In this episode, we re looking at a piece written by Phoebe Arsolognik-Wakefield about the decline in fertility rates across the 19th and 20th centuries, and the theories about what caused it.
00:00:00.000Hello, Simone! We are back to pro-natalist coverage.
00:00:03.940And today we're going to be talking about a very interesting phenomenon that not many people know about.
00:00:09.840Not many people are aware that half of Europe was below repopulation rate before the baby boom in TFR numbers.
00:00:16.720That means that they weren't having enough kids to replace themselves.
00:00:19.940The entire world was in a bit of a fertility collapse during that period.
00:00:23.960And we somehow got out of it with the baby boom, and then that's at a new sort of set point that we've been declining from ever since then.
00:01:02.300Yes, Phoebe. The Indian food in London?
00:01:05.800Yes, yes, yes. I do think you begin to see her blinders near the end of the piece.
00:01:09.900That is mostly due to the areas of policy in which she has worked.
00:01:13.460But outside of that, I actually think the piece is fantastic.
00:01:16.280Because it brought a lot of information to me that I didn't know.
00:01:19.000And I'd also say another thing I really liked about this piece and her writing is usually when I take a piece, I just read like a few paragraphs from it to get like the core of the message.
00:01:28.260I'll be reading over 50% of this piece.
00:01:30.420Because she presented so much consistent new information that I really have to read most of it to get the point across.
00:01:36.460Right. I think we should be clear that Phoebe is one of the most prominent pronatalists in the UK.
00:01:41.920She's very respected, she's very smart, and she's a wonderful person.
00:01:45.380And you may be bad with names, but yes, we do know her.
00:01:48.280And she was always presented to us as a who's who of one of the top pronatalist policy wonks and thinkers in the United Kingdom.
00:01:58.200So if you want to read this or other work of hers, you can check out Works in Progress.
00:02:03.640In 1800s, the average British woman had 4.97 children over the course of her life.
00:02:09.200About the same amount as the average woman living in Burkina Faso today.
00:02:13.640A century later, Britain's fertility rate had slipped to 3.9 children per woman.
00:02:18.040And 30 years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1.79, well below the replacement rate of 2.1, the number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady.
00:02:30.340So in 1935, the TFR of the UK was only 1.79.
00:03:02.780By the 1920s, over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany, and the Czech Republic.
00:03:10.300The US and Canada also saw steady declines in family sizes throughout the 19th century.
00:03:14.560By 1800, the average American woman had over seven children.
00:03:43.200And I'm going to put a graph on screen so everyone can see and they can more easily visualize than you can.
00:03:47.600If you look from 1800 to 1880, in most countries except for the US, you had a steady fertility rate.
00:03:55.740In the US, you had a slightly declining fertility rate.
00:03:58.500And then 1880 to 1920, pretty much across the board, you have steadily declining fertility rates.
00:04:02.780And it seems to accelerate in the US a little bit during that period.
00:04:05.480So, France's fertility rate had begun slipping even earlier to great alarm in 1896, an organization called the Alliance Nationale pour le Crossement des Populations.
00:05:13.940Li amici della vedeta amirata da tutti noi, questa gemma propria della nostra cultura saranno naturalmente accolti sotto la mia protezione per la durata del loro soggiorno.
00:05:34.040Created expressly to combat de natalite, essentially depopulation.
00:05:40.040It had attracted some 40,000 members by the 1920s with novelist Emily Zola, an early recruit.
00:05:46.920The Alliance Nationale was merely one of many organizations, local and national, established to resist France's apparent progress towards what demographer and statistician Dr. Jacarese Berletilione disparagingly called the imminent disappearance of our country.
00:06:04.860French pronatalists frequently and vividly campaigned on the issue as a serious matter of national security.
00:06:11.180In 1914, the Alliance Nationale published over a million posters showing two Frenchmen being bayoneted by five Germans.
00:06:19.620The poster bore a caption explaining that for every five German soldiers born, only two French soldiers were.
00:06:26.920That is a great pronatalist propaganda there.
00:06:30.240We need to get some of that on board, right?
00:06:34.880This was actually sent to us by a fan, and it was a Dieter Roosevelt speech from this period about...
00:06:39.180I love it that we can have Theodore Roosevelt tell us his thoughts on demographic collapse and how we should fix it and what it means for a country.
00:06:47.780Yeah, so this friend of the base camp pod said to us,
00:06:52.500one of Theodore Roosevelt's most famous speeches given in Paris in 1910 is known as the man in the arena speech.
00:06:59.440For the first time in my life, our base camper says, I just read the entire speech and found this very powerful paragraph.
00:07:06.120So now I'm going to read the paragraph from Teddy Roosevelt's speech as sent by our base camper.
00:07:12.180Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need,
00:07:18.720is to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land.
00:07:26.500It was the crown of blessings in biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now.
00:07:31.300The greatest of all curses is in the curse of sterility, and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility.
00:07:41.680The first essential in any civilization is that men and the women shall be father and mother of healthy children,
00:07:49.280so that the race shall increase and not decrease.
00:07:51.940If this is not so, if through the fault of society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune.
00:08:01.000If the failure is due to deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune.
00:08:06.000It is one of those crimes of ease and self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk,
00:08:12.800which in the long run, nature punishes more heavily than any other.
00:08:17.180If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thralldom of wrong and error,
00:08:26.060bring down upon our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren,
00:08:31.180then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.
00:08:37.500No refinement in life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches,
00:08:45.100no sensuous development of art and literature can in any way compensate for the loss of great fundamental virtues.
00:08:54.200And of these great fundamental virtues, the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race.
00:10:29.320And he apparently had like posters up everywhere about it and everything like that.
00:10:32.680Yeah, just the understanding, the prior, I guess, that I grew up with was that always there was this Malthusian concern for growing populations
00:10:40.940and that there was never any deviance from that ever since Malthus wrote his seminal piece, right?
00:10:46.540Like that's sort of where things left off.
00:10:58.620Contemporary demographers looked to shifts in values to explain the decline, like rising individualism, new family structures,
00:11:05.600and ways of living that were less compatible with parenthood.
00:11:09.020In need, Charles, a British statistician and feminist, argued that increasing female empowerment was one cause
00:11:14.460because motherhood made it difficult for women to compete with men economically.
00:11:17.360So they were even arguing that back in the 1920s.
00:11:19.380Charles, a mother of four, called children a handicap to vocational advancement in adult life.
00:11:26.640Despite the organized resistance of groups like Alliance Nationale, at least some Eastern European demographers doubted whether falling birth rates were truly reversible or even arrestable.
00:11:37.380In 1936, Dr. Carr Sanders, an English biologist, eugenicist, and later director of LSE, wrote, and this is in 1936,
00:11:46.700once the small voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain, in time to become so small that the reproductive rate will fall below replacement rate.
00:11:58.280And that, when this happened, the restoration of the replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem.
00:12:06.280But even as Carr Sanders wrote those words, he was being proven wrong.
00:12:11.040Europe and further afield, something we are still trying to understand, the baby boom.
00:12:15.960And here I am putting a graph on the screen that shows the giant jump in fertility rates that basically happened out of nowhere in tons of different countries.
00:12:24.340The baby boom was an unexpected change in the direction from half a century of falling fertility rates that had taken place in Europe and North America.
00:12:34.180Contrary to the popular belief that it was triggered by soldiers returning home from World War II, the boom, in fact, began in the mid-1930s.
00:12:41.200It was not simply an American or British phenomenon either.
00:12:44.120Demographic wave swept over Iceland, Poland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Austria, and the Czech Republic, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland,
00:13:22.580You really should not be citing his work or, as like an authoritative source, he seems completely to have gone off the deep end in some recent pieces.
00:13:30.240Well, I mean, he wants to use the data to argue for socialism, and it doesn't work.
00:13:35.680You know, so he lies about the data or lies about what the data is saying.
00:13:39.640Yeah, he doesn't even necessarily, like, hide the data.
00:13:43.240He will even point out that there is a very, very, very high cost to, quote-unquote, paying people through services or bonuses for pronatalism.
00:13:53.660He just wants countries to do it anyway, which I think is really interesting.
00:13:57.240Like, he doesn't deny the fact that it's prohibitively expensive.
00:14:00.880He just, I don't know, somehow wants money to come from I don't know where.
00:14:04.940Yeah, well, he wants the government to, like, create a Christian family department sort of thing that forces people to give birth, is sort of my read.
00:14:14.920This is where I'm going to begin to start summarizing what's in the piece.
00:14:17.880We're going to see on the screen here a graph that does show higher incomes associated with lower fertility rates, where we will see this in different time periods in the U.S.
00:14:28.760The most widely known piece of information about the baby boom is its most pervasive myth, that it was caused by the end of World War II.
00:14:36.440The baby boom was not the result of people making up for lost time during the war.
00:14:40.680It saw lifetime fertility rates rise, meaning that people did not simply shift when they had their children, but had more of them overall.
00:14:48.400And in many countries, including the U.S., U.K., Sweden, and France, the rise in birth rates began years before the war had even started.
00:14:56.060Well, neutral Ireland and Switzerland experienced booms that began during the war in 1940.
00:15:01.680Now we're going to talk about one of the explanations for this called the Easterlin hypothesis.
00:15:12.320My initial hypothesis around the baby boom is something we've discussed in other episodes, where I think that the hardship that people endured, even in neutral areas that weren't necessarily actively engaged in war, you know, caused by limited supplies, caused by, you know, trade issues that forced austerity on people's lives at the very least, if not genuine trauma, drove people to a level of vitalism that encouraged them, inspired them to have families.
00:15:41.020And that without some level of austerity or hardship, which could be culturally imposed through strong, hard culture or religion, or could be imposed through the vicissitudes of geopolitical conflict, as you saw with World War II, I think that's what drives higher birth rates.
00:15:58.740And I'm curious to see what this hypothesis is.
00:48:25.540And the post says, if you're 25 to 30 and your main circle isn't frequently discussing nihilism, human consciousness, morality, generational trauma, and the intractable pain of human existence, and is instead discussing cribs, diapers, and prenatal vitamins, then it's time to elevate your circle.
00:48:49.060It's a Facebook post that has over 600 upvotes.
00:48:52.280And, you know, you're reading this thing, and everyone's like, oh, I feel so seen in this.
00:48:56.300And I'm looking at this, and I'm like, wait, you want people to be less satisfied with their lives?
00:49:05.380Like, what tipsy-topsing world do you live in?
00:49:09.580Yeah, when I first read that, I thought it was the other way.
00:49:15.200My reading comprehension near the end of the day just plummets because I get so tired.
00:49:18.700And I read, like, oh, well, if you're talking about, you know, nihilism and intellectual stuff and not baby stuff, you should be elevating your circle.
00:49:31.120That's a broken – but what I also find interesting is the guy who this is attributed to here, I went to his page, the wealth dad, because they had reshared this, and then it went viral.
00:49:41.220I think he might have been making fun of it because he has two kids and a third on the way, and he was talking about how great his wife was for deciding to not redecorate their house in one of his posts.
00:49:52.460When I was trying to find where he had said this, what he said is, I'm glad my wife is not saving money and not redecorating the house so we can put more money for our third kid.
00:50:00.040And I'm like, okay, he pretty obviously doesn't think like this.
00:50:03.000So I think he posted this as a joke, and the antinatalist took it seriously.
00:50:08.580You know, I think that's actually a genre now, which is that jokes or parody created by one political side become appropriated by the other side, and it's sort of unironic.
00:50:25.260Like, sometimes it's ironic, sometimes it's unironic, and it's just like, yeah, and it happens – it goes in both directions.
00:50:32.980You know, like when – I think, like, 4chan tried to make it so that peace signs or okay signs or something were, like, supposed to be a sign of white pride, and then, like, actual white pride groups were like, this is perfect.