Chris Williamson hosted a nearly four-hour deep dive into the problem of collapsing fertility with leading experts @lymanstoneky, @SimoneHCollins and @StephenJShaw.

The wide-ranging discussion covered tremendous ground. Here are some key highlights!

The severity of the crisis

Few really grasp how bad the birthrate crisis is going to be. Shaw emphasized the dramatic effect of compounding and how countries with below replacement fertility will be orders of magnitude smaller in the future. That means the collapse of whole economies and countries, especially those with fertility rates continuously well-below replacement, which is 2/3 of countries today.

Loss of innovation

Innovation is a numbers game, and it takes large populations to give rise to brilliant innovators and entrepreneurs. More than that, Stone explained that a large and highly educated population and an advanced economy are preconditions for innovation to flourish, and that benefits the whole world. But populations that are high in innovation are in sharp decline, and aging societies are much less innovative and slower to adopt new technology. Thinkers like Robin Hanson say that innovation itself will grind to a halt.

Decline of small towns and rural areas

Collins mentioned the “urban population shredder” because birthrates are far lower in cities. But Shaw described a great irony: small towns and rural areas will be ravaged the most by population decline, as people migrate to a few marquee cities. That means in a declining country like Japan, a city like Tokyo can remain healthy long after rural areas and smaller towns face abandonment and collapse.

How do you invest in a declining world?

How do you make new businesses work when there are fewer customers every year than the year before? We have gotten used to a growing world, where growth doesn’t come at a cost to anyone because the entire economy is growing.

But before the Industrial Revolution, conflict was high because the pie was small and your gain was someone else’s loss. A shrinking world that is losing population every year could be like that.

This topic is upsetting but necessary

Williamson reflected how much he was attacked when he brought up this topic earlier in the year, because it tramples on so many sensitivities. The Internet got so mad at him it showed up in Google trends! But Stone and Collins said ruffling feathers is inevitable and a good sign.

Shaw marveled at how much public awareness has grown and how far people have come in just the last three years. Perhaps hope for change lies in growing awareness of the problem.

40% of today’s young women will never be mothers

Most women and men have no idea how little time they have, how quickly fertility drops off, and how high the odds are they will end up accidentally childless. The single easiest way to boost fertility may be to educate young people about how little time they have and how high the odds are that they will never have children past given ages. Shaw said that when young people learned this, the effects were life changing.

You can’t save the environment without innovators

There is little relationship between population growth and pollution, said Stone. What matters is technology. Emissions reductions have almost always come from changes in technology, not through changes in birthrates.

We need better technology, and more innovators not fewer, to solve our environmental problems.

Expectations are getting more expensive

The most common reason people give for not having kids is that they can’t afford it. But society is collectively richer than ever before. What is going on? There has been a huge inflation of standards and expectations, both in material goods and in the level of parenting you are supposed to give your kids. A generation ago, hardly anyone ate fresh blueberries and most people never travelled abroad. Now these things are normal, even expected. Collins argued you should opt out and go rogue, but Stone sided with the masses that these options are great and pretty hard to resist.

Economic success comes too late

Male earnings peak in the 40s. Apparently, men’s earnings used to be near their peak in the 20s. This creates a big problem because people often delay until their economic value is higher, missing most of their fertility window.

Shaw believes we won’t fix the birthrate crisis without finding a way to structure society so that people can get on with making money and having a family much earlier.

Housing in cities is terrible for families

Stone explained how there are modern norms and laws that say you need a certain number of bedrooms for a certain number of people. When you are renting, landlords often have strict occupancy limits and Child Protective Services is looming in the background. That means having a family in a place that is small is really risky. Most urban housing (studios and 1 and 2 BR apartments) would be practically illegal for a larger family and there are hardly any larger units to be found inside most cities.

The pain of unplanned childlessness

Not having the children you hoped to have is a source of incredible grief. How do we know? It turns out that there is a natural experiment. With fertility treatments one set of people is successful and another set of people is just unlucky. It turns out that prescriptions for antidepressants and antipsychotics are far higher among the group of people that undergoes fertility treatment without success.

Do kids make you happy?

Most research says yes, according to Stone. Collins objected to the whole framing. A lot of parenting is really hard, she admitted, but pleasure not how she thinks you should measure things. Deeper fulfillment along with the value of the lives brought forth should be the measure.

Men are more domestic than ever before

A lot of people say that men need to step up and help around the house. But today’s generation of young fathers already do more housework and are more involved with their children than any previous generation of men while birthrates are the lowest they have ever been.

Work from home

Stone pointed out that WFH is extremely pronatal and has a larger effect size on fertility than almost any single factor we can measure. Collins talked about how the economy used to be much more home based in the past, and how the huge conflict between work and family is kind of recent to our history. Both Stone, with four kids so far and Collins, with five so far, work from home the majority of the time.

Cash for babies?

Here the debate got really heated! Stone says that everyone has a price and if you give people large enough sums for babies, you will get more of them. He thinks we could get the TFR up to replacement in America for what we spend on seniors, although admitted that might not create great incentives.

Collins and Shaw were much more skeptical and said that governments haven’t had great success with just financial incentives. Collins argued that this would produce few net taxpayers and would be unsound financially.

The problem of travel

Young people, especially young women, LOVE to travel, especially internationally and that desire comes in big conflict with having family. A lot of people feel they will lose part of themselves if they have to give that up.

Stone loves to travel with his kids and wishes society prioritized families and kids in those environments.

Is education the problem?

All agree that we want both high education and high fertility, to have the kind of society we would want to live in.

Shaw urges that we need to find ways to find ways to allow education to be achieved more quickly so that people can get on with the business of having families more quickly. Everyone felt that more people should have kids while in college or graduate school, but that is still niche and rare.

The Laestadian Lutherans

Most high fertility groups in the world today have low education or are weirdly insular. But there is a group that achieves high education, high achievement and high integration into modern society, all while achieving a TFR of 4 or 5 births per woman.

Stone says that the Laestadian Lutherans of Scandinavia are exactly what we need more of, a group that contributes to society at a high level while maintaining very high birthrates. It’s hard to argue with that.

Making motherhood high status

Williamson reflected that if you could elevate the status of motherhood, that would be like the holy grail to solving the fertility crisis. He mentioned the Republic of Georgia and Stone, the author of the seminal paper on Georgian fertility, was on the scene to narrate about the power of the revered Patriarch Ilya II to create a baby boom all by himself.

The difficult question, which should be a topic of great interest and research, is how to give motherhood high status in many different cultural contexts.

Families aren’t getting smaller

As Shaw explained, children per mother in the US is even higher than it was a generation ago. The problem is that far fewer women are becoming mothers at all. This reflects a big decline in marriage and big challenges with partnering.

How can we get more people to partner up? Shaw was nothing if not consistent: we need to teach people how little time they have. The vast majority of people still want children, after all.

Doctors and C-sections

Simone Collins has had five kids, and plans to have more, all by C-section. Most people aren’t aware that this even possible and doctors usually people tell people who have C-sections that they can’t have more than two or three kids.

Collins had a thing or two to say about that. “The world record is eleven. My surgeon who did my last C-section, her record [for one patient] is eight.”

The risks for C-sections are manageable and most women who have more of them will be fine. Stone notes the irony that fear rules pregnancy in an era when pregnancy does not increase mortality at all in advanced countries.