#962 - Lyman Stone - The Real Reason Birth Rates Are Falling

How did you get into neighborhood design beef on Twitter?

So, I mean, somebody shared a photo of, it was like an aerial photo of some neighborhood in Phoenix, and they were like,

How would it?

I forget what exactly was, but they're like, How would any human ever want to live here?

I was like, I mean,

it looks like kind of a nice neighborhood.

Like, people have pools in their backyard.

It doesn't have like a big highway cutting through it or anything.

I street viewed the neighborhood.

There's a bunch of parks in the neighborhood.

Like, there's you in street view, you can see kids playing in the parks.

Like, clearly, people enjoy this neighborhood.

I also looked up like the Zillow on it.

Like, houses in this, in this neighborhood are like people clearly want to live here from the prices they're paying.

So, I said, like, you know, I don't know, it looks like a nice neighborhood.

Like, it looks.

It looks pretty nice to me.

And the thing that really set people off is I said it looked relatively walkable.

And what I mean by that is it's like, you can look up the census tract.

It's a density of like 9,000 people per square mile, which is considerably, considerably above the U.S.

average, right?

And if you look at the street grid, like

it's quite compact lots.

These are not like half acre lots or something.

They're like quite compact lots.

You could very easily walk around.

I could envision my kids going to play at any of the mini parks in the neighborhood.

There's a school on the edge of the neighborhood.

Kids could walk to school.

But people really were mad that I called this neighborhood walkable.

They were like, nothing in Phoenix is walkable.

It's 110 degrees in the summer.

And I'm like, okay, man.

When I lived in Montreal, it was like negative 10 degrees 11 months out of the year.

I didn't think that was very walkable either, but whatever.

So yeah, people didn't like the take.

What

where do you think that's coming from?

What's the

underlying

impetus of that, the motivation for them being so upset at you?

So a lot of people said, okay, but walkable to what?

There's no bars.

There's no restaurant in the neighborhood.

What are you walking to?

And I was like, I mean, 90% of the time when we walk somewhere, whether in my current neighborhood or when I lived in Montreal or when I lived in Hong Kong,

most of the walking we did was not walking to what.

It was walking to who.

Right?

We're like, oh, we're going to go to a neighbor's house and the kids are going to play at the neighbor's house.

We're going to go and visit someone.

And it looked like a neighborhood where like, you know, a lot of my friends could get houses.

My family could get houses.

Like we could all live close together.

We could walk to each other without having to cross like a major highway or some crap like that.

So when I looked at it, I looked at houses clustered close together, houses that look like they have families in them, lots of parks.

And I said, oh, this is clearly a neighborhood where there's a lot of who's that you might walk to.

My kids are going to have friends in this neighborhood.

But basically, a lot of,

you know, people who are going to remain childless until the day they die looked at it and were like, oh, but where's my like boutique concert venue?

Sorry, that was like a really hostile way of doing that.

No, I look like I well, look, people, people who don't have kids and people who do have kids, even people that are married and people who aren't married have very different ways.

We look at the world in different ways.

That's correct.

Is it not Nassim Taleb that says the world is split into two groups of people, those who have kids and those who don't?

And like the second group will never understand the first?

Little things.

The neighborhood I lived in in Montreal had like a crazy high walk.

It's rated like one of the most walkable, cyclable neighborhoods in North America.

And it was lovely.

I enjoyed it.

But I didn't think it was very walkable.

And the reason is, yes, there's a lot of stuff around,

but...

Montreal's public works program is basically controlled by the mafia.

And they do a terrible job maintaining the roads and the sidewalks.

And as a result you really can't push a stroller on half of the sidewalks they're too potholed right so like if i can't push a stroller there it's not walkable because when i'm walking i'm pushing a stroller um but people are like oh it's so walkable and i'm like no your public works are crap whereas phoenix it never rains there's no potholes boom

yeah so you're gonna you're gonna be hot but smooth well but you're only hot like four months of the year right like the southwest in the spring and fall is like the most glorious glorious climate there.

I mean, you're in Austin, right?

Like, you know, this.

Like, outside of the hot season, it rocks.

Yep.

So we're just getting into the thick of it now.

What about,

talk to me about the relationship between population density and fertility?

This seems to be an area of research that I didn't even know existed.

And in retrospect, kind of does make sense, but was certainly new to me.

Yeah.

So it's super intuitive.

We look at the world.

We look at look at any map of any country, and population density predicts everything, right?

Like the more dense counties in any country are like the more liberal voting counties.

The more dense counties are like the more economically active counties.

Like population density proxies for like everything in the world.

And one of the things it proxies for is fertility.

So in most countries, to be honest, in like almost every country, in almost every industrialized country, I should say,

if you look at a map of fertility and a a map of density, the really dense places are also the really low fertility places.

And this has caused people to very reasonably infer that there's like a linkage here,

right?

That this can't be a coincidence when the correlation is like off the cart, off the charts strong.

So,

but it turns out that it's actually kind of tricky when you start looking below the correlational level, when you try and look at mechanisms.

Like, okay, but why?

The simple story of density and fertility starts to break down really fast.

So there's some things that are quite clear, okay?

Like

neighborhoods where there is a very high ratio of adults to bedrooms have lower fertility.

And it's kind of plausible what's going on there, okay?

So like crowded houses are bad for fertility.

That's really clear.

But that's actually not always high density areas.

There's a lot of places where adults are very crowded together, but it's actually not super high population density, right?

So you see this less in the US, but you see this a lot in like Eastern Europe or Spain or East Asia, where you'll have like a rural area,

but it's got like a single apartment building in it.

And they're just like, well, we needed some more housing.

So we put a 40-story apartment building in a farm.

And this is a case where, like, this is not a high-density area.

Okay.

It's basically rural, but it just has a tower.

But it's a place where the amount of living space per adult is quite low.

Okay.

So

it seems like the actual thing doing the work here

is

like crowded living space, like small houses compared to people who have to occupy them, less like people per square mile.

These are obviously related.

Places really with really high people per square mile often also have like really crowded housing.

Like the classic example is like Kowloon Walled City, the old place in Hong Kong.

It's gone now.

Now it's a lovely park.

I've been there several times because we used to live in Hong Kong.

But, you know, it was very dense and it was very crowded.

But these are actually not the same thing.

So what's a better way to design it?

We need space.

We need to put people into houses.

They need to be not super expensive.

Not super expensive means space efficient for the real estate company that's going to make them.

You want, you know,

10,000 square feet of floor space, like ground net floor space in Manhattan.

Go fuck yourself.

But

you put that across two stories in an apartment and it's, you know, accessible to maybe the top 1% of owners.

What's a better solution?

You can,

there's a great infographic that circulates sometimes on Twitter, and it shows like three different neighborhoods.

And the neighborhoods all have the identical population density per square mile but in one of the neighborhoods it's like a big a couple big towers with like parkland between them in the other one it's like mid-rise apartment buildings kind of like like you'd see in um um

some of spain uh like eastern spain in um like valencia or something um uh it's like these mid-rise apartment blocks with kind of courtyards in them and then the third one is like townhouses and the point is they're all identical density where they vary is some of them have more height and then more empty space on the ground.

And others sacrifice some empty space on the ground to have less height.

Okay.

And what I would argue is if you want people to have kids, you should go for the less height and the less empty space on the ground.

That is, townhouses with tree-lined sidewalks are what everyone wants anyways.

Those are the most bid-up neighborhoods, so that's what we should build.

Those are the ones that have the lowest vacancy rates, so that's what we should build.

And they also have relatively high fertility rates.

That is, when you actually look at these like dense neighborhoods that are actually, they're like dense single family.

So I live in one of these neighborhoods.

It's almost entirely single family housing, but it's also almost 10,000 people per square mile.

And

like.

throw a rock in my neighborhood and you hit like a homeschooling family with five kids.

It's just, I mean, that's also just Kentucky.

that's the type of neighborhood families tend to want because it tends to be something that, like, your kid can walk to the park very easily.

We can walk to the YMCA and the gym and the pool really easily.

And it can be high density, but it also gives you actually a lot of the kinds of houses people want to raise kids in.

Kinds of houses that are convenient for families.

That is, they have a garage, they have parking, they have somewhere to put the stroller, stuff like that.

And also, that are still

in places where it's regulatorily legal to build them, it's relatively cost-effective for a developer.

Is it a case that

you are creating the sort of housing, or two things maybe?

One, that you're creating the kind of housing in high-rise apartments that single people or couples without kids are like, oh, this is cool.

Look at the floor-to-ceiling windows, and I've got a great view, and this park is so spectacular.

Or,

I guess, that parks and large open green spaces are kind of like a very sexy billboard of look at how well-natured our local environment is, not in the same way that my small back garden is, but that the day-to-day existence of most people is not spent in the park, it's spent in the house.

So the sort of positivity and the

ceiling that you feel like you have from a lifestyle perspective is higher.

Is that part of the mechanism that's going on?

Yeah.

So

part of it is

the first one you said, which is basically that like, and by the way, I'm not speculating on this.

At IFS, we just finished a survey.

We surveyed 9,000 Americans on their housing preferences and particularly their housing preferences as it relates to family.

So when I say something like, when people visualize their family life, liberals and conservatives alike, like across the political or ideological spectrum, they visualize a single family house.

Okay, 80% of them do.

That's not speculation when I say that.

That's fact.

We just collected the data on that.

Now, I have another survey in the field right now where we're going to look at: can you make apartments that are slightly more family-friendly, that'll like help people have their first or maybe their second kid in the apartment?

Because

apartments are kind of all that's being built in the U.S.

right now.

So, we're, our first report on housing at IFS was like, here's the ideal housing policy.

The next one we're going to do, it's going to come out this summer, is like, ha ha ha, you didn't listen to our ideal housing policy.

Here's how to do a needle exchange for housing policy, like harm reduction.

Like, can we make slightly less bad apartments?

The other thing is parks.

Parks are great.

I love taking my kid to the park.

Big parks are great.

Naturey parks are great.

If you keep them swarming with police,

okay?

Like

if you don't police your parks really well, they become places families really don't want to go to and they become disamenities, right?

They become places for basically drugs and crime um

the the number one thing the families want in any neighborhood is safety order and cleanliness beyond anything else beyond schools although schools matter too beyond a specific house you want safety order and cleanliness um if the neighborhood doesn't if you don't get a sense that it's safe clean and and and reasonable for your kid to walk around in the neighborhood nobody wants to raise a family there um they might do it because they don't have other options but it's not what people want.

And the problem with parks is that,

especially, we live in a time where like public disorder is really rising.

We're just,

I mean, people just don't really have respect for public spaces in the same way.

And as a result, public spaces increasingly are actually disamenities for families because they are not well policed.

That it doesn't have to be this way.

So, like, data communities and like master plan communities can still provide these like public space amenities

because they police access really aggressively.

But if you don't police access and police usage,

then these public spaces become disamenities for families with small children.

One of the most common reasons I think that people give for not having kids or not being able to have kids or not wanting kids is it's too expensive to get on the housing ladder.

How

what are the nuances to what people are saying saying around that?

And also, how does that relate to this population density style and type of home?

I imagine that this is very carefully, Gordianly knotted into itself.

So people are not lying when they say that housing is a barrier to their fertility.

When people say childcare is a barrier to their fertility, they're not lying, but

they're more often telling themselves a story about a series of other economic factors that are at work.

But housing is a case where

the price of one square foot of housing compared to the income of a young adult considering a first child, that age range, has skyrocketed.

It's just way more expensive to get housing than it used to be in the past, particularly housing in a neighborhood that is clean, orderly, and safe.

So that's very real.

And in our study that we did earlier this year, we showed that

in

MSAs with like the top third most expensive housing compared to young adult income,

young adults are more likely to live with their parents.

They have lower marriage rates and they have lower fertility rates.

So yeah, expensive housing, it keeps people stuck with their parents, stuck in their parents' basement.

And it prevents marriage and fertility because people of all stripes,

if you ask a 20-year-old, 20-year-old, close your eyes,

visualize the Christmas card you're going to send to all your friends 20 years from now.

You know,

you want to give an update to all your friends 20 years, send your like your winter greeting card, visualize the picture on the front of it of your family.

Now, what is the house behind your family?

Okay, I've done this experiment in classrooms of sociology undergrads, okay?

Like super, like not conservative kids okay like sociology undergrads super far left 90 of them when they open their eyes they say oh it was a single family house it was a two-story single family house with a yard

like

you mean it wasn't a super cool modern design floor to ceiling window

everybody everybody if you just ask people like was it made out of brick they're like

it was made out of brick like i can guess the color palette of the brick to within like a small range like everyone is imagining this.

This is now when push comes to shove, yes, people opt for other things, people make other choices, but at like a brute, like cognitive, schematic level,

when people think about their family and people don't just want to arbitrarily have kids.

Okay.

Nobody's like, well, I donated some sperm, therefore I have the kids I wanted to have.

Like, that's not how that works.

People don't want to have kids, they want to have a family.

And a family is a package.

It's, it's, it's a spouse.

It's kids.

It might be cousins.

it might be aunts, it might be uncles, but crucially, it's an arrangement of residence as well as people.

That being the case,

it's not enough to say, well, we built a bunch of apartments and apartments are cheap now.

Because guess what?

That's not what people mean when they say a family.

And how do I know that?

Because I just surveyed 9,000 of them on this topic.

We have to build the kinds of houses that people want.

And I want to say this doesn't mean we have to build expensive houses.

Okay.

I love Daybreak, Utah.

I don't know if you've ever been there or heard of it.

It's a gigantic master plan community.

It's got like 60,000 people now, which is huge for a master plan community.

It's super dense.

Now, it does have apartments.

It does have an apartment section.

It has a range of housing types, but I was just visiting a friend who lives there.

And like he lives in a single family house that's like, I don't know, 2,500 square feet or something, decent sized house.

You could easily raise kids there.

Though he doesn't.

He has two dogs.

But the neighborhood, like they're these small yards, very compact, but every one of these small yards that I passed has like a tricycle in front of it, right?

It's Utah.

Everybody's having kids.

You can build dense,

you can build dense single family, and that's what most Americans want.

You can do it affordably if zoning will allow it.

It's the type of housing that's most missing in America is dense single family.

And it can even be like townhouses.

Like it doesn't have to be detached, even.

It can be attached single family.

People are happy to live in that.

They're happy to raise a family in that, but nobody wants to raise a family in a small apartment.

Most people don't even want to raise a family in a big apartment.

Hauling a stroller up the elevator isn't fun.

Now,

I think you can imagine a world where this isn't true.

Okay.

You can imagine a world where

people kind of schematically lose their attachment to single family homes.

So I think the Soviets kind of created that world in Eastern Europe.

Right.

Like, so

what a fantastic role model for,

right?

So I say without endorsement.

Comment without endorsement.

But like Soviets, like, it was like really great.

Oh, you got the big apartment.

You can have another kid now.

Like, you've got space for them.

And it's like still a small apartment.

Okay.

And in some ways, like East Asia, they have super low fertility, but the people in the bigger apartments do have more kids.

So

you can imagine this schema breaking down, but like, I'm not sure we want it to.

Like, the examples of societies where people aspire to a bigger apartment are not societies that most of us are like, that's what I want.

This episode is brought to you by the RP Hypertrophy app.

This app has made a massive impact on my gains and enjoyment in going to the gym over the last year.

It's designed by Dr.

Mike Isrotel and comes with over 45 pre-made training programs and more than 250 technique videos.

It takes all the guesswork out of crafting the ideal lifting routine by literally spoon feeding you a step-by-step plan for every workout.

It'll guide you through the exact sets, reps, and weight to use and most importantly, how to perfect your form so that every rep is optimized for maximum gains.

It even adjusts every week based on your progress and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee.

So you can buy it and train with it for 29 days.

And if you don't like it, they'll just give you your money back.

Right now, you can get up to $50 off the RP Hypertrophy app by going to the link in the description below or heading to rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom using the code modern wisdom at checkout.

That's rpstrength.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout.

Right.

Okay, so outside of housing,

this always gets thrown around.

New study survey comes out.

The biggest reasons that people give for not having kids, not necessarily the reason for them not having kids, but what are the touted reasons that people give when they're asked, why are you not having kids or not yet have had kids or don't want kids?

Like

get into the mess of that.

The bigger reasons, I mean, people say costs.

That's common.

But actually like some of the most common reasons that people give

are

they don't want to lose their personal leisure time and hobbies.

That's like actually one of the biggest reasons is basically sometimes it gets surveyed as like leisure time.

Sometimes it gets surveyed as personal freedom.

Sometimes it gets surveyed as like hobbies and activities, but it's kind of this nexus of like disruption to my life.

That's one of the biggest reasons.

And it's a reason that really does predict not having kids.

So to the extent you're a person who really values like

kind of your individual hobbies, probably you're going to die alone.

I just got in trouble.

I tweeted about this on Twitter yesterday and it's been, I've been, I've been catching some heat about it today.

But, like,

yeah, I mean, the extent to which your sense of what's valuable and meaningful in your life is like your little projects, like, yeah, that kids mess that up.

Family messes that up.

So that's one of the single biggest reasons people give, and they're not lying about it.

They're not just making crap up.

Like, people who say this really do have fewer kids later in life.

You also see things about child care availability that that um that can be a very real issue, um, and that, but one of the most common ones is people who just say, Well, I just haven't met the right person yet, um, or I met the right person, but it was too late for us.

Um, that's one of the most common reasons, and that one also really does predict not having as many kids as you might have wanted to have.

Um, so partnership and personal freedom are definitely really important,

but

in both of those, I will say there's, I think, there's an underlying reason

that people

they almost don't have the words to articulate it.

And to be honest, we don't survey it because it's weird to ask people about.

And it's something like,

you know, the reason I don't have kids yet is because it just seems like it's kind of a weird thing for a person at my stage of life to do.

And I think that it's supposed to come later.

Okay, like it's, it's just nebulously,

it seems like the only people doing that at my age are people who like failed out of a career or something, right?

Like it's it's the sense that it's low status, but not just low status, but that it's like

it's not normal to do that at this time in life.

Or maybe it's normal, but only to have one at this time.

You wouldn't have had three kids by now.

Um

and I think figuring out how to tackle that

intuition is a really interesting question, a really interesting problem for people who care about this issue.

Where do you think that's come from?

There's a whole

school, like sort of long-standing literature around a concept called developmental idealism

reaching back.

And I

people argue this kind of set of ideas emerged about 500 years ago and then really took over around 150 years ago.

But it's basically, it's a reconceptualization of life and civilizational timelines that basically says no life is not a C is not cyclical.

Okay, so like traditionally most peoples view life as cyclical, right?

You have an infancy, then an adulthood, then a second infancy in some sense as an elder when you need care.

And life is just sort of cyclical and everything comes back in its time and there's nothing new under the sun.

Civilizations rise to periods of greatness, then they have decadence and they fall and then they rise again.

And there's no long-term trend.

Okay.

But developmental idealism introduces the idea that there actually is a long-run trend, that your life progresses linearly, not cyclically, that civilizations progress linearly or even exponentially, and they go through developmental stages, like a child.

You're young and then you get mature and blah, blah, blah.

So you get this ethic of development.

And that stage tends, and that approach tends to say,

Because there's this developmental thing, you really need to make big investments early in life and postpone things that impede investment making, most notably family.

There's other elements of developmental idealism that impinge on family formation, but this simple conceptual framework that life isn't really cyclical

is a really important psychological break between most modern people and more traditional societies.

And I mean, you can even see in things like most traditional people are dealing with cyclical seasons as part of their subsistence.

We are not, right?

We don't have as much seasonality in our life.

So that's, that's a big part of it.

But then beyond that, I think more contemporarily, I think just in the last 20 years, you see like a supercharged version of this with social media and the internet and the way that we can all observe each other's consumption in new ways that it feels like you're missing out on more.

now to have kids

even if you're not like you're actually not missing out on a lot more than you were in the past but it feels like you are because so many of us spend so much of our life just scrolling through other people's conspicuous consumption.

How much of it is...

Oh, wait, talk to me about the relationship between the diffusion of mobile phones and fertility preferences.

Is this a correlation?

So I have a paper in review right now on exactly this.

And the correlation is actually surprisingly weird.

The strongest relationship is when people get more access to mobile phones and to the internet,

they're more likely to adopt concrete, discrete preferences.

Not necessarily lower ones, just more concrete ones.

That is, they have less fuzziness around the numbers they report.

They're less likely to say, I'll just have as many kids as God gives me.

And they're more likely to like say a number.

And if they're going to say a number, they're more likely to say one number rather than like

five or six,

four or five, like they're like, no, I want two.

I want three.

Um, cell phones drive this sort of concretization of preferences, um, and they eliminate some of the flexibility that people naturally have around their family life, right?

Um, historically, people had limited control over their family life, there was a lot of early death, um, limited ability to control conception.

And so, humans adapted by having a kind of flexible conception towards family life.

Um, as people get more exposed to like Western media,

they tend to lose that flexibility and adopt really inflexible family norms.

I want exactly this.

If I don't get exactly this, it's a big problem.

And what's interesting, this actually sets people up for a lot of misery.

Okay.

So in non-Western contexts, when people undershoot their fertility desires, it seems like they don't suffer as much loss of like happiness as Western people who undershoot their fertility desires.

Like when Western people say they want want two kids, if they only have one, their odds of being depressed in their 40s and 50s are a lot higher.

But if you look at like an African woman who says she wants five and she ended up with three

The effects on her subjective well-being actually don't seem to be quite as large, though I will readily admit we don't have as good of data for that context as well.

And it seems like what's going on is Western people just adopt these really inflexible family norms, not just lower.

And when people people get cell phones, the inflexibility translates more rapidly than the actual lower numbers do, at least is what we're finding in early research.

So, but what does happen with social media,

aside from family desires, is we see people become less likely to intend big families, even if they desire them.

So this is actually a weird dynamic.

When people get cell phones, we see that more of them, they still want the same number of kids as their non-cell phone having neighbors okay so like if you're in a village where people have cell phone service and the neighboring village doesn't you all you both want the same number of kids but if you have the cell phone you're less likely to actually intend to have that number of kids why

beeps me

i just report the data man yeah no so like

this is this is like this is in our like questions for further research section is like why

and we we kind of think what's going on is

um

we do see this concretization this spread of like more concrete fertility desires and what's going on is people say well it would be instead of saying well it would be nice to have four and maybe i'll have them so i'm i'm open to that i'll try for it maybe i don't get it maybe i will

Once people are more exposed to Western media, they start to say, well, it'd be nice to have four,

but I'm not sure if I can hit it.

So it's better to just content myself with the two I have.

Right?

So you get this sense of like rationalizing the difficulties of your life.

At the same time, there's a whole different possibility that this is basically about exposure to different status hierarchies.

What the flexing brunch with the boys and the girls on a Saturday is far more Instagram worthy than a night of changing dirty nappies.

Yeah, yeah, basically.

So

I think one of the, so I published a study on this a couple of months ago

where we looked at, it's very hard to find cases of status interventions.

Like how often does a government or something like implement a policy where they announce like three kids is high status now?

And even if they do, like.

Do people really like believe it?

What does that even mean?

Yeah.

Right.

So, but we have one case where this did happen successfully.

So the country of Georgia,

their state church, the leader of their state church is, he's a rock star.

He's like the most popular public figure in the country.

He has crazy high approval ratings.

He's like a hero of national independence and revival, whatever.

So

he got ticked off that, and like 80% of Georgia is Georgian Orthodox.

So like, it's most of the people in the country are part of this church.

And he got annoyed.

that they just built this gigantic new cathedral and no babies were being baptized in it.

Okay.

And he was like crap my congregation my fold is dying like they're not breeding and also they're having a lot of abortions which is like a big no-no in conservative christianity um

and he said okay here's what i'm going to do i will personally baptize any thirdborn or higher child born to married georgian orthodox couples and i will become their godparent okay so this is interesting because for traditional Christian movements,

godparents matter a lot.

Like they are kin, they are family, so much so that it's actually incest to marry a godsibling in most traditional Christian traditions.

You can't marry godsiblings in Eastern Orthodox canon law because it's incest.

You are siblings.

You can't marry siblings.

So, anyways, this guy, he did this thing, he announced this, and in 18 months, the fertility of Georgia rose from 1.6 to 2.2.

And it remained, it's still above 1.6 to this day.

It's like 1.85 today or something.

So this worked.

I have a paper published where we use a bunch of different quasi-causal methods to show that it worked.

Georgian Orthodox fertility rose more than minority fertility.

It specifically rose among married, third, or higher births, all these different things.

The point is, it worked.

But the question is, why?

Like, why did it work that like this old religious leader was like, ah, I'll baptize your kids?

Why did that make everybody be like, eh, we're having a third kid?

Like,

why?

So

what we can say is the number of children Georgian women said they wanted to have didn't change.

They wanted three before the intervention and they wanted three after the intervention.

But the number they intended to have rose.

What's the difference?

Wanting is if I just ask, like, ideally, how many kids would you like to have?

Intending is, how many do you actually plan on having?

Okay, so that's very different.

You can imagine saying, well, I'd love to have four, but it's not going to work out for me.

I'm only going to have two.

We also know that people, the abortion rate fell, the marriage rate rose.

Women's education did not decline.

Women's workforce participation did not decline.

So it's not like women adopted more traditional roles.

People just like spontaneously had more kids.

We think what happened is that

in this case, case, this religious leader, he was popular enough and the offer of God family was compelling enough.

And also being part of a big mass baptism in the cool new church that they leveled a mountain to build is kind of actually kind of an Instagram worthy experience.

That this like hacked enough different psychological constructs that it made a lot of people be like, well.

You know, we used to think having a third child was like

kind of backwards.

like cool people don't do that.

But now good Georgians have a third baby and we want to be good Georgians.

So we're going to have a third baby.

So it like unlocked, unlocked kind of like a religious nationalist impulse that was latent,

which means you couldn't just do this anywhere.

But it does point to the fact that when you're able to alter status hierarchies, fertility does respond.

And without disrupting like women's ability to be economic citizens,

it's actually not a re-traditionalization.

It's like a new traditionalization, right?

That you get big families, but also women working, which is something that a lot of sort of conservative pronatalists often assume isn't possible, right?

That the only pathway to

roll back this.

And in Georgia, we see that's not the case.

Religious revival generated more babies, but didn't re-traditionalize women's roles.

How many kids do most Western women say that they want?

British-American?

Two.

Like two to 2.5.

There's a few countries that are like 1.9.

Like Malta is like 1.8 or 1.9.

Austria, I think, is 1.9, maybe.

But generally, most people say like between 2 and 2.5.

Well, they don't say 2.5, but the national average is like 2 to 2.5.

And in the US, it's like 2.2 or 2.3.

And how many do they intend?

Anywhere from 1.2 to 1.7 or 1.8.

I think in the US it's 1.9.

Right.

So,

yeah, I guess they're not actually that far off.

Like the birth rates and the intention rate are not actually that far apart.

Births versus intentions are not radically far off.

People are reasonably good predictors of what they themselves intend to do.

It's just that what they intend to do is a lot less than what they would like to do if their circumstances were different.

And so like the biggest things that predict intentions being lower than desires for young women are things like

mental illness is a big one.

So, like, people with more severe diagnosed mental illness have a bigger gap between intentions and desires.

People with less relationship history, so, people who have like never had a relationship by the time they're 28,

have bigger gaps between intentions and desires.

People with worse work histories as well, or people with histories of incarceration.

So

bad life outcomes predict a shortfall between intentions and desires.

People who are basically failing to hit key milestones.

Before we continue, if your workouts feel flat, your recovery is slow, or you've just been feeling off, it might not be your training plan or your diet.

It might be something a bit more boring.

like zinc.

And while supplements like tonkat ali can help, zinc quietly plays a huge role in testosterone production, strength, recovery, and energy.

And most people are chronically low on it, which is why I'm such a huge fan of Mementis' zinc.

It supports testosterone, boosts vitality, and helps keep everything running like it should.

Best of all, it's NSF certified for sport, which means it's been independently tested and approved for purity, safety, and zero shady ingredients.

So even Olympic athletes can use it, and you too.

And if you're still unsure, Mementus offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.

So you can buy it and try it for 29 days.

If you don't love it, they'll just give you your money back.

Plus, they ship internationally.

Right now, you can get 35% off your first subscription and that 30-day money-back guarantee by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/slash modern wisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout.

That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S.com/slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout.

Where do fertility preferences come from?

Like, what

is that?

Um,

that is a great question.

Not genes.

Right.

This is the one area of psychology that apparently genetics isn't going to step into.

Yeah, it's not genes.

We actually know this one.

There are very few genes that are relevant for fertility, and

they don't appear to be highly implicated in fertility preferences.

So it comes from some kind of socializing environment.

people are socialized into having bigger fertility, higher fertility preferences.

Um, some of that is from your parents, right?

You tend to absorb, there is some heritability of fertility and fertility preferences, though, heritability of these things is pretty low.

Fertility is much less heritable than most traits that we study heritability of.

Um,

so it tends to come from

idiosyncratic personal positive experiences of family life.

So

you happen to attend a church that has happy families.

And so you go, yeah, okay.

It's like religious people have much higher fertility preferences, but not all religious people, right?

And it's not necessarily the religious people whose parents had high fertility preferences.

So it tends to be what we call horizontal culture rather than vertical culture.

That is, it's culture you absorb horizontally from other people in your society, not vertically from your parents, primarily.

There is some parental influence.

And what is that horizontal culture?

Well, it's going to depend on the society you live in.

Sometimes it's religion.

Sometimes it's

sometimes it's peers.

Some of it's the tool.

I'm with people with big families.

What's that?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah, actually,

there's great studies on this that show that.

There's a study using a huge database of Dutch people.

There's actually a lot of studies involving large databases of Dutch people because I guess Dutch people like large databases, but

that shows that the more of your personal social network that is people with bigger families, the more kids you want to have.

And like causality here is a little tricky.

Like maybe the reason you have those friends is because you wanted that big families.

But the authors try to control for that.

And they argue that it's actually causal, that like social exposure to people with big families makes you want big families.

And they also show on the other side that like the more childless friends you have, the more likely you are to not want to have kids.

So this suggests that there's a real contagion of fertility preferences.

And this also points like the Georgian Orthodox case I give.

Like what really happened here is that like a public figure like started a fertility epidemic, right?

Like he stood up and said like,

you should all do this.

This is a good idea.

And then for whatever reason, some influential social actors were like, yeah, okay.

And then it just like infected everyone.

So

my favorite case of this, actually,

there's a study that

looks at coworkers and particularly like coworkers who sit close to you at work.

And they showed, and the first study to do this showed that like when a coworker who sits close to you at work has a baby, you become more likely to have a baby over the next few years, right?

That there's like contagion via proximate coworkers.

But then somebody said, they're like, wait, maybe that's not really causal because like maybe your seeding chart is not random.

They said, but what is random is the sibling behavior of coworkers.

So they said, what happens to your fertility when your coworker has a sibling who has a baby?

And they showed that like a ripple effect, like when a coworker sibling has a baby, it makes the coworker more likely to have a baby.

And then that eventually makes you more likely to have a baby.

It's like a ripple effect of babies.

So like, this is all a little goofy.

I'm like, I'm not sure how much I believe the exact exact effect estimate there, but I think the model it lays out is plausible, that like fertility behaviors are highly contagious and they operate via social learning, right?

That like a lot of us,

a lot of people,

people think parenting is harder than it is.

It's really genuinely not as hard as people think.

And the way we know this is that the number one thing that makes people most likely to increase their fertility preferences, like if you resurvey people longitudinally across a lot of waves, like what causes people to increase their fertility preferences?

The number one thing is they had, is they had kids.

When people have kids, they tend to want more kids.

They raise their fertility preferences.

And so what that tells us is as you acquire experience of children, you realize this is better than I expected.

Could that not be contributed to by the fact that there's an overhead that you need to pay in order to have one child?

You need to childproof the house.

You need to get a bigger car.

You need to do all of these things.

So kind of like a man who built a factory to make one pair of shoes.

You go, well, you know, I mean, the shoes are nice, but God, I'm kind of in for a penny, in for a pound.

I might as well have it, make a ton more shoes.

Is it possible to sort of bifurcate that?

Yes, it is actually.

So in the U.S., actually, not just the U.S., like every industrialized country that has these big fertility declines recently, the fertility declines are almost entirely among first births.

Conditional on having baby one, your odds of having baby two have only declined a little bit in most countries.

And conditional on having baby two, your odds of having baby three have not declined at all in most countries.

And your odds of having baby four, conditional on having baby three, have actually risen in a lot of countries.

So it is actually the case that, yes, what we see is in for a penny, in for a pound.

People who have any kids at all are still having them like they always did.

We're just seeing that some people are not having kids at all.

And as a result, they never learn that this is actually a pretty good thing.

But then if you imagine the social contagion effect, if none of your friends are having that first baby, you're not learning that actually when people have a baby, they tend to want more kids.

You're not seeing that.

And as a result, you get this contagion

where people are just...

They're not observing something that people used to observe in human life, which is once you have one, you realize, yeah, I could totally have another one.

And then you think, yeah, I could have another one after that.

And then you think, maybe I could have another one.

Then a lot of people feel this way.

Not everyone.

Obviously, there's some people who get two and they're like, oh, I'm done.

Or they get one and they think that that's always been the case.

I'm not, I don't want to say that doesn't happen, but

on average, having more kids causes upwards revision in fertility preferences.

So it's mimetic in both ways.

It's mimetic on the way up and mimetic on the way down, but it's a little bit of an unfair war when

the

social contagion is moving in the downward trajectory because it's very easy to flex the kind of lifestyle that seems aspirational online without kids.

And also all of the costs of having kids are very obvious and all of the benefits of having kids are very hidden.

Yes, the benefits of having kids are literally behind closed doors.

Like

they're the days where,

like,

on this podcast right now, my kids are with my wife out at playgroup.

You don't see them.

But the benefit of kids is times where I'm working on something at home and my 18-month-old just comes and sits in, I've got a little kid chair beside my chair.

You can't see it, but and she just comes and stands there and plays with her Legos on my desk.

And it's just sweet.

And it makes that 30 minutes of my day just more pleasant and happier.

okay but no one sees that because when it's time to record i like shoo away like i'm like go away kids i don't want you on the recording um uh we literally hide the joy of children right

um

so uh

before we were recording on this we were me and you were talking about how we were both tired uh i don't know what your reasons for sleep loss were but mine of course were jet lag because i was just in asia for two and a half weeks um with my kids and with another family with small kids.

We had five kids, five and under,

in Hoi An, Vietnam, and in Hong Kong.

And it was awesome.

Like

it was so much fun.

And yes, I'm going to do a massive flex post here in a few weeks where I do a blog post on how great it was and I show pictures of my kids.

But like

that is not.

That's not typical.

Like usually the travel flex is people being like, oh, here's like gorgeous me with like no children in sight.

But it's so fun to travel with kids.

Like it's exhausting.

Like it's exhausting in very different ways.

But like watching your kids freak out about some piece of cultural difference that you barely noticed is so much fun.

Or like when you're like explaining something to your kids when you're traveling and they and it like clicks with them, it's so cool.

That's a bit of a digression, but yes, it's just easier to flex a childless lifestyle.

Um, also, it's the inertial position, right?

Like, people are born childless,

and so it doesn't take any effort to stay that way.

Yeah, it's like life change through commission or life change through omission, I suppose.

Yeah, the set the set point here.

All right, what about uh male socioeconomic status?

How much is that contributing to this?

Uh, it definitely matters.

Um,

so

male

earnings,

young men's earnings have seen essentially no economic growth in the last 20, 25 years.

Other groups have, young women have to some extent, but particularly older people have.

Now, there's a popular notion that

when men have more income than women, or like when women are more dependent on men for their sustenance, that there will be more marriage and more babies.

This actually turns out not to be true in industrialized societies, that like US states that have a bigger gap between men and women, like if you put together like a like a panel model with fixed effects of states with like gender gap for young men and women versus marriage rate, a bigger gender gap in incomes does not actually predict like a higher rate of entrance into marriage.

What does predict it is when young men have a higher income relative to older men.

Now, this might sound weird.

Why is it that young the older men having really high incomes would be bad for young men's marriage rate?

Immediately, there will be some people saying, Well, it's because older men are poaching all the young women.

No, it's actually not that either.

Even if we restrict to only the incomes of already married older men, why is this?

And the reason is

through all of time,

all of human history,

since we came down from the trees, there is one thing that women have desired above all else, and it is insurance.

They have desired to be insured against income volatility, particularly the income volatility that arises from family.

To be clear, insurance is very different from economic provision.

In most human societies, women produce about half of the economic benefits of their family.

They farm, they gather.

In hunter-gatherer societies, women gather, they produce a lot of the calories of a society.

In agricultural societies, women work on the farm.

So do children.

In early industrial societies, women worked in factories.

Women have always been able to do economic provision.

The problem is their incomes tend to take a hit when they have a baby.

So they need someone who provides insurance.

Well, what kind of insurance are they looking for?

Well, most women's sense of

what they want to be provided for their children is going to be shaped by one thing, and that is what they observe from fathers when they are growing up.

Okay, so the comparison young men are facing is not young men's income versus young women's income.

The comparison young men are facing is their income versus the income of the women, the incomes of the women's they want to marry's fathers.

Okay, so if you want to marry a woman, she's comparing you to her dad.

Okay, and why do we know this?

Because across centuries of data on mating behaviors, we see that there's almost no hypergamy.

That is, women do not marry up if you compare their husbands to their fathers.

Okay.

They marry up if you compare their incomes to their husbands,

but they don't marry up if you compare their husband's income to their father's income.

Women match to husbands that share their father's socioeconomic status.

Okay?

Which means when older men become much wealthier compared to younger men, it sucks to be a young man because all the women are like, you clearly can't provide the things that my dad provided for my family.

It's so, it's like

so incestuously weird to think that your

potentially eligible male suitor is not competing with the other men around you.

It's like you as a guy don't need to be worried about that.

You're competing with her dad in a really weird way.

So, and I should say, it's actually, you're not strictly competing.

You are competing with her dad, but you're competing with her dad and the other dads of women she saw as peers when she was growing up.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

There's something I saw here across the last 300 years of British data.

Men and women very reliably match on male status correlated to women's father status, i.e., a lot of women without college degrees may themselves be poor, but often their families are not.

Exactly.

Exactly.

So that's Greg Clark's study that's a wonderful instantiation of this.

So yeah, you're men, you're not competing with other guys.

You're competing with me.

You're competing with

a confederation of fathers.

And what that means is, as dads, one of the things we can do for future men is not spoil our kids.

Okay.

And I know that sounds weird, but like, really, it's like, if you have a a lot of income, like hide it from your kids.

Like, wait until they're 35 to reveal to them how much money you're doing.

Millions.

There was millions waiting there.

And meanwhile, you had to have bread and cheese again for dinner, little Timmy.

No, like, but I mean, really, like, I think, I think there's like a genuine argument here for like

princess spoiling your daughters really wrecks their future marriage prospects.

Especially, like,

I have a lot of sympathy for this.

Like,

whenever I see someone, like a peer or a near peer who's like living a really opulent life,

it's always like the game of like

real money or debt.

Like, which one is paying for this?

Like, do you have that much income or are you just like upped your eyebrows in credit card debt?

And it's, it's often the latter.

And then I think, but the kids don't know.

The kids don't know.

Like, I have a dear friend, someone I cared about very much, who was always

giving so many gifts to his kids and not just to his kids, to everyone around him.

He was like infamously generous

until he committed suicide because it turned out he had massive gambling.

Highly overleveraged.

Right.

And the problem is after he died,

some of his older kids understood what had happened, but his younger ones didn't.

And so they just were mad at their mom because she's not providing what dad.

Why can't we maintain the lifestyle that we had before?

And the answer is the lifestyle we had before killed your father.

So, I mean, honestly, I think there's actually an argument that like don't spoil your kids is actually a really important part of like society maintaining healthy fertility rates.

I look forward to you proposing that to parents

and seeing that.

And I say this having just taken my kids on a two and a half week vacation in Asia where I absolutely spoiled them.

So, you know, chief of sinners, yeah, I am.

Is one of them a girl?

They are all girls.

Wow.

You have cursed them.

I have wrecked their marriage.

Good luck to their future.

In fairness, I brought two eligible marriage prospects on the trip as well.

The other family has boys.

So, you know, we're

arranged.

Very arranged.

I saw that.

Have you seen this experimental evidence on the acceptance of males falling behind this new paper?

No.

Allow me to educate.

This is the one part where I get to tell you something that you didn't already know.

In other news, you might have heard me say that hold luggage is a psyop meant to keep you poor and late.

And while that's true, it turns out that when a brand puts hundreds of hours into design, organization, and durability, suddenly checking a bag doesn't feel quite so much like a trap.

It actually feels like an upgrade, which is what Nomatic's done with their new method check-in luggage.

It's been designed from the wheels up to be lighter, stronger, and hold more.

It's got best-in-class materials, 360 degree silent glide wheels, patent pending micro welding technology and integrated TSA locks.

Basically, you can pack for between one and two weeks of clothes.

It's got a full perimeter expansion for even more space and it's lighter, so no more panic attacks every time that you wear your bag.

And their new carry-on can hold up to 20% more than other carry-ons, which means you can fit nearly a week's worth of clothing without checking a bag.

And they'll last you a lifetime with a lifetime guarantee.

Plus, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee so you can buy your new luggage try it out for a month if you don't like it they'll give you your money back right now you can get a 20 discount see everything i use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com slash modern wisdom that's nomatic.com slash modern wisdom when men fall behind people shrug a fascinating new paper reveals a sobering truth people are more accepting of men falling behind in the labor market than women adding insult to injury injury to insult they're also less supportive of government interventions to help men catch up.

Why?

A big part of it is that people commonly assume that males' failure is self-inflicted, that it's due to a lack of effort rather than buy us a bad luck.

As a result, people see men as less deserving of help.

This isn't just unfair.

It's short-sighted.

Men who fall behind often stay behind, and society as a whole bears the cost.

But that was a pretty huge new paper that Steve Stewart Williams talked about.

Yeah, no, I totally buy that.

I mean, you see this routinely, that there is generally,

I mean, our whole welfare system was designed around the idea that single moms need extra help okay but other but like poor dads don't um or in general it there aren't that many like single poor dads but um our whole welfare system is designed on this kind of assumption um

it's designed specifically to meet the needs of basically single moms um which is

maybe not an ideal way to design a welfare system for for various reasons.

Partly because it may encourage the creation of more single moms.

Oh, there's less obligation from the guy.

Oh, she knows she's got a benefit check, so I can just,

I'll flee.

She can look after herself.

Yeah, yeah.

But

yeah, I mean, I totally buy that.

That yes, there is a tendency to just blame men for their own failings.

Whereas with women,

maybe less so.

I would also say one of the other things I think going on is that there are just more socially acceptable pathways for women to exit the labor market, right?

If a man stays home and says, Well,

I'm just gonna, you know, I'm gonna focus on like, I'm gonna read, I'm gonna cook, I'm gonna clean, I'm gonna learn all these useful domestic skills so that someday when I marry someone, I can be a really useful house husband.

Nobody's like, okay,

cool.

But if like a woman says that, like, there's guys lining up at her door, right?

Allow me, allow me to service you, right?

So there are like, there are like these acceptable pathways out of employment for women that just like aren't there for men.

Likewise, like if a woman has a baby and she says, well, I'm going to take a year off to like raise my kid.

People are like, oh, that's great.

But if a guy's like, oh, he had a baby, I'm going to take a year off.

People are like, dude, your child must be fed and clothed.

Go to work.

Yeah.

Can you dig into the men as providers versus men as insurers thing a little bit more?

I've never heard of this

in the past.

So, okay.

We have a norm that really emerged in the 20th century that women don't contribute to household subsistence.

Okay, this didn't happen in the past because it would never have worked, right?

Like for humans to survive, everybody needed to be working on the farm.

Okay.

Now, you did have separation of tasks.

Okay.

Men maybe did the plowing.

Women raised the chickens.

Women raised the cow or did the dairying.

Okay.

There's a division of labor.

But I mean, look, go read Little House on the Prairie.

Okay.

Ma

is working all the time.

Okay.

She's not just keeping house.

Ma is out there making things of economic value that then Pa goes into town and sells.

Okay.

And while those books are, you know, fictionalized, they are accurate in representing that particular facet of subsistence, which is that women provided a very large share of the labor that gave households their subsistence and income throughout all historic human societies.

It's only in the 20th century, to some extent the 19th, but especially the 20th century, that societies routinely became productive and wealthy enough that women could actually

not contribute to subsistence and income.

That men's productivity got so high that it became possible to say, actually, women can stay home and have a book club.

Well, they could stay home previously, but home was not a place bereft of doing sea.

In an agricultural society, everyone stays home.

Like,

the dad is staying home because home is just the field in front of your house that feeds you or you die.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, like, the whole staying at home distinction is invented in like 1750.

Okay.

So you get like the sphere of domesticity is invented, basically.

I mean, look, you can go in the Bible in the book of Proverbs, the Proverbs 31 woman, she

grows crops.

She weaves fabric.

She sells goods in the marketplace.

She does all of the economic production of the house.

The man sits in the gate, which is code for politics and war.

Okay.

Can I just, I need, I need to just interject.

I've got an idea that I'm going to be terrified.

I'm going to lose.

Providers, insurers, we're going to go from the woman from the Bible.

Is it right for me to say then that what we're talking about as a novel

new

position for women in society when we take a broader perspective than simply the last 300 years is not one of them working, not one of them providing and contributing in this way, but one that is done in a much more statusful way.

It seems to me that the difference we have in the modern female work to the,

I guess, historical and then ancestral female work is that this is done in a much more male style,

which is

power, status,

individuality,

autonomy.

Is that a key distinction, or am I talking shit here?

No, you're absolutely right.

So, so actually, Proverbs 31 is actually a great case to exemplify this.

So, the woman does all the subsistence.

The man sits in the gate, which is a cultural reference for politics and war.

Okay.

So, what is politics and war in a Bronze Age society or an Iron Age society?

Well,

it's not your daily provision.

Like a warrior does not provide you your daily food.

What is he?

He's insurance against the other warriors.

Okay?

He's, if you say, what is the big big risk in my society?

Well, it's that the Midianites come and kidnap me and my children and sell us into slavery.

That's the big risk.

So I want to insure against that.

Okay.

I need a man for that.

Look, I can weave my own fabric and grow my own

barley and make my own barley beer.

But I,

mother of children, cannot march off on campaign against the Philistines.

Okay.

So a man insures against that.

Or if you think about agricultural, like a state-based agricultural society where like imminent raiding and pillaging is not an immediate threat,

still

women do a lot of the subsistence work,

but they do different kinds than the men.

They do things that are more compatible with having children around.

Actually, often they do more valuable.

That is, often they're doing work that's actually more cash-based, that is more saleable.

Whereas often the men are doing the like the staple crops that are basically muscle power intensive.

But when we think about insurance, what's going on here is women can provide for their own needs, their own daily needs.

Most humans can, and this has been true in all societies.

But what happens, though, is suddenly you get pregnant and your ability to work declines.

And then you have a baby and your ability to work declined and you have more needs.

Eventually, the baby grows up and the baby contributes to work around age, somewhere between age six and 14, depending on the setting, the kid basically becomes economically self-sufficient.

Okay.

So you really only have about, you know, six to 10 years

for that kid where you, you need coverage.

So you need like a temporary like unemployment insurance program, basically.

And what's that program called?

It's called husband.

You can do without husband if you don't have kids.

But if you have kids, holy cow, you need husband.

He is an insurance product.

He's not a, oh,

wifey needs hubby because otherwise she can't survive without him.

No.

Wifey needs hubby because those kids that hubby put in her have wrecked her prior subsistence strategy.

So he's better insurer for the damage he did.

Because that suggests that in the modern world, if women have got a lot of savings,

that they are much more prepared to be a solo mother.

Yeah, and so most solo mothers by choice do tend to to be higher income um

uh you talk to high income unmarried women and they do talk about oh i have to save up all this money before i have a kid because so it can have all these effects um they're not entirely

yeah yeah um they're self-insuring yeah um but self-insuring is really hard it's really expensive um it's really nice to have somebody else with uncorrelated income um and men's income is uncorrelated with women's fertility choices we know this from all the motherhood penalty literature that when women have a baby their income crashes, but their spouses doesn't.

So like the judgment that you want someone with uncorrelated income, that a husband tends to be uncorrelated is true.

Yeah.

Why is it that women keep selecting for men who are high earners, even if those women are out earning men on average?

So basically, so what do you, so,

okay, so I recently bought disability insurance for myself.

Okay, so like if I get disabled, it'll cover, I don't know, something.

And it, it's calculated as, as a percentage of my income.

Why is that?

Well, because when I was talking to my financial advisor, she was like, well, you have to think about maintaining your standard of living if you become disabled.

So why do women want spouses whose income is in some way comparable to their expectations?

And those expectations, as we discussed, are largely based on the standard of living that they would expect that their father provided for them.

For the same reason that your disability insurance is, or your life insurance, is calibrated based on your income, because you want to maintain a standard of living during the period in which you expect to be drawing on your insurance plan.

People understand that habituation and hedonic adaptation are a hell of a drug, and people don't like to go backward.

Exactly.

People intuitively understand that you do not want to go backwards.

I mean, that's the same with

your

current girlfriend's father's net worth versus your own thing.

And how much do you think, just to loop back to that, how much do you think that is contributing to

the sort of resentful bitter energy of intergenerational competition theory that

dude my favorite my absolute favorite answer when i'm like a third of a way through a half-baked theory and you're like

yes that's that that is it is that do we so two questions on that um is that both true for uh why is that true and is that true for both men and for women?

Is there this sense in women where they go, these male suitors aren't doing as well as my dad, which makes for a pool of ineligible partners?

I think so.

Yeah.

I mean, you can see lots.

You can, it is easy to find women complaining about the lack of eligible partners online.

And if you,

so I've done some structured interviews on this as part of a project.

And

when you lean on this argument a little bit, you end up finding that what these women tend to be saying is a lot of it is about socialization.

That is, they'll say, I mean, look, there's guys out there, but they're weird.

So, like, that's a big part of it.

And that's not really about income.

That's we can talk about

that's yeah, that's a separate dynamic.

Okay, but when the income stuff comes up, usually what they'll say is, look, you know, he doesn't have to earn more than me, he just has to have a stable job that like he's proud of.

Um, and then you say, Okay,

really,

and then they're like, Well, like,

so I did a couple of these structured interviews, and like multiple women unpromptedly were like, Well, look, my dad wasn't rich, but he did this job, and I'm like, Boom, we're at the daddy comparison.

We got that.

Um, like, intuitively, if you just push people on this, like, and you don't even have to start to compare to fathers, yeah, and I think that's super normal, yeah.

Like, that's who is the most, who is the most formative male partner role model that you need to do.

That's most common people will appeal to is like a friend's husband.

Okay.

It's like a friend who got married and has a husband.

They'll say, well, like my friend's husband, like he, you know, she earns more than him, but like he has a good job.

And then you're like,

is his income similar to what her father's income was?

And you're like,

I guess, yeah, it is kind of similar.

So for my wife and I, I'll just do full disclosure.

Her mom is a nurse and her dad is a pastor.

And my dad is a pastor and her mom is a nurse.

I earn way more money than my, well, my wife earns zero money now.

But

my earning potential was clearly higher than hers early on.

And so if you just looked at our individual stuff, it looked like hypergamy.

She married up.

But if you look at our parents' occupations, it's like this was literally a perfect 100% within-class marriage.

Yeah, the regression to the mean keeps on regressing.

Dig into that

social ineptitudes among

young men.

That's the most polite way that I can put it.

Yeah.

So, for what it's worth, I don't think it's just young men.

I think there's a lot of socially incompetent young women as well.

But they code very differently.

Socially incompetent young men code as like creepy, weird, and autistic.

Socially incompetent young women code as like

angry, depressed, and anxious.

Okay.

So they're different kinds of things.

But basically, what I think is going on,

and I think actually a scholar named Alice Evans has written a lot on this and very,

very capably and lucidly.

And not from like a,

you know, frothing at the mouth right-wing perspective.

She's, she's, I think quite quite liberal personally but she nonetheless will seize the same thing which is where young men and women are just inhabiting totally different social spheres they don't live in the same world online or in person they learn different ways of interacting different cues about what's normal my favorite example of this there was a survey in Korea where like something like 70% of young women reported that they'd been like sexually assaulted.

And then they asked them like, what is a sexual assault?

And like, like, 5% of men reported they'd been sexually assaulted.

And like, only like 8% of men admitted to ever having sexually assaulted anyone.

So they're like, how do these numbers stack up?

And then they asked everyone, like, what counts as a sexual assault?

And like, women's list of what counted as a sexual assault was just like pages of things.

And men were like,

well,

he didn't ejaculate in her.

So was it really sexual assault?

Like, Jesus Christ.

They just had like totally different definitions right so both both groups are absolutely insane yeah they they they like clearly both had some like there were clearly a bunch of psychotic people in both groups um but to say that there were bad things happening on both sides and people being truthful on both sides yes yeah yeah and also a ton of concept creep as well yes yes absolutely yeah yeah you know like clearly bad things happening um but like the the striking thing to me was just the extent to which the two sexes just had zero mutual understanding of what is sex massive failure of cross-sex mind rate.

And you see this, I mean, Korea is an extreme case, okay?

I'm not everyone's like Korea, but you see versions of this everywhere.

Can you explain what, like, what the fuck happened in Korea culturally?

Uh,

I don't have a complete answer to that, but I can do some educated speculation.

So,

um,

Korea is not alone, we see similar dynamics in Taiwan,

Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Japan.

These countries have some things in common culturally.

And so there's a temptation to say it's something about like the historic legacy of Sinitic cultural norms or something.

I don't think it's that.

I think it's the specific development model that they adopted the mid-20th century.

So all of these countries adopted versions of export-led growth and basically the idea that they would massively suppress consumption, labor activism,

everything to maximize savings, investment, exports, and growth.

Okay.

So the result is

you have these societies that just had incredibly low fertility rates

early on.

I mean, Japan's fertility rate gets low quite early.

There are societies that really aggressively told people, you should not have a family.

You should work harder.

You should grind harder instead of having kids.

Which is civilizationally suicidal advice.

What you wish for.

Yeah, yeah.

So they gave this advice and they implemented this advice successfully and they grew really fast.

These are also societies that their strategy for growth was not just grind harder in the factory, it was grind harder at school.

And grind harder at school is an interesting dynamic because women,

women do really well in school.

School is a female favorable environment for a variety of reasons.

And it has become more so over time.

And yet these are societies that women had curtailed work opportunities.

So they did great in school and then they didn't get a great job because

sexist boys' club or because it was hard to make work compatible with family or any number of things.

Women did great at school and then didn't get great jobs.

So

this creates a situation where a lot of women feel aggrieved about their circumstances, legitimately in many cases,

Which creates a uniquely extreme culture among young women.

And I do want to emphasize, I said before there's something going on on both sides, but

if you compare like Korean young men's social values on like the world values surveys to other countries with similar incomes, their young men are not unusual.

Like young Korean men are weird, toxic, horrendous.

Yeah, they're not super, like their views of like gender and and sex and marriage are like not that atypical for other societies with their income levels.

But Korean women, young Korean women have extremely atypical gender attitudes for a country of their income level.

Well, I

they're extremely progressive, basically.

Um,

on a number of like battery standard survey battery questions about like women in the workforce, mothers staying home with children,

the place of marriage and children in a happy life, questions like this.

Young Korean, and to a lesser extent, Taiwanese, Japanese, young people are just, the young women are just unusually progressive for societies with their other characteristics.

The young men are kind of normal.

So to me, that says that something did happen among women particularly.

And I think it's a combination of women succeeding in school then being locked out of the workplace by asian work norms i think also um

uh

kpop

um

k-pop was a state-sponsored initiative um by the korean government in the 1990s to create a services export to match their goods exports.

They were very successful.

They created a whole new cultural

world.

And the distinctives of K-pop are,

and now of C-pop or J-pop or any of the Asian pop cultures now, are single-sex bands

that are young, heavily plastic surgeried, and contractually celibate.

That is literally, they sign, like when they, when they apply to the record programs, they agree to like live in dorms, not have relationships, not have children for the duration of their contract.

And then once they want to have a family, they have to stop performing.

So they systematically created a culture of childless celebrities and role models.

Wow.

So I really recommend there's a documentary about the band Blackpink.

It's an interesting documentary to watch if you're interested in the social phenomenon of K-pop.

I am.

Where can people watch it?

Is it on YouTube?

It's on Netflix, I think, or at least it used to be on Netflix.

The last scene, you're going to watch the whole thing, and you'll be like, why is Lyman recommending that this is weird?

Unless you're just like really into teen girl culture.

The last scene will clarify for you why I recommended it.

But, but beyond that, I mean, okay, so I was in Vietnam two weeks ago, and we went to a place called the Bana Hills.

Okay,

it is, it's a hill,

it's a big mountain above Hui An above Danan, Vietnam.

And

I've done a couple of these, like cable car top of the mountain hill stations in Southeast Asia before.

And the other ones I've been to, you go to the top and it's a scenic view.

You know, you see the clouds and the mountains and the hills, and it's beautiful.

Maybe there's a Buddhist temple.

Okay,

I did not realize what Bana Hills was.

They have built a fake French, German, Bavarian village on top.

There's a a fake castle.

It's crazy, okay?

There's nothing to do.

You just take Instagram pictures and it's filled with cute.

It's filled with cute, like the little cats and the little dogs and the too cute stuff that's like so Asian.

And I think the whole cute culture is like part of what's going on in Asia is like

their childhood was so ruined by their educational culture that they have to stay children children until they're 40.

I'm just now like saying that

we're already in trouble.

But like, talk to young Asian people about how much, how their school culture was when they were growing up.

It's not fun.

That's fascinating.

And so, the

only thing that I still don't fully understand, I mean, I don't understand a lot of it, but the thing that I mostly don't understand is where this intense liberalization of women in Korea came from.

Is that simply a reaction to this imbalance between performance in school and opportunity in the workforce?

Or is there something else going on?

Yeah, so I think the genesis of it is basically

Asian women leapt ahead in school and then ran into a brick wall in the workplace.

which created a culture of

legitimate frustration.

Think about how fucking resentful you'd be.

I would be, holy fuck.

So, you're telling me for all of this time, I've been in this weird, you know, insular in some places, honor culture thing.

Does this sort of, it's, it's, it's very patriarchal.

It's sort of steeped in history.

It's got a long heritage.

Fuck me.

If you're in Japan, it's, you know, the country was completely isolated for the like four centuries or something.

And you're telling me that now, oh, hooray, I finally got access.

I can go and perform in education in the way that I want.

And I reach adulthood and nothing's changed.

Yeah.

So like, it's, there's a legitimate frustration there.

And then I think that the emerging cultural norms around like the k-popification of Asian youth,

on the other hand, for young men, you get a different dynamic around like anime and porn and stuff like that.

But I think that it basically creates.

Like K-pop stars, they're not just K-pop stars.

They're lifestyle influencers.

They're, you know, sharing things about their vacations and all this stuff.

Sure.

And And they are childless.

Surely that creates a vector, though,

of opportunity in the same way that the Georgian priest did.

Because if you're concerned about population decline in Korea, all that you need to do is make all the new K-pop stars have come out on stage full of children.

Someone's been reading my advice to the Korean government.

No, we just have the same level of autism.

That's it.

There you go.

So, no, so yeah.

So, like, if, like, if I was, you know, in charge of Korea, for example,

whoever

or Japan or whatever, like, here's, here's what I would do.

I would first say, first, the standardized testing that like governs your whole young life.

Firstborn children get automatically docked like 5% of their grade.

Just firstborn children are penalized.

Secondborn children, the penalty is a little bit smaller.

Thirdborn children, no penalty.

Fourthborn and up, you get bonuses.

Okay.

So you just punish people for having small family.

You just basically you just say, look, does that not incentivize

or that would cause a situation in which stupid but seventh children of a family get better jobs?

Does that not create an issue in the economy?

You know, maybe, but I'm confident enough that, like,

look, like, I have utmost confidence in the ability of the Asian education system to turn people into functional workers.

And there's not that many seventh-born children.

So this is not going to be a big problem.

And you could still set like a minimum standard.

Like you could be like, yeah, you can't get into top university.

But like, yeah, so one is, yeah, I think that you should basically just,

you know, just

penalize your bonus test scores based on parity.

Or you could just say like no firstborn children are allowed in the top university.

So you could do categorical qualifications instead.

And then secondly,

just make it illegal to perform publicly in Korea if you don't have a child.

Perform music publicly.

So, boom.

All K-pop stars will have children in nine months.

You've done very well in creating the North in the South overnight.

The dictatorial accusation.

So, I mean, look, would this work?

Like,

no, because there'd be massive backlash.

But no,

that's a difference.

Would it work?

Maybe.

Would it be exceptionally

I would be king for precisely one day.

Until everyone read your fucking policies.

So like there's this wouldn't work for a variety of reasons.

But I think

the question, once you start thinking about why it wouldn't work, you immediately realize that it's correctly identifying the problem, right?

High status, social role models.

It's the status system.

It's yeah.

The fact that it probably actually would topple a Korean government if they messed with K-pop is all you need to know about what's really really going on.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, look, it seems to me to be a vector for

influence.

And, you know, that can go in directions that at the time seem great and, in retrospect, seem maybe not so great.

A less authoritarian way of doing this is to hear that one, though.

The Korean

Ministry of Culture or whatever it's called actually does have

stakeholder quasi-owner status in some of the K-pop industry.

And they could

just use that status to nudge the companies they are involved with to systematically

promote

K-pop stars with families.

Going back to the West for a second, what is the truth in the double shift for women, but not for men?

Women do not have a double shift on average.

Statistically speaking, men and women report virtually, married moms and dads.

That's the group we're talking about here.

Married moms and dads report virtually identical combined hours of

household and non-household work.

Women report slightly more daily hours or daily minutes of leisure and sleep.

But it's like, I think it's like seven minutes more or something.

It's like trivial margin of error stuff.

Married moms and dads have virtually identical overall workloads.

There's not a difference in leisure of any note between the two.

I read that Robert Verbruggen

article on IFS, The Myth of the Lazy Father.

Yeah, yeah, what does he say?

It's probably something similar.

Yeah, it shows that contrary to widespread belief, when you consider both paid and unpaid labor, fathers and mothers do similar amounts of work.

In fact, on average, fathers do slightly more.

The myth of the lazy father persists in part because when evaluating gender fairness among parents, we tend to focus on household chords while ignoring paid employment.

Nagai cites Steve Stewart Williams again saying, as Steve noted in The Ape That Understood the Universe, it is more common, not just among humans, but in nature writ large, for females to be the sex that invests more in children.

We shouldn't find it surprising or offensive if women indicate a greater desire to spend time with their children, even if it costs them at work, and they do.

Yeah,

yeah.

So, I mean, there isn't a second shift on average.

Now, I will say

averages always disguise important variation.

For women who are working full-time,

there is a second shift because women who are working full-time don't necessarily tend to

have a commensurate reduction in their family responsibilities.

On the other hand, for women who are not working at all, their husbands tend to have

excessively high

combined work.

So what's going on is that

the distributions are wonkier than the averages would make us think.

So there are a lot of women who are working full-time and then coming home and still having to do a lot of domestic stuff because their husband is not compensating in the way that they might have wished.

And so they are facing a second shift.

And those women,

you know, may have a legitimate gripe.

But they are offset by other women who are not working full-time and also whose housework is

not even approximately close to their husband's combined paid and unpaid work.

Yeah, it's a strange one with that.

I guess sort of the visibility and the

stereotypical mundanity of household chores.

You know, the guy that stays an extra hour at work versus the woman who has to cook a meal.

Like, it just, it feels like, it feels worse.

It's like, well, there's, you know, in the same way as

pickup artists back in the day used to take girls to three different locations on one first date, because the way that the human brain perceives time and locations, it feels like more is going, oh, I'm more familiar with this person.

I've been to three.

Hey, I went to the park and I went to the ice cream shop and we went to the swimming pool together or whatever.

And I get the sense that

the type of chores, the type of household work that you do,

the parity between those two doesn't feel quite fair.

And if you were to say across a day,

10 hours was, let's say, 10 hours was spent, one of those things was done in one, and one of those things was seven and three.

The seven and three feels like more work in a way.

So the other thing going on is that there's very different, very big differences in the satisfaction that the sexes derive from different activities.

So

jobs that are more female-dominated tend to be jobs that are more personally satisfying.

That is, they tend to be jobs that people are more likely to report being satisfied and happy while they do the job.

Whereas jobs men do are more likely to be somewhat miserable.

Again, we're talking averages.

I know I'm going to get crap about this at some point.

Somebody being like, you didn't think about this thing.

We're talking averages, okay.

And this is data from the American Time Use survey that shows this.

So when women visualize,

you know, work, they're visualizing a bit of work that's relatively satisfying and pleasant.

So you can have a situation where the woman at home

is doing a chore that maybe is not super satisfying or pleasant, though I'll come to that in a moment.

and she visualizes the work that her husband is doing as being very satisfying and pleasant when the actual work he's doing is perhaps relatively unpleasant.

Um, you know, he's up on a roof installing yet another solar panel, hoping he doesn't fall off.

Um,

uh,

so um,

uh, you do get a dynamic like that.

Then, secondly, um,

in general, female-biased activities are activities where people tend to report higher life satisfaction while they're doing them.

It's not just paid work.

So like

activities that involve care of children, people tend to report very high life satisfaction while doing those activities.

They tend to report that those activities give them a lot of joy.

Even if it's changing diapers, yes.

So

now.

That's wild.

That's activity specific.

On the whole, when people reflect on their life, you do get a lot of women women who say, what did I do with the last 10 years?

I just changed diapers and did these things.

And I think that's probably because our society culturally does a bad job of providing narratives that create sort of long-run macro meaning in parenting.

And I think this is actually an interesting tie back to the Georgian case, because I think part of what happened in Georgia is that

They were able to give people a sense of long-run meaning in having children, that that child is part of a bigger project than just the satisfaction you get from being with your kid and getting some snuggles.

So I think what happens with a lot of stay-at-home moms, or not even stay-at-home moms, but moms doing domestic things is

in any given moment, they'll talk about how satisfying the work is, how much they enjoy it, how much they like it.

But then they also feel like

they don't really have access to like a story of meaning about how this is like a long-term project that progresses and really built something.

They're not building in the way that their husband is building a career because we don't really have a narrative in our society about that.

We don't do a good job of communicating, like, well,

you are building something.

You're building a family.

Like,

in a very real sense, you're building a civilization.

Like, you are, in some sense, like the culture creator for these children.

And civilization is just the culture that's built for each generation.

Like, you are engaged in the central civilizational task.

Your husband is just paying for it.

But that's not how we think about it because most of us today conceive the central civilizational task as market remunerated work, right?

It's that.

I have a theory around this.

Two working titles for it.

You can help meme if I with me if you want.

So I'm playing off the Matilda effect, but I'm calling it the reverse Matilda effect or second option, the soft bigotry of male expectations.

That basically, if a woman can do it, it's seen as less important.

And this was brought about, and it's fucking true, dude.

It's true.

You know how it was so fucking true, the most true that it's ever been, was that study that said, yes, women did as much big game hunting as men, and maybe even more.

You know, there was that big study that came out, and this group of very ideologically motivated researchers had said, yes,

women did precisely the same amount.

And in some situations, you can see that they even did more.

And big game hunting's calorie negative in any case, so it kind of doesn't matter.

And it's like, yeah, because you finagled the data so hard to make it like

one

incident of big game hunting was matched with like one a week from female to male.

And you have to ask yourself the question, and this was what brought it about.

And it's one of those like weird self-owns from people that are trying to be really manipulative with what they're doing.

And you go, what were you trying to say?

What you were trying to say is that inherent in what women women did, what they actually did, or at least what we can infer that they did from hunter-gatherer societies that we can observe and stuff like that, was somehow less valuable.

And because of that, we need to fucking retroactively change the narrative in order for what women did to be what men did.

And that's like,

if I'm a woman and my ancestors.

It's insulting.

It's fucking patronizing.

It is so fucking patronizing.

It's the exact same.

It's the exact same.

Andrew Schultz told me this, and

it's like a

formative memory that I've got about what modern women have to deal with.

So

his wife apparently is way smarter than him and used to work at Google and was like, you know, super high achiever type person, but wanted to have a family.

And Andrew's real successful.

And she has the benefit of now being a stay-at-home mom.

And he would be out with her at the supermarket.

And they'd both run into people that she used to work with at Google.

And they would say, oh, it's so nice to see you.

What are you doing now?

And her reply would be, I'm just a mum.

And Andrew said, it was the word just

that really killed him.

That there's this inherent sense of insufficiency that women have,

especially if you're talking to a still currently employed, maybe mother, maybe non-mother, that's at fucking Google, that you almost need to apologize.

It's like, oh, I got conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic servant.

And yeah, you know, I just put my sungress on and I'm in, you know, this weird sort of like servile role that I've got.

And you need to, and he said, yeah, it was the just that killed me.

Yeah, it's awful.

No, I mean, that's like,

and on the other hand, if you say something like, oh, I'm raising my children, people are like, are you saying I'm not because I'm working?

Like,

this is like the soft bigotry of career expectations.

Right?

Right.

If you say what you're actually doing, like, I'm, I'm hands-on raising my kids, people feel insulted by saying that, by you saying that, because they're like, what are you saying about how I'm raising my kids?

Or if you were to say something like, you know, I'm ensuring the continuity of civilization

for a thousand years,

people are like, a little bit grandiose, don't you think?

And I'm like, but that's what you're like, when my wife's talking, when my wife and I talk about this, I'm like, that's literally what,

like,

I'm working out here.

where i'm working i'm i'm you know i'm doing spreadsheets and emails um

because that brings in money that we can spend on

a multi-year political and religious project

that that our people have been doing for a very long time oh look i mean

and my wife is even implementing that project

one of my least one of my least favorite dynamics and this is something that i noticed when i first stopped drinking about nine nine years ago or so I'm aware that now low and no lifestyles,

the fucking like health and fitness du jour, right?

It's like so common.

Everybody's on low and no when it comes to alcohol consumption.

But about a decade ago in the northeast of the UK, this is fucking revolutionary, right?

I'd invented the steam engine.

I should tell you, one of my ancestors.

Lyman Beecher, literally invented the word teetotaling.

What?

Where did that come from?

Because

when they would have their big religious revivals, he would go in around and ask everyone how committed they were to getting rid of alcohol.

Were they going to get rid of all alcohol, just some alcohol?

And if they were going to totally remove alcohol, he would mark their name with a T, T for total.

What?

That is

so my family have been teetotalers ever since I remain, but I married into Lutheranism.

So I'm now the designated driver for my church.

Heathens.

Heathens everywhere.

But yeah.

Sorry, that's a digression.

That was a fucking sick story, dude.

Yeah,

I go sober and I'm in nightlife still.

I'm running all of these nightclubs.

I'm up till three, four in the morning in different cities across the north of the UK.

And

people got pissed.

Like people got people, other people

were made to feel uncomfortable by my lifestyle choice.

And I think that it's maybe not too dissimilar when you

uh

lean into the level of attention that you are giving to raising your kids inherent in me stopping drinking is the value judgment of not drinking is something i want to do Presumably, it's something I want to do because I think it's something that's good to do, which infers that the opposite of this is something which I would prefer not to do, which infers that that's bad, which means that if you're doing it, you are bad, which is your sense of self, which go fuck yourself.

Right.

And this weird roller coaster, quadruple-loop, roller coaster, mental cascade dance thing that people go through

just

straight away, you know, from I'm doing this thing and take pride in it to that means I think it's good.

That means that not doing the thing is bad.

That means that if I do it, it's not bad.

That means that it's a slight against me.

It's like, it's a type of mental gymnastics that would win gold.

But why is it like that?

Okay.

So this is the interesting question.

Because you're totally right.

That's 100% what's going on.

Anytime you say, I'm making choice X for me, people are immediately like, why are you judging my lifestyle?

So, um, now in my case, it's fair because I'm also a judgment, a very judgmental person.

So like, they're not wrong about me, but, but I'm sure you're less judgmental than me.

But, um, uh,

so, um, but the interesting thing is Why are people like this?

And I think the reason actually gets back to some of the like fertility as a social contagion thing we were talking about earlier, which is

like, if you think of humans in the ancestral environment, like small, mid-sized hunter-gatherer groups, like conformity is actually really important.

Like these are actually in many on many dynamics, not everything, these are very conformist environments.

Same with like agricultural societies where you're living with the same people for many generations.

Conformity is really important.

And when somebody else just starts doing something differently,

like

it can be problematic for the the group dynamic, right?

Like, if you're all going to hunt mammoths one way, and then Joe's like, meh, I'm going to do it this way.

Like, it takes a team to bring down a mammoth.

Joe can't just do his own mammoth hunting thing.

Likewise, for foraging.

Like, if you all know that there's 13 edible crops in the area and Sarah's like, I'm just going to throw this in the mix of berries that we've collected today, maybe everyone dies.

Thanks, Sarah.

So, you know, conformity, humans are conformists.

We want to be conformists.

It's soothing to conform.

It's pleasant.

We seek it out.

Now, there's also cases in which we seek out individuation for certain fitness-related reasons, but at a basic level,

for most of our decisions, most of us really want to just follow the craft.

Outsource to the wisdom of the truth.

Yeah.

And that's good.

I want to be clear.

I'm not saying that that's like a flaw.

It's actually like a great hack that we do this so naturally that we mostly for like a lot of kind of low attention decisions we just outsource um

but it also means that we do we our brains are hardwired to devote like excess attention to people who act differently um

we're interested in them we're fascinated by them we make netflix shows about them our literature is about them

um

uh but we're also often horrified and offended by them um

and so this speaks to the fertility contagion issue because it means like

as soon as what's normal switches for whatever reason, and I could go through a laundry list of historic cases where we've seen just a switch in the normal on family life.

And not just family size, like incest, who you can marry, polygamy, like all these different norms where you can see places where just it flips.

And what's normal changes and humans just boop, everybody changes.

And fertility is like that um where

you can get quite rapid changes because what's normal changes and cultural norms can pivot on a dime cultural norms seem like they last forever until they suddenly change

dude you're so awesome you're fucking fantastic at this I think you're a phenomenal communicator I'm sure that lots and lots of people are angry about lots and lots of things that we've said and uh my inherent

desire to not be misconstrued always runs up against talking about this topic, which I'm fascinated in.

But I'm sure you'll have given me great fodder to journal about at some point when the reactions come.

But you're just really, really great.

I love how you really do approach this like a demographer,

sterile and inhospitable.

It's a real compliment.

I can't wait to talk to you again.

I've got so much more I want to talk to you about.

But for now, let's bring this one into land.

Where should people go?

They want to check out your stuff.

Institute for Family Studies Pronatalism Initiative is the place to go, or you can find me on Twitter at Lymanstone KY.

I should clarify, that's KY for Kentucky.

It's not that I have an Eastern European last name.

Oh, KYG.

Yeah, but

yeah, no, I mean, it's great being on here, and I hope this is helpful for people.

I hope what people took from this is that

cultural influence matters.

And if your sibling has a baby, you can make your coworkers have babies too.

Wow.

What a, whatever the opposite of a tragedy the commons is,

dude.

I appreciate you.

Thank you.

My pleasure.