The main question I have is: how does a society get out of this? You went into great detail on specific policies that would alleviate this economic pain concentrated on young people, but if the fundamental problem is the old willing to sacrifice the prosperity of the young, how on earth does a country course correct?
Housing is cheap in red states and things are a lot more affordable. It helps with fertility, but it doesn't move the needle enough.
It's the same story with the economy being stronger in the Nordics. It helps TFR but hasn't change the picture.
Ultimately, low fertility people are subsidized by high fertility people because our retirement systems don't match claims with premiums. People can avoid the costs of child rearing and then push the cost of their retirement onto other people.
Everyone understands that if you have less kids you will have a better lifestyle. And so they make a variety of life choices that result in fewer kids even if they answer on some survey they want 2.5.
Making housing cheaper is good, but it will still be the case that identical people with fewer kids will be able to outbid people with more kids for the same housing. That's the fundamental problem. Positional goods and status games favor low fertility.
You need people with large families to be able to outbid low fertility people for positional and status goods. Or at least the competition should be fair, having more kids shouldn't be seen as a *penalty* in "the game of life".
That means higher taxes on the lower fertility and lower taxes on the high fertility. At like 5-10x the rates we do today.
I don't begrudge someone sitting in a zoning meeting and trying to get another townhome built, but passing a giant CTC would be a lot more direct. Once big families are flush with cash they can solve their own problems.
Even better than Boris' prose is the book "The Children of Men" by P. D. James (also an incredible movie), which paints a picture of a world that suddenly isn't able to have any new children. That UK in the book was not a utopia at all.
Great article. The core problem is that children (their parents on their behalf) can't vote but you can issue debt on their behalf. And yeah boomers suck.
And "culture" is often an excuse to not cough up the money. This is especially annoying when people on the right do it, certain conservative christians enjoy the sadomasochism of trying to raise large families with the deck stacked against them, they think it makes them special.
Still, I disagree with you on a few things.
Culture obviously matters in the sense that amongst smart people (the only fertility rate that matters because the people creating all the value in society) conservatives have replacement or near replacement fertility and liberals have TFRs of like 0.6. That's like a 300% gap.
Fertility has fallen because more and more smart people are going liberal.
Personally, I think this is because the childless liberal lifestyle is subsidized by conservatives children. They can avoid the costs of child rearing and then stick other peoples kids with the responsibility for paying their pensions and buying their houses. So economic incentives are shaping cultural choices.
We all know what this differing life script looks like.
Liberal: Move to a city for a professional job. Fuck around until your 30s. Settle for somebody and squeeze out usually one but definitely at most two kids. Use your dual professional income to afford the right urban and/or inner suburb real estate and send them to private school/expensive inner suburb public school. Also since you didn't start trying to get married till your 30s a significant number just never make it or become DINKs.
Conservative: Start trying to get married in your mid 20s, succeed before 30, have at least two but often three+ kids and move to the suburbs/exurbs. Wife is often SAHM at least while the kids are young.
These are very different life scripts that call for very different policy solutions. The conservative life script calls for cash benefits, no means testing, scalability, parental choice, and affordability. Its model is the Sunbelt Master Planned Community. I live in one.
This model is pretty successful. Republican state level politicians in the sunbelt have delivered on it, and have done so in even greater degrees recently. They protected families from public health officials during COVID. They build large amounts of cheap family friendly housing. They favor parental choice and produced universal school vouchers. All of this while keeping taxes and expenses low (University of Florida costs $6k a year).
I get from the State of Florida $25k a year in child benefits I didn't receive up north, all while not paying income taxes.
Yes, conservatives will oppose plopping down section 8 slums in their master planned communities (like leftist YIMBYs want to do), because that would be fucking retarded. But otherwise they are in favor of building and do so empirically.
The liberal life script mostly involves professional couples restricting fertility so that you can buy your way out of a broken system. It promotes daycare subsidies over cash payments. It usually eschews scaling benefits per child (to punish large families and favor small ones). It often means tests. It favors subsidies for expensive credentialed service providers (public sector unions, the groups, NGOs, etc).
It's models are California and New York on the "high" end and Chicago or Newark on the low end.
The solution is to start transferring resources from the liberal model to the conservative model. Then either more liberals will become conservatives (because they are economically incentivized to do so) or conservatives will use the extra resources and improved incentive structure to have even more kids.
Its tough. Conservative have done just about everything they can do at the state level. Federal politics is probably not going to produce meaningful family support for large UMC families. The math isn't there.
But status quo bias is strong. If you win an election and ram through the legislation laws have a way of sticking around. People get used to their child tax credit and defend it as a given rather than a nice to have. So you've got to have the right policy prescription on hand when the election happens.
I don't see a political coalition composed of low fertility urban professional women, LBGTQ, poor racial minorities, public sector unions, and NGOs churning out the kind of legislation that is going to help large UMC families in the suburbs by letting them keep more of their own money. So it's going to have to come from the right. But I'll take anyone's vote that wants to give it to me.
Gosh, this hurt to read.
The main question I have is: how does a society get out of this? You went into great detail on specific policies that would alleviate this economic pain concentrated on young people, but if the fundamental problem is the old willing to sacrifice the prosperity of the young, how on earth does a country course correct?
working on a number of follow up articles
but first step is usually joining the local Strong Towns or YIMBY Action group near you
Housing is cheap in red states and things are a lot more affordable. It helps with fertility, but it doesn't move the needle enough.
It's the same story with the economy being stronger in the Nordics. It helps TFR but hasn't change the picture.
Ultimately, low fertility people are subsidized by high fertility people because our retirement systems don't match claims with premiums. People can avoid the costs of child rearing and then push the cost of their retirement onto other people.
Everyone understands that if you have less kids you will have a better lifestyle. And so they make a variety of life choices that result in fewer kids even if they answer on some survey they want 2.5.
Making housing cheaper is good, but it will still be the case that identical people with fewer kids will be able to outbid people with more kids for the same housing. That's the fundamental problem. Positional goods and status games favor low fertility.
You need people with large families to be able to outbid low fertility people for positional and status goods. Or at least the competition should be fair, having more kids shouldn't be seen as a *penalty* in "the game of life".
That means higher taxes on the lower fertility and lower taxes on the high fertility. At like 5-10x the rates we do today.
I don't begrudge someone sitting in a zoning meeting and trying to get another townhome built, but passing a giant CTC would be a lot more direct. Once big families are flush with cash they can solve their own problems.
“First steps” and mainly because local YIMBY groups tend to be cross partisan and youth oriented.
It’s a great way on building IRL networks for broader goals
Will talk (and in dept) more in a future article
Well I went into this sceptical of economic explanations of declining fertility but you made a persuasive case about male job stability.
Even better than Boris' prose is the book "The Children of Men" by P. D. James (also an incredible movie), which paints a picture of a world that suddenly isn't able to have any new children. That UK in the book was not a utopia at all.
Great article. The core problem is that children (their parents on their behalf) can't vote but you can issue debt on their behalf. And yeah boomers suck.
And "culture" is often an excuse to not cough up the money. This is especially annoying when people on the right do it, certain conservative christians enjoy the sadomasochism of trying to raise large families with the deck stacked against them, they think it makes them special.
Still, I disagree with you on a few things.
Culture obviously matters in the sense that amongst smart people (the only fertility rate that matters because the people creating all the value in society) conservatives have replacement or near replacement fertility and liberals have TFRs of like 0.6. That's like a 300% gap.
Fertility has fallen because more and more smart people are going liberal.
Personally, I think this is because the childless liberal lifestyle is subsidized by conservatives children. They can avoid the costs of child rearing and then stick other peoples kids with the responsibility for paying their pensions and buying their houses. So economic incentives are shaping cultural choices.
We all know what this differing life script looks like.
Liberal: Move to a city for a professional job. Fuck around until your 30s. Settle for somebody and squeeze out usually one but definitely at most two kids. Use your dual professional income to afford the right urban and/or inner suburb real estate and send them to private school/expensive inner suburb public school. Also since you didn't start trying to get married till your 30s a significant number just never make it or become DINKs.
Conservative: Start trying to get married in your mid 20s, succeed before 30, have at least two but often three+ kids and move to the suburbs/exurbs. Wife is often SAHM at least while the kids are young.
These are very different life scripts that call for very different policy solutions. The conservative life script calls for cash benefits, no means testing, scalability, parental choice, and affordability. Its model is the Sunbelt Master Planned Community. I live in one.
This model is pretty successful. Republican state level politicians in the sunbelt have delivered on it, and have done so in even greater degrees recently. They protected families from public health officials during COVID. They build large amounts of cheap family friendly housing. They favor parental choice and produced universal school vouchers. All of this while keeping taxes and expenses low (University of Florida costs $6k a year).
I get from the State of Florida $25k a year in child benefits I didn't receive up north, all while not paying income taxes.
Yes, conservatives will oppose plopping down section 8 slums in their master planned communities (like leftist YIMBYs want to do), because that would be fucking retarded. But otherwise they are in favor of building and do so empirically.
The liberal life script mostly involves professional couples restricting fertility so that you can buy your way out of a broken system. It promotes daycare subsidies over cash payments. It usually eschews scaling benefits per child (to punish large families and favor small ones). It often means tests. It favors subsidies for expensive credentialed service providers (public sector unions, the groups, NGOs, etc).
It's models are California and New York on the "high" end and Chicago or Newark on the low end.
The solution is to start transferring resources from the liberal model to the conservative model. Then either more liberals will become conservatives (because they are economically incentivized to do so) or conservatives will use the extra resources and improved incentive structure to have even more kids.
Its tough. Conservative have done just about everything they can do at the state level. Federal politics is probably not going to produce meaningful family support for large UMC families. The math isn't there.
But status quo bias is strong. If you win an election and ram through the legislation laws have a way of sticking around. People get used to their child tax credit and defend it as a given rather than a nice to have. So you've got to have the right policy prescription on hand when the election happens.
I don't see a political coalition composed of low fertility urban professional women, LBGTQ, poor racial minorities, public sector unions, and NGOs churning out the kind of legislation that is going to help large UMC families in the suburbs by letting them keep more of their own money. So it's going to have to come from the right. But I'll take anyone's vote that wants to give it to me.