Noor: Robin Hanson, it's amazing to have you on the podcast. How's it going?

Robin: Nice to meet you.

Noor: Yeah, great to have you. Cool. Um, well, yeah, I think we should just jump right in and start talking about, um, fertility collapse, fertility decline. Um, you know, you've written a lot of really cool, um, things on the topic.

Do you wanna just start by just giving folks who have no idea, don't understand at all, what's going on? You know, could you just define, you know, what are the, um, key figures here and what's, what's going on?

Robin: So, most of you. That people are having fewer kids than they used to, and many of you probably know that worldwide.

This has now fallen below replacement. That is most places in the world are below replacement. You can probably guess that the places that are above replacement are mainly because they're poor and on the trajectory to be like the rest of the world, and so. Can forecast the consequences of future population very clearly for people who already exist because you know, at what ages people die is, is pretty well known.

The only question is what is future fertility? That is how many babies will there be? But over the last century or two, we've actually had a pretty consistent trend worldwide toward lower fertility. As places get rich, there's variation, but worldwide it looks pretty predictable. Once upon a time, people said, oh, well what happened was first, you know, mortality declined.

And so then fertility is declining to match it, and so it wouldn't fall below replacement. And in the last few decades what we've found is, yes, it does fall, replace below replacement. So there isn't some, you know, magic matching process that's gonna ensure that the population doesn't decline. Uh, it's part of a much larger, complicated cultural changes we've seen.

So, and those cultural changes are pretty, pretty deeply entrenched. So many people when they come to this and say, oh, well it's a complicated thing, but surely we can fiddle some knobs and, you know, things will change and it doesn't look so easy. So, so we can go into like, what are all these forces that are preserving and, and pushing in this direction?

But even then you might have thought, you know, okay, fine. And still not to be concerned. So the so are two things that I learned that really made me focus on this in the last. One is the fact that I think economic theorists of growth understand, which is in a declining population, the economy will also decline.

And in a declining economy, innovation grinds to a halt. That is if once the population say, is one 10th the, the previous peak, the innovation rate will be less than one 10th of that peak. And you go farther down and it gets even smaller. So the straightforward prediction is that within 30 years or so, the world population will peak.

World economy will peak around then or even earlier, world population economy will fall, and then it'll just keep falling for centuries. And during that centuries long period, innovation will just stop basically. And. Other big thing I realized is we actually see a few exceptions in the world of insular, highly fertile cultures, uh, like the Amish, like the already Jews and a few others, and they are succeeding in growing.

Amish have doubled every 20 years for a century. Um, they're on track to eventually dominate the world if the wor rest of the world just keeps small falling in population and they don't. Some of them will probably fail that as they try to adapt various changes, and that may risk their high fertility status, but probably not all of them will fail.

So then the future looks like something like the Amish take over the world in a few centuries. For example, in the United States, they're now 300,000 people. They were 5,000 people a century ago ago, and if they keep doubling every 20 years and another two centuries, they become 300 million.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Dominate the us. Um, they're gonna inherit the earth and they're pretty picky about things. That is, they often reject, technologies reject.

Noor: So I think part of, um, the framing for this tends to be a little bit, um. Gets, gets, I think, lost on people. So the, um, fertility rate drops over the last eight years for France is, you know, 1.96 to 1.68.

Like those numbers seem small, but if you frame that in terms of how does that actually change the demographics, I think that then it's become a little bit more compelling. So just to give a little bit more on, uh, just some, some other countries. Um, the drops over the last eight years for Sweden, it was one point.

Um, basically this is comparing 2023 fertility rates to 2015 fertility rates. So it's. 1.85. Now it's 1.42 in Sweden. In uh, America it was 1.84. Now it's 1.64. For the UK it was 1.78. Now it's 1.45. China, pretty dramatic one. It was 1.75. Now it's, um, 1.05. So if you put this in the context of how is it. What are the actual population changes?

For South Korea? You're gonna see 50% fewer people. In 50 years. China, you're gonna see 30% fewer people. Europe, 25% fewer people, and America 20% fewer people. So I think maybe that framing also helps people understand how dramatic these, um, fertility changes are over. You know, just the last eight years,

Robin: the key things to notice is we fell below replacement and still going down.

So there wasn't this magic. Everything will stop at replacement thing. The other thing is just to understand what processes are behind this. I mean, so just saying there's these numbers on a graph, you might say, well, maybe they could reverse. And I think if you see the processes that are, that are behind this, you'll realize how hard these will be to reverse.

Maybe one of the biggest ones is just gender equality. Mm-hmm. Barely in societies with less gender equality, they've had higher fertility. And so the more we, we've made sure that women have the same opportunities as men to do all the same things men have, then they choose, some of them choose that, and that's often at odds with higher fertility.

Um, another trend is our longer, less inflexible career paths. So young women who want to be as good as men at whatever men are good at, they follow a career path. And that means many years of schooling and then early career jobs, which don't offer much time off. And the idea that you could just take five years off and then jump back on the career, these career paths just aren't very tolerant of that.

Once you're off, they're not that eager to let you back on. And that's. Another thing that's in the way of fertility, in order to stop that, you somehow and have to shorten these career paths or, um, make them more flexible, and there's very little inclination for that. A third trend is this. We've swapped out what they've called cornerstone marriage for capstone marriage, but once upon a time you would just get married early.

You weren't, you ha you weren't successful yet. You weren't even very well formed. You were plastic. And then the two of you would try to succeed and try to form in the context of each other, and that would be who you became. And now startup

Noor: versus like a merger or acquisition situation, you're kind of doing the seed stage versus, you know, right.

So, so now the

Robin: norm is instead of, you know, you're supposed to wait until you have a secure career and also wait until you figure out who you are.

Noor: And

Robin: then find someone else who matches who you are, who you've become, and then get married and have kids. And that just leaves a lot less time for having kids after that long preparation process.

And you're just much pickier. Of course. So previously when you were marrying at 18 or something. You weren't being very picky about who you married. Well,

Noor: maybe I'll jump jump into the first two, right? Because basically the first one, what you said was just gender equality. And then two is like sort of inflexible careers, right?

So I don't think anyone's really willing to, you know, basically reverse gender equality. I think that one's probably here to stay. Um, so maybe for career flexibility, what do you think? You know, 'cause this is basically, this isn't just restricted to the us. This is literally a worldwide. Fertility collapsed problem.

Do you think that one's likely to change? You think that one's just gonna be on course of basically, Hey, you know, so, so remember the context here is

Robin: there's two ways to solve the problem. Somehow we change world culture.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: Or world culture continues as it is, and these small insular groups on the side just slowly grow until they take over.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: Those groups are toler, gender inequality.

It's really hard to induce careers to, um, you know, people who are hiring to consider someone who's taken a long pause. 'cause they are uncertain whether this person, you know, is randomly selected. That is if people were randomly choosing pauses. Okay. But if people are choosing pauses correlated with some other feature that's not desirable, then they are right to be suspicious of them.

And so how can you, how could they convince people not to be suspicious of that? Um. I mean, an extreme thing I considered at one point was just having a rule that basically everybody had to take a 10 year career pause. That is just make everybody quit work or school and say, well, okay, once you've had your third kid, then you can go back to your career path.

So if you can do that in less than 10 years, you get a, you get to be off. So like basically say until you have enough kids, you, you know, have to stop going to school and preparing for a career. Everybody has to do that. And if everybody has to do it, there's, there's no particular signal, the fact that you didn't do it, and that's really expensive for society.

I mean, the fundamental question is, can you make it so that having a child doesn't actually get in the rid of your, in the way of your career?

Noor: Mm-hmm. So

Robin: if you can go so far as to like, you know, give them so much support that they can push on a intensive career path and suffering very little for having kids.

Then, you know, that's a really high bar. Mm-hmm. Because at the moment, you know, I know kids are a lot of work. Yeah. Even if you get some help, there's still a lot of work and they, they definitely do cut back on your career, but this is just really hard to make kids that easy. In order to do that, you basically need pretty full-time daycare.

Of kids, right?

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: And that's expensive, right? So, so then we can talk about how could we make people be able to afford that. So, but you know, I think in some sense, if, so, there's a literature on like offering incentive to parents. And what we see is small incentives don't do that much.

Noor: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I think it just rationally it sounds like it's not that useful, right?

I mean, the point is, are you gonna, you know, lose a career that's making you whatever, $250,000 a year, $2,000 a year, whatever, whatever it is you're, you know, that person's salary is, if it, if it's on the binary difference between, oh, are they able to keep that job or they're not able to keep that job, then of course, like these benefits on the margins wouldn't really make a difference in someone's voice whether or not to have kids.

Robin: Well, I think, I think there are many margins, but I think just what we've seen is. People really want to compete and succeed in careers, and they want that strongly enough. That offering modest incentives to lose a lot on careers doesn't do it for them. I think we, economists are pretty confident that there is a price.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. You could offer people enough and then it would make a difference. So you could, one way you could think about it's, you could offer them so much money that they can pay somebody else to be the parents and then they could focus on their careers. But it's similar to you offer them enough, maybe they just wanna have parenting be their career either way works like somebody has to do the parenting.

So

Noor: what, so what do you think that number is in, uh, in the us?

Robin: I, you know, I think I would start out trying say $300,000 per kid.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: Um, that's so, um, but I have a reason for picking that number. Okay. Which isn't so much. So, you know, I've seen people say that like that might have a substantial effect on fertility, maybe 30% increase in fertility or something.

But, um, my reason for picking that number is it matches. Our estimates of the unfunded liabilities per citizen in the us.

Noor: Okay. Explain.

Robin: So, um, so, so one solution, fertility is thinking the abstract is if you could endow your kids with debt, they had to repay.

Noor: Okay. And

Robin: then it would be a profit making enterprise to have and raise kids because they would then owe you a lot of money.

You could sell this debt to other people to pay for your expenses early, and then investing in kids would be a profit making enterprise. Now, most people are horrified at this description because what we like to imagine is you give a gift of life to your kids and you're not. Then profiting off of their life later so much, right?

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: So people are horrified at this, at the individual level, but it turns out at the national level, we don't mind. Mm-hmm. So in the United States, uh, basically we've promised citizens a bunch of benefits in the future that we haven't arranged to pay for yet.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: So the way we arrange to pay for them is we plan to tax people in the future pay for these things.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: And that means every US citizen is on the hook to pay a bunch of debt

Noor: mm-hmm. That

Robin: we've arranged for them. And so that's just like the individual level, endowing your kids with debt, which we find horrifying. But at the national level, that's exactly what we're doing. We're endowing every new kid with debt.

And the actual, the sort of the direct debt that we have is like $30 trillion total. Yeah.

If you look at the unfunded liabilities, the debt we've things we've promised to pay, the smallest estimate of that I saw was a hundred trillion dollars, which is about $300,000 a person. So if we're actually gonna raise taxes in the future to pay for all these things we've promised, we basically then doing that by taxing each citizen $300,000, which means.

That's the financial benefit we ev the whole nation gets from every new kid. Every new kid on average is gonna pay that $300,000. So we should be willing to pay up to $300,000 to get that new kid to exist, to pay the rest of us all this liability

Noor: to be born or $300,000 per year

Robin: to be born and raised.

That is to basically become the citizen who pays all these taxes.

Noor: So basically for 18 years of existence,

Robin: they get Right. So there's the question of how you spread those payments out over time. Yeah. And there's also the question of how you adjust the payments for, you know, the quality of the kid basically.

So a common complaint about just paying parents $300,000 per kid is that's gonna induce the lower quality parents to induce a lot of low quality kids. Were not worth the average kid of $300,000. They'd be worth less. So how do we,

Noor: you, when you're saying worthless, you're talking about in terms of what is the amount of tax dollars, right.

Well, how, how much will they pay in the future? So, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Okay. Okay. So basically it sounds like, um, that's one way to think about it. Is there an, is there other, other sort of competing ways about, because basically the other way that you could think about, it's just what is the economic loss to the family, right?

Of basically, well, what is this person's salary per year? What percentage of their salary Right. Would they. And then all the percentage of their future salaries. Like that's kind of, I would say more So there's two ways. Individual in general,

Robin: you could try to estimate costs or you could estimate value.

Noor: Sure.

Robin: So I, I think it's simpler to try to estimate value.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Um, 'cause the cost will vary a lot. So that's why this value, the one value we kids get is just, they'll pay future taxes.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: We've set them up to, so I like that because it's easy to calculate and easy to justify. So, and in particular, so like when you have a house and you have, you take a loan on your house, if you took out an extra loan on your house to pay for your living expenses, that would seem unsustainable because, well, eventually you're gonna run out of the value of the house, and then you wanna have a house and you'll have to find some other source of income.

Right? But if you borrow money on a house to make an addition to the house, that can make more sense because the money you borrow, borrow could increase the value of the house, and then you're not, you know, wasting. Money of the value of the house by spending it off, you're making a good investment in the house, right?

So I think similarly, uh, if we spend money to create kids, that's not just spending money to get some consumption. It's an investment. And that's why you could fund it with debt. So if we pay $300,000 per kid, you know, to parents to have a kid, we could fund that by debt. We could just borrow another three.

For that, and then the rest of us don't have to pay for it. You see, we give the parents the 300,000 and then we borrow the money from investors, and then later on the taxes pay the investors and. We're not losing out. Right. So that, that's because it's a good investment.

Noor: That's so interesting. Yeah. I don't know.

When, when you say through the thousand dollars, that way, it seems actually quite low. It seems low that it would be that much for an entire lifetime worth of tax contributions. Right. You're, you're talking about basically from age 18 to age whatever, six.

Robin: Well, it's gonna be a

Noor: fraction

Robin: of their tax contributions.

Of course. We're thinking about the present value of a future discounted sum.

Noor: I see. Okay.

Robin: So

Noor: you're saying basically because those, those value of those dollars will increase. Is that, is that what you're talking about? Or why would it be? Right? I mean,

Robin: you know, the economy will grow and the tax base will grow and future, you know, income will be higher and they'll pay higher percentage of that, whereas taxes will rise.

Noor: Yeah, yeah. Got it.

Robin: Now, I, I mean, I think kids are worth more than just the fact that they'll pay future taxes, but that's more of a value judgment. That's

Noor: a one way to frame it. Let's just, um, roll back and just talk to all of the causes. So basically we talked one cause was of infertility, cannabis was, um, um, gender

Robin: equality was one, gender

Noor: equality.

Second was career sacrifice. And then what were the other Right. Other candidates.

Robin: Okay. So there was the long and flexible careers.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: Third was the cornerstone versus capstone marriage.

Noor: Okay.

Robin: Right. So because people have changed their standards for what it is to get married and what you should ask demand of your marriage partner and then yourself at.

We just wait a lot longer to get married.

Noor: So basically because people wait longer to get married, then they're gonna have fewer kids because they're gonna be natural, right? They wait

Robin: longer because they have new standards for what an appropriate marriage is. Cool. And unfortunately, that's also pretty deeply embedded.

Uh, it's, it's hard to imagine people willing to let go of that.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Uh, just to like get married at 18 with whoever they can find and figure things out later. That's pretty at odds with our current norms about marriage.

Noor: Okay. That's number three. Right? Do we have, uh, other candidates or those, these are the three main, yeah.

So, uh, another one

Robin: is that in traditional societies, one of the reasons it was feasible for young people to have kids is they were integrated in their larger families.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: That is, you know, families might arrange the marriage. They might live with their parents, they would maybe get a job from their parents and, you know, grandparents were basically much more involved.

Children in the past, and we've,

Noor: and they were also younger, right? Basically because, because people having Yes. They, they were younger

Robin: at the time too. Sure, sure. So, um, our norms have changed that, is that we want the parents to, you know, maybe help but to stay out of things.

Noor: And

Robin: so, you know, children move away from their parents and they match up with someone who lives far away and.

They don't expect parents to have much say in who they marry and or when they have kids or what their job is, and then they also don't expect parents to help that much in the parenting. And that all makes it harder to parent because all that extra grandparent help used to matter a lot.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: And that's also a trend that's hard to imagine changing.

Noor: And that's also the, the built in, uh, low cost, uh, childcare too. Right. That's sort of around the clock, right. Around the fringes. And it, you don't feel bad about it because you don't have to interview these people. You've kind of already lived with them your whole life. You kind of know they're, you know, they're pretty good because they made you.

Right.

Robin: Right. I mean, and two other trends, uh, that go against fertility first, we're much more urban.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: So it's, you know, very consistent trend worldwide that, you know, denser city, urban living. People have fewer kids.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: And then the other one is religion.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: Religion is promoted fertility pretty consistently.

Mm-hmm. And we just are becoming much less religious.

Noor: Oh wait. Oh wait. Why is, why is, uh, being more urban? Why does that go against, uh, people having more kids?

Robin: So, I'm not clear. We understand it. People often talk about how the kids don't have so much space and how housing is expensive.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: I'm not sure if that's the main thing, but it also goes along with urban.

Parents just have a lot more fun things to do instead of having kids

Noor: mm-hmm. Around,

Robin: in their world, around them. Uh, and so that's another story that we've made the world more fun for adults. Mm-hmm. Offered, you know, a Disneyland for adults of activities and places to go and things they can do in their career and their side, and that adults are more motivated and energized by all these other things.

Makes kids

Noor: to a higher cost. Basically, it's a combination of them being more distracted and then basically maybe not having enough space for, you know, the, the kids when they do arrive. Okay. Um, religion. Um, right. Religion. Now what well, do we have other potential causes? Well,

Robin: a lot of people in the last months, et cetera, have talked about fertility and how to promote it.

Mm-hmm. And they've talked about some of these trends I've talked about, and they talked about ways to maybe counter it.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And I think the biggest thing they're missing in those discussions is that. If you have a small group in our society that counters some of these trends in their friends and family, say when they have kids, these kids are just gonna go mix with the larger culture and get assimilated and your deviation will fade away.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: So the Amish and already Jews, et cetera, who have higher fertility. They not only have cultural elements to promote fertility, but just as important they have a high degree of cultural insularity that allows them to continue to be different from the larger culture.

Noor: Hmm.

Robin: So that's why another one of the key trends is over centuries we have become a more integrated world culture

Noor: and cities

Robin: are more integrated culture that is in a city.

You are part of this citywide culture and you will be very influenced by what. People all over the city are doing. And that makes it harder to have a deviation where a group, smaller group of people has a different culture and sees things different. In a rural place, you can have an area that just has a different local rural culture and they are mostly seeing each other and they're less influenced by global culture.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And so that's something that would allow them to be different in any ways. Mm-hmm. So another key feature about history is that online. You know, culture is definitely part of that. You know, if you just lived in a small town a century ago, it was mostly the other people in that small town you interact with and their culture and behavior.

And so if that small town had higher fertility, then you might too, because you would just be going along with what other people are doing there. And you would, might be read a newspaper about far away things, but it wouldn't really impress you. In the way that today you watch television, you're on the internet chatting, you are immersed in this world culture and having a lot of contact with it, and that means you're influenced by what people elsewhere are doing and you're comparing yourself to them.

Mm-hmm. Comparing yourself, your career, sec self, your money, your children, et cetera. You're vacations and that's meaning it's hard for you to deviate from this culture. You're immersed in.

Noor: Yeah. Okay. Cool. Do you think there's, um, other causes that you think are in the top five or top 10 that should be considered beyond the ones that, that we discussed?

Or do you think they're, those are kind of the main contributing things?

Robin: Well, I guess in particular, you know, in terms of when people do studies, female education is especially strong correlate with f

education gets longer for career paths. Education is where young people assimilate culture. And so when education is dominated by people who are deeply immersed in larger world culture of a low fertility culture, that's when young girls and women assimilate that culture

Noor: mm-hmm.

Robin: And become low fertility.

So, uh, you know, education is both something that takes a long time and delays fertility, but it's also a thing, a channel by which world culture. You know, takes hold of. And then we also have these interesting studies where like TV shows and radio shows when different places started to like watch TV from outside their village or radio from outside their village.

Fertility went down at the times when they got exposed to that because that tends to expose them to this larger world culture of lower fertility. These TV and radio shows showed families with lower fertility and they were seen as high status and exemplary, and then people wanted to copy those. So transmission of culture is really important as.

Part of this process. Cool.

Noor: So if you were to assign, um, you know, values to, like what percentage you, you would say each of these factors, uh, weighs into declining fertility, what would, how would you, how would you assign this?

Robin: Well, I have a related answer that is, I did a poll recently on Twitter. Yeah.

85,000 followers. So that, let me ask lots of questions.

Noor: Yeah. I usually

Robin: get a few hundred people to answer. So like, I got 2000 answers roughly, and so I, I picked eight of these trends. And I asked people which were they most willing to try to reverse in order to reduce increased fertility? So that's less about how important it is.

More. More how willing are people to. Accept the reversal on that trail. Okay.

Noor: So I agree that's that's the best next question, but first, before we get into that, can you just tell us what you think are the real contributors and then let's get into what people are, are, would be willing to change. I

Robin: mean, clearly the sort of sharing culture is enormously important at a meta level.

Okay. The world was fragmented into a million little villages doing things separately, and some of them would have high fertility and the world wouldn't have this problem. So

Noor: yeah,

Robin: certainly at this level, the fact that we're all part of the shared culture is the central fact causing. Fertility decline?

I'm not sure I can give you percentages.

Noor: Okay. Alright.

Robin: Um, but you know, certainly the most consistent trend we've seen is increasing wealth.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Over time. And that's obviously one of the trends. We're not very willing to reverse, we're not willing to get desperately poor to increase fertility.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Sorry, a thing I didn't mention in this list was higher parenting effort.

Noor: Okay. That's

Robin: pretty top on the list. Mm-hmm. So we've, I, my son just had a. I can see that my son is putting a lot more effort into parenting his daughter than we did in him.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Over time, there's just increasing standards for how much effort parents should put into kids.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: I even saw a statistic recently that like the number of clothes that parents are getting their kids, or just twice as much now as they were 25 years ago.

Noor: Okay. In

Robin: terms of just how many shirts and socks and shoes that we, we give our kids. So

Noor: yeah,

Robin: basically. We've just greatly raised our standards and that's, that discourages fertility because you know when you, like my son has one kid and they're putting a lot of effort and I think, can we, do we have time for a second kid?

Yeah. And they put it off because it seems so much effort for this kid. That Well, because it's Right.

Noor: It's twice as much effort as their parents put in. So it makes sense. Right.

Robin: But that, that's discouraging fertility in a pretty direct way.

Noor: Got it. Got it. Okay. So basically it sounds, so, it sounds like for you, your personal stack ranking for like the top three, number one is connected global culture.

Number two is higher, um, parenting effort. And then what's number three? I think

Robin: the capstone versus cornerstone marriage is a pretty big deal.

Noor: Okay.

Robin: But it's probably similar with the long career paths, long schooling paths. Mm. I mean, those are both pretty big things. They're all really strong.

Noor: Okay, cool.

All, so those are your top three. And then what, what do people think are the ones that they're most willing to change? So

Robin: the, the thing people were most willing, so I asked them to like talk about willingness to do, you know, calibrated in terms of how effective it would be. So that is, and so you should only like, say something's your top priority if you think like, by doing this we can have the biggest effect.

Noor: Yeah. On

Robin: fertility relative to sort of the cost of letting this trend rivers. And their top pick was about grandparents involvement. Now, I suspect that's because these people aren't imagining themselves being the grandparents. I suspect most respondents to the poll were thinking of themselves as the potential parents now and saying, yeah, I'd like a lot more help from my grandparents.

Noor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But

Robin: I don't think they were imagining their grandparents picking their spouse for them and say, an arranged marriage.

Noor: Mm-hmm. I

Robin: think they were just imagining parents coming and giving them more help. On their terms, you see?

Noor: Right. But

Robin: I don't think they're really thinking through the Yeah, but how much compromises do you have to make with your grandparents to get them the help?

Are you living near them, et cetera.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: And so I'm not sure I believe that, but that was the top result was, yeah, they're willing

Noor: to deal, they, they want the, uh, the benefits of having more, um, parental support, but not the costs. And they haven't, they didn't do the cost maybe. Okay. Fair.

Robin: Right. Okay. The second one was the long career stick career paths.

I, I think, you know, many people do realize that we don't actually need to go to school for this long in order to be qualified for jobs. Mm-hmm. We're in a rat race where if other people get a graduate degree, we have to, if we're gonna be competitive with them

Noor: mm-hmm.

Robin: We know that this isn't very efficient, but, you know, the question is how can we stop it?

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: You know, the only thing I can think of is like some sort of law that prevents everybody from getting more schooling.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Or more things, but that's a pretty dramatic.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: Um, it's pretty hard to sort of imagine how exactly to do that, but I think there's sympathy for it in the sense that I think people realize we're just going to school too long.

Noor: Yeah. I feel like the most canonical example of that is probably, you know, is medical school, right? Because you could just cut out undergrad, just send, if you wanna be a doctor, just go start on that four years early. Right? You do

Robin: that, right? Sure.

Noor: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they do that in other countries. That one's not.

Um,

Robin: super

Noor: rare. Okay, cool. That's number two. What was number three that people are most willing to change?

Robin: It was the parenting effort. So in the abstract, I think maybe people realize they're putting in too much. So there's actually a lot the literature on over parenting.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And many people realize that looks like a lot of people are over parented.

Mm-hmm. But again, it's this thing you're stuck into. If other parents are paying a lot of attention to their kids, you feel like you're allowed. If you don't, you're uncaring parent if you're not putting in as much effort as they are.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: And you don't wanna look bad to yourself or your kids. So we're all stuck.

But again, it's hard to imagine how to limit that. I don't know how we would set limits on parenting effort. Exactly.

Noor: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, definitely. And so

Robin: again, it's this thing we're all stuck in together.

Noor: Hmm. Yeah. I mean it's, it almost seems like the solution to that is just to have more kids. Right? Because if you have more kids, then by definition you don't have a choice about how to.

Right. But then

Robin: you're still gonna feel bad that you're neglecting the kids, their, your first kids, because the other ones compared to other parents around who don't have the other kids who are less neglecting their kids.

Noor: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And

Robin: people just don't want to feel bad that way.

Noor: Yeah. It's, and so

Robin: the number four one was the capstone versus cornerstone marriage that people, you know, I guess the willing and the abstract to change that, but again.

It's an equilibrium thing, like if other people are very picky about who they partner with and you are less picky, it feels like you are admitting that you're just less worthy of a good partner. Yeah,

Noor: yeah. Yeah.

Robin: And so I think it's hard for someone to like pick a partner at age 20 or something when everybody else waits till 30.

'cause they feel like they're lowering their standards and that's somehow admitting, you know, they just aren't worth as much, they're not worthy of as good a partner.

Noor: Yeah. Okay. So these are kind of some of the, um, causes, right? They're sort of like deeply ingrained cultural, um, sort of decisions that kind of society has emerged on over the last, um, you know, couple of decades.

What, what are some of the impacts of this, right? Like our economic system is sort of, uh, I mean, so

Robin: one of the things lots of people have noticed is that many nations have set up a retirement plan where instead of saving to pay for retirement, we just plan to tax the workers at the same time. People retired order to pay for retirement.

And that's worked in the past when there's been a lot fewer retirees than workers, but as population ages because of lower fertility, then it flips and we might have a lot more retirees than workers and now it doesn't work so well to try to tax the workers, pay for the retirees. And that's just something we're facing.

And you know, it's pretty stark. So we basically will just have to tax workers more and give retirees left.

Noor: Yeah. Okay. So basically collapse of social security. And then what's your kind of prediction on, you know, when that, when that's gonna happen?

Robin: Well, it's happening now,

Noor: yeah.

Robin: In the countries that are hitting this decline first.

So South Korea, Japan, China, they are now facing these things and they are looming problems in the near future.

Noor: Okay. So that's, that's a big one. What are some of the other sort of big, um, consequence, economic consequences of, you know, basically less people?

Robin: Innovation tends to be done by younger folks.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And so as the population ages, innovation is declining already.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Even, you know, less, we get less innovation per person.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And so that just means growth becomes slower.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And so that probably means maybe the economy might peak and decline before population peaks and decline.

Noor: That's really interesting.

So, so you don't think there's a chance with, um, basically people's health spans increasing with, um, all these different types of, um, uh, AI tools that people will, will actually be, you know, economically productive, innovative, um, you know, making new things later in life? Or do you think it's still gonna be the case that Nope.

People are always gonna do cool stuff that contribute when they're young.

Robin: So we could consider a set of like radical technology change scenarios and ask how that changes the analysis. Sure. Many people I know are imagining super AI is coming soon and the therefore it won't matter what human workers there are 'cause the AI will do everything.

Noor: Yeah. I'm

Robin: skeptical, but yeah, that could happen.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: Some people imagine some sort of life extension or ways that people would live longer and healthier. Honestly, if you look at the trends on, you know, life and health, they're pretty consistent and not so great. So I gotta say, I'm not buying, I, you know, I, I think you gotta project the trends forward and assume, yeah, that's roughly what it's gonna be.

We have not seen radical life extension, radical improvements in healthy life, and probably not going to.

Noor: Got it. So basically when you're saying, um, you know, young people are the ones who are, uh, innovating, I guess, what is the, what is the window that you're assuming? You're like, okay, people are gonna make new things from like this age to,

Robin: you know, well, it's a decline.

Noor: Okay.

Robin: You know, and we've already seen, for example, you know, young people make maybe more fundamental innovations and old people make smaller variations, maybe more of them. And we've already seen a decline of fundamental innovation.

Say the fertility is 1.4.

Noor: Mm-hmm

Robin: Then that means it if population falls by a factor of two every two generations and so it falls by a factor of four in a in a century. And then, you know, that's a slow decline. 'cause you know we're at 8 billion now, so it century falling by a factor five goes to a 2 billion, and then another factor of four goes to a half a billion.

Right. And so you're looking at many centuries of a slow decline. The key point is, you know, innovation declines proportionally, and so you're gonna have these many centuries where not much improvement happens. Not much technology is invented or, or approved. Okay.

Noor: That's sad time. That's pretty dramatic.

Basically. Um, it's, it's, uh, we can't really support retirees and basically young people are taxed, um, at a really high rate, not much innovation. What are some of the other, uh, consequences? Is there any positive consequences or all the consequences? Negative?

Robin: Well, if you were worried about impact on nature, then as the economy gets smaller, it has a smaller impact.

We'll be pumping less carbon into the atmosphere. We'll be encroaching less on nature, you know, reserves, et cetera. So pe if you don't like humans, impact on the universe, then you'll be happy to see if you are humans having impact on the universe. So today, in a city, uh, if you have a whole city that's full, then each person pays a modest fraction of their income for city services.

Mm-hmm.

Noor: If

Robin: a city empties out, but the city services cost the same, then each person has to pay a larger and larger cost to, for water and sewer and all those sorts of things. And so the likely way that we'll deal with that is just some cities will completely empty out and people will crowd into the remaining cities.

Noor: Yeah. It's actually kind of crazy 'cause what you're describing actually sounds like a doom loop, right? Because basically if like more of your s is taken away for taxes and more of your salary is taken away for, you know, expensive city services now it, it crushes, uh, young families or young people even more so that they would, would wanna have even less kids actually.

Robin: Right. So, but they can solve it by just leaving some cities entirely. Yeah. And then crowding into the remaining cities. So what will mm-hmm.

Noor: You

Robin: know, whether your real estate investments go well or not will depend a lot on whether you bet on the right cities.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: You know, the right cities will still do well because their real estate will be valuable, but most of the others will just be empty.

Noor: Mm-hmm. And

Robin: it might even be that the world concentrates on a smaller place in the world, like Europe or somewhere else, where people move there so they can be near each other and then other parts of the world just empty out.

Noor: So what do you think the chances are of, um, basically reversing the global culture, reversing some of these sort of ingrained, um, priorities that people have?

It sounds like those are the three that, you know, people who are considering becoming parents or are think are possible. What's your, you know, your personal thoughts on,

Robin: you know, what, what we could do is try to figure out how we think culture should change and then try to engineer that, but I don't recommend that.

Mm-hmm. I recommend using capitalism to let capitalists figure it out.

Noor: Okay.

Robin: So I would say, let's just commit to paying, say $300,000 per parent, and then other people will try to figure out how to get that money and they will then search in the space of cultural changes to make it work. So I think, you know, towns and religions and culture groups of all sort, even employers, they will be trying to find ways to.

Allow people there to have more kids while still doing the other things they want. In order to get that $300,000, it would be this, you know, dollar side in people's eyes, they'd be really trying to do it. So they would just search in the space of different ways to do it, and that's what we need. Mm-hmm.

Because I don't know the answer, and I don't think you do, and I don't think anybody does. But what we wanna do is just induce a bunch of experimentation to see what can work. So if you just offer enough money. Then people will try to search, find ways to, and then some places will succeed and then other places will copy 'em once some places figure out how to do it.

Uh, then other people will go, yeah, that's how we get the money. And then they'll start to do it.

Noor: Yeah. That's kind of interesting though. But I mean, if you look historically at kind some of the trends that you think are. Breaking down. Right. It basically like the idea of, of people, you know, relying on their parents and their parents being more involved in their marriage and things like that.

It's not really economic. Right? It's more sort of like the social fabric. Absolutely. Right. But if you, if you induce people back then with $300,000, they would, they, you know what I mean? Their parents wouldn't just leave and things like that. It's doesn't seem like it's really

Robin: so, but that's, so I think people incorrectly separate in their minds, money and culture.

Noor: Oh, okay. They

Robin: think money affects money and culture affects culture, but they don't affect each other, and that's just not true.

Noor: Okay.

Robin: In the history of capitalism, a lot of cultural change has been driven by people with material incentives.

Noor: So basically these parents were, you know, drawn to leave their hometown for a bigger city so that they could get a better job and get a better partner, and that led them to leave.

Basically, you're saying that economic pull drove them to leave and then, but culture even too, like

Robin: workplaces have experimented with different workplace cultures Exactly. In order to attract workers. Mm-hmm. And you know, firms have experimented with different consumer cultures in order to attract consumers.

A lot of our culture is wrapped up in our work and our consumption patterns, and those have been heavily shaped by capitalism.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And so, because capitalists had incentives, but, but,

Noor: but basically the, the capitalist force is, is fewer kids. Right? There's no capitalist force that's, that's for kids. No.

Robin: If you offer $300,000 per kid,

Noor: but where does that $300,000 come from? '

Robin: cause you can borrow it, like I said, because it's like adding an addition to the house. Um, it's adding to future value. So in fact, you can borrow against it and, and pay for it that way.

Noor: But the only entity that would potentially be, uh, interested in that would be the government.

But the government's sort of too myopic to really see that. Or the government right

Robin: now pays lots of its things by borrowing. That's why we have this 300,000 debt per person, right?

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And so far, investors are willing to pay for that debt.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: So as long as investors are willing to. Pay for the debt to borrow, you know, to buy the debt, then we can borrow more and so we can pay for kids by borrowing if we aren't willing to do it direct.

Noor: Oh yeah, sorry. I guess what I'm saying is sort of like capitalism has gotten to the situation, got us into the situation where, where women are like, well I'd rather just compete and, you know, make more money, have a longer career and all, basically all of these consequences lead led. Women and, and their partners to choose to have fewer kids.

Right. So I guess I'm not seeing where, where's the, I mean, I guess I get it in the abstract, but very practically, who, who is gonna be incentivized to offer this 300,000 loan, uh, to, uh, to, so, so the plan is

Robin: the government borrows the money the way it's been doing.

Noor: Yeah. Okay. Then

Robin: it gets $300,000 that it pays per parent.

I suggest to do that in a certain tax break, but we could go into that if you want. But the key idea is. Potential parents now see this $300,000. And

Noor: yeah,

Robin: other people help them find a way to make that work. So, for example, say you're an employer who, um, you know, has a bunch of female workers and you see that, you know, you're having trouble attracting female workers, you have to pay them more.

And you say, ah, if I could make my workplace more baby friendly. Then a lot of these mothers could get a baby, get this $300,000, and then be working, willing to work for me for a lower wage, and they might find a way to set up a career path in their firm to make that work. So why? Because they want the money.

That is because the women who might get the $300,000, they're willing to go to a job that pays them less. If it allows them the possibility still to get to pursue their career and get this money. So the employers would be matching that to try to make that work. Similarly, schools might find a way to make their school plan match parenting so that they could attract more students.

Noor: So, ha So have there been any, uh, countries so far who are kind of on the, the, the more aggressive side of the spectrum who have thought of this or just who just said, Hey, let's just give parents X dollars and like, have we seen any impact?

Robin: So, I mean, I think we have seen that the countries that have paid the most have had the biggest effects on fertility.

So, okay,

Noor: so which, which of the countries that have paid the most and what were the, what were the amounts and how, I don't know the

Robin: detail. I think like Hungary is one of them.

Noor: Okay.

Robin: They've paid a lot and they've had a big boost. Um, and you know, in times in history we've seen some boost. So for example, there was the baby boom in the United States from the 1930s through the fifties and the, and that also happened in Europe.

And apparently the main explanation for that was lower housing costs. The period of lower housing costs. And that seems so it definitely shows how simple material effects can have a big effect on fertility.

Noor: Yeah. Because, oh yeah,

Robin: that's how that works. Yeah.

Noor: Cheap, cheaper housing is actually a, a really good point than right.

But if you pay

Robin: people $300,000, that lets them pay more for housing. But if you

Noor: do it to a bunch of people at the same time, then it just makes housing more expensive unless they decide to go away from

Robin: other people, like to be more rural. Right. So. If, if everybody bids up the urban housing, but not the rural housing, then.

They will find a, a way to go rural in order to get the money.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: And so

Noor: cool. So he, so if you were in charge, you would focus on the um, $300,000 over affordable housing or any other um, uh, potential location. Well, it's a matter

Robin: way to deal with all the, I mean, obviously I would, I would love for people to reduce housing costs, but you know, that's 'cause we were crazy regulating housing and we seem to be stuck wanting to crazy regulate housing.

But if we could somehow get ourselves out of that, I would love for us to stop. But. The, the money is the simplest direct knob to turn Yeah. To make things happen. Um,

Noor: cool.

Robin: Honestly, the, the other thing I might say is, look, maybe we'll, like most civilizations in history, who noticed they had a problem of fertility with their elites or everybody, they failed to solve it.

Noor: Hmm. Oh, is that true? We're up

Robin: against a problem. Lots of civilizations have seen and failed to do much better. That's not a good track record. Mm-hmm. So I think you should also consider the possibility we will just fail at this.

Noor: Mm-hmm.

Robin: And the Amish will win or something like the AM will win this. Really take that possibility seriously.

Really engage it. And deeply that is, yeah, try to see, well, how could I join them some way or lie with them or help them or something to take seriously the possibility that that's just how this is gonna end.

Noor: Yeah. And then it, you know, on the, on the route of, you know, trying to make this $300,000 incentive happen, what do you think is the fastest path or the most likely path to, you know, that that seriously happening

Robin: in some sense?

People have to want it. So, I mean,

Noor: yeah.

Robin: We're, we're not gonna do a big policy like that unless someplace is concerned about, like, say, hungry or something, that they're concerned enough about it to do a lot.

Noor: Yeah.

Robin: Um, and the question is. Will that happen? And I'm not sure that is. I think there's already a lot of people adjusting their expectations and saying, well, it's not so bad if population declines.

And maybe that's what people really want. And we shouldn't really put pushing changes 'cause that would go against gender equality, et cetera. And I think that may win many places, even. Most places people will just say is that's kind of what happened in most of history, right? Through most of these other civilizations that had declines.

They just. Nope. They were, they accepted it and they accepted the decline and it just happened.

Noor: Yeah. I see. Basically it's sort of the, the quickest path is just that there has to be broad public outrage and support for, for it, and that seems like you have to change culture or change people's, basically, you have to, you have to show the negatives, um, right.

More clearly

Robin: and to people in the us like it's, it's becoming somewhat of a politically, you know, oriented thing, but that question, whether that's good or bad. If it's seen as a thing of equal concern on left and the right, then it loses energy and interest. If it becomes seen as on one side, I guess more on the right, then the people on the other side fight it and I'm not sure which is the best way to actually succeed.

Noor: Yeah. Got it. Um, well that's a pretty intense pictures. Basically it's either we accept it or we, we, uh, fight it, um, pretty intensely. Well, it was so amazing to, uh, get the chance to, um, to chow with you. I feel like this is a incredibly important topic that's a little bit, unfortunately under hyped or underused.

So it was amazing to have you and, uh, and, and unfortunately this is just gonna

Robin: be around for many, many decades. Yeah. You know, 30 years from now you might look back and remember, oh yeah. People were talking about it, and it won't be that much worse. 30 years from now, it'll be somewhat worse. Yeah.

Unfortunately, this is a problem that just slowly gets worse over centuries. Mm-hmm. Which is a reason why people may just not get very energized by it.

Noor: Yeah. Boiling a frog. Well, amazing to get a chance to chat with you, Robin, and have an amazing, uh, weekend.

Robin: Nice to talk.

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