A Techno-Trad Take on Fertility

We Need Modern Incentives for Modern Women

I’ve recently had two kids (well, my wife had them. I gave her Gatorade between pushes). One of them is a toddler, and the other was born about a month ago. In fact, I’m wearing him in a baby carrier as I write this. I’ve had the chance to see, up close, an entirely new marketplace hidden to me before. OBGYNs, nurses, doulas, nannies, lactation consultants, car-seat installation volunteers, and the list goes on.

I’m honestly not sure if a single one of them has been a man. Generally speaking, these are not high-paying careers, and to the extent that they are, e.g. OBGYN, they make less than the closest non-baby oriented alternatives.

Throughout this period of my life, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the economics of these professions. How much are they paid? Why not more?

I also think about my family and friends, why didn’t we start having kids earlier? Why did everyone wait until they were old enough to only have one or two? Why is the total fertility rate (TFR) dropping across developed nations, and particularly in my peer groups (Nick Land calls these cities we live in IQ shredders)? The infrastructure of our babies and future citizens is about as important as it gets, what gives?

When it comes to answering these questions, cultural explanations are often more fun to read. Long pieces about modern narcissism culture, linking declining birth rates to Lena Dunham’s 2012 TV series Girls are the sort of things ‘intellectuals’ write or that get clicks. Even if this is true, you can’t do anything about it. Changing the culture of women across all developed nations — whatever that even means — is intractably difficult.

Instead it’s useful to rely only on economic explanations and solutions. Economic solutions are tractable. How much could we solve if we looked towards economic mechanisms, instead of trying to mutate the culture.

Childcare Wages

One place to start is with childcare workers. They are a critical infrastructure layer for children, yet we don’t incentivize much investment or top talent to go into these fields. Childcare workers don’t make much money. The median hourly wage for childcare workers in the U.S. was $13.71. The lowest 10 percent earned less than $10.22, and the highest 10 percent earned more than $18.79. Pediatricians do make a lot of money, but tend to make less than other specialties, and are also more likely to be women.

Typically what happens at this point is someone reads these statistics, and they focus on the fact that some seemingly important job, done mainly by women or other minorities makes less money. They then say something like “that’s not fair, this is due to racism or discrimination, and we need the government to fix it by passing laws.”

The failure in reasoning here is that by getting the mechanism wrong, the solutions are incorrect. What we usually end up seeing is legislation that empowers employees, through the legal system, to bring discrimination lawsuits. This can be effective at mandating more women on corporate boards. Or marginally increasing the number of engineers who are women as companies want to hedge their legal risk. It doesn’t do much to help childcare workers other than your standard fare worker protection laws.

While the market is better than a centralized planner at allocating scarce resources, there are collective action and structural issues, unrelated to sexism or whatever, that can result in underfunding certain fields with respect to some theoretical societal optimum — and I think you can make a pretty clear case that this is true for the childcare industry as a whole.

Why Do They Earn Less?

I think a good model by analogy here for childcare wages is video game developers. The market for video game developers is rough. They work long hours, the work is built around brutal deadlines, and they make less money than their peers. Broadly generalizing, it’s more technically challenging work than building another website or business metrics table.

The reason this is the equilibrium in this market is because building video games is fun. Or more specifically, it’s a passion for video game developers. It’s not that hard to understand why, for some types of guys, building a video game is more fun than building a B2B software app.

The problem is that in the equilibrium, this means video game companies need to offer their developers less money, because part of their compensation is implicitly in the fact that they find the work more enjoyable than building another app.

This doesn’t seem unfair to me, another way to think about it is that I get a premium over video-game developers, because my work is far more boring. My employer also has to treat me marginally better because I might leave. Whereas if my employer knew I loved my job and product, they might feel more empowered to push me harder on a deadline.

On average, women are born more inclined to enjoy jobs involving babies, children, and this extends more generally to the health sciences. All the women that we have come across in the course of having our kids in part accept a lower wage because they love babies.

The market will offer people what they accept, and if you have a predisposition to love babies, congrats, you’re going to accept lower wages in equilibrium, and part of your compensation will be the job satisfaction of teaching and caring for babies. The invisible hand, in its infinite fairness, can get away with paying women less for the genetic gift of deeply loving children.

Market Inefficiencies

This is jointly explanatory with the fact that unlike other jobs, it’s a lot harder to capture value from jobs in childcare. To be clear, if I was any bigger of a fan of capitalism and markets than I am right now, I’d do something embarrassing like get Milton Friedman’s face tattooed on my leg.

This doesn’t mean though that capitalism is some simple process that we deploy, and its outcomes are optimal. The discourse is often so poisoned by ‘markets good’ or ‘markets bad, and we must fix them,’ that it’s difficult to just talk about market structure.

As it turns out though, the relationship between value provided society, and value that you’re able to capture for yourself, is a function of a bunch of things that are due to the structure of the space. Some of them relate to human capital and labor markets, but many are due to the difficulties of dealing with transaction costs or frictions in that particular market.

For example, if I learn how to optimize a piece of software, or build forecasts at scale, I can go make money for a B2B SaaS company within the year, and demand a small portion of the value I provide, which turns out to be a lot of money. If I am able to optimize a high-frequency trading algorithm, I can save millions of dollars a day at the right quant fund today, and demand a lot of money today.

If I figure out a way to improve outcomes for babies at scale, whether it’s in food-sciences by tweaking the formula they eat, caring for them, or even as a particularly effective ICU nurse, this will also have massive long-run value for a society. Even slightly reducing the burden of disability, or increasing the development of just a handful of children has massive society wide benefits.

Despite this, there is no market mechanism for me to capture the upside of this value. Society will benefit tremendously as those children mature, and by then no one will remember the pivotal role of everyone who helped get them there.

If you combine this back with the fact that it’s primarily a subset of women who also get intrinsic value from caring for children, it’s not hard to see why the equilibrium is low pay and under-investment in these fields. If you can’t capture upside of the value you generate, the field will not be staffed or invested in to its optimal level, and you won’t attract top talent.

I’m not going to spend time writing about how we are an atomized society as our local communities have degraded — we all already know this. Given that it’s true though, we increasingly depend on an economic infrastructure of child supporting sisterhood, rather than that organic sisterhood that has withered away. The nannies, doulas, and nurses we have had are great, they just cost lots of money.

Does this relate to TFR?

We’ve discussed the infrastructure side, but what about women’s choice to have children themselves?

Firstly, when we talk about culture vs. economics, it’s important to remember that to the extent that these are even independent and coherent categories, they feed into each other. It’s possible as the economic returns to children declined, as we moved away from agrarian ways of life or developed social security or whatever, fewer women had kids, as a result we all spend less time around kids and begin to want them less for reasons related to peer-effects rather than strict economic calculations.

In fact, often what culture is, is more of a decentralized algorithm to enforce economically optimal results. It’s tempting, and often interesting, to try and enumerate and assign scores to all the plausible contributors to lower TFR: Less religiosity, birth control, women’s rights movement, a move away from agrarian societies, the list goes on. To this end I agree with Ruxandra’s blurb, from her recent post, as the simplest explanation.

Contra Robin Hanson on Kings & Queens theory

Still, we can’t exactly do anything about these causes. They are due to structural factors. We can only address the symptoms, and in fact there is a long-history of this exact thing happening.

When we look back at the distant past, we can identify practices that existed to incentivize women to have children. Every tribe, religion, city-state, nation, or other group of humans knew its existence was dependent on reproduction. Those that didn’t take it seriously no longer exist.

In ancient Rome there were laws to penalize childlessness. In Sparta women gained critical status for producing warrior sons (as did the Nazis, and about a million other less famous governments). Single men in Sparta, so the stories go, were captured by groups of women and forced to marry. In Feudal Europe property rights were assigned to families to be passed down unto children. Christian sects, and really most religious in general, assign a spiritual purpose for women to give birth and grow the religion.

Even at the religious, community and family level, shame was often used for those who didn’t want children. You would be letting your family line, your parents, and your religion down.

If having many children was always in the immediate self-interest of a family and women, none of this would have been necessary. Why are there so many examples of mechanisms that had to be created to encourage fertility? It’s because the positive externalities of having children are large enough that families will often tend to have a suboptimal number of children.

In fact, when we try to appeal to these past mechanisms to get women to have children today, we’re being a little silly. They don’t work anymore, because they don’t apply to our modern world. Shame was an effective tool used in the past. Empirically, it doesn’t seem to be working anymore. When you try to shame women into having more kids, for example by yelling at them online, it doesn’t work. It is no longer backed by any real power. The atomization of society is such that we no longer feel as though we owe children to our parents, lineage or countrymen.

I cast no value judgment here, and it wouldn’t matter if I did. This is how things are. The machinations of these historical processes are hidden from us all. A higher-order interaction between the human process, the societies we’ve set into motion, and our technological structures. You’re not going to somehow reverse engineer this modern trend by being mad online at women for preferring to travel than have kids.

Women are Gaining Market Power

It’s self-evident that women have incrementally gained status within society over the past few generations. With this their options have grown in the choices they make and how they live their lives, and a consequence of this is a lower TFR.

It doesn’t matter which parts of this you specifically think are good, or bad, or misguided, this is what has happened and will continue to be the case. Women who aren’t in poverty have more choices in their life, many of which don’t focus on children yet offer some form of leisure that largely didn’t exist historically.

Forgetting for a moment that online leftists consider us to be in a second great depression of late stage capitalism, the actual reality we inhabit permits a shocking amount of free time and entertainment that was hidden from all but the ultra elite of the past.

If we spin a narrative from this now famous plot below, it’s not necessarily that they don’t want kids, it’s that they feel that the sacrifice of having many children is too large. If your household income is high enough, it becomes possible to have many children again without undue stress or sacrifice. My wife and I will consider a third, in part because we’re far to the right of the horizontal axis below, we spend too much money per year on a nanny and it’s kind of annoying, but you know, it’s not a big deal. We also have both sets of parents nearby and willing to help.

If you’re sufficiently poor, you’re probably not thinking about this in the first place, and getting knocked up either because you aren’t able to figure out family planning, or you’re still inhabiting a partially religious world as a recent immigrant.

In another life, I wish my wife and I had started having kids in our mid twenties, but we were living away from our family, in a different city, working hard to start our careers and build a foundation of wealth for our family. Launching a career on a women’s biological clock is a frantic race against time.

If we want to incentivize more women to have more children, we need modern mechanisms to encourage this behavior. The current issue isn’t only that TFR is dropping, it’s that it’s dropping specifically among our smartest cohorts of women. The graph above isn’t weighted by density, but obviously there are far more women in the 100-250 cohort than 250+. These are the most successful, intelligent, and secular women in America and they aren’t having a replacement level of kids.

Even using very conservative back-of-the-envelope math, a smart new baby is easily worth many millions of dollars in expected societal value, probably more when you consider the extremely low chance that they invent, or contribute to inventing something, that provides billions in value.

Suppose they earn 200,000 a year for 40 years, the present value of that wealth at a 3% discount rate is $4,622,954. Here we are even assuming they are earning all the wealth they generate, and not generating excess value beyond their wage, which is a wildly conservative assumption. It's reasonable to consider that the present value could reach tens of millions.

Just Pay Them

From tax breaks to better funded childcare, it’s not that hard to think of mechanisms to share some of that upside with the women who choose to give birth. Even conservative estimates show we have a lot of money to play with here, and one core purpose of the government is to make investments that the private sector cannot.

I’m not convinced that with this much money to spend, we couldn’t overcome the shift in cultural norms and options for women. Spending your late twenties, or even your entire life, with some amount of money, freedom, the ability to travel, and enjoy life is new for a non-aristocratic class. If you want to entice people to have kids and give this up early (or earlier) and have more kids, it will require serious incentives.

My wife and I didn’t have kids until we could maintain our lifestyle with their birth. If we had them earlier, we would have had to move to a lower-status area, away from our friends and family, and commute. Now that I have kids, I don’t think that would have been so bad, to be honest. At the time though it seemed like a big deal.

Plus, I might only think that because now we have the money to afford great child-care, and we have established careers, so we aren’t desperately trying to earn enough money to pay for daycare. If we had been given significant incentives to have children earlier, not only would we likely have taken them, but we would also have been motivated by the peer effects of our friends also taking them.

The common response to this is that TFR is high among poorer populations, and in poorer countries, so this seems like a deeper cultural issue than an issue about money. I don’t find this response all that convincing. The facts presented are true. However, the issue is that among the women we want to target have many options that didn’t exist in the past. Still, economic solutions remain underrated, we just aren’t going hard enough.

It’s a cruel reality of nature that the time in which we have to build our human capital and career eats into a women’s biological clock. All women who delay having a child for this reason take a gamble on their ability to conceive, among other risks. Yet the revealed preference of women is that this gamble is worthwhile. I don’t disagree with them, but it wouldn’t matter if I did.

Trad Solutions Won’t Work

When I think of my own daughter I’d certainly be happy if she was remarkably mature, and met a wonderful man and chose to have children younger than me. But what about the risk of her marrying someone less than ideal too early, and becoming stuck with kids? I would worry about that. If she wants to slightly gamble on the risk of struggling to conceive later to hedge this risk, I would think that’s reasonable (better yet, fertility tech would be much more advanced by then).

Again though, none of this matters. What I think, what people argue about on twitter, the weirdos who post older women’s dating profiles claiming they hit the wall and failed their obligation to having kids, none of it matters.

I agree with the Radical Feminist Hitler take on these points. Modern women don’t want to return to a world where they have to use vinegar and soap, downsize, and live at the whims of their husband to support them. They aren’t going to, it’s just not going to happen. Increasing fertility requires being serious about how to construct a world that’s conducive with the lives women want to live.

https://x.com/hollowearthterf/status/1746315006344323427?s=20

Trads often find this type of argument to trigger their disgust factor. When women aren’t willing to sacrifice their current career or economic trajectory for kids, they are implicitly defining some utility function that says something like “On the margin, lattes every day, a nice city condo, and a yearly trip to Spain is worth more to me than having my own baby.” If you have a kid, you then imagine giving them up to travel a little more, and for most people it’s sort of this unimaginable question.

But having kids is a transformative experience. It is an experience that is difficult to properly model until you experience it fist-hand: We need to encourage people to have kids before the transformation, and before they can’t imagine a world without the love they feel for their children.

More to the point though, why shouldn’t they have it all? We can afford it, and it’s not clear there is much we could invest in that has a higher ROI. Our future literally depends on women having kids, and telling them to go live in cabins and clean with vinegar is not the way forward.

The Future

My vision of the future is this: A group of women in their late twenties, probably mostly white and asian, who work in tech as product managers, maybe one data scientist, all post on Instagram (TikTok was shut down by the US Government) about their Saturday night at a monthly holographic Taylor Swift concert. Before the show, they enjoy high-end dining, which they can easily afford due to low taxes as an incentive for having had multiple children. After the show they go back to their high-rise where they live with their husbands in a new high density block in a cosmopolitan city.

During the concert all of their kids are being cared for at the luxury Amazon day-care facility (the Google one was shut down after three years), which costs $40 a night due to massive government contracts, as well as automating all cleaning and management through robots and AI. With an increase in investment in childcare, firms that collect top talent now have an incentive to provide these services.

After the show they pick up their kids. The one woman in the group, who has a special-needs child, then goes home to her live-in caregiver. In this case an immigrant on a work visa, who will get a green card after a certain number of years, enabling her to continue her career.

While it’s expensive in the short-run, these policies have allowed us to restrict immigration to relatively higher quality migrants at a rate that allows full assimilation, and has resulted in millions more children being born to American citizens than otherwise would have.

It’s not lost on me that the policies to enable this would profoundly restructure the economy to be more focused on birthing and rearing children, but this would be the true return to tradition. It’s a return to the historical world where we don’t assume people will just have the socially optimum number of kids, and we do something about it so our countries don’t end. Return to tradition isn’t shaming women on Twitter. That’s trying to use an old out-dated tradition. The true tradition is incentivizing women to have children.

For many nations, like South Korea, Japan, or China, that are below replacement TFR this level of radical transformation is the only hope of continuing to exist. These countries lack the social infrastructure for mass assimilation. A few years ago I would have considered China to have the state capacity to make this happen. It’s no longer clear to me that they do.

The US is able to persist with a below-replacement TFR of around 1.7 due to immigration. Our immigration exploits the fact that other nations where women have fewer choices, fewer rights, and where religious mechanisms still work, continue to have high birth-rates. Although a relatively low amount of our current immigration is actual brain-drain of other nations, it’s mostly lower skill immigrants.

However, we already know that the US (and certainly Europe) is not robust to unlimited and unbounded immigration. An arbitrarily shifting genetic, religious, or cultural shift will threaten the historical fabric of our nation. It’s not that I think we can successfully fight all long-term trends, they are inevitable, but I want them constrained to the right people and right velocity, such that we maintain our American ideals. At least until we build the machine god.

In the past religion was a mechanism to award spiritual rewards and local status to women for the burden of having children. We aren’t returning to a traditional world. Or rather, we aren’t returning to a traditional world, but if we stop having kids we will die out.

Religious memetics will have defeated a modern secular world that was ultimately unwilling to invest in its women on the terms they required. Representing the ultimate failure of both modern democratic capitalism and feminism, as we slide back into a religious world that can actually succeed at reproducing. Or womb tanks. Whichever comes first.