Robin Hanson: Culture as it Relates to Fertility Decline

In this episode, we are joined by the renowned economist and author Robin Hansen, an Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. The discussion centers around the challenging issue of fertility decline and its cultural underpinnings. Hansen outlines various trends contributing to lower fertility rates, such as prolonged education, intensive parenting, gender equality, urban living, and less religious adherence. He also explores the interaction of culture and economy, the potential for policy interventions, and the role of subcultures in addressing demographic challenges. Additionally, they touch on historical patterns, the evolution of cultures, and the strategies for fostering sustainable, high-fertility communities. The conversation offers a rich and insightful analysis of one of today's pressing societal issues.

[00:00:00]

Simone Collins: Hello everyone. As you can see today, we are joined by the one, the only, the incredibly prolific and brilliant Robin Hansen. He is the American economist author. He's also an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. But he is known for some of the most catchy ideas, ranging from grabby aliens to one of the most popular fertility intervention proposals, which has to do with sort of like a tax bonds on children's future tax generated income.

But most recently on the prenatal list front Robin Hansen's focus has been shifting to culture. So we wanted to have him on base camp to talk about prenatal list culture. Welcome, Robin.

Robin Hanson: Hello everyone. So, as you know, culture, I mean, fertility looks like a pretty hard problem, like, right? Yeah. So you guys are working hard.

I hope you have success, but you, you get that it's an uphill battle, right? Yeah, yeah. But so at least I feel good about fertility that I can. Frame a proposal and say it in words and say, if only you would do this, it'll probably fix the problem. That doesn't mean you can get somebody to do it, but [00:01:00] it's a nice thing to have is to be able to, yes.

Have a concrete proposal and say, look, if you do this, that would fix it.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Robin Hanson: And that's as a policymaker, I'm proud. Like that's kind of our job. Like, okay, if you guys won't do anything, you know what the hell Yeah. That's on

Simone Collins: you. Yeah. You could have it's, you could have had nice

Robin Hanson: things. We could, we at least had an idea for what to do.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Robin Hanson: But so I thought about for. Fertility for like eight months. And then like most people in fertility, I came to see culture underlying as a fundamental cause of fertility decline. It's, it doesn't mean that we have to fix it that way. Right? We can fix things with money that are caused by culture.

That's a, if you can

Simone Collins: afford it. Yeah. Right. If

Robin Hanson: you can afford it. Money and culture interact and have for many centuries, yes. Like capitalism and culture have had a lot of influences on each other. So just because something's caused by culture doesn't mean it needs to be fixed by culture directly. That is, you could do a a money thing that changes culture and I think the money thing we talked about in our last episode is such a thing that would change culture.

But you certainly notice that the proximate cause of the problem is [00:02:00] culture. And that induced me more of a theorist to say, okay, why? Hmm. What's causing culture to change? What is it just some random, you know, thing that just happens in the world? Or is there some more systematic way to understand why culture?

So it's not, it's like a half a dozen trends. I can point out that cons that seem to be causing fertility decline. You, you guys know them all Probably.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but I go into 'em. Let's go. Yeah. Yeah. We may particularly

Robin Hanson: very differently. Okay. Let's just mention them for, you know, for, for completeness sake. Yes.

So obviously like. Longer years of education and early career prep. Right. A lot of young women want, who are s very powerful. You know, capable people want to prove that they can do well in their careers and our career ladders don't give very good pauses. Yeah. And they want to show that they are capable and.

You know, be successful. And so they want to wait to as long as the career ladder requires to then consider having kids. So that's, that's one. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Hold on. As, as we go through each of these, I wanna talk about [00:03:00] how they can be addressed and how other cultures, their state high fertility have addressed them.

The two ways that this particular problem I've seen addressed is one have women not become educated or have men and women not become

Robin Hanson: educated. It works really well for fertility rates, but also

Simone Collins: in places like Kazakhstan. You still have men and women getting educated, but they're having kids in university.

And this is my favorite solution. I think that's the best time to have kids.

Malcolm Collins: It's what Simone said is you have to change the expectation of timing.

Robin Hanson: Mm-hmm. Yep.

Malcolm Collins: You get married, then you go to university or you get married. In your first couple years of university and should have a couple kids by the time you graduate.

Mm-hmm. This is normal within a lot of cultures. Then it's an easy thing to frame. I think the quiver full movement had a really good framing of this. You know, the the, the children are like the eras in the quiver of your youth, which, which points out is that children are supposed to be something that you sort of stock up on while you're young.

And, and, and then, and then provide benefit to you when you're older which is a very different framing than children [00:04:00] are. The capstone. Once you are stable.

Robin Hanson: That brings up a next trend, as you know, which is the switch from cornerstone to capstone marriage. You know, when I was young the norm was you just marry early when you're not fully formed, where you don't know what you're gonna become.

And the two of you form each other and become something together. Yes. Okay. And now the norm is you should find yourself and know who you are and we have a stable position. And then. Then match with somebody who matches your stable position in what you become.

Malcolm Collins: Exactly.

Robin Hanson: And that takes a lot longer, and that also puts on a delay.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And I, and I know with this particular trend is that it's not leading to better marriages like, right. No. A marriage, a marriage is actually much better, I'd argue to have a cornerstone marriage than to have a capstone marriage because you can one, grow together. Two, it fixes a lot of the problems with the existing monetary difference.

So, you know, one of the things I'm sure you're gonna get to is that women like men who earn more money than [00:05:00] them, but they also don't like men on average earning more money than them, which means that on average they're not gonna be able to find a spouse once they've corrected and they've overcorrected.

Now if you look at young women, they over-ear men pretty significantly. But so if they're like, oh, I'll only date men who earn more money than me, and on average women are earning more than men, you know, they're gonna have a really hard time fighting a partner, right?