The Ricochet Podcast - Cradle of Civilization

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

In less than eighty years, the US has slipped from its baby boom heyday to a baby bust. Timothy Carney, author of Alientated America and Family Unfriendly, joins the Ricochet Podcast to discuss the implications and potential consequences of the nation's waning will to procreate.   Steve, Charles, and James gab about the fuss over gerrymandering, appraise Trump's warning to DC leadership, and consider the predicament before Israel as they plan to occupy Gaza City.- Sound from this week's opening: Jim Acosta interviews an AI version of deceased Parkland shooting victim. 

Now you sound so much better. Yeah. All right, then we're good. Then we're good. There's the great James Lylux. Not the airline pilot James Lylix we were getting before. Yeah, right. There's a gentleman that we're coming up to New York.

Airline pilot, I like that. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. It's the... Ricochet podcast with Charles C.W. Cook and Stephen Haywood. I'm James Lylex, and today we talk to Tim Carney about babies. Who's making them? Do we need more? Why aren't we? And so forth. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I would like to know what your solution would be for gun violence.

Great question. I believe in a mix of stronger gun control laws, mental health support, and community engagement. We need to create safe spaces for conversations and connections, making sure everyone feels seen and heard. It's about building a culture of kindness and understanding. What do you think about that? I think that's a great idea, Joaquin. I see dead people. Welcome, everybody. It's the Rikoshae podcast, episode number 752. Why don't you join us at Rikoshae.com? Why not? There is no compelling reason on this firmament, as a man said, that you shouldn't. Because once you go there, you're going to find the most compelling, stimulating conversation and community on the web, the place you've been looking for all of these years, ricochet.com. I am joined. Well, I am. I should tell you that first.

James Lileaks here in Minneapolis, overcast, cloudy, wind in the trees. And I'm joined by two people, I believe, are probably in unbearably sunny climbs at the moment. Stephen Hayward in California and Charles C.W. Cook in Florida. Gentlemen, how are you to date? I'm well, James, but it's cloudy and cold and overcast here in coastal California, believe it or not. So I share your pain. It is monsoon season. Dark, angry skies, constant lightning, the rumbling of thunder, and rain, rain, rain. Oh, I like that. Well, then we're all in somewhat depressing climbs, but all, I assume, in a cheery mood nonetheless. Charles, do you ever have a bolt of lightning strike, one of those perambulating four-legged monstrosities you have down there and just blow it up?

Does that ever happen? Does anybody ever seen a crock just get atomized by a bolt from the bloom? I thought for a moment you were being rude about my dog. I have never seen that. And I don't know what would happen to an alligator. We did have a lightning strike recently that came very, very close to hitting our house. And it caused a brown out and everything turned off. And then some things took a while to turn back on again. And I put all sorts of expletives together and was not impressed.

But thankfully, everything came back. So thank you, Serge Protectors. You sacrificed yourself for my good. See, I would think that you, tech that you are, man who knows. doubt has all of his cats six cables arranged by color and cinched by by tie zip ties that you would have a generator and that you would like many men with a generator be gladdened to the to the reaches of your soul by the fact that you actually could go over and trip on the genie and uh and enjoy electricity in the boons of modern life but you don't i don't i've considered it maybe it's in my

future as have i i've also considered a battery backup that will enable myself to be powered for at least up to 30 minutes until, you know, I have to go back into the darkness. I have that. Speaking of the darkness, we have democracy dying in darkness in Texas, apparently, where the Democrats have fled rather than perform some sort of gerrymanding, gerrymandering vivisection on their beloved state. And from what I understand, they've gone to Illinois, which, as someone once described it, has districts that look like somebody gave an etch-a-sketched to a raccoon.

It's an amusing little turn of events. We've seen it elsewhere in Wisconsin, where the legislators fled. rather than perform their sworn duty. What's going on in Texas? And is this going to lead heaven for fend to a nationwide reaction from the Democrats that will force them to go against their principles and craft districts that seem only to reflect

certain societal, racial, and ideological components? Well, I guess I'll go first. First of all, you can hide a lot of Texas legislators behind Governor Pritzker of Illinois, so that was probably a shrewd place to Escape to. Fat shaming. Fat shaming, not allowed on this. Okay. First of all, this is so ridiculous. Gerrymandering has been done forever. Everyone knows that. It only became a threat to democracy

when Republicans got good at it, which they got good at it starting 20 years ago or so. I'm so old, I remember in the 80s when out here in California, it was generally acknowledged that the aggressive gerrymandering netted Democrats, five house seats above the air, sort of intrinsic voting string or what a more neutral map would have produced. And Republicans, I think at least three times in the 80s, put very expensive ballot initiatives on the ballot to try and get a fair redistricting and lost all three times. It never just moves the needle with voters very much. It's easy to campaign against.

And yes, I mean, Phil Burton, he was the famous congressman from San Francisco, Nancy Pelosi's predecessor in that seat. He called the California Maps his contribution to modern art because, you know, like the Illinois districts are all very, you know, went around here and there. The two things interesting about this, at least two, is Democrats don't have much running room. If you look at Illinois or Maryland or Massachusetts, where, you know, Republicans got 35, 40 percent of the total vote for House seats have zero House seats. It's been so skillfully gerrymandered that, you know, they can't gerrymandered any further if

you're a Democrat. And then beyond that, if you look ahead five years, in the next census, The blue states are going to lose, I don't know, something like 10 house seats. California is going to lose three and so forth. And all those seats are going to go to, guess where? Texas, Florida, Tennessee. They're going to go to mostly red states where Republicans are going to capture the lion's share of them. And so one little tip bit is if you ran the re-ran the 2020 election, I think this is right. With the vote splits that you had, Donald Trump would have won the electoral college because Michigan's going to lose a seat and, you know, some of the other Pennsylvania.

he's going to lose two seats. And so suddenly the Democrats are looking at a wipeout beyond the next census in all likelihood. So I don't know exactly why the Texans decided to do this, except I think they looked around and said, you know what, we can. So let's try it. Charles? Well, I keep being asked by people if I care about this, by which they mean am I upset about it?

And the answer is no. And the reason that I'm not upset about it is this was just explain. explained, the Democrats have already done this. We already live in a world in which gerrymandering is the norm. The term comes from Elbridge Gary, who's a founder. So this has been a political question as long as the Republic has existed. The ability to gerrymander has been increased by the advent of powerful computers, which is why you're seeing this arms race. But it's just totally bizarre to me to to see these complaints for a couple of reasons.

First, the Democrats keep saying, well, if you do this, then we're going to have to, uh, what? You already did it. Right. And two, we already have a census that is out of whack with the country as it actually exists. And I've said this over and over, and I'll say it again. I am so sick of hearing about our democracy. our democracy usually means that those who won power have done something that progressives don't like.

It's not really a question of democracy. It's a question of policy, defund plan para and defund NPR or what you will. This is actually a question of our democracy, this census mess up. This is the gears of how our system works. It affects the presidency. It affects the House of Representatives. and by extension, it affects the Supreme Court. So I can't get upset about this.

If you ask me a different question, which is, do I like this trend? Do I think there will be some negative consequences of this trend? I would have a different answer. Yes, I do think there will be some negative consequences of this trend. One example will be the creation of more safe seats and therefore more people who are unresponsive to democratic pressures and more people, frankly, on both sides who are crazy.

But we cannot live in a country in which this is only a problem when Republicans do it. And that is the way that this has been cast. And I'm not playing along. I'm glad Texas is doing this. Have you seen Maryland? And the fact that they flew to Illinois, the most cherry-handed state in the country, is just the icing on the cake. And none of the media outlets that have covered this have pointed that out.

It's like fleeing to Arizona to escape the heat. Well, two things in response to what you just said. When you said that the Democrats have said, well, now we have to respond, you hear this again and again. The Republicans do something that is outside of their usual parameters of action, i.e., they're pushing back. They're actually fighting. They're actually standing up.

They're actually not just acquiescing to some incremental diminution. And all of a sudden, the gloves come out, and the Democrats say that up to now, we have been virtuous and clean and full of fair play. But now regrettably, with a deep sense of dismay, we must now get down in the trenches and fight as dirty as they do, as if somehow. And I hear this all the time for people on the Democratic side, that they're always being rolled by the Republicans because they play virtuously.

The idea that either side, of course, has clean hands, is ridiculous. But I find that self-delusion to be just hilarious. The second is that you said when you're gerrymandering that it comes from who, it comes from a name of a guy, but his name is spelled, is pronounced with a hard G as opposed to the soft G of gerrymandering. It's like GIF. It's like the whole gift debate that we seem to keep having back and back. And just as the gift debate was spoiled by the inventor, the gift coming out with an absolutely

wrong answer to how it's pronounced, I expect that somebody will seance the mid the guy who was the origin of the gerrymander word and throw his hat in with a soft G. So I'm going to say gerrymander from now on and have it. People will look at me in a peculiar fashion. Can I just add that I hope. No, you can't, Stephen. Yes, of course you can. Well, I just hope that Texas will preserve a seat for Jasmine Crockett

because I want her to be the face of the Democratic Party for as long as possible. If not the rhetorical wellspring. Right. One more point before we go to a guest here. There was recently a crime in D.C., which was broken up by big balls, and you don't often get the chance to say that, especially when the person to whom the nickname applies seem to be the opposite of, but that's him. And there was, since it was Doge-related, since it was in a nice neighbor, I can't remember,

since the combatants were not the usual sort that you find in D.C. crime stories, there have been calls by Trump and others to federalize D.C. to yank away some of the tenants of home rule and say, no, we're going to make this place safe again. We're going to make D.C. walkable, livable, et cetera. What do you think about that? I'm totally fine with it. D.C. is a federal district. It is under the plenary control of the federal government.

And if it wishes, it can set up a secondary delegation of power to a board or a mayor, or really, whatever form of government it wishes that is not a monarchy. So if that secondary delegation, which is optional, is not working out, the federal government can take control of the federal district. There are some questions as to whether or not Congress needs to get involved in this that are important, but as a structural question, it seems to me self-evidently allowable. Steve? Yeah, I mean, it was decades ago, actually the 19th century when I guess Congress

ceded the Virginia side of the Potomac River back to the state of Virginia. And I've long thought that the best solution to all this is to take most of the District of Columbia and ceded to the state of Maryland and just make it part of Maryland. And then the federal government would control really the mall and the sort of core federal buildings, you know, the parts where the footprint is, you know, between Independence and Constitution Avenue. Maybe extended to K Street, I don't know, but it'd be small and compact and then let the rest of the city be part of Maryland and it's Maryland's problem. As a former resident of D.C., I couldn't agree more. The idea that it should somehow become a state was always the most laughable thing that you can think

of. Before we go to our guest, though, one little note. As far as big balls goes, And you just don't often get to hear somebody say that legitimately on a ricochet podcast. Do you guys know his real name? No. Edward Koresstein. Let me read you from his Wikipedia page. Correstine was born in December 2005. His father is Charles Kirstein, the CEO of a company called Lesser Evil.

Okay. His maternal grandfather, Valerie Martinov, was a KGB lieutenant colonel, executed by the Soviet Union as a double agent. Well, who knew? After his execution, his widow moved with their children, including Kirstein's mother, Anna, to the United States. His grandfather was popped in Lubianca by the KGB for being a double nature. Yes, I know. The things that you learn sometimes when people get the bleep beaten out of them in the D.C. environs.

We now go happily to Tim Carney, senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, senior columnist for the Washington Examiner. He's also the author of 2019's Alienated America and, more recently, family unfriendly, how our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be. Tim, welcome back. Hey, how's it going? Let's talk about falling fertility rates, because that's what everybody wants to hear in a weekend. Yay, or nay, I remember growing up with a four-horseman of the apocalypse,

one of which was going to be overpopulation, starvation, planetary despoilation, we got to stop ZPG, all the rest of it, a stark contrast to what happened after World War II when everybody came home and said, here are these vast potato tracks in long eyes. Let us fill them with houses and populate them with kids running, gambling about the lawn on a Saturday afternoon. It was a different view of what families should do, and now the West faces this disinclination to have children. Why? And what do we do about it? You got three minutes. There's a million places to go with there. I'll start where I usually don't start because you mentioned the baby boom. I think that the most underappreciated factor in our baby bust is civilizational sadness.

That's a term I came up with for the belief that we're just not good. We being, whatever, humans, Americans, white people, middle class people, Brooklyn hipsters. We are just not good is the answer that so many people in the West, in Canada, in Europe, in the U.S., etc., give. And when did we feel the opposite of this the most? in 1945, when our guys got off the boat, just having defeated two evil empires, our women met them on the pier, just having made all the weapons and kept the economy running, and they smooch on the pier, go back to the chapel, get married, and have a ton of kids, because more than ever before, ever since, we knew we were good. And guess where the baby bus in the West started in the 20th century? It started in Germany, Japan, and Italy, in places where they couldn't answer that question. do we are we good they couldn't affirmatively say that they either felt ashamed or they felt guilt and so where does that guilt come from here well climate guilt is like the surface uh manifestation

of it but i think it's a deeper guilt that's inevitable in a post-christian post-religious society that's an interesting thesis is steve heyward out in california tim and uh by the way i couldn't help when you mentioned that civilizational sadness the social scientist in me says Yeah, okay, how do you quantify that? And I know there are surveys, but I also remember, and James may remember this. In 1984, Walter Bondale would tick off the list of interest groups that he had affinity for. So, you know, blacks, women, gays, and the sad. But he was, he was, he said that I'm the candidate for the sad.

And, of course, really, he was just a sad candidate, as we know. So though there's something to that, I think. I've long thought that there was something to that. And I actually can't point to data, right? I mean, something I point out to students is if you look at the long-term surveys, they really start in the 50s of people who say they had high trust or confidence in American institutions, especially the government, it was up around 80%. Today, it's around 15%. And that's public sector, private sector, right? And there's a lot to all that. But that's a huge change, and I have lots of theories about that. But nonetheless, if you are, if you're in a sour boot about your current circumstances, and gloomy about the future, of course it's going to depress fertility rates. And one more thought, and maybe you've written about this, is after the big blackout in New York in 1966 and then again in 1977, guess what? Nine months later there were full maternity rooms because what do people do?

Now, that didn't happen during COVID. With the pandemic, correct. With the pandemic. And the reason was, is that people knew in 66 and 77, the lights are going to come back on. We'll get back to normal. return to normal would be good. So let's make whoopee. Whereas during the pandemic, there was not that confidence that, you know, what's going to happen after this? How long is it going to go? I said, demographers, right? Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, and there was the isolation. And so you were talking earlier about trust in institutions, trust in institutions, trust in neighbors, trust in humanity, something to lean on, whether it's a church, a community, something like that. All of that really matters. Like the undertaking of getting married and raising

children is not a solo undertaking. As a wise woman once put it, it takes a village to raise a child. Now, she met the Department of Health and Human Services, but anybody out there who's raised kids knows it means their neighbor. It means their pastor. It means the older kids down the block who babysit. It means a younger family down the block who hires your kids to babysit and mow the lawn. It takes so much support to raise a family. And so you need to trust that people are good. And then COVID was, it was really a sad period. I mean, I remember during the lockdowns thinking, we're not going to like want to talk about this. We're going to be embarrassed.

I mean, I spent almost a month, like just, I had a nice backyard and letting my kids run around the backyard and not seeing other people. And then I thought, what in the world did I just do? And so so many people just look back on that with a little bit of embarrassment and shame and don't want to talk about it. But it was deeply sad. And it was a lack of connection. And the people who thrived were the people who said, all right, most of our neighbors are being crazy. We're going to get together and we're going to form a pod. And what was a pod?

A pod was a sort of a creation of something that used to be a little more natural, which is a bunch of different families hanging out without having to schedule anything. And so a huge part of what I write about in my book is like that's what is missing. is the informal support from neighborhoods and from something that you belong to, like a church, most importantly. So, hey, Tim, Charles Cook. And, of course, we talked about this on my podcast. I love the book. Those are two different things you're describing. On the one hand, you have loneliness caused in that case by COVID, but more generally, we're told people are sad and lonely.

and civilizational underconfidence. I understand why the Germans felt bad in 1945. Frankly, I think they still should. There's the Englishman in me. But I don't understand why so many Americans have come to believe that their country isn't good and have started to say things like, well, really raise children in this world

when we are for all our problems, very rich and fun and dynamic and stable. why do you think that has happened? No, I think that's a great question. So first of all, it hasn't happened equally everywhere. White liberal women are the people who are most depressed about our society, least hopeful about the future, most negative, have the least trust of everybody else. Church-going people, while less happy, less trustful than a generation ago, are more happy, more trustful than almost anyone else. immigrants. Let me step in for a second here. Could it be that that first group that you

mentioned, the unhappy ones, are not having children because nobody wants to have children with them? I think it goes both ways. Your attractiveness is definitely influenced by how negative and unpleasant you are and how you look at everything as an aggression, a microaggression. I mean, when I see endless TikToks are these people in their cars with very large glasses and perhaps a septum ring and maybe a little, you know, Kool-Aid colored hair or something, fulminating about this, that or the other, the idea that somebody would find, look at that and say, that is the person with whom I want to conjoin my jeans and bring a new generation. They have self-i, I'm serious, they've self-isolated

by being such miserable people and keeping the bubbles wear. The misery is rooted in ideology. I think Charles was hinting at that maybe, but I definitely think it is. And I think it's rooted in a particular flavor of materialist secularism, that people, who try to find heaven on this earth always fail. And so they're always unhappy. And that when autonomy becomes a god, then you're never going to give it up. I mean, what was the recent New York Times piece? The problem with mankeeping and the big crux of the piece was the idea that some women are

finding that their husbands really rely on them. And then there's all these other stories that are like that. And it's about creating. And it's frankly, and this is a good topic to talk about, a hyper individual. Individualism is central to the American dream. It's central to our identity. It's a lot of conservatives. You should just call ourselves individualists, right? Like 50, 60 years ago. But also, that's always been in the U.S., in the context of tightly knit civil society and community. So to get back to Charles's point, and to mention an older book I wrote, Alienated America, it's that we know each other less. The bowling alone stuff that Robert Putnam laid out 25 years ago is still true. So the world is, sadder if you don't belong to stuff if you don't know your neighbors because then you start to introduce new replacements and so instead of being involved in your community what the left does is they try to change the world they get involved just in politics and guess what they fail to

change the world if trump gets reelected and amy connie bear gets on the supreme court and then when they fail to change the world they get all depressed instead of going and like you know helping build a new playground at the local park. You were going to say something about immigrants. Oh, immigrants. I was interested to know what that is. That's before I realized you were on the show and I didn't want to offend you. No.

Immigrants are more hopeful in general in the U.S. And so people will point out that immigrants have a slightly higher birth rate than native-born Americans, but that's entirely you could predict it all either by their more hope for the future of America. or by the fact that they're more religious than the native born. And so it's not, I mean, Europe might have a different issue, but it's not, you know, these, you know, swarthy, unkempt masses coming out and breeding like rabbits. It's people who kind of are a little more like the Mormons

getting off a boat and showing up in the U.S. But it's only a slightly higher birth rate because they often assimilate to our low birth rate model here. Interesting. So Timma, we said a minute ago, there's sort of two different questions, one basic fertility and the other, some of the wider social networks that are important. I think one question that may unite those two, somebody's going to say, this is a cliche, four guys on a podcast saying, isn't part of the

problem as always women went to work. But, you know, the point is, which if you're working, you know, you're not out doing the PTA like my mom did, you know, during the Boer War and all the rest of that. And, and then also, it's more of an economic trade. off to have more than one child. And so there's that to reflect on, and I'll do this sequel. Somewhere in the last week or two, I saw a story. I can't remember if it was the Times of the Wall Street Journal that said, huh, feminists have grudgingly conceded that you can't have it all.

But guess what? Conservative women do seem to be having it all. And part of the hatred for Caroline Levitt, just to pick the most representative figure, is she's a very young mom. And boy, does she look happy and fulfilling. She's having the time of her life, and that must absolutely outrage the sort of feminist left and so forth, right? So, I just reflect on that. I mean, it seems to be the women workplace and stuff, right?

Go ahead. Work, gender, community birth rates, all these stuff interact in a hundred ways, just to list a couple. You referred to the volunteering. Emma Green, who has written for the Atlantic. I'm not exactly sure where she is, but she wrote a piece a couple years ago on how all the volunteering in the U.S. has basically been done by mothers who no longer have really little kids and they don't have a full-time job. Now, some of this was bad, like prohibition, but most of it was good, right? Even abolition, a lot of that was driven by stay-at-home moms, right? And so, and then on the neighborhood,

I always think of how many people my age who we were the most sort of running around unsupervised super generation, possibly. How many of us have the story of doing something stupid, getting yelled at by somebody else's mom, and then thinking, can I get home to explain it to my mom before she gets the story from this lady on her front porch? Right. And so that safety provided by the fact that you know there's other people out in the neighborhood watching your kids on a summer afternoon, that's huge.

One of the ways I try to broach this difficult situation of talking about, well, yeah, when both parents are working, they're less likely to have more kids, they're more likely to put off kids, is to point out that there has that it's one of the problems has been also men not putting family first. Now, I have to spend more than 40 hours a week working. Thankfully, some of it, like today, I'm doing this from home. But family's more important. Like, all you men listening, your family's more important than your job. Okay? You might have a, It was specified role in your family of being the primary breadwinner. But that's like, you know, if anybody's specialized role, I make the analogy to Apple.

Apple has stores that bring in all the revenue. That doesn't mean the stores are more important than the design. And so I think valuing stay-at-home wives, acknowledging stay-at-home dads, they're a small minority, making life better for stay-at-home wives. And actually, my old county, Montgomery County, which I hate on all the time, actually had a lot of really good. library and rec center programs for stay-at-home moms and their little kids. There's a lot of things we can do besides saying, all right, you know, things were better in the 1960s when you had single breadwinner. Because women didn't have as much of an opportunity, right?

Men had like a sort of affirmative action. So guys, you got a man up, compete with the women, get a good job, but then acknowledge that your family is more important. And I think if I haven't, I'm not sure of this, but I think that when I lead with that, then it's more easier to explain to women, not the radical feminist, but to normal women. Also, women, stay at home wives and moms, because that's most of whom stays at home, they're good for society. They're good for your marriage. They're good for the kids, but they're good for everybody else's kids.

And not everybody can afford it. So you're actually doing a benefit if you could afford it, and you pull that off. No, I was a stay-at-home dad for many early years of my daughter. And the idea that somehow that's sitting with her and playing and watching Elmo and having lunch and going shopping and going to the park, somehow that that was in superior, that that was not as good as being in an office somewhere where somebody was putting together a spreadsheet and a slide deck to talk about maximizing strategies for the quarter to come. It's insane.

It's so much better to be home with your kids. But we have been told, however, I mean, the society in general, the lessons over the last 20, 30, 40 years have been that work is where you get your fulfillment. And somehow the idea of girl bossing your way through an email job until you're 32, is preferable to actually check out a little bit earlier and taking time with the kids. I don't see that message changing any time soon unless women start to ask for something different.

I see some positive signs. Now, part of it is, you know, it's in conservative subcultures that you see these positive signs. But I do think that, yeah, that the idea that marriage and family can be fulfilling with normies, That's what we have to worry about, right?

There are going to be people who are going to be 100% girl bosses. But also, it's an opportunity for schools to do something different. I always think about that. You talk about careers. Does anybody talk about which careers are more family-friendly than other careers? I always think, on the one hand, something that has a ton of flexibility, like being a writer. On the other hand, something that has just sort of infinite demand and a different type of flexibility, like being a nurse. nurses, if they're like, oh, I'm not going to work for the next four months and then I'll call

you and you'll give me shifts, they can do that. And it's just going to get more extreme as the population ages. So when you're in school, when you're leaving high school, going into college, are you thinking, I want to be a parent, which career not only can make money, but also in one way or another fit well within family life. Schools could lead the role in planting that idea in people's head. how about this? Let's posit something contrapositive. Let's say

that what we've seen in the last X number of years is an expansion of the opportunities open to women and that this is good and that they are no longer locked necessarily into a profession where they have a life where they have to be a secretary for three years and then go home and stay there forever until the kids are out and then

they either do the beddy for damn thing and pop pills or they join an art class or whatever. We have a new paradigm where they can work where there's more flexibility, more understanding of diverse rules for women. And if the consequence of this is a lower birth rate, that's not a bad tradeoff to make because we have expanded opportunity and rights to some people. And this is the cost, but overall society benefits from this expansion of rights and erosion of the old restrictive social model. Someone might

make that case, might they not? Yes. And I mean, I've thrown a couple things. A, it is true that stay-at-home moms used to be a lot less happy than they are today, in large part because a lot of women were what you were describing. They didn't choose to be stay-at-home moms, but if they weren't, you know, top of the class, absolute A-plus, they were not going to have the opportunities to stay in the workforce. So now that women who are stay-at-home moms basically have chosen it, they're a lot happier. But B, if more education for women is going to translate into a lower birth rate in most societies, but that means that we have to ask, okay, what are the things that we are willing to change to help people have as many babies as they want and want more babies than they currently

want? And for me, part of that is, has to do with revitalizing neighborhoods, making parenting more fun, making housing more affordable. Housing is the affordability story. I can't afford kids. That's mostly BS. But when it comes to owning a home, I really, I think the numbers really show that that is driving down the birth rate that homes are getting. So there are all sorts of things where if we take some moderate amount of feminism as a given and a positive thing, we can say, okay, A, let's dial back some of the autonomy worshiping feminism. But B, let's find all these other real world ways to promote family. Yeah, well, your mention of housing is a good lead in for me wanting to go at this

at the macro level instead of the neighborhood and household level we've been mostly talking about. And so, you know, some of our friends say, and we have the child care tax credit and a lot of our pro-family friends say, let's make that bigger. And our supply side friends say, no, that keeps us from lowering rates. It would be better. And then I raise my hand and point to Hungary, which, as you know, very pro-family Their latest innovation is if you have three children or more, you are exempt from the income tax for life. That's the ultimate supply-side policy, right?

It's not clear whether it has moved the needle fertility there. It's ticked up some, but the point is, is there any macro policies, something crazy like that, but something really out of the box like that that could reinforce this and actually nudge the fertility rate up in a significant way? Well, I'm skeptical of some of what Hungary is doing has been great, and it's a work. working and they've just almost setting the norm that family that this is what grownups do you grow up you finish school you get a job you get married you have kids like restoring that as a norm would be good but you know one thing they have that undermines that norm that tax policy you're talking about it only applies to women because they don't treat the the household the family as a tax unit they only treat women so our tax policy actually understands that the money i make isn't my money it belongs to me and my wife life. And so, like, it basically gets divided by two for our tax purposes. So Hungary isn't quite doing that. I would think if you just said, I only get to use the federal government tools, and so I don't get to, like, pave new sidewalks or, like, abolish travel baseball or any of the rest of that,

if I only get to use federal government tools, I would think, what can we do to promote the creation of new housing? And specifically, I think, and I'm researching this now, I think, sort of, uh, that there's something between sort of large, massive lots and McMansions and massive apartment buildings where the sweet spot lies that's pro-family housing, townhomes, that kind of thing. Pro-family, more housing would be a big part of it, and, I mean, that would be the number one thing I would do. And then I would make sure that employers feel free to, to use a horrible word, to discriminate, to discriminate in favor of parents and families.

And they do to some extent, right? Like American Enterprise Institute pays my health insurance, most of it, what I pay for my premiums is equal to somebody who has one kid. But AEI then is paying for all six of my kids. So there is some pro-family discrimination. I was glad you slipped that in, too. I wanted to mention that you're doing your part.

Let's lead with our chin and just say, no. Employers are allowed to promote family. And there's a reason for them to do it, which is that fathers, married fathers are better workers than other men. And so, but yeah, really right now, I don't know, maybe you guys have other macro proposals, and I'll tell you what I think of them, but something that would promote more family housing. Yeah. I have a question.

You think that kids are good and families are good. and you also, when we talked about this on my podcast, brought in the religious element, which you've mentioned here as well, from a completely agnostic, harsh, even eschatological view, is this a choice, or do we have to do this in some form or another? Because if you look at, say, the federal budget, there is a catastrophic consequence of not having kids. our system is set up, not just social security and Medicare and other programs, but our economy is set up atop the presumption that either we are going to have lots of kids or we're going to have lots of immigrants.

And if we don't do one or both of those things, it all collapses. So is this Tim Carney thinks or is this actually Tim Carney knows and we're now just fighting over the details? Well, so A, one of the things I try to do with my books is to paint a positive vision to inspire someone. So I start with me taking my son to little to T-ball and then realizing there was a bunch of parents hanging around drinking and it was the most fun thing in the world. And this too can be yours, dear listener. But on the darker side, I don't think talking about Social Security and Medicare is dark enough. because, as Krugman says, the same did Paul Krugman, we could just print more money.

And so, but money is really only a reflection of productive work. And so the problem isn't just that there's going to be fewer people paying into a retirement system for more retirees. It's going to be there's fewer people doing productive work. And maybe Google Gemini can replace the 911 dispatcher on the other end of the phone very adequately. and we can get away with massively smaller workforce, but maybe not. And that's a huge gamble. So fewer people doing productive work is, I think, a bigger problem. And then you mentioned immigration.

A, our three top sources of immigration in the United States, the highest number of immigrants come from Mexico, China, and India. All three of those countries are below replacement level themselves. So if there's one country that's not having babies and it can import babies, that's fine. The global birth rate might be below replacement right now. It's right out about the replacement rate. So that's, would the U.S. win in that regard? Probably, we would probably keep drawing people in.

But it's also not sustainable. I think Europe is more acute the civilizational problems there because they're getting Muslims in a formerly Christian world. Well, we're getting largely Christians in a still kind of Christian world. But I think that trying to replace babies with immigrants really doesn't work. The way I treat my children is not a relationship of equality, right? If we're going to treat immigrants the way parents treat children, that's a pretty unstable situation. I don't know what you think about that, but I think that immigrants are plus in the U.S.,

but saying, as Bell Saw Hill at Brookings, who she was like the hero of one of my earlier books, but I quote her as a foil. She says, we don't need babies, we don't need more babies, we just need more immigrants. I think that that is setting up, that is not the formula for social peace. I certainly agree with you that I don't want you to treat me like you do your children. Children versus immigrants, children are more likely to carry on the nature, the character, the founding precepts of the culture in which they were born. So there's that. Then again, when it comes to the future, people may say, well, you know what, I am not a

exactly all that upset about the idea of Elon Musk Optimus robots taking care of me when I'm in the home, singing me a nice little song and picking me up with gentle, loving hands. So maybe, you know, the automation will do the rest of it. Who knows? Well, and there's a lot of people who would prefer to not talk to another human being. So all you introvert listeners out there like, wow, a robot's so much better than a human. Sounds awesome. Especially since by then, they'll probably be on Mars as well doing line dances for TikToks. And, you know, you'll, you'll You'll be able to communicate with, you'll be able to adopt an optimist on, you know, do your time sharing with a robot on Mars. I mean, entirely possible.

But I like all these possibilities because I am generally bullish and optimistic about humanity and its accomplishments. But we began by talking about how there's a, the West has a civilizational sads. Yes. You know, in the 70s, people were saying, I'm not going to have kids because there's going to be famine. In the 80s, they were saying, I'm not going to have kids because there was going to be nuclear war. And then it became, I'm not going to have kids because it was clamming. image change, which all sound like excuses. What these people really seem to come down to is what you're saying before is the idea,

not just that Western civilization is some sort of baleful influence on the planet, but that humanity in general is a gross imposition at best and a horrible virus attack on Gaia at worse, and that we really don't deserve to have stewardship at this place because we've done nothing but muck it up. And all of this comes from self-detestation of culture. It comes from, you know, the people call cultural Marxism and the rest of it. but I think you can put it all at the feet of World War I and what it did to the spirit of Europe.

And if I could go back in history, I wouldn't kill baby Hitler. I'd kill Baby Gavriel Princeps because then maybe we'd have a fighting chance in the 21st century. Tim has been great fun. I love that theory. That's great. That should have been the opening to my book.

Forget about the T-Bull. There we go. Family unfriendly, how our culture made raising kids much harder than it needs to be the latest from Tim Carney, the American Enterprise Institute. and, of course, you can read them, I assume, in the Washington Examiner at regular intervals. Correct, Tim?

Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Pleasure. We will talk to you later. See you then. Next book, if not earlier. Well, that was fun. And, of course, there's more things in the world to discuss, and I'm trying to think what they might be.

We have, okay, we did redistricting, right? We've already beaten Sidney-Sweeney story into the pulp for two weeks, something like that. what was the one to you know there's there's there's there's Putin and Trump going on and there's the Ukraine whatever I mean I just I don't regard that stuff as being oh I know I know Israel wants to take over the entirety of Gaza good idea bad idea if Israel is going to be seen as the equivalent of Nazi Germany and its actions are going to be seen as the equivalent of the Nazi stormtroopers for doing what they've done thus far there is nothing left rhetorically for their critics to accuse them of being if they take over the entirety of Gaza

distribute at Hamas and do what they will. You guys? What say you? Well, I think maybe they don't have a choice. I'm sure Israel does not want to go back in and run Gaza. There's a reason they got out 20 years ago. They were sick of the place. But on the other hand, I think they're calling not exactly a bluff, but I think that we can tell that Hamas is not going to surrender. They're not going to make a deal for any hostages. And so the only thing left for Israel to do is finish the job and try and find hostages. Oh, Hamas put out that gruesome video of an emaciated hostage digging his own grave. They didn't just put that out, you know, locally. They put it out for the whole world to see. And maybe they're taunting Israel to occupy the whole place. I don't know. But I think Israel now

has to completely finish them off and root the whole place out. And it's going to be difficult. It's going to cause a big ruckus. But the status quo is not tolerable. And it may mean, I hate to say this, it may mean that the rest of the hostages are going to end up being killed. Because I'm sure anybody has complete control of them anyway. Nothing enriches some Moss more like defeat, it seems. Charles? Well, I don't know the answer because I'm not sure that there is one. I do know this, that Israel is in a very difficult position

because, A, it is surrounded still by people who want it to be annihilated, and that is an intolerable place. for any country to be. I've said before that if a state were in this position, I'd learn a nation in America, they would of course behave in the way Israel has. They wouldn't tolerate it. They wouldn't put up with it. The New York Times always talks about Israel as if it's desire not to be evaporated is some foible that is unique to it. It's actually a human trait. It is a human inevitability. And so it's trying everything it can to extricate itself from that position and it's doing it while be people are typically deranged

in describing and judging it there is a double standard with israel some of it's anti-semitism some of it is weird progressive hierarchies in play but israel does anything and like that don't trump meme half the world comes in and says wrong and i don't know what you do when you're in this terrible situation for which there's no obvious answer and even when you do the right things you're told that you are the worst country that's ever existed so i find it really hard to judge i just can't imagine the decision-making process that the cabinet is engaged in because it doesn't obtain anywhere else in the world there simply isn't another situation like this when i was a kid there were two supposedly intractable global problems. And I say this not because I had any insight into them

at all. I knew nothing about politics, but you'd hear about it. One was Israel and its neighbors. And the other was Ireland. And that one was, of course, very close to me. When I was 10 years old, the notion that four years hence, the Irish question would be resolved was laughable. That was an extraordinary achievement and one that no one I knew saw coming. or believed would stick once it had been put into place. But the actors in Ireland were different than they are in the Middle East. There weren't 26 northern islands surrounding the South. So you have a bizarre situation and it's impossible to know what's going to happen next.

So yeah, this is the latest attempt to do something. something about it, will it work? I just have no idea. I just wonder what the future brings, where Israel says, all right, this is it. You've crossed the line. Now we're going to move in, we're going to take over your entire territory, we're going to build it up, we're going to modernize the infrastructure, we're going to seal all the tunnels. We're going to have the hospitals not be tunnels with terrorist centers. We're going to rebuild civil society, restaurants, nice beaches and the rest of it. And then, and then we're going to leave. Don't make us do this. I mean, last thing before we go,

we've got one more interesting little Pequint's subject to discuss, but I want to tell you that a ricochet meetups are coming. Randy is getting a group together next weekend in Detroit, August 15th through the 18th in Detroit in Motor City, whether or not it's downtown amongst their new, beautiful, refurbished skyscrapers. I don't know.

You'll just have to go to ricochet and check. Granny dude, gauging interest in an upstate New York meetup in September. So if you're a ricochet or a ricochetti, as we like to say up there, hop into the comments and say whether or not you'd be willing to perambulate up to their red herring just posted about a ricochet at sea cruise meet up to tour

the Caribbean this December and again I'm just this tempted because I love the cruise ships I love going on Caribbean Johnson doing nothing but basking and eating and drinking and the rest of it so I don't know maybe I don't know somebody wanted somebody want to float my boat there and of course

ricochet fantasy football is going on as well wait a minute you say I thought this was an extremely political site that was hyper-focused on the issues of the day. No, there's a great community there in fantasy football. In addition to the conversations about old tech and movies and radio and sports and the rest of it, it's all there at ricochet.com, and the member feed is where you will find these things. Last point, boys, Jim Acosta had an interview with a person who no longer exists

with a digital simulacrum of somebody and asking him about gun control. Surprisingly enough, the creation or demon, take a choice, parroted back the opinions of the Coniacente and the Acosta. segment of things. What do you think about this? I'm not happy about reconstituting people via AI and having them say things from beyond the pale. Really, really don't like this. Well, given the fact that Jim Acosta was the primary embodiment of fake news, as Trump understood it, he just went out and ratified that in fact he is the leading avatar of fake news. I mean, I just, he must really be dumb to think that this was a good idea.

girls it is evil it is grotesque and the blame in my book goes to Acosta i don't think even seven years later you can go too hard after the parents who are still grieving this was jim acosta's responsibility to say no but he can't help himself and the weirdest thing about this James is that in his descriptions and defenses of what he did, he seems earnestly to believe that he was talking to something that approximates a sentient person rather than an answering machine. And he used it to launder his own views and then got all outrage when people said that it was ugly. The judgment is so bad. It's hard to know how. Could you imagine coming up with this idea at all. But running it past literally anyone you know in the whole

your craziest friend, your drug adult's craziest friend would go, ah, I think that's a bit much, Jim. And then he went with it. How did that happen? I know. And it wasn't really very good AI at all. The delivery was so robotic that as I said elsewhere, it made Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator movie sound like Paul Lind on Hollywood Squares. I mean, It was just bad. But, you know, on the other hand, you know, people hate that. And then they will find some other little bit of AI in the Internet. Donald Trump standing on the roof of the White House.

Somebody made him perfectly do the speech from Monty Python Holy Grail with John Cleese taunting King Arthur. And then you say, but that's funny, but that's good. We have no unifying moral objection to AI, which is one of the reasons that we're just floundering around with it and castigating this and laughing at that. Maybe we'll fix it by next week. Maybe by next week we'll have an AI version of me to babble along and break and wander and stumble his way out of the podcast. Stumble? No, I've got two signposts that I have to tap.

One of them is please do give us those five-star reviews wherever you can. And two, please, well, not please. It's for your own good. You go to ricochet.com and find the member feed. Oh, gosh, you got to pay for it? Right, but it's nothing. Shackles, just pennies a day. And you will find the community you've been looking for in the Internet.

your days. And frankly, if you don't like what we're saying there, start your own thread, have your own meetup. It's a community as good as the people who are in it, and that's why it is different. Different also is Stephen and Charles, two of the most steadfast podcasters. It's been my pleasure to work with, gentlemen. Again, this week, I've had a great deal of fun, and I hope you have as well. Good weekend to everybody, and we'll see you all on the comments at Wricotchet 4.0. Bye-bye.