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--:-- Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Today, we're talking about the pro-natalism movement, which argues that people need to have more babies. Some want to prevent economic implosion, others want to protect traditional family values. And some of the loudest voices in the movement are now in the White House.
--:-- Noelle King: Birth rates around the world are declining. Women are having fewer children. The question of why this is is hotly debated. And on Today Explained, we're going to talk to an expert who says she has an answer.
--:-- Noelle King: You have the option of going out with your friends, getting dressed, coordinating. Or you can just relax, chill out on the sofa and watch a film or play a video game. And maybe that's a bit easier, a bit more relaxing when you've had a hard day.
--:-- Noelle King: But the movement to get us to have more children, publicly led by people like Vice President J.D. Vance and Vice President Elon Musk, is also controversial because it is led by Elon Musk, who has as many as 14 children by four different mothers, and by J.D. Vance, who has suggested that non-parents should get fewer votes than parents.
--:-- Noelle King: What should we make of the pro-natalist movement that's coming up? Support for Today Explained comes from BetterHelp. Let me tell you a true story. Last weekend, I got an email from a listener who wanted to discuss their problems with me. And I said, look, I don't think that this is about me personally. At least I hope it's not. Why don't you try BetterHelp.com slash Explained?
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--:-- Noelle King: So let me say very simply, I want more babies in the United States of America. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King with Vox's Rachel Cohen, who covers, among other things, family policy.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: OK, everybody has been talking about who's having babies. For my money, it's given none of your business. But you've actually been covering this as a news story.
--:-- Noelle King: So there's a few reasons we're hearing about it more lately. One is that birth rates are falling pretty much everywhere, including in some of the countries we used to associate with really high birth rates, like India, Brazil or Mexico, and yes, the United States.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: It's happening worldwide at such a fast rate that last year, the UN announced the number of people on Earth will probably peak in the next 75 years, which is a pretty big change from even what they were projecting a decade ago, when experts thought the population peak was still well over a century away.
--:-- Noelle King: And the other main reason people are talking about it, in the U.S. at least, is that you have people like Elon Musk and J.D. Vance. They're speaking out about it a lot lately.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Musk calls falling birth rates the biggest danger civilization faces by far. If we don't make enough people to at least sustain our numbers, perhaps increase a little bit, then civilization is going to crumble.
--:-- Noelle King: And J.D. Vance, who opposes abortion rights, notoriously blasted, quote, childless cat ladies. We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they've made.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Yes, I do remember. These gents, and they are mostly gents, call themselves pro-natalists. What do they actually want to happen here? Or do they just want to criticize?
--:-- Rachel Cohen: So pro-natalists, it's essentially this broad ideological movement driven by concerns that the world is not producing enough children and that society should work to change that.
--:-- Noelle King: Now, not all pronatalists are politically conservative like Musk and Vance, and not all conservatives are particularly pronatalists. Some self-identified pronatalists really support abortion rights. They would never want to force women into having children they don't want.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: But given the power and influence of people like Musk and Vance, their sort of interest and involvement in the movement has definitely caused a lot of people to feel pretty afraid.
--:-- Noelle King: Hmm. Yes. And it makes you wonder, is there a similar thing happening on the left of the American political spectrum? Not exactly in the same way.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Like Donald Trump campaigned for president and said he wanted a new baby boom. How does that sound? That sounds pretty. I want a baby boom. Oh, you men are so lucky out there. You're so lucky.
--:-- Noelle King: No Democratic politician is talking like that. And that makes sense because abortion rights remain very much under attack and people want to be really careful in how they talk about both falling birth rates and reproductive freedom.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: But I think a political change is happening with the Democrats is we are seeing more of an effort lately from them to emphasize being, quote, pro-family.
--:-- Noelle King: Too many young parents are forced to exit the workforce because they can't find affordable child care. If we want to grow our population, we must continue expanding affordable child care. This is pro-family, pro-child, and pro-growth policy.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Democrats rightly recognize that they don't want to cede all the family-friendly political rhetoric to conservative pro-natalists.
--:-- Noelle King: So that was a really big part of the Harris-Walls campaign. They framed a lot of their care policy ideas as being more pro-family than the GOP.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: For example, extending the child tax credit to help them buy a car seat, to help them buy baby clothes, a crib.
--:-- Noelle King: Many of us are concerned about climate change, concerned about what human beings are doing to the planet, concerned about limited resources on planet Earth. And some people choose to have no kids or have fewer kids because of that.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: So what is the argument that there should be real concern that people are having fewer children?
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Right, so people do debate whether falling birth rates are problems. And the case for why it is essentially goes like this.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Most people on Earth right now live in a country below what demographers call the quote replacement rate, meaning each woman on average would have 2 children That essentially the mathematical amount of children needed to maintain a population current size in a generation or two
--:-- Rachel Cohen: So whether or not that a problem the idea is as the number of babies goes down, the number of workers will shrink too. And that means there can be fewer people paying taxes, fewer people available to do important jobs, less money going into welfare and pension systems.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Japan's baby bust is believed to be partly to blame for the nation losing its title as the world's third largest economy. Italy has the highest share of people over 65 years old among all EU member states.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: And if the trend continues, it will be very hard to sustain both the pension and the health systems. In the UK, by 2070, the number of workers is projected to rise by a million. The number of pensioners will rise by five million.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: This could lead to all sorts of economic and political challenges. more poverty, less investment. And you can also imagine some real intergenerational political conflict in the situation where there are fewer resources to care for the elderly, but they still have more political power.
--:-- Noelle King: All right. So I understand in the relatively immediate term that fewer people means fewer young people, fewer workers, fewer people paying taxes. The pro-natalists seem to think we are heading toward like a near-term disaster.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Demographers have been really wrong in the past. There have been population panics the other way, that the world was producing too many people. And that led to really horrible policy responses like mass sterilization campaigns and forced abortions and eugenics.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: So I think we should be humble in these moments as we're making predictions about the future. China's one-child policy went on for, I don't know, 35 years, and that was a freak out over too many people. Exactly.
--:-- Noelle King: Now they're stigmatizing childless women in China and trying to figure out how to get people to have more babies.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Do we have data showing that women really want more children and can't have them or are being barred in some way? Or is this just what we want?
--:-- Rachel Cohen: I think this is a key question. We know that most women, even those who do really want to be parents tend to prefer smaller families, which, you know, they're easier to balance with jobs, hobbies, friends, and of course, less expensive.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Most people don't really want five to 10 kids anymore. I think the real fundamental question is whether women with zero kids might have wanted at least one or two if they had felt more supported either by society, their government, or a partner or both.
--:-- Noelle King: So one of the big arguments that pronatalists make, including progressive liberal ones, is they point to surveys that suggest some people would be open to having more kids if it were easier and more affordable.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: So from that perspective, I think pronatalism has some overlaps with the reproductive justice movement, which says we should build a society that supports people having however many or how few children that they want.
--:-- Noelle King: But it is complicated.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Well, fortunately, the pro-natalists in the U.S. now have a lot of power. And therefore, I imagine they can make policy to get us all to have more kids.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: What policies have they introduced? Well, you know, in the U.S., we do have debates around the child tax credit, which is supposed to help ease the burden of raising children.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: And there's been some efforts over the last 25 years around the world to try and boost birth rates with things like more affordable child care and other sort of family policies.
--:-- Noelle King: But even in all these countries, including the U.S., birth rates continue to decline.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Throughout history, Rachel, having children or not has often been viewed as a very personal, private decision.
--:-- Noelle King: We're at a time in which the government seems to want to insert itself into that decision to help us make choices one way or the other. The one way being to have more kids.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: What does it mean for the government to be involved in this decision?
--:-- Rachel Cohen: I spend a lot of time writing about attacks on abortion rights in the U.S. and attacks on IVF. And I think your question gets at some of the most uncomfortable parts of this whole discourse.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: Because if it turns out it's not possible to use policy to voluntarily boost birth rates politically or otherwise, the question is, will leaders start then to talk about involuntary ways to do it?
--:-- Rachel Cohen: And it doesn't seem inconceivable to me at all that if you make the issue of falling birth rates more salient, if you've got people really activated around this idea that it's a huge problem and a threat to humanity, that you are going to see some people become more open to old reactionary ideas about controlling women's bodies.
--:-- Rachel Cohen: That you might see people saying, oh, women not having more kids are being selfish to human civilization.
--:-- Noelle King: This, I think, is the real fear that rhetoric from Elon Musk and J.D. Vance create.
--:-- Noelle King: Vox's Rachel Cohen. She covers housing, homelessness, and family policy.
--:-- Noelle King: Coming up, the baby bust isn't just an American phenomenon. Basically, no place in the world is having as many kids anymore. We'll see you next time.
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--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King with Alice Evans. She's a senior lecturer of international development at King's College London.
--:-- Alice Evans: Her research focuses on gender and babies not having babies.
--:-- Noelle King: And Alice has been everywhere. From Mexican villages to the Atlas Mountains to Uzbek towns to Korean universities.
--:-- Alice Evans: And by talking, learning from young men, older men and women across the world, I've started to think about, okay, well, why is fertility collapsing? What's going on?
--:-- Alice Evans: So birth rates are going down all across the world. What are the leading theories as to why this is happening?
--:-- Alice Evans: So I guess there's the right wing, the left wing, and then there's the Alice Evans take.
--:-- Alice Evans: Okay. I think the conservative right in the US will blame childless cat ladies, right? So they'll say that women are over-educated, they're living with their cats, and they're very, very selfish.
--:-- Alice Evans: Correct. But here's the thing. That theory has two major omissions, because the collapse in fertility is happening at vastly different political economies.
--:-- Alice Evans: I mean, in Tunisia and Turkey, female labor force participation is very low, around 30%, and yet their fertility is only 1.5.
--:-- Alice Evans: So even in places where women aren't even getting jobs, they're not having kids. You know, in India, extremely patriarchal casteist society, but in Tamil Nadu in the South, it's got exactly the same fertility rate as England and Wales.
--:-- Alice Evans: That's 1.4. So it's not just about these over-educated women pursuing their careers.
--:-- Alice Evans: Also, there's also a class-based variation. So the US right tends to blame these overeducated women in Sweden and in Finland, the rate of childlessness is actually amongst the most disadvantaged people.
--:-- Alice Evans: They're least likely to have children. I wonder if JD Vance knows any of this.
--:-- Alice Evans: You should call me up.
--:-- Alice Evans: All right. So that's on the right. And then we heard earlier that on the left, there's one theory that you often hear is that it's just become too expensive.
--:-- Alice Evans: Women would like to have more children, but they can't afford to. There's not enough support. People aren't making enough money, etc.
--:-- Alice Evans: Absolutely. So many people across the world experience economic difficulties.
--:-- Alice Evans: And so these could be like very high house prices in New York, making it much more expensive to have an apartment with an extra room, or the very expensive cost of childcare.
--:-- Alice Evans: You know, when I was in San Francisco, people would say it might be 30,000, super, super expensive. And that's prohibitively difficult for many families.
--:-- Alice Evans: Now, those difficulties are real, and governments should take those economic concern seriously, and I'm all here supporting cheaper housing, more affordable housing, greater access to safer, accessible childcare.
--:-- Alice Evans: However, I don't think that explanation is a full story because it won't explain why it's happening everywhere all at once, even at very, very different levels of income.
--:-- Alice Evans: And so that brings us to the Alice Evans theory.
--:-- Alice Evans: Yes, exactly. So what has happened everywhere all at once is that we see a rise of singles. And the rise in singles, that is, I mean, people neither being married or cohabiting, and it precisely correlates with the decline in fertility.
--:-- Alice Evans: Now, previously, late from the 1960s, American couples had fewer children. But now what's happening is they're not even forming those couples.
--:-- Alice Evans: So in America, for example, over half of 18 to 34 year olds are neither in a steady relationship nor living with a partner.
--:-- Alice Evans: Furthermore, just out from pew, most single Americans don't feel much pressure to find a partner. Half say they're not even looking.
--:-- Alice Evans: Are we sure that sexy singles are to blame? Because for many years, people have had kids without being married or without living with someone, without being in relationships.
--:-- Alice Evans: Oh, that's a great point. But that's actually going down too now. In America, it's been the least educated who are less likely to marry.
--:-- Alice Evans: And that's where there's been the steepest decline in fertility.
--:-- Alice Evans: All right. So I'm assuming you looked into why more people are staying single and also saying, I want to be single. What's going on?
--:-- Alice Evans: So here's the thing I think historically people would have married for one of three reasons very crudely love money or respect you know in conservative societies where singledom is totally stigmatized then you have to marry for respectability you know in India where it's so important lots of aunties and uncles might be pestering people you know when are you getting married when are you getting married you know for my grandparents it was just the done thing to get married.
--:-- Alice Evans: But now a society liberalises, you know, Miley Cyrus championing flowers, I can buy myself flowers.
--:-- Alice Evans: There's more permissibility. So that's one thing.
--:-- Alice Evans: There's also economic convergence. So as women earn their own incomes, they can increasingly be more independent.
--:-- Alice Evans: So compatibility Increasingly depends on love, whether people really enjoy each other's company.
--:-- Alice Evans: But of course there are lots of frictions you know people might be manipulative deceitful unfaithful and if there are lots of frictions they may call it quits
--:-- Alice Evans: So that might be one aspect of it economic convergence between men and women's earnings and cultural liberalisation making singledom more permissible.
--:-- Alice Evans: On top of that, on top of those shifts, I think the big change that we see all across the world, all at very different levels of income, is the massive improvement in hyper-engaging online entertainment in that TikTok, video games, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Bridgerton, Netflix.
--:-- Alice Evans: You can, you know, browse Blackpink's live stream. Well, go on Pornhub. I'm going to skip this one.
--:-- Alice Evans: Anything you like. All these technological advances enable instant access to the world's most charismatic, charming content, or maybe you prefer to do sports bets and gambling.
--:-- Alice Evans: And so why venture out when everything is at your fingertips from Netflix to Zoom meetings?
--:-- Alice Evans: And so we see, tracing the data over time, that there is growing isolation. Young people are spending much more time alone.
--:-- Alice Evans: So in recent surveys, 65% of young american men say no one knows me well 28 of gen z didn't socialize with anyone they didn't live with in the past week so we just see this global trend and it is absolutely global so for example last year i was in mexico and lots of different mexican little towns and mothers would say the biggest problem here is that our teenage sons are spending all their times in their bedroom and i'll hear the same stories in little indian villages in bangladeshi villages all these people being hooked on hyper-engaging media.
--:-- Alice Evans: Are there any countries that buck the trend?
--:-- Alice Evans: Well, yes, actually. So for example, I was in Uzbekistan for a month last year, and there there's been an increase in fertility.
--:-- Alice Evans: When I'm in Uzbekistan, people will typically ask me four questions, and the answer should always be yes. Do you like Uzbekistan? Do you like Uzbek food? Are you married? Do you have children.
--:-- Alice Evans: And that tells you a lot about people's priorities, you know, a strong national pride, and also this strong onus that women should be married and have children.
--:-- Alice Evans: So, you know, that's one option. You just pump up the status of marriage and fertility.
--:-- Alice Evans: In, you know, in Georgia, their Orthodox patriarch similarly did the same of bumping up the status of children and fertility.
--:-- Alice Evans: In Hungary, they tried to give people cheaper mortgages if they promised to be married and have children.
--:-- Alice Evans: But what I'm saying, the Alice Evans theory of the collapsing fertility is that these pronatal incentives of saying $2,000, $5,000 to have an extra child, they're simply too small if the prior constraint is that most people are increasingly single.
--:-- Alice Evans: I think that most governments are putting the cart before the horse by focusing on couples rather than realizing this prior constraint.
--:-- Alice Evans: And I think that if I'm right, that the problem is technology, this hyper-engaging media distracting us from us and driving this digital solitude, which ultimately prevents people from forming couples, then we need to think, well, you know, we have various options.
--:-- Alice Evans: Could we regulate technology in some way? Could we introduce further restrictions? Or what can we do in schools to ensure that we're fostering social skills?
--:-- Alice Evans: Because just as we see declining maths and English, reading skills across the OECD. Simultaneously, my interviews suggest that if people aren't spending time socializing, then they're not necessarily developing the capacity to bond and charm and woo.
--:-- Alice Evans: You know, if you're not mixing and mingling, then you get a little bit anxious if you go out into a crowd of unknown strangers.
--:-- Alice Evans: Yeah, I know. This is such a good point.
--:-- Alice Evans: And so the question becomes like, what do we do that doesn't simultaneously make us feel like we are losing personal civil liberties.
--:-- Alice Evans: Like the government could take my phone and send me to speed dating, but that would feel like a real invasion, a real invasion.
--:-- Alice Evans: And, you know, personal freedoms, people feel pretty strongly about those.
--:-- Alice Evans: So in terms of how we should change the conversation around what went wrong here, what is going wrong here and what we should do about it, what's your best idea?
--:-- Alice Evans: So my message for the world based on my globally comparative research is let's focus on the core problem and that's the rise of singles now how can we address that first and foremost we need to understand and tackle the problem let's have a range of pilot initiatives to build community groups to build local clubs and societies to support communities so that people can mix and mingle and fall in love
--:-- Alice Evans: I'm a great advocate for romantic love, for sharing our life stories, for empathizing and understanding with each other.
--:-- Alice Evans: That's quintessentially what makes us human.
--:-- Alice Evans: So if we put that problem front and center and start working on that tricky conundrum, then maybe we can, you know, address the loneliness and boost up the fertility.
--:-- Noelle King: Alice Evans of King's College London.
--:-- Noelle King: Today's episode was made in partnership with Vox's Future Perfect team.
--:-- Noelle King: It was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Jolie Myers and Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and engineered by Andrea Kristen Stotter.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. I want you, I need you I want you, I need you I want you, I need you Bye.
