Voices of Freedom - Interview With Catherine Pakaluk

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

An Interview with Dr. Catherine Pakaluk, Associate Professor of Social Research and Economic Thought, Catholic University of America What makes a society truly prosperous? Is it GDP growth and stock market returns, or is there something more — something rooted in strong families, vibrant communities, and institutions that help people flourish? Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom has spent her career exploring these deeper questions about economic freedom and human flourishing. Catherine Pakaluk is an economist whose research challenges us to think beyond conventional metrics and consider how families, faith communities, and schools work together to create meaningful prosperity. As both a Harvard-trained scholar and a mother of eight, Catherine brings a unique perspective to debates about family, economic opportunity, and the future of American society. She is an Associate Professor of Social Research and Economic Thought at the Busch School of Business at the Catholic University of America, where her research focuses on the economics of education and religion, family studies and demography, and Catholic social thought. Catherine's work examines the institutions and relationships that enable people to thrive, from faith communities to schools to families themselves. Her most recent book, Hannah's Children, examines women defying demographic trends by choosing large families, offering surprising insights about how people weigh what truly matters. Topics Discussed on this Episode: Catherine's path to economics and her focus on education, religion, family studies, and Catholic social thought The relationship between religious institutions and economic liberty How families function as economic and social institutions that create opportunity Research on school choice, educational outcomes, and teaching the next generation Catherine's most recent book, Hannah's Children, and insights about women who defy demographic trends What gives Catherine hope for American families and civil society

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. Relationship between economic freedom and human flourishing is one of the most important and difficult questions of our time. Do free markets really enable people to build better lives? What role the families play in transmitting values and creating opportunity? And how do we measure prosperity, not just in GDP, but in the richness of human relationships

and the strength of our civil society? Our guest today has spent her career exploring these tough questions. Catherine Pekolic is an associate professor of social research and economic thought at the Bush School of Business at the Catholic University of America. She's a Harvard-trained economist whose research focuses on the economics of education and religion, family studies, and demography, and Catholic social thought. Her work examines the institutions and relationships that enable people to thrive, from faith communities to schools to families themselves. As both a scholar and a mother of eight, Catherine brings a unique perspective

to questions of family, economic opportunity, and what institutions best enable human flourishing. Her most recent book, Hannah's Children, examines women who are defying demographic trends by having large families, challenging us to think differently about the value of children and the future of American society. Catherine, welcome.

Delighted to have you on Voices of Freedom. Thanks, Rick. It's such an honor. Let's jump right in. And, Catherine, let's start with you. and your path to economics. What drew you to economics in the first place? Sure. Well, it's kind of a fun story to retell.

In a sense, it was closely related to this population and demographic question that I'm researching now. But basically the simple story is I was a college student. And at the beginning of college, I was interested in medicine. And I wanted to help people get better and sort of improve public health. I thought those were things to dedicate. You could dedicate your life to them. And so I spent a couple of summers researching at the National Institutes of Health. And it was at the National Institutes of Health. I was doing research in viral epidemiology. So this was the mid-1990s. We were

researching AIDS, the AIDS epidemic. And in particular, the relationship between AIDS and cancer. And so we did some work looking in Africa. And amazingly enough, I encountered folks that I was working with on projects. These are mostly MD PhDs who said things like, well, AIDS is really a bad thing, but at the end of the day, it's a pretty good thing that a lot of people will be wiped out in Africa. I know. And I thought, I'm like this bright-eyed, idealistic, you know, 18-year-old, and I want to help people live, you know, good and healthy lives. And these people are saying, well, we actually really need a bunch of people to get sick and die in Africa. And of course, it's never your own country. You're sort of cheering for people to die in Africa. And I thought,

goodness, like, this could not be correct. I mean, is it true that in order to help people, live good lives, you know, you kind of have to cheer for people to die of terrible illnesses. And then I thought, well, I don't even know what this economic growth thing is. I don't know what prosperity means. How do we measure it? I mean, I know people shouldn't have diseases, but is it really true that if people don't die off in Africa, we can't have meaningful economic growth? And I honestly, at that point, I didn't know what economic growth was. I don't think I even knew what economics was of the discipline. So I started asking around, like, what is this economic stuff? And I went back to college and I signed up for my first economics class in the middle of all this pre-med stuff I was doing. And I thought, well,

this is really great. This is about people. And, you know, I don't know the answers to these things. So eventually I went to grad school, you know, hoping to kind of find out. Is it true that you have to sterilize people and hope for, you know, deadly illnesses to have economic growth and prosperity? So I really went to grad school and economics to answer those questions for myself because it really disturbed me. And then, of course, here I am today. Funny what leads you down certain career paths. It's fascinating. Fascinating.

Now, your research focuses on areas that just aren't always at the center of mainstream economics. I mean, that's just a fact. Right. The economics of education and religion, family studies, and demography, Catholic social thought, political economy. Talk a little bit more about why you chose to focus on these areas. And what insights can we all gain from those areas that conventional economic models just might miss.

Yeah. Well, when I began studying economics at the end of college and early graduate school, we come out of a period of time. I mean, I say out, maybe we're still in it. But there was a lot of frustration, we'll say, with what we might just call macroeconomics, like kind of a macroeconomics had had a lot of prestige. And that's the area of economics we think of that kind of measures, you know, GDP and states and nations. And this is something that really developed as a part of. the discipline really in the wake of the consecutive world wars and really when countries started

being aggregated. And so it really coincides with a period of time in which I would say national governments have had tremendous prestige as kind of the, we'll say, the Wizard of Oz behind the, you know, the black box of the economy. So this is macroeconomics. But, you know, especially in part because of the 1970s. And what I mean there is, you know, like there was a clear sense, you know, there was this stagflation and a terrible sort of set of economic crises. There was at that time a sense that maybe macroeconomics needed to be grounded in something, like what are people actually like and who's making the decisions and what really is the economy? Can you just add up all these statistics and come up with kind of a measure of the economy?

And so at that time, people spoke about what's called micro foundations to macroeconomics. And so when I came to grad school, I thought I was interested in macroeconomics because I thought I was interested in sort of like the progress of nations, if you will, which is really what, you know, what Adam Smith was interested in. But as I started taking courses in macroeconomics, I realized none of this is about sort of the progressive nations in the way that I think about it. Because I thought, well, you know, you don't have a nation until you've got a family and you've got a couple families and you've got a neighborhood. And so, I mean, perhaps this is because of my Catholic background or just kind of a sense that at the bottom, I mean, you've got to have people who aren't dying and, not dropping dead from diseases, but then how do they flourish? So I had this sort of intuition. And so I just started to ask the next question was like what parts of economics are concerned with kind of like

building a picture of healthy society out of what's happening at the most basic level, families and communities. And that takes you to these areas like education and communities and churches. And at this exact moment when I was recognizing the need to look at the macro foundations of macroeconomic, the micro foundations, it was exactly when a lot of the tools from statistics were being applied. This is the beginning of the era of free economics and the tools of economic statistics were being applied for the first time to things like schools and churches. The work of economist Larry Yonacone studied churches and I thought was really fascinating. So I sort of naturally settled there, which in the field wouldn't be thought of as a part of

macroeconomics at all. And I just settled to just, I turned off my, I said, you know, like, not sure I believe in this macroeconomic stuff. But if I do, I'll come back to it later. And that's where I started. Really interesting. Now, some of this isn't intuitive to all of us. Maybe it is to you. To a lot of us, it's just not. And I know a lot of your work explores the relationship between religion and economic liberty. Yeah. Expand on and describe what that connection is. How do religious institutions and faith communities actually contribute to economic freedom and prosperity? Yeah. Well, gosh, I mean, that's a simple, yeah, as a simple sentence for a really big answer. But maybe it's good if I just maybe take a couple of cases. So let's take the

case I've been working on recently, which is the contribution of religion to just family formation. And And we both marriages and having children, we know if we look across the country, we see, well, like, marriage is down in a sense. What we mean by marriage is down is that people are getting married later and they're getting married less, you know, with less frequency. And then when we think about children, people are having fewer children. Well, if you just took a survey at that macro level that I mentioned, you would find, well, it's funny. A lot of the places where marriage isn't down and children, you know, child isn't down are places with strong, we'll say biblical, traditions, biblical traditions that are thriving in churches and synagogues and neighborhoods. And so that would be an example. So you'd say, well, and of course we could go through many others.

You look at something like, you know, a taste for entrepreneurship, actually taking those kind of risks, building businesses, or something that matters a lot to the American experience, which is philanthropic initiative, we'll say, giving to charity. Every time you pick something out that's really important for the thriving of the free society, you'll find good. goodness gracious, it has a tremendously high level of correlation with religious practice. People go to church, give more. And there's a bunch of things that kind of like the card carrying academic elite will say to sort of wave their hands and wave that away. They'll say, well, well, okay, like generous people give more money and they also, you know, they feel very social and they go to church because they're social. There's no real connection between going to church and giving more money away, actually, or going to church and say, having the kind of work ethic that really makes you a great participant in a vibrant economy. So I'm saying that just to, you know, of course, just to hint at the fact that there are very deep connections here. So the card-carrying kind of academic elite says this is not really of importance, not of that much importance.

And it's probably not even causal. We'll use this language of causality that they really like. It's a bit puffed up, actually. However, so this is the big however, they don't really have any other explanation. So coming back to this demographic question, if all you have is this correlation, you say, okay, the church-going people, they're still having a lot of kids or they're still getting married young. If you don't have any story about why that is, well, then you can continue to wave your hands. You could kind of like brush it off. You could say it's an artifact of a primitive time or backward people. But if you can bring to the table a story about what's going on, well, then you have really, you have these strong correlations. and you have like an idea of what's causing this connection. So that's the kind of the light motif behind this kind of research that I've been engaged in. Schools are another good example.

Like, why are schools better off when they're religious? And what does it mean that they're better off? So it turns out that there's a lot of interesting connections you can make. And we can keep going, you know, again, the work ethic, the way these economic agents behave as employees and as citizens. that basically this work hasn't been fleshed out in the ways that it needs to be fleshed out. It was, or I guess I would say these raw correlations were maybe good enough in the 1980s, but today we have a very different intellectual landscape and people have actually forgotten the things that, you know, I would say like two generations ago a lot of academics took for granted,

which was that, well, like, of course going to church would create pro-social virtues in you. And now you get this kind of blank stare like, why? Why would that make it better? Why would that make anything better? So, you know, of course, there's lots of angles. People need to work on this. I'm just one economist. But it turns out, you know, there's a lot of really interesting angles that you can attack. And I think a lot of ripe work left to be done. Are there countries in the world where this is really thriving and working well? Or are there parts of this country that are different from other parts? Yeah. I mean, I think I would say. Probably most listeners would intuitively feel that the red states kind of look different from the blue states in this country. Maybe I could pick out an interesting example. It's a state like North Dakota or South Dakota. Yes.

These are places where there are, well, of course we know, like these are states that are pretty healthy. Their fiscal situation doesn't look like it does in California, New York, for instance. But again, one of the things that people miss is just sort of the strength of the institutional resources offered by local churches. in the Dakotas, a lot of Catholics, a lot of Lutherans, a lot of, you know, I'd say relatively healthy, mainline Protestant churches. So in this country, I mean, certainly I could point to the state of Utah, which, although it has changed rapidly in the last 20 years, still remains kind of like a cut above, in a sense. You know, we know these social capital indices will always tell us that Utah is really great. It's a great place to move. Because it's a good place to move, this, they've been a little bit

of a state that's received a lot of a lot of folks from places that have lower levels of social capital. But yeah, you'd say, look, you see that directly in like, I mean, certainly Salt Lake and the Provo Valley generally has been a hot bit of innovation, of successful business. We can point to lots of companies that have either relocated there or come up in that area. And then, of course, we know it's a great pace to live. Your neighbors are very neighborly, you know, these sorts of things. And, you know, is it possible to define what we think of when we think of how good it is to live in Utah without the contributions of the Mormon church? The answer is that would probably be a silly idea. And so I think we're kind of crossed the board confronting this reality that we probably have failed to take proper appreciation for what strong biblical church communities do for us. And they do things that so far, as far as we know, it's very difficult for the state to replicate.

You asked about around the world, and of course, I would say certainly on the marriage and family formation front, the state of Israel would stand out as a prominent and excellent example. Now, the political economy of the state of Israel is quite different from the United States. So to some extent, the integration of those abundant religious families in Israel is not quite as strong as it is here in this country, where we have about 5 to 10 percent of American families and households are strongly integrated with their churches. but also just as strongly integrated in the national economy. And so I don't think you have to look separatist as I think the religious families do in Israel. I mean, let's drill down on this a little bit more. Your research examines specifically how families function as economic and social institutions. Talk more about that.

What role do families play in creating economic opportunity? Clearly, families transmit values, really building the kind of social capital, that a society such as ours depends on. Yeah. Well, one of the things we've all been asking about in the last maybe 10 years we could highlight in particular, and this has been, I would say, painful, especially for those of us broadly on the political right,

is the amount of polarization and kind of the acceleration of political discord, I would say. Those of us who've been interested in defending and promoting civil dialogue and kind of principle, of the free society found it increasingly more difficult. All right, so what do families do? Well, what we've learned from going into the field and talking with lots of families and lots of people who is this kind of unintended consequence of having more than one child, we'll say that, is that young people grow up in their home with other human beings that they love,

but with whom they may disagree about lots of things. So as a, for instance, I have eight siblings, five brothers and three sisters. And I mean, goodness, my whole lifetime we've argued about all kinds of things. And we certainly love each other. We've come in and out of political disagreements. But that fundamental idea that sort of my brother or my sister may be pretty misguided on this thing, they'd probably think the same thing about me. But gosh, I love them anyway. And they're not my enemy, right? So kind of like, what's the basis for, we would say something like civil friendship, civic friendship. And civic friendship turns out to be really important because if you do reduce, you know, kind of your view of civil society to, we could say, like,

arms-length market transactions, which I think are vital, vital to have a flourishing, we'll say economic institutions where the basis of those relationships does not have to be familial. But if that's all you have left, well, then what we see is in the political discourse, a couple of things. One is the breakdown of civic, civic friendship. And the other thing is, I think, a real, a willingness to see political opponents as enemies rather than as kind of friends with whom you disagree. Right. And so that's just one example. Of course, there are many other ones I highlighted earlier.

Work ethic. This one, I think, will become more and more interesting to us going forward. This whole concern that kind of our young people are coming up, people use the language of snowflakes. Part of the language of snowflakes about young people is that they're sensitive, overly sensitive. But another aspect we could call it, sort of the marshmallow phenomenon. It's like there's snowflakes and there's marshmallows. And the marshmallow phenomenon is like no one has ever asked you to do anything difficult before. And so we're seeing, again, even on the right and the left, we're seeing a kind of a common problem of young people. You know, like they're 22 years old and they're

arriving at their places of work looking for kind of good quality of life and not, don't ask too much of me. I really like, you know, 34 hours a week and like a lot of benefits. It's like, is this coming from? You know, it's probably not nefarious. It's probably coming from sort of like if you had all of the resources of a successful mom and dad trained on you and you alone, you know, nobody really needed anything from you. Whereas when I interview moms and dads raising, you know, three or four kids or more, what I'm hearing across the board is there's this built-in way that we can really love the heck of out of our kids. And we, we shower them with everything. And yet, you know, there's only so much I can do for this child. And by the time this child

was eight or nine, you know, I had to hand him a vacuum cleaner and say, no, you go, you go vacuum because I'm holding your little sister. Or can you go buckle the kids into the car for me? Because I'm holding this, you know, the sibling. And so this kind of idea that there's a built-in way without being stingy or, you know, overtapping your children to begin to engage them in the work of caring for other people. And so this looks, again, like something really powerful. So there's all these neat ways. And then, of course, the Holy Grail probably from the perspective of economic flourishing, which is what you asked me about. The Holy Grail is this, I'm almost afraid to say it, this big elephant in the room about male labor force participation, which of course undergirds a lot of what we think is going on these days. And there's a big debate on the political right about male labor force participation, which has been declining since the early 1960s. And kind of is, is that phenomenon largely something that we should interpret as a result of, let's say, worse economic opportunities? So kind of the jobs that are out there, they're just not male jobs anymore. Like we've a lower share of the economy is devoted to manufacturing, say, which of course is true around the world.

That's not unique to us in terms of those narratives that blame deindustrialization. Or is the decline in male labor force participation more a function of declining male investment in family formation? So we see like young men who get married at, say, a biologically appropriate time, you know, sort of in the early to mid-20s, who all of a sudden have children depending upon them and a wife depending upon them. We see that these young men develop beautifully. And by the time they're in their mid-30s, they have a whole, you know, 10 years of work experience. So, you know, I'm kind of sketching out these two poles. And of course, it could be a little bit of both. But I think that the family story, it's a story that someone like George Gilder talked a lot about in the 80s and the 90s. I still think he was largely right book called Men in Marriage. If you haven't picked it up and you're listening to this, you know, go buy a used copy of men in marriage. It's probably out of print at this point. But this question keeps coming back. And I think it's time for a new investigation of the way in which committing to a family and having children earlier in life is a very positive predictor of.

men's success. Interesting. I mean, we're just past a few pretty prominent off-year elections in this country. Yeah. And just watching the news, watching certain candidates, female candidates, declare that, you know, this is not a time to get married, this is not a time to have kids. That's not helpful. No. No, no, no, no, it really isn't. No, quite the opposite. We need to encourage young men that we've, we've got lots of data that suggests that you're not injuring your future career prospects by, let's say, committing to marriage and having a couple of kids in your 20s. And so you're not injuring your prospects, but we can say pretty confident we think it's a boon. But again, this is one of these stories where the, you know, the card-carrying academic elite would not like to discover that traditional forms of commitment and, you know, I would say commitment and responsibility are, you know, they're not only. only personally beneficial, but they're socially beneficial. So, yeah, we're ripe for some new,

I think, some new research on this. And that's the thing I'm about to tackle next. Let's try to tell that story about men who have children. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So. I mean, let's switch gears a little bit. You've also done some significant work in the education space, which Bradley Foundation has been interested in for decades and decades, specifically school choice, but looking at school choice and the relationship between religious, and educational outcomes, parental engagement. What have you learned about how families and schools, about how families and schools work together?

And what's that tell us about education reform in this country? And obviously there's been a bit of a boom there in recent time, post-COVID. Recently. That's right. That's right. Yeah, that's right. I'm pretty excited about that boom. I mean, this kind of revival. And we almost used to, when I was coming up, we would call it school choice and now we're calling educational freedom or ed freedom.

And I'm not sure which one is better. It's kind of a constant, we'll say, like frustration of those of us who work in the pillars of the free society that language like school choice, you have a language of choice and language of freedom, they rhetorically, they end up conveying the wrong thing. Because it's not freedom that we are after for its own. sake. Of course, you can't be. So freedom rightly understood as the sort of highest gift of, of the creator to the creature is something that couldn't but be beneficial when exercised, when exercised within sort of a moral framework, right? And so we would, we would expect to see, like, if you were, if you asked me, like, could you put a name on this? I would want to give it another

name besides Ed Freedom or school choice. I don't have a problem calling it that. But what are we thinking about, I mean, it's kind of we're thinking about, like, what is the, what is the proper way to bring up a child? So in a sense, I think school choice and education freedom, they, they highlight the challenge that we have. Challenge that we have is to kind of change the default prescription. And the default prescription is kind of like the kid is, is sort of the responsibility of the state. And if the state has decided in, you know, her largesse to allow the parents to, you know, have some involvement, some freedom or some choice in that prospect, you know, the parent can choose another school, like, at the permission of the state, right? And you see how, like, how backwards that is. Okay. So I started with the current situation, this expanding. So I'm quite optimistic. But here's what, here's what we think we know. But the easy part of passing the law is the hard. part is putting it into reality and action. Yep. Yeah, the hard part that's exactly right, is

putting it into practice. Here's what we know, something like two or three million homeschooling moms in this country, educating their kids at home, largely at home, will say exercising their responsibility as more or less educational contractors, because actually it's so important to realize these homeschooling moms and dads, they're not making it all up. They're not, you know, like, it's not like school according to mom. But what we know is that two or three million homeschooling moms, it's like five million kids, are outperforming from every public school district in the country by a very large measure. And so you have to build what you know about educating kids around that, because if your theory can't account for that, if your, you know, your education economics

research cannot account for that. You don't have a good theory. And so currently what the state-of-the-art economics research will tell you, like the research of someone like Eric can you check at Stanford? He will say, well, we've we've crunched all the numbers. And what we can tell you is that money doesn't matter. Okay. That's the expression the economists will use. And so the economists will tell you there is no how much money you spend on a per pupil basis at the district level cannot explain the differences in the outcomes. Okay. That seems like a pretty big conclusion that I'll tell you that knowing that much from the economics literature, that has not filtered through to the public dialogue. Everybody still assumes that if you spend more money, you'll get more

outcomes. So I'd say economics research got that far. And there's a few other things. There's some interesting research that was done. This was kind of in vogue for economists in like the 90s in the early 2000s. Say since about 2010, there are no really interesting lines of research among the economists who were working on schools. It just lost its cachet in academics, a lot of what moves things forward is what's hot. But they got as far as that, which was at least to sort of disprove some of the, I would say, like, you know, politically liberal, progressive talking points about schooling, even if it didn't filter through to the conversation. But what they didn't have was a model that explains, well, if it's not money, kind of what is it? All right. And so if you come back

to that homeschooling model, it turns out that if you imagine that a kid is not like a piece of raw material, that you could just kind of dump into some black box and you'll get a piece of furniture out at the other end. The kid is, you know, more like a seed that has to grow in the right soil. So it turns out if you put them in the right soil, if you just stick the kid in a home-like environment where people love the kid, and then there's all this extra power if you worship God together with the kid. There's all this good soil. And then you expose a kid to good literature. You teach them how to read and do some arithmetic. I mean, this turns out to beat out like what else you can get most of the time. That's a kind of minimalist picture.

And so what we are trying to do now is really just flesh out kind of the middle. What are the, what's the kind of, we see that small is better for kids. Again, not surprising, they're like little animals. You never take your puppy dog and throw your puppy dog into some large farm with hundreds and hundreds of dogs running around. The dog would be very stressed out and you'd scratch your head and say, so you've got this thing, you know, Solzhenits and said, the human being is someone who could get used to anything. It's an animal that could get used to anything. expected kids to get used to anything for probably far too long. And so what we're trying to do now

is essentially take what we do know, which is that a great home-like, church-like environment for young people turns out to beat the average most of the time. And so then what else, in terms of institutional structure and resources, would round out that picture? Suppose you said, okay, there's some families who can't be homeschooling, all right? That's fine. And so what would you like to be able to offer those kids? But setting everything else aside, we don't need brick and mortar necessarily. Like, we're going to let everything be something new that we think about. We might think about one-room schoolhouses again, where we don't take for granted that a good way to socialize a 10-year-old is to put the child in a classroom with a bunch of other 10-year-olds, for instance.

Right. So so many things that are now ripe for sort of re-discovery and reopening. Yeah. And the fact is, I can't think of one large urban school system, public school system in this country that's working. Right. There are pockets within those school systems that are working, but for the most part, they're not working. That's right. And we owe that to this rising generation for sure. We do. And you can see on the ground here in Milwaukee, the per pupil expenditure in the public school systems can be as much as twice what a private school student is receiving.

through the choice program. And the result dramatically different. Dramatically different. Yeah. Yeah, what we see is. There and so much communication to be done there. I don't understand why this is such a lightning rod. Yeah.

Well, I mean, there's been this. It's politics and union politics and things like that. That's right. Union politics. But I think if we were to make the best of it, we would say behind the, I mean, the unions are their own animal and they're really an animal. But behind it, there was always this kind of progressive. idea that, like, you know, we should do for the children of the poor, you know, that this idea. So, like, at best, a

school should really be able to do for the child with the parents can't do for the child. And people really like this idea. And it's been very powerful for a long time. What we know, though, from, let's say, the United States in the 19th century is that these, like, little, again, one-room schoolhouses or two-room schoolhouses with sister so-and-so or father-so-and-so, they did a really good job for the children of the poor. And what we're seeing is like, the big well-funded public school systems, they just don't replicate that. And so there's, I think there's some real anger, or I guess I would say resistance to kind of agreeing to that prospect, because it does look pretty frustrated. You can have all these degrees and certificates

and you can be like the educational elite, but you can't really. You can't really. you can't really create a mother Angelica. Right. I remember her story and she had a single mom, but she eventually was educated by the nuns. And that those schools, and they really made, they really made a huge part of this country,

these various kind of religiously motivated schools, Lutheran schools, Baptist schools, all over the country. And there's, yeah, I, you know, I get it, but it's painful to, it's painful to recognize you can't replicate the effect of, I would say Christian and biblical charity by spending money, but you can't. Before we have to go, I do want to talk about your recent book a little bit, Hannah's children.

You interviewed 55 college-educated women who have five or more children, and there's no doubt that these women are defined the demographic trends we see across the developed world or the world, for that matter. What does you learn from these women about how they weigh costs and benefits? And why does you think this was worth studying? Well, Going back to something we talked about before, well, okay, I'll start it here. The declining birth rate question is soon going to be, if it is not now, the most important sort of problem for policymakers. Yes. The most important. We've just in the last two weeks, I think, seen a really lively and actually somewhat entertaining discussion about the insolvency of Social

Security's coming. We've seen this phrase that was coined by a friend of mine, total boomer luxury communism, I think, in relation to Social Security. The underlying thing that Russell Green is referring to, of course, is that these Social Security programs, these national pension programs, are not sustainable. The reason they're not sustainable is because people haven't had the children that were expected when the programs were built. I mean, there's, of course, there's about 10 other reasons why the programs are not sustainable today, too. But when I pick out Social Security, of course, we can extend it to Medicare, Medicaid. And right there, you've, you know, you've kind of described the lion's share of the federal budget and the lion's share of the spending, which is not a discretionary, it is just fixed.

And so this is the problem that's coming to the forefront. And so the population problem, we're seeing a lot of folks being interested in it. Before I got started writing this book, I was disturbed by the, I guess I would say, the ineffective but also sort of strange and maybe somewhat coercive-looking policy. that were being rolled out in places in Central Europe, such as Hungary, in order to try to persuade people to have babies. And I thought, this is going to work. We've got 30 years of data that says this won't work. But somehow people are still kind of missing the point. And so I basically thought, okay, we already know what the correlations are. It turns out religious people have more kids. And this was known. I mean, this has been known. But without a mechanism, people can't make good policy. And that's the way. And that's the way. And that's the way. And that's the way. And that's the way. And that's the way. And that's the way. And the way is the And that is to say they tend to view the religious contribution as a black box we can't understand. And it could be just sort of irrational stuff going on in there. It's just irrational. Who knows?

There's these like Amish people and they have kids and maybe there's these cultish Jewish people and they have kids. And there's some like old-fashioned Mormons and they still have kids. But it's kind of like not something that policy can depend upon because it's irrational. So we're just going to go forward doing what we do, which is we create nudges and incentives. and we're just, that's what we know. And I thought there's a story here that has to be told in such a way that it really is, that you drive home the point that, number one, the contribution of religious communities to the problem or to the, let's say, the contribution to the good behavior you would like to encourage is not irrational. It's not an irrational thing that people can't understand. They may say, well, look, I don't share the religious beliefs of these people. I don't want to be these people, as many of my reviewers said later. But what you want them to see is if I believed the way they did, and I was a member of that community, I could see making the same decision. And you want to reveal that many people join communities like this. They grow up, not religious. And they encounter a charismatic rabbi or a family

down the street that goes to a great church. And they think, you know, that looks kind of good. I might give it a shot. And then, you know, then it kind of works in a pattern. Like you join a great community. You become convicted that children are worth making sacrifices for, and then you arrange your life to do that. So the reason I thought it was worth doing is, number one, because this is the most important problem that's going to face the whole world right away. We're already seeing, I think, destructive and baddy policy solutions. And then number three, like, I think there are very concrete things that governments can do, not directly by trying to do sort of direct family policy. I sometimes call this the policy of zookeepers. You have your families in a little cage and you

kind of hand them some meat or some potatoes from time of time. But what they can do and should do, what countries can do and should do, is really question the relationship they have with churches and the religious community generally. And people scratch their heads. They say, well, we have religious liberty in this country. So what do you mean when you say more religious liberty? And I say, wait, really, how much liberty do we have if churches are desperate to open schools? But you're setting up a state monopoly over here. Okay, well, so people haven't thought about that, that actually your school policy is part of your religious liberty policy. Well, what about the other things that churches and religious communities historically did? Feeding the poor, clothing the naked,

like all of those things. Well, it turns out you could go down that list and you're going to find, oh, actually, the state's taken over that thing. So that is sort of the, the goal was in the, before to that conclusion, just try to dramatize and really set up, set up the storytelling there in such a way that people could read this. Number one, encounter some lovely people. Number two, really kind of put flesh on what it looks like to be a rational participant in a religious community that believes children are worth having. And then number three, of course, to point in hopefully a compelling way at the kinds of policies, I think states could really engage in that I think might make a difference and move the needle. I mean, I think if you could expand educational choice, we might say,

I think you could see a difference in your demographic scene in 20 years. And nobody's got anything that could pay off that quickly in the other realm. So yeah, it's worth doing. Really interesting. We've got time for one more question, Catherine, and we try to end these episodes on a high note, given all the work that you've done and you've done a tremendous amount, when you look at the challenges facing American families and our civil society today, what gives you hope and where do you see opportunities for institutions, whether it's markets or churches or schools or families, those are all institutions to help people flourish and lead better lives?

Well, that's easy. What gives me the most hope is being blessed to be a young grandmother. One of my sons and his wife welcomed a baby just a few days ago. So, and that's what gives me hope is that I know they're not that unique. I mean, they're unusual. They're in their early 20s. But I know I have many students I've taught over the last decade and a half that have gotten married and had kids. So honestly, for me, that is really, really very hopeful.

And there's many more of them than we realize. So the good thing about demographic realities is that when they're working in your favor, that sort of exponential growth factor works. really well. So their children and their children's children. So actually, I think that if I had to put my money on a country in, let's say, broadly in the West, that I expect to see able to kind of reverse some of this. I would say the United States is in a very good position. For instance, our birth rate is higher than Mexico's birth rate right now, which stuns most people. And if you drill down and you don't look at the average, but you look at the buckets, what you'll find is there are more large,

kind of religious families in this country than in Mexico, and that is enough to make the difference. So that's, to me, that's very hopeful. There are a large number of young people. They're drawn increasingly to more traditional forms of liturgy, be it Orthodox or more traditional Catholicism or seeing this across the board in the more liturgical Protestant traditions as well. And so I think actually there's a lot of health there, and I'm going to, if I have enough time and resources, I'll try to put some more descriptions on that and a couple of papers coming up. So that's, I think, a great reason for hope. And then I would say just in terms of the kind of opportunities for institutions to contribute to that flourishing would be really to, I think this is a good moment

to deepen our appreciation for, I would say, the principles of the founding. I know the founding is getting a lot of heat these days as, you know, maybe, I think, you know, like on the contrary, I think the principles of the founding and certainly the way it was lived out, the experience of the various religious institutions. I'm about to sort of bring, sort of republish some of the commentary of Catholic churchmen of the 19th century, who I think had a lot to say about how they were on the ground, developing schools and hospitals. So I think, I don't know, I think to me, I think there's a tremendous opportunity right now to say, look, okay, look, this New Deal thing didn't work out that well. It's sort of, you know, this idea that kind of like,

all the sudden, the, I don't know, for my, for my church, you know, the thought was like, well, now we've got a Catholic president and, you know, we don't have to be the ghettoized Catholics anymore. We're just got to work with the, work with the government. Sort of it'll all just become one thing. There's, like, I don't think, you know, now we're kind of looking. Maybe that wasn't the greatest idea. So I, I, I'm really optimistic that the resources we have in our past, especially the sort of the pre-federal era. the pretty big federal era after the Civil War, that actually we'll find a lot there to rejuvenate. And the good thing is, maybe you'll complain for me saying this, the good thing is, all these things are going to run out of money. So even if someone didn't agree with me, we're going to get there anyway. We're going to have to rediscover what it looks like to take care of each other without the largesse of the federal government. And so I think if we're a little bit cagey here, we could bring to the table. I guess I would say color the imagination of the American people so that they understand that as these federal programs recede, because they will, it's not necessarily cause for despair. But actually, we can be, we can look forward with a lot of expectation to the kind of society in which more local, more local institutions take care of each other. It'll be okay. Fantastic. Let's hope so. And America still does remain at a land of encroachment.

incredible opportunity. Yes, yes. Catherine Bacolic, thanks so much for your time today, and thanks for the very important work that you're doing. We truly do appreciate it. You're welcome, Rick. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe, so you don't miss an episode. I'm Rick Graber,

and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast.