This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… If you say that paying women large enough “baby bonuses” to raise the TFR (Total Fertility rate) is too expensive, what you’re really asking for is unpaid Handmaid’s Tale. Countries that opened opportunities for women but kept High Patriarchy intact are now discovering what happens when motherhood comes bundled with a husband who expects and needs to be hand-fed. The path out of the fertility trap runs as much through men’s attitudes and behavior as through women’s wombs, via de-broification. Raise up men to be good partners to constantly multitasking women as “partners in shipwreck”, in J.R.R. Tolkien’s words…
Now I see that Noah Smith, too, has joined the set of those worried about falling birthrates:
To my mind, the tell that Noah Smith is approaching this from the wrong end comes in this part of his piece:
But why do research when we already know the answer? You get people to do things by offering them monetary or status rewards to do so. Thus if you say that it is too expensive to change the incentives to make women want to have babies at the scale you desire, then you are saying that you want to—put it bluntly—hypnotize them, or Handmaid’s Tale them, to do so without paying for the outcome you claim to desire. But, as I said, we already know the answer: we get people to do things by making the things well-remunerated and high-status. Well-remunerated means paying mothers for the childcare that they do to train up the next generation of our society—the people whose taxes will pay for your Social Security benefits. And as for status—well, let me hoist something I wrote a year ago <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/weekly-briefly-noted-for-2025-01>:  Apropos of Claudia Goldin’s new paper “Babies” <https://www.nber.org/papers/w33311>, on how countries where the total fertility rate is now approaching 1—a population decline of 50% every generation—are countries where rapid economic growth a generation ago opened up opportunities to women, but where previous stagnation had cemented High Patriarchy’s cultural ability to resist the coming of modernity. Hence now it is hard to convince young women to reproduce given the cultural baggage of the ascribed role of “motherhood” they then undertake. The solution, of course, is to change the hearts and minds of young men. High Patriarchy teaches young men that their role is to provide resources and “protection” in return for cosseting and deference—and that a lot of the ability to provide resources and “protection” comes from first acquiring status as a bro among bros, status in the male community (in substantial part by joining in the policing of uppity women). But women with economic options have less need are much less willing to be “protected” than their great-grandmothers, have other ways of getting resources, and the idea that motherhood comes not just with children but a husband that must be hand-fed makes it less appetizing. It would be more appetizing if the potential husband would be focused on making you laugh and on being an extra helpful pair of hands to assist you in your constant multitasking, rather than off spending his energy playing some male-community pecking-order game. So, if you don’t like a TFR = 1 in your society, listen to the wise Eddie Cornelius:
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