Dave and Darby, maybe you've both addressed this elsewhere, but this interview does not engage with the biggest drivers of the decline in the birth rate, in the US at least. Births to mothers aged 15-19 are down 80% from what they were three decades ago, with a resounding 67% of that occurring since 2007. That accounts for half the decline in the birth rate.
Much of the rest is due to 20-24yo unmarried women having a lot fewer babies now. Remember, these were the very mothers vilified, shamed, and blamed for a host of societal problems, including and especially the crime rate. Animus against teen and poor single moms was so strong it was a major factor in Welfare Reform. But it turns out they were the ones propping up the replacement rate throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
Now I believe, and I'm sure you both agree, it is a positive development that we are not making high school sophomores be mothers anymore and that young adult women are more likely to be attending college than struggling to support kids low wage work and an inadequate social safety net. But we also may need to accept that there is not a sustainable way to encourage higher levels of procreation in educated 25-40yos to replace the kids not being born to what used to be higher fertility lower SES groups.
At the same time we could also be nicer to young single moms and poor families. I do see discourse in natalist spaces about the problem of CPS being weaponized against parents for things like letting their 10yo walk home from school alone but I'm not sure how aware y'all are of how intensely poor mothers and their kids are policed by child welfare entities. Pro Publica has been doing some good reporting on how states like Georgia are removing children on flimsy pretexts like "inadequate housing" rather than actual abuse or neglect. The welfare reformers in 1995 described "generations of children raised on welfare" but today it's generations of children lost to foster care.
Much of this heavy family policing of poor people is driven by the demand, mainly among affluent white people, for adoptable children, ideally five years old or less. Demand for newborn infants is so insanely high that adopting an infant through private adoption can take years and cost as much as $70K.
Paradoxically, support for adoption is high in both the natalist and antinatalist communities. In both cases for not-great reasons but I think pronatalists would do well to consider how adoption, as well as unnecessary removals for foster care, have highly anti-birth consequences. There are about 1M abortions in the US annually. I believe a not-insignificant percentage of them are on pregnancies that would otherwise be wanted and continued if the women were not (rightly) concerned about losing the baby to a predatory adoption agency or the child to CPS later due to poverty or instability.
South Korea might serve as a good warning here. The country gave 100Ks of its children away in adoption, mostly to the US, in the mid-late 20th century because single motherhood and mixed race children were stigmatized. I'm not suggesting by any means that is the most significant factor in their very low current birth rate but these things have generational effects.
On that note, Lyman Stone's (who is on the more conservative side of the natalist spectrum) analysis directly contradicts the claim that "half the decline in birth rate" comes from falling teen births. His data shows only 9-26% of fertility decline since 2007 is due to reduced teen births, meaning 74-91% is happening among adult women, primarily those in their early 20s.
While teen births have dropped 80% over three decades, it's a bit off to frame this as the main driver of overall fertility decline.
The highest fertility rates in the US and Western Europe over the past 50 years actually occurred in the 1990s-2000s, when teen pregnancies and abortion rates were already declining and educational/career opportunities for women were expanding. This suggests fertility trends are driven by more complex factors than teen birth rates alone.
Regarding your points about supporting young single mothers and poor families, I agree this deserves attention. The ProPublica reporting on states removing children for "inadequate housing" rather than abuse highlights important systemic issues. Most people across the political spectrum would agree that poverty alone shouldn't be grounds for family separation. These welfare challenges connect directly to fertility decisions - as Darby noted in our interview, people need security and support to form families.
On Adoption and CPS, I need to do a bit more research on my part before I can comfortably address it.
South Korea's experience further illustrates this complexity. Despite implementing massive restrictive abortion policies until 2021, their birth rate has fallen to among the world's lowest. Also I have an article I plan on releasing (soon hopefully) discussing the sheer mess of South Korean substandard policies.
Edits: Bad habit of reading and rewriting my comments
Edit: Your point about historical vilification of teen and single mothers is well-taken - it is nasty and cruel, with Clinton's welfare reform was a piece of work that hurt everyone. I have a *lot* of issues on they way Clinton did things
I have seen Lyman Stone's take on this in IFS but I tend to agree with the Economist's view on it. If the number of teen births were the exact same in 2024 as in 1991 (when there were actually fewer teenagers) there would have been an additional 350K babies born, which would put the US much closer to replacement rate. It was the largest drop in births, by far, to any demo, as a direct result of pregnancy prevention policies.
And the decrease in births to people in their 20s made up the rest of the decline, for the same and a variety of other reasons, including increased family policing and shaming the "wrong" people for procreating. The movie "Idiocracy" came out in 2006, and has become so influential in this matter it's basically shorthand for modern eugenics.
IOW you won't have a replacement birth rate, when you don't intend to replace the population that actually exists.
Dave and Darby, maybe you've both addressed this elsewhere, but this interview does not engage with the biggest drivers of the decline in the birth rate, in the US at least. Births to mothers aged 15-19 are down 80% from what they were three decades ago, with a resounding 67% of that occurring since 2007. That accounts for half the decline in the birth rate.
Much of the rest is due to 20-24yo unmarried women having a lot fewer babies now. Remember, these were the very mothers vilified, shamed, and blamed for a host of societal problems, including and especially the crime rate. Animus against teen and poor single moms was so strong it was a major factor in Welfare Reform. But it turns out they were the ones propping up the replacement rate throughout the latter half of the 20th century.
Now I believe, and I'm sure you both agree, it is a positive development that we are not making high school sophomores be mothers anymore and that young adult women are more likely to be attending college than struggling to support kids low wage work and an inadequate social safety net. But we also may need to accept that there is not a sustainable way to encourage higher levels of procreation in educated 25-40yos to replace the kids not being born to what used to be higher fertility lower SES groups.
At the same time we could also be nicer to young single moms and poor families. I do see discourse in natalist spaces about the problem of CPS being weaponized against parents for things like letting their 10yo walk home from school alone but I'm not sure how aware y'all are of how intensely poor mothers and their kids are policed by child welfare entities. Pro Publica has been doing some good reporting on how states like Georgia are removing children on flimsy pretexts like "inadequate housing" rather than actual abuse or neglect. The welfare reformers in 1995 described "generations of children raised on welfare" but today it's generations of children lost to foster care.
Much of this heavy family policing of poor people is driven by the demand, mainly among affluent white people, for adoptable children, ideally five years old or less. Demand for newborn infants is so insanely high that adopting an infant through private adoption can take years and cost as much as $70K.
Paradoxically, support for adoption is high in both the natalist and antinatalist communities. In both cases for not-great reasons but I think pronatalists would do well to consider how adoption, as well as unnecessary removals for foster care, have highly anti-birth consequences. There are about 1M abortions in the US annually. I believe a not-insignificant percentage of them are on pregnancies that would otherwise be wanted and continued if the women were not (rightly) concerned about losing the baby to a predatory adoption agency or the child to CPS later due to poverty or instability.
South Korea might serve as a good warning here. The country gave 100Ks of its children away in adoption, mostly to the US, in the mid-late 20th century because single motherhood and mixed race children were stigmatized. I'm not suggesting by any means that is the most significant factor in their very low current birth rate but these things have generational effects.
Thank you for reading the interview!
On that note, Lyman Stone's (who is on the more conservative side of the natalist spectrum) analysis directly contradicts the claim that "half the decline in birth rate" comes from falling teen births. His data shows only 9-26% of fertility decline since 2007 is due to reduced teen births, meaning 74-91% is happening among adult women, primarily those in their early 20s.
While teen births have dropped 80% over three decades, it's a bit off to frame this as the main driver of overall fertility decline.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-us-fertility-decline-is-not-due-to-the-drop-in-teen-pregnancies
The highest fertility rates in the US and Western Europe over the past 50 years actually occurred in the 1990s-2000s, when teen pregnancies and abortion rates were already declining and educational/career opportunities for women were expanding. This suggests fertility trends are driven by more complex factors than teen birth rates alone.
Regarding your points about supporting young single mothers and poor families, I agree this deserves attention. The ProPublica reporting on states removing children for "inadequate housing" rather than abuse highlights important systemic issues. Most people across the political spectrum would agree that poverty alone shouldn't be grounds for family separation. These welfare challenges connect directly to fertility decisions - as Darby noted in our interview, people need security and support to form families.
On Adoption and CPS, I need to do a bit more research on my part before I can comfortably address it.
South Korea's experience further illustrates this complexity. Despite implementing massive restrictive abortion policies until 2021, their birth rate has fallen to among the world's lowest. Also I have an article I plan on releasing (soon hopefully) discussing the sheer mess of South Korean substandard policies.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7888060/#:~:text=As%20many%20empirical%20studies%20have,in%20boosting%20the%20country's%20population.
Edits: Bad habit of reading and rewriting my comments
Edit: Your point about historical vilification of teen and single mothers is well-taken - it is nasty and cruel, with Clinton's welfare reform was a piece of work that hurt everyone. I have a *lot* of issues on they way Clinton did things
I have seen Lyman Stone's take on this in IFS but I tend to agree with the Economist's view on it. If the number of teen births were the exact same in 2024 as in 1991 (when there were actually fewer teenagers) there would have been an additional 350K babies born, which would put the US much closer to replacement rate. It was the largest drop in births, by far, to any demo, as a direct result of pregnancy prevention policies.
And the decrease in births to people in their 20s made up the rest of the decline, for the same and a variety of other reasons, including increased family policing and shaming the "wrong" people for procreating. The movie "Idiocracy" came out in 2006, and has become so influential in this matter it's basically shorthand for modern eugenics.
IOW you won't have a replacement birth rate, when you don't intend to replace the population that actually exists.