Good discussion of the birthrate crisis

Originally posted March 26, 2025

I found this discussion on Tyler Cowen’s podcast (edited and bolded by me) of the current fertility crisis very interesting. This crisis, which I have long believed to be the most important problem for moral not merely economic reasons, is my motivation to be a donor. 

Klein nicely articulates my view that having more people is a good thing in itself; the decision to have kids is fundamentally different than the decision to buy a vacation. He is also perceptive that cultural expectations on family size are very important and self reinforcing. You do not really need a bedroom for every child or a big backyard to have kids with great lives. Tyler is right that something will eventually happen to make the birthrate rise, although I fear it might take an evolutionary change over thousands of years, rather than a quicker cultural one. 

Partial Transcript:

COWEN: Do you worry that higher residential density might lead to lower fertility? I don’t think we know that for sure, but it seems plausibly true if you look at East Asia.

KLEIN: It seems to me that lower fertility is driven by women having more opportunities, and that the opportunity cost in leisure, money, pleasure, et cetera, of having children young goes up.

COWEN: That’s clearly a factor. It might be the major factor, but still, if you’re in a smaller apartment, it’s very hard to have three kids in Boston.

KLEIN: Is that true, though? My mom was out in New York recently. My great-great-grandparents, I guess it would be, lived in tenements in New York. We toured the Tenement Museum, which is a great tour to take because they have these preserved tenements from that period. These were very, very, very small places where you had, in the one we were in, I think it was six or seven people in the family were living there, and there was a boarder. That was very common.

If you go and you look in high-fertility immigrant communities — I used to live in San Francisco — you go down further into Daly City, things like that. People talk about this as very overcrowded. On some level, certainly it is, compared to the way I live, but in most places, people just live with less space.

So, I do think there’s a cultural norm thing here. Density, plus the norm that the kids all have their own room, is going to be very, very bad for fertility. But that’s going to be another consequence of, I think, the almost feedback loop of low-fertility societies. You begin to have expectations that cut against high-fertility families.

…

COWEN: With all the talk of supply constraints, shouldn’t you of all people be obsessed with fertility decline? It makes everything unaffordable. It limits market size.

KLEIN: I kind of am.

COWEN: Then we need to take money from somewhere and spend it on birth subsidies. I’m saying take it from Medicare.

KLEIN: Do you think birth subsidies work?

COWEN: We don’t know. I think we need to try them more and more extreme.

KLEIN: I am extremely open to birth subsidies. The question of where you should take them from in the budget is an interesting one, but I’m extremely open to birth subsidies. I think people should be paid for being parents. Part of why people do not have children earlier — particularly for women — a huge financial penalty that is lifelong. I’m not sure we know though, whether or not there’s a birth subsidy at a level that is politically in any way viable that actually works. I would love to see any country in the world pass some non-authoritarian, like non-Romanian decades-ago policy that seems to have an effect on birth rates.

I both think we are going to have severe political problems as societies shrink, and in my own moral framework, I think the continuation of human experience is a beautiful and important thing in the way it has just been absorbed into a liberal expressive individualism. I hear people talk about it as if it’s a good that is akin to whether or not they should take an international trip, like what are the cost benefits? I think that’s mistaken. I’m pro trying to think about fertility. I just have not seen any policies that work.

COWEN: The more uncertain we are about birth subsidies — and I agree that’s the correct view — doesn’t that mean we should all the more commit to some kind of revival of cultural conservatism on matters of family? That there’s an asymmetric pairing. Families should be expected to have three or four children, and that’s the alternative. Yes, we should try subsidies, but the more uncertain we are, we’ve just got to go the Ross Douthat route. I think he has five kids now. Good for him.

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KLEIN: 

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Israel is a little bit of a more interesting case from this perspective, but when you are there . . . People do, to some degree, what they see around them, and the influence of the Haredi families, of the ultra-orthodox families, which are huge, is everywhere. I was just in Israel, not just now, but back in June, and there was obviously a lot happening that you could notice, but you really could feel the difference of being in a high-fertility society there.

I’d had this interaction with somebody at Prospect Park before I had gone to Israel, and he had four kids with him. We had just been chatting, and I must’ve said something that made him think a little bit like I was asking, “What are you doing here with four kids?” I’d asked if they were all his because they looked different. I thought it might be a group of kids. He’s like,” Oh, yes, but . . .” He was explaining it away. He was like, “We’d only meant to have three and then we had twins.”

In Israel, nobody’s explaining away why they have four kids. Tons of people have four kids, tons of people have six kids, tons of people have eight kids. You have a society there that there is an anchor weight of just what is normal being placed by the fact that there is still a huge conservative religious community. But just doing the thing I think JD Vance was trying to do when he was scolding childless cat ladies — that doesn’t appear to work.

COWEN: But at the macro level, it can work if enough things change over enough time. Keep in mind, if this doesn’t happen culturally, it will happen through replacement. It happens one way or the other.

KLEIN: That might happen, but I don’t know.

COWEN: One favors one version of it, no matter what.

KLEIN: It could or it couldn’t, right? I understand there’s a view that if liberal secular societies begin to shrink, eventually it’s just going to be the Amish will take over the world. Maybe. Or maybe, as the Amish society grows, they will be impinged upon by all the pressures that hit all these other societies, and within a couple of generations their birth rates will fall very rapidly. I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all, would you?

COWEN: It may not be the Amish, but whichever are the remnants of high birth-rate cultures, it seems to me they will dominate. Maybe it’s Niger in Sahelian Africa.

…

COWEN: I genuinely don’t know. I fear it’s, as with negative emotional contagion — another topic we’ve discussed offline — that once you get on it, it’s hard to reverse, but it’s, in fact, not impossible to reverse. There are periodic historical reversals in both directions, and at some point, we’ll see another one, but we need some quite bracing, strong, maybe almost Straussian movement towards some version of cultural conservatism and religion to make this happen.