#962 - Lyman Stone - The Real Reason Birth Rates Are Falling

Summary

Modern Wisdom Podcast Episode #962: Lyman Stone - The Real Reason Birth Rates Are Falling

Host: Chris Williamson
Guest: Lyman Stone
Release Date: July 3, 2025
Podcast: Modern Wisdom

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1. Introduction to the Declining Birth Rates

In Episode #962 of Modern Wisdom, host Chris Williamson engages in a profound discussion with Lyman Stone from the Institute for Family Studies. The conversation delves into the multifaceted reasons behind the global decline in birth rates, exploring demographic trends, societal influences, and policy implications.

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2. Population Density and Fertility: Correlation vs. Causation

Lyman Stone begins by addressing the intuitive correlation between population density and fertility rates. He explains that denser areas tend to have lower fertility rates, a trend observed across almost all industrialized countries.

Lyman Stone [04:55]:
"Population density predicts everything... one of the things it proxies for is fertility."

However, Stone emphasizes that the simplistic view of density directly causing lower fertility is misleading. He points out that factors like crowded living spaces and small households play a more significant role than mere population numbers.

Lyman Stone [07:46]:
"It's actually tricky when you start looking below the correlational level... crowded living space, like small houses, is what's actually doing the work here."

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3. Housing Design and Family-Friendliness

The conversation transitions to how housing design impacts fertility. Stone advocates for dense single-family neighborhoods, such as townhouses with tree-lined sidewalks, which balance high density with family-friendly amenities.

Lyman Stone [08:19]:
"If you want people to have kids, you should go for the less height and the less empty space on the ground. That is townhouses with tree-lined sidewalks are what everyone wants anyways."

Stone argues that these designs make it easier for families to access parks, schools, and neighborly interactions, fostering environments conducive to raising children.

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4. Societal and Cultural Factors Influencing Fertility

Stone delves into broader societal influences, citing "developmental idealism"—a framework that views life and civilization as progressing linearly rather than cyclically. This ideology promotes delaying family formation to invest in personal and professional development early in life.

Lyman Stone [24:31]:
"Developmental idealism introduces the idea that there actually is a long run trend that your life progresses linearly, not cyclically."

He links this shift to modern societal expectations, where achieving career milestones often takes precedence over starting a family, thereby contributing to lower fertility rates.

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5. The Role of Social Networks and Media in Shaping Fertility Preferences

Exploring the impact of technology, Stone discusses how mobile phones and the internet have "concretized" fertility preferences, making individuals more likely to set specific goals for the number of children they intend to have. However, this also leads to a discrepancy between desired and actual fertility due to perceived or real constraints.

Lyman Stone [27:08]:
"Social exposure to people with big families makes you want big families... but cell phones make intentions more rigid."

Stone also highlights the "contagion effect," where the fertility choices of peers influence an individual's own decisions, further impacting overall birth rates.

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6. Case Study: Georgia's Religious Initiative and Birth Rates

A pivotal example discussed is Georgia's intervention by a state church leader who incentivized having a third child by personally baptizing and godparenting those families. This initiative successfully increased the fertility rate from 1.6 to 2.2 within 18 months.

Lyman Stone [34:20]:
"He announced this, and in 18 months, the fertility of Georgia rose from 1.6 to 2.2."

This case illustrates how altering social and status hierarchies can directly influence fertility behaviors without reverting to traditional gender roles or economic dependency structures.

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7. Male Socioeconomic Status and Its Impact on Fertility

Stone addresses the critical role of male earnings in family formation, arguing that young men's stagnant incomes relative to older generations hinder their marriage and fertility prospects. Women often compare potential partners' earnings to their fathers', creating a situation where young men struggle to meet these historical benchmarks.

Lyman Stone [53:32]:
"Women match to husbands that share their father's socioeconomic status... a bigger gender gap in incomes does not actually predict a higher rate of entrance into marriage."

This dynamic contributes to fewer marriages and, consequently, lower fertility rates, especially among younger men who feel they cannot provide the "insurance" women seek.

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8. Gender Roles and Household Labor: Debunking the Double Shift Myth

Contrary to popular belief, Stone presents evidence that married mothers and fathers in industrialized societies share household and unpaid labor more equally than stereotypes suggest.

Lyman Stone [89:08]:
"Married moms and dads report virtually identical combined hours of household and non-household work."

However, he acknowledges that while averages show parity, individual experiences can vary, with some women facing a "double shift" of paid and unpaid labor. This nuanced understanding challenges societal narratives about gender roles within the household.

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9. Cultural Case Study: South Korea and Fertility Expectations

Stone examines South Korea as a case where intense educational pressures and restrictive workplace norms for women have led to exceptionally low fertility rates. The rise of K-Pop culture, promoting childless lifestyles among its stars, further influences societal attitudes towards family formation.

Lyman Stone [80:46]:
"They systematically created a culture of childless celebrities and role models."

This cultural shift, combined with limited opportunities for women despite high educational attainment, fosters frustration and contributes to declining birth rates.

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10. Conclusion: Addressing Fertility Decline Through Cultural and Policy Shifts

Lyman Stone emphasizes that reversing fertility decline requires comprehensive cultural and policy interventions. These include designing family-friendly housing, redefining social norms around family and work, and leveraging influential role models to promote positive fertility behaviors.

Lyman Stone [107:28]:
"We have to build the kinds of houses that people want and create narratives that give long-term meaning to family life."

By addressing both the structural and cultural barriers to family formation, societies can create environments that support higher fertility rates without compromising individual freedoms or economic participation.

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Notable Quotes

• Lyman Stone [04:55]:
  "Population density predicts everything... one of the things it proxies for is fertility."

• Lyman Stone [08:19]:
  "Townhouses with tree-lined sidewalks are what everyone wants anyways."

• Lyman Stone [24:31]:
  "Developmental idealism introduces the idea that there actually is a long run trend that your life progresses linearly, not cyclically."

• Lyman Stone [27:08]:
  "Social exposure to people with big families makes you want big families... but cell phones make intentions more rigid."

• Lyman Stone [34:20]:
  "He announced this, and in 18 months, the fertility of Georgia rose from 1.6 to 2.2."

• Lyman Stone [53:32]:
  "Women match to husbands that share their father's socioeconomic status... a bigger gender gap in incomes does not actually predict a higher rate of entrance into marriage."

• Lyman Stone [89:08]:
  "Married moms and dads report virtually identical combined hours of household and non-household work."

• Lyman Stone [80:46]:
  "They systematically created a culture of childless celebrities and role models."

• Lyman Stone [107:28]:
  "We have to build the kinds of houses that people want and create narratives that give long-term meaning to family life."

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Further Resources

For more insights and research on fertility rates and family studies, visit the Institute for Family Studies' Pronatalism Initiative or follow Lyman Stone on Twitter @manstoneky.

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Note: Advertisements and non-content sections from the transcript have been omitted in accordance with the summary guidelines.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

How did you get into neighborhood design? Beef on Twitter.

[Lyman Stone]

So, I mean, somebody shared a photo of. It was like an aerial photo of some neighborhood in Phoenix. And they were like, how would it. I forget what exactly was like, how would any human ever want to live here? I was like, I mean, it looks like kind of a nice neighborhood. Like, people have pools in their backyard. It doesn't have like a big highway cutting through it or anything. I street viewed the neighborhood. There's a bunch of parks in the neighborhood. Like, there's in street view, you can see kids playing in the parks. Like, clearly people enjoy this neighborhood. I also looked up like the Zillow on it. Like houses in this, in this neighborhood, or like people clearly want to live here from the prices they're paying. So I said, like, you know, I don't know, it looks like a nice neighborhood. Like, it looks. It looks pretty nice to me. And the thing that really set people off is I said it looked relatively walkable. And what I mean by that is it's like you can look up the census tract. It's a density of like 9,000 people per square mile, which is considerably, considerably above the US Average, right? And if you look at the street grid, like it's quite compact lots. These are not like half acre lots or something. They're like quite compact lots. You could very easily walk around. I could envision my kids going to play at any of the mini parks in the neighborhood. There's a school on the edge of the neighborhood. Kids could walk to school. But people really were mad that I called this neighborhood walkable. They were like, nothing in Phoenix is walkable. It's 110 degrees in the summer. And I'm like, okay, man, when I lived in Montreal, it was like negative 10 degrees 11 months out of the year. I didn't think that was very walkable either, but whatever. So, yeah, people didn't like the take.

[Chris Williamson]

What, where do you think that's coming from? What's the underlying impetus of that? The motivation for them being so upset at you?

[Lyman Stone]

So a lot of people said, okay, but walkable to what? There's no bars, there's no restaurant in the neighborhood. What are you walking to? And I was like, I mean, 90% of the time when we walk somewhere, whether in my current neighborhood or when I lived in Montreal or when I lived in Hong Kong, most of the walking we did was not walking to what it was walking to who? Right? We're like, oh, we're going to go to a neighbor's house. And the Kids are going to play at the neighbor's house. We're going to go and visit someone. And it looked like a neighborhood where, like, you know, a lot of my friends could get houses, my family could get houses. Like, we could all live close together. We could walk to each other without having to cross, like, a major highway or some crap like that. So when I looked at it, I looked at houses clustered close together, houses that look like they have families in them, lots of parks. And I said, oh, this is clearly a neighborhood where there's a lot of. Who's that you might walk to. My kids are going to have friends in this neighborhood. But basically, a lot of, you know, people who are going to remain childless until the day they die looked at it and were like, oh, but where. Where's my, like, boutique concert venue? Sorry, that was like, a really hostile way of thinking.

[Chris Williamson]

No, I.

[Lyman Stone]

Look.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, look, people who don't have kids and people who do have kids, even people that are married and people who aren't married, have very different.

[Lyman Stone]

We look at the world in different ways.

[Chris Williamson]

That's correct. Is it not, Nassim Taleb that says the world is split into two groups of people. Those who have kids and those who don't. And, like, the second group will never understand the first little things.

[Lyman Stone]

Like. Like Montreal, like, the neighborhood I lived in in Montreal had, like, a crazy high walk. It's rated, like, one of the most walkable, cyclable neighborhoods in North America. And it was lovely. I enjoyed it. But I didn't think it was very walkable. And the reason is, yes, there's a lot of stuff around, but Montreal's public works program is basically controlled by the Mafia, and they do a terrible job maintaining the roads and the sidewalks. And as a result, you really can't push a stroller on half of the sidewalks. They're too potholed. Right. So, like, if I can't push a stroller there, it's not walkable, because when I'm walking, I'm pushing a stroller. But people are like, oh, it's so walkable. And I'm like, no, your public works are crap. Whereas Phoenix, it never rains. There's no potholes. Boom.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. So you're gonna be. You're gonna be hot, but smooth.

[Lyman Stone]

Well, but you're only hot, like, four months of the year. Right. Like, the Southwest in the spring and fall is, like, the most glorious climate there. I mean, you're in Austin. Right. Like, you know this, like, outside of the hot season, it rocks.

[Chris Williamson]

Yep. So we're just, we're just getting into the thick of it now. Uh, what about what. Talk to me about the relationship between population density and fertility. This seems to be an area of research that I didn't even know existed. And in retrospect kind of does make sense, but was certainly new to me.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. So it's super intuitive. We look at the world, we look at, look at any map of any country, and population density predicts everything, right? Like the more dense counties in any country are like the more liberal voting counties. The more dense counties are like the more economically active counties. Like all, like, population density proxies for like everything in the world. And one of the things it proxies for is fertility. So in most countries, to be honest, in like almost every country, on almost every industrialized country, I should say if you look at a map of fertility and a map of density, the really dense places are also the really low fertility places. And this has caused people to very reasonably infer that there's like a linkage here, right? That this can't be a coincidence when the correlation is like off the cart, off the charts, strong. So. But it turns out that it's actually kind of tricky when you start looking below the correlational level, when you try and look at mechanisms like, okay, but why. The simple story of density and fertility starts to break down really fast. So there's some things that are quite clear. Okay, like neighborhoods where there are a very high ratio of adults to bedrooms have lower fertility. And it's kind of plausible what's going on there. Okay, so like crowded houses are bad for fertility. That's really clear. But that's actually not always high density areas. There's a lot of places where adults are very crowded together, but it's actually not super high population density. Right. So you see this less in the US but you see this a lot in like Eastern Europe or Spain or East Asia, where you'll have like a rural area, but it's got like a single apartment building in it. They're just like, well, we needed some more housing, so we put a 40 story apartment building in a farm. And this is a case where like, this is not a high density area. Okay. It's basically rural, but it just has a tower. But it's a place where the amount of living space per adult is quite low. Okay. So it seems like the, the actual thing doing the work here is, is like crowded living space, like small houses, compared to people who have to occupy them less. Like people per square mile. Um, these are obviously related like places really with really high people per square mile often also have like really crowded housing. Like the classic example is like Kowloon Walled City. The, the old place in Hong Kong. It's gone now. Now it's a lovely park. I've been there several times because we used to live in Hong Kong. But you know, it was very dense and it was very crowded. But these are actually not the same thing.

[Chris Williamson]

So what's a better way to design it? We need space. We need to put people into houses. They need to be not super expensive. Not super expensive means space efficient for the real estate company that's going to make them. You want, you know, 10,000 square feet of floor space, like ground net floor space in Manhattan. Go fuck yourself. But you put that across two stories in an apartment and it's, you know, accessible to maybe the top 1% of earners. What, what's a better solution?

[Lyman Stone]

You can, there's a great infographic that circulates sometimes on Twitter and it shows like three different neighborhoods and the neighborhoods all have the identical population density per square mile. But in one of the neighborhoods it's like a big, a couple big towers with like parkland between them. In the other one it's like mid rise apartment buildings, kind of like, like you'd see in some of Spain, like eastern Spain in like Valencia or something. It's like these mid rise apartment blocks with kind of courtyards in them. And then the third one is like townhouses. And the point is they're all identical. Density where they vary is some of them have more height and then more empty space on the ground and others sacrifice some empty space on the ground to have less height. Okay. And what I would argue is if you want people to have kids, you should go for the less height and the less empty space on the ground. That is townhouses with tree lined sidewalks are what everyone wants anyways. Those are the most bid up neighborhoods. So that's what we should build. Those are the ones that have the lowest vacancy rates. So that's what we should build. And they also have relatively high fertility rates. That is when you actually look at these like dense neighborhoods that are actually, they're like dense single family. So actually I live in one of these neighborhoods almost entirely single family housing, but it's also almost 10,000 people per square mile. And like throw a rock in my neighborhood and you hit like a homeschooling family with five kids. It's just, I mean that's also just Kentucky, but, but that, that's the type of neighborhood Families tend to want because it tends to be something that like your kid can walk to the park very easily. We could walk to the YMCA and the gym and the pool really easily. And it could be high density. But it also gives you actually a lot of the kinds of houses people want to raise kids in. Kinds of houses that are convenient for families. That is, they have a garage, they have parking, they have somewhere to put the stroller, stuff like that. And also that are still in places where it's regulatorily legal to build them. It's relatively cost effective for a developer.

[Chris Williamson]

Is it a case that you are creating the sort of housing or two things maybe one, that you're creating the kind of housing in high rise apartments that single people or couples without kids are like, oh, this is cool, look at the floor to ceiling windows. And I've got a great view. And this park is so spectacular or I guess that parks and large open green spaces are kind of like a very sexy billboard of look at how well natured our local environment is. Not in the same way that my small back garden is, but that the day to day existence of most people is not spent in the park, it's spent in the house. So the sort of positivity and the ceiling that you feel like you have from a lifestyle perspective is higher. Is that part of the mechanism that's going on?

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. So part of it is the first one you suggest you said, which is basically that like. And by the way, I'm not speculating on this at IFS. We just finished a survey. We surveyed 9,000Americans on their housing preferences and particularly their housing preferences as it relates to family. So when I say something like when people visualize their family life, liberals and conservatives alike, like across the political or ideological spectrum, they visualize a single family house. Okay? 80% of them do. That's not speculation when I say that that's fact. We just collected the data on that. Now I have another survey in the field right now where we're going to look at can you make apartments that are slightly more family friendly that'll like help people have their first or maybe their second kid in the apartment? Because. Because apartments are kind of all that's being built in the US right now. So we're. Our first report on housing at IFS was like here's the ideal housing policy. The next one we're going to do, it's going to come out this summer. Hahaha. You didn't listen to our ideal housing policy. Here's how to do a needle Exchange for housing policy, like harm reduction, like, can we make slightly less bad apartments? The other thing is parks. Parks are great. I love taking my kids at the park. Big parks are great. Nature parks are great. If you keep them swarming with police. Okay. Like if you don't police your parks really well, they become places families really don't want to go to and they become disamminities. Right? They become places for basically drugs and crime. The, the number one thing the families want in any neighborhood is safety, order and cleanliness beyond anything else, beyond schools, although schools matter too. Beyond a specific house, you want safety, order and cleanliness. This if the neighborhood doesn't. If you don't get a sense that it's safe, clean and, and, and reasonable for your kid to walk around in the neighborhood, nobody wants to raise a family there. They might do it because they don't have other options, but it's not what people want. And the problem with parks is that especially we live in a time where like, public disorder is really rising. We're just, I mean, people just don't really have respect for public spaces in the same way. And as a result, public spaces increasingly are actually disamenities for families because they are not well policed, that it doesn't have to be this way. So like data communities and like master plan communities can still provide these like, public space amenities because they police access really aggressively. But if you don't police access and police usage, then these public spaces become disseminities for families with small children.

[Chris Williamson]

One of the most common reasons I think that people give for not having kids or not being able to have kids or not wanting kids is it's too expensive to get on the housing ladder. What are the nuances to what people are saying around that? And also how does that relate to this population density, style and type of home? I imagine that this is very carefully Gordianly knotted into itself.

[Lyman Stone]

So people are not lying when they say that housing is a barrier to their fertility. When people say childcare is a barrier to their fertility, they're not lying, but they're more often telling themselves a story about a series of other economic factors that are at work. But housing is a case where the price of one square foot of housing compared to the income of a young adult considering a first child, that that age range has skyrocketed. It's just way more expensive to get housing than it used to be in the past, particularly housing in a neighborhood that is clean, orderly and safe. So that's very real. And in Our study that we did earlier this year, we showed that in MSAs with like the top third most expensive housing compared to young adult income, young adults are more likely to live with their parents, they have lower marriage rates and they have lower fertility rates. So, yeah, expensive housing, it keeps people stuck in their parents basement and it prevents marriage and fertility because people of all stripes. If you ask a 20 year old, close your eyes, visualize the Christmas card you're going to send to all your friends 20 years from now. You know, you want to give an update to all your friends 20 years, send your like your winter greeting card. Visualize the picture on the front of it of your family. Now what is the house behind your family? Okay, I've done this experiment in classrooms of sociology undergrads, okay? Like super, like not conservative kids, okay? Like sociology undergrads, super far left. 90% of them, when they open their eyes, they say, oh, it was a single family house. It was a two story single family house with a yard.

[Chris Williamson]

Like, you mean it wasn't a super cool modern design floor to ceiling window?

[Lyman Stone]

Everybody, everybody, if you just ask people like, was it made out of brick? They're like, of course, of course it was made out of brick. Like, I can guess the color palette of the brick to within like a small range. Like, everyone is imagining this. This is now when people, when push comes to shove, yes, people opt for other things, people make other choices. But at like a brute, like cognitive schematic level, when people think about their family and people don't just want to arbitrarily have kids, okay? Nobody's like, well, I donated some sperm, therefore I have the kids I wanted to have. Like, that's not how that works. People don't want to have kids. They want to have a family. And a family is a package. It's, it's, it's a spouse, it's kids, it might be cousins, it might be aunts, it might be uncles, but crucially, it's an arrangement of residents as well as people. That being the case, it's not enough to say, well, we built a bunch of apartments and apartments are cheap now. Because guess what? That's not what people mean when they say a family. And how do I know that? Because I just surveyed 9,000 of them on this topic. So we have to build the kinds of houses that people want. And I want to say this doesn't mean we have to build expensive houses. Okay? I love Daybreak, Utah. I don't know if you've ever been there or heard of it. It's a gigantic master plan community. It's got like 60,000 people now, which is huge for a master plan community. It's super dense. Now, it does have apartments. It does have an apartment section. It has a range of housing types. But I was just visiting a friend who lives there and like, he lives in a single family house that's like, I don't know, 2500 square feet or something. Decent sized house. You could easily raise kids there, though he doesn't. He has two dogs. But, but the neighborhood, like, they're these small yards, very compact. But every, every one of these small yards that I passed has like a tricycle in front of everywhere, right? It's Utah. Everybody's having kids. You can build dents, you can build dense single family, and that's what most Americans want. You can do it affordably if zoning will allow it. It's. It's the type of housing that's most missing in America is dense single family. And it can even, even be like townhouses. Like, it doesn't have to be detached even it can be attached single family. People are happy to live in that. They're happy to raise a family in that, but nobody wants to raise a family in a small apartment. Heck, most people don't even want to raise a family in a big apartment. Hauling a stroller up the elevator isn't fun. Now, I think you can imagine a world where this isn't true. You can imagine a world where people kind of schematically lose their attachment to single family homes. So I think the Soviets kind of created that world in Eastern Europe. Right?

[Chris Williamson]

Like, so what a fantastic role model for.

[Lyman Stone]

Right? So I say without endorsement, comment, without endorsement, but like, Soviets, like, it was like really great. Oh, you got the big apartment, you can have another kid now. Like, you've got space for them and it's like still a small apartment. Okay. And in some ways, like East Asia, they have super low fertility. But the people in the bigger apartments do have more kids. So you can imagine this schema breaking down. But, like, I'm not sure we want it to. Like, the examples of societies where people aspire to a bigger apartment are not societies that most of us are like that. That's what I want.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Lyman Stone]

The bigger reasons. I mean, people say costs, that's common. But actually like some of the most common reasons that people give are they don't want to lose their personal leisure time and hobbies. That's like, actually one of the biggest reasons is basically, sometimes it gets surveyed as like leisure time, sometimes it gets surveyed as personal freedom, sometimes it gets surveyed as like hobbies and activities. But it's kind of this nexus of like disruption to my life. That's one of the biggest reasons. And it's a reason that really does predict not having kids. So to the extent you're a person who really values like kind of your individual hobbies, probably you're gonna die alone. I just got in trouble. I tweeted about this on Twitter yesterday and it's been, I've been, I've been catching some heat about it today. But like, yeah, I mean, the extent to which your sense of what's valuable and meaningful in your life is like your little projects, like, yeah, that kids mess that up. Family messes that up. So that's one of the single biggest reasons people give. And they're not lying about it. They're not just making crap up. Like people who say this really do have fewer kids later in life, you also see things about childcare availability that, that, that can be a very real issue in that. But one of the most common ones is people who just say, well, I just haven't met the right person yet, or I met the right person, but it was too late for us. That's one of the most common reasons. And that one also really does predict not having as many kids as you might have wanted to have. So partnership and personal freedom are definitely really important. But in both of those, I will say there's, I think there's an underlying reason that people, they almost don't have the words to articulate it. And to be honest, we don't survey it because it's weird to ask people about. And it's something like, you know, the reason I don't have kids yet is because it just seems like it's kind of a weird thing for a person at my stage of life to do. And I think that it's supposed to come later. Okay. Like it's, it's just nebulously. It seems like the only people doing that at my age are people who like failed out of her career or something. Right? Like it's, it's the sense that it's low status, but not just low status, but that it's like it's not normal to do that at this time in life. Or maybe it's normal, but only to have one at this time. You wouldn't have had three kids by now. And I think figuring out how to tackle that intuition is a really interesting question, a really interesting problem for people who care about this issue.

[Chris Williamson]

Where do you think that's come from?

[Lyman Stone]

There's a whole school, like sort of long standing literature around a concept called developmental idealism reaching back and I. People argue this kind of set of ideas emerged about 500 years ago and then really took over around 150 years ago. But it's basically, it's a reconceptualization of life and civilizational timelines that basically says, no, life is not a, is not cyclical. Okay. So like traditionally, most people view life as cyclical, right? You have an infancy, then an adulthood, then a second infancy in some sense as an elder, when you need care. And life is just sort of cyclical and everything comes back in its time and there's nothing new under the sun. Civilizations rise to periods of greatness, then they have decadence and they fall and then they rise again. And there's no long term trick, okay? But developmental idealism introduces the idea that there actually Is a long run trend that your life progresses linearly, not cyclically. That civilizations progress linearly or even exponentially. And they go through developmental stages like a child. You're, you're young and then you get mature and blah blah, blah. So you get this ethic of development. And that stage tends, in that approach, tends to say, because there's this developmental thing, you really need to make big investments early in life and postpone things that impede investment making, most notably family. There's other elements of developmental idealism that impinge on family formation. But this simple conceptual framework that life isn't really cyclical is a really important psychological break between most modern people and more traditional societies. And I mean, you can even see in things like most traditional people are dealing with cyclical seasons and as part of their subsistence. We are not right. We don't have as much seasonality in our life. So that's a big part of it. But then beyond that, I think more contemporarily, I think just in the last 20 years, you see like a supercharged version of this with social media and the Internet in the way that we can all observe each other's consumption in new ways. That it feels like you're missing out on more now to have kids, even if you're not. Like, you're actually not missing out on a lot more than you were in the past, but it feels like you are because so many of us spend so much of our life just scrolling through other people's conspicuous consumption.

[Chris Williamson]

How much of it is. Talk to me about the relationship between the diffusion of mobile phones and fertility preferences. Is this a correlation?

[Lyman Stone]

So I have a paper in review right now on exactly this. And the correlation is actually surprisingly weird. The strongest relationship is when people get more access to mobile phones and to the Internet. They're more likely to adopt concrete, discrete preferences, not necessarily lower ones, just more concrete ones. That is, they have less fuzziness around the numbers they report. They're less likely to say, I'll just have any as many kids as God gives me. And they're more likely to like say a number. And if they're going to say a number, they're more likely to say one number rather than like five or six, four or five, three. Like they're like, no, I want two, I want three. Cell phones drive this sort of concretization of preferences and they eliminate some of the flexibility that people naturally have around their friends. Family life. Right. Historically, people had limited control over their family life. There was a lot of early death, limited ability to control conception. And so humans adapted by having a kind of flexible conception towards family life. As people get more exposed to like western media, they tend to lose that flexibility and adopt really inflexible family norms. I want exactly this. If I don't get exactly this, it's a big problem. And what's interesting, this actually sets people up for a lot of misery. Okay, so in non western contexts, when people undershoot their fertility desires, it seems like they don't suffer as much loss of like happiness as western people who undershoot their fertility desires. Like when western people say they want two kids if they only have one, their odds of being depressed in their 40s and 50s are a lot higher. But if you look at like an African woman who says she wants five and she ended up with three, the effects on her subjective well being actually don't seem to be quite as large. Though I will readily admit we don't have as good of data for that context as well. And it seems like what's going on is western people just adopt these really inflexible family norms, not just lower. And when people get cell phones, the inflexibility translates more rapidly than the actual lower numbers do. At least is what we're finding in early research. So. But what does happen with social media, aside from family desires, is we see people become less likely to intend big families even if they desire them. So this is actually a weird dynamic. When people get cell phones, we see that more of them, they still want the same number of kids as their non cell phone having neighbors. Okay, so like if you're in a village where people have cell phone service and the neighboring village doesn't, you all, you both want the same number of kids, but if you have the cell phone, you're less likely to actually intend to have that number of kids.

[Chris Williamson]

Why?

[Lyman Stone]

Beats me.

[Chris Williamson]

I just report the data, man.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, no, so like this is, this is like, this is in our like questions for further research section. It's like, what? Why? And we, we kind of think what's going on is we do see this concretization, this spread of like more concrete fertility desires. And what's going on is people say, well, it would be, instead of saying, well it would be nice to have four and maybe I'll have them. So I'm, I'm, I'm open to that. I'll try for it. Maybe I don't get it, maybe I will. Once people are more exposed to western media, they start to say, well, it'd be nice to have four, but I'm not sure if I can hit it. So it's better to just content myself with the two I have. Right. So you get this sense of like, rationalizing the difficulties of your life. At the same time, there's a whole different possibility that this is basically about exposure to different status hierarchies.

[Chris Williamson]

What? The flexing brunch with the boys and the girls on a Saturday is far more Instagram worthy than a night of changing dirty nappies.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. Yeah, basically. So I think one of the. So I published a study on this a couple of months ago where we looked at. It's very hard to find cases of status interventions. Like, how often does a government or something like, implement a policy where they announce like, three kids is high status now? And even if they do, like, do people really, like, believe it?

[Chris Williamson]

What does that even mean? Yeah, right.

[Lyman Stone]

So, but we have one case where this did happen successfully. So the country of Georgia, their state church. The leader of their state church is. He's a rock star. He's like the most popular public figure in the country. He has crazy high approval ratings. He's like a hero of national independence and revival, whatever. So he got ticked off that in like 80% of Georgia is Georgian Orthodox. So, like, it's. Most of the people in the country are a part of this church. And he got annoyed that they just built this gigantic new cathedral and no babies were being baptized in it. Okay. And he was like, crap, my congregation, my fold is dying. Like, they're not breeding. And also they're having a lot of abortions, which is like a big no, no in conservative Christianity. And he said, okay, here's what I'm going to do. I will personally baptize any third born or higher child born to married Georgian Orthodox couples. And I will become their godparent. Okay, so this is interesting because for traditional Christian movements, godparents matter a lot. Like, they are kin, they are family. So much so that it's actually incest to marry a God sibling in most traditional Christian traditions. You can't marry God siblings in Eastern Orthodox canon law because it's incest. You are siblings. You can't marry siblings. So anyways, this guy, he did this thing, he announced this. And in 18 months, the fertility of Georgia rose from 1.6 to 2.2. And it remained. It's still above 1.6 to this day. It's like 1.85 today or something. So this worked. I have a paper published where we use a bunch of different quasi causal methods to show that it worked. Georgian Orthodox fertility rose more than minority fertility. It specifically rose among married, third or higher births. All these different things. The point is it worked. But the question is why? Like, why did it work that, like, this old religious leader was like, ah, I'll baptize your kids. Why did that make everybody be like, we're having a third kid? Like, so what we can say is the number of children Georgian women said they wanted to have didn't change. They wanted three before the intervention and they wanted three after the intervention. But the number they intended to have rose.

[Chris Williamson]

What's the difference?

[Lyman Stone]

Wanting is if I just ask, like, ideally, how many kids would you like to have? Intending is how many do you actually plan on having? Okay, so that's very different. You can imagine saying, well, I'd love to have four, but it's not going to work out for me. I'm only going to have two. We also know that people, that the abortion rate fell, the marriage rate rose, women's education did not decline, women's workforce participation did not decline. So it's not like women adopted more traditional roles. People just like, spontaneously had more kids. We think what happened is that in this case, this religious leader, he was popular enough and the offer of God family was compelling enough. And also being part of a big mass baptism in the cool new church that they leveled a mountain to build is kind of actually kind of an Instagram worthy experience. That this, like, hacked enough different psychological constructs that it made a lot of people be like, well, you know, we used to think having a third child was like, kind of backwards. Like, cool people don't do that. But now good Georgians have a third baby and we want to be good Georgians. So we're going to have a third baby. So it like unlocked kind of like a religious nationalist impulse that was latent, which means you couldn't just do this anywhere. But it does point to the fact that when you're able to alter status hierarchies, fertility does respond and without disrupting, like, women's ability to be economic citizens. It's actually not a retraditionalization. It's like a new traditionalization. Right, that you get big families but also women working, which is something that a lot of sort of conservative pronatalists often assume is impossible. Right. That. That the only pathway to feminism is to roll back this. And in Georgia, we see that's not the case. Religious revival generated more babies, but didn't re traditionalize women's roles.

[Chris Williamson]

How many kids do most Western women Say that they want British, American, 2.

[Lyman Stone]

Like 2 to 2.51 countries that are like 1.9. Like Malta is like 1.8 or 1.9. Austria I think is 1.9. Maybe. But generally most people say like between 2 and 2.5. Well, they don't say 2.5, but the national average is like 2 to 2.5. And in the US it's like 2.2 or 2.3.

[Chris Williamson]

And how many do they intend?

[Lyman Stone]

Anywhere from 1.2 to 1.7 or 1.8. I think in the US it's 1.9.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. So, yeah, I guess they're not actually that far off. Like the birth rates and the intention rate are not actually births versus intentions.

[Lyman Stone]

Are not radically far off. People, People are reasonably good predictors of what they themselves intend to do. It's just that what they intend to do is a lot less than what they would like to do if their circumstances were different. And so, like, the biggest things that predict intentions being lower than desires for young women are things like, like mental illness is a big one. So like, people with more severe diagnosed mental illness have a bigger gap between intentions and desires. People with less relationship history. So people who have like never had a relationship by the time they're 28 have bigger gaps between intentions and desires. People with worse work histories as well, or people with histories of incarceration. Um, so bad life outcomes predict a shortfall between intentions and desires. People who are basically failing to hit key milestones before we continue.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Lyman Stone]

That is a great question. Not genes.

[Chris Williamson]

Right? This is the one area of psychology that apparently genetics isn't going to step into.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, it's not genes. We, we actually know this one. There are very few genes that are relevant for fertility and they, they don't appear to be highly implicated in fertility preferences. So it comes from some kind of socializing environment. People are socialized into having bigger fertilizer, higher fertility preferences. Some of that is from your parents. Right? You tend to absorb. There is some heritability of fertility and fertility preferences, though heritability of these things is pretty low. Fertility is much less heritable than most traits that we study heritability of. So it tends to come from idiosyncratic, personal, positive experiences of family life. So you happen to attend a church that has happy families and so you go, yeah, okay. It's like religious people have much higher fertility preferences, but not all religious people. Right. And it's not necessarily the religious people whose parents had high fertility preferences. So it tends to be what we call horizontal culture rather than vertical culture. That is, it's culture you absorb horizontally from other people in your society, not vertically from your parents. Primarily. There is some parental influence. And what is that horizontal culture? Well, it's going to depend on the society you live in. Sometimes it's religion, sometimes it's. Sometimes it's peers, some of it.

[Chris Williamson]

If you're friends with people with big families.

[Lyman Stone]

What's that exactly? Yeah, yeah. Actually there's, there's a, there's great studies on this that show that. There's a study using a huge database of Dutch people. There's actually a lot of studies involving large databases of Dutch people because, I guess Dutch people like large databases. But that shows that, like, the more of your personal social network that is people with bigger families, the more kids you want to have. And like, causality here is a little tricky. Like, maybe the reason you have those friends is because you want to have big families. But the authors try to control for that and they, they argue that it's actually causal that, like, social exposure to people with big families makes you want big families. And they also show on the other side that, like, the more childless friends you have, the more likely you are to not want to have kids. So this suggests that there's a real contagion of fertility preferences. And this also points, like, the Georgian Orthodox case. I give, like, what really happened here is that, like, a public figure, like, started a fertility epidemic, right? Like, he stood up and said, like, you should all do this. This is a good idea. And then for whatever reason, some influential social actors were like, yeah, okay. And then it just, like, infected everyone. So my favorite case of this, actually, there's a study that looks at co workers and particularly coworkers who sit close to you at work. And they show. And the first studies do this, showed that when a coworker who sits close to you at work has a baby, you become more likely to have a baby over the next few years that there's contagion via approximate co workers. But then somebody said they were like, wait, maybe that's not really causal, because, like, maybe your seating chart is not random. They said, but what is random is the sibling behavior of coworkers. So they said, what happens to your fertility when your coworker has a sibling who has a baby? And they show that, like a ripple effect. Like, when a coworker's sibling has a baby, it makes the coworker more likely to have a baby, and then that eventually makes you more likely to have a baby. It's like a ripple effect of babies. So, like, it's all a little goofy. I'm, like, I'm not sure how much I believe the exact effect estimate there, but I think the model it lays out is plausible that, like, fertility behaviors are highly contagious and they operate via social learning. Right. That, like a lot of us, a lot of people, people think parenting is harder than it is. It's really, genuinely not as hard as people think. And the way we know this is that the number one thing that makes people most to increase their fertility preferences, like, if you resurvey people longitudinally across a lot of waves, like, what causes people to increase their fertility preferences? The number one thing is they had. Is they had kids. When people have kids, they tend to want more kids. They raise their fertility preferences. And so what that tells us is as you acquire experience of children, you realize this is better than I expected.

[Chris Williamson]

Mm.

[Lyman Stone]

If that. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Could that not be contributed to by the fact that there's an overhead that you need to pay in order to have one child? You need to childproof the house, you need to get a bigger car, you need to do all of these things? So kind of like a man who built a factory to make one pair of shoes, you go, well, you know, I mean, the shoes are nice, but, God, I'm kind of in for a penny, in for a pound. I might as well have it make a ton more shoes. Is it possible to sort of bifurcate that?

[Lyman Stone]

Yes, it is, actually. So in the us Actually, not just the us, like every industrialized country that has these big fertility declines recently, the fertility declines are almost entirely among first births. Conditional on having baby one, your odds of having baby two have only declined a little bit in most countries. And conditional on having baby two, your odds of having baby three have not declined at all in most countries. And your odds of having baby four, conditional on having baby three have actually risen in a lot of countries. Countries. So it is actually the case that, yes, what we see is in for a penny, in for a pound. People who have any kids at all are still having them like they always did. We're just seeing that some people are not having kids at all. And as a result, they never learn that this is actually a pretty good thing. But then if you imagine the social contagion effect, if none of your friends are having that first baby, you're not learning that actually, when people have a baby, they tend to want more kids. You're not seeing that. And as a result, you get this contagion where people are just. They're not observing something that people used to observe in human life, which is once you have one, you realize, yeah, I could totally have another one. And then you think, yeah, I could have another one after that. And then you think, maybe I could have another one. Did a lot of people feel this way? Not everyone, obviously. There's some people who get two and they're like, oh, I'm done. Or they get one and they think that that's always been the case. I'm not. I don't want to say that doesn't happen. But. But on average, having more kids causes upwards revision in fertility preferences.

[Chris Williamson]

So it's mimetic in both ways. It's mimetic on the way up in mimetic on the way down. But it's a little bit of an unfair war when the social contagion is moving in the downward trajectory, but because it's very easy to flex the kind of lifestyle that seems aspirational online without kids. And also, all of the costs of having kids are very obvious and all of the benefits of having kids are very hidden.

[Lyman Stone]

Yes, the benefits of having kids are literally behind closed doors, like they're the days where, like, on this podcast right now, my kids are with my wife out at playgroup. You don't see them, but the benefit of kids is times where I'm working on something at home and my 18 month old just comes and sits in. I've got a little kid chair beside my chair. You can't see it, but. And she just comes and stands there and plays with her Legos on my desk. And it's just sweet. And it makes that 30 minutes of my day just more pleasant and happier. Okay. But no one sees that because when it's time to record, I like, shoo away. Like, I'm like, go away, kids. I don't want you on the recording. We literally hide the joy of children, right? So before we were recording on this, we were. Me and you were talking about how we were both tired. I don't know what your reasons for sleep loss were, but mine, of course, were jet lag because I was just in Asia for two and a half weeks with my kids and with another family with small kids. We had five kids, five and under, in Hoi An, Vietnam, and in Hong Kong. And it was awesome. Like, it was so much fun. And yes, I'm going to do a massive flex post here in a few weeks where I do a blog post on how great it was and I show pictures of my kids. But, like, that is not. That's not typical. Like, usually the. The travel flex is people being like, oh, here's like, gorgeous me with, like, no children in sight. But it's so fun to travel with kids. Like, it's exhausting. Like, it's exhausting in very different ways. But, like, watching your kids freak out about some piece of cultural difference that you barely noticed is so much fun. Or like, when you're, like, explaining something to your kids when you're traveling and they. And it like clicks with them, it's so cool. That's a bit of a digression. But yes, it's just easier to flex a childless lifestyle. Also, it's the inertial position, right? Like, people are born childless and so it doesn't take any effort to stay that way.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it's like life change through commission or life change through omission, I suppose. Yeah, the set. The set point here. All right, what about male socioeconomic status? How much is that contributing to this?

[Lyman Stone]

It definitely matters. So male earnings, young men's earnings have seen essentially no economic growth in the last 20, 25 years. Other groups have. Young women have to some extent, but particularly Older people have. Now, there's a popular notion that, that when men have more income than women, or like when women are more dependent on men for their sustenance, that there will be more marriage and more babies. This actually turns out not to be true in industrialized societies that, like US States, have a bigger gap between men and women. Like, if you put together like a, like a panel model with fixed effects of states with like, gender gap for young men and women versus marriage rate. A bigger gender gap in incomes does not actually predict like a higher rate of entrance into marriage. What does predict it is when young men have a higher income relative to older men. Now, this might sound weird. Why is it that young, the older men having really high incomes would be bad for young men's marriage rate. Immediately there will be some people saying, well, it's because older men are poaching all the young women. No, it's actually not that either. Even if we restrict to only the incomes of already married older men. Why is this? And the reason is, through all of time, all of human history, since we came down from the trees, there is one thing that women have desired above all else, and it is insurance. They have desired to be insured against income volatility, particularly the income volatility that arises from family. To be clear, insurance is very different from economic provision. In most human societies, women produce about half of the economic benefits of their family. They farm, they gather. In hunter gatherer societies, women gather, they produce a lot of the calories of a society. In agricultural societies, women work on the farm, so do children. In early industrial societies, women worked in factories. Women have always been able to do economic provision. The problem is their incomes tend to take a hit when they have a baby. So they need someone who provides insurance. Well, what kind of insurance are they looking for? Well, most women's sense of what they want to be provided for their children is going to be shaped by one thing, and that is what they observe from fathers when they are growing up. Okay, so the comparison young men are facing is not young men's income versus young women's income. The comparison young men are facing is their income versus the income of the women. The incomes of the women's they want to marry's fathers.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes.

[Lyman Stone]

Okay, so if you want to marry a woman, she's comparing you to her dad. Okay, and why do we know this? Because across centuries of data on mating behaviors, we see that there's almost no hypergamy. That is, women do not marry up if you compare their husbands to their fathers. Okay. They marry up if you compare their incomes to their husbands, but they don't marry up if you compare their husband's income to their father's income. Women match to husbands that share their father's socioeconomic status. Okay? Which means when older men become much wealthier compared to younger men, Sucks to be a young man because all the women are like, you clearly can't provide the things that my dad provided for my family.

[Chris Williamson]

It's so cr. It's, like, so incestuously weird to think that your potentially eligible male suitor is not competing with the other men around you. It's like, you, as a guy, don't need to be worried about that. You're competing with her dad in a really weird.

[Lyman Stone]

So. And I should say it's actually, you're not strictly competing. You are competing with her dad, but you're competing with her dad and the other dads of women she saw as peers when she was growing up.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Lyman Stone]

Okay.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. There's a. Something I saw here. Across the last 300 years of British data, men and women very reliably match on male status correlated to women's father status, I. E. A lot of women without college degrees made themselves be poor, but often their families are not.

[Lyman Stone]

Exactly. Exactly. So that's Greg Clark study. That's a wonderful instantiation of this. So, yeah, you're men. You're not competing with other guys. You're competing with me. You're competing with a confederation of fathers. And what that means is, as dads, one of the things we can do for future men is not spoil our kids. Okay? And I know that sounds weird, but, like, really, it's like, if you have a lot of income, like, hide it from your kids, wait until they're 35 to reveal to them how much money.

[Chris Williamson]

Millions. There was millions waiting there. And you, meanwhile, you had to have bread and cheese again for dinner. Little Timmy.

[Lyman Stone]

No, like. But I mean, really, like, I think. I think there's, like, a genuine argument here for, like. Like, princess. Spoiling your daughters really wrecks their future marriage prospects. Especially, like, I. And I have a lot of sympathy for this. Like, whenever I see someone, like, a peer or a near peer who's, like, living a really opulent life, it's always like, the game of, like, real money or debt. Like, which one is paying for this? Like, do you have that much income? Or you just, like, up to your eyebrows in credit card debt? And it's often the latter. And then I think, but the kids don't know. The kids don't Know like I have a dear friend, someone I cared about very much who was always, always giving so many gifts to his kids. And not just to his kids, to everyone around him. He was like infamously generous until he committed suicide because it turned out he had massive gambling.

[Chris Williamson]

Highly over leveraged.

[Lyman Stone]

Right. And the problem is after he died, some his older kids understood what had happened but his younger ones didn't. And so they just were mad at their mom because she's not providing. What?

[Chris Williamson]

Dad, why can't we maintain the lifestyle that we had before?

[Lyman Stone]

Well, and the answer is the lifestyle we had before killed your father. So I mean, honestly, I think there's actually an argument that like don't spoil your kids is actually a really important part of like society maintaining healthy fertility rates.

[Chris Williamson]

I look forward to you proposing that to parents and seeing.

[Lyman Stone]

And to be clear, I say this having just taken my kids on a two and a half week vacation in Asia where I absolutely spoiled them. So, you know, chief of sinners I am.

[Chris Williamson]

Is one of them a girl?

[Lyman Stone]

They are all girls.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. You have cursed them.

[Lyman Stone]

I have wrecked their marriage.

[Chris Williamson]

Good luck to their future.

[Lyman Stone]

In fairness, I brought two eligible marriage prospects on the trip as well. The other family has boys.

[Chris Williamson]

So you know, we're arranged. Very arranged. I saw that. Have you seen this experimental evidence on the acceptance of males falling behind? This new paper?

[Lyman Stone]

No. What is this?

[Chris Williamson]

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[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, no, I totally buy that. I mean you see this routinely, that there is generally. I mean our whole welfare system was designed around the idea that single moms need extra help. Okay, but other. But like poor dads don't. Or in general there aren't that many like single poor dads. But our whole welfare system is designed on this kind of assumption. It's designed specifically to meet the needs of basically single moms. Which is maybe not an ideal way to design a welfare system for various reasons, partly because it may encourage the creation of more single moms.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, then there's less obligation from the guy. Oh, you know, she's got a benefit check so I can just, I'll flee. She can look after herself.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, yeah. But yeah, I mean, I totally buy that. That yes, there is a tendency to just blame men for their own failings, whereas with women, maybe less so. I would also say one of the other things I think going on is that there are just more socially acceptable pathways for women to exit the labor market. Right. If a man stays home and says, well, I'm just gonna, you know, I'm gonna focus on like I'm going to read, I'm going to cook, I'm going to clean, I'm going to learn all these useful domestic skills so that someday when I marry someone, I can be a really useful house husband. Nobody's like, okay, cool. But if like a woman says that like there's guys lining up at her door.

[Chris Williamson]

Allow me. Allow me to service you.

[Lyman Stone]

Right? So there are, like. There are, like, these acceptable pathways out of employment for women that just, like, aren't there for men. Likewise, like, if a woman has a baby and she says, well, I'm going to take a year off to, like, raise my kid, people are like, oh, that's great. But if a guy's like, oh, we had a baby, I'm going to take a year off. People are like, dude, your child must be fed and clothed. Go to work. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you dig into the men as providers versus men as insurers thing a little bit more? I've never heard of this. This. Yeah, in the past.

[Lyman Stone]

So, okay, we have a norm that really emerged in the 20th century that women don't contribute to household subsistence. Okay. This didn't happen in the past because it would never have worked, right? Like, for humans to survive, everybody needed to be working on the farm. Okay? Now you did have separation of tasks, okay? Men maybe did the plowing. Women raised the chickens. Women raised the cow, did the dairying. Okay? There's a division of labor. But I mean, look, go read Little House on the Prairie, okay? Ma is working all the time, okay? She's not just keeping house. Ma is out there making things of economic value that then Pa goes into town and sells, okay? And while those books are, you know, fictionalized, they are accurate in representing that particular facet of subsistence, which is that women provided a very large share of the labor that gave households their subsistence and income throughout all historic human societies. It's only in the 20th century, to some extent the 19th, but especially the 20th century, that societies routinely became productive and wealthy enough that women could actually not contribute to subsistence and income. That men's productivity got so high that it became possible to say, actually, women can stay home and have book club.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, they could. They could stay home previously, but home was not a place bereft of doing.

[Lyman Stone]

Seriously, in an agricultural society, everyone stays home. Like, like the. The dad is staying home because home is just the field in front of your house that feeds you or you die.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lyman Stone]

So, like, the whole staying home distinction is invented in, like, 1750. Okay? So you get like, the sphere of. Of domesticity is invented, basically. I mean, look, you can go in the Bible, in the book of Proverbs, the Proverbs 31. Woman, she grows crops, she weaves fabric, she sells goods in the marketplace. She does all of the economic production of the house. The man sits in the gate, which is Code for politics and war.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay, can I, I need to just interject. I've got an idea that I'm going to be terrified, I'm going to lose providers, insurers. We're going to go from the woman, from the Bible. Is it right for me to say then that what we're talking about as a novel new position for women in society when we take a broader perspective than Simply the last 300 years, is not one of them working, not one of them providing and contributing in this way, but one that is done in a much more statusful way. It seems to me that the difference we have in the modern female work to the, I guess historical and then ancestral female work is that this is done in a much more male style, which, which is power, status, individuality, autonomy. Is. Is that the, a key distinction or am I talking shit here?

[Lyman Stone]

No, you're absolutely right. So. So actually Proverbs 31 is actually a great case to exemplify this. So the woman does all the subsistence, the man sits in the gate, which is a cultural reference for politics and war. Okay, so what is politics and war in a Bronze Age society or an Iron Age society? Well, it's not your daily provision. Like a warrior does not provide you your daily food. What is he? He's insurance against the other warriors. Okay? He's. If you say, what is the big risk in my society? Well, it's that the Midianites come and kidnap me and my children and sell us into slavery, that's the big risk. So I want to insure against that. Okay? I need a man for that. Look, I can weave my own fabric and grow my own barley and make my own barley beer, but I, mother of children, cannot march off on campaign against the Philistines. Okay? So a man insures against that. Or if you think about agricultural, like a state based agricultural society where like imminent raiding and pillaging is not an immediate threat. Still, women do a lot of the subsistence work, but they do different kinds than the men. They do things that are more compatible with having children around. Actually, often they do more valuable, that is often they're doing work that's actually more cash based, that is more saleable. Whereas often the men are doing the like the staple crops that are basically muscle power intensive. So. But when we think about insurance, what's going on here is women can provide for their own needs, their own daily needs, okay? Most humans can, and this has been true in all societies. But what happens though is suddenly you get pregnant and your ability to work declines and then you have a baby and your ability to work declined and you have more needs. Eventually the baby grows up and the baby contributes to work. Around age, somewhere between age 6 and 14, depending on the setting, the kid basically becomes economically self sufficient. Okay, so you really only have about, you know, six to 10 years for that kid where you, you need coverage. So you need like a temporary, like unemployment insurance program basically. And what's that program called? It's called husband. You can do without husband if you don't have kids. But if you have kids, holy cow, you need husband.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Lyman Stone]

He is an insurance product. He's not a. Oh, wifey needs hubby because otherwise she can't survive without him. No, wifey needs hubby because those kids that hubby put in her have wrecked her prior subsistence strategy. So he's better insurer for the damage he did.

[Chris Williamson]

Because that suggests that in the modern world, if women have got a lot of savings, that they are much more prepared to be a solo mother. That they're. Yeah.

[Lyman Stone]

And so most solo mothers by choice do tend to be hiring income. You talk to high income unmarried women and they do talk about, oh, I have to save up all this money before I have a kid, because so it can have all these effects.

[Chris Williamson]

They're becoming insurers.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, yeah, they're self insuring. Yeah. But self insuring is really hard. It's really expensive. It's really nice to have somebody else with uncorrelated income. And men's income is uncorrelated with women's fertility choices. We know this from all the motherhood penalty literacy literature that when women have a baby, their income crashes, but their spouses doesn't. So like the judgment that you want someone with, with uncorrelated income, a husband tends to be uncorrelated. Is true.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Why is it that women keep selecting for men who are high earners even if those women are out earning men on average?

[Lyman Stone]

So basically, so what do you. So, okay, so I recently bought disability insurance for myself. Okay. So like, if I get disabled, it'll cover, I don't know, something. And it, it's calculated as a percentage of my income. Why is that? Well, because when I was talking to my financial advisor, she was like, well, you have to think about maintaining your standard of living if you become disabled. So why do women want spouses whose income is in some way comparable to their expectations? And those expectations, as we discussed, are largely based on the standard of living that they would expect that their father provided for them for the same reason that your disability Insurance is, or your life insurance is calibrated based on your income because you want to maintain a standard of living during the period in which you expect to be drawing on your insurance plan.

[Chris Williamson]

People understand that habituation and hedonic adaptation are a hell of a drug. And yet people don't like to go backward.

[Lyman Stone]

Exactly. People intuitively understand that you do not want to go backwards.

[Chris Williamson]

I mean, that's the same with the. Your current girlfriend's father's net worth versus your own thing. And how much do you think, just to loop back to that, how much do you think that is contributing to the sort of resentful, bitter energy of intergenerational competition theory? Yes, dude, my favorite, my absolute favourite answer, when I'm like a third of a way through a half baked theory and you're like, yes, that's that. That is it. Is that so two questions on that. Is that both true? For why is that true? And is that true for both men and for women? Is there this sense in women where they go, these male suitors aren't doing as well as my dad? Which makes for a pool, a pool of ineligible partners.

[Lyman Stone]

I think so, yeah. I mean you could see lots. You can. It is easy to find women complaining about the lack of eligible partners online. And if you. So I've done some structured interviews on this as part of a project and when you, when you lean on this argument a little bit, you end up finding that what these women are tend to be saying is a lot of it is about socialization. That is, they'll say, I mean, look, there's guys out there, but they're, they're weird. So like that's a big part of it. And that's not really about income. That's.

[Chris Williamson]

We can talk about that.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, that's a separate dynamic. Okay. But when the income stuff comes up, usually what they'll say is, look, you know, he doesn't have to earn more than me. He just has to have a stable job that like he's proud of. Um, and then you say, okay, really? And then they're like, well, like, so I did a couple of these structured interviews and like multiple women unpromptedly were like, well, look, my dad wasn't rich, but he did this job. And I'm like, boom, we're at the daddy comparison. We got like, intuitively, if you just push people on this, like, and you.

[Chris Williamson]

Don'T even have to, they start to compare to fathers.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. And I think that's super normal. Yeah. Like that's.

[Chris Williamson]

Who is the Most who is the most formative male partner role model that you have?

[Lyman Stone]

Most common people will appeal to is like a friend's husband. Okay. Is like a friend who got married and has a husband. They'll say, well, like my friend's husband, like he, you know, she earns more than him, but like he has a good job. And then you're like, is his income similar to what her father's income was? And you're like, I guess, yeah, it is kind of similar. So for my wife and I, I'll just do full disclosure. Her mom is a nurse and her dad is a pastor, and my dad is a pastor and her mom is a nurse. I earn way more money than my. Well, my wife earns zero money now, but my earning potential was clearly higher than hers early on. And so if you just looked at our individual stuff, it looked like hypergamy. She married up. But if you look at our parents occupations, it's like this was literally a perfect 100% within class marriage.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. The regression to the mean keeps on regressing. Dig into, dig into that social ineptitude among young men. That's the most polite way that I can put it.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. So for what it's worth, I don't think it's just young men. I think there's a lot of socially incompetent young women as well, but they code very differently. Socially incompetent young men code as like creepy, weird and autistic. Socially incompetent young women code is like angry, depressed and anxious. Okay. So there are different kinds of things. But basically what I think is going on, and I think actually scholar named Alice Evans has written a lot on this and very, very capably and lucidly and not from like, like a, you know, frothing at the mouth, right wing perspective. She's, I think quite, quite liberal personally. But she nonetheless will sees the same thing, which is where young men and women are just inhabiting totally different social spheres. They don't live in the same world online or in person. They learn different ways of interacting, different cues about what's normal. My favorite example of this is there was a survey in Korea where like something like 70% of young women reported that they'd been like sexually assaulted. And then they asked him, like, what, what is a sexual assault? And like, like 5% of men reported they've been sexually assaulted. And like only like 8% of men admitted to ever having sexually assaulted anyone. So they're like, how do these numbers stack up? And then they asked everyone like, what counts as a sexual assault and like women's list of what counted as sexual assault was just like pages of things and men were like, well he didn't ejaculate in her, so was it really sexual assault? Like, Jesus Christ. They just had like totally different definitions.

[Chris Williamson]

Right? So both, both groups are absolutely insane.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, they, they, they like clearly both had some. Like there were clearly a bunch of psychotic people in both groups.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, to say that there were bad things happening on both sides and people being truthful on both sides.

[Lyman Stone]

Yes. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And also a ton of concept creep as well.

[Lyman Stone]

Yes, yes, absolutely. Yeah. You know, like clearly bad things happening. But like the striking to me was just the extent to which the two sexes just had zero mutual understanding of.

[Chris Williamson]

What is a massive failure of cross sex mind reading.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. And you see this, I mean Korea is an extreme case, okay. Not everyone's like Korea, but you see versions of this everywhere.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you explain what, like what the fuck happened in Korea culturally?

[Lyman Stone]

I don't have a complete answer to that, but I can do some educated speculation. So Korea is not alone. We see similar dynamics in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Japan. These countries have some things in common culturally. And so there's a temptation to say it's something about like the historic legacy of sinitic cultural norms or something. I don't think it's that. I think it's the specific development model that they adopted in the mid 20th century. So all of these countries adopted versions of export led growth and basically the idea that they would massively suppress consumption, labor activism, everything to maximize savings, investment, exports and growth. Okay. So the result is you have these societies that just had incredibly low fertility rates early on. I mean, Japan's fertility rate get slow quite early. There's societies that really aggressively told people you should not have a family, you should work harder, you should grind harder instead of having kids. Which is civilizationally suicidal advice what you wish for. Yeah, yeah. So they gave this advice and they implemented this advice successfully and they grew really fast. These are also societies that their strategy for growth was not just grind harder in the factory, it was grind harder at school. And grind harder at school is an interesting dynamic because women, women do really well in school. School is a female favorable environment for a variety of reasons. And it has become more so over time. And yet these are societies that women had curtailed work opportunities, so they did great in school and then they didn't get a great job because sexist boys club or because it was hard to make work compatible with family or any number of Things women did great at school and then didn't. Didn't get great jobs. So this creates a situation where a lot of women feel aggrieved about their circumstances legitimately in many cases, which creates a uniquely extreme culture among young women. And I do want to emphasize, I said before, there's something going on on both sides. But, but if you compare like Korean young men's social values on like the world Value surveys to other countries with similar incomes, their young men are not unusual.

[Chris Williamson]

Like young Korean men are weird, toxic, horrendous.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. They're not super. Like their views of like gender and sex and marriage are like not that atypical for other societies with their income levels. But Korean women, young Korean women have extremely atypical gender attitudes for a country of their income level. What like they're extremely progressive basically on a number of like batter standard survey battery questions about like women in the workforce, mother staying home with children, marriage, the, the place of marriage and children in a happy life. Questions like this young Korean into a lesser, lesser extent. Taiwanese, Japanese young people are just. The young women are just unusually progressive for societies with their other characteristics. The young men are kind of normal. So to me that says that something did happen among women particularly. And I think it's a combination of women succeeding in school than being locked out of the workplace by Asian work norms. I think also K Pop. K Pop was a state sponsored initiative by the Korean government in the 1990s to create a services export to match their goods exports. They were very successful. They created a whole new cultural world. And the distinctives of K pop are. And now of C pop or J Pop or any of the Asian pop cultures now are single sex bands that are young, heavily plastic surgery and contractually celibate. That is literally, they sign like when they, when they apply to the record programs, they agree to like live in dorms, not have relationships, not have children for the duration of their contract and then once they want to have a family, they have to stop performing. So they systematically created a culture of childless celebrities and role models.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Lyman Stone]

So I really recommend. There's a documentary about the band Blackpink. It's an interesting documentary to watch if you're interested in the social phenomenon of K pop.

[Chris Williamson]

I am. Where can people watch it is on YouTube.

[Lyman Stone]

It's on Netflix, I think. Or at least it used to be on Netflix. The last scene, you're going to watch the whole thing and you'd be like, why is Lyman recommending that? This is weird. Unless you're just like really into teen girl culture. The last scene will clarify for you why I recommended it. But. But beyond that, I mean. Okay, so I was in Vietnam two weeks ago, and we went to a place called the Bana Hills. Okay. It is. It's a hill. It's a big mountain above Hoi an, above Da Nang, Vietnam. And I've done a couple of these, like, cable car, top of the mountain hill stations in Southeast Asia before. And the other ones I've been to, you go to the top and it's a scenic view. You know, you see the clouds and the mountains and the hills and it's beautiful. Maybe there's a Buddhist temple. Okay. I did not realize what Bona Hills was. They have built a fake French, German, Bavarian village. On top. There's a fake castle. It's crazy. Okay. There's nothing to do. You just take Instagram pictures and it's filled with cute. It's filled with cute, like. Like the little cats and the little dogs and the too cute stuff that's like, so Asian. And I think the whole cute culture is like, part of what's going on in Asia is like their childhood was so ruined by their educational culture that they have to stay children until they're 40. I'm just now, like, saying that I'm in trouble.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, we're already in trouble.

[Lyman Stone]

But like, talk. Talk to young Asian people about how much how their school culture was when they were growing up. It's not fun.

[Chris Williamson]

That's fascinating. And so the. The only thing that I still don't fully. I mean, I don't understand a lot of it, but I. The thing that I mostly don't understand is where this intense liberalization of women in Korea came from. Is that simply a reaction to this imbalance between performance in school and opportunity in the workforce? Or is there something else going on?

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, so I think the genesis of it is basically Asian women leapt ahead in school and then ran into a brick wall in the workplace, which created a culture of legitimate frustration.

[Chris Williamson]

Think about how fucking resentful you'd be. I would be.

[Lyman Stone]

Holy fuck.

[Chris Williamson]

So you're telling me for all of this time I've been in this weird, you know, insular, in some places, honor culture thing does this sort of. It's very patriarchal. It's sort of steeped in history. It's got a long heritage. F me. If you're in Japan, it's, you know, the country was completely isolated for the, like four centuries or something. And you're telling me that now? Oh, hooray. I finally got access. I can go and perform in education in the way that I want. And I reach Adelaide and nothing's changed.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, so like it's, there's a legitimate frustration there. And then I think that the emerging cultural norms around like the K pop ification of Asian youth, on the other hand, for young men you get a different dynamic around like anime and porn and stuff like that. But I think that it basically creates like K pop stars. They're not just K pop stars, they're lifestyle influencers. They're, you know, sharing things about their vacations and all this stuff. And they are childless.

[Chris Williamson]

Surely that creates a vector though for of opportunity in the same way that the Georgian priest did. Because if you're concerned about population decline in Korea, all that you need to do is make all the new K pop stars have come out on stage full of children.

[Lyman Stone]

Someone's been reading my advice to the Korean government.

[Chris Williamson]

No, we just have the same level of autism. That's it.

[Lyman Stone]

There you go. So no. So yeah, so like if, like if I was you know, in charge of Korea, Mr. Korea or Japan or whatever, like here's, here's what I would do. I would first say first the standardized testing that like governs your whole young life. Firstborn children get automatically docked like 5% of their grade. Just firstborn children are penalized. Second born children, the penalty is a little bit smaller. Third born children, no penalty. Fourth born and up you get bonuses. Okay, so you just punish people for having small fan. You just basically you just say, look.

[Chris Williamson]

Does that not incentivize. That would cause a situation in which stupid but seventh children of a family get better jobs. Does that not create an issue in the economy?

[Lyman Stone]

You know, maybe, but I'm confident enough that like look like I have utmost confidence in the ability of the Asian education system to turn people into functional workers. And there's not that many seventh born children. So this is not going to be a big problem. And you could still set like a minimum standard. Like you could be like, yeah, you can't get into top universities. But like, yeah, so one is, yeah, I think that you should basically just just, you know, just penalize your bonus test scores based on parody. Or you could just say like, no firstborn children are allowed in the top university. Um, so you could do categorical qualifications instead. Um, and then secondly just make it illegal to perform publicly in Korea if you don't have a child perform music publicly. So boom, all K pop stars will have children in nine months.

[Chris Williamson]

You've done you've done very well in creating the north in the south there overnight, like the, the dictatorial accusation.

[Lyman Stone]

So I mean, look, would this work? Like, no, because there'd be massive backlash.

[Chris Williamson]

But no, that's, that's the difference. Would it work? Maybe. Would it be accepted?

[Lyman Stone]

I would be king for precisely one day.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, until everyone reads your fucking policies.

[Lyman Stone]

So like there's this wouldn't work for a variety of reasons. But I think the, the question, once you start thinking about why it wouldn't work, you immediately realize that it's correctly identifying the problem. Right.

[Chris Williamson]

High status social role models.

[Lyman Stone]

It's the status system. It's. Yeah. The fact that it probably actually would topple a Korean government if they messed with K pop is all you need to know about what's really going on.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. Yeah. Well, look, it seems to me to be a vector for influence and you know, that can go in directions that at the time seem great and in retrospect seem maybe not so great.

[Lyman Stone]

A less authoritarian way of doing this is to hear that one though the Korean like cult Ministry of Culture or whatever it's called actually does have like stakeholder quasi owner status in some of the K pop industry. And they could just use that status to nudge the companies they are involved with to systematically promote K pop stars. With families.

[Chris Williamson]

Going back to the west for a second, what is the truth in the double shift for women but not for men?

[Lyman Stone]

Women do not have a double shift on average, statistically speaking. Men and women report married moms and dads. That's the group we're talking about here. Married moms and dads report virtually identical combined hours of, of household and non household work. Women report slightly more daily hours or daily minutes of leisure and sleep. But it's like, I think it's like seven minutes more or something. It's like trivial margin of error stuff. Married moms and dads have virtually identical overall workloads. There's. There's not a difference in leisure of any note between the two.

[Chris Williamson]

I read that Robert Verb Verbruggen article on ifs the myth of the lazy father.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. What is, what does he say? It's, it's probably something similar.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. It shows that country to widespread belief. When you consider both paid and unpaid labor, fathers and mothers do similar amounts of work. In fact, on average, fathers do slightly more. The myth of the lazy father persists in part because when evaluating gender fairness among parents, we tend to focus on household chores while ignoring paid employment. Nagai sites Steve Stewart Williams again saying, as Steve noted in the eight that understood the universe. It is more common, not just among humans, but in nature writ large, for females to be the sex that invests more in children. We shouldn't find it surprising or offensive if women indicate a greater desire to spend time with their children, even if it costs them at work. And they do.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, there isn't a second shift on average. Now, I will say averages always disguise important variation. For women who are working full time, there is a second shift because women who are working full time don't necessarily tend to have a commensurate reduction in their family responsibilities. On the other hand, for women who are not working at all, their husbands tend to have excessively high combined work. So what's going on is that the distributions are wonkier than the averages would make us think. So there are a lot of women who are working full time and then coming home and still having to do a lot of domestic stuff because their husband is not compensating in the. In the way that they might have wished. And so they are facing a second shift. And those women, you know, may have a legitimate gripe, but they are offset by other women who are not working full time and also whose housework is not even approximately close to their husband's combined paid and unpaid work.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it's a strange one with that, I guess, sort of the visibility and the stereotypical mundanity of household chores. You know, the guy that stays an extra hour at work versus the woman who has to cook a meal. Like, it just. It feels like. It feels worse. It's like, well, there's, you know, in the same way as pickup artists back in the day used to take girls to three different locations on one first date. Because the way that the human brain perceives time and locations, it feels like more is going, oh, I'm more familiar with this person. I've been to 3A. I went to the park and I went to the ice cream shop and we went to the swimming pool together or whatever. And I get the sense that, yeah, the type of chores, the type of household work that you do, the parity between those two doesn't feel quite fair. And if you were to say across a day, 10 hours was, let's say 10 hours was spent. One of those things was done in one, and one of those things was seven and three. The seven and three feels like more work in a way.

[Lyman Stone]

So the. The other thing going on is that there's very different, very big differences in the satisfaction that the sex is derived from different activities. So jobs that are more female dominated tend to be jobs that are more personally satisfying. That is, they tend to be jobs that people are more likely to report being satisfied and happy while they do the job, whereas jobs men do are more likely to be somewhat miserable. Again, we're talking averages. I know I'm going to get crap about this at some point. Somebody being like, you didn't think about this thing. We're talking averages, okay? And this is data from the American Time Use survey that shows this. So when women visualize work, they're visualizing a bit of work that's relatively satisfying and pleasant. So you can have a situation where the woman at home is doing a chore that maybe is not super satisfying or pleasant, though I'll come to that in a moment. And she visualizes the work that her husband is doing as being very satisfying and pleasant when the actual work he's doing is perhaps relatively unpleasant. You know, he's up on a roof installing yet another solar panel, hoping he doesn't fall off. So you do get a dynamic like that then. Secondly, in general, female biased activities are activities where people tend to report higher life satisfaction while they're doing them. It's not just paid work. So like activities that involve care of children, people tend to report very high life satisfaction while doing those activities. They tend to report that those activities give them a lot of joy, even if it's changing diapers. Yes. So now that's wild. That's activity specific. On the whole, when people reflect on their life, you do get a lot of women who say, well, what did I do with the last 10 years? I just changed diapers and did these things. And I think that's probably because our society culturally does a bad job of providing narratives that create sort of long run macro meaning in parenting. And I think this is actually an interesting tie back to the Georgian case because I think part of what happened in Georgia is that they were able to give people a sense of long run meaning in having children, that that child is part of a bigger project than just the satisfaction you get from being with your kid and getting some snuggles. So I think what happens with a lot of stay at home moms, or not even stay at home moms, but moms doing domestic things is in any given moment they'll talk about how satisfying the work is, how much they enjoy it, how much they like it, but then they also feel like they don't really have access to a story of meaning about how this is a long term project that progresses and really built something they're not, they're not building in the way that like their husband is building a career. Because we don't really have a narrative in our society about that. We don't do a good job of communicating. Like, well, you are building something. You're building a family. Like in a very real sense, you're building a civilization. Like you are in some sense like the, the culture creator for these children. And civilization is just the culture that's built for each generation. Like you are engaged in the central civilizational task. Your husband is just paying for it. But that's not how we think about it. Because most of us today conceive the central civilizational task as market remunerated work. Right?

[Chris Williamson]

It's, it's that I have a theory around this. Two, two working titles for it. You can help memeify it with me if you want. So I'm playing off the Matilda effect, but I'm calling it the reverse Matilda effect or second option. The soft bigotry of male expectations that basically if a woman can do it, it's seen as less important. And this was, this was brought about. And it's fucking true, dude. It's true. You know how it was so. You know how it was so fucking true. The most true that it's ever been was that study that said yes, women did as much big game hunting as men and maybe even more. You know, there was that big study that came out and this group of very ideologically motivated researchers had said, yes, women, women did do precisely the same amount and data in some situations. You can see that they even did more. And big game hunting's calorie negative in any case, so it kind of doesn't matter. And it's like, yeah, because you finagled the data so hard to make it like one incident of big game hunting was matched with like one a week from female to male. And you have to ask yourself the question. And this was, this was what brought it about. And it's one of those like weird self owns from people that are trying to be really manipulative with what they're doing. And you go, what were you trying to say? What you were trying to say is that inherent in what women did, what they actually did, or at least what we can infer that they did from, you know, hunter gatherer societies that we can observe and stuff like that was somehow less valuable. And because of that we need to fucking retroactively change the narrative in order for what women did to be what men did. And that's like if I'm a, if I'm a woman and my ancestors, it's insulting. It's fucking patronizing. It is so fucking patronizing. It's the exact same. It's the exact same. Andrew Schultz told me this and it's, it's like a formative memory that I've got about what modern women have to deal with. So his wife apparently is way smarter than him and used to work at Google and was like, you know, super high achiever type person but wanted to have a family. And Andrew's real successful and she has the benefit of now being a stay at home mom. And he would be out with her at the supermarket and they'd both run into people that she used to work with at Google and they would say, oh it's so nice to see you, what are you doing now? And her reply would be, I'm just a mom. And Andrew said it was the word just that really killed him that there's this inherent sense of insufficiency that women have that especially if you're talking to a still currently employed, maybe mother, maybe non mother that's at fucking Google that you almost need to apologize. It's like, oh, I got conned by the patriarchy into being a domestic servant and yeah, you know, I just put my sundress on and I'm in you know, this weird sort of like servile role that I've got and you need to. And he said yeah, it was the just that killed me.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah, it's awful. No, I mean that's like on the other hand, if you say something like, oh, I'm raising my children, people are like, are you saying I'm not because I'm working.

[Chris Williamson]

Also? This is like the soft bigotry of career expectations.

[Lyman Stone]

Right? Right. If you say what you're actually doing, like I'm hands on raising my kids, people feel insulted by you saying that because like what are you saying about how I'm raising my kids? Or if you were to say something like, you know, I'm ensuring the continuity of civilization thousand years people like, little bit grandiose, don't you think? And I'm like, but that's what you like. When my wife talking, when my wife and I talk about this, I'm like, that's literally what, what like I'm working out here or I'm working, I'm, I'm, you know, I'm doing spreadsheets and emails because that brings in money that we can spend on a multi thousand year political and religious project that, that our people have been doing for a very long time.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, look, I mean, and my wife.

[Lyman Stone]

Is the one implementing that project.

[Chris Williamson]

One of my least favorite dynamics. And this is something that I noticed when I first stopped drinking about nine, nine years ago or so. I'm aware that now low and no lifestyles, the fucking like health and fitness du jour, right? It's like so common. Everybody's on low and no when it comes to alcohol consumption. But about a decade ago in the northeast of the uk, this is fucking revolutionary, right? I was. I'd invented the steam engine and I.

[Lyman Stone]

Should, I should tell you, one of my ancestors, Lyman Beecher, literally invented the word teetotaling.

[Chris Williamson]

What. Where did that come from?

[Lyman Stone]

Because when they would have their big religious revivals, he would go in around and ask everyone how committed they were to getting rid of alcohol. Were they going to get rid of all alcohol, just some alcohol. And if they were going to totally remove alcohol, he would mark their name with a T. T for total.

[Chris Williamson]

What?

[Lyman Stone]

That is sick. So my family have been teetotalers ever since I remain, but I married into Lutheranism, so I'm now the designated driver for my church.

[Chris Williamson]

Heathens. Heathens everywhere. Um, but yeah, I.

[Lyman Stone]

Sorry, that's a digression.

[Chris Williamson]

That was a fucking sick story, dude. Um, yeah, I go sober and I'm in nightlife still. I'm running all of these nightclubs. I'm up till three, four in the morning in different cities across the north of the UK and people got pissed. Like, people got people. Other people were made to feel uncomfortable by my lifestyle choice. And I think that it's maybe not too dissimilar when you. Yeah. Lean into the level of attention that you are giving to raising your kids. Inherent in me stopping drinking is the value judgment of not drinking is something I want to do. Presumably it's something I want to do because I think it's something that's good to do, which infers that the opposite of this is something which I would prefer not to do, which infers that that's bad. Which means that if you're doing it, you are bad, which is your sense of self, which go fuck yourself, right? And this weird roller coaster, quadruply loop roller coaster, mental cascade dance thing that people go through just straight away, you know, from I'm doing this thing and take pride in it to. That means they think it's good. That means that not doing the thing is bad. That means that if I do it, it's not bad. That means that it's a slight against me. It's like it's a type of mental gymnastics that would win gold.

[Lyman Stone]

But why is it like that? Okay, so this is the interesting question because you're totally right, that's 100% what's going on. Anytime you say I'm making choice X for me, people are immediately like why are you judging my lifestyle? So now in my case it's fair because I'm also a judgment, a very judgmental person. So like they're not wrong about me. But I'm sure you're less judgmental than me. But so, but the interesting thing is why are people like this? And I think the reason actually gets back to some of the like fertility as a social contagion thing we, we were talking about earlier which is like if you think of humans in the ancestral environment like small mid sized hunter gatherer groups, like conformity is actually really important. Like these are actually in many, on, on many dynamics, not everything. These are very conformist environments. Same with like agricultural societies where you're living with the same people for many generations. Conformity is really important and when somebody else just starts doing something differently like it can be problematic for the group dynamic. Right. Like if you're all going to hunt mammoths one way and then Joe's like meh, I'm going to do it this way. Like it takes a team to bring down a mammoth. Joe can't just do his own mammoth hunting thing. Likewise for foraging. Like if you all know that there's 13 edible crops in the area and Sarah's like I'm just going to throw this in the mix of berries that we've collected today. Maybe everyone dies.

[Chris Williamson]

Thanks Sarah.

[Lyman Stone]

So you know, conformity, humans are conformists. We want to be conformists. It's, it's soothing to conform. It's pleasant. We seek it out. Now there's also cases in which we seek out individuation for certain fitness related reasons. But at a basic level for most of us, for most of our decisions, most of us really want to just.

[Chris Williamson]

Follow the crap, outsource to the wisdom of the group.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. And that's good. I want to be clear, I'm not saying that that's like a flaw. It's actually like a great hack that we do this so naturally that we mostly for like a lot of kind of low attention decisions, we just outsource. But it also means that we do, we, our brains are hardwired to devote like excess attention to people who act differently. We're interested in them, we're fascinated by them. We make Netflix shows about them. Our literature is about them. But we're also often horrified and offended by them. And so this speaks to the fertility contagion issue because it means as soon as what's normal switches for whatever reason. And I could go through a laundry list of historic cases where we've seen just a switch in the normal on family life and not just family size, like incest, who you can marry, polygamy, like all these different norms where you can see places where just it flips and what's normal changes in humans. Just everybody changes. And fertility is like that where you can get quite rapid changes because what's normal changes and cultural norms can pivot on a dime. Cultural norms seem like they last forever until they suddenly change.

[Chris Williamson]

Dude, you're so awesome. You're fucking fantastic at this. I think you're a phenomenal communicator. I'm sure that lots and lots of people are angry about lots and lots of things that we've said. And my inherent desire to not be misconstrued always runs up against talking about this topic, which I'm fascinated in. But I'm sure you'll have given me great fodder to journal about at some point when. When the reactions come. But you're just really, really great. I love how you really do approach this. Like a demographer. Sterile and inhospitable. See, it's a real. It's a real compliment. I can't wait to talk to you again. I've got so much more I want to talk to you about, but for now let's. Let's bring this one into land. Where should people go? They want to check out your stuff.

[Lyman Stone]

Institute for Family Studies Pronatalism Initiative is the place to go. Or you can find me on Twitter imanstoneky. I should clarify that's KY for Kentucky. It's not that I have an Eastern European last name.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, kyj.

[Lyman Stone]

Yeah. But yeah, no, I mean it's great being on here and I hope this is helpful for people. I hope what people took from this is that cultural influence matters. And if your sibling has a baby, you can make your co workers have babies too.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow. What a whatever the opposite of a tragedy the commons is. Dude, I appreciate you. Thank you.

[Lyman Stone]

My pleasure.

[Chris Williamson]

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books are I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.