In this episode, we talk about the alarming decline in fertility in some of the world s most important countries, and why we should all be worried about it. We also talk about what we can do about it, and how we can prevent it.
00:00:07.720Like, you know, I think generally women are much more likely to publicly complain about things and identify as depressed and say all these things.
00:02:23.400And we're talking with people about this day in, day out.
00:02:26.820Yesterday we had like a 90-minute conversation with someone writing a book about this.
00:02:30.820And this is where sort of like I read something this morning that now like, because, you know, our solutions to prenatalism, they're like very gender egalitarian.
00:02:42.700They're like, how do we make this work in a society where we keep high levels of education, high levels of prosperity, high levels of gender equality and choice, and also the choice to not get married and not have kids if you don't want to.
00:03:07.720And he writes in this analysis of the baby boom, assuming he's a he, for reasons that will become apparent later in my rant about all this, that basically nations that have undergone a first demographic transition, sort of, you know, when a nation becomes prosperous and more gender egalitarian and blah, blah, blah.
00:03:30.140And with more education, they start to see a decline in fertility.
00:03:33.600And he argues that baby booms prove that this decline can be reversible.
00:04:54.660What he does quite compellingly with tons of graphs and a lot of stats is show that really marriage is, is a big driving factor here more than I had thought when it came to specifically baby booms.
00:05:08.440You know, he points out that, for example, most fertility and the highest fertility is with monogamous married couples, that couples that stay married have the most kids.
00:05:17.040And, and we've seen this from other people, too.
00:05:19.000There's a shocking statistic here that you had told me.
00:05:21.400Like, of people who stay married for X of many years, something percent of them have a kid?
00:05:27.700Like, they're, like, average fertility is quite high, but I can't remember exactly what it is.
00:05:31.320But, like, several, several people from very different philosophical camps within the pronatalist movement all have this thing of, like, you know, monogamous marriage is a very key driver of fertility.
00:06:07.660And we'll, of course, link to the Substack post that sort of show, like, the fertility for married couples living together, married couples with a partner that's absent, separated couples, and, like, various levels of divorce and singlehood.
00:06:19.500And, obviously, like, highest fertility is a thing.
00:06:22.620And, clearly, I mean, even among our friends who are super prenatalist, the ones that have the most kids have a partner who's there to help them with the kids, obviously.
00:06:50.020He writes, the marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation down, young male wages up, and male employment down.
00:07:03.840Male employment up or male employment down is what you meant to say.
00:07:06.020Yeah, male unemployment down, meaning male employment up.
00:07:08.220So, like, I'm starting to get a little nervous because there is this camp within prenatalism, right, that's like, well, the whole problem is when women got educated, and then they got on the pill, and then they, and so what we have to do is just stop, stop female education and put them back in the home.
00:07:26.560So, I'm, like, getting a little nervous.
00:07:27.780I'm like, oh, man, is he, like, one of these guys?
00:07:30.480But here's where he, like, gets, like, the roller coaster is going back up.
00:07:34.280Like, I'm like, okay, this is good because he says, note that what matters here is relative gains, not absolute gains.
00:07:40.800Women did not make less money during the baby boom, he means, and were not less educated in 1960 as compared to 1930, merely less so in comparison to their male peers.
00:08:11.960Well, and I just want to make a note here that, like, a big problem that we have encountered when trying to matchmake friends and when we talk with people about relationship markets and whatnot is this problem of women really wanting a man who is higher in status than them.
00:08:24.480Even if they're super feminist, even if they're super, you know, independent, they still want a guy who's higher in status than them.
00:08:29.800So this male, this, like, relative male status thing is totally real.
00:08:33.060No matter how progressive you are, you know, no matter how woke you are, you're still super into that.
00:08:38.980But then here's where I'm like, but like, is he right?
00:08:42.000But like, oh, is he says what ended the baby boom in three words, second wave feminism.
00:08:47.880By this, I mean, the suite of changes referred to as the sexual revolution, no fault divorce, normalization of premarital sex, delegitimization of marriage as an normative form of family, combined with a concerted political campaign to raise women's relative economic and social status.
00:09:04.600Okay. So I totally agree with some things here. And I'm like, oh, with other things.
00:09:10.660So his prescriptions, and let's just discuss his prescriptions one by one. So we'll stop after each one.
00:09:15.520But hold on, before you get further, there was something you would talk to me about this morning, which I think is important for people to understand is he did a very good job of showing that historically what people have argued is like, it's the pill that causes.
00:09:25.540Right. And so he showed it in graphs when the pill was introduced versus when various women's rights movements happened and succeeded.
00:09:36.140And it seems to correlate much more with women's rights than it does with the pill or any sort of fertility.
00:09:42.320And this is tentative. This is not a perfect argument because after I read this, the one graph he showed was the legalization of the pill in Japan.
00:09:50.780And he demonstrated that fertility plummeted in Japan before the pill became publicly like widely available, but after second wave feminism started to have influence.
00:10:02.680Now, I push back on that a little bit because one, I know how culturally behind on picking like up trends Japan has been.
00:10:09.300I mean, when my parents were in Japan in the 80s, it was second wave feminism was not exactly a thing.
00:10:16.040Like, I think I think he's totally off there. He's grasping at straws when you actually look at the release of the pill and second wave feminism making its rise.
00:10:24.940And I had Claude sort of walk me through both of them. You know, I I got the legalization of of the pill at various stages.
00:10:32.640And then I also saw like the various like big milestones, like big publications and protests and media events for second wave feminism that would have spread those ideas and led to normalization.
00:10:40.940It'll happen at the same time. These things are so intertwined. I think it's impossible for someone to successfully parse them out and using Japan as an example is just not.
00:10:49.140So I I question his methods here. I still think it's compelling argument. And I do think, frankly, and you and I agree, it is culture and not scientific intervention.
00:10:57.360So I don't think the the pill is is any more strongly influential on pronatalism as a legalizing abortion is like we found that when you make abortion illegal, it doesn't bring back birth rates.
00:11:10.560Right. So like this is, you know, may temporarily cause a spike, but it doesn't permanently cause a spike.
00:11:16.840So, again, I I don't think he's wrong, but I do question his methods. Anyway, that's kind of beside the point.
00:11:21.260I think he makes an extremely strong argument. And this idea of relative male status to female status is really important.
00:11:28.380What I find nice about it is his point that, like, this doesn't mean female disempowerment.
00:11:32.220This doesn't mean women work in the home like this doesn't mean that, you know, women is not a handmaid's tale scenario that he's asking for at all.
00:11:38.880He's just saying you got to give men a chance to excel in society really fundamentally.
00:11:44.540But let's go back to his prescriptions. So I think they're actually quite interesting.
00:11:48.780And this is a this is a clever guy. He he encourages first roll back the welfare and pension state and lower income taxes.
00:11:58.020This is interesting. He argues this because he believes that a lot of the lack of dependence on marriage and lack of interest in marriage is that, you know, women can do just fine without a partner.
00:12:10.060And a lot of that's because of welfare. He believes that women are disproportionately reliant on welfare and able to qualify for welfare, which is, I think, accurate.
00:12:19.140Oh, oh, did you hear about the thing about I think it was welfare or something that one of our friends was telling us about women versus men and they were like, men basically never, ever qualify for this program.
00:12:53.040And in literally just tons and tons and tons of women. Yeah.
00:12:57.100Yeah. So, yeah, I agree with that. And I think that that is a dampener on marriage.
00:13:01.100And I mean, in general, I think that you and I would argue that we would prefer from a peronatalist perspective, but also from like a societal health perspective, that local communities offer these amenities more than the government.
00:13:15.000The government offering these amenities causes problems, disempowerment, poor services, actually, like not really good service provision.
00:13:22.260Whereas like if you live in a tightly knit Catholic community, Mormon community, Jewish community, Amish community, whatever, and they provide this support to community members, you're going to get higher quality, higher cultural fidelity, better mental health, et cetera.
00:13:35.720So I don't disagree with him on this. I'm kind of cool with this.
00:13:38.640So then on to the next one. And this is also super interesting.
00:13:41.560And we love it, but for different reasons, he argues that we should roll back the regulatory state.
00:13:47.640Why? He says affirmative action in favor of women is common across the baby boom countries, as is disproportionate female employment in state-created regulatory jobs, such as human resources.
00:14:01.740So he's basically saying that like a lot of women have employment and positions and incomes because of massive, sprawling government bureaucracy and rules and regulations that like a gynocracy.
00:14:15.280How do you outcompete men in bureaucracies?
00:14:17.200It's one of the areas where women do really well in bureaucracies.
00:14:20.320Exactly, exactly. So if you get rid of the bureaucracy, you're getting rid of, this headband is not staying in, you're getting rid of, you're getting rid of a lot of female employment.
00:14:29.580So he's like, well, you know, one way we can get women more dependent on men, or at least like lower in status, is by removing government bureaucracy.
00:14:37.120I mean, you and I are super in favor of anything that eliminates government bureaucracy.
00:14:40.700It hadn't occurred to me that this would disproportionately affect women's employment.
00:14:47.700So I'm like, ah, but at the same time, no, rip off the bandaid.
00:14:51.980Like he's right. One, this is like, this is not helpful bureaucracy.
00:14:56.480And again, like we're not removing women's opportunity to get work.
00:15:02.980We're just removing an industry that we think is a cancerous growth that also like, you know, is disproportionately favoring them kind of in an unfair way.
00:15:24.520So the other is he wants to end affirmative action for women and ban or de facto ban as similar lobbying organizations for men are the thousands of organizations, scholarships, and programs that exist to promote women's career success.
00:15:54.980And I think at this point now, and I've, I've seen this happen.
00:15:57.140Like I was, we were currently at a, a few, a few weeks ago, we were at a retreat with a lot of really high performing people in government and media, et cetera.
00:16:05.160And I, I came across a couple of people whose primary complaint about their job and their organization and their industry was that there were a bunch of, of affirmative action people who were like totally fine people, smart, wonderful, whatever.
00:16:21.140But they were just, they were simply not qualified for the position and they were in it and it was hurting the organization.
00:16:26.980And these people care deeply about the missions of their organizations and they were just so frustrated by the fact that like, that people were getting promotions, people were getting positions that they frankly just weren't qualified for.
00:17:06.140No, they serve very intelligent, already wealthy, already well-connected people who are smart enough and well-connected enough to even know about these opportunities.
00:17:14.440What they do is they serve to increase equality among the friend group of the people within power in our society.
00:18:16.520So I think even secondary education, when you look at the flight of the average secondary education, you know, high school teacher, middle school teacher, you know, they don't earn much money.
00:18:25.520They don't do is just lay off a good 75% of them, replace them with AI.
00:18:30.800And free them up for work that they actually care about.
00:18:33.640If they're going to complain about how much they're being paid, then we should consolidate resources on those of them that statistically are showing better outcomes.
00:18:42.520Well, and actually, you know, we, we talked about this during the pandemic there, there were issues of, of many teachers unions.
00:18:48.740I'm not going to name names or name like which school districts I heard this from, but from, you know, people working in school districts were finding that the teachers, when it was time to go back to school, refused to go back to school.
00:19:01.760They didn't want to reopen the schools.
00:19:02.980And this is why you see actually in districts where teachers unions were stronger, schools opened later.
00:19:07.400So the school closures in the end, like the tail end of the pandemic did not correlate with actual pandemic outbreak levels.
00:19:15.140They correlated with the strength of teachers unions.
00:19:17.920Well, because many of these teachers, oh, and, oh, sorry.
00:19:22.140The other thing, not just, not just going back to school, did they resist?
00:19:24.700They also resisted doing more than like three or four hours of synchronous learning per day.
00:19:29.080So like literally they would not be on camera live with their students or talking live with their students for more than four hours of the day.
00:20:09.880But like, I think it's more of an issue of impunity, of strength of teachers unions and just sort of knowing that like.
00:20:17.280Well, I mean, public sector unions shouldn't be legal.
00:20:19.460But it's I mean, yeah, but anyway, like the defund education thing, we totally agree with.
00:20:24.260And again, when you also look at educational attainment and you're right, actually, you know, this starts even at primary school.
00:20:29.060Men are men are screwed over in primary school.
00:20:31.240Men are really underserved and not well treated by the legacy education system, the current education system.
00:20:39.100And so, yeah, a way to give men an advantage, a better way to stick out is it's to defund education and or deemphasize education as a credentialing process.
00:20:51.000Because, you know, a big problem is women will look down upon men who do not have their level of education or greater.
00:20:56.980And yet it's like it's like saying like, you know, but like, oh, so I expect you to excel at my level or better in a system that has been systematically biased against you since you were in kindergarten.
00:21:10.340It's so screwed up. So I totally agree with him there.
00:21:12.900She's she's telling the truth about the kindergarten thing.
00:21:14.880You look at men, how they do in kindergarten.
00:21:17.560You look at men, how they do in high school, in middle school, dramatically worse.
00:21:21.620I mean, look, think about our children in in daycare now.
00:21:28.240If you look at the young ages, right, where like you're you're you're likely going to see the biggest impact of all this gender policy.
00:21:34.620They are underperforming more than women underperformed at the very height of, quote unquote, misogyny.
00:21:44.060Yeah. If you look at the education gaps in things like high school and then you compare that with a very height of the income gap during the women earn less whole thing, they don't even come close.
00:21:56.900I should note here that I meant at the height of when people cared about the pay gap, not the actual height of the pay gap.
00:22:04.160Obviously, at the actual height of the pay gap, you know, in the 1920s or something, obviously it was larger.
00:22:11.200But I'm talking about like in the 80s when it was like, oh, women earn 10 percent less than men.
00:22:16.800Where if you look at men in school systems today, they definitely do more than 10 percent worse than women.
00:22:23.040Yeah. Yeah. So like suffice it to say, we agree.
00:22:29.020Here's a place where I'm pretty conflicted.
00:22:54.420He argues that like if this were, for example, had to be gender neutral, which he seems to be opposed to, he would want to see pro natalist incentives in the form not of like, you know, support from the state, but rather income tax breaks.
00:23:08.280Because obviously that would like disproportionately benefit men who pay the highest amount of income tax, which is interesting.
00:23:16.680I really feel like, you know, if you if you are going to support, you know, parents, it is it is often the case that men are less available.
00:23:25.580Like not everyone is the incredible dad that you are.
00:23:27.940And you may not realize that, Malcolm, because you were like the dream dad.
00:23:31.120And I you blow my mind every single day and our kids adore you.
00:23:34.640And I just oh, I don't you're not real, Malcolm.
00:23:37.180You're not like you like I don't know how you exist.
00:25:03.460And I also think that no fault divorce is important.
00:25:06.960You know, our argument in the Pragmatist Guide to Relationships is if your relationship isn't working and if, you know, one person knows that they would be way better out of it, it doesn't matter if it's both.
00:25:16.940Like that, the sooner you end it, the better.
00:25:19.660This idea of sticking people in marriages is pretty toxic.
00:25:24.380So I don't know about this whole no fault divorce thing either.
00:25:27.200I think people should be able to leave toxic relationships easily.
00:25:39.860This whole like black-pilled men's movement, like women can screw you over, divorce, rape, you're entering this situation you can never get out of.
00:26:07.440It's a real statistic that of child custody cases, where the man tries to win the custody battle, doesn't just immediately say, I'm not trying, around 70% are won by men.
00:26:27.700Well, no, because a lot of these movements have an interest in lawing to people.
00:26:31.620They want people to feel better about the situations they have created for themselves.
00:26:37.100Because just as much as the progressive movement wants to say, none of this is really your fault, we can just give you money, it all goes away.
00:26:43.620There's an aspect of the red bill movement that's the same way.
00:26:45.880If you want to argue on the other side of this, there was a pretty good article that made arguments on the other side of this called misrepresentation of gender bias in the 1989 report of the gender bias committee of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.
00:27:00.320This piece does make it pretty clear that these numbers do appear to be legitimate.
00:27:05.440However, there are different ways you can run the data that will lead to you finding stuff like when mothers sought sole custody, the court granted the request at a rate 65% higher than when fathers made the same request.
00:27:19.340The larger point here is that the numbers are not as holistically and overwhelmingly weighted towards the side of mothers just get whatever they want, as many men's rights activists would have you believe.
00:27:33.260It is more a men and women are biologically different and have biologically different wants and behavior patterns on average, and that leads to differences in how much they want things like sole custody of kids.
00:27:46.440You know, I haven't done the video yet.
00:27:47.780I haven't posted it yet because I'm a little scared to be this antagonistic to our audience, but it's the one on the reason you haven't found a wife is really your own fault.
00:27:56.760But yeah, but we view that about pretty much everything.
00:28:00.260Well, I mean, with everything, it's about radical self-responsibility.
00:28:03.860And those are the factions of society that will survive.
00:28:06.240But I am, I mean, the black pill movement, the black pill movement towards marriage and stuff like that justifies its own failures by lying to itself about the real world successors.
00:28:20.200They're like 50% of marriages into divorce.
00:28:30.860And even when that 50% number came out, that was because they were counting the same marriages.
00:28:34.800So my dad went through like four or five marriages.
00:28:37.760So, okay, if he went through five marriages, right, and he was in a sample size with five other people, people would say 50% of marriage is in a divorce.
00:28:49.020And then those five other people never got a divorce at all.
00:28:52.140And it's like, no, my fucking dad just is a really unpleasant person to be married to.
00:28:57.300Note, if you want to take the other side of this argument, what you can do is say, yes, millennial divorce rates are very low, but their marriage rates are also very low.
00:29:06.980So it doesn't really matter that their divorce rates are low.
00:29:10.000I just like to always try to present both sides when I can.
00:29:30.420We know from studies, I think it was in Thailand or something, somewhere in Southeast Asia, that if you look at regions where tsunamis hit versus regions where tsunamis didn't hit, but they were, you know, culturally, economically, otherwise similar, you saw baby booms in the regions where the tsunamis hit.
00:29:47.480Map deaths, like periods of intense struggle.
00:29:50.080And yet not even where the tsunamis hit, but where people lost, like children, you know, where there was like extra tragedy.