Why "Socially Conservative" Nations Are Having Fewer Kids (Yes Really) With Aria Babu

In this insightful discussion with rising conservative thinker Aria Babu, we analyze counterintuitive social trends around fertility rates. We explain why more “socially conservative” countries often have lower fertility than socially liberal ones.

Aria contends intensive mothering expectations in traditional cultures create barriers. Malcolm notes conservative minority groups within secular societies have higher birth rates. We argue familial living stands crucial, not public policy concessions. Still, promoting extensive stay-at-home motherhood proves misguided, despite intuitions. Overall an incisive look at the data on real drivers of birth rates.

Aria Babu: [00:00:00] My theory for it is that British elites have three beliefs that are very difficult to square with each other, which is one of them, which is that biodeterminism is completely false. That a child's outcomes are based wholly on on their environment.

Second, the inequality is bad. So the fact that children from different. Households have different outcomes is genuinely negative. It's like a genuine, like really bad thing to happen. And three, the education can basically fix all of all of these ends. So then when you see that children who go to the same schools end up having different outcomes based on their parents backgrounds, the best theory that then comes to mind is, oh, it's about what's going on slightly before school, which I think is why so much energy is poured into the early years foundation stage.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: Hello! It is so exciting to be with you guys today. I am really excited to bring... Someone who I feel we, we have scouted in, in, in talent scouting, but it seems that all of the other rising conservative intellectuals also know her Aria [00:01:00] Babu who is sort of a underground key figure in the, the conservative intellectual movement in the UK.

And she recently started a sub stack. She's only one episode in, but I already love it. I was actually planning to do an episode just on. chain of subtext that she's releasing. So do you want to start by going into the subtext that you're working on the, the, the first episode, and then we can expand from

Aria Babu: there.

Yeah, of course. So my first piece was about how socially conservative countries. don't seem to have higher birth rates in socially liberal countries. So the first, like, look at the data, if you just look at the European value survey, and you compare that to just TFRs across these countries, shows that actually the more like socially conservative countries, so we're looking at thinking like Italy and Spain, for example, have lower birth rates than the more socially liberal ones.

We're thinking Scandinavian countries, France, Britain. My second post which I've already done the research for, but I haven't published yet, then goes into [00:02:00] asking why that might be the case. So my first theory is that maybe more socially liberal countries have better provision of childcare. They have more public services that support motherhood.

So I looked at cost of childcare, number of parents who use it, and Yeah, both of those things, basically, and also attitudes towards using child care. And it seems that those also have like literally no correlation with birth rates in different countries. And I remember seeing that in Austria the cost of a nursery place for two kids costs 3 percent of the average woman's income, whereas in Switzerland, it costs 64 percent and those countries have the exact same birth rate.

Fascinating. So that doesn't seem to make a difference. And I was like, okay, what is another reason why a more socially liberal country might have A higher birth rate. Well, maybe it's because a more socially liberal country. Well, I was going to say maybe it's just because it's a nicer place to live, but that's actually like super unmeasurable.

I mean, maybe it is a nicer place to live and that does make it easier, but that kind of sounds like b******t to me. sO then I thought, okay, [00:03:00] what are the other correlates that might have you have might have between social conservatism and yes, And I was wondering if maybe it's because the more you value motherhood, the more you prize it, the more work it might be for people.

So it's very difficult to then try and pick out data that suggests like how much work do you think children are? But the closest I could find on the OECD stats site is birth rates as correlated with the amount of time that mothers spend with new babies. Okay. Okay. And then you do get the correlation.

Then you get the correlation that pretty much maps to the socially conservative to socially liberal correlation. So that's my underlying theory currently, which is that the more socially conservative people also believe that having children is much more work.

Simone Collins: And so just to be clear, more socially conservative nations also report higher amounts of time spent with new babies.

And is this in the form of maternity leave or is there some other measure of time spent?

Aria Babu: So the stat I looked at was just number of hours. That they spend so they do like hours a day doing childcare. [00:04:00] So the OECD does classic polling, which is how many hours do you spend in work? How many hours do you spend in leisure?

How many hours do you spend in child in household labor in general? And then, so then they looked at new mothers of newborn women.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, this would also correlate with something that is really clear in the data was his East Asian countries. If you control for income have unusually low fertility rates and generally the more conservative in East Asian country is the lower its fertility rate is going to be.

And something we keep hammering home on this show when we bring up the East Asian sphere because it's something that I think goes against a lot of Westerners intuition is that East Asian countries are more socially conservative than Western countries by a pretty dramatic amount. And so this would also explain why those countries have such low fertility rates.

Which, this has a lot of really interesting implications of what you're finding. [00:05:00] So the first is something that, you know, progressives don't want to hear. Which is that it turns out that you're not actually helping by subsidizing child care. That does not appear to matter. But then the second is, and this is a deleterious thing, I keep seeing conservative influencers, even ones who think of themselves as pronatalist advocating, which is the stay at home mom lifestyle.

And what we are seeing here is Almost nothing other than wealth negatively impacts fertility as much as the expectation of the stay at home mother lifestyle among mothers. And there's two really interesting points we can take away from this. One, and we often point this out, there's a great, the Nobel Prize winner this year did a thing on this and I'm going to see if I can find the the

graph and put it on the screen, but it shows that over time Women, like, like we, we think that women now are.

employed in the workforce at higher rates than they were historically, which is [00:06:00] true. They are employed now at the workforce at higher rates than they were like in the 50s. But if you go back before that increasingly you see higher and higher rates of women participation in the workforce. And what we really had was just a slump of women, female participation in the workforce when jobs began to take people out of the home.

So, what we're actually seeing when people are modeling these stay at home wife scenarios is they think they are modeling a traditional lifestyle when they really are not modeling a traditional lifestyle. They're, they're modeling an incredibly indulgent lifestyle that was signaled by 1950s Hollywood and is just as indulgent as any lifestyle today in 1950s Hollywood.

I don't know if you've ever seen, like, movies in the 80s, but you look at them and, like, everyone lives in a mansion. Like, you look at Home Alone. Who lives in a house that large?

Simone Collins: I really, watching the movie, I'm like, what did they do for work?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. It's in New York or something. No, no, I don't remember, but I remember it's in like a city too.

No, no, they're outside New York or something. Yeah, I'm sorry, I forgot. The Home Alone [00:07:00] 2 is in New York, so the Comb clearly isn't in New York. So the, the, the, the second thing is, um, oh God, I can't remember what I was going to say.

Simone Collins: Well, I would just add, I would add one piece of an annotation, which is when you have like five, six, seven children, you know, having a stay at home parent then becomes essentially a career because you are doing homeschooling because you were doing household management in like a totally different level.

You know, it's like, you're no longer like cooking home meals. You are a caterer. So I would just say like normal people's stay at home mom experience, like the, the one that happens mostly in mainstream developed Nations is like one or two kids, which is indeed as Malcolm describes, like a luxury experience.

But when you're actually doing like six, seven, eight kids that, you know, does, does become a different story.

Aria Babu: So here's my theory about it, which is, I think, I think like South Korea is a really good example to dig down to it. I think for most of history, Having an additional child [00:08:00] actually wasn't that much of a problem to already existing child provided that you could give them enough food But now the returns on education are quite high and actually we don't have super good theories about how much parent investment helps with kids But we do see that the kids who generally achieve better do have parents who put, like, spend way more time with them.

Whether that's just, like, an effect of conscientiousness, or if that's, like, the actual action to the kid's benefit is something I don't really know. But I think South Korea is definitely a country where positional education and hard work is really, really well rewarded in the education system. So, like, their tests aren't really just IQ tests, like, you know, like the SAT can kind of be a proxy for.

So it really does help to study aggressively. So by having a second child, if you're not constantly reading to that kid and constantly teaching that kid math, Then you really are actually depriving your child. I think to some extent it is a rational approach to the education systems as set up in some of these

Malcolm Collins: countries.

I agree and disagree. So I'm going, I, I happen to be, I think that this is the intuition. I think what you are describing is why people are making these [00:09:00] decisions frequently. However, the intuition is wrong from the data.

We can look at economic and educational outcomes by number of siblings. And what we find is that when you go, I seem to remember, like, up to, like, two to three siblings, every sibling actually helps a little, or at least isn't negative.

You really, siblings really only begin to deleteriously affect their other siblings, I think, when you're going above three. And then the effect is incredibly small. So you have this intuition, which I think once you're a parent, like I, I would say this because I know we have a number of parents with a lot of kids who watch our podcast and it's sort of the thing that every parent goes through when they have a lot of kids is was the first kid you put astronomical amounts of time into them and stuff like that.

It's like a kid, a little bit less by the time you're on kid three, you're like, Oh s**t. Like, I really don't need to worry about potty training them because they're going to figure it out. You're like, I don't know. Mother,

Simone Collins: we were just talking with said, like, by the time I had the [00:10:00] fourth kid, I'm just making sure he's not going to bed with something like a choking hazard in his mouth.

Like, you know,

Malcolm Collins: no, I think that's what we're seeing here is so much of how kids turn out as really just genetics and their peer group, which you actually create an influence through having a large number of kids. So that's, that's I think a really good point and one that hopefully we can dispel a myth around.

But the other thing and the reason I think this data is so important is so many people's intuition is we just need to go back to the old ways or what they perceive as the old ways. And so one, I said, one of the problems is, is you might misperceive the old ways, but also the social and technological environment we are in is different.

And, and it is as important here when we talk about, you know. Is being a stay at home mother, like, the optimal choice to promote societally? Now, I think individually, it's a great choice. But I think that there's a lot of conservative influencers who think they're helping the prenatalist cause, and are promoting it for everyone who intends to have kids.

And that's where I think it's really [00:11:00] deleterious. And then the second thing is That, that so, sorry the, the, the other area I think we see this and we're always advocating for this on our show is fertility rates are falling pretty dramatically. And so some conservative practices that used to increase fertility, like, okay, let's say, Is that cue.

contraception bans, right? Like, let's ban contraception. And then that comes to, like, okay, you, you start to virtue signal around that, and you're like, I think even an embryo is a human life, and therefore I think IVF is bad. And now something that historically would have increased fertility rates, a belief that life begins at an embryo is now dramatically decreasing fertility rates because it's so hard to get pregnant naturally.

Aria Babu: Yeah, no, I'm completely with you. I definitely think the fact that people misperceive the past is, is like a massive thing that happens here as well. I think people definitely have this sense that historically women just were like only focusing on childcare, as if like, [00:12:00] As if, like, household maintenance wasn't itself basically a full time job in a way that it just isn't now.

And the other thing is, sure, maybe, maybe spending lots of time with your mother is like a really great thing for you as a child. But, growing up in a poorer household is almost definitely not better for you. So it depends completely on your own family's financial circumstances, whether or not being a stay at home mother is even better for your kids.

Well,

Simone Collins: and a note, because when we were first planning our family, like, way before we ever had our first kid, We actually wanted to look really closely at like, is it better for a mother to stay at home or to leave? I mean, you know, we, we just wanted to know like if there was any conclusive reason what the data says.

Yeah. And basically there isn't exactly conclusive research and you could find some studies that suggest. Sort of one way or the other, but ultimately it seems like it's slightly better if anything for the mother to work, especially if you have daughters, because the more important thing is to demonstrate to daughters that you can go out and work and it's sort of empowering to see that their mother works [00:13:00] and has, you know, a real life, you know, so beyond just being a mother.

And I, I think that's, that's telling and it makes a lot of sense. I would think also that my, my supposition of why this isn't just so obviously in favor of mothers staying at home, because I think especially in the modern age, a lot of mothers staying at home get pretty depressed and demotivated. So to have a mother who's kind of pumped out and bored or neurotic or living through their children because they're, you know, helicopter parenting and they'll.

Don't have anything else in their lives could be damaging. So even though maybe a lot of kids who have stayed at home, others are getting a lot of support. They're also getting micromanaged a ton. There's too much pressure on them. So yeah, I mean, even that is really interesting and it surprised us.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, I, I have an alternate hypothesis as to what's going on here.

And, and I should be clear that this is, I think, a really sort of sad study. Because I think a lot of women, they think they're making this enormous sacrifice and it's going to have this enormous positive effect for their kids.

Because to some women, this is a sacrifice to them. Not, not to all women. To some women, they prefer to be [00:14:00] stay at home moms.

But some women are like, I'm giving up a career that I would have preferred to have. And so this is the type of study that you have to lay very gingerly that shows actually you probably hurt your kids by making that choice. And, and that's really sad, you know, but I think that the reason is, and it comes back to what I was saying earlier, which is kids seem to develop best with minimum amounts of.

And unfortunately, I also think that women who are disproportionately drawn to stay at home roles especially if they have small families, which a lot of these women have right now, are the narcissistic type parents who want to completely laud over their children's life and helicopter parent, and that's what we're seeing.

You know, as a woman's other tasks, you know, whether it's laundry or something like that, got automated. They had more and more free time, as Simone was pointing to, and all of that free time got directed on hovering over children. And that seems to have negative psychological effects. [00:15:00] In other places where you can see this, like if we're talking about related studies that seem to indicate this is probably true, there's this great study on kids going to kindergarten and trying to teach them Language earlier, trying to teach them reading earlier and it found out this, this state for, for poor kids in the state, I want to say it was like Ohio is somewhere in the central United States.

They made pre

kindergarten free focused on teaching early reading and they thought they had done this amazing thing for like the poor and then longitudinal studies were done and it turned out it like put these kids behind like a year and a half. Which is to say that if you force a kid to learn something before they're ready or you force a kid to engage With ideas before they're ready.

It actually has pretty significant deleterious effects

Aria Babu: We we have actually pretty similar data in the uk. So, the uk has for lots of reasons got incredibly incredibly expensive childcare, but one of the reasons it's very tightly regulated and the regulations they involve things like making sure that a child is like learning to learning to hold objects, learning to speak, because obviously this is an early years foundation stages from baby up to school [00:16:00] age.

And the Department for Education recently monitored the outcomes of children who were in nurseries or childbinding. So regulated sectors or children who were staying at home with their parents and they found that actually the earliest curriculum is. Slightly net negative compared to just staying at home in I think informal childcare.

Wow. That could be a selection effect, but...

Simone Collins: It's also terrifying to me that in the UK, like, you can't just, like, pay a teenager, a responsible one, like, to just watch your kids. That's, that's wild.

Malcolm Collins: It was because a couple kids ended up killing another kid in some daycare. No, no, no, not

Simone Collins: daycare, but like, probably while they were being babysat.

So,

Malcolm Collins: yeah,

Aria Babu: I think it was part of Tony Blair's like education, education, education push. Cause it started in 2006. My theory for it is that British elites have three beliefs that are very difficult to square with each other, which is one of them, which is that biodeterminism is completely false. That a child's outcomes are based wholly on on their environment.

Second, the [00:17:00] inequality is bad. So the fact that children from different. Households have different outcomes is genuinely negative. It's like a genuine, like really bad thing to happen. And three, the education can basically fix all of all of these ends. So then when you see that children who go to the same schools end up having different outcomes based on their parents backgrounds, the best theory that then comes to mind is, oh, it's about what's going on slightly before school, which I think is why so much energy is poured into the early years foundation stage.

Malcolm Collins: That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. And it also, obviously it doesn't work and it seems to make things worse. So yeah, I, I, I think that with a lot of this stuff in the modern era, the cool thing is, is the data is out there and people. Look, we don't trust academia any more than the next guy, right?

But I feel like I'm pretty good at knowing when academics are lying in papers. Like I'm, I'm good enough at going through the data. So either you can go through yourself and look through it and you, you can develop patterns around this, or you can just sort of trust us as people who genuinely want what's best for [00:18:00] our own kids and, and to take over the world.

Right. So,

Aria Babu: It's very easy to track the social conservatism thing. Just just go to the OECD website and then go to the world value survey. It takes about like, I'm going to say 15 minutes to just. Do a quick rough.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well also like that you're telling people how to do it as well, right? Like, like go out there, do it for yourself.

It's the same with with multiple siblings, things. This intuition that if I spend less time on a kid, that's going to hurt the kid. Again, you can just look like this is a really replicated finding. You are hurting the kid by spending additional time on them. And this can be a really interesting thing for a husband who has a wife who is overbearing to work on, you know, to an extent you're in charge of protecting your kids.

 Something we've noted here about stay at home moms and this is another thing like, okay, do I want to have a stay at home wife? You know, go out there, look at the data, look at the outcomes. But, I think it's important to remember that like, if you have two kids and you are a stay at home wife, [00:19:00] you're going to go crazy because you're not really doing anything when you have like eight kids or nine kids, that's a completely different thing.

And we want to make sure that we are not conflating the two. But with that being the case, this is also true that. We think even a woman who intends to become a stay at home mom, like, I think that's a privilege that women can indulge in once they're a kid four. Right. But I think before that it's pretty indolent to be a stay at home mom.

That's my overly spicy take.

Simone Collins: What's, what's so interesting though, about the, the first substack piece you have, because it's so counterintuitive is, you know, when you think about progressive nations, you think about progressive culture being. Just so sterilizing, you know, it's, it's, these are very, very low birth rates that progressive people have.

So it's part of me wonders if it's, I mean, also more representative of a nation that on the whole is not super conservative, but is actually more diverse. So you've got more like super high blind [00:20:00] fundamentalists who are having tons of kids and then a bunch of super progressives who aren't, but I'm wondering like what your thoughts are on that.

I'm like, why are, yeah, what's going on?

Aria Babu: I suspect it probably isn't the like Sweden has like a large handful of like super fundamentalists. I suspect it really is just about people being more likely to have two or three kids versus one or two. Like that's kind of the range we're thinking within most, most rich countries.

And so I don't think it probably is that. My guess is also that people have very bad intuitions about which countries have. low birth rates. So I think most people would be surprised to know that India is currently a replacement rate.

Malcolm Collins: Below replacement rate as of this year. Yeah. And I think it's going to fall pretty quickly from, from where it is now, which is a, is a shame.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I think people, I guess they, there's a lot of conflation of population size with birth rate and it's going to take us a really long time to get around that.

Aria Babu: Yeah, I think so. I [00:21:00] guess. Also, it is definitely true that more conservative people at the very least in the Anglosphere do have higher birth rates.

So I guess it, like, it kind of, that's another reason why it makes intuitive sense and I don't actually have a great way of squaring that.

Malcolm Collins: So I, I do. I think that there is a big difference between being a conservative individual from a minority conservative group and being in a conservative normative environment.

Right. And I think that the conservative normative environment actually hurts conservative individuals within the country in terms of their fertility rate. And this is something that a lot of conservatives, it might be heartening, it might be disheartening. What it means is if you win. If you win the culture wars, the person who suffers the most from your winning is your cultural group, your people.

It is the feeling like a discriminated minority group, which is likely helping your fertility rate. and protecting your culture intergenerationally. When your culture [00:22:00] feels like it is in control of the state, it will degrade and become soft much faster, because you will feel like you have less to protect yourself from, and you will you know, I, I think, let go of a lot of the cultural hygiene related stuff, I guess I'd call it, like the

Simone Collins: But in other words You're describing sort of like a push versus pull culture, right?

Like if you're in the minority culture that, you know, encourages high birth rates, it's kind of like carrot rather than a stick to have kids because, you know, you can sort of stand out and be cool and be special and really help.

Malcolm Collins: Okay, suppose you're a tradcath, right? If you're a tradcath in a semi hostile governance system, like the United States, right?

Your perception of, of being a tradcath is going to be, that's your unique cultural identity and every kid you have actually matters a lot because it's, it's, it's your community that you're adding that kid to, it's your church, it's your, you know, however, if you are a tradcath and your country has Catholic leadership, like it is an officially [00:23:00] sanctioned Catholic state, Every kid you had feels a lot less important.

Maintaining the rules of your faith feel a lot less important, because they're also the rules of the state. This is one of the things that we often point out, that it is really silly and kind of stupid, as a conservative, to fight for things like banning pornography. Even if your group is anti pornography, because through banning pornography, the people who you're helping the most are your enemies, if you believe that no pornography is useful, you know, you're helping the secular sphere and cultural groups that were engaged in being hurt by pornography.

But you're also making the rules that your culture exercises to lower pornography consultancy. consumption less relevant to every individual's daily lives. And I think individuals stick with cultures better the more they actually have to choose to suffer to endure the rules of that culture.

Aria Babu: I think that probably makes sense. I would have like one extra guess though, [00:24:00] that actually that we will see these like, conservative right groups within like say America, if they do come to dominate the They will be, like, much more like they are now than they will be, like, the sort of, like, general American population.

Like, I know that, like, for example, like, the Amish has, like, a slightly higher bleed rate than it used to, and the Mormons have a slightly higher bleed rate than they used to. But I suspect that the people that will keep reproducing at a high level will be more... More like, like traditional Mormons.

Simone Collins: Absolutely. Especially because, you know, the ones who detract are the ones who don't have kids. And the ones who do have kids are the ones who stay.

Malcolm Collins: I need to update your intuition. The Amish actually have a lower bleed rate than they used to. The Mormons have a higher bleed rate than they used to. So, Mormonism right now is basically falling apart.

So they're not really useful to learn anything but like, don't do this lessons. Amish, on the other hand they have intergenerationally gotten to like incredibly low bleed rates, like 3 percent intergenerationally. And that's just me.

Aria Babu: So I thought as the

[00:25:00] Amish, basically, as they, as they have to move off, like being like purely like agricultural, you get like a small set of Amish that have to interact more and more with the English as they call it.

And that group has a lower birth rate. That group. Oh, yeah, it does.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So he's, he's referring more to, to strict. Amish, and not so much like the Mennonites who have cell phones. Schwartz and troopers.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, yeah. They're called. Anyway, uh, was there anything else you wanted to say on this topic? I don't think so.

I liked it. I mean, I think this is just really important for people to know because it is such a non intuitive thing. It is. It's so important from a pronatalist advocacy perspective because it is, I think in the same way that progressives, the first thing they want to say is let in more immigrants and you're like, well, that actually doesn't help.

And then they go, well, make, give people money and give free childcare. And you're like, well, that doesn't work. And they're like, well, all of the things that supported the s**t I already wanted to do don't work. And with conservatives, you have the similar instinct, which is, well, go back to the way things used to be, [00:26:00] uh, or at least the way that they perceive the way things used to be.

And you're like, You know, you have to say, unfortunately, no pronatalism as an agenda doesn't allow you to just push whatever it is that you were planning to do beforehand. You actually need to look at the data and be very intentional if you want to be one of the groups that survives. Yeah. And we are so excited to have you on and I hope people check out the sub stack.

And I expect many interesting things from her in the future.

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