Fertility News This Month

Thailand is cooked, Chile will try stuff that won't work, Japan's Fire Horse Year is looming, and prostitution reduces marriage

I’m going to start doing a monthly link roundup of fertility news I think is sort of fun or interesting or quirky. Quite a lot of this news will be me commenting on various random pronatal policies I hear about around the world.

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Will Chile Go Pronatalist? Chilean fertility has dropped like a rock: from almost 1.9 as recently as 2014-15 to barely over 1 today. Throughout Latin America, a lot of what’s going on is there was a prior pattern of “early start, drawn out finish,” and the early start often involved unintended pregnancy. Contraceptive efficacy is rising and the early start is getting blown up; but whereas that sounds like a story of delay, given that prevailing social norms around marriage in Latin America look more like Seoul than they do Houston, strong recuperative fertility seems unlikely.

Enter Kast, who says he’s going to launch a historic pronatal campaign. Their plan is published. Disclosure: they haven’t called me to ask about it.

My read on “Plan Renace” is… meh? Kast has 9 children himself, which, I hate to say it, doesn’t make him a compelling pronatal leader. People with big families, like myself, tend to just fundamentally misunderstand fertility decline— we think of child costs and benefits with multipliers, per kid, because our children come in bulk. But since most fertility decline nowadays is at the first birth, including in Chile, that kind of math just doesn’t apply. Plan Renace includes a modest baby bonus (cool!), but its central element is tax breaks that scale per kid. Don’t get me wrong, I love that, but I would not expect it to reverse falling fertility. Likewise, expanded public childcare is part of Kast’s proposal— it won’t do much.

If anybody working for Kast reads this, I’m an easy guy to contact, and your current advisors are clearly not giving you super solid advice.

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Thailand Isn’t Serious: