The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - The Real Secret to Saving Birthrates || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

Today's conversation might piss off a few prophylactic companies (no, I'm not suggesting we buy thumb tacks and go crazy). The question of the day is...how can we get people to procreate?Join the Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/PeterZeihanFull Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/the-real-secret-to-saving-birthrates

Everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from Tongarero National Park in New Zealand while I'm doing the Tangorero Northern Circuit. That is Mount Nogoraho in the background, which is, and basically we've been going around it the whole time. So why it's called Tangueroir Circuit, not Nogorahoe Circuit? I don't know. Anyway, you might recognize that mountain from Lord of the Rings. That is Mountain Doom. So I prefer to call this track the Doom Loop. Anyway, today taking a question from the Patreon crowd, and that's specifically if demographics are so core to the success and failure of countries, What are some policies that could be adopted to encourage demographic expansion? Just great question. Quick review.

People between 20 and 45 are the ones who are raising kids and spending money and building homes. That's where most consumption comes from. People between roughly 45 and 65, the kids have moved out, the house has been paid for, but they're earning a lot. So the consumption is down, but their income is high. And so they are investing, and that's where the capital and the tax base comes from. having a balance between those two without too many retirees, but enough children to generate the next generation, that's ultimately what you want. Anyway, in most of the world, that's not what we have. Birth rates have been declining for so long that most of the advanced world, including China and that are not just running out of children.

That happened 20, 30, 40 years ago. They're now running out of working age adults. So for many of these countries, it's too late. But not for everybody. For New Zealand, France and the United States and the Scandinavian countries of the demographic structures are much younger. and so there's plenty of chance to rehabilitate. Really, it comes down to one thing. Whether you make it easy to have kids, financially speaking, so low cost of electricity, low cost of land, low cost of food,

those are all real impetus. And finding ways to manipulate those things is absolutely important. But the biggest thing is making sure that would-be parents are able to still make choices. And for that, you need to keep both parents, in the workforce should they so choose. And so it isn't so much subsidization or paying people to have kids. That rarely works.

Instead, it is making sure that there are abilities that parents can still work and have kids. And that really comes down to child care. If you can provide affordable, easily accessible child care, that's a single biggest thing you can do to keep the birth rates high because parents, whether men or women, are going to not feel like that they have to make sacrifices in order to have a family. In the United States, I would argue that the only place that we get this right is with health care personnel, because if you're on call and you have to run into the hospital

or the clinic, then your kid has to go somewhere. And so there's a really robust system in the United States for that, for that specific subsector. But for everyone else, you're kind of on your own if you don't have a grandparent or an aunt or uncle nearby. The Scandinavians have done this a different way where they just have state subsidized health care for everybody, but that gets right. really expensive really quickly. Hopefully we can figure out something in between in the United

States before the birth rate drops too low. Okay, we're going to finish this one up from Manipori. Now, as any parent will tell you, there's one other thing that you have to have if you're going to be raising kids, and that's space. And the transition from agrarian to industrialized lifestyles, we all started moving in the towns, and the ability to banish kids to the outside went down. So even more than needing child care, you need the ability to put your kids somewhere. Well, in New Zealand, they've got that in spades. Not only is there a lot of green space in the country, but they have gone out and built in every major population center,

including all the minor ones, something really special.