somewhat important that their children have families of their own one day. By contrast some 46% of parents said it is unimportant if their own children have a family.

Pro-family people will have different ways of trying to explain away polls like these -- maybe the wording was biased -- a so-called push poll. These polls imply that most people just don’t put having children high on their list of goals, and that wouldn’t make sense, would it?

It hurts to admit it, but these polls are probably just what they seem. After all, we now have the lowest birthrates in history, in almost every country in the world in spite of abundant food and resources.

Reacting to yet another similar poll, Richard Hanania does not mince words:

Do we have an antinatal culture? The polls seem to say that, and that is the most obvious explanation for what is happening around the world. If you are keeping track, that is four different polls by three different pollsters showing that having children just isn’t a high priority for most people compared to paid work.

Most Aren’t Even Aware that Low Birthrates Are a Problem

How can people be so unconcerned about having kids in the middle of a low birthrate crisis? The answer is simple: they don’t know it is happening.

In 2024, YouGov published a poll of 3,386 US adults that asked a simple question: “Are there too many children being born or not enough?”

Below are the results. Slightly more people thought that too many children are being born.

But among young people and women, the ones actually in control of childbearing choices, it wasn’t even close. By a 2 to 1 margin, women thought that too many children are being born in America. This antinatalist sentiment prevails for everyone under 44.

Among women under 44, the ones chiefly responsible for making fertility decisions, YouGov found that just 10% even believed that there is a problem of low birthrates in America.

Another poll, by Newsweek in 2024, asked: “Are you concerned by the falling birth rate in the United States?” People were told that birthrates were falling and still, 42% responded that they were ‘not at all concerned’ while just 16% said they were ‘very concerned.’

It is nearly impossible to solve a problem that you don’t even recognize.

Bad Population Forecasts

If birthrates are collapsing where is the alarm? One problem is that the ones responsible for reporting on population have missed the mark.

The agency most relied on for giving population forecasts is the Population Division of the United Nations, through its huge World Population Prospects report published every two years. Everyone from governments to media to academia uses UN projections to understand and report what will happen with population.

But the UN forecasts have been horrendous, with the actual number of births in country after country coming in far below projections.

On top of this, the UN’s forecasts show fertility recovering in most countries absent any evidence. Consider what the UN’s World Population Prospects 2024 report had to say about Argentina.

Seeing this graph, mathematician David Bessis quipped, “Please explain the physical law that makes a falling knife stop falling in mid-air.”

In this case UN data was badly off from the moment it was published. According to the UN, Argentina’s TFR was 1.5. But in reality, the TFR of Argentina was just 1.24 in 2024 and it’s just 1.14 so far in 2025. These figures are according to official statistics from the Argentine government. So it goes with country after country.

Other sources people rely on aren’t any better. If you ask Google or AI about the latest fertility for Argentina, the number you get is again 1.50, a figure that is 5 years out of date and makes the problem seem much less serious than it is.

Population control messages persist

If bad data is one reason people don’t see the birth crisis, another reason is the persistence of population control messages and groups pushing them.

Many organizations from the Population Council to the Population Institute, Population Connection, the Population Media Center, Population Matters, Negative Population Growth and more were founded years ago with the objective of getting the public to have fewer children.

One of these, Population Connection, founded by Paul Ehrlich himself, has trained generations of US teachers and reached millions of young people.

Even though the facts have changed, most of these organizations are still very active spreading the gospel of population control. What comparable organizations exist to spread the word that the world needs more people?

Bismarck analysis Marko Jukic argues, “There is no such thing as a free marketplace of ideas where the best ideas win. The ideas that win are the most organized ideas, and organizing ideas is a full-time job. If nobody is paid to do it, it won’t be done.”

Can countries just ask people to have more children?

For almost 50 years since the 1970s, China pushed people to have fewer children, first through propaganda and then though the infamously brutal one-child policy. Taiwan, Japan, Korea and a bunch of other countries in East Asia had gentler population control compaigns. In every one of these countries, the programs were devastatingly effective, and now fertility rates in the region are the lowest in the world.

Meanwhile, China’s neighbor Mongolia has a fertility rate of 2.5 to 3 times the level of its East Asian counterparts. As almost every country in East Asia is withering, Mongolia is vital and growing. What is the difference?

Mongolia’s leaders did the opposite of its neighbors, urging people to have more children and celebrating mothers of many with great fanfare every year at the presidential palace in Ulaanbaatar.

Now in demography proof of anything is pretty difficult because there are so many variables involved. But if one country held for generations that having many children is good while its neighbors declared for generations that having many children is bad, common sense expects the first country to have a lot more children, which is exactly what you find with Mongolia and its neighbors.

Real Pronatalism Has Never Been Tried (at least not in the US)

Mongolia and other countries that have reversed fertility decline, such as Kazakhstan

and the Republic of Georgia, seem like odd cases that don’t translate well to other countries like the United States.

But if polls are to be believed, the United States doesn’t even have a pronatal culture (although there are family-focused subcultures). So, before we declare the birthrate crisis is unsolvable and write off whole countries, we might want to consider that that as a starting point.

As we saw, young women are much more likely to think overpopulation is the problem, a viewpoint that is at least close cousins with antinatalism.

Crime and borders, the climate, inflation, jobs and taxes -- all rank higher on Americans’ list of priorities than addressing the birthrate crisis. Almost eight months into the new administration, there has been few policies focused on addressing the birthrate crisis.

This matters not just for the US but for the whole world. Whether we like it or not, American culture and politics are followed and emulated in every country on Earth.

Progressive Pronatalism is Needed

The elephant in the room is this: the lack of a pro-child ethos is most acute on the progressive side. The birthrate collapse has been concentrated among progressives and there aren’t a lot of progressives speaking out in favor of having more children.

At the same time, a majority of young women in every developed country are left-of-center politically. It is hard to imagine solving the birthrate crisis without progressives playing a major role.

Winning the argument that the world needs more people

As obvious as the fertility crisis is to most people reading this, young people and especially young women haven’t been convinced, and they are the ones whose choices matter.

We are better off with more people

Much of antinatalism comes from our intuitive sense that more people means fewer resources for everyone. That is exactly how things worked in the hunter-gatherer era. If the clan grew too big, some people starved. Paul Ehrlich, author of the fearmongering book The Population Bomb, wrote that as population grew every resource would become scarce and global famine would follow.

But the great economist Julian Simon showed this isn’t how advanced societies work. In 1980, Simon made a wager with Ehrlich, arguing that with more smart people working together, the prices of resources would come down.

And that is exactly what happened. From 1980 to 2025 the world’s population went from 4.4 billion to 8.2 billion while most resources have increased in abundance. How? Very smart people working together found new and better ways to get resources. More people meant abundance, not scarcity.

Economists Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley expanded on Simon’s work in their 2022 book Superabundance, showing that prosperity depends on population growth.

What about environmental degradation? Just last month, data analyst John Burn-Murdoch showed that environmental metrics are getting better, not worse, because of innovation (which comes from of large, educated populations).

The Role of Policy

This is a policy essay, but isn’t the winning argument about having children a private affair? Partly yes, and private organizations will have to rise up to answer the many population control nonprofits that litter the landscape.

But consider what has happened with climate change. Whatever your opinion may be, it is the case that governments all over the world got involved in a big way, in education, in research, in funding solutions and in messaging. Political leaders everywhere made the case for fighting climate change and the trajectory of emissions changed dramatically.

Can the same happen with the birthrates? Yes. When problems arise that threaten nations, governments have to get involved, including by convincing the public. Can governments help build a pronatal culture in a way that is compatible with freedom and democracy? Yes. Look at what was achieved in Israel. And Mongolia. And France.

Daniel Hess

Paul Morland

Presented at Global Fertility Crisis Forum in Hong Kong, January 2026

Presented at the Natal Conference in Austin, Texas, March 2025

Addressing The Global Fertility Crisis Hess Morland

13.3MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

This essay is part of a series of policy essays exploring ways to raise birthrates.

If you ask young people why they don’t have children, financial considerations are near the top of the list. In a 2024 Pew poll, 36% of respondents under 50 gave “Can’t afford to raise a child” as a major reason they are childless.

The Wealth and Fertility Paradox

Most people know about the wealth and fertility paradox. As countries get richer, fertility goes down, so that the richest countries have some of the lowest fertility rates while the poorest countries have the highest fertility rates.

Not only that, but as countries get richer their fertility rates plummet. South Korea’s GDP per capita went from $158 in 1960 to $36,000 today, while fertility went from 6 births per woman to just 0.75.

So low birthrates can’t really be about money, right? Well, when you ask young South Koreans what is keeping them from having children, money comes up over and over, even more than it does for Americans.

What’s going on?

It’s all relative, and young people are relatively poor

Why do young people keep saying they can’t afford kids, when in reality society is richer than ever before? Are they just spoiled?

Part of it is down to priorities. Young people are choosing to emphasize careers first. But the truth is that young people are at the bottom of the heap, money-wise. One of the most miserable experiences in the world is feeling low-status, and in our world where status is tied to money, a lot of young people are feeling the burn.

Most people have very little wealth until their late 30s, and then they hit their stride in their 40s.

But that is a big problem for birthrates when ‘fecundability’ (how easy it is to get pregnant) is high in the 20s but is much lower after 35.

Haven’t young people always been relatively poor? No, not like today. Demographer Lyman Stone looked at the change in male earnings from 2001 to 2022 at across ages and looked at what happened to female fertility at from 2001 to 2022 for these same ages.

Young men’s income has been declining in the 20s, and this has been associated with lower birthrates for women their most fertile years. The relative status of young men is dropping, making them less attractive as partners. Men are doing better in their late 30s and 40s, but by that time, the fertility window is closing. (This age comparison works because men tend to partner with women who are about the same age.)

Young People Are Hitting Milestones Later than Ever

Amid this delayed financial success, young people are hitting the milestones of life later than ever. Decade by decade, a smaller and smaller share of young adults have achieved the big things (live on their own, have ever married, live with a child, own a home) by age 30.

If only a third of thirty-year-olds manage to own a home and another third still live with their parents, that will wreck birthrates.

Empty Nesters Dominate the Supply of Single-Family Homes

A study published in 2024 by real estate giant Redfin found something remarkable. Of homes most suitable for families (3 or more bedrooms) Millennials (who were 28 to 43 in 2024) and Gen Z (up to age 27) owned just 22% of them.

That means that people who were older than 44 in 2024 owned 78% of the 3+ bedroom houses in America! Most people in their childbearing years are stuck in something small, if they even live on their own at all.

If you think the norm of 3 bedrooms for family is just a modern convention one can dispense with, consider this: Child Protective Services typically have guidelines that there should be separate bedrooms for opposite-sex children over five years old, and children shouldn’t share a room with an adult unless they are an infant. Rental companies also impose strict occupancy limits.

That means that to have just two kids, a boy and a girl, two bedrooms will not do. Millennials don’t merely feel bad about not being able to afford a three-bedroom starter home. It is actually a big risk to have a family without one.

But there aren’t enough family-sized houses to go around, and people who are done with kids are dominating the market.

We can measure just how hard things are for young people getting started. Writer Tom Owens created the ‘Life Difficulty Index.’ It measures how hard it is for a new graduate with the median income to buy a median house and an average car.

The cost of a median house and a median car has risen 2.2 times faster than incomes for young graduates over fifty years. So, for young people starting out it is indeed a lot harder than it was for their parents and grandparents.

Retirees aren’t even using their savings

Everyone knows that you have to save up while you are working because you will need to spend that money in retirement. That’s what every financial advisor will tell you, and that’s how all the retirement calculators work.

Well, something incredible has happened in rich countries. People above age 65 have come to have a positive savings rate, The Economist found.

This is the opposite of what most people expect. On average, those over 65 in rich countries aren’t even drawing down their savings but are still adding to their savings every year!

Keep in mind, this is even before all the asset appreciation they have enjoyed in houses, stocks and bonds.

Social spending flows uphill

We’ve seen that across the developed countries, most of the wealth is in the hands of the old.

So, what do taxes and spending look like by age?

In short, the money flows uphill from the young and poor to the old and rich. The ones who should be having children are busy struggling to pay their bills while sending big sums to seniors who on average have much more than they do.

Here is another way of looking at things. Even when you count all spending on education, government still spends twice as much on seniors as on children. At the federal level, the difference is five times.

But parents don’t only shoulder a heavy burden when they are young. They often get fewer benefits when they are old. Consider two older women, one who was childless and had a career and another who stayed home raising a bunch of children who are now productive citizens. Which one qualifies for social security? Only the first woman.

The impact of deficits and inflation

There is one policy that stacks the deck against the young more than any other.

Budget deficits represent a borrowing in the present with debts put off into the future. America’s $35 trillion-dollar national debt means that that there is debt share of about $110,000 for every American.

And birthrates below replacement mean that the share of debt for each worker will be larger still.

But that isn’t the only way that deficits hurt the young. The inflation that results from deficits goes into assets like houses, making them much pricier to young people who haven’t bought in yet.

Meanwhile, the high interest rates needed to fight inflation mean that mortgage payments are far higher than they would otherwise be. Future homebuyers are squeezed by deficits in two different ways.

Seniors meanwhile are insulated from inflation in two big ways. First, the assets they own rise in value with inflation. Second, the benefits they receive are usually indexed to inflation.

Inheritance doesn’t fix the problem

If Baby Boomers have all this wealth, won’t inheritance fix things? Don’t Millennials stand to inherit a fortune?

Try not to get too depressed when you learn that the average age of inheritance is 61 years old.

Is the burden of the old causing lower birthrates?

If you plot fertility as a function of life expectancy, the longest-lived countries have the lowest fertility. Of course, life expectancy could just be a stand-in for national wealth.

But what if the numerous elderly of Korea, Japan, Italy and Spain are hurting fertility directly by claiming resources (from houses to social spending to care workers) that might otherwise go to families with children?

Policies to favor the young over the old

Given the extraordinary imbalances we see in favor of the old, especially for scarce resources like houses, it is logical that pronatal policies should favor the young. Here are a few obvious things:

• Control deficits and limit debt-financed elderly entitlements. Future generations are doubly burdened, first by the debt itself and the interest that must be paid on it, and then by the pernicious effects of inflation, which make homebuying much harder.

• Tilt social spending toward families more than seniors. It defies logic that so much money should flow from young and poor to the old and already rich, but that it how it is in almost every developed country.

• Favor property taxes over income taxes. The latter disproportionately hit the young while the former are born by the old who are much wealthier.

• Stop exempting seniors from property taxes. The elderly often are given exceptions on property taxes, so they aren’t pressured to move out of their houses. But the elderly often possess homes far larger than they now need, even as those wanting to start families are often confined to tiny apartments. Property taxes would incentivize the old to sell houses to the young, which is good for society in a world of too-low birthrates.

• Give parents better retirement income than non-parents. Parents do the hard work of raising up the productive citizens of the future. Yet non-parents, who didn’t contribute to society in that most fundamental way, often get more money in retirement than parents, because they had more years of work outside the home.

Smash the Gerontocracy?

Right now, society tilts hard in favor of the old over the young, at least financially. In most developed countries, people are in the weakest financial position of their lives during the prime childbearing years and are in the strongest financial position of their lives in old age, when they aren’t even working anymore.

That dynamic is obviously bad for birthrates. Changing it will be politically very hard, especially since the aged have disproportionate political power because they vote such high rates.

So far, few leaders have dared to touch old age entitlements even when it’s clear that a lot of people don’t actually need them. Still, with birthrates in free fall, leaders are needed who can face down the gerontocracy (rule by the old) that grips so many rich countries.

Until then, parents can help young adult children with downpayments, childcare and a lot more. The current paradigm, where people finally see inheritances when they are past sixty, doesn’t help anyone.

Israel's Fertility and Why It's So Significant

There are 38 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). These are generally considered to be the most modern and developed nations. Of these, 37 have fertility that is below replacement, and most are far below replacement. Only one advanced country, Israel, has above-replacement fertility.

As countries get richer, fertility usually falls, for reasons we all understand. Long educations mean that more of the childbearing years are spent in school. Greater freedom and opportunity for women, the demands of work, the availability of birth control and urbanization all contribute to low birthrates in advanced countries.

All of these descriptors apply to Israel as much as any country. Yet somehow Israel manages to have a fertility around twice the OECD average, close to three births per woman. Israel is the only advanced country on Earth with a population pyramid that shows growth. In every other, the pyramid is inverted, meaning that a country is decaying with time.

I recently wrote about the new Baby-Money Index (BMI), a substitute for GDP which multiplies income by the square of fertility to give a measure of true national thriving. A successful nation has both present prosperity and is producing the next generation.

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1865441274846720361

On the combined measures of income and fertility, one nation is far ahead of the rest. Israel's score laps every other country in this index. High fertility countries usually have very low GDPs and high GDP countries usually have very low birthrates. Israel is the only country in the world that does well in both categories.

We need to understand what is different about Israel if we hope to turn our own plunging fertility around. Let's look at a range of factors.

Israel and Education

Israel is one of the most educated countries on Earth, and a majority of its citizens hold at least a college degree. High education is usually associated with low fertility, so Israel is unusual in this regard. Canada, the most educated country, has a TFR of just 1.25 births per woman. Every country on the list below other than Israel suffers from low birthrates.

Israel's Housing Situation

Both high housing prices and urbanization are associated with lower birthrates, a pattern that I have documented extensively, and which is widely accepted in demography. Yet Israel is both dense and extremely expensive. Housing costs more per square foot in Israel than in any country in Europe. Yet Israel's fertility is far higher than that of any European country.

War, Nationalism and External Threats?

One theory says that Israel has high fertility because it is threatened by enemies. That may be true to an extent. But no country has faced greater existential threat in recent years than Ukraine. It has responded with a remarkable defense and a resurgent national identity. Yet Ukraine's fertility hovers near 1 birth per woman. Azerbaijan too is characterized by war and issues around national identity. Its fertility is also far below replacement.

And let's not forget that South Korea, the lowest fertility country in the world, lives under constant threat from the North.

Is it Religion?

A 2009 Gallup poll surveyed people in different countries, asking if religion is "important in your daily life." By this measure, Israel's religiosity was only average compared to European countries and much less than countries like Poland and Italy, each of whom has fertility near one birth per woman.

By religious attendance too, Israel is unremarkable. Just 27% of Jewish people in Israel attend a religious service each week, a bit more than in the United States. Of course, religion tells part of the story of high Israeli fertility but it doesn't tell the whole story.

Yes, the Ultra-Orthodox in Israel have very fertility, but they are just a small subset of the population. Fertility is high in all segments. Secular Jews in Israel have a fertility of about 2 births per woman, twice as high as the one birth per woman of secular Jews in the United States.

Is it social services?

Israel offers a variety of benefits around childbearing, from tax relief to child allowances. That is a good thing, and no doubt provides some boost to fertility. But what Israel offers in terms of benefits is pretty average compared to European social democracies. Sweden, Germany and South Korea all spend significant sums on pro-natal benefits and their most recent fertility rates were 1.42, 1.36 and 0.73 respectively.

"Getting married and having kids is the highest cultural value"

Ultimately, those who live in Israel or talk to Israelis almost always arrive at the same conclusion. Israeli culture just values having children intensely. A wonderful article by Dina Kraft in The Christian Science Monitor sheds light.

Another wonderful article, by Danielle Kubes in Canada's National Post, offers precisely the same explanation for high Israeli fertility: Israel is positively dripping with pronatal belief.

If you talk to Israelis and if you visit Israel, you will arrive at the same conclusion. Israel just has far stronger pronatal beliefs than are found in any other developed country and this is the main reason its fertility is higher.

Where did this pronatalism come from? It was intentional. Early Israeli leaders like David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir were intensely pronatal, speaking in direct language about the importance of having children. Subsequent leaders have continued to uphold these values and have added policy supports.

Most of all, Israel has never wavered in its pronatalism. While generations around the world (and especially in East Asia) were hearing the message that the world is overpopulated, Israel kept its core belief in the value of children.

A remarkable example of Israel's pronatalism

Late last year, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported something which was astonishing to those of us learning about it for the first time, under the headline, 'We Operate 24/7.'

Israel is so pronatal that your family and hospitals will work together to make it possible for you to have children even after you have died!

Hope for the rest of us

The fact that Israel manages high fertility in spite of many negative forces means there is hope for every wealthy, low-fertility country. Israel manages this most of all through intense belief in having children, very simply. Other countries can have that too, if they work at it hard enough. In August I reported how Mongolia developed cultural pronatalism and saw birthrates soar, in very different circumstances.

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1827418468813017441

With strong pronatal belief, almost every headwind can be overcome. Without that, even generous government spending on families is unlikely to succeed at raising fertility that much.

Fertility is a stack of factors, but pronatal belief matters most

I have written of the Fertility Stack, a whole range of factors that drive fertility, in this post:

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1867319128794546235

Israel does poorly on a number of metrics. In particular, housing is crowded and expensive, and educations are very long. Does that mean that those other factors don't matter?

In fact, they do matter and if Israel could address these things, it could have higher fertility still. Israel has high fertility for an OECD country, but its fertility is far from what is possible. I wrote about the Amish almost two months ago. The Amish also have strongly pronatal beliefs and have shorter educations and have plenty of space and affordable housing and have plenty of economic opportunity in America, and so Amish fertility is six births per woman!

https://x.com/MoreBirths/status/1851753530387743172

Risks to Israeli Fertility and What Israel Can Do

The biggest risk to Israeli fertility going forward is if it wavers in its pronatalism. In the first month with data showing babies born more than nine months after October 7th, 2023, Israel reported an 8% decrease in Jewish births compared to the previous two years. If Israel's view of itself changes or the intensity of its pronatalism diminishes, it could succumb to the low same fertility that threatens every other developed country. While other countries need to learn Israel's strongly pro-child ethos, Israel needs to work hard to maintain it.

The second biggest risk to Israeli fertility going forward is housing. Israel's crowding and house prices are extreme. Israeli fertility would no doubt be higher without this constraint. But southern Israel is not crowded. Even tiny Israel has room to grow, and it will need that space in the decades to come, having just passed ten million in population last month.

First, a look at the difference: A 2023 Pew survey found 57% of childless young men but only 45% of childless young women said they want children.

A new YouGov poll found that men are much more worried than women about low birthrates, across all categories. What can men do?

The most important thing young men can do in support of pronatalism is to aim for marriage. A popular blogger just wrote about men who 'sabotage women's fertility' by dragging things out instead of committing. She has a great point.

Married men are happier too, so marriage is great for most men's personal wellbeing. Some men fear marriage because it could end up in divorce, but surveys show that divorced men are similar in happiness to never married men.

So, the upside greatly exceeds the downside!

Next is education. Far more women than men go to college these days. This education mismatch contributes to lower rates of partnership.

Men increase their marriage odds by getting a college degree. Relatedly, a Finnish study found that more educated men have more kids!

Next is income. For men, higher income is increasingly associated with having more kids. Men hoping for families would do well to develop their career.

When Catherine Ruth Pakaluk studied women who have five or more children, she found that they were often married to high-earning men!

Next is helping with housework and childcare. A 2022 study by Doepke et al. entitled “The Economics of Fertility” found that in countries where men contribute more with chores and childcare, women tend to have more kids.

Women in the US and in most countries around the world have an ideal number of children that is higher than what they actually end up with as this now-familiar chart by The Institute for Family Studies shows.

The biggest hurdle from the perspective of women? A dearth of "quality" men. More men with education, strong income and a willingness to help at home will mean more women having children.

Meanwhile, those who can see what is happening can have a big positive impact by building awareness of the birth dearth. For this crisis to turn around, more people will have to see what we see.

It's good to be open minded and accept that nobody has all the answers.

What is a pronatalist?

Is a pronatalist someone like Lyman Stone, a leading demographer who advocates for countries to adopt family-friendly policies like baby bonuses and child allowances to help close the gap between desired and actual fertility?

What about a couple like Simone and Malcolm Collins who are working to sound the alarm about low birthrates but are critical of many pronatal policies, which they regard as ineffective while pioneering controversial ‘Reprotech’?

How about someone like Bryan Caplan, who wrote, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, but doesn’t advocate for family friendly spending, which isn’t conventionally libertarian?

Where does Matthew Yglesias fit in? He wrote One Billion Americans and advocates for more social spending, but snarkily mocks marriage advocates, even though marriage the commonest pathway to having children.

What about Elon Musk, who has brought more attention to the low birthrate crisis than anyone, but is against work-from-home and doesn’t make a Tesla minivan?

Of course these are all pronatalists!

The most important thing is to believe in children!

Secondary to that is figuring out how to get more of them.

Stone, who is starting a new Pronatalism Initiative with the Institute for Family Studies writes, “Pronatalism literally means in favor of births.”

He then adds, “We hope that there can be political progress made towards a broadly shared goal of helping people have more children and thereby get closer to their desired family size.”

The first part is an expression of an ideal, and covers, I would argue, a strong majority of people.

The second part is an expression of something narrower, describing people who are engaged constructively on the policy front.

We should embrace the broader meaning of pronatalism while sharing knowledge to make everyone (including ourselves) better pronatalists. It is early stages, and none of us really knows for sure how we will solve this, but there are a lot of factors that impact family formation positively.

The pronatalist ‘experts’ (and I aim to be one) can probably make the biggest positive impact by showing all the things that are helpful and not helpful toward raising birthrates, so that everyone from politicians to influencers to business leaders and everyone else can work to change both culture and policy to be more oriented to families.

It will take many sides

Some of the most valuable solutions will be ones that are difficult to accept ideologically. All solutions should be considered because fertility decline may be the most difficult challenge that humanity faces right now.

Conservatives may not want to admit it, but many countries with very low out-of-wedlock childbearing and high expectations for marriage also have exceptionally low birthrates. Several East Asian nations seem to show that when you aim for only perfect families, you can end up with far fewer families overall. Countries like the United States, France and Sweden would have fertility of 1.0 or less if we only counted births inside of marriage.

Meanwhile some would ban IVF, which would alienate much of the public that is in favor of it.

There is a case to be made for broadly tolerant cultures, even while communicating that some family models and pathways tend to work better than others.

Liberals should recognize that social policies without family-positive communication will have little impact.

Across Europe and in the Anglosphere, liberals push social spending to remedy low birthrates while not daring to actually name the problem, or directly encourage marriage and childbearing. Perhaps such talk feels ‘right-coded’, but to be silent is to pass on the most impactful levers of all, the levers of culture.

Members of the YIMBY movement probably don’t want to admit that high-rise living makes it difficult for people to have children and that suburbs and rural areas are much better for raising families. But the places where birth rates are the furthest below replacement are places where apartments rather than houses are the norm.

Non-religious people may not want to hear how important religious belief and religious communities are for family formation. But to solve the fertility crisis, can you simply ignore religion, which is one of the biggest factors in the data?

The challenge for non-religious people meanwhile is to develop new ethics that encourage family formation, or else concede some ground to older ethics. The world needs scientists and academics, many of whom are secular, but they aren’t replacing themselves.

Traditionalists may not like the answer that many men need to help more with domestic chores like childcare, cooking and cleaning. But nations like Italy, Japan and Korea that relegate household work to women have fewer children than nations like Sweden and the US, where the share is more equal.

Free market evangelists should feel responsibility to address the conflict between work and family, given that birth rates often plunge when markets liberalize.

They may also have to rethink their resistance to policies related to maternity and paternity leave and other family benefits. After all, if people aren’t able to have children, then the economy (and society) will decline.

Policy experts may be frustrated with folks who talk about the importance of having kids but don’t support specific pro-natal policies.

Yet when Elon Musk and others use their platforms to encourage people to have children, they may move the needle of birthrates more than any single policy could.

A global pro-humanity movement

If you believe low birthrates are a problem or if you have an expansive vision of the future, or if you just think families are great, then you are a pro-natalist. We can figure out the details later!

No political or ideological side has a monopoly on solutions to the low fertility crisis, just as no side is absolved of responsibility for having helped to cause it. There is plenty for everyone to be humble about. Facing eventually catastrophe if things are not resolved, we should be open to whatever might work including things that go against our preferences.

(Credit to the Institute for Family Studies and Lyman Stone for three of the four charts above and much other foundational work.)

The building industry can’t keep up

Immigration can bring a lot of benefits, but there are also costs, and housing shortages are often one of them. Housing limitations are a big reason why excessively high immigration rates are not feasible. The housing stock of a country increases gradually, but immigration can overwhelm housing suddenly. Elon Musk explained the problem back in January:

Housing shortages related to very high immigration are already occurring in the United States. Even though US fertility has been below replacement for 50 years, there aren't enough houses for families that want them.

House Affordability is a Causal Factor for Birthrates

The relationship between housing affordability and fertility rates has been well established in numerous studies. This can easily be seen among US states. Where homes are more affordable in relation to incomes, fertility is higher.

When homes are too expensive, young people are often stuck living with their parents. As demographer Lyman Stone showed in a study across many countries for the Institute of Family Studies, when young couples live with their parents, they tend to have far fewer children.

For fertility, it is crucial for young people to start living independently early in adulthood, but this is very hard to do when there is a housing shortage.

The Case of Canada

Canada offers a cautionary tale of what happens when immigration overwhelms the housing supply. No country in the world has higher net-migration per capita than Canada.

Meanwhile, fertility in Canada has plummeted to just 1.25 births per woman in 2023, meaning Canada has by far the lowest fertility among Anglosphere countries and one of the lowest fertility rates in the world. Why is fertility in Canada suddenly so low?

The lack of sufficient housing is surely a big reason. Home prices have tripled just since 2000, and housing has become the top political issue in Canada, pushing a generation of young people to the right.

Making matters worse, much of the housing being built in Canada is small apartments in high-rise towers. These are generally anti-natal. Canada really needs more of the single-family homes most sought after by people wanting children. The supply of those is much harder to increase.

While falling fertility in Canada has multiple causes, the immigration-driven housing crisis is a big one. Canada is an extreme case, but this effect is seen in other countries too. In New Zealand, which has the second highest per-capita migration rates, fertility fell from 2.0 to 1.5 since 2015. In the UK, it fell from 1.77 to 1.43 over the same time period. In these cases too, immigration-led housing shortages seem to be a major part of the story.

What about East Asia?

What about East Asian countries like Korea, China and Japan? They have very little immigration and yet have extremely low birthrates. Don't they undermine this argument?

First, low fertility has multiple drivers. A range of factors have an impact including cultural ones, and it is a mistake to distill birthrates down to just one cause. But second, within-country migration is massive in these countries, contributing to a similar housing dynamic locally.

Even though Korea, China and Japan are all depopulating and have low international immigration, they have extremely high rates of migration from rural areas to a few fashionable cities. The result is similar: young adults are priced out of housing and end up living with their parents, or else they live in tiny apartments. Fertility is exceptionally low in cities like Seoul, Shanghai and Tokyo, compared to the respective countries as a whole.

Everyone can’t live in the same place

When everyone tries to move to the same places, whether within countries or across borders, it is negative for birthrates by creating both crowding and local housing shortages. From a fertility perspective, geographic dispersion is much more pro-natal.

One of the great challenges for solving the global fertility crisis is figuring out how to have economic dynamism that is geographically spread out across many regions and countries. Networked communication can help. The economic benefits of migration will be short-lived if birthrates are so low.

While some things, like software, media and PR, can be done by individuals and small teams making apps and content that can be disseminated widely, this is not true of building physical things. For that you need many highly trained people working closely together.

What countries are manufacturing powerhouses?

The leading manufacturing country in the world by far is China. The United States is a distant second. Japan, Germany and South Korea round out the top five.

China, Japan and Korea are all experiencing outright population decline. The workforces in those countries will fall rapidly.

But every one of the leading manufacturing countries has below-replacement fertility, most of them far below.

Will AI Save Us?

Many people brush aside the economic impacts of falling fertility because 'AI will save us.' But making the chips that power AI is one of the most fiendishly difficult challenges in all of manufacturing. And where do we get those chips?

Uh oh! Chip manufacturing is dominated by South Korea, China, Taiwan and Japan. The fertility rate (births per woman) in those countries was 0.72, 1.0, 0.86 and 1.20 respectively in 2023.

Making the ships that move the products

What about ships that move all the manufactured goods around the world? Here is a look at that:

With shipbuilding the problem is even worse! Ultra-low fertility countries are almost 100% of the market!

Having more children is the only way out

The idea that we can have a thriving world with far fewer people in the advanced countries is a myth. If we want to make things, and especially the sophisticated things our world relies on like cars, chips and ships, that requires collaboration of huge numbers of smart and talented people in one place.

It seems like it would be hard to have a lot of kids when parenting is like this. And the data bears this out.

Time intensive parenting is linked to lower fertility

Data analyst and journalist John Burn-Murdoch looked at a number of policy and cultural factors impacting fertility rates. The two most negative correlations? For OECD countries, the amount of time mothers spent on ‘hands-on parenting’ and the amount time kids spent on homework both were linked to much lower birthrates. Both of these are proxies for high-intensity parenting.

This makes sense. If raising kids is seen as an onerous task, fewer people will want to be parents at all. Those that do become parents will want a lot less children.

The best family model? Whatever works

The Boom Campaign, a pronatalist group in the UK, presented this chart finding that the belief that “a child is likely to suffer if their mother works” was linked to lower fertility rates in Europe. (TFR values are from 2015-2019; fertility is lower everywhere now.)

For traditionalists, this is tough to swallow. Surely it is beneficial for kids to have their mother stay at home with them when they are little, right? Stay-at-home moms are a cornerstone of many successful families. But so are working moms. In parenting more than almost anything else, we make the perfect the enemy of the good.

It turns out that if women think they must choose either work or having children, then a lot of them will choose only work and birthrates end up being lower. This seems robust. Policy writer Aria Babu looked at the same question for a number of additional countries and found the relationship still holds.

It is more pro-natal to welcome either option, having a full-time parent or having two working parents, with equal enthusiasm. A majority of women want to work, and many have incredible talent. If society denigrates either careerist mothers or stay-at-home moms, a lot of women will reject motherhood completely.

Mainly we need more parents. For that it helps to be very flexible about how people get there.

Tiger mothers: How is it going?

There is one group so known for intensive parenting that there is a word for it. Yale Professor Amy Chua wrote a bestselling book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that valorized the intensive parenting-style of Asian parents worldwide. Her book drew a lot of strong reactions. Some were inspired to try harder, while many parents were upset that their children would be left behind.

No doubt, the book and the mindset that inspired it meant ratcheting parenting up more than ever.

How is all that tiger parenting going? Not very well, if the goal is to keep the lights on in the long run.

Is this just a quirk within East Asian countries? No. The East Asian pattern of high investment in very few children holds around the world. In the United States, East Asian women have the lowest fertility rate of any group, even though they have the highest marriage rates of all.

A lot of pronatalist thinkers are saying the same thing: We should go easier on parenting while having more kids

Bryan Caplan

Economist Bryan Caplan notes in his book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids that parenting should be easier than ever because of modern conveniences and our better quality of life compared to our ancestors. In theory, people should have more kids as society grows richer. Instead, we have fewer, and parenting feels harder. Why? We have placed many new requirements and expectations on ourselves that earlier parents never had. A lot of that effort isn't necessary, he says.

Caplan gives another reason not to try too hard with parenting: biology. Nature has a huge influence on how kids turn out regardless of what parents do. Adoption studies show that for all the effort that adoptive parents put into raising kids, they tend to be quite similar to their biological parents. This is liberating in a way. If our parenting matters less, we might as well have fun and not stress so much about whether someone got a little more TV than they were supposed to.

Tim Carney

Journalist Tim Carney in his book Family Unfriendly laments the ‘travel team trap’ and revels in the joy of a kind of controlled chaos where families hang out and socialize at events like church barbecues while kids run semi-wild, under the not-especially-watchful eye of their elders. The best part? Parents have a great time, everyone ends up happy and well fed, and nobody had to try very hard. Perhaps the dad manning the grill will sweat a little, but stress is low. When life is as fun as that, it’s not hard to imagine having a gaggle of kids. Carney has six and a few in his circle have ten or more.

Carney explains that parenting is a lot easier when there are thick parent networks where families back each other up. To have that, he says, it helps when one parent can step back from work to be devoted to the family full time. (For bigger families, that makes a lot of sense. Two full-time wage earners plus a bunch of kids is a harder difficulty setting than I would want, personally.)

Catherine Pakaluk

Professor Pakaluk’s book about mothers of five or more, Hannah’s Children, has some choice quotes.

“I couldn’t care less if my kids are happy. That’s their job.” – Laura, mother of 9.

“It’s funny because our culture wants to not have kids do [hard] stuff so that “they can have a childhood” but then when they don’t feel useful then they don’t know what to do. They feel depressed.” – Kim, mother of 12.

Bracing! Do you get a sense that this is a different parenting style? Yet here is the kicker: a Norwegian study of 114,500 kids found that those in big families were happier and had better mental health!

Lyman Stone

Stone looked at data on clothing spending and found something incredible. Parents are spending 7 times as much of their income on little kids’ clothes as they did at the height of the Baby Boom in 1960, even though there were a lot more kids back then! In inflation-adjusted dollars, he found, parents are spending 20x as much on kids’ clothes these days!

The lesson? We lament that parenting is so hard and expensive these days, but in a lot of ways we are doing this to ourselves.

We can aim lower in a lot of ways and things will be fine!

Marriage, religious communities, and single-family homes all make parenting easier

More Births has often emphasized the pro-natal effect of three things, marriage, religious attendance and single-family homes. What do they all have in common? They all make it so that parents don’t have to work as hard.

This weekend, my wife is away on a cross-country trip leaving me home with six kids. I am reminded why practically every culture on Earth has this weird institution called marriage. It is way easier to care for kids with two people than with one.

Religious groups are another cheat code to easier parenting. As Tim Carney wrote, the communities they offer do a lot of parenting work for you. In this world, that is no small thing.

As for a house with a yard? The data show that fertility rates are much higher in single family homes than in apartments, but why is that? Parenting is a lot less work when kids have a playroom, a yard to run around in, and a natural sound barrier with the neighbors. In a place with a yard, kids can entertain themselves in a bunch of different ways while parents can get stuff done. When the family is confined to an apartment, parents have to take a little trip every time the kids want to touch grass, which may be many times a day.

The year 2024 is a Dragon Year, according to the Chinese zodiac, the luckiest zodiac sign of all. In the past, couples sought to have a baby during such years, and the last dragon year, 2012, had a big baby boom with almost one million more babies born than the previous year.

While we don't know yet what the official numbers in China will be, signs from Taiwan are ominous. For the first half of 2024, Taiwanese births were down 3% compared to 2023. In the last dragon year of 2012, when there was a 17% increase. The Chinese dragon year baby boom may be a bust.

Meanwhile, marriages in China keep falling. Chinese demography expert @fuxianyi shared with me this chart on marriages in China. Births track marriages closely in China, and marriages have declined 13% so far in 2024, to the lowest levels ever.

In other words, it looks like China's fertility will keep falling in the years to come. In 2023, China's official fertility rate was just 1.02 births/woman, and China may now approach Korean levels.

The last time Chinese births were this low was before the founding of America!

The 9 million births recorded in China in 2023 is a fall of 70% from the 30 million births per year China was seeing 60 years ago, when the population was only half of what it is today. How small is this number of births for China? As Yi has written, the last time the number of Chinese births was this low was in the mid 1700s, when the Chinese population was just 180 million!

Instead of fearing that China will take over the world, we should probably worry about the global ramifications of a Chinese collapse. China has after all the world's first or second largest economy, depending on how you measure it.

What is causing this demographic collapse?

Low fertility in China has a range of causes. China's now-ended one-child policy casts a long shadow, as I wrote about recently. The loss of China's millennia-old tradition of arranged marriage is surely a factor.

But if you look at fertility data across China you find something remarkable. Cities like Shanghai and Beijing are leading the charge downward, with fertility rates below 0.6 births per woman. These are the lowest numbers anywhere on Earth, alongside similarly dense cities like Seoul and Macau.

And what is it about such cities that makes them so family unfriendly? They are extraordinarily crowded, denser than the densest western cities. (Chart by Yi).

That lower fertility follows urbanization is axiomatic in demography. We don't know all the reasons why, but this has been true throughout the world and has been true long before modern times. As Seoul and Shanghai show, there appears to be no limit to that effect: as cities keep getting denser, fertility keeps dropping, without any apparent floor.

China has embraced urbanization and density to an extraordinary degree and now is paying the price. Such density is totally unnecessary because cities are only 0.8% of Chinese land area.

But China continues to add to its huge stock of high-rise apartment towers in cities. These hold great appeal for young people, and so China continues to densify. For the foreseeable future, China may be stuck in a low birthrate regime. Below, the lights of Beijing.

Lessons for the world on housing

To the libertarian, the freedom to build anything anywhere feels like it should be absolute, and many libertarians now make this argument with a sense of moral certainty.

They see rules zoning rules favoring single family homes as an injustice to be righted, instead of sensible policy leaning into housing that is good for families. They close their eyes to the catastrophically low fertility of urban centers.

Meanwhile, builders are happy to erect as many apartments in towers as they have permission for. Young people flock into such apartments, which are great as long as you don't have kids. Build Baby Build, in the words of economist Bryan Caplan!

Will we ignore what is happening in Korea and China? They face fertility levels that are civilization-ending, and urban density is a big part of why.

China and Korea may be stuck with the density they have created, and the low fertility that results, for the foreseeable future. The urge to build and densify without limit is helping to bring down those beautiful cultures and may cripple the global economy.

Thinking about America's housing situation and growth

We hear daily of a housing crisis. Prices are high in a lot of areas and young people are having a hard time affording homes. This is surely hitting family formation negatively.

What is almost never discussed is that large areas of the country are depopulating (red in the map below). Houses are affordable across vast sections of the country, especially in the Midwest, but in almost every place on this map that appears in red.

There is a kind of social urge to want to be around other people, to seek out cities, and then bigger cities. Are we obligated to always follow that urge, as if everyone has a right to the same few urban areas even while much of the country empties out?

In the limit, that leads to a situation like in East Asia, with most people crowded into the same 1-3% percent of the land area and birthrates far too low to even sustain civilization.

In spreading out across the land, America was able to grow at an incredible pace in the past. Now following an opposite impulse toward densification, America and many other countries are on a path of decline. Yet with high-speed Internet and services such as Starlink, it is possible to be connected from anywhere.

Is there a way to grow economically without densifying so much? Given the fertility collapse unfolding in China and across Asia, it seems like we have to find a way.

So why did births fall so much when fertility desires stayed about the same? Yale professor Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham recently posted great visuals that plot fertility across different ages over time. They offer a big clue about why women are not having all the children that they want to have.

In this chart, the most yellow line is birth odds by age in 2000. The most violet line is births odds by age in 2020. The area under the curve is proportional to the total fertility rate in that year. What has happened? The left part of the fertility curve has shifted more and more to the right as women avoided teen pregnancy, postponed family, and had children later than before. Meanwhile, the right part of the curve changed very little because women aren’t actually able to increase fertility that much in their 30s and beyond. As a result, later childbearing does not on average make up for children not born to women in their 20s.

What if we look only at women who went to college? College-educated women avoided teen pregnancy even back in 2000 and are more conscientious about education and planning for family. These women started families around three years later in 2020 than in 2000, as the left part of the curves show. But again, the right part of the curve was still almost the same in 2020 as in 2000. Instead of shifting neatly to the right, the curve just got narrower, and the total fertility rate (represented by the area under the curve) kept going down.

In other words, delayed fertility could not be made up. Even though women’s plans have greatly changed, physical fertility limits have hardly changed at all. (American women in 2020 had an ideal fertility that is almost a whole child more than actual fertility, 2.5 vs. 1.6).

Think about what this means! Birthrates, now much too low, would likely be quite a lot higher if women weren’t constrained by age.

Technology has not been able to extend a woman’s reproductive window that much

As the next chart shows, IVF success rates have improved quite a lot for women in their 30s. Meanwhile, women over age 42 continue to have a low success rate from IVF. When older women do get pregnant using IVF, it is often with a donor egg. As much as we want to believe that technology overcomes age-related fertility decline, that hasn't happened very much yet.

The gap between actual fertility and what most of us think about fertility is enormous

With key education, more young people can plan accordingly and have the children they want. There is no substitute for starting earlier.

Consider two final charts. The first chart is from a 2023 working paper by Spears et al. entitled Age and Infertility Revisited that examined the odds of conception according to age. (This paper is part of the Elon Musk funded Population Wellbeing Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin.) The second chart shows results of a survey on fertility knowledge compiled by demographer Lyman Stone.

The first chart is groundbreaking and will hopefully one day become common knowledge. It is new to almost everyone. Most people think fertility drops off somewhere in the late 30s or so. Together with the second chart, this is the story of how almost all of us have a big knowledge gap around human fertility and how crucial the 20s are for having children.

Only 10% of women are aware that fertility decline is noticeable before age 30, while almost half of women think fertility decline becomes noticeable at 40 or later. But by then, the fertility window is almost closed for most women.

These facts are sad and promising at the same time. Sad because almost all of us are close to people who wanted to have children but started too late, if that isn’t your own story. Promising because things could be better for future generations who will be able to plan around peak fertility, which is far earlier than most of us realized.

It will take big changes in timelines around education, partnering and more but we must strive for a world where people can have the children they want to have, and fertility rates rise to where they are healthy and sustaining for society.

Can we have both economic success and healthy fertility? Yes! Let's explore.

First, the power of pronatal belief is incredible. Israel is economically advanced, high-tech, highly educated, and urbanized. Most countries like that have v. low birthrates. But Israelis believe deeply in the importance of having children, and that makes all the difference!

Second, work and family can be compatible if the timelines of life are structured carefully. I had a conversation with mother of 14(!) and tenured economics professor/author (!!) Catherine Ruth Pakaluk who did it all! She explained to me how she did it.

Third, marriage is pretty useful when trying to balance work and family. You are tag-teaming with another person, and when one person is spent, the other can step in. People are vastly more likely to have kids when that social structure is in place.

Fourth, work-from-home often helps resolve the conflict between work and family. Some data suggests WFH may be quite pronatal. A Demographic Intelligence survey found that women with remote work were much more likely to plan to get pregnant than those without remote work.

Fifth, grandparents' help is underrated. I asked my excellent dentist who is also the mother of two how she does it. She said that the grandparents make it all possible. Claire Lehmann suggests having kids young so the grandparents will be able to help.

Sixth, frugality is essential for most people wanting to have kids. A cruel fact of life is that the best time to have a family is when you are young, when money is tightest. How can you avoid having to work constantly when you need to make time for family? By spending less.

Seventh, we need a return to lower intensity parenting. We make the perfect the enemy of the good, and have too few kids.

Eighth, we need to fix the problem with childcare. The way to do that? Deregulation. States that have fewer rules around childcare have more of it, and it costs less!

Finally, we have to accept the challenge. Work and family will always be in competition for our time, and we just have to struggle to find a balance. There is no easy answer. At the end of the day parents will have to gut it out and prioritize both. Very little that is worthwhile is easy.

If he can do it… Who of us can imagine the responsibilities of Elon Musk? If he can find a way to make it work, what's our excuse? Are we busier than he is?

If our ancestors could do it... Not very long ago, our forebears had it rough, trying to scratch out new lives in places with nothing but grass and trees. They found a way, and had tons of kids along the way!

When things were unimaginably harder

There is a chart I think about a lot. Until recently more than one child died per family. How hard did life have to be back then?

Yet we are here because those before us carried on in circumstances we can hardly understand. Surely, we also can find a way! Children are the most important thing, the reason for everything else!

These rates in Korea and other countries are far above international guidelines for best maternal and neonatal outcomes (around 10-15 C-sections per 100 births).

Where rates of C-section are high, fertility tends to be much lower, by ~ 1/3 birth/woman in advanced countries.

The same relationship holds for US states. Although the variation in the rate of C-sections is just 23% to 38%, we still see that a higher rate of C-sections is linked to fewer births.

Numerous studies have confirmed this relationship. But why?

Demographer Lyman Stone explains how C-sections reduce future fertility: First, studies find the ability to conceive is reduced after a C-section, likely because of scar tissue in the uterus. Second, doctors advise women to avoid becoming pregnant again after 2-3 C-sections.

But what is going on with Korea? Why are doctors performing so many C-sections in Korea when they are so damaging to a woman's future fertility? Is this medically necessary? Mostly no. The prevalence of C-sections in Korea looks random.

The reason for excessive C-sections is money.

In Korea, doctors are compensated very little for vaginal delivery (one fifth to one third of similar countries). Combined with lawsuit risk, profitability for obstetricians was low. Many OBs went out of business.

Many others increased profitability through C-sections.

C-sections are of course lifesaving for emergencies. But the rate of C-sections shouldn't be above 20%. In Japan, the C-section rate is just 19% and fertility is 50% higher than in Korea.

Meanwhile in Israel, which takes natalism very seriously, just 14% of births are Cesarian.

Birth order shows that C-sections really are a culprit in lower birthrates

How do we know that this is causation and not just correlation? Looking at birth order, Stone found that where C-sections are more prevalent, women stop at just one or two children and are much less likely to have three or more. That is just what you would expect if the mode of childbirth were causing women to choose fewer children in the future.

Excessive C-sections reduce the fertility of mothers in particular

Worse still, over-zealous use of C-sections damages the future fertility of one group in particular, women choosing motherhood.

Getting to motherhood is often a long road and requires many things to come together: finding the right partner, having financial preparation, obtaining housing and then being able to actually get pregnant. Many women don't make it that far.

When those who "make it" have their fertility curtailed because of an unnecessary caesarian, it is a medical failure on the individual level and harmful for society as a whole. After all, in most countries women on average want more children than they are actually able to have.

Fixing financial incentives around delivery is the most cost-effective way to boost birthrates

When we talk about policies that can boost birthrates, most often we think of child tax credits or help with childcare. But fixing incentives for physicians so that they don't favor C-sections delivers a far bigger bang for the buck.

Korea is mulling $70,000 baby bonuses. Meanwhile, the future fertility of the few Korean women willing to become mothers is being diminished because physicians can earn couple thousand more dollars on C-sections.

At a minimum, the compensation for vaginal delivery and C-sections must be brought into parity. Perhaps compensation should be even higher for vaginal delivery, to incentivize doctors to preserve future fertility.

But this is not just a Korean problem. Dr. Neel Shah reported in a Harvard Medical School podcast: “Your biggest risk factor for the surgery is which hospital you go to. C-sections in this country vary between 7% and 70% by hospital. It’s tenfold risk, depending on where you go.”

The root of such differences is almost always skewed incentive structures, which need to be fixed.

Multiple C-sections are usually fine!

A study in Turkey looked at what happens when women have a lot of C-sections. Is it as bad feared?

Probably not! Among 244 women who had four or more C-sections, there was indeed a higher rate of complications compared to 1074 women who had 2 or 3. But there wasn't a single maternal death in either group!

It may be that doctors are being too conservative in advising women with multiple caesarians to avoid pregnancy. Women who want more children should probably go for it, regardless of their history!

Actually, we have every reason to believe that awareness of the problem, as bleak as it is, is essential to solving this. (Please share!)

History offers great recent examples where existential fears over population led to higher birthrates.

Case study, France

In the 1800s, France had the lowest fertility in Europe, and probably the world. France experienced a transition to low fertility before 1830, up to a century before many other countries in Europe, in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the secularization that followed.

But now when we think of France, we think of a country with relatively high birthrates. Over the past several generations, France has had one of the highest fertility rates in Europe, a complete reversal of the picture in the 19th century. How did France change?

France faced a terrifying outlook at the start of WWII. France's population in 1939 stood at 40 million, barely changed from 1839 when it stood at 35 million. Germany's population meanwhile had gone from 31 million to 70 million during that time, dwarfing France. Making matters worse, France's fertility rate was below replacement in the 1930s (replacement TFR was higher than 2.1 back then because of higher child mortality).

In the grim year of 1939, facing a war that they were totally unprepared for, the French passed the “Code de la famille.” This was a strongly pro-natalist set of policies borne of a national awareness that France faced a demographic crisis, which threatened its future.

Things for France would get very much worse before they got better. But France was set on a pro-natalist course that brighten its outlook after the war and ever since.

We think of France as the most fertile country in Europe, but for a very long time, France was the least fertile. Then, facing a sobering picture of national decline, France changed its attitude and laws around children and dramatically altered its path.

Case study, Israel and its Jewish forebears:

Most of us know that Israel is a young country full of children, and that it is the only country in the OECD that still has above-replacement fertility.

But how many know that in the 150 years prior to 1937, Jewish people in Europe had a birth rate that was far below the European average? Or that, by the 1930s the Jewish birthrate was probably lower than that of Japan today. That is the conclusion of Jana Vobecka' and other demographers.

In late December, I had the honor of being a guest in the home of a well-known rabbi in my area who had recently passed. He left behind 150 descendants, and I got to know several, babies among them. Incredibly moving, as you can imagine.

But this extraordinary fecundity was not by chance. The Jewish people faced unspeakable tragedy and as a result, are now continuously aware of demographic peril.

This awareness has not led to doomerism. In fact, awareness is at the root of the Jewish demographic revival we are now witnessing.

There are other examples (the Republic of Georgia and Hungary come to mind) where a reckoning with demographic decline led to a change in trajectory. But these two cases, which have held up for eighty years so far, offer hope of lasting, even permanent change in a nation's demographic path through coming to terms with existential crisis. (France saw some decline in 2023, but its fertility is still highest in Europe and higher than America's.)

Most people still don't know we have a low birthrate crisis

Those of us steeped in demographic minutiae feel at times hopeless, because the data has been getting worse for so long. "Countries have tried everything and nothing works."

Actually, the ethos of The Population Bomb by Paul Ehrlich, a book published 56 years ago, is still percolating through culture, even as the demographic numbers now show collapse. Its author never changed his tune, and the movement he started still grows.

There are plenty of young people still getting the message, now completely absurd, that the moral choice is to avoid children, due to climate risk and 'overpopulation'. They badly need a new narrative.

We know that messages matter because of how shockingly effective population control propaganda was in Asia, and how long its shadow has been.

There is an epidemic of unplanned childlessness that can be greatly helped simply through awareness

As @StephenJShaw reveals in his must-see BirthGap documentary, most of those past childbearing age who are childless actually wanted to have children. They were typically caught up in other things and missed their chance.

Many people in their 20s aren't even thinking about having children yet, even as their most fertile years pass them by. Meanwhile we witness the agony of friends in their late 30s and early 40s trying for children, often without success, as their fertility window closes.

How many of these people could have been helped if only someone warned them how things might turn out, while they were still young? A sort of ghost of fertility future?

As our X account @MoreBirths posted last month, if everyone was able to simply have the children hope for, there would no birthrate crisis!

The conclusion? Don't worry about sounding gloomy (or, for that matter, awkward). Demographic collapse is not inevitable, and sounding the alarm now will make a big difference.

Is it time to panic? Have you seen the latest data? Of course it is time to panic!

But after staring into the abyss for a while, remember that things can turn around. It has happened before. I believe we'll eventually fix this because we have no other choice.

But there is a vast difference between environmental doomerism, where the ‘solution’ is fewer people, and frank discussion of the low birthrate crisis. Low birthrates are not a hopeless problem, for the answer of forming families and having more children is readily at hand.

We need to be honest about what is happening. Fertility collapse points to devastating consequences for society and for the quality of life of everyone if people don’t have more children, and policy makers and prospective parents need to know this so they can do what they need to do.

But also, history supports the idea that fear about population decline can be a powerful spur to action and can lead to a turnaround.

Understanding how we got here

The idea that we should avoid discussing the low fertility crisis is silly when you realize that alarmism about overpopulation is a big part of how we got in this mess. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968, was an incredible force in society whose echoes reverberate today. Talk of overpopulation was extremely effective at driving down birthrates, spurring not just China’s brutal one child policy and India’s forced sterilizations but also population reduction messages around the world and especially in Asia.

Below are Korean population control posters from the 1970s and 1980s. The middle poster reads, “Two is too many!” The lowest birthrates in the world didn’t just mysteriously happen. They followed many years of intentionally induced panic about overpopulation.

Now that the opposite crisis is unfolding in part because anti-natalist messaging took hold and went way too far, are we just supposed to shut up about it? Are we to abandon the powerful tool of messaging after anti-natalists used it to help drive birthrates far below replacement?

What a weak response that would be, especially since Ehrlich ended up being wrong and losing every bet. Thanks to the work of Julian Simon and other economists, we know large populations of innovators working together bring prosperity, not poverty.

The low birthrate crisis is real, and it will cripple country after country. If these trends continue, the economic and human toll will be devastating.

We have to talk about it.

The greatest demographic turnarounds came through staring into the abyss

There have been plenty of cases where fertility rose for a little while, giving a temporary reprieve in the face of the birthrate decline of the past century. The Baby Boom is the most famous example.

But there are two examples of demographic turnarounds that have lasted many generations. One example most people know about is Israel. Following the tragedy of the Holocaust and other historical persecutions, every Israeli citizen has come to see having children as existential. Out of that burden has come new life. Israel is the only developed country in the world with above replacement fertility, averaging nearly 3 births per woman, twice the average in developed countries. Worrying about its demographic future has been very beneficial for Israel, and has led to much better outcomes.

It is easy to dismiss Israel as a peculiar case. But another there is another example.

France was the powerhouse of Europe for most of its history, and its security was ensured by its sheer size. Then the French Revolution led France to secularize and become individualist and in the 1800s, France had the lowest fertility in the world. By 1939 France, which had once been more populous than Germany was now far smaller.

In that year, France passed the Code de la famille, the most comprehensive pronatal policy in the world, and its leaders went from being indifferent about population to being consciously pro-natal, a stance that continues to this day.

France’s conscious pronatalism came too late to save it from devastation of World War II, but it changed France's trajectory. For the past 85 years France has had among the highest fertility rates in Europe. Early this year, French President Macron spoke of “demographic rearmament,” echoing the same fears of demographic decline that turned France toward pronatalism many years before.

Most Western leaders would have a hard time talking like this. Yet such honest talk makes a big difference. As any successful negotiator will tell you, the first step is to have the courage to ask for what you want, or what you need.

Where do French leaders find the courage to advocate openly for people to have children? They fear demographic decline, and that is a powerful motivator.

Raising the status of motherhood

I recently wrote about the extraordinary case of Mongolia. By celebrating mothers of many children, Mongolia has raised the status of motherhood and helped forge a culture where birthrates are 3-4 times higher than they are for its neighbors. Below, honorees descend the steps of the national palace, having been recognized for their nationally important role by the president himself.

We should elevate motherhood like this. But what is the logic? Why are they heroes?

In a war, the heroes are the men who take up arms and sacrifice themselves for the greater good in combat. But in the battle against population collapse, the heroes are mothers and especially mothers of many, who sacrifice themselves for the good of greater society.

If we talk about the birthrates honestly, then the status of parents is immediately elevated.

Pronatal efforts make no sense if you can’t see the crisis

Recently JD Vance was panned as being weird for talking about low birthrates. Elon Musk’s pronatalism too has gotten a mixed reception.

Why? Because most people cannot understand negative compounding. Below is the population pyramid for Korea. If fertility rates stabilize where they are, 100 Koreans today will have just 4 great grandchildren, and the country we rely upon for everything from ships to chips will not survive for long.

Country after country is following a downward path like this. If critics had any idea how devastating the low birthrate crisis will be, they would not mock the messengers as weirdos. They would be joining the messengers in looking for solutions.

How can we argue for marriage or religiosity (two of the most powerful forces supporting family formation) without talking of the calamitous population effects when we lose these social technologies?]

Once you understand that people aren’t having enough children, and that civilization is fading because of this, all the things that support people having kids suddenly make sense. Marriage makes sense. Religious faith has a clear purpose. Houses in the suburbs, often derided as “urban sprawl,” suddenly are incredibly important.

As well, many other policies that pronatalists favor, like child tax credits, are justified because we know that birthrates are too low.

The World Values Survey asks respondents “How important is religion to you?” (A common survey question, also used by Pew.)

With more than 60 countries surveyed, one can plot fertility as a function of the share of the population that rates religion as 'very important.' It turns out that the most religious countries in 2023 had a fertility rate that was on average twice as high as the least religious countries!

This holds true on an individual level as well. One reason fertility rates have fallen so far is that people are much less religious than in the past in many countries. This means that countries have a lot to gain by fostering a climate of religious freedom.

Religiosity is not incompatible with progress

Some think religion is a relic of the past, incompatible with high scientific and technological progress. But that ignores history. The UK was much more religious than relatively secular France throughout the 1800s. But it was the UK and not France that brought the world the Industrial Revolution.

Likewise, during the 20th century, the United States was much more religious than most other developed countries in Europe and Asia -- having experienced three Great Awakenings up to 1930. Yet it was the United States that led the way in scientific and technological advancement, much more than any other country.

Religious freedom and pluralism lead to greater population health

With many countries facing demographic decline, it is important to create space for a range of faith groups to flourish because it is these groups within each country that usually have the most pro-natal culture. One reason the United States has a healthier demographic outlook today than either Europe or East Asia has been America's religious tolerance and pluralism. That meant that while certain faith denominations were falling, others were rising to fill the gap.

Meanwhile, many of the countries with the grimmest demographic outlook are former Communist countries where religious practice was intentionally stamped out.

This is a map of countries already facing outright demographic decline.

And below is a map of current and former Communist countries. Although there are some differences, the similarities are remarkable. Notice Eastern Europe and also Cuba in the Western Hemisphere.

The leaders in Communist countries imagined that by repressing religion they were fostering progress. That turns out not to have been true. Economically these countries were basket cases. But in the aftermath of Communism, they have become demographic disaster zones as well. With pronatal religious beliefs and cultures having been pushed out under Communism, many of these countries have seen birthrates drop to very low levels in recent decades. That effect has combined with economic flight, and now countries that rejected freedom are shrinking fast.