The Baby Boom Mystery: Europe Was Below Repopulation Rate in the 1920s?!

A
Hello, Simone. We are back to pronatalist coverage. All right, we're going to be talking about a very interesting phenomenon that not many people know about. Not many people are aware that half of Europe was below repopulation rate before the baby boom. In TFR numbers, that means that they weren't having enough kids to replace themselves.

The entire world was in a bit of a fertility collapse during that period and we somehow got out of it with the baby boom. And then that set a new sort of set point that we've been declining from ever since then. But I want to talk about two things. One, this initial slump, and two theories for what caused a baby boom to potentially recreate a phenomenon like this that we can recreate every 100 years or so and then just have this cycle. That would be great.

Right, would you like to know more? This is written by Phoebe Arsalognik Wakefield. Phoebe came to our dinner in London. Remember? We met her.

B
Yeah, we know Phoebe. Oh, oh, oh, her. Yes, yes, Phoebe. The indian food in London. Yes, yes, yes.

A
I do think you begin to see her blinders near the end of the piece. That is mostly due to the areas of policy in which she has worked. But outside of that, I actually think the piece is fantastic because it brought a lot of information to me that I didn't know. And I'd also say, another thing I really liked about this piece in her writing is usually when I take a piece, I just read, like, a few paragraphs from it to get, like, the core of the message. I'll be reading over 50% of this piece because she presented so much consistent new information that I really have to read most of it to get the point across.

B
Right. I think we should be clear that Phoebe is one of the most prominent pronatalists in the UK. She's very respected, she's very smart and she's a wonderful person. And you may be bad with names, but yes, we do know her. And she was always presented to us as a who's who of one of the top pronatalist policy wonks and thinkers in the United Kingdom.

A
So this or other work of hers, you can check out works in progress in 18 hundreds. The average british woman had 4.97 children over the course of her life, about the same amount as the average woman living in Burkina Faso today. A century later, Britain's fertility rate had slipped to 3.9 children per woman. And 30 years later, in 1935, it had plummeted to 1.79, well below the replacement rate of 2.1. The number of children per woman needed to keep the population steady.

So in 1935, the TFR of the UK was only 1.79. That's kind of shocking. Yeah. Those are modern numbers. Yeah.

B
So much for. Oh, it was women entering the workplace. It was the pill. No. Yeah.

A
No, this is actually very important. It very clearly, this debunks the women in the workplace and the pill arguments. And even women getting educated at that time. Women, you know, also didn't have such high levels of higher educational attainment either. So.

Yeah. This trend occurred across Europe. By the 1920s, over half of Europeans lived in a country with a below replacement fertility rate, including Sweden, Germany and the Czech Republic. The US and Canada also saw steady declines in family sizes throughout the 19th century. By 1800, the average american woman had over seven children.

By 1900, she had fewer than four, and by 1930, fewer than three. So talk about how quick that's happening. It goes from four to three in just 30 years there. And that's. Sorry, that's from what you said, 1850 to 1900.

So, 18. O. Okay. Over the course of 100 years. No, no, 1933.

Oh, okay. And I'm going to put a graph on screen so everyone can see and they can more easily visualize than you can. If you look from 1800 to 1880 in most countries except for the US, you had a steady fertility rate. In the US, you had a slightly declining fertility rate. And then 1880 to 1920, pretty much across the board, you have steadily declining fertility rates.

And it seems to accelerate in the US a little bit during that period. So France's fertility rate had begun slipping even earlier, to great alarm. In 1896, an organization called the alliance national pour la crossevent de la populace. The way you butcher French, can you. It's like when Gomez speaks to Morticia in Italian.

Son uno perceived. No, tish, that's French.

No, I speak better like the guy in unglory. What's harder for you is when you butcher French for me. Like, oh, Malcolm, butcher some more French for me. I love it. Well, you love how patriotic I am.

B
Keep doing it. Keep reading it now. Sorry. Read that off again. Honestly created express.

Don't read it again. Okay. Alliance national pour lacrossement dela population francaise was born. Bonjourno, senora.

A
Grazie. Coralomi lo pronuncia coretamente C. Corretta. Created expressly to combat de natalite, essentially depopulation. It had attracted some 40,000 members by the 1920s.

Was novelist Emily Zola an early recruit. The alliance nationale was merely one of many organizations, local and national, established to resist France's apparent progress. Towards what demographer and statistician doctor Jacqueriez Berlatillion disparagingly called the imminent disappearance of our country. French pronatalists frequently and vividly campaigned on the issue as a serious matter of national security. In 1914, the alliance nationale published over a million posters showing two frenchmen being bayoneted by five germans.

The poster bore a caption explaining, for every five german soldiers born, only two french soldiers were. That is a great prenatalist propaganda there. We need to get some of that on board. Right. So hold on.

I will give the context of this. This was actually sent to us by a fan, and it was a Theodore Roosevelt speech from this period about I love it that we can have Theodore Roosevelt tell us his thoughts on demographic collapse and how we should fix it and what it means for a country. Yeah. So this friend of the base camp pod said to us, one of Theodore Roosevelt's most famous speeches given in Paris in 1910, is known as the man in the arena speech. For the first time in my life, our base camper says, I just read the entire speech and found this very powerful paragraph.

B
So now I'm going to read the paragraph from Teddy Roosevelt's speech as sent by our base camper. Finally, even more important than ability to work, even more important than ability to fight at need is to remember that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown of blessings in biblical times, and it is the crown of blessings now. The greatest of all curses is in the curse of sterility. And the severest of all condemnations should be that visited upon willful sterility.

The first essential in any civilization is that men and the women shall be father and mother of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not decrease. If this is not so, if through the fault of society there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the failure is due to deliberate and willful fault, then it is not merely a misfortune. It is one of those crimes of ease and self indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk, which in the long run nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down upon our heads the curse that comes upon the willfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done.

No refinement in life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature can in any way compensate for the loss of great fundamental virtues. And of these great fundamental virtues, the greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race. That's some prose right there. Right, right. Yeah.

A
No, he talks about the willfully barren and how disgusting they are, morally speaking. And that's maybe what we think of. Well, but also, like, what is the point of all of our progress? What is the point of all of our luxury if it is not used as a flywheel, if it's not used as momentum to create more human flourishing? Yeah, like, what was all of this for?

B
If we're just like a match going to light it and then flame out, what the hell? A match is for lighting, kindling. A match is for creating a bonfire. And these people just want to snuff. Like, I can't believe they want to.

A
Consume as much fuel as possible because they just. Morally quite selfish they are. Let's keep going here, because this is. And if you, any of you like new anti natalism makes sense because I have childlike understanding of morality, you should check out our video on. These people want us all dead and are weirdly reasonable about it.

And we go over all of the antinatalist arguments and they are not strong. But anyway, I'm gonna keep going with the piece here. The French were not the only nation to chafe against a new reality of smaller family sizes and quieter maternity wards. The british government established the National Birth Rate Commission in 1912. In fascist Italy, the battle for births was named one of Mussolini's four key economic campaigns of 1922.

B
Wow. Isn't that crazy? And he apparently had, like, posters up everywhere about it and everything like that. Yeah, just the understanding. The prior, I guess, that I grew up with was that always there was this malthusian concern for growing populations and that there was never any deviance from that ever since Malthus wrote his seminal piece.

Right. Like, that's sort of where things left off. And I was wrong. This is so cool. Thomas Melthus, by the way, was he after this or before?

Thomas Malthus was before this.

A
Fascinating. Okay. Contemporary demographers looked to shifts in values to explain the decline, like rising individualism, new family structures and ways of living that were less compatible with parenthood. Enide. Charles, a british statistician and feminist, argued that increasing female empowerment was one cause because motherhood made it difficult for women to compete with men economically.

So they were even arguing that back in the 1920s, Charles, a mother of four, called children a handicap to vocational advancement in adult life. Despite the organized resistance of groups like alliance nationale, at least some eastern european demographers doubted whether falling birth rates were truly reversible or even arrestable. In 1936, doctor Carr Sanders, an english biologist, eugenicist, and later director of LSE, wrote, and this is in 1936. Once the small, voluntary family habit has gained a foothold, the size of the family is likely, if not certain, in time to become so small that the reproductive rate will fall below replacement rate, and that when this happened, the restoration of the replacement rate proves to be an exceedingly difficult and obstinate problem. But even as car Saunders wrote those words, he was being proven wrong.

Something was happening. Europe and further afield, something we are still trying to understand. The baby boom. And here I am putting a graph on the screen that shows the giant jump in fertility rates that basically happened out of nowhere in tons of different countries. The baby boom, with an unexpected change in the direction from half a century of falling fertility rates that had taken place in Europe and North America.

Contrary to the popular belief that it was triggered by soldiers returning home from World War Two, the boom, in fact, began in the mid 1930s. It was not simply an american or british phenomenon, either. Demographic wave swept over Iceland, Poland, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Austria and the Czech Republic, Canada, Norway, Switzerland and Finland, thousands of miles across the sea. It even happened in Australia and New Zealand. And yet, Sanders doubt had been extremely well justified for whenever and wherever we have had data.

And since the industrial revolution, with the crucial exception of the baby boom, it has been a nearly iron law of fertility that higher incomes are associated with lower birth rates, which, by the way, is something that the Institute of Family Studies guy, what's his name? Lyman Stone. Lyman Stone. He says this isn't true. He's just completely delusional.

You really should not be citing his work or as, like, an authoritative source. He seems completely to have gone off the deep end in some recent pieces. Well, I mean, he wants to use the data to argue for socialism, and it doesn't work, you know, so he lies about the data, or lies about what the data is saying to. Yeah, he doesn't even necessarily, like, hide the data. He will even point out that there is a very, very, very high cost to, quote, unquote, paying people through services or bonuses for pronatalism.

B
He just wants countries to do it anyway, which I think is really interesting. Like, he doesn't deny the fact that it's prohibitively expensive. He just, I don't know, somehow wants money to come from. Well, I think he just don't know where. Yeah, well, he wants the government to, like, create a christian family department sort of thing that forces people to give birth is sort of my read.

A
This is where I'm going to begin to start summarizing what's in the piece. We're going to see on the screen here, a graph that does show higher incomes associated with lower fertility rates, where we will see this in different time periods in the US, the most widely known piece of information about the baby boom is its most pervasive myth that it was caused by the end of World War two. The baby boom was not the result of people making up for lost time during the war. It saw lifetime fertility rates rise, meaning that did not simply shift when they had their children, but had more of them overall. And in many countries, including the US, UK, Sweden, and France, the rise in birth rates began years before the war had even started, while neutral Ireland and Switzerland experienced booms that began during the war in 1940.

Now we're going to talk about one of the explanations for this called the Easterlin hypothesis. Okay. Is there anything that you want to say to this so far? Like, has this changed your understanding of anything or. No.

B
My initial. My initial hypothesis around the baby boom is something we've discussed in other episodes where I think that the hardship that people endured, even in neutral areas that weren't necessarily actively engaged in war, you know, caused by limited supplies, caused by, you know, trade issues, that forced austerity on people's lives. At the very least, if nothing, genuine trauma drove people to a level of vitalism that encouraged them, inspired them to have families, and that without some level of austerity or hardship, which could be culturally imposed through strong hard culture or religion, or could be imposed through the vicissitudes of geopolitical conflict, as you saw with World War two, I think that's what drives higher birth rates. And I'm curious to see what this hypothesis is, and I'm enjoying this. So this is fun.

Thanks for sharing this. Easterlin's explanation rests on the idea that the decisions individuals make in terms of whether and how many children they will have are strongly influenced by the difference between what they had expected their adult income to be while growing up, their quote unquote expected income, and what it actually is once they join the labor market, which he called relative income. He argued that people form an expectation of their income based on a range of social and economic signals, primarily those they receive growing up. The current average standard of living, the standard of living they experienced during their childhood, and a sense of their own prospects. The childhood of parents of the baby boom were marked by the Great Depression, during which unemployment rose to 25% and 9000 us banks collapsed, taking people's savings with them.

A
The us downturn was felt around the world. US GDP fell by 29% between 1929 and 1933, and global GDP with estimated 15% down. It was only around the end of the 1930s and the onset of the second World War that the economic growth began to pick up in 1978. Easterlyn used the cyclical element of his theory to predict that another baby boom would hit the west in the mid 1980s. But it never did.

Instead, american fertility rose from 1.83 in 1980 to 2.07 in 1990, and then fell a far cry from the demographic wave of the baby boom, in which fertility rose by over or 75% in many cases. Meanwhile, in Europe, fertility largely flatlined or declined. The cycle that is at the heart of the theory never emerged. And little trace of it can be seen in the decades that precede the baby boom. Even the strongest research.

So, obviously, a lot of academics have researched this, and this is a question that we can research. Even the strongest research showing a robust relationship between relative income and fertility finds the best. It can explain only a small fraction of the increase during the dababy boom, of around 12% of the overall rise. So, you know, lots and lots of people have tried to prove his theory because it sounds right. Like, when you hear it, you're like, oh, that makes sense.

I can see how that would have an effect. And even the converse of it, like, you know, yeah, sure, I could see people having more kids than expected. If they're like, holy smokes, I live like a millionaire. I never expected this. And you just kind of appreciate what you have.

B
And then, you know, the converse of that being, you know, millennials and younger generations being like, oh, I'm never gonna have the lifestyle that my parents had and then proceeding to not have kids. So it seems so intuitively to make sense. Yeah, well, I think it's very much like the initial reaction a lot of people have, which is like, well, if I had more money, I'd have more kids. And like, we know that the opposite is true. A lot of stuff around fertility is counter to an individual's intuitions.

A
And I think that that's what we're dealing with in this case, because, again, you can look at the data, it looks like it should line up in a fuzzy sense. Totally doesn't line up because you can look at it today. We can, we can, we can measure this in populations. They've been trying to prove this for half a century, is when he had this hypothesis a long time ago. And we just haven't found it.

Doesn't seem to be true. Easterlin focused on parents perceptions and expectations in his attempt to understand what drove the boom. A recent wave of research has looked instead at objective factors, in particular the cost of having children upon parents and how those changed. And here I'm putting a graph on the screen of the adoption of electric power, refrigeration, stove vacuum and washing machines from 1930s to 1960s. Parenthood rapidly became much easier between the 1930s and 1950s.

The spread of labor saving devices in home, such as washing machines and fridges, made raising children easier movements in medicine, making childbirth safer and easier access to housing made it cheaper to house large families. In 1930s, only two thirds of us homes had electricity. In 1960, 99% did. So we went in over a 30 year period for two third of homes having electricity to 99% of homes having electricity. That's huge.

B
Yeah, that is revolutionary. The UK and other european countries saw similar rollout rates. The household electrification paved the way for other technologies, including home refrigeration, which became more popular after an introduction of a compound called freon in the 1920s, a safer alternative to toxic chemicals previously used in fridges. Between 1930s and 1950s, the share of american households with a refrigerator increased from ten to 80%. 1930s to 1950s, this allowed consumers to take advantage of other innovations.

A
In 1928, bird's eye developed the double belt freezer, which allowed rapid freezing of fresh produce, improving the quality of frozen food with refrigerators found an increasing number of homes. Frozen food became popular from the 1930s onwards, followed by frozen ready meals. In 1946, the UK's frozen food sales amounted to only 150,000 pounds, but by 1964 it had grown to 75 million, about 1 billion in 20 twenty's money. So basically allow it for frozen food. And I think many people don't know, or if they haven't really meditated on this, how big a change this was in people's daily lives and how hard life was.

The ability to refrigerate food completely changes the way you relate to food. You are no longer spending a portion of your day or only buying cured meats. You no longer have to kill the animal and then immediately or like within a week, eat that animal. You know, you no longer the types of food you have access to dramatically expand and the cost of that food dramatically decreases. Now you can have industrial food, so I'm going to keep going here.

Other labor saving technologies proliferated and transformed the lives of ordinary people, particularly women. Consider the washing machine. Before this revolutionary object became a feature of daily lives, doing the laundry meant heating water with coal or firewood and scrubbing every item by hand. This was hot, sweaty work, often including pounding the laundry in a tub with something called a washing dolly. And its strenuous nature meant that women generally scheduled the chore for a Monday as it followed Sunday's day of rusk.

One early washing machine advert explicitly promised to transform blue Monday into a bright and happy day. By the 1940s, electric washing machines were becoming normal in middle class homes. And this is again, if you have never washed clothes by hand, I almost suggest you try it. So you know how. Yeah, I thought you were going to say, and because of its strenuous nature, women were.

B
Because, man, it was, it was actually quite a lot there. There are a bunch of youtubers actually, who, you know, do like sort of 1950s cosplaying and they'll be like, I'm going to eat depression era meals for a week and stuff like that and go through this. So there are lots of examples really readily available online for you to see how hard it actually was. And in my grandmother's autobiography, when she came to the United States and had access for the first time in her life as a young adult, a washing machine, she was just like, this changes everything. It was huge for her.

It was amazing. It was the best thing ever. But, you know, I'm hearing you say this and I am thinking about my grandmother a lot because, you know, she was in nazi occupied Paris, then she came to the US and, you know, she was part of this baby boom. They only had two kids. You know, this wasn't like, I'm going to have a ton of kids now.

So I don't really know how this would correlate. Well, your family seems to be genetically less, Natalie. In other families it could be is what I've noticed because I look at my family and they had tons of kids in these generations. Twelve, you know, 14, depending on the generation. We did that for a number of generations.

A
Even now, my family is very, very high fertility. I have a very large cousin network actually about to go see them in Maine. And pretty much everyone I'm related to has three plus kids, which is rare these days in the United States. Well, I applaud your fecundity, Malcolm. Well, no, it shows that our world framework kind of works with high fertility.

We'll see if we can keep it going because the fertility rate has dropped a little bit in this generation. Now, there is a paper that was done that basically destroys this entire argument. And I want to see if you can guess how they did it. If a baby boom was seen in, what other population would this argument completely fall apart?

B
It would have to be a population that. Oh, was it Japan or something? No, just in Europe. It's near us. Near us.

A
Who near us doesn't use washing machines? Doesn't use. Oh, the Amish. Yes, I see what you mean. I'll put a paper on stage screen here.

It's done in 2009, and it showed that the Amish did have an exactly equivalent baby boom to the rest of the population. Really? During this period. They weren't involved in the war. What did they do with any of this?

B
No, we're off the grid. That's where it gets really interesting. Only 50 Amish people ended up serving in the military. So it also kind of hurts your argument as well. My thesis.

Yeah, my hardship. Well, except. Well, right, right, actually, because they already. Well, they might. Yeah.

My position for them would be they already had hardship because they live a life with a hard culture and with deprivation. But then why would they experience a bump? Because you just level. I think you're partially right with the austerity, but I think there's another factor here and we're going to get to. It in a.

Yeah, because something has to cause the bump. Like, why would they have more fertility? It would just be steady. Historical demographic data on practicing Amish is scant, but the language, Pennsylvania Dutch, is spoken almost exclusively by the Amish, and the language is recorded in the census. By analyzing data from the us census, censuses from the relevant time period, that included data on primary language spoken to in the home and the number of children, 1940, 1980 and 1990.

A
It is possible to gauge the impact of the baby boom on the Amish community by tracking changes in completed fertility among Pennsylvania Dutch speakers. It turns out that during the baby boom, Pennsylvania Dutch speakers did see a fertility rise at the same time, at a similar magnitude to other Americans, and for as long, all without washing machines or refrigerators. So, nope, it wasn't that stuff. Between 1936 and 1956. America's now.

This is the one where I think they're onto something. This one. Can you guess what it would be? What else might have changed between the thirties and the fifties that could have caused the number of babies people had to hugely spike?

B
Globalization. It's medical technology. Amish don't shun medical technology. It's the one. Infant mortality went down.

Is that it? Yeah. And maternal death. Maternal. Okay.

Yeah. So, like, maternal online, this is when. Oh, gosh. Yeah. So between 1936 and 1956, America's maternal death rate fell by 51 deaths per 10,000 live births to under three per 10,000 live births.

A
51 to three over a period of just 20 years. This was mirrored by declines across the west. Sweden saw maternal deaths drop from 30 per 10,000 to four per 10,000. In England in 1874, maternal mortality peaked at 75 per 10,000. Years later, in 1945, it was less than five.

I'll have a graph on the screen that shows this sort of across the board. The US states that had higher maternal mortality than others. For example, averaged between 1915, 1935, Florida had almost double the mortality rate of Minnesota, 86 per 10,000, as compared to 44. By the 1950s, death rates had massively converged. And no two states with the biggest improvements saw the biggest birth rate increases.

So that explains a lot. There you go. Wow. Hold on. We're not done with this explanation yet.

Cause it's gonna turn out. It's not the huge explanation. We would like it to be interesting, but it helps. Okay. By comparing state falls and mortality with state baby booms, one analysis shows the effect of these medical advances on fertility in America was about 1.8 children per woman, or 55% of the rise in fertility.

During the baby boom generation. I would say. I believe it was probably 58%. I think that this is. Right now, I should note, this is not a good thing.

It is satisfying that we solved part of the problem, but it basically means fertility collapse never abated. The. Yeah, there was basically like a false modifier to the numbers. False modifier to the numbers. That is unreplicable in modern times.

Yeah, we can't lower for. We can't lower infant death rates by that much again in modern times and create another baby boom. Right. So. Okay, great.

But shoot. Yeah. You would have preferred to have something we could do something about, you know? But now the average american woman born in 1930 had three children, while the average amish woman born the same year had 4.5. So I also think that's interesting.

During this early period of the birth's explosion, when we're talking about the baby boom, there wasn't that much of a difference between amish families and the average american family. If you look today at amish families, their fertility rate is 5.76, so much higher than it was historically. So their fertility has actually been inching upwards since the baby boat. That's important. That's so interesting.

We're thinking about solutions here. Yeah. Now, here is why I'd say it's not just infant mortality. And this is also going to blow up her next argument as well. But I suppose I should throw it out there.

The little hand grenade this got me. Interesting. I was like, oh, well, we should be looking cross communities to find out where the baby boom existed and where the baby boom didn't exist. Okay. Okay.

So what did I do? I decided to start just googling. Did x country have a baby boom? Did x country have a baby boom? Dig.

X country have a baby boom. And I found something rather peculiar in the data. A lot of countries didn't have a baby boom. Most of Central and South America didn't have a baby boom. Africa didn't have a baby boom.

You know who did have a baby boom? Strangely, Japan, Korea. So, basically, like, the people who are adjacent to or involved, everyone who was. Adjacent to the war had a baby boom. Everyone who was.

So Ireland had a baby boom, but it was smaller than other countries. That is so weird. Ireland had a baby boom of only 8%. So many people might not know this about Ireland, but Ireland. I don't want to say the Irish were terrific cowards during World War Two, but they did side with the Nazis.

Irish bastard. McCarran. That's an irish name. Uh, yes. Can I assume you're CIA?

No. You know what, Patty? Hang on. Okay. God.

So where did you get access power? Ireland? Ireland was not an access power. Are you sure they were neutral, you asshole. Oh, that's right.

Sorry. I don't mean they sided with the Nazis. They. They couldn't. They couldn't hold their nose and side with the.

The UK and the United States. They decided to be neutral in the war, and as such, they experienced hardships, but not the same hardships. Everyone else was fighting, you know, fighting against true evil in the world and trying to save the west. Oh, dear. Oh, dear.

I don't. I don't. I don't think anyone should ever forget that they didn't participate in the. And I. And I am partially irish, but fortunately, my irish ancestors came to America before this display of cowardly cowardice.

B
Cowardice? Yes. Or obstinate, whatever you want to frame it as it is. Well, come on. I mean, the Irish who were.

This is. Oh, this is. No, you're probably going to need to take this out. But the Irish who were left after. These are the people who couldn't bother to leave the country during the potato famine, all right, you know, people dying, starving all around them.

Shit country, you know, just like, nothing's going well there right now. People are literally saying, like, we will pay your way to America. Like, just leave, evacuate. This is not. People don't know this, but a lot of the landlords.

A
Landlords offered to pay for people to move because they were afraid of results, because there'd been a few revolts before the potato famine that led to them killing the landlords. The landlords was like, oh, my God, we're not going to be able to feed these people. We need to get them out of here. We're going to die now. A lot of them died on these ships.

That's why they were called coffin ships. It was a risky prospect. It was risky. But the people who are willing to risk their safety for a better future pretty much all left Ireland. Yeah.

B
The ones who stayed and who, you know, chose to not get super evolved in World War Two. Is it. Can it be so surprising when those were the same people who, when faced with almost certain death from starvation, were like, I mean, let's just see this out, you know, let's write it out. I think it was more obstinance, and I think. I think that it's.

A
You could say it's obstinate might be an overly negative term. Stubbornness.

Stubbornness that also led them to not participating in the war. Yeah, sure. But anyway, this was really interesting to me, and it leads to my theory, before we go further, is my theory is that what caused this was a. And you can contrast this theory was a theory that they're laying out, because I don't think that people have kids for economic reasons, largely speaking, people have kids because they feel they have a duty to something greater than themselves. During this war, when nobody was sure how the world's future was going to turn out, when they weren't sure if there was going to be a future, if they were going to live in a nazi totalitarian state, if they were going to live in a.

B
You know, it's very scary. It was a very scary time where people, even in the places that didn't fight like the Amish and the Irish, had a world framework of sacrifice for a better future. And if you are living a life that is dedicated to a better future, if you are seeing your friends shot around you for a better future, if you are in the news every day, the world had existential threat. Let's see if we can get through this. Then you are like, what is all this for, what am I making these sacrifices for?

A
Right? Yeah. And you also start to. In these periods of deprivation, in these periods of almost hopelessness, you start to fantasize about a bright future too. And I think that plays some role in it.

B
It's something that my grandmother wrote about in her biography. You know, she wrote about, like, how she would fantasize about this future that she would fight to create if she could just survive this. Yeah. And for her kids, she would write about. And this is what you saw in the retro futurism of this period, the 1940s.

A
Retrofuturism was always of these techno utopias. That is what they were fighting for. And I think that it's why the techno utopian mindset is so important to our own view of the future. I think it is necessary to motivate intergenerational growth and expansion and a betterment of our species. I think the generations that have had this ended up improving our species, and the generations that didn't, I think, ended up hurting our species, largely speaking.

And so I think that what happened is you come back from the war and you're like, what are kids for? Well, I'm for my kids. Kids aren't for me. Kids aren't another appliance that are meant to make my life happier. My life is for the future.

And I think it was that mindset shift and that morality shift. It comes to, like, when you read that progressive book on fertility, and it was basically like, how do kids modify my own experience of the world? Instead of, I should have kids for their experience of the world? And that is a huge shift in mindset that happened this generation, and that wasn't around after this generation. I think that can explain the other 40.

Let's look at what they put the other 40% to. Alongside strides forward in household and medical technology, there is one factor that acted to lower the cost of having children and create the baby boom. It became easier to secure a home in which to raise children. The number of houses built soared across the west after world War two, including in New Zealand, Sweden, the US, Switzerland. In the UK, development did not increase immediately after the war, but the rate of house building did remain close to an all time high hit in the 1930s, this house building bonanza led to sharp rises in home ownership rates.

In 1940, less than 30% of american men over the age of 18 were homeowners. By 1960, it was 52%. In the UK, rates of home ownership jumped 32% in 1938, just before the war, to just over half. By 1967, there was a strong social expectation that married couples should have their own household. In 1940, 93% of married 25 year olds in the United States had their own households, while just 44% of non married 25 year olds did.

With easier access to housing that social pressure made necessary. Marriage rates rose. Between 1930 and 1960, marriage rates in the US increased by 21%. And I'll put a graph on screen here where you'll see the increase in marriage rates. And again here what you'll really notice is the increase in marriage rates is highly correlated by how much a country participated in the war, with Ireland, again, having the lowest of these increases, which I think, yeah, I think that this is Spain also had a very small increase, only 6%, and many people largely didn't participate.

So, yeah, I think that the problem with this theory, the home theory, is one you've got to remember, the person who's writing this is heavily involved in EMD policy. Her core policy area is make housing cheaper. So I get it. But the problem, and there are lots of prominent pronatalist advocates, like Morbirths on Twitter, Dan Hess, who we interviewed here, who also believe that housing policy plays a big role. We're not just saying that this is an isolated thing.

Amongst the problem is that we have data on this. Like we have actual data on how much housing access, the size of a house, the cost of a house in an area increases fertility rates, and it's like 13%. It's just not that big. Like, we have very robust data on this. Here is where they are not wrong.

And this I do need to note, I. You know how I say it's all culture at the end of the day, or mostly culture at the end of the day. The reason why housing affects fertility rates negatively is because of the cultural expectation that you should have your own home before you get married. That is the only reason that housing affects fertility rates. It's because of cultural expectations.

If you remove that cultural expectation, housing stops affecting fertility rates. As we see in cultures that where it's very common to have a multifamily houses. The house that you and I live in here, when we're talking about, you know, in the 18 hundreds, when the average American had seven kids, and when this house was built, four families were living in this house. You know, as they'd have kids, they get married and they just section off a part of the house to keep living in. That's probably what we'll do with our kids if they can't afford their own place.

The cultural expectation expectations of additional houses is highly toxic to fertility rates. And when you focus on fixing this intractable problem. And the reason I say it's an intractable problem, right. Is it the problem that everybody else wants to fix for their own reasons? Right.

Like, it is a generally popular thing. If I talk to somebody who's not a perinatalist, like, what percent of the population wants to make housing less expensive? I'd say probably 70%. At least. Pretty much everyone who isn't a homeowner wants that.

Right. You know? Yeah. So that being the case, there is a lot of public will to attempt to solve this problem. Adding the additional 1% that the weirdo pronatalist movement adds to that public will is going to make a trivial move and actually getting housing policy passed.

Okay. Not that it shouldn't be passed for, like, public good reasons, but we just aren't going to matter. We should be looking at the angles of this problem that are unique to the pronatalist movement and that can solve it without moving glaciers. Do you need to change your diaper? No, she's just, like, slowly passing out and getting wiggly, but trying to get a little more comfortable.

B
We're good. Fall asleep like this. But anyway, so that's why I don't think it's housing, because we can study that it's not that big an issue. And I'm sorry that it's not. It would be convenient if we could tie it to something so easy as how.

A
But I think it's primarily an unreplicable change that happened in terms of the decrease in maternal deaths, the change in perspective on reality that were caused by the war, and the purpose of an individual's life that were caused by proximity to the war. And I think that we, as a movement, need to push for that as well, while also understanding that things like housing do matter. But they matter because they matter because we have the social expectations that you need a house before you get married. And that's just not true cross culturally, and it's not true in most of history. It's something that was actually caused by this housing boom.

So, to read this again, 93% of married 25 year olds in the US had houses during the 1940s, while only 44% of the non marrieds did. It basically meant as soon as you got a house, you would get married. You only had a 5% chance of not getting married if you got a house. Well, or when you got married, you also got a house. Okay.

Yeah, but this was not true historically in America. So just to understand how much it was not true historically. In America. In 1940s, less than 30% of american men over the age of 18 were homeowners. Less than 30% before that.

So this cultural shift was the toxic pill, or one of the big toxic pills. The other has been the focus on the self that we saw before this period, and we've seen re increase after this period. And so only, I think, almost a. Recontextualization of identity that before, people used to see themselves as their family, their community, their clan, and then it started to become atomized. I am me, this, you know, the second son of this family who's interested in this thing and not so much identified with everyone else.

B
Right? Yeah, not identified with the future. Well, I don't also think the future was just on everyone's mind at this period, what happens next? And I think that futurism is intrinsic to any non toxic form of pronatalism, because you're doing all of this for the future. This drill will open a hole in the universe, and that hole will be a path for those behind us.

A
The dreams of those who have fallen, the hopes of those who will follow. Those two sets of dreams weave together into a double helix, drilling a path towards tomorrow. My drill is the drill that creates the heavens.

I love you today. Simone, any final thoughts? No. This is really interesting. I'm glad that you are following Phoebe's work.

Do you agree with my theory on this, by the way, or do you agree with hers? Where do you come down on this? I come down on both of you being right, but housing policy not being the boon that people think it will be, not just for the reasons you said, but because actually solving housing policy from a policy perspective is a lot harder than you would think. Like, if you declared a dictator to rule your area, it would be easy, but because there are a bunch of NIMBY people and because, you know of the way that government actually works, saying, oh, just solve housing. It's not that much more practical than, oh, just give everyone $500,000 to have more children.

B
You know, that kind of thing. Well, I also think that many people, even in their own lives, they are unwilling to think outside of the cultural box that they were placed in. Everybody always asks me, they're like, Malcolm, why did you go to St. Andrews? Like, why did you go to an undergraduate school in the UK?

A
And it was, well, I drew a list of all of the colleges that I was thinking about applying to, and then I said, which ones may I have not put on this list because of, like, whatever blinders I might be wearing and not realize I'm wearing. And then I was like, ah, yes. Ones outside the United States. So I started putting together charts of all of the best schools outside the United States. That's how I ended up there.

And then, you know, when I was applying for jobs, it was very much the same way. Or, you know, even when we were looking for work, we were like, at one point, we sent emails to a bunch of bed and breakfast owners, like, after I graduated from Stanford business School, offering to help them run and grow their operations if we could live for free. And in the area, it's like a recent. Nobody else is thinking like that, but I just wanted, like, the cozy lifestyle, right? And I think for a lot of people, it's like, well, they're like, well, it's too expensive to buy a house here and my parents won't let me have kids in my house, right.

And then, of course, you know what I'd say? I'd say, well, why don't you move to another country then? And they're like, well, I don't want to think about that. That's basically the answer, right? It's like, if your family's not going to be supportive in you doing the most important thing you can do as a human being, then you need to break the rules.

You need to do something that no one else has considered yet. Yeah, well, that's difficult. And I think one of the core elements of prenatalism when it comes to the importance of culture is by making prenatalism a no brainer, by bringing back having kids and a family to the evoked set of someone's default life plans. The problem is that our default settings have switched from have kids to not have kids or only have one kid. Yeah.

All right. I love you, Simone. Love you too, gorgeous.

B
All right. Shall I send you my. Oh, my God, we're going to. I just love so much being married to you. This is such a reward for me.

It really gets me through, like, everything I, you know, there's always. I'll read to put as an outro to one of the pieces, this crazy thing I saw in one of the anti natalist groups I'm subscribed to on Facebook. I just love watching my enemies fight amongst themselves. It feels like, you know, it's not only are you on the good guy side, but the bad guy side makes themselves miserable with their own lives, like fighting in Lord of the Rings or something when they're in the orc camp. And, you know, that's what it feels like whenever I enter, like, ultra woke spaces.

A
They're all fighting amongst each other and, like, live these nihilistic lives.

Why can't we have some meat?

What about them? They're fresh. They are not for eating.

Just a mouthful. A bit off the flank, the flight meets. Back on the menu, boys. But anyway, this meme that went viral on one of these, save the earth, reduced childbirth, that was this group, okay? And the post says, if you're 20 to five to 30, and your main circle isn't frequently discussing nihilism, human consciousness, morality, generational trauma, and the intractable pain of human existence, and is instead discussing cribs, diapers and prenatal vitamins, then it's time to elevate your circle.

This Facebook post that has over 600 upvotes, and, you know, you're reading the thing that everyone's like, oh, I feel so seen in this. And I'm looking at this and I'm like, what? You wait, you want people to be less satisfied with their lives? Like, you think that's an upgrade? Like, what tipsy topsy world do you live in?

B
Yeah. When I first read that, I thought it was the other way. My reading comprehension near at the end of the day just plummets because I get so tired. And I read like, oh, well, if you're. If you're talking about, you know, nihilism and intellectual stuff and not baby stuff, you should be elevating your circle.

That's what I thought. That's a broken for. But what I also find interesting is the guy who this is attributed to here. I went to his page, the wells dad, because they had reshared this and then it went viral. I think he might have been making fun of it because he has two kids and a third on the way, and he was talking about how great his wife was for deciding to not redecorate their house in one of his posts, when I was trying to find where he had said this, well, he.

A
What he said is, I'm glad my wife is not saving money and not redecorating the house so we can put more money for our third kid. And I'm like, okay, he pretty obviously doesn't think like this. So I think he posted this as a joke and the. And the antinatalist took it seriously. Whoops.

Anyway, you know, I think that's actually. A genre now, which is that jokes or parody created by one political side become appropriated by the other side in a sort of unironic, like, for sometimes it's ironic. Sometimes it's unironic, and it's just like. Yeah, and it happens. It goes in both directions.

B
You know, like, when I think, like, four chan tried to make it so that peace signs or. Okay signs or something were, like, supposed to be a sign of white pride. And then, like, actual white pride groups were like, this is perfect. Why did I think of this? And I think that is happening in both directions, and it's wonderful.

It's wonderful that it happens. All right, so I will get started here.

A
All right, so I will get started here.

The Baby Boom Mystery: Europe Was Below Repopulation Rate in the 1920s?!

Primary Topic

Episode Summary

Main Takeaways

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to European Fertility Trends

2. Debunking Fertility Myths

3. Cultural and Policy Influences

4. The Real Drivers of the Baby Boom

Actionable Advice

About This Episode

People

Content Warnings:

Transcript