Having kids is expensive. That’s not why no one is having them.

Every time I post about falling fertility on social media, everyone acts super normal.

Just kidding. I get two main responses:

1. “Why do you care? Do you hate women? You must hate women. Only people who hate women pretend to care about fertility and they’re just using it as a smokescreen to oppress us.”

2. “Of course fertility is down. Having kids is too expensive! Duh!”

First of all, I agree. I do hate women.

I also agree that having kids is too expensive.

Kids create costs. And just about everything you need or need more of when you reproduce has gotten more expensive. The cost of housing, healthcare, childcare, education, and transportation has risen faster than inflation, which itself is quite high, at least based on the outcome of the last election. It’s way outpaced wage growth, at least for bottom-half households.

So it makes sense to think that millions of people are desperate to have children but don’t because they just can’t afford them. It’s a simple, straightforward, heart-rending story.

The only problem is that it’s patently false.

A just-published paper, Why Is Fertility So Low in High Income Countries? joins an existing body of research showing that the rising cost of having kids is not why fertility is falling.

“Standard economic factors and policies are likely not responsible for much of the decline in fertility in high-income countries experienced in recent decades,” authors Melissa Schettini Kearney & Phillip B. Levine wrote. “Changes in income or prices cannot explain the widespread decline.”

First of all, imagine that people really were refusing to have children they clearly couldn’t afford. That by itself would represent a massive social change. And while there’s a first time for everything, this ain’t it.

In reality, the families who have the most kids are the ones least able to afford them. Americans whose household incomes exceed $200,000/year have a much lower fertility rate than families who earn less than $50,000. Many studies link greater levels of poverty with more fertility, not less. Medicaid pays for 40% of US births every year. Plus ça change…

I hate to have to tell y’all this, because it’s very annoying, but we do not know why fertility is falling. We have a better idea about why fertility fell 50 years ago, as the Kearney paper outlines.

In the modern day, simple calculations of easy-to-measure factors like education, income, and costs simply do not tell us much because:

1. These measures correlate weakly with fertility

2. Where they correlate, sometimes it’s positive and sometimes it’s negative

While we’re here, the culprit also isn’t sperm counts/quality or infertility.

It’s also not feminism.

Feminism may have played a very indirect role in fertility declines by possibly decreasing the marriage rate. According to Noah Smith, the Kearney paper, IFS, Dr. Alice Evans, etc., marriage still strongly predicts childbearing.

However, feminism isn’t the main cause. Like with costs, feminism correlates weakly with fertility. Tellingly, where it does correlate, it’s in the opposite direction. Countries that are more feminist and gender egalitarian have more kids than countries that are more sexist. See also: the Kearney paper; Do men hold the key to increasing births? by Darby Saxbe; recent research by Nobel-winner Claudia Goldin.

So what’s actually behind the baby bust, according to the Kearney paper? Basically, it’s what folks want.

More folks than ever want fewer or zero kids. We don’t really know why.

Kearney and Levine:

Generally, economists are loathe to rely on changes in preferences to explain behavior because that can explain virtually anything. But there are reasons to believe that the lifestyle, broadly defined, that is consistent with having a child or multiple children is becoming less desirable for many adults. This is hard to capture with standard economic models or identify with standard econometric techniques, but it is a shift that economists interested in fertility need to contend with.

As I pointed out in why increase fertility when you can just allow more immigration?, what people want is actually a very complicated question.

I mean, we made a whole movie just about women’s preferences:

I like the way Kearney and Levine put things. After summarizing a bunch of studies showing that people’s priorities and preferences have changed, they immediately point out:

It is hard to know exactly how to interpret these statistics given the ambiguity of the terms. Do people tend to report intentions in an unconditional sense, indicating what they would ideally intend or desire if they didn’t face the costs and trade-offs that they do? Or does it reflect intended or desired fertility in full recognition of costs and trade-offs, such that deviations from realized fertility imply the existence of frictions in achieving one’s intended fertility goals? Fertility intentions are also not stable over time. In general, people report higher intended fertility at younger ages. Does that reflect changing intentions as more information and experience is obtained? If so, which is the more relevant measure of intentions – the latent one that someone starts out with, or the evolved intention that better reflects likely trade-offs?

Why increase fertility when you can just allow more immigration? also made a case for caring about falling fertility.

Sure, a lot of people pretend to care about fertility rates in order to justify authoritarian, misogynistic, sex-negative policies. But that’s true of the moral panic around porn and sex work too. And that hasn’t seemed to have stopped many of you from caring about that.

“Bad people also care about this” is a good reason to be skeptical of the mainstream solutions, whether they’re banning and stigmatizing porn and sex work or outlawing abortion and birth control. But it’s a very poor excuse to dismiss all concerns about any potential problem.

First of all, natalism can, and should, be explicitly feminist.

Second, I’m not interested in any form of feminism that finds itself at odds with consensus reality. And the evidence really seems to indicate that falling fertility is having, and will continue to have, profound negative impacts on existing humans and however many humans manage to exist in the future.

‘Fertility rates this low raise concerns about the potential economic and social impacts of population aging and declining population growth, including a shrinking labor force, declining economic dynamism, and the fiscal unsustainability of social insurance programs,” Kearney & Levine wrote. “They also raise larger, more existential questions about what depopulation would mean for the climate, for living standards, and more generally for the welfare of humanity.”

The third most common comment I get on my fertility-related social media posts (oh my. I just realized that algorithms can’t tell the difference between me writing about fertility rates and me wanting fertility products and services and now my suggested ads make WAY more sense) is “Well, we shouldn't base our systems on rising fertility.”

Well, chief, maybe not. Maybe that was a mistake. But we did. So maybe that’s the problem to solve. Either way, ignoring falling fertility and its attendant problems is not an advisable path forward for feminists, or anyone else with any stake in the near- or long-term future of humanity.

And the first step, after deciding to care about an issue, is to get the basic facts right. And the basic fact is, we don’t know why fertility is down or how to get it back up again. But we do know that the answer is not (by itself, anyway) costs.

Your move, commenters.