Nuanced. - 245. Lyman Stone: Why Aren’t People Having Kids? Demographer Explains

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

Demographer Lyman Stone joins to explain why fertility is declining, how marriage, housing, childcare, and family policy shape people’s ability to have children and what countries can do to better support family formation with host Aaron PeteSend us Fan MailSupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

How did you become one of the leading voices on fertility, family formation, and demographics? Years ago when fertility was kind of taking this steep downturn, I think it was just one of the earlier people to sort of wake up and say, hey, this is a big deal. Where did this become something you cared about and you saw yourself wanting to pursue? My wife and I were considering having kids and we had a lot more difficulty than we expected. And the combination of sort of the personal journey of trying to figure out what's going on here. Like, what, what's the deal? Are we the only ones having trouble? What's going on with this nationally?

And then at the same time that I was researching and learning about this stuff. Why are people having less children than they say that they want? What's going on around the world is that marriage rates are declining rapidly. And in most society's rates of cohabitation are not rising fast enough to offset. Even rates of just casual dating are in decline in lots of countries. I've heard this discussed fertility rates and what's going on as a culture war issue. I've heard it discussed as an affordability issue. And then I've also heard like this is people's personal life decisions.

You shouldn't be involved in that. What are those people getting wrong? Fundamentally, it's rooted. It is a human rights issue is do people really have a right to have a family? If you were advising Canadian leaders on how to address fertility rates and family, what would be some of the primary policy prescriptions you would want to put forward? Lyman, thank you so much for joining us today. Would you mind briefly introducing yourself for people who might not be acquainted with your work?

My name is Lyman Stone. I'm a demographer. That means I study populations, specifically fertility. So I research why people have babies, why they don't have babies. I forecast babies, everything about babies. That's what I do. And research it in a lot of countries and in a lot of different locations to try and figure are why fertility is declining so much around the world and what we can do about it.

How did you become one of the leading voices on fertility, family formation, and demographics? Oh, that's a good question. It's a flattering one. I don't, I don't, maybe I'm leading. So I think basically, you know, a number of years ago when fertility was kind of taking this steep downturn, I think it was just one of the earlier people to sort of wake up up and say, hey, this is a big deal. This is something new. This is not just kind of the churn of low fertility we've seen in the past continuing. And I was one of the first to come out and argue that we should do something and that we had good warrant to do something about it and that we had some policies

that might actually help. For a lot of people, fertility as an issue is a handmaid, to their real agenda. Okay. They are actually interested in immigration or they're actually, actually interested in gender politics, or they're actually interested in, um, social security or, or whatever, um, or education. And fertility is like an extra stick that they use to beat someone on the point they already believed.

Um, and so I think the fact that fertility is, is really my only issue, um, in terms of my, my public advocacy, of course, personally, I have plenty of things I care about. But so I am I am all fertility all day. It's what I do. It's what I'm doing with my life. And so I think a lot of people came to see me as a credible source. That is that I was not using fertility as a, as like a wedge to try and boost some other issue. I'm really just in it for the babies.

May I ask? Often people have like a root to their story, like an impetus as to why they became interested in this. As an economist, there's lots of different directions you could go in. Where did this become something you cared about and you saw yourself wanting to pursue? That's a good question. So I mean, I was not originally trained as a demographer. I am now. I actually just graduated for my PhD at McGill in Montreal. all like two weeks ago. But so originally I was trained as an economist and I was working for a tax policy think tank and I was kind of assigned to work on a portfolio. Nobody else wanted to. And that was how taxes influence migration. So like where people choose to live to manage their tax burdens.

And I thought it was kind of interesting. And so I was in grad school at the time. This was when I was doing my master's, not my PhD. And I enrolled in some courses on migration. and the whole population stuff, all the population stuff was just really interesting. I thought that's pretty cool. And then I started writing about that some.

And then when I had a job transition, I kept blogging about it on my own blog. And then at the same time, my wife and I were considering having kids. And we had a lot more difficulty than we expected. And the combination of sort of the personal journey of trying to figure out, what's going on here? Like what what what's the deal? Are we the only ones having trouble? What's going on with this nationally? And then at the same time that I was I was researching and learning about this stuff. I started writing about more and more. And for a while, I was basically an autodidact.

When I wanted to study something, I would just Google and try and find academic papers or, you know, methods, handbooks or something like that and just read them. And then over time I eventually then went and did my PhD. And so now I'm a real demographer. Unless there's any doubt, today I had my first publication in the journal Demography. So there you go. There can be no doubt. Congratulations.

I'm wondering if we could just hold on the tax migration piece. Were there any interesting takeaways from that? I find it really interesting on those types of issues. like I went to law school and I was really interested in taxation of corporations because we hear a lot about how taxes flow and how people invest their money to avoid taxation. What were some of your takeaways

from that tax migration work? So for migration people, they want a good deal. And taxes are part of the deal. They're not the only part of the deal. If people feel like they're getting something really fantastic for the taxes that they pay, you can charge more taxes.

Okay. So if your town has world class scenery, you've got beaches and mountains, you can probably get away with charging more taxes. Okay, because somebody wants to live there. Or if you have incredible government services, if your taxes are feeding services that people really love and appreciate and value so much, you know, you're probably not going to be hurt by charging somewhat higher taxes. In practice, more money does not always create better government services.

And in practice, there are many tax bases that are more mobile than others. And one of the most mobile tax bases is income. Because people can move, but not just people, sometimes people don't have to move to move their income. Sometimes they can reallocate it to other entities. um that they will use later in life or something like that um you know you you you hold an s corp in another state that has no income tax you pay yourself the minimum salary that you need to live and then the s corp retains all the profits and reinvest them so that when you retire you sell the s corp

um it's this clever little strategy right there if you wanted to say avoid california income taxes So there's a lot of different ways you could, that income can be a particularly finicky tax base. And you see this corporate, you know, corporate entities can often restructure their income flows with a great degree of flexibility. So at the same time, individuals do pick up and move with taxes as part of the calculation in many cases. Um, taxes are usually not the single biggest factor for people moving. Usually other things are a new job, um, cheaper housing, better schools for your kid. Um, but taxes are absolutely part of the equation people do. When they get a job offer in another state or another province or something, they ask themselves,

okay, what's the after tax on this job? If the job looks great, but then you do the after tax and it's actually lower than what you're making now, you know, after tax. and after housing, you know, all these different things. So taxes aren't the only factor. But yeah, they have some, they have some modest influence on, on migration of people. And they have a bigger influence on migration of, of, of book money, so to speak. Any money that passes through a corporate ledger or a business ledger is just a lot easier to shuffle the geography on.

My follow up to that would be my understanding is you've lived in a few different countries. So perhaps have a deeper understanding of how citizens in different countries interact with their tax systems. And right now I'm in British Columbia. A lot of people are moving to Alberta to avoid taxes and be able to start that family that we're going to talk about in a little bit. One idea that I've had that I think could have legs and have an impact is having people pay their taxes at year end rather than having it automatically deducted because it would just change citizens' relationship with the money that they have to put into government. They would be more aware of the money that they're handing off rather than it automatically being deducted and not

really feeling that pinch as directly. What has been your experience seeing people in different countries interact with tax systems? Are some communities more docile and okay with being taxed more? Is there more differentiation among countries? Yeah, I mean, when I lived in Hong Kong, that's a super low tax environment. Nobody complained about taxes because they're like there weren't very many. But housing costs were insanely expensive. I mean, you know, they, you know, as bad as Vancouver or worse. And the government would try to do things to help, but Hong Kong was such an attractive business environment that it's just really hard to keep costs disciplined. There's just always somebody, who's willing to bid higher to move to Hong Kong.

You know, that just is the reality. And so, you know, I don't know that Hong Kongers worried too much about their taxes because they just didn't pay that many taxes. When we lived in Montreal, I mean, obviously, there's very high taxes in Quebec. But, you know, funny, the funny thing is in Montreal, I actually didn't usually hear people complaining about it too much. I think maybe elsewhere they might have felt differently, but my perception is at least in the part of Montreal I lived in,

which stipulated was a kind of, you know, posh part of Montreal. I think people felt they were getting their money's worth, so to speak. We had lots of nice parks and lovely things and festivals. So, you know, if you feel like you're getting your money's worth, you're maybe not going to complain that much. Americans, of course, love nothing more than to complain about taxes. So we hate paying our taxes.

But our taxes are also lower. So, you know, Americans do, you know, we obviously have withholding, but American withholding, my understanding is because our tax code is just more insane than most countries. our tax filing period afterwards tends to yield bigger adjustments to tax burdens. So refunds or obligations, the absolute value of the average adjustment to taxes in the U.S. after filing is much larger than in Canada. So we actually have something more like, and we don't literally have lump sum tax payment because we do have withholding, but our withholding is much less accurate as a measure of our final tax burden than Canadian withholding is at least that's that's my understanding. And so

we do end up having to, you know, pay lump sums or you get like a huge lump sum back and then are kind of annoyed that the government took the money from you earlier in the year and it's now giving you back your own money. Um, so I don't know, maybe the political argument works, but, um, but at the same time, it creates very strange dynamics in, in April every year as well, where, you know, some people end up at a payday lender because they have taxes that they didn't plan well for and other people end up suddenly sitting on a big check all at once and they just blow it on something pointless. So, I don't know, I think probably most people are benefited from having the government encourage a little bit of smoothing of obligations because most people

aren't great planners, which is also a fertility problem as it has. happens. Um, but, uh, yeah. Why are people having less children than they say that they want? How many kids do you want to have? That's the question. Me personally? Yeah, yeah, yeah. How many kids do you want to have three? Okay. Um, do you have like gender preferences, boy girl? Uh, likely, definitely a girl mixed in there for sure. Okay, definitely a girl mixed in there. And do you, do you have any kids right now? No, sir. How old are you? 30. 30. Okay. Are you married? I just got married three weeks ago. Just got married.

So would you say in the next five years, are the odds that you will have a kid a lot higher than they were in the last five years? Absolutely. So like if I'd asked you at 25, what are the odds you're going to have a kid in the next five years? What do you think you would have said? 20% maybe. 20%. And what would you say it is now? 100%.

100%. And what was the difference? Just being able to establish my life, have a house, have a good. paying reliable job, have this stabilized where it's And you are biologically male, right? And another difference that happened was you got married. Yes.

Okay. So you've actually just told, you've actually just told the story on why fertility is declining. Okay. So, um, you just got married. Before you were married,

your self-rated odds on having kids would have been very low over a given window of time. Now they're very high. Why are they very high? because you have someone to have kids with, that you are committed to each other. And that commitment does also have economic components. You know,

maybe that commitment happened in view of the fact that you'd achieve some level you or her had achieved some level of economic stability. I guess I'm assuming her. Of course, same-sex marriage is legal. But so fundamentally what's going on around the world is that marriage rates are declining rapidly. And in most society's rates of cohabitation are not rising fast enough to offset.

Even rates of just casual dating are in decline in lots of countries. And rates of sexual frequency are in decline in lots of countries. So what's going on is people are not even getting married. They're not even getting partnered. They're not having the first baby. In fact, in a lot of countries, we see that like, the odds that someone with two kids goes on to have a third, like are not changing or even actually going up over time. It's just that the odds that someone with zero kids has a first

kid are declining very rapidly. And in some countries, there's a decline in the rate that people with one go to two. And this is, this, this is just a telltale sign that people are not even starting families to begin with, let alone, you know, via marriage, let alone, let alone childbearing. What impact do you think that that has on societies? Like, what would the downstream effects of those types of decisions look like? I listened to your interview with Chris Williamson, and one of the pieces I found interesting is what pulls people into like an apartment. And you guys were talking about how big windows, like access to local amenities like coffee shops and bars and stuff. If that's pulling you in, you're likely not thinking about starting a family or you're being pulled in a direction. How much do you think that is individual decisions versus the environment starting to shape how we think about things?

You know, I think we do tend to make this strict line between the individual and the social, but I think it's something of a mistake. And what I mean by that is, you know, we make our decisions in a social context. If I go to the store and I choose to buy and I'm choosing between apples and orange, I have a decision. It's my decision. I'm choosing between apples and oranges. My society informs how I make that decision. It might convince me that apples are more healthy than oranges or oranges are more delicious than apples. And there's an objective truth to that as well. But my knowledge of that truth is going to be shaped by the cultural context I'm in. And then beyond that, why am I not being offered a pineapple? Why am I not being offered a lichy? Why am I not being offered a

paw or a persimmin because my society decided what I wanted to stock the stores with was apples and oranges in the same way. You know, if my society, you know, is offering me a choice of a different type of house, I can choose between the options I have. I can't choose between options I don't have. And if I don't have the option in my budget range of a house that has a spare bedroom, my fertility decisions are going to look very different. If I don't have the option of a career that is compatible with having kids, it's going to shape my choices. There's still my choices, okay?

You know, a person who wants two kids very significantly, they want it very much. In one society, may have two kids. In another, they may have none. They made their individual choices in both. cases, but in one of those societies, the identical demand curve for children yielded different outcomes because the, so to speak, the supply curve for children, that is the costs associated with the production of children in that society were very different. And those costs can be monetary costs, but they can also be non-monetary costs. One of the part of the supply curve for

children, if you want to think of it that way, is marriage or is a part. at least a stable committed partner, which is usually marriage. But look, I lived in Quebec for a long time. I'm well aware of not everybody wants to call it marriage. You get people who've lived together for like 25 years and have four kids. And they're like, oh, but we're not married. We're not married. We would never say we're married because we're like modern Quebecois people.

And I'm like, okay, whatever you're married. So a stable committed partner is part of the supply curve. And you can't just like wish that into existence, right? Like it's a coordination problem. You have to actually convince someone else to have kids with you. It involves some persuasion. And so. And if I'm not mistaken on that point,

it's only like 50% of men end up having children. And then it's like it's higher for women. There's some sort of thing I learned about in my... It's not that low. For men... Okay. Well, it kind of depends on the cohort you're talking about. But like, for young men today, like men who are in their, like, teens and 20s today...

Sorry, let's start with young women. For young women in their teens and 20s today... In Canada, we can expect that more than 25% will end up childless. possibly as high as 35%. For men, it could be as high as 40 to 45% will be childless. There's a lot of uncertainty in those estimates because people who are 15 today have a lot of life ahead of them.

So, you know, there's no perfect forecast. But, you know, if something like current trends continue, that's what we would see is something like that. But the women end up having, like, often multiple children, if, like, on, obviously on average, but, and then men, it's only that 45 to 45% that end up having children. And I just found that to be kind of striking that, and it makes logical sense. It just seems striking that so many men end up at the end of their life not having children. There are more men who will die childless than women.

Um, it's still most men will have children. Um, the majority will. Um, but, uh, it is, it is a higher rate of childlessness. And of course, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, is, the, the, the, the, the, the, more likely to have children with multiple women than women are to have children with multiple men, on average. Um, which is actually not usually because of like, you know, a man sowing wild oats with lots of women. The adopt. The adopt. common way this happens is through serial monogamy, right? You have a wife, you get married, you have kids, maybe she dies, or you get divorced, and then you go on and you marry someone else. So that's the typical way that men have multi-partner fertility is through serial monogamy, not through

not through multi-partner fertility at one time. Can I ask you personally, how hard is it not to let your own morality impact your study of this topic? Because just hearing that, I find that is tragic. Like my partner comes from a divorced family. And I just, that shaped a lot of her way of thinking about love, romance, what it means to be a woman, what it means to have a family, in a negative sense. Like it harmed her, her faith in all of those things. And just hearing that, I view that as a real tragedy, how does that impact you or are you able to separate the two? You know, I'm a personally very conservative person. So when I see, you know, well, in the U.S. right now, the share of births to unmarried mothers is actually declining slightly. And it is in Canada as well, I should say. And I think that's on the whole, you know, a cautiously positive outcome. I think kids deserve to have two married. parents who love each other. I think that they deserve that. As a demographer, and I should say also,

there are things we can do to change laws to make that more likely, right? We can avoid having marriage penalties. We can, you know, have appropriate waiting periods on divorce so that there's not frivolous filing. We can make sure that, you know, custody and property rules appropriately reflect, you know, spousal contributions in ways that, um, that encourage spouses to, you know, to at least attempt to working things out. Um, but, um, but in terms of fertility, um, you know, I, uh, it's important to be clinical first. We can, it's, it's not the value judgments aren't important. They are important. We have to make value judgments. We, we live in a world where normative judgments are not optional.

You have to make a decision, and every decision you make implies a normative judgment. That's if you think otherwise, you're just engaged in self-delusion. But the, the, you know, the clinical diagnosis has to come first, right? Normative judgments not made in view of facts are just,

well, you know, it's the, the, um, uh, The apocryphal quote about Napoleon, worse than a crime, a mistake. You know, making a normative judgment on the wrong facts is just amateur hour. You shared at the beginning that so many people kind of use this as a tool to accomplish another end. And I've heard this discussed fertility rates and what's going on as a culture war issue. I've heard it discussed as an affordability issue.

And then I've also heard like this is people's personal life decisions. You shouldn't be involved in that. What are those people getting wrong? Which people? They're getting different things wrong. Yeah. All of those people. What are they missing about this topic?

Yeah. So I would say centrally, fertility is a human rights issue. And I mean that very literally, in that. in that Canada and the U.S. and many other countries signed an agreement in the 1990s called the it's like the Cairo Declaration on Reproductive Autonomy or something like that, where they agreed that the 20th century population control was a really bad thing. And in the name of protecting human rights and human dignity, we would no longer do population control. Instead, we would adopt population policies that are,

are consistent with honoring people's right to reproductive autonomy. Okay. Um, that we would, we would recognize people's rights to make their own family decisions. Um, and at the time, a lot of people saw it as we're not going to force people not to have kids. We'll just give them the option of contraception. Like, that's how people saw it. But the flip side is true too.

We're not going to force people to have kids, but we're going to give them the tools to do it if they want. And a lot of countries. have failed to continue the progress on human rights that was begun in the Cairo Declaration by rolling back coercive population control. And they have failed to realize that in today's day and age, you know, appropriate population policy consistent with reproductive autonomy means it means pronatal policy. It means helping people have the kids they want to have. failure to do so is simply means that the people in your country are not enjoying their full rights as people.

And so, you know, it's an affordability issue. Sure. Yeah, I mean, affordability matters. Like, if things aren't affordable, people are not going to be able to exercise their rights. It's like if I said, well, you have a right to free speech, but you have to pay $100,000 to do it. You have the right. You're free to do it. You just got to have the money first. Okay. Well, we all recognize that that's not really a right to free speech, is it? Um, you know, uh, you know, if, um, uh, when people talk about as a culture war issue, um, uh, you know, we can say, well, you have a right to have a kid, but, you know, the government and the education system and every single institution that speaks to the public is going to tell you how having a kid would be so bad for you, for your career, for the environment, for all these things. But you can do it if you really want. but we're just going to constantly use taxpayer money to tell you how bad it is.

Is that really a free choice? Are you really honoring people's reproductive autonomy that way? You know, there are, there's any number of ways to frame the issue, but fundamentally it's rooted. It is, it is a human rights issue is, do people really have a right to have a family? And if a society is failing to enable people to have the kids they want to have, have if society is not yielding families at the rate people want. Um, and we can, we can talk about that about what people want it later on if we want.

Um, but, uh, then I think you just have to say that it's a society that is failing on an essential benchmark of human flourishing in human rights. And it's just you follow up on. When I say this in like, like you in type circles, which I, I work with periodically. Um, people get uncomfortable because my actual argument here is that the sustainable development goals, the millennium development goals, these types of like, countries have these like goals that they want to set for like doing the right thing. They're like commonly agreed on metrics.

In my view is that there should be a sustainable development goal, which is like the share of people who have the number of kids they say would be ideal. Or like, or maybe, or as a short end, you could like the difference between fertility rates and stated desire fertility rates. And this makes a lot of people uncomfortable because particularly the rich countries do not like to have sustainable development goal measures

that they do badly on. So the idea that like poor countries might be better than them at this particular goal in some cases is like, we wouldn't want to do an SDG that implies that like Canada's not sufficiently developed. Like Canada needs to be maxing the score. If it's not maxing the score, it's not really development because Canada's developed. It's this like like circuitous reasoning.

Like, oh, we know what developed countries are. So sustainable development goals should just be describing developed countries. The idea that there might be definitions of development and human flourishing that developed that quote unquote developed countries actually are failures at and are actually getting worse at constantly is like really kind of a mind bender for a lot of people and kind of like the NGO, um, an international organization circuit. Could you help me understand something? There's one piece I find really weird about our culture and our society. So I'm a first nation's chief. and within my community, having children, having a lot of children, very, very common.

Having children at 14, 15, 16, very common in comparison to the average Canadian citizen, particularly those in wealthier communities have much less children. And then I meet with my friends, some of them are police officers, and they go, well, I can't afford to have a child. And I can't. And it's like I have people living in abject poverty in houses that are not properly addressed, willing to have children at 14 years old and have grandma take care of them. And then I have a 30 year old who's a police officer making over $200,000 a year saying, I just don't know if I can afford this. And I just, I feel like I'm missing something. And I have a suspicion you might have.

Do Canadian police officers make $200,000 a year? If they're working overtime, they are. Yeah. Breaking news. Okay. Nice. Well done, guys. Okay. Um, uh, yeah, no, okay. So, so, so, I mean, I take the point. Um, and obviously, I mean, you know, to be clear, I, I want people to be able to have more babies, but, you know, most babies born it to a mom who's 14 or 15, um, a very large share of those are, of course, unwanted births, right? They're, the births that a mom might have preferred to avoid. Um, and so, and I think, you know, when we think about reproductive autonomy, continuing to have, help, you know, young women who want to avoid having kids, continuing to help them avoid having kids is an essential part of reproductive autonomy. As it happens, it's one that Canada is mostly very good at. That, like, there is, there is some unmet need for contraception, but it is

less common. Now, it is a lot of the unmet need for contraception is among First Nations communities, of course. And First Nations communities do have much. higher fertility throughout Canada. I want to say that the highest fertility provinces is is none of it. And I think it's like still like almost three children per woman or something, like 2.5. And so, and you're right. These are lower income communities than these higher income people. So what's going on? There's a couple things going on. When we talk about the cost of having kids, there are a lot of different types of cost. there's financial cost, just the things you pay for.

And often your high-earning police officer friend, his list of things he thinks he has to pay for are a lot longer than your, you know, your neighbor who had a baby very young. She just maybe doesn't think there's as many things that the kid needs. Whereas your police officer, a friend thinks that the kid needs like a million different enrichment programs and a giant college, savings fund. Okay. So there's a different, there's a, there's a cultural difference in perceptions of cost, monetary cost. There's also cultural differences, um, in perceptions of moral cost. There are a lot of people who inhabit communities where if they had a child at a very young age, they will be treated as having done something extremely embarrassing. And by young age year, I don't even mean 14.

I mean like 24. Okay. Like, like, actually, I have, I have like a good, a colleague who was talking about, like, him and his wife had their first kid when they were like 23. And they got people. And they're like, they're like, like, college educated, very capable people. And people are like, are you sure that's so young? Like, did you know what you were doing? Like, and he was like, yeah, we knew what we were doing.

We wanted kids. We're young, healthy. We wanted kids. Why wait? Um, um, so, um, uh, there are moral costs. There are status costs. There's also time costs that vary. You know, you mentioned grandma watching the kid. In a lot of communities, grandma does help or your neighbors help or your siblings help and you've got six siblings. So it's a lot of help. Um, uh, right now my wife, uh, is with my four kids. at a neighbor's house, they get together every Monday afternoon. There's like 25 kids or something there in like a bunch of different families. And, you know, it's super easy because there's like, there's a trampoline, there's a pool, there's a yard, there's a play space.

Like, everybody can get together and really at any given time, like only a fraction of the adults have to pay attention to kids. Right? Like most of the adults don't have to pay attention to kids. And like the older kids kind of watch the younger ones. great, okay, but a lot of people don't have that community. They don't have it at all. And so if you're not in a community that is invested in your kids, it quote unquote costs more. I could get in, I could elaborate on this more, but you see what I'm saying that these like, is it culture or is it cost? It's one thing. They're the same thing. The way I like to think about

this, the Washington Post recently stole one of my ideas. I'm very upset about it. Um, I've been talking about something I call the blueberry problem for a very long time. And they just wrote an article about it without, without giving me credits. So, but here's the blueberry problem. Let's get after. When I was growing up, if I told my mom, I wanted fruit, there were basically three things that might be given to me. Maybe an apple, maybe a banana. or very commonly a plastic cup with like a little wrapper on top and inside was like a liquid some kind of I don't know like sugary liquid or something in little chunks of diced fruit I don't even know what the fruits were actually like maybe pear or peach I don't even know um uh and there'd be like

it's like a little fruit cup and those things are like 15 cents a cup but right right and like bananas Like you can, you can get like the big like, you know, like shot full of hormones, GMO bananas for like super cheap and you like feed a family for a week with one of them. Right. I mean, apples. Like this like it's like this like is it even like are you even pay like I mean, yeah, if you get like the boutique weird varieties. But if you're just like I want a 15 pound bag of whatever that red apple is, you can you're going to feed your kids easy. The problem is now when my kids ask for fruit, there's, it's like. Oh, they want like the little, the little bitty clementines or blackberries or blueberries or whatever.

So did my cost of raising children go up? Well, no, I could still go just. And actually, we do because we're cheap skates. We can, you can just go buy a 15 pound bag of apples and throw it and, you know, you just have it on the counter. When a kid wants fruit, you're like, here's an apple. Eat it. The peal's good for you. I was like, I don't even know if it's good for you, but it's good for me to not have to cut it.

So there you go. The peels good for you. is good for me. Um, so, uh, you can do that. But, you know, if you're at the park and you're the parent who whips out like a little carton of blackberries, like that's a flex. Like, you're, you're a good parent. Like, we have cultural norms that induce us to see value in things, right? So a lot of parents spend a lot of money on like berries, okay, which are crazy expensive. Your kid can eat like $10 of berries in like 10 minutes. It's an incredible cost burn rate.

It's like using like a high end AI for something, right? You're like, oh, where'd my tokens go? And like, that's blackberries. So, um, uh, and you might say, well, fruit can't be that big a big of a budget. Well, I have four toddlers. So you'd be surprised. But beyond that, it's a microcosm what's happening everywhere. Did apples get more expensive over time?

Not really. like apples are still cheap. They were always cheap. Did blackberries get more expensive over time? Actually, no. Blackberries have actually gotten cheaper over time because of like globalization and supply chains and all this wonderful economic stuff. But my normative expectation about what I need to provide my kid has risen over time. And the crucial thing is I don't choose my norms. I can try to resist and just throw a banana at my kid. But if the kids next door only get like the, you know, organic non-GMO free range banana. No, bananas aren't free range. What are they saying?

You know, it's like the tiny little banana, but it's the banana that's good for you. Then like when their friends come over to our house, it's like, well, I guess I'm not going to feed you bananas. I'm going to feed you something expensive. Norms are shared. And because norms are shared across a culture, norms are effectively imposed. And so you can say, well, it's, it's not cost, it's culture,

but the reason for the cost is the culture. And also, the reason for the culture is the cost. The reason, or rather the structural factors, it got cheap and easy enough to ship berries year round into supermarkets because of globalization. And because suddenly you could get raspberries every day of the year, parents were like, Like, let's give our kids crazy expensive raspberries. They're here all the time. Let's do that. So the cost created the culture and the culture created the cost.

They're just one thing. May I ask? Why did you have four children? What went into that decision? Well, you know, you don't decide to have four kids. You make at least four decisions along the way. Unless you have twins. No, I mean, my wife and I, you know, I think growing up,

I dimly knew I wanted kids. And then my wife really knew she wanted kids. And we joked about having like nine kids because I just, I don't know. I before I was a demographer, I'll be honest, I didn't like think about concrete reasons all that much. I would, I would have just said I like kids. That's not true. I would not have said I like kids. I actually would absolutely not have said that.

I would have said, I think like kids grow up into like people that. that I like. And I think that I'll raise decent people who will probably do good things in the world. And so, you know, if I can raise three decent people or if I can raise one decent person, I can probably raise two. If I can raise two, I can probably raise three. If I can raise three, I can probably do four. If I can do four, can I do five?

I don't know. That's like an open conversation right now. You know, at some point, you get to a point where you can't do more maybe. but ultimately my wife and I, we, you know, adding people to the world is a good thing. So we decided to, I guess, do a lot of it. Along the way, we had a lot of miscarriages. We had a lot of babies we thought we were going to have and then didn't. And I think that that kind of, to be honest, I think it kind of hardened our resolve to have kids.

And we, you know, we figured out what was going wrong and found treatment. solved all that. But, yeah. Thank you for being willing to share that. People have children during very difficult times. I think of the Great Depression and how that shaped my grandmother and her willingness to just persevere through very difficult times. And I'm just wondering, you kind of touched on it.

How much of this is a civic duty that we've forgotten to teach young people about, about raising good children who can go and lead the country and take on the gifts that we've left them. I listen to an interview about citizenship and how it's your duty not just to vote for the best person, but also to think about where the country's been and where you hope that it goes to for your children and grandchildren. And within First Nations culture, we have this idea of Tomiuk of seven generations and thinking that far out. And so I'm just wondering how much do you go to civic responsibility to obviously you don't want people who hate children to have children, but how much of like, if you can, you should because we need good people to inherit the earth.

Yeah, I mean, I'm certainly hesitant about the notion of a duty to have children in general because I think, you know, again, it's, you know, you want people, you want people to want to have children, right? I don't want people to feel that they have to have children. I just want them to feel that they really, really want to. That said, I think that we can say, while I might not say that having children is a civic duty, I think it is something that we want to encourage as a civic aspiration. When we think about the vision of the good life,

what do we promote? All too often, we end up promoting a, consumption standard, basically, you know, a house, vacation, a certain basket of goods, frankly, when what we should be thinking about is, okay, is a consumption standard really actually our vision of the good life? Like, is that how I would measure my life? The answer is a little bit yes. Like, I'm not to say consumption standard is not part of how. I would, how I would assess how I'm doing in life. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm, I have not achieved full sanctification. Uh, I have materialist impulses. Okay. So like, yeah, consumption standards absolutely

something I think about. But ultimately, like, relationships of love and care are so much bigger. And to the extent I care about the consumption standard, like, I can go monk. Okay. Like, when I was single, didn't have kids. Like, I, I basically, like, lived like a hermit and spent no money. Like, um, uh, I, like, rented a spare bedroom and a house and like, just didn't really spend in money. Just didn't, didn't, you know, just walking around the neighborhood's free. So why do you need to do anything else? Um, uh, the consumption standards is ultimately about my children and my wife. I want things for them. Um, and now that I'm a, you know, prosperous middle age man, I occasionally want things for myself as well, too. But fundamentally, what we should

be saying is not the people have a duty to have kids, but we should simply be communicating to people from a very young age that what the good life looks like involves kids. And if you really are convinced it's not fine, go do your own thing. We're not going to force you to, but people who have kids live more satisfied, more meaningful lives. And the crazy thing is, you know, in happiness studies, people are like, well, kids don't cause happiness. And you're like, then why are all the people who have kids happier? Because in surveys, having kids predicts happiness. It just does.

And we're like, well, once you control for other things like when they have the kid, their happiness goes up, does not go up. So you're like, okay, so then if their happiness doesn't go up when they have kids, but if they are happier, then what you're telling me is all the happy people in society choose to have kids. And you're like, well, yeah, there's selection. And I'm like, you're aware that what you're telling me is choosing not to have kids as a miserable choice. Not that it causes you to be miserable per se, although I would actually argue that it does. I think there's actually good evidence that desired children stipulated lead to a lot of extra happiness in classic kind of empirical models of happiness.

But even if you don't take that, the fact of the matter is that one of the best predictors that people are going to have kids is that they're having. Happy. Happy people have kids. They have more kids. So that being the case, I think we should just tell young people like, look, you know, the natural fruit of happiness is you start going, I'm so happy with my life. Wouldn't it be great if there were more people like me? Like in the natural fruit of misery as you go, there don't need to be any other people like me. And if you find yourself saying there don't need to be any other people like me, it might be because you're miserable. And if you don't feel miserable, maybe you just don't. know it yet. Maybe you just don't even realize what true happiness is. Maybe you've just never experienced it. Why do you think people with children are more happy? Well, it's several reasons. One, I mean, there is the selection problem. Okay, people who are happier, have more kids. And the reason for that is people who are happy are way more attractive. They mate more. They

depressed people have less sex with their spouses. Um, uh, so, so the subjective affect definitely shapes the behaviors and the mating and matching. Also, happiness tends to correspond with a period of relative well-being in general, so you might feel more confident about having kids more confident about the future. But I would say that having children also does create some happiness and satisfaction and sense of meaning in life. And I think the reason is, excuse me, I think the reason is simply that we're hardwired for it. And that's true whether you are sort of, you know, religiously motivated and want to say that, that we are designed for a specific telos of family or whatever, or whether you're totally secular and you think we are just, that we are, you know,

produced by evolution, however it may be. I'm not taking a side there. I'm saying it literally doesn't matter which side of this argument you would be on. Both of them imply that you are hardwired for reproduction, okay? That reproduction opens up psychological avenues that you, that everything in you is built around rewarding you for success at this task. Reproduction. Certainly evolution is oriented around rewarding you.

for this. But virtually every religion is also very familistic and encourages family as a central basis of society. And so I would say that no matter of you, any rational person is going to believe that children unlock a range of human experience that your brain is likely to provide you a lot of rewards for unlocking. Oh. May I ask, we're working on a child care center up in my First Nation community, and I'm trying to find this balance between supporting families and being able to find gainful full-time employment with the reality that the two people who are going to love that child the most are their parents and their family members and their guardians. And I don't want to create a community that people just put their children to daycare work. who care but could never care about that kid the way their parents do with the reality that people do need full-time employment in order to be able to provide the best quality of life. How do I strike that balance?

So in general, families are going to vary in how they want a kid cared for. We often think that the options are either the parents or a child care center. And of course, there are other options. grandparents, neighbors, friends, babysitters, which option works best for a family, no one can really say except that family. They're the ones who really know.

That being the case, what we want to be doing is providing choice. So with child care, the best way to support child care is to give families a voucher that they can use on any child care expense they want. Okay, so you need to hire a babysitter. You can claim it against the voucher. You want to use a child care center.

You can claim it against the voucher. You want to have grandma, watch the kids. You can pay grandma if you want. A flexible, broadly available voucher that can be easily claimed and used against a wide range of child care expenses allows families the choice to handle it however they want. And in principle, for families that don't claim the voucher, you can offer some exchange rate where, okay, you know, for every $2 of voucher that you leave unclaimed, you can get. one dollar of, you know, home care allowance equivalent. Okay. So if you're really not using any child care, somebody's watching that kid. It's probably you. And so we're not going to pay you the full child care cost because a lot of that child care cost is going to like center based rent,

facilities fees, regulate, you know, regulatory compliance stuff that you don't have to pay as a parent. But we're at least going to pay you, you know, 40% of the child care voucher as like a home care allows to cover basically your labor cost. So, um, a child care voucher that has a home care component worth some portion of the care voucher amount is the best way to pay for child care. And it can support center-based care. If your center is good, people will choose it. That's fascinating. Have you seen that implemented in different regions? Finland, so the U.S. has a child independent care tax credit. credit. It's basically a voucher for middle and higher income families. It's not very big. Um,

and it excludes a range of families for different reasons. Um, and it's, it's not as flexible as it should be, but it's, it's the roots of the right idea. But it has no home care allowance. For a home care allowance, you have to look somewhere like Finland. Finland has a generous home care allowance where if you choose not to use the center based child care and you don't enroll in them, you can opt out and take a home care allowance. And a lot of families do. So I would like to see something like the child independent care tax credit expanded to be more flexible, but with a Finnish-style home care allowance.

If you were advising Canadian leaders on how to address fertility rates and family, what would be some of the primary policy prescriptions you would want to put forward? So there's a lot of things that can be done. You know, you got to solve the housing issue. You got to build housing. And you got to build family-friendly housing. That means houses with three bedrooms or more. They can be apartments, but they're going to have to be a big apartment.

You just got to build an enormous number of such units. Additionally, you know, marriage penalties. Every country in the world has means tested benefits, has punishments for low-income people who choose to get married. That's just how it is all over. So I got to deal with housing, got to deal with marriage penalties. But I would say that we shouldn't underrate cash. There is a simple way to get a lot of cash to families, to have kids. And that is basically baby bonuses.

When you have a kid, you should get a check. It should be a big fat check. It should be normal income, which means if you're low income and you get that check, it'll push you out of eligibility for a lot of welfare programs. So essentially it offsets some of the cost of it. If you're high income, a lot of it gets taxed away. The problem with it with giving a big check to families is it's expensive. How are you going to pay for it?

There's an easy way to pay for it. and that's called the market. What you do is when a baby is born, you take money, call it $10,000 and you put it in essentially a mutual fund for them. For every baby born in Canada, you put $10,000 in a mutual fund. When they have a baby,

then they can claim that account. Okay. So imagine that that $10,000 grows over the course of their life. Okay. By the time they're 30, you are looking at like $100,000. Okay. And if it's two Canadian babies growing up and marrying each other, they both get the baby bonus. Okay. Ask yourself, if you and another person were looking at $150,000 investment portfolio that you could access once you have kids, would it shape your decisions? Yes, it would. And again, because a program like this, if you treat it as normal income, it nudges people

out of welfare, right? So when low income people claim it, you end up recapturing a lot of the cost, right? If you get $60,000 more in income that year, odds are we ended up spending, you know, $20,000 less of welfare on you. Um, uh, so in then on high income people, you're recapturing a lot. And some people, of course, never have kids. So what do you do with the money for people who never have kids? You just reinvest it. And after about two generations, the program is totally self-financing.

It doesn't cost the taxpayer thing. Because the growth of the people, the growth of the funds for the people who never go on to have kids is sufficient. Again, we're talking about like 30, 40 percent of men never having kids. We just talked about this. For women, it's a bit lower, but still a lot. Their accounts just keep growing. And you're just seeding the new accounts out of. the programs from the childless people, right? And so eventually you end up with a self-funding

baby bonus program where everybody is getting just enormous help in their first year or two. And if you're worried about like, oh, this much money, it would just, you know, irresponsible people would just gamble it away. Okay. You could do like a disbursement over like five years or something. Like, okay, you get $20,000 a year or five years. Or you could do something like, okay, you get this. but if you never graduated high school, then it, you know, goes into like a trust that disperses to you in some way. Like, I don't know. You could think about different ways to do this if you're worried about, you know, misuse. There's there's ways you could try to do some benevolent paternalism there.

But fundamentally, it's just not that expensive to seed accounts when kids are young. And when they grow up, it's a lot of money for them. Have you seen any countries do this? It's a brand new proposal. The U.S. started to do it already with Trump accounts, except they don't mature when you have a baby. They just mature when you, like, turn 18, which is kind of lame. The Heritage Foundation in the U.S. proposed doing something like this for marriage that when you get married to you, it would mature. Their proposal had some other wrinkles.

But I'm a co-author on a proposal that just became public like two weeks ago, three weeks ago, as I've recorded this. In Finland, the proposal is called Valvo Sampo, which means, um, and finish it basically means like magical device that produces babies. So the financial model for is called the Valva Rasto, which means baby fund. But we've done the math. There's a paper out on details on this. It's a Valvo sample. It's very cool.

It's a very good idea. Everyone should do it. But no country has done it yet. So let's see if Finland can get started. Let's see if Canada can follow in their footsteps. I mean, I find one interesting thing about individuals like yourself who study a lot and have a deep understanding of an issue is that often they don't end up getting to share the piece that they found most enlightening or most informative or something that really changed their perspective. And so I just love to understand you've studied this for a very long time. You've continued to get credentialed in this area.

what is something that stood out to you that I might as an interviewer not know is fascinating to you that I might not get the opportunity to ask you about, but you think is important nonetheless? I mean, my two big ones that I always want to hit are marriage. That marriage decline is the biggest, not the only, but the biggest compositional factor shaping fertility decline. And secondly, that there's things we can do. We have a lot of research on how, for example, cash incentives shaped fertility. and they nudge it. Okay? Give people a thousand bucks,

$2,000 bucks, $3,000 to have a kid. You get a little bit more babies out of that. And so because the effects are small, people have tended to say, cash doesn't work. It's too expensive. The amount of money it would take to buy our way to replacement rate of fertility

is just too much. But if you're using market returns to inflate that money over a person's whole life so that it's ready when they need it, it's really not that expensive. we can solve this. It is not rocket science. It is just investment banking.

Additionally, another thing, I find often, you know, one thing that we didn't really touch on in this conversation was, was like women's entrance into the workforce, which is something people often have a question about. It's like, isn't this all really just downstream of feminism? Or if they don't think it's feminism, they think it's, isn't this just down. stream of legalized abortion or morally acceptable contraception or isn't this just downstream of being a rich society and just rich societies intrinsically have like higher opportunity costs for children? And you know, I don't think those are like super compelling explanations and we could spend another hour talking about why. But I think the actual thing to realize is, you know, you're, you're wearing glasses right now. And the reason is because I assume it's not just style.

I assume it's that your eyesight's not fantastic. And the reason your eyesight's not fantastic is mostly because I would bet one or both your parents had to wear glasses at some point, right? Because you just got some jeans from your parents that led to like not fantastic eyesight. But we can fix your eyesight. You can wear glasses or context or get LASIC surgery without rewriting your jeans. We don't have to fix causes to fix. to fix problems.

Okay? Maybe it is feminism and maybe it is contraception abortion, maybe it is opportunity costs from rising incomes. Maybe it's education. Maybe it's, there's a million stories you could tell about why fertility might be falling. And those different stories might point you

to various options for solutions. There might be some causes you can fix. But one of the biggest factors shaping long on fertility decline is just that child mortality declined. And when fewer kids die, people don't need to have as many kids to have the family size they want to have. Fixing that problem would be bad. Okay. I don't want to raise child mortality again in the hopes that it will boost fertility.

That would be a terrible solution. Right? I just saw there was a paper that came out today that showed that like in the U.S., the opioid epidemic boosted fertility in places that were hardest hit. Because there's like complicated reasons why. And I'm like, I'm not now going to propose like one way to solve the fertility crisis is to get everyone addicted to opioids. That would be a horrible solution. Okay. So like, um, solutions and causes just, uh, or sorry, causes and solutions just don't have to be the same things.

We can have solutions that don't fix the underlying problems. We don't necessarily have to. I think that was the best closing statement I've ever had on this show. because it just speaks to a lot of our addiction to understanding the problem. And I think that there's an absolutely to your point, a role to be played in that. But we also can just get to work immediately in trying to solve some of these things. We don't have to get lost in the, oh, is it 20% this, 10% that, 8% that, and tackle them all individually. We can just start looking at what actually pushes this back in the right direction.

How can people follow your work? So you can follow me on Twitter at Lymanstone, KY. You can read some of my work with Cardis at, I think that's just cardis.ca. You can also see my work in the U.S. at the Institute for Family Studies. That's IF Studies.org. That's where I serve as the director of pronatalism initiative there. Those are all good places to catch me.

Thank you for doing this. And thank you for the approach that you take to your work. I agree with you that so many people they find that something hits when they add in a culture war element or they add in another piece and it really makes it hard to have level-headed conversations

about the path forward when there's, and I understand like there's a lot of clickbait and there's a lot of opportunity to grow faster if you lean into certain aspects and your choice not to do that yet still have the opportunity to speak with Chris Williamson and so many people who are able to get your message out

I just find very admirable because we all see that. We all see when we talk about something, it hits a little bit harder or reaches more people. And you take a very calm, measured approach to a really important topic that I do think is overwhelmed by people who are trying to use it as a tool. And I didn't really think about it that way

until you said that at the beginning of this interview, but I couldn't agree more. And I'm just grateful for you taking the mature approach of not diving into those things for clicks and views and stuff. It's just, it's refreshing. I appreciate that. at at IFS and then in my work at Cardis as well, it is fact first. Because, I mean, you got to have the facts.

I mean, truth is its own benefit. Well said. Thank you again. Good talking to you.