00:00:00.000So, next one. I have four kids. Okay, birth rate right now is 1.58. Everybody I meet, I tell them I have a lot of kids, okay? What can we do to get the youth to start thinking about having a family, having kids, or maybe the crisis is so massive that it's going to take decades to fix, but how would you address it?
00:00:22.540It's going to take a generation to fix. For people who are interested, we just published what we call a landmark paper, long, long social science study on family policy, and people know the diagnosis well. There are cultural, economic, religious, social factors that go into this, but what we're saying in this bottom line is, while those need to change, and I'll come back to a couple of them that I think in particular need to change, there may also be a role for federal and state policy.
00:00:46.880And so, we have proposed, even as a conservative organization, that you invert some of the existing policies in federal law that disincentivize marriage and probably disincentivize the birth rate and actually incentivize young Americans before the age of 30 to get married and to have children.
00:01:04.480We're saying, to be clear, though, that's downstream from some bigger factors, what's going on culturally and economically. And just like you say to young people you encounter, get married, have a lot of children, our institutions, which are upstream of the institution of the federal government, have to do a better job of cultivating among Americans the desire to be married and to have children.
00:01:26.940Our religious institutions, our other cultural institutions. And so, these things have to occur in tandem. The good news is, while the data is admittedly mixed in some cases, in some countries that have done this, particularly Hungary and Israel, there have been modest improvements in the marriage and birth rates.
00:01:45.760And so, we at Heritage are sober about the timeline we think that it will take to reverse this, a generation, 20 or 25 years. But we believe we're not yet at the point of no return, although probably there are some societies in the West that are.
00:02:00.500Okay. While we're speaking, I just wrote this down. And I appreciate that. We have some case studies of where it's working, where it's not. Okay. Question for you. What hurts or, hell, what affects birth rate the most?
00:02:15.240One, I have affordability. Two, policies from the top. Incentives for me to say, let's have three kids. Let's stay married. Let's do this, right? Instead of, you know, the Lyndon Johnson 1964 policies of single mothers. Let's give them more welfare. Let's give them more incentive to not get married. I'm getting all this money from the government. Why would I get married? It's cheaper. You know, it's better for me to keep having these kids.
00:02:38.740Media, who we're turning as heroes. Okay. And then manipulation, feminism. So, out of those five, I got affordability, policies, media, who we sell as heroes, and feminism. Who's impacting that birth rate to be at 1.58 the most?
00:02:55.380I want to be abusive and help this multiple choice and add a sixth, which is culture. I'm going to put those last three in the same.
00:03:02.200Because, and it is a little, I mean, it actually is hard from a social science point of view to disaggregate exactly the percentage of blame for each of those.
00:03:11.760But culture broadly, I think, is the most important. Having said that, what we argue in the paper, and a lot of people who didn't think they would be convinced by argument have become convinced of it,
00:03:20.580is that if you have upstream these cultural trends that you outlined so well, and in 1965, the misnamed war on poverty aggravates that by disincentivizing marriage,
00:03:31.900and at least in some segments of the population birth, then you have the situation that we're in.
00:03:36.960And then what's happened, especially over the last 15 to 20 years, as health care and higher education costs have skyrocketed, we've foisted upon that really bad context,
00:03:48.520the impossibility from the standpoint of many young American men and women who want to be married and want to have kids of believing financially they can make it happen.
00:03:58.420And so what we're trying to do is address in that paper the last two of those, the federal policy and economic policies that need to change.
00:04:08.720We at Heritage, even though we have a little bit of cultural influence, will have to rely on Americans and American leaders to do their part.
00:04:16.780For example, we even say this in the paper, American policymakers using the bully pulpit, not just to push a particular policy,
00:04:25.100but to talk about this positive vision of what it is to be married and have children, can in fact help culture and those trends reverse.
00:04:33.480Have you seen any incentive that's been done for folks to want to stay married and have kids?
00:04:41.380Are there any countries that you look at and say, those guys did it right, they dropped at one point,
00:04:46.480we know China right now opened it up, their birth rate is horrible.
00:04:50.020When they say they got 1.4 billion people, I don't even know if that number is accurate,
00:04:53.060because when you do the math, it doesn't make sense when they went to the one-child policy,
00:04:57.400you just do the math on ChadGBT, the numbers don't go to 1.4 billion.
00:05:01.220So I don't know where they're at. Maybe they are, maybe they're not.
00:05:03.440What have you seen that's worked in a different country that the government incentive to cause people to have more kids and get married?
00:05:09.840Two countries. The gold standard is what Israel has done.
00:05:12.840Now, they've got some intrinsic advantages, largely religious, largely homogenous,
00:05:17.920but we believe that the policies that they've enacted, which we mimic in our paper, have also played a role.
00:05:24.500Because remember, we're not saying that our policy proposals are the end-all, be-all.
00:05:27.740We're just saying that if you get these other cultural and social trends reversed, these can be really helpful.
00:05:34.020But the second country, more like us, although much smaller, is Hungary.
00:05:37.500There, the data is mixed to positive, but the one piece of data, we're not expecting to see this,
00:05:44.480the one piece of data my social science colleagues learned that is really instructive is there was a dramatic decline in Hungary
00:05:52.240after they implemented pro-family policies in the married abortion rate.
00:09:53.160What you described is basically Hungary's system.
00:09:56.420And the second thing is we see this family policy paper as sort of a launch point to commence conversations like what you and I are having.
00:10:04.980We thought, especially given the news cycle, that we would get a lot more blowback on this paper, including from some conservative circles.
00:10:11.920While there are truly legitimate critiques of using government policy.
00:10:27.620Our response is, well, you're not going to be able to afford what we're doing if you don't have more kids as a civil society.
00:10:33.240And so what we will continue to do is do research on programs like what you've described.
00:10:39.160The second point I will say is I think there's a real opportunity here for states to participate.
00:10:44.620In fact, as a conservative, I would prefer states to do most policy.
00:10:48.820State legislatures could receive block grants from the federal government to go innovate and see over 5 or 10 or 15 years with incentives for them if there is an improvement in both the marriage and birth rates.
00:10:59.360Yeah, I think that would be one way for somebody to think about it.
00:11:04.160I think the other part is also universities.
00:11:07.000You're seeing more women are going to college, getting four-year degrees.
00:11:10.300I mean, I think the number is 64% versus 36%.
00:11:14.220So some could say that's a pro or a con because they're also being brainwashed longer with more the woke way of thinking when you're going to college.
00:11:21.860So I don't know if that stat is even a positive thing.
00:11:26.000There's obviously good for anyone graduating from college, whether men or women, but we're really concerned about the war on and the crisis of manhood in the United States, which doesn't come obviously at the expense of women.
00:11:37.780The complementarity of men and women should cause us to really be concerned about the thing that sticks out for me, having a then-teenage brother who committed suicide when I was nine, is the quadruple, four times as likely for boys and men in this country to commit suicide than women.
00:11:53.940We have a real crisis here in culture, in the economy, in policy, and what we're saying at Heritage is because we're conservatives, not libertarians, all due respect to our libertarian friends, we can see a role for the common good for federal policy to play.
00:12:11.480Four times more likely, so sorry to hear that.
00:12:36.280So why do you think that's happening today?
00:12:37.560You think the main reason is parents allow social media to, you know, be available to them too early?
00:12:42.900Well, we know that social media has a huge role to play.
00:12:45.540In fact, one of the most common critiques that we at Heritage make of social media, especially TikTok, is the effect that it has on young women, especially TikTok on young women.
00:12:53.820But broadly defined, social media, the breakdown of the family, of course, affects both boys and girls.
00:12:59.020But also institutions have no longer served any young American well, but I think young men have felt that particularly profoundly.
00:13:07.840And so this goes hand in hand with the big chunk of our family policy paper, Pat, that focuses on the diagnosis, where we get into a lot of these cultural and social factors.
00:13:16.980At Heritage, we believe very much not just in articulating policies that we'll go fight for, but shoulder to shoulder with fellow Americans, things that we as individuals can change through individual action or at our local level.
00:13:28.620And each of us needs to sort of pick up a little bit of the burden to make sure that whether it's suicide, mental health broadly, the dramatic concern that both young men and women have about the inauthenticity of our institutions,
00:13:42.740that we're doing what we can in our individual, family and local lives to improve culture, because no policy can offset these cultural trends.
00:13:53.160Your parents, did they raise you guys conservative?
00:13:55.400They did. They got divorced when when I was young, but both remained conservative.
00:14:00.040My grandparents spent a lot of time raising me. They were Reagan conservatives.
00:14:03.860I was the first registered Republican in my family because growing up, although we were all conservatives, because growing up in Louisiana at that time,
00:14:11.880it was actually hard before I was born for people who were conservatively minded to literally go register as Republican in that Democrat state.
00:14:19.140It was just hard, period, or for people to know?
00:14:22.820No, it was very difficult to actually go into the county clerk or the parish clerk and register as Republicans, the Democrat.
00:14:27.860Because they would know because you're going to get judged. And so they're going to why would you register a Republican?
00:14:32.160Exactly. And there's no Republican Party as an institution after Reconstruction.
00:14:36.400Were your parents, did they get the divorce after your brother passed away or was it pre?