Well....'more sex' and 'more babies' have uncoupled - one doesn't necessarily follow the other. Which isn't a reason to NOT have more sex, just sayin' it won't automatically solve the population issue...
I’d love to have had more kids. I had just two and I barely managed it because I didn’t have enough money.
But more money alone wouldn’t change much for most people.
Let me ask the question another way:
Hey, would you like to sign up for this volunteer position? If you say yes, it’s an 18-year commitment, minimum. Actually, it never totally ends. You’ll need to prioritize this volunteer position over your career, your social life and literally everything else.
It’s going to be quite costly — not just in direct expenses but in things like the need to pay for a larger place to live. In return, you’ll be lauded one day each year but the rest of the time you’ll be widely disrespected. Some people will make clear their disdain if you dare to combine your volunteer duties with traveling or eating out.
Oh, also your body will never be the same. You may develop things like stretch marks and loose skin on your abdomen. You might weigh more, and it’ll be difficult or impossible to find the time and money and mental bandwidth to groom yourself to the standards society requires in order for you to be even considered for many professional roles.
Yes, yes, Y E S. I could not have put it better. This is why the birth rate is falling even in the Nordic countries where there are so many benefits handed out. For the record, I think it’s a good thing to hand out those benefits, because it’s humane and does make parenting *a bit* easier.
But on the whole, having kids “the modern way” isn’t very appealing to a lot of people, and your comment encapsulates why. It’s a never ending volunteer job. And you may OR MAY NOT get back the proverbial “joy and sense of accomplishment” either.
Birth rates continued to be replacement level or slightly above when kids ceased to be economic assets *but still* did not demand the intensive parenting they do today, do not *have* to go to college (or trade school) in order to earn a decent living, did not usually require intensive support beyond 18 or 22 (if college), and public life was not as hostile to children as it is now. Just looking back on my early GenX childhood, no, I did not go to restaurants, etc. like kids today, but on the OTHER hand I could easily get to a park, the library, a vacant lot, wander around the neighborhood asking if Karen or Lisa or Julie could come out and play - that’s what you did, you knocked on doors and asked whoever answered if your friend was home and could play! I wasn’t in a lot of adults spaces but there were, on the other hand, plenty of places that kids could be kids and nobody really cared unless you broke something.
Yes. There are all sorts of ways that modern life has become unfriendly to children and to being a parent. Health care is expensive. If you go back to work, child care is hard to find AND expensive. Don't get me started on parental leave, or lack of same. As you note, in an Instragramed world you get dinged by Society for having been pregnant and being a mother because not everyone will bounce back like CHH has. As Angie Schmitt points out on her Substack, Love of Place, even the design of communities - where stores, schools, etc. are sited, how streets are put in, what vehicles people drive - has become unfriendly to children. Tax credits and other payments aren't going to suddenly make having children way more attractive, though it might move the needle for some.
I think cash to parents: $50k at birth, $40k a year later, $30k ... Down to $10k a year till they're in high school, would absolutely move the needle. No one has tried any cash subsidy remotely close to that large. Lyman Stone has studied showing more cash helps.
But yeah I'll also grant that I think it would be a good policy even if it didn't solve the crisis. But also... Isn't that all the more reason to do it? Like that cringe lib cartoon where someone says "what if we go to all the trouble of building clean livable walkable cities with renewable energy, but it doesn't fix global warming?".
Basically I think communal modern human society has created a miracle of material wealth and abundance, but the incentives for individuals now all point toward free-riding. We should tilt the incentives back the other way to reward people for the pro social work of creating more people.
I could see a cash incentive working but it would definitely have to be tied to births (not just general UBI) and it would have to be pretty hefty. The question there is whether anyone would agree to do it, but I could see it moving the needle in the US.
Yep basically a fully refundable child tax credit aka cash for kids, and frontloaded as described so you get the most in the years before they're in grade school.
Agreed a UBI would be if anything counterproductive.
There is a cash incentive like this in Russia - massive lump sum paid to the mother per child, meant to be used for housing or future education for the child (there are legalities with how you can spend this fund). For many poorer people, it can be the deposit for their first house, and the birth rate is going up (though it still cannot help the wide women-men discrepancy as over 1 million men have been killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).
Not saying it’s a perfect system, but I think it would be a nice incentive if adopted in Western countries.
"Russia’s attempts to boost its flagging birth rate — through policies promoting “traditional values,” tighter abortion restrictions and officials’ encouragement of larger families — appear to be falling short, as the number of births has fallen to its lowest level in centuries.
According to data released by the state statistics agency Rosstat, 195,400 children were born in Russia during January and February 2025 — a 3% drop compared to the same period in 2024."
I shouldn’t have said that - I’ve no stats to back it up. (What’s your source btw?) I’m just describing what I’ve seen around me. Almost all my friends my age already have kids in Russia; none in Western Europe. Anecdotal, yes, but it’s more about attitudes towards having kids in general.
I’m just saying, a cash sum would definitely be very attractive - though I doubt it would tip over the people who already didn’t want to have kids.
We don't even have mandated paid parental leave and keep giving more tax breaks for seniors. We'll never come close to enacting a policy this generous (which unless you had MASSIVE cuts elsewhere would be unsustainable financially)
That's all delusional. People don't have babies because their vital instinct is defunct. Worries about safety, the future, planning, etc., are expression of fear, in particular of fear of death and to be swallowed back into the nothingness from we we randomly emerged. Vitality is reckless and thoughtless, is overflowing energy that generates life because that's what vitality is: an outpouring of energy, art, thinking, adventure and, most of all, babies.
Cash, if anything, makes the situation worse because it equates having children with pain to be compensated, which is the opposite of what the people of our time want: pleasure to make them forget of mortality.
It's the opposite - people don't fear death as death comes as a blessing in old age. In a world where 50% of kids died before age 5 and death was ubiquitous at every age people feared it greatly. When it occurs at age 90 to a comatose dementia patient it's a welcome release.
That's the change and that's why religious doesn't get any traction in the modern world.
Exactly because death was so present, people lived like they could live forever. Now, people is seeking pleasure every minute like they could die tomorrow.
It's not that people fear death constantly at a conscious level, it's just the background note of contemporary life.
I remember having a conversation with a guy while waiting in line at a Starbucks in LA. When he heard I was Italian, he said that he had family there, in Mantua, and he visited sometimes. I asked him if he liked it, and he told me that no, everything is old and crumbling (never mind it has been crumbling since 1000 years - pretty slow motion) I told him that in my opinion that was because Californians don't want to think about death, and the old walls in Mantua were a constant reminders. He convened that yes, that was the case.
"Exactly because death was so present, people lived like they could live forever."
They did not. Having half their children die and death an ever present reality was an unmitigated horror. Your fantastical romanticizing of epic grief and sorrow is... somethin'
I’ve had similar thoughts. Women aren’t going to respond to nagging by having more babies! Besides, there’s no reason why the population must always go up in a linear fashion. If it goes down that will go a long way towards solving the housing affordability problem, among other things
Agree. Forcing the issue will require rolling back some of womens rights. Assuming that any roolback doesn't somehow include rolling back the right to vote (hard to imagine that ever passing, but let's play with the thought) , we can anticipate that passing such rollbacks will lead to political extinction for those who voted for such rollbacks.
I saw a graph somewhere showing that, based on historical records, gravestones, and archological finds, the authors estimated that as far back as they could look roughly 40 - 50% of children died before age 15. In past ages where that sort of death rate was occurring, and where farms and family businesses required labor forces, the push for lots of children made sense. Then came public health, microbiology, antibiotics.... Suddenly the survival rate went way up, and shortly after the birth rate began to drop. Instead of worrying about it, perhaps we can recognize that the 19th and 20th centuries were a "bubble" where families had lots of children as they always had, but suddenly lots more of those kids survived to have kids of their own. If survival to adulthood is the new norm, maybe 1 - 3 kids makes sense for a family.
I only recall it was on the SSRN repository (I am a sociology nerd), but someone wrote a paper saying that the “baby boom” *was* partly an after effect of public health. Fewer people were childless or stopped at one; the boom came not from mega-families but from most families having two to four kids, and fewer childless couples. And this was credited to antibiotics curing venereal diseases (which, even if they weren’t fatal, rendered people infertile), and also the decline of scarlet fever damaging heart valves which made pregnancy dangerous. (Ray Davies, of Kinks fame, had a sister, who gave him his first guitar. The sister had “rheumatic fever” as a child which damaged her heart, and she went to a dance hall and dropped dead on the dance floor, the night she gifted Ray with his guitar! “Come Dancing” is Ray rewriting history so his sister lives. 😢 )
Interesting point. I can see it. The young folks having kids after WWII had grown up through the Great Depression, then the war years. Suddenly things felt...better, if not entirely safe; Cold War, polio epidemic, etc. but far better economic conditions. I knew a lot of families with lots of kids growing up in the '50s, but I was raised Catholic and my Dad was Italian; that probably biases the result. By the way, I don't think the scarlet fever/rheumatic fever connection quite works. Antibiotics came into widespread use in the 1950s, when the parents of the Boomers were already adults and the heart damage was already there. However, the Boomer generation definitely benefited. Interesting angle on antibiotics and sexually transmitted disease by the way; had not considered that. When I was a budding microbiologist in the '70s syphilis and gonnorhea were still fairly widespread but readily treatable. The problem STDs became Herpes simplex, Hepatitis B virus, and then HIV.
Thanks for the Ray Davies bit. I had not heard that. Touching, if sad, story.
CHH, I agree that these interventions have been tried and while they have a socially positive effect, they do not have a "bang for the buck" solely in terms of birth rates.
I do think it's important to note that the TFR is an estimate and not a statistic measuring the birth rate at a moment in time. The TFR measures current birth rates among various age cohorts of women and assumes that going forward those birth rates by age will stay constant. So, for example, if the birth rates of women ages 35 to 40 are higher ten years from now than they are today, the TFR today will have been an underestimation, all other assumptions held equal.
The TFR in America has been below 2.0 before. From 1974 to 1986, the TFR was between 1.7 and 1.85 and then popped back up to over 2.0 from 1999 to 2009. This is based on Federal Reserve statistics.
I'm not suggesting that the TFR will increase from 1.6. And the general trend over 50 years has been a marked decline. I am suggesting that it is likely to fluctuate as it has done n the past. And absent some unanticipated technological fertility breakthrough, fluctuations are likely to be to the downside.
Just a reminder that a large chunk of "pronatalists" are motivated by eugenics.
The actual short- and medium-term answer for wealthy societies that need to increase population growth is immigration. Don't ask some "pronatalists" about their thoughts on that issue...
Immigration isn't a long term solution, because immigrants themselves usually revert to the fertility rates of the countries they move to, and fertility rates have declined worldwide. To quote from the article, "Immigration is good, but sadly it won’t solve the population problem. First, fertility is falling across the entire world, even in the poorest countries of Africa. In the world as a whole, fertility rates are approaching replacement level and may already be there." The solution to this problem is finding and incentivizing ways for young people from the ages of 18-35 to meet each other, form relationships, and have children. The groups that have above replacement fertility all emphasize having children and starting a family as the norm. The contradiction that modern society has, between biological clocks, meeting the right person, schooling, and establishing a career is a tough nut to crack.
You'll note that I specifically said "short- and medium-term answer." The issue is that a large number of "pronatalists" oppose immigration because they don't have some animating concern that the world might be underpopulated in the future.
Some of these people are indeed driven by xenophobia, or racial prejudice, but I've found that others just want replacement level birthrates, because they're worried about the second order consequences for pension systems, infrastructure, and keeping society running, when the population declines by 25% or 50%. I think that's a legitimate concern. On the immigration issue, I do think the general trend across the developed world is decreasing receptiveness to immigration, and you see this in France, UK, Italy or the US. China is projected to lose up to half of it's population by the end of the century, but no Chinese leader is calling for large-scale immigration from other parts of the world, because it would fundamentally change the culture and character of China, and the Chinese public has no appetite for that. I'd like to see a well functioning pluralistic society, but it's not easy to maintain. I agree with you that America will be harmed by decreased immigration in the short to medium term, but voters have made their feelings pretty clear. A similar surge of immigration in the early 20th century led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially banned Asians from immigrating, and severely restricted Jews and Italians from coming to the United States.
My contention is that anyone who is invested in "birthrates," like who is really into that, is immediately suspect. It's just an odd thing to be very animated about, and there's a reason that a lot of those guys really want is more white people and fewer nonwhite people, i.e. eugenics.
For people are invested in "birthrates" and not in population, which is to say anti-immigrant "pronatalists," well, I'm not even sure that presumption is rebuttable.
Lastly, I'd be curious to see what would happen with immigration if center-left parties like the Democrats were actually willing to make the case for immigration instead of running away from the issue and trying to talk about egg prices. We have one party scapegoating immigrants for everything and another party too cowardly to tell the truth because of a public opinion poll from two years ago.
Immigration, especially high skilled immigration or parents who will have high skilled children, is good. The only thing is that “sending” countries are also experiencing lower birth rates. Mexico, for instance, has a lower TFR than the US! If anyone said that during the 90s they would have thought you off your rocker, but nope, Mexicans are not having large families. This is what happens when you urbanize and professionalize.
What we can do, which the current administration is hell bent on ROLLING BACK but don’t get me started, is making the US a great place for high skilled immigrants to settle down in. Good luck with *that* under our current leadership.
We are running out of sending countries that have young people to spare and send overseas. When families have one or two children they tend to want to keep them nearer home, both for emotional and practical support and because they want to see their kids and grandkids.
It's weird how stressed some people are about the possibility that the population may decline from seven billion to five and a half billion. If the population falls below two billion, maybe they can start worrying.
Yes. To expand on that, as a biologist I've always found this emphasis on population growth a bit frightening. Yes, I know that science and ingenuity have avoided the population crash that was predicted by some in the late '60s, but we're still living on a finite planet. Population dynamics tend to either 1) wander around some steady state set by resources constraints; or 2) go through rapid population increase followed by population crash when resources are used up. Let's see, I'm 73 yrs old and in my lifetime the world population has gone from under 4 billion to ~8 billion today. Which track does that sound like?
At some point humans are going to have to wrestle with having more-or-less stable numbers. I think 5.5 billion sounds good...
I think, at least in the short term, the concerns aren’t so much about underpopulation as they are about old-vs-young ratios that are out of whack, and the many social issues that are liable to come out of that.
Those are certainly real concerns. However, that doesn't change the population dynamic I described. At some point the near-exponential growth had to slow, and I'm beginning to think that people intuitively recognize that - as CHH noted, birth rates are declining in much of the world. It's time to work out how we manage in a world with steady-state populations instead of kicking that can down the road.
The rhetoric is completely detached from reality. Current "worst case scenarios" have the global population falling to like 2000 levels near the end of the century. Did anyone think Earth was underpopulated 25 years ago?
As long as material standards determine well-being and status there will be a disincentive to have kids during youth.
That's why material solutions don't work. Having children will always be a sacrifice, and if sacrifice isn't considered to have intrinsic value people will avoid it.
One tech solution I’ve not heard discussed much, probably because it’s way too far out to count on, is longevity. If we were to get some truly meaningful healthy lifespan extension, say we double it, that would massively reduce the opportunity cost of 2 decades of childcare. Imagine if instead of all your healthiest years went to raising children, only half of them did!
We’d have to get rid of age discrimination which seems to be getting *worse* as people live longer and healthier. “Too old to hire, too young to retire” is no place to be. What is the point of living longer if you’re going to be spending those extra years living out of your car?
More than that, or perhaps related to that, we need meaningful improvements in joint preservation, vision preservation, hearing preservation, brain preservation. We've seen with our last two presidents, and a few senators, how analytical skills degrade over time. And I'm here to tell you after a life spent as an active outdoor person, spine, knees, fingers, start to become problems. Also, glaucoma and macular degeneration. Living longer isn't enough; we need functional older people.
I simply think technological advancements in reliable birth control have revealed that humans, on average, have treated reproduction as a sort of necessary evil, either due to economics and labor needs, or simply as an inevitable consequence of sexual intercourse. Given that the typical person in the modern world doesn't have the immediate pressures of the past (heavy social expectations, inheritance, concerns of lineage), many of the "reasons for" have been eroded and now fall short of the "reasons against" that dissuade people from having children. So once technology permitted us to reliably have sex without the risk of it actually producing offspring, most people began making a choice that their ancestors would've had external reasons against taking. Unless delivering and raising a child becomes far more effortless (maybe in the future you'll hand it all off to an android to raise your child, and birthrates will rise), I suspect the trend will continue to decline.
It genuinely fills me with happiness to see some women utilize their right to free expression to seriously consider and discuss how to raise the birth rate.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a trad-bro who shallowly wants to turn the cloak back to the first half of the 20th-century when women were largely confined to being idle, restless frustrated housewives. I believe that the new freedoms which women currently have in our society are all for the better; as it proves that those women who make efforts to embody any sort of genuine womanliness and femininity are doing it out of earnest personal choice and not just forced compulsion. I believe that in an ideal, healthy and happy society, abortion is legal for women, but *women themselves choose to utilize it very rarely.*
I find it downright mortally depressing to see child-birth and motherhood be given such a low social status in contemporary culture and people’s viewpoints. Being a mother, in many ways, simply isn’t seen as the “cool” thing to do. Women are loudly encouraged by Western governments to pursue every means of creativity on the planet, and to neglect the highest creative field of all, one that is the exclusive privilege of women: the creation and nurturing of new human life.
If our human race is to have a future, we will all need as many bright and mature women as possible to mentally tackle this problem. Please do keep it up, ladies!
Many same-gender couples (and mixed-gender couples who really want children but can’t conceive for any number of reasons) often go to great lengths and great expense to have children to raise and provide for.
While carrying a baby to term is currently the “exclusive privilege of women” (this is where technological solutions like mechanical wombs would come into play), nurturing children can be done by just about any human who cares to do so. Most people are perfectly capable of caring for and nurturing children, regardless of their sex or gender.
While I agree that nurturing children is often not given the status it deserves, I think that much of that is because until fairly recently women (and still, for low-income women) were often economically dependent on a man. That has changed for many people, but many of us alive today grew up in a time when childcare was an obligation of women, not a choice, and that still colors our perception of the childcare role in society.
I think that at a very fundamental level, no woman wants to have children unless she feels it is safe to do so (in the sense that it does not put her entire future at risk), and in our culture that means having an education, a career and a place to live.
The end result is that they end up waiting for these things to be in place, which often ends up being too late.
If we want birthdates to go up, we will have to make it feel like a safe and sensible choice to have kids in the most fertile period of a woman’s life. Until that is the case, most won’t.
In the Nordics, it's already like that, and birthrates are plummeting. The fear that you mention is insatiable, because they don't want additional security, they want to escape death because they are nihilist and lack the vital instinct that makes overlook death and safety concerns. No policy can close the gaping hole of nothingness.
I’m in the Nordics, and yes, there is a social safety net. But that in no way makes it feel safe to have kids early. If anything, there is even more pressure to to make sure you have an education and a good career before you start having kids.
Being a young single mom sucks, social services or not.
People have kids later in life because they believe having kids is a major, major step, that you need to be secure before it, and that they're a ton of work and being a young parent is super hard. So they wait until things are just right. I believe all these things, and so do most millennials and zoomers. (I'm a currently childless 35 yo married man).
The solution, I think, is to fight back against this fairly recent narrative and go "Having kids is great, actually". We've over-indexed on the pain and need to reassert some of the joy/fulfillment from it.
Given that CHH wrote a "marriage is great, actually" article recently she seems ideally positioned to save the human species with another article.
But… those beliefs are not mutually exclusive? I believe that kids are great! My two children are the most wonderful children in the whole entire world, and I love them so, so, so much! ❤️ And I also believe that they are a ton of work and that being a parent, young or otherwise, is very hard. Just today I woke up at 5:30 am because my beautiful little daughter was hungry and crying, and now I’m tired as heck.
That's fair, they're not mutually exclusive. I just think when young people talk about starting a family today, or the discourse surrounding it from school to college onwards, it's highly tilted to the negative aspects, and it should be more balanced if we as a society desire to raise fertility rates.
Otherwise even if you find a pill to extend fertility by 5 years or some other technological solution people will keep delaying it as much as they can.
(To be clear, I'm completely in favor of continuing to teach that it is a big deal, I just don't think it should be taught as being absolutely miserable, which is what I mean by balanced).
It's probably a sign of what you show above as well as my extreme risk aversion that I started sort-of regretting not having kids once reaching the 400K mark.
Yeah, new technology seems essential to me too. My flavor of choice is more time. If we lived for 200 years, it's not so much of an imposition to take a two-decade side quest raising children. You could even do it more than once between multi-decade spans of advancing your career, building some wealth, taking sabbaticals, etc.
People don't have children because they have lost their vital instinct, their will to live, that overflowing energy that is naturally generative. People are pleasure-seeking because they feel the gaping maws of nothingness ready to take them back. Such people don't have children. Reasons such as climate change, inequality, financial insecurity, gun violence, racism etc... are symbolic placeholders for nihilism, of living as deads
*reads headline*: “The answer is have more sex?”
Well....'more sex' and 'more babies' have uncoupled - one doesn't necessarily follow the other. Which isn't a reason to NOT have more sex, just sayin' it won't automatically solve the population issue...
I totally thought she was going there, too!
I also thought “dress in bright colored outfits? Have sex while dressed in bright colored outfits?”
Well, that proves her right. That's a lot of people's favorite thing.
Yep. Thought I was the only one feeling baited and switched over this studious and spiceless post. Do better, CHH!
I’d love to have had more kids. I had just two and I barely managed it because I didn’t have enough money.
But more money alone wouldn’t change much for most people.
Let me ask the question another way:
Hey, would you like to sign up for this volunteer position? If you say yes, it’s an 18-year commitment, minimum. Actually, it never totally ends. You’ll need to prioritize this volunteer position over your career, your social life and literally everything else.
It’s going to be quite costly — not just in direct expenses but in things like the need to pay for a larger place to live. In return, you’ll be lauded one day each year but the rest of the time you’ll be widely disrespected. Some people will make clear their disdain if you dare to combine your volunteer duties with traveling or eating out.
Oh, also your body will never be the same. You may develop things like stretch marks and loose skin on your abdomen. You might weigh more, and it’ll be difficult or impossible to find the time and money and mental bandwidth to groom yourself to the standards society requires in order for you to be even considered for many professional roles.
Yes, yes, Y E S. I could not have put it better. This is why the birth rate is falling even in the Nordic countries where there are so many benefits handed out. For the record, I think it’s a good thing to hand out those benefits, because it’s humane and does make parenting *a bit* easier.
But on the whole, having kids “the modern way” isn’t very appealing to a lot of people, and your comment encapsulates why. It’s a never ending volunteer job. And you may OR MAY NOT get back the proverbial “joy and sense of accomplishment” either.
Birth rates continued to be replacement level or slightly above when kids ceased to be economic assets *but still* did not demand the intensive parenting they do today, do not *have* to go to college (or trade school) in order to earn a decent living, did not usually require intensive support beyond 18 or 22 (if college), and public life was not as hostile to children as it is now. Just looking back on my early GenX childhood, no, I did not go to restaurants, etc. like kids today, but on the OTHER hand I could easily get to a park, the library, a vacant lot, wander around the neighborhood asking if Karen or Lisa or Julie could come out and play - that’s what you did, you knocked on doors and asked whoever answered if your friend was home and could play! I wasn’t in a lot of adults spaces but there were, on the other hand, plenty of places that kids could be kids and nobody really cared unless you broke something.
We played with axes and our parents had no idea :)
Matches too!
Yes. There are all sorts of ways that modern life has become unfriendly to children and to being a parent. Health care is expensive. If you go back to work, child care is hard to find AND expensive. Don't get me started on parental leave, or lack of same. As you note, in an Instragramed world you get dinged by Society for having been pregnant and being a mother because not everyone will bounce back like CHH has. As Angie Schmitt points out on her Substack, Love of Place, even the design of communities - where stores, schools, etc. are sited, how streets are put in, what vehicles people drive - has become unfriendly to children. Tax credits and other payments aren't going to suddenly make having children way more attractive, though it might move the needle for some.
I think cash to parents: $50k at birth, $40k a year later, $30k ... Down to $10k a year till they're in high school, would absolutely move the needle. No one has tried any cash subsidy remotely close to that large. Lyman Stone has studied showing more cash helps.
But yeah I'll also grant that I think it would be a good policy even if it didn't solve the crisis. But also... Isn't that all the more reason to do it? Like that cringe lib cartoon where someone says "what if we go to all the trouble of building clean livable walkable cities with renewable energy, but it doesn't fix global warming?".
Basically I think communal modern human society has created a miracle of material wealth and abundance, but the incentives for individuals now all point toward free-riding. We should tilt the incentives back the other way to reward people for the pro social work of creating more people.
I could see a cash incentive working but it would definitely have to be tied to births (not just general UBI) and it would have to be pretty hefty. The question there is whether anyone would agree to do it, but I could see it moving the needle in the US.
Yep basically a fully refundable child tax credit aka cash for kids, and frontloaded as described so you get the most in the years before they're in grade school.
Agreed a UBI would be if anything counterproductive.
There is a cash incentive like this in Russia - massive lump sum paid to the mother per child, meant to be used for housing or future education for the child (there are legalities with how you can spend this fund). For many poorer people, it can be the deposit for their first house, and the birth rate is going up (though it still cannot help the wide women-men discrepancy as over 1 million men have been killed in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).
Not saying it’s a perfect system, but I think it would be a nice incentive if adopted in Western countries.
And in South Korea...
In South Korea, cash incentives for having children--like monthly child allowances, baby bonuses, and subsidies for fertility treatments
-have had very limited impact on the country's extremely low birth rate.
Despite generous payments, the birth rate continues to decline, largely because financial support
alone doesn't offset high housing costs, long work hours, and social pressures around childcare and gender roles.
"and the birth rate is going up"
?
"Russia’s attempts to boost its flagging birth rate — through policies promoting “traditional values,” tighter abortion restrictions and officials’ encouragement of larger families — appear to be falling short, as the number of births has fallen to its lowest level in centuries.
According to data released by the state statistics agency Rosstat, 195,400 children were born in Russia during January and February 2025 — a 3% drop compared to the same period in 2024."
I shouldn’t have said that - I’ve no stats to back it up. (What’s your source btw?) I’m just describing what I’ve seen around me. Almost all my friends my age already have kids in Russia; none in Western Europe. Anecdotal, yes, but it’s more about attitudes towards having kids in general.
I’m just saying, a cash sum would definitely be very attractive - though I doubt it would tip over the people who already didn’t want to have kids.
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2025/04/14/russias-birth-rate-plunges-to-200-year-low-a88709
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Russia/Fertility_rate/
Below France and roughly the same as Germany.
We don't even have mandated paid parental leave and keep giving more tax breaks for seniors. We'll never come close to enacting a policy this generous (which unless you had MASSIVE cuts elsewhere would be unsustainable financially)
That's all delusional. People don't have babies because their vital instinct is defunct. Worries about safety, the future, planning, etc., are expression of fear, in particular of fear of death and to be swallowed back into the nothingness from we we randomly emerged. Vitality is reckless and thoughtless, is overflowing energy that generates life because that's what vitality is: an outpouring of energy, art, thinking, adventure and, most of all, babies.
Cash, if anything, makes the situation worse because it equates having children with pain to be compensated, which is the opposite of what the people of our time want: pleasure to make them forget of mortality.
It's the opposite - people don't fear death as death comes as a blessing in old age. In a world where 50% of kids died before age 5 and death was ubiquitous at every age people feared it greatly. When it occurs at age 90 to a comatose dementia patient it's a welcome release.
That's the change and that's why religious doesn't get any traction in the modern world.
Exactly because death was so present, people lived like they could live forever. Now, people is seeking pleasure every minute like they could die tomorrow.
It's not that people fear death constantly at a conscious level, it's just the background note of contemporary life.
I remember having a conversation with a guy while waiting in line at a Starbucks in LA. When he heard I was Italian, he said that he had family there, in Mantua, and he visited sometimes. I asked him if he liked it, and he told me that no, everything is old and crumbling (never mind it has been crumbling since 1000 years - pretty slow motion) I told him that in my opinion that was because Californians don't want to think about death, and the old walls in Mantua were a constant reminders. He convened that yes, that was the case.
"Exactly because death was so present, people lived like they could live forever."
They did not. Having half their children die and death an ever present reality was an unmitigated horror. Your fantastical romanticizing of epic grief and sorrow is... somethin'
I’ve had similar thoughts. Women aren’t going to respond to nagging by having more babies! Besides, there’s no reason why the population must always go up in a linear fashion. If it goes down that will go a long way towards solving the housing affordability problem, among other things
Agree. Forcing the issue will require rolling back some of womens rights. Assuming that any roolback doesn't somehow include rolling back the right to vote (hard to imagine that ever passing, but let's play with the thought) , we can anticipate that passing such rollbacks will lead to political extinction for those who voted for such rollbacks.
I saw a graph somewhere showing that, based on historical records, gravestones, and archological finds, the authors estimated that as far back as they could look roughly 40 - 50% of children died before age 15. In past ages where that sort of death rate was occurring, and where farms and family businesses required labor forces, the push for lots of children made sense. Then came public health, microbiology, antibiotics.... Suddenly the survival rate went way up, and shortly after the birth rate began to drop. Instead of worrying about it, perhaps we can recognize that the 19th and 20th centuries were a "bubble" where families had lots of children as they always had, but suddenly lots more of those kids survived to have kids of their own. If survival to adulthood is the new norm, maybe 1 - 3 kids makes sense for a family.
I only recall it was on the SSRN repository (I am a sociology nerd), but someone wrote a paper saying that the “baby boom” *was* partly an after effect of public health. Fewer people were childless or stopped at one; the boom came not from mega-families but from most families having two to four kids, and fewer childless couples. And this was credited to antibiotics curing venereal diseases (which, even if they weren’t fatal, rendered people infertile), and also the decline of scarlet fever damaging heart valves which made pregnancy dangerous. (Ray Davies, of Kinks fame, had a sister, who gave him his first guitar. The sister had “rheumatic fever” as a child which damaged her heart, and she went to a dance hall and dropped dead on the dance floor, the night she gifted Ray with his guitar! “Come Dancing” is Ray rewriting history so his sister lives. 😢 )
Interesting point. I can see it. The young folks having kids after WWII had grown up through the Great Depression, then the war years. Suddenly things felt...better, if not entirely safe; Cold War, polio epidemic, etc. but far better economic conditions. I knew a lot of families with lots of kids growing up in the '50s, but I was raised Catholic and my Dad was Italian; that probably biases the result. By the way, I don't think the scarlet fever/rheumatic fever connection quite works. Antibiotics came into widespread use in the 1950s, when the parents of the Boomers were already adults and the heart damage was already there. However, the Boomer generation definitely benefited. Interesting angle on antibiotics and sexually transmitted disease by the way; had not considered that. When I was a budding microbiologist in the '70s syphilis and gonnorhea were still fairly widespread but readily treatable. The problem STDs became Herpes simplex, Hepatitis B virus, and then HIV.
Thanks for the Ray Davies bit. I had not heard that. Touching, if sad, story.
CHH, I agree that these interventions have been tried and while they have a socially positive effect, they do not have a "bang for the buck" solely in terms of birth rates.
I do think it's important to note that the TFR is an estimate and not a statistic measuring the birth rate at a moment in time. The TFR measures current birth rates among various age cohorts of women and assumes that going forward those birth rates by age will stay constant. So, for example, if the birth rates of women ages 35 to 40 are higher ten years from now than they are today, the TFR today will have been an underestimation, all other assumptions held equal.
The TFR in America has been below 2.0 before. From 1974 to 1986, the TFR was between 1.7 and 1.85 and then popped back up to over 2.0 from 1999 to 2009. This is based on Federal Reserve statistics.
I'm not suggesting that the TFR will increase from 1.6. And the general trend over 50 years has been a marked decline. I am suggesting that it is likely to fluctuate as it has done n the past. And absent some unanticipated technological fertility breakthrough, fluctuations are likely to be to the downside.
Wasn't the early aughts mini-baby boom spearheaded by Latino immigrants? You also had the housing bubble.
Just a reminder that a large chunk of "pronatalists" are motivated by eugenics.
The actual short- and medium-term answer for wealthy societies that need to increase population growth is immigration. Don't ask some "pronatalists" about their thoughts on that issue...
Immigration isn't a long term solution, because immigrants themselves usually revert to the fertility rates of the countries they move to, and fertility rates have declined worldwide. To quote from the article, "Immigration is good, but sadly it won’t solve the population problem. First, fertility is falling across the entire world, even in the poorest countries of Africa. In the world as a whole, fertility rates are approaching replacement level and may already be there." The solution to this problem is finding and incentivizing ways for young people from the ages of 18-35 to meet each other, form relationships, and have children. The groups that have above replacement fertility all emphasize having children and starting a family as the norm. The contradiction that modern society has, between biological clocks, meeting the right person, schooling, and establishing a career is a tough nut to crack.
https://open.substack.com/pub/noahpinion/p/lets-save-the-human-species?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1sw82d
https://www.niussp.org/fertility-and-reproduction/fertility-and-nuptiality-of-ultra-orthodox-jews-in-the-united-states/#:~:text=Using%20this%20data%2C%20I%20find,population%20an%20entire%20decade%20younger.
https://dailyyonder.com/amish-population-growth-rural-america/2024/04/10/
You'll note that I specifically said "short- and medium-term answer." The issue is that a large number of "pronatalists" oppose immigration because they don't have some animating concern that the world might be underpopulated in the future.
Some of these people are indeed driven by xenophobia, or racial prejudice, but I've found that others just want replacement level birthrates, because they're worried about the second order consequences for pension systems, infrastructure, and keeping society running, when the population declines by 25% or 50%. I think that's a legitimate concern. On the immigration issue, I do think the general trend across the developed world is decreasing receptiveness to immigration, and you see this in France, UK, Italy or the US. China is projected to lose up to half of it's population by the end of the century, but no Chinese leader is calling for large-scale immigration from other parts of the world, because it would fundamentally change the culture and character of China, and the Chinese public has no appetite for that. I'd like to see a well functioning pluralistic society, but it's not easy to maintain. I agree with you that America will be harmed by decreased immigration in the short to medium term, but voters have made their feelings pretty clear. A similar surge of immigration in the early 20th century led to the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially banned Asians from immigrating, and severely restricted Jews and Italians from coming to the United States.
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/immigration-act
My contention is that anyone who is invested in "birthrates," like who is really into that, is immediately suspect. It's just an odd thing to be very animated about, and there's a reason that a lot of those guys really want is more white people and fewer nonwhite people, i.e. eugenics.
For people are invested in "birthrates" and not in population, which is to say anti-immigrant "pronatalists," well, I'm not even sure that presumption is rebuttable.
Lastly, I'd be curious to see what would happen with immigration if center-left parties like the Democrats were actually willing to make the case for immigration instead of running away from the issue and trying to talk about egg prices. We have one party scapegoating immigrants for everything and another party too cowardly to tell the truth because of a public opinion poll from two years ago.
An unfortunately large number of “pronatalists” really want “more white people plz”
Immigration, especially high skilled immigration or parents who will have high skilled children, is good. The only thing is that “sending” countries are also experiencing lower birth rates. Mexico, for instance, has a lower TFR than the US! If anyone said that during the 90s they would have thought you off your rocker, but nope, Mexicans are not having large families. This is what happens when you urbanize and professionalize.
What we can do, which the current administration is hell bent on ROLLING BACK but don’t get me started, is making the US a great place for high skilled immigrants to settle down in. Good luck with *that* under our current leadership.
We are running out of sending countries that have young people to spare and send overseas. When families have one or two children they tend to want to keep them nearer home, both for emotional and practical support and because they want to see their kids and grandkids.
It's weird how stressed some people are about the possibility that the population may decline from seven billion to five and a half billion. If the population falls below two billion, maybe they can start worrying.
Yes. To expand on that, as a biologist I've always found this emphasis on population growth a bit frightening. Yes, I know that science and ingenuity have avoided the population crash that was predicted by some in the late '60s, but we're still living on a finite planet. Population dynamics tend to either 1) wander around some steady state set by resources constraints; or 2) go through rapid population increase followed by population crash when resources are used up. Let's see, I'm 73 yrs old and in my lifetime the world population has gone from under 4 billion to ~8 billion today. Which track does that sound like?
At some point humans are going to have to wrestle with having more-or-less stable numbers. I think 5.5 billion sounds good...
I think, at least in the short term, the concerns aren’t so much about underpopulation as they are about old-vs-young ratios that are out of whack, and the many social issues that are liable to come out of that.
Those are certainly real concerns. However, that doesn't change the population dynamic I described. At some point the near-exponential growth had to slow, and I'm beginning to think that people intuitively recognize that - as CHH noted, birth rates are declining in much of the world. It's time to work out how we manage in a world with steady-state populations instead of kicking that can down the road.
I agree.
The rhetoric is completely detached from reality. Current "worst case scenarios" have the global population falling to like 2000 levels near the end of the century. Did anyone think Earth was underpopulated 25 years ago?
When I was in my 20s the world population was ~4 billion, the US population maybe 200 million. That felt about right...
As long as material standards determine well-being and status there will be a disincentive to have kids during youth.
That's why material solutions don't work. Having children will always be a sacrifice, and if sacrifice isn't considered to have intrinsic value people will avoid it.
One tech solution I’ve not heard discussed much, probably because it’s way too far out to count on, is longevity. If we were to get some truly meaningful healthy lifespan extension, say we double it, that would massively reduce the opportunity cost of 2 decades of childcare. Imagine if instead of all your healthiest years went to raising children, only half of them did!
We’d have to get rid of age discrimination which seems to be getting *worse* as people live longer and healthier. “Too old to hire, too young to retire” is no place to be. What is the point of living longer if you’re going to be spending those extra years living out of your car?
More than that, or perhaps related to that, we need meaningful improvements in joint preservation, vision preservation, hearing preservation, brain preservation. We've seen with our last two presidents, and a few senators, how analytical skills degrade over time. And I'm here to tell you after a life spent as an active outdoor person, spine, knees, fingers, start to become problems. Also, glaucoma and macular degeneration. Living longer isn't enough; we need functional older people.
I simply think technological advancements in reliable birth control have revealed that humans, on average, have treated reproduction as a sort of necessary evil, either due to economics and labor needs, or simply as an inevitable consequence of sexual intercourse. Given that the typical person in the modern world doesn't have the immediate pressures of the past (heavy social expectations, inheritance, concerns of lineage), many of the "reasons for" have been eroded and now fall short of the "reasons against" that dissuade people from having children. So once technology permitted us to reliably have sex without the risk of it actually producing offspring, most people began making a choice that their ancestors would've had external reasons against taking. Unless delivering and raising a child becomes far more effortless (maybe in the future you'll hand it all off to an android to raise your child, and birthrates will rise), I suspect the trend will continue to decline.
It genuinely fills me with happiness to see some women utilize their right to free expression to seriously consider and discuss how to raise the birth rate.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a trad-bro who shallowly wants to turn the cloak back to the first half of the 20th-century when women were largely confined to being idle, restless frustrated housewives. I believe that the new freedoms which women currently have in our society are all for the better; as it proves that those women who make efforts to embody any sort of genuine womanliness and femininity are doing it out of earnest personal choice and not just forced compulsion. I believe that in an ideal, healthy and happy society, abortion is legal for women, but *women themselves choose to utilize it very rarely.*
I find it downright mortally depressing to see child-birth and motherhood be given such a low social status in contemporary culture and people’s viewpoints. Being a mother, in many ways, simply isn’t seen as the “cool” thing to do. Women are loudly encouraged by Western governments to pursue every means of creativity on the planet, and to neglect the highest creative field of all, one that is the exclusive privilege of women: the creation and nurturing of new human life.
If our human race is to have a future, we will all need as many bright and mature women as possible to mentally tackle this problem. Please do keep it up, ladies!
Many same-gender couples (and mixed-gender couples who really want children but can’t conceive for any number of reasons) often go to great lengths and great expense to have children to raise and provide for.
While carrying a baby to term is currently the “exclusive privilege of women” (this is where technological solutions like mechanical wombs would come into play), nurturing children can be done by just about any human who cares to do so. Most people are perfectly capable of caring for and nurturing children, regardless of their sex or gender.
While I agree that nurturing children is often not given the status it deserves, I think that much of that is because until fairly recently women (and still, for low-income women) were often economically dependent on a man. That has changed for many people, but many of us alive today grew up in a time when childcare was an obligation of women, not a choice, and that still colors our perception of the childcare role in society.
I think that at a very fundamental level, no woman wants to have children unless she feels it is safe to do so (in the sense that it does not put her entire future at risk), and in our culture that means having an education, a career and a place to live.
The end result is that they end up waiting for these things to be in place, which often ends up being too late.
If we want birthdates to go up, we will have to make it feel like a safe and sensible choice to have kids in the most fertile period of a woman’s life. Until that is the case, most won’t.
In the Nordics, it's already like that, and birthrates are plummeting. The fear that you mention is insatiable, because they don't want additional security, they want to escape death because they are nihilist and lack the vital instinct that makes overlook death and safety concerns. No policy can close the gaping hole of nothingness.
I’m in the Nordics, and yes, there is a social safety net. But that in no way makes it feel safe to have kids early. If anything, there is even more pressure to to make sure you have an education and a good career before you start having kids.
Being a young single mom sucks, social services or not.
This doesn't change what I said: no matter what safety net you build, fear won't subside and society will make you even more fearful.
“because they are nihilist”
Well I guess that takes care of that.
People have kids later in life because they believe having kids is a major, major step, that you need to be secure before it, and that they're a ton of work and being a young parent is super hard. So they wait until things are just right. I believe all these things, and so do most millennials and zoomers. (I'm a currently childless 35 yo married man).
The solution, I think, is to fight back against this fairly recent narrative and go "Having kids is great, actually". We've over-indexed on the pain and need to reassert some of the joy/fulfillment from it.
Given that CHH wrote a "marriage is great, actually" article recently she seems ideally positioned to save the human species with another article.
But… those beliefs are not mutually exclusive? I believe that kids are great! My two children are the most wonderful children in the whole entire world, and I love them so, so, so much! ❤️ And I also believe that they are a ton of work and that being a parent, young or otherwise, is very hard. Just today I woke up at 5:30 am because my beautiful little daughter was hungry and crying, and now I’m tired as heck.
That's fair, they're not mutually exclusive. I just think when young people talk about starting a family today, or the discourse surrounding it from school to college onwards, it's highly tilted to the negative aspects, and it should be more balanced if we as a society desire to raise fertility rates.
Otherwise even if you find a pill to extend fertility by 5 years or some other technological solution people will keep delaying it as much as they can.
(To be clear, I'm completely in favor of continuing to teach that it is a big deal, I just don't think it should be taught as being absolutely miserable, which is what I mean by balanced).
It's probably a sign of what you show above as well as my extreme risk aversion that I started sort-of regretting not having kids once reaching the 400K mark.
On the other hand, congrats on making it to 400,000 years old!
Yeah, new technology seems essential to me too. My flavor of choice is more time. If we lived for 200 years, it's not so much of an imposition to take a two-decade side quest raising children. You could even do it more than once between multi-decade spans of advancing your career, building some wealth, taking sabbaticals, etc.
People don't have children because they have lost their vital instinct, their will to live, that overflowing energy that is naturally generative. People are pleasure-seeking because they feel the gaping maws of nothingness ready to take them back. Such people don't have children. Reasons such as climate change, inequality, financial insecurity, gun violence, racism etc... are symbolic placeholders for nihilism, of living as deads