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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.
  1. Healthcare:

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

Reminder that physician salaries are a low percentage of healthcare expenses, that the AMA has nothing to with supply restriction, spots can be expanded by local governments and hospitals (and have been!), and that the AMA has been lobbying for a supply expansion for decades.

At the end of the day, all the dollars spent on healthcare end in someone's pocket. If not doctors (and I'll believe some aren't hugely compensated compared to their efforts), then who is keeping the dollars my insurance company (and I) pay the local "nonprofit" hospital for care? Obviously insurance gets it's share (capped by Obamacare). Their executives (doctors!) are compensated pretty well as far as I can tell.

I believe the actual answer to this is "Private Equity firms". Where the money eventually goes after that is incredibly complicated to track (by design), but last I checked they played a fairly important role in cost inflation.

Why does Private equity play such a big role in modern investing? Is it a new thing, or did some regulatory change happen, or is there some reason I hear them brought up in almost any economic discussion nowadays, or am I just misremembering a time before private equity was a talking point?

I don't think that private equity is a particularly new thing - it was how Mitt Romney made his money, after all.

My personal belief, which I freely admit has no actual verifiable statistical backing, is that the main reason you're hearing more about them is that the proboscises of parasitic capital are being turned inward. A lot of financial instruments and practices, whatever their legality or the finer points of how they work, essentially functioned as wealth pumps that funneled treasure from various parts of the world to the imperial core. But those wealth pumps develop constituencies and dependents, so they can't just turn off when the flow of lucre begins to slow, and as a result they're forced to target the interior of the empire. These engines of exploitation, which have for years been going into poorer countries and exploiting them for profit, are being forced to turn to the US heartland because that's where the easiest money is. Now, instead of buying hospitals and dramatically raising prices while lowering quality in the global south, they do things like buy Red Lobster and suck out so much capital it dies, or set up cartels in the firefighting equipment manufacturing sector, driving up costs of equipment massively while also simultaneously creating shortages in both repair parts and finished vehicles (https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/did-a-private-equity-fire-truck-roll).