I Am a Pro-Natalist

I enjoyed Lyman Stone’s article arguing that pro-natalists should be more open about their views, and also more judgmental about the choices people make in their lives. His argument is basically that among more sophisticated pro-natalists the tone taken is something along the lines of this:

Fertility is decreasing and that may cause a few societal issues. If you don’t want to have kids, that’s totally fine! We definitely don’t want you to feel pressured or judged in any way. But since people want more children than they’re having, maybe we should consider these small policy tweaks to make that more likely.

There are a lot of problems with this. First of all, as Lyman points out, it’s dishonest. The people who prioritize getting the birth rate up think it’s a good thing to have more kids. By necessity, this means that it is a bad thing to have no or few children. You can’t fool people on this point.

I would add that the “people are having fewer children than they want” argument is extremely weak. You will often see citations to charts like this.

I’m guessing that when you ask women this question, they’re thinking about an ideal scenario without tradeoffs. But there are always tradeoffs between having children and doing other things, and we should take actual behavior as closer to reflecting true preferences. The question “What would you do if you had no financial constraints and total freedom?” doesn’t tell us much about how individuals are likely to act under any real world conditions. As a purely financial matter, people in advanced countries are much more capable of having their desired number of children than anyone else in history. We have to acknowledge that they’ve chosen to have many fewer than is socially optimal and this is despite the relative ease with which they can create families today.

Anyway, Lyman has inspired me to write the piece I’ve been thinking about for a while, which is to explain why I am a pro-natalist. One reason I’ve hesitated is that those who care a lot about this issue are the kinds of people I find extremely unappealing. If you look at last year’s Natal conference, many of the attendees and featured guests are prone to white nationalism, spreading fake news, MAGA cultism, anti-vaxx, Based Ritualness, and overall rightoidism. There were also many attendees I respect.