Why Fertility is Collapsing: Shocking Stats with @MoreBirths

This episode discusses the various factors influencing declining fertility rates globally, from socio-economic impacts to cultural shifts.

1. Later marriages and higher marriage ages correlate strongly with lower fertility rates.
2. Economic factors and urbanization significantly impact fertility, with denser cities often having lower birth rates.
3. Cultural attitudes towards gender roles and marriage also play critical roles in shaping fertility trends.
4. Discussions on the effectiveness of pronatalist policies across different countries reveal mixed results.
5. The episode underscores the complexity of fertility issues, involving an interplay of socio-economic, cultural, and personal factors.

1: Introduction and Guest Introduction

Hosts introduce the topic and guest Daniel, who is recognized for his detailed demographic analyses on Twitter. Daniel: "You can search at more births for whatever topic, and there's a good chance that I will have written about it."

2: Factors Affecting Fertility

Daniel discusses various factors influencing fertility rates, including marriage, urbanization, and socio-economic conditions. Daniel: "Countries that have more hard-coded gender roles have lower fertility rates than countries where men are more willing to help domestically."

3: Marriage and Fertility

The hosts and guest analyze the significant impact of marriage on fertility rates, emphasizing the importance of marital stability and early marriages. Daniel: "The odds of having children are far higher if a couple is married."

4: Urbanization and Its Impact

An in-depth look at how urban living affects fertility, with a focus on the benefits of suburban and rural living for raising larger families. Daniel: "The denser you get, the lower the fertility is."

5: Economic and Cultural Influences

A discussion on how economic successes and cultural norms across different regions influence fertility rates. Daniel: "It turns out that the countries that are more have more hard-coded gender roles have lower fertility rates than countries where men are more willing to help domestically."

1. Consider the timing of marriage to potentially influence family planning.
2. Evaluate the impact of living environment on family size aspirations.
3. Recognize the importance of gender equality in domestic roles to support fertility.
4. Be aware of cultural and socio-economic factors that could affect personal decisions about having children.
5. Engage in community and policy discussions that promote family-friendly environments.

In this illuminating episode, Malcolm and Simone Collins sit down with Dan Hess, better known as Morberths on Twitter, to discuss the crucial behavioral and lifestyle factors that correlate with higher and lower fertility rates. Hess, a prolific demographer and data analyst, shares his insights on the impact of marriage, urban density, living arrangements, and sexual history on fertility outcomes.

The conversation begins with an examination of the dramatic rise in the average age at first marriage across Europe and its potential implications for fertility. Hess emphasizes the importance of marriage as a fertility factor, highlighting the significant happiness and wealth gaps between married and unmarried individuals.

The discussion then turns to the role of urban density and housing in shaping fertility patterns. Hess argues that suburban living and lower population density are more conducive to higher fertility rates, while high-rise urban environments tend to suppress reproduction. Malcolm and Simone explore the potential of exurbs and remote work as a solution to this challenge.

Hess also delves into the impact of young adults living with their parents on fertility, noting the stark differences between countries like Spain and Italy, where a large proportion of 25-34-year-olds still reside with their parents, and countries like Sweden, where this practice is far less common.

Finally, the group discusses the relationship between sexual history and fertility, with Hess presenting data suggesting that individuals with fewer lifetime sexual partners tend to have higher fertility rates. Malcolm and Simone offer their perspectives on the underlying factors that may drive this correlation.

Throughout the conversation, Hess showcases his extensive knowledge of demographic trends and data, emphasizing the importance of understanding and addressing the complex web of factors that influence fertility in modern societies.

People

Daniel, Simone, Malcolm Collins

Guest Name(s):

Daniel

Content Warnings:

None

A
This is one thing that's really wonderful about my feed is that you can search at more births for whatever topic, and there's a good chance that I will have written about it. Now you are the kind of the reference point encyclopedia if you need. I really want to. Oh, this is fascinating. Yeah.

C
48% of homeschooling households have three or more children. Keep in mind this, like 24% happier rating. This is including the terrible marriages. Oh, yeah. Good marriages are like off the charts, like double happiness ratings.

A
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, the gap is just so incredible that it's almost ridiculous that the people aren't like knocking down the doors eager for this. And one interesting point is that those are, those guys that got divorced are the ones that are lining up first to get remarried. They're not upset that they were married.

They're just upset that it ended and they want to get back into a marriage. Because if you look at the remarriage rate, it's actually very high in the United States in the current year. Interracial marriage is more common than inter political marriage. It turns out that the countries that are more have more hard coded gender roles have lower fertility rates than countries where men are more willing to help domestically. Would you like to know more?

B
Hello, everybody. Today we are joined by moorbirths on Twitter, also known to his more close acquaintances, such as ourselves. And now you, Daniel. We're super excited to have you, Daniel. And today, because you are the foremost person on Twitter, giving really great graphic, heavy, in depth threads on Twitter, on demographical apps and prenatalism, we'd love to discuss the fertility factors that correlate with higher fertility and lower fertility from a behavioral and lifestyle standpoint.

Previously, we talked about things that were happening on a national level from a policy and propaganda standpoint, I think it's really fun to talk about the personal attributes. Malcolm and I have talked a lot about different cultural elements, but what really stands out to you and what have you talked about at length on Twitter when it comes to factors that correlate with low or high fertility? Yes. One of the factors that's a really big factor that's not especially talked about is marriage. So that's one thing that's a really big fertility factor.

A
And so part of it is people are just marrying late. And actually, this is a twitter that I just put out today, but you can see the average age at marriage. Yeah. So here we can see the age at marriage in Europe, and it's like super high everywhere. Oh.

C
So for people who are watching this on audio, like, it is actually shocking. Most of the ages are, like, 33.8 in France, 34.8 in Sweden, 31.9 in the UK. In Germany, 31.2 in Ireland, 31.9. Like it is. Wow.

Where'd you get the uk number? I don't see that, Simone. I'm sorry. I'm looking at Ireland stealing me. Sorry.

A
Yeah. This map doesn't show the UK, but it's. Yeah, certainly it's very high in all of Europe. And I'm going to. I want to switch to Sharon.

B
The lowest one we're seeing here is 24.9. Malcolm, you and I married at 25 and 26, where we were young married. Yeah. You look at a country like Turkey, it's 25.2. So we were younger than we would have brought down the average first age in Turkey.

C
And. Yeah, that's wild. Yeah. So, yeah, I want to actually share something else that's. I want to share.

A
Show this on a world scale so we can see what's going on even more. So here. I didn't realize how late it was on average. I'm wondering, maybe this has to do with second marriages, if they're counting every single marriage that happens. Maybe when 70 year olds get remarried after they're widowed.

Here is the world. Okay, so here we can see first marriage. So you can see how Europe stands out as having these super late marriages. You can see. You can also see that what's the most fertile part of the world?

And what's the part of the world that has early marriages? Really interesting. So we talk about fertility collapse in Latin America, and I think what people would be surprised by here is a good chunk of Latin America hastility later marriages than the United States. Yeah. And I.

C
And most of the developed world has later marriages in the United States. So you're looking at a place like Australia has much later marriages. South Africa, Canada, developed country anymore. Greenland has super late fertility rates. Chile, very late fertility rates.

Brazil, late. Sorry, not late fertility rates, late marriage rates. Brazil and Chile are really unique on this graft. They're in like 34, 32 range. That's interesting.

A
And fertility is dropping all throughout the twenties. So, like, by the time you're 30, even for a woman, fertility is already, like, way lower than it was. That's like trying to have kids with a grandmom.

We have six children. So I'm very fortunate. When my wife was, she was 36 or 35 when she had the fifth one, and she was 40 when she had the 6th one, but when she was, like, 30, 35 or 36, the doctor called it medically like a geriatric pregnancy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is.

This is the now. This is the age that people are getting married in Europe now. I do want to. People are instantly going to react in Europe, people don't have to get married to have kids, and most people don't. And that's true.

B
Yeah. But nevertheless, it is still true that the odds of getting, of having children are far higher. Like four times as high if a couple is married. And this came up in the swedish data that I think Malcolm and I reviewed in a previous podcast where correlating highly with this drop in fertility rate that now even Sweden is seeing, despite their incredibly pronatalist lifestyles and policies, is the cohabitation of couples, but not marriage, which is interesting. Yeah.

A
So people who say that marriage doesn't matter, like, the data does not bear this out. The. Oh, my God. The data on marriage in terms of, like, life, happiness and stuff like that is so high. We did another episode on this, and I'll try to pull this up in the research, but I seem to remember it's like the difference between making like 200k extra a year on average.

C
And so if you correlated it with career decisions that people are making instead of getting married, if what they are actually pursuing is happiness, they are making the wrong decision. I think we have to think about what marriage signals to. Marriage signals a level of expectation that you are going to be in this for life. And when you choose to not get married, I think the default assumption is that at some point, you're not going to be together. Even couples who marry and then get divorced a year later, they still started out thinking it was going to be forever.

B
And those are the people who are going to commit to having kids. Yeah. And the advantage of marriage, like socially, is just massive in terms of, if you look at happiness, the happiness gap is huge, the wealth gap is huge, the life expectancy gap is enormous. And there's another thing. You have this.

A
It's funny, you have this element of the far right and the far left that are, like, against marriage. You have the men going on their own way, manosphere types, and then you've got the hardcore feminist types that are both against marriage, whereas the normies in the middle are like, this is obviously good, but you go ahead.

C
It'S twelve to 25% higher or 24% higher. What is higher? Happiness ratings among individuals who are married versus ones who aren't. And so talking about that when I'm on YouTube and I'm just organically letting things autoplay. The messages that I'm getting, at least from women, is having a husband is like having another child to take care of.

B
They don't provide support or they're going to leave you. Even if you want to be a trad wife and be supported by them, they're going to dump you and you're going to be on your own and your life's going to be ruined. We do have fewer disincentives to leave a partner if your husband has married you because you're attractive, which is a huge problem because women often try to secure husbands for using that. He doesn't really have that much of a reason to not leave you when you become older and thus intrinsically less attractive, which is like a natural process that women go through when we're attractiveness is how fertile and genetically healthy a woman looks in a historic context. And historically, the reason why men didn't do this is because when a man left his wife in a historic conservative context, everyone in the community would know that he had left his wife, and this would attach a huge negative social modifier to his status as a partner, and his status was in the community, whereas we no longer have these externalities anymore.

C
And then with women, you've got alimony and all sorts of other perverse incentives around potentially leaving a husband and not having as much negative effects as you would have in a historical context, because you're still getting the cash flows. Why not leave the husband if you still get the cash flows, no matter what you do? It is important to recognize why people are so critical of the institution of marriage today while still pointing out that, objectively, if you can get into a healthy marriage, because keep in mind this, like 24% happier rating, this is including the terrible marriages. Oh, yeah. Good marriages are like, off the charts, like double happiness ratings.

A
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, the gap is just so incredible that it's almost ridiculous that the people aren't, like, knocking down the doors eager for this. And one interesting point is that divorced men, who are supposedly the ones that got burned and wrecked, the worst, these are the reason that the MGTOw people are so against marriage, because, oh, it might end in divorce and then the guy is wrecked. No, those are those guys that got divorced are the ones that are lining up first to get remarried.

They're not upset that they were married, they're just upset that it ended and they want to get back into a marriage because if you look at the remarriage rate, it's actually very high. But I have another chart that I want to share next. Which, do you know, off the top of your head, if remarriage rates are higher among men versus women? Yeah, yeah. They are higher among men than among women.

That's what the data shows. But the one thing that, where women really have a huge benefit from marriage is if you look at household wealth and household income, it's just massively higher for women that are in marriage. There's just, there's just so many economic efficiencies in terms of everything. But there is another point that I want to talk about with marriage. There's actually two types of marriage, and we.

So there's, like, kind of the business type of marriage, which is the marriage that existed until the 20th century. The corporate family. Yes, yes. But this is not a dead model. It's actually a pretty active model.

B
Yeah, totally. If you look, your couple, even I know you guys are quite in love with each other, but also, we also. Decided to get married when we knew we weren't in love, and that was. You also have a. You're a mission driven marriage.

Mm hmm. Yeah. We are a corporate marriage. First and foremost concept of marrying for love or for. It's one of the crazy things is we tried to match make people right.

C
And they'd be like, we're like, look, we've done like a deep dive on all of your personal history, everything like that. Your class status, everything. You've amazing couple. And they look at the picture of the person and they're like, oh, I'm not interested. And I'm like, excuse me, this isn't a prostitute.

This is someone you're marrying. How arousing you find them is next to irrelevant. And they've been taught. They're like, no, sex is very important. I've learned that from.

What? Where did you learn that from? You learn that from these stupid status hierarchies that you're competing in. But at an objective level, if you choose your partner and how arousing they are is a huge part of why you are choosing them, you are going to be dramatically less happy and less productive, and your kids are going to be less efficacious than you would have been had you just approached this like a sane person. And we're not, like, serving people, individuals who are way out of their league or something.

These are people who just are not their perfect aesthetic, where the way you should really be approaching marriage is anyone who's, like, above a bottom bar of I would have sex with that person should be easily in the category of marriage. What, Danielle, is your second type of marriage, aside from that. Okay, so the second one is called companionate marriage. And so actually, this is an interesting thing, because most people don't realize this, but the original fertility collapse in America was, like, before, like, long before the pill, like, America, and, like, all of western Europe were actually below replacement level in the 1930s. And you have to remember, by the way, that replacement level fertility was higher than 2.1 back then.

A
It was probably, like 2.5 or something. Right? With all the deaths, with higher, like, infant and child mortality and stuff like that. So, like, Europe and America were below replacement fertility, like, in the 1930s. Imagine that.

And what caused that was the transition from this corporate or, like, that. The view of marriage, of a household as, like, a business and as a purposeful, like, mission driven thing to, like, companion in marriage, which is actually, you know, because there was. There's a ton of ways, actually, people think that, oh, it's just modern birth control. People have been able to control their fertility for, like, thousands of years. Oh, yeah.

The reason that Rome collapsed, almost certainly. And I had a. I have a Christmas day thread that's awesome. I just popped that out there, and it got, like, a couple hundred thousand views. Like, I just.

I came home, I came downstairs, like, to the presence just a little bit late so that I could pop out that thread. And then. But it was Matt, this because it was like talking about the fall of Rome, which is, like, on every person's mind. Right, everybody? Yeah.

It was actually fertility collapse in Rome, like, back then. And we know because the leaders of Rome were trying really hard to encourage fertility, but people, the roman leaders, were able to. They were trying to pass laws to encourage people to have more children, but people were able to control their fertility very easily through withdrawal, as people have known about withdrawal since probably, like, caveman times, probably. And also, they would leave the babies on hillside. So all sorts of things.

C
Oh, there are loads of interventions of hedonism. There's less reasons for cultural practices that you inherited from your ancestors to be followed because they can seem pretty pointless and they will endanger hedonistic pursuits and mindsets. And cross culturally, whenever you have a time of prosperity, you often abandon many of the old ways which motivate things like kids have value and stuff like that, as concepts. And. Yeah, we do see this in Rome, as you pointed out.

A
Okay, so something new, something different I want to point out next. Here's a new visual. This is probably something that you guys have seen. Here we go. This visual was created by John Byrne Murdoch over in the UK.

C
Oh, we did an episode on this. This went super viral. You know that. So here's an interesting fact. Like, in the United States in the current year, inter racial marriage is more common than inter political marriage.

A
Oh, that's interesting, right? Yes. And it's interesting when you consider that for every conservative man, like, if you're out there dating and you're a conservative man, there, there are more than two conservative men fighting over every conservative woman, and there's more than two democratic women fighting over every democratic man. It's wild. So I would say my recommendation for my daughters would be become a hardcore conservative.

My recommendation for my sons would be to hide, if you're hide any conservatism and be shown, show moderation. So it just sheerly, by the numbers. But here's another. That's actually really solid dating advice. Now, here's another piece of.

I don't, Malcolm, you. You coded as broadly progressive when I met you. I agree. So what find the conservative genotypes in the progressive population? Okay, here I want to show, like, another chart.

What this shows is how the time that men invest in household chores. So this is one way of bridging the kind of the cultural gap between men and women. Men and women have got to get along if you're going to have children. Obviously, it turns out that the countries that have more hard coded gender roles, which would be like Japan, South Korea, Italy. The term machismo is an italian word.

I think these countries have lower fertility rates than countries where men are more willing to help domestically. And so this is something. I hadn't seen this before, but this makes perfect sense. And it's something that a lot of conservative guys misunderstand. They're like this get in the kitchen attitude.

C
They think this leads to high fertility rates. And I'm like, it objectively does not. If anything, it is what is causing South Korea's fertility collapse, because no woman wants to get married under these terms. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

A
In South Korea, there's like a term for it. I forget what it is, but it's like the three no's. It's no marriage for no. Yeah. Nos.

Oh, jeez. There's four now. It might be threads. No marriage, no sex, no kids. And I think that there's a fourth.

One, but I could know anyway. Yeah, yeah. These are women that are just, you know, straight on strike. Now, what is manlier? To refuse to do dishes and have no children or be there as a guy, like, in the kitchen helping out and then have a bunch of kids.

B
It's no sex, child rearing, dating, or marriage. Yeah, no sex, children. Yeah, dating, marriage. And I have a personal, personal anecdote related to that. After four kids, I received an ultimatum from my wife.

A
No more kids were done unless you start helping around the house. Actually, there's a big gap between number four and number five and six. I had to because I thought, I'm. I'm the breadwinner, my wife is taking care of the kids. I was like, I'm doing my part.

I'm done. You know, I've checked off my box and I got that ultimatum. And I had to learn, learn to be a lot more domestic. I do a lot of, I do a lot of laundry. I do, I do all the grocery shopping.

I do all sorts of house cleaning and cooking I had. And then my wife was willing to have two more. Now we're at six, so that's really interesting. So, like, the marginal investment needed from you in terms of supplementary care became higher after a certain number of kids. Yeah, there were, there's a, there's two aspects to it.

One is like the raw amount of help and the fact that taking off the load. So that certainly made it easier. But the other part is when there's a cold gender dynamic, when there's conflict in the gender domain, in the, then that's gonna lower fertility. And what the guy can do to soften that and fix that is to start helping domestically or help it in whatever ways they can. And all large families know that it's all hands on deck and it's not.

It's whatever works. And if somebody is good at some particular thing, then they can do that regardless of traditional gender roles. So it's. I think that the best philosophy for what kind of household you have or what kind of dynamic should you have is whatever works. Yeah, totally.

B
In our household, I do all the inside housekeeping. Malcolm does all the outside housekeeping. I get any, I do the, obviously all the pregnancies and then any infant. And he gets all the oldest. Every kid other than the youngest is my responsibility.

So as you can see, Malcolm's taking on the lion's chair. No, I don't think so. And there is no answer. There's no right answer. It's just like what every couple is going to find, that, like, what they're comfortable with and what they're good at.

A
It may break along traditional gender lines, it may break totally opposite there, but it. That's. But the get in the kitchen mindset is sterilizing something that so many guys think that they look so cool for doing. And it's like, you don't look cool. Well, I appreciate, too, that you pointed out the birth control argument, because it's both the get in the kitchen argument and the birth control argument that we hear so much from misguided people talking about pronatalism.

B
And it just drives me so nuts because to your point, yeah, people totally had ways of not having kids, and that has existed for a long time. And no, birth control was not the death knell. There are a lot of other cultural factors, but what would you else. What other factors? So let's go.

A
Let's jump to something completely different. Yeah. Which is? Which I want to talk about, which is housing. So let me pull up another visual.

B
This is great because there's a huge correlation between YIMBY people and pronatalists. We've noticed. We're not really sure why because we haven't. We don't. They're both like practical, real obvious solutions that you can implement that make things better in society.

C
Yeah, but that Yimby ism is or people who don't know yimby as it means. Yes. In my backyard, they're trying to loosen restrictions on development to get less expensive houses, and they want to cross correlate these things. And I don't think that they're highly cross correlated at all. But maybe, Danielle, you can change your mind.

A
Okay, so I have, yeah, this is an issue that I have and I have a strong disagreement, actually. I love that. That's our favorite. Okay, here we go. This is, this is, so what we're looking right now is Macau.

Okay. This is Macau. Its fertility is like 0.6 or something. It's like insanely low. It's like one of these insanely low places.

Just like Seoul and Shanghai and Beijing and Bangkok and places like this. So this is my, I have a very sharp disagreement with Brian Kaplan. I know he's got this new book coming out and he's a YimBy guy. He's got rid of all zoning. Yeah.

But I think you have to be very careful because it matters dramatically what you build, because this, if you build an apartment tower, that could be around for 100 years. And so one of my posts, the density is intensely correlated with fertility, like all the way up and down the spectrum. So let me share something else next. A kind of a contrast. Let me see.

Here we go. Now, how does that look? Now we're looking at a picture of a. This is Atlanta suburban neighborhood. This is Atlanta.

So the fertility. So, nor usually what we see in the world. And this is one of the most strong correlations in all of demography, is the denser you get, the lower the fertility is. Yeah. And I think Emile Kierkegaard has done some interesting blog posts on how cities for a very long time have been fertility shredders.

B
How? For IQ Shredders is the term. No, but for him, fertility shredders, the. Term on the Internet has been floating around for 15 years, is IQ shredders, because the cities draw in the smartest people for economic purposes, and then they don't have children. Yeah, but just think of high fertility groups.

A
We know the answer that I think one of the greatest inventions that America has had is, like the suburbs, because the suburbs can let people have space and a yard people wouldn't like. This is the answer. Oh, no, this is urban sprawl. No, it's a wonderful thing. God bless urban sprawl.

Like, seriously, we have to, like, pronatalists have to understand this because the correlation is so incredibly strong. Like, one reason, and I was in Japan with my family in September, and I got, we were staying on the outskirts of Tokyo. We rent Airbnb as a thing in Japan. And also, and if you have a big family like we do, you have to rent a house. You can't be staying in a hotel anyway.

But we were. So we, I got to see Tokyo and Japan up close. And, and the urban landscape is the reason that it's almost impossible for, because Japan is actually extremely pronatalist now. Like, they have been trying to be pronatalist for 30 years, and people in Japan are really positive on kids. But Japan has this problem, which is that Tokyo is like a sea of urban high rises, and that, like, structure just has, is associated with super low fertility.

So that's one dynamic. And the other dynamic is that all the young people are just drawn to Tokyo, and so they just keep coming to Tokyo, where they go on to have, like, very small families. And meanwhile, in the countryside of Japan, like, there are all these suburban looking houses in the beautiful japanese countryside that, like, are available for a song. Like, they're practically giving them away, but nobody wants to live there because everybody's drawn to these urban high rises. And so it's like this elevator effect or this.

Everybody's just drawn into the city where they keep having low fertility. The TFR in Tokyo is like 1.0. And this is, you have to understand that this is now a very pronatal culture. And still, because of the urban architecture, they can't break through. So what's wonderful about the suburbs is that people are still integrated with the urban economy.

They can still be connected with the urban economy, but they're not in these urban high rises. High rises and then the density. I'd promote a totally different answer. I think exurbs. And building up the exurbs take it further in the post office economy.

B
Okay. Yes. So, yeah, I think what Daniel's talking about here, and also I have to, I'll find a link of to the Emile Kierkegaard substack article where he talks about this and he does talk about what distance from cities is optimal because that's the question. Right. Like where to?

C
Yeoman farmer. Yeah. Everyone needs to own their plot of land where they can grow food and can commute to the city once a month if they need to. But, yeah. What you're saying, though, is based on where we're going with the economy, that in the end, being even further away.

A
And here's another chart that I'm, that I. That we can put on the screen if you'd like. This is actually by the Institute for Family Studies, which is awesome because you can find so much, such a wealth of data on all the fertility factors. But here, what we're looking at is the fertility for rural suburbs and city center. So the fertility is far higher for rural than the suburbs, which is far higher than the city center.

So like, the less dense you can have, the better it is for fertility. And this seems, this seems to be like such a robust relationship. This is like one of the iron laws of demography is the more urbanized, the lower the fertility. So that's a major factor, Malcolm. Yeah.

So the further out you can get. Yeah. And work from home is also a wonderful factor for this reason. So if part of it is like the burden of childcare, if you like, one problem in Korea is that people have to have a hundred activities for their kids. And childcare is so difficult.

But if you just have a house with a yard, the kids can just be out in the yard, like bouncing around on the trampoline or playing with, playing in the backyard. And you don't even have to supervise them much because they can just play and you there with an earshot. And it just incredibly lowers the burden. And there's also like the psychological effect of feeling crowded. The mouse experiment, right?

B
Yeah. The mouse utopia experiments continue. Yeah. Yeah. So the denser it is, like density itself has a really negative psychological impact.

C
And I don't think that these dense centers economically make sense anymore. They have become economically unrealistic. And a lot of people are like, what? No, there's so many efficiency gains. And it's like, yeah, but all the efficiency gains are offset by how progressive they become, which ends up creating these giant bureaucracies, which ends up making them less efficient than less urban areas.

So on paper, they look more efficient, but because they allow and encourage this ultra progressive mindset, they become less efficient. Yeah. So this is something I want to show here. Here's another thing. Here's just a quick thing related to density here.

A
This is a map of South Korea by density. And here, people in South Korea are concentrated in the same people. People talk about South Korea? Oh, they can't. They have no choice.

It's a tiny country that it's going to be dense. No, it's actually by choice, because so much of South Korea is, like, empty. It's not like culture. One of the weirdest things about South Korea is if you drive outside of the major cities, when you see the suburban towns, what you will see is a cluster of skyscrapers next to each other and then nothing else. It is the most bizarre thing you have ever seen.

B
Yeah. Three high rises and a mall complex. So this is a terrible. This is because. Yeah, so this.

A
I think Brian Kaplan is making a big mistake with his book. I think it's. That's my position and I'm sticking. Yeah. Because he's actually a pronatalist.

B
Yeah. But he's got. He had that book. I think I even have it on my shelf. Selfish reasons to have more kids.

A
Yeah. Here it is right here. Here we go. There it is. You're.

C
You're saying that these buildings will be here for 100 years? No, they'll be rotting in a hundred years. Look up like Detroit blight porn. I'll add some to this. I know what, this is an interesting thing, because, actually, if you look at Japan, and I was just there, it's not even though the TFR in Tokyo is the lowest in all of Japan.

A
Like, Tokyo is full of people because people are, like, coming out from the countryside, and it's actually the country where the countryside, where the fertility rate is higher, that is empty in Japan because everybody keeps flocking to the cities. So actually, it's the countryside where the fertility rate is higher that actually will give you the despair porn in Japan of all the rotting houses, which is ironic. So it's not necessarily true that the places that have the lowest fertility rate are going to be the places that empty out because people keep being drawn to the city. So I think if I was actually, if I was king of Korea, if they still imagine they still have kings and for some reason they make it me like that, not so likely. But if I was, I would, like, order everybody into the countryside and then I would make sure that nobody's in the buildings because I love Korea and I don't want to hurt anybody.

But I would then demolish all the, these skyscrapers because I really believe that these buildings, these tall, dense skyscrapers, are a big cause of the ultra low fertility in all of this is true in Shanghai. This is true in Beijing. This is true in all these asian cities. So I think we have to be incredibly careful because if you throw up a high rise, that could be drawing people in for 100 years and that could be killing fertility in a country for 100 years. I don't think we have to worry about that.

C
I don't think any of these high rises are going to be fully operational in 100 years. Okay. Anyway, I want to. I'll move on to some other factors here. Let's see.

A
Here's something that is completely different. Let me see. We've just been to so many cities at this point, Malcolm and I, where the buildings are 30 years old and crumbling. So it's scary. It's a critical mass.

C
We're going to have a level of urban blight and in nature recapture that people can't imagine. And I think what we'll be dealing with in 100 years is rats eating people's babies. In Manhattan, that's going to be a major issue. Okay, so this is a completely new fertility factor. Okay, so we're looking at a graph share of young people aged 25 to 34 living with parents.

B
Oh, no. Oh, no. Okay, this is painful, but you look at these numbers and it's like insane. Oh, my gosh. In Spain, it's 37.2.

C
I want to be clear here. This is in correlated with their economic success. Often. Yeah, failure. Oh, no, I'm wrong here.

No. It's correlated with their economic success. The more economically successful. Sorry, I thought the colors were reversed. No.

A
Okay. What we're looking at is the share of young people living with their parents. Yeah. So it's much lower in the economically successful regions and much higher in places like I'd really be interested to see. No, Malcolm, you've got it wrong.

B
It's lower in regions. Let me explain this map what we're seeing a little bit. So this sheds a lot of light on why the fertility in the catholic countries is so low. So we can see Poland. We can.

A
Poland. In Poland, 43% of young people age 25 to 34 live with their parents. In Italy it's 47%. In Spain it's 37% as compared with, like in Sweden it's 4%. So we can see this incredibly dramatic difference across Europe of, and we know, as you guys know, the fertility rate in Spain and Italy and also Poland are incredibly low, even though they're catholic countries.

And I would argue that this, ironically, having a close family culture can be bad in the, in the sense that the parents coddle their. I want to see. I don't know. I find very little interesting about this, to be honest, because this only is useful to me if I'm seeing it in contrast with the high fertility countries of equivalent economic success, where this just looks like a graph of economic success of each country. If I could contrast Greece or Italy with Turkey or something like that would be interesting.

C
I don't. I want to highlight one thing, though, which is that another thing that correlates with a better relationship with parents or parent relationship satisfaction action is, I think, higher depression. So I think a lot of parents think I need to give my kids this amazing childhood. They need to be my best friend. I would love for them to continue to live with me.

B
I'll support their lifestyle. But what you're creating, while they're. They will really genuinely like you more. They're also sadder. They're not getting married, to your point, and they are not economically.

A
Yeah, I understand your point and it is a valid point, but there is, and it'll take me a minute to. I don't want to throw up this chart because I'm going to have to look for it. But you see the same relationship in the United States where in the states where people leave the nest earlier, they all have a higher fertility rate. So this is like the flyover country. Very interesting.

C
You can send it to us afterwards and I'll let it. And you can find it very easily on my twitter. If you just search for, I think. Even better, drive people to your twitter. Yeah.

A
If you search, like launch, like at more births, you search launch because I talk about it as failure to launch countries like in the flyover states where in the states where people get out of the house earlier and are on their own earlier, they have a much higher fertility. It's been great to have you on. I love all these thoughts. I love all these graphs. I know our audience will.

C
You can join our discord server too, which apparently some fan started and now it's actually like bopping pernatalist conversation, which is cool. Everyone lists themselves with how many kids they have next to their names. Just happened organically. I didn't ask for this, so you'd be high stat. You got six kids.

B
Yeah. You're living the dream. Yeah, no, I have a, I have more factors that we can share and we can talk more, but I guess we're reaching the end of our time here. If you had a few more graphs you wanted to discuss, quickly, pull up the, the ones that you're most interested in. Yeah.

A
Okay. Let's talk about a couple more facts. I have one more, I have another spicy take here, so you may appreciate this one. All right, let's take a look at this. All right, so we're looking at.

So this is by Ayla. Oh, this looks familiar. Yes. This is her own data, and it's great that she's honest about it, but this is, and there's other data that backs up this same trend where actually, the more partners somebody has, the lower their fertility is. And actually, and I can also, just.

B
Being poly regardless of your partner count, seems to make. Yeah, but I also see something here that you might not be noticing, is the jump in number of kids in poly relationships between 45 and 45 and 50, which implies that they're counting kids that are brought in from alternate partners in relationships that they're considering their kids. I know she says is your partner, but I bet that's what's causing that. So you think that Polly's even artificially inflated in this graph in terms of. Yeah, because almost no woman is having kids over 45.

Oh, that's fair. And this is showing a big jump in the number of kids per poly relationship after the age of 40. Yeah. And I want to, I'll stop sharing this and share one more chart here that's related to this. So here we go.

And I think a high correlatory factor here, if we're talking about the depressing effect of multiple partners or more partners on fertility, is what are you living for in life? Are you living for a broader purpose or your value set, or are you living for fun and pleasure? And if you're living for fun and pleasure, I could see partner count being higher and kids being lower because that's just how it works. Yeah, that's right. But this is a trend that is not new.

A
It's actually, this is a chart. You can look at the number of children. This is for men. This is the number of children by the number by partner count since age 18. And the people who think that it's the players, it's the, like the Mac daddies who have tons of partners have the highest fertility.

That's not true. It's actually the highest fertility are the people that had very few partners. And I think a big correlation for this is early marriage. So the earlier, one of the most important factors for high fertility is early marriage. And if you want to understand the baby boom, which 1946 to 1964 baby boom, like the Og baby boom, what caused that?

A big part of that was that people were just getting married young and in high numbers. And so that, so getting married young, it would be correlated, of course, with a lower partner count. So that may be a big part of what we're seeing. But this, people who think that they have to be a player with tons of partners in order to have a lot of kids have it. If you're sleeping as lots of people and you're not having kids with them, that's just masturbation with another person's body.

C
I had Simone tweet recently, sex is a fetish. Yeah, it is a fetish because it's something that you find arousing that has nothing to do with reproduction. And so that's, that's because people always accuse us. They're like, oh, you have a breeding fetish. And it's one.

It's disgusting that your world perspective is the only thing that can motivate someone is what arouses them, which is a lot of ultra leftist worldviews. Like their entire identity is based around what arousalism. And so they assume that everyone else's must be because they're sociopaths. And that's the way sociopaths see the world, or at least narcissists do. But also what you're seeing here.

B
No, but three also all of our children were created through IVF. So the breeding fetish kind of goes out the window. Yeah. Yeah. And that's something that I wish conservatives would let go of this hang up about.

C
They mostly are. It's interesting the conservatives that have a hang up about this, like they're not having kids. Who did we meet at the prenatalist conference? Like Pat Buchanan, who had a big hang up of this and all of his kids have been victim of the catholic priesthood and he was, Pat Buchanan. Was not there at the NATO Con.

Who am I thinking of? We were talking about, I don't know. Pat Fagan. I don't know. I feel like it was a catholic guy.

A
Yeah, but you got we got in. A big fight at the conference. It was like a hardcore old catholic guy, and he had three kids and every single one of them adjoining the priesthood. And he has no Pat Fagan because he's got eight kids. He would, I remember because every, they went around the room asking, who has the most kids?

And he won. He like, oh, it might have been, I guess I assumed was all of the kids that he was mentioning who joined the priesthood that maybe he had. So he might still have some that are having kids. Okay. So he just tithed 10%, it's fine.

C
Not, but it's these cultural groups. As I've mentioned, the cultural groups that are being most hit of the religious communities by fertility collapse are Catholic Christians and Orthodox Christians are the two highest hit of all western cultural groups. Jews aren't hit that bad. Protestants are hit a little, but not that bad. Muslims are hit actually worse than Protestants or Jews, but still do a little better than catholic and orthodox communities.

But the communities that motivated high fertility through these strict restrictions around, like, when life begins, condoms, et cetera, don't appear to be able to motivate fertility anymore in a modern ecosystem. Yeah, it depends. With catholic fertility, it's hard to tell, and it's hard to tell where things are going because you have a big contrast also between Catholics in Europe and Catholics in America. And I don't know if maybe Catholics in America, I need to be clear. Classics in Europe and in Latin America, which are both collapsing.

A
That is true. That is true. Now, somehow in, in the United States, it seems Catholics have a higher fertility. And I don't know if it may have to do with the fact that they're a minority in America. That could be it.

C
Yeah. So being a minority, we think that's a big factor. Yeah, that's a big factor. Which means the sense of being a renegade. Like, you're not going to feel like a renegade if you're a Catholic in.

B
Italy, I'm feeling that there's something to fight for because you are the other surrounded by very different group. Yeah. In hostile land, which is interesting because. A lot of conservatives fight for the opposite of that. They're like, we need, like, one country, one people, and it's.

C
That's the exact opposite of what's going to succeed. Yeah. It does not correlate with success fertility wise. Yeah. A lot of things are changing.

A
A lot of, as you have said, culture, cultures that, that have been in this situation for a while can learn to fortify themselves. Like one example that's been exploding of a high fertility subculture is homeschool families. This is hardly talked about, but actually, and homeschool families are renegade culture that. Wait, have you seen, do you have statistics on homeschooling fertility rates? Let me see if I can pull that up.

B
When you finally remove people from sterilizing educational platforms. And of course you've talked about that when we, in our previous conversation where at public schools, people are literally being taught to see population growth and reproductive reproduction as a bad thing that hurts the environment. Is it any wonder that going to homeschool suddenly helps you out? All right, here I'm going to share something, relate some data related to homeschooling right now. Nice.

A
All right. Because I do have that and you, this is one thing that's really wonderful about my feed, is that you can search at more births for whatever topic and there's a good chance that I will have written about it. Now you are the kind of the reference point encyclopedia if you need. I really want to. 40.

C
Oh, this is fascinating. Yeah. 48% of homeschooling households have three or more children.

A
Yeah. This is a very important thing. It turns out like you need to have a norm of three children as like the baseline in order to just have replacement fertility. Because in our world today, now, approximately one third of young people will have zero children. It's also compelling stat because homeschooling is not easier when you have more kids per se.

C
Yeah, presumably it's harder. So yeah, you have more kids to educate. You would think that home, that parents of more children would be more motivated to send them out, send them to public school, not have to pay for them, use food services. These are great stats. Yeah, this is great.

Definitely be repeating and it has been so good to have you on. And people should definitely check out your. Profile more on Twitter. It's like the Encyclopedia of demographic collapse. Graphs, stats, arguments.

B
Really great threads. So definitely. But I also want to point out that it's not merely collapse porn, it's, there's a lot of, there's a lot of levers and there's a lot of ways to increase fertility and every little bit helps. Yeah. Because getting from like 1.3 to 1.5 or 1.6 makes such a dramatic difference for the future because it all compounds.

Totally agree. Yeah. It's been great to have you on. Yeah. Thanks again for coming on.

This is really fun and thanks for your time. Have a spectacular day. Yeah, thank you so much, you guys also. Thank you. Thank you.

A
It's been wonderful. Chow, a citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility.

C
Chow, a citizen has the courage to make the safety of the human race their personal responsibility.