Babies and Reasons
CrowdSource 8.5.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: Why aren’t we having more babies? Is that a weird question?
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Why Aren’t We having More Kids?
According to a CDC report published in April, in 2023 US birth rates plunged to a new historic low. Old interviews in which J. D. Vance inveighs against childless “cat ladies” have added fuel to the fiery debate about the birth dearth.
To be clear, Americans definitely want more kids. According to Gallup: “Americans’ preference for smaller families, which has been the norm for the past 50 years, is shifting as their view of the ideal number of children in a family has crept up to the highest level since 1973.” [Note: Reader Paula Amati points us to this recent Pew survey that suggests a more complicated story about whether Americans want more children.]
Yet the current birth rate is 1.66 births per woman — well below replacement level. Fewer babies were born in 2023 than any year since 1979.
The basic question is: Why aren’t people in the having more kids? Most answers focus on practical matters:
Dating takes too long. Philosophers Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman just published a book, What are Children For? where (among other things) they critique dating: “very long explorations on the dating market, they include dedicating your entire 20s and early 30s to more or less casual dating, certainly not dating with a view to family. They involve an endless vetting of that potential partner through long, nonexclusive dating, then long, exclusive dating, then cohabitation, then trial parenting a pet before one even is willing to consider having children.”
Higher opportunity costs for women. A libertarian take: “Most women realize they will likely not be able to be a successful career woman, a dedicated mother, and a jaw-dropping homemaker all at the same time. There are choices to be made here, and some women are simply deciding that motherhood is the role they can let go.”
Economic uncertainty. For example, lack of affordable housing.
On the other hand, in a big essay this past week, Christine points to “existential worries … pointing to a loss of stabilizing self-confidence among recent generations, or to the lack of an overarching framework (religious or otherwise) that might help guide people toward a ‘good’ life.”
In other words, as Nietzsche put it: “If we have our own why in life, we shall get along with almost any how.” And if you don’t have a “why,” then why have babies?
Social policy and economic incentives are easier to argue about than ultimate meaning. But sometimes, you need to talk about ultimate meaning. That time is now.
Is Pro-Natalism Weird?
The new Democratic strategy is to refer to Trump’s GOP as “weird.” Because pro-natalism is becoming an increasingly hot topic, one that’s usually associated with the political right, people are now asking: is pro-natalism weird?
It’s weird but good. Ross Douthat explains: “it’s just hard for people to get their minds around the idea that reproduction, something that seems so basic to human nature, something that we’ve spent decades talking about in terms of ‘control’ and careful management, lest human impulses run to Malthusian or environmentally ravaging extremes, is actually just not happening on a scale that could make economies collapse and cultures disappear.”
It’s weird and fake. According to David Karpf, professor of internet politics: “It takes a particular brand of self-aggrandizing self-deception to build an entire world-saving plan on the belief that your children, your grandchildren, and your great-grandchildren will all abide by your dictate that they must all have lots of kids. The independent, rebellious drive ends now! For the next century or two, all of our progeny will gleefully follow in our footsteps.”
Some pro-natalists are weirdos. Writes Jonathan V. Last: “Here is an uncomfortable fact: Do you know who … is really into natalism? Racists and weirdos.” Last was a long-time pro-natalist, having published, in 2013, a book titled: What to Expect When No One’s Expecting: America’s Coming Demographic Disaster.
It’s absolutely not weird. So argues the X account More Births: “Worrying about [the drop in births] means you have a grasp of basic arithmetic and understand what numbers mean. The ones who are dismissive show their ignorance of the data and their general unseriousness about the future of the world. The data … points to long run economic and social decline, due to birth rates that are extremely low and headed lower still. The parts of the world that are below replacement fertility account for above 90% of global GDP, and more than 95% of patents and scientific publishing.”
Weird or not, pro-natalism is not going away, because demographic decline is real.
From the Crowd
Sam Mace, reflecting to the podcast episode, “Freddie deBoer on Democracy and the Democrats,” drawing a comparison with UK party politics:
I’m … unconvinced primaries are a great way of selecting candidates. Despite always promoting greater citizen input on here, so I may be at risk of contradicting myself, primaries aren't really designed for this. They’re voted on generally by partisans who have a more extreme vision of politics than the average voter. Thus, their judgement as to what constitutes the “best” candidate is likely to be limited. In the UK, we saw the Conservative membership elect Liz Truss to become PM (shortest PM in history who barely made it past 100 days in office) and Labour in 2015 and again in 2016 elected Jeremy Corbyn who produced the worst electoral results in almost a century.
It strikes me that parties don’t have to be or even internally they shouldn’t be “democratic.” I'm not sure this necessarily impacts broader democracy on a bigger level. Of course the fact politics is so far away from so many is a problem but primaries don’t strike me as the best way to facilitate public engagement.
… I’m also not sure how democratic the primary system really is given they have a tendency, as with Trump, to enable an extreme plurality in the party to have an outsized section of the vote. This is generally because primaries attract people who are more heavily partisan and ‘committed’ to their politics. In the UK when parties haven’t really whittled down candidates the members may be more represented but the traditional voters of those parties are left behind. I would therefore argue while primaries appear more democratic on the face of it ultimately they are likely to misrepresent how the traditional voters of said party really feel and what kind of candidate they would want.
See you next week!
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To be fair, I think we are missing one important point on the pro-natalism argument. In that - as someone who doesn’t have kids (yet) - I do find a certain divide in general worldview with friends who have become parents. Having children appears to refocus people on what truly matters, not least because their “free time” goes to hell, but also because there appears to be a greater sense of responsibility for one’s actions and decisions. Among my peers I definitely see the desire to be the best versions of themselves, while being constantly humbled by the experience of being a parent and turning generally more risk averse. Becoming a parent definitely has a meaningful impact on a person, and therefore, not becoming one ought to have one as well.
It seems to me that natalism as a conscious movement is slightly odd in the way that traditionalism is slightly odd: it mostly works well if you choose it because it seems like the natural thing to choose. If you are consciously choosing and crafting your traditions, you're acting very differently from someone actually guided by tradition. And if you are very conscious about how everyone should have kids, you've to some extent given into the idea that having kids is an optional lifestyle choice.
My wife and I met at a small Catholic college and married five weeks after graduating. 23 years later we have seven kids, ranging from 7 to 22. A lot of the other people we know from college or from church likewise have what today counts as large families.
But this isn't part of a "we need to have lots of kids because of the demographic problems of the US" plan, but rather the natural outgrowth of two things:
First, if you combine the belief that it's wrong to have sex outside of marriage and that inside of marriage it's wrong to use artificial means of birth control (as opposed to selectively avoiding sex during infertile times in order to space children) with the natural desire of young people in love to have sex -- you end up with people who marry young enough to have a lot of kids. We had 5 of our 7 kids before age 30, so it's kind of natural that we had more kids that a couple who married at 30.
Second, in a worldview in which human persons are unquestionably good things, meant by God for eternal life, the trade offs involved in spending your life bringing up little persons seem more worthwhile. This isn't to say that I've never grumbled at having a small person onto me in the middle of the night (or even natter endlessly about Pikachu), but it does give you a clear reason for why it's worth going through all that. Sure, I've had many co-workers over the years say things like, "It might be nice to have kids someday, but right now my wife and I are really focused on travel." But while I'd like to travel and hope to do it more as the kids grow up and move out, having a worldview about the relative important of human beings and trips to Machu Picchu makes it possible to get off the fence on questions like "is this the right year to make the jump into having kids, or should we wait another year?"