American Thought Leaders - Elon Musk Has Been Sounding the Alarm on Birthrates. Is He Onto Something?–Catherine Pakaluk

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Why are people in developed economies having fewer and fewer children? Is it really because raising children is too expensive? Or are there other factors at play? How will declining population rates affect Western economies and societies?And why are some families bucking this trend, and having five, six, seven, or even eight children? How does having children affect a woman’s long-term happiness?In this episode, we sit down with social scientist and researcher Catherine Pakaluk, author of “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

We don't know what the economy will look like with shrinking population, but I mean, you cannot have economic growth without population growth. Why are people in developed economies having fewer and fewer children? Is it really because raising children is simply too expensive? Or are there other factors at play? We should not be so sure that we can count on people wanting children. And why are some families bucking this trend and having five, six, seven or even eight children? How does having children impact a woman's long-term happiness?

Today I sit down with social scientist and researcher Catherine Pakaluk, author of Hannah's Children, the women quietly defying the birth dearth. This is American Thought Leaders and I'm Janja Kellek. Catherine Pakaluk, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Thanks. It's great to be here. Catherine, you talk about the situation of low birth rates, and you address it from a whole series of angles that I hadn't frankly thought about. And one of them is, frankly,

is this even an issue? Aren't we in a better position? Isn't it a, you know, what happens in civilized affluent societies that birth rates are lower and then, and that's actually a good thing? Is this a, is this a real problem at all? Yeah. Okay. Well, putting on my demographic hat for a minute, demographers use this magic number of 2, sometimes 2.05, 2.1, as a kind of special number. It's the number above which two children per woman or per couple, above which a population will grow, even modestly, your births are about 2.5 or 3, below which your population will eventually shrink. This number is called the replacement rate. Over the course of the last couple of hundred years, you know, we can take the United States, we would say go back to about 1800, and the birth rate has come down from about eight children per woman to now below two. It's almost unimaginable. Eight children per woman was the average?

Eight children per woman was the typical number of children, right? I mean, now this is an average, yeah. But that is an enormous decline, and it's a decrease, and it comes along with many of the things that I think the ordinary person would consider good. Economic growth, industrialization in the best sense, progress, let's say reductions in child mortality. I mean, those are terrible things to have. And so we could think about that high birth rate

as reflecting not all of those children survive to adulthood. Sort of more productive society in the sense that each worker is able to add more value, more productivity to the society. So you don't need as many workers. And so in a broad and global sense, the reduction of birth rates, and I'm not saying it's the reason, but in a broad and global sense,

the reduction of birth rates from about eight down to about two, we'll say it goes along with lots of good things. And so all right, so what about this magic number of two? Well, where we are now is we're going below two. This is not something that really the experts predicted or believed would likely happen because so much of the focus was on kind of what did we do about these exploding birth rates and that's, you know, people with old enough to remember

can remember the time when the concern was that people had too many children. Of course, there were the population bomb and all that. I mean, there's still people that believe this. There are still people who believe this. I get emails on a regular basis from quacks around the world who say, shame on you for the work that you're doing. There are still too many people in the world.

So that is still present. But you asked the question, well, what about, is this really a problem where we are today? And the reason it may be a problem, and we should at least raise the question, is because the things that I mentioned, economic growth, rises in productivity, we don't believe those things can occur with a shrinking

population. And so sustained birth rates below two for generations upon generations will lead mathematically to countries and nations and ultimately the globe as we are really on that precipice now shrinking its population. But if I can add a little bit on here, I mean the the way that that's being mitigated, for example, in the U.S. and frankly, many liberal democracies is through immigration. That's right. Right? That's right.

And that has been the mitigation for quite some time. I think the assumption has been that that would be okay, that it would kind of balance itself out over time. There'll be kind of low birth rate countries welcoming immigrants from all over the place with high birth rates and that, well we're not gonna ask questions about what happens in 50 or 100 years, but that's been maybe just an unspoken settlement

that countries with low birth rates have been happy to have. But as lots of people have pointed out recently, Elon Musk fairly recently, the immigrants aren't going to be there in the future because what we call a convergence to low birth rates is really the iron fact of modern demography. So all around the country, the countries that you might have thought, oh, well, they're still having eight or nine children per household in that country. That's just not true anymore. Well, and so now we come to what you call the Gordian knot in your book. Why? I mean, you're trying to address this.

So lay out to me what people have thought. And, of course, you do this very well in the book. What people have thought are the reasons, and then some other things that you've happened upon. Yeah. So maybe I'll take a step back and say one of the things that I learned in this process was that we should not be so sure that we can count on people wanting children. And so it raises that question, why do people have children, and where do they come from? And we could go back to someone like Thomas Malthus, who's

very concerned that the human race will always be stuck in these cycles of overpopulating beyond our resources and then encountering famine and destruction. And then the population would shrink back down because of all the famine and the destruction, and then we would outbreed our resources again. And this was this kind of Malthusian scenario.

We think of people like Paul Ehrlich and the population bomb as being kind of neo-Malthusians, people who believe that human beings are likely to sort of breed irrationally, just consuming all the resources and breeding up to the level of our resources at all times. What we know now, if we didn't know it then, we know now is that human beings don't breed like animals. We don't breed up to the level of our resources. What we see over time is in fact that these dire predictions of outbreeding our resources have never really come true. What we see instead is something that, well, forgive me, it looks fairly rational. It looks as if people make decisions about their family sizes in response to local conditions,

the way they do about all kinds of other things. So then what's going on? How did we end up where we are? Well, I would want to point to a couple of things. One is going back to 1800 when people had eight or nine children per family, we don't need children as much as we used to. And so that sounds rather utilitarian. You know, do people just have kids because they needed them? And that raises a steep question about why people do anything or why they choose anything. And I think fundamentally they choose things because they want

them or need them. And children are pretty useful to have in a time when societies are trying to sort of make ends meet, if we'll put it that way. It's really difficult for us today to imagine the kind of economic deprivation that most people lived with 200 years ago. So in those days, children were labor, they were help. Imagine if you don't have running water and somebody has to go bring water in from the well. You know, having an extra pair of hands is really helpful. We don't even need to sort of expand on while kids are labor on the farm. I mean, they are labor on the farm. But simple things like doing the dishes and getting the water, I mean, all of those things, more hands make life easier. And what's happened over the last really 200 years

is that all of those types of things where you'd say, well, more hands obviously makes life better, we don't need children for those things anymore. The other big thing we used to need children for was support in our old age. And of course, you can point to a number of things, but really, kind of New Deal style, large government programs, universal pension programs, really reduce the need for the typical family to think about children as a way to support yourself in your old age. You know, something just occurred to me,

too. There seems to be, and I don't know if you've looked at this empirically, but there also seems to be a lot less of a sense that as a kid, you have to take care of your parents in their old age. Now, is that a reaction to this? Or how did that? Well, I think it comes together. I think it's packaged together, right?

We have an expectation that society will take care of you. We call this a social safety net. Yeah, I mean, I think, but now you hear older folks talk about not wanting to burden their children. So these are different ways in which I like to say it's a kind of erosion of the need value of children to the household. And so what's left over is the want value. Right. Well, and also just like what's socially sort of acceptable. That's right. That's right. That's such, it's such a big question. That's right. What's normal?

What's normal. Yeah. And what's normal as it evolves, we are such social animals that what's normal becomes itself a cost on us to deviate from what's normal, right? So that's a cost. Of course we have to confront ultimately also the change in tech sort of sexual reproductive technology that comes in the 20th century because all of a sudden you can you can couple up all you want and children are not necessarily the byproduct of that coupling up and and so you know these are all different ways we've we've we've made it far less likely that sort of the ordinary course of human life will lead to children. So we do have to ask. So it's not a relevant question why people want children, if they want them, when they see them fitting into the life course,

whether they see them as something that you fundamentally do after you've gotten everything else in order, or whether they're the kind of thing that you do when you're a young person, because it's easier to have children when you're young. So this points to your point. What's normal to have? How many is normal to have? And when is it normal to have your first child? Today would be around 30. Overall, just to sum it up, going back to 1800, you see that the need value of children has decreased and eroded in a couple of ways. And some of these ways are, I think, normal and natural. We became wealthier. We didn't need as many people going to the well to get crap water. More children survived out of infancy, of course. So, you know, if you wanted to end up with four,

you might have had to have six or seven. So more children survived, which is obviously a wonderfully good thing. And then finally, just going back to this point about the 1960s, scholars sometimes call it the contraceptive revolution. The pill and legal abortion kind of does this thing where there's, well, just a maximum control to time and plan your births around your career and the other wants that are in your life. So together, the 1960s is the major inflection point of married mothers going into the workforce. And the opportunity cost of having children increases dramatically.

Ceteris paribus, we should see fewer children. You described the trend and the reality, I I guess as a train wreck. So why is it so dire, given, you know, our modern sensibilities and the incredibly, you know, prosperous, and this is, people often forget about this, because of course, there's a lot of social strife, and we live in an unbelievable time of prosperity, where just a whole lot of things, which are huge issues for people, even a century ago, certainly Certainly two are just not. Yes. So why is it a big problem? I would like to say there are three reasons it's a big problem. There are economic reasons, political reasons, and kind of human reasons. You cannot have economic

growth without population growth. You don't have to have eight children per family to have economic growth. but if you have a shrinking population there are just not people to do all the jobs. Some people will say, well what about AI and what about robots and things like that? That is probably a facile answer. At the end of the day, if you like being able to drive up to the Starbucks and have a coffee in the middle of your road trip, we need people to staff these things. Starbucks and have a coffee in the middle of your road trip. We need people to staff these things.

We don't know what the economy will look like with shrinking population. When you think about a town in the middle of the Rust Belt that's been kind of emptied out of people, and when you go through that town, you say, oh yeah, over there, that was a fast food joint, but it hasn't been open for 20 years and it looks kind of terrible. Even today, we know that most of the government projections, when they score the impact of bills here in Washington, we know that they incorporate and assume a much higher birth rate than we have. So economic impacts, the political impacts, you know, now I have to speculate a little bit more, but we are going to see, I think, increasing political instability over the question of identity. I mean, well, just to put it simply, I mean, these kind of nationalist

questions that are on the table, we see this certainly today at play, like what does it mean to be a nation? I mean, all these kind of questions, which I can't answer, but I think part of why they stress people out is because when you're a shrinking population, you do have to kind of deeply wonder if your way of life or who you are is going to go away. Setting aside the dysfunctions and the immigration system,

and those are legitimate matters of political debate, it doesn't surprise me at all that when people are worried about whether their own way of life or their own nationality may disappear in the future, they would see immigration as a bigger threat. And the third thing is kind of a human reason to be worried about low birth rates. You know, when I was a kid, people used to write about it. They would say, in Japan, nobody has cousins. And in Japan, nobody has brothers and sisters. And they would say this about, you know, it's like there were these lone places.

But what I grew up with, as described in a few isolated, you know, maybe Asian or Western European countries, Spain, that is today the global reality. It's where everybody's going. They will have fewer and smaller kinship networks. And so it's led some people to speculate about whether one of the reasons we see so much investment in political identity today, and, you know, we'll say larger identity politics in general, is because our own kinship identities are shrinking. We don't come from clans or tribes. We don't have extended families the way we used to. We don't have a dozen crazy aunts and uncles. And so there's

some kind of human loss there that I think is difficult to calculate. It's a more atomized society, right? So there's a bunch of people out there, but you're not related to them. So that raises questions about loneliness, atomization, individualism, the types of things that I think people are wondering about today. We put a very high value in this society on happiness. So how does happiness fit into this? You mentioned loneliness. But that's tied. It's very tied.

As you say, there's various ways of measuring it. I think we like to think of these surveys like how happy are you? Like it's all just garbage. Actually, I think a lot of it's pretty good stuff. They don't ask you how happy you are. They call you up and they say, you know, all things considered, you know, how's it going today? You ask a lot of people that question and you ask the same people that question over time and you start to see how it rises and falls. And we do see that these happiness measures, they fluctuate pretty consistently with things like how many how many close

friends do you think you do do you have somebody you could call in a in a pinch but certainly loneliness is is there's a lot of ways to measure it we know that it's increasing and very interesting to me I just scratched the surface of it it's a tremendous number of medical professionals that are researching the effects of loneliness on all sorts of long-term health outcomes. It's one of the reasons why people who are stably married over time have better health outcomes. But wait, you're saying loneliness leads to much worse health outcomes? Is that what you're saying?

Correct, yeah. Yeah, and these are things I just scratched the surface of when I started working on this book. Yeah, loneliness is correlated with all of these sorts of things to the extent that some medical professionals are saying it's a kind of something that should be elevated in public awareness as the kind of thing. Certainly, people with large and robust kinship networks, because they come from large and robust families, you know, it's like loneliness is not your problem. Finding some alone time is your problem, right? You know, if you've got four

or five siblings, you know, you're looking for a spot in the basement where you can get on the phone for five minutes without your siblings constantly on you. But it turns out that, you know, having all of those siblings around, having lots of cousins, lots of aunts and uncles, it can be annoying in the short term or in a moment it's annoying, but that it makes you immune from a bunch of things that are negative, right? Well, and the other sort of, I guess, obvious question, obvious to me, because this is what I keep thinking about is secularization. Yeah. Yeah. And how does that fit into this picture? Right. Because, you know, for example, every single one of the women. Yes. That you went to 55 that

you interviewed for this project. Yeah. Was religious. And that's actually also a question. I mean, why is that? How did that happen? Why didn't you interview the non-religious women with large families? Right. Right. Well, there's two parts of your question. I looked for them. I looked for them. Now, this is a small qualitative study, meaning if you want to do two or three-hour interviews with people, you can't interview thousands of people.

But in my search for women to interview, I did look for secular women. In fact, I talked to and called the National Atheist Association or one of the National Atheist Association, who in your database do you have for me who has a number of children that I can interview? And they came back to me and they said, we couldn't find anybody. I said, okay, I'm not super surprised. So how did it happen?

Well, in part, because if you set out to interview women with let's say larger than normal numbers of children, you go to cities and you ask people where where are families hanging out in your city? And you are invariably going to get the answer well they point to this church or they point to that church. So we we went to those places looking for our interviewees. So how does secularization fit into this picture? Religious faith, particularly biblical faith, provides a very strong want value for children. It gives us a basis for wanting children.

So now children are blessings from God. They have spiritual value. Know that the relationship you have with your child will last forever these are all things that are built into that religious package a culture that's rising in secularity will be falling in the want value of children I think that's the story of secularization fascinating well there's also another element that I hadn't thought about until just now, and that's, you know, even in my extended family, there's people who really want to have children,

but it's actually very hard. Fertility actually has gone down itself. That's right. Never mind the ability to stop it. That's right. Right? Yes, that's right. So, I guess a lot of people don't mind, but some people do. Yeah, that's right. So, I guess a lot of people don't mind, but some people do. Yeah, that's right.

Right? Yeah, so that's an important thing to talk about. So we know that it has become increasingly common that couples would suffer infertility. We do not think that medical infertility is the lion's share of the decrease in birth rates. It's across the globe, but I think it's always important to talk about the fact that that's increasing. A piece of what we call medical infertility, of course, is we have to always separate the incapacity of a man or a woman to conceive or to

generate a child, which could be a result of medical deficiencies or other problems or hardships. But another piece of, we'll say, medical infertility is trying to have children at too old of an age for your biological makeup. So we know that there's a fertility sort of sweet spot for women, especially. And for women, that sweet spot really is in their 20s right so women are really highly fertile in their late teens their early 20s and that really starts to decline already by the mid-20s it's

starting to decline and then into the 30s most people are vastly unaware of that so we've done is we've shifted marriage to the around the late 20s early 30s socially, right? That's the socially acceptable time to get married. So a piece of what we think of as medical infertility today is Getting the timing wrong for the life cycle the female life cycle We've covered a lot of dimensions here But I want to come back to this question of happiness Because you quote a lot of statistics in the book that show that just women in general have become

unhappier. And how important are kids in this? What evidence do we have around this? And, you know, it's sort of a, it's supposed to be kind of part of the liberation, isn't it? Right. Yeah. I can speak to this. Some of the literature calls this a paradox. Perhaps one of the most interesting papers that's been written about this, a of the literature calls this a paradox. Perhaps one of the most interesting papers that's been written about this, a pair of economists at the University of Michigan wrote a paper called The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness. They looked at these self-reports of happiness

that are available in many, many social surveys. And they go back to about the 1970s, and they look going forward to the 80s, the 90s, the 2000s, and they show two things. You know, one is a subtle reduction in the amount of women reporting being very happy or happy at different levels. So a decrease in women's overall reports of happiness. Another thing that was interesting was a change in their position relative to male reported happiness. And so they included both of these findings, right?

So whereas in the beginning of the 1970s, basically women reported generally being a bit happier on average than males in these surveys, by the end of the study period that they were looking at, that had reversed to where males reported generally being a bit more satisfied with life than females. There's a very interesting study done by some demographers that look at what we would call the gold standard kind of data about happiness. What's the gold standard kind of data? Well, we would interview biological identical twins. And we would look at different choices they make in their lifetimes and then look

at their measures of happiness. Why would we do that? Well, because we know that there's a biological component to your happiness. And so comparing across individuals who have different biological components, it's not always obvious. So if you looked at twins and you said, oh, look at this. comparing across individuals who have different biological components, it's not always obvious, right?

So if you looked at twins and you said, oh, look at this, it looks like twins with children are happier than twins without children. I mean, they're the same twin, right? And go down the line, you know, with a job, without a job, I mean, all the types of things that could influence happiness. So this is the kind of data set that these demographers looked at. And they looked at the differential impact of a child on the happiness of males in partnerships and the happiness of females in partnerships.

They said, wow, basically everybody that we looked at, males and females, they're really a lot happier when they're coupled up. Being in a long-term partnership, typically marriage, is really great for your happiness. They said, what about the addition of a child? Does that change your reports of happiness? And what they saw was that once men were coupled up, happily coupled up, the child didn't have a substantial impact on their, they're already pretty happy. But for women, there's this extra big boost when that child comes for women and not for men. It's a very differential impact of at least having one child on the happiness of women in this particular data set.

Okay, so what does all that mean? suggests that as birth rates have decreased, as the total fertility rates have decreased, that perhaps that's one of the culprits in leading to this reversal of the happiness gap for men and women. So, you know, this is all, it's new, it's kind of speculative. I would tell you there's not vastly high quality literature on the relation between children and sort of long-term happiness. A lot of the studies that look at the impact of children on, we'll say, couples' marriages or women's happiness really looks at kind of the short-term impact. They don't look long enough. Why is that a problem? Well, if you talk to somebody who has a small toddler, you know, and say, how is your life going? They might look like

they're a little less satisfied with life than about three years ago, right? Because they're managing more things and things. But what you really want to look at is kind of like the long life course. And we generally see that married men and women with children are really at the top of the happiness pyramid. Well, and there's another, I can't help but think about, there's very, very strong data that shows that children that come out of arrangements like that, you know, coupled relationships, have statistically a huge, higher, hugely higher likelihood of being successful, break out of economic hardship, and so forth. And that's, I can't help but think there's a relationship there. So let's take a moment now, I can't help but think there's a relationship there.

So let's take a moment now. I want to kind of talk about, you know, the study you did and the people you spoke with, but tell me a little bit about yourself. Like, you know, how you came into deciding to go do deeply talk to, you know, 55 different women. And also, you know, I noticed that you spoke to the women, not necessarily the fathers as well. And that's curious. But tell me how you got to that in the first place. Where do you come from? Yeah, that's right. I've been looking at, as an economist, the changes in the birth rates for 20 years, more than that. It's a really interesting question. I came from a larger than average family. It was always an interesting question to me.

My parents were very pro-life, so I grew up in a very pro-life household. By definition, when you grow up in a pro-life, kind of conservative community, you ask questions a lot about why people don't want babies and whether babies are always good. And that led me in college to ask kind of bigger questions about what do we know about whether babies are always good.

So fast forward to I'm in college and I'm doing research at the National Institutes of Health. I'm in a lab where we are studying the relationship between AIDS and cancer. So this is the 1990s and not a lot is known about the relationship of AIDS and cancer. So AIDS we understand is caused by a human retrovirus HIV and it's it's one of a few human retroviruses and so I think this is really interesting stuff. I'm thinking maybe I'd like to go into medicine. And I hear people kind of over the water cooler, as they say,

kind of hush-hush saying things like, well, you know, it's really probably for the better that AIDS will wipe out a lot of people in Africa because there's too many people in Africa. And as a young person, I mean, I was really appalled by this. I thought, really? I mean, could that be true? I mean, we have to celebrate this horrible disease because there's too many people. I mean, I thought this was pretty scandalous. I mean, I thought it was terrible. So the people around me are MD-PhDs. They're doing this

research. And that was a really quick introduction to the idea that because you have a lot of letters after your name or you're kind of considered an expert, you may not be a terribly ethical person or you may not have wise judgment. But in any case, this implanted in me this deep question. Is there a problem with people, population growth for economic growth? Is this an obstacle to prosperity, right? And that's what led me to think about economics. I thought, I don't really know the answer to this question. I don't think it should be the case that we have to celebrate disease. But I wanted to

know the answer. So I went into economics and of course I studied all kinds of things. And ultimately, of course, what I learned as I was in graduate school and working on more minute topics was that we're really not in any kind of situation of needing to worry about overpopulation, but actually, as we discussed, birth rates are falling. What I encountered over and over was this, we'll say, theoretical puzzle. Are fewer children being born because people demand fewer children? Are they lower wants and needs? Or are fewer children being born because it's become, in some sense, structurally more difficult, or the costs are too high?

People will say on the street, it's just too expensive to have a kid today. That kind of thing. So is this basically a demand problem or a supply problem? And the literature, the theoretical literature, didn't have an answer for that. You could tell the story both ways. And when, as a social scientist, when the data can't deliver you the answer, what you need to do is revise your theory. You need to get information from people. And so for this kind of a topic, you know, how people decide about their family size, it seemed to me that qualitative work, long-form qualitative interviews, would be the right approach.

So although most economists today do not do this kind of long-form interview process, I thought, well, this is a place to start. Is it the end of the research? No. What you do is after you learn things in the qualitative interviews that you didn't know and I heard lots of things we didn't know well then you can build that into new surveys and then you can launch those new surveys with you know tens of thousands of people and hopefully really then start to zero in on things that really are helpful to

think about the problem well so what are the biggest things that you learned then? Why don't we just start there? Because I'm immediately wanting to know what you discovered. Yeah. The simple way to say what did I learn was that falling birth rates are more of a demand problem than a cost problem or a supply problem. What I found talking to people who have larger than normal families, if it was a cost problem, like an outlay problem, you would sort of expect to find out that if you had all these people with extra kids, it was because they had smaller costs.

Right. Or they were more affluent. Yeah, or they were more affluent, or something like that. So I didn't find that at all. What I was struck by in interview after interview after interview was this language of very intense want, right? Desire, the sense that whatever the cost, this was worth doing. It was the focus of so much of their activity in their life because it was so

worthwhile. They talked about having children the way many people would talk about getting healthier or about getting wealthier, right? As something that you wouldn't be done doing it, right? Have you ever talked to a health nut who said, you know, I've kind of reached a point now where I've gotten healthy enough. I think I'm done being healthy. Or I've reached a, I just want to stay exactly this healthy, but I'm not going to keep going any further. How many people would say I'm done growing my wealth? Like I would really like to stop. We understand that to be a very bizarre, certainly people, it may not be their central focus in life.

I hear you loud and clear. Yeah. But this is really interesting. People assume that this is a never-ending process that you want to better. Something that you see as objectively and substantively good, you don't put a limit on it in your life. So what I encountered was a group of women who basically described childbearing in that way. Like, look, this is a substantive good. And so long as I can afford the next child, we gonna we're gonna try to be open to the next child we're gonna try

to have the next job well and in some cases like even if I'm not sure it'll work out it'll work out right yeah well I think that's exactly right yeah and so yeah I interviewed people at the top of the income spectrum and at the bottom I found them of all types in between. And I was so fascinated to discover that the want value of children arising from faith among women of very different faiths could look so similar. In my sample, everybody identified with a religion. I do present in the book the least religious woman I found. So I tell her

stories. It's very important to tell because she will say, she said to me that having children for her was separate from the Jewish part. Yeah, so she said being Jewish is separate from our having five children. And then she goes on to explain why she has five children. So it's a very interesting story. I would say that her childbearing was not motivated by biblical faith, not in the way that it was for the other women. So yeah, about 98% of my sample was religiously motivated. But do tell us, what was her motivation? She had five children because her husband wanted nine children. And so far as I understood, he didn't want nine children for biblical reasons. Although, as you pointed out, he didn't talk to the husbands.

That's for the next project or a next project. Yeah, there's a limit to how much you can focus on in one project. I will say why women first. Well, in part, I'm a woman. But really, the research reason to talk to women first is because it's women's education and it's women's labor market opportunities that spells out this inflection point in the 1960s towards below replacement birth rates. So really, the question was to kind of dig into that and discover, is it possible to want children enough to be above replacement we'll say in in today's world and this is why it was

important to interview women with college education what I did in this project was I interviewed people who have much larger than normal family sizes and this group which has no name will say so I say that they're the women who defy these trends. It's 5% of women, basically. It's 5% of women have as many children as the sample size in my book. I call them women who've defied the contemporary trend to low birth rates. But it's, I think, here's the question. Are they important for the discussion we're having about low birth rates? Why talk to this kind of fringe group? How important are they? And I actually think you

can't answer that question until you talk to them. Here's the reason. Suppose you make the assumption that they're kind of a fringe group and you say, well, they probably have a lot of kids because they're in a cult or they have a, they're following somebody else's decision. A modern, well-educated woman would never have all those kids. Well, no, we hear that all the time, right? So the president of France constantly says this, Macron says this. Well, women who get a lot of education wouldn't have. So if you make assumptions about the people who deviate

from the average, then you've cut off maybe what you could learn from them. So you've prejudged it as like, there's nothing we can learn from this group. The thought here was like, maybe there is something we can learn. Now, if what I had found out was that they couldn't articulate why they were doing this, they were all following blindly some religious leader, I'm doing this because

the Pope says so, I'm doing this because the rabbi says so, or they just are like unwilling to adopt modern technology or they didn't have any other options in their life, they never went to the, well, that would sort of confirm these suspicions, right? Right. Some people called this group of people breeding cults. So the research question was, can we learn anything from this group that could help inform the conversation we're having about the birth rates?

And so for that reason, I mean, I'm kind of going back to your question, it's really important to talk to the women who are making the decisions and say, like, are you doing this because your husband really is forcing you into this? You're doing it because the rabbi is forcing you into this. Like, what can you tell me about it? That's a delicate conversation. That has to be a three-hour conversation. Well, and that also helps that you're someone who's had a lot of children because there's someone you're someone that they will trust that's right right because there is this weird stigma right

and this is it's it's all a big it all it all plays in right because because on the one hand I think to myself wow did you do this study because you want to validate your own life decisions at some level because we all have our own biases right yeah we do on the other hand it's very much the case that it's very hard to connect with people when they feel like you're judging them. And there certainly is a lot of judgment revealed, right, in the book, too. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, I like to think of it as sort of we all arrive at our work with things that make us better at our work. So, I mean, I figured, look, back to this question about the theory, what's happening with birth rates. There's a thing to be done, which is to talk to people in all of the buckets of childbearing, people who end up, we'll say, involuntarily childless.

That number is rising rapidly. We know that childlessness, some people are calling it accidental childlessness. Some people are calling it involuntary childlessness. When I began this project, I believed and now still believe that talking to people in one-on-one settings for two or three hours really helps us get a better handle on what's happening with birth rates. I don't really mind if people think maybe you did this because you just wanted to boost up your own lifestyle. I think that's fine. So what is the bottom line? The bottom line here, I think, is that if we're thinking about family and children and birth

rates in the future, in a post-contraceptive revolution universe, or in a modern universe, we have got to be talking a lot more about the sources of want value for children, which, of course, fundamentally means confronting the secularism of modernity. So I finished my book. So the want comes from people believing that it's a good thing. Believing that it's a good thing. That it's a good, yeah. Believing that it's a good so strongly that they're willing to sort of trade off other goods. Well, and of course there's been attempts done, you know, in Hungary, most recently in Australia.

There's other examples that you cite. Yeah. So how's that gone? Yeah. Well, so it hasn't gone very well. Now it was known, you know, I didn't write my book to make that case. I mean, that was well known, that has been well known for a long time. Countries outside the United States have had lower birth rates for quite some time. And so you, we, you know, Australia and Austria and

parts of Western Europe and Norwegian countries. And to some extent, well, we certainly would talk about Korea and South Korea. Lots and lots of countries have tried to structure the system of, we'll say, transfer payments in their country, various subsidies and so on, to favor more births. Hasn't gone well. I don't mean that there's any dire consequences to doing that, besides, you know, running into debt, government debt, which is, of course, a plague today. But it hasn't successfully raised birth rates. And I think the reason is simple. I think the reason is because the real cost of having children today isn't the financial payments.

The cost of having children today is what you have to give up. Right. It's not doing something. Correct. It's not doing something. Instead, you're having kids instead. That's right. Right. That's right. And that thing that you might do, and this is the value of talking to women,

that thing that you might do is very close. It's a very closely held identity. Like, say I'm say, I'm 28 years old, and I've gone to law school, and I've begun my work. Like, to give that up means not just walking away from maybe a second income, or even temporarily, it means actually changing, like my social group in a pretty fundamental way. It means maybe leaving off a kind of prestige. I have a career, like do you just stay home? No, I have this thing. And it's so I think that's

the real cost margin that women talk about is that. That's very hard to do. So, you know, how much money do you have to offer somebody to get them to give up their identity, their professional identity in a deep way, or to put their professional identity on hold, well, it's probably a very big number. If you can bribe people, so to speak, to have children that they otherwise weren't going to have, it's probably a pretty big number.

So some people out there will cite numbers on the order of like $300,000 or $500,000. Maybe that's the kind of number that could tip the scales. But no country has tried anything of that scale. Because why? Because that's not an affordable number. Well, but also someone would have to agree to pay for that. Yes, exactly. At least in theory. At least in theory. It's impossible to think about that being politically feasible. Yeah, that's right. I myself have come across moms who have one or two kids and really are thinking this is quite enough.

Thank you very much. And so it might be, as much as they may appreciate your book, it might be tough for them to square this thing. Or would they have to just have that conviction at the outset? Yeah. Right. Is that if they were going to explore this, how does that work for you? So I think the thing that I learned from talking to so many women who had deviated from the trend, is that very few of them set out to have a large family. And what seemed to me the key... Wait, wait, wait. So they weren't planning on it in the

first place. This is just to highlight what you're just telling me. Yeah, that's right. Many of them, we'll say, were accidental large families in the sense that they hadn't sketched out their life plan with five or six children. So how did that happen? What it seemed to be important was not actually to rush into the next child in order to have a big family. But what seemed to be very clear and different from what you hear in general was just to kind of keep the door open. So the women that I talked to described frequently not being ready for a next child. But as opposed to many of our peers, they didn't close the door.

They didn't make an irreversible decision never to have another child. They just said not now, not today, but maybe in six months, maybe in 12 months, maybe in two years or three years. And so I think all of the women I talked to stressed the importance of being ready for another child. And they all had found their way to friends and communities where children were welcomed and praised and valued, churches, neighborhoods, and that sort of thing. So I would say to somebody who maybe feels like, you know, this sounds nice for the people you wrote about, but I'm not sure that's me, that that's fine. It's not you today. But just to keep the door open, because what happens is, we know this, but lots of things,

our desires change. What we want changes over time. And the difficult thing for us is to put ourselves in a position where we can't go backwards, we can't open that door again. So that would be one thing I would say. There's something that really came out, at least in my mind, as I was reading your book and I've been of course been reading lots of books over the last few years and it has to do with a sort of maybe obsession or need that I'm seeing in our society to control things right and this is I mean and this really as I was listening to your inch you know as you're speaking with these various women and you're

writing up do you does this is this something that rings a bell for you yeah what a great question. So in the family space, that's the language of family planning. Right. And so this was the whole question. customized autonomous life plan that I've been encouraged to cultivate from a young age. So I think it was typically rendered in terms of planning and not so much control, but I think it's the same thing, right? Birth control is a kind of question of control. Birth control, planned economies. That's right. Planned economies. that's right city development i mean just so many areas and

maybe like too much yes of a focus on that in our society that's what's coming out in all sorts of areas of inquiry that i'm interested in right now i think this is a very interesting theme it's something that different women in my book describe in different ways. So someone like Hannah, who's the first woman you meet in the book, and the book is subtly titled after Hannah, she talks about how she's in a sense entrusted the planning of her family size to God's plan. And she says, well, God made the world from the foundation of the world, and he knows what's in the world, and knows what's good for us. Now, this was one way of putting it.

Jen, who I talked to, who was trying to think where she lived, she lived in the American South. She was a Bible-believing Protestant, So very different tradition from Hannah, who was Jewish. She used the language of Jeremiah, sort of, God has plans to prosper you and not to harm you. So this has become like a personal motto for her. So certainly, I think this is part of the religious nature of the letting go of a certain, you have the willingness to let go maybe because you trust ultimately that it will work out, that God knows. And so understanding what that looked like, because what it didn't look like was having as many children as you can possibly have. So nobody talked about, well, just not thinking about it so but this is kind of to your point right rejecting a

planned economy does certainly not mean that we no planning at all right it means that the planning takes place in this kind of this mysterious space of local knowledge and local conditions, right? And, you know, innovation and creativity which happens at the local level. And it definitely doesn't mean, you know, rejecting a planned economy doesn't mean chaos and disorder, right? Of course it means all these other things. So that is a really interesting question and I think it certainly points to a broader set of topics that comes out of this, right? What are the unplanned benefits of having more children than, let's say, human rationality might suggest?

Well, and I would say that your book, in a way, is a testament to that because there's so many examples of people saying, I had no idea. I didn't realize it would be like so good and that's right you know there's just a lot of that yeah that's right the extra child might have been chosen because a child is always a blessing let's say but then they're telling me later well but this child brought all this goodness to my life I didn't intend directly I didn't know it was coming right a healing a joy a happiness and excitement you know like all of these other things. And yeah, I think that that's a big story of having children is unintended benefits.

This has absolutely been an absolutely fascinating discussion for me. Yes. Any final thoughts as we finish? Yeah, well, I think sometimes people think when I say that it's a demand question, we really need to focus on why people want children, not kind of the putative costs of having children. I'll translate this into the popular parlance. A lot of people think what, so what you're saying is this is really a cultural matter. It's not a policy matter as much or a politics matter. It's a cultural matter.

And then what people do is they think, well, that means you think it's hopeless, because they think you can't change culture. But I don't think that's true at all. I actually think it's a much more hopeful thing to discover that the change we need is as simple as more people wanting children. I think it's much more easy to change what people want than it is to shift entire economies.

Great. Why is that? Because I think that we know from long life experience that a chance encounter, simple information that's passed from person to person, could actually change overnight what it is that people want. Which means that telling stories about our children, telling stories about the value of having children,

as they do in this book, certainly like reporting what women are saying about what it means to have more than normal numbers of children, making more space for churches in a society that's become, we'll say, hostile to religion, thinking about how we treat our churches. I think these are all avenues which may, fact lead to very rapid change. And so one of the things I came away from this research with was a lot of kind of optimism that actually it's not impossible at all. There's nothing inexorable about these contracting birth rates. But it does have to do directly with values. It has to do with values, yeah.

It does have to do with values. And, of course, people say, well, do you mean that we should have, like, a religious state that should then, you know, tell people kids are blessings and, you know, force them into church and count church attendance? And, of course, no, that's not what I mean at all. But I do mean that, you know, certainly in the United States, we've crowded out the role of churches in civil society in pretty profound ways. We've made it very difficult for churches to educate children, make them kind of have to ask for the right to use the tax money

to set up religious schools. We shut them down during COVID. We said churches aren't necessary. They're not necessary to human life. Can you think about that for a minute? Well, suppose they are necessary. Suppose churches do provide the fundamental drive to have children, to form families, to get married, which seems like a risk in a world where it's not normal to get married when you're 20 or 22. Suppose churches provide this. Well, then they certainly are necessary, and we shouldn't shut them down willy-nilly anyway. We focus probably too much on, you know, kind of subsidies and direct incentives, but less on kind of are there ways in which modern social democracies can foster or encourage the health and flourishing of all churches, of all, I say, like living religious communities. I think it's possible, vastly more so than we realize. So I think there's a message of hope here, which I think I'd like to leave us on that note. Well, Catherine Pakaluk, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. You're welcome. It's been great to be here. Thank you all for joining Catherine Pakaluk and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kellek.