Challenges and Criticism of Progressive Approaches to Falling Fertility Rates

Malcolm and Simone react to a progressive writer's absurd proposal to address declining birth rates - punitive taxes if both spouses work! They explain how this would just discourage marriage and responsibility, worsening societal outcomes. Instead, tax incentives align better with reality, especially if focused on people having kids younger. Pets as child substitutes comes up again too.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] And so here's what I suggest we do. Okay. I say, and I'm quoting here. I say that I'd massively increased marginal tax rate on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity costs for having children. he goes further punitive marginal tax rates on the 2nd earner in a household would knock many women and some men out of the labor force by lowering the opportunity cost of having children because there'd be no career to give up

 You serious? You don't know. Everybody knows you never go full retarded.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Wild. And I remember, have you heard of Zilogon Wild? I love Zilogon Wild, it's fantastic. Made me remember the house on Batman Road, which you like seriously thought about buying. That like Yes! Like it was a cult, but it had all these like It was a mansion! It was a mansion,

Malcolm Collins: it had a bunch of It was a super cheap mansion, because it looked insane.

And it was on a place called [00:01:00] Batman Road. Yeah,

Simone Collins: and you were like so ready to buy it. You're like, it's a fixer upper. And I'm like, this was clearly owned by a cult before. Why do you want this house? And I wonder, you know, like if, if we bought that house, would it have shaped us? Do the homes that people live in shape people?

Malcolm Collins: I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I know that I love the house we got. We definitely got ahead on this cottagecore trend here. Right. You know, I see, I don't think I would

Simone Collins: be wearing a medieval corset. You know, a chamise, you'd be wearing what? Like in the house on Batman Road? I would probably have to be wearing a beige jumpsuit because that was the vibe.

You know,

Malcolm Collins: that was the vibe. I love it. Hey, I don't know. That could work for us as well.

Simone Collins: So,

Malcolm Collins: anyway, we've got to get into our topic today. Oh, yeah. So, we read an article by somebody being like, look, progressives are finally waking up to fertility rates. You know, and they are, and I, I see this [00:02:00] repeatedly in progressive pieces, you know, the New York Times did a front page piece on this recently, but the crazy thing is, is I thought as progressives woke up to this, right?

They would more and more, and I've always, you know, taken this position. But they've used it to try to give handouts and so creatively, you know, I point out and I'm going to put up on the screen the graph that shows that if you sort studies by how large their margin of error is, what you will see is all of the studies that shows this matter and have a huge margin of error and all of the studies that show this doesn't help at all have a very small margin of error.

If you look at something like the program that was in Hungary, where they spent literally 5 percent of their GDP on this last year. So the year before Alaska, we just passed the New Year's.

They got their fertility reset by like 1. 6%. Considering that, like, it's falling like 13 percent this year in Korea, like you're getting double digits declines in a lot of places. It's irrelevant. It's not going to fix anything. And so it's like, well, they're going to, Try to use it to support those programs.

[00:03:00] And it's, it's, it's stupid and it's not going to work, but you know, at least, you know, they're part of the conversation now. Well, well,

to my surprise they were dumber than I could have even conceived what they actually It

Simone Collins: was worse than handouts, right? I mean, the thing is like handouts, it's, it's a. It's a nuanced form of dumb, right? Like in that money does make a difference, just not nearly enough of a difference. You know, it's, it's like saying, Oh, I'll help fund your trip to Europe.

I'm going to give you 50, you know? Oh, thanks. That's definitely going to get me across the Atlantic. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, I mean, This article here was in Quillet, you know, that's like a Atlantic's, I think like mainstream publication or something or like,

Simone Collins: like millet.

Malcolm Collins: Quillet. And the article was called Misunderstanding the Fertility Crisis.

Of course, [00:04:00] like, an article where he misunderstands the fertility crisis. But of course, he's implying that all of us are misunderstanding the fertility crisis because we think that culture has something to do with this. But Hold on. So I will read to you. So first, one thing I find really interesting is he talked about how he began to realize this was a problem is and he heard his conservative friends who like worked at Fox News saying that they were working on the fertility rate crisis.

He's like, I'd never heard of this before. And so I looked at the data and I begrudgingly suppose that it is a real problem and we probably should do something. And so here's what I suggest we do. Okay. I say, and I'm quoting here. I say that I'd massively increased marginal tax rate on the second worker in any household to force them out of the labor market, which would lower their opportunity costs for having children.

 And then in another part of the article, he goes further punitive marginal tax rates on the 2nd earner in a household would knock many women and some [00:05:00] men out of the labor force by lowering the opportunity cost of having children because there'd be no career to give up disempower

Simone Collins: families.

It's fine.

About what? You serious? You don't know. Everybody knows you never go full retarded. What do you mean? You went full retard, man. Never go full retard.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. It gets it gets better.

So then he goes on to say in another part of the article, two income households aren't vastly more common than they used to be because of a brutal Malthusian competition for increasingly scarce resources. So basically he's arguing against the idea that, you know, as women entered the labor market, it decreased wages for everyone.

And, and now because of that, we need two income families to work. So then he goes on to say. Basically, instead, women work because their [00:06:00] wages are so much higher than they used to be. There isn't a two income trap. There's an expanded females economic opportunity trap. And that opportunity cost is what is contributing to the mightily to the decrease in fertility.

So I, I'm like our listeners, you're smart people. Can you immediately see the idiocy of this idea? That what he is suggesting that we do, so I will maybe break this down and it wasn't obvious to you what he is suggesting that we do, he is saying that individuals now as married couples, both people have so much economic opportunity.

That there is no reason to have kids, like the competing things against having kids now are just so much bigger, like all of the things you can do in the world, whether it's the internet or travel or everything like that, and all the economic opportunities. So what we need to do is remove economic opportunities from [00:07:00] people.

Now, in a way, he's right. If you could enforce this policy fairly without the very obvious unintended side effect, which I'm seeing of our viewers have already figured out, but if you could implement this policy, right? It would just impoverish a lot of people, which does increase fertility rates.

You know, if you remove people's economic potential, you increase their fertility rates. But the downside is the obvious effect it's going to have. Which is people just won't get married before having

Simone Collins: kids. Yeah. Yeah. That's what's going to happen. That's what will really happen. Yeah. Well, I mean, so yeah, like, basically, if everyone followed the rules, or like, you couldn't escape from it, like, if common law marriage was also grandfathered

Malcolm Collins: into this.

No, no, no. What they would then do is not get common law marriage. You'd just have more totally single mothers.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But let's, so I mean, what he's really arguing though, which I think is, It's first ironic is that this is roughly the same argument made by that conservative substack writer who wrote [00:08:00] the subset we discussed on baby booms, who was like, Oh, we just need to economically disempower women.

Because the problem is that like, until men, excuse me, until men are given the opportunity to be more. Prestigious and higher status and women, women won't have marriageable men, which is, I mean, it's not untrue that he's sort of arguing the same thing, but from a very different angle. And they're both sort of arguing for effectively the same thing, which is economic disempowerment of women, which is.

Pretty

Malcolm Collins: messed up thing. This come from this ultra progressive perspective. But it is functionally what he's arguing and keep in mind, you know, we're already in a certain situation in this country where I think the last numbers I saw, and I want to do a full episode on this, where 50 percent of children born in this country now are born to single mothers.

And So you're not actually helping you're, I mean, you're probably not helping that much because you, you are assuming, and I seem to remember it was something like 10 years ago or something, or 20 years ago, it was something like only 13 percent or 5%. I don't know. It was like, yeah, it's

Simone Collins: gone on [00:09:00] significantly.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah, it's just exploded because again, and a lot of people are operating under this assumption that the way that our culture is changing and the way things like fertility rates are changing and who's having kids is changing has been a linear change, and it's just sort of like the stuff they saw in their own childhood, but more.

And that is not what we're seeing here. We're seeing a complete sea change. And who is having kids and these policies, so I mean, I want to know, do you have any other thoughts on this policy? Simone? Like, it's,

Simone Collins: it's odd to me because 1, this is someone who does have kids and who values kids. And.

But, but two, like he's choosing a policy that I also think would dissuade more people from wanting to have kids. So I was just watching a new segment on why dink couples, you know, exist and why they feel so incentivized to not have kids and the big, [00:10:00] big argument that is made is the financial penalty for choosing any lifestyle arrangement that compromises their earning ability.

is, is meaningful enough for them to significantly change their lives. And this is no different basically saying, Oh, well, you know, if you get married, we're going to penalize the second marriage. Yeah. And it's like plummeting marriage

Malcolm Collins: rates already. Yeah. And, and you know, that's a huge problem. So. When you say that he is somebody who has kids and likes kids I want to go into some of the stuff he says about his kids because it's actually very elucidating.

If you look at this from the progressive perspective, the way that they see this stuff. So he says, quote, I used to roll my eyes at people who said, quote, having kids is the best thing I ever did. And my kids are my life in quote. But then I realized how true it is. The insights of evolution make it painfully obvious.

After I had my first [00:11:00] child, I described to a philosophy PhD friend, how my new feelings revealed the poverty of the English language. My deep feelings for my children Deserve a word other than love, which we use to describe the feelings we have for our spouse or an excellent movie.

And I never felt that before learning that my wife was pregnant and seeing my son for the first time. By the way, I didn't feel love for my kids the first time I saw them. I, I'm so confused by guys who do that. I think that might be a exclusively female phenomenon that has to do with

Simone Collins: it. There's also country songs about like the moment they see the first, first ultrasound.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I know. I hear that, but I feel like it's something you're just supposed to say. I don't know. The first time I see babies, I'm like, they look gross. Yeah,

Simone Collins: you're really like, pass.

Malcolm Collins: Pass. So, so the then, then he goes on to say, my philosopher friend, that it sounded like having children was a quote, consciousness expanding experience, end quote, which was a great way to put it.

So, you know, this guy, now that he has three kids and he has three kids now, you know, and he's, he's talking to his [00:12:00] wife. Which is notable.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Who has three kids anymore?

Malcolm Collins: And she's like, well, I would, it would limit how much I can travel. anD like, okay. Yeah. Denying a human, a life, denying one of your kids.

Like if you knew that kid, would you be like, yeah, I treated you for travel because I really like going to Italy. Like what, like it's so insane that anybody would do that. But I think this comes to culture, which is to say the way you culturally frame. How you think about human life when a human life begins what is given up by not having a kid, you know, the way we do where we say, you know, life begins before conception.

And that that means that when you decide not to have a kid, or you do something that prevents you from having a kid you are denying that person existence. And then, and then you've got to think, like, what am I denying them existence over? And it really refrains it for you, you know, having to explain to that kid in the future.

Yeah. Like, the things that you thought were more important than them, but this is the way our society frames it, so people [00:13:00] don't have this huge push, and this is another thing he kept going into, so when he titles the article, Misunderstanding the Falling Fertility Rate, what he thinks that we, and all the other conservatives who care about this are misunderstanding Is that culture has anything to do with this?

So I'm going to read some quotes here because I, I, I found them just absolutely bizarre. The conversation has stuck with me because people who worry about low fertility rates focus on vague cultural explanations and don't look at the simple ones staring them in the face. Microeconomics. Opportunity cost is what you must give up to buy what you want in terms of other goods and services.

But the concept applies to every action you take. People who are concerned, and this is a separate part of the article, people who are concerned about the fertility crisis and want to reverse it should be the most interested in understanding the causes of the decline in the first place. This is why I find the vague cultural arguments that people raise for having children [00:14:00] so frustrating.

Culture is a set of human actions that evolve. Now, so that is all dumb. Everything he has said so far is pretty dumb, but then he gets to some white stuff here, and there is some stuff that he's saying that is right. So culture is the set of human actions that evolved to partially deal with the problems of the past and to harness opportunities.

Yes, we agree with that. Culture is not some magical force outside of economics, politics, and technology, but a set of human actions affected by economics, politics, and technology. Culture, in turn, affects economics, politics, and technology. To argue for changing the culture without changing the rest is unserious, except he just made the point here, okay?

The point is, yes, culture is not some magical force outside of culture, economics, and technology, and that it gets affected by those, but it also affects those, right? So, economics, politics, and technology are things that any movement is going to have a very difficult time changing. You know, you can make specific economic changes, but we [00:15:00] can study how those affect fertility rates because we have in numerous examples of people who have tried this in other countries, and it just doesn't work like we know this culture is the stronger force here.

And if you make cultural changes, well, then that obviously then impacts that the other systems as well. And I think that he is. Afraid that if culture is the explanation, then the answer is going to be, we have to go back to the way things were. And, and so that's why he has this huge reason to, to sort of twist his brain to argue for something that is obviously not true.

That's my read.

Simone Collins: And it would destroy, effectively destroy the thing that I guess would be more traditional, which is marriage. But I, I just, yeah, I don't think he's really thought through it and I, I just, it, it bothers me again. Like this is why we're in this in the first place is it gets me so mad when so many people [00:16:00] look at falling.

Fertility and they're like, well, time to take away reproductive rights. Time to take away women's empowerment. Like let's do that. And like to see even a progressive person effectively say that really makes my blood boil. Because no, I mean, that's, that's just not. That's not how it works. And, and I think when we look at the past and, and we think, Oh, well, things worked back then because women weren't empowered.

Not exactly. Women had a lot of influence within the family. They had a lot of economic power within the family too. I mean, of course things vary in like legally women were pretty disempowered in many places, but I don't know. It just really

Malcolm Collins: bothers me. There is one truth that he's capturing was in this article that I think sometimes lost to conservatives in the space.

Is, is the and progressives in the space as well is he's pointing out fundamentally, which is something that we really agree with is that the problem isn't not enough [00:17:00] money. The problem is too much money. Which is something that he fundamentally gets, you know, he's saying that women aren't leaving these positions because they don't have.

Enough money that it's not that the economics of families are depressed. It is that there is such a super abundance of opportunity that is competing with wanting to have kids. What is missing is well then how realistically do you get people to go and have kids without, you know, making marriage seem like the worst, but let's, let's tour him on this.

Like, let's assume you're going to design an actual economic. System that is going to motivate people to have kids. What does that look like? Right? In a healthy way, like, like, like, let's try to do what he's doing, but make this healthy. So one,

Simone Collins: I think people who are having kids are the people who should be getting tons and tons of tax advantages, like effectively being any tax because they are providing the next generation of taxpayers.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: I think [00:18:00] tax, tax taxes should be a huge thing here. I, I think you need some sort of like incremental decreasing taxes, the more kids you have. And it should get very big. Like if you go above three or four. Well,

Simone Collins: I think the tax, the tax decreases you should get should also, this should only apply to parents who are not utilizing low income based state services.

Like if you are utilizing those, we just finished with pronatalist. org putting together both a guide to federal resources for parents and for state based resources for parents. And what was really sobering to me is that the vast majority of states have pretty much nothing for families, regardless of income.

And by that, I mean, like they don't have a few states do have things and some examples of services that states provide to all families in some cases are like, oh, free transport, like free public transport for kids to go to school, you know, you can use this metro system. Yeah. If you're a minor or like here's this home visiting program or community [00:19:00] support

Malcolm Collins: program.

Sorry. I was thinking about different countries, but yeah, good. No, no, no. This is

Simone Collins: United States states. Because that's, that's where we started. It was an easier place to start and you can find these by the way, if you go to pretty little list. org and then under services, it links to a parent resources page.

But the vast, vast, vast majority of services are for low income families and that's fine. And that's important. You know, I, I totally, I, I can't bear the idea of children suffering and going without and being hungry and not having the healthcare that they need. So fine, but you also then shouldn't be incentivized to have more kids.

If you like, literally are not financially stable enough to handle those things yourself, but parents who are and are creating new tax, especially like, because if you're a family. That is able to pay for your own children. You are also more likely to produce children who themselves will be. High income generators and therefore high taxpayers.

So you should be given the biggest reward in terms of tax cuts for having kids and [00:20:00] it's the easiest and simplest thing to do. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: well, I mean, I think there's other incremental things you could do that would work really well. By the way, people are wondering what I keep looking at off screen. One of our sons, he got a big bag full of rocks, little, little gemstones for Christmas because he likes playing with rocks.

And now the other kid loves it, you know, but this was a much better gift, but a much more messy gift than I had anticipated. And now I'm playing with my little hoard of gemstones on the table because they're so fun. They're so fun to, to collect and sort. Except

Simone Collins: now that we've given Torsten, and of course his name is Thor stone.

Of course he wants rocks for Christmas. But like now that we've given tourists in all these rocks, he now like, is very, he's like, well, I want a rock, my rock. And he'll like, freak out about not having, and they'll give him a rock. And he is like, no, I need a little rock. And then I need a house rock. And then I need to, he is like, all these, we have no idea what rock he's looking for.

It's [00:21:00] always like, what Very specific rock out of like the hundreds of rocks he was given in crystals for Christmas. Oh my god.

Malcolm Collins: But anyway, so back on topic. So the question of like, what could you actually do? I think you can, you can, is economically incentivize the steps leading up to having kids as well.

Oh, so getting married. I think there should be a level of economic incentivization for marriage. But then you need some actual qualifications of marriage, you know, what does it mean to be married? So, but I guess you wouldn't have that many people doing it just for the economic incentives. It'd be pretty hard.

So you'd have a light level of, I don't know, don't

Simone Collins: people get married like for immigration purposes? I do think that, I don't know.

Malcolm Collins: So a light level of economic incentive for marriage heavier economic incentive level, and you would want this marriage. To scale logarithmically, like with the more kids you have for the longer

Simone Collins: your marriages, like if you've been married for five years, then it starts,

Malcolm Collins: you could also make it something that could be [00:22:00] really good is the economic incentives kick in at higher levels.

The earlier you have your first kid. So you get this larger tax break because you don't know how much money you're going to earn or something like that. So, so again, you know, you, you are less likely to, like, try to cheat the system if you're a very wealthy person having a ton of kids because I'm like, I'm a wealthy 50 year old and I can just produce kids and that gets me out of the tax bracket.

That's not a useful thing to have. In the economy, right? Like you wanted to have some marginal increase there, but not a big one. What you would want is the huge advantage to come where if you start having kids, you know, in your late twenties or mid twenties and then you end up becoming wealthy after that, you know, I think that's where you should get the real advantage so that people sort of normalize to having kids much earlier in life, which is what we, what we need if we're realistically going to get the fertility rate back up.

I think it was something like. God, what was it something like in the 1970s, the average age of the first mother first child in the US [00:23:00] was, I think 21 or something, or

22. Oh, wow. That's wild.

Simone Collins: tHat's pretty young. Like even by 1800 standards. It's, it's not, it's, it's, it's interesting.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, it was 21.4 in the 1970.

In 1970. That is wild. So that means a lot of women were having kids, you know, at 18 and 17 and, you know. But

Simone Collins: I mean, tax cuts aside, well, I mean, yeah, tax cuts aside, there's so many additional things. Like, it is insane to me that parents pay for child care and for tuition with post tax dollars.

Malcolm Collins: Like, Oh yeah.

It's also insane to me that most universities like if they're giving you financial support for kids. And this would be one of the first things that I would really target is they do not calculate how many kids you have into that. So if you have 10 kids, you are treated the same as somebody who has one kids in terms of can you go forward.

In terms of

Simone Collins: financial aid at a university? Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: So the only way that they will give you a break on this is if [00:24:00] multiple kids are in the university system at the same time.

Simone Collins: Oh,

Malcolm Collins: interesting. So if I have a few of the system at the same time, but the, the reality is, is that parents often aren't paying for the university out of like their yearly income, they're paying for it out of a huge amount that they saved up over decades to send their kids to college.

So that is an insane system for how you're pricing this. So very obviously, you know, if you want to be fair and deal with these systems, that would be something to target. Yeah. Well, Simone, at least the world is waking up to this to some extent. It's nice. Maybe they'll start to think for more than five seconds about it.

We'll see, you know, I, I don't know. It's, it's very hard to get people to take this issue as seriously as it needs to be taken, but the world is waking up. Like I'm, I'm seeing this now they're begrudgingly, like if you say a fertility rate crisis, they're no longer like. Oh, you must be saying that because you have a breeding fetish, which is like literally that used to be something that we got told all the time.

Right?

Simone Collins: Like, yeah. [00:25:00] Spring of last year. That was the, one of the most common. Assumptions and conclusions.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and now people are like, yeah, obviously, but like, X is the obvious solution. And yet they haven't thought about it at all. X is not the obvious solution, I guarantee you. So, I love you to death, Simone.

I'm so glad that I have kids with you. I do agree with what he says. I love our kids more than I love you.

Simone Collins: Yeah, which I was so afraid of. Remember I was like, what if you love our kids more than, and then, and now I'm like, no, this is great. I want you to love our kids more than you love me. So,

Malcolm Collins: You know, these people, you know, something that he talks about in the article is like, you cannot communicate someone who doesn't have kids, what they're missing out on.

There is just no way it's a conscious. You really

Simone Collins: can't. And yet a lot of child free couples are like. You don't understand the love I feel for my dog. And I'm like, I'm sorry. Like that's

Malcolm Collins: no, that is so disgusting. Well, this is the guy being like, well, you know, [00:26:00] I, I, yeah, I don't want to get gross here, but yeah, it's, it's disgusting.

Yeah, you know what? You're not discussing animals as a child substitute. Yeah, well, I mean, that's what they're doing. They're masturbating an emotional subset that a baby is supposed to fulfill with a pet. And then they pour their parenting instinct, you know, instead of into a baby, into a pet, you know, this is what somebody is doing when they're using pornography instead of sex or something like that.

They are using their pet for masturbation and it's gross.

Simone Collins: Pets as pornography.

Malcolm Collins: But they're doing it like publicly and, and proudly. And it's like, I, this does not come off the way that you think it comes off. It does not. I saw this one article that made me really sad. There was a two sisters and one of the wives had written into this magazine about how angry she was at her parent in the will.

Oh, this

Simone Collins: famous Miss Manners article. Yes, yes, yes.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, in the will, their mom [00:27:00] had given additional money to her sister because her sister had kids and she was like, my dog is my kid, like when her sister had kids, a kid, a sister had a kid. Okay, she's like, but my dog is my kid. Does she know how hurtful this is to me that I don't have this additional money for my dog?

Like that she had gotten into this level of psychosis where she actually thinks it costs as much to raise a dog. As a child and that like, have

Simone Collins: you seen how much that refrigerated pet food is? I

Malcolm Collins: mean, well, no. And then her dog is like the equivalent of like a continuation of the family line or something like that.

And that could have kids itself that would then continue the family, you know, the, the, the dog in any way, like she's lucky she got a dime from her parent, because this woman sounds like a psychopath. As everyone does whenever they, they clearly and loudly signal that they are using their dogs to masturbate.[00:28:00]

But anyway, I love you to death, Simone. You are a perfect wife and,

Simone Collins: You are my special sun pony. You too.