You Want Babies, So You Should Get Babies

Breaking down the different reasons to be pronatalist

Today, Stephanie H. Murray has a piece out at The Dispatch arguing that parents are vital for society to continue, and that any pronatalism which doesn’t emphasize this is not going to do very well. As a companion to that article, she has a Substack post primarily focused on insulting people who disagree with her. She calls people who disagree with her “insincere,” “wishy washy,” offering “crap,” “disingenuous,” “entirely counterproductive,” “pretending,” “undermining the pronatalist cause,” and “patronizing.” With friends like these, pronatalism doesn’t even need enemies!

I’m going to respond to the central argument of the post, try not to linger on the weird insults aimed at other people trying to help parents as Stephanie H. Murray claims she wants to do.

1. Thesis: Pronatalism Must Be Communitarian

But to respond, we need to understand the argument. You should read the main article, but the simple summary is Stephanie H. Murray lays out basically three possible pronatal arguments:

1. Do it for the GDP and the pensions

2. Do it because fertility is below desires

3. Do it because it’s for the greater good of some group

Before I go further, I hope you recognize these categories! The first person to formally lay them out as the central “kinds” of pronatalism was… me! One of the first things I wrote for the Pronatalism Initiative was a piece laying out a typology of pronatalism. The three categories Stephanie H. Murray lays out, I call “Economic/Structural” pronatalism, “Freedom-focused pronatalism,” and “Communitarian pronatalism.”

Stephanie H. Murray doesn’t link to this piece, which is sort of odd, because the first example she links to of her #2 case above is a 2018 piece by me about fertility being below desires. Stephanie knows me and reads my work at least sometimes, and I’m definitely the most outspoken public proponent of Freedom-focused pronatalism (her type #2), so it’s actually kind of odd that she doesn’t cite the article which invented the framework she’s taking a side on. But, whatever; sometimes people do the reading, sometimes not (I’m allowed to say that unironically since I literally assign readings to students).

However, Stephanie H. Murray also seems confused about if #1 and #3 are the same or different reasons. For example, this quote merges the two reasons:

And yet, I think the temptation to either deny or politely ignore the real economic challenges low fertility presents in our attempt to reverse it is not only disingenuous, but doomed to fail. I don’t think it’s possible to convince more people to raise kids without admitting that, ultimately, society will suffer if they don’t.

While this one (correctly) recognizes that economic and communitarian outcomes are not the same:

There is evidence that “prosocial” motivation plays a significant role in drawing people into the nursing profession, government or the military. This sort of other-centered impulse is, no doubt, only part of the puzzle—I don’t think many people would become nurses for free just for the satisfaction of serving their communities—but it’s an important part nonetheless. People are drawn to work through a mixture of values and practical considerations; their motivations for having kids are likely going to be the same. I think this sort of validation is particularly important for work that asks more of people than money can ever really repay.

I’m going to treat her argument charitably: she’s not making the mistake of assuming that “low fertility is bad because it threatens our group in a way that triggers altruistic sacrificial motivations” is the same view as “low fertility is bad because it will reduce GDP and pension viability, including across-group transfers which may be antithetical to altruistic sacrificial motivations.” Some people may be happy to make sacrificial choices for their group, and yet not recognize “individuals whose production and consumption count towards U.S. GDP” or “individuals eligible for Social Security” as “the group they want to sacrifice for.”

If we are appealing to peoples’ sense of honor, value, pride; their sense that they’re doing something of transcendent worth, then we are necessarily appealing to transcendent communities.

This is one of the major points Trent McNamara makes in his excellent book Birth Control and American Modernity. The book ends by asking, basically, “Is it even possible to motivate the kinds of sacrifices needed for childbearing without leaning on the moral structures of transcendence?” Will people “have one for the GDP” if the GDP has no eternal, transcendent value?

The short answer is no: people will not have babies for non-transcendent communities.

How do we know? Well, we can look at a society like Korea where fertility is crazy low, where they have a military border with a hostile power that would like to conquer them, where lack of babies is openly acknowledged as a massive threat to their ability to survive as a country… and yet the de novo culture movements in Korea are all anti-natal!

Koreans aren’t responding to the fact that low fertility may very plausibly cause them to be annexed by North Korea by cranking out more babies, they’re responding by just having even fewer babies.

Why? Well, Korea is a massively secular society, and Korean identity is quite literally fractured: half of them live in North Korea. South Korea cannot easily lean on some kind of transcendent idea of Korean-ness since 1) the existential threat is from other Koreans, 2) Koreans are most very secular, especially the young ones, and 3) the Korean government’s entire growth strategy after the 1950s was to lean on a massive dose of developmental idealism which is a kind of cultural universal solvent against collective identity. Without a transcendent community to lean on, telling Korean young people “have a baby so we can conscript him” or “have a baby for the GDP” is useless. And again, we know this, because Korean elites have been saying this stuff for decades and it’s not doing crap.

On the other hand, Israel can appeal to a transcendent identity! Even secular Jews generally have some kind of sense in which their fates and position in life are linked to other Jews. The surrounding Arab Muslim states will never let the Israeli Jews forget the divides between them. The survival of Israel depends day-in-day-out on Israelis believing there’s a transcendent community worth dying for.

All of this to say:

Though Murray kinda seems to fuse “do it for the GDP” vs. “do it for the community,” these are actually totally different arguments.

I’m going to focus on the debate between communitarian and freedom-focused pronatalism, and leave economic pronatalism mostly off to the side, because I think it’s boring.

Now that we understand the framework she lays out, where does Stephanie H. Murray land on it? The answer is her #3, what I call communitarian pronatalism. She strongly argues that without communitarian pronatalism, pronatalism is doomed. She also thinks freedom-focused pronatalists are “disingenuous;” that we’re squeamish about making the communitarian argument, so we won’t say it out loud, and instead say the freedom-focused “but people want babies!” argument. I’m gonna rebut that.

2. But First, We Agree!

On some level, I feel this article is attacking a straw man. I’m not sure if Stephanie H. Murray even understands the argument freedom-focused pronatalists are making. Consider this quote from my earlier article (emphasis added):

At the Pronatalism Initiative, our main perspective is that of freedom-focused pronatalism. We think the main problem of low birth rates is that people are not enjoying “freedom to have family” to the full, and the solution is to unshackle them from whatever unreasonable obstacles may be holding them back. Of course, we recognize that economic pronatalism is important as well, and that, for most individuals, communitarian pronatalism is personally motivating (the family is, at its core, the most basic and central “community” in society). But when it comes to defining our policy vision and engagement with the public, our focus is on the freedom to have a family, not the beneficent effects of fertility on the economy or any given community.

It’s right there. We agree that actually the real motivations for most people are communitarian, and that economic pronatalism is obviously important to policy.

Nobody is saying those don’t matter. Freedom-focused pronatalists aren’t hiding the ball here. We just think that there are compelling reasons to put individual freedom front and center, and to emphasize that people do already want kids.

Now, on to where we disagree.

3. Who is the audience?

There are difference audiences for pronatal discourse. When I talk to close friends who share my values, I may say something like, “God instituted as an honorable estate for the creation and rearing of children in a union of love which serves as a type and tutor for the child of the holy love of the Trinity.” I would not say that if I were testifying before Congress. This is not because I am being disingenuous. It is because civil societies are based on public reason. We have to make arguments which are publicly acceptable to others who do not share our values. If somebody says to me, “I support a child tax credit because I like to eat babies, and we’re running out of babies for me to eat,” I 1) am not highly persuaded to support the child tax credit on that basis and 2) immediately perceive the speaker is not just a cannibalistic psychopath, but also fundamentally doesn’t understand me, my interests, my values, or the kind of political system in which I hope to live. It’s a big turnoff.

We have strong moral duties to make arguments which reflect the values and interests of our political opposites.

I know in the age of owning the other side this is unpopular, but I believe we really do owe it to society to justify our policy preferences in terms of the other side’s values. You have to explain why actually what you’re doing is what the other side should in fact also support. If you’re not doing that, you’re not engaged in civil discourse, you’re doing polemics. And to be clear: I’m not opposed to polemics! Polemics are super important! Political contest is valuable and important and polemic is an invaluable part of creating, maintaining, and extending political coalitions. But no majority lasts forever, and so when you have a majority, it’s vital that you not only own the other side, but also make a compelling case for why, when your majority fades, your policies should not be repealed.

Nonrepeal is especially important for pronatal policy, since raising children takes many years, and parents are not stupid.

Polemical pronatalism is unlikely to work for the simple reason that parents will see very clearly that the Giant Conservative Child Subsidy is… loathed by the liberals and gonna be repealed as soon as they take power. So you can’t count on it to be there for your kid in the future.

I’m not arguing we should never have polemics. I’m not arguing that our political contests should be “winsome.” Polemics win elections! I am however arguing that alongside winning elections, we need to have a parallel and equally true and honest argument for why the other side, when they next win, really should accept the policies we implemented.

The utter failure of each side to make this kind of case is why now every time there’s a change of power we get a raft of EOs radically changing every single part of American political life: because neither side appears able to make persuasive arguments for why the other side should let any of their accomplishments stand. This cycle will never work for pronatalism.

3.1 Communitarianism Can Be A Dangerous Game

So, why does this all matter?

If I go to my legislator and say, “Look man, we need pronatal policies, because my local church has fewer baptisms than funerals.”

His response is: So what? Keeping your church healthy is your church’s job. Even if you subscribe to Christian Nationalism, at the end of the day, it’s a big country, and the policymaker has to respond to aggregated interest, not the particular communities to which individuals actually feel transcendent connections. Point blank, appealing to communitarianism will never work for this kind of political argument.

And in fact, it can be deeply alienating, as I said in my earlier article:

There is, however, a seedier side to communitarian pronatalism, when the “community” in question is an imagined community such as a racial or national group rather than an actual human-scale community like a family or congregation. The vast majority of communitarian pronatalists have some actual real-world community they want to see perpetuated, but some use the language of communitarianism to concoct the notion of racial communities. Most famously, the Nazis promoted extremely aggressive pronatal policies for the races they saw as desirable, while exterminating those seen as undesirable. In China today, the communist government actively promotes higher fertility for the Han Chinese majority, even as it forcibly sterilizes religious and ethnic minorities and kidnaps their children. Thus, communitarian pronatalism covers an enormous range of political territory, from simple love of family to the bonds of faith and creed, to—in some of the worst cases—racial supremacism and genocide. It is this last strand of communitarian pronatalism that has given pronatalism, writ large, a bad name to many demographers.

Gee, I wonder why pronatalists might be slightly hesitant to make the communitarian argument to governments!

Stephanie H. Murray mentions that Israel is often touted as a case of communitarian pronatalism. I agree, it is (to some extent: important caveats apply). And I’m a very pro-Israel person, so the comparison doesn’t bother me. But, uh, maybe Stephanie H. Murray should consider if Israeli communitarian attitudes are also connected to things like: government tolerance and support for settler communities in the West Bank, decades of warfare and tension with Arab and Muslim countries in the region, accusations of being an “apartheid state,” etc, etc. I don’t think it takes any particularly imaginative jump to go from “Our community needs to keep going, so have babies even though it’s a huge personal sacrifice!” to “Our community needs to keep going, so [do immoral thing] even though it makes you feel guilty!” Evil actually is not usually banal. The truth is, the Nazi guards killed Jews because they specifically believed Jews threatened their communities, and that the community of the Aryan race was extremely valuable and important. We don’t have to act like there’s no correlation between “thinking your community is incredibly super awesome” and “being willing to kill people for your community.” Here’s data from the Integrated Values Survey:

There are some countries where >75% of fighting-age men report high willingness to fight for their country, and also where biological ancestry is not seen as important for legitimate citizenship. Funny enough, those countries are all Nordic. The lower right hand corner of that graph is composed of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Finland. So, lol.

But outside of Scandinavia, the men who are willing to die for their country are men who live in countries where blood is seen as important for citizenship. Virtually every country where men overwhelmingly report willingness to serve is a country that really values jus sanguine type citizenship.

This is not me making a comment on multiculturalism per se. This is me pointing out that, yeah, it really is the case that there’s a very real psychological link in the human brain between “This community is super important and we should sacrifice for it” as it applies to biological continuation of a community (fertility, i.e. ancestral-citizenship importance), and as it applies to killing outsiders (willingness to fight in a war).

My point here is super simple:

Two very good reasons not to make communitarian pronatalism your central public pitch are 1) it’s probably not persuasive in a diverse society and 2) in the real world this kind of public pitch has a correlation with lots and lots of killing.

3.2 Effective Movements Have Clear Aims

YIMBY people are effective at getting reforms because even though YIMBY is partly a diffuse movement, a vibe, it’s also an extremely clear set of policy asks. The movement for same-sex marriage certainly had a wider vibe and culture to it, but it was effective because it had a super clear policy ask. Pro-life people didn’t win by persuading the entire culture to become pro-life, we won by having an extremely clear policy ask that could be implemented.

One beef I have with a lot of pronatalists is the lack of a clear aim. “We want a pronatal culture!” okay how will I measure it? What legislative language should I prepare to create such a culture? How will I know when I have valued parenting enough?

Richard Hanania may be almost personally responsible for killing off Federal affirmative action. Why? He had a crazy-clear story and ask: get rid of one executive order.

Even cultural campaigners like Christopher F. Rufo may talk about vibes and attitudes and broad cultural trends— but at the end of the day they have super clear asks, like “do not use ESG for investment allocation decisions” or “fire the board of directors.”

Paradoxically, cultural movements don’t win by staying cultural! They win by becoming almost comically concrete. America will be made great by renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. It’s a joke, but it’s also serious— if your cultural campaign cannot be reduced to a to-do list, you’ve already lost, you have no hope. When Christians gained power in the Roman Empire, they immediately launched into a to-do list which had been openly discussed for decades among Christian elites: defunding and closing pagan temples, ostracizing pagan religious elites, imposing public Christian norms, banning pagan sacrifices, etc. If you don’t have a to-do list, you’re not even in the game.

There will be debate about what a pronatal to-do list would be, but the key point is it absolutely positively cannot be “vibes.”

So take this from Stephanie H. Murray :

Those of us who want to reverse falling fertility while preserving the values of a liberal society have a tricky task ahead. We’ve got to hold two truths at once: that no one ought to be coerced into parenthood, and that we will all suffer if no one raises kids. That may seem like an impossible line to walk—and yet, we walk versions of it all the time. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that would hesitate to admit that we need doctors. And yet, most of us agree no one should be coerced into medical school. In other words, acknowledging the necessity of parents while respecting individuals’ right not to become one is really just a matter of applying the same logic to parenting that we do to every other path in life.

You’d think such an article would end with, like, a call to action. A comment on how we can do whatever it is we’re being told we should do. Instead, we’re just told we have to “hold two truths” and “acknowledge” things. This is just discourse about discourse, logomachy. This is vibes, when what is needful is to-dos.

For pronatalism to win, we can’t be a movement that spends its time arguing about how people should feel about our articles. We have to be a movement that says, “Pass this law,” “Remove this EO,” “Hire this person,” etc, etc. But alas, we aren’t such a movement, because opinions about How Other People Should Make Their Family Choices are like assholes.

3.3 But Vibes Do Matter

That said, I do think vibes matter! They just don’t matter for the articles in political magazines like The Dispatch. It matters what vibes Hollywood puts out about parents. It matters what vibes pastors put out about having kids. It even matters what vibes major celebrities and political leaders put out about having kids! Ya know whose vibes absolutely do not matter? Think tank analysts and journalists who cover the debates among them about the correct way to structure the child tax credit. Our vibes do not matter. Or rather, our vibes qua our professional debates do not matter. My personal vibe IRL is very pronatal and it has absolutely nudged other people into having more kids than they would have otherwise, and I’m pretty darn proud of that. But the purpose of writing about pronatalism as such is obviously to persuade people with very high political information and involvement. For that crowd, vibes out, to-dos in.

But if you’re a TikTok influencer with 500,000 followers, okay, vibes very much back in! But the idea that the inside baseball of policy wonks arguing about policy agendas needs to be written in a way that an ambivalent 32-year-old reads the tax policy article and says, “Yes, now I am inspired to conceive” is just goofy. Nobody expects same sex marriage advocates to persuade gay people to get married, nobody expects that pro-life advocates have to personally picket at abortion clinics every weekend, nobody expects that YIMBY advocates must personally construct highrises, and so nobody should have an expectation that pronatalists write every article as an actual effort to persuade readers to go forth and multiply. If our movement matters, it’s because we have policy asks.

4. What is the greater good?

In her article, Stephanie H. Murray points out (correctly) that people pursue many jobs for altruistic reasons. Likewise, they parent for largely non-cash type reasons. This is a nice paragraph encapsulating the argument:

We account for this irredeemable sacrifice by honoring it — certainly not by pretending that the soldier risks his life for his own good. All around me, I can see that parents, and mothers in particular, are desperate for some recognition that the work they are undertaking is valuable, not just for themselves or their children, but for the world. Will people be motivated to have kids for the sake of GDP? Maybe not, if you put it that way. But does the prospect of serving one’s community and society motivate people to take on emotionally and physically taxing, even life-risking, work? Yes, all the time.

Again I want to emphasize, it literally isn’t the same to tell someone “do it for your community” and “do it for the GDP.” GDP could be bad for your community!

4.1 Money Talks

But thee bigger point is that we have to ask what’s really going on in this paragraph. “Don’t pretend the soldier risks his life for his own good.”

Okay, but, uh, we actually do pay soldiers, and in fact military recruitment is extremely class-correlated because people of higher social class can get better-paying jobs elsewhere, so they don’t serve. This isn’t rocket science. The relatively low pay of military officers vs. private sector jobs requiring similar skills is a massive problem for U.S. strategic readiness that has been commented on for literally decades. It actually turns out that unpaid men don’t fight, a fact that is known by everyone who’s ever read any military history ever, where “the soldiers hadn’t been paid in months, so they switched sides and joined the enemy” only happens in, like, every war. The miracle of Valley Forge was precisely that George Washington somehow managed to prevent this from happening when under anyone less charismatic and capable than Washington, the army would absolutely definitely have dissolved. Do you know how many months American soldiers went without pay in any war between 1800 and 2025? I’ll tell you how many: zero. Zero months. American combat soldiers missed zero pay periods in that 2-century period. In the Civil War, sometimes getting the physical currency to the frontlines (or to family elsewhere) was logistically tricky, but it was never an issue of any uncertainty about ability to pay. OTOH, the Confederacy actually did miss pay periods, and that literally did cause desertion, even though the Confederate troops were on the whole extremely intrinsically motivated and fighting for generally lower wages!

This isn’t to dunk on soldiers, it’s to afford them the dignity and humanity they deserve: they should be paid well and on time, and when they aren’t they respond like normal humans, not mythic heroes of indomitable will, because the men defending us are normal humans being asked to do extraordinary feats. We should honor that by not paying them like crap. I could go on about this a lot longer, but suffice to say, there are quite a lot of reasons every Roman Emperor without a death wish raised military pay.

Stephanie H. Murray also mentions doctors as being altruistically motivated. This is, of course, false. Doctors, collectively, engage in a decades-long conspiracy to prevent competition which might altruistically help more people. Secondly, doctors are… famously well paid! Nurses also are some of the highest paid professions compared to their educational attainment! I don’t doubt that medical professionals also have genuine care for their patients but, again, because this service is honorable we pay through the nose for it.

In the case of Israel, which Stephanie H. Murray brings up, I feel it worth noting that Israel staffs its military literally through conscription. That’s fine, I have no objection to it, but the metaphor to pronatalism is, uh, fraught. Romania did do coercive pronatalism. Anybody who’s read about that experiment is justly horrified by many of the outcomes.

My point in this section is simple: the vibes-based argument “we should honor this stuff, and people will do more of it” is not well-supported by the cases given, since they all seem to actually suggest that money is not, like, an “also important” thing but is actually a completely necessary precondition and an ongoing shaper and structurer of the entire phenomenon. Without pay, the troops go home.

4.2 Externalities and coordination problems

Now, the key thing to realize here is I don’t disagree that we should honor the sacrifices parents make for the good of their communities. These goods are externalities: benefits to society not captured by parents. Economists study externalities and generally argue that when externalities are large, goods can be underprovided. When Stephanie H. Murray says:

In a very literal sense, society needs my kids more than I do.

She’s arguing there are large externalities. I agree, there are, so we should pay lots of cash to parents. There’s no disagreement here. There are very few pronatalists out there being like, “Actually, parents are successfully internalizing the benefits of fertility: we should reduce the Child Tax Credit.” The only person being dunked on here is a man made entirely of straw.

But, Stephanie H. Murray does have a problem in her argument. I’m reposting the same quote here, but now with emphasis added:

We account for this irredeemable sacrifice by honoring it — certainly not by pretending that the soldier risks his life for his own good. All around me, I can see that parents, and mothers in particular, are desperate for some recognition that the work they are undertaking is valuable, not just for themselves or their children, but for the world. Will people be motivated to have kids for the sake of GDP? Maybe not, if you put it that way. But does the prospect of serving one’s community and society motivate people to take on emotionally and physically taxing, even life-risking, work? Yes, all the time.

So she admits right off the bad that her actual worry about externalities won’t motivate people.

And by the way, experience suggests this is true, having tried that line of argument on people.

More generally, externalities have a big problem Stephanie H. Murray skips: a child is actually born! This ends up creating a different economic problem: coordination.

Consider two different tasks: in one, you risk your life, and others in society are made extremely slightly better off. In the other, you risk your life just as much, others in society are made extremely slightly better off, and also a new person is added to society and they will experience the average welfare of society.

If you are motivated to improve society, it’s likely because you think Society Needs to Be Improved. i.e. you think society right now is somewhere between “okay, i guess” to “really bad.”

Adding one kid doesn’t help society much. We need hundreds of thousands more kids. You know this. So if you have an extra kid, but nobody else does, all you really did was create some totally ephemeral and vague abstract social benefit you will literally never perceive because it’s so diffuse (not fake! just diffuse!), and in the meantime you spend the rest of your life watching your kid struggle through the world you failed to improve very much. Many people do indeed worry about bringing their child into a “bad world.” So when we tell them “do the heroic thing,” they’re like, “It’s heroic for me, but isn’t it sort of screwing over my kid?”

Consider the South Korean case: “Have more kids! So we can conscript them! To fight against a nuclear-armed foe!”

That’s not a great pitch.

Several years ago I wrote an article making the “heroic” pitch for kids. Bookish people liked it. Normies I sent it to to persuade them found it pretty gross and weird because it involved encouraging people to knowingly add sufferers to the world.

Again, speaking from experience here, efforts to persuade people to have kids for any greater good are extremely difficult to pull off! One reason is because they aren’t dumb, and they realize that you’re persuading just them. If you knew a band of murderers were at your door, would you add an extra child to your dinner table? Some of us with heroic moral commitments answer “Yes, life no matter its pain or end is worthy.” That’s my personal vibe. But after quite literally focus-grouping this stuff for many years in many formats, I can tell you that argument is not just a flop, it literally results in people saying, “Well, I thought I wanted kids. Maybe I don’t now.”

Without belaboring it too much, just remember:

Most people aren’t heroes, and so heroic ethical arguments trigger fear, not inspiration.

Now, there is an exception to this!

Fertility is rather contagious. Lots of studies (you can Google Scholar them) find evidence of fertility contagion. When a reference person has more babies, their peers have a bump up in baby odds as a result. This finding has replicated in many contexts.

People do not want to make a heroic personal sacrifice to produce beneficent externalities for society on the whole, but they do want to do good things for society if doing so doesn’t separate them from the herd.

So, there’s a bandwagon effect. And this is super logical for many evolutionary reasons I won’t belabor here, but the TL;DR is that basically you don’t convince people to have kids by talking up their heroic sacrifices, you do it by finding a way to create a bandwagon effect where the social costs of having a kid fall a lot. This, by the way, is how religious people do it! In religious communities, it’s just “normal” to have more kids. Kids are around a lot at events. People have closer extended kin networks. Parents do a lot more alloparenting of each others’ kids. Religious communities create pronatal bandwagons by conferring moral prestige on familistic choices, and this drags social peers along. Religions do not in fact induce higher fertility by cultivating ethics of heroic parental sacrifice: quite the opposite, they much more often have strong norms punishing conspicuous consumption, discouraging doing too much for your kids, limiting helicopterism, etc.

Successful cultural pronatalism mostly depends on normalization, not valorization, of bigger families.

Pronatalism depends more on making childless people feel like the odd-man-out (talk to childless adults at church about this feeling sometime!) than making big families feel like heroes. So we should not assume that adding a hero cult to Western family norms will help much.

4.3 So what’s the greater good?

Describing the freedom-focused pronatalism approach, Stephanie H. Murray says:

This is a difficult position to trace out because, in a sense, I agree that people having fewer kids than they’d like is indeed a problem. Is it the problem, though? By that logic, if desired fertility fell to zero tomorrow, and people ceased having kids altogether, then all would be well, which is silly.

Again, it’s not clear she actually gets the argument she’s engaging with.

If people wanted zero children, yeah, that would super suck!

Also, I would be opposed to government-sponsored rape centers to achieve a higher birth rate! That would also be extremely bad!

The point of focusing on what people want is not to say, “As long as we hit this number, everything is perfect and good.” It’s to just acknowledge the hard-won wisdom of history that trying to make women have kids they do not want is not a good thing. On abortion we can argue about if forcing an unwanted birth is allowable because there’s (according to pro-life people) a second life involved, but it’s hard to imagine anything other than the duty to prevent killing which could justify forcing a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy. “But muh GDP” is definitely not a good enough reason.

If Americans decided to stop having kids, that would be awful.

But also, societies as collectivities can, do, and indeed should have a right to, decline.

I’m not saying I want my community to decline. I do not. And if tomorrow all the people of my hometown said, “Actually, Wilmore was a mistake. We’re all gonna move away,” I’d be extremely sad. But I’m not gonna send in the cops and be like, “No. Lyman has too many fond memories of a childhood in Wilmore to allow you to leave.”

More broadly, while we might consider financial subsidy to keep Wilmore alive, it’s hard to understand the exact justification for this if the people really do want to leave. If it’s the case that the people of Wilmore just don’t care to stay there longer, why should my love of Wilmore overrule their basic rights?

If the people of Korea just want to decline, that certainly seems really bad to me, not at all “well” as Stephanie H. Murray says, but also… they do have that right. We shouldn’t kidnap a minimum viable population of Koreans and keep them breeding in the name of preserving endangered ancestry lineages. If a society wants to end, we should let it, and efforts to keep it alive when its own members want it dead won’t work. Julian the Apostate had a major go at it, but when the ghost has left the machine, that’s it.

So what’s the greater good?

I do think that, conditional on the fact that we live in a pluralistic society, the only option is freedom-focused pronatalism.

We have to justify pronatalism in terms of happiness, not because it’s the argument which comes most naturally, but because it’s the truth, and a truth which in fact justifies.

5. Does happiness matter?

Stephanie H. Murray has some very disparaging things to say about happiness. From her Substack follow-up (emphasis added)

They seem, on the one hand, perfectly well aware that low fertility is a problem for society, but then when it comes to reversing it, act like it is simply a problem for individuals. That various obstacles stand between people and their optimal quota of baby cuddles. Or, more subtly, that people just don’t quite understand how integral baby cuddles are to their happiness.

Or consider:

For one thing, selling people on the emotional rewards of parenting is a trickier task than it sounds. It requires maintaining a sunny view of parenting, which can easily backfire when people discover that it is in fact a pretty tough job. I suspect much of the most negative content about parenthood circulating online is a direct byproduct of the disillusionment that often occurs for those who pursue parenthood solely on the promise of individual fulfillment.

So first, “baby cuddles” as a stand-in for “peoples’ considered preferences about their family choices” is, uh, something. “I think I want 5 kids,” lol, little cuddle-addicted there aren’t ya? You cuddler.

5.1 Why people want kids

When we say “People want more kids than they’re having” we do not mean “There is a critical shortage of snuggles.” People want all sorts of different things from childrearing. Some of the most important motivations may indeed be communitarian ones: the desire to see specific communities perpetuated. But we actually have studies on “why people want kids.” Here’s one representative example:

This is a study in Poland, so maybe not representative, but the key columns are b (effect sizes) and p (significance). This is in multivariate models with some demographic controls. What you can see is that, for women, “feeling needed and connected” is huuuuugely important, followed by the “joys of infancy.” We’ll come back to how that fits into Stephanie H. Murray ‘s framework in a bit.

For men, the biggies are the satisfaction they get from childrearing, the joys of infancy, and feeling needed. But men’s benefit from “feeling needed” just over half as big as women’s. Women really need to be needed in terms of fertility statistics.

On the negative side, for both sexes, the big negative was basically the drudgery of childcare.

So, Stephanie H. Murray says that “cuddles” is an absurd thing to think motivates fertility, and instead we should laud women’s heroism for doing a difficult task. What the data shows is, actually, “cuddles” (i.e. “joys of infancy”) are the second biggest predictor of women’s desire for kids. The first is “feeling needed,” but of course childcare duties are the big negative, and childcare is the thing that’s needed. So Stephanie H. Murray is suggesting we should ignore the clear “joys of infancy” benefit (even though “discomforts of pregnancy” turns out not to be super predictive in this model), and instead focus on the mixed experience of “being needed by your kid,” i.e. the heroic labor done for them.

I think that’s a mistake. I think we should focus on the underlying fertility motivation which is unambiguously positive.

Next, do notice that for men the biggest factor is “satisfaction of childrearing.” This one was trivial for women. When men think about parenthood, the beliefs that make them most desire children are things about their kids growing up. Women’s desire for children centers around providing for their children’s needs, and also the glow of motherhood; men’s centers around shaping and molding children as they grow. I can tell you there’s some variety in other similar studies, but these basic trends generally hold up in other surveys not done in Poland.

So here, I’ll note that I generally do not focus on cuddles and cute babies when explaining what we mean by “desire for children.” But making fun of such a focus is crazy! That really is a big part of what women in particular straightforwardly say they want out of parenthood! Why on earth would be mock that?

Second, Stephanie H. Murray is diagnostically correct that the “I’m doing an incredible service fulfilling my kids’ needs but also wow this is burdensome” is a very real dynamic in the data, and in particular for moms, which I think surprises nobody. The issue is that it’s something of an ouroboros: every new need fulfilled is also a new drudgery recalled.

But my broader point is simple:

It doesn’t matter why people want kids, only that they want kids.

If I want to solve the lack of affordable housing, I really need to know why there isn’t more housing. But if I’m looking to buy a house, all I really need to know is that there isn’t much I can afford. If U.S. fertility desires were, say, 0.4 children per woman, then I might wonder why they were so low. But since in fact U.S. women desire 2-2.7 children depending on how you phrase it, I really only care that fertility is below desires. All this debate about “Why people want kids” or, worse, why they should want kids is besides the point:

People do want kids! It’s bad they’re not having them!

5.2 But do people want kids?

Sometimes people question the credibility of stated fertility preferences. I may someday do a big post laying out the whole argument for why we should take these questions seriously, but for today let’s take just two sub-cases where people who wanted kids randomly were prevented from having them. Our cases will be comparing miscarriage vs. live birth, and failed IVF vs. successful.

First, miscarriage. A recent paper using longitudinal panel data in Germany asked the simple question, “What happens to life satisfaction after a miscarriage?” Lots of controls for pre-event traits are included, and the model is indeed a panel model with fixed effects. So that means, “conditional on a woman’s pre-event happiness,” how did her happiness change after the miscarriage. The figure below is my work reproducing one line from one of their figures.

Life satisfaction falls a lot in the year of miscarriage, and remains lower for two years afterwards. The effect size is in standard deviations: it’s a really big effect!

There’s no long run effect for an obvious reason: most miscarriages don’t end fertility! Women go on and have another kid. The pain fades. I do not mean to diminish this; my wife and I are raising 3 kids, we have miscarried 4. I fully understand the pain involved here; I’m simply saying, there’s not a long term negative effect most likely because eventually people have kids.

So, when people, by chance, lose a pregnancy, they get less happy for a couple years, but that fades out over time as they have other children. That’s consistent with the idea that people trying to have kids really do want them, and failure to have them generates very real sadness in their life.

Next, let’s discuss IVF! A recent paper leveraged the fact that nobody gets IVF by accident to explore causal effects. Everybody getting IVF wants kids, so this is a clean case where we know the preferences involved. Everybody getting IVF wants another kids.

But some people get a kid, and others don’t. Sometimes IVF works, sometimes it doesn’t. Here’s how women’s odds of being prescribed antidepressants changed after IVF based on if it worked right way, worked with a delay, or never worked:

As you can see, women whose IVF never worked out end up with about 7 percentage points higher odds of being prescribed antidepressants (i.e. having clinically significant depressive symptoms). Since prescribing rates were about 25-30% in the control group, that means that IVF failure increases depression by 20-30%.

In other words, when women fail to have a child they want to have, they get 20-30% more depressed (in Sweden).

Both of these cases are kinda nicha: German miscarriages, Swedish IVF… but their very niche-ness helps us appreciate that the effects are probably causal. When people undershoot their fertility goals, they get a lot less happier, so much so there’s actually a change in their healthcare utilization for mental illness many years later!

It’s incredibly degrading to treat undershooting of preferences like some trivial issue of “not enough cuddles.”

Maybe the reasons people give for having kids aren’t heroic and altruistic and self-sacrificing enough for Stephanie H. Murray . But the truth is, most people just want to live pretty normal quiet lives, fitting in with their neighbors, having a normal family. And when they don’t get that, it hurts, and the hurt remains as long as the gap remains. The hurt is not a mild one, but in fact clinically meaningful.

If I told you I could reduce depression symptoms by 20-30% by giving a drug, you wouldn’t call it a minor effect!

Now, you may think, “Lyman, that’s crazy: there’s no way the effects are that large.” And yes I agree, real effects may be smaller. IVF-seeking women may have unusually strong desires. But since we already know that parents are happier and more mentally healthy than non-parents from tons of other descriptive data, and we know most childless people are not childless by choice, we can have a high confidence that some of the better mental health for parents really is because kids are a source of happiness, and not having desired kids is a major source of sadness.

6. Can we remake the world?

I was struck by this quote from Stephanie H. Murray :

It is as absurd as attempting to recruit people to the army while pretending that it doesn’t matter if anyone signs up.

It struck me because of the ways in which pronatalism is like an army, and also the ways in which it is not like an army.

6.1 The Baby Army

We already discussed the collective action problem above: if you’re trying to tell parents to have babies for the good of society, this doesn’t work, because aside from the positive externalities there are also seriously problematic coordination problems. Those coordination problems mean that the heroic parents who choose to have more kids can have a low expectation of “fixing” social problems that motivate pronatalism, and as a result, they’re unlikely to be persuaded to try it at all.

Think of what happens when an army realizes defeat is inevitable: desertion skyrockets. Some people will be suicide bombers and bitter-enders, but most people prefer to back a winning horse. So the communitarian or economic arguments for pronatalism are exactly like an army in this regard.

This also explains why the collectivist arguments for pronatalism are so demoralizing: incremental changes don’t matter in these arguments!

If you need to boost births to boost GDP, but you can only boost fertility by 0.2% with a given policy, that’s just not much. It’s not “enough.” And it costs so much! So… why bother? May as well just desert from the army rather than die in battle if the odds of victory are so low.

But if the benefits of pronatalism accrue to individuals regardless of if their neighbors follow through, then the army metaphor falls apart!

It doesn’t matter if your neighbor has kids for you to get satisfaction from raising your own kids. This argument works even if pronatalism doesn’t persuade everybody. Even if just one subculture is persuaded, this argument works. This argument doesn’t depend on pronatalists having sweeping political victories in order to achieve higher fertility, it doesn’t depend on a bandwagoning effect that may never come.

So pronatalism is not like recruiting for an army in this sense. Every single baby is a bonus baby, a baby that counterfactually doesn’t exist, and which adds benefits even on its own, even if nobody else joins the baby army, because that baby’s parents have their own reasons to think it’s wonderful to have that baby.

6.2 What Winning Means

Recently I did a podcast interview with somebody (not yet published) where we we discussed a bit what “winning” means. He was fixated on boosting “global” fertility: what policy or cultural change could ever be big enough to do that?

I pushed back pretty hard: we don’t need to fix “global” fertility. I’m not out here cheerleading for Russia or China or Iran to have a baby boom. I’d be fine with just NATO and allied countries figuring out how to do pronatalism.

Even more niche, if I had a rock-solid guarantee that, say, Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod members would have TFR of 3 indefinitely, my motivation to pursue general pronatalism would indeed be reduced! I’d still do it because I genuinely believe it’s good, but at a purely personal level of my own satisfaction, winning doesn’t mean a huge scale. On a given weekend, I’m deeply and personally concerned with the fertility behaviors of about 1 million people, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t so many people.

However, such a rock-solid guarantee is impossible. Cultural norms percolate across groups. As such, even though I personally really love my community and want it to continue, I make strenuous efforts to effect pronatal change across a much broader spectrum of communities, including many I do not personally like.

Nonetheless, a dose of realism is important: we have very few documented cases of societies going well below replacement for a long time and then coming back above it for a long time. That should frame our sense of the difficulty of the problem. Out of the thousands of generation-length periods for countries we have data on in the last few centuries of data, we have really just a few dozen comeback cases, and most of them are the mid-20th-century Baby Boom or post-Soviet recoveries.

The historic record should tell us that the prior probability of successful pronatalism is, in fact, pretty low.

This may seem like I’m being a Debbie Downer, but I think realism is the first step for genuine hope. This is a massively uphill battle. Our first victories in it will not be decisive routes of the enemy, they will be places where we win minor skirmishes, find things that work a bit here and there. As we start to make these little solves and figure out what works, we will, as a society, find other things we can try to do.

Humanity will figure it out, but in the meantime, we can expect hard fighting for small strips of territory regained.

Expecting anything else is a pathway to despair when it takes longer and turns out to be politically harder than anticipated. There are no silver bullets for pronatalism; too many different forces in society are stacked against fertility for One Weird Trick to work.

As such, especially at this present moment, we need arguments that explain why it’s worthwhile to have kids now, at this present time, even if the problems of society don’t get solved. I think “because it’s a heroic and noble approach to trying to tackle those problems, even if it fails!” is a super great thing to believe if you’ve got the stones for it, I just think most people… don’t. Most people don’t like instrumentalizing their kids for GDP or community survival or whatever, and most people don’t stay on sinking ships.

We need an argument that says, “Look, even if society goes down the crapper, your family can still be a place of love and care and dignity: have some kids! they’re great!”

6.3 RETVRN?

I love the vibe on rewriting the history of individualism and simply Becoming A Traditional Community Again. Stephanie H. Murray says:

Those of us who want to reverse falling fertility while preserving the values of a liberal society have a tricky task ahead. We’ve got to hold two truths at once: that no one ought to be coerced into parenthood, and that we will all suffer if no one raises kids. That may seem like an impossible line to walk—and yet, we walk versions of it all the time. I don’t think there’s anyone in the world that would hesitate to admit that we need doctors. And yet, most of us agree no one should be coerced into medical school. In other words, acknowledging the necessity of parents while respecting individuals’ right not to become one is really just a matter of applying the same logic to parenting that we do to every other path in life.

I think it’s a lot harder than she lets on. The way we sort this out with doctors is we pay doctors tons of money. We are not about to do that for babies, since it’s way too expensive. For activities with low-fail missions that we really need to always be available, we generally pay well and offer very good benefits. Talk to a friend who works as a firefighter; it’s quite a good job these days!

Now look, I love the idea of giving away tons of money to parents! Spoiler: Israel does this, and it’s a big part of why their birth rate is so high. But I’m also a realist: no industrialized society is actually going to do this, not on the massive scale “treating being a mother like being a doctor” implies.

If my neighbor not having kids creates real harms against me, I have a claim against him. If we are really going to justify our pronatalism through externalities, then there’s just as much argument to punish childless people as there is to reward parents. Now, again, my whole point is we should not justify pronatalism via externalities, and instead should focus on intrinsic benefits. But if we are going to do it via externalities, seriously, why are we allowing childless people to collect Social Security? They contribute nothing to it! Why aren’t we punitively taxing childlessness? Those baddies are jeopardizing all of civilization by not having MOAR BABIES! Let’s tax them!

Would it be coercion? I dunno; depends on how you define it. Subsidies for parenthood are mathematically equivalent to taxes for childlessness. If the Child Tax Credit isn’t coercion, neither is cutting benefits for childless people.

And yet we all know that these policies are nonstarters, and I suspect Stephanie H. Murray doesn’t support any of them, even though they are the actual policy implications of the theory she lays out.

Point blank, the policy tools that could create the kind of communitarian ethos Stephanie H. Murray suggests we cultivate are by and large not on the table for almost any governments, probably shouldn’t be on the table in many cases, and in any case aren’t policies she probably favors.

So, why don’t pronatalists advocate for the collectivist concerns Stephanie H. Murray emphasizes? She says it’s because we’re “disingenuous” or “insincere.” The real truth is that those of us who’ve studied up on pronatal policies past and present realize that these kinds of arguments for pronatalism point in bad and ineffective directions, and that the only real hope lies elsewhere.