Sweden's Pronatalism Fails: Just Like We Predicted

We analyze the recent collapse in Swedish birth rates, despite its generous pro-family policies. As Sweden embraced feminism, state-supplied daycare, and progressive values, we predicted their fertility incentives would prove fruitless. Sure enough, financial subsidies cannot overcome the cultural antagonism modernity holds towards childbearing. We reiterate that culture- not money- drives birth rates. Until having children is celebrated and prioritized, the developed world will continue on the path to slow suicide.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Even men have become feminists.

The state supplies universal daycare and flexible employment for mothers, fathers take up their share of domestic labor, and both parents are awarded generous leave from their jobs to raise the next generation

across these countries that had been implementing these policies, they have begun to see their fertility crash. And we told you, but I want to hear you pontificate on this first.

Simone Collins: I, yeah, I, this was very much. And I told you so kind of thing, because we're like, it's not the money.

It's not the money. It's not the money. It's a culture. And here it is. There's, there's no exogenous celebration of people being parents. I think one of the big problems is, is there's this dream that you can have a pronatalist culture and everyone can work and everyone can participate in the modern economy and identify as career people.

Would you like to know more?

Simone Collins: Remember when we took that trip to Sweden and you paid like 30 for a hot dog and then we decided to stop eating

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, no, it's funny so [00:01:00] we we did this trip to Sweden and I love the the trip that we did there actually because This was what Simone gifts me when she's giving me a trip. Like we don't go on normal trips I should say before we went to Sweden Simone had me for me, she emailed every one of the VCs in, in the city we were visiting and every one of the private equity company owners and all of the famous startup people.

And so when we went there, just cold email, but, you know, I have a Stanford MBA and she was a Cambridge student at the time. So a lot of them responded. I mean, we would go to their offices and we would see what they were working on and everything like that. Because And they know where all the

Simone Collins: good restaurants are.

Malcolm Collins: Well, it's important to never allow yourself to come to indolence. To do a trip just for idle curiosity, I think, is sinful. And so, while we can see the world, we need to make sure that we learn how to improve ourselves on these trips. And At this point, I was also trying to learn, because I was working as a VC in South Korea how some small economies were doing well with their venture capital investing, and others were not, because this was very interesting to me, [00:02:00] like why you would get some economies creating these giant companies.

And just for

Simone Collins: TLDR of your theory, which I think is very astute, is that basically for countries, Startup economy to work well, if they're relatively small and they eventually have to leave, they can't be, they can't have a sufficiently compelling market like South Korea does, because then basically you go big in your own home market, but never really make yourself ready for an international market.

If you have a very, very, very small market like that in Sweden, you immediately have to be international from day

Malcolm Collins: one. You need to be so small that the first market you are attempting is an international market. So this means that this is why areas like Germany and France have such bad startup marketplaces.

Whereas domestic markets are too big, Finland, Sweden, Estonia, stuff like that, because they're so small that the initial market needs to be somewhere else. I think that was a very

Simone Collins: astute observation on your part.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, I appreciate it. So anyway, we go there. The food there [00:03:00] is so expensive. It's obscene.

We were starving the whole time. Basically, I would only eat street food when I was there or food that the people we were meeting was hands

Simone Collins: that we got at the grocery store. But that was okay. Also, you know, Swedish people are not dreadfully obese because they can't afford it. Can't afford

Malcolm Collins: it. But anyway, I I want to talk more on the topic of falling fertility rates in Sweden because a lot of, for a while, this narrative had existed that in the Nordic countries, in this land of gender equality, there seemed to be some level of resistance to fertility collapse that wasn't seen in countries, you know, like the Catholic countries of Southern Europe, which had lower fertility rates.

And so every

Simone Collins: progressive pointed to it like, Oh no, Sweden proves. That you can have a very progressive gender policy, you can have men and women treated the same, you can have you know, really semi

Malcolm Collins: socialist policies. I can read this quote from an article on this, right? Even men have become feminists.

The state supplies universal daycare and flexible employment for mothers, fathers take up their share of domestic labor, and both parents are awarded [00:04:00] generous leave from their jobs to raise the next generation. As one 2015 study claimed, it is precisely in, quote, extraordinarily equal, unquote, Sweden, where family friendly public policies are especially effective.

That we supposedly see how, quote, the spread of more egalitarian values on the national level and more progressive family supported policies will have a positive effect on fertility and family stability, end quote. The problem is, I guess I'll, I'll get to where we are now. Since 2021, the number of births in Sweden is down more than 12 percent and the fertility rate has fallen by almost 14%.

The country's 2023 total fertility rate, a projection of lifetime fertility of all women. In a particular year, we're surely, I think, below 1. 5 children per woman. That's catastrophically low. Marriage rates, too, have been falling in Sweden for 15 years. Precipitously, since 2016, inmarital unions aren't being replaced by long term cohabitation.

[00:05:00] Since the Swedish state began Counting such quote unquote consensual unions in 2011, there has been a steady decline in their rate of formation. Most notable are the falling rates of marriage and union formation among parents in 2021. They were doing so at rates of around half the level of just a decade earlier.

Fertility and family formation are declining in Norway and Finland even more dramatically. France's 2023 fertility figures are especially troubling in the light of the country's recent ability to buck falling fertility trends across Europe, generally credited to its huge family policy budget, which amounts to 3.

4 percent of GDP in 2019. So wow. So, you know, these are measured in, in chunks of GDP and across these countries that had been implementing these policies, they have begun to see their fertility crash. And we told you, but I want to hear you pontificate on this first.

Simone Collins: I, yeah, I, this was [00:06:00] very much. And I told you so kind of thing, because we're like, it's not the money.

It's not the money. It's not the money. It's a culture. And here it is. There's, there's no exogenous celebration of people being parents. I think one of the big problems is, is there's this dream that you can have a pronatalist culture and everyone can work and everyone can p