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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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The 7 Habits of Highly Fertile People

I Background

Look into the comment section of any mainstream video or article on below-replacement fertility, and you will find a familiar refrain: it is simply too expensive to have children.

However, despite this common meme, the data do not bear it out. Plotting Total Fertility Rate (TFR) vs Household Income actually produces a U shape with peaks at household incomes <$20k and >$1m, and trough around $200k per year. 2012-2016, 2018-2022.

What is happening here?

My wife and I are members of the PMC, as are most of our friends. We are in our mid-thirties. We have noticed that our friends are branching into one of two forks:

  • High-PMC who have a household income of $400k+ and are having 2-3 children.
  • Low-PMC who have a household income of $150k - $200k and are childless, or have one child and are baffled as to how they could afford more.

Recently, I have had the opportunity to get to know well two families quite outside our social circle. The first is the family of a carpenter who makes $30/hour, lives in a rural area 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city, stay-at-home mom, five kids. The other is an urban family, headed by single-mom who works as a receptionist at a low-end hotel (making, I would guess $20-30k/year), also with five kids.

While these families are superficially quite different, when it comes to childrearing, they actually have a lot of beliefs and habits in common. And, these beliefs and habits stand in stark contrast to those of my peer group - folks who are making quite a bit more money and yet cannot imagine affording five children!

I document them below, mostly for myself:

TL;DR: High-fertility families structure their lives in such a way as to make children extremely cheap and dramatically less time-intensive.

II Habits of Highly Fertile People

1) High-fertility families do not believe that every child needs their own room.

  • Carpenter: Three bedroom house 45 minutes outside of a tier-2 city costs around $200k. Husband and wife in the master, their three daughters share one bedroom and two sons share another.
  • Receptionist: Urban, subsidized apartment. Mother and baby share one bedroom, two girls in another room, two boys sleep in the living room on pull-out beds.
  • PMC: Cannot imagine having the millions it would take to afford a six-bedroom house in a tier-1 city.

2) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for education.

  • Carpenter: Stay-at-home mom is part of a homeschool pod with other families.
  • Receptionist: Sends her kids to the local public school in urban tier-2 city. The school is not good.
  • PMC: Would slit their throats rather than send their kids to the same public school as the receptionist. Intend to pay $25k-$40k/year/child for private school.

3) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for kids' stuff.

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Almost all of the clothes, toys, cribs, and other accessories that a child needs, their parents acquire for free. Hand-me-downs, Buy Nothing Facebook groups, friends/neighbors/family, etc.
  • PMC: Every kid needs brand-new everything. Sure, you might be able to get multiple uses out of your $800 crib or $300 car seat, but you are not shopping at Goodwill for little Charlotte.

4) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for enriching activities.

  • Carpenter: When the children are free they are either playing outside, playing inside (on screens), or doing chores. The older kids have part-time jobs. The kids do play sports through some homeschool rec-league I don’t understand. The parents spend very little, but the mom does have to drive the kids around for games.
  • Receptionist: Play outside of the apartment. Sometimes that's in the public library (video games on the library computers), sometimes that's the Boys and Girls Club, sometimes that's just out in the neighborhood. The mom spends $0 dollars and essentially no time on this.
  • PMC: $3,000 for Introduction to Data Science camp at Stanford, thousands of dollars between new gear and hotel rooms for travel sports (not to mention the hours spent driving), thousands for tutors in piano, math and foreign-languages.

5) High-fertility families start early. They have known no other adult life, besides being parents. Their tastes are quite modest.

  • Carpenter: Had their first kid at 20. Mostly cook in, occasionally go to casual-dining restaurants like Applebees, spend their vacations driving to state or national parks. Have never been to Disneyland and don’t think they’re missing out.
  • Receptionist: First kid at 17. Basically the same as the above, except doesn’t really vacation.
  • PMC: Spent their twenties eating at Michelin-starred restaurants and traveling overseas. Now, starting to have children in their early-to-mid-thirties, they simply do not have enough fertile years left to get to five children. And, furthermore, they cannot fathom bringing five kids to French Laundry nor buying that many tickets to Morocco.

6) High-fertility families pay roughly $0 for childcare:

  • Carpenter and Receptionist: Grandparents, friends, neighbors cost $0. The older children are expected to care for the younger.
  • PMC: $40k+/year for a nanny or $10k/year + an extra bedroom for an au-pair

7) High-fertility families pay very little for (and think very little about) healthcare

  • Carpenter: To be honest, I don’t know
  • Receptionist: Medicaid, cheapest possible pediatrician + the school nurse
  • PMC: Not only do they have excellent insurance through their employers, they also pay out-of-pocket for all kinds of treatments. Moreover, they spend a lot of time meticulously researching pediatricians, specialists, orthodontists, etc.

I am not trying to say that having five children is the only worthy goal in life. And, it is entirely possible that the progeny of the PMC will somehow be “better” than the progeny of the Carpenter or Receptionist - healthier, higher-IQ, more worldly.

III Policy Ideas for Increasing Fertility

It also occurs to me that, even if you cannot change the beliefs and habits of the PMC, you could still make policy decisions that increase their fertility:

1) Decrease the cost of housing.

  • There are, of course, a myriad of known-good solutions: from slashing regulations in order to increase housing supply, to improving transportation to make it viable to live in the ‘burbs and commute into the city.
  • Even if you cannot convince the PMC that each kid does not, in fact, need their own bedroom, by reducing the cost of that one marginal bedroom, you increase their fertility.

2) Improve the public schools

  • Imagine if an excellent education, in a safe environment! was commonly available in American public schools. Not only would more families choose to send their children to public schools over paying tens of thousands for private schools, you would also dramatically lower the cost of housing in those few school districts that actually do a decent job.

3) Decrease the cost stuff

4) Enriching activities:

  • No ideas. Competition here is zero-sum.

5) Starting early:

  • Wild first idea: perhaps make sex-ed a required course in college with a strong emphasis on fertility windows.

6) Childcare:

  • Ensure Middle America thrives so that young PMC don’t feel like they have to leave the heartland for the coasts where they don’t have grandparents + the same social network for childcare. Ha. Ha. Easy to say.

7) Healthcare:

  • Destroy the AMA’s supply-limiting bullshit, dramatically increase the number of doctors, dramatically decrease cost of healthcare.

For (2) I'd add "Provide more school choice". I live in a school district where the best public schools are barely adequate, but in Texas the state will also pay for charter schools, which makes a difference. Charter schools can't screen students by anything more than some combination of "the applicant is in our geographic area", "applicants with a sibling already attending get preference", and "random lottery", but it turns out that the implicit self-screening of "the parents are concerned enough with their kids' education to move schools" and "the parents are on-the-ball enough to be able to get kids to school without a bus driving to their house" is enough to concentrate the most motivated kids and avoid the most disorderly.

We may be getting vouchers for private schools soon, too, so we'll see how that works out. Support for a voucher program in general is at 55% among Texas Democrats, 65% for Texans as a whole.

The downside of school choice is more car traffic and less buses.

As a travelling technician, my quality of life is much lower during the school year. Urban planners trying to minimize car traffic hate this trampling of the commons. And a certain striver mentality is going to look down on parents taking shortcuts to go where the good schools are instead of applying "the grass is greenest where you water it" and actually getting involved.

It's all tradeoffs in the end. On the whole, I'm no fan of your solution.

Good example of the strategy I described here https://www.themotte.org/post/1405/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/285720?context=8#context

The grass, in this instance, doesn't grow nearly as quickly as my children do, and I'm not going to gamble their early education on the hope that I can unilaterally drag an underperforming school district out of the mire.

Who says it has to be unilateral? It's very unlikely you're the only one who wants better conditions. You may just not know your probable allies yet.

That's just it: I don't know who my probable allies are (or if they exist), and finding/mobilizing them will be part of my initially-unilateral effort. Meanwhile I have to live somewhere and send my kids to a school district today.

Your objection to school choice is traffic? Of all the trivial and unimportant objections to the greatest good.

I drive my kid to school. I pay taxes, a very small portion of which are spent on roads. I paid for these commons and I'll "trample" my kid to school through them. I'm also entitled to use of public infrastructure.

There are more. It's the first thing I thought of.

It's also a self-inflicted isolation from one's neighborhood, and that carries knock-on effects where it becomes harder to put down roots. Less chance to see the talents of your neighbors, less chance to share your talents with their families, less Slack in your systems to absorb actual shocks.

Maybe you don't value that as much as I do. That's okay.

You drive your kids to school and also they play with neighbors. It is not either or. There's a small park with play equipment hundreds of feet from my house. Most houses on my street have children. We know them.

When I was a kid I had to bike a few miles to public middle school and high school. Selfishly trampling on the public commons. I also had friends in my neighborhood. There was no exclusive choice.

But that striver mentality is retarded and destructive and needs to be discouraged.

Correct. Voice >> Exit Exit >> Voice; you can't make your local stabby school much better but you can move to a non-stabby district.

(Edit: damnit, got it backwards the first time)

For a certain income level & standard of living, yes. I know where the "good school districts" are in my state, and we don't earn enough to afford housing in them. Cheaper states are a net decrease in quality of life for commute time, job prospects, and quality of community. It's a local maximum with a lot of activation energy to find a new maximum.

I'm aware this is not your problem to solve. The incentives are greatest for me to make lemonade where I'm at, and uncover opportunities where I'm at.

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