We spend around 10% of GDP on the elderly. If you paid that out to every parent today it would be around $36,000 a year or ~$650,000 a kid by age 18. I think you intuitively understand this would easily trigger more births.
But what about…country X! They gave parents (some tiny X% of that) and it didn’t work! Yeah, because it’s some tiny X% of that! Not 100% of that or anything close!
But what about Hungary! Don’t they spend 5% of gdp or something!
Hungary has a bunch of tax breaks and government service subsidies for working moms that dump their kids in daycare and follow a very specific (ex soviet) life script that is in every other way anti-fertility. It provides basically nothing to anyone who doesn’t want to follow that life script. It provides no incentive to the husbands earnings despite being the #1 economic correlate to higher fertility (they have no concept of married filing jointly in Hungary).
In short you need to give people cash, preferably in the form of payroll tax breaks for married couples.
We already spend about half that 10% on kids, unfortunately we give it to the teachers union (and other government agents) rather than parents, so 50% of the problem can be solved without spending another dime just by giving parents control over the money.
The other 5% we just need to fix the funding mechanism for retirement benefits.
The structure of these retirement programs is such that they highly incentivize childlessness, because benefits get paid out regardless of whether you had the children to pay for them. In insurance terms, the costs of childbearing are the premiums and the benefits are the claims. There is a huge mismatch therefore between premiums and claims causing a classic insurance death spiral. No insurance regulator would allow such a structure to exist in the private market. I note that high fertility groups like the Amish actually get to avoid SS and Medicare taxes.
We aren’t going to fix this on the claims end. We can fix this in the premium end by raising payroll taxes on those with fewer children and lowering it in those with more. You simply recognize that if raising future taxpayers is a legitimate form of payroll tax contribution and price appropriately.
Once you eliminate the free riding problem people can live as they please. I hope they have more kids but if they don’t at least things are finally “fair”.
I strongly doubt that “neurotic UMC lib parenting” is the cause of fertility shortfall. I hate on neurotic UMC libs as much as the next guy, but I see lots of people who aren’t neurotic UMC libs struggle with raising a family even though they let them play in the street and don’t drag them to spelling bees.
It costs fucking money! Houses are expensive. Healthcare is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Your time is expensive. If you don’t like the public schools (we gave it a shot, we threw in the towel) then education is expensive!
I ran the math on what it costs to live in the house I grew up in on my dad’s salary. He could not afford it today! He let me play in the street with friends but that assumes you can afford to live on that street.
There are two people I see that oppose this:
1) cheapskates who want to continue free riding the system
2) masochistic people who want having lots of children to make them special and balk at the idea of making it any easier
Sorry, I can’t come up with any better reasons to defend the status quo here. If you don’t want to spend political capital on this issue fine, but what I see people spending political capital on seems a lot worse than tax breaks for parents.
I agree with most of this, but the question remains whether explicitly targeting natalism through policy has any salutary effects. I don't think it does.
Once you get beyond three children, it becomes impossible to program their lives. That’s why large families tend toward natural R selection and why the most K selected types are the ones with only one or two children. It’s a serpent devouring its own tail. The fact we even have a conference like this is an indicator that we were being judged by God and found wanting.
The segments of the American population which consistently have the most children are those with high IQs, diligence, conscientiousness: the Haredim and Amish. Not R-selected at all.
It's very difficult to pass one's values on to one's children if you live in a community which lives by opposite values and hand your children over to that community's institutions for education; you are saying and doing contradictory things.
A lot of people don't realize that the Amish are pretty successful economically. Many work as skilled tradesmen at good wages (the farms don't make much money anymore on their own unless they are also running a retail business, and they often allow normies to drive them to factories to work). They don't have to pay SS or Medicare taxes (that's 15.3% of income right there). Healthcare cost is low (they do allow people to use necessary modern healthcare). Their expenses are low and they have no debt.
In short Amish have adopted enough modern technology to "afford" a SAHM they marry young, and a young SAHM is a fertility gold mine.
When Keeperman says R selected, I think he means allowing for a certain openness of experience in your children's lives instead of being programmatic. The Amish certainly hold their children to high standards and make demands of them,, including teaching of various skills, but lots of their kids time involves open ended play or boredom and the opportunity to choose that life for themselves (Rumspringa). Far more freedom than the average Private School to Prep School to Ivy League to Law school pipeline of the average upper middle class WEIRD family.
The is is a weird way to redefine R vs K. I always understood it to mean low vs high parental investment. Compare Rumspringa to the normie ritual of sending your kids off to college to reenact movies about college debauchery.
I actually observed this with the first round of Tiger parenting preaching from Amy Chua 20 years ago. As with Vivek, it wasn’t well received then either.
But something she points out that ironically aligns with your argument is the great burden placed on parents. In her understanding, it’s those white affluent parents who walk on eggshells to protect their children’s self-esteem and spoil them rotten with birthday parties and constant indulgence.
So, prospective parents basically get two choices: obsessively groom the child for super success or become their slaves and turn them into maladjusted monsters.
I think the key, as you suggest, is to create a culture of leisure and chilling out. People, especially women, are too stressed to reproduce and raise kiddos. Less work, less doomscrolling, and more moments of boredom and idleness for us adults as well as the kids. I agree that letting the children play and getting away from politics definitely eases the tension.
Yep. I actually ended up writing a whole essay about your speech here. It just got me thinking about the situation. There’s a call to crunchy simplicity underneath it all. It’s undeniable that the culture of over-parenting and being too online has killed the mood and discouraged settling down in a loving marriage.
I’ll let you know when/if it gets picked up somewhere.
You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. While centralized government policies designed to encourage childbreaing are likely to be counterproductive, there are many policies which make having and raising children more painful and expensive, and they should be done away with. For instance, if you live in a major American city or suburb, parks where you and your children can spend time should be safe, clean, pleasant, accessible. You should be able to buy a car which can fit a large family comfortably and safely without being wealthy (the killing of the station wagon via regulations is a matter of policy.) Tax policies should reflect the fact that you're deferring hedonic spending in order to raise future taxpayers. Homeschoolers should be given a reasonable portion of the money they're saving the state. Etc.
Most policies that are implemented to induce higher birth rates don't work, and especially tend not to work on the population they're targeting.
I don't disagree that "politics is interested in you." Don't want to be naive about that. But the goal should be depoliticization of this topic, just as the goal for trans stuff should be depoliticization. Politicizing stuff that should not be political is how the left gains new power. We want to starve them of oxygen.
Birthrates have been politicized since the Fabians. At this point, the only people having and raising lots of kids are those with a coherent alternate worldview/ideology, and they'll keep having and raising them no matter whether you help or hinder them, but the decent thing to do would be to stop hindering.
It's impossible to incentivize a behavioral change on this issue in isolation, but at least the people doing the right thing should stop being punished for it.
I'm very skeptical about the ability to depoliticize such a fundamental and polarizing issue, especially when the other side is not interested in depoliticizing it.
College admissions is driving the crazy and expensive over-investment in scheduled activities.
If childhood is to be restored, then educated, professional-class parents are going to have to accept that their kids likely won't be admitted to the same selective colleges the parents attended. I know it sounds obnoxious, but that can feel like a step down; if your kid is bright, you naturally want them to have a college experience on par with your own (with all the small class sizes and prestige perks). If your degree from a "good" school opened doors for you, then doubly so.
But attitude shift is possible. I live in the Northeast around people with degrees from "fancy" schools. A handful of the high-achieving kids go to the Ivies but a growing contingent, usually white males, go to Southern schools like University of Alabama.
Besides, so many Zoomers grind out their childhood and adolescence in striving activities, only to be rejected by their schools of choice. I tend to think that when and if the Zoomers have kids, they'll have to recognize that parenting around college admissions is a fool's game.
Not adding more fuel to leftist political machines is a good point. There is a real danger of misaligned incentives and wasteful "programs".
I don't buy the premise that the topic of "natalism" can be left out of the political discourse altogether, because that assumes that it starts out from a neutral position. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We have negative propaganda in the form of "more humans pollute the planet" (a half-truth at best) so "be a good citizen and end your line" (except for immigrants, of course, we need those as "workers").
We have a suicidal and unprecedented transfer of wealth to the old, and there is no mechanism in todays aging democracies to put and end to it.
We have unobtainable housing due to regulation and monetary policy decisions, causing a flight into assets. At the same time cities are increasingly unsafe due to demographic changes, putting even more pressure on the housing market and requiring even more parental oversight.
We have increasing credentialism due to labour laws, the never-ending extension of the "education" scam and the requirement to Keep Up due to increasing pressure on the labour market due to immigration.
The rat-race of parental over-investment in children is triggered by those factors above, it did not just materialise out of thin air. To tell people to just "take it easy maan" will not work, because the anxiety-inducing living conditions prevail and they weigh heavier than words.
How do you want to keep this out of the political domain?
I don't think anti-natalism is a meaningful political force. People who say they won't have kids because of climate change are fringe weirdos looking for an excuse not to have kids anyway.
I'm all for solving the problem of living in an anxiety-driven society. More kids will be an effect of soling that problem. But I don't think we solve it by talking about natalism (which, again, imo, only produces more anxiety.)
I agree there is hardly any explicit "anti-natalism", just rationalisations that may sound like that. I know quite a few people that don't want to have kids and sometimes use climatism etc as justification. They aren't weirdos, they're just a bit neurotic but otherwise pleasant and normal people.
Unless I misunderstood you, your suggestion is also "talking about natalism", but in a less alarmist, climatism-of-the-right way: let go, stop being a helicopter parent, let kids figure things out.
So you'd rather "let it crash"? Because the crash will come.
We spend around 10% of GDP on the elderly. If you paid that out to every parent today it would be around $36,000 a year or ~$650,000 a kid by age 18. I think you intuitively understand this would easily trigger more births.
But what about…country X! They gave parents (some tiny X% of that) and it didn’t work! Yeah, because it’s some tiny X% of that! Not 100% of that or anything close!
But what about Hungary! Don’t they spend 5% of gdp or something!
Hungary has a bunch of tax breaks and government service subsidies for working moms that dump their kids in daycare and follow a very specific (ex soviet) life script that is in every other way anti-fertility. It provides basically nothing to anyone who doesn’t want to follow that life script. It provides no incentive to the husbands earnings despite being the #1 economic correlate to higher fertility (they have no concept of married filing jointly in Hungary).
In short you need to give people cash, preferably in the form of payroll tax breaks for married couples.
We already spend about half that 10% on kids, unfortunately we give it to the teachers union (and other government agents) rather than parents, so 50% of the problem can be solved without spending another dime just by giving parents control over the money.
The other 5% we just need to fix the funding mechanism for retirement benefits.
The structure of these retirement programs is such that they highly incentivize childlessness, because benefits get paid out regardless of whether you had the children to pay for them. In insurance terms, the costs of childbearing are the premiums and the benefits are the claims. There is a huge mismatch therefore between premiums and claims causing a classic insurance death spiral. No insurance regulator would allow such a structure to exist in the private market. I note that high fertility groups like the Amish actually get to avoid SS and Medicare taxes.
We aren’t going to fix this on the claims end. We can fix this in the premium end by raising payroll taxes on those with fewer children and lowering it in those with more. You simply recognize that if raising future taxpayers is a legitimate form of payroll tax contribution and price appropriately.
Once you eliminate the free riding problem people can live as they please. I hope they have more kids but if they don’t at least things are finally “fair”.
I strongly doubt that “neurotic UMC lib parenting” is the cause of fertility shortfall. I hate on neurotic UMC libs as much as the next guy, but I see lots of people who aren’t neurotic UMC libs struggle with raising a family even though they let them play in the street and don’t drag them to spelling bees.
It costs fucking money! Houses are expensive. Healthcare is expensive. Childcare is expensive. Your time is expensive. If you don’t like the public schools (we gave it a shot, we threw in the towel) then education is expensive!
I ran the math on what it costs to live in the house I grew up in on my dad’s salary. He could not afford it today! He let me play in the street with friends but that assumes you can afford to live on that street.
There are two people I see that oppose this:
1) cheapskates who want to continue free riding the system
2) masochistic people who want having lots of children to make them special and balk at the idea of making it any easier
Sorry, I can’t come up with any better reasons to defend the status quo here. If you don’t want to spend political capital on this issue fine, but what I see people spending political capital on seems a lot worse than tax breaks for parents.
I agree with most of this, but the question remains whether explicitly targeting natalism through policy has any salutary effects. I don't think it does.
Once you get beyond three children, it becomes impossible to program their lives. That’s why large families tend toward natural R selection and why the most K selected types are the ones with only one or two children. It’s a serpent devouring its own tail. The fact we even have a conference like this is an indicator that we were being judged by God and found wanting.
Yes. I believe it is a kind of judgement beyond our understanding.
The segments of the American population which consistently have the most children are those with high IQs, diligence, conscientiousness: the Haredim and Amish. Not R-selected at all.
It's very difficult to pass one's values on to one's children if you live in a community which lives by opposite values and hand your children over to that community's institutions for education; you are saying and doing contradictory things.
A lot of people don't realize that the Amish are pretty successful economically. Many work as skilled tradesmen at good wages (the farms don't make much money anymore on their own unless they are also running a retail business, and they often allow normies to drive them to factories to work). They don't have to pay SS or Medicare taxes (that's 15.3% of income right there). Healthcare cost is low (they do allow people to use necessary modern healthcare). Their expenses are low and they have no debt.
In short Amish have adopted enough modern technology to "afford" a SAHM they marry young, and a young SAHM is a fertility gold mine.
When Keeperman says R selected, I think he means allowing for a certain openness of experience in your children's lives instead of being programmatic. The Amish certainly hold their children to high standards and make demands of them,, including teaching of various skills, but lots of their kids time involves open ended play or boredom and the opportunity to choose that life for themselves (Rumspringa). Far more freedom than the average Private School to Prep School to Ivy League to Law school pipeline of the average upper middle class WEIRD family.
The is is a weird way to redefine R vs K. I always understood it to mean low vs high parental investment. Compare Rumspringa to the normie ritual of sending your kids off to college to reenact movies about college debauchery.
I actually observed this with the first round of Tiger parenting preaching from Amy Chua 20 years ago. As with Vivek, it wasn’t well received then either.
But something she points out that ironically aligns with your argument is the great burden placed on parents. In her understanding, it’s those white affluent parents who walk on eggshells to protect their children’s self-esteem and spoil them rotten with birthday parties and constant indulgence.
So, prospective parents basically get two choices: obsessively groom the child for super success or become their slaves and turn them into maladjusted monsters.
I think the key, as you suggest, is to create a culture of leisure and chilling out. People, especially women, are too stressed to reproduce and raise kiddos. Less work, less doomscrolling, and more moments of boredom and idleness for us adults as well as the kids. I agree that letting the children play and getting away from politics definitely eases the tension.
Lots of this is resolved by people simply logging off. Haidt is right about this.
Yep. I actually ended up writing a whole essay about your speech here. It just got me thinking about the situation. There’s a call to crunchy simplicity underneath it all. It’s undeniable that the culture of over-parenting and being too online has killed the mood and discouraged settling down in a loving marriage.
I’ll let you know when/if it gets picked up somewhere.
Here it is:
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/07/dont-overcomplicate-babymaking/
You may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you. While centralized government policies designed to encourage childbreaing are likely to be counterproductive, there are many policies which make having and raising children more painful and expensive, and they should be done away with. For instance, if you live in a major American city or suburb, parks where you and your children can spend time should be safe, clean, pleasant, accessible. You should be able to buy a car which can fit a large family comfortably and safely without being wealthy (the killing of the station wagon via regulations is a matter of policy.) Tax policies should reflect the fact that you're deferring hedonic spending in order to raise future taxpayers. Homeschoolers should be given a reasonable portion of the money they're saving the state. Etc.
Most policies that are implemented to induce higher birth rates don't work, and especially tend not to work on the population they're targeting.
I don't disagree that "politics is interested in you." Don't want to be naive about that. But the goal should be depoliticization of this topic, just as the goal for trans stuff should be depoliticization. Politicizing stuff that should not be political is how the left gains new power. We want to starve them of oxygen.
Birthrates have been politicized since the Fabians. At this point, the only people having and raising lots of kids are those with a coherent alternate worldview/ideology, and they'll keep having and raising them no matter whether you help or hinder them, but the decent thing to do would be to stop hindering.
It's impossible to incentivize a behavioral change on this issue in isolation, but at least the people doing the right thing should stop being punished for it.
I'm very skeptical about the ability to depoliticize such a fundamental and polarizing issue, especially when the other side is not interested in depoliticizing it.
Very well put!
Based
Brilliant
You remain quite shit at your ostensible métier, L0m3z (sic):
https://conservativedesign.substack.com/p/confidential-to-lomez
College admissions is driving the crazy and expensive over-investment in scheduled activities.
If childhood is to be restored, then educated, professional-class parents are going to have to accept that their kids likely won't be admitted to the same selective colleges the parents attended. I know it sounds obnoxious, but that can feel like a step down; if your kid is bright, you naturally want them to have a college experience on par with your own (with all the small class sizes and prestige perks). If your degree from a "good" school opened doors for you, then doubly so.
But attitude shift is possible. I live in the Northeast around people with degrees from "fancy" schools. A handful of the high-achieving kids go to the Ivies but a growing contingent, usually white males, go to Southern schools like University of Alabama.
Besides, so many Zoomers grind out their childhood and adolescence in striving activities, only to be rejected by their schools of choice. I tend to think that when and if the Zoomers have kids, they'll have to recognize that parenting around college admissions is a fool's game.
Not adding more fuel to leftist political machines is a good point. There is a real danger of misaligned incentives and wasteful "programs".
I don't buy the premise that the topic of "natalism" can be left out of the political discourse altogether, because that assumes that it starts out from a neutral position. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We have negative propaganda in the form of "more humans pollute the planet" (a half-truth at best) so "be a good citizen and end your line" (except for immigrants, of course, we need those as "workers").
We have a suicidal and unprecedented transfer of wealth to the old, and there is no mechanism in todays aging democracies to put and end to it.
We have unobtainable housing due to regulation and monetary policy decisions, causing a flight into assets. At the same time cities are increasingly unsafe due to demographic changes, putting even more pressure on the housing market and requiring even more parental oversight.
We have increasing credentialism due to labour laws, the never-ending extension of the "education" scam and the requirement to Keep Up due to increasing pressure on the labour market due to immigration.
The rat-race of parental over-investment in children is triggered by those factors above, it did not just materialise out of thin air. To tell people to just "take it easy maan" will not work, because the anxiety-inducing living conditions prevail and they weigh heavier than words.
How do you want to keep this out of the political domain?
I don't think anti-natalism is a meaningful political force. People who say they won't have kids because of climate change are fringe weirdos looking for an excuse not to have kids anyway.
I'm all for solving the problem of living in an anxiety-driven society. More kids will be an effect of soling that problem. But I don't think we solve it by talking about natalism (which, again, imo, only produces more anxiety.)
I agree there is hardly any explicit "anti-natalism", just rationalisations that may sound like that. I know quite a few people that don't want to have kids and sometimes use climatism etc as justification. They aren't weirdos, they're just a bit neurotic but otherwise pleasant and normal people.
Unless I misunderstood you, your suggestion is also "talking about natalism", but in a less alarmist, climatism-of-the-right way: let go, stop being a helicopter parent, let kids figure things out.
So you'd rather "let it crash"? Because the crash will come.