Babies Come Back

Storks don't take bribes.

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It’s been a while since the Remnant featured some pro-natal wonkery. To fill that void, Jonah’s joined today by Elizabeth Nolan Brown, a senior editor at Reason, to discuss her cover story for the latest issue of the magazine, “Storks Don’t Take Orders From the State.” Together, they discuss the many burning questions surrounding baby-making in modern America: Why are fertility rates falling (spoiler: Elizabeth doesn’t think it’s because there’s a crippling sex recession)? Are pro-natalist policies working in other places? What are the main reasons to have children? And will Jonah ever explain his hatred of old people?

Show Notes:

-Subscribe to The Dispatch and watch an exclusive live Remnant with Jonah, Steve Hayes, and Chris Stirewalt

– Elizabeth’s author page at Reason

– Elizabeth’s cover story, “Storks Don’t Take Orders From the State”

– The vampire problem

– Jonah: “The Worst Fang Club”

– Yuval Levin: “The Changing Face of Social Breakdown”

– Jonah: “I Think We’re Turning Japanese”

– Brian Doherty: “Libertarian Party Faces State Rebellions”

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Comments (57)
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  1. Avatar photo
    Clifford Luebben

    As someone who has always struggled with being on time in ways that have nothing to do with my level of respect for others or what have you, I really hate the value of punctuality as described by Jonah. I realize it is the perception of probably the vast majority of Americans and perhaps most post-industrial societies but I hate it.

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  2. Avatar photo
    Jonathan

    Short of aggressive authoritarian policies, how many people would actually change the number of kids they have based on something the government does? I speculate that falling birth rates is driven mainly by medical technology enabling people to have the number of children they want.

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  3. Jim S

    Great interview. Lots to parse.

    I found Jonah’s comments about the hypocrisy about being libertine but raising kids with ‘bougie’ values interesting because I agree, but it is funny to hear it from his side.

    I have made the tongue and cheek comment before about Conservatives rejecting those “damn Liberal elites with their intact 2 parent households, kids born in wedlock, and solid family and financial planning” but here is Jonah making my point for me. If these folks are disinclined to jump aboard his ‘family values’ bandwagon maybe that is because of all the other baggage that the right insists on dragging along. I think these folks are some of the lowest hanging fruits for an updated GOP coalition, but the idea that supporting those ideals requires going along with a whole bunch of extraneous ( and often extreme ) right-wing social policy is a non starter.

    In a perfect world it would be enough to be ‘pro family’ and ‘pro family success’ for all families, but we do not live in that perfect world.

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  4. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    This was very good. I am very conservative when it comes to the family and children and the social fabric of society and yet very libertarian when it comes to the role of the state in all of those things (that it doesn’t have one). So this touches nicely on the way I think about pro-natalism. I like the way many conservatives talk about the issue, but dislike their purported solutions (which, remember are not being implemented in a hermetic vacuum by a theoretical government but would be implemented by THIS government that we have in real life).

    I’m glad Elizabeth pushed back on the “people in the comments like it when I fight with libertarians” thing. Libertarians lean into the heroin stuff because it makes them funny and less threatening but they come in for more than their fair share of hatred and scorn (because everyone hates the guy who points out that their preferred policy will never work and shouldn’t even be tried).

    On the “kids these days”/Japanification stuff, I’m generally with Yuval. But I’m not with some other “conservatives” who seem to be going too hard the other direction: “back in my day we had a LOT of unsafe premarital sex and we drank before driving and did a lot of drug, and the kids these days need to have more unprotected sex and get behind the wheel after a beer or ten.” This kind of thing is stupid. Not all risks are equal (some are beneficial and some are stupid) and conservatives forty years ago were lamenting the social ills of widespread unsafe sex and drug use etc. and they were RIGHT to do so. Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

    Finally, Elizabeth’s essential point continues to prove that subsidies don’t work and the government is actually quite powerless to incentivize the behavior they desire in their citizens. The reason conservatives must NOT get into the business of having the state decide what is good and right for people to do is that the progressives will ALWAYS be more inclined and better able to make use of any such tools conservatives put into place for the state to shape people’s family lives. Conservatives won’t win that fight. The best we can do is what we do best: to focus on the role of civil society (informal associations and formalized institutions) in shaping public life and private morality (incidentally, this is more effective than any state can hope to be). As Elizabeth said, “IF we are going to have public schools…” then there is a role for inculcating (or trying to) virtue and patriotism into our rising citizenry. But her first word does a lot of the work there.

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  5. Sam19952005

    nice show topped by her intelligent resistance to pregnancy for her and the five baby comment :) and of course JD's leaning for the topic (I am in his camp). Nice show and no need for heroin talk thankfully.

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  6. Avatar photo
    Kit

    The rest of the story
    Some context on population
    The world currently contains some 8-ish billion people.
    The UN in its medium population projection forecasts 10.8 billion by the mid-2080s
    So, population increase oveall in the midst of decline in developed and some developing countries.
    Africa, the Middle East and other areas are projected to more than make up for those declines.

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  7. Avatar photo
    George.Skinner

    Falling birth rates is another overdetermined phenomenon. People having kids later, availability of birth control, the physical impact of pregnancy, the sheer effort in looking after kids for that first 5 years until they get into school, the expense of parental leave, the impact on careers, the cost of raising a kid including a bigger home, bigger car, etc.

    If I were trying to address these issues, I think the first one I'd look at is the cost of housing: mitigating that problem helps would-be parents, but also addresses something that's weighing on broader society and the economy as well.

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  8. SwedishChef

    This is such a complex issue, and what makes it so compelling and interesting is just how pervasive it is, cross-culturally, without fail.

    But I really do wonder if it boils down to women in modern societies having much greater control over their reproduction. Being pregnant, giving birth, postpartum recovery, nursing, and newborn/infant life still SUCK for most women, despite modern medicine (and thank god we have that). I've had one kid already, and I only think I can do it one more time. Barely. And no amount of government incentives would convince me otherwise.

    Modernity makes having children much more of a timed choice than it has ever been, and we might just be seeing a collapsing to the mean of "If women had near-complete control of their reproduction, how many kids would they have?"

    A favorite example: if Queen Victoria had had her way, she would not have had nine kids.

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  9. Avatar photo
    Seth B

    Request for next Reason guest on the Remnant: Matt Welch.

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  10. Zack F

    She deserves a gift basket for fielding some of those questions and a mild apology for absorbing the brunt of Jonah's angst for libertarians

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