2023-12-01

Indian Bronson

Making more, better people

My family tree goes back 14 generations. The median age of fatherhood is 36 years. I will go through a few sections like objectives, concepts, goals and strategies.

What do we want? "We". The genes for spaceflight? Malcolm and Simone's interstellar ships, those genes aren't evenly distributed. If you try to raise other people's fertility, then that's kind of weird to care about their fertility. It's important to frame these objectives.

Objectives

As an objective, we might ask what do we want? We want more and better people. We want human flourishing. What would you want to get if you had this? Do you want a higher fertility? Higher replacement rate? Do you want more wealth, smarter people? What things would you look at and want to improve to have human flourishing? If you know what your goals are, then you might stand a chance to work backwards.

Objectives: a better age structure

The age structure of much of the developed world looks poor. The age dependency ratios are all screwed up. Social Security will be insolvent by 2030. The kinds of people who join the military don't resemble the decisionmakers anymore. It's all huge problems.

Objectives: a new income/TFR relationship

This is a sketch from a 2016 American communities survey data on household income and TRF. I make no pronouncements on the buckets but in the lower income bucket you have higher than replacement rate fertility. In the upper areas, maybe children. In the middle, you get a BMW or a dog or something.

Objectives: median marriage age drop

Maybe you want a better median marriage. It used to be that the median marriage age for women was between 20 and 25. As late as 1980, the median marriage age was 22. That was one year after the Star Trek movie came out.

Maybe you want less debauchery? Make of this what you will. Maybe you want to get more marriages at all costs. It turns out the great decline in divorces in the past few decades is because there's a great catering in marriages. If you want more marriages, don't worry about family courts.

Wish list

Here is my wish list. I want prime age male labor force participation of 95%, I want housing to income ratio <= 30%. I want average age of bride 22 years. Etc.

MoreBirths

More Births on twitter is actually here. There actually have been micro-baby booms in different countries including the United States. They have a mix of structural causes including very proud and confident culture, like tearing down statues and great statesmen... In the United States, affordably priced minivans had huge effects on fertility.

Concepts

Let's look at the structural and cultural factors. What are the path dependencies? Let's look at total fertility rates by marital status. You could have fertility without marriage. There could be a de-linking of sex and marriage. But it turns out that the fertility rate of married people is actually pretty good. But what's true today is that basically nobody is married. The reason for Western fertility decline is actually marriage rate decline. People who are married, they just keep having kids. If you like your spouse alot, sometimes you do more than hug them. If you don't have a spouse, it's harder to have kids.

The car seats as contraception study... it's an absurd effect size on the number of births that don't happen. If you have 3 kids in the car and then you need a big enoug hcar for all the car seats which are legally required. Well, parents as a result just stop having kids. The car seats then aren't saving any kids' lives. They are in fact preventing more births.

"Family systems and fertility intentions: exploring the pathways of influence". A lot of countries have gap. Women like kids. They want babies. But they don't have babies. Why? If you have people living on top of each other in buildings, people feel oppressed and they don't reproduce. But if you spread them too far out, then there are no grandparents or support system for having kids.

There has been a massive increase in the number of births to women who are 40 and up. This is technological but also cultural. Actually most of those women are having their children out of wedlock. This is concurrent with the cratering of pregnancies that occur among younger women sometimes younger than 18. You can say what you want about teenage pregnancy, but if you eliminate it then you turn off fertility from women for ages 25-35 years. Something about guarding against teenage pregnancy causes fertility decline during their most productive years when they should probably be having kids.

Path dependency

Say you have two people, both married at 50. One marries at 20, the ohter marries at 49 years old. You can end up with the same block of metal compressing them, but there are two different amounts of work being done to them or something. Life is like this. If you have two sets of people and they are all married at age 49, that doesn't tell you that they were married at 20 or not. Having kids at 20 is a lot easier than having kids at 40 or 50 years old.

The other side of path dependency is that... to make these choices, to go through life in a certain way, what has to be given to young people what kind of has to be conveyed to them is that every decision they make and at every point in time, there are closures to other paths they could have taken. In the United States, female doctors have an infertility rate 4x greater than other women. Also they retire around the age of 40 years old. So what was the point of that? Why did they go to medical school? They lose both their medical career and their fertility. It's crazy, and nobody tells them that.

Results and goals

If you want to increase calvinist birth rates or something, or maybe some other population and you want more births... you have to take responsibility for that and set goals for that. You need to give the children of that community different lifepaths, you have to build services to defray their costs. It might be a little bit weird, but maybe you can have reporting built around this? For the circle of people in your concern, what's the TFR? How many marriages are there? How many children are born each year? What's the cost of having a kid? My wishlist has a lot of things in there. And then you should check up on those people each year and see whether those numbers are increasing or decreasing and help modify hte lifepaths of people in there. It's hard to get 26 years old there.