Emily Oster (5:09)

Thanks so much for having me.

Isaac Saul (5:10)

So, first of all, I have to confess, I'm a fan. I don't usually do this at the top of interviews. I'm sure you get it all the time. I have a new four month old baby at home, so congratulations. Thank you very much. I'm a parent and in, you know, the psychotic thing that is parenting, where you're googling every scary thing that happens in pregnancy and post pregnancy, I came across a lot of your work and you became a really great resource for me. So I'm sure You get it all the time. But I appreciate all the stuff that you've done and certainly have. Have found it really beneficial for myself and my wife.

Emily Oster (5:47)

Thank you.

Isaac Saul (5:47)

I'd like to start. Yeah, you're welcome. I'd like to start with just a basic question that I guess has a really complicated answer. I'm 34. A lot of my friends are not having kids these days, and I think there are a lot of reasons why. I know you've written a lot about this, and I know it's becoming a really important issue in the country politically. People are talking about it more now than I think they ever have. I guess I'd be curious to just get the lay of the land from you. Why people aren't having as many kids right now, if that's true or that's just my impression, what the data says and kind of what you're hearing from people.

Emily Oster (6:23)

Yeah. So it's a big question. But let's start with the biggest global take, and then we can dial down a little bit into what we know and what we don't know. So if we think globally, fertility rates are on the decline kind of everywhere. So in every. At this point, every kind of rich country has a fertility rate below replacement. So that's below about 2.1. There are a number of places in Asia that have fertility rates below 1, which means their populations are cratering very quickly. And then even if we look at less developed countries where the fertility rates tend to be higher, we have still seen very, very large declines. 25 years ago, 30 years ago, there were places that had a fertility rate of 8. No place has a fertility rate of 8 anymore. So we've really seen this kind of global decline, and in particular a decline in developed countries to below replacement. So that's kind of the basic overlay fact. And I think that's important to note because a lot of the explanations that we can get into are informed by observing that this is not a US specific phenomenon. Now, how much have the fertility rates declined is actually not a super straightforward question, because the way we measure fertility rate, sort of total fertility rate, is to look at a given year and the fertility rate at each age and then effectively add them up as if a woman is experiencing all of those ages exactly as they are in this year over her life. And then that's the kind of total fertility rate. And that kind of works fine if you're in a steady state. But one of the things that is happening now is people are having kids later. And so as we are sort of moving fertility later and later you may get a situation in which the kind of current people who are 34 don't have kids at 34 like people used to, but actually now they have kids at 41 and maybe they end up with about the same number of kids as they did before, but they're later. And so then our kind of measure of total fertility rate that we have in the moment is going to overstate the extent of decline. So the data is a little tricky. But on the whole, it's pretty clear fertility rates have gone down a fair amount and are now low enough that the population is expected to shrink.

Isaac Saul (8:51)

Obviously, there are a lot of contributing factors to this. I mean, a lot of people have different solutions. One of the ones that I've seen that's fairly common is the kind of cash incentive, the birth boosting incentive. That's something President Trump is reportedly considering now. $5,000 payout or tax break for your child. We had the child tax credit. You've written a little bit about this. Tell me what you're seeing in terms of whether financial incentives are something like, like we've seen in Israel or South Korea that could actually spur people to have more children.

Emily Oster (9:24)

So the evidence on financial payments for kids is mixed and not super encouraging about this as a game changing solution. There are some episodes where there were large, seemingly sizable fertility changes in response to incentives. Those incentives were very big. So, you know, far in excess of $5,000, closer to a year's SA salary, effectively. So really like big incentives, you can get people to have some more kids. Even those effects are not enormously large. And some of them seem to be sort of moving fertility, kind of moving fertility rather than increasing it overall. So, you know, I tell you, if you have a baby now, like, I'm going to give you $10,000 and you were going to have a baby either now or in a year. So I'm going to have it now for my $10,000. But that's different from taking someone who wasn't going to have a kid and saying, okay, this is like going to totally increase the amount of babies. So I would say, could there be a little bit of an impact or a little bit of change in timing of those kind of policies? Yes, they probably need to be larger than $5,000 and we should not expect this to return the US to replacement? For sure those effects are small.

Isaac Saul (10:37)

Do you think the takeaway there is that people aren't actually so cash strapped that they're not having kids? Like, how do we interpret that.

Emily Oster (10:48)

It's tricky because I think that there's also some evidence on, you know, child supports, which does seem to again, and I would say they're like more direct things that would be more directly impactful, like support for things that will help you pay for preschool or childcare, stuff like that. Again, you know, those show the same sort of there are some positive impacts. They're relatively small. I don't know if I would say it tells us that people aren't having kids for this reason, but when I look at the global changes in fertility, when you are seeing the same or even larger declines in places like Norway, Sweden, where we know that the social supports are very great, it does suggest that there's something going on beyond family supports that's different from saying we shouldn't have family supports. I feel pretty strongly that we should be having better support for families in the US but it doesn't feel to me that those changes are really deeply what's behind the fertility declines.

Isaac Saul (11:59)

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Paige Desorbo (13:06)

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Isaac Saul (14:04)

So I guess that kind of invites the question of like what factors do you think are out there that are are pushing that?

Emily Oster (14:11)

Yeah, so I guess I would say there's sort of several leading theories. Let me speculate. I'm not sure we can really settle on one of these. But if we think about the theory for what might be going on, here's a few. So one is that people are waiting until later to have kids. And that's both actually causing us to overstate how much fertility decline there really is. But also because it becomes more difficult to have children when you're older that some of the people who intended to have kids end up basically running out of time. Either they are not able to conceive or they have one instead of two or two instead of three. And so some of this is almost a sort of problem of kind of waiting and then finding you can't. So I think that's one piece that may be going on. I think there's another piece that's of kind sort of pretty clearly going on which is that teen birth rates have totally cratered. Like teens are not having a lot of kids. That's actually a good thing in the U.S. i mean we don't like that's on purpose. We tried to get those to go down. But it is clearly true that that used to be a group that was contributing reasonable amount to 15 to 19 year olds were having some kids and now they are really not having any kids. And that's a technological change that is all for the good. People have better control over their fertility. There are fewer accidents, more long acting reversible contraception, things like. So those are kind of two practical things that may be going on. It seems clear to me that part of what's going on is just more people are deciding not to have children. And I don't know what that is. I mean that sort of feels like that has to be a piece of it, people deciding not to have kids. And if we sort of put aside and say it can't all be because it's too expensive or because it's there's something there where more People are just saying this is not for me. And we're seeing then more people having no kids, as opposed to the fertility declines that have happened in the past where people used to have six and they had five and they went from three to two. This is like going to zero. And I'm not sure what that is, but that feels like the key thing that we're struggling to understand is just this decision sort of saying, I could have children, I have resources to have children, but I am choosing not to.

Isaac Saul (16:41)

Yeah, so that's a great point. I mean, I have actually written about this, which from my perspective there is kind of this, I guess I called it like a cultural thing, this sort of big cultural question mark that's kind of mysterious, which is like, doesn't feel like there's a policy solution. It's just sort of a social, cultural phenomenon that we might have to shift by kind of winning the argument that like kids are great and beautiful and you should do it and it'll enrich your life. And that that debate maybe isn't necessarily happening right now. We're just kind of like throwing money or policy solutions at it. I'm curious, I mean, you mentioned earlier that you do think we should have more family support in the United States. You just don't think that's necessarily going to be the kind of silver bullet for solving fertility stuff. Make that case for me. Like, what's the upside of the family support? How do we compare to other countries? Why should people who are watching their tax dollars get sucked up by the federal government want it to go to things like supporting families?

Emily Oster (17:44)

In the US the easiest thing to argue for is paid parental leave. We do not have any federal paid parental leave for women or men in the US and that means that there are a lot of women in the US who are having a baby and going back to often manual labor jobs after two, a point at which they are still experiencing pretty substantial complications from childbirth. So there's an argument in favor of better parental leave, which is an argument based on being a good person or ethics that, that doesn't feel ethical. It doesn't feel like we want to live in a society where that's the expectation. And then I think there's just a practical cost based argument which is that when kids get sick it's expensive. And we know from the data that kids get sick more when they are in daycare before 6 or 8, they get more RSV, there are more RSV deaths. So there's a bunch of actual. Even if you didn't care about the ethics and you didn't, and all you cared about was Medicaid tax dollars. It would still potentially be efficient to provide some maternal paid leave that people could access so they could stay home for longer. So I think there's a bunch of just practical cost based arguments for that particular intervention. And then I think that there are some, again, some efficiency, labor market efficiency arguments for childcare supports, because we know when we provide better childcare supports, women are more likely to stay in the labor force. And women staying in the labor force produces more tax dollars later improving their lives, improving the lives of their kids, but also providing more tax dollars. So I mean, again, for me, part of this reason, part of the reasons to do this is just, I think we deserve to give the kids who are born in the US a fighting chance to have a good start. And a lot of these policies would particularly help families with fewer resources whose kids are not getting all the things they need at the beginning. But even if you're making just sort of venal economic arguments, actually pretty strong ones in favor of a lot of these programs effectively paying for themselves in various sort of short and long term ways.

Isaac Saul (19:57)

So just to put a fine point on that, first kind of the health care point, you were saying that the actual health care costs increase when we send mom or dad back to work sooner because they're there, basically increases the chance that their baby's going to get sick because they have to go to daycare, they're bringing stuff home from work or whatever else. And then we're paying for that on the insurance side.

Emily Oster (20:20)

Yeah, and because a lot of this is going to hit for Medicaid, it's actually we're paying for it on the insurance side with tax dollars that are funding Medicaid. And so, you know, we have some good, actually good, relatively recent evidence about RSV in particular respiratory illness that basically when you give people, you know, eight weeks of paid leave, you see less respiratory hospitalizations for RSV in, in kids. And again, like, those hospitalizations are really expensive. You know, having a baby in the, in the picu, in the pediatric ICU for like a week costs Medicaid quite a lot of money.

Isaac Saul (20:56)

Yeah, that makes sense, I will say. I mean, I definitely became a little bit radicalized on this question after just going through my experience. I mean, my wife had a very uncomplicated, straightforward birth, thank God. And week two, I mean, we were sitting in bed, she's like still bedbound, and we're just looking at each other like, holy I can't believe you, like, there are people going back to work where you are right now. The baby is totally helpless and dependent on her for everything. I'm pretty much useless. I mean, it's, it's insane and it, it really, it changed my perspective on it in a really profound way. I mean, we, I run tangle and I have 10 full time employees and I was like unlimited, like with like post birth, you know, how much paternity, if you want. Because it's just, it seems so nuts to send people back to work at that stage after seeing it up close myself.

Emily Oster (21:55)

Yeah. And I think, you know, part of the, I think many people would agree with that. I actually think part of what's gotten in the way of this at this particular policy at the federal level is that it is so popular that everybody wants to like stick it in some bill full of stuff the other side doesn't like because it's like, oh, but also maternity leave in addition to all this crap you don't like. And that's been an issue. But we'll see whether, I mean, a lot of states have ponied up on paid leave, which I think is, is, is great.

Isaac Saul (22:22)

Yeah, our, our great big beautiful dysfunctional congress at work there with those kinds of tactics. I mean, makes you want to rip your hair out for sure. We'll be right back after this quick commercial break.

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Colin Seberger (23:47)

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Isaac Saul (24:26)

Our recent coverage of the declining birth rate stuff sparked a very interesting response that I suspect that you've run into. It was the first time I sort of got it in mass, you know, from we have a mailing list, like 400,000 people, and we got hundreds of emails from people after we talked about, you know, we covered Trump's baby bonus, as he's calling it. We actually cited some of your writing, or I did in some of my analysis, and there were a lot of people who wrote in and just said we shouldn't try to fix this issue. Like, the declining birth rate is actually a good thing. The country's overpopulated, our resources are strained. Climate change, the environments being destroyed. That strikes me, interestingly enough, as like something right in your strike zone. It's kind of the intersection of economics and parenting stuff, I guess. I'm curious what you make of that response and how you kind of make the case. I think I understand from your writing that you do view dropping fertility rates as an issue and how you kind of make that argument.

Emily Oster (25:34)

Yeah, I mean, there's a bunch of facets to this. So we start by saying, I think from an economic growth standpoint, dropping fertility rates are a potential issue. Economic growth is about people. And it's not that this sort of view, like society, is going to collapse into a heap of dust if we don't have people. That's not right. But the structure of society, the way things will look, it's going to be very different if we have many fewer kids. And you can look at some of these East Asian in South Korea, Japan, the structure of society is really different when it's a lot of old people and not a lot of kids. And that's the short term. And then in the long term, declining fertility rates have implications for cities and for just other aspects of life. Now I think other people will say, look, climate change, et cetera, it would be better to have fewer people. That feels like a philosophical and an ethical debate that different people will come down in different ways on. I think you can read Ross Douthat from the times who has a very strong view that people are good, Other people have a view. People are fundamentally bad, and fewer of them is better. I think people are good. For me, in some ways. The more interesting question is backing up from that. From the individual standpoint, do we want to encourage. Should we be encouraging people to have children? And, you know, is it. I think that comes down to the question of whether you think people are making a mistake when they choose not to. If we, like, accept that, a lot of people are saying, I choose not to, and that if we're at least some of those people, it's not like, I don't think I could afford it, but, like, I don't want to do this. This isn't a change to my lifestyle. I want to make one view is, like, you see the options we made not having kids, like, a more reasonable option. It used to be like, everybody had kids, or, you know, it was like, there's no birth control. And so, like, we're forced into this now. Like, that's a real choice not to have kids. And if people choose not to have kids, like, that's choice, and we should be encouraging choice. And I think another view is that this is a very. That people are ex post making a mistake, and that in fact, like, they would be happier if they had children, and somehow they're missing some crucial piece of information that would show them that and that then we are like, then they're making a mistake. And I think those are sort of two different views about just the individual choice. Even putting aside the sort of, like, what does this mean for society picture.

Isaac Saul (28:09)

I'm curious. You've been doing this for over a decade now. I mean, I just looked it up to make sure I had this. But your first book was published in 2013 on parenting. That's 12 years to now from your book being published. I imagine it took years of research just to get the book out. I'm curious how the kind of questions have changed over the last 10 or 15 years. I mean, are you getting different inquiries from new parents? Are the concerns shifting? Like, how's the tide moving? Or is it just kind of a lot of the same stuff coming up over and over again?

Emily Oster (28:44)

Yeah, things shift. Um, you know, I. People have gotten way more into data. Like, I was on, like, a little bit of the leading edge of the idea you could, like, use data to make choices. Now people are very into using science and data. So that's like, that's been interesting. Um, and there are certainly questions that I did not used to get that. I get now, like the number one question I get every single week when I talk on Instagram. I get it all the time in emails and it gets asked all the time on our on parent data is, can I use Botox while I'm breastfeeding? Somehow, like, when I was having my kid, like, no one was into Botox. Now Botox is like, Everybody has Botox. 100% of people have Botox. And so I don't know, like, that's new. That was like, it didn't even put it in the first book. I had to like in the last revision, we had to put a chapter in about Botox. It's like you're missing, I will say a sort of. At a, at a deeper level, I think that there is, there feels like more anxiety to me about how much we might be messing our kids up. And I think this is a little. Feels a little bit like a post Covid hangover. Although it's hard for me to tell because I like, I started doing so much more of this work during COVID So I'm like not sure how much is just amount of questions as opposed to the tenor of questions, but I do feel like people are kind of.

John Law (30:06)

Hey everybody, this is John, executive producer for Tangle. We hope you enjoyed this preview of our latest episode. If you are not currently a newsletter subscriber or a premium podcast subscriber and you are enjoying this content and would like to finish it, you can go to retangle.com and sign up for a newsletter subscription. Or you can sign up for a podcast subscription or a bundled subscription, which gets you both the podcast and the newsletter and unlocks the rest of this episode as well as ad free daily podcasts, more Friday editions, Sunday editions, bonus content, interviews, and so much more. Most importantly, we just want to say thank you so much for your support. We're working hard to bring you much more content and more offerings, so stay tuned. For the rest of the crew, this is John Law signing off. Have a fantastic weekend, y' all. Peace.

Isaac Saul (30:59)

Our executive editor and founder is me, Isaac Saul, and our executive producer is John Law. Today's episode was edited and engineered by John Law. Our editorial staff is led by Managing Editor Ari Weitzman with Senior editor Will K. Back and Associate editors Hunter Casperson, Audrey Moorhead Bailey Saw, Lindsay Knuth and Kendall White. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet75 and John LOL. And to learn more about Tangle and to sign up for a membership, please visit our website@readtangle.com.

Colin Seberger (31:42)

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Emily Oster (32:12)

Onslaught of the Trump administration, wondering what.

Isaac Saul (32:15)

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