I always knew I wanted to have children. And since all my jokes are terrible and I really enjoy chatting about the weather, it just felt a little premeditated. Everyone I knew knew I wanted kids. I put it on my online dating profile (not recommended if you’re trying to date). As I changed jobs and locations in my twenties, the only constant part of my vision for the future was becoming a father.
In late 2023, my dream came true: my wife gave birth to our daughter. He’s funny and exhausting and wonderful.
I hope I love being a dad, and I do! I expect my friends and younger family to be parents at the same time. That was not proven true. Most of my friends are not parents yet. Some are thinking of trying. Others never want to.
It’s not just my community: The birth rate in the United States is declining rapidly. In 2005, “Born to Woman” (an uncomfortable metric that measures how many children the average woman has) was just over 2. Now it’s about 1.6.
And this is not an American phenomenon. Birth rates are falling around the world, from Germany to Japan to India. Many countries have tried to convince their citizens to have more children. Those efforts have largely failed.
But now there’s a growing movement in the US that thinks it can buck the trend. They call themselves pronatalists. The group is ideologically mixed, but its loudest champions (see: Elon Musk and JD Vance) are conservative.
Lyman Stone is one of the best known pronatalist educators. Stone is a demographer and Director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies. He is also a cheerful person Poster at X.
It’s worth noting that Stone is a conservative Christian, and that informs his work. His argument that the decline in marriage is behind the decline in birth rates is hotly debated. But he is an influential figure in an influential movement. And I think he makes a compelling case that, even if you don’t share his politics or religious beliefs, you should share his concern about how many kids we don’t have. And so, when I was asked to host an episode Highlights PodcastWhere Vox journalists highlight people doing interesting work, I gave Stone a call.
Below are some selections from our conversation. Be sure to listen to the whole thing.
Miles Bryan
Tell me what you do, who you are and why what you do matters.
Lyman Stone
I am a demographer. I do research on people – people and population change. In particular, my specialty is fertility. Almost everything in life eventually touches fertility. There is no part of our society that is not affected by reproduction in some sense for the simple fact that we are only one generation away from the end of society. If people choose not to have children, there will be no future society. It’s that simple. This is the central question of civilization.
Miles Bryan
People should care what is the best argument you can make [the falling birth rate]?
Lyman Stone
There are many reasons for wanting more people. One is that people are generally pretty good. You know, I love my wife. If my wife had not been born, I could not have loved her. Maybe I loved someone else just as much. may be Or maybe a little less. Because none of the other people I’ve met in my life have been people I thought I’d love like he did. Each additional person truly contributes something wonderful and good to society. Now, sometimes you get really bad ones too. You get serial killers in the mix. But in general, people are good.
I care a lot about progress and innovation. I want a society that really advances human development in deep, meaningful and important ways. I don’t want to see only marginal improvements in people’s lives. I want my children to enjoy a much better life than I did.
Innovation is actually a simple equation. It’s population size time “How many children were malnourished in childhood?” Bar “What are the Institutional and Economic Returns to Risk Taking?”
So basically, I’m not a super smart person, okay? I’m never going to discover a cure for cancer. I might one day write a paper that eight other academics think is excellent. Those who are able to do truly groundbreaking, innovative things that move humanity toward a truly greater good are rare. They are very rare. If you have a large population, you will literally get more of them.
Now, beyond that, you have to make sure those kids are taken care of. It doesn’t matter if the child is born and they are really capable and have a lot of potential but they are malnourished and starving and their brains don’t develop normally. They drink lead poisoning. Then they are not going to be very productive. So that’s the second thing: they have to have a healthy environment.
And then the third part is: you have to make sure you don’t live under communism where they’re punished for being creative and innovative and entrepreneurial. You must have real rewards for risk-taking, entrepreneurship and innovation. In America we get a lot of awards for it, some would argue too much.
But regardless, the point is, every additional person, every human being born into the world, is a roll of the dice. But it’s actually a load of dice. Usually you go slightly above the historical average because life is getting better. We’re getting richer and more prosperous and living longer and all these things. Usually you roll like a four. But every time you hit a six. Every once in a while a child is born and they grow up in an environment where they can invent calculus or they can write the constitution or they can do something that turns the tide for everyone.
It’s really the case that adding people to society makes us all more productive. It allows us to sell to more people, buy from more people, love more people, have more people as friends, exchange ideas with more people. It gives more people who actually create the real fountain of all productivity, which is the idea.
Miles Bryan
As the world gets richer and richer, people are having fewer children. There are holiday options for women. People have more resources than they did 60 years ago. How do you account for that?
Lyman Stone
In the middle, we are better off. Who is the middle person in America? They’re like 42 years old or something. ok But how fertile are you when you’re 42? Not much. Once you realize that young men’s income is their main marriageable characteristic, you have to ask: Well, what happened to the income of 20-something men in the last 30 years? And the answer is that it has decreased.
Miles Bryan
For the United States and for other countries where we have seen it?
Lyman Stone
For almost every country. And that is not because we have become poorer as a society. This is because our economy requires more efficiency meaning the highest incomes are coming later in life and this is a steeper path.
So you’re poorer in life, you’ve spent more years in school, you’ve spent more years in internships and things like that, and you’ve reached the highest income later, and then you’ve lived longer. And you are very rich for many of those later years. ok So overall, people are better off, they’re healthier, they’re richer, they’re more prosperous. All great things. I am all for being rich, happy and healthy. But the point is, if you want people to get married, make 25-year-old men rich.
And I know that sounds so regressive. But I’m not trying to do some gross incel stuff here. I’m not saying, “Women just owe me.” No, men are bad marriage candidates! I understand why women are like, “I don’t want to marry that guy.”
