In this episode, the discussion revolves around fertility rates, demographic collapse, and fertility policy featuring Dan from More Births, a renowned figure in public communication on these issues. Topics include the significance of cultural attitudes over housing space in influencing fertility, the concept of a 'fertility stack'—various factors impacting fertility rates—and related statistics. The conversation also touches on the importance of a pronatalist culture, early marriage, religiosity, and the support of extended family, as well as the negative impact of high C-section rates. Join our hosts and Dan as they delve into these complex issues, debate their viewpoints, and discuss solutions for encouraging higher fertility rates.
Simone Collins: [00:00:00] Hi everyone. We've got Dan has here.
He is more births on X. He is a legend in communicating with the public on fertility and demographic collapse and fertility policy. And we are thrilled. And we just saw him in person a couple of weeks ago. Now he's here with us. On the podcast. And he's going to talk about his top theories, his thoughts on priorities.
Because I'm going to explain why they're wrong. Okay. And Malcolm's going to be, and we're going to see our own little base camp flame war here, marshmallows over the fire of disagreement. It's all good.
Malcolm Collins: Also he's in a fertility collapse task force. We're putting together with the heritage foundation, which I'm also really excited about right now.
So we've got right now, you guys, the heritage foundation guys, and Catherine.
More Births: Puckaloo. Yes.
Malcolm Collins: But. The argument we were getting into because you you were destroying it all you're saying you actually agree with me and I don't like this because But I was saying that because there were two core concepts You we wanted to go over with a lot of statistics in this episode One [00:01:00] is the importance of living space to fertility rates Which is something that you're known for frequently arguing and then the second is the concept of a fertility stack which is a collection of things that impact fertility rates And I was saying that I actually disagree even with the lesser fertility stack issue, because I think it draws away for the overwhelming importance of culture.
And I think that if we don't look at this as a culture first problem, it causes groups that could otherwise be saved to be able to. Push off their, their real problems to like secondary quality of life issues that they want to micro focus on. And I think giving them an excuse to do that is incredibly damaging to the wider conversation.
So I want to hear your debate here. And stats on why this stuff is so important.
More Births: Okay. Well, I, I'm, I'm, I have bad news. I, I actually do agree with you. There's a big problem here. I don't know. We, we want to, we want to be a [00:02:00] flame war here, but actually no, you, you are right. I mean, the, the most important driver of fertility above everything else is culture.
Yeah, absolutely. And. And so I do agree this this concept of the fertility stack. So I I can I can talk about what the major first
Malcolm Collins: first let's do the major things in the fertility stack then try to convince me that housing space matters at all Because I, I just say, and I, and I'll repeatedly say this is, is if you look historically in America, it was common for multiple families to live in one household.
Like that, that means that the only reason we care about living space before having kids is completely cultural. It's, it's like being trans or something. Like, I don't understand how I can say that one, if I'm like, this is inefficient and doesn't help people. So we should change our culture rather than change, you know, our biology.
When I look at houses, I'm like, well, we should change our culture rather than changing our environments because there's nuance
Simone Collins: to this. And I want to hear Dan's [00:03:00] argument and I can also throw in some things that some people have shared with me that have moderated my views on this.
More Births: Okay. Yes. Would you, do you want to talk about housing first or the, yeah, let's talk about housing first.
I guess the
Malcolm Collins: easier one for you to argue. Cause it's such a, your core thing.
More Births: Yeah. Yeah. So, Pro NATO belief and having a culture that's pro family is definitely very important. But, but, you know, housing, having the right kind of housing and housing space does matter also. And I just want to use the example of a group that is all around you guys, where you are in Pennsylvania, which is, which is the Amish.
So, so we have, you know, the, Example of Israel, which is a wonderful example of, of pro natal culture
Malcolm Collins: and very dense housing. That's gotten denser recently.
More Births: Right. No, very dense housing. That is there. That is actually, I would say their biggest limitation. But I would say, you know, the Amish have many of many similar values, you know, pro natal belief very religious, tight knit culture.
And they also have You know a lot of space and [00:04:00] a lot of room to grow and you get a fertility rate of of six
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but the core thing that correlates with fertility in American what is it dutch whatever speakers basically amish in america is the use of cell phones which is I mean, it's so overwhelming it cuts their fertility rate by into like a third of what it is when they don't use Cell phones which shows that that cultural intrusion matters more to them than the land ownership itself You And I also point out that if you're contrasting Amish culture with Jewish culture in the way it relates to land ownership, you can immediately see how Jewish culture negates the housing issue specifically with, with Amish individuals, it's believed you need your own house to get married and they'll even do like barn raises and like, you know, you make money off the land and everything like that.
If you go to Israel, if you go, and we've argued this in other videos, that Judaism is an urban specialized culture, I think today, 98 percent of Jews live in urban areas. If you go to rural parts of Israel and you look at the way they structure their, their cities, they look like micro dense [00:05:00] settlements instead of like actually like spread apart cities typically based around like a minion.
And it's, and I'll, I'll put pictures on screen of it cause it's really weird. But it shows that even if you give Jews a lot of land, because their culture is so adapted, For less space, they use the land in a way where they're not like taking it up with giant houses and everything. So, I don't want to say that you're I do hear
More Births: it.
I do hear it. No, I really do. I do want to 1 thing. I do want to emphasize this is and this is the core of the topic of I say the fertility stack is that there. It is multifactored and I would agree with you that pronatal belief and culture are the most important element and I have that, you know, as the top of the I also want to point out there is, you know, quite a, you know, quite a significant housing restraint, particularly when you can't have, [00:06:00] you know, all of you know, all of cultures you know, being as pronatal as, as you can.
As Israel. So I want to, I want to, you know, present some stats, show us some stats. Sure, sure.
Simone Collins: Well, and while Dan pulls up some stats I will point out that one thing that really changed the way I look at this is a mother that I speak with a lot pointed out that it made sense or it could work to have a really big family and a lot of kids in a really small house.
When you lived in a culture where obviously the kids are playing outside all day They just come home for dinner and they sleep they basically eat and sleep in the house And the rest of the time they're out playing in the neighborhood kids can't go out anymore. They're not allowed to go out There's no space for all those kids
Malcolm Collins: simone You're the one who brought up the wolves of new york kids So these were like a family of like eight people who lived in a studio apartment and they never went outside in new york Leaving once a year and they grew up perfectly emotionally normal and everything like that.
You do not need space. You do not need the outdoors. They may have a [00:07:00] modifying effects, but they are not. There are ways to build culture around this. And this is like if I was going to conceptualize a fertility stack, instead of putting culture at the top of it, I'd say a fertility stack is almost like a A chart on the wall that like you need to read and culture is the lens so somebody can be like Oh that housing number is fuzzy and it's like no just change out the lens like ka chink and it's like oh It's not fuzzy anymore you don't need to because if you change culture you can change the optimal amount of really almost anything in the fertility stack whether that's income or housing or space but continue.
Yeah
More Births: What I'm showing here on the screen is this is a map of fertility in Sydney, Australia. So you have great, it's greater Sydney. So all the surrounding area is the Sydney suburbs. And then you have you know, downtown Sydney is that area with a fertility of one. So you're, you're in the, when you're in single family homes.
[00:08:00] And, you know, and I want to emphasize that this is normies. Okay. You know, these are,
Malcolm Collins: this, this could also be a map of urban monoculturism. Well,
Simone Collins: I think this thing is, is, is fertility roundup. Zvi, who mentions your work and talks about it also points out that what we're looking at is a lot of selection effects too, you know, like people who are choosing not to have kids don't go to urban.
Oh, I,
More Births: I know that. That's a, that, that is a. A fair point. I do want to point out particularly, you know, in terms of the selection argument. Well, I don't know if we want to take a minute here to look to go over this chart before we go to go on. Sure. Let's go over this chart. Yeah. So we do see that that the fertility in the Sydney Suburbs is very healthy.
It's, you know, around two you know, up to, up to 2.
1,
In many of the Sydney suburbs, as, as you get to the urban core, you're down to 1. And then, and then in the, in the urban core of Sydney your fertility is 1. 0. And I, [00:09:00] there's a couple, there's one factor that I really want to emphasize is Is is that is most of the apartment towers you know, and in downtown urban areas, it's all, you know, high rise apartment towers.
And most of these apartment towers tend to be studios and 1 and 2 bedroom apartments. So they tend to, you know, they tend to be very, very small. And there's actually. There's actually pretty strong cultural norms now that didn't exist before where, you know, the boys are supposed to have their, you know, if you have a boy, they're supposed to have their own room with only boys.
If a girl is supposed to have their own room with only girls, and it's supposed to be separate from the parents. That's the, I'm not saying, I'm not pressing about putting a value judgment on that. I'm just saying that that's the norm that we have now. And it's a pretty strong norm because Child Protective Services, you know, We'll actually use things like that, you know, as a judgment for whether they'll take somebody's kids away.
[00:10:00] So, so this is, this is a pretty,
Malcolm Collins: you know, we need to stop that in government. I mean, I think that this is a great point. You know, if we get in with the Trump administration with this task force. We need to be removing those sorts of barriers with Child Protective Services. And I'd also note, when you're talking about the city and people living in these cramped spaces, a point that Zvi made in his roundup that I thought was really powerful, which is that you actually probably want smaller apartments being made in urban centers, rather than larger apartments, if what you care about is fertility rates.
Because they are smaller apartments than individual people. What is really correlated with a drop in fertility rates isn't living in smaller apartments, but it's living with roommates. That's the thing that has like the biggest drop. And so if you get a bunch of like two bedrooms in like the, the middle of a city, instead of really small studios, then that means more people are living with roommates, really, that's what's happening.
And instead of having more room to themselves and more money to themselves, whereas I would say like the number one thing for me for an urban center would [00:11:00] be to change the zoning. to make very inexpensive, extremely small units for people during the stage of their life where they're looking for a wife.
And I think you can already see, do you engage in the stage of life where you go to a city to look for a wife? Lyman stone did data on this, and I'm sure you've looked at it where he shows that actually being in a metro area is increases your lifetime fertility rate. Whereas it's living with parents or living with a group that decreases it.
You, you saw that one. To the extent that it helps
Simone Collins: you get married younger, it's really helpful. Also to the extent that you get married younger and make a lot of money younger, because there's additional research on housing and fertility shows that if you acquire a home at a younger age that has a positive effect on her fertility because theoretically that could be like an additional income stream.
It's more financial stability. It can make people feel more comfortable. But right now, of course, as a young person, it's really hard to buy a home. But if you go to a city and make a lot of money, find a partner like that's great. So I like that point. [00:12:00]
More Births: All right, let him talk. Right, right. So there is. What you just mentioned, I, I, you know, I, I think that, that, that, that I have to disagree with it and, and here's why, because you know, I did read, you know, Sfi's Fertility Roundup, and I, I think it's, it's, it, it is, it does jive with how a lot of free market economists think, but, but actually what has happened, and we have enough experience to see this is that East Asia has done exactly this.
East Asia has, has a ton of exactly what you're talking about. Very inexpensive you know, small apartments for singles one and twos. And what I, what I had a post that, that got a lot of I think on Sunday is I, I called it a, it's a de facto one child policy where the people have tiny apartment.
They're very inexpensive, but they're very, very [00:13:00] small all across Asia. And the places where that are built like this, this is where you see fertility rates, you know, in Seoul. Of you know, of I think 0. 55 or something in Seoul and, and, you know, it's, there's kind of a misconception that Seoul is very expensive.
Actually, the rents in Seoul are 75 percent less than in the, in New York city. So you're going to pay 25%. In Seoul, what you're going to pay in New York City. So I lived
Malcolm Collins: in Seoul in, in one of these units,
More Births: I've been to Korea three times. So we, we, we have both, we both know Korea, but go ahead, go ahead.
Malcolm Collins: So I lived in one of these units.
I would, I actually could not sing the praises of this style of unit enough for high fertility rates. And I'll explain why when I look at the shower units. So first I need to talk about how small these units are. The one that I lived in. Was probably about double the size of a twin mattress. In terms of like the room vault space.
Maybe, maybe three twin mattresses if you like cut them [00:14:00] up and like, the restroom was a toilet and then on top of the toilet was a showerhead. Like they didn't have a separate space to go for like showering and toilet. It was just in a corner and that was it. And it, it, It really felt like the room from it crowd.
I don't know if anyone's seen that episode where they get the TV that's too big.
Speaker: Man, these anti piracy ads are getting really mean. I think we're sitting too close to the screen, and the floor's all sticky over here. All right. Okay, let's move back then. I
still think we're too close. Well then, sit in the sink. I'm not sitting in the sink again. Okay, princess. Your flat is way too small for this telly. That's nonsense.
Speaker 4: What's wrong with you now? I need to go to the toilet. Well then, go.
I'll hold it [00:15:00] in.
Malcolm Collins: But the point being is I was able to afford this place very inexpensively while I had a high paying job and then send that money for my wife to get her graduate degree and save money. And then we used money I saved during that period to like buy a real house.
It. If I had to live in like a New York style, like one of these larger houses, I wouldn't have been able to save as much money and set myself up as much. Like, what are your thoughts on that?
More Births: Well, I, I mean, this is, this is why you know, I try to be sort of agnostic on what the answer is and just kind of, you know, be, be driven as much as I can, you know, by the data.
And I don't want to claim to be, to have a hundred percent of the answers, but I do want to say that You know, the lowest fertility rates that we see in the world are places, you know, whether it be in China or Korea or even even Tokyo, Tokyo does a little bit better. But Tokyo's fertility is still only around 1.
0. Right? But, but these are places where, you know, [00:16:00] housing is actually abundant and cheap, but it's very small
Simone Collins: when I think that if it comes back to culture, like again at this, like, I'm really interested in the effects of that psychedelics can have from a therapeutic standpoint, whether you're dealing with depression or PTSD, but the research all shows.
Basically, if you just. Have a trip. You just like, okay, whatever. Try it out, but you don't go in with structure intentions, you know, the sort of a framework and plan like you don't change. You don't see an improvement in your situation where it's you come in with this framework of you're working with a therapist.
Here's the plan. You're coming in with these intentions. It can be transformational. I think the problem is in these cities that we're talking about, yeah. There isn't this perception of, okay, you go to the city to find your spouse, to make the money, to buy your house, to start your family. It is you go to the city to have fun.
You go to the city to travel more. You go to the city, you know, to, to do all these things. And when, when we look at these Asian cultures that are especially struggling with low birth [00:17:00] rates, when you look at the cultural traditions around dating, they're just. Like, it's very, very hard for people to find partners.
So it's no surprise to me that people in these cities are struggling. If you shifted that, and I know Tokyo, for example, is trying you know, Japan is trying to create new dating apps, for example and if you changed what it meant to live in the city and suddenly there were tons of singles events, or perhaps sponsored by the government, where you get dinner and drinks and it's speed dating you know, I think that things could be changed really quickly because it shifts the purpose of that low cost housing.
More Births: So, I don't know, I've got another, another Yeah, put up
Malcolm Collins: more, put up more, but I
More Births: want
Malcolm Collins: to hear you address Before we go further, I want to hear you address the Limestone Metro statistic, because I found that very interesting.
Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx): Specifically, this is the one here that being in a metro increases your overall fertility rate if you're in a metro when you're younger.
More Births: Well, okay, this is, there's a, you know, the, how, how are, the U. S. data classifies Metro [00:18:00] is really, It's not very granular is, is what I'm saying.
And I know exact, I, I, I've studied this data and I, I know exactly what he's talking about. I, I read, I read those papers a hundred percent. And so I live in an urban area. I, I live in a city according to the, the census data. So I'm in, I'm in an urban area, but I am, I am sitting here in a. A five bedroom single family home.
That's that's urban and it's all jumbled together. So
Malcolm Collins: i'm looking you have a Five bedroom home more births. We need to brought five bedroom. Do you have a backyard too? Well, no wonder you like housing you're you're living the life here. I it's not amazing It's a mansion. I'm gonna put on, I'm gonna put on visualization of more Bird house
Speaker 6: This estate is basically Buckingham Palace's less famous cousin. With rooms and stunning gardens, it's a quintessential British manor. It's said to have an underground pool and cinema.
Malcolm Collins: and I'll put on the [00:19:00] library.
Here we go. This is Hollywood.
More Births: Yeah. Yeah. We put, I have five tours and, and, and Seven. Seven butler's quarters. No, I'm just kidding. No, no, no.
Simone Collins: And I had a slide down, like a, you know, for mean butler
Malcolm Collins: kid. No, we actually my, my, my, I have a family member who insists on having an au pair for every kid they have, and they're a very high fertility family, and it is comical.
Simone Collins: I don't know. I can say this must be nice. Yeah, it must be nice.
More Births: No, it, it, I, I do wanna it does make it, it does make it a lot easier. And this is one thing that we need to talk about. I think you know, there, there an a, a great, you know, some of the great pronatalist communicators one of my, one of them is my friend, Tim Carney.
He has a book called Family Unfriendly. It's, he's a, he's a father of six. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a, he's a great guy. I hope, I hope you guys can meet him at some point. We
Simone Collins: did. We did. We had him we had him over. Oh, yeah, the night before we saw you he went to our first one. Oh, great. Oh, great.
Yeah. And he's [00:20:00] awesome. Yeah. We, we, we should probably have him on the podcast. But, but his
More Births: point, and it's a point that I think you guys have made also is that one aspect of Of parenting. That's important for from a pronatal perspective is for it to be easy. Like, you can't, you can't have this high impact helicopter parenting and, and have six kids as I do.
I mean, we were, we, we, we probably did a, a more careful detailed bit of work with our older ones than we, than we you know, but it, it, it, it's fine. And they actually get to be a more responsible and they, and more, more confident. You know, my, my, my 17 year old took one of the cars and she's, I, I don't know, I don't even, I don't think any of us even know where she is.
And, and that's, she's, she's, she's, she's, she's trustworthy and she's very responsible, so it's okay. And, but, but, you know, we can't, it is impossible. To helicopter her. I, [00:21:00] I don't have, I don't have the capacity. Yeah, and that is
Simone Collins: to your point, to her benefit. Also, helicoptering really does, like, I was just thinking today about how I introduced foods to our first kid.
Of like, I pureed the food at home. I spoon fed everything. Nothing went in the mouth. Nothing was swallowed. Like, and it was very stressful and very expensive. And now like with our kids, I just give them like stuff to chew on when they're teething and then just let them hand feed. With non choking hazard foods when they feel like it and I don't worry about it and it's so much more sustainable and that's just like all across the board.
So it isn't, but again, that's culture, but I didn't want to mention,
More Births: I didn't want to mention as well, you know, talk about, you know, urbanization, as I say, I, I'm part of the urban category and, you know, having a house in the suburbs is not the, is not what I'm talking about. I'm not talking, you can have pretty good density.
In the suburbs. What I'm talking about is these these high rise like we saw the man like [00:22:00] soul like Sydney, where the suburbs of Sydney have have quite healthy fertility, and it's that urban core, and you can argue why and there is an intersection. I do want to mention that there is. I do agree that there's an intersection with culture there.
Malcolm Collins: This didn't used to be the case. And I point this out to people, like people are like, Oh, city's always low fertility. That's, that's not true. Like there have been periods of immigration in the United States where everyone was like, ha, ha, ha, the Irish, you know, it's always like. Five families living in one house was tons of kids.
Like there have been periods in history where urban centers had high fertility rates, but they were always periods, not where urban centers had larger houses, but where there were cultures in those urban centers that normalized sharing the space.
More Births: Well, yeah, so no, you're, you're, you're right. Fertility has been, you know, fertility in during the during the baby boom in New York City was above three.
So, so, so you can, but, but I do want to emphasize what I was saying before is that is that we have [00:23:00] kind of a confluence of fertility. You know, modern expectations say that, you know, if a, if a boy is, is above like toddler age and a girl is above toddler age, they're supposed to each have a separate room and separate from their parents.
Yeah, I do agree that you know, having a lighter hand and having, you know, a lot more flexibility about these things is a great idea, but I'm, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm also, you know, reporting things as they are. This is, this is the norm that we have. And in this, in this norm, you know, having a bunch of kids in an apartment is, Just not done it is it is not almost non existent In a great way that you could fix this and
Malcolm Collins: this is something that i'd love to do You know if we have a ton more kids like we go for mass production is vertical We need to do is get the like a bar that can support them and then basically just hang them [00:24:00] in bags so we can Okay
More Births: Bat cave or something like that.
Malcolm Collins: Meat hooks, meat hooks. Push a button and it goes, there's you, back and I hook up. No,
Simone Collins: we, we used to joke that we were gonna go to old morgues and buy the the drawers. You know, just pull out bets. Wait, Simone, I don't remember
Malcolm Collins: this cause I
Simone Collins: would
Malcolm Collins: have done
Simone Collins: that. And we've joked about that like a billion times every time we watch some kind of,
Malcolm Collins: Well, can you put like a an alert for this?
I want my kids to sleep in the morgue, George. We can pull them out. Your reporters would go apoplectic about this. But let's see more stats here, Dan.
More Births: I, I, okay. You, you want to see more on, on, on density? Yeah,
Simone Collins: then I also want to talk about, But the elements of the fertility stack, because I am curious, you, you ran us through it when we were in DC, but I want to hear
Malcolm Collins: the part of the recap of it.
Density wise, that density is okay. What you need is a cultural tradition of living in different levels of density at different stages of your life, [00:25:00] which is what I was raised with. And if you had this cultural tradition, which I believe we actually have, it's just Some people have forgotten it because we don't pass on our culture.
Well anymore. It's it's it's obvious to people Oh, I go in the city when i'm young and looking for a spouse and then I leave the city and have kids after that and yet you know One of the things I heard that really got me is you're supposed to go to a city and run Now people go to a city and sit and and they don't understand why their lives end up becoming a disaster But yes, tell me about this.
More Births: Okay, so this this is you know for for cities around the world You you know, I found and again, I'm trying to simply report things as I see them. You
know,
I'm trying to be a referee here and just present the data. 11 thing. That is a very strong correlation. Is that the higher the share of apartments as a fraction of total housing, you know, the lower the fertility rate.
So you have places, you [00:26:00] know, like China and Korea, Spain. Also, Italy. Also where almost all of the housing is apartments, they tend to have lower fertility and places on the other end of the spectrum, like, you know, you know, Atlanta is a good example where, you know, Almost all of the housing is houses.
You know, fertility you know, it is much higher. So
Malcolm Collins: sorry. Does anyone here believe that Paris has a higher fertility rate than Atlanta or Dallas? That seems unbelievable to me.
More Births: Well, you know, France overall has a, has, has a relatively high fertility. Well, there's a couple of things about Paris. I do believe that.
I do believe that data point because Paris has a very high proportion of Muslim immigrants. So I think that Well, I'm
Simone Collins: Catholic, right? I mean,
More Births: Catholicism helps. Yeah, but No,
Malcolm Collins: Catholicism doesn't help. Well, I think,
More Births: I think what we could be seeing in Paris, we could be seeing a strong effect [00:27:00] of Muslim immigrants.
Malcolm Collins: So in a lot of people, I'm sorry, I need to be clear about the stats here around Paris. France typically has a uniquely high fertility rate among its white population as well. It is not just the immigrants that are boosting it. Yeah, they, they probably have an effect. You're absolutely right about that.
But it also has a uniquely high native
More Births: fertility rate. Yeah, and France, you know, one thing that's really cool about France is we, we, I'm, I'm hearing baby industry there, right? Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm going to mute myself. That's wonderful to hear. You know, me and baby industry hung out and we, I got her to sleep, but at our last meetup, she's your
Simone Collins: biggest fan.
I think she, she can probably hear you and be like, Where's my Dan?
More Births: Right. So, but you know, what, one thing I want to say in Paris or in France's favor, is that, is it the French leaders like have no problem just saying like, Hey guys, for the sake of the nation, like everybody, please have more [00:28:00] children and like in, in the Anglosphere.
Like in England that would be gauche and like completely embarrassing. Like the French Prime Minister, and not just Macron, but like every French Prime Minister since World War II has said that. That, you know, it's important to Have children and you know, to, and to, but don't you,
Malcolm Collins: don't you like being in a subversive movement?
Like for American culture, isn't it even better that I can say have more children and it's subversive and cool and rebel? Like,
More Births: yeah, no, I, yeah, there, there is something, something cool about that to, to be the, the underground, the pro rebel
Malcolm Collins: beat the system out
More Births: pronatalist underground, right?
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, you got to have we will replace you as our slogan.
Yeah. I'm a very
More Births: big tent kind of guy. So that's my own, but, but yeah.
Malcolm Collins: Actually, Simone, can we, can we talk to, to Kevin Dullard about making natalist clothes, make the [00:29:00] slogan? We will replace you.
More Births: Oh boy. Anyway but yeah, no, I do, I do want to emphasize. That the density and apartment living is not the only thing, but in order to I, as far as I can tell, in order to have healthy fertility and live in an apartment or a dense configuration, you really have to have a very pronatal culture.
So Israel has that, you know, 1 example that people give is that you have a high fertility in the. You know, one of the more dense places on earth is the Nile Delta, like around Cairo, Egypt, but mostly, you know, and that's true. You do have high fertility. You also have a high, I just saw data just this week that the, the per, the percentage of the population that believes in pure Sharia law is like [00:30:00] 80 some percent in Egypt.
It's like a hair. It's a smidgen higher than in Afghanistan.
Simone Collins: Whoa!
More Births: In Egypt? What happened? So like the, the common man in Egypt what is very extremely hardcore, like fundamentalist Islam.
Okay.
Your man on the street in Egypt. Yeah. So there's an interesting like political point here, which is you know, the, you know, our American leadership had the, had the idea that we need to knock off the military dictatorship in Egypt in order so that the people can get, you know, can be free.
And so you can have a liberal society. Actually, the military dictatorship was the reason for the liberal society because they were, they were keeping a lid on like, unlike the, the extreme radical fundamentalism that, that, that's the, that's like actually the, the core belief of like 80 percent of the population.
Simone Collins: That's one, it's such an interesting contrast to [00:31:00] Iran, which has so lost God, despite the government really trying to impose it. We did an episode on this, it's something like
Malcolm Collins: only like 26% of the population still identifies as religious and only like, 40% believes in, in like heaven. Yeah. And so this
More Births: is the power of grassroots culture.
This is a strong a strong data point in support of your, your, your theory of people rebelling against the government in a way. Because, because in Egypt you had a secular government and, and a grassroots that's like. You know, fervently religious and in Iran, you, you, you have had the opposite effect where you had a, a theocratic group on top.
And this is the point I
Malcolm Collins: am, I am like, like a lightning rod about, it is so important that people get it through their heads, that if you attempt to enforce, through laws and through government, religious systems, it is the worst thing you could conceivably do for it. It's going to
Simone Collins: [00:32:00] backfire if you make government do it.
Malcolm Collins: But for your religion, if you, if you want more extreme evangelical Christians or more Catholics, porn bans. We'll have the exact opposite effect. If you want more of that banning gay marriage, we'll have the exact opposite effect. Anything you attempt to do to heavy handedly enforce your religious values on a society has the effect of killing that religion within that society.
You can see this in the data. It is just an overwhelmingly powerful effect. But what I want to hear here, and this is something, you know, when we're talking about all of this, where I'm like, Oh my God, it is so important that people get it is the culture. And family culture, not about enforcing culture from the government, but like you have to take responsibility, i.
e. you cannot be like, Oh, the government will like ban porn and like, my kids will be fine or whatever. Like, how do you personally teach your kids when it's okay to get married, what's their sexuality, et cetera. And I [00:33:00] think if you don't take this culture first mindset. It's very easy. And I see this even with members of the prenatalist movement to say, I'm just going to raise my kids the way my grandparents, you know, like, IE, like we're going to go back to the way things were in the 1950s and 1940s and I'll raise them in that format.
And within a household that's operating within that format and they'll be fine. And I'm like, no, they won't. They won't. All deconvert you, you can see this in the data. You'll, you'll keep like one of your kids. And if we don't like hold that in front of people's faces, like you can't just do things the way you used to, you can't just enforce these values on people.
Then they end up focusing on this little stuff. Like, well, you know, I'm a traditional Christian and I'm trying to make, you know, housing smaller, you know what I mean? Like housing barrier.
More Births: Well, I do want to say the, the, in the data, housing. You know, does seem to matter quite a bit. So I don't want to dismiss it.
I don't want the other thing, you know, I don't want to say it doesn't matter. I'm not, I'm not going to say it's the most important thing, but I'm not the other. The other reason that [00:34:00] I stick to housing so much or that I mentioned housing quite a bit is that it's, it's so lasting. And if You know, these where you have a sea of urban high rises, you know, almost everywhere in the world that you see that you see, you know, fertility rates extremely low, usually below one.
I mean, so, so that that type of that level of density in the data, it just looks it looks very bad. But I, I will agree that the pronatalist culture is the, is a trump card that can overcome. You know, a whole lot and that's
Malcolm Collins: where people live is largely culturally influenced, right? Like, okay. If you're more urban monoculture minded, if the urban monoculture has infested your mindset more, you're more likely to live near an urban center.
And I, and I understand, like, it's one of these things to me where it's like, but I'm able to live in an urban center without that affecting me. I just don't [00:35:00] know if like smaller houses affect, or I have seen any evidence. And I mean, any evidence at all. That, that, that smaller living spaces affect already high fertility subgroups.
More Births: I did see, and I don't have it in front of me and I wish I did, but, but Limestone did find that even for Orthodox Jews, he found that even for Orthodox Jews, they had higher fertility when they lived in the New York suburbs than they did in, in the, So even
Malcolm Collins: cross traditions, cause that's the thing that really get it when I mean track across.
I don't, I think it's really like silly and I basically personally ignore any graph that's like people currently living in the center of Manhattan have a few kids. I'm like, obviously. Right. But what I want to see is people who have ever lived in the center of Manhattan, how does that affect their fertility rate?
Because again, I think that this is a life stage thing.
More Births: Well, you know, I had an interesting [00:36:00] conversation, which I. You know, with like a, a young professional I, I, I kind of did a, a tour of newly built apartments in, in Bethesda Rockville near, near where I live. And I was talking to people, you know, first of all one notable thing is that among, you know, I, I, I went there and I acted like I was Somebody looking for a three bedroom apartment and I went to the rental office and I asked and four different newly built towers that I visited had zero three bedroom apartments in the entire building.
I mean, I don't mean,
I don't mean none. I don't mean zero three bedrooms available to rent. I mean, I mean, the building was constructed with no units being more than two.
Simone Collins: That makes sense because from an investment standpoint, The understanding of the real estate market is this basically three plus bedroom houses are the worst possible investment because there is a.
Glut of that inventory from boomers becoming [00:37:00] empty nesters and moving out of their three plus bedroom houses is big downsize and then there's this massive population of dinks or one kid couples or families That only want two bedroom or can afford two bedroom houses and spaces. Yeah. Well, I don't I
More Births: I'm not I'm, not a developer.
I have a There's a developer that I'm communicating sometimes with on X.
Yeah. His
name is Bobby Feigen and I want to talk to him more about what exactly are the economic reasons, but it's, it's a pretty, it's a pretty dramatic fact that, that all over America, you know, three bedroom and larger apartments are built at all.
And I think it, I think it, I think it has something to do with the fact you get more, more paying renters per square foot, stuff like that. It may have something to do with rules around, you know, fire escapes and egresses and things like that. I'm not, I'm not sure. I really think it's about
Simone Collins: demographic trends.
More Births: It could be. I [00:38:00] don't, I don't want to say why they're, they're doing this, but this is what they are doing. They are, they are almost exclusively building like studios and ones and twos almost exclusively. Yeah,
Simone Collins: that totally makes sense. Yeah. And
More Births: so I talked to a, a, a guy who he was a graduate of, of UVA top graduate, high income, married.
He ha he and his wife happily married. He and his wife have one kid. He, he said he stopped at one. They live in a two bedroom apartment in one of these buildings. He said they would like to have four children. But he doesn't feel like he could do it in the space that he has. He said, if I had a single family home, I would I would love to have four children.
And I'm like, Holy s**t.
Malcolm Collins: Well, this is the point, right? Like he doesn't feel like he, I mean, obviously he can do it in the space he has, but the cultural expectations lead him not to feel like he can do it in the space he has.
More Births: Right.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah.
More Births: Yeah. That, that, yeah. So you're, you, you have a, you have a good point in the, in the past people.
[00:39:00] Would put a lot of people in, in a, you know, Lincoln's log cabin, probably one, one room probably had, you know, the entire family, plus grandma and, and uncle Jethro or whatever.
Malcolm Collins: But what I, what I guess I'm saying here is, look, you can, you can choose to fight. Like you're, you're choosing like a slider, like where do I place my fight on this particular issue?
Right. Why would I place any fight in the getting larger, cheaper apartments when I know that like, that fight is almost impossible to win, but the culture fight is at an individual, intentionally prenatal individual, pretty easy to win.
More Births: I, I, I hear you. That's, that is a, that is a good point. I, I do wanna.
Yeah, I am very troubled by by East Asia. I'm very troubled by Asia and the fact that they seem to have painted themselves into a corner with like basically 100 percent of their housing being, [00:40:00] I would say, Unsuitable to families by modern norms. And I mean, maybe it's possible to get people to have, you know, to, to, to put like six, seven people in one room again.
But
Malcolm Collins: I
More Births: want to
Malcolm Collins: elaborate on a point that you were making because you've, you've made it before more completely. Which is to say housing is very durable. You know, once you've built all of this housing, that's the way it is. So in East Asia, you can't be like, oh, you need to change all your housing to make it like bigger.
Like the housing is already there. Right. And it's going to be there for another 30, 40 years.
More Births: Right. So that's a, that's a, that's a, that's a problem. If, and you know, one thing I want to mention the fastest growth. Like of any country that, as far as I know, the fastest demographic growth of any country in history was that was the United States in the early part of its history.
So America went from like, I think about 3 million, [00:41:00] I may get this number. Not exactly right, but from about 3 million in 1776 to about 76 million in the year 1900. So just
Simone Collins: mostly, mostly, mostly birth rates, not immigration. That's right. That's exactly right.
Malcolm Collins: It was an average in our area, I think in the 1800s, it was an average of 14 children per woman.
Oh my goodness. We went
More Births: for it. Yo! And the thing that I do want to, there's a couple of things that were happening there. So, so the culture element was a big piece of it. You had these, you had these these great awakenings like round after round of great awakenings in the United States that, that, that, that re infused Americans with this fervent religiosity.
But another thing you had is the pioneer culture where. Where people and I could see this in my own ancestry. I, I had a, a lovely family friend who, who traced my family's ancestry back. I have, I have some of my ancestry goes back [00:42:00] to the Mayflower and you could see you could see that people you know, people would constantly, we're constantly going West and they would, they would stay in one place for like a couple of years and.
And then, and then everybody would go further west and you know, constantly spread out on new territory. And that seems to, you know, this, this abundant space and the ability to spread out seems to have been one of the factors that, that, that did play a role in America's Ability to expand so quickly demographically.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, I'd point out here that what really killed American demographics from this perspective, right. And I actually think when you talk about East Asian fertility rates and you're talking about cultural norms, you know, Oh, it was modern cultural norms. So. So let's let's like study where these cultural norms came from.
If you look at during our period of rapid growth, it was common even in the frontier. So you can look at our house, which was built originally on the frontier. It was originally built as like a stone house by one guy. And if you look at the way the house is divided in the way the [00:43:00] rooms are used, so you can see where like the piping goes at one point.
Four different families were living in this one house. They were all related, like brother, sister, et cetera, you know, so like you would marry someone while you were still living with your parents and then you divide your house up among all the siblings or something and then go out of one of you made a lot of money.
And, and so what changed this cultural norm? It was World War Two. After World War Two basically America had this big economic boom largely unsustainable. It was because it was exploiting the rest of the world. And This economic boom is where concepts like the possibility of a nuclear family were born, i.
e. a husband goes out and supports the rest of the family on one income. This is not the norm anywhere historically. This was just a result of an economic boom that happened in America due to a cheat code. That was basically like Europe's factories are all destroyed. And you know, all the everywhere else in the world that could produce high tech stuff had destroyed their economies.
And so we could you know, really gain from that. So we had this ultra luxurious lifestyle. Anyway, the [00:44:00] culture that was the birthplace of the pre urban monoculture. Culture was born here in America. And then that was exported to Japan. That was exported to China. That was exported to Korea. That was exported to all of these other places in regards to how much space do you need?
It was actually specifically after the war in America where it became common for people not to marry until the person they were going to marry owned a home. That is not traditional America. That's specifically, I think it changed from 40 percent to 80 percent after the war.
More Births: I do think that, you know, The housing aspect is one of, is, is one of the factors that I think gave us the baby boom.
So, so from 1946 to 1940, 64, of course, fertility in the United States, you know, shot up to like above three, which was amazing.
Malcolm Collins: But we can look at the data and we know that it's mostly medical advances. I would
More Births: say, no, I, if you're talking about the works in progress piece, I read everything. I read all of that.
Yeah. [00:45:00] I, I do, you know, they, they, they, they got some stuff. There's some stuff that I agree with most, most strongly. One of the things that I agree with most strongly is you had, you had a high rate of young marriage. So, so that was, you had people, women marrying at the, at an average age of 20, which was the earliest.
that women married like in, in U. S. history. So, so you had this, this really young age of marriage. So that was one cause of the baby boom. A
Simone Collins: huge cause. Maybe
More Births: the single, the single greatest cause, but another cause and the works in progress piece did point, point to this thing was you had a huge surge in suburban building, you know, so it wasn't fancy.
It wasn't They weren't these little houses
Simone Collins: in a ticky tacky. Yeah, they weren't like great houses, but they're fine. Actually enabled early homeownership to in the sense of like economic independence and security. Well, there's another thing I can say as [00:46:00] a father of
More Births: six, you know, one of my experience, my kids are very They can be high conflict at times.
Let me just, you know, which is a good healthy spirit, I guess, but it's not a bug. I think it's great. But having space, just a little space to spread them out and put them in little quarters over here over there. You know, is the greatest peace mechanism that I know of in our household.
Malcolm Collins: I agree, but you can do that without extra space.
So, so in our household, you know how we do this? We do this with teepees. We have little play teepees and, and when the kids are getting rough, we just set up all the teepees and we go, okay, go to your teepee and play there.
More Births: Okay. Interesting. I mean, the problem with older, you'll see, you'll see, it gets more difficult when they get a little older because, you know, my second daughter, she is an incredible talker.
She's the funniest person that I know. And, you know, I [00:47:00] mean, even a level of humor that, that, that, that is, is, is very remarkable, but, but she, she's really quick witted. And when she gets to arguing with her siblings. You know, it's, it's nuclear, it's nuclear. It, I mean, if you can have a nuclear war of, of words, you know, and the only thing that I know to do when that, when that happens is to get them in different parts of the, the house or somebody takes a walk or this or that, you know, and how, you know, having a yard, having a place for the kids, one aspect that I think is very valuable as well as is for little kids to be able to play in the yard, you know, basically relatively unsupervised.
And they, you know, and this is back to what Tim Carney was saying about kind of the, the lower effort parenting, as opposed to, you know, if I lived in an apartment, in a, in an apartment, in a high rise, I'd have to, we'd have to come up with things for the kids to do five times a day.
Malcolm Collins: You can't do that even in the suburbs.
Now it's illegal. We've got to see [00:48:00] that's called on us for having our kids play in the yard unsupervised.
Simone Collins: Yeah, we bought this place thinking, Oh, this is great. It's right by a park. Our kids can go play in the park. No, no, we would go with the virtual,
Malcolm Collins: you know, if we get into the administration with a, with a, you know, the panel, one of the things we really need to focus on is dismantling CPS.
Or at least re establishing norms around how you can call it and why you can call it.
More Births: Right, I, I, yeah, I do think, I, I, that is a, I, I do believe that that is a genuine issue, which I, I, I, I don't, I can't really put a finger on, on, in terms of numbers, but I think You know, they're they have very strict expectations about about density.
So so they are one of the enforcers of of the expectation of, you know, lower density and and, you know, they have a strong concept of crowding and you know, things like this. And also child's independence. You know, if they go to the park by themselves, these are issues that, you know, there's no none of these are indications of [00:49:00] abuse.
But but and I think it's it is very, you know, traumatic. You know, we're very fortunate, you know, knock on wood, right? That that hasn't happened. You know, to us, but it has happened to friends and and you know, even to a relative. And it's very traumatic. And I can see why after that happens, somebody would be very reluctant to have further kids.
Because it, because it's,
Simone Collins: it feels illegal. Like it literally feels like we're in trouble for having this many kids sometimes, which is. Not good. I mean, and it's not, and it's not just that too. It's not just CPS. It's also the level of regulatory control over child care, like the credentials you need to work at a daycare, for example.
And even like you can see the dampening effects on fertility just from their babysitting regulation. I mean, we haven't relatively lucky compared to some places considering that you can't just have your neighbor watch. Oh yeah. This is, this is a,
More Births: this is an antenatal [00:50:00] factor. You know, in, in DC, for example, very close to where I live there's a rule that you have to have like a college degree to watch like a, a, a small child.
And I don't see how, how college has anything to do with watching small children in terms of the skill set. There's no, there's no reason for, for that. And it just makes. Childcare much harder to get much more expensive. And you know, the, the fertility rate in Washington DC itself is around 1. 0. So, so, so what is
Simone Collins: this?
I mean, like no one lives in DC except for college students. So that surprised me, but I mean, I just, I don't know. I'm the idea that the government wouldn't have to. Control over anything like this. I mean, there's, most people don't know this, but there's even like, there's some states in the US have regulations on how many dogs you can have.
For example, some cities limit the number of dogs you can have. Like there's a lot of control over how people live and I don't like any of it. Hold on,
Malcolm Collins: so let's hear his, his stack idea. I want to hear the fertility
Simone Collins: stack. So what, aside from housing, [00:51:00] would you say really belongs in the fertility stack?
And do you have it ranked by most to least important? I mean, I know all this stuff. Okay, yeah,
More Births: I will. The most important thing I would say is pronatal belief and ethos. Alright, culture, yes. So I had a, I had a tweet about Mongolia. I don't know if you saw that, but it was, it was retweeted by the owner of the platform.
So it got like 10 million views or 15 million, actually.
Simone Collins: That's so cool.
More Births: Yeah. So, but yeah, Elon retweeted that, but it's about it was about how Mongolia has. Has this award that they give for mothers of four Children to six Children. If you're if you have at least four Children, you get the order of maternal glory.
Second class. If you have six Children, you get the order of maternal glory. First class. And that actually, you know, cause Mongolia's Fertility rate to to increase very sharply and they make a big deal out of it. And you [00:52:00] have so you have this this pronatal ethos and if you believe that having children is good, you know Is very good very important.
That is I would say the the The most important thing on your on your fertility stack. So that's that's element number one, and that can conquer so much. So if you want to look at a country like Israel that has high fertility, even though they're dense, even though they're educated, even though women have more education than men, even though they're technological.
These are all factors that are negative, right? But they have one factor that is paramount, which is that they believe Really, really intensely that having Children is centrally important. And that is kind of a trump card. It's not, as I say, it's not the only thing, but it's if it has, if it has a waiting, maybe that's at least 50%.
Maybe more. Okay. So next element of the fertility stack is marriage. So, Age of marriage or just marriage more broadly like [00:53:00] both so marriage rate Is one I agree with this one
Malcolm Collins: by the way
More Births: marriage rate is one marriage age Is is another so the the baby boom the biggest cause of the baby boom as I as i've said I think is marriage age when you when you get married at 20, which was the average age in Of the women married in the United States in 1960, the average age was 20.
Malcolm Collins: Half we're getting married, like, like dramatically. But yeah, for
More Births: everybody, for every old spinster who gets married at the age of 23, right? That means somebody else is getting married at the age of 17. Right? Well, a better
Malcolm Collins: for everybody getting married at 26. Somebody's getting married at 14. Okay.
More Births: Anyway, different world, different world. That. But, but yeah, yeah. So, I think, but when the average age of marriage was 20 like it was, you know, it was almost impossible not to have like three kids because you know, you have like a 20 [00:54:00] year span of, of fertility, especially, you know, one thing that people really need to realize is that fertility is far, far higher in the twenties than in the thirties.
So like by the age of. There's a something called a fecundability, and I actually want to, I want to share this chart. Here we go. This is one of the most important charts. exists in all of pronatalism. So we're going to it right now. This is the most important chart that exists right here. There it goes. I'm just sharing it now.
Simone Collins: Let's take a look here.
More Births: This is called, this is fecundability. And this was, this was done. This was a study that just came out in 2023. And so this is the monthly probability of a Being able to get pregnant. And I don't know, you know, the axis. So I, you can, I, I don't know if the, if the axis [00:55:00] scales according to, but, but so, so don't look at the axis as an exact percentage, but look at the scale of it.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I don't know what
More Births: to, but I like to say
Malcolm Collins: they didn't go younger than 15. I'm just saying this graph has a totally other side to it here.
Simone Collins: It does show though. I mean like, and there's obviously also a lot of complicating factors around. Wait, hold on. How did they
Malcolm Collins: get the 15 to like 18 year old people?
No, I
More Births: don't think, I don't think, I think they, yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. That's an
Malcolm Collins: interesting question. All
More Births: right. But here we do see that the peak. Of like human fertility is at the age of 20
Simone Collins: And isn't that interesting that also is like the peak age like physical appearance that men just constantly want to date Like no matter how old they are.
They want to date women who are like 20 19 20. Yeah it just perfectly correlates with fecundity, which is
More Births: Right, that is [00:56:00] pretty remarkable. And another remarkable thing is that you know fecundability by the age of 32, it's already, it's already down to one third. Of what it was at age 20. So getting married in your twenties is so massive in terms of fertility.
It, it swamps, you know, almost everything else. And as, as I say, this is what, this is the easiest and most obvious explanation for the baby boom is that people were just getting married super young and they had, you know, so many highly fertile years You know, and there's another thing when you, when you get married young, I mean, I think my wife was 24.
So, and I was 27 When you get married very young, like we did, we had four and then, and then it was overwhelming and we, we were swamped and we, and we stopped and then, and then we, we caught our breath and you know, we're able to get a second wind and we still had time for a second wind when we were in our, in our mid thirties you know, to have two more.
And so [00:57:00] we but most people. at their mid thirties, they're starting with round one. So,
Simone Collins: yeah.
More Births: So, you know, that's another thing that the people in previous eras benefited from. If you marry early and you have kids early, you can, you know, you, you can, you can get kicked in the stomach and roll around and then, and then you can recover and get back on your feet again.
Simone Collins: Well, and now actually we're seeing an interesting trend and cause I think, you know, a big discussion that Malcolm and I have, our stance that we hold is. Pandora's box is open with, with modernity, with you know, globalization, with culture, like there is no going back. You can't undo it and just go back to how things were.
You're going to have to find a new way forward.
More Births: One of the interesting ways forward. And I do want to say, I very much
Simone Collins: agree
More Births: that, That we're not going to get out of this the same way we came in
Simone Collins: exactly You got to push you got to push through and one of the ways people are pushing [00:58:00] through which I think is really interesting Is couples are getting married young, which is really great.
They're freezing embryos And many of them are now then just waiting. So that actually will enable them to get pregnant at much later. Rare freezing
Malcolm Collins: is the number one, most important thing to high fertility. We'll
More Births: see. I, I, I, you know, I, I, I, as I say, I want to remain agnostic agnostic on something until I have seen data on whether you know, I, I, I, I, I, I do, you know, I'm a big, big tent pronatalist and I, and I think, you know, I'm, you know, and, and I, I held baby industry and it was wonderful.
And you know, I'm, I'm very much in favor of, of trying many things. I don't know. There is a, there is a possible scenario where where, where, where people, you know, put off forming a relationship that I saw some data that, no, hold on.
Malcolm Collins: No, but this is different embryo freezing versus egg freezing.
Mary freeze [00:59:00]
Simone Collins: good material young and see what, what this does embryo freezing. That is,
More Births: that is different. You're right, you're right. Because when you have
Simone Collins: a frozen embryo, like the, the, the big limiting, you already have a partner creating the embryos. It's not. Transferring them and carrying them like you could chemically delay menopause.
I think the oldest woman to give birth via IVF, she lied to the doctor, but she was in her sixties. So you can, like, it's amazing what you can do. Yes,
Malcolm Collins: it's the quality of the eggs at the age they're produced, which is, you know,
Simone Collins: we have to, yeah. So, like, I think that's, that's might be an interesting way that couples go forward.
Another, a very, a very common thing we're seeing among like a chic urban couples who are like up and coming is they get married young, as young as they can. And they freeze embryos and then they have kids naturally. And they're essentially creating the optionality to have high fertility, but still have kids the romantic traditional way, as long as they can.
While also [01:00:00] not compromising the health or feasibility of children later in age. So we're seeing interesting and promising trends on this front. But none of this changes the fact that early marriage is key here because freezing eggs and freezing sperm while a good idea to maintain optionality is just not as effective as freezing embryos and you can't freeze an embryo if you haven't done
Malcolm Collins: your printer yet.
And I do, I do agree with you. What is the biggest factor in what age you get married? Are you asking me? Anyone? Oh, the biggest factor? It's culture, it's obvious. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Culture. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,
More Births: culture broadly. Yes, of course, of course.
Malcolm Collins: Anyway, what's next in the fertility stack? What's next?
Yes. Yeah, what we got here,
More Births: religiosity is a, is a very strong factor. I mean, how, I guess religiosity is, yeah. I'd also say culture. Yeah. And, and you know, one thing we talk, you know, you, you've, you've talked about Catholic fertility and i, I, that what we, well, what I do seem to see is that. Where people do remain, you know, church going and faithful, they do have high fertility.
But [01:01:00] as we've seen in a lot of these Catholic countries, there's a high, very high rate of de de churchification,
Simone Collins: Deconstruction. Yeah.
More Births: So that's religiosity is another one. I mentioned the, the housing and the housing type. I really, and I'm, I, I'm, I'm gonna stick with my, my guns on that. That, that's a significant, not, not the only factor, but it is one of them.
It is one of them. It's a factor.
Simone Collins: It's a factor. And there's, there's tons and tons of research that show effect. So
Malcolm Collins: there is, there's research that show correlational effect. I actually don't think. Okay. Yes. Yeah. Correlation. Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah. Causation.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I, is there causational data on this that you've seen Dan?
More Births: Well, I would say there is causation in the modern world in the sense that you know, your you will have a hard cap, you know, culturally. And, you know, this is also true for you know, rental, you know, apartment complexes will kick somebody out if they have too many kids you know, beyond the capacity that they have, you know, for example two [01:02:00] kids per bedroom is, you know, Is seen as like a limit that apartment complexes.
Oh,
Simone Collins: just in terms of like, this is our fire code limit of residence. They'll have their
More Births: own limits that they can. Wow. You know, and I, and I know this because when I was, when I was a young and when I was five years old, my, you know, my parents were having kids in an apartment and they, and my, my little sister was born and they got.
They got summarily kicked out and told to kick, you know, I had to go get a, if we get a
Malcolm Collins: task force
More Births: together, make this illegal. Yeah, yeah, that, that, that, that could help, that, that could help. But I do, I do think that people also make the conscious decision based on their own perception of, of space. So I, I don't want to, we've talked about that quite a bit.
I'll, I'll, I'll move on another. Another point another factor is men's earnings. Men's earnings in particular. Men's earnings are pronatal. Women's earnings are not, [01:03:00] actually. So there is It's, it's
Malcolm Collins: entirely dependent on the culture. In some cultures, the less money you have, the more kids you have. The, some cultures, more money means more kids.
Okay, unless
Simone Collins: you change the culture around women marrying, like, low, low income, like women right now, and almost like, I think this must be universal across culture, want to marry men who are of higher status than them and higher economic wellbeing. And if you, if you have depressed male earnings, which you totally see in the data I just saw an ex like a couple of days ago, a really great graph showing how income has changed over time since the eighties across different groups.
And while it has gone up for women significantly especially minority women. It has plummeted for non college educated men. Just plummeted. And like, no wonder I don't particularly agree it
Malcolm Collins: hasn't plummeted. My point is, is everybody knows it was in certain cultural groups and, and the majority of cultural [01:04:00] groups, the less money you have, the more kids you're going to have.
Simone Collins: Yeah, but then you need like even poorer women. All I'm saying is basically like women are more likely to marry young if there's a large body of like, Higher status than them. Single men willing to marry.
More Births: There is a, I do see a lot of that in that is something that's pretty strong in the data, which is that that male earnings.
Like a high earning man in most modern societies is going to have more children than a low earning man. And actually the highest earning, the highest fertility subgroup is people who are high income and low education. So that would make a lot of sense. So, so if you, if you can
Malcolm Collins: imagine like a, Low indoctrination, whenever you hear education, you should think indoctrination, high income, low indoctrination.
More Births: But there is another problem with education that is not just indoctrination, which is simply years of schooling. So, you know, if you [01:05:00] assume that somebody is not going to get pregnant while a woman's not going to get pregnant, particularly while she's in school and she, and she's going all the way for a PhD at the age of 32, then that's That's like, here, here, I'm doing the Donald Trump hands here, right?
You see what I'm doing
Malcolm Collins: here? No better time to have kids than when you're getting a PhD or something like that, and people have done it and been like, yeah, this is like when people should be having kids. It's wild. That
Simone Collins: really does bother me. I mean, one, there is a culture currently in higher academia that many pronatal women in academia have pointed out that is pretty anti nudalist that they're getting a lot of side eye for having kids and they're seeing, it's like, oh, you're, you're, Compromising your career.
I don't know how you're gonna make it work. Whereas like that should be the opposite of the case. You really should start your families while you're in school. It is one of the best times to do it. So academia is, should be held very responsible for this topic. Well, there is also
More Births: in relation to that, you know, we, we have are, you know, our, our friend Catherine Pakaluk, you know, she had eight Children and [01:06:00] also raised a further six Children from her, her husband's first marriage, his his wife tragically passed.
And then she so it was kind of, so she inherited his six Children after his first wife passed and then had eight more. And she is a tenured economics professor who has a PhD from Harvard. Exactly. So, but what did she do? How did she do it? This
Malcolm Collins: is the person who wrote Heather's Children, by the way.
Continue. Yes, Hannah's Children. Yeah,
More Births: yeah. So, but which I, which I have, I actually, I actually wrote the very, The very first review of her book actually it's such a good book. I love it so much yeah, I wrote the first I I got a copy before it came out and I I put the the very first review Nice, so but but yeah, she yeah, yeah, yeah.
And what she did was she, she spaced out her PhD over like twice as many years. And like, it, it took her like, like 12 years to get tenure or something like that, [01:07:00] and she just was okay with that. And now she's very successful. Now she's like world famous. She's becoming world famous. So, you know, she's doing fine in terms of.
Her, I mean, becoming a world famous public intellectual is probably like the height of human accomplishment, right? You know? So, and raising a big family. You just don't have to do it all at the same time, is the point.
Simone Collins: Yeah, well, she does have it all. It just takes a while. And you don't
More Births: have to, you don't have to, what, what you have to do is have, have children in your twenties and early thirties.
Yeah. She couldn't go
Simone Collins: back and get that. She couldn't be like, now I've done it. Now I'm going to have my, you know, huge family. It would be gone. It was always the
Malcolm Collins: spouse, wife slash husband first. And then. Security, not security first, then wife says spouse. And I'd even go so far as to say you will never have real [01:08:00] security if you do it the other way around, because if you get security before you get wife slash spouse then the, the, that wife sees you as a source of potential income, resources, et cetera.
And they are much more likely to divorce you. I think a huge part of the drop in divorce for our generation has been because people understand this now. And for the individuals who don't see this, who want the security first, you, you will never have security in your life because you are just a time bomb of divorce.
More Births: Well, there's another point which I've, I've emphasized before, which is that if you look at wealth in the United States and probably a lot of countries are similar wealth is very low in the twenties and, and it starts to climb a little bit in the thirties, but wealth really takes off. In the forties and fifties.
But if you wait until the forties and fifties, you, your, your fertility window has passed you by. So, so you actually have to, most people have to have Children when they're young [01:09:00] and poor. I mean, even Elon Musk, when he was like in his twenties, you know, his, his wealth was like one one thousandth. Or one probably much less than one one thousand It was probably like one ten thousand one one hundredth of thousandth of what it is now you know if the point is that that there's this trajectory that almost everyone follows in the in modern society where most people are poor in their 20s and then and then start to Start to gain a little traction in their 30s and then are really taking off financially in their 40s and 50s You you can't wait that long.
You have to You you have to start much earlier. So just a couple more going through the fertility stack a little bit more. So grandparents support is a big one. That's a big a big thing. It's called aloe parenting. And grandparents are the biggest source of that in Israel. For example, in Israel, you have these thick family Networks beyond the nuclear family that provide a great deal of [01:10:00] childcare.
Malcolm Collins: Yeah, that, that makes a quick side question here. It might not be related to this discussion, but what determines a grandparent's likelihood of helping with parenting?
More Births: I mean, I think it's pronatal belief.
Malcolm Collins: It's culture. Yeah. It's literally culture. Everything you're saying here is culture is all the time.
Simone Collins: Sorry.
Malcolm Collins: Huh. I got it. I
Simone Collins: mean. Continue, continue, continue. I just
Malcolm Collins: want to make sure that we understand that it's literally culture.
More Births: Well, yeah, no, it's, it's interesting because my own grandparents who were wonderful people, but they didn't have that, that culture. No, my,
Malcolm Collins: my, my family doesn't have that culture.
And so you are responsible as a perinatalist for creating that culture in your kids with your own actions.
Simone Collins: Yeah. I mean, like we we've, we've baked it into our internal family culture of like, we are one, like we are. Happy to raise our kids, kids, you know, that is our you the most pronatal
More Births: grandparents type thing [01:11:00] that I have ever seen, which is, so in my neighborhood there's a Catholic couple that raised 11 children.
Okay. And then in a, in a decently big, but not enormous. You know, suburban house and then you know, of those 11 children, one of one of their kids had, like, you know, caught the bug, if you will, you know, got married young, married a wonderful young woman and wanted to have a big family. You know what the parents did?
They sold their house for really cheap to that son and his wife, like, way below market. And then they moved into an apartment. And so they, they kind of, and then, and then now they come over to their, to this house that was once their own house to watch the kids. That
Simone Collins: is wild. Wow. Dedication to the cause.
And they,
More Births: this is a young couple. They already have six, I think they're going to [01:12:00] get to 10 or 11, this, this young couple that lives down the street. And
Simone Collins: they would not be able to get there without that parent's support. And now they're young homeowners. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. So
More Births: I mean, that's like hardcore like here You want to do what we did you believe in having a big family take our house?
like
Malcolm Collins: You know, that's the culture that requires that you know, like, oh, yeah You know, right. What else is in this this this stack? What else is in the fertility
More Births: stack? Okay, so another one That almost nobody thinks about, but this is a significant factor across countries and across U. S. States is C sections.
So the higher rate of C sections that that there is the lower fertility would be. And I think, by the way, That this is kind of manufactured in the sense that I think
Malcolm Collins: this is a completely
More Births: irrelevant. This is more likely to be correlatory than you'd think. It's true in the data. And I'll tell you, I'll tell you why [01:13:00] is, is that doctors tell you that you can't have more than C sec more than they do.
Simone Collins: And that's, that is a big problem. That is something that
More Births: they shouldn't say, but they do. And I know that you've Simone, I think you've had four, right?
Simone Collins: Yeah, I've had four in my, my surgeon who's done two of those four the most she's ever done on someone is seven. And she says basically there's no correlation between the number of C sections you've had and problems.
It's all about specifically your unique biology. There's some women who like, no, like one C section, never again. And there are other women who it's like, keep going. That's a
More Births: wonderful point, which is that it is possible to have a lot more, but the messaging that doctors give overwhelmingly,
Simone Collins: Yeah. It's like, well, of course you're never going to have like two or
More Births: three only.
So there is like. And country like South Korea has a rate of C sections like, like 60 percent or 55 percent and this is not necessary and combine that with the kind of the message that [01:14:00] the C sections limit fertility. And then what you end up with is that there's a very strong negative relationship between the C section rates.
You
know what OECD country has the lowest rate of C sections? Ooh France? No, there's one OECD country with the highest fertility. Israel? Yeah.
Simone Collins: Oh, wow. That makes sense.
More Births: So Israel kind of, intentionally avoids un You know, unmedically necessary C sections. I'm a big fan of C sections that are medically necessary.
But the other thing is that there's a lot of miscommunication around it. I agree with that, yeah. Which, you know, I was very moved, Simone, when you said, I think you told Piers Morgan, right? You said, I'm gonna How many children are you going to have? You said it until they, they, they
Malcolm Collins: forcibly removed my uterus in a botched surgery.
Yes.
More Births: I like, I don't know if I, if my eyes got wet when I heard that, [01:15:00] cause like, that's, that's a really moving statement, actually. I think you're a, you're a lucky guy, Malcolm. I mean, you know, like
Simone Collins: there's, and this is actually an added, again, it's culture Malcolm's going to say, but you know, Back in the day, the rate at which women died in childbirth was similar to the rate at which men died in, in battle.
And I think, yeah, there's, there's this you know, like the way that women, you know, reach the hall of the Valhalla is by dying in childbirth. Like it's the, it's the honorable way to go in many ways. And, and they were willing to go that way. They were willing to undergo the risk in many cases, they still wanted kids despite the risk because they were There was glory in it.
It meant you were serving your country, you were serving your family, you were defending what you believed in. And I, I very much believe in bringing that back. And of course, I think a lot of the, the, the fears that young women have around things like pregnancy and the related risks, one, they're super overblown and, and it's actually a lot more nuanced in terms of like, is it bad for you?
Is it good for you? Does it hurt you? Like, is it actually [01:16:00] dangerous? There's a lot of nuance there. But also. The, the, the values are all wrong. Like it, even if it was really dangerous. And I, I, I questioned that, like, there's, we're going to have another episode or we go over this more. I think women should be like, well, yeah, like this is, if you're going to go, you should go doing this, you know?
Like, why do you really want to die? Like after. Like four crappy months on hospice care or you don't
More Births: have to die at all. And actually, actually, this is something that the rate, the risk, and this is a big victory of civilization is that, is that the risk of actual death and childbirth is very, very, very, yeah, it is extremely low.
I mean, even if you're even if you're on your seventh C section or whatever, which I hope you get to.
Simone Collins: Well, no, I wouldn't, you know, when you read Hannah's children, there are many, there, there are at least like two or three examples of women who did have to stop having children or chose to stop having children because their doctors were like, lady, you're going to get a heart attack if you do this again.
Like you literally like from a health standpoint, cannot keep having [01:17:00] children. Knock
Malcolm Collins: it off lady.
Simone Collins: We're in
But what I will say is. Having having a child should be seen more like in terms of the risks is similar to like being into running marathons.
You could really screw up your body getting really into like Ironman competitions and you can really screw up your body really getting into pregnancy. But like, these are things that like. They're hills worth dying on, and again, it comes back to culture.
More Births: Well, yeah, I mean, the, the, the question is you know, I, I think when I talk, talk again about the fertility stack, I think, you know, if you want to have higher fertility rates across society, I think you have to have, you also have to have something, You know, things that make a difference with with the normies, if you will, because I actually
Malcolm Collins: disagree with this.
I think that thinking of fertility rates is something to raise at a societal level is fundamentally misguided and will not work. You need [01:18:00] to think about how to raise fertility rates at the level of individual families. And then we're coming back
Simone Collins: to Egypt and Iran. We need grass
Malcolm Collins: roots, right? And then at the societal level, convince them it's worth doing and investing in.
All society needs to do like in terms of like actually fixing this is make people feel like they are living unworthy lives or humiliated for not having lots of kids. Like one of the things that we've been promoting recently as a channel is if you are a man, And you have three kids, fewer than three kids.
You are a cuck. You're being cucked by every man. You're paying taxes. You're being cucked because other men are replacing your genes in the nest. You are contributing to the next generation. And those kids are eating your, your genetic lines lunch. And when you build mindsets like this, like, Oh my God, I don't want to be cucked.
But there's also alternates. So one of the things that we offer was like our heart EA 501 c3 [01:19:00] foundation Is if you are just in a life situation where you can't have kids or whatever, right? You can donate to us and we will keep your genome on file for whatever civilization we end up creating Well, yeah, I
More Births: mean So, so, yeah, one more element of the, of the fertility stack, if you will, which, which, which again wraps around to culture and, you know, is, you know, having a culture of large families.
I mean, one thing that happened you know, In modern times is that we had this norm of two children. And if you have a norm of two children, you're going to have, you know, in a, in a modern society, it looks like you're going to have about one third of the population is going to have no kids. Typically just people, you know, some guys never can get a good job.
Some, Some women just don't want to have kids. Some people never seem to get their life together. You know, some women just don't want to date men that are that just are at the bottom of the of the social rung, And [01:20:00] so forth so you're gonna have
Malcolm Collins: this is why we need this is why we need harems I should have four wives.
Where are my sister wives?
More Births: Okay. Anyway
Malcolm Collins: continue.
More Births: So, What what what so what you what you really need is a norm of many types of larger families like you would, you need, if one third are not going to have Children, then you have to have a norm of three Children per family among everybody else to get to replacement.
So you just need to have a higher set point if you will. And this, this is one reason why I think Which is why I really love large families and you know, people like Catherine Alek with, with a very, very large family mm-hmm . Is, is that you kind of, you know, set the, the, the family size Overton window, if you will.
Mm-hmm.
So if
you can open that up, you know, if, if she has what I say, si, you know, 14 children. Then, then me with six children is not weird at all. Suddenly it feels
Simone Collins: like, yeah, [01:21:00] like, Oh no, I'm very conservative here. You don't feel like a freak. And I will say that I went into her book thinking, all right, I'm aiming for eight.
I'm aiming for eight. And then I came out of her book and I'm like, I'm aiming for 12 to 14. I can do this. Come on. We can do 12 to 14. We can do it. This is 100 percent dependent on my uterus, but like, it definitely just knowing I think a big thing and I was looking at different stat actually today. That was it.
It found that apparent receiving welfare. Non trivially increase the odds of a child taking using government services and welfare as well. Like basically we three, three times more likely
Malcolm Collins: three
Simone Collins: times. So we're, we're way more likely to do stuff if we're exposed to it. If we see it, if you come from a family with, with a lot of kids, you're more likely to be like, yeah, this is normal, you know, or a family, you know, this is a big thing with our school that, that we're developing over time is we really want to expose our children.
And other children within our culture and our cultural network [01:22:00] to very high achieving families and parents and, you know, with careers and influence and, you know, that are doing things that are exciting because we want kids to normalize. Oh, I could be a thought leader. I could be you know, building rocket ships.
I could be you know, changing germline genotyping. For, you know, generations to come. Like we want children to normalize to that because really that's all it takes. And you're absolutely right. Like if we normalize big families. People will be like, yeah, okay. Like this is doable. And it's amazing just for me, because I don't get a lot of exposure to large families, to people who have like five plus children.
And the few friends I do have who have a lot of children don't talk with me that much because they're kind of busy, you know, we don't live right next to each other. So just reading a book where I'm hearing interviews with these people, if it was able to have that much of an influence on me, like just imagine what a little bit more.
Our culture could do.
More Births: Yeah. I, I, I, I do think, you know, but that, that's the, that's [01:23:00] the $100 trillion question, which is the size of the global economy. Like, you know, building a, a broader culture, you know, we, we, we can have subcultures to survive. But the question is, can you, can you have a, you can't,
Malcolm Collins: you have to, you have to build a culture of building subcultures.
More Births: Yeah. We'll, we'll see. We'll see. We'll see. I, I don't, anyway. Great
Malcolm Collins: to have you on. Great to have you on. Great to talk. Wonderful, wonderful. See what changed the minds. Did I convince you at all that it does, it makes sense to think about this as primarily a cultural issue.
More Births: I, it is. I, I do, I have emphasized that culture is incredibly important, but I, I, I would also say that
Malcolm Collins: no, but culture fixes housing easier than you can fix housing.
More Births: Well, I, I would say, you know, even in, in Vienna in 1920, fertility was 0. 6. So Vienna in [01:24:00] 1920 was soul in, you know, this was before the pill. This was before, you know, modern birth. Oh yeah. And in cities, well, no
Simone Collins: ancient, ancient Rome was like this. Cities have been fertility shredders for as long as there have been cities.
That's always, I do think,
More Births: I do think that culture It doesn't exist on an island. I mean, you know, you, you talk about the urban monoculture and that, that literally is a reflection of the fact that there's a culture that that's particularly pervasive in cities that is antagonistic,
Malcolm Collins: evil culture that will hunt you down and erase you.
More Births: But, you know, I, I do think that you know, where, where people live can, can shape culture as well. I don't think the Amish could be the Amish. If, if they didn't. Have, you know, the rural living that they have. No,
Malcolm Collins: no, no. I push back.
More Births: Her righty Jews are all over in Manhattan. Well, but, well, the Amish and the Haredi are extremely.
No, that's true. Like, yeah, [01:25:00] but the Amish have chosen a bad culture. We'll see, we'll see. I, they may, they may, they may replace, they may be the one that, that who, you know, Robin Hanson you know, thinks that they're, they're going to be You know one of the winners of oh, he's
Malcolm Collins: super wrong So the okay, so just a side here So we often talk about the pax de romana of the urban romana Is the peace of rome it meant that there were a bunch of people who would have otherwise killed each other But were at peace because they were under the roman empire The amish are living under the pax de romana of the urban monoculture because they are extremist pacifists as soon as the urban monoculture falls groups that are like I don't even say my cultural groups.
Like if one of my kids was like, he was struggling and starving and his kids were at risk and he's like, yeah, but those Amish have some nice land over there. He's going to go take it with his gun drones or even an AR 15. It's easy. Like I, I guess what I'm [01:26:00] saying is, is it the Amish pacifism? As long as that's in place, the Amish are basically a negligible factor in long term human civilization.
More Births: We'll see. I, as I say, I, I, I try to, I try to focus maybe
Malcolm Collins: AI will protect them. Maybe AI will protect it. Wouldn't that be funny if AI is the reason people don't just kill the Amish and take their land. One
More Births: thing about the Amish. Is that they're not, they're, they're not anti technological just on a, they don't believe that technology is evil and it's sinful necessarily.
They actually that, that what they believe about technology is they're, they're very selective in anything that they think is going to like mess up their family culture. They, they, you know, cause I, I had an interesting, I was in Pennsylvania in in October probably not, not, not very far from where, where you guys live in Amish country.
And you know, there was a couple of young guys and they were there in a sheets use, [01:27:00] you know, Pennsylvania is full of sheets that they were, they were there using the ATM, you know, taking turns you know, getting all their cash out. And I was like, wait a minute. I thought Amish, I thought, But actually they do use technology.
They have no problem with it. They just, they just pick their technology that, that they think won't change their cultures. They may not use cell phones, but they have no problem using ATMs, for example. So I, I think that, I think that who knows.
Malcolm Collins: The problem with the Amish isn't their lack of technology.
It's their pacifism. That's what makes them so vulnerable.
More Births: But mate, we'll see. I, you know, as the old Chinese proverb goes, we shall see, right? Yeah,
Malcolm Collins: we shall. All right. Have a good one guys. Simone, what are we doing for dinner tonight?
Simone Collins: Either tomato soup and grilled cheese or teriyaki chicken with wine, rice.
Because we haven't thought out more steak for you, but before we go, everyone go to x. com backslash more births because this [01:28:00] is and promote
Malcolm Collins: the conferences, the perennials episode. Yes.
More Births: Yes. So, yeah. Okay, go ahead. Sorry. Go.
Simone Collins: Oh, Dan, by the way, are you going to be there?
More Births: Yes, I'm going to be, I'm going to be one of the speakers.
Simone Collins: Okay, so join us and More Births at the Natalism Con in March in Austin. And you can get a 10 percent discount if you sign up today for Colin. So do it because you should save your money for kids.
More Births: Right, right. And I, again, follow me at More Births. More Births. I, I write as much as I can. About all, you know, all sorts of factors driving fertility, including culture.
Yeah.
Malcolm Collins: And by the way, people are like, why is the prenatalist conference so expensive? I'd point out that last year, Kevin Dolan ended up eating cost on the conference, right? Like you can complain about the conference being expensive, but venues are expensive, right? Like the conference does not make money.
So keep that in mind if that is your [01:29:00] concern. Right.
Simone Collins: All right. Dan, thank you so much. And I am already looking forward to our next conversation. And
More Births: lots of love to you and the family. Okay. Good luck to everyone. Good to, good to see baby industry there. All right.
Simone Collins: She's rebelling now, but that's okay.
She'll get dinner next. Good.
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